What’s in a name? I’d like to address a misnomer… 💡 Other editors have flagged this before, but it’s worth repeating because it still crops up. I’m talking about the tendency to refer to everything an editor does as ‘proofreading’. It’s no mystery why this happens. ‘Proofreading’ is a common word in the right sort…
Last week, I encountered a former ‘professional garbage designer’. I’ll explain… I first came across the intricate paper art of Suhail Shaikh in autumn 2023, when I visited his exhibition at the Atkinson, Southport, UK. I was there again recently to hear him talk about the exhibits and also the work that got him where…
I love comedy, intentional and otherwise … Humour is forever a massive asset in the quest to maintain sanity and joy, and to speak truth to power.
……The idea, then, was to take workshops into schools and community venues and do some tailored improv to boost the local supply of realism, inventiveness and quality of life.
Many times over the years, people have recommended I read The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk. (Or, to give it its full title, The Body Keeps the Score: Mind, Brain and Body in the Transformation of Trauma.) The book lays out a modern understanding of trauma and describes therapeutic approaches that…
To die extremely rich is disgraceful. So said Andrew Carnegie. More precisely, he said, ‘…the man who dies thus rich dies disgraced.’ Carnegie was a successful industrialist and later a philanthropist, and his philanthropic legacy includes thousands of public libraries, as well as vast investments in education and research. The very first library I loved was…
Would you say you’re a realist? According to Oxford Dictionaries, that would be ‘A person who accepts a situation as it is and is prepared to deal with it accordingly’. On 30th June 2020, I took part in the Climate Coalition’s virtual lobby. I spent an hour on Zoom with my MP and around twenty…
In the most recent episode of BBC Radio 4’s Word of Mouth (14th January 2020), author Michael Rosen spoke to George Marshall of Climate Outreach about communicating climate change in ways that are relatable and true to life. They know their stuff, of course, and listening to their conversation was half an hour well spent.…
How we communicate about the climate crisis matters, of course – the words we use and the occasions on which we choose to deploy them. I live in a part of the world (the UK) already affected by climate change but not yet overwhelmed by it. Most climate-related death and disease, most of the climate…
The Letters to the Earth project has gathered contributions from citizens acclaimed and obscure. In their letters they’ve expressed their fears and dreams to our home and host planet in a time of rapid extinction rates and climate breakdown. Mine, written in snatched moments during a busy week, was short but nonetheless personal. I’ve included…
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