Work to live but don’t live to work. Plucking words from the mind, stitching them together into sentences and weaving them into paragraphs will create a text, but all of that takes time. Being a workaholic means crunching the amount of time these processes take and prioritising work over rest. The results can be good, bad or ugly.
If you haven’t yet realised that I am a workaholic, I must respectfully ask you, where have you been? I am neither proud nor resentful; instead, I have come to embrace this as my default method of functioning. As such, I must sometimes intervene and disrupt the burgeoning workflows before they breach the overwhelming threshold.
The Good
As a child, I juggled multiple hobbies; gymnastics, cheerleading, athletics and I might as well include gaming. In primary school, I even played for the football team as one of the two girls who made it into the squad. When I wasn’t toe-punting…
In these unpredictable times, we can’t afford to take the power of laughter for granted. It’s the glue that holds us together when the world around us feels like it’s falling apart. Like the touch of a wand, it has the magical effect of making everything feel okay, even if that’s just for a moment.
“As much as we can be undone by one another through grief, we can also be undone in fits of laughter and that is a powerful political moment,” says Jessie Clark.
The Importance of Laughing Earnestly
Angelic voices and gentle strums of the guitar on centre stage in the Roundhouse — Lianne La Havas performs a one-off show live-streamed from London.
Returning from a five-year hiatus with a new self-titled album ‘Lianne La Havas’, the singer-songwriter donated all proceeds from the show to Black Lives Matter-related organisations.
On Wednesday 15 July 2020, the performance began with Lianne poised on stage—perched like a nightingale. With her mere presence, she sprinkled daintiness into each corner of the dimly-lit room. With melodies sweeter than sugarcane, Lianne’s voice stirred and hung in the air at odds with the metallic arches that formed the Roundhouse’s iconic circular structure.
Accompanying vocalist Mariama Frida Touray stood to the left of the…
Whether it’s the amount of seasoning to add to my favourite dish or the voice that tells me it’s better to go the long way instead of the shortcut, my ancestors are always whispering and I’m embracing all their signs.
Despite going to sleep late and getting up early, I awoke in a great mood. I own an awful lot of black t-shirts, so as they are folded away — some inside out — in my drawers, it’s not easy to tell which one is which. On any given day when I sift through my options, what I uncover is often a surprise. Today, I stumbled upon the t-shirt with the name “MARLEY” sprawled across the chest above an image of the legendary musician’s face and dreadlocks, all printed in white on black.
When I walked into my mum’s…
With their seventh studio album, Gorillaz remain true to their alternative selves. The British virtual band released ‘Song Machine, Season One: Strange Timez’ in October 2020, an extraordinary audiovisual project that sees the fictional bandmates embark on new episodic adventures. This article explores alternative music and some of the best tracks from ‘Song Machine’.
As a child, I believed that I was going to become the best DJ of my generation. My mum had a glorious rack of her favourite CDs neatly stacked between the slots. From 2Pac and other hip-hop legends to Sweet Female Attitude with their UK garage classic ‘Flowers’, I performed mixes that were unheard of on my imaginary decks. I didn’t lift any needles and the crossfader remained untouched because I was scratching my poor mum’s CDs into the carpet and against everything else that lay hidden between the fibres.
The fine scratches that were barely visible in bright light…
Languages adapt to the spaces in which they are formed, by absorbing culture, histories and, of course, social norms. For this reason, untranslatable words and phrases exist.
As key means of communication, languages are bound to relativity. So it’s not just about what words are used but how they are used, and in what context. Think about the words ‘OK’, ‘okay’ and ‘alright’. Do you gravitate towards any of them? Do you avoid using any of them when texting, and if so, why? How would you feel if you sent someone a long message and they simply replied with ‘OK.’ Would you be mad or would it depend on who that person is? In reality, all of these words are variations of more or less the same…
Communication is the exchange of meaning between people. Words, gestures and images make up the essential ways in which we share information and ideas. The first article in this series explores how we connect through language and what that means in relation to politics and culture, starting off with Britain and the stiff upper lip.
Languages come in all forms, from Latin-based languages that have been exported across the world via colonialism, English firmly established by British and American Imperialism to Cyrillic, the writing system for Russian and Bulgarian, they are always political and imbued with culture. As eloquently put by Scarlet Sena de Farias, an English teacher from São Paulo in Brazil:
“Languages are a reflection of culture, and culture is who you are, why you exist, how you exist and why you do things the way you do. And most importantly, it’s why you say things the way you say them. Languages are…
Today would have been C. L. R. James’s 120th birthday. Cyril Lionel Robert James (1901–1989) was a Trinidadian writer, journalist and historian. In 1938, he published The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution, a pioneering text on the Haitian Revolution and those who seized independence in 1804.
The Black Jacobins came into my life six years ago as part of The French Revolution(s) reading list. Unlike most first-year students, the idea of additional reading filled me with excitement. I won’t admit to running, but I definitely sped-walked to the library to get my hands on a copy of James’s book after class. Haiti had always bewildered me. I heard about its suffering too often and had seen images of hurricane-stricken life; the destruction and destitution that ensued. My mind paired Haiti with poverty but that didn’t sit right with me. “How did part of an island in…
Kaeshelle Rianne
Writer, Journalist and Editor
