Culture
Wha’s aboot oor Bubblyjock vote?
Twenny nineteen Brexit-split Parlia- ment orders a’ UK turkeys t’ vote Pejoratively said pr’aps, nae fun, ‘cept fer oor nationalists ye kin note. Three year, many mare years yet t’come, no unlike York pie’s fower…
Re-branding the Curriculum for Excellence
PISA results attract particular (and perhaps disproportionate) attention because they are now the only substantial source of comparative data available to Scottish policy makers. Walter Humes update explains why ‘refreshing’ CfE is unlikely to deliver…
Drugs, poverty and entertainment Pt 2
Cool Britannia Danny Boyle’s film of Trainspotting was the pitch-perfect opening salvo for Tony Blair’s Cool Britannia. A post-ideological antidote to the conscience-pricking social realism of such politically-driven directors as Peter Watkins and Ken Loach,…
Drugs, poverty and entertainment
Why are there so many deaths from drugs in Scotland? We know all the standard answers but maybe, too, the creative sector has a part to play? Part One of two
A shift in business thinking?
‘The most technologically savvy generation in history – the ‘Zoomers’ – are about to join the workforce. They have different priorities, one being better stewardship of the planet. Building a better future depends on embracing…
Five poems for a general election in hard times
A selection of five poems for this general election in hard times. To shine a light on our better nature, to remember how many different people are responding to the urgent issues of 2019 with…
Nato’s irrelevance?
Turkey’s incursion into Syria has exposed deep rifts between Americans and Europeans over Nato’s future just as many are questioning the alliance’s future…
Inverness ‘ain’t no mess’ so it needs the Ironworks
The Ironworks is an essential part of local culture and a vital asset to the Highlands. In fact in a small country we would all be poorer without it says Dougal Perman of Scottish Music…
Truth springs from poetry…and dangerous women
For Nadine Aisha Jassat, poetry is activism. She used to used to whisper, “‘I’m a poet’, now I shout it from the rooftops and help others on their journey to shouting who they are, too.”
New Brutalism in St James Square: #MoultriesHill Part 2
Enough was enough. The cost and the disruption were too much. It made more sense to build the new Scottish Office elsewhere and leave the old gaunt, grey building to the pigeons.
The tangled history of Edinburgh St James
‘So St. James Square remained the province of a handful of small businesses and workshops and 3,700 or so of Edinburgh’s lower orders and their exploitative, ever-neglectful landlords. The long decline of James Craig’s tenement…
Who’s it for – yon McMenace?
“So they come and see what the McManus has to offer and then the museum changes from something ‘we can do’ with our kids to ‘this is something we NEED to do with our kids.’”