Culture
Can satire bring Brexit Britain to its senses?
This is a good time for satirists, though there’s no clear line between farce and tragedy in the real life script written in the words of our political leaders. Fay Young samples poetry and music…
The moral certainty trap
There is every chance that the strident, morally certain progressives of the future will look at us in much the same way we look at the slave owners. And much the same way the slave…
Common humanity of Glasgow Slavery Remembrance
Kate Tough’s poetry stirs hearts and minds as Glasgow celebrates Slavery Remembrance Day 2017 with growing openness about the city’s link with the slave trade.
Scotland’s drug death crisis
‘The prevention of DRDs in Scotland requires an immediate and radical harm reduction led response, developed in collaboration with people who use drugs….The tragedy of Scotland’s spiralling deaths from drug use is everyone’s problem. The…
Plukes on plinths: an inquiry
‘But Gibson’s Red Road flats owed much more to constituents chapping his door about their damp decrepit decaying sandstone tenements, his wish to keep Glaswegians in Glasgow, and a desire to help local industry by…
Edinburgh Festival’s 70 years of giving to arts – and economy
‘But regardless of whether we view culture as an intrinsic good in itself or for the instrumental benefits it brings, there’s no question that they are increasingly an economic driver at local and national levels.’
Silent greetings from Mars
‘Men may be from Mars,’ Tom says with a chuckle, handing me the signed copy, ‘but that does not mean we are without feelings.’
Nothing to see, and nothing to say: Marlie Mul at GoMA
\The boundaries of possibility are set before we open our mouths. The exhibition space becomes no longer filled with art, but whatever happens in there remains art all the same.’
Regeneration comes from community grassroots
‘Not everybody wants to participate in workshops, meetings, agendas.’ In her second article on the Stalled Spaces project, Susan Mansfield meets Scottish communities where regeneration begins in vacant plots and grows from the grassroots up.
The war poets and the Edinburgh golf club
‘Finding the place of this historic meeting – (between Owen, Sassoon and Graves) – adds another piece of information to our knowledge of the war poets’ Scottish enlightenment and to the history of the conflict’.
From eyesore to empowerment: liberating ‘stalled spaces’
What happens when local communities take control of wasteland? In the first of two articles Susan Mansfield reports on the extraordinary successes of the Stalled Spaces Scotland scheme.
Jeremy Corbyn, ‘Holy Fool’
Jeremy Corbyn’s serene countenance during the election campaign drew frequent parallels with that of a Buddhist monk, Corbyn himself at one point referring to his efforts to attune himself to a Zen mindframe. But Corbyn’s…