Category: Society and Social Issues
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Worshipping the gods of commerce
[A version of this article was first published in Kansai Scene magazine and was co-written with Anil Ramsingh.] In 1994 a UN Human Development report stated that what we are now seeing is: “an arresting picture of unprecedented human progress and unspeakable human misery, of humanity’s advances on several fronts mixed with humanity’s…
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God-bloggerer
[Photo: DNA strand. Religion did not give us this.] [This article was first published in Catalonia Today magazine, January 2018.] I call myself an atheist because god has not been proven to any clear degree, but like other people I can enjoy certain things that are called…
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Evolution’s forgotten man
[This article was first published in Catalonia Today magazine, November 2017.] This story begins in the late 18th century with a small boy’s limitless curiosity, at first for staring at his marbles and stones, but soon this grows into a thirst for knowing what lies deep under the British countryside around him. William Smith…
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Dangers of the sell-off
[This article was was first published in Catalonia Today magazine, January 2017.] A new year has begun but not much has changed apart from the date on the calendar. In Australia, that faraway land that has the reputation of a kind of paradise according to some people here in Catalonia, the national government is…
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Getting Orwell wrong
[Photo of Julian Barnes © Alan Edwards] [This article was first published in Catalonia Today magazine, October 2017.] In the New York Review of Books not long ago, the well-known British author Julian Barnes ran his eye over some compilations of George Orwell’s work. Thinking about the school where a young Orwell was sent to…
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Real red: Corbyn and Goytisolo
[This article was first published under the title "The rallying of the left" in Catalonia Today magazine, July 2017.] Elections can be strange events. The British one last month produced a mixture of results but one thing it showed was that a genuinely democratic socialist government there is a distinct possibility after the…
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The quiet one
[This article was first published in Catalonia Today magazine, June 2017.] There he is. Sitting along the side of the class, with his head down. He could be a child or an adult — and certainly female too — but today at least this introvert has very little to say for himself.…
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The words we use
[This article was first published in Catalonia Today magazine, April 2017.] Good. Bad. These are two words that have come back into public language recently. Unfortunately, they are words which express the extremes of a moral spectrum and have been returned to politics via the snarling mouth of US liar-in-chief Donald Trump. I have…
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The Trump show
[This article was first published in Catalonia Today magazine, March 2017.] There is really only one news story over the last months: the start of Donald Trump’s regime. Before the end of last year I said on Matthew Tree’s TV discussion program that one of the main reasons Trump was elected was…
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“Cohencentric” [On the life and work of Leonard Cohen]
[This article was first published in Catalonia Today magazine, October 2016.] Finishing a long biography of the long, long life of the singer/songwriter and poet Leonard Cohen, something occurred to me the other day. Here was a man who had toiled away on his work year after year, suffering from regular periods…
Brett Hetherington 