The Critical Commentator

    An Abstract Drawing Madge Gill (1882-1961) Image Credit:: London Borough of Newham Heritage Service [CC  BY]                                                         Further and deeper into the jungle. Taunted by the quivering vines, mocked by the rubber trees, bitten and bruised by the asphyxiating vileness of nature. Ropes groaning, mud and rock resisting... The jungle plays tricks on your senses... Can you still tell the difference between the reality and the hallucination, between everyday life and the dream? Why haul a steamship across the jungle? Why bring the opera to Iquitos? But of course if you have to ask these questions, you shall never know the answers. Werner Herzog famously dragged a real 320-tonne steamship over the Andes while making his monumental, disaster-strewn 1982 film Fitzcarraldo... Jonathan Liew watc...

Trigger warning: this article may offend people who like trigger warnings. Lochiel's Warning Robert Inerarity Herdman (1829-1888) Photo Credit: Glasgow Life Museums [CC BY-NC-ND] A new study is the latest to suggest that telling people they are about to experience offensive content does not seem to change their behaviour - and could even make them want to watch it. Researchers found that during the course of a week, young people came across trigger warnings on social media dozens of times. Sometimes these came in the form of text, cautioning them that a post contained distressing content. Sometimes it was blurred images or video that they had to consent to see. Whatever the variety of sources of the warnings, the response to them was largely the same irrespective of whether or not people said they suffered from trauma, they were ignored. The study, published in the Journal of Behaviour Therapy and Experimental Psychiatry, found that the 261 participants, 90 per cent clicked through...

 I used to think sobriety was boring. These days, I think getting wasted is. It might surprise you, but a lot of people in clubland don't drink or take drugs any more. It's not just a Sober October fad - the sober-curious wave is a full-blown cultural shift. It's simply not as cool any more to be face down in a club cubicle or face up in a skip at dawn. Boors Carousing Dutch School Photo Credit::York Museums Trust [Public Domain]  Back in my late teens and early twenties the club culture currency was drink and drugs. Later, I built a career behind the DJ decks in front of triple vodka and Cokes, sobriety felt like a door slammed shut on fun. But, spoiler: it wasn't. It was a door opened, a secret passage into something real... Frankly, there's something very rock-and-roll about revealing how "clean" you are, when you used to be  an absolute menace. I got tired of it all. The drinking. The preparing to drink. The things that drinking would lead to. The reco...

Merry-Go-Round Mark Gertler (1891-1939) Photo Credit: Tate [CC BY-NC-ND] ... Why is this practice so common among people my age? If you aren't hearing-impaired and are fluent in the language, what is it about subtitles that makes them appealing? An easy assumption is that this is the result of a short attention span, passivity and a lazy nature, a failure of generation zombie. But having experienced watching TV with and without  subtitles, I'd say the former doesn't beget lazy viewing so much as a quicker information download. The new status quo of "subtitles on" among the young reflects both a values shift and cultural conditioning as a result of of big tech's encroaching impact on our entertainment experience. For instance, the small screen in our living room has to share the limelight with the micro screen in our lap. The U survey [research by streamer U] revealed that 80% of generation Z and millennials "double-screen" when they watch. With subti...

  The Golf Course, North Berwick John Lavery (1856-1941) Photo Credit: Tate [CC BY_NC-ND] The lasting memory of this Ryder Cup won't be a single swing of the club so much as the ugly backdrop: galleries that drifted from partisan into venomous and the organisers who let the line slide until it snapped... There's a difference between atmosphere and interference, and Bethpage spent too much of the weekend blurring the two. Boos during practice swings and the sing-song "YEW-ESS-AY! YEW-ESS-AY! after a European miss were tiresome, but survivable. What crept in on Saturday was different: insults aimed at players' wives, homophobic slurs, cheap shots at Mcllroy's nationality dripping with tiresome stereotypes. Europe answered with performance. So much for home advantage: for two years the Bethpage sales pitch was the snarling, uniquely American cauldron that would rattle Europe. Message received, but the idiots took it literally. Add the optics of Donald Trump's fly-...

...  lf Woodhall believes it, it must be true. Less than a year ago the 24-year-old Yorkshire native moved to the United Arab Emirates with little more than a dream. Today, she is one of Dubai's successful manifestation gurus, effectively preaching that wellbeing can be achieved by wishing to be well. The Charlatan Frans van Mieris the elder ( 1635-1681) Photo Credit: Guildhall Art Gallery [CC BY-NC] Hers, though is a fitting and growing niche in a city where if you've got it, you flaunt it, and if you don't, you're here because you want it.. There was only so much partying Woodhall could do before she turned to manifestation, she explains, starting workshops that have gathered a following among the legions of Gen Z manifesters on TikTok (as evidenced by the proliferation of cameras on the beach) "We've grown up comparing our lives to celebrities and influencers," Woodhall says. " I feel like it's what Dubai was missing for the expat community....