Kester Brewin

Being in that part of the UK for holiday, and hearing on the grapevine that a few people are interested in exploring the thinking I’ve been doing around Hakim Bey’s work on pirates and TAZ, I thought I’d round up a few things here… Firstly, the series of posts I did on ‘A Plea for [...]

Very interesting report today in the Telegraph that NASA have detected a large solar flare erupting from the sun – which is likely to cause some spectacular displays of the northern and southern lights. These ‘coronal mass injections’ are actually a source of immense worry for disaster planners, as the largest eruption could result in [...]

I’ve been following the discussions that have been going on in the Church of England recently over the issue of whether women should be able to be bishops. It appears that the answer is going to be ‘no’. Or, at least, ‘not yet.’ What I’ve not quite been able to tease out is precisely why. [...]

Jonny has written again defending the ‘in and out’ stance he wants to take with institutional forms… And though it often seems to be falling on deaf ears, I want to support this view too! Jonny wrote a response to my posts reflecting on whether those who had been involved in the Emerging Church movement [...]

As a teacher – and an INTJ on Myers-Briggs – I can quite understand Sartre when he writes in a play that ‘Hell is other people.’ (I wouldn’t go as far as Zizek and say that ‘I hate my students – they are boring and stupid’, partly because they’re always trawling around the web looking [...]

In ‘No Exit’ – what is considered to be his best play – Sartre wrote the line ‘L’enfer, c’est les autres‘ which is commonly translated as hell is other people. I was reminded of this last night hearing AC Grayling introduce Zizek, who had written in the Guardian that the worst job he had ever [...]

London is continually fascinating. As humans we are always quick to project personalities onto our creations; London the person is complex, darkly funny, steeped in history, welcoming all but criticising many, intelligent, crafty… a heavy drinker who enjoys the night. ‘London Nights‘ looks like a brilliant series of 10 radio programmes, looking at the city [...]

I’ve said it many times here before, but if you haven’t already tuned in to Radio 4′s ‘In Our Time‘ archive on your iTunes, then you’re seriously missing out. Listening to it I’m always reminded of the great quote in Good Will Hunting where Will quips to a Harvard student: you wasted $150,000 on an [...]

A really nice series of images from David LaChapelle for iD magazine (ht Barry Taylor) What I like about them, as Barry says, is that the new lens with which these images have been shot forces us to reappraise scenes from the gospels that have become over-familiar and domesticated. The story of the woman washing [...]

Had a great time at Apple 5 on Wednesday – good crowd of people out to hear Manjit Kumar, author of Quantum talking about The Quantum Cathedral – how the collaborative efforts that went into building the Large Hadron Collider are paralleled only by the immense achievements of the construction of the medieval cathedrals. I’ll be [...]