Kester Brewin

In response to a piece extolling the possible virtues of new technology for precipitating an educational revolution, I wrote a piece on HuffPost Tech reflecting on my own practice as a teacher, and how I feel technology should function in the classroom. It’s the kind of conversation (one of so so many) I wish I [...]

Having been urged by lots of After Magic readers to go and see Iron Man 3, I saw it last night and thoroughly enjoyed it. The series has always had more biting wit that similar franchises, and has done well combining that with some thoughtful content too. I don’t want to talk much about the [...]

Tad Delay has written a great couple of punchy paragraphs thinking about Boston, radicalised youth and the problem of religion within empires. What town in America goes a single year without producing young men who – amidst the college-aged angst of life directions, relationships, or career fears – turn to religious fundamentalism and/or militant violence? [...]

A good friend Jonny spent a week or so in silence in the hills of Wales recently, and has been blogging really beautifully about the experience. The term I don’t like that’s often used for these periods is ‘retreat’ – it’s too military for me, and carries with it a sense of moving backwards. Though [...]

Been following with interest the US Supreme Court deliberations on the right to gay marriage – a debate that has been going on in various other parts of the world too. What’s interesting is the vociferous nature of the opposition from religious groups on the right. I mean, they really hate this. Which is odd… [...]

A few weeks ago I was loitering in art bookshop on Charing Cross Road waiting for a film in Leicester Square, and came across this book of postcards, all with images celebrating the Mexican Día de Muertos. The pictures are gloriously macabre, and yet somehow comic too. The original festival is pre-Columbian in origin, but now [...]

Very excited that After Magic will be available in the next few days now. It’s a compact read at around 25,000 words, but covers a lot of ground within that. As I’ve increasingly found with the books I’ve written, the source material that’s given rise to After Magic isn’t really the kind of stuff you’d [...]

After Magic will be available in the next couple of weeks. It’s a book I’m genuinely excited about sharing, containing as it does what I think is the most clear expression of my thinking. So what is the book about? Firstly, through a number of plays, books and films it explores the archetype of the [...]

Very excited to announce / reveal / admit that I’m most of the way through a new (short) book, which I’m hoping to have available by early April. The book begins with Shakespeare’s play The Tempest and uses Prospero’s renunciation of magic as a way of opening up an archetype of the move ‘beyond super-nature’ [...]

Last night I went to see The Effect at the National Theatre, a new play by Lucy Prebble, who made waves with her previous piece ENRON. (It ‘stars’ Billie Piper, who I’d not seen on stage before but – just as an aside – her performance confirmed so much that I’d heard: she’s a very [...]