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 [...]

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? [...]

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 [...]

The blanks for the After Magic hardbacks to be hand-inked arrived today, and I’ve got to say I’m really excited about them. They’ve come out really really well… Will be doing the printing onto the covers this weekend and begin sending them out on Monday all being well. There’s a small number still available for [...]

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’ [...]

  Some complex ideas in this post, but I think rich rewards if you’re willing to persevere… Catching up on some old episodes of Radiolab (a brilliant podcast, if you’re not already on it) I came across the above section in the programme about loops. In it, the presenters discuss the idea of statements that [...]

One of the things I try to do on this site is draw together different strands of things that I come across. One strand… interesting… 2 or 3 covering the same issue in different ways… suggests there’s something deeper to look at. Towards the end of last week, Tony Jones posted what might have been [...]