A few lessons learned the hard way Foraging has gained popularity largely due to its accessibility, yet this very aspect can also be a drawback. Gathering your own food fosters a deeper sense of place and reveals the vital role wild plants play in our food system and ecological health. Recently, I’ve been watching DIRT by Huckberry, a YouTube series which showcases farming, foraging, and fermenting, highlighting communities dedicated to these practices across generations. From Hokkaido to...

The rising anti-democratic culture of the alt-right Lovers of culture and activists often treat culture as a battlefield where progressive art, media, and pedagogy automatically counter fascism — until they read about the Dark Enlightenment, an anti‑democratic, anti‑egalitarian philosophy that arose in online forums in the late 2000s. At its centre sits a prominent software engineer, Curtis Yarvin, who writes under the pseudonym ‘Moldbug,’ and British philosopher Nick Land, who rejects the...

St Andrews can be brighter One of my favourite novels, Still Life  by A.S Byatt, depicts how colour becomes bodily. Warm tones signify desire and vitality, while luminous contrasts convey emotional exposure for the protagonist, Frederica. Intensifying life while simultaneously arresting it, colour becomes a marker of impermanence. In an interview, Byatt explained how in Ancient Rome, green and yellow probably meant blue while purple meant red, and she discussed how we have a ‘physical...