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Navigating in a connected world

Alex Lee ponders the promising ideas, stalled projects and pricey gadgets that aim to help visually impaired people get out and about. But it seems that an actual human could be the essential ingredient.

When you don’t belong, you drink

In the third part of her exploration of belonging, Tanya Perdikou unpicks the addictions that have shaped her past and uncovers the connections that make recovery possible.

Queer cafés and gay mylk

Holly Regan explores queer London spaces where the alternative – oat milk – is the norm for the communities gathering there.

Milk trails round Euston

Where cows once grazed near Wellcome Collection in London, baristas now froth their milk. Esther Leslie uncovers Euston’s dairy-based urban history.

How to rehabilitate the concrete jungle

A huge concrete housing estate from the 1960s, now seen as an ecological mistake, is being drastically redeveloped, compounding the environmental errors. Owen Hatherley posits a more creative solution.

The beautiful language of bookplates

Don’t judge a book only by its cover. Take a look inside, where decorative bookplates reveal stories that cross continents and centuries.

Intertwined with air

Siwakorn Odochao details his people’s way of perceiving trees and humans as intimately connected, and draws on the air as the element that weaves between them. Through the co-dependency of humans and trees to prepare the air for each other, he elaborates on the relationship between air, health and environment.

Why zombies can’t help coming back

Although it might appear that zombies are a 20th-century phenomenon, created for the horror-movie industry, they’ve actually been around since medieval times. Find out what zombies like to do, and how to get rid of them.

Titans in the landscape

How the Peckham Experiment inspired my fiction

Find out how an unruly mass of archive material from a 1930s radical health centre has inspired brand new writing.

Mixed feelings and milk siblings

A friend in need has a profound effect on Alev’s feelings about women sharing their milk in this final instalment of ‘The Breastmilk Market’.

A freezer full of breastmilk

When new mum Alev Scott began pumping her milk between feeds, she soon found she was freezing more breastmilk than her baby would ever need. So Alev began to investigate ways to share her oversupply.

A message from my skin

As wildfires threatened Seattle, resident Sydney Baker experienced corresponding flares of acne and rashes. Her skin was telling her something about the health of the world around her.

A woman in her wilderness of things

Even though her home was overwhelmed with stuff, Georgie Evans’s grandma couldn’t stop buying things. In this series, Georgie delves into hoarding, and attempts to make sense of her grandma’s behaviour.

The fine line between collecting and hoarding

Being ‘a collector’ is often celebrated but being labelled ‘a hoarder’ can be humiliating, at best. Georgie Evans asks what makes one set of objects a collection and another a hoard.

Coronavirus, Crohn’s and me

Clinically vulnerable to COVID-19, Lucia Osborne-Crowley has been shut in her flat for months. With her chronic condition transformed into a life-threatening one, she explores what the pandemic is revealing about living with long-term illness.

The ancient doctors who refused payment

The NHS might only be 70 years old, but the idea of free healthcare goes back to Ancient Greece, when devout doctors provided their services without charge.

Is shoegaze the loneliest genre of music?

Christine Ro explores the connection between shyness and shoegaze.

Daria Martin on ‘Sensorium Tests’ and ‘At the Threshold’

When ‘get well soon’ doesn’t cut it

When loved ones are seriously ill, we can hide behind dishonest platitudes or struggle to find the words. Meet the woman working to fix how we speak to sick people.

Lustmord and the three perspectives of murder

Artist Jenny Holzer's work shines a light on the three perspectives of sexual murder: the victim, the perpetrator and the observer.

Healing through ink

Taking an approach learned from his OCD treatment, Josh Weeks faced his fear of getting tattoos, and embraced inking as part of the healing process.

In the tracks of Derek Jarman’s tears

Researcher E K Myerson shares her moving encounters with the personal papers of artist and filmmaker Derek Jarman.

Trading breastmilk with men

When Alev Scott advertised her milk for sale, she was inundated with messages from men keen to satisfy sexual fetishes. Here she finds out who they are, and why women sell to them.

Doris Day blows against

Dodie Bellamy remembers a heady summer watching Doris Day grimace and gust in vintage movies, her expressive exhalations changing her onscreen world with a puff.