I first heard about Thy Neighbor’s Wife when watching Netflix’s Voyeur, a documentary about author Gay Talese and a man who’d bought a motel solely so he could peep on the activities of those renting rooms. I found Voyeur fascinating, and so when I came across this on offer, I thought I’d give it a go. Thy Neighbor’s Wife is a big, fat book, delving into the sexual mores of the American public, and the efforts of lawmakers to govern these, from the mid-twentieth century […]
Don’t wanna be shamed? Maybe just don’t be a dick…
Once forming a big part of punishments, particularly before the 19th century, public shaming has come back with a bang since the rise of social media. In So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed, journalist Jon Ronson takes a look at some of the people who have become famous for being publicly shamed – people like Justine Sacco, the African Aids tweet woman; Lindsay Stone, who took a photo of herself flipping off a sign at Arlington Cemetery; and various men who’ve been caught in sex scandals […]
B@*!@*ds!
In The Establishment: And How They Get Away With It, journalist Owen Jones takes a look at who and what exactly make up The Establishment in Britain and lays out the long con that has been played on a British public that has swallowed hook, line and sinker, the lie that the Establishment only wants the best for our country and that the blame for all of our problems lies squarely with the disabled, unemployed and immigrants, rather than the shower of greedy shits at […]
A Slight Disappointment
The British have apparently long been fascinated with crime and criminals, from the crowds that would gleefully gather to watch public executions hundreds of years ago right up to the Sunday night telly watcher, inhaling the latest series of Sherlock. In A Very British Murder, Lucy Worsley – she who’s also regularly on telly as one of its more engaging historians – looks at the British appetite for murders most foul, and how those appetites have affected and evolved our most popular forms of entertainment. […]