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60The Catchings Press, by Robin McMillion | Book Review
The follow-up to The Children of the Children (reviewed here), The Catchings Press is a literary coming-of-age novel set in 1967-68, in the fictional small town of Catchings,…
Cutie Pies by the Slice, by Kimberly Nixon | Book Review
If you enjoy Depression-era historical fiction, Cutie Pies by the Slice will definitely be one to add to your reading list this autumn. Set in the twenties to…
You’re Wrong About | Podcast Review
There's a specific feeling You're Wrong About is built to produce, and it happens almost every episode: the slow, slightly uncomfortable realization that a story you'd absorbed as…
In Between Rooms, by Adrian Mompoint | Book Review
The cover of In Between Rooms gives you a perfect preview of what you’re in for: a bloodied stuffed elephant sitting alone. It’s a fitting image for Adrian…
Hardcore History | Podcast Review
Most history podcasts are built around episodes. Hardcore History is built around expeditions, and the distinction matters more than it sounds like it should. A single installment can…
Walking Through Water and Light: Tokyo’s teamLab Planets | Place Spotlight
Most museums ask you to keep your shoes on and your hands to yourself. teamLab Planets, tucked into Tokyo's Toyosu district, asks the opposite of you almost immediately:…
Nine Hundred Years of Appetite: London’s Borough Market | Place Spotlight
Most food markets are built for transactions. You go in, you know roughly what you want, you leave. Borough Market, tucked beneath the railway arches on the south…
A House That Doesn’t Behave: Meow Wolf’s House of Eternal Return | Place Spotlight
There is a moment, not long after you walk through the front door of an unassuming Victorian house on the edge of Santa Fe, when the house stops…
Why Europe Keeps Breaking Its Own Heat Records
Why Europe Keeps Breaking Its Own Heat Records By the time August 2026 arrived, Western Europe had already lived through what climate monitors were calling its hottest June…
Why Is Measles Making a Comeback in 2026?
For most people under sixty, measles has existed almost entirely as a historical footnote — a disease their grandparents worried about, consigned to old textbook photographs of children…
Why Do We Say “Bless You” After a Sneeze?
It's one of the most automatic social reflexes in existence. Somebody sneezes, and before most people have even consciously registered it, a "bless you" is already out of…
The Surprising Reason Honey Never Goes Bad
In 1922, archaeologists opening tombs in Egypt found sealed pots of honey buried alongside pharaohs thousands of years earlier. According to numerous later accounts, the honey was still…
Why Does Time Feel Like It Speeds Up As You Get Older?
Ask almost any adult over forty and they'll tell you the same strange thing: summers used to last forever, and now entire years seem to evaporate somewhere between…
So You Want To Be A Professional Athlete, by Linda Soules | Book Review
So You Want To Be A Professional Athlete is another entry in the “So You Want To Be A…” series by Linda Soules, the illustrated career-exploration line for…
So You Want To Be A Scientist, by Linda Soules | Book Review
So You Want To Be A Scientist is the latest entry in the “So You Want To Be A…” series by Linda Soules, an illustrated career-exploration line for…
Waiting for the Bad Thing to Happen, by Anita Fiore Welsh | Book Review
Anita Fiore Welsh was given up for adoption in 1963, through an adoption that wasn’t legal. Her memoir, Waiting For the Bad Thing to Happen, published July 21,…
Sol Canyon, by Michael Wolf | Book Review
Sol Canyon by Michael Wolf is a Los Angeles detective novel that starts out as a light character piece and gradually turns into something quite a bit darker.…
Syracuse Will Burn, by Jim Loughran | Book Review
Ancient Sicily is, in large part, criminally underused in historical fiction. Everyone wants to write about the fall of Troy or Caesar crossing the Rubicon, but Syracuse rarely…
T.V. Holiday’s Vendetta: Legend of The Iron Warrior Vol. 3, by T.V. Holiday | Book Review
Vendetta is the third book in T.V. Holiday’s Legend of The Iron Warrior series. I haven’t read the first two, so I came into it cold, but it…
Stuff You Should Know | Podcast Review
Radiolab is one of those shows that made a whole generation of podcasters rethink what audio could do. It isn't a science show in the classroom sense —…
99% Invisible | Podcast Review
99% Invisible starts from a simple premise — most of the designed world around us goes completely unnoticed — and builds an entire show out of making the…
Radiolab | Podcast Review
99% Invisible starts from a simple premise — most of the designed world around us goes completely unnoticed — and builds an entire show out of making the…
May Flowers at The Three Coins Inn | Book Guide and Review
May Flowers at The Three Coins Inn is comfort reading in its finest form — the kind of book to curl up with when the world feels overwhelming.…
How Do You Live Without Love? | Book Guide
How Do You Live Without Love? is a literary fiction drama that tackles tough questions through the lens of institutional decay, grief, and faith. It's written primarily for…
Love Me Do, by Meg Macy | Book Review
There’s something satisfying about sequels, and Meg Macy’s Love Me Do, published 15 December 2025, delivers exactly that pleasure. This continuation of the “All You Need Is Love”…
Rainy Wood (As It Began), by Taanja Mahye | Book Review
The first book in Taanja Mahye’s Rainy Wood series, As It Began is a dark and atmospheric historical novel set in 1917 Minnesota. It follows fifteen-year-old Helen Spooner,…
Let Slip the Beasts, by Suzanne Berget | Book Review
What does it mean to be human when your memories might be fake, your body is no longer your own, and a corporation holds the patent on what…
Steal the Reaper, by Todd Hosea | Book Review
Steal the Reaper by Todd Hosea is a book with a premise I have never quite encountered before, but that feels like a lost or forgotten Stephen King…
Salvation Reigned, by Travis James Peterson | Book Review
Apocalypse stories are a guilty pleasure of mine, so I was eager to dig into Salvation Reigned. It’s a bit of hard book to categorize, and that’s part…
I Get Knocked Down, by Murphy Buck | Book Review
As the title signposts, I Get Knocked Down is a collection of deeply personal poems that tackle some difficult subjects. Poetry can be tricky to review because it’s…
What Was the Most Modern Ancient Civilisation?
What Was the Most Modern Ancient Civilisation? If you've ever stood in a museum, looked at a 4,000-year-old object that could plausibly have come from an IKEA catalogue,…
Why Do We Procrastinate (Even When We Know Better)?
If you've ever spent an afternoon reorganising a sock drawer to avoid writing an email that would take eleven minutes, here's a small consolation: you weren't being lazy,…
Shedunnit | Podcast Review
If you have ever finished an Agatha Christie at 1am, put the book down, and immediately wanted to phone someone — anyone — to ask whether all those…
Backlisted | Podcast Review
There is a very specific danger that comes with listening to Backlisted, and I think it only fair to warn you about it up front: your to-be-read pile…
Black River, By Yvonne Osborne | Book Review
Black River by Yvonne Osborne, the follow-up to 2024’s Let Evening Come, is a literary rural noir set in the lowlands of Michigan farm country. If you’ve ever wondered…
The Sizable Problems With an Interspecies Relationship, by Belladonna Bryson | Book Review
The Sizable Problems With an Interspecies Relationship by Belladonna Bryson, originally released in 2024 with a one-year anniversary edition out in March 2025, is a debut fantasy romance…
The Hierarchy of Angels, by W. J. Whitley | Book Review
The Hierarchy of Angels by William Whitley, released in May 2026, is a debut novel that drops readers straight into a richly imagined alternate-history world that feels like…
On Falling | Film Review
Laura Carreira's debut feature opens not with a crisis but a beep. Then another. Then another. Aurora, a Portuguese migrant working as an order picker in a sprawling…
All Five Senses, One Building: Porto’s Wondersense Museum | Place Spotlight
We spend most of our waking lives looking at screens. We scroll, we tap, we stare. Even when we visit museums, the instinct is often the same —…
The Allusionist | Podcast Review
Language is something most of us use every day without giving it a second thought. We reach for words instinctively, string them into sentences, and move on. We…
The Children of the Children, by Robin McMillion | Book Guide and Review
The Children of the Children is a cult drama set during the final years of the Cold War. The novel centres on an apocalyptic religious community called The…
Next in Line, by T.W. Baker | Book Guide and Review
I wasn’t exactly sure what to expect when I picked up Next in Line by T.W. Baker going by the cover. As it turns out, this is a…
Off Script: The Actor’s Operating System, by Francisco Marquez | Book Guide
Published 17 February 2026, Off Script: The Actor's Operating System by Francisco Marquez is a practical handbook for actors built around a singular organizing idea: that the techniques…
The Migration of Vivex, by Xyne | Book Review
Released on 23 March 2026, The Migration of Vivex by Xyne is a LitRPG novel that slithers straight out of the dark swamp of survival fiction. I reviewed…
The Last Diaspora: Book 1: Letters To Earth, by Mandy Gardner | Book Review
Released in 2019, The Last Diaspora: Letters to Earth by Mandy Gardner is the first in a five-book sci-fi series about planetary colonisation, published by Endless Ink Publishing.…
The Dyre Prophecy, by Wyatt Moore | Book Review
Some books feel like they were made to be discovered on a school library shelf, shoved into a bag and finished in one sitting. Wyatt Moore’s second novel…
How to Sit with Someone, by John Gerrard | Book Review
How to Sit With Someone: Peer Support Skills for Connection & Mental Health is a short and accessible guide by John F. Gerrard on the often-overlooked craft of…
What Are the Best Podcasts Right Now?
If you've ever asked a friend for a podcast recommendation and received, in response, a fifteen-minute monologue ending with "but honestly it depends what you're into," here's a…
What Are the Best Books of 2026 So Far?
If you've ever stood in a bookshop in June, paralysed in front of a table labelled "Best of the Year So Far," here's a small consolation: the paralysis…
Who Are the World’s Most Popular and Unpopular Leaders Right Now?
If you only follow the news in your own country, you'd be forgiven for assuming every leader on Earth is wildly unpopular and clinging to office by their…
The Dreamer’s Path: Twin Peaks and David Lynch the Actor, by Brent Simon | Book Review
The Dreamer’s Path: Twin Peaks and David Lynch the Actor by Brent Simon, published in February 2026, is one of those wonderfully obsessive books that feels less like…
What Are the Easiest and Hardest Languages to Learn?
If you've ever sworn you're "just bad at languages" after bouncing off French in school, here's a small consolation: the difficulty was never entirely in your head, and…
Are Plants Secretly Paying Attention?
You walk past a houseplant a hundred times a week and think nothing of it. It doesn't move, it doesn't make a sound, it doesn't seem to do…
Medicine for the Blues, by Jeff Stookey | Book Guide
The 1920s are often remembered as a decade of jazz, economic prosperity and social change. Images of flapper dresses, speakeasies and bustling cities dominate popular culture's understanding of…
What Lies through the Smoke, by C. C. Ford | Book Review
What Lies Through The Smoke by C. C. Ford, released in 2025, is a debut novel that introduces readers to a world of dieselpunk vibes, a term I…
When the Darkness Swallowed the Sun, by Robin Newbold | Book Review
Robin Newbold’s fourth novel, published by Spectrum Books in 2026, is a dark, twisting thriller set against the sweat and neon of Thailand’s islands. The author is apparently…
I Fall to Pieces, by Dani Lewis | Book Review
First published in November 2025, I Fall to Pieces is the first entry in Dani Lewis’s Cassie Hunt series, and it is one of the most hilarious mysteries I’ve read…
The Dyre Prophecy, by Wyatt Moore | Book Review
Some books feel like they were made to be discovered on a school library shelf, shoved into a bag and finished in one sitting. Wyatt Moore’s second novel…
Off Script: The Actor’s Operating System, by Francisco Marquez | Book Review
Published 17 February 2026, Off Script: The Actor’s Operating System is a practical guide for actors. The book has a unique approach to acting based on Marquez’s ‘operating…
The Last Diaspora: Book 1: Letters To Earth, by Mandy Gardner | Book Review
Released in 2019, The Last Diaspora: Letters to Earth by Mandy Gardner is the first in a five-book sci-fi series about planetary colonisation, published by Endless Ink Publishing. While…
Features & Hidden Gem Reviews
In-depth features and honest reviews of things worth seeking out.
Walking Through Water and Light: Tokyo’s teamLab Planets | Place Spotlight
Most museums ask you to keep your shoes on and your hands to yourself. teamLab Planets, tucked into Tokyo's Toyosu district, asks the opposite of you almost immediately:…
Nine Hundred Years of Appetite: London’s Borough Market | Place Spotlight
Most food markets are built for transactions. You go in, you know roughly what you want, you leave. Borough Market, tucked beneath the railway arches on the south…
A House That Doesn’t Behave: Meow Wolf’s House of Eternal Return | Place Spotlight
There is a moment, not long after you walk through the front door of an unassuming Victorian house on the edge of Santa Fe, when the house stops…
All Five Senses, One Building: Porto’s Wondersense Museum | Place Spotlight
We spend most of our waking lives looking at screens. We scroll, we tap, we stare. Even when we visit museums, the instinct is often the same —…