Simon Taylor

… the worst vices of our digital societies: intellectual irresponsibility, proud mediocrity, implausible denigration with impunity, but most of all verbal terrorism, the schoolyard bullying the participants got involved in with incomprehensible enthusiasm, the cowardice of all aggressors who used pseudonyms to vilify but would never repeat their insults out loud.

each person has their own singular encounter, not just with the deceased but also with the event itself, … death … Nobody can be denied their relationship to it, their membership in that society. And death as something that is, rather than as the lack of something, is sobering to behold. That

my mother and my father are far away and huddled together against the weather they look hopefully out to the sea as if one of us is coming to pick them up and the odd thing is that they show no resentment at the lateness in their faces as they

Narratives of crisis emplot events to create a meaningful sequence. The way they construct this sequence is prior to and entails the choice of explanatory mechanisms and the fingering of guilty parties. To speak about “post-truth,” declining trust in science, and/or the “death of expertise” is to sketch the

I think of the demands of people they fill my dreams and I cannot satisfy them. Perhaps they can’t be satisfied. Yet, woken by birds and the light of day that is always sudden, I still hear talking. Being polite’s been overtaken by the demands of sociability. That’

a pot sits on the stove the accused sits there in the pot no recording devices are permitted in the changing rooms the information at my fingertips cases differ the facts stay the same my blood is cold anyway I can’t wait to enter the house to prepare the