Marina Benjamin
Marina is a former arts editor of the New Statesman and deputy arts editor of the Evening Standard newspaper in London. Her books include, Living at the End of the World which looked at end-time cults, Rocket Dreams, an off-beat elegy to the Space Age, and Last Days in Babylon, the story of the Jews of Iraq. Marina specialises in the culture of science, developmental psychology and strong personal narratives. Her acclaimed memoirs The Middlepause and Insomnia have been translated into 9 languages. Her latest memoir A Little Give will be published in 2023. She can be found on Twitter @marinab52.
Edited by Marina Benjamin
Freedom and choice
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Why not driving is my own form of resistance
As romantic petrochemical-fuelled narratives slip into the past, I’ve found my own kind of freedom in a life without a car
by Vicky Grut
Philosophy of art
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To master the art of close looking, learn to hold time still
Visual literacy is a skillset that’s rarely taught, but it begins with learning how to look – and how to hold time still
by Grace Linden
Sacred places
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Nan Shepherd delved into a queer erotic kinship with nature
In the Highlands, Nan Shepherd found an erotic kinship with nature: ‘The Living Mountain’ a core text for queer ecology
by Melissa Matthewson
Values and beliefs
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What if my lessons in existentialism were in bad faith?
When I’m teaching existentialism in the classroom, how can I tell where bad faith ends and enlightenment begins?
by Robert D Zaretsky
Stories and literature
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Forget ‘Little Women’. How did girls learn to be grown women?
How might 19th-century novels for adolescent girls help us find healthier models of what it means to grow up female today?
by Julie Pfeiffer
Love
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What I’ve learned about relationships as an agony uncle
I am an agony uncle. This is what I’ve learned about men, women and how relationships work in my 10 years of giving advice
by James McConnachie
Stories and literature
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Young women were the true originators of the Grimms’ Tales
Snow White, Rapunzel, Cinderella – the old fairy tales are full of female lust and hope, and most were told by women
by Christine Lehnen
Memoir
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If madness is like drowning, then writing is my raft ashore
I imagine madness as a kind of watery death, like Ophelia’s. The only way I can get to safety is by writing myself ashore
by Azania Imtiaz Khatri-Patel
Stories and literature
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Remembrance of telephony past: what Proust made of the phone
For Marcel Proust, the telephone gave distance a sensory form and allowed new ways to experience absence more profoundly
by John Attridge
Friendship
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For Beauvoir, it’s friendship that lets us become truly ourselves
For Simone de Beauvoir, friendship, even more than love, was the means to overcome the tragedy of our radical separation
by Skye C Cleary
Personality
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Dietrich showed how adopting a persona can reveal one’s true self
Kaloprosopia – the art of crafting a persona, as Marlene Dietrich and David Bowie did – can help us access a truer self
by Sam Mills
Nature and the environment
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Grey whales taught me how to mother, how to endure, how to live
When I was in crisis, grey whales taught me how to mother and how to endure, till I could find my own paths through change
by Doreen Cunningham