This essay, on fear as a means of enforcing social order, was my Observer column this week. It was published on 30 March 2025, under the headline “Just like McCarthy, Trump spreads fear everywhere before picking off his targets”. “Gold, mister, is worth what it is because of the human labor that goes into the finding and getting of it.” It’s a line spoken by Walter Huston in the 1948 film The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, a story about greed and moral corruption directed […]| Pandaemonium
This essay, on the debate over decolonising Shakespeare, was my Observer column this week. It was published on 23 March 2025, under the headline “Why decolonise Shakespeare when all the world’s a stage for his ideas on injustice?” “My quarrel with the English language,” James Baldwin wrote in his essay Why I Stopped Hating Shakespeare, had been “that the language reflected none of my experience.” And so “I condemned him as one of the authors and architects of my oppression...| Pandaemonium
This essay, on the significance of the Palestinian-Israeli film No Other Land, was my Observer column this week. It was published on 9 March 2025, under the headline “Ignore the row: Oscar-winning No Other Land offers a vision of a shared Palestine forged in solidarity”. In 2009, Tony Blair visited Masafer Yatta, a collection of hamlets in the Palestinian West Bank. He had come to see a school that had gained attention for having been rebuilt in defiance of Israeli attempts to tear […]| Pandaemonium
In the wake of the Douglas Murray defamation case against the Observer this week, which focused on a column I had written last August, there have been a large number of claims that I lied or sought…| Pandaemonium
Oresteia at the Park Avenue Armory, New York. Photo: Joan Marcus This essay, on what Aeschylus’ Oresteia trilogy can tell us about the Gaza conflict, was my Observer column this week. It was …| Pandaemonium