Daniel Soar

Sometimes​ another world is there – you glimpse it out of the corner of your eye. In 1965 an engineer called Ivan Sutherland – he had effectively invented the whole field of computer graphics by writing a program called Sketchpad which allowed users to draw directly onto a screen – had a vision of the future. ‘The ultimate display,’ he wrote in a conference...

Sometimes​ you just have to think of England. It may be embarrassing, it may be awful, but it exists. Max Porter’s Lanny – his second novel – is partly about an idea of England. It’s set in an unnamed village, ‘fewer than fifty redbrick cottages’, within commuting distance of London, a place that is ‘a cruciform grid with the twin hearts of church...

On Sunday​, 30 September 2007, in the late afternoon, four men met in an airy, book-lined apartment in Washington DC and had a two-hour discussion around a marble table. The subject, it seemed, was the misguidedness, stupidity and sometimes dangerousness of religious belief. Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens: over the previous few years each had published...

There is​ no reliable single view of a big city building. Take London’s tallest skyscraper, the Shard. Here’s one view: it looks like a blown-up version in glass and steel of Kim Il-sung’s Tower of the Juche Idea in Pyongyang – except it’s a monument to capital rather than revolutionary self-reliance. Both towers are steep pyramids, stretched vertically until...

Earlier​ this month, a small storm hit social media when it was revealed that a number of cultural studies journals had been the victims of a massive hoax. Three collaborators had submitted twenty ‘bat-shit insane’ papers – as they described them – to places like Gender, Place and Culture and Sex Roles. Four of the papers were published, and another three had been...