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Book cover of "Murderland: Crime and Bloodlust in the Time of Serial Killers" by Caroline Fraser. The design features a monochrome photo of a man's face—partially obscured—with a superimposed industrial landscape and plume of smoke, blending the imagery of a serial killer with a polluted, foreboding environment. The title is in bold yellow text at the top, and the author's name appears at the bottom in yellow, noting her as the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of "Prairie Fires".

The Crazy Wall

Caroline Fraser’s Murderland dismantles the voyeurism of true crime by tracing serial murder not to aberrant monsters but to the poisoned infrastructures, institutional apathy, and cultural amnesia that made their violence possible.

Line drawing of Rising Damp and Porridge start graphics

What We Were Laughing At: Rising Damp, Porridge and the Post-War Delusion

Why were we laughing? From the crumbling walls of Rising Damp to the locked gates of Porridge, from the clenched class tension of The Likely Lads to the surreal paranoia of Reggie Perrin, the golden age of the British sitcom was never just about gags. It was about containment. These were shows about men—white, working class, often thwarted, trapped in rooms they didn’t build but could never leave. They weren’t sitcoms so much as comedies of decline.

Adam Scott as Mark Scout in Severed

We’re all already severed

Watching Severance, I couldn’t help wondering if we’re already living it, split between the person we are at work and who we are the rest of the time, with capitalism quietly stealing the best parts of us.

Adolescence – The New Lost Boys

Full of unflinching realism, Adolescence is a harrowing exploration of justice, masculinity, and radicalisation, told in relentless real time. This review contains spoilers.

Photograph of Harlow Town railway station in 2007

Everything, Even Ruins, Is a Choice

The ruins Owen Hatherley documented over a decade ago, of modernist ambition, of public housing, of a Britain that once believed in itself, have only deepened, and with a new New Labour government poised to repeat the same failed housing policies, the cycle of speculation, privatisation, and social cleansing shows no sign of ending.

Errol Morris’s Chaos

The Manson murders have long been framed as the dark collapse of the 1960s dream, but Errol Morris’s Chaos: The Manson Murders suggests a more unsettling possibility, that the violence was not the product of countercultural excess, but of a deeper, hidden war waged by the state against the radical potential of the era.

A City in Fear

A review of the recently shown BBC Scotland documentary series ‘The Hunt for Bible John’.