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SubscriptionsAuthor: John Mitchinson
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The Upside Down: Saint Cuthbert – Wonder Worker
John Mitchinson reflects on why the life of Saint Cuthbert still has important things to teach us
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The Upside Down: Operation Shylock
John Mitchinson on why Shakespeare’s most problematic play still has plenty to teach us
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The Upside Down: Why Our Rituals of Death Need Re-Thinking
John Mitchinson reflects on what he learned about the ‘baffling presence of absence’ when his father died in his arms
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The Upside Down: Perchance to Dream
John Mitchinson explores why we need to spend a third of our life asleep
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The Upside Down: The Ruffian on the Stair
For this month’s column, John Mitchinson pens a personal reflection on why knowing about what kills us makes it no less mysterious
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The Upside Down: The 18th Century’s Ultimate #BookToker
John Mitchinson explores what the novelist behind a 1759 masterpiece can teach us about the importance of marketing as a publisher
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The Upside Down: Why We Get the Green Man Wrong
John Mitchinson explores a presence not a character, lurking on the edge of our technology-addled consciousness…
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The Upside Down: Homo Loquens – Why We Learned to Talk
It’s not hard to see how the evolution of cooperation and the evolution of language are mutually reinforcing, writes John Mitchinson
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The Upside Down: Why We Underestimate Fungi at Our Peril
Perhaps it is the atavistic fear of something growing inside us and consuming us from within that makes us feel so ambivalent towards fungi, writes John Mitchinson
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The Upside Down: Why the Tuskegee Experiment Still Resonates
John Mitchinson explores the lasting impact of a controversial American study steeped in the institutional racism which continues to permeate the country today
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The Upside Down: Why Folk Songs Still Mean Something
The longer we look at this traditional music, the more we see that its very malleability is its strength and its challenge, writes John Mitchinson
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The Upside Down: Why We Still Celebrate Christmas with Dickens
John Mitchinson explores the enduring relevance of the “little Christmas book” the author penned in 1843
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The Upside Down: Men Are From Earth, So Are Women
John Mitchinson explores how our brains reflect our lives not our genitals John Gray’s Men are from Mars, Women are From Venus was the highest-selling non-fiction title of the 1990s. With sales of over 15 million copies across 40 languages, it created its own publishing ecosystem: Why Men Don’t Listen and Women Can’t Read Maps;…
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The Upside Down: Why Apples are Odder than they Look
John Mitchinson explores the diversity within the fruit of knowledge
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The Upside Down: Why Being ‘Bird-Brained’ is a Compliment
Warbling, tweeting, courting, teaching – John Mitchinson explores the ever-deepening mystery of birdsong
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The Upside Down: Breaking the Frame of History
John Mitchinson lifts the lid on why the Luddites weren’t really ‘Luddite’
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The Upside Down: Themself Alone
John Mitchinson explores a surprisingly modern role model from the backstreets of Jacobean London
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The Upside Down: Back to the Future
John Mitchinson explores why we are hardwired to remember the past, with memories that are made in the moment
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The Upside Down: We Won’t Bow Down – What I Learned in New Orleans
John Mitchinson reflects on his latest trip to the ‘Big Easy’
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The Upside Down: Where Is the Man? The Many Lives of Pontius Pilate
John Mitchinson explores the enduring fascination with the man who was asked to send Jesus to his death
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The Upside Down: Let Them Eat Nothing
John Mitchinson explores how the horrors of the Holodomor still underpin Ukrainian identity
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The Upside Down: Kissing Cousins – Why Learning About Neanderthals Teaches Us More About Ourselves
John Mitchinson explores why our closest cousins were wrongly defamed as boorish, rude stupid louts
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The Upside Down: Glass Act – The Substance that Enabled the Scientific Revolution
John Mitchinson explains why gazing out of his window or at his computer screen brings him wonderment at an invention we spend little time observing
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The Upside Down: Slow Company – The Shameful History of Humans and the Giant Tortoise
John Mitchinson explains why our relationship with these fascinating creatures is such a depressing one
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The Upside Down: The Appeal of Hibernation
If humans can’t yet hibernate, could we approach something like the ‘torpor’ that bears and other larger mammals practice? asks John Mitchinson
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The Upside Down: Wish You Were Here – The Persistence of the Postcard
With emails, text messages and WhatsApp groups now a dominant feature of all our lives, John Mitchinson considers the enduring qualities of a more humble form of social communication
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THE UPSIDE DOWN: Less Is More – What Buckminster Fuller Still has to Teach Us
John Mitchinson explores the lessons in the inventor, philosopher and mathematician’s ‘doing more with less’ philosophy
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The Upside Down: Odd and Odder – The True Value of Eccentricity
John Mitchinson makes the case for those who have lived and died by their own rules, flying in the face of conventionality
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The Upside Down: Let Them Eat Bread
John Mitchinson charts a brief history of British food and the emergence of a humble meal enjoyed billions of times each year
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The Upside Down: Outrageous! Are We Hardwired for Scandal?
John Mitchinson unearths some of the juiciest incidents turning the gossip mills of times past
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The Upside Down: The Lie of the Land
John Mitchinson explains why we should listen to the farmers and why their plight deserves our attention
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The Upside Down: The Cobbett Conundrum
John Mitchinson explores the problematic legacy of one of the founding fathers of English radicalism
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THE UPSIDE DOWN: Playing the Game – How Sport Can Set Us Free
John Mitchinson explores the connection between liberty and fair play
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THE UPSIDE DOWN: Mental Slavery – What ‘Moving Forward’ Will Require for America
John Mitchinson explores how the mental structures that enabled slavery are still alive and thriving in the United States today
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The Upside Down: Long Live the Elders! The Exemplary Life of Barry Lopez
John Mitchinson returns with his reflections on the final book of the late great American author and what it reveals about the demands on humans to evolve ethically in order to meet the many challenges on the horizon
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The Upside Down: The Year of No Yule – How the Puritans Created Christmas Without Meaning To
John Mitchinson explains how increasing intolerance around festivities in the 17th Century helped promote a reactionary backlash
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The Upside Down: Why the Poetry of Claudia Rankine is Essential Reading for Right Now
John Mitchinson considers how the author combines the integrity of an investigative journalist with a rhetorical urgency in a timely exploration of whiteness
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THE UPSIDE DOWN: Very Like a Whale – We Need to Rethink Our Relationship with Nature
John Mitchinson is back with another fact and fun-filled insight into the human animal and what we can learn from orcas and octopuses
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THE UPSIDE DOWN: History’s Greatest Headline – Why the Dreyfus Affair Still Reverberates
John Mitchinson reflects on what may be the finest moment in print journalism – the use of the press as a channel of truth and justice
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THE UPSIDE DOWN: The Shocking Brutality of Empire was a Scandal In Its Own Time
John Mitchinson considers the relationship British people have with their country’s past and how questions raised by uncomfortable imperial truths remain unanswered
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THE UPSIDE DOWN: Keep Clean and Carry On
John Mitchinson explores how pandemics can have odd and unexpected consequences and ponders what the new ‘normal’ will be post-COVID-19
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THE UPSIDE DOWN: The Eloquence of Saying Nothing
John Mitchinson explores how being quiet and listening might help us to adjust to the isolation imposed on us by the Coronavirus – and beyond.
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The UPSIDE DOWN: This Too Shall Pass – What Defoe’s Plague Journal Can Still Teach Us
As the Coronavirus pandemic changes all of our lives, John Mitchinson reflects on how the observations of humanity revealed in such moments of crisis transcend time and place.
