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Written by
John Mitchinson
John Mitchinson is a writer and publisher and co-founder of Unbound, the world's leading crowdfunding platform for books. He was previously Director of Research and a senior writer for the BBC TV show 'QI'. He is co-host of the popular books podcast Backlisted and a Vice-President of the Hay Festival. He writes a monthly column, 'The Upside Down', for Byline Times
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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
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
The Upside Down: Breaking the Frame of History
John Mitchinson lifts the lid on why the Luddites weren’t really ‘Luddite’
The Upside Down: Themself Alone
John Mitchinson explores a surprisingly modern role model from the backstreets of Jacobean London
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’
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
The Upside Down: Let Them Eat Nothing
John Mitchinson explores how the horrors of the Holodomor still underpin Ukrainian identity
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
