When James Brown returned to George Orwell’s dystopia in an age of pervasive social media intrusion and a global pandemic, it felt a very different novel to the one he had read as a teenager.
On re-reading 1984
Category: Commentary
A Cultural History of the Brain in the 1950s
Historian Andreas Killen on the history of the brain at the start of the Cold War.
The Market Enchanters: Mind Control in the History of Advertising
Cultural historian Anat Rosenberg on the history of mind control in advertising and its links to current discussions of social media.
The Pathology of Boredom
Artist, campaigner and facilitator of creative projects Dr Lizzie Burns writes about the effects of boredom and how to counter them.
The Chronic Time of the ‘Dress Rehearsal’
Shaul Bar-Haim explores how Coronavirus affects our experience of time.
Narratives of Apocalypse
Naomi Richman explores the cultural history of apocalyptic thought and how it can guide us in imagining a better future.
A Faceless Crisis
Naomi Richman examines the language, metaphors and imagery that our minds attach to the ‘invisible enemy’ that is coronavirus.
States of Security: John Bowlby, Child Psychology, and National Security in the Cold War
How did child psychologists contribute to the Cold War discourse of “National Security”? Carolyn Laubender discusses the relationship between John Bowlby’s attachment theory and larger political anxieties about the protections offered by the nation state.
Do Good Enough Mothers Make Good Enough Democracy?
As Emma Smith’s Wunderblock opens at the Freud Museum London, we publish here one of the texts by the Hidden Persuaders team that informed the development of the exhibition.
Psychological Warfare and Cold War Science
We interview Audra Wolf about her new book, Freedom’s Laboratory: The Cold War Struggle for the Soul of Science.
