Nihilist Optimism

Some thoughts scribbled in the free response box of another survey, responding to school's obsession with measuring attendance data (and poor discussion of other underlying performance factors) Across the UK, school leaders and policymakers increasingly repeat a simple mantra: attendance equals attainment. Parents are routinely asked to agree with statements such as, “Good school attendance is directly linked to better academic achievement for my child.” On the surface, this appears unobjectionable. Who could be against children attending school? Yet the language used – “directly linked” – reveals a deeper problem. It blurs the crucial distinction between correlation and causation, reducing a complex educational ecosystem to a crude behavioural metric. “Linked” is a deliberately vague word. In statistical terms, attendance and attainment are correlated: pupils who attend more often, on average, achieve higher grades. But correlation does not demonstrate that attendance itself cause...

To say that Rancid’s second album Let’s Go is the punk equivalent of James Joyce’s short story collection Dubliners might initially sound like either overreach or playful provocation. It is meant neither way. Rather, it is an attempt to take both works seriously as realist cartographies of working-class life: as composite portraits in which the true protagonist is not any singular character but the city itself, understood as a collective subject and structuring space of experience. James Joyce gives us Dublin not as romantic capital but as dense social atmosphere: clerks, daughters, drunks, minor political operatives, each moving through the muted light of empire’s periphery. The stories of Dubliners are individually modest. Their power lies in accumulation. Paralysis is not simply a theme; it is a climate. The famous snow of “The Dead” falls “general all over Ireland,” dissolving the distinction between living and dead, success and failure, into a shared condition. Rancid’s Let’s G...

A Parable About Unpaid Labor... Composed After Being Asked to Peer Review Too Many Times... And written after the Author Was Caught Engaged in Labor During A Strike Day... The last unpaid reviewer died on a Tuesday, sometime after the armistice bells began to ring across the Perseid Belt. No one knew their name. The archives listed them only as External_Reviewer_7, field of expertise: “science fiction, trans* studies, or both.” Cause of death: exhaustion induced by recursive footnotes. Time of death: indeterminate. They had been revising their comments for thirty-six standard cycles when the war finally ended and the galaxy abolished the practice that had sustained it. For decades, the Intergalactic Consortium of Journals had broadcast its calls into deep space: We are looking for reviewers with publication experience and expertise in either science fiction, trans studies, or both…* The calls traveled faster than light, faster than mercy. They slipped through wormholes and into the sof...