In the autumn of 44 BC, after Julius Caesar’s brutal assassination, the ringleader, Brutus, was in Athens raising support for a full-scale conquest of Italy that would restore the values of the old Roman Republic.

Only when history is decarbonised and decolonised will we understand how architecture should advance. For the time being, the art and science of building design are additionally hobbled by ‘systemic’ gender bias and ‘western-centric’ chauvinism.

Rag rugs are friendly things. Made throughout history, some say as far back as the Vikings, they came to prominence in the 1840s with the arrival of jute sacks, and remained popular right up until the 1950s and the era of fitted carpets.

A new book has been published telling the story of the bizarre “Wallace & Gromit-style” DIY music studio that was a breeding ground for some of Sheffield’s most experimental future-stars of the ’70s and ’80s.

On 8 January of this year, the house I was renting in Altadena, California, burned down in one of the seven wildfires that ripped through the Los Angeles area that week. In the bigger picture, the loss of my house seems almost incidental.

Is AI fuelling cultural stagnation, and how quickly are we sacrificing the planet in the process? These are the kind of questions that surface while reading Medium Hot: Images in the Age of Heat, the latest collection of essays by artist and theorist Hito Steyerl.

Recently, Verso Books published a translation of Louisa Yousfi’s Rester barbare (Fabrique, 2022), giving it the English title In Defence of Barbarism: Non-whites Against the Empire. Some would call this text a brutal, crude, even savage book. My response to that charge is simple. That is part of its intention.

Over the last few years, there have been intense, often bone-chilling debates across mainstream and social media about immigration. With the unprecedented popularity of Nigel Farage’s Reform party in the UK, Donald Trump’s executive orders in January clamping down on immigration, and the rise of the far-right in many European countries, there is no denying that migration and movement between countries are being treated as increasingly urgent national issues.

On Easter Sunday Vladimir Putin released a seemingly boilerplate message celebrating Christian “joy and love”. The missive ended, however, with a jarring statement that expressed thanks for the Russian Orthodox Church’s “support for the defenders of the Fatherland” – an unmistakable reference to the soldiers waging war in Ukraine.

When I was a teenager in the early 1990s, one of my teachers told me to read Orwell’s essays in the hope—forlorn, at least in the short term—that doing so might prompt me to rein in my prose.