Category: Society and Social Issues
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“I never saw my mother”
In surely one of the most moving passages ever written in the English language, former US slave Frederick Douglass penned words that remind me of something vitally important. ‘I never saw my mother, to know her as such, more than four or five times in my life, and each of these times was in very short duration,…
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Oh, father! Where art thou?
An excerpt from my first book (“The Remade Parent”) published at The Good Men Project “The American author and father Paul Theroux once said that the expression “Be a man!” strikes him as insulting and abusive. That it actually means: “Be stupid, be unfeeling, obedient and soldierly, and stop thinking. Manliness…is a hideous and crippling…
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The loneliness of the long-distance teacher
March 2020 was just the start… At least the badly-exploited Glovo guys on their bikes get together in the public square. They can have a chat or a moan with each other between deliveries. Unlike them, the average Business English teacher here in Spain is now more than likely to be sitting solo at a…
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Worshipping the gods of commerce
[A version of this article was first published in Kansai Scene magazine and was co-written with Anil Ramsingh.] In 1994 a UN Human Development report stated that what we are now seeing is: “an arresting picture of unprecedented human progress and unspeakable human misery, of humanity’s advances on several fronts mixed with humanity’s…
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God-bloggerer
[Photo: DNA strand. Religion did not give us this.] [This article was first published in Catalonia Today magazine, January 2018.] I call myself an atheist because god has not been proven to any clear degree, but like other people I can enjoy certain things that are called…
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Evolution’s forgotten man
[This article was first published in Catalonia Today magazine, November 2017.] This story begins in the late 18th century with a small boy’s limitless curiosity, at first for staring at his marbles and stones, but soon this grows into a thirst for knowing what lies deep under the British countryside around him. William Smith…
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Dangers of the sell-off
[This article was was first published in Catalonia Today magazine, January 2017.] A new year has begun but not much has changed apart from the date on the calendar. In Australia, that faraway land that has the reputation of a kind of paradise according to some people here in Catalonia, the national government is…
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Getting Orwell wrong
[Photo of Julian Barnes © Alan Edwards] [This article was first published in Catalonia Today magazine, October 2017.] In the New York Review of Books not long ago, the well-known British author Julian Barnes ran his eye over some compilations of George Orwell’s work. Thinking about the school where a young Orwell was sent to…
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Real red: Corbyn and Goytisolo
[This article was first published under the title "The rallying of the left" in Catalonia Today magazine, July 2017.] Elections can be strange events. The British one last month produced a mixture of results but one thing it showed was that a genuinely democratic socialist government there is a distinct possibility after the…
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The quiet one
[This article was first published in Catalonia Today magazine, June 2017.] There he is. Sitting along the side of the class, with his head down. He could be a child or an adult — and certainly female too — but today at least this introvert has very little to say for himself.…
Brett Hetherington 