EXCLUSIVE PREVIEW
Andrew O’HaganThe Search for Satoshi
People told me not to believe this dubious man who appeared out of the blue in London last December, the man who said he was Satoshi Nakamoto, inventor of bitcoin. ‘I want you to tell it warts and all,’ he said. The unmasking of Satoshi had begun. More
Trans Narratives
Today, trans people – men, women, neither, both – are taking the public stage more than ever before. In the words of a Time magazine cover story in June last year, trans is ‘America’s next civil rights frontier’. Perhaps, even though it doesn’t always look this way on the ground, trans activists will also – just – be in a position to advance what so often seems impossible: a political movement that tells it how it uniquely is, without separating one struggle for equality and human dignity from all the rest. More
The Great Train Robbery
People who live in cities assume their city is a thing in the way they talk about it. They ‘hate’ London, they ‘adore’ Belfast. We don’t speak of the railways as a whole in that way even though we move in and out of the railways constantly, and spend hours – years – of our lives there. The railways may, as Simon Bradley writes, be ‘a uniquely discrete system: a separate domain ... ruled by their own mysterious rhythms and laws’, but you seldom hear ‘I love the railways,’ or ‘I hate the railways.’ More
Ways to Be Pretentious
Patti Smith, who turns seventy this year, has had just one hit single (1978’s ‘Because the Night’) in forty years, and the only one of her 11 albums with an unassailable reputation is her glorious debut, Horses. I’ve known many people who dearly love Horses, but I can’t recall a single person ever declaring a passion for any of the other work, intermittent poetry and photography included. For a while now, Smith has been the sort of feel-good, feels-real celeb who gets invited to ‘guest edit’ Vogue when the Dalai Lama is resting. More
Does one flare or cling?
British Vogue was born in September 1916, when German U-boats prevented the Americans from transporting their edition to British shores. Condé Nast, who had bought the US version in 1909, wasn’t taking any risks by launching a British edition: American Vogue was the second most popular reading material in the trenches (after the Saturday Evening Post) and that was just the men. Its US editor, Edna Woolman Chase, claimed they liked the frills and furbelows: ‘a vastly different diet from mud and uniforms, boredom and death’. More
