Category: Culture

The New Pilgrimage: Where the Spiritually Restless Are Going in 2025 (and Why)

If you squint past the clickbait, you can see it: a quiet migration of the spiritually restless, moving across borders of music festivals, ashram-adjacent retreats, moonlit parties, and plant-medicine sanctuaries. It isn’t a single scene so much as an ecosystem—a mycelial network of gatherings trading in awe, somatic release, and the soft afterglow of being…

Are Audiobooks “Reading”—or Are We Just Drowning in Pleasant Noise?

Audiobooks used to live in the glove compartment next to the maps: road-trip companions, a mechanical voice keeping you company between gas stations. Now they’re the fastest-growing slice of publishing, a soundtrack to errands, commutes, workouts, bedtime. Spotify is muscling into a space Audible once treated as a fiefdom; AI voices are almost human, and…

Sabina Nessa: A Kind and Generous Soul, and the Story Britain Can’t Stop Forgetting

When 28-year-old teacher Sabina Nessa walked through Cator Park in southeast London in September 2021, she should have arrived at a pub five minutes later. She never did. Her murder became another entry in Britain’s grim ledger of women killed in everyday moments—walking home, going for a run, taking the shortcut everyone takes. A Life,…

Jill Scott’s Anthem Remake: When “The Star-Spangled Banner” Sounds Like Protest

The national anthem has always been more litmus test than lullaby. At ball games, at graduations, in moments of national pageantry—it forces us to ask whose nation we’re celebrating. Jill Scott’s reimagining of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” first performed in 2020 and circulating again in cultural conversation, is less performance than protest. Where Francis Scott Key…

Why Dark Academia Refuses to Stay Buried: Greek Ghosts, TikTok Tweeds, and 2025’s Romantasy Invasion

I keep waiting for Dark Academia to shuffle back to whatever mist‑stained cloistered courtyard it crawled out of, but—like a PhD student on the seventh cup of tea at 3 a.m.—it will not go gentle. In 2025, the genre isn’t just alive; it’s staging an all‑campus occupation, annexing the romantasy shelves and mutating into ever‑stranger chimeras of…