#unknown-pleasures

#unknown-pleasures

Clothing that bears the name of a city near or far has become a closet staple for many consumers in recent years, evolving from impulse purchases to mainstream fashion.

A vision lay before him: Fleet Street blanketed with snow, silent, empty, pure white, and, at the end of it, the huge and majestic form of Saint Paul's Cathedral. It was a spellbinding moment: the great thoroughfare temporarily devoid of carts and carriages, the cathedral looming blurrily out of the still-falling snowflakes a real-life snow globe.

The widespread practice of showing the Eid Al Adha slaughtering to children can desensitize them to violence, as many families take pride in this tradition.

The brain processes aesthetic experience like other rewards, such as food or money, indicating that the appreciation of beauty is deeply rooted in our neurological responses.

Attar's 'Conference of the Birds' follows a flock of souls seeking the Simorgh, symbolizing the Divine, through seven valleys, ultimately revealing the Divine as a reflection of the self in relation with others.

François Ozon's adaptation of The Stranger, while visually stunning, reveals the limitations of cinema in depicting the complex inner states of consciousness that Camus masterfully crafted in his text.

For one human being to love another: that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks, the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation.

The Mirror uses erotic cinema as a narrative tool to explore something rarely addressed in this genre: the emotional aftermath of a breakup, where desire, memory, and fantasy intertwine as Roberto tries to understand what has happened to his relationship.

Rumi argues that to love is to enter the unknown: to love is to empty the self of all self-knowledge entirely. He believes that emptiness is a paradoxical state of infinite fullness, allowing for the purest form of love and union with the divine.

So long as I manage to avoid lightbulbs or stay out of wine glasses, the buzzing will inevitably give way to silence. My wings will abruptly stop flapping and I'll careen towards the ground like an asteroid. I'll become a speck on a rug, a bit of debris absent-mindedly vacuumed up by someone who has no idea what adventures I've been on in the past minute.

All of us live in an age where we're bombarded by social media and artificial intelligence - when striving to be your authentic self becomes an increasingly difficult task. Yet, even if it has somehow become a common goal, it is unclear how many of us can truly define the "authenticity" that we say we are pursuing.

I was suspicious, even cynical, about what the world insisted was vital to the life of my unborn child. I was partly sceptical because so much of the advice I was getting was contradictory. But I was also suspicious because I'd spent most of my 20s reading Nietzsche. Nietzsche is not, perhaps, a natural choice for a young mother. But he helps to fuel certain questions about values, and purpose, that are central to questions of care.

Erving Goffman, the Canadian sociologist, built an entire framework around this in his 1956 work The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. His argument was elegant and a little unsettling: social life is theatre. We are always performing. Every interaction has a "front stage" where we manage impressions, modulate tone, and curate which parts of ourselves are visible.

February 2026 issue.When I was a child I was terrifiedof the space between One and Zero vast as the ages before my birthstrait as my death-late at night I heard my parents arguinglovingly in their locked room, the angora cat coming homewith a sparrow in her mouth, and the raindrops on the shinglescounting themselves-how to sleep, how to cross the empty placebetween the name "sparrow" and that limp thing crying,adamant, creating me with its cry