Category: Biography
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What’s So Special About Fela Kuti
By Bergotte Fela Anikulapo Kuti built a nightclub in Lagos, declared it an independent republic, married twenty-seven women simultaneously, recorded nearly eighty albums, was beaten, imprisoned, and raided by the Nigerian military so many times that he began to treat the violence as material, and in the process created one of the most original and…
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The Weight of Being Seen
I have never much minded what people think of me. I don’t read a room for approval, and being ignored has never cost me (much) sleep. Which is what makes the last fifteen years interesting to me in a way that has almost nothing to do with vanity: I ran an accidental experiment on how…
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Sophia Luna Portra
Encounters · No. 8 Snake Skin, Warm Blanket Sophia Luna Portra makes sculptures from muslin and coffee, sings gothic folk songs about transformation, and thinks about clothes the way a philosopher thinks about the self. She is at the beginning of something. By Bergotte A note on this essay: the preceding pieces in this series…
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The Reel Argument: Agnès Varda
By Bergotte Agnès Varda spent sixty years making films about the people and things that the world had decided did not matter, and she did it with a curiosity so genuine and a formal intelligence so complete that the combination amounts to something close to a philosophy of cinema — a sustained argument, made in…
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Monstrous Bitch
Who Gets to Be a Monster? Book: Monstrous Bitch: A History of Terrifying WomenAuthor: Eleanor JohnsonPublisher: Princeton University PressPublication: 6 October 2026Pages: 344ISBN: 9780691291666Genre: Cultural history / Feminist criticism / Mythology There are monsters, and then there are women who have been made monstrous. The distinction lies at the heart of Eleanor Johnson’s wonderfully provocative…
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How Proust Can Change Your Life
How Proust Can Change Your Life In 2000, the BBC made the rather unlikely decision to turn Alain de Botton’s book How Proust Can Change Your Life into a television film, with Ralph Fiennes playing Marcel Proust. The result is neither straightforward biography nor literary adaptation, but something more curious: an attempt to ask what…
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The Human Condition According to Mark Twain
By Bergotte Mark Twain understood that civilisation is a confidence trick. Not a failed experiment or a work in progress or a fragile achievement requiring defence, but a sustained, organised, multigenerational deception in which human beings persuade themselves and each other that the cruelties they practise are either necessary, natural, or invisible. His comedy —…
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Jonathan Anderson: The Intelligent Disruptor
How a boy from Northern Ireland transformed Loewe, dismantled the boundaries between fashion and culture, and arrived at Dior with more creative power than any designer since Christian Dior himself By Bergotte Fashion periodically decides that one designer matters more than everybody else. The reasons are never entirely aesthetic. A designer becomes important because he…
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What’s So Special About Miriam Makeba
By Bergotte Miriam Makeba was exiled from her country for thirty-one years. She was stripped of her passport, banned from attending her mother’s funeral, and prevented from returning home to South Africa by a government that understood, correctly, that her voice was more dangerous to apartheid than most weapons available to the opposition. She responded…
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Why Gen Z Looks So Badly Dressed to Gen X
Taste, Technology and What Happened to the Individual Eye I think About This A Lot… by Birgitte Hahn-Etc There comes a point in middle age when one catches oneself looking at a group of twenty-somethings and thinking something one had promised never to think: Why are they all dressed like that? This is treacherous territory.…
