If you missed Will’s Point of View, A Sense of Home, on Radio 4 earlier on, you can listen again here.
Also on Radio 4, Will returns to the Moral Maze for a special end-of-year debate on Meaning, with Rowan Williams, Alice Roberts and Bonnie Greer on 29 December at 8pm.
Pick up a copy of the brand new INQUE magazine to read Will’s new short story. Other contributors include Margaret Atwood, Max Porter, Joyce Carol Oates, Ocean Vuong, Tom Waits, Ben Lerner, Alexander Chee, Kae Tempest and Hanif Kureishi.
“Click-clack goes the kitchen bin flap and it’s as if some definitive barrier has fallen into place in our minds and we forget — we forget about our rubbish. You may be like me, and have a dedicated recycling bin in your kitchen as well, in which case where you deposit your detritus delivers you either a little positive stroke — see how virtuous I am, carefully discarding this cardboard packaging — or a tiny demerit: perhaps I should have exhaustively washed out that yoghurt pot, so as to avoid it going up in smoke?
“Because that’s the reality of what happens to our waste: the days of extensive landfill are over. The new solution is to recycle as much as possible and incinerate the rest, in the process generating electricity. I wasn’t aware of this before researching a BBC Radio 4 programme on the subject, which is not say that I wasn’t conscious of my own lack of awareness, if you see what I mean.
On the contrary, I’ve always been intrigued, good Freudian that I am, by the nature of the rubbish heap upon which our civilisation is built. For the discoverer of the unconscious, it was the desire to repress the reality of our own organic nature — and together with it, its derelictions, defecations and eventual death — that resulted in the refinements of society. But surely: as it is to the individual, so it is to the collective — if we didn’t forget about that empty yoghurt pot the second we discarded it, we might not be able to get on with our important economic role as consumers, and buy another full one.”
Read the rest of Will’s piece on what happens to our waste, published in the Times (paywall) here.
Will-of-the-Dump is on BBC Radio 4 today at 4pm.
Confirmation bias and its role in culture and society.
In this week’s Multicultural Man column, Will writes about his second speed-awareness course, this time a virtual experience.
A long essay in Harper’s Magazine argues that the symptoms we now call PTSD are only an extreme version of a distinctively modern consciousness.
NEW: Listen to Harper’s Magazine web editor Violet Lucca talking to Will about his essay:
On the politics behind the nation’s beloved baking show.
Will’s blistering attack on cars and their drivers, who are “told they have the ability to go anywhere when the truth is they’re shackled to a grotesque and Sisyphean go-round: they have to make the money, to pay for the car, to sit in the traffic jam, to make the money to pay for the car” for A Point of View on Radio 4.
This week’s Multicultural Man column considers the James Bond actor’s comments on his fondness of gay bars.
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