Month: May 2026

By Robertha Green Gonzalez

The phrase addictive personality is usually delivered as a warning. It suggests excess, lack of control, and an inability to let go- typically associated with substances. Psychologically, it is framed as a vulnerability. The phrase is usually brought into discussion when someone looks at their bank account, looks at the bar slot on a Saturday evening after perhaps too many pints, looks rather excitedly into their friend’s eyes and says, ‘We should bet on something,’ or alternatively, ‘Fancy a cig?’ only for the slightly more sober member of the party to respond, ‘I could never… addictive personality’ I suppose in that setting perhaps the idea of an ‘addictive personality’ is justified, but i heartily believe it transcends this. The ‘addictive personality’ can also be explored as an emotional affliction, and within relationship dynamics, perhaps this is not always detrimental.

Firstly, I think we need to make a clear distinction between a ‘love addict’ and someone with an addictive personality. The two, I believe, are quite different. Of the two, the ‘addictive personality’ may in fact be the more constructive temperament. Love addicts, serial monogamists, and those who find themselves addicted to relationships tend to do so in pursuit of the euphoria accompanying romantic attachment. They seek the intense chemical reactions and emotional highs that occur while chasing or beginning a relationship. The experience is often fleeting and perhaps more lustful. It involves romanticising and idealising another person, falling hard for an imagined future with them while overlooking their actual, often less romantic and ultimately disappointing disposition. By contrast, the addictive personality within a relationship is not necessarily driven by this pursuit of emotional highs. I would go as far as to argue that there is an entirely different way to interpret this temperament. Temperament research frequently links so-called “addictive traits” with high sensitivity and reward responsiveness. Individuals who feel pleasure more intensely often return to the source of that pleasure repeatedly, a pattern typically understood as harmful, especially when associated with substance use, like smoking. Within relationships, however, once stripped of its most destructive expressions, this ‘addictive personality’ can be understood as something more poetic, a temperament built for devotion. At its core, the addictive personality, perhaps better described as a ‘devoted personality,’ is simply a personality inclined toward ritual wherein small details become personal mythology. The result is a life composed of meaningful fragments: saved tags, repeated flavours and familiar textures. From the outside, these rituals can appear menial; tea is brewed the same way each morning, the same glasses are used to drink from- but the small details indeed accumulate. Teabag tags are saved rather than discarded, gathered and held carefully in a small Cath Kidston bag that once held a mother’s old coins. The objects themselves are not valuable, yet their meaning is created through repetition, wherein fragments become emotional evidence that life is lived through patterns and curation. 

Through this lens, the danger lies not in devotion itself but in the belief in inevitability. The real vulnerability of an addictive temperament is not attachment, but the expectation that meaningful experiences will repeat. When something feels deeply right, the mind begins to interpret it as destiny. In ordinary habits such as tea, music, or daily walks, this expectation causes little harm. In relationships, however, it can be devastating. People, unlike one’s own curated rituals, are unpredictable. Where others may treat connections as temporary, the devoted personality assumes they are enduring. People with this trait tend to form strong attachments to patterns and rarely move through life casually; this could be attributed to the innate human appetite for comfort, which is forged by predictable routines that reduce cognitive load and increase a sense of control. For some personalities, however, this tendency toward repetition becomes especially pronounced. What others might call fixation can also be understood as attentiveness. In other words, the ‘devoted personality’ is someone who tends not to treat experiences as disposable. 

Literature captures this tension particularly well- a nice example being in Sally Rooney’s Normal People. Throughout the story, the relationship between Connell and Marianne goes through a series of separations and reunions resembling an acute emotional gravity. They move apart, then return to each other again, as if repetition itself carries meaning. However, in the final pages of the book (spoiler!), that pattern is disrupted. Connell has the opportunity to leave for New York and pursue writing, and Marianne decides against going with him, resulting in what some (myself included) may call one of the most heartbreaking endings in modern fiction. In their final conversation, Marianne says, “You should go. I’ll always be here. You know that.” The power of the conversation lies in what it represents psychologically. Connell embodies motion. The acceptance that life can change direction and that people must sometimes follow those changes. Marianne embodies emotional permanence. Her statement is not merely about remaining in a physical place. It reflects the belief that meaningful experiences continue to exist even when circumstances change. For someone with a deeply attached temperament, that line resonates because it articulates a particular philosophy of devotion. The world may move forward, people may leave, circumstances may change, but the meaning of what happened does not simply disappear. 

In a culture that increasingly values novelty and disposability, new drinks, new routines, new relationships, this temperament resists the idea that everything must be replaced. 

It saves the teabag tags. 

It remembers the glass from the first beer. 

It keeps small artefacts of repetition because repetition itself feels meaningful. 

Seen clearly in relationships, the ‘addictive personality’ is not simply a predisposition toward excess. It is a temperament built for devotion.

Featured Image – Toby Dossett

By Raphael Henrion

I recently had the pleasure of attending an open mic event for songwriters hosted by Durham University’s Open Mic Society (whose president is our very own Matthew Dodd!). Entering the intimate venue of the Claypath Deli late, I sat at the front near the door, which provided me with a very close view of the performers as they came up one by one. I was genuinely impressed, and at various moments also moved, by both the lyrical and melodic quality of the performances, many featuring songs never heard before in a public setting such as this one. Yet as each singer moved the microphone out of their way and unplugged their guitars from the small amp, I found myself being increasingly fascinated by the performers’ accents.

Every single singer shifted from introducing their songs in what I would consider a British accent to singing in an accent that was distinctly Americanised. Despite initially trying to brush this observation to the side, I found myself being increasingly distracted by this recurring phenomenon, prompting a few scrambled thoughts on my notes page between performances. My friend, an employee of the Claypath Deli, told me that they considered each singer’s changed accent to be more of a personal blend of accents rather than an entirely North American one. Nonetheless, this change was present and noticeable. 

Since that night, I have been mulling over what causes this change, or more specifically, why the British accent is lost, whatever form of British accent that might be. While I do sing and have dabbled in writing myself, I am by no means taking away from or criticising others’ choices. After all, if I may be afforded the cliché, the beauty of music is its subjectivity. Ruminating on the why has led me to a few potential reasons why singers may choose to stray away from their natural spoken accent, subconsciously or otherwise.

The first is social and cultural, with a widespread adoption of a kind of ‘default’ pop-singing style. We have come to identify the ‘Americanised’ accent with certain popular forms of music, with linguist Andy Gibson suggesting that this shift happens automatically, calling this style of singing the “pop music accent.” Numerous famous British artists do this, including Adele, Mick Jagger, and Amy Winehouse. Even Sam Fender, from here in the North East, softens and changes his accent when singing compared with his strong spoken Geordie voice. As this style of singing has come to be expected, singers may be gravitating towards it inadvertently simply because that is the norm.

Stemming from this industry-wide homogenisation, I would put the second reason down to vulnerability, which was especially relevant in a small venue such as the one I attended. Performing original music, especially if it is inspired by difficult emotions, memories, or experiences, is inherently vulnerable and for many can be intimidating. I suggest that by shifting away from one’s own ‘natural’ voice, singers can find comfort and create a barrier, hiding behind a different accent. By creating a character that can be embodied while singing, they may be able to protect themselves from feeling exposed or nervous. Indeed, I noticed a number of singers that night who came across as shy and restrained in their spoken introductions, before seeming to gain confidence while singing in an Americanised accent.

Finally, while I am ultimately unconvinced by the strength of this argument, many people would state that the Americanised accent is linguistically caused, with intonation, vowel length, and diction all being changed by the very process of singing itself. And while this may be true, the existence of countless other accents in different singers and genres across the world must mean that this is not a strictly necessary change. Many British artists sing in their native accents, with a few names that spring to mind including Lily Allen, Alex Turner/ Arctic Monkeys, Blur/ Damon Albarn, and Kate Nash. 

All in all, singers have a right to sing in whatever accent they choose. Some of the most popular and culturally significant singers of many countries including this one do adopt this Americanised pop accent. I am not in any position to tell anyone how to sound or what voice to choose, though I would suggest trying out singing in your native accent – you may like the rawer, more intimate sound that emerges when you take that wall down.

Featured Image: Phoebe Bridgers, Billboard

By Emilia Brookfield-Pertusini

‘Breaking the rules, buggering about with the reader, drawing attention to himself’  – Kingsley Amis on Martin Amis

My biggest disappointment with my English Literature BA at Durham is that I never got to talk to people about Nabokov’s Lolita as promised in my third year sexology module. It’s not a particularly challenging or niche text, most people are at least familiar with that lip lickingly good first paragraph, but christ it is a can of worms in a seminar room of people who still covet Jane Eyre aged 21. How could you like a text about something like that! Why would someone write that! The clamours of condemning cries ringing through the room, all of us ultimately missing the point. To say it’s a beautiful novel is not very tasteful, but I certainly think it’s true. It’s a reading exercise in taste and tolerance. Nabokov toys with his reader and uses voice to sugarcoat the hardest pill to swallow, but ultimately it will always be unfairly  known as the noncey novel. We are apprehensive about its taste, and more frequently we have become a population of readers who spit out challenges to our tastes on the mediocre grounds. 

This month The Guardian, short on change for an idea of their Saturday magazine, ran ‘The 100 Best Novels of All Time’: an updated version of their 2003 list. The Pilgrims’ Progress has been dethroned and completely denounced from the list (thankfully),  Money by Martin Amis is nowhere to be seen, replaced by another theoretical hinterland from Italo Calvino, and for some reason we are continuing to pretend that Elena Ferrante is better than Virginia Woolf (che schifo!). The only hope is that Lolita has climbed the ranks to 25.  In 20 years, can ‘The Best Novels of All Time’™ really change that much? Apparently so. Our new list is, dare I say, tame. There is nothing shocking or unexpected held in the ranks: it looks like a list of the most name-dropped titles in a y13’s UCAS personal statement. What happened! Why have we become so ubiquitous, so agreeable, so inoffensive? I blame taste.

Enter Evelyn Waugh, in all his snobbish forgery. Almost a century ago Waugh, in his usual arrogance, decried good taste as a psy-op, made by the British Wartime government to interfere with people’s lives. He rallied his readers to fill their homes with what they liked and bollocks to your neighbours opinions. While he did base his dislike for taste in an typically elitist colour (oh, Evelyn), blaming the ‘plague’ of taste on some upstart at a polytechnic, his snarky observations ring true: ‘it seems odd that Colonel Brown’s wife who disagrees with you about politics and religion and how to bring up her daughters should see eye to eye with you[r taste]’. Surely the point in curating individual taste is to be, well, individual. To like things that others do, yes, but for differing reasons, and to let yourself disagree with people’s takes. Can we really say someone has the ‘best’ taste in books if they have read the majority on that list? Or do they just have the most acceptable and agreeable? Waugh took his anti-taste agenda further, animating his cir-de-coeur  in the form of A Handful of Dust’s Mrs Beaver: a modern woman (bad) who likes chromium plating (worse) and fills her home with other people’s furniture (criminal). Mrs Beaver’s yoghurt gobbling habits are scorned by Waugh, perceiving her role as a tastemaker as a detriment to society as she refuses to let eccentrics be eccentrics when there are tasteful, fashionable interiors to sell. Whatever, I wonder, would he make of the hoards of people now telling us to run into corporation backed trends. To give up whatever quest of personal taste cultivation they could have embarked on to run head first into the new popular thing that won’t give them odd looks on the Tube.  I wonder what he would make of Martin Amis…

Opening a Martin Amis novel is opening a can of grotesque, extreme, bravadoing worms. His novels spiral and debauch, with his most canonical work Money being a novel where characters ingest their sexuality savagely while guzzling on grease and nursing a neverending cigarette. Despite the amount of ingesting within this novel, purging is its driver, as John Self spills his high cholesterol guts on every facet of his life to the reader. He is truly unbearable, and considerably unlikeable. And yet, it is fantastic. Amis’ novel of voice aims to make us wince and recoil, recalling his inspiration from Nabokov. Nabokov and Amis’s novels are testing, not for their writing style or themes, but because they aim to test our patience and practice. You get the sense that Amis had good fun playing about with what Money could be – so much so he includes moments of self-insertion just to get even more in on the action. The rules were altogether ignored, Self doesn’t give a toss – or at least superficially does -about how he comes across, and it is an unpleasant novel – read it! 

Reading isn’t meant to be tasteful, it is supposed to be taste making. Push your senses to the extreme and heighten your taste, man. Upon the publication of a paperback edition of Lynch’s 2024 Booker Prize winner Prophet Song, my grandma sent me a copy. Shortly followed by a postcard, her preferred mode of communication for all forms of message, stating ‘DO NOT READ. UTTERLY MISERABLE BOOK!’ I read it. Every minute spent with it felt like a panic attack. And yet I recommend it for such a reason. Being brought to panic attack levels of stress from words is truly fantastic – art can do that! It’s not safe, it’s not fun, and it’s certainly not tasteful, but it helped make my taste. Sod what Waterstones tell you, or some corporate plug online, or even an author – read what YOU like and make your own taste. If the taste is good, you relish it. Be opinionated, break the rules, and be original. And if we are going to start curating our reading avenues based on universal taste, then call me the filthiest reader alive. 

By Alicia Mora de Rueda

The eternal return is Nietzsche’s most theatrical idea, and also the one that most people, encountering it for  the first time, tend to dismiss as too dramatic to take seriously. The demon appears, announces that your life  will recur exactly as it has happened, infinitely, and asks you how you feel about that. The straightforward  response is to say ‘yes, fine’, or to say ‘no, awful’. But Nietzsche’s real interest is in what the thought does to you – if it functions as a kind of moral pressure, an imperative to live as if every Tuesday were worth  repeating forever.   

The Czech-French author Milan Kundera opens his novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984) by taking this concept seriously enough to argue against it. What he argues, however, is much stranger than simple and outright rejection.  

The eternal return is impossible. We know this, and the impossibility is the problem. We live once, our  choices cannot be tested against their alternatives, and nothing we decide will ever be confirmed or refuted  by repetition. In this sense, every choice floats free of the gravity that recurrence would have given it. This seems to be what Kundera means by the ‘lightness of being’ – the vertiginous condition of existing in a life that carries no weight because it can only ever happen in one direction.  

The four characters he builds the novel around are studies in what this lightness really costs. Tomas, the Prague  surgeon, has arranged his emotional life around a principle he calls ‘erotic friendship’, which entails the  separation of physical intimacy from anything that might require him to stay. He has lovers without allowing any relationship to become fully binding, thus preserving his freedom and foreclosing almost everything else. Sabina, who appears most often in his life, takes this further and turns it into a philosophy. She leaves everyone before they can define her, betrays every fixed identity available to her (country, artistic tradition, the men who think they understand her…), and reads her own serial disappearances as a form of integrity and a ‘self’ that exists precisely because it refuses to be fixed.  

Against them, Kundera places Teresa, who arrives in Tomas’s life carrying a heavy suitcase, a detail he  lingers on, and who loves in the way that weight demands: fully, without this separation of body and soul that Tomas has built his whole life around. And then there’s Franz, the fourth main character, who cannot encounter anything without making it meaningful, who projects onto Sabina an idea of her so complete that she has almost no room to exist inside it.  

What Kundera refuses to do is cast judgements on these positions, which is partly why the novel has endured so profoundly. He doesn’t suggest that Teresa’s suffering ennobles her, or that Sabina’s freedom is something to aspire to. Instead, he seems more interested in what each of them pays to live by their philosophy, and, importantly, exactly when the bill arrives.  

Sabina ends the novel in America. She has exited every relationship and country that might have formed her,  making paintings in a city where nobody knows what she escaped from or why. The freedom is therefore  genuine, total, and also (this is what the novel won’t let you ignore) completely without echo. This same  freedom has left her without any ground beneath her, so that every act of departure that felt like self-preservation has accumulated into a life in which nothing was allowed to accumulate. The eternal return, if it were real, would have given her choices weight, each decision meaning something proportional to its  infinite repetition. Without it, she is exactly as free as she intended to be, and that freedom feels, by the end,  like it belongs to a life that never quite solidified.

Tomas and Teresa end the novel in a small village, having given up Prague and surgery and most of what  their previous lives contained. Their circumstances look, from the outside, like a kind of defeat that has narrowed, creating a life that is reduced rather than built. The happiness they have is modest and specific and hard to explain in terms that would make sense on paper. Nothing about their trajectory redeems the difficulty of it (Kundera is too honest a writer to suggest that it does). Rather, he simply shows that something has survived; what remains is a life built from weight rather than around the avoidance of it, which is not necessarily the  same thing as a life that went well.  

The problem the novel circles is not really about philosophy in the abstract, since it is lived before it is  theorised. It is more about how one chooses what to hold on to when holding on to anything feels like a  foreclosure. Kundera never quite resolves the tension between lightness and weight, because it is not the kind of tension that resolves at all. What he does show, though, is that Sabina’s costs are invisible precisely  because they look like freedom from the outside, and there is no repetition, no demon, no recurrence to make  them legible – not to us, and not to her.

Featured Image: Elisa Cabot

By Victoria Travers

There is a spot in the library I always try to get. It faces the window, but more importantly, it faces a tree. Usually, there are birds moving through it, hopping from branch to branch, and when I’m lucky, they’ve got whatever they’ve foraged in their beaks. So, when I need to look away from the work trawling across my laptop screen, I get to see something that feels simultaneously so separate but all too similar to the ecological studies I was reading. 

That morning, easing myself into work with something gentler than my usual music, I clicked on a ‘This is John Denver’ playlist. It was supposed to be background noise. Instead, it became a distraction. For anyone familiar with John Denver’s catalogue, the sheer number of songs, either explicitly or implicitly, rooted in nature is astounding. Mountains, rivers, rain, sunlight, country roads: the natural world is not just decorative, metaphorical world-building, but central. It is the emotional architecture.

And Denver was hardly alone. There used to be so many songs about the world around us at the forefront of popular music: “Green Green Grass,” “I Feel the Earth Move,” “Morning Has Broken,” and “Big Yellow Taxi”, to name but a few. Songs where fields, weather, birdsong, trees, earth and sky were not niche interests, but part of the common imaginative language. Nature could be everything you wanted it to be: romantic, spiritual, political, nostalgic, or just simply there.

What struck me was not just that these songs describe nature, but that they assume nature matters. A walk in the rain, the morning dew on the side of a mountain, the loss of trees to a parking lot: these are treated as emotionally legible experiences. The listener is expected to understand why they mean something. 

So why does that now feel almost old-fashioned?

Of course, nature has not disappeared from music entirely. It would be too neat, and probably too melodramatic, to claim it has. Hozier still writes as though the forest is a place of worship and rot and desire. Bon Iver can make winter landscapes feel like a form of internal weather. Taylor Swift’s folklore and evermore are full of lakes, woods, ivy, snow, cliffs and gardens (I could also argue that these albums emerged from lockdown: an unusual period when many people’s permitted worlds narrowed to the supermarket, home, and the walk outside). But even these examples feel slightly set apart from the centre of mainstream pop. They occupy a particular aesthetic territory: indie, folk-adjacent, autumnal, cottagecore, wistful. Nature is still present, but it often arrives already stylised.

The first recent mainstream example that came to my mind was, unfortunately, Lil Dicky’s “Earth”, the 2019 celebrity charity single in which various famous people voice animals with varying degrees of dignity. This is probably unfair; the song did raise money for environmental causes. Still, I found myself slightly depressed that the most immediately available example of a nature-centred pop song was also essentially a joke.

For the sake of my own ego, I tried again. Gorillaz’s Plastic Beach came to mind: a brilliant, strange, synthetic album about pollution, consumerism and waste. But even there, nature appears largely through its destruction. The beach is plastic. The ocean is contaminated. The natural world is not encountered so much as mourned, mediated through apocalypse and irony.

This, I think, is part of the shift. Modern culture is not silent about nature. If anything, it is frequently anxious about it. We talk about climate change, extinction, pollution, ecological collapse. But the natural world increasingly enters mainstream art as crisis, not companionship. It appears as something damaged, vanishing, morally instructive. Less often is it simply allowed to be beautiful, ordinary, funny, boring, intimate, or woven into daily life.

Curious, and by this point absolutely not doing the ecological reading I had intended to do, I searched to see whether this was just nostalgia dressed up as insight. It turns out there is some evidence behind the feeling. A study by Selin Kesebir and Pelin Kesebir found a decline in nature-related words across English-language cultural products from around the 1950s onwards, including fiction, song lyrics and film storylines. References to the human-made environment did not show the same pattern, suggesting that this was not just a general change in language but a more specific cultural drift away from nature. 

That does not mean everyone in the 1970s was wandering through meadows writing ballads about moss, nor that everyone now is spiritually bankrupt because they listen to synth-pop. But it does suggest something subtler and more troubling: that the shared cultural vocabulary of nature has thinned. The words are still there, but perhaps they are less central to the stories we tell about ourselves.

The same seems visible beyond music. Landscape painting no longer holds the cultural dominance it once did. Films often use nature as backdrop, threat, or spectacle, but less often as a serious emotional presence. Even adaptations of novels deeply embedded in landscape can seem oddly hesitant to let the land itself become a character. Nature is everywhere, yet strangely distanced: filmed beautifully, marketed aesthetically, invoked politically, but not always inhabited.

And yet I do not think this is only a story of loss. Recently, I have noticed small signs of return. Online, among the churn of microtrends and self-conscious identities, I keep seeing variations of the phrase: “cool girls like birdwatching.” It is easy to laugh at this, and maybe we should, a little. But beneath the trend is something sincere. There is an appeal in birdwatching precisely because it resists the pace of everything else. You cannot make the bird arrive faster. You cannot optimise the branch. You have to wait, look, and accept that most of the world is not performing for you.

Perhaps that is why nature feels newly attractive to a generation exhausted by acceleration. The appeal is not only environmental, but temporal. Nature offers a different rhythm. It does not ask to be consumed instantly, ranked, posted, monetised or improved. It can be engaged with lightly or obsessively. You can know the Latin name of every bird in the tree, or you can simply enjoy the fact that something small and alive is there.

This is what I feel in the library, looking out between paragraphs. The tree is not spectacular. It is not the Rocky Mountains. It is not a cinematic wilderness. It is just a tree outside a building, with birds in it. But it interrupts the flatness of the screen. It reminds me that the living world does not only exist as a field site, a dataset, a crisis, or a metaphor. It exists insistently, ordinarily, whether or not culture remembers how to sing about it.

Maybe we have turned our backs on what nature can give us. Maybe there is a political argument to be made there. But the great thing about nature? It will always be there. No expectation, no performance. All you have to do is just look through that window and let nature do the rest.

Featured Image: Victoria Travers