strand

On my last call of the day with Ma, I hear from miles away about the family gathering on the floor, as is customary across Bengali households, and chat over the steam and smell of masala chai and vegetable croquettes. I smile, and try to make do with the last piece of gulab jamun tucked at a corner in my fridge.

Writer Madeleine Rick explores the phenomenon of Australian 'cultural cringe' and notions of home, featuring a conversation with King's College London Professor Alana Harris.

Nostalgia is not cultural comfort, but cultural cowardice. It’s a way for people to simulate connectivity whilst ignoring the collective responsibility we have to create our own future. With the rise of nostalgia, our culture more broadly is at a crossroads, edging towards implosion and the end of the present. 

Writer Emily Bunder reviews the "Every Body Knows" exhibition, part of the CMCI Winter Festival 2025.

Life in 2025 feels like a series of reboots. The shiny future we were all promised – one of flying cars which ‘Back to the Future 2’ predicted would arrive in 2015 – never did arrive. Thus, nostalgia has become the vehicle for our escapism – the means by which we may live out a fantasy of some cultural and political present that never came into being.

Writer Shanai Tanwar reflects on her experience as an international student in London as her first term draws to a close.

Writer Sayema Islam discusses how the Coca-Cola brand utilises nostalgia marketing in order to create a brand mythos.

Jennifer Hensey discusses how nostalgia romanticises submission, turning the tradwife into an aesthetic of comfort and control.

As the world tilts into economic freefall, social exhaustion and climate crisis, we start to reach backwards. Not because the past was better, but because the future feels like it’s been cancelled.

Inside the walls of Dagenham Library in East London, I found myself surrounded by writers, readers, and creatives, all gathered in celebration of the written word and the magazine born from their shared passion.