Scientology is for an able guy like you or like me … The insane and so forth, somebody else can have them. They’ve already failed.
- L. Ron Hubbard, 1966.¹

The Church of Scientology is obsessed with the concept of 'ability'. In his only public interview to date, David Miscavige, the current leader of the movement, said that the singular goal of Scientology is to ‘help the able become more able,’² and the Church claims to do just that by proselytising the psycho-therapeutic 'technology' invented by its founder, L. Ron Hubbard.

Casual observers of Scientology might notice the near-total absence…

In August 2019, Donald Trump captured global attention by making an offer for the United States to buy Greenland from Denmark.¹ The Danish and Greenlandic governments both dismissed the idea as absurd, pouring icy water on Trump’s media storm. Vague and short-lived, Trump’s ‘Greenland thing’ seemed a microcosm of the scatter-gun approach that he brought to policy-making — silly, weird, unprecedented, pointless, transient.

In reality, however, it represents one of the most historically significant episodes in the Trump administration’s hectic single term. As climate change continues to transform the Arctic, revealing untapped natural resources and opening up new sea lanes…

Friday, 24 March 1939 — Spring had just begun in the Principality of Liechtenstein, a tiny pocket of sovereign land nestled between Austria and Switzerland. The First Austrian Republic, a shadow of a once sprawling Austrian empire, had been absorbed by Adolf Hitler’s Germany just one year prior.

The fall of Austria brought soldiers of the Third Reich to the borders of the defenceless and officially neutral micro-state of Liechtenstein. While fear gripped most Liechtensteiners, die-hard Nazi sympathisers welcomed the potential Anschluss (unification) with Germany. True to Nazi form, they plotted a putsch — a violent takeover of power —…

2021 marks the tricentenary of the collapse of the Swedish Empire, one of the most unusual and unpredictable empires to romp across early-modern Europe. And yet, despite having had all of three centuries to mull it over, historians are still puzzled by Sweden's 'Age of Greatness'.

When it gained independence from Denmark in 1523, the Swedish nation covered a sparsely populated and resource-poor area stretching from the Baltic sea into the Arctic Circle; hardly the foundations on which to build a mighty empire.¹ Over the next two centuries, however, Swedish territory grew at an exponential rate. Much of what is…

QAnon, one of the defining conspiracy movements of our time, is a socially conservative system of thought that mobilizes mass disinformation in service to the Make America Great Again (MAGA) ideology of former President Donald Trump. Its followers see foul play around every corner.

QAnon adherents associate progressive causes like LGBT+ rights and feminism with the movement’s arch-enemy, a powerful (and fictional) set of pedophiliac elites who run the world behind closed doors. Die-hard believers often see trans people as one of the most insidious Trojan horses deployed by the evil cabal.

This is despite the total absence of trans…

The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim is almost a full decade old. Praised to the heavens upon its release in 2011, many recent critics accuse it of being ‘a mile wide and an inch deep.’ Sure, they argue, there’s plenty of places to go, people to meet, and factions to join, but they all feel shallow.

There is one area, however, in which Skyrim still stands head and shoulders above most other open-world role-playing games: its in-game books.

Skyrim has over 300 books for the player to discover and read (excluding letters and journals) — some of which are carried over…

February in the United Kingdom marks LGBT+ History Month, a tradition initiated by a Missouri schoolteacher in 1994 and celebrated at different times of the year around the globe.

While gay and lesbian history has become relatively well-known over the past two decades, trans history remains an uneasy addendum to the commemoration merry-go-round. Every year, the effort to foster public awareness of trans history runs into the pervasive belief that trans identity was invented recently by medical quacks and Millennials/Gen Z. Convincing society that the trans past is even real remains an all-consuming preoccupation.

Historians have proposed a number of…

LGBT+ History Month comes around every February in the UK (and October in the USA) to commemorate and celebrate the queer past. Emphasis is usually placed on the history of gay, lesbian, and bisexual people, with the ‘T’ being an afterthought. Some people aren’t even convinced that trans people have much of history, believing that trans identity was invented by liberal busy-bodies and ‘snowflakes’ sometime after the Second World War.

Quite the contrary. Trans history is now a burgeoning field with a growing list of innovative texts for readers to choose from. …