When Virginia Woolf wrote this innocuous sentence in "A Room of One's Own," her foundational work of feminist criticism, she opened the door to another field, still decades in the future--that of queer literary criticism. Do not blush," Woolf cautioned her audience. "Let us admit in the privacy of our own society that these things sometimes happen. Sometimes women do like women." Chloe and Olivia are characters in a book that Woolf has invented, a mediocre novel by a writer she names Mary Carmichael. Ostensibly, the women are friends and colleagues, not lovers, but Woolf drops clues for attentive readers. At one point, she interrupts her train of thought to ask for reassurance that Sir Chartres Biron is not lurking somewhere in the room. When she gave her original talks, Biron had recently been appointed the chief magistrate in an obscenity case that had been brought against the publisher of Radclyffe Hall's "The Well of Loneliness," a novel about a girl named Stephen who wants to be ...

Halloween might be over, but the scary memories last a lifetime, at least for me. I do not like horror. I am one of the world's biggest wusses, and feeding my imagination with nightmare fuel will keep me up at night for weeks. I was recently so disturbed by a simple bus advert for the movie Smile that I read the Wikipedia summary of the plot, and just that was enough to screw with my sleep. My partner, meanwhile, cannot get enough of disgusting films and terrifying games, so he's delighted to be living through something of a golden age for video game horror.

There's an urban legend saying that if you wander around at night and go to a subway station and you ride a train with nobody on it, it might just take you to the other world,

Artificial intelligence (AI) is arguably the new spectre of digital cultures. By filtering information out of existing data, it determines the way we see the world and how the world sees us. Yet the vision algorithms have of our future is built on our past. What we teach these algorithms ultimately reflects back on us and it is therefore no surprise when artificial intelligence starts to classify on the basis of race, class and gender. This odd'hauntology'1Jacques Derrida, Spectres de Marx, Paris, Galilée, 1993. is at the core of what is currently discussed under the labels of algorithmic bias or pattern discrimination.2For