May I compliment Overland for its decision to publish Nell Butler’s article ‘Everything that is courageous and beautiful’. It was like the proverbial breath of fresh air to read something that confronted the zeitgeist of modern publishing with its morbid obsessions with identity, fantasy and money.

CJ Chanco’s ‘Law and order’ (published in Overland 226) presents an overly grim view of politics in the Philippines at present, counterposing a dystopian present under President Rodrigo Duterte with the untraceable claim that ‘trust in the left is at an all-time low’, and various other smears against the progressive mass movement.