Rachel Johnston

Nov 13, 2024 | perspectivemedia.com | Rachel Johnston

Are we creating a new climate of cultural intolerance? Is freedom of expression becoming ever more tightly squashed? To many, such questions are fast gaining traction. Discussion of the difficult, the unfashionable, the downright controversial, is being increasingly constricted – and, what’s more, in that very forum where it should flourish most freely: the creative arts. The arts bring us pleasure. They provide a pastime. They preserve our past stories and commemorate our present lives.

Jun 1, 2024 | perspectivemedia.com | Rachel Johnston |Max Lunn

Look at the little kids in a primary school class. They delight in pictures. They love listening to stories. They jump about to music, bash table tops like drums. Art, this would seem to suggest, is a lot more than a frilly bit tacked on to the fringes. It is fundamental. It’s integral to human life. So why this lingering sense that the art world is the realm of the privileged, that our museums and galleries are places where posh people swan about? The cultural world has a class problem.

Feb 29, 2024 | perspectivemedia.com | Rachel Johnston |Leyla Sanai

Are you ready to play a party game? No doubt you’ll remember it from when you were a kid. It was called “Simon Says” and it basically entailed a blind obedience to orders. Whatever the despotic Simon instructed, you jumped to and did it. Except that for the new high-cultural version of this old playground classic, the former commanding officer has cashed in his commission. The eponymous Simon has been replaced by the performance artist, Yoko Ono.

Feb 26, 2024 | elifesciences.org | Rachel Johnston |Katherine Aracena |Luis B. Barreiro |Amanda Lea

Request a detailed protocol To assess effects of DNA methylation-environment interactions on gene expression in vivo, we evaluated endogenous methylation and gene expression from matched whole genome bisulfite sequencing (WGBS) and RNA-seq data collected from human monocyte-derived macrophages (n=35 donors), with and without infection with the influenza A virus (IAV; Aracena et al., 2024).