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The political and internet activist Eli Pariser coined the term ‘Filter Bubble’ in 2011 to describe how we have become sheltered from opinions that differ from our own Pointing the finger at such mechanisms as social media streams and the ‘personalised’ results delivered by online search engines, he warned that the online experience of news and culture was coming to resemble an echo chamber Our Twitter and Facebook feeds repeat back to us our own points of view, expressed by others who share them; our browsing history makes it possible for advertisers and news sites to guide us towards other things that its algorithms suggest we ‘might like’, shielding us from anything that we might not like, anything new We become entrenched in our opinions, unable to understand, enter into dialogue with, or even countenance difference The polarisation of political perspectives in the United Kingdom, United States, and across Europe seems increasingly to bear out this analysis   It is our hope that little magazines such as The White Review might in some small way work against this tendency towards intellectual isolation, the withdrawal into what Pariser calls a ‘personal ecosystem’ We are privileged to be able to place together radically different things within the pages of a single publication That is much in evidence in this issue, which juxtaposes the systemic critique of Martin MacInnes with Elizabeth Peyton’s emotionally charged still lifes and portraits; a discussion of Cally Spooner’s scripted performances against the lyrical experimentalism of Geoffrey G O’Brien’s poetry; Evan Harris’s attempts to find the appropriate form for his experience of the failures of British education beside Sophie Seita’s investigations into the properties of language The art critic Orit Gat investigates the tendency towards homogeneity in the way that art is presented on the internet, and calls for a new plurality We hope that print publications such as ours can offer new and surprising encounters   Yet, as we have noted in previous editorials, patterns seem to emerge in each issue, though their form might (like clouds) be informed by the reader’s own state of mind The reminiscence prompted by the