Headlines
‘Rally for Gaza’ protest at Oxford Union talk featuring Nancy Pelosi
"A protest organised by student solidarity campaigns Oxford Palestine Society and Youth Demand has broken out in front of the Oxford Union where Nancy Pelosi is speaking."
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Features
Philosophy and Technology: Science’s moral afflictions
On March 28th in a dingy Manhattan courtroom, unrepentant crypto-mogul Sam Bankman-Fried was sentenced to 25 years in prison. This landmark sentence came after an appeal by his lawyers against Bankman-Fried’s conviction in November...
2024: The year of elections
In his classic 19th-century work Democracy in America, the politician-cum-philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville looked to the democratic system in America with deep envy. In this system, he perceived a largely egalitarian society in which...
“Diesmal schweigen wir nicht!” (“We won’t be silent this time”)
Germany’s right-wing factions push forward
In another spectacular repeat of European history, a group of right-wing politicians met with an Austrian neo-Nazi last November in a small German town called Potsdam, known for being the...
How To Grieve a Stolen Diary
Elizabeth Bishop’s poem ‘One Art’ is beautiful because of its hypocrisy. The speaker exalts loss - of places, names, houses, their mother’s watch - with an odd joviality. You’re sure, reading it for the first time, that there must be something disingenuous going on here. The act of writing...
Taiwan’s 2024 Elections: What Taiwan can teach the UK about democracy
It’s 8am in Taipei, on the 24th November 2022. This morning as I walk to class, negotiating my way around the noodle carts and motorbikes parked half-way out into the pavement, I am stopped at the crossroads by a local election candidate, brandishing a loudspeaker in one hand and...
Why are men still getting more firsts than women?
Why are men still getting more firsts than women?
Oxford University’s Strategic Plan for 2018 to 2024 claims to prioritise the need to reduce the gender awarding gap. It aims to “set ambitious targets by April 2019 to reduce by 2024 gaps in attainment by gender, ethnic origin and socio-economic...
Profiles
“Everywhere we go, we ask: ‘What are the dominant narratives about the city? And what are they hiding?”
I’ve walked past the Clarendon Building on Broad Street many times – but I’d never thought to ask what it had been used for in the past. While today it innocuously houses the Bodleian Library admissions department, in the 19th century, its basement was used as holding cells for...
“If you want to understand the mess we’re in today, you need to know some history.”
Eugene Rogan, a historian of the Middle East and fellow of St. Anthony’s College is a tutor I feel slightly in awe of: charismatic and cheerful, fluent in several languages, always on the move to his next appointment, and for one of our classes, 3500 miles away in Cairo...
Culture
The rise of genre fluidity: Is this the death of genre as we know it?
My favourite genre of music: a question I’ve found becoming increasingly difficult to answer over the years, and it’s only now that I’m discovering why. Whilst we may not be listening to more, or less music than before, today’s era of genre-blurring, experimental DJ remixes and mood-based Spotify playlists...
Memory and Narrative in Miguel Gomes’ Tabu
"Now approaching the 50th anniversary of the Carnation Revolution, I return to Miguel Gomes’ 2012 feature Tabu."
Life
Food in Ramadan: Fast or feast?
Take a deep breath in, and hold. Hold it for as long as you are able to (without passing out), and then, once your lungs are pleading for air, only then, should you exhale. And that - that relief you feel once you are able to breathe again -...
A day in the life of an Oxford influencer
“Yet though they might be close physically, sometimes watching these videos makes me feel worlds away from the lives they live”
