Headlines

 Four colleges invest in revitalising local businesses

News Jeremy Azzopardi and Miriam Ilderton -
All Souls, Brasenose, Lincoln, and Oriel are working together to revitalise Oxford’s historic Market Quarter, with a particular focus on encouraging independent businesses.  The quarter makes up much of the city’s centre, including Turl Street, High Street, and King Edward Street. All four colleges own properties in the area, many of which are occupied by small businesses. Alongside restoring and redeveloping specific properties, the project is also designed to promote greater collaboration between businesses and the colleges. The colleges have...

Comment

Features

What the UK can learn from threats to Canadian student journalism

Emma Heagney -
The perseverance of The Concordian and The Tribune in the face of Bill C-18 demonstrates just how impactful institutional support can be, not least for allowing these student journalists to believe that their work is worth fighting for.

Oxford’s obsession with being busy is pretty performative, right?

Finbar Dinnen -
At Oxford, it seems like we get used to talking about our lives as nothing more than a summary of the things we’ve accomplished lately, or at least are just about to. The longer your list, the better you must be doing, because to be busy is to be making the absolute most of your time here – and who doesn’t want to be doing that?

No Greek life doesn’t mean no rape culture

Ruya Oral -
Perhaps the most effective tool we have at our disposal against casual sexism is casual feminism.

After the glut: A renaissance for the AI age?

Agatha Crowther -
Erasmus had a content problem. By 1525, Europe’s most famous humanist was being pirated, misquoted and buried beneath unreliable editions. “Is there anywhere on earth exempt from these swarms of new books?” he demanded in the preface to his 1508 Adagia. Print had made ideas wonderfully democratic. Unfortunately, it had...

From Oxbridge to Silicon Valley: The rise of student entrepreneurship

Emma Heagney -
Does a university education remain valuable for these young entrepreneurs, or can entrepreneurship serve as an increasingly popular alternative to traditional routes to success?

Visual politics in Oxford’s streets

Jiayue Shi -
One of the most enduring images of grassroots politics is the pamphlet and the pamphleteer: the putting up of flyers, the taking over of public surfaces, the giddy circulation of agitational print, the vexation of the powers that be.

Profiles

‘A symptom of our divided society’: Stuart Jeffries on Oxford, philosophy, and the present state of protest 

Leo Maudsley-Barton -
It’s safe to say that Stuart Jeffries has a complicated relationship with the University of Oxford. He is now a freelance arts journalist, writing regularly for The Guardian, Financial Times, Spectator, and Mail on Sunday. Earlier in his career, he also wrote as a jazz critic for the communist...

‘We were the poor relations’: Naomi Lightman on life as a woman at Oxford in the 1960s 

Gavriella Epstein-Lightman -
The year Naomi Lightman came to study at Oxford – 1962 – was the first in which women were allowed to become members of the Oxford Union. Four years earlier, the five women’s colleges had finally been granted equal status with the men’s colleges.

“I am proud of being a Jew, and equally proud of being an Arab”: Professor Avi Shlaim on Iraq, Zionism and belonging

Saba Ahmadzadeh Noughani -
Long before he became one of Israel's ‘new historians’, Avi Shlaim was a boy in Israel, self-conscious about the sound of his first language. Years earlier, that same boy had been growing up in Baghdad, a city that had been home to Iraqi Jews for two millennia, in a...

‘We have to end the complicity of Western countries with Israel’: Peter Beinart on Purim, Palestine, and the importance of changing your mind

Stanley Smith -
Peter Beinart knows the importance of admitting when you’re wrong. A professor of journalism and political science at City University of New York, a New York Times columnist, and Editor-at-Large of Jewish Currents, he has spent the last three decades as a leading liberal voice in the United States. But, unlike other pundits who pin their flags to the mast in order to pay the bills, Beinart’s writing is characterised by subtlety, self-reflection, and a remarkable political transformation.

Culture

The midterms and the YA novel: Impossibly happy endings

Ruya Oral -
Given its intense media coverage and everything that seems to be on the line, I feel as though I have been anxiously awaiting the results of the 2026 US midterm elections for weeks, months – maybe years.

How books are burned today

Romilly Ireland -
It is a worrying thought that what sits on your bookshelf today could be out of reach tomorrow. You might believe book banning to be a thing of the past – the stuff of Nazi Germany or Mao’s China – but restricting public access to books still happens today;...

The burden of the face: Why are so many singers wearing masks?

Leandro Landolina and Francesca Lamberti -
We can all name at least one musician who has performed behind a balaclava, helmet, or hood. Whether to preserve anonymity, cultivate mystery, or construct an entirely new artistic identity, masking the face is common among those under the limelight.

New Oxford Windrush generation exhibit opens for Black History Month 

Madison Garrett -
Amidst recent political tension provoked by the government’s refusal of slavery reparations to the Caribbean, this year Black History Month is celebrated uniquely in Oxford. The inaugural exhibition at the newly opened African Caribbean centre, The Island, honours the thousands of Caribbean constituents the government invited to the UK...

Life

Shedding selves, one term at a time

Eva Zielke -
There is the college self, who you become when you queue for the dining hall, do your laundry, and collect parcels from the porter’s lodge.

A decade worth celebrating: Spiced Roots turns ten

Priya Burrow -
This year, Spiced Roots celebrates its tenth anniversary, and Oxford has every reason to join the party.

The psyche behind a museum gift shop

Abigail Christie -
Like most soon-to-be finalists, I spent the majority of my summer vacation after second year researching and preparing for my dissertation.

Acts of time, physical giving, and words of touch

Sahana Narayan -
Ask someone their love language, and they’ll probably have an answer. They might even pull out online test results.