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Review: “Kid A Mnesia” by Radiohead

Tom W. McGrath
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Review: “Kid A Mnesia” by Radiohead

Kid A and its sister album Amnesiac helped introduce electronic instruments to alternative rock, and were a risky sonic departure from Radiohead’s guitar-based and immensely successful OK Computer. But there is a sense in which OK Computer and Kid A were also a natural progression. If OK Computer was interested in collective anxiety about a rapidly technologizing, isolating world, Kid A represented the realization of those fears. In Kid A the machines have arrived, in the form of an Aphex Twin and Autechre-inspired soundscape, and what remains of the human element is scrambling around for whatever meaning, structure and coherence it can find. Listening to “Idioteque”, “Everything in its Right Place” and “Kid A” you sense that the organic voice is keeping the electronic forces at bay, but only just. And sometimes the electronic forces gain control, as in Amnesiac’s more experimental “Pulk/Pull Revolving Doors” and “Hunting Bears”. Then the world is looking very inhuman.

As with 2017’s OKNOTOK, this re-issue of Kid A and Amnesiac is a twentieth anniversary celebration of one of the group’s most creative periods, featuring both albums and a further disk of twelve unreleased tracks. Since the original songs have not been remastered, whether this is a fitting celebration largely depends on whether these twelve unreleased tracks deserve inclusion. 

At their core is a pair of quite polished songs. “Follow Me Around” has been knocking about for many years (see the performance by Yorke and Jonny Greenwood in Macerata in 2017, and the earliest version on the 1998 documentary film Meeting People is Easy). “If You Say the Word” came out of the blue, though. Or almost: in Ed O’Brien’s diary entries from September, 1999 he does talk about a song called ‘say the word’, which he says has ‘great drum, bass and vocals’, although he is ‘personally getting a bit anxious over it, as i [sic] can’t find anything that works with it, or rather i have an idea but can’t get the sound right. makes me a bit neurotic’. 

It seems Ed must have eventually got the sound right because these are both album-calibre songs. But you can see why they never made it onto the original releases. “If You Say the Word” features some disquieting ondes Martenot, like several of the band’s more haunting songs from the time, and some equally disquieting lyrics: ‘when you forget how lucky you are, buried in rubble, sixty foot down’. Nevertheless, it’s a little too calm and contemplative to belong fully alongside riled-up Amnesiac tracks like “Packt Like Sardines In a Crushd Tin Box” and “Knives Out”. WhereasAmnesiac is claustrophobic, “If You Say the Word” is airy and spacy. Almost uplifting. Too much so to be on an album whose cover features a crying Minotaur.

“Follow Me Around” is a good example of Radiohead refusing to release a song until the ‘right’ moment (sometimes, in my view, many years too late when things have moved on, cf. “Lift”). But it’s better late than never on this occasion. The main difference between this version and the live performances is that Yorke’s voice is partly fed through a computer, in true Kid A style, though only to the degree that it sounds like he has an artificial voice shadowing his real one. I thought this a little odd at first listen, but it’s grown on me; his voice is quite literally followed around. Yorke sings ‘I see you in the dark…Comin’ after me, yeah, headlights on full-beam, comin’ down the fast lane’, and thus continues his important tradition of motoring-themed lyrics and song titles (see “Killer Cars”, “Airbag”, “Stupid Car” and “Traffic”).

The accompanying video for “Follow Me Around” unfortunately doesn’t achieve much that wasn’t done already in the 2017 “Man of War” video, featuring another man running from a faceless, frightening force. The video for “If You Say the Word” is quite humorous by Radiohead standards. In absurdist fashion, ‘wild’ city workers are captured from a state of nature and brought to the City, a tamed, closed environment where they live a sanitised working existence.  

The other ten tracks are a mixed bag, but there are flashes of brilliance throughout, and it is noticeable how well the songs are sequenced and blended. It sounds much more like a concept album designed from the start as a seamless succession than a collection of odds and ends assembled 20 years later. “Like Spinning Plates – ‘Why Us’ Version” opens the disk. It is similar to the piano-based live version released on 2001’s I Might Be Wrong, but has a curious (probably early) alternative vocal melody, and a stunningly ethereal outro. This certainly has a claim to being the best version of the song. “Untitled v1” is a spooky, uncertain ambient interlude that flows serenely into “Fog – Again Again Version”, which pitter-patters cheerfully before Yorke’s fragile, melancholy vocals arrive. He proceeds to make you feel strangely wistful about ‘baby alligators in the sewer’ who ‘grow up fast’. 

Then come the two polished songs already discussed, followed by “Pulk/Pull – True Love Waits version”. This song’s title sounds preposterous. How, I wondered, could the sparse electronic moodiness of “Pulk/Pull Revolving Doors” and the anthemic “True Love Waits” come together? Surprisingly they do so rather well, becoming a relaxed but purposeful version of “True Love Waits”. This adds a third (album) instalment of the song, following the live acoustic version in 2001 and the subdued closer of A Moon Shaped Pool. It’s a combination I didn’t know I wanted, but it works. I also find it funny that “Pulk/Pull Revolving Doors” might possibly have never come about without “True Love Waits” needing a backing track.

The ambient “Untitled v2”, which has shadows of “Pulk/PullRevolving Doors”, leads into “The Morning Bell – In the Dark Version”, the third version of the song in as many disks. This is rather plodding and doesn’t add much to the other versions. “Pyramid Strings” is also underwhelming, albeit menacing. The more determined drums of “Alt. Fast Track” then kick in, which feels like you’ve just fallen into a Bourne film. It’s only a sketch of a song, but it’s quite compelling. A shame it isn’t longer, though. “Untitled v3”, which recalls the harp at the end of “Motion Picture Soundtrack”, melds into “How to Disappear into Strings”. This is a sinister and cinematic end to the disk, reducing the Kid A song to its bare orchestral essence, and forming an organic and satisfying closer.

In the book accompaniment to the re-issue Kid A Mnesia Yorke describes how after OK Computer ‘There was this fierce desire to be totally on the outside of everything that was going on, and a fierce anger, and suspicion. And that permeated everything’, and how when making Kid A he would ‘be going off on one in all directions, flailing around, experimenting with lots of different things’. From this period of clearly intense and repetitive creative struggle emerged an engaging, challenging and frequently intoxicating body of work. There was no need to put Kid A Mnesia together. But the additional disk is more than worth having for those who enjoy this Radiohead era. 

Image: Nicholas Lœuillet// CC BY-SA 2.0 via Flickr

Professor Stephen Blythe announced as new Principal of LMH

Pieter Garicano
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Professor Stephen Blythe announced as new Principal of LMH

Harvard Professor Stephen Blythe has been announced as the new Principal of Lady Margaret Hall, starting in Michaelmas Term 2022.

In a statement released by LMH, Blythe said that “I am honoured to have been elected by the Governing Body as the next Principal and am delighted to be joining LMH. I look forward to working together with the Fellowship to support, strengthen and champion the pioneering academic mission of the college.

“I admire LMH’s bold initiatives in recent years and its achievements in diversifying access to an Oxford education. Founded with the goal of opening education and career opportunities to the previously excluded, LMH is a distinctive academic community which transforms lives and tackles pressing challenges facing higher education.”

Professor Blythe is currently a Harvard Professor of the Practice of Statistics. As an undergraduate, he studied Mathematics at Cambridge’s Christ College, where he was 3rd Senior Wrangler. He also holds a PhD in statistics from Harvard University. After graduating, he taught as a lecturer in Mathematics at Imperial College London, before transitioning to roles in finance. 

Having held positions as Managing Director of both Morgan Stanley New York and Deutsche Bank London, in 2006 he returned to Harvard, taking a leadership role at the Harvard Management Company (HMC). HMC is responsible for the management of the University’s endowment of approximately £30 billion, which is the world’s largest. In 2014 he was appointed President and Chief Executive Officer of HMC, while continuing to teach in his capacity as Professor of the Practice of Statistics.  

In their statement, LMH emphasised that “As endowment chief, professor and alumni leader, [Blythe] has been committed to reducing barriers to higher education, increasing access and developing academic talent regardless of background.”

Blythe will replace the current interim Principal, Professor Christine Gerrard.  

Image Credit: Herbi1922 / CC BY-SA 4.0

Reshuffling our thoughts

Flora Dyson
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Reshuffling our thoughts

A shock decision by Spotify has fundamentally shaped the concept of the album in the digital age. Adele’s new album, 30, can no longer be shuffled as the streaming giant followed the artist’s conviction for her album to be heard as a cohesive, narrative whole. Whilst the loss of a small button may seem inconsequential to many, it alters how we conceptualise the album in an increasingly disparate musical age. 

Arguably many of the 20th and 21st century’s finest albums act as a muscial entity, rather than a collection of disparate songs. Adele’s 30 follows an explanatory narrative as she follows her divorce. The singer says her album, amongst others, “tells a story and our stories should be listened to as we intended.” Yet Adele is not the first to use her album to express a narrative. Bruno Mars’ and Silk Sonic’s recent album, An Evening With Silk Sonic, uses funk inspiration which is novel in comparison to the poppy tone of Mars’ oeuvre. The funk-king Bootsy Collins announces the work in “Silk Sonic Intro” which makes the album appear as a recording of a live performance, conceptualised as a narrative whole, situated in time,.

The structure of An Evening With Silk Sonic and 30 hark back to an age of analogue listening. Music was heard on vinyl, with the needle cutting through tracks in the artist’s intended order. Connections across an album would be recognised by the attentive listener. The Beach Boys’ seminal work, Pet Sounds, translates melodic musical material from “I Know There’s An Answer” into “Hang On To Your Ego” which provides reflective threads on the previous angst within the album’s narrative and compliments the contemporaneous technology it would be played on.

Music-playing technology fundamentally has changed our concept of the album and its narrative. Streaming allows us to drag-and-drop our preferred tracks into curatable playlists based on mood or the music’s association in a display of listener agency. Listenership has moved from passively appreciating an artist’s work to reforming it to fit our taste. It is almost as if the album has become a box of chocolates; we pick our favourites and discard the rest. However, the album is not a disposable commodity and is, in most cases, a piece of art with personal to its creator and cultural value to its listener. Do you read a chapter of a novel at random, only to put it down again, or select your favourite objects in a painting? Alas, I thought not.  

The album, like a painting or a book, should be considered as a whole work. Music-disseminating technology devalued the album to pander to listener preferences in a seismic shift of musical authority. Music listening is now based upon it reception rather than artist intention. Artists release their albums into the public realm and express their innermost artistic creativity through such mediums. Surely we would be doing them a disservice to reorder and cherry-pick the fruits of their labours?

Image Credit: Florencia Viadana

‘To help us survive’: On Stephen Sondheim

Clementine Scott
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‘To help us survive’: On Stephen Sondheim

Right after my GCSEs, as I was gradually exiting a deeply embarrassing Hamilton phase, I saw the 1961 film adaptation of West Side Story. I was at a screening in Spitalfields Market, in an industrial former warehouse – the perfect setting for that film’s gritty vision of New York City. Yet what dragged me into a new stage of musical theatre obsession was not West Side Story’s sweeping approach to filming complex choreography, or its dazzling technicolour aesthetic, but the lyrics of Stephen Sondheim, who passed away last November at the age of 91.

I didn’t know how to articulate this at the time, but watching West Side Story I encountered for the first time a quality I’ve come to look for in great musical theatre: the distillation of complex emotion into song in a rounded yet deceptively simple manner. Here was a prime example of showtunes’ unique ability to bring human feeling to a higher plane, whether that feeling was an immigrant’s anxiety (‘America’) or the immediate processing of first love (both the tense euphoria of ‘Maria’ and the giddiness of ‘I Feel Pretty’). Here, too, were the exhilarating aspects of Sondheim’s lyrics which would become his hallmarks, and which I would come to love: the complex, hyperactive rhythmical structures (‘Something’s Coming’), the patter songs that manage to be both comic and profound (‘Gee, Officer Krupke’), the unexpectedly raw comedown from a soaring chorus (‘We’ll find a new way of living / We’ll find a way of forgiving’).

If Sondheim had retired after West Side Story, his legacy would still have been notable, as a 27-year-old who had written lyrics which complemented and uplifted a domineering score by the more experienced Leonard Bernstein. But there was much more to come. After again contributing lyrics to another composer’s score (Jule Styne’s Gypsy), Sondheim first wrote both lyrics and music for a musical in 1966 with A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Forum. He then spent the next three decades composing a string of shows unprecedented both in their melodic complexity and the themes with which their lyrics dealt, ranging from the ennui of dating in the city, to collective responsibility, to the price of artistic genius.

It would be at this point in the tribute essay that I would reflect on the formative experience of seeing Sweeney Todd or Sunday In The Park With George as a pre-teen, and how that encouraged a lifelong obsession. But as the old adage goes, Sondheim wrote musical theatre ‘for adults’, and I think that until a few years ago I was simply too young for his work; my first encounter with Sondheim was a secondary school production of Into The Woods, and I wish this had immediately triggered a deep fondness for his lyrics, but it would still be a few more years before that fateful West Side Story screening. Pretentious as I was at fourteen, I was too stuck on finding Into The Woods’ fairytale motifs passé, and failed to recognise its poignant message of human responsibility for others in the community, best expressed in the sinister yet beautiful lyrics of ‘No One Is Alone’.

If Sondheim did not exclusively write for adults, then, he at least wrote for those with some experience of life, who could benefit from having the truth of their lives put to them, without any bullshit. It’s been notable in the aftermath of his death how many social media mourners used his pithier lyrics as a form of therapy (‘No One Is Alone’ and ‘Children And Art’ from Sunday have become ubiquitous as expressions of grief for Sondheim himself), and it’s this universal quality that’s made his songs so adaptable when performed in other, completely different media.

In this light, it’s fitting that a watershed moment in my gradual discovery of Sondheim was watching Marriage Story two Christmases ago, in which Adam Driver performs ‘Being Alive’ from Company as a divorced man reeling from the memory of the love described in the song (in stark contrast to Company’s perpetually single Bobby). While the context of previous events in Company’s plot – Bobby’s disillusionment with love thanks to the eccentric married couples in his life – undeniably makes the climax of ‘Being Alive’ richer, even without this context Sondheim’s lyrics are sufficient to convey the song’s message, and were enough to get me instantly hooked. The way ‘Being Alive’ ricochets from dismissal of monogamous love as a waste of time (‘someone to sit in your chair / And ruin your sleep’), to a cathartic acceptance of wanting passionate, complicated love (‘let me be used / vary my days’), to a sort of tenderness amidst the chaos (‘I’ll always be there / As frightened as you / To help us survive’) helped me rationalise as a late teen all the contradictory notions I had about the relationships I wanted, and the lyrics became mantras to which I continually refer. I even took it one step further than personal therapy, and once used ‘Being Alive’ to express how I felt to a former romantic interest – humiliating, but an experience everyone should have with the work of their hero.

Though I believe certain earlier musical theatre lyricists, particularly Sondheim’s mentor Oscar Hammerstein II, don’t always get enough credit for their work’s thematic richness, Sondheim nevertheless turned a corner by being both a lyricist and a composer, allowing his scores as well as his lyrics to reflect his characters’ complex emotions. My emotional response to ‘Send In The Clowns’ from A Little Night Music has varied widely since I first heard it, from frustration and desire for missed romantic opportunities to resolve themselves, to resigned acceptance of things just not working out. I think this emotional turbulence is in part due to Sondheim’s score: the song’s unusual metre and short phrasing give the sense of something unfinished, and Sondheim’s confinement of the vocal line within a fairly narrow range of notes leads the audience to expect a belted climax which never comes, leaving them instead with a resigned, half-whispered ‘Well, maybe next year’. The emotional richness of ‘Send In The Clowns’ stems from its simplicity, and this is also evidence of Sondheim’s respect for actors who sing, as opposed to singers who act – when Glynis Johns originated the role of Desiree in A Little Night Music in 1973, Sondheim prioritised the husky, desperate quality of her voice over undue strain on her vocal range and inability to sustain notes.

So how should we honour Sondheim’s legacy? Firstly, by celebrating his work, through the inevitable revivals next year and the new film version of West Side Story, as well as engaging with parts of the canon which we haven’t yet touched (as a classicist, it’s shameful that I haven’t got around to listening to the Plautus-influenced Forum). Furthermore, the irony is not lost on me that I’m a 21-year-old who loves musicals mostly about people in their thirties or older, so we should be open to the resonance of Sondheim’s lyrics growing and changing as we age; Sunday In The Park With George, and especially its climactic number ‘Move On’, offers a message of encouragement to all who create (even those of us who write theatre criticism!), and the more I write, the more the words ‘Anything you do / Let it come from you / Then it will be new’ serve as comfort. The more relationships and friendships we form, the more Sondheim’s words can resonate. Just as I understood ‘Send In The Clowns’ more after accepting that teenage relationships don’t always last, I hope that Company will help me navigate the woes of third-wheeling and feeling stuck as one’s friends evolve, and that Merrily We Roll Along will provide a blueprint if and when cracks show in my idealistic university friendships (it was the perfect Sondheim to have seen in my first term at Oxford for this reason).

But what do I know? Since Sondheim once referred to theatre critics as ‘ignoramuses’ and had a famous disdain towards their appraisal of his work, perhaps the decision about his legacy should be up to him. The answer to how Sondheim would’ve wanted to be remembered may lie in his commitment to mentoring the next generation, expressed most poignantly in an email to Lin-Manuel Miranda in which he wrote of ‘repaying what I owe Oscar [Hammerstein]’. Not only was Sondheim’s mentorship instrumental in the development of titans like Miranda, Jonathan Larson (a process fictionalised in the recently filmed autobiographical musical Tick, Tick, Boom), and Jason Robert Brown, but he also imparted wisdom and encouragement, replying to thousands of letters with aphorisms as simple yet profound as his lyrics, letters which are now documented on the wonderful Instagram account @sondheimletters. Therefore, Sondheim’s legacy may lie in the writers whom he inspired, and we might honour him by seeing an original piece of musical theatre writing next season: one unhampered by desire for commercial success and concerned with expressing its writer’s individual voice, just like Sondheim’s work did forty years ago.

Thank you, Stephen Sondheim. May your memory be a blessing, and may we remember that – in the words of the Baker’s Wife from Into The Woods – ‘no one leaves for good’. 

Image Credit: Tantó / CC BY-SA 4.0

Emotional Contagion: an insight into Oxford University’s terrifying epidemic of burnout and hyper-productivity

Dania Kamal Aryf
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Emotional Contagion: an insight into Oxford University’s terrifying epidemic of burnout and hyper-productivity

CW: Mental health issues, chronic illness, death, suicide 

The main character Patrick Bateman from the film American Psycho, studied at Harvard and works on Wall Street. He is wealthy, intelligent, charismatic, attractive – he embodies conventional ideals of ‘success’, and surrounds himself with important, influential people. Yet, he is also permanently on edge, and he knows it. 

Detached from his humanity is the shell of a man whose life is governed by entirely abstract and erratic perceptions of himself and his surroundings, distant from reality. In public, Bateman conforms to the façade of a calm exterior that is seen as highly desirable, yet, his inner world remains plagued by existential angst.

I could not help but notice how the neuroticism of Bateman and his circle seem to portray an eerily similar parallel to many of us here at Oxford. 

While the film remains a timeless classic that brilliantly satirises The White Male Psyche™ in a world of relentless material pursuit, Patrick Bateman nevertheless embodies a genuine sense of always being “on the verge of frenzy”, that many of us constantly experience. Especially with our endless ‘essay crises’, weekly all-nighters, excessive drug and alcohol consumption, and the obsession with grades and internships – many Oxford students continuously joke about eventually losing grip on their own sanity. But how much of this is merely cynical humour, and how much truth are we revealing when laughing at our own misery? 

Amongst these dreaming spires, emotional contagion hangs thick in  the air like an intoxicating fog. It is a destructive concoction of morbid perfectionism, righteous self-obsession, and a sense of perpetual tiredness. 

Even before the Covid-19 pandemic had exacerbated our global mental-health crisis, Oxford’s ‘work hard, play hard’ culture has still been notorious for its destructive effects. In 2013, for example, Oxford was cited as “the worst place to battle depression”, and in 2016, the SU Welfare report showed that 58% of undergraduates think that being at Oxford has had negative impacts on their mental health, and that BAME students were twice as likely to be diagnosed with depression whilst at Oxford. The following year, a Metro article cited Oxford students as being ‘the most miserable’ in the UK, and more recently in 2018 and 2019, students were still writing about how this university continues to brazenly fuel a mental health epidemic. 

The statistics on suicide rates at Oxford are also just as disturbing, and yet, remains nothing new. Over a period of 30 years, from 1976 to 2006, as many as 48 Oxford students had died by suicide, according to a case study published in 2010. As recent as last year, a student from Harris Manchester died of an overdose, and in 2013, Balliol College saw two of its students fall victim to suicide, with both incidents taking place only 3 months apart from each other. These terrifying headlines and statistics lie merely at the surface of Oxford’s genuine mental health crisis – as countless incidents of self-harm and suicide attempts, psychiatric visits to A&E at the John Radcliffe Hospital, and students suffering in silence still go unreported. 

While these issues have never been exclusive to Oxford, it is perhaps fair to argue that the culture at this university nevertheless exacerbates it. We are constantly pushed to our limits – burning out without having the time to properly recover, and then instantly expected to be on our feet again. In enduring the solitude and isolation that accompanies Western individualism, and the cut-throat competition of our work-obsessed, capitalist world – our individual productivity ultimately becomes necessary to ensure one’s survival.

Whether within the workforce, or within this university, the measurement of one’s worth based on their productivity and functionality, essentially remains the same. From a eugenicist perspective, it could also be argued that our society also measures the value of one’s existence through their extent of material contribution, instead of all lives being seen as equally valuable, simply by virtue of being human. Especially within the myopic Oxford bubble, this sentiment becomes so amplified to a point where it is sometimes impossible to ignore. 

In a strange way, being at Oxford has also further highlighted the many contradictions of our human existence. Here, we are constrained by the theoretical abstractness of academia, yet equally liberated by the privileges and opportunities that would be difficult to find elsewhere. We are sheltered, as we are exposed, and knowledgeable, as we are ignorant. In our pursuit of understanding more about our world, we end up understanding less so about ourselves – or rather, feeling like we have learnt too much, to a point where it simply becomes overwhelmingly incomprehensible. 

While this same problem has been around for generations, and is ultimately nothing new, one could also argue that our generation experiences a much heightened sense of existential angst and unhealthy competition, largely due to living in an increasingly virtual society. Our online presence that we cautiously curate (whether through Linkedin, Twitter or Instagram) has become a hallmark of identity, an assertion of our existence, and a vain pursuit of validation. The desire to be recognised for one’s worth is only innate, and nothing to be ashamed of – yet, in an echo chamber where everyone screams to be heard, it becomes impossible to not drown in the loudness of one’s own insecurity.

Our culture of hyper-productivity demands us to ‘live up to our full potential’, but are we truly living our honest lives if we are merely chasing endless material pursuits after another? More seriously, I ask this as a genuine, non-rhetorical question: are most of us actually happy? Or, like Patrick Bateman, are we all just a little bit anxious, insecure, and always on the verge of frenzy?  

We murder our soulful and spiritual selves in pursuit of a material self who relentlessly chases after infinite ambitions. We exchange healthy hours of sleep for more caffeine and extra time in the library. We trade few meaningful relationships for a large network of fleeting, superficial connections. We regard ‘intellectual discourse’ as more worthwhile than small talk about the weather. We over-analyse the scientific, the structural, the social, and the psychological intricacies of our strange little world, while slowly losing touch of our own humanity. 

“Best advice I got when I entered academia: We’re all smart. Distinguish yourself by being kind,” was a Tweet I saw a long time ago, and have held onto since. Yet, ironically, I failed to realise how “being kind” was also supposed to include kindness to myself, above all else. “Being kind to myself” did not entail being selfish, irresponsible or lazy. But instead, it meant the recognition of my own worth that still offers so much room for genuine curiosity, hard work, and achievement – in a way that does not kill me. Most importantly, “being kind to myself” entailed not comparing myself to others, because after all, I came here to learn, not to compete. 

As a disabled student who reluctantly had to rusticate, I now realise that this was, perhaps, the universe’s way of telling me to be kinder to myself, in allowing me some time off from academics. In hindsight, it has also given me the opportunity to slowly reconnect with my soul, and allow myself to heal. 

Yet, the struggles I endure, and the systemic barriers that I overcome and work to dismantle whilst being disabled at Oxford, are not meant to be a demonstration of my ‘resilience’, or an example of ‘never giving up’. Instead, they are merely experiences of what makes me human, especially in a broken world that has been fundamentally designed to kill us all.  

But still, I refuse to die – at least not yet. 
I realise that I no longer want to work myself to an early grave by conforming to unrealistic standards of “success”, or by constantly putting myself “out there, achieving great things”.

Instead, I simply wish to just be.

Slowly, I am learning to embrace the wholeness of my existence – in all its beautiful significance, in all its tragic meaninglessness, and its endless contradictions of being human.

Image Credit: Microbiz Mag / CC BY 2.0 via flickr.com

Spiking, injuries and disappointment at Varsity Trip club nights

David Tritsch
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Spiking, injuries and disappointment at Varsity Trip club nights

CW: Spiking

Students at the annual Oxford and Cambridge Varsity ski trip have reported serious injuries and spiking incidents at the Le Malaysia nightclub in Val Thorens. The club was selected as the venue for this year’s ‘Blues Bop’ event, advertised as “the most in-demand event of Varsity Trip”, with tickets re-selling for up to 1000% of their original price.

On Tuesday’s ‘Blues Bop’ event, security shouted at students and pushed them onto the ice, with many slipping and multiple students falling unconscious. Despite paramedics and medically certified representatives of NUCO, the holiday provider organising Varsity Trip, being present, several students received no medical attention at the event. Le Malaysia nightclub refused to provide guests with free drinking water, instead charging €3 for a bottle of water. Unlike in the UK, nightclubs in France are not legally required to provide guests with free tap water on request. Speaking to Cherwell, one Oxford student reported being pushed and manhandled by club staff, with security personnel calling guests “animals”.

Le Malaysia has served as a venue for Varsity Trip events before and hosted several club nights on the last trip in 2019. Joe Hilton, Co-President of this year’s Varsity Trip confirmed to Cherwell that Varsity Trip decreased the number of tickets sold for events in Le Malaysia this year, but maintained that capacity issues were likely caused by attendees that were not part of the Varsity ski trip. ‘Blues Bop’ has consistently been the most popular event on past Varsity Trips and tickets sold out in minutes. While tickets were sold for £10 on booking day in October, they have been offered for up to £100 on Facebook groups dedicated to reselling Varsity Trip tickets.

Inside the club, an incident of spiking by injection allegedly took place and was reported to both the Varsity Trip committee and NUCO. Over the past months, incidents of spiking by injection, where victims are injected with a spiking drug through a needle, have become increasingly common in UK nightclubs, and several incidents were reported in Oxford over Michaelmas Term 2021. Students reported that security did not check whether all attendees had tickets for the event and that several guests were let into the venue without a pat down search, which most attendees were subjected to.

Despite these reports, Hilton told Cherwell that the Varsity Trip committee is not ruling out booking Le Malaysia for future trips to Val Thorens. The day after the event, a meeting between NUCO, the Varsity Trip committee, and Le Malaysia club management took place, where Le Malaysia committed to refusing entry to guests not on the Varsity trip before 1am and to increasing the presence of NUCO staff on Varsity nights, should the club be booked again. Hilton also said that the Varsity Trip committee is considering paying for water for students on future Varsity Trip club nights if venues do not offer free tap water.

On Thursday night, a day after the meeting, Malaysia served as a venue for Varsity Trip’s ‘Final Night Party’. NUCO and the Varsity Trip committee again received several reports of guests being spiked by injection. While two cases were formally reported, Cherwell has been made aware of up to seven alleged incidents. Speaking to Cherwell, Hilton said that “one of the incidents took place so early in the night that we believe it is highly likely the person responsible was a student themselves”.

Eloise George, a student at Oxford, told Cherwell: “Fundamentally, I feel that NUCO and Varsity have let us down hugely. Both events I have been to at Malaysia have involved violence from bouncers, unsafe ground conditions, and no support. The atmosphere created before people even entered the club – any searches were so inadequate, they were brief pat downs that would not have detected a needle. The whole final night I was relying on my male friend to protect me. It’s just not good enough. I don’t think I’ve had a single good night out at Varsity as everything has been so disorganised and frequently really stressful. It’s been a jarring experience, and I wouldn’t attend another event held at Malaysia or recommend that others do until they work with NUCO and Varsity to improve their safety and duty of care.”

NUCO and Le Malaysia nightclub have been contacted for comment.

This article was amended on December 12th, 4:00pm, to account for the following: a) the Varsity Trip committee decreased the number of tickets sold for events at Malaysia this year (a previous version wrongly stated that ticket sales had been increased); b) the alleged spiking incident which occurred early in the night took place on Thursday (‘Final Night Party’), rather than on Tuesday (‘Blues Bop’).

Image Credit: Santeri Viinamäki / CC BY-SA 4.0

How conservatives are weaponising feminism to bring down Roe v Wade

Iseult de Mallet Burgess
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How conservatives are weaponising feminism to bring down Roe v Wade

CW: Abortion

“Empower Women. Promote Life.” 

Mississippi Attorney General Lynn Fitch’s anti-abortion campaign is centred around a slogan that uses the façade of feminism to justify a reactionary agenda. Fitch is the face of the abortion case poised to overturn Roe v. Wade, which began with oral arguments on December 1st. Fitch claims that abortion bans can “empower” women to “have it all” – utterly and wilfully deaf to the masses of lesser-privileged women who are and will be harmed by this agenda. 

The right to abortion is recognised in Roe v. Wade: the landmark 1973 decision of the U.S. Supreme Court in which the Court ruled that access to safe and legal abortion is a constitutional right. Roe has been under attack for years – but in the Mississippi case, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the Supreme Court will rule on the constitutionality of a pre-viability abortion ban for the first time since Roe. Overturning or further eroding Roe would put more than 25 million women at risk of losing access to abortion, and in danger from unsafe, illegal abortions.

How did we get here? How did we get to a place in which the language of feminism is being used to dismantle the rights the movement fought to secure?

One answer is that today’s brand of mainstream, liberal feminism is an ineffectual and unfortunate result of the neoliberalisation of feminism – a decades-long process beginning in the late twentieth century, which watered feminism down so that it no longer threatens the status quo. A movement that once prioritised social solidarity and mass mobilisation now promotes individual achievement, self-optimisation and careerism in the name of “empowerment.” A movement once about liberation is now a de-politicised shell prioritising individual choice over structural analysis. A movement once critical of capitalism has become its handmaiden.

This process began with the rise of neoliberalism in the late twentieth century. Neoliberalism championed freedom, hyper-individualism, and self-optimisation. As women were granted greater freedom and autonomy through participation in the free market, second wave feminists began to view liberalism as the way forward for feminism. So although the second wave of feminism began as a critique of capitalist exploitation and the role of women in postwar, state-managed capitalist society, the movement was seduced by neoliberalism and allied itself with capitalism.  

One particularly unfortunate consequence of this process was the emergence of “choice politics” as a central tenet of the feminist movement. Choice politics supposes that any choice made by a woman is empowering by default, which rests on the idea that the act of making a choice is the ultimate expression of a woman’s autonomy and freedom.

Because of choice politics and the narrative of “women’s empowerment” which touts the careerwomen as the ultimate image of gender equality – and because neoliberal feminism is entirely ignorant of the structural aspects behind gender inequality (such as patriarchy, capitalism, and white supremacy) – the language of liberal feminism is apolitical, and easily adopted by anyone. 

Fitch’s argument is that because of feminism, women are now fully able to pursue both motherhood and a career, eliminating the need for abortion. To support her argument, she draws on her own experience as a (white, upper middle class) single mother. 

According to Fitch, women are no longer inhibited by unwanted pregnancies. This could not, however, be further from the truth: overwhelming evidence suggests that denying people access to abortion has consistently proved detrimental to their mental and physical health. What’s more, if Roe v. Wade is overturned, the likely scenario is that people with means and privilege like Fitch will still be able to access abortions, but women without the same privileges – such as women of colour, poor women, and undocumented women – will be harmed most severely. 

This is not at all to say that mainstream feminism is the sole culprit for conservatives’ languaging and agendas. The misappropriation of feminism is just a new approach by anti-abortion conservatives who have been waging war on reproductive rights for decades. It is, however, a particularly bleak perversion that women, such as Fitch, are increasingly becoming the face of this anti-choice agenda. 

Image Credit: Adam Fagen / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

Barbie reborn

Eleanor Zhang
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Barbie reborn

CW: Body image

When I learnt that a new Barbie film is coming out in 2023, my first reaction was excitement. The batch of watchable Barbie films produced by Mattel trickled out more than twenty years ago, and the name Greta Gerwig never fails to ramp up expectations. Despite this, I’m not entirely convinced that choosing Margot Robbie to play the plastic doll would, as promised, give the production “a lot of exciting ways to attack” the Barbie stereotypes. 

At six or seven, even slightly older, the Barbie industry to some girls in my generation could only be described as a religion. There was something liturgical about huddling together and rewatching the franchise films over and over, accompanied by re-enactments of the stories that were treated like gospels; there was the Barbie magazine that preached to us what to wear, how to care for your hair and, essentially, how to be a ‘real girl’. Our shared love for Barbie led to activities social as well as personal: while there would be exchanges of costume pieces at playdates after school, brushing your doll’s hair was something you’d want to do in private, in bed with your night lamp on, to form a deeper connection with the miniature mannequin. 

Barbie to girls that age was truly omnipotent: she was a brilliant painter, a talented singer, a skilled ballet dancer, a good student, an elegant ice skater, and so much more. She could be a mermaid one day and have wings the next, and a year later she’d be forming a trio of musketeers with her best friends Nikki and Teresa. Her journey was whimsical but real enough to encourage children to follow her example. Because of her status as a role model, if not an idol, she lent many of us the will power to go to one more dance class, or spend an extra hour practicing our instruments. Parents would soon pick up on our adoration and make use of it, pushing us to wear this skirt or attend that performance, because “look, Barbie does it”, and there was nothing some of us wouldn’t do to keep it up with her.

Now an adult and aware of Barbie’s supposed crippling toxicity, I still find it very hard to deny the happiness it once brought me. It was hard to deny the social life I had because of the dolls I owned, and even harder when Barbie’s stories did bring good things to my world view. Things about friendship and love, and how a girl could fight villains and save the day with the right skills and company. Nostalgia complicates the belated realisation that the Barbie from my generation was, in fact, not made for everyone, myself excluded from its image of muliebral perfection. The majority of Barbies back then were generically blonde, and among the very few brunettes, all of them were white. There was also zero variation in the dolls’ figures, only the “original” skinniness, a body proportion later proven to be scientifically unrealistic to achieve. My later memory of Barbie comprised two instances that made me feel self-conscious about the distance between me and a beauty standard incorporated by my playmate of many years. One was of a curvy girl denied by the group of friends the chance to role-play Barbie; the other was of a white acquaintance introducing their blonde and white daughter matter-of-factly: “she never has a bad time at school, because all her classmates think she looks more like Barbie than themselves do.” 

Admittedly, the Barbies that girls play with today are not the same as their predecessors designed after a bachelorette party gift, the German blonde white doll named Lilli. With sales taking a tailspin all the way from 2012 to 2017, Mattel introduced three more body types in addition to the original slender frame, along with different skin colours and hair. The box of Barbies I was recently shown by a 13-year-old didn’t all remind you of Uma Thurman in her twenties, and the owner in question also liked the fact that they now don’t all look the same, some even looked “chubby”. But a recent browse on Mattel’s website made me very skeptical about the company’s claimed effort in promoting positive body image and diversity, a change of strategy that apparently brought about a 23% rise in sales in the quarter after the design overhaul. Out of the 18 dolls from the Fashionistas series, the only Barbie range that currently features alternative types, 12 of them have the original body shape. And while the remaining four are branded as “curvy”, they still look on the slim side, an impression corroborated by researches that put them on a UK size 6/8, with a BMI index of 0.38, meaning that the curvy dolls are still far slimmer than the average 16-24-year-old woman in the UK. As for racial representation — true, there are additions of skin tones, eye colours, hair colours and textures, the claimed “wide variety” only allows me to find exactly two dolls on the website who could potentially look like myself, a woman of East Asian descent. Ironically, it would not be wrong to cast someone looking like Margot Robbie to play Barbie in 2021, for dolls looking like her, Caucasian and thin, still take up an unproportionally large space on Mattel’s item list. 

More than 62 years after its invention, Barbie’s influence on children’s perception of beauty is still a relevant topic. But we should also bear in mind that beauty standards are not only conveyed through dolls. A 2019 study that examined young girls’ reactions to Barbie’s new looks concluded that girls’ comparison of themselves with their dolls is also conditioned by their exposure to other social stimuli, such as peers and media.
Questioning a Barbie film adaptation’s choice of actress is therefore not about a doll’s stance on inclusivity and diversity, but our society’s stance on these issues. A society where blond white people are still over most of our grocery’s packaging, and less than half of models in Fall 2021 are people of colour. This is why I feel, as I’m disputing a blonde white actress’ eligibility to play a doll, that it’s all a bit pointless, with a cinema just starting to welcome protagonists who aren’t straight white and male. At least, with a female lead, the Barbie film won’t be a complete step backwards, as long as we’re still reaching for the day when all of us can be in the spotlight.

Queer As Folk: Pride is where community is

Eleanor Zhang
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Queer As Folk: Pride is where community is

I was glad that I binged the American Queer As Folk instead of another round of Friends back in March 2020. Adapted from Russell T Davies’ original in 1999, the show was the first hour-long drama to feature homosexual men and women in the history of American television, as well as the first to include detailed depiction of sex between men. To many’s surprise, it quickly hit first place on the network Showtime’s roster after its initial release, despite the prediction that the viewship would primarily consist of gay and lesbian audiences. 

I, for one, was grateful for the large cast in the show, back when I was cooped up at home and socialising on a screen. I remember how I motivated myself at the start of another online day with two episodes (which in hindsight must have been more, since I got through five seasons within two months), and feeling that I, too, was having breakfast at Liberty Diner in Pittsburgh, beginning a new day with last night’s gossips at the queer nightclub Babylon. In fact, I vividly remember several of my lockdown clubbing dreams all taking place in various shapes at Babylon, a place full of glam and glitter, and too good to exist in last year’s reality. 

Babylon is where you see the biggest crowd in the show. It appears at least once in each episode, where the group of four friends, Michael, Brian, Ted, and Emmett, would meet up after a long day at work and, for some of them, a day of hiding their sexualities and therefore getting mistaken for being straight. Michael, for example, goes so far as to date a female colleague in pretence, just so his long-awaited promotion at the supermarket would not be compromised. Ted is an under-appreciated accountant, chronically taken for granted at work; at night, his confidence is repeatedly knocked on the dance floor,  where young meat is favoured over middle-aged men like him. Brian, good-looking and successful at his job, has to work extra hard to earn respect as an openly gay man. Babylon for the queers in Pittsburgh is a literal shelter: outside on the street, they’re disregarded, insulted, beaten and murdered; inside there’s only them among themselves, huddled together in darkness with some that desire them, and the others that they desire. Sex in the back room is a collective protest. Looking for sex is the extertion of a freedom that’s otherwise hindered in the outside world. And the aggregation of movements and voices exudes a shared power that refuses to be denied. 

But the sense of community in Queer As Folk, despite the abounding explicit sex scenes, is not shown through unabashed promiscuity. A sentiment so widely acknowledged among queer folks living on Liberty Avenue, it can only be described as family value. The group of central characters consisting of five gay men and a lesbian couple, Lindsay and Melanie, form a family that literally shares blood, as the two women bear children biologically fathered by their gay friends. But in more abstract – and important – ways, their bond is strengthened by a duty they take upon themselves to protect their own. In the course of five seasons, we see Justin evolve from a homeless teenager banished by his family to an ambitious artist, offered a roof by queer friends and allies ranging from his high school best friend to his first love. We also see Hunter, an HIV positive minor, settle in his new adoptive family and a second life away from teen prostitution. Admittedly, these personal journeys might be less frequently seen in real life than on TV. Yet the message carried in this little soap opera bubble is nonetheless heartening: that the queer community is supportive and inclusive, and that for the very vulnerable, it’s often more loving and nourishing than the institutions and relatives that have failed to accept them.

It reminded me of my own experience with fellow queer folks, from my first Pride in Munich, to Haute Mess at Plush in Oxford, to the ‘Queers Helping Queers’ Facebook group on my year abroad in Berlin – and how they’ve made me feel like I belong, wherever in the world or whichever stage I’m at in life. What also came to mind were the moments of seeing rainbow flags flying out of anonymous windows, or sitting across a stranger in Pride-print clothes, and feeling an instant strike of kinship. Of knowing that, in sharing a self discovery different from our peers but relatable to us each, what makes us similar often catalyses kindness. In the show, people living on Liberty Avenue are so tightly knit, they’re reluctant to leave their turf for bigger houses. As overly sentimental as their decision might seem, I find it understandable: in this community, the expected kinship rarely fails to deliver. 

Queer As Folk as a TV production is far from perfect, not the least because of its aggressively Caucasian cast. Yet as the first queer equivalent of Friends, binging it brought comfort at a time when all there was in the world was uncertainty, rising discrimination, and hatred. It was an anchoring feeling, realising that, albeit with fictional characters and events, the pride elicited by the show is genuine, that being queer means having a community that will always have your back. 

Hackers targeted Oxford vaccine research

Charlotte Keys
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Hackers targeted Oxford vaccine research

The National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) has highlighted in their annual review that hackers targeted the University of Oxford’s Covid vaccine research this year. 

Their review shows that the health sector has been experiencing record hack attempts, with 777 cases recorded between August 2020 and September 2021. This is an increase from the 723 incidents recorded in 2020. 

The NCSC, part of the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), revealed that one in five incidents were aimed at organisations with connections to health, with particular targeting of coronavirus vaccine research. 

Additional cyber-protection support has been provided by the NCSC to those working in the health sector, from NHS workers to vaccine researchers.

Researchers at the University of Oxford received help from the NCSC this year after security experts alerted them to a threat from ransomware which had the potential to significantly disrupt the progress of the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine. 

Ransomware, an area of growing concern, is a form of cyber-attack where the criminal or hostile state locks a user out of their data and demands a ransom for the return of their data. However, in some cases, even if the money is paid, not all data is returned to the victim of the attack. 

The NCSC’s Active Cyber Defence (ACD) programme removed 2.3 million cyber-enabled commodity campaigns; this included 442 phishing campaigns using NHS branding. 

The growth in reported incidents is in part due to “the organisation’s ongoing work to proactively identify threats through the work of its Threat Operations and Assessment teams,” the NCSC has said. 

Earlier this year, NCSC Chief Executive, Lindy Cameron, warned that criminals and state-backed groups would use the pandemic as an opportunity for cyber-attacks; both in targeting information around vaccines and creating fear. She said, “some groups may also seek to use this information to undermine public trust in government responses to the pandemic, and criminals are now regularly using Covid-themed attacks as a way of scamming the public.”

The transition to remote work and use of third-party computing and cloud services has created an opportunity for criminals to target businesses during the pandemic, whilst hostile states have an interest in medical and vaccine research, threatening the UK’s medical industry over the past year. 

The NCSC also predicts that ransomware attacks, which first gained prominence in 2020, are “almost certain to grow” in the next year.

Cameron, whilst talking about ransomware, highlighted “in my view it is now the most immediate cyber security threat to UK businesses and one that I think should be higher on the boardroom agenda.”

Director of GCHQ, Jeremy Fleming, stated, “This year we have seen countless examples of security threats: from state-sponsored activity to criminal ransomware attacks. It all serves to remind us that what happens online doesn’t stay online – there are real consequences of virtual activity”. 

Fleming added that “In the face of rising cyberattacks and an evolving threat, this year’s NCSC’s annual review shows that world-class cyber security, enabled by the expertise of the NCSC as part of GCHQ, continues to be vital to the UK’s safety and prosperity.”

The NCSC has expressed an interest in further international collaboration efforts from law enforcement agencies to target ransomware operators oversees, notably in China and Russia. This comes after talks at the G7 summit which was held in Cornwall earlier this year. 

China, the NCSC states, is a “highly sophisticated” operator in cyber space and has been singled out as the biggest threat to Britain’s tech security. They warn in their annual review that “how China evolves in the next decade will probably be the single biggest driver of the UK’s future cyber security”.

A spokesperson from Oxford University said: “We welcome the NCSC annual report which highlights the cyber protections needed around the ground-breaking work of our vaccine researchers. Our information security team have been fortunate to have excellent support from within NCSC.  They have provided a real contribution to the cyber protections around the vaccine research throughout the pandemic.”

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