Saturday 26th July 2025
Blog Page 280

Wearing the colour pink

Clementine Scott
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Wearing the colour pink

Every year of my Oxford degree so far I’ve optimistically bought a ticket to the Pink Night fundraiser, and every year I’ve arrived at the same quandary a few weeks later: what to wear. I know it isn’t particularly sustainable to be buying new pink outfits every year with little repeat wear potential, even if they’re thrifted, but I am occasionally too weak to resist the promise of a fresh Instagram post, and so I have become well-acquainted with the pitfalls of wearing pink. Every possible shade of the colour seems to come with its own potential issues — pastel can feel a bit fairy princess, or worse, bridesmaid, coral makes it seem like you didn’t think you could pull off a ‘proper’ pink, and Schiaparelli-esque fuchsia is such a domineering shade that it threatens to wear you rather than you wearing it. 

I also think that part of the reason why pink can be such a difficult colour to wear is found in its diverse usage in popular culture. Much has been made of the mid-20th century shift from pink as a ‘boy colour’ to a ‘girl colour’, through landmark hyperfeminine iterations of the colour worn by Mamie Eisenhower on Inauguration Day 1953 and Marilyn Monroe in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, but less is made of how pink was now the definitive colour not just for girls, but for every type of girl. No other colour has had quite such a range of iconic female characters in film clad in it. While white and black-based looks still adhered to the Madonna-Whore dichotomy, pink was the definitive colour for every section of the spectrum of female archetypes from toxic feminine mean girl icons like the Pink Ladies and Regina George, to Molly Ringwald’s ingenues, to genuine role models like Elle Woods. In the words of the Lebanese designers Azzi & Osta, pink “represents the softer or the wilder side of a…woman”.

Yet this universal palette of pinks provided to women across the board has inspired some reactionary approaches to the colour. The mid-2010s were the age of ‘millennial pink’ as the subject of derisive Guardian articles, and pastel manicures clasping rose gold iPhones, and more than ever before pink was associated with a particularly delicate brand of femininity. At the same time, to a certain group of people born between 1999 and 2003, a certain shade of pink brings flashbacks to Tumblrs filled with sunsets and bubblegum pink cigarette lighters overlaid with Lana Del Rey lyrics or questionable takes on mental health — here, suddenly, was pink gone grunge. The point is, people wanted pink femininity but without any hangups about being bad feminists, and the result was an aesthetic that seemed more regressive than any cinematic rich bitch’s go-to pink blazer. By the time Jodie Comer’s Villanelle made her debut in pink tulle in 2018, and stars from Gemma Chan to Dakota Johnson took cues from her at the Oscars the following year, the idea of an edgy, ‘not like other girls’ girl in head-to-toe pink felt a bit passé.

So where next for pink? Who What Wear forecasts a step away from millennial pink and soft pastels, and towards hot pink, via Zendaya power suits and ubiquitous Jacquemus bags. However, just as paler pinks bring to mind troubling questions about our femininity and how we express it, brighter pinks can tread a fine line between feminine power and caricature. As long as pink has its cultural and political baggage, there will be few colours through which one can express oneself in a wider variety of ways. With the problematic versatility of pink uppermost in our minds, let the annual Pink Night outfit search commence.

Image Credit: Gentlemen Prefer Blondes Trailer

Oxford researchers to lead 4-day work week trials

Humza Jilani
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Oxford researchers to lead 4-day work week trials

After a year that has seen skyrocketing numbers of resignations, the surging popularity of working from home, and corporate rethinks during the COVID-19 pandemic, employers are scrambling to hold onto talent and avert the worst of the so-called Great Resignation. 

Researchers from the University of Oxford and the University of Cambridge might have found a solution: a 4-day work week, which is set to be piloted at up to 30 companies throughout the United Kingdom. Similar tests are expected in the United States and elsewhere.

Participating companies will slash work hours from 40 hours a week to 32, and will closely monitor any changes in productivity and employee satisfaction. The trials will launch in June 2022 and last for six-months. The trial is also expected to cover issues such as corporate environmental footprints and gender equality, reflecting a feeling from companies that the growing concerns of employees and activists have to be addressed. 

The U.K. version of the trial is overseen by 4 Day Week Global, a nonprofit pushing for shorter work weeks and improved labor rights, in partnership with researchers from Oxford, Cambridge, and Boston College. Researchers will analyze data about productivity, interview participating companies, and think of metrics to measure the overall success of the program. 

Researchers and advocates hope that the trials will produce an informed report that can be used as a template for companies thinking of making the switch. They also hope to use the report to sway the opinions of policymakers. Already, France is pondering a 32-hour work week, which would be a reduction from the country’s 35-hour work week.  

Advocates hope to show that reducing working hours to four days, without cutting pay, will result in the same productivity and economic returns for corporations. There is some anecdotal evidence that reducing hours can counterintuitively increase productivity and staff retention, thereby saving costs for companies, as well. 

Campaigners argue that cutting work hours can easily be achieved by cutting down on meetings and relying on technology to sort through workloads. One of the biggest hurdles that supporters hope to overcome is perception. Previous trials have had mixed results, owing to the different needs of specific sectors. There are also fears that shortening the work day would come with a cut in worker compensation, potentially creating new problems for workers and exacerbating burnout. 

The COVID-19 pandemic led to surging interest in their work, as the explosion of work-from-home policies led to a broader reconsideration of norms in the Western office culture. 

The trials are the culmination of four years of organizing and advocacy by the 4 Day Week Global, founded by Andrew Barnes and Charlotte Lockhart. According to their website, they’re committed to finding solutions to improve business productivity, worker health outcomes, strong families and communities, and promote gender equality. They claim that the five-day work week emerged from organizers seeking to reduce the previous six-day norm a century ago. They see their own work as the successor to that movement. 

Image: Israel Andrade

Jesus and New College announce support for “Thinking Black” creative writing prize

Elena Rotzokou
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Jesus and New College announce support for “Thinking Black” creative writing prize

Jesus College and New College have announced their intention to collaboratively support Thinking Black’s 2022 Creative Writing Prize.

The writing competition, which is part of Thinking Black’s Year 10 creative writing course, is launching in March 2022 and is targeted at Black British Year 10 students. Providing participants with a prompt, the course asks them to respond in the form of writing they engage with the most. This year’s prompts are:

Folk Tales – African and Caribbean Writing

Windrush – Post-War Migration Literature

The Diaspora – Contemporary Black British Writing

Writing Fundamentals – Poetry, Prose & Drama

Dr. Matt Williams, Jesus College’s Access Fellow, views the college’s sponsorship as an inroad into making higher education in Britain more equitable: “We are delighted to be working with Thinking Black and New College on this new creative writing. It is essential that the University of Oxford and its colleges work towards widening participation of Black British students in higher education. Thinking Black do such tremendous work with young students and it is our privilege to support them.”

Daniel Powell, New College’s Head of Outreach has stated: “We are very pleased to be supporting such an important initiative. We are proud to be a College that is fully committed to widening participation to university, and recognise the importance of these sorts of activities to increasing aspirations and ambitions of students from under-represented backgrounds.”

Thinking Black is a social enterprise founded in 2017 in an effort to equip young Black British people with transferable academic, communication, and leadership skills that allow them to evolve into successful leaders. It has supported over 200 Black British students over the years and is already being sponsored by Oxford’s Pembroke College. Its current administrative team consists of eight Oxford students and graduates.

At the moment, Thinking Black supports four programmes, each one tailored to a specific age group from Year 8 to Year 10 and focused on one of the following areas: art history, public speaking, essay writing, and creative writing.

As participants in the programmes, students enjoy access to lectures, discussion groups, and skill-oriented workshops, as well as a syllabus of books, articles, and music by Black thinkers. Black university students and graduates mentor participants to assist them in producing a researched piece of work on a topic of their choice, for which they can receive a cash prize or which they can get published. They also have the opportunity to attend a Celebration Day at Oxford University.

Hope Oloye, Director of Thinking Black and an alumna of Pembroke College at Oxford, has spoken about the Year 10 programme New and Jesus College support: “We’re so glad to be launching our new Creative Writing Prize in partnership with New College and Jesus College. The programme provides young Black students across the country with the opportunity to attend high-level lectures, access diverse works of Black literature, and formulate written responses. Students will be rewarded for their work with cash prizes and publication in an online anthology. We can’t wait to get started!”

Thinking Black’s website states that the programme aims to enable participants to “cultivate a more personal relationship with writing.”

Image: Bencherlite / CC BY-SA 3.0

John Evelyn: 3rd Week, Hilary Term 2022

John Evelyn
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John Evelyn: 3rd Week, Hilary Term 2022

It’s been a horny few weeks at the Union. With the termcard set, the excitement of the first few weeks abating, and the spectre of elections still just far enough over the horizon, your indefatigable committee members have been left with far too little to do and have begun shagging one another.

Nowhere has this been more true than on sex-retary’s committee, where current and former members alike simply can’t keep their hands off each other. On a particularly big night out, one member plucked up just a bit too much Dutch courage and found himself waking up East of the Cherwell in an unfamiliar bed, but next to a familiar face. 

Meanwhile, it’s been from one extreme to the other for the Univ Queen. Last time it was OULC. This time it was the attempted sex party by the Wannabee-Bullingdon Boys over at the Hayek Society. But our Queen and her consorts weren’t there for the sex. No, they were horny for some votes. Unfortunately, in their haste to attend every hackable event that evening, they forgot to abide by the dress code. Imagine showing up to a black tie Tory sex party in casual dress. My lord, the humiliation. No secret after-party orgy at the Randolph for you, tut-tut.

It was not all in vain, however, as it has been reported that the Queen may have slated one of her very own Wannabee-Bullingdon Boys, none other than the Italian Stallion himself. Perhaps the future does hold a few Randolph after-parties. John Evelyn is not envious. Still, anything would beat going to the non-orgy after party that wound up in the  lair of a particular Greek God.

In even sexier news, the ROs are now in fisticuffs over exactly what system should be used to decide the order of precedence for replacing empty committee positions in the event that a committee member resigns or is removed. I guess that’s what they get up to when they have too little to do.

Finally, in the sexiest but saddest of news, the Union has eaten of the forbidden fruit and been ripped from the Garden of Eden. It shall be dearly missed.

Well, that’s been another two weeks in this veritable bone zone. John Evelyn apologises for the filthiness of his colleagues and promises his next entry will be more highbrow.

More to cum. John Evelyn x

Oxford Goes Underground: In Conversation with Komuna

Flynn Hallman
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Oxford Goes Underground: In Conversation with Komuna

Three Wednesdays away from Komuna’s launch event at Plush on the 16th of February, Deputy Editor, Flora Dyson and I sat down to chat with the group’s director, Adam Possener. 

The event is advertised as ‘an immersive night of Queer funk, jazz, contemporary classical and techno music’. It aims ‘to celebrate queer contribution to experimental music as part of Pride Month’. It’s the first project of Komuna, a collaborative group of musicians and artists, split between Oxford and London, and we wanted to get to know more about its origins. Adam explained that the idea for the project came from his experience attending the experimental Warsaw Autumn festival over the summer. “I’d never heard classical contemporary stuff in a club before,” he said, “I thought it was really cool, and something there’s not as much of in the UK”. He went on to talk of the underground nature of the festival, and its conduciveness as an environment for flourishing countercultures in musical experimentation and underrepresented artists and approaches. “I came back thinking ‘I want to do that here,’ so I got some people I know together”.

Shortly after its formation, the group agreed on the name, ‘Komuna’. “It’s a Polish word,” he explained, “It kind of translates as ‘to commune,’ or ‘have an intense conversation’”. The name neatly captures the atmosphere Adam associated with the Warsaw Autumn festival, promoting the interactivity of a music event with the intensity and energy of the underground scene. We asked how he hoped the Plush event would also achieve this. “There’s going to be such a variety of music styles,” he said “and the idea is to blend them seamlessly”. Rather than having one act after another, he spoke of different sounds, performances and approaches to genre “progressing into each other, hopefully to try and make the experience as immersive as possible”. “From funk to experimental jazz, you can trace a path,” he explained, “the more experimental the jazz is, that can then go into the classical, and then go into the more techno stuff” and so on. The intention is that “everything is amplified,” he said, there’s live music as well as DJ sets “so it should run seamlessly from DJ into string quartet.” In the spirit of the group’s creative experimentation, this blended approach extends beyond the event’s music. Textual recordings are incorporated into the set-lists, while all the group’s artwork (some of which has already been released on their instagram page) is done by their own artist and graphic designer. 

The topic of conversation then turned to Plush’s suitability as an underground setting capable of providing a similar sort of counterculture atmosphere to that of the Warsaw Autumn festival. “It’s a really cool space,” he said, “its underground, quite small and confined, they don’t normally have live music there but I think it will be quite an interesting environment for it.” 

We wondered how the night’s music would reflect this aesthetic, and particularly how he hoped it would celebrate queer contributions and experiments in music. “We’re trying to celebrate it but not completely separate it,” he said. “We didn’t want to ghettoise the music, it’s about focusing on underrepresented artists within those spheres.” He gave the example of one of the songs on the string quartet’s repertoire for the evening, ‘Gay Guerilla,’ by Julius Eastman. A late 20th-century minimalist composer, Eastman’s body of work has only recently begun to receive greater critical acclaim and public exposure, and Adam spoke enthusiastically of the process of hunting down his original, scrawling, handwritten score in order to adapt it for the string quartet ahead of rehearsals for the event. 

Asked about his views more generally on underrepresentation of queer artists in the music industry, he referenced techno as a prime example of a genre with popular heteronormative associations, with a tendency for queer contributions to be underrepresented and delimited. “You have to delve deeper into a genre to find different artists,” he said, “because they’re all there, but when it’s done it’s done separately, as only for the queer community”. In this sense he also spoke about his hopes for Komuna’s launch to bring something new in comparison to more mainstream pride events. Beyond (and by no means belittling) the Lady Gagas of the world, he outlined that “there’s so much more that also needs to be heard at these events.” In a similar vein, we wanted to hear more about his views on underrepresentation and a lack of choice in the Oxford music scene. “There’s a lot of the same music being played,” he said, especially with a lack of club venues playing things outside the repetitive Bridge and ATIK pop repertoire. “Even on the classical side, lots of it here is very samey,” he admitted, perhaps hinting at the immutable presence of Bach and Elgar billboards outside the Sheldonian. With this lack of musical range naturally comes a lack of representation, and in turn, a diminishment of opportunities for individual expression. As he went on to say: “what’s useful about having [the range of venues catering to different music genres] in London is that you have a scene, there’s a vibe and aesthetic, and you don’t have that here so you have to kind of make of it what you can.” This seems to be the key aim for Komuna’s launch on the 16th of February. “It’s about what you do with the space,” he said, not only hoping to bring respective music scenes to Oxford, but on the same night, at the same time, and in the same room. The hope is ultimately that by enabling these scenes to seamlessly interact with and inform each other, they will also inspire a different kind of interaction between those attending the event. In this sense the theme of ‘conversation’, evoked in group’s name, seems all the more apt. As Adam went on to explain, this also ties in to the dress code for the evening. Left as one word, ‘experimental,’ he explained that “the dress code is a way for people to relate to the event.” The genres or sounds people associate themselves more with will “feed into their style, and so that improves on the conversation idea, because by showing and wearing or performing an outfit they’re part of the night and its atmosphere”.

The event is marketed as unique for Oxford. Its tagline of ‘this is not your average club night’, full of the potential for platitude, actually feels genuine. Amidst your average Oxford term-table of late night kebab peregrinations, and reluctant, instantly regrettable, trips to Bridge or ATIK, Komuna’s launch in a few week’s time represents an attractive experiment in a means of escape. I mean, what’s not to like? It’s at once a club night and an underground festival, it will have multiple DJs and live music performed by a string quartet, all with the intention of celebrating pride month through an immersive interspersion of sounds, outfits, and influences.

We ended our chat by asking Adam how he would sum up the evening as an experience for those attending. He answered honestly: “it’s an experiment for everyone… maybe you’ll end the night at a kebab van, but you’ll have had an experience that’s a bit different”. Now there’s certainly no cynicism about kebab vans here, but to take his point a bit further, maybe it’s worth considering what journey you want to take to that famed destination of the Oxford night out a few weeks from now. Hopefully it will be after resurfacing from Plush after a new, interactive, underground experience of an Oxford music event, and not another Wednesday stuck in the ATIK.

Thanks to Adam Possener for the interview. 

Follow Komuna’s instagram page @komunacollective for event playlists and more info about the launch. 

Image credit: Gala Hills, graphic design: Kayanne Shaikh

Headington Shark at centre of heritage dispute

Daniel Moloney
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Headington Shark at centre of heritage dispute

The owner of Oxford’s Headington Shark house has become embroiled in an argument with Oxford City Council over the iconic landmark’s heritage status.

The sculpture, which was erected in 1986 by journalist and broadcaster Bill Heine, was the cause of a six-year planning row with Oxford City Council. Heine had submitted a planning application, which the council rejected. He appealed to the then-environment secretary, Michael Heseltine. The rejection attracted a wide audience who came to the shark’s defense. Peter Macdonald, Heseltine’s planning inspector, ultimately decided to allow the sculpture to remain. 

Now though, the Shark sculpture at 2 New High Street, Headington, is one of 17 proposed additions to the Oxford Heritage Asset Register. The position of the City Council is far different than its original attempts to remove the sculpture, and instead they intend to preserve it. 

The sculpture was constructed by John Buckley. He worked alongside a group of volunteers consisting of students and anti-war activists in what was a three month process before the shark was transported to its permanent location.  

Magnus Hanson-Heine, who inherited the house in 2016, is adamant he does not want it added to the city council’s list of important pieces of heritage. The quantum chemist, who works at Nottingham University, said there were two aspects to his objection to its inclusion on the heritage asset register.

Dr Hanson-Heine said he feared it was “a stepping stone” towards getting it listed on a national basis, meaning more planning controls, although “this is academic as I have no intention of removing it”. On top of this, if it was listed, it would go against the purpose of the sculpture, which was to protest planning restrictions and censorship.

He said: “I see what they are trying to do and I’m sure it’s very well intentioned. But they don’t view it now as what it is. You grow up with these things, they become part of the scenery and you lose focus of what they mean.”

“My father always resisted giving any conclusive answer to the question of what the meaning was of it as it was designed to make people think for themselves, and decide for themselves what is art.”

“But it was anti the bombing of Tripoli by the Americans, anti-nuclear proliferation, anti-censorship in the form of planning laws specifically.”

Dr Hanson-Heine qualified this statement when speaking to Cherwell stating, “Those were clearly reasons for putting the shark up, but the surreal shock of seeing something like that unexpectedly and having the chance to look again at your surroundings and the art work with “fresh eyes” to add your own meaning, I don’t think that’s an afterthought.”

Dr Hanson-Heine does not ‘resent’ the council for the years it spent trying to have the controversial sculpture removed or for finally approving of it. However, he has complained about the alleged restrictive nature of the public consultation on the addition of these landmarks.

He said: “The nomination forms have been, let’s say, lacking in that they do not really provide an option to object to the listing for listing’s sake.”

“They ask questions like ‘do you think it adds value to the area’ which most people would say, yes it does. They have not given the option to say no. They have not truly consulted in that sense.”

The consultation ends on January 26 after the deadline was extended from December.A decision will then be taken as to whether the nominations should be added to the register. Inclusion of a building or place on the register “helps to influence planning decisions in a way that conserves and enhances local character”. However, it does not place any extra legal requirements on owners.

Image: Eoin Hanlon

Laurel Hell review: Unapologetically unresolved

David Tritsch
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Laurel Hell review: Unapologetically unresolved

“I will neglect everything else, including me as a person, just to get to keep making music. And even if it actually sometimes hurts, it doesn’t matter as long as I get to be a musician.” It almost feels as though Mitski’s own words from 2018 predicted her new album, which took three years to produce and follows her announcement of an “indefinite” hiatus from music after the final performance of her Be the Cowboy Tour. Her new album Laurel Hell celebrates the duality between the Japanese-American artist’s revolt against Mitski the cult figure and her undying need to keep singing, writing and dancing. 

The opening track ‘Valentine, Texas’ sets the stage for the rest of the album: “Let’s step carefully into the dark”, she sings, accompanied by minimal keyboard chords, before cascading into the second verse, slamming piano keys while evoking images of the American South: Mitski wants to “drive out to where dust devils are made” and “where clouds look like mountains”, hoping that “they’ll finally/Float off of [her]”. This juxtaposition of refuge and chaos characterises the entire album and is presented in its title. ‘Laurel Hell’ is a term from the Southern Appalachians, where laurel bushes grow so thickly that some areas are almost completely impassable. In an interview with Zane Lowe on Apple Music, Mitski explained: “ I’ve never experienced it myself, but when you get stuck in these thickets, you can’t get out. Or so the story goes. And so there are a lot of Laurel Hells in America, in the South, where they’re named after the people who died within them because they were stuck. And, so the thing is, laurel flowers are so pretty. They just burst into these explosions of just beauty. And, I just, I liked the notion of being stuck inside this explosion of flowers and perhaps even dying within one of them.”

Laurel Hell does not try to replicate any of Mitski’s earlier works, such as the unfiltered despair in ‘Class of 2013’, or the longful yearning in ‘First Love / Late Spring’. The feeling of being at a crossroads brings with it its very own set of emotions. In ‘Working for the Knife’, she regrets how the world seems to have “moved on without [her]”: “I always thought the choice was mine/And I was right, but I just chose wrong.” The track also seems to describe her struggle with the music industry and the vibrating synth sound in the intro is replicated in other songs on the album, such as ‘Everyone’, where the synth transitions into a heartbeat-like pattern, while Mitski sings: “I opened my arms wide to the dark/I said ‘Take it all, whatever you want’”. 

‘Love Me More’ presents the listener with the perfect complement to ‘Everyone’, with both offering contradicting responses to Mitski’s struggle in ‘Working for the Knife’. While Mitski returns to the dark in the latter, she chooses a different path in ‘Love Me More’: “I could be a new girl/I will be a new girl”; she pleads for someone to “fill [her] up” and “drown it out/drown [her] out”. The music video to ‘Love Me More’ features a doll, a puppet of a bird drenched in ink and Mitski desperately trying to imitate different images of herself. This, together with the commercial, even upbeat sound of ‘Love Me More’, creates a deeply uncomfortable atmosphere, and it is hard not see a second interpretation of the album’s title here: Mitski really doesn’t want to be famous. And while many artists who’ve risen to some degree of popularity have lamented the dark sides of life as a star, few have managed to pull this off convincingly. Mitski, on the other hand, doesn’t try to convince anyone. The short, often repetitive verses make many songs on Laurel Hell seem so brutally honest that at times you feel as though you’re listening to a monologue that was never intended for you.

While Mitski’s previous albums have offered fairly standard indie rock sound and shone through her talent as a singer and songwriter, it seems she is trying to introduce more meaning into the instrumental parts of her songs this time. Many tracks on the album play with the juxtaposition of flashy synth sounds and traditional piano accompaniment, giving Mitski’s conflict yet another dimension. But here, the album’s production is trying a bit too hard. The 80s-pop synth parts could be more imaginative and ultimately compromise Mitski’s voice and writing for a stylistic element that could have been more compellingly executed in a single song instead of overshadowing the entire album. A notable exception is ‘Heat Lightning’, a ballad-like, metaphor-heavy piece, where Mitski lies awake at night and “feel[s] a storm approaching” and surrenders to the unknown: “There’s nothing I can do/Not much I can change/I give it up to you”. 

Has Mitski already chosen, then? She embraces the dark and, in the album’s penultimate song ‘I guess’, it appears she bids farewell: “I guess this is the end/I’ll have to learn to be somebody else”. But after singing “From here, I can say: ‘Thank you’/From here, I can tell you: ‘Thank you’” – the perfect breakup if you want – the album’s final track ‘That’s Our Lamp’ suggests a different direction. Accompanied by bells and trumpets, in a radical instrumental departure from the rest of the album, she “look[s] up into our room/Where you’ll be waiting for me”. The ending is therefore, like the rest of the album, decidedly ambiguous. Will Mitski give the stage another chance? Or is this really her good-bye? Fans have speculated she might choose the path Fiona Apple has chosen: live a life away from the music business, limit her interaction with fans and the press and sporadically release music on her own terms. With Laurel Hell, she has shown us that she isn’t quite ready to let go yet.

Image Credit: David Lee // CC BY SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons

Oscar Wilde, the 70s, and psychiatrists: The Importance of Being Nihilists

Cherwell Stage
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Oscar Wilde, the 70s, and psychiatrists: The Importance of Being Nihilists

What made you want to write the play?

I drafted an initial, much shorter version of the play in Year 13 while studying The Importance of Being Earnest for A Level. I wrote all the parts with my classmates in mind, and at the time it was just a bit of a laugh. Last term, when I was dipping a tentative toe into Oxford drama, I discovered that all you had to do to put on a play was get a bid together. I thought I could rewrite Nihilists and put out a call for a crew…and that’s what ended up happening!

How has the rehearsal process been?

It’s been fantastic: great fun and I’ve learnt so much from it. We started with a Zoom readthrough just before Christmas (after I had panic-written the rest of the play in the week after coming back from the Varsity trip). We then started online rehearsals in the new year. We spent 0th week, 1st week and 2nd week fitting rehearsals around the schedules of eight cast members (relying a LOT on When2meet and Exeter’s Cohen Quad). The cast are all brilliant and we get along really well – it’s always fun thinking of new warm-up games, and I often leave rehearsals feeling like I’ve had a decent ab workout from laughing.

How has the pandemic affected the process of putting the show together?

It’s definitely had an impact on my blood pressure. But in all seriousness, I didn’t really consider that having a cast of eight would significantly increase the risk. We’ve had to be extra careful in the weeks leading up to the show: wearing masks in rehearsals and making sure no one gets too close to one another (which proves tricky when trying to coordinate a fight scene). It’s a shame when people have to pull out due to Covid, and my heart goes out to all the other productions in the same situation. It’s stressful, but you can get around a surprising number of things if you’re determined enough.

Any fun rehearsal stories?

It’s always fun doing ridiculous warm-ups. We all became particularly fond of ‘What Are You Doing?’, a game that involves walking around the room until someone points to someone else and asks, ‘What are you doing?’. Some bizarre scenarios have ensued from this, including a casual conversation with an electrician happening at the same time as a story about killer seeds taking over the world. Rehearsing a scene in the style of a teen high school movie was also hilarious. And I always look forward to blocking the scenes involving throwing Lucas into a piano.

What has your favourite part of the process been so far?

Meeting so many brilliant people. Whether that’s chugging coffee with crew members, spending 80% of my time on Facebook Messenger, or watching the cast giggle their way through the final act, it’s always about the people.

What makes this project unique?

The play is inspired by Oscar Wilde, his wit and his words…but Nihilists goes in many different directions. It’s sprinkled with anachronism, so watch out for 70s song lyrics and hippies reminiscing about the good old days. Although the play has its fair share of farce (we’ve got psychiatrists being transported inside pianos, very quick costume changes, and a lot of panic), at the end of the day the play is about who we are as people. It digs into some of the most important things we have to face in our lives. Sexuality, family, the education system, the way we judge others and ourselves. It’s tough to navigate life and love.

Describe the show in three words.

Pianos; deception; triviality (or is it seriousness?)

What advice would you give to those wanting to write/direct a show in Oxford?

Even if you don’t think there will be time, or you’re a bit unsure about your idea…go for it. Oxford drama has AMAZING resources and there will always be people enthusiastic about your project who want to get involved. I had never directed anything before this, and despite watching some National Theatre behind-the-scenes videos in pure fear before the first rehearsal, I realised that once you’re in the room with the actors, there’s no ‘right way’ to do it. The whole team, both cast and crew, work together to create something that everyone is proud of. As for the writing, there’s so much new writing popping off at the moment and always room for more – now is the time to get that project out there!

Why should people see the play?

If you want slapstick, wit, high energy, role doubling, love in many forms, a dash of seriousness, secrets and lies, vibrant costumes, bizarre but very human characters, and ultimately a good laugh…this is the play for you!

Image Credit: Sophie Magalhaes

The Importance of Being Nihilists ran at the BT Studio from 1-5 February.

In a tale of Eastern European democracy, all unhappy families are alike

Justas Petrauskas
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In a tale of Eastern European democracy, all unhappy families are alike

CW: LGBTQ+ rights, homophobia

The first sentence of Leo Tolstoy’s novel Anna Karenina states what is often referred to as the Anna Karenina principle: ‘Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.’ When it comes to democracy, in Eastern Europe there indeed seem to be a lot of unhappy families. Hungary, under the leadership of Victor Orban, is the only EU member classified as only a ‘partly free’ democracy. In Poland, the ruling Law and Justice party is moving towards a similar direction: free and independent media is under attack, the opposition are  painted as traitors and the country’s constitutional court is firmly under the control of the party. Tiny Slovenia’s prime minister is experimenting with media-targeted assaults and in Serbia Covid-19 is being used as justification for excessive restrictions on individual liberties and electoral cycle disruptions. The question is, however, are they really all unhappy in their own way? Are all these instances of democratic backsliding and shifts towards hybrid authoritarianism really unrelated and separate in origin?

The remarkable similarities between the countries’ transitions towards one or another version of ‘illiberal’, ‘flawed’ or ‘plebiscitarian’ democracy suggest a different version. In 2009 Victor Orban, head of Hungary’s right-wing populist Fidesz party declared that after a series of election losses it was time to create ‘a central political forcefield’ in the country. Only three years later, helped by the unprecedented election victory in 2010, a new Hungarian constitution, combined with official and semi-official reforms, entrenched Fidesz’s domination in the judicial system and the media. In 2014, the party secured the constitutional super-majority for the second time, with the electoral playing field fundamentally altered and boundaries between the Fidesz party and Hungarian state essentially erased. 

The same story continued in Poland, where Jaroslaw Kaczynski, the éminence grise of the right-wing, populist and fiercely socially conservative Law and Justice party, declared in 2011 that ‘a day will come when we have a Budapest in Warsaw’. The day came in 2015 when Law and Justice won the first full parliamentary majority in Poland’s post-communist history. It was not long before judicial reforms effectively eliminated constitutional checks and balances, party loyalists filled an astonishing portion of civil service jobs, and public broadcasters were turned into a mouthpiece of the ruling party. When the 2019 election came, Law and Justice comfortably received the highest vote share by any party since the country’s return to democracy in 1989.

The fate of Serbian democracy followed along similar lines and in Slovenia, it can be argued, the first steps of this transition to flawed democracy are starting to materialise. It is not even that important what the state in which these countries find themselves is called – although ‘flawed democracy’ seems to serve the purpose best. What really matters is that the quality of the democratic environment in Poland, Hungary, Serbia and Slovenia is deteriorating. The changes these countries went through are not in themselves remarkable. In fact, they broadly resemble what Larry Diamond, a leading American democratisation scholar, has identified as ‘autocrat’s twelve-step program,’  including the demonisation of opposition, control of the judiciary and breakdown of independent media. What is remarkable though, is that these instances of democratic backsliding were localized in a very particular region and very specific period of time. They occurred to the East of the former Iron Curtain, a couple of years after the 2009 financial crash and evolved during the uncertainty of the Covid-19 pandemic.

To fully grasp how these similarities come into play, it is crucial to understand one thing: flawed democracy, no matter how quickly it comes about, never does so as a complete package. There is no bundle of measures that voters agree upon to approve a ‘hybrid regime’ or a ‘partly free’ democracy. There is no referendum on the abolishment of judiciary independence or sidelining of the NGOs. No party – not even Orban’s Fidesz and Kaczynski’s Law and Justice – include proposals to limit media freedom in their election manifestos. Instead, these changes come individually and societal support for them is gathered not as part of a complete, systematic package, but as support for individual ideas and measures. Poland’s crackdown of its constitutional court was motivated and carried out as an administrative reform, designed to eradicate the influence of former communist judges. And who, in a country whose darkest years have passed under the shadow of hammer and sickle, would disapprove of it? On the same note, the Law and Justice’s implementation of generous transfer payments to families with children and support for Poland’s infamous ‘LGBTQ-free zones’ are received well in a more conservative and rural east of the country. 

This is where the strength of these populist authoritarians lies. To come to power, they do not need to persuade all of the electorate to agree with them on all the measures. They only need to get part of the population to agree on some individual measures separately. And the more vulnerable the electorate is to populist proposals, the more disillusioned people are with the status quo, the easier it is for would-be-authoritarians to get to power and start the destructive work of transitioning towards flawed democracy. Democracy is vulnerable to such attacks if the electorate has less faith in the the parties, the civil servants, the government agencies, the politicians and the journalists which make up the system as a whole than they do in one political actor promising to fundamentally alter and change the system in the benefit of the people. The strength and vulnerability of democracy, in short, is about trust. 

And trust is the factor which Eastern Europe is lacking. As the Pew Global Attitudes survey highlights, social trust – beliefs about the trustworthiness of other people – is in decline in the region. However, the situation is much worse with another kind of trust, the institutional one. The fifty or so years which these countries spent as communist-ruled USSR satellite states has generated social environments in which trust in institutions was punished. Trusting party-controlled media would have led one to form ridiculously false beliefs about the state of reality. Trusting government institutions and being a dutiful citizen would have prevented one from reaping the rewards of the shadow economy, which flourished due to the crystal-clear shortcomings of the centrally planned one. Trusting one’s colleagues in work and expressing one’s beliefs about forbidden topics like failures of the state, life in the West or benefits of intellectual freedom could have resulted in job loss or, at worst, imprisonment. The communist societies of Poland, Hungary, Serbia and the USSR were societies characterised by the extreme hostility of citizens towards the state and everything related to it: courts, government agencies and politicians. In HBO’s miniseries Chernobyl there is one particularly illustrative scene. When Valery Legasov, a soviet scientist, testifies in court and speaks of ‘lies that practically define us’, he speaks not only about fatal design flaws in nuclear reactors. His speech is also a reflection on society which had lost something that makes it a society in the first place – trust.

Fifty years under authoritarian communist rule cannot pass without consequences. The effect of lack of institutional trust on the robustness of democracy is tragic. The whole democratic project, including parties, the media and NGOs, are significantly weakened and become more vulnerable to the attacks from populists who seek to paint them as flawed, illegitimate and not on the same side as the people. In healthy democracies, these attacks and political actors behind them are quickly identified and either refuted or ignored by most of the population. But where social trust is low, it is easy to sell one social group as scapegoats – “the liberals”, “gay people”, “the EU supporters” – and capitalise on these attacks on one’s way to power. 

The lack of trust also fuels other factors which make Eastern European democracies more vulnerable. One is growing urban-rural division: market-based reforms carried out in the 1990s unleashed the potential of cities and helped to generate a new, liberal and educated urban class, but resulted in slowly shrinking rural areas which are often poorer, less educated and more likely to support populist, socially conservative parties. In Hungary, Orban’s Fidesz was first elected mostly with the help of rural voters who were disillusioned with the previous socialist government. He carried on with the same support group ever since: those who distrust the “liberal values imposed by the EU” and those who are not educated enough to spot the manipulatory tactics used by the Fidesz-controlled press. These are the people whose faith in democracy as a project – all those gruelling discussions and government changes every four years  – was not high in the first place. In Poland, support for Law and Justice roughly divides the country into two parts – socially conservative rural East and liberal urban West. 

The would-be authoritarians of Eastern Europe also make use of its relatively weak social institutions. The media is not as strong or independent as in the West and twenty-or-so years of democracy is often not enough to establish well-followed precedents or evolved norms. However, the fact that the deterioration of the state of democracy was so quick and that societal divisions still exist in these countries means that there is some hope for the future of democracy in Europe’s east. In Poland, opposition parties control the Senate and, in the streets of Warsaw, Krakow, and other major cities, protests against the destruction of rule of law or the oppression faced by the LGBTQ community often erupt. In Hungary, the united opposition goes almost head-to-head with Orban’s Fidesz in opinion polls and, with parliament elections coming up in 2022, could pose a serious challenge to Orban for the first time in a decade. 

This hope is, unfortunately, fragile. The longer Law and Justice or Fidesz or Serbian Progressive Party stays in power, the tighter their informal and formal grab on state institutions will be. The fact that societies are divided means that it becomes more difficult for the opposition to build a unifying case. It can then rely only on its own support base in cities, and this base is, after all, limited. Finally, no matter what strategies opposition parties choose, the structural obstacles will still be there. A significant portion of the population in Eastern European countries will still lack explicit trust in democracy as a system, with all its imperfections, and instead will tend to fall for the promises of populist leaders. Eastern European democracies are likely to continue to look like a group of unhappy families, but unhappy in one, very specific way.

Image: European People’s Party/ CC BY 2.0 via Flickr

Could the pandemic get worse, again? And can we anticipate the future of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, or of any organism?

Aditi Chandra
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Could the pandemic get worse, again? And can we anticipate the future of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, or of any organism?

A recent article in Quanta magazine explores how scientists have been attempting to predict the future of the pandemic by understanding the constraints on the virus’s evolution. 

The genetic material of any organism is like a computer program written in sequences of four types of either RNA (for many viruses) or DNA bases (for all other species). Changing the sequence, or genotype, of base pairs changes the program: in general, small changes will have small or no effects.  These changes, which biologists call mutations, occur frequently and almost randomly in nature. (There are several caveats to this claim, and sometimes even a single mutation can have huge effects.)

When a virus has enough mutations to change its behaviour and shape (the phenotype), it becomes a new variant or strain. Mutations happen because of random, independent events, and in general, this means that several significant mutations are unlikely to occur at once in a single generation. For a new variant to emerge from the original strain, the virus must accumulate the right mutations over several generations.

This alone doesn’t limit the space of possible variants, although it slows down large changes. The more important restriction comes from natural selection. Natural selection compels the virus to gather its mutations in a specific sequence; in other words, the order of mutations matters. This is because some viral genotypes could leave the virus impaired and unable to function or replicate efficiently in their hosts – that is, some genotypes have low evolutionary fitness. If the virus moves into such a genotype “on its way” to becoming the next variant of concern, then the chain of mutations is likely to be broken simply because this strain of the virus dies out. 

One of the first people to formulate a way of thinking about whether evolution can deliver an organism to a particular spot in genotype space was the American biologist Sewall Wright. Wright re-imagined the problem in terms of a “fitness landscape” and reduced it to three dimensions to make it visualizable. 

The basic idea is that variation is represented on the horizontal axes (this could be either genotypic or phenotypic variation), and the vertical axis – the height – tells you how well a virus that is characterised by the values on the axes at any point will do in the real world. When you zoom out, you can expect to be looking at a picture of a landscape, with peaks and valleys, and perhaps the occasional canyon where a small mutation has led to a large change in fitness. 

If you were to drop a swarm of viruses over some region of the landscape, over time, natural selection would leave only the viruses that climbed to the top of a peak – those with the highest relative fitness. Depending on where you start, this doesn’t have to be the highest peak (and often isn’t, in practice); it may just be the peak that is nearest or easiest to climb. Our swarm of viruses usually can’t get to a higher peak by crossing a valley (this is why the order of mutations matters) because they would struggle to survive at all once they’re actually in the valley.  

Sewall Wright invented fitness landscapes to think about evolution, but they didn’t just remain biological tools. Fitness landscapes as a conceptual aid show up where the problem involves a large or high-dimensional space and only a few correct answers. The idea appears everywhere from the social sciences to string theory/cosmology, and is arguably one of the most powerful tools in science to conceive of problems with large spaces.

In principle, the landscape idea does the trick: you need as many dimensions as there are bases that can mutate, but once you’ve got those, and a way of experimentally testing or even predicting fitness, you can predict evolution by exploring the connections between peaks. So where’s the catch?

In comparison to humans, viruses have tiny genomes. SARS-CoV 2, for instance, has about 30,000 RNA bases. By contrast, humans have about 3 billion DNA bases. While the number of base pairs doesn’t fully determine an organism’s complexity  – onions have about 14 billion more base pairs than humans –  the limited size of a viral genome still means that they must be relatively simple.

But even viruses aren’t simple enough to make the problem fully solvable by a fitness landscape. 30,000 bases translates into nearly a quintillion (ten to the seventeenth power) possibilities. Even for computers, that’s hard. Add to that the difficulty of predicting the fitness of a genotype and the complications of testing this in the lab, and it’s easy to see why biologists have largely used fitness landscapes as a metaphor rather than a quantitative tool. This may now be changing with increased computational power and machine learning, and some argue that the fitness landscape is making a comeback. One way in which using the landscape has arguably worked is for the smaller problem of understanding the stability of mutations in the part of the coronavirus spike protein that binds to human lung receptors. 

The ubiquity and reach of the fitness landscape doesn’t mean that it’s without criticism, however. The idea has been criticised for being misleading: three-dimensional intuition doesn’t easily translate to high dimensional problems. While the landscape conveys some basic intuition, it is possible that the idea of peaks and valleys does not represent what really happens in higher dimensions.  Some have argued that the problem is better represented by a network, with nodes representing genotypes and edges the mutational paths between them. Of course, the notion that the landscape is static is wrong too: the environment that determines the fitness of a genotype is constantly changing (vaccines and widespread immunity may have changed the fitness landscape of the coronavirus, for example). 

Several alternatives to the fitness landscape have been proposed, and the criticisms and caveats to the model mean that the landscape is an imperfect but valuable conceptual aid to convey basic intuition. Evolution is highly complex, and it may never be possible to predict it. While science has made significant progress in anticipating the routes the virus’s evolution could take, the future of the pandemic is still unpredictable. 

Image: Thomas Shafee / CC by 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons

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