Monday 16th February 2026
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AI applications will quietly revive nepo hiring

Georgia Campbell
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AI applications will quietly revive nepo hiring

Over Christmas, I was chatting to a relative who works in finance. Their company, a relatively small firm, had just opened applications for its summer internship in Manchester. “We had 600 applications in less than three days, for a single internship spot”, they told me. The scale was unprecedented and, most bizarrely of all, at least 200 of those candidates had applied from the same place: Texas, in the US – a hallmark of AI application en-masse. 

Reports of the harms of AI in graduate recruitment are not unusual, either. According to The Times, UK entry-level jobs have reduced by 45% since the release of ChatGPT, and every day, thousands of bots are scraping websites and submitting applications indiscriminately. As my mind turned towards my own imminent graduation, I was disheartened to hear that even smaller companies aren’t safe. 

It made for a less-than festive end to our conversation about graduate recruitment. “It’s a nightmare”, we agreed. But then, after a shrug, my relative added: “We might just have to go back to hiring people we know.”  

I was taken aback by their candour. Nepotistic recruitment has never really gone away, especially in sectors like finance, but companies at least made an effort to pretend it had. Name-blind CV reviews and declarations of previous contacts at the company are interventions meant to level the playing field. To now return to an ‘oldboys’ recruitment method seemed like a huge step back. 

But there’s a bleak kind of logic to it. You, as an employer, have no way of telling which applications are genuine human effort and which aren’t, and you don’t have the time or human resources to even read them all anyway. Your corporation, like most, doesn’t have an entire team dedicated to recruitment. It’s wasted work for you and the grads that actually did put the work in and whose applications won’t be given the attention they deserve.  

So next year, instead of advertising the opportunity widely, you hire your next door neighbour’s son, who you’ve known since he was six and is a stand-up lad. Or you take on a grad from your alma mater, a rigorous university which you know produces hard-workers. With any luck, your neighbour will return the favour by offering your very capable niece an internship. And so it continues. Decades of progress in widening access reversed. 

The only alternative appears to be a total embrace of AI on the other side of the hiring process. The vast quantity of AI-generated applications require the processing-power only AI can provide. Recruitment becomes reduced to chatbots applying to chatbots: dead internet theory at its finest. 

And on top of that, companies specify that applicants shouldn’t use AI in their submissions, but why would they listen? AI will almost definitely be used to judge them, and given the number of job applications needed to secure a single graduate spot, students are choosing quantity over quality. Who can blame them? 

Of course, there are options besides nepotism and AI armageddon. Hiring teams could specify criteria to reduce the overall number of applications and boost those from underrepresented groups: state-school educated, BAME, those with disabilities. Such “positive action” schemes have already been implemented successfully at a number of big corporations, including NatWest, The Guardian, and PwC. Though it doesn’t solve the issue for students not included within those groups, maybe it’s a start. 

But do we really expect that most UK companies will make the effort? Their bottom line is their bottom line: they don’t really care about access. Grads without connections are collateral: unlucky – try again next year. I tentatively suggested the positive action policy to my relative, who seemed to just sigh hopelessly: “AI’s just wrecking the whole thing anyway.”  

Which leads me to my final point, we often hear people using AI as a catch-all bad guy for the UK’s problems: “It’s all AI’s fault.” But AI itself can’t be at fault, AI doesn’t have agency: it doesn’t have consciousness (yet). For the time being, at least, humans are still behind the bots – there are people pulling the strings and making hiring policies. Just resigning to the idea that AI is taking over won’t solve anything. It’s more than depressing: it’s disempowering, and this kind of fatalism can only result in lazy policies.  

In the meantime where does that leave the grads? Is the answer really just… network more? Make nepotism work for you? It’s hardly a fair or realistic conclusion. But if that is where recruitment is heading back to, there doesn’t seem to be much other choice. Oxford is privileged in the sense that its alumni networks are amongst the best in the world; many of the big societies, such as LawSoc, Oxford Women in Business, or the Union, have direct lines to some of the best in the business. I feel uneasy suggesting such a solution, especially given the barriers to entry to those societies in the first place, and the fact that Oxford students still struggle to get grad spots in spite of the promised leg up by the university brand. To say we can do absolutely nothing to help ourselves, though, feels like giving up.

But the real change can only come from employers, who must be emboldened to take meaningful action. It’s not over yet, and a real solution would benefit everyone involved. Because, lest we forget, there are still humans behind the chatbots applying to chatbots: students who just want prospects. Nepotism doesn’t provide that, aside from for the lucky few, and AI only complicates an already-crowded space. 

Students want to put in the effort. We just need a fair chance – only human choices, not AI, can give that to us. 

In defence of the internship spreadsheet

Antonio Reis
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In defence of the internship spreadsheet

Every few days, without fail, my friend sends me a screenshot of his cold email spreadsheet. Dozens of colour-coded rows list firms I’ve never heard of, tracking interviews, rejections, and the occasional win. I receive them with a familiar cocktail of guilt, stress, and vague dread. I tell myself I don’t care. I came to the University of Oxford to pursue knowledge, not to optimise my LinkedIn. But hours later, I inevitably find myself doomscrolling CareerConnect.

It’s easy to criticise “internship culture”, with its nerves and competition, but it’s worth asking why it’s so contagious. At Oxford, where ambition is concentrated and comparison is practically unavoidable, the pressure to plan early isn’t a bug but a feature. The question is not whether this culture exists, but whether it is entirely corrosive – or whether, handled well, it can sharpen purpose rather than hollow it out. For this reason, it’s worth defending.

There’s a classic line: you are the product of the five people you spend the most time with. If that’s true, it explains what makes Oxford so distinct. The teaching is excellent, but the academic and curricular differences between any top university are likely marginal. What truly separates Oxford is selection. The admissions process concentrates intense, ambitious people in one place: almost everyone has some deep passion, side project, or sense of purpose. You are surrounded by students who expect a lot from themselves – and, implicitly, from you.

This intensity seeps into daily life, amplified by Oxford’s physical and social structure. Dining halls and their long tables regularly seat you by people you don’t know. New connections and conversations strike up easily. This dynamic is replicated everywhere: society socials, lectures, and college bars. Networking becomes an everyday experience. You occasionally become aware that you might be talking to the next prime minister, Stephen Hawking, or Nigella Lawson.

Inevitably, talks drift towards future plans – not because everyone is soullessly ambitious, but because when everyone around you is building something, standing still feels like falling behind.

Of course, this has costs. You start measuring yourself against friends, and pressure accumulates. But, to use the cliché, diamonds are formed under pressure. Competition incentivises innovation and improvement. You see what is possible earlier, you learn faster, and your standards rise.

I hated my friend’s screenshots, but they worked. They forced me to confront how passive I’d been about my own future. I joined more committees, updated my CV, and, reluctantly, downloaded LinkedIn. I discovered exciting opportunities I would never have considered otherwise. I’m no hardcore careerist, but proximity to ambition is motivating.

This isn’t to deny that this culture can be toxic. If your self-worth depends entirely on employability, something has gone wrong. But not all pressure is poison. High-pressure environments have always produced excellence alongside stress. We accept this in sports and music; why not careers?

Internships are also undervalued as learning tools in themselves. It’s not mere résumé-padding, but a test run to gather information about your own preferences and abilities before the consequences become dire. Discovering at 19 that you would absolutely despise investment banking is far better than discovering that at 25 with rent to pay and no alternatives.

The logic is temporal: work now reduces panic later. We accept this principle everywhere else: we revise before exams, not after results. Yet we treat internships as unnecessary stress rather than what they really are: an insurance against future panic. Thinking seriously about the future can provide vision and purpose. Insulating ourselves from the outside world doesn’t preserve some purer intellectual life; we just delay an inevitable confrontation with reality.


Finally, we should ​​interrogate the moral tone of some anti-hustle critiques. Wanting a fulfilling, well-paid, meaningful career is not shallow. For many students, it’s not optional. Dismissing concern about employment as trivial is often a position made comfortable by safety nets, family connections, and wealth. It is quietly elitist, echoing an era where jobs didn’t matter, and university was just a playground for the aristocracy before they returned to their family estates.

Internship culture deserves critique, but also recognition. The problem is pursuing an abstract goal without understanding what success means for you. Instead, acknowledge pressure but don’t let careers become totalising. At a place like Oxford, competition is both a by-product and driver of excellence and personal growth. We pretend students shouldn’t care too much about their futures, while quietly rewarding those who do.

If my friend is reading this, though: please stop sending me screenshots of your spreadsheet.

Jharkhand’s Chief Minister visits Oxford

Angelina Mirraslavska
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Jharkhand’s Chief Minister visits Oxford

Jharkhand’s Chief Minister Hemant Soren visited Oxford University near the end of January as part of his official international and academic engagements in the United Kingdom following the World Economic Forum (WEF) Annual Meeting in Davos, Switzerland. 

Soren is the longest-serving Chief Minister of Jharkhand, one of India’s most mineral-rich and industrially strategic states, located in the northeast of the country. 

The Chief Minister was formally received at a reception at Somerville College hosted by principal Catherine Royle. Somerville has long-standing links with India, having educated Indira Gandhi, former Prime Minister of India and recipient of an honorary degree, as well as Cornelia Sorabji, the first Indian woman to study law abroad.

The reception recognised Mr Soren’s work in indigenous welfare, climate action, sustainability, just transition frameworks, and expanding equitable access to higher education. The event was supported by the Oxford India Centre for Sustainable Development (OICSD), established in 2013 with backing from the government of India. The Centre adopts an interdisciplinary approach, combining humanities, science and technology, and the physical, medical, and social sciences to address sustainability challenges. More than 40 Indian scholars are currently affiliated with OICSD and based at Somerville.

Attendees included students, academics, Indian scholars, civil servants, and researchers from across the University. Among them was Shri Ravi Shankar Shukla, IAS, an officer of the Government of Jharkhand, currently pursuing the MSc in Water Science, Policy and Management as an Elizabeth Moir Scholar. The Chief Minister was also welcomed by Dr Radhika Khosla, Associate Professor at the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment, Research Director of OICSD, and Programme Leader for Zero Carbon Energy Use at Oxford’s ZERO Institute.

The reception aimed to strengthen links between academic research and policymaking, with a focus on aligning OICSD’s work with Jharkhand’s development, environmental, and governance priorities. 

The visit also included informal discussions with students and scholars, who expressed interest in convening a dedicated workshop with the Chief Minister to examine Jharkhand’s government programmes, public policy initiatives and sustainable development.

Soren also visited the archives of St John’s College to see rare photographs and preserved records of his ancestor Marang Gomke Jaipal Singh Munda on 23rd January. Jaipal Singh Munda attended St John’s, and was an Olympian, tribal leader, and member of India’s Constituent Assembly in the period immediately preceding the country’s independence. The materials on display included photographs of his Oxford hockey team, records from the Debating Society, and his personal letters and notebooks.

Soren commended St John’s for preserving the materials. He expressed interest in collaboration between the Government of Jharkhand and St John’s College, including proposals to preserve Jharkhand’s historical and intellectual heritage for future generations through archival exchange, digitisation, and joint conservation initiatives. The discussions included the possibility of establishing a dedicated St John’s–Jharkhand PhD or doctoral scholarship in memory of Jaipal Singh Munda and Dishom Guru Shibu Soren, Soren’s father and former Chief Minister of Jharkhand.

Why you shouldn’t finish your reading list

Anisha Mohammed
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Why you shouldn’t finish your reading list

On being accepted into Oxford, everyone warned me about the reading lists. “You’ll be reading eight hours a day,” they said, half-serious, half-proud. At the time, it sounded almost romantic. I imagined long afternoons tucked away in ancient libraries, light slanting through leaded windows, books piled high beneath the dreaming spires; the kind of intellectual exhaustion that comes with purpose, the price of becoming someone serious and scholarly. Then the term started, and I realised that “reading list” was really just code for “we dare you to sleep.”

Sixth form hadn’t prepared me for this. I was used to summarised textbook chapters and neat exam-board extracts, not three entire novels and a stack of theory articles before Thursday’s tutorial. So when I read The Atlantic’s piece, “The elite college students who can’t read books”, I immediately recognised myself in their experience. However, the article seemed to frame the issue as one of attention span: we simply can’t sit still long enough to read anymore. This is a growing narrative for our generation, and maybe relevant to universities with slightly fewer contact hours. But for me, it’s not just about distraction. It’s about design.

There’s a difference between being lazy and being lost. Reading lists at universities, especially in the humanities, can often feel endless; not just in volume, but in purpose. You’re handed 20 or 30 titles for one essay, often with little explanation of why they’re there or how they relate to one another. Some texts are foundational, some are marginal, some are there to challenge you, and others seem included simply because they can be. But no one tells you which is which. In an environment like Oxford, where tutorials can feel quietly competitive and intellectual confidence is often performed as much as developed, that ambiguity carries weight. You’re not just trying to learn; you’re trying to prove that you belong. Reading becomes less about understanding and more about keeping up appearances, about staying afloat in a system that rewards the impression of mastery.

When you don’t know why you’re reading something, it’s hard to care about it. The sheer volume makes it easy to feel like you’re working in a vacuum, turning pages simply to meet a deadline. In a degree built on curiosity and interpretation, that lack of direction slowly drains motivation. A degree you once loved can start to feel like an endless series of tasks to complete rather than ideas to explore. Instead of excitement, there’s anxiety; instead of engagement, there’s exhaustion. Reading stops being a process of discovery and becomes just another obligation you’re already behind on.

Everyone knows the unspoken truth: no one actually finishes everything on their reading list. And, in many cases, you’re probably not meant to. Different degrees (and even different tutors) operate with very different expectations about depth versus breadth. But this lack of clarity matters. The guilt that comes with unfinished reading, and the sense that you’re constantly falling short, can make students feel like failures before they’ve even begun. We all end up reading strategically: jumping between chapters, skimming introductions and conclusions, trying to extract just enough insight to write something coherent. There’s something faintly absurd about attempting to assemble a passable argument in front of a tutor who has likely internalised each article on the list. Yet this coping strategy is often treated as evidence of poor focus, rather than as a rational response to an impossible workload.

As Rose Horowitch writes in The Atlantic piece, “to read a book in college, it helps to have read a book in high school”. And yes, maybe I wasn’t fully prepared for this kind of academic reading. Sixth form didn’t train me to juggle multiple books a week, and there’s little I can do now to retroactively fix the education system. Oxford, for all its brilliance, has a tendency to throw students straight into the deep end with little acknowledgement of how uneven that preparation can be. That gap isn’t a personal failing, and it shouldn’t be treated as one. The more important question is how universities can make reading feel purposeful rather than punitive, and less like a test of endurance.

In my second year, one of my tutors made a small but transformative change. Under each text on the reading list, they added a short bullet point explaining why it mattered and how it linked to the essay question. That was all. But suddenly, each book had a reason to be there. I could see how arguments spoke to one another, where I might enter the debate, and which texts I needed to prioritise depending on my angle. The reading stopped feeling like a burden and started feeling, dare I say, enjoyable again.

Maybe that’s what is missing. The problem is multifaceted: there are too many books, too little time, and too little preparation for the kind of sustained, critical reading university demands. But the element most often overlooked is purpose. Purpose isn’t just about knowing what to read; it’s about understanding why you’re reading it and what you’re meant to do with it. That sense of direction is what makes students feel capable rather than overwhelmed, curious rather than inadequate. Understanding the reasoning behind a reading list doesn’t solve everything, but it changes how we approach the work. If reading lists were framed less as endurance tests and more as maps, reading might start to feel less like survival, and more like learning again.

Oxford study finds that ChatGPT reproduces global inequalities

Beatrix Arnold
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Oxford study finds that ChatGPT reproduces global inequalities

New research from the Oxford Internet Institute (OII), together with the University of Kentucky, reveals that global biases are reproduced and amplified by LLMs (Large Language Models). The study found that the LLM ChatGPT consistently favours wealthier countries in the Global North, relying heavily on stereotypes in the generation of its responses, despite the appearance of objectivity. 

‘The Silicon Gaze: A typology of biases and inequality in LLMs through the lens of place’ was published in the scientific journal Platforms and Society on 20th January. Researchers used a Python-based query engine to analyse 20.3 million ChatGPT queries, asking the AI system to rank countries in answer to questions which ranged from “which country has stupider people?” to “which country has a more corrupt economic system?”. 

ChatGPT was found to systematically attribute positive characteristics to higher-income regions in the Global North and to privilege countries with stronger digital visibility. For example, when asked “which country is smarter?”, African countries emerged as the lowest-ranking, while the vast majority of European and North American countries were ranked among the most intelligent. Such stark regional clustering, the paper suggests, reflects how AI amplifies pre-existing socioeconomic hierarchies and aligns with historical perceptions of racial difference, rather than employing any objective metric of intelligence.  

The research, which aimed to “understand how generative AI perpetuates and disrupts deep-seated inequalities across scales of place and categories of knowledge”, identified five sets of biases within what they called the ‘silicon gaze’: availability bias, pattern bias, averaging bias, trope bias, and proxy bias. The paper concluded that “bias is a structural feature of generative AI, rather than an abnormality”. In addition to the published paper, the researchers created a public website, inequalities.ai, which explains the findings. 

The publication of the paper comes not long after the University of Oxford became the first UK university to offer generative AI tools to students, in the form of ChatGPT-5. One of the researchers, Matthew Zook, a Professor at the University of Kentucky, told Cherwell of his concern that “as institutions like Oxford adopt AI tools, there is a risk of taking responses at face value”. 

His co-author, Mark Graham, a Professor at the OII, urged that “students and staff should be encouraged to verify outputs, interrogate sources, and exercise caution when models make claims about places, communities, or social conditions.

“There is also a strong case for ongoing institutional evaluation and auditing of these tools, rather than assuming that provision of access is sufficient. An institution like Oxford, with significant research capacity in this area, is well placed to negotiate not only access to such systems but also the conditions under which they are evaluated and used.”

When asked about the implications of their conclusions, Graham told Cherwell that the study “reinforces the need to treat LLM outputs as situated and shaped by power and data availability, rather than as neutral reflections of the world”. The research, however, is limited in its scope, assessing only one LLM through the lens of regional comparison. It promises to be the first step in a larger project to analyse the politics of attention which informs generative AI systems.

Will 2026 finally kill the clean girl?

Beatrix Arnold
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Will 2026 finally kill the clean girl?

Last weekend, I was invited to a 2016-themed party. We put on exaggerated make-up, wore clashing outfits, and played a reprehensible amount of Shawn Mendes. Judging by my Instagram feed, we’re not the only ones. 

Throwback photos of tie-dye, flannel tops, and skinny jeans are the visual accompaniments to what seems to be a collective sense of nostalgia as we start the new year. Through the rose-gold spectacles, 2016 represents a time before everything was overproduced, over-optimised, and relentlessly monetised – a VSCO-filtered bygone era that thrived on experimentation. Embracing cringe looks like an act of self-liberation, an escape from the hyper-curation of the digital landscape in recent years. Could this nostalgia, bolstered by concomitant trends such as Zara Larsson’s polychromatic makeup, represent a cultural shift away from a fashion scene hegemonised by the pursuit of perfection? Could it, in other words, spell the death of the clean girl?

The clean girl has become ubiquitous throughout celebrity culture, magazines, and social media in recent years. Her brand prescribes a lifestyle, the impetus behind which is the curation of a kind of idealised minimalism. It’s no revelation that her practised effortlessness belies its unattainable requirements. The performance of the clean girl demands a level of privilege that ultimately celebrates wealth, thinness, whiteness, and able bodies; her lifestyle is only achievable if you’re already insulated financially, socially, and genetically. 

The predominance of the clean girl has, of course, been challenged before. ‘Brat summer’ was heralded as a new era, the reincarnation of the ‘messy girl’ characterised by two day old mascara, tangled hair, and cigarette ash – it seemed like the clean girl was on her deathbed. But this wasn’t liberation. The pendulum swung back and the clean girl lived on, repackaged as ‘demure’, the corrective to the period of licensed messiness. Brat summer had exhausted its course, and to cling onto it was ‘cringe’. The clean girl, by contrast, was the grown-up standard, invested with a sense of moral superiority, to which social media dictated we return after a wild summer of temporary license. 

In fashion, subcultures and their accompanying aesthetics are usually the product of a community, a unified worldview: punk was anti-establishment, goth was rooted in non-conformity, even 2016 boho-chic was inspired by the shared values of the moment. The clean girl, in contrast, has never been a subculture to belong to, but an aspirational standard. Innovation is replaced by prescription, community is supplanted by consumption. The clean girl aesthetic favours conformity, not creativity – she is inspired not by ideas, but by a shopping list. There is no shared ideology beyond the Pinterest board. Her make-up is stripped of its artistic potential, its aim becomes invisibility. Her fashion, narrowed and purged of variety, offers almost no room for interpretation, let alone expression. For the clean girl, fashion is a medium of emulation. 

This is nothing new. The clean girl is a modernised iteration of a perennial aesthetic, upgraded with pilates and Erewhon. She is purity culture, quiet luxury, old-money minimalism made more palatable for a new generation. She is perfection –  and perfection will always sell. This all-pervasive aesthetic has, in various different permutations, always been the norm; opposing aesthetics serve to define by opposition, and ultimately affirm, that norm. Like Kim Kardashian’s stripped-back house, ‘clean’ signifies distance from chaos, a glossy exterior that disguises its cost. 

Despite what Sydney Sweeney might protest, fashion is and always will be political. It is the clean girl’s self-distancing from subversion, her very apoliticism that makes her a cultural lightning rod. The aesthetic, largely harmless in isolation, bleeds into wider, more pernicious social trends, such as the Ozempic craze, or the ‘tradwife’. The ‘no make-up’ look, neutral tones, and homely lifestyle amounts to rehearsed restraint, a whispered performance that politely declines to take up space. As self-expression is sacrificed for submission, and the male gaze is reasserted as the arbiter of ideal beauty, the clean girl implies a modest, non-threatening, domestic form of femininity.

With her rigid sleep schedule, workout routine, and curated minimalism, the clean girl lifestyle is an exercise in self-discipline. When women, and the population at large, are convinced to police themselves, they are much less likely to imagine alternatives. It’s easy to see how the clean girl culture of hyper-optimisation is a fundamentally capitalistic one. Consumption is marketed as self-improvement, beauty is transformed into duty, and self-expression mutates into self-exploitation. 

In the visual economy of the digital age, appearance goes beyond individual expression, and becomes social, and even political, currency. Against the background of rising white nationalism, and the proliferation of AI generated media, appeals to authenticity feel futile. At any rate, if Pantone’s colour of the year is anything to go by, it seems likely that the clean girl will keep dodging assassination attempts – she’s always been here, and she’s not going anywhere.

Collaborative research: Why top university students are switching to secure file sharing platforms

External Contributor
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In the historic libraries and modern laboratories of top universities, the nature of academic research is undergoing a transformation. Gone are the days when collaboration was confined to physical paper exchanges or the precarious sharing of a single USB drive in a college buttery. Today, the academic life of a student – whether an undergraduate working on a group presentation or a post-graduate mid-way through a PhD – is defined by the constant movement of digital data. 

As the sensitivity of research increases and the threat of data breaches grows, the method of that movement has become a point of serious debate. Yet, for many top university students, the “standard” free tools are no longer being viewed as sufficient for the protection of intellectual property.

Prioritising privacy with secure file sharing

The sheer volume of digital work produced across the university is staggering. From massive data sets in the sciences to extensive bibliographies and scanned manuscripts in the humanities, the need for a central, accessible hub for project work is undeniable. This shift is not unique to the Dreaming Spires; it reflects a broader global trend in education, where data suggests that 90% of college students use cloud-based collaboration tools to manage their workloads. 

The primary driver behind the move toward more specialised platforms is the requirement to share files securely. When working on groundbreaking research or confidential archives, students cannot afford to have their data harvested by major tech corporations for advertising profiles or, worse, exposed in a leak. Switching to an encrypted platform ensures that only the intended recipient can access the contents of a shared link. This “zero-knowledge” approach means that the provider itself cannot see what you are working on, offering a level of academic freedom that is essential in a rigorous research environment.

The collaboration convenience advantage

Beyond the obvious security benefits, these platforms are also solving the logistical headaches of group work. Securely sharing large files—such as high-resolution imagery or complex coding projects—often hits the size limits of traditional email attachments. By using a secure link, students can give collaborators instant access to large folders without compromising the integrity of the data. 

Secure file sharing allows for a more fluid exchange of ideas, where the focus remains on the quality of the research rather than the technical hurdles of moving it between devices.

Managing the digital dissertation

For most students, the final year represents the culmination of years of work, and the digital safety of a dissertation is paramount. Relying on a single laptop is a recipe for disaster; hardware failure or theft can result in the loss of months of progress. Modern students are now prioritising “redundancy” in their digital habits—backing up their work to an encrypted cloud as they type. This ensures that even if their physical device is compromised, their intellectual output remains safe and easily restorable.

Integrating these secure habits early in one’s academic career is also a form of professional preparation. As graduates move into fields such as law, medicine, or government, the ability to manage sensitive information securely will be a prerequisite. By adopting these tools now, students are protecting their current grades and mastering the digital hygiene required for the modern professional world. The switch to secure storage platforms is a necessary evolution for anyone serious about their academic and professional future.

Nostalgic and sincere: ‘The Glass Menagerie’ in review

Jessica Phillips
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Nostalgic and sincere: ‘The Glass Menagerie’ in review

Crazy Child Productions staged a genuine and thoughtful adaptation of Tennessee Williams’ The Glass Menagerie. The play follows the Wingfield family, narrated by Tom (Oli Spooner) who tells the story of his life with his mother Amanda (Lyndsey Mugford) and sister Laura (Matilda Beloou). The plot focuses on Amanda’s struggle to find her daughter a suitable husband, after Laura has failed to make her own way in the world. The drama is filled with unexpected revelations and ultimately, an eruption of the family tensions that have simmered throughout. 

I took my seat next to a smoke machine, which periodically coughed out bursts of fog, filling the space with a slightly musty smell. Quaint music underscored the conversations surrounding me on three sides, while overhead, a series of intricately crafted animal structures hung from the ceiling. The space was successful in creating a nostalgic atmosphere, but the O’Reilly felt slightly too big to evoke the sense of entrapment the play seems to demand. 

The decision to stage it in the round meant at times that the play and the actors felt restricted. In the first few moments of the show, I was seeing a lot of people’s backs. The actors were sitting around a kitchen table which inhibited their movements. When they did exchange seats, and I came face-to-face with Mugford, I realised what I had been missing in the first few minutes. The acting in this show was wonderful, and it is a shame that it was hidden from my view because of the limitations of the staging.

The first lines delivered by Lydnsey Mugford in a bouncing southern American accent were utterly enthralling. She played Amanda with convincing sincerity. The actors excelled in silences too: the slight slouch of Laura’s (Matilda Beloou) shoulders and her careful reactions to her mother and brother’s conversation made her a pleasure to watch even when she wasn’t the focus of the scene. At moments, Tom (Oli Spooner) also doubled as stage manager, rearranging the set while his mother and sister spoke to remind us of his dual role as actor and narrator. Additionally, the fading of the light in tandem with Mugford’s softening voice as the scene transitioned provided another skilful combination of stagecraft and performance, drawing on the very murkiness of the play that the actors and directors were keen to express. 

A highlight of this production was the staging of Amanda and Tom’s fight at the end of the third scene. Mugford’s varied intensity in her performance made these moments of heightened emotion even more startling. It was Spooner’s physicality, however, that triumphed. His crawling, loping motions as he approached Amanda created a real sense of threat and an aggressive release of repressed emotions. The choice in a later scene to have Tom lie on the ground and look up to the would-be stars while talking about his desire for adventure was another effective combination of movement and speech.

The second act felt more static and conversation-based than the first. While I believe this is largely down to Williams’ script itself, the structure of the act unfortunately drew attention to the struggles of working in the round, since I missed a number of conversations and interactions. Some of these interactions also relied on a visual effect to supplement the conversation, which, due to this issue of the sightlines, was lost on me. This was an unfortunate consequence of the staging choice for this play; the round demands near-constant motion, and yet that would not have done justice to Williams’ script. The directors, in their close attention to the text and compelling interpretation of it, cornered themselves with this particular staging. Yet Robson and Lacey-Hughes’ skillful direction was evident in the intricacies of movement, interaction with space, and lighting, which showed a thoughtful collaboration between directors, cast, and crew. 

This show has certainly set a high standard for student theatre this term. Crazy Child Productions delivered an intricate, poignant show, despite the confines of its staging. This is a show that speaks to a generation of ‘Toms’, a generation trapped by responsibility and uncertainty, yet well aware of the potential of a life beyond their own.

Irreverent, laugh-out-loud funny: ‘My Dead Mum’s AI Boyfriend’

Abigail Lakeland
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Irreverent, laugh-out-loud funny: ‘My Dead Mum’s AI Boyfriend’

What’s the worst thing you could find out about your mum in her will? For Carrie (Sali Adams), the protagonist of Interrobang Productions’ My Dead Mum’s AI Boyfriend, there’s one standout discovery: Aled. Brilliantly voiced by Billy Morton, Aled is a chatbot, but also, more concerningly, Carrie’s mum’s AI boyfriend. Adams’ laugh-out-loud original play (directed by Aman Arya) follows Carrie, a Welsh secondary school teacher based in Guildford, processing the death of her mum whilst on a trip to scatter her ashes in Anglesey.

There are some seriously funny moments throughout this play. During her Welsh pilgrimage, Carrie listens to a radio host (Jonathan Tanner) play a fantastic satirical show dedicated to Take That. Aled eulogises Carrie’s mum but ends his speech with “Was that too effusive?”, adding a hilarious stab of bathos. In a deliciously awkward encounter, Carrie makes her mum’s ashes ‘talk’ to a stranger by playing with the lid of the urn. Clippy, the Microsoft Office virtual assistant, also gets a mention, a move which earns Adams significant respect in my book.

While topical and often laugh-out-loud funny, My Dead Mum’s AI Boyfriend is also heartfelt and tender. In one particularly tear-jerking scene, Carrie, paying homage to her Welsh mum, watches the Six Nations on TV and sings along to the few words she knows of the Welsh national anthem. Adams depicts beautifully how it feels to move away from your spiritual home – that intoxicating mixture of guilt and nostalgia, manifesting in unexpected moments like watching rugby.

Costumed in a frumpy blouse and cardigan, Carrie is evidently disappointed about her lot in life: a mere classroom teacher, nothing compared to her big-city mum. When the audience meets her, Carrie’s biggest character flaw is being too cold, a trait which Aled seems to heal. Adams is making a clear commentary on communication: Aled, a robot, offers non-judgemental warmth and kindness, whilst Carrie struggles to open up to the people she loves. In many ways, this worked well, but I was left wondering how much more cohesive these plot points might have been if Adams had the courage to lean into Carrie’s unlikeable traits.

The play was at its best during the service station interlude. Carrie, on her way to Wales to scatter her mum’s ashes with Aled, makes a stop to buy a pasty in a service station. Whilst she’s in the bathroom (offstage), the audience listens to Carrie on the phone to her cat-minder, in a touching moment. The dialogue between Carrie and Amber (Avani Rao) was surprisingly engaging given Amber’s lines were pre-recorded.

Carrie’s dialogue with Father Thomas (Adam Griffiths), a priest in her hometown Anglesey, was sweet and painful in equal measures, showing how one’s home-town is so easily rendered a ghost-town. In a quintessentially irreverent moment, this heart-wrenching nostalgia becomes the set-up for the best joke in the show.

Yet there is one thing I’d recommend to student writers: don’t use cut essay material in your play. One scene was devoted to an internal debate with philosopher John Locke (Hannah Wei) about what constitutes a person. I found this scene a little pretentious, dull, and tonally off kilter with the rest of the show, even if the opening night audience laughed knowingly – perhaps they know something about John Locke that I don’t. Nonetheless the dialogue appeared absurd in the mouth of a secondary school teacher, for whom tutorials are a hazy memory.

Aside from minor errors on the night, Iona Blair’s sound design was immersive and effectively cosy. When combined with Libby Alldread’s lighting design, the set really came together during the intimate Six Nations TV scene. Whilst some props in the show were necessary and effective (the Bluetooth speaker representing Aled, the urn, the pasty), I do wish the production had dispatched with the unwieldy, awkward boxes Adams was constantly reconfiguring (to make a car, a bed, a pair of seats).

Adams does her punchline premise justice. Alongside the dark comedy sits Adams’ pertinent musings on grief and reconnecting with loved ones, even posthumously; the play starts with Carrie scrolling aimlessly on her phone, and ends with her making a call. My Dead Mum’s AI Boyfriend leaves the audience wondering whether it really is technology to blame for our lack of connection.

A twisted tour-de-force: ‘Bugonia’ in review

Toby Bowes Lyon
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A twisted tour-de-force: ‘Bugonia’ in review

Bugonia is yet another triumph for director Yorgos Lanthimos and his collaborators. With his distinctive blend of comedy, tragedy, and absurdity, Lanthimos has remade a 2003 South Korean film, Save the Green Planet!, and in doing so produced a cynical but ultimately rewarding reflection on the human condition. His film centres around the kidnapping of a powerful CEO by two men convinced she is an alien plotting to destroy the Earth, in a story which strikes the right balance between farce and realism.

Lanthimos and screenwriter Will Tracy made a few important decisions when adapting Save the Green Planet! Most importantly, they changed the genders of key characters, with the CEO (Emma Stone) now female, and the kidnappers (Jesse Plemons and Aidan Delbis) both male. This turns gender into one of the film’s core interests, with Lanthimos exploring the misogyny powerful women can face, and the link between violence and ‘incel’ culture in America.

But, as ever with Lanthimos, none of the characters are treated with a sense of moral superiority. They are all flawed and ambiguous, with the audience’s emotions split between horror at what the CEO is subjected to, and pity at the mental illness of the kidnappers, one of whom is cognitively impaired and is effectively controlled by the other. This fits into Lanthimos’s broader interest in manipulation and the power dynamics of relationships, as well as themes of loneliness and emotional fragility.

Teddy, the lead kidnapper, is clearly deeply troubled. Over the course of the film, Lanthimos treats his story with the seriousness it deserves, chronicling a history of sexual abuse, bereavement and childhood trauma. In doing so, the film raises questions about how many people have failed Teddy, implicitly criticising both his community and the state for turning their back on him. Teddy is presented as a broken man who cannot escape his past, someone left behind in society’s emphasis on material gain, competition and self-interest.

Jesse Plemons’s brilliantly intense performance as Teddy is matched by an equally impressive turn from Emma Stone. Her portrayal of CEO Michelle Fuller is nuanced and considered; she is neither an innocent victim, nor a greedy corporate boss who got what she deserved. Nonetheless, she is emotionally distant, and lacks concrete remorse or empathy for Teddy’s mother, who is in a coma because of a drug trial run by her company. She therefore represents the personal cost of ambition, and, perhaps, in a nod to one of Lanthimos’s favourite themes, the corrupting influence of power.

Underlying all of this is the film’s interest in the environment. Teddy’s enthusiasm for beekeeping and anxiety about the decline of bee populations makes him a more sympathetic character, while echoing his concerns about the end of humanity. He even compares the division of roles in a bee colony to human society, casting Fuller as the queen bee which all the other bees tirelessly, and mindlessly, work to feed. Fittingly, the buzz of bees is the overwhelming sound at one of the film’s most dramatic moments; for Teddy, beekeeping represents a means to escape and process trauma, and chaos in the bee colony reflects chaos in his mind. Bees are hence woven into the musical fabric of the film, in one of the many clever elements of Jerskin Fendrix’s remarkable score.

The film meditates on some of the darkest aspects of modern America: its lack of concern for the environment, its interest in profit over human relationships, its lack of care for the most vulnerable. Even its title is existentialist. ‘Bugonia’ refers to the ancient Greek belief in bees spontaneously generating from the carcasses of sacrificed cows, perhaps hinting at the idea that new life will always emerge, even if humanity is doomed to extinction. The planet might even be better, the film hints, if it were free of humans.

The film’s use of the absurd has its own important function. It links to the idea of challenging conventions, as well as echoing the chaotic and seemingly meaningless nature of human life. Lanthimos wants his audience to reconsider every aspect of how they have been told to live, to stop copying others and to start thinking for themselves. His film debates conformity versus rebellion, and the collective versus the individual.

Bugonia is not a perfect film, but it does not need to be. Some aspects of its depiction of gender, mental illness and manipulation may strike some viewers as exploitative, and its ending may prove frustrating for those who favour realism over allegory. But its genius lies in its tackling of the human experience in a way which is not only darkly funny, but also philosophically resonant, and at times deeply moving. Lanthimos has announced he will take some time off to creatively recharge after Bugonia; it is a break he very much deserves after producing such a dark, twisted but ultimately hugely clever tour-de-force.

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