Monday 28th July 2025
Blog Page 429

Of masks and masquerades in 2020 – from necessity to accessory?

Sophie Grapentin
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Of masks and masquerades in 2020 – from necessity to accessory?

Masks might seem strange, unusual, and new to the British fashionista but in many countries face coverings have been used for both hygiene and fashion long before the events of 2020 unfolded. When watching a YouTube video on the day of a Japanese Cosplayer I was struck by the young woman putting on a mask before leaving the house. Being asked why, she merely said that her make-up wasn’t finished yet and so she wanted to cover her face.

To be able to stay with family, I myself spent this pandemic in Germany where masks became mandatory in late April. At first the response overwhelmed the country. Free patterns were available online, elastic was sold out in all the shops and avid crafters made masks for friends, relatives, and neighbours. However the longer time went on, the less enthusiastic people were about masks. Despite them still being mandatory on public transport and in shops, the masks came off. Slowly they started slithering down people’s faces, first covering only their mouths, and now hanging under their chins. People take them off to eat or drink or sneeze inside train cabins and rip them off their faces as soon as they can. But officially masks are here to stay and now the UK too has made masks obligatory for public transport and shops.

Joining the avid crafters my sister and I made masks too. When I saw my friends suffer while I was in a different country and had no way to go to them, sending them a cloth mask became my way to tell them that I care. In digging through fabric scraps for their favourite colours, I had a chance to say all the things I wanted to say to them. It meant, I want people to see you and who you are even when your face is covered. It meant, I want you to be safe when I have no other ways of keeping you safe. It meant, I want you to remember me even when you haven’t seen me in months and it meant, I’m keeping you in my thoughts too. Masks became a form of love language when things felt uncertain.

Over the past months, many clothes brands also started producing masks from leftover fabrics, often before mask wearing became mandatory in July. With economic insecurity fashion brands producing luxury goods like silk lingerie switched to masks. The British lingerie company Harlow & Fox created seven different designs of silk and lace masks. Developments like this allowed customers to support their favourite small businesses even when they had to tighten their purse strings.

Yet, while this little bit of fabric has taken up an array of meanings and social functions in the past months, it has not yet become a true fashion accessory. Fashion generally has suffered this year. Without parties and dinners, or drinks and club nights we simply don’t have the audience to show off a look. But fashion production didn’t stop and in many places clothing stores have reopened. Pictures of long lines in front of fast fashion stores like Primark went around the world and a friend from London sent me a short video of a line in a luxury shopping area she titled ‘URGENT Louis Vuitton buys’. Clearly people want clothes and clearly people are willing to make an effort to get them, whether they are spending a lot of money on it or a little.

But fashion is not the same as clothes. On the streets people seem to wear what they already had; many appear to have gone to the back of their closets to find something that feels new. Even white skinny jeans appeared back on the streets just a few weeks after several fashion writers had published their love-letters and goodbyes to the body-clinging style. Luxury brands which would usually maintain the strong-hold for the impractical, ridiculous, and fashionable have focused their latest releases on commerciality. The 2020 resort collection Chanel has debuted online could not be playing safer. Navy, white and red for summer are as revolutionary as florals for spring. Their wide-legged trousers were cute, and I enjoyed the chain belts placed directly on naked skin. But in the end, not a piece in this collection was particularly new or exciting. Now, if a luxury fashion house with millions behind them doesn’t have the capacity for fashion this season, what will happen to the rest of us?

Even couture season, the place for fashion designers to make the impossible possible with the help of the best craftsmen in the world, disappointed. Not because the fashion wasn’t beautiful. With nods to the past and lots of glamour, Christian Dior, Ulyana Sergeenko, or Valentino invited the audience to dream simultaneously about an idealised past and an idealised future. Yet it seems that facemasks fit into neither fashion fantasy. Only Victor & Rolf’s couture show included a black cloth mask which a commentator with the optimistic tone and apocalyptic expectations of a 1940s war morale film narrator called “the smartest new accessory of the season”. However, the mask disappeared afterwards and even the models showing outerwear did not wear one during the rest of the show.

Masks might not be high fashion (yet) but that should not deter us from having fun with them. My mother might not be a fashion icon, nevertheless the matching of her cloth masks to her summer dresses and blouses perfectly fits the monochromatic, head to toe, matchy-matchy looks we know so well from social media. And even if protecting others isn’t the new black, being kind will always be in fashion.

Bin or Bake? Reducing your food waste

Katie Schutte
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Bin or Bake? Reducing your food waste

How much food did you leave on your plate the last time you ate? Maybe it was just a rogue potato, or some stray salad leaves, but did you consider the consequence? Each time we throw leftovers in the bin we’re contributing to one of the biggest challenges our society faces today: climate change.

There’s the humanitarian concern to consider too – since lockdown, 1.5 million Britons have gone without food for a whole day due to lack of money or access to food.  But when we throw away food, few of us consider the wasted energy and water taken to grow, harvest, transport, and package it. In 2019, only 55% of food consumed was produced in the UK, and 26% imported from the EU. 

Once in landfill, food decomposes and releases methane, a greenhouse gas which is about 80 times more powerful than CO2 at warming the Earth over a 20-year timescale.  In fact, food waste is responsible for 6% of global greenhouse gases. 

Overall, about one-third of all the food produced in the world goes to waste.  If we look at figures on an individual level in the UK, it’s equally shocking: in 2015 studies found that each person wastes about 108kg of food every year, 77kg of which is edible.  Unlike other environmental concerns, such as single-use plastic, which we can easily cast-off as a problem for governments and corporations to address with policy, food waste isn’t so easy to distance from our own conscience. The government-funded charity Waste and Resources Action Programme (WRAP) released a report this year that household food waste makes up 70% of UK post-farm-gate food waste. This incorporates all food waste production – from manufacture and wholesale, to the retail and hospitality sector – minus that arising in primary production. 

So whilst it may not feel harmful to throw out the odd bread crust, food waste is an environmental (and humanitarian) concern that we have significant influence over.  Fortunately there are plenty of easy ways we can adapt our behaviour in order to minimise this global issue.

1.              Buy less

How many times have you heard that prevention is better than cure? When it comes to food waste, it’s better to not produce the waste in the first place than to find ways to dispose it. Consumerism drives waste, and if there was a reduction in demand then the system would stop producing more food than individuals need.

A good way to avoid buying more food than you can eat before it spoils is to check your fridge and cupboards. People have habitual shopping habits, buying the same products each week as well as buying on impulse, but you might already have food that needs finishing first. And be realistic – do you really need a 2 litre carton of milk (no-one needs that much coffee to get through an all-night essay crisis) or an entire loaf of bread if it’s just for you? Shop smart and the environment, and your bank account, will thank you for it.

2.              Organisation

We’ve all done it: opened a tin of tuna or jar of tomato sauce when there’s already one open in the fridge. One study showed that for nearly a quarter of people in Britain, the main reason they discard food is because they forgot what they had in the fridge.  Try to organise your fridge using the FIFO method, ‘First In, First Out’, by placing the oldest food and opened cans at the front. This way you can avoid opening the fridge to the not-so-pleasant smell of sour cream, or discovering a mouldy can of chickpeas hiding at the back.

3.              Consider what you waste

Here I would like to take the opportunity to praise any vegans reading this list. Food waste is not equal in its carbon emissions. Most of us are aware that meat and dairy products have much higher carbon emissions than fruit and vegetables, and it follows that reducing the amount of meat you bin will have a greater impact than how many carrots you waste. For example, producing beef uses 20 times the land and emits 20 times the emissions as growing beans, per gram of protein.  And although fresh vegetables and salad make up a quarter of edible household food waste in the UK, they only account for 12% of the greenhouses gas emissions from food waste, compared to meat and fish which make up 19% of the emissions despite only making up 8% of wasted food.  Far better to make the extra effort to save meat from being binned than a few petit pois.

4.              Compost

As mentioned previously, food releases methane when it decomposes in landfill, and this powerful greenhouse gas is considerably more effective at trapping infrared radiation in the atmosphere than CO2.

Composting is an extremely effective way to reduce methane emissions, with one study estimating that greenhouse gas emissions from composting are just 14% of the same food dumped into landfill. Another study suggests that, for foods like bread, this figure drops to just 2.2%.  Moreover, composting foods like coffee grounds make excellent fertiliser for plants, adding nutrients like nitrogen back into the soil. It’s a win-win situation!

On a separate (but very important) note, most tea bags are not compostable because of their plastic seals. Although brands like Clipper claim to be ‘plastic-free’, they simply use PLA, a bio-plastic derived from plants rather than fossil fuels.  PLA requires heat over 60°C, water, and specific enzymes (not available in normal environments) in order to biodegrade, making it unlikely these tea bags will decompose in home compost.  Don’t contaminate your compost with these plastic tea bags – instead, buy tea leaves or Pukka tea bags, as these are sealed using a simple stitch of organic cotton.

5.              Freezing

You’ve boiled the kettle, opened a tin of baked beans and headed to the toaster when – disaster! The bread is mouldy! With the help of modern technology, this can easily be avoided. Simply freeze a sliced loaf and defrost a slice as and when you need it. Alternatively, freeze half a fresh loaf so that your current loaf won’t be blue around the edges by the weekend.

The freezer is your best friend when it comes to saving food and money. Freezing fruit, which spoils quickly, makes for a delicious smoothie or batch of jam. Frozen vegetable scraps e.g onions, garlic, celery ends, mushroom stems and leftover herbs, can be stored in a bag in the freezer, and made into brilliant vegetable broths, packed with nutrients. Even foods like milk, pasta, cake (although let’s be honest, who actually has left over cake?) and cheese can be frozen! Which brings us to the next tip…

6.              Buy reduced food

It may just be a habit I’ve acquired over the years from my mum, but the first things I look for in a supermarket are the orange ‘reduced’ price labels. Besides saving yourself money, buying reduced food prevents supermarkets from throwing edible produce into landfill. If you don’t eat it before the ‘use-by’ date, just freeze it when you get home and it will stay fresh until you defrost it.

7.              Read the label

People often get confused about labelling on products. “Sell by” is used by retailers to decide when the product should be sold or removed from the shelves. “Best by” is a suggested date that consumers should use their products by. Neither of these terms tells you when the food is unsafe to eat.  Follow the ‘use-by’ date instead, although even this is just an indication of when the food will pass its best quality, and food is sometimes still edible sometime afterwards.

8.              Eating out

This next one is a little less conventional – again, I have my mum to thank. Next time you go out to eat, take containers with you so you can bring the leftovers home. Before you start thinking about what the staff will think, consider the fact that a) you paid for the food b) the food tastes good and c) it will go straight in the bin if you leave it there on the plate.

Also, don’t feel afraid to ask for an ingredient to be left out if you know you won’t eat it. For example, if you’re eating out for brunch and you order an option that has a side of mushrooms which you know you hate, then ask for it to be left off. That way, you avoid it being cooked and immediately wasted.

9.              Get creative!

There are plenty of recipes online for using up leftovers. Trusty BBC Good Food has its very own ‘Leftover Recipes’ section, including stir-fries, bread and butter pudding, and traybakes. Using up leftovers doesn’t have to mean baking yet another banana bread (although this is, by no means, a negative). It can be as inventive as using sour cream to make chocolate cake or scones, to simply frying mash potato or re-cooking soft cereals to make them crunchy again.

Food waste emits about three times the global emission from aviation, and each one of us has a responsibility to reduce it.  Sending food into landfill is the least preferable option when dealing with food waste, and as more and more systems use food waste, for example, in anaerobic digestion, to make into animal feed, or to redistribute to people going hungry, we need to embrace our own responsibility in the wider food waste network and make individual changes to our lifestyles. None of these suggestions are particularly radical or difficult to do, but all of them require the right mind-set and attitude towards food waste. Next time you go to bin ‘just’ a few chips, or ‘only’ a bread crust, consider the wider impact of your actions, and how you could help change the figures above so they tell a more positive narrative.

Creativity and Covid-19: How social interaction fuels the creative industries

George Newton
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Creativity and Covid-19: How social interaction fuels the creative industries

When the pandemic forced governments across the world to put lockdown measures in place to stop the spread of Covid-19, many hailed the new-found time as an opportunity to work on half-finished projects and new ideas that had been repeatedly pushed to the bottom of the to-do list, as more urgent and pressing tasks were prioritised. These projects took many forms, some decided to learn a language, others took to working out at home, some wanted to learn to play a musical instrument and many, myself included, took the time to widen their culinary repertoire, with banana bread being a popular choice. 

The type of social interaction offered by Zoom, Skype and Teams is largely inauthentic and plagued with buffering and connectivity mishaps that tarnish the very essence of natural human exchanges.

The gift of time, however, was a double-edged sword. It provided a rare interruption in our frantic lives to engage in novel and interesting activities. For many artists and people involved in the creative industries, however, the prospect of spending an indefinite period at home with next to no exposure to the outside world was stressful and offered little inspiration. 

There were countless ways to reach others by video calls; Microsoft Teams, Skype and Zoom all spring to mind. Still, the type of social interaction offered by those mediums is largely inauthentic and plagued with buffering and connectivity mishaps that tarnish the very essence of natural human exchanges. Art and the creators of art are largely inspired by human interaction and by those around them, two aspects that often provide an original idea for a piece.

Even the work of novelists and poets, artists whose artforms ostensibly seem to be very independent and solitary pursuits, depend saliently, if not wholly, on human contact and interaction. The act of putting pen to paper, or fingers to keyboard in the modern-day, is based on a plethora of micro-interactions. The stimulus for a novel, a play or the main traits of a particular character can be traced back to a simple memory, a scent, an individual crossed on the street or even the place where the writing happens.

The Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa, for instance, was known to frequent the A Brasileira café in Lisbon, as shown above. He always sat at the same table, which is where his statue stands today. Having lived in and met the residents of many of Lisbon’s neighbourhoods, Pessoa was well-known for creating many heteronyms that he used in his work. While the focus of this article is not Pessoa, he surely exemplifies the effect of humanity on an artist and their work. Social interaction and those around the artist offer stimuli for creativity, stimuli that have been mostly – if not wholly – inaccessible since March. 

As I established earlier, articulating the human experience through art, whether it be music, sculpting or dance, is almost completely dependent on human interaction. The nature of that interaction, however, is not what you would expect. According to Dr Mehrabian’s study, 93% of communication is non-verbal. In fact, he concluded that 55% of human communication is in actual fact visual. Simple experiences such as seeing strangers in the street, sitting next to someone on the bus, waiting next to someone in the queue or bumping into somebody at a concert are all forms of interaction and in some way offer a form of communication, even though we are not directly aware of it.  

Articulating the human experience through art, whether it be music, sculpting or dance, is almost completely dependent on human interaction.

The truth of the matter is that Covid-19 and the lockdown limited inspiration, it was a period of creative stasis, a dip in creativity. This is because one of the aspects that makes the world so exciting is the people in it, the way they live, the activities they pursue and the way they think and connect.

Although it is ironic that I am expressing this idea to you via a screen, understanding the way people live, the activities they pursue and the way they think cannot be transmitted over a series of illuminated pixels that blur and glitch. Facial expressions, seeing people exchange handshakes, hugs, kisses and frowns are all parts of humanity that are lost when face-to-face contact is not possible. Many human characteristics such as scent and personal attributes such as passion and charisma cannot be transmitted through a digital medium. Nevertheless, when normality resumes and life as we knew it, or indeed a form of it ensues, there will be scope for artists of every kind to embrace humanity and social interaction. Perhaps a new conscience and understanding of humanity will emerge as a result of these bizarre, troubling and dare I say it -unprecedented- times. 

While the impulse for artistic creation has been limited, so has the funding to ensure the survival of venues and creative organisations during tough economic times. Music venues, theatres, recording studios, independent cinemas, Jazz clubs, restaurants, food markets and art galleries have all had to close for a substantial amount of time due to lockdown measures introduced in March, with several cultural venues setting up crowdfunding pages and the like to guarantee survival.

Nevertheless, when normality resumes and life as we knew it, or indeed a form of it ensues, there will be scope for artists of every kind to embrace humanity and social interaction. Perhaps a new conscience and understanding of humanity will emerge as a result of these bizarre, troubling and dare I say it -unprecedented- times. 

Not only do these places provide the general public access to art and creative content, but they can also be used by artists as a prompt for new work. The financial impact of such stasis cannot be ignored. The closure of creative businesses and organisations affects artists’ livelihoods; in a world of online streaming, musicians who cannot perform or go on tour suffer financially, artists whose exhibitions are cancelled struggle to sell paintings and independent cinemas who can no longer receive visitors or show the latest films struggle to pay bills and rent. 

The Creative Industries Federation claims that ‘the UK’s creative industries are on the brink of devastation’, and that prior to the pandemic the UK’s creative sector was growing at ‘five times the rate of the wider economy’; however, now, it is predicted that 122,000 permanent creative workers are due to be made redundant before the year’s end. Social interaction fuels the production of art and is integral to the experience of consuming art, whether it be a theatre, a restaurant or a gallery.

Social interaction is fundamental for the financial wellbeing of creative industries, to provide a stimulus for new art, to exhibit art and also to remunerate those who devote their time to create it. While the lockdown measures are important and necessary to prevent further contagion, the impact of Coronavirus has truly disrupted the economic model of creative businesses and organisations, deeply affecting the general public’s access to art, and of course the artists themselves. 

Social interaction fuels the production of art and is integral to the experience of consuming art, whether it be a theatre, a restaurant or a gallery.

The very act of transmitting human experiences through art depends on interacting with others. The development of new ideas and trends is only possible when artistic stimuli can be shared and approached by different people. Equally, the places that house art and exist to exhibit also require human interaction. In light of this, it is only natural for artists to have experienced a block or a dip in creativity since March, and for venues, theatres, galleries and the like to have experienced financial difficulties since the lockdown announcement. It has been damaging, tiring, frustrating and heartbreaking for many. Normality will eventually resume, and when it does, art will be as wonderful as ever. 

Cover Image: Janko Hoener via Wikimedia & Creative Commons.

Thirsting for a heatwave

Bianca Pasca
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Thirsting for a heatwave

Stepping out, you are hit by a torpid wave of heat. It’s getting harder to breathe and beads of sweat run down your forehead. If that weren’t enough, there’s a wet spot under your armpit. Damn right attractive, isn’t it? You would never think about it as “sweet summer sweat”, least of all as reminiscent of sensuality or passion. One thing’s clear: unlike Leon Tallis from Ian McEwan’s Atonement, you do not love England in a heatwave. So then, you might wonder why this sluggish sensation has come to be so ardently associated with sordidness, or why Sean Paul thinks this is “the right temperature to shelter you from the storm.”

Picture this: you’re on the porch, a glass of wine in your hand, as the sun sets after an oppressively hot summer day. Alannah Myles’ ‘Black Velvet’ is carried along by a soft evening breeze, proclaiming that “music’s like a heatwave.” You might then imagine warm bodies pressing against each other to a soundtrack of slow, sensual jazz. Heat is languorous. A hot, slow breath, fogging up the glass. Then coldness is all a-tremble, shivering, making your blood run cold…well, not so fast! 

Heat may be stifling and oppressive, but it is also sizzling, bursting with a sense of freedom. It is Brownian motion, a state of increased entropy, of disorder. It gives the sensation that something is about to happen, that there is tension about to be released in full force. In The Great Gatsby, heat signals the oncoming climax, as tempers rise, “it’s so hot, and everything’s so confused.” Meanwhile, “cold” is Gatsby’s attitude — aloof, apparently unfeeling.  

Heat, then, is both torpid and trepid, stifling and enraging. And somehow, sensuality and passion can be linked to all of these states without contradiction, as if, to return to the world of Atonement, “all the rules change” when spirits run hot.

It boils down to this: love’s fire can be tender, pure in the way flames can be purifying, a symbol of rebirth, rising from the ashes. It can even be sacred, like the fire of Vesta in antiquity, tended by the Vestal Virgins. But at the same time, it can be a disastrous force, the “heat of passion”: ravaging, burning. We have a long tradition of associating love with either the soul or the carnal (this being lust, for which, hot damn, you’ll probably burn in Hell anyway). The ancient Greeks had different names for different types of love, of which perhaps Eros is the one most closely associated with flaming passion. 

You might say it depends on the era you have in mind. After all, in the “Age of Steam”, heat was dynamism—progress setting things in motion, rather than languor. Thermodynamics, rather than a sexy poem. But it seems as if the link between passion and flames has been here for longer than we can say. From Ovid to Shakespeare, there is always “fire sparkling in lovers’ eyes”, and even the word ardour, used in English to suggest passion since Medieval Times, comes from the Latin ardere, “to burn”. 

It seems natural to associate the physical side of things with bodies ‘in heat’, and old ideas about medicine and physiology might have also helped perpetuate the symbolism. Interestingly, the theory of the bodily humours associated blood with an enthusiastic, friendly temper (from which we derive sanguine), while impulsive, aggressive behaviour was associated with an excess of yellow bile. But old physiology also had a theory proposing that, in fits of passion, our blood starts rising in temperature. Thus, we talk about being hot-blooded, and blood itself is tangled up with images of heat and desire: “Oh hot blood, love is gonna get ‘ya.”

The association between heat and illness doesn’t stop here, though: how many times have we heard of the ‘fever’ of desire? Even disease is associated with a frenzied sort of love (or a cramped, hot dance floor in Oxford…) In Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, the passions and vices at a tuberculosis sanatorium are presented against a backdrop of sweltering temperatures and fevers. Even though the action is set in the Swiss Alps, the atmosphere makes you think of the excesses of The Eagles’ ‘Hotel California’ more than anything else. Hans, the protagonist, associates his feverous palpitations with his obsession for a Russian patient, Clavdia Chauchat. This lustful heat is an intoxication, both boosting your spirits and making you feel dizzy and lethargic. 

Fire is passion, but it can be passionate love or hate. So, when ‘[s]ome say the world will end in fire’, they might be right. Because “from what they’ve tasted of desire” and what they know of hate, they might reach the same conclusion that, be it through love or hate, the world will indeed end not in ice, but fire.

In the end, the same heatwave can inspire lewd lyrics or thoughts of doom and global warming. More realistically, perhaps, your only cravings could be a cold shower and some ice in your drink. How hot weather might capture your imagination could be as varied as our symbolism for love and fertility: some as cliché as roses, others as obscure as glass sponge skeletons. For now, though, Donna Summer will continue to demand ‘hot stuff’, and Italian cities in the summer will continue to be the chosen setting for pretentious love stories.

Still, our hottest hits might do well to use different symbols to suggest sensuality, since we have so many, like, you know, fig trees and oysters. Which, I admit, sound at least a little bit cooler.

Review: The Silent Patient

Amelia Horn
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Review: The Silent Patient

Alex Michaelides’ The Silent Patient is the must-read thriller of 2019, an instant New York Times and Sunday Times #1 bestseller. Stephen Fry described it as “absolutely brilliant”, and it took home the Goodreads Choice Award last year for best mystery/thriller. It also won the prize for my worst read of 2020 so far, but I’m clearly in the minority.

If you’re looking for a good book, I’d give this one a miss, but I will it give it one thing- The Silent Patient is accidentally hilarious.

Much of the hype around the thriller comes from the synopsis, which, admittedly, is pretty engaging. Talented artist Alicia Berenson shot her husband five times in the face and hasn’t spoken a word since – our protagonist, Theo Faber, wants to find out why.

Unfortunately, this is as good as it gets.

Theo is ostensibly a forensic psychotherapist, which supposedly facilitates his fascination with ‘saving’ Alicia. Instead, it seems to licence him to go around like Sherlock Holmes, ‘investigating’ Alicia’s background by asking her friends and family inappropriate questions. Theo clearly never learnt about patient confidentiality, but other than getting a slap on the wrist from his superior, no one really cares.

Luckily for him, Theo doesn’t actually have to do any detective work, because every time he talks to someone, they just so happen to immediately give something away. Reading these interactions felt like playing Professor Layton on the Nintendo DS (anyone?). Theo would talk to the receptionist, who would say something like “If you want to know about Alicia, talk to her cousin”, and off he’d go to see the cousin and do some more illegal detective work. He’d speak to the art dealer, who would look shifty and say “I don’t know anything”, and our self-styled Hercule Poirot would make the mind-blowing realisation that “There was something he wasn’t telling me.” Michaelides might have been more subtle simply by writing wink wink, nudge nudge.

Theo is introduced with a seven-page ‘info-dump’ in which he recounts his entire life story. The bits that are relevant to the plot can be neatly summed up in one sentence; Theo had an abusive father, took an overdose at university, and from then on, started seeing a therapist who in turn inspired his own choice of career.

But don’t worry, there’s one part of Theo’s life that Michaelides saves for a later ‘info-dump’ – he has a wife. The reader then has to endure nine pages of the author hammering the point home that his protagonist is really into his wife, because – spoiler! – the entire plot hinges around this fact.

Both of these are classic examples of telling and not showing the reader what they need to know, and typifies the author’s writing style. Rather than trusting the reader to pick up on clues, Michaelides inserts long and jarring explanatory passages. There are no carefully dropped hints, little things that amount to an overall impression of what the author wants to convey. Not only are these passages like a massive flashing neon sign saying “Look at this!”, but they don’t make the story believable. Theo is meant to be so cut up over his wife cheating on him, but since we’ve just been told that he loves her, we haven’t seen it, we can’t feel any empathy for him. It doesn’t help that his way of dealing with this is to go back to his old therapist (who conveniently lives nearby) and ask her what he should do. Her response is “dump her”, because apparently, good therapists don’t exist in this book.

Every other character in the book is cartoonishly two-dimensional. There’s a tacky, narcissistic woman whose name is literally Barbie, the handsome but arrogant Christian, and the “blonde, pretty, rather petite” receptionist, Tanya. It won’t surprise you to hear that the owner of the art gallery is a Parisian named Jean-Felix. Of course, thrillers aren’t known for winning characterisation, but such a lack of imagination is really quite impressive.

As if it weren’t already suffering, Michaelides injects multiple unnecessary metaphors and similes into his prose. Some of the better ones are merely redundant, but some are frankly ridiculous. I genuinely laughed out loud when I read: “Its icy cold inside, like climbing into a fridge”, as if everyone reading will think ‘Ah, yes, now I think about the last time I climbed into my fridge, I really know what he means.’

It makes for an important lesson, though. Creative writing at school taught us that if you packed as many metaphors as you could into your work, it would be automatically better. The point The Silent Patient makes painfully clear, though, is that this just isn’t true. Similes and metaphors are meant to be used only when the likeness drawn can make the image or sensation more vivid in the reader’s mind.

Every human being has felt cold; it’s not difficult to imagine. We don’t need to visualize climbing into a fridge to understand how cold it is! Even if Michaelides really wanted to emphasise how cold the cafe was, there are a thousand similes that not only make more sense, but are also much prettier. It brings us back to this fundamental lack of imagination. If (like on Family Fortunes) 100 people were asked to name something cold a fridge would be one of, if not the most, popular answer.

There were also some serious inconsistencies in the setting of the novel. Despite it taking place in the UK, multiple characters used the word ‘shrink’, and Gabriel, Alicia’s husband, just so happened to have a gun. The clunky and incredibly tenuous explanation for this was the basis for another eye-roll moment; Alicia, who conveniently keeps a diary leading up to the murder, happens to have an argument with Gabriel about the gun. She writes in her diary that it was an old rifle from his father’s farm.

Why would Alicia, who is married to this man and has clearly had this argument with him before, write down the entire conversation and the reason for him wanting to keep the gun? Michaelides employs another of literature’s most cringe-worthy tropes; the journal as a narrative style. It’s way too handy that Alicia writes this in her diary, so much so that it is easily exposed for the poorly disguised plot device that it is. Need to explain away something improbable? Whack it in a diary entry, no one will notice.

The other huge selling point of The Silent Patient is its ‘shock twist’, and I kept reading in the hope that the big reveal would bring everything together. It did in part mitigate for some of the insanity going on, in that it somewhat explained why Theo was such a terrible therapist. Things started to make a bit more sense, but it wasn’t enough; there remained some gaping plot holes, and I found myself feeling a bit cheated. A good twist brings all the loose ends together, building on countless little hints dropped throughout the rest of the book. I shouldn’t have to wade through 317 pages of absurdity before everything starts to make even a little bit of sense. Michaelides’ twist had very little buildup, rendering it unbelievable when it actually happened. I won’t give away anything here, but it’s safe to say I was left confused and sceptical.

The Silent Patient isn’t meant to be a work of literary genius, and that’s alright. Most thrillers are fun and gripping, a good holiday book, which is the kind of read I was looking for. Novels don’t have to be complicated or profound to be fantastic. But as readers, we deserve more than what Michaelides gave us: lazy characterization, clunky writing, and a lame twist.

If you’re looking for a good thriller, skip The Silent Patient and read Marisha Pessl’s Night Film, or Stuart Turton’s The 7 ½ Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle. But if you want a laugh or a lesson in how not to write a book, Alex Michaelides has you covered.

Shadow banning and its role in modern day censorship

Oluwakemi Agunbiade
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Shadow banning and its role in modern day censorship

It is no secret algorithms dominate our online social lives – it is not as if we aren’t making our own decisions when it comes to who we talk to or what media we consume, but it would be wilfully ignorant to ignore how systems have been programmed to categorise, collect, and suggest data just based on our likes and follows. This exposes us to content, people and ideas that we just would not have found on our own – but it begs the questions of how much control do these systems have in restricting what we see? 

This brings us to shadow banning. 

Shadow banning is the decision of a social media platform to partially or wholly obstruct a person’s content from being interacted with – preventing new people from searching for your content, ensuring you do not appear under hashtags or even limiting how often you are suggested as a person to follow are just a few ways this can be achived. Platforms such as Instagram and Tiktok rarely acknowledge the claims of this nature but rather point to their right to remove posts that do not align with their Community Guidelines and how agreeing to use the platform is consenting to their power to do so. 

In the grand scheme of things, having your videos taken down or fewer people finding and engaging content is not the greatest detriment to the world, but there is a significant pattern to who is being shadow banned. If I refer back to Tiktok’s community guidelines, they claim to scrap videos created to facilitate harm onto others but within the guidelines, they make an effort to reiterate that they allow ‘educational, historical, satirical, artistic, and other content that can be clearly identified as counterspeech or aims to raise awareness of the harm caused by dangerous individuals and/or organisations.’ This quote and their statement to show support of the Black Lives Matter movement will come as surprise especially to the number of black creators that have seen their engagement rates fall and their videos be taken down on their app. 

Instagram has shown itself to be just as complicit in this – there has been significant backlash from sex workers, sex educators and often queer inclusive sex-positive spaces on the app. Chante Joseph in her Guardian piece exposed the grey area that is not as clearly defined as Instagram’s no nudity policy where the administrators can flag content as ‘sexually suggestive’; many people argue that this is necessary to ensure children are not exposed to inappropriate content – rather than parents taking accountability or social media platforms at least attempting to introduce any form of age restriction, the onus is placed on creators. But consider, for example, LGBTQIA+ creators; their accounts are providing information that young people who may not have even come out to themselves would otherwise be able to access so they can process and understand their feelings in a healthy space that wasn’t available to them just a decade ago. In essence, these guidelines about what a person is allowed to share is being defined by some arbitrary moral standard where discussions of sex specifically those outside the realm of the heteronormative are something to be protected from, even though there are very few spaces that allow for them in real life either.

Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, Facebook all are often steeped in their reputation of being superficial and resting on the self-gratification of people wanting to be seen (which isn’t even itself a bad thing), but besides that they can be used to share ideas, political thoughts and knowledge. So when black creators attempting to inform the masses are restricted from sharing information or when sex workers’ messages on misogyny are inaccessible because their page is considered too ‘sexually suggestive’ (a term not defined so therefore difficult to avoid), the silence is deafening. Shadowbanning is a threat to us because it maintains for us the illusion of control. Yet the whole idea is synonymous with censorship and the obstruction of information. Further, this obstruction is dictated by what platforms see as appropriate so the power we assumed we had in our voices can still be silenced.

Illustration by Emma Hewlett

Money talks: China’s approach to international relations

Louise Hossein
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Money talks: China’s approach to international relations

Since Xi Jinping’s appointment as Chairman, a slow yet steady process of ‘tightening up’ has happened in China. On the global stage, this has resulted in accusations of violations of human rights, freedom and security. Recently, Liu Xiaoming, the Chinese Ambassador to the UK, appeared on The Andrew Marr Show to address several key issues that China is facing pushback for, including the new national safety law in Hong Kong, the persecution of the Uighur ethnic group, and Huawei 5G technology. The results revealed a lot about the Chinese Communist Party’s stance on international relations and how it feels it should be viewed on the global stage.  

On the 14th June, Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, and Sport Oliver Dowden announced that from the end of this year, it will be illegal for UK telecoms operators to buy 5G equipment from Chinese tech giant Huawei. Dowden also stated that all Huawei technology must be removed from use by 2027. This comes as another blow to the Chinese tech company, which has already been blacklisted by the US, with President Trump urging other countries to consider a similar ban. When asked about this, Liu Xiaoming was quick to emphasise that such bans were a mistake, going as far as to compare it to when the Qianlong Emperor told the British that China had no need for their manufacturing in the 18th century. He seemed to warn that the UK may face a similar 150-year decline as a consequence. However, what Liu fails to see is that the actions taken by the Chinese Communist Party over the last 5 or so years have directly resulted in the discord between China and the UK. 

Since 2017, evidence has appeared to show that the Uighur people of Xinjiang, a Muslim ethnic minority living near the Western border of China, have been facing mass detainment. Following the CCP’s crackdown on “terrorism”, it has been estimated that a million or more Uighurs have been sent to “re-education camps”. The Chinese government, who initially would not even acknowledge that such camps existed, now maintain that these camps are simply what is necessary for the security and safety of the Chinese people. However, document leaks to the ICJI state that these camps aim to “resolve ideological contradictions and to guide students away from bad emotion […] so that they can understand deeply the illegal, criminal and dangerous nature of their past behaviour”. They also read that the camps are highly secure to prevent escapes. Perhaps for someone who was found guilty of plotting an attack, these kinds of measures may seem reasonable, but a leaked document known as the Karakax List shows that Uighur people have been detained for innocent actions such as visiting certain foreign countries or lacking Mandarin ability. Adding to this the Uighur testimonies which tell stories of awful, unlawful acts being forced upon them, including forced sterilisation, it seems to me quite blatant that China is in violation of international law. 

However, when Marr asked Liu about the situation, he responded first with “Have you been to Xinjiang?”, as if to say, “What do you know about it?”. When confronted with the video of a Uighur woman crying as she explains the horrific story of her forced sterilisation, Liu proceeded to talk over the top of the video, almost as if it was not playing. He maintained the standard party line that the Chinese Communist Party has brought prosperity and growth to the border region – which is true to some extent – but failed to acknowledge that there has been an influx of the Han ethnicity (the majority ethnicity in China) and the unfair favouritism that they have received. He also fails to mention that the Uighur language has been under attack for two decades with many Uighur speaking teachers being made redundant, and the anti-sanhua campaign which aims to wipe out halal, Arab-style dress and Saudi-style mosque buildings that is currently in action. The most disappointing thing about the CCP’s response to the dissatisfaction of a minority of the Uighur people is that they refuse to consider the socio-economic aspects of life within the region which may be the root of the supposed “issue” and have taken incredibly severe measures which violate even their own constitution.  

2020 has also seen the introduction of new state security legislature in Hong Kong which was forced through by Chinese mainland officials in May. The introduction of the new law brings fears that the mainland will exploit the judiciary independence of Hong Kong, affecting both residents’ and non-residents’ rights to freedom of speech and judiciary autonomy. On the 20th July, Foreign Secretary, Dominic Raab, announced that the UK would suspend sales of arms equipment to the region and the extradition treaty which it originally had with Hong Kong, as well as implementing an immigration route for BNOs which will be ready by 2021.  Thus, the line was drawn. As Raab himself pointed out, economically and technologically, positive UK-China relations are important, but these violations of the freedom and independence of the Hong Kong people cannot go unnoticed. 

But that really is the key point, the undertone to Liu Xiaoming’s interview seemed to be “turn a blind eye to our domestic affairs and focus on the economic benefit which we can bring to you”. Many a time I have wondered in disbelief as to why the Chinese Communist Party must take such severe actions against its own people, using methods which violate the standards and values (supposedly) upheld on a global level. Liu’s interview has prompted my conclusion that the CCP believes only economic affairs are relevant to international relations, and that their domestic affairs should simply be ignored on the global stage. The fact that China is facing such pushback is perhaps a double-standard: many countries turn a blind eye to the internal affairs of the US for example, but just because not all problems have been called out, does not mean that no issues should be called out at all. Any steps taken to hold Beijing accountable for their actions on the global stage are worthwhile and important.  

Thus, China’s international relations have reached an interesting position. Due to economic investment and relations maintained from the early Reform and Opening period, China has strong alliances with many nations, including Russia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Nigeria and the Philippines – all of whom signed a joint statement commending China’s “counter-terrorism” work in Xinjiang. What we can read from this is that China, who is second in line for the title of world hegemony, provides a stable power base for countries that may not be so willing to cooperate with the US propagated world system. On the other side, there is a group of predominantly European countries, as well as the US and Japan, who are willing to take a stricter policy towards China. There is inherently a discord between the two systems – those countries who ally with China may do so mainly for economic reasons and perhaps protection from the West, those who consider China critically are more confident in their place in the global system and are unlikely to back down. Only time will tell how the subsequent tension will play out. 

Oxford University ranked best university in the world for 5th consecutive year

Amelia Wood
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Oxford University ranked best university in the world for 5th consecutive year

Oxford University has been ranked the best university of the world by Times Higher Education (THE) for the fifth year in a row. The university is the first institution to have done so under THE’s current methodology. Stanford University and Harvard University finished 2nd and 3rd respectively. Cambridge University, the only other British university to make the top 10, finished in ­6th place, down from 3rd last year.

29 UK institutions made the top 200, the second highest of any country after the US. China doubled its presence in the top 100 from three to six and became home to the first Asian university to ever enter the top 20.

Phil Baty, Chief Knowledge Officer at the Times Higher Education, praised Oxford’s unprecedented performance, pointing to the University’s international outlook as a particular area of distinction.

He said: “The Times Higher Education World University Rankings deploy a comprehensive and balanced range of 13 separate performance indicators to cover world-class research universities’ core missions, across teaching, research, knowledge transfer and international outlook.

“Under the current decade-old methodology, no university has ever topped the THE World University Rankings for five consecutive annual editions.

“So this year’s rankings results are a testament not only to Oxford’s enduring reputation among leading scholars globally, but also to its ability to continually innovate, publishing cutting edge research with the highest global impact across a wide range of disciplines and providing a uniquely stimulating teaching environment.

“Oxford excels across all of our indicators, but its international outlook scores in particular stand out against world top-ten peers in the US. That commitment to international collaboration and partnership, should be cherished and protected.”

Professor Louise Richardson, Oxford University’s Vice-Chancellor, said: ‘‘We are delighted to have consolidated our position at the top of the THE World University Rankings this year. The international standing of British Higher Education is a testament to generations of investment in education as well as to our extraordinarily talented staff and students. The COVID-19 pandemic, which has posed such a threat to higher education around the world, has also demonstrated the critical role universities play in addressing global challenges.”

Oxford University’s ranking comes in a year of headlines for the university, with the Jenner Institute at the forefront of the search for a COVID-19 vaccine.

Taking the old over the new: The importance of re-watching

Skye Fitzegerald McShane
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Taking the old over the new: The importance of re-watching

I think it’s safe to say most of us have been watching more films and television than usual recently. Deciding what to put on, however, can often take up more (frustrating) time than actually watching it, part of the perils of having too much choice and not much else to do but scroll.

I offer a deceptively simple solution: watch something you’ve already seen. Some will groan or raise a bored eyebrow faced with this repetitiveness, whilst others might find a comforting escapism in going back to an old favourite. The nostalgia it can bring can be reason enough to re-watch something: the familiarity and safety of something already loved should not be sneered at, especially in times such as these where those two qualities are hard to find.

But re-watching is important beyond nostalgia: another look can reveal things about a show or film that change everything you think about it, or at least add some interesting nuance. Sometimes it’s almost a necessary practise, when a first look at something perhaps revered as vital viewing just leaves you confused. A re-watch can be a powerful tool in understanding and appreciating things to their full capacity, and should not be disregarded too easily in favour of constant newness.

Take my experience with 70’s gangster epic The Godfather, one of my favourite films. The first time I watched it I certainly enjoyed it, with all the dramatic lighting and intense Al Pacino stares. But if I’m honest a lot of its intricate mafia business was lost on me, and the times where I’ve forced friends to try it for the first time since have necessitated several breaks for explanations about what’s actually happening, whose name is what, and which person in a dark suit we’re meant to be rooting for. It’s quite a lot to take in first time around. But when watching it again, I could take a metaphorical step back from the plot to focus on the spiderweb of details within, and it is these details which have made the film endlessly compelling.

During that second watch, and every time I’ve seen it since, I have found more and more to relish. I love to focus on each figure in the iconic first scene wedding and the set-up of their stories to come, and to track the subtle changes in how Michael, the principal character, interacts with his world as he morphs into someone almost unrecognisable by the films end. I can sit back and appreciate the power of the soundtrack, the editing, the direction, without simultaneously trying to connect the dots within the main story.

The more familiar I am with the story the freer I feel to interrogate it as well, casting a critical eye on the agency and power (or lack thereof) of the film’s women. Similar stories can be told about so many other excellent films and TV shows I’ve gone back to: on a second watch you can find deeper and deeper personal intrigue as well as a tighter grasp on the plot. There’s no imperative to over-analyse every little action, just a chance to take them all in.

 It’s like the difference between working on a puzzle with or without knowing what it should look like when complete. Finally understanding how everything fits together at the end is exciting in its own way, but there’s also something compelling in being able to interrogate exactly why each piece fits together the way it does. The high stakes tension of not knowing how things will end is gone, leaving space to observe exactly how and why these endings happen.

Parasite, for a more contemporary favourite, is an excellent film for this kind of treatment. The true power of all the choices made by both the characters and the film makers can only fully be appreciated once you know what they are building up to, and, even then, interpreting each walk up or down the stairs, each camera pan demands much theorizing as to its meaning. I wanted to watch it again as soon I stepped out of the cinema, and Bong Joon-Ho has crammed so many subtleties in that film I think I could do so endlessly.

Saying this, not everything deserves multiple re-watches, and not everything needs multiple re-watches to be seen as brilliant. However, I’ll strongly defend the point that one mark of a truly great piece of television or film is its ability to stand up to being re-watched. Something you can come back to again and again knowing there is more to see, to interpret, to explore. Something that can still hold you once you know all the set ups, all the jokes, all the twists and turns. Something that also holds up outside of its original context and is not flooded with things once seen as ‘entertaining’ or ‘funny’ which are in fact simply lazy, offensive, discriminatory or generally (and rightfully) no longer tolerated. Films and TV shows that can’t stand up to the scrutiny that comes from a re-examination don’t need repeating, but those that do deserve celebrating.

For some people the allure of the new will always take precedence over going back to something they’ve seen before. But I think there is something particularly special in the re-watching experience, whether it’s the simple pleasure of nostalgia or the allowance of time and space for deeper appreciation of something great. For these reasons I stand decidedly by the importance of a re-watch. At the very least it’s one solution to the question of what to put on next.

Surrealism on film: Fellini and ‘Juliet of the Spirits’

David Alexander
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Surrealism on film: Fellini and ‘Juliet of the Spirits’

Everyone’s going a bit crazy these days.

I, for one, am happy to admit that the last few months have been quite bizarre, and I’ve certainly been over-thinking, daydreaming and fantasising more than I usually do. And when we want to over-think, to daydream, to fantasise, the limitations of reality make it quite an unsuitable territory in which to plant our mental playground.

Enter: surrealism.

We normally think of surrealism in terms of art. Dada, Dalí and so on; bizarre juxtapositions and ambiguous non-sequiturs. No story to speak of (it’s hard to become emotionally invested in a melting clock-face), and a breezily playful disdain for fixity of meaning. 

I think much of the best work surrealism ever produced was on film, though. And I think the person who did it best was Federico Fellini.

His films always have a touch of the fantastical about them. As screenwriter, he manged to inject a subtle romance into Roberto Rossellini’s Rome, Open City and Paisan, otherwise pillars of sombre neorealism, and this seed germinated as he directed his own films. La Strada (1954) is a good early example, stuffed as it is with the kind of over-sized eccentrics and magical elegance Dickens would be proud of.

1960’s La Dolce Vita was maybe the hinge – Fellini’s last gasp of real-life air before his plunge into unreality. Even it has a lot of theatricality though: people like Anita Ekberg’s Sylvia, her long dress famously flowing through the Trevi Fountain, just don’t exist in real life.

But then came 8 ½ (1964).  In the opening scene, while the audience was still muttering and the lights had only just dimmed, Fellini went full-on Dada. It’s a rush-hour scene, with a thousand lifeless commuters trapped in their cars – our protagonist scrambles to get out of his, and then floats, transcendently, into the Italian cloud, until a rope wraps itself around his leg and yanks him back to earth. “Confused?”, Fellini seems to ask us. “You should be. Now, look at this…”

8 ½, about a director struggling to dream up a film, is very much a film about a director’s dreams. And it’s great, and I love it, but I’m not a director and neither are most people. So, the more relatable film, in my opinion, came next.

1966’s Juliet of the Spirits is maybe Fellini’s masterpiece. It’s about a housewife who is facing an extremely difficult ‘real’ life. She’s stuck in a kind of awkward limbo with little but shallow bourgeois diversions to entertain her, while her husband is quietly, but noticeably, having an affair that she can never quite pin him down on. As her unhappiness grows and patience wears out, she visits various local eccentrics who trigger or deepen intense flights of mental fantasy, which draw on memories and stories about her family. 

One of these takes place at a fantastical carnival, with horses and soldiers and a bi-plane that takes off with her grandfather and a dancer. One dream happens in a crumbling religious school, run by the hooded monks of which nightmares are made. The ending, without spoiling too much, scraps the idea that the surreal should be detached from the ‘real world’ at all.

All these sequences flow in and out of the central narrative, riding on the steady stream of Nino Rota’s score, which skips through jazz and music-hall snippets, lilting pipers and blaring circus fanfares. Its playful syntheses distil the energy of the controlled chaos taking place on screen. I think it might be the best film score ever composed. It’s certainly the most fun.

Giulietta Masina’s performance in the central role helps control the film a lot. She has an effortlessly deadpan expression for much of it, contrasting (in a very surrealist way) with the craziness around her.

But I also think she brings agency. Roger Ebert thought Fellini simply used Masina (his real-life wife) as a conduit through which to explore his own fantasies, but I disagree. It’s true she meets neighbours whose sexual flamboyance might have excited Fellini at his lustiest. But they’re only one part of her adventure.

Besides, in the end it’s only Juliet herself that can reconcile the rowdy memories and dreams inside her head. And she does, I think, though it’s left just slightly ambiguous. Any ending more straightforward would be disappointing.

It’s such an entertaining film, and it looks fantastic. The music matches the action so well that I was reminded of Fantasia, and, like that Disney classic, there’s something almost primally satisfying about its synchronisation.

Juliet of the Spirits is also relevant to a world stuck for months with its own thoughts. It’s about those times when our minds run away with us; when we dream about what could happen in the future, or what did happen in the past. It also suggests, tentatively, and with rare glimpses of seriousness, that all these things can be reconciled. Or at least, that it’s a lot of fun to try.

It’s streaming on a service called MUBI at the moment, though I don’t know how long it will stay there for. I had no idea about this until recently, but it turns out that students can subscribe to MUBI for free!

So, if you have a spare two hours and fancy stepping inside a head that isn’t yours for a change, give Juliet of the Spirits a watch. Isn’t that, after all, why watch movies in the first place?

Image via Flickr

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