Rania Kim, Wyn Shaw, Isabella Welch and Tucker Drew pose by the Zaha Hadid tunnel in St. Antonys for some retro-futurism in the world’s oldest university.
Blog Page 523
Opinion – The Labour Leadership: Making the Best of a Bad Bunch?
4 years on from the election of Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour Party is in electoral tatters. The once great force of Attlee and Blair has been left with its worst election defeat since 1935. Whilst that election actually saw Attlee gain 102 seats following Henderson’s abysmal 1931 performance, December’s leaves Boris Johnson with untrammelled power in the House of Commons and Dominic Cummings threatening a total overhaul of the Civil Service. With the local and London Mayoral elections in May, and devolved parliament elections in 2021, this leadership election might constitute the most important decision Labour has had to make since entering coalition with Winston Churchill in 1940.
The loss on December 12th was incredibly upsetting – like many centre-left voters, I was left with a choice between Boris Johnson’s right-wing agenda which included curbing judicial power, imposition of a hard Brexit, and a continuation of economic policies which have caused suffering for the last 10 years, and an institutionally antisemitic Labour Party, with an incredibly unpopular leader, trusted by few outside of the left of the party, and who lead one of the least inspiring political campaigns I have ever seen run in my life. The following “period of reflection” has become a period of self-congratulation for “winning the argument” (but losing 60 seats and nearly 2 million votes).
Currently, the leadership election candidates, and likely-candidates include former members of the Shadow Cabinet, backbenchers, allies of Jeremy Corbyn, foes of Jeremy Corbyn, and everything in between. The left of the Party is currently in disarray, as continuity plans were interrupted with Laura Pidcock’s departure from Parliament and the loss of a number of other Corbyn allies.
The current favourite for the leadership is Shadow Brexit Secretary, and former head of the Crown Prosecution Service, Sir Keir Starmer QC. Starmer (who is named after the founder of the Labour Party) was born to a toolmaker and a nurse in 1962, studying at the University at Leeds before taking a BCL at Teddy Hall. He joined parliament in 2015, representing Holborn and St Pancras and his skill and intellect helped him quickly progress through party ranks. His popularity has come as a shock to many on the left of the party, as Twitter analyses his tenureship of the CPS and the role he played in a number of high-profile prosecutions. He has been criticised as being another “middle-class Londoner” though given the background of the current Prime Minister, I am unsure of the impact this will have on the country’s perspective of him. Anyhow, Sir Keir’s pro-European tilt is likely to be popular amongst Labour Party membership which is predicted to have voted 89% remain. He is currently favourite to win the leadership, with recent polls showing 61% support after distribution of preferences.
Clive Lewis, MP for Norwich South was one of the first to declare his candidacy for the leadership, emphasising a pro-Remain message. He argued that the Labour Party was not resolute enough in its Europhile message during the campaign, which caused a drop in support. It appears he has attracted support from Shadow Home Secretary Dianne Abbott, who signalled her support by sharing his Guardian launch article. Lewis was cleared by Labour of sexual assault in 2017 after being accused of “grabbing a woman’s bottom” at a Conference Fringe event. He was also criticised at the conference for telling a man at Momentum’s World Transformed event to “get on your knees, bitch”. Lewis’ Europhile message may go down well with some amongst the membership, but is unlikely to gain traction amongst those who are fed up of Brexit, and want to focus on scrutiny of the deal, rather than a return to discussion of the referendum result. His platform also includes constitutional change, with a move towards a system of proportional representation, and an emphasis on environmental issues – Lewis has been a fervent supporter of global-warming pressure group Extinction Rebellion.
Jess Phillips is also one of the candidates to have made a formal declaration of her candidacy, having waited (unlike some others) for our entry into the new decade to announce. Phillips is a well-known Member of Parliament, despite not having served in the Shadow Cabinet and is definitely not a friend of Corbyn, or the Corbyn project. She told journalist and activist Owen Jones that she “would knife Jeremy Corbyn in the front, not the back” and once told Diane Abbott to “fuck off” during a Parliamentary Labour Party meeting, criticising the leader for not appointing enough women to the Shadow Cabinet (though Abbott has put forward a different story). Phillips finds many of her allies closer to the centre of the party, being a regular attendee at Labour First and Progress events – two of the centrist factions within the Labour Party. She reached national attention during the Birmingham School Strikes, where she went up against many of her constituents who were protesting requirements for teaching about same-sex relationships in primary schools. She clashed with many protestors, and called for an exclusion zone around the school to stop intimidation of pupils and teachers. Her constituency witnessed a smaller swing to the Conservatives than the national picture, with her vote-share declining by 2.4%. Phillips has, however, been the subject of criticism over her relationship with the transgender community, with many accusing her of transphobia due to her links with the group Woman’s Place, though she seldom makes public comments about her stances. Her silence is worrying, and her support will waver unless she clarifies her stance, and rejects transphobic politics.
Lisa Nandy has taken Twitter by storm but a recent YouGov poll puts her at only 5% – perhaps another example of why it’s important to take the online-activist-bubble with a pinch of salt. Nandy’s support comes from her ideological positions and the role she has played in the party over the last 9 years. The daughter of Marxist academic Dipak Nandy, she set up the Centre for Towns in 2018 in an effort to redirect infrastructural priorities and re-build a lot of Britain’s broken and outdated town infrastructure. Nandy isn’t aligned with the Corbynite wing of the party by any means (she served as co-Chair of Owen Smith’s unsuccessful 2016 leadership campaign) but nor is she on the right of the party at all. She has been a critic of Labour’s more Europhile policies which may make her unpopular with some members – she voted for the second reading of Boris Johnson’s Brexit deal before the 2019 election, indicating that further support would depend on amendments. Nandy’s position, on the soft-left of the party, representing a Leave constituency, and being from outside of the M25 may stand her in good stead for support from those who believe previous election strategies were misguided and she may be able to find her way to a more promising position as she gains more media attraction through the debates. Her launch article was notable for being in a regional newspaper, compared to many other candidates’ launches in the national news.
Next up is Rebecca Long Bailey. “Born to the sound of the Stretford End”, it appeared that Long Bailey launched her campaign in all but name before the 2019 Election even took place, with an intimate video outlining her life story and priorities for Britain posted to her Twitter in November. She is known by many to be a very close ally to Jeremy Corbyn’s team, in particular John McDonnell, with the pair having worked together on Labour’s economic proposals and is definitely seen as a continuity candidate. Long Bailey replaced Hazel Blears, a former Minister and Secretary of State under Blair and Brown and Chairperson of the Labour Party, in 2015. She had previously been a lawyer at Pinsent Masons, Halliwells and Hill Dickinson, specialising in commercial law, commercial property, and NHS contracts and estates. If she were successful in her bid to be Leader, and to be Prime Minister, would also be the first Roman Catholic to ever be Prime Minister of the UK. Long-Bailey supposedly made a new Granita pact with flatmate Angela Rayner, whom she endorsed for Deputy Leader before Rayner even declared. Some had hoped that Rayner would instead run for Leader, believing she would be better at uniting the party. Long Bailey launched her campaign in the left-wing news magazine Tribune, becoming the most recent candidate to declare. She pledged to continue the manifestos of the 2017 and 2019 manifestos. Her launch seems to have criticised every electoral success of Labour in the last two decades – from Blair’s 3 election victories to the successful 2014 campaign to keep Scotland in the UK. Her launch article did not mention antisemitism once, nor the investigation of the party by the Equality and Human Rights Commission – only the second time a political party has been investigated; the first being the BNP.
Emily Thornberry, like Clive Lewis, was one of the few candidates to launch their candidacies before the New Year hit. Thornberry, the MP for Jeremy Corbyn’s neighbouring constituency of Islington South and Finsbury, has been an MP since 2005 though did not hold any positions in the Brown or Blair governments. As a backbencher, she was on the Communities and Local Government Select Committee and introduced a Private Member’s Bill which sought to improve the control of housing association tenants over their landlords, and in 2008 sought to change the law to allow single women and lesbian couples to seek IVF treatment. Despite not being seen as a natural Corbyn ally, Thornberry has served in the Shadow Cabinet since 2015 and as Shadow Foreign Secretary since 2016. In 2014, Thornberry resigned from the Shadow Cabinet under Ed Milliband after sending a tweet described as “snobby” – a picture of a white van outside a terraced house with the caption “Image from #Rochester.” Thornberry’s difficulty is that she is both not seen as a Corbyn ally, seen sometimes to undermine his position, but equally isn’t incredibly well liked by the soft-left or right of the party for serving in the Shadow Cabinet. It is unlikely that Thornberry would do well as party leader, with her “snobby” tweet perhaps dissuading those who see her as an out-of-touch London MP, a criticism she has long had to deal with.
The candidates, declared and considering, stretch the breadth of the Labour Party’s ideological spectrum and represent incredibly different parts of the country both inside and outside of Greater London. In its over 100 year history, Labour has never had a female leader. With the PLP currently consisting of over 50% women, it is important that the Party doesn’t ignore the incredible talent of some of the candidates running. Over the next 5 years, Britain will need someone to hold Boris Johnson’s feet to the fire. Though parliamentary defeats will likely be unheard of in this parliament, public opinion and political mood across the country will be able to help shape some of the agenda of the new Tory government. Whatever happens, Labour needs a candidate who can rebuild the party’s relationship with the Jewish community. The last 4 years have been a stain on the Labour Party’s history. We have witnessed Labour MPs, particularly women, hounded out of the party, faced with disgusting antisemitic abuse and bullying whilst the leadership either stood idly by or did not take sufficient action.
Moreover, the new leader will need to be able to inspire confidence amongst those voters who were lost by the Labour Party in 2017 and 2019. They will face an incredibly hard job of linking two social cleavages – a liberal, richer (on average), city-based group of voters, and the middle class, university-educated voter, with Labour’s traditional base- a more socially conservative, Old Labour-esque economic group of voters in towns still left behind from Thatcherite cuts, exacerbated by austerity in the Coalition and since 2015 under Conservative governments. Though a depressing prediction, the 2019 Election was not just a guarantee for 5 years of Johnson-led government, but 10 years (at least) of Conservative government – even in the midst of the Iraq War, Tony Blair managed to keep a majority thanks to previous victories.
In order to be victorious in the future, the Labour Party needs radical change. It needs to build new trust with the country, reorientate its priorities and focus on defeating the Conservatives at local elections, national elections (both the Welsh Assembly and Scottish Parliament have elections in 2021) and whenever the next General Election will be. Labour needs a sensible leader, not one marred in historical controversy like Jeremy Corbyn. They need a vision which can unite Labour’s electoral coalition, which marks a decisive break from Corbynism as we enter a new decade of politics, and a new decade of Conservative austerity. Though many (including myself) are unsure of who they will be supporting for Leader, it is without a doubt that the successful candidate must be able to fulfil all of these criteria.
Review: Doctor Who’s New Year’s Day Episode, “Spyfall”
On New Year’s Day, exactly ten years after David Tennant’s beloved Tenth Doctor regenerated into Matt Smith, Doctor Who returned with the first instalment of its twelfth series since the 2005 comeback. The first part of the two-parter Spyfall is a fast-paced, at times light-hearted, at times terrifying tribute to 007, international espionage and your perennial invasion of Earth.
Despite the stakes, it’s a simple story. The Doctor (Jodie Whittaker) and friends are summoned by ‘C’ (Stephen Fry) to MI6, who’ve been oblivious to all the previous invasions of Earth and can’t work out who’s behind a string of attacks on agents across the globe. The Doctor suspects it’s something to do with Bromsgrove’s own cyber mogul Daniel Barton (Lenny Henry) and dumps Yaz (Mandip Gill) and Ryan (Tosin Cole) in Silicon Valley to do some hapless sleuthing. Meanwhile, the Doctor journeys to the Australian outback to catch up with old friend ‘O’ (Sacha Dhawan) before the team kick off the Twenties in style at Barton’s black tie bash.
Sinister Internet tycoons, the international assassination of spies and the Doctor on WhatsApp – it’s Doctor Who channelling the zeitgeist without it ever seeming forced. It says something about the attitude and confidence of showrunner Chris Chibnall’s second series opener that Stephen Fry is dead within five minutes, and that the whole narrative hinges on a few lines of dialogue in the final seconds of the episode. The real triumph of Spyfall is its unexpected shattering of expectations, which force us to look at the whole episode in a totally new light, right when we least expect it.
The episode reminds us why Whittaker was picked for the job, her performance being the strongest aspect of her debut series, which was received with mixed reviews. She now owns the role, and rightfully defies keyboard misogynists when she reveals her “upgrade” to C. It’s good to see Yaz and Ryan doing a bit more, and you can’t imagine the whole thing working without crooner and star of The Chase, Bradley Walsh, who features as the wistful Graham O’Brien, now participating in an actual chase. It’s also the best Doctor Who has ever looked. It’s filmic, glamorous and colourful, lurching from a Sheffield basketball court to a London underpass, to MI6, San Francisco and the outback. This is Doctor Who for the 2020s.
I still hope that the Thirteenth Doctor is gifted some meatier dialogue over the coming weeks– some real ‘Doctor moments’. Whittaker’s Doctor is fun, but it’s important to be reminded that the Doctor is someone who has brought down civilizations, destroyed worlds and suffered unimaginable heartbreak. Whittaker is, after all, the successor to Peter Capaldi, whose Doctor was locked in a permanent existential/midlife crisis and once spent a whole incredible episode talking to himself (2015’s Heaven Sent). Thirteen’s four twenty-first century Doctor Who were all successful because we feared them just as much as we wanted to hang out with them. Spyfall’s cliffhanger changes everything and might represent a golden opportunity for a totally new, more intriguing side of the Thirteenth Doctor to see the light of day.
This is a Doctor who hasn’t yet dwelled on her past, but she’ll now have to confront some home truths. Her friends will surely get caught in the crossfire. As refreshing as it’s been to enjoy more straightforwardly pally companions like Bill Potts, Graham, Yaz and Ryan (after tempestuous friendships between the Eleventh Doctor and Amy Pond and between the Twelfth and Clara Oswald), I hope we’ll learn more about the relationships between the Doctor and her friends, and see them tested too.
It seems that the Thirteenth Doctor won’t be entirely exempt from the dramatic plot arcs that characterised the Smith and Capaldi years – and that’s not a bad thing. After all, Series 12 begins with rather a lot riding on it. Chibnall’s inaugural series came in for a lukewarm reception and the absence of an overarching narrative arc was singled out as a major flaw.
While many diehard fans bemoaned the lack of complex narrative, there are plenty of more casual viewers who say the show hasn’t been entirely the same for a whole ten years, ever since head writer Steven Moffat (of Sherlock fame) took over from Russell T Davies back in 2010. The Moffat era faced accusations of being too complicated, too clever and too timey-wimey, like Sherlock but with Daleks. If the Davies era made us believe aliens might march into the house at any minute, Moffat’s Doctor Who was more like fantasy: a cosmic, poetic and angsty exploration of identity that liked to completely blindside us. Ten years after flatulent green monsters infiltrated Downing Street in 2005’s Aliens of London, the Twelfth Doctor, in that staggering one-hander, spent 4.5 billion years trapped inside his own last will and testament with some flies. Clearly, the show has changed a lot over fifteen years, but Chibnall has learnt some lessons and Spyfall, I think, embodies the best of Doctor Who.
Indeed, the episode charts a middle road. It’s uncomplicated, but masterful, offering a nuanced understanding of the impact of Tardis travel on home life. And it throws up some tantalising questions that remain, for now, unanswered.The Doctor has been issued a stark warning: ‘everything you think you know is a lie’. What does it mean? Will the invasion be thwarted? And, in true cliffhanger fashion, how will they get out of this one? It’s a winning formula, and I hope Series 12 keeps it up. Above all, Spyfall is fun – and perhaps that’s what’s most important. At fifty-six, the Doctor’s prognosis is looking good.
Consuming Food
In his 2008 essay ‘On Food’, Mark Grief lamented that eating had become a hobby, “one pastime among others”. Food and the act of consuming it had been transformed into a mode of entertainment. That was more than a decade ago. In 2020, I’m more likely to watch food for leisure than actually eat it.
I don’t choose to watch all the food that I do. We are surrounded by images of food through advertising, and passively consume vast quantities of it. As good as it feels to look at food in this way, you’d be right in thinking that it isn’t really a hobby – we don’t exactly volunteer our time or eyes to bus stop KFC adverts. But whilst marketeers and food companies might hold us hostage to some images of food, a large number of us actively seek them out.
Deliberately watching food isn’t a novel phenomenon: Come Dine With Me has (unfortunately) been running since 2005 and, though it’s difficult to believe, Mary Berry did have a TV presence before The Great British Bake Off. Up until a few years ago, though, when we actively looked at food on the television or in a magazine, it usually meant looking at a person too. That person was a celebrity chef like, say, the acclaimed food writer Nigella Lawson, or Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, founder of the River Cottage enterprise. The former would make a pavlova for an impromptu, dimly-lit gathering of beautiful people at her central London mansion, and the latter might knock up a 5-cabbage coleslaw to share with his rosy-cheeked, hobby-farmer pals. Sure, the dishes looked great, but mostly we were watching people, people engaged in lifestyles and processes performed through food. It was easy to pretend that, were we to cook the right stuff, we might, for the duration of a meal, be blessed with envious curves and a gift for alliteration, or the kind of earthy, rugged charm that only comes with milking your own goats.
But the power and presence of TV food personalities is fast diminishing. Sure, the Bake Off is still a phenomenon, and it did bring us the national treasure that is Nadiya Hussain; but it’s difficult to ignore recent casualties. Industry giant Jamie Oliver’s restaurant empire lies in tatters, and Nigella hasn’t released a new book or TV show since 2017. We’re no longer interested in the people who made watching food a primarily personality-, lifestyle- and TV-based activity.
Today, actively watching food means foraging for content online, where the most popular cooking videos and images feature almost no human presence at all. Not only is the way we’re sourcing food images changing, but who’s watching has also shifted. TV cooking shows are perhaps, unsurprisingly, associated with the middle-aged and the middle-classes, but research by Google reveals that millennials watch 30% more food content on platforms like YouTube than other adults. One of the biggest producers of online food content is Tasty, a division of Buzzfeed which creates videos shot in an overhead format so you can only see the hands of the person cooking. There might be the odd voice-over, but for the most part, they’ve cut out the middle-man so it’s literally just you, the viewer and images of food. The Tasty formula is simple: videos are short and densely packed with shots of protein- and fat-heavy foods in motion. It’s a model that’s been replicated by similar brands across platforms – it’s almost impossible to open the discover page on Instagram and not encounter several hundred 20-second food videos that end with a cheese pull. Social media is bursting with repetitive food content of this kind and, with each video boasting thousands if not millions of views, it’s content that is being consumed a dizzying rate.
Rather puzzlingly, the lack of variety or discernible culinary skill in these videos doesn’t appear to be a turn-off. I mean, how many 3-minute variations on beef lasagne does it take before we get bored? But the truth is we’re not watching for the recipe; no one really contemplates making a giant bread cheese cube or a 5-layer, mayonnaise-based chocolate fudge cake. In reality, we’re simply obsessed with consuming highly aestheticized images of food that convey an almost grotesque level of abundance.
You might argue that watching someone make a ridiculous amount of energy-dense food isn’t that bad, but with a few clicks you can now witness someone consume a crap-ton of food too. ‘Mukbang’ is a phenomenon which originated in South Korea, but has since garnered an international reputation. In any given Mukbang video you can watch someone eat several days’ worth of calorie-rich food for no other reason than the entertainment of their viewers.
There is something deeply disturbing about this level of visual food consumption. Some experts have warned of the potential psychological and physiological implications of our newest food-related hobby: it’s possible that watching food in this way could provoke our appetites, negatively engage our brains, encourage unhealthy habits and endanger those suffering or at risk from eating disorders. Despite these worrying effects, watching food doesn’t seem to have particularly negative cultural associations. Visual food content is often categorized as ‘Food Porn’, and although the term has a pejorative ring, it’s not often used in that sense. I can proudly caption my Instagram of an oozing egg yolk with the hashtag #foodporn and encounter none of the censure that is directed at other forms of artificially simulated desire.
Whilst watching food is stimulating, it is also comforting and strangely numbing. When we’re entertained by images food we rarely have to critically engage with it. Talking about what we physically consume in our day to day lives is exhausting. What you eat, where and even how you eat it signals our ethical and political concerns (or lack thereof) in an all-too-simplistic way. It can feel like important discussions about food take the pleasure out it. So we stop talking and start watching, because it’s easier. Ironically, though, the way we now visually consume food is desensitizing in the extreme and, like any addiction, more and more is required to feel satisfied. If we truly want to enjoy, appreciate and understand food, we need to challenge how and why we watch it.
Dominic Cummings and his Whitehall Weirdos
Special adviser Dominic Cummings helped himself to a wide slice of Whitehall’s well-stretched attention this week after he published a job ad on his blog decrying the presence of privately-educated Oxbridge humanities graduates in government. Coverage has been keen to focus on Cummings (himself a privately-educated Oxford history graduate), and as such has bent his call to enlist “weirdos” into a narrative it doesn’t necessarily fit. The Telegraph’s editor was quick to hail the post as a “broadside against political correctness” while much was made of his dismissive attitude towards “public-school bluffers” and “English graduates”. Cummings’ concerns are instead essentially technocratic, and he is right to seek institutional change.
Cummings’ blog (dominiccummings.com) is a loose-wrought web of findings from papers on machine-learning alongside pop culture afterthoughts which consistently expresses frustration with slow government. In March 2019, he echoed John Von Neumann’s 1955 essay “Can We Survive Technology?” in lamenting the “essential problem that the scale and speed of technological change have suddenly blown past political institutions”, and that “for progress, there is no cure”. In the same post, he wrote that government now requires an “extremely different model of effective action to dominant models in Westminster”. It makes sense he should feel this way. Television, he says, is seventy years old and most politicians still do not understand it well. Social media, less so. How, he keeps asking, can we expect the existing pillars of state to cope with the radically transformative sciences of artificial intelligence and genomics? His 2020 call for “true wild-cards”, “assorted weirdos” and “misfits” (preferably with an MSc, PhD or ‘alternative talents’) to apply directly to a personal email certainly sets new precedent, if unlikely to upend the ‘dominant models’ of the Civil Service. I agree with Cummings that true ‘cognitive diversity’ is desirable in policy implementation as much as, if not more than, in elected roles. He is right to point out that the status quo for diversity in either is poor. The odds of dropping a tennis ball at random from the Press Gallery into the Commons Chamber and hitting any kind of scientist remain low.
However I distrust both his apparent motivation and mechanism for achieving this change. Cummings also signposts future overhauls to the state bureaucracy, which he labels “SW1”. Singling out “the horrors of human resources”, which “obviously need a bonfire”, the implications of his recruitment drive in Number 10 stretch far beyond the short-term “fast, cheap way to find good ideas” that his email address ([email protected]) demands. The wider changes that this clarion call may pre-empt seem more likely to achieve the “capable state” his blog seeks.
It is true that government should be more widely representative than it is. While not an elected body, the Civil Service is a democratic organ, and as such should be responsive to democratic forces. If it is true that a government should look like those it represents, it is especially true that those who advise the government should be selected from a wide talent pool. A less ‘generalist’ Civil Service, with specific expertise and further removed from the SW1 bubble, could be better at fulfilling the Service values of objectivity and impartiality and well-placed to meet the needs of a diverse population. The job ad is right to seek out those who have never been to university or “fought their way out of a hell hole” and wrong to deride “gender identity diversity blah blah blah” for this reason.
While these (if any) changes would come slowly to the permanent civil service, Cummings seems eager to use the temporary staff at Downing Street as a proving-ground during the five years of long slog in government. His blog brims with ambition and ego, perhaps misplaced. Now that it meets power he seeks to cast a team of managers for ‘megaprojects’ and superinfrastructure, citing examples like the Manhattan Project to develop nuclear weapons or the US Government’s Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). His posts fiddle with ideas like free universal genetic sequencing for the UK population or the use of machine-learning in accelerating government decision processes. While a diverse team of advisers, characteristic of these projects, is at least principally healthy for any executive, the job ad seems to reveal the strange patronage relationship that Cummings could have with such a team. When he writes that “if you play office politics, you will be… immediately binned”, he implies not only his own power to hire and fire but also the importance of personal loyalty. He has no patience for formal hierarchies or “New Labour junk”, he says; “I’ll bin you within weeks if you don’t fit”. In asking that applicants should sort through his own reading list before interview, he is asking for workers that share the academic enthusiasms of his blog rather than the range and diversity he claims to seek. In doing so, Cummings is only replacing one bubble with another built in his own image. He may be right to suggest that government is inefficient or unrepresentative, but at best this job ad provides the wrong answer to the right problem. Certainly, the introduction of “super-talented weirdos” to Downing Street seems unlikely to solve Whitehall dysfunction at large.
How to Maintain Meaningful Relationships over the Vac
Pretty quickly you realise that Oxford socialising is intense. A week of regular cups of tea with someone can create speculative rumours about your relationship with them worthy of any gossip mag, whilst a minor (or major) breakdown about an essay deadline, tough tutor or dating turmoil in front of a new friend makes you feel like you’ve bonded for life. In the nine weeks I’ve spent at Oxford, I’ve felt at my most vulnerable in front of people who didn’t know me mere weeks ago and I’ve learnt more about the people I’m close with now than friends I’ve known for the majority of my life.
The reason relationships at Oxford can be so genuine is that they thrive on the close proximity and the shared experiences. The majority of friendships are formed and maintained with face-to-face connections over cups of coffee or behind laptop screens, cultivating empathy as you experience everything about that person, from the way they hold themselves, to the tone of their voice. This allows an unedited vulnerability more likely to generate a lasting relationship and it’s furthered by the unique culture, uniting students through the power of bizarre bop themes and crewdates. Social media is largely reduced to a perfunctory role of facilitating that real-life socialising and in such a pressurised environment, having understanding friends nearby fosters a supportive atmosphere that breeds BFFs.
But friendships that seemed entirely unbreakable in 8th week now appear far more fallible in the wintry light of the Christmas break. Outside of Oxford, friendships are conducted through a minefield of group chats, DMs and Facebook tags – leaving you yearning for the days of 2am catch-up cups of tea or impromptu get togethers. When you’re home for Christmas and you find your new friends far-flung and preoccupied with family and old school friends you can feel at a bit of a loss. It’s easy to be unenthused by superficial chatter about upcoming collections when you’re used to the animated discussions of the last Bridge Thursday or the drama from the latest bop and you can’t be bothered to type out lengthy prose on what exactly you’ve both been up to.
So meet up with them! The happiest I’ve been this vacation was when I was sat around a dining table with my nearest and dearest from College, having dinner and catching up properly. It’s the easiest way to combat that texting lethargy and seeing friends outside of Oxford confirms that you don’t just work in a specific, pressurised setting. If they can’t travel, or you can’t, Facetime is the next best thing and negates that anxiety about slow responses or what a ‘reaction’ to a message really means.
Relationships move fast at Oxford, close friendships are created in the blink of an eye (or the time it takes to exchange lecture notes) and when a week is an eighth of a term, the time you spend with people becomes far more significant. Whilst this means the relationships you develop can be meaningful and worth maintaining, the vacation is also a good opportunity to take some time away from those newly formed friendships and to gain some perspective outside of the Oxford bubble. Over Christmas people may not be reaching out as much, but sometimes it’s this distance that makes you appreciate them all the more. Hilary term will only reaffirm the friendships formed in the first and the vacation can be a time to reunite with older friends who are often easier to neglect when you’re overwhelmed with books and bops come term time.
If you’re missing people, tell them – though beware the landmine of misinterpreted intentions, the ticking time bomb of replying too quickly, or too slowly and the inevitable awkwardness of a read message with no reply. It’s tempting to just wait until they’re your neighbour again and invite them over for a cup of tea. But be brave and reach out to them; arrange a Facetime call or a daytrip to see them, catch up on how their holiday has been and commiserate about collections together. It doesn’t have to be the incessant chatting, meeting up and nights out of an eight week term, but they’ll be pleased to hear from you, I promise.
How to Maintain Meaningful Relationships over the Vac
Pretty quickly you realise that Oxford socialising is intense. A week of regular cups of tea with someone can create speculative rumours about your relationship with them worthy of any gossip mag, whilst a minor (or major) breakdown about an essay deadline, tough tutor or dating turmoil in front of a new friend makes you feel like you’ve bonded for life. In the nine weeks I’ve spent at Oxford, I’ve felt at my most vulnerable in front of people who didn’t know me mere weeks ago and I’ve learnt more about the people I’m close with now than friends I’ve known for the majority of my life.
The reason relationships at Oxford can be so genuine is that they thrive on the close proximity and the shared experiences. The majority of friendships are formed and maintained with face-to-face connections over cups of coffee or behind laptop screens, cultivating empathy as you experience everything about that person, from the way they hold themselves, to the tone of their voice. This allows an unedited vulnerability more likely to generate a lasting relationship and it’s furthered by the unique culture, uniting students through the power of bizarre bop themes and crewdates. Social media is largely reduced to a perfunctory role of facilitating that real-life socialising and in such a pressurised environment, having understanding friends nearby fosters a supportive atmosphere that breeds BFFs.
But friendships that seemed entirely unbreakable in 8th week now appear far more fallible in the wintry light of the Christmas break. Outside of Oxford, friendships are conducted through a minefield of group chats, DMs and Facebook tags – leaving you yearning for the days of 2am catch-up cups of tea or impromptu get togethers. When you’re home for Christmas and you find your new friends far-flung and preoccupied with family and old school friends you can feel at a bit of a loss. It’s easy to be unenthused by superficial chatter about upcoming collections when you’re used to the animated discussions of the last Bridge Thursday or the drama from the latest bop and you can’t be bothered to type out lengthy prose on what exactly you’ve both been up to.
So meet up with them! The happiest I’ve been this vacation was when I was sat around a dining table with my nearest and dearest from College, having dinner and catching up properly. It’s the easiest way to combat that texting lethargy and seeing friends outside of Oxford confirms that you don’t just work in a specific, pressurised setting. If they can’t travel, or you can’t, Facetime is the next best thing and negates that anxiety about slow responses or what a ‘reaction’ to a message really means.
Relationships move fast at Oxford, close friendships are created in the blink of an eye (or the time it takes to exchange lecture notes) and when a week is an eighth of a term, the time you spend with people becomes far more significant. Whilst this means the relationships you develop can be meaningful and worth maintaining, the vacation is also a good opportunity to take some time away from those newly formed friendships and to gain some perspective outside of the Oxford bubble. Over Christmas people may not be reaching out as much, but sometimes it’s this distance that makes you appreciate them all the more. Hilary term will only reaffirm the friendships formed in the first and the vacation can be a time to reunite with older friends who are often easier to neglect when you’re overwhelmed with books and bops come term time.
If you’re missing people, tell them – though beware the landmine of misinterpreted intentions, the ticking time bomb of replying too quickly, or too slowly and the inevitable awkwardness of a read message with no reply. It’s tempting to just wait until they’re your neighbour again and invite them over for a cup of tea. But be brave and reach out to them; arrange a Facetime call or a daytrip to see them, catch up on how their holiday has been and commiserate about collections together. It doesn’t have to be the incessant chatting, meeting up and nights out of an eight week term, but they’ll be pleased to hear from you, I promise.
Top 10 Transformations in Literature
New Year, new you? Let’s see how long this year’s resolutions last. As the festive cheer fades into oblivion and January rears its miserable head, so begins the annual inundation of well-meaning self-helpers who pledge that this really will be the year that they make those long-overdue changes to their lives. But how much can we really alter ourselves? And how often are these revisions ever more than purely superficial? It is no surprise that literature has, for millennia, attempted to document our human fascination with metamorphosis. We could say, of course, that all literature is about change – about characters growing, developing, learning – but the transformations in the following list are somewhat more emphatic. Changes of heart, changes of mind – from the skin-deep to the skin-crawling – here are 10 literary works which shed light on the varying mutations and renovations that we all may dread or dream of undergoing.
Metamorphoses, Ovid (c.8 AD)
“In nova fert animus mutatas dicere formas / corpora”, opens Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and that is as good a summary of the fifteen-book epic as any. Cataloguing hundreds of myths, this is a monumental study of the human desire for mutability and adaptation. Incredibly, these tales continue to resonate – perhaps now more than ever. Before there was ghosting, it seems, there was metamorphosis. Daphne transforms into a laurel tree to avoid Apollo. Io becomes a cow to avoid jealous Juno. And Jove, with his unquenchable libido and slippery shape-shifting tricks for shirking responsibility, is a frightening warning of unchecked male power.
A Midsummer Night’s Dream, William Shakespeare (c.1595)
Shakespeare gives new meaning to the term jackass when Puck the mischievous sprite transfigures silly Nick Bottom’s head into that of a donkey. Only in the chaotic topsy-turvy realm of comedy could the ass-faced fool then find himself romanced by Titania, queen of the fairies. Are we to treat any of this as real, or is it all simply part of a whimsical midsummer fantasy? Bottom’s epilogue suggests that it is we, the audience, who have been dreaming all along.
“Lamia”, John Keats (1819)
Lamia seeks Hermes’s help to be rid of her serpent form so that she may pursue the beautiful youth Lycius. The transformation is painful, but Lamia is prepared to endure the torturous “anguish drear” and “scarlet pain” in order to satisfy her lust. All seems to be going well until mood-killing philosopher Apollonius turns up and reveals Lamia’s true identity.
A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens (1843)
In Ebenezer Scrooge, Dickens created perhaps the most famous miser in all of literature. But he also gave new power to the festive season as a time for redemptive metamorphosis. A rebuttal to the 1834 Poor Law Amendment, which applied Malthusian theory to the poverty relief system in an attempt to deter all but the truly destitute from seeking workhouse support, Dickens’s portrait of a man’s transformation from misanthropist to philanthropist is a timeless reminder of how it is never too late to change.
Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Robert Louis Stevenson (1886)
“Man is not truly one, but two”, warns Stevenson in one of the most famous tales of transformations in literature. And yet, Henry Jekyll’s devolution into the atavistic rogue Edward Hyde isn’t really a transformation at all: it’s an unleashing of something that has always lurked within him. Through Hyde, Jekyll is able to indulge the Wildean double-life suspected of many Victorian gentlemen. Hyde may even be a coded reference to suppressed homosexuality, or indeed any secretive taboo frowned upon by Fin de Siècle English society. He is an outlet for the supposedly respectable Jekyll’s inner desire for depravity and debauchery – the “devil” he had “long caged”. In releasing Hyde, Jekyll is letting free the beast within us all.
The Metamorphosis, Franz Kafka (1915)
Imagine waking up one morning to find yourself transformed into a giant bug. When travelling salesman Gregor Samsa becomes an incapacitated insect, his family–tragically–are repulsed by him. Kafka’s surrealist nightmare continues to disturb and perplex, and Samsa’s struggle to prove his worth in spite of his hideous appearance remains as devastatingly moving as ever. Philip Roth’s The Breast (1972), in which a man is transfigured into a colossal human mammary gland, is a lighthearted and hilarious spin on the tale. Last year, Ian McEwan reversed Kafka’s concept in Brexit satire The Cockroach.
Orlando, Virginia Woolf (1928)
After a lengthy sleep, the Elizabethan nobleman Orlando awakens not as a bug, but as a woman. His mind is the same, but his body has morphed into that of a female. Orlando is also unable to age, and so we track the eponymous hero/heroine from the Renaissance all the way to the 1920s. A pioneering work of postmodern proportions, Woolf’s landmark biography-cum-novel is a sharply satirical treatise on the fluidity of gender, the constraints of literary form, and the historical sidelining of women.
The Changeling, Joy Williams (1978)
The masterful Joy Williams is never better than in her underrated sinister yarn about a woman who becomes convinced that her child has been replaced by another. But this is by no means the strangest conundrum at the heart of The Changeling, a novel brimming with metamorphic mysteries. Pearl, an alcoholic who longs to escape her menacing husband’s family (including a cacophony of dreadful and indistinguishable children), doesn’t know if she’s drunk or sober when she watches a little girl transform into a deer. By the end of the novel, at which point Williams takes to manic Beckettian prose, we’re not so sure either.
The Bloody Chamber, Angela Carter (1979)
Like Stevenson, Angela Carter was fascinated by the bestial appetites that we are forced to suppress. This wonderfully witty collection of stories returned the bleakness and sex to fairytales that had long been diluted by the Disney machine. But in Carter’s searing hands, these fireplace legends also become parables of female empowerment. Take “The Tiger’s Bride”, for instance, based on “Beauty and the Beast”. In Carter’s story, the heroine does not seek to transform the Beast back into human form; instead, she allows him to turn her into a majestic furry beast of her own. Sometimes Beauty is the Beast.
Bridget Jones’s Diary, Helen Fielding (1996)
New Year’s resolutions became fashionable all over again with Bridget Jones. Helen Fielding’s clumsy but loveable foot-in-mouth heroine vows to make serious alterations to her life (career success, weight loss, giving up smoking – and, naturally, finding Mr. Right) as she hits thirty. Needless to say, the course of true love does not tend to run smoothly for this literary darling. A modern retelling of Pride and Prejudice, it takes the dashing but uppity Mark Darcy to convince Bridget that she need not change at all: he may just love her exactly the way she is.
Iran: What Could Happen Next
The assassination of General Qasem Soleimani constitutes not only an escalation in tensions between the USA and Iran, but one of the most significant escalations in Middle Eastern politics for some time. Not only was Soleimani a revered war hero in Iran, but he was also intimate with the Iranian clerical leadership, heading the Quds Force, a subdivision of the highly trained, equipped and ideological Revolutionary Guard. His assassination is markedly different to the killing of al-Baghdadi or Naim Qassem, ex-leader and deputy leader respectively of ISIS and Hezbollah; the killing of a leading military figure of a sovereign country can, not unfairly, be interpreted as a declaration of war, however horrific his record.
Further, Iran’s influence throughout the Middle East is heavily reliant upon Quds and the Revolutionary Guard. Over several decades, the Iranian Ayatollahs have become extremely adept at covert warfare, funding, training and supporting terrorist organisations throughout the Arab World in countries such as Yemen, Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq. Multiple Iranian proxies were closely connected to the recent protests which besieged the US embassy in Baghdad that began this course of events. This bombing by America therefore is not some peripheral restraint on Iranian economic interests but constitutes a direct attack on their most efficient weapon on the international stage.
Already American citizens have been urged to withdraw from Iraq entirely and told not to approach the Baghdad embassy. Numerous American and international businesses operate within Iraq, whose production shall no doubt suffer as a result. Further, they may see their own operations under attack, seen by Iranian sympathisers and operators as proxies of US interests. Though I suspect retaliation by Iran itself will likely target explicit American and Israeli targets, wider Iranian sympathisers in Iraq may also turn their anger towards western entities writ large. Let us not forget that although certain elements within the Iraqi parliament are sympathetic towards Iran, Iraq remains a needed ally of America. That American citizens are being urged to leave a US ally is therefore a dramatic and sudden alteration in US-Iraqi relations, and it shall be very interesting to see how the Iraqi government responds to this unfolding event.
To stabilise their position, America has resorted to sending a significant number of troops to Kuwait – 3000 thus far, though I suspect many more could be sent within short notice. America will likely scramble to secure vital interests within Iraq, as they simply cannot afford to completely abandon their presence within the country. It is vitally important not only to checking Iranian interests, but also to address issues in bordering Syria. If the Iraqi government fulfils the request of the legislature to revoke the invitation to America, US troops will also be forced to vacate Iraq, or be in breach of international law. Their departure, along with other coalition forces helping to mop up remnants of ISIS, would fundamentally change the precarious positions of power between terrorist groups, Assad and Russian forces, and coalition-backed entities in Iraq and Syria. This would likely be to Assad’s gain.
America is not the only power responding to this event – Iran has promised fire and brimstone for the assassination of a man they call a national hero. Russia has been one of the few powers to explicitly admonish America for the killing, but it’s unclear just how much they can do to respond. Retaliation will therefore likely come in one of three potential forms: firstly, directly by the Iranian regime and its Revolutionary Guard; secondly, from associated Iranian-backed entities such as Hezbollah; and thirdly, from disparate unorganised groups unaffiliated with any regime, likely in Iraq itself. We should not be too quick, however, to portray all of Iraq’s population as pro-Iran and as eager to take up arms against America. Iraq’s government had previously come under great scrutiny for continued ties to Iran, including from Iraq’s Shi’a population, and media organisations such as Al-Jazeera have reported celebration at Soleimani’s killing, seen by some as a key meddler in Iraqi affairs. Nonetheless, it is at least plausible that sections of the general population in Iraq, and across the Middle East, will be impassioned by this act.
A retaliatory strike through Hezbollah is a favoured Iranian tactic. But I suspect it shan’t be seen as enough this time by the Iranian regime. You can expect escalation from Iranian-backed organisations in Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, and elsewhere, jeopardising not only the little political stability present in such countries, but also the economic and political interests of Saudi Arabia, Israel, and other US allies in the region. Sadly, it is almost certain that such entities will respond with violence of some kind. If, however, the Iranian response was limited to peripheral attacks through such entities, Iran may worry that America would see this as a strategic win, encouraging them to ramp up their actions against the Quds forces. In essence, if Iran does not respond with an attack in kind, they may worry they come off as the loser in this engagement.
Finally, will some official Iranian entity attack United States operatives? The number of interests the Ayatollah of Iran must now consider are numerous – much of the Iranian population I will likely demand a swift and powerful response. However the dramatic strength of the United States in the Middle East (furthered through the new presence of troops in Kuwait and southern Iraq) would make at least certain retaliatory strikes an almost certainly failures. Iran may also be seeking advice from Russia, China and others to see what options are open to them. A more successful route of attack for Iran may be digital, making use of recent advancements in technological warfare.
A likely site of tension is the Strait of Hormuz, shared between Iran and the Gulf states. It was here that last year a British-flagged tanker was seized, and the presence of Iranian, British, Saudi, American and smaller Gulf nation militaries makes this region a likely source of conflict. While I remain sceptical as to the potential for total war, some form of an economic embargo at choke points by Iran could prove devastating to international oil production and prices.
One outcome, of which I remain sceptical, is the potential for war à la Iraq 2003. In 2003, America faced a pariah state led by a secular leader with little domestic or international support, a military weakened after war with Iran, and a generally incapable leadership. In Iran, one finds a sizeable population, a highly efficient military force, not-insignificant levels of support for the state from the populace, and geographical constraints on potential invasion. Only the most hawkish of figures such as John Bolton consider direct regime change feasible, and with Trump also considering his domestic re-election, I doubt he shall consider war, which has become a vote loser I suspect since 2003. Of course, conflict can stop short of invasion, and as I have said, violence in Iraq or the Strait will itself constitute a worrisome escalation in affairs.
I’ll note that America’s assassination of Soleimani is not necessarily an irrational display of aggression (I shall leave it to you whether it can be justified or not). As I have said, the Revolutionary Guard remains Iran’s best way of influencing affairs in the Middle East, and through it, terrorist organisations have seen great success in limiting US influence in important strategic regions. And though the US-Iran nuclear deal contained much good it was wholly implausible that Iran would sacrifice its organisational and military network which has afforded it so much regional influence. In the absence of cooperation, any effective response to Iran would most naturally take the form of retaliation against Quds. They are, as we have seen in the Baghdad protests, capable of and willing to, present violent threats to US personnel.
The killing of Soleimani is not comparable to prior instances of escalation between Iran and America. It is the single most brazen act of escalation America could have taken short of an attack on Iranian soil. As such, the response one can expect from Iran should be of similar proportions. Countries such as Great Britain are right thus to urge for de-escalation, as Iran will no doubt respond in a very dangerous manner. If we are to avoid an ever-worsening position now, America must work very closely with its international allies to moderate its position, and Russia should attempt to tame Iran’s response, though the extent to which it can is questionable. One will likely see related conflict breaking out in Palestine or Lebanon, as Israel is seen by Iran as an extension of US interests, and Hezbollah figures were also assassinated alongside Soleimani. We must be wary of the potential American response to the murder of an American soldier or citizen, which is now an entirely plausible outcome, as it could further exacerbate affairs beyond measure.
“Bikram”- Review: The fad variant assumes corpse pose
As a die-hard yogi since the age of eleven, I was quick to judge the idea of the new Netflix documentary Bikram as being unfair. I was concerned that it would unjustifiably taint the name of yoga; an activity which, in my eyes, is capable of positively transforming the world. However, Bikram yoga is a breed of the sport that I had heard a lot about and never tried, having only dabbled with the traditional variation of Iyengar yoga and then devoting myself to the more rigid practice of Ashtanga. I was vaguely aware that Bikram was a type of eponymous yoga that involved a fixed sequence and heat to achieve powerful results, however I had no understanding about the man himself or his impact on the practice. In spite of this, yoga is something which I view as being a healthy and beneficial practice, therefore I was optimistic in deciding to watch Netflix’s most recent expository offering, but it opened my eyes up to the other side of yoga, the side of yoga which should not exist, let alone be tried.
The documentary explores the creator of Bikram yoga, a man named Bikram Choudhary, now 75 years old, who brought the series to the Western world in 1971. The yoga consists of a 26-posture sequence in a room of 41°c, intended to replicate the climate of yoga’s origin, India. The practice lasts 90 minutes and encompasses two kinds of breathing exercises. Everyone featured in the documentary sings the practice’s praises, saying that it made them want to share the gift which had given them so much.
This power, however, was not just solely down to the effective structure of the series, but more so, perhaps, down to its teacher. Bikram was, as former studio owner, Patrice Simon notes “like a lion […] a force”. Another yoga teacher, Val Sklar Robinson, goes further to say that “he saw potential in you that you might not see [yourself]”. Throughout the documentary, his effective teaching style and series is highlighted and praised, even when his darker side is explored. The consistency of this praise made a part of me eager to try out his practice and see if it appealed to me in the same way that it had appealed to so many others. But this was only fleeting.
It is apparent straight away that Bikram is a strange and abrasive character. The clips exhibit him parading around his classes scantily clad in no more than a black pair of speedos, coupled with his firm voice dictating the class “welcome to Bikram’s torture chamber, where you’ll kill yourself for the next 90 minutes” which speaks to the sheer difficulty of the practice. Another of his former students, Jakob Schanzer, underlines Bikram’s forthright nature, noting how he told him to suck in his stomach as he did not like “to see the jiggle jiggle”. From the outside, these examples deter me from wanting to experience his teaching, yet also intrigue me as to why these people continued to exalt him at this point in the documentary; these ‘quirks’ appear to be part of the reason as to why America was so taken by him.
In this vein, Bikram yoga is described as ‘McYoga’; an all-American practice which went very much against the grain. There was no chanting and, although originating in India, it blossomed in Beverly Hills where its traditional roots were disregarded for the physical benefits which could be gleaned. He wholeheartedly approved of this name, having already become incredibly wealthy, boasting a collection of ostentatious cars and pairing a Rolex with his characteristic speedos during class. This yogi was one the world had never seen before.
It transpires that Bikram was and potentially still is a sexual predator, having been accused of raping several of the women he taught. One of the main difficulties for these women was that they were forced to continue with the practice in order to become yoga teachers, as the only way to become a teacher of Bikram is to go through its creator directly, leaving them trapped within his system. Sarah Baughn, a former student who suffered at his hand in this way, says he asked her to be in a relationship with him while already married and assaulted her later on when she resisted his predatory advances. Another, Larissa Anderson, was raped by him at his family home while his wife and children were upstairs. She did not feel able to tell anyone or do anything about it due to it being her life’s mission to become a teacher and having already made many sacrifices along the way. This deterred me even more from the practice, I wondered why anyone would want to be part of it if it belonged to an avaricious predator who was unsafe to be around.
Another noteworthy moment that Bikram recognises is his relationship with his former legal counsel, Micki Jafa-Bodden. When she got wind of the sexual allegations made against him and suggested to his wife that he step down, she was forced to resign and had her visa and car taken from her; Bikram ruined her life. Micki decided to go to court against him. Although she eventually won the case, she has still not received any remuneration as he fled the country instead of facing the legal consequences and has still not been charged criminally.
The documentary ends with recent images of him teaching in Spain 2019. For some reason, he is still teaching yoga after many testimonies against him and after this court case exposing his immorality. Yet this is where the true conflict lies, he brought the western world an ostensibly very effective type of yoga and an equally effective, albeit abrasive teaching method which has caused many to overlook his significant flaws. This is revealed at the end when Patrice Simon expresses her desire for him to make a “comeback” as his yoga is “magical”. Interestingly, the documentary demonstrates how this is not actually his own yoga, but rather a form of yoga invented by his guru in India. Mukul Dutta testifies to this, having shared this guru in the past. Dutta appears to be deeply offended by Bikram’s theft of the practice and use of it in his own name rather than the name of its true creator. This was the straw that broke the camel’s back for me and inhibits me from trying the practice myself; even if it is valuable, there is nothing I can see that is moral in its origins.
If Bikram yoga calls to you, whether that be because you want to see if you can push yourself to your limit with the powerful sequence, or whether you want to understand why so many continue to revere the practice in spite of the claims against it, I urge you not to. Bikram yoga was founded on greed and lies. Its legal owner is someone who is fraudulent, dogmatic and predatory which, for me, corrupts the practice and outweighs any physical benefits which could be reaped. I think I will stick to Ashtanga yoga, and I feel angry that this man has tarnished yoga’s name.