Sunday 3rd August 2025
Blog Page 683

How to beat the fifth week blues

-
0
How to beat the fifth week blues

Oh we’re halfway there! One month in. One month to go. Our health is short of optimal thanks to appalling weather, piling up work, too much alcohol and too little sleep.

How to survive fifth week blues? Food is thy medicine.

For the committed health nut, a big icy fruit and veg smoothie is beautiful brain food – cool drinks in cool weather are the coolest. Any combination can work. The green ones are especially useful for curing a particularly bad hangover, or simply as a study break treat.

As much as a mug of hot chocolate or a brownie offer a hefty dose of sugar, properly nutritious foods are said to help with concentration, and to safeguard against flu – or rather contain it, because we seem to have flu all the time.

For the millennial with a deep pocket, and who has not turned vegan, poached eggs are ideal. Breakfast, lunch or dinner, eggs are a cheap, protein-packed choice. The warm, runny yolks deserve to be enjoyed with eyes closed. It’s all about the smooth, sticky, thick but still liquid texture — not easy to achieve and a test of a chef’s skills. But luckily Oxford’s cafes generally hit the mark. Cutting open poached eggs (preferably accompanied by a crisp piece of sourdough toast, of course) on a cold morning to see the yolks oozing out is such an aesthetic and sensual pleasure. Plus, the comfortably satisfied belly is always conducive to a good day.

For the less health conscious, there is the ultimate comfort food of chicken nuggets and chips. Regardless of the other sauces you choose, always get mayo as well. The hot, juicy chicken nuggets and the salty, crisp chips (they are meant to be eaten quickly, so open the takeout box and start eating immediately on your way back!) are just missing something without that essential mayo – just like your lunchtime sandwich. Caution: this item must be consumed in moderation. If overdone, you will feel quite horrible the next morning.

Enjoy food and enjoy life. My go-to foods in mid-term dizziness might just make this happen.

Journey’s End preview – a play about brotherhood

Bessie Yuill
-
0
Journey’s End preview – a play about brotherhood

2018 marks both the centenary of the First World War’s end, and the 90 year anniversary of R. C. Sherriff’s ‘Journey’s End’, the hit play that would launch Laurence Olivier’s career and change how many people saw the war.

When producer Jessica Bradley and director Agnes Pethers looked at the OUDS schedule for this term and realised there was no productions specifically planned for the centennial Remembrance weekend, they knew that this play was the right one to shake people out of their cliched view of the war.

“After 100 years we’re just too comfortable with it – ‘this happened, it was sad, we’ll wear a poppy’. 60,000 men dying in the Somme becomes just a number, so you can avoid the tragedy,” Agnes explains to me. “With this production, all these young alive faces acting and becoming these characters, at the exact same age as they would have been, you can’t escape it.”

Their aim is to evoke the real experience of the trenches in order to shock modern audiences.

This production is affiliated with four charities in this aim: Walking with the Wounded, Combat Stress, SSAFA and Oxford Winter Night Shelter.

Sherriff was certainly writing what he knew: he was an officer during the end of the war, and the play is set over the course of the three days before the Battle of St Quentin, in March 1918. In the dugout, officers had the lowest life expectancy of any group involved in the war, and the battle written about would result in 38,000 British casualties on the first day.

The implication that these characters are all going to die is inescapable. Sherriff certainly would have been picturing the friends and brothers who he saw killed. His experience helps the script to show the reality of war, separate from the heroes and machismo. Instead, he emphasises the experience of individuals.

This authenticity brought about visceral reactions from veterans when it first debuted, with some PTSD sufferers actually having to leave theatres. However, it was still embraced.

Agnes and Jessica mentioned the significance of their tag-line in our interview: ‘Think of it all as – as romantic. It helps.’ As I watch the actors rehearse scenes, that line starts to makes sense. It both challenges a complacent 2018 reaction to the First World War, where we can repeat tragic statistics from a century ago with no real emotional reaction, and empathetically encapsulates the coping mechanisms of the characters themselves, who have to believe they’re fighting for something in the midst of chaos.

‘Journey’s End’ demonstrates a wide range of reactions to this directionless trauma. Characters like Hardy and the Colonel (played by Dom McGann and Charlie Wellings) cope by shutting themselves off and focusing on trivial matters, so that they don’t have to think of the Germans in identical trenches 70 yards away as humans.

Joe Stanton’s Osbourne becomes a fatherly figure to all the younger men, like the impressionable Raleigh (Joe Woodman). This brings heart-wrenching pathos to one scene in which the latter doesn’t understand how dangerous their next raid will be. Hibbert (Flinn Andreae) falls apart entirely, racked with neuralgia from the shellshock (here treated with more empathy than in previous productions.) A German soldier similarly collapses when kidnapped – Sherriff extends an unprecedented amount of sympathy towards the other side in his script.

The twitchy body language and brittle accent of Albert McIntosh’s existentially petrified Stanhope may be the most compelling characterisation, however.

In a play about brotherhood, his paranoia and alcoholism threatens to cut him off from the other men. All the other soldiers, in interacting with this character, see the debilitating potential of war, and this strains all conversations.

The scenes I watched were filled with long pauses which brought about gut-wrenching tension.

Agnes tells me that creating the sound design was crucial to the play. They focused on creating a sparse soundscape evoking the endless waiting and existential horror of the trenches.

The set will also be minimal: earthy materials, a black backdrop, and candles instead of electric lighting to immerse you in the time and place.

“All the bids had passed for the traditional spaces over summer,” she explains, “so we’ll be in St Mary Magdalene’s Church, which is kind of perfect, in terms of a respectful venue. It feels like we’ve got the right place, the right dates – since it’ll be performed on the actual 11th November.”

Respect for the individuals is clearly a crucial aspect of this production. The play’s purpose isn’t to either lionise or dismiss the cause all these young men are dying for: either approach would do a disservice to the fellow soldiers who R.C. Sherriff actually saw die, and the veterans that this production honours through its charitable associations.

What the original script emphasises, and what this production aims to honour, is the soldiers’ devotion to each other, and the complicated relationships that are borne out of such horrific circumstances.

The cast and crew here themselves seem equally devoted to the play’s young characters and its message.

“Everyone’s really doing this to honour the centenary, you know?”, Agnes tells me as she lets me out of a side gate. “They’ve all given up their time for an actual cause.” I believe her – the First World War won’t be forgotten or romanticised at this centenary production.

‘I just try to see the world clearly’: An Interview with Louis Theroux

Abby Ridsdill-Smith
-
0
‘I just try to see the world clearly’: An Interview with Louis Theroux

I am a little apprehensive to interview Louis Theroux. A two-time BAFTA award winner, the presenter of over 60 documentaries, and an acclaimed writer and journalist, he is an icon , a treasured one man brand. Over the course of his career, he has redefined the documentary making scene, winning over the British people with his frank, faux-naif style, and thought-provoking insights.

But more intimidating than his career history (and it is intimidating) are the comments of journalists who have spoken to him before. Previous interviews describe Theroux as ‘inscrutable’, and bemoan the fact that he knows all the ‘machinations and deflections’ of interview technique. When I tell a flatmate about our conversation, I get a sage nod and a helpful reminder: “It’s not going to be easy, is it? Interviewing the interviewer?”

But in reality, Theroux is (or seems) a much less terrifying interview candidate. Although he is just as intelligent and perceptive as you would expect (his conversation is peppered with references to enlightenment ideas and existential issues), he is also disarmingly funny and considerate. When he joins in at the end of a point, he offers me an immediate apology, “Sorry I interrupted- what were you gonna say?”

We are calling to discuss Theroux’s latest series, ‘Altered States’, which, like his other series, is filmed in America. The series is wide ranging: going, via polyamory, from open adoptions to assisted dying. He explains that the series looks at ‘different ways of doing important life decisions’, adding that “America has always had a kind of utopian spirit […] when you think of the American spirit, it involves a certain wide-eyed ingenuity and the idea of human perfectibility. Each [episode] is to do with both that can-do culture and also a kind of commercial culture [… that] points towards the possibility of a certain way of handling these existential issues that many of us have to face at one point or another”.

America holds an important place in Theroux’s heart. His father, the travel writer Paul Theroux, is a native Bostonian; Theroux himself got his first break in the States, as a correspondent for TV Nation. But Theroux says it’s more than that: America has “a fascinating culture and society with extremities of wealth and poverty. It’s a vast country, large population. Culturally, British people grow up with […] the idea of America, that it has a certain brashness and unselfconsciousness, in certain cases a stereotype of vulgarity.” His relationship with America has changed over the course of his career: “There’s been an old tradition of shows that slightly make fun of America – maybe I was slightly guilty of that at one stage.”

Maybe he’s a little guilty again in this series. One of the more surprising scenes in ‘Love Without Limits’ finds Louis stripping off to engage in a sensual eating party. Over the credits, we hear Theroux explaining that it wasn’t entirely enjoyable: he was fed far too much cheese. It’s a departure from weightier approach the presented has adopted over the last few years.

“The reason I do it sometimes is partly because I find it quite funny and partly because I think it’s a helpful way of changing the dynamic with the contributors,” Theroux explains, “it’s a little bit of going naked almost in sort in an ethnographic way. It’s like the idea, if you’re going to live in the village, you have to live the way the villagers live. “I think that’s quite revealing. As I say, it’s sort of fun for me up to a point, sometimes its uncomfortable. […] One of the reasons I enjoyed doing the polyamory program was that it was a chance to turn the clock back a bit and do participation and do things that I haven’t done in a while. […] We were all aware on the team that it would be fun to get back to a slightly lighter and more comical mode of film making of which the sensual eating workshop was a part.”

Indeed, quite a lot of ‘Love Without Limits’ (his episode on polyamory) feels like a throwback to Theroux’s earlier work. In the discussions he has with Bob, Nick and Amanda about monogamy and conventional relationships, there are echoes of his trip to meet swingers. His massage at the party feels like it could have been filmed back at the brothel in Weird Weekends. Theroux released a handful of retrospectives earlier in his career: he made two documentaries with the Westboro Baptist Church, and another two with the porn community in California, back in the early 2000s.

But Theroux hasn’t revisited his subjects in a while. “It’s something that I’m always tempted to do,” Theroux tells me, “I’m naturally curious about what happens to the people that I film with after I leave. Even going back to when I was at TV Nation I remember always thinking… gosh – what happens to these people? … For the most part, they don’t really change that much… You know yep, they’re still waiting for the UFOs to land, or – yep, he’s still a neo-Nazi living in Idaho like – no change […]

“My lesson from it was if you go back on something you need to have a really good reason for doing it.” He cites his documentary ‘Savile’. Filmed in 2016, the program responded to ‘When Louis met Jimmy’, an early documentary made when Savile was just an eccentric children’s entertainer. “The fact that someone I spent a couple of weeks filming with turned out to be one of the most notorious sex offenders of modern times in Britain was a massive change in the landscape,” says Theroux.

I observe that the opportunity to release these retrospectives is a privilege borne from Theroux’s immense popularity. Theroux has a cult following; he can assume that his audience will have watched the majority of his repertoire. Theroux isn’t so sure: “I’m aware of a cult following, whether it’s growing or not, I don’t know.

“And I can’t always tell how big it is and in general, I’d be in dangerous territory if I was trying to second guess what my cult following was interested in. Having said that,… we have talked about some kind of, you know it’s 20 years since we did Weird Weekends and we’re sort of thinking – is that something we should mark? Or is there a case for doing a revisit? Or is there a story we should follow up on? But we haven’t quite decided what it would be.”

For Louis, this concern about relevance, or appropriate subject matter, has spread through his entire career: “There came a point when the idea of making programs about people doing odd things felt limiting.

“We more or less ran out of road on a certain style or tone of storytelling. There’s always more people you can find who are up to something that seems a bit ridiculous, but for me the idea had been for the shows to have some depth and some broader resonance, so we weren’t making shows about Elvis conventions, we weren’t making shows about cheese rolling or Ernest Hemingway lookalike conventions…it just felt too trivial… There came a time when I had a choice to make about telling stories that were funny but lacked grit or weight, and telling gritty, weighty stories that weren’t funny. We went with the not funny and that’s more or less … been the area of inquiry for us as a production for the last ten years.”

We turn to the politics behind, or alongside, documentary making. Though Theroux has talked politics in the past, he says it’s not at the forefront of his documentary process: his programs are “not conceived as political documentaries … I just try and see the world clearly.”

But he adds, “I’ve tried to make these shows hint at or speak to a kind of a background of what’s going on, a bigger picture to do with inequality of income or slight lack or provision for the more vulnerable. “These more recent shows aren’t really about people making choices that are utterly bizarre,” he notes, “they are speaking to a wider social issue, though it’s not explicit throughout the program. “What lies behind them is a sense that there is a vulnerable class of people…who aren’t very well off; their choices are conditioned by not having much money.” But is his presence somewhat political?

I observe his ability to shift the narrative of the program, convincing his subjects to challenge their opinions. He concedes that, “just by being there, we’re altering reality in some way”, but argues “this whole idea of being there as a blank slate, or to be non judgemental, is a bit misleading. “You’re there to reflect a kind of reasonable position on how the world is, not just to report fairly, but if someone’s a Nazi, to challenge them on why, if someone’s killed people, to reflect a view of that being horrendous and inquiring why on earth someone would do that?… It’s not so much with the job of changing [their] mind, its more with the job of figuring out what’s happening.”

He recalls a moment, in the ‘Choosing Death’ episode, when he tells one of the contributors that her broken heart will pass: “in a sense I’m kind of breaking the rules of conventional journalism, but it just felt like the right thing to do,” he says. There is a pause.

“It’s only human to want to tell people that things will get better,” I tell him. Louis agrees. “I think there are times when to be human and not strictly journalistic is appropriate. Sometimes, those are the most powerful moments in the program.”

Students ‘infuriated’ over VC’s access event

-
0
Students ‘infuriated’ over VC’s access event

Oxford University Vice-Chancellor Louise Richardson was grilled over the University’s access schemes and policies at a student Q&A panel on Tuesday, with concerns being raised over her shifting of responsibility towards the colleges and away from the central administration.

During the student-organised “access and diversity brainstorming event” held at the Oxford Martin School, Richardson described access as “one of the biggest challenges the University faces”.

Richardson also noted that since colleges independently select the students admitted, they are responsible for the resources they provide for their students.

However, some students expressed disappointment with the Vice-Chancellor’s comments.

Mansfield JCR President Daria Lysyakova noted that Richardson’s view on issues of access was one that “[she does] not share”.

Lysyakova said in a statement that “as the exemplary college for access, [Mansfield] needs to make [their] voice heard louder”.

Currently, Mansfield admits the highest percentage of state-school students out of all of the University’s colleges and PPHs.

Lysyakova told Cherwell: “Whilst I understand that the Vice Chancellor does not have the authority to tell colleges how to run their business, as each college is a charity independent from the University, what the Vice-Chancellor does have, in light of her position, is the necessary status and influences to effectively encourage colleges to priorities access and allocate their resources in ways which would best aid students in need.

“I strongly disagree with the opinion of the Vice-Chancellor that the onus of continuing access should be entirely on the Colleges.

“I believe that such a mindset would eventually bring colleges who are currently leading access, such as Mansfield, to reconsider their priorities.

“The University is not giving Colleges a substantial incentive to improve access – instead the Vice Chancellor seems to believe that this would come about through the good faith of Colleges alone.

“I hope that she would reconsider this position and work to encourage wider diversity across Oxford.

“I would further like to note that access has always been a priority at Mansfield and will continue to be at the heart of our ethos.”

In a post on the Mansfield’s JCR noticeboard, Lysyakova stated her intention to write a letter on behalf of the JCR and to lobby other JCR presidents to do the same.

Third-year Mansfield student Sara Harb, who attended the meeting, said that she felt a “disconnect” between the student-led access schemes and those of the University, which “the VC has to take responsibility for”.

She told Cherwell: “It isn’t good enough for her to effectively accept that student experience at Oxford is simply a matter of a college lottery.

“She wants us to address the wider societal inequalities, while there are clearly some massive inequalities between colleges, which is something she is responsible for and can feasibly address.”

At Tuesday’s meeting, Richardson also agreed with suggestions that the University should start to pressure the government to improve access provision earlier in the education system, claiming that early education is “central to Oxbridge access”.

Richardson stated her continued support for the current main undergraduate access programme, UNIQ, which brings 850 state school students to Oxford every summer. The capacity of UNIQ is expected to increase by 500 places in the coming years.

At the meeting, Richardson reportedly told the audience that the poorest Oxford colleges continue to provide more educational funding than the vast majority of UK universities.

Event organiser Ben Fernando told Cherwell that he believed the event went “very well” and was pleased with the variety of audience members.

He added: “The point was to come to constructive solutions, so firstly I hope the students have a bit of a better idea of what’s being done on the University side, and vice versa.

“In terms of making concrete progress, obviously we’ll have to see what’s acted upon, but as I understand it some of the disability campaigners and First-Gen reps have already scheduled further discussions with the University leadership as a result of the meeting, so that’s a good start.

“I think this was a pretty effective way to discuss the issues, and I hope we’ll be able to do similar things again in the future.”

The University was contacted for comment.

Calls for Uni to introduce Oxford Living Wage

Daniel Hall
-
0
Calls for Uni to introduce Oxford Living Wage

The Oxford Living Wage Campaign have called on the University to introduce the Oxford Living Wage, as Oxford City Council announces it will introduce a higher minimum wage for its employees.

The Council will pay its staff a minimum of £10.02 an hour from April 2019.

The Oxford Living Wage is set at 95% of the London Living Wage, as calculated by the Living Wage Foundation, to reflect the high costs of living in Oxford.

The council’s announcement has led to renewed calls for the University to adopt the measure.

Chair of the Oxford SU Living Wage Campaign, Rebecca Durkin, told Cherwell: “The Living Wage Foundation’s National Living Wage simply isn’t enough in an Oxford context, and it’s unacceptable that some employers (including colleges) continue to only pay the government’s statutory minimum wage.

“We hope that the university and its colleges will follow the City Council’s lead and introduce the Oxford Living Wage for all staff.”

In February, Cherwell revealed that no Oxford colleges pay staff the Oxford Living Wage. Two permanent private halls, Blackfriars College and Campion Hall, pay the Oxford Living Wage.

Councillor Martyn Rush, Living Wage Champion for Oxford City Council, said: “The Oxford Living Wage helps our employees afford to live with dignity. It also helps the council by improving staff motivation and retention, enabling us to provide better customer service.

“A number of other local employers already pay the Oxford Living Wage, including Oxford Bus Company, Campion Hall, Blackfriars College and My Life My Choice. Oxford City Council encourages other employers in Oxford to follow their lead and adopt the Oxford Living Wage.”

Eleven out of Oxford’s 38 colleges are currently paying the National Living Wage of £8.75 an hour, including Mansfield and Somerville.

Uni remains undecided after ‘e-exam’ pilot

-
0
Uni remains undecided after ‘e-exam’ pilot

Oxford University has conducted a trial of written exams undertaken on computer, as University authorities consider a major rehaul of Oxford’s examinations policy.

Participants in the trial, conducted in April last year, included the Department of Computing Science, Faculty of Law, and Faculty of Theology and Religion. The project was carried out by IT Services in a selection of college collections in conjunction with the subject departments.

The Education IT Programme said: “The e-exams project investigated the potential of the digital examination system for use with typed, invigilated examinations by funding and running trials during the start of Trinity term 2018”.

The trials used Inspira software platform. An Oxford University spokesperson told Cherwell that “computers were locked down and resources including spellcheck and thesaurus were removed”.

They added: “The trial has been evaluated and the results and next steps are being discussed within the University, but no decision about wider adoption has been made.”

“The pilot was a small-scale exercise in bringing examinations into line with how students learn and will apply their knowledge in the future.”

In Michaelmas 2016, the Digital Education Strategy consultation with academic staff and studentsidentified increasing interest intrialling the use of technology for assessments.

Currently, the use of a word processor in exams is limited for students with Specific Learning Differences or physical disabilities/illnesses that make writing difficult.

The news comes as e-exams are being used more often at other universities across the country.

In the UK, according to a survey by the Heads of eLearning Forum, more than 60% of universities have introduced e-exams in at least one or two modules.

Brunel University is one of the first UK institutions to introduce digital exams, encouraging students to use their own laptops. Brunel’s director of learning, Simon Kent, said that this move tried to make assessment as authentic as possible.

However, not all are in agreement. Chairman of the Campaign for Real Education, Chris McGovern, told The Times that “we need to break the dependence on digital technology and encourage young people to remain multiskilled.”

Moderation and the free speech debate

Barney Pite
-
0
Moderation and the free speech debate

If you haven’t heard of Quora, imagine Wikipedia meets LinkedIn, YahooAnswers all grown up, or Facebook with a brain. Think of a social media site where lawyers ask doctors questions about Christian doctrine, entrepreneurs market the latest products and the hottest ideas, and Mark Zuckerberg hunts for his next investment. Quora is social media at its best: a knowledge market for people with questions that only an expert can answer.

Quora is unusual on the social internet: it puts quality of content over quantity of users. Quora’s moderation strategy packs a serious punch – the administration responds to reports of policy violations within hours, at the latest. Site moderation is so stringent on Quora that the community has discussed whether moderation policies pay sufficient heed to freedom of speech. But what Quora has discovered is simple: if you want to curate high quality content, you need to moderate the conversation – or the people who have the expertise won’t share it.

In 2009, Adam D’Angelo and Charlie Cheever, two senior executives at Facebook, decided to start a website. Their project was founded on high ideals: D’Angelo and Cheever wanted to ‘share and grow the world’s knowledge’. Quora – the plural of ‘quorum’ and the name they eventually settled on – was all about quality: “The site naturally selects for high quality people,” remarked D’Angelo, in a 2010 interview. “A lot of people really like to answer questions, and they re- ally enjoy sharing their knowledge. Especially people who have valuable knowledge.”

Within a year, Quora’s impressive clientele included: Mark Zuckerberg, Mark Andressen, one of the most powerful venture capitalists in Silicon Valley, and Fred Wilson, a Wall Street investor with stakes in Twitter and Tumblr. The user base has continued to expand: now Quora counts Barack Obama, Hilary Clinton, Justin Trudeau, and Jimmy Wales among its number. A list of the most-viewed writers reads more like a roster of academia’s great and good than a series of internet celebrities: Richard Muller, a recipient of a MacArthur ‘Genius’ Fellowship and a physicist at Berkeley, Robert Frost, who works at NASA, and Ernest W Adams, a professor at Uppsala University in Sweden.

Quora’s high minded principles are reflected in the biographies of its founders. After attending Philips Exeter – an elite boarding school in Massachusetts, where his classmates included Zuckerberg, and he won national coding tournaments and Informatics Olympiads – D’Angelo went to Caltech, where he read Computer Science and competed as an international collegiate programmer. Charlie Cheever, his co-founder, worked for Amazon and Facebook before Quora. Before that, he was at Harvard.

In the years since its foundation, Quora has grown quickly: despite Quora’s drive to ‘optimise for quality’, the site now attracts 200 million unique viewers per month. A 2017 fundraising round returned a 1.8 billion USD valuation, double the company’s worth in 2014. And Quora has pushed for globalisation: users can access the platform in Spanish, French, German, and Italian, with Indonesian, Hindi, Japanese and Portuguese versions in the pipeline.

A fundamental of how Quora curates expertise is that it recognises that a free space isn’t necessarily a safe one. In order to foster informed and quality speech, you need to generate an environment which gives the users with real knowledge the confidence to come forward.

I spoke to Jonathan Brill, head of Writer Relations at Quora, about their moderation strategy. “Quora is about making people feel safe enough, so that they can share what they know with someone else who has a question,” he said. “It’s not enough for it to be technically available to everybody to share their knowledge, it also has to feel safe enough, or else only the incredibly thick-skinned, hostile and combative people will feel safe.”

The safety of the social internet is a hot topic. Today, when terrorists hatch plots on WhatsApp, extremists organise rallies on Twitter and elections are won on 4chan, what’s said online can resound much more widely than the confines of the platform. But to what extent should Silicon Valley’s titans decide which sounds resound? What are the guidelines by which Silicon Valley decides what is and isn’t fair? Should governments moderate Silicon Valley’s moderation process? Who watches the Watchmen?

For years, platform administrators kept their distance from the people who used their platforms, as more users created greater advertising revenues, and lax usage policies meant more users. But with the simultaneous rise of Donald Trump and an uber-politicised social media, administrative structures have started to weigh-in. In 2016, notorious provocateur Milo Yiannopoulous was permanently banned from Twitter after publicising abuse of Ghostbusters’ star Leslie Jones. More recently, in August of 2018, Spotify, Apple, Facebook, Vimeo and Youtube removed videos published by InfoWars’ Alex Jones. Online right-wing factions protested loudly, in both cases. Yiannopolous condemned the situation in Breitbart:“Anyone who cares about free speech has been sent a clear message: you’re not welcome on Twitter,” said Yiannopoulos. Stevan Crowder, a right-wing podcaster and blogger, Tweeted that: “An anti-free speech communication platform will lose its value’, in the wake of Yiannopoulos’ ban.

It would, however, be an exaggeration to describe Quora as opposed to free speech. Quora prioritises real expertise at the expense of totally open discourse: “Most of the brightest people in my life I would not describe as combative or eager to engage in online conflict,” said Jonathan. “They want to avoid conflict. That’s what smart people do. So if you want to provide a space for the smartest of smart people to share what they know, you have to eliminate the shenanigans that are present in most online spaces.” Eliminating shenanigans, for Quora, means putting all the power in the hands of the content creator. I asked Jonathan about Quora’s anti-trolling measures. “It feels like you have a lot of tools at your disposal,” he replied. “You can block the person, you can delete the comment, you could respond to it if you want, and you could go further and delete the whole thread and what they say at any point. It’s your answer; you wrote it, you own it.”

From the outside, Quora might sound like a dull and stuffy place, frequented by people with bigger egos than brains, but there’s a reason public figures with busy schedules and guarded agendas are drawn to the website. Quora curates quality expression in topics as broad as Jose Mourinho’s defensive football, and nuclear physics. Quora’s quality is seriously addictive, both if you’re writing or if you’re just reading. It’s easy to find the social internet vacuous; Quora adds some- thing fundamentally serious and considered.

When Quora had a critical mass of answers, questions, and users, its founders decided to make a change. BNBR (Be Nice, Be Respectful) became one of Quora core moderation principles. BNBR was controversial because the website seriously enforced it, banning a number of prominent users including Brooke Schwartz, due to alleged BNBR violations.

On Medium, a publishing platform and social journal- ism site, Schwartz wrote ‘[their] obsession with BNBR is turning Quora into a cesspool of crap and spam, especially considering they’re systematically banning all of their best users.’

Schwartz’s argument isn’t totally coherent, as a goal of Quora’s assiduous moderation program is to minimise exactly the sort of ‘crap and spam’ Schwartz sees all over Quora. But anything the site loses from BNBR, it certainly makes up for in users who like it.

I spoke to Andrew Weill, a tax lawyer from the San Francisco area, who writes about parenting, atheism, politics, and the law, for an audience of almost 60 thousand followers. When asked how Quora facilitated good quality content, he responded simply: “BNBR. That’s less about the Quora enforcement, which is spotty, and more about the fact that the site attracts people who like BNBR and set it as their normative standard.”

People have argued that both this insistence upon BNBR, and its totally writer-centric approach to moderation, infringe upon freedom of speech: “Quora, instead of allowing free speech, act [sic] like a bunch of censoring Nazis,” wrote Gregory Smith, a banned second amendment-supporter, on his blog. Philip Pillali, a student from New York, described a BNBR decision as “a targeted attempt to silence an answer that disagreed with the views of the moderators of the platform.”

Yet, Quora’s mission – to curate a virtual space for the dissemination of expertise – is one that attracts people who’ll Be Nice and Be Respectful without being asked. BNBR exists because the kind of user Quora wants to attract likes it, and they won’t post on the site unless a policy of its kind is in place. Again: smart people want to avoid conflict online, they don’t want their expertise challenged or insulted by nameless online trolls. “Without a concerted effort to enforce BNBR policies,” wrote Jim Watkins, a Canadian writer with four and a half million total views, “Quora would not be a forum I would spend any time on.” “Without the rule of BNBR, Quora would devolve into name-calling and nastiness. It would become the home of crackpots and kooks,” said Peter Flom, a statistical consultant with 74 thousand followers.

And support for BNBR isn’t necessarily politically one-sided. I spoke with Matthew Bates, a teacher from Chicago. With 70.5 million views and 63 thousand followers under his belt, Bates is the best known conservative on a site that leans to the left. “The ability to delete comments on your posts and block people helps,” said Bates. “Also the ability of everyone to report people for harassment helps a lot.”

A safe space is good for everyone who is taking the site seriously: it doesn’t infringe upon free speech to enforce rules which ensure the platform’s broader quality. And Quora doesn’t see itself as a website designed to foster the discourse that an open forum encourages. “Discourse is more of a byproduct of a lot of people on Quora feeling safe enough to share their knowledge,” said Jonathan. If you disagree with someone, write your own answer. But a writer’s space is theirs to control, and if they want to delete your comment or block you, they are free to do so.

This moderation style is hardly the online norm. “I’m confident that we spend a lot more time thinking about it and per our overall budget we spend a lot more on trying to solve that problem,” said Brill, when asked about how his competitors moderated. “And the rea- son is very simple. Economically, if we want to be the best place to share your knowledge, again, the kind of people we want to get to do that, on Quora, just aren’t going to do it if they feel threatened.”

Quora isn’t ignorant of historical biases, either: they recognise the groups who’ve been worst treated in the academic and discursive space. Brill observes that: “women and minorities are targeted and harassed on various platforms on the internet by people that are using pseudonyms. We’re more diligent than most about making sure it doesn’t happen and about responding quickly when it does.” The site enforces a real name policy – it’s possible to ask a question anonymously, but to ensure informed and quality content, and to show that the writer knows what they’re talking about, an account has to be in the user’s own name.

When a prominent and popular user admitted that he was writing under a pseudonym, his account was blocked, despite having legions of fans. If writers can hide under the veil of anonymity, they can say what they want, without the risk of reputational damage. Quality communication requires honesty. The trade- off that Quora has made isn’t straightforward. The Internet is funded by advertisers who put the quantity of attention drawn above quality. Nevertheless, Quora has become a place to go if you need to find something out, providing valuable expertise when you need it most. They moderate harshly, because they need to – an informed space demands an amnesty on abuse.

Quora is different from other sites on the internet, but the changes they’ve implemented demonstrate lessons about the nature of communication, both online and not. We’d all do well to remember that.

 

 

The Inaugural Women’s Oxford Boxing Match: Preview

-
0
The Inaugural Women’s Oxford Boxing Match: Preview

Oxford’s first ever female boxing event will take place on Saturday 17th November at the Iffley road sport centre.

The match will see the women of Oxford University’s Amateur Boxing Club compete against tough competition from across the nation, with boxers coming from as far afield as Cornwall and Essex.

The OUABC women’s team is currently one of the strongest female squads in the country, and the match will see Oxford’s best and brightest compete across eight senior and two junior bouts.

The OUABC roster looks particularly strong this year, featuring the newly crowned Amateur Boxing Association champion and 2018 Blue, Lydia Welham, whose last opponent asked for the match to be stopped after one of Welham’s ferocious punches, as well as OUABC women’s co-captain, Rachel Wheatley, herself a Blue in 2017 and a BUCS silver medallist.

Accompanying these two stand out boxers are veterans of the fiercely contested annual ‘Town vs Gown’ match, OUABC president Indie Walker, women’s co-captain Ella Penny and Sofia Lindqvist will be looking to dazzle once again under the bright lights, following strong performances at the event last year.

The match also sees the return of Zoey Zhang, who will enter the ring after a brief hiatus following the 2017 ‘Town vs Gown’.

In addition to the experienced fighters of OUABC, the Oxford Women’s Boxing Match will see two new boxers blooded when Kaya Axelson and Jessica Lee enter the ring to spar in their first ever Amateur Boxing matches.

In addition to the senior bouts, there will be a series of junior fights, which will give the crowd a chance to see the up and coming talent that the club possesses.

Indie Walker, OUABC president, told Cherwell “The women’s team is the strongest it has ever been. We’re training twice a day most days and we’re ready to smash this match. The workouts have been gruelling but we’re all glad the event is now within reach.”

The match looks set to be a historic occasion for OUABC and offers the rare chance to see boxers of such high quality fighting competitively in Oxford.

The weight of inheritance

Becky Cook
-
0
The weight of inheritance

When we express our love for a piece of culture, we will often hoard vintage posters, hunt out first edition books, stack piles of vinyl and CDs, or seek original paintings in museums.

But some fans take their love further, transforming themselves from enthusiasts into devotees by visiting the sites their favourite artists and writers once graced.

Their ‘cultural pilgrimage’ manifests in different ways – for fans of The Beatles, it is a visit to Abbey Road, for fans of Oscar Wilde, it is kissing his grave in Paris with bright red lipstick. But the act of journeying, of actively seeking out a destination like a pilgrim, remains the same.

Jungian thinkers structure pilgrimages into three stages: the release from the conventions of home, the spiritual renewal at the destination, and the return journey in which the pilgrim leaves something of themselves behind and takes something of the site back with them.

It is an ethos of transfer, a movement in which one physically ends up at the same point but spiritually transcends one’s former self.

But in secular terms, the cultural pilgrims who pose in front of Abbey Road or kiss Oscar Wilde’s grave do not hope for some kind of life-altering shift in perspective, or even necessarily a new interpretation of Abbey Road or The Picture of Dorian Gray. Rather, it seems cultural pilgrims attempt to cling onto the vestiges these artists leave behind.

In the absence of ever being able to meet Oscar Wilde, standing at his grave is the next best thing, the closest they will ever get to the man himself, both physically and emotionally. A false sense of intimacy is cultivated, in which the pilgrim feels a familiarity that is necessarily one-sided.

This promise of intimacy or rebirth fits well with the idea of religious pilgrimage, as the objects in that case are supposedly endowed with a transcendental force; they become gateways to an otherwise inaccessible spiritual beyond.

But for the cultural pilgrim, a grave is just a grave – there is no communing with a spiritual deity involved. It seems that our obsession with these objects and places is therefore rooted in the cult of the artist, rather than being an exercise in self-discovery.

This cult has proliferated through Western culture thanks to the iconography of languishing geniuses cultivated by the Romantics. Just as historically, pilgrimages drew people to sites and artifacts they believed were imbued with sacred or mystical power, we believe that the mere presence of an artist imbues a site with some mystic mark that is emotionally potent yet physically untraceable.

The artist has the ability to transform something as mundane as a zebra crossing or as common as a local pub – things that are not unique in themselves – into sites of devotion, pulling people from all over the world in a magnetic lurch.

This kind of thinking inscribes a ghostliness within these places, as cultural pilgrims enter a negotiation with a vestige, a reckoning with their own envisioning of an inaccessible past. But soon the cult of the artist expands into a cult of tradition. Objects of pilgrimage are, after all, only what they are because of their popularity. We love to replicate the image of The Beatles on Abbey Road and then let it fly through other people’s Facebook timelines and Instagram feeds.

Perhaps what the cultural pilgrim brings back from their destination, then, is not some kind of spiritual rebirth, but visual evidence of proximity to the iconic.

The cultural economy of the latter half of the twentieth century meant images such as the sleeve of Abbey Road proliferated throughout mass culture to no end, and with our tendency towards distributing images of ourselves on social media, engaging with these kind of traditions may merely signify a further participation within this economy.

Putting on red lipstick and kissing Oscar Wilde’s grave is a bizarre act when stripped of the curtains of tradition surrounding it. To do so seems to say more about a desire to be part of a tradition, than it does about the way individuals choose to express affection for a dead artist.

By leaving our lipstick stains behind, we are trying to appropriate a larger moment in cultural history. It is not enough to want to be intimate with the artist – we want to become part of their legacy as well.

Sometimes being at Oxford feels like being a cultural pilgrim. In my first meeting with my tutor, she told me to feel “haunted’ by being here, to feel the weight of inheritance – the inheritance of a thousand-year history of intellectual distinction”– despite the enormous cultural chasm between Oxford at its conception and Oxford now. But perhaps that is what we look for when we turn ourselves into cultural pilgrims – being part of that haunting weight of an irretrievable, inaccessible past.

Loveable rogues: why we love a good villain

-
2
Loveable rogues: why we love a good villain

The old proverb that a hero is only as great as their villain is a valid concept. In order to understand a villain, we must first understand they are only half of a whole. A binary shared with a hero, where they coexist and depend on one other. Good versus evil. Light versus dark. Protagonist versus antagonist. A dichotomy perfectly captured in Jekyll and Hyde, or more recently in this month’s Venom. Two opposing sides wrestling for control.

So what then qualifies as a great villain? Is it the capability to commit pure evil and show no signs of redemption? Agent Smith, Alien, Predator and the T-1000 are all considered to be relentless killing machines and among the most famous villains standing the test of time. But whilst they are distinctly identifiable as villains, does this black and white approach necessarily make them great? The Joker, arguably the greatest villain of all time, thrives on anarchy and nihilism. But he is not totally dislikeable.

His one redeeming quality is the humanity he displays towards Batman, and the equal status he gives to his nemesis. The Joker is inherently flawed by an inability to permanently kill his adversary, which perfectly personifies how both villains and heroes cannot exist without their antithesis. This by no means makes him less of an effective villain. On the contrary, for a man so hellbent on wreaking chaos, it adds a level of understanding to a character whose backstory remains as ambiguous as his endgame.

This, ironically, is something which Joaquin Phoenix’s upcoming standalone film could potentially undermine. By giving the Joker an origin story, a name, a human identity, you suddenly make him comprehensible; but the whole purpose of his character is to thrive on nonsensical actions. The ambiguity surrounding the Joker is what ultimately makes him so compelling to watch, because viewers cannot unpick his thought processes.

I have seen many rankings that place Darth Vader as the greatest villain of all time. And yet by the end of Return of the Jedi, can he even be labelled as such after slam-dunking Emperor Palpatine into the Death Star reactor?

He proves once and for all that he is the Chosen One and finally gets round to bringing balance to the force. While this is a classic example of villains performing heroic deeds, this metamorphosis is becoming increasingly recognisable in contemporary films and television.

We need only take Loki, the villain who broke free from the stereotype of Marvel villains being underdeveloped, and became a tortured soul torn between his selfish ambitions and his family loyalties. By Infinity War, he too was willing to risk everything in order to protect his brother.

Even on the small screen, despicable characters like Jaime Lannister and Negan, who each started off as an incestuous Prince Charming and an eccentric psychopath respectively, are being given stays of execution in order to give them a well rounded arc of redemption.

This sense of completion, revealing more humanity to characters than we might initially consider, simply makes for more engaging drama.And so it seems that villains aren’t considered great because of their lack of humanity, but rather because of their humanity.

While the Daleks and Cybermen are perhaps the most famous Doctor Who villains, the most effective is without doubt the Master, whom has a philosophical stance and sympathisable characteristics which makes him not just a threat, but also a well developed character.

Similarly, Thanos, the being who took the universe’s overpopulation issue into his own hands (quite literally) is only tolerable because he isn’t selfish. He is quite possibly the most selfless person to have ever existed, not caring about personal perceptions and instead focusing on the pragmatism of what’s at stake.

Some films, meanwhile, prefer to keep us completely in the dark about who we should be rooting for. Sicario is critically hailed for its consistent moral shapeshifting, leaving it to the audience to decipher whether there is a clear hero or villain, or whether we are simply left with characters who are inherently human.

What we are seeing nowadays is a preference to shift away from the clear cut binary of heroes and villains. We live in a time of antiheroes like Walter White, Jax Teller, Rick Grimes and Thomas Shelby, whose villainous actions are depicted as a response to their individual circumstances.

So if we can understand the reasons driving a character’s choices, we can connect with their journey and even if we don’t endorse it, we can empathise with where they are coming from. Which is undoubtedly why it is so thrilling to watch an underappreciated chemistry teacher turn into one of the most dangerous drug dealers to ever grace the state of Albuquerque. Not even Thanos poisoned children.

 

1...682683684...2,517Page 683 of 2,517

Support Student Journalism

Cherwell is Oxford’s oldest independent newspaper, established in 1920. We are entirely student-run. By supporting us, you will contribute to keeping our paper in print and online. Every donation makes a difference.

Donate

Explore

Follow us

More

Oxford Student Publications Limited © 2025 - All Rights Reserved | Privacy Policy

Website by James Ashley