Tuesday 22nd July 2025
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Matt Ridley on ice ages, bird watching and cultural evolution

Calum Stephenson
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Matt Ridley on ice ages, bird watching and cultural evolution

What made you decide to study zoology at Oxford?

I was a passionate naturalist from the age of about ten, having been introduced to birdwatching by my father. Birdwatching got me into natural history and natural history got me into the biological sciences. A zoology degree represented the chance to study animals and animal behaviour—I just saw it as a way of studying my hobby I suppose. But I had done enough biology to realise by then that the concepts of evolution and genetics were absolutely huge ideas, and why would one not want to spend one’s time looking at huge ideas?

You’ve been actively involved in science communication for several decades now. Has the general public’s perception of science changed since your time at Oxford?

I think these things do change, but possibly they don’t change as much as we think they do. There was a little bit of a revolution going on when I joined science journalism in terms of saying, “Hang on a minute, genetic engineering is happening, microchips are happening, we’ve got to explain these things to our readers”.

When I joined The Economist, a man named Richard Casement had gone to the editor and said “Look, it’s absurd that we don’t have a section of this magazine devoted to science and technology, will you let me start one?”. He started out by doing some fantastic basic explanatory things: what a silicon chip was, what genetic engineering was. He’d get right into the nuts and bolts of scientific ideas.

For me, getting really deep into what causes ice ages and so on has always been the fascination. This allows you to have a debate with your reader about something that is both esoteric and complicated, but explainable if you use good metaphors. You don’t want to patronise so instead you simplify. That’s what I’ve always wanted to do, whereas an awful lot of what passes for science journalism just very quickly scoots straight over the science part, then goes straight to the politics of this specific scientific issue. There is a market out there for curiosity about the world and not everything has to have a political angle.

In the opening of your TED talk, ‘When Ideas have sex’, you talk about how often scientifi c concerns are blown out of proportion. Whose fault is this?

I’ve seen this happen again and again, whether it’s on GM foods, fracking, climate change, the ozone layer… Often there is a real problem, but also a degree of exaggeration and indeed hysteria. I think the blame lies partially with the media which will always report sensationalist, exaggerated versions of the truth.

But there is another group called pressure groups, the NGOs, who often play a very large role in hotting these things up. We’ve seen it with Friends of the Earth being rebuked by the Advertising Standards Authority this month for mistaking the risks of fracking. There is quite a big industry of that going on, more than there was 30 years ago.

Those are the two main culprits in my view, but scientists have to take some of the blame themselves, because the temptation to exaggerate the problem and therefore increase your own funding is definitely real, to the extent that if you publish a paper saying that “Actually this problem is not as bad as people think”, then you are at some [level] threatening the budget for your own work. But I don’t think it is quite as cynical as that in the minds of most scientists.

Science at its best consists of Professor A saying “This is a problem” and Professor B saying “Nonsense, you’ve put a decimal point in the wrong place”. For me, science works when everyone is pushing their own agenda, with their agendas often in different directions.

In your TED talk you go on to discuss the evolution of human culture, emphasising the importance of exchange between cultures. What makes exchange so important?

I’m convinced that the invention of exchange—me giving you a fishhook and you giving me a fish—may have played a very large part in the development of modern human society and in the sudden explosion of prosperity that we have seen in the last 200,000 years. The argument comes from a lot of fields: psychology, anthropology, biology, economics and the understanding of the non-zero sum nature through which both sides benefit. The more you specialise then the more exchange you can do, the more you can exchange, the more you can specialise.

You can look at more recent archaeology to see what’s happening on islands like Tasmania where people were isolated for 10,000 years: culture went ‘backwards’, became ‘simpler’. So for me the blindingly obvious elephant in the room that a lot of anthropologist have neglected is the role of exchange in driving culture.

What particularly intrigues me is that when you look in the animal kingdom this kind of exchange of diff erent things at the same time, rather than the same things at different times, is virtually unique to human beings, with some very minor exceptions. It’s also apparently unique to modern human beings, with quite good evidence beginning to accumulate that Neanderthals didn’t do this. They only ever used local materials for their tools, implying there was no exchange over long distances. I think that exchange is the key to understanding the modern revolution of 200,000 years ago. It’s all about how intelligence became collective and cumulative.

Do you have any advice to young students looking to get into writing and journalism?

It’s not as easy as it used to be because the revenues of the media have dried up almost completely, thanks to Google. There is much less opportunity for professional careers in journalism than there used to be. That’s, I’m afraid, a rather depressing thought. It means that a lot more journalism is amateur. Through mediums such as social media people can contribute in all sorts of ways, so it’s a much more open profession in that sense, but I would be wary of making it a whole career rather do it alongside something else.

Margo Price live at the Bullingdon

Emily Beswick
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Margo Price live at the Bullingdon

A few minutes before Margo Price comes on stage, I find myself talking to a friendly man from Birmingham. He tells me that the last time he saw Price—with her previous band, Buffalo Clover—the audience consisted of four people, “including the support”. What a difference a critically-acclaimed debut album makes: tonight, the country singer packs out the Bullingdon on one stage of a 2017 solo tour that will take her across the UK and America.

Price’s voice has been compared by many to Loretta Lynn in her heyday, and it sounds even more striking live. After the obligatory opening beer, she launches into a slow intro to ‘Tennessee Song’, the long, held notes showcasing a compelling blend of raspiness and crystal-clear expression. The versatility of her voice is underlined in a new song, ‘Taught Me With Your Eyes’, which sees her convey vulnerability over a steady waltz beat.

The four-strong band gives her songs a richer sound than on the record, with the pedal steel and her husband Jeremy Ivey’s harmonica adding a quintessential country twang. Declaring “I’m never going back to Florida unless it’s to see Mickey Mouse”, Price dives into ‘Desperate and Depressed’, a rant about a disastrous time on the road. The walking bass and pounding drum beat give an angry edge to the repeated cry “I’m desperate and depressed/Ain’t it a mess”.

You’d forgive Price for playing a set list full of her celebrated 2016 album Hands of Time, but she defies that expectation. “Who wants to hear some shitkicking country music?” she shouts at the start of ‘Paper Cowboy’, an old-school honkytonk tune reminiscent of Hank Williams. At one point, she even leaves the stage, allowing the band to play a completely instrumental number alone, as if we were in a Nashville country bar.

Homages to classic country and rock artists abound. In the night’s most intimate moment, she duets with her husband’s guitar accompaniment on Dolly Parton’s ‘Jolene’. Then, with just a tambourine and her voice, Price leads the audience in a stirring rendition of Janis Joplin’s bluesy ‘Mercedes Benz’.

Previously, Price has criticised lazy and stereotypical media comparisons to female country singers: she told Rolling Stone, “I feel kind of like one of the men. I’m like David Allan Coe. I’ve been to prison, man!” Her song ‘Weekender’— based on a weekend stint in jail— is one of the most popular songs of the night, a masterpiece of catchy hooks and tragicomic observations. To cheers she recounts writing the song in her cell, on a piece of crossword puzzle paper and a smuggled pencil.

In a similar spirit, she dynamically covers Merle Haggard’s ‘Red Bandana’ and Johnny Cash’s ‘Big River’ with the kind of gusto reserved for true devotees.

The gig is at times unpolished—the transitions are occasionally awkward, as Price does not quite have the technique of filling in gaps with conversation perfectly practised. The flipside of this is extraordinarily raw moments such as in the climax of ‘Hurtin’ on the Bottle’, when Price dashes off the stage and into the audience. Forming a circle, she dances enthusiastically with the crowd in one of the most astonishing crowd interactions I’ve ever seen.

Price continues to surprise with her encore. She covers Kris Kristofferson’s classic ‘Me and Bobby McGee’ with a piece of beautiful staging: she starts the song alone with a guitar, before her band gradually join her on stage and together build the song to a thrilling culmination. After ‘Four Years of Chances’, a blues-influenced original song with an alluring bass line, she concludes with Rodney Crowell’s ‘I Ain’t Living Long Like This’. While the band pounds out rocky rhythms, Price bounds across the stage with her tambourine, completely absorbed in the moment.

There is a final thunderous chord, a beat, and rapturous applause. The audience, and I, are left in no doubt that Margo Price is much, much more than her bestselling album.

Profile: Michael Gove

Fred Dimbleby
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Profile: Michael Gove

The British people “have had enough of experts”. It was the defining moment of a referendum campaign that was not exactly limited in defining moments. It has come to signify the success of the Brexit vote, the success of Donald Trump and the rise of populist, mostly right wing, leaders around the world. Comically, it was a mistake.

Michael Gove never meant that the people had had enough of experts but rather that they had had enough of experts with “acronyms” who get it “consistently wrong”. Gove managed to cause not only a day of news, but also a legacy of many months, because he was cut off before he explained fully what he meant.

When I talk to Gove he seems to have forgotten about his lack of belief in experts. He believes that government education policy, in relation to Grammar Schools, was “driven by the evidence about what works” and that it would be more preferable to be “guided by the data rather than ideology”. Regardless of issues of misquoting, this certainly resembles a shift from his words on the Sky sofa during the referendum debate.

Indeed, a lot has changed since the end of the referendum campaign. David Cameron has resigned, Theresa May has replaced him, Boris Johnson has got a job at the Foreign Office and Gove has moved from a prominent place in the cabinet to the back benches, after his botched attempt to win the leadership of the Tory party.

Publicly, he seems to have decided that that part of his political, and personal, life is no longer one that should be discussed in interviews such as this. When I ask him about his long relationship with Boris Johnson, which spans all the way back to their presidencies of the Oxford Union, Johnson in 1986 and Gove in 1988, he says that he has “taken a vow of silence” on that particular subject.

Gove is an optimist at heart. It seems that he can see some sort of light in every situation. Despite having supported Hillary Clinton during the campaign, he says he has adapted and now sees promise in the presidency of Donald Trump. He suspects that “President Trump will be a different proposition from candidate Trump” and that, despite understanding popular concerns with the president, it is Trump’s aim for people to “look clear sightedly at what he is doing in the presidency rather than necessarily taken as read the assumptions that were generated from the campaign trail.”

We are yet to see whether Gove will be right, and initial actions by the new administration may call into question his optimism. But, in Gove’s mind, political adaptation is the key to this new relationship in order to secure the best deal for Britain as possible. For him, there needs to be no “romance to the relationship” but rather a more pragmatic “strong and businesslike” manner in its proceedings.

Pragmatism may be a defining aspect of Gove’s political ideology. When I raise concerns about whether, in order to gain a trade deal, the British Government should dismiss political decency he replies that political gains can be secured, whilst keeping to the standards of moral decency, through a policy that can only be described as non-embarressment.

In other words, keeping concerns about another government quiet and pressuring that government in private, rather than in public. He cites an example of dealings that he had with Saudi Arabia, when he held the justice brief. He said that he “wanted to ensure that the British Government, and my ministerial colleagues agreed with me, adhered to certain standards but in ensuring that those standards were adhered to, quite a lot of time, we had to exert private pressure rather than public pressure.” He made a calculated decision to limit public criticism of Saudi Arabia, and instead influence from the inside, and believes that that is how Theresa May should, and indeed will, handle the ‘special relationship’ during Trump’s presidency.

Pleasingly, Gove will take a joke at his own expense. When I ask him about whether we are in greater political turmoil now than ever before, he alludes to the “rage of party during the time of Queen Anne” and “the way in which the Victorian house of commons operated”. When I quote John Crace who said that Gove’s chat with Trump was “the interview of the century” he laughs and remarks immediately that he thinks it may have been a bit “tongue-in-cheek”. Similarly, he jokes that “many people might be very relieved” that he “has never been a minister charged with foreign relations”. You will not find any of the egocentrism of many of his political contemporaries in Gove.

However, he seems to have developed a knack for convincing himself of the purity of his side of the debate. For him, people should not be more afraid of Theresa May’s perceived shift to the right in her period as Prime Minister as she is in fact “more left-wing than some of her conservative predecessors”. Similarly, when I ask about Trump’s interpretation of Brexit’s cause as the idea that “people don’t want to have other people coming in and destroying their country”, Gove dismisses it immediately. “I think that his analysis of the reasons behind Brexit is incorrect,” he says. “Migration is a factor…but certainly not the driver that he thinks it was.”  Indeed, he sees the arguments for Brexit as being “solid and robust” and dismisses any recent attempts to discredit them.

I ask about his recent use of the word ‘snowflake’ on Twitter when responding to concerns about Boris Johnson’s recent speech linking Francois Hollande to World War Two. Gove dismisses the linkage of the word to the alt-right and to a modern type of hate politics. He says that he “came across the term in a marvellous book by my friend Claire Fox” and that he “wasn’t aware that this phrase…had that particular genealogy”. Although Fox’s book certainly brought the word into wider usage, it has mostly been used as a pejorative term, especially during the presidential campaign.

It reduces the very serious concerns of many students and members of our generation to simple wimpiness or an unwillingness to engage. Yet Gove seems to have removed the context from the word believing that it is appropriate to use that sort of language online and yet still presenting himself as the epitome of politeness in public debate.

We finish the interview by discussing the future of his political and journalistic career. He does not view a return to mainstream, front bench, politics as a likely possibility in the upcoming months. He says he’s “very happy being a back bench MP” and thinks he will be “spending a good few years on the back benches yet”.

Review: John Hodge’s ‘Collaborators’

Bessie Yuill
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Review: John Hodge’s ‘Collaborators’

Oxford Innovative Theatre’s new version of John Hodge’s Soviet satire at the Pilch provided a fascinating balance of dark humour and surreal tragedy. Based on the real-life association between the writer Mikhail Bulgakov and Stalin, this play reimagines the dictator’s admiration for the often subversive artist as a Faustian bargain between the two, and portrays Bulgakov’s descent into the moral complications of associating with the Kremlin as Stalin increasingly occupies his art.

The scenes I previewed showcased Miranda Collins as Bulgakov’s concerned wife Yelena, Callum Coghlan’s comically sympathetic officer Vladimir, Sophie Badman as the officer’s wife, Alex Rugman as morally astute friend Vassily and Rupert Stonehill as fellow subversive artist Grigory. They interacted with a playful humour which was undercut by a sense of the paranoia surrounding the Kremlin and those artists that questioned it. The contrast of the setting—Bulgakov’s flat in Moscow—with the mentioned tragedies of Russian peasants also demonstrated the creeping darkness surrounding the artist’s dilemmas. The supporting cast appears to be excellent at conjuring this precarious, nightmarish version of a society comedy, while unaware of the precise danger that Bulgakov is in. The main draw, however, must of course be the two leads.

The balance of opposites in Rory Fraser and Joe Peden, playing Bulgakov and Stalin respectively, brings the central premise to enthralling, darkly comic life. The initially pleasant and relaxed demeanour of Peden’s Stalin threatens to break through to brutal aggression at any moment, creating a tense unease for the audience which would not exist if they were merely shown the cliched statesman figure that the name ‘Stalin’ conjures.

Fraser as Bulgakov captures a nervous intellectual perfectly: originally preoccupied with his artistry but increasingly haunted by the mounting moral conundrums. The scene between the two characters in Act 2 that I was shown played their conversation as cat-and-mouse manipulation, as the power shifted between them until Bulgakov caved. The casting serves this dynamic absolutely and charges their dynamic with a compelling contrast.

The tensions underlying the fast-paced wit are created equally by the script and the cast, and the chilling joviality of the play’s humorous moments are sure to amuse and disturb an audience. This play of paranoia and double-meanings delivers the promise of its ambiguous title, and makes you consider loyalties both artistic and political—but don’t be put off if you don’t know much about Russian history, as you’re guaranteed an incredible time with this surreal interpretation anyway.

Collaborators showed at the Pilch Studio from Wednesday 25 – Saturday 28 January.

1st Week News Summary

Cherwell Broadcasting
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1st Week News Summary

CherwellTV takes you through the headlines from First Week.

Do not limit the aims of the Women’s March

Susannah Goldsbrough
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Do not limit the aims of the Women’s March

Last Saturday, on the first full day of Donald Trump’s presidency, women’s Marches took place across the globe, from the city at the heart of it all, Washington DC, to countries as diverse as Thailand and the Bahamas.The mood in London was upbeat, optimistic even. Mothers pushed toddlers in prams, fathers strolled along, hand in hand with their daughters, and people of all ages and genders belted out pop songs, blasted over the crowd on loud speakers. It was a reassuring assertion of liberal ideas and feminist solidarity on a very disturbing day.

Yet strangely, over the last few days, liberals, feminists and people I generally consider rational have erupted in scandalised condemnation of the marchers as opponents of democracy. Janice Turner wrote in the Times that “this rally feels anti-democratic” because “Trump won”, while Rod Liddle, in a particularly nasty piece for the same news- paper, accused marchers of “approv[ing] of democracy only when the people [they] like are elected.”

Liddle is certainly qualified to critique the legitimacy of a feminist movement. His credentials include a 2009 piece for the Spectator, which began: “So—Harriet Harman, then. Would you? I mean after a few beers obviously, not while you were sober” and for which he would later have to apologise. Thank you for airing your views, Rod. Feminists worldwide are always fascinated to hear what you have to say.

While obviously few of the detractors are as unpalatable as Liddle, their arguments are nonetheless flawed. The marchers had plenty to say, none of which was antidemocratic. Their protest was not, as Turner claimed, “against the election result itself” or even specifically against Donald Trump. What these men and women were standing up against was an America whose priorities have become so skewed that 46 per cent of the electorate voted to make a man, who pointed at GOP rival Carly Fiorina and said “Look at that face! Would anyone vote for that?”, their president.

One media outfit that made the radical journalistic decision to actually ask protestors what they were protesting about—the much maligned BBC—identified calls for “racial and gender equality, affordable healthcare, abortion rights and voting rights” as key issues under threat from the Trump presidency. British marchers identified a wide range of issues on the table, including “anti-immigration feeling, the refugee crisis and Irish and Northern Irish women being denied access to abortion”.

One marcher, Erica Wald, summed it up well. She said that she was protesting against “the normalisation of Donald Trump” and by that, I think she means, the normalisation of his terrifying views. Not against Trump himself – that would be fruitless – and not against his assumption of office – that would be antidemocratic. Against a culture that produced 59.4 million voters who accept what he stands for as normal, or as necessary, or even as desirable.

The website for The Women’s March on London describes itself as “a grassroots movement of women to assert the positive values that the politics of fear denies”. Trump’s victory proved a “catalyst” for a conversation about all kinds of issues; it is not the issue itself. More than that, these marches were not entirely issue-based, they were symbolic.

Because on Friday, I sat down to dinner in college and everyone around me was just, well, sad. But on Saturday, people lined the streets and cheered each other, for being feminist, open-minded and undefeated. We needed some hope for democracy last weekend and that’s what the women’s marches provided. Please don’t do them down.

Blind Date: Rosie and Tom

Cherwell Life
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Blind Date: Rosie and Tom

Rosie

Somewhat uncharacteristically, I turned up five minutes early. This provided ample time to try to Facebook stalk my date, without much success (I blame the Turf’s poor internet connection, and to a lesser extent, the fact that I didn’t know his surname). After spending a couple of minutes deliberating which out of the two seemingly lost guys I should walk up to, Tom resolved the situation by coming up to me and introducing himself. This created a calm and laid-back atmosphere that lessened the inherent awkwardness of a blind date. We managed to talk for two hours without too many or too long uncomfortable silences, touching on ideal, but unlikely, exam topics for lawyers, Persian history, and Sergio Leone films. We even realised that we had a compatible taste in music (read: I actually knew who he was talking about).

Out of ten: 8

Looks? 7.5

Personality? Very agreeable (tolerated incessant sarcastic chatter)

Second date? We didn’t exchange numbers

Tom

Having never been on a blind date before, I entered into this with a certain amount of trepidation. Fortunately though, despite some slight initial confusion recognising each other, the evening was rather fun. Rosie was a pleasure to talk to, and we soon discovered a shared appreciation for classical music, in particular for Beethoven. It was good fun sharing in the usual sordid of tales of tutorials gone wrong and embarrassing encounters with tutors, and her sense of humour made the whole thing very enjoyable. The pub did have a tendency to get rather loud, which occasionally made hearing each other a little difficult, but overall I found the whole thing to be very entertaining. Alas, all good things must come to an end, and a need to prepare for early morning tutorials forced a conclusion to the date but, all things considered, it was a very pleasant evening.

Out of ten: 7

Looks? Attractive

Personality? Easy-going with a good sense of humour

Second date? Another drink as friends perhaps

 

The strange death of globalisation

Alfie Steer
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The strange death of globalisation

A lot can happen in a year. For the past thirty it seemed as though the west, and indeed most of the developed world, was moving towards one single destination: an increasingly interconnected, globalised, consumerist society. Liberal, democratic, multicultural, and metropolitan.

A destination of such political inevitability that even Francis Fukuyama was willing to describe the capitalist liberal democracies of the west as the end points of human development, the end of history as we know it. Any threat to the inevitable march of globalisation, be it from the anti-capitalists, religious fundamentalists, nationalists and fascists, were all cast to the side lines, knocked down by the waves of lattes and cosmopolitan liberalism. But history isn’t always linear.

The political shockwaves of Donald Trump and Brexit have not only shaken the very foundations of the mainstream political establishment, but have diverged the course of history in the west.

Perhaps more than at any point since the Second World War, we face uncertainty, and impending calamity. The populist rhetoric of demagogues, tapping into the deep frustrations of large swathes of the population has seen the greatest kickback against globalisation ever. It is no surprise, that with the rise of the Neo-Fascist Alt-Right, and the shocking increase in racist incidents on both sides of the Atlantic, many have sounded the death knell of globalisation completely.

It is undeniable that the death of globalisation—in its current incarnation at least—has been delivered by its victims. The white working classes have felt little more than a sense of complete abandonment over the past thirty years at the hands of globalisation, stripped of their sources of lifelong employment, and thrusted into alienating and precarious service-sector jobs and zero hours’ contracts.

Deprived of a voice through harsh trade union laws, and marginalised by a system that values the south over the north, the urban over the rural, the white collar over the blue collar; is it any surprise that they seized the first promise of radical change offered up to them? The most bitter irony of all, however, is that those they have rewarded and empowered in this kickback, the rich white males of Nigel Farage and Donald Trump, will be anything but the champions of the forgotten that they shamelessly claim to be.

The death of globalisation will no doubt be greeted both by joy and terror. But that is not to say that the idealistic values of it are doomed. The liberal globalised society that rewarded and marginalised millions in equal number has been cast off and replaced with the most nationalistic collection of odious demagogues since the Second World War.

Those that have given them power, often out of sheer despair at the political status quo, will not be rewarded for their contribution. We as progressives must recognise its faults and failures, and why people rejected it, but we must never fall into despair or give into the pseudo-fascism of the old right.

Though globalisation in its rampant, unregulated and unequal form may be dead, its immensely positive values, the core, fundamental beliefs of solidarity, democracy and progress that made it a fundamental force for good, as flawed as it was, can and must continue to be championed. The very future of the west depends on it.

Professors and politicians awarded honorary degrees by Oxford University

Lucy Enderby
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Professors and politicians awarded honorary degrees by Oxford University

Seven people are to be awarded honorary doctorate degrees from Oxford University at Encaenia, the annual honorary degree presentation.

The recipients this year are Dr Robert Darnton, Professor Eugene Braunwald, Professor Joan Argetsinger Steitz, Professor Judith Weir, Bryan A. Stevenson and Baroness Shirley Williams. This is in recognition of their achievements in their fields, and are subject to approval from the congregation.

Bryan A. Stevenson, who is an attorney and Professor at New York University school of Law, founded the Equal Justice Initiative, a private non-profit law organisation, which focuses on defending those who may have been denied effective representation or fallen victim to racial bias. He is to be awarded with an honorary doctorate of civil law at the end of this academic year. Previously, he has received honorary degrees from universities such as Yale, Princeton, and the University of Pennsylvania, as well as several other awards for the work in his field.

Stevenson told Cherwell: “I am deeply honored and humbled by this unexpected recognition from Oxford University. As one of the world’s most prestigious universities, it will be a singular and distinct privilege to be awarded this degree. However, I am most grateful that Oxford would recognize someone who works on behalf of the incarcerated, condemned and marginalized.”

The composer and Master of the Queen’s Music, Judith Weir, is to become a doctor of music. She was resident composer with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra in the 1990s. In addition, the Boston Symphony Orchestra, the Minnesota Orchestra, and the London Sinfonietta have also commissioned work from Weir.

She told Cherwell: “I admire Oxford University, particularly in the present era for its excellence in the teaching of my own subject, musical composition. So, should the proposal to award me an honorary degree be approved by Congregation at the end of this month, I will be glad to accept.”

Yale Professor of Biochemistry and one of the leading scientists in her field, Joan Argestinger Steitz, is set to receive a doctorate in science, recognising her work into RNA molecules, which play an important role in cancer and infectious diseases. The honorary degree will be an addition to the long list of recognition she has received for her pioneering work.

Speaking to Cherwell, Steitz said: “I am humbled and awed by the honor that Oxford is conferring on me. I have been privileged to have been a part of the 20th century revolution in biology. The time I spent as a postdoc at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge sealed my devotion to the molecule I love best, RNA, as well as my love of England.”

Robert Darnton, a cultural historian and academic librarian, who studied at Oxford University on a Rhodes scholarship, is to be presented with a doctor of letters. His current research focuses on topics such as French culture in the 18th century and the history of the book.

Speaking to Cherwell of his time at Oxford, he said: “My tutors opened up whole new vistas of understanding when I was a student, and I learned a great deal from colleagues and friends in later years, when I was offered hospitality at Balliol and All Souls.”

Oxford students showed somewhat conflicting opinions on awarding of honorary degrees. In response to the honorary degrees, Jacob Greenhouse, a student at Regent’s Park College said: “I don’t think that honorary degrees are a huge problem. They tend to be given out to older members of society who have made a huge difference to the world. It’s not as if they are then going to use these degrees to some use, they are more ceremonial and everyone knows that.”

An undergraduate who wished to remain anonymous told Cherwell: “These are arbitrary titles awarded to valuable members of society, yet in some ways devalue the months of successive hard work of true PhD students.”

Honorary degrees have been awarded by the University of Oxford since 1478.

Four Gorillaz of the Ape-ocalypse

Natalia Bus
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Four Gorillaz of the Ape-ocalypse

A narrow corridor and a darkly clad, ominous figure swaying in a gold Trump-esque elevator follows the disturbing white noise which begins the first taste of Gorillaz music for six years. ‘Hallelujah Money’ was released the day before Donald Trump’s inauguration on Friday, marking, as Gorillaz indicate, the beginning of the end.

Benjamin Clementine’s old-fashioned croon offers an eerily soulful meditation on money, power, and humanity.

An enlarged Big Brother style eye is the first of many appropriately random backdrops in the video released alongside the single. It unnervingly blinks behind the figure of Clementine as he begins.

The tune enters its chorus as Clementine drops his enduring stare with the first “Hallelujah/ Hallelujah money”. Next the vision turns to nightmare: Clementine’s oblique figure is dominated by a man’s screaming pale face, with his eyes ritualistically rolling back in his head.

Damon Albarn’s robotic emotion-purged voice filters out the background, his words questioning all that keeps us tethered to who we are: “How will we know?/ How will we dream?/ How will we love?” as if through a megaphone during an especially dark rally. The emphasis is on knowledge, which in this post-truth world seems to have been lost. Gorillaz search for it with the same intensity as the huge blinking eye which returns again and again.

Apparently reading from the Bible, Clementine then resumes his piercing stare and almost clinically assures “What the whole world, and whole beasts of nations desire: power” as three geishas all in white wave goodbye and proceed off the screen. Here, the synthetic beat becomes especially repetitive, seemingly leading to an exultant climax.

Instead, the video ends with Clementine stroking the Bible as the track disintegrates to a jarring conclusion of sound and image. He is suddenly replaced with a brief, all the more disturbing clip of SpongeBob SquarePants running away in shrill horror.

This is what the future holds according to Damon Albarn and co. If we heed the warning, as it is difficult not to, we should all be afraid. Very afraid.

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