Headlines
SU-supported College Disparities Campaign launches to create equal ‘Oxford experience’
Following the release of The College Disparities Report, a subsequent College Disparities Campaign has announced its launch. The Campaign uses the findings of the report and suggests solutions to the problems, most notably creating an Endowment Fund, to balance out financial disparities between colleges. An open letter to the Vice-Chancellor, Irene Tracey, will be sent urging the University to take action. On Monday 29th April, a university-wide email from the Student Union (SU) will encourage all students to sign the letter, available to read...
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Features
Sharron Davies, the Oxford Literary Festival, and the place for transgender athletes in professional sport.
The bell chimed for 2 o’clock on Thursday the 21st of March and the doors closed for the Oxford Literary Festival’s most controversial talk: ‘Sharron Davies, Unfair Play: The Battle for Women’s Sport.’ I...
WaterTok, Stanley cups and the half-empty glass of consumerism
We all need to drink more water. A 1998 New York Hospital-Cornell Medical Center survey of 3003 Americans found that 75% of those interviewed were ‘chronically dehydrated’ — a condition apparently characterised by fatigue,...
Philosophy and Technology: Science’s moral afflictions
On March 28th in a dingy Manhattan courtroom, unrepentant crypto-mogul Sam Bankman-Fried was sentenced to 25 years in prison. This landmark sentence came after an appeal by his lawyers against Bankman-Fried’s conviction in November...
Oliver Twist, a Sceptical 9th Grader, and an Orthodox Monastery: The Making of a New Generation in Northern Kosovo
Eager hands reach toward the ceiling as children at the Ismail Qemali school in Mitrovica, northern Kosovo, desperately try to attract the attention of an author who has come to talk to the pupils about her new book. They want to know more about the central character - a...
Tristram Hunt: the Politics of Repatriation
If you came here for a vicious takedown or a strident defence of Tristram Hunt’s position on “colonialism and collecting”, you might be slightly disappointed. Now, it’s clear that the important conversation over decolonisation has continued to ring out across this university’s faculty and student body – reverberating strongly...
How To Grieve a Stolen Diary
Elizabeth Bishop’s poem ‘One Art’ is beautiful because of its hypocrisy. The speaker exalts loss - of places, names, houses, their mother’s watch - with an odd joviality. You’re sure, reading it for the first time, that there must be something disingenuous going on here. The act of writing...
Profiles
“Everywhere we go, we ask: ‘What are the dominant narratives about the city? And what are they hiding?”
I’ve walked past the Clarendon Building on Broad Street many times – but I’d never thought to ask what it had been used for in the past. While today it innocuously houses the Bodleian Library admissions department, in the 19th century, its basement was used as holding cells for...
“If you want to understand the mess we’re in today, you need to know some history.”
Eugene Rogan, a historian of the Middle East and fellow of St. Anthony’s College is a tutor I feel slightly in awe of: charismatic and cheerful, fluent in several languages, always on the move to his next appointment, and for one of our classes, 3500 miles away in Cairo...
Culture
Review: ‘Long Day’s Journey Into Night’
I walked into the Wyndham Theatre’s production of Long Day’s Journey Into Night by Eugene O’Neill half-expecting a night at the London Theatre like any other. Beer in hand, I filed in with my family to the gorgeously decorated auditorium and sat watching the stage with the rest of...
Film around the world – Turkey’s Atıf Yılmaz
Atıf Yılmaz was a Turkish film director. Until his death in 2006, he was extremely prolific and directed films across every decade of Turkish cinema starting in the 1950s. He directed more than a hundred films in total - I’ll write about two of them.
Two of the films he...
Life
How to be a vegan – and an Oxford student
I have a disturbing secret to admit, which might cause people to think I’m crazy, and Katie Hopkins to think I’m smelly: I’m vegan.
I have been vegan for over four years, and I can honestly say I have never found it difficult. Choosing a path of compassion and non-violence...
The ultimate guide to May Morning
Dating back over five hundred years, May Day celebrations (traditionally) present an opportunity to herald in the arrival of spring. Whilst the tradition is now used as a clever marketing tool by nightclubs to get you dancing to even more cheesy ABBA tunes than usual, the historic element still...
