In Conversation with the EICs
When I meet with Editors-in-Chief Finn Currie and Gruffydd Price to discuss the MT25 issue of The Isis, they arrive in accidentally matching outfits. The pair, who began with opposite visions—Finn, a self-declared maximalist from the fiction team; Gruff, a minimalist with an eye for negative space
Progress in Positano
You might claim that anti-intellectualism is on the rise. You wouldn’t be the first. The assertion that intellectualism—that is, a preference for, and emphasis on, reason and intellect—is under threat has been made many times. Let me give just one example, upon which the above statement is bas
Guillotine: You should keep your unplanned pregnancy and take it to Spoons
In Anglo-American culture, the figure of the mother is entirely inseparable from the image of the martyr. The Good Mother completes her divine Duty. The considerate Mother, who keeps herself indoors with the crying baby, sequesters herself from the world, martyrs herself for the cause of everyone el
Dr Faustus got me thinking
What does an Oxford student director want to hear from a critic? How does that differ from an Elizabethan playwright? As I sat in the Keble O’Riley on a rainy Wednesday night, I couldn’t help but notice how the Oxford dramatic scene is really a strange apparatus. There is a kind of Fausti
A Norwegian reviews Hedda Gabler
As a Norwegian, going to see an English production of an Ibsen play felt a bit like going to see Shakespeare performed in French. On my way to the Pilch to see Tiptoe Productions’ staging of Hedda Gabler (co-directed by Ollie Gillam and Gilon Fox), I could feel a sense of protective patriotism bub
Interfaith static in the Klang Valley
On Thursday, 15th August I stepped out of St John’s Cathedral into the sweet, warm darkness of evening in Kuala Lumpur. It was the Feast of the Assumption and I felt grateful for the obligation to go to church, a place where smells, songs, images, gestures and words were so familiar. Will and I ha
Why Oxford’s shitty phone service is more than annoying, it’s dangerous
Oxford’s shitty service is such a boring topic it doesn’t even merit pub chat. And yet we’re all constantly trying to decipher the robotic voices on the end of our phone calls; or waiting, white-knuckled, for the blue line to make it across the screen on Safari. When I first move
Bygone dreams: a review of Carl Sagan’s ‘Cosmos’
‘If inclinations toward slavery and racism, misogyny and violence are connected—as individual character and human history, as well as cross-cultural studies, suggest—then there is room for some optimism. We are surrounded by recent fundamental changes in society […]. Women, patronised for mi
IOTW: Ballroom Emporium
Situated at the Cowley head of Oxford’s most treacherous roundabout—an arena where pedestrians, cyclists, and vehicles alike engage in transitory games of chicken, all to make their way in and out of the City Centre—sits Ballroom Emporium. The gilded, serif lettering displaying the boutique’
