ISIS Mix 001: David King
David King steps up for the inaugural ISIS Mix, the first of a new series in which Oxford's best student DJs put together a selection of the tracks that have influenced them.
Baring My Bones
‘Things just feel… so bleak, somehow. So overwhelmingly, inescapably bleak,’ I mumbled, voice monotone, eyes dead. I was eighteen, but my brain and bones, ravaged by seven years of cruel anorexia and vicious bulimia, felt at least eighty. Curled like a melancholic tadpole opposite my psycholog
What We’re Into: Staff Picks
I’m a big fan of Readux Books, a Berlin-based publisher which produces beautifully designed pocket-sized works of translated fiction, so I was pleased to find this essay by its founder in the LA Review of Books. It’s a clever meditation on the paradoxes of translation, which expresses it
Beyond the Numbers
In Budapest, a city of some 1.7 million people, life goes on apparently as normal. Locals and tourists bustle about in the wide avenues, and the dramatic scenes of a couple of weeks ago—crowds of migrants flooding around Keleti Station or through the streets—have largely subsided. But, beneath t
Our Mourning Ritual: Life after Death Online
Earlier this year, on Thursday the 26th of March, I attended my father’s funeral. At the reception I was approached by a man I had never met before. Once he introduced himself I instantly recognised his name, but couldn’t pin down where from. The name hung in the back of my skull. I suspected it
From the archives: Dinner with Lucien Freud, 1983
Once Lucian Freud was asked to paint the portrait of a former Principal of Jesus College. “A charming physics don asked me if I would do it. I rather liked the idea of being up there amongst a lovely collection of Elizabethan works, but the problem was that I find it difficult to paint people [&he
What Online Campaigning Has Taught Me about how the Media Presents Sexual Assault
As with almost all projects, one tends to learn much more about the issues that you are grappling with, or the problems that you are trying to solve, once the process is already underway. Since I began campaigning against sexual violence and victim blaming with the #NotGuilty campaign in April 2015,
Abortion in Northern Ireland
“Pregnant people with money have options and pregnant people without money have babies. Or drink bleach,” observes Mara Clarke, the director of the Abortion Support Network in Northern Ireland. Together with draconian restrictions in the Republic of Ireland, Irish attitudes towards abortion have
Hymn to Intellectual Duty
The phrase ‘political prisoner’ is charged with both power and notoriety, concepts I had never associated with my 75 year old grandfather. To me, he has always been my baba, a former English teacher whose days are spent writing poetry and tending to his garden. I’d heard my parents talk about