Out of Thin Air: MH370, Flight 8501 and vanishing aircraft
There’s something undeniably alarming about flying. It’s with a certain relief that even the most seasoned air traveller feels the thud of the plane’s wheels touching the ground. Despite the oft-used statistic that flying is safer than car travel, it is, for want of a better phrase, a bit scar
The ISIS Short Essay Competition: ‘Is it possible to dress rationally?’
Self-Fashioning If I were to dress rationally, I might wear beige. But beige is an ugly word and an uglier colour. If I were to dress rationally, I might do so in the wartime way. But I am as happy to ration my fashion as I am to don beige – that is, not at […]
The Bell Tower
At dusk comes a tipping of the scales— the steady thrum of insects fading into heart-beat silence. Growing shadows feel no absence, but a slipping, and a spreading. A subtler world awakes. I climbed the bell tower where the air is close, anticipatory, penetrating the depths of dusk, which is tight
Thoughts on the Death of my Father
(Nappies aren’t supposed to be for grown-ups. Grief, not crusts, whips hair into curls. He does his dying, is gone; still the nurse’s day […]
The Spider: Is the internet becoming conscious?
Originally conceived between the 1960s and ’80s as a communications network for the disparate US defence agencies, the internet was later turned into a limited scheme for research institutes to communicate and collaborate with one another. Gradually, the TCP/IP protocol was developed and prolifera
The Alpha Course: Orange squash with Oxford’s evangelists
Got questions about life? #tryalpha #htbchurch “Christianity is cool!” retweets @alphacourse, the twitter account for the evangelistic course which has allegedly ‘saved’ the Church of England. On their Instagram, you can find a stream of attractive men in their early 20s with man-buns and Ca
The ISIS Short Essay Competition: “O tell me the truth about love” (W.H. Auden).
Picture a café on the High Street. A little place that serves coffee, loved by its owners, who bought the shop in 1985 having retired from their high-paid jobs in the city, because it’s what they always wanted to do, really, low income be damned. A couple sits in the corner; students, who met at
Phage: The antibacterial arms race
In 1896, Cambridge graduate Ernest Hankin could be seen furiously paddling a small canoe through the Ganges of India. Under a glaring sun, he measured decay in corpses recently consigned to the holy waters. Hankin describes collecting samples from these bodies: fighting off snapping turtles, plungin
The ISIS Short Essay Competition: ‘Is it rational to fear your own death?’
I am not dying, but I am afraid. My friend is. My dearest, closest friend, who I have spent thousands of hours and exchanged millions of words with: dying, quite quickly, and there is nothing really that anyone can do. I don’t know what afterwards will be like – I can’t imagine, and I don’t