@grok, why doesn’t he love me?
I love reading people’s texts whenever they happen to be seated close to me. You can judge me for it. I don’t mind. Nevertheless, much to my delight, last month, crammed into a rush hour Paris metro, I was seated next to a young woman who was typing out livid paragraphs at [
Between Courses
A hangnail drags Beneath swigs of light, strings of wine On a shared table; joists Pierce through junk emails Into the cul-de-sac we cycled around Every night. The cutlery has been arranged So carefully. Silver ribbons Fasten my hair into a war of attrition Between what is and what should have been
A geopolitical history of gin, lightly stirred
Gin is a drink, yes. But it’s also a prism for observing the slow collapse of empire, the invention of gender roles, and the gradual withering away of the student overdraft. It is not, contrary to your flatmate’s claims, just something to pour over artisanal ice when they’
GUILLOTINE: In defence of Flat Earthers
Søren Kirkegaard’s Concluding Unscientific Postscript has a funny little story: a lunatic escapes from an asylum. He goes into the city and knows they’ll toss him right back in there when they catch him, so he settles on a way to definitively prove his sanity. The madman finds a little r
Stop calling me pretentious.
Everyone needs to stop calling me pretentious. Right now. This detestable designation has sept into our contemporary cultural like a viral infection of the kidney, and it fails me to launch a moral crusade against it. It’s a vacant phrase, a tool for the uneducated to attack the righteous.
Getting into Art, in broad strokes
‘Everyone in Oxford has an opinion on modern art,’ says Theo Joly, OUDS President and co-director of Art, a new play showing this week at the BT Studio. ‘The person who talks about modern art in the smoking area—we all know someone like that. It’s so annoying.’ Art is an od
Icon of the Week: Overheard at Oxford
‘Britain has an underincarceration problem.’ Is this The Isis’ latest thought-provoking Guillotine, designed to scandalise ? Or just another anonymous submission to Overheard at Oxford, reflecting the casual provocations that flow through student consciousness? The fact th
Should we seek a Vatican-core summer?
Last Thursday, white smoke emerged from the roof of the Sistine Chapel, signalling to the world that the College of Cardinals had reached their decision. A new Pope was chosen—the inheritor of the seat of Saint Peter. Amidst the more traditional Catholic chants of ‘Viva il Papa’
GUILLOTINE: Modernity is inherently pornographic (Or, A Critique of ‘The Gooning Ideology’)
Foreword – A MODEST NOTE OF APPEAL Dear Citizen Lowenberg, Citizen Bilsland’s ‘The Gooning Ideology’ raises interesting ideas in light of Enlightenment republican virtues. However—it misses the point. The objective of gooning is never merely a ‘masturb