500 Words Competition
The UK’s longest-running student publication is now accepting entries for its writing competition! Entrants are asked to write 500 words or less on either: a) Windows b) Doors or c) Both of the above Responses can be in any form, non-fiction or fiction, and interpret the words in any way. We w
Since the Baby
The slamming door clawed at her headache. It bounded and rebounded in the wake of the shopkeeper as he ran out into the street, wailing her name while clutching something between the palms of his hands. She turned her gaze away from his bawling lips and buried her foot into the accelerator. The idea
Letter to the Isis: #1
The existence of an academic elite at Oxford can never be justified unless it is open to students of every background – The Isis, October 1978. This is a statement made in the first article of the 1,684th edition of The Isis, and despite being published nearly forty years ago, it still rings painf
Unfair and Lovely: Exploring the World of Skin Lightening
Most girls have fond memories of sneaking into their parents’ room, aged 6 or 7, to play with their mother’s makeup. You could barely reach the dressing table, but once you’d climbed onto a stack of books, you just about managed to reach her fancy red lipstick. You inspected your new plaything
Exorcising Mississippi’s Cemeteries
“Mississippi had no art except in cemeteries”. These words of Eudora Welty’s, a comment on her photographs of graveyards around the state, have strangely buried themselves in me. It is not that the general sentiment is unfamiliar. Southern artists frequently motioned towards themselves as awkw
Not this
We’d been arguing for a while already before I became aware of the plant growing over the windowsill, reaching into the room through the open space left by the raised window as the light outside assumed red evening angles and multiplied the dimensions of things, its exploring fronds so distant fro
Busybodies of the Small Town
My grandmother is eighty-one years old and hasn’t yet learned how to sit still. This afternoon she’s delivering poinsettias to a woman from her church whose husband is unwell, then going to the fruit shop, the deli, the butcher’s. She’s talking – in that current-quick way of hers ̵
The Problem with Facebook
Like most people my age, I used Facebook throughout my teens. I still check the site every day, several times a day. Realistically, I check it several times an hour. Yet using Facebook never sat easily with me. It put me on edge, and I always vaguely meant to consider the exact reasons for these [&h
On Jerusalem
You don’t have to have strong views on politics, or Donald Trump, or the Palestinian question, to acknowledge the sheer idiocy of the US president’s latest bout of verbal diarrhoea. In 1995, Congress passed the Jerusalem Embassy Act, a law for the purposes of initiating and funding the relocatio