The ISIS Short Essay Competition: ‘If this was the last piece of paper in the world, what would you write on it?’
“Ask the Microvac,” wailed Jerrodette I. “Ask him how to turn the stars on again.” (The Last Question, Isaac Asimov) There are more than fifty-five thousand museums in the world today. New York alone has more than eighty of them. Each year, millions of people flock to these spaces, populated
The ISIS Short Essay Competition: “O tell me the truth about love” (W.H. Auden).
Love cannot be just another Holocaust story! Or so my readers will surely exclaim in disbelief when I reveal that I wear love on my index finger. The ring is a symbol, I suppose, a small token of remembrance; it is a silver band which encloses a Star of David, purchased in the Jewish quarter [&helli
The ISIS Short Essay Competition: “O tell me the truth about love” (W.H. Auden).
At the end of the BBC miniseries Pride and Prejudice, Lizzie and Darcy finally kiss. They’re in a carriage so the approach is somewhat unstable, but the music swells and their lips finally meet and the series ends on a still of their faces that fit together like puzzle pieces. The perfect end to a
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 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
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
‘Fiction’s about what it is to be a fucking human being’ [David Foster Wallace]. Is it?
Fucking Being To fucking be or not to be fucking. When so much writing – from song lyrics to medieval poetry – is concerned with sex (the giver, the receiver, the lack, the lust), I wonder whether it is possible to write, not about ‘what it is to be a fucking human being’ but rather [&hellip
The ISIS Short Essay Competition: “O tell me the truth about love” (W.H. Auden).
A mathematician’s perspective The science of love: instead of The One, there’s a distribution of Ones, everyone in the world has a number that tells you how compatible/suitable/loveable they are to you. Above a certain threshold we call it love. There exist algorithms to optimise your chances of