Icon of the Week: Daniel Lloyd BCyA, Founder of Markers for Mindfulness
“I know what it’s like not having enough paper to colour things in and bring drawings home for my mum to put on the fridge.” This is one of the first things Daniel shares with me. We’re sitting in his room, the window slightly ajar. He’s sipping a hot chocolate while I drain the coffee [&h
Who’s Afraid of Music?
“Against music – for architecture”, proclaimed Salvador Dalí in his 1942 autobiography, a statement that received frustratingly little elaboration from the surrealist. Dalí was an outspoken and often self-contradictory man, for whom shock was often the desired response to his statements. How
The Athletic Artistry of Wrestling
Philosopher and essayist Roland Barthes likened it to the theatre of antiquity and the plays of Racine and Molière. Record producer Rick Rubin called it “storytelling taken to the next level”. To someone with little or limited knowledge of it, it might at first appear odd to hear poeti
In Conversation With: Bob Boilen, Founder of Tiny Desk Concerts
“It is very difficult indeed to go anywhere in the world … where people haven’t heard about and watched Tiny Desk Concerts. This is the very definition of a global phenomenon”, read a note to staff from NPR earlier this year. The series of musical performances behind an NPR office des
Icons of the Week: Katie Stamp and Jakub Trybull, Creators of A Bear’s Favour
A Bear’s Favour (niedźwiedzia przysługa) is a work-in-progress documentary made by six students from the University of Oxford, who sought to unpick the political climate in Poland. Since the fall of Communism in 1989, post-communist prosperity and living conditions drastically improved. In 2018,
In conversation with: Maggie Nelson, author of The Argonauts
“I write the thing I think is best, not the thing I think will please the most people.” When my friend gifted me a copy of Maggie Nelson’s bestseller The Argonauts for my birthday, I mentally placed it onto my ‘to read’ pile. It was a hot summer’s day, and frankly, I wasn’t quit
In Conversation With: Chris Hendricks, Club Penguin Composer
When I was waddling around Club Penguin’s virtual island as a small child, it was far from my imagination that I would, one day, be holed up from a real-life blizzard in North Denmark and speaking to the game’s composer: Chris Hendricks. Just a few years prior to that, Hendricks himself w
Icon of the Week: Peter Sutton, Artistic Director of the Jesus College Shakespeare Project
Peter Sutton is Jesus College’s Alumni Engagement Manager and the artistic director of the Jesus College Shakespeare Project [JCSP], which aims to stage all of Shakespeare’s plays, one per term, finishing in Hilary Term 2034. To widen access to Shakespeare and drama, the Project also brings in s
Do I Drink Enough Beer for the AfD?
As political tensions rise in my native Germany, I can’t help but feel a sense of helplessness. Gone are the days when I could comfortably look down upon the UK for its messy politics and the strength of its far right. With the conservative CDU (Christian Democratic Union) and right-wing AfD (Alte