Boris Johnson is a bad classicist

15th April 2021

Whenever someone asks me what my career prospects as a classicist are, I say that our current prime minister is a classicist, and I am usually met with a grimace or huff. Indeed, Boris Johnson is a less than desirable poster boy for classics. He exemplifies every bad stereotype about the field: he is priviliged for being ‘pale, male, and stale’ and a public school alumnus, and entitled and apparently out of touch with current social values. I am reluctant to use him as an example of a good career path for a classicist for these reasons, but also because he is, frankly, a bad classicist.

Boris Johnson is a bad classicist

The Grammys 2021

25th March 2021

On Sunday 14th of March at the Staples Center in Los Angeles, musicians gathered far and wide on Zoom screens or in person to attend the 63rd Grammy Awards. The ceremony passed with no major technical failures and it featured several impressive performances that adapted well to the televised format with almost no live audience: Dua Lipa proving that she can actually dance instead of looking like a pencil sharpening, Taylor Swift’s cottage-core mashup of Cardigan/August/Willow, Doja Cat finding yet another way to make ‘Say So’ new and interesting, HAIM stomping around showing that they can in fact go toe-to-toe with any male rock band, and Bruno Mars making his suave comeback after snatching Lorde’s AOTY to name a few. While other performers, well, didn’t. (Harry Styles I’m looking right at your extremely underwhelming Grammy opening performance and ugly red-carpet look.)

The Grammys 2021

Moxie: The good, the bad, and the ugly

25th March 2021

It is likely that you have seen ‘Moxie’ being promoted all over your Netflix suggestions, or you’ve heard it come up in conversation, perhaps on Instagram. If you have not yet heard of it, it is a movie where a stereotypically shy, introverted, wallflower girl is inspired by her mother’s feminist activism and decides to start a movement in her own school, beginning as an anonymous rebellion called Moxie. In the meantime, she dates an idyllic male feminist, and tackles a wide variety of controversies or political issues, such as rape culture, homophobia, ableism and xenophobia. However, despite there being some notably great aspects of how they approached these themes, there were also areas where the topics felt awkward or underdeveloped, and other parts of the plot that were simply useless and cringe-worthy.

Moxie: The good, the bad, and the ugly

The architecture of death

25th March 2021

Architecture has been a way to immortalise and to honour death. From the Egyptian pyramids to war memorials, architecture and design have forever been dedicated to death. But Shusaku Arakawa and Madeline Gins sought to allow their inhabitants eternal life through their design.

The architecture of death