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Opinion / Page 7
Top Ten Musicals You Should Watch
Since about the age of fourteen, I’ve been into musicals. I’ve been a singer since I was eight, and the logical next step seemed to be auditioning for a school musical at fourteen – The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee – which I both got a main role in (Olive Ostrovsky) and broke my […]
Let’s Talk About Feminism
When a woman says they are a feminist, they have to preface it with “I don’t think women are better than men and I don’t hate men”. In this day and age, feminism is unjustly connoted as a radical movement. The initial wave of feminism in the early ninetieth century emerged to fight the oppression […]
Corona-Fuelled Despair, Everywhere I Look Around
In 2017, I had something of a mental breakdown. I could not afford to go travelling after finishing my A Levels, so it seemed like the next best thing. The term ‘breakdown’ implies something of a spectacle in the context of mental health, but in reality, mine was neither dramatic nor sudden. It was not […]
What To Do With Donald Trump In November
As a Scot looking in, I would like to think I have a good read on America. I’ve visited the country, take more than a passing interest in their current affairs and study alongside literally thousands of them. My thoughts on America is that it is equally, if not more, mental than any other country. My hypothesis was […]
Starlings in Quarantine: Maya Zealey
Over the past week my phone has been filled with people’s lives going back to normal. It’s all freshly dyed hair, dinner and drinks, and spontaneous holidays. I scroll and see nothing but smiles, faces relieved that this period of boredom and monotony seems to be drawing to a close. Quarantine gave me no choice […]
Jeff Bezos Made $13 Billion in a Day, and Times Readers are Loving It
Yes, I read The Times. No, I don’t own a Barbour jacket. But occasionally I like to peer into the minds of those who certainly do, and in such moments, I turn to The Times’ comments pages. Today, dear reader, I invite you along with me, as together we hear the arguments in favour of […]
Theatres and Coronavirus: The Final Curtain Call for the UK’s Arts Industry
Earlier this month the government announced a £1.57bn support package aiming to “protect Britain’s world-class cultural, arts and heritage institutions” after weeks of lobbying from industry leaders. The support package from the government includes: A £1.15bn support pot for cultural organisations in England delivered through a mix of grants and loans. This will be made up […]
Learning A Language In Lockdown
Maybe it’s counterintuitive to suggest that now, when the rest of the world seems more off-limits than ever, is the perfect time to start learning another language. With all that’s going on, it probably seems like the least appropriate way to spend your time. But if you’re still searching for something to do this summer, […]
Jonathan Franzen’s Purity is Pretty Bad
Like a lot of people, I realised pretty early on that one of the potential upsides of lockdown was the opportunity to spend more time reading. There’s always the question of what to read, though. For some reason, I decided that I was feeling like a Big American Novel, and so I turned to an […]
Angus, Thongs and Intersectional Feminism
During lockdown, I’ve taken to revisiting some of my all-time favourite childhood films, and while it has been immensely enjoyable and nostalgic, it has also been very eye opening. In some films certain scenes were problematic to say the least. While a younger version of myself would have glossed over these scenes, I found my […]
New Leader, New Labour?
Politics isn’t easy when the public won’t take you seriously, and after a decade out of office there comes a point when you have to wonder whether the problem is you, not them. Scandals reported in progressively shrill headlines don’t help matters, and the opportunities given by another five years in the wilderness don’t stretch […]
First as Farce, then as Tragedy: Monty Python as Government Policy
There is a sketch in season 1, episode 3 of Monty Python’s Flying Circus called Stolen Newsreader that I have been thinking about a lot recently. It goes something like this: John Cleese begins to read the six o’clock news in calm, even tones when suddenly several bandits burst through the door. They fire their […]
This Not That: Whitewashing
Some of you may remember the hashtag #OscarsSoWhite that floated around on social media in 2015 and 2016 in response to all twenty of the acting related Oscars nominations going to white people. The hashtag was coined by activist April Reign and was used to call out the blatant lack of diversity within Hollywood and […]
Coronavirus and the Music Industry
The summer concert schedule doesn’t look quite like everyone expected. The warm weather usually means touring artists and major festivals with packed crowds of strangers. However, amidst the coronavirus pandemic, event organisers have been forced to cancel or postpone virtually every large social gathering centred around music. In an industry linked to live experiences and full audiences, concert […]
Showing Racism The Red Card
We have recently seen the return of top-flight English football, where goals and quality play were expected to grab the headlines. Instead, the majority of the conversation has been of the work of the players and the league off the field. I am, of course, talking about the Premier League’s support of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement, […]
Why You Should Do A Year Abroad – Even If It’s Not The Best Year Ever
I always wanted to go on a year abroad. In fact, I had practically decided to go on one even before applying to university and deciding to study modern languages. Everything about a year abroad seemed perfect. Not only an opportunity to escape the piercing wind and pouring rain for a year, but also a […]
Coronavirus: Did We Overreact?
It’s not often that you get the feeling that you are living through a historic moment – that your present reality is a defining period which will shape the world for generations to come and be etched into the national psyche along with events such as WWII. Yet it feels as if we are in […]
Petrified: White Supremacy Set In Stone
The past few months completely shook the unsuspecting year of 2020, and as countries across the globe went into lockdown it seemed as if the world had gone quiet. It was in the midst of this silence that the Black Lives Matter movement erupted following the murder – it was murder – of George Floyd […]