Rachel Knighton speaks from personal experience I remember sitting in a geography class, several years ago, learning about urbanisation. The textbook in front of me told of the rise in migration from rural to urban areas, as people flocked to the city in search of a higher income for their families. The case study...
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Alexandra Reynolds questions how gender is hardwired to urbanity. Accelerated urbanisation has inevitably brought with it a rapid growth of urban poverty; a poverty produced not only by poor provision for housing, health services and education, but from socially conditioned constructs of equality, gender identity and criminal activity.  The recently fevered support for David...
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As the balance of power shifts, Peter Hagen cautions against rash action on Iran. The ruling elites of Iran are remitting power like shit remits a blanket. The good news is that there is no prospect of democracy, and the strong chance of an emerging military dictatorship. Consider facts rather than emotion. In the...
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Writing with misplaced authority, Guy Wilson calls for a radical review of British democracy. There is no perfect pickle, there are only perfect pickles. Well, we’re in a pickle now. “Who talks of boom and bust economics today?” A question posed by Tony Blair in 2007, around the time of his resignation. Back then it...
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Serena Driver and Katie Markham examine the conceptualisation of   prostitution. “The oldest trade in the world”: it’s a saying as old as the issue it negotiates, indicating that prostitution is an entrenched and therefore unchallengeable part of culture and history, and that, being a ‘trade’, it is a logical extension of a thriving capitalist...
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Holly Philips discusses the endemic culture of pornography. From Page 3 to Playboy pencil cases, to that Friends episode where Monica thinks she catches Chandler wanking over sharks, to our own university’s ‘PORNO V’ event last term, it seems that we live in a society saturated with pop-cultural porn references. This endemic proliferation and...
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Looking to the Middle East, Peter ‘Hulk’ Hagen examines the role of money as a political instrument. On the 7th June, 1981, eight Israeli F-16s roared over the Iraqi desert en route to the site of Osirak Nuclear Materials Testing Reactor. They were not there to film Top Gun. Operation Opera was a controversial...
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Benjamin T. Schonewald explores the effect of the recession on voting Everyone is learning to loathe the news. Every day, there’s a new scare-story or scandal, and increasingly these terrible tales are centred around the murky and oft-misunderstood world of finance. I can’t pretend to know much more than anyone else about the recession,...
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Ever wondered how writers and philosophers spend Chistmas? Jennifer O’Mahony overcomes obstacles as problematic as the not entirely recent death of the interviewees to bring you these exclusive insights Sigmund Freud: Anna wanted a horse for Christmas. As an extra special treat I’m going to continue to use her as a psychoanalytic subject for...
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Food, alone among the sensual pleasures, has always proved a felicitous subject for literature: eating leaves itself open to more varied description than drinking, it is more easily evoked by language than music or art, and it is considerably less embarrassing to read about than sex. Freudians may advocate a psychoanalytical approach to literature,...
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