Seldom do I come across a play that inspires me so deeply, I find I must go out and buy a copy of the script. I love theatre, and I love reading, but for some reason I am happy to leave most plays at the stage door. The ephemerality of the performance becomes part and parcel of its charm.

Such was not the case with Arcadia. Widely regarded as the late playwright Tom Stoppard’s masterpiece, Arcadia transcends easy description: it unfolds in dual timelines, one modern (1993) and one charmingly vintage (1809); it is a harmonious ode to oft-dichotomized disciplines, the humanities and mathematics; it is as much about sex and base attraction as it is about love. The blend of wordplay, dramatic irony, and timeless themes earned Stoppard comparisons to Shakespeare at the play’s opening performance at the National Theatre in 1993.

The current London iteration of Arcadia was announced on 29 October 2025, exactly one month before Stoppard’s passing. This gave added spotlight to the production, which premiered at the Old Vic on 19 January 2026, as it was the first major production of any play by Stoppard following his passing. The production boasts director Carrie Cracknell, coming off a buzzy 2024 season heading The Grapes of Wrath at the National Theatre and Carmen at the Met Opera.

In full transparency, I knew none of this when I sat down to watch Arcadia in mid-February. The tickets were a gift, and I had not done much more than read posters advertising the play as “sexy,” “timeless,” “a must-see.” The lights dimmed, and I was entranced. The first scene, taking place in 1809, covers everything from “carnal embrace” to chaos theory to the existence of free will. The remaining six scenes grow no less complex, mixing, as one character comments, “disorder out of disorder into disorder”, until the timelines are co-occurring and characters speaking over each other in the finale. And yet, nothing feels out of place. Suspension of disbelief is unnecessary, as the complexities are not fantastical; each thread in Stoppard’s tapestry is some very real, true-to-life aspect of human existence. Each character has some unique blend of neuroses and higher ideals, rather it be Septimus’s polymathy and casual intimacy, Valentine’s courtly love and stalled doctoral dissertation, or Hannah’s steely exterior contrasted with her fascination for Romantic-era literature. It is the sheer humanity of each character that brings the play to life; it is their emotional and inter-relational arcs that drive the plot forward, rather than external events.

The notable beauty of Arcadia for someone like me – a student at Imperial – is that it gets the sciences right. Two characters in the play are particularly fascinated with mathematics: thirteen-year-old Thomasina in 1809, whose education is limited to at-home tutoring, and young-adult Valentine in 1993, who writing his dissertation in maths at Oxford. Thomasina’s prodigy and non-traditional education allow her to ask questions of the limits of mathematics: “if there is an equation for a curve like a bell, there must be an equation for one like a bluebell, and if a bluebell, why not a rose?” Her curiosity drives her to make iterated graphs of natural phenomena, which Valentine is later asked to decipher by literary historian Hannah. He quickly brushes aside what the audience knows to be true brilliance as child’s play, insisting that Thomasina could not have known what the graphs meant, an all-too-common dismissal of women in STEM, especially 30 years ago. But in the same scene, he inhabits that self-same curiosity, lamenting that relativity only explains very large and very small phenomena, not “the things people write poetry about – clouds – daffodils – waterfalls – and what happens in a cup of coffee when the cream goes in”. One of the (albeit many) drumbeats by which Arcadia marches is this call-to-arms, the inherent mystery that drives all of us at Imperial to push ourselves ever onward.

The Old Vic production has been granted a new home at the Duke of York’s Theatre from 20 June to 12 September 2026. Director Carrie Cracknell will continue shepherding the story, and many of the actors are reprising their roles as well. Selfishly, I am grateful that the roles of Thomasina and Septimus have not been recast; Isis Hainsworth (who was nominated for an Olivier for her Old Vic run) and Seamus Dillane have some of the best chemistry I have seen in the past decade on stage or screen. Tickets start at £25, and I cannot imagine a better way to celebrate the end of exams than to be reminded of the beauty of our studies – go see it while you can!

In the West Basement of Beit Quad hides an inconspicuous darkroom unbeknownst to many, a room where chemicals are meticulously used to develop film and curate prints. 

Two weeks ago, I got the opportunity to tour the darkroom with Imperial student experts Dimitris Alexopoulos and Ye Zimao (Steven). Stepping into the darkroom felt like stepping into Walter White’s caravan from the show Breaking Bad. Bottles of mysterious white powders and assorted chemistry equipment (used strictly to develop film and absolutely nothing else) line the room. Zimao and his friend, Forrest Li, demonstrated the process of developing and making prints of the small strips of film taken. It was astounding to watch them work in virtually pitch darkness, solely relying on experience and feeling around to develop their film. The whole process seemed long and cumbersome to someone like me, whose experience with film extends to a grand total of one roll of film. I couldn’t help but question: Why do you still work with film, if digital is so much easier and faster to work with? As it turns out, the answer isn’t that they’re masochists. For Dimitris and Zimao, the charm lies in the parts of photography that technology has made easy to overlook.

Film photography and its development methods are much less conventional today, largely due to how convenient digital photography has become. Modern cameras can capture dozens of images in a single second, while editing software allows photographers to endlessly adjust colour and exposure with a flick of a slider. Even if these adjustments don’t look good, there’s always Ctrl+z there to save you. In stark contrast, film photography offers no such luxuries. Every roll has limited frames, meaning photographers must be more selective when choosing to capture an image. Once the film is exposed to light, it must be handled, developed, and printed through a process that requires considerable patience and precision. Making prints demands deliberate decision-making, since every adjustment and subsequent print costs time, effort, and materials. 

Dimitris and Zimao imparted to me that these inconveniences are not flaws in the process of film photography, but part of the appeal. The need for slowness and deliberation encourages the photographer to think more carefully about when to press the shutter, the lighting in the frame, and the composition of the shot. Rather than taking hundreds of pictures and relying on extensive editing afterwards, film photographers are challenged to get the ‘best’ picture right off the bat and make each shot count.

It’s like chemical magic.

As someone who shoots exclusively on digital cameras, I can definitely see how the convenience and speed of modern technology can sometimes hinder the opportunity to be more intentional and involved in our craft. Film photography, in contrast, instills a deeper level of engagement in creating an image by promoting intentionality. After spending two hours immersed in the world of film, I do indeed see why so many photographers stay devoted to the film development process. 

Beyond the darkroom, the Photography Society also hosts photography walks where photographers of all experience levels explore different locations and learn from one another. Their WhatsApp group also serves as a platform for members to interact with the community and seek advice from more experienced photographers. The Society also curates art exhibitions at Imperial, providing students with opportunities to showcase their best works. Whether you’re interested in digital photography, film photography, or simply looking for a place to meet fellow creatives, the Photography Society offers a welcoming place for all. To keep up with their activities, follow them on Instagram @icphotosoc.

Late last year, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) – the same organisation responsible for the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines with which all websites in the UK are legally required to comply – published a draft note detailing multiple layers of guidance on what they believed could help achieve a more sustainable web. This draft note, the Web Sustainability Guidelines (WSG), was meant for a diverse audience involved in the lifecycle of creating digital products, from digital teams to policymakers and those involved in running the business. This was innovative in that, for the first time, actionable guidance to help digital teams understand sustainability in technology was being articulated. It went beyond just the technology hardware and software themselves, but also included the entire process required to run it – from the business aspect to the social and finance considerations and more. 

There is increasing awareness that digital technology and AI have negative impacts on the environment. In the initial phase when ChatGPT was first launched, well-intentioned people started estimating the amount of water consumed by each AI query or image generated. However, because the Internet is distributed in different geographical locations all over the world, with endless possibilities of combinations of hardware and software, and high variability in consumer usage patterns, it is nearly impossible to estimate even ballpark figures that may be representative of the true environmental costs. In other words, environmental costs of technology use is highly context-dependent, hence it is difficult to prescribe a blanket solution beyond high-level principles for the sustainable use of technology.  

People use technology in legitimately beneficial ways that improve their lives. For example, we rely on quick Google searches to find information we need, and students whose first language is not English rely on AI translation to understand difficult concepts that they are learning. The resulting cognitive dissonance between the benefits and environmental impacts of technology and AI is real, and can engender a sense of helplessness, anxiety, and guilt in people who genuinely want to try to reduce their carbon footprint. 

For some time now, in a corner of the web, there has been a small community of people passionate about making the web more sustainable. Amongst some of their experiments was a grid-aware website that could adapt your website to be less carbon intensive if the grid your device was running on was not as clean; another was a calculator that estimated how much emissions your website was producing. Through these experiments and more, they have grappled with the ambiguity and uncertainties of measuring the environmental costs of digital technology mentioned earlier. The result is WSG as an articulation of what a sustainable web could look like, which has been useful for Imperial to adapt and adopt for its digital estate and the page views it serves. 

Imperial’s first WSG, published on 13^th March this year, is a first step to try to reduce the environmental impact it takes to deliver Imperial’s digital content. It is meant to guide content editors, regardless of their technical background, on decisions they can control, such as what content is published, how pages are structured and formatted, and how media assets are used. Although each web page’s emissions seem minute at 3 to 5mg of CO₂, the University of Edinburgh’s implementation of the sustainable web design principles across more than 65,000 webpages has shown to achieve potential emissions reduction of 25 tonnes annually, so there could be non-trivial savings with Imperial’s similarly-sized digital estate. The principle of compounding, well-known in finance to produce exponential growth in savings, likewise applies when it comes to emissions savings. 

Some of the guidance poses co-benefits, such as improving user experience, accessibility and performance. However, there are also real trade-offs involved. For example, reducing the use of images, videos, and animations reduces energy consumption, but may also reduce the site’s visual appeal. More importantly, what is valuable is the process of different parties coming together to assess and consider the environmental trade-offs, and building a culture of giving the planet a seat at the table in decision-making. 

Ultimately, what is digital requires physical resources to power, but these environmental costs tend to be out of sight and out of mind. Since web sustainability principles can enable emissions reductions at source, they will be increasingly important to consider as one of many tools to reduce technology’s energy footprint amidst growing demand for digital services, including AI.

Thanks goes to Susie Yang who worked on the drafts of Imperial’s web sustainability guidelines, and Yilong (Calvin), who worked on the tools, calculations, and analyses for web sustainability.

Reports of antisemitic violence, alarming polling on public attitudes towards Jews, and government promises to curb these trends have made national headlines on a weekly basis since the start of the year.

In particular, some university campuses have come under scrutiny as perceived hotbeds of antisemitism. Vivienne Stern, the head of Universities UK, wrote last month that she had “no doubt… that antisemitism continues to rise at universities,” while polls conducted in recent years have consistently found higher rates of antisemitic sentiment among young people.

To learn more about the experiences of the Jewish community at Imperial, Felix spoke to two committee members of Imperial’s Jewish Society (JSoc), who requested anonymity and are referred to here by the pseudonyms James and Marc.

Both James and Marc believe antisemitism to be a growing issue both on and off campus. This concern is echoed by nationwide polls, which show that 47% of Jews last year saw antisemitism as a “very big” problem, up from 11% in 2012. 

“We have friends at other campuses, and we share stories,” James said, “and the feeling is very much that antisemitism has been growing a lot. And not only is it in people’s minds, it’s being translated into acts.”

James noted that the situation was “much better” at Imperial than in other London universities, mentioning acts of violence perpetrated on other campuses. Last November, for instance, UCL had to issue an apology for multiple “unacceptable” antisemitic incidents that had occurred since the beginning of the academic year. 

However, he cautioned that “even if Imperial is not that bad, people won’t feel safe” due to their awareness of incidents from other campuses.

“We have friends that, for example, used to wear a kippah – which is the head covering for Jewish men. A lot of them have stopped doing that just because it’s not safe anymore.”

He added that even students who chose not to wear religious signs can face pressure when their peers know they are Jewish.

James and Marc were reluctant to give details of antisemitic acts committed on campus, to ensure victims who preferred to remain anonymous can’t be identified. “In the overwhelming majority of cases that I know, people have not reported these acts,” Marc said.

They referred to general examples including antisemitic caricatures in student accommodation, verbal abuse on campus, and cyberbullying. Another flagrant example of online extremism was the “Imperial Agarthan Society”, a once-popular Instagram page that notably shared racist and Holocaust-denying posts and private messages. James distinguished acts that target specific students from those that are meant to intimidate the community, saying both were prevalent. “But most incidents are not reported because people are scared to do that,” he insisted.

Both members of JSoc spoke positively of the support offered by Imperial. “They’ve been great and we have an open line of communication with them; they’re very proactive in listening to us and our concerns,” Marc said. 

In particular, Marc said the College’s reporting systems are “quite efficient” and don’t result in excessive delays. Now, to increase the share of incidents that are reported, the committee is working to reassure members that the tools are anonymous and effective.

However, Marc said he had been “disappointed” by the lack of support from the Imperial student body and described a community that feels “isolated.”

“No one has come up to me and said, ‘How are you doing?’ There’s no allyship; we’re just by ourselves.”

I asked them if the threat of antisemitism has changed the way they operate as a society. 

“We haven’t at all changed our programming in terms of what we offer our members and the Jewish community on campus,” Marc said. “I would even say that it’s been a vector for increased engagement and more responsibility on our part because we feel like we really have to be there for students and create a safe and welcoming space.”

James recalled having “a lot of discussions” with Imperial’s security team concerning increased protection. Even though JSoc chose not to alter the way it operates, he argued that the very need to raise these questions was abnormal: “I don’t think that’s a discussion that a lot of societies are having.”

The British government has asked universities to publicise anonymised data on campus antisemitism and promised to increase policing in areas with a high share of Jewish residents. I asked James and Marc what more society as a whole could do to protect Jewish individuals, including students.

James opined that the problem should be tackled at its source: “We can think about protective measures, but my opinion is that there’s a lot of work to do on education.”

“I would really call on the student body to be supportive,” Marc added. “If you’re curious, come, ask questions. Although we’re a small community, we work to make people feel safe and create the sense that you can be Jewish at Imperial and have a wonderful experience.”

We can’t, obviously: the ethical concerns place this firmly in dystopian science fiction territory. Yet, the Yale spinout startup Bexorg is offering something very close. The team created a proprietary system which takes brains removed from deceased people who choose to donate their bodies to science and connect them to machines which pump oxygenated fluid through and remove waste from the organs. The brains have minimal coordinated neural firing and are kept under anaesthetic to further reduce electrical activity. The company’s ethics board says this combination of anaesthetic and low coordination means the brains are not conscious.  

The purported benefits of this technology are impressive. Drugs targeting neurodegenerative diseases are difficult to test because what works in a mouse does not always work in people, but the use of aged human brains allows the trials to account for the natural aging-related degeneration of the cells. Biomarkers are collected from the brains, and after 24 hours the brains are removed and sliced, letting scientists collect cell-specific results.  

Bexorg’s CEO and cofounder Zvonimir Vrselja claims this will allow drug developers to avoid the so-called “valley of death,” where drugs fail to translate from animal to human trials. The startup was founded in 2021 with the goal of revolutionising drug trial using a combination of their brain-perfusion technology and an AI-based model of the brain, and so far, the disembodied brains have already been used for clinical trials.  

This summer, Karman Space Programme (KSP) is planning to launch its VEGA rocket, which they have been designing and building since late 2024. The team aims to reach an altitude of 20 km, above the current record for a liquid bipropellant rocket. This would be KSP’s first launch since December 2023, when the previous team’s solid propellant rocket reached 9 km.  

The current team’s thirteen members are split into three main sub-teams: airframe, in charge of the rocket’s structure; avionics, which deals with the electronics; and propulsion, responsible for the engine and propellants. KSP is not a society registered with Imperial College Union, as they say that would restrict their possibilities. Instead, they operate “more like a startup” that undertakes long-term projects rather than annual competitions typical of university rocketry teams, and their members get “hired and fired” depending on performance and commitment.

A member of the team notes that KSP is “very much a full-time commitment” that students must balance with their studies.  She proudly tells me that the entire system and life cycle of the rocket, from idea to launch pad, is designed and manufactured by students. A team member suggests that KSP is “a slice of San Francisco in SW7.” Fittingly, KSP’s newly formed AI Lab focuses on “multi-fidelity” physics AI models, which are trained on data of variable accuracy for optimised performance to help streamline the design process and optimise flight hardware. 

The rocket 

VEGA is a liquid bipropellant rocket. This means that both the oxidiser and the fuel that enter the engine are liquids, producing more thrust while being lighter than solid propellants. In fact, the engine is cryogenic, meaning the propellants are gases which are liquified and stored at very low temperatures, making it even more efficient. VEGA’s engine produces 7.2 kN of thrust, making it the most powerful amateur engine of its class in the UK.  

In addition to its engine, KSP is also building reusable architecture: “every part” of the eight-meter-tall rocket is recovered and able to be launched again in a short timeframe. This complicates manufacturing as components must remain reusable after launch. 

The team hopes that VEGA will reach an altitude of 20 km over the summer, breaking the altitude record for a liquid bipropellant rocket which currently stands at 17.2 km and is held by Georgia Tech.  

Challenges 

As the adage suggests, rocket science is “extremely difficult.” There are technical and practical difficulties regarding systems integration, where the sub-teams responsible for different parts of the rocket must ensure it works together. Moreover, building in South Kensington is hard: due to the lack of space, KSP is unable to have their rocket fully assembled for long periods of time, and the constant disassembly and reassembly has proven a significant hurdle. As a result, the team is considering getting their own workshop. 

Another distraction is funding. As KSP does not receive financial support from the university, they are limited to sponsorship, meaning students must commit some time to raising money, effort that could have been spent on designing or manufacturing the rocket. However, one team member says “the team is very lucky to have developed strong relationships with sponsors who believe in and support KSP’s mission.” 

Finally, obtaining permission to launch a rocket from the UK’s Civil Aviation Authority is very slow and expensive. Instead, KSP has opted to launch VEGA in Nevada. 

Looking ahead 

While the team prepares to launch VEGA this summer, its long-term goal is to reach the Kármán line, the widely recognised definition of the edge of space, 100 km above mean sea level. KSP is recruiting more students and hopes to expand to other universities such as Oxford and Cambridge.

Lila Abu-Lughod’s Do Muslim Women Need Saving? sets out to interrogate how Western discourses of liberation and feminism have reduced Muslim women to a single archetype: voiceless victims in need of rescue. She aims to replace the caricature of these women with complexity, and to expose how the rhetoric of “saving” Muslim women has often justified imperial violence. It is an admirable and, in many ways, urgent project, but her execution does not live up to its promise. For a book that set out to restore Muslim women’s voices, it too often ends up speaking over them instead.

For all her insistence on specificity, Abu Lughod’s ethnography is confined almost entirely to Egyptian fieldwork. She uses Egyptian women – more specifically, a few Bedouin women in Egypt – as illustrative counterexamples to Western caricatures of what Muslim women are. The irony here is that in her attempt to critique Western generalisations, she replaces them with her own. While these views may reflect the experiences of some Egyptian women, they cannot bear the weight of representing hundreds of millions of others.

Perhaps the greatest disappointment of this novel is that its best insights – its exposure of how the “rescue” narrative feeds imperial ambition and Western self-congratulation – are buried under defensive, self-contradictory prose. AbuLughod is right that Muslim women are not monolithic, that oppression takes different shapes, and that Westerners must confront their own hypocrisies. But she goes too far in the other direction, dismissing genuine feminist struggles as naïve and insufficiently acknowledging the misogyny that undeniably exists in many communities.

She criticises the mistakes of Western feminism, but in doing so, she also dismisses Muslim women who do challenge patriarchal customs from within their own communities, implying that their activism is somehow inauthentic or compromised by proximity to Western frameworks. Women like Nawal El Saadawi and Fatema Mernissi, who have long fought for reform within Muslim contexts, are largely absent from her analysis. Instead, Abu-Lughod seems to suggest that gender inequality itself is a Western misreading of Muslim life.

Her treatment of specific practices such as veiling, seclusion, and honour culture also verges on apologism. Rather than acknowledging the diverse meanings these practices carry, she often portrays them as benign symbols of cultural difference, ignoring the very real constraints and violence many women face. To deny that these practices can be both culturally rooted and sometimes exploited through oppressive means is to refuse Muslim women the right to name their suffering.

In the end, Abu-Lughod’s book mistakes moral discomfort for moral depth. Its criticism of Western saviourism shades into a refusal to name any wrongs. It is possible to reject imperial feminism, but also to acknowledge that many Muslim women face systemic injustice. It is possible to disagree with someone’s values and still respect their agency.

So, do Muslim women need saving? No – but not for the reasons Abu-Lughod gives. No, because Muslim women, in their extraordinary diversity, are not a problem waiting for an external solution. Those facing injustice need solidarity, not rescuing. This means taking seriously the arguments of reformers within Muslim communities rather than dismissing them as Westernised, and supporting material change rather than performing moral concern.

I believe the question was never really whether Muslim women need saving. It was whether we are capable of helping without making ourselves the protagonists of someone else’s story.

Imperial is certainly one of a kind. Regularly rising in global university rankings and this year reaching 2nd on the QS ranking, it has long been a zenith of academic rigour and scientific achievement. However, its most unique feature is its singular dedication to STEMM: science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and medicine. Since 2003, it has also been home to a Business school, which has not reached the same superlatives as the other departments at the College. With all these accolades, one begins to wonder if Imperial’s STEM-only success is a rare gem or a fluke. In my view, it is the latter.

No other university of similar stature or ranking is as dedicated to STEM-only research and education as Imperial. In the UK, Imperial College London is the only Russell Group university that has no faculties of humanities or social sciences. Globally, while STEMfocused universities do exist with similar repute to Imperial, they rarely exclude all non-STEM subjects from their grounds. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) both are home to well-regarded departments of social sciences, including economics and politics, which offer undergraduate and doctoral degrees. ETH Zurich, while only offering one undergraduate degree in the humanities and social sciences (mainly focused on military sciences and history), does employ a sizeable faculty of humanities who administer historical and philosophical modules on ‘Science in Perspective,’ which are required of all undergraduates. The École Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL), Technische Universiteit Delft (TU Delft), and Nanyang Technological University Singapore (NTU Singapore) all have similar structures. Meanwhile, though Imperial offers its Horizons modules to all undergraduates, these modules are one of three options available via the I-Explore requirement, the others being Business for Professional Engineers and Scientist (BPES) and further STEMM modules. There is thus no requirement to complete a humanities or social sciences module as an undergraduate at Imperial.

It should be noted that the inverse of this phenomenon rarely occurs. Prestigious universities dedicated mainly to the social sciences and/or humanities are rarer to begin with, and the ones that exist do not presume that mathematics or sciences would not be useful to their studies. For example, the London School of Economics and Political Science has a reputable department of Mathematics, as does Bocconi University in Milan, Italy. Sciences Po in Paris offers specialisations in climate sciences and policy, bioethics, and big data. Some of the best art schools, like the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, even require their students to take modules in mathematics.

The argument of this piece is simple: the lack of a faculty of humanities and social sciences at Imperial is a disservice to its students. The lack of exposure to nonSTEM ideas harms crucial workplace skills, including verbal communication, technical and non-technical writing, and ethical considerations of one’s work. While there are certainly avenues to build these skills at Imperial, is it not the duty of a university to ensure its alumni are up to par in these regards? Especially in the current landscape of artificial intelligence, it is a necessity, not a luxury, to build one’s strengths in the humanities. A recent study in The Economist revealed that philosophy students have been much more likely to be hired after finishing their degree than computer science students, which the authors attributed to the rising automation of entry-level computer science jobs. But AI currently cannot (and likely will not) write convincing rhetoric, while Imperial students can. The polymathy of a STEMM student with training in proper communication will be enviable for generations to come.

In short, I am hoping for a return to Imperial’s roots. At its earliest, Imperial was a remarkable blending of disciplines: the Royal College of Science, the Royal School of Mines, and the City and Guilds College uniting on one campus. In its surrounds were the Royal College of Art and the Royal College of Music, meant to exist in harmony and resonance with the sciences at Imperial. These are not opposing forces; they are both pure expressions of curiosity and creativity. The students at Imperial deserve to explore such disciplines without sacrificing time in their degree.

It was difficult for me to watch Louis Theroux’s Inside the Manosphere without a consuming sense of unease. In the documentary, Theroux follows several key figures within the manosphere ecosystem, examining how they cultivate influence and monetise grievance. While I was already aware of how deeply anti-feminist and misogynistic the manosphere could be, I had not fully grasped the scale of its impact, nor how effectively it has embedded itself within the anxieties and identities of a generation of young men.

At the centre of this system lies the metaphor of the “red pill.” Borrowed from the 1999 film The Matrix, it once symbolised the choice between remaining with a comforting illusion or confronting a more unsettling reality. “You take the blue pill,” Morpheus tells Neo, “the story ends (you remain ignorant)… You take the red pill, you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes.”

Within the manosphere, the “red pill” no longer signifies truth-seeking but r a t h e r conversion to a new mindset. To be “red-pilled” is to adopt a preconfigured worldview in which modern society is fundamentally rigged against men, due to the alleged excesses of feminism. Put simply, it is the belief that male worth has been reduced by the world favouring women.

This thought process is dangerous because it reduces women’s values to little more than appearance and sexuality, flattening human relationships into transactions driven by status and desirability.

From there, misogyny becomes a framework through which young men interpret rejection and their own self-worth. What is more concerning, however, is not simply the existence of these ideas, but their mass appeal – and the extraordinary ease with which they are amplified or disseminated across the internet.

Prominent figures in the manosphere, such as Andrew Tate and Myron Gaines, have built large audiences by exploiting this worldview in podcasts, tweets, and reels. Their appeal is easy to parse; they speak with clarity in a cultural moment defined by ambiguity and offer rigid prescriptions where institutions are beginning to provide little beyond vague reassurance. In doing so, they position themselves as authority figures despite the extremity of their beliefs and, in some cases, their criminal allegations.

The influence has specifically been able to flourish at a moment when male insecurity and loneliness are increasingly easy to manipulate. Amid declining trust in public institutions, these figures step in and claim to speak unfiltered truths, supposedly unencumbered by social convention and political correctness.

This dynamic extends far beyond the manosphere, echoing patterns seen in more traditional forms of social organisation, from insular religious sects to political movements built on populist rhetoric.

What distinguishes the manosphere, however, is its audience. It draws heavily on young and impressionable men navigating social and economic precarity. In the United Kingdom, youth unemployment has fluctuated in recent years, while rising living costs have made independence increasingly difficult to attain. Amongst these economic pressures, there are narrower paths to stability. This is where digital spaces can take up space and make individuals more receptive to simplified explanations that bring comfort.

To be told that one’s struggles are not incidental, but systemic (and the result of identifiable antagonists), can be perversely reassuring.

The deeper problem, then, is not simply the existence of figures like Tate or the persistence of misogynistic subcultures. It is the ease with which authority is conferred upon them and how mindlessly we elevate their voices. Younger, naïve audiences mistake their confidence for credibility and their community for comfort. And in doing so, they suspend the very faculty that might allow us to question these figures and their messages.

Unfortunately, there is no simple corrective or antidote. Calls to “log off” or disengage from digital life, while not without merit, underestimate the structural forces at play. The incentives that shape online discourse, from recommendation algorithms to monetisation models, are unlikely to disappear. Nor is the human desire for belonging easily displaced.

What remains, then, is the more difficult task of cultivating critical distance. To learn how to resist swallowing the red pill, in its contemporary sense, is not merely to reject a set of ideas, but to question the process by which those ideas acquire authority. It requires a willingness to sit with ambiguity, to interrogate certainty, and to recognise that the most compelling narratives are not always the most truthful.

A brief electrical outage at Imperial’s South Kensington Campus has resulted in the College’s public address speakers producing loud intermittent beeping sounds since this morning. The issue was unresolved as of 11pm today.

The sounds were heard across campus, including at the Abdus Salam Library, where staff distributed earplugs. Students also reported noise disruptions during exam sittings.

Imperial said the outage, which took place this morning, was the result of issues with distribution network operator UKPN. 

“Our teams are in touch with contractors who are working to mute the speaker beeping sound as soon as possible whilst they troubleshoot any further issues and reset the system. We apologise for any disruption this issue has caused,” the College said.

This is a developing story.

The Drama is a romantic, thought provoking movie. It explores modern and dark themes of how our past affects our relationships, how we respond to people in our close circle having done bad things, and how influenced we are by others in our own relationship with a partner. It explores the downward spiral of a couple, Emma and Charlie, who on the week of their marriage disclose disturbing things they have done or just thought of doing in their past with their best man, Mike, and best woman, Rachel, both of whom are in a relationship with each other as well. However, Emma changes everything by telling her story: she had planned a school shooting when she was in middle school but never acted on it once she heard of another school shooting happening nearby. Hearing this, Rachel immediately brings up her cousin’s paralysis caused by a school shooting, becoming infuriated with her. That’s when Charlie himself begins to have doubts about Emma, and whether he really knows her. Charlie’s beliefs and feelings become vulnerable to change through the lens of others perceiving his fiancé, and this brings up an important question in their soon to be legally official relationship: how unconditional is their love? Setting the plot in a time-limited atmosphere was clever as it brings tension and doubt in the audience as to whether they should go through with it at all, given Charlie’s reactions and own fears that come surging in his imagination. Essentially, Emma stops being seen as a person and gets reduced to her non acted action 15 years ago. Her growth is completely disregarded, and her identity fully entangled in her past. 

Most scenes are hard to watch and frustrating, yet engaging and funny at times, written and directed by Kristoffer Borgli. It would’ve been even better if we got more insight into Emma’s past. 

What’s interesting to note is how, arguably, we can say that what Rachel did is worse, having locked a child in a closet all night and not disclosing it when she was asked about the missing kid, essentially leaving him to die. Instead, she makes Emma’s past all about herself by placing herself as the victim due to her cousin whom she wasn’t shown to be that close with. Further, Charlie’s act of cyberbullying when he was in school, eventually making his victim move schools, is one of the most common factors in causing school shootings. Emma’s planning, as she put it, happened when she was in a dark place and felt isolated. Only when she felt listened to and part of a community, however, did she start to advocate for gun control, becoming a leading figure in her school’s community. Nevertheless, Rachel still focuses on the dark intrusive thought Emma had, guilt tripping her up to, and not stopping at, her marriage. As an audience, you begin to feel frustrated and pretty annoyed with Rachel, who deflects her own guilt and her own act as a minor misbehaviour compared to what Emma thought about doing; whereas Emma admits her guilt and confronts the truth. In doing so, Rachel places herself at a moral superiority over everyone else.

A romantic, thought-provoking movie

The Drama also touches on how glamorised school shootings are in the US, especially online, and how such online media can influence mentally vulnerable children into it. Thirteen-year-old Emma starts to see it as an aesthetic – something the internet is skilled in portraying. 

Casting is also intentional, as making Emma a black woman played by Zendaya and Charlie a white man played by Robert Pattinson creates a racial dynamic that is hard to ignore. This is parallelled with Rachel and her husband, who is black. Whilst Emma is no longer given the grace of complexity or empathy after her confession, everyone else does. Thus, The Drama addresses an important social issue: when the school shooter is white, conversations begin to span around mental health, past experiences and bullying, yet when that same school shooter is black, that individual becomes a representation of threat. Empathy is not given equally. This also applies to when the perpetrator is an immigrant, and how people tend to start addressing immigration policies instead of the individual’s background. 

The Drama is an interesting watch if you are into films that subtly expose societal issues and make you question them, provoking conversations around your own perspective and relationships. 

Michael is probably the first biopic to have sold over $200 million in only its first week on public screen. With this rate, one would wonder why the movie got 39% of rotten tomatoes, most calling it “untruthful” and “disappointing”. It’s curious seeing the great discrepancies between what critics have to say and what the general audience does, the latter mounting up to 97% audience scores.  

More people are beginning to get interested yet again with the King of Pop, as his music is re-entering the Billboard on popular music streaming platforms. On several occasions I’ve heard it play in shops and even grocery stores since the movie’s release.  

If we compare the biopic with the 1992 The Jacksons: An American Dream series, then it can be said that the series portrayed Michael’s childhood best, focusing more on the brothers and the family. Yet, the biopic was more revealing for Michael’s teen and adulthood.   

Jaafar Jackson, Michael’s own nephew, played his uncle exceptionally for someone who never acted before. Michael’s mannerisms, voice and artistic talent could not have been better embodied.  

Further exceptional acting that we can’t omit from stating are Michael’s parents: Joe and Katherine Jackson played by Oscar nominated Colman Domingo and Nia Long respectively. Michael’s relationship with his parents is quite clear.  The tensions between his controlling and abusing father, trying to control Michael and his career throughout his life having essentially “robbed” Michael of his childhood, and his mother, helpless in the hands of her husband yet still supportive of her son. Joseph’s character, portrayed as a villain, really did emit a frightening presence even when he sat without a word. However, it can be disappointing for some audience members how Katherine does not get enough lines that really represented her role in Michael’s life. Touching on the point of limited screen featuring, Michael’s siblings could often feel like more background characters than close and influential relatives – and three of them were missing entirely from the movie: Janet, Rebbie and Randy. This is especially striking given how close Michael and Janet were. Comments of her reasons from abstaining are contradictory, but La Toya Jackson simply explains it as a kind declination. Her support for Jaafar, though, was mentioned. Among the greatest critics of the film is Paris Jackson, Michael’s daughter, criticizing how ungenuine and controlled the narrative is, focusing on a “fantasy” image of her father, which did not sit well with her values.  

The movie did initially show Michael’s alleged sexual accusations that emerged in 1993 in the last act, but those had to be scrapped entirely and reshot due to a legal settlement clause forbidding Jordan Chandler, the first accuser, to be mentioned. Thereafter, more “sanitized” versions of Michael were shot as most critics put it. Of course, it could feel like only half of his story was shown, leading to some critics calling it “unsatisfying half”. Nevertheless, the themes of abuse and family exploitation and how those shaped and often impeded with Michael’s personal artistic growth, in my opinion, were very well narrated.  

The tensions intensify with Michael’s estate, run by entertainment attorney John Branca and Michael’s chief business advisor, co-producing the movie and making his character feel crucially important in his career, compared to Quincy Jones, Michael’s mentor. Paris got in disagreements with the estate and thus John as to their using it for sales and monetary gain.  

Going back into the narrative of the biopic, some less “sanitised” scenes did include facts like the King of Pop’s lifelong vitiligo condition which had a serious impact on his self-perception. It also touched upon his frustration with his father, and how that relationship negatively impacted his lifelong health during the Jackson 5 reunion tour incident, where he got severe burns and a later dependency on drugs.  

Still, this does not override the main narrative of his artistic genius and growth. Perhaps we are looking at a promising sequel?  

Overall, the biopic was good but not perfect, and if you go into it expecting a dark and realistic background to Michael’s career and life, then expect to leave dissatisfied. However, if you go into it to experience a feel-good story of personal growth and battles, then expect to be thrilled. 

Haruki Murakami has become a household name. Often seen as the frontrunner of Japanese literature in the West, he has also become an increasingly divisive author. Despite criticism regarding his presentation of women, and repetitiveness or banality in his oeuvre, Murakami still emerges as a widely read, well-enjoyed novelist. So why do people love (or hate) his work?

Anonymous

When I first read Kafka on the Shore, I hated it. I hated the gore descriptions about dead cats and their hearts, the unsettling sexual themes, the bizarre twists that came across every new page. That, however, lasted only a few pages. Halfway through the book, I was being roped into a world of metaphysical gateways, labyrinths, and dream-like states where anything was possible. That’s what made it so special. No film or play could capture the essence of the story like Murakami did. To think of it, reading Murakami is like watching a dream unfold. You won’t remember the events clearly, they might not even make sense at the time, but they leave you altered forever.

Tarun Nair, Chief Copyeditor

I read Norwegian Wood as a teenager, and inevitably (and intensely) identified with Toru Watanabe as an introverted loner looking for love. I saw it as a book about goodbyes: people flit in and out of Watanabe’s life like fireflies, never to be seen again. As banal as this might be, it still feels incredibly tragic to me

Mo Majlisi, Editor-at-Large

Murakami is the definition of middle brow. I dislike him because what little I have read of him was, quite bluntly, basic. I suspect that he is a bit like The Count of Monte Cristo: a signalling device for uninspired, insipid Gen Zs to say they read, without any sense of actual curiosity and love of reading. If he was good, I would have expected better discourse, but it’s clear that his books are just there to look hip and cool. Japanese literature has some really good contemporaries, and Murakami is undeserved of the fame and status he has received. Slopfest.

Aditi Mehta, Books Editor; Deputy Editor-in-Chief

The first time I came across sex in a novel was in a Murakami novel. Printed, explicit, glaring at me, it was sort of an “aha” moment: it revealed my first glimpse of adulthood. I finally seemed to understand what grown ups might read about too; books became more sacred because nothing was taboo.

Haruki Murakami’s A Wild Sheep Chase (1982) and Dance Dance Dance (1988) are part of  his loosely connected “Rat Trilogy”, which also includes Wind/ Pinball (1973) and Hear the Wind Sing (1979). The novels follow the same unnamed narrator, a detached Tokyo advertising writer navigating loneliness, loss, and increasingly surreal encounters. In A Wild Sheep Chase, the narrator is drawn into a strange investigation after a powerful right-wing figure demands he locate a mysterious sheep pictured in a photograph sent  by his old friend, the Rat. Accompanied by his girlfriend Kiki, he travels to Hokkaido and  encounters the enigmatic Sheep Man and the isolated Dolphin Hotel, both of which become central symbols in Murakami’s surreal world. Dance Dance Dance  revisits the narrator several years later as he returns to the rebuilt Dolphin Hotel searching for Kiki, only to become entangled with characters including the lonely teenage girl Yuki, the actor Gotanda, and the hotel receptionist Yumiyoshi. Across both novels, Murakami blends detective fiction, magical realism, and existential reflections, using recurring disappearances, dreamlike spaces and the supernatural “Sheep” mythology to explore alienation, modernity, and the search for meaning in contemporary life.

Haruki Murakami’s A Wild Sheep Chase and Dance Dance Dance trace a shift from the search for meaning to the endurance of meaninglessness. Murakami suggests that survival in a spiritually empty modern world requires continuous motion and fragile human connection, while stagnation leads to spiritual disappearance. Renowned for his blending of the surreal with the alienation and isolation of adulthood, these novels depict different stages of the narrator’s existential journey. Taking place four years apart, they follow the same protagonist as he attempts to cope with continual loss and the apparent meaninglessness of his life.

Movement

The narrator’s movement changes across the two novels. In A Wild Sheep Chase, his travel is purposeful and goal-oriented: he is actively searching for the Rat and, consequently, the Sheep. After receiving a letter from his long-lost friend with an image of a strange sheep enclosed, he begins a journey to track down the animal in order to find the Rat and uncover the mystery behind the image. Movement in this novel is investigative and tied to discovery; travelling forward means getting closer to an answer. By contrast, in Dance Dance Dance, the narrator continues to move, but it is no longer in pursuit of a solution. Instead, he moves because he must. What once functioned as a search for meaning becomes a survival mechanism. Early in the novel he reunites with the Sheep Man after the events of A Wild Sheep Chase, who tells him, “Dance while the music is playing.” This advice becomes integral to the narrator’s philosophy of living. Stagnation, rather than uncertainty, becomes the true danger, suggesting that remaining engaged is the only way to avoid being consumed by emptiness.

The supernatural system of the novels undergoes a similar transformation. In A Wild Sheep Chase, the Sheep moves between hosts and shapes history, functioning as an active metaphysical force that manipulates power and political structures. The narrator’s journey is therefore not simply personal but connected to a hidden system that governs the world around him. In Dance Dance Dance, however, the Sheep disappears, and the Sheep Man shifts from an ominous figure to a guide. The disappearance of the Sheep signifies the collapse of this supernatural order. Without it, the narrator is left in a world that is no longer controlled by hidden structures but is defined by absence and uncertainty. Where meaning once seemed to exist within an external system, the narrator now must generate his own sense of direction through movement and connection.

Women

A common criticism of Murakami is his treatment of women, and this issue is very much on display in both novels

Both novels also revolve around the recurring disappearance of women. A Wild Sheep Chase opens with the death of one of the narrator’s former partners and the end of his marriage, and closes with the disappearance of his current partner, Kiki. In Dance Dance Dance, several women the narrator crosses paths with similarly vanish soon after entering his life. Their absence repeatedly pushes him into motion, forcing him to investigate, search, and attempt to reconnect. Characters such as Yuki’s absent mother, unstable romantic relationships and the literal disappearances that occur throughout both novels function as gateways to the metaphysical world. The narrator is drawn deeper into the strange systems underlying reality through these absences. Yet while disappearance drives the narrator’s movement, it never leads to full or lasting connection, reinforcing the novels’ atmosphere of instability and loss.

A common criticism of Murakami is his treatment of women, and this issue is very much on display in both novels. All the female characters function more as narrative catalysts than fully developed individuals, existing primarily to motivate the narrator’s emotional or physical movement through the story. Dance Dance Dance contains one of the most uncomfortable examples of this dynamic, in the inappropriate friendship between the 13-year-old Yuki and the 30-something narrator. Although their relationship is not sexual, the narrator repeatedly suggests that if she were older, they would date, and at times their interactions felt troublingly close to grooming. There are other moments that highlight Murakami’s tendency to objectify women, such as the scene in which the narrator returns home with the very drunk Dolphin Hotel receptionist, Yumiyoshi, and considers taking advantage of her, thankfully landing on no – but only because it would not be “fair”.

As an avid Murakami reader, I thought I would be accustomed to his portrayal of women, but I found Dance Dance Dance particularly unsettling. While I believe Yuki and the narrator had a genuine, though socially unconventional friendship, several of their conversations feel gratuitous and could easily have been omitted without affecting the narrative.

The Dolphin Hotel

The hotel functions as a mysterious and liminal space with a strong connection to the supernatural

Just as the narrator evolves between novels, so does the Dolphin Hotel. In A Wild Sheep Chase, the hotel functions as a mysterious and liminal space with a strong connection to the supernatural, somewhat reminiscent of Oshima’s cabin in Kafka on the Shore. The old Dolphin Hotel is family-run, and one of its residents is the owner, a sheep researcher who permanently occupies a room in the building. His presence becomes crucial to the plot: without the owner, the narrator and Kiki would never have encountered the Sheep Man or begun to understand the significance of the Sheep and the fate of the Rat.

In Dance Dance Dance, the narrator returns to the hotel because he believes he is somehow connected to it. He returns to find it has been completely rebuilt into a modern corporate hotel. The space has become sterile, commercial and disconnected from the supernatural atmosphere it once possessed. This transformation can be read as a metaphor for memory itself. Modernisation has buried the deeper layers of reality beneath polished surfaces, replacing a space that once held meaning with something static and impersonal. However, despite the hotel’s transformation, the narrator eventually discovers that the new dark, otherworldly space where the Sheep Man resides still exists beneath the new building. Hidden behind the polished surface of the modern hotel is the same shadowy realm he encountered years earlier. This suggests that although capitalism and modernisation may bury the deeper layers of reality, they do not fully erase them. The metaphysical world has not disappeared entirely; it has simply been concealed beneath the surface. The narrator’s ability to access this place implies that movement between realities is still possible, even in a world that appears sterile and controlled.

Despite the narrator’s growing sense that the world lacks inherent meaning, his relationships remain the most important aspects of his life. Whether romantic, platonic, or even purely transactional, these connections keep him engaged with the world around him. His bond with Kiki, his friendships with Yuki and Gotanda, and even his interactions with characters such as Mei and June create moments of connection that interrupt the otherwise isolating emptiness of his existence. Helping others becomes the narrator’s primary way of avoiding despair. Rather than withdrawing from the world, he remains involved in the lives of those around him, allowing these relationships to provide structure where metaphysical meaning once existed.

Skeletons

Understanding the climax of Dance Dance Dance requires returning to the role of the Sheep in A Wild Sheep Chase

Dance Dance Dance climaxes in the recurring dream sequence, in which the narrator finds himself in a hotel room with Kiki and six skeletons. The skeletons appear to represent those in his life who were consumed by the void of disappearance – individuals whose connections to the world have collapsed, leaving behind only the remnants of their existence. Yet the narrator can only clearly identify five of them. The presence of a sixth skeleton suggests the unsettling possibility it represents the narrator himself.

Understanding this scene requires returning to the role of the Sheep in A Wild Sheep Chase. The Sheep is not simply a supernatural being, but the centre of a system of control and power. The Sheep moves between hosts, manipulating history and political structures and creating a hidden metaphysical order beneath ordinary reality. When the Rat ultimately kills himself while possessed by the Sheep, he destroys this system and breaks the cycle of the Sheep’s movement. In doing so, the Rat performs the trilogy’s most decisive act of resistance. By sacrificing himself to destroy the Sheep’s control, he prevents the continuation of a system that turns people into mere hosts for power. Yet his act also removes the final structure that gave the world a hidden order, leaving the narrator to navigate a reality that is no longer controlled, but fundamentally empty Dance Dance Dance therefore takes place in a world after this collapse. Without the Sheep, there is no controlling force, hidden meaning or organising system behind reality. The world becomes empty rather than controlled, which is why the narrator’s life feels directionless.

Seen from this perspective, the skeletons in the dream can be interpreted as the remains of those who were connected to that lost system. They represent what is left after the supernatural order collapses: empty remnants of meaning. The room becomes a kind of metaphysical graveyard. If the sixth skeleton is the narrator, the dream suggests that, without the Sheep, he too risks becoming one of these lifeless remnants, another person left behind in a world that has lost its structure. The scene therefore functions as a warning. Without movement and connection, he could easily become spiritually stagnant. This interpretation also directly clarifies the Sheep Man’s advice to “Keep Dancing”. If the old metaphysical system has vanished, meaning will not emerge from supernatural forces, historical structures or destiny. Instead, people must create their own meaning through action, movement and connection. Dancing becomes a metaphor for continuing to engage with life despite uncertainty. In contrast to the stillness of the skeletons, dancing represents life itself: movement, interaction, and the refusal to disappear.

Parting thoughts

Where A Wild Sheep Chase depicts the narrator’s search for meaning, Dance Dance Dance portrays life after meaning collapses. Murakami ultimately suggests that the solution is not to rediscover a lost system of answers, but to continue moving forward regardless. In a world defined by disappearance and uncertainty, survival depends on maintaining connections and remaining in motion – continuing to dance while the music is still playing, even in a world where meaning itself has disappeared.