Activity

The lollipops and little skirts are tropes of girlhood and that turns viewers on, but no one is fooled that the models are anything but adults. And the women in chains? Might they also exist in a world where pain is an enticing idea, but only an idea — a place where whips draw no blood?

I have n…

[...] when Mr. Turner refers to the assault as “twenty minutes of action.” This action is not a slang word for sex, but a nod to the necessity of a plot he cannot comprehend; he cannot even think in terms of conflict, of stories with more than one side.

“Decolonize” is a big idea, but it does not yield, by itself, a systematic political program. Nor need it. Nothing wrong with starting on one statue and seeing what comes of it. The thing for the less engagé among us is to listen and learn what we can. Universities are resilient creatures and have …

If Oxford is worth reforming, as activists must believe it is since they’re not demanding that we tear it down and start from scratch, then it must be because it can be reformed, that this can be effected by argument and persuasion. But we should keep our expectations low. Oxford — and the mainstre…

Rhodes Must Fall was picked up in Oxford by student activists during my last term there, in response to a landscape just as marked as Cape Town by Rhodes and his money. They set their sights on similar goals: “the plague of colonial iconography,” the “Euro-centric curriculum . . . which frames the …