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In Search of All Souls

I recently sat the All Souls Fellowship exam, called by some the " world's hardest exam ". It requires you to write twelve essays for four papers over two days; the breadth and novelty of the questions make it a fascinating experience. Two of the papers were "general papers" and two were in a humanities subject of your choice (in my case, philosophy); most papers had around 25 questions. I've summarised my answers below, as well as noting some of the other particularly interesting questions. General paper I: 1. How should you prepare for the end of the world? I started off with a somewhat emotional argument about the badness of death on an individual level. I referred to Epicurus' argument that we have nothing to fear from death because when we are dead, we will not have any preferences about it at all - but argued, in response, that having preferences about future states of the world is a foundation of our lives. In terms of the end of the
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25 poems

After about a decade of collecting and appreciating poems, I’ve decided to put together an anthology of my favourites, along with some commentary on what I like about each. My tastes lean towards short poems, and ones with an immediate poignancy or beauty to them - with a few notable exceptions which you’ll see below. I’m now 25, so it seemed appropriate to include 25 poems, in three sections. In general, poems are only ever about love or loss, and usually both, so the first two sections deal with those two themes. The third section consists of those rarest of creatures: non-romantic poems which are actually (mostly) happy. I hope you enjoy all of them as much as I have. Love poems: since feeling is first, by e e cummings No second Troy, by William Butler Yeats Marrysong, by Dennis Scott How do I love thee, by Elizabeth Barrett Browning A quoi bon dire, by Charlotte Mew La figlia che piange, by T. S. Eliot He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven, by William Butler Yeats Jenny Ki
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Book review: Very Important People

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New York’s nightclubs are the particle accelerators of sociology: reliably creating the precise conditions under which exotic extremes of status-seeking behaviour can be observed. Ashley Mears documents it all in her excellent book Very Important People: Status and Beauty in the Global Party Circuit. A model turned sociology professor, while researching the book she spent hundreds of nights in New York’s most exclusive nightclubs, as well as similar parties across the world. The book abounds with fascinating details; in this post I summarise it and highlight a few aspects which I found most interesting. Here’s the core dynamic. There are some activities which are often fun: dancing, drinking, socialising. But they become much more fun when they’re associated with feelings of high status. So wealthy men want to use their money to buy the feeling of having high-status fun, by doing those activities while associated with (and ideally while popular amongst) other high-status people, parti
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