Jeanette Winterson, One Aladdin Two Lamps (Penguin Books, 2025) Jeanette Winterson’s new novel is a bold frenzy of interconnected narratives, embracing the  power of imagination and of storytelling amid the age of AI I am not a religious person, but attending Jeanette Winterson’s recent book launch   was perhaps the closest I’ve come to a religious experience. Gathering in St George’s Church on a stormy mid-November evening, I felt once again inspired by the narrative geniu

Illustrations by Grace McKenna I spent the past weekend cleaning out my prized top floor room of a residential student house in Providencia’s Eduardo Hyatt Street. It was a largely successful post-semester purge; a distinction I quantified by the three large plastic donation centre-bound bags I hauled through 30-degree Santiago. Unburdened of earthly possessions and three Chilean child burns victims helped as the store assistant repeatedly reminded me (one per bag!), I headed

Lily Allen, West End Girl (2025) Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ In five months’ time, I will be turning 22. These double digits are sold to young women as our most fun and frivolous age, the last hurrah of our girlhoods before reality kicks in. Think Taylor Swift, her girl squad, and that bloody black fedora. It is an image that I aspired to for a long time, an image promising freedom, spontaneity, and messiness. And it was okay to indulge this fantasy because, when the clock struck twelve

Illustrations by Grace McKenna So, apparently Donald Trump and Bill Clinton had a thing on the side. Last week, Congress disclosed over 2,000 of American sex offender Jeffery Epstein’s emails from the decade leading up to his death. The first leak, revealing from Epstein himself that ‘of course’ U.S. president Donald Trump ‘knew about the girls’ , was surprisingly not the information that turned the most heads. An email sent to Epstein by his brother, Mark, suggested that Rus

Illustrations by Grace McKenna We’ve all heard the saying “don’t judge a book by its cover.” In many theoretical or philosophical situations this may be true, but what about with actual books?  Nowadays, this phrase is used more in its metaphorical than literal sense, but some of its earliest recorded uses were in reference to real books. In George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss  (1860), the character Mr Tulliver says “But it seems one mustn’t judge by the outside”  in relati

Illustrations by Grace McKenna Two weeks ago, two friends and I completed the W-trek in Chilean Patagonia with ten complete strangers. However, we did not follow the classic route that carves a ‘W’ through the notoriously unforgiving landscape, but a personalised route that Strava’s GPS satellites recorded as a stodgy box shape.  The substantial size of our group and our tour agency’s meticulous ethos meant our provisions were strictly rationed into four boxes of industrial q

Illustrations by Grace McKenna Venue: Edinburgh University Film Society (Upper Hall, Pleasance) ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ Playtime follows the bumbling Monsieur Hulot—among other characters—as they navigate a hyper-consumerist Paris in a variety of sketches. It is made up of six segments: (1) the airport, (2) the offices, (3) the trade exhibition, (4) the apartments, (5) the restaurant, and (6) the roundabout. Being made up of such a wide range of sketches, it’s difficult to explain the plo

Illustrations by Grace McKenna In this day and age, I would be hard pressed to encounter someone who has not heard of Chat GPT. While this form of generative AI is sweeping the internet, delivering computer-generated content from text to images, many of us have already been wondering what impact this will have on creative industries like art, writing, and even media. This week we are bringing the subject of AI closer to home, examining the implications of AI on generating the

Illustrations by Grace McKenna A thirty-four year old, Muslim, immigrant, democratic socialist is elected mayor of a city hailed as the center of capitalism just one year after an inexperienced, convicted felon accused of authoritarian rhetoric is elected for the second time to lead the land of the free and one of the most powerful states in the world. I’m Gwynne, The Broad’s new Politics columnist, and I’d like to get to the bottom of this kind of dissonance by exploring the

Photograph by Isabel Beiboer (@ibfilmforyou) From the outside, the Edinburgh music scene appears a close-knit and impenetrable community. I was unsure about how to get my foot in the door and this column off the ground. However, through mutual friends, I was recently and happily introduced to Daisy Casemore. I first met Daisy at an intimate evening of music and poetry she organised in her living room, to fundraise for Medical Aid for Palestinians, but I had heard her name man