Posts in Features

This is the time of year we all start thinking about self-improvement. Shifting the excess weight we added over Christmas. Finally joining the gym. Personally I have decided this is going to be the year I learn how to Rhumba.

But there are other ways of improving your own lot and that of others.

Read More
Scaling up changes everything. How can we predict its effects?

Policy makers at all levels know what it’s like to watch a scheme that’s have done well at pilot stage fail to succeed when scaled up. What works for 30 children in Loughborough may not work for 1000 in Lagos. Or even London.

That’s not because the ideas were poor in the first place, or because the pilots themselves were poorly run, but because scale affects projects in different ways and as such needs a different evaluative approach.

Read More
Things You Only Know When You're Plus Size and Online Dating

‘I am already in love with your body.’

In an era of #MeToo, that’s a bold thing for a man to say to a woman he’s barely interacted with on a dating app. I think I’m supposed to be flattered. But when it’s the third sentence in, and both the others have been about his love for big women, you know this man isn’t talking to you – he’s talking to his fixation.

Read More
Immersive theatre may be sexy – but we need to start talking about consent

“Truth or dare?” This is the challenge put to a few audience members in a game of “spin the bottle” at an immersive production of The Great Gatsby currently being enjoyed by audiences in Borough, south London.

Read More
Coney Island Baby

Love and longing accompanies beer and boogie on the boardwalk as Emma Burnell and her sister visit the most American place in New York.

It is against my innate sense of romance to go to the seaside and not fall in love. Not ‘kiss me quick and grope me furtively under the Waltzer’ love. But ‘flirty giggles, flipped hair, batted eyelashes and a deep, soulful longing for someone who, in an hour, will be just another stranger again’ love. That’s what the seaside is for – you can’t have all the fun of the fair without the emotional rollercoaster.

Read More