qwertyuiopasdfghjklzxcvbnmqwertyui opasdfghjklzxcvbnmqwertyuiopasdfgh jklzxcvbnmqwertyuiopasdfghjklzxcvb nmqwertyuiopasdfghjklzxcvbnmqwer Bernard Levin Award 2011 tyuiopasdfghjklzxcvbnmqwertyuiopas Entries and Awards dfghjklzxcvbnmqwertyuiopasdfghjklzx cvbnmqwertyuiopasdfghjklzxcvbnmq wertyuiopasdfghjklzxcvbnmqwertyuio pasdfghjklzxcvbnmqwertyuiopasdfghj klzxcvbnmqwertyuiopasdfghjklzxcvbn mqwertyuiopasdfghjklzxcvbnmqwerty uiopasdfghjklzxcvbnmqwertyuiopasdf ghjklzxcvbnmqwertyuiopasdfghjklzxc vbnmqwertyuiopasdfghjklzxcvbnmrty uiopasdfghjklzxcvbnmqwertyuiopasdf ghjklzxcvbnmqwertyuiopasdfghjklzxc Contents WINNER Alizeh Ovais Kohari – The Wrangling of Minds .............................................................................................4 HIGHLY COMMENDED Charmian Walker-Smith – In bed with the enemy .......................................................................................6 HIGHLY COMMENDED Andréana Lefton – A Home for the Wander-Wounded................................................................................8 HIGHLY COMMENDED Rimmel Mohydin – I’m with Stupid ............................................................................................................10 JUDGES PICK Luke Smolinski – Bernard Levin Award: a parody.......................................................................................12 Calum Young – My Wright’s Bar Sandwich.................................................................................................13 Christopher Wilford – Babel or Babylon? ...................................................................................................15 Xin Ting Wang (Heather) – The Transformer..............................................................................................17 Jessica Dell – Richness of London, introduced through its newspapers.....................................................19 Matt Guilhem – Resident Osmosis..............................................................................................................21 Tausha Cowan – A Smile Goes a Long Way ................................................................................................23 Emma Kelly – Chip off the old block ...........................................................................................................25 Elizabeth Lowell – LSE Perspectives: A Lesson in the Human Factor..........................................................27 Steph Linsdale – Why state school kids don’t need to moan .....................................................................29 Rasha Touqan – Well Toto, We’re Most Definitely Not in Kansas Anymore..............................................32 Christopher Finnigan – Evening on LSE’s Houghton Street ........................................................................34 Neha Jain – All in a day’s work....................................................................................................................36 Matthew Shearman – Kitchens of London, Unite! .....................................................................................38 Nathan Briant – LSE: the 1960s...................................................................................................................41 Rawan Mariam Abdulla – LSE is that place.................................................................................................44 Maeve Glavey – Just Another Week at LSE.................................................................................................47 Eugenia Marna – Dear Jurisprudence.........................................................................................................49 Heba Elsayed – Chronicles of a PhD Student: How Events in Cairo led to my Own Revolution in Understanding ............................................................................................................................................51 Anita Shargall – ‘Reminiscences make one feel deliciously aged and sad’.................................................54 Claire Tighe – A sense of greater responsibility..........................................................................................56 2 Laurence Vardaxoglou – A GREAT BIG THANK YOU....................................................................................58 Gabrielle Letimier – Youthhood seductions ...............................................................................................62 Alexander Young – The ‘melting pot of cultures’ .......................................................................................64 Rouba Mhaissen – The List .........................................................................................................................66 Marina Gerner – LSE: Love, Sex and Education ..........................................................................................69 Nevena Crljenko – A World Elsewhere .......................................................................................................71 Sri Ranjini Mei Hua – Swing ........................................................................................................................73 Yangyang Fang – Get ready to battle..........................................................................................................76 Kerry-Rose O’Donnell – Pinstripes and Placards.........................................................................................79 Marion Koob – How lucky we are...............................................................................................................82 Alice Fonarev – Balancing Acts ...................................................................................................................84 Mina Yilmaz – A Step into the ‘Dreamhouse’ .............................................................................................87 Teresa García Alonso – LSE Student’s Union ..............................................................................................90 3 WINNER Alizeh Ovais Kohari – The Wrangling of Minds When, with a solitary flick, the two hands on the clock become one and the demand and supply lines begin to blur into each other, I shut my textbook and call up a friend. By the time the clock hands have stretched as far away from each other as they possibly can, we are perched by the river, on the Southbank, eating lunch. ‘My head is cluttered with Plato,’ she says. ‘Mine with regression lines,’ I groan. ‘Let’s talk about something else.’ We are economists-in-training with a love for books and so, our conversation skips from one to another. Watching gaggle after gaggle of insufferably cheery tourists float by, I tell her how in a book I am currently reading, a character declares that she knows a trick for the perfect picture: ‘You must look into the camera and say ‘La petite pomme.’ I stumble over the French; her tongue flies over it with enviable ease. We repeat the words together – ‘La petite pomme!’ – and freeze for a moment, two (usually serious-looking) girls with pretend pouts. We look at each other from the corners of our eyes, confirm how absurd we look, and convulse into helpless laughter. Another friend joins us. He is livid: on the way back from the LSE, he saw a bus that stated, proudly, boldly, that ‘There’s probably no God, so stop worrying and have a good day’. ‘To assume the absence of a God,’ he seethes, biting angrily into an apple, ‘to just assume it so nonchalantly, I mean, come on’ – with a vehement gesture towards the river and the sky – ‘how could there not be a God?’ And another friend points at my copy of The Economist, which shows a child in Africa, hollow eyes on a gaunt face, and says quietly, ‘How could there be one?’ *** And so it goes, the wrangling of minds. We sit by the water and debate the existence of God, St Paul’s slender steeple on one side of the river, the Tate’s fat finger on the other, while above us the sky changes weather with characteristic English nonchalance. Yesterday, a squabble ensued over the independence of the subcontinent (‘We only left because we wanted to, because it was 4 in our interests,’ asserted an English friend and the Indians and Pakistanis amongst us, staunch patriots, pounced on him, our hackles raised.) We ponder over the secret feminism in Shakespeare’s A Taming of the Shrew, watch Oedipus at the National Theatre and wonder why he, Oedipus, felt the need to gorge his eyes out – after all, he didn’t know he was marrying his mother, did he now? Economics geeks, we discuss the world in terms of opportunity cost, marginal utility, cost-benefit analyses. We point at the Hare Krishna cart that parks itself on Houghton Street every single day and joke again and again, always laughing, never tiring: ‘But there’s no such thing as a free lunch!’ We are from all over the world, with ideas diametrically opposed, tempers dangerously similar; we argue, debate, discuss, dissect, try to know the causes of things. We refuse to be each other. And that, though it spawns so many quarrels, is the best part of it all. London will do that to you: it will turn over and annihilate ideas that you have carefully nurtured in rooms sheltered from the light of experience. And even as those long-cherished views are twisted and crushed, even as they begin to appear so – silly, we find ourselves emboldened by London, by all that has taken place within its fold, by all that can still take place – perhaps, by our hands. Less than half a mile away from the LSE, in ramshackle Soho quarters, Karl Marx once