In Amongst It

 For any rugby fans in the Northern Hemisphere, the images are iconic: The 'H' goalposts on jerseys and balls, Miles Harrison's iconic voice calling the games for Sky Sports, the dramatic updates of the quarter-final qualifiers as bonus points and points differences shifted which teams had an easy route to the finals. The old format for the tournament was imperfect, sure, but it still became the best tournament professional rugby has had. The World Cup is brilliant and will hopefully become better and more intriguing with its expansion for the next iteration, but it lacks the Heineken Cup's never-ending competitive streak. Super Rugby is mostly a fait accompli with scant exceptions. The Six Nations and the Rugby Championship suffer from their exclusivity. The Heineken Cup had it all. But then it lost it. It rebranded in 2014 as the 'European Rugby Champions Cup' and immediately lost some of its most iconic imagery and associations. The money that has plagued mos...

I remember going to see a well-cast sci-fi linguistics film in 2017 prepared to nerd out and bask in talk of clauses, semiotics and word order. What followed was anything but, though all such topics of conversation were sprinkled throughout the film like flecks of past-its-sell-by pre-grated Parmesan. A shy-of-2-hours deep meditation on the nature of time, language, and memory, Arrival felt important. It deeply moved me in a way that was at the time explicable. The friend with whom I saw the film laughed at me, but I know what I felt. I was only marginally interested in linguistics at the time - forgive me, I was seventeen years old - but I knew this film had explored something more profound than mere ink blots on a page or larynx-based phonetics. All the Hollywood tropes of villainry are intelligently semi-subverted, though Russia and China still appear to be the bad guys when dealing with the heptapods compared to our heroes, the American military. Louise Banks, played fantastically...