Image Credit: Jamie King
Pi Perspective is back! We are very excited to be relaunching our editorial, where we dish steaming hot pi straight from our journalists’ humongous minds.
Editors-in-Chief
Chances are, you’re familiar with London Plane trees; they are smooth-barked, pointy-leaved, and scattered throughout London. As a tree, they come as close as a tree can in defining a city: They’re everywhere from Gordon Square to Embankment. There is something about this tree that feels so special: it has a certain old-Disney, Bloomsbury, focaccia-sandwich, je ne sais quoi of European high life.
But this is fundamentally untrue: bred from the American Sycamore and the Oriental Plane (I wonder who named the ‘Oriental Plane’), there is in fact nothing European about this tree. In fact, it only evokes a specific 18th-Century Britain, which is coincidentally when the hybrid was planted.
A part of the city’s beauty has always been, and will always be, indebted to its wealth and in cases like London’s this means exploitation. I was deeply afraid that the city I have fallen in love with over the last 2 and a half years owes its magical allure to imperialism. But that doesn’t mean I can’t appreciate the tree. In many ways, I wonder whether, although harvested through imperial expansion, migration in the 2 centuries later now means that the London Plane is a symbol of Britain’s past but also its present: As the trees change colour and shed their leaves across Camden, Southbank and the rest of northern Europe, are they revealing a past lurking beneath the nostalgia in 101 Dalmatians, or the (mostly) fallen empires and multi-ethnic legacies which crunch their leaves and order oat flat whites under their canopy?
News & Features
This week, the Democratic Party pulled off a historic victory to regain a Senate majority of 54 seats. The victory has been labelled a ‘blue tsunami.’
This is despite Trump-backed billionaires who donated more than $600 million in support of Republican candidates.
In a historic victory, the deep-red state of South Carolina turned blue, as did Kansas which had not elected a Democratic senator since 1932.
Among the newly elected Democratic senators include Abdul El Sayed from Michigan and Texas’ James Talarico. Elon Musk poured in over $200 million on Texas alone but failed to defeat Talarico. Equally, El-Sayed’s victory comes despite the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) spending over $39 million to defeat him. El Sayed is the first Muslim senator in the United States’ history.
It is clear that President Trump’s own policies – his war on Iran, close relationship with billionaires, and extreme self-enrichment – and those of his friends and family are now viewed as unacceptable by American voters. Another major concern for the electorate was the US relationship with Israel. JD Vance acknowledged this and posted a tweet stating that one of the primary causes of their major losses in the midterms was the US relationship with Israel. He wrote that Americans want a “change to our relationship to Israel.”
After dominating American politics for 10 years, the era of Trump appears to be coming to an end. The Republican Party’s response to this repudiation remains to be seen
Opinion
I woke up on Wednesday morning ill, exhausted and unenthused about my morning tutorial. But I also woke up on Wednesday morning with a text from my friend which said: ‘THEY FLIPPED TEXASSS’ (with many more enthusiastic s’s). It’s a strange thing to open the news app on your phone and, for once, to be met with good news about the global political landscape. Even stranger was that upon reading about the US political landscape, I wasn’t left with my usual sense of growing existential dread and, often, apathetic nihilism, about the state of the world. That our mood, and more importantly the lives of people globally, depend on the volatile voting patterns of US citizens is a truth we are all far too comfortable with. I am just one of millions who stared at my phone screen in disbelief on Wednesday morning, hardly believing that I had been given permission to hope again. So, thank you, I suppose to the US voters who have decided that the rest of the world may hesitantly begin to release the breath we have been holding in for, at least, the last two years. The cynical side of me cannot help but wonder if it’s really wise to trust the people who elected Donald Trump to the presidency twice.
Lifestyle & Culture
I have always thought of reading as a somewhat personal act. It’s the private ingestion of words for the cultivation of our minds, an intimate transition of knowledge between people. And yet, during my latest excursion to the Waterstones on Gower Street (a Mecca for UCL Humanities students like me), I was accosted by a new display of books on the second floor titled ‘Books to be seen reading’. What fell beneath the innocently laminated sign was a collection of titles I’ve seen splattered across my Instagram explore page. It made me wonder: in 2026, do we read to feed our minds or to merely beseen doing so?
It’s no coincidence that pop stars like Dua Lipa and fashion houses like Valentino are endorsing books to reaffirm their cultural cachet; In an age polluted with doomscrolling, AI fruit soap operas and dwindling attention spans, reading has become resilience. A palpably human rebellion against the enshittification of everything pure and good.
Such displays of book-loving in fashion shows and movie press tours may seem performative, but ultimately, they’re for the best. Our world has transitioned from creation to consumption; performance is necessary for survival. If books have to be sexy, so be it – at least they’re being picked up off the shelf.
Sport
This week, Bunny Shaw, top scorer in the WSL last season, Jamaican star, and one of the very best strikers in the world, did not make the FIFPRO World 11 Shortlist. Her fellow players failed to recognise her league-winning efforts and simply didn’t vote for her.
My immediate feeling was absolute sympathy for Shaw, before recognising a similarity between this shortlist, and some sort of popularity contest encountered at school. Only four non-European players made the cut, and yet English players such as Chloe Kelly, who had a remarkably average season, saw acclaim. This heavy bias, and lack of correlation to real talent, is all the more intriguing in a player-voted award. It seems that, like children, players really do just vote for those close to them, and majority groups form in a European-dominated footballing world.
Maybe Bunny Shaw will never be part of this inner circle unless she has a team of English or Spanish players ready to rally behind her. Herd mentality in sport is just the same as in the rest of the world, where evidently your background and connections have much more of an effect on whether you achieve renown than your talent.