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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
If you, like me, feel a bit of doom and gloom over the current state of the world and the weather this week, I would implore you to go to a supermarket. We live in such a time and place that be it the depths of December or the middle of June, I can acquire a lemon, a pumpkin, and a bottle of merlot in under 5 minutes. If I really wanted to, I could get it delivered. Anyone who has played Stardew Valley will know for a fact that this was not always possible. From different seasons in different continents for less than the price of a half pint in Institute, you can buy a mango, something which was impossible until 1930. Queen Victoria may have never got her mango, but you know who did? Of course, the implications of this are not all harmless; part of this miracle leans on carbon emissions and exploitative trade within the industry. Nevertheless, the globality of the food on our shelves would be enough to send a medieval peasant into a spiral. Andy Warhol called them the museums, as do some of my friends when we go abroad, so maybe try to give your Sainsbury’s local some of the same treatment.
News & Features
Is British politics going back to normal? According to an October 2026 poll by IPSOS we’re seeing a return to the two-party system we know (and love?). More than 1100 Brits were asked their voting intention, and the results saw Labour and the Conservatives taking the top two positions with 32% and 24%, respectively.
The British government has been historically dominated by a two-party system, starting with the Whigs and Tories and evolving to the modern Labour and Conservative party system we see today. Many have argued against the system, claiming it promotes hyper-partisanship and tactical voting, limiting minority voices. It is partially why the Reform surge was so shocking; in an IPSOS poll from September 2025, Reform dominated the polls, with a 34% lead, leaving Labour trailing twelve points behind. Now, Labour is experiencing its highest percentage of support in any opinion poll since October 2024.
Just this year, Reform has undergone a Parliamentary standards investigation into an undeclared £5 million donation, triggering a by-election, along with the publication of multiple undercover investigations exposing potential illegal foreign donations and an onslaught of racism from party members. Scandals aside, perhaps Andy Burnham is responsible for this refreshment in the polls. In his first 100 days as PM, Burnham has, significantly, reinitiated the conversation about Britain's relationship with the EU.
After over a year of considering the possibility of a five-party system, it seems we’re falling back into our old ways. But with the release of the Autumn budget, we are yet to see how Labour and the new and shiny Burnham fare.
Opinion
I feel like finding a seat at the Student Centre has become something of an Olympic sport. Arrive anytime after 11am and you're met with a sea of MacBooks, half-empty water bottles and bags, all seemingly studying for degrees of their own. Their owners? Nowhere to be seen.
This week, I've found myself circling the same floor several times, hoping that one of these mysteriously abandoned desks might finally become available. Yet somehow, a single water bottle is enough to claim ownership of prime university real estate for hours on end.
Of course, everyone deserves a break from studying, but I feel like there’s something rather impressive about students managing to occupy two places at once. Perhaps UCL should start charging rent for these desks. Given London's housing market, I'm sure they’d make a fortune…
Lifestyle & Culture
For most of us, the post is probably an unexciting affair. You hear Royal Mail cluttering with your letterbox and prepare for a mildly threatening letter about the TV licence or a bank statement for the previous tenant. But, occasionally, you get blessed with something quite different; for me, this morning, it was an A6 piece of card, illustrated with a red squirrel straight out of Beatrix Potter; on the flip side, my friend’s drawling handwriting sending greetings from Windermere.
In a world where everyone you know is reachable every minute of the day, there’s something delightful about an inefficient mode of communication. Where letters feel redundant and texts are so practical that they’re straight up unromantic, the postcard is the perfect compromise – besides, how much do you really need to write when the picture is doing all the talking?
It’s a form that’s hardly changed since its invention in the late 1800s - think back to those vintage postcards you studied as a primary source in history, the ones that gave you a glimpse into someone’s everyday life. While the illustrations have gained in eccentricity over time, the sentiment is still there: “I’m here, and you’re there, and this funny little picture made me think of you.” And I find it lovely to think that sentiment will live on a physical piece of card rather than in the nebulous ether of end-to-end encryption, for someone else to write a history essay about someday.
Sport
With Halloween around the corner, I’ve been asking myself what scares me. For an athlete, it’s hard to think of a bigger fright than a failed drugs test.
This week, it emerged that Peres Jepchirchir, the reigning women’s world marathon champion, has been provisionally suspended after testing positive for EPO. Questions remain, but she is far from the only high-profile name to have failed a test in recent times. Whilst the current sporting system is the cleanest it has ever been, it feels as if we have seen a proliferation in positive cases.
A large reason for this is obvious: better detection, dedicated anti-doping, units and randomised out-of-competition testing mean the threshold to cheat is so much lower than it has ever been. If anything, the current system faces calls for being too thorough, rather than the reverse.
Yet, common sense would suggest that, given all this, we should be looking at a sporting world with virtually no positive tests. But we still do.
So, as I delegated another time-consuming task to Claude this week, I reflected on a culture that prioritises results over the process, and what better symbolises this than AI? We teach our children, our students and our workers to skip the queue, find the shortcut, defending it in the name of productivity. Is it not just, however, teaching us to find an “easy-way-out”?
I’m not attempting to draw a causal link between the AI boom and athletes turning to banned substances. Doping long predates AI; cheating is ingrained in human history. But I wonder if our temptation to cheat will only grow alongside our dependence on AI. An athlete’s positive test is not solely an indictment of the individual, but of the culture around them.