theSIGNAL CULTURE
12 September 2026
"The most dangerous things in the world are sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity."
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Culture
Photo: Eric Prouzet / Unsplash
A Naga delegation visited Oxford's Pitt Rivers Museum in 2024 to reclaim their ancestral remains.

Oxford Museum Returns Naga Ancestral Bones

For more than a century, thirty-nine sets of skulls and bones belonging to the Naga people of northeastern India and Myanmar have rested inside the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, far from the forested hills where they once lived. The University of Oxford Council has now formally voted to return those ancestral remains — removed from public display in 2020 as part of a wider decolonisation effort — following a direct appeal made by a Naga delegation who visited Oxford earlier this year. Most of the Naga collection, which the museum claims is the largest in the world, was gathered by colonial administrator and anthropologist John Henry Hutton, who handed thousands of objects to the museum over a hundred years ago.…
  • Should all colonial-era human remains held in Western museums be repatriated immediately?
Culture
Photo: Michael Starkie / Unsplash
Drones illuminate the Manchester sky with Oasis's logo and a mysterious future date.

Oasis Light Up Manchester's Sky

On a Thursday evening in Manchester, hundreds of drones carved the Oasis logo into the darkness above the Joie Stadium before dissolving it into a single cryptic message: the date 14.09.26 and the time 4pm BST — a teaser for what is widely expected to be a major tour announcement. The display arrives just days after the release of Oasis: Don't Look Back In Anger, a documentary written by Peaky Blinders creator Steven Knight, which follows Liam and Noel Gallagher through their celebrated 2025 reunion — their first since a bitter split in 2009 — and includes their first joint interview in over two decades. Hints scattered across social media have pointed to venues as storied as Celtic Park in Glasgow and Knebworth in Hertfordshire, where the band once played to 250,000 people at the glittering height of Britpop, leaving fans to wonder how far, and how far afield, this next chapter might reach.
  • Should reunion tours be considered artistically significant, or are they purely commercial?
"
It's not a coincidence that this film is all in the dark.
Yuval Abraham, co-director of NAZA
Culture

The men who called themselves small cogs

A new documentary from the makers of No Other Land forces its audience to sit inside the machinery of mass killing — and listen to it hum.

On a rooftop in Tel Aviv, at night, with the city's ordinary lights glittering below, Israeli intelligence officers describe, in calm and technical language, how they helped to build an artificial-intelligence tool that swept for phone signals and recommended apartment buildings in Gaza for air strikes. They admit, without apparent anguish, that they bear some responsibility for thousands of deaths. "My role is technical," one of them says. "I'm just a small cog," offers another.

It is this phrase — so banal, so ancient in its evasions — that the film-makers Rachel Szor and Yuval Abraham have chosen to hold up to the light. NAZA, which is competing for the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival and was produced by the Guardian, is structured around the testimony of 24 anonymised military and intelligence insiders. The title, the audience gradually discovers, is an acronym used within the intelligence service to denote the number of civilians expected to die in a given strike. One source claims that approval was once granted to kill 500 civilians for a single Hamas target.

The Gaza health ministry has reported more than 73,000 deaths over three years of bombardment, the vast majority of them civilian. Abraham and Szor do not linger on the rubble for long; instead, the camera drifts, almost dreamily, through the rush-hour traffic of Tel Aviv, just 44 miles away, where the cinematheque is running a Claude Lanzmann retrospective — a detail that does not feel accidental. The film carries a significant creative pedigree: it was executive produced by Jonathan Glazer, the director of The Zone of Interest, whose influence can be felt in the film's structural insistence on proximity and normalcy as forms of horror. Szor and Abraham previously won an Oscar for No Other Land, which offered, as Abraham puts it, "some light to latch on to.

" This new film refuses that comfort entirely.

Photo: Ross Sneddon / Unsplash
Directors Rachel Szor and Yuval Abraham at the Venice Film Festival, where NAZA competes for the Golden Lion.
Discuss
  • What does it mean morally to be 'just a small cog' in a system that causes mass harm?
  • How does setting scenes in ordinary Tel Aviv, rather than Gaza, shape the viewer's emotional response to the film?
  • Should documentary film-makers like Szor and Abraham be considered journalists, artists, or activists — or all three?
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theSIGNAL IN THE LAB
iVOCABULARY
banalanonymised
pedigreerepatriationretrospective
decolonisationcryptic
iiGRAMMAR FOCUS
Wish and if only — expressing regret
Use 'wish' or 'if only' + past perfect (had + past participle) to express regret about past events, and 'wish' or 'if only' + simple past to express regret about present situations.
had · knew · were · hadn't · could · had been · lived
  1. The Naga community wishes their ancestors' remains returned to them a century ago.
  2. If only the intelligence officers more transparent about the human cost of the AI targeting tool.
  3. Dr Vihuto Asumi wishes the spirits of his ancestors finally at rest after so many decades of separation.
  4. Abraham and Szor wish more people about the true meaning of the acronym NAZA before seeing the film.
  5. Oasis fans wish they exactly which venues would be included in the upcoming tour.
  6. If only Jonathan Glazer involved in the film's production from the very beginning.
iiiDEPENDENT PREPOSITIONS
Complete each phrase with the correct preposition. All phrases come from today's articles.
  1. to bear some responsibility ___ thousands of deaths
  2. to compete ___ the Golden Lion at Venice
  3. to latch ___ something
  4. removed ___ public display in 2020
  5. shaped ___ the violence of those years
ivCRITICAL THINKING
The Pitt Rivers Museum describes the Naga collection as 'the largest in the world' — a phrase that frames imperial acquisition as a form of achievement. Who benefits from that framing, and whose perspective does it erase? Consider also how the language institutions use to describe colonial collections shapes public debate about what repatriation actually means.
vCREATIVE · HEADLINES
Write a headline for the NAZA documentary story in each of the following styles. One line each, no explanation:
  • TABLOID NEWSPAPER
  • LUXURY MAGAZINE
  • ACTIVIST BLOG
viWRITING
The Oasis drone display used spectacle and secrecy in equal measure to generate excitement, while NAZA uses darkness and anonymity to generate discomfort. Write a short paragraph comparing how these two very different events use atmosphere and ambiguity to provoke a reaction from their respective audiences.
viiDEGREES OF EXTREMITY
Complete each ladder from mild to strong. Fill in the missing word or phrase at each level using context from the articles.
  • uncomfortable→→
  • disagreement→→
  • removed from display→→
  • contributor→→
  • hint→→
  • gathered→→
viiiSPEAKING
  1. How should governments decide which colonial collections qualify for repatriation?
  2. Does the involvement of a famous director like Glazer strengthen or weaken a documentary's credibility?
  3. Can a drone light show be considered a genuine artistic event?
  4. What responsibilities do museum visitors have when viewing contested collections?