By Will Oxlade

Some people's understanding of OCD is as simplistic as 'someone who prefers things to be organised'. There's more to it - the fear and anxiety, for example. My case isn't extreme but I do have a compulsion to push my front door twice after locking...

By Jess Reid

It's a commonly held belief in 2013 Britain that we live in a sexually enlightened (not sure what that actually means, but we'll go with it) age. Gay marriage is finally on the horizon. We're all on the pill, or similar (right?). Full frontal nudity...

By Gareth Cartwright

It's a vast data-surfing canoe that we're all sharing, and I certainly do not claim to be sitting on the shoreline. As frequent and active users of social networking sites, we're all constantly rowing through page upon page of needless information. Devouring the never-ending stream of...

by Ed Perry

With dystopian sci-fi ascending to become the go-to genre for big-budget productions (see Oblivion, Star Trek and The Hunger Games), bastardised gothic-horror is finally being beaten into submission, receding into the shadows like a sparkly vampire. Hurrah.

But as post-modern derivatives of vampires and werewolves wane...

by Abby Moss

OK, first off, I'd like to back-track on my shameless headline. This is actually a pretty grim story. Somebody in Sweden has been grabbing cats, cutting them open and leaving them outside their owner's houses. The police can't figure out who. This probably isn't...

By Tom Walters

Remember MySpace? You know, that big, friendly online place where we bragged about what bands we liked, whilst decorating our pages with glitter and trinkets. Now fast forward to the present day; what do you hear about it nowadays? That's right, not a sausage.

MySpace,

By Jemimah Steinfeld

Rappers get a bad rap. Well, this is the message that resonates from the recent news that Detroit-born rapper Danny Brown received a blow job on stage when he was performing in Minneapolis last Friday. In case you haven't heard of him, he's fairly...

By Ed Perry

Everyone hates the 'one percent'. Most people do anyway. After all, the only people who tend to like one-percenters are other one-percenters and, well, there aren't very many of them. This poses something of a conundrum regarding the Iron Man franchise. We go to the...

By Lore Oxford

The recent release of Spring Breakers has sparked international debate with regard to its cast of scantily clad, Disney-famed tween role models. Twitter has been overflowing with conflicting opinions, from "I heard Spring Breakers is trashy and a waste of time...

By Xanthe Hawksley-Walker

Pornography is something that we at Planet Ivy like to think we know a lot about. And, if you are a member of the human race, you probably know at least a little bit about it too.

The nature of pornography is changing...

By Ed Bradley

This whole internet thing is really picking up speed, isn't it? I must have been 11 before I'd even heard about it, and when we bought our first modem (after what must have been insufferable high-pitched demands) its main use was sending inane...

By Jess Reid

As we all inevitably leave our twenties and begrudgingly begin the slow pitiful march towards responsibility and self-loathing, it's important to ask the question - what next? For some it's fulfilling careers and the exciting discovery of our greatly unrecognised adult self, and...

By Duncan Moreland

Once upon a time, when the world was proud of its debauched soul, it was bloody easy to start up a cult. All you needed were flowing robes, some candles, a bunch of emotionally depraved misfits, perhaps a sacrificing table, and a leader with a...

By Lucy Draper

A new teen pregnancy campaign was launched in New York on earlier this month, with the apparent aim of reducing the city's 20,000 annual teen pregnancies. The public information campaign ('information' used in the loosest sense of the word here) is employing many...

By Lucy Draper

Endgame: Syria is a new online strategy game based on the present war in Syria. The company who produced it, Auroch Digital, has been making news-based games for a few months as part of their 'Game The News' project. Tagged with the motto...

By Barney Guiton

Various media outlets were running with variations on Iain Duncan Smith saying that stacking shelves in a supermarket was more important than geology on 17 February. In context, the implication was a bit of a stretch from what he actually said, but hey,...

By Ben Evans-Wild

As should probably have been expected in the wake of the December shootings at Sandy Hook, America's knee is still jerking over a month later, in a variety of depressingly haphazard directions.

One relatively extreme example is the booming trade of the bulletproof...

By Graeme Denhoff-Ball

Around five years ago, I wished death upon Sir Paul McCartney. This wasn't a personal vendetta. It wasn't pent up rage or resentment that John and George perished before he. I wasn't a deranged Rolling Stones fan bemoaning the injustices of Beatles pre-eminence. And no, I wasn't...

By Natalie De Winter

Last week, the US military officially ended the ban on female combat roles. Due to promotion within the infantry requiring combat experience, women have until now been effectively precluded from rising up the military ranks, which makes this news welcome in more ways than...

By Lucy Draper

So there's some good news and some bad news from across the pond. The good news is that someone has finally decided that it's time to tell the Republicans that rape = bad. Following on from a series of startlingly appalling statements from certain Republican members (