Søren Hough

Science Communicator

London, UK

Science Communicator. Freelance journalist/editor. Founder/Editor-in-Chief at Movie Fail. Contributor at RogerEbert.com. Cancer Biologist (PhD).

Søren Hough

Science Communicator

London, UK

Science Communicator. Freelance journalist/editor. Founder/Editor-in-Chief at Movie Fail. Contributor at RogerEbert.com. Cancer Biologist (PhD).

Featured
Reproductive Liberation & Roe v. Wade
The US State in particular has a long history of abusing people’s bodily autonomy. From enforced sterilisation of Black and Indigenous women, prisoners, and disabled women; to making abortion unavailable through basic health insurance for poor and dispossessed people; to hinging foreign aid on not supporting abortions for people in the Global South; to prosecuting trans people and their families for choosing to support transition, the US government has acted on the urge to control the bodies of everyone who isn’t a white able-bodied cis man. And now, as of June 2022, Roe v. Wade has been overturned, undermining access to reproductive care all over the country.
The Commoner
Medicine Gender Politics Science Philosophy
Featured
Neighbours are the Best Barricades: Interview with Cambridge Community Kitchen
Cambridge Community Kitchen (CCK) emerged out of the same anarchic current that created The Lockon (see this interview), a squat based in Cambridge, UK. Throughout COVID, CCK has bypassed local government to prepare and deliver vegan food to rough sleeper
The Commoner
Politics Interview
Featured
Fight the Power: Cyril Schäublin on Unrest
Everything seems to tick in "Unrest," the latest effort from Zurich-born writer/director Cyril Schäublin. “Unrest” depicts the working lives of 19th century anarchist watchmakers in the Swiss mountains, laying bare the absurdities of the wage system. Schäublin follows workers as they navigate their working hours across four different time zones in one town—factory time, train station time, municipality time, and church time. It is a fitting theme after his 2017 debut, “Those Who Are Fine,” skewered the transactional and atomized nature of capitalist society. His new film blends the persistent whirring of factory machines with the heavy breathing of manual labor, an intentional confusion of internal and imposed rhythm.
RogerEbert.com
Film Interview Politics
Featured
Light in a Dark Space: Interview with The Lockon Cambridge Squat
The Lockon is a vegan squat based in the building of the former Hopbine bar in the centre of Cambridge. The squat formed in the beginning of 2020 and, following intense legal battles with the landlord, won the right to continue using the premises as a living and organising space. Today, The Lockon serves as a home for its residents and a mutual aid resource for locals who need food, clothing, or other materials — no questions asked. The Commoner sat down with Glade, a long-time resident at The Lockon, to get their perspective on how the project started, how it builds community in a non-hierarchical manner, and how it fits into the broader Cambridge landscape.
The Commoner
Politics Interview
Featured
On Vaccines, Masks, and Equal Freedom
Those who argue that wearing a mask or getting vaccinated is an infringement on freedom should be reminded that our freedoms are inherently limited by the safety and well-being of others; any infringement on others’ safety thus becomes its own form of coercion. This is the concept of ‘equal freedom’ or ‘equal liberty’ which is embraced across much of the political spectrum, anarchists included. In her 1932 essay ‘Anarchism and American Traditions,’ Voltairine de Cleyre cites the desire of the American revolutionaries to ‘set the limits of the common concern at the line of where one man’s liberty would encroach upon another’s’ and reiterates that ‘equal liberty is the political ideal.’
The Commoner
Politics Medicine Science
Featured
Pastries, Freedom, and Love: An Interview with The Artist Airidescence
The Artist Airidescence is a multimedia anarchist creator whose work has picked up significant attention on social media. Their ongoing anarchist raccoon art series has been popular enough to warrant sold out print runs on Etsy. Recently, in collaboration with scholar Zoe Baker, they have produced an animated short film entitled Pastries, Freedom, Love: A Malatesta Story based on text by the Italian anarchist Luigi Fabbri. The full short can be viewed in full for free on Youtube. The Commoner sat down with Airidescence to discuss the inspirations for their art, how Pastries, Freedom, Love came to be, and what projects are on the horizon for 2022.
The Commoner
Film Politics Animation Interview
Featured
Climate Change, COVID-19, and Austerity: A Discussion with Michael Marmot
I sat down with Professor Sir Marmot on behalf of Science for the People in August 2020 to discuss the social and environmental factors that play into public health, how those factors tie into race and socioeconomic status, and how we can improve wellbeing through social and policy-based change.
Science for the People Magazine
Medicine Public Health Politics Climate Change
Featured
Mutual Aid Does Nothing Alone: A Rebuttal to Joanna Wuest
In her article ‘Mutual Aid Can’t Do It Alone,’ The Nation author Dr. Joanna Wuest alleges that mutual aid is insufficient to support people in (and out of) crisis. She contends that while mutual aid is a useful tool, its efficacy pales in comparison to state programmes. Yet Wuest fails to engage the arguments of mutual aid’s progenitors and proponents.
The Commoner
Science Politics
Featured
Peasants with Pitchforks: An Interview with Noam Chomsky
Noam Chomsky is an award-winning linguist, political theorist, dissident, and activist. He is currently Professor Emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Laureate Professor of Linguistics at the University of Arizona. Chomsky is a prolific author, having published over one hundred books since 1967 on topics ranging from anarchism to media skepticism.
Science for the People
Interviews Science Politics
Featured
COVID-19 is No Blessing in Disguise
COVID-19 has caused incalculable suffering. For environmentalists, this only portends the coming devastation of climate change. Yet some have argued that for all of the damage the pandemic has incurred, it has also precipitated a recovery in the environment by bringing society to a standstill. This is, to some extent, borne out by the data: the International Renewable Energy Agency has estimated an overall 6-8% reduction in annual emissions for 2020.
The Commoner
Politics Science
Featured
London Film Festival 2020 Highlights
It wasn’t like the last time I’d visited the British Film Institute. The buildings were all the same, massive cubes of concrete sitting along the bank of the Thames. Their façades were aglow with pink and blue lights, as I remembered them last time, glinting off of the river as we crossed Waterloo Bridge. But it was hard to ignore the general quietness. I’d visited Southbank years ago. I was on a date at the Winter Market just a stone’s throw from the BFI; it was a frigid November evening but the whole riverside was packed. Here I was again, my date from that night now my fiancée, accompanying me to a London Film Festival screening of Bassam Tariq’s "Mogul Mowgli." This time there were hardly any pedestrians milling about despite it being a fairly balmy October evening. I’d been back since for other film screenings but now, as we stood outside the building waiting to be let in—under the new rules, we weren’t allowed to queue in the lobby—I considered how drastically cinemas have changed to accommodate safety recommendations.
RogerEbert.com
Reviews News
Featured
Planet of the Humans and Climate Change: Muddled, Misinformed or Malevolent?
Planet of the Humans is a 2020 documentary directed by Jeff Gibbs, executive produced by Michael Moore and distributed by Films for Action. The movie purports to reveal the failures of environmentalists for investing time and activism in green technologies which, according to Gibbs, have not fulfilled their promise for a more sustainable future.
Science for the People
Film Politics Interviews Science
Featured
Runaway Biology: A Call for Conscientious Genome Editing with CRISPR
As scientists and governments methodically deliberate on the best way to regulate CRISPR’s use in society, those seeking fame and fortune plow ahead heedless of the consequences. CRISPR, now a Nobel Prize-winning technology, is a permanent fixture in biological research and clinical medicine. We must take its dire ethical implications, from changing the food we eat to altering human evolution, more seriously.
Science for the People
Politics Science
Featured
CRISPR-SONIC: targeted somatic oncogene knock-in enables rapid in vivo cancer modeling.
CRISPR/Cas9 has revolutionized cancer mouse models. Although loss-of-function genetics by CRISPR/Cas9 is well-established, generating gain-of-function alleles in somatic cancer models is still challenging because of the low efficiency of gene knock-in. Here we developed CRISPR-based Somatic Oncogene kNock-In for Cancer Modeling (CRISPR-SONIC), a method for rapid in vivo cancer modeling using homology-independent repair to integrate oncogenes at a targeted genomic locus.
Genome Medicine
Science Academic
Featured
A CRISPR Moratorium Isn't Enough: We Need a Boycott.
Get the latest public health information from CDC: https://www.coronavirus.gov . Get the latest research from NIH: https://www.nih.gov/coronavirus.
The CRISPR Journal
Academic Science
Featured
Interview with Nora Twomey, Director of The Breadwinner
Cartoon Saloon has knocked it out of the park ever since they hit the scene in 2009 with The Secret of Kells. Their feature-length movies have consistently garnered praise from critics. Nora Twomey, who co-directed Kells, is back as a solo director on the studio’s third film: The Breadwinner. The Breadwinner is an adaptation of Deborah Ellis’s book of the same name.
Movie Fail
Interviews

About

Søren Hough

Film Journalism

Blogging

Editing

Epigenetics Research

CRISPR

DNA Repair

Podcasting

Film Criticism

Science Journalism

I am a freelance film and science journalist. My work has been featured on key entertainment industry websites including RogerEbert.com (www.rogerebert.com/interviews/the-magic-of-magi-douglas-trumbulls-quest-to-explore-a-new-planet-of-cinematic-potential) and ScottFeinberg.com (http://moviefail.com/tag/scottfeinberg.com). I additionally serve as an Editor at Science for the People magazine (https://magazine.scienceforthepeople.org/web-extras/noam-chomsky-interview-covid-19-climate-crisis-class-warfare/).

I started Movie Fail (http://moviefail.com) in January 2012, a site dedicated to multimedia reviews, op-eds, academic essays, and news articles about movies and the film industry. My work there includes interviews with multiple Oscar-nominated filmmakers (https://moviefail.com/nora-twomey-director-the-breadwinner/) and up-and-coming directors (https://moviefail.com/astrid-goldsmith-writer-director-squirrel-island/).

I brought my experience as an Editor and Staff Writer to The Massachusetts Daily Collegian (http://dailycollegian.com/author/soren-hough) one year later as I began working for the paper as a film and science correspondent. In the spring of 2013, I was hired as Editor of the film section of the paper for the fall of 2013.

In December 2013, I graduated from the Film Studies and Microbiology programs at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. In 2023, I graduated from the University of Cambridge with a PhD in Biochemistry.

The cover photo is a screen shot from Tete's wonderful short film, raintown.