Jack is a first-year History undergraduate, News Reporter for University Radio York (URY) News and contributor to The Yorker in addition to OpinionPanel. His first collection of articles for these and other publications is The Morbid 9K Race: Articles 2012, released as a free ebook in January 2013. He is also the author of the plays One Night in the Death of Iain Dennison and The Flagstaff Drop as well as short stories and poems. His most admired authors are Robert Graves, Christopher Hitchens, D.H. Lawrence, Primo Levi and Richard J. Evans.

His interests are very subject-aligned - he talks about history constantly and will not shut up. Aside from this, his spare time is concentrated around debating, the Drama Society, war and strategy games, eating mints, The Smiths, Puccini and rescuing the reputation of Friedrich Nietzsche from its blackened association with German nationalism.

Jack's articles focus primarily on the political art and strategy of student campaigns and protests, the battle for control of public opinion, reformism versus radicalism, UK and U.S. electoral politics and fringe extremism of every variety. In 2013 he plans articles on the present-day cultist followings of 20th-century tyrants, the Troubles of Northern Ireland and its understanding in younger generations, the plausibility of 'successful' campaigns involving violence and relationship between the working-class and the intelligentsia.

The Morbid 9K Race: Articles 2012 - Jack Staples-Butler'

2012. THE GUINEA PIG YEAR.

Tuition, terror and the trite. For the generation born in 1993 and afterwards, 2012 heralded great cause for despair. Crippling youth unemployment, strangulated opportunities and the trebling of university fees to £9,000 per year. But the battle for the state of affairs faced by the young in 2012 seemed to be dead and done with - most were resigned to every sordid abjection now confronting students and school-leavers. While Britain's attention turned to the Jubilee and the Olympics, Jack Staples-Butler turned to the tumultuous social and political conflicts of recent years: the 2010 student protests, the 2011 Riots, the continuing clashes of nationalist and Islamist paramilitaries and the endless battle for control of public opinion. But 'current' events aren't everything. Age-old debates are taken on in Staples-Butler's articles for OpinionPanel, from God and the State to who does (and does not) have the right to like The Smiths.

With 35,000 words of opinion, analysis and polemic along with over 200 references and footnotes, this collection includes a Preface and Afterword by the author and a special first-hand account of #demo2012, including the now-infamous stage invasion which brought the attempted revival of the student protests to a violent end.