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https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2007/apr/12/comment.politics2 | Opinion | 2007-04-11T23:06:29.000Z | Max Hastings | Max Hastings: Blair's iron grip on his party's loyalty invites the electorate's derision | Irecently met somebody who attended a dinner addressed by John Major. Gosh, he was good, said my friend: witty, self-deprecating, fluent. Our former prime minister, who once could have won a contest for self-pity alongside such champions as the heir to the throne, today seems a new man. He has learned to relax, no doubt assisted by a handsome bank balance. Because people seem to like him, he likes himself more. In old age, he may achieve a contentment that eluded him in Downing Street, and, indeed, for years afterwards while his wounds remained raw.
Contrast the circumstances in which Major and Tony Blair find themselves today, with those of a decade ago. In 1997, even many Tories like myself recoiled from the shambles of that fag-end government, and supported Labour.
The most striking characteristic of Major was his littleness. He appeared a wholly inadequate occupant of his office, needing to sit on a pile of cushions, metaphorically speaking, to get his head above the cabinet table.
Blair seemed incomparably more substantial: effortlessly dominating any audience; touching the hearts as well as the heads of the British people; committed to an important agenda; admired on the international stage. He looked, above all, a modern man, while Major might have escaped from the cast of a 60s suburban sitcom.
Today, however, we can concede some virtues to Major which we discounted when he lived in Downing Street, decency and honesty prominent among them. He did and said silly things, but it is hard to remember any deceit in which he engaged.
None of us would have guessed in 1997, maybe even in 2001, that Blair's premiership would come to be characterised by mendacity, an infinite willingness to pretend that things were other than they were. Nobody, writing the history of the Blair era, is likely to describe the prime minister as a straight shooter.
Britain's relationship with Europe is no better today than it was in Major's time, though we have been spared a showdown such as that which accompanied the Maastricht treaty. Healthcare has profited from Labour's huge spending, but education and transport have not. Major deserves credit for starting the process of arbitration in Ireland, which Tony Blair has brought to fruition a decade later. The Tory leader, admittedly in George Bush Sr's wake, was party to the absolutely right decision not to go to Baghdad at the end of the first Gulf war. Major also devised safe havens for the Kurds, enforced by allied air power. I was among those who rubbished this notion at the time, yet it proved a real success.
Many of Major's troubles, his appearance of inadequacy if not impotence, stemmed from the fact that he could not control his own party. There were almost daily headlines about Tory revolts, prominently involving such towering figures as Iain Duncan Smith and Bill Cash. Major's premiership was dominated by parleys with his own dissidents, petty humiliations and cliff-hanging votes.
Consider the irony, that one of the worst aspects of Blair's rule is the submissiveness, even servility, of the Labour party. If it was reasonable to endorse the 2003 Iraq war, it is fantastic that Labour MPs have sustained their support for Britain's engagement, when it has become plain not only that the war was unjustifiable, but that it is also unwinnable.
Blair's iron grip on his party's loyalty invites the electorate's derision, now that his partnership with Bush has brought catastrophe. Many of us would admire Labour more had it forced Blair out when his follies and deceits were exposed. Instead, of course, we see cabinet ministers and backbenchers addicted to office and power. Where once a Labour MP's greatest fear was of betraying principle or conscience, today we see the Westminster herd trembling at the risk of losing their cars and red boxes, or the possibility of acquiring these wonderful things. Labour's quiescence, through these bleak years when Blair's foreign policy has brought Britain disaster, invites public contempt and, according to the polls, is receiving it.
Yet if circumstances were always against Major, he made matters worse by his stunning trivialisation of policy. Lacking big ideas, he resorted to playing with paperclips. The Citizens' Charter was his most risible gesture. The notion of the British government awarding "charter marks" to deserving institutions prompted public mirth. It suggested that the prime minister regarded the conduct of office like a school prizegiving, and made us all wonder if he would give underperformers six of the best.
Blair has done many rash things, but his seriousness of purpose was never in doubt. Even today, when he has become discredited, he seems an infinitely more substantial figure than his predecessor. Major looked like what he was - a second-division politician elevated to the premiership solely by Margaret Thatcher's desperation for a loyalist to take up her mantle.
Blair was a leader who gained dominance of his own party only after being tested in the fire, who possessed vision and a commitment to innovation. Even now, his ideal of what Britain needs to become in the 21st century deserves respect. Failure of execution has undone him, not lack of ideas. John Major's only idea was to get through to Friday night.
Historians will probably decide that not much of lasting significance happened in Britain during Major's seven years - even Black Wednesday looks relatively trivial. Tony Blair's decade has been vastly more eventful. It is odd to recall how loudly we clamoured for government action between December 1990 and May 1997, above all to address the public services.
In the years since, of course, we have witnessed prodigious spending on health, education and transport. It is hard to argue that most of this has produced results. Perhaps we should have shown more gratitude for those years of Tory squabbling, which promoted government inertia. Under Blair we have learnt to dread the threat of "a new government initiative".
Yet, even if John Major today basks in some public affection, enhanced by the stench emerging from the drains of his successor, it is hard to think of him with nostalgia. In Major's days of office I used to say unkindly that he should have stuck to his day job at the Standard Chartered Bank. There seems no reason to revise that view. He had nothing of importance to say to the British people. He yearned for their appreciation, without earning it.
Tony Blair was unquestionably worthy of his office. It is the waste of his talents and opportunities that will command the dismay of posterity. He is a remarkable man, who has fallen from grace. John Major was a quite unremarkable one.
Blair will soon leave office, his term ending in failures of much more lasting importance than those of Major. But while most of us would not cross the road to hear the former Tory leader make an after-dinner speech, Blair will always command an audience. What he has to say will always be interesting. It is what he has done, and not done, which has almost destroyed his reputation. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2022/may/21/on-my-radar-eva-rothschild-cultural-highlights | Culture | 2022-05-21T14:00:21.000Z | Kathryn Bromwich | On my radar: Eva Rothschild’s cultural highlights | Born in Dublin in 1971, artist Eva Rothschild is best known for her large-scale sculptures. In 2009 she was awarded the Tate Britain annual Duveen Commission, for which she produced Cold Corners, a vast zigzagging sculpture, and in 2014 she became a Royal Academician. She represented Ireland at the 58th Venice Biennale in 2019. She lives and works in London. Her latest exhibition, Our Life, Our Sweetness and Our Hope, is at Modern Art, London SW1 from Thursday to 25 June.
1. Book
Hurricane Season by Fernanda Melchor
I read this recently and was totally transfixed. It’s a book about a small town in Mexico, and it starts with the discovery of a body. It’s not a crime novel, it’s about the relationship of different people in the town to the dead person, who is known as the witch. Everything shifts the whole time: who the witch is – whether she’s male or female, what she is to different people – becomes completely blurred. It’s about poverty, abuse, drugs, violence against women – it’s amazing, but not for the faint-hearted. I’m looking forward to reading her new book, Paradais, which was released this year.
2. Film
Compartment No 6 (dir. Juho Kuosmanen)
Seidi Haarla on a train to Murmansk. Photograph: Sami Kuokkanen/AP
I was interested in watching this because it’s set on a train, which I always enjoy – probably because of the [Richard Linklater] Before Sunrise films, and reliving memories of travelling when I was younger. It’s about a Finnish woman and a Russian man who end up sharing a compartment on a journey across Russia, to Murmansk. It’s set in the 90s, so pre internet, and everything’s very unpolished. There’s a 90s Europop soundtrack, and she’s listening to music on a Walkman, which obviously seems quite luxurious, something from the west. I found it really moving.
3. Podcast
Backlisted
Backlisted’s 100th episode featured Philip Pullman (centre). Photograph: Backlisted Podcast
The strapline is “giving new life to old books”. They have two presenters, John Mitchinson and Andy Miller, and every week they have a guest talking about rediscovering a book, and how it reads now. Earlier this month they had Stephen Fry on, discussing De Profundis by Oscar Wilde. They’ve also had episodes about Natalia Ginzburg’s Family Lexicon and Nuala O’Faolain’s Are You Somebody?. Sometimes I feel like contemporary fiction is always to the fore, but I do find it really valuable reading books from the early 20th century – it’s a different style and pace of writing that I find really interesting.
4. TV
The Young Offenders (iPlayer)
‘I love the gormlessness of the main characters.’ Photograph: Miki Barlok/BBC/Vico Films
I tend to watch TV with my youngest son, so it’s usually what he wants to watch. We’ve been watching this Irish comedy show about two complete eejits from Cork called Conor and Jock, and their long-suffering mum, and I just love it. I love the gratuitous swearing, the violence, the thieving, the mishaps, the complete gormlessness of the main characters. Regardless of whether they are stealing bikes, stealing a tuna, trying to rescue a duck, all of these ridiculous situations they get into, there’s something about the relationships in it that is really tender and sweet.
5. Dance
Botis Seva’s BLKDOG, Sadler’s Wells, London
‘A fantastic piece about urban masculinity.’ Photograph: Camilla Greenwell
Botis Seva is a choreographer and dance artist from south London, and he has a dance company called Far from the Norm. This was a fantastic piece about urban masculinity. It had an amazing soundtrack, which was a mash-up of a father reading a story to his son and some quite heavy beats, and it was really atmospheric. I’m really interested in boys, in masculinity – I have three sons, and I made a film called Boys and Sculpture some years ago.
6. Music
Ted Hawkins
Watch a video for The Lost Ones by Ted Hawkins.
Usually I listen to classic rock, but over the past few months I’ve been listening to a lot more bluesy music, specifically this artist from Mississippi, who died in 95. I was listening to somebody like Townes Van Zandt, and then this came on with the dreadful Spotify algorithm. Usually that really annoys me, but I was stopped in my tracks by this guy’s voice and the directness of his singing. It ranges from joyful and funny to incredibly abject – there’s a song called The Lost Ones, written from the point of view of a child asking for help, which is devastating. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2015/may/06/bobbi-kristina-brown-whitney-houston | Music | 2015-05-06T14:20:36.000Z | Danyel Smith | The ballad of Bobbi Kristina Brown: born of pop royalty and plagued by tragedy | This piece was originally an obituary. I thought Bobbi Kristina Houston Brown was facing imminent death. On the last day of January she was found floating unconscious in a bathtub at her Georgia home. In 2012 Bobbi Kristina’s mother was found in a bathtub in a Beverly Hills hotel. Whitney Houston accidentally drowned, with help from cocaine and heart disease. Bobbi Kristina is hanging on, but only just.
Bobbi Kristina Brown, daughter of Whitney Houston, rushed to hospital
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This piece feels like an obituary because on 21 April Cissy Houston told reporters that her granddaughter – who had weeks before been released from a medically induced coma, but who has remained unresponsive – has “global and irreversible brain damage”. Bobby Brown told the audience at a recent Dallas concert that his daughter was “watching him”, but Bobbi Kristina remains on life support. An Us magazine source – a neurologist – says: “There is little chance for meaningful recovery … in cases like this, the personality is usually gone forever.” Cissy went on to say that Bobbi Kristina, who turned 22 in March, “can live in this condition for a lifetime … We can only trust in God for a miracle”. Bobbi Kristina is among us and not among us. Life, death – the complex binary suddenly seems simple. But it’s hard to know how to act around purgatory.
Bobby and Whitney versus the world
It’s tempting to think that Bobbi Kristina Houston Brown, with her generous, gap-toothed smile, had a chance. Her birth in 1993 occurred six months after the release of her father Bobby Brown’s third studio album, Bobby, on which the grand if defensive duet Something in Common featured. The lyrics are credited to Teddy Riley, Brown, Bernard Belle and Whitney Houston. “I believe old fashioned rules/ And old-fashioned ways/ Courtesy, honesty/ Like in the good old days,” sang Houston. Bobby started the song with the words: “This one’s dedicated to those who don’t believe in love – especially our love.” It was Bobby and Whitney versus everybody.
The fable at the time – the reason Brown and Houston felt a song like this was necessary – was that Princess Whitney was being carried away by thuggish bonehead Bobby Brown of New Edition, who had sold millions of records as a solo star including 1988’s Don’t Be Cruel – a No 1 album with a title that alluded to Elvis Presley. He was the rowdy Boston boy with the flat top, and Whitney was the respectable and refined former model who, in peau de soie heels and with a once-in-a-century voice, had “crossed over” – radio and recorded music industry code for “white people adore her”.
Something in Common was recorded during the year The Bodyguard was filmed and is almost too easy to read as an attempt to take Houston’s story back to black, and back toward Bobby, since Houston’s Bodyguard co-star/love interest was Kevin Costner. (Though there were cries of “no chemistry”, the movie ended up being the second highest-grossing worldwide of 1992.) Bobbi Kristina, likely conceived the summer of 1992, was the song made flesh and blood. And this was before celebrities were seeing around corners, living that straight-edge #sxelife, playing the long game for brands, PowerPointing their life stories in advance, and finding ways to maintain and commission body, soul and family while being eternally on the road.
Bobbi Kristina was born in 1993 – Michael Jackson ruled Super Bowl halftime, a Spanish language radio station was No 1 in Los Angeles for the first time ever, the US was starting to look like itself. Bobby Kristina’s mother, in the 1993 video for her version of I’m Every Woman was, as she told me when I was interviewing her for a 1998 Vibe cover story, “big, and happy” and close to giving birth. Whitney was in a swingy black turtleneck, and breezily reigned over her predecessors and those who walked in her massive footsteps. Chaka Khan – who recorded I’m Every Woman in 1978 – was in the clip, and appeared warmed by Houston’s embrace. Also featured were TLC, on their way to becoming the bestselling girl group of all time. It seemed Bobbi Kristina would be born into a brilliant and imaginative world full of sisterhood and batons being passed; soul and pop and new jack swing. Whitney is surrounded by gorgeous, spirited little African American girls in the video. You can see in them her dreams of Bobbi Kristina. “Anytime you feel/ Danger or fear/ Instantly, I will appear,” sang Whitney. If only it were so.
And if the abundance of motherhood was there in Houston’s shape and her intonation, it seemed also to make even more magnetic her typically smirky smile. Whitney was a thrillingly successful, hardworking, code-switching creative. When she was strong – and she was strong a lot, it wore her down – she could be what she wanted to be, when she wanted to be. And when she was singing out that she was every woman, she had her man, and she was about to have a baby, The Bodyguard and its soundtrack were changing the game, and she didn’t any longer have to stand next to radio promotion executives, doing the princess wave, stumping for airplay on pop stations.
Whitney carried Bobbi Kristina onstage at the American Music Awards when she was two. She attended New Jersey’s Edison High School for a short time. “Bobby and Whitney were very clear that they wanted their daughter to be mainstreamed and not singled out,” says Richard Krieg, a local politician. “Their daughter showed up the next day in a chauffeured Rolls.” Bobbi Kristina went to high school in Huntington Beach, California. While there she was referred to as a “party girl” and a “problem child” by Hollywood Life. She had many identities: awkward preteen, protector, friend and companion to her mom, possible attacker of her mom, tweeter, caretaker of her mom, red carpet regular, paparazzi-bait. Wild girl. I met Bobbi Kristina once, when she was four. Her jumper was lemon-yellow, bright as noon.
“Is this Miss Girl?” I said.
“Come to mommy,” was Whitney Houston’s response, as Bobbi Kris inched downstairs toward her mother, in the rumpus room of their new Jersey home. Bobby Kris looked at me, the stranger.
“Are you shy?” That’s what her mother asked her, in an encouraging way. “Are you shy?”
The “crack is wack” interview was December 2002. Bobbi Kristina’s mother told Diane Sawyer: “Let’s get one thing straight. Crack is cheap. I make too much money to ever smoke crack.” Houston acknowledged that “it has been, at times” marijuana, alcohol, cocaine and pills, and when Sawyer asked which was the biggest devil among them, Whitney said: “That would be me.” Bobbi Kristina was nine.
In 2003, Bobbi Kristina’s grandfather, John Houston, was suing his daughter from his deathbed: “Pay the money that you owe me,” he told her, via a taped interview on Celebrity Justice. Bobbi Kristina’s father was arrested on a range of charges including battery of her mother, parole violation and back child support (for his other children). That year, Whitney and Bobbi Kris recorded Little Drummer Boy together. Bobbi opened the song in a voice startlingly low, bold and crystalline.
“Sing, baby,” said her mother, with encouragement and pride. “That’s my baby.”
Whitney sang those words to her daughter before plunging into the 1941 song, signature riffs still at her beck and call. The rich liquid tension, the relaxed reach, the clear ambition so often in her voice was even more present. Bobbi came back in at the end, her voice an exact amalgamate of her mother’s and her father’s. Her parents were drug users and they loved her and each other, and they were eventually terrible to and for each other. There was jail and drugs and courtroom dramas. These parents of Bobbi Kristina’s divorced when she was 14. There was a custody battle with insults, accusations and literal finger-pointing. There were tabloid covers and MadTV spoofs.
“Frankly,” Houston said in court in 2007, “I needed to be divorced from him so that I could get my life back on track.” After Houston’s 2012 death, there was a reality show, The Houstons: On Our Own. It could not of course compare to the phenomenon that was Bravo’s 11-episode run of Being Bobby Brown, which aired in 2005. “Apparently devoid of self-consciousness,” went the reviews. “Manages to rob Houston of any last shreds of her dignity.”
A decade ago, before public hyper-awareness of one’s own narrative became the norm, the lives of Bobbi Kristina’s parents set a high bar for the kind of nonscripted dysfunction missing from today’s Instagram feeds and so-called reality shows. With selfie sticks and bucket lists and seductively vanishing updates on the Snap(chat), we draw our own full if wobbly circles. We know Celebrity Rehab and Survivor and Rock of Love arcs by heart. We have been alerted to the spoilers, and our triggers have been warned: we are our own live events. Bobbi Kris is teachable moment and hashtag (between #BOBBY and #bobbibrown) and a candlelight vigil and a curbside memorial all in one. She is a musical tribute waiting to happen. Content awaiting curation: 10 inspiring songs Bobbi Kristina could have recorded had she lived.
Oh wait, that was a month ago. She has not lived in this world since January. She has an incision in her windpipe so she can breathe. On the afternoon of Monday 27 April, the hash was about Bobbi Kris being Bobby Brown’s “twin”, and a midwestern radio station poking: “Do you think Bobby Brown should be granted guardianship over Bobbi Kristina’s estate?” Throughout Bobbi Kristina’s life it was comforting to imagine that Whitney would emerge, sparkles in her ringlets, like she did for Brandy in their 1997 version of Rodgers & Hammerstein’s Cinderella, and remind her daughter that the world is full of zanies and fools who don’t believe in sensible rules. That idea of a mom figure – of parents – offering non-smothering protection and nonjudgmental wisdom is seductive. A fairytale.
The impulse to judge Bobby Brown and Whitney Houston is strong. My impulse to judge Bobbi Kris is nonexistent. This because Bobbi Kristina Houston Brown, who hardly even had her own name, has not lived long enough to turn a corner and become herself. What model had she for the redemptive powers of one’s third and fourth decades on Earth? What model had she for living wild – but long enough to look back on her wildest days with some joy and a shiver and her own gapped-toothed smile? The calamity is that in attempting to write even her obituary, it is her parents’ lives we must mine. She was their something in common. Even if Bobbi Kristina sees again, walks again, breathes again – it wasn’t enough. The girl is gone. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/mar/09/vote-referendum-modernise-ireland-constitution-women-home | World news | 2024-03-09T21:46:48.000Z | Rory Carroll | Irish voters overwhelmingly reject proposed changes to constitution | Ireland has overwhelmingly rejected proposed changes to references on family and women in its constitution, delivering a rebuke to a government that had urged voters not to take a “step backwards”.
Voters repudiated the family referendum with 67% voting “no”, and buried the care referendum in an even bigger landslide of 74%.
“The family amendment and the care amendment referendums have been defeated – defeated comprehensively on a respectable turnout,” said the taoiseach, Leo Varadkar, on Saturday, hours before the full results were announced.
The scale of rejection spelled humiliation not just for the government but also opposition parties and advocacy groups who had united to support a “yes-yes” vote.
Critics said they ran a lacklustre, confusing campaign that perplexed voters and alienated progressive allies – a contrast to the seismic 2015 same-sex marriage referendum and 2018 abortion referendum that underscored Ireland’s secular, liberal transformation. Turnout on Friday was 44%, a sharp drop from 64% in 2018.
The government had billed the votes – held on Friday to coincide with International Women’s Day – as opportunities to embed inclusivity and equality in a constitution dating from 1937.
The referendums proposed changing article 41. The family amendment proposed widening the definition of family from a relationship founded on marriage to “durable relationships” such as cohabiting couples and their children. The care amendment proposed replacing a reference to a “mother’s duties in the home” with a clause recognising care provided by family members.
On the eve of the vote Varadkar said “no” votes would be a “step backwards” that would send the wrong message to unmarried couples and maintain “very old-fashioned language” about women.
Soon after ballot boxes were opened it was clear that appeal had foundered, with “no” votes piling up in Dublin and across the country. The yes campaign mustered just 32% support for the family referendum and 26% for the care referendum.
Few claimed it was a conservative backlash. Some feminist and other progressive groups had urged “no” votes, calling the proposals vague or insipid.
Ireland to vote in ‘women in the home’ referendums amid apathy and confusion
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The Lawyers For No group criticised the proposals’ wording and lack of legislative scrutiny and warned of unintended effects. “I trust individual voters. They looked at what was being put before them and they said ‘no’,” said Michael McDowell, a senator and former justice minister who was part of the group. “This is an emphatic repudiation of what I think was unwise social experimentation with the constitution.”
Some worried that widening the definition of family could affect rules on tax and citizenship. Others said expanding the burden of care from women to the whole family elided the state’s responsibility.
The defeat embarrassed the government and prompted calls for prominent campaign figures such as the children’s minister, Roderic O’Gorman, to resign. But the result is not expected to destabilise the ruling coalition of Fine Gael, Fianna Fáil and the Greens.
Eamon Ryan, the Green party leader and transport minister, said there would be no attempt at another referendum before the next election. “The next government will have to come back to this and consider the campaign and what were the arguments that merited a ‘no’ vote in both cases.”
Opposition parties also faced accusations of misjudging the county’s mood. The Sinn Féin leader, Mary Lou McDonald, said her party was “very much” in touch with public sentiment and blamed defeat on the government. “They didn’t collaborate, and they failed to convince.”
The Labour leader, Ivana Bacik, said the government had ignored alternative wording proposed by the legislature’s gender equality committee and then ran a lacklustre campaign. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/may/08/theresa-may-rebuffs-fresh-calls-to-resign | Politics | 2019-05-08T13:19:01.000Z | Heather Stewart | Theresa May rebuffs fresh calls to resign | Theresa May has no intention of setting out a fresh timetable for her departure, Downing Street has signalled, with a spokesman insisting she is determined to “get Brexit done”.
The spokesman dismissed calls from Conservative backbenchers for the prime minister to step down, saying she had already “made a very generous and bold offer” to the 1922 Committee of resigning if her Brexit deal is passed.
Q&A
What is the 1922 Committee?
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“She is here to deliver Brexit in phase one, and then she will leave and make way for new leadership in phase two,” the spokesman said. “That is the timetable she is working for: she wants to get Brexit done.”
Earlier, May signalled her intention to fight on in No 10, using prime minister’s questions to compare herself to Liverpool football club making a remarkable comeback to win the Champions League semi-final.
0:43
Theresa May: I can make a Liverpool-style comeback in Europe - video
When the Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn, suggested May could learn how to do well in Europe from the Liverpool manager, Jürgen Klopp, May replied with what appeared to be a scripted gag. “I actually think that when we look at the Liverpool win over Barcelona last night, what it shows is that when everyone says it’s all over, that your European opposition have got you beat, the clock is ticking down, it’s time to concede defeat, actually we can still secure success if everyone comes together.”
Her refusal to budge comes before a crucial meeting of the 1922 Committee of Tory backbenchers, where they will decide whether to change party rules to allow another no-confidence vote on May’s future. The current rules say a prime minister cannot face another challenge within 12 months, and May won the last confidence vote in December.
Brexiter sources on the committee have said they are increasingly confident they may have enough support to remove the time limit, after a previous ballot went narrowly against changing the rules.
However, it is not yet sure to pass, nor is it certain that Tory MPs would vote by a majority to remove May; many soft Brexit supporters would rather she had passed a deal in order to prevent her successor campaigning for a no-deal departure from the EU.
Timeline
Theresa May in power
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In a sign of growing frustration among Tory MPs, the backbencher Andrea Jenkyns directly called on May to quit her post at prime minister’s questions.
“She’s tried her best, nobody could fault or doubt her commitment and sense of duty, but she has failed,” the Brexit-supporting MP said. “The public no longer trust her to run Brexit negotiations. Isn’t it time to step aside and let someone else lead our country, our party and the Brexit negotiations?”
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'Isn't it time to step aside?' Tory MP calls for May resignation – video
However, May rebuffed the suggestion, blaming the MPs who failed to back her Brexit deal. “This is not an issue about me and it’s not an issue about her. If it were an issue about me and the way I vote, we would already have left the European Union.”
The prime minister is still trying to strike a deal with Labour to pass her withdrawal agreement before MEPs have to take their seats in the European parliament on 2 July, after abandoning their target of getting it done by the time of the elections on 23 May.
The Downing Street spokesman confirmed the Conservatives were preparing to campaign in the European parliamentary elections, saying the party was “up and running, and our message is that, there’s only one party that can deliver Brexit”. He said May would be taking part in some campaign events.
The government formally announced on Tuesday that it will not have a Brexit deal agreed in time to take part in the EU-wide poll on 23 May.
“Our aim is that these MEPs never take up their seats,” the spokesman said.
Asked why the Conservatives were taking part in elections they did not want to take place, the spokesman said: “Because it’s democracy.” | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2022/apr/10/from-the-observer-archive-traffic-jams-parking-meters-motoring-special-1966 | Life and style | 2022-04-10T05:00:11.000Z | Chris Hall | Traffic jams and parking meters: the perils of motoring, 1966 | ‘P
robably the safest place to drive a car in Britain now is in the middle of a Scottish loch,’ is the arresting beginning of the Observer Magazine of 16 October 1966, a special issue to coincide with the Motor Show at Earl’s Court, London (‘Living with your car’).
This state of affairs was ‘a sad reflection on the crowded state of our roads, with their jams and their queues, their narrowness and their parking meters’ – newly arrived horrors clearly.
The chap on the cover once caught 24 trout in a day from the driver’s seat of his Amphicar Ropotamo II. I presume it travelled at 7.5mph rather than the 75mph stated. Unless that was how he’d managed to catch so many fish – by high-speed drag net.
They looked at ‘some of the ways in which drivers – men and women – enjoy their motoring off the beaten track’. One production-car trial involved driving a family car up a series of 36 muddy slopes in the hills above Llandudno. ‘Wives often come along and take over from their husbands with alternate stints at the wheel. Some even bring children – to add traction by bouncing up and down on the back seat.’ Note this wasn’t for the kids’ enjoyment; they were merely ballast.
Which brings us to ‘the brightest gleam in 1966’ which had been ‘the arrival on the scene of the word “safety” – really taken seriously for the first time by makers and motorists’. A feature on choosing seatbelts for children partly suggested it was only because they were so unruly – ‘since they adore clambering up and over seats at great hazard both to themselves and the driver, the only safe answer is for them to be strapped into the rear seat’.
Still, there was always a Merit toy steering-wheel and dashboard to keep them ‘pacified for hours’ – ‘it has a horn in the middle which works, but mercifully gives only a tiny toot’. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/social-care-network/2017/sep/11/capable-confident-staff-good-quality-social-care | Social Care Network | 2017-09-11T08:01:25.000Z | Andrea Sutcliffe | Capable, confident staff are the bedrock of good quality social care | Andrea Sutcliffe | Great social care has the power to transform people’s lives positively but inadequate, unreliable care is devastating and casts a dark shadow over the rest of the sector, undermining public trust.
Despite the vast majority of adult social care services registered with the Care Quality Commission (CQC) providing good quality care overall, we know this is not always the case.
On Monday’s Health and Care Innovation Expo in Manchester, I am proudly flying the flag for Quality Matters – the adult social care sector-wide commitment that CQC, along with many others, helped to launch this summer.
Quality Matters recognises that the responsibility for quality in adult social care rests with staff, providers, commissioners and funders, regulators and other national bodies, all of us listening to, engaging with and acting on the voice of people using services, their families and carers. None of us can do it alone. All of us have to work together to make sure these vital services deliver the quality that anyone using them has every right to expect.
What care homes can do to improve life for their residents
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Whatever role you have in health and social care, you have a vital part to play in making the ambitions of Quality Matters a reality. And the evidence from CQC’s inspections, set out in our State of Adult Social Care Services 2014-2017 report is that staff are committed to meeting that challenge, with more than nine out of 10 services rated as good or outstanding when inspectors ask the question: Is this service caring?
While Quality Matters emphasises the importance of everyone working together to achieve high quality care, it also sets out expectations for each of the groups that have an influence on quality:
Staff should have a clear understanding of what quality is and of their uniquely important role in helping to deliver high-quality care and enabling others to contribute to a sustainable, well-led, high-quality workforce for now and the future.
It was obvious from the co-production of Quality Matters with people using services, their families and carers that what staff do and how they behave is so important. They said they want services to be “human” with a workforce that has empathy, listens and works together with families and carers.
Capable and confident staff, equipped and empowered to deliver care that is safe, effective, caring and responsive are the bedrock of good quality services. To achieve this, leadership in social care needs to be robust and proactive, supporting staff and establishing a values-based culture of openness and respect where staff feel free and confident to speak up.
The ambitions set out in Quality Matters are inspiring but this cannot be another well-intended strategy that sits on a shelf gathering dust. For those ambitions to become reality, we all need to act and the small steps taken locally are just as important as any big, national initiative. Take a look at the document – it’s a good, easy read. Perhaps you could discuss at your team meetings or with the people using your service? What do you like about it? What could you do today, tomorrow to make a difference?
There are lots of resources available to help. Skills for Care has produced a Good and Outstanding Care Guide to share learning and offer practical examples from the most highly rated services; the Social Care Institute for Excellence (Scie) has a wealth of resources, including these great videos on personalisation in care homes; and together with the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence, Skills for Care and Scie have created Care Improvement Works to share their resources shaped around the five key questions CQC asks on inspections.
Whatever you do, the time to do it is now. For everyone involved in adult social care and for people relying upon these vital services, making quality matter has never been more important.
Andrea Sutcliffe is chief inspector of adult social care at the Care Quality Commissionand is speaking about Quality Matters at the Health and Care Innovation Expo; the Guardian Health and Social Care Networks are media partners for the conference.
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If you’re looking for a social care job or need to recruit staff, visit Guardian Jobs. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/football/2015/feb/24/manchester-city-v-barcelona-five-things-we-learned-from-champions-league-first-leg | Football | 2015-02-24T21:59:08.000Z | Jamie Jackson | Manchester City 1-2 Barcelona: five taking points from the Etihad | Jamie Jackson | 1) Brilliance of Barcelona shows up the Premier League
When performing as they did in the first half Barcelona are dazzling – their control, passing and movement befuddled Manchester City. The neon-yellow kit worn by Lionel Messi and his team-mates was an apt colour for a team who shone. Every question they asked of City was unanswerable during those opening 45 minutes. City deserve credit for fighting back in the second half but two days after Messi and Gerard Piqué were photographed near midnight outside a casino their side’s display was so brilliant that one had to be reminded that City are the English champions. Barça’s play was, simply, the stuff of fantasy for long periods. On this showing the Premier League is schoolboy fare. Maybe English football should spend a few nights at the casino.
2) City miss Touré but even he would have struggled
Manuel Pellegrini decided to replace the suspended Ivorian, the team’s talisman, with James Milner, a player who has been bursting to operate in the central midfield role which took him to City from Aston Villa, where he had been outstanding in the position. Milner’s first contribution was to float a 20-yard ball into Edin Dzeko’s path for City’s opening foray and in Touré’s absence he later took a free-kick won by Sergio Agüero, though this came to nothing. Not for the first time, though, Fernando, his partner for the evening, proved suspect, playing one back pass into Luis Suárez to allow him to run at Joe Hart’s goal. Later, Milner fired in a pass but Samir Nasri passed up the chance. But so good were Barcelona that even Touré would have struggled on this night.
3) Pellegrini backs bold words in team selection but City suffer
The uber-calm Chilean produced the most upbeat programme notes of his tenure as City manager, saying: “We feel we can beat any side in the competition. We have already shown that by defeating Bayern Munich here in the group stages. If you can do that then why can’t you beat Barcelona also? I am sure you will see us trying to play in the same way as we did against Newcastle United [in winning 5-0] and in the second half at Stoke City.” For Pellegrini this is about as bullish as he gets and he proceeded to back his bold talk with a starting XI that featured two strikers, with Dzeko playing alongside Agüero. If this was brave, by half-time it looked like high folly – Barcelona were 2-0 ahead and flying through two goals from Suárez.
Agüero shows his class and makes presence felt
In this most difficult of contests the Argentinian still managed to throw City a lifeline with the 69th minute goal created by a David Silva flick. Before this, Agüero had warned Barcelona of how he could damage them. One illustration came when fooling Javier Mascherano with a shimmy to win a free-kick. Another when a second-half run had the visitors backpedalling before a 20-yard shot carefully watched by Marc-André ter Stegen. The man who played only 45 minutes in last year’s tie due to injury had been impatient to face this gilded Barça side. “This is a new game and we’re not the same as we were last season,” he said. “They aren’t either. Both teams have had reinforcements that have improved the squads.” Agüero ensured his presence was felt.
5) Barça keeper Ter Stegen given far too little to do
During the first half when his colleagues were a blur of skill, invention and sheer majesty, Barcelona’s 22-year-old goalkeeper could console himself that despite not yet experiencing a minute in La Liga for the club he joined last summer he is the No1 for the Champions League. Signed from Borussia Mönchengladbach in a ¤12m (£8.8m) deal, Marc-André ter Stegen plays second fiddle to Claudio Bravo in the weekly bread-and-butter stuff but what a consolation to be able to pull up the armchair to watch this team when on song. Last month he said: “It’s good to be at Barça but the situation is difficult.” Ambition is great but apart from picking the ball out of the net after Agüero struck, Ter Stegen had little else to do. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2016/oct/18/the-red-barn-lyttelton-theatre-review-david-hare-georges-simenon-mark-strong-elizabeth-debicki | Stage | 2016-10-18T10:21:55.000Z | Michael Billington | The Red Barn review – David Hare turns Simenon's stormy tale into a film noir | There is a palpable glamour about David Hare’s adaptation of Georges Simenon’s 1968 novel, La Main. It is given a high-concept production by the Almeida’s current wunderkind, Robert Icke (1984, Oresteia), and designed by the adventurous Bunny Christie. Aside from Mark Strong, it also stars Elizabeth Debicki, who memorably haunted TV’s The Night Manager. Yet, although it is momentarily impressive, there is something glacially chic about the whole enterprise.
Hare, to his credit, has intelligently confronted the main problem: Simenon’s novel is told in the first person. It sees events through the eyes of Donald Dodd, a small-town Connecticut lawyer, whose old friend, Ray Sanders, died after the two men and their wives were caught in a blizzard returning from a New Year’s party. Where the book is subjective, the play is objective and Hare carefully builds up the suspense to explain what really happened on the fatal night. Hare’s dialogue is also more layered than Simenon’s: when Ray’s wife, Mona, tells Donald, after he has braved the storm to find the missing man, “I know what you’ve done”, the line takes on a Pinter-like resonance.
But, although it’s a good, taut script, how do you present it on stage? Icke and Christie have opted to present the action as if through a camera viewfinder: in short, the surrounding black panels contract and expand to focus on a central image. This gives the show a filmic quality and enables the action to shift from a Connecticut party to the Dodds’ clapboard home and the Sanders’ stylish Manhattan apartment. It also allows the design team, including Paule Constable and Tom Gibbons on light and sound respectively, to create a horrendously plausible winter storm. But, over 22 scenes, the cinematic technique becomes repetitive and one begins to feel one is watching a slowly decelerating film noir.
Unforgettable … Elizabeth Debicki in The Red Barn. Photograph: Tristram Kenton/The Guardian
Even if it’s a classic case of an ingenious design idea upstaging the play, Icke confirms that he can direct actors. Strong, virtually unrecognisable as Donald, gives an exact portrayal of an uptight, middle-class lawyer who, as he says, has lived life with the handbrake on. Even Strong’s poker-backed posture seems to crumble perceptibly as he faces the consequences of his actions. Debicki, as the dead man’s wife, also gives an immensely subtle performance: her face initially seems a blank canvas on which other people impose their desires, but there is a pivotal moment, as Mona tells Donald of her hunger for change, when Debicki’s features unforgettably cloud over with disappointment. But possibly the toughest role is that of Donald’s protective, intimidating wife whom Hope Davis endows with just the right refrigerated compassion.
Behind the production, however, lurks a big question. Simenon’s novel takes us inside the mind of a man driven to extreme acts by a life of controlled anger and jealousy. Hare has dramatised it well and highlighted both the stifling nature of small-town life and the significance of a period – the late 1960s – when the hippie revolution was threatening established values. But, given the cinematic nature of this production, I found myself wondering why we were watching the play in a theatre. A simpler presentation might have made the question irrelevant. As it is, we have a strange hybrid in which a novel has been turned into a stage production that paradoxically aspires to the condition of film.
At the Lyttelton, London, until 17 January. Box office: 020-7452 3000. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/feb/20/i-have-your-back-rishi-sunak-tells-farmers-at-nfu-conference | Environment | 2024-02-20T17:41:25.000Z | Helena Horton | I have your back, Rishi Sunak tells farmers at NFU conference | Rishi Sunak has told farmers: “I have your back” at the National Farmers Union conference, as he promised to “change the culture” in government around farming.
Sunak was the first prime minister to address the NFU conference since Gordon Brown in 2008, and had brought three Defra ministers with him to put the Conservative case to farmers.
Farmers say recent flooding that has hit the UK could lead to a significant hit on food production.
Sunak committed to improving food security in the UK and expressed concerns about low self-sufficiency in “things like tomatoes, pears, plums, lettuces and apples”. Sunak also said he had “once milked a cow”.
He took two questions from the audience. Replying to one farmer, Hannah, from Hertfordshire, he admitted that allowing farmers to trade with the EU was a “work in progress”.
He said: “We are working very hard with individual countries to ease all those areas in which there are differences. I’ll be totally honest, it’s a work in progress.”
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Farmers have been critical of trade deals undercutting their business, including the free trade deal with Australia and the prospect of importing Canadian pork and Mexican beef. Sunak said: “We are absolutely committed to supporting you and making sure that you are not undercut.”
He expressed sympathy for those who had been affected by recent floods that had wiped out thousands of acres of crops. “It’s always devastating when that happens,” he said.
Later, David Eudall, economics and analysis director at the Agricultural and Horticulture Development Board, told the conference that the rain would cause huge problems. “In previous years when we’ve seen this [level of rainfall], like 2019-20 when we had a very similar wet period through the autumn and winter for planting, we saw a 24% reduction in the planted area. Considering we’re in a similar area and have similar weather pattern we’d expect we’re going to see a similar magnitude of scale.”
The Environment Agency chair, Alan Lovell, faced an angry reception from farmers who said the EA had worsened the flooding situation. He responded: “I take issue with the idea that water comes from the EA: water comes from above.” He also revealed a new inspections regime for sewage works, to restore checks to their level in 2010, before cuts by the Conservative party.
Recent polling from the Country Land and Business Association found that people in rural areas are defecting to Labour in huge numbers, with the party’s share of the vote having climbed to 37%, up 17 points on the 2019 general election result, and the Conservatives’ share falling 25 points to 34%.
More respondents in the poll believe Labour understands and respects rural communities and the rural way of life than the Conservatives (28% v 25%). The Conservatives hold 96 of the 100 most rural seats but face losing more than half to Labour and the Liberal Democrats, including those of Jacob Rees-Mogg, Jeremy Hunt and Thérèse Coffey.
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Minette Batters, leading her last NFU conference as president, said the farming vote was still up for grabs and asked for Brexit-related labour problems to be solved.
“Which party will introduce a minimum five-years seasonal workers scheme and recognise that we need more people if we’re to continue providing the raw ingredients for the country’s largest manufacturing sector?” she asked. “Which party will formally commit to sourcing more food from British farms? For our schools, hospitals, our military?”
Batters alluded to protests in Wales, where farmers have been blockading roads with their tractors over plans to force them to plant 10% of their land with trees. She said: “I have watched and listened as the Welsh government try and deny our members and their children the farming futures they had planned.”
The next big battle for the NFU is against the supermarkets, which they accuse of intimidating farmers and striking unfair deals, which cause them to go out of business.
Batters said: “There are still many of our members who will not raise a complaint for fear of being delisted by supermarkets. Conference, this is wrong. It’s unfair, and totally unacceptable. In my last address as NFU president, I have a message to all food retailers and, most importantly, to their shareholders. You have a duty to your farmers and growers. They have a right to earn a fair price. For what they produce for you to sell. This means the culture at the top of food retail has to change. Right now, the badge of honour sits with an often ruthless buyer for negotiating the hardest deal [with] suppliers. Retailers should find them more than that.
“That badge of honour needs to be worn by responsible board members who recognise the importance of long-term supplier relationships. But it’s really that we need a blueprint for action. My suggestion is that the Groceries Code Adjudicator survey of supplies is used to create a new framework. This would embed retailers’ ethical responsibilities to farmers and growers within their businesses, environmental sustainability goals and corporate social responsibility.” | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/oct/30/baumgartner-by-paul-auster-review-amiable-aimlessness | Books | 2023-10-30T07:00:07.000Z | Anthony Cummins | Baumgartner by Paul Auster review – amiable aimlessness | Isuspect anyone who was ever spellbound by the existential gumshoe shenanigans of The New York Trilogy – postmodernism in a fedora – will always take a chance on a new Paul Auster novel, however much he has tested that faith with the fiction he has produced in the decades since. He’s been struggling to get his gifts to align for some time – at least since 2007’s dourly Kafka-ish Travels in the Scriptorium – and while the Booker-shortlisted 4321 had admirers, its life-after-life premise (four takes on a single Auster-adjacent protagonist) felt to me void of spark.
So I wanted to love Baumgartner – all the more after the news this year that Auster was being treated for cancer – and for some 40 glorious pages I did. Starting in 2018, the book gives us two years in the life of the titular protagonist, a septuagenarian writer (what else?), almost a decade widowed when we join him at his desk at home in New Jersey. He needs to fetch a book from another room, but suddenly remembers the hob is still on from breakfast – and hadn’t he promised to call his sister? But there’s a UPS delivery at the door… and then the phone rings: his cleaner’s young daughter in distress because papá just sawed off two fingers at work. Another call at the door: someone to read the meter. Baumgartner descends to the cellar to show the way when – wallop – he tumbles downstairs…
Winningly farcical and fast-moving, it’s a terrific opening, a cascading comedy of perpetually interrupted thought, built on a clausal onrush of period-shy sentences in the manner of German writer Heinrich von Kleist, praised by Auster as “one of the greatest prose writers of the early 19th century”. The syntax – always more, more, and still more – is poignant as well as manic when, easing off the gas, with Baumgartner’s knee on ice, the novel’s pile-up of incident gives way to a passage in which he is seen obsessively unfolding and refolding the clothes of his late wife, Anna, garment by garment by garment.
Yet even in the most involving moments there’s a red flag: Auster’s actual words, and the events they itemise, matter less than the fact of their accumulation – a storytelling strategy whose recklessness comes into view once we slide from Baumgartner’s here-and-now into his memories of college, university, marriage and career as a Princeton philosophy professor. As he sifts the unpublished papers of Anna, a poet he first met in the 60s (excerpts include her memoir of an old lover named Frankie Boyle), there’s a dawning sense that the book won’t have the page count to resolve the vast number of threads it starts to spin. Texture, not substance, is the game, but when Baumgartner “asks himself where his mind will be taking him next”, you can hear the narrative architecture creak.
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The oddest passage occurs when we find the protagonist “suddenly… remembering his trip to Ukraine two years ago and the day he spent in the town where [his mother’s] father was born”: a cue for Auster to plonk down an old piece about his own visit to an ancestral birthplace, transplanting his family tree to what Baumgartner calls “the obscure Auster side” of his heritage. The thriftiness is fine, ditto the long-patented authorial step from behind the curtain, but it’s hard not to see the episode as a bit of bodged-in bulk (Auster even introduces the segment as a “short, confounding text”, as if by way of apology).
When we hear that Anna’s death preceded “a glum interlude of masturbation [before he] started chasing after women” – the most important of them a divorcee 16 years his junior – the stage seems set for a probing of later-life lust, not least during a passage comparing their physical attributes. But even with the climactic arrival into Baumgartner’s life of a young female academic, familiar formulas are ignored in favour of a kind of amiable aimlessness. There’s a measure of charm in the news that a minor character is ready to come “back into the story after an absence of several chapters”, or the nudge-wink gloss on Baumgartner’s otherwise hazy opus-in-progress as a “serio-comic, quasi-fictional discourse on the self”, although the book is only knocking holes in a fourth wall it never cared to build. Auster’s turbo-charged kickstart ultimately takes us on a ride without destination – yet who would blame him?
Baumgartner by Paul Auster is published by Faber (£18.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2021/mar/26/stephanie-davis-qualifies-olympic-marathon-british-trials | Sport | 2021-03-26T14:44:53.000Z | Paul MacInnes | Stephanie Davis reaches Olympics less than three years after first marathon | Stephanie Davis, a part-time athlete who ran her first marathon less than three years ago, will represent Great Britain at the Olympic Games after blitzing the field at the long-distance trials at Kew Gardens in London.
Davis finished with a time of 2hr 27 mins 16 sec, almost three minutes clear of second-placed Natasha Cockram at the specially convened race, the first time a one-off trial for the Olympic marathon has taken place since 1980.
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It was a personal best for the 30-year-old, who only began racing competitively in 2018 after joining the Clapham Chasers in south London. It also fell well within the 2:29.30 Olympic qualifying standard for Tokyo.
Davis finished her first marathon in a time of 2:41 and has continued to outdo herself with each race, with a 2:32 in the London Marathon of 2019 – despite running with a hip injury and from the massed start – and 2:27.40 in Valencia in December of that year. Friday’s trial was her first full marathon since then, due to the disruption caused by Covid-19.
The Glaswegian continues to maintain a career in finance, with a senior role at the asset management company Lazard. Last year she gave an insight into how she maintained a training regime despite holding down a job. She said she ran 60-70 miles a week, around half the level of many elite athletes, but added: “I also do a lot of cross-training, including swimming and going on the elliptical, and cycle to work every day.”
In the men’s qualifying event there were emotional scenes as Chris Thompson secured a place at the Games at the age of 39. Thompson, who turns 40 next month, also recorded a personal best with a time of 2:10.50. After coming from behind, he surged clear in the final laps of the race around the historic botanical gardens. The 2012 Olympian finished more than a minute clear of second-placed Ben Connor, who had already qualified for the Games.
Chris Thompson celebrates as he wins the men’s marathon race at Kew. Photograph: Tom Dulat/British Athletics/Getty Images
“I don’t know how I’ve done it – I’m 39 for crying out loud – this doesn’t happen,” said an overwhelmed Thompson. “This sounds bad but I knew it with two laps to go and I was trying to control my emotions then.
“After 30 minutes I realised I had worked the course out and I realised you can’t keep pressing like this. I just entered my own little mind palace and thought: ‘This is the rhythm I need.’ I feel like someone is going to tell me this didn’t happen.”
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Kew also hosted an early-morning trial for the 20km walk. Callum Wilkinson said he was “disappointed, gutted and embarrassed” to miss the Olympic qualifying standard of 81 minutes after winning in 82:47. Tom Bosworth, who finished sixth at the Rio Games in 2016, came second and already has the required time for Tokyo. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/jul/31/a-beautiful-young-wife-tommy-wieringa-review | Books | 2016-07-31T07:00:28.000Z | Julie Myerson | A Beautiful Young Wife review – dissection of the male heart | You know you’re in the presence of properly great fiction writing when you forget to question a single word of it. “This happened,” the author declares – and that’s it, you’re there, the book in your hand suddenly so much more urgent and alive than the world around you. Absolute narrative authority is a rare commodity, hard to unwrap and (I would argue) near impossible to teach. So what a joy to stumble across it here – along with prose of such exquisite precision and intensity – in this Dutch writer’s sixth novel.
Edward is a virologist, an eminent one, having made his name with an Aids breakthrough in the 1980s and then moving with a neat kind of serendipity straight into avian flu. At 42, he has everything a man could want, except for a mate. So when a traffic-stoppingly beautiful blonde comes cycling down the street, it feels as sweetly inevitable as his high-flying (sorry) career in bird flu. Still, he can’t quite believe his luck when Ruth – 15 years his junior – seems to fall for him too. And though her father extends a less than warm welcome – “I had hoped that she would take care of me some day, but the way things look now, it’ll be your wheelchair she’s pushing”– pretty soon the two are married.
The evocations of sex, bodies, appetites and desires are reminiscent of Updike at his very best
The chinks in the marital armour appear slowly, but with a doom-laden rhythm, as if a part of Edward has always sensed his luck couldn’t last. At a medical conference in Aspen, Ruth is bowled over by the mountain views but wry about the GlaxoSmithKline sponsorship, harping on yet again about her vegetarianism, while Edward silently mourns the scaloppine and lamb chops that have one by one “vanished from his repertoire”. Meanwhile, back at home the arguments about capitalism and “the closely knit interests of science and industry” continue. As his Beautiful Young Wife pins Bentham texts to the bathroom wall and accuses him of neglecting to imagine the pain he inflicts on his ferrets, Edward finds himself drawn “like water to the lowest point” to a work colleague and slides into an affair. And then, just as the marriage seems at breaking point, he and Ruth do the inevitable: they decide to try for a baby.
Given the novel’s length (a mere 128 pages of such power that I can’t quite bring myself to call it a novella), I’m disinclined to reveal more. But what follows is an examination of the ageing male heart – a dissection as subtle and tender as it is, ultimately, unnerving. For this is a wonderfully disconcerting piece of work which, on a second and even a third reading, only seems to grow more expansive and multifaceted while managing at the same time to remain mysterious and tightly furled.
The stuff of virology is robustly well drawn, all of it crucial and convincing. Seemingly minor characters creep up on you. Ruth’s feckless sponger of a brother who doesn’t inoculate his five-year-old son because “he has the right to go through the childhood illnesses” is a comic portrayal that strikes a bleak chill into your bones, but ends up earning its narrative keep in a way that is as apt as it is startling.
Meanwhile, the evocations of sex, bodies, appetites and desires are reminiscent of Updike at his very best: driving back from hospital with your baby and feeling “as frightened and indomitable as a teenage couple in a stolen car”; those early, shocking days of new parenthood with its “happiness delicate as gold wire”. It’s a real credit to the near-invisibility of Sam Garrett’s translation that only the Dutch surnames serve to jolt you back now and then to the Netherlands.
Ultimately, though, it’s Wieringa’s relentless, sometimes excruciating honesty that resonates. It will be a long time before I forget the description of Edward “trying not to groan” as he squats to pick up the cap of the toothpaste tube because he knows that if he bends from the waist “his belly and breasts seemed to separate from his frame and dangle in shapeless pleats”. If one of the purposes of fiction is to show us ourselves, Wieringa’s mirror is polished to perfection.
A Beautiful Young Wife is published by Scribe (£9.99). Click here to buy it for £6.55 | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2016/jan/23/wiener-dog-review-todd-solondz-sundance-greta-gerwig | Film | 2016-01-23T12:32:39.000Z | Nigel M Smith | Wiener-Dog review – Gerwig, Delpy and DeVito, united by a dachshund, divided by Solondz | Todd Solondz is a film-maker who’s built his entire career on a divine ability to severely divide audiences – and really anger his dissenters. Happiness, his most memorably divisive film, was a dark comedy that mined uncomfortable laughs from a storyline largely centred on the activities of a paedophile. It was so controversial in fact, that the Sundance film festival, known for screening edgy fare, flat out refused to show it in 1998 due to its illicit content.
No child molesters creep into Solondz’s eighth feature, Wiener-Dog, but his latest proves the film-maker, at 56 years old, has lost none of his bite. However, the plot description would lead you to believe otherwise.
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Sundance’s official summary of the film reads: “Wiener-Dog tells several stories featuring people who find their life inspired or changed by one particular dachshund, who seems to be spreading a certain kind of comfort and joy.” Indeed, that “one particular dachshund” features prominently in each of the four mostly unrelated vignettes that make up the film, although Solondz leaves it unclear how the canine lands with each of its strange owners. But Wiener-Dog doesn’t find Solondz going light to deliver an inspirational medley. Instead, he’s created arguably his most caustic film since Happiness.
Like much of Solondz’s output, Wiener-Dog is essentially a slew of short films, populated by an obscenely illustrious cast, including Julie Delpy, Greta Gerwig, Danny DeVito, Ellen Burstyn and Zosia Mamet.
Delpy kicks things off with her trademark acerbic delivery as Dina, a mother of a young boy recovering from cancer who really shouldn’t be a mother at all. Her husband surprises the family by adopting the dachshund, which the child names Wiener-Dog, but Dina immediately takes a deep dislike to the new addition. While tucking her son into bed, she recounts how her non-neutered childhood dog was “raped” by a stray dog named Muhammed, which resulted in her pet dying while giving birth to stillborn puppies.
Things cheer up with the arrival of Greta Gerwig as Dawn Wiener, the grown-up version of the shy, unpopular seventh grader played by Heather Matarazzo in Solondz’s breakout film, Welcome to the Dollhouse. She’s now a timid veterinarian’s assistant. Following a lucky series of events, Dawn comes to care for the adorable dachshund, before embarking on a strange road trip with an old classmate.
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Next up is Danny DeVito in a tour-de-force performance as a film professor at his wit’s end with his uninspired students and insipid colleagues. This sequence lets Solondz, who’s never betrayed his independent roots to parlay his talents into the mainstream arena, tear into Hollywood’s vacuous nature - and it’s a hoot to watch.
Solondz leaves his best for last with the film’s closing chapter, which focuses on Nana, a massively embittered elderly woman (Ellen Burstyn in her best performance since Requiem for a Dream). When her estranged granddaughter (Mamet) shows up unannounced and asks what to call the cute household dachshund, she’s shocked to learn it’s named Cancer. “It felt right - everyone’s dying,” says Nana.
A sequence during which Nana dreams of how her life could have been better had she played her cards differently is the film’s chief highlight: mordantly funny, but most importantly, poignant. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2017/mar/10/michelangelo-sebastiano-rauschenberg | Art and design | 2017-03-10T09:30:01.000Z | Jonathan Jones | From Michelangelo to Rauschenberg: this week’s best UK exhibitions | Michelangelo and Sebastiano
This exhibition is a micro-history: a detailed exploration of a short period in the life of Michelangelo Buonarroti when he collaborated closely with a painter far less famous than he was. It is a tale that takes you to the heart of High Renaissance Rome, with stunning exhibits including a rarely seen Michelangelo statue of the risen Christ and a convincing replica of an entire frescoed chapel.
National Gallery, WC2, 15 March to 25 June
Gillian Wearing and Claude Cahun
The spooky games of Claude Cahun created some of the most compelling photographs of the surrealist age. This French visionary lived with her lover in the Channel Islands in the 1930s and 40s. She also lived inside her head, putting on disguises, assuming male identities and using the camera to record her travesties. Her images resonate powerfully today, anticipating performance art and identity politics. This exhibition juxtaposes her with Turner prize winner Gillian Wearing, but could equally well have set her alongside Cindy Sherman, ORLAN or Marina Abramović.
National Portrait Gallery, WC2, to 29 May
Robert Rauschenberg
If you have not yet seen this important exhibition, don’t miss out. Rauschenberg’s capacious imagination and rollicking intellectual freedom are fully revealed in dazzling gestures, from getting his friend John Cage to drive along a piece of paper to make a long black wheelprint, to creating a computer-controlled mud fountain. Yet out of his ingenuity came the profundity of his most enduring works, the combines and silkscreens with their rich textures and suggestiveness, and powerful Dante-inspired drawings.
Tate Modern, SE1, to 2 April
Sooni Taraporevala
Film-maker, author and photographer Taraporevala presents images of life in her home city of Mumbai since 1976. Thirty years in one of the world’s most populous and socially complex places are documented here with the humane poetry of black-and-white photography.
The Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester, to early 2018
Josiah McElheny
Paintings that explode from the wall in crystalline structures, drawings that seem to float in glass, and a film based on a 1912 story by the German author Paul Scheerbart feature in this multi-dimensional exhibition. McElheny takes on the history of imperialism and the complexities of modern physics via intellectually omnivorous art that chews over big ideas.
White Cube Bermondsey, SE1, to 13 April | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/sep/16/battery-electric-freight-train-wabtec-rail-transport-emissions | US news | 2021-09-16T11:00:14.000Z | Oliver Milman | ‘Dramatically more powerful’: world’s first battery-electric freight train unveiled | The world’s first battery-electric freight train was unveiled at an event in Pittsburgh on Friday, amid a fresh attempt by some US lawmakers to slash carbon emissions from rail transport in order to address the climate crisis.
Wabtec, the Pittsburgh-based rail freight company, showed off its locomotive at Carnegie Mellon University as part of a new venture between the two organizations to develop zero emissions technology to help move the 1.7bn tons of goods that are shipped on American railroads each year.
Perched upon a strip of rail at Carnegie Mellon’s technology campus on the banks of the Monongahela River, the cherry red, 75ft-long train provided a striking background to politicians, rail executives and academics who urged a swifter industry transition away from fossil fuels. Dignitaries were allowed to clamber up a vertiginous ladder on to the train to inspect its confines, which included a small driver’s cabin in front of 500 lithium-ion battery modules, arrayed in stacks in the heart of the vehicle.
The new train, known as the FLXdrive battery-electric locomotive, underwent successful trials in California earlier this year where it was found to have cut fuel consumption by 11%, which meant reducing the amount of diesel used by 6,200 gallons. Wabtec said that the next iteration of the locomotive, to be rolled out within two years, will be able to cut the consumption of diesel, the fossil fuel traditionally used in freight rail, by nearly a third.
The company also said emissions will be entirely eliminated through the development of accompanying hydrogen fuel cells. If the technology is used worldwide, Wabtec estimates planet-heating emissions could be cut by 300m tons a year, with nearly half of those saved emissions occurring in the US.
Wabtec’s battery cell used in the train. Photograph: Courtesy of Carnegie Mellon
“A bolder, cleaner, more efficient transportation system is in our grasp,” said Raphael Santana, chief executive of Wabtec. “This is just the beginning.”
The rail industry is seeking to position itself as an enthusiastic backer of Joe Biden’s climate agenda despite its history of funding groups that reject the reality of climate change and fiercely protecting the stream of coal transported on US rail.
The use of rail to move freight long distances has been an integral part of the American economy since the Union Pacific and Central Pacific railroads were joined up in 1869, allowing goods to flow freely to the US west for the first time. The rail freight industry is now worth around $80bn and spans 140,000 miles of track across the US.
However, the environmental benefits of rail have been undermined by the heavy reliance upon diesel to fuel freight trains, as well as a widespread preference among businesses to move goods via trucks rather than trains. This is a problem globally beyond the US – the International Energy Agency has said that freight rail is “often neglected” in climate debates and currently carries only 7% of all freight moved around the world.
Wabtec is betting the FLXdrive will change this dynamic. Housed in a traditional locomotive body, the new battery system drives the axles of the train and uses the kinetic energy of the train’s braking to partially recharge the battery, . The newest version will be a 7-megawatt battery locomotive, which is “100 times the power and energy within a Tesla – it’s dramatically more powerful”, said Eric Gebhardt, Wabtec’s chief technology officer.
The unveiling of the locomotive was used by two attending Democrats to renew their calls for $600m in the planned Congressional reconciliation bill to be dedicated to a new freight rail innovation institute that would provide the research and development to cut emissions from the sector. The lawmakers, and Wabtec, consider battery-powered trains more practical and cheaper than electrifying all of America’s rail network.
“We are trying really hard to get it into the bigger bill,” Senator Bob Casey told the Guardian. Casey, a Pennsylvania Democrat, has introduced to the Senate a $600m proposal for the institute, with an identical bill in the House of Representatives written by Conor Lamb, another Democrat whose district includes part of Pittsburgh. “We are in a race against irreversible climate change and rail is part of the strategy to cut emissions,” Casey said.
The battery cell room on the train. Photograph: Courtesy of Carnegie Mellon
According to Casey, recent climate disasters, such as the flooding in Tennessee and New York City and wildfires in the US west, have focused the minds of some fellow senators. “Senators are human beings, too,” he said. “Republicans don’t have the same sense of urgency we do but many of them recognize the party can’t just deny this stuff anymore.”
A greater tonnage of goods is now moved by trucks on roads than by rail, however, and the rail industry hopes action on the climate crisis will prove advantageous to its own prospects. “If we decarbonize all of the locomotives and decrease the number of trucks, we will get to where we need to be,” said Gebhardt. Medium and heavy duty trucks are responsible for about a quarter of all US emissions from transportation, according to the Environmental Protection Agency, more than double the pollution emitted by aircraft.
Gebhardt said that Wabtec hopes to develop fuel cells with so-called “green” hydrogen, which is produced via renewable energy, but that “blue” hydrogen was a possibility, despite researchers warning that this form of energy can in some cases be even more polluting than traditional fossil fuels.
Bill Sanders, dean of the college of engineering at Carnegie Mellon, said that he hoped the proposed institute will provide research on fuel cells, battery systems and railroad efficiencies.
“This is a very exciting moment – battery technology is developing extremely quickly now,” he said. “People talk about autonomous cars but I think progress on rail is significantly closer than that. We see interest from the federal government in supporting this and I think that would be very helpful.”
This article was amended on 17 September 2021 to clarify a reference to the level of charge returned to the battery by the locomotive’s braking system. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/mar/01/battle-baba-amr-timeline-syria | World news | 2012-03-01T18:06:13.000Z | Matthew Weaver | Battle for Baba Amr – timeline | 3 February: Protesters mark 30th anniversary of a massacre in nearby Hama, when up to 20,000 people were killed under the orders of President Bashar al-Assad's father, Hafez. Free Syrian Army rebels are filmed in control of captured tanks in the Baba Amr area.
4 February: Activists claim 200 people are killed on the opening day of the bombardment, the highest death toll reported for a single day in the 11-month uprising.
5 February: The BBC's Paul Wood, reporting from near Homs, describes "pretty constant shelling".
6 February: A makeshift field hospital is hit in Baba Amr, killing 19 people, according to reports. A gas pipeline nearby is attacked.
7 February: Britain and the US recall their ambassadors to Damascus in protest at the Assad regime's "murderous" behaviour towards its own civilians. Omar Shakir, an activist in Baba Amr, says: "It was unbelievable in Bab al-Amr today. There was shelling everywhere: machine guns, mortars, everything."
8 February: Video footage shows residential areas being pounded by shells. Resident claim they are under "genocidal attack". "Where's freakin UN? Why isn't anyone helping us?" Homs activist Danny Abdul Dayem says in one of several video appeals.
10 February: Activists claim rockets are hitting Baba Amr at the rate of one every three minutes. The Guardian's Martin Chulov reports intense fighting near Homs: "As we get closer to Homs there is a lot more fighting. There is gunfire all around, rockets are landing."
A doctor in Baba Amr, Muhammad al-Muhammad, says prematurely born babies are dying in the area because of the lack of incubators.
13 February: Chulov says the siege of Homs has been tightened and the city is all but sealed off.
20 February: The International Committee of the Red Cross tries to negotiate a ceasefire in Homs.
21 February: Activists count 250 shells landing in one morning. Citizen journalist Rami al-Sayed is killed. His YouTube channel Syria Pioneer documented hundreds of clips of the government's crackdown.
22 February: The Sunday Times journalist Marie Colvin and French photographer Rémi Ochlik are killed in an attack on a makeshift media centre. Two other journalists, Paul Conroy and Edith Bouvier, are wounded.
23 February: Conroy and Bouvier record video appeals pleading to be rescued.
24 February: The Red Crescent rescues seven wounded people from Baba Amr, but the wounded journalists refuse to leave.
27 February: A mosque in Baba Amr is filmed being shelled.
28 February: Thirteen activists are killed when Conroy is safely smuggled out of Homs.
29 February: A ground invasion of the Baba Amr area begins from the direction of the al-Bassel football stadium.
1 March: The Free Syrian Army announces its withdrawal from Baba Amr. Within an hour the Syrian government declares it has taken control of the area. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2018/oct/21/kimi-raikkonen-lewis-hamilton-f1-us-grand-prix | Sport | 2018-10-21T20:15:11.000Z | Tom Dart | Kimi Räikkönen makes Lewis Hamilton wait for F1 title with US GP win | The permutations were so varied and the fate of the title so uncertain until the last seconds that even the victor of the United States Grand Prix appeared baffled by it all.
“Did you win the championship?” Kimi Räikkönen asked Lewis Hamilton as they waited to step on to the podium. “No,” came the reply.
Mercedes outplayed in thriller to postpone Hamilton’s crowning
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Not yet, anyway. For the second year in a row Hamilton did not seal the drivers’ championship at one of his favourite venues. Needing to outscore Sebastian Vettel by eight points, Hamilton’s Mercedes finished third on Sunday and Vettel recovered from a dire start to end up fourth. While it was a vexing and unexpected outcome for Hamilton, who had won five of the six previous GPs here and was seeking his fifth successive victory this season, he did at least extend his advantage over Vettel by three points to 70, with three events and a maximum of 75 points remaining. There is precious little in Vettel’s recent form to suggest he is capable of winning all three.
Still, this was more recession than procession as Hamilton lamented his team’s tyre strategy and gave credit to the speed of his opponents. Even with this weekend representing a mini-renaissance for Ferrari, it would hardly be a surprise if, as happened last year, Hamilton’s fifth title was rubber-stamped in Mexico next Sunday.
Kimi Räikkönen holds up the winning trophy as Lewis Hamilton applauds. It was the Finnish driver’s first race win since 2013. Photograph: Larry W. Smith/EPA
Playing the role of chief party pooper was Räikkönen: an improbable candidate to win the race even though he started second on the grid behind Hamilton and Ferrari were clearly faster in Texas than they have been in recent weeks.
Hamilton arrived in Austin in search of his 10th first-place finish of the season, with six wins in his past seven races.
Räikkönen’s recent pedigree is less impressive. He was world champion in 2007, Hamilton’s rookie year, but it had been 113 races since his last win – in Australia in 2013 with Lotus. He is moving to Sauber for 2019, a switch unlikely to enhance his prospects of more podium finishes. At 39 the Finn is the oldest winner of a grand prix since Nigel Mansell, when 41, in Australia in 1994.
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Hamilton was so relaxed as he set a track record during qualifying on Saturday that he gave the Texas-born actor Matthew McConaughey a hug after getting out of the car. As crucial as the times, though, were the tyres.
Räikkönen began on ultra-soft tyres, with the rest of the top five on super-softs, giving him better grip that helped him overtake Hamilton at the start as the drivers surged uphill on the straight leading into the first turn.
Vettel was having less fun. The German qualified second-fastest but began in fifth position as the result of a three-place grid penalty for failing to slow down sufficiently during a red flag period in Friday practice.
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That punishment robbed spectators of a direct Vettel-Hamilton duel and looked to have smoothed the path to victory for the 33-year-old, who knew that a first-place finish with Vettel third or lower would be enough to draw level with Juan Manuel Fangio on five titles. Ending in second with Vettel fifth or worse was another potential route to triumph.
Either outcome looked eminently possible as Vettel collided with Daniel Ricciardo and spun on the first lap – his second successive crash with a Red Bull following contact with Max Verstappen two weeks ago at Suzuka, and yet another example of the blunders that have pockmarked the second half of Ferrari’s campaign. As Räikkönen built up a lead of a couple of seconds, Vettel was outside the top 10.
Underlining a chaotic opening that provided plenty of overtaking opportunities, Verstappen soared to seventh after five laps despite starting in 18th. Ricciardo retired when a sudden loss of power forced him to pull over, reportedly prompting him to put his fist through a wall in anger.
Sebastian Vettel spun off the track on the first lap after an incident with Daniel Ricciardo. Photograph: Clive Mason/Getty Images
Vettel picked off the cars ahead to haul himself back into contention under blue skies that made a welcome change from days of grey drizzle, while Hamilton began to narrow the gap on the leader as the ultra-softs wore down. Coming up to the midway point in the 56-lap contest, Hamilton clearly had the speed edge and Räikkönen struggled to hold him off before heading into the pits.
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Vettel set the fastest time on lap 36 but was down in fifth position, over 29 seconds behind Hamilton and needing the Mercedes to pit again after its early stop on lap 11 during a virtual safety car period. Hamilton did exactly that, his rear tyres blistering. It handed the lead back to Räikkönen and left the Briton 12 seconds adrift.
Valtteri Bottas let his teammate through, moving Hamilton up to third and setting up an exciting finale as he hunted down Verstappen and Räikkönen, steadily gaining on them but running out of laps, while Vettel sought to get past Bottas.
Hamilton reduced the gap with Verstappen to under a second with three laps to go. On lap 54 Hamilton accelerated to go wheel to wheel with Verstappen and for a moment it seemed the title was his – but then he ran wide and the impressive Verstappen reclaimed second place. Seconds later Vettel passed Bottas to move into fourth and it was clear that Hamilton’s coronation would have to wait after a thrilling and at times perplexing afternoon. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/football/2022/apr/07/is-the-london-stadium-beginning-to-feel-like-home-for-west-ham-fans | Football | 2022-04-07T07:00:07.000Z | Pete May | Is the London Stadium beginning to feel like home for West Ham fans? | West Ham are “massive” to quote the chant of the moment – and so, surprisingly, was the London Stadium in the memorable Europa League win against Sevilla. Six years after moving from Upton Park, the club’s troubled new ground had changed from corporate dome to a cauldron of noise. Is Stratford finally starting to feel like home for Hammers fans?
For all Karren Brady’s promises of a successful migration, it did not start well in 2016, with fans who preferred to stand put next to fans who wanted to sit and fights breaking out in an early game against Watford. The stewarding was poor and in a League Cup tie against Chelsea rival fans used the circular concourse to cause aggravation.
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It seemed difficult to get a chant going all around the vast stadium. The diehards had many complaints: the distance from the pitch, plastic fans, the long walk from Stratford and the sale of popcorn. It was forgotten that sometimes Upton Park could be quiet, too. The club improved the stewarding and moved fans to more appropriate areas, but many problems remained.
The nadir for the London Stadium was the pitch invasion during a 3-0 home defeat to Burnley in March 2018. David Moyes was in his first spell as manager with the club, as ever fighting relegation rather than moving to the promised next level. One middle-aged fan planted a corner flag in the centre circle. With the stewards as proactive as the West Ham defence, Mark Noble found himself acting as a makeshift bouncer, manhandling one miscreant and inspiring the Guardian cartoonist David Squires to draw Noble singing “I’m forever throwing Herberts, stewards vanish in thin air”. Several hundred fans gathered around the directors’ box chanting: “You’ve destroyed our club” at owners David Sullivan and David Gold. There didn’t seem any coming back from that.
Mark Noble confronts a pitch invader during a match against Burnley in 2018. Photograph: Jordan Mansfield/Getty Images
Another problem was how to cover the athletics track. When Sofiane Feghouli scored against NK Domzale in the first Europa League match there and kissed the massive green carpet around the pitch, it highlighted how the playing area looked like one giant chunk of AstroTurf. The then manager Slaven Bilic complained in 2017 that it made it psychologically difficult for his players to track back: “You look up and it is not easy, because everything is green ahead of you, to appreciate exactly where is the end of the pitch.”
In 2016 the distance from the managers dugout to the pitch at the London Stadium was reported to be 90 feet, and the athletics track was covered by a green carpet. Photograph: Calver/MDI/Shutterstock
For a long period there was a standoff between West Ham and the stadium’s owners, the London Legacy Development Corporation, which would not allow a claret carpet to be installed over the running track area. Eventually, relations improved and the carpet finally arrived in April 2019. It was not, as some feared, a shagpile offcut from Sullivan’s home, but a claret surround with the club’s name emblazoned at the sides.
Michail Antonio was so impressed he celebrated a goal against Leicester by lying down and fondly stroking the carpet. Renaming the East Stand the Billy Bonds Stand was another positive move. Bonds came on to the pitch before the game against Newcastle and was moved to tears by the reception he received.
But even the Irons’ magic carpet couldn’t prevent the Manuel Pellegrini years turning sour. Moyes returned and West Ham were out of the relegation zone on goal difference when lockdown happened. They played their final games behind closed doors and stayed up. In the Covid season of 2020-21 Moyes started to make dramatic progress.
West Ham finished an improbable sixth and the fans had a team they could be proud of, if only on TV. When 10,000 fans were allowed for the final game of the season against Southampton they discovered the stands at either end had been squared off, making it much more like a football ground.
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When this season began with a 4-1 home demolition of Leicester the fans realised they were grateful to be back watching West Ham, whatever stadium they were in. It felt like a homecoming. Fans were more used to their pubs and matchday routes. The incremental improvements had worked: the carpet, the squared ends, playing music outside the stadium, the razzle-dazzle before matches of flame throwers, DJs, bubble machines and light shows. The ground was slowly developing an identity.
Bubbles are lit up by a pyrotechnics display at The London Stadium. Photograph: Charlotte Wilson/Offside/Getty Images
Home wins against Liverpool, Manchester City and Chelsea created the best atmosphere since the last season at the Boleyn. And selling popcorn really didn’t matter much. Memories are being made, such as a tearful Andriy Yarmolenko scoring against Villa and raising his hands to the sky. The Sevilla match put it up a notch again. When the two goals went in under the lights the whole place was bouncing.
The West Ham fans celebrate their side’s Europa League round-of-16 victory over Sevilla. Photograph: Julian Finney/Getty Images
The London Stadium will never be as intimate as Upton Park and the stands at the sides really could do with being closer to the pitch. But opposition teams do not fancy playing there now and 60,000 fans turn up every game. A new generation don’t even remember the Boleyn.
It has been a long journey, but it does feel like the Hammers finally have a ground that is not only literally massive, but also has the power to intimidate once more.
Pete May is the author of Goodbye to Boleyn (Biteback) and blogs at hammersintheheart.blogspot.co.uk | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/jan/29/donald-trump-americans-us-culture-republican | Opinion | 2024-01-29T06:00:27.000Z | George Monbiot | To beat Trump, we need to know why Americans keep voting for him. Psychologists may have the answer | George Monbiot | Many explanations are proposed for the continued rise of Donald Trump, and the steadfastness of his support, even as the outrages and criminal charges pile up. Some of these explanations are powerful. But there is one I have seen mentioned nowhere, which could, I believe, be the most important: Trump is king of the extrinsics.
Some psychologists believe our values tend to cluster around certain poles, described as “intrinsic” and “extrinsic”. People with a strong set of intrinsic values are inclined towards empathy, intimacy and self-acceptance. They tend to be open to challenge and change, interested in universal rights and equality, and protective of other people and the living world.
People at the extrinsic end of the spectrum are more attracted to prestige, status, image, fame, power and wealth. They are strongly motivated by the prospect of individual reward and praise. They are more likely to objectify and exploit other people, to behave rudely and aggressively and to dismiss social and environmental impacts. They have little interest in cooperation or community. People with a strong set of extrinsic values are more likely to suffer from frustration, dissatisfaction, stress, anxiety, anger and compulsive behaviour.
Trump exemplifies extrinsic values. From the tower bearing his name in gold letters to his gross overstatements of his wealth; from his endless ranting about “winners” and “losers” to his reported habit of cheating at golf; from his extreme objectification of women, including his own daughter, to his obsession with the size of his hands; from his rejection of public service, human rights and environmental protection to his extreme dissatisfaction and fury, undiminished even when he was president of the United States, Trump, perhaps more than any other public figure in recent history, is a walking, talking monument to extrinsic values.
We are not born with our values. They are shaped by the cues and responses we receive from other people and the prevailing mores of our society. They are also moulded by the political environment we inhabit. If people live under a cruel and grasping political system, they tend to normalise and internalise it, absorbing its dominant claims and translating them into extrinsic values. This, in turn, permits an even crueller and more grasping political system to develop.
If, by contrast, people live in a country in which no one becomes destitute, in which social norms are characterised by kindness, empathy, community and freedom from want and fear, their values are likely to shift towards the intrinsic end. This process is known as policy feedback, or the “values ratchet”. The values ratchet operates at the societal and the individual level: a strong set of extrinsic values often develops as a result of insecurity and unfulfilled needs. These extrinsic values then generate further insecurity and unfulfilled needs.
‘From his endless ranting about ‘winners’ and ‘losers’ to his reported habit of cheating at golf, Donald Trump is a walking, talking monument to extrinsic values.’ Photograph: Justin Lane/EPA
Ever since Ronald Reagan came to power, on a platform that ensured society became sharply divided into “winners” and “losers”, and ever more people, lacking public provision, were allowed to fall through the cracks, US politics has become fertile soil for extrinsic values. As Democratic presidents, following Reagan, embraced most of the principles of neoliberalism, the ratchet was scarcely reversed. The appeal to extrinsic values by the Democrats, Labour and other once-progressive parties is always self-defeating. Research shows that the further towards the extrinsic end of the spectrum people travel, the more likely they are to vote for a rightwing party.
But the shift goes deeper than politics. For well over a century, the US, more than most nations, has worshipped extrinsic values: the American dream is a dream of acquiring wealth, spending it conspicuously and escaping the constraints of other people’s needs and demands. It is accompanied, in politics and in popular culture, by toxic myths about failure and success: wealth is the goal, regardless of how it is acquired. The ubiquity of advertising, the commercialisation of society and the rise of consumerism, alongside the media’s obsession with fame and fashion, reinforce this story. The marketing of insecurity, especially about physical appearance, and the manufacture of unfulfilled wants, dig holes in our psyches that we might try to fill with money, fame or power. For decades, the dominant cultural themes in the US – and in many other nations – have functioned as an almost perfect incubator of extrinsic values.
A classic sign of this shift is the individuation of blame. On both sides of the Atlantic, it now takes extreme forms. Under the criminal justice bill now passing through parliament, people caught rough sleeping can be imprisoned or fined up to £2,500 if they are deemed to constitute a “nuisance” or cause “damage”. According to article 61 of the bill, “damage” includes smelling bad. It’s hard to know where to begin with this. If someone had £2,500 to spare, they wouldn’t be on the streets. The government is proposing to provide prison cells for rough sleepers, but not homes. Perhaps most importantly, people are being blamed and criminalised for their own destitution, which in many cases will have been caused by government policy.
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Yes, Trump is dominating the primaries. That doesn’t mean he’ll beat Biden
Robert Reich
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We talk about society’s rightward journey. We talk about polarisation and division. We talk about isolation and the mental health crisis. But what underlies these trends is a shift in values. This is the cause of many of our dysfunctions; the rest are symptoms.
When a society valorises status, money, power and dominance, it is bound to generate frustration. It is mathematically impossible for everyone to be number one. The more the economic elites grab, the more everyone else must lose. Someone must be blamed for the ensuing disappointment. In a culture that worships winners, it can’t be them. It must be those evil people pursuing a kinder world, in which wealth is distributed, no one is forgotten and communities and the living planet are protected. Those who have developed a strong set of extrinsic values will vote for the person who represents them, the person who has what they want. Trump. And where the US goes, the rest of us follow.
Trump might well win again – God help us if he does. If so, his victory will be due not only to the racial resentment of ageing white men, or to his weaponisation of culture wars or to algorithms and echo chambers, important as these factors are. It will also be the result of values embedded so deeply that we forget they are there.
George Monbiot is a Guardian columnist | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/film/1998/oct/09/1 | Film | 1998-10-09T16:39:50.000Z | Richard Williams | The Truman Show review – Jim Carrey is impressive in deftly satirical comedy | Sometimes, although not often enough, a Hollywood entertainment succeeds in persuading people to look at the world they’re living in, and to reflect on what is being done to them. In recent years most of these films have been about the media, in one guise or another, which is hardly surprising. Nor is the basic idea of The Truman Show exactly astonishing. You’d need to have been dead for the last 10 years not to understand that the commercial imperatives of the mass media have changed the relationship between information and entertainment in most people’s lives. But Peter Weir’s film is so cleverly conceived and brilliantly executed that it almost seems like a fresh thought. And even if it doesn’t, it nevertheless forms the basis of a very witty exercise.
Truman Burbank (Jim Carrey ) is the protagonist of a 24-hour TV soap opera that functions as an extension of normal fictional soaps into the territory of “reality programming” - all those dead hours of prime time devoted to life among the staff of a large hotel or a cruise liner. The other difference between this show and a regular soap is that Truman thinks it’s real, because in his case it is.
The creation of a producer called Christof, who seems to be a cross between Phil Redmond and Lars Von Trier, Truman was born and has lived his entire life inside a synthetic world, located on an ‘island’ created inside a giant dome that functions as a mega-studio. Truman’s family, neighbours and colleagues are all actors. The weather is as artificial as the small personal crises that Christof injects into Truman’s life in order to retain the interest of a worldwide audience numbered in billions.
Weir takes us into the production suite, high in the dome, where Christof and his directors look down on their subject, flicking between thousands of cameras concealed everywhere - in buttons, flowers, and even (in one superlative shot) behind the digital instrumentation on the dashboard of Truman’s car. Everything is covered, in all senses. When a microphone breaks its moorings, falling from the ‘sky’ and shattering on a pavement a few yards from Truman , his puzzlement is quickly answered by a radio news bulletin describing debris falling from a passing airliner.
The screenplay is by Andrew Niccol, whose directorial debut, Gattaca, presented a thoughtful and elegant speculation on a future determined by genetic engineering earlier this year. Niccol inserts deft satirical touches (such as the use of product placement in real-time transmission) and finds ingenious explanations for most of the potential implausibilities, including the fact that in all his 30 years Truman has never ventured away from this little haven of peace, prosperity and pristine clapboard houses - a sort of Knots Landing minus adultery, violence and unemployment.
The undoing of this perfect world begins with the unscheduled appearance of Truman’s father, long since written out of the programme by Christof, and by the activities of a former cast member (played by Natascha McElhone), the only outsider who perceives the danger.
Niccol gives Christof an assumption of omniscience that Ed Harris turns into a brilliant parody of the repulsive and deluded self-seriousness of just about every TV person you will ever meet. His Zen-cool ‘creative’ pose plays well against his laid-back studio directors (Paul Giamatti and Adam Tomei) on one hand and a pair of hard-nosed network executives impersonated by two outstanding veteran actors, Philip Baker Hall and John Pleshette, on the other.
The Portmeirion-like hyper-reality of Seaside, a genuine ‘planned community’ built less than 20 years ago on the Florida coast, does duty for Truman’s hometown. Its obsessive neatness and shiny surfaces are cleverly exploited by Weir’s designer, Dennis Gassner, whose previous credits include The Grifters and Barton Fink. Gassner’s imagination also enables the denouement, when Truman arrives at the frontier of his universe, to provide a moment of genuine and touching wonder.
As for Carrey, this is a performance to impress even those whose teeth are normally set on edge by a glimpse of his rubber mug. Although Truman has been advertised as his first straight role, in fact it merely requires him to tune his usual over-the-top weirdness down to an appropriate blend of Cliff Richard’s wholesome grin, Jerry Lewis’s comic energy and Anthony Perkins’s spooky mildness.
I loved Weir’s explanation for the character’s grotesque good humour, which at first seems like nothing more than Carrey’s overplaying. It is, after all, the only mode of behaviour Truman knows, since he has been confronted from birth by characters acting in a way that they think will please him, in order to win his favour and thereby influence Christof to extend their contracts. Such attention to philosophical background is the reason the film works so well.
Actually, though, I don’t think The Truman Show is really about the manipulation of modern media at all. That’s just an excuse. What Niccol and Weir were after was a setting for an allegory dealing with something much more timeless: nothing less than the existentialist dilemma. Is each of us alone? Who’s really in control? Now there’s the oldest human conundrum, and the biggest story, of all. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2014/aug/31/mary-j-blige-interview-uk-london-sessions | Music | 2014-08-31T08:00:00.000Z | Tom Horan | Mary J Blige interview: 'The UK is a better place to make music than the States' | Ashort walk from Lord's cricket ground is a pocket of St John's Wood that seems for ever suspended in the 70s. Around the corner from a clutch of Peabody estates, the Oslo Court restaurant still serves prawn cocktail, peach melba and veal Holstein. It's 1.59pm on a Thursday at the height of this summer's heatwave, and as an MCC member passes by in his egg-and-bacon tie, a black Mercedes pulls up outside a grand but anonymous building. From the car emerge two women clutching union jack carrier bags. The one with the coiffed blonde flick and the Gucci espadrilles is Mary J Blige.
The much-garlanded soul singer isn't here for the heritage eats. Blige is starting her two o'clock shift at RAK recording studios, itself synonymous with eras long departed. The blue plaque above her head records the name of founder Mickie Most, producer of hits for Hot Chocolate, the Yardbirds, Suzi Quatro and more. But Blige is at RAK for a project that is entirely of the moment, decamping from New York for a creative stint in London that promises to deliver the most innovative and unusual album of her 22-year career. For two weeks she has been collaborating with some of the most exciting young artists in contemporary music, a disparate group who are in their own way as ineffably English as any on the roster in the glory days of Most.
The movement that began with Amy Winehouse and Adele and now sees British acts making up 40% of sales in the US charts has been followed by a second wave of UK musicians being embraced by America. In particular this summer, the insistent pop house music of Surrey brothers Disclosure and the impassioned torch songs of their friend Sam Smith have cut a swath from east coast to west. As well as performing, all three are accomplished songwriters, and it is with Disclosure, Smith and their coterie of regular collaborators that Blige has been hard at work. Ten new songs, co-written and recorded by the singer in one month in postcodes W6, NW8 and NW5, will be released this autumn as Mary J Blige: The London Sessions.
Baronial as RAK may be, the studio that Blige is using is no more than 10ft inside the front door, and in turn the booth where her microphone awaits no more than 6ft inside that. By 2.01pm she is ready for action, the closest to a litany of diva demands being a whispered "Can I get my tea, please?" Primed for this businesslike approach to the recording process is a team of 12 blokes, ranging from tea boy to session players and finally the producer of the day, Jimmy Napes, 20 years her junior, who stands before the mixing desk. Napes co-wrote much of Disclosure's immaculate debut album Settle and has done the same for Sam Smith's debut In the Lonely Hour. It may be Napes's bicycle that is propped against the desk. He signals for the track to be run, and Blige attacks her opening note.
But where is she? A window the width of the room looks into the cavernous recording area that holds the musicians. Through it can be spied a bass player and pianist, barely illuminated, and at the back a distant drummer. Blige, however, is invisible. She is definitely in there somewhere: her voice begins to dance across the music in tones that are rich and plaintive and entirely assured. In just a line or two she fills the mixing room with life. Then she audibly digs down and summons up something extra. In the bottom left-hand corner of the window her outstretched hands appear, reaching up from her spot in the shadows. Napes, however, is not convinced.
"Something not quite right with your phrasing at the beginning of verse two," he says. 'Can we go again please Mary?'
She laughs.
"What's happening is I can't flip the page quick enough to get to that part," she says. Napes peers over to see her struggling with the sheaf of lyrics. "But I'm warming up," she says brightly. "We're getting there!" Which, as she was born in the Bronx, is pronounced "We gittin they!"
Now she sings again, and what is striking is not just the timbre, but the rhythm. With her voice dipping in and out of it, an initially unremarkable beat has taken on new punch and syncopation. Blige was first launched as "the queen of hip-hop soul", and it was over thumping breakbeats that she first sang for producer Sean "Puffy" Coombs in the early 1990s, and then again a decade later with Dr Dre. To compete with beats takes real vocal talent; to somehow elevate them too is one of Blige's special gifts.
Napes wants another take. Then another. On the seventh, Blige has appreciably gone up a gear. By the ninth, however, the engineer is exchanging glances with the boy operating the computer behind a spaghetti vongole of wiring. She may have made 11 studio albums and been a guest vocalist on more than 120 tracks, but truculence is a known aspect of Blige's character. Are the toys about to exit Mary's pram?
"OK, Mary," says Napes. "Let's do the last take." "You just say that to get the best performance," says the engineer. "Then you get her to do one more after."
"Sshhh," says Napes, possibly winking.
Blige sings it all again, somehow finding what Napes calls "an extra 5%".
"I'm happy, Mary," he says.
"I'm happy that you happy, Jimmy," comes the voice from the booth.
With her vocal duties done, Blige comes into the mixing room to listen to the playbacks, sinking into a sofa next to the project's American executive producer, Rodney "Darkchild" Jerkins, a don of the production world who has worked most notably with Michael Jackson, Beyoncé and Lady Gaga. Aside from the song, the two also appear keen to talk about food, and in particular fish and chips, the consumption of which Blige feels is central to what she calls "the London-scene experience". Napes meanwhile is in the RAK kitchen, which has hosted the tea breaks of everything from Radiohead's The Bends to Kim Wilde's Kids in America. I ask him how he came to be part of the album.
"It has been a little bit surreal to be honest," he says, 'I grew up listening to Mary J Blige, and then there she is with the Disclosure boys in Kentish Town, where my studio is, next to a car park. She had loved Stay With Me, which I wrote with Sam Smith for his album, and that's how I got the opportunity to work on this project. We were writing for a week or so – we've got some wicked songs. It does take time to get the confidence to say to her, 'I think you can sing that better' – but it's crucial. She is counting on me to call her on stuff, because she wants to make the best record she can."
Disclosure were the starting point for Blige's fascination with London's new crop of music-makers. Late last year she saw the duo's single F for You on the Vevo video site, and got in touch with them about covering the song. The resulting release was not a cover, but an astutely balanced duet, composed by Blige, that retained the vocals of the group's 20-year-old singer Howard Lawrence and married them with a set she had written herself. Her contribution brought new depth to the original: driving, gutsy, soulful – it made Disclosure sound immeasurably funkier and was the most original thing she had done in years.
"I love what Mary did on that track," Howard tells me on the phone. "She hadn't just changed everything, written entirely new stuff and gotten rid of everything we'd done. She wrote something we believe totally fits with the track stylistically – it's an excellent house music vocal. But she also chose to send it over and say 'what do you guys think'? As opposed to putting it straight out and saying 'I don't care what those guys think, I'm Mary J Blige."'
And what about when it came to working face-to-face with the 30-times-nominated, nine-time Grammy winner in deepest Kentish Town? "The track Right Now started with some chords I made on Jimmy Napes's piano," he says. "We took that and gave it a Disclosurey feel with some drums that Guy [his brother] made. Mary leaves the instrumental side to us and gets much more involved when it comes to writing vocals. So she puts an idea in, then we all have a dog-fight until someone comes up with something that they agree on. It's a really good way of working, because no one is afraid to just pitch ideas. We did the majority of the songwriting within about two and half hours, and then spent a lot of time editing and polishing, because that's how Guy and me work. We'll write a whole song very roughly, then go in and proof-read it for a long, long time and change it so much that you wouldn't even recognise it from when you started.
"Mary has amazing vocal control but she also has such a level of soul to her voice. That's why she is the queen of that style, of writing using ad libs. She'll just go off on one over a track, and get really into it – just sing whatever comes naturally. And that normally ends up making the final take."
Mary J Blige in London: 'Working with these guys, it's like they're my family. We have a good chemistry together.' Photograph: D'Andre Michael
And what about her notion of a London sound? What does he think she believes she is getting from this month spent collaborating here? "The sound in London at the moment is house music. That is what the majority of people are producing their songs like. But the ones that get truly successful are the ones using proper songwriting. Rudimental for example – they write proper songs and then produce them like dance music. And that is exactly what we're trying to do, along with a few other people. But that applies to any genre, not just dance music. You could take the songs off Sam Smith's album, produce them in a completely different way and they would still be a huge success – you could produce them like acid jazz and I still feel like they'd get somewhere."
Back in the studio, Blige is preparing to leave. It is the third anniversary of the death of Amy Winehouse and she has arranged to have a get-together with Amy's father, Mitch Winehouse, whom she does not know but wants to meet. After some discussion with the assembled locals she has decided on dinner at the nearby Sea Shell of Lisson Grove – conceivably London's poshest chippy. When she has gone, Rodney Jerkins, an affable pear-shaped man umbilically attached to a MacBook Pro, plays rough edits of some of the London Sessions tracks. "It's all comin' from here right now," says Jerkins, whose embrace of "yookay" cuisine consists of taking constant furtive nibbles at a supply of Cornish pasties.
"On the final record, we wanna keep the feeling of London," he says. A film crew are making a documentary of the recording, and he plans to drop in audio clips from it between tracks. "You have so much different music here. Variety births the next generation. In California the music kind of all feels the same. That 90s house vibe you have right now – it feels fresh. Dancin', celebratin' – feelin' good about life. We're making a Mary Blige record, but she can introduce new styles to the world." He says they will make 13 tracks and then choose a final 10. We listen to three and the variety is striking.
Mary J Blige duets with Sam Smith on Stay With Me for an encore at Smith's show at the Apollo theatre, New York, in June. Photograph: Theo Wargo/Getty Images for Capitol Records
It is certainly not an out-and-out house record. Pick Me Up, produced by Watford's own Naughty Boy and co-written with Emeli Sandé, mixes sub-bass with clarinet and a percussion sound that recalls early 00s UK garage. Therapy, written by Napes and Sam Smith, has a doo-wop feel, while the Disclosure number is house plus additional squelches. Disparate as the writers and producers may be, Jerkins agrees that these all sound unquestionably like Mary J Blige tracks: 'She knows how to cement her voice to the lyric. She knows how to make you know what she's been through." The feeling that she conveys of a life lived though all its triumphs and defeats is certainly at the heart of Blige's sound.
The next day she is back at RAK to work with another young UK producer, Sam Romans. Romans thinks he knows the attraction of Blige's "London scene": "I'm doing a track at the moment with Naughty Boy – a soul track – and he was saying it's amazing how a Pakistani singer from Watford and a Jewish producer are making something that would be described as black music. That is the interesting thing about England."
And what of Blige herself? At the end of the Romans session we sit down to talk at her hotel and she starts with her own vision for The London Sessions. "Our idea was to become part of London," she says, "to really embrace the culture – to really live in it. Not that I haven't been here before, but I've never had the chance to really soak in it the way I have this time. To make records ["rekkits"] from the London-scene perspective." What is that exactly? What does she think London has? "Freedom," she says. "The music is free over here the way it used to be in the States. Artists are just free to do what they love. Listening to the radio you can hear the freedom. The music is living and breathing – you can hear that from Adele's last album. It was massive – a big deal. But she did what she loved."
She has clearly relished the combination of creative freedom and the discipline of a time limit. "Working with these guys," she says, "it's like they're my family. We all seem to have a good chemistry together. And when I sign on, I sign on – I can't go hang out! Because I have to make sure that my music is right. And I love to work. I love creating, and once I'm in it, I'm just in it. I just love being all in the midst of the creativity."
Does she always find it so easy to enter a studio and summon up such potent and emotive performances? "Once you agree you're ready, you ready," she says. "You walk in. You already know what the mindset is, you know what the song is. You read the words, and get everything from here [hand on heart]. When I'm singing, I don't think about anything but what I'm doing. I could look crazy in that moment, it doesn't matter to me. I'm just trying to get all this stuff out. Because it feels good to get it out. It feels good to sing. It's like you can fly almost, when you singing that stuff."
Of her meeting with Mitch Winehouse, she says this: "When you lose a child… I can't even imagine what that must feel like. But he's a beautiful person. It was like he gave me the chance to hug her through him. She was one of the special ones, and I never got a chance to meet her. Her voice had a lot of pain, a lot of joy, a lot of struggle, trying to figure out 'Who am I'? And she was just so free in her expression. She said whatever she wanted to say – and that's what I admired about her. She was talking to you: 'It is what it is – like it or not.'"
In everyone connected with The London Sessions, this quest for emotional honesty was a recurrent theme. Never arch or ironic, all the young Londoners were notable for an earnestness that somehow chimed with Blige's years of singing with a raw and open heart. The final part of the jigsaw came in a telephone conversation with Sam Smith, writer of four songs for the Blige project and riding high in Los Angeles on the success of his debut album and its anthemic single Stay With Me.
"With my record – and when you think about Adele, and Amy Winehouse and Ed Sheeran – we're not worried about the way we're looking, the way we're coming across in our music," he said. "We're just saying what's in our minds and in our hearts. Some people think that when you are singing about heartbreak, or how lonely you are, or how sad, that you are admitting to weakness. But I don't see that as weakness. I see that as strength – to be able to face your issues and your sadness head-on. That's what I've tried to do in my music, and I think that's what this Mary album is about – a fearless vulnerability.'
Mary J Blige: The London Sessions will be released in November on Capitol Records | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2015/oct/06/chewing-gum-michaela-coel | Television & radio | 2015-10-06T08:00:04.000Z | Filipa Jodelka | Council estate of mind: Michaela Coel’s Chewing Gum is smart, bawdy and brilliant | “M
y mum was gonna name me Alyssa, which means sweet angel in Indian,” says Tracey Gordon to camera in new E4 comedy Chewing Gum, “but when I came out, she looked at me and called me Tracey.” Written and created by Michaela Coel, who plays Tracey, and based on her award-winning play of almost the same name, Chewing Gum is full of delicately observed moments like this. Twenty-four years old, Tracey lives with her mum and sister in Tower Hamlets, stuck between her oversexed best friend Candice and patronising, limp wetwipe of a boyfriend, Ron. Ron is trying to raise her from deprivation, namely by denying her the peen, and is good for the sum total of two things: memorising Bible verses and making you realise, years later, what a lucky escape you had. When he gets ploughed down by a car, as happens halfway through the first episode, it couldn’t have come soon enough. As far as the dramatic arc is concerned, this event opens the, er, floodgates to an immensely pent-up Tracey getting her sexually naive rocks off.
Filthy, funny and Christian: the many sides of Chewing Gum's Michaela Coel
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What I love about Chewing Gum is – and I say this as someone who was born, grew up and still happily lives in a setting eerily similar to Tracey’s – that unlike literally every other depiction of a council estate today, there is not one single solitary shot of moody, dilapidated blocks, boys with pitbulls, or weathered men trying to look menacing next to a Nissan Sunny. Instead, Tracey is devoutly Christian and celibate, and blanches at some of her friends’ coarseness. So do I, to be fair, and at times it’s a challenge. If I have to hear the words “bare pussy” out of my TV, though, I’m glad they’re spoken by Tracey and Candice (Danielle Walters) for the authentic cadence alone.
Wincing through studiedly urban accents is a unique torture for any audience, but at times I wonder whether it’s a tool to erode what’s left of working-class morale. If anything can finish the job that mine closures and the demonisation of chicken nuggets started, it’s a 30-year-old Oxbridge graduate saying the word “bredrin”.
It’s a bizarre and sad fact that, television commissioning-wise, anything niche (and, for some reason, in TV, black Britons are considered niche) is often passed over for the more broadly relatable. So I hope, over the course of this series, the gallows humour formed in adversity is not scrubbed out to make way for the common denominator of gross-out shagging. Given that Michaela Coel’s incredible timing, warmth and gift for physical comedy basically make her, in my eyes, the second coming of Lucille Ball, I feel she could carry it off whatever.
The subject of unapologetic brilliance brings us neatly to Nadiya GBBO’s eyebrows. The Great British Bake Off, which has carried me through summer on a wave of royal icing, sabayon and meringue like the giant sponge-happy baby I am, reaches its final this week. Owing to deadlines and strict cake embargos, it’s a mystery who’s made it through, but I’m calmly confident that Nadiya is still there. The fact that she has consistently been the best baker is immaterial; what she does with her brows is pure poetry, from stricken to heart-wrenching to envy of every goth in the UK in the time it takes to whip up some fondant icing. The reason that Bake Off is so gently docile isn’t because its fans are quivering, conflict-averse wusses – though we are – but because the main draw of the programme is in its appeal to base gluttony. Fights and tension tend to curdle all the iced, triple-carb wonders a bit. Nadiya’s eyebrows, therefore, provide all the drama we need. They are also the only things I’ve seen stand up to pastry bastard Paul Hollywood and his glare, designed to send icy shards into contestants’ hearts. “Mmm, strong flour is it?” Paul might say with a smirk I’d quite like to wipe off with the dough hooks of a De’Longhi. Nadiya has it under control, forming those magnificent brows into a pair of daggers that send him running to the judging room. Nadiya’s eyebrows, I salute you ~~.
Chewing Gum starts tonight, 10pm, E4; The Great British Bake Off continues tomorrow, 8pm, BBC1 | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2022/jan/10/limitless-win-will-ant-and-decs-gameshow-drain-the-entire-planets-finances | Television & radio | 2022-01-10T12:40:36.000Z | Stuart Heritage | Limitless Win: will Ant and Dec’s gameshow drain the entire planet’s finances? | Given their decades-long ubiquity, it’s weird to realise that Ant and Dec don’t actually make a lot of television shows. Just three really, at the moment: Saturday Night Takeaway, I’m a Celebrity … Get Me Out of Here! and Britain’s Got Talent. In TV years, all three are positively ancient, with the first two starting in 2002 and the third in 2007.
With hits as perennial as these, it’s little wonder that Ant and Dec don’t choose to branch out more, especially when their efforts to host new shows tend to flounder and die in the space of a year or two. Anyone remember PokerFace? Push the Button? Red or Black? In all honesty, probably not.
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Which brings us to Limitless Win. On the face of it, this is a shiny-floored Saturday night gameshow like any other. There are questions. There’s a Who Wants To Be a Millionaire-style money ladder. There are absurdly chipper contestants. On the face of it, Limitless Win is utterly anonymous. It could be presented by Bradley Walsh or Nick Knowles or Davina McCall or the ghost of Bob Monkhouse or a photofit of a horse.
So why have Ant and Dec chosen this to be their first new series proper in a decade? Probably the format. Limitless Win is, with the exception of a few bells and whistles that we’ll come to in a moment, Who Wants To Be a Millionaire. The more questions you answer, the more money you win. But, as the title suggests, there is no upper limit. On Millionaire, you answer 15 questions and go home a – well, millionaire. But here, you can just keep going until you lose. That might be when you reach a thousand pounds. It might be at a million pounds. The onscreen money ladder goes all the way up to £12m, but it doesn’t stop there. In theory, a genius could take part on Limitless Win, and be its only ever contestant, and slowly drain the entire planet of all its financial reserves.
That is unlikely to happen, of course – largely because Limitless Win suffers from the annoying gameshow trope of slowing everything to an agonising crawl wherever possible. We meet the contestants. We see them backstage. We get to watch them debate every single possible answer to every single question, at length, in real time. Maybe I’m the only one who finds this sort of thing infuriating. Maybe the general public is crazy for watching couples passive-aggressively bickering about the number of sails on the Blue Peter ship like the world’s worst dinner party guests. Who can really say?
On the subject of annoyances, Limitless Win also seems to be the recipient of several gratuitous complications. For instance, the answer to every question is a number. You lose lives depending on how much your answer varies from the correct answer. You gain lives in a quickfire 60-second round. You pick the number by twisting a dial. There are also lifelines, which come at random and are so numerous that each has to be explained at length every time. If you want to use a lifeline, you have to hit a button. There is another button for when you want to cash out. It is all so unnecessarily complicated that, when your auntie inevitably pulls the home game edition out of the cupboard three Boxing Days from now, she’ll get three lines into the instructions before your entire family loses their minds with rage.
And yet, despite all this, Limitless Win resides in the upper echelons of gameshows. The reason for this, of course, is Ant and Dec. As hosts, they are absolutely effortless. They can explain the rules without battering you over the head. They can chat to the contestants like old friends. When the prize amount starts to gain altitude, they ramp up the tension like a pair of pantomime dames, clutching their temples and pulling faces at the crowd. The thing is, they sell all this like a dream. Another host might be tempted to overdo it, plunging the show into the realms of insincere melodrama. Not Ant and Dec: theirs is a perfectly weighted performance. It doesn’t show off their skill set perfectly – that’s still I’m a Celebrity – but it’s beautiful to watch nonetheless.
Are they enough to keep me watching Limitless Win? In all honesty, probably not. Once you’ve seen one episode, the only reason to stick around is to see how much money the contestants will win, and you sense that the press will make a lot of noise about the big episodes ahead of time. Still, this is Ant and Dec’s most effective new venture in probably two decades and, as such, you shouldn’t be surprised if it becomes an ITV mainstay. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2014/oct/15/dc-batman-superman-justice-league-movie-avengers | Film | 2014-10-15T21:21:48.000Z | Toby Moses | DC announces Batman, Superman and Justice League movies to rival Avengers | DC and Warner Bros have set out their slate of movies to challenge Marvel’s dominance of the superhero market – with new Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman and Justice League releases among more than 10 films to be released between 2016 and 2020.
Marvel’s introduction of a shared on-screen superhero universe has paid huge dividends at the box office, with 2012’s Avengers taking over $1bn and this year’s Captain America: the Winter Soldier topping $700m. DC and Warner Bros are set to ape that model, starting with the much-hyped release of Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, directed by Zack Snyder and due to be released in 2016, followed by further standalone titles building to two Justice League movies, which will bring the whole DC gang together.
Batman v Superman is already the subject of much speculation, and is expected to introduce a slew of favourite comic characters to the silver screen – including Wonder Woman, played by Gal Gadot; Game of Thrones’ Jason Momoa as Aquaman, and the Flash – with Ezra Miller, perhaps best known for We Need to Talk About Kevin, just announced in the role.
A statement from DC and Warner Bros said: “In a massive expansion of the Studio’s DC Entertainment-branded content, Warner Bros Pictures and New Line Cinema will release a slate of at least 10 movies – as well as standalone Batman and Superman films – from 2016 through 2020 that expands this prized universe of characters:
Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, directed by Zack Snyder (2016)
Suicide Squad, directed by David Ayer (2016)
Wonder Woman, starring Gal Gadot (2017)
Justice League Part One, directed by Zack Snyder, with Ben Affleck, Henry Cavill and Amy Adams reprising their roles (2017)
The Flash, starring Ezra Miller (2018)
Aquaman, starring Jason Momoa (2018)
Shazam (2019)
Justice League Part Two, directed by Zack Snyder (2019)
Cyborg, starring Ray Fisher (2020)
Green Lantern (2020)
The second Avengers movie, Age of Ultron, is being released by Marvel next year. Photograph: REX/c.W.Disney/Everett
Whether the appetite for comic book adaptations can support such a bold release schedule remains to be seen – especially given the lukewarm critical reception to Zack Snyder’s Man of Steel, the jumping-off point for this new universe of films. Sony has recently run in to trouble with its plans for a Spider-Man-based universe of films, with the Amazing Spider-Man 2 disappointing at the box office, putting plans for a standalone Venom film on hold, and pushing back the suggested release date for a third Spidey film from 2016 to 2018. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/sport/blog/2015/dec/02/the-joy-of-six-sports-radio-documentaries | Sport | 2015-12-01T19:30:09.000Z | Jack Kerr | The Joy of Six: sports radio documentaries | Jack Kerr | 1. The Sounds of Sport
When sound designer Dennis Baxter started working on the TV broadcast of the 2012 Olympics, one of his first tasks was improving the sonic quality of what was being beamed out.
“People have ingrained in them a memory of certain sounds,” he narrates in this BBC documentary about his profession. “If that sound is not fulfilled, then the mind knows that there’s something wrong.”
Capturing the Games sonically is a massive undertaking. His team at the London Olympics included 350 sound mixers and 600 technicians working with close to 4,000 microphones. Many microphones are in place just to catch the microsounds of the event.
Close-up mics on the parallel bars pick up the sound of the wood flexing and the uniforms rustling. Contact mics on the balance beams get its resonance and vibrations. There are even microphones on the handrails leading up to the diving board and one at the bottom of the pool for the bubbles and a general dampened underwater ambience.
The results are exquisite, as this Peregrine Andrews production demonstrates. Sound design rarely gets the credit it deserves, especially in sports broadcasting. But the Olympics wouldn’t be the same without all the fine details and textures Baxter and his team feed into the audio mix.
The Sound of Sport won a gold award at the New York Festivals, proving it’s not just one for the sound nerds and audiophiles.
2. The Post-Billiards Age
It takes it’s name from a Buckminster Fuller quote and bills itself as “a tiny radio show about design”. But that’s a pretty loose gambit for KALW’s 99% Invisible. Just look at their show titles: The Accidental Music of Imperfect Escalators; Used To Be A Pizza Hut; Lawn Order; and so on.
Sport has been a recurring fascination for this program of mini-documentaries. Tune in and discover everything you never thought you wanted know about baseball socks, the basketball shot clock, and the dying moments of a multi-player online gaming universe.
Or the billiard ball. Get this: the billiard ball begat the ping pong ball, and their lineage begins with the elephant. Sounds ridiculous, right? Well, it’s all laid out here.
3) The Record Fakers
“I had my hands to the side of my face in classic Home Alone shock,” wrote Guardian reviewer Miranda Sawyer when The Record Fakers was aired in 2013. An investigative documentary wrapped as a BBC Radio 5 Live special, producer Steve Houghton and presenter Mike Costello delve into a drugs regime so extreme that it eventually pushed one athlete into having sex reassignment surgery.
But what horrified Sawyer most was the story of Ines Geipel. The world-record relay runner (and now an anti-doping campaigner) fell in love with a Mexican man while competing overseas. She told her boyfriend, who told the Stasi, who tried to find a lookalike of the Mexican. It was a desperate attempt to stop their star athlete from fleeing – and it failed (as did their attempt to get her to join the Stasi).
So instead, they “told her she had to have her appendix out, and had the surgeon cut through all her stomach muscles so she could never compete again. They operated on her, and deliberately mangled her insides.” She was, in Stasi-speak, “strategically extinguished”.
4. Field of Tainted Dreams
“Even in the La Trobe Uni [footy club’s] song, there’s a reference about poofters.” For ABC Radio National’s Background Briefing, Walkley Award winning journalist Sarah Dingle reveals just how deeply rooted homophobia in Australian sport is.
Male players from the amatuer leagues of the country’s football codes tell of violence on the field, isolation in the change rooms and bullying online. When the AFL’s Essendon threw its support behind a LGTBI supporters’ group, it led to some straight fans walking away from the club.
The courageous journey of Ian Roberts, rugby league's first openly gay player
Read more
There are many gay men playing at the highest levels of Australian football, the documentary reveals. “Some of my friends have dated them,” one openly gay amatuer reveals of the national rugby union team. Another claim suggests there are around a dozen gay AFL players.
From the defence forces to Hollywood, there are men who are out and proud. Yet to this day, only one Australian footballer of any code has felt comfortable enough to come out publicly. Dingle calls it a conspiracy of silence.
It’s another story in the women’s arena. “When I first started playing with the Matildas, [everyone was asking] what percentage of girls are gay,” remembers Sally Shipard. “Oh my god, that question got old. You try to be like real tongue-in-cheek back, but it kind of hurts you underneath.”
For the record, La Trobe have now changed those lyrics.
5. Ghosts of Football Past
Sport nuts with a thing for 99% Invisible’s style of documentary-as-program will love some of Radiolab’s work too. “A good game is a kind of weird, constantly shifting war between the (free-thinking) three-year-old in us and the (law-respecting) six-year-old [in us],” we hear in their special on the wide-reaching topic of games. Their edit of BBC’s The Lonliness of the Goalkeeper is similarly top notch.
But perhaps their best sports-themed program looks at American football. Introduced as a show for those who really don’t really care about the game, it begins with an fascinating look at how years of back-and-forth between ivy leaguers and Native Americans led to the game as we know it.
One of the main themes is the work of innovative coach Pop Warner. He realised his small Native American players needed to do something different if they were going to win consistently. So he invented the trick play. He starts by getting his players to stick the ball up their shirts, but one after another, his innovations are outlawed.
Warner then exploits a change in the rules to invent a trick that defines the game to this day: the spiralling ball. “A ball travelling through space traces a profoundly elegant path,” we hear from historian Sally Jenkins. It seems to defy physics.
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6. Dock Ellis & the LSD No-No
This is not a radio documentary, but an ingenious way of working with a piece of oral history. What James Blagden and the Victory Journal do is turn a radio interview into a mind-bending animation.
The story: baseball pitcher Dock Ellis has a day off between games for the Pittsburgh Pirates. So he drops some acid. When he wakes up two days later – “which I thought was the next day” – he drops some more. By the time his girlfriend shows him the morning paper to prove that it really is game day, he is tripping balls.
It sounds like it should have been a disaster. It was anything but. Despite having all kinds of crazy visions, Ellis pitched a full nine innings without giving up a single run. He pitched a no-hitter. On. Acid.
The animation uses a four-minute chunk of a much, much, much longer radio interview Ellis did with American Public Media. He is such a fine storyteller that his voice alone might be good enough. But Blagden takes it to the next level with some clever use of sound effects and a minimalist, somewhat trippy animation.
Ellis’s story has been riffed on hilariously by the late Robin Williams, and turned into a stunning online feature by ESPN. Others have worked with it too, but it’s the animated version that takes gold. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/voluntary-sector-network/2016/jun/21/digital-customer-service-charities-social-media | Voluntary Sector Network | 2016-06-21T09:28:17.000Z | Zoe Amar | Digital customer service: how charities can do it successfully | One of the challenges for charities in the digital age is the pressure to be responsive and always on. So how do charities, including those with small teams and budgets, deal with their stakeholders’ queries, comments and complaints? There’s a plethora of channels to consider, from instant messaging to answering questions via social media, or steering beneficiaries towards FAQs on your website. Your audience also want you to reply quickly. A recent study indicated that 42% of people expect a response on social media within 60 minutes.
As more people go online, the digital customer service trend is likely to grow. It may seem daunting but it’s a big opportunity for charities to engage with their audience. It may even generate income. According to Buffer, 50% of customers are more likely to buy products or services from organisations that are contactable on social media. Ross McCulloch, head of communications at Relationships Scotland and director of digital agency Third Sector Lab, advises charities to “go where your customers are”.
“We shouldn’t expect people to email or phone us if they’re far more comfortable asking a question on Twitter or speaking direct to staff on a messenger platform such as WhatsApp,” he says. “As well as offering people choice and flexibility, this has the potential to save organisations time and money.”
So what should charities be aware of when delivering digital customer service?
Understand how your audience behaves online
During his time at Relationships Scotland, McCulloch has observed that contacting charities for the first time via social media has become the norm. He says: “For many of the people who go on to access a family mediation or relationship counselling service, Facebook is the natural place for them to have their first contact with our organisation. The staff who deal with it are the same staff who handle queries from the public via email and telephone – we take it seriously as a customer service channel.” Knowing why and how your stakeholders use digital channels is essential.
Know the problem you are trying to solve
Damien Austin-Walker, head of digital at vInspired, says: “Our insights show that young people have limited time, and our analytics showed young people searching for opportunities, but many then drop off without applying. We wanted to see what the effect was of solving customer issues and providing support in real-time.” His charity recently trialled an on-site pop-up chat service and found young people’s willingness to engage with it, and the positive sentiment it generated, encouraging.
Review your enquiries process
Rachel Peck, digital marketing manager at Diabetes UK, advises charities to map out the messages you are getting into your social media accounts, along with the topics that are covered, the teams the messages are sent to and the frequency with which they are received. Her charity gets queries on topics ranging from nutrition and healthcare to fundraising via social media.
Initially, Peck’s team emailed these queries to the charity’s helpline counsellors, but as they increased it became time consuming and less efficient. As part of its commitment to providing advice and support, the digital team worked closely with the customer service staff to streamline the process, and eventually trained counsellors and those in customer care to respond to stakeholders via the social media management system. Diabetes UK’s average response time for social media messages is now 90 minutes, compared with two to three days previously.
Instant messaging and bots are the future
Instant messaging offers huge potential due to its growth and the private nature of the channel. Nick Owen, digital communications officer at Médecins Sans Frontières, says: “Instant messaging channels such as WhatsApp are already changing the way we communicate, not only with our supporters but also with our patients and beneficiaries. We’ve had people come to us through WhatsApp in places like Mali and India asking for medical care which we’ve been able to relay to the field.”
McCulloch adds: “Bots within messenger apps and other forms of artificial intelligence will be the real game-changer, allowing people to ‘self-service’, thus freeing up staff time to deal with more difficult queries. These types of AI within online channels could transform the way advice and support organisations deliver services.”
For more news, opinions and ideas about the voluntary sector, join our community. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/money/2021/sep/12/as-heating-bills-go-up-put-your-energy-into-keeping-costs-down | Money | 2021-09-12T05:26:13.000Z | Shane Hickey | As heating bills go up, put your energy into keeping costs down | Millions of people are set to see their heating bills go up from next month – and some are predicting more rises to come next year.
The soaring wholesale price of gas in the first part of this year recently led the energy regulator Ofgem to increase its price cap, and the 11 million households who pay by direct debit will see prices rise from an average of £1,138 a year to £1,277 from October.
And because wholesale energy prices continue to be so expensive, it is now suggested that there will be a second increase next April in order to take account of the rises.
However, there are ways to keep your bills down. Paul Winney of the Centre for Sustainable Energy (CSE), a Bristol-based charity, says there are simple steps to take in order to improve your home’s energy efficiency.
Know what you use
The first step towards cutting the amount of energy you use is knowing exactly what it goes on. Energy companies are supplying a new generation of smart meters as part of the government’s national programme to replace older models. These allow consumers to see in more detail what they are using.
If you do not have a smart meter, check with your supplier to see if they are installing them in your area. Or you can buy one for between £30 and £40, usually with a sensor that clips onto a power cable to measure energy consumed, and a display detailing usage. As Winney explains: “This will show the impact of turning a particular light or appliance on, or off. It can tell you which things in your house use the most.
“This can help you decide which energy-hungry appliances to use sparingly in order to cut costs.”
As a rule, appliances that have moving parts, or produce heat, use more energy than those that produce light or sound. Typically, the appliance that will use most is an electric shower, followed by an immersion heater, according to the CSE, but this also depends on how long a device is on for.
A fridge, which has a low power requirement, actually uses a significant amount of energy simply because it is on all the time.
The best way to judge energy efficiency is via the energy labels on an appliance, with those ranked “A” or above the most efficient for their size, an important consideration when buying a new machine.
A washing machine with a A+++ rating will typically use £65 less energy than an A+ machine over an 11-year product lifespan, according to the price comparison site MoneySuperMarket, while a modern dishwasher will be £7 less a year to run compared to an older model.
A quarter of a home’s heat is lost through the roof, so installing loft insulation is a big money-saver. And it will last for about 40 years. Photograph: DWImages/Alamy
Stop the draughts
Heat can be lost through gaps by windows, doors and floorboards, with older homes particularly susceptible. Letterboxes, loft hatches and unused chimneys also pose potential problems.
Straightforward solutions include fitting foam strips and plastic seals – you can buy these from your local DIY store, usually for under £10, and they are easy to fit.
The Energy Saving Trust, a not-for-profit organisation campaigning for energy efficiency, says that getting a professional to draught-proof a home should cost about £200 and may be worthwhile if you have features such as sash windows.
Insulation in walls and lofts will make your home more energy efficient. If you are upgrading a heating system, good insulation might mean you only need to fit a smaller, cheaper system which can run more efficiently, the trust says.
In an uninsulated home, one quarter of the heat is lost through the roof. Loft insulation will last for about 40 years and can be done by either a professional or a homeowner, according to the CSE.
MoneySuperMarket puts the cost at between £285 and £395 for a professional to install it, depending on the type of property – a terraced house will cost more than a detached one.
Houses with extensions should also consider flat-roof insulation. “They can lose a lot of heat and are expensive to insulate, so it is usually best to do it at the same time as regular maintenance or repairs,” advises Winney.
How to pay
How you settle your bills can have a direct impact on what you pay. If you are able to, paying by direct debit may be cheaper, as suppliers often offer discounts, says Stephen Murray of MoneySuperMarket.
The energy comparison site UK Power says discounts can be as much as 6% for a monthly direct debit or 3% for a quarterly one.
Also, Ofgem could soon be calling on suppliers to hand £1.4bn in customer credit back to households under plans to stop the energy companies from holding on to customer credit balances. Under the proposed rules, suppliers will need to “auto-return” extra credit to customers every year on the anniversary of joining the supplier.
It can also pay to look at your meter. By sending regular readings (if your smart meter is not already doing that for you), you will ensure you only pay for the energy you have actually used. Otherwise, you run the risk of estimated bills.
And the old adage, as with all services, also applies – ensure that you shop around for the best price. There are 49 energy suppliers in the UK, according to Ofgem, and switching to a better deal can net hundreds of pounds in savings every year. Ofgem has a list of 11 approved comparison sites which it has accredited.
Save water
The average person in the UK uses 145 litres of water every day and over one fifth of energy bills arises from heating it, according to the Energy Saving Trust.
One way to decrease the amount you use is via an aerated shower head, which mixes water with air, sharply reducing the amount used. These cost from less than £20 on Amazon up to hundreds of pounds.
Or you could simply spend less time in the bathroom. The average person spends seven and a half minutes a day in the shower. Simple four-minute timers, which can be attached to the side of the shower, are readily available and – if everyone in the household plays along – could dramatically reduce the amount of water used. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/aug/28/the-coming-wave-by-mustafa-suleyman-review-ai-synthetic-biology-and-a-new-dawn-for-humanity | Books | 2023-08-28T08:00:31.000Z | John Naughton | The Coming Wave by Mustafa Suleyman review – AI, synthetic biology and a new dawn for humanity | What is it with wave metaphors? Technological determinists – people who believe that technology drives history – love them. Think of Alvin Toffler, who saw the history of civilisation as a succession of three such waves (agricultural, industrial and post-industrial). The idea is of immense power, unstoppable, moving inexorably towards us as we cower before its immensity, much as the dinosaurs must have done when they saw the mile-high tsunami heading in their direction.
Mustafa Suleyman says he is not a determinist, but at times he sounds awfully like one. “At its heart,” he writes at one point, “technology emerges to fill human needs. If people have powerful reasons to build and use it, it will get built and used. Yet in most discussions of technology people still get stuck on what it is, forgetting why it was created in the first place. This is not about some innate techno-determinism. This is about what it means to be human.”
The oncoming wave in his title is “defined by two core technologies: artificial intelligence (AI) and synthetic biology”, and it’s the conjunction of the two that makes it intriguing and original. Together, he thinks, these two “will usher in a new dawn for humanity, creating wealth and surplus unlike anything ever seen. And yet their rapid proliferation also threatens to empower a diverse array of bad actors to unleash disruption, instability, and even catastrophe on an unimaginable scale.” Our future, apparently, “both depends on these technologies and is imperilled by them”.
Once you get past this hyperbolic prologue, the book settles down into a serious exploration of what the future might hold for us all. Suleyman’s credentials for the task are good: he was co-founder of DeepMind, arguably the smartest AI company around, but he has also worked in the charitable sector, in British local government, and at Google – where he worked on the company’s large language models (LLMs) and the thankless task of trying to persuade the search behemoth to take ethics seriously. Although he hasn’t worked in molecular biology, his account of DNA sequencing, gene editing and the design and manufacture of new genetic products seems well-informed and supports his case that AI and computational biology are the twin challenges that will soon confront societies.
So what’s needed? The conventional answer is regulation, which he regards as inadequate
Translated into terms of technological waves, Suleyman’s evolutionary sequence looks like this: humans first used technology to operate on the physical world – the world of atoms; then they worked on bits, the units of information; and now they are working on creating new forms of biological life. Or, to put it more crudely: first we invented mechanical muscles; now we are messing with our brains; and soon we will be doing this with our biology. However you portray it, though, the reality is that we are in the process of creating monsters that we have no idea how to manage.
The most refreshing feature of the book is the way it candidly addresses questions that are generally not discussed in polite society. They are all questions to which, at the moment, we have no answers, so any discussion of them would inevitably be depressing. So we avoid them. This “pessimism aversion” is Suleyman’s bete noire; he regards it as a luxury we can no longer afford as technological progress becomes exponential. We need to get real about the future that might loom if we do not get our (human and democratic) act together.
He’s right. So what’s needed? The conventional answer is regulation, which Suleyman rightly regards as woefully inadequate for the scale of the challenge. Regulation is the last refuge of an exhausted mind: something that kind-of worked in the past, and so will hopefully work again – in an entirely transformed context. Instead, he proposes “containment”, a term with echoes of the cold war and George Kennan’s strategy for keeping Soviet power under control in the postwar era – requiring long-term, patient, firm and vigilant restriction of the adversary’s expansionist tendencies.
Mustafa Suleyman’s solution ‘is effectively a utopian dream’.
“Containing technology,” Suleyman writes, “needs to be a much more fundamental programme, a balance of power not between competing actors but between humans and our tools. It’s a necessary prerequisite for the survival of our species over the next century. Containment encompasses regulation, better technical safety, new governance and ownership models, new modes of accountability and transparency, all as necessary (but not sufficient) precursors to safer technology. It’s an overarching lock uniting cutting-edge engineering, ethical values, and government regulation.”
There is good news and bad news here. What is welcome is the way the book addresses the problem we have with modern technology at the right level – which is many notches above our current uncoordinated, scattergun approach.
The bad news is that Suleyman’s solution is effectively a utopian dream. He knows this, which is why there is an anguished undertone in the final chapters of the book. On the one hand, containment is essential if Homo technologicus is to make it through to the next century (climate crisis permitting). On the other hand, it looks like an impossible dream: “how to contain the seemingly uncontainable”.
Still, to his credit, he sticks to his guns to the end, winding up with a 10-step plan for containment, all of which makes sense and is eloquently articulated. Reading it, what came to mind was Gramsci’s famous adage that what we need is “pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will”. To his great credit, Suleyman has both.
The Coming Wave: AI, Power and the 21st Century’s Greatest Dilemma by Mustafa Suleyman is published by Bodley Head (£25). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2008/mar/27/modestyitsnotexactlyameric | Books | 2008-03-27T10:00:32.000Z | Jean Hannah Edelstein | Hillary and Barack could learn much from Ogden Nash | In need of a comic couplet ... Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama in Ohio, February. Photograph: Michael Czerwonka/EPA
Modesty: it's not exactly Americans' most beloved character trait. And as I watch the ongoing battle between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama as they fight to clinch the Democratic nomination, I am struck by a profound sense that the candidates should have slightly less high self-esteem.
Get over yourselves, I imagine I would say to Barry and Hill, given the chance to have a chat with them. This is not about you. Do what's best for America. Haven't you ever read (see, this does have a literary point!) the greatest work of the greatest American poet?
I'm all over Walt Whitman, says Barack.
I'm conversant with Emily Dickinson, says Hillary.
Don't be silly, candidates! I'm talking about Ogden Nash, says me.
Yes, that Ogden Nash - king of 20th-century American light verse. Nash is without a doubt most famous for his pithy animal poems, which makes for a droll afternoon at the symphony when juxtaposed with Saint-Saens' Carnival of the Animals. But while the great man's meditations on the nature of the octopus ("Tell me, O Octopus, I begs / Is those things arms, or is they legs?") and other critters may be among his best-known, it is his ultimate paean to the value of modesty that, I believe, should be embraced by potential leaders of the free world.
For while "Kindly Unhitch That Star, Buddy" is marked by Nash's characteristically insouciant kinda-rhyming couplets - "I hardly suppose I know anybody who wouldn't rather be a success than a failure / Just as I suppose every piece of crabgrass in the garden would much rather be an azalea" - the underlying message is a serious one. Living one's life tethered to the tyranny of the boundless American dream can rather often end in tears because few people will ever actually reach the stars to which they have pinned their dreams.
Nash sanguinely offers a positive spin on inevitable disappointment: "Which perhaps is just as well because if everybody was a success nobody could be contemptuous of anybody else and everybody would start in all over again trying to be a bigger success than everybody else so they would have somebody to be contemptuous of and so on forevermore."
Get it, you two? Should you really be wasting all of this time haggling over who gets to run when the important thing is simply to ensure that the Republican stranglehold on the White House (and the world) is finally relinquished? I realise that they're politicians, and thus bound to be fairly brimming with confidence, but at this point shouldn't one of the two fall on his or her own sword to clear the way, ensuring that the Democrats regain the White House? Clinton's suggestion that Obama should drop out of the race to become her running mate was a bit cheeky, but in a way it makes sense: in either permutation, a ticket featuring both of them would probably be a political juggernaut. But neither of them is willing to accept the secondary job that has been famously described as equal in value to a bucket of warm saliva, and as a result things are getting unacceptably petty and personal.
Alas, embracing Nashian modesty is not considered to be a part of the skill set required for candidates for the commander-in-chief. It almost makes me want to run for President myself one day, just to push through a policy that will make Ogden Nash's modesty masterpiece required reading material for all Americans who "...think they will eventually wear diamonds instead of rhinestones / Only by everlastingly keeping their noses to their ghrinestones".
But I won't. It would be a bit overambitious. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/food/2024/feb/10/meera-sodha-vegan-recipe-lemon-black-sesame-loaf-cake | Food | 2024-02-10T12:00:41.000Z | Meera Sodha | Meera Sodha’s vegan recipe for lemon and black sesame loaf cake | The new vegan | Asingle shard of sunlight piercing through the windows in February is enough to boost my endorphins. The same is true of a slice of good lemon cake in the coldest months. It meets me exactly where I am: between brightness and comfort. Lemon can be brusque and blunt, but, in this cake, its zest, packed with flavoursome oils, give a gentle, aromatic flavour, while its juice, combined with yoghurt, forms a tender, soft crumb. There are nutritional benefits to eating black sesame seeds, but I’ve used them here, alongside the tahini yoghurt cream, for pleasure, a nutty crunch and a slick of velvet creaminess.
Lemon and black sesame loaf cake
You’ll need a 1kg loaf tin and electric beaters. The cake keeps well for a few days, tightly wrapped in foil.
Prep 5 min
Cook 1 hr, plus cooling time
Makes 1 x 1kg cake, to serve 8
For the cake
100g coconut yoghurt – I like Coconut Collab
130ml whole oat milk
Finely grated zest of 2 lemons, plus 4 tbsp juice (from the zested lemons)
150g vegan butter, at room temperature
175g caster sugar
2 tsp vanilla paste
250g self-raising flour
20g (2 tbsp) black sesame seeds, plus extra to serve
½ tsp bicarbonate of soda
¼ tsp fine salt
For the tahini cream
250ml oat whipping cream
8 tbsp icing sugar
4 tbsp light tahini
Heat the oven to 200C (180C fan)/390F/gas 6, grease and line a 1kg loaf tin.
In a small bowl, mix the yoghurt, milk and two tablespoons of the lemon juice.
In a large bowl, mix the butter, sugar, vanilla and lemon zest, then, using electric beaters (or in a stand mixer), whisk until very pale and fluffy. Clean the beaters.
Add the remaining dry ingredients to the butter mixture, then pour in the yoghurt and milk mixture and fold in gently, until everything is well combined. Spoon the batter into the lined tin, then bake for 40 minutes, or until a skewer comes out clean. Remove and leave to cool.
While the cake is baking, make the tahini cream. Put the cream in a large bowl and whip with electric beaters for about five minutes, until it forms soft peaks. Add half the icing sugar, a tablespoon of lemon juice and half the tahini, then whip again for a minute. Add the remaining sugar, tahini and last tablespoon of lemon juice, whip for a final minute, then put in the fridge to chill until needed.
Once the cake has cooled, lift it out of the tin and spread the whipped cream all over the top. Sprinkle on a few sesame seeds, then slice and serve. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2023/nov/30/golden-bachelor-finale-ratings-popularity | Television & radio | 2023-11-30T17:31:31.000Z | Adrian Horton | The Golden Bachelor’s older singletons have saved a franchise | Strange as it may sound, one of the hottest shows on TV this fall has been … an old dating series now catering, for once, to senior citizens. That would be The Golden Bachelor, a new spin-off of America’s pre-eminent dating series in which a 72-year-old widow searches for love among a cohort of age-appropriate women aged 60-75. The show has delivered the franchise’s highest ratings in years – its September premiere reached a combined 13.9 million viewers and set a streaming record as ABC’s most-watched episode of an unscripted series ever on Hulu. And it’s not just appealing to the golden demographic; the series scored the franchise’s best ratings for the 18-49 demographic since a 2021 episode of Bachelor in Paradise, which adheres to the much more standard format of hot young singles commingling in hot exotic locales.
Anecdotally, The Golden Bachelor has transcended the generally siloed island of Bachelor Nation – no show has been mentioned to me more this fall, or with more surprise and delight. I’m generally dating show agnostic, and yet found myself charmed by the older midwesterner Gerry Turner and his suitors, all openly looking for companionship after love, loss and many former eras. Regardless of who Turner chooses on this week’s two-hour season finale – 64-year-old Leslie Fhima, a former national aerobics champion, or 70-year-old Theresa Nist, who also lost a longtime beloved spouse – the Golden Bachelor has undoubtedly reinvigorated America’s pre-eminent dating franchise.
The Golden Bachelor: is America ready for an over-60s dating show?
Read more
That’s partly down to Turner, who has the story of reality TV fantasy – a small businessman married for 43 years to his high school sweetheart and devastated by her sudden death in 2017, just weeks into retirement – and plenty of midwestern aw-shucks charisma. (Never mind a strangely gossipy and juiceless Hollywood Reporter hit piece that came out earlier this week, which claims he has been less than forthcoming about his romantic past pre-Golden Bachelor.) Over the course of the season, Turner has come off as a bit hapless but well-meaning older bachelor – admiring of the women, unaware of the spotlight, faithful to the process, and increasingly pained by the demands of rose ceremonies, which require that he “end the journey” with someone.
In other words, the usual Bachelor machinations, but for a life experience and demographic woefully underrepresented in pop culture. Just a handful of storylines on TV or reality shows – the UK’s My Mum, Your Dad, a selection of First Dates – have approached dating in later life, even though the audience for linear television skews older. It took several episodes for me to not feel a jolt of shock at Turner making out with one of the women, so rare is the portrayal of sexuality or physical intimacy over the age of 60 on the screen.
Gerry Turner. Photograph: Brian Bowen Smith/ABC
The show has, for better and for worse, taken this in stride with archetypical sunniness. (It’s worth noting that all of the women are in the top percentiles for health and beauty at their age, with interventions ranging from hair coloring to Botox.) Whether by Turner’s lead or the producers’, the show has emphasized the vitality of senior citizens – a group pickleball date, several off-road vehicles and plenty of kissing – while remixing the formula for the realities of age. Rather than assuaging parents on the hometown dates, Turner has to win over grown children and young grandchildren. Several contestants have hearing aids. For the first half of the season, Turner predominantly bonded, often sweetly, with women who had also lost a spouse; grief was a go-to date topic. The much ballyhooed fantasy suite dates were both “an opportunity to talk without filters”, as Turner put it, and an opportunity for producers to shoot Turner and his bachelorette kissing in bed and looking satisfied with morning coffee. The phrase “knocking boots” is used.
It’s still The Bachelor – cheesy, overdrawn, difficult to trust and at times artificially rose-colored. For all the heartache past and present, there is little discussion, at least on-screen, of the concrete future: where couples would live, how they would integrate lives and, most pertinent for this demographic, how they imagine caretaking duties in later age. Many words are spent on how it feels to date as a senior, how much the women love Turner, how much it hurts him to let them go, but comparatively little on the women’s lives outside of the show. “Do you know what I do at all?” Nist asked Turner in Costa Rica, one date before a potential engagement. (He didn’t, and she explained starting a career as a day trader after years as a homemaker.)
Still, The Golden Bachelor feels different from any other dating show. The stakes are both higher, in that people appear genuinely interested in finding a partner in a limited dating pool (the women seem acutely aware that Turner is one of the most handsome 72-year-olds on the market), and lower, in that all participants aren’t looking for fame or attention to build their identities. The Bachelor franchise, though nominally in the name of love, has long become synonymous with a certain sort of middle America-aiming social media influence. The Golden Bachelor has little of that patina; some of the contestants have public Instagram accounts, but neither the show’s relatively mild drama nor the contestants’ self-presentation feel eyed toward branding. Everyone has led a full life before this – marriages, divorces, children, careers, past hobbies and new ones. The women seem to genuinely like each other and enjoy their time. Almost all of the contestants professed to leave the show with a new lease on love.
Whether that’s true or not is hard to say – it’s reality television. But for the contestants’ open hearts and the show’s open doors to a new generation of participants, The Golden Bachelor is more genuinely winning than most. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2024/apr/24/rebel-wilson-memoir-to-be-published-uk-sacha-baron-cohen-passages-redacted-rebel-rising | Film | 2024-04-24T16:58:16.000Z | Ella Creamer | Rebel Wilson memoir to be published in UK with Sacha Baron Cohen passages redacted | The UK edition of Australian actor Rebel Wilson’s memoir will be published with redacted passages relating to her experience on set with Sacha Baron Cohen.
In a chapter titled Sacha Baron Cohen and Other Assholes, Wilson recounts filming the 2016 comedy film Grimsby – released in the US as The Brothers Grimsby – alongside Baron Cohen. “SBC summoned me via a production assistant saying that I was needed to film an additional scene,” she writes.
“What followed was the worst experience of my professional life. An incident that left me feeling bullied, humiliated, and compromised. It can’t be printed here due to peculiarities of the law in England and Wales”. The rest of the page of the book is blacked out, and there are several further lines redacted on the following pages.
“We are publishing every page, but for legal reasons, in the UK edition, we are redacting most of one page with some other small redactions and an explanatory note,” a spokesperson for HarperCollins told the Guardian. “Those sections are a very small part of a much bigger story.”
The memoir, Rebel Rising, will be out in the UK on Thursday, after its US release earlier this month. The UK edition was due to be released on 4 April, but was pushed back “to coincide with Rebel Wilson’s press tours”, according to the publisher. Publication was also delayed in Australia.
Last month, representatives for Baron Cohen rejected the allegations of bad behaviour on set. “While we appreciate the importance of speaking out, these demonstrably false claims are directly contradicted by extensive detailed evidence, including contemporaneous documents, film footage, and eyewitness accounts from those present before, during and after the production of The Brothers Grimsby,” they said.
Commenting on the redaction in the UK edition, Baron Cohen’s representatives said: “Harper Collins did not fact check this chapter in the book prior to publication and took the sensible but terribly belated step of deleting Rebel Wilson’s defamatory claims once presented with evidence that they were false.
“Printing falsehoods is against the law in the UK and Australia; this is not a ‘peculiarity’ as Ms Wilson said, but a legal principle that has existed for many hundreds of years.
“This is a clear victory for Sacha Baron Cohen and confirms what we said from the beginning – that this is demonstrably false, in a shameful and failed effort to sell books.”
Sacha Baron Cohen denies Rebel Wilson’s claims of ‘asshole’ behaviour on set
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In the memoir, Wilson also writes that every time she would speak to Baron Cohen, he would mention that he wanted her to “go naked in a future scene”. She told him that she did not do nudity. “I was constantly saying no to him, and he didn’t like it.”
Another passage refers to an email Wilson said she received which stated that Baron Cohen wanted her to fly to London for “reshoots” for a “graphic sex scene”. She said she called a meeting with Baron Cohen, the writers and the director, Louis Leterrier, to express what she “would and wouldn’t be comfortable doing” in the scene. “The attitude I felt from them was: Rebel Wilson is causing an issue. I’m the problem. Why won’t I just film the graphic sex scene as written, where because I’m so overweight the bed falls through the floor?” she wrote in the book. “Eventually […] I agreed to shoot something so I could get the hell out of this awkward room.”
Rebel Rising by Rebel Wilson (HarperCollins Publishers, £25). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2024/apr/03/one-in-three-uk-water-workers-verbally-abused-amid-sewage-fury-gmb-finds | Business | 2024-04-03T05:00:20.000Z | Alex Lawson | One in three UK water workers verbally abused amid sewage fury, GMB finds | Water industry workers say they have been physically assaulted and feel unsafe working alone for fear of attack amid a public backlash over sewage dumping.
More than one in three UK water employees have been verbally abused at work, according to a survey of almost 1,300 staff conducted by the GMB union.
Water companies in England faced a barrage of criticism last week as data revealed that raw sewage was discharged for more than 3.6m hours into rivers and seas last year – the worst year on record for storm water pollution.
The companies – including heavily indebted Thames Water which faces questions over its financial future after investors said on Thursday they were unwilling to invest further funds – have been widely condemned by the public and politicians over leaks and spills.
That anger appears to have manifested on the frontline. Workers complained that they had faced “very hostile” abuse from the public, in a series of anonymous testimonies delivered to the GMB and shared exclusively with the Guardian.
One employee said they had stopped interacting with members of the public after a colleague was “violently assaulted and was off work for weeks with a broken jaw” and another claimed an employee was attacked with a machete.
Another said they had been “physically assaulted by minors while shutting down a vandalised fire hydrant while their parents stood laughing”.
An employee, who now refuses to wear clothing with the company logo, wrote of an alleged incident where colleagues were dealing with a sewage spill in a road. “Drivers were purposefully splashing staff with sewage. He was soaked. It was in his eyes and face. Appalling and disgusting behaviour by the public,” they said.
Another worker said they now “feel unsafe working alone in a lot more places and areas than I used to”.
According to the survey, 52% of workers said they believed reports of sewage dumping had contributed to an increase in abuse.
Workers said they felt “underpaid and underappreciated” and that abuse frequently came from motorists, when works enforced road closures. Call centre workers had also suffered abuse, they said.
The GMB research found that just 20% of wastewater workers thought infrastructure was good enough to stop leaks, and the same number had witnessed unreported sewage spills in the past year. One in five said they had either personally been encouraged to under-report sewage spills, or knew a colleague who had.
One respondent said managers had not investigated reports of abusive customer behaviour as they were “afraid of customer complaints affecting the score card targets. It is easy for managers not to investigate aggressive customer behaviour.”
Gary Carter, GMB national officer, said: “No one should go to work and face abuse. But this situation is horrifying, because the negligent actions of water bosses in allowing sewage dumping to rocket has exposed their own workers to physical and verbal violence.
“GMB demands a zero tolerance approach to the abuse of water workers – and calls on water shareholders to fork out for the desperately need infrastructure to stop record sewage spills.”
Last week the Environment Agency launched a portal to make it easier for water company whistleblowers to safely report serious environmental wrongdoing by their employer.
The agency said it was a “bid to crackdown on sewage pollution and other environmental wrongdoing” and said any findings could be used to support enforcement action against companies, including financial penalties and criminal prosecution.
England’s privatised water firms have been criticised for failing to invest in infrastructure while paying out billions in dividends to investors.
Last week shareholders in Britain’s biggest water company, Thames Water, said they had withheld £500m from the indebted utility after a standoff with the regulator, Ofwat, which is refusing their demands to increase customer bills by 40%.
In response, a bond issued by Thames Water’s parent company has now fallen to record lows. The £400m bond, which was issued by the water supplier’s parent company, Kemble and which matures in 2026, has lost more than 80% of its value over the past 12 months. It halved to only 12.7p after the shareholder update, before lifting slightly to 14.4p on Tuesday.
Kemble is expected to try to persuade its lenders to agree to a debt for equity swap. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/mar/06/momentum-fined-16700-for-breaching-electoral-law | Politics | 2019-03-06T11:26:05.000Z | Peter Walker | Momentum fined £16,700 for breaching electoral law | Momentum, the Jeremy Corbyn-supporting Labour grassroots movement, has been fined £16,700 after what the Electoral Commission described as “multiple” breaches of electoral law related to spending returns and failures to report donations.
The total included a fine of £12,150 for submitting a spending return for the 2017 general election that was not complete and accurate, the elections watchdog said. This was the highest such fine levied on a non-party campaign, it added.
The commission said: “This is the first time that Momentum has been investigated. In order to meet their legal reporting obligations in future, they must ensure they have the right staff and processes in place.”
As a registered non-party campaigner, with the spending limits entailed in electoral law, Momentum submitted a spending return in September 2017. The commission launched an investigation in November that year after “a number of issues were identified with the return”.
The results of the investigation found the group omitted almost £23,000 of reportable donations from a post-poll donation report, and failed to provide all the necessary declarations and invoices.
The organisation also received two smaller fines for delays in reporting donations to it from the Transport Salaried Staffs’ Association (TSSA) union, which should have been done within 30 days.
The commission said one £10,000 donation was received in July 2016, but not reported until January this year. Another sum of £8,000 was received in May 2017 but not reported until July 2018.
Louise Edwards, the head of regulation at the Electoral Commission, said: “Non-party campaigners are essential for a healthy democracy. But just as crucial is that after a poll, voters can see complete and accurate spending data.
“The fines that we have levied reflect Momentum’s repeated revisions to their spending return, poor record-keeping and failure to follow advice given by the commission prior to the election.”
In a statement, Momentum spokeswoman Laura Parker said the group had been initially investigated over allegations it spent more during the 2017 election than the regulated spending limit of £37,920, but that the commission found this was not the case.
“It is understandable that the Electoral Commission would investigate Momentum – we managed to do a lot with very little. Our general election campaign was powered by tens of thousands of volunteers who helped out in our office, ran training sessions and knocked on doors in marginal constituencies across the country,” Parker said.
On the errors that were made, she said: “This isn’t surprising for a new organisation, which at the time was less than two years old and had 25,000 members and 150 local groups. The Conservatives likely employ more lawyers than Momentum have staff, and even getting close to fully complying with these complex regulations for a volunteer-led, social movement organisation is a herculean task.”
But, Parker added, the level of the fines was “disproportionate”. She said: Not only did Momentum cooperate fully with the Electoral Commission, but these offences are incredibly minor when compared with other political organisations.” | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/apr/01/trees-are-at-the-heart-of-our-country-we-should-learn-their-indigenous-names | Opinion | 2019-04-01T03:48:43.000Z | Jakelin Troy | Trees are at the heart of our country – we should learn their Indigenous names | Jakelin Troy | The last time I went back to my Country in the Snowy Mountains, I noticed tree after tree felled, chopped down seemingly without thought.
For me, it was unfathomable. First Peoples worldwide have fundamentally and always understood trees to be community members for us – they are not entities that exist in some biological separateness, given a Linnaean taxonomy and classed with other non-sentient beings. Trees are part of our mob, part of our human world and active members of our communities, with lives, loves and feelings.
In Indigenous philosophies, all elements of the natural world are animated. Every rock, mountain, river, plant and animal all are sentient, having individual personalities and a life force. Trees are also one-stop-shops for all our needs, and sustain us with their generosity. The hard bark creates our houses, soft paperbark wraps our babies, stringy bark twists into fishing lines and cords, water carriers are carved from knots, leaves and fruits are our food and medicine, and roots and branches become tools that make our lives easy.
For centuries the rivers sustained Aboriginal culture. Now they are dry, elders despair
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Trees provide us with inspiration for our art and give us the aesthetic of the landscape. When the invading British, as one of their first acts on our Country, cut them down, we wept and cried with the trees, sharing their pain and shielding them with our bodies.
When we destroy trees, we destroy ourselves. We cannot survive in a treeless world.
In Australia, we should bring back into use the Aboriginal names and knowledge systems for trees and plants that are lost to everyday use. This year is the United Nations international year of indigenous languages. In this year how wonderful it would be for Australians to learn the original names of our trees?
We can begin by saying again the name for the grass tree or xanthorrhoea – which is gadi – the name by which the clan who lived in what is now the Sydney CBD called themselves: the Gadigal. It provides one of the strongest resins in the world. A beautiful and ancient long-lived tree that has almost become extinct in the Sydney CBD.
The waratah is an icon of Australia and the symbol of the state of New South Wales. Most Australians would not know that its name came into Australian English in the earliest colonial period from the language of the Gadigal clan. The Gadigal held the spectacular flower in high esteem and gave it a key role in funeral ceremonies as a symbol of the ongoing life of the spirit of the deceased.
In Sydney we should all know the word damun – the Port Jackson fig tree so common it was said by the Gadigal to be the favourite habitat of a mischievous spirit.
In Australia, trees of great significance to Aboriginal communities continue to be destroyed. Currently Djab Wurrung people are trying to stop the Victorian government from cutting down sacred eucalyptus trees, including birthing trees where countless generations of their people have been born. This is a cultural and environmental loss for all Australians.
Indigenous communities worldwide suffer from the damage done to their trees. In the Himalayan region of Swat in north Pakistan, my Torwali friend Mujahid told me of the devastation of the ancient deodar forests by the Taliban when they overran his valley in 2008-9.
These trees (lo see thaam in Torwali) are a form of cedar that take 200 years to mature, and live for at least 1,000 years. The trees are integral to local history: the stand that sheltered the wali (ruler) of Swat on his travels is now a semi-sacred place. Trees also help people track seasonal changes so important to an agricultural community. Mujahid explained that his mother would say that the sun rising over a particular tree indicated it was mid-winter.
The Taliban commanders cut the beautiful trees to sell the timber to fund their operations. The result was an environmental and social disaster. The trees with their extraordinarily deep roots helped keep the steep mountainsides intact. Deforestation and an unusually early melt of the winter snow in 2010 created extreme mudslides and floods that devastated communities from Kalam to Bahrain.
How to stop deforestation: 'Indigenous people are the best park rangers'
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In Chile, I met with Mapuche people who live in the great and ancient Araucaria forests of the southern Andes. These forests have been similarly devastated by governments that allowed extensive logging. The Mapuche revere the trees as sacred and refer to them as family members. They rely on the piñon (pine seed) of the tree as a staple in their diet. The Pehuenche Mapuche are named for the Araucaria. Pehuén is araucaria in Mapudungun, their language.
Scientists conceive they know more about trees and plants because they study them and give them scientific names. We, the indigenous peoples of the world, have a deep-seated understanding of what this foreign science means. However, we understand it without disconnecting ourselves from the plants and trees around us.
Let’s speak their names.
Professor Jakelin Troy is Director of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Research at the University of Sydney.
The Talking trees series is on at the Museum of Contemporary Art through to June, in conjunction with the exhibition Janet Laurence: After Nature. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2013/nov/12/idris-elba-paris-thriller-bastille | Film | 2013-11-12T13:24:00.000Z | Andrew Pulver | Idris Elba catches Paris metro thriller Bastille | Luther star Idris Elba is to further expand his big-screen presence by taking the lead role in Paris-set thriller Bastille.
According to Variety, the London-born actor is to play a US secret agent who is hunting the perpetrators of a terror attack on the Paris metro. The film is a co-production between French outfit Vendome and US company Anonymous Content, but no director has yet been attached.
Elba recently completed the third series of Luther, while taking on more significant film roles – including key parts in Pacific Rim, Prometheus and Thor: The Dark World, in which he plays the Asgardian sentry Heimdall. His recent portrayal of Nelson Mandela in Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom has been rewarded with a concerted awards season campaign and a screening at the White House for President Obama.
Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom: watch the full-length trailer
Idris Elba's Luther set for big screen prequel | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2024/feb/08/kali-malone-all-life-long-review | Music | 2024-02-08T11:30:11.000Z | Alexis Petridis | Kali Malone: All Life Long review – music to blot out the world’s clamour | You could describe Kali Malone’s sixth album as her most approachable to date, but it’s perhaps wise to give a bit of context if you do.
It is, after all, the follow-up to 2023’s Does Spring Hide Its Joy, which contained a grand total of three tracks – all versions of the same piece – and lasted over three hours. Featuring Malone playing a sine wave oscillator accompanied by cello and guitar, Does Spring Hide Its Joy was in itself substantially more approachable than, say, 2018’s Arched In Hysteria, a composition consisting of fearsome discordant tones overlaid with what sounded like the fizzing and humming of an amplifier on the fritz, or the same year’s compilation with a self-explanatory title, Organ Dirges 2016-2017. Her music operates somewhere on the border that separates modern classical – she studied electroacoustic composition at Stockholm’s Royal College of Music – from the world of avant-garde drone rock: her chief collaborator is Sunn O)))’s Stephen O’Malley, who’s also her husband. An interview with the Guardian in 2023 had her enthusing about overhearing the racket made by five gardeners all using leaf-blowers at the same time (“There’s so much beautiful sound out there, it’s all just your perception whether you experience it as music”).
Notice is thus served that Malone is unlikely to win a coveted slot on Spotify’s Hot Hits UK playlist in the foreseeable future. Her most famous celebrity fan might be Radiohead’s Thom Yorke – who interviewed her at length for a fanzine he put together in 2019 – but her oeuvre clearly speaks more to the wildly leftfield aspects of his taste than to his Glastonbury-headlining side.
By contrast to its predecessor, All Life Long clocks in at a relatively trim 78 minutes and features 12 pieces, scored for choir, brass and pipe organ – the latter ostensibly Malone’s primary instrument, but one that she hasn’t used on record for five years. Perhaps that’s a gesture of defiance: in France, Malone’s organ performances in churches have proved controversial, at least with a far-right “Catholic integralist” group called Civitas, who forced the cancellation of one concert in Brittany by occupying the church and threatening violence. But when you read her interviews, which are very much the place to go if you’re interested in the cultural contexts of 15th-century meantone organ tuning, it seems more likely she’s just fascinated by the instrument and its possibilities.
It’s tempting to wonder what the aforementioned religious integralists might make of the two vocal pieces on All Life Long, on which unaccompanied choir the Macadam Ensemble sound as if they’re performing a liturgy, albeit using Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben’s essay In Praise of Profanation and Arthur Symons’ 1901 poem The Crying of Water, from which the album also takes its name. Listeners with rock-trained ears, meanwhile, might expect a heavy metal band to strike up midway through each.
You can see why both the essay and the poem might appeal to Malone. The former deals with turning the sacred to secular use, while the latter’s depiction of the sound of the sea as an “unresting”, endless “mournful cry” could reasonably be applied to the sombre sound of All Life Long. The pieces for organ slowly shift and evolve as textures and harmonic patterns reappear across the album alongside moments of dissonance, although the latter are more fleeting and less extreme than in Malone’s previous work. She frequently resolves into one long, sustained chord, as on the trance-inducing No Sun to Burn.
‘I want an indescribable feeling’: composer Kali Malone on her search for the sublime
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The tracks using brass force you to consider the nature of the instruments themselves. The music is no less mournful in tone than the organ pieces but somehow feels more declamatory: the ghost of a fanfare clings to it despite everything.
Despite its minimalism, this is not music that feels dry or emotionally austere. There’s a genuinely affecting melancholy about Prisoned on Watery Shore, while Moving Forward invokes a kind of contemplative calm. It’s also music that feels strangely malleable. Listened to on headphones, at volume, the organ pieces can feel overwhelming and transportive, the slow motion at which they move sucking you in and temporarily obliterating the world outside. But played on speakers at a lower volume, they act as hugely effective ambient music, lending a contemplative chill to your surroundings.
On paper, All Life Long looks like hard work for anyone whose musical tastes don’t usually dwell on the avant garde fringes. The reality is that it requires virtually no effort on the part of the listener: you just have to let yourself succumb.
This week Alexis listened to
Yaya Bey – Chasing the Bus
Taken from the Brooklyn R&B vocalist’s hotly anticipated new album Ten Fold, Chasing the Bus offers lyrical romantic discord set to music you can fall into: warm, slow, silky. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2012/aug/29/the-list-review | Stage | 2012-08-29T09:13:55.000Z | Lyn Gardner | The List – Edinburgh festival review | Which of us can put hand on heart and say: "I have never neglected a friend?" Who hasn't had reason to regret a failure to visit or a phone call that has gone unmade? The unnamed woman in Jennifer Tremblay's powerful monologue has more reason for repenting her inaction than most. "I didn't lay a finger on her, but it's as if I killed her," she says, fixing us with her blue, anguished eyes.
The "her" is Caroline, a friendly neighbour in a small community. The woman has moved from the city, and finds the country threatening: the fields menace her, and even the walk to the tree at the end of the garden is overwhelming. She's not coping well with her children or husband, either. She tries to keep control of her life by making lists obsessively. When Caroline extends the hand of friendship, the woman is all too ready to judge this new friend for the messiness of her home, overflowing with children and washing.
But, as the woman's racked story of motherhood, female friendship and love tumbles out, it is she who is being judged. We, the audience, sit high above like a jury in a courtroom. In the process, of course, we are judging ourselves.
Everything about Muriel Romanes's production is just so, including John Byrne and Roland Fraser's design – a curved, beaten-copper panel whose greenish tinge hints at the countryside. Projected on to it are images of trees, their witchy, finger-like branches encroaching on the tiny model house perched precariously on a chair. But the really magnificent thing is Maureen Beattie's mesmerising and thrillingly unforgiving performance as a woman who cannot forgive herself. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2020/dec/01/the-godfather-coda-the-death-of-michael-corleone-review-francis-ford-coppola-al-pacino | Film | 2020-12-01T14:00:02.000Z | Peter Bradshaw | The Godfather Coda: The Death of Michael Corleone review – Coppola edits the past | Just when you thought you were out … he pulls you back in. Francis Ford Coppola has presided over different editorial remixes of Apocalypse Now, and now he’s done the same with his little-loved The Godfather Part III from 1990: with new edits and a new title. He and co-writer Mario Puzo have removed the “threequel” stigma by renaming it The Godfather Coda: The Death of Michael Corleone, but, at 158 minutes (compared with the 175 and 202 minutes of the other two films), it’s hardly short enough to be a coda and doesn’t function structurally as such. Rightly or wrongly, it is exactly what the original title declared it to be: part three, the third act in the life of Michael Corleone (Al Pacino), who in his 60s tries to go into respectable business by bailing out the Vatican’s financially embarrassed bank. He thereby becomes a businessman of enormous power, somewhere between Faustus and Mephistopheles, yet also a vulnerable target for shadowy conspirators.
There are a number of little changes to the original, the most important being at the very end, which might baffle those wondering about that new title. This change could imply that his real death was the emotional or spiritual death that happened on the steps of the opera house in Palermo, or even much earlier than that.
Michael is drawn back into mob violence ostensibly because he gets involved in a quarrel between Joey Zasa (Joe Mantegna), the boorish boss of the casino he sold off, and his nephew Vincent Corleone (Andy Garcia), son of the late Sonny, played in G1 by James Caan. Naturally, Michael sides with Vincent, with awful results. But it isn’t just this. Michael realises that the supposedly legitimate world of business and politics he has been yearning for all his life is just as brutal as the mob, and Michael comes to play a key role in cheekily fictionalised versions of two real events: the 1978 death of Pope John Paul I and the 1982 murder of the Vatican-connected banker Roberto Calvi.
This film was derided at the time as a shark-jumping mess: choppy, convoluted, anti-climactic and with an underwhelming performance from the director’s daughter, Sofia Coppola, as Michael’s daughter Mary. It undoubtedly feels stuffy compared with Scorsese’s GoodFellas, which came out the same year and was much more vibrant than Coppola’s rather stately and self-consciously Shakespearian tale. (Amusingly, Scorsese’s mother Catherine had a cameo in both films.)
Well, some critical revisionism is in order. Admittedly many scenes in this film are obvious retreads of key scenes from part one: the initial party set piece in which Michael receives visitors in his sanctum, and the final sequence, in which cold-blooded hits are intercut with a public event. But they are intended as “mirroring” events, full of dramatic irony and ill omen. This film has ambition and reach: maybe the conspiracy-theory stuff from the real world feels forced, but it gives a kind of surreal vividness to Michael’s endgame. His audacious “confession” scene with the cardinal who will become Pope John Paul I is outrageous in a way, but also melodramatically inspired.
And Sofia Coppola isn’t as bad as all that. She brings a mopey callow yearning, as well as unresolved sexual tension to her forbidden love affair with her cousin Vincent. (And of course has proved herself as a director many times over since then.) I’m not sure how much, if anything, Coppola’s re-edit does for the film, but it’s worth a watch.
The Godfather Coda: The Death of Michael Corleone is in cinemas on 5 and 6 December and available on digital platforms and Blu-Ray from 8 December. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2024/jan/29/i-miss-out-on-a-family-experience-the-deaf-victorians-taking-legal-action-against-cinemas-over-captions | Society | 2024-01-28T14:00:10.000Z | Adeshola Ore | ‘I miss out on a family experience’: the deaf Victorians taking legal action against cinemas over captions | The dawn of the Barbie doll was projected on the big screen in the opening scenes of Greta Gerwig’s blockbuster film, but Simon Andersson was still waiting to take his seat.
Andersson, who is deaf, had requested cinema staff provide him with a closed-captioning device, called CaptiView, which allows cinemagoers to watch subtitles on a small screen that is attached to their cup holder. But the staff at the cinema were unaware the technology was on offer.
“I waited 20 minutes so I missed 10 minutes of the movie. Apparently it’s the best start,” he says.
“It’s a common experience when the staff don’t know what it is and have to find out. It’s really stressful.”
For members of the deaf community, going to the movies is an experience that they say is often frustrating and inaccessible due to glitchy closed-captioning technology.
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As captions and subtitles have become increasingly common for audiences streaming content at home, particularly millennials, there is a renewed push in the deaf community for cinemas to provide open-captioned films, where captions appear at the bottom of the main screen.
Andersson is among a group of six Victorians who have launched legal action against one of Australia’s largest cinema chains, Hoyts, alleging the majority of movie sessions are inaccessible to deaf and hard-of-hearing audiences due to technology issues with the CaptiView equipment.
The matter, lodged with the Victorian civil and administrative tribunal, argues not having access to the full movie because of the device amounts to discrimination by breaching the state’s equal opportunity legislation.
Philip Waters, who is among the group of six, says the device is commonly called “Craptiview” in the deaf community.
Waters, the general manager at Deaf Victoria, says he wants to be able to see movies with his children but can only go to screenings with open captions because of problems with the device.
“I miss out on a family experience which is not great,” he says.
CaptiView was rolled out in Australia in 2009 across the nation’s big four cinema chains – Hoyts, Village, Reading and Event.
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The six applicants argue it has a multitude of technology problems and cinema staff are often unequipped to set up the device. The device, which runs on wifi, sometimes picks up the signal from an adjacent theatre, meaning it displays the wrong captions. It is not possible to focus on the movie screen and the device at the same time, so neither the dialogue nor movie are seen in their entirety.
If a person physically shifts in their chair, like uncrossing their legs, the equipment has to be physically readjusted, leading the viewer to miss out on dialogue.
Waters, who wears glasses, says the device often leads to eye strain because it requires the user to focus on the equipment, about 30cm from their face, then change their focus to the movie screen.
“It’s quite difficult on the eyes and fatiguing,” he says.
Waters says he wants all cinemas to show open captions for all films and sessions.
“This is a social experience that I would feel included in,” he says.
“If someone complains about the captions, if a hearing person says ‘oh, there’s captions, I don’t like it’, it’s kind of like complaining about the ramp into the cinema,” he says.
“You can’t complain to somebody about something that provides access.”
Hoyts offers open-captioned films in select cinemas for some movies. Waters says cinema chains have ignored feedback from the deaf community and says a complaint “often just results in a free ticket”.
“It’s ironic because a free ticket can’t be used. I wouldn’t get any use out of it,” he says.
Andersson says many people beyond the 3.6 million Australians with hearing loss, could benefit from captions including audience members with English as a second language, neurodivergent people and parents watching a film in a baby-friendly screening.
He pointed to comments from acclaimed director Christopher Nolan, who last year said muffled dialogue was his “artistic choice” due to his use of Imax cameras, which are not completely soundproof.
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“It is now more common in the mainstream for everyone to be OK with captions,” Andersson says.
“I’d feel relieved if there were open captions on every film and would go to the movies more. People will accept open captions.”
The cinema is a really important experience because it’s an immersive experience. You can’t get that from your TV at home
Simon Andersson
Waters says while cinemas have argued in the past that open-captioned films are unpopular and do not attract large audiences, they are often only displayed in off-peak screenings at unpopular times.
Lauren Rosewarne, an associate professor and popular-culture expert at the University of Melbourne, says there is evidence that perceptions towards subtitles are evolving.
“Squid Game was a good example of an international show with subtitles that can actually get a huge audience in a country like Australia, because most of us don’t speak Korean.”
But she says some audience members would view open captions as a disincentive to go to the cinema.
“Cinemas are struggling to compete with at-home offerings, in the sense that people have bigger screens at home, it’s cheaper to watch a film at home and there are no transport costs,” she says.
“There’s lot of research that talks about people’s perception with subtitles [being] that it breaks their feeling of feeling immersed in the film.”
I am Deaf and I love raves – I wish more people felt welcome in the dance world
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In 2022, Netflix revealed that 40% of its global users have subtitles on all the time, while 80% switch them on at least once a month. In 2012, Netflix reached an agreement with a deaf-rights group to provide subtitles on all its streaming content by 2024 after it was sued for failing to do so.
Julie Phillips, a disability advocate who helped the group lodge their claim, says they chose to only launch legal action against Hoyts but hoped it would also spur change in other companies.
A spokesperson for Hoyts confirmed the application before the tribunal.
“Hoyts continues to be committed to making the cinema experience accessible to all its guests by providing technologies and services for people with varying mobility, hearing, visual, and neurodiverse needs,” the spokesperson said.
Dolby, the manufacturer of CaptiView, has been contacted for comment.
Andersson has opted to watch movies at independent cinemas, saying they have more open-captioned screenings and are receptive to requests for subtitles.
He saw Oppenheimer at Hawthorn’s Lido cinema last year and says it was an “amazing experience”.
“The first minute is just a huge [atomic] bomb and you could feel the vibrations through the cinema. It was really dark. It was so amazing,” he says.
“The cinema is a really important experience because it’s an immersive experience. You can’t get that from your TV at home.” | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2011/aug/18/aliens-destroy-humanity-protect-civilisations | Science | 2011-08-18T18:04:56.000Z | Ian Sample | Aliens may destroy humanity to protect other civilisations, say scientists | It may not rank as the most compelling reason to curb greenhouse gases, but reducing our emissions might just save humanity from a pre-emptive alien attack, scientists claim.
Watching from afar, extraterrestrial beings might view changes in Earth's atmosphere as symptomatic of a civilisation growing out of control – and take drastic action to keep us from becoming a more serious threat, the researchers explain.
This highly speculative scenario is one of several described by a Nasa-affiliated scientist and colleagues at Pennsylvania State University that, while considered unlikely, they say could play out were humans and alien life to make contact at some point in the future.
Shawn Domagal-Goldman of Nasa's Planetary Science Division and his colleagues compiled a list of plausible outcomes that could unfold in the aftermath of a close encounter, to help humanity "prepare for actual contact".
In their report, Would Contact with Extraterrestrials Benefit or Harm Humanity? A Scenario Analysis, the researchers divide alien contacts into three broad categories: beneficial, neutral or harmful.
Beneficial encounters ranged from the mere detection of extraterrestrial intelligence (ETI), for example through the interception of alien broadcasts, to contact with cooperative organisms that help us advance our knowledge and solve global problems such as hunger, poverty and disease.
Another beneficial outcome the authors entertain sees humanity triumph over a more powerful alien aggressor, or even being saved by a second group of ETs. "In these scenarios, humanity benefits not only from the major moral victory of having defeated a daunting rival, but also from the opportunity to reverse-engineer ETI technology," the authors write.
Other kinds of close encounter may be less rewarding and leave much of human society feeling indifferent towards alien life. The extraterrestrials may be too different from us to communicate with usefully. They might invite humanity to join the "Galactic Club" only for the entry requirements to be too bureaucratic and tedious for humans to bother with. They could even become a nuisance, like the stranded, prawn-like creatures that are kept in a refugee camp in the 2009 South African movie, District 9, the report explains.
The most unappealing outcomes would arise if extraterrestrials caused harm to humanity, even if by accident. While aliens may arrive to eat, enslave or attack us, the report adds that people might also suffer from being physically crushed or by contracting diseases carried by the visitors. In especially unfortunate incidents, humanity could be wiped out when a more advanced civilisation accidentally unleashes an unfriendly artificial intelligence, or performs a catastrophic physics experiment that renders a portion of the galaxy uninhabitable.
To bolster humanity's chances of survival, the researchers call for caution in sending signals into space, and in particular warn against broadcasting information about our biological make-up, which could be used to manufacture weapons that target humans. Instead, any contact with ETs should be limited to mathematical discourse "until we have a better idea of the type of ETI we are dealing with."
The authors warn that extraterrestrials may be wary of civilisations that expand very rapidly, as these may be prone to destroy other life as they grow, just as humans have pushed species to extinction on Earth. In the most extreme scenario, aliens might choose to destroy humanity to protect other civilisations.
"A preemptive strike would be particularly likely in the early phases of our expansion because a civilisation may become increasingly difficult to destroy as it continues to expand. Humanity may just now be entering the period in which its rapid civilisational expansion could be detected by an ETI because our expansion is changing the composition of the Earth's atmosphere, via greenhouse gas emissions," the report states.
"Green" aliens might object to the environmental damage humans have caused on Earth and wipe us out to save the planet. "These scenarios give us reason to limit our growth and reduce our impact on global ecosystems. It would be particularly important for us to limit our emissions of greenhouse gases, since atmospheric composition can be observed from other planets," the authors write.
Even if we never make contact with extraterrestrials, the report argues that considering the potential scenarios may help to plot the future path of human civilisation, avoid collapse and achieve long-term survival.
This article was amended on 19 August 2011. The subhead said the report was "for Nasa". This has been corrected. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2011/jan/21/cucumber-cooler-drink-recipe-henry-dimbleby | Life and style | 2011-01-21T12:00:00.000Z | Henry Dimbleby | Cucumber cooler drink recipe | Henry Dimbleby | This might just be the most beautiful-looking drink in the world – perfect for a pure detox. The simple addition of cucumber brings a more refreshing taste, and a more satisfying way to rehydrate. At dinner parties put one jug on the table with these long, translucent strips of cucumber, and another jug floating with thin slices of lemon. It's so cheap, but it looks lovely.
Serves 4
1 cucumber
1½ litres of cold water
1 lime
Peel the cucumber, discard the peel then, using the peeler, keep peeling the flesh of the cucumber into long ribbons, turning the cucumber as you go. Drop the pieces straight into your favourite jug. Keep making ribbons until you get to the seeds. Squeeze lime into the jug with the water and lots of ice.
Adapted from Leon: Naturally Fast Food | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2014/mar/31/fantastic-beasts-trilogy-harry-potter-jk-rowling | Film | 2014-03-31T07:12:00.000Z | Ben Child | Harry Potter spinoff Fantastic Beasts to be movie trilogy | JK Rowling's Harry Potter spin-off Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them is to be a film trilogy, according to comments made by the head of Hollywood studio Warner Bros.
Kevin Tsujihara broke the news in a profile in the New York Times over the weekend, the newspaper describing the film as "three megamovies".
Fantastic Beasts, which is set 70 years prior to the arrival of Potter and his pals at the magical Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, will feature the swashbuckling adventurer Newt Scamander. The title is borrowed from the first-year textbook that Potter uses at Hogwarts school in the novel Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone.
Rowling published the Fantastic Beasts Magizoology compendium in 2001 to raise money for the charity Comic Relief. She will write her debut screenplay for the first movie in the series, a development she told the Times was entirely down to new Warner CEO Tsujihara's arrival at the studio.
"When I say he made Fantastic Beasts happen, it isn't PR-speak but the literal truth," Rowling told the newspaper. "We had one dinner, a follow-up telephone call, and then I got out the rough draft that I'd thought was going to be an interesting bit of memorabilia for my kids and started rewriting!"
Rowling added: "When Kevin got the top job, he brought a new energy, which rubbed off. He's a very engaging person, thoughtful and funny."
Fantastic Beasts, which was announced in September, does not yet have a director or start date, let alone a cast. Nevertheless, the new saga is firmly in the spotlight due to the huge box office success of the Harry Potter films. The series is the highest grossing film franchise in history, with $7.7bn (£4.6bn) in box office receipts. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2010/aug/22/eels-tomorrow-morning-review | Music | 2010-08-21T23:05:00.000Z | Ally Carnwath | Eels: Tomorrow Morning | CD review | January's End Times found Mark E Everett picking through the wreckage of a failed relationship with bleak humour. Its follow-up is tentatively upbeat, tracing his recovery and the first flickerings of new love. Both themes will be familiar to long-term Eels fans, and his default musical setting, in which naive Casio-pop rubs up against grungey basslines and rasping vocals varies little here. But this is still a warm, beautifully balanced record, its glimmering epiphanies offset by the gruff wit of tracks such as "Baby Loves Me" and "The Man". | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2012/jan/11/carpenters-goodbye-love | Music | 2012-01-11T13:12:59.000Z | Ian Tasker | Old music: The Carpenters – Goodbye to Love (Live at the Palladium) | The Carpenters have never really been cool. Not now, not then, not ever. So on the day I went to see them at the London Palladium in November 1976 I wasn't exactly shouting my attendance from the rooftops. Back then I liked to think (mistakenly as it turned out) that I was pretty cool – preferring the Band to Bread, Santana to Sweet, and the Mahavishnu Orchestra to Mud.
So what was I doing high-tailing down the M1 to see the king and queen of nauseous, sentimental, sugary pop? Three and a half decades later I can't for the life of me recall why, although I do remember the friend who flogged me the tickets telling me he thought the Carpenters' resident guitarist Tony Peluso was as good as Eric Clapton, which had at least got me thinking (mostly that my friend was certifiable).
I wasn't expecting much when Richard and Karen Carpenter, complete with band and orchestra, took to the stage that Saturday night. However, what they served up was about as close to perfection as pop music can get. The highlight of the night – captured for posterity on the album Live at the Palladium – was a 15-minute medley of their hits.
Karen Carpenter's voice was surely one of pop music's finest, and her effortlessly warm and velvety voice was a revelation as she and the band went through Close to You, Only Yesterday and Rainy Days and Mondays. By the time they reached Goodbye to Love I realised it would be safe to admit going to the concert after all.
A melancholic ballad, it is made even more poignant in retrospect. Karen Carpenter was already painfully thin and would die of heart failure brought on by anorexia in 1983. In her short life she apparently never found true happiness so to hear her sing the lyric "all I know of love is how to live without it" is, for a softie like me at least, heartbreaking.
However, as the medley moved to its conclusion something quite amazing happened. From out of the assembled ranks of orchestra and band members a guitar player abruptly stood up, taking the spotlight to play a terrific solo that surely should have been a feature anywhere else but in a Carpenters song.
Tony Peluso might not have been as good as Clapton, he might not even have been terribly cool, but he and the Carpenters won at least one new fan that night. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/oct/03/boohoo-shoppers-discounts-shein-sales | Business | 2023-10-03T13:26:22.000Z | Sarah Butler | Boohoo fails to lure shoppers with discounts as rival Shein takes a bite | Boohoo has warned that sales will fall by more than expected this year as shoppers buy fewer items than hoped for amid heavy competition from the Chinese rival Shein and the revival of high street shopping.
The online fast fashion specialist said it expected annual sales to fall by between 12% and 17%, a dive from the maximum 5% drop previously forecast, as analysts said the group had lost market share despite price cuts.
Boohoo’s sales are shrinking after a boom during the coronavirus pandemic, when stores on high streets and in shopping centres were forced to close for many months.
Sales fell 17% to £729m in the six months to 31 August, forcing the company £11m further into the red than a year before – to a loss of £26.4m.
It said sales of its core brands Boohoo, Pretty Little Thing, Karen Millen and Debenhams had fallen by 10%, in line with the wider online fashion market, while sales at its new labels, including Oasis, Warehouse, Dorothy Perkins and Burton, were even weaker.
Shoppers have returned to the high street to try on outfits after the pandemic drove them online, while the cost of living crisis has made them think twice about the delivery and returns charges associated with online shopping.
The cost of handling deliveries and returns has risen sharply amid worker shortages and increases in the minimum wage, prompting Boohoo to introduce a £1.99 charge to return items last summer.
The company is also facing heavy competition from Shein, which uses social media to push cheap garments, as well as sites such as Vinted and Depop that have popularised secondhand clothing.
Louise Déglise-Favre, an apparel analyst at the industry analysts GlobalData, said: “[Boohoo’s] struggles are largely due to the meteoric rise of Shein, which has jumped to the top of the ultra-fast fashion game and continues to steal market share. Shein is more agile than Boohoo and offers unbeatable low prices while keeping up with the endless stream of new micro-trends appearing on social media. Paradoxically, the group has also suffered from growing criticism from some consumers against fast fashion, decrying its environmental and social impacts.”
Boohoo said it expected to make underlying profits of between £58m and £70m in the year ahead, suggesting a potential fall from analysts’ hopes of £68m. The company said it was focusing on more profitable sales and cutting costs by £125m.
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The group is also hoping to revive its business in the US after the opening of a US distribution centre that will speed up deliveries to homes to about three days from more than 10.
John Lyttle, the Boohoo chief executive, said: “Our confidence in the medium-term prospects for the group remains unchanged as we execute on our key priorities where we see a clear path to improved profitability and getting back to growth.” | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/mar/09/texas-abortion-ban-cross-state-lines-study | US news | 2022-03-09T11:00:31.000Z | Maya Yang | Texas abortion ban forcing thousands to cross state lines for procedure – study | Texas’s highly restrictive abortion law has forced thousands of women to cross state lines to seek the procedure, according to new research by the University of Texas.
Since the passing of the law, known as Senate Bill 8 (SB8) last year banning almost all abortions in the state, an average of 1,400 Texas women traveled each month between September and December 2021 and sought abortion services at 34 facilities in nearby states.
The average is approximately the same as the total number of Texans who traveled out of state each year to those clinics for all reasons between 2017 and 2019.
In August 2021, only 235 Texans went for abortions in the 34 facilities, the month before SB8 took effect.
The states that many Texas residents sought abortions from include Arkansas, Colorado, Kansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, New Mexico and Oklahoma. Nearly three out of four Texans, or 45%, who traveled out of state during those months seeking the procedure obtained abortion care in Oklahoma, which just has four facilities that offer abortion services.
According to the research, the number of Texans seen each month at these clinics since the law took effect is more than double the monthly average of all abortion patients seen in Oklahoma in 2020.
Around one in four Texans seeking an abortion, or 27%, traveled to New Mexico to obtain such a service. The state has seven facilities. New Mexico does not require state-mandated counseling, waiting periods or parental consent for minors.
From October 2021 to February 2022, researchers interviewed 65 Texas women who sought abortion services across state lines.
The participants ranged from 18 to 42 years old. Nearly half, or 46%, identified as Hispanic/Latinx, 23% as Black, 21% as white, 6% as Asian and 2% as more than one race. Participants reported a median gestational duration at abortion of nine weeks. Texas bans abortion after about six weeks.
The participants described their frequent experiences with delays, often as a result of state law that include mandatory ultrasounds and counseling visits.
Some participants said they visited “pregnancy resource centers” – organizations that frequently offer ultrasounds free of charge but may seek to discourage pregnant people from seeking abortion.
Participants who had medical conditions that posed health risks for continuing their pregnancy said their healthcare providers were reluctant to offer information on out-of-state options for abortion services.
The law, which disproportionately affects communities of color, adds a burden in the need to travel, as not all may have the necessary resources to travel beyond state lines.
Due to long wait times at nearby abortion services in neighboring states, many participants said they were unable to get an appointment at those facilities and had to travel even farther to obtain abortion care.
From Fort Worth, Texas, for example, the nearest Oklahoma facility is nearly 200 miles, or over three hours’ drive away.
From Houston, the facility is 450 miles, or seven and a half hours away. To obtain an abortion in Oklahoma, people first must receive state-mandated counseling and then wait at least 72 hours, imposing a further cost and time burden that is beyond many would-be patients.
Additionally, unlike in New Mexico, minors are also required to notify a parent and obtain parental consent before receiving abortion care.
In June, the conservative-majority supreme court is expected to deliver a decision on Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the most significant abortion rights case since the landmark 1973 supreme court ruling in Roe v Wade, which effectively legalized abortion in the US.
The case pits Mississippi’s last abortion clinic against the state’s leadership, as the latter seeks to ban abortion after 15 weeks gestation and asks the highest court to overturn Roe.
“I’ve never felt more like the government doesn’t give a shit about me than I do right now, to be honest with you. I’ve never felt it so deep inside of me that I am so disposable, that I don’t matter, that I don’t get any bodily autonomy in such a horrible [life-threatening] situation … I just wish that I could have [had] done it here, at home,” said one Texas woman to the researchers of her experience in obtaining an out-of-state abortion.
“I really feel like this whole Texas law – I don’t agree with it. It’s not right, and it’s so hard. I can just imagine the women who don’t have the support system that I have, how hard it is for them to get an abortion if they’re able to … If I didn’t have my support system, it would have been so hard, if not impossible, to get this done,” another said. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/money/2023/mar/03/luton-dart-the-most-expensive-train-in-britain-opens-for-business | Money | 2023-03-03T15:13:09.000Z | Gwyn Topham | Luton Dart: ‘the most expensive train in Britain’ opens for business | Seven years in the making, Luton airport’s long-anticipated light rail link finally opens to passengers next week – a swift connection that has, somewhat unfairly, been billed as the most expensive train in Britain.
As airport bosses promised, the gleaming new £290m Dart shuttle from train to airport is a significant upgrade: accessed straight out of Luton Parkway railway station and replacing the bus that was needed between trains and the airport terminal. It brings the airport to within about a half hour’s total journey from central London on the fastest trains.
But at £4.90 for the 1,999 metre (1.25 miles) trip, the Luton Dart is pricey even by the standards of British rail fares (which increase by 5.9% this weekend). It appears to have ousted the notorious Heathrow Express transfer service as the most expensive by distance.
A flight from Luton to Palma this month on easyJet, at £56 return, comes in at roughly a hundredth of the Dart’s price a mile. Even the Orient Express from London to Venice – sleeping in a private cabin with steward service and sumptuous dining and fine wine included for the £4,500 ticket – only works out roughly double the price on mileage.
So are they making a killing on the Luton Dart? Graham Olver, the chief executive of Luton Rising, the council-owned company that runs the airport, argues not. “If you’re savvy, it’s £47.50 return for a family from central London. Blue badges holders, pensioners and airport workers go free.”
Olver urged a focus not on the cost but the value of the scheme: “We’re a massive social enterprise with a £2bn asset.”
According to East Midlands Railway, some advance tickets on the Luton Airport Express from London St Pancras, and including the Dart shuttle, will cost as little as £47.50 return for a family of four – substantially cheaper than other airport rail transfers from the capital.
Local residents will get a 50% discount, bringing the cost into line with the soon to be retired bus service.
Technically, the shuttle is not a train but a cable car, designed to cope with the rapid 40m ascent up the hillside to the airport. It is made and operated by the Doppelmayr Cable Car company, the same firm behind Boris Johnson’s £60m folly, a cable car over the Thames at docklands (distance o.6 miles, price £6).
The ride itself, tested by the Guardian in a preview trip on Friday, is a smooth 2 minutes 39 seconds, arcing gracefully upwards and curving over the A1081, on a bridge decorated with an ornamental crest emphasising this spectacular addition to the Luton skyline. The Dart dips underground to reach the airport, where passengers emerge from under an eye-catching canopy roof in yellow steel – “not gold-plated”, a spokesperson emphasises.
The fares will allow the Dart to break even, Olver said, with the cost of financing its construction as well as operations. It is part of an upgrade in infrastructure, including a possible second terminal, that could let Luton airport grow from 18 million to 33 million passengers a year.
Most importantly, as Olver and the leader of Luton borough council, Hazel Simmons, point out, any airport profits go to vital local services. Simmons said: “Our airport exists solely to support the town and people in it … I’m amazed and delighted that we have been able to bring something like this to Luton airport.”
The airport has funnelled £180m to the local community over the past 25 years. Each passenger earns Luton 53p.
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How does the Dart compare?
Luton Dart £4.90 for 1.25 miles – £3.95 a mile
Heathrow Express £25 (£32 first) for 16.5 miles – £1.52 a mile (£1.94 in first class)
London Euston-Manchester Piccadilly £184 anytime single (£255 first) on Avanti for 161 miles – £1.14 (£1.58) a mile
Or if you really want to spend more …
London Underground’s Piccadilly Line, from Covent Garden to Leicester Square, is the shortest zone 1 stop at 250m. A single costs £2.50 – or £6.30 for a cash fare in peak time. If you insisted on using cash and travelling only the shortest stop, you could hit £40 a mile. (You can also do a single journey with Oyster on the longest hop, West Ruislip to Epping, 34.1 miles for £3.50 on the Central line or – changing trains to avoiding Zone 1 – £1.90, or £0.06 a mile.) | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2010/sep/19/rebecca-adlington-basket-diet | Life and style | 2010-09-18T23:03:04.000Z | Morwenna Ferrier | What's in your basket, Rebecca Adlington? | I've been swimming properly, at least semi-professionally, for over 10 years and I don't remember much from my pre-swimming days foodwise. I still swam then so I imagine my diet was similar to what it is now except with less food. All I know is that when I was little, when I lived in Mansfield, my mum raised me on homely food, cooked from scratch. Lasagne, shepherd's pie and casseroles. Quite stodgy, yeah, but very decent food.
I've heard boxers have a rough time with food so swimmers are relatively lucky in that department. The most important thing with us is not weight, it's energy, which is why we have about six or seven small meals a day. Every morning I get up at 5.15am and I can just about stomach a glass of apple juice and a small bowl of cereal before I train. After a two-hour swim I'll have a second breakfast which is the same as before except much bigger: usually a bucketful of cereal and more apple juice. What I have varies – Rice Krispies, Weetabix Minis, anything like that, kids' cereals. Then I'll spend the morning doing weights and in physio.
By now I'm starving so I'll have a sandwich. I go through phases with my fillings. At the moment it's cheese, tomato and ham on 50/50 Kingsmill bread. Four slices, so two sandwiches. After lunch it's more training and then an apple, a portion of jelly and yet even more training either in or out of the water before I hit the gym. Here I'll do my set workout and break occasionally with a banana or a banana shake. Dinner is pasta or fajitas or braising steak. Now I live on my own, so when I cook it's something fast and easy.
It's a normal diet, just a lot of it. I can't imagine what it's like to go on a diet. I mean I would definitely faint if I didn't eat almost constantly. I only get a stitch if I don't let my food digest so the digestion process is the only time I stop doing anything.
I am allowed to eat what I want so long as I steer clear of takeaways. I still allow myself treats like chocolate and the odd glass of wine. My biggest weakness is cake, especially my friend's homemade chocolate cake. That or anything from the Hummingbird Bakery. I could eat a box of their cupcakes and if and when I request them, I have to make sure everyone gets one otherwise I'd eat the lot. The sponge and the frosting are to die for.
I can't stand fish. Yuck. Even talking about it makes me feel ill. Everything about fish is wrong. Their eyes, the smell, the taste, the fleshiness. Gross.
Dr John Briffa on Rebecca Adlington's basket
Apple juice
Highly sugary, apple juice will supply some ready and easily absorbed fuel for Rebecca's morning session. It is not, however, something I'd recommend in quantity for less active individuals, on account of its, well, very sugary nature. If drunk, I recommend diluting fruit juice at least half-and-half with water.
Rice Krispies
Like the apple juice, this stuff will liberate sugar quite quickly into Rebecca's bloodstream. That might just about be OK for an athlete who will generally be burning sugar readily and using it to replenish fuel-depleted muscles. However, I think such fodder, in the long term, is generally a major health hazard on the basis of its blood sugar-disrupting nature, and the fact that it is generally low in nutritional value.
Cheese, tomato and ham sandwich
Like the kids' cereal, this meal is largely fodder (the bread). The problem for most mere mortals with this sort of food is that by releasing copious quantities of sugar into the bloodstream, it stimulates processes that predispose to things like weight gain and type 2 diabetes. It can also, in the shorter term, lead to blood sugar lows (as the body can over-compensate for the highs) that can lead to fatigue, fuzzy thinking and food cravings.
Apple
Fruit such as this is a great way to get some carbohydrate into the body in a relatively tempered and nutritious way. This is so much better than most of the other carbohydrate sources in Rebecca's diet (eg bread, children's cereals, cupcakes).
Banana
Same as apple really, though generally higher in carbohydrate and a bit fast sugar-releasing, too. This fruit is still so much better than a lot of the carb sources so prevalent in Rebecca's diet.
Jelly
Sugary rubbish. Just rubbish.
Braising steak
At last, a decent source of protein. This has particular relevance to Rebecca as it's difficult to make or maintain muscle without some decent protein in the diet.
Cupcakes
Another example of a quite trashy food based on refined, fast sugar-releasing carb. In some respects, with a diet like this, it's perhaps a good thing that weight is not a major issue for swimmers like Rebecca. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/dec/22/why-did-i-build-a-walking-desk-because-i-could | Opinion | 2021-12-22T03:27:16.000Z | Warren Murray | Why did I build a walking desk? Because I could | Warren Murray | Ihave been working from home since 2011, long before the pandemic, and getting enough exercise without a daily commute to the office has proven a challenge. I exercise most effectively when it’s just built into my day, like cycling to work was previously.
My home office is also my person-cave and it is rigged out with a small couch and a TV. At some stage I independently discovered the concept of “temptation bundling” before it became a thing. At night I was binging TV shows while doing what I called the Batman Workout – situps, pushups and pull-ups, which was all Christian Bale’s Dark Knight ever seemed to need. By the time all six seasons of The Sopranos were finished, I actually was on my way to getting slightly ripped. But then I must have hurt my back, run out of good TV shows, or got the shits with it or something because I stopped.
I necessarily digress here. I’m a tinkerer and a nerd and some years ago I started pulling apart exercise treadmills that had been abandoned on the side of the road and turning the parts inside into other things. My first effort was converting my old-tech metalwork lathe to variable speed – its name is Frankenlathe. The second effort was a benchtop drill press – its name is just Drill Press.
Now I can walk my daily five kilometres or so without becoming sweaty and angry like I would outside
Meanwhile, to address my lingering home office fitness and ergonomic concerns, my carpenter father-in-law knocked up for me a very simple sit-stand computer workstation – basically some lengths of timber screwed to my workshop bench that cantilever out to support a keyboard/mouse work surface. I bought a gas-lift drafting chair so I would be sitting at the right height, and an elevating arm for my computer monitor. When wanting to stand, I could push the chair aside and raise the monitor up – the keyboard and mouse stayed at the same level.
Just standing up at your desk does burn calories – but as a form of exercise it is dead boring, your feet get sore, your legs want to walk off somewhere else, and eventually you realise that it’s easier to think sitting down. I decided a treadmill workstation or “walking desk” would be the go. You can buy these in various forms but I decided to improvise.
Your average exercise treadmill is too long for what my workspace could accommodate, but on Gumtree I found one shorter than usual and in full working order. I may have gotten it for free – it was a “need it gone” ad – though an exchange along the lines of “$10 and I’ll help you load it” comes to mind.
I started stripping down the mini-treadmill, first discarding the handrails and figuring out the controls, but eventually it just languished in the Land of Unfinished Projects (garage) for several years, being variously shoved out of the way, tripped over, or having things stacked on or draped over it.
Building a bare-bones home gym: ‘A small bar with weights and two dumbbells can do a lot’
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Then I got interested in craft beer. Very interested. Then came the pandemic. Then between both of those combined, I was out one belt-hole in my trousers, then two, and it was time to take action.
Since breaking my hand in three places when I fell headlong while trying to take adult tennis lessons(!), a Dark Knight Rises workout regime has been out of the question, at least while the hand is in rehab – a frustratingly longwinded process. So the idea of a walking desk was revived.
Exercise treadmills can be raised to a vertical position so you can move them around more easily or stow them. I decided that mine would fold up in front of me when not in use, with the keyboard/mouse work surface sitting between me and the vertically stowed treadmill. The “arms” supporting my existing cantilevered desk just needed to be moved a bit further apart and screwed down again with good ol’ batten screws. The upright treadmill would then fit in between.
When standing on the treadmill, both the desk surface and the monitor would need to raise up by quite a lot. So my elevating monitor stand now attaches to a Besser/cinder block, which is clamped to the workbench using a bit of hardwood cut into an L-shape and another batten screw going into the workbench.
The desktop was more complicated. In the raised position, it has to be elevated and forward (away from me) in relation to its lowered position, so that I can be further forward, otherwise I would shoot off the back of the treadmill mid-stride. And when swinging the treadmill up and down, the desktop surface also needs to be shifted out of the way.
Those are the basics of how this pandemic project came to exist.
What kills exercise for me is the knowing you are doing it, and the waiting for it to end. Walking is one of the few things that I can do adequately and indefinitely without thinking about it very much. And with a treadmill desk, I don’t need to find the time.
Typing and using a mouse is a challenge when desk-walking, but you adapt, including by going into your computer settings and putting the mouse tracking on low, and sort of bracing your wrists on the desk surface to steady your hands as you type.
The Dirty Secret here is that my home office/bunker/person-cave is air conditioned. I despise the heat of summer, but now I can walk my daily five kilometres or so without becoming sweaty and angry like I would outside. The air conditioner is a repurposed one of those box-type ones that you see hanging out the wall of a cheap motel room. I put a second, outward-swinging door on my office, cut a rectangular hole and hung the air conditioner in that hole, so when I need it, I can just swing the door shut and plug it in. But that’s another story … | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2013/oct/15/brad-pitt-fury-stuntman-stabbed-bayonet | Film | 2013-10-15T14:51:00.000Z | Andrew Pulver | Brad Pitt movie stuntman stabbed with bayonet | A stuntman on the Brad Pitt movie Fury was rushed to hospital today after apparently being stabbed by a bayonet.
The 35-year-old was airlifted to Oxford's John Radcliffe hospital after the incident on the set of the second world war film, which is currently shooting in the countryside in the Chilterns foothills.
Fury, directed by David Ayer (End of Watch), is the story of a US tank crew operating in Germany towards the end of the war, as they face a desperate enemy.
According to production company representative Claudia Kalindjian said: "There has been an accident between two professional stuntmen which happened in a rehearsed action sequence.
"It was an accident. It is obviously very unfortunate. He left the set laughing and talking."
The South Central Ambulance service spokeswoman they had been called at 11.32am to deal with a shoulder injury. Thames Valley police said they were not treating the incident as a crime, but the Health and Safety Executive were investigating.
More on Fury
Brad Pitt aims sights at second world war tank movie Fury
Brad Pitt action film asks villagers to ignore gunfire and explosions | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2018/feb/27/helen-newlove-victims-commissioner-crime-justice | Society | 2018-02-27T13:00:25.000Z | Owen Bowcott | Helen Newlove: ‘Victims should never be let down by the justice system’ | Owen Bowcott | Baroness Newlove has every right to feel exasperated. For years, the victims’ commissioner has listened to Conservative party promises that stronger protection for the rights of victims will be enshrined in law.
But successive government reshuffles – that have whisked new secretaries of state through the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) and out before they have time to deliver on their agendas – combined with Brexit-induced legislative paralysis have thwarted passage of a bill.
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As recent high-profile cases – such as the trial of former football coach Barry Bennell, and the parole of taxi rapist John Worboys – show, victims, still do not receive sufficient support, Newlove believes. But the Tory life peer is more determined than disappointed. “For two years after the Queen’s speech [in 2015] I have pushed for the victims’ law that they promised,” she says. “There’s going to be [an MoJ] victims’ strategy ... but I keep calling for a victims’ law. These people should not be let down.” The MoJ will not confirm when the strategy will be published or when the long-promised victims’ bill might appear.
Newlove also wants to tackle the thorny issue of compensation. A report on how accessible the Criminal Injuries Compensation Authority is and how it has treated victims is due soon. For years the CICA refused to pay out compensation to victims who were abused as children on the grounds that they were deemed to have consented to the attacks. Although the policy was changed last year, Newlove still thinks there is room for improvement. “The whole principle,” Newlove said, “is that [if it involves anyone under 16] it’s statutory rape. It’s about treating victims with dignity and respect.”
Newlove was a housewife and then a legal secretary until the events of one evening in August 2007 catapulted her into public consciousness. Her husband, Garry, was murdered by a gang on the doorstep of the family’s home in Cheshire. He had gone outside to confront teenagers who were vandalising his wife’s car and a neighbour’s digger. His attackers were reported to have laughed as they kicked him to death. The ensuing outrage and media attention transformed Helen Newlove into a committed campaigner for justice whose personal experience delivered a different perspective on the shortcomings of the criminal justice system.
Having founded a charity, Newlove Warrington, to improve community safety in 2008 and set up set up the National Licensed Trade Association in 2010 to provide education and training for landlords and bar staff to help stop binge drinking, she was made a Conservative life peer in 2010 and was appointed the government’s champion for active safer communities the same year. Then in 2012, Newlove was appointed victims’ commissioner for England and Wales, with responsibility for championing the interests of victims and witnesses as well as monitoring compliance with the Victims’ Code, which sets out what each criminal justice agency must do for victims and a timeframe they must do it in.
Her office’s last report recommended increased funding for registered intermediaries (RIs) – professionals such as speech therapists and psychologists, who give a voice in court to those, such as the very young or adults with learning difficulties, who have problems communicating. In two extraordinary cases last year, RIs helped a two-year-old girl become the youngest person ever to give testimony for a British court and a former chorister, rendered immobile by motor neurone disease, was enabled to give evidence from his hospice bed using eye-tracking technology, which allowed him to speak via a computer. His account helped convict a retired Anglican vicar of indecent assault.
Newlove’s support for extra funding for RIs is consistent with her experience of court procedures at the trial of her husband’s murderers. She recalls watching her daughters, “traumatised and grieving for their father”, give evidence at the murder trial. “It really wounded me deeply when I watched my daughters in our case.”
Victims need legally enforceable rights, commissioner says
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“When they gave evidence, there was just an usher. They would really have liked someone who was more comforting and could explain what was happening. It’s about building a relationship. They felt very lonely. It left me thinking they didn’t have the support [they needed].
“It’s about how hard is it for them to be believed. .. I don’t want other vulnerable people [to feel] they have not had justice.” Entitlement to a registered intermediary, Newlove believes, should be a right contained in any new victims’ law.
If her recommendations to provide faster access to RIs are not taken up by the MoJ, Newlove says, it would be “letting victims down”. Ensuring an RI is on hand to help a vulnerable witness or victim give their account of what happened promptly to the police or courts is vital in order to secure evidence for a trial.
Swift justice, she added, is better. Helping victims express themselves empowers them. “If you don’t have the right people supporting them you are not making it easy. It’s about rehabilitation of victims as well as offenders.
“Why should victims always have to be fighting their corner? That’s why we need a victims’ law.”
Curriculum vitae
Age: 56.
Family: Married with three daughters from a previous marriage.
Lives: London and Merseyside.
Education: St Patrick High School, Eccles, Manchester; St Helens College.
Career: 2012-present: victims’ commissioner for England and Wales; 2010-12: government’s champion for active safer communities; 2011-2014: chair, Community Alcohol Partnerships; 2010: set up the National Licensed Trade Association; 2008: founded Newlove Warrington charity; 2000-2007: legal PA, Linder Myers, Berg Legal; 1990-2004: housewife and mum; 1980s: committal court assistant, Manchester magistrates court;
Public life: 2017-present: deputy speaker, House of Lords; 2017-present: select committee, civic society, House of Lords; 2016-2017: EU Justice subcommittee, House of Lords; 2010-present Conservative peer in the House of Lords.
Interests: Reading, history and politics, watching Real Housewives of Cheshire and a bichon frise, Alfie.
This article was amended on 28 February 2018. An earlier version said RIs helped a two-year-old girl testify in a British court. The two-year-old’s evidence to the court was pre-recorded outside the courtroom. This has been corrected. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/education/2017/feb/23/ppe-oxford-university-degree-that-rules-britain | Education | 2017-02-23T06:00:06.000Z | Andy Beckett | PPE: the Oxford degree that runs Britain | Monday, 13 April 2015 was a typical day in modern British politics. An Oxford University graduate in philosophy, politics and economics (PPE), Ed Miliband, launched the Labour party’s general election manifesto. It was examined by the BBC’s political editor, Oxford PPE graduate Nick Robinson, by the BBC’s economics editor, Oxford PPE graduate Robert Peston, and by the director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, Oxford PPE graduate Paul Johnson. It was criticised by the prime minister, Oxford PPE graduate David Cameron. It was defended by the Labour shadow chancellor, Oxford PPE graduate Ed Balls.
Elsewhere in the country, with the election three weeks away, the Liberal Democrat chief secretary to the Treasury, Oxford PPE graduate Danny Alexander, was preparing to visit Kingston and Surbiton, a vulnerable London seat held by a fellow Lib Dem minister, Oxford PPE graduate Ed Davey. In Kent, one of Ukip’s two MPs, Oxford PPE graduate Mark Reckless, was campaigning in his constituency, Rochester and Strood. Comments on the day’s developments were being posted online by Michael Crick, Oxford PPE graduate and political correspondent of Channel 4 News.
On the BBC Radio 4 website, the Financial Times statistics expert and Oxford PPE graduate Tim Harford presented his first election podcast. On BBC1, Oxford PPE graduate and Newsnight presenter Evan Davies conducted the first of a series of interviews with party leaders. In the print media, there was an election special in the Economist magazine, edited by Oxford PPE graduate Zanny Minton-Beddoes; a clutch of election articles in the political magazine Prospect, edited by Oxford PPE graduate Bronwen Maddox; an election column in the Guardian by Oxford PPE graduate Simon Jenkins; and more election coverage in the Times and the Sun, whose proprietor, Rupert Murdoch, studied PPE at Oxford.
More than any other course at any other university, more than any revered or resented private school, and in a manner probably unmatched in any other democracy, Oxford PPE pervades British political life. From the right to the left, from the centre ground to the fringes, from analysts to protagonists, consensus-seekers to revolutionary activists, environmentalists to ultra-capitalists, statists to libertarians, elitists to populists, bureaucrats to spin doctors, bullies to charmers, successive networks of PPEists have been at work at all levels of British politics – sometimes prominently, sometimes more quietly – since the degree was established 97 years ago.
“It is overwhelmingly from Oxford that the governing elite has reproduced itself, generation after generation,” writes the pre-eminent British political biographer, John Campbell, in his 2014 study of the postwar Labour reformer and SDP co‑founder Roy Jenkins, who studied PPE at the university in the 1930s. The three-year undergraduate course was then less than two decades old, but it was “already the course of choice for aspiring politicians”: the future Labour leaders Michael Foot and Hugh Gaitskell, the future prime ministers Edward Heath and Harold Wilson.
From the archive: PPE: the Oxford degree that runs Britain – podcast
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But Oxford PPE is more than a factory for politicians and the people who judge them for a living. It also gives many of these public figures a shared outlook: confident, internationalist, intellectually flexible, and above all sure that small groups of supposedly well-educated, rational people, such as themselves, can and should improve Britain and the wider world. The course has also been taken by many foreign leaders-in-the-making, among them Bill Clinton, Benazir Bhutto, Aung San Suu Kyi, and the Australian prime ministers Malcolm Fraser and Bob Hawke. An Oxford PPE degree has become a global status symbol of academic achievement and worldly potential.
The Labour peer and thinker Maurice Glasman, who studied modern history at Cambridge, says: “PPE combines the status of an elite university degree – PPE is the ultimate form of being good at school – with the stamp of a vocational course. It is perfect training for cabinet membership, and it gives you a view of life. It is a very profound cultural form.”
Yet in the new age of populism, of revolts against elites and “professional politicians”, Oxford PPE no longer fits into public life as smoothly as it once did. With corporate capitalism misfiring, mainstream politicians blundering, and much of the traditional media seemingly bewildered by the upheavals, PPE, the supplier of supposedly highly trained talent to all three fields, has lost its unquestioned authority. More than that, it has become easier to doubt whether a single university course, and its graduates, should have such influence in the first place. To its proliferating critics, PPE is not a solution to Britain’s problems; it is a cause of them.
O
xford PPE remains opaque to outsiders. It is often mentioned in the media but rarely explained. Even to know what PPE stands for is to be unusually well-informed about British education and power – often, to be part of the same Oxford milieu as the PPEists. When I asked one former party leader what he got from the degree, he said with studied insouciance: “Why would you want to write about PPE?” As the establishment often says when scrutinised: nothing to see here.
PPE is particularly associated with Labour. The degree helped shape party figures as different as Tony Benn, Tony Crosland and Peter Mandelson. In office, says Glasman, Labour has often effectively been “the governing wing of the PPE course”. Yet the same could be said of the Tories. The former cabinet ministers Michael Heseltine, Nigel Lawson, William Hague and David Willetts, and Cameron’s former Downing Street guru Steve Hilton, are all Oxford PPE graduates. Current Conservative PPEists include the health secretary Jeremy Hunt, the chancellor Philip Hammond, the work and pensions secretary Damian Green, and the justice secretary Elizabeth Truss.
“PPE thrives,” says Willetts, a former education minister who is writing a book about universities, “because a problem of English education is too much specialisation too soon, whereas PPE is much closer to the prestigious degrees for generalists available in the United States. As a PPE graduate, you end up with a broad sense of modern political history, you’ve cantered through political thought, done [philosophical] logic, wrestled with economics from monetarism to Maynard Keynes. You’ve had to get through a lot of work – 16 essays a term. That’s very useful later when you have to write a speech to a deadline.” Willetts adds: “As a minister, you do sometimes think that British political life is an endless recreation of the PPE essay crisis.”
Not everyone thinks that last-minute cramming and improvisation – Cameron’s hastily-arranged EU referendum comes to mind – is the best way to run a country. Last October, the leading Brexit campaigner and former government education adviser Dominic Cummings wrote on his influential blog: “If you are young, smart, and interested in politics, think very hard before studying PPE … It actually causes huge problems as it encourages people like Cameron and Ed Balls to … spread bad ideas with lots of confidence and bluffing.”
Other critics of PPE are blunter still. “All the Worst Remainers Read PPE at Oxford”, jeered James Delingpole on the far-right website Breitbart last year. Nigel Farage of Ukip sometimes calls over-complicated political ideas “PPE bollocks”. In the tabloids and on the internet, PPE has become synonymous with elitist, impractical, inadequate. In 2014, the columnist Nick Cohen, himself an Oxford PPE graduate, published his much-cited thoughts on the course in the conservative Spectator magazine. PPEists, he wrote, “form the largest single component of the most despised governing class since the [1832] Great Reform Act”.
Ed Miliband, David Cameron and Philip Hammond Photograph: Guardian Design Team
Britain is a country notoriously comfortable with educational elitism, with elaborate hierarchies and tight power networks. Yet in their often crude and illiberal way, these enemies of PPE are right to point out the strangeness of a single degree, and the mindset it often produces, remaining dominant for so long. And some of their arguments are echoed, in a more subtle way, inside Oxford PPE itself. The Labour peer Stewart Wood, a former adviser to Ed Miliband, took the degree in the 1980s, taught politics at Oxford between 1995 and 2010, and still runs occasional seminars there for PPE students. “It does still feel like a course for people who are going to run the Raj in 1936,” he says. “Vast reading every week; writing essays that synthesise and summarise – these are the skills of a civil servant in the late British empire. In the politics part of PPE, you can go three years without discussing a single contemporary public policy issue. There’s too much about the past, about political institutions, and not enough about populism or social movements.”
The very structure of the course, Wood believes, leaves many PPE graduates with “a centrist bias”. “You cover so much material that most students think, mistakenly, that the only way to do it justice is to take a centre position. And they conclude, again mistakenly, that to do well in the exams you have to avoid being an outlier. They think if you know a bit of everything, you’ll never be found out.”
The rise and possible fall of Oxford PPE is part of a bigger story: the 100-year trajectory of a political establishment
Mark Littlewood, director of the free-market thinktank the Institute of Economic Affairs, who studied PPE at Oxford between 1990 and 1993, claims the degree’s political bias goes deeper. “PPE leads people towards a sort of statist role. My tutors were absolutely charming and brilliant, but I don’t think I was exposed to a single libertarian, conservative or classical liberal one. The students were overwhelmingly leftish.” A current PPE third-year says: “Nearly every academic at Oxford who teaches politics is a liberal, to some extent. They go from moderate Conservative to moderate Labour. There are lots of people on the right economically, but nearly everyone’s a social liberal.”
The rise and possible fall of Oxford PPE is part of a bigger British story: the hundred-year trajectory of a political establishment, which may now be turning decisively downward. “The crisis of PPE is part of the broader crisis of social democracy”, says William Davies, a politics lecturer at Goldsmiths College in London. “PPE is seen as part of the apparatus of the state … privilege connected to public service” – at a time when fewer and fewer voters believe such a thing is possible. Once widely regarded as “highly qualified people with good intentions”, as Davies puts it, PPE graduates are now “bogeymen”. How did a mere undergraduate degree become so important?
O
xford PPE began as something radical. In 1920, in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution and the first world war, the university was in a reforming phase. Usually glacially slow to change, Oxford had, according to its official history, become “interested in the problems raised by political unrest in Europe and Asia and high unemployment in the UK”.
An idea had been gradually crystallising for a degree that engaged with the contemporary world, rather than the medieval and classical ones which were Oxford’s usual preoccupations. Such a degree, argued economics and philosophy dons, would produce graduates better able to serve Britain and its empire. It would also open up Oxford to state-educated applicants, if it dropped the university’s traditional requirement that all students know Ancient Greek, a speciality of private schools.
At Oxford, then as now, classics was reverently called “Greats”; so the advocates of what would become PPE first called their concept “Greats without Greek”, then “Modern Greats”. “Almost always in Oxford,” says the economist Andrew Graham, who studied Oxford PPE in the 1960s, was a tutor there until 1997, and remains a prominent advocate for the degree, “the more you can make it look as if what you’re proposing has been implicit in Oxford life all along, the more you can do quite radical things”.
At first, the reformers wanted the new course to include a large science component – something Dominic Cummings and other current PPE sceptics think the degree gravely lacks – but that proposal proved one innovation too many. Instead, in November 1920, Oxford agreed to offer a PPE course, the first of its kind in the world. The university journal the Oxford Magazine, and many dons, suspected that PPE might prove a superficial or incoherent degree. Regardless, the first PPE students arrived the following autumn.
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For all three years of the course, they worked on all three subjects: frantically composing essays to present at multiple weekly tutorials, taking frequent rounds of exams, and attempting to understand topics from “British Constitutional and Political History Since 1760” to the economic thought of Adam Smith and the philosophy of Aristotle. In 1970, the PPE syllabus was finally relaxed a little, allowing students to drop one subject at the end of the first year. Most do, but a high-status minority do not. And for both groups, the diffuse character of the course persists: “When I questioned one of my dons about this,” says Ricken Patel, who studied PPE at Oxford from 1996 to 1999, before co-founding the global online activist network Avaaz, “he said, ‘You are sinking deep boreholes into vast terrain. We teach you how to dig. It’s up to you to connect those boreholes.’”
From the start, for some ambitious students, Oxford PPE became a base for political adventures as much as a degree. Hugh Gaitskell arrived at the university in 1924, a public schoolboy with no strong ideological views. There he fell under the spell of GDH Cole, an intense young economics tutor and socialist – the first of many such PPE dons – who was “talked about”, Gaitskell wrote excitedly later, “as a possible leader of a British revolution”. When the General Strike broke out in 1926, Gaitskell became his driver, ferrying urgent correspondence between Cole and the union leaders in London, back and forth along the twisting country roads, racing to get back to his Oxford college before its gates closed each evening.
Thirty-four years later, when Gaitskell was Labour leader, he published a glowing memoir about his PPE years. The leftwing writer Hilary Wainwright came across it as a schoolgirl. “I was becoming radical,” she remembers, “and I thought, ‘Yes! I want to go there!’” She started the degree in 1967.
Thanks to its closeness to Westminster and the capital’s other power centres, Oxford University has always been a worldly as well as otherworldly place. But PPE made the sporadic involvement of dons and students in national politics much more systematic. This traffic has been particularly intense at one college: Balliol.
Balliol is a narrow L-shape of Victorian and older buildings, lacking in architectural fripperies, almost utilitarian compared with more aristocratic Oxford colleges. For centuries it has striven self-consciously to be more meritocratic and outward-looking: pioneering entrance by exam rather than wealth and connections, playing a central role in the creation of PPE, and seeking to populate the establishment with what it used to call “Balliol men”: able, reform-minded, impregnably sure of themselves.
Balliol has always had more PPE students and dons than other colleges – an elite within the elite – and has taught them in its own way. “Balliol PPE,” says Graham, who was a tutor there for 28 years, “has had the view that the disciplines should be interlinked, that you’ll be a better economist if you’ve studied some philosophy.”
Graham is an unshowy, seemingly unguarded character, who calls himself “a leftie” and has a Cuba guidebook on a coffee table in his modest Oxford house. But he was a key economic adviser to the Labour prime ministers Harold Wilson and James Callaghan in the turbulent 1960s and 70s, and to the Labour leader John Smith in the 1990s. (Between 2005 and 2016, Graham was also a director of the Scott Trust, which controls the Guardian.)
During the late 80s and early 90s, Graham taught the future Labour ministers Yvette Cooper, Kitty Ussher and James Purnell, now the BBC’s director of strategy. Ussher remembers: “I was having a conversation with Andrew one day in the early 90s, as we were walking across the quad, about the British rate of inflation. He was doing a lot of arm-waving. He said, ‘Inflation’s high. What can you do about it? Interest rates … you put them up!’ He was really saying, ‘This is something you can effect. Something you might do in later life.’” A decade after graduating from Balliol, Ussher was a Treasury minister.
I asked Graham how he felt when he detected political potential in a student. He said with uncharacteristic care, “If you think people are going to go and make a positive contribution to the good society …” Then he beamed: “You feel pleased!”
Edward Heath and Roy Jenkins studied PPE at Balliol. John Campbell wrote in his biography of Heath that the Balliol philosophy tutor AD Lindsay, one of the architects of PPE, was “the greatest influence in Heath’s life … after his mother”. Heath was still religiously attending Balliol events when I studied modern history there half a century later.
During the long mid-20th century heyday of social democracy, some Balliol tutors enjoyed advertising their power. According to Jenkins, the economist Thomas Balogh, who taught there from the 1930s to the 60s, “liked arranging for his tutorials to be interrupted by telephone calls from the famous”. In the 1960s, a favourite caller was the prime minister and PPEist Harold Wilson, who had hired Balogh as a Downing Street adviser.
Like Heath and many early PPEists, Wilson came from a working-class background. Like many PPEists, he came to Oxford to do a different subject and then switched. And like Heath, he found studying PPE a life-changing experience. Forever after, Wilson would tell people he had achieved the top PPE First in his year. One of his tutors said that Wilson worked so hard at Oxford, he “knew more about elections than anybody else in Europe”. Wilson went on to win more general elections than any other modern British political leader.
P
PE quickly became Oxford’s fastest-growing degree, second in student numbers only to history. The future Labour and SDP politician Shirley Williams did PPE in the late 1940s. “It had a special attraction,” she says. “It was a new subject by Oxford standards. The dons were not traditional Oxford dons. And economics was becoming a more and more important part of political life, as the British economy got into difficulties.”
Yet during the postwar years, PPE gradually lost its radicalism. One of the strengths and weaknesses of Oxford is that it is not a top-down university: what is taught is largely decided by what dons want to teach. The PPE tutors acquired habits, and the syllabus “stopped evolving”, says Williams. By the late 1960s, despite the decade’s global explosion of protest politics, PPE was still focused on more conventional, sometimes insular topics. “The economics was apolitical,” Wainwright remembers, “questions of inequality were not addressed. In politics, the endless tutorials seemed so unrelated to the crises that were going on. PPE had become a technical course in how to govern.”
Not coincidentally, it became a favourite for the offspring of prominent politicians and economists. Margaret Jay, James Callaghan’s daughter, studied PPE at Oxford from 1958 to 1961. “There were six PPEists in my year at my college [Somerville],” she recalls. “One was Gaitskell’s daughter. Two were daughters of the extremely well-known economists [and Labour advisers] James Meade and Nicholas Kaldor.” More recent PPEists include Rory Campbell, son of the former Labour spin doctor Alastair Campbell, and Will Straw, son of the former Labour foreign secretary Jack Straw and head of the official Remain campaign. As PPE became part of the Oxford landscape, dominated by the university’s endless appetite for traditions, it exchanged its original meritocratic culture for something more dynastic.
Harold Wilson, Edward Heath and Roy Jenkins. Photograph: Guardian Design Team
During the 1960s, a rebellion began against the degree that is the forgotten – and more thoughtful – precursor to the anti-PPE mood of today. The troublemaking leftwing writer Tariq Ali was part of it. After enduring the course from 1963 to 1966, he bet a friend that he could bring up the Vietnam war in all his final exam papers. “In economics,” Ali remembers, “one of the questions was: ‘Which is the cheapest form of subsidised transport in the world?’ And I put, ‘The American helicopter service from Saigon to the jungle, which is totally free. The only problem is that occasionally it’s a one-way trip!’”
He hoped the examiners would fail him, thus exposing the course’s conservatism. But the dons were too canny, or too liberal. They gave him a Third.
Meanwhile the wider PPE student body fragmented. Wainwright recalls, “There were two layers: the usual would-be politicians, like [the future Tory minister] Edwina Currie and [the future Labour peer] David Lipsey, who’d be at the Labour or Conservative clubs or the Union [debating society], and the political activists and critics of the PPE course.” She joined the latter. “We began a critique of the whole course, organising ourselves into groups. We wanted a more politically engaged course, that looked beneath the status quo’s surface.”
The most potent product of this ferment, part of a wider questioning of British university degrees, was a long polemic, The Poverty of PPE, published in the great revolutionary year of 1968. The title was a reference to a book by Karl Marx, whom many felt the course covered inadequately, and the final text was written by Trevor Pateman, an astringent leftwinger who had just received an outstanding First. Oxford PPE, he wrote, “gives no training in scholarship, only refining to a high degree of perfection the ability to write short dilettantish essays on the basis of very little knowledge: ideal training for the social engineer”.
Pateman’s accusation of glibness is repeated by many of today’s PPE critics. But his argument that the degree’s intellectual limits were deliberate, intended to cement and dignify the deep structure of British power, was more fundamental, and led him to urge changes to the course that were hardly populist or tabloid-friendly. He wanted PPE to incorporate sociology, anthropology, and art, to become “more fluid” and “frankly subversive”, and to “assist the radicalisation and mobilisation of political opinion outside the university”.
The PPE hierarchy responded as English establishment liberals tend to when attacked by radicals: absorbing some of the criticisms to reform their institution, while leaving its fundamentals intact. By 1971, the politics reading list included the counterculture favourites Frantz Fanon and Regis Debray, as well as a section on “Deviance, Alienation and Anomie”. But a much longer section remained on “British Political and Constitutional History since 1865”. An only modestly updated version of this course theme survives to this day.
O
xford PPE can be a stubborn, elusive enemy. At the university, it is both everywhere and nowhere. “PPEists are ubiquitous,” says the third-year student. “Nearly every student society will have PPEists on its committee. PPEists are generally quite outgoing, good at talking, good at flitting from one thing to another.” Students of more rigidly-timetabled Oxford degrees, such as the sciences, have traditionally considered PPE a bit lightweight. In a women’s toilet cubicle in one of the university libraries, there used to be graffiti above the toilet roll: “PPE degree. Please take one.”
Unlike many other Oxford courses, PPE has no faculty building. In a city full of grand academic headquarters, PPE makes do with the partial use of two relatively anonymous facilities, half a mile apart: a low glassy block for politics and economics and a plain stone one for philosophy. In a sense, Oxford PPE isn’t an institution at all, but a diaspora of students, scattered between its three subjects, in ever-shifting combinations, as the compulsory proportion of the syllabus has steadily shrunk.
“There isn’t even a senior PPE tutor,” says Andrew Graham. “All there is is a PPE committee, which meets …” he slips into untypical vagueness, “somewhere in one of the buildings”. A recent member of the committee tells me it meets twice a term, “for a couple of hours”. How would he sum up the current mood of the committee? “They feel pretty good. They feel they’ve brought PPE up to date.”
The third-year student says: “In my tutorials, we’re talking about the Brexit [court] case. We’re reading current government documents about it.” PPEists can also study “Game Theory”, or “Politics In China”, or “the Sociology of Post-Industrial Societies”. The perennial criticism of the degree as parochially British and old-fashioned can be overdone.
Yet one focus of the course has not changed since 1920. The official video for potential applicants opens with a lingering shot of the door of 10 Downing Street. “Lots of people go into politics,” emphasises a tutor in the film, “so you have a lot of resources to draw on.” Lists of famous political alumni appear in the newsletters of the politics and economics departments.
So far, there has only been one period when this flow has been interrupted. Between 1979 and 1997, fewer PPEists than usual became central political figures. Gangs of Oxford graduates continued to materialise in the cabinet; but many had studied other subjects, most commonly law, and they were joined by a new elite, also law graduates, from Cambridge. The governments of Margaret Thatcher and John Major were more hard-edged and dogmatic, and less statist, than their postwar predecessors, and so had less use for the supple, compromising, pro-Whitehall mindset of many Oxford PPEists.
Stewart Wood did the degree from 1986 to 1989, when Thatcherism was at its zenith. He remembers the course alternately “chasing the Thatcher reforms”, with hastily set essays on privatisation, or ignoring her altogether. Mark Littlewood says that when he studied PPE at Balliol in the early 1990s, “There was still a view that Thatcherism was an aberration.”
Graham, who taught Littlewood, says this is a caricature: “I remember doing lots of seminars and tutorials about Thatcherite economics!” Littlewood does concede that in philosophy he was asked to read a libertarian book – Anarchy, State, and Utopia by Robert Nozick – and as a consequence stopped being “a soggy social democrat” and became an advocate of small government. Strikingly, others who have chafed against Oxford PPE, such as Hilary Wainwright and Tariq Ali, tell similar stories of finding liberation in the margins of the course, by latching on to dissident tutors or devising their own reading lists. Graham says: “This idea that PPE is about indoctrination … the people we teach are too clever for that. And they rebel.”
Benazir Bhutto, Aung San Suu Kyi and Rupert Murdoch Photograph: Guardian Design Team
But not all of them. As Thatcherism began to weaken in the late 80s and early 90s, so PPE was helping to form the next, more pragmatic generation of British politicians – and achieving a peak of influence that seems distant now. At Oxford, David Miliband and Ed Miliband were both tutored by the economist Andrew Glyn. A former Oxford PPE student himself, Glyn had for much of the 70s and 80s been a central thinker for the leftwing revolutionary group Militant, but had then acquired a grudging respect for social democracy. “Andrew was Ed’s biggest intellectual influence,” says Miliband’s former adviser Stewart Wood. In 2011, I had a conversation with Miliband about modern capitalism, and he emphasised how a steadily smaller share of profit was going to workers. Glyn had pioneered precisely that argument decades earlier.
Meanwhile at Balliol, Yvette Cooper and James Purnell were part of a confident group of PPEists, who delivered precociously fluent speeches at student gatherings, and made themselves useful to the reviving Labour party. During the long Oxford summer holidays, Purnell worked for a rising young MP called Tony Blair. With a tradition of bringing politicians to Oxford, as seminar participants or visiting speakers, PPE both demystifies politics for students and helps the parties spot talent.
It gives you fluency. Just like politicians, journalists often have to be performance artists
Michael Cockerell
David Cameron did the degree from 1985 to 1988. His politics tutor Vernon Bogdanor famously said afterwards that Cameron was “one of the ablest students I ever taught”. Although Cameron was barely politically active at Oxford, within weeks of achieving a First he obtained a job in the Conservative Research Department, a fast track for future ministers. “You could see Cameron as a classic PPEist: worldly-wise, tutored in the ways of the media, the essay-crisis prime minister,” says the documentary-maker Michael Cockerell, who has made celebrated profiles of a succession of PPEist politicians, including Cameron, Ed Miliband, Roy Jenkins and the postwar Labour reformer Barbara Castle.
Cockerell, naturally, did PPE himself. “It gives you fluency,” he says. “Just like politicians, journalists often have to be performance artists – the piece to camera outside Number 10. And PPEists come to understand how people operate in public life, what’s beneath the gloss.”
Although, given the insidery tone of much British political and economic journalism – and its failure to foresee the financial crisis, or populism, or the fates that awaited Cameron and Miliband – the media PPEists perhaps understand the political PPEists a little too well: an understanding that sometimes softens into empathy, or outright sympathy, while ignoring ways of doing politics that lack the civility of the PPE tutorial.
Maurice Glasman say: “PPEists don’t do conflict. Oxford PPE reduces everything in politics to a technical question: what’s the right policy? PPE teaches you, ‘Don’t be vile to bankers after the financial crash. What they were doing wasn’t stealing; it was down to the wrong government policy.’”
Generalisations about a form of education as baggy and enduring as PPE will never be totally accurate. Even the political careers of individual PPEists can be interpreted in wildly different ways. Was Cameron a compromising or radical Tory? It probably depends on your experience of austerity. But it can be said that the record of generations of PPEists in reforming Britain has been mixed. For every Roy Jenkins, who as home secretary helped legalise abortion and homosexuality, there has been a Danny Alexander, the former Lib Dem Treasury secretary, who unconvincingly justified the coalition’s spending cuts for five years, and then immediately lost his seat.
I
n some ways, Oxford PPE is still thriving. Applications for the course rose by 28% between 2007 and 2015. One successful recent applicant says: “I didn’t know that much about PPE when I was at my comprehensive. Then, during the application process, you pick up this reputation. Everybody comes to know this list of people who did PPE.”
“But when you go to the lectures, and they’re absolutely packed out – hundreds of people – you realise that only a few of them will go into frontline politics.” Instead, the influence of PPE has become more diffuse: many politically inclined graduates go on to work for charities, aid agencies, activist groups, the World Bank, the United Nations. It is an acknowledgement by the students themselves that the days of the degree simply producing a Westminster elite may finally be ending.
Nor is politics, however you define it, the only career Oxford PPE qualifies you for. “At my college, the investment banks were just hoovering them up,” says someone who taught the course between 2000 and 2009. William Davies, while critical of Oxford PPE’s political caution, sees an inconsistency in how its graduates are treated by the course’s enemies: “The ones who just scurry off into the City and make as much money as possible – you never hear about them again. They’ve joined the truly invisible elite that the public don’t understand. Meanwhile, the public-spirited PPEists get a kicking.”
Regardless, over recent decades two dozen other British universities have set up their own PPE courses: from a more politically adventurous version at Goldsmiths, in which Davies is involved, heavily informed by sociology, anthropology and cultural studies – the sort of course the 1968 Oxford radicals wanted, but never quite got – to a more maths-heavy, technocratic, four-year version at the London School of Economics. The PPE concept has also spread to dozens of universities abroad, from the United States to South Africa and the Netherlands.
But the closest equivalents of Oxford PPE are older: the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, founded under a different name in 1936, and the Ecole Nationale d’Administration in France, founded in 1945. Like Oxford PPE, both were attempts to improve government, and both have accumulated enemies as faith in government has soured.
Shirley Williams has been a Kennedy School professor since the late 80s, and says it has “more of the grit of politics, more study from practical experience” than Oxford. Ricken Patel studied at the Kennedy School after Oxford, as many PPE graduates do, and found it more “professional”. “The curriculum was all technical skills: public speaking, strategic management – you’re not going to learn these from PPE.” But he goes on: “It had nothing like the academic rigour of PPE. And the Kennedy School took no position on what values and principles you, as a graduate, might be advancing.”
Yet Graham and other PPE veterans worry that over the last decade, unnoticed by the outside world, some of the Oxford degree’s “values and principles” have been weakening. In line with economics teaching elsewhere, “Oxford economics has become more and more mathematical,” he says. “Economics is becoming more separate from the other PPE subjects. And there’s been a reduction in tutor interest in PPE as a whole. It’s getting harder to persuade them to contribute outside their subjects.”
He thinks that Oxford PPE “will probably hold together”. A production line for mild politicians that has already survived the rise of fascism in the 1930s, the second world war, the collapse of the postwar centrist consensus, the end of the British empire, and decades of social disruption caused by the internet and post-industrialism, may well be flexible and robust enough to keep functioning while populism runs its course.
But if PPE does not survive, Oxford University, ever pragmatic, already offers an alternative of sorts. Seven years ago, after a £75m donation from the Ukrainian-American businessman and philanthropist Leonard Blavatnik, Oxford opened the Blavatnik School of Government. It occupies a purpose-built new building, a great whorl of glass and golden stone, a few hundred yards from the PPE philosophers’ dowdier premises. The Blavatnik offers courses in public policy for postgraduates, but summarises its mission more expansively: “educating leaders”. In Britain, as in most old countries, one elite tends to replace another.
Follow the Long Read on Twitter at @gdnlongread, or sign up to the long read weekly email here. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/travel/2024/mar/10/sanlucar-de-barrameda-andalucia-spain-beach-bars-and-restaurants | Travel | 2024-03-10T07:00:12.000Z | Sorrel Downer | Horses on the beach, fried fish and sherry: Sanlúcar de Barrameda, Andalucía, Spain | Even the geology conspires to make Sanlúcar de Barrameda feel laid-back. Spain slows and drifts out peacefully in this coastal cul-de-sac of estuarine sandbanks, wide beaches and shallow rippling sea in the corner of the province of Cádiz. It certainly helps that there are no rocky cliffs and surfer waves, and that the thick sand keeps the beaches soundproofed and free from the rattling drawl of pebbles.
I live among uneven green mountains in the Sierra de Cádiz, so a visit to this flat expanse of navy blue and cream is tantamount to therapy. Each August, horses thunder down the sands in a series of evening races, but that burst of exertion aside, the mood on its several beaches is generally tranquil. Especially in winter and spring.
Sandy beach near Sanlúcar de Barrameda. Photograph: Irina Naoumova/Alamy
My own routine is to stroll the length of Playa de la Calzada – a paseo maritimo lined by quivering palms and quiet chalets – to the low headland at Las Piletas, then return barefoot in the shallows through flitting fish, passing fishing boats lilting at their moorings. Out of season I do this, like almost everyone, accompanied by frolicking dogs.
Fish is a common denominator of the Sanlúcar experience: fried, grilled, oven-baked, stuffed in tacos, served raw in ceviche by next-generation chefs. Largely thanks to fish and shellfish – including its renowned langostinos – the town was rightly named Spain’s capital of gastronomy in 2022.
Locally produced salty manzanilla sherry and the disproportionate number of cloud-free days help with the spirit of alegria
Along with the locally produced salty manzanilla sherry and the disproportionate number of cloud-free days, the certainty of eating well drives the spirit of alegria (meaning joy or happiness) that builds up from noon in the bar and restaurant terraces of Plaza del Cabildo in the centre, and the old river mouth fishing district, Bajo de Guía.
Lunch options after a stroll along La Calzada include Veranillo de Santa Ana, tucked in among the chalets at the start of the beach: it’s the choice for melt-in-the-mouth bass and halibut served with leeks and clams (booking advisable).
Evening horse riding along the beach at Sanlúcar de Barrameda. Photograph: Carl DeAbreu/Alamy
The cheap and cheerful chiringuitos (beach bars) are alluring on a summer’s day, but the restaurants in Bajo de Guía provide good food plus eye-catching, life-affirming entertainment. The clattery zinc tables lining the river are invariably packed, with flamenco music, football on TV and Europop blaring from competing speakers; and there’s much vigorous yelping and shouting. Some customers arrive on their horses and get served in the saddle. The strip is chaotic though strangely relaxed because no one is in any hurry to go anywhere else.
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Sanlúcar was once the starting point for people going everywhere else. It was from here that Juan Sebastián Elcano and Ferdinand Magellan set sail in 1519 for the first circumnavigation of the globe, and new world expeditions brought home the riches evident in many of the churches and small palaces of Barrio Alto, the old quarter up the hill.
Exploring the shady cobbled streets between the white walls of old cloisters and bodegas is peaceful and rewarding. And there is no better place to sit on a hot afternoon than in the mighty church of Our Lady of the O, whether you’re religious or not.
Calm, light-filled La Alcoba del Agua, hidden in narrow streets 10 minutes’ walk from La Calzada, is great value, with doubles from €55 (€69 in summer) room-only.
This article was amended on 11 March 2024. An earlier version said that Juan Sebastián Elcano was from Sanlúcar, when he was from the Basque Country. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2012/dec/07/britain-recessions-history | Business | 2012-12-07T15:46:21.000Z | Larry Elliott | British recessions: a short history | Post war blues: 1920-24
Britain suffered a colossal boom and bust in the years following the end of the first world war. The economy grew rapidly in 1919, due to the release of pent-up demand, but diminished production capacity after four years of total war meant inflation surged. British goods became uncompetitive on world markets and policy was tightened aggressively by the Bank of England and the Treasury. The result was the biggest peak-to-trough fall in output in 100 years.
The Great Depression: 1929-33
The UK suffered less grievously than Germany or the US after the Wall Street crash of 1929, in part because its economy had already suffered a big slump in the early 1920s and grew only modestly for the rest of the decade. There was, however, a fall in output on a similar scale to that seen in 2008-09. The road to recovery began in September 1931, when Britain was the first country to come off the Gold Standard, allowing the pound and interest rates to fall. Cheap money boosted industry and house building.
Stagflation: 1973-76
The west's long postwar boom came to an end in the autumn of 1973, when the Yom Kippur war resulted in a fourfold increase in oil prices. Britain already had inflationary problems because of the Heath government's attempts to boost growth and a miners' strike led to a three-day week in early 1974. Unemployment and inflation rose, and the annual increase in the cost of living hit a postwar peak of 26% by the summer of 1975. Until recently, this was Britain's only double-dip recession.
Manufacturing meltdown: 1980-81
Margaret Thatcher came to power in 1979 convinced that radical action was needed to reverse Britain's relative economic decline. Interest rates were raised in an attempt to tackle inflation, with the pound – already rising as a result of the UK's booming North Sea oil revenues – allowed to appreciate further on the foreign exchanges. Even so, the annual inflation rate rose to 20% in Thatcher's first year in office and this, together with high borrowing costs and cheap imports drove 20% of manufacturing to the wall.
Lawson's legacy: 1990-92
By the mid-1980s, Britain was growing strongly, unemployment was coming down and inflation was below 2.5%. But under Nigel Lawson's stewardship, a property frenzy was allowed to develop, fuelled by low interest rates and tax cuts. After hitting a trough of 7.5% in 1988, interest rates doubled in the next year, with the result that unemployment rose above 3 million for the second time in a decade and house repossessions hit record levels. The bust was intensified by Britain's membership of the Exchange Rate Mechanism, which prevented interest rates from being cut.
Banking bust: 2008-9
While not as deep as the slump of the early 1920s, the recession that began between the run on Northern Rock in September 2007 and the collapse of Lehman Brothers a year later has proved the most stubborn in Britain's modern history. In all the previous downturns, output rose above its pre-recession peak within 48 months, and in some cases well before that. Output is currently more than 3% below its early 2008 level and the Office for Budget Responsibility predicts it will be 2014 before the lost ground is recouped. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2023/nov/09/picasso-painting-golden-muse-sells-new-york-femme-a-la-montre | Art and design | 2023-11-09T08:49:26.000Z | Harriet Sherwood | Picasso painting of his ‘golden muse’ sells for $139.4m in New York | A portrait of Pablo Picasso’s “golden muse” and secret lover has sold for $139.4m (£114m) at auction in New York, making it the second most valuable work by the 20th-century artist.
Femme à la montre, painted in 1932, was described by Sotheby’s as the “prized jewel” of about 120 artworks owned by Emily Fisher Landau, one of the greatest art collectors of the 20th century, that were sold on Wednesday evening.
The portrait comfortably exceeded Sotheby’s estimate of at least $120m but fell short of the record for a Picasso at auction, held by Les femmes d’Alger, which sold for $179.4m in 2015. Four other works by Picasso have sold for more than $100m in the past 20 years.
Picasso painted Femme à la montre during his explosive “year of wonders” as he prepared for his first large-scale retrospective in Paris at the age of 50.
By 1932, his clandestine affair with Marie-Thérèse Walter had been under way for several years. The relationship began when the artist, then 45, spotted the 17-year-old through the window of Galeries Lafayette in Paris. She inspired paintings, drawings and sculptures, some of which are considered the greatest works of Picasso’s eight-decade career.
The portrait was bought in 1968 by Fisher Landau, one of the greatest art collectors of the 20th century. She hung it above the mantelpiece in the living room of her New York apartment. By the time she died, aged 102, earlier this year, her art collection could have filled several museums.
Fisher Landau began collecting art in earnest after a burglar made off with diamonds, emeralds, rubies and sapphires that had been gifts from her husband. Instead of replacing the jewellery, Fisher Landau decided to use the substantial insurance payout to buy paintings and sculptures.
She acquired works by Mark Rothko, Franz Kline, Henri Matisse, Georgia O’Keeffe, Piet Mondrian, Paul Klee and others. Andy Warhol painted her portrait.
The Fisher Landau sale on Wednesday kicked off the autumn auction season, which is expected to include more than £2bn of art sold by the big three auction houses Sotheby’s, Christie’s and Phillips.
On Thursday, Christie’s will sell a large Claude Monet water lily painting that has been largely unseen by the public, having been owned by the same family for more than 50 years. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/food/2023/dec/24/best-sparkling-wines-to-end-the-year-and-start-the-next | Food | 2023-12-24T06:00:46.000Z | David Williams | End the year with a bang: great sparkling wines | David Williams | Domaine Sérol Turbullent Champs Libre Rosé, Vin de Table, France NV (£19.37, stannarywine.com) Buying sparkling wine is so much more complicated than it used to be. That’s a good thing for the most part, reflecting as it does how many more very good sparkling wines are being made these days in so many different places. Indeed, bubbly, along with the various experimentations being made with leaving white grapes on their skins (aka orange, or skin-contact white wines), is perhaps the single most creative corner of the wine world right now, a far, distant cry from the days, not all that long ago, when it was basically champagne plus a few cheaper, largely inferior alternatives. Like orange wines, much of the novelty in new-wave sparkling wine is actually about reclaiming once-unfashionable or forgotten styles, such as méthode ancestrale aka pétillant naturel (or pet-nat), where a wine completes its fermentation in bottle, leaving behind plenty of fizz-giving CO2. It’s a style which, in the case of Domaine Sérol in the Côte Roannaise east of Lyon, is utterly, joyously juicy and light (10% abv), a rejuvenating tonic for the days between Boxing Day and New Year.
Jansz Premium Cuvée, Tasmania, Australia NV (£14.49, reduced from £18.99, until 1 January 2024, Waitrose) If the pet-nat/ancestrale method is responsible for some gloriously fun and funky fizz, the traditional method, as patented in Champagne (and also known as the méthode champenoise), is still the choice of most ambitious sparkling winemakers, not least in the French region itself, of course. If only The Real Thing will do for your New Year’s Eve toasting, current Champagne favourites of mine include the stylish, patisserie-creamy Tesco Finest Premier Cru Brut Champagne NV (£25), the mouthwatering elegance of Henriot Brut Souverain NV (from £29.97, northandsouthwines.co.uk; thewinesociety.com), the resonant depth and precision of Philipponnat Royale Réserve Brut NV (£47.21, justerinis.com). The appetisingly savoury but pin-sharp and racy Michel Gonet 3 Terroirs 2018 (from £44.95, corkandcask.co.uk; shrinetothevine.co.uk). For good-value traditional-method alternatives, meanwhile, try an apple-tangy example from the Loire, such as Domaine du Clos des Aumônes Vouvray Brut NV (£14.50, thewinesociety.com) or a tried and trusted old favourite Tasmanian from Jansz.
Breaky Bottom Cuvée Sir Andrew Davies, East Sussex, England 2016 (£35.70, corneyandbarrow.com) England’s collection of top sparkling wine producers continues to expand. Among the Blighty-based bubbles I would be delighted to say goodbye to 2023 with are a super-zippy offering from a relatively new player, The Grange Classic Brut, Hampshire NV (from £34.99, thewinesociety.com; hhandc.co.uk); and a virtuoso bottling from one of the English scene’s earliest pioneers in the East Sussex South Downs, Peter Hall, a cuvée named after the English classical music conductor with a bright, incisive style that builds into an appropriately orchestral swell of citrus and English red apple. Trentino in Alpine northern Italy is another cool-climate hotspot making increasingly impressive sparkling wines, among them the very pure-fruited Ferrari F1 Edition Brut NV (from £27.97, northandsouthwines.co.uk; Harvey Nichols). And Germany’s take on bottle-fermented sparkling wine, sekt, is as good as I can remember, with standouts including the tangfastic Dr Loosen Extra Dry Sekt NV (£14.99, down from £18.99 until 1 January 2024).
Follow David Williams on X @Daveydaibach | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/tvandradioblog/2013/sep/20/orphan-black-sci-fi-thriller | Television & radio | 2013-09-20T12:52:00.000Z | Phelim O'Neill | Orphan Black: an enjoyably complex new sci-fi thriller | Like ITV on a Saturday night, I've always regarded BBC3 as a televisual accident black spot. If you wade in recklessly and things end badly, then there's no one to blame but yourself for going there in the first place. But tonight, at 9pm, it's well worth ignoring the usual risk factor to see one of the most enjoyable new shows around, the Canadian science-fiction thriller Orphan Black.
In the opening moments of this 10-part series, we join street-smart Brit Sarah Manning as she, with great purpose, rolls into an unidentified city, which doesn't seem to be welcoming her. Seconds after alighting her train and briefly having what sounds like a heated phone call, she wanders along the station platform to investigate a clearly troubled woman who is crying, pacing and carefully arranging her belongings. The stranger faces Sarah. They are shockingly identical. The stranger then steps into the path of an oncoming train. Sarah, shocked and confused but with her opportunistic instincts intact, grabs her doppelgänger's handbag and quickly exits the scene.
So begins a wonderfully complex drama that is compelling from the off. The central performance, or rather performances, of Tatiana Maslany, who plays both women in the opening and, we quickly find out in tonight's two introductory episodes, a number of other characters, is the main reason Orphan Black works so well. It's an acting gig any performer would love to get, but few could actually handle. For the little-known but hard-working Canadian actress Maslany, it's a star-making turn that has already seen her beat Claire Danes, Elisabeth Moss, Julianna Margulies and others at this year's critic's choice television awards. In fact, her stock has risen to the point where she's just completed a two-episode guest spot on Parks and Recreation as Tom Haverford's love interest.
We'll return here in a few weeks to discuss plot developments in depth, so pay attention to how Maslany adopts varied accents, postures, attitudes and other elements to construct different women who, for reasons we slowly discover, all share the same face. Maslany shows real commitment and stamina as well as ability.
There are others to enjoy here, too. Jordan Gavaris plays Sarah's gay, hedonistic foster brother Felix, who has a ton of fun turning what could be a stock role into something memorable and credible, and Gavaris and Maslany have great chemistry.
The show's closest reference point would be something like Utopia. Both begin with a mystery that feels utterly obscure and impenetrable, then is revealed to be more credible, involving and relevant, not to mention ruthless. Both shows generate a lot of humour from their situations without sacrificing the danger and tension. So give it a go. And if you, like me, would never normally venture into the no-go area of BBC3, then you're in for a pleasant surprise.
This article was amended on 20 September 2013. It said the show was set in New York, which was added at the editing stage. It was filmed in Toronto, although the city in the programme is never specified. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/nov/26/rachida-dati-paternity-sexism-france | World news | 2012-11-26T19:30:00.000Z | Nabila Ramdani | What Rachida Dati's paternity case tells us about sexism in France | Beyond the criminal allegations being aimed at former president Nicolas Sarkozy, the most explosive legal case in France at the moment is centered on his protegee, Rachida Dati.
Lawyers for the former conservative justice minister will be at the Tribunal de Grande Instance in Versailles next week, where judges will hand down a ruling with potentially massive financial consequences. Dati has named the casino and restaurant tycoon Dominique Desseigne as the father of her only child, now three. Desseigne, who is one of France's richest men, is reportedly refusing to take a DNA test, but the court ruling could order him to co-operate. A positive result would entitle both mother and child to a multimillion-euro stake in his fortune.
If it already sounds like a Gallic Dallas, it gets worse. Desseigne has offered the names of seven other "famous men" who were said to have had overlapping affairs with Dati in the year during which the child was conceived – from other big-shot businessmen, through a TV star and Qatari prosecutor, to a younger brother of Sarkozy. If nothing else, Dati's case illustrates the appalling image female politicians have in France at the moment. While men's alleged illicit affairs are still viewed as inconsequential, they always come to define their female counterparts.
Dati was made France's first female justice minister from an ethnic minority just five years ago. The so-called garde des sceaux, or "keeper of the seals", is a position stretching back to before the 1789 revolution, and has been occupied by some of the most distinguished politicians in history. Yet Dati's watch was summed up by Judge Bruno Thouzellier as showing "frivolity in the face of hardship". Rather than implementing much-needed reforms of France's legal system, Dati is accused of concentrating on media appearances and her celebrity love-life.
In some ways the surprise is that we know as much as we do. The Dati v Desseigne judgment comes at a time when the alleged sexual incontinence of French public figures is making headlines like never before. From the orgies and alleged sexual brutality of former Socialist presidential hopeful Dominique Strauss-Kahn to the fraught domestic life of President François Hollande, secrets once guarded by strict privacy laws and a reverential press are bursting into the open. Media observers believe that the Strauss-Kahn scandal served to embarrass the French press, who are now attempting to make amends of sorts. Only last month it was claimed that the Socialist head of state was at one stage been "sharing" his then-mistress, Valérie Trierweiler, with the conservative minister Patrick Devedjian.
The well-documented affairs of head of state, Jacques Chirac, are part of an adulterous tradition involving pretty much every president, including the Socialist François Mitterrand who kept "a secret family" at the taxpayers' expense. Dati, who as a minister made much of her preferences for stilettos and designer work clothes in interviews and photo shoots with Paris Match, fitted straight into the macho, sexist culture of French politics in a manner matched by first ladies Trierweiler and her predecessor, Carla Bruni.
These are the women currently associated with French politics. Very few people outside of the country would be able to name a single female minister at the moment.
Yes, Hollande has ensured a cabinet of gender parity, but the big jobs – prime minister, foreign minister and interior minister – all went to men. Justice is now occupied by Christiane Taubira, but, without picture spreads and gossip, her profile is relatively subdued.
Taubira has brought in some admirable anti-harassment legislation, but has already presided over a scandal in which acquittals and lenient sentences followed a protracted gang-rape trial in the Paris suburbs. It led to accusations from feminists that France's soft approach to rapists was symptomatic of a society where the influence of female decision-makers is negligible.
Amel Khadri who works on social projects close to Fontenay-sous-Bois, where the multiple rapes took place, says: "There are too many crimes related to macho men attacking defenseless women. French society seems to show no willingness to tackle these sexist attitudes."
Paris-based feminist activist Anne-Cécile Mailfert says: "Our fight for parity is also about questioning our ability to fight sexist diktats, and the system of male domination, and to construct male-female equality in every field: to recognise the competence of women to exercise power is central and transcends the political sphere."
In 2009, Dati was herself attacked by feminists for returning to work just five days after giving birth. The evidence presented to the Versailles court gives further grist to her detractors' mill as it appears to confirm that much of her time as justice minister was spent pursuing her affair with Desseigne, accompanying him to dinner parties, travelling on holiday to Mauritius – where the pair were inevitably snapped by paparazzi – and that she even considered accepting a "love nest" apartment in Paris's 16th arrondissement from him. Dati is also said to have "burst into tears" when Sarkozy fired her for what many said was an abject inability to be an efficient minister, offering her the relative obscurity of jobs as a Paris mayor and MEP.
This woeful narrative is being picked over by lawyers as Dati puts her all into her potentially life-changing case against Desseigne. For mother and daughter, it could all end in limousines and private planes for life. As far as the profile of French female politicians is concerned, it is another step backwards.
This article was amended on 27 November 2012. The original said Rachida Dati was France's first female justice minister. She was the first from an ethnic minority. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2016/dec/09/rupert-murdochs-fox-agrees-deal-to-buy-sky | Business | 2016-12-09T19:38:04.000Z | Jasper Jackson | Rupert Murdoch's Fox makes Sky bid five years after hacking scandal | Rupert Murdoch swooped in with an £11.2bn offer to take full control of the satellite broadcaster Sky, five years after he was forced to abandon a similar deal amid public revulsion over the phone-hacking scandal.
The media mogul’s 21st Century Fox film and television group said it had reached an agreement in principle to buy Sky, which would bring together the company behind Fox News with the largest pay-TV broadcaster in Britain to create the most powerful media group in the UK.
Labour and Liberal Democrat politicians said the government had to intervene and demanded an inquiry on the grounds of public interest. Fox owns the controversial rightwing Fox News network in the US, while Sky News is a politically neutral service in competition with the BBC and ITV news.
Sky takeover deal – all you need to know
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Completing the deal, which values all of Sky at £18.5bn, would represent a long-held ambition for Murdoch and his son James, the chief executive of 21st Century Fox. Murdoch already owns 39% of Sky but was forced to abandon an attempt to take full control in 2011 after it emerged that journalists at the News of the World had hacked the phone of the murdered teenager Milly Dowler.
If the negotiations between the two companies lead to a definitive takeover offer being accepted, competition authorities must be notified and the secretary of state for culture, media and sport, Karen Bradley, will have to decide whether to ask the media regulator, Ofcom, to carry out a public interest test.
Tom Watson, Labour’s deputy leader and shadow culture secretary, warned of the “likely concentration of further media power in the hands of a single company” and said it would be incumbent on Ofcom and other competition authorities to ensure media plurality was upheld in the UK if the takeover proceeded.
“The bid must also be judged on its likely impact on the UK news market and the provision of robust and independent journalism,” he said.
Vince Cable, the former Lib Dem business secretary, said the proposed takeover was a test of the government’s independence from large media owners. When Cable was in government he referred Murdoch’s previous bid to a public interest test in 2010. He said on Friday that the market situation had not changed since.
“The level of plurality in UK media has remained comparable since I referred a similar takeover bid to the competitions authorities in 2010. Nothing seems to have materially changed and if this takeover was to go ahead then there would be similar concerns raised about media plurality in the UK,” he said.
“The way Theresa May’s government deals with this is a test of their independence from the influence of large proprietors. The consultation that has been launched on the implementation of Leveson would suggest there is a tendency for some to bow to the power of media giants – this must not be the case.”
If the government does refer the deal to Ofcom, company insiders say 21st Century Fox believes it is in a better position to clear any regulatory hurdles than Murdoch’s previous bid. This, they say, is because the mogul’s newspapers, including the Sun and the Times, have been spun off into a separate company, News Corp, since the hacking scandal. They also argue that the UK media landscape has become more fragmented.
Rupert Murdoch founded Sky in 1989 but after an initial financial crisis, the company was merged with rival satellite broadcaster BSB a year later. Since then the media mogul has retained a substantial stake, but never controlled a majority of its shares. When Cable announced the public interest test for their 2011 bid, the Murdochs had agreed to spin off Sky News into a company with an independent editorial board. But after it emerged that News of the World journalists had hacked into Dowler’s phone, Conservative, Labour and Lib Dem politicians agreed that a takeover could not proceed and the Murdochs withdrew.
Claire Enders, a media analyst, said a takeover bid had been inevitable since Brexit, because the falling pound meant Sky was far cheaper to a US company paying in dollars.
Why is Murdoch taking over Sky now? Blame Brexit and Netflix
Nils Pratley
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She said she did not believe Bradley would refer the bid to Ofcom on public interest grounds because the market and company structure had changed. “The circulation of the newspapers – now part of an entirely separate company – have dropped drastically since 2011.”
The European commission, which cleared the previous bids, is also likely to look at the new deal. In 2014, Sky took full control of Sky-branded services in Germany, Austria and Italy, meaning any UK takeover has a European dimension that did not exist before.
The offer proposed by Fox is priced at £10.75 of cash per share, representing a premium of 40% to Sky’s closing price on 6 December, the last business day before the initial proposal had been received from the US company. Immediately after the news of the proposed deal was announced on the London Stock Exchange, shares in Sky soared nearly 30% to £10.26.
Justifying the planned takeover, 21st Century Fox said: “In the past several years, 21st Century Fox has consistently stated that its existing 39.1% stake in Sky is not a natural end position.
“A proposed transaction between 21st Century Fox and Sky would bring together 21st Century Fox’s global content business with Sky’s world-class direct-to-consumer capabilities, which have made it the number one premium pay-TV provider in all its markets.
“It would also enhance Sky’s leading position in entertainment and sport, and reinforce the UK’s standing as a top global hub for content generation and technological innovation.” | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/oct/27/backlash-after-elon-musk-labels-scottish-first-minister-humza-yousaf-racist | Politics | 2023-10-27T14:56:19.000Z | Severin Carrell | Backlash after Elon Musk labels Scottish first minister Humza Yousaf racist | Elon Musk has provoked a furious backlash in Scotland by accusing Humza Yousaf of being “a blatant racist” after the tech billionaire saw a highly selective clip of a speech by the first minister.
Musk, the owner of Tesla, Space X and the social media site X, formerly known as Twitter, reacted to a 45-second clip of Yousaf listing all the senior public posts in Scotland held by white people, which was posted on X by an anonymous account called End Wokeness.
The account, which has a paid-for blue verification mark, accused Yousaf, who is Scotland’s first ethnic minority first minister, of “openly despising white people”. It said: “Why would Scotland’s parliament and King select a guy who hates almost 100% of the country?”
Musk replied: “What a blatant racist!”
What a blatant racist!
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 26, 2023
Musk was quickly challenged on X, while Yousaf responded by posting a gif of an Asian shopkeeper from the BBC Scotland sitcom Still Game doing a shimmying dance in his shop with the words “racists foaming at the mouth at my very existence”.
Racists foaming at the mouth at my very existence.
Me: pic.twitter.com/DsKRWRhnIy
— Humza Yousaf (@HumzaYousaf) October 27, 2023
Numerous posts pointed out that Yousaf had been arguing that Scotland’s public sector and institutions were not demonstrating a clear commitment to racial diversity given nearly every one was run by white people.
The Ferret news website subjected the post, which reused a clip from an account called ChurchillsCigar, to its factchecking service and found it was false. It said the extract was a highly selective excerpt of a broader statement, a conclusion reposted by critics of Yousaf’s government.
The excerpt of Yousaf’s statement has been repeatedly amplified in Scotland by far-right nativist groups who claim it was racist. Audience members and protesters have also accused him of racism at events.
Yousaf has been widely praised for his handling of the Israel-Hamas crisis, hosting meetings with Jewish leaders and the widow of a Jewish man murdered by Hamas and issuing joint statements condemning the violence. His wife, Nadia El-Nakla, is half-Palestinian and his first wife was white.
The clip was taken from May 2020 when Yousaf was speaking to MSPs on a motion in support of anti-racist activism after the death of George Floyd, where he discussed the racism he had experienced since being elected.
“Some people have been surprised or taken aback by my mention on my social media that at 99% of the meetings that I go to, I am the only non-white person in the room,” he told the chamber. “Why are we so surprised when the most senior positions in Scotland are filled almost exclusively by people who are white?”
He then listed all the senior judicial, policing and legal posts in his justice portfolio held by white people, and said the same could be found in health, another portfolio he held.
“Almost every trade union in the country, headed by people who are white people,” he added. “In the Scottish government, every director general is white. Every chair of every public body is white. That is not good enough.”
A spokesperson for Yousaf said on Friday: “The first minister has been on the receiving end of racist hate, abuse and death threats his entire life, and has stood firm against hatred and bigotry, of any kind, throughout.
“Sadly, much of the racist abuse and threats of violence the first minister faces are directed his way on X. Mr Musk should use his position to tackle racism and hatred that goes unchecked on the social media platform he owns.” | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/sport/blog/2012/jun/29/joy-of-six-european-championship-finals | Sport | 2012-06-29T11:35:28.000Z | Scott Murray | The Joy of Six: Great European Championship finals | Scott Murray | 1) USSR 2-1 Yugoslavia (1960)
The infant European Nations Cup was all about the Soviets. They flew out of the blocks in the very first qualification game, Anatoli Ilyin scoring after four minutes against Hungary in front of a 100,000-plus crowd in Moscow's fancy new Central Stadium, and never looked back. They were 3-0 up by the 32nd minute, eventually winning the game 3-1. For the second leg in Budapest, Hungary brought back a couple of superannuated Magical Magyars in Gyula Grosics and József Bozsik, and a young star-to-be in Florian Albert, but the Soviets were still too good, and registered a 1-0 win.
In the quarters, Spain's right-wing dictator General Franco claimed full marks for irony, rolling out the red carpet to allow the USSR to saunter straight through to the semis. Whereupon an impressive Czechoslovakian side starring Josef Masopust were dispatched 3-0 in a sweltering Marseille, a lopsided result in which the Russian keeper Lev Yashin was reportedly his side's star man, despite Valentin Ivanov's two goals.
The final at the Parc des Princes in Paris would not be such a showcase of goalkeeping magnificence. Yugoslavia had the better of the first half, Milan Galic at the heart of everything, switching play this way and that in the middle, swinging in dangerous crosses from the left, and eventually scoring the opener, stooping to head a right-wing cross inside the near post on 43 minutes. Yashin, hanging around by the aforementioned upright, should have thrown his cap on it, but didn't, and rocked back on his heels, punch drunk after the mistake, gaddered on incompetence. Admittedly the legendary keeper otherwise had something of a stormer, superbly saving a couple of Bora Kostic free-kicks, but this was up there with Egon Loy's standing-around-smoking-a-fag display at the European Cup final a couple of months earlier.
But anything Yashin could do badly, his opposite number Blagoja Vidinic could do worse. Just after the restart, Vidinic spilled a low, hard but ultimately speculative shot from the dangerous Valentin Bubukin. Slava Metreveli was on hand to sweep home the loose ball. The match went into extra time, and with seven minutes to go, Mikheil Meskhi clipped in a cross from the left which Vidinic went walkabout to claim. He got nowhere near it, and Slava Metreveli guided a header back past the lost keeper and into the top-left corner.
Had the better team prevailed? With Yugoslavia having slipped it around slickly, it's not clear that they did. But the USSR were a staunch outfit, and having started the ball rolling back in 1959, it was somehow fitting that they were the first team to pick up the Henri Delaunay Trophy. Wearing the greatest kit in the history of football – CCCP proudly across the chest, as bold as the Caucasus mountains – as they did so.
2) West Germany 3-0 USSR (1972)
The next European Nations Cup, and the two newly monikered Uefa European Football Championships after that, were pretty heavy on Soviet action too. In 1964, the USSR defended their title all the way to the final, where they were beaten by Spain. In 1968 only the toss of a coin denied them a place in a third final. They made it three finals from four in 1972, sealing their reputation as the most consistent force in the tournament's early years.
West Germany, by comparison, hadn't entered in 1960 or 1964, and had humiliatingly crashed out at the qualifying group stage in 1968 after drawing 0-0 in Albania. However they swaggered to victory in 1972, becoming in the process the tournament's first entry into the Classic Teams canon.
The team contained some legendary names: Franz Beckenbauer, Gerd Müller, Paul Breitner, Sepp Maier. But Euro 72 was Günter Netzer's tournament. The most famous game in their procession to the title was the 3-1 victory against England at Wembley in the quarter-finals. "Football from the year 2000," claimed one newspaper then, giving the sophisticated performance a futuristic gloss at a time when nobody could have possibly anticipated the horrors of Carsten Jancker, Paulo Rink and Jens Jeremies. But despite Netzer swaggering about like he owned the place – which was fair enough, because that night he did – the Germans didn't quite achieve the near-perfection suggested by legend. They took a while to finish England off, requiring two late goals to set the seal on a game they should have won long before. The much-less-regarded final, however, is another matter.
This time the Germans didn't hang about before administering the decisive blows. Again Netzer was the star in a 3-0 win. "Attacks came from every direction, yet those that brought the goals all came from the irrepressible Netzer," reported Albert Barham in this the Guardian. Jupp Heynckes was also heavily involved in the first two, Muller following up his shot for the first, Herbert Wimmer tucking away his pass for the second. Muller, needless to say, added the third, ending a move started by Netzer. "Without question West Germany are the best side in Europe since that great Hungarian team of the 1950s," concluded Barham. "Invention triumphed over convention."
And yet West Germany so nearly didn't get their reward, the match coming close to being abandoned near the end, when the woefully mismanaged Heysel crowd – a chilling harbinger – spilled out over fences and stood along the touchlines, at one point mistaking a foul for the final whistle and rushing the stage. Maier, who had little else to do all afternoon, acted as a very effective bouncer, dispatching the encroachers back into the throng.
3) West Germany 2-1 Belgium (1980)
There were pre-tournament fears that Euro 80 would go untelevised when Italian outside broadcast technicians threatened to have a good old strike. Pennies were proffered, and no plugs were pulled, though once the event was over there was a general sense of regret at an opportunity missed. Euro 80 was – the sweet little mascot apart – an egregious assault on the peepers (and that's before the Italian polis cracked open their tear gas canisters to deal with the panettone-brained oafs England had sent over under the erroneous description of supporters).
Exceptions and rules, and all that, and what better game to buck the trend than the final. By 1980, the West Germans had taken over the USSR's mantle of regular finalists. This would be their third final on the bounce, having been one Panenka away from retaining their title in 1976. Jupp Derwall's side brushed past champions Czechoslovakia, Holland and Greece to get there, while Belgium squeaked past Italy, a highly average England, and Spain to make their first-ever international final.
The Germans were hot favourites, though Belgium were unbeaten all year and knew how to keep games tight, soaking up pressure and looking to occasionally break upfield through Julien Cools, Jan Ceulemans and François Van der Elst. The match started with Germany on the front foot, Horst Hrubesch chesting down and pelting home after 10 minutes. But Belgium did not buckle, despite some German bundestikiundtaka, and although our David Lacey noted that "by half-time West Germany could have been three goals in front", it was still on.
But after the break the Germans lost Hans-Peter Briegel through injury – crumpled by René Vandereycken – and with it their momentum. On 71 minutes, Wilfried Van Moer sent Van der Elst clear, forcing Uli Stielike to upend the striker in the D. Van der Elst threw himself into the area, and a penalty was awarded. A shocker of a decision, but Vandereycken converted.
From that point, Belgium began to threaten. "Had the match gone to a further half hour," wrote Lacey, "It is by no means certain that West Germany would have won, such was the strength of Belgium's recovery having been out-thought and out-paced for half the game." But with two minutes to go, the Germans won a corner, Karlheinz Rummenigge took it, and Hrubesch planted a header home. A dramatic, see-saw victory was complete. Lucky the telly people turned up for work after all, then. Though they can wipe pretty much everything else they taped.
4) France 2-0 Spain (1984)
1984 was some year for France. They had started it with a 2-0 friendly victory over England. (As a momentum-scuppering aside, but an intriguing sign of the times, that England team had an all-Luton front line of Paul Walsh and Brian Stein. As well as two Luton players, the side contained two Southampton stars – Steve Williams and Peter Shilton – plus a player apiece from Watford and Ipswich Town in John Barnes and Terry Butcher. Modern football's jiggered the chances of that ever happening again. But anyway.)
France followed that up with three warm-up wins ahead of their hosting of Euro 84, against Austria, West Germany and Scotland. Six goals scored, none conceded. The side – with le carré magique of Michel Platini, Alain Giresse, Luis Fernández and Jean Tigana – were clear favourites to win the Euros. And win it they did, with victories over Denmark, Belgium, Yugoslavia, Portugal and, in the final, Spain. Another 14 goals, only four let in.
Platini having wafted the Henri Delaunay Trophy around his head, the team wrapped up the year with three victories in the World Cup qualifiers against Luxembourg, Bulgaria and East Germany. The 12-match streak, with a tidy symmetry, was bookended by a pair of 0-0 draws in Yugoslavia.
Strangely, of all the 12 games, it was the one which landed France Euro 84, their first major trophy, that was the least convincing. Nothing much had been expected from Spain at the tournament. They were not far short of appalling while hosting the World Cup two years previously, while they'd only managed to qualify ahead of an average Holland on goal difference after an eyebrow-raising 12-1 win in their final group match.
But despite being short on top-drawer talent, they battled hard to reach the final. They only won one game en route to the Parc des Princes – Antonio Maceda's header knocking out Jupp Derwall's reigning champions West Germany in the very last minute of their final group game, as detailed here by Rob Smyth in an earlier Joy of Six, but squeezed past the highly fancied Danish Dynamite side in the semis on penalties to set up the big clash.
Little was expected of them. They were without Maceda, who had also scored against Denmark but picked up a fatal booking in the same match. The equally influential Rafael Gordillo was also suspended, while Andoni Goicoechea was injured. But against the odds they performed magnificently against nervous hosts. They were the better team – Santiago Urquiaga causing havoc down the right, Santillana winning powerful headers in the box – until, on 57 minutes, the normally dependable Luis Arconada jumped over Platini's lame free kick, allowing it to creep into the right-hand corner. In the Guardian, David Lacey compared the mistake to Dan Lewis's howler for Arsenal against Cardiff City in the 1927 FA Cup final.
"The triumph, deserved though it was because of the standard France had set earlier in the tournament, was not particularly distinguished," added Lacey. "Had Spain concentrated more on playing fluent football than hacking down their opponents, they might have taken the game to extra time. There were periods when they seemed the better team." But despite Yvon Le Roux's 85th-minute dismissal for a second bookable offence, Spain could craft nothing. And at the end, Bruno Bellone was sent free by Tigana to bundle France over the line.
5) Denmark 2-0 Germany (1992)
Even with the story well told, it's difficult to understate just how unfancied Denmark were at Euro 92. Having turned up at the last minute to replace the stricken Yugoslavs – well, OK, they had nine days' notice – their preparation was slightly shambolic, to say the least. Over half of the squad had been playing league football four days before their opening game, while their best player Michael Laudrup had flounced because he didn't like manager Richard Moller Nielsen's tactics. No chance.
But when the tournament got under way, it soon became clear that Moller Nielsen's side had a buzz about them. "On the early evidence you would have to say that the Danes have the necessary attacking qualities to reach the semi-finals," wrote David Lacey after England's slightly fortunate 0-0 draw with this newly arrived rabble. Brian Laudrup, Flemming Povlsen and the left wing back Henrik Andersen started to make "serious searching runs". John Jensen screwed a shot against the inside of a post. Peter Schmeichel looked formidable in goal.
A week later, a Lars Elstrup winner shocked highly-fancied France, the Danes had made it to the semis, and the continent sat bolt upright to take notice. Reigning champions Holland were still expected to win, but required a late Frank Rijkaard goal to scramble a 2-2 draw, and couldn't take advantage as Marco van Basten missed in the subsequent penalty shootout, Kim Christofte sliding home the decisive spot kick with "a nonchalance that was almost unreal", according to Lacey. "Nobody will underestimate Denmark now, but it is hard to avoid the feeling that last night's events were part of a conspiracy to bring the European Championship to Germany for a third time. The strength of Germany's performance against Sweden [in the other semi, which Germany won by a 3-2 scoreline that flattered the Swedes] and the likely toll this match has taken of Denmark's physical resources can only work in the World Cup holders' favour."
Denmark would be without the hideously injured Henrik Andersen – who cracked his kneecap in the semi – while Brian Laudrup and John Sivebaek were carrying injuries. But they played an almost perfect game. On 18 minutes, Jensen arrowed that shot past Bodo Illgner. Schmeichel went into full octo-keeper mode with some stunning saves: he denied Jurgen Klinsmann and Stefan Reuter early on, Stefan Effenberg just before half time, and finally Klinsmann again with 19 minutes to go.
But Denmark kept it tight for the most part, and had their moments on the counter. With 12 minutes remaining, they sealed victory with a sucker punch, Kim Vilfort – who had missed a great chance earlier in the half – taking advantage of Thomas Helmer's poor clearance to score.
The world champions had been felled by a team who hadn't even qualified by right, as the legendary Lacey noted in what may well stand as the greatest soccer zinger in the history of all journalism: "Nothing much good for Germany ever resulted from shots in Sarajevo."
6) France 2-1 Italy (2000)
For 2000, see 1984: a French side superior in just about every department making heavy weather of a final they were expected to walk, at a magical tournament they had defined with their free-scoring sparkle.
This was a better match than the 1984 game, though, only a notch or two below a belter, and a fitting end to the greatest international tournament of modern times (and possibly ever, though that's a debate for another day). Having said that, it took a fair old while to start: 54 minutes, in fact, whereupon Marco Delvecchio ghosted past Marcel Desailly to sidefoot home a teasing Gianluca Pessotto right-wing cross, Pessotto having been set clear by a twinkling Francesco Totti backheel. A goal worthy of capping a superlative three weeks.
But no. Unfancied Italy sat back in order for France to pour forward and leave gaps at the back. The rope-a-dope tactic should have paid off, but Alessandro del Piero and Delvecchio took turns to idiotically spurn a series of opportunities. Meanwhile the best player in the world, Zinedine Zidane, was, according to Lacey, "reduced to the role of a disembodied brain in a laboratory, still able to think but unable to make things happen".
Despite Italy's misses, the rope-a-dope tactic should still have paid off. But entering the fourth and final minute of stoppage time, David Trezeguet set his fellow substitute Sylvain Wiltord away on a skedaddle down the inside left. Wiltord drove through the legs of Francesco Toldo, and extra time loomed.
But Italy were already done. There was only ever going to be one winner after that, and with 13 minutes of extra time gone, Trezeguet lashed home spectacularly after a run from Robert Pirès (a third substitute, chapeau Roger Lemerre). A golden goal, brave Italy were granted no opportunity to strike back; the only blot on an otherwise perfect tournament. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2022/mar/01/its-a-more-expansive-inclusive-version-how-women-reshaped-the-history-of-the-beatles | Music | 2022-03-01T13:00:13.000Z | Annie Zaleski | ‘It’s a more expansive, inclusive version’: how women reshaped the history of the Beatles | For teenager Janice Mitchell, hearing the Beatles’ I Want to Hold Your Hand on US radio in December 1963 affected her in ways she still can’t quite articulate. “How do you explain why [you were] electrified when you were struck by lightning?” she says, laughing.
I Want to Hold Your Hand didn’t just sound more interesting than the other songs in rotation on her home town station, the single represented an escape from a difficult childhood. Mitchell, of Cleveland, Ohio, grew up with neglectful parents who eventually abandoned her and two younger siblings. And 1963 had been another hard year. Mitchell was reeling from the death of a beloved great uncle, one of the few adults who had shown her kindness.
The arrival of the Beatles provided a glimmer of hope. “I realised I wanted to go to where the Beatles were from, because I figured that’s where happiness would lie,” Mitchell says. “That was my goal: to go there and breathe Beatles air, walk on sacred Beatles soil and have a happy life.”
Mitchell made good on her wish, as she recounted in her riveting book My Ticket to Ride: How I Ran Away to England to Meet the Beatles and Got Rock and Roll Banned in Cleveland. She and another resourceful friend successfully left the US and spent a blissful three weeks in England in autumn 1964, enjoying London nightlife and the sights and even visiting Liverpool – though, unfortunately, they did not cross paths with any of the Beatles.
The Beatles in February 1964. Photograph: Evening Standard/Getty
My Ticket to Ride is far from the only Beatles book released last year. Most notably, Paul McCartney’s bestselling The Lyrics: 1956 to the Present arrived weeks after The Beatles: Get Back, a companion piece to Peter Jackson’s epic-length documentary. But Mitchell’s memoir is one of the few Beatles books written by a woman in the 60 years since they released their debut single. The Beatles have profoundly shaped and enriched the lives of women, but the literature, journalism and critical scholarship – with a few notable exceptions – tends to focus disproportionately on how men experience and appreciate the band and its music.
“For a generation X woman coming up in the 1990s, the odds of placing a Beatles-related story or interview at a major publication felt like 100-1,” says music journalist Kristi York Wooten. Yet in recent years more scholars, journalists, musicians and podcasters are challenging conventional Beatles narratives and expanding who gets to lead conversations around the band. To Wooten, this shift is long overdue. “Media coverage of the band’s evolution has depicted women as bystanders, rendering our stories of the music’s impact inferior or merely tied to fandom.”
Ardent Beatles fandom isn’t always viewed in a positive light, despite how vital it was to the band’s success. As critic Sasha Geffen writes in Glitter Up the Dark: How Pop Music Broke the Binary: “Without Beatles girls, there’s no Beatles. Each group forged its identity in relation to the other.” Yet the narrow stereotype of a Beatles fan that crystallised during the 1960s – think a teenage girl screaming over the band because they’re so cute – lingers.
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“Female scholars who are also fans of the Beatles still run the risk of being perceived as more of a fan than as an authoritative voice,” says Dr Christine Feldman-Barrett, a senior lecturer in sociology at Griffith University and author of last year’s A Women’s History of the Beatles. “The legacy of the ‘hysterical’ female Beatles fan is such that it has, I believe, made a good amount of women reluctant to write about the Beatles until more recently.”
Feldman-Barrett’s book is a comprehensive corrective to outdated modes of thinking. It delves into lesser-covered topics ripe for analysis (such as how the Beatles influenced female musicians) and takes a fresh look at Beatlemania, the women of the Beatles’ universe and fan relationships with the band.
The book grew out of Feldman-Barrett’s lifelong appreciation for a band that opened her eyes to other subjects, such as “British history, the interest in eastern spirituality in the 1960s”, she says. “It’s really been a portal into different interests.” As Geffen writes: “A girl could invest her desire in the band, but she could also discover herself there.”
Decades later, the Beatles’ ability to spark curiosity persists across generations. Growing up in the UK, musician and author Stephanie Phillips was struck by the Beatles’ cultural omnipresence. “As a young person who wanted to develop my own sense of self, it almost felt overwhelming,” she says. Coming to the band’s music in her 20s via noisier covers by American bands such as Pixies and Throwing Muses “gave the Beatles this alternative sheen and almost made them sound like an obscure underground cult band,” she says.
Stephanie Phillips of punk band Big Joanie. Photograph: Lorne Thomson/Redferns
Such sonic leeway shaped the music Phillips makes in the punk band Big Joanie – she references both the White Album’s “experimental song structures” and the taut songcraft of the Beatles’ “earlier, pop-centric albums” – and helped her cement a different perception of the band. “My version of the Beatles wrote short and snappy love songs, experimented with every genre possible and was clear about the cultures they were influenced by,” she says. “It is in my mind a more expansive and inclusive version of the Beatles than the band that I grew up hearing on the TV as a kid.”
Dr Holly Tessler vividly recalls hearing news reports on John Lennon’s 1980 murder, although she didn’t know who the musician was at the time. “Being the dorky kid I was, rather than listening to the music, I decided it was going to be a research project,” she says. The 10-year-old borrowed Nicholas Schaffner’s The Boys from Liverpool from the library and spent the next few weeks reading (and re-reading) the book, “boring all of my friends and family” by peppering them with Beatles facts. “After what must have been an interminable amount of time, my parents just said: ‘Here, kid, listen to music.’ And there was no going back.”
Maureen Cleave, British journalist who championed the Beatles, dies aged 87
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Tessler’s subsequent insatiable interest in all aspects of the Beatles led her into academia and founding the University of Liverpool masters programme The Beatles: Music Industry and Heritage. Launched in September 2021, it offers a rigorous study of the band’s cultural, media and economic impact. Tessler says the class is diverse, spanning new graduates to mature students in their 60s. “I was a little bit concerned that there would be a big division,” she says. “They’ve all sort of bonded now. And everybody’s a happy little group of Beatles students together.”
The younger generations of Beatles fans who came to the band long after their breakup are even less beholden to rigid historical narratives surrounding the group, says Tessler. “[They’re] much more plugged into debates around gender and sexualities than earlier generations would have been.”
It’s a conversation that has been broadened by the podcast world. “I see more young fans wanting to move away from the ‘who do we blame for the breakup’ approach, and more towards an approach that analyses everyone’s individual experiences, emotions, and points of view,” says Thalia Reynolds, who co-hosts Another Kind of Mind: A Different Kind of Beatles Podcast with Daphne Mitchell and Phoebe Lorde. The show operates as a collective of voices presenting thoroughly researched episodes (sample: “Jealous Guy: Lennon-McCartney and Competitive Admiration”). “We thought it was past time the Beatles were discussed with empathy and humanity,” says Lorde. “That means making the effort to see things from every perspective.”
Competitive admiration? … Paul McCartney and John Lennon. Photograph: Bettmann Archive
The podcast’s co-hosts say the Beatles have shaped their lives in numerous ways: influencing them to perform, write and develop an appreciation for music; deepen friendships; and even find solace in discussions about topics such as John Lennon’s sexuality. “The Beatles’ music, their story, their selves are uniquely comforting,” says Mitchell.
It isn’t necessarily a given that multiple generations of Beatles fans will get along. Allison Boron grew up a fan of the Monkees and Beatles. As a teenager, she eventually found kindred spirits in the latter’s nascent, circa-Y2K online community. “I can’t imagine who I would be without the Beatles,” she says. “It sounds crazy sometimes when I hear myself say that, but there’s really no way they haven’t impacted my life.” One early job working for a local Beatles tribute band piqued her interest in the music industry, where she works today.
In 2018, she launched the podcast BC the Beatles. Boron recalls how she and co-host Erika White received plenty of encouragement from older fans. But they also experienced ageism, sexism and fandom gatekeeping. “We were bumping up against people who didn’t think we had a place at the table because we weren’t there originally,” she says. “We were having a hard time getting taken seriously.”
'I was shattered' – Paul Weller, Booker T and more on the day the Beatles split
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Empathy for the unfairly maligned Yoko Ono inspired the launch of All About the Girl, a Liverpool-based podcast. “All my life I had heard all sorts about her, that she was some kind of talentless destructive force, or a joke,” says co-host Chloe Walls. “Only when I started to do my own research did I grasp the total disservice done to her by the mainstream narrative.” Walls came to love Ono’s music while researching the Beatles after seeing the 2019 movie Yesterday; she was “irritated” by how the film “fundamentally misunderstood what made the Beatles great.”
Several podcasters interviewed mentioned Beatles fan fiction and fan art as an influence on their fandom – and especially that of younger generations. For Walls, the Beatles’ online fandom was also formative in that it “allowed me to be creative in a space with other likeminded people” and also introduced her to her partner (and podcast co-host) Daisy Cooper. The pair met in 2020 on Tumblr, “in a discussion about the relationship between John and Paul,” Walls says.
As an adult, My Ticket to Ride author Mitchell worked as a journalist and a private investigator. While writing her book, she used those skills to try to figure out aspects of her painful childhood. She discovered greater empathy for her younger self – as well as perspective on how hearing I Want to Hold Your Hand altered the trajectory of her life. “If I had never heard the Beatles at that time, my life would have been completely different.”
My Ticket to Ride: How I Ran Away to England to Meet the Beatles and Got Rock and Roll Banned in Cleveland by Janice Mitchell is published by Gray & Company. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2021/feb/08/boohoo-dorothy-perkins-burton-wallis-phillip-green-arcadia | Business | 2021-02-08T08:13:05.000Z | Kalyeena Makortoff | Boohoo buys Dorothy Perkins, Burton and Wallis for £25m | The online fashion retailer Boohoo has bought Dorothy Perkins, Wallis and Burton for £25m, completing the breakup of Sir Philip Green’s Arcadia Group.
The deal to buy the three remaining fashion brands out of administration does not include any of their 214 UK stores, which will permanently close and put about 2,450 jobs at risk. Nor does it include the group’s Outfit chain, which sold products from all Arcadia brands from its 65 stores. These stores will permanently close, with the loss of hundreds more jobs.
Boohoo said on Monday that it had agreed to buy “the e-commerce and digital assets and associated intellectual property rights, including customer data, related business information and inventory of the Burton, Dorothy Perkins and Wallis brands”. Only 260 head office roles – involved in design, buying, merchandising and digital operations – will be transferred to Boohoo under the deal.
The shop workers union Usdaw said the sale of Arcadia’s remaining brands to an online specialist was “another devastating blow for our high streets”. It called for a joined-up plan, involving unions, employers and government, to help the struggling retail sector, and backed calls for increased taxes on online retailers.
Dave Gill, Usdaw’s national officer, said: “Retail is crucial to our town and city centres; it employs around three million people across the UK. The government must take this seriously; we need a recovery plan to get the industry back on its feet.”
The Manchester-based company said the takeover would be completed by Tuesday and that all three brands would be fully integrated by May this year.
The deal comes only weeks after Boohoo bought the Debenhams brand in a £55m deal that also excluded its high street sites, leading to the likely loss of up to 12,000 jobs.
Boohoo revealed in January it was in exclusive talks to buy Dorothy Perkins, Wallis and Burton, as administrators at Deloitte sought buyers for the remaining brands in the Arcadia empire, which went into administration last year.
The online retailer Asos bought the Arcadia brands Topshop, Topman and Miss Selfridge last week for £330m. The brands-only deal did not include any of the stores or warehouses. At least 2,500 high street shop workers are at risk of losing their jobs as a result of that deal. Arcadia’s plus-size clothing brand, Evans, was sold to the Australian retailer City Chic Collective for £23m in December.
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So far, administrators have raised more than £500m from selling Arcadia’s assets, which will be distributed to the company’s creditors. A report by the administrators, seen by the Guardian, suggested Green’s family was likely to receive £50m from the sale of Topshop, relating to an interest-free loan it made to the group in 2019 at the time of an emergency restructure which is secured against the group’s Daventry warehouse. However, more than 1,000 suppliers and landlords to the high street fashion chain are expected to get less than 1% of the money owed to them.
Boohoo shares closed down almost 5% at 347p.
Boohoo also confirmed on Monday that it was ordering its Leicester-based suppliers to stop using outside labour and subcontractors and bring all clothes-making in house by 5 March. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/social-care-network/2016/jun/30/occupational-therapy-changed-my-life | Social Care Network | 2016-06-30T07:55:06.000Z | Kim Thomas | The day an occupational therapist changed my life | Martin Bennetto, 52
Martin Bennetto
“In December 2010 I was rushed to hospital with a brain haemorrhage. I was in there for two weeks and came out on new year’s eve. I thought I’d soon be ready to go back to work, but when my OT came to interview me, I fell asleep as she was talking to me. She gave me tools to stop the fatigue setting in. Just 10 or 15 minutes’ meditation, even in a noisy room, and I get my energy back and am ready to go again.
“It was six months before she finally said: ‘You’re fit to go to work now.’ It was a sad day when she said she was totally discharging me, because I was losing that safe place. I didn’t think occupational therapy would help somebody like me. It’s such an eye-opener. I can never thank her enough.”
Mike Kerr, 33
Mike Kerr
“I was on holiday 16 years ago and I dived into a swimming pool, not realising it was the shallow end. I hit my head on the bottom and broke my neck. I spent 10 months in hospital in Glasgow, where I received occupational therapy. It was just learning to do things with the limited mobility I had in my hands – picking things up, fastening buttons, dressing myself, the things you take for granted.
“Before my accident, sport was my main interest. While I was at the unit, I was able to use the hydrotherapy pool and take part in sports days.
“When I came out I took up wheelchair rugby and competed in the 2012 Paralympics. If it wasn’t for the OTs, I would never have had the opportunity.”
Esther Rutledge, 80
Esther Rutledge
“I had my fall after stepping on the worktop in my kitchen to reach the meter, which is in a high cupboard, and landed on my shoulder, fracturing my humerus. The specialist from the fracture clinic decided it needed to be pinned and have a plate put in.
“Once back at home, I had an OT from the re-ablement team come in and see me twice a day for a week, and then in the mornings for a week after that. They helped with the dressing, and I also had to have help with drying my feet and back. It was not only a help in the practical sense but a pleasure to know someone was coming in. We joked and got on. It was invaluable.”
Maria Selby, 65
Maria Selby
“I’ve had a double lung transplant. Last year, I was told about a new choir called Singing 4 Breathing, for people with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), run by OT students at Northampton University, so I went along to find out what it was all about. There are 50 of us, we meet weekly and sing a mix of folk and pop songs. The teacher has taught us how to breathe when singing. It makes you feel so happy and joyful. I never knew I could sing a tune. It’s so amazing when you think you can’t speak because you have COPD, and yet you can sing.”
Joe Levelle, 34, and his son Tom
Joe and, son, Tom Levelle
“Our son Tom suffered a huge brain injury when he was born. About 40% of the left side of his brain had been damaged. We were told he would find certain things very challenging, especially speech, high-capacity functions and movement.
“We met Anne Gordon, who manages the OT team at Evelina London children’s hospital, when Tom was six months old. Tom would never grab anything with his right hand, so Anne suggested using constraint-induced movement therapy, which meant restricting his left hand, forcing him to use his right hand.
“Tom’s right hand is still affected, but he can now grab a ball with both hands, and hold a cup – things that other people would think is not that big a deal, but for us it’s absolutely massive.”
Join the Social Care Network to read more pieces like this. Follow us on Twitter (@GdnSocialCare) and like us on Facebook to keep up with the latest social care news and views. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2012/nov/18/families-rising-food-prices-budgets | Society | 2012-11-18T17:43:00.000Z | Amelia Hill | Families struggle to eat healthily amid rising food bills and shrinking budgets | Nicola Probert is nervous. She hasn't let her partner, Tony Hodge, go food shopping for the family on his own since the day he came back with a £3 DVD, a six-pack of premium baked beans and two milkshakes for the children – an extra £10 on the bill that meant their two sons couldn't go to the soft play centre that weekend. Today, though, Nicola has no choice: she is recovering from a minor operation and can't leave the house. She isn't happy.
"Please don't get Heinz baked beans," she implores him, handing over the shopping list she's written out in painstaking detail. "Even if they're on offer, they're more expensive than own-brand. Don't get posh, individual packets of crisps either; get the supermarket ones that come in multipacks. And please don't buy any of those offers they pile up by the front door of the supermarket – they're always more expensive than the stuff you can find at the back of the shop."
Tony sighs. Nicola tries to make amends. "We can afford some fresh meat this week," she coaxes. Then pausing, adds: "As long as they've got their three-for-£10 deal still going." The couple exchange a look of exasperation, then burst into exhausted laughter. Nicola, however, stops after a couple of seconds. "Sometimes I wonder what's happened to our family," she says sadly. "It's not like we're the poorest of the poor. A few years ago, we didn't have to count the pennies like this."
Nicola is a phlebotomist, taking blood samples from patients, on maternity leave after the birth of the couple's second child seven months ago. Tony works full-time in the building trade. The couple live in Bristol on a household income of around £24,500 a year. They spend around £80 on food every two weeks. "We don't have trouble keeping to our budget in other areas – although with fuel bills rocketing up, we're fortunate our flat is a heat trap – but when it comes to food, it's a constant struggle just to buy enough food to fill our stomachs," says Nicola.
"It makes me furious. Affordable, nutritious food should be a right for everyone, not a privilege for a few."
The couple are among the more than 13 million people who live in poverty in the UK, suffering what the Joseph Rowntree Trust says are food shortages on a scale not seen since wartime rationing. Food prices have spiked across the world but in Britain, where we import around 40% of our food, prices have risen at more than twice the EU average and families are struggling to afford food that has increased by 32% since 2007.
"Many people don't think that in the UK – the seventh richest country in the world – people go hungry or go hungry for healthy food," said Lindsay Boswell, chief executive of FareShare, the UK charity that feeds 36,500 people every day, redistributing high-quality, surplus food from the food industry to a network of community organisations that support vulnerable people across Britain. "But they do. Many families are feeling the pinch financially as a result of unemployment and redundancies, the high cost of living and government spending cuts." Research is building up, pointing to the fact that people on what were once regarded as reasonable salaries can no longer afford to eat enough, much less eat enough healthy food. A recent report by Save the Children looked at 5,000 families with incomes of up to £30,000 a year and found that to ensure their children get enough food to eat, nearly two-thirds of parents skip meals, go into debt, avoid paying bills, and put off replacing worn-out clothing.
Giselle Cory, a senior research and policy analyst at the Resolution Foundation, says families on £42,500 are struggling and those on £50,000 could be next to discover they are no longer able to afford the food they want. "We're very much not only talking about society's poorest," she said. "We're talking about families who, a short while ago, could afford their weekly shop without a problem. These are the ones who are now struggling to get by."
Two children in every school class are going hungry because their parents fail to provide proper meals, according to a study by the parenting website Netmums and the child welfare charity Kids Company, with an estimated one million children in the UK now living in homes without enough to eat. A Guardian teacher network survey in June found that four out of five teachers (83%) saw pupils hungry in the morning and 55% said up to a quarter arrived having not eaten enough. Almost half of teachers had brought food in for pupils who arrived at school with empty stomachs.
Most experts agree the problem of Britain's nutritional recession is going to get worse, with the cost of the weekly shop continuing to rise by about 4% a year until 2022 at least, an increase almost twice the current rate of inflation of 2.7%. The average cost of a food shopping bill in Britain is £76.83 a week, an increase of £5.66 compared with last year, according to Which?. In a decade, the annual food bill for the average family will be over £4,000, up from £2,766 last year.
In Bristol, where the Hodges live, a recent report by Oxfam revealed that 26,500 people can't afford to eat enough. At least one in every 16 parents say they skip one meal a week so their family doesn't go hungry, with 41% saying they have been "forced" to buy cheaper food because healthy food has become unaffordable.
Emma Murray, co-founder of the Bristol North West Food Bank, has seen an increasing number of professional people arrive at her door, needing emergency food parcels. "We don't just get unemployed council house families here by any means," she said. "We had a gentleman here last week who lived in Clifton, the most affluent part of Bristol. He had lost his job and was mortified to find himself asking for our help. We had another professional woman the other day who was so embarrassed to be here that she couldn't come through the door."
Murray's food bank has fed over 3,000 people since it opened 20 months ago, many referred from agencies, including GPs, health visitors, schools and job centres. "There's a lot of disbelief about food poverty because families who have always been able to afford to live independently of the state are very ashamed about needing help for something as essential as food," she said.
At the supermarket, Tony heads to the Branson's baked beans piled up by the front door, £1.50 for three tins. "Last week, these were £1 for four," he says. "It's disgusting the way supermarkets try to squeeze extra money from families who are struggling and can't afford the extra pennies, even with something as small as a tin of beans." He makes his way down the aisles, gazing blankly from side to side. "Food doesn't mean anything nice to me any more. It just makes me feel stressed," he says. "The cheap things we can afford are so tasteless and pointless that I often can't even be bothered to eat."
Carefully choosing a small onion and a single floret of broccoli, he glances over at the peppers. "My oldest boy loves peppers. It's the one healthy food he can't get enough of," he says. "But look at the price of them. We'd have to go without a meal just so that he can have a healthy snack."
It takes Tony five minutes to scour the shelves for the cheapest jam. "To be honest, I wouldn't be this careful if I wasn't being watched, but it means I've saved myself about £2 on jam and the same on baked beans," he says. "I'm itching to buy something that actually tastes nice and would be a treat but Nicola would go mad, and she'd be right to." As he heads to the till, however, he grabs two Cornish pasties, on offer at two for £1. "Nicola won't like that," he says. "But I have to leave the house at 5am every morning and sometimes I forget to make lunch – or we don't have enough food in for me to do it.
"It's bad to buy those pasties, I know, but it's less bad than if I have to buy something at work, where it'll cost four times as much."
Both the Department of Health (DoH) and the British Retail Consortium (BRC), the trade association representing retailers from large supermarkets to independent shops, insist that families can eat both healthily and cheaply. According to government estimates, poor households could eat within the official Eatwell healthy eating guidelines if they spent just 21p more on food each week. The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) estimates that low-income households spend £16.49 per person each week on foods in the Eatwell categories. But, the department says, they could meet all the Eatwell goals by increasing their spend on food to £16.70 and spending £2.77 a week less on high-fat/high-sugar foods, £1.88 more on bread and other starchy foods and £2.22 more on fruit and vegetables.Prof Philip James, a former nutrition adviser to the government and president of the International Association for the Study of Obesity, rejects these claims.
"The reality is that anyone who does not essentially live independently of any state influence – that is, those who have no mortgage, whose salary has not been frozen and who have a handsome pension – is going to be affected by a government making some of the biggest cuts to local authority budgets at the same time that it is predicted food prices are going to rise even further," he said.
Healthy eating is expensive – and increasingly so, according to research by Mysupermarket.co.uk, the price comparison and shopping site, which shows that, in the past year alone, staples such as 500g of minced beef have risen by a fifth, from £2.20 to £2.80, while a 1kg bag of onions is up by 18%, from 87p to £1.02. Carrots, potatoes, eggs and orange juice have also seen steep rises. Although processed food has seen the sharpest price rise – 36% – since 2007, the next steepest rise, at 34%, has been in fruit. The cost of vegetables has risen by 22% over the same period.
The government assessment of food affordability paints a bleak picture of how the diet of the nation's poorest 10% has deteriorated since the financial crash. Between 2007 and 2010, the most recent period analysed, low-income households cut the amount of food they buy by 11%. But while trading down to cheaper products has helped many people offset some of the food price rises, low-income households have not managed to trade down, possibly because they were already buying cheaper products, the report suggests.
In 2010, the poorest 10% bought 26% less red meat and pork than in 2007, 25% less fruit and 15% less vegetables, raising concerns that the food industry and the government are not doing enough to promote affordable, healthy food choices for all segments of society. This, says Cory, corresponds to what Resolution sees on the ground. "It's unequivocal," she said. "When food prices go up and household incomes go down, people on low to middle incomes buy less healthy food and more unhealthy food. It's a very real causation and, frankly, an unarguable one."
Back in Bristol, Nicola is unpacking Tony's shopping bags as he hovers anxiously. "You've done well," she says finally. "This was a big shop and I was expecting it to cost £50 and you've come in at £46.19, even with those pasties."
Tony peers over her shoulder to try to identify something he wants to eat for supper. There isn't anything. He slumps down on the sofa and reaches for the remote control.
"It just all looks so cheap and nasty," he says. "To be honest, just looking at it takes my appetite away."
This article was amended on 20 November 2012. The original said that in 2010, the poorest 10% bought 26% less fresh meat than in 2007. That has been corrected to red meat and pork. An estimate that low-income households spend £16.49 per person each week on foods in the Eatwell categories was by Defra, not the Department of Health; and research about the rising cost of staple foods was by Mysupermarket.co.uk, not the government's Food Statistics Pocketbook. These points have been corrected. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2023/feb/23/republican-dissidents-lurk-in-the-shadows-hoping-to-be-noticed | UK news | 2023-02-23T18:52:50.000Z | Rory Carroll | Northern Ireland republican dissidents lurk in the shadows hoping to be noticed | The ambush of a senior Northern Ireland police officer on Wednesday night was almost certainly the work of a tiny group of so-called republican dissidents who have long tried – and consistently failed – to escalate a violent campaign.
The New IRA has launched sporadic attacks on security forces over the past decade to show that there is still a flickering flame in the tradition of physical-force republicanism.
It is not about Brexit, the Northern Ireland protocol or the upcoming 25th anniversary of the Good Friday agreement. It is not about sparking a Troubles 2.0. It is about showing they exist.
While Northern Ireland transitions to a post-conflict normality – notwithstanding Stormont’s political dysfunction – the New IRA and other dissident groups lurk in the shadows, looking for opportunities to unsettle the security services and the rest of society.
A hoax warning here, an improvised device there, a shooting. Mostly the attempts fail. The groups’ numbers are small, their terrorist skillset meagre, and they have been infiltrated by intelligence services.
Yet every so often they manage to maim and kill. By such a yardstick, if carried out by the New IRA, Wednesday’s attack was a rare success. Two masked men shot and critically injured a detective chief inspector, John Caldwell. The 48-year-old father was off duty and putting footballs into the boot of his car at a sports complex in Omagh, County Tyrone. He was with his son and other children he had been coaching.
While people and political leaders across the UK and Ireland expressed horror, those responsible will have celebrated. Caldwell was a senior, high-profile officer. The attack made headlines and chilled the Police Service of Northern Ireland.
Three men were arrested on Thursday but that is no guarantee they will be charged, let alone tried and convicted. If this was the work of the New IRA, their only regret will be not killing Caldwell outright.
The New IRA emerged in 2012 via a merger of several groups opposed to the peace process, including the Real IRA. Police believe it has several hundred active supporters, a mix of former Provisional IRA members and new, young recruits, including some born after the 1998 Good Friday agreement.
In their worldview, Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness sold out by abandoning the armed struggle. There is, after all, no united Ireland. Those who keep fighting for it are the true republicans. That they are politically isolated and publicly reviled reinforces the self-mythology.
A timeline of New IRA attacks shows a concentration in and around Derry, plus a combination of ineptitude, dogged persistence and ability to change tactics.
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In January 2019, a van bomb exploded at a courthouse in Derry moments after police had evacuated the area. Three months later a New IRA gunman killed the journalist Lyra McKee – she had been standing beside a police Land Rover - during a riot in Derry’s Creggan area. In June 2019, it claimed responsibility for placing a device under a police officer’s car at a golf club.
In April 2021, a bomb with flammable liquid was left close to a police officer’s car in Dungiven. A year later, youths attacked police with petrol bombs during an Easter parade linked to dissidents. In November, a delivery driver in Derry was hijacked and ordered to drive to a police station. Later that month a New IRA improvised device damaged a police patrol car in Strabane. The two officers inside were not hurt.
The market town of Omagh was the scene of the worst attack of the Troubles – a Real IRA car bomb that killed 29 in 1998. Some thought the scale of public revulsion would chasten dissidents into abandoning violence. They didn’t. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2010/may/09/general-election-2010-conservative-lib-dem | Politics | 2010-05-09T20:45:48.000Z | Patrick Wintour | General election 2010: Deadline day for Conservative Lib Dem deal | Nick Clegg, the Liberal Democrat leader, has given himself until the end of tomorrow to decide whether to let David Cameron form a government, or instead risk a deal with Labour that might be seen as illegitimate by the public and jeopardise the success of a yes vote in a referendum on electoral reform.
Clegg met Gordon Brown for an hour at the Foreign Office today and is understood to have set out his fear that a Lib-Lab coalition might be regarded as illegitimate even if Brown stood down as its leader.
Senior cabinet figures have told Brown in the last 48 hours that he should stand down and operate merely as a transitional figure for an unspecified period.
Brown is said to be willing to step aside in due course, with some cabinet hardliners saying he should quit before a referendum on electoral reform and that his presence would taint the outcome.
In these circumstances, the rules provide for the cabinet to choose a leader from within its ranks. No agreement exists as to the identity of this figure, but the likely options are Labour's deputy leader, Harriet Harman, or foreign secretary David Miliband. Some cabinet ministers were privately urging the Lib Dems to call for Brown to go as a precondition of an agreement.
Cameron and Clegg met for 30 minutes in the Commons tonight – their second face to face meeting since the election. The meeting followed seven hours of talks between Lib Dem and Tory negotiating teams at the Cabinet Office to discuss the outlines of a common policy programme to deliver stable government. The negotiating teams agreed to meet again tomorrow. Cameron is understood to have told senior Tories that he would not be offering a referendum on electoral reform under his government, which would deny the Lib Dems one of their most cherished prizes.
So far Cameron has only offered a cross-party inquiry into electoral reform.
Neither side gave much away except to say they had discussed deficit reduction, climate change, civil liberties, political reform and bank regulation. The emphasis on deficit reduction is designed to calm the markets before trading opens tomorrow.
Clegg has been surprised by the Tories flexibility in the negotiations. Cameron has suggested reductions in the number of MPs, an elected House of Lords and a fixed-term parliament – all major concessions.
But Clegg still regards electoral reform as the main prize he can secure from the last Thursday's general election, which left his party holding the balance of power, albeit with a reduced number of MPs.
Instead of a working in a coalition, Clegg and Cameron could agree "confidence and supply" – a commitment by the Lib Dems to let a Tory budget and an agreed Queen's speech through. Clegg is also understood to believe that the coalition talks between his senior MPs and Conservative counterparts have only another 24 hours to run before the public will lose patience.
Clegg's team comprised the Lib Dem manifesto author, Danny Alexander, home affairs spokesman, Chris Huhne, the schools spokesman, David Laws, and the former chief whip Andrew Stunell.
The Tory team was the party's policy chief, Oliver Letwin, shadow chancellor, George Osborne, the shadow foreign secretary, William Hague, and Ed Llewellyn, Cameron's chief of staff.
Labour is trying to convince Clegg that his chances of electoral reform for the Commons are much greater under a Labour-organised referendum.
Brown, who returned to Downing Street from Scotland with his family today, has also promised that he would pass legislation on electoral reform almost immediately. There have also been Labour guarantees about caps on spending in the referendum.
In contrast, Cameron would not be able to back electoral reform even if he granted a referendum. Senior Tories such as Graham Brady, the right's candidate for chairmanship of the 1922 committee of backbenchers, said his instinct was for a Cameron minority government, partly due to his fear of electoral reform.
Many Tories see a proportional voting system as likely to exclude the Tories from government for generations, as well as destroying the cherished link between MPs and their constituencies. Speaking todaybefore talks resumed, Clegg said: "I'm very keen that the Liberal Democrats should play a constructive role at a time of great economic uncertainty to provide a good government this country deserves. Throughout that we will continue to be guided by the big changes we want – tax reform, improving education for all children, sorting out the banks and building a new economy from the rubble of the old, and extensive fundamental political reform."
He is also under serious internal political pressure, including from the former Lib Dem leader in the Lords Lady Williams, not to strike a full coalition deal with Cameron. She told the Guardian it is not in the Tory DNA to move properly in key areas. "I think it would be better for us to offer them confidence and supply and let them govern as minority government coupled with cross-party work in two areas: we need swift cross party action to bring down the deficit, and action on political reform."
It is known other very senior Lib Dem MPs and peers do not want Clegg to strike a deal with Cameron, saying he will have fulfilled his promise to the electorate to give the Conservative leader the first chance to form a government on the basis that he came first in seats and share of the vote. Simon Hughes, the Lib Dem energy spokesman said today: "I can't imagine that a review [on electoral reform] would be enough to be honest. We've been there before, we were there at the 1997 election … We had an inquiry, a referendum was promised, there wasn't a referendum." | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2012/dec/19/pollard-inquiry-bbc-jimmy-savile | Global | 2012-12-19T13:52:00.000Z | Dan Sabbagh | Pollard inquiry: BBC 'incapable' of dealing with Jimmy Savile affair | Nick Pollard delivers his review into the decision by BBC Newsnight to drop a report into alleged abuse by the late broadcaster Jimmy Savile ITN
Chaos and confusion, a lack of leadership from senior executives and an adherence to "rigid management chains" meant that the BBC proved "completely incapable" of dealing with the Jimmy Savile affair, according to an excoriating 185-page report into the handling of and fallout from the decision to axe a Newsnight investigation into child sexual abuse by the late presenter.
Peter Rippon, Newsnight's editor, is to be replaced, after the report by former head of Sky News Nick Pollard – costing £2m and published on Wednesday – found that his decision to drop the Savile investigation was "seriously flawed".
But Pollard concluded that Rippon's decision was "done in good faith" without him being put under "undue pressure" by his bosses, the BBC's director of news Helen Boaden and her deputy director, Stephen Mitchell.
Yet it was Mitchell who faced some of the most serious criticism from Pollard and he announced his retirement on Wednesday. He will leave the BBC in 2013 after nearly 40 years.
Pollard said that Mitchell made a "serious mistake" in deciding to remove the intended Newsnight Savile film from the BBC's "managed risk programmes list" in November 2011. This would have flagged the existence of a potentially controversial item to other BBC executives. However, there were harsh words for many other BBC executives too.
The BBC Radio 5 Live controller, Adrian Van Klaveren, who oversaw Newsnight's disastrous 2 November report that falsely linked Lord McAlpine to an allegation of child sex abuse after Boaden and Mitchell were "recused" from Savile-related coverage, is also moving to another job at the corporation, like Rippon.
Liz Gibbons, the Newsnight deputy editor who oversaw the 2 November report, is also moving to a new BBC role. Boaden will return to her post on Thursday after she was "recused" during the Pollard inquiry.
A second report – published by the editorial standards committee of the BBC Trust – that examined the circumstances around the disastrous misidentification ofMcAlpine by Newsnight – also revealed that three unnamed employees had been subject to disciplinary action following a "grave breach" of standards.
Pollard's report said the "most worrying aspect" of the Savile/Newsnight affair was that the BBC showed a "complete inability to deal with the events that followed". In a clear criticism of George Entwistle – the director general who resigned on 10 November after being overwhelmed by the Savile scandal – and other senior executives, Pollard said they proved unable to get to the bottom of what had happened with the axed Newsnight film that would have revealed the truth about Savile in late 2011.
"The efforts to get to the truth behind the Savile story proved beyond the combined efforts of the senior management, legal department, corporate communications team and anyone else for well over a month," Pollard said.
He noted that a culture of suspicion and "an apparent adherence to rigid management chains and a reluctance to by pass them" hampered a resolution.
There were particularly harsh words about Rippon's blog, published on 2 October shortly before an ITV documentary finally exposed Savile's sex abuse, explaining why Newsnight dropped its investigation into the same allegations in December 2011. The BBC was later forced to admit the blog contained factual inaccuracies and correct it – but this took nearly three weeks.
"The preparation of the blog can only be described as chaotic. When clear leadership was required, it was not provided," Pollard concluded.
"The BBC was thrown into disarray by the errors in the blog and had no structure in place to deal with them. What is marked is both the time it took for the errors to be addressed and the fact that for some time at least, no one individual fully stepped up and took responsibility for the issue."
Reaction to the report
The BBC Trust, responding, said it would be the "first and top priority" for incoming director general Lord (Tony) Hall to "reform" the BBC's management culture. Accepting that the BBC had dominated by "chaos and confusion" that could have been "avoided by better leadership" the trust said it expected change from Hall within "three months" of his arrival in March.
Maria Miller, the culture secretary who criticised the BBC's response to the Savile scandal, said the Pollard report "raises serious questions around editorial and management issues at the BBC and I look to the trust to help tackle these.
"I also remind the trust how vital it is to publish all relevant evidence, as soon as possible, in order to rebuild public trust and confidence in the BBC," Miller added.
"It remains critical that we do not lose sight of the most important issue in this – the many victims of sexual abuse by Savile. I urge the BBC to now focus on the review into those abuses, and ensure it is swift and transparent. I will remain in close touch with the trust as they oversee this work."
Pollard told a press conference following the publication of his report on Wednesday: "Perhaps the most worrying aspect was not the decision to drop the [Newsnight] story but complete inability to deal with the events that followed for a few months after the Savile investigation was halted."
He said there had been a "complete breakdown in communication all the way up the chain, effectively from Peter Rippon to George Entwistle".
He added: "There was an element of personal difficulty between the key personalities as well, that's quite shocking in a way. Newsrooms can only operate on the basis of trust and mutual confidence and discussion. A lot of that was missing."
Tim Davie and Lord Patten reactions
Tim Davie, the acting BBC director general, told the press conference that he had tried to be reasonable when it came to disciplining staff in the wake of the Newsnight affairs.
"I would say 'go to the report, look at it calmly and think what is fair and proportionate'. That is not to say there aren't learnings for many people from this affair, but that doesn't necessitate summary dismissals or disciplinary action," Davie said.
He conceded that the BBC had "taken a hit" in terms of public trust, and added "any degree of arrogance or assumption that trust will bounce back is ill-founded. We need to earn it day, in day out. This is a long process not a 24-hour job."
Lord Patten, the BBC Trust chairman, said that he was frustrated by the lack of teamworking at the top: "While the BBC is a fantastic organisation and does great journalism, there has been in some part a lack of professional camaraderie and a lack of collegiate behaviour which I find pretty surprising."
The chairman also said Pollard's report did not change the trust's thinking as regards the £450,000 payoff for George Entwistle, who resigned after only 54 days in the job, even though it revealed that he did not read an email from a colleague that referred to Savile's "dark side" shortly after the former presenter died in October 2011.
Patten added that "this report doesn't, I think, give us any reasons for thinking there would have been grounds for summary dismissal", which would have reduced Entwistle's payoff by half. Patten said the BBC would "continue to take legal advice" but that "I am not going to finish up in a long and expensive legal battle which might end up costing the BBC more".
Entwistle said in a statement: "Pollard's report underlines the fact that any managerial shortcomings relating to Newsnight's aborted Savile investigation were largely the result of unsatisfactory internal communications. These flowed from silos and other structural issues that I had identified when I became DG and had begun work to resolve. I welcome Nick Pollard's recommendations in this area.
"I took the decision to resign as director general in November 2012 because I thought it was important to take responsibility, as head of the organisation, for the mistakes Newsnight made in its report on child abuse in North Wales.
"I am pleased that the Pollard report makes it clear I played no part whatever in Newsnight's decision not to broadcast the original Savile investigation – just as I was not personally to blame in any way for the journalistic failures on Newsnight when it broadcast its erroneous report about the North Wales care home."
Rippon said he did not agree with Pollard's conclusion that his decision not to broadcast Newsnight's Savile investigation was flawed, but added that it was the right time to move on. "Given all that has happened regarding the programme over the last few months, I recognise that it is right for Newsnight now to have a fresh start."
Mitchell said: "Given the strain over the past month since being told to stand aside from the job I loved, having endured the Pollard review process and now having read its criticisms, I have decided that it is in my interests and those of the BBC that I bring my career to a dignified end.
"Whilst I feel vindicated that the review has found that I put no undue pressure on Peter Rippon, I disagree with the remainder of Mr Pollard's criticisms in relation to me."
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https://www.theguardian.com/film/2013/oct/17/captain-phillips-review | Film | 2013-10-17T19:00:00.000Z | Peter Bradshaw | Captain Phillips – review | This unbearably tense hijack thriller from Paul Greengrass is based on a true story from 2009 about a Somali pirate attack on an American container ship. Like his 9/11 nightmare United 93 (2006) and his Northern Ireland drama Bloody Sunday (2002), this film is about a catastrophe that is the surface symptom of bigger economic and political factors. Tom Hanks is merchant marine captain Richard Phillips, about to pilot an American container vessel on a hazardous 10-day journey around the Horn of Africa and into the new bandit country. Meanwhile, a Somali fisherman called Muse (Barkhad Abdi) is part of a community terrorised by a local warlord. They have no choice but to obey when this baron orders them out on a hijack expedition tooled up with semi-automatic assault rifles.
Just as in United 93, the heart-sinking premonition of danger comes with a radar-bleep. Two green dots coming towards Phillips's big, placid ship far too quickly. The contrast is plain: on one side the huge, lumbering ship; on the other, the fast, manoeuvrable little skiff. One is weighed down with possessions, the other has none. In centuries gone by, piracy or privateering was the prerogative of rich nations seeking warlike advantage as sea-trading routes opened up. In the 21st century it is different, and when Muse finds that gigantic, ill-defended craft it is like Ishmael seeing the whale. Captain Phillips is his big prize. This is a quasi-war movie set in peacetime: in some ways, a post-9/11 film, perhaps specifically a salve to the memory of USS Cole in 2000. America fights back, but against a new enemy. Globalisation and poverty are incubating these attacks. All civilian shipping can do is wait for the next assault.
More on Captain Phillips
Captain Phillips: watch the trailer
Director Paul Greengrass on Captain Phillips | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2013/may/27/royal-ballet-review | Stage | 2013-05-27T16:39:13.000Z | Judith Mackrell | Royal Ballet: Raven Girl – review | It has a bird woman and a prince, love and transformation, but Wayne McGregor's first fairytale ballet is light years away from the world of Swan Lake. His narrative comes from Audrey Niffenegger's graphic novel The Raven Girl, which embraces in extraordinary measure both the magical and mundane in its story of a postman who falls in love with a raven, and fathers a human daughter with the soul of a bird.
The extremes of Niffenegger's imagination inspire McGregor and his design team to create some spellbinding imagery. Deft cartoon scenery flips the action from a windswept cliff to a Kafkaesque city; ingenious props evoke the Raven Girl's yearning to release the bird inside her: a spinning circular trapeze; a pair of transfiguring, iridescent wings.
McGregor choreographs with an unusually wide palette, channelling Frederick Ashton for the eccentricities and robustness of his human characters, and Merce Cunningham for the scattered asymmetries of the raven chorus. Best of all is his tenderly imagined movement for the two women, the Raven's bird-boned brittleness modulating into maternal expressiveness, the Girl's frustrated anger dissolving into swooping flight as she meets her Raven Prince and falls in love. Sarah Lamb as the Girl is outstanding: fearless in her battle with gravity, yet with a core of bewildered vulnerability that evokes a 21st-century Odette.
For all the ballet's strengths, however, it fights a losing battle against the more intractably undanceable elements in Niffenegger's sometimes dislocating story. Loose ends trail, and too often McGregor has to resort to his designers to narrate events for him. The work's beguiling originality counted for a lot, but in among the cheers for the evening's closing ballet – Symphony in C – you could detect relief that the Royal had reverted to familiar fare.
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https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/feb/02/brexit-white-paper-key-points-explained | Politics | 2017-02-02T14:54:21.000Z | Jon Henley | Brexit white paper: key points explained | Jon Henley | A day after parliament voted overwhelmingly to give Theresa May the power to trigger article 50, the government presented MPs with its formal policy paper setting out how the UK proposes to leave the EU.
David Davis to present Brexit white paper to House of Commons
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Here are the key points of the Brexit white paper, which essentially builds and expands on May’s Lancaster House speech last month. It amounts to a list of objectives, many of which will not necessarily be easy to achieve.
Sovereignty, great repeal bill and control of UK laws
The paper says the British parliament has been sovereign throughout the UK’s EU membership, “but it has not always felt like that” – a striking comment.
It says the government will bring forward a separate white paper on the great repeal bill, which was first announced by May in her Conservative party conference speech last year to remove the European Communities Act of 1972 from the UK statute book and convert the body of existing EU law into domestic law.
The paper confirms that “wherever practical and appropriate” the same rules and laws will apply in the UK on the day after it leaves the EU as did before.
It also confirms that the government intends to “take control of our own laws”, which will mean “bringing to an end the jurisdiction of the European court of justice in the UK” and establishing a new mechanism for resolving future disputes between the UK and the EU.
The union and Ireland
The paper says the government will “work with the devolved administrations on an approach to returning powers from the EU that works for the whole of the UK and reflects the interests of Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales” but does not go into specifics.
It also promises that no decisions currently taken by the devolved administrations will be taken away from them, and indeed that more decisions will be devolved (it does not say which). And it says it will pay particular attention to the Isle of Man, Channel Islands and Gibraltar, all of which have unique relationships with the EU.
On the island of Ireland and the common travel area with the UK, the paper notes the UK and Irish economies are “deeply integrated” and says the government will work to “develop and strengthen” those ties after Brexit.
It says it aims to retain “as seamless and frictionless a border as possible” between Northern Ireland and the Republic, and wants Irish and UK citizens to be able to continue to move freely north-south and east-west, “while protecting the integrity of the UK’s immigration system”. Again, it does not say how.
Immigration and reciprocal citizens’ rights
On the rights of EU nationals living in the UK and vice versa, the white paper goes no further than May’s speech.
It says securing their status is “one of this government’s early priorities for the forthcoming negotiations” and reiterates that “the UK remains ready to give people the certainty they want … at the earliest opportunity”. (The EU-27 have always seen this as part of article 50 negotiations).
It says it is consulting with expatriate groups abroad and EU businesses and other groups “to ensure we understand their priorities”, and “recognises the priority placed on easy access to healthcare by UK nationals living in the EU” – a key concern of many, particularly pensioners.
On controlling immigration, the paper offers no clarity. It says the government is “considering very carefully” the options open to it and working to “understand the impacts on the different sectors of the economy and the labour market”.
Businesses and communities will be able to contribute their views, it says, and suggests – for the first time with regard to immigration – that “there may be a phased process of implementation”, to give companies and individuals time to plan and prepare.
It says EU students can continue to come and study, in the short term at least, but says nothing about future access for EU workers. It also says workers’ rights under EU law will be preserved after Brexit.
EU trade, single market, customs union and budget
The white paper reiterates that the government aims to secure “the freest and most frictionless trade possible in goods and services” with the EU outside the single market and via “an ambitious and comprehensive free trade agreement”.
It also wants to be outside the customs union, so it can negotiate its own trade deals, but would like “a new customs agreement”, which should be theoretically possible thanks to new technology. Again, this does not go further than May’s speech.
We are told once more that the UK will not seek to adopt an existing model used by other countries, but try to “take in elements” of the single market in certain areas – in other words, bespoke deals for important business sectors. From the EU perspective, all this is ambitious: it sounds suspiciously like cherry-picking.
The paper plays up the financial services card, which the government plainly considers a strong one: the EU has a clear interest in “mutual cooperation arrangements”, it says, describing the City as Europe’s only global hub for money, trading and investment on which the EU will continue to rely.
It confirms the UK will leave the Euratom treaty, the legal framework for nuclear power, but says a new relationship will be negotiated, and it says the UK’s future status with EU agencies regulating areas such as medicines, aviation, food safety and financial services will also be part of discussions.
And there will be no more “vast contributions” to the EU budget, as May already said.
Trade with other countries; research
The paper repeats May’s pledge to make the UK a “champion of free trade” and says it will seek bilateral free trade agreements and participate in multilateral negotiations through the World Trade Organisation.
It acknowledges Britain “cannot agree new trade deals until after we have left the EU” – a possible bone of contention with the EU27 – but says there is “much we can do to prepare and to achieve now while respecting our obligations as members”.
It also says work is already under way on establishing Britain’s own schedules covering trade in goods and services at the WTO, aimed as far as possible at replicating those it currently has as an EU member.
The paper also says Britain aims to “continue to collaborate with EU partners” on a key part of its new industrial strategy: science, research and technology. Many academics expect this to become considerably more difficult after Brexit.
Security and crime cooperation
As May has already said, the UK will seek to continue working with the EU “to preserve UK and European security and to fight terrorism and uphold justice across Europe”, the paper says.
It says the government will aim to retain and develop existing cooperation in initiatives like Europol, the European arrest warrant, the Schengen information system, the new EU passenger name records, and the European criminal records information system.
In terms of security and defence, it also promises to “remain committed to European security and add value to EU foreign and security policy” – an offer that may well prove valuable in the exit negotiations.
Orderly exit
The white paper says the government aims to deliver “a smooth, mutually beneficial exit” but says this will require “a coherent and coordinated approach on both sides”. Article 50 will be triggered no later than the end of March, it repeats.
It acknowledges it is “in no one’s interests for there to be a cliff-edge for business or a threat to stability”, saying the government would like “to have reached an agreement about our future partnership” by the end of the article 50 process and repeating May’s suggestion of variable “phased processes of implementation” to give everyone time to plan and prepare for the new arrangements.
The paper also reiterates the prime minister’s remarks that “no deal for the UK is better than a bad deal for the UK” – and suggests that, to mitigate against the impact of not getting the deal it wants from the EU, the government will prepare legislation “to ensure our economic and other functions van continue”.
It does not say what the legislation will contain, or what future economic model the government might envisage. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/jan/03/the-guardian-view-on-the-nhs-winter-crisis-not-such-a-happy-birthday | Opinion | 2018-01-03T18:52:49.000Z | Editorial | The Guardian view on the NHS winter crisis: not such a happy birthday | Editorial | For the NHS in England, 2018 has begun much as it is likely to go on. This year is the 70th anniversary of Britain’s most treasured institution. But it is eight years into a funding regime that has failed year after year to match the inexorable growth in demand. It operates on the very edge of viability. Any system-wide increase in need tips it over the edge.
The contours of the winter crisis are familiar: the Christmas and New Year shut-down of supporting services – the GPs, community health workers and social services who help to keep people at home – coinciding with winter flu and cold weather always puts the NHS under pressure. Even in Scotland, where slightly higher funding per patient and much closer coordination between hospital and social care reduces problems such as bed-blocking, there are nightmare stories about long waits on trolleys and a service that shows painful signs of stress. Yet while the wretched experience of a system running off the rails is familiar, there is also something unusual going on here.
First, more thought than ever went into avoiding another Christmas crisis – yet it has still happened. From July, conspicuous planning was underway. Instructions were issued to free up thousands of beds. Accident and emergency bosses were ordered to make detailed contingency plans. By November, however, it was clear they had not succeeded. A critical assessment by NHS Improvement reported that no more beds were available, because – again – of failure to provide more social care. It predicted a winter of woe. And while it is important to recognise that some trusts are managing well, it has duly arrived. No amount of planning can get around the hard fact that there is a shortage of capacity in terms of both beds and staff.
Second, after the chancellor refused to release more cash for the core functions of the NHS in his autumn budget, NHS England began trying to manage a public debate about what it might have to ration. Although they are being undone as far as possible without actually repealing the legislation, it is now becoming clear how the ill-conceived Lansley reforms of 2011-12, which aimed to distance the NHS from Westminster, are resetting the politics of the health service.
As an example, consider how Tuesday’s decision to suspend outpatient appointments and elective surgery for the rest of the month, and to suspend penalties for having mixed wards, was taken, not after crisis meetings at the Department of Health but by the new national emergency pressure panel. Consider, too, that the job of explaining the decision and insisting that there was no crisis because there was a plan fell to Professor Keith Willett, head of trauma care for NHS England, not to a politician.
That meant that Theresa May was able to talk sympathetically about the “frustration” of having surgery cancelled. The health secretary, Jeremy Hunt, also apologised, saying it “is absolutely not what I want”. And while in a series of interviews he did accept the need for a “substantial” increase in funding to meet the challenge of an ageing population, he did not entirely remove the impression that the growth of autonomy in NHS England is being taken by politicians as a licence to talk about the state of the English health service as if it were an arms-length organisation. Spending decisions that ministers take in Whitehall are somehow distanced from their impact on the hospital ward. That is why the Patients Association demanded that ministers must be accountable. “The policy decisions that have left the NHS in this position are taken by the government,” it says.
Ministers hope they can manage the NHS in a way that stops the funding crisis exploding into a national scandal. Yet neither NHS England, nor thinktanks such as the King’s Fund or the Nuffield Trust, believe it is possible to sustain world-beating levels of care on the existing budget. Waiting times at A&E and for non-urgent surgery are set to grow. Local reorganisations, likely to mean closures of much-loved services, will provoke political uproar. Brexit could precipitate a further crisis in staffing levels; the expansion in numbers of doctors and nurses that is underway will take years more to arrive.
Whitehall documents released last week record how in 1992 the then health secretary Virginia Bottomley appealed unsuccessfully to the Treasury for more money. The state of the NHS became a proxy for Tory neglect of the public sector that smoothed Tony Blair’s path to power in 1997. “Trouble ahead,” John Major minuted. Sometime between now and 2022, it looks as if it will be deja vu all over again. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2016/nov/29/mahler-second-symphony-manuscript-sold-record-sum | Music | 2016-11-29T12:54:18.000Z | Michael Hann | Mahler's second symphony manuscript sells for record £4.5m | It was the ideal Christmas gift for someone with several million spare pounds and a love of Mahler: the complete manuscript of the composer’s second symphony – known as the Resurrection – was up for auction at Sotheby’s in London on Tuesday morning.
Big bang theory: discovering Mahler
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The buyer had to part with a record price for a music manuscript, paying £4,546,250 for the 232-page document. Sotheby’s said it was “the most significant musical manuscript ever to have been offered at auction”, noting that the only comparable symphonic manuscripts to have been sold at auction were those of nine Mozart symphonies (which sold for £2.5m at Sotheby’s in 1987) and Schumann’s second symphony (£1.5m in 1994).
“No complete symphony by Mahler, written in the composer’s own hand, has ever been offered at auction, and probably none will be offered again,” said Simon Maguire, Sotheby’s senior specialist in books and manuscripts.
The Mahler manuscript is unaltered since it was first set down by the composer, including his own deletions, alterations and annotations.
The manuscript was sold by the estate of Gilbert Kaplan, an American economist and businessman, who became obsessed with the Resurrection symphony after seeing it performed at Carnegie Hall in New York in 1965, and it became a dream for him to conduct the piece.
Gustav Mahler … pictured in 1907. Photograph: Imagno/Getty Images
Kaplan began learning conducting in 1981, and went on to conduct the symphony in more than 100 performances. He conducted two recordings of the work, with the London Symphony Orchestra in 1987 and the Vienna Philharmonic in 2002. He also established the Kaplan foundation, dedicated to Mahler scholarship and promoting the composer’s work.
David Finlayson, a trombonist who took part in the New York Philharmonic’s 2008 performance of the work under Kaplan, took a dim view of the amateur conductor. “As a conductor, he can best be described as a very poor beater of time who far too often is unable to keep the ensemble together and allows most tempo transitions to fall where they may,” he wrote.
“His direction lacks few indications of dynamic control or balance and there is absolutely no attempt to give phrases any requisite shape. In rehearsal, he admitted to our orchestra that he is not capable of keeping a steady tempo and that he would have to depend on us for any stability in that department. Considering his Everest-sized ego, this admission must have caused him great consternation upon reflection … Mr Kaplan and his assault on conducting leave many musicians angry, bewildered and befuddled.”
Others, however, defended Kaplan. The writer Norman Lebrecht, who attended the performance, wrote: “Having watched him master the work over almost 25 years, I am convinced – and so are many musicians – that no one alive has such detailed knowledge of the score … There were rhythms in the second and third movements that he delivered more idiomatically and true to score than I have heard from most professionals. The performance as a whole achieved its intended catharsis – and if the New York Philharmonic think they can do that without a conductor, as the trombonist suggests, well, let’s see them try.” | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/jun/08/could-dumping-save-the-reef-csiro-finds-its-possible-to-turn-back-clock-on-effects-of-fossil-fuel-burning | Environment | 2021-06-08T08:00:15.000Z | Graham Readfearn | Could dumping save the reef? CSIRO finds it’s possible to turn back clock on effects of fossil fuel burning | Continually dumping crushed rocks from a bulk carrier along a Great Barrier Reef shipping route could counteract the acidification of ocean water caused by fossil fuel burning, but would come with unknown side effects on the marine environment and coral reefs, according to a study from Australia’s science agency.
In what is described as a “first order assessment”, scientists at CSIRO found it was theoretically possible to turn back the clock on the effect of decades of fossil fuel burning, but the radical step came with “as yet unquantified risks”.
As well as causing the atmosphere and oceans to warm, increasing levels of CO2 in the atmosphere from fossil fuel burning has changed the pH of the ocean, making it harder for corals to form their skeletons – a process known as calcification.
The lead scientist in the study, Dr Mathieu Mongin, said researchers were now being forced to consider the viability of radical interventions to save the reef because of a lack of global action on the climate crisis.
Scientists trial cloud brightening equipment to shade and cool Great Barrier Reef
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One reef expert, Prof Terry Hughes, described the concept of adding materials to the Great Barrier Reef’s waters, as modelled in the study, as “reckless”.
Reef scientists are exploring the viability a range of local interventions to try and buy time for the world’s largest coral reef system.
A trial has already been carried out of a delivery system to spray trillions of nano-sized ocean salt crystals to brighten clouds, that could be deployed to cool the reef during summer periods when corals are at risk of bleaching.
The new study, published Tuesday in the journal Environmental Research Letters, raises the concept of using an existing shipping route to deploy an alkaline material that could raise the pH level of the water, making it less acidic.
The research used actual pH measurements taken from sensors on a ship owned by mining company Rio Tinto that travels the Weipa to Gladstone route – a journey that typically takes four days.
Mongin and colleagues used those measurements to test and calibrate their computer model that simulated the material being released for two years using the ocean and weather conditions between January 2014 and December 2015.
Mongin, a carbon chemist and modeller at CSIRO, said: “Because there is a lack of action on climate change and reducing emissions, that is forcing us to explore these interventions.
“We have to explore all the caveats and that will have to be done with our scientific colleagues and reef managers.”
The study looks at the potential affects of adding a solution of crushed Olivine – a common mineral – at a rate of 90,000t over three days. Ocean currents then spread the solution out over the reef.
Mongin said the modelling showed the material would need to be continually added to the ocean waters to sustain the raised pH levels.
“The day you stop, within three months you go back to where you were,” he said.
The model suggests a continuous release of the material every three days for one year along the reef’s length offsets four years of ocean acidification caused by current CO2 emissions.
“We are not advocating for doing this intervention,” Mongin said. “We are dealing with the current status of the Great Barrier Reef. We see this coming and we see no action and it is hard for us to think about doing these interventions.
“But it is my job to test it so the public is aware of what might be coming if we don’t act now. We are stepping outside our comfort zone, but we have to do it.”
Scientists have already carried out a small-scale experiment on a coral cay on the southern part of the Great Barrier Reef, showing that adding an alkaline solution to the water increased the rate at which corals could build skeletons.
Prof Hughes, of James Cook University’s Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies, said the concept of adding 90,000t of Olivine “every three days for a century or so” was “reckless”.
He said: “The study does not investigate the ecological impacts of manipulating water chemistry at huge scales, beyond acknowledging that light levels would be reduced.
“The Australian government has spent hundreds of millions of dollars in recent years to reduce water pollution on coastal reefs. Deliberately reducing light levels throughout the GBR would have enormous detrimental impacts on corals, seagrasses, and other key species that use sunlight to photosynthesise.”
Dr Kennedy Wolfe, a marine biologist at the University of Queensland who helped carry out a previous ocean acidification experiment, said it was important to understand the potential viability of broad-scale conservation measures.
But he said the study showed a “major shortcoming” of the approach was the need to continually add material to the ocean.
He said: “As the study points out, seawater chemistry would rapidly return to pre-intervention levels if alkalinity injections ceased. Does this mean that 90,000t of alkalinity source must be added to the GBR every three days for all eternity?
“Actually, we would likely need to add more and more alkalinity to the system to counter the continued intensification of ocean acidification due to global emissions, unless emissions are drastically curbed alongside alkalinity injections.”
Globally, the average pH of the world’s oceans is at its lowest in about 800,000 years.
While the pH levels of the water naturally swing back and forth daily, and across the seasons, one study has found the highest levels of CO2 the Great Barrier Reef’s corals were exposed to in the 1960s now represented the lowest levels.
Dr Katharina Fabricius, a senior principal research scientist at the Australian Institute of Marine Science, said: “Overall it’s clear that reef calcification has declined.
“The GBR has become 6% more acidic in the last 10 years. We are exactly following the trend [of CO2 levels] in the atmosphere.”
She said while some marine species might be able to move to escape warmer temperatures, “for ocean acidification, there is no escape”. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/apr/08/levelling-up-policies-raise-incomes-make-rich-richer | Opinion | 2023-04-08T18:00:28.000Z | Torsten Bell | Levelling up policies raise incomes, but also make the rich richer | Torsten Bell | Levelling up is all the post-Brexit rage. Rightly so: incomes in Nottingham are less than a quarter of those in Kensington. Now, new research brings important lessons about what levelling up success is – and isn’t – likely to achieve.
It comes from a place some might not welcome: the EU. For decades, Brussels has been levelling up Europe, with structural funds – currently more than €50bn (£44bn) a year – boosting poorer regions. This brings results: an extra half a percentage point on economic growth in those regions. But while average incomes rose, so did income inequality within the regions. Better-off households received bigger income boosts, because pay rose most for more educated workers.
What are the lessons, including for British levelling up? The authors simply call for “more egalitarian” approaches. That’s a cop-out because their findings shouldn’t be a surprise and policy tweaks won’t sever the connection between poorer regions catching up and becoming more unequal.
Poorer households look fairly similar across areas (their incomes depend on national benefit and minimum wage levels) but the rich are significantly richer in more productive places. Hence income inequality is higher within richer than poorer areas in the UK.
If levelling up ever actually happens, it will close north/south divides, making the country as a whole richer. But it almost certainly means parts of the north of England being more unequal. Pretending this trade-off doesn’t exist makes people feel better, but does nothing to help us build a better Britain. Nor does giving up on levelling up. The real lesson is that Britain needs an economic strategy that levels up poorer parts of the UK productivity wise and levels down gaps between rich and poor everywhere.
Torsten Bell is chief executive of the Resolution Foundation. Read more at resolutionfoundation.org | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2024/mar/12/youtube-sensation-lucia-keskin-its-my-worst-nightmare-to-be-called-an-influencer-things-you-should-have-done-bbc | Television & radio | 2024-03-12T15:13:26.000Z | Coco Khan | YouTube sensation Lucia Keskin: ‘It’s my worst nightmare to be called an influencer’ | Lucia Keskin, AKA “Chi” Keskin – the 23-year-old writer and star of the BBC’s offbeat comedy Things You Should Have Done – has an unusual specialist skill. She is so deadpan she can make audiences furious. “I often look depressed when I’m not,” she says, in her apathetic style. She recalls her first ever live television appearance on Soccer AM with footballer Robbie Keane. “I was enjoying myself but people online were like ‘oh my God, who is this? I’ve seen more personality in dishwater.’
“I remember saying to my agent, ‘I can’t do this, everyone hates me.’ But then I watched the video back, and I look like I want to end it all,” she says. “So fair enough.”
In her six-part show, Keskin plays the deadpan and downbeat Chi (like Keskin herself, it’s short for Lucia, pronounced Lu-chi-a). Chi is unambitious; a self-proclaimed “stay at home daughter” who makes up for her lack of common sense with her love of baggy T-shirts. In the first minutes of the show, Chi is informed that both her parents have died in a car crash. “Let us know if there’s anyone we can call,” offers the policeman, to which she replies straightly: “Well I would say Mum and Dad usually but …”, her sentence trailing off into an uncomfortable silence. Awkward is the name of the game in Things You Should Have Done. In order to inherit the family home, Chi has to complete a list of adulting style tasks left by her parents – eg get a GCSE, learn to drive – often with absurd results. Chi’s haphazard attempt at driving results in her instructor being wrongly labelled a paedophile, getting a job sees her try to move into a retirement home. It’s dark, it’s sweet, it’s sad, and at points it’s surreal. In other words, it’s Lucia Keskin through and through.
To viewers who are seeing Keskin for the first time, it might seem a bit premature to be discussing signature style. Keskin’s only other acting credits amount to a few episodes of Big Boys (Channel 4), a role in the three-part Sneakerheads (Dave) and a cameo in Diane Morgan’s Mandy. But online, Keskin has been honing her craft for her hit YouTube, TikTok and social channels since she was 16.
‘I didn’t want the character to have the same name. I knew it would draw comparisons’ … as Chi in Things You Should Have Done. Photograph: Jack Barnes/BBC/Roughcut TV
“I hated school,” she says. “I had really bad depression so I avoided it at all costs. When it came to the week of my GCSEs, I went to see the Addams Family Musical every day. That was more important to me, I wanted to see Sam Womack as Morticia!”
Like Chi, Keskin grew up in coastal Kent (Margate), living until recently with her parents and never quite learning how to drive. She insists the similarities between the two Chis end there though. “I really didn’t want the character to have the same name,” says Keskin. “I knew it would draw comparisons. Though maybe you could say it’s an exaggerated version of some parts of me.”
Opening her GCSE results was one of Keskin’s first videos for her YouTube channel when was 16. “[The results] came out yesterday but I didn’t get them because I was asleep,” she recounts, the beginnings of her hapless comedy characters already emerging.
“That video was a slow burn,” she says. “Each year it picks up more people. I’m sure some people only know me from failing my GCSEs.”
It’s now been watched nearly a million times, and her channel has nearly half a million subscribers. But Keskin says she isn’t one of those who achieved viral fame, where one video went stratospheric and a new life followed. Rather, it has been a steady growth.
“I wasn’t making any money off of any of it for years,” she says. When she did finally get the numbers to start monetising content, she got props. “I bought wigs,” she says. “I bought a better camera, I bought a green screen. When I had to move out from my mum’s it was because my room was a bomb site of costumes and wigs. It was crazy. It was like a whole warehouse in one small room.”
A lot of Keskin’s content has riffed off zeitgeist pop culture, replete with celebrity impressions and surreal diversions. She’s made a parody of Coronation Street with a made-up toe mishap plotline called Coronation Feet, plus the delightfully named spoof “low budget Line of Duty”.
‘There’s definitely a stigma to doing online comedy. And I get it’ … Keskin. Photograph: Jack Barnes/BBC/Roughcut TV
Some of it didn’t work: “I was doing all sorts of random things. I was dressing up as a potato and walking around my local shopping centre.”
But some did: “I recreated an entire episode of Friends. It took me ages,” she says. Keskin played every character, it’s nearly 20 minutes long, and has been seen nearly two million times.
“But it was during the lockdown that I started writing sketches.” She’d create skits about Poundland head office brainstorms (“You know how everything is a pound?” she says, playing a gormless employee, “Why don’t we just … slowly start adding in other prices?”) or make fun of social media (in one video she is seen crying into the camera about the speed toast pops up while making beans on toast). She’d imagine what beloved sitcoms would be like if they happened in the pandemic (Nessa from Gavin and Stacey is selling homemade vaccine); or play an old lady talking to her grandchild in 2071 (“We used to have a thing called outside,” she says. “Don’t worry it’s over now”).
It was around this time that her audience numbers exploded. There was something about Keskin’s observations of the quotidian that chimed with people’s shrunk and domestic worlds.
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“Everyone was so on their phones, and had nothing to do,” Keskin says. “And it was weird because even though everyone else’s life had changed, mine hadn’t. I was always just at home. But it gave me more motivation to entertain people. People had nothing to do. So it was like, ‘well I’ve got nothing to do either’. I’ll do something.”
Soon enough, Keskin caught the eye of the comedy world, with endorsements from legends like Dawn French. She was signed by a top comedy talent agent, landed a meeting with the BBC – and the rest is history.
Talent that is discovered online is often derided – they can be called “influencers” rather than artists, their work seen as cheap clickbait. Sometimes this criticism is fair. But in Keskin we can see the benefits of the internet as a launchpad for careers. There’s something egalitarian about it too. Usually a new talent being launched with their own show will have come through university and then a theatre show (see Michaela Coel or Phoebe Waller-Bridge), or through a standup circuit that is dominated by the affluent. They aren’t usually young women from Kent, with a “G in RE” and whose craft has somehow blossomed even under the harsh conditions of social media. “Getting heckled on stage must be horrible,” she says. “But when you’re doing it online, you still get comments, you just get to keep them, they stay for ever.
“There’s definitely a stigma to doing online comedy. And I get it, I dislike the stereotypical influencer – the one where it’s all for show – too. It’s my worst nightmare to be called an influencer.”
From left … Jamie Bisping, Selin Hizli, Keskin and Sinead Matthews. Photograph: Jack Barnes/BBC/Roughcut TV
Arguably, Things You Should Have Done showcases the best of Keskin’s creative journey. It includes surreal turns and bad wigs – at one point she plays John Humphrys hosting Mastermind where the special subject is grief – while showcasing her clear potential as a screenwriter with a knack for what audiences find funny and moving. Some of the best moments of the show are not performed by Keskin but by the others: Am I Being Unreasonable? star Selin Hizli playing Chi’s prickly Aunt Karen; Daniel Fearn as Karen’s browbeaten husband Dave; and Jamie Bisping as his teenage son Lucas, a simple soul with a puppy-like loyalty to Chi. Between all their high jinks is a family dealing with loss, sometimes unkindly to each other. This isn’t influencer content where the aim is to be likable or relatable.
“I think the more unlikable [the character], the better,” says Keskin. “Horrible people, stupid people are way more fun to write about.”
No wonder she names deadpan-master Diane Morgan and pitch-black comedy icon Julia Davis as two of her heroes.
“I look back at old stuff and I think, ‘how was I so cringe then’,” she says. “And it’s crazy because in four years’ time I’ll look back at now and think the same.” At 23, Keskin still has plenty of time to look back and cringe. And to take her deadpan to even more outrageous levels.
Things You Should Have Done is on iPlayer now. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2021/nov/19/la-clique-review-alt-cabaret-leicester-square-spiegeltent | Stage | 2021-11-19T11:54:16.000Z | Lyndsey Winship | La Clique review – intimate alt cabaret full of giddy thrills | Taking the Edinburgh festival by storm back in 2004, La Clique was the show that ushered in the new wave of alt cabaret in the noughties, and its now-famous spiegeltent hosted everyone from chanteuse Camille O’Sullivan swinging on a trapeze to Bath Boy, singers Meow Meow and Le Gateau Chocolat, and hula hooper Marawa the Amazing.
Seventeen years on, director David Bates is still seeking out the cream of the nu-cabaret scene from around the world and La Clique returns with relish, pitching up in London’s most touristy commercial spot yet still managing to feel like an intimate, underground experience.
Asbestos-tongued … Heather Holliday at La Clique. Photograph: Tristram Kenton/The Guardian
German/Australian cabaret queen Bernie Dieter takes the crowd in hand as MC and even manages a Covid skit that’s actually funny. La Clique is never just about the skills, it’s about the theatre. Handstander Mirko Köckenberger doesn’t balance on poles but on suitcases while wearing a bellboy costume. Burlesque performer J’aiMime doesn’t just take her clothes off, she gets swallowed up by a giant pink balloon while doing it. There are truly original acts and familiar ones too – La Clique veterans will recognise high-risk rollerskating duo the Flying Willers, only this is the next generation of skaters – Skating Willers III – taking up the baton.
Highlights this time round include every occasion “Incredible Hula Boy” Craig Reid appears on stage, bursting with cheeky exuberance. He does more than jiggle hoops, including an ebullient quick change routine. And there’s LJ Marles, louche, lithe and slinky, wrapping his thigh-high Pretty Woman boots around his aerial straps. All kinds of sexiness are embraced with a flirtatious rapport between artists and audience (only the endlessly thrusting saxophonist Leo P hasn’t got the tone quite right).
The most head-exploding moments come from sword-swallowing, fire-breathing, vintage pin-up girl Heather Holliday. She must have some sort of steel-lined gullet and asbestos tongue, so much danger does she slide down her throat. Her act gives you that visceral reaction you only get with live performance. La Clique is an edgy, sexy, joyful show full of giddy thrills and celebration.
At Leicester Square Spiegeltent, London, until 8 January | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/careers/2015/nov/24/free-food-games-and-massages-why-techies-are-happy-at-work | Guardian Careers | 2015-11-24T07:00:10.000Z | Kirstie Brewer | Free food, games and massages: why techies are happy at work | If the chief happiness officer (CHO) in your office is a dog, the chances are you work in the technology industry. Yes, CHOs (four-legged or otherwise) are not uncommon in tech workplaces; and neither are writable walls on which to pen your lightbulb moments, unlimited free food, games and massages.
These are just some of the perks and quirks to be found in an industry that is keen to put creating a happy workplace culture at its core. And these efforts appear to be paying off, if the latest research from jobs website Glassdoor is anything to go by.
Tech jobs were found to be the best for work-life balance following feedback from UK and US employees: web developer ranked highest in the UK, joined in the top 20 by data analyst, software engineer and design engineer. In the US, data scientist, SEO manager, social media manager and UX designer (user experience designer) led the pack.
“It’s a no-brainer that tech companies are using happiness as a tool to acquire and retain talent,” says Sarat Pediredla, chief executive and CHO at mobile app developer Hedgehog Lab. He believes the tech space has taken the lead in offering a good work-life balance simply because of supply and demand.
“Really good tech employees are difficult to find, difficult to retain and difficult to consistently manage as it is a super competitive field with high wages,” he explains.
A UX designer’s earnings typically range between £35,000 and £88,000, according to data from Hired.com, a recruitment platform for tech jobs headquartered in San Francisco. Meanwhile software engineers in the UK can expect to take home an average salary of £44,000 when they’re starting out.
But sizeable salaries aren’t what propel tech to the top for work-life balance. Neither are touchy feely grass walls or the occasional jaunt down the office slide.
“Tech employees tend to focus more on the soft benefits far more than other industries; things that are intangible like having a happy environment and being treated like adults,” Pediredla says.
According to Hired.com, 70% of candidates for technical roles – such as developers, designers, product managers and data scientists – don’t end up taking their highest paying offer. Ultimately, they want the flexibility and autonomy to work on something they are excited about, according to Sophie Adelman, the firm’s UK manager.
“The kind of people who get hired are very mission-driven and super motivated because they want to work hard in order to have an impact,” she says. “In the startup tech space in particular, you’re the underdogs trying to change an industry and bring something new to the world.”
If you want to get into the tech space – whatever your vocation – Adelman’s general advice is to find a company with a mission you can be passionate about. “The more passionate you are the more of yourself you’ll be willing to give,” she explains.
But be warned: a career in tech certainly does not mean working fewer hours. “The tech industry offers more flexibility in terms of when and how you work – but you’ll probably work longer hours overall,” Adelman points out.
So-called millennials (typically meaning 18- to 34-year-olds) are beginning to outnumber older generations in the workforce. But demands for a better work-life balance shouldn’t be the preserve of the young or the tech space, argues Jenn Lim, CHO of Delivering Happiness. She co-founded the company with Zappos chief executive Tony Hsieh to inspire science-based happiness at work and in everyday life.
“I speak to people across a lot of different industries about how they can improve their workplace culture; it isn’t just the tech industry which is prioritising the idea,” she says.
Lim lived through the dotcom boom and bust of the 1990s and then set her sights on improving workplace culture, before it became the buzz-phrase it is today. “[The dotcom boom] was an incredible time, so extreme – there was so much money being made and lost and such an excess of behaviours,” she recalls.
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“I have learned that having a higher purpose and value is number one; it is important for employers to constantly measure how happy people are and come up with tactical plans to make sure it can be sustained.”
Tech companies are naturally well-placed to equip their people with the digital tools they need to embrace the sort of flexible working that makes them happy, points out Ann Pickering, HR director of O2. But that doesn’t mean other businesses can’t do the same.
“If businesses want to future-proof themselves, they must be agile in their thinking, learn from innovative startups and support their employees, both to work more productively and to achieve that all important work-life balance.”
O2 has sought to discourage presenteeism, where employees feel pressure to be seen in the office in order to be valued, says Pickering. “After all, how many of us feel that we need some headspace to crack on with an important document, or get frustrated travelling for over an hour just for a 30-minute meeting?”
The company has invested in equipping its people with the right tools they need to make flexible working work for them – whether that’s a laptop, or the digital devices required to hold remote meetings, she explains.
Tech companies tend to be more agile in their thinking, Pickering adds. This is partly because many didn’t exist 20 years ago and are less tied down to the outdated working patterns often seen in more traditional industries.
“The truth is technology has fundamentally transformed the way we work, both in the tech sector and beyond,” she points out. “No employer – regardless of the sector – can justify or afford to retain a workplace routine rigidly based on the nine to five.”
Looking for a job? Browse Guardian Jobs or sign up to Guardian Careers for the latest job vacancies and career advice | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2014/sep/24/readers-short-films-venice-brazil-doha-barbican-city-visions | Cities | 2014-09-24T09:24:39.000Z | Guardian readers | Readers' short films: invisible Venice, Brazil's toy city and a Doha lullaby | Our Guardian Cities and Barbican City Visions film competition challenged readers around the world to make a three-minute film about their city – in any style. This week, as we look forward to the unveiling of the winners at the Guardian Cities Surprise Screening at the Barbican on 27 September, we take a look at some of the best entries. In this roundup we meet a Venetian gondolier, watch the rhythms of Porto Alegre and hear the story of Doha’s urbanisation.
Venice
Venice - the Invisible City
Venice is a city that residents share with thousands of tourists every day, yet aside from the odd gondola or vaporetto ride, the waterways, only visible from intersections with the pedestrian world, remain a mysterious and impenetrable alternate reality. Franco and Massimo, members of the oldest rowing club in Venice, took me out on their boat to explore the city's canals.
Sent viaguardianwitness
ByJoe Sartorius
3 Sept 2014
Porto Alegre
Doha
Doha Lullaby A film by Suzannah Mirghani
This film is about how Doha evolved from a one-night tribal settlement into one of the fastest modernization projects the world has ever seen, transforming an overnight camp into a bustling metropolis over the course of a few decades.
Sent viaguardianwitness
BySuzannahmirghani
28 Aug 2014 | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2024/feb/01/wa-public-school-funding-agreement-australian-education-union-comment | Australia news | 2024-02-01T06:55:53.000Z | Caitlin Cassidy | ‘Deliberate lie’: education lobby group says ‘landmark’ school agreement falls short of 100% funding | Education experts say a “landmark” deal to fully fund Western Australia’s public schools by 2026 is “not good enough” and still lets the state government “off the hook”.
The “statement of intent”, announced on Wednesday by education minister, Jason Clare, would increase funding for Western Australian public schools by $1.6bn over the next five years, with $770m coming from the commonwealth.
“Fully funded” refers to the school resource standard (SRS), which estimates how much public funding a school needs to meet students’ needs.
Under the statement of intent, the federal government would increase its public school funding from 20% of the SRS to 22.5%, with the state government to lift its own funding by an equivalent amount to reach 100%.
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Currently no public school in Australia, except for schools in the Australian Capital Territory, is funded at the SRS level – a benchmark for required funding based on student needs.
But the Australian Education Union (AEU) president, Correna Haythorpe, said the deal was “not good enough”.
She said the deal allowed state governments to continue “fudging the books” using a depreciation tax which allows them to claim about 4% of their public school funding share on non-school expenditures like transport, capital depreciation, regulatory bodies and preschools.
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“Some money is not enough money. This has been going on for far too long – the hero moment needs to be now.”
When questioned over the 4% tax on Wednesday, Western Australia’s minister for education, Tony Buti, said it had “always been considered” as part of the funding agreement, adding “every other state does it”.
The 4% depreciation tax equated to around $230m of WA’s funding share in 2023.
“That 4% goes to ensuring that we have a quality education,” Buti said.
Haythorpe said his comments were “complete rubbish”, adding that former shadow minister for education Tanya Plibersek had described the tax as “accounting tricks” before the federal election.
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“The money is used to deal with capital depreciation – to pay the cost of regulatory bodies and registration boards – it doesn’t deal with resources needed on the ground,” she said.
“It was never [intended to be] part of the SRS – it was a sneaky clause the Liberal government introduced in 2018 that took everybody by surprise.”
Clare hailed the deal as a “landmark moment” for building a “better and fairer education system”.
He said fully funding all public schools would require both the commonwealth and the states “chipping in”, adding the WA agreement was “just the first step”.
Clare declined to comment on whether Labor would remove the 4% tax loophole as promised prior to the election, or whether he would consider further lifting the commonwealth share of funding.
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Education ministers in New South Wales, Victoria, Queensland, ACT and South Australia as well as Liberal-led Tasmania have rejected WA’s deal, urging the federal government to increase its SRS funding share to 25% – a call backed by the AEU and the Greens.
Parliamentary Budget Office figures estimate a 5% increase by 2028 would cost just over $1.8bn.
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The Greens spokesperson for education, Senator Penny Allman-Payne, said the WA deal was “an agreement to keep public schools underfunded into the future.”
Even if this deal-to-make-a-deal produces actual funding reforms, the WA school system will only receive 96% of its bare minimum funding.
“If this is the model that the federal education minister is looking to roll out to the rest of the country, then Labor is leaving 2.5 million public school kids short changed. Again.”
The convener of advocacy group Save our Schools, Trevor Cobbold, said while the deal was a significant step forward, it still let the state government “off the hook”.
He said if the commonwealth was to increase its share of funding to 25%, it should be conditional on states getting rid of the 4% rule.
“It’s not a benchmark for agreements with the other states,” he said. “It’s just not true they’re going to get to 100% [of funding] by 2025 or even 2029.
“This is another deceit perpetrated by the government … a deliberate lie,” he said.
Cobbold noted the WA government had cut its funding share for public schools from 84.4% of the SRS when the last funding agreement was penned in 2018, to 75% in 2024.
“WA has agreed to start clawing back cuts to its share over the past five years,” he said. “But with the commonwealth funding share at 22.5%, WA public schools will be funded at only 95.6% of their SRS in 2029.
“The cumulative under-funding over five years will be about $1.6bn. This is not good enough, especially while WA private schools will remain over-funded to at least 2029.” | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/fashion/2022/sep/14/new-york-fashion-week-sustainable-eco-politics | Fashion | 2022-09-14T16:14:26.000Z | Morwenna Ferrier | ‘Surprisingly sustainable’: fashion meets eco meets politics at New York fashion week | Three months after the US supreme court’s decision to reverse Roe v Wade, removing the constitutional right to a legal abortion that held for nearly half a century, the New York designer Gabriela Hearst took to New York fashion week to “statement-cast” Cecile Richards, a former president of Planned Parenthood, on her spring catwalk.
This fashion week is the first since the June decision, and on Tuesday afternoon, wearing a black double-breasted coat with rose gold bars flecked along the lapel, the women’s rights activist was among 50-strong “goddesses and warriors”, who included teenage climate campaigner Xiye Bastida and amputee model and activist Lauren Wasser.
Inspired by her daughter, Gabriela Hearst channelled the ancient Greek poet Sappho with her spring 2023 collection. Photograph: Rodin Banica/WWD/Getty Images
The show was not explicitly skewed towards women’s reproductive rights, rather, it focused on those who were overlooked, inspired by ancient Greek poet Sappho – often considered the female Homer – only discovered by Hearst after her daughter decided to dress like her for Halloween. “It makes me question if I would have heard of her had she been born a man,” she said before the show.
The Uruguayan-born designer launched her womenswear label in 2015 with the sole aim of making clothes that women can actually wear, albeit for a three- or four-figure price tag. Despite showing both women’s and men’s fashion on Tuesday, the modest number of actual men actually on the catwalk – there were a few, though they largely appeared as accessories to the women, and were dressed in complementary colour suits – was an attempt to put women front and centre of the show.
Featuring leather and nappa (faux leather) dresses with gold breastplates, floor-length merino dresses knitted like cobwebs, poppy-coloured suits and fisherma-stylen sandals, the collection sat somewhere between ancient and modern Greece except inside a warm, corrugated-metal fish hangar in Brooklyn, normally a transit point for 10m pounds of fish a year and which once hosted a Democratic debate between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders. The Resistance Revival Chorus, a collective of women and non-binary singers, soundtracked the show, suitably dressed in white floor-length gowns.
Supermodel Paloma Elsesser walks the Gabriela Hearst spring 2023 runway. Photograph: Kristy Sparow/Getty Images
Hearst, who lives in New York and also oversees Chloé, made a quiet arrival in fashion at a time when women designing for women was a rarity. Known for since snagging two of the most visible women in US politics – Jill Biden, who wore two versions of the same embroidered dress on the night of the inauguration and first address to Congress, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who wore a teal suit for a fashion shoot for Interview magazine – Hearst is also wellknown for her sustainable manufacturing practices.
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From the Gabriela Hearst spring 2023 collection. Photograph: Rodin Banica/WWD/Getty Images
In this spring collection, one-third of the collection was made from deadstock fabrics, and the shoe soles were largely biodegradable. Even the glue that held together the gold-foil knitted dresses was eco certified – never mind that the warehouse was packed to the rafters with international press and buyers.
Elsewhere at this surprisingly sustainable NYFW, circularity muscled its way on to the catwalk at Coach, where under British designer Stuart Vevers, leather footballs and old leather jackets were reworked into jumpsuits, coats and bags.
Vevers’s collection was an homage to his love of American neo-noir cinema. Set on a rickety New York pier, and referencing everything from Paris is Burning to “Joey Ramone at Rockaway Beach and Patti Smith at Coney Island, it was all about modern proportions and bare legs. Seven oversized leather jackets in chocolate brown, a pair of trousers and a beautiful patchwork coat were followed by a handful of paint-spattered knits and finally various short babydoll dresses in pastel and gingham. Shoes were hi-tops or jelly sandals in bright colours – very 80s, very distressed Dorothy in Oz.
In both cases these were clothes that looked to the future while working with the fabrics – and a mood – set firmly in the past.
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Rapper Lil Nas X debuts as a model for Coach at NYFW. Photograph: Taylor Hill/FilmMagic | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2014/may/25/in-conflict-review-owen-pallett | Music | 2014-05-24T23:05:06.000Z | Paul Mardles | In Conflict review – Owen Pallett's grasp of melodies rarely disappoints | Asinger, string arranger and composer, whose score (alongside Arcade Fire's Will Butler) for Spike Jonze's Her was nominated for an Oscar, Owen Pallett is equally comfortable in the worlds of baroque pop and classical. His fourth album emphasises his fluidity, its complex arrangements and Pallett's choirboy voice placing him somewhere between Arthur Russell and a less hysterical Rufus Wainwright. Chorale and the title track are brilliantly skew-whiff and, though Pallett is guilty of trying too hard to impress ("Even as a child you felt the terror of the infinite," begins Song for Five & Six), the Canadian's melodies seldom disappoint. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2023/jun/29/pj-harvey-i-inside-the-old-year-dying-review-a-disquieting-escape-into-the-wilds-of-dorset | Music | 2023-06-29T11:32:16.000Z | Alexis Petridis | PJ Harvey: I Inside the Old Year Dying review – a disquieting escape into the wilds of Dorset | The last time the world of music heard from Polly Harvey was more than seven years ago, in the spring of 2016. Brexit had yet to happen, Barack Obama was still president, and the 53-year-old was on a world tour, albeit the kind of tour the late PJ O’Rourke conducted to research his 1988 opus Holidays in Hell, rather than the kind that involves roadies, riders and soundchecks. The Hope Six Demolition Project, Harvey’s ninth studio album, offered a travelogue of ravaged locations around the globe – Afghanistan, Kosovo, the roughest neighbourhoods of Washington DC – that Harvey had visited in the company of photographer and film-maker Seamus Murphy. It was clearly a process that she ultimately found exhausting: by the end of the accompanying run of live shows, she was apparently considering retiring from music entirely.
The artwork for I Inside the Old Year Dying. Photograph: Publicity image
She didn’t, but after seven years of dabbling in film and television scores and doing whatever it is that Polly Harvey does when she’s not being PJ Harvey (which frankly could be anything from practising diabolism to getting the prosecco in and inviting the girls over for Love Island – few contemporary artists have so successfully drawn a complete veil over their personal lives), she has returned in a very different place. The one similarity between I Inside the Old Year Dying and its predecessor is that it arrives preceded by a book of poetry, Orlam, an alternately disturbing, dream-like and mysterious novel in verse: I Inside the Old Year Dying essentially adapts 12 of its poems for lyrics. They are set very close to home, in Dorset – where Harvey was born and still lives – and written in thick, occasionally archaic local dialect. Orlam came with a glossary, which is useful when listening to the album, although you don’t need it to understand why Harvey might be enthralled by the language she uses, above and beyond simply geographically rooting the songs. Chawly-wist, clodgy, giltcup, reddick, un-gurrel, puxy: these are words that sound great – rich and satisfying in the mouth – even if you don’t know what they mean.
Besides, the glossary won’t help much with the enigmatic plot, involving a girl on the cusp of adolescence, escape into nature, ghostly “chalky children of evermore” and a spectral, Christ-like figure called Wyman-Elvis, whose speech mingles the lyrics of Love Me Tender with Jesus’s teachings from the gospel of John (anyone interested in drawing parallels between Harvey’s work and that of her sometime collaborator Nick Cave might note a link to Cave’s 1985 epic Tupelo, which conflated Presley’s birth with the nativity). Its obscure nature is occasionally slightly frustrating – it would be nice to know what’s going on, because what’s going on sounds fascinating. But rather than puzzling it out – or indeed, rooting through it for inferences of autobiography – it’s probably better to just immerse yourself in the atmosphere the album creates.
PJ Harvey: I Inside the Old Year Dying – video
I Inside the Old Year Dying is at the opposite end of Harvey’s musical spectrum to the muscular garage rock and massed backing vocals of The Hope Six Demolition Project. The drums and Harvey’s keening vocals are very in your face: the former recorded without reverb, so they appear to be playing directly in front of you; the latter uncorrected, with every sibilant “s” and microphone-popping “p” sound – and indeed the odd bum note – left in, giving a sense of first-take immediacy. Everything else floats somewhere in the middle-distance, a gauzy mass of fingerpicked acoustic guitar, flickers and gusts of feedback, trombone and synthesiser in which individual instruments are often hard to pick out.
The effect is oddly disquieting, the weird mix lending a disturbing, fever-dream edge to the prettiest melodies, as on A Child’s Question, August. Even Seem an I, which moves from unaccompanied folk-ish singing to the kind of tough guitar riff and strident backing vocals Harvey would have turned into something straightforwardly forceful on The Hope Six Demolition Project, sounds weirdly smeared, smothered in electronics that spin out of time with the rest of the track. The album is frequently overlaid with field recordings of children playing, powerlines humming, rivers rushing and wind rattling fences, a cocktail of sounds that evokes the mood of an ominous old public information film.
There are moments where stark images punch through – “I ascend three steps to hell, the school bus heaves up the hill,” she sings on Autumn Term, as potent a description of first-day-at-secondary dread as you could wish for – but, for the most part, I Inside the Old Year Dying is pretty inscrutable. It requires the listener to submit to its immersive world – a world that, frankly, only PJ Harvey would have dreamed of conjuring up in the first place – but that’s not a problem. Like the Dorset woods they describe, I Inside the Old Year Dying is eerily forbidding, but intoxicating, and easy to lose yourself in.
I Inside the Old Year Dying is released on 7 July
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This week Alexis listened to
Say She She – C’est Si Bon
Not a cover of the old 70s classic by Dr Buzzard’s Original Savannah Band, but the first track from Say She She’s second album is nevertheless a joy: funky, poppy, entirely delightful left-field disco. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2011/oct/14/liam-fox-resigns | Politics | 2011-10-14T15:21:42.000Z | Allegra Stratton | Liam Fox resigns | The defence secretary has resigned his position with "great sadness", folding under the pressure of daily revelations about the man he gave access to the heart of government and British defence strategy.
Liam Fox became the first of Cameron's Conservative cabinet ministers to leave in the 17-month life of the coalition and now triggers the prime minister's first reshuffle, an operation he had wanted to avoid until half way through the parliament.
Though the chief secretary to the Treasury, David Laws, resigned only 17 days into the formation of the coalition, that was by necessity only a reshuffle of Lib Dem cabinet ministers since the coalition agreement stipulates there must be five in the cabinet. It is expected Cameron will perform a limited reshuffle, merely replacing Fox without going reorganising his entire government lineup.
Rumours that the transport secretary, Philip Hammond, would be Fox's replacement were dubbed speculation by his office within half an hour of Fox's resignation.
Other names rumoured to be in the frame include the northern Ireland secretary, Owen Paterson, and the international development secretary, Andrew Mitchell. It was even suggested that the former foreign secretary Malcolm Rifkind currently on the backbenches, could be recalled to the cabinet. That would avoid the need to replace someone in another cabinet post.
Downing Street insisted Fox had not been pushed into resigning over the activities of his friend Adam Werritty but it was a decision taken by him with "dignity".
However, senior figures inside Downing Street were worried that the former defence secretary's position had become untenable when fresh stories emerged in the first editions of newspapers on Thursday night. Cameron's team were alarmed that journalists had began to establish where the funding for Adam Werritty's lobbying activities had come from.
The Times unearthed a corporate intelligence company with a close interest in Sri Lanka, a property investor who lobbies for Israel and a venture capitalist keen on strong ties to fund the £147,000 bill he notched up on travel and hotels, sometimes including first class travel and five-star hotels.
In his resignation to the prime minister, Fox said: "I mistakenly allowed the distinction between my personal interest and my government activities to become blurred. The consequences of this have become clearer in recent days. I am very sorry for this.
"I have also repeatedly said that the national interest must always come before personal interest. I now have to hold myself to my own standard. I have therefore decided, with great sadness, to resign from my post as secretary of state for defence – a position which I have been immensely proud and honoured to have held."
Fox crumpled under the weight of this week's revelations and the prospect of another weekend of speculation. He could not hold out until the inquiry into his behaviour wound up officially – expected to be at some point next week. The prime minister had always held out the right to exercise his own judgment and keep Fox in his post even if the report were critical, but the defence secretary decided to bypass the process and limit the personal and political damage.
It is understood that Werritty's appearance before Sir Gus O'Donnell – the man performing the inquiry to establish the propriety of his work – did not impress the cabinet secretary.
In his response to Fox's resignation letter, the prime minster said Fox had overseen key changes in the Ministry of Defence "which will ensure that they are fully equipped to meet the challenges of the modern era".
He added: "You can be proud of the difference you have made in your time in office, and in helping our party to return to government.
"I appreciate your commitment to the work of this government, particularly highlighting the need to tackle the deficit, and the relationship between Britain's economic strength and our national security."
Fox was a well-liked secretary of state for defence overseeing a successful campaign in Libya, though he did disagree with the prime minster over the way it was carried out.
In his resignation statement, he said: "I am proud also to have played a part in helping to liberate the people of Libya, and I regret that I will not see through to its conclusion Britain's role in Afghanistan, where so much progress has been made. Their bravery, dedication and professionalism are second to none."
Fox will now join the backbenches where he enjoys some popularity but it is not expected he will act as a lightning rod for discontent.
In his resignation statement, Fox said: "I appreciate all the support you have given me – and will continue to support the vital work of this government, above all in controlling the enormous budget deficit we inherited, which is a threat not just to this country's economic prosperity but also to its national security." | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2018/nov/30/matthew-mcconaughey-ive-never-done-a-film-thats-lived-up-to-what-i-imagined | Film | 2018-11-30T06:00:30.000Z | Benjamin Lee | Matthew McConaughey: ‘I’ve never done a film that’s lived up to what I imagined’ | At this point, the sight of Matthew McConaughey scuffed up and scuzzy, without a tan but with a shirt, is no longer a shock. It has been seven years since the McConaissance that saw the actor stop (or, at least, curb) toplessness to be consciously reborn as a grizzled character actor.
But what remains surprising is just how low – or rather high – he is now willing to go. Previous roles of the McConaissance (“I don’t mind the word,” he grins. “It’s got a good metre”) have seen him embrace fried-chicken greased vileness (trailer-trash thriller Killer Joe), pot-bellied greed (mining saga Gold) and life as an emaciated rodeo redneck (Aids drama Dallas Buyers Club). But they have still always been heroes on some level, even if there are a lot of caveats. Underneath it all, they are winners.
White Boy Rick is the first time that is not the case. McConaughey’s character – a single father in 1980s Detroit struggling to keep his family together as his son falls deeper into a drug-dealing underworld – sports a jacket so musty you can almost smell it from the stalls. Richard Wershe Sr spearheads a string of schemes predestined to fail. This is a man repeatedly – and convincingly – referred to as a loser.
“I didn’t choose to play the loser,” drawls McConaughey amiably in Toronto earlier this autumn. “I played a guy who’s trying to win but doesn’t. You can’t fault him for not being a hustler and a guy with some endurance but he’s ill-equipped, man. He’s living on hopes and dreams of the future but he’s fricking paralysed in the present.”
Such empathy with his character is understandable. At some point in the mid-2000s, McConaughey also felt trapped. Smugly flirting his way through a decade of films such as How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days, Failure to Launch, Fool’s Gold and Ghosts of Girlfriends Past had given him repetitive romcom strain. “The things that were really interesting me, I wasn’t getting offered.” But unlike Welshe, he had the confidence, the agency and the cash to end his stasis.
McConaughey in Magic Mike.
His agent was instructed to send him only glamour-free, small-budgeted scripts. Before long, his mantlepiece was groaning (an Oscar, a Globe, a Gotham, a Screen Actors Guild award for Dallas Buyers Club, an Independent Spirit award for Magic Mike, another for Mud, a New York Critics Circle gong for Bernie, endless nominations – and a few wins – for his existential cop in the first season of True Detective).
McConaughey didn’t just prove to the world he could act – or preemptively extend his professional sell-by date. He also managed to nix the notion that People’s Sexiest Man Alive 2005 was a vain clotheshorse. Face to face, he still looks like a matinee-era cowboy, hair and stubble at perfect length, tan intact, shirt buttons more undone than not. This is a guy who definitely still surfs at the weekend. During his comeback, he has been careful to play down those pin-up chops, or at least slather them in unfortunate facial hair – though he is at pains to stress it is not a conscious rejection.
“I was not running from anything, I was running to,” he says. At times, McConaughey seems to channel a particularly convincing self-help audiobook. “This is just the next chapter. I didn’t go seeking. I didn’t go: ‘I want roles where I can really transform, I want roles where I can get skinny or fat.’ You look at the character and I go: ‘Well, who is that?’”
McConaughey’s Oscar-winning performance in the Aids drama Dallas Buyers Club. Photograph: Anne Marie Fox/AP
In getting to grips with such a motley crew, the actor has enormously broadened his brand – and audience. From playing an oiled-up veteran stripper in Steven Soderbergh’s Magic Mike to a closeted, fetish-loving gay reporter in Lee Daniels’ bizarre potboiler The Paperboy, he has embraced a fluidity that happily expands an on-screen sexuality previously wasted with beefcake womanisers. Meanwhile, he has kept a finger in the mainstream via the likes of Sing and Interstellar. Rare is the cinemagoer – multiplex or arthouse, all genders, all sexualities – who doesn’t admire him.
He has simultaneously become one of the most prominent Christian actors in Hollywood, expressing passionate gratitude to God when accepting his Oscar (“He’s graced my life with opportunities that I know are not of my hand”), speaking in 2014 about the importance of viewing his marriage “spiritually”, then, two years later, claiming that “mankind has bastardised religion”. Yet he’s also, somehow, a pro at flogging luxury watches, and a creative director for Wild Turkey, the Kentucky bourbon distillery. It’s a slick, nuanced rebrand, a tightrope walk of morality that can make him seem alternative or conservative, depending on the circumstance.
His involvement in White Boy Rick is born partly from social conscience. Along with his wife, Camila, with whom he has three children under 11, he set up the Just Keep Livin’ foundation, “dedicated to helping teenage kids lead active lives and make healthy choices to become great men and women”. That means not embarking on the kind of choices made by the real-life Rick, who, after heading deeper into criminality, became the FBI’s youngest-ever informant before heading to jail, where he remains to this day, the longest-serving non-violent juvenile offender in Michigan’s history – which is where McConaughey visited him.
“I’ve talked to many people in prison,” he says, “and most of them say they’re innocent. Not him. But he said there have been people who sold a lot more than he did who came in after him and are already out. There are murderers who have come in and got out; the math of the sentence does not add up with the crime committed.”
Does McConaughey think Wershe’s sentence reflects a system that punishes non-violent drugs offences too harshly? Or was Wershe an exception?
Fool’s Gold, 2008, with Kate Hudson. Photograph: Warner Bros/Sportsphoto/Allstar
“Oh, man,” he says, “I don’t know how equipped I am to answer that. Look: on a personal level, I know and understand that consequences can and do help people decide to take the right path. At the same time, you gotta look at it in a different way and say, ‘Well, let’s look at where is this happening. Who are the repeat offenders? How much are people a victim of what they’ve already inherited and all they know?’”
So far, so circumspect. But for a man only a year off 50, McConaughey can seem – as well as look – remarkably youthful. His enthusiasm is puppyish, positivity on full-beam: “I see the bright side of everything,” he says, randomly, at one point. He asks me how old I am.
“See, you’re 34 and I’m 49 but I’d still call you ‘sir’,” he laughs. “I find myself doing that still. I have more people that come and want me to share my experiences now than I did before. And I go: ‘Yeah, OK, I guess I’ve been doing this for 26 years. Oh yeah, I’m a father of three. Oh yeah, I do have some experience under my belt.’
“In life in general – but also specifically in our business – there’s an initiation process and people don’t just let you in. I didn’t have many people let me in on some things and years later I’m going: ‘Come on, man, you could have just told me that; it took me seven years to figure it out!’”
McConaughey, a media studies graduate from Austin, Texas, was 23 when he got his breakthrough: he was spotted by Richard Linklater in a TV ad for the local paper. The director cast him in Dazed and Confused in 1992 – a hugely significant and splashy first role – and an enduring cult film. But the road was rocky: his father died during filming and four years of ropy horror and crime procedural TV followed before a followup breakthrough, in the John Grisham adaptation A Time to Kill. While his first film showcased a knack for playing the slacker, his second allowed him to demonstrate a more refined southern charm and courtroom command. Suddenly, there came a flood of scripts – but again, he found himself at sea. “The discernment was a challenge at that point,” he says, drily.
With Idris Elba in The Dark Tower. Photograph: Ilze Kitshoff/AP
There were unusual, often ill-advised choices. Despite his credentials as a leading man, he opted for smaller roles in Steven Spielberg’s Amistad, Robert Zemeckis’s faith-based sci-fi Contact and Linklater’s heist flop The Newton Boys. He regrets passing on Guy Pearce’s role in LA Confidential, and he auditioned for the part of Jack in Titanic and was bereft to lose it to Leonardo DiCaprio.
The McConaissance, too, has not been without its blips. In 2015, there was Gus Van Sant’s lethargic, Cannes-booed disaster The Sea of Trees, which was never released in the UK. Gold, the 2016 crime drama, was pure distilled Oscarbait that never saw even the glimmer of an award. The American civil war epic Free State of Jones, from the same year, was a project close to his heart that few audiences cared for; last year, the reviled franchise non-starter The Dark Tower came and went.
It’s hard not to start wondering what comes after a renaissance. Might it even be time for a new era in his reinvention? After all, he’s the first to admit to consistent career wobbles. The gap between screenplay and finished film is such a gripe he teaches a class of his own creation at the University of Texas called Script to Screen. He won’t name names, he says, but naivety about what can happen to a performance is “absolutely” something that has burned him in the past.
“I’ve given this advice: don’t do press junkets or talk about the film until you’ve see it. I’ve done that before and I went and saw the movie and I was like: ‘Every interviewer I’ve talked to must have been thinking, what fricking movie is he talking about?’’
You can see why such embarrassment would pique him: this is a man who likes to pride himself on good, old fashioned honesty. “I mean,” he says, stumbling for the first time in our meeting, “I’ve have never been in a film or given a performance that was as good as I’d hoped it would be.” He pauses, carefully and cautiously delivering what feels like a fresh realisation. “I’ve come close. I’ve seen some that are close. The movie that was closest to the script that I’ve ever been a part of is Mud. There was like one scene different and the dialogue is almost exactly what Jeff Nichols wrote.”
McConaughey in Killer Joe. Photograph: Allstar/Studiocanal
The dreams have always been better than the reality, he thinks. “I’ve never done [a film] that’s lived up to what I imagined it could be.” He softens the blow for his peers, while keeping things strict for himself. “I’ve been a part of a bunch of films that I highly respect and really have a love for and think are great. And I’ve done performances that I’m very happy with and I’m like, ‘Good job, McConaughey!’ But nothing that I’ve ever thought …” He tails off – he can’t seem to bring himself to articulate what real excellence might be like. “And I don’t think I’ll do one that does.”
He’s not being too hard on himself? There’s that Oscar, after all …
“Hard enough! I wouldn’t say too hard!”
No more Mr Nice Guy: the actors who revived their careers with extreme makeovers
Read more
But his forthcoming projects seem, on the face of it, unlikely to offer the opportunity to achieve what he wants. He’s a fisherman seduced by Anne Hathaway in the noirish, yacht-set thriller Serenity; then comes Harmony Korine’s comedy The Beach Bum; then Toff Guys, Guy Ritchie’s return to the gangster genre.
Still, if McConaughey is drifting, he is, at least, cheerful about it. “I’m still getting off on acting,” he says. “I’m not bored at all. Acting is like a working vacation for me. I can’t wait to go to work. I’m scared about it, I love it. I love the adrenaline of it. I’m confident with it. I’m surprised with it. It spooks me in a good way.”
He continues evangelising. “I really like the adventure and experience of diving into it. It’s an excavation. It’s a construction. It’s architecture, building something. I’m happy. I look forward to it. I don’t make many films my kids can see yet but I look forward to them one day looking at my stuff and going: ‘Oh, I see what Dad was doing!’”
And if anything might spur him back to pre-McConaissance fodder, it’s surely this. “Yeah,” he grins again. “We’re not sitting them down with Killer Joe any time soon.”
White Boy Rick is released on 7 December and Serenity on 1 March. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/stage/theatreblog/2012/may/09/german-theatre-dares-three-kingdoms | Stage | 2012-05-09T13:32:00.000Z | Simon Stephens | Deutsch courage: why German theatre dares – and wins | British playwrights have tended to fall into two camps in the past 15 years: the type that succeeds on Broadway and the type that succeeds in Berlin. This is a gross simplification, of course – based on no research whatsoever and instinct so acute that it is practically made up. But I suspect there is something in it.
Over the past decade my failure to have work produced in New York has been only consoled by the fact that I've managed to work in Germany. Something about this makes me happy. Those playwrights I most admired and most wanted to emulate – Martin Crimp, Sarah Kane, Edward Bond – had succeeded in Germany. Having artistic success in Germany was also charged with connotations of that great moment in history when David Bowie and Lou Reed and Iggy Pop all moved to the shadow of the wall. I wanted to be in their gang.
The country hasn't let me down. The essence of German theatre is different to much of the theatre in the UK. Bolstered by a breathtaking level of state subsidy, theatre workers there are not concerned with the pursuit of private sponsorship, nor the possibility of a successful commercial transfer but rather with art and provocation. Their actions are to unsettle and undermine. This is not a culture of staged literature but of the physical force of dance, the visual energy and intellectual daring of contemporary art, the thrust of rock'n'roll.
No single German artist more fascinates me than the director Sebastian Nübling. His work is visceral and individual, authored and alive. He brings a muscle of theatricality to my work that few British directors I know aspire to. He has directed four of my plays to date. Three Kingdoms, which has just opened at the Lyric in Hammersmith, is the fifth.
We have made Three Kingdoms with three actors from the UK, three from the Kammerspiele in Munich and with the extraordinary Estonian theatre company NO99.
Led by director Tiit Ojasoo and the leading Estonian artist Ene-Liis Semper, their work has ranged from productions of The Pillowman and a deeply unlikely Noises Off to an outdoor staging of the Seven Samurai involving real Samurai swordfighting and a political rally to launch a fake political party to an audience of 5,000. They are known as the "athletes" in Estonian theatre, so visceral and energetic is their work.
Britain's theatre culture can be hermetically sealed at times. The danger of our island mentality is that we can spend too much of our energies looking inwards on our own strengths, and imagining the rest of the world is looking at us too. This is as true in the theatre world as it is in the spheres of economics or politics – as I've realised, working with Nübling and NO99. It has opened the possibility of working in different ways. If travel alters artists' perspective on that which we imagine we know, then international collaboration allows us to interrogate the assumptions that sit underneath our work. It would be possible to build a working life without ever having those assumptions interrogated. But, speaking personally, that interrogation has freed and inspired me.
There is also no way we could have brought the play to London without the support of World Stages London. Established to support international collaborations in the capital, this festival is predicated on the notion that rather than demonstrating our skills to one another, international artists can benefit from working towards a shared objective. Collaboration is draining, difficult, expensive and complicated, but I hope that like other shows which are part of the season, Wild Swans, Babel, or Wah! Wah! Girls, our play will demonstrate the worth of that work.
Three Kingdoms is, for me, defined by a fascination with the UK's relationship to Europe. It is touched by the ghost of the second world war and the Soviet Union and by a chill in the face of the horrors of globalised sex trafficking. It is fuelled by a love of the films of David Lynch or the novels of Raymond Chandler.
In that sense I think I've written no other play that better serves the clash of cultures that define the spirit of World Stages London. I will be fascinated to see if the assumptions and expectations of our audiences will be as provoked and interrogated to the same degree as mine have been in working with them. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2022/apr/17/voters-are-angry-labour-activists-say-partygate-could-turn-tide-in-dudley | UK news | 2022-04-19T10:35:54.000Z | Jessica Murray | ‘Voters are angry’: Labour activists say Partygate could turn tide in Dudley | Over the past two months, the Labour candidate, Adrian Hughes, has knocked on more than 1,000 doors in Upper Gornal and Woodsetton in north Dudley before May’s local elections.
The most marginal ward in a historically marginal council, it was won by the Conservatives last year by 82 votes when there were five candidates on the ballot paper. This year there are only two options: red or blue.
Like many in his party, Hughes is optimistic that a combination of local grievances and growing anger over Partygate and the cost of living crisis could help turn the tide of Labour’s fortunes in the West Midlands town, after it lost 12 seats last May, giving the Conservatives a majority following a period of no overall control.
“We’re all starting to feel a bit of a momentum now. We’ve spoken to a lot of people so we’ve got a good idea of how voters are feeling and they’re angry,” said Hughes. “People are bringing up the Downing Street parties everywhere we go.
“I don’t know if we’ll claw everything back in one year, but I think we should see a significant improvement.”
Out campaigning the evening after news broke that Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak had been issued with fixed-penalty notices, there was palpable anger among voters.
Ron Malkin, 87, said he was “very disappointed” that the prime minister had not been honest and owned up to his mistakes.
He has previously voted Conservative, but said he wasn’t sure how he would vote next month. “He could have come clean and told the truth but he didn’t,” he said of Johnson. “I would be surprised if they get in next time there’s a general election after all this.”
Adrian Hughes talking to an Upper Gornal and Woodsetton resident. The Tories won the ward by 82 votes last year. Photograph: Andrew Fox/The Guardian
Susan Webb, a longtime Labour voter and retired civil servant, said she thought Labour had a better chance of winning in the area this time than it had had in a long time.
“I feel like the Conservatives have had their chance and failed miserably,” she said, adding that the Partygate scandal had “opened the door” for Labour votes.
Further down the street, a nurse returning from her shift said she had been listening to Johnson “denying he had ever lied” on the radio on her way home, something that particularly angered her after the sacrifices NHS workers had made throughout Covid.
Leaning out of a back door, her nextdoor neighbour said: “I think it is disgusting that they were having a party when we were all doing the right thing.”
Despite the apparent fury over the party scandal, Labour is under no illusions about the uphill battle to win back ground after the Tories took overall control of the council last year with 46 seats to Labour’s 24.
“There are some defending Labour councillors in other wards which we lost by 700 votes last year – that’s a lot of votes to win back,” said Hughes.
The local Conservatives are adamant they are on track to win more seats despite national turmoil within the party.
Partygate “might have an impact on a very small margin. But I think most people are sick to death of this particular story,” said the council leader, Patrick Harley. “Will we have the spectacular results that we had last May? It’s hard to predict. But I certainly think we’ll end up as being a larger group than what we are now.”
Dudley is often seen as a bellwether council, having swung between Labour and Conservative (often minority) control over the years. But Labour hasn’t had overall control since 2016, and all four MPs in Dudley are now Conservative.
According to Hughes, times are changing, particularly since the party’s change of leadership – Jeremy Corbyn was very unpopular in the area, he said. “There’s no anger on the doorstep towards us any more. Before, a lot of people in Dudley would tell you, if you went and knocked on doors it would get slammed in your face or people would be angry.”
Labour is also pushing hard on local issues, such as anger at the council spending £100,000 on sending nine employees to a conference in Cannes during a cost of living crisis – which Harley defended by insisting it would lead to millions of pounds of investment for the region.
Qadar Zada, the leader of Dudley Labour group, said Conservative party scandals were welcome news for Labour, but did not diminish the need for the party to present an appealing alternative.
“I came into politics to improve the lives of local people, not to capitalise on their sadness, their loss, their grief,” he said. “But having a failing Conservative government is good for Labour, in the sense that we can then put forward our agenda which is good for people.”
The deputy leader, Judy Foster, said: “We learned the lessons from last May. We immediately undertook a listening exercise and our manifesto is based on what people were telling us on the doorstep.”
In the neighbouring borough of Sandwell, hopes are not quite so high, and there is speculation that the Conservatives could make substantial gains off the back of recent council turmoil.
The Labour-run administration has been mired in scandal and misconduct allegations in recent years, and commissioners have been drafted in to run the authority.
The council has had six leaders in as many years and an audit last year found there had been a “breakdown in trust, respect and confidence” among governance.
And there are fears that an overall disillusionment with politicians could lead to a low turnout across the board in May. “People are annoyed about politics, and we can’t be complacent about that,” said Zada. “We need to make sure people come out to vote. And ultimately rebuild trust.” | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/oct/01/charles-aznavour-obituary | World news | 2018-10-01T15:24:56.000Z | Michael Freedland | Charles Aznavour obituary | The singer, songwriter and actor Charles Aznavour, who has died aged 94, was one of France’s best-loved entertainers and its most potent show-business export since Maurice Chevalier. Edith Piaf was one of those who encouraged his early career, and in many ways Aznavour could be seen as the male Piaf; his slight frame disguised a similarly huge talent. He was as important a composer and songwriter as he was a singer – and he could be a great actor even without singing a note on screen.
There were times in Aznavour’s career when he was as popular outside France as he was in his own country. His recording of She, a sweet, soulful number composed by Aznavour and Herbert Kretzmer, topped the British charts for several weeks in 1974. Aznavour’s songs were in the great dramatic tradition of the chanson, storytelling to music, rather than mere verse sung in the way of the conventional pop song. Even when he performed in English, his songs sounded as though they had first been minted in Montmartre. He was often called the French Frank Sinatra and the comparison was apt. When he sang The Old Fashioned Way or Yesterday When I Was Young, listeners somehow caught his nostalgia kick and remembered those days, too.
Charles Aznavour’s recording of She topped the British charts in 1974.
In films, he was a character actor who was always the most interesting figure on the screen. His lead role as a musician clashing with criminals in François Truffaut’s 1960 drama Tirez sur le Pianiste (Shoot the Piano Player) established him internationally.
Aznavour, however, was always self-deprecating. He would refer people to a crumpled piece of paper on which, as a very young man, he had written his weaknesses. They were, he said: “My voice, my height, my gestures, my lack of culture and education, my frankness and my lack of personality.”
No one doubted his frankness, but his personality was one of his greatest characteristics, and he seemed to personify French culture to the English-speaking world. His height (5ft 3in) was the only thing that he could do nothing about, but it was one of those great trademarks that help to mark out a show-business personality – that and his gravelly voice, and the facial features that got craggier as he got older. Aznavour recalled: “They used to say, ‘When you are as ugly as that and when you have a voice like that, you do not sing.’ But Piaf used to tell me, ‘You will be the greatest.’”
Aznavour’s family were Armenian and went to France in the wake of the Turkish massacres of their people. His parents, Mischa and Knar Aznavourian, were living in Paris at the time of their son’s birth, in a poor part of the Latin quarter, where his father worked as a cook and his mother as a seamstress. His father was also a part-time singer and his mother a sometime actor, but neither made a living at what they wanted to do most.
Charles Aznavour in a scene from the movie Paris Music Hall in 1957. Photograph: Ullstein Bild/Getty Images
Encouraged by them, he danced, played the violin, sang and aspired to act. He got work as a film extra from the 1930s onwards and in 1941 joined the Jean Dasté dramatic troupe. During the second world war, having adopted Charles Aznavour as his stage name, he joined the singer-composer Pierre Roche in a nightclub act and gained experience writing lyrics and in cabaret. In the postwar years they went on tour with Piaf around France and in the US, but split up when Roche married.
Aznavour wrote songs for artists including Piaf, Gilbert Bécaud and Juliette Gréco, and in the 1950s began to have some success in his own right, first in France and then internationally. By the early 1960s he was able to sell out Carnegie Hall in New York. He appeared in films such as Les Dragueurs (Young Have No Morals, 1959) and La Tête Contre les Murs (The Keepers, 1959). By the time he made Le Testament d’Orphée (Testament of Orpheus, 1960), he was enough of a star to be featured in a cameo role as himself. After his acclaimed performance in Shoot the Piano Player, he starred in US and British films including Candy (1968) and And Then There Were None (1974), an Agatha Christie adaptation, and in the Oscar-winning German drama The Tin Drum (1979).
Liza Minnelli welcoming Charles Aznavour on to the stage at the end of her show at the Lido cabaret in Paris, 1987. Photograph: Laurent Rebours/AP
In 2002 he appeared in Atom Egoyan’s drama about the Armenian genocide, Ararat. Aznavour retained close ties to his family’s homeland. When an earthquake hit Armenia in 1988, killing more than 20,000 people, he formed the charity Aznavour for Armenia and wrote Pour Toi Arménie, which he recorded with a lineup of well-known French singers, to help support those affected by the disaster. In 2004 he was made a National Hero of Armenia, and a few years later an Aznavour museum was opened in the capital, Yerevan. He was appointed Armenia’s ambassador to Unesco and in 2009 Armenian ambassador to Switzerland.
Across his eight-decade career, he wrote more than 1,000 songs and was said to have sold more than 180m records. He continued to record popular albums, including Duos (2008), a collection of duets with, among others, Elton John, Carole King, Liza Minnelli and Plácido Domingo. In 2011 he held a month-long residency at the Olympia music hall in Paris.
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Aznavour was married three times and had six children. “I know my life is a flop,” he said once. “A flop as a father, a flop as a man. You must make a choice: a successful life as a man, or show business. Now it is too late even to make a choice. I belong to the public or to my pride. My only salvation is to become a greater artist.” A legion would say he achieved that salvation.
He is survived by his third wife, Ulla (nee Thorsel), whom he married in 1967, and their children Katia, Mischa and Nicolas; and by Seda and Charles, the children of his first marriage, to Micheline Rugel. A son, Patrick, from his second marriage, to Evelyne Plessis, predeceased him.
Charles Aznavour (Shahnour Varenagh Aznavourian), singer, songwriter and actor, born 22 May 1924; died 1 October 2018 | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/jul/06/why-we-still-adore-malory-towers-enid-blyton | Books | 2019-07-06T11:00:20.000Z | Gwendolyn Smith | Hold on to your boaters: why we still adore Malory Towers | The Malory Towers books – for anyone whose childhood was cruelly deprived of them – are Enid Blyton’s series of raucous stories set in a girls’ boarding school in postwar Britain. They are heartwarming. They are funny. The one thing they’re apparently not, though, is current.
On the face of it, tales of classroom tricks and Cornish cliffs have little to say to those growing up in the modern, digital world. Then there’s the matter of Blyton’s class snobbery, racism and sexism; even though Malory Towers is more forward-looking than the rest of her catalogue, admitting you’re a fan is often received as tacit admittance that you have a secret shrine to Nigel Farage in your basement.
But as devotees like me have long maintained, the prevailing messages are ones of tolerance, community and female power. No bad thing, then, that it’s enjoying an unexpected rebirth. Last week CBBC announced it had commissioned a Malory Towers adaptation to air in 2020. Meanwhile, a stage version produced by Wise Children, the theatre company led by former Shakespeare’s Globe director Emma Rice, is about to go on tour. Then there’s a volume of four new stories written by modern authors.
Malory Towers is said to still be a big seller (like the rest of Blyton’s books: she’s amassed more than 500m worldwide sales). But the franchise is now fashionable rather than just lucrative. Why have tales of common room sing-songs and half-term teas been swept up by the zeitgeist?
The second book in Enid Blyton’s Malory towers series, written in 1947.
The series was written between 1946 and 1951, when Clement Attlee’s Labour government was nursing the country back to health after the war. For Rice, this means Malory Towers is imbued with hope and goodwill – attitudes useful in the current political climate.
“We want to look into faces not of rage and bitterness but of hope and truth, like Greta Thunberg and all the brave young climate change activists,” she says. Lucy Mangan, journalist and author of one of the new stories, can also spot a political resonance: “The books are set in a stable, unchanging, enclosed, safe little world – which we all hanker for at some time or another, and I suspect more than ever now that everything seems to be going to hell in a handcart.”
Blyton is hardly a common source of feminist inspiration. But with Malory Towers’s emphasis on women’s potential, it arguably chimes with current conversations around gender. Indeed, the stage production is billed as “the original ‘Girl Power’ story”. Rice points out that the all-female character list means it aces the Bechdel test, which measures the representation of women in works of art. “I love how uninterested in traditional ideas of femininity the characters are,” she says. “It’s such an empowering picture of girlhood for young people today. Nobody is asking them to conform.”
It would be preposterous, however, to suggest that such feminism caters for an audience beyond posh white girls. In contrast, the new wave of Malory Towers adaptations is resoundingly diverse. Rice’s production features BAME and non-binary trans actors in the lead roles. “These stories are to be enjoyed by everyone and, for that to make sense, the young people in the audience need to be able to see themselves onstage,” she says. And while it’s early days for the BBC adaptation, commissioning editor Amy Buscombe says “casting will be as representative as you’d expect for a modern CBBC production.”
New Class At Malory Towers, the collection of new stories, also updates Blyton’s all-white cast. Narinder Dhami’s story centres on an Indian pupil called Sunita, while Patrice Lawrence portrays Marietta, a mixed-race girl. Lawrence points out that Blyton’s originals are dodgy when it comes to representation: “I’ve met people who were at boarding school whose parents sent them from overseas in the 40s and 50s. We also know that people from African and Caribbean descent have been here for a very long time.”
When Lawrence was growing up in an Italian-Trinidadian family in Sussex, she says she had to do an “ethnic hop” to enjoy literature. She hopes that inclusive updates will save future generations from doing the same: “For a woman to see someone like her in something as iconic as Malory Towers is a really big deal.”
Enid Blyton sitting in her garden in Beaconsfield, Buckinghamshire. Photograph: George Konig/Getty Images
Not all modern tweaks are welcomed; in 2016, “sensitive revisions” of Blyton’s Famous Five books were famously pulled from sales in favour of the originals. But beyond the unmistakably white lineup, there are anachronistic elements of Malory Towers that patently need modernising if they’re to be adapted for new forms – the fat-shaming for one.
How can we update classics without eradicating what makes them distinctive? “You take the bits you love and quietly leave the rest behind,” says Rice. And while Mangan is “quite anti mucking about with the originals” because of their historical context, she reckons that “if you are writing new stuff, you should jettison as many of the unfortunate things as you can”.
One of the most appealing aspects of Malory Towers is how forward-looking and resourceful (most of) the characters are. There is a neat symmetry in how the series’s renaissance is being led by open-minded, inventive storytellers – many of whom are women. In cutting old-fashioned tropes and foregrounding the books’ best aspects – humour, friendship, the emphasis on women discovering themselves in a space almost entirely absent of men – a sparky, emboldening series has been preserved for new generations. That’s something to celebrate, perhaps with lashings of something stronger than ginger beer.
Malory Towers opens at the Passenger Shed in Bristol on 19 July, then tours the UK. New Class at Malory Towers is published by Hodder
Haven’t read the books? Here’s a glossary to help
Darrell Rivers
Protagonist whom the books follow through her six years at school. Loyal, good-hearted and incapable of stopping herself losing her rag around...
Gwendoline Mary Lacey
Spoilt, spiteful pupil who enjoys brushing her hair, scowling and acting as a vehicle through which Blyton can relay a succession of clumsy cautionary tales.
North Tower
Part of the castle-like school where the main characters Darrell and Gwendoline are joined by stolid Sally, sharp-tongued Alicia and nervy Mary-Lou in a “dormy”.
Potty
Nickname for Miss Potts, first-form mistress and head of North Tower. Not remotely deranged, unlike Mademoiselles Dupont and Rougier, the French teachers.
Alicia’s ‘deafness’
One of the tricks the girls play on teachers. Other memorable pranks include sneezing pellets, and removing the hairpins from the mademoiselles’ buns with a magnet. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2023/oct/28/typist-artist-pirate-king-review-carol-morley-outsider-artist-audrey-amiss-monica-dolan | Film | 2023-10-28T14:00:16.000Z | Wendy Ide | Typist Artist Pirate King review: warm-hearted portrait of outsider artist Audrey Amiss | Cinema has an enduring fascination with troubled creatives. Films such as The Electrical Life of Louis Wain and Séraphine draw us into the overheated imaginations of their artist subjects; Alex Ross Perry’s jarring Her Smell probes the battle-scarred psyche of a drug-addled rock musician by placing us, uncomfortably, in her head. But Carol Morley’s fictionalised portrait of real-life outsider artist Audrey Amiss (Monica Dolan) takes a different approach. Rather than actively attempt to evoke the inside of Amiss’s mind, the film is more passive and observational. Like the artist’s hapless former psychiatric nurse Sandra Panza (an underpowered Kelly Macdonald), we follow dutifully in the trail of chaos left by Amiss’s quixotic interactions with the world, real and imagined.
It’s a humane and warm-hearted little road movie, which takes a generous and accepting stance on Amiss’s rather abrasive character traits. But it’s also slightly flat and disjointed as a piece of film-making, failing to reflect the untrammelled, eclectic creative output of its unpredictable subject.
The amazing undiscovered life of Audrey the artist
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A prolific artist and collector of ephemera (junk food boxes and lollipop sticks found particular favour), Amiss was unknown during her lifetime and spent considerable stints in psychiatric institutions. Morley discovered a cache of her art, writing and diaries in the archives of the Wellcome Institute after she was awarded a screenwriting fellowship by the organisation. In one of the film’s more successful devices, Amiss’s actual drawings are interspersed throughout the film, a playful dialogue between the real Amiss and the fictional one. But the energy of her frenetic drawing style is not matched by the storytelling. Spending time with Amiss is draining. The film, like everyone who comes into contact with her, seems utterly exhausted by the experience.
Watch a trailer for Typist Artist Pirate King. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2022/jan/07/the-guide-pen15-tv-golden-age | Culture | 2022-01-07T11:54:32.000Z | Gwilym Mumford | The Guide #16: how the streaming revolution is hurting TV’s golden age | It has been a bittersweet experience watching the final seven episodes of Pen15 (available on Sky Comedy and Now in the UK and Hulu in the US), the cringe-inducing high-school comedy that sees thirtysomething comics Maya Erskine and Anna Konkle play 13-year-old versions of themselves (amid a cast of actual teens). The show is as brilliant and bracing as ever, full of adolescent angst, absurdist humour and the occasional moment of devastating drama. But until these episodes arrived, there was no indication that they would be the show’s last.
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When that news broke, the assumption was that Pen15 – a little-watched if critically beloved comedy – had been cancelled, but that wasn’t the case: Erskine and Konkle have both just had children and have tons of other commitments (Erskine is in the upcoming Obi-Wan Kenobi series; Konkle is writing a memoir), so were conscious of burning out, and – crucially – felt that they had told their characters’ story. Still, it’s hard not to feel like Pen15 has gone too soon.
This is a pretty common feeling these days. The promise of the streaming revolution was that you would get more of what you wanted, when you wanted – and the expectation was that that would extend to shows getting to tell their stories over as many series as required. After all, one of Netflix’s earliest moves was to revive the beloved and prematurely cancelled show Arrested Development (a move that didn’t go so well). In actuality, though, the length of a series in the streaming age tends to be pretty short. Really, we should have seen this coming: streaming platforms – with their algorithmic models predicated on figuring out who is watching their content where, when and why – were always likely to make ruthless decisions on when to cut a show loose. Indeed Netflix has been particularly brutal in this regard (Glow, we hardly knew thee).
But Pen15 illustrates another reason that shows aren’t sticking around for long: the talent. Creating TV, particularly in an age where quite a few shows resemble blockbuster movies in their scope and budget, is an intense, laborious experience, so the old model of series trundling on into their sixth, seventh or eighth year hardly feels fit for purpose (it is hard at this point to imagine a show like Succession, so operatically full-on every week, being able to maintain that intensity for another five or six years). And, of course, these days TV has become a desirable place for Hollywood A-listers, whose schedules – not to mention salaries – don’t chime terribly well with multi-series epics.
That is why, in the past half decade or so, we have witnessed the rise of the limited or mini series: self-contained stories that get told within a tight 10 episodes or fewer. A superstar such as Kate Winslet can take on Mare of Easttown knowing that she isn’t signing her life away to a multi-series show. And it’s also why there has been an increase in anthology shows such as American Crime Story or Black Mirror, with a different cast every series or even episode.
Brevity has its benefits, too: attracting a higher calibre of talent (take Barry Jenkins directing all 10 episodes of The Underground Railroad), and allowing its creators to tell ambitious, tightly constructed stories, with none of the wheel-spinning or forced cliffhangers that a longer, baggier show might necessitate. Such programmes don’t outstay their welcome. Strikingly, of the top three shows on the Guardian’s best TV of 2021 list, two were limited series (Mare of Easttown, It’s a Sin) and one was an anthology series (The White Lotus, whose second season will have a different setting and cast, including – excitingly – The Sopranos’ Michael Imperioli).
Still, it is hard not to feel a pang of regret for the TV that we have lost: those vast, “novelistic” series like The Sopranos and The Wire, aren’t gone necessarily, but they’re certainly harder to get made. (Although we should note that on US “network” TV, the never-ending show is still the model, in the form of procedurals such as CSI or comedies such as The Simpsons). And it’s hard not to feel sadness too for the shows that disappeared right as they seemed to be hitting their stride. I personally could have watched … oh, another 15 series of Pen15.
If you want to read the complete version of this newsletter please subscribe to receive The Guide in your inbox every Friday. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/jan/03/the-case-for-keto-review-why-a-full-fat-diet-should-be-on-the-menu | Books | 2021-01-03T07:00:00.000Z | Joanna Blythman | The Case for Keto review – why a full-fat diet should be on the menu | The investigative journalist Gary Taubes is known for his painstakingly researched and withering demolitions of the “eat less, move more” diet orthodoxy, but his latest book is personal. The Case for Keto is aimed at “those of us who fatten easily”. Taubes locates himself in this beleaguered group, “despite an addiction to exercise for the better part of a decade” and a diet of “low-fat, mostly plant ‘healthy’ eating”. “I avoided avocados and peanut butter because they were high in fat and I thought of red meat, particularly steak and bacon, as an agent of premature death. I ate only the whites of egg.” Yet still he remained overweight.
Taubes started to shed those pounds when he realised that one-size-fits-all diet advice fails, among other reasons, because people are metabolically different. Some of us can eat fattening carbohydrates and sugar and get away with it; others can’t.
Those who claim to have “a sluggish metabolism” are too often seen as making lame excuses for their weakness and indulgence. This punitive view – that fat people could easily be thin people if only they would eat less and exercise more diligently – is wrong, says Taubes. It amounts to what the philosopher Francis Bacon called “wishful science”, based on “fancies, opinions and the exclusion of contrary evidence”.
More likely, people who are perpetually fighting to lose weight have “a metabolic disorder of excess fat accumulation”. They store fat when they ought to burn it for energy. They become “insulin-resistant”, meaning that their insulin levels stay higher for longer in a day than is ideal. These people are predisposed to hold on to fat, notably above the waist, rather than to mobilise it. The only solution for them, Taubes says, is keto. “Lean folks aren’t like us. They don’t get fat when they eat carbohydrates; they may not hunger for them just thinking about them. They have a choice to live with carbs or not. We don’t.”
The very notion that carbohydrate restriction is vital for some people is currently contentious
Keto is not a short-term diet “fix”, but a way of eating for life. It keeps you in a metabolic state – ketosis – whereby your body stops using sugar for energy and starts to break down stored fats instead. The liver converts these fats to molecules known as ketones, which the body uses for energy. Taubes argues persuasively that people who are prone to the metabolic disorder of excess fat accumulation must embrace this approach even though it means the entire carbohydrate food group is off-limits. “It is that simple. Just like smokers who quit cigarettes and drinkers who abstain from alcohol, fixing the condition requires a lifetime of restriction” because they have to “remove the cause of the excess body fat from their diet”.
The idea that carbohydrate is fattening, dangerously so for some people, is not new. In 1825, the French gastronomy writer Brillat-Savarin, who spent 30 years struggling with his weight and called his paunch his “redoubtable enemy”, noted that in more than 500 conversations he had held with “dinner companions who were threatened or afflicted by obesity”, the foods they craved were breads, starches and puddings. He gave short shrift to those desperate to lose weight, but appalled by the idea of forsaking carbs for life: “Then eat these foods and get fat and stay fat!” Taubes is more diplomatic, but his underlying message is essentially the same.
The very notion that carbohydrate restriction is vital for some people is currently contentious. The UK government’s healthy eating script still tells us all to base our meals on starchy food and in some conventional public health circles, a diet that eliminates carbohydrates is considered potentially dangerous, a contention that Taubes does a good job of dispelling by referring to up-to-date nutritional science.
Adherents to the conventional low-fat gospel will splutter into their skimmed milk when Taubes points out that those who cut out carbs need to eat more fat and, in particular, “vintage fats”, including cold-pressed olive and coconut oil, and all animal fats, and to eschew modern fats, such as industrially refined “vegetable” oil and margarine. “Eating foods that humans have been eating for thousands, or hundreds of thousands of years, and in the form in which these foods were originally eaten, is likely to have fewer risks and so be more benign than eating foods that are relatively new to human diets or processed in a way that is relatively new.”
Taubes’s advice is directly at odds with the stale paradigm entrenched in public health circles for the last 60 years. But he is one of a growing band of medics and nutritional experts whose results show that dietary thinking should move on. Those who feel doomed to be fat would be well advised to digest every word of Taubes’s cogently argued, agenda-shifting book. It could be a life-changer for some.
Joanna Blythman is an investigative journalist and author. Her most recent book is Swallow This: Serving Up the Food Industry’s Darkest Secrets (Harper Collins)
The Case for Keto: The Truth About Low-Carb, High-Fat Eating by Gary Taubes is published by Granta Books (£14.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/may/29/hungary-criminalises-migrant-helpers-stop-george-soros-legislation | World news | 2018-05-29T16:53:05.000Z | Shaun Walker | Hungary to criminalise migrant helpers with ‘Stop Soros’ legislation | Viktor Orbán’s government has introduced a controversial set of laws to the Hungarian parliament, known informally as the “Stop Soros” plan, that would impose jail terms on people or organisations deemed to be aiding illegal immigration.
Enemy of nationalists: George Soros and his liberal campaigns
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The legislation was a key promise of Orbán’s Fidesz party before elections last month. Fidesz won with a two-thirds majority, meaning the bill and a number of constitutional amendments can be passed without hitches.
The bill is known as “Stop Soros” because it targets some organisations funded by the financier and philanthropist George Soros, whom Orbán’s government has demonised for the past year as the main backer of illegal migration to Europe.
Rights activists have been worried about the bill because of the potential for any NGOs working to give legal or other aid to migrants arriving at Hungary’s borders to fall under the definition of supporting illegal migration.
George Soros, financier and philanthropist. Photograph: AP
The text of the legal amendments, published late on Tuesday, did not contain a number of controversial provisions from previous drafts, which stipulated that NGOs working on migration would be subject to national security checks and a 25% tax on foreign funding.
However, it is unclear, given that the new law speaks of prison terms for those deemed to be aiding illegal migration, if the absence of those provisions indicates a climbdown.
'A useful punching bag': why Hungary's Viktor Orbán has turned on George Soros
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“Those who provide financial means … or conduct this organisational activity on a regular basis will be punishable with up to one year in prison,” read part of the law.
“This is a legal framework and it will be up to the courts to decide how they will qualify certain activities,” said Csaba Dömötör, state secretary, at a press conference on Tuesday.
Additional provisions make it impossible for anyone to claim asylum in Hungary if they passed through a country deemed safe prior to their arrival.
The UN’s refugee agency said the package of laws, if passed, would “deprive people who are forced to flee their homes of critical aid and services, and further inflame tense public discourse and rising xenophobic attitudes”.
Human Rights Watch has called for Fidesz to be expelled from the European People’s party grouping in the European parliament if the package is passed. The EPP, made up mainly of centre-right parties, has been tolerant of Orbán’s centralising impulses and populist campaigns, but its leaders have reportedly told the party’s leadership that there are certain red lines, including the closure of a Soros-founded university in Hungary.
Liberal Hungarian university warns Viktor Orbán could force it abroad
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Since 2015, when hundreds of thousands of migrants passed through Hungary en route to western Europe, Orbán has based his political programme on harsh anti-migrant sentiment. He ordered the construction of a fence at the border between Hungary and Serbia, and his Fidesz party won a two-thirds majority in parliament last month after campaigning almost exclusively on an anti-migrant platform.
Earlier on Tuesday, Soros spoke in Paris to a gathering of foreign policy experts and suggested Europe needed to do more to support democratic governments in Africa to reduce the number of migrants fleeing them. He described a Europe in crisis, but accused populists of exploiting the situation.
“The whole of Europe has been disrupted by the refugee crisis. Unscrupulous leaders have exploited it even in countries that have accepted hardly any refugees. In Hungary, Victor Orbán based his re-election campaign on falsely accusing me of planning to flood Europe, Hungary included, with Muslim refugees,” Soros said. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2021/aug/27/metronomys-anna-prior-on-going-solo-its-always-felt-like-theres-been-something-missing | Music | 2021-08-27T12:00:07.000Z | Kate Solomon | Metronomy’s Anna Prior on going solo: ‘It’s always felt like there’s been something missing’ | We have all developed (and often abandoned) new skills during 18 months of lockdown – but can any of us claim to have used ours to produce anything as sparkling and vibrant as Metronomy drummer Anna Prior? Holed up in a town over the bridge from her adopted home of Lisbon, she spent the pandemic getting over a relationship, DJing on Soho Radio, starting a record label and teaching herself how to craft gorgeous, sun-dappled sad bangers.
The Guide: Staying In – sign up for our home entertainment tips
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Her debut solo single, Thank You for Nothing, bounds in with a cheeky reggaeton drumbeat and invites you to the beach for a litre of sangria before revealing itself to be the breakup song its title suggests. As a lifelong drummer for other people’s musical visions (Prior played for Dev Hynes’s indie band Lightspeed Champion before joining Metronomy some 10 years ago), she is revelling in finally doing her own thing.
“It’s always felt like there’s been something missing there for me, you know? I’m excited [when a Metronomy album comes out] but there’s a limit,” Prior says over video call as a breeze slams a door shut in her Portuguese apartment. “This time I was waking up at midnight and waiting for the song to come live on Spotify. And then I got up early when it was played on BBC Radio 6 Music. It’s really exciting to have something out there.”
Prior didn’t intend to embark on a solo career: the track’s first iteration was a file named Housey_4.mp3 as she strove to write a house tune that could slip easily into her DJ sets. But then a lockdown task set by Metronomy head honcho Joe Mount set her on a different path.
“I had to cover a Buena Vista Social Club song,” she recalls. “I got super-obsessed with different types of rhythms. I switched out the four-to-the-floor for this reggaeton beat, and it became this poppy thing, which I didn’t really expect to come out of me. But that’s what came out.”
Rather than sit around and wait for label interest, Prior took the advice of a friend who told her: “Just start your own label.” So she did, Beat Palace Records: a female-run, female-staffed home for female and non-binary artists for which – aspiring musicians, take note – she is currently spiralling down YouTube rabbit holes seeking out her first signings.
Portugal is still under strict Covid restrictions, so the label has been a great distraction for Prior as she watches other artists post on Instagram about the return of festivals in the UK. “I saw Bicep posting from the stage looking at the crowd and it almost made me cry,” she says. “I’ve missed that feeling so much.” Perhaps next time she’s out there, it’ll be watching a sea of people vibe to Thank You for Nothing in the early evening sun. See you down the front! | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2016/aug/25/pauline-hanson-on-fence-over-support-for-abcc-union-coalition | Australia news | 2016-08-24T21:45:15.000Z | Gareth Hutchens | Pauline Hanson on fence over support for ABCC | Pauline Hanson says she is genuinely undecided about whether or not she will support the Turnbull government’s Australian Building and Construction Commission legislation.
The federal government will need her support – and the support of her three One Nation senators – to pass its ABCC bill through parliament, because Labor and the Greens will not support it.
The ABCC bill was used by the Turnbull government as a double-dissolution trigger for the 2016 election after it failed to pass the Senate twice.
Pauline Hanson can't be dismissed this time. One Nation is bigger than it looks
Peter Lewis
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Hanson told Sky News on Wednesday that she has recently had meetings about the ABCC legislation with the employment minister, Michaelia Cash, and the CFMEU and Master Plumbers Union, but she had not made up her mind about it.
“We have 1.8 million people in Australia that are associated with the unions. Now they have a right to have someone who is going to represent them as well, in all fairness,” Hanson said on Wednesday.
“Now I’m not saying whether I, at this stage, agree with the ABCC or not. I want to make an informed decision to bring the people along with me [so] they know I’m not going to be railroaded by the government, or the unions.
“My opinion is going to be based on what I think is right for the people and the future of this nation,” she said.
It is understood that unions have been dedicating a lot of resources into courting Hanson’s vote on this issue.
Out of 76 Senate seats, the Coalition has 30 seats. It needs 39 votes to pass legislation through the Senate.
Labor has 26 seats, the Greens have nine seats and there are 11 crossbenchers.
Shorten delivers kidney punches with a smile as Turnbull braces for opening rounds
Katharine Murphy
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Labor and the Greens plan to vote against the ABCC legislation, so the government will need support from nine of the 11 crossbenchers.
Without the support of Hanson and her three other One Nation senators, the government will not be able to pass the bill.
Hanson said on Wednesday she would like to hold a roundtable discussion about the ABCC legislation – involving unions, the government and independent senators – so the public has an opportunity to understand what the bill is about and why she will eventually decide to support it or not.
Australian Bureau of Statistics data shows there were 1.6 million people in August 2014 who were trade union members in their main job. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/world/commentisfree/2018/nov/05/newsroom-diversity-media-race-journalism | World news | 2018-11-05T12:00:03.000Z | Jelani Cobb | When newsrooms are dominated by white people, they miss crucial facts | Five years ago, I came across an article in the New York Times about a spate of robberies in the Bronx. It was the kind of story that has been a staple in the metro sections of newspapers since there have been metro sections in newspapers, focusing on the reaction of people living in the neighborhood where robberies took place. But there was a notable wrinkle: Confronted by armed antagonists, the article sighed, many people refused to surrender their belongings, even when they had only a few dollars on them. The article tsk-tsked at community members for tempting fate. A criminologist offered a suggestion that it was “nuts for the victim to refuse”. A few dollars, readers were told, are not worth one’s life.
The article stuck with me in part because I’d once lived near that area and understood the realities of crime there. But I also was struck by the ways in which the efforts of a journalist, an editor, an expert, and even neighborhood residents seemed only to further a narrative of liberal condescension, missing crucial facts about life in this place.
Here’s what I knew: people who live in a rough neighborhood and are confronted with a demand for money are forced to make calculations that people in safer, more affluent areas rarely think about. The few dollars in their pockets may represent their only way to get to work; surrendering cash is not only an immediate loss but also one that jeopardizes a future paycheck. More crucially, people who are known to be easily victimized likely will become frequent targets, a reality that may make their neighborhood virtually unlivable. What, to the journalist, seemed inscrutable was, to many residents, reasonable.
The media isn't diverse – and this leads to appalling reporting
Steven W Thrasher
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It was not lost on me that the journalist who wrote the story was white and that the neighborhood was largely black and Latinx. The article represented not simply a case of a journalist missing a story. The story, to me, spoke to the problem of what happens when the demographics of the Times – and American newspapers in general – look nothing like the demographics of the communities they cover. The people who are most likely to appear in these kinds of stories are the least likely to have a say in how those stories are told.
Conversations around diversity in media have tended to focus on cozy niceties. “Diversity” is often partnered with the word “inclusion” in our racial vocabulary. Since the conflicts of the 1960s, it has been increasingly apparent that our political, educational, and media institutions should not appear to be monochromatically white. But appearance is not the real problem. A democratic media is.
A half-century ago, members of the Kerner Commission – an advisory board formed by President Lyndon B Johnson in response to a series of race riots – spelled out the role of a mostly white media in failing to cover the cause of unrest. It called on news outlets across the country to diversify. In the decades since, including “diverse” perspectives in media and elsewhere has become broadly acceptable – eight out of 10 Americans view ethnic diversity as “at least somewhat important” in the workplace. Yet 50 years after Kerner, we still see chronic underrepresentation of racial and ethnic minorities in print and broadcast media. In 2017, only 16.6% of journalists at daily newspapers were people of color; in the US population, more than 37% of people are non-white. According to a 2015 poll, more than three-quarters of the guests on Sunday morning shows were white. There is currently only one person of color, CNN’s Don Lemon, hosting a weeknight primetime show on the three biggest cable news networks. This underrepresentation of minorities is a more polite way of saying that there is an overrepresentation of white people in media – 79% of people working in the publishing industry are white. Two years ago, the dearth of people of color at the Oscars generated the satirical #OscarsSoWhite hashtag. A #NewsroomSoWhite hashtag would now be equally fitting.
There is something awkward about this kind of racial census taking: journalism is difficult and our media outlets, we like to think, are staffed by people who have the skills to get the job done. This is often the case. But it leaves a question unasked: how many people who have the skills to do this work never even get the opportunity to try?
I came to journalism through alternative newspapers in the Washington DC area. I contributed to the Hilltop, Howard University’s student paper, and wrote for a small black-owned weekly, where I learned the fundamentals of writing on deadline. My first job at a majority-white publication was at the Washington City Paper, in 1996. David Carr, who would go on to become a crucial voice in media criticism at the Times before his death, in 2015, arrived at the City Paper from its sister publication, the Twin Cities Reader. The City Paper traditionally had chilly relations with much of the city’s majority black population. In addition to the lack of minority representation on staff, the paper’s critical coverage of the mayoralty of Marion Barry was often read as thinly veiled racial condescension.
Carr, with characteristic insouciance, set out to diversify the staff. He started a paid internship program and put out feelers for writers who might be interested in working at the paper. His first class of interns included me; Holly Bass, now a writer and playwright; Neil Drumming, currently a producer with This American Life; and Ta-Nehisi Coates, who would go on to win a National Book Award. Carr did not pat himself on the back for his recruitment style. (To my knowledge, he never even spoke of it outside of an article he wrote explaining the importance of newspaper and magazine internship programs at a point when many outlets were eliminating them.) But equally important was the fact that he did not hire any of us in pursuit of a vague, frankly condescending ideal of “inclusion”. He explained in straightforward terms that he worried that there were specific stories missing from his newspaper. He wanted a better publication and believed our work would help him build one. And we did.
The enduring whiteness of the American media
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Years later, in 2013, I attended the annual conference of the City and Regional Magazine Association and participated in a panel on media diversity. My session was scheduled to immediately follow a panel, always well-attended, on bestselling magazine issues. The theory was that the huge lead-in would generate a spillover crowd for the diversity panel. Instead, people streamed out of the room, leaving just a handful of outlets left to discuss the disappointing number of people of color in the industry. Afterward, I talked to people from magazines in Detroit, Birmingham, Philadelphia, Washington, and Los Angeles – places with large black populations – and learned that none of them had any black writers on staff; the only black journalist at Atlanta’s regional magazine had left a year or so earlier. Not only were outlets overwhelmingly white, it seemed, based on the lousy showing at the conference, that few people were concerned about inequality.
The implications of the media’s representation problem could not be more clear. As race emerged as a central theme of the 2016 elections, crucial decisions about coverage were being made in institutions employing few of the people Donald Trump maligned. Euphemisms appeared when unblinking assessments of racism and religious bigotry were warranted. A persistent theme of “economic anxiety” was cited to explain away an animosity that was clearly connected to much darker objections. As a corollary to this, the work of journalists like Adam Serwer, Nikole Hannah-Jones, and Jamelle Bouie, which pointed to the centrality of racism as a motivating factor for Trump voters, came under attack. (Subsequent studies have validated their contentions.) Debates over the role of race in political coverage remain deeply predictable and dispiriting: as in the story of crime in the Bronx, where white journalists dominate, the most familiar and comfortable narratives hold sway.
There’s another reason why diversity matters. The media exists in a climate of unprecedented hostility. The relationship between the White House and the press, frequently rocky, has devolved into a circumstance in which the president of the United States has referred to us as the “enemy of the people”. Trump’s attacks are facilitated by the fact that, in the past two decades, trust in the media has plummeted. This is a crisis of democracy, since the press’s role as a guardian of democracy is founded upon the trust of the public. But at least some portion of that distrust is a product of people who rarely see themselves or their stories depicted in the media they consume. A great deal must be done to rebuild public trust. But it can begin by including the voices of all Americans. The press, tasked with protecting American democracy, is best secured by reflecting the American people.
This article is the lead essay from the upcoming print issue of the Columbia Journalism Review, devoted to the subject of race and the media. The Guardian is partnering with CJR on an event to kick off the issue today at the Columbia Journalism School, and will carry a livestream beginning at 2 pm. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/nov/04/enemies-of-the-people-british-newspapers-react-judges-brexit-ruling | Politics | 2016-11-04T09:05:00.000Z | Claire Phipps | British newspapers react to judges' Brexit ruling: 'Enemies of the people' | On Thursday morning, the high court ruled that parliament – and not the prime minister by use of prerogative powers – would need to trigger Article 50 to start the UK’s exit from the European Union.
On Thursday evening, a portion of the British media exercised its own prerogative: to attack the judges behind the ruling.
DAILY MAIL: Enemies of the people #tomorrowspaperstoday #bbcpapers pic.twitter.com/n5ynFalnEa
— Neil Henderson (@hendopolis) November 3, 2016
Some lawyers and legal experts thought “enemies of the people” was perhaps a little over the top:
Here's a reasoned piece of journalism (not): pic.twitter.com/Td2dZ3Yz8S
— James Turner QC (@JamesTurner37) November 3, 2016
This is getting completely out of hand. If The Daily Mail speaks of Judges as enemies of the people, democracy is being undermined. Shame!
— Nigel Pascoe QC (@nigel_pascoe) November 3, 2016
Revenge of the tabloids
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"We want UK judges deciding on UK legal matters!"
- UK judges decide on UK legal matters.
"ENEMIES OF THE PEOPLE!"
— Law and policy (@Law_and_policy) November 3, 2016
Others homed in on the finer detail:
Is the free GIANT map of Britain for use when we're hunting down the ENEMIES OF THE STATE? pic.twitter.com/ibe8FssjLL
— Robert Hutton (@RobDotHutton) November 3, 2016
"I mean, being OPENLY GAY is one thing but... WORKED WITH TONY BLAIR???" 😱
— Jane Merrick (@janemerrick23) November 3, 2016
How about that fencing, though?
If the worst they can say about you is you're an OPENLY GAY EX-OLYMPIC FENCER TOP JUDGE, you've basically won life. pic.twitter.com/j8tUTjODuP
— J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) November 3, 2016
The Telegraph also pits the judges against “the people” and turns them blue, to hammer home an unspecified point:
"Do they look evil enough?"
"I was thinking the same."
"Try a blue filter."
"There we go." pic.twitter.com/wk1EChkTzP
— Jack Tindale (@JackTindale) November 3, 2016
There are, though, reasons beyond the fact that they’re silly to object to headlines like these:
Daily Mail - a U.K. news organisation - in complete opposition to the rule of law : https://t.co/ahWjMy6jvT
— emily bell (@emilybell) November 4, 2016
Today's a bad day for the constitution
Not because of #Brexit case but attacks on independent judiciary & rule of law pic.twitter.com/f1ohqkGXNi
— The CBA (@TheCriminalBar) November 4, 2016
Editors of @Telegraph might want to ask (fired) colleagues in Hungary or Turkey what its like to run a paper in country w/o rule of law. https://t.co/GJnRSj22JK
— R. Daniel Kelemen (@rdanielkelemen) November 3, 2016
Mind you, Kelemen is professor of political science and Jean Monnet chair in European Union politics at Rutgers University, New Jersey, and sounds suspiciously like one of those “experts”. As does this Bagehot chap:
The Telegraph versus Walter Bagehot https://t.co/v7XXtL2Dw8
— Jonn Elledge (@JonnElledge) November 4, 2016
Telegraph columnist (but pro-Remainer) Mary Riddell appears to be giving Friday’s edition a miss:
Ignore anti-judge venom in tomorrow's press, and give thanks for an independent judiciary upholding the principles of our democracy
— Mary Riddell (@MaryRiddell) November 3, 2016
Meanwhile, over in Daily Express-land:
The opening paragraph is quite possibly the biggest overreaction in newspaper history. pic.twitter.com/VgUj6vr5bW
— Gary Lineker (@GaryLineker) November 3, 2016
Spare your pinch-zoom fingers; here’s that first paragraph:
Today this country faces a crisis as grave as anything since the dark days when Churchill vowed we would fight them on the beaches.
It’s not just as bad as the second world war, though, as the Express goes on:
Truly, November 3 2016 was the day democracy died.
Onward to dystopia then:
The front page attacks on the 3 judges for basically just doing their job is scary. This is fast becoming a dystopian land.
— Gary Lineker (@GaryLineker) November 3, 2016
Being told to also check out the Express and Telegraph front pages. Not sure my poor, defeated, British heart can take it.
— Jojo Moyes (@jojomoyes) November 3, 2016
By contrast, the Sun’s take is fairly tame, plumping for the cosy familiarity of foreigners, elites and a blink-and-that’ll-be-funnier-than-actually-seeing-it pun. It’s almost as if they don’t genuinely believe that Brexit has been blocked after all.
THE SUN: Who do EU think you are? #tomorrowspaperstoday #bbcpapers pic.twitter.com/WlOx5URDZa
— Neil Henderson (@hendopolis) November 3, 2016 | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2023/jul/10/right-to-privacy-why-the-suspended-bbc-presenter-remains-anonymous | Media | 2023-07-10T14:07:22.000Z | Jim Waterson | Right to privacy: why the suspended BBC presenter remains anonymous | Media outlets have not named the male BBC presenter who allegedly spent £35,000 on explicit photographs from a young person, despite widespread speculation about their identity on social media and messaging apps.
The BBC director general, Tim Davie, told staff “individuals are entitled to a reasonable expectation of privacy” during investigations, while sources at the broadcaster said there was no plan to name the suspended presenter but accepted there was little they could do if viewers began to notice the presenter’s absence from specific programmes.
There is not believed to be any court order or injunction banning publication of the individual’s name. Instead, the legal risk of linking a prominent person to serious allegations has stopped mainstream news outlets from putting the name in the public domain.
There are two main legal issues for news outlets to weigh up on the story: First, there is the defamation risk of libelling the presenter by reporting false allegations. Any media organisation needs to be confident that they know the identity of the presenter and also that they have the material to back up the allegations that are being made.
At the moment, almost all the known details about the case have come from reports in the Sun newspaper. The tabloid’s reporting is based on anonymous quotes from the mother of the young person involved, making it difficult for other news outlets to independently establish the facts.
Secondly – and perhaps more importantly in this case – is the growing shift towards privacy in the English and Welsh legal system.
In the past, British newspapers were known globally for their wilful disregard for privacy, happily exposing extramarital affairs and gleefully diving into the private lives of celebrities and members of the public if they felt it would sell more copies. This often went too far, such as in the case of the former Bristol schoolteacher Christopher Jeffries, who was wrongly arrested in relation to the murder of his tenant and vilified in the tabloid press before being released without charge.
After a series of rulings over the past decade, judges have made clear they increasingly prioritise the rights of an individual over the media’s right to report intrusive details.
One major change was Cliff Richard’s 2018 legal victory over the BBC. The broadcaster hired a helicopter to provide live coverage of police raiding his home. Richard was never charged with any offences and a judge ruled that the BBC had unfairly invaded his privacy by naming him as an individual who was under investigation by the police.
Hanna Basha, of the law firm Payne Hicks Beach, said judges tried to balance the reputation of the individual and the public’s right to know what was going on: “The law recognises the privacy of suspects in investigations unless there is an overwhelming public interest in naming them.”
The principle, she said, was that people should have the ability to rebuild their lives and move on if the allegations are found to be baseless.
A more substantial ruling came in the case of Bloomberg v ZXC last year, where the supreme court concluded the news service should not have named an American businessman who was under investigation for potential offences. The court concluded that “profound and irremediable” harm can be caused to an individual who is named as the subject of an official investigation, especially if no charges are brought at a later date.
This has real-world effects. In 2020, a Conservative MP was arrested on suspicion of rape but later released without charge, with mainstream media outlets never naming the politician involved. Only last week, the BBC was blocked from airing sexual misconduct allegations against an internationally famous man because he is also under criminal investigation for alleged serious sexual offences.
Basha said a major issue was that news stories lived forever on the internet. In the past, an allegation that came to nothing would be forgotten about as the news agenda moved on and print newspapers were binned. Nowadays, allegations that came to nothing can be found on search engines for the rest of a person’s life, causing ongoing harm to their reputation.
Ironically, she pointed out that the privacy afford to the suspended BBC presenter has caused damage to his colleagues, who have been forced to publicly distance themselves from the claims: “It becomes a process of elimination. I’m not sure that’s helped their other employees who the BBC also owe a duty of care to – that doesn’t seem fair to them or their reputations.”
It is possible that the BBC and police will conclude the presenter has no case to answer and he is never publicly identified. | Full |
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