The Spectator

Is the rest of the world still working from home?

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issue 12 August 2023

Scout’s honour

Thousands of teenagers were evacuated from the World Scout Jamboree in South Korea as flooding, a heatwave and then the threat of a typhoon affected the event. What exactly is a ‘jamboree’?

– Lord Baden-Powell adopted the word for the first gathering of scouts at Kensington Olympia in 1920. But the word itself can be traced back to the mid-19th-century American West, when it was used for a drunken revel – presumably not what Baden-Powell nor subsequent heads of the scouting movement would encourage.

– The first documentary evidence for use of the word is in the report of a murder trial in the New York Herald in 1868, when two of the accused were described as indulging in a  jamboree before the crime was committed.

Home comforts

Is Britain’s fondness for working from home shared globally? Mean answers to the question: how many full-paid days are employees working from home this week?

India 2.

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