Society

Much dust was kicked up by the Conservative pledge to widen right-to-buy to housing association tenants. How dare the Tories offer six-figure discounts on homes that don’t belong to them? Or so the housing chiefs thundered, amid threats to mire the idea in a costly court battle. But as the dust settles, how much of that anger is justified? Will the idea seriously harm the landlords to most of the nation’s social housing tenants? The first thing to note is that much of the initial anger was poorly directed. Housing chiefs were caught somewhat off-guard by a surprise pledge to compensate them for the six-figure discounts. This financial twist – not extended to local authorities – undermined

As the FT reports, Apple and IBM have got into bed together. The deal they’ve struck has major implications for the growing number of people using wearable tech (and indeed mobile phones) to monitor their health. Here are the details. IBM has entered into partnership with Apple and other manufacturers of medical devices to make health data from wearable tech available to doctors and insurers. One outcome will be personalised treatments for diabetics. But that’s only part of the picture. This is how it will work. If you’re self-monitoring your heart rate, calories and cholesterol levels – as more and more of us are – you will now be able to

Just a few weeks ago, David Cameron had not decided whether to extend right-to-buy to a further 1.3 million families in housing association homes. The  idea, from Iain Duncan Smith, was relatively new and carried risks. As all radical policies do – but you can see why Cameron would be worried about this one. Imagine two men, who work next to each other in a factory. One rents privately, the other rents from a housing association and is now offered a massive discount to buy his house: up to £102,700 if he’s in London, £77,000 outside it. He’s is over the moon: his capital gain would  be more than he’d be able to save in a decade

Close your eyes for a moment and place an image in your mind of the sort of person who needs to claim state benefit for their disability. The most common picture is someone almost destitute, reliant on the benefit just to function in their day to day life, likely to be claiming a multitude of other entitlements; the sort of person who won’t ever be able to derive a normal income. Whisper it: the majority of people claiming Disability Living Allowance are the sharp elbowed middle classes, with incomes placing them in the top half of those in the UK. Amongst pensioners, arguably those who need the most help with their

The latest brief was to submit irregular quatrains that bring together two people from the world of the arts and finish on a couplet describing the consequences. Popular couplings included Wendy Cope and Alexander Pope; Salvador Dalì and Bob Marley; Horace and William Morris; and Mel Gibson and Henrik Ibsen. Two competitors paired Tolkien and Graham Greene, with not dissimilar results. Here’s D.A. Prince: If J.R.R. Tolkien met Graham Greene would a hobbit’s story become The Power and The Glory? And take two from Virginia Price Evans: Had J.R.R. Tolkien Met Graham Greene, The Hobbit’s lair Might have been the end of the affair. This one drew the crowds and

Cricket-captain-turned-cricket-commentator Richie Benaud died in Sydney this morning. He would have been 85 next October.  That last pair of sentences contains, believe it or not, two of the most crucial facts in modern Australian history. As of the last (2011) census, approximately 24 million people lived in Australia. It is a fair bet that (whatever the Fourth Estate supposes) fully two-thirds of them would struggle to remember – on the optimistic assumption of their ever having known – who Malcolm Fraser was, or who Gough Whitlam was. (From the mere fact that voting at Australian elections is compulsory, it need not follow that voting at Australian elections is literate.) But

I learn from The Problemist, the organ of the British Chess Problem Society, that the polymath Dr Jacob Bronowski also composed chess problems. According to the article I read, Bronowski was born in Lodz, Poland, in 1908, grew up in Germany and then became an undergraduate at Jesus College, Cambridge. He was a mathematician, biologist, historian of science, theatrical author, poet and inventor, and of course is most celebrated as the author and presenter of the 1973 BBC TV series The Ascent of Man. The puzzle in Diagram 1 composed by Bronowski. This puzzle is a reflex mate which is a variant of the self-mate theme. In a self-mate White must