Books and arts – 22 January 2015
Society
Thursday
To 2192: Never again
Eight unclued lights were papal names used only once. Pope JOAN (30) was the fanciful ninth. First prize Michael Grosvenor Myer, Haddenham, Cambridge Runners-up Roderick Rhodes, Goldsborough, N. Yorks; Anne Manger, Penrith, Cumbria
The Economist beats the Guardian to appoint its first female editor
With the Guardian still to name their new editor-in-chief, the Economist has thrown down the gauntlet by appointing their first female editor. Zanny Minton Beddoes will succeed John Micklethwait to be the magazine’s next editor, making her the first female editor in its 172 year history. Formerly the publication’s business affairs editor, Minton Beddoes interviewed for the post last Thursday, beating off competition from Tom Standage, the magazine’s digital editor, and the foreign editor Ed Carr. It’s thought that her wealth of knowledge about the US from her time working in Washington made her the favourite for the coveted role. A popular choice amongst her peers and colleagues, Minton Beddoes is known for her intelligence as well as her sartorial style. ‘She’s extremely
Finally! A health story about cancer that doesn’t resort to hyperbole
The lot of the snarky health-science debunker is not a happy one. It involves going to a lot of newspaper websites actively seeking out stories that will annoy you, and getting annoyed by them, and then writing about how annoyed you are. Look, here’s a piece that claims some food or other makes you live longer, based on how some chemicals responded to some other chemicals in a petri dish. Look, here’s a piece which claims substance X causes cancer in the headline, and then admits in paragraph 19 that it does no such thing. Look, here’s a piece which takes the results of a trial in mice and reports
Will Will.i.am come out in support of Prince Andrew?
The Duke of York is expected to host a private reception tonight at the World Economic Forum, in what will be his first public appearance since he was accused of abusing an under-age ‘sex slave’. One question that remains, however, is which of the movers and shakers at the summit will choose to attend the Duke of York’s little soirée in light of the alleged scandal. Mr S hears that photographers in Davos have been tipped off that Will.i.am will be present at the do. The singer and judge on the BBC’s The Voice is an old chum of the Prince, having worked closely together in the past on the Inspiring Digital Enterprise Award. The duo
One-day cricket can make even a turbo-charged century tedious
What a remarkable innings that was in Johannesburg earlier this week when South Africa’s admirable Hashim Amla carried his bat throughout the 50-over match against West Indies for 153 off just 142 balls. Or perhaps you didn’t notice. Coming in at the 39th over after the dismissal of R.R. Rossouw (for a mere 128) was A.B. de Villiers, who proceeded to smash endless one-day records with 149 off 44 balls. His reached his century (31 balls) in just 40 minutes: I’ve seen people take longer to get their pads on. De Villiers completely overshadowed Amla’s pedestrian 153, and if the rest of the South African team had scored at the
The war on frat culture
New York It’s a new semester and a new start at the University of Virginia. Thomas Jefferson, the university’s founder, once encouraged America’s youth to ‘come and drink of the cup of knowledge and fraternise with us’. But this term, any student who fancies a swig from the cup of knowledge had better be sure it doesn’t contain any unauthorised alcohol — in fact he should beware fraternising at all, especially in a ‘frat house’, for fear of breaking the strict new rules. It’ll seem incredible to fans of the 1978 film Animal House, but at the University of Virginia, one of the heartlands of America’s famous ‘Greek’ system, the
Andrea Chénier, Royal Opera House, review: like a Carry On – but without the jokes
Who on earth could have predicted that a hoary old operatic melodrama set in revolutionary France would find resonance in the present where the pen as a weapon against bigotry and hypocrisy has suddenly achieved iconic status. But hold up, let’s not get carried away. We’re talking about Giordano’s Andrea Chénier. Though its eponymous poet does indeed extol free expression at the service of love, the sentiments — the voices of reason in a time of high anxiety — don’t run too deep. And so we’re back where we started, with a hoary old melodrama. So how to stage something that only gets staged in the first place if you
Why tomorrow’s parents won’t want their children to go to university
Could the current generation of parents be the first ones who won’t want their children to go to university? Until now that mortarboard photo on the sideboard has always been the dream, visual proof that your offspring have munched their way to the top of the educational food chain. Advancement by degree. But that was before tuition fees. Now there’s a price tag attached to your little one’s ‘ology’ (to quote Maureen Lipman in those BT ads), how many people will automatically see it as a good thing? Perhaps more of us will refuse to prostrate ourselves before the great god Uni? If so, that can only be a good
How to stop being scared of full stops
Typical mother-to-mother email, January weekday, 2015: ‘Thanks so much for helping out yesterday, Jamie had a great time with you all, thanks also for bringing his games kit home, let me know if you need me to help tomorrow… xx’ Emails and texts like this, flitting across the ether in their thousands, demonstrate the free-flowing currency of helpfulness — mother going the extra mile for mother, in her Volvo, every day — in school-run land. But have you noticed the appalling punctuation? The use of the ‘weak comma’, or ‘splice comma’, where there should be full stops? My guess is that you have, especially if you are over 45 and
On the Yeats trail in Galway
The Go Galway bus from Dublin sounds an unlikely pleasure, but it is both comfortable and punctual. There is free Wi-Fi if you want it, but it would be criminal to do anything other than gawp at the view. Two and a half hours pass quickly when you are travelling at sunset, passing between rain clouds with rainbows falling out of the sky. While my trip was, as they say, for ‘the craic’ (a good friend’s 40th), I couldn’t come to Galway without making time for a W.B. Yeats pilgrimage. His patron Lady Augusta Gregory had her home near Gort, in the south of the county: Galway is saturated in
Lines on law
In Competition No. 2881 you were invited to do as Carol Ann Duffy has done and provide an amusing poem about a piece of government legislation. The first line of her poem ‘22 Reasons for the Bedroom Tax’, ‘Because the badgers are moving the goalposts’, is, of course, a reference to environment secretary Owen Paterson’s unfortunate attempt to explain the government’s failure to reach cull targets. Adrian Fry was entertaining on the Chancel Repair Bill. Commendations, too, to Mike Morrison, Virginia Price Evans, Max Ross and John Whitworth. Alan Millard takes the bonus fiver. The rest get £25 each. ’Twas legislation heaven-sent, A spark of pure enlightenment, That glorious Act
January Wine Club | 22 January 2015
The end of the month is nigh and the sorry few still on the January water wagon are no doubt clinging to it by their fingertips, knuckles ever whiter. I’m not trying to tempt any of you to jump off prematurely, I promise, but we’ve some cracking wines this week courtesy of FromVineyardsDirect, those crafty runners-to-ground of hidden treats and treasures. I don’t know what the vinous equivalent of a truffle hound is, but FromVineyardsDirect must have a few in the kennel, because nobody is better at coming up with bargain parcels from the unlikeliest of places than FVD’s Esme Johnstone and David Campbell. The 2011 La Réserve Claret (1)
The Stonewall dinner left me with one question: why are volunteers so horrible to one another?
I watched the video with some trepidation. Stonewall (the campaigning gay and lesbian equality organisation) had just sent me the YouTube link. This was to a short film of the dinner that Stonewall’s founders attended last year to celebrate the quarter-century anniversary of our existence; and most of us had been there. Now we were but wrinkled reminders of the young revolutionaries we had once been. So this could have been a rather mellow occasion. We had started the organisation as a defiant response to what came to be known as ‘Section 28’: a small measure that was part of a sprawling local government bill and intended to stop the
Making physics history
The European philosophical tradition, Alfred North Whitehead claimed, consists of a series of footnotes to Plato. If you really want to see Plato’s heirs in action, though, philosophy is the wrong place to look. Look, instead, at physics. Nowhere else is the spirit of the Academy cultivated so assiduously: the maths fetishism, the disdain for mere appearances, the passionate yearning for a timeless, radiant truth. Throw a rock in a physics faculty and you’ll hit someone explaining that the laws of reality are eternal, written in the burning sigils of mathematics. Extreme cases, such as Max Tegmark, go so far as to claim that reality itself just is mathematics, which
Wednesday
Ministers to introduce plain-packaging for cigarettes
The government has finally decided to bring in plain packaging laws for cigarettes. This U-turn is a sort of U-turn because MPs will get a free vote on it, after David Cameron recognised the depth of feeling in his party on the issue, so the government has decided to bring in plain packaging, but in as gentle a way as possible. In fact, it is a rotation through 360 degrees, as the original position had been in favour of plain packaging, which was then reversed in 2013. There will be a sizeable chunk of Conservative MPs who oppose the measure, which public health minister Jane Ellison says is a ‘proportionate
Je suis Page 3
Here is a preview of Toby Young’s Status Anxiety column from this week’s Spectator, out tomorrow… ‘I for one would be sorry to see them go,’ wrote George Orwell. ‘They are a sort of saturnalia, a harmless rebellion against virtue.’ He was writing about the seaside postcards of Donald McGill in 1941, but his defence of them and their ‘enthusiastic indecency’ could equally well apply to Page 3. Orwell’s argument was that McGill’s caricatures of women, ‘with breasts or buttocks grossly over-emphasised’, gave expression to ‘the Sancho Panza view of life’. There’s a fat little squire in all of us, he thought, although few of us are brave enough to admit it.
Labour’s new political broadcast uses a veteran to promote NHS scare stories
Now we know what ‘weaponising’ the NHS looks like: a World War II veteran. Labour has released an emotive party political broadcast via Mirror Online starring Harry Leslie Smith. The 91-year old received two standing ovations at the Labour conference last year for his strident defence of the NHS — a theme continued in this video. The purpose of the PPB can be summed up in two words: emotional blackmail. Labour appear to have used Leslie Smith, telling a very moving story about his family and how much the NHS has done to improve our quality of life, to point to the notion that the health service is somehow in
Delaying publication of the Chilcot report is the right thing to do
I don’t know about you but I tend to think Sir John Chilcot’s report into the Iraq war should not be published before it is finished. Actually, I do know about you and I know I hold to the minority view on this matter. So be it. Fashionable opinion is not on my side. Then again, fashionable opinion thinks Tony Blair is a war criminal so we may safely treat fashionable opinion with the contempt it has earned. It can go hang. Nevertheless, as Isabel says this new delay will feed a perception the report is crooked. That is, zoomers zoom and morons gonna moron and there’s nothing anyone else can do
Obama prepares for battle in his sixth State of the Union address
If you think British politics is broken, just look across the Atlantic to see how dysfunctional things can really become. Since the Republicans seized control of the Senate in November, the gridlock in Washington has become even worse. The Republican-controlled Senate and House of Representatives are set to spend time and money debating legislation, only for the White House to veto it. In his sixth State of the Union (SOTU) address last night — the rough equivalent of the Queen’s Speech here — Barack Obama killed off any hopes of bipartisanship. The president pointed to the priorities set out by the Republicans and set out why he doesn’t intend to work with