Society

You wouldn’t have thought that Starbucks’s pricing policy could influence rock history, but that’s what happened. In the early 1990s, when Mike Kroeger was working in one of its Canadian stores, a cup of coffee cost $1.95. So Kroeger spent all day handing customers their five cents change, saying: ‘Here’s your nickel back.’ When he later joined a band, and it needed a name, he simply combined the last two words into one. Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe, on the other hand, had some friends who, because of their place of employment, were known as the ‘pet shop boys’. The band themselves don’t use the ‘the’, though of course everyone

Test, track and trace is an integral – and very expensive – part of the government’s plans for lifting lockdown and getting the country back to normal. The government is trying to hire 25,000 contract-tracers to augment an app-based system which seems mysteriously to have all-but vanished from its plans. But could there be a cheaper way of gaining advanced warning of infection in an area, allowing localised lockdowns to be imposed? Whatever happened to RNA levels in sewage was followed very closely three days later in hospital admissions A study led by Jordan Peccia at Yale University raises the possibility of an intriguing early warning system for Covid outbreaks.

God, I loathe the bishops. Not Beth Rigby, Robert Peston and the other hacks who seem to be auditioning to guide the morality of the nation. I mean the actual bishops, who turn out to be even less use than these competitively incensed cross-examiners. Most people in Britain couldn’t name a bishop if they tried. But Nick Baines is a name worth remembering. The otherwise utterly un-noteworthy Bishop of Leeds came to my attention in January 2019 when he gave a talk at Bradford Cathedral in which among other political interventions he referred to Boris Johnson (then foreign secretary) as ‘an amoral liar’.  Four months later the same Nick Baines,

This morning was the first time that my father, Robin Hanbury-Tenison, had ventured beyond his veranda since coming home two weeks ago from a Covid-induced stay at Plymouth Hospital. He’s very weak but we’ve borrowed a mobility scooter from a local friend and I convinced him to take a turn of the garden with me to smell the flowers and see what’s blooming. He visibly perked up while navigating our gravel paths and pointed out ragged robin, purple loosestrife and wood anemones, all of which have sprung forth while he lay sedated in intensive care. I trotted along beside him vigilantly, ever ready to throw my shoulder into the scooter

The world is being held hostage by an organism so small that even the most powerful microscope could miss it. It has taken thousands of lives and brought superpowers to their knees. It has also united us in suffering and opened our eyes to the fragility of our way of life. A proposed panacea is vaccination. But will a vaccine be found? Or is the search for one likely to prove fruitless? In order to appreciate the magnitude of such a task, it is important to understand a little of the biology, history and challenges of vaccine development. Here there emerge three good reasons why a vaccine might not be

I started clap for carers after being inspired by what I saw back home in the Netherlands. If the Dutch have it in them, I thought, then the Brits definitely have it in them as well. It didn’t even take 24 hours for clap for carers to take off and appear on the Instagram pages of celebrities like Victoria Beckham. And here we are. Nine weeks on, I think the reason for the success of clap for carers is that it is a chance for people to reunite with their neighbours and communities. It also gives people a chance to see each other and thank key workers. But I think that