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Friday

Thomas Fink

Science needs Russians

Something extraordinary has happened. It wasn’t just the docking of a SpaceX capsule at the International Space Station, some 250 miles above the Earth, on a mission to rescue stranded astronauts. It was the sight of Americans and Russians embracing. As the new arrivals – Nick Hague and Aleksandr Gorbunov – appeared through the hatch, it was hugs all round. There are now four Russians and seven Americans manning the ISS. Since the outbreak of the war, collaborations with Russian scientists – measured by the co-authors named on papers – have dwindled across the West Then consider that this happened just a few days after the International Chess Federation voted

Wednesday

Sean Thomas

What horror does to us

Tonight, the BBC will be broadcasting what is – to my mind – the scariest film ever made. Indeed, I would go further than that, I would say this movie is the scariest human artwork in any form – and that includes novels, plays, stories, the lot. This film beats them all, and by a distance. What is it? Of course, I’m not going to tell you that straight off, that would break all the rules of scary suspense writing. First, I want to examine the underlying questions: why do we like being artificially scared? And what makes a particular ghost story or Dracula remake genuinely frightening? The questions sound

James Maker

I’m finally a proper villager

I knew that my adjustment to living here was complete when, this morning, I hit the send button of an email. I had written to the parish council suggesting that the local church change its street signage. This is, of course, the critical moment when the character undergoes a metamorphosis into Flora Robson. ‘The board is in a shade of blue one associates with a major hospital,’ I wrote in mild protest. I was about to file him away as a bisexual in search of his first same-sex experience I suggested a smaller sign in heritage-green. The clerk of the parish council obviously runs a tight ship because she responded

Robin Ashenden

London is a great Eastern European city

When, after three years of living in Eastern Europe, I came back to the UK, I found myself acutely nostalgic for the post-communist world. Life over there had a charm and directness that London seemed to lack. Luckily, I discovered that even in the capital you can find the best of Eastern Europe all around you – if you know where to look. A lovely place to walk into on a winter afternoon, or to visit at Orthodox Easter, as people teem outside and priests scatter holy water about I was aware of course, even in my teens, of Polish London. There was the restaurant Daquise in South Kensington which,

Tuesday

Kristina Murkett

Royal Mail is a right royal mess

Benjamin Franklin famously said that there are only two certainties in life: death, and taxes. It turns out there is a third: Royal Mail not delivering post on time. I live in East Oxford, where Royal Mail has not met its target of delivering 91.5 per cent of all first-class mail by the next working day in over five years. The reality is much worse than that: my OX4 postcode seems to only receive letters somewhere between once every two weeks and once a month. This can be a minor inconvenience (it is a bit surreal receiving birthday cards in June when your birthday is in May), or it can

Howard Spencer

Hunting for the lost blue plaques

Most people assume that once a blue plaque is installed, it’s there to stay. That is not always the case. Around 50 of the over 1,000 official plaques are no longer in situ on their original building – almost always because that building has gone. Now English Heritage, the charity I work for, is asking for help from the public to track down any of the lost plaques that may have survived. In all likelihood, both early Byron plaques are completely lost – potentially somewhere within the foundations of John Lewis In 1867, the Society of Arts inaugurated its new memorial scheme with a plaque to Lord Byron, marking the

Andrew Watts

Gutweed and bladderwrack? Yum!

Foraging has become a sign of status rather than a lack of it and seaweed is perhaps the most abundant wild food of all. The alternative is mushrooms, but I’ve always thought fungus-hunting a bit too wild; the possibility of a first-class risotto being offset by the risk of death or, worse, expanded consciousness. Rotting seaweed is disgusting. My local newspaper in Cornwall regularly publishes complaints from tourists Caroline Davey, who trained as a botanist before becoming a forager, assures me that only three species of seaweed are poisonous and they are found only in deep water. They might conceivably wash up on the shore, but the basic rule of seaweed

Monday

Julie Burchill Julie Burchill

Obesity will soon be history

I’ve just seen a graph which surprised me only slightly less than one might which showed that the majority of people in the UK thought that Keir Starmer could be trusted to tell the truth about what he had for breakfast. It shows that US rates of obesity have started to fall. The reason, according to the Financial Times, which published the graph, is that one in eight Americans is now taking semaglutides, drugs like Ozempic and Wegovy. I’ll state right here that I’ve got flesh in the game – though a good deal less than I did before I encountered the wonderful world of semaglutides. I wrote here in