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Friday

Jane Stannus

Avoid microplastics? Don’t bother

They’re everywhere, it seems: in the oceans, the fish, the soil, our drinking water, our vegetables, our grains and cereals, our meat – even in us. Microplastics and smaller nanoplastics are tiny particles of plastic flubbage measuring half a centimetre or less that result from the degradation of plastic refuse, and according to recent news coverage the world is simply crawling with the stuff. Anxiety might turn out to be the biggest health problem caused by microplastics It’s getting everyone in a tizzy. On the one hand you can’t possibly avoid it, since it’s already more or less everywhere. But you must do something, the reports insist, or risk a plethora of terrifying

Wednesday

John Sturgis

Could the BBC sink Desert Island Discs?

Desert Island Discs is 80 years old and to celebrate this milestone the BBC has planned an event unprecedented in the show’s long history. It is also one that will surely have its creator and original presenter, Roy Plomley, spinning in his grave. Desert Island Discs Live will take place at London’s Palladium over three nights later this month with host Lauren Lavern in conversation with celebrity guests Russell T. Davies, Katherine Ryan, Lemn Sissay, Ellie Simmonds, Dara Ó Briain, Sue Perkins ‘and more to be announced’. The whole charm of the show, and the reason for its longevity, is its intimacy If this sounds like your sort of thing then

Bridget Phetasy

Sydney Sweeney and the return of real body positivity

Yay! Boobs are back! Sydney Sweeney made engagement farming easy with her cleavage-revealing curtain call this past weekend as the host of Saturday Night Live. If you spend any time online at all, I’m sure you’ve seen the video. Wrapped in a revealing little black dress, Sydney thanks the cast, the crew, Lorne Michaels and giggles and bounces in familiar ways I haven’t seen in decades. For anyone under the age of 25, they’ve likely never seen it in their lifetime – as the giggling blonde with an amazing rack has been stamped out of existence, a creature shamed to the brink of extinction. sydney sweeney’s end speech at SNL pic.twitter.com/tNtMr4YTcJ

Sean Thomas

Why Cambodia is the best country in the world

Yeah, I know, ridiculous. Cambodia? How can that be the best country in the entire world? For a start, most people can’t place it on a map. This includes close relatives of mine who are studying geography at A Level. They know all about the Marxist topography of urbanism, but Cambodia, err, um, is that near Africa? Also, Cambodia?? Isn’t that the country that suffered a fearsome Maoist genocide within living memory, with a quarter of its population dying by execution, torture, famine and disease, and the rest left so hungry they resorted to eating giant spiders roasted in tomato powder? The landscape is agreeably green, the jungles are often

Tuesday

Robin Ashenden

A Soviet guide to vodka

One of the perks – a perilous one – of visiting the Former Soviet Union in the 1990s was the cheapness of the vodka. I was used to paying London prices for it but in Estonia (where I lived for two years) you could find bunker-bars where they’d serve you a generous tumbler – enough to blitz you for an evening – for about 40 pence. Most people wanted nothing more from alcohol than that it should anaesthetise them and help them forget, and vodka was ideal for this. Unlike whisky or brandy, you couldn’t crow over its ‘vanilla overtones’, its ‘hints of butterscotch’ or its ‘aged in the wood’

Jane Robins

Can’t sleep? Try a boring audiobook

I’m sleeping with the actor Richard E. Grant at the minute and can highly recommend the experience. He’s reading Agatha Christie’s The Murder at the Vicarage to me and has the perfect voice for it, faintly lascivious but not disturbingly so. As for the content, it’s just what’s wanted – engaging but not too stimulating. Like so many of us, I’m nodding off to the sound of an audiobook. Crime novels work well, as long as they are not overly gruesome or suspenseful I was already enamoured of Richard E. Grant who’d, on other late nights, read me Iris Murdoch’s The Sea, The Sea. The plot unfolds at a gentle

William Cook

The Nazi next door: inside my grandmother’s house

Each time I return to Hamburg (about once a year, on average) I pay a sentimental visit to my grandmother’s magnificent old house, where she spent her cosseted, idyllic youth, during the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich. It’s a robust Teutonic villa, a bombastic relic of the Gründerzeit – that flamboyant building boom which followed Bismarck’s triumphant unification of Germany. It’s on one of Hamburg’s smarter streets, a leafy avenue called Heimhuderstrasse – but it’s not the ornate architecture that draws me there, or even the snob value of the neighbourhood. What brings me back year after year are the stories that cling to this house like ivy – stories from the

Monday

Sean Thomas

Are we ready for P(doom)?

It’s difficult to remember a time before climate change – a time when our daily discourse, our newspaper front pages, endless movies and TV documentaries, and Al Gore, Greta Thunberg and Sir David Attenborough (Peace Be Upon Him), were not lecturing us, sternly and constantly, about the threat to our planet from the ‘climate emergency’, the melting of the ice caps, the levelling of the Amazon jungle, the failure of the Gulf Stream, the desertification of Spain, and the complete and total cessation of snowfall in Great Britain, apart from the regular occasions when it snows.  In fact, if you are under 30 you may not even be aware that

Ross Anderson

Why Apple killed its electric car

After spending over $10 billion, screwing over corporate partners, hiring and firing talent and a decade of work trying to develop a flagship product for a new, massive market, Apple has killed what could have been its most ambitious product yet: an electric car. The failure of the electric vehicle project singularly reflects the culture and hubris of Apple Its death comes with no announcement, for Apple never officially acknowledged ‘Project Titan’ existed, but Mark Gurman of Bloomberg reported last week that its 2,000-person team had been shifted to other projects. Its demise is surprising because Apple rarely gives up on big projects, and because of just how much time and money had