We spend our lives mourning our childhoods. Our values and expectations are shaped throughout our younger years, sometimes subconsciously. Once we learn that, say, an ice cream dropped on the hot sand during a day at the beach won’t be replaced, the ice cream becomes a little part of us, a part we can’t get […]
Culture
How can we develop a deeper, more human and multifaceted understanding of the past?
Spotify and an Australian journalist both made more headlines for one of the most influential pop stars on the planet
Continue reading...A cathedral’s plan to host standup comedy has been criticised, but if it keeps places of worship relevant I’m a believer
Continue reading...The news channel’s prickliness after a BBC presenter made a passing joke about ratings only made it funnier
Continue reading...Streaming was supposed to kill off vinyl and CDs. Not a bit of it
Continue reading...The end of a long-running spoof signpost to a nonexistent Welsh airport is a sad moment for our determinedly unsilly era
Continue reading...Why is life treated as less valuable than the depiction of life? By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 19th October 2022 What does it take? How far must we go to alert other people to the scale of the crisis we face? Only one answer is clear: further than we have yet gone. We […]
All too revealing of how the system works ... how the talented former chief of the FT, capitalism’s house journal, was in thrall to ‘movers and shakers’
Even a brilliant newspaper editor can undersell a good story on the front page. At the start of Lionel Barber’s account of the world from his perspective as editor of the Financial Times between 2005 and 2020, there is an extensive list of dramatis personae, almost all of them male. (“One day,” he writes later, “I will deal with the alpha male problem, but not today.”) The players are broken down into their categories: politics, business and finance, royalty, journalism and diplomacy. The heart sinks – if journalism sits so easily in such a cast list, how can it do its job of comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable?
His skills as a fixer are finely honed – but they cannot restore a pre-Trump normality. As president, Biden’s private self, shadowed by loss, must come into its own
Every year after 1975, Joe Biden, his second wife Jill, his sons Beau and Hunter and their growing families, would gather for Thanksgiving on Nantucket island off Cape Cod. Part of the annual ritual was that the Bidens would take a photograph of themselves in front of a quaint old house in the traditional New England style that stood above the dunes on their favourite beach.
In November 2014, when Biden was serving as Barack Obama’s vice-president, he found, where the house should have been, an empty space marked out by yellow police tape. The building, he wrote in his memoir Promise Me, Dad had “finally run out of safe ground and run out of time; it had been swept out into the Atlantic”.
Continue reading...