The greatest modern challenge – and it’s really unique to our age – is to separate the ludicrous from the genius. We have to overcome the challenge everywhere from the Cabinet through the campuses to the catwalk: are we supposed to admire or sneer at those policies, courses or fashions? But, extreme sushi notwithstanding the contradiction of our age hasn’t so far been literally served up on a plate in front of us. Read more

I haven’t firetruckery-ied around here for some time. I’m not sure if my reluctance to post arose because the US presidential election has by itself provided more firetruckeries than the world has needed for months, so more from me seemed otiose, or because I have myself been under a lot of all kinds of pressure in the same period. For one reason or another, e.g., most of them lying outside my choice, I Read more

Still reeling from the Brexit, like the rest of the world – apart from the few million English & Welsh people who voted for it – and I find myself hoping that my thinking is a bit muddled, like how you just can’t do a cryptic crossword or watch The Usual Suspects if you have a head cold.

Because, if I’m not muddled, it’s becoming clearer and clearer that there is a right wing tide (packaged as concern for one’s own safety) that is rising fast enough to float the presidency of the Drumpf.

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It’s not been a good week to be an animal anywhere in the world, as Harambe, the17-year-old silverback gorilla at Cincinnati Zoo might have told you, if he hadn’t been shot dead in his own pen (in the understandable haste to save the life of a three-year-old boy who’d wandered into the enclosure).

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It’s taken a couple o’ days well for the rage to simmer low enough – and the heart to steel itself tough enough – to contemplate the gang rape of the 16-year-old child in Rio last week by perhaps up to as many as 33 men, including her 17-year-old boyfriend. The world knows of it because several of her assailants posted pictures and video of her and the crime, some turning her degradation into selfie-opportunities; one particularly low low-life made what he thought was a good joke about it. Read more