More than a million people have signed a petition calling for former Post Office chief Paula Vennells to lose her CBE over the Horizon scandal, which saw more than 700 sub-postmasters wrongly convicted of fraud due to a faulty IT system. A new ITV drama about the scandal has revived calls for justice, with the government under pressure to exonerate the victims en masse through an act of parliament. US Secretary of State Antony Blinken has returned to the Middle East amid growing fears that the war in Gaza could escalate into a wider regional conflict. Iran-backed Hezbollah unleashed a series of rocket attacks against Israel from Lebanon yesterday, prompting retaliatory air strikes by the Israeli military. Nasa has successfully launched a rocket carrying a lunar lander into space. If all goes to plan, the Peregrine 1 will touch down on the moon on 23 February – the first US craft to do so since the Apollo missions ended in 1972. |
When kids could be kids: a Saturday Evening Post cover from 1935 |
Let's stop mollycoddling our children |
I recently got into weightlifting, says Matthew Syed in The Sunday Times, and discovered that you only get the full benefits by making your muscles hurt – if they "tear a bit", they're stronger when they heal. It strikes me that this concept of "self-repair" is one we're forgetting when it comes to our children. We increasingly coddle them, thinking it's "a form of kindness", when in fact it undermines their "resilience, robustness and flourishing". A "recent seminal paper" in the Journal of Paediatrics found that there are now record rates of anxiety and depression among American kids, and that suicide rates among under-15s rose sixfold between 1950 and 2020. The authors blame this development not on social media, but on a shift in the 1980s, when we went from seeing our progeny as "tough cookies" to "Ming vases".
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In England, the number of primary school pupils who walked home from school plummeted from 86% in 1971 to 25% in 2010. Children are increasingly confined to soft-play areas rather than exploring local fields; in classrooms, they are shielded from failure and even barred from playing games that involve winners and losers. It's no surprise that when these coddled kids reach university, they demand all kinds of protections: after a "mildly controversial" female speaker gave a talk on sexual violence at Brown University in the US, for example, students were comforted with colouring books, cookies and a video of frolicking puppies. As with so many things, "overprotection is perilous". |
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Rich Polk/Golden Globes/Getty |
Oppenheimer dominated the Golden Globes last night, winning categories including best film drama, best actor (Cillian Murphy) and best director (Christopher Nolan). Succession was the small-screen winner, with gongs for stars Sarah Snook (pictured), Kieran Culkin and Matthew Macfadyen. And as ever, the winners didn't just bag trophies, says Robb Report. Along with the presenters, they each received gift bags worth up to $500,000, with goodies including a five-day luxury yacht charter in Indonesia; a pair of emerald earrings worth $69,000; and six bottles of Liber Pater, the most expensive wine in the world, worth around $193,500 a pop. See the full list of winners here, and goodies here. |
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Executives and board members at Elon Musk's companies are increasingly worried about his drug use, says The Wall Street Journal. According to multiple witnesses, the tech billionaire has taken LSD, cocaine, ecstasy and magic mushrooms in recent years, often at private parties where attendees have to "sign non-disclosure agreements or give up their phones". This includes "multiple tabs of acid" at a 2018 Los Angeles party and ketamine (for which he says he has a medical prescription) with his brother Kimbal in 2021. The 52-year-old is not particularly coy about his consumption: in 2018, he "got into trouble with Nasa for smoking marijuana on the Joe Rogan show" (pictured). |
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Taylor Swift with friend and fellow popstar Selena Gomez. John Shearer/MTV/Getty |
"Taylor Swift is not a closeted lesbian," says The Daily Telegraph. That's according to close friends of hers who have felt the need to speak out after The New York Times ran a 5,000-word article mining the 34-year-old pop icon's back catalogue for "hairpins" – clues that she is secretly gay. The piece notes that the star released a video on Lesbian Visibility Day in which she dances at a Pride parade and turns down a man's marriage proposal in exchange for a pet cat, and that she regularly wears dresses with a "rainbow motif" and depicts herself "trapped in glass closets or, well, in regular closets". |
Rishi Sunak and his wife Akshata Murty celebrating Diwali at No 10. Henry Nicholls/AFP/Getty |
Britain's genius for not overthinking |
The most remarkable thing about Britain's prime minister, London's mayor, Scotland's first minister and the probable next head of the BBC all being Asian, says Janan Ganesh in the FT, is the overwhelming "lack of domestic interest in that trend". I am often asked to go on TV to comment on this or that, but I have "never been invited to discuss this subject". It is virtually never spoken about, either in the form of "conservative misgivings" or "liberal self-congratulation". Plenty of places are as diverse as Britain, but few are so indifferent to that diversity. Why? |
The simple answer is that "we aren't very reflective people generally". The old attack line that the English are "anti-intellectual" is basically right. That's not to say the nation has any less "cognitive processing power" than the next, merely that we are impatient with – even suspicious of – abstract thought. Consider our greatest minds. Shakespeare wrote 38 plays and 150-odd poems without giving "the slightest hint of an overarching worldview". David Hume, "the most important philosopher to have written in English", practised a kind of "anti-philosophy", which emphasised experience, not reason, as the basis of knowledge. In his penetrating book on British art, Sensations, the critic Jonathan Jones argues that one theme runs from Thomas Gainsborough to Lucian Freud and beyond: "empirical observation". So yes, we "skirt the subject of identity", but then we skirt most disembodied concepts. "In the end, Britain is cosmopolitan because it doesn't overthink." |
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Recent Virgin Atlantic adverts have emphasised the company's "wonderfully diverse workforce", in particular its female pilots, says Rod Liddle in The Sunday Times. "So, a short corrective." Virgin has a lower proportion of female pilots than the global average, and fewer than, say, British Airways. Also, in a survey last year, three-quarters of its pilots said they had worked with colleagues who were "clearly" unfit to be on duty "due to fatigue or tiredness". Still, as you crash into a mountain you can at least "revel in the diversity of the crew". |
It's a clip-on keyboard for the iPhone, designed to appeal to users nostalgic for the days of physical buttons. The $139 Clicks case is one of the many zany gadgets on display at this year's Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, says CNET. Others include a robot vacuum that finds and washes out stains; a TV that becomes see-through when you turn it off; and a (rather bossy-sounding) AI-powered toothbrush that tells you which areas you missed and how to improve your technique. |
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"If you cannot make knowledge your servant, make it your friend."
Spanish writer Baltasar Gracián |
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