
The case for
Who will be our next prime minister?
There are five contenders left for Tory leader and prime minister. Who are they?
16-17 July
The case for
There are five contenders left for Tory leader and prime minister. Who are they?
Film
There’s something “distinctly millennial” about the new Netflix adaptation of Jane Austen’s Persuasion, says Helen Lewis in The Atlantic. Its heroine, Anne Elliot, is not the “quiet, melancholic presence” of the novel, but rather a “klutzy Fleabag clone”. She hurls herself onto a chaise longue, screaming into the eiderdown; asserts she’s “single and thriving” while swigging wine straight from the bottle; and breaks the fourth wall with bemused eyebrow wiggles. She’s a recognisable trope of modern culture: “the aspirational yet relatable ‘hot mess’”. Characters dish out anachronistic zingers – “if you’re a five in London, you’re a 10 in Bath” – surely crafted to deliberately bait literary purists.
Podcast
The roots of Sri Lanka’s political chaos go back to 2005, says Emily Schmall in The Daily, when Mahinda Rajapaksa was first elected president. He envisioned Sri Lanka as “the next Singapore”: a booming economy with a growing middle class. So Rajapaksa courted China and the IMF for loans to build the infrastructure he believed would make Sri Lanka a tourist hotspot. “And it worked.” Europeans flocked to the country; modern cities sprang up with high-rise towers and luxury hotels. In just ten years, the economy “more than tripled”. People largely turned a blind eye to Rajapaksa’s nepotistic appointments and “vanity projects” – notably a Chinese-funded state-of-the-art cricket stadium – as they, for the first time, enjoyed their share of modern luxuries.
Zeitgeist
If the words Caecilius est in horto fill you with nostalgia, says Tristram Fane Saunders in The Daily Telegraph, prepare for exciting news: the beloved Cambridge Latin Course (CLC) is getting an inclusivity update. For 52 years, children have studied the adventures of Caecilius the banker and his dog Cerberus in the last days of Pompeii. It’s an enthralling tale. The height of excitement in a French textbook is “a visit to the piscine or bibliotheque”; in the CLC, it’s “mass death by volcano”. Whole classrooms have been “reduced to tears” as Caecilius, believing his family dead, utters his last words: “de vita mea despero” (“I despair of my life”). Book two is even grislier, following the “Iago-like psychopath” Salvius as he plots and murders his way across Europe.
Nature
Human childhoods last about a quarter of our lives, longer than those of any other species, says Brenna Hassett in The Guardian. We spend “25-odd years” growing up, and that’s what makes us “Earth’s most complex animal”. There are multiple ways we “invest in the slow growth of the next generation”. One is monogamy, which about 90% of animals have “dismissed as unworkable”, but in our case gives us “genetic co-investors” – dads, in other words. This means less competition for mates, and as such, our genitals are “remarkably unremarkable”. If we had the same reproductive habits as mouse lemurs, for example, men’s testes would be the size of grapefruits.