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All the week’s wisdom in one place
26 November-2 December 2021
Kyle Rittenhouse
If I’d been a jury member in the Kyle Rittenhouse trial, “I might also have acquitted” him, says David Aaronovitch in The Times. In a case that has gripped America, the fresh-faced teenager was charged with shooting dead two men and injuring a third during riots in Kenosha, Wisconsin, last year. Rittenhouse, then 17, had travelled to the city to “protect” property with an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle. When one man chased and tried to disarm him, he shot him dead. Another man then attacked him with a skateboard, so he killed him too. And when a third man pointed a handgun at him, he fired again, this time non-fatally. Rittenhouse obviously shouldn’t have inserted himself, armed, into such a volatile situation. But under Wisconsin’s laws, he had a right to self-defence if he felt his life was in danger.
The Channel
Perhaps it was too much to hope that the deaths of 27 people in the Channel would change the tone of the migrant debate. Instead, says The Times in an editorial, this “sadly unsurprising tragedy” has only sharpened the cross-Channel war of words. Boris Johnson says France must do more to crack down on “sophisticated, highly lucrative” people-smuggling gangs, and more robustly police its beaches. Emmanuel Macron says Britain isn’t doing enough to address the “pull factors”, including the large “black economy”, that encourage migrants to risk the dangerous crossing.
Heroes and villains
Erica Hart uses a drone with a thermal imaging camera to find lost dogs, with fabulous results. In the past six years she has helped reunite 200 families with roaming pooches, and says that every time she finds one, it feels “like winning the lottery”.
Tomorrow’s world
Driverless “roboats” are set to make Amsterdam’s canals a lot smarter, says Jesse Orrall in CNET. The driverless robot boats, built by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, can shuttle people around, deliver goods and gather waste. Two prototypes are floating around the Singel, Herengracht, Prinsengracht and Keizersgracht waterways this month.
Noted
NFT is Collins Dictionary’s word of the year. It defines the notoriously confusing acronym – short for non-fungible token – as “a unique digital certificate, registered in a blockchain, that is used to record ownership of an asset such as an artwork or a collectible”. Other new words for 2021 include “crypto”, “metaverse” and “pingdemic”.
Inside politics
I’m beginning to think I was wrong to back Brexit, says Fraser Nelson in The Daily Telegraph. I voted leave in the hope that we could “swap a parochial European policy for a world of ‘Global Britain’” – we could cut the Brussels red tape, “strike bold trade deals” and establish a fruitful relationship with Europe. So “where are these sunlit uplands”? Our service exports to the EU are “falling twice as fast as those to the rest of the world”. Our relationship with the bloc has been hammered by “the vaccine wars and Northern Ireland rows”. And the new trade deals enthusiastically promoted by Foreign Secretary Liz Truss are just “rolled-over EU agreements”. The proposed Australia deal is being phased in over 15 years, “as if free trade is a huge threat from which Britain needs to be protected”.
Zeitgeist
For the first time in 69 years, the Queen did not speak at the Church of England’s annual General Synod, says Matthew Parris in The Times. There was something melancholy about her absence, and about the Archbishop of York’s concession that the Church is dying. His speech, like a foghorn in an advancing fog, only reinforced the shudder. “Let our death be a grand operatic death,” he said. “Let it be something fantastic. Let’s not crawl into a corner.”
Quoted
“The British public has a deep and abiding love of personal liberty. But mainly for themselves. Other people? Not so much.”
The case for
Britain’s in better shape than we tend to think.
Big Tech
After rioters stormed the US Capitol on 6 January, some of the most powerful institutions in America sprang into action, says Ian Bremmer in Foreign Affairs. But not the ones you might expect: Facebook and Twitter suspended President Trump’s accounts, while Amazon, Apple and Google blocked Parler, a Twitter alternative that Trump supporters were using to co-ordinate the attack. Payment apps such as PayPal and Stripe stopped processing donations for the Trump campaign.
Blue whales
Humans like whales, says Simon Barnes in Tortoise. “It’s about their size, their mystery, their existence in the inaccessible oceans and their closeness to ourselves; we are, of course, all mammals who breathe air and suckle our young.” And in 1982 humanity deliberately acted against its own material interest in using whale oil for everything from lamps to cosmetics when, apart from a few “refuseniks and dissenters”, the world agreed to stop whaling. Earlier, in 1965, we’d decided to stop hunting blue whales. By then that species was as good as extinct: about 350,000 had been killed in less than a century, or 99% of the global population.
Jennifer Lawrence
Jennifer Lawrence feared for her life when her private jet malfunctioned in 2017. “I know, flying private, I deserve to die,” she tells Karen Valby in Vanity Fair. The plane’s two engines failed and it nosedived towards the runway. “I started leaving little mental voicemails to my family, you know, ‘I’ve had a great life, I’m sorry’.” Despite a bumpy emergency landing, nobody was hurt – and Lawrence, after a large pill and several mini bottles of rum, boarded another plane.
Dean Martin
The Rat Pack were easily characterised, says Keiran Southern in The Times. Frank Sinatra was the tough guy, “a friend of mobsters who had a voice to die for”; Sammy Davis Jr was the nice guy, “a stellar talent confined by racial prejudices of the day”; and Dean Martin was the drunk. But according to a new documentary, King of Cool, Martin was not as he seemed.
Gary Stevenson
Gary Stevenson used to gaze at the shining towers of Canary Wharf as a poor schoolboy in Ilford, east London, with a paper round that paid £12 a week. “I saw it on the horizon,” he tells Anoosh Chakelian in The New Statesman, “and thought: ‘That will be a place where I’ll get a job and make money. Why shouldn’t it be me?’” So it turned out. After winning a banking job in a card game at the height of the financial crisis, Stevenson took home £400,000 in his first year, having just turned 23. By 2011 he was Citibank’s most profitable trader.
Staying young
Crying offers “near-magical benefits” for mental and physical health, says Tanner Garrity in Inside Hook. All of us – particularly men – should do it more. Women cry five times more often than men, and they cry for longer, typically six minutes per blub compared to just three for men. Crying releases oxytocin, a natural pain reliever that makes us feel calmer and more content. It also dials down the stress hormone cortisol. In fact, tears are “swimming with stress hormones”, which get flushed out during a good cry.
Love etc
Cara Delevingne says trying to keep quiet during orgasm makes you feel it more. “When you just try and not make, like, any noise, you feel it way more, and it’s like, Whoa!” The actress and supermodel has a point, says Gigi Engle in InsideHook, in the sense that most of us are conditioned to make performative noises during sex. “But… total silence?”
Xi Jinping
Xi Jinping holds much of the world’s fate in his hands. But how many people know anything about the Chinese president’s family life? As Michael Sheridan explains in this Stories of Our Times podcast, Xi had an unsettled childhood. He was born into China’s red aristocracy in 1953, and initially lived in an elite leadership compound in Beijing. But when his father was sent to work in a factory during one of Mao’s purges, Xi ended up doing gruelling manual labour in the countryside.
Culture wars
Dick Gregory only ever wanted to be a comedian, says Jon Ronson in his podcast, Things Fell Apart. The black American was a stand-up sensation in the early 1960s – back when comedy was an almost entirely white world. Gregory had a white agent, a white manager and white lawyers. He played to white crowds. He couldn’t stand it. “My dad felt that it was not okay for him to be comfortable in his hotel room every night after a show and turn on the evening news and see his people being brutalised,” says Gregory’s son Christian.
Film and TV
“From its opening minutes, The Wheel of Time is epic in scale,” says James Poniewozik in The New York Times. This lush and ambitious Amazon Prime series rivals Game of Thrones, and even Peter Jackson’s Tolkien films, for grandeur and polish. Rosamund Pike stars as a Gandalfian figure, Moiraine of the Aes Sedai, an all-female order of enchanters who weave smoky strands of magic. True, the show’s world-view owes less to realpoli
Books
When Fyodor Dostoevsky wrote Crime and Punishment, he was in a panic, says Steven Kellman in the LA Times. It was 1865, and the 43-year-old Russian author was suffering from painful epileptic seizures, mourning the death of his wife and brother, and saddled with gambling debts. Writing a book was the only way he could stave off his impatient creditors, so he needed to knock out his novel at pace. But that wasn’t straightforward either.
Moneymakers
Jeff Koons has two exhibitions on this autumn. One is at the Palazzo Strozzi in Florence, built in the 15th century by Renaissance banking tycoons to flaunt their wealth. The other is at the Qatar Museums Gallery, built in the 21st century by Gulf oil tycoons to flaunt their wealth.
On the money
Gina Lollobrigida – the Italian film star once called “the world’s most beautiful woman” – has hired a mafia-busting former magistrate to challenge a court ruling that she is no longer fit to manage her millions. The 94-year-old actress is fighting a legal battle with her son, Milko Skofic, who says her assistant Andrea Piazzolla “brainwashed” her and stole assets worth €5m.
A long-lost episode of Morecambe and Wise will be screened this Christmas for the first time since 1970. The BBC thought the footage was gone for good, but thankfully Eric Morecambe’s son Gary found a recording of it in his attic. Here’s the comedy duo performing their Christmas show in 1978.
Desert Island Discs
Ralph Fiennes, 58, currently performing TS Eliot’s Four Quartets at the Harold Pinter Theatre, grew up in a bohemian household with six siblings, including his foster brother Michael, he told Sue Lawley on Desert Island Discs in 1999. His father was a photographer and there were always “concerns about schooling and money”. The family moved around a lot, living in cramped makeshift houses.