All the week’s wisdom in one place
30 July-5 August 2021
The Olympics
After an ill-executed vault on Tuesday, America’s superstar gymnast Simone Biles withdrew from the Olympics, citing mental-health issues. Quite right too, said Lindsay Crouse in The New York Times. “Being the greatest means knowing your own variable limits and when to push through the pain – and when not to force it.”
The pandemic
America’s pandemic should be over by now, says David Frum in The Atlantic. If it weren’t for “conservative, evangelical and rural Americans” refusing to get the vaccine, we’d be nearing herd immunity. New, more infectious variants would have nowhere to spread and life could return to normal. But “pro-Trump America” has decided vaccine refusal is a statement of identity and a test of loyalty.
Climate change
Climate change may be hastening “the first outright water war since the days of ancient Mesopotamia”, says Roger Boyes in The Times. Ethiopia is planning to build a huge dam on the Nile to create the largest hydroelectric plant in Africa. But downstream of that, Egypt’s exploding population depends on the river’s water. Both nations have threatened to use military force to defend their share of this liquid gold.
Heroes and villains
A colony of badgers, which are digging up graves at a Tweedmouth Cemetery in Northumberland. Local residents are furious, and the bereaved have taken to patrolling the graveyard at dusk to protect their loved ones’ graves. But since badgers are protected by law, they can’t be moved on.
Tomorrow’s world
Artificial intelligence company DeepMind has overcome “a huge scientific hurdle”, says Matthew Sparkes in New Scientist. It took “decades of painstaking research” for scientists to map the complex structure of just 17% of the 20,000 proteins in the human body – a vital step in creating medicines for many diseases. In less than a year, DeepMind has raised that figure to 98.5%, and this “treasure trove of data” is being made freely available, “which could lead to rapid advances in the development of new drugs”.
Quoted
“I always advise people never to give advice.”
Inside politics
Sadiq Khan has been busy socialising, says Alex Wickham in Politico. Last week he met President Biden’s climate envoy, John Kerry, and this week he was hobnobbing with Yael Lempert, the most senior diplomat at the US embassy. More meetings with top American officials are in the works. “Which all seems like sensible stuff for a London mayor to be doing, but won’t help cool rumours that he’s planning a tilt at the Labour leadership if and when a vacancy arises.”
Zeitgeist
John Lennon’s Imagine has made more appearances at the Olympics than most athletes, says Dorian Lynskey in UnHerd. It was played at the summer Games in 1996 and 2012, and at the Winter Olympics in 2006 and 2018. We heard it again in Tokyo this week. It’s strange, because if we took the song’s advice – “Imagine there’s no countries” – it would “theoretically put paid to the whole event”.
Noted
France has launched an app offering 18-year-olds €300 to spend on cultural pursuits. But they haven’t been rushing to the nearest opera house. French newspapers are complaining about a “manga rush” as teenagers sink their state handouts into Japanese comic books. That’s despite the cultural bias built into the app: the only video games that can be bought with it are non-violent French ones.
The case for
The world is heading for trouble, says a new study.
Westminster
In “one of the most extraordinary exchanges in recent political journalism”, Dominic Cummings last week admitted to the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg that he considered getting rid of his boss, Boris Johnson, shortly after the 2019 general election. His brazen justification for what would have amounted to a coup d’état? “That’s politics.” Cummings referred to – but didn’t name – a shadowy “few dozen” co-conspirators against the PM.
China
Hu Ji has hunted Chinese fugitives “from Fiji to France”, say Sebastian Rotella and Kirsten Berg in ProPublica, becoming a “star” back home in Wuhan for bringing enemies of the Chinese Communist Party to justice. He’s part of Operation Fox Hunt, a shadowy global “fugitive apprehension programme” that claims to have caught more than 8,000 international runaways. The targets aren’t murderers or drug lords; for the most part, they’re public officials and businesspeople accused of boring financial crimes.
Paris Hilton
Paris Hilton was the original influencer, says Martha Hayes in the Telegraph. In the Noughties the “It girl” was famous for being famous. When she wasn’t filming reality TV show The Simple Life, she was clubbing and “carrying miniature dogs around in designer handbags”. It’s true, says Hilton: “I invented getting paid to party.”
The Rolling Stones
Despite a combined age of 309, the four remaining members of the Rolling Stones are fitter than ever, says Guy Kelly in The Telegraph. The rock stars have weathered a lifetime of hell-raising and are touring the US this autumn. So what’s their secret?
Lulu Lakatos
You have to admire Lulu Lakatos, says India Knight in The Sunday Times. The 60-year-old Romanian has been found guilty of breezing into Mayfair jeweller Boodles in a low-cut dress and breezing out with seven diamonds worth £4.2m, leaving seven pebbles in their stead.
Noted
The richest five families in Florence in 1427 remain the richest today. Research by the Bank of Italy shows the pattern holds further down the social scale: any family in the 1427 top third is almost certain to be there today.
Staying young
Swimming gives a “boost to brain health” more effectively than other aerobic activities, says neuroscientist Seena Mathew in The Conversation. It enhances cognitive functions such as learning and memory by increasing levels of a protein called “brain-derived neurotrophic factor”, which repairs damaged neurons and neural connections.
Love etc
Rejoice!” says Polly Vernon in The Times. After weeks of speculation, singer Jennifer Lopez is officially back together with her former fiancé, actor Ben Affleck. It’s been a grisly 17 months, but this marks the return of “pure, glittering, A-list celebrity gossip”.
Sport
Charlotte Dujardin’s two dressage bronzes in Tokyo have made her Britain’s most decorated female Olympian. But how did her 10-year-old chestnut mount, Gio, travel the 5,713 miles to Japan?
Justice
In 2011, 10 years after Ray and Vi Donovan’s 18-year-old son Chris was murdered, they met one of his killers, says Matthew Syed in Radio 4’s Sideways podcast. Aged 15 at the time of the incident, he was the youngest of the three teenagers convicted for the crime – a gang randomly attacked Chris and his brother Phil one Friday evening.
JK Rowling
I’m not precious about writing, JK Rowling tells Simon Armitage in his Radio 4 podcast, The Poet Laureate Has Gone to His Shed. “People always say, do you only write when you’re inspired?
Film and TV
In the first series of This Way Up we met Aine, an Irish expat checking out of rehab, says Isobel Lewis in The Independent. She’d suffered, in her words, “a teeny little nervous breakdown”. Later we learnt that it involved a suicide attempt.
Books
How Sarah Gilbert and Catherine Green found the energy to write Vaxxers: The Inside Story of the Oxford AstraZeneca Vaccine and the Race Against the Virus (Hodder £20) is beyond me, says James McConnachie in The Sunday Times.
This six-bedroom villa in Fiesole has views of the Tuscan countryside and nearby Florence. Reached via a narrow lane from the town’s main square, it has eight bathrooms, balconies, terraces, a pool, pergolas, olive groves and orchards. There are two smaller houses in the 2½ acres of grounds. €3m.
Quoted
“If you think you can do a thing or think you can’t do a thing, you’re right.”
Eating in
Supermarket strawberries are “all pout and no kiss”, says Tom Parker Bowles in Country Life. “They promise so much and offer nothing.” It’s because supermarkets are obsessed with making the berries look beautiful and long-lasting. Flavour takes a back seat.
The great escape
The minuscule Mediterranean island south of Sicily has double-jabbed 84% of its population and is welcoming fully vaccinated Brits.
Noted
The UK’s first Olympic gold medallist in tennis, John Pius Boland, hadn’t planned to compete at all. He was visiting a friend in Athens, who happened to be a member of the organising committee of the first modern games in 1896. The friend signed him up for the tennis, and Boland promptly won both the singles and the doubles.
Designed by Czech sculptor David Cerny, this 23ft mirrored fountain has six rotating sections that distort and eventually recreate a human head. The reflections of the sky and the city are best enjoyed at sunset.
Noted
China has banned for-profit tutoring of schoolchildren in a radical overhaul of its $100bn education industry. Until recently more than 75% of students aged 6-18 were privately tutored ahead of exams. Beijing is concerned about the declining birth rate and fears educational expenses are putting Chinese parents off having more than one child – even though it’s now legal to have three.
Kate Moss is the new face of Kim Kardashian’s lingerie brand, Skims, which is designed to suit every body type. The pair recently visited the Vatican together. Bras start at £31.
Moneymakers
Welcome 2 America, an album Prince recorded in 2010 then mysteriously shelved, has just come out. The posthumous release – he died in April 2016, aged 57 – comes years into a labyrinthine legal battle over the musician’s estate.
On the money
Will the American private equity group Fortress succeed in its attempt to buy Morrisons, Britain’s fourth biggest supermarket chain? Maybe not, says Alistair Osborne in The Times. Its biggest shareholder, Silchester, has what is “close to a blocking stake” at 15.1%, and it doesn’t want to accept the £6.3bn bid.
Footage of an old G7 drinks reception has gone viral on Twitter. Watch here for the best bits – Margaret Thatcher making small talk, the Queen chatting in French and Ted Heath being told he’s “expendable”.
Desert Island Discs
Andrew Lloyd Webber is fighting to keep his West End production of Cinderella from closing. Musicals have always been a stressful business, he told Sue Lawley on Desert Island Discs in 1999.
Quirks of history
In Frederick Forsyth’s 1971 thriller The Day of the Jackal, the fictional assassin who tries to kill President de Gaulle assumes a false identity – that of a dead child. I did it myself to prove it was possible, Forsyth tells Marcus Scriven in The Mail on Sunday. The author scoured a graveyard near London to find the name of a child who had died, obtained the boy’s birth certificate, then applied for a passport in his name: James Oliver Duggan, as in the novel. He even invented a false witness, a church minister in Wales. Off went the application with the fee; back, two weeks later, came a fat package containing a passport. “I never used it,” says Forsyth. “I just tested the system and it worked.” The loophole has since been closed.
