The young woman helping me with a story about poverty in Oklahoma last year, not a socially unaware or politically conservative person, didn’t blink when I happened to ask if she owned a gun. Where she lives, it might take police 40 minutes to arrive in case of trouble. She had three, including one under the mattress. It helped me grasp America and its relationship to firearms.
The title of David Foster Wallace’s Brief Interviews With Hideous Men is pretty self-explanatory. It is a collection of postmodern short stories featuring a series of wretched men who are questioned until they reveal their tortured pasts.
The death of Cecil the Zimbabwean lion has shone the spotlight on the lucrative business of trophy game hunting – but is there any more to this $200m (£156m) industry than the desire of rich white men to demonstrate their machismo?
Let's be honest; this is a difficult time for the Labour Party.
How many times do you have to kill a man before he dies? Not for the first time Mullah Mohammad Omar, Emir of the Faithful, friend and protector of Osama bin Laden, creator of the Taliban, destroyer of graven images, has died.
I think we can all agree that “disaster” is quite a hefty word. It is bigger than “accident”, and bigger even than “calamity”. In my battered 85-year-old thesaurus, it ranks up there with “catastrophe, tragedy, ruin”. Yet this is how celebrity hairdresser Nicky Clarke has chosen to describe what would happen if the Duchess of Cambridge – brace yourselves – allows herself to go grey.
Over the past few years, I’ve heard the Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, deliver broadly the same speech. That’s not a criticism – he’s required to perform frequently, sometimes on several occasions in the same day. It’s also part of his brief to sell London, to make the capital city appeal to inward investment.
How much pocket money did you get for doing jobs around the house when you were a kid? Lots of parents incentivise good behaviour, exam results and obedience through the time-honoured means of financial reward, and there's nothing wrong with that. After all, this is kids we're talking about. They can't be relied upon to go out of the house in matching shoes, much less act in their own best interests. But one parent has found a way to keep that be-good-for-cash dynamic going well into the afterlife. Читать дальше...
Everyone is right. Everyone is wrong. Everything has been tried. Nothing works for long. Calais is a never-ending tragedy. After 20 years of “treaties” and “solutions”, the cross-Channel migrant crisis is worse than ever.
Like millions around the world, I was saddened to read that a beloved lion, called Cecil, was shot and killed by an American hunter in Zimbabwe. In 2007 I spent a couple of weeks in South Africa making a documentary about trophy hunting (Louis Theroux's African Hunting Holiday). I also wrote a short piece about the experience.
I couldn’t help but feel intensely irritated by the way Cara Delevingne was treated during her so-called ‘car crash’ interview on Good Day Sacramento this week. In my mind, in fact, it wasn’t her who came across badly, but the American anchors themselves.
For many Americans, the past three weeks have felt like the final straw in a year that has seen unprecedented recognition of police brutality against people of colour. Each day since the death of Sandra Bland on July 10th has heralded a new theory or an additional piece of evidence; this morning was no different, with the release by Texas police of new CCTV footage in an attempt to quash the wilder conspiracy theories about her death. Questions – very important questions – still remain, however. Читать дальше...
Normal children would be excited by a low roofed plastic wendy-house to hide away in and stew pretend tea. Some privileged toddlers may dream of a more stable wooden playhouse – big enough to host non-imaginary guests and less likely to blow away in a gust of wind. But no child other than Prince George could conceivably be the owner of a magnificent £18,000 cottage on wheels.
There are only four northern white rhinoceros left alive in the world after the death of one of the critically endangered animals at a zoo.
All property is theft, it has been observed, and some of the most expensive property in London, especially, appears to have been purchased with the proceeds of crime of one sort or another. Of course, not every home registered to an offshore trust belongs to a drug dealer or money launderer – many are merely legally avoiding their tax obligations, as they would see it – but enough are so financed for the Prime Minister to make a point about proposing to clean things up during a speech in faraway Singapore. Читать дальше...
Prison may or may not work for its inmates, but it seems unreasonable to suppose that it works for their children. Most of the women sent to British prisons – often for relatively minor, non-violent offences – are mothers, and, thus, some 17,000 children a year are victims of a criminal justice system that fails to take into account their needs and likely fates. No Sure Start programme in the world can compensate for the loss of a parent in this way, and the loss of maternal love and care is too... Читать дальше...
Amnesty International is more accustomed to being the toast of Hollywood luvvies than attracting their ire but proposals leaked this week to change the human rights group’s position on prostitution have pitted them against Emma Thompson, Lena Dunham, Kate Winslet and Meryl Streep.
Jessica Ennis-Hill will take part in the heptathlon in next month’s World Championships in Beijing, having been named as one of 62 members of Great Britain’s squad.