More time and money is being spent on children than ever before. And it's a global trend. Professor Tina Miller, who has studied how parenting styles have changed over several decades, considers what this investment in our sons and daughters tells us about the modern world. She considers whether the gold standard of educational achievement goes hand in hand with rising inequality and individualism. What might the unintended consequences be and how difficult is it for parents to opt out?
21 June 2020
The Red Line: Guyana (Cambridge Analytica and the next Cuban Missile Crisis)
While everyone has their eyes on its imploding neighbours Guyana is entering its own new phase, one that is likely to make it one of the world's next big geopolitical flashpoints. With Iranian missiles, Cambridge Analytica buying elections, and a country up for sale this isolated jungle nation could be the next launchpad to threaten the world superpower at home.
Cautionary Tales: A Tsunami of Misery
Saving people from an urgent threat can cause their lives to be blighted in profound, yet hidden ways. A monstrous wave and then a nuclear disaster forced Mikio and Hamako Watanabe from their home. But being saved from the potential dangers of a radiation leak destroyed their lives in a different way. Why do urgent dangers prompt us to take action, when far worse long-term ills are so often ignored?
New Statesman: The history wars
Unthinking racism was woven into the fabric of everyday life in Britain through the Fifties, accepted as part of the natural order of things for the great majority of white people. In the Notting Hill race riots of 1958, white working-class Teddy Boys assaulted black people on the streets and attacked their houses. In the Smethwick constituency in the West Midlands, the Conservative candidate at the parliamentary election of 1964, Peter Griffiths, fought on an openly racist platform – and won.
Open racism reached its apogee in Enoch Powell’s infamous “rivers of blood” speech in April 1968, with its vulgar racist language (“grinning piccaninnies”) and threats of violence, which prompted London dockers to down tools and march on Westminster waving banners with the slogan “Back Britain, not Black Britain”. An opinion poll conducted shortly after the speech showed 74 per cent approval for Powell’s attack on “coloured” immigration. Labour’s defeat in the 1970 election was widely attributed to the favourable reaction of significant parts of the white electorate to Powell’s words. [...]
Still, nostalgia for empire has been a significant factor in the minds of many Leave voters, 39 per cent of whom told the same recent survey they would like Britain still to have an empire, compared to 16 per cent of Remainers. Such fantasies find expression in the minds of some right-wing Conservatives, who think that pride in Britain’s long-vanished overseas empire should be part of the national identity. [...]
Rhodes stipulated in his will that race was no reason for exclusion from the scholarships. However, the scholars had to have Latin and Ancient Greek and nobody thought that black Africans or African Americans could pass this test. The selectors did not interview candidates at the time, and when a Harvard student who did have these languages, Alain Leroy Locke, son of freeborn African Americans, applied, his brilliance ensured he was admitted. By the time he arrived in Oxford, in 1907, it was too late to rectify the misunderstanding. Locke graduated in 1910, and went on to become an influential philosopher and the effective founder of the Harlem Renaissance. [...]
Pulling down a statue can strike a blow for the recalibration of public memory and the proclamation of a new national identity. But in the long run, it often does not settle anything. In February 1917 revolutionary crowds pushed over statues of the reigning tsar, Nicholas II, and imperial memorials were cleared away across Russia and its provinces. After that, the new Russia proclaimed by Lenin and Stalin generated its own, equally celebratory statuary.
Pindex: Coronavirus: 3 Hidden Killers. w Stephen Fry
Your greatest risk of death might surprise you, and there's a good chance you can prevent it. Plus, new research shows how to end the coronavirus pandemic.
Literary Review: Come Hell & High Water
As Stephen Taylor argues in this enthralling new book, it was men like these who, in the great age of sail, made the British Empire possible. He tells the story of Britain’s rise to maritime supremacy in roughly the century from 1750 to 1850, using first-hand accounts of life on the lower decks, official records – ships’ logs, muster rolls, court martials and so on – and other contemporary sources. [...]
When their personal discontent became intolerable, they deserted in their tens of thousands. Nelson himself reckoned that 42,000 deserted between 1793 and 1802 alone, a figure Taylor believes may be on the low side. Their skills made them highly prized commodities and they were happy to sail under any flag, towards any compass point. The institution that valued that commodity least was the Royal Navy.
Perhaps the most resented British naval practice in this period was impressment, the seizure of experienced seamen (and, after 1798, almost any suitable man) for service on the waves. Those pressed on land often left behind wives and children, who were condemned to destitution. Taylor highlights the case of Mary Jones, a mother of two, one newborn, who was evicted from her home after her merchant seaman husband was taken. She was hanged in October 1771 – suckling her baby on the gallows, it was said – for stealing a length of cloth. Those pressed at sea might have spent two years sailing to India and back, only to be seized within sight of English shores – and two years’ backpay – for another year or more of service.
FRANCE 24 English: France won’t ‘erase’ history by removing colonial-era statues, Macron says
Unusually for a French leader, Macron acknowledged that someone’s “address, name, color of skin” can reduce their chances at succeeding in French society, and called for a fight to ensure that everyone can “find their place” regardless of ethnic origin or religion. He promised to be “uncompromising in the face of racism, anti-Semitism and discrimination”. [...]
Amid calls for taking down statues tied to France’s slave trade or colonial wrongs, Macron said “the republic will not erase any trace, or any name, from its history ... it will not take down any statue”. [...]
But government minister Sibeth Ndiaye — a close Macron ally and the most prominent black figure in current French politics — wrote an unusually personal essay Saturday in Le Monde calling for France to rethink its colour-blind doctrine, which aims at encouraging equality by ignoring race altogether.
Deutsche Welle: In search of identity: The new generation of photo artists from China
The Alexander Tutsek Foundation is now showing "About Us," an exhibition of contemporary photography from China, with works by internationally renowned artists such as Chen Wei, Ren Hang and Yang Fudong, as well as names that are still largely unknown outside China, such as Gao Mingxi and Liang Xiu.
Seventy photographs from the last 20 years by 14 Chinese artists are presented in the show — works reacting to the radical changes in Chinese society.
The themes of this new generation of artists revolve around self-perception, subjective experiences, and daily life. They look at memory and history, melancholy and resistance, dreams and visions, the body and individuality — and the common denominator for all of them is the search for their own identity. How can one anchor oneself in a country that is changing as rapidly as China?
Bloomberg: There's Nothing Exceptional About Any Country
For every commentator declaring the end of a given national exceptionalism, others pop up reasserting it. This seems to be an iron law of history: Every nation at one point or another claims to be superior to others or endowed with a special mission. Exceptionalism, ironically, is universal. [...]
Of the many exceptionalisms around today, one in particular resembles the 19th-century German variety. Russia has long seen itself as a “Third Rome,” following the empires of the Caesars and the Orthodox Byzantines, whose role “Holy Rus” tried to take over. Like the Germans of yore, Russians are sure their culture and soul is deeper than the West’s. As expressed in the thought of scholars such as Aleksandr Dugin, this exceptionalism implies a manifest destiny to rule over an anti-Western “Eurasia.” Putin is said to subscribe to much of this worldview. [...]
The problem is that exceptionalism leads to bad things. The first is hypocrisy. How, for instance, could the U.S. or U.K. ever have claimed to be morally superior when the first English ship carrying African slaves to America arrived in 1619, a year before that other English ship, the Mayflower, brought the Pilgrims to their city upon a hill? And what would either country say if the anti-racism riots of recent weeks — late blowback for that earlier legacy — had taken place in, say, China or Iran? Exceptionalism requires editing a country’s past, and indeed lying.
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