Bad news can be good for you. But the news needs to get more informative, analytical, and investigative — debates and simple presentations are not enough.
Earlier this year, in my pre-Covid naïvety, I penned — well, typed — a long(ish) read on the news media. A formative thesis of my thinking on the news, I made the fairly simple move of informing my readers that news is just a lens for the world that filters out most of the good, keeps in some of the mundane, and retains almost all the bad. But, perhaps slightly differently to most of the “bad news” takes, I don’t think that’s a bad thing.
I started off with a definition of the news as reporting on things that are…
The Chancellor’s Budget on Wednesday set out a broadly positive economic roadmap for recovery, but many important policies were missing.
A little over a week after the Prime Minister laid out the roadmap for unlocking after the third, and hopefully final, lockdown, the Chancellor was tasked on Wednesday with delivering a budget that delivered on three main aims for the government:
- continuing the economic support associated with the lockdown restrictions
- supporting the recovery from the pandemic with fiscal stimulus and keeping taxes low
- setting out a plan to deal with the debt accrued during the pandemic
Last March, Rishi Sunak announced the furlough scheme, the uplift in Universal Credit, loan schemes for businesses, along with funding for coronavirus testing, PPE…
Transgender people endure vile attacks, invalidation by trans-exclusionary feminists, and invalidation by the law. It’s time for change.
With many forms of discrimination — misogyny, racial discrimination, and homophobia, for example — society is moving consistently in the right direction, and strong progressive consensuses have been formed, strengthening every day.
Though the historic effects of racist and patriarchal power structures still stain our society today, and the enemy has not fully surrendered, the war on these forms of hatred is very much being won.
Trans people do not enjoy the same consensus support for their rights, equality, and dignity.
By international standards and comparison to other Western countries, the UK is unusually tolerant and protective of trans rights…
And it could be a lot worse than the last one.
My country has produced yet another very bad variant of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. (Get your booing out of the way now, because I’m about to ruin your day with some bad news.)
The previous UK variant, which originated in September in Kent, and came to prominence in December when it was discovered to have spread rapidly across London and the South-East even during the November lockdown, was — and remains — challenging.
It is this variant which is now the completely dominant strain across the UK, and spreading at an alarming rate across the big pond and elsewhere. …
The story of American capitalism is of corruption and entrenchment. Robinhood and Wall Street have now taken that to a whole new level.
It’s become something of a cliche, but, unlike many cliches, it is only becoming more true as time goes on: “We all too often have socialism for the rich and rugged individualism for the poor.”
It was first said by MLK Jr., and has since been co-opted by many on the left, including Bernie Sanders, who invoked the words at the Democratic primary debate in Nevada last year, as a direct attack on Michael Bloomberg.
It’s a simple, effective dichotomy, but it gets at a deep message and a sinister story, that is at the heart of the history of…
The genocide of the Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang is a humanitarian atrocity, but too many on the left are turning a blind eye.
As progressives, we avow a single, self-evident principle of human rights: the rights of all people, regardless of their race, religion, gender, sexuality, or nationality, are equal and deserve equal protection under the law.
As such, we feel that the very fundamentals of democracy are attacked when former-President Trump and the GOP buy into anti-Chinese rhetoric, using xenophobic slurs and attacking the Asian community in the West. And we have good cause to be concerned about such rhetoric.
In almost all Western democracies, the already high rates of hate crimes and violence committed against people of Chinese origin have soared…
Our education system is not fit for purpose, trust in democracy is extremely low, and misinformation is rife. A new focus in education could fix all of that.
Information literacy is the confluence of literacy, numeracy, critical thinking, and data skills. It is, in its basic form, what every person needs to navigate the modern world, where information is king and ideas power the economy.
Current education focuses too much on rote learning, pure knowledge, and depth of knowledge. Of course, knowledge is important: it is vital to developing skills and improving as learners and as people. But knowledge is only one part of what is necessary for intelligence, self-development, and a good education.
We already recognise that fact. We recognise the importance of literacy and numeracy, and…
The third-worst per capita death rate in the world, and the deepest recession in the G7. How did we get here?
The UK’s pandemic stats are harrowing.
100,000 people have now died from Covid-19 since the start of the epidemic, with excess mortality hovering somewhere in the region of 120,000.
It’s easy to make excuses, to forget about this huge loss, to put it down to some understandable mistakes and move on. But to do that would be to fail to appreciate the true scale of the toll we are talking about here.
I’ve been trying to find a way to wrap my head around the death totals throughout the pandemic, and to remove the numbers which are simply too big…
Individuals have had a range of reactions to the pandemic: terror, apathy, and denial chief among them. Why do we react so differently?
Covid denial has been occupying my thoughts for a while. You can tell from my stories over the past few months: ‘Why Covid-19 Is Much Worse Than The Flu’, ‘Everything We Get Wrong About COVID-19’, and ‘Why Is Screening Asymptomatic People For COVID-19 So Difficult?’
Driven though I may have been to dispel myths about the pandemic and clear things up, I’ve struggled to really think about why we get so much misinformation, disinformation, and denial in our public discourse. The vehicles for the spread of this misinformation are fairly obvious: social media is the chief culprit, but the media…
While Washington DC condemned genocide in China, Westminster chose trade over human rights.
Jan. 19 was a historic day — for many reasons. Most people will remember it as the final full day in the White House for Donald Trump. But something far more important consumed the day, as, on both sides of the Atlantic, politicians gave their verdict on the genocide and human rights abuses against the Uyghur people in Xinjiang, China.
It was a tale of two countries.
Both the outgoing Trump administration and the incoming Biden administration condemned Chinese rights abuses in Xinjiang, calling it a “genocide”. The state department’s report was highly critical, and rightly so. …
