Society

Bloomsbury’s former editor-in-chief Alexandra Pringle popped up on British television this week to argue that the late Jason Arday’s publisher could not have been expected to fact-check his book Great and Unfortunate Things. The argument she made raised a lot of eyebrows and has precipitated a lot of self-righteous ridicule online.   The problem with Arday’s book is that a great deal of what he says in it seems to have been codswallop “I think questions of truth and accuracy in memoir are very, very blurred because they are subjective accounts of a bit of someone’s life,” she told listeners. “A memoir is not an autobiography, and it’s important to make the distinction between the two.

A little while back I came across a copy of Ted Hughes’s Laureate poems which had an inscription to some friends. Inside was an unpublished squib by the late poet laureate which read: “The Royalist/ Is afraid/ The Queen’s a pin/ In a hand-grenade.” If I understand the poet’s meaning correctly then I count myself such a royalist. I dislike criticism of the royal family, especially of the monarch. When it happens it feels too much like people hammering at something fundamental – far more fundamental than the critic appreciates. If criticism is to be made it seems to me that it should be done privately, so as not to disturb the fragile equilibrium of the rather magical arrangement we have on these islands.

Dolly Parton was all-American. Born into the dirt-poor Tennessee hills of the Great Smokey Mountains, her upbringing reflected the indigent nature of country life in the South, even as the urban and suburban United States reaped the rewards of peacetime. Her father was, among other things, a tobacco farmer but struggled to support his wife and 12 children, all but one of whom survived infancy. It was a childhood steeped in hard work, mountain wisdom, and most important of all, the Bible. Dolly Parton’s fame and fortune were built on talent, toil, personality and moral character But unlike some country singers, Parton did not wallow in her hardscrabble childhood.

When I read that a new scientific study had shown impacts on the brains of those watching short form videos I was delighted. As someone who doesn’t have a television, doesn’t let my daughter use any screens and refuses to watch videos – I always ask friends, “is there a transcript you can send me?” – I felt vindicated. Perhaps now I could gloat I told you so, videos are bad to everyone I know. Participants were shown short videos they liked they “exhibited significant deactivation” in parts of their brains responsible for “cognitive control” – demonstrating a mechanism which might mean that short-video consumption makes people prefer instant gratification and lowers their self-control. Is this backed up by other studies?

Last week, a documentary called The Great ADHD Myth aired on British television, which took a long overdue look at attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. The program has since faced a significant backlash online and a tidal wave of complaints to Ofcom (Britain’s version of the FCC). Perhaps this says more about ADHD than it does about the documentary. Because as the program revealed, many scientists now see the condition as more of a “social construct” or “identity marker” than a real illness. At the center of this row, and one of the star witnesses of the documentary, is Dr Sami Timimi, a Fellow of Britain’s Royal College of Psychiatrists and a consultant child and adolescent psychiatrist.

America is rediscovering the work of Spectator writer Shiva Naipaul. His 1980 book about the Jonestown massacre, Journey to Nowhere: A New World Tragedy, was reissued by Outsider Editions last month. There has also been much talk recently about so-called “Third-Worldism,” a quasi-ideology that some on the right blame for the West’s ills. The Third World is a concept about which Naipaul had much to say. Below is an essay he published in The Spectator in 1985. We do not see people as they are anymore. Instead, we see – or learn to believe that we see – those ghostly entities we call “relationships.” There’s me, there’s you – and, somewhere in the middle, there’s our relationship.