Features

Wednesday

Lloyd Evans

Could I find a girlfriend on a Guardian Blind Date?

Free grub, free booze and the chance to fall in love. That’s the deal offered by Blind Date, a matchmaking strand in the Guardian that brings together lonely hearts and asks them to spill the beans. When I applied for this enticing freebie I had no expectation of being chosen, but my email was answered within hours. Amazing. Randy singletons are in short supply among Guardian readers. I was asked to describe my ‘interests’, which are rather limited. I tend to avoid travel, sport, art, museums, cars, planes, movies, pubs, music, parties, dancing, eating out or holidays. I’m never invited to dinner by anyone or ‘for the weekend’, thank God. I avoid TV, and my idea of hell is ‘a walk in the countryside’.

Svitlana Morenets

Should Ukraine hold a general election next year?

In the months before Russia invaded Ukraine last year, Volodymyr Zelensky was fighting for his political life. The former comedian was elected in 2019 on a pledge to end the war in Donbas by an electorate exasperated with its political class. Zelensky initially set out to negotiate with Vladimir Putin – but achieved nothing. He appeared naive and out of his depth. However, Zelensky’s transformation into a wartime leader captured the world’s imagination and rallied his allies. Yet some of those allies are beginning to ask whether, if this war is really about the free world versus autocracy, as Zelensky claims, Ukraine should hold a general election next year.

Tom Switzer

Meet the Aboriginal politician leading the charge against Australia’s Voice referendum

Sydney Every so often, in the life of nations, there comes a moment when a new political force articulates a sense of frustration at the old orthodoxies, or a yearning for something new. Sometimes, such a force turns into a momentous presence that transforms the national landscape. Australia has reached such a moment in the person of a 42-year-old Aboriginal mother of four. A conservative legislator for little more than a year, Jacinta Nampijinpa Price, the shadow chancellor for indigenous affairs, has challenged the old, failed narratives which argue that systemic racism is responsible for indigenous woes and that a policy of welfarism and separatism is the answer. As a result, she has changed the nature of our national debate surrounding our Aboriginal population.

Rory Sutherland

Why we hate surge pricing – but love happy hour

A Dominican and a Jesuit were chain smokers. Both were eager to be allowed to smoke while performing their devotions, but needed to gain permission from a higher authority. ‘I tried asking the Prior, but he was dead against it,’ said the Dominican. ‘What did you ask, precisely?’ enquired the Jesuit. ‘Well, I asked him whether it was acceptable to smoke while I was praying.’ ‘Wrong question,’ replied the Jesuit. ‘I asked my Abbot whether I could pray while I was smoking. Permission granted.’ To economists, price is a number. To everyone else, price is a feeling This is called a framing effect and is one of the best attested findings in the psychological sciences.

Thursday

Leah McLaren

The simplicity and joy of recorded conversations

Recently I stumbled across a file of conversations I’d recorded with my seven-year-old son Frank back when he was four. Topics include his travels through wormholes, why he finds planet Earth ‘boring’, the tragic story of how his ‘first family’ died and how he got his ‘laser eyes’. It was only by listening to these voice notes three years later that I understood just how precious audio recordings are, and also how under-used. The conversations I taped illustrate the nuances of Frank’s four-year-old self more vividly than any photo or video could. Anyone attempting to write fiction should take note of the power of audio – conversation and voice are how character is built. A physical description tells you relatively little.

Melanie McDonagh

Parent trap: the relentless rise of children’s speaker Yoto

If you want a handy metaphor for contemporary childrearing, it’s a colourful plastic box with big red buttons on it. Yoto is the name, and before long, you’ll be seeing it where you already see children using screens – so pretty much everywhere. One in 50 British homes with a child under 12 is said to have one. It’s like a CD player-cum-iPad with ambitions to run your child’s life. The essential bits of it are plastic cards that you or the child – the idea is that the child has agency here – slot into the player to listen to a story, but there’s a whole range of other options – radio, podcasts, night lights, sound effects.

Wednesday

Christopher Caldwell

The enormity of the migrant crisis will upend European politics

When hundreds of mostly African migrants escaped from the transfer centre in Porto Empedocle, Sicily, last weekend and began roaming the town’s bakeries and shops begging for food, the mayor took to social media to explain. There were 2,000 migrants squeezed into a facility meant for 250, he told terrified locals. The conditions were inhumane. The repeated attempts to escape were inevitable. On the island of Lampedusa, 11,000 migrants had arrived in the space of five days. There were 6,000 migrants in a facility meant for 600. The Sub-Saharan Africans were fighting with the North Africans. ‘To get food is a problem,’ one migrant told a television interviewer. ‘If you don’t fight, you don’t have food.

Cindy Yu

125,000 Hong Kongers have come to the UK. Where are they?

The Revd Dave Ho Young wasn’t interested in being Chinese when he was growing up. After his parents’ divorce, he was brought up by his British mother in Shropshire, while his Cantonese father moved back to Hong Kong. These days, the Revd’s Chinese heritage plays a bigger part in his life: his evangelical C of E church, St Barnabas in Leeds, has become a gathering place for the city’s newly arrived Hong Kong émigrés. Two years ago, Britain opened the route to residency for Hong Kong Chinese who hold British National (Overseas) passports, after the National Security Law imposed by the Chinese Communist party ended the city’s ‘one country, two systems’ arrangement with the mainland.

Dan Hitchens

Inside the fastest growing – and shrinking – churches in the UK

The Pentecostal preacher is in full flow – his voice raised to near-deafening volume, his gestures expansive but exact, the congregation murmuring back a chorus of ‘Amens’ – when he receives an unexpected interruption. ‘A woman asked me at the barbecue last week,’ he is telling us, ‘“Pastor, if I won the Lottery…”’  A voice somewhere to his right intervenes. ‘A-MEN!’ A wave of laughter from the congregation. The preacher rides it. ‘No! Don’t Amen that! We don’t believe in lotteries, we believe in work. Hard work. So, she asked me, “Pastor, if I won the Lottery, and I gave the money to the church repair fund, would you accept it?” And I said…’   The congregation is quiet again. We’re in the realm of moral theology.

Owen Matthews

The exiled activists who dream of dismantling the Russian empire

There is a dream called the Republic of Ingermanlandia. This republic’s values will be European, its borders will be open and it will prosper like its neighbour Estonia on the back of a booming digital economy. For the moment Ingermanlandia is better known as Russia’s Leningrad Region, and its capital as St Petersburg. But soon, promises Maxim Kuzakhmetov, a leader of the Ingria Without Borders independence movement, Russia will suffer ‘catastrophic defeat in Ukraine and will collapse like the USSR, or like all the empires who lost the first world war’ and disintegrate into its constituent regions. This week in London and Paris, exiled activists from more than 40 regions of Russia will gather for the Free Nations of Post-Russia Forum.

Elisa Segrave

How an animal psychic helped find a missing dog

It was more in a spirit of desperation that I decided to contact an animal psychic after my friends’ terrier Lark disappeared. Lark vanished one evening from their house. She was chipped, and her collar had their number on it, but as the days went by no one called. Lark’s photo was put on Facebook and on posters near her home. Had she been stolen, or hit by a car? We searched for her body but found nothing. Was she stuck down a rabbit hole? Five days after her disappearance, my friends went on a prearranged holiday and left me in charge of the mystery. Becky mentioned birds of prey, and people living off the land. It seemed a litany of clichés I put dog food outside Lark’s home. What if she returned and, like Peter Pan, couldn’t get in?

Wednesday

Boris Johnson

Why aren’t we giving Ukraine what it needs?

When you visit the rehabilitation centres for those Ukrainian soldiers who have received life-changing injuries, you swiftly learn how to deal with the shock of what you see. You don’t flinch or look away; of course not. You learn the habit of the skilled doctors and nurses and physiotherapists – of concentrating not on the wounds but on the individuals, on the men; and though many women have been killed or injured in this beastly conflict, I must have seen over a hundred badly injured soldiers in Kyiv and Lviv, in three different hospitals, and they all were men. Do not believe for one second that these Ukrainian soldiers could be persuaded to lay down their weapons You notice some remarkable qualities in these patients. They are not by any means all young, far from it.

Cindy Yu

How I got to know Westminster’s ‘Chinese agent’

On Monday, I was surprised to discover a photo of myself in the papers next to a parliamentary researcher who had been arrested on suspicion of being a ‘Chinese agent’. The photo was taken in February at a panel in parliament entitled ‘Defeating the dictators’. The man and I are both twentysomething China watchers who work in Westminster. I’d got to know him in a professional capacity, but every so often, we had a drink together or hung out at a friend’s flat. It was only when I saw reports of his arrest that I realised I hadn’t heard from him since an evening six months ago when we teamed up to play Codenames, the board game in which rival spymasters race to rendezvous with their agents. We smashed the other team.

Daisy Ayliffe

How ITN used NDAs to silence staff

One of the aims of journalism is to identify injustice and hold the powerful to account, so it’s odd that ITN – which makes news for Channel 4, Channel 5 and ITV – remains so unwilling to examine its own wrongdoing. Women who work for ITN have tried to report harassment and discrimination, but soon after doing so found themselves suddenly out of a job and bound by non-disclosure agreements. I spent seven years in Channel 4 News as a journalist and commissioning editor. It was my perfect job. Colleagues felt like family and we forged strong bonds. After the Black Lives Matter movement started, Anna Mallett, then ITN chief executive, had a message for staff: ‘The time for change is now,’ she said. Anyone suffering discrimination must report it, for the good of us all.

Matt Ridley

Why won’t Greenpeace admit that wind turbines may be killing whales?

Who cares about whales? Whales might be dying because of sonar surveying, but Greenpeace simply ignores the science that doesn’t suit it. So far last year, 71 whales have washed up dead on the shores of New England and neighbouring states. The rate seems to have risen in recent years along with a growth in the number of offshore wind turbines. A small group of concerned citizens have started to campaign against the turbines on behalf of the whales, and the journalist Michael Shellenberger has made a short film about their efforts called Thrown to the Wind. The evidence gathered by the scientists in the film is far from conclusive: it’s a correlation that could be a coincidence. But it’s not a mad idea that wind farms threaten whales.

Petroc Trelawny

The arts world wants Labour

A pang of melancholy as I detach the Royal Albert Hall pass from my BBC lanyard. I had a similar feeling late on Saturday night as I watched our team of engineers start to take down the hundreds of microphones that have enabled us to broadcast the Proms live each night on Radio 3. It has been a remarkable two months of music-making. The last season was curtailed by the death of the Queen; Covid infected the mood and scale of the 2020 and 2021 festivals. This time around, from my eyrie in the radio commentary box at the back of the side stalls, or the television studio high up in the gallery, there was a sense of a fresh start. On the Last Night the BBC Singers got the loudest applause.

Kate Andrews

‘We’ve cut carbon emissions by decimating working-class communities’: the leader of the GMB union on the folly of net zero

Last week there should have been a great victory for the British turbine industry. Auctions were held for offshore wind power, asking companies to bid for the right to supply electricity at £44 per megawatt hour – a third of the price offered eight years ago. The government and the renewables lobby hoped that a successful auction would show that wind power could compete with fossil fuels. Instead, developers worried that they couldn’t turn a profit on the amount they would be paid for energy. There wasn’t a single bid. ‘Communities up and down the east coast can see wind farms, but they can’t point to the jobs’ ‘It was very embarrassing,’ says Gary Smith, leader of the GMB union. ‘Whitehall told us wind was getting cheaper and cheaper.

Charlie Taylor

Our prisons are in crisis

Just as the drama of the escape and recapture of Daniel Khalife settled down, HMP Wandsworth returned to more routine problems. On Sunday, another prisoner was hospitalised, having been stabbed by a fellow inmate. Quality of staff is critical. The best officers have an intuitive sense that something is going on This sort of violence is all too common, especially in the overcrowded Victorian local prisons that hold often volatile remand prisoners. In the past year there have been 1,878 serious assaults on prisoners, an increase of 32 per cent on the previous 12 months. The cause is usually a score being settled between gangs or the failure to pay a debt.

Julie Burchill

Britain is now a nation of shoplifters

I was a teenage shoplifter. I had a good run at it, from 12 to 14, and found it as addictive as any drug: the anticipation, the antsiness, the sharp stab of joy on completion. But all it took was getting caught, spending an hour in a police cell before being grimly collected and yelled at by my dad, to make sure I never went looking for a five-finger discount again. Shoplifting used to be something which, with the help of stern parents and the police, people grew out of. No longer. Now we are in a world of, as the Gail’s Bakery boss Luke Johnson has put it, ‘widespread, really widespread aggression, abuse and shoplifting’. Asda chairman Stuart Rose says that shoplifting has effectively been decriminalised due to lack of police action.

Thursday

Philip Hensher

Click bait: confessions of a Lego addict

The empire of Lego has many dominions and protectorates, with every year, it seems, new territories to conquer. There are theme parks; there are films of excruciatingly ironic sophistication; there are competitions to make bizarre tableaux that grip nations; there are highly controlled TV documentaries about life at the heart of Lego in Denmark. I don’t feel my life will be complete until I’ve spent a week constructing Hagia Sophia out of plastic bricks It is an astonishingly powerful brand and its growth has been extraordinary to watch. Many years ago, it was just one building toy among many, like Meccano or Fischer Technik. Now, it is supreme. Some tremors were, however, observed last week when a plunge in profits was reported.