Barbra streisand

Thursday

Rory Sutherland

The case for a daily limit on social media posts

A few years ago, my old school magazine featured a pupil’s brief account of a geography field trip. Before the magazine was mailed out, someone had noticed a jokey reference to a minibus being driven erratically after the teacher had visited the local pub, and worried that this might be libellous. The school could have reprinted the magazine, or else thought ‘publish and be damned’. Alas they did neither: they stuck a white sticker over the offending paragraph in every copy. This led to the piece receiving perhaps 1,000 times more attention than it would otherwise have done, the attempt at censorship spotlighting a harmless joke that most people wouldn’t have noticed anyway.

Wednesday

Hermione Eyre

Richard E. Grant’s tribute to his wife leaves us shattered for his loss

Richard E. Grant pulls off a feat here. The title is twee but the content isn’t. With unselfpitying dash the actor-writer recounts caring for his wife, the dialect coach Joan Washington, through lung cancer last year (‘Living grief. Raw. Savage.’). He thoughtfully interleaves the heartbreak with glitzy showbiz recollections which help keep our peckers up, so we ricochet through time, from the Golden Globes to the Royal Marsden, from sedative injections to Star Wars. It’s an unusual structure, but it works – so, to use one of the author’s expressions, ‘Why bloody notsky?’ Grant’s daily diary-keeping is what makes the book.

Friday

Richard Bratby

Hear the greatest Parsifal of our time sing like a Muppet: Jonas Kaufmann’s Christmas album reviewed

In classical music circles, Christmas arrives with the overture to Handel’s Messiah. Or so they’ll tell you. In truth, festivities kick off when you hear a ping from your phone and glance down at your inbox: OMG — you have to hear this! There follows, as tonic follows dominant, a link to YouTube and the 2014 Christmas in Vienna Medley — the occasion, still barely fathomable to anyone who believes that we share a common European culture, when a quartet of opera singers in full evening dress, and shimmying on the spot like a vicar at a Sunday School disco, attempted to cover George Michael’s ‘Last Christmas’. But not this year. Oh no.

Monday

Natasha Green

Barbra Streisand makes a mistake and tells the truth

From our US edition

‘I feel bad for the children. I feel bad for him,’ said Barbra Streisand to the Times of London about Michael Jackson, who was by his own admission ‘really bad’ and, according to Wade Robson and James Safechuck, much, much worse in private. Streisand’s interview was a wide-ranging reflection on her legend and upcoming tour. The kind of men who agree with her defense of Jackson won’t buy tickets. Most of them are already locked up. ‘His sexual needs were his sexual needs, coming from whatever childhood he has,’ said Babs, referring to the Jackson Five’s Greatest Hits and Freud’s theory of early childhood sexual development.

barbra streisand