Culture

Tomorrow, 12 August, is the 'Glorious Twelfth': the official start of the grouse-shooting season. This normally means plenty of tweed and guns heading north, in cars, in planes, and on the railways. This year, however, there's something of a spanner in the works. Just weeks before the start of the season, ScotRail announced that they would be banning all guns on their trains. This is despite the fact that unloaded, properly licensed firearms are allowed on trains, as long as they are carried ‘in accordance with the law’. The sticking point here, however, is the part that says ‘with prior permission of the train company’.

For technology manufacturers, healthcare is already big business, and, with an ageing population increasingly comfortable with technologies that would’ve been unthinkable even a decade ago, the opportunities to innovate are only going to increase. The Future Health Index, a global report commissioned by Philips, supports the fact that it is not just the UK’s younger generation that are embracing these technologies. However are these products – from popular or trendy FitBits to state-of-the-art imaging equipment – really going to revolutionise the country’s medical care? And will the NHS require a head to toe change of ethos to accommodate them?

Over the weekend I, like a good dozen others, endured the Twitter rage of Nassim Nicholas Taleb, an old man who rolls around like a drunk trying to prove he’s still the toughest hombre at the bar. He’s the sort of guy who screams at the Cambridge classicist Mary Beard: https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/892736047519608833 He’s the sort of guy, who, when I and others objected that bragging about his citations was a ‘crass’ way to behave, cried: https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/893079278870548481 He’s the sort of guy who when I replied: https://twitter.com/NickCohen4/status/893098347875246082 Can come back with: https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/893807860278317057 He’s that hard.

In Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, a dystopia rules mankind in a way that renders the masses compliant consumers. The apex of medical mind control in the book is soma: a tranquilliser offering 'a holiday from reality’. Huxley describes how its users' ‘eyes shone (and)...the inner light of universal benevolence broke out on every face in happy, friendly smiles’.  Huxley’s vision was intended as a nightmare but PricewaterhouseCoopers appear to have taken it as an inspiration. Their new report, Workforce of the Future, predicts what the labour market could look like in 2030. As you might expect, automation takes the starring role and a survey of 10,000 workers across the world presents mixed opinions.

A season ticket at the Parc des Princes, home to Paris Saint-Germain, will set you back somewhere between £336 and £2,116, with individual tickets ranging from £25 to over £100, depending on how good your eyesight is. But this is a small price to pay in order to watch footballing luminaries like Edinson Cavani, Ángel di María and Dani Alves light up a league that has long been the sickly cousin of the European superpowers. Indeed, if you’re a PSG fan, this cost will be nothing compared to the phenomenal resurrection, started in 2011, of a European superpower that appeared to be in terminal decline.

If there was a buzzword from last summer then it was surely 'burkini'. The media got its swimsuit in a twist over France's decision to ban the Islamic garment from its beaches. Slow-witted Anglophone columnists – many of whom have a curious predilection for insulting the French – lapped it up and enthusiastically portrayed Islam as the victim of Gallic oppression. Those trusty custodians of liberal values, the Guardian and the New York Times, got particularly worked up, the former declaring in an editorial that 'women's right to dress as they feel comfortable and fitting should be defended against those coercing them into either covering or uncovering.

Getting agitated, are you, about declining sperm counts? The Guardian called the fall in numbers 'shocking'; for the Telegraph, never one to underplay these things, 'Sperm count collapse could spell doom for humanity'. Really? It feels like one of those stories about species extinction, helped by the undeniable resemblance of spermatozoa to tadpoles. You may have noticed that women are markedly less agitated about all this than men, at least the three I spoke to. For once – hah – it’s not women who have all the angst about procreation. All the Bridget Jones business about body clocks, biological sell-by dates and egg freezing was formerly the preserve of women. Now men can share the grief…welcome, progenitors.

The other day I frowned at Love Island. I dislike adding (in my tiny way) to such shows’ publicity, but sometimes the obvious moral objection must be made, when sexuality is tackified, and when other commentators queue up to say what kitschy fun it is. The worldly pundit smiles at my earnestness: ‘It’s the culture we live in, it goes with cultural freedom. Why bother disapproving?’ I picture a cool old cove like Simon Jenkins saying this. ‘On the other hand, maybe we do a need a new Mary Whitehouse, just to spice life up a bit,' he smirks. Well, I want to broaden my frown to another show, Channel 4’s Naked Attraction, and I want to step up the earnestness.

A new star is born today into the centre-right blogosphere: UnHerd. The latest brainchild of Tim Montgomerie, founder of ConservativeHome, it has launched with a mission statement to 'dive deep into the economic, technological and cultural challenges of our time'. Its launch blogs show a wide mix of subjects: a YouGov poll revealing the low regard with which the public view traditional news media, Peter Franklin on why we should get ready for Prime Minister Corbyn, James Bloodworth on the crash ten years on and Graeme Archer on how meat-eating may come to be seen as barbaric by our grandchildren. UnHerd is also marked out by its financing model. It has no paywall; all articles will be free to read with the costs covered by an endowment from Sir Paul Marshall.

There is a group of women who have every reason to feel aggrieved to learn that the BBC is paying Gary Lineker £1.8 million a year and John Humphreys between £600,000 and £650,000. But it doesn’t include Jane Garvey and Emily Maitlis, both of whom appear to be grubbing by on a little below £150,000. It is the 101,000 women found guilty last year of evading the TV licence. If you want a genuinely worrying gender disparity, forget the BBC’s highest-earners and look at the balance of people at the bottom of society who are being dragged through the courts for the non-payment of the tax. The Perry Review into the TV licence, which reported two years ago, found that 70 per cent of those prosecuted for non-payment in 2012 were women.