Homelessness

Thursday

Emily Rhodes

Words on the street

From our UK edition

A white van pulls up outside St Giles in the Fields, an imposing 18th century church in central London, around the corner from Tottenham Court Road station, for a couple of hours every Saturday afternoon. St Giles is known as ‘The Poets’ Church’ because it has memorials to Andrew Marvell and George Chapman, but this humble van makes the nickname more fitting. It’s a library. To be homeless is to have no fixed address, which means you can’t borrow books from a public library — but it doesn’t mean you’ve no desire to read. Quaker Homeless Action set up this mobile library in 1999, making runs into London twice a week and lending books to more than a thousand homeless people a year.

Thursday

Benjamin Markovits

Onwards and downwards

From our UK edition

This is a very upsetting book. The Harvard sociologist Matthew Desmond spent a year and a half living in low-income housing in Milwaukee — first in a trailer park on the mostly white South Side and later in a rooming house in the black inner city. Desmond himself plays no part in the body of the story, but he reports what he saw and heard, using a digital recorder and filling in the rest with double-sourced eyewitness accounts and official documents. And what he saw was upsetting, though not always, or not particularly, in a dramatic way. The things that happened to the people he lived among happened too often and routinely to seem extraordinary to them.

Thursday

Mary Wakefield

Am I a brave cult survivor, too?

From our UK edition

When I was 21, I lived with a cult for a year. It was a commune really, a tight-knit group of Christians, but I’ll call it a cult because it was in Texas and for special occasions we all wore white. There were other cult markers, too: we had a charismatic leader; the younger kids were home-schooled; and, to my great excitement, one (now ex) member wrote a book after she left: I Can’t Hear God Anymore: Life in a Dallas Cult. That I ended up there is a testament to the dangers of showing off. All those endless questions after finals, all those inquiring adults: ‘And what are you going to do now? What’s your plan?’ Well, I had no plan.

Thursday

Kate Chisholm

Did Radio 4 have to deal with the Germanwings disaster as it did?

From our UK edition

‘You can hear pretty clearly the sound of one of the helicopters and you can see it in the darkness,’ yelled James Reynolds over the noise of helicopters, police sirens, vehicles on the move. It was 8.10 a.m., the Today programme on the morning after the fatal Airbus A320 crash in southern France last week. Reynolds, a fine reporter, had been sent off to the crash site for an on-the-spot report, ‘live’ action, high-octane drama, tension so taut it’s almost visible. ‘I can see a convoy of police vehicles coming up the road with blue sirens,’ he continued. ‘There goes the police helicopter...’ Huge noise of rotors whirring. ‘It’s almost passing overhead.’ No doubt about that as the noise boomed around the kitchen.

Thursday

The Spectator

Fort Lauderdale’s law against feeding the homeless still isn’t America’s dumbest

From our UK edition

States of criminality A 90-year-old Florida man feeding the homeless was arrested under a Fort Lauderdale law which makes it illegal to share food with members of the public. Other laws from the 'Land of the Free': — In Indiana you can be arrested for statutory rape if you are caught driving a car with a passenger under the age of 18 who is not wearing socks and shoes. — In Ocean City it is illegal to eat while swimming in the sea. — In New York State it is illegal to walk around on a Sunday with an ice cream cone in your pocket. — In South Dakota it is illegal to lie down and fall asleep in a cheese factory. — In Oklahoma it is illegal to make an 'ugly face' at a dog. — In Nebraska it is illegal to sneeze in church.

Thursday

Charlotte Moore

The history of the home – with the spittoons put back in

From our UK edition

In 1978, a family of Russian ‘Old Believers’ living in a supposedly uninhabited part of the Siberian taiga were discovered by a team of geologists. They had fled Stalinist persecution, and for half a century had lived in isolation in a ‘low, soot-blackened log kennel’ with a floor made of potato peelings and crushed nutshells, one tiny window, a fire, a single rushlight, and one item of furniture — an axe-hewn table. Five adults lived without sanitation in a space seven steps long and five steps wide. The geologists were horrified.

Thursday

Digby Warde-Aldam

Are you a Yuffie? 

From our UK edition

I remember, during one of my last classes at UCL, the topic of conversation turned from the cultural implications of Algerian independence to the subject of life after university. Our lecturer, a grumpy ‘progressive Hoxhaist’, told us that things had never been worse, and out of the 20 or so students in the room, only one or two would have found any kind of full-time employment by the time the year was out. ‘But it’s not fair!’ cried one girl, ‘we’ve all worked so hard over the last four years, we’re all clever [speak for yourself, I thought], we all have debts and we’re just going to be ignored!’ ‘Who are you going to blame, then?’ responded the lecturer. The question was a pertinent one: who were we to blame?