Smartphones

State of the nations Sir: My spirits were raised by your stirring defence of the forthcoming royal visit to America (‘Britain’s Trump card’, 14 March). Its contemporary importance can be viewed in the light of Charles Moore’s Note (same issue) that the remaining hereditary peers have just been removed from the House of Lords. The monarch has thereby become the only person with a part in our legislature by virtue of inheritance, a situation bound to encourage those with republican instincts. Their tired old question will be resurrected: why can we not elect our head of state? The answer will be evident in pictures from the White House. The hereditary

The West’s track record Sir: I read with much sadness Matthew Parris’s reservations about western attempts at regime change in Iran (‘Is this Starmer’s finest hour?’, 7 March). Sadness because he is quite correct, given the West’s track record in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and Syria. He rightly alludes to Benjamin Netanyahu’s ‘Greater Israel’ plans amid destabilised, chaotic neighbours. In Syria in late 2010, I spoke with resident Sunni, Shia, Alawi, Christian and even Jewish residents from Homs and Hama to As-Suweida and Aleppo: well over 90 per cent pointed to their freedom of association and of worship, the women to the secondary and tertiary education they could enjoy, and all

About a decade ago, the people I dreaded meeting most at parties were the ed tech evangelists – men and women who lit up with zealous excitement about bringing screens into schools. If only every schoolchild had a laptop, they thought, then humanity could flourish, nurtured by the great river of the internet and by an exciting stream of educational apps. It was as if a school laptop was a Mary Poppins bag out of which whatever they most wanted was sure to appear. For the ed tech utopians of the right, what they dreamt of was a great stream of savvy little Einsteins, liberated from turgid teachers. For those

I can’t be the only neurotic mother to have rejoiced when the Princess of Wales revealed recently that she has a strict ‘no phones at the table’ rule. The Prince of Wales then later let slip that Prince George, who is 12, isn’t allowed a smartphone. When George eventually does get a phone, William added, it will be a brick without the internet – similar, one imagines, to the sort favoured by drug dealers. Hallelujah! Up until now, the best line for parents to trot out has been the old chestnut that ‘Silicon Valley guys send their children to schools where the tech use is unbelievably moderate because they know

A new book by an American writer, Christine Rosen, details the way in which we are losing touch with the real world: the one we evolved in, as opposed to the virtual one. All the scrolling and texting means we’re forgetting the look and feel of life unmediated by screens. The book is called The Extinction of Experience, and if we get more anxious year by year, then it’s not just wars or the cost of living, Rosen suggests, but because we’re grieving for the real world, whether we know it or not. I definitely know it. I’m Gen X, so I grew up without the internet, yet like other

I’m autistic, I teach autistic children and I care for autistic adults, but I never kid myself that we are better than other people. When I asked a fellow autistic man if he could name any famous autistic people, he replied: ‘Hitler and Einstein.’ I love his answer because it punctures the romanticism around autism. There are evil autistic people, as well as geniuses. Was Hitler autistic? We’ll never know for sure, but he showed several symptoms. People who met him found that once he started talking, he would not stop. He was also nocturnal, had an addictive personality and developed lifelong obsessions (in his case, racial purity). Around half

Before he became Prime Minister, Keir Starmer admitted he was concerned about what life in Downing Street might be like for his children. It was, he said, the ‘single thing’ that kept him awake at night. What’s notable is that we aren’t even aware of Starmer’s children’s names. They are teenagers but that’s about all we know about them. They were not photographed when Starmer and his wife Victoria entered No. 10, nor have they been seen since. ‘We do try to protect them… we don’t use photos of them in any way,’ Starmer said. There seem to be no pictures in the public domain of Starmer with his children.

I am not often lost for words, but the five middle-aged homeless men who spoke at the Big Issue celebration in the House of Lords last month left me truly awestruck. All five had endured lives of childhood abandonment, violence, pain, destitution. All five had emerged from the darkness philosophical, hopeful and loving of their fellow man. I have not stopped thinking about them, and when I start on my usual daily beefs – signs on the Tube telling me I mustn’t give money to beggars (why not if I want to?); signs on the Tube telling me I can’t stare at people (what if someone is listening to a deafening

The online PE teacher Joe Wicks has announced, in a fit of self-reproach coinciding with the launch of his new television programme, that he considers himself addicted to his smartphone. He says he forced himself to take a whole five days off social media in order to be more ‘present’ for his children, and that doing so ‘opened my eyes to just how much I struggle with it on a daily basis’. ‘I justify the use of my phone for work,’ he said in a post on Instagram (I won’t labour the irony, but he really did deliver this revelation in a post on Instagram), ‘but in reality I’m probably