Tabloids

Friday

Freddy Gray

Lorna Hajdini and the willing suspension of disbelief

"A lie can get halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on." That old saw is now hopelessly out of date. These days, an apparent malicious falsehood can become global news in a matter of seconds, especially if it contains suggestions that pants might have come off. Human beings love to share shocking gossip, and internet technology means that we can do so at terrifying speed and scale. Social media now resembles the lower-rent tabloids of old, rife with fantastical pieces about aliens or sex slaves and the occult Take, for instance, the incredible tale of the feline JPMorgan executive who "sexually harassed" a junior male staff member.

Tuesday

Philip Hensher

The demonising of homosexuals in postwar Britain

Not every human culture leaves clear and legible accounts of itself. Here we have a comparatively recent way of life which we know thousands of men led. It was proscribed, and those who lived within it had good reasons to conceal their participation and nature, usually taking care not to leave any records. Invisible and, even at this short distance, impossible completely to understand, the culture of male homosexuals in London was only partially legalised in 1967. Before that has to be interpreted through material which is intrinsically unsatisfactory. A comparison might be drawn to the textual means historians have of understanding another proscribed culture, the early Christians in Rome.