Culture

Culture

Yesterday

Sam McPhail

Is the World Cup ball rigged?

The World Cup’s new ball is the most technologically advanced ever, FIFA tells us. It has a 500Hz motion sensor chip, which lets VAR and analysts figure out precise positioning, speed and even the spin on the ball, for some weird reason. But former England goalkeeper Joe Hart says the Trionda ball is making life harder for goalkeepers trying to save shots. “It’s that kind of shoulder height,” he continued: As soon as [players] are not using the curling technique, as soon as that ball is not spinning, the goalkeepers are struggling.” Hart obviously has lots of experience in the area and was particularly known for his ability to deal with shots around the head and shoulders, but is he right?

ball
Zak Asgard

Longevity is not the meaning of life

So you want to live forever? Excellent. You’ve come to the right place. Here at Gilgamesh-Makropulos Limited, we know a thing or two about immortality. First, we need to track your metrics: biological age versus chronological age, average number of erections per night, metabolic health, maximal oxygen consumption, heart rate variability, stool volume and color and salivary flow rate. Sound good? My assistant will fetch the paperwork.  This might seem like the beginning of a potboiler sci-fi rip-off. But it’s actually closer to our reality than Bernard Williams would have liked. While we still haven’t achieved immortality, the cult of "longevity" has become something of a gold rush in recent years.

Monday

Daniel Seifert

I miss Roger Federer

Epic figures leave epic gaps when they retire. The generations that follow are doomed to be compared to past heroes by nostalgic fans. So it is with Roger Federer. Novak Djokovic might be the GOAT (greatest of all time, to use the phrase du jour) in terms of sheer numerical achievement. But tennis is art, not science. Ballet, not bookkeeping. For the aesthetes among us who drink in the sight of on-court grace like champagne, Federer will always be number one.  To answer why, you don’t need words, though heaven knows enough have been written about the grace of Rog. (David Foster Wallace famously called watching the Swiss savant "a religious experience"). Click on any clip and watch Fed glide on the court, near-supernatural in his poise.

roger federer

Saturday

Anthony Whitehead

The glorious silliness of tribute band names

Seeing a tribute band can be a strange experience. There are your heroes on stage once more, magically rejuvenated and playing the music of your youth. You too feel briefly young again – until you notice everyone else at the gig is also at least 57. But as often as not the band is brilliant. They have lovingly tracked down the right guitars, effect pedals and amp settings in search of the perfect sound. They have styled their hair just so, applied the requisite tattoos and, at some obvious expense, commissioned perfect replicas of signature stage outfits. See Björn Again and the girls might come complete with the purple capes worn for ABBA’s 1980 world tour before changing into the white-booted “SOS” look.

tribute
Lloyd Evans

Britain’s National Health Service believes in fairness – they treat everyone with equal contempt

Edward Gibbon was troubled by a swelling in his lower abdomen. I have the same condition. “Wow. That’s huge,” said my GP as he gazed at the affected area. “Huge?” I said, trying to sound nonchalant. “I wouldn’t know. It’s the only one I’ve ever seen.” My cyst has been expanding steadily for decades and I was told a few years ago that its intentions were peaceful. My new GP was trying to scare me, obviously. I don’t blame him. It’s dull work staring at sick bodies all day and he was trying to amuse himself with a spot of scaremongering. “You’ll need a scan within two weeks,” he added. “Cancerous perhaps?” I asked. He nodded with a sly grin.

national health service
Richard Bratby

Fresh, original Mozart

It’s spring in Vienna; well, OK, it’s early summer but it’s a gray day when Mozart doesn’t make you feel younger and I reckon this new release from Alim Beisembayev will do just that. In a world of infinite entertainment possibilities, Beisembayev has done the hard bit – the choosing – for you. Here we have two late piano concertos (Mozart wrote them between the ages of 30 and 32, as his own solo career wound down) charged with a grandeur, a playfulness and an endless smiling compassion that will come as a glorious corrective to anyone whose last experience of Mozart involved bodily fluids and confectionery in Sky’s hellish remake of Amadeus.

mozart
James Delingpole

The Roswell incident is the setting for an enjoyably old-fashioned caper

Aliens are very fashionable right now. Steven Spielberg recently announced that they are real and have been visiting us since for ever – but then he does have a poorly reviewed new movie to push. Trump’s White House, meanwhile, has been busily trolling us with hints that it knows more about the subject than it has hitherto let on. I personally think it’s all bollocks – or, if you believe Project Blue Beam, worse than bollocks. But whichever camp you fit into, I think you’ll thoroughly enjoy the three-part documentary series The Alien Autopsy Scandal. It has the feel of one of those old-fashioned capers where an unlikely band of English eccentrics with specialist skills – butchery, model-making monsters for Dr.

farm roswell
Peter Parker

The problem with ‘queer art’

In 1911, Duncan Grant’s “Bathing” went on display as part of a design scheme for the dining room of the Borough Polytechnic in Southwark. This large painting depicts a group of strongly muscled male bathers diving, swimming and hauling themselves into a boat. Only one of them is wearing a bathing slip, and while this kind of spectacle might have been familiar to anyone educated at a public school at this period, the art critic of the Times complained that it could well have “a degenerative influence on the children of the working class.” The picture now hangs in Tate Britain, and is used on the gallery’s website to direct people to an account of “Queer Life and Art.

art
Bryan Appleyard

Alien fever shows no signs of abating

These two books are about aliens – intelligent beings who may or may not have visited our planet. Jonathan Caplan is a distinguished lawyer and believer; David Lavelle is a journalist and skeptic. Aliens have always been with us. For at least 4,000 years there have been reports of strange visitations assumed to come from heaven, hell or simply the universe. Angels and demons were commonplace, but they were eventually replaced by technology-based visions, most often flying saucers. These could be quietly ignored until 1947, when postwar alien fever was sparked in Roswell, New Mexico. Metal and rubber debris were found which the US Army initially claimed were parts of a “flying disc.

blood
Anne Sebba

There will be blood – the vital work of field transfusion units

Most conventional World War Two military histories focus on weapons, materiel and even the manpower needed for a decisive victory over Hitler and the Axis powers. Little has been written about blood as a strategic resource. However, a pioneering service of specially trained medics who worked dangerously close to the front lines, pumping blood into the veins of battle casualties, not only saved lives but contributed significantly to winning the war. They did this by returning men to the front line and boosting morale by persuading them that, if wounded, they had the maximum chance of life.

dressing
Henry Jeffreys

The secret to dressing exceptionally well

As I scribble these words on a train to London, I’m wearing a lightweight Italian wool suit, a shirt from Gieves & Hawkes, a silk spotty tie and a pair of Church’s suede brogues. You might mistake me for a prosperous Neapolitan gentleman of a certain age. But in fact, I’m a charity-shop dandy – my outfit came to less than £60. That’s less than a pair of new trainers for my teenage daughter. I’m particularly pleased with the shoes, which I picked up locally for £30. A new pair would set you back £700. If you’re not too grand to buy secondhand, it’s actually far easier and cheaper for men to dress smartly than to be slovenly. I learned this important fact in my early twenties.

Friday

Catriona Olding

The highs and lows of life as an artist

Provence “Painting is a stupid job. Do something useful and train to be a nurse,” commented a man beneath a column I wrote last month. Although well used to the vitriol leveled at artists from some quarters, I found this particularly annoying. I was a general nurse from 1981 to 1985, after which I completed psychiatric training and spent five years working in acute psychiatry in the East End of Glasgow. That was followed by a year as a district nurse and seven more as a practice sister. I nursed because my lower-middle-class background, with its discouragements and lack of contacts, didn’t equip me even to consider somehow making a living from the two things I’d loved most since I was a child: books and art.

Deborah Ross

Toy Story 5 contains delicious touches

Toy Story 5 – do we need it? One worries for the narrative integrity of characters when an IP is thrashed to death like this. The latest ​installment, however, does address one of the most pressing dilemmas of modern childhood (screen time) and whether it will be the end of toys. (‘Extinction… Not again!’ cries Rex, the dinosaur.) It is timely, with some delicious touches – Woody now has a bald spot So it is timely, with some delicious touches – Woody now has a bald spot. And while it isn’t as entertaining as the first three and stumbles at the finishing line, it may be better than the fourth, with its horrible doll Gabby Gabby.

toy story 5
birds
Horatio Clare

A trove of avian lore and history

I finished reading The Book of Birds by Robert Macfarlane and Jackie Morris, and leaned out of my attic window to smoke and think about it, when there among the tumbling spires of the apple trees was a spasm of fluttering and a flurry of notes: two spotted flycatchers! One held the air for a moment, hovering and looking me in the eye, and then darted back to its perch while the other called. It has been years since we have seen them, and straight to my bird books I went. The Book of Birds was no help because it does not include the spotted flycatcher and is not designed as a recognition guide. Instead, Macfarlane writes: "Ours is a field guide with a difference... It asks not 'What is that bird?' but 'Who is that bird?' The aim is to help readers identify with them.

Alexander Larman

Why are there no good films about Independence Day?

This month marks 30 years since the release of Roland Emmerich’s Independence Day, a science-fiction blockbuster best viewed as the anti-Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Spielberg’s 1977 film suggested we would be better off finding common ground with extraterrestrial visitors; Emmerich’s more bombastic picture stuck to the (surprisingly Trumpian) idea that aliens were evil, wished to destroy our planet and must be resisted at all costs, preferably with nuclear weapons. It is not a subtle film, with the most fondly remembered moment coming in the famous shot when the White House is destroyed by an alien spacecraft.

America
Simon Jenkins

The making of America

The story of the United States was determined from the start by the manner of its birth. The original 13 English colonies may seem lost in the distant past. Yet it was their diversity that was the key to their union. The creation of the US reflected the tensions of 17th-century England, pitting the Puritan republicans of Massachusetts against the landed gentry of Virginia, Quaker New Jersey against Catholic Maryland. The Founding Fathers resolved these tensions by instituting the concept of states’ rights. Their Constitution was a tissue of compromise, yet it was robust. What served to unite 13 colonies still holds together the mightiest nation on Earth.

Madonna
Alexander Larman

What went wrong with the Madonna biopic?

Madonna Louise Ciconne has had one of the more eventful American lives of the past half-century, and it is little wonder that she might wish to depict it on screen in a big-budget film. After all, as the recent success of the Queen and Michael Jackson biopics have shown, it doesn’t matter how good the pictures are, as long as they include the best-known songs that made the artists household names and a smattering of the drama that led to their current eminence. Even if, as in Michael, it was the decision to omit most of the really interesting events that led to cries of whitewashing. Yet there’s been no Madonna biopic, and this is not because she has refused to cooperate. Far from it.

Thursday

Olivia Potts

Chicken Milanese is the king of homemade fast food

When it comes to home cooking, we’re obsessed with optimization. Today this manifests itself in reels on Instagram offering a "hack" to make the time you spend in your kitchen shorter and your dinner to arrive more quickly. Harder, faster, better, stronger. None of this is new: there was a time when every Jamie Oliver cookbook shaved ten minutes of the promised cooking time off the last. Delia Smith’s How to Cheat at Cooking caused a public outcry (can you believe she advocated for frozen mashed potato?). The whole appeal of air fryers is that they’re fast, and while slow cookers don’t exactly get to their destination quickly, they do so with as little intervention as possible from the cook.

chicken milanese

Wednesday

Gavin Mortimer

The French love affair with Scotland

France’s summer smash at the cinema is set to be a comedy called The Perfects. It opens next week with an all-star cast that includes Scottish actor Alan Cumming. The Perfects are a family of con-artists who flee France to escape the police and they end up in Scotland where madcap adventures in tartan ensue. It’s further proof that France can’t get enough of Bonnie Scotland. Films, television documentaries, newspaper features and even a puff piece earlier this month on the primetime lunchtime news about a visit to the most isolated pub in Scotland.  Billy Connolly once famously likened Scottish folk singers to ‘singing shortbread tins," churning out clichéd lyrics about mountains, heather and a Roamin' in the Gloamin.’ "Garbage!

scotland

Tuesday

Kelly Chapman

My night with Woah Vicky

It was a sticky night at the lower east side menswear store "Le Pere," where dozens of downtown New York's sceney regulars filled the room to see the viral phenomenon “Woah Vicky” read her original poems. Publicist Mitchell Jackson has a nose for this generation’s enfants terribles – besides Vicky herself, a few of his clients dotted the crowd, including playwright Matt Gasda and the memoirist Caroline Calloway. The reading drew the usual familiar faces, including celebrity photographer Matthew Weinberger, Byline co-founder Gutes Guterman, and writers Mackenzie Thomas and Michael Crumplar. Woah Vicky, the marquee reader of the evening, is a 26-year-old influencer from Atlanta, who first became famous as a teenager for a string of racial controversies and celebrity feuds.

woah vicky

Monday

Nancy Alsop

I’m being bullied by Duolingo

For the past 264 days, I have been hounded by a merciless small green owl. If I were to share this with friends, troubled whispers about my mental wellbeing would soon strike up. Disquieted, they might even cart me off to the hellscape of a wellness intervention. And yet this malevolent bird is entirely real. It is there when I unload the dishwasher, lamenting its disappointment in my efforts; and it is there when I put my daughter to bed, warning that it is about to become "very angry." Yes, Duolingo is an insidious Jiminy Cricket on modern shoulders – except that it lives in our pockets and, rather than dispensing wisdom, is an emotionally blackmailing shame merchant with rage issues. It wasn’t always this way.

duolingo
Philip Patrick

Why Japanese students aren’t woke

One of the joys of living in Japan is the lack of wokeness. It is not that it doesn’t exist – there is a Tokyo Pride, the odd Gaza protest, and gender equality is increasingly discussed – it’s simply that the concept doesn’t quite translate. Like the strikes that only take place at the weekend so as not to inconvenience customers, woke protesters here are tiny in number, generally polite and devoid of the threatening aggressiveness of the West. And diversity isn’t really a thing. Maybe that’s another reason tourist numbers have exploded. You can get away from all that here…  The young in particular seem charmingly oblivious to the culture wars, and universities are generally safe spaces for the woke-phobic.

Thursday

Zoe Strimpel

Meet my snooty AI sommelier

My grandparents’ home was a proper house, on the cusp of Hampstead Heath in North London, with roses and flagstones at the front. It was the sort that looked like it housed a robust wine collection – solid on account of good, aged European bottles, bought at a time when standards were, one assumes, higher.  There was one bottle in my grandfather’s possession that came with particular fanfare: a 1974 Bordeaux whose label was so far gone you couldn’t see exactly what it was. As a treat, I arranged to have the sommelier of the Connaught Hotel examine and open it. Once the cork gave way, a thud of brown sediment rocked the bottle. It was decanted and it breathed – inasmuch as a long-dead thing can breathe. Still hopeful, we tried the sherry-looking stuff – and it was nasty.

Wednesday

Daniel Seifert

Why do I get stuck with bores at parties?

There are a handful of obsessive mania-types I can get along with swimmingly. Kleptos, heavy-drinking dipsos and nymphos to name a few. But at monomaniacs, I draw the line. Give me anything, anyone, at a social occasion — but not a one-topic conversation.   Why is it that the fewer interests people have, the more boring they become? One wonders what history’s great Renaissance men would have made of today’s crypto bros or blockchain fanatics. I pick on blockchain because, as with so many problems benighting the world, technology is to blame. I’m no Luddite, but I hereby shame content algorithms in the strongest of biblical terms saying, Verily, ye have spawned dullards.

topic bores

Monday

Graeme Thomson

None of McCartney’s new songs will trouble his setlist for long

On May 30, 1966, the Beatles released “Paperback Writer” – a fortnight after “Paint It Black” by the Rolling Stones and only days before Bob Dylan released “I Want You” as a single. Paul Simon wrote and recorded (with Art Garfunkel) “A Hazy Shade of Winter” not long after. Yes, yes, what bliss it was in that dawn etc. But anyone predicting back then that, 60 years later, all four artists would still be releasing new music and touring to large and appreciative audiences would have been laughed clean out of the Bag O’Nails. Even when glossy monthly music magazines such as Q started appearing in the 1980s, 40 was regarded as the dark side of the moon for the foundational pop stars of the 1960s.

paul mccartney
Josh Sims

Why are we still seduced by wealth?

Show me the money. Show it to me in the dedicated pages of national newspapers, in documentaries and TV series and on social media, where influencers make their money by showing me the money. Let me revel in all the clichés we’re offered – the poorer man’s idea of wealth, defined by supercars and mega-yachts, houses pent and country, dinky handbags and preposterous watches, fat cigars, deep tans, Tic Tac teeth and honed abs, for even the body is performative of money these days. Tom Wolfe would be slack-jawed.  Forty years ago he coined the sadly forgotten term "plutography," to capture the then prevailing trend for the publishing business to offer readers a monthly dose of full-color insight into how the other half lived.

Saturday

Josie Cox

My Memorial Day pilgrimage to a Pennsylvania Walmart

Here in the US, Memorial Day – which falls on the last Monday in May – is, officially, an occasion for mourning and honoring military personnel who have given their lives in service to this great country. Unofficially, it is an occasion for charred hot dogs, 24-packs of Bud Light and nationalistic merchandising usually confined to airport gift shops. In our household, however, Memorial Day marks something different entirely. It’s the day we make our annual pilgrimage into the heart of consumer capitalism: a Walmart in East Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania. By now you might know that I live in Manhattan. You might, therefore, be wondering why exactly we’ve adopted this strange ritual, necessarily involving a rental car and gridlocked traffic on the George Washington Bridge.

Friday

Elizabeth Garner

The importance of fairy tales in testing times

In the realm of magic and imagination, human nature can be better understood than in the world of our everyday lives: “The best of our tales do not lie or die.” It is a bold claim, which the folklorist Jack Zipes explores across continents and class in a series of essays. He guides the reader from the origin of oral storytelling, through medieval writings, to 17th-century literary salons and finally to today’s cinema screens. In the course of this journey, he focuses on the specific genre of the “wonder tale,” in which “those who are naive and simple are able to succeed because they are untainted and can recognize the wondrous signs... They have not been spoiled by conventionalism, power or rationalism.

fairy tales
boroughs
James Delingpole

Why I’m increasingly drawn to optimistic sci-fi

You know you’re getting old when you see Geena Davis from Thelma & Louise cast as a granny sex symbol and Alfred Molina as a character so elderly you’re supposed to believe that he could drop at any time. This is one of the running gags of The Boroughs, a sci-fi/monster series set in an upmarket, Stepford Wives-esque desert retirement village, and clearly aimed at aging farts like I very nearly am who imagine themselves to be much younger and groovier than they now are. “Don’t worry, wrinkly kids,” the series reassures us. “By the time you hit your seventies you’ll be taking more drugs and having more sex – even crazy, orgy sex [note to squeamish viewers: this scene takes place off camera] – than ever before.