8 posts tagged “guardian”
This weekend the Guardian and Observer published a really lovely Guide to the night. My favourite piece without a doubt is Jeanette Winterson on why she adores the night. Just gorgeous:
Food, fire, walks, dreams, cold, sleep, love, slowness, time, quiet, books, seasons – all these things, which are not really things, but moments of life – take on a different quality at night-time, where the moon reflects the light of the sun, and we have time to reflect what life is to us, knowing that it passes, and that every bit of it, in its change and its difference, is the here and now of what we have."
Guardian readers can be a bolshy lot, so it's a brave company that submits to their ethical blog Q&A. Howies dealt with it pretty gracefully when they were turned over, but you'd have thought it would have given Neal's Yard Remedies some idea of what they might be in for. Apparently not...
It's impossible to say at what point they decided this had all been a terrible idea - was it when a reader asked:
Do you see no problem with trying to be 'ethical' while at the same time selling snake oil for a living?
or perhaps:
I was wondering what your policy was on dealing with the situation of one of your stocked alternative medicines actually being proven to work. Would you discontinue it? After all, it wouldn't be alternative any more, just medicine.
or maybe:
I've been soaking a £20 note in a bathfull of water for the last few days, is it ok to pay for an order using my new homeopathic money? I now seem to have rather a lot of it.
We'll never know.
Oliver Burkeman has a great column on homophily - our "tendency to seek out and spend time with those most similar to us".
I've been thinking about this a lot lately - for many of us, we spend much of our social time with people who hold similar views and like the same things; we read books, newspapers and blogs that support our opinions and we watch programmes and films that dovetail with our tastes.
However open-minded they might consider themselves to be, I'm guessing most people probably don't spend a lot of time seeking out people and ideas that will challenge them. If you're lucky, you might have friends who are happy to engage you in a challenging, possibly-slightly-heated-but-mostly-civilised, debate. Sometimes they might even change your mind. But certainly in my case, if I'm not careful, I find this is the exception rather than the rule. So, what's wrong with that? Well,
...as the Harvard media researcher Ethan Zuckerman puts it, "Homophily causes ignorance." (It also makes us more extreme, studies show: a group of conservatives, given the chance to discuss politics among themselves, will grow more conservative.)
However, I have noticed that there is one area of my life that doesn't display this comforting effect - and that's work. At work I don't necessarily choose who is in my team, or who I collaborate with on a project - and that can be a refreshing change. Having to work with someone whose views I don't share, or whose way of working I don't understand can be frustrating or occasionally downright infuriating - but the creative tension sometimes produces much better results, and certainly does its bit to prevent complacency. In short, it's good for me.
Burkeman agrees:
The unspoken assumption here is that you know what you like - that satisfying your existing preferences, and maybe expanding them a little around the edges, is the path to fulfilment. But if happiness research has taught us anything, it's that we're terrible at predicting what will bring us pleasure. Might we end up happier by exposing ourselves more often to serendipity, or even, specifically, to the people and things we don't think we'd like?
He suggests:
... Facebook could easily offer a list of the People You're Least Likely To Know; imagine what that could do for cross-cultural understanding. And I love the Unsuggester, a feature of the books site LibraryThing.com: enter a book you've recently read, and it'll provide a list of titles least likely to appear alongside it on other people's bookshelves. Tell it you're a fan of Kant's Critique Of Pure Reason, and it'll suggest you read Confessions Of A Shopaholic by Sophie Kinsella. And maybe you should.
Maybe I will.
In this Saturday's Guardian Weekend magazine, various celebrities were interviewed by children. It makes for a fantastic read - full set here. They got some much more interesting answers out of the interviewees than many celeb profilers usually manage, and I also found myself warming to people I don't usually expect to like.
I particularly enjoyed Richard Hammond being interviewed by 7 year old Kirsty Stark. I would also have loved to hear the answers to some of the questions they didn't get to ask.
After all, who hasn't wanted to ask Lewis Hamilton "What do you do if you need a wee while you're racing?" or Roger Federer "Is Gillette really the best a man can get?".
The Guardian is running a seven-part guide to writing. Looks good. Insert your own spelling joke here.
I've been reading The Night Bookmobile every Saturday in the Guardian but, as I'm going through a particularly dim patch, hadn't twigged that it was online. Brilliant.
Update: Hmmph. I have slightly gone off this now, as I can only find the most recent two on the site. But... as I said, it could just be the dimness.
Saturday's Guardian Weekend magazine included a feature called The Hell of the Grotto, interviewing lots of Father Christmases. (What's the collective noun for a group of Father Christmases? A sack? Anyway...)
The whole thing made me laugh, but I particularly enjoyed the following quotes:
Last year we had a real reindeer. But the reindeer was not a professional, so we're not having one this year."
and
Sometimes you get lecherous mothers. A young mum once sat on my lap and asked if I would empty my sack on her bed. I think she'd been drinking. We once had a drunk elf who gave out the wrong presents, then fell into the lake."
Merry Christmas!
New community standards and participation guidelines over at Guardian Unlimited. Seems to me like a pretty reasonable attempt at setting down some common sense guidelines without stifling debate - whether the theory works in practice is a different matter. I will be very interested to see how this one turns out.
