Tonight’s the return of Children In Need, but it’s a tough ask this year. Everywhere you look, funding for charities is being cut; and with the cost of living increasing, fewer people can afford donations to make up the shortfall. But we all know that child poverty in Britain is a scandal, so the Children in Need campaign this year feels more important than ever. Read More
The UK’s religions are bracing themselves for the forthcoming Census announcements, which in the Autumn are likely to show further decline in religious affiliation in England and Wales. It’s already declined in the Northern Ireland census; and it’s likely to do so here too, when Scotland reports next year. After years of America bucking the global trend, which shows that religious belief generally declines as countries become more affluent, data from the US now looks similarly gloomy. Read More
Surfing the crimson wave? A visit from Aunt Flo? Got the painters in? This week Scotland led the world in tackling period poverty with the coming into force of the Scottish Government’s Period Products Act. This requires councils and places of education to offer sanitary products free to those who need them. Read More
Last week, an IT engineer was put on leave, after claiming that a chatbot he’d been working on had become sentient. Global commentators rushed to their keyboards, to argue about robots and consciousness, and to ask if this program had finally aced the Turing Test. Read More
March 13th, 1996: the day Dunblane became synonymous with a school massacre: sixteen pupils and one teacher were shot dead that day. May 24th, 2022 the town of Uvalde in Texas becomes synonymous with a school massacre too: nineteen children and two teachers gunned down in cold blood. Read More
Her Majesty the Queen is 96 today. She’s been Queen for 70 years, and by the time of her Platinum Jubilee in June, she’ll be the world’s third longest-serving monarch. By Christmas she’ll be second only to the Sun King, Louis Quatorze of France, who tops the league tables with a reign of 72 years and 110 days. Read More
I must confess that I’m a total killjoy about April Fool’s day. I’m haunted by the memory of one of my primary teachers sending a hapless boy down the corridor to ask another teacher for a ‘long stand’; and I still go red remembering being jeered at in the playground for falling for something foolish. But of course I see the point of it all. It’s one of the few non-religious festivals that seems to crop up all over Europe and beyond, so today we join many other countries around the world in pranking our friends and neighbours. Dennis the Menace is Scotland’s Patron Saint of pranking, and he’d be in his element today. Read More
While the dark shadows of war gather over Ukraine, scientists in a lab in Oxfordshire have built a star, managing to generate energy from fusing hydrogen atoms for a full 5 seconds. It’s a major milestone in the development of a new clean energy source. What these two situations have in common, is that they show the best and worst-case scenarios for our use of Artificial Intelligence. AI is accelerating scientific and medical discovery; but at the same time, the use of drones threatens to transform warfare, raising deep ethical questions about decision-making and control over life and death. Read More
Black Friday seems to have started early this year. Technically it’s this Friday, the day after Thanksgiving, but my inbox seems to have been full of deals all month. But do you know why we shop? The sociologists think it’s because we fear death. Shopping keeps this fear at bay, because it’s distracting. Buying stuff makes our reality feel more substantial, and buying cool stuff wins us approval from our peers, which makes us feel really alive. Read More
Scotland is Top of the European league! Unfortunately it’s for drug deaths. And this week, we’re back at the top of the UK charts for alcohol-related deaths too. There are lots of people injecting drugs all the time, for diabetes, or fertility treatment, but we direct our disapproval at those who break the law, regardless of the tragic stories behind the statistics. And in some ways that’s right: if we didn’t disapprove of law-breaking, it would become normal, and the law would cease to work. Read More
