The Critical Commentator

  Ordinary has become an insult in the 21st century. [ Goodness, I didn't know that. ] No one aspires to be average, that sounds mediocre and dull: they want to excel. [ So that's what I must be then - mediocre and dull .] Everyone now dreams of being extraordinary, talented, gifted, different, unique in their own way. [ I don't really remember my dreams .] It's all about "main character energy" as Gen Z. calls it.  Nothing less, we have become convinced, will make us feel contented and fulfilled [ Are Gen Z Chinese? Don't they believe in energy flow when using holistic medicine?] We need to max our lives in every way, push ourselves to the limit, perfect our daily routines and sleep schedules, curate our existence and compete to win. [ This sounds very complicated to me. Is there to be any time for the craic and banter? The pub? Reading? Walking? No time to stop and stare?] A Portrait with Books Madge Gill (1882-1961) Photo Credit: London Borough of Newha...

  According to his former economic adviser, Gary Cohen, "Trump won't read anything - not one-page memos, not the brief policy papers, nothing." Instead he gets most of his news from screens: Fox News and Truth Social are favourites. This preference explains a lot about the chaos of our present politics. The president is hardly alone in his allergy to the written word. Reading is in decline everywhere. Most widely cited are a series of reports suggesting that students from universities  are increasingly unable to read the books their lecturers assign to them. According to one professor, his students were "intimidated by anything over ten pages." And this is more than merely the sort of thing professors always said about their students... The Inattentive Reader Henri Matisse (1869-1954) Photo Credit: Tate [CC BY-NC ND] A study of the leisure habits of nearly a quarter of a million Americans found that the number who spent time reading on a typical day (including n...

  What I find strange is that everywhere else in psychiatry we take a person's circumstances  seriously and understand that the world someone lives in can impact on how they feel and behave. No competent doctor treating a depressed woman would disregard the fact that she has been made redundant, or hasn't slept since the baby arrived, and we'd think it negligent to hand her a prescription and not consider the environmental, psychological and social factors. With ADHD that habit has been mislaid and we have settled on the idea that the difficulty sits inside the child and the world around him is beside the point. Patients Waiting to See the Doctor, with Figures Representing Their Fears Rosemary Carson (b.1962 Photo Credit:: Wellcome Collection [CC BY]   Yet look at the world we have built for him. The criteria have widened over the years, so behaviour once thought unremarkable now falls inside the diagnosis. We've handed children devices engineered to capture their at...

  You may think it's a commitment to buying a round, the ability to chat at length about the weather or make a proper cup of tea. But when it comes to what makes people proud to be British there is a consensus across all ages, demographics and political groups and tea, pints and the weather don't get a look in. Hard work, fair play and community are the values that voters - no matter which political party, age group, social class or region they come from - instinctively believe capture what it means to be British, according to a large-scale study of values by the research firm Public First. The Food Queue Joseph Edward Southall (1861-1944) Photo Credit Gallery Oldham [CC BY-NC-ND]  "When you talk to people across Britain it's clear they have a shared set of values - if fairness is Britain's moral compass, hard work is its character, and community the thing that binds us," said Olivia Walsham, the director of social policy at Public First... In the study, which...

  And what was this delirious, delicious night if not fantasies bleeding into reality? It happened gradually, then suddenly; first seeming as though it would never start, then as though it would never finish. A silver haze poured from a sky that betrayed neither day nor night, the lines between heaven and earth blurred as though even the gods deemed this a spectacle they couldn't miss. The anarchic mass of sound and colour was so overwhelming and primal that this resembled more revolution than sporting event. The stadium shook as though dancing along to the rapture, as though the earth might give way at any moment. (Private Eye, 2026: Rory Smith on England v Mexico, Observer) Tlaloc, Aztec God of Rain unknown artist Photo Credit: Hastings Museum and Art Gallery [CC BY-NC] The official Adidas Belgium away jersey for the World Cup is a unique, light blue shirt featuring pink, white and black accents, designed as a tribute to the Belgian surrealist artist Rene Magritte... The base col...

  Many kids at my comprehensive [school]were as talented as my peers at Balliol [Oxford University] but never got close to university. What I saw at Oxford was not the soft bigotry of low expectations but of entitlement: kids who lacked ability but had plenty of credentials (a very different thing) and contacts. "One or two telephone calls are still necessary to find places for the borderlines," John Rae, the head master of Westminster School in the 1980s, admitted when talking about how he got so many pupils into Oxbridge. "Some lavish dinners for dons may have gone into preparing for those calls." In his book Chums , Simon Kuper notes that Alec Douglas-Home was admitted to Oxford "practically as his birthright, got a third class degree and still went on to become prime minister, the third consecutive Etonian in the job". Merit Francesco Guardi (1712-1793) Photo Credit: Walker Art Gallery {CC BY-NC]   A version of this rigged system persists today: 7 per ...