The Critical Commentator

  Telephone Wire Basket with Computer Components Dail Behennah (b. 1953) Photo Credit: Somerset County Council [CC BY-NC-ND]  Phubbing - the practice of ignoring or snubbing your partner in favour of your smartphone, of scrolling endlessly through Instagram streams of people you don't know, inhaling TikTok content designed for someone a third of your age but LOL AMIRIGHT, studying YouTube masterclasses on the correct way to fold fitted sheets, and in doing so ignoring all gentle enquiries re the quality of your day and what you should have for dinner - is according to Turkish scientists, damaging to relationships... While it's always nice to have scientists confirm things we instinctively know about our lifestyles with funded research and measured statements such as "marital conflict mainly occurs when people are ignored by those they value", we definitely did already know this about our lifestyles, didn't we? ... attempts to stop phubbing have come and gone. Reme...

Raving Madness Caius Gabriel Cibber (1630-1700) Photo Credit: Bethlem Museum of the Mind [CC BY-NC]    [Michael] Cera is 35 and must be one of the few millennials not to own a smartphone. What does he do when he has a spare 30 seconds and needs to save himself from boredom? "I don't know. Sometimes I'll just be bored." He laughs, as if it's no big deal. It gives him space to process things, he says. Does he look at the rest of us, staring into our phones, and feel sorry for us? He isn't judgemental but says: "I feel sorry for my son, I feel sorry for the world. I think it's getting very lonely." Sometimes he will do a head count on the subway of "how many people are looking at their phones and it makes me feel lonely.  Even being with friends or with family, you're with somebody you love and haven't seen in a while, and they're with their phone. It's like they left the room. I think it bums a lot of people out, honestly. I fe...

  The theatre behind a new production of The Sound of Music is facing criticism for its use of a trigger warning to caution audiences that it touches on "Nazi Germany and the annexation of Austria". Chichester Festival Theatre, where the revival of the stage show opens next week, is warning prospective ticket buyers that some of them "may find certain themes distressing"... Arthur Bourchier (1863-1927) as Shylock Charles A. Buchel (1872-1950) Photo Credit: Royal Shakespeare Company Collection [CC BY-NC-ND]    It is the latest example of a cultural institution using trigger warnings, or content notes as they are sometimes referred to, to tell people in advance about difficult subject matter they might encounter. The write and broadcaster Rabbi Jonathan Romain ... described such warnings as "incredibly patronising". He said they did a "disservice" to the audience. Earlier this year, the actress Tracy-Ann Oberman, who is Jewish, explained why her p...

  Duty Paid Ralph Hedley (1848-1913) Photo Credit: Sunderland Museum & Winter Gardens. [CC BY-NC] UK plutocrats rank proudly fifth in the world for mega-wealth, but our poor have 20% less than the poor of Slovenia. Britain has got a lot poorer, partly due to economic own goals such as Brexit. There is less of everything following "the most dramatic period of spending cuts in modern history", so taxes must rise unless voters are ready to see public services disintegrate further. That's the choice - and the sharp message from Paul Johnson, Institute for Fiscal Studies director, in his new book, Follow the Money. He has killer facts: no politician dare challenge IFS figures. His analysis of our warped tax system, riddled with reliefs for rich people and penalties for the rest, offers irrefutably fairer options. "Government's dirty secret is that it chooses not to do the right thing," he writes. That's through fear of voters (he has the advantage of not...