The Critical Commentator

  According to its own statistics, only 58.4% of Deutsche Bahn's long distance trains ran on time this September. You need only enter a station to know things have gone badly wrong. There is a constant drone of tannoy announcements: indeed this is the melody that now accompanies all rail travel in Germany. Even if your train isn't mentioned as late or cancelled in the announcement, it doesn't mean you are safe. Once there is a slight delay, the minutes begin adding up in a ripple effect, as any train that loses its slot on the overcrowded tracks can be forced to wait its turn in the system. We don't even talk much about train delays any more. Only occasionally do you read about, say, the Swiss refusing to allow late-running German trains on to their network. Anyway, why talk about dreary delays, when it is so much more fun to discuss the excuses given by German rail. My favourite is an expression that might one day be emblematic of contemporary Germany. I hear Deutsche

  A persistent strand of opinion holds that scepticism about smartphones and social media is fogeyish or alarmist, the inevitable preoccupation of the sorts of people who would have lain awake in 1968 worrying about Mick Jagger's haircut. Even the government's apparently banal case that smartphones are distracting is not uncontroversial. The journalist Johann Hari's recent book, Stolen Focus , about smartphone's impact on our ability to concentrate was met with bitter criticism...   Every teacher will attest to the disruption caused by phones. As will anybody who has tried to read a novel in the past ten years. A recent study suggests that the average teenager receives 237 notifications a day. The most compelling case for a smartphone ban is made by the psychologist Jonathan Haidt, who has argued that an "international epidemic of mental illness" among teenagers should be blamed on phones. The majority of teenage girls "now say that they experience persis