The Critical Commentator

  Anxiety, Head of a Girl Jean-Baptiste Greuse (1725-1805) Photo Credit: Victoria Art Gallery  [CC  BY-NC-ND] It all started ... because of a recurring argument with his boyfriend. His partner didn't think they spent enough time together, but Adam thought that they did. There was only one way to settle this, he decided: cold, hard data. So he began keeping a note of the days they saw each other and the days they didn't "It started with just one element," he told me, "But then you're like, is there more stuff to track?" The spreadsheet expanded; soon, he was tracking his sleep, social engagements, exercise regime and cultural intake. He even started to record, on a scale of one to eight, how much cheese he had eaten that day... While gathering data about our lives might once have been a fringe pursuit for Silicon Valley tech nerds, now it's just an everyday activity for many of us. We track our step counts, calories consumed, exercise completed, menst...

  Frozen chips, long a staple of the British diet, are enjoying a spectacular boom in France, where potato fields are becoming a valuable investment. In the northern French countryside, where three quarters of the nation's potatoes are produced, farmers are ripping up other crops to plant them and big corporations are building factories worth hundreds of millions of euros to transform them into frozen chips. The Potato Gatherers George William Russell  (1867-1935) Photo Credit: Armagh County Museum [CC BY-NC-ND]  Tensions are rising over claims that Dutch and Belgian farmers are ruining the french landscape by removing hedgerows and meadows to plant potatoes in the area now known as La Vallee de la Frite. (Chip Valley) The transformation is being driven by an insatiable French appetite for chips, accompanied by a dislike of the chores involved in making them. "Young generations no longer peel much," Ward Claerbout, legal and external affairs director at Agristo, a Belgian...

 I can confirm from acute research exposure  that celebrity gossip journalism may well be the weirdest form of the English language: a brain-melting argot of multiple compound nouns, facts as adjectives, adjectives as exclamations, exclamations as facts. Commas less as punctuation and more as a lifestyle choice. A spurious tissue of quasi-truth spun out of the unattributed, unchallenged testimony of "close pals", albeit the kind of pals happy to spill your most intimate personal secrets to a tabloid journalist. The Gossips Pierre M Beyle (1838-1902) Photo Credit: York Museums Trust [Public Domain]  This, for the most part, is how the life of Kyle Walker has been recorded. Based on media footprint alone, he might well be one of the most chronicled English footballers of the past decade,and largely for issues unrelated to anything he did in a defensive transition. Search the internet for this player of 93 England caps and pretty much every medal at club level and you will b...

  The first of the myriad anglosajon peculiarities that would confound and exasperate Julio Camba in his 15 months as London correspondent for el Mundo revealed itself when a porter tried to help the young Spanish journalist with his luggage as he arrived at Victoria station in December 1910. Victoria Station, London, the Sunlit Square Charles Ginner (1878-1952) Photo Credit: Atkinson Art Gallery [CC BY-NC-SA] "The worker grabbed my suitcase and shouted, so I started to shout, too," he wrote shortly afterwards. "Given that I'm Spanish, I shouted much more than he did and, finally, he shut up. Camba concluded that, unlike their Spanish, French and Italian neighbours, the English were not given to passionate outbursts. Or passion. Or, indeed, outbursts. "The English," he noted in an aphorism that has hardly aged over the past 115 years, "endure the proximity of the continent with the same irritable gestures as a man who lives next door to a young music ...