The Critical Commentator

  Truth presenting a Mirror  to the Vanities of the World Northern European School Photo Credit: Ashmolean Museum Oxford [CC BY-NC-ND]  ... When you place loyalty to party, to leader, above all other considerations - for jobs, policy positions and execution - you will inevitably degrade the quality of the outcome. Tribalism eradicates accountability. If all that matters is that you say and do the right thing by your party and its boss, you can literally get away with anything. It is now the dominant organising principle of American politics as well as the media. It causes senators to forsake their roles as part of a co-equal branch of government. It causes members of Congress to abandon their responsibility to scrutinise the actions of an executive branch. It causes the media to forgo their role as public watchdogs and become instead cheerleaders. The same tribalism led political and media loyalists of Joe Biden to engage in a four-year act of political deceit, the preten...

  Svendborg Harbour, Denmark 1934 Martin Bloch (1883-1954) Photo Credit: Ben Uri Collection [CC BY-NC-ND] The trap was laid in a rented office... For six months, beginning in mid-2022, a parade of people - members of motorcycle gangs, entrepreneurs, lawyers, real-estate barons, politicians, - trooped through to recount their sins to Amira Smajic. They didn't come for expiation. They knew Smajic to be one of them - an outlaw, and in her particular case, a business lawyer so skilled at laundering money that she'd enabled a couple of billion kroner in financial crime over the previous decade. They called her the Ice Queen, because she showed not a flicker of regret for what she did. In her office, Smajic's visitors bragged about dodging tax, bribing officials or exploiting the bankruptcy code. She offered them coffee and coaxed forth their confidences. Six cameras and three microphones, secreted in power sockets captured it all - footage that was turned into a documentary call...

  Incessant demands for consumer feedback  are the newest plague on our inboxes...Tripadvisor is still badgering me to review a restaurant I didn't actually attend, after looking it up last month; my new exercise mat came with a questionnaire; and when I bought a splurge item through a luxury fashion marketplace, I was invited separately to review the web portal, the individual brand, and the delivery company, each in turn. It's enough to drive one back to shopping in person, with cash - anything that doesn't require an email address. So I was initially enthused to hear about Dorian, the Notting Hill [London] restaurant that is tearing up the rulebook on customer feedback... Any complaints left on Google or Tripadvisor will be roundly ignored; any customer who even mutters about leaving a review will be ejected on the spot. They certainly won't be emailing you to ask if there's room for improvement. A Group of Cats Dressed as Gentry Dining in a restaurant unknown ar...

  A Chinese Sage is Offered Food in a Garden unknown artist Photo Credit: Wellcome Collection [Public Domain] Growing up in a Chinese takeaway, I saw first-hand how Britain's  relationship with Chinese food was changing. My parents' business, Lucky Star, in Beddau, in the south Wales valleys, was more than just a place to grab a meal - it was the heart of our community and the backdrop to my childhood. From the 1960s to the 1990s, Cantonese cuisine from southern China - particularly Guangdong province, Guangzhou and Hong Kong  - held a special place in the hearts and stomachs of Brits. A new cuisine evolved: sweet and sour chicken, egg fried rice and chow mein.  But this classic Chinese takeaway is in sharp decline...  So are the British really falling out of love with Chinese food? One factor behind the decline is more choice. Where the high street was once dominated by fish and chips, Chinese and Indian options, now we have Thai, Vietnamese and Korean too. We'...

  You don't need to be a doctor to have noticed that certain medical diagnoses that used to be rare now appear common. Anecdotally at least, it feels like everyone either has ADHD  or knows someone who does. Neurodivergence was one of the buzz words of 2024 and mood disorders such as depression and bipolar have skyrocketed. The data backs this up. ADHD diagnoses doubled for boys and trebled for for girls  between 2000 and 2018. In the 1940s, autism was thought to affect one in 2,500 children, while today one in 100 has been diagnosed. Chronic conditions with no strict diagnostic criteria, such as chronic Lyme disease and long Covid, have also become a part of daily life... We are living in an "age of overdiagnosis," O'Sullivan says [Suzanne Sullivan is a consultant neurologist in the NHS] "We're turning people into patients, medicalising their lives and causing undue anxiety with no benefit." The Sick Child Edvard Munch (1863-1944) Photo Credit: Tate [CC...

  Socrates unknown artist Photo Credit: Harris Manchester College, University of Oxford [CC BY-NC] As a university lecturer in the humanities, where essays remain a key means of assessment, I am not surprised to hear that there has been an explosive increase in the use of AI. It is aggressively promoted as a time-saving good by tech companies, and wider political discourse only reinforces this view without questioning AI's limitations and ethics. While AI may be useful in several academic contexts, its use by students to write essays is indicative of the devaluing of humanities subjects and a misunderstanding of what original writing in disciplines such as history, literature and philosophy enables: critical thinking. "How can I tell what I think till I see what I say?" asked the great novelist EM Forster. He meant that learning to write well, to feel one's way through the development of an idea or argument, is at the heart of writing. When we ask AI to write an essay...