The Critical Commentator

 It used to be that parents deposited their children at their university halls with a cookbook, a duvet, and a plea to occasionally call home. [It used to be that 18 year olds left home by themselves and managed to find their new accommodation at college or university without anyone's help. With a cookbook and a duvet? Surely not.] Mother and Child Jankel Adler (1895-1949) Photo Credit: Ben Uri Collection [CC BY-NC-ND] Now, it seems, some expect to remain intimately involved in their children's lives even after they have flown the nest, and are turning to WhatsApp and Facebook groups to keep tabs on their escapades. [Keeping tabs on their escapades? Doesn't this seem a little weird?] "Is it normal for your kids to be out till 1am even though it's  a Monday?" One parent asked on a Facebook group for parents of students at Glasgow University. [No it's not normal. On Mondays 4 or 5am is normal. It might be later on Tuesday.] "Once the learning starts wil...

  Singapore is paying its citizens to pick up a book for at least 15 minutes a day in an effort to fight the rise of doomscrolling. The affluent city hopes the strategy will improve concentration, critical thinking and the imagination of its citizens  . Readers will be awarded points that can be redeemed for cash. Logging 50 daily  reading sessions on a government website will earn one Singapore dollar (58p). Payable sessions are limited to one a day and must be 15 minutes or more. Singapore: View across the Harbour to Fort Canning and the Cathedral John Edmund Taylor (active 1860-1885) Wellcome Collection [Public Domain] The national library board's chief executive, Melissa Tam, said sustainable reading habits were built through small and achievable steps. "We live in a world of extraordinary abundance, of content, information and stimulation," she told the Straits Times. "At any moment, we can scroll through hundreds of headlines, watch a video or get a summary of ...

  The annual UK supplement market is worth £3.6 billion, more than £50 per person,    and most of us have a similar collection of pills which, while not, clinically approved drugs, promise that illusive modern nirvana: "wellness". But Van Tulleken, [Medical Doctor and honorary associate professor at University College London] having interrogated the evidence and witnessed how they are produced for his new book, Make Me Well, believes we're all wasting our money... "Manufacturers," he says, seize upon research that shows feeding collagen to mice stimulates collagen production in their own skin. "Yet when you remove studies that are paid for by the industry, the effect vanishes."...  Van Tulleken,  48, and his identical twin brother, Chris, have spent much of their careers debunking fashionable ideas. In their BBC What's Up Doc? podcast they argue that fears about microplastics are overstated, that we don't need eight hours' sleep a night or...