Media

Oh those Russians. When they’re not beating up English football fans, they’re cheating at the Olympics. They occupy other countries and shoot down civilian airliners, then pretend it wasn’t them. They’re helping Assad win the Syrian civil war. They’re even driving up London house prices. There’s no infamy, apparently, of which Russians are not guilty. ‘OK — we did do all those things,’ admits a Moscow broadcaster friend, a little sheepishly. ‘But everyone else does them too! We’re the only ones to get punished, because everyone hates us.’ Since the annexation of Crimea in 2014, Russians have become the world’s official pariahs. Russian athletes have been kicked out of the

I’ve heard it said that the ‘countryside’ is an urban idea, a place invented by the late Victorians in order to escape industrialisation. If so, we’re craving it more than ever. Surveys suggest 80 per cent of us now dream of living in a rural idyll. Since foxhunting was banned, riding to hounds has never been more prevalent. Suddenly five million people — most of them city dwellers — are tuning into The Archers, and viewing figures for Countryfile are higher than for The X Factor. But perhaps the most revealing indicator of the allure of the countryside is the enduring appeal of Country Life magazine, which was founded in

John Humphrys staggering around in a piece of ‘virtual reality’ headgear that looked like binoculars and made him feel sick was as attention-grabbing as radio can be. So I listened in last week as the intrepid Today presenter tried out infotech’s latest gimmick. The Oculus Rift began life on a crowdfunding website, heralded as an exciting new tool in virtual reality: a tool that computer-games boffins had long been trying to crack. Facebook bought it, and Rift should hit the market this month. I experienced a forerunner years ago when sampling for my newspaper a day in the life of a bus driver. At a driving school I sat behind

Poor Eddie Redmayne. Just because he looks quite like a girl, he finds himself a spokesperson for the burgeoning trans movement. Recently, he was forced to explain to those of us watching BBC News that ‘the notion of gender being binary’ is now considered ‘antiquated’. People are very excited about being trans at the moment. Countless TV shows and films depict it, Mark Zuckerberg has just called his daughter Max, and a man called Hilary has just talked us into another war. Being trans is clearly catching: hermaphrodite whelks on the undersides of fishing boats are growing penises, and vast swaths of young people, unable to buy a home or

Did you know that tampons were just another brutal expression of the oppressive patriarchy? I must confess that I didn’t either, until the story broke this week about an unfortunate woman who decided to run the London marathon during her time of the month without any panty pads, in ostentatious protest against the alleged male practice of ‘period-shaming’. I’ll come to the ‘unfortunate’ part in a moment. But first, the background. Her name is Kiran Gandhi (a Harvard MBA and former drummer of the agit-rock collective MIA) and four months ago, she chose to run the London marathon, unencumbered by the ‘absurd’ presence of a chaffing ‘wad of cotton’ wedged

One of the fundamental principles of English common law is that you are innocent until proven guilty. And rightly so, for imagine how unfair it would be if any old loon with an axe to grind had only to lodge a trumped-up complaint with the relevant authorities in order to have you punished for no reason whatsoever. Actually, though, this cruel and capricious system exists in Britain. It’s called the Independent Press Standards Organisation (Ipso) and, as might be expected of the bastard offspring of the Leveson inquiry, it’s doing an absolutely first-rate job of empowering bullies and curbing freedom of speech in order to assuage the spite of that

Martin Williams, former head of the government’s air quality science unit, has declared that the reason we have a problem with air pollution now is that ‘policy has been focused on climate change, and reducing CO2 emissions, to the exclusion of much else, for most of the past two decades. Diesel was seen as a good thing because it produces less CO2, so we gave people incentives to buy diesel cars.’ Yet another example of how the global warming obsession has been bad for the environment — like subsidising biofuels, which encourage cutting down rainforests; or windfarms, which kill eagles and spoil landscapes; or denying coal-fired electricity to Africa, where

What are newspapers for? The answer, of course, is not just to tell us what’s going on and explain the implications, but also to select the most important items from the background noise. Over the last few years, though, we’ve started to get our news in a different way: through Google, where selections are made on the basis of a constantly evolving algorithm, and through social media sites where news stories are recommended by friends. Throughout this change, Google has argued vociferously that it is not a publisher. Particularly in Europe, issues such as privacy, copyright and the right to be forgotten have led it to claim that it’s simply a