A weekly reflection on a topical issue.
Howard Jacobson on a very tricky dilemma - which of his possessions can he throw away or put into storage...and which must he keep? "I inhabit a simple moral universe when it comes to sheets of paper", he writes. "Paper with words on, good. Paper with numbers on, bad". But it's more complicated with some other things "How can I release the evidence of me to a storage company somewhere on the North Circular Road!" Producer: Adele Armstrong
Michael Morpurgo reflects on our future connection with the First World War. "How will we pass it on, this torch of history?", he asks. "Those missing men, those wounded, those who lived to count the cost, their story is our story and we must tell it again, keep it alive" Producer: Adele Armstrong.
Howard Jacobson discusses the politics of dress - form religious clothing ....via too short trousers...to ripped jeans. And why are men so reluctant these days, he wonders, to put on a "little finery"? Producer: Adele Armstrong
Howard Jacobson on the end of mooching as a way of life. "Rooting around, doing nothing in particular, walking but not knowing where I was walking to....I can only regret the happy mooching hours of earlier times", writes Howard. He ponders whether our present age of mass anger and disgruntlement is partly a result of our expectations of instant gratification. "We sit, like so many privileged Aladdins, rubbing our smart lamps in full confidence that the cyber genie will appear in ripped trousers...
Howard Jacobson reflects on maleness in the aftermath of the Brett Kavanaugh story. "With every sniff and grimace" Howard writes of the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, "it wasn't sorrow or confusion we witnessed but petulance and menace, as though a prize bull had been cornered and in its fury knew only to kick out". "This is not a good time to be a man", he says. Producer: Adele Armstrong
Val McDermid argues that the sheer scale of tourism on a shoestring is destroying the very thing we crave when we travel. "Our great cities are year-round destinations", she writes, "but when the hordes arrive, cultural simplification is seldom far behind". She says we've grown used to cheap and cheerful instant gratification in many areas of our lives without any thought for the consequences. Producer: Adele Armstrong
Val McDermid asks if Sadiq Khan’s plan for a Glasgow-style crime reduction unit can have the same transformative effect in London as it did in Scotland. "If we change the script people live by", writes Val, "then surely we should be able to alter our outcomes". Producer: Adele Armstrong
Val McDermid argues that crime fiction isn't really about murder at all. "We shift people out of their comfort zones and make them squirm", she writes. "But not because we kill people". "It might be murder that sets the wheels in motion, but it's the time and place that lead us through the labyrinth to answers that are not always comfortable". Producer: Adele Armstrong
Adam Gopnik examines the issues raised by the row between Serena Williams and an umpire. "The question everyone is asking", writes Adam, is "would he have done the same to a man?" Producer: Adele Armstrong.
Adam Gopnik on why the prefixes we use speak volumes about us. The "pregnant prefix", Adam writes, "is now the giveaway of class identity - and class bound condescension. The "um"s, "like"s, "look"s, "well"s and particularly "so"s of the world tell all". Producer: Adele Armstrong.
"To stand in the corridor of a crowded locked ward in a contemporary British mental hospital" writes Will Self, "is still to feel oneself closer to Hogarth's hellish vision of Bedlam, than any enlightened healthcare". Will tells the disturbing story of what happened to a friend, recently detained in a London psychiatric hospital. Producer: Adele Armstrong.
Tom Shakespeare is downsizing. But what to do with his books? He points out that he has nothing like the magnitude of problem faced by the Argentine-Canadian author, Alberto Manguel, a few years ago when he downsized from his medieval presbytery in France to an apartment in New York and had to deal with 35,000 books! Or even the 3,000 books Penelope Lively wrote about recently. But Tom ponders how few of his thousand or so books will be enough to live with. Producer: Adele Armstrong....
Tom Shakespeare on why he rejects the idea of a bucket list. He proposes instead an idea dreamt up by one of his mates - a list that rhymes with bucket but begins with an F. "Let's call it a Forget-it-list" he says. Tom shares the top ten items on his Forget it List this week. Producer: Adele Armstrong.
As we near the end of four years of collective reflection on the First World War, Michael Morpurgo talks of the importance of never taking peace for granted. "We have been looking back, remembering, or trying to", he writes, "because remembering a time and a war that none of us can remember is hard". He discusses one particular plan - the dream of a WW1 soldier - to make a new pilgrims way in No Man's Land. Producer: Adele Armstrong.
Michael Morpurgo argues it's time to think again over Brexit. "It is surely time to accept that we have made a mistake", he writes, "that whichever way we voted, things are not turning out the way we expected". "Or are we too proud?" he asks. Producer: Adele Armstrong.
Michael Morpurgo on a new initiative to help refugee children. Michael says "it shames us" that Britain in recent years has done so little to help child refugees. "There are fine examples of how our predecessors have shown great kindness towards the suffering of child refugees", he writes. He argues that we now need to follow their example. Producer: Adele Armstrong.
John Gray argues that in the Brexit debate, few Remainers seem to have noticed the illiberal and fragmented Europe that has recently come into being. "Illiberal forces are advancing across the European continent", he writes, with hard right politics strengthening their hold in many countries. He says the idea that staying in the European Union is a way of protecting liberal values is simply an "illusion". Producer: Adele Armstrong.
Sarah Dunant on her uneasy conundrum over inheritance tax. "Like most intelligent beings", Sarah writes, "I'm passionate about addressing climate change for future generations. But my urgency of commitment also comes from an attachment to one in particular - the next". The desire to hand something on has always been with us, but it raises big moral dilemmas. Producer: Adele Armstrong.
Adam Gopnik sets out to determine the difference between cliche and universal truth. Via Homer, Shakespeare and the Beatles, Adam observes that "the deepest statements in literature are very near relations to the dumbest statements in life". How can Homer get away with writing twenty lines about laundry?! And end up with an epic poem of great beauty. Producer: Adele Armstrong.
Will Self argues that the past is not "a foreign country". He says we often have delusions about the past because of our "failure to grasp how our present shapes our hindsight". Producer: Adele Armstrong.
"What would it be like to consciously feel you were nothing but a robotic phenotype", asks Will Self, "pre-programmed to replicate its own integrated genotypic code then become...obsolete?" Taking the contemporary TV series "Westworld" as his starting point, Will explores consciousness, humanity and artificial intelligence. Producer: Adele Armstrong.
Will Self once wrote that he could no longer identify as a Jew at all. As anti-Semitism once again comes back to the centre stage of British political life, Will says he's had cause to rethink his position. "Once societies contain a certain proportion of active bigots", he writes, "all rational debate on such matters begins to shut down as everyone reverts - tediously, ineluctably - to type". Producer: Adele Armstrong.
"Cute mobile machines with arms, hands and big friendly eyes reminding you to take your next pill... or lifting people in and out of wheelchairs" - is this the way to look after a growing elderly population? Sarah Dunant reflects on the crisis in care for the elderly and wonders if artificial intelligence can provide a satisfactory answer. Producer: Adele Armstrong.
On 5th June 1968, Bobby Kennedy was assassinated. In one of the most famous editions of Radio 4's "Letter from America" - Alistair Cooke gave an eye witness account of the assassination. This is an edited version of the original talk - broadcast on Sunday 9th June 1968.
Amit Chaudhuri on why he believes modern movies have a "spiritual glumness". "Digitisation's subterranean agenda", he says, "is to repress natural light." Unlike old black and white films which were flooded in natural light, he sees the light of digitisation as a grey light. "We're meant to be distracted by drama, violence and special effects; but, crucially, enchantment is withheld from us." Producer: Adele Armstrong.
Sarah Dunant gives a personal view on Ireland's abortion referendum. She remembers one of her first jobs after university - working in a Pregnancy Advisory Service in London as a counsellor - and seeing many young women from the Republic of Ireland who'd come to England seeking an abortion. And the day, some years later, when she went back there, that time as a client.
"Calcutta was born old", writes Amit Chaudhuri. But restoration work of old buildings in the city, he says, "is now often based on the assumption that an old building...must have once looked new, or should have". He says restoration in Calcutta - and in many other cities around the world - must stop fetishizing the new.
"My problem with words is something I have never written down or spoken out about". The writer, Stella Tillyard, talks about her "battle" with dyslexia - from her childhood to now. She vividly describes the "gremlin that takes me by the hand, pulls my confidence away, and makes my heart beat too fast when I have - as now - to read aloud". Producer: Adele Armstrong.
Tom Shakespeare ponders why disabled sexuality is still so often taboo. "Sexuality is a human right", he points out....and says we must set aside the notion that disabled people have "special needs" when it comes to sexuality. "We have all the normal needs of non-disabled people". Producer: Adele Armstrong.
"The past is concretised and solidified in things", writes Stella Tillyard "and they vibrate with the experience of their use". Stella tells the story of a small Italian Museum - the Museum of Deportation and Resistance - and reflects on how we remember the past. Producer: Adele Armstrong.
