A sneak preview of the new, more realistic EastEnders scripts, as seen by Tom Chivers.
Month: January 2014
La Brana man: there’s a lot to learn from old blue eyes
The cave-man from 7,000 years ago is not so different from the city-dwellers of today Seven thousand years ago, in what is now north-west Spain, there lived a strange-looking man. Strange, at least, by modern standards: though dark-skinned and swarthy, with black or dark brown hair, he had jarringly blue eyes. La Brana 1, as this…
In defence of Maajid Nawaz, blasphemy and (funny) cartoons of Mohammed
I’ve been a fan of the webcomic Jesus and Mo for years. The idea is a simple one: the two religious figureheads J Christ and Mohammed share a house and discuss matters of religious philosophy, often in arguments with a wise atheist barmaid at their local. It’s funnier than I’ve made that sound. It is,…
Obama says cannabis is no more dangerous than alcohol. He’s wrong: it’s far safer
President Barack Obama has said something hugely controversial. “As has been well documented, I smoked pot as a kid, and I view it as a bad habit and a vice, not very different from the cigarettes that I smoked as a young person up through a big chunk of my adult life,” he said. “I…
Hilary Mantel and the art of missing the point
Around this time last year, Hilary Mantel infuriated a certain kind of tabloid newspaper and a certain kind of tabloid-pandering prime minister by saying some things about the Duchess of Cambridge. Her long, subtle speech was clearly a comment on the media coverage of our young queen-to-be – that the real person is imprisoned in…
You don’t have to be mad to be a comic, but it can help get a laugh
Comedians are mad. That is a largely uncontested fact. The idea of standing in a badly lit basement bar in front of 150 drunk strangers, armed with nothing but a microphone and some pre-written mother-in-law jokes and trying to make them laugh is just a crazy thing to do. If you’ve ever been to a…
Is there such a thing as a ‘Muslim child’?
The Times reported at the weekend that the “Muslim birthrate” is significantly higher than the British average, and that “Almost a tenth of babies and toddlers in England and Wales are Muslim.” Richard Dawkins then wrote a letter to the newspaper, saying that “Babies and toddlers are too young to know what they think about…
Kew’s ‘codebreaker’ mourns his lily
Carlos Magdalena ‘has done things no one else can do’ but a thief has put at risk his work to save a tiny, rare plant. Tom Chivers reports In a little warm puddle in rural Rwanda, a tiny flower used to grow; a water lily, barely half an inch across. It was discovered in 1985…
Sugar addiction: the best way to increase human freedom may be stricter laws
Britain is fat; about half of all adults are considered “overweight” – and nearly a quarter obese – by body mass index (BMI), the standard measure. I get called “slim”, from time to time, but my BMI (weight in kilos divided by the square of my height in metres: 1.8 metres, 82 kilos, BMI 24.8)…
Printing new lives: how 3D printing could change the developing world
Technology gets a bad rap, too often. Twitter is reducing our attention spans, computer games are making us violent, texting is ruining our ability to spell, Facebook is turning us all into sociopaths or something. Generally speaking, the people complaining about this are doing so by typing it into their fantastically useful multipurpose computing tools,…
UK weather: it’s just a storm, not global warming
Every time the weather does something, somewhere, we break out into the same argument, about what it means for the climate change debate. Cold weather in the US, hurricanes in the Philippines, droughts and heatwaves in Australia, and, of course, drenching storms in Britain: is it caused by (or does it disprove) anthropogenic climate change?…
NYT columnist: ‘I smoked weed when I was young. But I grew out of it, so it should stay illegal’
[ooyala id=”E4bXRlajqi_fSN6K4KNnNRvP1SeNU4rK” ] I quite like David Brooks, the New York Times columnist, usually. He seems wise and not mad, which are really my two chief criteria for opinion writers. But he’s written a startlingly smug, patronising and complacent piece in today’s NYT in response to the legalisation of marijuana in Colorado, and since I…
Tom Chivers 