The Joy of Six 1042

"Sometimes state delivery is best, but how has the country which once developed a thriving mutual and cooperative sector managed to lose so much of it? The loss of so many building societies during the 1980s/90s was a backwards step, for example. The demise of cooperatives (particularly in poorer/working-class areas) another." Tony Robertson is a social liberal, not a socialist.

Polly Curtis has spent three years investigating how the state makes decisions on behalf of children at risk": That is potentially nearly 27,000 children in the care system who, with the right support, might not have needed to be there. We are taking children away before we have done everything we can as a society to support a family to stay together safely." 

"People stopped laughing at Bottomley’s jokes only when they grasped the source of his money. It was not enough that he lied or that he enriched himself. They needed to see that he was rich because he stole from them." David Renton piece on the conviction of the disgraced Liberal MP Horatio Bottomley feels relevant to politics today..

Rhianna Evans says Tony Hancock should be revered as one of the founders of modern British comedy. "If you had to pinpoint the first well-known British sitcom, the one that broke the mould, the one that still holds relevance to this day, it would surely be Hancock's Half Hour."

"It was clear that Sully followed in no one’s footsteps. This uniqueness unsettled reviewers when her books first came out; now, it was what intrigued me. Even relative to my own extensive knowledge of neglected writers, the extent to which Sully’s work had vanished seemed astonishing." Brad Bigelow on the strange disappearance of the novelist Kathleen Sully.

Matthew Shallenberger argues in a Twitter thread, argues that the whole "the NYT ruined Wordle" thing is a case study in confirmation bias.