The Joy of Six 1396

"Opportunities to object are limited. Roadblocks and checkpoints have been established at either end of the only lane in and out of the village. Cars are searched with sniffer dogs and ID demanded. All footpaths have been closed off, and unless you live here you stand no chance of getting in. Secret Service agents keep a watchful eye on the hordes of police who are doing their bidding. In short, we’ve been completely sealed off from the outside world." An anonymous contributor to The Oxford Clarion describes life in the Cotswold village of Dean during JD Vance's visit.

Shaun Thompson was wrongly identified as a criminal by new police cameras. He explains why, if this technology is rolled out across the country, or is used at this year’s Notting Hill Carnival, as planned, such injustices will disproportionately affect Black people.

"Climate action does not just need good policy, it also needs good psychology. Understanding and addressing how people perceive climate measures is essential to avoid backlash and build lasting public consent." Wouter Poortinga looks at the psychology of winning public support for climate policies.

"The conference circuit, once lively with questioning and dialogue, now contends with a new problem: the 'ghost academic'. These are scholars whose names appear in conference programmes and proceedings, whose abstracts are listed, yet who never turn up to deliver their presentations. They accrue the CV line, but never share the substance." Anne Tierney and Doug Specht say the obsession with metrics in academia is imperilling the tradition open intellectual exchange that was the hallmark of scholarly life.

JacquiWine on Rose Macaulay's The World My Wilderness. Here is Macaulay's description of a London bombsite: "They climbed out through the window, and made their way about the ruined, jungled waste, walking along broken lines of wall, diving into the cellars and caves of the underground city, where opulent merchants had once stored their wine, where gaily tiled rooms opened into one another and burrowed under great eaves of overhanging earth, where fosses and ditches ran, bright with marigolds and choked with thistles, through one-time halls of commerce, and yellow ragwort waved its gaudy banners over the ruins of defeated businessmen."

Patrick Glen looks back to the Isle of Wight Festival of 1970: "The lineup included the Who, Miles Davis, Joan Baez, Joni Mitchell, the Moody Blues, Jethro Tull, Sly and the Family Stone and Gilberto Gil; Jimi Hendrix played one of his last performances before his death."