Six of the Best 378

The Dish addresses David Cameron: "Thank you for clearing the air on these matters of surveillance. You have now demonstrated beyond any reasonable doubt that these anti-terror provisions are capable of rank abuse. Unless some other facts emerge, there is really no difference in kind between you and Vladimir Putin. You have used police powers granted for anti-terrorism and deployed them to target and intimidate journalists deemed enemies of the state."

Why is the membership of political parties declining? Jennie Rigg explains.

Rigged looks at the work of Ivan Illich.

"Efforts to re-engineer the young-male imagination are doomed to fail, but they will succeed spectacularly in at least one way. They will send a clear and unmistakable message to millions of schoolboys: You are not welcome in school." On Time Ideas, Christina Hoff Summers argues that school has become too hostile to boys.

The Virtual Victorian pays tribute to Alice Guy-Blache - "an astonishingly talented film-maker who influenced the earliest days of the art".

"The District's a very branchy sort of line, with trains shuttling off in all sorts of directions. But until 1959 there was another branch line, a stumpy little curve heading less than a mile through Acton. Whatever were they thinking?" Diamond Geezer traces the line from Acton Town to South Acton.