Saturday, December 05, 2020

Six of the Best 981

"It didn’t matter if many of the voices expressing these opinions online were paid for by multiple accounts, boosted by dark digital analytics, or indeed often outright replicants run by troll farms hosted and funded by hostile foreign countries. If the Supreme Court had ruled that corporations were people, why not networks of bots and troll armies?" Peter Jukes explains the rise and fall of the dark money and online culture war strategies that put Donald Trump in the White House and pushed Britain out of the EU.

Vince Cable looks at what may happen to British farming after Brexit.

"The UK is the only country in Europe that still has formal public exams at 16. Of course, it made sense when the majority of young people left school at 16, as the results helped them find a pathway into work or into the next stage of education. However, today, between the ages of 16 and 18, all young people have to be in education or work-based training." Mary Reid calls for GCSEs to be scrapped.

Sarah Coomer looks back to Christmas Day 1973 and the BBC's adaptation of M.R. James's ghost story Lost Hearts: "Stephen, played by Simon Gipps Kent, an actor who was fated himself never to see his thirties, has a refreshingly realistic lack of agency as opposed to the oft-seen ass-kicking young hero - he is entirely at the mercy of the adult world he is forced to encounter so prematurely."

A London Inheritance visits the Post Office underground railway that used to hurry the mail between London sorting offices and railway termini.

A Netflix documentary tells the story of a miraculous cat sanctuary on the Greek island of Syros, reports Patricia Claus.

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