The Joy of Six 1143

"As Putin progressed down the line John immediately said, 'John Sweeney BBC. Would you tell us why you are murdering people in Ukraine'. The President had to answer in English because his interpreter was so taken aback that he was unable to.  After the questioning John and his cameraman were taken into a cellar where he was repeatedly punched in the stomach before being released." Richard Kemp listens to John Sweeney at a dinner at the Local Government Conference.

Josh Marshall takes us inside Twitter's 'extended weekend of doom'.

Justin Ling asks what will happen to Putin's useful idiots without Putin: "Just outside Moscow, Russian migration lawyer Timur Beslangurov is looking for residents for his new Potemkin Village. But unlike the fake one supposedly constructed by Russian nobleman Grigory Potemkin to impress Catherine the Great, Beslangurov’s village and its inhabitants will be quite real. Planned for the Serpukhov district south of Moscow, it is to be a home for Western expatriates who are tired of the “radical values” of their supposed democracies."

"Twin studies are still widely used and may remain useful in trying to find out the heritability of illnesses and other physical outcomes where the environmental component is unlikely to differ between identical and fraternal twins. But there is a huge gap between attaching a heritability percentage for, say, macular degeneration, and for something like IQ or academic performance, where it’s impossible to untangle the interlocking influences of biology and culture." Gavin Evans on the problems with psychology's favourite way of studying the influence of genes on behaviour.

Anna North mourns the decline of American playtime: "Prior to the 1980s, parenting advice had often emphasized the importance of independence - allowing children to walk to school on their own, play unsupervised, and hold part-time jobs when they were old enough. Starting in that decade, however, conventional wisdom began to shift toward the idea that children should be watched all the time."

The problems with the MCC's concept of the 'spirit of cricket' are analysed by Andrew Iris.