The Joy of Six 1563

"Toby Young stole his status and career. And in every sinew of his body, he knows that. For most people, imposter syndrome is an irrational insecurity; Toby Young should feel that way. He was an imposter at Oxford, he was an imposter in journalism, an imposter in New York, an imposter in education, and most recently has set himself up as the boss of an imposter 'Union', acting as if anyone can genuinely call themselves General Secretary." Apart from that, Mic Wright has a lot of time for him in this 2020 piece.

"Perhaps the most depressing thing of all is that just when we need to be mustering competent researchers who can undertake the careful and time-consuming work of reviewing new submissions, academic publishers are pursuing rapid growth, which will provide ever more opportunities for fraudsters to find an outlet for their work." Dorothy Bishop finds that the rise of AI is making it increasingly difficult to identify fraudulent scientific journal papers.

Samantha Ward considers how climate change will affect zoos.

Anna Merlan salutes the vision of Paulina Borsook, who foresaw the right-wing, anti-government path that the moguls of Silicon Valley, who were once hailed as liberals, would take in her 2000 book Cyberselfish.

"The Venice-set Don’t Look Now remains one of Roeg’s most admired and influential works, and one of the few to be warmly received on arrival. An intelligent, harrowing and provocative adaptation of Daphne du Maurier’s supernatural thriller in which a married couple (movingly portrayed by Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland) use a working assignment in a wintry Venice as an attempt to overcome a recent tragedy in which their young daughter has drowned, the film hints at the horrors that underlie domesticity in Roeg’s characteristically imagistic style." Jason Wood surveys the work of Nicloas Roeg.

Chris Arnade visits the beautiful, lonely city of Perth: "Right next to my apartment is a tidy pocket park, with playground, dog walk, bathroom, and a garden of plants that only could be found in Western Australia. It’s idyllic and as I passed it my first night I imagined spending my week sitting there, reading, watching kids play, making friends with the retirees, but since then I’ve never seen anyone in it other than solitary morning walkers anxiously scolding their dog for not defecating fast enough."