"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.
"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."
My own Toby Young anecdote, supporting what Mic Wright wrote. I met him on his first day at Oxford – he was reading PPE in the year below me at the same college. The tradition was for the second years to throw a party for the ‘freshers’ to welcome them and help them mingle. And it happened that my room was chosen for the party. Toby turned up, looked haughtily around the room and strode over to my record player, yanked off the record that was playing (“Papa’s Got A Brand New Bag” as it happens) and said, “Haven’t you got anything good?” The record was scratched beyond repair and I was too stunned to reply, but he soon left the party, declaring loudly, “This isn’t much fun – I’m off to find a shag.”
ReplyDeleteOf course, he refused to replace the record, but I managed to avoid him for most of the next two years – as did nearly all of his college contemporaries, who couldn’t stand him. He’d be off elsewhere, ingratiating himself with the upper-class cocaine set.
Many years later, I’d been having a lunchtime pint in The Queens in Primrose Hill with a colleague and we were just walking back to work past Lemonia, the Greek restaurant on Regent’s Park Road, when I spied Toby, dining at one of the tables outside with a middle-aged woman who could have been his agent or perhaps his aunt. I seized my chance, walked up to the table and said loudly, “Hello, Toby. You never replaced that record of mine you scratched, you c..."
I've been following politics since 1981 and I used to edit a School Buildings magazine. Toby Young's Free Schools idea is the single worst thing I've come across in public life in living memory.
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