My peculiar hobby is cutting things out of newspapers. I suppose this is a bit like grasping at life as it speeds by, and I don't want to just forget it all, and neither do I want to be ignorant of the world I live in. I have just finished filing these articles.
Category 1 Interesting books - reviews of books I might read
A Possible Life - Faulks
How Much is enough? - Skidelsky
Ancient light - Banville
The Better Angels of Our Nature - Pinker
The Betrayal - Dunmore
et almost infinitum!
Category 2 Current concerns
Junk culture, hacking, antidepressants - do they work? - the growing gender imbalance (Germaine Greer said it would not make women more valuable, only increase sex-trafficking and prostitution), scrap metal stealing, Portugal experiments with decriminalising possession of small amounts of drugs, the great Pacific Garbage patch (a pool of rubbish twice the size of Texas), John Lewis management, how many nuclear warheads there are in the world, the Catholic silence on child abuse, the Royal Mail and how badly it has been managed, tsunamis, running the railways, GM food , libraries, plastic surgery, our dependence on money from Qatar, how to look after people with dementia - a model from the Netherlands, the hunger of the North Koreans, the death of the newspaper, CCTV nation, the scramble for territory in the arctic, is Fairtrade a good idea?, microgeneration of domestic power, the effects of porn.
Category 3 Health and Science.
Roman Britain was warmer, drinking chocolate is good for the memory, domestic cats kill billions of items of wildlife a year, pop music is louder than it used to be, should surgeons take Modafinil?, Calpol is linked to asthma, sperm can be grown in a lab, college kids have less empathy than they used to have, the Nazis gave Pervatin to their troops - now called crystal meth., older parents are happier, aspirin is good for you but not everyone should take it all the time, premmy babies are more likely to develop autism.
Category 4 Politics
A surprising number of my concerns turn out to be American. Working conditions in the iPad factory in China, middle-class tax breaks, slackers, sexual harassment by top men (like Arnie), oil pipeline, Obama loves covert operations, Guantanamo Bay, social mobility is difficult in the US, the corrupt Putin regime, Germany's economy based on mini-jobs; its efforts to boost the fertility rate. In the UK: abortion of girl babies in the UK, fixing the rate of UK gilts so yields are low thus robbing savers of decent interest, Climategate - scientists deleting unwelcome data, Britain's children are unhappy and wallowing in materialism.
Category 5
Human interest stories.
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