'We are a poor country, where everything is expensive, despite what the Tories say'

Rishi Sunak’s pointless revolution

Tom McTague for UnHerd

For 13 years, Conservative Party leaders "have traipsed up to one party conference after another attempting to spin the reality away: that we are a poor country where everything is expensive", writes Tom McTague for UnHerd. Walking around Manchester this week "was a grim reminder of this paradoxical reality" that the British state is "both distant and impotent; the city's successes its own, but its future in someone else's hands". Outside the southeast, "Manchester is the home of Britain's great hope of economic success", he writes, but "maybe it is also where it goes to die".

Read more

Down With Efficiency! (When We Get Around to It.)

Parker Richards for The New York Times
"We are no longer achieving an acceptable level of whimsy," writes Parker Richards in The New York Times. "In even the smallest corners of daily life, we are asked to abandon delicious inefficiencies – the archaic flights of fancy, the capricious nonsense – in favour of a totalizing commitment to the false idols of logic, regularity and efficacy", he adds. But a "life whimsically lived, a society whimsically (dis)ordered, is one that promotes freedom of thought, even as it knows many of the freely found thoughts won't be all that useful".

The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

Read more

The 'fit but fat' research finally validates what women like me knew: being obese does not mean unhealthy

Emily Morris for the iNews site

"Research showing that a quarter of middle-aged women are 'fit but fat' is not news to me, a fit but fat 40 year old woman," writes Emily Morris for the iNews site. It may, however, "be a surprise to anyone who has ever viewed fat people as weak, lazy or lesser". She says that "the more people understand that 'fit and fat' is possible, the less fat people will be on the receiving end of tired, old-fashioned jokes and prejudice that are often thinly-veiled as 'concern'".

Read more

There will never be no wrong VAR calls – but is having refs in charge the right one?

Max Rushden for The Guardian

"We don't love referees, so our openness to forgive them for erring is far less than it is for players," writes Max Rushden in The Guardian. But "officials are constantly harangued by players, by managers, by the crowd", add to that the "relentless abuse on social media" and maybe "they’d make fewer mistakes if none of that happened". It's certainly "worth trying before the good ones (leave) in search of a quieter life", he concludes.

Read more