We chase away the dark. Since the industrial revolution humanity has been progressively shortening and lighting up the night. Cheap LED lights now turn suburban gardens into fairgrounds and industrial units into film sets. Our main roads are visible from space. But the darkness that we have abolished was nature’s essential counterbalance, which ecosystems needed to thrive. Many species are suffering, and few more than the glow worm.
The Met Police chief, Mark Rowley, recently announced that his force would be releasing more bodycam footage as standard. It used to be published very rarely and only following the conclusion of criminal proceedings. The move is aimed at increasing transparency and highlighting the realities of frontline policing. It could also be seen as an example of another legacy institution making the shift to short-form video content.
Emma Hayes has described the difference between men’s and women’s football as cortisol v. dopamine. Under her management between 2012 and 2024, Chelsea won the Women’s Super League seven times, the FA Cup five times and the League Cup twice. In 2024 Hayes was recruited by the US national team and they won gold at the Olympics. I was delighted when I heard that she’d be part of the ITV line-up for their coverage of the men’s World Cup this year. But – as a lot of people have been asking on social media – why did the set designers feel the need to put her in a kitchen?
Wearing a football jersey and waving the national flag, Abelardo de la Espriella trotted out the quasi-fascist trinity from the days of Operation Condor, ‘Dios, patria y familia’, promising to end gay marriage and abortion, introduce megaprisons on the Bukele model, cut government spending by 40 per cent by eliminating ministries and privatising state enterprises, and slash whatever taxes and regulations remain on trade, production and commerce to attract US capital. Trump would ‘co-pilot’ his government, he said. Bernie Moreno, the Republican senator for Ohio, said Colombia will be at the centre of the Shield of the Americas.
Bill Clinton called the White House the ‘crown jewel of the federal penitentiary system’ but that’s not the way Jill Biden saw it. On becoming first lady, she was transported into a ‘magical place’, an enchanted castle where wishes could be conjured into being. It wasn’t just that she could call down to the kitchen in the middle of the night and summon a cheeseburger, but that the building itself seemed to anticipate her desires.
Andy Burnham has shown an awareness that the argument for more devolution, for the rebuilding of local government and the rebalancing of the country away from Westminster, goes hand in hand with a critique of Britain’s neoliberal, privatised economy. The British state was unmade by the collapse of the municipal project and can only be remade by its revival.
‘How Dirty Old Father Thames Was Whitewashed’ (‘Punch’, 31 July 1858)
The Thames may be cleaner than when it was declared biologically dead in 1957, but other rivers are close to ecological collapse, suffocated by algae, fungi and weeds that bloom in the run-off from industrial farming. On 1 June, Natalie Bennett, a former leader of the Green Party, waded into this slurry with the first reading of a private member’s bill in the House of Lords. The Nature’s Rights Bill calls for Nature (capitalised) to be recognised in law as ‘a legal subject and rights-bearing entity’.