S2 Newspaper Article Homework

You will be expected to complete one article every week.

1 Article Questions

1) Thinking about the article as a whole, give one reason why the title is effective. (1)

2a) Which one of these best describes the purpose of the article:

A. To persuade the reader that…

B. To entertain & amuse the reader.

C. To criticise…

D. To inform the reader about… (1)

2b) Quote 3 words or phrases that helped you work out what the purpose was. Then, explain how they helped you. (6)

3a) What is the target audience of the article? You must write one answer down for each of the following: AGE GENDER NATIONALITY INTERESTS (4)

3b) What about the article made you think it was for this audience? (4)

4) In your own words, summarise the main points the writer makes in the article. Give 3 bullet points. (3)

Remember, POINTS are not the FACTS we are given. They are the wider ideas the writer is highlighting to get their point across.

5) Use a dictionary to write down the meanings of the words in bold. (1)

6) What is the writer’s opinion on the topic? (1)

7) Identify one of the writer’s uses of imagery or sentence structure. Explain why they were effective. (2)

8) In what way is the final paragraph an effective conclusion to the article? (2)

(25 marks) 2 Why are high school memories burned into our brains?

Trapped in a holding pen of teenagers brimming with hormones, we experience emotions so strong they monopolise our recollections

For better or worse, many of us never forget high school: the unrequited romantic crushes, chronic embarrassment, desperate struggles for popularity, sexual awakening, parental pressure and, above all else, competition – social, athletic, academic.

There’s even an entire genre of entertainment that revolves around high school. Beverly Hills 90210, Mean Girls, Heathers, The Breakfast Club and Fast Times at Ridgemont High all revisit the conflict and angst of these years.

What is it about this period of our lives that makes it seem more meaningful and memorable than any other?

My research experience as an evolutionary psychologist leads me to believe that many factors interact to make our teenage memories so vivid. But the main driver is the collision between the hardwiring of our brains that took place across several million of years of evolution and the odd social bubble created by high school, which poses an unprecedented social challenge to our prehistoric minds.

In other words, the world that we evolved to be successful in (a small, stable group of interrelated people of various ages) is very different from the holding pen full of teenagers brimming with hormones that populate our world during the high school years.

Some look back on high school as the best time of their life and pine for those “good old days”. Whether or not this was actually the case, it turns out there may have been some evolutionary advantages to having a rosy view of the past.

But most of us remember high school with an emotional mixture of longing, regret, joy and embarrassment. And strong emotions equal strong memories; even the music from those years gets imprinted on our brain like nothing that comes later.

Memory researchers have, in fact, identified something called “the reminiscence bump”, which shows that our strongest memories come from things that happened to us between the ages of 10 and 30.

What is it about this time of life that makes it stand out from the rest of our years? Part of it is undoubtedly due to changes in the brain’s sensitivity to certain types of information during adolescence. Emotions signal the brain that important events are happening, and the teen years are 3 chock full of important social feedback about one’s skills, attractiveness, status and desirability as a mate. This is precisely the stuff we need to pay attention to in order to successfully play the cards we have been dealt and to become socially and reproductively successful.

Memory research may offer hints about why the mental snapshots of our high school years remain so vivid even decades later. But evolutionary psychology can also help explain why so much meaning is attached to these years and why they play such an important role in who we become.

For example, there’s a reason teenagers often strive to be popular.

As far as scientists can tell, our prehistoric forebears lived in relatively small groups. Most people would live out their entire life in this group, and one’s social standing within it was determined during adolescence. How much one was admired as a warrior or hunter, how desirable one was perceived to be as a mate and how much trust and esteem was accorded to one by others – all of this was sorted out in young adulthood. A person deemed to be a loser at 18 was unlikely to rise to a position of prominence at 40. Thus, from an evolutionary perspective, the competition of the teen years had lifelong repercussions.

Of course, today, those who have unsavoury high school experiences can move to new places after graduation and start over. However, even though we may be consciously aware of this (to the extent that we are consciously aware of anything when we are teenagers), the psychological buttons that get pushed in the adolescent brain make us become consumed with our social lives during this period.

Popularity can become an obsession, since you’ll be ranked against the people in your own age cohort for the rest of your life. After all, your status as an adult primarily depends upon how you stack up compared with them, not with others.

Also, strong pressures to conform ensure that you do not stray too far from a friend group’s values. Ostracism from the group in prehistoric times was tantamount to a death sentence.

It all requires forging alliances and demonstrating loyalty to others. The result is a splintering of the social world into competing cliques that grind each other up in the gears of the social hierarchy. Back home, conflict with parents is usually inevitable. Parents want their children to succeed, but they usually have a more long-term perspective than that of their teen.

So the things that the parent thinks that the child should be concerned with (preparing for a career and developing important life skills) and the things that the child is emotionally driven to actually be concerned with (being popular and having fun) are often at odds. Parents usually realise where the parent-offspring tension comes from. Kids don’t.

Meanwhile, hormones fuel the sort of “showing off” that would have increased one’s attractiveness in early societies. In young men we still reward, to some extent, the things that would have been essential for success in hunting and combat thousands of years ago: the willingness to take risks, fighting ability, speed and the ability to throw with velocity and accuracy. Young women will showcase their youth and fertility. Beauty, unfortunately, continues to be a significant criterion by which they are judged.

In earlier times, because you had a personal connection with nearly everyone in your group, the ability to remember details about the temperament, predictability and past behaviour of peers had a

4 huge payoff. There would have been little use for a mind designed to engage in abstract statistical thinking about large numbers of strangers. In today’s world, while it is still important to keep tabs on known individuals, we also face new challenges. We interact with strangers on a daily basis, so there’s a need to predict how they’ll behave: will this person try to swindle me or can he or she be trusted? Is this someone important that I should get to know or a nobody that I can safely ignore?

It’s a task many of us find difficult because our brains weren’t really wired to do this, and we fall back on cognitive shortcuts, such as stereotyping, as a way to cope.

Natural selection instead shaped an innate curiosity about specific people – and a memory to store this information. We needed to remember who treated us well and who didn’t, and the more emotional the memory, the less likely we are to forget it. It’s tough to forget when the person you thought of as a close friend publicly snubbed you, or the time that you caught another trusted friend flirting with your boyfriend or girlfriend.

The result is a strong propensity for holding grudges. It protects us from being taken advantage of again but can also make for some uncomfortable, anxiety-inducing moments at high school reunions.

To further complicate things, high school is probably the last time in life when people of all sorts are thrown together for no other reason than they are the same age and live in the same area. Yes, high schools are often segregated by economic background and race. But most high schoolers will still encounter more day-to-day diversity than they will later in life.

After high school, studies have shown that people begin to sort themselves out according to intelligence, political values, occupational interests and a wide range of other social screening devices.

At the same time, however, the people you knew in high school remain your default group for engaging in social comparison.

According to “social comparison theory”, we figure out how good we are and develop a sense of personal worth by comparing ourselves with others; the more similar those others are, the better we can gauge our own strengths and weaknesses. Because your high school classmates will always be the same age as you – and because they started out in the same place – there’s inherently a degree of interest in finding out what happened to them later in life, if for no other reason than to see how your own life stacks up.

Given all this, it’s no wonder that the English Romantic poet Robert Southey once wrote that the “the first 20 years are the longest half of your life, no matter how long you might live”.

Written by Frank McAndrew for The Guardian

5 Cincinnati zoo: every mother knows it could happen to her

Even the best parents can’t prevent kids from hurting themselves and those around them. So why do we continue to blame them when accidents happen?

Following the death of a gorilla in a Cincinnati zoo – shot after a four-year-old entered its enclosure – there has been a large outcry from many wondering why the mother of the boy was not being held responsible for the entire situation. After all, if she’d been doing her job as a mother, there’s no way this would have happened, right?

If you believe that, you either don’t know anything about raising small children, or you’ve been blessed with unnaturally docile kids.

I clearly remember running out to my mailbox for 20 seconds while my 18-month-old was watching Little Einsteins, only to find that he had dashed up and locked the door behind me. No amount of pleading would get him to unlock the door. My keys and cell phone were inside with him.

He was left alone with every light socket, every cleaning agent, every climbable bookcase - everything that we are constantly grabbing from our child’s hands at the last minute – for a full 20 minutes before I was able to get a maintenance man to let me into my apartment. That he was simply sitting on the floor playing with his toys when I reentered the apartment is a small miracle.

I remember how quickly my sons could dash away from me and into a busy street after a suddenly dropped ball, missing incoming cars by mere inches as I wildly grabbed for them and flung them out of the path of death.

I remember these moments and many more so clearly because I, like many mothers, have replayed them over and over in my head, unable to stop the movie of worst case scenarios that could have been from torturing me. Unable to stop berating myself over how close my failures as a mother had come to costing me the most precious beings in my life.

I shared these moments and more on Facebook on Monday night, in the face of the brutal public shaming of the mother of the 4-year-old boy who had managed to find the one child- sized entryway into the gorilla enclosure. I knew I was not alone.

6 Soon, I had dozens of responses from other parents, sharing their close calls. A mother whose small child had grabbed a stool and climbed out a second-story window. A handful of stories of children who had momentarily disappeared from their parents in malls and grocery stores. Near drownings, poisonings and stabbings. Broken bones, stitches and concussions – all on a loving parent’s watch. The stories poured out of parents, mostly mothers, with a sense of relief – they were finally able to say the thing that we never admit in public.

No amount of good parenting can guarantee our kids’ safety.

It is a terrifying thing to admit, but it’s true. Small children have a death wish. They have an innate sense of curiosity matched with the inability to comprehend danger. Add to that small size, surprisingly quick movement, and a creativity forgotten in adulthood, and you have a recipe for never-ending possible disaster.

For all of human history, it has been a gamble as to whether we could keep our precious offspring alive. So much is completely out of our control. Illness, the elements, war, famine – it’s bad enough when you don’t add in things like jumping off staircases, running into traffic, or trying to make household objects into working parachutes. The mortality of our children is an unbearable reality, so when the worst does happen, to admit that it could be so random and uncontrollable is unacceptable. We are people, dammit, we are in control. Someone must be to blame otherwise it means that none of us are safe.

And, predictably, we blame mothers. The pressure on mothers to be ever vigilant, never tired, never unhappy, never overwhelmed and never distracted is an impossible and dangerous expectation. The idea that we should be able to “manage” our children, as if they are reasonable adults and not semi-feral animals covered in germs and fuelled by destruction, is laughable. But we perpetrate these myths, and whenever the truth becomes unavoidable, we shame the mother instead of looking at the situation honestly.

This shame does nothing more than torture mothers with the knowledge that, according to society, they are bad mothers. It prevents them from asking for help and from having the sort of conversations about the dangerous situations our children find themselves in that could indeed make our children safer.

If you have a child, you know that feeling of panic when in a split second your precious baby had endangered themselves. If you don’t have children, know that you were the source of that same panic to your parents multiple times. Imagine the horror movie likely running through in constant loop of the mind of the mother of that 4 year old boy – of what did happen and the even worse horrors that could have been. And show a little empathy.

By Ijeoma Oluo for The Guardian

7 How Captain America Made Chris Evans a True Movie Hero

No one was sure where the actor was headed, until Marvel made it clear.

Strip away the super-soldier serum and the star-spangled tights, and the story of Steve Rogers, as told in the comics and the recent Marvel films with Chris Evans, including this weekend's Avengers: Age of Ultron, is one about a man given an opportunity to change his life. It is a story about a man with gifts, both unrealised and undiscovered, who comes to actualise his potential and become something more. Something great. This is not just the story of Steve Rogers. It is also the story of actor Chris Evans becoming Captain America.

Before Chris Evans picked up the super-soldier's shield, he was a talent with untapped potential of his own. With turns in The Perfect Score, Fantastic Four, The Losers, and The Nanny Diaries, there was undoubtedly something very watchable about Evans. His all- American, high-school-quarterback looks, his class-clown knack for smart-assery, and his sincere charm, made the actor immensely likeable onscreen.

But while he had talent, Evans wasn't exactly exceptional. Part of that is that his given virtues made him somewhat indistinguishable from a particular class of actors: Ryan Reynolds-like hunky smart-alecks who tended to be defaulted to roles as rom-com love interests, or the wise-cracking comic relief in action movies. It didn't help that Evans' attempts at serious roles (London, Street Kings, Puncture, or Sunshine) tended to be dramatically unconvincing—and tended to go unwatched at the box office. His performances often felt more as if he was playing at emotions, not actually embodying them. You looked into his eyes—where so much of powerful acting is conveyed—and you could only see Evans trying to be someone. Not actually being them.

It's not that it wasn't possible Evans might show us more one day. It just seemed hard to tell when Evans would find a role, and a groove, that would realise whatever gifts we had yet to see. If, frankly, those gifts were there at all.

Then Captain America came along.

Just as sickly Steve Rogers was given a chance to become the best version of himself in Captain America: The First Avenger, so too was Chris Evans. When Evans put on the red, white, and blue outfit, he realised what we had been waiting to see. It's not just that it's a role that deviates from his past ones. It brings out the best in him. Now he, and the Captain America movies, have become the consistent high points of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Avengers: Age of Ultron is no exception. When you look in Evans' eyes now, you see him 8 being Captain America, not trying to be. There's genuine emotion there when required (say, when he's bedside with the dementia-suffering love of his life), as is intelligence (in action mode he has the constantly roaming eyes of a military tactician).

He also embodies Cap in a more literal sense: his physical bulk. But the more impressive accomplishment is that instead of using his physique as a shortcut to onscreen presence, he fills that formidable figure with an almost physical weight of authority. An authority that tends to evoke a kind of patriarchal, Father Knows Best quality, and a compatible tone that Evans continually manages to summon from his car hood-sized chest—despite the actor only being 33 years old. (He brought a similar ahead-of-his-years gravitas to his lead turn in last year's beloved international action movie Snowpiercer.) It's always there, whether Cap is chastising his teammates for language, improvising and assigning orders, or offering ideological lectures like "This isn't freedom. This is fear" in Captain America: The Winter Soldier, or "Every time someone tries to end a war before it starts, innocent lives die" in The Avengers: Age of Ultron.

It is, however, not just Captain America's fatherly sternness that Evans performs so well. It can be difficult to get the tone of Cap right, because he's both military bravado and Boy Scout innocence; gruff tactical efficiency and Atticus Finch empathy. But Evans nails the warmth of Cap with the same timbre of sincerity and conviction. (I swear he drops his voice an octave for this role to achieve that.) That element of the role offers a natural fit for Evans' abilities. His knack for boyish humour and charm are perfect for Captain America's old- fashioned good-naturedness and the lingering insecurity of a former 98-lb weakling. He's as believable nervously asking his neighbour out as he is gently ribbing his brothers- in-arms, or doling out mid-battle gallows humour. Chris Evans' Captain America is, in other words, a role that may fluctuate in tone, but never wavers in its performance. Like Rogers, Evans brings his innate gifts to his newly acquired ones.

There's a great scene in The Winter Soldier where Captain America knows he's about to be attacked by 20 men in a moving elevator, and says, "Before we get started, does anyone want to get out?" Evans performs it convincingly with equal amounts of mild boyish glee, amused lightness, matter-of-fact resignation, chutzpah, and confident menace. It's a wonderful moment, in no small part because you realise just how much fun it's become to watch Chris Evans excel at playing (and growing with) this character. It's one of many moments in a Marvel movie that makes you realise there really was greatness in Chris Evans. Just like Steve Rogers, all it took was Captain America to draw it out.

By Alexander Huls for Esquire Magazine

9 Kids at the catwalk: In defence of taking children to fashion shows

Was Kim Kardashian wrong to bring baby North West to Kanye’s Adidas show? Half the crowd thought so, judging by their faces during North’s tantrum. Our fashion editor disagrees

What is it about taking kids to catwalk shows that makes people so cross? I don’t get it. You can take kids to music festivals, you can take them to fancy restaurants, you can take them to far- flung corners of the world, and the world will look on and think: that’s cool, it’s all good life experience. But take them to Somerset House for a London Fashion Week catwalk show? Cue more pious outrage than that time Michael Jackson dangled his kids out of a hotel window.

Does it make people cross because they think you are using the kid as an accessory to attract attention, like a new pair of Sophia Webster shoes? This would make sense if the fashion industry was peopled only by neurotic loners who use their ovens for shoe storage and have no human contact between one show season and the next, but in reality this workforce has a disproportionately high rate of working mothers. So, perhaps it makes people cross because they believe fashion is inherently morally degenerate, and therefore the front row no more of a place for a child than a crack den? Um, run that one by me? Because I fail to see how the next generation will be inexorably corrupted by early exposure to the return of the high-waisted trouser.

Jess Cartner-Morley and her daughter at London fashion week. As you may have guessed, I have taken my kids to fashion shows. When I returned to work after having my first baby, Alfie was just six months old, so my mum came with me to New York and Paris fashion weeks, looking after him while I was working. I never took him to a show myself, because I just didn’t see how I could concentrate and take sufficiently detailed notes on a collection to write a news review while simultaneously bouncing a baby. (Kim Kardashian doesn’t have this problem, obviously.) But, at Paris Fashion Week, a friend who came down with flu, knowing my fashion-loving mum would love to see a show, offered her tickets to Yves Saint Laurent and Stella McCartney. Mum sat in the fourth row, Alfie on her knee. He was utterly transfixed, and clapped wildly at the end. (He was particularly enthusiastic about YSL. I like to think that he recognised the design genius of Tom Ford, but in reality he had just learnt to clap and was really pleased with himself.) Since my daughter Pearl was about

10 six – old enough to sit still during the sometimes- lengthy waiting, and then sketch quietly – I have taken her to a few Saturday shows most London fashion weeks.

The kids you see on the front row of fashion shows are not there for show, but for very practical reasons. The month of catwalk shows doesn’t break for weekends, because it is more time- and money-efficient to schedule the four cities – New York, London, Milan, then Paris – back to back. If a buyer from LA has flown to Milan, she doesn’t want to twiddle her thumbs in a hotel room – and miss her own kids back home, most likely – so that the locals can hang out with their families. It’s an efficient system. Nevertheless, most of us would quite like our kids to be able to pick us out in a line-up once fashion month ends. So what’s the harm in combining a Saturday morning at the shows with spending some time with your child?

But there are politics involved, for sure. The plus-mini-one scenario is entirely different in celebrity and civilian scenarios. If you are a celebrity, the designer will be thrilled you brought your kid, because the paparazzi love nothing more than a celebrity baby, so it’s great publicity. This does not apply, obviously, for us civilians. The Saturday-morning-baby thing is tolerated – after all, lots of designers and show organisers are women with kids and understand – but you have to play by the rules. You don’t bring kids until they are old enough to behave themselves: this is someone else’s big day, and not yours to jeopardise by bringing a toddler who might have a tantrum. And you never, ever let your child sit on a seat next to you until the lights go down and you are completely sure the seat is free.

But you know what? Kids are so much fun at fashion shows. As Kanye West said the other day, “Fashion is merely opinions. And I have lots of opinions.” Kids have a million opinions, and they are not afraid to share them, which makes the after-show debrief hilarious. Also, children have an incredibly low bar when it comes to celebrity, and so are made up when they get to have their picture taken with anyone even vaguely off the telly, which is perfect for London Fashion Week where your Jolie-Pitts are hard to come by, but every other show has someone from Saturday-night light entertainment in the front row.

But I’ll be honest: there are downsides. For a start, you can’t have a kir royale and a couple of canapes and call it lunch. I may be an irresponsible, front-row-with-kid mummy, but even I know that.

Written by Jess Cartner-Morley for The Guardian

11 How dystopia hammers home the reality of climate change

It’s so easy not to really listen when the media (and science teachers) go on about climate change – but the cause of most dystopian societies in books, from The Hunger Games to Divergent, is invariably huge environmental disaster. Time to read, sit up, learn and then take action before its too late.

Climate change. We learn about it in school. We see it on the news and nature shows. We’re told it’s coming and it will be irreversible if we don’t do something. But we’re young. Most of us don’t listen, do we? We’re the internet, smart phone, computer generation and most of us aren’t clued up on renewable energy or carbon footprints. And even when we know all about them, we often don’t think they affect us. I was like that, when I was younger. And then, then I read my first environmental disaster novel - a dystopian.

The idea of a futuristic world devastated by the very things that are affecting the environment now... It was terrifying - the idea that such horror and pain and fear could come from too many cars and forgetting to turn the light off (and cows - don’t forget cows guys: they produce loads of harmful gasses... via a fart!). It was like being really scared in an incredibly vivid way, so unlike all the textbooks I read about the subject before.

Yes, school teaches us a lot of things. Algebra. Science experiments. The difference between affect and effect. But when it comes to current events in the world around us, both environmental and political, does anything really beat a dystopian? Everyone should learn from the mistakes made in books - especially dystopias. If you look at the causes that lead to most dystopian societies, the catalyst is generally the destruction of the environment, or a world war or a huge nuclear explosion. All manmade problems - all things we could so easily stop.

The Fire Sermon by Francesca Haig: huge nuclear explosion that destroyed most of humanity. Same disaster for The Handmaid’s Tale by Margret Atwood led to death and sterilisation.

Mass murder and destruction (though rather unspecified) led to The Hunger Games - and really, who wants that to happen? Definitely not me, because seriously, if I was in the Hunger Games, I would definitely die...

Another unspecified disaster created the world of Divergent - and while it looks not too bad to begin with, hello Insurgent and Allegiant...

12 Huge environmental disasters (like solar flares and tsunamis) caused the Glades from The Maze Runner universe and I don’t know about you, but I really don’t want to get stuck in the Maze... And in the Chaos Walking trilogy by Patrick Ness, humanity has moved to a new planet and can now hear everyone’s thoughts and is ruled by a creepy cult-like church that committed genocide and invaded other towns and... it’s not good.

The books are good - amazing - but the world... Yep, would not like to live there either... You see, there are so many scary, dark beliefs about what’s coming in the future - all of which are covered in dystopian novels. Nuclear apocalypse. Uncontrollable climate change that destroys the environment. A city full of people with pink eyelashes and blue lips (that one might be less realistic). Zombie rising (again, not so likely...).

And climate change is an issue our generation will need to deal with, not something for the distant future. We’re nearing the end of the world, people! Kidding, kidding. I hope... Seriously, though, the reason dystopia is so huge right now is because it’s just so relevant. I mean, the past is something that’s already been written, the future is the unknown factor: we don’t know what’s going to happen to our environment, if we’ll be able to change it. And that’s where dystopia come into the equation: they look at all the scary uncertainties we’re worrying about in our time and put them into a devastated future, building a (generally terrifying and evil) society around the disaster. It’s a way of showing the seriousness of environmental conservation, while also helping teenagers and children deal with the harsh facts. I’m sure we all know that sometimes, it’s ridiculously hard to learn from textbooks in geography lessons. It’s hard to wrap your head around all the facts and statistics and keywords about climate change. And then you read something like Breathe by Sarah Crossan or The Last Wild by Piers Torday and you just totally get it. You completely understand how serious everything is, how badly we need to do something. I mean, who wants to live in a bubble?

Who wants to live in a world where animals have vanished from all but one place? No one! We like real air and we like animals! And this, this is why we need to read dystopians. It makes climate change interesting. It makes us understand how vital environmentalism is. It makes us think. It makes us act. We need to look at all the mistakes made in books that lead to these dystopian worlds and we need to change them.

We need to do everything we can to avoid the apocalypse and we need to learn from books. Recycle. Preserve energy. Don’t set off a nuclear explosion... So now I have a challenge for teenagers and children and parents everywhere. Do something for the environment today. Buy a dystopian. Read it. Understand. Change something. Oh, and buy it as an ebook. C’mon, people. It’s Eco Week.

Written by Megan Quibell for The Guardian

13 Why, in 2016, are women still (mostly) silent film stars?

Study lays bare the fact that women are given far less dialogue than male actors – because it’s men who still get to tell the stories that form our cultural narratives

It’s rare to have proof that the less sexually desirable a woman is perceived to be, the less anyone cares what she has to say. And yet, Polygraph’s study of who is granted on- screen dialogue in more than 1,000 movies does exactly that: the percentage of dialogue allotted female characters waned after actors hit 31, dropped precipitously after they hit 42 and all but disappeared when they hit 65. But when in 2014 80% of films had no women credited as writers, perhaps it’s to be expected that women overall had fewer lines and that the on-screen women the mostly male writers and directors thought audiences would like to hear are the youngest.

Maybe it’s even just par for the course that a summer would-be blockbuster such as Men in Black 3 had just one woman with enough lines to show up in the Polygraph study: “Hot Pants Girl”. (Then again, even testosterone action fest Expendables 3 gave its sole female speaker an on-screen name, even if she didn’t have that much dialogue.)

Still, when the dragon in Mulan has more dialogue than the titular character, when films with casting gender parity feature men speaking more often than women, and when only 18% of films have women as two of the top three speaking parts (a scenario that male actors go into 82% of the time), the question isn’t just whether women are underrepresented in Hollywood.

The question is who gets to give voice to the stories that form our shared cultural narrative, and the answer is “men”.

Though women aren’t proportionately represented on screen, in speech or behind the cameras, they are in front of the screens: women make up a larger share of movie audiences in the US than men and female-led movies have a stronger return-on-investment than male- led movies (even controlling for budget disparities, as Hollywood tends to spend more money on male-led films).

And yet, when we go to the movies, women are rarely the leads unless it’s a “women’s” movie – and sometimes, even when it is, we still aren’t the ones doing most of the talking.

14 Research from the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism shows that for every one woman who speaks even in films with less than an R rating, there are around three male speaking characters and that crowd shots have an average of 17% women (a ratio that hasn’t changed since 1946). It’s nonetheless rare – unless you count Geena Davis – that anyone comments on the lack of women on screen and speaking. Studies such as the Annenberg one show that we view a lack of female representation as normal, and we view actual demonstrable parity as giving unequal weight to women.

The lack of female representation isn’t intentional or even probably conscious: it’s just that when women aren’t seen and aren’t heard in public and cultural spaces, we come to view that absence as normal. We come to see the “everyman” as, well, a man: we learn to identify with men, to see ourselves in men (even as women) and to see the woman’s perspective as the minority one, even if we are a slight demographic majority.

Movies starring, featuring and weighted male are just movies; movies starring, featuring and weighted female are “chick flicks”, and ones that supposedly only women want to see. That the data on “chick flicks” and female moviegoers doesn’t support the false hypothesis that women aren’t enough of an audience to matter to Hollywood hasn’t done nearly enough to spur change in the industry or our society. Just witness all the griping about Rey’s ascendence in Star Wars: The Force Awakens. Some male fans seemingly couldn’t see themselves in an orphan stranded on a desert planet who has access to The Force and helps defeat the Empire in battle unless that orphan was male like Luke Skywalker or Finn, John Boyega’s character, and complained that the movie had gone too far by casting a woman in the lead. But 78% of the dialogue was spoken by men and Finn had more lines than Rey, even though The Force Awakens had the highest percentage of dialogue spoken by women (28%): in the original movie, Episode IV, just 6% of the dialogue was spoken by women.

One outspoken woman is apparently, at least subconsciously, viewed as equivalent to two men – in cinema, and sometimes in life. And while that feels like the start of the joke, it’s not really funny to the two-thirds of women left standing silently on the sidelines to make things feel more “equal”.

Written by Megan Carpentier for The Guardian

15 Since when were music festivals al fresco fashion shows?

At a music festival, self-consciousness should be left behind – along with personal hygiene. And you can’t really do that if you’re fretting about whether your Native American headdress really works with your Isabel Marant boho top

I’ve been seeing a lot in magazines of late about “festival fashion”. But what exactly is “festival fashion”?

In an ideal world, by which I mean my world, festival fashion consists of a plastic rubbish bag fashioned into a poncho; wellies covered in E coli; absolutely no clothes because you lost your tent on the Friday night and your clothes shortly after that; and maybe a hat that you found in a skip by the toilets. This, clearly, is how a festival attendee knows they have had a good weekend, and I live in constant hope that when I see the words “Festival fashion special!” on the front of a weekly glossy magazine it will include photos of men who look like Iggy Pop with a hangover wearing parkas splattered with fecal matter and dragging a wet dog round on a string.

But of course, such hopes are dashed time and time again, because what festival fashion actually means is endless boring photos of people such as Kate Bosworth and Poppy Delevingne, who, as far as I can tell, are famous purely for being photographed at music festivals, looking improbably glamorous. We can talk until the cows come home about how Kate Moss and her Hunter wellingtons and Sienna Miller and her boho leather belts are to blame for this, but increasingly my finger is pointed more towards the rise and rise of Coachella in the US, AKA the whitest event in American history this side of the 1960s. Perhaps unsurprisingly, a music festival in California, where the weather is always good and the celebrities are in close proximity, has proved itself especially conducive to furthering the myth that music festivals are not about music, mayhem or mischief-making, but white girls looking as sexy as possible with pointless hair accessories.

Unsurprisingly, this idea that music festivals are actually al fresco fashion shows has risen up alongside the – for want of a better term – middle-classification of music festivals. Seriously, have you seen some of the nonsense that happens at them these days? Friends have told me about one particular music festival where you have to make reservations – reservations! – ahead of time in order to eat food cooked by Michelin-starred chefs in a field. Honestly, can you even imagine? This is at a MUSIC FESTIVAL, an event where I

16 personally think a young person is winning if they remember to bring underwear, never mind pre-booked dinner reservations.

I’m a pretty high-maintenance kinda lady. I like my creature comforts as much as the next spoilt fashion columnist. But this is also why I love music festivals, because they allow even the most obnoxious of us to offer it all up to the weather gods, get disgusting and lose that self-consciousness that plagues us the rest of the time. Look, I don’t want to sound like Ol’ Granny Time here, rocking on my porch and telling sepia-tinted tales about that year at Glastonbury when Travis headlined and how, oh truly, those were the days. But one of my favourite photos does, indeed, come from that seminal year and it features myself, several friends and more strangers all sitting in a field at 6am. I appear to be wearing – and I’m looking at the photo as I write this – wellies printed with stars, corduroy trousers at least two sizes too big, a sweatshirt with a map of Asia on the front (because sure, why not, maybe useful?) and a man’s ski jacket. And I was not 12, not 16, but 23 at the time and already working in the fashion department of this paper. That’s right, readers, you were taking style guidance from a woman who wore wellies with stars on them. No, you cannot now have a refund.

The point is, I looked like a complete weirdo but I also had a great time, and I firmly believe those two things are connected. No one has fun when they are fussing over how they look, or if they’re too scared of getting messy to relax. I love fashion and I love festivals but I do not understand people who go to festivals with specific looks planned. Do these people have fun? Because they don’t look like they’re having fun. They look like they’re thinking about how to look as hot as possible on Instagram, and that, to me, is completely anathema to the festival experience. I never understood Kate Moss and Alexa Chung’s predilection for denim hotpants at Glastonbury – seriously, do they not feel the cold? Or the mud? Never mind the various Pucci outfits worn by the aforementioned Poppy Delevingne.

Like I said, the music festival is where you should leave your self-consciousness behind along with your personal hygiene, and you can’t do that if you’re fretting about whether your Native American headdress works with your Isabel Marant boho top. I just worry, Poppy Delevingne, that you’re missing out on the sweet, sweet pleasures of trying to find your tent at 7am while wearing star- studded wellies. Then there’s that sense of delicious pride when you arrive back in your hometown and everyone looks at you like you’re insane because you’re dressed like a basket case and you know that the worse you look, the bigger your triumph in surviving the weekend. So you walk home from the station, in your sweatshirt printed with a map of Asia, head held high, until you get home, collapse on your sofa and vow never to underestimate indoor plumbing again. Simple pleasures, Poppy Delevingne. And you’re missing out on the lot of them.

Written by Hadley Freeman for The Guardian

17 Dear Katie Hopkins. Stop making life harder for disabled people.

My father is Stephen Hawking, and I have an autistic son. So it makes me sad when your ‘jokes’ about Ed Miliband mock people with disabilities.

Dear Katie Hopkins, I am writing to you – not respectfully, but politely – to ask you to stop. I read your comments about Ed Miliband and his supposed resemblance to someone “on the spectrum” just as I got home from a trip to Australia. I was there as one of the presenters of a show which featured my father, Stephen Hawking (I’m going to assume you know who he is) as a live hologram beamed into Sydney Opera House.

In my introduction to him, I said that I hoped attitudes to disability had changed since I was a child in the 1970s when having a disabled father was a rarity. We were openly and intrusively commented on when we went out together. We had many difficult moments, such as the time a restaurant manager asked us to leave while we were in the middle of lunch because we were putting the other diners off their food. In fact, it was like growing up with a whole world of people like you, everywhere, all the time.

The point of my story at the talk in Sydney was that I hoped that now, no disabled person would encounter this kind of behaviour – and that they would be treated with respect and dignity. It’s on YouTube; you can watch it and see how the audience responds.

And then I read with great sadness your “jokes” (are they jokes? I don’t even know?) about Ed Milliband.

I have an autistic son. He’s very sweet, polite, hard-working, kind and generally lovely. But yes, he does stare at people from time to time. When we are on the tube, occasionally I have to say to a member of the public that my son is autistic and that I’m sorry he is staring. The reaction is always kind and compassionate.

But if he were staring at you, I presume it wouldn’t be okay, that you would make a laughing stock out of him. You would use his disability against him – and you wouldn’t care how embarrassed, hurt or distressed he was. Because it wouldn’t matter to you. Don’t you think kids with autism have enough to deal with already? Don’t 18 you think that they already face enough rejection and social isolation with you making it worse? Do you really think they need you to tell them they don’t fit into society?

And when someone with your public profile tells others that it’s okay to mock people with disabilities, you cause enormous damage. The little work I’ve done with child carers of disabled parents shows what a vulnerable group they are, already regularly bullied and taunted by their peers. It just takes a figure like you to validate the bullies’ point of view – and who knows how terrible the outcomes could be. There are lots of kids out there with disabled parents or siblings whose lives just got harder because of you.

I don’t know what you are paid to express such unreserved and trenchant views, but it surely cannot be enough. Soon, the media spotlight will move on and your planned obsolescence (planned by media companies, not by you) will kick in. At which point, you will be left with no viable career and a backwash of hatred of a staggering acidity and volume.

To be honest, I don’t really care what happens to you. But I do care what happens to people with disabilities and their families, and I care that you are making difficult lives even more challenging. Please stop.

Written by Lucy Hawking for The Guardian

19 Posting photos online is not living. You are producing your own obituary

As you point your phone at everything from Notre Dame to a slice of chocolate cake, remember these images will take on significance only after you have gone

Summer begins again. Millions of people are packing their bags to get away from it all. Their eyes are ready for fresh sights: sun-drenched beaches, famous museums, parasolled cafes.

More eyes than ever before will, however, see nothing fresher than the screens of their own smartphones. They will not need to look at sunsets and palm trees, for they will have flawless copies on their devices (click!). The great scale of the Notre Dame cathedral, in Paris, or the Colosseum, in Rome, will bring no risk of eyestrain: they will be able to see the grandeur of these sites in harmless digital miniature (click!). Screens will give them their own versions of the Mona Lisa or Van Gogh’s Sunflowers, versions that have this significant advantage over the originals: they can be owned, stored and used as material for a personal online story.

As we see more and more parents who seem to watch their children grow up entirely on a screen, it becomes obvious that storing our sensory stimuli in digital form has become the main event. No one really believes that they will sit down in the future and play back everything they have recorded. That is clearly not the objective. No, the point is that ordinary memory has come to seem inadequate as a register of “life” – whatever that is. Human experience needs to be converted into the inhuman in order for it to be real. If it has not been made digital, it did not happen.

How did we get here? Ours is a materialistic era, so we are inclined to believe in materialistic explanations. Digital technology, we tell ourselves, has caused this devaluation of experience. But the opposite explanation, though more mysterious, is equally true: it is the devaluation of experience that has caused digital technology. It is not that digital prostheses exist, and so, with remarkable coincidence, our inner life suddenly “needs” them. No, for more than a century we have been caught up in machinic processes that have caused us to stop believing in our own experience, and – like a colonised people asserting themselves in the oppressor’s language – we feel a surge of dignity with each new word we learn of the machine’s own tongue.

20 Of course, when machines can laugh, they will, like other oppressors before them, ROFL at these efforts of us to “speak machine”. They will see our obsessive self-documentation for what it is: a futile attempt to assert what we do not ourselves believe – that we actually live. I am visiting New York. I am eating chocolate cake. I have a flower in my hair.

When people were really alive, they did not need to protest so much. They did not imagine that strangers might be interested in the fact that they had chocolate cake at lunch. Not, at least, during their lifetime. They were aware that such trivia become significant only at the moment of death – at which point, yes, it is suddenly overwhelmingly poignant to remember that someone had those clothes and food and rhythms.

In an era when people still believed in their own lives, they wrote autobiographies. We, by contrast, have become auto-obituarists. Despite all the work that social media users do to document themselves from one day to the next, what is recorded is not life. Rather it is death-in-life: it is “existence” from which life has already fled, leaving behind a digital husk. Our social media footprint is an obituary we write ourselves – a set of remembrances we leave for future generations to give strength to this simple, spurious claim: that we lived. Only at the moment of our death does our Facebook or Instagram account acquire its true and always intended significance, and finally the chocolate cake that we had for lunch once is meaningful.

That consummation lies in the future. A day will come when this summer’s screen obsession finally makes sense. It’s just that we will never live to see it.

Written by Rana Dasgupta for The Guardian

21 Are proms the worst thing to happen to British schools in the past 20 years?

Even the word itself is annoying. School prom? Why not just a good, old- fashioned school dance? Perhaps because the whole thing is indeed a promenade, with the manner of arriving - glass coach, pink limo, Hummer jeep - apparently just as important as the event itself. There is no doubt that cash- gobbling proms are a ghastly American import, right up there with chewing gum and the glorification of hip hop culture. However, I think we are going to have to accept that they are here to stay.

The school prom has become a rite of passage that has significance and value to millions of young people in the UK. A ceremony, complete with sparkly dresses and tonged hair, a ritual that marks the end of childhood. And it's not always such a terrible thing. A friend's 17-year-old daughter had a lovely prom. The classmates organised a dinner and dance in a local hotel, with fireworks. There were smart boys in bow ties, girls in long frocks; young adults being all grown up, on the cusp of the great adventure of life. What could be nicer!

But hang on a star-spangled minute, what fresh hell is this? Proms for primary school kids? Yes, primary proms are here and they are happening now. A West Midlands mother has just spent more than £1,000 on her 11-year-old daughter's prom, determined to give her little Beth a night she would remember forever. Aimee Woolley took on an extra job as a cleaner to pay for the prom. It was a night she and her daughter planned for months - just what hubby and two older brothers thought of all this is anyone’s guess.

On the day, Beth had fake tan, plastic nails, a princess dress, shoes, matching handbag, a tiara and professional hair and make-up, including false eyelashes. In her £200 glitter-strewn frock, she was ferried about in a limousine and drank non- alcoholic cocktails with her equally thrilled pals. She looked lovely, but she didn't look like a little girl - she looked like a mini-adult. And when one regards all these

22 pre-teenies, togged out like ballroom dancers at a fiesta of acrylic, it makes for uncomfortable viewing. There is the nagging suspicion that it is really all about the mums, not the daughters.

It is all about grown women indulging in some princess fantasy that they never managed to fulfil themselves, but are experiencing vicariously through the medium of their spray tanned and glossed offspring. Every mother wants to make her little girl feel special, that is understandable and commendable. The problem begins when they scrub off the glitter, launch themselves on the big wide world and find out that they are not so exceptional after all.

I really admire Aimee for having the energy and drive to fund all this by getting up at Sam every day to clean offices - but how many other mums get into debt over something so ephemeral and stupid?

You have to wonder where and what it all leads to - what happens when your darling girl is 16, 18, 21, a bride? Do the dresses get bigger and bigger, and the nails get longer and longer as the costs go up and up? Especially in a world where parents seem unable to say no to their children. Getting dressed up for parties is fun at all ages. It never, ever stops being fun. However, a little bit of prom propriety would not go amiss. Before it's too late.

Written by Jan Moir for The Daily Mail

23 Black Widow: girls and boys need more kick-ass female Avengers action figures

Even the Hulk has noticed the lack of Black Widow toys and the absence sends a troubling message – female superheroes are less worthy than their peers. Even the Hulk wants to see more Black Widow toys.

For real: during April’s Avengers: Age of Ultron promotional tour, star Mark Ruffalo took to Twitter and made a small demand. A valid point that also explains why his request prompted a response from Disney Consumer Products – who immediately started doing damage control.

“Black Widow is a staple in the Marvel Universe with a robust consumer products program,” the company said in a statement to Vanity Fair. “Tied to The Avengers: Age of Ultron, Marvel has over 60 Black Widow SKUS [stock keeping units] across diverse categories such as Hot Wheels, action figures, video games, T-shirts, costumes, and collectibles, with even more products available for back to school and Halloween.”

And hey, that’s great. By addressing Ruffalo’s concerns in such a public and timely way, Disney obviously understands the urgency in levelling the playing field for the male and female superheroes. But to put their statement in a little more perspective, the back-to- school shopping season is several months away, and Halloween is even longer. On top of that? Sixty lines pales in comparison to the seemingly umpteen available for Marvel heroes such as Captain America, Iron Man, or even Thor. Hell, even Loki. Black Widow is a boss who shouldn’t need a crusade to increase the availability of character-based products. Especially since it’s not as if Disney’s not exactly an independent startup. The funds are there.

The problem is, Black Widow is being treated less like a boss, and more like The Girl CharacterTM – which has been especially evident over the last couple of weeks, with everything from Ruffalo having to deflect sexist press questions to co-stars Jeremy Renner and Chris Evans calling her a whore. So, yes: the sexism surrounding this character is very real. And having to fight for toys is another huge indicator of that.

The thing is, this concern over the availability of Black Widow merchandise comes at time when Disney and Marvel can start again – or at least start visibly trying. This isn’t the first time the company’s been called out for excluding Black Widow (Nerdist published a takedown in January), but it’s the first time one of the franchise’s stars has drawn attention to the problem. And it’s also the first time that Disney publicly acknowledged the issue – as 24 well as the first time two stars (Renner and Evans) made frantic apologies following a Black Widow joke. The landscape is changing, and Disney has a chance to embrace it and to help usher in an era in which strong female characters are just as celebrated as dudes who don’t wear sleeves.

To start this now would be key – especially since the summer’s next biggest blockbuster (Jurassic World) has already come under fire from Avengers director Joss Whedon, who scrutinised the trailer, for marketing Bryce Dallas Howard’s character as “a stiff” compared with co-star Chris Pratt’s “life-force”. So, by increasing the availability of Black Widow products now (or as soon as humanly possible), Disney would reiterate the importance of women in the action movie world – or they would at least send the message that female characters deserve more than just being The GirlTM. Also, they would help set the precedent when it comes to tie-in merchandise down the road – especially with the release of Star Wars next year. (Lest we forget how Leia was unrepresented toy-wise in comparison to Luke, Han, and Darth Vader.)

Ultimately, the lack of Black Widow toys on store shelves is less about the actual pieces, and more about the message their absence sends: that women aren’t as worthy of representation, that “toys for girls” are unpopular, and that hyper-masculinity prevails over all other character traits. And considering we’re living in an era in which we’re working very hard to diminish gender constraints, to under-represent such an important character tells boys that it’s OK to overlook Black Widow as a person, to consider her as lesser because she’s not a boy, and to diminish her narrative or character traits as just an extension of gender and nothing else.

And what it tells girls is even worse: that you can kick ass, take names, and save the lives of the heroes you see marketed everywhere, but – despite all those things you’re still “just a girl”. Here’s hoping that Disney’s finally gotten the message and that by December, we’ll be singing the praises of there being just as many Rey toys as there are of Poe Dameron.

Written by Anna T Donahue for The Guardian

25 A moment that changed me: the chance to use new life-saving cancer drugs A stroke of luck at a bleak time meant I got to take the ground-breaking Herceptin. It allowed me to live, and follow my dream of becoming an author

Though I loved being an English teacher, my dream from childhood was to be a writer. Aged 34, I was head of English in a secondary school, newly married, and about to start a family. Just three weeks after the wedding I found something strange in my right breast. It was more of a mass than a lump.

On the 11 November 2004 at 1.35pm, I was told I had cancer. The words I remember were “no cure”, “mastectomy”, and “breast cancer and pregnancy don’t mix” – all said in the same sentence.

In a period of terrible luck, I experienced some very good fortune. I’m convinced Herceptin saved my life.

No one in my family had had breast cancer. I was young, slim, hadn’t eaten meat since I was 12, didn’t smoke, didn’t over-drink, and wasn’t on the pill. The bad news got worse: I had the most aggressive form of breast cancer - HER2. The tumour was 7cm. It had spread to my lymph glands and a blood vessel in my chest. I’d need radical surgery, chemotherapy and radiotherapy.

I had a mastectomy. Nothing can prepare you for how this looks. When I saw mine the day after the op, I passed out cold. Even now I have a very bony chest wall on my right side. My treatment was life-saving but also life changing, a constant reminder of what I’ve been through. Then chemo. Ugh, chemo.

It makes you gain weight. It makes you tired beyond reason. It makes you forget things. Gives you ulcers. Makes you catch every bug going for years afterwards. And the hair loss: I wasn’t worried about it until it happened. I had short hair anyway, and in my student days had once or twice shaved my head. But again, nothing can prepare you for it. Hair loss is so public. So obvious.

And not just head hair, but eyebrows and eyelashes too. No hat, wig or headscarf can hide the fact that you are A CANCER PATIENT.

26 Much more positive was my experience with newer medicine. When my breast nurse asked the consultant about Herceptin, the reply was: “Not yet.” The chances of HER2 recurring was high – 50/50. Herceptin was already being used to treat secondary breast cancers. It was a new type of drug that triggered the body’s own immunity to fight the tumour. It wasn’t yet available on the NHS in the UK, but some private patients were being offered it. Six months after my diagnosis, my cousin was also told she had HER2 breast cancer. Her husband’s private medical insurance paid for her to have Herceptin. The treatment still wasn’t available to me, or people like me. After much soul-searching, I decided to try to fund it myself – at the cost of more than £30,000.

Then Barbara Clark, an HER2 cancer patient from Somerset, challenged her primary care trust’s decision not to fund Herceptin when it clearly had clinical benefits. After threatening them with court, they agreed to pay. Her own fundraising had amassed thousands of pounds, which she donated to other HER2 patients, myself included. By November of 2005, Patricia Hewitt, the then health secretary, finally ruled that Herceptin could be given to all HER2 patients, regardless of their trust.

It was both incredible and awful to be at the cutting edge of this controversy. Had I been diagnosed even six months earlier, I might well have missed out on Herceptin. In a period of terrible luck, I experienced some very good fortune. I’m convinced Herceptin saved my life.

Fast-forward four years, and my cancer treatment was over. Yet the life I’d had before cancer wasn’t there any more; I wasn’t the same person either. I needed something to fill what cancer had taken. Luck played a part in this too.

In the summer of 2009 I took a group of students on an Arvon residential course. I started writing. And writing. When I came home six days later, I couldn’t stop crying. Or writing. So I signed up for a master’s in writing for children.

What started out as a childhood dream quickly grew into a passion. By doing the MA, I felt I’d validated my writing, given myself “permission” to take it seriously. I tapped into something long hidden inside of me and brought it out again, fresh and new.

Cancer has taken away my chance to be a mother, changed my career path, and made my future questionable. Yet it’s made me rethink life dramatically. And now I’m doing the one thing I always wanted to do – write books. My fifth novel is about to be published. The nightmare has happened, but then so has the dream.

Written by Emma Carroll for The Guardian

27 Star Wars fans: for God's sake get a grip, it's only a movie

Mass hysteria over the new Star Wars trailer, especially among grown men, leaves Martin Daubney feeling baffled.

In case you missed it – perhaps you were in a galaxy, far, far away – the trailer for the new Star Wars movie was released yesterday. Even though Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens isn’t due to be released until December 18, its trailer was unleashed eight months ahead of that date, at a huge “official fan convention” in California.

The Telegraph’s film critic Robbie Collin flew half way around the world to see its 111 seconds and compared the event, attended by 7,500 variously fancy-dressed miscreants, to “a mass flamingo flocking, or perhaps the migration of wildebeest across the Serengeti”.

The trailer was also shown as a simulcast online and, globally, grown men starting behaving the way tween girls do when Justin Bieber takes his top off. Like Beliebers, Star Wars fans (how can it be that they don’t even have a name, like Trekkies?) took leave of their senses, gushed adoringly in quasi-orgasmic tones and posted wildly inappropriate tweets. Some even started dressing as Storm Troopers and body-popping on YouTube. One adult male tweeted: “I’ve watched the trailer 13 times now, I’m literally crying.” Another: “I don’t think I’ve seen my wife this happy since our wedding day. In fact she might be happier”. Seriously? Perhaps he needs to up his game between the sheets.

Am I the only man who finds this behaviour all a bit odd? Shouldn’t grown men get over Star Wars already? Don’t get me wrong: I quite like the look of the new trailer. To me, it looks mostly like every other Star Wars movie, only with better CGI. It certainly looks slicker than Tom Cruise’s sci- fi flick, Edge Of Tomorrow. But “quite liking” Star Wars doesn’t seem to be an option these days. You’re either a fully paid-up convert, or a heathen. If you can't appreciate it as the foremost work of art of our age, you're a plebeian who just doesn’t get it.

I don’t dislike Star Wars. Far, far from it. I watched the entire box set last summer, which proved to be a life-saver on a monsoonal July week in Cornwall. My son loved it. But then, he’s six.

I remember going to see the first Star Wars film in 1977 and being pant-wettingly excited about it. But then, I was seven.

28 I’ll probably see The Force Awakens at some point, after my son nags me into submission due to the inevitable and unavoidable tsunami of marketing the film will receive. The opening line of the new trailer – “the Force is strong in my family” – is telling. Because, like ginger hair, a Star Wars obsession is a condition that is passed on genetically.

I have close friends, colleagues and neighbours who baptised their sons into the Star Wars brethren while they were still in nappies (the kids, I mean). One has bought every Star Wars Lego toy in existence – these have the biggest franchise mark-up of them all – for his boy, who is not yet ten. He gleefully posts pictures of completed Millennium Falcons, AT- AT Walkers and Imperial Star Destroyers on Facebook, which I find simultaneously sweet and tragic.

I’ll admit, I’m partly guilty here, too. Like conjunctivitis, you can’t avoid picking up Star Wars toys when you’ve got a kid these days. After our Star Wars box-set marathon, I bought my son a replica light sabre, which – true to 1970s form – broke the first time he hit me with it, which prompted an emotional meltdown, a habit some Star Wars fans don’t seem to have grown out of.

You can forgive a small child getting overexcited about what is essentially a kids' movie franchise, but not adults. Of course, it’s a free world, I suppose, and Star Wars fans do not inflict any harm, especially if wielding a wobbly, defective light sabre. But like collecting action figures or skateboarding, shouldn't we leave Star Wars at puberty’s door?

Worst of all, Star Wars obsessives are complicit in the grandest financial extraction process in the history of popular culture. The Star Wars films and their re-releases have generated $4.54bn in worldwide ticket sales, according to Bloomberg data. This week, the release of the trailer for The Force Awakens added almost $2 billion to the value of Disney.

Stripped back to bare mammon – which is what all of this is really about – that makes Star Wars just another product, like Frozen, but with more lasers and less annoying songs. And that’s why, sorry guys, I’m just not feeling the Force with Star Wars any more.

Written by Martin Daubney for The Telegraph

29 Has James Corden cracked America?

Though his Late Late Show is treading water in the ratings, the British host has scored on the web with a number of viral hits and been nominated for an award.

The thing about getting a late-night talkshow on a major network is that it’s sort of like a supreme court appointment: once you’re in, you’re in for life, even if things are going badly and those that put you in power are having second thoughts about their nomination. Though the British James Corden was an unorthodox choice for CBS when they needed a host to fill Craig Ferguson’s chair when he departed last year, the gamble has largely paid off – even if ratings are somewhat flat.

When the show kicked off six weeks ago on 23 March, the ratings were higher than usual, averaging about 1.5 million viewers, just slightly above NBC’s Late Night with Seth Meyers, its only competition in the time slot. However, after initial interest waned, the show settled into an average of about 1.3 million and has stayed there ever since, nearly identical to where Ferguson was before. Meyers has a slight advantage of about 1.4 million viewers each week. The one addendum to those figures is that Corden holds on to a larger portion of his lead-in, David Letterman’s Late Show, than Meyers does his lead-in, Jimmy Fallon’s Tonight Show. Fallon, however, has a bigger audience than Letterman.

Where Corden is excelling, however, is in his viral potential. Other than a sketch where Meyers takes Game of Thrones’s Jon Snow to a dinner party, the NBC host hasn’t really been able to break through into the conversations about late night that are happening on blogs and social media.

Another franchise that has fared well is Corden singing karaoke in the car with musicians, with installments featuring Mariah Carey and Jennifer Hudson racking up 5m and 3m views respectively. Then there are the one-off hits like Katie Couric pranking Corden and his mock underwear ad with fellow Brit David Beckham, which have both reached 5m views online.

These days, while viewership is shrinking across late night in general, these viral successes are more important than ever. They create alternative revenue streams for the shows (as modest as they might be) and give the hosts a sense of legitimacy, vitality and relevance. These viral moments connect Corden to younger viewers who are more likely to consume 30 their comedy in three-minute chunks online than they are in an hour a night on the old- fashioned tube. That’s going to come in handy when he has One Direction sitting down on the couch 14 May, certainly a booking coup for the upstart show.

Judging by their reaction to his first show, Corden has been a hit with critics even if the New York Times called him “amiable, if not particularly special”. He’s just been nominated for a Critics’ Choice award. I will admit that I haven’t tuned in regularly since being utterly charmed by him on that first broadcast.

I decided to give the show a spot check on Thursday night and found it to be a little bit more slack than it was initially. Corden now has a more traditional monologue, which doesn’t really seem to be his strong suit. He’s at his best when interacting with the guests; having them both out at once is a calling card that no other host tries or could pull off. However, an earnest guest like Helen Hunt, who joined actor Nicolas Hoult on the couch last night, makes his work harder.

One of the great things about the initial episode was that he hosted Hanks and Mila Kunis, neither of whom had projects to pitch. Both Hunt and Hoult were there shilling for their most recent movies, which made the proceedings seem like every other marketing opportunity for celebrities on these talkshows. Though the banter was entertaining, the games that they played seemed a little ho-hum and a prepared section where he asked the audience to guess if outrageous iPhone apps were real or fake was downright boring.

The strangest part of the episode was that an alarm seemed to go off right before they cut away to commercial break. During the next segment, Corden was interviewing Hunt and Hoult on what appeared to be the soundstage’s roof, complete with the audience and band sitting in folding chairs. When that segment ended, we came back from the break and everyone was back inside with no explanation given. It was as if there was a fake (or real?) fire in the studio and they decided to just relocate to the roof and then return without giving a hint of what transpired. I don’t know if Corden does this regularly, but it would be a bit of surrealist tomfoolery that would differentiate his show and make it a bit more avant- garde than his cohort. However, I’m still confused as to what it actually was.

Like a judge who just won’t hang up his robe, it seems Corden will be with us for quite some time even if the ratings remain stagnant. As long as he can continue hitting those YouTube videos out of the park and coming up with some small innovations to the late- night game, it will make sense for CBS to keep him around and trying to overtake Seth Meyer’s small advantage (something that the impending advent of Stephen Colbert’s reign at Late Night might help him accomplish). Right now he’s faring well, if not thriving.

Written by Brian Moylan for The Guardian

31 I saw postwar Europe unite. We can’t let it unravel

My family history leads me to reject the thirst for isolationism of those who want to leave the EU: we need to embrace common sense and hope again

I have always liked to imagine that I was conceived the night before my dad went to war, mid-October 1939. I know he came home in 1940. He was part of the British Expeditionary Force that retreated from northern France and he was on the last boat leaving Cherbourg just as the Germans were on the outskirts of the town.

I learned three years ago, thanks to an appearance on Who Do You Think You Are?, that he had returned severely shell-shocked. I don’t know what impact his return had on my mother, brother and my infant self but before too long he was back with his regiment, the King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry, and he was absent from my life until his big frame filled our doorway in September 1945.

My recollections of those five years are thin but my mother, I know, adored, protected and spoiled my brother, Trevor and me. My cot was beside her bed in our tiny house and an earliest memory is rolling out of it and straight into her bed because the mattresses were of the same height. When I was too big for my cot, I slept with her. I only remember feelings of warmth, safety and love.

All that changed in 1945. Now there was a frustrated, angry, discontented man exploding around our small space. But the three of us learned to adjust, though our world could never be that idyll again. However, that was not the only adjustment – there were plenty of others: shortages, rationing, nothing to spare.

However, I slowly came to understand that other families were in a far worse case than us. Friends, fathers, brothers, uncles who had not come home or who had returned as ex-POWs, one of them from a Japanese camp.

In my house the Labour victory in the first postwar election that brought Clem Attlee to No 10 produced cheers and clinking of beer glasses. We had won the war, and the feeling in my community was optimistic. Our own people were back in power, and our neighbours felt that the working man was now going to have to be reckoned with.

In 1951 the Festival of Britain brought to the country a sense of a unity, even outside the British Isles. With my church choir I went to London for the first time to sing in the Festival 32 Church at the end of Waterloo bridge. With our eyes out on stalks we walked around that stupendous celebration of Britain now and Britain to come.

For the first time I became aware of my country as a place hoping to share its future with others all around the world. Yes, millions had died but the hope now was that never again could a war like that be repeated. The world had suffered, not just Europe, and it seemed a lesson had been finally learned. The cold war was still ahead but the United Nations had come into being, and global responsibility and collaboration was also the future.

And when the European Union came into existence and the UK became a member, it was for me a triumph of all those convictions that the future must be one of worldwide cooperation and unity, and here we were paving the way with the beginnings of collaboration across Europe and learning the lessons of our own history.

In a little over a month’s time, all that will be at the mercy of the ballot box. For those of us who identify as Labour, we need only look to the back of our party membership cards, which carry the line: “By the strength of our common endeavour we achieve more than we achieve alone.” Ultimately, this is the decision we face. Do we wish to stick with our allies, our neighbours and remain in Europe, or do we wish to leave?

It is the biggest political decision of our generation, and it is our children and our grandchildren who will live with the consequences. Though I am convinced that the stay vote will win the day, nevertheless the fact that so many fellow British citizens want to leave Europe is shocking. Standing alone was how we were in 1940.

Why campaign to put us back there? I do not understand this thirst for isolationism. The most potent arguments, politically, economically, socially, urge us to remain. Let this just be a passing insecurity, and let us once more embrace reality, philosophy, common sense and hope for our country.

Written by Patrick Stewart for The Guardian

33