In The News
Media, issues and events in the spotlight - Past Topics 3

Seth Rogen Versus Kim Jong-Un
- What should we make of a comedy positing the assassination of a North Korean despot? As free publicity for a Christmas release, the intervention of the People’s Republic of North Korea over the movie, The Interview,

The Treadmill
- The non-stop world we inhabit exists not because technology demands it, but because we have lost the values that could tame its relentlessness. Daimler has taken a stand. In 2014 the Stuttgart car-maker gave one hundred thousand of

When The Lights Went Out
- Remembering the Great War. Winston Churchill observed: ‘history will be kind to me for I intend to write it’. I doubt he would have said this in the digital age, where anyone can blog their view of the world.

Heart On Sleeve
- What should we make of the trend for visibly displaying our ethical credentials? Writing in Prospect (October 2014) under the title ‘If I ruled the world’ novelist Howard Jacobson, easing into the role of dictator,

Hate Speech
- Should there be legal limits to my freedom to insult you? When does my insult of who you are and what you believe become a crime? Or is it never a crime? These are questions we are struggling to answer in twenty-first century

The Deafening Hush
- Why are we so afraid of quietness today? Only by absorbing it may we gain the resources to flourish. The way the media pounced on Pope Benedict’s observations in January 2012 about the role of silence in human life

The Amnesia Of nations
- The Russian punk band Pussy Riot, however crass and insensitive, has a point. Russia’s government has many internal critics but few have made an impression on western publics

The Things We Know We Don't Know
- Human rights campaigns usually find their feet with the creation of a figurehead that others can rally round; one pitiful country lacks such a person.
There is something about North Korea that prevents most people from taking it seriously.
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