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17 August, 2023

The number of top A-level grades has fallen sharply this year, as exam boards reverse two years of inflated marks based on teacher assessment during Covid. A and A* grades made up 27.2% of the total, according to results released this morning, compared to 36.4% last year and 44.8% in 2021. Michael Parkinson has died aged 88. Over a seven-decade TV career, he interviewed more than 2,000 celebrities, from Muhammad Ali to David and Victoria Beckham. “LionYESses!” says The Sun, after England beat their Australian hosts 3-1 yesterday in the Women’s World Cup semi-final. The final, against Spain, is at 11am on Sunday. 

Alessia Russo slots home England’s third goal

David Tennant as Hamlet: the work of a “drunken savage”?

Shakespeare’s genius: mixing smut with the sublime

The schools in Florida planning to teach Shakespeare’s works “only with excerpts”, to shield students from anything too salacious, are part of a long tradition, says Drew Lichtenberg in The New York Times. The playwright Nahum Tate was so horrified by the “bloody climax” of King Lear that he rewrote its ending. This “sanitised” version, premiered in 1681, held sway for more than 150 years. Voltaire described Hamlet as the work of a “drunken savage” who wrote without “the slightest spark of good taste” (though this didn’t stop him “openly borrowing” from the Bard for one of his own plays). Nietzsche thought Shakespeare’s works were “the ne plus ultra of grisly truths”, with Hamlet in particular a treatise on the “horror or absurdity” of existence. “Nietzsche being Nietzsche, he considered this a good thing.”

In other cultures, the “bawdy lowbrow” and the “poetic highbrow” have separate champions: in France, there’s François Rabelais and Jean Racine; in Spain, Miguel de Cervantes and Pedro Calderón. But Shakespeare managed to combine high with low “into something rich, special and strange”. His work is “almost purposefully designed to confound those who want to segregate the smutty from the sublime” – proof that “profundity can live next to, and even be found in, the pornographic, the viscerally violent and the existentially horrifying”. That’s why efforts to sanitise his work always fail in the end. “One can no more take out the dirty parts of Shakespeare than one can take out the poetry.” And that is his genius.

Low-slung baggy trousers “with a visible boxer waistband” were popular on men in the 1990s, says The Washington Post. Now women are bringing them back as “comfy chic”. It began in 2021, when Prada sent models wearing skirts with a boxers-style waistband down the runway, and Hugo Boss put Gigi Hadid in a boxers-and-gym-shorts combo. Today, the style is all over TikTok, as women add a “masculine touch” to stereotypically feminine outfits.

The world might be reaching “peak coffee”, says the FT. Demand keeps increasing, thanks to the growing middle class in Asia and Africa who see the drink as a status symbol. But warming temperatures mean that “up to half of current coffee farmland could soon be unusable”. Once a staple, the beverage could rise in price enough to become a luxury. Or, perhaps worse, the dominant arabica bean will be replaced by the hardier but “less refined” robusta – and “coffee lovers will be faced with a drink that doesn’t taste as good”.

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This rare two-headed snake is back on display at a Texas zoo after a two-year hiatus to recover from an injury. Known by the names Pancho and Lefty – one for each head – the three-foot-long Western rat snake has the same condition that results in conjoined twins in humans. Having two brains means the eight-year-old reptile’s movements are often “uncoordinated and awkward”, says Smithsonian Magazine – in 2021, it injured its left neck trying to move in two directions at once. “The right brain is much more dominant and tends to control where they go,” says zookeeper Maddie Michels-Boyce. “The left brain is seemingly just along for the ride.”

The protest at Rishi Sunak’s Yorkshire home

Greenpeace’s history of misinformation

“Never let it be said that Greenpeace lacks a sense of its own importance,” says Dominic Lawson in the Daily Mail. When the government cut all ties with the environmental group after its campaigners draped black cloth over Rishi Sunak’s Yorkshire home, its leaders issued a “statement of epic pomposity”. Apparently, being denied meetings with ministers is a “worrying signal about the future of democracy”. On the contrary, I can think of plenty of reasons why the charity “should never have been given such high-level access to government in the first place”. Chief among them: its long history of “serious and effective misinformation”. 

Take its “ferocious campaign” in the 1990s to prevent Shell from dismantling an oil storage installation at sea. Greenpeace insisted the unit contained 5,000 tonnes of crude oil, around 100 times what Shell claimed. But Shell had the correct figure all along – and the eventual decision to dispose of it onshore provided “no net environmental gain”. Then there’s the group’s fervent lobbying against “golden rice”, which is genetically modified to provide more Vitamin A and could thus save “countless lives” in the developing world. Worst of all is its entrenched opposition to nuclear power, which it calls “dirty, dangerous and expensive”. In reality, nuclear causes marginally fewer deaths per unit of energy produced than wind power. As for its supposed dirtiness, when Germany decommissioned all its nuclear plants after Japan’s disaster at Fukushima, it had to restart almost 20 coal-fired power stations. Yes, Greenpeace is brilliant at “drawing attention to itself”. But we shouldn’t pay attention to its “profoundly anti-scientific approach”.

“A musk ox crossbred with Ozzy Osbourne.” Erica Canepa/Bloomberg

Last weekend, “self-described anarcho-capitalist” Javier Milei won a surprise victory in Argentina’s presidential primary, says Jacob Gallagher in The Wall Street Journal. And though his policies are weird enough – shutting the country’s central bank, creating a market for selling human organs – it’s his hair that has really got the world talking. It isn’t quite a mullet, moptop or mohawk, “but some complex combination of the three”. It seems to move in all directions at once, culminating “in a swoop that resembles a treacherous alpine slope”. The overall effect is “a musk ox crossbred with Ozzy Osbourne”. His nickname in Argentina is El Peluca, or “The Wig”.

San Franciscans are taking advantage of the city’s abundance of self-driving taxis, says The San Francisco Standard, by getting down to it in the back seat. One unnamed man in his 30s claims he has undertaken “at least six separate sex acts” in driverless robocars, ranging from “impromptu make-out sessions” to going the whole hog. “There’s no one to tell you, ‘You can’t do that’,” he says, adding that one car got so hot that the windscreen completely fogged over. “In any other context, in any other vehicle, that would be an actual problem.”

It’s Bradley Cooper wearing a prosthetic nose to play the Jewish composer Leonard Bernstein, a move that has infuriated parts of the internet. Following the release of a trailer for the upcoming movie Maestro – which was also directed and co-written by Cooper, who isn’t Jewish – viewers described his false schnozzle as “the equivalent of Black-Face or Yellow-Face”, and accused him of perpetuating the stereotype that Jewish people have large noses. Bernstein’s children aren’t so bothered. “Bradley chose to use makeup to amplify his resemblance,” they wrote in a statement. “We’re perfectly fine with that.”

“The customer’s always right; that’s why everyone likes us.”

Homer Simpson

That’s it. You’re done.

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