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3 September, 2023

The Creation of Adam from the Sistine Chapel ceiling by Michelangelo. Graphica Artis/Getty

“Where the church withers away, it leaves a gap” 

The bells at the church nearest my house “still ring out on Sunday morning”, just as they have for centuries, says Juliet Samuel in The Times. It’s one of the few in London where congregants still gather in their hundreds, “filling the pews and the donation boxes”. But it’s no secret that Christianity is fading in Britain. In the last census, in 2021, the number of self-described Christians fell 13 percentage points, to 46%, while the number who said they had “no religion” rose 12 points, to 37%. Many liberals see this as a good thing – they think religion is a “force for conflict, ignorance and prejudice”. But that’s GCSE-level analysis. “The common factor for evil and exploitation is not religion, but humanity.” 

I’m not Christian, but I’m still saddened by Christianity’s decline. “Where the church withers away, it leaves a gap.” There are few other places where a community gathers regularly, purely on the basis of geographical proximity, to “rest and reflect”. There is no “shared stock of wisdom” in times of crisis, only “the Google search box waiting for your plaintive question”. In fact, technology is a big part of the problem. As the French anthropologist Marc Augé put it: “The television and the computer have replaced the hearth.” And where old religions have faded, new quasi-religions have filled the void: witness the “neo-paganism” of environmentalism; the increased tribalism of politics; the rise of conspiracy theories, super-fandom and health fads. It’s easy to see this as just another part of modernity, of society naturally moving on. But secularisation is eroding our shared sense of history, and culture, and community. “This is a loss that is not easily regained.” And it’s one we should be able to acknowledge “without being accused of pining after medieval theocracy”.

Sun, sex and short sentences: how to write a bestseller

No one really knows what makes books sell, says The Economist. The more honest publishers openly admit as much – Simon & Schuster boss Jonathan Karp compares taking credit for a bestseller to “taking credit for the weather”. But look through recent big hits and some trends do emerge. Thrillers and romance fare the best. The settings are often exotic: Danielle Steel’s 200 or so novels, which have sold over a billion copies, have titles like Five Days in Paris and Sunset in St Tropez, not A Fortnight in Glasgow. In this, Steele might echo Ian Fleming, who wrote: “I think you will find that the sun is always shining in my books.”

Many of today’s bestsellers also share stylistic traits. “Sentences tend to be short. Really short. And repetitive. Really repetitive. Think Hemingway. On holiday.” Bestselling authors also tend to make the most of any research trips they have done. One of Steel’s recent titles opens with the heroine looking out over Rome, at “Saint Peter’s Basilica and Vatican City, the dome of the San Carlo al Corso Basilica, and to the north, the Villa Medici and the Borghese Gardens”. Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code offers such detailed tours through Paris that it’s like “switching on a verbose satnav”. But perhaps the most striking quality of top authors is their phenomenal output. Steel says she writes “until her nails bleed”; the thriller writer James Patterson has churned out more than 340 books, albeit often in collaboration with other writers. That, perhaps, is the key. “Don’t get it right, get it writ.”

THE TOWNHOUSE This one-bedroom maisonette in Clapton, east London, has an airy kitchen-diner with large windows, a mezzanine-level snug in the bedroom, and colourfully painted accent walls. Outside, a communal terrace enclosed by mature greenery offers plenty of space to entertain guests or read a book. Clapton train station is a few minutes’ walk. £475,000.

Mandel: filled a warehouse with printers and generated 1.4 million tickets

The Romanian mathematician who gamed the lottery

Ever wondered whether it’s possible to buy enough lottery tickets to cover every combination of winning numbers? That’s what Romanian-born economist Stefan Mandel did, says Zachary Crockett in The Hustle. The self-described “philosopher-mathematician” developed a “fully-fledged automation system” in Australia: a room full of printers churning out pre-filled tickets. And it worked. Over the 1980s, he and his syndicate won no fewer than 12 lotteries, including one jackpot of $1.1m. Eventually, the Australian authorities cottoned on and outlawed his strategy. So Mandel set his sights on an even bigger target: the lottery in the US state of Virginia. 

Still based in Melbourne, he hired 16 full-time workers to print out tickets, and shipped the “one-tonne of paper weight” over to a contact in the US. Of course, each of the tickets still had to be taken to an authorised lotto retailer, paid for in person and processed, so Mandel notified big retail chains in advance that his team of 35 couriers would be buying them in bulk. The plan all went smoothly – until one of the chains refused to process any more tickets, leaving 700,000 combinations unaccounted for. It meant that Mandel’s “fool-proof” plan would “ultimately come down to luck”. He proved a lucky man. One of his 6.3 million combinations came up, securing him a $28m jackpot – not bad, for a $5.5m outlay. “You could not have written a script as good as this,” said Anithalee Alex, who ran the ticket-buying operation in Virginia. “This is one time real life was better than fiction.”

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Condé Nast Traveller has compiled a list of the world’s 50 most beautiful small towns. They include the pink and orange Albarracín, in Spain; Bocas del Toro, a nine-island archipelago in Panama filled with houses on stilts; Castle Combe in Wiltshire, where no new homes have been built since the 1600s; Kaikōura, which sits on the east coast of New Zealand’s South Island; and Gokayama, a UNESCO-listed settlement tucked in the mountains of central Japan. See the full list here.

Bill Edgar may be the world’s only “coffin confessor”, says Vice. For 10,000 Australian dollars, he’ll crash someone’s funeral and say what they couldn’t, or didn’t want to, when they were living. His first client, Graham, had terminal cancer, and his best mate – or, “who he’d thought was his best mate” – was trying to seduce his wife as he was dying. So at the funeral, Edgar got up during the friend’s eulogy and told him: “Mate, sit down, Graham in the coffin’s got something to say.” Graham scarpered the minute he opened the envelope. He has since done almost 70 more funerals, and sometimes carries out house sweeps too. For one 88-year-old gentleman who was going into palliative care at hospital, Edgar dismantled his home sex dungeon before his three sons found it. 

Amsterdam: a cyclists’ paradise. Getty

“Life is so much better on two wheels”

Britain is “perhaps the most anti-cycling country in Europe”, says Ed West on Substack. Pedal-pushers like me are “seen as aggressive, arrogant and smug – even, shudder, left-wing”. But in the late 19th century, bikes were a “truly revolutionary form of transport”: they liberated women, helped working people get around, and “hugely expanded the dating market” in rural areas. Since then, like many peasant pursuits, cycling has become a “bourgeoise hobby” typically practised by men obsessed with craft beer. Famous cyclists include the broadcaster Jeremy Vine, whose social media complaints about drivers are so off-putting that he must be “some sort of agent provocateur of the motor industry”.

It’s a shame, because cycling is good for you and society in general. The Netherlands, where almost everyone cycles, has the most physically active people in Europe, and the happiest adolescents. People claim that cyclists’ paradises like Amsterdam and Copenhagen are naturally more suited for bikes than London, but they both used to be incredibly car-choked before authorities moved towards a different model. London itself had segregated cycling lanes as far back as 1934, but they were removed in the 1950s when car “mania” struck. There is no non-smug way of putting this, but “life is so much better on two wheels”.

“Tact is the ability to tell someone to go to hell in such a way that they look forward to the trip.”

Winston Churchill

That’s it. You’re done.

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