var article_index = {"trivia":[{"id":134,"category_id":3,"name":"The arctic is melting yet I can\u2019t stop thinking about Taylor Swift\u2019s legs","description":"The arctic ice is melting and this is going to have major, lasting implications for sea levels and weather around the world. <br \/>\n<br \/>\nA few people care a lot but, strangely and shamefully, Taylor Swift\u2019s legs are far more captivating. They are lovely in ways that seem to defy description: somehow they look ordinary, yet perfect. They are long, yet not freakish. They seem unbowed by their implausible length; both utterly firm and yet yielding and soft.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nPeople who take global warming seriously tend to get apoplectic at this point. They\u2019re not wrong. While delightful, Taylor Swift\u2019s legs are of little significance in comparison with the fate of the planet. But getting angry at our fascination with the thighs of a singer is counter-productive in a democracy. We cannot be collectively dragged into being more responsible through guilt. And for a very simple reason. We don\u2019t have to pay attention. If those who care about arctic melt are going to get angry, bitter and stern, they\u2019ll just be ignored. <br \/>\n<br \/>\nThe problem is, we really do need to do something about that ice. But the starting point has to be indulgence towards the way our minds work. We are interested in Taylor Swift\u2019s legs not because we are evil - but because we are wired in unhelpful ways. If we are going to be interested en masse in the defrosting poles, we need to take our fragilities on board and therefore get serious, very serious, about trying to make important news not just \u2018important\u2019, but also beguiling - almost as tempting to hear about as Taylor\u2019s legs. Then things stand a chance of changing.","artist_name":" ","painting_name":" ","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/1388067383SWIFT-GREY.png","stub":"the-arctic-is-melting-yet-i-cant-stop-thinking-about-taylor-swifts-legs","order":1,"category_name":"Trivia","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/1388067383SWIFT-GREY.png"},{"id":150,"category_id":3,"name":"I\u2019m so shallow that I\u2019m ashamed","description":"A lot more people seem to want to become famous nowadays. Are we growing more shallow and narcissistic?<br \/>\n<br \/>\nNo. When people say they want to be famous, ultimately what they mean is something far more touching and vulnerable than it might sound: they want the world to be nice to them. <br \/>\n<br \/>\nUnfortunately, the world isn\u2019t generally nice to us unless we have a name. <br \/>\n<br \/>\nThose who pin the blame for 'celebrity culture\u2019 on a character defect in modern humans are missing the point. The real cause of celebrity culture isn't shallowness; it is a widespread feeling of humiliation among those who aren\u2019t famous. <br \/>\n<br \/>\nA society where everyone wants to be famous is one where being ordinary has failed to deliver the degree of respect necessary to satisfy people's appetite for dignity.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nIf we want to decrease the urge for fame, we should not begin by frowning upon celebrity culture; we should start to think of ways of making kindness, patience and attention more widely available, especially to the young. ","artist_name":" ","painting_name":" ","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/1388068333XFACTOR.png","stub":"im-so-shallow-that-im-ashamed","order":17,"category_name":"Trivia","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/1388068333XFACTOR.png"},{"id":151,"category_id":3,"name":"It's absurd how Hollywood celebrities like Angelina are always trying to make Africa 'sexy'","description":"Last year (and a few other years too), Angelina was the highest paid female star in Hollywood. But she\u2019s been spending a lot of time in Africa. She doesn\u2019t go to refugee camps in the Democratic Republic of Congo or in Rwanda to boost her income. She goes there to help people who are in great need. Ultimately, she makes Africa \u2018sexy\u2019.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nThis is often deemed ridiculous. A moralistic, or aggressively \u2018mature\u2019 person might point out that ideally we should not need celebrity endorsement to get worried about systematic rape or the plight of refugees in Sierra Leone and Tanzania.That\u2019s true. But such high-mindedness is self-defeating. It fatally miscalculates what it takes to motivate people. In a fantasy world we\u2019d be motivated purely by the love of justice and humanitarian generosity. But most of us are not like that. We need encouragement, a lot of inducements, before we direct our thoughts - and money and effort - to distant strangers. Not because we are mean but because we are normal. It\u2019s normal to care a lot more about your own family than about other people\u2019s families, to be obsessed about your own life and pretty detached about the suffering of people you\u2019ll never meet. Getting over that hurdle isn\u2019t simple, though sometimes it\u2019s important. The stern moralist forgets the barrier is there and so can\u2019t help us over it. Angelina - or those behind her - bear it in mind.","artist_name":" ","painting_name":" ","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/1388068358AFRICA.png","stub":"i-only-care-about-africa-because-of-angelina","order":18,"category_name":"Trivia","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/1388068358AFRICA.png"},{"id":157,"category_id":3,"name":"My country is going to the dogs","description":"What kind of country do we live in? What is the average person in it like? Should we feel scared or reassured, proud or ashamed?<br \/>\n<br \/>\nThe first thing to admit is that we can\u2019t answer these questions on the basis of our own experience alone. It is so hard to get to know a nation. We build up a picture of what the country is like through the news.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nAnd it isn\u2019t pretty. Here are some recent headlines from The Daily Mail:<br \/>\n<br \/>\n<strong>Mother accused of starving her four-year-old son to death<\/strong><br \/>\n<br \/>\n<strong>Members of sex ring threatened to cut off the face one of their victims and decapitate her baby after she tried to tell police<\/strong><br \/>\n<br \/>\n<strong>Man kept his wife chained up in the basement and whipped her with dog chains<\/strong><br \/>\n<br \/>\n<strong>Church-going woman, 51, used anti-freeze to kill husband she hated and son who was worse than a pest before poisoning daughter who would not get a job<\/strong><br \/>\n<br \/>\n<strong>Factory worker sexually assaulted two 13 year old girls while picking fruit<\/strong><br \/>\n<br \/>\n<strong>Pilot bludgeoned wealthy wife to death because he felt humiliated<\/strong><br \/>\n<br \/>\n<strong>Toddler bled to death in hospital due to 'catastrophic' lack of communication between doctors<\/strong><br \/>\n<br \/>\n<strong>Man tried to chop off his ex-girlfriend's hands with a meat cleaver<\/strong><br \/>\n<br \/>\nIf asked why it has decided to tell us all this, and is driving us more than a little mad as a result, the Daily Mail will soberly reply that it has no choice. It simply has a duty to tell us \u2018the truth.\u2019 <br \/>\n<br \/>\nYet this isn't entirely true. The news is only one set of stories about what is happening out there, no more and no less.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nOur nation isn't just a severed hand, a mutilated grandmother, three dead girls in a basement, embarrassment for a minister, trillions of debt, a double suicide at the railway station and fatal five-car crash by the coast.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nIt is also the cloud floating right now unattended over the church spire, the gentle thought in the doctor's mind as he approaches the patient's bare arm with a needle, the field mice by the hedgerow, the small child tapping the surface of a newly hardboiled egg while her mother looks on lovingly, the nuclear submarine patrolling the maritime borders with efficiency and courage, the factory producing the first prototypes of a new kind of engine and the spouse who, despite extraordinary provocations and unkind words, discovers fresh reserves of patience and forgiveness.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nThe headlines we are given about the nation are not the nation.","artist_name":" ","painting_name":" ","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/1388068836DAILYMAIL.png","stub":"my-country-is-going-to-the-dogs","order":24,"category_name":"Trivia","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/1388068836DAILYMAIL.png"}],"tragedy":[{"id":143,"category_id":1,"name":"I like it when someone important fails","description":"We like it, though we might not always admit that we do, when a celebrity falls from grace. Yesterday they were on the red carpet, everyone was their friend. Now they are in a humiliating divorce, or they are up on drugs charges. <br \/>\n<br \/>\nIt can seem pretty squalid to enjoy this kind of news. But maybe it\u2019s not because we are heartless. Perhaps something rather different, and a lot more to our credit, is going on. <br \/>\n<br \/>\nWe are mesmerised because we crave intimacy. When you really are close to someone it\u2019s not only their good sides you see; you get to know them more deeply. You see their sufferings, you are there when things go wrong. With a close friend you hear all about the terrible divorce; you know about the drinking bouts.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nBut mostly this doesn\u2019t happen. Mostly we only ever encounter the edited, airbrushed surface of other people. We say we like strength and admire success. We do, but weakness and failure makes us more connected to the people we like. <br \/>\n<br \/>\nWeird though it sounds at first, people become more likeable when we know their flaws. They seem more like us. We\u2019re routinely terrified that if people knew what we are really like they\u2019d ditch us. If they knew what we\u2019re like when we\u2019re in a rage, or drunk or depressed or when we lash out verbally at someone, they\u2019d think we were monsters. Yet the truth is, because we are all like this to some extent, it is actually reassuring, even nice, to hear about the messes in the lives of others. It\u2019s not cruelty that takes us there, but the need to know that we are normal, that our own troubles are not a unique curse, but that similar things happen even to people who - on the surface - have all the things we lack. <br \/>\n<br \/>\nIn the background, with a lot of celebrities, we can sense a huge effort to be perfect.  But, paradoxically, the celebrity who tried and failed may actually be more likeable. They are doing something more important than they ever could through being perfect. They are rehearsing in public something we all need to do: learn, somehow, to live with our awful flaws, our vulnerability, and our secret patheticness. <br \/>\n","artist_name":"Can\u2019t help watching her cry","painting_name":" ","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/1388068072NIGELLA.png","stub":"i-like-it-when-someone-important-fails","order":10,"category_name":"Tragedy","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/1388068072NIGELLA.png"},{"id":144,"category_id":1,"name":"I love reading about accidents","description":"He loved his bike. He was thinking of tomorrow, and put on a burst of speed. He didn\u2019t see the van changing lanes until too late. The van driver wasn\u2019t being careless, but he\u2019ll never escape the guilt. His brains went across the dual carriageway. It was an appalling accident. <br \/>\n<br \/>\nIt seems like the lowest distraction. What monsters we are to crane our heads as we drive past, rubbernecking the scene of the tragedy, or to seek out the images of - for those involved - the worst day of their lives. <br \/>\n<br \/>\nBut in truth, parts of our lives go wrong because we don\u2019t keep death in mind; we become ungrateful for what we have, wedded to uninspired habits. Death is the most terrible thing. But we can evoke the thought of death to evoke what life is about. <br \/>\n<br \/>\nIt\u2019s this powerful fact that may be in the back of our minds when we rush to check up on the latest disaster. We\u2019re not ghoulish. We are searching for the meaning of life. ","artist_name":"You should slow down to look at the wreckage ","painting_name":" ","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/1388068097BIKE.png","stub":"i-love-reading-about-accidents","order":11,"category_name":"Tragedy","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/1388068097BIKE.png"},{"id":145,"category_id":1,"name":"I love a tragedy","description":"Every year, at the end of March, the citizens of ancient Athens would gather under open skies on the southern slopes of the Acropolis in the Theatre of Dionysus and there listen to the latest works by the great tragedians of their city. The plotlines of these plays were unmitigatingly macabre, easily matching anything our own news could provide: a man kills his father, has sex with his mother and then gouges out his own eyes (Oedipus Rex); a man has his daughter murdered as part of a plan to revenge the infidelity of his brother\u2019s wife (Iphigenia); a mother murders her two children to spoil her unfaithful husband's plans to start a new family with another woman (Medea).<br \/>\n        <br \/>\nRather than regarding these stories as grotesque spectacles that all right-minded people should avoid, in his Poetics of c.335 B. C., the philosopher Aristotle looked generously upon the human fascination with them. He proposed that, when they are well written and artfully staged, such stories can become crucial resources for the emotional and moral education of a whole society. Despite the barbarity they describe, they themselves can function as civilizing forces.<br \/>\n        \t<br \/>\nBut in order for this to happen, in order for a horror (a meaningless narration of revolting events) to turn into what Aristotle called a tragedy (an educative tale fashioned from abominations), the philosopher thought it was vital that the plot should be well arranged and the motives and the personalities of the characters properly outlined to us. Extreme dramatic skill would be required in order that the audience spontaneously reached a point at which it recognised that the apparently unhinged protagonist of the story, who had acted impetuously, arrogantly and blindly, who had perhaps killed others and destroyed his own reputation and life, the person whom one might at first (had one come across the story in the news) dismissed as nothing but a maniac, was, in the final analysis, rather like us in certain key ways. A work of tragedy would rise to its true moral and edifying possibilities when the audience looked upon the hero's ghastly errors and crimes and was left with no option but to reach the terrifying conclusion: 'How easily I, too, might have done the same'. Tragedy's task was to demonstrate the ease with which an essentially decent and likeable person could end up generating hell.<br \/>\n        \t<br \/>\nIf we were entirely sane, if madness did not have a serious grip on one side of us, other people's tragedies would hold a great deal less interest for us. While we circle gruesome stories in the media, we may at a highly unconscious level be exploring shocking but important questions: If things got really out of hand late one night, and I was feeling wound up and tired and insecure, might I be capable of killing my partner? If I was divorced and my spouse was keeping my children from me, would I ever be able to kill them in a form of twisted revenge? Could I ever start chatting with a minor on the internet and, without quite realising the enormity of what I was doing, end up trying to seduce him or her?<br \/>\n        \t<br \/>\nFor civilisation to proceed, we naturally need the answers to be a firm 'no' in all cases. There is a serious task for the news here: the disasters we are introduced to should be framed in order to give us the maximum encouragement to practice not doing the things that the more chaotic parts of us would \u2013 under extreme circumstances \u2013 be attracted to exploring. We may never actually fling our children off a bridge at the end of our access day or shoot our partner dead during an argument, but we are all, at times, emotionally in the space where these sort of things can happen. Tragedies remind us how badly we need to keep controlling ourselves by showing us what happens when people don't.","artist_name":" ","painting_name":" ","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/1388068127TRAGEDY.png","stub":"i-love-a-tragedy","order":12,"category_name":"Tragedy","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/1388068127TRAGEDY.png"},{"id":146,"category_id":1,"name":"I stay up too late reading about the misfortunes of others","description":"They were off to a party. The mother, 43, had baked a cake. The two children, 8 and 4, were in the back, well strapped in. But they stood no chance. It was a head-on smash. Somerset police said they had rarely seen anything like it.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nWe feel sad to read of this, and at the same time, we enjoy it. We have to or we wouldn\u2019t read. This may be because we are all, somewhere within us, uncomfortably sad and disappointed. We harbour, quietly, a lot of darkness. At the same time, we live in societies that ceaselessly promote images of ambition and happiness, of thriving relationships, lucrative careers and successful endeavours, most of which lie painfully out of our reach.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nDisaster news takes some of the pressure off. It bears within it a broad and helpful message: humanity suffers. It is this moral that our unconscious apprehends and applies to the particulars of our own griefs. The differences in proportion between our difficulties and the accident victim's may seem obscene, but they are also (privately) supremely useful. The exaggerated scale of the pain that someone else has to endure serves to put our problems in perspective. We stand to feel a new gratitude for certain basic privileges that we lost sight of in our envious or frustrated moods. Whatever our disappointments, we have not just had a relative die in a car crash, we have so far avoided contracting a fatal virus and our house is still standing.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nImmersing ourselves in accounts of misfortune can enable us to adopt a more constructive and generous attitude towards ourselves and others. The growth of tolerance and a measure of hope may paradoxically be fed by news of extreme sorrow.","artist_name":" ","painting_name":" ","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/1388068199CARSMASH.png","stub":"i-stay-up-too-late-reading-about-the-misfortunes-of-others","order":13,"category_name":"Tragedy","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/1388068199CARSMASH.png"}],"celebrity":[{"id":138,"category_id":6,"name":"Rosie Huntington-Whiteley is too beautiful","description":"It\u2019s not really normal to cope with Rosie\u2019s looks. In the past, we only had to compare ourselves with a small number of people in the tribe. Now the tribe has given way to the whole world. What is considered normally desirable is being defined by a freakishly perfect elite. <br \/>\n<br \/>\nHow do we cope? We can\u2019t easily unwind this kind of exposure. So we have to get better at understanding statistics. Rosie\u2019s beauty is not normal. It is as rare as a mass murder. The problem is, we tend to think there are far more murders than there are. Three stories of stabbing in a week make it feel as if everyone is knifing everyone else. We wildly exaggerate how common certain things are. <br \/>\n<br \/>\nWe have to remind ourselves that though people do get stabbed and some have perfect faces, this is deeply unusual. Perhaps there were three stabbings - but there are 65 million people in your country. Rosie is beautiful, but hers might be the most beautiful face in 700 million women.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nWe recognise symptoms of panic when the frequency of a bad thing is exaggerated. We don\u2019t yet recognise a similar kind of hysteria that can occur when the frequency of a very attractive good thing is exaggerated through the news.","artist_name":" ","painting_name":" ","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/1388067921ROSIE.png","stub":"rosie-huntington-whiteley-is-too-beautiful","order":5,"category_name":"Celebrity","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/1388067921ROSIE.png"},{"id":148,"category_id":6,"name":"The news makes me jealous","description":"Elon Musk is one of the richest men in the world. He helped to found Paypal, he started Tesla Motors, and he runs a space rocket company, SpaceX. He wants to send humans to Mars within ten years. He is worth eight billion dollars. His wife (pictured) is very nice. And he is 42. <br \/>\n<br \/>\nIn response to these sort of stories, we\u2019re meant to be very mature: quietly pleased by the tycoon's success, impressed by his initiative, pleased about his marriage. News organisations that otherwise warn us of the damaging side effects of strobe lighting, nudity or profane language see no need to prepare us for the potentially problematic consequences of witnessing the success of others. They imply that we might take in information about an 8 billion dollar 42 year old without registering any particularly harmful or troubling after-thoughts, simply a broad sense of delight at the sheer genius and resourcefulness of mankind.<br \/>\n \t<br \/>\nThis is insanity. Below a twitching surface, most of us are caving in under the pressure of envy, feeling the ache of our tragically ignored and soon-to-be-forgotten egos in a world of apparently infinite possibility. We are likely to be in agony over the contrast between the hopes that were once invested in us and the reality of what we have done with our lives. <br \/>\n<br \/>\nWe need help with envy. It is the single most powerful emotion thrown up by the news and it\u2019s the emotion that we\u2019re least able to discuss and confront in a mature way. We were once children who felt jealous if a sibling had a slightly better torch or pair of shoes than us. The 8 billion extra is obviously going to be hard to swallow.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nDealing with envy starts with an acceptance that it\u2019s OK to feel this emotion. We have to give up strategies of denial (\u2018Musk is unhappy\u2019 \u2018Who cares about going to Mars?\u2019 etc.). We have to admit to the terror of being that most frightening of modern characters: a loser.  ","artist_name":" ","painting_name":" ","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/1388068280MUSK.png","stub":"the-news-makes-me-jealous","order":15,"category_name":"Celebrity","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/1388068280MUSK.png"},{"id":154,"category_id":6,"name":"Celebrity culture is so shallow","description":"Serious people usually think badly of celebrity culture. We\u2019re not meant to be devoted to celebrity news. <br \/>\n<br \/>\nCelebrities are meant to be shallow and stupid. But before we even get to any celeb in particular, the very idea of having heroes, people we look up to, listen to carefully and think well of, seems daft and childish. Shouldn\u2019t you just go your own way?<br \/>\n<br \/>\nThis is crazy. The impulse to admire and have heroes is an important part of human nature. Ignoring or condemning it won't kill it off; it simply forces it underground, where it lurks undeveloped, prone to latch on to inappropriate targets like Paris Hilton. <br \/>\n<br \/>\nRather than try to suppress our love of celebrity, we ought to channel it in optimally intelligent and fruitful directions. A properly organised society would be one where the best-known people (the ones whose party and holiday photos we looked at most often) were those who embodied and reinforced the highest, noblest and most socially beneficial values.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nIn its golden age, the ancient city state of Athens was unembarrassed celebrity culture. It had some legendary celebrities: statesmen like Pericles and Demosthenes, athletes like Philammon the Olympic boxer and Chabrias the chariot racer and musicians like Melanippides and Anakreon.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nThe job of news outlets is to make the celebrity section no less exciting than it is now, while ensuring that it features people who will spark our imaginations because they have something properly helpful and good to say. Celebrity stories should, in their mature form, make up one of the most serious sections of the news.","artist_name":" ","painting_name":" ","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/1388068419CELEBS.png","stub":"celebrity-culture-is-so-shallow","order":21,"category_name":"Celebrity","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/1388068419CELEBS.png"},{"id":159,"category_id":6,"name":"The News has been delivered to the wrong address","description":"At certain points in the past it was extremely difficult to come by information about what was happening anywhere else. And you probably didn\u2019t mind. What difference would it make, if you were a crofter in the Hebrides, to learn that a power struggle was brewing in the Ottoman Empire. But a few people had to keep themselves well informed. A merchant planning to send ships to distant seas needed to know whether piracy was on the increase in the Indian Ocean. A diplomat seeking to broker a peace deal needed to know quite a lot about what the leaders of other countries were up to. Perhaps the most distinctive kind of news was the court circular - saying that the king had departed from Westminster and was heading up river to Hampton Court. Crucial information if you had business with the monarch. <br \/>\n<br \/>\nMuch of what we now take for granted as news has its origins in the information needed by people taking major decisions or at the centre of national affairs. We still hear the echoes in the way news is reported - timing is assumed to be critical, as it really would be if we were active agents. If you don\u2019t have the latest update you might make a terrible blunder or miss a wonderful opportunity. The classic instance of this was when the Rothschild bank in London was quick to get information that Napoleon had been defeated at the battle of Waterloo. The outcome was sure to have a dramatic effect on the value of British government bonds. Knowing as soon as possible was the key to making the right call. <br \/>\n<br \/>\nEase of communication and a generous democratic impulse means that selections from the knowledge base, originally designed for decision makers, now gets routinely sent via the media to very large numbers of people.  Its as if a dossier which might properly arrive upon the desk of a minister has accidentally been delivered to the wrong address and ends up on the breakfast table of a librarian in Colchester or an electrician in Pitlochry. It contains an up to the minute analysis of the French government\u2019s aerospace policy and statistics about employment trends in Wales. Of course there are people who need to know these things. But the librarian or electrician might quite reasonably turn round and politely point out that they can\u2019t do anything with this knowledge and that, surely, the files have come to them by mistake. They don\u2019t, but only because habit has closed our eyes to the underlying strangeness of the phenomenon. <br \/>\n<br \/>\nEvery day the news gives us stuff that is both interesting for some people and irrelevant to you. So one reads a very insightful article on the prospects for political reform in Pakistan, meaning that if you were wondering whether Pakistan was a good place to locate a new factory you\u2019d be able to make a better informed decision. Or there are revelations that tensions in the cabinet are more serious than previously supposed. If you were wondering whether this might be a good time to launch your leadership bid, this would be a good piece to read. <br \/>\n<br \/>\nThe modern idea of news is pleasantly flattering. Yet it\u2019s really quite strange. We keep getting information that isn\u2019t really for us to know what to do with. No wonder we\u2019re sometimes a bit bored. It\u2019s not our fault.","artist_name":"It should have gone here: the German Chancellery","painting_name":" ","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/1388068543CHANCELRY.png","stub":"the-news-has-been-delivered-to-the-wrong-address","order":26,"category_name":"Celebrity","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/1388068543CHANCELRY.png"},{"id":160,"category_id":6,"name":"I want to go on holiday with Harry Styles","description":"One Direction's Harry Styles and Kendall Jenner - of the Californian Jenner-Kardashian clan - have taken a skiing holiday together.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nIt must be lovely to be them: the money rolls in, you are surrounded by people who think you are wonderful, there are legions of admirers, sex is on tap - and you are still so young.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nIt's not surprising if at times we find ourselves day-dreaming about being (or being with) Harry Styles. Imagine waking up and realising that you are 19 and everyone thinks you're hot, that you have 10 million pounds in the bank, with masses more on the way; all the celebrities want to party with you. The Prime Minister would gladly take your call if you could be bothered ringing him up. When you travel, you take a private jet. Instead of annoying announcements about delays on the runway, the captain simply asks if you are ready and throttles back. They already know what drinks you like. If you find someone cute, you invite them to Stockholm for the weekend or, maybe, Santa Barbara. They won't say no. There's a fabulous restaurant in Spain; the owner's begging you to drop by anytime.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nAlmost everyone has day-dreams. But we don't always feel very proud of the fact. Actually, some people see day-dreaming as positively dangerous. They worry it makes us passive. We sit at the computer, clicking on links, fantasising about being rich, while those who actually are rich get on with stuff. Stop fantasising, the critics say, it only leads us to accept inequality and to be idle spectators of life.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nBut day-dreaming is a remarkable achievement. The father of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, made an instructive observation about babies. A baby wakes in the night. The mother isn't there. The baby cries. Maybe it's going to take a few minutes before the mother comes along to see what's the matter. In those few minutes the baby is alone with its distress. To an adult it doesn't seem a long time, but to an infant it could seem devastating. The good possibility is that the baby can imagine the mother is there; the baby day-dreams, or fantasises that it's not alone, that she's here already. And that might be enough to hold things together for a while. Fantasy comes to the rescue. The baby doesn't have better options.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nWe should take a leaf out of Freud's book. It really is painful that - even if our lives are OK - we really are missing out on a lot. And we're never going to get them. We're not going to be young and simultaneously have more than enough money to last our entire lives. And very few people we fancy will sleep with us. It's plain dishonest to say such things aren't painful.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nDay-dreaming is a kind of safety net that stops us going crazy with the sense of missing out.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nRather than worrying only about the risks of escapism, we should be equally concerned about what happens when people don't have day-dreams (when they don't look at enough celebrity pictures). The inability to fantasise can lead people to act out, rather than, dream their wishes. In Perth last year, a civil servant wanted to be an aristocrat, so he fiddled the government health insurance program and spent millions on champagne, luxury luggage, a fancy apartment and chauffeurs. He was tormented by the demands of his imagination. But instead of day-dreaming harmlessly he became a criminal. Failures of fantasy are a central cause of white collar crime.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nWe need to rely on ways of coping with the sad things we can't put right: fantasy is one of the resources we can use. We accept this when people are (for example) wrongfully imprisoned: they might say afterwards how they kept themselves sane by imagining they owned a hotel and spent thousands of hours working out all the details of the decoration. We think this shows wonderful resourcefulness. That's because we've accepted that their problem of incarceration couldn't be solved. If we have a pessimistic or just realistic starting point about what you can can change in life, fantasy looks more impressive.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nDay-dreaming is a problem only when one fantasises about things that, actually, are within one's grasp. But when societies like ours constantly suggest more is available to us than is really the case, it is a safety valve. Fantasy is a frank admission of the goodness and appeal of what one hasn't got.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nFor most of us, the danger isn't that we soothe ourselves into wanting too little. We tend to struggle with the agonising possibilities of wanting too much. Surrounded by countless visions of lives far more appealing than our own, day-dreaming is a way of coping.","artist_name":" ","painting_name":"","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/1389806606STYLES.png","stub":"i-want-to-go-on-holiday-with-harry-styles","order":27,"category_name":"Celebrity","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/1389806606STYLES.png"}],"anxiety":[{"id":136,"category_id":2,"name":"I can\u2019t stop thinking about what the new iPhone will be like","description":"In the news, intense speculation always surrounds the launch of the next generation iPhone. <br \/>\n<br \/>\nIt is strange to get extremely excited about the changing face of a product, which - for all its small evolutions - is at heart very similar to the one that came just before it. <br \/>\n<br \/>\nWe\u2019re impatient at how slowly technology moves:  where\u2019s that long-promised rocket to Australia? What about the personal helicopter and bionic suit? We can imagine so much more than we end up having.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nMaybe it would be easier if the future never came. But it will. Just rather too slowly for us. One day, some radical new kind of transport system will whisk us to Sydney in the time it takes to finish this sentence - but that will be in three hundred years time. There\u2019ll be drugs to cure baldness and death - by 2190. Our successors will pity us about how tough it was in our day, the way we think of people who died of bubonic plague and had to use chamber pots. We\u2019re strung awkwardly between millenial hope and day to day resignation.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nBecause our hopes are so big, we can\u2019t help but secretly want technological developments to be more significant and consequential than they in fact are. The messianic longing has to go somewhere and, for want of a better destination, nowadays it often gets channelled to our phones. <br \/>\n<br \/>\nBut there is a lot we can change right now outside of technology. We don\u2019t always have to wait for Apple to make the screen better. Tech companies are very narrowly focused on resolving problems of speed, convenience and distance. Yet we have so many other needs - and might learn to treat certain aspects of life with the same kind of undaunted ambition as Apple confronts the dilemmas of mobile technology. For example, it\u2019s in our hands to get our relationships to go slightly better - right now. If we can get hopeful about battery life stretching 30 minutes longer, there\u2019s also reason to celebrate saving one hour a week having less intense arguments. <br \/>\n<br \/>\nIt\u2019s not that we should give up being fascinated by the improvements to communications devices that might be available next year. It\u2019s rather that we need to start treating other parts of existence more like our phones: as things we might improve. We might make a start by trying to fix our characters, one bit at a time, starting now.","artist_name":" ","painting_name":" ","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/1388067873IPHONE.png","stub":"i-cant-stop-thinking-about-what-the-new-iphone-be-like","order":3,"category_name":"Anxiety","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/1388067873IPHONE.png"},{"id":137,"category_id":2,"name":"The news is too biased for me","description":"Many thoughtful people imagine that what makes news organisations serious and worthy is their ability to provide us with information that is 'unbiased'. <br \/>\n<br \/>\nBut this bias against bias is fundamentally mistaken. Facts can only become meaningful and relevant to us when they slot into some picture of important or trivial, right or wrong, hopeful or worrying, good or bad. News organisations that vaunt their neutrality forget that neutrality is simply impossible vis a vis the biggest questions facing our civilisation. There is no technocratic, risk-free, all-knowing sober set of answers to cling to. It's a question of politics in the widest sense, and in the end, if you like, of philosophy.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nAt heart, the tricky word 'bias' simply alludes to the business of having a 'take' on existence. One may have a better or worse take, but one needs a take: what does one believe is important? What seems just? What should we be striving for? One can't make any sense of the flotsam of daily events in the news without having some answers. If the news is to matter to us, it must be presented to us by organisations that have tried to think through the ends of human life, that have a vision of where we are trying to go as a species, and that have somewhere articulated their answers to their audiences. <br \/>\n<br \/>\nThink of the figures we most revere in history: Plato, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Sigmund Freud, the Buddha, Ghandi, Nelson Mandela... All of these have been highly biased: each of them had a strong sense of what mattered and why, and their judgements were anything but perfectly balanced. They were just flavoured in the right way.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nWe don't need news stripped of bias, we need news presented to us with the best kinds of bias.","artist_name":" ","painting_name":" ","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/1388067894BBC.png","stub":"the-news-is-too-biased-for-me","order":4,"category_name":"Anxiety","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/1388067894BBC.png"},{"id":152,"category_id":2,"name":"All politicians are idiots","description":"It\u2019s clearly very important for most of us to believe that politicians are dreadful people - egotistical, unprincipled, witless or, worse, devious and cunning. <br \/>\n<br \/>\nThere are always bits of evidence turning up that can be used to reinforce these ideas. Politicians get rowdy during parliamentary sessions; some of them fiddled their expenses a while back; they are desperate for donations and court unsavoury backers; they retreat to the bunker when journalists go for them. <br \/>\n<br \/>\nNow the really tricky thing is that in truth, if we\u2019re honest, most politicians are not in fact catastrophic, given how challenging it is to govern a country. They are for the most part relatively hard working, occasionally intelligent, well-intentioned people; in their own ways they all care about the collective good of the country. This doesn\u2019t mean they hit on perfect policies or are effective. But it does mean they\u2019re not a bunch of charlatans, crooks and scoundrels. <br \/>\n\t<br \/>\nThis thought is very very hard to swallow. We rebel against it. It\u2019s more manageable to think they are terrible than to think they are good enough. <br \/>\n<br \/>\nWhy are we so drawn to doing our politicians down? <br \/>\n<br \/>\nSecretly (and rather oddly), we envy politicians. A lot. We envy their connection to power, their success in getting elected, their status, their opportunity to shape a society, their cars and special passes, their position as insiders in the key discussions and decisions. We think at some level, as one is almost encouraged to in a democracy: why should that person not be me? It\u2019s humiliating that they\u2019re at the controls, and we\u2019re the passengers. <br \/>\n\t<br \/>\nBeing cynical provides a way of telling ourselves that there\u2019s nothing really to envy. After all, who would we envy an idiot? Wouldn\u2019t it be a nightmare to be in charge of the country anyway?<br \/>\n<br \/>\nOf course, it\u2019s a sign of things going well if we are governed by people we envy. We should want to be administered by people who are in some ways in a better place than we are. <br \/>\n\t<br \/>\nIt would seem utterly naive and feeble to feel gratitude towards a politician. Yet gratitude shouldn\u2019t be such a maligned emotion to feel in this context. Obviously they don\u2019t get everything right. But they are willing to face contentious and serious decisions, to face endless hostile cross-examination and to risk failure every day. <br \/>\n\t<br \/>\nTo an impatient adolescent, their harassed, decent, well-meaning (and inevitably very flawed) parents look like imbeciles. That\u2019s not because the adolescents necessarily have appalling parents, it\u2019s just that they don\u2019t appreciate how difficult it is to be a parent. No one blames the adolescent; but everyone knows that,  if they become parents themselves, it will all look a bit different. ","artist_name":"Secretly, we envy his power","painting_name":" ","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/1388068381OSBOURNE.png","stub":"all-politicians-are-idiots","order":19,"category_name":"Anxiety","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/1388068381OSBOURNE.png"},{"id":153,"category_id":2,"name":"The comments after articles make me feel sick","description":"The ability to post comments at the end of on-line news stories has revealed something unusual about our fellow citizens.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nEven though most of them seem really quite nice and very polite (even those we know quite well), to judge by the comments, other people are in fact, when it comes down to it, in privacy, something very different: jealous, furious, vindictive, heartless, obsessive, unforgiving - in a word, little short of insane.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nThis is troubling. Which is correct, the picture we have of other people from our own experience or the far darker picture given to us by the Comments sections?<br \/>\n<br \/>\nWe believe it is - on balance - the former. The Comments section are like people\u2019s journals. In journals, we write all sorts of things down in extreme moods; we want to kill the friend who let us down, the whole of our lives has been useless, we don\u2019t really love our partners, we\u2019re lonelier than we have ever been, we want a lover. Then the mood passes - and we feel very glad indeed that no one has read the diary and is taking what we said there as the definitive truth about us.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nUnfortunately, the Comments are not like journal entries. They stay up, everyone reads them and they come to seem like the truth about the personalities of others. This drags us down and can make life feel intolerable. Overall in a society, people need to be able to think reasonably well of their fellow citizens. Otherwise, no one can leave the house or get on with anyone. <br \/>\n<br \/>\nIt isn\u2019t a priority to see the worst side of people\u2019s minds. The priority is to learn how to trust and think a little bit better of one another. We might need to skip those Comments\u2026","artist_name":"But what\u2019s she really like deep down?","painting_name":" ","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/1388068401COMMENTS.png","stub":"the-comments-after-articles-make-me-feel-sick","order":20,"category_name":"Anxiety","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/1388068401COMMENTS.png"}],"addiction":[{"id":141,"category_id":4,"name":"I can\u2019t stop checking Twitter","description":"We are used to the idea that the news is about what has just happened. But there\u2019s another way of defining news: news is anything that you haven\u2019t heard of before - that matters now. <br \/>\n<br \/>\nThat means something trivial that happened just now isn\u2019t really news, whereas something profound that you didn\u2019t know about that happened five hundred years ago is news. Christianity ran with this view of news when it decided to call the Bible \u2018the good news\u2019.  Missionaries could sail off to Japan with the urgent conviction that they were bringing \u2018the news\u2019 to the East - even though the stories they wanted to tell had all happened centuries before. <br \/>\n<br \/>\nWe take it for granted that everyone has heard everything about what happened yesterday and that everyone has had all the interesting thoughts that it\u2019s possible to have about it and that they never need to listen to any of it again. Therefore, the \u2018news\u2019 has to be about what happened since then - even in the last minute, if we\u2019re following things on Twitter. <br \/>\n<br \/>\nA lot of the time, that makes great sense. But, sometimes, it\u2019s completely off target; sometimes the real \u2018news\u2019 happened a long time ago, like last  year or in the fourth century B.C. But it should still be explained to people because this news is very important to the business of living a good life, more important than something that happened an hour ago on the Twitter feed.","artist_name":"Frances Xavier reaches Japan, 1549, with old information that remained news.","painting_name":" ","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/13880679991549.png","stub":"i-cant-stop-checking-twitter","order":8,"category_name":"Addiction","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/13880679991549.png"},{"id":142,"category_id":4,"name":"I want to look at semi-dressed celebrities all the time","description":"Though we occasionally feel guilty about it, it\u2019s natural to want to be around attractive people. And as they can be in short supply in daily life, people, especially heterosexual guys, often turn to the news. Keira Knightley has been on holiday with her husband James Righton. She has been wearing light summer dresses and a range of quite small bikinis.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nThe standard interpretation is that guys who look at pictures of attractive strangers are shallow: all they care about is cleavage, lustrous hair, long legs and skimpy clothes.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nThat\u2019s true to an extent. Keira is astonishingly beautiful and people care about that. She\u2019s remarkably slender with a perfectly intriguing face. There are likely to be many men wishing they could be with her, and many women hoping they could be like her. <br \/>\n<br \/>\nBut actually, the really odd, even embarrassing, thing that happens when people find Keira (and many others) interesting, is that the appeal usually goes beyond just the clothes, the face and the body. Yes, the body matters, but the beauty of the body is often in some kind of alliance with other psychological things, things like tenderness or playfulness, a sense of humour or sensitivity. But because we\u2019re not so good at describing those other things and because it seems weird to feel quite deeply for strangers, this aspect of things tend to get downplayed. It seems easier to own up to wanting to have sex with a stranger than to wanting to touch their soul.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nSexy is sometimes the first name we call attractive things. It\u2019s easy to think that what we call \u2018being turned-on\u2019 is purely a physical thing. But actually, when people get turned on, it\u2019s more complicated and a bit nicer too: they are often picking up on slightly less obvious, but equally interesting signals coming off someone\u2019s features. <br \/>\n\t<br \/>\nYes, the hot body is the lead in and it matters. But the hints about personality are quite important too. In fact, once you start to notice what a person is like (not just how pretty they are), a really important move opens up. You begin to see how a person could be deeply attractive without being conventionally gorgeous.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nIn thinking that we are only interested in people with perfect legs and cheeks we do ourselves a curious injustice. Of course we like pretty people. But we like a lot of other things too. ","artist_name":"Keira Knightley on holiday with husband James Righton","painting_name":" ","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/1388068028KIERA.png","stub":"i-want-to-look-at-semi-dressed-celebrities-all-the-time","order":9,"category_name":"Addiction","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/1388068028KIERA.png"},{"id":147,"category_id":4,"name":"I find the news more interesting than my partner","description":"It\u2019s a fascinating story: a clear blue day, a brand new Boeing 777, an experienced crew. Then mayhem. You could spend all day on this. <br \/>\n\t<br \/>\nBut you know it wouldn\u2019t be a good idea. Sometimes the disasters of others prompts us to focus on our own neglected priorities, but after a while, these stories also risk distracting us from our deeper concerns. The scale, colour and immediacy of disasters, especially involving planes, gives them the power to elbow themselves to the forefront of our consciousness, where they insistently squat, demanding updates every ten minutes (which most news outlets duly oblige us with), thereby obscuring the call of all those far quieter yet for us far more consequential worries which we need to face within ourselves. When a plane has just crashed at San Francisco airport, we may reflexively start to respond in the manner of an air accident investigator or a panicked relative, rather than remember that this is not in fact really any of our business \u2013 and that we ought more fairly to be spending the day looking within, trying to interpret those faint pulses of anxiety upon which the effective management of our selves depends.<br \/>\n        \t<br \/>\nA balanced life requires a curious combination of inner and outer concern: we have to internalise the general message that emerges from others\u2019 accidents \u2013 that we are highly fragile and temporary \u2013 without, however, getting so deeply immersed in their particulars that we allow the disasters of strangers to become excuses or means by which we avoid our responsibilities to ourselves. We must both register and yet at the same time not fixate upon the sadness and pain with which the news seeks to confront us at every turn.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nWe are so used to equating being human with the simple act of feeling that we are apt to lose sight of what a necessary achievement it is occasionally to remain numb. Such are the limits of our own concentration and emotional resources, having a serious and appropriate concern for ourselves and the handful of people who deeply depend upon us must frequently involve a calculated restriction of sympathy for, and interest in, others \u2013 a due recognition, in other words, that not everything that happens is our business.","artist_name":" ","painting_name":" ","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/1388068230PLANE.png","stub":"i-find-the-news-more-interesting-than-my-partner","order":14,"category_name":"Addiction","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/1388068230PLANE.png"},{"id":155,"category_id":4,"name":"I always read the headlines before I go to sleep","description":"The news wants you to keep reading, but you also know there are times you should stop. The news is the best distraction ever invented. It sounds so serious and important. But it wants you never to have any free time ever again, time where you can daydream, unpack your anxieties and have a conversation with yourself. <br \/>\n<br \/>\nThere are countless difficult things hiding away deep within us which we should give some thought to even though the desperate temptation is to keep clicking and looking. We need news sabbaths. We need long train journeys on which we have no wireless signal and nothing to read, where our carriage is mostly empty, where the views are expansive and where the only sounds are those made by the wheels as they click against the rails. We need plane journeys when we have a window seat and nothing else to focus on for two or three hours but the tops of clouds and our own thoughts.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nWe need relief from the news-fuelled impression that we are living in an age of unparalleled importance, with our wars, our debts, our riots, our missing children, our after-premiere parties, our IPOs and our rogue missiles. We need, on occasion, to be able to rise up into the air, to a place where that particular conference and this particular epidemic, that new phone and this shocking wildfire, will lose a little of their power to affect us \u2013 and where even the most intractable problems will seem to dissolve against a backdrop of the stars above us.<br \/>\n <br \/>\nWe should at times forego our own news in order to pick up on the far stranger, more wondrous headlines of those less eloquent species that surround us: kestrels and snow geese, spider beetles and black-faced leafhoppers, lemurs and small children \u2013 all creatures usefully uninterested in our own melodramas; counterweights to our anxieties and self-absorption.<br \/>\n        \t<br \/>\nA flourishing life requires a capacity to recognise the times when the news no longer has anything original or important to teach us; periods when we should refuse imaginative connection with strangers, when we must leave the business of governing, triumphing, failing, creating or killing to others, in the knowledge that we have our own objectives to honour in the brief time still allotted to us.","artist_name":" ","painting_name":" ","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/138806845930000.png","stub":"i-always-read-the-headlines-before-i-go-to-sleep","order":22,"category_name":"Addiction","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/138806845930000.png"}],"overload":[{"id":135,"category_id":5,"name":"I don\u2019t care about the big stories of the day","description":"Nelson Mandela's body was laid to rest in a family plot, after political and religious leaders paid tribute to South Africa's first black president at a state funeral service. <br \/>\n<br \/>\nAnd yet you don\u2019t care. You know the reasons why it\u2019s important, but they don\u2019t grip you. This has happened a few times before: when the budget finally went through, when the spying story came out, when coral of the Great Barrier reef was revealed to be in poor condition... You realise these things matter for the world. Yet, in private, you don\u2019t care.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nNot because you are bad, but because you are somewhere else. You can\u2019t take it on board. This isn\u2019t your struggle; you\u2019re needed elsewhere on subjects that, while they\u2019re tiny in the grand scheme of things, matter a lot within your context. <br \/>\n<br \/>\nThe news is jealous. It doesn\u2019t want to allow you a private sense of purpose. It should. There is a kind of person who recoils when there is too much external pressure to feel something, anything; a person who bridles at the idea of an expected response. This kind of person is often a bit depressed at Christmas, suspicious of birthdays and not very good with prize-winning books and films that everyone likes. Maybe at school, this person didn't join in the singing. <br \/>\n<br \/>\nIt would be dangerous if hardly anyone paid attention to what the government was doing, or what was happening to the environment or read the books that expert judges had deemed valuable. But it is not right to go from this to the demand that everyone should be interested in every item at the very moment when the news machine requests their attention. <br \/>\n<br \/>\nIndeed, we badly need people whose attention is not caught up in the trends of the moment and who are not looking in the same direction as everyone else. We need people scanning the less familiar parts of the horizon. <br \/>\n<br \/>\nThere was a time when that particular now-dead statesman was unrecognised, when the approved legislation hadn\u2019t even been formulated, when few people were interested in coral reefs... These things had to get going, and to do so, they needed a pool of independent thinkers of a kind who turn today\u2019s unpromising themes into tomorrow\u2019s mainstream, \u2018obvious\u2019 topics of interest. <br \/>\n<br \/>\nIndifference to big banner events can be churlish. But it can also be the mark of deep and important originality. Let\u2019s treat the phenomenon of not being interested in some stories with cautious respect.","artist_name":" ","painting_name":" ","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/1388067854MANDELA.png","stub":"i-dont-care-about-the-big-stories-of-the-day","order":2,"category_name":"Overload","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/1388067854MANDELA.png"},{"id":139,"category_id":5,"name":"I can\u2019t take the headlines any more","description":"Io is the innermost of the four moons of the planet Jupiter and, with a diameter of 3,642 kilometres, the fourth-largest moon in the Solar System. It was named after a mythological character, a priestess of Hera who became one of the lovers of Zeus.  With over 400 active volcanoes, Io is the most geologically active object in the Solar System. Its surface is dotted with more than 100 mountains that have been pushed up by extensive compression at the base of Io's silicate crust. Some of these peaks are taller than Mount Everest. <br \/>\n<br \/>\nThoughts of Io help us to recover perspective. The planet offers to soothe our worries about what will happen to us next week by holding our attention to something vast, impersonal and deeply majestic. We are reminded of how minor our own preoccupations can look from a distance. The problem isn\u2019t that we worry about next week - rather it is our tendency to fret excessively and unproductively. Io can help us break the circuit of anxiety. We will have to face next week when it comes. <br \/>\n<br \/>\nBut we can do so a little refreshed, thanks to a few moments with a handsome, terrifying distant moon.","artist_name":" ","painting_name":" ","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/1388067937IO.png","stub":"i-cant-take-the-headlines-any-more","order":6,"category_name":"Overload","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/1388067937IO.png"},{"id":140,"category_id":5,"name":"There\u2019s too much news","description":"It feels like there is always an infinite amount of news, so much is happening in the world every day. A newspaper could be 1,000 pages long and hardly scratch the surface. Perhaps if you really cared about the news, you\u2019d read more and more of it? <br \/>\n<br \/>\nYet there\u2019s a strange thing that goes on. After a while it becomes clear that the same kinds of events are recurring again and again. The details of the story change, but the core issue is the same. In New Zealand, the mayor of Auckland recently got into huge trouble for sexting his mistress and for abusing his travel budget. In Australia at much the same time a Queensland MP - and head of the state ethics committee - had an affair, and there were sexual photos and allegations of misuse of public money. Then it was reported that US Secret Service agents around the world had been hiring prostitutes, visiting brothels and having extra marital affairs. Meanwhile, in the UK the man who had been, until shortly before, running the Co-Op bank was caught up in a sex and drugs scandal. A while back, there was an American president who\u2026<br \/>\n<br \/>\nAll of these stories circle round the same archetypal story. It goes like this: Men in highly responsible positions are coming unstuck because their sexual desires lead them to do things that, when made public, are shameful. Really there is just one story here which is being repeated. What could be seen as four (or, over a year, 40 or 400) different news items actually belong to just a single story. There is a lot less news than we suppose. <br \/>\n<br \/>\nThe search for archetypes - for the basic patterns which recur many times - is not just a game. Identifying the underlying theme is more important in the long run than going through the details of every specific case. The big news - the news that matters - is not so much that this particular MP or mayor or banker or leader did what they did. What we need to address is why such things happen. It is the archetype that takes us to the nub of this.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nThe point of an archetype is to simplify the vast number of things which are going on at any one time. If we were more conscious of archetypes, we\u2019d have to take in a lot less news. That\u2019s why news organisations don\u2019t normally want to tell you about archetypes (ad revenue would go down). We think they should.","artist_name":"Auckland mayor Len Brown has been having an affair. News but not new.","painting_name":" ","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/1388067973LENBROWN.png","stub":"theres-too-much-news","order":7,"category_name":"Overload","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/1388067973LENBROWN.png"},{"id":156,"category_id":5,"name":"I\u2019m scared of floods, bird flu and everything else","description":"Most news outlets leave you in no doubt that you should be scared, very scared. Of extraterrestrial objects, mutating viruses, floods, fires, spiders and cancer.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nNews outlets badly need their audiences to be agitated, frightened and bothered a lot of the time \u2013 yet all of us have an even greater responsibility to try to remain resilient.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nContrary to what the news usually suggests, hardly anything is ever totally new, few things are truly amazing and very little is absolutely terrible. The revolution will not mean the end of history; it will just change a lot of things in many different small and complicated ways. The economic indices are grim, but we have weathered comparable drops many times over the last century and even the worst scenarios only predict that we will return to a standard of living we had a few decades ago, when life was still possible. A bad avian flu may disrupt international travel and defeat known drugs for a while, but research laboratories will eventually understand and contain it. The floods look dramatic, but in the end, they will affect merely a fraction of the population and recede soon enough. Rome fell, but six hundred years later, everything was almost back to normal again. <br \/>\n<br \/>\nThese soothing arguments take their inspiration from Stoic philosophy. Stoicism, a philosophy which developed in Ancient Greece and Rome many centuries ago, was designed to help its practitioners keep calm in the face of crises through a tone of courageous pessimism. The Stoic thinker Seneca had a particularly attractive down-beat resilient spirit:<br \/>\n<br \/>\n\"Winter brings on cold weather; and we must shiver. Summer returns, with its heat; and we must sweat. Unseasonable weather upsets the health; and we must fall ill. In certain places we may meet with wild beasts, or with men who are more destructive than any beasts. Yet we cannot change this order of things one bit. It is just the law of Nature to which we have to adjust. That which you cannot change, you have to learn to endure.\u2019 <br \/>\n<br \/>\nStoicism is the philosophy most diametrically opposed to the spirit of most modern news. We like it here. As Seneca wrote calmly:<br \/>\n<br \/>\n\u2018What need is there to weep over parts of life? The whole of it calls for tears.\u2019<br \/>\n","artist_name":"He\u2019ll get through this.","painting_name":" ","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/1388068492FLOOD.png","stub":"im-scared-of-floods-bird-flu-and-everything-else","order":23,"category_name":"Overload","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/1388068492FLOOD.png"},{"id":158,"category_id":5,"name":"300 people died today in a faraway land - and I just don\u2019t really care","description":"The standard response is that we\u2019re just shallow, for caring more about a new pop song than about a mudslide that destroyed a neighbourhood in a town in northern Brazil, about the birthday of one baby of a member of the British royal family than about a hundred thousand desperate children suffering from rickets and malaria in central Africa.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nYet what if this astonishing level of disengagement turned out to be not entirely the fault of the audience? What if the real reason viewers and readers don't much care about what is happening in foreign lands is not that we are especially shallow or nasty, nor even that the events described are inherently boring, but instead simply that we just don\u2019t know enough about most disaster zones to care about them?<br \/>\n<br \/>\nWhat tends to make it into the news are the disasters, the really unusual bits. Therefore, a bombing that kills thirty people is thought more newsworthy than a quiet day in a fishing village, an outbreak of a tropical disease that tears its victims\u2019 lungs apart in three hours is considered to be of greater interest than the peaceful collection of the harvest and revelations of torture by the security services are deemed more significant than a collective lunchtime ritual of eating tabbouleh and vine leaves in a bucolic field overlooking the river Jordan.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nThe problem with this philosophy is that unless we have some sense of what passes for normality in a given location, we may find it very hard to calibrate or care about abnormal conditions. We can be properly concerned about the sad and violent interruptions only if we know enough about the underlying steady state of a place, about the daily life, routines and modest hopes of its population.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nYet, when it comes to most other countries of the world, despite the news media\u2019s amazing technological capabilities, despite the bureaux, correspondents, photographers and camera operators, we are given no information whatsoever about ordinary occurrences. We don't know whether anyone has ever had a normal day in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, for no such thing has ever been recorded by a Western news organisation. We have no idea what it's like to go to school or visit the hairdresser in Bolivia; it's entirely mysterious whether anything like a good marriage is possible in Somalia; and we are equally in the dark about office life in Turkmenistan and what people do on the weekend in Algeria. The news parachutes us in only for the so-called 'important' events \u2013 the earthquakes, the gang rapes, the indiscriminate destruction of whole villages by drug-addled killers \u2013 and assumes that we will feel suitably shocked and drawn in by them.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nBut in truth, we can't much care about dreadful incidents unless we've first been introduced to behaviours and attitudes with which we can identify; until we have been acquainted with the sorts of mundane moments and details that belong to all of humanity. A focus on these does not in any way distract from 'serious' news; it instead provides the bedrock upon which all sincere interest in appalling and disruptive events must rest.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nWe all already understand our own country just from living there. We know what it's like to take a train, attend a meeting, go to the shops, walk the children to school, flirt, laugh and get cross there \u2013 and this is why we immediately engage when we hear that someone has been kidnapped in Newcastle-upon-Tyne or that a bomb has exploded in Edgebaston. But we don\u2019t know any of these things in far-off places. We need to learn something about street parties in Addis Ababa, love in Peru and in-laws in Mongolia to care a little more about the next devastating typhoon or violent coup.","artist_name":" ","painting_name":" ","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/1388068519300PEOPLE.png","stub":"300-people-died-today-in-a-faraway-land-and-i-just-dont-really-care","order":25,"category_name":"Overload","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/1388068519300PEOPLE.png"}]}