What’s your earliest memory? My older sister screaming like a banshee because she was trapped with our family poodle in the back of the car while he was experiencing a bout of explosive diarrhoea. Who are your heroes? I have such respect for JLo, Lady Gaga, Beyoncé and Ariana Grande (who I once met in an airport bathroom – she gave me a mini concert in between flushes). I love seeing artists in control of their business. What book last changed your thinking?
How the Word is Passed by Clint Smith, which explores the modern-day imprints of slavery still found on our monuments and towns. Language is so powerful, and we need to understand what we are really saying and how much damage we are doing by not examining our pasts.
Daniel Ngamije, Rwanda’s minister of health, has warned that Western countries vaccinating their teenagers against Covid-19 ahead of vulnerable and elderly people in developing countries such as his is unfair. In an interview with the
New Statesman, Ngamije said that rich countries will not be safe as long as coronavirus continues spreading among unvaccinated populations, potentially causing dangerous new variants to emerge. Rich countries such as the US and those within wealthy blocs such as the EU are now vaccinating teenagers against Covid-19, bringing them closer to the threshold for “herd immunity”. While teenagers are at low risk of being made seriously ill by Covid-19 themselves, they can transmit it to people who are at a higher risk.
On 31 January 2020, the day that the UK reported its first cases of Covid-19 and that it left the European Union, Boris Johnson boasted that one of his government’s priorities would be “controlling immigration”. The free movement of people was duly ended but the free movement of coronavirus was not. It was on 1 April of this year that ministers first learned that the Delta
(M)otherhood by Pragya Agarwal The choice to have a child or not can be fraught with guilt and anxiety – and often it is not a free choice at all, when our options and desires are so profoundly shaped by outside pressures: our cultural environment, our social status, our economic realities, our biology. In this powerful and compelling book, the behavioural scientist Pragya
9 June 2021 England hopes for “normality” on 21 June – but for observers of the solstice the date has always been ripe with possibility Perhaps a kind of delirious celebration will unfold too among the plants, which have had as strange and reluctant a spring as many of us. By Alice Vincent Ever since Boris Johnson announced in February the “roadmap” for easing lockdown, the words “21 June” have taken on new meaning, of that impossible-seeming thing: a return to a pre-Covid, restriction-free life. As a gardener, and someone who marks out their years by the seasons, it’s been a funny thing to hear discussed – on the news, by excitable Radio 1 DJs anticipating “the club”, in dozens of social-media memes. For solstice watchers, 21 June has always held significance: the longest day, the tipping point, the start of summer.