Category: People
-
The great opportunity: how Covid transformed global crime
BY the end of March, one week into the UK’s first lockdown, recorded crime in Lancashire had dropped by a startling 40% compared with the four-year average. “At first there was some mild panic,” says DCI Eric Halford, of Lancashire Constabulary. “Most senior officers expected a surge in demand…” This article first appeared in The Guardian on…
-
The flawed brilliance of J.B.S. Haldane
TOWARDS the end of his life, J.B.S. Haldane was inseparable from a pebble that had been found in the Valley of Elah in Israel, where David felled Goliath with a similar projectile. A king-size man who towered over British biology for several decades in the middle of the 20th century, Jack Haldane—the “half-Dane”—was a more…
-
‘It’s not over’: intimate diaries from the eye of the UK’s coronavirus storm
WHEN the Oxford team working on a Covid-19 vaccine first started holding weekly catchups in early February, Christina Dold, a 35-year-old senior postdoctoral researcher, jokingly referred to them as “Cobra” meetings. But it was in one of these early sessions that she found out how many volunteers they would be immunising daily, once the vaccine…
-
The coronavirus slayer!
ON 20 January, KK Shailaja phoned one of her medically trained deputies. She had read online about a dangerous new virus spreading in China. “Will it come to us?” she asked. “Definitely, Madam,” he replied. And so the health minister of the Indian state of Kerala began her preparations… This article first appeared in The Guardian on…
-
Closed borders and black weddings
PLAGUES – or, to use a more modern term, epidemics of infectious disease – pluck at our most primal fears. We have lived with them for at least 10,000 years, ever since our ancestors took up farming and built the first semi-permanent settlements. And they have always had the upper hand. They know us intimately,…
-
The drift of humankind
FOR a man who spent his career illuminating the vast, dim migrations of people in prehistory, Luca Cavalli-Sforza’s life was remarkably circular. He first became interested in his major field, genetics, in the house of the geneticist Adriano Buzzati at Belluno, in the hills north of Venice. There he helped to collect thousands of flies…
-
Adventurer in time
IN JULY 1962, Michel Siffre took off his watch and descended into the abyss of Scarasson in the French Alps. There, in a cave 130 metres below the surface, he set up camp next to a glacier. With a torch as his only light source, and deprived of all reminders of the passage of time,…
-
Notes from underground
ON 3 November 1793, in the thick of The Terror, the porter of the disaffected Val-de-Grâce abbey in Paris took advantage of the general commotion to slip into a stairway that led into the network of tunnels under the capital, and set off in search of treasure… This article first appeared in The Idler around 1…
-
Nous les Français, ne devons pas oublier comment accueillir un voisin en détresse
D’ICI 2019, le gouvernement va créer 12,500 places pour les réfugiés et les demandeurs d’asile. “C’est une connerie”, dit Michel Sitbon. “On en a besoin maintenant. Avons-nous oublié, nous les Français, comment accueillir un voisin en détresse?”… Cette tribune a été publiée sur le Huffington Post France le 21 juillet 2017. Cliquez ici pour lire l’article dans…
-
Twins on NHPR
Talking with New Hampshire Public Radio’s Word of Mouth presenter Virginia Prescott about the twin boom on 19 September…