Innehållsförteckning för 19th November 2021 från Guardian Weekly

FW de Klerk Last apartheid president of South Africa who oversaw Nelson Mandela’s release and the transfer of power. He died on 11 November, aged 85. Quandra Prettyman American champion of Black women’s literature. She died on 21 October, aged 88. Wilbur Smith Prolific Zambianborn adventure novelist with 49 books and sales of 140m. He died on 13 November, aged 88. Austin Currie Leading light of the Northern Ireland civil rights movement and co-founder of the Social Democratic and Labour party. He died on 9 November, aged 82. Viktor Bryukhanov Engineer who oversaw the construction and meltdown of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Ukraine. He died on 13 October, aged 85.…

It was almost as if the pandemic had never happened. In Cologne, thousands of revellers in fancy dress jostled side by side in a tightly packed throng as they counted down to the start of the annual carnival season at 11am on 11 November. In Paris, bars were open late and filled to bursting, with Armistice Day a national holiday. In Amsterdam, it was business as usual in overflowing cafes and coffee shops. But rather than heralding the start of celebrations, those nights last week may have been a last hurrah as a fourth wave of coronavirus sweeps across Europe. Half a dozen Dutch towns cancelled the popular parades that marked the annual arrival of Sinterklaas last weekend, and Germany’s Christmas markets could yet be called off. “You can’t imagine…

Having a net zero target is causing emissions to rise Most of the media seem to think that the idea of net zero emissions is unproblematic, despite the fact that many climate scientists consider that it is very problematic (Big story, 5 November). Given the prominence of the idea at Cop26, this lack of balance in the reporting of breakthroughs is worrying. For example, Robert Watson, a former chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, has denounced net zero as a trap set by industrialists and governments. He and other climate scientists say the push for net zero has encouraged a “burn now, pay later” approach, which has seen carbon emissions continue to rise. As a sociologist, I am not in a position to evaluate such criticisms of net…

As one of the most zealously driven artists of the Britpop era, Damon Albarn has spent the last 20 years doing something you would expect more major rock stars to do, but that hardly any actually seem to manage: using the space and time created by vast success in order to do exactly what they want, unbothered by commercial concerns. The Nearer the Fountain began life as a commission from a French arts festival, underwent a Covid-punctuated gestation period and has emerged as the de facto follow-up to Albarn’s 2014 solo album, Everyday Robots. It’s a markedly different beast from its predecessor: more opaque musically and lyrically, flecked with jazzy saxophone, frequently driven by the sound of an ancient drum machine. It drifts along in a melancholy, stoned mist, its…

As Peter Doggett notes in Growing Up: Sex in the Sixties, his fascinating but deeply strange new book about the decade, the montages so beloved of TV documentary-makers – the fuzzy clips of gyrating hippies with flowers in their hair – don’t tell even half the story. Decades are not neat. Just as the 60s would not really get going for most people until some time in 1975 (at least), the 50s hung about like a bad smell long after 1960. The so-called revolution walked hand in hand with something altogether more repressive: a backwards tug that enabled the old double standards so far as men and women go not just to survive, but to thrive. Swerving the obvious territory of the Chatterley trial and the Profumo scandal, Doggett sets…

As temperatures plummet on the European Union’s eastern frontier, thousands of Middle Eastern migrants remain stranded in the no man’s land between Poland and Belarus. It’s now clear they were assisted in their arrival by Alexander Lukashenko, Belarus’s despotic leader, for use as human pawns in a cruel political game. Yet, instead of forcing the EU to drop sanctions against his regime as he had evidently hoped, Lukashenko has merely triggered a further round of tougher measures to come. Andrew Roth, Lorenzo Tondo and Martin Chulov survey the backdrop to this complex situation and the dire conditions at the border, while Kenan Malik outlines the hypocrisy at the heart of Fortress Europe’s migration strategy that has served to encourage Lukashenko. The big story Page 10 → Cop26 ended with views divided over whether…

RIVERS London’s Thames is teeming with life again, report reveals Seahorses, eels, seals and sharks are living in the tidal Thames, according to the most comprehensive analysis of the waterway since it was declared biologically dead in the 1950s. But scientists from the Zoological Society of London, who carried out the work, warn that the 150km tidal stretch of the Thames is suffering from rising nitrate levels as a result of industrial runoff and sewage discharges. Water levels and temperature are also rising as a result of global heating. Species living in the Thames include seahorses and even sharks, including tope, starry smooth hound and spurdog. The most recent count revealed there were about 900 harbour seals and 3,200 grey seals. GEOLOGY First continents rose 700m years earlier than thought…

Emissions cuts (known as mitigation) Pledges on cutting emissions by 2030, known as nationally determined contributions, or NDCs, are inadequate to limit temperature rises to 1.5C, and according to analysis published during the talks would lead to a disastrous 2.4C of heating. Only one major emitter – India – produced a new NDC at the talks, so the work of getting NDCs in line with a 1.5C goal was always going to stretch beyond the Glasgow summit. However, under the 2015 Paris agreement, nations are only required to return every five years to set new NDCs. Sticking to that timetable would take the world well beyond 1.5C, so one crucial aim for the UK hosts was swifter revisions. That was achieved – the question of revising NDCs will be on…

At the start of November, it was difficult to find a single Labour MP who genuinely thought their party was in with a chance of winning the next election. The mood was one of quiet resignation at the prospect of a fifth consecutive defeat. The media had also largely written off Keir Starmer. A fortnight of Tory sleaze stories later, with Boris Johnson at the centre of many, it all looks very different. A golden rule of spin doctors, often attributed to Alastair Campbell (though he denies being the originator), is that if a bad story is still on the front pages nine days after it broke, then the person at the centre of the storm is in terminal trouble. It all began with the Owen Paterson fiasco, in which…

Michelle Carr is frequently plagued by tidal waves in her dreams. What should be a terrifying nightmare, however, can quickly turn into a whimsical adventure – thanks to her ability to control her dreams. She can transform herself into a dolphin and swim into the water. Once, shetrans, formed the wave itself, turning it into a giant snail with a huge shell. There’s a thriving online community of people who are now trying to learn how to lucid dream. (A single subreddit devoted to the phenomenon has more than 400,000 members.) Many are simply looking for entertainment. “It’s just so exciting and unbelievable to be in a lucid dream and to witness your mind creating this completely vivid simulation,” said Carr, who is a sleep researcher at the University of…

Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, a British citizen holding dual Iranian nationality, has been detained in Tehran for more than five-and-a-half years on bogus accusations of spying. Successive Conservative foreign secretaries, including Boris Johnson, have promised and failed to secure her freedom. The reasons are unclear. This shocking situation must not continue. Richard Ratcliffe, Nazanin’s husband, has campaigned tirelessly for her release. His courage and fortitude are admirable, as are hers. Fearful his wife may be illegally jailed again, he mounted a 21-day hunger strike outside the Foreign Office to dramatise her plight, ending it last Saturday. Talks last week between Britain and Iran once more failed to make progress. Nor is there movement in the cases of two other Britons, Anoosheh Ashoori and Morad Tahbaz, also held hostage by Iran. “We’re still…

OLIVIA COLMAN’S HUSBAND has written his first TV drama, a true crime series starring his wife, and I have so many questions about this that she says she can bring him downstairs to join in if I like. Ah, the possibilities when interviewing someone over Zoom. “Eddy!” she shouts up the stairs. We carry on alone, accompanied only by one of their dogs and a child who briefly pops into the room to a big grin from mum. Colman, blessed with the friendliest, giggliest face on British telly, familiar from so many hit shows, somehow feels as if she belongs in my home, as if we are already friends. This, as we will find out, is something of a problem now she’s an international megastar. Her fame comes not just…

During the 18th century, in the borderlands between present-day Ukraine and Poland, an extraordinary religious movement arose. It was a Jewish heresy invented by a man called Jacob Frank – “the most hideous and uncanny figure in the whole history of Jewish messianism”, according to the Israeli scholar Gershom Scholem. Frank claimed that the end times had come and conventional morality needed to be turned upside down. He bragged about defiling the Torah with his naked buttocks, encouraged his followers to break all sorts of sexual and dietary taboos, and eventually persuaded many of them to be baptised into the Christian church. Charismatic, transgressive and downright loopy, Frank comes across today as a Monty Python mash up of Osho, David Koresh and Mormon leader Joseph Smith, but he was highly…

Since my dad died two years ago, I’ve reconnected with one of two younger sisters (I’m one of five) who abandoned our family without explanation. Our father was an alcoholic and abusive to our mother. Our older sister had to step into our mother’s shoes – a lot for her young shoulders. Through no fault of her own, she was ill-prepared to take on four sisters. My younger sister (whom I now communicate with on a regular basis) seems to have a lot of hatred towards this older sibling. Almost every conversation we have concludes with her talking about our older sister’s faults and how she made mistakes in not acting responsibly when our mother had a breakdown 40 years ago. I usually ignore her ramblings, but lately I find…

Prep 10 min Soak Overnight Cook 1hr+ Serves 4 • VEGAN • DAIRY FREE • GLUTEN FREE Ingredients 250g dried borlotti beans1 carrot, peeled and cut into very large chunks1 shallot, unpeeled, cut in half1 large stick celery, cut in half2 garlic cloves, smashed1 pinch dried chilli flakes50ml olive oilSalt1 radicchio50ml extra-virginolive oil1 splash red-winevinegar This satisfying Italian bean side dish brings a continental warmth to the table. Method Soak the beans overnight in cold water, then drain, put in a large pot and cover with fresh cold water. Bring to a boil, cook for two minutes, then drain again. Replace with fresh water to cover the beans, and add the carrot, shallot, celery, garlic, chilli and olive oil to the pot. Bring to a boil, then turn down the…

It is an architectural curiosity that attracts admirers from around the world, an asymmetric stack of identical concrete boxes in a neighbourhood dominated by the glass edifices of corporate Japan. But after occupying a corner of Tokyo’s Ginza district for almost half a century, the Nakagin Capsule Tower faces an uncertain future. When it was built in 1972, Nakagin was the capital’s only example of the metabolism architectural movement, which fused ideas about megastructures with those of organic biological growth, and a physical expression of Japan’s postwar economic and cultural revival. Stacks of asymmetric concrete cubes make up the Nakagin Capsule Tower exterior in Tokyo, Japan. Its designer, the celebrated architect Kisho Kurokawa, envisioned its 140 self-contained prefabricated capsules as pieds-à-terre for professionals who wanted to avoid long weekday commutes…

There is little doubt that lucid dreaming can be learned. One of the best-known techniques is “reality testing”, which involves asking yourself regularly whether you are dreaming – with the hope that this will spill into your actual dreams. Another is Mnemonic Induction of Lucid Dreaming (Mild). Every time you wake from a normal dream, you spend a bit of time identifying the “dream signs” – anything that was bizarre or improbable and differed from normal life. As you then try to return to sleep, you visualise entering that dream and repeat to yourself the intention: “Next time I’m dreaming, I will remember to recognise that I’m dreaming.” Some studies suggest that it may be particularly effective if you set an alarm to wake up after a few hours of…

One night in the early 1990s, during a dinner party at his home in Paris, Stéphane Bourgoin, an author and bookseller then of no particular renown, began to hold forth on the matter of serial killing. Bourgoin’s guests were barely familiar with the concept. They listened, horrified, nauseated and rapt. Bourgoin told them about an FBI unit of so-called profilers trying to help catch such killers, about the traits of the typical killer, and about some of the more awful specimens in the United States. “We were utterly captivated,” Carol Kehringer, who was among Bourgoin’s guests that night, recalled recently. Kehringer was then in her 20s, starting out as a television producer. “I started asking him all sorts of questions,” she said, “and the more he spoke, the more I…

The UK health secretary, Sajid Javid, has confirmed that NHS staff will have to be vaccinated against Covid in a bid to address the 103,000 personnel who have not yet had a single dose. The move will finally bring frontline healthcare workers in line with care staff who had to be immunised by last Friday or risked losing their jobs, although NHS staff will have until next April in the hope of avoiding a mass winter exodus. Unions and some doctors’ organisations have voiced strong opposition. In some ways, it is remarkable that requiring NHS staff who have face-to-face contact with patients to be vaccinated is even controversial. Healthcare workers have a professional duty of care not to harm patients, which is why the majority have already taken the vaccine,…

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For the past half-century, postmodernist thinkers have been trying to discredit truth, identity and reality. Identity is a straitjacket, and truth is just some middle-aged academic’s opinion. As for reality, it has become as obsolete as dressing for dinner. Objectivity is a myth in the service of the ruling powers. If only we could shed these illusions, we could revel in a world of infinite possibility. Instead of waking up to the same tedious old self each morning, we could flit from one identity to another as easily as David Bowie. The final liberation is that anything can mean anything else. Once you kick away fixed meanings and firm foundations, you are free to enjoy yourself. Postmodernism is meant to be fun, even if a current of nihilism runs steadily…

QUIZ Thomas Eaton 1 Which film star might be found at SE7 TW5? 2 Which Ken Welsh travel book inspired a sci-fi classic? 3 What does a barium meal precede? 4 Which protest movement began at the University of Cape Town? 5 Who is the only British swimmer to retain an Olympic title? 6 Which canine travelled with Jones, Blake, Dinkley and Rogers? 7 Which German city was the “Queen of the Hansa”? 8 The British Gazette newspaper was published during what crisis? What links: 9 Stargazer; lionfish; reef stonefish; fang blenny? 10 Peter Ustinov; Christopher Biggins; Anthony Andrews; Michael Sheen? 11 Banchan; chimaek; hallyu; kimbap; mukbang? 12 Westminster airport; Trafalgar Square ziggurat; Regent Street monorail? 13 Trump (June); George W Bush (July); Clinton (August)? 14 18th-century dandy; crested penguin;…