Society

The science writer Jared Diamond once called agriculture "the worst mistake in the history of the human race." Yuval Noah Harari, author of Sapiens, dubbed it "history’s biggest fraud." Yet newly identified plague outbreaks among ancient hunter-gatherers in southeast Siberia question whether they were right to be so negative about the introduction of farming. A new study published in Nature looks at archaeological sites on the west side of Lake Baikal. The lake is the world’s largest freshwater body, arcing for 400 miles between forested snow-covered mountains. Winter temperatures can drop below -22F, with parts of the lake surface frozen for half the year. Hunters and gatherers and nomadic herders occupied this challenging environment for millennia.

Last month’s headline in the New York Times was obfuscating: “In the UK, a Violent Cycle: Hateful Attacks, Right-Wing Agitation and Riots.” Because hatred is now irrevocably associated with the “right-wing,” innocent American newspaper readers will have presumed that these agitating, rioting reactionaries were also the authors of the “hateful attacks.” The New York Times and the PBS News Hour delivered such twisted, incomplete and minimized versions of recent incendiary events in the UK that I was obliged to tell the stories of Henry Nowak and Stephen Ogilvie to more than one ordinarily up-to-date American friend, because the salient details had been omitted from left-leaning reports.

Every so often, a fashionable new concept is born. Witness the arrival of "matrescence," which, for the uninitiated, is a phrase used to describe the physical, psychological, emotional and social transition a woman undergoes when becoming a mother. Or, as my mother and grandmother would have put it, and perhaps yours too: motherhood. "Matrescence" first appeared in the 1970s, coined by the medical anthropologist Dana Raphael, but it seems to be reaching maturity now. Advertisements splashed across the back page of the New York Times make the case for the inclusion of the word in the dictionary. A "global movement" is being launched (by a social networking site for women and a company that sells baby bottles) to put matrescence on the cultural map.

I’ve always been keen on Kim Kardashian, going right back to the earliest years of her family reality show. At one point in an over-excited piece for the Sun, I even compared her to Helen of Troy – a modern day icon of beauty whose bum launched a thousand quips. Hamilton has a long history of acting like both a princeling and a drag queen in terms of entitlement and drama, while also liking to present himself as the underdog But my word, she can pick them. Starting with Ray-J, who appears to have been talking about little else since 2007 but the sex tape they made as youngsters in 2003. Then there was most famously Kanye West.

“You are going to die before me and leave me to deal with this, and I will curse your soul for all eternity,” I once said half-jokingly to my husband over a glass of wine. We were having one of our regular conversations about what he was going to do about his late uncle’s possessions, which had arrived at our house in lorry-loads about a year after we had married. “Why don’t you do half an hour of sorting every weekend? I will help you,” I would suggest in reference to the multiple barns, basements and attics at our farm, which were now piled high with three generations’ worth of male hoarding. But with an increasing number of children in the house and no sense of urgency, progress was slow.