Cnn

Tuesday

Brian Martin

Fools rush in: Mania, by Lionel Shriver, reviewed

Pearson Converse teaches literature at Verlaine University, Pennsylvania. She exists in an alternative universe to our own in which the Mental Parity Movement holds sway.  There is intellectual levelling, and no ‘cognitive discrimination’. This is high satire, exaggerated, crude, inviting ridicule of the social system portrayed, close to the great satirists of the 18th century in tone if not in style.   Yet Lionel Shriver’s Mania is more than just a satire. It is a study of Pearson’s family life and her ‘unbalanced’ relationship with her best friend from childhood, Emory. Pearson has three children: an intellectually gifted girl and boy by a high-IQ sperm donor, and an averagely intelligent

Saturday

Andrew Tettenborn

Clive Myrie, the BBC and the trouble with Ofcom

Ofcom’s tight grip on current affairs broadcasts has been likened by some observers to a choking collar. Clive Myrie, one of the BBC’s most decent and best educated correspondents, disagrees. But Myrie’s robust defence of Ofcom’s role, which he put forward in the inaugural Harold Evans Memorial Lecture this week, should trouble anyone concerned with preserving free speech on air. Myrie took a simple line: to compare the US and UK broadcasting landscapes. In the US there is not, and under the First Amendment probably could not be, any regulation of how news is presented. The result is overbearing influence exercised by presenters on channels such as CNN or Fox; a ‘trust deficit’ as regards

Thursday

Taki

My advice to Trump supporters? Smile and take it

New York There are times, living in this here dump, when I doubt if anyone’s heard of the word magnanimity. By the looks of it, no one in left-wing media circles has ever come across it. That egregious Amanpour woman compared Trump’s administration to Nazism on CNN after the election, which reminds me: during my dinner’s drunken aftermath, I noticed a man in my house. He hardly even bothered to greet me, the host. It was one James Rubin, a vulgar American who is — or was — married to that rather unattractive British-Iranian Amanpour. I never did find out who invited that bum to my house, but someone obviously