Have you made a complaint recently? I don’t mean moaning to your partner about the weather or your neighbour’s barking dog but a written, formal complaint. If you haven’t you should—because we are relying on sharp elbowed, middle class people like you to keep up and even improve the performance of everything—the NHS, the BMA, […]
The year has barely started, but it is a fairly safe bet that one of the stand-out albums of 2012 will be Leonard Cohen’s Old Ideas. For the many (including me!) allergic to the bedsit misery of his early work, there is reassurance about what old age can bring us in the drollery, bite, and […]
Reality is created by the language we use. Language creates reality rather than describing it; that is the consistent message from Ludwig Wittgenstein, Benjamin Lee Whorf, and John R Searle. If we want to change reality one way is to change the language used, and for this reason we ban, or try to ban, the […]
I’ve had a brainwave. It’s a proposal that could be implemented today and save the UK 5000 lives a year (at a rough guess.) The proposal is to stop all escalators immediately. I must confess that my brainwave, brilliant and simple as it is, has ignoble origins. Living in London and travelling regularly on the […]
Dear creative friends, Might you be interested to try and depict in some way—in a novel, play, series of poems, popular book, or whatever—a sustainable and believable world and how we might get there? I ask because us scientists (I hesitate to call myself a scientist but will for now) are extremely worried about the […]
I’m up early and off to the death festival for the third day with a very light heart, and we are straight into practicalities. […]
About 10 months ago I blogged that an exodus of doctors from Portugal would be a sign of Portugal’s worsening economic situation. Medicine has always offered one of the few stable and prosperous careers. Most doctors are still in employment, and our income levels are usually above the national average as many doctors juggle professional commitments in both the public and […]
The announcement last week of the design of the NHS Commissioning Board is critically important. It signals the end of the prolonged period of ambiguity which managers have experienced since the white paper was published in July 2010. For those who have been through the round robins of previous reforms there is a realisation that […]
The second day of the festival began with Jude Kelly, the artistic director of the Southbank Centre, explaining that the festival is about “reshaping our ability to look death in the eye, and to have a relaxed way of talking about death.” In a secular age, she says, we don’t have ways of congregating to […]
The Southbank Centre, London’s art centre on the South Bank of the Thames, is holding a festival of death. The aim is “to look death in the eye…to confront mortality head-on through music, theatre, literature, and debate.” […]