With Looking, RuPaul and Modern Family, is LGBT life now mainstream? From the late 1990s to the mid-2000s, primetime American television audiences grew to embrace two male characters who would come to define two distinct types of gay male characters. The sensitive Will Truman and the flamboyant Jack McFarland, portrayed by actors Eric McCormack and Sean Hayes, became the backbone of the hugely popular sitcom Will & Grace. It was the first time two such characters regularly took the stage in primetime television.
In the years since, the advent of reality television (Queer Eye for the Straight Guy) and the diversity of cable programming (Queer as Folk) provided more diverse representations of LGBT lifestyles. But now gay characters and personalities have moved from niche to mainstream in shows like Modern Family or HBO’s Looking. Gayness is now less of a reason for having a character, and has instead become just another plot twist or character nuance. But it doesn’t mean all the work is over. About the panel Has television reached a post-gay state? Letters: Children must learn to question, not simply obey | Politics. Polly Toynbee fears for the future of arts subjects under the new curriculum and I agree with her (Austen, Orwell and Dickens will die out in Gove's world, 5 November).
The present situation is the logical conclusion of education policy over at least 30 years. "Child-centred education" is derided as insufficiently "rigorous" and the interests of employers and working parents take precedence. Longer hours and shorter holidays will result in children who are more tired and disengaged from education if more lessons are crammed into the day. Pupils who lean towards creative subjects will find that many schools no longer offer drama, art and other "soft" subjects that would better suit them. Education as a broad concept has been lost in favour of training in "the basics". Many years ago, as a young teacher, I read an American book called Teaching As a Subversive Activity which had a lasting effect on me.
Education isn't all about English and maths. Iain Duncan Smith's second epiphany: from compassion to brutality | Polly Toynbee. In Easterhouse this walk has become a Via Dolorosa, a path trod regularly by visiting journalists and TV crews seeking the sacred spot where Iain Duncan Smith (nearly) wept in epiphany a decade ago. It sickens the locals, groaning when yet another visitor asks the way. The picturesque boarded-up Glasgow tenement, where Duncan Smith was photographed looking stricken, was already condemned, and long ago replaced under Labour. But life behind front doors took a desperate turn for the worse, largely due to the man who underwent a Damascene conversion here – only to undergo a reverse conversion later.
Bob Holman, the 76-year-old lifelong community organiser who founded Fare – a celebrated community centre staffed mainly by unemployed volunteers – was touched by Duncan Smith's conversion: "I thought him a decent man" – perhaps misled into trusting a fellow Christian. Tim Montgomerie, founder of ConservativeHome and now the Times comment editor, arranged that visit as Duncan Smith's adviser. Russell, choosing to vote is the most British kind of revolution there is. Dear Russell, Hi. We’ve met about twice, so I should probably reintroduce myself: I’m the other one from Peep Show. I read your thing on revolution in these pages with great interest and some concern. My first reaction was to rejoin the Labour Party. The Jiffy bag containing the plastic membership card and the Tristram Hunt action figure is, I am assured, in the post. It’s about influence and engagement. Why do pensioners (many of whom are not poor old grannies huddled round a kerosene lamp for warmth but bloated ex-hippie baby boomers who did very well out of the Thatcher/Lawson years) get so much attention from politicians?
Many of the young, the poor, the people you write about are in desperate need of support. This is exactly what the present coalition is in the business of tearing to pieces. You talk of “obediently X-ing a little box”. Maybe it’s this timidity in you that leads you into another mistake: the idea that revolution is un-British. Rob. Never False Your Breath, i don't give a fuck about how you fuck: or, your hot ass mess is not my revolution. Who is responsible for the US shutdown? The same idiots responsible for the 2008 meltdown | Slavoj Žižek.
In April 2009 I was resting in a hotel room in Syracuse, hopping between two channels: a PBS documentary on Pete Seeger, the great American country singer of the left; and a Fox News report on the anti-tax Tea Party, with a country singer performing a populist song about how Washington is taxing hard-working ordinary people to finance the Wall Street financiers. There was a weird similarity between the two singers: both were articulating an anti-establishment, populist complaint against the exploitative rich and their state; both were calling for radical measures, including civil disobedience. It was another painful reminder that today's radical-populist right reminds us of the old radical-populist left (are today's Christian survivalist-fundamentalist groups with their half-illegal status not organised like Black Panthers back in the 1960s?). This twisted ideology is also behind the current federal government shutdown in the US. Is Britain on the right track to become a nation of cyclists? - five-minute video debate.
The Syrian presidency's Instagram account shows the banality of evil | World news. Asma al-Assad looks poised and fragrant as she ladles food out of a vast silvery bowl to children who wait patiently for their portion. The first lady of Syria is dressed down for the occasion in a pale blue blouse, caught in an ethereal white light as she tends to the needs of her people. The woman is a saint. In another photograph she sits on the ground with girls in Guide-like uniforms, and in another, she gives a little girl a new doll. She chats and smiles with grateful (and perhaps nervous) recipients of her bounty, in touchy-feely pictures that show her physically touching the poor and disabled.
These are some of the images from the daily rounds of the wife of president Bashar al-Assad that are puzzling a world riven by debate about claims that Assad used sarin gas in an attack on his people in the suburbs of Damascus on 21 August. It's no laughing matter. The war in Syria has been made easier for Bashar al-Assad by powerfully enforced reporting restrictions. In Syria, it's a case of all or nothing - Comment - Voices. Unsurprisingly, people who feel they were swindled into war 10 years ago by bloodcurdling accounts of Saddam Hussein's non-existent weapons of mass destruction are dubious about their government's claim that President Bashar al-Assad's army used poison gas on a mass scale on 21 August.
All the questions that should have been asked in 2003 about Iraq are being asked about Syria: what is the evidence for chemical weapons? How partial are the sources of information? Why should Assad do something so much against his own interests? Would a limited air assault on Syrian military bases deter him from using chemical weapons again, supposing he used them this time, or would it be the first step towards ever-deeper British and American involvement in the war? All these are reasonable questions and many of them have reasonable answers. Of course, the use of poison gas was always likely to provoke the United States into action, something Damascus has been desperate to avoid for two years.