Innholdsfortegnelse for 04-02-19 i The Big Issue

01 WATCH David Bowie: Finding Fame A brand-new feature-length documentary charting David Robert Jones’ journey from David Bowie to Ziggy Stardust and beyond premieres on the Beeb. Covering his early years, it’ll feature unheard audio, unseen archive, eight-track deconstructions and rare contributions from friends, family members and muses. It may also contain the contemporary premiere of the so-called Holy Grail of Bowie performances – Ziggy’s television debut on ITV in 1972, a month before his iconic Top of the Pops performance, the only known copy of which was recently recovered and restored. BBC Two, February 9 02 BUY New in the Big Issue Shop: Nemi Teas A quality cuppa in various flavours that’ll refresh not just your taste buds but your conscience, all of Nemi Teas’ products, be they bagged…

I’m reading the Changemakers issue [January 14-20] and I’m very surprised that there is no mention of Extinction Rebellion or even a section for environmental changemakers. This is a global movement that has grown exponentially since the initial declaration of rebellion in October. It is autonomous and consists of people from every walk of life, concerned with the climate emergency facing all species. We are rising up to demand that governments and mainstream media tell the truth about what is happening, take appropriate action to drastically cut carbon emissions to net zero and set up a citizens assembly to manage this transition. As an in›luential media source I ask you to remedy this omission by reporting on Extinction Rebellion in your next issue. There is no time to lose and…

You’ve heard of Dragons’ Den , but our social investment arm Big Issue Invest has invited social enterprises into Caterpillars’ Cocoon to earn the chance to Power Up. Thirteen Midlands firms pitched their business plans to experts last week at Experian’s Nottingham HQ as part of BII’s search for the next big thing to follow in the footsteps of Big Issue-backed coffee innovators Change Please and period poverty pioneers Hey Girls. The Power Up Midlands programme will offer vital investment of up to £50,000 each and business development to help the winning firms turbocharge their efforts to help their communities, in partnership with Barclays, Power To Change and Experian. “The region has been historically underinvested in, with a heavy reliance on the manufacturing and retail industries,” said…

The Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts is a good place for me to spend a birthday. It’s in the University of East Anglia, and it’s a beautiful, calming and creative place. I recommend its Elisabeth Frink exhibition, Humans and Other Animals, that I went to see with a little posse of my youngest kids, my wife and a few friends last Wednesday. I love Norwich, and the Sainsbury Centre is one place I always go to. Frink was a major English sculptor and printmaker of the last century and her heads are particularly big and thoughtful. Her drawings and prints are likewise strong and engaging. The centre’s permanent collection is well worth a visit, combining modern with what used to be called ‘primitive’, but I can’t remember the new word…

Not that long ago, the internet was seen as a global force of good — a utopian technology that would make the world more democratic and better in every possible way. But these days, the internet’s utopian sheen is starting to show some major wear and tear. From Google to Facebook to shady political influence peddlers like Cambridge Analytica, there is a growing realisation that there is something wrong with this technology. It was supposed to free us. Instead, it’s turned into a privatised information weapon. It spawned a crop of powerful monopolies that control the global flow of information, and which have turned our phones and computers into a machine of surveillance and social control. They’ve addicted us to their platforms and now sell our attention to the highest…

An extracurricular fad has recently gripped the otherwise staunchly professional working environment of The Big Issue office in the form of DIY music radio bingo. The rules are simple: stick a cheesy ‘no-repeat’ station such as Planet Rock, Absolute 80s or Smooth Radio on in the background, all draw up your own personalised bingo cards, and cross off those involuntary nostalgia-spilling artists of yesteryear as they predictably come, in fierce competition for such glittering prizes as a box of old wine gums left lying about since Christmas. Behold how surprisingly exciting listening to a run of artists that may go something like Living In A Box, Nik Kershaw, Soul II Soul and T’Pau can suddenly become. Marvel as Howard Jones elicits perhaps the single most ecstatic cheer he’s stimulated in…

Pour yourself another glass of rosé and don't think too hard about what you're really afraid of Where are we as a society when murder documentaries are our cosy, self-care go-to after a hard day? I briefly thought this as I settled down to watch Conversations with A Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes. Ted Bundy, in case you don’t know, was one of the 1970s’ most famous serial killers, and there were a LOT of them. At one point, randomly bumping people off was more popular than smoking on the top deck of a bus or leaving your kids outside the pub. Interest in Ted endures not just because he was a violent, psychopathic kidnapper/rapist/murderer/necrophiliac with well over 30 young female victims, but because he was supposedly good looking, if…

Our guide this week: Susumu Hamada is Osaka-born and raised. He leads walking tours in the downtown area and sells The Big Issue Japan on the pedestrian bridge in front of the Umeda (Osaka) station. “Come chat – I’ll let you know how to have some fun in Osaka,” he says. 01 My top tourist tip Get advice from the locals Osaka has so many rivers and bridges that it has long been called ‘Water City’ and ‘Happyaku-yabashi,’ meaning 808 bridges. If you’re in the city, try getting tips from people on the street rather than from a guidebook. Osakans are friendly, kind, and will be happy to help you out. I think the essence of Osaka is the warmth of its people. 02 My favourite spot Nakanoshima You just…

Co-op, Gloucester Road, Bristol I came to Bristol for a fresh start after my brother died Monday–Saturday 9.30am until 4pm I came to Bristol from Manchester for a fresh start seven months ago after my brother Ronaldo died. This came after my dad had also passed away about two years ago. I couldn’t stand to stay there and my auntie said my son and I should come here to stay with her because I might feel better in a different city. They both died of cancer but my brother was only young, just 18. I don’t know my mum because she left me when I was a child and I was brought up by my father. You can’t imagine how hard it was when I lost my dad. I have…

THIS WEEK WE ASKED YOU... How much would you pay for a plastic bag in a supermarket? Morrisons announced plans last week to raise the price of its reusable plastic bags from 10p to 15p as well as introducing a 20p reusable paper option. But will this be enough to remind shoppers to bring their own bags to the till? I’d pay 15p. However, most people at the self check out seem to help themselves anyway without scanning the bag. @Deborahjcole, Twitter Maybe take away plastic bags all together and only sell reusable ones and paper ones. Elaine Hambleton-Willis, Facebook I don’t get why they’re charging for the paper ones? Nicky Tickner, Facebook Better to make them all biodegradable rather than putting all this effort into making life hard for…

On a very narrow top level, it’s a good idea. Want to improve the literacy rates and communication skills of children? Involve the entire community. It takes a village, and all that. Except this village is likely to be found in out-of-town shops. And not all of them, just a couple. This is where the problems begin. Last week Westminster’s Children and Families minister Nadhim Zahawi launched his bold new strategy. In the teeth of some damning statistics – a recent Oxford University Press study showed more than 40 per cent of five and six-year-olds did not have a large enough vocabulary to do well in school and a Nielsen Book Research study last year found that only half of pre-school aged children are being read to on a daily…

It took a neck brace, internet strangers and being bored at work, but Julius Sweetland changed thousands of lives. The 35-year-old’s software OptiKey lets people with motor neurone disease use computers and have conversations using only their eyes. It’s free, forever. After graduating from the University of Bristol in 2005 with a degree in computer science, Sweetland forged a career in software development mostly in finance, with names like Goldman Sachs and CME Group. It is not, the Londoner admits, the most feelgood of industries, and he always wanted to write some code that would make a difference. When his aunt Gill was diagnosed with motor neurone disease in 2010, he witnessed how the illness attacks the body’s neurons. Around one in 50,000 people will develop it each year, with…

New Yorker Sigrid Nunez has accumulated an enthusiastic following through her seven novels, the latest of which, the National Book Award-winning The Friend, is finally being published in the UK. And thank goodness for that. At just over 200 pages, it may seem slight, but do not be fooled. In fact, The Friend is quite extraordinary in its ability to send out sparks of intrigue, information and imagination in just a few sentences. The narrator of The Friend is a literature lecturer who begins the story in the throes of deep grief after the suicide of her beloved friend, a renowned novelist. After a visit to his widow she reluctantly inherits her old mentor’s orphaned dog, a lolloping Great Dane called Apollo. And in a plot…

The Big Issue: So a script lands on your desk based on a novel by James Baldwin, written and directed by Barry Jenkins, the hottest filmmaker on the planet. What is your response? Stephan James: First of all, the marriage of Barry Jenkins and James Baldwin really excited me. Then you read it and realise just how beautiful this story is. It is very much a love story, but like no other I have seen in the cinema, in terms of black love. Black love is this thing that is in existence but we don’t get to see it in this way. Never. This film feels revolutionary because you have a young black couple who are not just lovers, they are true soul mates, and they have been since they…

A hand up, not a handout... Our sellers BUY every copy of the magazine for £1.25 and sell it for £2.50. Trade, not aid… Which is why we ask you to ALWAYS take your copy of the magazine. Our sellers are working and need your custom. Poverty is indiscriminate… That is why we provide ANYONE whose life is blighted by poverty with the opportunity to earn a LEGITIMATE income. The right to citizenship… The Big Issue Foundation, our charitable arm, helps sellers tackle social and financial exclusion. Prevention… Big Issue Invest offers backing and investments to social enterprises, charities and businesses which deliver social value to communities.…

Without wanting to sound like we’re bottling it, there are a quite a few theories to how champagne as we know it came to be. One popular French view is that Benedictine monk Dom Pierre Pérignon was first to have supped a glass at Hautvillers Abbey in 1697 after trying to rid the abbey’s wine of bubbles. Failing in that task, he drank his creation and allegedly announced: “Come quickly, I am drinking the stars.” But this theory is now thought to be a myth that stems from a 19th-century marketing campaign. An article by Benoit Musset, a University of Maine history lecturer, confirms that sparkling wines already existed by that point but were not as popular as today. English physician Christopher Merrett penned a report for the Royal Society…

At 16 I was at an all-boys’ boarding school, where I felt there was a lot of pressure on me doing well in my GCSEs. I remembered working very hard but getting very stinking reports. They said I was focusing on the wrong things. I liked being in plays and, though I wasn’t very good at it, playing cricket. In the end those reports turned me off working hard – teachers telling me I wasn’t working when I was. I sort of petered out academically. I just thought, ah fuck this. I think by 16 I was quite bad-tempered, I really hated to be told off when I knew I hadn’t done anything wrong. Anything I saw as unfair gave me this silly sort of anger. To this day, if…

01 The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald It isn’t a big door thumper of expansive length, but it might be, line-by-line, the most perfect American novel ever written. Has any work of fiction better distilled the meretricious core of the national success ethos; the immense loneliness at the heart of the failed American dream? 02 Humboldt’s Gift by Saul Bellow A brilliant meditation on art and success; the way that money in the United States is the way we keep score, and the sad way that intimacy becomes a commodity amidst our crazed capitalist dance. 03 Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon Pynchon’s dazzling, wildly erudite, frequently maddening, ever-bracing meditation on V-2 rockets and the uncertainty principal inherent in 20th century physics (to name but two of its vast subjects).…

The last time writer/director Barry Jenkins brought us one of his films, he performed that rarest of tricks: turning a $1.5m budget into an excellent drama, a box office hit, multiple Oscars, and a movie that gave the Academy Awards the most dramatic twist finale in its history. Most crucially of all, the film in question – Moonlight – has continued to resonate, and rightly so. Yet If Beale Street Could Talk, Jenkins’ new release, hasn’t quite enjoyed the same level of Academy love. Shut out of the bulk of major Oscar categories, it’s easy to conclude that the film is more conventional, just a little less ambitious, and doesn’t feel as groundbreaking. For me? I’d just argue that it’s quieter. It’s a slow, patient diligent piece of cinema that’s…

GPs are increasingly ‘social prescribing’ activities from cycling to knitting and reading to gardening for people with mental ill health 23% of 391 GPs use social prescribing regularly – up from 19% in 2015 More than 420 GP practices across the UK are working with parkrun UK to send patients on 5K and 2K weekly running/walking groups Playing outside for an hour a day improves children’s risk-taking, socialising, confidence and fitness, and exposure to sunlight helps the body to create Vitamin D…