Innholdsfortegnelse for 16-01-2017 i The Big Issue

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Last week scientists created the tightest knot ever made. It is built from 192 atoms linked in a chain, just two millionths of a millimetre wide – around 200,000 times thinner than a human hair. That’s a little more complex than the reef knot you were taught at scout or guide camp. It’ll be a devil to take apart. The knot has been developed to keep Donald Trump’s hair in place. It’s ideal for tiny hands. Actually, one part of this opening statement is false, fake – not real. Sad! How can you trust The Big Issue if it’s delivering things like this? Typical journalists. Typical press, making up garbage. They need brought in line. What follows is not a heartfelt plea for people to stop disliking journalists and the…

POEM BY DAVID ST CLAIR Of myself. To talk of personal experiences To know of this world Not all history can be resurrected Nor even repeated There are of course reservations To be made. We will be leaving tomorrow We even have some metal boxes ready Wait. How about going the other way Not out but inside ourselves Towards breaking down the mind sets The psychiatric professions The social workers The daylight The morning after before I fall asleep tonight And the end, again, of my madness Can I prove it, can I prove that I am sane As normal as all of us, or am I truly Out of my mind Living in a different world from the one You experience Am I able to I am not quite…

“WE DON’T HAVE A CITIZENRY INTERESTED IN THE BEST OBTAINABLE VERSION OF THE TRUTH” As the world adjusts to the reality of a Trump presidency, legendary American journalist Carl Bernstein is of the opinion that we are facing “an incredibly dangerous moment”. He says: “Trump’s campaign promises are a mix of the horrific and [the] ugly and undemocratic. [He showed] an ignorance about our history in this country, what real existing conditions are, such as his characterisation of black America without any sort of recognition whatsoever of the huge black middle class in this country.” But, he adds, it may not be all bad news: “There are some campaign promises, such as his call for huge infrastructure spending, that address questions long overdue that the Republicans particularly have been keeping…

For two millennia London has been a global heart of commerce, trade, industry and labour, with people from across the globe going about their daily toil in the face of plague, destruction and Tube strikes. A new exhibition at the London Metropolitan Archives celebrates the working lives of Londoners over the last 500 years. From labourers who built the sewers to the last nightwatchman, waitresses to wrestlers, Brunel to Dickens, the industrious are celebrated in portraits, from 15th-century drawings to colour photographs from the 1980s. The Londoners: Portraits of a Working City, c.1447 to 1980 , London Metropolitan Archives, February 6–July 4; cityoflondon.gov.uk…

A taxing issue In a recent column by John Bird [December 5-11], he writes about increasing house values. It’s about time more people did this: it’s a scandal! If businesses did this, it would be called ‘asset stripping’ and rightly reviled. Because individuals do it, it is called ‘saving’ – but is in fact freeloading at the government’s expense. You make the case very elegantly for a land-value tax. It was once mooted that one’s late life care be paid for by a charge on the value of one’s house to be levied after death. The increase in house prices has nothing to do with the owner’s hard work – it is the result of government policy. Why, therefore, should not the government have the result of its own hard…

This is possibly the most difficult article I have ever written. It has been days in the writing but months in the thinking. And I have to tell you that I cannot come to a pleasant conclusion. It is an article about dread. I don’t normally do dread. I don’t think I’ve ever done dread; that is fear of the future. That doesn’t mean that I haven’t dreaded things that might happen or are happening, like global warming – a heat wave in the Arctic this winter for instance? Rather, I have always felt that one could create a head of steam around the issues and that change itself, climately, will force our hand. And that finally a uniformity of minds will be created. No – this dread is meeting…

“I had a bit of a problem with drinking too much when I was on the early breakfast show” I got my first radio job, at Power FM on the south coast, when I was 16, as soon as I left school. I’d been volunteering for a year, helping out. Then I got this letter from the boss saying he’d seen me working, everyone had told him how helpful I was. He said, send me a demo and I’ll make you a star. I’ve still got that letter. So I did a demo, which I think was awful, but out of that I got the coveted overnight show, between 1am and 6am. Chatting to myself in the middle of the night, alone in a big building in this eerie industrial…

Inside the enormous glass and steel structure known as The Baby Shard, opposite the actual Shard, central London, Rebekah Brooks steps out of the lift. We’re inside The News Building, home of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp, alongside various publishing corporations. Stern-faced, suited men flank airport-level security: bags through a scanner, bodies through a metal detector. On the 17th floor of this eerie, sci-fi, none more sign-of-the-times building sits another contemporary construct, the Media Celebrity Athlete, Tom Daley, the planet’s best-loved diver known for many ‘platforms’ (ho ho); a prolific public presence across his own YouTube channel, reality TV (Splash!, Tom Daley: Diving for Gold ) and social media (more than four million followers across Twitter/Instagram). Since his much-commended, self-motivated ‘coming out’ video in 2013 (filmed on his phone, 12 million…

Martin Scorsese’s new film is called Silence. This slow-burning historical drama about two Portuguese Jesuit priests struggling with perilous missionary work in 17th-century Japan might seem a left-field choice for some fans of the director (it opened during The Big Issue’s Christmas break but is still on release). In fact Scorsese has been wanting to make this film since reading the Shusaku Endo source novel more than 20 years ago. The disconcerting thing about this film is less its subject matter – spiritual concerns needle away at most of his films, even (or especially) when he’s focussed on the profane company of gangsters and boxers. No, what threw me is the title. Scorsese is one of cinema’s great enthusiasts – and not someone we easily associate, in his public guise…

When your distinctively spare, reverberant, under-the-covers intimate sound has been as widely borrowed from as The xx’s has since their hugely influential Mercury Prize-winning debut album came out in 2009 – and everyone from James Blake to Drake and Beyoncé has done at least a little of that – then it’s time to change-up. The London trio return, gazing outwards with their “open and expansive” third album I See You, which guides their hitherto glacial and crepuscular form of electronic dream-pop out from the shadows and into the (strobe) light. Where 2012’s Coexist was a faintly underwhelming effort to replicate the successes of their critically lauded debut, its long-gestating follow-up possesses a winning spirit of freedom, adventure and even – whisper it – fun. In 2015 the band’s resident electronics…

I was really moved by what Carmine Menna [The Optician of Lampedusa, New Year Edition 2017] said when he pulled the first migrant out of the water: “When I felt the flesh and bone of that first stranger’s hand in mine… that’s when I understood. That’s when I began to see.” I did a story-gathering workshop last night with the Forget-me-Not Chorus in Cardiff. This charity supports sufferers of dementia and their friends/carers. I hadn’t known what subject to approach them with and then, when I read the excerpt from Emma Jane Kirby’s book, I knew straight away: hands. We take them for granted – but as Carmine Menna said, it’s how we begin to see, to feel, to talk to and to know one another more deeply. It’s like…

Next Monday, gig-goers in London can enjoy a free gig from dubwise rising R&B stars Shanty – simply by showing their copy of The Big Issue. The exclusive gig – with support and guest appearances from By The Rivers (acoustic) and Ayishat Akanbi (DJ set) – is at Cargo in Shoreditch on January 23 from 7pm (over 18s). There will be no tickets available. Instead, all you need to do is take your copy of this magazine along on the night. “The magazine and what it stands for is very close to our hearts, no one should have to live on the streets or experience poverty,” Shanty vocalist Benjamin Willis said of the London band’s decision to stage this unconventional show. “The Big Issue has been at the front-line for…

“The union is an unusual creation that worked in the dog days of empire but increasingly the margins are pulling apart” “Northern Ireland on the brink.” How often have we seen these headlines over the years? Growing up on the southern side of the Irish border in the dark days of the 1980s, news from the north seemed to comprise solely of such dire warnings. Three decades on, Northern Ireland is very different. If, as looks highly likely at the time of writing, the devolved government at Stormont collapses it will be over a bungled renewable heating scheme. There is no talk of gunmen filling the political void. Indeed, there is little mention of Northern Ireland at all any more. The longstanding enmities between nationalists and unionists seem almost quaintly…

1. DIARY OF A WIMPY KID Jeff Kinney Kinney is a genius. This book made me laugh so loudly I frightened my own children. Greg is a superb narrator but for me it’s the supporting cast that make this book so funny. His naïve best friend Rowley and younger brother Manny are my favourites. 2. CHARLOTTE’S WEB EB White I remember reading this twice when I was younger and cried both times. A wonderful story about the strength of true friendship. 3. THE MAGIC FARAWAY TREE Enid Blyton I was a big Blyton fan as a child, and this book really captured my imagination. I could picture the tree and the bizarre characters so well – Moon Face was my favourite. 4. THE SNAIL AND THE WHALE Julia Donaldson; illustrated…

Calling all book lovers! You have already seen The Big Issue’s pick of the great reads that are coming up in 2017 – and if you missed them, you can catch up at bigissue.com But the year is young, and we know you are itching to get stuck into some fantastic new books to while away the dark months at the start of the year. So we have a special treat for our book-loving readers. We have two massive boxes of books that we’ve collated from our shelves. There are top autobiographies, thrillers, crime novels, gorgeous art books, kids’ titles and comedy books – a bumper selection box in which the fussiest reader can’t help but find plenty of hidden gems. To enter our competition to win a bumper box…