Innholdsfortegnelse for 1/18/2021 i The Big Issue

Last year, as the Covid crisis first gripped, The Big Issue launched the Ride Out Recession Alliance. While furlough measures helped millions of people, it was clear they wouldn’t help everybody. And we decided to do something about that. Early figures suggested that more than 400,000 households were at risk of homelessness. As employment security was crumbling and jobs were being lost, finding enough money to keep a roof over your head was increasingly tough for far too many. At The Big Issue, we did not want to see a generation lost to homelessness, with the life-battering, mental health-hammering changes that brings to those who go through it, to the families and to society. Our focused work for 29 years had been for our vendors, the men and women on…

Facts & figures Wikipedia has more than 55 million articles in more than 300 languages Wikipedia is edited by more than 280,000 volunteer editors every month around the world Wikipedia is edited 350 times per minute and read more than 8,000 times a second Wikipedia is accessed by 1.5 billion unique devices every month and read more than 15 billion times every month Roughly 89% of articles on Wikipedia are in languages other than English Most vandalism (edits that do not meet Wikipedia’s reliability and neutrality standards) is addressed within five minutes on Wikipedia Wikipedia is supported by nearly 7 million donors, with the average donation being about $15…

I once saw someone take apart the remains of an atomic bomb with a pink vibrator. Obviously, I had to ask the role of a sex toy in deactivating nukes, and the scientist happily obliged my curiosity. As part of the process, he explained, the team needed to agitate their plutonium. This had proved tricky; it wasn’t easy to find something small, cheap and wipe-clean that could shake a sample of the world’s deadliest material within the confines of a lead-lined workspace. Eventually, the team had decided to pop down to the local red-light district and buy a gyrating butt plug – the perfect tool for the job. Unfortunately, the scientist continued, the device he was holding wasn’t the original, which had broken on the first day. One team member…

More people than ever before are keeping up with the latest news at bigissue.com. Are you? Here are the latest highlights: - Find out everything you need to know about free school meals and the current fiasco - Hear Eddie Izzard talk about fundraising and fighting the far right in clips from the interview - Know your rights when it comes to furlough and job security - Watch Arnold Schwarzenegger give a rousing defence of democracy - Learn more about our 100 days campaign and the impact of the pandemic on vendors…

The new threat of mass homelessness means that The Big Issue has to innovate. And in record time. We have to do all we can to keep people out of the harm of homelessness. Not wait until people are homeless because through the pandemic they have lost their livelihood; and are therefore unable to pay their rent or mortgage. That’s why nine months ago we started our Ride Out Recession Alliance (RORA). We have to fight back against any idea that we can’t afford to keep people out of homelessness. Because homelessness costs the country more than supporting people to keep their home. But of course the biggest and best way of keeping people out of homelessness is keeping people in work. And that is why this week we are…

BOOKS Like it when things get superheavy? Then you’ll be in your element Kit Chapman TV Lockdown means ANY kind of travel show is bathed in melancholy Lucy Sweet MUSIC Ker-ching! Why rock legends are cashing in on their catalogues Malcolm Jack Streamers By David Bastin “Being 60, everything hurts, especially in winter,” says David, “which is why I like to travel where the sun is kinder to me. Morocco just last year. I speak French and Spanish thanks to my time in the foreign legion: communication is key to human harmony. “I have written poetry since I was 10 and learned to paint in prison, it was therapeutic. I hope you like my yellow period (it was Vincent van Gogh’s favourite colour).” The work on this page is created…

01 So Much by Trish Cooke, illustrated by Helen Oxenbury This was a favourite when my boys were small. Each member of the family comes and does something fun with baby – something that the reader can do too. It gives a lovely sense of the powerful love some extended black families enjoy. 02 Julián Is a Mermaid by Jessica Love This is such a gorgeous book – gentle, loving and groundbreaking! It’s so inspiring to have illustrations of the real shapes of women, and to see the relationship between the boy and his grandmother. The page with the grandmother in swimming class is my favourite! 03 A Story About Afiya by James Berry, illustrated by Anna Cunha The illustrations in this book are just stunning. I keep staring at…

Apart from going for another FECKING WALK, watching TV is probably the last thing you want to do at the moment. Of course, that won’t stop you from spending hours of enforced sedation in front of boxsets you’ve seen countless times before. But chances are that pretty much anything else would be preferable to another day of staring at a screen, like going on a trip to a recycling centre perhaps, or a nuclear reactor. At this point we’re so starved of fun we’d choose the middle aisle of Lidl as a viable holiday destination, just so that we can gaze upon the majesty of a discounted air fryer. As the world shrinks, I’ve found myself watching any old programme that features people going somewhere. It can literally be anyone…

1. In which year was the first iPod launched? 2. What are the colour of the studs that mark the left edge of a UK motorway? 3. Which author created the character Paddington Bear? 4. Patrick Stump is the singer of which US rock band? 5. In which UK county is Margaret Thatcher’s hometown Grantham? 6. Which Martin Scorsese film was the first to feature Robert De Niro? 7. On what part of the body would you wear galoshes? 8. What is the chemical symbol for sodium? 9. What is nine cubed? 10. Who wrote the 2017 novel Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine? 11. Who won the BBC’s 2020 Sports Personality of the Year? 12. In Only Fools and Horses what was the name of the tower block that Del…

A hand up... Our sellers BUY the magazine for £1.50 and sell it on for £3, keeping the difference. Not a handout… Vendors earn a legitimate income, and gain valuable social and employability skills. With your support now, we can continue to help them now and in the future. The right to citizenship… The Big Issue Foundation, our charitable arm, helps sellers to 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.…

SUPPORT YOUR LOCAL VENDOR VENDORS Across the country vendors are prevented from working on their pitches by the national lockdown. Our staff is working closely with each vendor to make sure there is extra support to make up for lost earnings. We also understand that apart from reduced income, the lack of social interaction will cause a lot of distress. If you would like to pass a message on to your local vendor please email editorial@bigissue.com and we’ll do our best to make sure they know they still have your support. SUBSCRIPTIONS AND SHOPS Since the first national lockdown in March, we have supported our vendors with more than £700,000 of financial assistance to make up for lost sales. As the only certainty is more uncertainty, we urgently need your…

Overview Wikipedia is a multilingual open-collaborative online encyclopedia, which is how Wikipedia is described on the Wikipedia page about Wikipedia. The English-language version contains 6,227,517 articles, which were viewed 269 billion times last year. As it marks its 20th anniversary, The Big Issue speaks to co-founder and frontman Jimmy Wales, and Wikimedia Foundation CEO Katherine Maher to find out about the challenges that come with controlling the biggest source of information on the planet in a time of fake news and dangerous views. History On January 15 2000, tech pioneers brimmed with optimism about the potential of the information age, including 34-year-old Alabama-born Jimmy Wales. He had a vision at once simple and preposterously ambitious: “To create a free, high-quality encyclopedia in all the languages of the world.” “That was…

I have a lot to thank George Saunders for. I was a short-story sceptic, a committed chain-gobbler of the full-fat novel, until the release of his celebrated Tenth of December collection back in 2013. That book was so heavily lauded and so often recommended that I bought a copy, and was escorted into a vast genre that I had completely misunderstood and have since come to love. In Saunders’ own work, he typically creates warped worlds – sometimes just slightly off-track from everyday life, sometimes psychedelically so – in which his characters are confronted by outlandish moral dilemmas. The Semplica Girl Diaries from Tenth of December is one such extraordinary creation: a keeping-upwith-the-Joneses tale in which a financially embarrassed father copies wealthier neighbours in buying girls from third-world countries to…

Juicy stories of excess on the sets of film productions? Well, there’s no shortage of them. ›e abandoning of the expensive sets for 1963’s Cleopatra, only for them to be used by the much cheaper Carry On Cleo instead. The shooting of 1990’s Days Of Thunder and how it became a prolonged party for some of its crew. Or what about 1980’s Heaven’s Gate, where among the many jaw-dropping stories, a giant irrigation system was installed on a chosen field at the insistence of director Michael Cimino, just to get the right kind of grass? Filmmaker Peter Medak (The Krays, Let Him Have It) certainly didn’t go into the making of 1973’s Ghost In The Noonday Sun expecting to attract such similar stories. Yet as he revisits the wreckage of…

Neil Young just sold half of his for an estimated £110m. Fleetwood Mac’s Stevie Nicks sold most of hers last year for around £73m, while her ex-bandmate Lindsey Buckingham more recently sold all of his for an undisclosed but presumably not dissimilar sum. In the biggest publishing rights deal of all to date for a single songwriter, in December, Bob Dylan pocketed a rumoured £225m for 100 per cent of his approximately 600-song catalogue. Many would argue that you can’t put a price on 60 years of some of the finest and most important American art ever created – including such epochal masterpieces as The Times They Are A-Changin’ and Like a Rolling Stone – but they’d be wrong. The price is about £225m. Tempted by clearly eye-wateringly fat cheques,…

‘The Big Issue saved my life – and you could be saving lots of others’ Vendors have lost their income. With vaccine hope on the horizon, The Big Issue is calling on readers to help them get through the next 100 days. Right now, none of the 1,340 regular Big Issue vendors are able to sell the magazine. Cambridge vendor, Lee Welham, 37, is well known on his pitch not only for selling magazines but for helping the city’s many tourists to find their way around. Last week, joining Big Issue founder John Bird on Sky News to talk about our Winter Appeal, Lee underlined how the magazine has been vital in getting him through tough times. “The Big Issue singlehandedly saved my life,” he said. “I am so fortunate…