There have been penalties for those who looked the other way when Epstein was convicted of child sex offences and decided to maintain relationships with the financier — but not for the British ambassador to Washington, reveals SOLOMON HUGHES
Glass half empty? How water privatisation in England is continuing to fail citizens
Part of dealing with vast problems such as climate change and the new weather patterns it brings is making public decisions about the future, argue ROX MIDDLETON, LIAM SHAW and JOEL HELLEWELL
Dry cracked earth at Baitings Reservoir in Ripponden, West Yorkshire
Labour’s new Treasury unit will ‘challenge unnecessary regulation’ by forcing nominally independent bodies like Ofwat to bend to business demands — exactly what Iain Anderson’s corporate clients wanted, writes SOLOMON HUGHES
DR DYLAN MURPHY looks at a Big Brother Watch report which exposes the government as an enabler of DWP secret spying on benefit claimants
The EU faces a critical choice: will it remain in the shadow of an increasingly unreliable US ally, or will it forge its own path in a multilateral world where co-operation with China is essential, asks MARC VANDEPITTE as leaders meet for the EU-China Summit
A lot of discussion about how the left should currently organise – including debate on whether the Green Party is a useful vehicle for advance – runs the risk of refusing to engage with or learn from the reasons the left was defeated previously, argues KEVIN OVENDEN
For Egypt trade trumps the Israeli genocide of the Palestinians, but how long can the country’s ‘misleaders’ – and others in the region – continue their indifference against the popular will of their own people, asks ROGER McKENZIE
IT’S easy to forget the complex system by which water ends up coming out of our taps.
Towards the end of Ulysses by James Joyce, Stephen Daedalus and Leopold Bloom have just finished a lengthy drinking session, and have returned to Bloom’s house.
Bloom fills an iron kettle with water from the tap in order to prepare cocoa. Joyce describes in exacting detail the causal chain that delivers water into Bloom’s kettle: all the way from the 2,400 million gallons of “Roundwood reservoir,” through a “subterranean aqueduct of filter mains” constructed at a cost of “£5 per linear yard” and eventually through a system of “relieving tanks” down into Dublin.
By including this lengthy description — over 200 words long — Joyce emphasises the communality of even the intimate, personal act of filling a kettle.
Society contains millions of superficially isolated personal decisions: a late-night cup of cocoa. But Joyce knew that by including the wider perspective, he could demonstrate that these small acts in fact rested on vast networks of co-operative endeavours.
More from this author
What’s behind the stubborn gender gap in Stem disciplines ask ROX MIDDLETON, LIAM SHAW and MIRIAM GAUNTLETT in their column Science and Society
While politicians condemned fascist bombing of Spanish civilians in 1937, they ignored identical RAF tactics across the colonies. Today’s aerial warfare continues this pattern of applying different moral standards based on geography and race, write ROX MIDDLETON, LIAM SHAW and MIRIAM GAUNTLETT
The distinction between domestic and military drones is more theoretical than practical, write ROX MIDDLETON, LIAM SHAW and MIRIAM GAUNTLETT
Nature's self-reconstruction is both intriguing and beneficial and as such merits human protection, write ROX MIDDLETON, LIAM SHAW and MIRIAM GAUNTLETT
