“I need to do it.” Kim Rugg remakes newspapers. Via.

Glenn Ricketts and Peter Wood on “diversity,” uniformity and things best left unsaid.

The “diversity” doctrine… urges students to huddle inside their pre-chosen identities. The Yale [application] question is the first of a long series of subtle steps that teach students to lead with their particularities and to cultivate a kind of group vanity… Would the Yale admissions office look favourably on the student who answered, “I have found ‘diversity’ to be a cudgel by which self-appointed elites attempt to enforce their preferences over others. Diversity to me has been the experience of having my individuality denied, suppressed, and demeaned. It is a word that summarizes a smarmy form of oppression that congratulates itself on its high-mindedness even as it enforces narrow-minded conformity.” No, any student really seeking admission to Yale wouldn’t say such a thing. But chances are very good that a great many students harbour insights very much like that. They know their ethnic or racial categorization, their socio-economic status, and other such characteristics matter far more to admissions offices than their actual thoughts about who they are.

Eve Binder notes the rise of Fat Studies.

Jacqueline Johnson knows what it’s like to be shunned because of her weight. In the early 2000s fat activism was edging into existence, and Johnson, a weight studies scholar, was deemed too skinny to take part. “I tried to join a fat activist group, and I was rejected because I was not of size,” she remembers… Today it’s a different story. Johnson, who teaches a course on weight and society at George Washington University, is currently a professor with 25 students of all heights and widths. Her Fat Studies class is one of a handful popping up on campuses across the country, teaching students to think about body size critically, politically, and regularly. But despite such courses’ popularity among students, critics worry that such classes emphasize bleeding-heart politics over intellectual rigour.

And Jeff Goldstein on the same.

The only epidemic at issue here is the epidemic of grievance-mongering passing itself off as legitimate “scholarship.” A course on the psychology of creating and empowering ever more oppressed victim groups and the new politically correct vocabulary (and corresponding “hate speech”) that will grow around them… would be far more valuable for students.

Feel free to add your own.

At last, a blog devoted to William Shatner’s hair. // Happy dog. // Sneakers made from Play-Doh. // An igloo made from fridges. // Couches made from fridges. // A skeleton made from wool. // Dinosaur skull found embedded in church wall. // Implanted sight. // Freelensing. // Bagelfest. // Nuclear weapons simulator. // Near Earth objects. // The Nile. // Spicules. Side view. // Making glass signs. // Steep. // Tipping etiquette. // How to eat sushi. // Water, sand, slow motion. // Condoms of yore. // Filip Dujardin photographs unreal architecture. // There’s pleasure to be had in a pile of leaves.

With bonfire night almost upon us – and with it a feeling of crushing ecological terror – let’s turn for reassurance to the pages of a certain newspaper. A troubled Guardian reader asks,

Setting light to bonfires and sending fireworks up into the sky don’t strike me as very environmentally friendly. Is there a better way to mark bonfire night?

Mercifully, Leo Hickman has some thoughts.

Attend an organised public display instead of setting off fireworks yourself in your own backyard. Surely it’s better to contain the noise and pollution in one area than see it dispersed across a wider area?

This fairly innocuous suggestion leads Mr Hickman to more emphatic, and revealing, territory:

Quite why fireworks are not just restricted to organised public events has always been beyond me, given how dangerous they can be to children. Or maybe – as was fiercely debated on this site last year – fireworks should be banned altogether?

An earlier Guardian poll – Should Fireworks be Banned on Environmental Grounds? – was a close-run thing, with a narrow majority willing to permit an evening of explosive hedonism. The Guardian’s Felicity Carus suggested a possible compromise in the form of “green fireworks,” a quieter, less colourful, less explosive alternative made from sawdust and rice chaff.

As regulars will know, Mr Hickman and his colleague Lucy Siegle steer Guardianistas through the labyrinth of modern living with their Ask Leo & Lucy column – “your ethical dilemmas sorted.” Dilemmas that, for Guardian readers, include, Should I Employ a Cleaner? (“If you employ a cleaner, their pay should be fair. Buy some less toxic cleaning products or make them yourself using ingredients such as vinegar, lemon juice or vegetable-based soap.”) Among many other agonies of note are, What’s the Greenest Way to Wrap my Sandwiches? and What Should I Do with the Fur Coats I Inherited from my Mother? (Since you ask, suggestions range from the inventive – “donate them to an animal sanctuary that uses them as bedding for abandoned puppies” – to the slightly surreal – “Turn the central heating down and wear them indoors.” And, “Use them in the home, where everyone understands their history etc.”)

Mr Hickman, whose radical credentials have impressed us previously, is also the author of A Life Stripped Bare: My Year Trying to Live Ethically, the cover of which displays the Guardian’s eco-gnome denuded and brandishing his veg box. Positioned to the right of Mr Hickman’s shirtless torso is an approving comment by Radio 4’s Libby Purves:

Very entertaining.

Full of useful new things to fret about.

The Observer’s Carol McDaid was equally thrilled:

There are plenty of facts – Quaker Oats and Tropicana juices are both owned by George Bush-backing PepsiCo – and a selection of helpful letters, like the inspiring one from a woman who crochets her own dishcloths.

An essential purchase, clearly.

Goodness. The Sunday paper of the left is shilling for the Beeb. An Observer editorial bemoans the 16% cut to the BBC’s annual £3.8 billion subsidy and the six-year freeze of the license fee. We learn,

These are serious cuts with serious consequences.

The details of which remain somewhat vague. We do, however, learn that David Cameron finds the corporation’s modest austerity “delicious,” which of course makes him A Very Bad Man.

Is he in hock to Rupert Murdoch?

Bad men with dastardly motives. That must be it. Only a fiend would stand in the way of the Beeb and its subsidised tumescence. All good people know that the state’s statist broadcaster is entitled to your earnings, being as it is wise, impartial and utterly benign. [The aforementioned tumescence is illustrated rather nicely by rjmadden in the comments.]

The BBC’s ability to compete as a world-class programme maker stands in grave doubt.

There isn’t, then, a market for heavily-branded world-class programming? Is voluntary subscription not an option?

Of course, continuing spasms of introversion, such as the pending journalists’ strike over pensions, don’t help.

Strikes that were scheduled to coincide with the Conservative Party conference with a view to depriving it of air time, thus saving the public from any ideological waywardness.

But there is nothing delicious about their predicament, nor about the real losses of freedom and resource involved.

Freedom for whom? For those of us who are coerced into subsidising a vast media organisation whose political bias has been announced by employees, admitted by its own Director General and catalogued daily and at length? 

The licence fee isn’t a tax, to be turned on or off like some Whitehall tap. It is a contract between viewer and corporation.

Contracts are generally entered into voluntarily. If I want to watch Sky, I enter into a contract by choice. I choose a package that suits me and am free to change my mind. In contrast, the BBC license fee isn’t a contract in any meaningful sense. I cannot choose the programming I have to pay for and, short of renouncing television altogether, I cannot opt out. For most of us, the license fee is a condition of television ownership and has to be paid irrespective of personal preference. It is, in effect, a tax.

Meanwhile, Labour’s Ivan Lewis tells Guardian readers,

Labour will stand up for the BBC, make no mistake.

A favour that will doubtless be reciprocated at public expense.

If I buy one and you buy one, we could race them all day. (h/t, Peter Horne) // Sadly, I don’t yet have my own wine tasting cave. // A beginner’s guide to warp drive. // The three pound gummy worm. // Heart jellies. // Tentacle pie. // Transplanted hands. // Time travel, obviously. (h/t, TDK) // Extremity. // Staircases of note. // Female character flowchart. (h/t, Mr Eugenides) // Jimmy Olsen in a jam. // Irregular gears. // Tubeless toilet paper. // Swooning kittens. (h/t, Adam) // Hazardous but fun. // “He wanted a yin and yang symbol with some dragons, but was instead shocked to discover the 16-inch tattoo was of a penis.”

Dicentra steers us to the musings of Melanie McDonagh and a feminist rationale for fraud, dishonesty and extortion.

It begins thus,

It’s a wise child, they say, that knows its own father.

The subject being pondered is DNA paternity testing and its consequences. Given what follows, you may want to bear that opening sentence in mind.

For the entire course of human history, men have nursed profound, troubling doubts about the fundamental question of whether or not they were fathers to their own children; women, by contrast, usually enjoyed a reasonable level of certainty about the matter. Now, a cotton-wool swab with a bit of saliva, plus a small fee, less than £200, can settle the matter. At a stroke, the one thing that women had going for them has been taken away,

The one thing?

the one respect in which they had the last laugh over their husbands and lovers.

I hadn’t realised parenthood was about having the last laugh. Clearly, I need to brush up on the etiquette of modern mating. But surely paternity tests merely level the playing field in a matter of some gravity? What mama knows (and doesn’t say), papa can now find out. In terms of paternity, is that really such a crushing injustice?

DNA tests are an anti-feminist appliance of science, a change in the balance of power between the sexes that we’ve hardly come to terms with. And that holds true even though many women have the economic potential to provide for their children themselves… In making paternity conditional on a test rather than the say-so of the mother, it has removed from women a powerful instrument of choice.

Choice that may include deception and extortion.

Uncertainty allows mothers to select for their children the father who would be best for them.

Suckering former lovers? Not a problem. Mama wants a selection box. Depriving a child and its actual father of a chance to know each other is also apparently fine. Because uncertainty allows it. Feminism, so conceived, seems to entail the right to a little moral sleight of hand. But hey, choice!

The old situation, in which women presented men with a child, and the man either did the decent thing and offered support, or made a run for it, allowed women a certain leeway… Paternity was ambiguous and it was effectively up to the mother to name her child’s father, or not… Many men have, of course, ended up raising children who were not genetically their own, but really, does it matter?

Answers on a postcard please.

Apparently this is a genuine section header from a Barnes & Noble store.

Via Anna.

For newcomers, some short films from the archives.

Temptation. Small children, marshmallows and delayed gratification.

Misremembered. Just whose memory is it?

Tempted by Sunlight. Two words. Goth Cruise.

500 Flavours of Soda. Carbonated pleasures.

The Whale That Exploded. It can happen, people.

Photograph of Jesus. Strange goings-on at the Hulton Photo Archive.

And by all means mosey through the greatest hits.

Thinking, it will be recalled, is the activity one performs before one has arrived at the answer.

Fabian Tassano ponders dangerous thought. And how to prevent it:

A mediocracy encourages people to react personally. Instead of considering whether something is true, people ask themselves, “how does this affect me? Should I have an emotional reaction to this?” An example. When I once suggested to my younger brother – who, like me, spent part of his education in the state sector – that state schools seem to be bad for many people, and to damage them psychologically, his response was “Thanks a lot, that makes me feel really great.” The only way my brother could apparently regard the hypothesis that state schools are awful was in terms of a possible insult to himself. I understand my brother’s reaction, and I suspect many alumni of state schools have a similar attitude. The trouble is, if no one who attended a state school is able to have an impersonal/objective approach, and be willing to admit it was damaging, those responsible for perpetuating the state school system can go on doing so unchecked, while claiming the moral high ground.

Regarding the opening quote, this, also spotted by Fabian, seems relevant.