Guardian reader SanityRestored:

I’m prepared to judge you. Sorry if you don’t like it. But for the damage you are inflicting firstly on your own kids, and secondly on society in general, don’t I have the right to judge you?

Guardian reader NorthernLass81:

A decision that cannot really be justified.

Guardian reader ivanpope:

Every single comment you make is a Tory comment… I’m not sure that you really fit in at the Guardian… It’s commonplace for those of a leftist bent to move to the right as they get older (i.e. as they acquire income, assets and status). You are just following the norm, but I can still dislike you for that.

Guardian reader smallactsofdefiance:

Parents will perform the most extraordinary mental contortions in order to justify why their child is so special they must ditch their principles.

Guardian reader sammace:

An utterly immoral act.

Guardian reader Jonathan Staples:

What’s the article next week? Are you going to justify joining BUPA?

Heavens. And the Great Moral Horror that has these righteous souls so indignant and a-twitch? The Guardian’s education journalist Janet Murray has – oh my – sent her daughter to a fee-paying school:

I’ve been asked how I can reconcile writing about education for the Guardian with having a child at a private school… Deep down, I don’t think I ever really had a problem with private education. It just didn’t seem socially acceptable to say so.

Of course the sound of a thousand hands being wrung and knuckles being cracked has had some effect:

When I walk Katy to school in her straw boater and blazer, I sometimes sense people – particularly other parents – judging me.

And so,

I plan to send Katy to a state secondary if I can,

Whew. Her soul may yet be saved.

but if I find myself dissatisfied with what is on offer, I will go private again.

Unrepentant! Fetch the stones.

John Travolta, Johnny Depp, Nicole Kidman and Britney Spears are among the celebrities who’ve been Photoshopped to look like mere commoners. 

A vision of tomorrow, and at least one classic sentence, courtesy of the Guardian’s Jackie Ashley: 

Prospect magazine carries a thoughtful, slightly wistful piece by the former Labour MP Chris Mullin in which he calls for the abolition of the private car.

Yes, Mr Mullin would have us inhabit a world denuded of the automobile – a mode of transport he regards as “a disastrous invention” – and with it some rather obvious but unmentioned freedoms. Instead, he thinks we should want to live in a more bipedal and egalitarian world. A world not unlike, 

Hanoi, the capital of Vietnam, before the coming of market forces.

And naturally, Ms Ashley is very much intrigued: 

That might be going too far for today’s politicians, but the effect of hard times and the oil price on budgets, and the sheer misery of modern car commuting, suggests that a more radical agenda could be popular. That means much bolder support for cycling, with cars banned from many more roads and parks. It’s one of the few radical shifts in lifestyle that is easily deliverable and for which there is no real drawback.

Banning cars from roads is easily delivered and has no drawback, see? At least, not for Ms Ashley, who cares so very much and thinks so very deeply.

As do other cerebral and compassionate Guardianistas:

Cars should be banned – they are unhealthy, dangerous, a lazy and destructive option. The only people who should be allowed them are: (a) people who work far from their home where public transport is not sufficient (they would have to provide evidence upon trying to buy a car); (b) people with 3 children or more (for transporting kids + big weekly shops); (c) disabled people who would find it difficult to use public transport. All would have to provide proof when buying their car. Everybody else will have to use trains, buses, trams, their feet, bikes.

And, 

It is also vastly selfish to drive around with empty seats.

Though not, perhaps, as selfish as wishing to impose on others a “radical shift in lifestyle” and limited mobility. Unless shrinking a person’s world and robbing them of autonomy is now considered a virtue. Curiously, the Guardian comments are largely fixated with the respective hazards posed by cyclists and motorists, and which party smells more. Ms Ashley and Mr Mullin’s wild fits of authoritarianism, and those of their admirers, don’t cause much fuss.

Photos from the World Tobacco Sniffing Championship. // Airport security encounters man with suspicious penis. // “On July 19, 1957, five men stood below a 2 kiloton atomic test. A tape recorder was present to record their experience.” // Titan’s vortex. // A vending machine for every need. Including mashed potatoes and gravy. // Biology up close. // Handsome ‘bergs. // Painting Batman big. // When pensioners have guns. // Orang-utans master iPads. // The problems of relativistic baseball. // People and things rotating. // Comics out of context. // Cleavage hands. // Assorted title sequences. // The complete Black Narcissus (1947). 

Ralph Rugoff, director of the Hayward Gallery, explains visual art: 

Art is really about ideas. It’s not about looking at things.

According to the Guardian, Mr Rugoff is “one of the most highly respected curators on the global contemporary art scene” and has “shaken up art audiences on both sides of the Atlantic, inspiring them to engage with the kind of puzzling, cerebral work that tends to put off all but the most dedicated of contemporary art aficionados.” Prior to his moving to the Hayward, we learn that Mr Rugoff “curated a survey of invisible art that included paintings rendered in evaporated water, a movie shot with a film-less camera, and a pedestal once occupied by Andy Warhol.” Such was the unspeakable daring of this invisible art venture, Mr Rugoff has seen fit to repeat it, daringly, at the Hayward. Now Londoners can gasp in wonder at Gianni Motti’s empty frames and Tom Friedman’s blank piece of paper, at which the artist supposedly stared for a very long time. If the colossal cleverness of it all is too much to endure, art lovers may wish to extend the premise by not being visible either.

Setting aside the gallery’s standard blather about “diverse aesthetic practices and concerns” and “using invisibility as a metaphor that relates to the… marginalisation of social groups,” one can’t help but feel that conceptual artists are in fact tragic figures, or tragicomic at least. By and large they’re the leftovers, the dregs. They’re the people who weren’t good enough to get a job in advertising. Having abandoned craft, aesthetics and mere looking at things – and with them, any sense of wonderment or joy – what’s left is typically hackneyed, desperate and gratingly self-conscious. And so, for instance, arch conceptualist Stefan Brüggemann - whose work allegedly “re-presents something which is absent” and “comments on the absence of conceptual art, because conceptual art no longer exists” – attempts to explode our brains with this: 

And of course this mighty conundrum: