Can't Get You Out of My Head — Love, power, money, ghosts of empire, conspiracies, artificial intelligence – and You.

Don’t miss this excellent six part documentary series from the BBC. 

An emotional history of the modern world by Adam Curtis.

We are living through strange days. Across Britain, Europe and America societies have become split and polarised. There is anger at the inequality and the ever growing corruption - and a widespread distrust of the elites. Into this has come the pandemic that has brutally dramatised those divisions. But despite the chaos, there is a paralysis - a sense that no one knows how to escape from this.

Can’t Get You Out of My Head tells how we got to this place. And why both those in power - and we - find it so difficult to move on. At its heart is the strange story of what happened when people’s inner feelings got mixed up with power in the age of individualism. How the hopes and dreams and uncertainties inside people's minds met the decaying forces of old power in Britain, America, Russia and China. What resulted was a block not just in the society - but also inside our own heads - that stops us imagining anything else than this.

Can't Get You Out of My Head

Can't Get You Out of My Head - Series 1: 1. Part One - Bloodshed on Wolf Mountain:

Yuval Noah #Harari On The Lessons from a year of #Covid #LongRead

2020 has shown that humanity is far from helpless. 

• Epidemics are no longer uncontrollable forces of nature. Science has turned them into a manageable challenge.

• Covid also underlined "the power of information technology", as hundreds of millions of people shifted to an online world in a matter of weeks,  notwithstanding all its deleterious effects on society. 

• Covid has also shown the incredible resiliency we have built into our Food Supply through the Automation of Agriculture.  "While in 1349 an average farmhand reaped about 5 bushels per day, in 2014 a combine set a record by harvesting 30,000 bushels in a day.

Consequently Covid-19 had no significant impact on global production of staple crops such as wheat, maize and rice. 

• In turn, Covid showed global trade could go on functioning more or less smoothly because it involved very few humans. 

A largely automated present-day container ship can carry more tons than the merchant fleet of an entire early modern kingdom. In 1582, the English merchant fleet had a total carrying capacity of 68,000 tons and required about 16,000 sailors. The container ship OOCL Hong Kong, christened in 2017, can carry some 200,000 tons while requiring a crew of only 22. 

Why, then, has there been so much death and suffering? Because of bad political decisions, says Yuval Noah Harari in the Financial Times. 

Yuval Noah Harari: Lessons from a year of Covid

In a year of scientific breakthroughs — and political failures — what can we learn for the future?

7 hours ago

© Rafael Heygster/Helena Manhartsberger

How can we summarise the Covid year from a broad historical perspective?

#Tutoring has become a weapon in the global arms race in #Education. There’s no limit to what some parents will pay...

If a good school begets a good university, a great job, a suitable spouse, house and all the rest, then it’s never too early to start training. 

Ever more parents, particularly those with money to spare, consider their children to be engaged in an academic arms race. Tutoring is a secret weapon.

...

Tutoring has bullied its way into education systems all over the world with remarkable success over the past two decades. In Britain last year, more than a quarter of children in England and Wales aged 11-16 received some kind of private teaching outside school, according to the Sutton Trust, a social-mobility charity; in London that figure rose to over 40% of children. (Less than a fifth were doing so in 2005, the first year for which the charity collected such data.) British parents spend an estimated £2bn on private tuition each year, not including other extra-curricular activities such as sport or music lessons.

That picture is replicated across the world. A recent research paper points to a rise in the prevalence of “shadow education” throughout Europe. In Germany, Ireland, Italy and Spain at least 40% of school-age children have had private tutoring; in countries where there is a lack of faith in the state schooling system, such as Greece, that figure can rise to between 80% and 95% of all children.

Read the whole piece on The Economist's 1843 magazine here:

Education - First-class flights, chauffeurs and bribery: the secret life of a private tutor | 1843 magazine | The Economist

Education - First-class flights, chauffeurs and bribery: the secret life of a private tutor | 1843 magazine | The Economist