‘Naked and starving’: letters tell how English paupers fought for rights 200 years ago: [P]reviously unpublished letters of penniless and disabled paupers living in the early 19th century reveal the sophisticated and powerful rhetoric they used to secure regular welfare payments from parish authorities, despite being barely able to read and write.
( Read more... )

Do not have anything to do with a TV company that solicits via Amazon sponsored links, confuses 'effect' and 'affect', and, possibly even worse, cannot spell 'documentary'.

We consider this a very bad sign.

Mental illness in family? - Are you 16-24 & effected by this? TV docmentry wants to talk to you.

(The site that links to seems perfectly ( Read more... )

Extracted from a very much longer spam email received today:
This village has no pipe-borne water, nor post office. So, l am ( Read more... )

Increasing numbers of children are suffering from myopia.

Would that be 'suffering from' or 'diagnosed as being'? given that the figures are worldwide and presumably include regions in which routine sight-testing has historically been far from universal.

Furthermore, for fairly large swathes of historical time, even given the possibility of ( Read more... )

Dept of You Couldn't Make It Up: A retired teacher who now spends his time campaigning for improved literacy has revealed that he taught classes for 17 years even though he could not read or write.

Evidence from the Berlin Film Festival suggests that Madonna should stick to her last: Madonna reinvents herself as film director (let's all do the ( Read more... )

Doris Lessing, aged 88.... [i]n her [Nobel] acceptance speech... recalls her childhood in Africa and laments that children in Zimbabwe are starving for knowledge, while those in more privileged countries shun reading for the 'inanities' of the internet. You know, I would find this a lot more compelling if one could not, looking back over the ( Read more... )

(I did not go on the arranged visit to place of interest [??] organised by conference, which appeared on the schedule fairly late in the day and after I had made my plans to come with partner and spend some time sightseeing.)

This morning to the Museum of Musical Instruments, which is a) in a fab former Art Nouveau department store building, and b ( Read more... )

( Christopher Hilliard, To Exercise Our Talents: The Democratization of Writing in Britain )

Catherine Bennett muses on whether environmentalism might be considered a religion. While obviously it is a good thing that individuals think about the environmental footprints they are leaving, this is so one of those things where the worst sins are not being committed on the individual level, and it shouldn't be just about feeling cosy about one' ( Read more... )