All posts tagged: Gill

D-day deserter Rishi Sunak didn’t do his duty, so why should gen Z be expected to do theirs? | Martha Gill

D-day deserter Rishi Sunak didn’t do his duty, so why should gen Z be expected to do theirs? | Martha Gill

Published by skeptic

Rishi Sunak is in an unfortunate position. Anything he does that even slightly cuts convention will now be read as a terrible blunder. Once a narrative like this picks up steam it is hard to stop. The press wants to add to the story arc. A delighted Labour will help it along. And perhaps even some of his own camp, looking for a scapegoat in the coming election defeat, will be rooting for him to fail. There’s really no spinning his latest gaffe. It’s quite the decision to aim your entire campaign at those who care about the Second World War, and then to D-day ceremony, leaving veterans standing. Is this match-fixing, you wonder? Some wild scheme – a Westminster version of Mel Brooks’s film The Producers – to turn the campaign into a notorious flop and then somehow profit? The Conservatives have sacrificed their chances with wide swathes of voters in pursuit of a traditionalist core. Insulting war heroes is rarely a wise move. But here it may be fatal. What we saw last week …

India’s T20 World Cup 2024 squad: Rishabh Pant in, Shubman Gill out | Cricket News

India’s T20 World Cup 2024 squad: Rishabh Pant in, Shubman Gill out | Cricket News

Published by Sam

Pant returns to the side more than a year after his near-fatal car crash as India name Rohit Sharma-led 15-man squad. Rishabh Pant has found his way back into the Indian cricket team after being included in the country’s 15-man squad for the ICC Men’s T20 World Cup 2024. The wicketkeeper batter, who suffered multiple injuries in a horrific life-threatening car crash in December 2022, made his comeback to the game earlier this month with his Indian Premier League franchise Delhi Capitals. Pant was one of the few players whose inclusion in the T20 World Cup squad would have been subject to some scrutiny given his lack of professional outings in recent months. However, Indian selectors have put their weight behind the attacking batter who has scored 987 runs in 66 T20 internationals. Rohit Sharma will lead India’s quest for a second T20 World Cup title, with all-rounder Hardik Pandya as his deputy. ????India’s squad for ICC Men’s T20 World Cup 2024 announced ???? Let’s get ready to cheer for #TeamIndia #T20WorldCup pic.twitter.com/jIxsYeJkYW — BCCI …

Mental health is a measure of success, not a reason for politicians to sneer | Martha Gill

Mental health is a measure of success, not a reason for politicians to sneer | Martha Gill

Published by skeptic

There’s more to life than money, but societies can struggle to express it. When we talk about the state of nations and their citizens, we tend ultimately to boil it down to a few economic indicators. These can tell us a great deal, but they don’t quite tell us everything. The untouched stretch of ancient woodland, the arts in education, the close-knit community, the healthy childhood: there are plenty of valuable things that cannot always be weighed on this scale. And this is a problem, particularly for people who want to hang on to those valuable things. Here’s a rule of thumb: if you can’t measure how much something is worth, it becomes tricky to protect it. Those who do not want to see a bluebell wood destroyed or another humanities subject ditched can find it hard to argue their case against the cold logic of pounds and pence. What yardstick can they use that will be taken seriously? It’s not just activists for whom this is an issue. Governments have long flirted with the …

It’s important to recognise trauma – but we should not let it become our entire identity | Gill Straker and Jacqui Winship

It’s important to recognise trauma – but we should not let it become our entire identity | Gill Straker and Jacqui Winship

Published by skeptic

How we shape our identity plays a vital role in determining our wellbeing. This shaping, often unconscious, can propel our personal growth but also sometimes limit it in unintended ways. As societal awareness grows about the traumatic impact of racism, domestic violence, prejudice, discrimination, poverty and the like, there has been an increasing focus on trauma-informed therapy. This approach recognises trauma’s influence on wellbeing and shifts away from blaming victims for their circumstances. Victimisation is multilayered, often requiring social and therapeutic intervention. But there is a danger that individuals affected by trauma may unintentionally adopt an overarching “trauma identity”. This exclusive identification as a victim can overshadow more positive aspects of someone’s identity, limiting their autonomy, enjoyment and creativity. Meet Alex*, a 28-year-old man unconsciously entangled in his victimhood. Having experienced significant traumas in the past, Alex developed a subtle but powerful habit of weaving these traumas into his daily interactions due to a need to elicit sympathy and support from others. Unaware of this pattern, he experienced and portrayed himself as a perpetual victim …

Can’t read a map or add up? Don’t worry, we’ve always let technology do the boring stuff | Martha Gill

Can’t read a map or add up? Don’t worry, we’ve always let technology do the boring stuff | Martha Gill

Published by skeptic

The dystopian novels of the last century were mostly filled with terrifying visions of the rise of technology – a genre of which we are still to tire. Charlie Brooker’s hugely successful Black Mirror series in which technology kills, maims or subjects people to terrible fates will have a seventh incarnation this year. But just for balance, just for once, I’d like to see a dystopia in which humans of the 2020s are catapulted into a world equipped only with the technology of a few decades ago. The repetitive domestic chore. The mind-numbing assembly-line job. The tyranny of a thousand paper forms to fill out by hand, post and file. In 1949, the year George Orwell published Nineteen Eighty-Four, the simple task of washing your clothes took, for many people, half a day’s grind. Thousands in the UK toiled in factory jobs in which their value came down to the ability to complete a simple arm movement. Accountants wore out their eyes and bored themselves stupid over endless pencilled columns of numbers. Even since 2011, …

Hundreds by Rohit, Gill put India in the lead against England

Hundreds by Rohit, Gill put India in the lead against England

Published by Sam

DHARAMSALA, India : Rohit Sharma and Shubman Gill both struck hundreds and combined in a burgeoning 160-run stand for the unbroken second wicket to put India firmly in the lead on day two of the fifth and final test against England on Friday. India, who hold an unassailable 3-1 lead in the series, have been in the ascendancy since bowling out England for 218 at the picturesque Himachal Pradesh Cricket Association Stadium. Home captain Rohit got a life on 68 when Zak Crawley missed a sharp catch at backward short leg but that was as close as England came to a breakthrough before lunch. India were 264-1 at the break with Rohit on 102, his second hundred of the series that included three sixes. Gill was the more aggressive of the pair, smacking five sixes in his stellar 101 not out. The overnight batters went after the bowlers right from the word go. The one shot that epitomised their approach was when Gill stepped out against James Anderson and hit test cricket’s most successful fast …

Millennials will be the richest generation ever, but who gets that wealth is down to luck | Martha Gill

Millennials will be the richest generation ever, but who gets that wealth is down to luck | Martha Gill

Published by skeptic

What have millennials been complaining about? Far from languishing in poverty as society’s lost stepchildren, they are on course to become the richest generation in history. That’s according to a report from the estate agent Knight Frank, which tells us that in the next 20 years there will be a “seismic” transfer of wealth assets from older cohorts to people born between 1981 and 2000. Generational unfairness solved? Well, no, of course not. These assets will be distributed to millennials entirely according to how rich their parents are. This will make one of this cohort’s biggest problems worse. Which is that the determining factor of millennial success is, increasingly, whether or not you come from a rich background. The social contract – work hard and get on – is really a contract about peer competition … And this is now being torn up This problem is vastly underrated. Headline figures about how this cohort is doing overall, or in comparison with older people, tend to miss something important, which is that human beings are wired to care …

The plight of King Charles moves us, but we soon tire of feeling sorry for the poor | Martha Gill

The plight of King Charles moves us, but we soon tire of feeling sorry for the poor | Martha Gill

Published by skeptic

The human capacity to empathise is among our most celebrated qualities – so it can be rather galling to think this purest of instincts might be infected with bias. Nevertheless, this is what psychologists tell us. We can suffer, apparently, from “compassion fatigue” – present in burnt-out care workers, but also at scale (Ukraine frets that, two years into a war with Russia, supporters in the west will reach compassion fatigue). We also suffer from “compassion fade”: as the number in need increases, tragedies dissolve into statistics. Both biases have an element of paradox – we are withdrawing sympathy as the need for it increases. But I wonder if there is also a third sort of paradoxical bias lurking within our good intentions; call it “compassion status-bias”. It is among our most ancient instincts to observe, suck up to and imitate people a few rungs up on the ladder – witness the dynamics of any office, the pages of any magazine – but I reckon we also fling a great deal of excess sympathy up …

Will no one rid King Charles of his turbulent prince – Andrew has to go, but how to do it? | Martha Gill

Will no one rid King Charles of his turbulent prince – Andrew has to go, but how to do it? | Martha Gill

Published by skeptic

The royal family is supposed to have divested itself of Prince Andrew. But it hasn’t finished the job. It’s exactly two years since he was stripped, with great ceremony, of his public duties, his two dozen military titles, what charity patronages remained, and – sort of – the abbreviation HRH, which he can apparently still use, just not “officially”, whatever that means. The prince remains on royal property but in a kind of internal exile, kept away from balconies and windows. He has been partly digested but not fully expelled. Yet Andrew’s unofficial status – royal liability – is unchanged. The unsealing of 900 pages of court documents in the US last week exposed new details of his friendship with Jeffrey Epstein, further weakening his case that he hadn’t the foggiest idea what the paedophile financier was up to with all those young girls. And further harming the reputation of the royals at large. The new revelations are damning rather than incriminating, but they have put the prince back in the headlines. So, probably, will continued legal proceedings …