Credit: Joe Giddens /PA
SIR – There may be benefits to both employers and employees of spending fewer days in the office (report, May 11), but what about customers?
I have had odd phone calls with people working from home. One had to put me on hold to deal with her dog, which was barking so loudly we couldn’t hear each other. A second apologised for the crunching noises, explaining he was eating toast while finding my details on the computer. A third failed to make promised return calls and couldn’t understand simple details – the slurred speech was what really concerned me.
Does the truth set us free? – Ulrika Carlsson, PhD in Philosophy at Yale University and writer for Axess Magazine in Stockholm, Sweden
Why social liberals are not moral relativists – Thomas Hurka, University Professor and Jackman Chair in Philosophical Studies at the University of Toronto
How to prevent AI from taking over the world – Ruth Chang, Chair and Professor of Jurisprudence at the University of Oxford and a Professorial Fellow at University College, Oxford
Why Donald Trump was the ultimate anarchist – Melissa Lane, Class of 1943 Professor of Politics and Director of the University Centre for Human Values at Princeton University
07 May, 2021
Queen Idia Ivory Mask, perhaps the greatest of all Benin’s treasures, is now in the British Museum
• FURTHER to Dan Carrier’s review of Barnaby Phillips’s book ‘
Loot, Britain and the Benin Bronzes‘
(Alloy steal, April 29), in 1978 I saw Nigeria from end to end, having been offered a rare visa to photograph the results of the oil boom.
The Biafran War was a recent memory so there was paranoia about a white man with cameras, and my minder often had to explain me to soldiers and police, flourishing his letter from the ministry.
The Guardian and other papers and magazines used the photos for years, no other photographer having got in; the portrait of Fela Kuti at home in Lagos with most of his 27 wives has been printed countless times.
John B. Thompson: On Researching Changes in the Book Publishing Industry
John B. Thompson, author of the new book Book Wars, shares the research that went into his account of how the digital revolution changed publishing for readers and writers.
Author:
In his new book,
Book Wars, John B. Thompson documents the whirlwind changes of the book publishing industry in recent decades, from the advent of Amazon to the boom of self-publishing. He shares about his experiences researching the book in this author profile.
Name: John B. Thompson
Publisher: Polity
Genre/category: Nonfiction
Elevator pitch for the book: This book tells the story of how the digital revolution has transformed the world of book publishing, from the surge of e-books and the rise of Amazon to the self-publishing explosion and the growing popularity of audiobooks. It provides a comprehensive and fine-grained account of digital disruption at the heart of one of our most important creative industries.
The Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cambridge, Stephen Toope, described the student gathering on Jesus Green for Caesarean Sunday as “disappointing” and “a slap in the face” in an email sent to students yesterday (05/05).
Caesarean Sunday, aka ‘C Sunday’, is named after Jesus College’s drinking society, The Caesareans, and historically included a fight between Jesus drinking society and the Girton Green Monsters, an aspect of the event which has now been banned.
The 80-year-old event takes place on the Sunday of the May Bank Holiday at the start of Easter term, and also normally represents the last big event of the academic year before exam season.