Drama-biopic starring Steve Coogan will reignite a row that split Irish football fans but there are good signs for its artistic merit
Watching the teaser trailer for Saipan before its cinematic release later this summer called to mind that episode of Friends in which it is revealed Joey leaves his copy of The Shining in a freezer whenever it becomes too scary for him to continue reading. While 23 years may have passed since Roy Keane’s fabled eruption on the eponymous volcanic speck in the western Pacific, it is hard to get past the feeling that the makers of this drama-biopic might have been better off leaving the most seismic row in Irish football history and its accompanying media frenzy hidden among the frozen peas, ice-cream and portions of batch-cooked lasagne. Instead it is about to be sent out into a public domain where it will almost certainly reopen old and, in many cases, still festering wounds.
Everyone of a certain age with a passing interest in football has their own version of what happened in Saipan that they believe to be true, although the details often differ depending on who happens to be doing the telling at any given time. Over the years I have chatted to several former Republic of Ireland footballers who were present at the infamous team meeting where Mick McCarthy held aloft a copy of that interview given by Keane to the Irish Times and asked his captain to explain comments that were scathing in their criticism of the national association’s laissez-faire attitude when it came to preparing for the 2002 World Cup in Japan and South Korea in the immediate run-up to the competition.
Continue reading...While figures like Steve Bannon have exploited the issue, scientists have done themselves no favours by shutting down legitimate inquiry
More than five years after the Covid-19 pandemic was declared, its origins remain a subject of intense – and often acrimonious – debate among scientists and the wider public. There are two broad, competing theories. The natural-origins hypotheses suggest the pandemic began when a close relative of Sars-CoV-2 jumped from a wild animal to a human through the wildlife trade. In contrast, proponents of lab-leak theories argue that the virus emerged when Chinese scientists became infected through research-associated activities.
A perplexing aspect of the controversy is that prominent scientists continue to publish studies in leading scientific journals that they say provide compelling evidence for the natural-origins hypotheses. Yet rather than resolving the issue, each new piece of evidence seems to widen the divide further.
Jane Qiu is an award-winning independent science writer in Beijing. The reporting was supported by a grant from the Pulitzer Center
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Continue reading...This flamboyant tale of fakers and forgery, straddling the turn of the 20th century, is a smart and witty investigation into love and authenticity
We become ourselves by copying others, whether dutifully or audaciously, in acts of homage or appropriation. What is education if not a prolonged process of copying, and isn’t the same true, Nell Stevens asks in her latest novel, of falling in love? Suddenly besotted with another young woman, her protagonist Grace begins to wear her scarf at the side of the neck as her lover does, and to feel “clearer and more deliberate and more like myself” as she does so. “When we fall in love with a person, we fall in love with the copy of them, inexpertly done, that we carry around with us whenever they aren’t there.”
At its heart The Original has two strands of copying: both are preoccupations of the late-Victorian era the book is set in. There are the pictures made by Grace when she’s brought, penniless, to her uncle’s house aged 10 after her parents are sent to lunatic asylums (though her uncle and aunt may well be more dangerously mad than her loving parents). She copies her cousin Charles’s paintings so well that he declares her a magician – or possibly a machine – and then she makes her way to secret independence by creating clever forgeries and then successful copies of famous works of art, from Van Eyck’s Arnolfini Portrait to Velázquez’s Rokeby Venus. And there is cousin Charles himself, who is lost at sea only to return 13 years later, possibly as a brilliant fake, his jaw a little too heavy but his voice and manner so perfectly attuned to the original that his mother welcomes him delightedly back into the household. All this is playing out in a book that is at once a fake – a copy of the Victorian sensation novel – and distinctly idiosyncratic, the original the title proclaims.
Continue reading...People are disgusted by the idea of eating bugs despite their lighter planetary cost compared to traditional livestock
Recent efforts to encourage people to eat insects are doomed to fail because of widespread public disgust at the idea, making it unlikely insects will help people switch from the environmentally ruinous habit of meat consumption, a new study has found.
Farming and eating insects has been touted in recent years as a greener alternative to eating traditional meat due to the heavy environmental toll of raising livestock, which is a leading driver of deforestation, responsible for more than half of global water pollution, and may cause more than a third of all greenhouse gases that can be allowed if the world is to avoid disastrous climate change, the new research finds.
Continue reading...From peat bogs containing centuries of history to the fascinating world of sea creatures’ senses, the theme for this year’s annual event is ‘Biosphere’
Continue reading...I had my dream career in publishing, but was jumping from one emotional and romantic disaster to the next. Could I find stability and rootedness with a new life on an island?
If you’d told me when I was in my early 30s that, by the end of that decade, I would be living in a houseboat, I would never have believed you. I was a devoted Londoner, born and bred, and very wedded to my city lifestyle. I’d got a 100% mortgage and bought a tiny flat with a balcony, where I would host parties – and defy gravity – every weekend.
Romantically, I was jumping from one emotional disaster to another, falling for unsuitable people, closing my ears to those who dropped hints about biological clocks. I had my dream career in publishing and most weeknights could be found stumbling out of the Groucho Club and into a cab. In the early 00s, publishing was all about “networking” and there was always someone keen to go for “just one” – code for a late night of heavy drinking, often culminating in karaoke. I’d get out of bed at 9am the next day, get on the tube and be at my desk by 10, with my boss shaking his head knowingly at my “breakfast meeting” alibi. Then I’d do it all again.
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