Politics, tech and media issues from a Muslim perspective
I’ve been a member of the National Trust, a British conservation charity which maintains a large number of estates including parks, stately homes, gardens and landscapes, since 2019. I’ve spent many an afternoon wandering...
Late last month it was reported on Bloomberg (archived copy here) that the government were considering making it compulsory to pay the TV licence fee to watch streamed on-demand entertainment online from providers such...
Last week, while looking for something to watch while doing a large stack of ironing during the lockdown, I stumbled upon the first series of the six-part BBC crime drama, Happy Valley. This drama,...
Today I saw a piece in the Globe and Mail, a Toronto-based newspaper, in which a professor at York University (the one in Toronto) called for schools to change the way they teach the...
Last week the prime minister, Theresa May, joined her four living predecessors to make a video promoting a project to build a permanent Holocaust memorial and education centre in Victoria Tower Gardens, a small...
Today my social media was abuzz with people, mainly women, laughing uproariously at a picture sourced form the Daily Mail in which an “interiors therapist” with a background in feng shui, named Suzanne Roynon,...
This morning a British rapper, Blaine “Cadet” Johnson, from south London was killed in a car accident on the way to a show at Keele university in Staffordshire. He was 28. Some people I...
There’s a letter in today’s Guardian in response to a debate about the virtues of Pimlico comprehensive school, a concrete-and-glass building designed by the architectural team at the then Greater London Council which was...
Yesterday there was much indignation on Twitter and elsewhere that the New York Times had published an interview with the novelist and poet Alice Walker which contained a recommendation of a book by David...
A couple of years ago there was a sketch on a Canadian comedy show (starts at 01:26), the Baroness Von Sketch Show, in which a woman walks into a clothing store and tries on...
A Twitter defence of James Franco (right), who has been accused of sexual assault explicitly by one actress and implicitly by others: If you read closely, it said it happened during filming of Palo...
An online women's publication called "The Establishment" last year published an article attacking the editing of Anne Frank's diary by her father, Otto Frank, for publication in the 1940s after the death of the...
Last weekend David Bowie died, and amid the non-stop media tributes (which have been compared to the relentless coverage of Lady Diana's death in 1997, although they can't have really approached that — normal...
The Theory of Everything is a bio-pic of Professor Stephen Hawking, the British professor of theoretical physics and former Lucasian professor of mathematics at Cambridge university, who is best-known for his book A Brief...
Back in the 1980s, Doctor Who featured a storyline in which The Doctor was transported to a land ruled by so-called happy people, a land in which sadness is illegal and punished by the...
Roman Polanski and the sin of simplification (in today's Observer) Victoria Coren Mitchell tries to make a case that the situation of Roman Polanski, the subject of a book published by the woman he...
Taking Up Space: Women vs. Men | You think I just don't understand, but I don't believe you. Cathy "Bug" Brennan, someone who I have heard described as one of the most extreme and...
Terry Deary on Libraries (from the Guardian) Terry Deary (of Horrible Histories fame) thinks bookshops are closing because libraries are cutting their throats by lending out books rather than selling them. Uh, not so...
I watched Wednesday night's Exposure documentary in which the claims that have been made about his molestation of young girls in the BBC studios and at a special boarding school in Surrey in the...
Last night it was announced that the actor Michael Clarke Duncan, best known for playing John Coffey in the 1999 film The Green Mile, based on the Stephen King novel of the same name,...