一、After a year of unrest, Iran’s youth keep flame of freedom alive in secret protests
1Young Iranians have taken their protests against the authoritarian regime underground one year on from the death in custody of a 22-year-old woman detained for allegedly wearing the Islamic headscarf incorrectly. The death of Mahsa Amini on 16 September last year led to the largest wave of popular unrest for years in Iran and a brutal crackdown by security services in response, with hundreds of men, women and children killed and thousands more injured, according to human rights groups.
2Young Iranians who spoke to the Observer say they have continued to protest secretly. “We may have quit the street protests temporarily, but we haven’t quit the protests,” says Reza, a Tehran-based DJ and university student who says he plays “revolution-driven” music to keep “the momentum” going. “I protested the first two months and somehow managed not to get hit by a pellet. Soon after we found out about the first execution, we were warned by our parents and professors to quit protesting on the streets. That’s when we came up with the idea of night protests.”
3Reza and his university colleagues, both male and female, have organised underground action in the capital. “One of our preferred ways of protesting is to go near government offices and cover the walls in freedom posters. We come back and play music, especially [songs] that are frowned on by the fascist regime. “We had a Shervin Hajipour [the Iranian singer arrested after his protest song went viral] protest the evening after he won the Grammy award to celebrate our fight for freedom. Everything we do in these night protests is considered normal for teens in the west – like women dancing, singing, not wearing a scarf – yet we have to do them in secret.
4“These get-togethers keep us united and motivate us to keep fighting in every way possible.” Golnaz , a 19-year-old economics student from Isfahan, regularly attends underground protests and has channelled her love for art into a form of dissent. “Many think the get-togethers happen only inside homes or garages. We do go outside and protest in many ways,” she says. “At the risk of getting caught, I have been riding bikes without a hijab and have successfully covered walls with graffiti. We then come back to one of our friends’ homes, and we stay awake, dance, sing and try to bring back our university colleagues to the streets in protest. “Us women have never stopped protesting. We continued to defy the mandatory hijab, and we don’t see that changing in the near future.”
5Students in Mashhad, one of the most religious cities in Iran and the home town of the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, say they have also gone out on the streets to test the level of violence used by security forces. “Between March and June, we organised street protests and called out freedom-loving Iranians to come dance in groups of men and women,” says Azad. “Surprisingly, the first two times we were let off with a warning. The third time in May, we were violently dispersed. A few of us were hit but it was nowhere close to how violent the security forces were last October.”
6Syed, another student from Mashhad, says authorities had been acting against businesses serving women without a hijab. “I know several cafes and restaurants that have been closed already for flouting the mandatory hijab restrictions. For this reason, many civil disobedience and pro-freedom meetings are held underground and anonymously. “From underground protests to family gatherings, we’ve realised that these small protests in private circles are what’s keeping the desire for freedom alive among the youth of Iran.”
7Syed continues: “Kudos to those women and girls who are so brave that they’re still protesting out in the open by removing their head scarves. They are the real heroes for whom we continue to fight. Since freedom of expression has no place in Iran, people should use every forum to express their fight for freedom.” Golnaz adds: “If the regime successfully stops people all over the country from protesting on Mahsa’s death anniversary, we have many other ways to continue our protests. And we will.”
二、Economic inactivity：Why are so many Britons not working?
1Slugabed. Slowpoke. Idler. Loafer. The English language has many evocative terms for those seen as workshy. British politicians have made hearty use of them when debating economic inactivity. Economists, however, used to point out that Britain had a good record on this score. For two decades until 2019 its inactivity rate (the share of people of working age who are neither working nor looking for a job) was among the lowest of any rich country. Then something went awry. pandemic lockdowns smothered economic activity everywhere. But whereas other economies bounced back—since 2020 the inactivity rate has fallen, on average, by 0.4 percentage points across the OECD, a club of rich countries—in Britain, uniquely, it continues to climb, and is up by 0.5 points. What’s going on?
2The immediate cause is not disputed: more Britons than ever are classified as unwell. Data released this week showed a remarkable 2.6m people, a record, are economically inactive because of long-term sickness—an increase of 476,000 since early 2020. inactivity helps explain why firms are struggling with labour shortages and, in part, stubbornly high inflation. And there is a hefty bill. The Office for Budget Responsibility, the fiscal watchdog, says more long-term sickness has added £15.7bn ($19.6bn), or 0.6% of GDP, to annual government borrowing because of lost tax receipts and higher welfare spending.
3Diagnosing the cause of the swelling sick rolls is trickier. Could covid, its mystery cousin long covid, or shakier mental health post-pandemic be to blame? Hardly. These are not unique to Britain. Are the woes of the National Health Service the cause? Waiting lists for elective treatment have grown immensely: from 4.6m in February 2020 to 7.6m this summer. Yet look closely, and this is not the answer either. More than half of those waiting for care are not of working age. Nor do the biggest drivers of higher waiting lists by treatment type (for example, musculoskeletal issues) match the reported conditions of the long-term sick (which often relate to mental health).
4Instead, the primary cause is in the welfare system. The previous labour government, and Conservative-led ones since 2010, gradually made it harder for claimants to get incapacity benefits. That helped guard against fraud and kept rates of economic inactivity low. But some people with real needs were wrongly denied benefits. In 2019, after several high-profile cases of people being declared fit for work and then dying, the government reversed course and made it much easier to obtain benefits. Over 80% of the claims lodged in the fiscal year 2019-20 were successful, up from just 35% in the decade before.
5Meanwhile, perverse incentives have been added. The old system did a fair job of nudging those who were temporarily incapacitated back into work as soon as they were better. The new one has sharply raised the relative rewards of claiming to be permanently incapacitated. Those who are deemed unable ever to return to employment now get twice as much as those expected to go back to work one day. This gives people a strong incentive to exaggerate their ailments, and never look for a job again.
6Policymakers should find ways to tighten up. While taking care not to punish the truly ill, they should encourage those who can to go back to work, even part-time. This means bumping up benefits to the temporarily incapacitated, and regularly reassessing recipients to see if their health has improved, which rarely happens today. Politicians are no doubt loth to reopen the welfare debate as an election looms. But ignoring it comes with a large and growing cost. Calibrating the safety-net sensibly is their job. They must not shirk, dodge or duck-shove it.
三、A giant leap for women
1They charted the stars for pitiful wages, knowing their observations about the universe would be attributed to male colleagues, and died in relative obscurity, their scientific achievements unrecognised and overlooked. Now, in a tribute to trailblazing British female astronomers, two asteroids have been named for Annie Maunder and Alice Everett, among the first women in the world to earn a living in astronomy.
2Maunder and Everett, who became friends while studying mathematics at Girton College in Cambridge in the 1880s, were early members of the British Astronomical Association (BAA), which put their names forward to the Catalina Sky Survey for the honour.“These were extraordinary women who did extraordinary things,” said Mike Frost, head of BAA’s historical section . “They deserve their place up in the sky.”
3Like all female students at Cambridge until 1948, the pair were not awarded degrees despite passing their examinations with honours. After graduating, they both took jobs as “lady computers” at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich. “Lady computers would measure the positions of stars,” said Frost. “The astronomer Royal realised that there was this pool of women coming out of Oxbridge, highly talented in mathematics, who could be hired cheaply.”Before accepting the job, Maunder–ranked top mathematician of her year at Girton–begged for an increase on her £4 a month salary, explaining she could “scarcely live on it”.
4After recording the largest sunspot ever seen at Greenwich, Maunder married her boss, Edward Walter Maunder, and as a result was forced to resign her post. She continued to work as a volunteer assistant to her husband, going on expeditions with him around the world to photograph the total eclipse of the sun–a “technically very difficult” feat, said Frost. “She was a very talented astronomer and solar photographer.”Later, Maunder and her husband created the now famous butterfly diagram in order to analyse sunspots, but she was not credited as a coauthor. The pair published extensively but often only under Walter’s name.
5Refused fellowship of the male-only Royal Astronomical Society until 1916, Maunder could not present scientific papers, relying on her husband to communicate her controversial discoveries. Everett, meanwhile, struggled to earn enough as an astronomer, despite observing and measuring the positions of 22,000 stars in a single year and publishing two papers on star orbits. “She was offered a post at a big observatory but it was withdrawn because they couldn’t figure out how to allow a woman to observe there for practical reasons,” said Frost.
6Dr Elisabeth Kendall, mistress of Girton, said Girton’s Victorian women were often pioneering and fearless, and lived together in a unique, “spirited atmosphere”. “There was a sense of community and camaraderie,” she said. “A lot of these women were used to having to fight to achieve their potential. They knew they had to be better than the best men.”By naming the asteroids after Everett and Maunder, the world is “finally” acknowledging their contributions to astronomy, Kendall said–and that’s not just about doing justice to the past. “It’s about inspiring the future.”
四、Soaring car theft：The Kia issue
1TikTok, a Chinese-owned social-media platform where users post short videos, is a fount of useful information. Type “Kia” into its search bar and the helpful autosuggest adds “boys tutorial”. Click through and the most-liked result is a video explaining how to steal a Hyundai car. A gloved hand pulls the plastic off the steering-wheel housing and then jams a screwdriver into the ignition switch and wrenches it aside. Over rap music a computerised voice says: “this is why you should not buy Kia or Hyundai.” The hand attaches a usb cable onto an exposed socket, and twists, and the car starts up. The video has over 415,000 likes. It is one example of a viral internet trend led by “Kia Boys”, adolescents who steal cars to joyride them and post the videos on social media.
2On August 24th the City of Chicago announced it had filed a lawsuit against the American subsidiaries of Kia and Hyundai, two South Korean car manufacturers. The lawsuit alleges that the firms did not include simple immobiliser technology in some of their cheaper vehicles, making them extraordinarily easy to steal. In 2022, over 8,800 Kias and Hyundai cars were stolen in Chicago, making up two-fifths of the 21,000 vehicle thefts recorded. So far this year, they account for more than half—and the total compared with this point last year has doubled. The result of the failure to install immobilisers, said Brandon Johnson, Chicago’s left-wing mayor, is a “nationwide crime spree”.
3Mr Johnson’s critics accused him of trying to abrogate responsibility for crime. Raymond Lopez, a conservative-leaning alderman, told Fox News the move was from a “socialist playbook”. Yet Chicago’s lawsuit is one of seven to have been filed by cities against the manufacturers so far this year, as car theft has soared across America. Baltimore, New York and Seattle are among the other cities to also be suing. Last year, over 1m vehicles were stolen, the highest figure since 2008, according to the National Insurance Crime Bureau, a trade association. Kias and Hyundais were among the most-stolen cars. A class-action lawsuit by owners was settled by the firms for $200m earlier this year.
4It is unclear what chance the cities have in the courts. They all argue that, by selling cars which are so easy to steal, the two firms wasted police time and enabled other crimes. Kia says its vehicles were compliant with the law, and the lawsuits are “without merit”. Unlike those in Europe or Canada, regulators in America do not require vehicles to be fitted with immobilisers, which usually work by demanding a code from a radio key fob to start a car. The firms have also offered software updates which make it less easy to steal the affected cars. All new Kias and Hyundais sold now have immobilisers fitted.
5Yet in 2015, 96% of new cars sold by other manufacturers did come with immobilisers, which cost at most a few hundred dollars. For Kia and Hyundai vehicles, the figure was just 26%. Todd Henderson, a legal scholar at the University of Chicago, says that on the face of it, the cities suing might have a case. It would rest, he says, on the argument that when a simple and cheap technology is available that can radically reduce the chance of a product causing enormous damage, “the non-inclusion makes the product defective.” A car that is so easily stolen might be analogous to an iron that does not automatically switch off, and so burns down a house.
6Graham Farrell, a criminologist at the University of Leeds in Britain, says that car theft is a “keystone crime”. He argues that the dramatic decline in car theft in the 1990s—in America, annual thefts peaked at 1.7m in 1991—was in large part due to cars being fitted with immobilisers. Stolen cars directly enable other crimes. It is hard to do a drive-by shooting without wheels. But especially easy-to-steal cars may have even more deleterious effects by, in effect, creating new criminals. A study Mr Farrell published in 2020 argues that car theft is a gateway drug into criminality: young boys who begin by stealing cars go on to have more extensive criminal careers.
7If so, that ought to worry American cops and politicians. The enormous spike in violence that began in late 2020 seems to be ebbing. So far this year, murder rates in a majority of American cities have fallen sharply compared with last year. But car theft continues to rise. The risk is that the “Kia Boys” may just be getting started.
五、Tougher GCSE grading ‘to lead to flood of resits’
1Schools and colleges in England are expecting a flood of “demotivated” young people forced to retake their GCSE English and maths exams next year, as nearly 40,000 more students are thought likely to fail at least one of the subjects.
2Students who remain in full-time education and have not gained at least a grade 4 (equivalent to a lower C) in English or maths have to resit the subjects until they are 18. The numbers are likely to rise this year as GCSE grading returns to tougher, pre-pandemic levels. Pupils from disadvantaged backgrounds are expected to be worst affected, with school leaders and teaching unions calling on the government to revise the requirement.
3Last year England recorded the widest gap in GCSE results for a decade between disadvantaged pupils and their better-off peers. Headteachers have said many pupils this year have struggled with anxiety in the aftermath of Covid , as well as the effects of the cost of living crisis.
4Kevin Courtney, the joint general secretary of the National Education Union , said: “Forcing resits is demotivating for many students and the low pass rate is a clear sign of policy failure. Educators know the weaknesses of the current system and have suggested many alternatives . The government should rethink this outdated policy.”
5Fewer students were required to resit English and maths courses in recent years, as GCSE grades were awarded by teacher assessment in2020 and 2021 and more generous grading was applied last year.
6In 2022, 75% of pupils taking GCSE maths gained a grade 4 or above, while 77% gained a grade 4 or better in English. Applying 2019 grade proportions would cause both pass rates to drop by several percentage points, so about 37,000 fewer pupils would pass English and 25,000 fewer would pass maths than in 2022.
7In 2022 only one in five of those retaking their maths GCSEs passed.Prof Alan Smithers, the director of Buckingham University’s centre for education and employment research , forecast that about 100,000 pupils in England will receive fewer top grades this year than in 2022 . Bill Watkin, the chief executive of the Sixth Form Colleges Association, said it was possible that some sixth forms and colleges would lower the GCSE grades required for entry . “ But what no one wants to do is to raise false hopes by saying : ‘Oh, you’ve got 3s and 4s in your GCSEs. I’m sure last year they would have been 4s and 5s, so let’s put you on an A-level course.’ Because if you do that, you risk a young person being overstretched and very unhappy,” Watkin said.
8Gillian Keegan, the education secretary , said: “grading is returning to normal, which means a pupil who would have achieved a grade 4 before the pandemic is just as likely to achieve that this year.”
六、hip-hop turns 50：Going on tour
America has dominated hip-hop for decades, but the future of the genre will be decidedly less American
1TO UNDERSTAND hip-hop’s future, look no further than the lead single on the album “Utopia”, by Travis Scott. Mr. Scott is American, but the song’s beat is part-Brazilian, inspired by bailes funk, a cousin of hip-hop born in the favelas. Featured on the track is the Weekend, a Canadian sensation, and Bad Bunny, a Puerto Rican who raps in Spanish and has been the world’s most-streamed artist for three years on Spotify. The song’s title is “K-Pop”, perhaps referring to the drug ketamine (but also generating interest from fans of Korean pop). One critic has called it a “diabolically stupid plan to create the most popular song in the world”, by bringing stars and elements of global hip-hop into a single tune. It worked: the song recently climbed American charts.
2Since its supposed origin at a block party in New York on August 11th 1973, hip-hop has become the most popular musical genre in America, together with R&B. (hip-hop is technically a larger lifestyle category but is often used interchangeably with rap.) It has shaped culture in black America’s image and has become so much a part of America’s identity that the State Department even runs a “hip-hop diplomacy” scheme, which sends rappers, DJs and break-dancers abroad. Next year breakdancing, which emerged at early hip-hop parties, will officially become a new Olympic sport.
3hip-hop’s past 50 years have been heavily American, with many stars and songs emerging there. But America’s hip-hop dominance in the next half-century will not be as great. That is for two reasons.
4First, the geographical centre of hip-hop is shifting: first from New York City and Los Angeles, then to southern cities like Atlanta in the 2000s, and now to everywhere. Many of the most influential new hip-hop stars are no longer African-American. Take the very good Bad Bunny, whose song, “Me Porto Bonito”, has been streamed 1.5bn times on Spotify since its release last year. (That is around 38% more than the Beatles’ most-streamed song, “Here Comes the Sun”, released in 1969 and added to Spotify in 2015.) Central Cee, one of Britain’s most popular rappers, took drill, a subgenre of rap born in Chicago, repackaged it in London and exported it back to America. Americans learn British slang from him on TikTok and at shows: “In London I’m verified; in New York I’m valid.”
5Far from tightening the West’s grip on cool, the internet has dropped rap’s already low barriers to entry: anyone with a voice, microphone and internet connection can release a verse. A greater pool of talent is one reason that people in many countries increasingly listen to local rap rather than American hip-hop artists. “People want to see themselves represented,” says Aori Sauthon, a rapper and Brazilian hip-hop music executive.
6In turn, American artists are taking more cultural cues from global hip-hop. Ice Spice, one of America’s brightest new rap talents, uses the British drill sound popularised by artists like Central Cee. Burna Boy, a Nigerian artist, is helping popularise afrobeats, a genre from west Africa and its diaspora, among American rappers. Some think that afrobeats could become as influential as the South has been in shaping hip-hop’s sound. (The South spawned trap, a subgenre of rap music characterised by booming drums with melodic, auto-tuned vocals.) American hip-hop has always been inspired by other, global music: early records sampled Ethiopian jazz. But this is the first time that artists in other countries are taking on Americans’ dominance in hip-hop so directly.
7The rise of global stars dovetails with a second trend, which is hip-hop’s surprising wobbles at home. In 2023 a hip-hop album did not top the American charts until July, the longest wait in 30 years. hip-hop made up 42% of the top 50 most-streamed songs on Spotify in America in 2020 but accounts for just 16% so far this year, according to Chart metric, a data firm. Country and Latin music have been gaining share.
8The charts do not fully illustrate any genre’s broader cultural influence, but they have still prompted some soul-searching. Some are concerned that hip-hop is experiencing a “mid-life slump” in America. The easiest explanation is that hip-hop’s biggest American stars, such as Kendrick Lamar and Post Malone, are more established and are less focused on churning out hit releases than they used to be. Some emerging stars, such as Juice WRLD, have died young, and with them the potential for new albums, even if they remain among the most-streamed rappers.
9It may also be that listeners feel hip-hop has strayed too far from where it started. What began as an anti-establishment movement in the Bronx has now become the “cultural arm of capitalism”, says Tricia Rose, a professor at Brown University who was among the first people to study hip-hop. Materialism is rampant in lyrics and lifestyles. “Rappers from the favelas now go to Prada to buy socks,” laments Mr. Sauthon, the Brazilian hip-hop executive. Many criticise the rise of trap and “mumble rap”(a term for rap songs whose lyrics are hard to decipher) for a perceived lack of lyrical depth.
10But defenders point out how hip-hop has retained its anti-establishment roots, being invoked by young people and political activists globally, from Pretoria to Palestine. And despite all the talk of a hip-hop downturn in America, its influence remains indisputable. Morgan Wallen, today’s most popular country singer, uses trap-inspired beats and sings with a rap-like cadence. Recent albums from Taylor Swift are replete with swear words. “I’m not sure that would’ve happened before hip-hop,” says Adam Bradley, a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles.
11Far from being ready for a mic-drop, hip-hop is just starting a new sort of tour: with more artists from more countries embracing the genre than ever. Middle age has never looked so good.