© Doug Mills/The New York Times
Is it to be a degree and heavy debt when graduate jobs are shrinking? Or foregoing a degree, knowing society still worships them? Confused, angry: who wouldn’t be
Some months ago, I was at my old university, speaking to prospective sixth-form and college students about taking a degree in the arts and what future careers they could expect. It was a cohort of teenagers from underrepresented backgrounds: all of them had that glint of ambition in their eyes, a desire to better their circumstances. After the talk, they showed me their precocious LinkedIn profiles already advertising their talents to future employers. I expected them to ask what would be of more value out of a degree in the arts or Stem, but I was unprepared for something more bracing: whether it was worth them going to university at all.
It is a question that keeps on rearing its head, as the graduate recruitment crisis and crippling student debts paint a picture of a pursuit with diminished returns. Those of us in the orbit of young people increasingly wonder whether we can, in good conscience, encourage them to go and get a degree. The options being presented increasingly look like snake oil, so is it any wonder that young people feel disillusioned and deceived?
Jason Okundaye is an assistant Opinion editor at the Guardian
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© Illustration: Joe Magee/The Guardian
© Illustration: Joe Magee/The Guardian
© Illustration: Joe Magee/The Guardian
Aromatic snacks stuffed full of flavourful chicken mince, and a comforting Korean stew
I use a lot of rice paper and always have plenty at home, because it can be used in a wide variety of ways. It’s delicious fried, as are most things! These half-moons are filled with an aromatic chicken mince, while tteokbokki is a Korean dish of chewy rice tubes that are often cooked in a stew. They are not always easy to find, but I love them, so I make my own.
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© Photograph: Kim Lightbody/The Guardian. Food and prop styling: Florence Blair. Food styling assistant: Phoebe Altman.
© Photograph: Kim Lightbody/The Guardian. Food and prop styling: Florence Blair. Food styling assistant: Phoebe Altman.
© Photograph: Kim Lightbody/The Guardian. Food and prop styling: Florence Blair. Food styling assistant: Phoebe Altman.
© Dmitry Kostyukov for The New York Times
This year’s Baftas were a chaotic mix of wild praise and inadvertent insults as the best actor prize was won by an unknown – and one of the nominees seemingly slurred from a man in the stalls
Going into Bafta night, everybody’s secret hopes for a little British movies that could were centred on folkie comedy The Ballad of Wallis Island. In the event though, Ballad wound up with nothing and I Swear, about Tourettes activist John Davidson stormed the show, capped by a jawdropping win for Robert Aramayo in the best actor category. As the man himself said, it was not to be believed that he’d be heading to the podium ahead of the likes of DiCaprio, Chalamet and Ethan Hawke. You probably have to go back to the mid-1980s and Haing S Ngor’s win for The Killing Fields for someone so unheralded to take the prize.
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© Photograph: Stuart Wilson/BAFTA/Getty Images for BAFTA
© Photograph: Stuart Wilson/BAFTA/Getty Images for BAFTA
© Photograph: Stuart Wilson/BAFTA/Getty Images for BAFTA
Coincidence or not, the party has timed its congress for the centenary of an infamous Nazi rally. But condemnation didn’t stop Hitler, and it’s not enough now
Germany’s far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) is different from its sister movements across the west.
In a country deeply conscious of its own history, the party, now riding high in the polls, has to decide whether it rejects or embraces Hitler as an ideological antecedent. Rather than answering definitively, the party is deliberately opaque. It flirts with the Nazi legacy without explicitly committing to it. Far from putting voters off, this strategic ambiguity cultivates a surprisingly powerful mix of outrage and plausible deniability.
Katja Hoyer is a German-British historian and journalist. She is the author of Beyond the Wall: East Germany, 1949-1990. Her latest book Weimar: Life on the Edge of Catastrophe comes out in May.
© Photograph: Karina Hessland/Reuters
© Photograph: Karina Hessland/Reuters
© Photograph: Karina Hessland/Reuters
From flooding in Peru to the fight for fair wages, a lot more goes into the price of fruit than what supermarkets charge consumers for
Why have apples increased so much in price in the UK? They seem much more expensive than bananas, even though many are homegrown, and so don’t have to travel halfway around the world.
It seems bananas (sorry) that fruit grown in the country where it is being sold costs more than produce which has been shipped thousands of miles. But, unlike other goods, such as petrol, the price we pay at the supermarket for fresh food has become detached from the cost of getting it there.
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© Composite: Guardian Design;LEAIMAGE;Catherine Falls Commercial/Getty Images
© Composite: Guardian Design;LEAIMAGE;Catherine Falls Commercial/Getty Images
© Composite: Guardian Design;LEAIMAGE;Catherine Falls Commercial/Getty Images
It is an epic piece of music that literally falls apart – and it perfectly captured the end-of-days chaos after the tragedy. Composer William Basinski and musician Anohni recall its febrile birth in New York’s avant-garde scene
‘Do you remember me phoning and saying, ‘Get over here! You won’t believe what’s happened!’” William Basinski is reminiscing with his old friend Anohni about the summer of 2001, when he made a startling discovery. Out of work and at a loose end, the experimental composer had decided to digitise some recordings he’d made in the early 1980s – snippets of orchestral music and muzak he found on shortwave radio stations. He was planning to add his own instrumentation, but as the tapes started playing on a loop he noticed something else was happening: the music was gradually degrading. The recordings were so old that the iron oxide particles were falling off the tape as they played. Soon, there would be nothing left but crackles and then silence.
It was every musician’s worst nightmare. But for Basinski it was like striking gold.
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© Photograph: Brad Rickerby/Reuters
© Photograph: Brad Rickerby/Reuters
© Photograph: Brad Rickerby/Reuters
The Belgian ceremony attracts beekeepers from the Netherlands, France and Germany keen to boost dark bee numbers and stop the spread of the hybrid honeybee
Every summer, 1,000 virgin queens descend on the Belgian town of Chimay. During the “wedding flight”, a male attaches to the female. His endophallus (penis equivalent) is torn off and he falls to the ground and dies. Mission accomplished.
Beekeepers come and pick up their fertilised queens in small colourful hives, driving them back home, sometimes more than 300km away. They will use the genetic material gathered in south Belgium to build new colonies in the Netherlands, France and Germany.
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© Photograph: Wirestock, Inc./Alamy
© Photograph: Wirestock, Inc./Alamy
© Photograph: Wirestock, Inc./Alamy
The world’s No 9-ranked team, who have been largely absent from international competitions for over a decade, is reaping the benefits of state-sponsored investment
In 1986, when Norwegian delegate Ellen Wille stood on stage at Fifa’s annual congress in Mexico and demanded the creation of a World Cup for women, it sparked support from one of the room’s unlikeliest allies. Delegates from North Korea, so the story goes, were inspired by Wille’s speech and returned to Pyongyang with a plan: to use women’s football as a tool to reassert their collapsing power on the world stage.
The plan was simple: starting in the late 1980s, the government would invest heavily in the women’s game, inserting football programs into school curriculums, establishing women’s teams in the military where players trained full-time, creating youth talent identification pathways, and constructing brand-new facilities across the country.
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© Photograph: Kim Won-Jin/AFP/Getty Images
© Photograph: Kim Won-Jin/AFP/Getty Images
© Photograph: Kim Won-Jin/AFP/Getty Images
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