--:-- Asma Khalid: This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. America is changing and so is the world. But what's happening in America isn't just a cause of global upheaval. It's also a symptom of disruption that's happening everywhere. I'm Asma Khalid in Washington, DC. I'm Tristan Redman in London. And this is The Global Story. Every weekday, we'll bring you a story from this intersection where the world and America meet. Listen on bbc.com or wherever you get your podcasts.
--:-- Janet Jalil: This is the Global News Podcast from the BBC World Service. I'm Janet Jalil and at 13 Hours GMT on Monday the 7th of October, these are our main stories. One year on from the Hamas attacks on Israel, world leaders join Israelis in commemorating those killed.
--:-- Janet Jalil: Rockets have been fired into Israel from both Gaza and Lebanon as the Israeli military continues to carry out attacks against Hamas and Hezbollah.
--:-- Janet Jalil: The Japanese government admits a cabinet photo that was widely mocked online was digitally altered. Also in this podcast, why Westerners in their 50s and 60s are more likely to have serious health problems than their parents.
--:-- Janet Jalil: Increases in obesity rates across generations and growing social inequalities in health within generations are likely to explain at least part of this generational health drift.
--:-- Asma Khalid: Israelis have been marking the first anniversary of the Hamas attacks on October 7th. Even as the devastating war in Gaza it ignited, rages on, and is spiralling into a wider conflict that could destabilise the entire Middle East.
--:-- Asma Khalid: Ceremonies began at 6.29 local time, the moment when Hamas fighters began the attack that left some 1,200 people dead and saw 250 taken to Gaza as hostages.
--:-- Asma Khalid: At the site of the Nova Music Festival, where more than 300 people died on what should have been a day of joy, President Isaac Herzog presided over the memorial ceremony, which began with the last track that was played at the festival before the attackers struck.
--:-- Asma Khalid: Relatives held pictures of those who'd been at the festival, demanding that the Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, do more to ensure the return of the hostages.
--:-- Asma Khalid: One of those who was taken into Gaza from the festival was Or Levy. His brother, Michael, says one year on, there's no end in sight to the family's trauma.
--:-- Michael Levy: Mentioning a date means that something ended. And for us, nothing has ended. We are still in this fight. We are still fighting for all the release. We are still begging whoever can help to free the hostages, including all.
--:-- Asma Khalid: Of the Israeli communities targeted by Hamas, Kibbutz Beri suffered the biggest loss of any single village. More than 100 people were killed there.
--:-- Asma Khalid: It emerged that it had taken Israeli forces seven hours to arrive there to fight off the attackers from Gaza.
--:-- Lise Doucette: You can still feel the pain, the grief here. It is still raw and it is chilling to walk through these communities and try to imagine what they were going through.
--:-- Lise Doucette: At this time, a year ago, during the horrific onslaught by Hamas fighters, you mentioned the Nova Music Festival, just a short drive from the Kibbutz of Beri, where I am now, and the fields of Reim, which were the scene of this music celebration turning into a slaughter at dawn.
--:-- Lise Doucette: It's now a forest of Israeli flags and flowers and the smiling photographs of the young Israelis and foreigners, some of the thousands who were there in those very, very dark early hours.
--:-- Lise Doucette: And that is where the commemorations began this morning. That one was presided over by the Israeli president, Isaac Herzog.
--:-- Lise Doucette: Like where I'm in Barrie, I can see just at the corner of this street, a street of charred houses with volleyball nets turned upside down and a ghost community.
--:-- Lise Doucette: People are finding the strength to come back and they'll have a commemoration here too.
--:-- Lise Doucette: It was once a vibrant community, a kibbutz, which one of the few kibbutzes which still holds on to the original communal values of kibbutz.
--:-- Lise Doucette: And many of them here, like many of the kibbutzes close to the Gaza border, were populated by left-wing activists who had believed that peace was possible.
--:-- Lise Doucette: So some are coming back today to honour the dead. But until all of the hostages are accounted for, and there's still said to be about 100 across the border in Gaza, this October 7th remains an open wound here and across the rest of Israel.
--:-- Janet Jalil: Well, in the 12 months since the Hamas attacks, Palestinians in Gaza have paid a horrific price.
--:-- Janet Jalil: According to the Hamas-run health ministry, close to 42,000 people, mostly civilians, have been killed.
--:-- Janet Jalil: Most of the population has been displaced, and nearly 60% of all the buildings in the territory have been destroyed or damaged.
--:-- Janet Jalil: The humanitarian situation remains dire, with widespread hunger and a collapsing health care system.
--:-- Nariman Suleiman: We want to return to life before October 7th. We used to wake up and make our breakfast.
--:-- Nariman Suleiman: Since October 7th, I haven't made a breakfast like normal people. Everything in our life is done quickly.
--:-- Nariman Suleiman: I don't know how long this situation will last. Will Israel leave us after October 7th? I don't know.
--:-- Nariman Suleiman: God willing, the situation will ease.
--:-- Rushdie Abu Alouf: I've been covering this area for about 25 years and I've seen many attacks, but nothing like what Hamas did that day.
--:-- Rushdie Abu Alouf: And we were expecting Israel to retaliate back, but never expect 42,000 people to be killed.
--:-- Rushdie Abu Alouf: About 10,000 people are missing. And over 55 to 60 percent of the Gaza buildings, including schools, universities, hospitals and infrastructure, completely destroyed.
--:-- Rushdie Abu Alouf: And over two thirds of the population are displaced from their original homes.
--:-- Rushdie Abu Alouf: And even if they are allowed back, they won't find their homes standing anymore.
--:-- Rushdie Abu Alouf: So it's been a year of sadness for the people in Gaza, a year of displacement, a year of pain, a year of death, a year of terror for most of the people outside.
--:-- Rushdie Abu Alouf: But for those who managed to escape the war outside, I've been to many countries, to Qatar, Egypt.
--:-- Rushdie Abu Alouf: I've seen hundreds of them. The answer they always answer when you ask them about anything that yes we survived the war but we are not okay.
--:-- Rushdie Abu Alouf: No, there's a huge sense of loss and guilt for those who've managed to to escape but we are hearing today that hamas are still firing rockets now.
--:-- Rushdie Abu Alouf: The whole goal of israel is to eradicate hamas but hamas are showing today on this anniversary that they have still have the ability to fire rockets from the territory aimed at Tel Aviv.
--:-- Rushdie Abu Alouf: So the situation still remains dire.
--:-- Rushdie Abu Alouf: Are the Palestinians still supportive of Hamas or are they blaming Hamas for this destruction that been visited on them?
--:-- Rushdie Abu Alouf: I think the Hamas popularity has declined in a significant way and you can notice this by just following the Facebook posts from people inside Gaza.
--:-- Rushdie Abu Alouf: Some of my friends and my relatives and the people who I know in Gaza, I talk in regular places, they equally blame Hamas for what is happening and what has been happening in the last year in Gaza.
--:-- Rushdie Abu Alouf: But we should understand that Hamas is a fundamental religious organization and the people who believe in Hamas, who support Hamas, they will continue to support it.
--:-- Rushdie Abu Alouf: And no matter what Israel has done to Hamas, militarily, I think they have done a great damage that will prevent Hamas from launching attacks similar to the 7th of October.
--:-- Rushdie Abu Alouf: I've been talking to many security officials, former security officials in Gaza, and they believe that Hamas militarily was really hitting hard and they are not able to do what they have done back a year ago.
--:-- Rushdie Abu Alouf: But politically, they still have great supporters in Gaza and people, they do support Hamas.
--:-- Rushdie Abu Alouf: And until now, today, I've seen people posting some images of Hamas militants killing the Israelis back in 7th of October.
--:-- Rushdie Abu Alouf: And they still praise what Hamas has done.
--:-- Hugo Bishaker: As well as the rockets being fired into Israel from Gaza, they're also being fired from Lebanon.
--:-- Hugo Bishaker: As the Israeli military continues to carry out attacks against Hamas and the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah.
--:-- Hugo Bishaker: The Lebanese authorities say one Israeli strike has killed 10 firefighters.
--:-- Hugo Bishaker: Meanwhile, the Israeli military is investigating how five rockets fired by Hezbollah managed to penetrate its Iron Dome defence system and hit the port city of Haifa on Sunday night, injuring several people.
--:-- Tal Rosen: I was at my home, which is like 500 metres from here.
--:-- Tal Rosen: I heard a boom and I heard in the radio that there is a site here in this junction.
--:-- Tal Rosen: I went straight away.
--:-- Tal Rosen: In the beginning, we didn't find any injuries.
--:-- Tal Rosen: And then I showed them this building.
--:-- Tal Rosen: There were sheds of glasses in this building.
--:-- Tal Rosen: I went inside and I found four people injured between a minor to a moderate.
--:-- Tal Rosen: Then I just went out.
--:-- Tal Rosen: I called the emergency forces, the corresponders, to take them and they take them to hospital.
--:-- Matthew Hollingworth: You see people sleeping outside on the streets, people taking shelter in schools, academies, other government institutions.
--:-- Matthew Hollingworth: We have public health concerns, waterborne diseases, communicable diseases.
--:-- Matthew Hollingworth: And we're all desperately trying to provide some kind of respite to a population that is so incredibly scared of what's coming next and the escalation becoming an all-out war.
--:-- Hugo Bishaker: Overnight, more Israeli airstrikes, around a dozen airstrikes hitting Dahir, an area of Beirut where Hezbollah has a very strong presence.
--:-- Hugo Bishaker: And we've seen footage of one of the sites attacked.
--:-- Hugo Bishaker: There were secondary explosions suggesting that weapons and ammunition were being stored there.
--:-- Hugo Bishaker: And these attacks continue.
--:-- Hugo Bishaker: And I think we're seeing no signs, no indication from the Israeli military that they are de-escalating this campaign against Hezbollah.
--:-- Hugo Bishaker: And actually, this morning, the Israeli military announced that a new division has been deployed to Lebanon.
--:-- Hugo Bishaker: So potentially thousands of additional Israeli troops being sent to Lebanon as this ground invasion of the country continues.
--:-- Hugo Bishaker: And yet at the same time, Hezbollah shows no sign of giving up on its cross-border attacks.
--:-- Hugo Bishaker: And the Israelis have been concerned by the fact that some of those missiles that were fired by Hezbollah managed to get through its Iron Dome defence system and landed in Haifa.
--:-- Hugo Bishaker: Exactly. And this is Israel's third largest city.
--:-- Hugo Bishaker: And it's unusual for rockets to manage to penetrate what is a very sophisticated air defence system that has been developed by the Israelis.
--:-- Hugo Bishaker: And we've seen that weeks of airstrikes and targeted killings have really degraded, weakened Hezbollah.
--:-- Hugo Bishaker: But the group still has some ability to continue to fire those rockets, continue to launch those cross-border attacks.
--:-- Hugo Bishaker: And what is interesting is that this morning, in a statement to mark the first anniversary of the Hamas attacks on Israel, Hezbollah remained defiant.
--:-- Hugo Bishaker: They said, we are confident in the ability of our resistance to repel the Israeli aggression.
--:-- Jeremy Bowen: With his thoughts on the situation in Gaza and Israel one year on from the Hamas attacks, here's our international editor, Jeremy Bowen.
--:-- Jeremy Bowen: He begins his report from a kibbutz in southern Israel.
--:-- Jeremy Bowen: The survivors of the attack on kibbutz Kva'aza have not come back to live here.
--:-- Jeremy Bowen: The ruins have not been touched.
--:-- Jeremy Bowen: Kvahaza, right on the border, was one of the first targets of Hamas.
--:-- Jeremy Bowen: They killed 62 people here and took 19 into Gaza as hostages.
--:-- Jeremy Bowen: That buzz is from an Israeli drone heading for Gaza.
--:-- Jeremy Bowen: Later, we heard airstrikes.
--:-- Jeremy Bowen: Bereaved families and a grieving nation were promised total victory over Hamas by their prime minister.
--:-- Jeremy Bowen: A year on, Hamas are still fighting.
--:-- Jeremy Bowen: The ground around one house has been excavated
--:-- Jeremy Bowen: It was the home of Nirel Zinni and his fiancée Niv Raviv
--:-- Jeremy Bowen: Both killed by Hamas
--:-- Jeremy Bowen: Nirel's father spent weeks looking for his son's head
--:-- Jeremy Bowen: He didn't find it
--:-- Jeremy Bowen: A neighbour said there was a nightmare on every corner
--:-- Jeremy Bowen: We are still inside the trauma
--:-- Jeremy Bowen: We are not in post-trauma like people said
--:-- Jeremy Bowen: We are still here, we are still...
--:-- Jeremy Bowen: We are still in the war
--:-- Jeremy Bowen: My victory, I will be here with my son and daughter, with my grandchild, and living peacefully.
--:-- Jeremy Bowen: Four Israelis, Kfar Aza, and all the other places that Hamas attacked on 7 October have become repositories of very deep and still raw national trauma.
--:-- Jeremy Bowen: And the horror that happened here has, for the vast majority of Israelis, absolutely justified everything that Israel has done since then.
--:-- Jeremy Bowen: Israel's Prime Minister Netanyahu promised a mighty vengeance.
--:-- Jeremy Bowen: His defence minister said they were fighting human animals in Gaza and would act accordingly.
--:-- Jeremy Bowen: Israel has damaged or destroyed nearly 60% of all Gaza's buildings, according to satellite analysis.
--:-- Jeremy Bowen: Almost 42,000 Palestinians, mostly civilians, have been killed.
--:-- Jeremy Bowen: 10,000 are missing, thought to be under the rubble.
--:-- Jeremy Bowen: The estimate is that 40% of casualties are children.
--:-- Jeremy Bowen: Israel insists it follows the laws of war, spares civilians, and it rejects and condemns the accusation of genocide made by South Africa at the International Court of Justice.
--:-- Jeremy Bowen: More than two million Gazans, the UN says, are trapped in a humanitarian catastrophe without food, water and medical care.
--:-- Jeremy Bowen: As families are displaced repeatedly on Israel's orders, improvised camps spring up.
--:-- Jeremy Bowen: The Israelis say they're protecting civilians.
--:-- Jeremy Bowen: The UN says nowhere is safe.
--:-- Jeremy Bowen: Israel does not allow journalists into Gaza, so trusted Palestinian colleagues filmed Insaf Hassan Ali and her family in Almuasi, a supposedly safe area hit by at least 18 Israeli airstrikes.
--:-- Jeremy Bowen: Insaf and her family have had to move 15 times.
--:-- Jeremy Bowen: We were walking on Saladin Street when a car was hit and we saw it burning.
--:-- Jeremy Bowen: On the left, there were people killed
--:-- Jeremy Bowen: On the right there were people killed
--:-- Jeremy Bowen: Even the donkeys were thrown around in the bombing
--:-- Jeremy Bowen: And we said that it we done
--:-- Jeremy Bowen: The next rocket will be for us
--:-- Jeremy Bowen: On the West Bank, the other side of the Palestinian territories, violence and killing have increased sharply.
--:-- Jeremy Bowen: This is Janine, where many Israeli raids have not deterred or destroyed local armed Palestinian militias.
--:-- Jeremy Bowen: The cemetery is filling up with their dead.
--:-- Jeremy Bowen: The war in Gaza has radicalised both sides.
--:-- Jeremy Bowen: The West Bank is already part of the pile-up of serious conflict in the Middle East.
--:-- Jeremy Bowen: There could be a bigger explosion here if Israel and Iran continue to accelerate into all-out war.
--:-- Jeremy Bowen: A cease-fire deal in Gaza might just cool the crisis and create a space for diplomacy.
--:-- Jeremy Bowen: Perhaps the war can end in Gaza too.
--:-- Jeremy Bowen: Or perhaps it's too late for that.
--:-- Asma Khalid: Still to come on this podcast...
--:-- Asma Khalid: When I began in Cambridge, you could say to students, this week it's Dickens, please read Great Expectations, David Copperfield and Bleak House.
--:-- Asma Khalid: Now, instead of three novels in a week, many students will struggle to get through one novel in three weeks.
--:-- Asma Khalid: Why more and more literature students are struggling to read books.
--:-- Asma Khalid: America is changing. And so is the world.
--:-- Asma Khalid: But what's happening in America isn't just a cause of global upheaval.
--:-- Asma Khalid: It's also a symptom of disruption that's happening everywhere.
--:-- Asma Khalid: I'm Asma Khalid in Washington, D.C.
--:-- Asma Khalid: I'm Tristan Redman in London.
--:-- Asma Khalid: And this is The Global Story.
--:-- Asma Khalid: Every weekday, we'll bring you a story from this intersection, where the world and America meet.
--:-- Asma Khalid: Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts.
--:-- Professor Sara Russell: As we record this podcast, a mission into space that's being described as a crime scene investigation is due to be launched shortly by the European Space Agency.
--:-- Professor Sara Russell: The Hera probe is tasked with checking damage done to an asteroid called Dimorphos two years after a NASA spacecraft in a scene that could have been out of a movie deliberately crashed into it to see if it could be successfully knocked off course.
--:-- Professor Sara Russell: Professor Sara Russell is the head of the Planetary Materials Group of the National History Museum here in London and spoke to Michelle Hussain about the mission.
--:-- Professor Sara Russell: It was basically a suicide mission, so the probe didn't do very much except take loads of pictures and then crashed into Dimorphos, Dimorphos, the little one.
--:-- Professor Sara Russell: But if we know that it did change its orbit, it did knock it off course, So what more needs to be established?
--:-- Professor Sara Russell: Well, we don't know exactly what happened.
--:-- Professor Sara Russell: So Dimorphos is actually a very small asteroid.
--:-- Professor Sara Russell: It's only 150 metres across and we can't easily image that from Earth.
--:-- Professor Sara Russell: So that's why we need to have this mission to go and look in detail.
--:-- Professor Sara Russell: Firstly, at how it's moving now and how it orbits around its parent asteroid.
--:-- Professor Sara Russell: So it's a moon of a bigger asteroid.
--:-- Professor Sara Russell: How that's changed.
--:-- Professor Sara Russell: Is the important conclusion whether or not ramming it in that way could have put, you know, did it smash it into pieces?
--:-- Professor Sara Russell: And if so, could that be dangerous in its own right?
--:-- Professor Sara Russell: Well, that's one of the things that exactly that we want to find out that could be that Dimorphos isn't there at all.
--:-- Professor Sara Russell: It's been completely destroyed.
--:-- Professor Sara Russell: We think that's probably unlikely.
--:-- Professor Sara Russell: It's probably just been deflected slightly, which is what we'd expect.
--:-- Professor Sara Russell: But it depends a lot on the strength of the asteroid.
--:-- Professor Sara Russell: And so we have to understand whether how the momentum shift from this spacecraft to the little asteroid actually affected it.
--:-- Professor Sara Russell: What's the ideal result to come back with, that it was completely destroyed, even though I know you say it's unlikely, but in this kind of scenario, is that the safest thing?
--:-- Professor Sara Russell: No, so I think if something is split into lots of different pieces, then that is a risk in itself, that then you have all of these many baby asteroids to worry about rather than one big one.
--:-- Professor Sara Russell: So the best scenario is that we can deflect it in a very way that we understand very well that will ensure that it sails past the Earth safely.
--:-- Paul Moss: A study of people in their 50s and 1960s in Western countries has found that they're more likely to experience serious health problems than their parents did.
--:-- Paul Moss: Researchers examined data for more than 100,000 people in the United States and Europe.
--:-- Paul Moss: And according to their findings, this can't simply be explained by people living longer.
--:-- David Lewis: They're considered the luckiest age group to have ever lived, not having to go to war, jobs for life, solid pensions and richer than all previous generations.
--:-- David Lewis: But perhaps all is not so great for baby boomers.
--:-- David Lewis: That's those born between 1946 and 1964.
--:-- David Lewis: This new study, which analysed data over a 14-year period ending in 2018, found that obesity, diabetes and other chronic diseases all seem to be affecting those born in the 1950s and 60s more than older peers born before or during World War II.
--:-- David Lewis: The study was a joint one between Oxford University and University College London.
--:-- David Lewis: It found rates of illnesses actually increased across successive generations of the 20th century
--:-- David Lewis: So how did we get here
--:-- David Lewis: Well the report lead author Laura Germaino from UCL told us a little bit more
--:-- Laura Germaino: I think it's important to emphasise that this trend is the result of changing social and environmental context experienced by these different generations across their whole lifetimes.
--:-- Laura Germaino: So for instance, increases in obesity rates across generations and growing social inequalities in health within generations are likely to explain at least part of this generational health drift.
--:-- Laura Germaino: This trend seems to be continuing in younger post-war cohorts.
--:-- Laura Germaino: For instance, generation X are more likely to be obese, to have diabetes and to be in poor mental health than baby boomers in their 40s.
--:-- Laura Germaino: So it looks like health concerns will continue for future generations.
--:-- David Lewis: The reviews show that those born after the baby boom were more likely to develop cancers, lung disease, heart problems and high cholesterol as things stand.
--:-- David Lewis: So how do the academics find all this out?
--:-- David Lewis: Well, the health data of more than 100,000 people from England, Europe and the United States was analysed.
--:-- David Lewis: Experts looked out for key indicators such as body mass index, high blood pressure, as well as their grip strength.
--:-- David Lewis: That's considered a good measure of muscle ability and ageing.
--:-- David Lewis: Interestingly, rates of chronic diseases rose across successive generations in all regions studied.
--:-- David Lewis: So despite medical advances over the decades and greater public awareness of the cause of illnesses, those above 50 or so remain at a greater risk of chronic illness and disability than previous generations before them.
--:-- Mickey Bristow: Now to Japan, where an official photo of the new cabinet has been ridiculed by social media users because of the unkempt appearance of some of the politicians in it.
--:-- Mickey Bristow: One commentator said it was utterly embarrassing.
--:-- Mickey Bristow: But the same photo posted by the government showed the politicians looking much tidier.
--:-- Mickey Bristow: Officials have now admitted to editing the original image, as our Asia-Pacific editor, Mickey Bristow, reports.
--:-- Mickey Bristow: The differences between photographs taken by the Japanese media and the one issued by the Prime Minister's office are not large or immediately obvious.
--:-- Mickey Bristow: In the undottered photos, there's a small triangle of white shirt visible under the formal jackets of the Prime Minister and the Defence Minister.
--:-- Mickey Bristow: In the government's handout, those patches have been tidied up in what an official said were minor edits.
--:-- Mickey Bristow: On social media, some commentators focused on what they thought was the sloppiness of the dress in the original pictures.
--:-- Mickey Bristow: A close examination of the assembled group might also lead to questions about gender equality in Japan.
--:-- Mickey Bristow: Only two of the Cabinet Ministers photographed are women.
--:-- Mickey Bristow: But perhaps the biggest concern relates to fake information, particularly for this Japanese government, which has pledged to restore public trust in politics.
--:-- Mickey Bristow: In a world where rapidly evolving artificial intelligence has blurred the line between truth and lies, honesty and reliability now seem more important than ever, even if it's just about clothes.
--:-- Jonathan Bate: I've been teaching in British and American universities for 40 years.
--:-- Jonathan Bate: And when I began in Cambridge, you could say to students, this week it's Dickens. Please read Great Expectations, David Copperfield and Bleak House.
--:-- Jonathan Bate: Now, instead of three novels in a week, many students will struggle to get through one novel in three weeks.
--:-- Jonathan Bate: Why? Well, a currently fashionable answer is that it's to do with the attrition of attention span due to smartphones, six minute YouTube videos and instant TikTok dopamine hits.
--:-- Jonathan Bate: And I guess that is part of the story in the last few years.
--:-- Jonathan Bate: Of course, it really does all begin in schools, doesn't it?
--:-- Jonathan Bate: You only have to look at the thinning of the GCSE and A-level syllabuses and the tendency to prescribe works because they're shorter.
--:-- Jonathan Bate: I think of it as the, for John Steinbeck, of mice and men effect.
--:-- Jonathan Bate: You know, they'd never prescribe the grapes of wrath anymore, but of mice and men is nice and short.
--:-- Jonathan Bate: I think there's one other factor, though, which is a kind of unintended consequence of the push in both elite British and American universities towards diversity and access.
--:-- Jonathan Bate: You know, the very desirable idea of getting in more students from disadvantaged backgrounds, because those students come from disadvantaged schools where the teacher's main task is crowd control.
--:-- Jonathan Bate: And so the demands in terms of reading long books just are not there.
--:-- Jonathan Bate: It was interesting that one professor quoted in this article in The Atlantic speaks of an attainment gap between public and privately educated students.
--:-- Jonathan Bate: And I would have to say when I was teaching at Oxford, that was my experience.
--:-- Jonathan Bate: What, those who had been educated in the state system in Britain were less able to engage?
--:-- Jonathan Bate: Exactly, not less able to engage very, very able students, but they simply hadn't been exposed to large numbers of long books, hadn't really developed, you know, that habit of concentrated lengthy reading, which private schools in both the UK and the US still concentrate on.
--:-- Jonathan Bate: That said, I mean, I find it very interesting out here in the States.
--:-- Jonathan Bate: There is this phenomenon in a lot of charter schools.
--:-- Jonathan Bate: Charter schools are a bit like academy schools.
--:-- Jonathan Bate: They're state funded, but free to set their own syllabus.
--:-- Jonathan Bate: And there's a big revival within these schools of so-called classical education.
--:-- Jonathan Bate: So my teenager has just graduated out of a high school called Great Hearts.
--:-- Jonathan Bate: And there they read the Iliad, the Odyssey, Dante's Inferno, Shakespeare, Crime and Punishment.
--:-- Jonathan Bate: They even read Nietzsche and Hegel.
--:-- Jonathan Bate: My son came back from school one day saying, we had bagels in class.
--:-- Jonathan Bate: And I said, why?
--:-- Jonathan Bate: And he said, the teacher said, you're going to have Hegel bagels because you've been reading Hegel and he's really difficult.
--:-- Jonathan Bate: So I'll reward you with bagels.
--:-- Jonathan Bate: Well, I couldn't understand Hegel when I was a graduate student.
--:-- Jonathan Bate: I'm amazed that 17-year-old American kids are reading Hegel.
--:-- Jonathan Bate: So there is some hope.
--:-- Jonathan Bate: And for those who aren't doing those things, the longer term impact is what?
--:-- Jonathan Bate: I think the longer term impact is both very troubling for the future of a literary culture.
--:-- Jonathan Bate: If you haven't got readers, what are writers going to do?
--:-- Jonathan Bate: The intensive, thoughtful, quiet reading of great books is good for mental health.
--:-- Jonathan Bate: It's very very good for developing skills of concentration and critical thinking and if that falls away that is problematic for businesses for society for individuals and for the sake of balance
--:-- Janet Jalil: I'm Janet Jaleel. Until next time, goodbye.
--:-- Janet Jalil: This intersection where the world and America meet. Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts.
