Yes / No / Not Given

Many universities now record lectures and make them available online within hours of delivery. Supporters describe recorded lectures as a simple way to widen access: students can review difficult explanations, pause complex diagrams, or catch up after illness. For students who commute long distances or balance study with employment, this flexibility is not a minor convenience but a practical condition for staying enrolled.

It would be misleading, however, to treat lecture recording as a complete substitute for attendance. A live lecture is not only a stream of information. It also offers a rhythm of attention, opportunities for immediate clarification, and a shared intellectual atmosphere that can encourage students to persist with challenging material. Recordings preserve the lecturer's words, but they cannot reproduce every feature of the learning event.

Some lecturers worry that recordings inevitably reduce attendance. This fear is understandable, but the available evidence is less decisive than the anxiety suggests. In several institutions, attendance fell only in courses where lectures already depended heavily on passive delivery. Where teachers used discussion, problem solving, or brief in-class tasks, recordings tended to complement rather than replace attendance. The real issue, then, is not the existence of recordings but the quality of the face-to-face session.

Universities should therefore avoid blanket policies. Making every session compulsory without considering student circumstances ignores the realities of modern higher education. Yet giving recordings priority over classroom design would be equally short-sighted. A better approach is to publish recordings as a support tool while designing live sessions that give students a reason to be present. Technology is most valuable when it strengthens teaching choices, not when it excuses weak ones.

The debate over recorded lectures is often framed as a choice between tradition and innovation, but that framing is too narrow. The strongest argument for recording is not that it makes attendance unnecessary; it is that it gives students a second route into demanding material. Used thoughtfully, recordings can make university study more resilient without reducing the importance of the classroom.

The idea that a standard working week should occupy five days is more a historical accident than a law of nature. The five-day week became widespread only in the twentieth century, and in recent years a growing number of organisations have begun to question whether it remains the most sensible arrangement. Trials of a four-day week, in which employees work fewer hours for the same pay, have been conducted in countries ranging from Iceland to New Zealand. Enthusiasts present these experiments as proof that shorter weeks are not merely pleasant but economically rational.

The evidence, while encouraging, deserves to be read with some care. In several widely reported trials, output remained stable or even rose slightly after hours were cut, and employees reported lower stress and better health. Yet many of these schemes were run by firms that volunteered to take part, and such organisations are unlikely to be typical. A company confident enough to experiment with its own working patterns may already enjoy strong management and motivated staff. To treat its results as a guarantee of what would happen everywhere is, in my view, to claim more than the data can support.

It would be equally mistaken, however, to dismiss the four-day week as a fashion that suits only a handful of technology firms. Critics often argue that the model cannot work in sectors such as healthcare or manufacturing, where output depends directly on hours worked. This objection has force, but it is not decisive. Even in these sectors, a careful redesign of shifts and a reduction in unproductive meetings have, in some cases, allowed shorter weeks without any loss of service. The real obstacle is frequently not the nature of the work but the assumption that time spent is the best measure of value.

What follows from this is not that every employer should immediately adopt a four-day week, but that the burden of proof has shifted. For most of the last century, the five-day week was simply assumed to be efficient; that assumption can no longer be taken for granted. Governments would be unwise to impose a shorter week by law, since the right arrangement plainly varies from one industry to another. They would be equally unwise, though, to ignore a body of evidence that points, however tentatively, towards the benefits of rethinking how working time is organised.

The debate ultimately concerns more than productivity statistics. It asks what work is for, and how large a share of a life it should reasonably consume. On that broader question the trials cannot provide a final answer, but they have at least made it respectable to ask.

Boredom has an unenviable reputation. It is commonly regarded as a void to be filled, an unpleasant gap between activities that the well-organised person learns to eliminate. The proliferation of portable screens has made such elimination almost effortless: a queue, a delayed train, or a quiet evening can now be banished with a few taps. Whether this represents progress is, however, less obvious than it first appears.

Psychologists who study attention have begun to suggest that the capacity to tolerate boredom may be more valuable than its bad name implies. When the mind is deprived of external stimulation, it does not simply idle; it tends to turn inward, generating associations, revisiting unresolved problems, and occasionally arriving at solutions that directed effort had failed to produce. This is not to romanticise tedium. Prolonged, inescapable boredom — of the kind associated with monotonous work — is genuinely harmful. The claim is narrower: that brief, voluntary episodes of under-stimulation serve a purpose we lose at our peril.

Some commentators go further, arguing that the constant availability of distraction is eroding the ability to concentrate altogether. The evidence for so sweeping a conclusion is, at present, thin. Studies showing that heavy device use correlates with shorter attention spans rarely establish which causes which, and the histrionic tone of much popular writing on the subject does the argument no favours. It would be more honest to say that we do not yet know the long-term effects, and that caution is warranted precisely because we do not.

What does seem defensible is that boredom performs a signalling function. The discomfort it produces is, in effect, a message that one's current activity is no longer meaningful, prompting a search for something that is. A person who never experiences this discomfort, because every empty moment is immediately filled, may be deprived of a useful prompt to reconsider how their time is spent. On this view, the problem with constant distraction is not that it is enjoyable but that it silences a signal we would do well to hear.

None of this amounts to a call to abolish the technologies that make distraction easy; that would be both futile and unnecessary. It is rather a plea for a more discriminating attitude — one that treats the occasional empty hour not as a defect to be corrected but as a resource whose value we have been too quick to dismiss.

Rewilding — the large-scale restoration of ecosystems to a self-sustaining state, often by reintroducing species that have vanished from a landscape — has captured the imagination of conservationists across Europe and North America. Its advocates present it as a welcome departure from traditional conservation, which they characterise as a labour-intensive effort to freeze habitats in a particular, often arbitrary, historical condition. Rather than managing every hedgerow and meadow by hand, rewilding aims to hand control back to natural processes and let landscapes find their own equilibrium.

The appeal of this vision is understandable, yet it rests on assumptions that deserve scrutiny. Chief among them is the belief that nature, once released from human interference, will reliably return to a richer and more stable state. Ecologists who study disturbed landscapes are more cautious. They note that ecosystems altered over centuries do not simply rewind; released land may instead be colonised by a handful of aggressive species, producing a monotonous scrub that supports fewer creatures than the farmland it replaced. To assume that abandonment automatically yields abundance is, the evidence suggests, optimistic.

A second source of controversy is the reintroduction of large predators, such as wolves and lynx. Supporters point to the celebrated case of Yellowstone National Park, where the return of wolves is said to have revived entire food webs by controlling deer numbers. Critics counter that the Yellowstone story has been simplified to the point of distortion, and that its lessons may not transfer to the smaller, more crowded landscapes of Western Europe. There is force in this objection. Yet it does not follow that predators have no place in rewilding; it suggests only that their effects are more context-dependent than enthusiasts sometimes admit.

Perhaps the most neglected dimension of the debate is the human one. Rewilding is frequently presented as a matter of ecology alone, but the land in question is rarely empty. It is farmed, grazed, walked, and valued by communities whose livelihoods and identities are bound up with a particular place. Schemes imposed without genuine consultation have generated lasting resentment, and such hostility can doom a project regardless of its ecological merits. A rewilding programme that treats local people as obstacles rather than partners is, in my view, unlikely to endure.

None of this is an argument against rewilding as such. Used selectively, and with proper attention to both the evidence and the people affected, it can restore degraded land and reconnect fragmented habitats in ways that conventional conservation cannot. The danger lies not in the idea itself but in the temptation to treat it as a universal remedy, applied everywhere with equal confidence and too little regard for local difference.

It is natural to assume that the easier a learning experience feels, the more effective it must be. Educational technology is frequently marketed on precisely this premise: smoother interfaces, instant feedback, and material broken into effortlessly digestible fragments. The intuition is seductive, and almost certainly mistaken. A substantial body of research now suggests that the subjective sense of fluency during study is a poor, and sometimes inverted, guide to how much will later be remembered.

The phenomenon at the centre of this work has been labelled, somewhat paradoxically, 'desirable difficulty'. Experiments have repeatedly shown that conditions which slow learners down or make study feel harder — spacing sessions apart rather than massing them together, testing oneself instead of rereading, varying the context in which material is practised — tend to produce more durable learning, even as they depress performance and confidence in the short term. The learner who rereads a chapter until it feels familiar typically feels well prepared; the learner who struggles to recall it from memory usually feels worse, and remembers more.

It would be a mistake, however, to conclude that difficulty is valuable in itself. The qualifier 'desirable' is doing real work here. Obstacles that exceed a learner's current capacity, or that consume effort without engaging the material — a badly designed interface, an incomprehensible textbook — impose what researchers term 'extraneous' load, and these hinder rather than help. The benefit arises only from difficulties that compel deeper processing of the content itself. Distinguishing the two in practice is far from straightforward, and the literature is more confident that the distinction exists than about how to draw it in any given case.

The implications for education are not as direct as enthusiasts occasionally imply. If harder study feels less effective, learners left to their own devices will tend to abandon the very strategies that would serve them best, gravitating instead towards the comfortable inefficiency of rereading. This suggests that the responsibility for introducing desirable difficulties may lie less with the individual than with the way courses are designed — a conclusion that sits awkwardly with the prevailing emphasis on learner autonomy and self-directed study.

What the research most firmly establishes is a warning rather than a prescription: that our intuitions about our own learning are systematically unreliable, and that the feeling of fluency should be treated with suspicion rather than trust. Beyond that, much remains contested. How large these effects are outside the laboratory, and how far they survive contact with the messy realities of a real classroom, are questions on which the honest answer is that we do not yet know.