A Point of View

"I work hard so that my teenage daughter can have holes in all her clothes", writes Adam Gopnik. He reflects on the greater significance of designer holes in jeans...and why it's a trend to be celebrated. "I know what you are asking", Gopnik says. "How can you be rattling on about torn jeans...when our world, by your own account, may be coming to an end?" ! "Liberty large is what we fight for, but the little liberties of life - and the arbitrariness of fashion is one of life's most engaging little liberties - are part of the way we recognize that the larger liberty exists". Producer: Adele Armstrong.

Adam Gopnik - a lifelong fan of Bob Dylan - muses on Dylan's "utterly predictable lack of gratitude" towards his Nobel Prize."The terrible and intriguing truth", he writes, is that "people are tragically impressed by indifference...and pitifully contemptuous of the charming". The Dylans of this world, Gopnik says "impress us as the true egotists we secretly are". Producer: Adele Armstrong.

Adam Gopnik muses on liberals and liberalism - and why liberalism is so despised. "At a moment when it seems likely to be drowned out in America" he writes, "I shall make a small forlorn effort to speak its truths". Producer: Adele Armstrong.

Adam Gopnik asks what hope is there of a liberal, open society in America during the next 4 years. He argues that Americans must hold to the faith that liberal politics really do rise from the ground up.

Roger Scruton assesses some of the reasons behind Donald Trump's victory. And he asks why many who intended to vote for Donald Trump would not have confessed to their intention. "They wanted change," writes Scruton. "A change in the whole agenda of government".

Adam Gopnik reflects on why he believes a victory for Donald Trump would be a disaster for America. The American Presidential election "posits a simple eternal human confrontation between sensible and crazy", he writes. He says we must not pretend that the rise of Trump is essentially a "people's revolt" or a movement of the dispossessed. Producer: Adele Armstrong.

Howard Jacobson argues that dissatisfaction with life is essential for the health of the human spirit. "It might come to outweigh other emotions to the point where it is detrimental to the vigour of an individual or a society, but without it there is no vigour at all." Producer: Sheila Cook.

Howard Jacobson applauds the granting of an appeal by Shylock in a mock trial in Venice as a symbolic revoking of a bad decision in Shakespeare's play. "It's natural to rage against wrong decisions, miscarrriages of justice or the inclemencies of nature, but the more fanciful of us go further and imagine that some power will intervene and make things right again." Producer: Sheila Cook.

Howard Jacobson applauds the playwright Tom Stoppard's attack on the ignorance of the average audience, arguing we should not only aspire to be educated ourselves but should not be offended by the evidence of education in others."We are an entangled species; we are not to be unknotted easily. When we turn our backs on difficulty in art, we turn our backs on who we are."Producer: Sheila Cook.

Howard Jacobson deplores the fashion for "whooping" as a mark of approval, and sees it as a species of social blackmail."The whoop is on an errand to keep things simple. That which strikes audiences as true because it is what they think already, elicits a whoop." Producer: Sheila Cook.