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THE IDLER

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SUMMER 2008 EDITOR’S LETTER

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his issue of the idler has been guest edited by those two polite revolutionaries, the men from QI, John Lloyd and John Mitchinson. In between running a TV show and writing bestselling books, the pair have found time to put together a set of articles for this mag. It’s our collective intention that these pieces express the more radical edge of the whole QI approach to life and the universe. Our natural inborn curiosity and desire to learn, the QI men believe, are illserved by school and indulged too little in our increasingly frantic adult lives. Philosophizing, a study of history and the natural world, humour and a certain wide-eyed pleasure in the world and its doings: these are the QI antidotes to State-sponsored boredom and the reduction by big business of human beings to commodities and wage slaves.

In the pages that follow, you’ll find leisurely conversation the two Johns defending learning for learning’s sake. John Mitchinson writes on the warm-hearted genius of William Morris. QI associates Justin Pollard and Elizabeth Garner stand up for subjectivity in history and the importance of nature unenclosed. The QI curriculum proposes ideas for play-based education, and we present a smattering of QI questions not seen before in the UK. John Lloyd presents his Notes For A Book I Cannot Be Bothered toWrite.

In the rest of the mag, David Boyle of the New Economics Foundation writes on the fairy renaissance. We print new work from Bronwen Jones and Alice Smith. At the back we suggest ideas on how to live dangerously and die well, as well as how to start your own school and build a bill-free house. There’s an interview with Mark Eitzel of American Music Club, and, for your further edification, a reading list chosen by QI.

For a closing thought, I will leave you with the great Robert Louis Stevenson: “My idea of man’s chief end was to enrich the world with things of beauty, and have a fairly good time myself while doing so.”

Tom Hodgkinson

THE IDLER

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