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The working-class boy, the Balliol bar and an encounter with the young Boris Johnson

newstatesman.com · 1,218 words · saved by 1 readers

A nasty story from the Prime Minister's university days has reminded me that it is a fallacy to expect progress in those younger than you. By Nicholas Lezard One of the things that has been keeping me going, as a kind of substitute for socialising, is Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg’s handy little platform for selling ourselves to the world. While I have long thought that Zuckerberg is a creep (one of his first sites, you may know, offered a way of rating the attractiveness of female students at Harvard), I cannot gainsay the site’s being a handy way of both keeping in touch with people and making friends. As I do not know any neo-Nazis, flat-Earthers or anti-vaxxers, my experiences have been fairly benign. The worst that happened recently was when I accepted a friend request from someone with whom I had 95 mutual “friends”. As the friends I interact with are on the whole a decent bunch (and I know many of them in real life) I thought I’d accept. Also, he described himself as a “polo photogr

(Photo By Getty) One of the things that has been keeping me going, as a kind of substitute for socialising, is Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg’s handy little platform for selling ourselves to the world. While I have long thought that Zuckerberg is a creep (one of his first sites, you may know, offered a way of rating the attractiveness of female students at Harvard), I cannot gainsay the site’s being a handy way of both keeping in touch with people and making friends. As I do not know any neo-Nazis, flat-Earthers or anti-vaxxers, my experiences have been fairly benign. The worst that happened recent

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