My career as village crank, banging out letters to the editor, is on the upswing! Two letters published in the past three weeks! One in the Guardian, one in the International New York Times. They trimmed them a bit, so I’ll let you read them as nature, well me anyway, intended:

To the Guardian:

Sirs,

I congratulate the sub-editor who struck this blow for grammatical sobriety. The ‘festival of song’ is, indeed, “kitsch”, not “kitschy”. Too often, your reviewers and journalists have been allowed to pin an unsightly tail on this poor word and on its “camp” mate as well. Each is as ridiculous as describing Usain Bolt as “fasty” or “Joanna Lumley” as “glamorousy”.

Yours sincerely,

Joe Boyd

To the New York Times:

Sirs,
Mark Lynas (INYT April 25/26) knocks down a straw man. Informed objections to GMO crops are not, as he suggests, because they are intrinsically harmful to human health. Lynas purports to support GMO food as a means of limiting pesticide use, but the most widely planted GMO crops are corn and soya plants genetically engineered to permit and encourage the use of pesticides and herbicides, Monsanto’s Roundup in particular.

The primary interest of GMO-developing corporations is in profiting from the sale of chemicals and fertiliser as well as securing copyright on ‘dead-end’ seeds. Cartoonish descriptions of GMO-objectors as Luddite and anti-scientific is a destructive distraction from scholarly studies that show putting the future of the world’s agriculture in the hands of such companies is a path towards the planet’s impoverishment, not its enrichment. This view is not irrational but evidence-based and scientific.

Yours sincerely,

Joe Boyd