Intelligence Squared

Parents everywhere are having to decide whether to encourage the final throws of Potter-mania as they give in to Christmas season pressures to see the last and latest film. Are the Hogwarts adventures good for our children? Writers Amanda Craig and Matthew de Abaitua disagree.

P.J. O’Rourke is America's premier political satirist and has more citations in The Penguin Dictionary of Humorous Quotations than any other living writer. In this live appearance for Intelligence Squared he’ll be discussing his new book, Don’t Vote – It Just Encourages the Bastards, a brilliant, hilarious and ultimately sobering look at why politics and politicians are a necessary evil—but only just barely necessary. Moving from Adam Smith to Milton Friedman to a late-night girls’ boarding school game called Kill-F*@k-Marry, O’Rourke will explore the nature of the social contract. For him the essential elements are power, freedom and responsibility: the people like the freedom part, politicians like the power part, and hardly anyone wants to hear the responsibility part. This leads him to postulate the “Death, Sex and Boredom Theory of Politics.”

Ireland nears the brink; biological determinism; how do we stop prisoners from reoffending – and Wills and Kate make plans for a royal wedding. Our round-up section, summarising the unfolding story of the debates behind the big news of the past seven days

Be careful what you tweet. This week, the law come down on a Twitter user who'd jokingly threatened to blow up an airport. The site is reshaping what it's acceptable to say in public. Shouldn't we, in Britain, so famed for our reserve and restraint, be doing more to resist it?

The temptations of protectionism are strong right now – both to the US with its dreadful trade balance, and China with its undervalued currency. Is it not the time to re-visit the economic dogma that free trade is unambiguously good

Proposing the motion is James Groves, Head of Education at think-tank Policy Exchange. Opposing the motion is Reni Eddo-Lodge, a student and Guardian blogger.

This week the debate on workfare was provoked by Iain Duncan Smith’s white paper on welfare reform, which promises to put long-term benefits claimants in 30-hour-a-week work placements. Duncan Smith said he hopes that the placements will get jobless adults back into “the habits and routines of working life,” as well as flushing out those who are doing cash-in-hand work but continuing to claim benefits. The first targets for the scheme would be the 1.4m adults on jobseekers’ allowance who have been out of work for at least nine of the past ten years. The plans will emulate an American model, pioneered in Wisconsin, where the welfare state was overhauled in 1987, time-limiting benefits and forcing the unemployed to undertake unpaid community work. The news – announced to the press before being discussed in Parliament – has been greeted with approval by many on the right. Tim Montgomerie, writing on Conservative Home, welcomed it as a move that will “threaten [the] workshy,” while The Sunday Times reported that “Layabouts who have become so dependent on benefits that they do not know how to work are to be forced to take jobs or be stripped of their benefits.” Melanie Phillips argued in The Daily Mail that the reforms did not go nearly far enough – the coalition should have introduced a time-limit on benefits alongside the work placements. Some on the left have also given the reforms a cautious welcome – Jackie Ashley wrote in The Guardian that “it's right to admit that in some families morale collapsed long ago, leaving two or three generations in a passive, depressed no-man's land, outside the rest of society,” and that if placements get them back on their feet, they are to be welcomed. James Purnell, a former Labour Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, wrote in The Times that there is a “covert consensus” on welfare – a cross-party agreement that welfare needs to be “supportive enough, otherwise poverty becomes a trap; but it must also be tough enough or the support itself becomes a trap.” However, Purnell warned that there are good and bad ways of reforming welfare – and many people believe that the coalition plans fall on the bad side. The Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, said in a radio interview that forced work could push the unemployed into "a downward spiral of uncertainty, even despair." Meanwhile, Alison Garnham, chief executive of the Child Poverty Action Group said, “Doing a job should always mean getting paid.

Since the 1990s, New York galleries have witnessed an unprecedented 78% increase in exhibitions of Asian art, the bulk of it contemporary. Precipitated by the circumstances of their rapidly expanding economies, daily life for many in the East is undergoing something of a revolution. Contemporary art is part of this revolution. It realises the East’s rapidly evolving tastes, aspirations, and categories of consciousness, whilst articulating the accompanying anxieties about loss of identity and cultural specificity. Contemporary Art from the East both grapples with, and typifies, the problems of globalised modernity. Should we see this new cultural outpouring as the spoils or the victim of rapid globalisation? Speakers for the motion - Alexandra Munroe and Iain Robertson Speakers against the motion - Matthew Collings and Richard Wentworth Chaired by Tim Marlo

The France-UK defence pact will see British and French special forces join together in a 10,000-strong force, it gives the UK the right to borrow the Charles de Gaulle aircraft carrier during the next ten years (when we will no longer have one of our own), and offers sharing and collaboration on unmanned drones and other advanced military hardware. The two countries will also combine the testing and maintenance of their nuclear arsenals and collaborate on nuclear warheads for the next 50 years. This is mainly about budget tightening here and outre-Manche. The economic crisis has made the entente become frugale. The deal has shocked many former military officials and some Tory backbenchers, and the right-wing press has enjoyed bringing up historical disagreements such as Agincourt and Trafalgar. Colonel Tim Collins, a leading figure in the British army during the Iraq war, has said he is skeptical. “The truth is that for years, the French have punched below their weight.” True? Does moving the entente from "cordiale" to "intime" threaten the security of the nation? Philip Barber wrote in The Telegraph letters that it will, whereas George Grant, of the Henry Jackson Society, feels more cocorico about it. Listen to them debate the matter out

The writer wrestling words onto the page in a lonely attic, or the editor in his office wielding a red pencil – which image is the most attractive, the most poignant, the most, well, literary? Recent revelations have suggested that, while much of the perceived glamour may be with the writer, the real work of literary production rests with the editor. It could be that the sword is mightier than the pen. We invited literary agent David Godwin and writer and researcher Catherine Humble to discuss who we really have to thank for the books we enjoy. Research by Oxford academic Professor Kathryn Sutherland has found that Jane Austen, famous for her polished prose, in fact produced rambling manuscripts studded with errors that had to be pruned into shape by her editor. And last year, the publication of a collection of Raymond Carver stories in their original form showed the startling contrast between Carver’s intentions and editor Gordon Lish’s interventions. Catherine describes the contrast as between “ellipsis and waffle,” although she prefers Carver’s versions partly on the grounds that using a lot of words can reveal more about the painful difficulties of communication than using very few. In defence of the judicious editor, David discusses Maxwell Perkins, the legendary New York editor who worked with F Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway among others. Both our debaters agree that a good editor is something very similar to a good reader: attentive, understanding and attuned to the writer’s voice. So are we right to be disappointed to discover that favourite novels were collaborative enterprises rather than the work of one brilliant soul? Or is it, perhaps, our emphasis on the romantic image of the literary genius that is at fault? See what you think after you’ve heard David and Catherine discuss the various editorial relationships of Raymond Carver, DH Lawrence, Philip Roth and others. Literary agent David Godwin and writer Katherine Humble discuss the motion 'Great books are edited, not written.

The live Intelligence Squared debate packed out the Royal Geographic Society venue on an evening when the London Underground was on strike. The performances – Dom Anthony Sutch as the utterly compelling modern-day portly Abbot asking for the right kind of bashing; the angry intensity of Peter Hitchens; the panache of Howard Jacobson’s eulogy for language; the cut and thrust of Geoffrey Robertson; the sweet reason of Matthew Parris and the calm, measured performance of the former Archbishop of Canterbury – were a plentiful reward for any tribulation of the journey. Underneath the brilliance of the performances lies some of the most serious questions of our time: should the state be neutral when it comes to religion? how far from neutrality is Britain today? and what special dispensations from the laws of a secular liberal society can we contemplate in the name of religious belief – how far does tolerance require us to tolerate intolerance? You can read tomes of political theory on this. Or you can watch and listen carefully to this beautiful set of performances and find embedded in them encapsulations of almost every position taken on these tricky, subtle and crucial questions of our time. Speakers for the motion - George Carey, Peter Hitchens and Howard Jacobson Speakers against the motion - Matthew Parris, Geoffrey Robertson QC and Dom Antony Sutch Chaired by Jonathan Freedlan

The great Henri Cartier-Bresson, a man who captured a thousand moments, once said that “photographers are the hunters, not the cooks.” But does that make photography a lesser medium? Are the likes of Robert Capa, Robert Frank and Cartier-Bresson himself always going to be inferior artists to Michelangelo and Monet? In this Intelligence Squared debate, AA Gill concedes that photography “revolutionised the nature of art,” but interprets the motion as implying otherwise. Was it not, Gill asked, fundamentally about the exclusivity, about “who is allowed into the club and who is merely a snapper?” Stephen Bayley disagrees. He opened his argument by saying that, “questioning photography would be like questioning sight, but the motion is about the medium, not what is art.” As such, paint is more subtle, wider in “scope and variety…far more susceptible to human interference and therefore allows for a better message.” In contrast, photography is “powerful but limited in expressive range,” as it depends most of all of on technology and equipment: “photographers are ‘dominated by their medium, not masters of it.” The photographer, Bayley concluded, is “more passive, less creative. He has to wait for his great moments; he cannot create them. Speakers for the motion - Stephen Bayley, José María Cano and Michael Mack. Speakers against the motion - A A Gill, Chris Steele-Perkin

The Crystal Cathedral, a 10,000 plus mega-church in Orange County, California, filed for bankruptcy this week. The Crystal Cathedral was the original tele-evangelical church, and its "Hour of Power" television show is broadcast all over the world. Last month, the Reverend Eddy Long, star pastor of the New Birth Missionary Baptist Church in Atlanta, Georgia, who preaches family virtues and has been feted by George Bush at the White House, was accused of sexually harassing three young men. Ted Haggard, who disbanded the massive New Life Church of Colorado Springs when a gay prostitute revealed their rapport, briefly became an insurance salesman before announcing this summer that, cured of his homosexuality, he was starting again. The mega-church movement is closely associated with the rise of American evangelical styles of worship in Latin America and Africa. When the Chilean miners emerged from the mine two weeks ago, they were wearing T-shirts sent to them from a megachurch in Georgia. Evangelical churches have been credited with - or implicated in - re-building the grass-roots of the American right over the past 15 years, with the Tea Party being the latest vehicle for that coalition. The evangelical movement has a globally influential role, and the megachurches are an important element of it. They have huge congregations with inspirational, charismatic pastors. They are run like businesses and, it might seem, often with rather business-like objectives of raising funds and satisfying customers. In this Skype debate which brings together a London audience and speakers from the US, we wanted to hear from insiders to American Protestantism. This is not a debate about the rights and wrongs of religion, but rather a very specific debate from within Protestant Christianity about the form of worship found inside the megachurches.

Is the great age of exploration over? Has the modern traveller swapped Ulysses’ quest for the Happy Isles for a short break at the Holiday Inn? Maybe. But most of us still yearn for the rough, rugged and romantic places of the explorer’s imagination, places where no travel company has been before us…. And some of Britain’s greatest explorers and travellers will be taking us there, in mind if not in body, as they examine the past, present and future of great exploration

“You don’t get to 500 million friends without making a few enemies.” So goes the strapline of David Fincher’s new movie The Social Network, the dramatisation of the birth of modern social networking that chronicles the rise of Facebook from Harvard bedroom to globe-straddling corporation. It’s not quite the same message as Google’s “Don’t be evil” motto but then Facebook never claimed to have a personality. It was just a vessel for users to interact through supposedly allowing each of us to impose our personalities on the site. The Social Network movie portrays the birth of Facebook as a Shakespearian tragedy, with love, betrayal, greed and more than a few bodies left on the stage. But as we become more and more entwined with the fabric of our Facebook existence are we really being exposed to the brave new world where everything and everyone is there at our fingertips? Or are we being distracted from true engagement with the world and simply herded into appropriate marketing boxes? Are we working for the machine, turning our social lives into the greatest Tupperware party in history, or are we learning to use a freedom-enhancing tool