Your task is to extract the thesis of an opinionated news article by selecting some of its text segments. The thesis is a summarization of what the author wants to persuade the reader of. Your answer should consist of segments of the given text. Note that you are not allowed to combine different sentences.
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Question: Joan Didion as the new face of Celine? That's so smart. In dark days, the heart cleaves disproportionately to Lilliputian scraps of good news and so it was that as events played out in Paris last week, I kept thinking of the writer Joan Didion, the star of Celine's latest ad campaign, tiny in black, her porcelain face half obscured by sunglasses as big and as inky as the dinner plates in the kind of restaurants frequented by Patrick Bateman in American Psycho . Oh, the brilliance of Didion! I like to think of myself as wholly resistant to the wicked wiles of big fashion , but this campaign seemed somehow to have got through , and I was all aflutter . What, I wondered, was the provenance of the socking great pendant that hung about her neck in Juergen Teller's photograph? Was it by Celine or was it, as they say, model's own? Could I find something similar on eBay? All day long, between work and news bulletins, I restlessly Googled various combinations of the words "buy", "vintage", "bronze", "large" and "locket" . The coverage of the Paris fashion house's decision to make the author of Slouching Towards Bethlehem, The White Album and The Year of Magical Thinking its new face has focused mostly on her age . Didion is 80 ; when she began her career as a writer at American Vogue in the late 50s, the personnel director of the magazine's owner, Conde Nast, would from time to time stop her in the hall and ask her when she had last called her mother . Apparently, we should celebrate Teller's photograph of her as a particularly exalted example of fashion's increased willingness to embrace models with wrinkles, liver spots and histories that trail all the way back to the days when women still wore white gloves and little hats to work . At last, the thinking goes, fashion has realised that beauty may also come with silver hair . What? You don't buy that? Well, then . Think of it this way . At least it seems finally to have grasped that women don't simply give up shopping the moment they turn 50 . But it's not Didion's age that interests me . It's her status as a writer and thinker . By choosing her- acclaimed and bestselling, but also trenchant, highly mannered and somewhat complicated - Celine's creative director, Phoebe Philo, is sending out quite a bracing message , even if the semaphore in which it's written will, alas, be largely illegible to those who know nothing of Didion . There' s something going on beyond the cunning commercial appeal to the kind of conflicted consumer who values the inner life as much as the outer  - I mean the kind of woman whose "buttery" leather tote must be big enough to contain at least one hardback if it is not to make her feel guilty for the rest of her life . Isn't this campaign also in the business of suggesting that to be clever and a touch difficult(Didion is nothing if not unpredictable) is to be timelessly beautiful? That this is, in fact, a state to which women might like to aspire? Oh, Phoebe! If only I could afford your gorgeous, minimalist gear , I would dash out and buy something right now just to say thank you . And yet how often have I chickened out? How often do I try, even now, to wear pretty clothes, fun clothes, to embrace colour and print and embroidery? To toddle along in shoes in which I cannot run or even, if I'm honest, walk? Like most professional women who are neither beautiful nor willing to play dumb all of the time, I fear being thought ugly or uncompromising or seeming as if I have not made an effort . I fear, if you will, being seen to be picking a fight, whether by the way I speak or the way I dress . I guess you could say that I wear the swishy frock and high heels the better that I might be allowed, sometimes, to speak my mind . I adore the way that Didion, half child and half sphinx, thinner than a cigarette, looks . But she is not, and never has been, classically beautiful . Nor is she willing to play the fool . She is discreet, but never decorous ; she is fierce, preternaturally observant and, sometimes, a little self-obsessed . And her clothes - unfussy, elegant, practical, a touch forbidding - reflect this . What Teller's photograph says to me is: approach with caution; subject may bite . I love the continuity in this, the wholeness, the confidence in the way that the clothes are an extension of the personality - and I salute Phoebe Philo for recognising it, for extolling it to the world as worthy of admiration, as a thing to be replicated by those women who have the pluck, if not exactly the hard cash .

Answer: In dark days, the heart cleaves disproportionately to Lilliputian scraps of good news


Question: Children in our towns and cities are being robbed of safe spaces to play. Where do the children play? Where can they run around unsupervised? On most of the housing estates I visit, the answer is hardly anywhere . A community not built around children is no community at all . A place that functions socially is one in which they are drawn to play outdoors . As Jay Griffiths argues in her heartrending book Kith, children fill the "unoccupied territories", the spaces not controlled by tidy-minded adults, "the commons of mud, moss, roots and grass" . But such places are being purged from the land and their lives . "Today's children are enclosed in school and home, enclosed in cars to shuttle between them, enclosed by fear, by surveillance and poverty and enclosed in rigid schedules of time." Since the 1970s the area in which children roam without adults has decreased by almost 90% . "Childhood is losing its commons." Given all that we know about the physical and psychological impacts of this confinement , you would expect the authorities to ensure that the remaining 10% of their diminished range is designed to draw children out of their homes . Yet almost everywhere they are designed out . Housing estates are built on the playing fields and rough patches children used to inhabit, and offer almost nothing in return . In the government's masterplan for England, the national planning policy framework, children are mentioned only twice: in a catalogue of housing types . In parliament's review of these plans, they aren't mentioned at all . Young people, around whom our lives should revolve, have been airbrushed from the planning system . I spent Monday wandering around the new and newish housing developments on the east side of Northampton . I chose this area because the estates here are spacious and mostly built for families : in other words, there is no possible excuse for excluding young people . In the places built 10 or 20 years ago, there is plenty of shared space , but almost all of it is allocated to cars . (You can see the photos on my website .) Grass is confined to the roundabouts or to coffin-like gardens , in which you can't turn a cartwheel without hitting the fence . I came across one exception - a street with wide grass verges . But they sloped towards the road: dangerous and useless, a perfect waste of space . This land of missed opportunities, designed by people without a spark of joy in their hearts, reifies the idea that there is no such thing as society . Had you set out to ensure that children were neither seen nor heard, you could not have done a better job . On the last day of the holidays, which was warm and dry, across four estates I saw only one child . By comparison, the Cherry Orchard estate just completed by Bellway Homes is a children's paradise . But only by comparison . Next to the primary school, with plenty of three- and four-bedroom houses, it is designed to appeal to young families . But in the middle of the development, where a village green might have been, there' s a strange grassy sump, surrounded by a low fence . It's an empty balancing pond, to catch water during exceptional floods . Remove the fence, plant it with trees, throw in some rocks and logs, and you'd have a rough and mossy playground . But no such thing was in the plans . Other shared spaces on the estate have the charming ambience of a prison yard : paved and surrounded by garden fences almost nine feet high . There were a few children outdoors but they seemed pressed to the edges, sitting in doorways or leaning on fences . Children don't buy houses , so who cares? Throughout the country, they become prisoners of bad design, and so do adults . Without safe and engaging places in which they can come together, no tribe forms . So parents must play the games that children would otherwise play among themselves , and everyone is bored to tears . The exclusion of children arises from the same pathology that denies us decent housing . In the name of market freedom, the volume housebuilders, sitting on their land banks, are free to preside over speculative chaos , while we are free to buy dog kennels priced like palaces in placeless estates so badly designed that community is dead on arrival . Many want to design and build their own homes , but almost no plots are available , as the big builders have seized them . In Scotland the government is considering compulsory sale orders , which would pull down prices - essential when the speculative price of land has risen from 2% of the cost of a home in the 1930s to 70% today . A national housing land corporation would assemble the sites and supply the infrastructure, then sell plots to community groups, housing associations and people who want to build their own . It goes far beyond England's feeble community right-to-build measures , which lack the muscular facilitation that only public authorities can provide . But it's still not far enough . What if people were entitled to buy an option for a plot on a new estate, which they would then help to plan? Not just the houses, but the entire estate would be built for and by those who would live there . The council or land corporation would specify the number and type of homes , then the future residents - including people on the social housing waiting list - would design the layout . Their children would help to create the public spaces . Communities would start to form even before people moved in , and the estates would doubtless look nothing like those built today . To the Westminster government, this probably sounds like communism . But as countries elsewhere in Europe have found, we don't need volume house builders, except to construct high-rises . They do not assist the provision of decent, affordable homes . They impede it . What is good for them is bad for us . Bellway, its brochure reveals, asked children at the neighbouring primary school to paint a picture of a cherry orchard, and displayed the winning entries in its show home . "Why not pop over to say hello, view our wonderful development and sneak a peek?", it asks . That's the role the children were given: helping the company to sell the houses it had already built . Why can't we shape the places that shape our lives?

Answer: A place that functions socially is one in which they are drawn to play outdoors


Question: What freedom of speech? The photos of 40 of the world's government leaders marching arm-in-arm along a Paris boulevard on Sunday with the president of the United States not among them was a provocative image that has fomented much debate . The march was, of course, in direct response to the murderous attacks on workers at the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo by a pair of brothers named Kouachi, and on shoppers at a Paris kosher supermarket by one of the brothers' comrades . The debate has been about whether President Obama should have been at the march . The march was billed as a defense of freedom of speech in the West ; yet it hardly could have been held in a less free speech-friendly Western environment , and the debate over Obama's absence misses the point . In the post-World War II era, French governments have adopted a policy advanced upon them nearly 100 years ago by Woodrow Wilson . He pioneered the modern idea that countries' constitutions don't limit governments; they unleash them . Thus , even though the French Constitution guarantees freedom of speech, French governments treat speech as a gift from the government, not as a natural right of all persons , as our Constitution does . The French government has prohibited speech it considers to be hateful and even made it criminal . When the predecessor magazine to Charlie Hebdo once mocked the death of Charles de Gaulle, the French government shut it down -- permanently . The theory of anti-hate speech laws is that hate speech often leads to violence, and violence demands police and thus the expenditure of public resources, and so the government can make it illegal to spout hatred in order to conserve its resources . This attitude presumes, as Wilson did when he prosecuted folks for publicly singing German songs during World War I, that the government is the origin of free speech and can lawfully limit the speech it hates and fears . It also presumes that all ideas are equal, and none is worthy of hatred . When the massacres occurred last week in Paris, all three of the murderers knew that the police would be unarmed and so would be their victims . It was as if they were shooting fish in a barrel . Why is that? The answer lies in the same mentality that believes it can eradicate hate by regulating speech . That mentality demands that government have a monopoly on violence, even violence against evil . So, to those who embrace this dreadful theory, the great loss in Paris last week was not human life, which is a gift from God ; it was free speech, which is a gift from the state . Hence the French government, which seems not to care about innocent life, instead of addressing these massacres as crimes against innocent people, proclaimed the massacres crimes against the freedom of speech . Would the French government have reacted similarly if the murderers had killed workers at an ammunition factory, instead of at a satirical magazine? And how hypocritical was it of the French government to claim it defends free speech! In France, you can go to jail if you publicly express hatred for a group whose members may be defined generally by characteristics of birth, such as gender, age, race, place of origin or religion . You can also go to jail for using speech to defy the government . This past weekend, millions of folks in France wore buttons and headbands that proclaimed in French:"I am Charlie Hebdo." Those whose buttons proclaimed"I am not Charlie Hebdo" were asked by the police to remove them . Those who wore buttons that proclaimed, either satirically or hatefully,"I am Kouachi" were arrested . Arrested for speech at a march in support of free speech? Yes . What's going on here? What's going on in France, and what might be the future in America, is the government defending the speech with which it agrees and punishing the speech with which it disagrees . What's going on is the assault by some in radical Islam not on speech, but on vulnerable innocents in their everyday lives in order to intimidate their governments . What's going on is the deployment of 90,000 French troops to catch and kill three murderers because the government does not trust the local police to use guns to keep the streets safe or private persons to use guns to defend their own lives . Why do some in radical Islam kill innocents in the West in order to affect the policies of Western governments? Might it be because the fruitless Western invasion of Iraq killed 650,000 persons, most of whom were innocent civilians? Might it be because that invasion brought al-Qaida to the region and spawned ISIS? Might it be because Obama has killed more innocent civilians in the Middle East with his drones than were killed by the planes in the U.S  on 9/11? Might it be because our spies are listening to us, rather than to those who pose real dangers? What does all this have to do with freedom of speech? Nothing -- unless you believe the French government .

Answer:
The French government has prohibited speech it considers to be hateful and even made it criminal


