Is it ever possible to take a neutral position on the importance of free speech? The task certainly seems quite difficult. As Vogue’s favourite philosopher, Amia Srinivasan, notes this month in the London Review of Books, many Right-wingers seem to …
How PwC captured Australia
PricewaterhouseCoopers claims it was created to fulfil one purpose: “To build trust in society and solve important problems”. Inevitably, its mission statement contains a list of platitudes explaining how it hopes to achieve this; among them is the insistence that …
Inside the mind of a monkey-torturer
In 1944, my grandfather was serving aboard the USS Sealion (SS-315) when it became the first and only Allied submarine to sink an enemy battleship. The operation inadvertently imperilled more than 1,000 British and Australian prisoners of war. My grandfather …
Affirmative action’s fatal flaw
Say what you like about progressives in America and their nebulous calls for “racial equity”, but they got one thing right: college admissions have always been a zero-sum game. With limited places at the prestigious universities and tens of millions …
Edward Blum: My battle against affirmative action
Following the Supreme Court ruling against race-based affirmative action, we are republishing our interview with Edward Blum, leader of the now-victorious campaign group behind the legal challenge
Is it all over for affirmative action? Edward Blum, a 71-year-old conservative legal …
The countryside revolt against the Tories
When George Orwell tried to define Englishness in his 1941 essay “England Your England”, written under the sound of Nazi bombers, he resorted to a list of images: “The clatter of clogs in the Lancashire mill towns, the to-and-fro of …
RFK Jr and the virtue of bodybuilding
“The most entertaining outcome (as if we were in a movie) is also the most likely,” Elon Musk declared recently. If Musk is right, then the next President of the United States must surely be swole, anti-vaccine boomer, Robert F. …
Why Meghan’s podcast failed
In a tiny variation of the origin story of America, another British empire has crumbled within a few years of attempting to set up shop on US soil. Archewell Audio, the brainchild of Meghan Markle and (the artist formerly known …
What should trans pride look like?
Pride Month, the annual celebration of the alphabet soup that is the enforced marriage of LGB and T, is almost over. During this weekend’s Pride parade through central London, there will be much chanting of the mantra “No LGB without …
The Bank of England is sacrificing workers
When Britain’s brightest economists gathered last week, they set themselves a straightforward task: to decide what to do about the UK’s high rate of inflation. Eventually, after much brain-racking, they came up with a solution: to crash the economy.
It …
Is liberal society making us ill?
As rates of Covid-19 infection started to dwindle, there came signs of a much stranger pandemic: long Covid and its host of long-term complications. You might think that, since men and older people suffer the most complications from the virus, …
The impotence of the Covid Inquiry
Of all the trite statements routinely rolled out by political figures in the aftermath of an atrocity, there is one which is particularly grating: “Lessons will be learned.” It is objectionable not just for its passivity and vagueness, but its …
How narcissism killed the tourist
Look up images of Alpe di Siuse and Lago di Braies on Instagram, and you will find thousands of posts showing what appears to be a glorious alpine meadow and a captivatingly secluded glacial lake, ringed by the peaks of …
The corruption of French feminism
Five summers ago, in June 2018, a short clip from Arrêt Sur Images, a French talk show, went viral after a balding, bearded male reprimanded the host for calling him a man. “Je ne suis pas un homme, monsieur,” Arnaud …
The California militia ready for civil war
Redding, the capital of Shasta County in the far north of California, spreads out in thin strips of suburbia, its freeways reaching up into mountainous upcountry. Here, 19th-century gold-mining settlements crouch in the valleys among snow-ridged glaciers and lines of …