When I entered public high school at the age of 16 following a half-decade of home-schooling, what I saw there blew my mind. The year was 1998, and the student body of Raleigh’s Needham Broughton High School encompassed everyone from …
How Europe can defend itself
Consider a very British scenario. A beloved monarch has just died, and the stability they embodied is starting to fade. At home, there is growing industrial conflict between capital and labour, and growing constitutional conflict between secessionism and Unionism. Externally, …
Is trans the new anorexia?
When teaching freshman composition in New York colleges in the mid-Eighties, I picked up a peculiar pattern in one-on-one conferences with my female students. With improbable frequency, they’d confide that they were anorexic. The term had only entered the popular …
Workers have lost faith in money
Ten years ago, I was in a basement bar in Shoreditch, the fashionable part of London that had adopted the moniker “Silicon Roundabout” thanks to the confluence of tech firms there. I was speaking to one of the many salons …
Medical freedom is poisoning America
At his “Miracle Ranch” in California, Robert O. Young would charge up to $5,000 per day to treat cancer patients. As part of his recommended six-week stay, the father of the alkaline diet would analyse the blood of patients, make …
The Wagner Files
The Wagner Group might be a gang of hired murderers, but it is also a well-oiled machine: peel back its layers of barbarity and you’ll find a slick private military company with plans to expand its influence throughout the world. …
Buck Angel: ‘We never denied our biology’
“I used to be a woman, and I really am a feminist.” With his full beard, bald head and inked, muscular forearms, Buck Angel cuts a striking figure. The trans porn star is an unlikely feminist ally. We shouldn’t really …
Big Tech’s welfare dystopia
On December 10, 2020, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey announced a $15 million donation for a policy pilot across several American cities. About seven months earlier, America’s economy had cratered amid the Covid pandemic, leaving behind a workforce desperate for funds. …
Is Jolyon Maugham the new Alan Partridge?
“Because we are not a charity, with narrowly defined objectives, we have to ask ourselves constantly what we are for,” confesses Good Law Project chief Jolyon Maugham, in his new fundraising pamphlet disguised as a memoir, Bringing Down Goliath. It …
Will Biden be the next Carter?
On the face of it, Joseph Biden Jr and James Carter Jr ruled over two Americas, their terms separated by six administrations and more than four decades. Their futures, too, could not seem more divergent: today, as America’s 46th President …
The Blue Wall is crumbling
Driving through an affluent suburb of Düsseldorf in the Seventies, J.G. Ballard had a vision. Like Shepperton, Ballard’s hometown in Surrey, this 20th-century arrangement of wealth, leisure and family located on the fringes of a great city seemed eternal. A …
The rise of baby doomers
As the media cycle lurches from the promotion of one existential crisis to another, demography continues to dominate. In the UK, low birth rates and ageing populations mean we won’t be able to afford healthcare and pensions; we have too …
We need to resurrect Eastern Europe
The states of the former Soviet sphere have been trying to shrug off the “Eastern Europe” label for years. The term brings to mind tired stereotypes about an impoverished, illiberal post-communist East, which are for the most part tired and …
Will America win from de-dollarisation?
The most important element in the debate over the utility of Western sanctions against Russia, is also the most ignored. The sanctions regime mostly comprises of restrictions that have been deployed before, such as export bans and the freezing of …
Britain’s oligarchs are stuck in limbo
When British politicians boast of their support for Ukraine, they reach for statistics: 1,550 individuals sanctioned, including 130 oligarchs; 180 companies targeted; £18 billion frozen. Those are big numbers, packing an impressive rhetorical punch, but they disguise a big problem: …