There was a great three-panel comic that the artist Art Spiegelman did for The Virginia Quarterly Review a while back that neatly encapsulates the dubious if nearly universal centrality of the Holocaust in American Jewish life. In the strip, the …
In defence of deepfakes
Philosophers of knowledge sometimes invoke a thought experiment involving “Fake Barn Country”, an imaginary land which for some reason is scattered with lots of convincing barn facades but very few real barns. Somewhat unusually, a man in Fake Barn Country …
Who will win the gentrification wars?
Gentrification. Are you pro or anti? Perhaps, if you’re reading this article in a small town with a dilapidated high street, this question may be far from your mind. But if you’re inside the M25, it will loom larger, and …
Is George Santos a Machiavellian prince?
After the latest batch of revelations about his hidden history and penchant for patent falsehoods, Americans are struggling to make sense of New York Representative George Santos. Even before he was able to take office in January, several newspapers began …
The dignity of dying at home
My mother liked to tell me stories of medicine at home: how I was born on her bed, and how her own mother had died in hers. Both tales involved family doctors of the old-fashioned sort, with black bags and …
Where are the Young England radicals?
Have things ever been so grim? Given the depressing reality of contemporary Britain — with the endless stories of sleaze and decay, decline and division — it is easy to draw that conclusion. Surely the NHS has never been this …
How Bill Clinton created post-truth America
While Bill Clinton was campaigning to be President in 1992, the singer Gennifer Flowers gave several interviews in which she named him as her long-term lover. Clinton denied it, of course. It was one of the many lies that he …
Mexico’s cartel corruption on trial
It is no big secret that Mexican police officers moonlight for drug traffickers. As far back as 2010, a state commander nicknamed “El Tyson” admitted in a confession video on national television that he was not only a high-ranking cartel …
The beauty of Botox
One of my closest friends is allergic to Botox, which was exactly as terrible a discovery as you might expect. It started while she was still at the doctor’s office, with a burning sensation at the injection site. (“That’s just …
Does feminism have mummy issues?
Freud didn’t really understand women. This is not an original point: it was first made by Freud himself. According to his biographer Ernest Jones, Freud admitted: “The great question that has never been answered, and which I have not yet …
How Big Pharma feeds off the NHS
I used to think, perhaps naively, that even the current Conservative government valued the NHS’s “national treasure” status too much to let it go the way of the debt-fuelled US healthcare system. Now, I’m not so sure: NHS privatisation, by …
Iran’s ideological war on Britain
The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) is an idiosyncratic creation of Iran’s revolutionary class that now sits at the centre of the modern Iranian state. In 1979, the Islamic constitution established the group as an “ideological army” — in deliberate …
Is the psychedelic industrial complex evil?
“More real than reality itself.” This is the sales pitch made by fans of dimethyltryptamine. Otherwise known as DMT, the compound found in ayahuasca returned to the spotlight recently thanks to Prince Harry’s description of his trips, which, he says, …
What if King Charles were your landlord?
Nansledan is a partially built village on a hill at Newquay: the wind blows through, almost knocking me off my feet. The Cornish housing crisis is a paradigm of the national one: towns filled with holiday lets and Airbnbs while …
The phoney ethics of ESG
This year at Davos, three letters were on the tip of every person’s tongue, perhaps the only acronym uttered with equal joy by Greta Thunberg and billionaire and BlackRock CEO, Larry Fink. They are ESG, or “Environment, Social and Governance”. …