Jeremy Clarkson’s savage polemic against Meghan Markle, with its sick fantasy of splattering her naked body with mud, may be of interest to, of all people, philosophers. Philosophers of language talk about “performatives”, meaning bits of language which get something …
The Dreyfus Affair is not finished
On January 13, 1898, Parisians awoke to the chorus of hundreds of news criers who, striding along the grand boulevards and brandishing copies of the newspaper L’Aurore, were shouting passages from the article that sprawled across the front page. It …
The art of empty apologies
Everyday life is full of unwitting moral pitfalls. Overnight, formerly benign words can take on strange and harmful new meanings. It is easy to be blindsided by the rapidly changing public fortunes of activities you’ve always enjoyed — using gas …
Westminster isn’t that corrupt
Britain hates its MPs and loves a moral crusade; outrage at their behaviour is a feature of political life. Yet while the hue and cry is often well-directed, popular ire tends to obscure the reality: that few of our politicians …
Why the West should go nuclear
Nuclear power is often described as “the double-edged sword of science”, reflecting the fact that it can be used for both useful and peaceful purposes as well as deadly and destructive ends. This has never been truer than today. On …
My Prince Harry moment
I became a priest on a hot summer’s day at Lichfield Cathedral. I was as prepared as I thought I could be for the vows I was about to take. What I wasn’t prepared for, though, was the whole paraphernalia …
Why Harry couldn’t be a hero
Prince Harry has finally taken up the role he was always destined to fill. If Diana was, as Tony Blair dubbed her, the Princess of Hearts, Harry is her true heir: the Prince of Lolcows.
A “lolcow”, for those who …
Inside El Salvador’s brutal gang crackdown
In her cramped breeze-block home on the outskirts of El Salvador’s capital, across an alley from a school currently occupied by soldiers, 65-year-old Francisca Alas rolls down her sock to show a scar from the machete of a gang member. …
How universities entered Cloud Cuckoo Land
What explains the recent, alarmingly broad and rapid capture of cultural, political, and economic institutions by neo-Marxist identity politics and liberation ideologies? Writing in Tablet, Russell Jacoby argues that the end of the rapid expansion of universities in the late …
What’s wrong with violent fiction?
I was last asked the question three weeks ago at a panel discussion on crime fiction. The time before that, it was in a written Q&A for a literary magazine. I no longer remember the first time I heard it; …
The philistine war on AI art
Among the most ingenious moments in Kraftwerk’s admirable oeuvre is the point in 1981’s “Pocket Calculator” when a human voice self-contentedly sings: “By pressing down a special key / It plays a little melody.” The melody follows in confirmation. The …
This was not Brazil’s January 6
Will Brazil have its own “January 6”? The question has been posed repeatedly over the past year in speculation as to what might happen should Bolsonaro lose the October 2022 election. Brazil’s moment finally arrived: two days late and two …
Did the West impose austerity on Africa?
The 21st century was supposed to belong to Africa: it heralded the start of the “Africa Rising” era, when the continent seemed destined to enjoy an extended period of economic growth and rising incomes. Two decades later, however, that narrative …
The slow death of the NHS
Every day, we’re told that the NHS is collapsing. It’s failing the sick and wounded at their hour of greatest need, leaving frail old people lying for hours without an ambulance, farming out patients to care homes, and forcing the …
Prince Harry’s Faustian bargain
One of the characteristics of fame is that it is essentially Faustian in nature; to become a celebrity, one must sell one’s soul to the devil. It’s a highly questionable idea — why should there be such a price for …