I never imagined I’d feel profound grief at the passing of a public figure.
At those points in my life where someone close to me has died, the hours and days afterward felt heightened, timeless and liminal: as though the …
Why men are no longer wild
Chris McCandless had been dead for two weeks when a pair of hunters stumbled upon the abandoned bus he had been using as a makeshift shelter near Alaska’s Denali National Park. A note taped to its door read:
ATTENTION POSSIBLE …
Will Sweden finally vote for the far-Right?
Last week, Sweden’s far-Right Sverigedemokraterna party published a slick campaign video, a sort of closing argument before this Sunday’s election. “Swedes,” Jimmie Åkesson, the party leader, said, “are not a people who burn cars — we are a people who …
Italy will win the food wars
Twice each week, a caravan of macellai, pescivendoli, and fruttivendolo comes to town. They swell the streets beneath a medieval castle keep in the 14th-century northern Italian city where my family maintains a home. When time allows, on Tuesdays or …
Effective altruism is the new woke
Around 2014, I started to notice that something was up in academic philosophy. Geeky researchers from fancy universities, having first made their names in abstract and technical domains such as metaphysics, were now recreating themselves as public-facing ethicists. Knowing some …
Why the populists failed
If you want to feel a certain sense of dread, look around you, at the accumulating challenges facing Western societies, and at the leaders chosen to manage them. The archetypal, boringly competent, technocratic politician of the past 40 years stands …
The dark side of the art world
I was visiting an exhibition last week when I came across a painting I had handled, several years back. I knew it well from my time working in the art world, so it was a bit like bumping into an …
Can Liz Truss tell a story?
The most arresting opening to a wedding speech I have come across started thus: “Being asked to give the Best Man’s speech is a bit like being asked to have sex with the Queen Mother.” The audience gasped, clearly a …
Am I really a threat to democracy?
Is it Joe Biden who is the real fascist? Or Trump? Or is it actually… me?
The world is wearily familiar by now with the overheated and extremely public style in which America conducts its internal disputes, and Joe Biden’s …
Poverty is not inevitable
The energy companies are drowning in dollars, while a season of strikes continues to dismay much of the media. Cathy Newman of Channel 4 News talks about “taking on” the trade unions, as though they were a bunch of armed …
Hollywood needs nepotism babies
During the summer holiday, one week of family viewing was devoted to the Hunger Games series. It reminded me what a vintage star-is-born story it was when Jennifer Lawrence went from the indie hit to Winter’s Bone to making The …
What does Liz Truss see in Canada?
Faced with soaring costs of living, increased collateral damage from the war in Ukraine, and widening national inequality, Liz Truss seemed curiously optimistic in her first speech as Prime Minister. What could possibly be driving such bullishness? Absent any sign …
Why is Edward Enninful editing Vogue?
Why are the models so thin? Why are the clothes so expensive? And what is the point of fashion? These were questions I had to answer pretty much every day for the decade I worked as a fashion journalist, and …
Schools shouldn’t fly BLM flags
After more than two years of disruption, American schoolchildren are finally returning to something approaching normal education — in-person, and without masks or social distancing or other “non-pharmaceutical interventions”. But many of these children are returning transformed. Last week, data …
How Labour can beat Truss
Tony Blair used to say that the worst thing about being in opposition was that you would wake up every morning thinking about what you wanted to say, while government ministers were waking up thinking about what they were going …