The date 1619 does not appear in the introduction to African Founders: How Enslaved People Expanded American Ideals, Pulitzer-Prize-winning historian David Hackett Fischer’s encyclopaedic, magisterial new book. But the controversial project that takes that date as its name — launched …
Lock up your cats
Back in the last century, “putting the cat out” was a definite thing. You might remember the excellent zeugma from Flanders & Swann’s Have Some Madeira, M’Dear: “he hastened to put out the cat, the wine, his cigar and the …
The dangers of gender-affirmative care
The Biden administration recently announced a plan to ban “conversion therapy” and dismantle barriers to “gender-affirming care” for transgender-identifying children and adolescents. A few days later, Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal introduced the “Transgender Bill of Rights” on Capitol Hill which sought …
Voters deserve better than Chris Pincher
The Subscription Rooms in the centre of Stroud have long played host to small historic moments. In March 1962, the Georgian building hosted one of the first Beatles concerts. The band were paid £32 between them. It was one of …
How we forgot Elvis
The most telling line in Baz Luhrmann’s new movie Elvis comes at the very end, in the form of a title card: “His influence on music and culture lives on.” As I left the cinema, exhausted and annoyed, I wondered …
Barristers need to strike
In a remote and smelly robing room in Isleworth Crown Court there remains pinned to a wall a notice from 2007. It tells barristers to sign in on the new computer system “to avoid delays to your pay”. In the …
Incels can become heroes
Scott was on the brink of divorce when he started talking to Sarina. The 41-year-old soon found himself falling in love. Reinvigorated by his new romance, Scott began helping his wife around the house without resentment. Sarina’s radical empathy had …
Ideology has poisoned the West
A century has passed since William Butler Yeats sensed the stirrings of a “rough beast” with a gaze “blank and pitiless as the sun”. That beast’s apocalyptic hour has come around again, its rebirth announced by the galloping horsemen of …
Our universities need a revolution
What is the point of university? It used to be, when Harvard was founded in 1636, “to advance learning and perpetuate it to posterity”. But in recent years the university has taken on an altogether narrower character. Learning is no …
Michael Gove won’t save the North
Recently, the Prime Minister found himself on Tyneside but thought he was on Teesside. So what’s the problem, other than straightforward stupidity? The problem is that the British road to power rarely leads north, and at a time of much …
Did Ukraine need a war?
War has always been the father of innovation: a reset for societies forced to adopt whatever methods work just in order to survive. The outburst of voluntarism that has gripped Ukraine is a striking example: mutual aid groups, local volunteer …
The founding myth of Stonewall
Like most origin stories, the Stonewall uprising has been the subject of popular mythmaking. Various branches of the LGBTQ+ rainbow now take credit for the moment, 53 years ago this week, when a group of patrons at a Greenwich Village …
Fragile students just need a hug
The number of children killed by preventable accidents declined in every UK nation between 1980 and 2010. The number of children killed or seriously injured by a car gets lower by the year; the incidence of severe burns has declined …
Schools can resist the trans wars
People get very worked up about children’s books. In 1987, the Right-wing press stirred up a shameful moral panic about Jenny Lives with Eric and Martin, a harmless picture book that featured a gay couple and was kept on such …
The cost of Biden’s racialism
Joe Biden may have once bragged about his cooperative relations with segregationists, but he still arguably owes more to African-American leadership and voters than any politician in recent history. After all, it was black voters who bequeathed him the two …