After months of staff allegations of toxic bullying at Scottish beer company BrewDog, the company’s chief executive has finally explained the cause of his “intense and demanding” behaviour: he suspects he has “light-level autism”. In an open letter published last …
The psychedelic utopia is a lie
“We are going to usher in a new day in the treatment of psychiatric diagnoses and brain health disorders.”
Rob Barrow is the CEO of MindMed: a leader in a new species of pharmaceutical firm. These companies, described as “corporadelic”, …
Will you catch Monkeypox?
Just as we were starting to put the two years of the pandemic behind us, the last thing anyone wanted to hear was that a new infectious disease was spreading unexpectedly. Yet this is exactly what has happened: towards the …
Boris Johnson broke Britain
Pity the poor columnist attempting to write The Case for Boris: a blank screen sits before him, the cursor blinking helplessly. There simply is no case for Boris, no justification for any continued role in public life. None of the …
How Boris destroyed Boris
We are in the summer of 2032, and once again Boris Johnson is fighting for his life. Above Downing Street the carrion crows circle, as they have so often in the last 13 years. Once again a senior minister has …
America needs to calm down
Wherever you look someone is sounding the alarm about how America has been taken over by evil extremists and is going to hell in a handbasket. This sort of talk used to be confined to the fringes: you’d actually have …
Why I didn’t want children
I live in Crouch End, a part of North London otherwise known as Nappy Valley. Regularly appearing on lists of the best places in the capital to raise a family, the area is full of the type of coffee shops …
Who is Germany preparing to fight?
The Berlin elite is quick to lambast other countries for any perceived lack of predictability. Being berechenbar or “reckonable” ranks high among the Teutonic virtues. So Germany’s own recent policy gyrations have been wondrous to behold.
The attack on Ukraine …
How the Left fell for capitalism
What may turn out to be the biggest political movement of the 21st century emerged from the rainforest remnants of southern Mexico on 1 January 1994, carried down darkened, cobbled colonial streets by 500 pairs of black leather boots at …
The antidote to America’s race wars
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 …