There are few topics that provoke the same depth of feeling among new mothers as breastfeeding. Is breast best? Should formula feeding mums be criticised? This acutely sensitive debate came roaring out of the posset-stained and sleep-deprived world of new …
Amber Heard’s toxic femininity
The Men’s Rights Movement was born to weigh in on cases like Johnny Depp’s. The movement gained prominence during the Seventies and Eighties in response to what some men saw as preferential treatment of women in family court cases, especially …
The twilight of identity politics
During the 2016 Democratic primary Hillary Clinton began to enthusiastically deploy identitarian arguments against Bernie Sanders. Her media surrogates derided his supporters as straight white “brocialists”. Bernie Bros were guilty of “mansplaining” anti-capitalism to the nation’s minorities and aspiring young …
Why can’t the Left take a joke?
Chris Rock was in London last week with his new show, observing — not inaccurately — that many people are very afraid of offending others these days. Presumably some comedians are even more afraid now, having seeing Will Smith slap …
Facebook’s slide into dystopia
It has been ten years since Facebook’s IPO. Superficially, the experience is the same: news feed, friends network, third-party apps. Yet the feel of the site has completely changed. Whether it was the parade of casual game notifications, the injection …
Buffalo and the myth of racist America
What connects the tragedies of May 25, 2020, and May 14, 2022? The straightforward answer, at least according to many in the media and on the Left, is systemic racism.
On May 25, 2020, a black man was murdered in …
Putin’s plan to starve the world
Lviv, Ukraine
“In the old days, we had horses and cows and pigs and chickens. Now we are dying of hunger. In the old days, we fed the world. Now they have taken all we had away from us and …
Why normal people love Sally Rooney
I am suspicious of the Sally Rooney phenomenon. In particular, I suspect the claim, often made on behalf of the books, that they are an especially authentic or perspicuous representation of the experiences of young adults today.
Her novels — …
How to stop children being indoctrinated
During one of the morning assemblies at my convent school, our headmistress, a fearsome nun who beat me with a shoe for accidentally breaking a window, announced that there was to be an amnesty on “Garbage Pail Kids” trading stickers. …
Even McDonald’s couldn’t save Russia
The arrival of Big Macs, skinny fries and those absurdly-thick shakes in Moscow 32 years ago heralded a moment of hope that the world was entering an era of peace and prosperity after the Cold War. This was at a …
What Putin and liberals share
Putin’s aggressive war on Ukraine may have had the unintended consequence of reviving a moribund Nato alliance, but for many liberals, that isn’t enough. Just as the war saved Johnson from seemingly inevitable ejection from Downing Street, so have defenders …
George Monbiot’s farming fantasies
Ever since they rode out of the Book of Revelation circa 90AD, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse have wreaked existential havoc. They may now finally be about to achieve the End Times. We are either going to starve to …
What’s wrong with being straight?
As a gay man — I know that awful phrase is usually followed by irrelevant twaddle, but please bear with me. As a gay man, I have always found heterosexuality quite fascinating. I have made something of an unconscious study …
The white privilege of BLM
For every major metropolis that painted BLACK LIVES MATTER on its streets two years ago, there were huge swathes of America where the whole movement felt like a distant diversion, similar to the current war in Ukraine. You knew it …
Why pit villages turned to rave
Certain dance tunes never fail to take me back to the area I grew up in. Stirlingshire, in Central Scotland, is a county whose gloomy beauty and dramatic ruins have made it enduringly popular with tourists and retirees alike. In …