Andrew Sullivan is one of America’s best known political observers and writers. He is an independent-minded conservative who supported Obama, was a leader of the gay marriage movement, and has since argued forcefully against Donald Trump. His Substack is one …
Hell is your Facebook friends
How will Facebook celebrate its 20th birthday? Perhaps it will create one of those cute video montages they like to generate at significant moments. Starting with a tinkling piano soundtrack, a couple of breathless friend requests, and some self-conscious, tentative …
Hell is your Facebook friends
How will Facebook celebrate its 20th birthday? Perhaps it will create one of those cute video montages they like to generate at significant moments. Starting with a tinkling piano soundtrack, a couple of breathless friend requests, and some self-conscious, tentative …
Flailing Germany is the future of Europe
For much of the Merkel era, Germany stood as an island of economic and political stability amid Europe’s perennially stormy waters. Those days, however, seem like a distant memory. Europe is still in crisis — but now Germany is the …
The excoriating comedy of Auschwitz
The most-told joke about Auschwitz surfaces in different forms. As I first heard it while a teenager in “north London” — not just a cluster of adjacent postcodes, of course, but shorthand for a mindset that one kind of pundit …
Should America strike back at Iran?
There’s no denying Iran’s proxy forces are great value for money. The regime’s support for its allied militias, including the Lebanese Hizbollah, Hamas and the Houthis, probably doesn’t exceed a few billion dollars per annum — perhaps even less, given …
Will Britain lose World War Three?
Will 2024 be the year of a Third World War? As Russia’s war in Ukraine grinds on, the Middle East threatens to erupt, and China intensifies its military pressure on Taiwan, a global conflict seems all but inevitable.
How strange, …
An election defeat could save the Tories
In 1981, Neil Kinnock was attacked in the toilets at the Labour Party Conference. His assailant was a supporter of Tony Benn, eager to strike a blow for the radical Left; but as so often in the history of that …
Millennials are rebranding the menopause
There’s a scene in Sunset Boulevard in which Norma Desmond, the former silent film star, is watching a movie in her Hollywood mansion. It’s one of her own movies, of course — they’re all she ever watches — because in …
Canada’s immigration backlash is far from populist
As the United States and Texas state governments clash over the Mexican border, a very different kind of immigration crisis is taking place elsewhere in North America. Unlike in the divided US, Canada is supposed to be one of the …
Why the Right fears Taylor Swift
In pop music, one of the most time-honoured devices for upping the emotional ante is known colloquially as the “Truck Driver’s Gear Change”. In it, the melody stays the same, but is modulated up a whole note, with the effect …
Northern Ireland’s anguish isn’t over
Northern Ireland’s unionists have agreed to do what the Conservatives could not: pay the price for Brexit. The magnitude of this moment should not be underestimated, but nor should it be particularly celebrated. Right or wrong, the DUP’s decision to …
Twenty years a Terf
Twenty years ago, the slur of “Terf” had not been invented, and the concept of gender ideology was confined to university lectures on Judith Butler. Radical feminists were fighting for the rights of women, and everyone knew they didn’t have …
The Democrat extortion racket will backfire
In a viral speech earlier this month, the newly elected Argentine president Javier Milei accused Western leaders of embracing a vision of economic “collectivism” that will lead “to socialism, and therefore to poverty”. And in many ways, he’s right.
Signs …
The male baldness industrial complex
Shakespeare had it wrong: uneasy is the head that wears no crown. Because from Samson onwards, men have feared losing their hair. It’s something to do with ageing perhaps, a sense of retreat or fading virility — though for decades …