Every January I think of eastern Ukraine. Wherever I am in the world, it’s never as cold as the winter months I spent there during the height of war between Kyiv and Moscow between 2014-2015. Technology stops working, your knees …
Parents are the new political tribe
Shortly after Glenn Youngkin was sworn in as governor of Virginia on Saturday, he issued a flurry of day-one executive orders. With those initial actions, the first Republican to win statewide in the Commonwealth since 2009 was true to the …
What lockdown took from my parents
In the uneasy, bright days of the first lockdown of 2020, my father remembered 1946, and his own father setting off on the train from Wallingford to London to debrief Admiral Dönitz, Hitler’s successor for the last days of the …
The annihilation of Michel Houellebecq
In Michel Houellebecq’s startlingly long new novel, the 735-page Anéantir, our Everyman protagonist Paul Raison is returned by family illness to his childhood bedroom. There, in typical Houellbecqian fashion, he jabs us with a completely heterodox, completely confident provocation: Matrix …
How long can humans survive?
In the deep ocean, occasionally, a whale carcass falls to the bottom of the sea. Most of the time, in the state of nature, creatures have just about enough to survive. But the first creatures to find the whale have …
Europe is blind to the next jihadi threat
It’s been a while since Isis staged a major attack on the West. Occasionally the group’s degraded propaganda organs will try and claim one, but even that is less common nowadays. Still, just because Isis central isn’t orchestrating mass murder …
How to bring down a Prime Minister
A grey, chilly morning in the heart of London. Amid intense speculation, the Conservatives have gathered to discuss the Prime Minister’s future. Nobody doubts that he’s a character, a winner, a showman with the common touch. But there have simply …
How our universities became sheep factories
A joke about education in Soviet Russia:
– My wife has been going to cooking school for three years.
– She must really cook well by now!
– No, they’ve only reached the part about the Twentieth Communist Party Congress …
Farewell, then, Gina Miller
“We’ve had to scale the event back,” the bald man told me.
It was less than half an hour before Gina Miller was due to launch her new political party, True & Fair, in a Westminster conference centre. Other than …
This is not how civil wars start
I moved recently to a remote part of Northern California, where in a couple weeks an election will decide whether or not allies of the local militia take control of the county government. It’s a fraught situation, in a part …
The misogyny of the NHS
When it became clear two years ago that the NHS could be overwhelmed by a terrifying new virus, Britain leapt to its support: we clapped, we donated and we decided to paint rainbows. What we didn’t do, however, was question …
Will nudge theory survive the pandemic?
In 2015, during a public debate on behavioural science in Lucerne, I was accused of supporting tactics befitting an unsavoury authoritarian regime. At the time, knowing how well-intentioned my colleagues were, I thought this was, quite frankly, nuts.
I remain …
Kamala Harris was set up to fail
When I was a young girl in Somalia, I would listen to the grown-ups around me ask my brother: “What would you like to be when you grow up?” No one ever asked me this.
But I always interrupted. I …
What the West gets wrong about Putin
In 1999, Vladimir Putin suddenly sprang from bureaucratic obscurity to the office of Prime Minister. When, a few months later, Yeltsin unexpectedly resigned and Putin was voted in as President, governments around the world were taken by surprise yet again. …
Who will rise from the Boris chaos?
The inability to organise a piss-up in a brewery is the definition of uselessness; however, Boris Johnson’s government seems determined to break new ground.
Back in the spring of 2020, with the whole country under lockdown, it was vitally important …