Why do some people take a peep at the last few pages of a novel first? Yes, we know it’s cheating. But forget whether a cheeky glance at the ending constitutes a great crime against reading — why do many …
The Medicis Knew How to Level Up
What’s the point of levelling-up? The government’s white paper on the subject was published yesterday — to less than glowing reviews.
But there’s a school of thought that its authors were doomed from the start. If you believe that geography …
The hidden virtue of reality TV
Noel Coward once said that “television is for appearing on, not watching”, but I’m not convinced. Since the turn of the century, I’ve turned down a vast array of reality shows, starting with Celebrity Detox and ending with Celebrity Big …
How Britain became Putin’s playground
On Monday, Liz Truss warned Russia’s oligarchs that there will be “nowhere to hide” their dirty money in London. Which is pretty weird when you think about it, since the statement includes the implicit admission that the money is already …
Should we let children catch Omicron?
As we enter our third Covid year, much of the world is getting back to normal. Denmark yesterday dropped most of its Covid restrictions and welcomed back “the life we knew before”. In the UK, face masks and Covid passports …
Why Canada’s truckers will lose
The world does not usually pay much attention to Ottawa, Canada’s sleepy capital city. But over the weekend it generated international headlines. A “Freedom Convoy” consisting of anti-vaccine mandate truckers descended on the Canadian parliament to protest cross-border vaccine mandates …
Vasectomies won’t save the planet
When H. G. Wells imagined the end of the world, he thought of a salt dead sea under a dying sun. His time traveller, having navigated his machine 30 million years into the future, saw this: algal slime, lichenous rocks, …
Why the experts are losing
We tend to characterise totalitarianism as a top-down affair, where the state controls the thoughts and actions of its citizenry according to the whims of some politburo. But in the West today, the project of information control and narrative management …
The rise of Europe’s fake populists
After seven inconclusive rounds of voting, on Saturday the Italian parliament re-elected Sergio Mattarella as the country’s president and official head of state. It didn’t come entirely as a surprise. As I noted on UnHerd, the two most likely winners …
Raquel Rosario Sánchez won’t be silenced
Raquel Rosario Sánchez should be graduating this month with a PhD from one of the UK’s most prestigious universities. Instead, she will be in court, suing the University of Bristol for allegedly failing to protect her from bullying and harassment.…
René Girard’s apocalypse is now
“The apocalypse,” declared René Girard, “has already begun.” The most influential philosopher in the world today was on a messianic mission before his death seven years ago.
Since then, his work has found acclaim far beyond the academy: business gurus, …
What Ukraine can learn from Israel
Almost eight years ago I watched a Ukrainian teenager lob a can of Mojito Royce Ice into a ditch and had the first stirrings of what the future might hold. It was May 2014, and I had travelled to the …
Scientific tyranny has captured America
Plato’s dialogues are full of strikingly individual characters who have been stamped by the accidents of their time and place but are nevertheless familiar to us from our own. A particularly fine example is the teacher of rhetoric Thrasymachus, who …
How Covid stole our privacy
As soon as I turn on my phone, it becomes a node in a network, giving me access to the entire world. But it also gives Apple access to information about me and my behaviour; I become another source in …
Putin’s next move
A couple of weeks ago, in a biting sleet wind, I visited the graveyard of the tiny village of Bohoniki in Poland’s far north east, home to Poland’s minuscule Tatar Muslim minority, descendents of the Mongol Golden Horde. On the …