“This district is the birthplace of the Black Panther Party,” Lateefah Simon proudly narrates, as she walks past murals of black nationalists. The camera then pans to shots of the University of California, Berkeley campus. “We taught the nation how …
Should nations have a right to conquest?
The two expulsions took place only a few years apart. In the first, starting in 1945, the Soviet Union took the lead in driving as many as 12 million ethnic Germans from territories that had previously belonged to Germany. They …
How safetyism killed playtime
There’s a certain type of British festival, where middle-class, middle-aged parents relive the glory days with their children in tow. It’s all cult bands from the Nineties, craft ales, and fairy lights in the broadleaved woodlands to make the walk …
After MAGA, a new Trump rises
As America inches ever closer to its next election, the rest of the world is now forced to face the fact that Donald Trump is almost guaranteed to be the Republican nominee, and the favourite to return to the White …
The Empireland delusion
Sathnam Sanghera is not fighting a “culture war”. The growing shelf of imperial history under his name might verge on the zone of engagement, and certainly emerged at a time of global reckoning over colonialism and race, but they are …
Why are women ditching the pill?
Like many women, I’ve tried most contraceptive methods. I soldiered on with Microgynon and Cerazette for years longer than I should have, and spent multiple afternoons in the university surgery with an infected implant. The copper coil was a medieval …
Life on Israel’s home front
By choice, I’ve worked with victims of war and atrocity. During my lengthy career as a psychologist, I’ve cried with scores of Holocaust survivors and their children. I’ve visited the killing fields of Poland and written extensively on the psychological …
The chaos behind Iran’s grand strategy
Reporting from Israel at the end of last year stirred various emotions in me, not least a constant feeling of mild claustrophobia. Not from the Hamas rockets that incrementally forced me to duck into bomb shelters, nor from the colossal …
Women are losing the abortion election
Ever since the Dobbs decision redefined the reproductive rights of American women, the issue of choice has started to resemble a frantic game of ping-pong. In red states, Republican-controlled senates immediately got busy passing abortion bans, sometimes in direct opposition …
Is there a realist case for Palestine?
Since October 7, foreign policy realists who were united in opposing escalation in Ukraine have split into two opposing camps. One side has taken a generally forgiving view of Israel’s response to Hamas’s terror assault. The other has been more …
Confessions of a hypochondriac
It’s been a difficult week for those with illness anxiety disorder — the group formerly known as hypochondriacs. Primed to react with a jolt of unpleasant adrenalin to any health-related headline, the already troubled sufferers were this week brought the …
ChatGPT will kill off the Romantic genius
You have to salute the brass balls of the Japanese literary novelist Rie Kudan. She was accepting one of Japan’s most prestigious literary awards, the Akutagawa Prize. The judges were hosing her new novel, The Tokyo Tower of Sympathy, down …
The curse of warrior women
If history teaches us anything, it’s that you can’t be a warrior woman without some guy wondering what you’d look like going commando. According to Herodotus, after the Greeks defeated the Amazons, they loaded three ships with captives — only …
Britain is still scarred by the miners’ defeat
In July 1984, Margaret Thatcher gave a speech to the 1922 Committee about the miners who had been on strike since March. “We had to fight the enemy without in the Falklands,” she said. “We always have to be aware …
Crystal Hefner came too late
Half the trick of business is knowing when to get out, and Hugh Hefner was a great businessman. “His timing was perfect,” said the New York Times obituary, when he died in September 2017. The comment referred to Hefner’s genius …