It is an odd feature of America’s political system that the drawn-out handover of power from one ruler to his successor takes place over the Christmas holidays: the liminal moment when the waning year gives birth to its successor, a …
The New Orleans killer was an all-American loser
There is much that remains murky about Shamsud-Din Jabbar, who rammed his truck into New Year’s Eve revellers in New Orleans, murdering 15 of them. But we do know this much: He was Texan-born and -raised, an Army veteran who …
Why the Left needs to watch Star Trek
On 9 February 1967, hours after the US Air Force had levelled the Port of Haiphong and several Vietnamese airfields, NBC aired a Star Trek episode featuring a concept that clashed mercilessly with what had just happened. Under the “Prime …
Snobs miss the rare beauty of darts
A world-champion darts player writes home…
Dear Mother and Father,
Shame you can’t congratulate me. I am, I know, a disappointment to you. You hoped I would follow in your footsteps and become a literary critic or expositor of abstruse …
Why girls deserve a drink
Remember those first moments of alcohol-fuelled exhilaration when you were young? The energy rising lightly in your solar plexus and making your cheeks ache from smiling; and how time would drop away, so that there was only now, tonight, this? …
The West still doesn’t understand Iraq
Last year was, on balance, a miserable one for the world. And while only a fool attempts to predict the future in geopolitics, I am firm in the conviction that 2025 will be worse.
If 2024 was depressing, it was …
MAGA’s divisions can’t be healed
Even before his return to the Oval Office, the coalition that allowed Trump to win the election is fracturing. It is still too early to tell just how serious the rift caused by the H-1B visa row really is. But …
How André Gide made the modern memoir
In the May of 1921, André Gide spent a long evening with Marcel Proust. Much of the conversation revolved around homosexuality, with the older writer showing Proust some pages of an autobiography he was writing. “You can say anything you …
Why Trump won’t end the war in Ukraine
The imminent return of Donald Trump to the White House has dramatically reframed the discussion about the Ukraine war. After years of insisting on a Ukrainian military victory at any cost, the Western political and media establishment appears to be …
How John Updike invented Brat
Harry Angstrom — better known by his nickname, Rabbit — has the typical problem of a 26-year-old Western man. He feels trapped. Trapped by the small apartment he rents, and trapped by his job demonstrating kitchen gadgets in a department …
Ozempic could destroy modern civilisation
Should I start taking Ozempic? I found myself pondering this question recently as I walked past a local shop I like to call the Dopamine Store.
The Dopamine Store, the first shop I pass as I turn onto my local …
The new Sino-Indian War
Expect bloodshed. The opening salvos have been fired between India and China in Asia’s bizarre Historikerstreit. Its instigators, strangely enough, are two British historians — Peter Frankopan and William Dalrymple — who substantively agree with one another. Not that this …
Why progressives should talk to their enemies
“Free and open debate,” the Reverend Jesse Jackson once told me, “is part of the bedrock of democracy.” Anyone who doubts the civil rights leader’s sincerity need only look at his 1977 debate with David Duke. For 60 minutes, with …
How Europe crashed its car industry
The Mirafiori car plant is the last surviving automobile factory in Turin, the historical engine of the Italian car industry. At Mirafiori’s post-war peak, Fiat manufactured one million vehicles a year, employing 60 000 people. For much of this past …
Walt Whitman: the original Substacker
I can remember exactly where I was when I first read Walt Whitman. Lying on the bed in my girlfriend’s dorm room in college, I started reading “Song of Myself” from Leaves of Grass out loud and, much to my …