What is Judith Butler afraid of?

Worried about doctors giving fertility-destroying drugs to physically healthy teens? Perturbed by the placing of rapist males alongside female prisoners, or the allowing of any male into a woman’s changing room on his say-so? Annoyed by the sight of hulking …

The ugly return of homophobia

As a child of the Eighties and Nineties, I remember well that homosexuals were fair game in the mainstream media. One columnist in The Star railed against “Wooftahs, pooftahs, nancy boys, queers, lezzies — the perverts whose moral sin is …

Britain’s farmers need to revolt

In The Shepherd’s Life, his memoir about following the family tradition of Cumbrian hill farming, James Rebanks highlights the obsession of “modern industrial communities” with the importance of “going somewhere”. “The implication,” he observes, “is an idea I have come …

Is black trauma porn over?

Monk Ellison, a struggling black college professor, writes My Pafology as a prank: the stereotype-laden novel is a clapback at the publishers who equate “Black stories” with tropes of poverty, brutality, and violence.

But the joke, as it turns out, …

Why we need genocide cinema

“I don’t like getting involved in a genocide-off,” said Jonathan Glazer about his film, The Zone of Interest, which offers a chillingly clinical, fly-on-the-wall view of the Commandant of Auschwitz, Rudolf Höss, and his family as they go about their …

How lads’ mags went soft

“We hired a helicopter, we got hold of a sniper rifle, we shot radioactive wolves…” Writers at loaded magazine used to pride themselves on their wild gonzo journalism and madcap antics. It was, as founding editor James Brown described it, …