Sweden has long been a country known for its commitment to tolerance and its embrace of human rights: a “moral superpower” devoted to foreign aid, progressive causes and support of developing nations. All the more surprising, then, that Sweden now …
Comrade Starmer has never had class
Has Keir Starmer traded in his barrister’s wig for a hammer and sickle? He certainly seems keen for voters to think so, with his repeated pledges to smash “the class ceiling”. The “project” of Labour, Comrade Starmer believes, is to …
I went to Gabon for football – and found a massacre
The taxi pulled up outside an unremarkable concrete block. It wasn’t quite what I’d been expecting but I paid and got out. An election banner drooped from a second-floor balcony. Maybe this was the right place.
It was January 2017, …
Vivek Ramaswamy is the Macbeth candidate
In the arena of modern American politics, few figures have enjoyed an ascent as rapid as Vivek Ramaswamy. This 38-year-old son of Tamil Brahmin immigrants has positioned himself as the intellectual heir to Donald Trump in the current Republican primary …
Has the Church stopped working?
Ever since the Enlightenment — in fact, ever since the ancient philosophers complained about the young and their lack of morals — religion has feared for its future. So the front page of The Times yesterday was hardly a scoop.…
The dawn of the Brics World Order
Last week’s Brics summit was supposed to herald the dawn of a new world order. It would announce the end of the American era and the rise of another, this time belonging to developing nations. It would even, according to …
How Putin is weaponising Prigozhin
Even in Russia, where the line between fact and fiction is often impossibly blurred, the life and death of Yevgeny Prigozhin is a fantastic tale. Two months ago, having been pilloried as a traitor who had threatened to bring down …
Imagine a future without children
Of all the grim futures on offer today, climate change is unquestionably the doomsday scenario that weighs most heavily on the minds of the most people. Despite the raging hype that AI might one day turn against its creator, no …
The new front in the war against HIV
When the head of the UK’s largest and longest-running HIV charity, the Terrence Higgins Trust, told this year’s Pride London parade that Britain could soon be the first country in the world to eradicate HIV, the cheer that went up …
The Age of the Museum is over
A decade ago, I spent more months than originally desired living in the bush of Sudan’s remote and war-torn Blue Nile state with SPLA-N rebels from the Uduk tribe, whose 20,000 odd members had found themselves stranded, by an accident …
Liberalism’s sin was born in the Cold War
If the contemporary political scene is strewn with wreckage, it is clearer than ever that “neoconservatism” and “neoliberalism” did much of the damage. More than any other, these two ideologies have afflicted both the centre-right and centre-left, fostering the sense …
The trouble with conversion therapy
Group belonging is important for human beings. We are tribal mammals and evolution has left some of us as terrified of social exclusion as we are of physical death. But as always, you can have too much of a good …
The hypocrisy of Australia’s Net Zero policy
An unbroken canopy of ancient eucalypts rides over the ridges of the Atherton Tablelands and disappears into the horizon. Queensland’s wet, tropical ecosystem is like nowhere else on Earth, the sacred remnants of the ancient Gondwanan forest that covered Australia …
Foucault foresaw our identity crisis
A common experience these days is being told that people don’t talk about things that people are constantly talking about. “Let’s Face It” — declared a recent headline on the website of McLean Hospital, the famous psychiatric facility in Boston …
Why you should let your teen read smut
You can read anything at the beach. I live in a seaside university town, and it’s not uncommon to see bikini-clad students devouring Crime and Punishment or Principles of Political Economics through sunglasses. Of course, this works the other way, …