What’s the point of physical exercise? What’s the purpose of heaving, puffing and snorting your way around a gym three or four times a week? Personal health, obviously. The opportunity for competition at a demanding level of physical engagement too. …
Does Ukraine need to compromise?
Over the past year and a half, calls for peace negotiations between Ukraine and Russia have been widely dismissed by the Ukrainian government and its more maximalist online supporters as either Putinist propaganda or defeatism. Yet the so-far lacklustre results …
Trump colluded with the Swamp
In a radio address to the nation, delivered in 1943 as the tide of war was beginning to turn, Franklin Roosevelt surveyed the progress on America’s home front as it churned out materiel at lightning pace: “I saw thousands of …
How abduction panic became big business
Why did Phoebe Copas shoot her Uber driver? The 48-year-old got into a car driven by Daniel Piedra Garcia on June 16 thinking she was heading to El Paso in Texas. But when she saw a sign reading “Juárez, Mexico” …
The snake within the suffragette movement
A gardener and a suffragette meet by chance on a road by the River Thames. He is carrying a flower-pot, and she is on her way to burn down a house. So starts Stella Benson’s satirical debut novel I Pose …
The cruelty of Canada’s euthanasia policy
With uncharacteristic humility, I would concede that a few positions I’ve argued fiercely in print might be viable on paper, but in practice are a disaster. The “war on drugs” being a fiasco, years ago I advocated the legalisation of …
The West is losing the plot
Since the rise of psychoanalysis in the late 19th century, philosophers, psychologists, historians, and cultural theorists have all sought refuge in the comfort of so-called “narratives”. In university classrooms across the world, this nebulous term is now frequently deployed when …
How Ukraine is using animal propaganda
A “big, white bear of a dog” called Bayraktar, named after the Turkish-made drone that neutralised a Russian convoy heading for Kyiv; a scarred black poodle called Dishika, after the belt-fed, tripod-mounted DShK machine gun that has taken down dozens …
Non-places are robbing us of life
At Leeds-Bradford airport, as the closure of my departure gate fast approached, I stood at a security conveyor waiting for the results of a swab of my daughter’s rucksack. My eyes pleaded with the put-upon official to speed things up. …
What’s the point of the Women’s World Cup?
A useful guide to the significance of a sporting achievement can be gleaned from how desperate politicians are to be associated with it. And given that within minutes of England’s 3-1 World Cup semi-final win over Australia on Wednesday, Lib …
Let women be promiscuous
Once upon a time, Darwinian theory was regarded as anathema to feminism. It presents gender stereotypes as inherent and predetermined, rather than as a production of socialisation and implies that women should fulfil “traditional roles”. No wonder it found a …
How MBS wins friends and influences people
Prior to the 1973 Arab oil embargo, nobody cared much for Saudi Arabia: a largely nomadic, pre-industrial desert nation with a population smaller than London. But in the last 50 years, it has become a friend worth cultivating. So much …
Why men need bad-boy literature
In so many ways, the “crisis of masculinity” is a crisis of imagination. We have a vivid, if generalised, image of its victim: the lost boy of modernity surrounded with his clichés of video games, online porn and Jordan Petersons. …
Artists have forgotten how to draw
Think of poor Antonio Mini. Once a student of Michelangelo, Mini is now remembered as the most famous slacker in the history of European art. One day, the maestro sketched a couple of Virgins and instructed his pupil to copy …
Here come the female Andrew Tates
“Men do not love you, okay? So stop thinking that they do. They tolerate you. They lust you. That’s it.”
The YouTube influencer SheRa Seven’s advice for young women is as sharp as the wings of her black eyeliner. To …