God Save The King. The announcement yesterday that King Charles is receiving treatment for cancer has sent another tremor through a Britain that feels frailer by the day.
And yet, this reminder of our King’s frailty, at 75, also stands …
The future is barbarian
The wars in Ukraine and the Middle East have been on many minds recently, not least because neither has been working out the way our politicians and pundits insisted they would. As a result, a genuine revolution in military affairs …
Everyone loses in America’s misinformation war
The below forms part of the testimony Lee Fang delivered to the House Select Committee on Weaponization on 6 February, 2024.
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Chairman Jordan, Ranking Member Plaskett, esteemed members of the Select Committee,
As an independent investigative journalist, it is …
E.P. Thompson, Marxist rebel
Edward Palmer Thompson was an unlikely Little Englander. He was born 100 years ago into the sort of polymathic, globe-trotting family that this country no longer seems to produce. His parents met in Jerusalem in 1918, where his mother taught …
The burden of Jewish privilege
We Jews have an old joke about the Holocaust: Abie Cohen, after being gassed and burnt in Auschwitz, goes to heaven. After a few weeks of waiting patiently, he eventually gets to see God and demands to know if the …
America’s arrogance has kneecapped Israel and Ukraine
It seems unlikely that America will make it to this November without being forced into a very public reckoning with a decade of disastrous foreign policy failures. Taken separately, any one of America’s impending losses in the Middle East, Eastern …
Is it naive to believe asylum seekers?
Elizabeth I put it best. “I have no desire to make windows into men’s souls.” In other words, who knows what people really believe? When I baptise people, I ask them — or those who stand in for them — …
Can Jordan Bardella seduce France?
If you asked an AI-powered robot to generate a new star for France’s hard-Right National Rally (RN), it would probably produce someone just like Jordan Bardella. The MEP and head of the party’s ticket for June’s elections to European Parliament …
Techno-admin will ruin your life
An older relative of mine — I’ll call her Jan — moved house a couple of years ago. She’s in her late seventies, and technology scares her: she doesn’t like the fact that everything is done via app or website. …
The death penalty degrades America
Last week, having tried and failed to kill him with the more traditional lethal injection, the state of Alabama suffocated Kenneth Smith to death for his role in a 1988 murder-for-hire. In this unprecedented method, which the state has called …
Andrew Sullivan: What I got wrong about Trump
Andrew Sullivan is one of America’s best known political observers and writers. He is an independent-minded conservative who supported Obama, was a leader of the gay marriage movement, and has since argued forcefully against Donald Trump. His Substack is one …
Hell is your Facebook friends
How will Facebook celebrate its 20th birthday? Perhaps it will create one of those cute video montages they like to generate at significant moments. Starting with a tinkling piano soundtrack, a couple of breathless friend requests, and some self-conscious, tentative …
Hell is your Facebook friends
How will Facebook celebrate its 20th birthday? Perhaps it will create one of those cute video montages they like to generate at significant moments. Starting with a tinkling piano soundtrack, a couple of breathless friend requests, and some self-conscious, tentative …
Flailing Germany is the future of Europe
For much of the Merkel era, Germany stood as an island of economic and political stability amid Europe’s perennially stormy waters. Those days, however, seem like a distant memory. Europe is still in crisis — but now Germany is the …
The excoriating comedy of Auschwitz
The most-told joke about Auschwitz surfaces in different forms. As I first heard it while a teenager in “north London” — not just a cluster of adjacent postcodes, of course, but shorthand for a mindset that one kind of pundit …