To say that The Game has aged badly would be to understate how outrageous it was even in its own time: 20 years ago, just as women had finally become empowered to pursue sex on its own merits, and on …
How Islamophobic is Lee Anderson?
Sometime during the late 20th century, the Irish Republican movement decided to align itself with the Palestinian cause in an attempt to build — as they saw it — a kind of global anti-colonial alliance. In response, the Loyalist movement …
Fifty years on, who governs?
After months of speculation, the beleaguered Conservative prime minister summoned the cameras to Downing Street to make a special announcement. The economy was stagnating and his attempts to bring down inflation had been hammered by an energy crisis. Public sector …
Russell Vought: America’s false Christian Nationalist King
Last week, Donald Trump accused the Left of wanting to “tear down crosses… and cover them up with social justice flags”. “But no one will be touching the cross of Christ under the Trump administration,” he reassured a convention of …
Bad therapy is stunting our kids
The vast majority of therapists today are women. So, too, are the vast majority of their clients. But the earliest ones were almost all men. And, whatever we think of him now, Sigmund Freud’s ideas on infant development were more …
The realist case for Israel
Navigating the wars in Ukraine and Gaza has brought the political theory of realism to the fore, becoming a sudden mainstay of popular and journalistic analysis. More than anyone, University of Chicago professor John Mearsheimer, the doyen of American realism, …
Britain doesn’t need a sick king
If we were living in the world of mythology, King Charles’s cancer might have some dire consequences. It’s possible that the entire economy would collapse, famine would kill off millions of citizens and those who survived might perish of plague. …
The men paying to be taller
When Ryan* arrived in Istanbul he was 5’7” — but when he returned to the UK he was 5’10”. By having his legs surgically broken and then extended at the glacial rate of 1mm per day, he had achieved his …
The Machiavelli of Meta
In six years, Nick Clegg has gone from political has-been to one of the most powerful executives at one of the world’s biggest tech firms: President of Global Affairs at Meta. As one of Mark Zuckerberg’s most trusted consiglieri, Clegg …
South Africa’s stagnant election
Shortly before Britain’s skelm (furtive) and short-lived annexation of the Transvaal Boer republic, the Victorian travel writer Anthony Trollope said this of the unfortunate country:
“These people in the Transvaal would not pay a stiver of tax, there was in …
Why are Americans becoming more stupid?
“The empires of the future are the empires of the mind,” said Winston Churchill. And judging by the state of education in America, it seems both of those empires could soon crumble. The dysfunction is evident from top to bottom: …
My torment as a gamer girl
Until recently, I did not consider myself a “gamer”. I still flinch at the term, probably because the reputation of gaming is impossibly, incorrigibly lame — adolescent, feverish, and with the stale whiff of the teenaged bedroom. I, conversely, am …
The repression of Soviet Ukraine
“Whichever way this war ends,” thought Volodymyr Ishchenko on 24 February 2022, “I will no longer have a homeland.” In the preface to his new book, Towards The Abyss, the iconoclastic sociologist outlines his Soviet-Ukrainian identity as distinct from Ukraine’s …
Why I never gave up on Manchester United
I wondered if we would ever do this again. Sachin, Carlo, Kier and I watching a Manchester United game in my living room. The dog barking randomly, knocking things over with its tail. Pizza on its way. Not unexpectedly, Wolves …
Who’s afraid of a female brain?
For decades now, an axiom of middle-class feminism has decreed that there are no important inbuilt differences between male and female brains. In fact, so the favoured story goes, there are no male and female brains at all, except in …