It is a drab Wednesday in April and I am sat naked in a transparent plastic shed. Tucked away in a forest near the sleepy town of Uckfield, a woman starts to hit me in the face with some birch …
How disastrous births haunt women
The third time I went into labour, I was determined to avoid getting told off. With both of my previous births, I had somehow managed to get things wrong. My errors the first time: going to hospital too early, then, …
AI has always plagued mankind
Why are the countries of the West sliding toward electronically enhanced totalitarianism? Was it inevitable that government employees and corporate technicians wielding digital and psychological tools would promote a false conspiracy theory to cripple a sitting American president, and suppress …
Inside Liberland: Europe’s Bitcoin micronation
Chugging down the Danube in a fisherman’s boat, past the unrecognised exclave known as Liberland, it’s hard to reconcile fantasy with reality. This patch of land — lushly forested, mosquito-ridden and boggy — remains unclaimed by neighbouring Croatia and Serbia, …
Washington DC is a failed city
If you had to pick the exact day when the young, affluent, and oblivious of Washington DC were forced to accept that they live in a failed city, 22 July 2021 would be as good a choice as any. That …
The French need a revolution
You have to wonder what Indian PM Narendra Modi, guest of honour at the Champs-Elysées military parade today, will be making of the political fever in France. The tremulous mood was captured well in his counterpart Elisabeth Borne’s recent interview …
At Nato, America recaptured Europe
It is now clear that the Russian invasion of Ukraine marked the end of one era in world politics and the beginning of a new one. As with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the collapse of détente …
Should Huw Edwards have been named?
The Yewtree investigations into historic sexual offences by public figures changed two things about the British relationship with celebrity. First, it made us more suspicious of it: the nice men in your living room had in several cases, it turned …
The Asian-American class war
In the metropolises of the West, shops that sell bubble tea — or boba, as it is commonly known — have proliferated over the past few years, a microcosm of the boom in East Asian cultural exports. At the same …
How the mob turned on Huw Edwards
I was at the BBC on Wednesday afternoon when the news broke that Huw Edwards was the person everyone has been speculating about. I could tell something was afoot, as the newsroom started rushing around, in anticipation of some incoming …
Milan Kundera’s last joke
Milan Kundera had the questionable good fortune to live through what seemed like the historic victory of his defence of the individual against the state — only to see his life’s work become shockingly relevant again before his death on …
Is Casey DeSantis the next Jackie Kennedy?
The critics of Casey DeSantis, wife to Republican presidential hopeful, Ron, can’t decide which derogatory stereotype they think best describes her. She’s been everything from a conniving Lady Macbeth in the carapace of a Disney princess, to a wannabe glamour …
Starmer should beware a Left-wing insurgency
Have Labour’s strategists achieved the impossible? Not only is the party 20 points ahead and in with a shot of winning four by-elections, but, perhaps even more impressively, its leader finally appears to be shrugging off his custardy sheen of …
The Prigozhin copycats are coming for Putin
Kremlinology is like reading tea leaves or astrology. It is closer to an art than a science — little is as it seems, and what information does trickle out has often only been released to service further palace intrigue. Nearly …
The death games of Ukraine
Down in a bunker a little way back from the Ukraine frontline, I am watching a staple of modern warfare: a drone attack in real time.
The command centre is a small room with three TV monitors, two of which …