Ever since the Dobbs decision redefined the reproductive rights of American women, the issue of choice has started to resemble a frantic game of ping-pong. In red states, Republican-controlled senates immediately got busy passing abortion bans, sometimes in direct opposition …
Is there a realist case for Palestine?
Since October 7, foreign policy realists who were united in opposing escalation in Ukraine have split into two opposing camps. One side has taken a generally forgiving view of Israel’s response to Hamas’s terror assault. The other has been more …
Confessions of a hypochondriac
It’s been a difficult week for those with illness anxiety disorder — the group formerly known as hypochondriacs. Primed to react with a jolt of unpleasant adrenalin to any health-related headline, the already troubled sufferers were this week brought the …
ChatGPT will kill off the Romantic genius
You have to salute the brass balls of the Japanese literary novelist Rie Kudan. She was accepting one of Japan’s most prestigious literary awards, the Akutagawa Prize. The judges were hosing her new novel, The Tokyo Tower of Sympathy, down …
The curse of warrior women
If history teaches us anything, it’s that you can’t be a warrior woman without some guy wondering what you’d look like going commando. According to Herodotus, after the Greeks defeated the Amazons, they loaded three ships with captives — only …
Britain is still scarred by the miners’ defeat
In July 1984, Margaret Thatcher gave a speech to the 1922 Committee about the miners who had been on strike since March. “We had to fight the enemy without in the Falklands,” she said. “We always have to be aware …
Crystal Hefner came too late
Half the trick of business is knowing when to get out, and Hugh Hefner was a great businessman. “His timing was perfect,” said the New York Times obituary, when he died in September 2017. The comment referred to Hefner’s genius …
Dean Phillips: America’s first AI candidate
As Washington and the political world spent yesterday pouring over Nikki Haley’s disappointing performance in New Hampshire, another less well-known challenger was also licking his wounds. On the same night, Dean Phillips was hoping to pull off a surprise victory …
New Hampshire revealed America’s true divide
New Hampshire, then, was far from Donald Trump’s difficult second album. If anything, it was another performance of his Greatest Hits. His path to the White House is firmly in sight; Nikki Haley’s primary challenge, by contrast, has been rendered …
Israel is still winning the political war
Even if its form is military, war is always a political struggle. And in spite of all the anti-Israel demonstrations around the world, Israel is definitely winning the political war — the real one, waged not in the streets but …
Is Iran sexually repressed?
We tend to associate Iran with repressive morality police hunting down women for wearing loose hijabs. We think of 22-year-old Jina Mahsa Amini, who died in police custody a year ago after being caught wearing an “improper” headscarf — and …
Farewell to my Princess Diana dog
My dog Maisie bore a striking resemblance to Princess Diana. Looking across at her one evening, she shot me a look and I saw it. With those beseeching big eyes, she was a dead-ringer for the People’s Princess in that …
The false hope of the new Alzheimer’s drugs
“Dementia steals people’s lives, turns their relationships upside down, destroys their hopes and dreams,” said David Cameron, as president of Alzheimer’s UK. This was back in 2017, and his ambitions were impressive: the Government had just published plans for £60 …
Modi has created a new theocracy
India’s entry into the ranks of the world’s surviving theocracies — Iran, Afghanistan, the Vatican City — arrived bathetically. When the history of the nation’s descent from secularism to Hindu nationalism is written, it might end in Ayodhya. Just after …
How Labour lost the Welsh Valleys
Last year, I found myself back in the Rhondda valley and the village where I spent most of my childhood. As I walked through its typically inclement grey terraced streets, I came upon the boarded-up premises of the Ton and …