A rumour was born the last time my group Decius were out on the road.
If you linger long enough in Berghain’s Panorama bar, if you remain until Monday morning when the sun is back up, occasionally they’ll open the …
Will Israel-Hamas cause a world war?
As Israel continues to mourn and Gaza continues to be turned into rubble, many in the Middle East are coming to a grim realisation: that things could soon become much, much worse. Huge tectonic shifts now threaten to rupture the …
The tragic death of Labour Zionism
Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson once boasted that it was impossible “for a political party to be more committed to a national home for the Jews in Palestine than was Labour”. Keir Starmer only wishes he could be so confident …
How Putin exploits Russian antisemitism
Sunday’s ugly scenes at Makhachkala Airport in Russia’s Dagestan region, where a mob ran riot through the terminal and onto the runway in search of Jews disembarking from a plane from Israel, might suggest that Vladimir Putin is beginning to …
The real chaos of the ‘new normal’
“Generation gap” is a term that trips neatly off the tongue, often used to describe banal differences between older and younger people in matters of cultural taste, approaches to work, political opinion, and myriad other features of social life. Just …
California’s criminals need an audience
I was feeling an oddly serene mix of relief and pleasure and fatherly accomplishment, sitting in a barbershop on a sunny Saturday afternoon, watching my 12-year-old son get his hair cut roughly a month too late. As hanks of blond …
Will Jews return to the Ghetto?
It is a warm Monday morning in Rome, and the city’s ancient ghetto resembles an armed camp. As carabinieri line the streets, a cloud of melancholy hangs in the air: not only had more than 1,400 Jews recently been slaughtered …
The colonial hypocrisy of Japan
Because the first half of the 20th century is thought of in the West as an era of imperial decline, it’s easy to forget that, in these decades, there was one nation whose empire was fast expanding. Japan was on …
People are still being buried alive
I hadn’t given the dangers of being buried alive much thought before my visit to an Edgar Allan Poe museum in Richmond, Virginia. I knew what every schoolchild knows — that some Victorians were so terrified at the prospect of …
The genius of the World at War
In one of the opening scenes of Evelyn Waugh’s Men at Arms, the central character Guy Crouchback vacates his Italian castle in 1939 once the approaching conflagration can no longer be ignored. “He expected his country to go to war …
The trouble with attachment theory
I’ll tell you up front: I am an avoidant partner. I frequently withdraw into myself and become uncommunicative. In fights I get quiet rather than angry, saying less and less, making a partner feel like they have no ability to …
Yayoi Kusama doesn’t need a race reckoning
“I decided long ago that one must paint terror as well as beauty from life.” So says the titular character in “Pickman’s Model”, a short story by HP Lovecraft about how artists make monsters — or become them. Pickman’s paintings …
Where is the Left today?
There is something presumptuous lurking in the very phrase, “the Left”. Under a show of cosmopolitan inclusion, the term hides a reality of unconscious parochialism. The parochialism is both geographical and historical in nature.
First there is the implicit geographical …
The empty promise of Friends
This article was first published on 27 May, 2021
Neo fights his way free of the membrane. He sits bolt upright, slime sluicing from his bald skull, and stares in horror. Facing him is an endless vista of identical pods, …
Saudi Arabia’s empire of sand
There’s a slight hush and then a ripple across the room as he enters. “That’s MBS,” a delegate mutters in French, tugging at his neighbour to stand as Mohammed bin Salman, the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, strides into the …