It’s easy to fall off the radar at university. Exactly 20 years ago — 17 years old, awkward and terribly uncertain of myself — I did just that. Too young to drink legally (and apparently too ill-connected to procure a …
China isn’t as strong as you think
You wouldn’t have guessed from Narendra Modi’s beaming smile after the G20 last weekend that the global economy was running out of steam. The latest IMF forecast projects it to expand by 3% this year, down from the 3.5% anticipated …
Inside the Big Cannabis lobby
The spot was just off a country road in Kenilworth, a town in Warwickshire, at an events centre called the NAEC Stoneleigh. The week before, it had hosted the annual Stoneleigh Horse Show, a buttoned-up pageant of show-jumps and tweedy …
An Arctic war is coming
In a land of extremes, nowhere in the Arctic does the temperature oscillate more wildly than the tiny settlement of Fort Yukon in north-eastern Alaska. This village — of a few hundred residents belonging to the indigenous Gwich’in community, and …
Is this the end of the Soros empire?
Even in retreat, the Soros empire commands a feverish hysteria. When, last December, the 93-year-old George finally handed control of his Open Society Foundations (OSF) to his 37-year-old son, Alexander, many of his liberal supporters wondered whether it was the …
Why women need to feel fear
Feminists, when I was growing up, used to encourage girls to “get loud” and rail against the social pressure to be compliant and “nice”. We were taught to push back against the idea that women need to be appealing to …
Britain’s rulers should be more French
In the English-speaking world, we tend to place Charles de Gaulle and his confrontational style of politics, filled with strops and tantrums, into a category marked “The French”, where we can alternatively laugh at and be a bit scared by …
Las Vegas is the future of the West
Of the very few activities in my life that I count as being unambiguously improving, reading books and visiting authoritarian states probably score highest. Both are generally engaging, educational in some form or other, and force me to confront alternative …
The ‘segregated’ playdate that led to a bomb threat
I was preparing for a work call when I heard the telltale helicopter sounds overhead. I say “telltale” because my neighbourhood gets several different types of helicopter traffic, each with its own sonic profile and emotional resonance — TV news …
Britain is turning into South Africa
I’ve always suspected that Europeans are incapable of understanding South Africa, the strange and complicated nation where I was born and often return. At bottom, the issue is this: how can people so accustomed to safety, stability and a well-functioning …
Should women learn to love pain?
Reflecting on the subject of pain in his Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein concluded that the grammar of the concept had an essential relation to publicly recognisable forms of “pain-behaviour”: wincing, saying “ow”, yelping, crying, and so on. He thought that it …
Why America is seduced by the Obama sex scandal
There’s this face Tucker Carlson makes when he’s got a particularly wild story in the offing. The eyebrows knit together at the centre, the mouth is downturned with lips either slightly open or pursed in a pouty frown. Whoever wrote …
The emptiness of Macron’s grand strategy
In the latest battle for strategic autonomy, Emmanuel Macron has notched up a small victory. Last month, under French pressure, American Fiona Scott Morton resigned from her post as chief economist of the EU’s Directorate-General for Competition. Starting from this …
The dark arts of Starmer’s reshuffle
New uniforms, new haircuts and new shoes at the ready, many children went back to school this week (to the ones that aren’t about to crumble around their heads, that is). It was, too, the return of “Hogwarts” — many …
Burning Man is a capitalist lie
Marie Antoinette probably never said “Let them eat cake”. But she did provoke popular fury by building a model peasant village at Versailles, where she would retire to escape the pressures and opulence of court life, and even sometimes dress …