The end of holiday season is upon us, and a chance to apply a new perspective to life as it slowly returns to boring normality. For a few short weeks, if you were lucky enough, you were able to immerse …
Beware the new leviathans
Are men and women naturally good? The philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau thought so, though he admits that we began in a state of “savagery” in which moral terms such as good and bad simply didn’t apply. From there, however, the human …
Can a psychologist find you love?
We spend our lives chasing it, nurturing it, or watching it slip away. Yet the truth about love seems to dissolve in the light, evading any attempt at definition. Are we any closer than the famously love-struck ancient Greeks to …
Why Sweden tolerates Quran burning
Sweden has long been a country known for its commitment to tolerance and its embrace of human rights: a “moral superpower” devoted to foreign aid, progressive causes and support of developing nations. All the more surprising, then, that Sweden now …
Comrade Starmer has never had class
Has Keir Starmer traded in his barrister’s wig for a hammer and sickle? He certainly seems keen for voters to think so, with his repeated pledges to smash “the class ceiling”. The “project” of Labour, Comrade Starmer believes, is to …
I went to Gabon for football – and found a massacre
The taxi pulled up outside an unremarkable concrete block. It wasn’t quite what I’d been expecting but I paid and got out. An election banner drooped from a second-floor balcony. Maybe this was the right place.
It was January 2017, …
Vivek Ramaswamy is the Macbeth candidate
In the arena of modern American politics, few figures have enjoyed an ascent as rapid as Vivek Ramaswamy. This 38-year-old son of Tamil Brahmin immigrants has positioned himself as the intellectual heir to Donald Trump in the current Republican primary …
Has the Church stopped working?
Ever since the Enlightenment — in fact, ever since the ancient philosophers complained about the young and their lack of morals — religion has feared for its future. So the front page of The Times yesterday was hardly a scoop.…
The dawn of the Brics World Order
Last week’s Brics summit was supposed to herald the dawn of a new world order. It would announce the end of the American era and the rise of another, this time belonging to developing nations. It would even, according to …
How Putin is weaponising Prigozhin
Even in Russia, where the line between fact and fiction is often impossibly blurred, the life and death of Yevgeny Prigozhin is a fantastic tale. Two months ago, having been pilloried as a traitor who had threatened to bring down …
Imagine a future without children
Of all the grim futures on offer today, climate change is unquestionably the doomsday scenario that weighs most heavily on the minds of the most people. Despite the raging hype that AI might one day turn against its creator, no …
The new front in the war against HIV
When the head of the UK’s largest and longest-running HIV charity, the Terrence Higgins Trust, told this year’s Pride London parade that Britain could soon be the first country in the world to eradicate HIV, the cheer that went up …
The Age of the Museum is over
A decade ago, I spent more months than originally desired living in the bush of Sudan’s remote and war-torn Blue Nile state with SPLA-N rebels from the Uduk tribe, whose 20,000 odd members had found themselves stranded, by an accident …
Liberalism’s sin was born in the Cold War
If the contemporary political scene is strewn with wreckage, it is clearer than ever that “neoconservatism” and “neoliberalism” did much of the damage. More than any other, these two ideologies have afflicted both the centre-right and centre-left, fostering the sense …
The trouble with conversion therapy
Group belonging is important for human beings. We are tribal mammals and evolution has left some of us as terrified of social exclusion as we are of physical death. But as always, you can have too much of a good …