First, there was Mali; then came Burkina Faso. Today, in the epic saga that is the anti-Western revolt sweeping across the Sahel, it is the turn of Niger to play the protagonist — the third country to suffer a coup …
America is now a zombie state
“Every nation gets the government it deserves,” wrote the philosopher Joseph de Maistre, and some are getting it good and hard right now. De Maistre’s moral interpretation of politics admits of exceptions, but the United States in 2023 is not …
Why you should be a thick traveller
Anthropology is in some ways an odd and creepy thing to do. Anthropologists spend a lot of time watching people, often people who are very different from themselves, in the hope of understanding them. If done wrong, as it has …
The invisibility of autistic girls
“Let’s go to page seven,” says the psychologist.
I flick through the papers on my lap. There it is, at the bottom: “Autism, without accompanying intellectual impairment and without accompanying language impairment.” I read that I fulfil all seven diagnostic …
What really causes Trump Anxiety Disorder?
Donald Trump stops me sleeping, and I am not alone. The multiply indicted former president’s fans sneeringly call it “Trump Derangement Syndrome”. Psychologists, who since 2016 have seen a rise in people anxious about the state of the world, call …
The cult of Plastic Woman
How fantastic is life in plastic? I’m not talking about Barbie here, though of course the film’s defining moment is Gloria’s bitter feminist monologue: “I’m just so tired of watching myself and every single other woman tie herself into knots …
Why Faroe Islanders kill whales
Three bottlenose whales have come to Kaldbaksfjorður. They can be easily seen from the winding road that skirts the edge of the narrow sound, ten minutes’ drive from Tórshavn, the capital of the Faroe Islands. Two are adults, twice the …
Inside Tony Blair Inc.
I
At the end of every week, Tony Blair receives his “box” to review over the weekend. It is no longer the tatty, old red briefcase of a Prime Minister, but a virtual one accessible from his laptop wherever he …
The sex coach is killing intimacy
There’s a scene in the movie Demolition Man where two characters have sex — or rather, what passes for sex in the futuristic utopia where the film takes place. The act itself has been replaced by a cybernetic facsimile thereof: …
The four thinkers who took on the mob
What is the formative connection between the private self and other people? Or, as the architect of libertarianism Ayn Rand once put it, how should we order “the two principles fighting within human consciousness — the individual and the collective, …
How Twitter lost the libs
“Bliss was it in that dawn to be online, but to be chatting shit with your mates was very heaven” — William Wordsworth
It’s been a while since anyone would believe any ascribed quote on Twitter. In my trembling little …
Rugby league can save the Brexit dream
It must have taken a lot for Boris Johnson — onetime Eton prop-forward; archetypal rugby union boy — to go begging for the votes of those who play rugby league. But as Britain went to the polls in 2019, Johnson …
Canada’s cynical immigration racket
When Canada’s population hit the 40 million mark earlier this summer, it was celebrated as a milestone and a “signal that Canada remains a dynamic and welcoming country”, in the words of the country’s chief statistician. The Washington Post, among …
The Donald Trump Monster Movie
In Hollywood sci-fi movies from the Fifties, there is often a moment when the US military drops an atomic bomb on a monster. It then invariably emerges from the radioactive cloud unscathed — to the disappointment and horror of those …
The new paganism of the digital age
Is it weird where you are? It so often seems that we’re now living in the astounding science-fiction future of our dreams. Yet although it has turned out dystopian in ways we hadn’t quite predicted, there is also a sense …