Consider famous moments of moral crisis throughout the ages, real or imagined. Peter denying that he knew Jesus before the cock crowed, say; or Jean Paul Sartre’s former pupil in Existentialism Is A Humanism, torn between joining the Free French …
The secret messages behind the lab-leak cover-up
“What happened to Oppenheimer damaged our ability as a society to debate honestly about scientific theory,” wrote Kai Bird, author of the biography on which Christopher Nolan’s new film is based. “Yet too many of our citizens still distrust scientists …
How the Saudi Empire bought football
I was five years old, desperately precocious when it came to football, and furious that my mam hadn’t let us watch England against Czechoslovakia in the 1982 World Cup. We were on holiday, and that meant that we had to …
The impossible truth about Afghanistan
In “The Impossible Fact”, the 20th-century German poet Christian Morgenstern tells the story of an academic who undergoes a traumatising experience. He staggers home, wraps damp cloths around his forehead and collapses into his armchair to process what has happened. …
Digital oligarchs have weaponised the banks
The debanking of Nigel Farage demonstrates the power of a law that is already being enforced without having been formalised. Found guilty of crimes by state censors, secret committees of bureaucrats, or inscrutable algorithms, individuals can be disconnected and de-personed …
The last hope for English cricket
The furore over the “spirit of the game” suggests, misleadingly, that there is indeed some such thing in contemporary cricket. But take a closer look and it becomes apparent that the much-fetishised “spirit”, a code of honour about as anachronistic …
How the AfD won over Germany
To understand how the far-Right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) became Germany’s second-largest party, consider the events of the past five days. In an interview with the state broadcaster ZDF on Sunday, Friedrich Merz, the leader of Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic …
What’s wrong with cannibalism?
“I ate his liver with some fava beans and a nice chianti,” whispers Hannibal Lecter, before making that scary teeth-sucking noise. But what makes Lecter our favourite moral monster is not that he eats people; it’s that he gruesomely murders …
McDonald’s made me a Marxist
There is a saying at McDonald’s: “‘tits on tills’ — boys in the kitchen, girls on the counter.” The idea, as a 22-year-old former worker described in a recent BBC report, is “to put attractive people at the front”. Human …
Has Gids learned from its failure?
Tomorrow, it will be a year since the closure of the controversial Gender Identity Development Service (Gids) at the Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust was announced. Rated inadequate by the Care Quality Commission and overwhelmed by an exponential rise …
Greece was destined to burn
My grandmother had the theory that, as we get older, our mind subconsciously cleanses our memories of myriad misfortunes, leaving a sanitised version of the past for us to feel nostalgic about. The optimism of remembrance, she called it. Little …
Our culture war is not a distraction
As our culture war rumbles on, there are hordes of denialists at hand to reassure us that it either “doesn’t exist”, or that it is a mere “distraction”. Labour MP Ben Bradshaw warns us that we need “to resist the …
Western lockdowns still torment Africa
Nearly three months after the World Health Organization declared that Covid-19 was no longer a global health emergency, the repercussions of Africa’s policy response to the pandemic are yet to subside. Quite the opposite: as a result of its response …
America’s pop-culture armageddon
When the great American critic HL Mencken wrote his great essay “The Sahara of the Bozart” in 1917, lamenting the absence of high-level American minds equal to those of Europe, especially in the South, he badly missed the mark. America …
The murder trial that broke me
I see the worst of humanity, the very depths of depravity: I am a reporter on male violence against women and girls. There was a time in Sarajevo, not long after the Balkan war, when I witnessed a dozen women …