It’s 2am here in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and I’ve just finished writing 7,500 words of corporate marketing copy. I then turn my attention to this piece. But my attention is glitching. So I do something I haven’t done since I took …
America’s desperate dysfunction
In his short story A Clean, Well-Lighted Place, Ernest Hemingway describes a deaf old man who likes to sit in the terrace of his favourite cafe late into the evening drinking brandy, much to the frustration of a young waiter …
Elbridge Colby: China is more dangerous than Russia
Since writing Donald Trump’s National Defense Strategy in 2018, Elbridge Colby has become one of the most influential conservative defence thinkers in America. If a Republican wins the presidency in 2024 — whether Trump or DeSantis — he is likely …
The myth of America’s imperial decline
With a New World Order lurking on the horizon, will America play nothing more than a supporting role? That is certainly the impression given by recent reports in the US and beyond. While the Ukraine crisis has helped to renew …
Stop trying to make ‘digital blackface’ happen
Sweet Brown is wearing a tie-dyed tank top, a scarf knotted around her short dark hair. She’s talking to the camera like it’s someone she knows intimately, telling the story of her brush with death: “I said, oh lord Jesus, …
America is fighting the wrong university wars
The University of Texas at Arlington consists primarily of large parking lots, brown patches of grass and rectangular buildings capable of holding thousands of students. When I was a tenure-track assistant history professor there, for four years in the mid-2010s, …
The trouble with arresting Trump
On 22 January 1905, the Orthodox priest Georgy Gapon led a large procession of hungry and dissatisfied workers towards St. Petersburg’s Winter Palace, an event that would culminate in the tragedy known as Bloody Sunday, as imperial soldiers opened fire …
Is America turning into Pakistan?
Let’s start with a game of “Guess the Country”. In this nation, a former head of state announces his attempted return to power, so his opponents set out to block him. In doing so, they revive past sex scandals and …
How Russia and China overtook the West
For the past year, Nato countries, led by the US, have strived to nudge the rest of the world into providing military aid for Ukraine and sanctioning Russia, in the hope of isolating the latter. They have, by and large, …
Tucker Carlson’s fake populism
I shudder whenever I see Tucker Carlson trending in the news. Not because I think he’s a fascist or white supremacist, but because I once held him up as the harbinger of a new kind of politics. It wasn’t too …
Lionel Shriver: ‘I benefited from wokeness’
Lionel Shriver visited The UnHerd Club this week to talk about sensitivity readers, the cowardice that’s infected publishing, and why she’s determined to keep offending people. Below is an edited transcript of her conversation with Katie Law, UnHerd’s Books Editor.…
The betrayal of Baghdad
Baghdad. Winter is almost over. Traces of Saddam Hussain still litter the city. There is so much chaos, you’d think the Western coalition had never tried to rebuild the place. And, after all these years, it wouldn’t feel strange to …
America’s new class war
What explains the widening chasm between America’s political class and the American people? While the Democrats and Republicans squabble over climate change and race, these are among the lowest concerns on the public’s agenda: according to Pew, voters care far …
America is showing its age
It is sometimes helpful to remember, when trying to get perspective on the exhausting, high-octane politics of the United States, that it is a very old country. Americans can’t claim the thousands of years of cultural continuity of China or …
How America can win the Chip Wars
Semiconductors are for the 21st century what oil was for the 20th — the material resource that fuels the entire modern economy. And, much like oil in the Seventies, our leaders are waking up to the fact that microchip manufacturing …