The day I received my absentee ballot from the DC government, there was a story in the Washington Post about the DC Council’s imminent vote: “The bill would eliminate most mandatory minimum sentences, allow for jury trials in almost all …
The tyranny of a Covid amnesty
I spent the last days of innocence before Trump and Brexit heavily pregnant. Like many first-time mums, I read a lot of pregnancy books, but the one I liked most was Expecting Better. Written by Emily Oster, an economist, the …
The tyranny of a Covid amnesty
I spent the last days of innocence before Trump and Brexit heavily pregnant. Like many first-time mums, I read a lot of pregnancy books, but the one I liked most was Expecting Better. Written by Emily Oster, an economist, the …
Cormac McCarthy’s irrational apocalypse
“When the onset of universal night is finally acknowledged as irreversible”, warns a character in The Passenger, “even the coldest cynic will be astonished at the celerity with which every rule and stricture shoring up this creaking edifice is abandoned …
Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska nightmare
In 1982, Bruce Springsteen was at the height of his powers. Seven years earlier, his third album, Born to Run, had brought him global fame. “Springsteen is everything that has been claimed for him,” declared Rolling Stone. Critic Dave Marsh …
America’s conservatives would never elect a Hindu
Here in America, the most surprising storyline in the Conservative Party’s latest psychodrama is the fact that Rishi Sunak has emerged from it. It is impossible to imagine someone like him being chosen to lead the Republican Party, America’s closest …
How free should US states be?
Years ago, I visited America’s most dignified factory. A place of noise, dust and heaving trucks. And yet of higher purpose. Granite Industries of Vermont is a principal maker and supplier of headstones for the government.
The factory workers constructed …
The Resistance Media’s double standards
It’s hard to say exactly when unbridled, gossipy speculation about the health of our political candidates became an accepted part of the American media landscape. It might have been November 2015, when Vanity Fair published an article entitled “Is Donald …
Why Truss’s gamble failed
Shortly before the Government’s ill-fated budget, I had coffee with a Conservative MP who was keen to stress that the Tory party was heading towards disaster. It isn’t going to work, the MP told me, likening Truss’s breakneck dash for …
Will America end Zelenskyy’s dream?
Even as “kamikaze” drones rain down on Kyiv, the mood over Ukraine is shifting in the US. Between May and September, the share of Americans who are extremely or very concerned about a Ukrainian defeat fell from 55% to 38%. …
The demonic power of oil
For nine days in January 1901, mesmerised spectators on a hill in south-east Texas watched a deluge of oil erupt high into the air and descend back to earth. Nobody before had discovered oil in the volume found at Spindletop. …
Sex strikes won’t win the midterms
American culture will sexualise anything in order to sell it to young people: cars, hamburgers, and for decades now, voting. In 1990, the awareness-raising non-profit Rock the Vote sought to bring youths to the polls with a TV spot featuring …
Did America cause Europe’s energy war?
All of Europe is suffering as a result of the energy crisis, but for the continent’s largest economy, this is more than just an economic crisis — it’s an existential one. Once hailed as Europe’s economic powerhouse, Germany is now …
Feminism can’t kill the beauty pageant
Good-looking, groomed, docile. They were paraded around the arena, so that we could all see their body composition and their agility; so that we could see there were no signs of illness or infirmity. This is good stock, a fine …
What really divides America
Reading the mainstream media, one would be forgiven for believing that the upcoming midterms are part of a Manichaean struggle for the soul of democracy, pitting righteous progressives against the authoritarian “ultra-MAGA” hordes. The truth is nothing of the sort. …