Picture a huge, poisonous fruit falling to the ground, its skin splitting open, the rancid pulp pouring out. Picture the ants discovering the mess, swarming over it, drunk on the abundance in front of them — and far too preoccupied …
How the RA uncancelled me
It has now been a year since I woke up to nearly the entire UK press in my inbox, wanting to speak to me.
The Royal Academy of Arts had just publicly announced that they would no longer stock my …
Why can’t the Left take a joke?
Chris Rock was in London last week with his new show, observing — not inaccurately — that many people are very afraid of offending others these days. Presumably some comedians are even more afraid now, having seeing Will Smith slap …
The cruel world of yoga
The bar for doing a yoga practice couldn’t be any lower: all you need is a mat and a body, although even the mat is optional. You don’t have to be flexible. You don’t have to be strong. You don’t …
No woman is safe on Twitter
When the journalist Leta Hong Fincher wrote about forced marriages in Xinjiang, she was bombarded with online abuse for weeks. Games designer Brianna Wu was driven from her home during an online campaign against sexism in her industry. The account …
Five rules for fighting transactivism
It will not have escaped the eagle-eyed that something about modern transactivism seems to make otherwise Gillick-competent adults veer towards the infantile. From the EHRC’s recent clarification about the legality of single-sex spaces under the terms of the Equality Act, …
The corruption of the feminist library
It was a feminist bookstore that led me to the Women’s Liberation Movement. I was a shy 17-year-old, in Leeds, in 1979. I nervously opened the door of the shabby shop front, which had posters of Audre Lorde and Kate …
Louis CK won’t be cancelled
Recall the early days of #MeToo: the excitement, the promise, the sense of a tectonic shift reshaping the culture from the roots. There was a time, in the movement’s first fecund months, when powerful men were falling like dominos. It …
How fear consumed American theatre
We all know our consciousness is corrupt, and a long life, examined, brings the burden of regret, shame, and indeed a horror at our own actions that, at times, becomes scarcely bearable.
The theatre, and tragedy particularly, offers a median …
American education’s new dark age
Some years ago, I taught a course in public writing at the Claremont colleges, the consortium of elite liberal arts institutions in Southern California. My students were juniors or seniors, mostly humanities or social science majors, almost all smart, a …
Escaping American tribalism
One summer afternoon when I was 23 — this was in 1987 — I was twiddling the dial on the radio in the apartment I was subletting on 114th St. when I stumbled on a station that was unlike anything …
You can’t cancel Putin
“We cannot just witness these atrocities and do nothing.” It’s a statement that resonates, the kind of thing you’d expect to hear from those we empower to keep the peace: Nato, the UN, our leaders. But this solemn vow to …
In defence of wokeness
Since the end of the Second World War, most of the world’s conflicts have been civil wars. The average length of an international war is less than six months; for a civil war it is seven years. The heretic is …
Trashy Tories should read Roger Scruton
“Love is a relationship between dying things,” said Roger Scruton just months before he was to succumb to lung cancer. We hold on to the ones we love, and hold them ever closer, precisely because they are mortal and will …
Dickens hated Oliver Twist
Charles Dickens hated Oliver Twist. Rarely in English letters do we find a case of an author so embarrassed, so fundamentally ill at ease with his own creation. Oliver spends the first half of the novel crying, begging, whining, and …