More than 20 years before the advent of Tinder, an MTV show called Singled Out offered an unwittingly prescient insight into the dangers of algorithmic dating. The premise was simple: a dating pool of 50 potential suitors milled around in …
How landlords became monsters
Everyone under the age of 40 has their landlord horror story. We trade them, like old war wounds. My own, in retrospect, is rather pleasingly metaphorical, something of a capsule (or cubicle) scatological comedy. At one point, as part of …
GPT-4 couldn’t resurrect my dad
Over the decade before he died, in 2014, my father sent me thousands of emails. Carefully-crafted little gems, their subjects ranged from general advice, drawn from his own hardscrabble existence, to musings about the matriarchal nature of orca society, the …
Momfluencers won’t absolve your guilt
Maternal guilt is a bottomless resource. Enter the momfluencer. She’s like an influencer — but her particular genius is to target the most vulnerable, the most guilt-ridden the most exhausted consumer. New mothers. The genius of the momfluencer is 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 …
The Ozempic class war has begun
If you, a commoner, encountered a feudal lord in the year 1200, the latter would likely be wearing fine armour, carrying a well-polished sword, and riding a horse. Upon seeing these visual cues, you would address him properly, lest he …
The secret millennial class war
“Kevs”, “Neds”, “townies” and “dobbers”. Do these labels mean anything to you? How about “pikeys”, “grungers”, “moshers” and “skate-punks”? If bells are starting to ring, then I’d wager my strongest Pokémon card that you went to a UK secondary school …
Will the working class strike back?
I felt oddly cheerful last Friday evening as I trudged home through the snow, forsaken by public transport that had stopped running. The truth is that, like Slade or Morecambe and Wise, strikes bring back poignant memories of the Christmases …
Why do we pretend to be working-class?
Are we, to quote New Labour in the Nineties, “all middle-class now”? Do we all want to be? Not according to recent polling; far from middle-class norms pervading, British people disproportionately see themselves as working-class.
To understand why, it’s worth …
The return of class war
There was a story the Left used to tell in the early 2010s that everyone took for granted. The era, they said, of big labour strikes was over. The Soviet Union had fallen, Thatcher had crushed the miners, the biggest …
Can you read in Scottish?
However indifferent we might have been to our school days, most of us will remember at least one moment of significant connection to a teacher, or a lesson, or a book. I recall my high school teachers as a mixed …
The bankers have launched a class war
When the Bank of England announced its single biggest interest rate hike in 33 years last week, and warned that the UK faces its longest recession ever, it forgot to mention one important detail. It’s the actions of the Bank …
The British Army has a class problem
In 2008, at a birthday party in Fulham, a 26-year-old aspiring portrait painter met the adjutant of the Household Cavalry Mounted Regiment. As the section of the British Army that performs ceremonial duties with horses, the regiment is often judged …
How the British conquered Majorca
In the mid-Twenties, the author Ada Harrison visited Majorca and discovered that it had “fallen to Britain”. Majorca had “become one of those places which, the English say, are being ruined by the English”. The result was that the Hotel …
Escaping the Seventies class war
It happened in Teignmouth. Drizzly Devon on a summer’s day in the early Seventies. We’d come back to the coach park early, Mum and me, having explored the town. In a shack at the gate was a man selling Mars …