On 9 February 1967, hours after the US Air Force had levelled the Port of Haiphong and several Vietnamese airfields, NBC aired a Star Trek episode featuring a concept that clashed mercilessly with what had just happened. Under the “Prime …
How André Gide made the modern memoir
In the May of 1921, André Gide spent a long evening with Marcel Proust. Much of the conversation revolved around homosexuality, with the older writer showing Proust some pages of an autobiography he was writing. “You can say anything you …
How John Updike invented Brat
Harry Angstrom — better known by his nickname, Rabbit — has the typical problem of a 26-year-old Western man. He feels trapped. Trapped by the small apartment he rents, and trapped by his job demonstrating kitchen gadgets in a department …
Ozempic could destroy modern civilisation
Should I start taking Ozempic? I found myself pondering this question recently as I walked past a local shop I like to call the Dopamine Store.
The Dopamine Store, the first shop I pass as I turn onto my local …
On choking during sex
I don’t remember when I first became aware of the choking craze: I’m pushing 70, am barely online and generally not paying much attention to other people’s sex stuff. But I dimly recall maybe five years ago seeing an online …
Nobody believes the centrist fantasy
I wonder if Labour’s governing generalissimos, Morgan McSweeney and Pat McFadden, watched much Christmas telly this year. They might have recognised the strong manly relationship at the heart of Gone Fishing on Christmas Eve. Or shed a tear watching the …
Can love survive gender politics?
I go to the algorithm the way I imagine some of my ancestors went to church. I go for company. I go because everyone is already there. I go for conversation, or, on days when I want to sit alone, …
The torture of an unphilosophical life
Even if you haven’t read Robert Musil’s unfinished modernist masterpiece, The Man Without Qualities, you probably agree that it has a great title. If you have read it, I’m sure you agree, because the novel returns obsessively to the theme …
The promise of Hanukkah
Candidates for elite military units, the Navy Seals, Green Berets, and British SAS, conclude months of torturous weeding-out with a final ordeal. A physically exhausted, sleep-deprived, injured SAS applicant related his test’s end. He arrived at the designated finishing point, …
Otto Weininger: godfather of the manosphere
On 4 October 1903, a 23-year-old man went to the house where Beethoven had died in Vienna and shot himself. Otto Weininger felt himself to be a great genius; he hoped in his final moments to absorb some of Beethoven’s …
Why men fear Sydney Sweeney
They say Londoners are never more than six feet from a rat; it’s the same with Hollywood blondes and telephoto lenses. And like the rats, paparazzi don’t tell the blondes they’re there. So, when Sydney Sweeney was papped last week …
The politicians lying about Syria
Old grievances in Western politics have been reopened by the sudden fall of Syria’s Bashar al-Assad. And they are as dispiriting in their dishonesty as they are myopic in their self-interest. On the one hand, we have the unrepentant interventionists …
The return of Muscular Christianity
Rhea Graham is not your average content creator. With a powerful physique and a penchant for heavy lifting, she looks every inch the fitness influencer. Yet her page isn’t quite what you’d expect from someone who bench presses 55 kilos …
The truth about the Woke Right
The feminist writer Audre Lorde famously observed that “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house”. She was wrong, though. Sometimes appropriating the master’s tools can come in very handy. Already accustomed to the sound of falling masonry, onlookers …
How the internet perverts desire
Romantic love, one of the great organising forces in Western societies, is in crisis. Just look at the low fertility rates, and correspondingly high rates of singleness and sexlessness, in the contemporary West.
Or take divorce. Even high-profile advocates for …