Freud didn’t really understand women. This is not an original point: it was first made by Freud himself. According to his biographer Ernest Jones, Freud admitted: “The great question that has never been answered, and which I have not yet …
Is the psychedelic industrial complex evil?
“More real than reality itself.” This is the sales pitch made by fans of dimethyltryptamine. Otherwise known as DMT, the compound found in ayahuasca returned to the spotlight recently thanks to Prince Harry’s description of his trips, which, he says, …
The phoney ethics of ESG
This year at Davos, three letters were on the tip of every person’s tongue, perhaps the only acronym uttered with equal joy by Greta Thunberg and billionaire and BlackRock CEO, Larry Fink. They are ESG, or “Environment, Social and Governance”. …
Vietnam still haunts America
In the course of his troubled presidency, Richard Nixon spoke 14 times to the American people about the war in Vietnam. It was in one of those speeches that he coined the phrase “the silent majority”, while others provoked horror …
The Labour Party has a woman problem
Domestic abuse is about control and power and silencing someone. It can take many forms. A text. A glance. A threat disguised as a promise. The idea is to manipulate you; to paralyse you.
I have lived through an abusive …
Tár and the triumph of amoral artists
“Once I saw it, I was offended: I was offended as a woman, I was offended as a conductor, I was offended as a lesbian…”
Tár, Todd Field’s new film about an eminent female conductor, is splitting the musical crowd. …
We get the sculpture we deserve
Dismembered limbs. Torture flashbacks. Screams. Humans pulled apart and reassembled. A chilling scene in the 2007 Battlestar Galactica sci-fi movie Razor depicts Commander Adama’s recollections of stumbling upon a laboratory where the flesh/robot hybrid Cylons conducted horrific experiments on living …
Why would anyone envy the NHS?
They say the first step in fixing a crisis is to recognise there is a problem. So let us give thanks for a Labour leader’s dismissal of the belief that Britain’s health service is the envy of the world — …
The cost of China’s zero-child policy
The last time China’s population contracted, its citizens were lucky if they could find grass to eat. It was the early Sixties, and Mao’s disastrous and ridiculously named Great Leap Forward had left millions in abject poverty. China is infinitely …
How the Davos elite took back control
Thousands of the world’s global elite are convening in Davos this morning for their most important annual get-together: the meeting of the World Economic Forum (WEF). Alongside heads of state from all over the world, the CEOs of Amazon, BlackRock, …
The art of empty apologies
Everyday life is full of unwitting moral pitfalls. Overnight, formerly benign words can take on strange and harmful new meanings. It is easy to be blindsided by the rapidly changing public fortunes of activities you’ve always enjoyed — using gas …
Inside El Salvador’s brutal gang crackdown
In her cramped breeze-block home on the outskirts of El Salvador’s capital, across an alley from a school currently occupied by soldiers, 65-year-old Francisca Alas rolls down her sock to show a scar from the machete of a gang member. …
The philistine war on AI art
Among the most ingenious moments in Kraftwerk’s admirable oeuvre is the point in 1981’s “Pocket Calculator” when a human voice self-contentedly sings: “By pressing down a special key / It plays a little melody.” The melody follows in confirmation. The …
Prince Harry’s Faustian bargain
One of the characteristics of fame is that it is essentially Faustian in nature; to become a celebrity, one must sell one’s soul to the devil. It’s a highly questionable idea — why should there be such a price for …
New Year in a Ukrainian trench
Ochakiv, Ukraine
The sun rises on 2023. Its rays light up the trench, an unwelcoming black void into which we gratefully disappear to take cover from the artillery, rockets and Iranian Shahid drones that are launched daily from the Russian …