The war on free speech is hardly a novel phenomenon, instead mutating over the centuries. What is new, however, is its global aspirations: today, the conflict takes the form of a world war.
You can see its shadow in every …
The Oxford kids are alright
Life as a gender-critical feminist can be quite strange. The first time I ever entered the Oxford Union, I was a 19-year-old fresher. All I really remember is getting very drunk on peach schnapps, crashing into a trestle table, and …
Do Just Stop Oil deserve to be in prison?
“Can you hear the future weeping? Our love must save the world.” So ended Morgan Trowland’s closing address to the jury, in the trial for Public Nuisance that followed his and Marcus Decker’s “Just Stop Oil” protest last year on …
The martyring of Scott Adams
Picture this: it is 1692 in Salem, Massachusetts, and the Witchfinder General is patrolling the area in search of accused witches. The bodies of the women most recently found guilty are still hanging by their necks from the gallows; tensions …
Musk will never tame Twitter
Elon Musk and Twitter seem to be circling the drain. When Musk banned any links to Twitter competitors on Sunday, prompting criticism even from former allies and a humiliating climbdown later that day, it appeared as if Musk had fully …
What I discovered at Twitter HQ
One name at the centre of the story about Elon Musk’s “Twitter Files” is that of Jay Bhattacharya. A professor at Stanford’s medical school, he rose to prominence as a co-author of the “Great Barrington Declaration”, which opposed Covid lockdown …
The rise of Archaeologists Anonymous
In a quiet group chat in an obscure part of the internet, a small number of anonymous accounts are swapping references from academic publications and feverishly poring over complex graphs of DNA analysis. These are not your average trolls, but …
John Milton’s free speech crusade
For John Milton, death was not the end of his troubles. He spent his final years blind and disgraced, in continual fear of execution by the state. As a fervent republican who had written tracts defending regicide, the restoration of …
We are not all Salman Rushdie
“We’re born alone, we live alone, we die alone. Only through our love and friendship can we create the illusion for the moment that we’re not alone.” It’s a quote that bobs along the supposedly inspirational currents of the internet. …
My apology to Salman Rushdie
Sometime in the early Nineties, I found myself standing next to Salman Rushdie at a urinal. The Groucho, it must have been. We looked away from each other with more than the usual degree of concentration. I didn’t like his …
How we gave up on Salman Rushdie
The year was 1989. It was only when Salman Rushdie took his seat at the memorial service that the lethality of his predicament sank in. The remembrance for the writer Bruce Chatwin on Valentine’s Day was held at a Greek …
What do Tory voters want?
The Conservative Party is in the grip of its most important leadership election in nearly 20 years. While the last two contests, in 2016 and 2019, were all about Brexit, this one is about the deeper question of what it …
What do Tory voters want?
The Conservative Party is in the grip of its most important leadership election in nearly 20 years. While the last two contests, in 2016 and 2019, were all about Brexit, this one is about the deeper question of what it …
The age of attention politics
A couple of decades ago, I spent a week trying to commute on the London Underground without looking at the adverts in tunnels or on the carriages.
At the time a committed anti-capitalist, I experienced the ever more intrusive presence …
Open Letter to Elon Musk
Dear Elon,
Congratulations on the acquisition of Twitter. We hope this will help put the world on track to be a better place.
You stated that “Free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy and Twitter is the digital …
