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 …
How the elites lost the Twitter war
Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter is a litmus test of where you stand in the online ecosystem. To some, it means a dawn of “free speech” on a platform that has increasingly cracked down on unwanted views. To others, it …
Do we need Caesar Elon Musk?
In 1515, Pope Leo X issued a papal bull stipulating that all published material translated from Hebrew, Greek, Arabic and Chaldaic into Latin, or from Latin into the vernacular, should be moderated by sensitivity readers. Without such precautions, the document …
When libel laws are needed
“Andrew Doyle is an ultra-conservative anti-feminist homosexual who uses a drag persona on Twitter to attack trans and queer people… He wishes with all his heart that he was Julia Hartley-Brewer. Pathologically so.”
Only one assertion in this tweet is …
Why Twitter is so awful
When I began writing for UnHerd, I was a nobody with an anonymous Twitter account. That’s less the case now, which is nice in many ways. But there’s a lovely facelessness, and freedom to reinvent yourself, that I miss about …
We need to talk about the vaccines
Last week, a group of scientists, doctors, and academics published an open letter calling on Spotify “to take action against the mass-misinformation events which continue to occur on its platform”. Specifically, they were objecting to two recent episodes of Joe …
