Jeremy Farrar’s book from August 2021 is relatively more candid than most accounts of the initial decision to lock down in the US and UK. “It’s hard to come off nocturnal calls about the possibility of a lab leak and …
Pandemic Samizdat in the US
On May 15, 1970, the New York Times published an article by esteemed Russia scholar Albert Parry detailing how Soviet dissident intellectuals were covertly passing forbidden ideas around to each other on handcrafted, typewritten documents called samizdat. Here is the beginning …
The Great Demoralization
On March 6, 2020, the mayor of Austin, Texas, canceled the biggest tech and arts trade show in the world, South-by-Southwest, only a week before hundreds of thousands were to gather in the city.
In an instant, with the stroke …
Britain’s rulers should be more French
In the English-speaking world, we tend to place Charles de Gaulle and his confrontational style of politics, filled with strops and tantrums, into a category marked “The French”, where we can alternatively laugh at and be a bit scared by …
Anthony Fauci’s Very Bad Week
It’s not been Anthony Fauci’s best week.
Forever intent on managing his image and public opinion on the pandemic response, he accepted a seemingly safe interview on CNN. The reporter was someone he trusted, Michael Smerconish, who tossed in what …
How Zadie Smith succumbed to history
Why bother with fiction? That’s one question. Why bother with history? That’s another. And they’ve both been torturing Zadie Smith, who has now produced the sort of fiction she once dismissed as “aesthetically and politically conservative by definition” — a …
How France lost control of Gabon
Gabon fulfils all the stereotypes you might have about the west coast of Africa. Brutal, kleptocratic dictator whose family have been in power for over 50 years? Tick. Highly corrupt political system that facilitates large multinational companies to pillage, rob …
Liberalism’s sin was born in the Cold War
If the contemporary political scene is strewn with wreckage, it is clearer than ever that “neoconservatism” and “neoliberalism” did much of the damage. More than any other, these two ideologies have afflicted both the centre-right and centre-left, fostering the sense …
Modern Europe was born on the battlefield
Why write about the Hundred Years War? This succession of destructive wars, separated by tense intervals of truce and by dishonest treaties of peace, was one of the seminal events in the history of England and France, as well as …
Trump colluded with the Swamp
In a radio address to the nation, delivered in 1943 as the tide of war was beginning to turn, Franklin Roosevelt surveyed the progress on America’s home front as it churned out materiel at lightning pace: “I saw thousands of …
How to make Britain cool again
“Britpop’s Back. But What Happened to Cool Britannia?” asks a recent headline in the New York Times. Quite a lot, it seems. Pessimistic about our prospects, and uninspired by our King’s agenda, Britain is in search of a new story. …
Hip-hop: the last bastion of American freedom
On 11 August 1973, there was a party at an apartment building at 1520 Sedgewick Avenue in the Bronx. The host, Cindy Campbell, was a black immigrant teenager from Jamaica who wanted to earn some extra cash to buy back-to-school …
Stop comparing the West to Rome
On both sides of the Atlantic, hysterical comparisons between the collapse of the Roman Empire and the senile polities of the modern West have become the journalistic norm. Every major problem facing our society — from climate change to Covid …
Niger and the collapse of France’s empire
First, there was Mali; then came Burkina Faso. Today, in the epic saga that is the anti-Western revolt sweeping across the Sahel, it is the turn of Niger to play the protagonist — the third country to suffer a coup …
Interview 1825 – James Corbett on You’re The Voice
via Efrat Fenigson: 🎙️My guest today is James Corbett: an award-winning investigative journalist, and a lecturer on geopolitics and open source journalism. James started The Corbett Report website (https://www.corbettreport.com/) in 2007 as an outlet for independent critical analysis of politics, …