Every day brings another laboured press furore, over the latest bastion of British heritage to fall to the “woke” axe. This time it’s a famous outlaw: news that the Nottingham Building Society has updated its brand, to remove the Robin …
The futile fight for England’s identity
As Conservative politicians continue to insist that “England’s national identity” is being undermined — while remaining scrupulous in their unwillingness to describe what they mean by that term — it turns out that, as usual, foreigners know exactly who we …
The trouble with attachment theory
I’ll tell you up front: I am an avoidant partner. I frequently withdraw into myself and become uncommunicative. In fights I get quiet rather than angry, saying less and less, making a partner feel like they have no ability to …
How the truth fell into disrepute
Truth is harder to dispose of than some people think. To say that there is no truth is already to have stated one, or at least what you take to be one. Yet the idea of truth is a lot …
America is trapped in high school
When I entered public high school at the age of 16 following a half-decade of home-schooling, what I saw there blew my mind. The year was 1998, and the student body of Raleigh’s Needham Broughton High School encompassed everyone from …
Have we reached peak trans?
Is it really too much to ask those who struggle to define the word “woman” to refrain from running for public office? Ketanji Brown Jackson, Joe’s Biden’s nominee for the Supreme Court, was asked to provide the dreaded definition during …
Was Ukraine betrayed by its elites?
The Russian invasion of Ukraine is only the most recent and violent violation of its sovereignty. The deeper roots of the crisis lie in Ukrainian elites’ failure to represent their whole nation and to uphold its sovereignty, aided and abetted …
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 …
This is not how civil wars start
I moved recently to a remote part of Northern California, where in a couple weeks an election will decide whether or not allies of the local militia take control of the county government. It’s a fraught situation, in a part …