Towards the end of September 1915, the eminent physicist Oliver Lodge heard from his son Raymond, who had gone to fight in Flanders that spring. His situation was “difficult”, but “he has got so many kind friends helping him. He …
Why men should embrace testosterone
For decades, we’ve been living in a world of steroid smoke and mirrors. On one side, we have athletes and bodybuilders taking heroic doses of these substances in secret, often guided by “broscience” and internet forums rather than medical professionals. …
France has scorned globalisation
Although French voters rejected the far-Right National Rally in last weekend’s election, in giving most of their support to either the RN or the Left, they still repudiated Emmanuel Macron’s liberal internationalism. In doing so, France joined the rising tide …
The mean girls conquering pop
Sabrina’s got that boy wrapped round her finger. Olivia knows she might sound crazy but she doesn’t care. Chappell is having a sexually explicit kinda love affair with a closeted woman. Billie is going to eat that girl for lunch, …
A plague of fallacies has devoured the internet
We lived, without knowing it then, on the other side of the digital chasm. I know the first time I heard the word “internet”: on a trek through Ness Woods in Northern Ireland. My father, self-taught and insatiably curious, told …
The Big Air Con
Airport world is a parallel dimension. No matter where they are geographically, all airports are essentially the same place, with a simplified “international English” and a time zone only loosely tethered to its location. Airport world even has its own …
Who will win a post-heroic war?
Neither the West not its enemies are prepared to fightSome 30 years ago, I coined the phrase “post-heroic warfare” to acknowledge a new phenomenon: the very sharp reduction in the tolerance of war casualties. My starting point was President Clinton’s …
The trouble with political Christianity
In the apocryphal Gospel of Thomas, Jesus condemns those who “(either) love the tree and hate its fruit (or) love the fruit and hate the tree”. A regular critique of the nominally religious is that they claim to believe in, …
Mama Swifties need to grow up
It’s been a bumper week for middle-aged journalists enthusing about Taylor Swift. Broadsheet music critics attending the Edinburgh leg of her ongoing Eras tour seemed positively high on second-hand oestrogen fumes as they filed their encomiums. And there were further …
America’s cult of Weird
Readers, friends, sea cucumbers, square roots of negative one! A momentous anniversary will soon be upon us! Next year, 2025, will mark the 80th anniversary of the day a car rolled into my hometown of Reno, Nevada, in the strange …
The vacuous politics of Franz Kafka
We have been lied to about Kafka. Our received image is that of a morose manic depressive, a gloomy and sickly bundle of nerves hacking away at his craft in isolation, like some Lana del Rey avant la lettre. But …
The narcissism of liberal gods
By now it’s a cliché that liberalism in the Anglosphere has become a religion, whether or not its adherents know it. But less often remarked is a fact somewhat in tension with this claim: namely, that its worshippers get to …
Why smartphones bamboozle politicians
The year is 2008. It’s break time, and my twin sister is a library monitor. A swell moves through the playground; packs of children are pulled like magnets to the big bay window of the library, where a note is …
The danger of trial by statistics
Sally Clark had two sons. Both died within weeks of birth, a year apart, apparently of sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS), sometimes called cot death. SIDS is — mercifully — rare; in England, at the time, it struck roughly one …
Ridicule is nothing to be scared of
My daughter started cutting herself when she was in the eighth grade. By the ninth, she had scars on both her wrists and her thighs, shallow ones, but visible. Covid lockdowns were beginning to end, but they had taken their …