I was the sole audience member at an otherwise-empty afternoon showing of Luca Guadagnino’s Challengers this week, which should have been a rare luxury but instead made me feel like a pervert. Challengers is not a sex movie — ostensibly, …
The delusion of having a meaningful job
I suspect Montaigne was being coy when he complained of the “wild and useless weeds” that would encroach on his mind in idleness. It is to those wild shoots that Montaigne owed his genre-defining essais, and thus his lasting influence. …
The Alzheimer’s industry
In a leafy London suburb, there’s a smart little clinic that promises miracles. Run by Dr Andrew Greenland, an NHS consultant in emergency medicine, the Greenland Centre claims to be able to do something that the drug industry has failed …
The case for polyamory
The world seems to be awash with new ways of being in a relationship — or so a flurry of articles examining polyamory would have us believe. Last month, The New York Times featured a 20-person “polycule”; earlier this year, …
The lunacy of Child Liberation
Lionel Shriver’s latest novel, Mania, starts from the wild and wacky premise of a world in which “the last civil rights battle” is being fought against discrimination on the grounds of intelligence, and the “s-word” is as taboo there as …
The barbarians are laughing at us
There are many contenders to be the world’s predominant civilisation in the remainder of the 21st century. In Moscow in March, a group of top clergy and pious entrepreneurs from the Kremlin’s inner circle lauded their country’s role as creators …
Kandinsky was betrayed by Left and Right
Expressionism, Nikolaus Pevsner snootily pronounced, was “the art of the ugly, an heroic stylisation of the hideous”. Wassily Kandinsky, its most exemplary adherent, was taxed with the charge of producing “art for art’s sake”. There is, admittedly, some truth to …
How civil servants killed the spy
The police were searching the home of a Libyan terror suspect, Abu Anas al-Liby, in Manchester when they came across an al-Qaeda handbook. The year was 2000, and the handbook — later dubbed the “Manchester Manual” — laid out the …
Who is to blame for gender theory?
Here’s a version of a story you might have heard before: first feminists got what they wanted, and then they got what they deserved. At some point in the Noughties, the idea that men and women were fundamentally alike in …
Liberalism didn’t protect Salman Rushdie
Why did he do it? Hadi Matar, 24 — dim, lugubrious, incel-y — had by his own admission “read, like, two pages” of The Satanic Verses. Judging by his slacker patter, one wonders whether he fully understood them. Yet there …
The enlightened case for being selfish
Ever since the events of October 7, the streets of American and Western cities are routinely filled with heated demonstrations. The vast majority of the people in attendance are usually not themselves citizens of Palestine or Israel, but locals whose …
Inside the Gen Z sex war
Women to the Left, men to the Right. And heaven forbid there is any crossover. These days, young people are floundering in their sex-based political silos wanting different things: girls are still seeking equality and boys miss being the good …
The civil war in the biohacking movement
As a tenured professor of biology and genetics at Harvard Medical School, David Sinclair has long been the world’s most qualified “biohacker”. The term refers to a broad community that attempts to enhance bodily performance, sometimes through simple treatments like …
Inside the disinformation industry
“Our team re-reviewed the domain, the rating will not change as it continues to have anti-LGBTQI+ narratives… The site authors have been called out for being anti-trans. Kathleen Stock is acknowledged as a ‘prominent gender-critical’ feminist.”
This was part of …
How Elon Musk lost his vibes
Elon Musk’s electronic music phase may have been a bit of a joke, but it captures the spirit of capital. His 2020 single, “Don’t Doubt ur Vibe (because it’s true)”, is a mantra for self-reliance in the hungry market, for …