In 1984, the tiny Irish seaside town of Burtonport attracted a swarm of international press attention. The occasion was the opening of a new educational establishment: St Bride’s School for Girls, residing in a former hotel previously home to a …
The cult of Plastic Woman
How fantastic is life in plastic? I’m not talking about Barbie here, though of course the film’s defining moment is Gloria’s bitter feminist monologue: “I’m just so tired of watching myself and every single other woman tie herself into knots …
The Left must reclaim JS Mill
A century and a half after the death of John Stuart Mill, it is easy to think that we have had enough of him. Although William Gladstone once posthumously canonised him as “the saint of rationality”, many contemporary thinkers believe …
The Taliban’s lessons in masculinity
During the US evacuation of Afghanistan, as the mainstream press argued about the fate of translators, or the evacuation of Pen Farthing’s dogs, the online Right had fun tweaking progressive noses by cheering on the Taliban. The return of veiling …
Why Progress isn’t feminist
It’s now an open secret that most Instagram influencers edit their images: smoothing skin, whitening teeth and plumping curves. Last year, OnlyFans content creator Diana Deets, also known as “Coconutkitty”, was castigated for making her NSFW images and videos seem …
Who will stand against Progress?
These days he would be mobbed as an “eco-fascist”, but Edward Goldsmith would probably have been better described as a traditionalist. The founder of The Ecologist magazine, where he employed me as a naive young writer in the late Nineties, …
Why Occultists don’t believe in progress
Reflecting on his life amid the rising discords of a turbulent era in his poem “All Souls’ Night: An Epilogue” (1920), William Butler Yeats wrote:
I need some mind that, if the cannon sound
From every quarter of the world, …
How far-Right are you?
A common form of classroom cruelty when I was at school involved a game we called “Contagion”. The instigator would touch the person next to them, having chosen a low-status scapegoat — usually “Holly”, who wore thick glasses and was …
Gen Z’s worship of the Unabomber
“The industrial revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race.” Writing those words as the introduction to his 1995 anti-technology manifesto Industrial Society and its Future, Ted Kaczynski couldn’t have known that they would someday spawn …
The West is homeless
I was chatting to the log man as we unloaded chunks of dried beech into my driveway from his trailer. Usually he brings me ash, but ash is becoming harder to find now that ash dieback disease, imported into Ireland …
Peter Thiel on the dangers of progress
You can tell a bit about someone based on their preconceptions about Peter Thiel. Whether the reflexive response to the name is “malign far-Right plutocrat”, “philanthropic saviour of all that is good” or “who?” is a reasonably reliable guide to …
Scientific tyranny has captured America
Plato’s dialogues are full of strikingly individual characters who have been stamped by the accidents of their time and place but are nevertheless familiar to us from our own. A particularly fine example is the teacher of rhetoric Thrasymachus, who …
