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 …
The hidden virtue of reality TV
Noel Coward once said that “television is for appearing on, not watching”, but I’m not convinced. Since the turn of the century, I’ve turned down a vast array of reality shows, starting with Celebrity Detox and ending with Celebrity Big …
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 …
The death of intimacy
The sexual entrepreneur keeps a spreadsheet of every encounter she’s ever had. It’s populated with all kinds of information: how much they talked, the different positions they tried, whether it was the first or second or fifth time, and, of …
We have all lost the argument
The study of arguments is one of the thriving intellectual pursuits of a time — and is it any wonder? Social media’s business model depends on perpetual rancour and the amplification of extreme points of view. Twitter often reminds me …
Smartphones and Social Media – A Mass Surveillance Dystopia
Source: Smartphones and Social Media – A Mass Surveillance Dystopia…
The Social Media Exodus Has Begun. Here’s Where Everybody’s Going.
Source: The Social Media Exodus Has Begun. Here’s Where Everybody’s Going.…