“We are back to the enigmatic pulse-beat of the messianic,” wrote the literary critic George Steiner a few months after the fall of the Berlin Wall. “No economist-pundit, no geopolitical strategist, no ‘Kremlinologist’ or socio-economic analyst foresaw what we are …
The BBC’s phoney war on disinformation
Ever felt your ears burning? I get as much flak online as the next believer in the existence of human biology, but recently I’ve noticed it ramping up somewhat. For the purposes of researching this column, I gingerly dipped my …
Mosul and the Law of the Cigarette
“Remember the Law of the Cigarette,” says my fixer Mohammed as we approach a checkpoint on the outskirts of Mosul. We’ve spent the morning driving through a landscape scarred by the war against Isis. Villages are filled with ruined buildings …
Why do progressives watch porn?
Is it time we started having less nuanced conversations about porn? We’ve all encountered the alternative: the sort of smug, self-styled progressive who maintains that every political controversy can be resolved by sufficiently “nuanced conversation”. The trickier a problem looks, …
India’s lost lockdown generation
All his life, 15-year-old Rehan Shaikh was known as a quiet, respectful, promising boy. His teachers praised him, frequently telling his mother how bright his future was going to be. In his hometown of Anjangaon, in central India’s Wardha district, …
Why doesn’t Britain regret lockdown?
“In retrospect, lockdowns were a mistake.”
If you agree with the above statement, you are, I’m afraid, still in the minority. Three years to the day since Britain brought in its first nationwide lockdown, the latest wave of UnHerd Britain …
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 …
America is fighting the wrong university wars
The University of Texas at Arlington consists primarily of large parking lots, brown patches of grass and rectangular buildings capable of holding thousands of students. When I was a tenure-track assistant history professor there, for four years in the mid-2010s, …
George Osborne’s sordid Elgin plan
From the very beginning, Elgin’s removal of the Parthenon’s statues and friezes caused something of a discursive British civil war. On one side were humanists, like Lord Byron; on the other were Empire apologists, who defend Elgin’s actions and support …
The Sons Of Disobedience / Hugo Talks
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Source: Hugo Talks Read the original article here: https://hugotalks.com …
Boris and the world’s worst birthday party
“No cake was eaten, and no-one even sang happy birthday.” As parties go, it was a miserable one; as scandals go, however, it was more than enough. Amid all the political kerfuffle over his appearance at the Standards and Privileges …
The trouble with arresting Trump
On 22 January 1905, the Orthodox priest Georgy Gapon led a large procession of hungry and dissatisfied workers towards St. Petersburg’s Winter Palace, an event that would culminate in the tragedy known as Bloody Sunday, as imperial soldiers opened fire …
The music-hall depravity of British politics
What do John Major, Tony Blair and Ken Livingstone have in common? Obviously, they’re politicians who are now some way past their vote-by date, but more than that, they all have music-hall blood running through their veins. Major’s parents, Blair’s …
A very modern Jesus Revolution
In 1967, a cloud of idealistic young Americans descended on San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district for the Summer of Love. At the epicentre of the hippy counterculture, they rejected materialism, conformity and war, instead embracing art, spirituality, community and psychedelic drugs.…
WHO’s Pandemic Preparedness Hearings – A World Divided
This article is an expanded version of PANDA’s Substack article that drew attention to a WHO public participation process designed to gather opinions about proposed responses by international bodies to future pandemics. It provides more detail about those who submitted …