The year of the femcel

You may have already forgotten, but 2022 is supposed to be the year of the femcel. In case you have forgotten or never knew, a femcel is the female counterpart to an “incel”, or involuntarily celibate male, a woman who …

Civil disobedience is coming

Britain may be recovering from a heatwave, but its politicians are already fearful that winter is coming. Only now, more than 170 days since the war broke out, are policymakers realising the potentially catastrophic implications of their gung-ho approach towards …

Bob Dylan has no philosophy

This is something special, obviously. Consider, for a moment, the author’s credentials. Pelé knows a lot about playing football, as does Floyd Mayweather about boxing, but do they have the chops to transfer their instinctive and acquired expertise into the …

The fall of Seattle

This February, Bruce Harrell, newly installed as mayor of Seattle, made it official that his city has gone into decline. “The truth is the status quo is unacceptable,” he said in his first state of the city address. “It seems …

Our Queen’s sacrifice

It seems that it should be a near spiritual ritual of Britishness to live through the end of the reign of one sovereign and the beginning of another. The emotions around the death of a monarch are, for those who …

Humanism is a heresy

“There is nothing particular about man. He is but a part of this world.”

This observation on the pretensions of humanity — cool, disillusioned, unsparing of sentimentality — was made in the Forties, midway between our own time and the …

Why I broke up with Dua Lipa

What do you want from a pop star? Personally, I don’t want anything too ambitious. I want bright melodic hooks that edge into melancholy, spiky basslines that drill into my brain, and uncomplicated lyrics that speak frankly of love and …