Here we go again. About 30 minutes into counting the first votes of the Iowa caucus, the Associated Press, CNN, NBC and various other news networks called it for Donald Trump.
There was little doubt that the former president wasn’t …
How Edinburgh University stifled my investigation
Almost 150 years ago, a young medical student at Edinburgh University was inspired by one of his lecturers to devise a detective with remarkable powers of deduction based on solid scientific principles. Arthur Conan Doyle wanted a hero for the …
How New Labour created the Rwanda stranglehold
Amid the tension surrounding the Government’s Rwanda policy, one striking cause has been largely ignored. Read through yesterday’s coverage and you could almost miss it — the recognition, in a joint resignation letter fired off by former Conservative Deputy Chairmen …
Aliens are among us
In 1950, Enrico Fermi, the man who built the first nuclear reactor, was having lunch with some other scientists when the discussion turned to aliens – and he first articulated what’s become known as “the Fermi paradox” by asking: “Where …
Degrowth communism is capitalism’s monster
A spectre is haunting the West — the spectre of degrowth communism. Or so Kohei Saito, the rising star of contemporary Marxist thought, would have you believe. Saito is the author of Slow Down: How Degrowth Communism Can Save the …
The betrayal of British Kurds
This week, two activists are facing trial under the UK’s Terror Act for the “crime” of holding a flag at a demonstration. But this wasn’t a Palestinian flag, which former Home Secretary Suella Braverman has said could be a criminal …
The curious case of Israeli ‘genocide’
Since the early 1600s, the Bavarian town of Oberammergau has, once a decade, mounted a massive Passion Play, dramatically re-enacting Jesus’s trial and crucifixion. Spread over five hours and with a cast of thousands, it has for centuries attracted audiences …
Labour is stalked by treachery
Ramsay MacDonald should be one of the great figures in Britain’s political imagination: the man who rose from nothing through force of personality and circumstance to become the country’s first Labour prime minister 100 years ago next week. But he …
We are all Mean Girls now
In 1995, a girl named Emily Brown raised her hand during our pre-high school anti-bullying presentation. “Excuse me,” she said, smiling serenely at the guest speaker: “I think you should know, it’s just not like that in our class. We …
Why American cities are squalid
The Thursday before Christmas, I woke up in downtown Sofia, leisurely drank a coffee, and jumped on a metro that took me directly to the airport. In less than an hour, I was at the gate for my flight to …
Is Iowa the next step to civil war?
In the silence of the Civil War’s Antietam battlefield on a winter day, bucolic hills give way to rows of small, white gravestones in the nearby cemetery. Wandering over the deadliest ground in American history, a melancholy visitor may be …
Keir Starmer and the triumph of the middle class
The Labour Party has a bad habit of losing elections, but its overall success can’t be doubted. Historically speaking, one of its functions has been to defuse working-class militancy by channelling it into parliamentary forms — and at this, Labour …
British Nimbys are unlikely populists
What do a mulberry tree, a newt and a railway station car park have in common? All of them have provided a reason, or maybe a pretext, to block the construction of new homes in Britain. In fairness, the mulberry …
Why children are skipping school
Lily was among the growing number of so-called ghost children — the ones who aren’t in school. I never met her; I only met her mother, Jane, because Lily didn’t feel ready to talk to me. Lily had been off …
How Bolshevism built modern Britain
Vladimir Lenin has a way of confounding Marxist historians, many of whom generally — and with good reason — attach odium to Great Man History. For he was that rare thing: an individual instigator of historical change. A hundred years …