Society

Jerry Seinfeld and the dark truth about ‘Free Palestine’

I see Jerry Seinfeld has got the pompous left sobbing into their keffiyehs. His sin? He refused to buckle to their neo-religious mantra “Free Palestine.” The comedy legend was accosted by a YouTuber outside Madison Square Gardens in NYC last week. ‘Free Palestine’ feels like a jeer designed to taunt Jews “Can we get a ‘Free Palestine’?” the streamer asked as he shoved his mic towards Seinfeld’s mouth. Seinfeld smirked. He held his tongue. No “Free Palestine” passed his lips. It gets better. He then proceeded to shut down his chirpy interrogator with three words. “It doesn’t exist”, he said. He was talking about Palestine. Cue fury from the Gazaholics. This was “racist rhetoric”, cried the cranks at the Council on American-Islamic Relations.

Terry Barnes

How many people did Australia’s backpacker murderer kill?

Australians are known for world-class performances in many fields. Mostly, our achievements are a source of national pride, but one field of achievement causes us only horror and shame. Our serial killers are some of the most prolific and brutal anywhere. And none are more brutal or prolific than the late, unlamented, Ivan Robert Marko Milat. Milat took his victims into the forest bound, terrified and subjected them to unspeakably sadistic torture The facts of Milat’s known killing spree are gruesome and horrific. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Milat turned the Belanglo State Forest, a bushland reserve off the main highway to Melbourne, and 80 miles from Sydney, into his personal killing field.

Atbin Moayedi

Sweden shows that not all immigrants are the same

I’m just going to say it. Not all immigrants are the same. I know that reading that might make you feel uncomfortable, particularly if you’re white and American and therefore more vulnerable to cancel culture and snowflakery. But it’s true. Some immigrants are simply better than others. And by better, I mean that immigrants from certain nations and cultures are more likely than others to integrate and make a positive contribution to their new country. Sweden is a useful terrarium of immigration; the good, the bad and the ugly Sweden is a useful terrarium of immigration; the good, the bad and the ugly. I was born in Sweden to Iranian parents in the early 1990s.

Max Horder

Is the White House trying to hurt Anthropic?

The US government has finally intervened in the AI regulation question, albeit in the kind of haphazard, incoherent, and possibly corrupt manner in which the Trump administration tends to wade in to anything related to the stock market, particularly on a Friday evening before it closes. The US Department of Commerce announced that Fable, Anthropic’s hardened version of the underlying model Mythos, was indeed far too dangerous to be released to the general public. Then they issued a blanket export control directive saying that no “foreign nationals” should be allowed to use the new product. So Anthropic, most of whose employees are foreign nationals, had no option but simply to turn Fable off.

Saturday

June 13, 2026

Julie Burchill

Kim Kardashian deserves better than Lewis Hamilton

I’ve always been keen on Kim Kardashian, going right back to the earliest years of her family reality show. At one point in an over-excited piece for the Sun, I even compared her to Helen of Troy – a modern day icon of beauty whose bum launched a thousand quips. Hamilton has a long history of acting like both a princeling and a drag queen in terms of entitlement and drama, while also liking to present himself as the underdog But my word, she can pick them. Starting with Ray-J, who appears to have been talking about little else since 2007 but the sex tape they made as youngsters in 2003. Then there was most famously Kanye West.

Josie Cox

My Memorial Day pilgrimage to a Pennsylvania Walmart

Here in the US, Memorial Day – which falls on the last Monday in May – is, officially, an occasion for mourning and honoring military personnel who have given their lives in service to this great country. Unofficially, it is an occasion for charred hot dogs, 24-packs of Bud Light and nationalistic merchandising usually confined to airport gift shops. In our household, however, Memorial Day marks something different entirely. It’s the day we make our annual pilgrimage into the heart of consumer capitalism: a Walmart in East Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania. By now you might know that I live in Manhattan. You might, therefore, be wondering why exactly we’ve adopted this strange ritual, necessarily involving a rental car and gridlocked traffic on the George Washington Bridge.

Freya India

How iPhones became birth control

A new study has found that smartphones are a likely cause of falling American birth rates. Economists Caitlin K. Myers and Ezekiel Hooper tracked the rollout of the iPhone across the country and found that the more people used smartphones, the further birth rates fell. This was especially true for the youngest cohort of women. Between 2007 and 2011, use of the iPhone was correlated with between 33 to 52 percent of America’s fertility decline. There’s been a lot of discussion about smartphones and falling fertility rates lately. Most arguments go something like this: smartphones and social media are linked to rising rates of anxiety and depression, less sex and less in-person socializing.

Friday

June 12, 2026

Olenka Hamilton

Decluttering is the ultimate act of love

“You are going to die before me and leave me to deal with this, and I will curse your soul for all eternity,” I once said half-jokingly to my husband over a glass of wine. We were having one of our regular conversations about what he was going to do about his late uncle’s possessions, which had arrived at our house in lorry-loads about a year after we had married. “Why don’t you do half an hour of sorting every weekend? I will help you,” I would suggest in reference to the multiple barns, basements and attics at our farm, which were now piled high with three generations’ worth of male hoarding. But with an increasing number of children in the house and no sense of urgency, progress was slow.

Jawad Iqbal

The World Cup’s critics must give it a chance

There has been so much controversy in the run-up to the 2026 World Cup that it is sometimes easy to forget that it is actually a soccer tournament. That is why it is something of a relief that the competition is finally underway, allowing fans to focus on the game itself rather than all the off-field goings on. The 2026 competition is being played in North America with thousands of fans descending on the United States, Canada and Mexico to watch their national teams in action. It features 16 host cities, 48 teams, and 104 matches. It amounts to a stupendous orgy of soccer excess. Even so, the build-up to this tournament has been markedly ugly and increasingly politically-charged, despite FIFA’s attempts to paint it as a unifying global event.

Dot Wordsworth

Know your facepalm from your headslap

“That’s not a facepalm,” said my husband. “It’s a headslap.” He proved the point by making contact between the flat of his hand and his noble brow, producing a percussive sound. Then he covered his eyes with outstretched fingers and said: “That’s a facepalm.” He was right to make a semantic distinction between these two nonverbal gestures. The headslap signifies usually comic frustration at another’s stupidity. The facepalm conveys embarrassment. The names are recent. Facepalm is not found earlier than 1996 in the Oxford English Dictionary. Those who like to employ emojis (which I do not) will find one for the job. The headslap has not yet been noticed by the OED.

Flora Watkins

Tequila slammers all around!

“Tequila, it makes me happy, / Con Tequila it feels fine” goes the student anthem by Terrorvision. It is midnight, somewhere around the turn of the new millennium, and we are on the sticky dancefloor of a grotty union bar in Edinburgh, but it could be Bristol, Cambridge or Newcastle. You get the picture. The song is greeted by whoops and an influx of revelers throwing drunken shapes. Meanwhile, some bastard in your friendship group who’s feeling flush is already elbowing his way to the bar to spank part of the student loan that’s just hit his account on a bottle of José Cuervo tequila, shot glasses, lemons and salt. Slammers all round! Bleurrggghhhhh.

Mary Killen

Dear Mary: how do I stop friends buying me pet-themed presents?

Q. I have been working in a large restaurant alongside a very attractive, although shy, girl. I live near the restaurant and she has come back for drinks on a few occasions. She seems to enjoy my company but I have been too feeble to take things further. I fear that if she does not find me attractive, by making a move I could ruin our friendship. What should I do? – Name withheld, London W6 A. Step one: buy a Feverscan forehead thermometer. This liquid crystal strip is held on to one person’s forehead by another, thus requiring a degree of physical intimacy. Step two: ask the girl to your flat along with another colleague. When they arrive, act slow-witted and explain you are feeling odd.

Rory Sutherland

Variety is the spice of evolutionary life

I would have enjoyed mathematics more at school if I’d known what the real value was. The benefit of studying math isn’t numeracy at all: it’s creativity – a kind of benign neurodiversity. A new set of eyes through which to see the world, and the priceless lesson that the best way to solve a problem is to redefine it. Many of the most interesting people I’ve met have been mathematicians. Nassim Taleb taught me a whole new way to look at statistical variance. And, in a chance meeting with Stephen Wolfram, I heard something which at first surprised me, but which has needled me ever since.

Richard Koenig

Exploring Bologna from above

Matteo Giovanardi was navigating a midlife crisis amid a failed marriage and needing shelter when he moved into a medieval tower in the northern Italian city of Bologna. Rising over a small piazza, the tower topped out at 60 meters, its floors dirtied by pigeon droppings, its walls blackened with the soot of ages. Seven years passed before Giovanardi moved out. For he had found in this tower – the Torre Prendiparte – not only shelter but a salutary mission. “I needed to rinse away the pain, to imagine the rest of my life,” he tells me when I visit. “It is not only bricks. Prendiparte is a magical place.” It was early in the 1990s when Giovanardi took up residence in the tower.

Melissa Kite

Once we Brexiteers get our Irish passports, we can go anywhere

“There’s a flat rat under the mat!” I shrieked, and wondered whether that was the sort of jaunty phrase that could be used for elocution lessons. I had lifted this mat by the main staircase to hoover the floor beneath it and there it was, a perfectly flat rat in the shape of a cartoon dead beast beneath this mat. I began laughing uncontrollably, because if you’ve ever seen a flat rat under a mat you will know that it is intrinsically funny, whatever your views on rats. You will laugh even if you don’t like rodents, or indeed if you like them way too much. Even if you are a member of the Rat Preservation Society, when you see one flattened paper-thin, stuck to your floorboards, I challenge you not to burst out laughing, while jumping up and down.

Lloyd Evans

My new job at the Amazon packing factory

What will you do if it all goes wrong? I have a back-up plan: working for Amazon. Its Luton warehouse offers tours to the public, and I went along to see what my future may hold. The vast hangar sits in a field of mega-sheds near the M25, where built-up London peters out into scrub and green farmland. I arrived at a bright-yellow security gate where I was greeted by Amin and Sophie, who seemed thrilled to welcome our party. Six in all. Sophie asked us – or perhaps ordered us – to deposit our phones in a locker whose key she retained during our visit. Amin explained the rules. Follow me. Walk within the blue lines. Ascend staircases on the left. Use the handrail. Off we went.

Mark Galeotti

What Tommy Robinson really sees in Russia

Everyone who is everyone – within a certain political and social fragment – has been in Russia this past week. Conservative American conspiracy theorist Candace Owens; Errol Musk, father of Elon; toxic “manosphere” influencers Andrew and Tristan Tate; and Tommy Robinson, the far-right activist. Robinson told the Guardian that he had traveled to Moscow “to see how this country got itself so well on to the straight and narrow and see the beauty of a civilized society here.” In the process, he was walking a well-trodden path of westerners heading to Russia to see exactly what they want to see. Once it was socialists like Sidney and Beatrice Webb, who found Stalin’s regime “the very opposite of a dictatorship.

Patrick Smith

Why I take frog poison

You picture the rainforest, naturally. A clearing at first light, a shaman with thousand-yard eyes, the canopy screeching overhead. What you do not picture is a fourth-floor flat on an east London estate, a woman wafting sage around your head and the slow realization that you have just handed over £150 to be – quite literally – poisoned. This is kambo. And at the lowest ebb of my late thirties, becalmed in a miasma of self-loathing and suffering from PTSD following a moped accident in Thailand, I had decided it was precisely what I needed. Made from the dried skin secretions of a giant monkey frog, it is also, as of last month, suspected of having killed its first Briton.

Mary Wakefield

Save us from the Gospel according to Grok

The Rt. Revd. Martyn Snow, the handsome and up-to-date Bishop of Leicester, has decided that it’s OK, even admirable, for clergy to use AI to write their sermons. Bishop Snow was on the radio the other day, proud to share with listeners that in his diocese, they’ve even had an AI expert come to give pointers to the priests. No more painful head-scratching on a Saturday afternoon for the lucky clerics of Leicester. ChatGPT will sort it. Just plug in a Bible verse and a few well-crafted prompts, and you’re off to the cricket, or to Pride, whichever way you swing. It’s one of those many times I wish Michael Wharton was still alive and writing.

Daniel McCarthy

The ‘great man’ era is passing away

Not long ago, I participated in one of the many off-the-record discussions in Washington about ending the war in Ukraine. This conversation was quite detailed, with American academics and policy wonks asking a European who was especially well-informed on Russian matters just what a land-for-peace deal or security guarantees acceptable to all parties might look like. When my turn to speak came around, however, I had to wonder whether all this wasn’t moot. There just isn’t much time to reach an agreement – let alone implement one –before the end of Donald Trump’s second term. And when America elects its next president in November 2028, Vladimir Putin will be 75 years old.

Thursday

June 11, 2026

Gage Klipper

Is it OK to be a horse guy?

Is it gay to be a horse guy? According to my parents, the answer, hilariously, is “yes.” I never grew up riding in a very professional or competitive manner because, as I recently learned as an adult, my parents thought it was just too gay. Everyone knows the stereotype of a horse girl. My parents certainly did, after raising two girls in the horse-show world. Linked to social privilege, emotional intensity and a bit of naivety, the horse girl eventually shifts the obsession with her horse into her boyfriend and becomes the caricature of a high-maintenance clinger. I can see why my parents wanted to avoid that type of socialization for their only son. But the stereotype isn’t all true (my sisters turned out normal.

Bill Kauffman

How Jeff Taylor came back from the dead

I’ve long regarded Iowa’s Jeff Taylor as one of the most interesting politicians in America – and that was before I knew that he had once died and come back to life. Jeff, 65, is a political science professor at Dordt University and a two-term state senator from a rural district in northwest Iowa. He’s written books on Bob Dylan, William Jennings Bryan, the decentralist tradition in American politics and other worthy American subjects that are of no demonstrable interest to, say, Marco Rubio or Hakeem Jeffries. He is thoughtful, mild-mannered, affably learned and willing to make radical breaks with the corporate stooges of the Republican establishment. And now he has written a book about the day he died. The driver turned off the siren and slowed down.

Rod Dreher

Budapest is nice but it’s no Birmingham, Alabama

I am shocked by how serene I am since moving back to America – to Birmingham, Alabama – from Budapest. Everything I love about life in general is in Europe. But to my surprise and regret, it’s not home. I don’t know why I was wrapped so tight by anxiety in Budapest, but I was. I had a great life there, no complaints – except for no church community, which wasn’t Budapest’s fault, just a matter of my inability in local languages. Being back in the US, in a place where I have access to an Orthodox church in my own language – well, I can literally feel the anxiety uncoiling within me. I can’t explain it, but I’m not going to think about it, just be grateful. I went to church yesterday at St. Symeon, the Orthodox Church in America parish in town.

Douglas Murray

Britain imported a problem it refuses to name

I get the sense that the political and media class badly miss Katie Hopkins. Back when the reality TV star was still a regular on Britain's screens and in our newspapers, she could be relied upon to be the focus of attention whenever the people in charge didn’t want the public’s attention to be focused where it ought to be. So when a British soldier was decapitated on the streets of London, or a suicide bomber went off at a pop concert packed with teenage girls, Ms. Hopkins could be found saying something that a lot of people were thinking – only in a more colorful or unwise way.