Society

John Jenkins

Why Iran is not Iraq

At the moment, a lot of people – notably including the Prime Minister, Sir Keir Starmer – are comparing the current war with Iran with the Iraq invasion of 2003. Do they have a point? There are several common claims of comparison, some good, some bad. There is no use pretending that the decisions Starmer has made will not have vast and far-reaching consequences The principal claim is that what happened in Iraq means we should steer well clear of any further involvement anywhere. It reminds me of the final scene in that magnificent film, Chinatown. A private detective moves to intervene to stop a horror unfolding but one of

Bridget Phetasy

The Epstein files and the new Satanic Panic

I’ve spent the last few years building an audience of skeptics and – let’s be honest – more than a few conspiracy theorists who turned out to be right about some pretty big things. We saw #MeToo devolve into a moral panic where accusation equaled guilt and due process was something only rape apologists cared about. We watched Covid turn half the country into snitches who, drunk on their own righteousness, ratted out neighbors for having a barbecue. We talked endlessly on podcasts about groupthink, social contagion and mobs. And on some of the biggest questions – the lab leak, institutional corruption, “gender-affirming care” and the machinery of public manipulation

James Heale

In bed together: the writers of HBO’s Industry on bankers and politicians

No TV show better encapsulates the nexus between money and power than Industry. The HBO drama sees investment bankers screwing, snorting and slogging their way to the top of English society. Now, in its fourth series, political intrigue is taking centre stage. Think House of Cards – but with more sex and better-remunerated hotties. Mickey Down and Konrad Kay, the co-writers of the show, explain when we chat that they wanted to ‘expand the canvas’ as Industry progressed. It initially focused on the ‘hermetically sealed’ world of the trading floor but has now expanded beyond. ‘Finance is linked to other spheres of influence,’ says Down. ‘Obviously finance and media have

Nicholas Farrell

My wild house parties with Rose Wylie

Dante’s Beach, Ravenna I rang up my old best friend, Luke-John, for a chat a few days ago and to ask him about his mum, Rose Wylie. She is 91 and this week becomes the first ever female painter to be given a solo show at the Royal Academy. When I was in my late teens and early twenties, her house in the village of Newnham, near Faversham, became a safe haven for me, and I used to stay there a lot. Rose and her husband Roy, who was also an artist and died in 2014, were just so dead cool. Neither was well-known, and they had little money, but

Wednesday

Ian Maxwell

My sister Ghislaine became a prop in the theater of global online outrage

My family name has become a byword for scandal. My father, Robert, went from press baron to tabloid monster within weeks of his death in 1991. My sister Ghislaine, convicted in New York three decades later for sex-trafficking offenses linked to Jeffrey Epstein, became the algorithmically optimized villain of the online age. Last week’s arrest of the former Prince Andrew shows how fully a newer system has taken hold: one in which guilt is first declared on the homepage and only later, if at all, tested in court. Law is meant to cool passions. The modern content economy is designed to inflame them Old protections – the presumption of innocence,

Gareth Roberts

The BAFTAs N-word scandal has been very revealing

At the BAFTAs on Sunday night, John Davidson – whose story of living with Tourette’s syndrome is dramatized in the (very good) film I Swear – shouted out the N-word when black actors Delroy Lindo and Michael B. Jordan were on stage to present an award. You’d hope that by now people might understand the mechanics of Tourette’s symptoms – that the tics are totally involuntary, and consist of erupting with the worst possible things at the worst possible times; the imp of the perverse dialed up to 11. But no. The cruel and ideological politics of identity still have a grip on the mediocrities of the creative industries This was another

Sunday

Maria Botcharova

Wartime love is not for the faint-hearted in Kyiv

People say love develops more quickly in war – because in a world where anything can happen, what is there to lose? Single and in Kyiv for a while, I decide to swallow my distaste for dating apps and start swiping. The first thing I notice is how many men are from Turkey and based a thousand miles away. How would this work? I decide to focus on the local ones and start chatting to a couple of guys. One seems reasonable if a little forward. He suggests meeting pretty quickly, then calls to chat. I don’t really know Ukrainian norms but frankly, hearing someone’s voice gives me faith that

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Jeremy Carl Senate
Jeremy Carl

My theatrical Senate confirmation hearing

It’s a bit difficult to explain a Senate confirmation process to those who haven’t gone through it. It is, to put it in a single word, intense. Years ago, the first time I had a hit piece written about me, I wanted to crawl into a hole in the ground and die. During my confirmation hearing, my attitude was more, “Oh, Chuck Schumer is denouncing me from the Senate floor as a racist, anti-Semitic, white supremacist. It must be Monday.” I still haven’t even bothered to read the vast majority of press accounts or descriptions of me that have come out in the days since the hearing. It’s important in

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Gearóid Ó Riain

Inside the real jobs crisis

After much talk of an economic slowdown, February brought reassuring headlines. The official unemployment rate had fallen as another 130,000 jobs were added to the US economy, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That is good news, but it is not the whole story. The official unemployment rate counts only people actively looking for work – it does not capture those who would like a job but have stopped searching. The official unemployment rate is so narrow that it hides long-term changes in the economy. In fact, things are far worse than the official figures suggest. This matters for more than just economists. We tend to treat employment statistics

Friday

Neal Pollack

Pam Bondi’s not-so-secret mission

On February 11, the arrow on the Trump administration’s “See ’n Say” pointed in the direction of Attorney General Pam Bondi, who spent four extremely contentious hours arguing with congressional Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee, who questioned her about her handling of the Epstein files. “Your theatrics are ridiculous,” she said, in a case of the pot calling the kettle black, to New York’s Jerry Nadler, who asked her if the Epstein files would lead to prosecutions. Bondi called Jamie Raskin, a former constitutional law professor, a “washed-up loser lawyer.” She accused Kentucky’s Thomas Massie of having Trump Derangement Syndrome and said Vermont’s Becca Balint, whose grandfather was killed

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Thursday

Melanie McDonagh

The two missing words in King Charles’s Andrew statement

There are, you’ll note, two little words missing from King Charles’s statement on former prince Andrew’s arrest on suspicion of misconduct in public office. It goes as follows: I have learned with the deepest concern the news about Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor and suspicion of misconduct in public office.  What now follows is the full, fair and proper process by which this issue is investigated in the appropriate manner and by the appropriate authorities.  In this, as I have said before, they have our full and wholehearted support and co-operation.  Let me state clearly: the law must take its course. As this process continues, it would not be right for me to

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Alexander Larman

The seismic arrest of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor

Ever since the Restoration of Charles II in 1660, no member of the royal family has been arrested, which makes this morning’s news that Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor has been taken into police custody under suspicion of misconduct in public office all the more seismic. And with a certain grim irony, his arrest comes on his 66th birthday, of all days. This arrest represents not so much the beginning of the end as the point at which the Rubicon has been crossed, forever This development had seemed inevitable for a considerable amount of time now. Remarks from both Buckingham Palace and prime minister Sir Keir Starmer in the past few days seemed

Wednesday

Drew Pavlou

Did Billie Eilish get me deported?

For someone who believes that “no one is illegal on stolen land,” it’s a surprise that Billie Eilish’s legal team may have blocked my entry to the US. My plan was to test her theory of land ownership, which she stated at the Grammys to great applause, and take over her LA mansion with the help of Native Americans. But, sadly, I was turned back at the border last weekend – my sacred and inalienable right to freedom of movement curtailed by border guards who were, I suspect, briefed about my arrival by Eilish’s team. I’m an Australian political activist, more usually focused on exposing the influence of the Chinese

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Matthew Parris

My Epstein confession

As the flames of the Epstein Inquisition burn higher, let me get my general confession into the public domain before the guardians of public morality come for me. Here begins my deposition. I, Matthew Francis Parris, do solemnly confess that I know slightly and have been on mostly friendly terms with former British ambassador to the US Peter Mandelson; and continue to believe him to have been a far-sighted force in the creation of a sane and successful Labour government such as we so notably lack now. I CONFESS: that I know former prime minister Sir Tony Blair, who knows Lord Mandelson, who knew Jeffrey Epstein, and appointed Mandelson to

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Dot Wordsworth

How should Misha Glenny have pronounced ‘stela’?

‘Can you tell us what a stela [pronounced stealer] is and describe it for us?’ Misha Glenny asked the learned guest Fran Reynolds on In Our Time, blessedly continuing after Lord Bragg’s long innings as presenter. The episode was on Hammurabi, King of Babylon. Professor Reynolds managed to get quite far before saying: ‘There’s the most beautifully carved cuneiform inscription on the stele [pronounced steely].’ Misha Glenny then mentioned that in Paris, the week before, he had gone to ‘see the stele, as I gather it’s pronounced’, on which Hammurabi’s laws are carved. Later he picked up the courage to return to stela. It’s a word that has been used

Peter Bear

Europeans love offal – why don’t we?

The British used to love offal but now we tend to be a bit wimpy about it, unlike the French or Italians, let alone the Austrians. (I once ate a pig’s lung in Vienna. Its texture was rather like an Aero bar.) In the UK you’re unlikely to find a restaurant that would serve you andouillette or tripes à la mode de Caen. Even that traditional British staple steak and kidney pie is a rarity these days. Mind you, I did once eat bull’s testicles in an Italian restaurant – Macellaio on the Old Brompton Road. They’ve since been given the chop from the menu. In Italy, particularly Venice, they

Adam Holloway

Why I invaded the Chagos Islands

Peros Banhos, Chagos Islands On Monday at 08.52 local time, I waded ashore to the Chagos archipelago alongside four islanders who had come to establish a permanent settlement – which they hope will make it impossible for the British government to hand the territory to Mauritius.  We had managed to come this far in absolute secrecy. We worried that our passage to the Chagos Islands might be interrupted by either a British patrol boat or even a Chinese submarine. So, we bought a boat in Thailand and provisioned it in Sri Lanka. Then we made the five-day ocean passage from the port of Galle in Sri Lanka to the northernmost

Tuesday

Kellie-Jay Keen

The truth about trans violence

The latest “trans violence” was committed by a heterosexual man who went to a hockey game in Rhode Island and shot his family, then himself. His daughter described him as sick and mentally ill. Robert Dorgan, who preferred the name Roberta, is just the latest in a long line of violent people claiming to be transgender. Last week, a 6ft 18-year-old boy, who wanted to be a “petite” woman, was identified as the main suspect in the worst mass shooting in Canada’s history. Last summer, a male called Robert Westman killed two children and injured many more at the Annunciation Catholic School in Minneapolis. The 2023 Nashville school shooter was

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Saturday

Christopher Ferguson

There is no evidence that social media harms children’s mental health

The government is consulting on the merits of banning children under the age of 16 from social media and looks prized to do so. As with many such digital abstinence movements, politicians who advocate for this change are influenced by The Anxious Generation, a book of pop psychology written by Jonathan Haidt, which claims that social media has worsened young people’s mental health. Far from ‘drowning in evidence’, real researchers – not pop psychologists – are scouring a great desert looking for puddles Proponents of such bans tell us there is an overwhelming scientific consensus behind them, usually citing Haidt’s book. The UK’s Leader of the Opposition Kemi Badenoch, who is

Thursday

Stuart Heritage

The horror of the male wig

Horrible injuries are commonplace in boxing but none, surely, has been quite so devastating as that sustained by the heavyweight Jarrell Miller. In the moment it took for an uppercut to land, the Brooklyn boxer’s life changed forever. Miller went from professional athlete to, well, “the man who got his wig punched off.” I have rewatched Miller’s hairpiece getting punched off countless times, my hand clamped to my mouth. Why didn’t his team throw in the towel? Why didn’t the referee just stop the fight? Why didn’t Miller, his wig flipped up at 90 degrees like a kitchen trashcan lid, simply step out of the ring, exit the arena and

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Wednesday

Tina Brown

How Jeff Bezos destroyed the Washington Post

The debacle of the Washington Post’s hara-kiri last week dispatched the myth that a tech billionaire could save journalism. Jeff Bezos’s purchase of the paper in 2013 was greeted with euphoria, not just because he was a big fat wallet who would absorb the losses, but because we thought his Amazon wizardry was transferable to journalism’s battered business model. The man was a digital titan, for God’s sake. He started selling books online from his garage and built it into a $2.2 trillion consumer nirvana, with a Blue Origin side hustle of suborbital rockets. Surely he would figure out innovative new ways to bring the Post’s rigorous reporting to hungry

Dot Wordsworth

Me, myself and the i

Misuse of myself “should be a capital offence,” suggests Oliver Duff, the editor of the i Paper. “As reflexive pronouns, myself and yourself require a prior subject (I, you),” he says. I applaud the prospect of a general massacre of abusers of the English language, but by Mr. Duff’s criterion, Shakespeare and Richardson, Ruskin and the great lexicographer Samuel Johnson himself should have been slaughtered. Historically, myself began not as a reflexive pronoun but as an emphatic, and as an emphatic it is often still used. Other constructions allow it too. In a letter in 1782, Johnson wrote that “both Williams, and Desmoulins and myself are very sickly.” There it

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Lionel Shriver

Who doesn’t want a better life?

Every couple of years a columnist-cum-novelist will inevitably stoop to shameless self-promotion. In my defense, at least the novel released this month is germane to the political moment. Lest its simple title, A Better Life, come across as lame, I asked the designers of my British and American hardback covers to use imagery that conveys the book’s focal subject matter: immigration. See, proponents of unfettered mass migration have eternally assured us that most illegal immigrants – or as the Biden administration instructed federal law enforcement to call them, ‘newcomers’ – are merely seeking ‘a better life’. This explanation is routinely trotted out as an irrefutable justification for a potentially near-infinite

Mary Wakefield

Why are adults buying so many children’s toys?

On the fourth floor of Selfridges, in London, is the children’s toy department. Most of the vast space is given over to soft toys – mounds of synthetic fur, thousands of little beady eyes – and when I visited last Saturday afternoon the customers were almost all adults. I spent two hours there, standing by a tower of little Paddington bears, watching the shoppers in the queue for the register, and it was eye-opening. Almost no one was buying for a child. I saw two Chinese women with white toy lambs, a 17-year-old boy with a dragon, what looked like drug dealers waiting in line for Pokémon cards, and a