Society Archives

Thursday

May 14, 2026

The ‘airport effect’ that’s ruining modern life

The phrase “computer says no” now has its own Wikipedia page. The first recorded use dates back to a Stasi-era 1970s East German film segment titled Der Computer Sagt: Nein. However, its idiomatic use arose in 2004 via a series of sketches in Little Britain, each illustrating an example of technology--enabled bureaucratic intransigence, typically flying in the face of common-sense human judgment. It is perhaps the 21st-century equivalent of “jobsworth.” To behavioral scientists, the phrase illustrates something known as “defensive decision-making,” whereby the primary motivation for a decision is not the likely quality of the outcome but the decision-maker’s often unconscious urge to use any available means to offload accountability for his actions.

Melissa Kite

What really killed off the traditional B&B

To B&B or not to be B&B? That is the question. Whether it’s nobler to offer breakfast to a guest is not in question, but whether it’s possible has been my dilemma since I started my guest house. After reading Ross Clark on The Spectator website saying that he longs for the traditional B&B, all I can say is I’ve really tried to be that landlady he describes, in pink fluffy slippers, frying bacon in a house with Artex walls. I’ve tried to take people who roll up late at night, I’ve tried to put the second B back into the enterprise, and I’ve tried to cope with customers who, like Ross, want the option of a cooked breakfast but not a fry-up – porridge, made just the way they want it, which is different for every single customer.

Lloyd Evans

Man vs lobster

She was doing a postgrad course in a town by the sea, and a strange thing happened to us one afternoon. On the quayside we saw lobsters being sold from a trestle table. Only one of them remained and I squinted at it, close up. The sharp oval claws, like holsters, had been bound in elastic bands to stop them nipping customers. It seemed a small-minded precaution. These imposing pincers were cumbersome and useless on dry land. But in the sea, with the water’s buoyancy to give them mobility, they would be swift and lethal weapons. Yet the lobster-catcher had neutralized them with a pair of turquoise bands. What for? The beast was already defeated, plucked from its natural habitat by a giant human being, and yet the victor was fearful of the tiniest nip from his prisoner’s claws.

Max Pemberton

Is your wellness smoothie giving you cancer?

There’s a question I’ve started being asked at work. Given I’m a psychiatrist, it isn’t one I’d ever expected to hear: “Do I have cancer?” A young woman with anxiety wants to know whether the lump on her neck is sinister; she has been watching a great deal of TikTok. A man in his late thirties, in for a routine review, mentions in passing that his sister has been referred for a colonoscopy and wonders whether he should be too. At a dinner party a few weeks ago, a friend leant across halfway through her low-alcohol natural wine and asked me, in a small voice, whether it was true her generation was getting cancer in their thirties. Yes, I said, perhaps a little too bluntly. She looked rather panicked for the rest of her evening.

The Spectator

Which animals are older than David Attenborough?

Travel sickness Three people were reported to have died in an outbreak of hantavirus on a cruise ship returning to Europe from Antarctica. How likely are you to fall ill with an infectious disease on a cruise? A European study that analyzed US data on 760 cruises between 2010 and 2013 found an overall illness rate of 2.81 cases per 10,000 traveler-days, while 97% of cases involved norovirus. The rate of outbreaks was highest on ships which had a home port in Cuba or Egypt and lowest on ships with a home port in France, Greece, Italy or the UK. Local difficulties Does a governing party ever do well in local elections?

Rod Liddle

The unstoppable rise of stupidity

Hold the front page: I’ve found a very good contemporary novel to occupy my time. Such things have become vanishingly rare, even if one is grateful for David Mitchell’s metafiction, the occasional blast from Michel Houllebecq and Ben Marcus’s engaging lunacy. By and large, modern novels lack depth, originality of form and language, political unorthodoxy (i.e. freethinking) and a vaulting fictional imagination. Where, today, would you find the J.G. Ballards, the David Storeys, the Anthony Burgesses? In the sensitivity reader’s rejected pile, I suspect.

Charles Moore

Keir Starmer is downplaying the Islamist threat to Jews

At the anti-Semitism “summit” in Downing Street, Sir Keir Starmer achieved a personal first. He used the word “Islamists.” But in order to utter a word he had previously avoided in relation to the subject, Sir Keir had to approach it crabwise. Instead of identifying Islamists as the main ideological and physical threat to British Jews, he said: “We’re clear-eyed about the fact that anti-Semitism does not have one source alone: Islamists, far-left, far-right extremism, all target Jewish communities.” Islamists were thus inserted into the conversation but also downplayed. It is obsolete not to recognize that the far right in Britain – for the moment at least – more or less leaves Jews alone.

Simon Heffer

It’s time to uncancel Enoch Powell

Despite a career of nearly half a century in public life, Enoch Powell is generally remembered for one utterance only: the so-called "Rivers of Blood" speech he made in Birmingham on April 20, 1968, in which he voiced his opposition to the race relations legislation being taken through parliament by the then Labour government. Powell was the Conservative opposition’s defense spokesman. His speech threw the leader of his party, Edward Heath, into a profound panic, and he sacked Powell immediately, initiating decades of assertions that Powell was racially prejudiced. Powell always said – entirely honestly – that he never made a speech about race: just speeches about immigration policy and his profound disagreement with how it was usually managed.

Wednesday

May 13, 2026

Cockburn

WATCH: Keir Starmer declares himself a ‘gooner’

They say being honest in the face of adversity can help save your neck. British Prime Minister Keir Starmer this afternoon proudly told the House of Commons, “I am a gooner.” https://twitter.com/PolitlcsUK/status/2054575703371153826 Cockburn must be charitable to Starmer (someone has to) and note that his word choice offers an example of two nations divided by a common language. In American English – very online American English – a “gooner” is someone who indulges in extensive bouts of self-gratification. Thanks to Harper’s magazine for making the term more widely known. In British English, however, “gooner” is a variation of “Gunner,” meaning “fan of Arsenal Football Club.” This is only slightly less embarrassing.

Lawrence Newport

Britain is sick of the Westminster psychodrama

The British Army has long lived by a simple maxim: “Prior preparation and planning prevents piss poor performance.” It remains as true today as ever. Disasters are rarely unavoidable or destined to occur. Usually, they are the consequence of decisions – or the refusal to make them – over several weeks, months, and even years. Any government would be wise to follow this advice before entering office. Yet Keir Starmer's Government, much like many of those that came before it, will fail because it lacked the prior preparation and planning to prevent the poor performance it subsequently delivered. Each time Westminster convinces itself that the problem was just personnel Living standards in decline. Industries leaving. Jobs going elsewhere. Wages stagnant. Communities fractured.

Monday

May 11, 2026

Chris Smith

How dangerous is the cruise ship hantavirus?

Virologists, the imaginative bunch that we are, often name new viruses after the places they were first found. Zika virus was initially described in Uganda’s Zika forest, while the Ebola river, flowing through what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo, needs no explanation for the dread disease documented there. There are existing case reports of human outbreaks in South America stemming from gatherings and parties. That said, the documented efficiency of the transmission under these circumstances is extremely low Hantaviruses are chips off the same block.

Sam Leith

TV doesn’t ruin childhood, but phones might

When I was a nipper, a staple of children’s television was a show called Why Don’t You? The full title, as the theme song made clear, was: “Why don’t you just switch off your television set and go and do something less boring instead?" Very “meta”, as we didn’t then say. And, of course, generations of children sat on the sofa gormlessly drinking Um Bongo while we watched the show’s cast demonstrate all the wholesome arts-and-crafts activities we could have been doing instead of watching TV. This was a few years before our parents discovered the joys of eating microwave TV dinners while watching Master Chef. A previous generation feared that the rise of television would put an end to children reading. It didn’t I start with this to give a bit of context.

Thursday

May 7, 2026

John Power

Hantavirus doesn’t look like the next Covid

Over the past few days, more parts of the press have been reporting that the hantavirus outbreak aboard the MV Hondius has spread beyond the boat, and that health authorities are "racing" to track people who have been on board. "Why rat virus patients could become super-spreaders" is the headline of one Telegraph article. "Superspreader fears" is the caption of one image in the Sun. The Daily Express is even running a poll asking its readers "are you worried about the hantavirus cruise outbreak?" – a vote which they may have somewhat prejudiced by dubbing MV Hondius the "Horror Hantavirus cruise" in another article published just yesterday. The Daily Mail has gone one further, alternatively calling MV Hondius the "Death Cruise" and the "Doomed cruise.

Wednesday

May 6, 2026

Joanna Williams

The slow death of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion

For the past few years, woke has been on life support. Back in 2020, police officers knelt for Black Lives Matter, children were taught that boys could become girls, and the trans-inclusive Pride flag seemed to fly from every building in the country. Since then, there has been something of a retreat. The Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) industry still has a pulse and is more than capable of reinvention, but it is less confident and more defensive. Human Resource officers were able to rule the roost Why the change? Donald Trump’s second term in office is one reason for the vibe shift. The President punctured all manner of sacred convictions as he signed executive orders to keep DEI out of education and men out of women’s sports.

Andrea Miotti

We are closer to AI extinction than we think

A specter is hanging over humanity: the specter of superintelligent AI. While governments busy themselves with the mundane work of politics and putting out the fire of the day, the most consequential technological development since the splitting of the atom is accelerating beyond anyone’s ability to control it. We are entering an era where the AI systems themselves are threats, not just humans Anthropic, one of the world's leading AI companies, recently announced a new AI system, Claude Mythos. The model can autonomously find and exploit critical security vulnerabilities in every major operating system and internet browser underpinning our digital infrastructure, including flaws that survived decades of human review.

Friday

May 1, 2026

Mary Wakefield

Shameless Britain: we are a nation of shoplifters

It’s been more than a week since Sean Egan, a manager at Morrisons in Aldridge, announced that he’d been sacked just for doing his job – for stopping a thief nicking booze – and national outrage over the whole affair is still running high. Sean is on morning TV as I write, donations to pay for his appeal rising steadily. In part, the fuss is a measure of sympathy. Sean worked at Morrisons for 29 years and was liked by the people of Aldridge. He was sacked, say Morrisons, because they have a “deter, don’t detain” policy – though what Morrisons think could possibly have deterred this thief, given his long list of previous convictions, is anyone’s guess. But the feeling for Sean isn’t just a swell of support for one man; it’s also a symptom of wider frustration.

Melissa Kite

Americans think they want the ‘real Ireland.’ They don’t

As the first Americans of the season got out of their car I scrunched up my face and groaned. “They’re all like that, remember?” said the builder boyfriend. “What if the bed gives way?” I demanded. “How will they even fit in the bed?” The BB shrugged. “Who cares?” he said, with his usual sunny attitude. I don’t mean to suggest these people were overweight. I mean they were giants. I’m sure their depth was right for their height. There was just an awful lot of them, and we are not the Premier Inn, with super-king beds that sleep two medium-sized horses. She was in sportif wear. He was tousle-haired and bearded, dressed in a flowing shirt and baggy trousers.

Toby Young

The American dream is dying. Good

The American dream is dying, according to the Times of London. To mark the US’s 250th anniversary, the paper commissioned YouGov to explore whether the country’s citizens still believe that if you “work hard and play by the rules” you will eventually be successful. Turns out, only 38 percent of the respondents think this applies to all Americans, while 59 percent think the American dream is now less attainable than it was when they were growing up. In addition, 38 percent rated today’s quality of life as “excellent” or “good,” compared with 60 percent who said the same about 1976, the bicentennial year.

Freddy Gray

Lorna Hajdini and the willing suspension of disbelief

"A lie can get halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on." That old saw is now hopelessly out of date. These days, an apparent malicious falsehood can become global news in a matter of seconds, especially if it contains suggestions that pants might have come off. Human beings love to share shocking gossip, and internet technology means that we can do so at terrifying speed and scale. Social media now resembles the lower-rent tabloids of old, rife with fantastical pieces about aliens or sex slaves and the occult Take, for instance, the incredible tale of the feline JPMorgan executive who "sexually harassed" a junior male staff member.

Dot Wordsworth

Where do passion-killers come from?

“Rearing homing pigeons was always a passion for the Queen,” said a feature in the Daily Mail about Elizabeth II on the centenary of her birth. Yet perhaps that passion didn’t rage, hot as lava, through her veins, decade after decade. With Sir Keir, it has been football – “his only real passion and his one release from the tensions of office,” according to another source of the Daily Mail’s. Every young person tries to convince their chosen “uni” that they are passionate about law or sport science. “When you can turn your hobby and passion into your profession, then that is the best thing there is,” observed Marie-Louise Eta, the football coach, as though it were a truth universally acknowledged.