Society Archives

Monday

June 1, 2026

Marilyn Monroe was just like the rest of us

Marilyn Monroe was born a hundred years ago today. She was famous enough in her lifetime to be one of those rare figures referred to by their first name alone. Such fame seldom lasts. Even Frank now needs to be called "Sinatra." She is still "Marilyn" partly because the name fell out of use; her fame survives partly because she died young – of a barbiturate overdose, presumed to be suicide – at the age of thirty-six. My favorite Monroe story is one told by Billy Wilder, who directed and co-wrote the film Some Like It Hot. Newly engaged to Arthur Miller, the actress was taken to meet Miller’s parents in a small New York apartment with thin walls. Nervous of being overheard while she was using the bathroom, Monroe turned on the taps to cover the noise.

Saturday

May 30, 2026

Daniel Seifert

Forties’ love: tennis serves me a perfect midlife crisis

There comes a time when every man must choose how to tackle an impending midlife crisis. A Maserati? A marathon? A mistress? Lacking the wealth, stamina or sheer Italian-ness for any of the above, I’ve plumped for that most gentile of sports to feel alive again: tennis. The problem with a new hobby, of course, is that you immediately feel more infantile than raffishly young. Picking up fresh skills means relearning how to learn, decades after university, when you actually had the appetite for self-improvement. Sure, tennis is, as studies have found, one of the most effective activities for staying healthy. But it’s also infuriatingly finicky. Technique-wise, I can fire off a decent groundstroke (forehand and backhand), thanks to lessons as a mopey teen.

Dear Mary

Is it ‘common’ to look at a restaurant bill before paying?

Q. My sister has married in later life and we all like her husband. They have moved nearby and now join us in the weekly pub quiz. I am not competitive but just enjoy taking part. My brother-in-law went to Harvard, and although I went to St. Mary’s Wantage I am able to hold my own when socializing with very bright people and have never felt “inadequate.” At the quiz, however, whenever there is a trivia question on pop or soap operas he looks at me and says, “Go on – you’ll know this one.” I shouldn’t mind this but I find it maddening. – O.I., London SW13 A. Chippiness is the wrong response. Instead roll gracefully with the punches and each time there is a really difficult question, turn the spotlight on him saying, “Go on, you’ll know this one!

Melissa Kite

We’ve lost our only anti-vaxxer friend in the village

“Can I go now?” said the farmer I was talking to over my gate, and he looked so scared I felt a bit ashamed of myself. I had flagged him down as he went by in his rickety blue tractor that’s so old it looks like Noah used it to load hay on to the Ark. I told him I hadn’t seen him for a while. He usually waves or comes in for a chat. He has been our favorite neighbor since we moved to West Cork. As he owns the land above us where our water well is situated, that’s all to the good. We went out of our way to befriend him from the get-go, but after deluging him in home-baked fruitcakes and offers of dinner, for he lives alone, we realized he was our sort of person anyway.

Mary Wakefield

The rise of the child-haters

On Petersfield station, southbound side, there’s a huge billboard advertising a tropical holiday with a photo of a beautiful couple joyfully splashing each other in the water. I walked past it, stopped, walked back and stared. “Adults-only holiday,” it read. “Entirely child-free.” But this wasn’t “adults only” in the 20th-century sense: getting frisky with strangers after a pink gin and an all-you-can-eat buffet. What was being sold was a holiday guaranteed to contain not a squeak of any disgusting child, and the whole tone of the advert was one of joyful relief: at last! Just what we’ve all always wanted, but never dared to admit! The beautiful couple could spend their days scrolling freely on their expensive phones, undisturbed by the excited shouts of infants.

Philip Hensher

What lists of our greatest novels get wrong

“Where are all my favorite parts?” Arnold Schoenberg asked, on being presented with a severe academic analysis of the Eroica symphony. “Oh, there they are. In the tiny notes.” The tendency of many people, presented with the overwhelming abundance of an art form, is to exclude as much as possible. Reduce the wonderful life of incidental invention to the tiny notes; erect walls excluding the fascinating curiosity, the eccentric, the madly idiosyncratic. Produce a list of the 100 Best Books, sticking to declared Greatness. People have been producing lists of the Best Books for a hell of a long time. When copyright law was reformed in 1774, it enabled publishers to produce collections of novels for the first time.

Lionel Shriver

If you think your bills are bad now, just wait

Forgive the doom-mongering, but the US, and especially the UK, may be dangerously on course for a sovereign debt crisis. Yet debt and deficits play a surprisingly minimal role in our countries’ politics. Overspending on borrowed money hardly featured in either nation’s elections of 2024. A Labour MP hoping for Andy Burnham to challenge Keir Starmer for her party’s leadership recently told Times Radio that investors would see the UK as “the best place to be” if only the government pursued “progressive policies that do speak to our communities.” She added darkly, “The markets will have to get into line” – which was like brandishing a saber at the heavens and threatening that the weather “will have to get into line”... or else!

Friday

May 29, 2026

Charles Moore

The £10 pint explains the rise of Reform

I bought my first pint of bitter, in a pub in Slough, in 1972. It cost 12 pence. The Bank of England inflation calculator tells me that is the equivalent of £1.45 today. Yet a pint now sells for £10 in London. What went wrong? Many factors, of which the first was Britain’s entry into the EEC on January 1, 1973. We were eventually made to "harmonize" our alcohol duties with our partners, leading to a drop in the duty on wine and a rise in that on beer, to reflect French cultural preferences. The most recent shock has been Rachel Reeves’s attack on small businesses with employer NI rises, punitive workers’ rights, ever-higher minimum wage etc. In the 1970s, the price of a pint, like the cost of a packet of cigarettes, was a major issue of concern in each year’s Budget.

Damian Thompson

Weight-loss drugs killed my appetite for life

Sam Altman, the co-founder of OpenAI, which launched ChatGPT, is not overweight. Gay tech billionaires rarely are. Even so, as he explained in a recent interview, he was keen to try a GLP-1, one of those drugs that have revolutionized weight loss in the past five years. You can understand why he was curious. Ozempic and Mounjaro might appear to have nothing in common with artificial intelligence, but both phenomena have helped to create the sensation that we’re entering an era of accelerating and uncontrollable change. Alas, he screwed it up. He had someone inject him with a megadose, puked all night and then lay in bed for days "staring at a white ceiling thinking nothing," not only feeling no urge to eat but also no "desire for anything.

Peter Jones

Did Plato invent women’s lib?

One could go on endlessly about what the ancients have done for us, but one of the most interesting things is that Plato could be said to have invented women’s lib, though it seems to have taken 2,500 years to catch on. Since most ancient states were at war much of the time, putting the male population especially at risk, women had to commit to the production line as soon as possible if the state were to survive. But Socrates, in Plato’s dialogue The Republic, portrays a utopia in which women shared the same status as men. The ruling class of this state are called Guardians and Plato likens them to dogs hunting and protecting the flock, an activity in which female dogs engage just as much as male dogs (though the males are stronger).

Rory Sutherland

My points-based system for choosing our leaders

Our esteemed London editor was once excoriated for saying that the public had had enough of experts. "The people of this country have had enough of experts from organizations with acronyms saying they know what is best and getting it consistently wrong." His remark sits within a fine conservative tradition: there is William F. Buckley, who stated: "I would rather be governed by the first 2,000 people in the telephone directory than by the Harvard University faculty." There is Thomas Sowell, who wrote: "Intellectuals are people whose end products are intangible ideas…Whether their ideas turn out to work... is another question entirely." And of course there is Edmund Burke: "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to read PPE at Oxford.

Dot Wordsworth

When does a drama become a psychodrama?

When Labour blocked Andy Burnham from standing as its candidate last time around, Douglas Alexander, the Scottish Secretary, rejoiced at avoiding "three months of psychodrama – who’s up, who’s down, who’s getting on with who…" But as Gareth Roberts remarked in The Spectator’s Coffee House, "I’m not quite sure what the difference is between psychodrama and good old-fashioned plain original-flavor drama." Indeed, Mr. Alexander’s characterization of psychodrama sounds like the essential lineaments of pure politics: "Who loses and who wins; who’s in, who’s out," as King Lear puts it. King Lear itself might be a classic psychodrama, if madness is the defining feature.

Piers Morgan

No one likes Arsenal, we don’t care

Arsenal’s triumph in finally winning the Premier League again after 22 long, often eyeball-wrenchingly tortuous years has gone down like one of Keir Starmer’s motivational “I’m not leaving!” speeches, which is ironic given the Prime Minister is an avid Gooner like me. It’s hard to understand why a club that boasts a fanbase including us, Jeremy Corbyn, Rwanda’s President Paul Kagame, the late Osama bin Laden and Prince Harry (whose matchday allegiance has followed a similar path to his royal duties, in that he never turns up) attracts such opprobrium that we were recently named the “most-hated supporters” in the league. But as with Millwall in their hooligan heyday, if no one likes us, we don’t care.

William Cook

My annual pilgrimage along the route of the Berlin Wall

Each time I return to Berlin – that wonderful, awful city where I whiled away the best days of my misspent youth – I take a walk along the cobbled path that marks the route of the Berlin Wall. Half a lifetime since it came tumbling down, there isn’t much left to see. A few stretches have been preserved as memorials, but it’s mainly an absence not a presence – a ghostly gap between the backs of buildings, a fissure between past and present, between the hard truths of the last century and the uneasy ambiguities of today. Why do I persist with this melancholy Wanderung, year after year? Because a walk along the Mauerweg (as Berliners call that zigzag footpath) is the best way to take the temperature of this Faustian metropolis.

Bill Kauffman

The many versions of ‘Come Saturday Morning’

Wedding season has begun. First out of the gate this year was my young first cousin once removed, who entered marital bliss in a lovely Catholic ceremony in the small western New York city of Lockport, hometown of the logorrheic novelist Joyce Carol Oates and the supermodel cum hemorrhoid-cream spokeswoman Kim Alexis. As I sat nursing a non-alcoholic beer (I should’ve stuck with water) at the reception I awaited the father-daughter dance, and not only for its poignancy. I have paid attention to these ever since reading a newspaper article several years back that said Eric Clapton’s “Wonderful Tonight” was then the second-most-popular song for this wedding-reception custom. Hmm.

Chilton Williamson, Jr.

The difficult pursuit of happiness

For six centuries, from the Renaissance forward, the architects and creators of modernity have promised and predicted a new world, one which, in Thomas Jefferson’s immortal words, would be dedicated to “the pursuit of happiness.” The birth of that world in its political aspect is being celebrated this year in the United States, as well as, to some extent or another, throughout the West. This phrase, so vague and rhetorical as to be meaningless, is also the best definition there is of the modern project. Hence the 250th anniversary of the birth of the US is an obvious moment to consider how far America, and with it the world it has so radically influenced, have advanced since 1776.

Ruaridh Nicoll

In Cuba, we’ve all become preppers

We may not be happy campers here in Havana. But increasingly we are campers. Enter any home, from the most privileged (a relative term these days as the blackouts rise to 22 hours a day) to the poorest, and the trappings of off-grid living are everywhere. Some of the kit wouldn’t shame the back of a hedge-fund weekend warrior’s tricked out Jeep as it wended its way into the wilds of Glacier National Park. Do you know what an Ecoflow Delta Ultra 3 is? Well I didn’t, until recently. It’s the latest in “portable power stations.” Basically a big battery, it can keep a freezer running for 12 hours, or power several fans through the night. But at $1,500, it’s 150 times the average Cuban monthly pension.

Joel Salatin

How to save American farming

Farm bankruptcies in the US have risen by 50 percent in the past year. Soybean farmers lost an average of $100 per acre in 2025, according to the Department of Agriculture, while corn growers are set to lose $150 per acre this year. Meanwhile, the national beef herd is at its lowest level since 1950 and retail prices have jumped by 40 percent in the past 18 months. Normal businesses would diversify away from corn or soybeans and try to profit from the rising price of beef, as well as goods such as eggs and tomatoes. They would, in other words, react to the changing realities of the market. But American farms are not normal businesses. Most of my fellow farmers are stuck in a world of perverse incentives, from government subsidy and bailouts to financialized capital and farmland.

Fr. Alexander Lucie-Smith

The rise of the cartel cults

“And this,” I was told, five minutes after arriving in Mexico, “is where they murdered the Archbishop.” I was at the entrance to the car park at Guadalajara airport. The archbishop was Cardinal Juan Jesús Posadas Ocampo, who died in a hail of bullets on May 24, 1993, along with six other people. He was murdered for daring to criticize the cartels, at least according to the official narrative. There are other theories: he may have been caught in crossfire between rival cartels, or it may have been a case of mistaken identity, and Posadas was assumed to be a cartel head, many of whom, presumably, look like archbishops; or else it was the work of the government itself, which feared Posadas knew too much about its collusion with the cartels.

George Farmer

How to reclaim your life

I stopped charging my phone beside my bed four years ago and have never regretted it. Alarm clocks seemed destined to go the way of the DVD, but I am on a solo mission to restore them to bedside tables around the world. The harsh tone of the alarm is certainly no match for what Spotify can give us, but it’s worth avoiding the 30 minutes of doomscrolling that the phone inevitably causes. Since making the switch from the waking blue-light bath, I have rediscovered those early hours of the morning, with their associated peace and silence, before children and work invade my limited headspace. Carving out that half hour before the noise begins has helped restructure my priorities in life. Every year the Pope chooses a preacher for the Roman Curia’s annual Lenten retreat at the Vatican.