Humans are more than just apes
Unlike chimps, we have an alarming willingess to believe what we’re told
Society
Wednesday
Pope Leo is following in Francis’s footsteps
The new pope refuses to discipline bishops who move against traditionalists
Why do white men’s feelings matter more than black lesbians’?
So there you have it: the feelings of white men matter more than the rights of black lesbians. That’s the takeaway from the mad fracas at a Gold’s Gym in Los Angeles this week, where a female gym-goer by the name of Tish Hyman says her membership was unceremoniously revoked. Her offense? She dared to complain about the presence of a person with a penis – what we used to call a bloke – in the women’s changing room. Ms. Hyman is a lesbian and a singer originally from the Bronx in New York. She says she encountered a man who identifies as a woman in the changing area of
Tuesday
Marjorie Taylor Greene auditions for The View
Joy Behar said, ‘you’re slamming Republicans too much. You’re taking my job’
Monday
Why Taylor Sheridan quit Paramount
Sheridan has been working at a rate of energy that would kill many lesser men
Trump refuses to take 60 Minutes bait
The President was calm – and even counterintuitive
Sunday
King Charles and Pope Leo share the same religion
They preach environmental sustainability through draconian measures – at the expense of common sense and science
Friday
Pray for the persecuted Christian church
Christianity is today the most oppressed religion in the world
Thursday
I’m a slave to my Apple Watch
Aside from streaming on an iPad, when riding a stationary bike one of the few entertainments on offer is tracking your heart rate. Breaking 150 beats per minute provides a fleeting (and doubtless misplaced) sense of achievement. Yet the wearable heart monitor that came with my exercise bicycle proved unreliable; one’s BPM never truly drops from 137 to 69 in one second. This is all to explain why I bought the fitness freak’s fetish: an Apple watch. Its heart rate monitors are accurate. I opted for a reconditioned older model, not only half the price of the new ones but inclusive of the pulse oximeter function, which a medical technology
Michael Heath on 75 years at The Spectator
When I joined The Spectator in 2000, the office was in Bloomsbury, in a four-story Georgian house, and the further down the building you went, the more stylish, the more Spectator (I thought), everything became. On the top floor, blinds drawn, sitting in the half-dark, was Kimberly Fortier, the American publisher, often in long meetings with media alpha males. She would soon be married to the publisher Stephen Quinn and having an affair with former British home secretary David Blunkett, but was always looking to widen her portfolio. One floor down was former British prime minister Boris Johnson, then editor of the magazine, mostly immersed in meetings of his own
Are black-metal bands going Christian?
In his youth, Emil Lundin became obsessed with the idea of recording the world’s “most evil album.” The lanky, long-haired Swede formed a black-metal band and set to work. He faced an immediate obstacle. In making history’s most nefarious musical creation, he could hardly use Swedish, with its singsong tones. English was also out of the question: he didn’t want to sound like ABBA. That left Latin, the native tongue of the occult and, it is said, of demons. In a quest for suitably devilish lyrics, he pored over arcane texts. That led him to Latin editions of the Sayings of the Desert Fathers – badass early Christian monks –
What makes a ‘survivor?’
Are you a survivor? We are not, luckily, all Gloria Gaynors. She declared in 1979: “I’ve got all my life to live, and I’ve got all my love to give/ And I will survive.” Gaynor has, so far, made good on her promise. Surviving afflictions unscathed is not always an unmixed virtue. “She would be earning a good living somewhere… The Mary Taylors of the world were natural survivors,” wrote P.D. James in Shroud for a Nightingale in 1971. Now, even a new biography of Lady Margaret Beaufort (1443-1509) is subtitled Survivor, Rebel, Kingmaker. But what of those poor people who have gone through the misery of child sexual “grooming?”
How the occult captured the modern mind
The British science-fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke, author of 2001: A Space Odyssey, proposed a “law of science” in 1968: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Clarke’s proposition had a quality of rightness, of stating the obvious with sparkling clarity, that propelled it into dictionaries of quotations. The timing was perfect: Concorde would soon be flying over rock festivals packed with hippies obsessed with “magick.” Naturally Clarke’s readers understood the difference between aerodynamics and sky gods. But African tribesmen gawping at an early airplane, or Pacific Islanders watching an atomic explosion, could only conclude that they were witnessing a supernatural event: for them, a scientific explanation was literally
Wednesday
De Blasio ‘imposter’ hoodwinks British paper
A veteran US correspondent quoted a man claiming to the former mayor on his ‘misgivings’ about Zohran Mamdani
Sunday
The perils of Catholic social media evangelism
One of the new crop of self-made and self-credentialed online evangelists has flamed out in spectacular fashion
Is Jack Carr behind the Department of War?
Carr shrugs when asked if he thinks he was in any way responsible for the name change, others believe he was
Friday
An evening in Austin with Graham Linehan and Meghan Murphy
‘I’ve never done a salon before,’ Graham Linehan said. ‘Maybe this is the way forward’
Thursday
Did the mafia make NBA stars offers they couldn’t refuse?
Players allegedly helped notorious crime families rig poker games
Prince Andrew finds refuge in video games
Oh God, not that. That’s all we need, I thought, reading in a long account of Britain’s Prince Andrew’s current travails that “according to visitors to Royal Lodge,” he now “spends much of his time playing video games.” Even before all the unpleasantness with the child-rape allegations against Jeffrey Epstein, one of the Prince’s more embarrassing qualities was his appearing as an “ambassador” for this or that – usually accompanied by a helicopter trip to a golf course. Now he’s reduced – no chopper, no putting green; woe is him – to being an ambassador for adults who play video games. As an adult who plays video games, and even
The lost art of the insult
Imagine I were to begin this column by remarking that a woman preaching is like a dog walking on its hind legs: it is not done well, but you’re surprised to find it done at all. Dear me, that would never do, even in as cheeky a magazine as The Spectator. Then try instead: “Dr. Johnson was no admirer of the female sex. ‘A woman’s preaching,’ he said, ‘is like a dog’s walking on his hinder legs. It is not done well, but you are surprised to find it done at all.’” I could get away with that. An antiquated opinion, safely attributed to an 18th-century writer, enclosed behind quotation