The Weekend Essay

Afghan women’s meetings on Zoom with their supporters outside the country often now end in tears as the stories of Taliban rule are too hard to bear. One prominent regional woman’s leader was beaten by her own younger brother. He said she could not go out on her own without a male relative and needed to cover more of her face and head. ‘I brought him up as if I was his mother,’ she said in shock and humiliation. This is self-policing of a society in fear. It is a year since President Ashraf Ghani fled the country, telling no one and precipitating the swift collapse of his government. Speaking

The youth aren’t doing well – not in America, at least. Even before Covid, experts were ringing the alarm bells about a decade-or-so-long trend of American teens and tweens experiencing a steady uptick in anxiety, depression and self-harm symptoms. Late last year, US surgeon general Dr. Vivek Murthy published an official advisory attempting to raise awareness of this issue. As the accompanying press release explained, ‘from 2009 to 2019, the share of high school students who reported persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness increased by 40 per cent, to more than one in three students. Suicidal behaviors among high school students also increased during the decade preceding Covid, with 19

For some time now it has been assumed that in November the National Congress will rubber stamp Xi Jinping’s continued role as China’s supreme leader for a third five-year term, which would make Xi the first Chinese leader for a generation to serve more than two terms. Just a year ago his position as one of China’s three pre-eminent leaders was confirmed when the 400 members of the Central Committee passed the third ‘Historical Resolution’ in the Chinese Communist Party’s 100-year history. The previous two were organised by Mao in 1945 and Deng Xiaoping in 1981. The resolution highlighted the concept of ‘Xi Jinping Thought’ as a historical equivalent to

The Russian military has performed far worse in Ukraine than anyone could ever have predicted. After failing to take Kyiv, Russian troops have now been forced to focus on the Donbas region. Despite this greater concentration of forces, they are still struggling to make any major gains beyond the final capture of Mariupol, which had been under siege since the first days of the invasion without resupply or relief. For Vladimir Putin this represents a grand humiliation. But for the West, Russia’s struggling campaign offers an unrivalled opportunity to understand Russia’s capacity to pose a future military threat. Key to this will be working out how many of Russia’s current

With scientists mapping our neurons in ever greater detail, and companies like Google claiming they’re close to creating human-level artificial intelligence, the gap between brain and machine seems to be shrinking — throwing the question of consciousness, one of the great philosophical mysteries, back into the heart of scientific debate. Will the human mind — that ineffable tangle of private, first-person experiences — soon be shown to have a purely physical explanation? The neuroscientist Steven Novella certainly thinks so: ‘The evidence for the brain as the sole cause of the mind is, in my opinion, overwhelming.’  Elon Musk agrees: ‘Consciousness is a physical phenomenon, in my view’. Google’s Ray Kurzweil puts it

Xi Jinping has made his choice. He is sticking with his ‘best friend’ Vladimir Putin, and no end of Russian atrocities or wishful thinking in the west is going to alter that. Their axis of autocracy presents a far-reaching challenge to western democracies, which the UK in particular is struggling to come to terms with. There has been a chorus of western voices calling on China to act ‘responsibly’, exercise its influence with Putin, and generally live up to its supposed commitment to the principles of sovereignty and territorial integrity. That will not happen. Those principles were always a myth, but fundamentally Xi and Putin have too much in common.

Marine Le Pen, if recent polling is to be believed, is rapidly cutting Emanuel Macron’s lead in the upcoming French presidential elections. If she succeeds in gaining sufficient votes this weekend to enter the second round, we should brace for a serious upheaval in French politics at a time of unnerving uncertainty about the global order. The French press, having forgotten Le Pen for a year, is now energetically reminding voters of her unsuitability for high office. In the public imagination, Le Pen ranges from a modern-day avatar of Joan of Arc to a rancid bigot masquerading as a moderate. Say her name, and people react with fervour: they may

We were having a few drinks in a rented flat in the centre of Grozny in late 1994. A bunch of foreign reporters, including myself, who were usually based in Moscow, had been sent to check out the strange conflict flickering in Chechnya. It was late at night. The room was full of fag smoke. Someone played a guitar, inevitably. There was vodka. Outnumbered women journalists were enduring attention from men who were digging warfare, and living their best life to date. In a few cases, it was vice-versa: young male producers made interesting targets for seasoned female reporters. At the time, the background noise from the Kremlin was that if Chechen rebels