America

Barbecue is a fact of life in America. Long summer evenings and reliably good weather make it an easy choice – plus turning on the oven heats up the house to an intolerable level, so if you want a hot meal, outdoors it is. When I was a kid my mom wouldn’t turn on the oven for the entirety of July and August. It was burgers, salads or quick quesadillas on the grill every night of high summer. Americans have been barbecuing pretty much since before the nation was a nation. The tradition came up from South and Latin America with the invading Spanish. Barbacoa they called it, and they’d use green

You might think someone who grew up in the 356-room Belvoir Castle wouldn’t be too worried by a traffic fine. But when Lady Eliza Manners was caught speeding, she avoided paying off the full £100 ticket by claiming ‘financial hardship’. And apparently she’s not the only budget-conscious occupant of the Leicestershire property. Her mother Emma, the Duchess of Rutland, recently claimed she shops in Asda. While it might be hard for those on the actual breadline to sympathise with the troubles of the titled and entitled, such states of affairs do stand to some sort of reason. If you think heating your two-bed home has become an expensive business, try

The American comedian Bill Maher is an intelligent man with a good sense of humour. When he’s right, he tends to be very right. However, when he’s wrong, he tends to be so wrong it leaves a person scratching their head in disbelief. He has a tendency to sometimes misrepresent the facts. This is true when it comes to weed. For the uninitiated, Maher loves weed. I mean, he really loves weed. He is forever talking about it (see here, here and here), arguing, repeatedly and unapologetically, that it’s a largely harmless drug. As I have shown elsewhere, it’s not. It robs many people of motivation and happiness. Nothing good comes from smoking weed on a

Where is Melania? This was the question on many people’s lips after the former First Lady was absent from the after-party at the Mar-a-Lago estate on Tuesday night following her husband’s quick trip to New York City. Trolls took to social media to ridicule Mrs Trump for ‘not standing by her man’ during his indictment; some even cracked jokes that she was moving on to pastures new with freshly single Rupert Murdoch. Wherever she was, I hope she was happy. In fact, I hope she was positively beaming while horizontal at a spa getting a deep-tissue massage with martinis flowing and charging it all to her husband’s credit card. For

The chanteuse is back. Did You Know That There’s a Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd, Lana Del Rey’s ninth album, arrived ten days ago. It’s a lush, dreamy voyage through said tunnel, one best listened to on vinyl, but not one that doesn’t pose questions about life, love and how Del Rey found said tunnel. Del Rey herself also causes people, specifically men, to ask questions, and not just about life, love and tunnels. One of those questions, put forth by a young heretic, was not so existential, but instead a plea for understanding, specifically about the 37-year-old’s appeal. It read: ‘It is once again time for me to ask that heterosexual conservative

I stumbled upon it in one of the darkest corners of the internet: a Facebook parenting group. The mother’s intentions were pure, I tried to tell myself. But I couldn’t help feeling exasperated – and even a bit saddened – by her post: ‘I’m desperately looking for a Rubik’s cube tutor for my son,’ read the message. ‘He’s four.’ It was June 2020. The world was in the horrendous early throes of Covid-19. Governments were struggling to contain the virus. Researchers were working around the clock to churn out a vaccine. Millions had already lost their jobs and their health. Millions more would lose their lives in due course. And