Culture

It used to be the case that tabloid stings struck the fear of God into politicians and celebrities. Now social media is claiming the scalps of public figures on an almost weekly basis.  Quite simply, life is on the record 24 hours a day, seven days a week. If you want to enter public life brace yourself for one long reality TV show. Privacy is dead and thanks to the advent of the camera phone everyone is now a journalist. There is no hiding place. If you’ve got a fondness for tweeting be aware it’s not a place for nuance. As a wise man once said, too many tweets make

Picture a village. It has a grocery shop and a pub. A little down the road you can find a cobbler and a hardware store. A factory manufactures parts for some large concern in a nearby city and local farmers supply their produce to the villagers. There are a dozen taxi drivers, a priest, a few doctors, teachers, nannies and so on. Crucially, there is also a shared idea of what constitutes the good life, a common culture that enables the inhabitants to trust each other – perhaps the most fundamental and most overlooked component of a properly functioning economy. We are looking, in short, at that increasingly endangered social

How ironic that it should take an invasion of the female-only pond in Hampstead by trans women to make luvvies realise the implications of allowing any old Tom, Dick or Harry who self-identifies as female into women’s spaces. Those virtue-signalling ideals are all very well around your fashionable dinner tables, but remember: it’s real women in the real world — prisons, refuges and anywhere vulnerable women exist — who have to live with the consequences. This is an extract from Sarah Vine’s Diary, which appears in this week’s Spectator

Predictions of the death of the shop have become as much a ritual of New Year as fireworks and the singing of Auld Lang Syne. The two big retailers which have so far reported on their business over the Christmas period have provided the usual ammunition. Next reported sales up by 1.5 per cent in the 54 days to 24 December (compared with 2016), but only because online sales (which rose 13.6 per cent) offset sales in physical shops (which were down 6.1 per cent). Debenhams had a miserable Christmas, with like-for-like sales falling 2.6 per cent in the 17 weeks to 30 December. It is now thinking of shifting

  Old establishment New establishment Order of the Garter BBC Sports Personality of the Year Parliament’s Woolsack The Supreme Court The Borgias Sir Nicholas Serota and friends William Rees-Mogg Owen Jones Jacob Bronowski Simon Cowell Ciggy soak and TV cook Fanny Cradock Clean-living (Deliciously) Ella Mills Shirley Williams Lily Allen MCC committee members BBC trustees Sid James Lord Sugar Oxbridge high-table dinners Institute for Government lunchtime talks Toad in the hole Sushi Richard Ingrams Guido Fawkes website Bishop of Sodor and Man Emma Thompson Young Conservatives Tinder The Astors The Kardashians The Dimblebys The Dimblebys Athenaeum Babington House BBC Facebook Morecambe and Wise Philip Hammond and John McDonnell Roast joints

Although I wrote in my last post that social media makes people miserable, Twitter is also a fantastic resource for acquiring knowledge from experts and specialists in different areas. One of my favourite accounts is Rolf Degen, who daily tweets a number of scientific studies into human behaviour. Just before Christmas he linked to a story concerning the impact of alcohol consumption on politics, suggesting that booze makes us more right-wing. According to the paper ‘alcohol strips away complex reasoning to reveal the default state of the mind’ and drunkenness therefore encourages ‘low-effort, automatic thought’ and so promotes political conservatism. Similarly, as this study of the anti-anxiety drug lorazepam shows, ‘anxiety exerts a general inhibitory effect

We’re closing 2017 by republishing our twelve most-read articles of the year. Here’s No. 4: Madeleine Kearns on her time at New York University: As a child in Glasgow, I learned that sticks and stones might break my bones but words didn’t really hurt. I’m now at New York University studying journalism, where a different mantra seems to apply. Words, it turns out, might cause life-ruining emotional trauma. During my ‘Welcome Week’, for example, I was presented with a choice of badges indicating my preferred gender pronouns: ‘he’, ‘she’, ‘they’ or ‘ze’? The student in front of me, an Australian, found this hilarious: ‘Last time I checked, I was a girl.’

Was 2017 that terrible? Everyone feels like they’re losing and the world is going to hell, and in many ways it does feel like a dark cloud is approaching. This article, about a sex robot conference being moved after a threat from Islamic extremists, did strike me as the sort of thing one of the more pessimistic of 20th century writers might have predicted about our age. People are so depressed about the year they even got angry about Taylor Swift being happy, because how dare she. And yet despite this being such a terrible year medical progress continues in a miraculous way, worldwide poverty continues to tumble and while the planet is

We’re closing 2017 by republishing our twelve most-read articles of the year. Here’s No. 7: Douglas Murray on the sexual counter-revolution: We are in the middle of a profound shift in our attitude towards sex. A sexual counter-revolution, if you will. And whereas the 1960s saw a freeing up of attitudes towards sex, pushing at boundaries, this counter-swing is turning sexual freedom into sexual fear, and nearly all sexual opportunities into a legalistic minefield. The rules are being redrawn with little idea of where the boundaries of this new sexual utopia will lie and less idea still of whether any sex will be allowed in the end. It is partly whipped

Conmen and fraudsters thrive in confusion. And few places are more confusing and opaque than the jargon-ridden world of online advertising. Which is odd really, since the entire social media edifice – Google, Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat – depends on it. 2017 was the year of the tech-lash, when people and politicians started to push back against tech-led disruption. But there’s potentially a far more significant threat looming for the tech giants: ad fraud. On one level, online advertising is very simple: you get shown endless adverts as you bounce your way around the net, and an advertiser pays whenever someone either looks at, or – the holy grail! – clicks

Movie star Matt Damon has tentatively, politely suggested that the #MeToo cleansing of Hollywood, this chasing of suspected perverts out of the film world, has hints of a ‘culture of outrage’ to it, and guess what has happened to him? Yep, he’s been consumed by the culture of outrage. He’s been insulted, demonised, Twitter-raged against. ‘Is Matt Damon OK?’, asked one newspaper headline, because if you express an outre opinion these days, people will worry that you’re ill. It feels like a grimly fitting end to 2017: someone raises concerns about outrage, and before he’s even finished explaining himself he’s shut down by outrage. I’ve read Damon’s comments, which he