Ideology

This is the kind of comic novel I greatly admire, because it makes me feel so anxious and wrong-footed. I laughed wholeheartedly until an inner voice chided, in a contradictory fashion, ‘that’s not supposed to be funny’ and ‘can’t you see it’s a joke?’ Given that the book is about that very modern set of dilemmas, my admiration for Julius Taranto’s work is even greater. The novel’s protagonist is Helen, a graduate student, who explains her field in the opening sentence: ‘The Rubin Institute had nothing to do with high-temperature superconductors, so I cannot say I had spent much time thinking about it.’ Her supervisor has been offered a position

The War on the West is Douglas Murray’s latest blast against loony left wokery, chiefly in the areas of race and ‘social justice’. ‘This is not like earlier wars,’ he writes. ‘It is a cultural war, and it is being waged remorselessly against all the roots of the western tradition and against everything good that the western tradition has produced.’ The meticulous, measured way that Murray presents his arguments and evidence suggests a man who knows he’s in for a lot of flak. For instance, he has the audacity to suggest that the death of George Floyd, however brutal and inept the policing, doesn’t actually bear any signs of racism.