Lionel Shriver is a columnist at The Spectator and author of We Need to Talk About Kevin, among other books.
After three hours of parsing American case law, for once I share Donald Trump’s exasperation. See, many a naif, including yours truly three hours ago, would have thought the Democrats’ “sanctuary cities” unconstitutional. A sanctuary city instructs its local police force to cease all co-operation with federal immigration agents. The constitution’s supremacy clause dictates that
Many years ago, a friend described one of my serious literary novels as “clever.” I was offended – but I shouldn’t have been. The friend was from across the pond, where I now understand “clever” means smart. For Americans, cleverness implies a shallow, facile intelligence. Applied to people, it hints at sly, calculating deviousness or
During last week’s excruciating Oval Office make-nice between an insultingly buddy-buddy American President and a fraudulently obsequious New York City mayor-elect, the contest was over which pol was the more patronizing. At one point Trump graciously granted his petitioner permission to call him a “fascist” while clearly implying the guy’s OTT campaign rhetoric had been
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
Last week, a bill cleared the US House Judiciary Committee that would establish a 13-person commission to consider federal reparations for slavery. Although similar legislation has been introduced in every Congress since 1989, this is the closest such a bill has ever advanced towards a full vote in the House. The President’s support for this
In a recent column, I vowed to return to a point made in passing. To refresh your memory, the American magazine the Nation printed a formal apology for running a harmless 14-line poem by a white writer about homelessness. The poet’s sins: using the word ‘cripple’ and adopting a voice lightly evoking what I gather
Promoting physical fitness, the left has developed a bracing set of competitive callisthenics. Participants vie over who can complete a marathon crawl on the belly like a reptile, who can flop onto the floor in a pose of the greatest prostration, and who can bend over the farthest, pants down, while begging to have large
Dear 2016 WriteNow mentees, Thanks so much for your open letter to me. It seems only good manners for me to write back. You’re rightly proud of having been admitted to a challenging programme at Penguin Random House that mentors gifted young minority authors and helps to cultivate their talents. My own publisher, HarperCollins, runs
I’d been suffering under the misguided illusion that the purpose of mainstream publishers like Penguin Random House was to sell and promote fine writing. A colleague’s forwarded email has set me straight. Sent to a literary agent, presumably this letter was also fired off to the agents of the entire Penguin Random House stable. The
During a dozen years in Belfast I collected a number of political coffee mugs, hailing from both sides of the divide. Unionist designs including the heartbreakingly punctuated ‘Ulster Say’s No’ (not merely to the Anglo-Irish Agreement; no to everything) and the impressively witty ‘Reservoir Prods’: four toughs in shades identified as ‘Mr Orange’ and ‘Mr
When, on a test of general knowledge, the highly educated score far worse than chimpanzees, university degrees may be overrated (definitely). But something more interesting may also be going on. According to the newly released Factfulness by Hans Rosling, we would-be smart people would improve our results on multiple-choice questions about the current state of
After an essay in this month’s Prospect about literature and freedom of speech, it seems I was cited on Twitter as a ‘racist provocateur’. Now, I rather fancy being a ‘provocateur’. But as for the adjective. Someone can call you ‘stupid’, and that’s just one person’s opinion. It doesn’t seem true because a single childish
By all accounts, Ikea founder Ingvar Kamprad was my kind of guy: may he rest in peace (on an Askvoll standard double). Like me, he was a skinflint. For a multibillionaire to buy his clothes at flea markets and select his groceries from supermarket quick-sale shelves is charming. About his retail wares, I’m more ambivalent.
Growing up in Raleigh, North Carolina, I took the monuments around the state capitol for granted. The first Confederate soldier killed in the Civil War, Henry Lawson Wyatt, has leaned into the wind on those grounds for 100 years. Atop a pedestal inscribed, ‘To North Carolina women of the Confederacy’, a mother in billowing skirts
