Today

28 Sep 2022

Monday

26 Sep 2022
In praise of the speeding crackdown

We all needed a laugh, what with the pound tanking and inflation running away, my old pal Kwasi delivering a Budget, probably for a bet, like Milton Friedman’s last cheese-dream, and the threat of nuclear annihilation starting to seem like a welcome turn up for the books. Said laugh has just been obligingly provided by the Metropolitan Police. They have just, without broadcasting the fact, decided to enforce the speed limit with the tiniest bit more rigour – and as a result, they’ve nicked more than two and a half times as many people for speeding in the first six months of this year than they did in the last six months of last year. Some 347,000 drivers have been walloped with points, fines and/or the baneful necessity of spending most of a day in a dismal room being given dismaying accounts of what happens when your front bumper makes contact with a toddler at 35mph.

In praise of the speeding crackdown

Wednesday

21 Sep 2022

Monday

19 Sep 2022
The midlife crisis spread: why are the affluent so depressed?

‘You are here’, as those signs in windswept carparks unhelpfully point out. Yup. No mistaking it, you will tend to think glumly as you look at them. I had the same feeling when I looked at a new report from no less an institution than America’s National Bureau of Economic Research. The report is called The Midlife Crisis. It tells us that in the western world, one’s forties and early fifties are associated with problems with sleep, clinical depression and suicidal thoughts, disabling headaches and dependence on alcohol, alongside a decline in basic measures of life satisfaction. Well, fancy. I don’t know about clinical depression and suicidal thoughts, I should say. Not so melodramatic, me. But I can tell you that I wander through the kitchen every day and turn upside-down the bowls and pans my wife has left on the draining board right-side-up, so the water runs out of them rather than pooling in the bottom.

The midlife crisis spread: why are the affluent so depressed?

Thursday

15 Sep 2022
Charles III will reign in an age where feeling trumps duty

Charles III’s first address to the nation as King began by speaking of sorrow – and went on to speak of love. He used ‘love’ or its cognates eight times in that short speech. He spoke of his ‘darling Mama’ and ‘dear late Papa’, of love for Harry and Meghan, love for his people and for tradition, and the loving support of his ‘darling wife’. He spoke, too, of grief and consolation. In setting out his stall as King – if that’s not too vulgar an expression for what he has been doing over the past few days – Charles III has done so in terms of feeling. He has not spoken just about his devotion to duty, but about his heart. He has been King, but also chief mourner – the visual focus of a huge historical event. He has walked solemnly behind his mother’s coffin just as, decades ago, his sons walked behind that of their mother.

Charles III will reign in an age where feeling trumps duty

Wednesday

14 Sep 2022

Monday

12 Sep 2022
I’ve become a war addict

It is an almost unquestioned orthodoxy that war is hell, and that every needless death in a needless war diminishes our common stock of humanity. It’s curious, though, how we're able to hold that conviction alongside a positively visceral excitement at watching the Ukrainian counter-offensive carve its way through the Kharkiv Oblast. Some 3,000 square kilometres have been recaptured: Ukrainian troops are moving through their own land at such a clip that they’ve made more progress in three days than the massed might of the Russian invaders have since April. I’ve been eating it up. Haven’t you? The images of abandoned armour, the fuel dumps, the sullen faces of Russian commanders rounded up as prisoners of war. Those lines and arrows on the maps, telling us that this bridge has been destroyed, that weapons dump annihilated, that pocket of troops encircled and stranded on the wrong side of the river, this pocket of troops routed and running leaving a trail of plundered white goods in their wake.

I’ve become a war addict

Wednesday

7 Sep 2022

Monday

5 Sep 2022
Is Liz Truss a Tory Jeremy Corbyn?

Many years ago, when the earth was young and leaving the European Union was a position espoused only by those trying to stay on the right side of Bill Cash at a drinks party, Ken Clarke stood for the Tory leadership against Iain Duncan Smith. He said one memorable thing while making his doomed bid for the captaincy – which was that the Tories needed to decide whether they were going to be a political party or a debating society. What I understand him to have meant by that was that ideological purity buttered no parsnips in politics. For most of its history, its friends and its enemies alike would agree that the Conservative party has been a magnificent machine for winning and retaining power. While the Left frittered its energy denouncing ideological deviationists, reciting parrot-like dogmas about collective ownership, and purging its own ranks, Tories were pragmatists.

Is Liz Truss a Tory Jeremy Corbyn?

Wednesday

31 Aug 2022

Monday

29 Aug 2022
We still love our failing NHS

A new poll about the NHS, the Sunday Times tells us, has discovered ‘a decline in support’ for the National Health Service. The story spoke of ‘wide dissatisfaction about the state of the health service’, under the headline: ‘Britain falls out of love with the NHS’. The figures from the poll itself tell a slightly different story. The headline finding was that three people in five are now not confident that they would receive timely treatment were they to fall ill tomorrow. But these three people in five aren’t necessarily saying they’ve ceased to approve of the NHS. It seems to me that they are simply affirming what they’ve read in the papers and heard about on telly and experienced, piecemeal, themselves. It’s bloody hard to get an in-person appointment with a GP.

We still love our failing NHS

Wednesday

24 Aug 2022

Monday

22 Aug 2022
Sanna Marin and the rise of fake controversy

With an honourable exception for the Beastie Boys, I can’t stand the use of ‘party’ as a verb. It immediately reminds me of ‘Party, party, party, oikies!’ – the war cry of the drunken potbellied Afrikaaners who once roared in their bakkiesonto our Namibian campsite at about 2 a.m. and proceeded to be, well, Boerish. It’s a usage that smacks of creepy men in movies inviting young women into their cars, or footballers in search of questionably consensual sex. It has passed from a frat-boy Americanism into a tabloid euphemism for illegal drug use and sexual sleaze without ever quite passing through a phase of meaning, actually, having a party. Yet ‘partying’ is what the Finnish Prime Minister stands accused of. Video has leaked of 36-year-old Sanna Marin dancing and lip-syncing to pop music with her friends, drink having evidently been taken.

Sanna Marin and the rise of fake controversy

Wednesday

17 Aug 2022
The Book Club
Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones: A Question of Standing
46 min listen

My guest on this week's Book Club podcast is Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones – whose new book A Question of Standing: The History of the CIA looks at the real-life story behind one of the most mythologised agencies of American power. How does the world's first democratically answerable spy agency actually work? Were all those dirty tricks, extra-legal shenanigans and attempted assassinations – sorry: 'health adjustments' in the lingo of Langley – really the work of an agency gone rogue? Did the CIA fail to foresee the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Iranian Revolution, the Arab Spring and the Twin Towers – or has it been made to take the fall for political ineptitude? And what is its standing now? 

Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones: A Question of Standing

Monday

15 Aug 2022
Salman Rushdie and the incitement of violence

When I met Salman Rushdie in New York a couple of years ago, he told me that the days in which he feared physical attack were long behind him. ‘It only affects my life when I talk to journalists,’ he said, a little pertly. ‘It is 20 years since I required any form of protection. I go everywhere I want.’ That was true, and not true. It was obvious to me – and, Sir Salman being no fool, will have been even more obvious to him – that thirtysomething years after the philistine clerisy of Iran sentenced him to death, there was nothing to prevent a lone nutter making an attempt on his life. And it looks like that is exactly what has now happened. The reason he denied something so obvious is that he didn’t want it to define him.

Salman Rushdie and the incitement of violence

Thursday

11 Aug 2022
Our long, vulnerable childhoods may be the key to our success

The central question in Brenna Hassett’s book, put simply, is: why are our children so very useless for so very long? Or: ‘What is the possible adaptive value of teenagers?’ If we consider maturity, or adulthood, to be the point at which an animal can play its own role in the evolutionary process – i.e. have its own babies – why is it that we have evolved to mature so slowly; and, even when mature, to delay having children until many years after we’re first physically capable of doing so? The framework in which Hassett sets out to answer this is one to do with investment and return on investment. An animal invests energy in growing its young. Sometimes that energy is front-loaded in gestation: infant giraffes come out more or less fully baked, or precocial, and are making their knock-kneed way across the savannah soon after birth.

Our long, vulnerable childhoods may be the key to our success

Wednesday

10 Aug 2022
The Book Club
Andrea Wulf: Magnificent Rebels
48 min listen

In this week's Book Club podcast, I'm joined by Andrea Wulf to talk about the birth of Romanticism at the end of the 18th century. Her new book Magnificent Rebels tells the story of the "Jena set" – a staggering assemblage of the superstars of German literature and philosophy who gathered in a small town and collectively came up with a whole new way of looking at the world. Goethe, Schiller, Fichte, Schelling, Novalis, the Schlegel brothers, the von Humboldt brothers – and their brilliant and daring wives and lovers... their intellectual fireworks were matched by a tangle of literary feuds and hair-raising sexual complications. Here's a piece of the jigsaw of intellectual history that most British people will only vaguely know of if at all – and it's fascinating.

Andrea Wulf: Magnificent Rebels

Monday

8 Aug 2022

Wednesday

3 Aug 2022

Monday

1 Aug 2022
Should Apple snoop on your iPhone?

Should Apple use software to scan the photo library of every individual iPhone in search of images of child abuse? GCHQ thinks so. So does the National Cyber Security Centre. (Well, you might say: they would, wouldn’t they?) And so does professor Hany Farid, inventor of a technology called PhotoDNA, which is already used across the web to scan for illegal images. He told the Internet Watch Foundation that, though Apple paused proposals to roll out this software last year thanks to 'pushback from a relatively small number of privacy groups', 'I contend that the vast majority of people would have said, ‘sure, this seems perfectly reasonable’'.  At issue, it should be said, is not the idea of checking for such images altogether.

Should Apple snoop on your iPhone?

Saturday

30 Jul 2022

Thursday

28 Jul 2022
Is technology killing nostalgia?

The latest trend among the scions of Generation Z – those born between 1997 and 2012 – is posting ‘throwback videos’ on TikTok. Talk about a snake eating its tail. Having reached the ripe old age of, say, 11, Generation Z is digging through their archives to offer a wan critique of that embarrassing haircut they sported in the dim and distant past of, say, 18 months ago, or reminiscing with friends about ‘Snapchat filters we all used to use’. That’s silly, but it’s also a little sad. As we ponder world-historical events on a ten-, 20- or 50-year timeline – the long-term effects of Brexit; the resettling of the status quo in European security; even the climate crisis – it’s somehow easy to miss changes that are potentially even more lasting and fundamental.

Is technology killing nostalgia?

Wednesday

27 Jul 2022

Monday

25 Jul 2022
The curse of ‘deadmin’

George Monbiot has gone to war. Some readers may know this fellow by his nickname 'Moonbat' – he’s a Guardian columnist, environmental campaigner and sometime bugbear of my colleagues on this magazine. But I think his casus belli, here, crosses the ideological battle-lines.  He is in a righteous rage because, a full four months after the death of his mother, Vodafone was refusing to cancel her mobile phone contract. He says they were rude and aggressive, insisted on speaking directly to his 'frail, confused' elderly father (despite his children having a power of attorney), asking him to recite his dead wife’s phone number and tell them exactly when the contract started, and using his failure to recall as an excuse not to cancel the contract.

The curse of ‘deadmin’

Friday

22 Jul 2022

Monday

18 Jul 2022
The latest Tory leadership debate was a grim spectacle

The eyes had it, in last night’s leadership debate. Penny Mordaunt and Rishi Sunak took turns directing to the camera a puppy-eyed gaze. Tom Tugendhat blinked manfully, as if overcome from time to time with a sense of his humble desire to serve. Kemi Badenoch blinked, too – but more in the way of someone regretting the decision to switch her specs out for contact lenses. And if Liz Truss – an apprentice of Mrs Thatcher’s gimlet-eyed stare – blinked at all, I confess I didn’t notice it. I was distracted by the fact that she seemed to have four eyebrows rather than the usual human ration of two. I suppose she had decided she’d look more statesmanlike by drawing them on higher up her brow, but failed to completely erase her original, homegrown eyebrows.

The latest Tory leadership debate was a grim spectacle

Wednesday

13 Jul 2022

Monday

11 Jul 2022
The fatuous idea that politicians must be ‘in touch’

I was in Hyde Park on Friday watching an open-air Pixies show with very great delight when somewhere between ‘Vamos’ and ‘Debaser’ one of my companions bid fair to harsh my buzz by asking what I reckoned to the Tory leadership contest. Well, goodness. I mumbled something about not really having a dog in the fight but thinking that, whatever his other shortcomings (the visible self-love, mostly, and maybe that thing with his wife’s tax status), Rishi Sunak seems to more or less have his head screwed on. ‘But he’s a multi-millionaire,’ my friend said. ‘Isn’t he just going to be hopelessly out of touch?’ And there it was, the worst, most fatuous and most unanswerable charge that can be levelled at a politician: that they are out of touch.

The fatuous idea that politicians must be ‘in touch’