From Trumpism to lockdown, people believe in the craziest things
Following his disgruntled supporters’ rampage through the Capitol, Donald Trump’s fate hangs in the balance. But one artefact of this…
It’s completely rational for girls to want to be boys
I’ve always been perplexed why anyone lucky enough to be born male would want to swap sexes. But it seems…
No one wins in the race race
After the explosion of international self-abasement over George Floyd’s killing in Minneapolis, much theatrical soul-searching ensued. So your basic man…
We need a dose of vaccine realism
One of my geniuses as both a commentator and a character is to confront what for most normal people amounts…
What the three types of Trump supporter really want
As Democrats’ colossal collective sigh of relief drives wind turbines even over in Britain, let’s not lose sight of the…
I’m voting to make America boring again
I just spent £2.50 in postage to bring about one of the last things I want. Specifically, the next-to-last thing…
Covid has killed off our civil liberties
It started with smoking. The 1960s and 1970s saw little popular objection to legislation restricting advertisements by private companies purveying…
It isn’t always easy to give money away
I always felt sorry for my father, then president of a chronically strapped educational institution, for having ceaselessly to approach…
The Covid hysteria is getting worse
Readers may recall a column last month that laid out powerful evidence for the proposition that the ethnic and racial…
The trouble with ‘taking back control’
I sympathised with Leave voters who yearned to ‘take back control’ of British borders. After all, if being a country…
What really makes people fat
In the UK’s capital city, where do the fewest obese people live? North London. The most? East London. The weight…
Never has a virus been so oversold
There’s nothing unprecedented about Covid-19 itself. The equally novel, equally infectious Asian flu of 1957 had commensurate fatalities in Britain:…
Open letters have become ransom notes
In the States, the ‘open letter’ is enjoying quite the formal renaissance. Curiously, recent examples of this newly popular epistolary…
Open letters have become ransom notes
The ‘open letter’ is enjoying quite the formal renaissance. Curiously, recent examples of this newly popular epistolary genre exhibit striking…
We’re making a spectacle of shame
When I was about ten, on return home from church I ate a peach, the juice of which dribbled down…
Political pandering won’t prevent Covid deaths
When the media have gone large on the conclusions of an overpoweringly tedious report, one of the biggest favours a…
Marching against racism is too easy
When I first saw the footage of George Floyd being asphyxiated by a policeman’s knee on his throat, my reaction…
Marching against racism is too easy
When I first saw the footage of George Floyd being asphyxiated by a policeman’s knee on his throat, my reaction…
Is living without risk really living at all?
Taking my life in my hands — as we all do when getting out of bed — I walked along…
This is not a natural disaster, but a manmade one
Should our future permit an occupation so frivolous, historians years from now will make a big mistake if they blame…
If this is a war, let’s fight it like one
Under the cloud of conformity that has settled over the land as a replacement for air pollution, heretics who doubt…
Real problems erase fake ones
Last week, a friend quoted a two-year-old email of mine: ‘I’m starting to root for a plague or world war…
The British have bought the lockdown hook, line and sinker
I am a type. I don’t like groups. I maintain few memberships. I question and resist authority, especially enforcement of…
The longer lockdown continues, the more imperilled we become
Comically, Chinese Communist party officials have speculated that Covid-19 was planted by the US army. Yet a respectable conspiracy theorist…
Why Hachette were wrong to drop Woody Allen’s memoir
Even amid plague, economic apocalypse, and the cancellation of 2020, dumb stuff keeps happening. Besides, loads of us will now…
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