Newsnight’s fate is a bad omen for the BBC
Newsnight, we learned last week, is losing ten minutes off its running time, more than half its staff including its entire…
The evolving phenomenon of ‘Brexit regret’
It was reported this weekend that the great trans-Pacific trade deal (CPTPP), the one that Lord Cameron just boasted would…
Can the government be trusted with free speech?
This summer, horrified by the rising numbers of students no-platforming and harassing visiting speakers whose views they don’t like, the government…
The dying days of Rishi Sunak’s black hole government
In my admittedly sketchy understanding of it, black holes are formed when something becomes so massive that it collapses in on…
What can be done about AI porn?
The foul-mouthed puppet musical Avenue Q, way back in 2003, caught the spirit of the age to come. ‘The internet is…
What the Babylon scandal tells us about the British government
One of the consistent themes of Dominic Cummings’s kamikaze mission to reform the machinery of the British state was that…
Are Amazon’s publishing gurus doing anything wrong?
Alex Kaplo lives, apparently, the life of Riley. The 31-year-old’s website shows him roaring around in a Mercedes, and he…
How to win four Nobel Prizes in literature
‘Hi Jacques,’ I say as the publisher of Fitzcarraldo Editions appears on my Zoom screen with his Franz Hals facial…
Can we be honest about Israel and Palestine?
Qui tacet consentire videtur: who keeps silent is seen to consent. That Latin tag haunts the western response to the…
How Elon Musk killed Twitter/ X
Twitter was a newswire. That, at least at first, was the point of it. Something that came with all the…
It is time to rethink the age of consent
In 1983 Samantha Fox was sixteen years old when she first appeared topless on Page Three of the Sun. That…
The ‘naive cynicism’ of Russell Brand’s hasty defenders
I can’t imagine that Channel 4’s investigative slot Dispatches has had such an audience in living memory. On Saturday evening, many…
There’s not much we can do about China spying
A parliamentary researcher has just been arrested on suspicion of espionage. A man in his late twenties, with reported links…
Silicon Valley’s curious obsession with building old-fashioned communities
It’s a peculiar thing about billionaires: they don’t half have a weak spot for building ideal communities from the ground up. You could…
Why not house refugees on barges?
‘By the light of the torches, we saw the black Hulk lying out a little way from the mud of…
Passports out of hell
Roger Moorhouse describes how various diplomats stationed in Europe risked their positions to issue as many forged ‘tickets to safety’ to Jews as possible
Ancient worms and the problem with climate politics
The poet Elizabeth Bishop, when she was feeling blue (which she often was), used to find comfort in thinking in…
Immigration and a government in a state of post-hypnotic suggestion
Hurrah! The government, it was reported yesterday, is working on getting some more migrants. To plug a million-strong post-Brexit labour shortage in…
YouTube and the final state of total Kippleization
When I look back over my life, a decade or two from now, when I finally succumb to the strontium…
Trans activists don’t help themselves
I’ve tried to stay out of the trans-rights conversation, honestly I have. There are a number of reasons for this,…
The unedifying Yilin Wang vs British Museum row
If you visited the British Museum’s new exhibition China’s Hidden Century a fortnight ago, you’d have seen a substantial section on the revolutionary woman…
Why is it so difficult to find MPs who aren’t useless?
It’s a sign, possibly, of my increasing age and bad temper that I find myself harking back to an imaginary past in…
The idiotic campaign against Elizabeth Gilbert
At the end of the 1920s, Erich Maria Remarque’s novel Im Westen nichts Neues appeared in English as All Quiet…
Is Boris Johnson a great man of history?
Boris Johnson has always been an enthusiastic proponent of the long unfashionable ‘great man’ theory of history. As he argued…
The Schofield story is not a matter of national concern
I’d kind of hoped, until recently, that Phillip Schofield would not trouble my consciousness in any big way again. I had…
