New York
Have we been fighting a very different disease to China?
One of the great mysteries of coronavirus is how the epidemic has become much more severe in Europe and North…
Bill de Blasio isn’t an anti-Semite but…
Bumbling Bill de Blasio is all thumbs, and not just on Twitter. Slow to respond when Orthodox Jews suffered an…
COVID-19 vs the American spirit of resistance
If the coronavirus were as deadly as the bubonic plague, which killed about a third of the population of Europe…
Doctor’s notebook
New York I hear it said now and again that Covid-19 is just a nasty winter bug, nothing more than…
No, the coronavirus isn’t racist
It was just a matter of time before the coronavirus was leveraged as a tool of race politics. With the…
Diary
‘How are you bearing up?’ ‘Is everyone terrified?’ ‘What’s the mood?’ These are the questions concerned family and friends are…
Life and death in New York City
No matter where in the apartment I am, if I sit very still, I hear a siren. Over the 18…
Bursting the Cuomo bubble
Andrew Cuomo is having a moment. He enjoys ubiquitous coverage. His press conferences attract viewership second only to the president’s.…
Consider the costs
Less than 24 hours after California governor Gavin Newsom closed ‘non-essential’ businesses and ordered Californians to stay inside to avoid…
Diary
Exactly 50 years ago I drove, for the first visit of many, across country to Aldeburgh in Suffolk, following the…
In 2020, Trump must save the cities
This article is in The Spectator’s December 2019 US edition. Subscribe here. In 2014, America’s progressives got a wake-up call. That year,…
The cops are impotent in lawless New York
New York Things are heating up, in both London and Nueva York, as this place should correctly be called.…
Don’t write off Joey Salads
Freshman Democrat Rep. Max Rose must steel himself for a tough re-election scrum in his Republican-leaning district. An unconventional, Trumpian…
An elegy for New York
New York The master of the love letter to New York, E.B. White, eloquently described the city as a place…
Farewell to Bill de Blasio, 2020’s least consequential candidate
Friday news drops are often saved for surprising or important stories. What NYC mayor Bill de Blasio announced on Morning…
Pity poor Candace Bushnell, still flogging Sex and the City at 60
On paper, Candace Bushnell and the medieval warlord El Cid don’t have a lot in common. The first made a…
A drag army in waiting: This Brutal House, by Niven Govinden, reviewed
Niven Govinden’s This Brutal House is set in the demi-monde of the New York vogue ball. This is an organised,…
Parallel worlds: The Heavens, by Sandra Newman, reviewed
The Heavens is Sandra Newman’s eighth book. It follows novels featuring, variously, sex addiction, Buddhism and a post-apocalyptic teen dystopia;…
The death of New York’s nightlife
New York This is my last week in the Bagel and I’m going to give it the old college…
My prescription to make New York happy again
New York This place feels funny, a bit like Beirut, where Christians, Jews, Muslims, Druze and encamped Palestinians live…
Writing as revenge: Memories of the Future, by Siri Hustvedt, reviewed
Why are people interested in their past? One possible reason is that you can interact with it, recruiting it as…
Why did no one think the premise of Mums Make Porn was questionable?
What can parents do about the avalanche of pornography available to their children on tablet, phone and laptop? This question…
I’m back in New York: the city that’s perennially offended
New York Goodbye, snow-capped peaks; hello, swampy brown East River. So long, fresh alpine air; greetings to choking diesel…
New York: the fact – and fiction
New York At times I used to think the place was real. The New York of films, that is. The…
An extraordinary encounter in a New York taxi
New York If I wrote this in one of those newspaper diaries about metropolitan life, no one would believe…
