Social media
Getting the sack was a shock but not a surprise
It was a shock but not really a surprise. I came back from holiday at the beginning of August to…
Can democracy survive the tidal wave of technological progress?
For a brief moment in 2011, standing among thousands of people occupying Syntagma, the central square in Athens, it looked…
It is a sin to die in the Land of the Depraved
New York Remember when the internet, Twitter, Facebook and other such useless gimmicks were supposed to usher in an era…
I’ve faked my own iPhone death
After much thought, I am toying with the idea of faking my own death. I mean in a virtual sense,…
Corbyn knows elections are won on social media but the Tories have barely logged on
There is a naive belief at the top of government that because the Tories are only a fart’s yard behind…
Ignore the Twitter cry-bully brigade – on social media, you reap what you sow
The nastiest person on Twitter has quit Twitter. Because I’m so generous I shan’t mention his name. All I’ll say…
The new tycoons
The giants of the internet have long said that they are not publishers but mere platforms — or couriers —…
High life
I think this week marks my 40th anniversary as a Spectator columnist, but I’m not 100 per cent certain. All…
The turf
Racing moves off the back pages only when its opponents have bad news to gloat over. Two examples lately have…
Snobbery in the age of social media
We like to think we have moved on from the age of snobbery. Judging others by birth or status, or…
The right kind of dumbing down
Thanks to meteoric advances in computational power, it is now possible to take abundant data from a wide range of…
Let’s keep up the Moggmentum
‘We need to talk about why the internet is falling in love with Jacob Rees-Mogg, because it’s not OK,’ warns…
Letters
Technical education Sir: I am grateful to Robert Tombs for highlighting the baleful use of ‘declinism’ as part of the…
Joan Collins: The celebrity trend I just can’t stand
Not only are today’s young girls having to work hard on their abs, butts and glutes, now the likes of…
Nicholas Soames’s Twitter account is a miracle (and so is his diet)
Miracles are not ceased. A few years ago, a kindly educational therapist took pity on John Prescott and set out…
The vaping craze isn’t about nicotine. It’s about gadgets
Probably you never visited the flats of middle-class student drug dealers in the 1990s, because crikey, neither did I, and…
The internet’s war on free speech
The web was meant to empower us all. Right now, it’s empowering censors
I have seen the future, and it’s a racist, filthy-mouthed teenage robot
‘I’m a nice person,’ said the robot. ‘I just hate everybody.’ Maybe you know the feeling. The robot in question…
Why Joan Bakewell must be right about anorexia
You can always tell when a public figure has said something with the ring of truth about it by the…
What happened when my son went to school as Goldilocks
Whenever I hear a leftie complain about being abused on Twitter, I think: ‘You should try being me.’ A case…
The sad decline of the teenage snog
Sometimes I sit my nieces down and treat them to tales of dating in the dark ages, before iPhones arrived…
Long before Twitter, Wogan offered continuous conversation
For once, the superlatives that have greeted Terry Wogan’s death from cancer have been entirely in keeping with the man.…
2016 will be a vintage year for tech billionaires and jihadis
This is going to be one hell of a year, hell being the operative word. It will be the year…
A Christmas parable from the Spectator’s business editor
I thought you might enjoy a little parable for Christmas, so here goes… The boardroom clock said twelve minutes…