Social media
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…
Ian Rankin’s diary: Paris, ignoring Twitter and understanding evil
After ten days away, I spent last Friday at home alone, catching up on washing, shopping for cat food, answering…
The most dangerous word in the digital world is 'send'
Those who forget the pasta are condemned to reheat it, tweeted Jon Ronson, a man I’d never heard of until…
Maybe bitcoin isn’t the work of the devil, after all
I confess to being an out-and-out Luddite when it comes to bitcoin and other so-called crypto-currencies. To the extent that…
Women’s issues are for everyone now, not just feminists
‘Women’s issues’ are for everyone. So feminism is obsolete
Isis takes its British schoolgirl jihadis seriously. Why don’t we?
When the first schoolgirls ran away to Isis I had some sympathy for them — at least, I could see…
The problem with Jeremy Corbyn’s populist media-loathing
The new leader walks across a bridge, in the dark, while the journalist asks him questions. He’s not shouting, this…
A lesson in graceful Twitter style – from a resigning shadow minister
‘Tweeting’s like text messaging, isn’t it?’ said my husband confidently, though not, as usual, from any knowledge of the matter.…
Email needs eugenics
You won’t read much about Sir Francis Galton nowadays because, while it’s inarguable that the man was a giant in…
Does anyone else have an upper house as undemocratic as the Lords?
Peers’ peers Forty-five new peers were created. Are we alone in having an upper house of parliament made up of…
Breast-feeding isn't always best
New mothers who can’t keep to the breast-feeding orthodoxy face needless misery and shame
The young are miserable and the old are happy – shouldn’t it be the other way around?
We learn from a new report that children in England are among the unhappiest in the world — more unhappy,…
