9/11 could happen again
When I visited the trenches of northern France a century after the First World War ended, I found farmers’ plows still turning up munitions and dead men. Like little children…
The return of the loony Left
Every so often, social groups fall prey to mass hysteria. The “choreomania” of 1518 saw several hundred Strasbourg peasants dance themselves to death. It lasted weeks, with victims convulsing rhythmically…
The collapse of the postwar order
Since 1945, several pillars of Western life have been taken as given. First, that Western armies can more or less have their way with lesser powers and that guerrilla resistance…
How to Nixonmaxx the right way
Richard Nixon is back — this time as a source of viral memes. “Nixonmaxxing” is the latest fad roiling the young, very-online Right. Yet Nixon is being revived for the…
Watching Trump’s Apocalypse
A certain kind of helplessness has always been part of our arrangement at the movies. After all, we did nothing to save Marion Crane. That poor, pretty woman had been…
Sharpe: relic of a lost Britain
Whatever the merits of Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey, and Matt Damon’s portrayal of Odysseus as a suburban American dad, weary and stricken with guilt over his role in the Great War…
The American disaster
In 1831, at the dawn of American democracy, the French political scientist Alexis de Tocqueville spent the best part of a year in the United States. His book Democracy in…
Burnham faces an insurgent Britain
In the BBC’s 1975 Panorama documentary on Sandhurst — now on iPlayer, perhaps through a scheduler’s sense of mischief or apprehension — we follow officer cadets as they train to…
AI and the false consciousness trap
The trouble with impressive new technologies is that they have the uncanny ability to expose the awfulness of our relationship to one another, not to mention to our own selves.…
The myth of the King of the North
“Too Northern”; “Not really Northern at all”; “Strategically Northern”; “A plastic Northerner”; “A professional Northerner”; “A Northern soul populist.” Not since Jon Snow rode South in Game of Thrones has…