The conversion paradox
Like Aristotle, our Labour overlords take a firm line on the question of essence versus accident in the human soul. A desire to stuff your face with cake is fixable…
America’s other constitution
We may now speak of an ancient America. You’ll forgive me such bold pronouncements, for there isn’t the time to waste trapped in tired registers of speech, and I have…
Why hot people are Right-wing
In 2021, a professor of psychology at Stanford called Michal Kosinski downloaded one of the many basic open-source facial recognition software programs from the web and applied it to a…
The great British housing con
The current political mood in Britain makes it easy to lose sight of things. Even as Andy Burnham, Keir Starmer’s successor in waiting, gave his first major policy speech on…
It’s time to dump the Founding Fathers
The ink spilled on the much-ballyhooed “Founding Fathers” could fill Boston Harbour. There’s Thomas Jefferson, the sphinx-like figure of American politics, a man who can be read as the origin…
How Britain became Zombieland
Cordyceps unilateralis, colloquially known as the “zombie ant fungus”, is an organism straight out of a horror story. A native of tropical rainforests, the fungus emits spores that attach themselves…
Queen of the data centers
In the summer of 2020, Gretchen Whitmer, the governor of Michigan, was very close to becoming vice president of the United States. Then-candidate Joe Biden had won the nomination and…
How Britain became Zombieland
Cordyceps unilateralis, colloquially known as the “zombie ant fungus”, is an organism straight out of a horror story. A native of tropical rainforests, the fungus emits spores that attach themselves…
The dangers of devolution
The political temperaments of Keir Starmer and Andy Burnham couldn’t be more different. While the current prime minister is a sober, plodding proceduralist, whose worldview has been forged by decades…
American democracy was born in feudal Europe
If there is a foundational dogma to America’s civic religion, it is that the United States is an exceptional country. The reason we emerged as the world’s first modern democracy,…