America’s awful post-9/11 remake
The Houthi leaders who’ve overrun the Yemeni coast of the Bab el-Mandeb are a piece of work. Within hours of their takeover, they promised $500 payments to local residents in…
Welcome to the AI doom wars
On Monday, Jacob Coxon briefly became the most talked-about man in Silicon Valley. Resigning from his job as a researcher at Anthropic, he assailed his ex-employer in the bluntest of…
How lust overcame liberalism
The groin wants what it wants, as Emily Dickinson didn’t quite write. But this is exactly the refrain from middle-aged male scribes, drooling in print over the young actress Sadie…
Are you diverse enough to foster?
Fiona*, our new social worker, had checked the padlocked bolt on our garden-shed door; she had run her hand over our mattresses to make sure they were soft. Now she…
The AI revolution will devour Apple
The physical mobile phone seems to have stagnated. Take the next iPhone, which new Apple CEO John Ternus has just unveiled. Featuring a folding screen and incrementally improved processing, that…
Will the British Right lose us the Falklands?
There is something Pavlovian about Argentine leaders: show them low approval ratings and they start salivating over “las Malvinas”. Javier Milei never used to lose much sleep over this rocky,…
What Charlie Kirk sowed
Tragedy has a way of unifying movements. For the Right, no recent event seemed more likely to generate such a galvanizing effect than the assassination of Charlie Kirk exactly one…
How Goalhanger seduced the bourgeoisie
The Southbank Center has hosted many great cultural events over the years. In 1951, the Festival of Britain almost single-handedly dragged British art out of its postwar slump. In 1958,…
Barbara Cartland: masked masochist
Romance fiction is the genre of masochism: it’s less about love than control, less about pleasure than pain. This is why Matthew Sweet calls his superb new life of Cartland…
Britain’s paramilitary nightmare
George Orwell claimed that a hatred of uniforms was as much an enduring part of English identity as reverence for the law, suet puddings and misty skies. From an English…