Society Archives

Friday

May 1, 2026

My heated argument about Italy’s birthrate

Dante’s Beach, Ravenna We were having dinner in the Osteria del Tempo Perso (the Hostelry of Lost Time). It is in the old city which in the 5th century was the last capital of the western Roman empire as, besieged by various types of barbarian, the final fall drew ever nearer. I was drinking again. The rules are simple: I can drink when abroad, defined as anywhere outside the province of Ravenna, which I rarely leave; or else when anyone foreign – i.e. non-Italian – comes to visit, which is even rarer. My younger brother Simon, the KC, had come for a long weekend with his second wife Cyrena, two of his four children from his first marriage, Sam (33) and Rufus (28), and his stepdaughter, Jemima (22).

Max Jeffery

The new age of transgender rage

It’s a year since the UK’s Supreme Court ruled that gender means biological sex – and not much has changed. The Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC), which is advising the government on how to apply the judgment to law, has spent a long while drafting guidance. But last week, word arrived that Bridget Phillipson, the women and equalities minister, wants the EHRC to “tone down” its advice, leading to further delays. Why the holdup? My guess is that it has something to do with a new era we are entering. An era of “TRANS RAGE.” That’s not my expression. It’s from Bash Back, a recently formed anonymous collective going after people and organizations it believes frustrate the transgender experience.

Thomas Steventon

My miracle match against the Vatican’s cricket team

Many have come to Rome seeking spiritual guidance: Thomas à Becket, Lord Byron, Lionel Richie. I came for a different purpose: to defend a papal cricket trophy. I am not Catholic. And, until last year, I had never played cricket before. It all started, as many great British stories do, with a pub: the Three Stags in Kennington. My friend Tom had invited me to what he described as a “Cricket Club Party.” As I headed upstairs, the barman’s quizzical look when I mentioned I was there for “the party” should have given me cause for concern. As I came in through the doors, I was greeted by what appeared to be the end of a Sunday lunch and a collection of six individuals for whom the collective age would have been a record-setting Test score.

Natalie Livingstone

The unlikely link between Nuremberg and The Devil Wears Prada

In the aftermath of Péter Magyar’s victory in Hungary, while I watch people dancing in the streets as they celebrate Viktor Orbán’s dramatic ousting, I think of my Hungarian grandparents. As Holocaust survivors, they were the lucky ones, and they remained proud Hungarians to the end. They would have greeted this election with characteristic realism: Minden csoda három napig tart, as the saying goes. Every miracle lasts three days. Hungary is a country still feeling the long aftershocks of World War Two and the Holocaust. Those shocks seem clearer than ever after the years I have spent researching The Nuremberg Women, my new book on the trials.

Lionel Shriver

‘Tea-towel-gate’: another British travesty

During last September’s freshers’ fair at Royal Holloway, University of London, two students got into a brief verbal tiff that became subject to the administration’s immediate alarm. Our characters: Brodie Mitchell, a self-described non-Jewish Zionist, and Huda El-Jamal, the female president of the Friends of Palestine Society, who is of Palestinian descent. Mitchell says El-Jamal taunted him – “Here’s the wannabe Jew” – and questioned why he wasn’t wearing a yarmulke. Referring to the keffiyeh El-Jamal was wearing as a headscarf, Mitchell taunted back: “You’re wearing a tea towel over your head.” A monstrous exchange, we can all agree. Naturally, Royal Holloway suspended Mitchell for nine weeks – nine weeks!

James Delingpole

My perilous pursuit of Colombia’s birdlife

It was just after seeing my first resplendent quetzal that I hatched my crazy plan to visit Colombia. I was in the Costa Rican cloud forest at the time and my guide – you need a guide because the birds are impossible to spot without someone who a) can identify the different calls and b) carries a $2,000 Swarovski Optik monocular – said, “Of course, if you really like this sort of thing the place to go is Colombia.” Costa Rica, delightful though it is, only has around 900 species of bird. Colombia, on the other hand, has nearly 2,000 (including 83 endemics: i.e., ones you can find nowhere else), more than any other country in the world. When I tried impressing on my wife what an incredible incentive this was, she wasn’t convinced. “But what if we die?” she said.

Gage Klipper

Croquet hasn’t quite gone away

Growing up, I remember a set of strange colored mallets that occupied a dusty corner of the family garage. My mother had purchased them as a novelty, I learned, in an effort to take up croquet when she bought her first weekend home upstate. She had fond memories of playing croquet as a child, but to me it always rang somewhat ironic: the city slicker’s romantically anachronistic idea of, “What else is there to do in the country?” So when I got invited to this year’s Annapolis Cup – the 42nd annual croquet match between St. John’s College and the US Naval Academy – I wasn’t sure what to make of it. My first instinct was to assume it was a gag, a silly put-on for charity.

Peter Watson

Palm Beach is religious about real estate

A reporter, writing in one of the local rags recently, observed that “Palm Beach does not take itself too seriously.” Er… wrong. Very wrong. Palm Beach takes itself very seriously indeed and, as the location with the greatest density of billionaires, why not? And the two things it takes most seriously are money and property. As I have remarked here before, property prices are close to being a religion in Palm Beach. Not a day goes by without the local “shiny sheet” reporting the latest property price news, mostly a happily reassuring dollar figure for this condo or that beachfront palace. Given this, well, preoccupation, it is no surprise that we now have two new concepts in property. These are “property promiscuity” and “polydomary.

Ruaridh Nicoll

The marvels of Cuba’s national botanic gardens

The last time I visited Cuba’s national botanic gardens, there was a wedding in a tucked-away corner by the Japanese pool. The happy couple stood at the water’s edge as jacanas – Jesus birds – walked the lily pads behind them. I have been thinking about that couple, as we’ve just heard that the botanics have closed due to the oil blockade the US is imposing on the island. The gardens were an escape in a collapsing city, not that we could still reach them, as there is no fuel. I have a small boy, Santiago, and it’s hard to entertain him in these trying times. On calm days, there is the beach, the beautiful miles of sand to the city’s undeveloped east, but with an empty gas tank, that too is out of reach.

Sebastian Mallaby

Meet Mythos: the new AI system causing panic over cybersecurity

It’s tempting, even fashionable, to pooh-pooh the hyperbole from our tech overlords. The release in 2022 of ChatGPT, the first mass-market conversational AI system, unleashed a volley of supercilious put-downs. The chatbot was not intelligent. It was merely hallucinating, manipulating statistics, regurgitating phrases from the internet: it was a “stochastic parrot.” Well, over the next three years, ChatGPT became unputdownable. It learned to handle photographs and videos, extract wisdom from dense textbooks, sound like Scarlett Johansson, write everything from code to songs to emails and offer tips on fixing washing machines. Not bad for a parrot.

Charles Cornish-Dale

Could too little cholesterol be the cause of autism and ADHD?

In September last year, shares in Kenvue, the maker of Tylenol, plunged when Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced the results of an investigation into the environmental causes of autism. One of the causes discovered, RFK Jr. said, was Tylenol use by pregnant women. Studies positing a link had already been used in lawsuits by hundreds of parents who believed acetaminophen – the drug’s medical name – had caused their children to develop autism or ADHD. Now, Kennedy said, the FDA had even more robust data to support that link. Kenvue has since lobbied the FDA to prevent new warnings about the risk of using Tylenol during pregnancy from being added to its product.

Blake Neff

The powerful incentives for vilifying white Americans

The Southern Poverty Law Center may not, we hope, be long for this world. The Trump administration’s new indictment has exposed the organization’s practice of funneling millions of dollars through fake bank accounts to “informants” sitting in senior positions at the very “hate groups” it claimed to monitor. Even if the SPLC survives, the criminal proceedings may leave it so damaged and exhausted that it sheds most of its influence. Others have charted out the potential financial incentives behind the SPLC’s alleged misconduct: the demand for “hate” in America exceeds the supply, so to create sufficient far-right activity to keep donations flowing, the SPLC was perhaps ready to pay off the operatives it supposedly fought.

Michael Tracey

Fight me, Jim Acosta: Michael Tracey

The recent DC media revelry was thwarted by a blundering assassination attempt, and in my case, a drunken challenge from journalist Jim Acosta, formerly of CNN and now Substack. He asked me to “step outside” so we could settle our differences like real men. I was eager to oblige on the sidewalk in front of the Smithsonian Museum, where Substack was hosting its gala. His fury erupted when I dared approach the VIP partygoer Julie K. Brown – comically credited with having broken the Jeffrey Epstein story in 2018 with her series of painfully overrated articles in the Miami Herald. She has since enjoyed hero status, getting showered with every contrived journalism award. Julie has even had her likeness optioned for some sort of streaming-service drama.

Paolo Odoli

Why Bermuda is loyal to the King

At St. Peter’s Church in St. George’s, Bermuda, the oldest Anglican church in continuous use in the Western Hemisphere, a photograph of the late Princess Diana with the then-Prince Charles has just been taken down. Removing the reminder of the King’s last visit to the island in 1982 was a matter of administrative prudence ahead of his arrival on Friday. A small gesture that reveals much about the respect and deference Bermudians feel towards the British monarchy. The 2022 royal tour of the Caribbean by the Prince and Princess of Wales was defined by protest, demands for reparations and independence from the British Crown. Bermuda will not repeat that performance.

Wednesday

April 29, 2026

Brendan O’Neill

The Golders Green atrocity is the final straw

It is undeniable now: war has been declared on British Jews. A fascistic crusade is being waged against our Jewish compatriots. The anti-Semitic atrocity in Golders Green today is further brutish proof of this unsettling fact. We’ve had fire bombings at synagogues, the murder of Jews in Manchester on Yom Kippur, and now this frenzied knifing of Jews in London. There can be no more equivocating – this is a moral emergency. The most sickening thing about today’s knife pogrom is that it was entirely predictable The scenes from Golders Green are truly grim. Video clips show the suspect wielding his knife with demented fury at two visibly Jewish men.

Michael Auslin

Why America’s democracy needs the British monarchy

Perfect spring sunshine beamed down on King Charles III and Queen Camilla as they slowly made their way down the sloping lawn of the British Embassy in Washington this week. None of the hundreds of eager Americans gathered at the Embassy’s garden party had ever seen a British king in the nation’s capital. The last visit was in 1939, by King George VI, when a similar garden party took place in the shadow of the gathering storm in Europe.

Simon Hunt

Is OpenAI losing its shine?

Sam Altman has always been a charmer. At school he reveled in the art of persuasion, joining a school debate team and taking part in national tournaments. After charming his teachers, Altman graduated into charming investors, launching a startup at just 19 before working his way up to become president of Silicon Valley’s premier startup incubator, Y Combinator. Last year, OpenAI managed to spend more on marketing and employee share options alone than it made in overall sales When he later joined OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, his charm was key to recruiting a team of some of the brightest coders and scientists in the world. But for some who worked close to him, the charm started to rub off: they realized he was very good at telling them what they wanted to hear.

Monday

April 27, 2026

Lee Cohen

What Harry and Meghan don’t get about royal visits

King Charles III’s state visit to Washington this week is the monarchy executing its core diplomatic function with precision and dignity. In Donald Trump’s Washington, an invitation to an event with the British monarch remains the most sought-after in the city. By stark contrast, the King’s son and daughter-in-law careen around the globe representing no one but themselves. They dress up as royals in a sustained exercise in self-promotion and profiteering that repels observers and belittles the very institution that gave them their platform. One upholds the Crown’s purpose, while the other commodifies it. The Sussexes’ grift cheapens the Crown’s reputation and insults the public’s intelligence The King and Queen travel as invited guests of the US government.

Katherine Dee

How we all become numb

These nights, sleep won’t take me. Thirty-one weeks pregnant, I’m too big to ever be comfortable. I toss; I turn; I move to the guest room in the vain hope that having a bed to myself might offer some reprieve from the fact my bones can no longer support my weight. Some time around 3 or 4 a.m., I give up and open TikTok, where the algorithm offers its nightly liturgy of dread. “If you’re seeing this, it’s meant for you,” a woman in her car, voice low, telling me to install a Ring doorbell because somebody could be casing my house. I live in Chicago, and someone just stole my neighbor’s catalytic converter. It’s plausible, I think.

Friday

April 24, 2026

Julie Burchill

Don’t whitewash Michael Jackson

We’re not used to famous pedophiles having a great talent; perhaps because all of their drive goes into their secret obsession, they’re generally just operators with a lot of front. It’s been easy to slice the cultural contributions of, say, Jerry Sandusky from one’s life and not feel the least absence. If the chattering classes are allowed to keep their Eric Gill, why can’t the dancing classes keep Michael Jackson? On the other hand, we’re inclined to give Caravaggio a pass, as he was such a great painter as well as a boy-abusing murderer – and it was such a long time ago, that the victims can't speak out. The same goes for the pedophile Paul Gauguin, who spent many years spreading syphilis among a proportion of the girl children of Tahiti.