Society

Friday

Douglas Murray

The real race problem on the British right

I think it was Zadie Smith who I first heard point out that race is in America what class is in Britain: the conversation underneath every conversation. When I first heard that remark I slightly balked. Not least because one had rather hoped that class would be less of a thing in Britain in the 21st century. I suppose it is, although you do still meet people who treat the English language as though it is a minefield in which one incorrect vowel will suddenly take them out. But if the class stuff still lingers in Britain, the good news is that we now have the American race obsession too. For anyone who hasn’t lived in America, it is hard to describe just how permeated race is into every conversation in the culture.

race

Monday

Brendan O’Neill

Iran’s uprising and the moral bewilderment of Western youth

I’m starting to feel sorry for progressives who are schtum about the revolution in Iran. My contempt for them is giving way to pity. Imagine watching women fling off their hijabs in glorious defiance of the cruel mullahs who rule over them and feeling nothing. Imagine seeing brave youths swarm the streets to confront the tyrants who oppress them and just looking the other way. The extraordinary valor of the young in Iran has exposed the moral bewilderment of the young in the West Imagine seeing that young man in London this weekend scaling the walls of the Iranian Embassy to yank down the flag of a ruthless regime and saying: "Well, it’s complicated.

Sunday

Louise Perry

Are falling birth rates a bigger threat than overpopulation?

In 1980, two academics made a bet. Julian Simon, professor of economics at the University of Illinois, predicted that the prices of chromium, copper, nickel, tin and tungsten would fall over the coming decade. Paul Ehrlich, professor of population studies at Stanford University, predicted that prices would rise. What Simon and Ehrlich were really betting on was the future of humanity – specifically, how many souls could the good ship Earth carry without running aground? By 1980, the global population had seen a period of enormous growth: doubling between 1800 and 1930 to reach 2 billion people, and then doubling again to reach 4 billion by 1975. Every sign suggested that this rate of growth would only accelerate, and Ehrlich was among those who saw catastrophe looming.

falling birth rates

Friday

Mary Wakefield

No sex please, we’re Gen Z

For many years now we have all been agonizing over the fertility crisis. Why aren’t the kids having kids? It’s become a sort of parlor game, the swapping of the various theories. Is it the cost of living? Microplastics? Eco-anxiety? Tight underwear, I heard the other day, and snorted with scorn even as I tipped my son’s stretch-cotton briefs into the bin. But now another, rather more fundamental explanation for the baby shortage has emerged. It’s not just that younger generations aren’t having babies – it turns out they aren’t really having sex at all. The Atlantic was first to properly examine this trend among young Americans, in a terrific piece which gave a name to the phenomenon: the Great Sex Recession.

Peter Jones

What a shame Andrew Tate didn’t live in ancient Greece

Has any public figure of recent memory ever admitted to feeling shame for anything they have said or done? As a moral term “shame” appears to have disappeared almost entirely from normal discourse (bar the self-satisfied “fat-shaming”). That tells us much about ourselves. Aristotle discusses the term in some depth. He does not see it as an active virtue, but rather as a “condition involving a range of feelings,” which he defines as “a kind of pain and agitation concerning the class of evils, whether present, past or future, that seem to bring a person into disrespect.” His definition is well in tune with the evidence of ancient Greek literature, in which the presence or absence of shame puts your reputation at stake.

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Dot Wordsworth

If you’re ‘reaching out’, you sound deranged

“Why doesn’t anyone ever do what you ask them to?” inquired my husband, who is something of an expert on the question, I should have thought. He was referring specifically to a plea I made three years ago to people I’ve never met to stop sending emails that begin: “I am reaching out to you.” But it has grown worse. Using the expression makes it sound as though the emailer is deranged. Reach out has for more than a century meant “to offer sympathy, support or assistance” to people. Correlatively it can mean to seek those things. British Prime Minister Keir Starmer has acquired the habit of issuing a Christmas message. For 2025 he said: “At this time of the year, which celebrates love and abundance, loss or hardship can feel even more acute. Reach out.

Catriona Olding

Make mine a Moka pot

It’s strange the things that can trigger amity or affection. At the beginning of the capsule/pod coffee-maker craze, when George Clooney, with his come-to-bed eyes, was seducing the world with Nespresso machines, I bonded with my eldest daughter’s Italian boyfriend over the Bialetti Moka pot. Notwithstanding the expense and waste of the capsule coffee makers, I need at least three pods to get the lights on in my head in the morning. I’ve never had a good coffee from any of them. Contrast that with the cute, economical, environmentally friendly little Moka, the smallest of which – one cup – costs about $30 and, depending on the quality and freshness of the coffee used, makes a better cup than any café or restaurant.

James Tidmarsh

France’s bistros are dying

Emmanuel Macron says France’s traditional bistros should be granted Unesco world heritage status. Speaking at the Élysée this week, the French president vowed to help save the country's traditional cafes. "This is a fight that we want to take on, because our cafés and bistros aren’t just selling croissants, baguettes and traditional products – they’re also on the front lines of preserving French craftsmanship and know-how," Macron told a group of French bakers at the annual Epiphany cake ceremony. France doesn't need to list its bistros. It needs to decide whether it still wants them Macron is right about what the bistro represents. For generations, it has been a shared meeting place as much as a commercial one; somewhere to linger and belong.

Monday

Alexander Larman

Is Britain about to see a lot more of Prince Harry?

The year just gone has hardly been a banner year for either the Duke or Duchess of Sussex, culminating in the humiliation of yet another publicist departing from their employment at its end. However, all of us hope that 2026 will be an improvement. Last weekend brought the potentially good news for Harry – although, perhaps, less so for the rest of us – that the litigious prince might yet have succeeded in his aim of being provided with British taxpayer-funded police protection whenever he returns to the UK. If this is indeed the case, we can expect to see a lot more of him. Let joy be unconfined.

Stephen Daisley

Trump is winning the Maduro meme war

The Vietnam war was the first Americans watched on their nightly TV news, the Gulf War the first that could be followed live on CNN, and the Global War on Terror the first documented online through the work of bloggers, citizen journalists and video-sharing sites like LiveLeak. Meme warfare is being used not only to humiliate the Venezuela regime but also domestic critics of the President’s actions The US invasion of Venezuela, Operation Absolute Resolve, marks another innovation: it is the first armed conflict in which the victor has simultaneously won a conventional military victory and a meme war.

Tuesday

Alexander Larman

The uncozy chaos of Harry and Meghan

Lucky subscribers to "As Ever," Meghan Markle’s Pravda-esque newsletter, were given an exclusive insight this festive season into how the Duchess of Sussex would be spending the Christmas period. She wrote that "Last night, I was nibbling the remnants of our Christmas Eve feast (dim sum this year), wrapping a few last-minute gifts, and tiptoeing down the stairs with my husband to make sure 'Santa' had enjoyed his cookies and 'the reindeer' had eaten their carrots. Anything to maintain the morning magic of Christmas through our children’s eyes.

Monday

Meghan Markle, as told to Julie Burchill

My Christmas round-robin

Happy Holidays, friends. Think about that word for a moment. Hold it in your sacred space. Surely that’s what the Holidays are all about? Friends. Like family – only better. Friends – the family we choose. People who are respectful and loving towards us. Like Oprah. (Hi, Oprah!) Or like people who are proficient at hair and makeup and are keen to gift their gift. Friends. Let’s dissect that beautiful word. It comes so close to being fiends – but narrowly avoids it by the felicitous presence of the letter R. Note also that it contains ends –which is what must happen to the relationship, regrettably, if fiendish behavior is ever displayed by the disappointing so-called friend. Family – not so great, right?

Wednesday

Sarah Perry

Slipshod: a short story by Sarah Perry

It was months before the difficulty with Marnie and Addison was talked about, or even alluded to. The sight of their names in emails circulated around the department was enough to cause a pall to settle on everything, like ash from fires only just put out. Besides, the nature of the difficulty (that was the word we all used) was both so opaque and so distressing we’d have had trouble talking about it, even if we’d wanted to. It fell to me to piece things together. My brief from Helen was simply to satisfy the university that nobody in the department was to blame. It fell to me because I am, she tells me, part of the furniture: unremarkable, functional, predictable.

slipshod
Gyles Brandreth

How Queen Camilla is spreading the joy of reading

Queen Camilla loves a book. Almost any book will do. "There’s something so tactile about a book," she says. "I like the smell of the pages when you open the cover. I like turning the pages and folding down a corner ready for next time…" The Queen, 78, has loved books for as long as she can remember. She says her father, Bruce Shand, inspired this lifelong passion: "He read to us as children. He chose the books, and we listened. He was probably the best-read man I’ve come across anywhere. He devoured books." Bruce Shand was a soldier. His father was a writer, about architecture, food and wine. His father was another writer, who, incidentally, was briefly and secretly engaged to Constance Lloyd, who went on to marry Oscar Wilde. This is a family with literary leanings.

Thursday

Jay Bhattacharya and Matthew J. Memoli

How we cured DEI at the National Institutes of Health

Since the National Institutes of Health was founded as a one room laboratory in 1887 its mission was simple; perform biomedical research to enhance health, lengthen life and reduce illness and disability for Americans. Scientists for more than one hundred years have taken this scientific approach to turn discoveries into better health. This mission unites all Americans of every race, color and creed. Everyone wants science that benefits their health. Over the last decade and a half this mission has been corrupted by a new mission and ideology: diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI). This political ideology was reflected in all aspects of the NIH, including hiring practices, promotion and tenure, employee training, performance reviews, communications, management and, yes, even science.

Jay bhattacharya nih dei

Monday

Neal Pollack

The Trump-Kennedy Center?

“I have a good memory, so I can remember things, which is very fortunate,” a tuxedo-clad President Trump said on the red carpet before hosting the Kennedy Center Honors. “But just, I wanted to just be myself. You have to be yourself.” To open the show, Trump stood behind the presidential lectern and invoked the name of Johnny Carson, who, he said, was a master improviser like him. Trump hadn’t prepared much. He didn’t need to. "This is the first time a president of the United States has ever hosted the event. I don't know why.” It’s actually kind of an interesting question. Ronald Reagan, of course, would have made an excellent Kennedy Center honors host. Both Bill Clinton and Barack Obama enjoyed a stage and an audience in their primetime years, and George W.

Alexander Larman

Is Prince Harry about to spend a lot more time in Britain?

For lovers of self-destructive hubris – a quality that the Duke and Duchess of Sussex surely possess in spades – the saga of Prince Harry’s security is surely the gift that keeps on giving. His attempts to obtain British taxpayer-funded armed protection whenever he brings his family back to the UK have been expressed with much fervor and repetitiveness. And now, in this season of miracles, it looks as if he might have got his wish after all.  It seemed certain, after various expensive and amusingly humiliating courtroom defeats, that Harry’s desire to hire members of the London Metropolitan Police as his private security detail whenever he is back in the country of his birth would be denied.

Wednesday

Ross Clark

Climate doom is not science

The costs of not dealing with climate change are, of course, much higher than the costs of dealing with it. We know this because, as climate campaigners keep telling us, climate change is going to set the world alight and unleash mad tempests which are going to wreak destruction on the global economy. Not a few of them have been trying to prove this by parroting a paper by the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research published in the journal Nature in 2024 which concluded that a rise of 8.5 Celsius in global temperatures by 2100 will shrink the economy by 62 percent.

Climate change

Tuesday

Matt Ridley

The end of the climate cult

Finally, thankfully, the global warming craze is dying out. To paraphrase Monty Python, the climate parrot may still be nailed to its perch at the recent COP summit in Belém, Brazil – or at Harvard and on CNN – but elsewhere it’s dead. It’s gone to meet its maker, kicked the bucket, shuffled off this mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the choir invisible. By failing to pledge a cut in fossil fuels, COP achieved less than nothing, the venue caught fire, the air-conditioning malfunctioned – and delegates were told on arrival not to flush toilet paper.

Climate
olivia nuzzi
Katherine Dee

Olivia Nuzzi and the return of ‘celebrity journalism’

There are two competing ideas going around about “the old days” of journalism. In one, journalism was a sober public service, safeguarded by editors and ethics, untainted by the capital-A, capital-E Attention Economy. In the other, it was a racist, sexist boys’ club we managed to leave behind – even if only briefly, for long enough to support Teen Vogue’s politics vertical. (May they rest in peace.) The current pile-on concerning celebrity reporter Olivia Nuzzi, whose ex Ryan Lizza has revealed her affair with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., leans hard on the first fantasy. Once there were newsrooms; now there are “personal brands.” Once we had Walter Cronkite and Edward R. Murrow; now there is a woman in a Lana Del Rey cosplay Mustang with 1990s porn-star brows.