Society

Thursday

Jonathan Ray

The trials and tribulations of cowboy college

I first got a taste for it in Eminence, Missouri. Riding a horse, that is, Western style. I also got a taste for the glorious Ozarks, a striking part of the world too often overlooked by, well, erm, everyone. The fact that it was sometimes hard to get a drink put a slight dampener on things. Too many wretched “dry” counties dotted about the two states I was criss-crossing – I’m told, almost 40 in Arkansas and 30 in Missouri. Can this really be true? ‘Swing the loop like you’re putting on a cape – you know, like Zorro,’ Lori said… as I got tangled up again To Europeans, this is plain daft. I know we’re all terrible drunks, especially we Brits, but it’s nice to be able to get a proper drink whenever a thirst strikes. Just saying.

Dot Wordsworth

A guide to Strait talking

I little thought in 2023, when writing about dire straits, that we’d so soon be pushed into them by trouble in the Straits of Hormuz. In discussions of these on the wireless, I find that even the best-informed commentators begin by referring to this geographical feature as the Strait of Hormuz but before long fall into calling them the straits. Insisting on the singular strait seems sterile pedantry. The Oxford English Dictionary has got the usage pretty straight: “When used as a geographical proper name, the word is usually plural with singular sense, e.g. the Straits of Dover, the Straits of Gibraltar.” A pleasant piece of naval slang 100 years ago was up the Straits, meaning “in the Mediterranean.

strait
Brian Morton

Potatoes are one of life’s great simple pleasures

My wife found the list in the back pocket of my gardening trousers. That ought to have been a clue, but she didn’t pick up on it. She marched into the study with an interrogative stride. “Who the hell are Mimi? Orla? Charlotte? Anya? Lady Christl!?” I felt a pang of relief that she hadn’t found my “tasting notes” as well. “Charlotte – firm, puts out well, nice finish.” If my wife had been a gardener or an allotmenteer she would have recognized the names as varieties of spud. Still, I can’t blame her. The faintly porny air does persist, as do some mysteries. Mimi, for instance – a redhead, “small, but plentiful” – disappeared suddenly some years ago and no one knows exactly why.

potatoes
Mary Killen

Dear Mary: Is my dentist profiting from my gold filling?

Q. I went to stay in the new house of a close, but not very close, friend. She put me in a charming room, but it was above a really noisy boiler that kept randomly firing up throughout the night. In the morning, when the husband asked me in front of the breakfast table if I had slept well, I told him about the boiler. I could tell from everyone’s faces that he and the other guests thought I had been rude to mention it. But if I had not said something, the next guest put in that room would be up all night just like me. What else could I have done, Mary? – Name and address withheld A. You could have used the following method. Asked had you slept well, you could have gushed: “Like a top. Such a comfortable room!

Rory Sutherland

Why engineers beat lawyers

I once asked my friend, the engineer Guru Madhavan, why engineering faculties at most universities were outliers in containing more than a small minority of conservatives and political moderates. He explained it in a single sentence: “In engineering, you are peer-reviewed by reality.” ‘Legal’ thinking now precedes ‘engineering’ thinking rather than the other way around In any field where you are judged more by the quality of the outcome than the quality of your argument, there is a limit to the extent to which you can adhere to some all-encompassing ideological world view. If a bridge falls down, it is not a good bridge. The opposite is also true: in real life, if something works, you don’t always need a theory to explain why.

white british boys
Toby Young

White working-class boys are being left behind in Britain

Late March marked the fifth anniversary of the publication of the report of Lord Sewell’s Commission on Racial and Ethnic Disparities (CRED). In spite of a suitably diverse group of commissioners (or perhaps because of that), it refused to blame “systemic racism” for the underachievement of certain ethnic minorities in the UK. It didn’t dismiss that hypothesis entirely, but concluded that other factors – class, geography and family background – were more important. This analysis (supported by lots of data) did little to protect the commissioners from the fury of the woke left, who denounced them for ignoring historical injustices.

Melissa Kite

Meghan is a woman much misunderstood

Lying in bed with a swollen face, I decided that the best thing to do was nothing, so I ended up watching the Duchess of Sussex make smoothies. I don’t know why everyone is so mean about her Netflix show because it hit the spot for me. As I took to my bed after surgery to take out the old screws and plates in my long-ago broken jaw, everything put me on edge apart from watching Meghan and her lovely way of smiling and smiling as she expressed wonderment at a bunch of grapes, or the way a liquidizer whirred. As my face swelled and turned some interesting shades of green and yellow, and I wondered if I would ever smile again, there was something absolutely restorative about watching Meghan gasp with enthusiasm about flowers and honey and lettuce. Everything was “amazing!

ski
Rachel Johnson

Never pass up a chance to ski

The snow is deep and crisp and even, the sky bluer than blue, and beneath my Black Crow skis the soft hiss of fresh powder. I’m rehearsing my excuses as I carve my wiggly way down a well-upholstered piste. “I’ve gone skiing by mistake,” I cry out on the pure mountain air. I’m almost embarrassed by my own excess as this is my second ski break of the year, and to go twice before Easter during a war and an energy crisis is giving peak first-world indulgence. Still, as I like to say, I have not one but two Agas, “just not in the same house,” so what the heck. Here goes. My two ski trips in two months, then.

Ysenda Maxtone Graham

Do you have the patience to own an EV?

There’s a distinctive glow of virtue that emanates from people recharging their electric cars in public places. I call it the Light of the Charge Brigade. In the run-up to Easter, I spent two hours observing the phenomenon at Fleet Services on the M3. It was mostly men doing the charging. They’ve cracked the EV way of life, and are very pleased with themselves. A sparklingly fulfilled man called Paul was driving from Colchester to Seaton in Devon in his Skoda Enyaq with a carload of friends. He’d planned this stop for a first charge and Pret elevenses. Later he was planning to stop at Montacute House in Somerset for a late lunch and a second charge on one of the National Trust’s chargers.

trojan horse
Peter Jones

The Trumpian appeal of a Trojan horse

Given the tonnage of missiles launched at Iran, it seems remarkable how relatively few Iranians have been killed. But the Americans have no interest in wasting multimillion dollar ordnance on pain-in-the-ass innocent bystanders. However, Donald Trump is now considering a land invasion. That would have been unwise, as the ancients knew. Knowing all about the problems of land assaults against defended cities, the ancients often preferred to lay siege. That could be a wearisome business and did not necessarily guarantee success. Troy was besieged for ten years, but it took the trick of the wooden horse to take it. So when the Persian king Darius (c.

Damian Thompson

How Pope Leo XIV is quietly reshaping the Vatican

On the afternoon of Easter Sunday last year, Pope Francis was driven through St. Peter’s Square in an open-topped Popemobile. A few weeks earlier he had nearly died from pneumonia, so pilgrims were thrilled to watch him blessing babies. They told journalists that it was a miracle to see the 88-year-old Argentinian in such good shape. At 9:45 the next morning, the Vatican announced that Francis had just died from a stroke. And so began the preparations for a conclave that elected the second pope from the Americas. Cardinal Robert Prevost – “Bob” to his friends – was a Chicago-born dual citizen of the United States and Peru. Until 2023 he’d been bishop of the Peruvian diocese of Chiclayo.

pope leo xiv
israel
Rod Liddle

The real reason the left hates Israel

“Listen to what the man on the left of the camera has to say about Israel, the man who is addressed as Nick,” a radical Corbynista friend suggested to me the other day in a social media message designed to change my mind about the Middle East. It’s part of a sustained campaign on his part which dates back at least ten years and is usually conducted with good grace, if never accord. So I listened to what this chap Nick had to say, with growing hilarity. Not because of what he said – which was what you might expect from a rank anti-Semite, but because of who he was. For it was none other than Nick Griffin, the former leader of the British National party. Mr.

prince william
Charles Moore

Does it matter if Prince William believes in God?

The Prince of Wales seeks to assure us that, as a friend puts into his mouth, “I might not be at church every day, but I believe in it.” That formulation does not necessarily mean he believes in God or the doctrines of the Church of England. All it means is that he believes in the efficacy of the C of E and will dutifully fulfill his future role as its Supreme Governor. Actually, that is all we need to know. His great Tudor predecessor said she did not want to “make windows into men’s souls”; even kings are only men. The important thing, from a constitutional as opposed to a spiritual point of view, is that he acts the part with good grace, which he surely will. Whether he does so by divine grace poured into his heart is a question above all our pay grades.

David Whitehouse

Will Artemis II fulfill our Space Age dreams?

As the Artemis II mission thundered into the sky last night, a full moon rose above Cape Canaveral. It was no coincidence: the timing of the lift-off was ordained by lighting requirements and the mechanics of the Moon's orbit. The mission set off not in the direction of the Moon, but towards where the Moon will be in five days’ time when the spacecraft swings around it in what is called a "free-return trajectory." The crew of four are the first in almost 54 years to go to the Moon. In a way, things have not changed so much since then.

Wednesday

Alexander Larman

Does Prince Harry regret his ‘Mr. Mischief’ messages?

Prince Harry used to be fun. It is easy to forget this given the Meghan-Montecito-highly litigious incarnation of the Duke of Sussex, but there was a reason why, for many years, he was the most popular and accessible member of “the Firm.” Less stiff than his brother and considerably less cerebral than his father, he conveyed a sense that he was Harry Wales, the royal you’d want to go for a pint with. Or, as we now know, to have “movie snuggles” with journalists, with whom he could complain about being “hungover again for the third day running.

Friday

Melanie McDonagh

The Church of England makes me grateful to be a Catholic

Granted, I was not the most obvious person to appreciate the installation of Sarah Mullally in Canterbury, even though I think her a splendid Christian pastor and indeed, an exemplary Christian. Her kind, homely face radiates charity and good will; the simplicity of her speech speaks of sincerity. But as a bolshie Catholic, it’s not possible to spend long in Canterbury cathedral during this very Anglican celebration without the subversive thought surfacing that this cathedral is, by rights, Catholic, the Reformation being an unfortunate blip in the great scheme of things.

england

Wednesday

Mark Nayler

Don’t let AI read philosophy for you

The German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) once wrote that "the man who feels himself drawn to philosophy must himself seek out its immortal teachers in the quiet sanctuary of their works." That’s easier said than done: philosophical classics have a terrible reputation outside ivory towers – as big, boring, difficult books, filled with obtuse theorizing about irrelevant problems, their covers featuring ghastly old men staring miserably out at the reader. Books about philosophy are hugely popular today, most of which repackage the thoughts of past thinkers for time-pressed readers – but I suspect not many people transition from these guides to the great works themselves, especially when AI can do all the hard reading for you.

philosophy

Sunday

Charles Moore

Will books soon become extinct?

I am glad that BBC Radio 4 is producing a series called How Reading Made Us, presented by the subtle, super-literate Times of London columnist James Marriott. I must declare an interest. Roughly 98 percent of my earnings over 45 years have depended on the fact that plenty of people like reading. Now we are thinking harder, however, about the fact that form affects substance. The idea of an encyclopedia, for example, as developed (from classical roots) in the 18th century, was that all needful knowledge on a particular subject could be assembled and consulted in a book or series of books. With AI, there is little need for this form. The form of a book, which often seemed so compendious, can now seem cumbersome. Fiction, too, is affected by form.

books

Saturday

Melissa Kite

I’m stuck in a house of madness

“I want to learn Iranian,” said my father, resolutely, as he watched the bombing on TV. “Farsi,” I said, thinking I would talk to him about that very happily on the basis it was better than helping him contact the Ukrainian government so he can fight the Russians. “What’s that?” he said. “Farsi,” I repeated. “Parcel?” he said. But it was pointless trying to explain, for he was up and looking out the window and telling me to look in the parcel box. We were waiting for the special food I had ordered for the new cat someone irresponsibly rehomed to my parents and which already has a stress condition from living with two dementia sufferers. I need to take it with me back to Ireland when I get a spare week or two to gather the papers for the EU.

madness
extremist
Toby Young

Am I an extremist?

The Communities Secretary Steve Reed recently rose in the House of Commons to unveil “Protecting What Matters,” the British government’s new “action plan” to “strengthen social cohesion” and “tackle division.” According to the accompanying press release: “Millions of families, friends and neighbors will feel a stronger sense of community, unity and national pride thanks to renewed efforts to stamp out extremism, hate and division announced today.” I was not among those millions. Conspicuous by omission in the announcement was any mention of Islamist extremism.