Society

Thursday

Alexander Larman

The seismic arrest of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor

Ever since the Restoration of Charles II in 1660, no member of the royal family has been arrested, which makes this morning’s news that Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor has been taken into police custody under suspicion of misconduct in public office all the more seismic. And with a certain grim irony, his arrest comes on his 66th birthday, of all days. This arrest represents not so much the beginning of the end as the point at which the Rubicon has been crossed, forever This development had seemed inevitable for a considerable amount of time now. Remarks from both Buckingham Palace and prime minister Sir Keir Starmer in the past few days seemed to indicate that both the King and the Prime Minister expected that the once-unthinkable would happen sooner rather than later.

Wednesday

Drew Pavlou

Did Billie Eilish get me deported?

For someone who believes that “no one is illegal on stolen land,” it’s a surprise that Billie Eilish’s legal team may have blocked my entry to the US. My plan was to test her theory of land ownership, which she stated at the Grammys to great applause, and take over her LA mansion with the help of Native Americans. But, sadly, I was turned back at the border last weekend – my sacred and inalienable right to freedom of movement curtailed by border guards who were, I suspect, briefed about my arrival by Eilish’s team. I’m an Australian political activist, more usually focused on exposing the influence of the Chinese government in Australia. But I made an exception after Eilish made her ludicrous statement at the Grammys.

Drew Pavlou billie eilish
Adam Holloway

Why I invaded the Chagos Islands

Peros Banhos, Chagos Islands On Monday at 08.52 local time, I waded ashore to the Chagos archipelago alongside four islanders who had come to establish a permanent settlement – which they hope will make it impossible for the British government to hand the territory to Mauritius.  We had managed to come this far in absolute secrecy. We worried that our passage to the Chagos Islands might be interrupted by either a British patrol boat or even a Chinese submarine. So, we bought a boat in Thailand and provisioned it in Sri Lanka. Then we made the five-day ocean passage from the port of Galle in Sri Lanka to the northernmost islands of the Chagos archipelago.

Tuesday

Kellie-Jay Keen

The truth about trans violence

The latest “trans violence” was committed by a heterosexual man who went to a hockey game in Rhode Island and shot his family, then himself. His daughter described him as sick and mentally ill. Robert Dorgan, who preferred the name Roberta, is just the latest in a long line of violent people claiming to be transgender. Last week, a 6ft 18-year-old boy, who wanted to be a “petite” woman, was identified as the main suspect in the worst mass shooting in Canada’s history. Last summer, a male called Robert Westman killed two children and injured many more at the Annunciation Catholic School in Minneapolis. The 2023 Nashville school shooter was a girl called Audrey, who identified as a man called Aiden.

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Saturday

Christopher Ferguson

There is no evidence that social media harms children’s mental health

The government is consulting on the merits of banning children under the age of 16 from social media and looks prized to do so. As with many such digital abstinence movements, politicians who advocate for this change are influenced by The Anxious Generation, a book of pop psychology written by Jonathan Haidt, which claims that social media has worsened young people’s mental health. Far from ‘drowning in evidence’, real researchers – not pop psychologists – are scouring a great desert looking for puddles Proponents of such bans tell us there is an overwhelming scientific consensus behind them, usually citing Haidt’s book.

Friday

Patrick West

Why Gen Z is troubled by Jesus

Many teenagers today find Christianity off-putting because Jesus seems too fond of "mansplaining." He appears to have a "God complex," while the Almighty is alienating on account of being "really violent and aggressive." These are the findings in the report Troubling Jesus, the third part of Youthscape’s "Translating God" project, based on a recent survey of British 14- to 17-year-olds. Drawing on five reading groups, in which teenagers reacted to passages of scripture traditionally understood as conveying "good news," Youthscape faced reactions "radically different" from what it says might have been expected. While Jesus was not only seen as a condescending male chauvinist and God the Father as a bully, many youths discerned other issues in the readings.

christianity gen z jesus

Thursday

Tina Brown

How Jeff Bezos destroyed the Washington Post

The debacle of the Washington Post’s hara-kiri last week dispatched the myth that a tech billionaire could save journalism. Jeff Bezos’s purchase of the paper in 2013 was greeted with euphoria, not just because he was a big fat wallet who would absorb the losses, but because we thought his Amazon wizardry was transferable to journalism’s battered business model. The man was a digital titan, for God’s sake. He started selling books online from his garage and built it into a $2.2 trillion consumer nirvana, with a Blue Origin side hustle of suborbital rockets. Surely he would figure out innovative new ways to bring the Post’s rigorous reporting to hungry new audiences?

Monday

Matt Ridley

The inconvenient truth about polar bears

The BBC reported terrible news recently about polar bears: they are thriving. This is very annoying of them as it goes against the interests of environmental activists, polar bears being the very emblem, mascot and clickbait of climate change cataclysm. But the bears’ stubborn refusal to get the memo and starve has become too obvious to ignore. The latest evidence comes from the Barents Sea, and the Norwegian-administered archipelago of Svalbard in particular, where bear numbers have been steadily increasing. Surprisingly, they are also getting fatter, according to measurements taken when bears are caught and weighed. This is despite a decline in sea-ice cover in the area, especially in fall.

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christian nihilism
Luke Lyman

Christian nihilism is taking over American life

There’s something very religious about nihilism. For proof, look to the new capital of American nihilism, Minneapolis. A callousness toward death and danger has fallen over the city. Of the many disturbing videos to come out of Minnesota’s anti-ICE protests, one of the stranger examples shows a white man walking up to a line of heavily armed law-enforcement officers, shouting: “Shoot us in the fucking face! Shoot me in the fucking head!” What possesses someone to do that? I understand being against Donald Trump and Stephen Miller’s blitzkrieg deportation policy. And it’s not irrational, in the viral age, to protest theatrically. But this is psychotic. It is the death drive in overdrive.

Sunday

Cockburn

Takeout with Woody, Soon-Yi and Epstein

The more salacious aspects of the Epstein files are well known – but what of the banal side of being a billionaire sex pest? It’s no secret Woody Allen and his wife Soon-Yi Previn were close friends with Epstein, as the trove of emails show. One food-obsessed friend of Cockburn alerted us to the non-stop back and forth of emails, spanning years, between Soon-Yi and a coterie of Epstein assistants. The topic? Scheduling dinners at Epstein’s townhouse, along with directions on what Woody and Soon-Yi would like to order-in that night. Soon-Yi does all the ordering and coordinating, as she explains in an email to one of Epstein’s assistants when asked for an email to pass on to private equity titan Leon Black, “Woody doesn’t email but he texts.

Friday

Brendan O’Neill

The Epstein scandal has morphed into a moral panic

That’s it, I’m out. I’m finished with the Epstein scandal. This morning I read about a man who is on the cusp of cancellation because he once sent a flirtatious email to Ghislaine Maxwell, years before her crimes were known about. This is getting ridiculous. It feels like MeToo on steroids. There’s a medieval vibe of finger-pointing and rumor-mongering The man is Casey Wasserman. He’s chair of the Los Angeles 2028 Olympics. And there are hollers for him to stand down. All because he once got digitally horny with Ms Maxwell. "I think of you all the time," he wrote in one email. "What do I have to do to see you in a tight leather outfit?" he asked. That’s it. A little bit of lame middle-aged wooing.

Christopher Caldwell

How to lose friends and alienate people

After two deadly shootings in confrontations between Donald Trump’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents and the activists obstructing them, Minneapolis was starting to remind people of Kent State. By “people” we mean progressive baby boomers, inclined to make the Vietnam War the measure of all things. For them, the massacre of four student protesters by a nervous detachment of Ohio national guardsmen in 1970 alerted parents to the war’s inhumanity. It started the groundswell against Richard Nixon that would force him to exit the war three years later – and the White House the year after that. The analogy is a bad one. Trump’s position differs a lot from Nixon’s. It’s stronger politically.

Thursday

Kevin Cook

The dying art of sports journalism

Late in January, while the Washington Post was gearing up for the Olympics, staffers got an email from managing editor Kimi Yoshino. “As we assess our priorities for 2026,” she wrote, “we have decided not to send a contingent to the Winter Olympics.” A few days later the Post announced that it would send four journalists to Italy after all – down from more than a dozen. That’s four people to cover a two-week event with more than 116 medal competitions. Then at the start of this month, all 45 members of the sports team were told the section was being shut down. “We will be closing the Sports department in its current form,” the Post’s executive editor, Matt Murray, said in a statement afterwards.

Daniel McCarthy

The folly of Hamnet

Democracy has not been kind to William Shakespeare. His works may be read and performed more widely than ever, but readers and audiences understand less and less of what they see. Egalitarianism encourages narcissism, and narcissism interprets all art as autobiography. Shakespeare could only write about his own life, and if, in fact, he wrote about royal courts and noblemen, then Shakespeare must not have been Shakespeare, the actor from Stratford-upon-Avon. He must have been Edward de Vere, the earl of Oxford, or somebody like that. He could not have possessed the intelligence and imagination to transcend his personal identity, for none of us can do that. It would be superhuman. That’s one foolish contention arising from the idea that writing must always be memoir.

Dryden Brown

I need a home for my digital nation – why not Greenland?

I left the Greenlandic parliament – the Inatsisartut – last year and walked to the Hotel Hans Egede to grab my swim trunks. I came here to explore one of the last frontiers on Earth. Greenland is a quasi-communist country that prohibits land ownership and depends on Danish aid. Perhaps the US will change that, someday. I met my team in the lobby with towels. I’m the CEO of Praxis, a new kind of political project we call a “digital nation.” It’s a community of more than 150,000 people who want to help build a better future for western civilization. In 2020, we launched as a transgressive group chat interested in Greek literature, cryptocurrency and New York’s art scene. We hosted events and were antagonistic to our woke counterparts. We grew quickly.

Dot Wordsworth

Do only bitches bitch?

‘How many letters?’ asked my husband, as though it were a crossword we were doing together. ‘Five,’ I replied. ‘Begins in b, ends in h.’ The clue, according to the Daily Telegraph, was that the head of Norfolk county council had told opponents not to ‘b---h and moan’. ‘Belch?’ asked my husband optimistically, adding at intervals, in exactly the same hopeful tone: ‘Blush? Birch? Bunch? Bleach?’ ‘Too many letters,’ I replied to the last suggestion. Obviously the intended word was bitch. But I wondered why it had to be blanked out. Is bitch taboo in every sense? Would it be blanked out in the Crufts sense of a female dog? The doublet ‘bitch and moan’ is quite common.

Piers Morgan

What Trump told me in my hour of need

"The two enemies of human happiness are pain and boredom," espoused German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer. Having spent the past two weeks in the grip of both, after fracturing my femur so disastrously it necessitated a total hip replacement, I can confirm he’s correct. And given I did it tripping in a hotel restaurant, I would add "shame" to the list. The pain was excruciating; the shame even worse. (History will record that the Free Solo daredevil Alex Honnold successfully climbed the 508-meter Taipei 101 tower, without safety ropes, in the same week I failed to navigate a six-inch step.) But the boredom’s been stupefying.

Andrew Watts

What Freud would say about Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor’s teddy bears

It is widely known that when a Duke of York is down, he is down, and the recent hit-piece in Heat – "'Pathetic' Andrew’s tantrums over prized teddy bears" – found a new way of kicking Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor. Its royal source said that "being forced to move [out of Royal Lodge] has sent him into a full-on meltdown because he keeps telling people the bears won’t cope with the change… as he says, it’s their home too." When it was reported last month that Andrew’s teddy bear collection was being sent to a south London storage facility, I was on the verge of feeling sorry for him; until I realized I was actually feeling sorry for the bears. There are no wonderful games to play in a lock-up. Of course I anthropomorphize teddy bears: that is what they are for.

Wednesday

Sean Thomas

Has AI finally developed consciousness?

Depending on where you stand on AI, January 30, 2026 will go down in history for one of two things. Either it is the day when the AI singularity really began and the robots became conscious – or the day when it was revealed that far too many people are credulous about AI and were fooled by a bunch of cosplaying crypto-bores.  To recap: this story begins with several confusing names you may have glimpsed on the internet in recent days – Clawdbot, Moltbot, Openclaw, Moltbook. They represent different pieces of the same extraordinary puzzle. Built by London-based software developer Peter Steinberger, OpenClaw (the current name for what started as Clawdbot) is an AI "agent" that runs locally on a user's own hardware and connects to everyday apps such as WhatsApp, Telegram and iMessage.

Lionel Shriver

No one is safe from a wealth tax

No matter how many jurisdictions discover the hard way that wealth taxes backfire, in California an initiative is collecting signatures to put a "one-time" (ha!) 5 percent tax on the net worth of the state’s roughly 200 billionaires on November’s ballot. Hey, those guys are rich. They won’t even notice. But the funny thing about people and money is that even folks with lots like to keep it. The 2026 Billionaire Tax Act is slyly retroactive, a variety of pre-crime legislation – applying to anyone resident in California on 1 January this year, looping a bungee cord around the ankles of would-be absconders. Thus billionaires such as Peter Thiel scrambled to establish a presence in a lower tax state before midnight on New Year’s Eve.