Society

Friday

Catriona Olding

My cave house’s wonderful history

Provence Looking back on it, apart from this year’s wildfires, the stultifying heat of high summer in Provence isn’t so bad if you accept that the time to exercise is 6 a.m. and work is only possible before midday and from late afternoon onward. Holidaymakers and the better-off have pools to jump into and air conditioning to enjoy. But during the afternoons the rest of us lie almost naked on the bed under a ceiling fan, shutters closed, while the Rouge Noir varnish on our toenails melts. I’m told that Frenchmen sit in their underwear watching the Tour de France. One such afternoon about five years ago, Jeremy and I were lying side by side, inert, under the whirring blades of the fan, when we heard voices on the usually quiet public pathway below the bedroom window.

Lloyd Evans

My radical plan for the House of Lords

A neighbor betrayed me to her 16-year-old son. “Lloyd knows about politics,” she told the youngster. “He can help you with your essay.” I was introduced to a spotty teenager who appraised me suspiciously through a pair of smudged NHS glasses. “What’s the essay about?” I asked. “Politics,” he said. That seemed to leave the field wide open. “Contact a few members of the House of Lords and ask them to name their greatest achievement.” He nodded. “Sounds good, thanks,” he said with an air of finality, like a chef asking a new minion to sweep the floor. I accepted defeat. My plan had been to give him a sagacious ruling from on high. “Listen, m’lad. Always do your homework or you’ll end up doing someone else’s.” But he understood that better than me.

Thursday

Cosmo Landesman

The unsaid truth about suicide

Did you know that in the UK and the US, September is a month devoted to suicide prevention? And that on the 10th of this month, it’s World Suicide Prevention Day? No, neither did I. And neither did any of my friends. Yet we’re all aware that suicide is a serious problem. Every 90 minutes, someone in the UK or Ireland dies that way. It’s the biggest killer of men under 45. And suicides among teenage girls and young women have almost doubled in recent years. We’ve been having these suicide prevention events every September for more than two decades and yet the rates are not going down. Maybe it’s time to challenge what I’d call the suicide prevention consensus.

Patrick Drury

‘We pretend to teach, they pretend to learn’: the reality of lecturing Chinese students

Shanghaiing, the practice of drugging and kidnapping men on the US West Coast for service on ships bound for China, was made a federal offense in 1915, but every summer the university where I teach draws reverse inspiration from it when the dean flies to China to round up students. Though it’s unlikely that he cruises the teen hangouts of Yichang or Xingtai, slipping laudanum into school leavers’ bubble teas, the demand for Chinese freshers is such that the use of press gangs by British universities would be neither unexpected nor much out of character. More than one in 20 students in Britain are Chinese. They contribute billions to the UK economy annually and without them several universities would go bankrupt and most would struggle.

D.J. Taylor

Tolkien knew the truth about power

One route into the thorny question of J.R.R. Tolkien’s politics comes courtesy of Giorgia Meloni. Scarcely a profile of the Italian Prime Minister hits the newsstands these days without the Tolkien references piling up like so many windfall apples: The Hobbit plays put on with fellow-members of the Movimento Sociale Italiano youth group back in the 1990s; the fixation on the Ringbearer’s sidekick Sam Gamgee (“Much more useful than Frodo”); the annual birthday tribute to a man who “brought up so many of us with his stories.” Here, clearly is a Middle-earth obsessive, Tolkien’s work a direct prompt for political action. Head a thousand miles north into the Scandinavian forests and the hard-right tocsin clangs even louder.

Are you having a 'nun girl summer'?
Damian Thompson

Are you having a ‘nun girl summer?’

20 min listen

Why are young women suddenly fascinated by nuns? From “nun girl summer” on TikTok to a wider “quiet revival” of Christianity among Generation Z, the religious life appears to be enjoying an unexpected cultural moment. But is the attraction genuinely spiritual – or are young women simply drawn to the aesthetics, certainty and tranquility of convent life? This week on Holy Smoke, Damian Thompson is joined by the Spectator's US assistant editor Margaret Mitchell and the Daily Mail’s Mimi Yates to discuss the unlikely appeal of nuns to Gen Z. They explore the joy and “slow living” of convent life, the exhaustion of the attention economy and whether retreating into an all-female religious community offers an escape from modern dating and the “manosphere.

Gavin Mortimer

Marine Le Pen’s Muslim headscarf ban is popular, not populist

Marine Le Pen has promised to ban women wearing Muslim headscarves if she becomes president next year. The leader of the National Rally declared on X: “I will submit to the French people, by referendum, a bill to combat Islamist ideologies with numerous powerful measures, including the banning of the Islamist headscarf in public spaces.” Le Pen may be out of step with the rest of the political class but she is speaking for a majority of the people France has led the way among European countries on the issue of conservative Islamic dress. In 2004, for example, a law was passed prohibiting the wearing of conspicuous religious symbols in schools. It applied to Christians, Jews and Muslims, but France was accused of using the bill to persecute Islam.

Lionel Shriver

We are ignoring the biggest threat the world faces

In my mid-twenties, my one-bedroom in Astoria, Queens, developed a roach problem. I don’t mean the odd single scurry disappearing irretrievably beneath the fridge, either. Oh, it started that way. But I didn’t take measures when the situation was manageable because roaches gave me the creeps, and so many activities beckoned that were much more fun. Between a small shelf and the kitchen wall I stored spare brown paper bags – from which I began to detect a rustling. At some point, the bags began to move. Beside them, the wall gathered an undulating shadow that I trained myself never to look at directly; like Faye Dunaway in Little Big Man, I would “avert my eyes at the necessary moment.” One night a friend came to dinner and stared at that wall in frank revulsion.

Wednesday

Robert Jackman

‘Clean cocaine’ isn’t worth it

Cocaine has a tendency to get the press all aflutter. So it's probably no surprise that the Daily Mail had a splash earlier this summer with a feature about a legal energy supplement compared – at least in the headline – to “clean cocaine.”  What on earth is this product, I wondered. It turns out that the reality is slightly less dramatic than the tabloids might suggest: Wildkraut – also known as Energy Sniff – is a powdered supplement from Austria which combines the dosage of caffeine you might otherwise get from a Red Bull with some esoteric alpine herbs. The one thing that it does have in common with cocaine is that it is intended to be snorted.  As someone more than partial to energy drinks, I was immediately curious.

clean cocaine
cripple
Julie Burchill

Call me a cripple

In case you missed it (well done, if so), last week Will Self wrote an extraordinary rant on Substack attacking various journalists for how they wrote about Jason Arday and demanding they be held responsible for his death. It reminded me of one of those dogs in a pub that starts barking at some imagined threat to its owner, then gets carried away with the excitement of its own barking until it totally loses its mind and has to be taken outside to calm down.

Tuesday

Gareth Roberts

Ali G and the death of comedy

Ali G: Who Iz I? is set to hit cinema screens next month. The return of this bling-bedecked denizen of the West Staines Massive, first seen on TV in 1998, is a disquieting symptom of our century’s static culture. Back in 1998, it would have been inconceivable for the big new comedy film to have been a revival of TV characters from 1971 – On The Buses or The Liver Birds. Today, along with Ali G, we are also blessed by Alan Partridge and Have I Got News For You, even older comedy institutions. And there are endless reiterations of old shows and formats: Star Trek, Spiderman and similar, Blankety Blank, Bergerac. Mass culture has essentially stopped.

milo yiannopoulos
Pedro L. Gonzalez

The unlikely defenders of Milo Yiannopoulos

Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents detained and deported British provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos last week. The official X account of the Department of Homeland Security posted his unflattering mugshot online, which has roughly 24 million views as of this writing. You would never guess, looking into that defeated face, that Yiannopoulos had been one of the earliest supporters of the President whose administration ultimately sent him packing.   Yiannopoulos built his brand as a habitual line-stepper who danced through the highest halls of right-wing celebrity, pioneering political provocation through the power of the internet.

Monday

Theo Hobson

The trouble with humanities

Sociology is an academic discipline that I generally steer clear of. It seems as full of trendy guff as Education. But there is a minority report, a subculture that questions progressive orthodoxies. A new book co-written by Jennie Bristow and Ellie Lee called Growing Up in the Culture Wars, out in the US in January, is in this frail tradition. They offer some excellent insights into what has gone wrong. One insight is that mainstream sociologists have become confused about the idea of normality; it has become seen as an oppressive threat. They acknowledge that there is a healthy sociological tradition of criticizing “normativity,” meaning the way in which societies reinforce the status quo by presenting it as natural.

humanities

Friday

Sam Leith

Does it matter that Jason Arday’s memoir is made up?

Bloomsbury’s former editor-in-chief Alexandra Pringle popped up on British television this week to argue that the late Jason Arday’s publisher could not have been expected to fact-check his book Great and Unfortunate Things. The argument she made raised a lot of eyebrows and has precipitated a lot of self-righteous ridicule online.   The problem with Arday’s book is that a great deal of what he says in it seems to have been codswallop “I think questions of truth and accuracy in memoir are very, very blurred because they are subjective accounts of a bit of someone’s life,” she told listeners. “A memoir is not an autobiography, and it’s important to make the distinction between the two.

Thursday

Douglas Murray

Harry and Meghan deserve a second chance

A little while back I came across a copy of Ted Hughes’s Laureate poems which had an inscription to some friends. Inside was an unpublished squib by the late poet laureate which read: “The Royalist/ Is afraid/ The Queen’s a pin/ In a hand-grenade.” If I understand the poet’s meaning correctly then I count myself such a royalist. I dislike criticism of the royal family, especially of the monarch. When it happens it feels too much like people hammering at something fundamental – far more fundamental than the critic appreciates. If criticism is to be made it seems to me that it should be done privately, so as not to disturb the fragile equilibrium of the rather magical arrangement we have on these islands.

Wednesday

Stephen Daisley

Why the world loved Dolly Parton

Dolly Parton was all-American. Born into the dirt-poor Tennessee hills of the Great Smokey Mountains, her upbringing reflected the indigent nature of country life in the South, even as the urban and suburban United States reaped the rewards of peacetime. Her father was, among other things, a tobacco farmer but struggled to support his wife and 12 children, all but one of whom survived infancy. It was a childhood steeped in hard work, mountain wisdom, and most important of all, the Bible. Dolly Parton’s fame and fortune were built on talent, toil, personality and moral character But unlike some country singers, Parton did not wallow in her hardscrabble childhood.

Tuesday

David Shipley

Is short-form video rotting our brains?

When I read that a new scientific study had shown impacts on the brains of those watching short form videos I was delighted. As someone who doesn’t have a television, doesn’t let my daughter use any screens and refuses to watch videos – I always ask friends, “is there a transcript you can send me?” – I felt vindicated. Perhaps now I could gloat I told you so, videos are bad to everyone I know. Participants were shown short videos they liked they “exhibited significant deactivation” in parts of their brains responsible for “cognitive control” – demonstrating a mechanism which might mean that short-video consumption makes people prefer instant gratification and lowers their self-control. Is this backed up by other studies?

Alexander Larman

Who should pay for Meghan and Harry’s security?

It isn’t long now until the joyous day that Harry and Meghan once more make Britain their home, but several aspects of their return are still clouded in mystery. We have no idea, for instance, where they are going to be living – although the Cotswolds have been mooted. Once they arrive there, there is also the rather vexed question as to whether their no doubt hugely expensive security is going to be privately funded or the taxpayer’s burden. Two former home secretaries have gone public to argue that there should be at least some level of taxpayer-funded protection for the Sussexes. This may not be a wildly popular perspective but can at least be justified on humanitarian grounds.

Andrew Gilligan

Cambridge’s Farah Ahmed: study engineering ‘to produce weaponry for jihad’

Cambridge University’s education faculty – former home of Jason Arday – has appointed as assistant research professor a woman who wrote that Muslims should study engineering and computers “to produce advanced weaponry for Jihad in order that the deen [Islam] may dominate over all other deens.” This is the fourth in our series of articles about Farah Ahmed, a former activist in the racist, extremist and separatist group Hizb ut Tahrir, now banned as a terror organization, who has been given a senior role by Cambridge training the future leaders of the teaching profession.

Nicholas Farrell

I want to be a good father – like Machiavelli

Dante’s Beach, Ravenna When Machiavelli was tortured, then banished from Florence in 1513 to his modest farm in the Tuscan countryside, in the afternoons he used to “sink into vulgarity,” as he put it, and play cards and backgammon with the local men in the tavern next to his small house.