Society

Friday

August 7, 2026

How Black Lives Matter created Jason Arday

Jason Arday, I miss you already. The resignation of the Cambridge professor, sporting Adonis, charity-fundraising extraordinaire and credibly accused fantasist has brought to a close the most delicious silly-season story for some time. Cambridge traded academic rigor for phony virtue. It chose political expediency over the pursuit of truth On Wednesday night, Arday announced he was stepping down from his positions at the University of Cambridge and Jesus College, after a trickle of plagiarism allegations, as well as questions over his extracurricular achievements and his wild claims of violent intimidation, became a flood. That’s not how he put it, mind.

Katherine Dee

Why does TikTok hype extreme violence?

Everybody’s worried that nobody reads and that the people who do are reading smut. In great quantities, it should be said, but still smut. Since the advent of the novel, our arbiters of morality have made it known that if a book has even a hint of sex in it – especially if that sex is suspected of inflaming the erotic imaginations of featherbrained young women – then it “doesn’t count” as reading. It’s just masturbation. Earlier this year, a young woman went viral after bragging about reading 100 books or something like it. She was treated like, well, that six-year-old who went viral after reading 100 books. The response to this woman was like the response to the little boy: “Uh, does it count if the books are Curious George?

Philip Hensher

Who will we be without our ability to read?

In Arthur C. Clarke’s 1953 science-fiction novel Childhood’s End, a race of benevolent aliens arrives to take control of Earth and its peoples. They have been sent here, it transpires, to oversee the transformation of the human race from Homo Sapiens – individual, unique, quarrelsome – into a hive mind. The change happens in a single generation to everyone under the age of ten – and parents no longer know what their children are. “All the hopes and dreams of your race are ended now,” the alien supervisor says. “You have given birth to your successors, and it is your tragedy that you will never understand them – will never even be able to communicate with their minds... you will not think them human and you will be right.

Christopher Caldwell

All roads lead to Nashville

“There ain’t nothing like the loving of a hard-driving cowboy man,” as the country singer Barbara Jean puts it towards the end of Robert Altman’s movie Nashville, and, really, there ain’t nothing like Nashville itself, either. It’s surprising more has not been made of it this year, when the country’s 250th anniversary has got tangled up with the flailing Trump presidency. Though he made the film in 1975, Altman set it a year in the future, amid a fictionalized and chaotic 1976 presidential campaign. He meant to give an account of a country that, on the 200th anniversary of its founding, had descended into unprecedented gaudiness and depravity. When Jimmy Carter wound up winning the White House, Nashville came to seem prophetic. But it is more than that.

Alexander Larman

Amanda Knox should not do comedy

I am a great believer that there should be no unbroachable topic in comedy, as long as the person broaching it does so in a funny enough fashion. This, however, does not mean that this person should always be entitled to do so. Had Jimmy Savile launched into a new stand-up career eulogizing the joys of pedophilia and necrophilia, I am not sure that he would have been playing to enthusiastic audiences, no matter how good the jokes, and while Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor proved to be inadvertently hilarious while discussing everything from Pizza Express to sweating on the BBC show Newsnight, I am not sure he would be cheered to the rafters at an open-mic night at his local Jongleurs.

Michael Brendan Dougherty

My Jersey Shore summers

Sea Isle City, New Jersey It’s August 3. My mother’s birthday. Standing in the surf, my youngest son this morning said to me: “What would you do if you could breathe underwater and live there under deep pressure the rest of your life?” “I would eat more fish, I think.” “You could explore the Mariana Trench,” he corrected me. My brother-in-law Matt came down with his two sons to join us. The boys splashed and hollered in the rough sea. The red flag was put up by the lifeguards today. The fathers talked about how much easier it got each year.

Alex Diggins

The remains of Sierra Leone’s City hotel symbolize Graham Greene’s ‘soupsweet land’

The City was once Freetown’s most storied hotel. It burned down in the early 2000s, a few weeks after British paratroopers fought off Revolutionary United Front rebels in a battle which helped bring an end to Sierra Leone’s decade-long civil war. But the hotel had been on its uppers for a while before then. The Ferraris, a family of Swiss hoteliers, had long since abandoned it, and the City had become a brothel, where clients were serviced in dingy, candle-lit rooms. One correspondent who visited the site shortly after its destruction found a pile of rubble and a sign warning in Krio: “No piss ya.” Nowadays, there’s a scruffy Leonco gas station where the City once stood. On one side is Philton Guesthouse; on the other is Paty’s Beauty Salon.

Douglas Murray

Rod’s bravery made others brave too

How do you produce the type of person who cares deeply while seemingly not giving a damn? With great difficulty, it turns out. Plenty of people imagine that they can say what they think, but very few do. For most people, some real or imaginary social punishment lies on the horizon: a dinner they won’t be invited to; a club of which they fear they will never become a member. Rod Liddle was one of the happy few who was free. He was free to say what he thought. He was free to voice unpopular opinions and – often harder – he was free to voice popular opinions. When the whole world seemed to be falling on his head he had a perfectly contented attitude toward it.

Thursday

August 6, 2026

Olivia Potts

Grasshopper Pie is like a teenage fever dream

Grasshopper pie is an unlikely dish: bright green, mint-flavored, combined with obscure liqueurs and set with marshmallows, all sitting in an Oreo crust. It feels like the fever dream of a sweet-toothed teenager who’s been let loose on their parents’ drinks cabinet, and will regret it tomorrow. The pie is based on the cocktail of the same name, which combines equal parts crème de menthe, crème de cacao blanc and cream. It’s a heady mix of mint, white chocolate, dairy and alcohol. The cocktail hails from New Orleans and its origin is claimed by Tujague’s in the French Quarter, where it was supposedly invented by the owner, Philip Guchet, in 1918. It tastes exactly as you’d imagine and is, forgive me, far better suited to a pie filling than it is to a drinks party.

Alex Alfirraz Scheers

How nukes made the world safer

Three hours after daybreak, a blinding flash ripped through the morning sky. August 6, 1945, began as a tranquil and clear day in Hiroshima. By 8:15, the Enola Gay, an American B-29 bomber, reduced Japan’s seventh-largest city to cinders. Three days later, on August 9, Nagasaki would suffer the same fate. For the first and only time in human history, atomic bombs were used in anger. Eighty-one years on from the atomic bombings of Japan, the uncomfortable truth is that nuclear weapons are the reason that World War Three has been avoided. Because nuclear weapons were part of the equation, those crises eventually de-escalated Yet according to the latest survey on nuclear weapons by the Pew Research Center, 69 percent of the American public thinks that they make the world less safe.

Dot Wordsworth

Fantasticks, calash, noctivagation – the wonderful words of Anthony Wood

When the King visited Oxford in September 1687, there was a bit of a shambles in the Bodleian, where they had laid out a banquet for his breakfast. He ate some mutton and pheasant. When he had finished, there was a scramble for the many dishes left over. The University had paid £160 for this banquet or ambigue, noted the antiquarian Anthony Wood. Ambigue, borrowed from French ambigu, meant a meal where all the dishes were served at once. It appears in the fifth index, “Words,” printed in 1900 in a 400-page volume of indexes to Wood’s Life and Times edited by the indefatigable Andrew Clark, who claimed “a little space for words and spellings characteristic of Wood,” and for “a few minor subjects” not in the other indexes.

Mary Killen

Dear Mary: what should I do if I run into my ex on holiday?

Q. A woman I have known for many years and who helped look after my mother has just had her leg amputated. One Saturday this month, she is out of hospital and is throwing a late birthday party at her farm with a hog roast etc. to celebrate. However, I have invited a schoolfriend to stay that weekend, and she has pancreatic cancer. Would it be very rude to go to the party for a short time? I have a charming, polite, gay man as my other house guest to keep my schoolfriend company.– E.S., Sussex A. Never underestimate the fun of spending unsupervised time in someone else’s house. Your guests would be delighted if you went out to a party. However, don’t be tempted to raise the topic of rival health conditions and which one trumps which. There could be no useful outcome.

Rory Sutherland

My top tips for Andy Burnham

I am cautiously optimistic about Britain’s new leader. For one thing, the fact that Andy Burnham went to Cambridge not Oxford, did not study PPE, is not a lawyer and did not grow up in Surrey makes him something of a diversity-hire among our more recent prime ministers. This gives us hope. It is a near-universal law of problem-solving that you cannot think your way out of problems using the same mindset that created them in the first place. One tip: government needs a marketing function. Rather than explaining itself to the public, it has endlessly sought to cadge publicity by ingratiating itself with the news media. As all journalists since Watergate are largely motivated by discrediting those in power, this is hopeless.

Lloyd Evans

My friend the failure – and the star

“Altogether Elsewhere.” The title page of an unpublished travel book caught my eye during a recent clear-out. The author, Matthew Leeming, was a character who deserved to be famous but somehow never made it. He was imaginative, witty, fearless and greedy – wonderfully greedy. He inherited his father’s ceramics company and ran it for years with great success. He loved being rich. “Money,” he used to say wistfully, “eases the pain of being alive.” To pique women’s interest, he claimed to be off-limits. ‘I’m training for the priesthood,’ he confided He invented businesses out of thin air. In Oxford he lived in a neighborhood called St. Clement’s and he created a summer school by printing a ream of luxury notepaper with an imposing letterhead: “St.

Patrick Kidd

The curious history of sporting superstitions

My father had been waiting his entire life for that whistle. After 75 years, the curse was over. Mayo were Gaelic football champions, having overturned the second-biggest deficit in the history of All-Ireland finals. The county hadn’t seen such a miracle since Father Horan got the taoiseach to fund an international airport near the shrine of Our Lady of Knock. Three months before Dad was born in Castlebar, Mayo won the 1951 title. Their celebrations on the way home were exuberant and, so the legend goes, disrupted a funeral in Foxford. The furious priest (some versions blame the widow) cast a curse on them, saying Mayo would never again lift the Sam Maguire Cup while any of those players lived. Nonsense, right? Except that Mayo then lost 11 finals, four by one point.

Lawrence Osborne

What Istanbul gave me

Why do novelists set their stories in cities or landscapes which seem to haunt them? Not the places of their childhood – an obvious choice – or places they’ve researched because those places are intellectually attractive. The places they can’t avoid in their own subconscious. I’m often asked this question because the places I write about are considered exotic. But to me, it’s the reverse. I write about a city long after I’ve lived there and left it, having never had any intention to write about it at all. Such was the case, for me, with Istanbul. I moved there in 2011 after 20 years in New York. It came about by chance. My mother died that year and I came back to Brighton to attend the service.

James Heale

‘He’s either the Messiah – or the Antichrist’: on the campaign trail with Nigel Farage

“We love you, Nigel!” In Clacton-on-Sea, there is little sign that the Reform leader’s star has waned. Campaigning with Nigel Farage here is a burst of cackles, quips, nicotine and selfies: a march through sun-kissed streets with a cast of canvassers, aides and minders. A child clasping a teddy bear dances around, a Reform rosette pinned to her top; a groaning assistant clutches two dozen poster boards. On the doors in Seawick there is near-universal support, with variations on the theme which Farage has made his campaign slogan: “I’m with Nigel.” In the middle of silly season, Clacton is hosting one of Britain’s most bizarre by-elections.

Lionel Shriver

Tax the poor

A sanctimonious liberal like any other respectable 16-year-old, I made a seminal lurch to the right the first time I opened a pay slip. I was manning the register weekends for the Ice Capades Chalet in Atlanta and made about $40 a week. Or so I imagined. Then where the hell was it? The significantly lighter payment was my rude introduction to taxation at source. Indignation at being fleeced at a minimal income persisted into my adulthood. I lived on a wing and a prayer for decades, and having to pitch anything whatsoever into the communal pot was consternating. I fancied that I asked for nothing from government; in trade, they should ask for nothing from me. I wasn’t yet a grown-up.

Lucas Chancellor

Love lessons from my grandfather

After a lovely 25th birthday trip to Vienna, I returned home to face the reality of my quarter-life circumstances. I had been happy with my milestones to date – a degree, a stint of modeling on the European and New York runways, a couple of relationships and some encouraging writing contracts – but was then told by my mother what my grandfather Alexander Chancellor had pulled off by the time he was my age. Having moved to Italy to work for Reuters news agency, he spoke Italian fluently and had married my grandmother, Susanna Debenham; he had two children, he had bought a house and even had someone iron his shirts from time to time, which Susie was definitely not going to do. By the time he reached 35, he was editing this magazine.

William Clouston

Rod had one great regret

In 2019, I had to explain to Iain Dale – live on LBC – that Rod Liddle’s suggestion in his Spectator column that elections should be held on Islamic holy days to deter Muslims from voting was not a serious proposal. Neither was his idea that students be drugged by their parents to the same end. It was humor, and they were jokes. When he was in hospital a few weeks ago, I visited Rod with some cake. While he munched away, he expressed a sense of regret that he could have been a great writer. Rod always thought his true calling was writing fiction, rather than journalism, and always wondered if he’d sold his soul by following the money. He was right – he did have the makings of a British Houellebecq.