Society

Thursday

Lloyd Evans

Confessions of a dog hater

“Do you like animals?” asked the woman at the door, collecting for a zoo. “No, I hate them, they keep trying to kill me,” I said. That got rid of her. I feel a little ashamed of my hostility to animals, which I inherited from my mother. She was raised in rural Ireland and she loathed the countryside and all its nonspeaking inhabitants. To her, animals were either predators or ingredients, and she particularly despised geese, rats, mice, squirrels and dogs. “Vermin,” was one of her favorite nouns. And she regarded the word “pet” as a self-deluding fantasy. Which seems reasonable. Animals cannot be tamed but their owners can be deceived. Any beast will turn murderous when cornered. Dog-hate entered my soul. It festers there still.

Peter Hitchens

The great whataboutery delusion

If you live near the frontiers of acceptable opinion, as any thinking person must surely do, you quickly find that these badlands are policed mainly with insults and innuendos. And so you learn one morning, to your surprise, that you are an apologist for some repulsive regime which you strongly dislike. If you have been especially daring, you may be a “war crimes denier” as well. Or you are charged with “whataboutery,” a word its users think will magically erase your case. Or, in many ways best of all, you are a conspiracy theorist. There is a myth that this phrase was invented by the CIA to try to discredit protesters against the Vietnam War, but the expression is far older than that.

Mary Wakefield

Texas was right to save baby Gabriel-Rumi

A court in Dallas, Texas is due to decide the fate of a small baby called Gabriel or Rumi, depending on who you believe his mother is. Gabriel-Rumi is at present a sort of Schrödinger’s baby, suspended between possible futures and suspended also, poor sod, between life and death: born with a heart defect, headed now for surgery. Gabriel-Rumi’s short life has so far been the subject of a media frenzy, for reasons I’ll explain, but should he later look back and be appalled at all the fuss, I’d like him to know what a service he’s already done the world. The global surrogacy business surges on, valued at almost $40 billion, heading for $300 billion by 2030; an accelerating factory belt of babies commissioned, grown, sold.

Arabella Byrne

Do you have Old Money Face?

Recently, I have started to worry about my face. Early in the morning, before the children wake up, I’m sure I can see ghosts in the downstairs loo mirror. My 20-year-old self’s face flashes before me but soon vanishes reproachfully into the crow’s feet around my eyes; I didn’t like her anyway. My long-deceased father lingers over my cheekbones and draws the smoking lines around my mouth in ash. I frown back. My grandmother, anxious, appears in the split second between posing and relaxing. I squint as she used to when playing bridge. If the past is an inscrutable face, I am reduced to reading, not between the lines but between the wrinkles. I never thought I would get old – I’m 43 – but it’s happening.

Owen Matthews

Who gets to decide when assassination is justified?

When is extrajudicial killing just war by other means, and when does it become a state-sponsored act of terror? “We were not terrorists but fighters for freedom who fought with our eyes open,” Menachem Begin wrote of Irgun, the irregular group of fighters he led during the 1947-48 civil war in Mandatory Palestine, the tactics of whom included bombings and assassinations. But where does the August 1 bombing of the Balzi Rossi restaurant in central Moscow – which killed at least five people and injured more than 20 – stand on the scale? Some would describe the attack as a legitimate military operation. The bomb targeted the lavish birthday celebrations of Colonel-General Aleksandr Chayko, commander-in-chief of Russia’s Aerospace Forces (whose son-in-law died in the blast).

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Monica Sobchak

The insanity of the Lindsay Clancy sympathizers

In 2023, Lindsay Clancy, a former labor-and-delivery nurse from Duxbury, Massachusetts, strangled her three children to death with exercise resistance bands in the basement of the family home. She then cut her wrists and neck and jumped from a second-story window, an act that left her paralyzed from the waist down. Her murder trial opened in Plymouth Superior Court in July and is expected to run for six to eight weeks.  Both sides agree Clancy killed five-year-old Cora, three-year-old Dawson and eight-month-old Callan. What is contested is whether she should be held responsible.

Alexander Larman

Goodbye, Harry and Meghan

A shade over three decades ago, Gary Barlow and Take That sang “Whatever I said, I didn’t mean it, I want you back for good.” “Back for Good” has traditionally been taken to be a song about someone wanting their loved one back after a breakup. However, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex clearly listened to it on whatever easy listening channel they tune into in Montecito and decided that this is not simply Gary Barlow’s lovelorn lament but the earnest desire of the British people to have them return to us. Therefore, Meghan and Harry have announced that they will be returning to Britain. Not for a visit of a few days, as has happened in recent weeks, or even for a more protracted period.

Wednesday

Alexander Larman

What happened to Will Self?

It is usually taken as a given, for better or worse, that the Grand Old Men of English letters tend to move, if not necessarily to the right, to an accommodation with conservatism and the status quo as they grow older. It is, after all, harder to rail against the establishment when you have been weighed down with CBEs, honorary doctorates and the adulation that comes from being a much-loved writer. However, nobody seems to have told this to the novelist, polemicist and one-time enfant terrible Will Self, and the results have been, depending on your perspective, either disappointing or bleakly amusing. Self has published an extraordinary 7,000-odd word open letter to Andy Burnham on his X account, as part of what he calls his “Sitreps.

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Corey DeAngelis

Inside Arizona’s battle for school choice

Arizona families won big this week. The teachers union and Save Our Schools fell short (again) in their latest attempt to roll back the universal Empowerment Scholarship Account program that helps more than 100,000 students there. The groups needed 255,949 valid signatures to place their Protect Education Act on the November ballot. They submitted 421,451, but after legal challenges and county reviews, so many proved invalid that the initiative appears to have fallen well short of the minimum number. School-choice opponents will continue to organize and spend Nearly 70,000 signatures were disqualified. The Arizona Free Enterprise Club noted that the initiative is projected to be more than 10,000 signatures short.

Steven Edginton

Will the BBC apologize for its role in the Jason Arday story?

The BBC’s coverage of the Jason Arday scandal is something of a scandal itself. The corporation spent years uncritically promoting the myth of Arday. Prior to July 2026, the broadcaster produced at least 11 radio programs (totaling nearly six hours of Arday content), four news articles and two TV interviews championing the academic and repeating his false claims. When the initial story broke about his plagiarism and lies, the BBC doubled down on its defense of the academic. The first article which I would say features real criticism of the former professor was published on August 6, a day after he resigned, more than two weeks after the original Arday exposé was published on Substack and six years after the BBC’s first hagiographic piece about the late academic.

Tuesday

Brendan O’Neill

The media didn’t kill Jason Arday

What sounds more like a mob to you? Reporters asking questions about a professor’s résumé and backstory? Or swarms of the perpetually offended damning those reporters as racists, fascists, scum, even murderers? It’s the latter, isn’t it? This is the bleak irony of the Jason Arday tragedy: his self-styled defenders decry the media mob while forging their own frothing mob. They accuse journalists of destroying a man’s life even as they hound those journalists, and libel them as “lynchers,” and demand that they face the kangaroo justice of a public shaming. Arday’s death was a 'modern-day lynching,’ say self-styled anti-racists The people with blood in their nostrils are not the newspapermen who only did their jobs and asked probing questions about a public figure.

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Monday

Patrick West

Jason Arday wasn’t the victim of a ‘racist witch hunt’

For decades, voices on the liberal and progressive left have invariably rolled out the terror-inducing accusation of “racism” in order to get their way and silence opponents. It’s thus unsurprising to see, in the wake of British academic Jason Arday’s death, that they're still resorting to this cynical tactic, and in this case, to absolve themselves of responsibility for having exploited this vulnerable man in the first place. To call it a ‘witch hunt’ is predictable and unfounded hyperbole In response to Arday’s death, Jo Grady, general secretary of Britain’s University and College Union, said the “level of harassment he suffered and the racism he was subjected to has been sickening.

luigi mangione political violence
Alex Bronzini-Vender

The end of the Luigi cult

Americans love their killers. Still, Luigi Mangione, who shot UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson dead in December 2024, may be the most beloved of them all. It took a special sort of fetishist to see something in maniacs like Ted Bundy or Jeffrey Dahmer, who killed for no reason other than their sadistic compulsions. Mangione, though? Nearly every American has been ground down by our country’s healthcare system. Mangione’s defenders rarely dispute that he gunned down Brian Thompson, the CEO of UnitedHealthcare Police had prepared for a mob last Friday, as Mangione appeared in a Manhattan courthouse to plead guilty to federal stalking charges. But by midmorning, the officers outnumbered everyone they’d been sent to contain. The cult of Luigi had not come.

Sunday

Brendan O’Neill

Jason Arday’s death is dreadful – and enraging

Behold the human wreckage of the cult of diversity. The tragedy of Jason Arday is that he was both built up and destroyed by the ruthless machinery of DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion). The academy made him into the golden boy of its philistine project of “decolonization” and gave not one thought to what the consequences might be if his thin story unraveled, as it inevitably would. No one can deny it now: wokeness makes false gods and real tragedies. Journalists found a story and they told it. It was the academy and Arday’s colleagues who failed to do their jobs The death of Arday is not only dreadful – it is enraging. It feels like a catastrophe foretold.

Saturday

Melanie McDonagh

The tragedy of Jason Arday

Simon Baron-Cohen, the distinguished Cambridge autism specialist, has been speaking movingly about his friend, Jason Arday, in a BBC radio interview. Baron-Cohen said the last contact he had with Arday was hours before he was found dead at an address in south London yesterday afternoon: “He really wasn't coping. He was being subjected to relentless scrutiny... ridicule, discrediting every detail of his life... He wasn't coping with the loss of his career, the loss of his reputation. He felt he couldn't go on.” Jason Arday was a victim, but not in the way that his political champions suggest Baron-Cohen went on to talk about him as “an incredibly kind and gentle and caring and generous man”.

Friday

Nigel Biggar

Who decides if a word is racist?

I swear Rod Liddle was smiling down on me last week, as I found myself tussling with an editor. I’d written a sentence containing the word “Chinamen.” She wanted me to remove it, because, she said, “Chinaman” is widely acknowledged to be a racial slur. In my view, words have no single intrinsic meaning. Within limits, they can mean a variety of things, differing according to context – not least the tone of voice in which they’re delivered. Even “Yes” can mean “No,” when said by an Englishman trained in the subtle art of oblique speech.

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Thursday

Rory Sutherland

Throw away your keyboard

The older and more plutocratic among you may remember the unlamented business-class airline seat of the 1980s and 1990s. Every few years, major airlines would proudly announce the wondrous extra legroom available in their long-haul business class and the increase in the recline angle of the seat. And each time the experience got worse. You see, the person sitting in front of you now invaded ever more of your airspace when they reclined their own seat. You then had no choice but to follow suit to regain the lost territory. The resulting Nash equilibrium meant everyone on board was forced to spend the entire journey leaning backwards at 45°. Getting to the lavatory required playing an involuntary game of Twister with the person sitting by the aisle.

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Lara Brown

Class clowns: the triumph of inanity over British academia

Daniel Defoe observed that plague victims “never perceiv’d that they were infected” until they discovered the “tokens” on their skin. By that point, “nothing could follow but certain Death”. Something similar might be said of Britain’s universities. In recent days, the Jason Arday affair has captured the world’s attention because of its absurdity. But the humiliation of Cambridge is not an early sign of infection. It is just a particularly visible bubo. At one level, Arday’s fall reveals how, even in the most elite universities, DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) dogma has warped intellectual standards to the point of madness.

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Douglas Murray

The mawkish madness of Dobby’s ‘grave’

I don’t know how many readers have visited the grave of Dobby the house-elf, but any who have should immediately be sectioned and have their subscriptions to The Spectator canceled. This strong course of action occurs to me after reading one of those stories that can make you laugh, cry and smack your head into your hands all at once. It relates to a “memorial” which apparently sits on Freshwater West beach in Pembrokeshire, Wales. The area is run by the National Trust – a charity which used to look after the UK’s heritage sites. The beach in question was where filming took place for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.

Tanika D’Souza

AOC and the dishonest business of egg freezing

"All of these men often times who are saying, ‘oh if you haven't had a kid by 30 like you're done,' it's just not supported," said Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, in a video uploaded to her Instagram Story on Sunday night. The 36-year-old congresswoman has announced to her audience of 9.6 million followers that she, like a growing number of American women, has decided to freeze her eggs. She continued, "Don't trust the people writing abortion laws, that don't even understand the first thing about a woman's body, to tell you about how many eggs you have at what age.

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