Society Archives

Wednesday

August 12, 2026

Let cyclists pee in public

Demi Vollering, Juliette Berthet and Célia Gery are phenomenal athletes. They are all in the FDJ United-SUEZ cycling team and all competed in the Tour de France Femmes. Vollering even won it. So you would think they would be inspirational for millions of people worldwide, and especially millions of young girls who now know that they too can be badass cyclists one day. UCI just throws out so many fines for urine infractions – to men and women Except that four days ago, Vollering, Berthet and Gery were fined CHF100 (about $120) by the UCI (International Cycling Union), the world governing body for cycle racing. What had they done? Dastardly pro cycling tactics?

Monday

August 10, 2026

Peter Wood

Jason Arday and the Dukes and Dauphins of DEI

The Music Man, The Sting, Catch Me If You Can: movies and theater have a rich tradition of stories about imposters who manage to fool a lot of people. The literary branch includes the Duke and the Dauphin in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and Herman Melville’s riverboat epic, The Confidence-Man. Indeed, tricksters are found almost everywhere stories are told. Native Americans have their tales of Coyote. Ananse, the spider, a key figure in West African and African-American folklore. We admire the cleverness of such cozeners, at least in fiction. Their victims often get what they deserve. The DEI agenda, as long as it prevails, will ensure a long line of Jason Arday fabulists And this may be the case with Jason Arday too.

Jason Arday at Cambridge (Credit: YouTube)

The $20 burrito has become an unlikely point of contention in Republican politics

Margaret Mitchell

Americans deserve burrito abundance

It’s a tough time to be in the business of burrito-making. The price of beef is on the rise. A farm supplying Taco Bell’s shredded lettuce was linked to the spread of cyclospora – a parasite whose laxative effects have been, for at least two people in Michigan, fatal. The latest salmonella outbreak, traced to jalapeños from Mexico, has driven Chipotle and Qdoba to announce recalls. And now, a $20 burrito has become a symbol of GOP infighting. It’s tainted, through and through. The argument began when Andrew Kolvet, a spokesman for Turning Point USA, wrote on X: “One of our TPUSA college students gave me his take on affordability: ‘A burrito shouldn’t cost $20.

Fraser Nelson

‘I asked for a substitute for the f-word. He suggested the c-word’: the joy of editing Rod

It was in Westminster Magistrates’ Court, where I was sitting waiting for the judge’s verdict, that I decided I needed a better way of handling Rod Liddle’s column. As editor of this magazine, I had inherited one of its greatest writers; a force of nature loved by his readers for his bravery and candor. But it sometimes led to difficulties: in this case, criminal prosecution. The judge had a choice: prosecute our owners, the editor, or the magazine. The magazine was fined. “Rod was right,” I was told by Aidan Barclay, who as proprietor had nearly ended up in the dock himself. “But truth is no defense. Not any more. You need to spot these things before they blow up.

Sunday

August 9, 2026

John Power

Fact check: the many claims of Jason Arday

Jason Arday has resigned from his post at the University of Cambridge, but as the story rumbles on and new revelations about him emerge by the hour, The Spectator thought it would be useful to create a comprehensive reference guide of all the outlandish claims made by our modern-day Walter Mitty. Arday claimed that he went to both South America and West Africa to install water points Athletic prowess Arday claimed that he once ran 600 miles between Edinburgh and London in six days for charity, an accomplishment which would put him in the upper tier of world ultra marathon runners. He also claimed that he ran run 30 marathons in 35 days. On the 21st marathon he suffered from an epileptic fit and fractured his leg after falling down.

Michael Gove

To be a Spectator reader was to love Rod

Since becoming Spectator editor there was one observation I heard more often from readers than any other: “Rod is the first page I turn to every week.” Whatever people’s politics, background or other interests, to be a Spectator reader was to love Rod. Rod did his best, of course, to be unlovable. At least in print. Nothing, and no one, apart from possibly Millwall, was spared from his criticism. Savage, foul-mouthed, merciless. But also hilarious, superbly well-informed and honest. Above all honest. There are all sorts of enlightened souls in and around journalism who pretend to that virtue.

Ben Clerkin

Meeting Abdul El-Sayed at the Detroit farmers market

The farmers market in Detroit is an unlikely crucible. Certainly Abdul El-Sayed, the freshly (and narrowly) minted Democratic Senate candidate for Michigan, was not expecting it to be one when he went glad-handing in Eastern Market in the hours before the polls closed. But it was clear that the buyers and sellers of fresh fruit and vegetables that he encountered had quietly put him and his policies on the scales and found them both to be a little lightweight. Not that they’d be rude enough to say so to his face. Of course, El-Sayed would go on to win the primary. But his predicted margin of victory – up to 20 points – evaporated as the night turned into a scrappy contest with his rival Haley Stevens, who represented the more mainstream wing of the party.

Anastasia Brown

Inside Pete Hegseth’s church

The second-floor meeting room on Pennsylvania Avenue is unassuming, but it’s filling up fast when I walk in on Sunday morning. Young mothers in long floral dresses are assembling toddlers on the rows of seats, men (in suits and ties) chat near the doorway, coffee cups in hand. I am sitting next to a couple of other reporters, who take notes throughout the service. The focus has never been on the church itself, but on Capitol Hill The Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches worships using the traditional Presbyterian liturgy: the Lord’s Prayer, hymns accompanied by piano and a scripture reading.

Saturday

August 8, 2026

Kemi Badenoch

I didn’t want to like Rod Liddle

One of the joys of being director of digital at The Spectator, back in 2015, was seeing the magazine proofs before they went to print. Rod Liddle’s column was the first thing I looked for, always the one I was most eager to read. He made me laugh every single time, something very few columnists are able to do. I was annoyed I liked those columns, because I didn’t want to like Rod Liddle. All I knew of his personal life was through the scandal that followed him leaving his wife during the so-called “Sextator” years. I took a dim view of that. Although we both worked for The Spectator, I didn’t actually meet Rod for a long time because, woke snowflake that he was, he only ever worked from home. The first time we met was at a Spectator summer party, years later.

Catriona Olding

Tears and terror on the front line of the French wildfires

Provence As soon as I opened my front door I could smell it. Along the path, flakes of white ash landed on my arms. Looking north beyond the cliff, I saw a rapidly increasing plume of brown-black smoke. Before long it filled a third of the sky. Not again. Ten years ago, almost to the day, the concrete shack I was renting in the woods a few miles from the village was almost engulfed. Jeremy was having a break and staying with me when a wildfire broke out in the valley below. The smoke and flames looked about a quarter of a mile away and firefighting Canadairs flew low overhead. Friends told us to leave but I refused. I’d left everything behind in Scotland 18 months before and couldn’t face doing so again. Jeremy asked if he’d have to knock me out and throw me over his shoulder.

Ella Veakins

There’s no excuse for a plastic plant

Monstera deliciosa, otherwise known as the Swiss cheese plant, is perhaps the most popular houseplant of them all, probably because it’s so easy to care for. In normal circumstances, you almost have to try to mess it up. A heatwave, however, can put a monstera under stress. Subject one to warm weather for too long and you’ll find its poor leaves scorched, its roots damaged and its stems desperately dehydrated. For this reason, you might feel the temptation to turn to a shockingly popular alternative: the plastic plant. It should be resisted at all costs. A potted history takes us back to the 1950s, when a postwar manufacturing boom saw the mass production of cheap polyvinyl chloride and polyethylene.

Friday

August 7, 2026

Chilton Williamson, Jr.

Sports are just a distraction from death

Pascal attributed royalty’s employment of court jesters to the king’s desire to forget or ignore, for however brief a moment, the fact of his own mortality. Carl Trueman, in The Desecration of Man, suggests that today’s star athletes and entertainers owe their remuneration, exceeding by many times the annual salary of the US president, to the major role they play in helping postmodern and post-Christian people to do the same.

Gage Klipper

Steeplechase is a profoundly English sport

I spent years living in the UK buying and selling horses, but I didn’t know a thing about steeplechase until I moved to Maryland. Despite technically originating in 18th-century Ireland, the equestrian sport of steeplechase feels about as English as it gets. Riders race on thoroughbreds, barreling over tree-like jumps called timbers on long and wild tracks. Steeplechase combines every elite aspect of the horse world: racing, jumping, the rugged outdoorsmanship of foxhunting and the proud formality of English jockey silks. And with a season running through early spring and fall, the crowd of spectators is typically encased in tweed. Maryland, a state founded as a Catholic refuge, exists now as an inheritor of the English aristocracy – at least when it comes to the country life.

Josie Cox

The meaning of the lemonade stand

It’s a big week in my household. My London-born, New York City-raised eight-year-old is taking an initial tentative step into the glorious, promise-filled world of American capitalism: she’s setting up her first lemonade stand. If you’re not American, or you haven’t spent much time here, you may be wondering why I’m announcing this with the fanfare of an Ivy League acceptance letter. And sure, perhaps it’s evidence that I’m slowly morphing into the Type A Manhattan parent I so like to mock. But also: the lemonade stand occupies a somewhat mythical space in American culture. As well as a way for children to earn a few dollars during the summer holidays, it’s a rite of passage.

Tom Slater

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.