Society

Friday

Flora Watkins

Tequila slammers all around!

“Tequila, it makes me happy, / Con Tequila it feels fine” goes the student anthem by Terrorvision. It is midnight, somewhere around the turn of the new millennium, and we are on the sticky dancefloor of a grotty union bar in Edinburgh, but it could be Bristol, Cambridge or Newcastle. You get the picture. The song is greeted by whoops and an influx of revelers throwing drunken shapes. Meanwhile, some bastard in your friendship group who’s feeling flush is already elbowing his way to the bar to spank part of the student loan that’s just hit his account on a bottle of José Cuervo tequila, shot glasses, lemons and salt. Slammers all round! Bleurrggghhhhh.

tequila
Mary Killen

Dear Mary: how do I stop friends buying me pet-themed presents?

Q. I have been working in a large restaurant alongside a very attractive, although shy, girl. I live near the restaurant and she has come back for drinks on a few occasions. She seems to enjoy my company but I have been too feeble to take things further. I fear that if she does not find me attractive, by making a move I could ruin our friendship. What should I do? – Name withheld, London W6 A. Step one: buy a Feverscan forehead thermometer. This liquid crystal strip is held on to one person’s forehead by another, thus requiring a degree of physical intimacy. Step two: ask the girl to your flat along with another colleague. When they arrive, act slow-witted and explain you are feeling odd.

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Rory Sutherland

Variety is the spice of evolutionary life

I would have enjoyed mathematics more at school if I’d known what the real value was. The benefit of studying math isn’t numeracy at all: it’s creativity – a kind of benign neurodiversity. A new set of eyes through which to see the world, and the priceless lesson that the best way to solve a problem is to redefine it. Many of the most interesting people I’ve met have been mathematicians. Nassim Taleb taught me a whole new way to look at statistical variance. And, in a chance meeting with Stephen Wolfram, I heard something which at first surprised me, but which has needled me ever since.

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Richard Koenig

Exploring Bologna from above

Matteo Giovanardi was navigating a midlife crisis amid a failed marriage and needing shelter when he moved into a medieval tower in the northern Italian city of Bologna. Rising over a small piazza, the tower topped out at 60 meters, its floors dirtied by pigeon droppings, its walls blackened with the soot of ages. Seven years passed before Giovanardi moved out. For he had found in this tower – the Torre Prendiparte – not only shelter but a salutary mission. “I needed to rinse away the pain, to imagine the rest of my life,” he tells me when I visit. “It is not only bricks. Prendiparte is a magical place.” It was early in the 1990s when Giovanardi took up residence in the tower.

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Melissa Kite

Once we Brexiteers get our Irish passports, we can go anywhere

“There’s a flat rat under the mat!” I shrieked, and wondered whether that was the sort of jaunty phrase that could be used for elocution lessons. I had lifted this mat by the main staircase to hoover the floor beneath it and there it was, a perfectly flat rat in the shape of a cartoon dead beast beneath this mat. I began laughing uncontrollably, because if you’ve ever seen a flat rat under a mat you will know that it is intrinsically funny, whatever your views on rats. You will laugh even if you don’t like rodents, or indeed if you like them way too much. Even if you are a member of the Rat Preservation Society, when you see one flattened paper-thin, stuck to your floorboards, I challenge you not to burst out laughing, while jumping up and down.

Lloyd Evans

My new job at the Amazon packing factory

What will you do if it all goes wrong? I have a back-up plan: working for Amazon. Its Luton warehouse offers tours to the public, and I went along to see what my future may hold. The vast hangar sits in a field of mega-sheds near the M25, where built-up London peters out into scrub and green farmland. I arrived at a bright-yellow security gate where I was greeted by Amin and Sophie, who seemed thrilled to welcome our party. Six in all. Sophie asked us – or perhaps ordered us – to deposit our phones in a locker whose key she retained during our visit. Amin explained the rules. Follow me. Walk within the blue lines. Ascend staircases on the left. Use the handrail. Off we went.

Mark Galeotti

What Tommy Robinson really sees in Russia

Everyone who is everyone – within a certain political and social fragment – has been in Russia this past week. Conservative American conspiracy theorist Candace Owens; Errol Musk, father of Elon; toxic “manosphere” influencers Andrew and Tristan Tate; and Tommy Robinson, the far-right activist. Robinson told the Guardian that he had traveled to Moscow “to see how this country got itself so well on to the straight and narrow and see the beauty of a civilized society here.” In the process, he was walking a well-trodden path of westerners heading to Russia to see exactly what they want to see. Once it was socialists like Sidney and Beatrice Webb, who found Stalin’s regime “the very opposite of a dictatorship.

Patrick Smith

Why I take frog poison

You picture the rainforest, naturally. A clearing at first light, a shaman with thousand-yard eyes, the canopy screeching overhead. What you do not picture is a fourth-floor flat on an east London estate, a woman wafting sage around your head and the slow realization that you have just handed over £150 to be – quite literally – poisoned. This is kambo. And at the lowest ebb of my late thirties, becalmed in a miasma of self-loathing and suffering from PTSD following a moped accident in Thailand, I had decided it was precisely what I needed. Made from the dried skin secretions of a giant monkey frog, it is also, as of last month, suspected of having killed its first Briton.

gospel
Mary Wakefield

Save us from the Gospel according to Grok

The Rt. Revd. Martyn Snow, the handsome and up-to-date Bishop of Leicester, has decided that it’s OK, even admirable, for clergy to use AI to write their sermons. Bishop Snow was on the radio the other day, proud to share with listeners that in his diocese, they’ve even had an AI expert come to give pointers to the priests. No more painful head-scratching on a Saturday afternoon for the lucky clerics of Leicester. ChatGPT will sort it. Just plug in a Bible verse and a few well-crafted prompts, and you’re off to the cricket, or to Pride, whichever way you swing. It’s one of those many times I wish Michael Wharton was still alive and writing.

Daniel McCarthy

The ‘great man’ era is passing away

Not long ago, I participated in one of the many off-the-record discussions in Washington about ending the war in Ukraine. This conversation was quite detailed, with American academics and policy wonks asking a European who was especially well-informed on Russian matters just what a land-for-peace deal or security guarantees acceptable to all parties might look like. When my turn to speak came around, however, I had to wonder whether all this wasn’t moot. There just isn’t much time to reach an agreement – let alone implement one –before the end of Donald Trump’s second term. And when America elects its next president in November 2028, Vladimir Putin will be 75 years old.

Thursday

Gage Klipper

Is it OK to be a horse guy?

Is it gay to be a horse guy? According to my parents, the answer, hilariously, is “yes.” I never grew up riding in a very professional or competitive manner because, as I recently learned as an adult, my parents thought it was just too gay. Everyone knows the stereotype of a horse girl. My parents certainly did, after raising two girls in the horse-show world. Linked to social privilege, emotional intensity and a bit of naivety, the horse girl eventually shifts the obsession with her horse into her boyfriend and becomes the caricature of a high-maintenance clinger. I can see why my parents wanted to avoid that type of socialization for their only son. But the stereotype isn’t all true (my sisters turned out normal.

Bill Kauffman

How Jeff Taylor came back from the dead

I’ve long regarded Iowa’s Jeff Taylor as one of the most interesting politicians in America – and that was before I knew that he had once died and come back to life. Jeff, 65, is a political science professor at Dordt University and a two-term state senator from a rural district in northwest Iowa. He’s written books on Bob Dylan, William Jennings Bryan, the decentralist tradition in American politics and other worthy American subjects that are of no demonstrable interest to, say, Marco Rubio or Hakeem Jeffries. He is thoughtful, mild-mannered, affably learned and willing to make radical breaks with the corporate stooges of the Republican establishment. And now he has written a book about the day he died. The driver turned off the siren and slowed down.

Rod Dreher

Budapest is nice but it’s no Birmingham, Alabama

I am shocked by how serene I am since moving back to America – to Birmingham, Alabama – from Budapest. Everything I love about life in general is in Europe. But to my surprise and regret, it’s not home. I don’t know why I was wrapped so tight by anxiety in Budapest, but I was. I had a great life there, no complaints – except for no church community, which wasn’t Budapest’s fault, just a matter of my inability in local languages. Being back in the US, in a place where I have access to an Orthodox church in my own language – well, I can literally feel the anxiety uncoiling within me. I can’t explain it, but I’m not going to think about it, just be grateful. I went to church yesterday at St. Symeon, the Orthodox Church in America parish in town.

Douglas Murray

Britain imported a problem it refuses to name

I get the sense that the political and media class badly miss Katie Hopkins. Back when the reality TV star was still a regular on Britain's screens and in our newspapers, she could be relied upon to be the focus of attention whenever the people in charge didn’t want the public’s attention to be focused where it ought to be. So when a British soldier was decapitated on the streets of London, or a suicide bomber went off at a pop concert packed with teenage girls, Ms. Hopkins could be found saying something that a lot of people were thinking – only in a more colorful or unwise way.

Wednesday

Damian Reilly

UFC Freedom 250 is straight from the ‘bread-and-circuses’ playbook

What can we expect from this weekend’s UFC event on the White House lawn? There is a more than good chance that this occasion, staged to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the signing of the US Declaration of Independence, will climax with American headliner Justin Gaethje being knocked out all too quickly by the terrifying Georgian short-ass Ilia Topuria. Like everything to do with the UFC, the prospect is ludicrously exciting. If you are a sports fan – indeed, if you are merely interested in the colorful business of being alive – and you don’t follow the Ultimate Fighting Championship, you are missing out. With its incredible cast of outsized characters and mesmerizing subplots, it is ceaselessly and wonderfully entertaining.

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ticket
Sam McPhail

FIFA aren’t the only ones to blame for rip-off World Cup ticket prices

The FIFA World Cup starts tomorrow, and soccer fans and news outlets are complaining that tickets are far too expensive. The England Supporters Travel Club says that following England all the way to the final would cost supporters more than $7,000 in tickets alone. Prices have more than doubled since the last World Cup and the cheapest standard ticket for the final is $4,185. But how much of this is down to FIFA’s greed? This year's World Cup is jointly hosted by the United States, Canada and Mexico across 16 cities. The United States is holding 78 of the matches, while Canada and Mexico have 13 each. When bidding for the tournament, the host nations used existing events as pricing benchmarks: boxing matches, hockey tournaments and the Super Bowl.

belfast cultures
Brendan O’Neill

Belfast and the truth about ‘alien cultures’

How would you describe a culture where women are flogged in public for "inappropriate dress?" A culture where one woman suffered 40 lashes from a leather whip for the crime of wearing trousers and a T-shirt? A culture where a man who lies with a man risks being whipped a hundred times before being put in a dank cell for five years? A culture where apostasy is considered such an abominable sin that even a heavily pregnant woman could be sentenced to death for supposedly committing it? The good people of Belfast are well within their rights to ask whether men from such a culture should be living on their streets Personally, I would call such a culture "alien.

Monday

Sam Leith

Who really owns your iPhone?

Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime. Rent the man a spot on the river, and make him tick a box on a multi-thousand-word end-user license agreement meaning that any fish he catches, ultimately, still belongs to you, and you stand to get very, very rich indeed. We live in an age where stuff we think we own is, really, stuff to which we subscribe This is the business model that now dominates the digital age.

greenland denmark centrism
Mark Brolin

Denmark and the myth of centrism’s reinvention

The European center’s favorite trick, when losing voters, is to explain that democracy is under grave threat and that power must therefore remain inside the circle of “sensible” centrists who know why voters are wrong. Starmer embodies the British variant of centrism: despite promises of real change, only managerial declinism has emerged Denmark has now provided the latest demonstration. Almost ten weeks after the election, Mette Frederiksen has secured another government. Her Social Democrats suffered their worst result since 1903, falling to 38 seats in a parliament of 179.

Saturday

Matthew Fraser

What will become of Paris’s ugliest building?

Parisians were recently treated to the impromptu spectacle of a shirtless 26-year-old man scaling bare-handed the 59-story Montparnasse office tower. For many in the French capital, news reports of the vertiginous feat were another reminder – if they needed one – of how much they loathed the chocolate-brown skyscraper looming incongruously over the burnished boulevards of the Left Bank. The spiderman exploit was not witnessed by anyone inside the 210-meter skyscraper. The Montparnasse tower was empty. The city’s most unloved building has been vacant since March. More than a half-century after its inauguration, it’s awaiting a long-overdue facelift. The wait may be long. The Montparnasse is despised by Parisians as an eyesore, but it has also failed functionally.

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