Society

Friday

October 2, 2026

Why does everybody now have a playbook?

Playbooks are proliferating. In the past few weeks I’ve come across the counter-hybrid playbook, the wartime playbook, the Coldplay playbook, the preppy-meets-sporty playbook, Hitler’s playbook and the nepo-baby playbook. I used to think that the rather thumbed metaphor of playbook referred to a book of words containing the script or libretto. After all, book of words or book of the words has often been used figuratively to mean “the rules.” In Money in the Bank (1942), P.G. Wodehouse has Dolly Molloy exclaim: “There’s nothing in the book of the words to prevent Mrs. Cork having the bozo pinched and stowed away in the cooler.” In the medieval theater the literal playbook was looked after by the garnement man, the props man.

Mary Killen

Dear Mary: Help! My roommate won’t let me watch Harry Potter

Q. I am a lifelong fan of J.K. Rowling’s work. I have read and watched everything she’s written and am so looking forward to December when the new Harry Potter TV series drops. My problem is that I’ve moved into a flat with a close friend who disagrees strongly with J.K.’s views on gender and has pleaded with me to commit to not watching the new series on ethical grounds. I can neither lie to my flatmate nor bear to forfeit something that will bring me so much happiness that it would be no exaggeration to say it will give me a reason to live. – P.R., Edinburgh A. You can resolve this by taking a tip from guilty Greens, who buy carbon credits from bodies such as the nonprofit Atmosfair to offset the eco damage of flights they have taken.

Will Collins

Searching for nationhood in Slovakia

It is difficult to discern a unifying cultural theme in Trenčín, a midsized Slovakian town with an imposing castle, a charming Habsburg square and a surplus of specialty coffee shops. This is a common feeling in many central and Eastern European cities, which have played host to various religions, ethnicities and foreign occupiers over the centuries. It is especially true of Slovakia, a country that has only existed since 1993 and lacks the historical pedigree of its Hungarian, Polish and Czech neighbours. Trenčín (pronounced Tren-cheen) is experiencing a sudden influx of visitors because it was named one of two European Capitals of Culture this year. The other, Oulu, is somewhere in Finland. There is no mystery to the Finns.

Catriona Olding

Looking on the bright side of life with Eric Idle

Provence “Would you like to meet Eric Idle? Don’t worry, he and his wife Tania are smashing.” This was 2009. I was visiting my old art teacher from school, Frank Docherty, and his wife, Chrissie, in the village of Montfort-sur-Argens. Eric had a house nearby, they said. They’d got to know one another a few years before when Eric had begun buying Frank’s surrealist paintings. I was too wee for early Python but as a teenager knew every line of The Life of Brian. And all the voices. I apologize now to anyone who was on late-night double-decker buses from Paisley to Glasgow in 1982.

Lloyd Evans

London’s one unforgivable crime

Everyone knows the rules. London invented trains that run underground as well as the protocol that makes the system bearable. A London Tube passenger enjoys the same prerogatives as an evil tyrant in a fairy tale. Do not stare. Do not approach. Do not distract him in any way. Respect the cocoon of solitude that protects him from the surrounding hubbub. But this simple covenant is not universally observed. Since I moved to London in 1973, I have twice been bothered by chatterboxes on the Tube. Twice, yes. It may sound like a minor annoyance to an outsider but residents of London will recognize the agony I have suffered. A Tube passenger enjoys the same prerogatives as a tyrant in a fairy tale. Do not stare.

Esther Walker

I’ll do anything to keep Zack Polanski out of Parliament

On the morning of the 2005 general election, the young man who sat opposite me at work asked, “How did you vote?” “That’s none of your business,” I replied, in a silly, prim voice. A cruel look passed across his face. “You voted Tory, didn’t you?” he crowed. “That’s why you won’t say!” He started to point at me. “Tory voter! TORY SCUM!” I was appalled. It was my first experience of tribal politics and I didn’t like it. I can’t remember what I said in reply, but I certainly didn’t reveal how I’d voted. If I had voted for Michael Howard’s Conservative party, I would have been too ashamed to admit it and if I had voted Labour, I wouldn’t have wanted to admit that, either – not if it meant I was now a kindred spirit to this maniac.

Owen Matthews

What if AI is actually good at writing novels?

The spectacular fall from grace of Haitian-Canadian writer Thélyson Orélien in many ways resembles our own culture war over Jason Arday. The celebrated author, feted in TV studios and in the literary salons of Québec and Paris’s Saint-Germain-des-Prés for his hard-hitting descriptions of the migrant experience, was accused on X both of serial plagiarism and of using artificial intelligence to write his latest novel. His accusers decried the soft bigotry of low expectations that caused the woke intelligentsia to turn a blind eye to mediocrity because their hero was a capital-B Black man.

James Dixon

The strange world of professional mourners

MournMate is a new online market-place that promises to connect bereaved families and funeral homes with professional mourners in the US. It was advertising for its first “500 Founding Members” when I looked and, curious to know what it was all about, I signed up. The qualifications and requirements were surprisingly broad – the site was looking for actors, musicians, public speakers, eulogy writers and anyone with experience of religious or cultural ceremonies. The advertised rate was $25 to $300 an hour, with an extra 50 percent for emergency bookings. Grief, it seems, has joined the gig economy.

Josie Cox

Meet Parker the bodega cat, the feline Bryan Johnson

You’ve probably heard of Bryan Johnson, the questionably rational entrepreneur and venture capitalist famous for his “don’t die” philosophy and for peddling anti-aging techniques that range from the psychedelic to the vampiric. Johnson, who’s 49 and bears more than a passing likeness to Data from Star Trek: The Next Generation (if Data was into Korean facial treatments), recently made headlines for using the duration and hardness of his nighttime erections as gauges of biological health. If you’re an internet rabbit-hole kind of person, then – good lord! – Johnson is the gift that keeps on giving. That’s all well and good, but have you heard of Parker the bodega cat? The reason I ask is that I thought of Johnson recently when I encountered said beast.

Gary Dexter

Pilates is pseudoscience

Pilates has long been mocked as the regimen of middle-aged Manhattan neurotics. Samantha from Sex and the City was an adherent and today social media is awash with so-called “Pilates princesses.” Stefon Diggs, the 6ft, 191lb Washington Commanders wide receiver, has been filmed stretching on – and falling from – a reformer Pilates machine. Since 2020, online searches for Pilates have grown fourfold. But the success of Pilates is comparatively recent. By the time of his death in New York City in 1967, Joseph Pilates’s method was not particularly well-known and, according to friends, he felt bitter about it. Science, he thought, had not recognized his contribution to physical wellness. In his latter years he drank rather too much and chain-smoked cigars.

Steven Edginton

Invented claims of lynchings and racist violence are irresponsible — and dangerous

“Cases of Black people found hanged in the US South are a reminder of nation’s lynching history,” read an ABC News headline last month. That phrase – “lynching” – has been used again and again in reporting on the death of a woman in Mississippi. The Associated Press used the word, as did the British state broadcaster the BBC, the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post. You may think, with such a loaded phrase, that the suspects are members of the KKK. In fact, all three are black men, charged with the murder of Tasia Fortune, a 29-year-old woman found dead on August 3 in Jackson. Fortune’s own mother has said that she doesn’t believe the killing was motivated by race. You would hardly know it from the media’s coverage.

Mary Kate Rogers

A Gator for a weekend

I’ve never cared about a football team larger than my high school’s. Even when my cousin walked out with the Alabama Crimson Tide a decade ago, the Southeastern Conference meant nothing to me. I saw photos of his championship ring on Instagram, shiny as a bride. Then I married a University of Texas graduate. My husband anticipated the Longhorns’ long-awaited entry into the SEC at least as much as our wedding. My family became Longhorn-in-laws, dutifully asking after Quinn Ewers at the holidays as though he were our son. “He’s lost weight,” I would say, echoing the television announcers I overheard from the kitchen, “And he’s going to church!

Piers Morgan

The truth about Princess Diana’s brother

“Mr. Morgan,” said the faux-regal voice at the end of the line, “this is Earl Spencer. I’ve got you now, you bastard.” Suffice it to say, this call didn’t happen last week after the alleged “historian” was forced to publicly apologize for publishing a lie about me in his new book. (He accused me of being Mirror editor in 1993 when it published gym photos of Princess Diana in a notorious invasion of her privacy that cost £1 million in damages – but I didn’t join the Mirror until 1995.) However, the irony of what that call was about isn’t lost on me, 31 years later.

Rupert Hawksley

From Playboy pin-up to prohibitionist: the man taking on British gambling

The August 2004 cover of Playboy features a topless Eva Herzigova (“The supermodel is supernaked”) and promises a piece about “America’s 10 sexiest bartenders.” If that isn’t enough to excite you, another article is puffed, no less conspicuously: “Weird new casino games (and the men who invent them).” Turn to page 73 and a bald, bespectacled man, with “prominent ears on a frank, slightly frowning face,” stares out at you. This, we learn, is the “Bill Gates of card game inventors” and his name is Derek Webb. The Englishman made his money at the poker tables in Derby: “I could play three times a week with a £50 buy-in and make £8,000 a night.” From 1979 to 1994, Webb split his time between the East Midlands and Las Vegas.

Thursday

October 1, 2026

Monica Sobchak

Cornell brings back #MeToo

#MeToo is back – thanks, largely, to Cornell University. A former student, identified only as Jane Doe, alleged in a civil suit last month that seven members of the Chi Phi fraternity drugged and gang-raped her in October 2024. Most of the subsequent social media outrage blurs a few distinctions. Prosecutors looked at her initial 2024 police statement and decided not to file charges. Cornell ran its own Title IX process. The county DA says the new civil lawsuit is “dramatically different” from what she told police at the time – as her original statement suggested she consented, and that when she raised concerns, the men stopped.

Patrick West

Forget Piddington, here are the real micronations

While last month’s majority vote by the inhabitants of Piddington in Oxfordshire to seek independence from Britain was a stunt – albeit one making a serious point about plans to house more than 1,000 asylum seekers in an army base near the village – further afield, there are more concerted attempts to establish real micronations. Prominent among these is the self-proclaimed autonomous territory of Liberland, which lies on a stretch of land on the Danube separating Croatia and Serbia. Unlike microstates, such as Monaco or the Vatican City, which are recognized internationally, micronations aren’t. Perhaps the best-known of its type today is the majority Russian-speaking rogue nation of Transnistria, a sliver of land which broke away from Moldova in 1991.

Rory Sutherland

How the triple lock became political kryptonite

It was early December 1973 and I remember my grandmother asking, “What would you most like for Christmas?” I knew in an instant: “One day, perhaps, it would be good if the weekly rates of my basic state pension were to increase by the greatest of three candidate measures, namely (a) the year-on-year growth in the average weekly earnings index; (b) the year-on-year change in the consumer prices index for the month of September; or (c) a fixed nominal floor of 2.5 percent – with the determination being a simple maximum function rather than an average, and the resulting uplift taking effect from the first Monday of the following tax year in April. Or, failing that, an Etch A Sketch.

Melanie McDonagh

Christa Pike should be allowed to live

Coincidentally with the sad passing of Esther Rantzen, who spent her last couple of years campaigning for assisted suicide in the UK, there’s just been an interesting case of an assisted dying going wrong. The state of Tennessee kills prisoners sentenced to death by means of an injection of pentobarbital, the same substance used by the Dignitas clinic in Switzerland (only not usually by injection) where Dame Esther had considered going after she was diagnosed with stage four lung cancer. Pike has been executed once; that, even supporters of the death penalty must agree, is enough Unfortunately, or fortunately, depending on your point of view, a prisoner sentenced to death, Christa Pike, survived a double injection of pentobarbital and is now in hospital being resuscitated.

Charles Moore

How long has Ranulph Fiennes been under some sort of control?

It is repeatedly pointed out – I have probably written it myself – that the triple lock on the state pension is ruinous. There is a genuine difficulty, though, political and moral, about getting rid of it. No one likes to lose a benefit they already possess. The abolition will annoy 99 percent of its recipients, of whom there are 13.2 million. Besides, we pensioners have retained a traditional skill almost entirely lost to younger generations, called voting. We know how to go to a polling station and put a cross on a ballot paper. We therefore have the power to slay any party we think is making us poorer. The Tories invented the triple lock.

David McCloskey

What the CIA and MI6 really talk about

The Special Relationship has seen more special days. Earlier this year, President Trump delivered his verdict: “How is the relationship? It’s the relationship where, when we asked them for help, they were not there. When we needed them, they were not there. When we didn’t need them, they were not there. And they still aren’t there.” Trump was referring to divisions between the US and UK over the wisdom and conduct of the war in Iran. (Even amid a spat, though, he can dish out praise. Just this week, following the arrest of five men outside RAF Fairford, used by American bombers to strike Iran, the President said the UK authorities had done an “amazing job.”) But his remarks landed at a moment of divergence in the US-UK relationship that extends well beyond Iran.