Society

Scattered along the streets of Washington DC are electric scooters. Most have four-letter names: Bird, Lime, Skip, Jump, Bolt. Using one for the first time, you may prefer to employ another four-letter word. I know I did. My first taste of the e-scooter phenomenon was on a visit to Los Angeles in February last year. The Santa Monica company Bird had been up and running for only five months, yet already its scooters were all over the city, like avian excrement. Students at UCLA embraced the Birds. Nobody seemed fazed by the undeniable fact that you cannot look cool on a battery-powered two-wheeler. The epidemic then spread to other American metropolises: Atlanta, Minneapolis, Miami. New York has so far held out, but will likely soon fall.

Doddering Prince Andrew, known as Randy Andy among the Teterboro class, appeared on BBC’s Newsnight Saturday evening for a sit-down from Buckingham Palace to set the record straight on his relationship with dead sex trafficking kingpin Jeffrey Epstein. It’s being called some of the best television of the year, or at least the best episode yet of Brass Eye, despite the BBC’s Emily Maitlis failing to ask the Duke of York the most obvious question on everyone’s mind, ‘Who killed Jeffrey Epstein?’ ‘It would be a considerable stretch to say he was a very close friend,’ Andrew said of Epstein, explaining the pair only saw each other, like, three times a year, or triple as often as many people see their own parents.

This article is in The Spectator’s November 2019 US edition. Subscribe here. The floor is slippery. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised, I’m taking a tour of Abyss Creations, the factory where the ‘Ferraris of love dolls’, RealDoll and Realbotix, are made. A thin layer of silicone coats almost every surface. A (real) woman in her late twenties, the PR coordinator, Catherine, shows me round. She has the attitude of a hostess at a theme-park restaurant: bored or stoned or maybe both. I’m sure she’s given hundreds of these tours, heard the same dumb jokes a million times and watched us all slap the ass of a doll reluctantly yet instinctively.

Squinting through the penumbra of blue smoke that is nearly always contiguous with my person, I was surprised — no, scandalized — to see a silly little remark about G.K. Chesterton stud the pages of the National Review this week.Chesterton, that many-sided genius, once had the gall to defend the practice of torching a nice clump of tobacco and inhaling the fumes. Here is what he wrote, many years ago: '…to have a horror of tobacco is not to have an abstract standard of right; but exactly the opposite. It is to have no standard of right whatever; and to take certain local likes and dislikes as a substitute.

CNN enjoyed a rare day-off from being the most despised name in broadcasting on Tuesday. The full brunt of the nation’s enduring anti-media animus got redirected at ABC News for a change following a leaked video from Project Veritas showing anchor Amy Robach on a hot mic. A frustrated Robach revealed that a full report she produced on Jeffrey Epstein’s pedophile ring — implicating Bill Clinton and Prince Andrew — had been ‘quashed’ by the network three years ago.The leak dominated trending topics across social media.

It is difficult to describe what’s going on at digital publisher G/O Media — the parent company of such publications as Deadspin, Gizmodo, Jezebel and the Onion — as anything less than a complete dumpster fire. Acquired from Univision by a private equity firm earlier this year, G/O Media in the past few weeks has seen the shuttering of one property (Splinter), a staff revolt at another (Deadspin) after executives reportedly told the newsroom to stick to its primary focus, sports, and quit branching off into culture and politics and the implosion of a million-dollar ad buy after G/O attempted to hit its promised numbers by running autoplay video ads with the sound on.

Headline-writing can be hard, chaps. Especially when you have to capture the true spirit of a person in the light of their death. But with the demise of Isis founder Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, a truly heinous individual, surely putting his character into black and white is a black-and-white issue. If you're the Washington Post, apparently not, as Spectator contributor Kelly Jane Torrance was one of the first to point out. https://twitter.com/KJTorrance/status/1188467380491640833 'Austere religious scholar at helm of Islamic State dies at 48', the paper crowed, dolefully commemorating the life of the man who inspired hundreds of deaths. Obviously, the headline of his obituary has since been changed.

Silicon Valley can’t catch a break politically these days — from either party. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg was grilled extensively by members of Congress this week in a hearing ostensibly about the company’s now-on-shaky-ground Libra cryptocurrency that turned into a broader scrutiny of its ethics and business practices. Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s questioning, predictably, went viral, with even a remix that replaces Zuckerberg with Cousin Greg from HBO’s Succession. But it’s not just Democrats — such as presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren, who’s made Zuckerberg a campaign trail bogeyman — assailing venture-backed billionaires these days. Republicans want a piece of the action, too.

Time to put it away, boys, the colonists are blushing. Gays might be longing for the days when it was only marauding gangs of bachelorettes terrorizing homosexuals in their native habitats. But step into any gay bar today and you’re likely to find multiple disparate clans of shrieking girls haranguing the DJ and pounding fruity cocktails without even sporting Team Bride tiaras and penis straws. It’s one of the ballsier intrusions in this age of tearing down walls and dictating human sameness. And, inevitably, women have crashed the last frontier, gay sex apps, and it’s not going well for anyone. ‘Send me a dick pic and I will cut it off,’ screeched one women on her Grindr profile, a location-based gay men’s hookup app.

On Wednesday, Cockburn stopped by ‘Sovereignty or Submission: Restoring National Identity in the Spirit of Liberty’, hosted by conservative publications American Greatness and The New Criterion at a private club in Washington.There, Cockburn heard a wide-ranging discussion about nation states and governance, featuring Spectator columnists Daniel McCarthy and Roger Kimball, as well as the Hoover Institution’s Victor Davis Hanson, the Heritage Foundation’s David Azerrad, American Greatness editor Chris Buskirk, National Review’s John O’Sullivan, and Hillsdale College and Claremont Institute fellow Michael Anton.Over lunch, Tucker Carlson delivered a keynote speech on what he has learned since Trump’s election.

When he created Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg radically changed the world. In a speech today at Georgetown University, he seemed eager to do so again. It is my fervent hope that he is successful. In sweeping rhetoric liberally sprinkled with historical references, Zuckerberg drew a line in the sand, recognizing that ‘the ability to speak freely has been central in the fight for democracy worldwide.’ He bemoaned the fact that ‘we’re seeing people try to define more speech as dangerous’ and committed himself and Facebook to being forces for good in the fight to preserve freedom of expression.In a world increasingly intolerant of dissent, this is no small promise, and I don’t believe it’s an empty one, either.