Society

Friday

Lloyd Evans

Never trust a happy jogger

What is it for? Jogging means being in a hurry to get nowhere in particular as fast as possible. And it qualifies as certifiable behavior. The madman can see the purpose of his actions but the sane man can’t. City-dwellers are more prone to this mental abnormality than rural folk, who prefer not to go loping through fields of wheat or scampering over the muddied divots of an open moor. In cities, the lunatics are -everywhere, which makes it tricky for the authorities to detain them under the Mental Health Act. Some joggers know that chasing around their neighborhood like a hamster on a wheel is a little crazy. Hence “jogger’s face,” the anguished expression worn by many of the semi-athletes as they galumph along the streets. “Why am I doing this?” they cry inwardly.

Dean Godson

Can Britain learn from Sweden’s immigration crackdown?

There is a decisive shift occurring in European politics. It’s happening across nations – and parties. It lies behind the far-right Alternative für Deutschland’s victory in the Saxony-Anhalt state election last weekend. And it is the underreported factor in Sweden’s recent general election. In almost every part of the continent, the politics of crime, security, migration and citizenship is driving governments to harden their borders and toughen their approach towards integration, especially when it comes to Islamism. On the center-right, the Austrian Chancellor Christian Stocker has outlined that he plans to bring in a ban on what he calls political Islam.

Peter Hitchens

How I became a Canadian nationalist

This is how I became a Canadian nationalist. I did it on the rebound. I never wanted to, and it is a strange experience to find myself pounding the arm of my chair when Mark Carney, of all people, defies the Almighty Trump. But it is so. Once, like that poor man who speaks the first lines in The Godfather, I believed in America, arsenal of liberty, land of the free, inheritor of Magna Carta and so on. Then, after a couple of years in Moscow, I went to live in Washington, DC. And it was there that I was wooed and eventually seduced by the land of maple syrup. To begin with, it was the discovery that soppy British sentiment about the US was not in practice returned. It wasn’t so much that they didn’t like us as that they had barely heard of us. Legally, Britain didn’t seem to exist.

Mary Wakefield

The real reason children no longer enjoy reading

At the tail end of the summer holiday, my son and I had a shouting match in King’s Cross station. For more than three hours on the train south from Durham, he’d been staring at a single question on a comprehension paper. The text began with a description of a road running through the moonlit countryside, and question three asked: “Why does the author compare the road to a gray silk ribbon?” Between Durham and Peterborough, I had repeated that question, with increasingly psychopathic calm. “So darling, why does the author compare the road to a ribbon?” By the time the Arsenal stadium came into sight, I could feel small things inside my brain starting to come loose and on platform 1I lost my cool. “Just give me an answer, anything! Tell me it’s a metaphor, at least.

Toby Young

I’ve found the perfect school for Harry and Meghan

As the author of How to Lose Friends and Alienate People, I have to acknowledge that I still have some way to go to match the radioactive negativity Harry and Meghan generate with their every move. The Sussexes’ accumulated expertise in committing increasingly nauseating acts of hypocritical entitlement with every week that passes should qualify them both for a Regius Chair in Blithe Privilege at the University of Self-Regard. The latest episode in their narcissistic odyssey – The Sillyad – has been their agonizing over where to send their children, Prince Archie and Princess Lilibet, to school. Harry and Meghan’s decision to educate them in England is, in its way, admirable.

Michael Simmons

Labour must go further and faster in the North Sea

John Healey stood in front of two giant robotic arms this week and promised to “make Great Britain growth Britain again.” The Chancellor also promised, borrowing a catchphrase from his neighbor in No. 10, to deliver “good growth in every postcode.” In the North Sea, 150 miles east off the coast of Aberdeen, lies the first big test of this promise. The 6,000-ton Jackdaw extraction platform is ready to start pumping gas from a field three miles below the surface. Twenty years after the Jackdaw field was first successfully prospected, it will, at the stroke of a ministerial pen, finally be allowed to operate. Industry bosses were told to prepare for a possible government handshaking visit on September 15.

Bill Kauffman

Pale Dread is the next great Washington novel

My only novel, Every Man a King (published in 1989), included a caricature of a famous political figure for whom I worked – and whom I might treat more kindly today, for as the years melt away so do the harsh judgments. As Babs Streisand sang, what’s too painful to remember we simply choose to forget. Judging by A.G. Doran’s new novel, Pale Dread, set in the State Department during the chaotic first Trump administration, its author has chosen to forget nothing of his sentence in our nation’s capital.

Chilton Williamson, Jr.

Technology is crowding out the arts

From the beginning of human history until the day, relatively speaking, before yesterday, every civilization has given scope to, and thus been the product of, human genius in every one of its manifestations including the representative, the literary, the musical, the architectural, the mechanical and technical arts and the sciences. Naturally, each of them had its special characteristics and talents with which it became associated and for which it became known: in the case of China, her bureaucratic and military sophistication; in that of Japan, her refined aestheticism and grace of living.

Josie Cox

My New York City survival guide

It’s September in New York City. Mercifully, the sweltering heat is abating. The putrid smell of trash is lifting ever so slightly and the kids are back at school after what feels like 100 years of overpriced summer camps with mortgage-worthy price tags. For me, it also means swapping my usual attire – best described as “I’m a freelance writer and can therefore wear whatever the hell I want” for the more publicly appropriate slacks and a nice shirt as I head back to the classroom to teach graduate students about the art and absurdities of communication. I’ve been co-teaching two of these classes every fall for the past five years and enjoy the structure they bring to my otherwise higgledy-piggledy week.

Thursday

Brendan O’Neill

Ed Sheeran has done nothing wrong

So now we know what happens if you refuse to prostrate yourself before the Gaza cult. If you politely decline wearing the keffiyeh like a holy shroud and chanting “Free Palestine” on a mindless loop. They will destroy you. They will hound you like an infidel and seek your excommunication from polite society. Just look at what is happening to Ed Sheeran. The anti-Ed hysteria really is spinning out of control Pop’s Mr. Nice Guy, penner of bloodless ballads, is being ripped to shreds online. He’s damned as a “coward,” a “lowlife,” even as “complicit” in one of the great crimes of the 21st century. “Call off the rest of your American tour!” cry the frothing Ed-hunters. What sin did he commit to warrant such venom?

ed sheeran

Wednesday

Gwion Wyn Jones

The death of biblical literacy

We are often told these days, most recently in James Marriott’s much talked about book The New Dark Ages, that the world has a problem with reading. During such an emergency, then, it could be quite invidious to claim that some manifestations of this problem may be more or less bad than others. But it is difficult not to bemoan especially one crisis that cannot be blamed entirely on bloated screen times: the decline of biblical literacy. I have observed this first-hand when teaching history undergraduates at Oxford. These are the brightest and most hard-working young historians in the world. But it is not an uncommon occurrence to be met with blank stares when I mention the prophet Jeremiah or question them on the Exodus narrative.

Bible

Tuesday

Paul Burke

The cynical genius of Sydney Sweeney’s latest advert

Sydney Sweeney is at it again. After causing a collective coronary for some very silly people last year by appearing in a sexy ad for American Eagle jeans, she’s appeared in another ad. This time, it’s for Novig – a sports “prediction” betting app. And this time, Sweeney is naked. As I write this, almost two million people have watched the ad and only a minuscule minority will be traducing the use of Sweeney’s body to sell a very unsexy tech product Well, not quite naked. She’s partly concealed by various sports accoutrements as she gazes into the camera and repeats the word “sports” over and over again. In so doing, she’s driven some men wild and some women even wilder – but for very different reasons.

Monday

Simon Diggins

Al-Qaeda haven’t gone away, you know

“They haven’t gone away, you know.” Gerry Adams’s chilling words, uttered during the peace process, to remind everyone that the IRA still existed, would do as well for al-Qaeda, the architects of the 9/11 outrage, the 25th anniversary of which fell on Friday. Osama bin Laden’s killing in May 2011 may have removed the titular head of al-Qaeda but, neither that well-deserved death, nor the subsequent splintering of al-Qaeda from ISIS (Islamic State of Iraq and Syria) in 2014, has diminished either the virulence or potential danger that al-Qaeda presents.

al-qaeda
Sam Leith

The real reason AI is so frightening

In Joseph Heller's Catch-22, the anxious Colonel Cathcart is in the habit of compiling little lists of recent events. He draws these lists up under two headings: “Black Eyes” and “Feathers In My Cap.” Into the former, he puts everything that seems to damage his chances of preferment – bombing his own runway again, and so forth – and in the latter, everything that will redound to his credit. I like to imagine Sam Altman, the boss of OpenAI, and his fellow AI overlords doing something similar. In the “Black Eyes” column, we might find near the top of the list the original sin of generative AI.

Jonathan Morrison

What will life look like on the Moon?

Space is back in the news. Whether it’s Donald Trump unveiling Space Force uniforms inspired by Starship Troopers, the SpaceX flotation that made Elon Musk the world’s first trillionaire (for a whole 12 days), or NASA’s Artemis II, which carried four astronauts around the Moon in April – the final frontier suddenly feels fashionable once more. Not that jackboots ever really went out of fashion. The next few years will see even bigger milestones in mankind’s journey toward the stars: Artemis IV will land astronauts at the Moon’s south pole in 2028, for the first time since 1972; China plans to follow suit before 2030; new privately owned space stations such as Vast’s Haven-2 and Axiom are due to start replacing the aging International Space Station at about the same time.

Sean Thomas

Dario Amodei and the AI apocalypse alchemists

Such is the pace of change in AI that it has been, yet again, quite a weekend. On Saturday, Dario Amodei, boss of Anthropic, published an essay, "We Must Pace the Frontier," urging his industry to slow down. Within the hour Elon Musk replied: “Dario is right.” Sam Altman, the boss of OpenAI, followed. By Sunday, Amodei was on Face the Nation, again asking everyone to apply the brakes on the grand and momentous technology of our time. None of it proves imminent superintelligence. But it is the sound of something ominous The cynical explanation is obvious. OpenAI has just shelved this year's IPO; Altman suddenly believes it unwise.

Saturday

Sahil Mahtani

The Bayeux Tapestry must never be returned to France

The Norman Conquest is a crime against humanity that remains, over a millennium on, entirely unsettled. The French still refuse to pay reparations for the 1066 genocide. And the rapacious Norman invader class remains firmly at the pinnacle of every aspect of public life in Britain. Indeed, the economist Gregory Clark has shown that, in some ways, the Conquest never truly ended because Norman last names remain overrepresented at Oxbridge some 30 generations on. Some of the nation's most glittering buildings still wear their Norman Caen stone shamelessly; walk past many great ecclesiastical facades and the conspiracy is right there in plain sight, yet no one mentions it. France owes us money and the math is fairly simple So France owes us money and the math is fairly simple.

bayeux
Lionel Shriver

We need to talk about Lindsay Clancy

The declaration of a mistrial in the filicide case of Lindsay Clancy coincides, for me uncomfortably, with a new UK reissue of my 2003 breakout novel We Need to Talk About Kevin. The book concerns a mother whose son becomes a high-school mass murderer. She agonizes over whether something has always been wrong with him or something is wrong with him because something is wrong with her. Prior to publication, I’d imagined that the commercial hook would be the frequency with which self-pitying adolescents were taking their misery out on their classmates and teachers, since when I wrote the novel school shootings had yet to be fictionalized. Instead, what hit a cultural nerve was “maternal ambivalence.” The text dares to explore parenthood in de-romanticized terms.

Thursday

John Power

Don’t believe everything that AI companies say

Two big stories are driving interest in artificial intelligence this week. The first is the resignation of Jacob Coxon, a researcher at Anthropic (maker of Claude) who used to work for OpenAI. He said in a statement on X: https://twitter.com/hilbertspaess/status/2097476196791709843?s=20 Coxon went on to say that “the people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade”, and that employees at Anthropic are aggressively driving forward because they believe they are in the only company capable of managing the technology safely and ethically. At OpenAI, “many have not deeply internalized the civilizational stakes.”  Scary stuff.

AI
Douglas Murray

Would Sadiq Khan back a rave in a mosque?

I must return, regrettably, to the subject of the Church of England. Readers with long memories may recall the year of our Lord 2024. In February of that year, the people who are meant to care for Canterbury Cathedral allowed a “silent disco” to take place over two nights in the place where St Thomas à Becket was martyred. Two thousand revelers turned up to take part in what became known as “a rave in the nave.” Naturally the Church of England authorities denied that this constituted any sort of defilement of one of England’s holiest places. Fast forward to September of that same year and it was Peterborough Cathedral’s turn. That was when it announced an Ibiza-themed nightclub evening with DJs spinning an “epic” set of “soul, funk and contemporary hits.