Society

Friday

August 21, 2026

Does Yogi Bear have a connection to yoga?

“Well, we all have areas of ignorance,” said my husband with a little too much relish, I thought. He was responding to my admission that I had reached a ripe old age without realizing that the words yoga and yoke had the same origin. Yoke has been used in English for more than 1,000 years and yoga only since about 1785, but it had been in use in Sanskrit since the first millennium BC. The meaning of yoga was held to be either the yoking and reining in of the senses, or the yoking and joining oneself to the Prana (life force), the Om (absolute) and the Universe.

Sophia Money-Coutts

If we allow dogs at weddings, why not a python?

Three women in my Tuesday weights class are getting married. While we squat and thrust and fling our kettlebells around, there’s nonstop talk of veils, decorations, modes of transport to the venue and whether anyone eats wedding cake these days. Men are allowed in this weights class but, oddly, none ever shows up. The major update from one of the brides this week was that the local register office had given permission for her dog to attend the ceremony. She duly bought “a little tux” for Badger, so he could look the part. How do we feel about dogs at weddings?

David Christopher Kaufman

The Obamas are to blame for the Sussexes’ failure in the US

You can blame the Obamas for the Duke and Duchess of Sussex's ill-fated adventures in America. There they were, Barack and Michelle, with eight-figure book deals and a lucrative spin on the global keynote circuit after Donald Trump's triumph in 2016. Barely two years later, Mrs. Obama was filling major arenas on a rockstar-styled promo tour for her White House-memoir Becoming. I remember sitting up high at the Barclays Center in New York in 2018, when Sarah Jessica Parker interviewed Mrs. Obama with awkward sycophancy, clearly dazzled by the former First Lady’s sheer presence. Obama’s candor and intellect, no matter how commodified to maximize book sales, stood as a sharp contrast to the icy aloofness of her replacement, Melania Trump.

Toby Young

Ghent University shouldn’t have suspended Nathan Cofnas

It is ironic that the “be kind” brigade beating their breasts and wailing about the "lynching" and "assassination" of Jason Arday think the appropriate response is to whip up hatred against Nathan Cofnas, the scholar who exposed Arday's academic misconduct. At the vigil for Arday at Trafalgar Square in London, several speakers singled out Cofnas for blame, including Diane Abbott MP, who described him as a “racist.” Nathan contacted me shortly afterwards worried that he risked being murdered if he set foot in London.

Bill Kauffman

The disappointment of DNA tests

Those sending their saliva to ancestry.com and 23andMe might want to heed the advice Dr. Zaius gives to Charlton Heston as the stranded astronaut sets off to stumble upon his destiny in Planet of the Apes: “Don’t look for it, Taylor. You may not like what you find.” Exhibit A: our friend Peter, descendant along the Quincy line in Massachusetts – you know, the folks who more or less invented New England. Peter took an early iteration of one of those DNA tests and was told, to his astonishment, that he was – according to Science! – significantly Norwegian. Muttering the Yankee equivalent of “WTF,” Peter threw himself into a full-bore exploration of this putative heritage.

Ruaridh Nicoll

Varadero, Cuba’s unbeatable beach

I have a sideline in travel writing, so am lucky enough to have seen some very lovely beaches. Few are as spectacular as Cuba’s Varadero. There are others I prefer – Cossies in the Cocos (Keeling), if you happen to be passing, or the hidden beach at Achmelvich in Scotland, where I shivered between granite walls in my childhood summers. But if classic sun, sea and sand is your thing, Varadero’s 12-mile, palm-fringed spit is unbeatable. It took me years of living in Cuba to visit. I believed that Varadero was all about package tourism – socialist package tourism. Then I went and walked those infinite sands at dawn, the water as clear and intoxicating as absinthe, and got over myself. Now my family and I have moved here for a month.

Josie Cox

Canada’s greatest asset

If Donald Trump wants to make Canada the 51st state, I suspect it’s for the wrong reasons. I just got back from a family holiday. We started in Vancouver, then drove to Whistler, before flying to Calgary and taking the Trans-Canada Highway – past places with names like Bearspaw and Dead Man’s Flats – into the Canadian Rockies and Banff National Park. I was telling a friend about the trip a few days ago and actually welled up when I was describing the deep azure hue of Lake Louise; the vastness of the forests and the astonishing beauty of the wildlife – from chipmunks to grizzlies – that seems to co-exist peacefully with the comparatively tiny human population. It was nature on a scale that made human beings feel refreshingly incidental.

Mathias Döpfner

There’s still time to save the West

When The Spectator asked me whether I would write an essay on “Why we need to strengthen the West,” I was delighted – and bemused. Why is this even up for debate? That we must explain and justify “the West” at all indicates just how weak it has become. It would be better if it did not need strengthening but were simply strong. It is not. The West has become an invalid. What exactly, though, are we trying to strengthen? The West is an idea, not a location. It rests on four pillars: Athens – where democracy was born. Rome – the cradle of the rule of law. Jerusalem – where Judeo-Christian values placed the inviolable dignity of the individual at the center.

Thursday

August 20, 2026

Peter Watson

What Palm Beach reveals about America’s new class system

Snobbery, affectation and hierarchy are supposed to be un-American. But there are signs that social class – or more strictly income levels – are starting to stratify. People have begun to hunker down with like-minded citizens who share their values, which are more often than not determined by wealth. In fact, there is a growing trend of ultra-rich individuals who, when buying a house, buy other houses around it, and then sell on those other houses only to people they know. It even has a name: polydomory. Provoked by Covid and the disturbing number of deaths it caused, people were persuaded to change their lives in major and relatively sudden ways. Many Californians moved to Texas, while similar numbers of New Yorkers and New Englanders decamped to Florida.

David Whitehouse

Trump has bet everything on Mars

America has what might be the best evidence for life on Mars. NASA’s Perseverance rover has gathered rock samples that could contain compelling biosignatures of ancient microbial life. No one is quite sure yet, and the samples need to be tested in a lab before we can conclusively prove that our distant neighbor once harbored life. Too bad. We’re never going to see the results. In January, funding for the project was canceled. Donald Trump has other plans for the red planet. He obsesses over competition with China and with planting the Stars and Stripes on alien soil. So to the horror of many of the world’s scientists, Trump has pulled the US space effort away from incremental robotic exploration to prioritize human landings on the Moon and Mars.

Helen Andrews

Have I lost 10 IQ points for every child I’ve had?

I sometimes feel like I have lost ten IQ points per child. If my husband and I ever have a fourth, I might have to quit writing altogether and find a less cognitively demanding line of work – maybe run for political office. The causes of “mommy brain” are disputed. Studies have shown that, after she gives birth, certain parts of a woman’s brain become more active while others shrink. Once this was thought to be a result of temporary hormone changes, but now scientists believe that pregnancy causes a woman’s brain to be permanently restructured. Even years after their children’s births, mothers’ brains still show a reduction in gray matter volume.

Alice Hancock

The joy of getting lost in the Peloponnese

Even if you’re far from being a classicist and loved Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, it hardly paints an enticing picture of Greece as a holiday destination. But perhaps we can all admit that, lovely though they are, the Greek islands are becoming a little predictable. A Greece that is lesser known, and far more exciting (dare I say, Homeric) is the Peloponnese. This is a dark and swarthy Greece – a better setting for parched shipwrecks and violent feudalism, as well as hidden hotels and good food. Haunted by Lord Byron and once home to the great travel writer Patrick Leigh Fermor, the Peloponnese is a region to get lost in.

Nigel Jones

Don’t grow a beard

I was looking at a photo of my great-grandfather the other day and admiring his beard. A magnificent spade-shaped affair, it reached halfway down his chest. He was a Victorian, of course, and his era was, above all, the century of the beard. All the eminent Victorian males, such as Darwin, Dickens, the Earl of Salisbury and Prince Albert wore them. When Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth decreed recently that all US military men should be clean shaven, it struck me that, had that rule been around in the 1860s, the American Civil War would never have been fought, since all the leading generals on both sides were endowed with substantial forests of facial hair. One Union commander, Ambrose Burnside, was so notably hirsute in this respect that he lent his name to sideburns.

Lloyd Evans

Confessions of a dog hater

“Do you like animals?” asked the woman at the door, collecting for a zoo. “No, I hate them, they keep trying to kill me,” I said. That got rid of her. I feel a little ashamed of my hostility to animals, which I inherited from my mother. She was raised in rural Ireland and she loathed the countryside and all its nonspeaking inhabitants. To her, animals were either predators or ingredients, and she particularly despised geese, rats, mice, squirrels and dogs. “Vermin,” was one of her favorite nouns. And she regarded the word “pet” as a self-deluding fantasy. Which seems reasonable. Animals cannot be tamed but their owners can be deceived. Any beast will turn murderous when cornered. Dog-hate entered my soul. It festers there still.

Peter Hitchens

The great whataboutery delusion

If you live near the frontiers of acceptable opinion, as any thinking person must surely do, you quickly find that these badlands are policed mainly with insults and innuendos. And so you learn one morning, to your surprise, that you are an apologist for some repulsive regime which you strongly dislike. If you have been especially daring, you may be a “war crimes denier” as well. Or you are charged with “whataboutery,” a word its users think will magically erase your case. Or, in many ways best of all, you are a conspiracy theorist. There is a myth that this phrase was invented by the CIA to try to discredit protesters against the Vietnam War, but the expression is far older than that.

Mary Wakefield

Texas was right to save baby Gabriel-Rumi

A court in Dallas, Texas is due to decide the fate of a small baby called Gabriel or Rumi, depending on who you believe his mother is. Gabriel-Rumi is at present a sort of Schrödinger’s baby, suspended between possible futures and suspended also, poor sod, between life and death: born with a heart defect, headed now for surgery. Gabriel-Rumi’s short life has so far been the subject of a media frenzy, for reasons I’ll explain, but should he later look back and be appalled at all the fuss, I’d like him to know what a service he’s already done the world. The global surrogacy business surges on, valued at almost $40 billion, heading for $300 billion by 2030; an accelerating factory belt of babies commissioned, grown, sold.

Arabella Byrne

Do you have Old Money Face?

Recently, I have started to worry about my face. Early in the morning, before the children wake up, I’m sure I can see ghosts in the downstairs loo mirror. My 20-year-old self’s face flashes before me but soon vanishes reproachfully into the crow’s feet around my eyes; I didn’t like her anyway. My long-deceased father lingers over my cheekbones and draws the smoking lines around my mouth in ash. I frown back. My grandmother, anxious, appears in the split second between posing and relaxing. I squint as she used to when playing bridge. If the past is an inscrutable face, I am reduced to reading, not between the lines but between the wrinkles. I never thought I would get old – I’m 43 – but it’s happening.

Owen Matthews

Who gets to decide when assassination is justified?

When is extrajudicial killing just war by other means, and when does it become a state-sponsored act of terror? “We were not terrorists but fighters for freedom who fought with our eyes open,” Menachem Begin wrote of Irgun, the irregular group of fighters he led during the 1947-48 civil war in Mandatory Palestine, the tactics of whom included bombings and assassinations. But where does the August 1 bombing of the Balzi Rossi restaurant in central Moscow – which killed at least five people and injured more than 20 – stand on the scale? Some would describe the attack as a legitimate military operation. The bomb targeted the lavish birthday celebrations of Colonel-General Aleksandr Chayko, commander-in-chief of Russia’s Aerospace Forces (whose son-in-law died in the blast).

Monica Sobchak

The insanity of the Lindsay Clancy sympathizers

In 2023, Lindsay Clancy, a former labor-and-delivery nurse from Duxbury, Massachusetts, strangled her three children to death with exercise resistance bands in the basement of the family home. She then cut her wrists and neck and jumped from a second-story window, an act that left her paralyzed from the waist down. Her murder trial opened in Plymouth Superior Court in July and is expected to run for six to eight weeks. Both sides agree Clancy killed five-year-old Cora, three-year-old Dawson and eight-month-old Callan. What is contested is whether she should be held responsible.

Alexander Larman

Goodbye, Harry and Meghan

A shade over three decades ago, Gary Barlow and Take That sang “Whatever I said, I didn’t mean it, I want you back for good.” “Back for Good” has traditionally been taken to be a song about someone wanting their loved one back after a breakup. However, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex clearly listened to it on whatever easy listening channel they tune into in Montecito and decided that this is not simply Gary Barlow’s lovelorn lament but the earnest desire of the British people to have them return to us. Therefore, Meghan and Harry have announced that they will be returning to Britain. Not for a visit of a few days, as has happened in recent weeks, or even for a more protracted period.