Society

The American businessman and astronomer Percival Lowell first popularized the notion of life on Mars in 1906 when he described vast canals observed on the planet, some spanning the equivalent distance of Boston to San Francisco. He believed an intelligent Martian civilization was in peril, their world drying out and dying, and they had constructed as a planet-wide irrigation system to move water from Mars’s polar ice caps to the rest of the planet.American folklore has it that the idea of Martian intelligent life was so pervasive that a 1938 radio drama of H.G. Wells’s War of the Worlds, about a Martian invasion, ignited mass panic when millions of people believed it was a real newscast.

Households in America produce 254 tons of trash annually and only 34 percent is recycled. Every person creates 1,316 pounds of trash destined the landfill, about the weight of a grizzly bear. America represents 4 percent of the world’s population yet produces 12 percent of the world’s waste and Germany recycles around twice as much as the US. The statistics tell one story. A different tale is that recycling programs across the country are failing as companies struggle to make money and the amount of waste that ends up as landfill is growing every year. It’s a depressing story of failed ambition confronted by market realities that has left the mountains of trash growing as a monument to American excess and unchecked environmental pollution.

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.