Society Archives

Sunday

August 9, 2026

Inside Pete Hegseth’s church

The second-floor meeting room on Pennsylvania Avenue is unassuming, but it’s filling up fast when I walk in on Sunday morning. Young mothers in long floral dresses are assembling toddlers on the rows of seats, men (in suits and ties) chat near the doorway, coffee cups in hand. I am sitting next to a couple of other reporters, who take notes throughout the service. The focus has never been on the church itself, but on Capitol Hill The Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches worships using the traditional Presbyterian liturgy: the Lord’s Prayer, hymns accompanied by piano and a scripture reading.

Saturday

August 8, 2026

Kemi Badenoch

I didn’t want to like Rod Liddle

One of the joys of being director of digital at The Spectator, back in 2015, was seeing the magazine proofs before they went to print. Rod Liddle’s column was the first thing I looked for, always the one I was most eager to read. He made me laugh every single time, something very few columnists are able to do. I was annoyed I liked those columns, because I didn’t want to like Rod Liddle. All I knew of his personal life was through the scandal that followed him leaving his wife during the so-called “Sextator” years. I took a dim view of that. Although we both worked for The Spectator, I didn’t actually meet Rod for a long time because, woke snowflake that he was, he only ever worked from home. The first time we met was at a Spectator summer party, years later.

Catriona Olding

Tears and terror on the front line of the French wildfires

Provence As soon as I opened my front door I could smell it. Along the path, flakes of white ash landed on my arms. Looking north beyond the cliff, I saw a rapidly increasing plume of brown-black smoke. Before long it filled a third of the sky. Not again. Ten years ago, almost to the day, the concrete shack I was renting in the woods a few miles from the village was almost engulfed. Jeremy was having a break and staying with me when a wildfire broke out in the valley below. The smoke and flames looked about a quarter of a mile away and firefighting Canadairs flew low overhead. Friends told us to leave but I refused. I’d left everything behind in Scotland 18 months before and couldn’t face doing so again. Jeremy asked if he’d have to knock me out and throw me over his shoulder.

Ella Veakins

There’s no excuse for a plastic plant

Monstera deliciosa, otherwise known as the Swiss cheese plant, is perhaps the most popular houseplant of them all, probably because it’s so easy to care for. In normal circumstances, you almost have to try to mess it up. A heatwave, however, can put a monstera under stress. Subject one to warm weather for too long and you’ll find its poor leaves scorched, its roots damaged and its stems desperately dehydrated. For this reason, you might feel the temptation to turn to a shockingly popular alternative: the plastic plant. It should be resisted at all costs. A potted history takes us back to the 1950s, when a postwar manufacturing boom saw the mass production of cheap polyvinyl chloride and polyethylene.

Friday

August 7, 2026

Chilton Williamson, Jr.

Sports are just a distraction from death

Pascal attributed royalty’s employment of court jesters to the king’s desire to forget or ignore, for however brief a moment, the fact of his own mortality. Carl Trueman, in The Desecration of Man, suggests that today’s star athletes and entertainers owe their remuneration, exceeding by many times the annual salary of the US president, to the major role they play in helping postmodern and post-Christian people to do the same.

Gage Klipper

Steeplechase is a profoundly English sport

I spent years living in the UK buying and selling horses, but I didn’t know a thing about steeplechase until I moved to Maryland. Despite technically originating in 18th-century Ireland, the equestrian sport of steeplechase feels about as English as it gets. Riders race on thoroughbreds, barreling over tree-like jumps called timbers on long and wild tracks. Steeplechase combines every elite aspect of the horse world: racing, jumping, the rugged outdoorsmanship of foxhunting and the proud formality of English jockey silks. And with a season running through early spring and fall, the crowd of spectators is typically encased in tweed. Maryland, a state founded as a Catholic refuge, exists now as an inheritor of the English aristocracy – at least when it comes to the country life.

Josie Cox

The meaning of the lemonade stand

It’s a big week in my household. My London-born, New York City-raised eight-year-old is taking an initial tentative step into the glorious, promise-filled world of American capitalism: she’s setting up her first lemonade stand. If you’re not American, or you haven’t spent much time here, you may be wondering why I’m announcing this with the fanfare of an Ivy League acceptance letter. And sure, perhaps it’s evidence that I’m slowly morphing into the Type A Manhattan parent I so like to mock. But also: the lemonade stand occupies a somewhat mythical space in American culture. As well as a way for children to earn a few dollars during the summer holidays, it’s a rite of passage.

Tom Slater

How Black Lives Matter created Jason Arday

Jason Arday, I miss you already. The resignation of the Cambridge professor, sporting Adonis, charity-fundraising extraordinaire and credibly accused fantasist has brought to a close the most delicious silly-season story for some time. Cambridge traded academic rigor for phony virtue. It chose political expediency over the pursuit of truth On Wednesday night, Arday announced he was stepping down from his positions at the University of Cambridge and Jesus College, after a trickle of plagiarism allegations, as well as questions over his extracurricular achievements and his wild claims of violent intimidation, became a flood. That’s not how he put it, mind.

Katherine Dee

Why does TikTok hype extreme violence?

Everybody’s worried that nobody reads and that the people who do are reading smut. In great quantities, it should be said, but still smut. Since the advent of the novel, our arbiters of morality have made it known that if a book has even a hint of sex in it – especially if that sex is suspected of inflaming the erotic imaginations of featherbrained young women – then it “doesn’t count” as reading. It’s just masturbation. Earlier this year, a young woman went viral after bragging about reading 100 books or something like it. She was treated like, well, that six-year-old who went viral after reading 100 books. The response to this woman was like the response to the little boy: “Uh, does it count if the books are Curious George?

Philip Hensher

Who will we be without our ability to read?

In Arthur C. Clarke’s 1953 science-fiction novel Childhood’s End, a race of benevolent aliens arrives to take control of Earth and its peoples. They have been sent here, it transpires, to oversee the transformation of the human race from Homo Sapiens – individual, unique, quarrelsome – into a hive mind. The change happens in a single generation to everyone under the age of ten – and parents no longer know what their children are. “All the hopes and dreams of your race are ended now,” the alien supervisor says. “You have given birth to your successors, and it is your tragedy that you will never understand them – will never even be able to communicate with their minds... you will not think them human and you will be right.

Christopher Caldwell

All roads lead to Nashville

“There ain’t nothing like the loving of a hard-driving cowboy man,” as the country singer Barbara Jean puts it towards the end of Robert Altman’s movie Nashville, and, really, there ain’t nothing like Nashville itself, either. It’s surprising more has not been made of it this year, when the country’s 250th anniversary has got tangled up with the flailing Trump presidency. Though he made the film in 1975, Altman set it a year in the future, amid a fictionalized and chaotic 1976 presidential campaign. He meant to give an account of a country that, on the 200th anniversary of its founding, had descended into unprecedented gaudiness and depravity. When Jimmy Carter wound up winning the White House, Nashville came to seem prophetic. But it is more than that.

Alexander Larman

Amanda Knox should not do comedy

I am a great believer that there should be no unbroachable topic in comedy, as long as the person broaching it does so in a funny enough fashion. This, however, does not mean that this person should always be entitled to do so. Had Jimmy Savile launched into a new stand-up career eulogizing the joys of pedophilia and necrophilia, I am not sure that he would have been playing to enthusiastic audiences, no matter how good the jokes, and while Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor proved to be inadvertently hilarious while discussing everything from Pizza Express to sweating on the BBC show Newsnight, I am not sure he would be cheered to the rafters at an open-mic night at his local Jongleurs.

Michael Brendan Dougherty

My Jersey Shore summers

Sea Isle City, New Jersey It’s August 3. My mother’s birthday. Standing in the surf, my youngest son this morning said to me: “What would you do if you could breathe underwater and live there under deep pressure the rest of your life?” “I would eat more fish, I think.” “You could explore the Mariana Trench,” he corrected me. My brother-in-law Matt came down with his two sons to join us. The boys splashed and hollered in the rough sea. The red flag was put up by the lifeguards today. The fathers talked about how much easier it got each year.

Alex Diggins

The remains of Sierra Leone’s City hotel symbolize Graham Greene’s ‘soupsweet land’

The City was once Freetown’s most storied hotel. It burned down in the early 2000s, a few weeks after British paratroopers fought off Revolutionary United Front rebels in a battle which helped bring an end to Sierra Leone’s decade-long civil war. But the hotel had been on its uppers for a while before then. The Ferraris, a family of Swiss hoteliers, had long since abandoned it, and the City had become a brothel, where clients were serviced in dingy, candle-lit rooms. One correspondent who visited the site shortly after its destruction found a pile of rubble and a sign warning in Krio: “No piss ya.” Nowadays, there’s a scruffy Leonco gas station where the City once stood. On one side is Philton Guesthouse; on the other is Paty’s Beauty Salon.

Douglas Murray

Rod’s bravery made others brave too

How do you produce the type of person who cares deeply while seemingly not giving a damn? With great difficulty, it turns out. Plenty of people imagine that they can say what they think, but very few do. For most people, some real or imaginary social punishment lies on the horizon: a dinner they won’t be invited to; a club of which they fear they will never become a member. Rod Liddle was one of the happy few who was free. He was free to say what he thought. He was free to voice unpopular opinions and – often harder – he was free to voice popular opinions. When the whole world seemed to be falling on his head he had a perfectly contented attitude toward it.

Thursday

August 6, 2026

Olivia Potts

Grasshopper Pie is like a teenage fever dream

Grasshopper pie is an unlikely dish: bright green, mint-flavored, combined with obscure liqueurs and set with marshmallows, all sitting in an Oreo crust. It feels like the fever dream of a sweet-toothed teenager who’s been let loose on their parents’ drinks cabinet, and will regret it tomorrow. The pie is based on the cocktail of the same name, which combines equal parts crème de menthe, crème de cacao blanc and cream. It’s a heady mix of mint, white chocolate, dairy and alcohol. The cocktail hails from New Orleans and its origin is claimed by Tujague’s in the French Quarter, where it was supposedly invented by the owner, Philip Guchet, in 1918. It tastes exactly as you’d imagine and is, forgive me, far better suited to a pie filling than it is to a drinks party.

Alex Alfirraz Scheers

How nukes made the world safer

Three hours after daybreak, a blinding flash ripped through the morning sky. August 6, 1945, began as a tranquil and clear day in Hiroshima. By 8:15, the Enola Gay, an American B-29 bomber, reduced Japan’s seventh-largest city to cinders. Three days later, on August 9, Nagasaki would suffer the same fate. For the first and only time in human history, atomic bombs were used in anger. Eighty-one years on from the atomic bombings of Japan, the uncomfortable truth is that nuclear weapons are the reason that World War Three has been avoided. Because nuclear weapons were part of the equation, those crises eventually de-escalated Yet according to the latest survey on nuclear weapons by the Pew Research Center, 69 percent of the American public thinks that they make the world less safe.

Dot Wordsworth

Fantasticks, calash, noctivagation – the wonderful words of Anthony Wood

When the King visited Oxford in September 1687, there was a bit of a shambles in the Bodleian, where they had laid out a banquet for his breakfast. He ate some mutton and pheasant. When he had finished, there was a scramble for the many dishes left over. The University had paid £160 for this banquet or ambigue, noted the antiquarian Anthony Wood. Ambigue, borrowed from French ambigu, meant a meal where all the dishes were served at once. It appears in the fifth index, “Words,” printed in 1900 in a 400-page volume of indexes to Wood’s Life and Times edited by the indefatigable Andrew Clark, who claimed “a little space for words and spellings characteristic of Wood,” and for “a few minor subjects” not in the other indexes.

Mary Killen

Dear Mary: what should I do if I run into my ex on holiday?

Q. A woman I have known for many years and who helped look after my mother has just had her leg amputated. One Saturday this month, she is out of hospital and is throwing a late birthday party at her farm with a hog roast etc. to celebrate. However, I have invited a schoolfriend to stay that weekend, and she has pancreatic cancer. Would it be very rude to go to the party for a short time? I have a charming, polite, gay man as my other house guest to keep my schoolfriend company.– E.S., Sussex A. Never underestimate the fun of spending unsupervised time in someone else’s house. Your guests would be delighted if you went out to a party. However, don’t be tempted to raise the topic of rival health conditions and which one trumps which. There could be no useful outcome.

Rory Sutherland

My top tips for Andy Burnham

I am cautiously optimistic about Britain’s new leader. For one thing, the fact that Andy Burnham went to Cambridge not Oxford, did not study PPE, is not a lawyer and did not grow up in Surrey makes him something of a diversity-hire among our more recent prime ministers. This gives us hope. It is a near-universal law of problem-solving that you cannot think your way out of problems using the same mindset that created them in the first place. One tip: government needs a marketing function. Rather than explaining itself to the public, it has endlessly sought to cadge publicity by ingratiating itself with the news media. As all journalists since Watergate are largely motivated by discrediting those in power, this is hopeless.