Mission to Mars | The Spectator

Learn to stop worrying and love data centers

In popular mythology, America is the land that innovates while Europe regulates. America gets on with things while Europe prevaricates by allowing Luddites, environmentalists and all kinds of naysayers to call the tune. There is some truth in that, which is why the growth in the US economy has outstripped that of Europe this century. It’s also why America has a near monopoly in the tech sphere that now shapes our age. Now, however, America, like Europe, finds itself consumed by a popular war against data centers. Given that these centers are the beating heart of the modern economy, just as the coal mines were the lifeblood of the industrial revolution, this presents a very big problem.

Matt McDonald

Lee Greenwood is Trump’s court bard

The stage lights flicker. The MAGA faithful whoop at the first tinkle of piano keys. They’ve been here a hundred times. They know what’s coming. If tomorrow all the things were gone I’d worked for all my life And I had to start again With just my children and my wife “God Bless the USA” has been through several iterations since it first appeared on Lee Greenwood’s third album, You’ve Got a Good Love Comin’. It was a Gold-certified single in May 1984 and the soundtrack for a short film about Ronald Reagan, which was shown at that summer’s Republican National Convention. Greenwood performed the song at the 1988 RNC – and it resurged in popularity after the First Gulf War and the 9/11 attacks.

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.

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.

Ian Williams

Could China colonize Mars before America?

A 20-year-old Chinese researcher dressed in a red crayfish costume has become a symbol of Beijing’s ambition. At a scientific conference in Paris last fall, he explained that he was working on an important project. His plans would enable his country’s astronauts to prepare spicy crayfish soup, a Chinese favorite, on Mars. “That’s what we’re competing with. The vibe is good in Beijing,” Drew Endy, associate professor of bioengineering at Stanford University, said in evidence to a Senate hearing last month. The hearing examined whether the US is losing its innovation advantage to China. Concerned senators saw the big red crayfish as further evidence of the scale of Chinese ambition when it comes to Mars.

Heather Mac Donald

The case for drone policing

In the Russia-Ukraine war, drones have leveled the playing field between economically unmatched adversaries and have provided unprecedented capacity to monitor enemy troop and equipment movements. In domestic law enforcement, they are already being used for crime scene reconnaissance, for tracking suspects and for finding missing persons. Their greatest potential, however, lies in detecting and responding to a crime in progress before a victim or witness reports it. This is a line that police agencies have been reluctant to cross. A quadcopter drone is a battery-powered, unmanned aircraft, held aloft by four helicopter-like propellers. They usually carry cameras capable of recording in detail objects below them or as much as 2,000 feet away.

Daniel McCarthy

How capitalism subsidises the DSA

What would Karl Marx think of his latter-day disciples in the Democratic Socialists of America? No doubt he would find their politics largely agreeable, but they would present him with a class conundrum. DSA is not a movement of workers but of people with intellectual credentials: some 80 percent of its members have college degrees and 35 percent have advanced degrees. Those credentials are all granted by the institutions that capitalists sustain – it’s not bricklayers who endow Harvard University. State colleges and universities depend on government funding, but government itself, under capitalism, is simply an instrument of business interests.

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.

Roger Kimball

It’s DSA vs ICE in the battle of the acronyms

In the Battle of the Acronyms, perhaps no contest is more ferocious than the slugfest between the DSA – that’s “D” for dumb and “S” for commie, I mean “socialist” – and ICE (always excepting TDS vs MAGA). A wacko woman steers her car into an ICE agent. He shoots her. The media calls make up and tries to turn the dead woman into the second coming of Saint George Floyd. There was a warehouse full of outrage just waiting to be paraded at prime time but somehow the entertainment fell flat. Renée Good, the woman in question, didn’t have what it takes to triumph in the victimology sweepstakes. The anti-Trump media wept for a week and then went on to other wheezes. Nevertheless the Democratic Socialists of America have kept an eye on ICE.

Alex Bronzini-Vender

The end of the Luigi cult

Americans love their killers. Still, Luigi Mangione, who shot UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson dead in December 2024, may be the most beloved of them all. It took a special sort of fetishist to see something in maniacs like Ted Bundy or Jeffrey Dahmer, who killed for no reason other than their sadistic compulsions. Mangione, though? Nearly every American has been ground down by our country’s healthcare system. Mangione’s defenders rarely dispute that he gunned down Brian Thompson, the CEO of UnitedHealthcare Police had prepared for a mob last Friday, as Mangione appeared in a Manhattan courthouse to plead guilty to federal stalking charges. But by midmorning, the officers outnumbered everyone they’d been sent to contain. The cult of Luigi had not come.

Damian Thompson

Why don’t liberal Christians influence elections?

We’ve heard a lot about a “God gap” between Republican and Democratic voters in the United States – and for good reason. The gap between churchgoing conservatives and secular progressives, when measured by voting habits, has become conspicuously wide. In 1980, 40 percent of Democrats attended church regularly, with GOP voters a couple of points higher. Today, Republican church attendance is still in the low to mid-40s, while less than a quarter of Democrat voters are regular worshippers; only 17 percent of Harris voters in 2024 reported weekly attendance. Meanwhile, according to the Pew Research Center, roughly 40 percent of Democrat or Democrat-leaning voters are religiously unaffiliated (atheists, agnostics or “nones”) compared to only 21 percent of Republican voters.

Jamie Metzl

Smarter machines are going to need wiser humans

Everywhere we go these days, we hear people talking about the inevitable arrival of artificial general intelligence (AGI), usually understood as the moment when machines can perform every cognitive task as well as or better than humans. Some people await this moment with excitement, others with dread. Either way, the assumption is that sooner or later machines will cross some threshold and surpass us across the board. I have come to summarize my response to this perception in seven letters: AGI is BS. Part of the problem is that AGI has no agreed scientific definition. The term has increasingly become shorthand for the idea that intelligence exists on a single ladder, with today’s machines somewhere below us and tomorrow’s destined to climb past us.

Katherine Dee

‘I’m in love with a 2D character’

Perhaps you’ve heard of Akihiko Kondo before. He’s the Japanese man who “married” the Vocaloid character Hatsune Miku, a computer-generated pop singer in a formal – though not strictly official – ceremony in 2018. He wore a tuxedo, she a handmade dress and veil, and 39 guests turned up to watch. Kondo’s marriage has been covered in the media dozens of times and it’s often treated as a one-off human-interest story – the kind of thing published so readers can gawk at it and say, “Oh, that’s weird.” Kondo’s story isn’t unique, though. Romantics have fallen in love with fictional characters throughout history and they continue to do so, both in Japan and elsewhere.

James Gray

Don’t fall for the latest scam targeting authors — I nearly did

“Hello, James Gray. I am [ABC, a well-known executive editor at Macmillan, New York]. I recently came across your work and was genuinely captivated by it… I’d love to learn more about any projects you may be developing... I’m also curious whether you are represented by a literary agent. If you are, I would be happy to continue the conversation via them.” This was a shot straight to the pumped-up ego. I’ve been slaving away more or less unnoticed for many years and published a few books, all pretty modest. Small things but mine own. At last, I’ve been spotted by a major publishing house. My name in lights. Here comes the big time. So I shot off some manuscripts, a résumé, a blurb.

Tim Shipman

Revealed: the feuding at the heart of Reform

If Tolstoy had written about British politics, he might have noted: “Happy parties are all alike; every unhappy party is unhappy in its own way.” Reform UK is beginning to resemble a laboratory test for the idea that every party run by Nigel Farage is unhappy in the same way. Just as in UKIP and the Brexit party, a highly dominant leader exists at the center of a court, with extreme tensions between loyalist long-marchers and arrivistes, between insurgency and respectability, between campaigning and preparing for government. A new round of bloodletting erupted on August 17, when the founder of ConservativeHome, Tim Montgomerie, who defected to Reform two years ago, was suspended following public criticism of Farage and the party’s home affairs spokesman Zia Yusuf.

Charles Moore

The questions Cambridge still has to answer about Jason Arday

If poor Jason Arday killed himself, it will be necessary to work out why. To do so, it will help to know why he resigned his professorship. It seems highly unlikely he resigned if Cambridge University did not want him to. It had defended him in public throughout, after all. Yet if he had been confident of Cambridge’s continuing support, why did he sacrifice the benefit of its protection? If Cambridge suggested to him that its protection would, for whatever reason, shortly cease, what caused its change of mind? What a terrible shock for him if the institution which had raised him so high was now ready to cast him out. Is the institutional attack on the press over this matter a deflection from the truth?

Quentin Letts

Enjoy Anglican priests while you still can

Something amazing happened as I was walking my 91-year-old mother through Ledbury: we saw a bobby on the beat. He was even in a helmet, not a baseball cap. “A real policeman!” squealed various people, reacting as they might to a steam train or an Austin-Healey, reminders of more distinctive days. The same surprise may soon be evident when we see dog collars. A new scheme, oversight ministry, adopted by some Church of England dioceses, is taking vicars off the streets. Instead of being front-line clergy they will become “oversight ministers” and “area deans,” managers of lay, unpaid “focal ministers.

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).

Douglas Murray

The mawkish madness of Dobby’s ‘grave’

I don’t know how many readers have visited the grave of Dobby the house-elf, but any who have should immediately be sectioned and have their subscriptions to The Spectator canceled. This strong course of action occurs to me after reading one of those stories that can make you laugh, cry and smack your head into your hands all at once. It relates to a “memorial” which apparently sits on Freshwater West beach in Pembrokeshire, Wales. The area is run by the National Trust – a charity which used to look after the UK’s heritage sites. The beach in question was where filming took place for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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