In a recent column, I vowed to return to a point made in passing. To refresh your memory, the American magazine the Nation printed a formal apology for running a harmless 14-line poem by a white writer about homelessness. The poet’s sins: using the word ‘cripple’ and adopting a voice lightly evoking what I gather
Everyone knows the real reason people like Donald Trump are sceptical of climate change is that conservatives are fundamentally anti-science. Some doubt science because it conflicts with their religious beliefs; others because its implications might mean radically shifting the global economy in an anti-growth or heavily statist direction, which goes against their free-market ideology; others
Promoting physical fitness, the left has developed a bracing set of competitive callisthenics. Participants vie over who can complete a marathon crawl on the belly like a reptile, who can flop onto the floor in a pose of the greatest prostration, and who can bend over the farthest, pants down, while begging to have large
The latest exciting news is that it may very soon be possible for surgeons to perform uterine transplants, so endowing a man who has ‘transitioned’ into being a strange approximation of a woman with the ability to gestate a child. And to give birth, after a fashion. The benighted child would need to be hacked
Anxious to find out what food they served at the Red Hen restaurant in Lexington, Virginia, I clicked on the relevant site and was transported immediately to a discount motorcycle website entirely in Korean, or Japanese, or maybe Chinese. I don’t know — I can’t tell the difference between those respective hieroglyphics. Maybe that was
I’d been suffering under the misguided illusion that the purpose of mainstream publishers like Penguin Random House was to sell and promote fine writing. A colleague’s forwarded email has set me straight. Sent to a literary agent, presumably this letter was also fired off to the agents of the entire Penguin Random House stable. The
During a dozen years in Belfast I collected a number of political coffee mugs, hailing from both sides of the divide. Unionist designs including the heartbreakingly punctuated ‘Ulster Say’s No’ (not merely to the Anglo-Irish Agreement; no to everything) and the impressively witty ‘Reservoir Prods’: four toughs in shades identified as ‘Mr Orange’ and ‘Mr
When, on a test of general knowledge, the highly educated score far worse than chimpanzees, university degrees may be overrated (definitely). But something more interesting may also be going on. According to the newly released Factfulness by Hans Rosling, we would-be smart people would improve our results on multiple-choice questions about the current state of
After an essay in this month’s Prospect about literature and freedom of speech, it seems I was cited on Twitter as a ‘racist provocateur’. Now, I rather fancy being a ‘provocateur’. But as for the adjective. Someone can call you ‘stupid’, and that’s just one person’s opinion. It doesn’t seem true because a single childish
My friend’s ten-year-old daughter has a new hobby. Like many of her school pals, she hopes to become a video blogger — a ‘vlogger’. She has started to record clips of herself for others to watch, share and ‘like’. She showed me a few, then gave me a list of famous vloggers to watch: JoJo
When I mentioned on social media recently that I’d lost friends because of Brexit, I was quite surprised by the vehemence of the response. Lots of fellow Leavers had stories to tell about friends who now cut them dead or former clients who would no longer work with them. Many said they prefer to keep
By all accounts, Ikea founder Ingvar Kamprad was my kind of guy: may he rest in peace (on an Askvoll standard double). Like me, he was a skinflint. For a multibillionaire to buy his clothes at flea markets and select his groceries from supermarket quick-sale shelves is charming. About his retail wares, I’m more ambivalent.
Growing up in Raleigh, North Carolina, I took the monuments around the state capitol for granted. The first Confederate soldier killed in the Civil War, Henry Lawson Wyatt, has leaned into the wind on those grounds for 100 years. Atop a pedestal inscribed, ‘To North Carolina women of the Confederacy’, a mother in billowing skirts
