Features

Wednesday

November 5, 2025

Prince Andrew finds refuge in video games

Oh God, not that. That’s all we need, I thought, reading in a long account of Britain’s Prince Andrew’s current travails that “according to visitors to Royal Lodge,” he now “spends much of his time playing video games.” Even before all the unpleasantness with the child-rape allegations against Jeffrey Epstein, one of the Prince’s more embarrassing qualities was his appearing as an “ambassador” for this or that – usually accompanied by a helicopter trip to a golf course. Now he’s reduced – no chopper, no putting green; woe is him – to being an ambassador for adults who play video games. As an adult who plays video games, and even writes about them from time to time, I generally welcome news of figures in public life who do the same. Not on this occasion.

Roger Kimball

Time for a reckoning on the 2020 election

Last spring and summer I watched bits of our contemporary gladiatorial contests, AKA congressional confirmation hearings. One thrust that many Democrat inquisitors relied on to soften up their victims was some form of the question: “Do you believe that Joe Biden won the 2020 election?” At least one contestant resorted to the parry “I believe that Joe Biden was seated as president,” which of course is not quite the same thing as acknowledging that he actually won. The subterfuge did not pass by unnoticed. Nothing escapes these Democrat Divas of the Dialectic. Having exposed the equivocation, they attempted to pounce. “Aha! So you are an election denier! Now let’s talk about the attempted insurrection of January 6.

Owen Matthews

Putin thinks time is on his side

Very well then – war. That is the bottom line of Vladimir Putin’s response to Donald Trump’s latest attempts at mediating an end to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. In August, Putin rejected the peace deal that Trump lined up in Alaska. Now, the Kremlin has scuttled the White House’s plan for a summit in Budapest by insisting that Russia’s demands for Ukrainian demilitarization and “de-nazification” remain in force. Clearly, the Russian President still believes that he can win the war on the battlefield – and terrorize Ukraine’s civilians. What is Putin’s plan?

Lionel Shriver

I’m a slave to my Apple Watch

Aside from streaming on an iPad, when riding a stationary bike one of the few entertainments on offer is tracking your heart rate. Breaking 150 beats per minute provides a fleeting (and doubtless misplaced) sense of achievement. Yet the wearable heart monitor that came with my exercise bicycle proved unreliable; one’s BPM never truly drops from 137 to 69 in one second. This is all to explain why I bought the fitness freak’s fetish: an Apple watch. Its heart rate monitors are accurate. I opted for a reconditioned older model, not only half the price of the new ones but inclusive of the pulse oximeter function, which a medical technology suit has forced Apple to eliminate in current American models until the litigant’s patent runs out in 2028.

Jonathan Leaf

Humans are more than just apes

Revolutions in science happen like Mike’s bankruptcy in Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises: slowly, then suddenly. For the past two decades, neuroscientists have been interested in the ways that the human brain differs from those of other primates. The prevailing assertion among primatologists was that our genome is only 1 to 2 percent distinct from chimps’. Then in April, a team of more than a hundred of the world’s top geneticists published an article in Nature revealing that it’s actually ten times as different. This has enormous implications. After all, if humans aren’t just souped-up chimps – as primatologists have often suggested – then many widely accepted ideas about our nature must be reconsidered.

Joseph D'Hippolito

Pope Leo is following in Francis’s footsteps

Since Pope Leo XIV’s election in May, Catholics have wondered whether he would continue Pope Francis’s radical agenda or ignite a more conservative reaction. After five months, the verdict appears clear. Leo will not only promote the principal policies in Francis’s agenda, but work to solidify them. This includes suppressing traditionalist theology and liturgy while bolstering activism on the environment, migration and same-sex relationships. Traditionalists initially viewed Leo with hope. They noted his ability to recite the Latin Mass, his choice of papal livery favored by Pope Benedict XVI and his meeting with Cardinal Raymond Burke, who supports maintaining the Latin Mass. But the new pope refuses to discipline bishops who move against traditionalists.

Daniel McCarthy

Trump is being misled on Venezuela

President Trump is being misled into a regime-change war close to home. Few Americans nowadays find much to celebrate in the Iraq War or the intervention that overthrew Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi. Regimes were successfully changed both times, but what came after the dictators’ downfall was civil war, regional instability and mass-migration flows that exported many of those nations’ troubles to their neighbors. Now the Trump administration wants to do to Venezuela’s despot, Nicolás Maduro, what George W. Bush did to Saddam Hussein and Barack Obama did to Gaddafi. That will predictably do to the Americas – including the US – what the War on Terror did to the Middle East, North Africa and Europe. Why would Donald Trump make such a mistake?

Neal Pollack

Wokeness ended my backroom Jeopardy! habit

In May I got a Facebook message from a guy named Mikey Walsh, who I’d met once at a trivia night at Mister Tramps, one of the diviest dive bars in Austin, Texas. He told me he’d been running a quiz called “Buzz In Buzzed,” which was exactly like Jeopardy!. Several of the regular players had been on Jeopardy! like me, and he was looking for more contestants to play. “This is not a business,” he said. “It’s free to play, and there’s no prizes. It’s just nerds playing trivia for fun.” This wasn’t the kind of offer I turn down. The opportunity to play fake Jeopardy! in the back of the bar for no money? Sign me up, I said. A couple of weeks later, I went to Buzz In Buzzed.

Mary Wakefield

Michael Heath on 75 years at The Spectator

When I joined The Spectator in 2000, the office was in Bloomsbury, in a four-story Georgian house, and the further down the building you went, the more stylish, the more Spectator (I thought), everything became. On the top floor, blinds drawn, sitting in the half-dark, was Kimberly Fortier, the American publisher, often in long meetings with media alpha males. She would soon be married to the publisher Stephen Quinn and having an affair with former British home secretary David Blunkett, but was always looking to widen her portfolio. One floor down was former British prime minister Boris Johnson, then editor of the magazine, mostly immersed in meetings of his own with associate editor Petronella Wyatt. We’d sometimes find him on the landing, staring mistily into the middle distance.

Paul Wood

The return of Erik Prince

Erik Prince, the American mercenary, wants to sell you a phone. His Unplugged phone is aimed at stopping big tech and big government spying on you. It’s available in the United States, and shortly in the United Kingdom too. He tells me: “It’s been troubling for me to see the crackdown on free expression in the UK.” But the phone is a sideline. His main business remains sending private armies to some of the world’s most dangerous places. The Biden years were lean ones, or at least quiet ones; now that Donald Trump’s back, so is Prince. Most people know Prince as the founder of Blackwater, the world’s most notorious private military company. In 2014, four of Prince’s soldiers got long prison sentences in the US for opening fire on Iraqi civilians, killing 14.

Euan Dawtrey

How chess killed Danya Naroditsky

Last month, chess grandmaster Daniel “Danya” Naroditsky started streaming again from his house in North Carolina. He had taken a break from it recently; I was one of at least a thousand viewers to welcome him back that night. But something was off. Danya, normally effusive and energetic, seemed haggard. As the broadcast went on, he began to slur his words. At one point, realizing he’d made a wrong move, he punched himself in the head. It was painful to watch. Throughout, Danya talked about a man whose accusations had allegedly subjected him to torment and abuse over the past year. At times, he was close to tears.

Michael P. Gibson

3I, the interstellar object that’s baffling astronomers

Science began in the skies. Just after sunset, to be exact, on the evening of November 11, 1572 when a young Danish nobleman, Tycho Brahe, raised his eyes to the night sky. There, above his head, a star was shining brighter than all the rest – a new star that should not have been. Brahe thought he was mistaken, that his eyes were playing tricks on him, but others confirmed what he saw. And yet, according to the reigning theory, derived from Aristotle, there could be no change in the eternal heavens. Surely then this object could not be a star. It must be an anomaly in the upper atmosphere, closer to the Earth, within terrestrial realms. But Brahe got to work. Using trigonometry and observations, he found that the impossible had indeed occurred.

Sean Thomas

Live-translation AirPods are the future

I have arrived in Naples, Italy, after an arduous flight from a chaotic London Gatwick Airport. I’m settled in a glamorous top floor apartment in the Quartieri Spagnoli – the romantic old “Spanish Quarter” – where Vespas fizz over cobbles and laundry hangs across alleys like flags of endless surrender. Most importantly, I’m clutching my Apple AirPods3 in their shiny new capsule. Because I’ve come here to do a grand, futuristic experiment using their much-heralded “live translate” function. Does it really work as smoothly as Apple says? Can I actually slot them in my ears and have them translate the Italian speaker in front of me, in real time? Is it really like the sci-fi Babel Fish from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy?

Katherine Dee

What Islam can teach us about AI

In Islamic cosmology there are three orders of intelligent beings. Angels, made of light, have no choice but obedience. Humans, formed from clay, carry the burden of free will. Between them live the djinn, created from “the smokeless flame of fire.” The djinn are, in many ways, like people, but they categorically are not people – from their constitution to their morality. Like the Good Neighbors of British and Celtic tradition, the djinn exist in parallel to us. They think and decide, marry and worship, and are fallible, just as we are. The Qur’an describes some as believers and others as not: “And among us are Muslims [in submission to Allah], and among us arethe unjust.

Tuesday

October 21, 2025

Spectator Editorial

Trump’s border policy is beginning to bear fruit

The second Trump administration tends to characterize those who have illegally crossed the southern US border as drug dealers, criminals and rapists. That is, of course, exaggeration, but it is no more a fiction than is the alternative belief, common among liberals, that all migrants are desperate people fleeing for their lives, who cannot possibly be expected to live in their home countries and are utterly dependent on making it to America in order to survive. If that were true, illegal migration would be little to worry about and good for the soul – and indeed the economic well-being – of America.

Neal Pollack

Why is Stephen Miller so divisive?

One of the most striking things about Trump 2: The Trumpening is how few characters are still on board from the Donald’s first term. Other than the President himself, it’s almost a completely different cast. Even the First Lady only rarely appears, as though she’s contractually obliged as a guest star for the occasional episode. But there’s one very important exception: White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller. And while Trump Derangement Syndrome afflicts millions of Americans, Miller Derangement Syndrome is, as they used to say during Covid, a comorbidity. MDS may have reached its peak earlier this month when Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez referred to Miller as a “clown.

Tara Reade

From Russia with love

My morning routine is the same. Coffee, feed cats, exercise, walk, read the latest news. Except now I wake up in Moscow. The coffee shop, Skuratov, is Siberian and they roast their own beans. The coffee is strong with a chicory flavor. I meet my colleague from RT International and we discuss all the latest geopolitics and news around town. Later, I take the metro. For less than $5, I am across town. The metro is clean, marble and looks like a museum with beautiful sculptures. Unlike the metro in NYC or Chicago, there are no drunks, no rats and the train is quiet as passengers read their books or phones. No one has to clutch their purse or bag as there is very little petty theft.

Ben Domenech

How Israel won the war – and lost the PR battle

Regardless of the ultimate outcome of the Gaza peace deal brokered by Donald Trump, the past two years have seen Israel achieve an unprecedented litany of military accomplishments in the Middle East. The level of damage done to Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis is difficult to comprehend. The end of the Assad regime and, with American support, the demolition of the Iranian nuclear program – setting it back years at the least – were steps that many once thought impossible. Israel has emerged from the post-October 7 period unquestionably stronger in every way except one: its support around the globe, particularly among the youngest voices in the West.

Katarina Szulc

How the drug cartels are ‘diversifying’ into baby-trafficking

Juárez, Mexico On the morning of September 2, in Juárez, Chihuahua, Mexican law enforcement raided a remote safehouse and uncovered one of the most grotesque cartel operations they had ever encountered. They found not just the usual drugs but rudimentary medical equipment and bloodstained tarps. The evidence confirmed what many investigators had suspected but couldn’t prove: that growing US demand has created a black market in human babies. Police arrested a brutal female gangster, Martha Alicia Mendez Aguilar, who was allegedly running an operation that procured these babies, luring in young mothers and performing illegal C-sections. On the streets they call her La Diabla: the She-Devil.

Luke Lyman

How Alex Jones won

One of my favorite Walt Whitman stanzas goes like this: I’m a pioneer! I’m an explorer! I’m a human, and I’m comin’! I’m animated! I’m alive! My heart’s big! It’s got hot blood goin’ through it fast! I like to fight! I like to eat! I like to have children! I’m here! I got a life force! This is a human! This is what we look like! This is what we act like! This is what everyone was like before us! This is what I am! Just kidding. That’s Alex Jones, the voice of our time. Nobody in media has won more in the past 20 years than Jones. He’s lost a lot along the way, of course, including the largest defamation suit in American history and access to every mainstream media platform. But those were only temporary slowdowns.