Features

Thursday

D.J. Taylor

Tolkien knew the truth about power

One route into the thorny question of J.R.R. Tolkien’s politics comes courtesy of Giorgia Meloni. Scarcely a profile of the Italian Prime Minister hits the newsstands these days without the Tolkien references piling up like so many windfall apples: The Hobbit plays put on with fellow-members of the Movimento Sociale Italiano youth group back in the 1990s; the fixation on the Ringbearer’s sidekick Sam Gamgee (“Much more useful than Frodo”); the annual birthday tribute to a man who “brought up so many of us with his stories.” Here, clearly is a Middle-earth obsessive, Tolkien’s work a direct prompt for political action. Head a thousand miles north into the Scandinavian forests and the hard-right tocsin clangs even louder.

Sarah Beth Spraggins

Is Pete Hegseth running for president? Or getting fired?

Pete Hegseth has a face for television and a machismo of sorts. It appears, even to parts of MAGA, that Donald Trump put him in charge of the armed forces because the President likes attractive people on TV. “Right out of central casting,” Trump once told Secretary Hegseth, patting him on the bicep. “Pete loves war!” Hegseth has declared that he wants to sideline military lawyers and go from “tepid legality” to “maximum lethality,” partly because it rhymes. He was accused of ordering the killing of survivors after strikes on alleged Caribbean drug boats – which, if true, would be a war crime. Hegseth has a tattoo on his right arm that reads “Deus Vult,” a rallying cry from the first crusade in 1096.

Lionel Shriver

We are ignoring the biggest threat the world faces

In my mid-twenties, my one-bedroom in Astoria, Queens, developed a roach problem. I don’t mean the odd single scurry disappearing irretrievably beneath the fridge, either. Oh, it started that way. But I didn’t take measures when the situation was manageable because roaches gave me the creeps, and so many activities beckoned that were much more fun. Between a small shelf and the kitchen wall I stored spare brown paper bags – from which I began to detect a rustling. At some point, the bags began to move. Beside them, the wall gathered an undulating shadow that I trained myself never to look at directly; like Faye Dunaway in Little Big Man, I would “avert my eyes at the necessary moment.” One night a friend came to dinner and stared at that wall in frank revulsion.

Wednesday

Milo Yiannopoulos

I am a persecuted human rights icon

Thursday night, New Orleans. I have flown in from Los Angeles for work and am walking off the jet bridge, thinking about dinner, when 15 men in vests coalesce around me. I have never been arrested before. Even they find it strange, because I am British, and I am in Balenciaga, and I am ever so nice about it all. They take my belt, wallet, every piece of identification, my rosary and missal, cash. They put me in chains. Real chains. Every man they arrest, whatever he has done, ends up garlanded in steel like this: wincing, hopping, clattering. It hurts more than they make out on TV.  I mean to stare into his lens with defiance and stoicism, but I am fat and covered in filth and stains and drool Yes. I am being deported.

Thursday

Eilis O’Hanlon

How Ireland succumbed to ‘radical chic’

When a law student from Co. Kildare was stopped this summer on suspicion of transporting a bomb across the Irish border for use by dissident republicans, her solicitor said she had not been aware of what was in the bag and that she had been “manipulated.” Yet the 25-year-old’s arrest highlighted an alarming revival in Irish republicanism – and the role being played by a younger, well-educated, middle-class generation. During the Troubles, much of Ireland mercifully avoided the pull of radicalism. There was always a certain degree of quiet sympathy for the IRA in predictable sections of the media and academia, but popular support for Sinn Fein, the Irish Republican party, in the 26-county Republic remained negligible throughout the worst years of terrorism.

Friday

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?

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Thursday

Damian Thompson

Why Democrats can’t close the God gap

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.

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.

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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.

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.

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.

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.

Spectator Editorial

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.

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.

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.

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.

Daniel McCarthy

How capitalism subsidizes 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.