The spectator

Welp, another 30 days in the gulag. How will I ever survive this time? About a year ago, I stopped using Facebook almost entirely, deleted the app from my phone, and ceased to accept new ‘friends,’ as a few thousand requests continue to pile up in my inbox. It got to a point that, even while self-censoring, nearly every time I opened my mouth on the platform I got slapped with a ban. There was nothing I could do: someone at Facebook clearly has me on a list and, really, Facebook is lame. I’m not sticking around some tyrant’s house if he doesn’t want me there. But friends encouraged me to say. I’m ‘letting them win’, my friends said, if I deleted my account, as though they haven’t already won.

Spectator USA is barely a year old, but its British parent has been around since the 19th century. Indeed, The Spectator’s pedigree is even older than that, as the magazine takes its name from an earlier, 18th-century sheet produced by Joseph Addison and Richard Steele. Today The Spectator’s British website harks back to the days of Addison and Steele in the name of its daily commentary department, the ‘Coffee House,’ for in the 18th century, coffee houses were the places where things like The Spectator and other specimens of what would later evolve into magazines and newspapers were usually to be found. Before there were newsstands or bookstores with magazine racks, there were coffee houses. ​Today Facebook is like the world’s worst coffee house.