Culture

Twitter outrage about a few sectarian mugs has left Lionel Shriver glad to be in her fantasy world offline

Here in the English-speaking world, the hours after work and before dinner are known as the ‘reverse commute’. We spend these hours standing on trains, sitting in cars, or pedaling for our lives. Over there in France, these hours are called the ‘cinq à sept’. Although they may also involve being pressed up against other … Read more

Because we’re living under the New Misogyny

By ceasing its promotion of R. Kelly and XXXTentacion’s music, Spotify aims to show its users that they are headed towards the moral promised land.

Tom Wolfe has died at the age of 87. In 1998, William Cash interviewed the great author for The Spectator: Yes, Tom Wolfe does own one of those 12-room Upper East Side apartments, as he wrote in Bonfire of the Vanities, ‘the mere thought of which ignites flames of greed and covetousness under people all … Read more

Racer and the Jailbird is a terrible name for a film. It sounds like an unsolicited tribute to that sorrily misbegotten Seventies’ genre, the action-comedy buddy movie—like Freebie and the Bean (1974) or Smokey and the Bandit (1977). But it is not. Nor, though the trailers for Racer and the Jailbird misrepresent it as such, … Read more

In, Bartlett Sher’s revival, Eliza Doolittle’s stalwart character is the great triumph.

Cynically timed to minimise news coverage, Katy Perry’s decision to bury the hatchet with Taylor Swift just as things are kicking off big style in the Middle East is nevertheless huge news. The parallels between the Swift/Perry crisis and the historic tensions in the Middle East have long been impossible to ignore. Both have come to define a generation, and … Read more

If Trump is rotten from the core, what the hell does that say about the popular culture we’ve all let flourish in the past few decades?

If you were to revisit the house you grew up in, would you take a look at your old bedroom? The answer is yes, of course you would—unless, that is, you are Ronit, Rachel Weisz’s character in Sebastian Lelio’s Disobedience. If you are Ronit, you will instead ponder your late father the rabbi’s rich collection … Read more

It is now fifty years since the événements of May 1968, when young Parisians lobbed onobble stones at the police, occupied the Sorbonne, and launched the Boomers’ long march through the institutions. That makes it fifty years since Jean-Luc Godard lost the plot—never a good idea if you are a film-maker. Godard has made plenty … Read more

A doozy of a correction from the New York Times. On Sunday the Gray Lady published a profile of Campbell Brown, the CNN anchor turned head of news partnerships at Facebook, by Times tech reporter Nellie Bowles. All was going well until Bowles got onto the social media site’s new video series platform: ‘Ms. Brown wants to … Read more

Is Jon Hamm’s name really Jon Hamm? Or is it a stage name, meant to telegraph his acting style? When an actor is called Slim Pickens, you know he’ll never play the Dane. Hamm is the name at the top of the bill in Beirut, and preserved pork is what he delivers, thinly sliced in the … Read more

Has the British artist Steven Patrick Morrissey, often known simply by his last name Morrissey, embraced the alt-right? Or is he just living proof that not every celebrity Brit is a moral coward? This week, the former frontman for The Smiths has attracted media attention after he condemned Halal meat as “evil,” called out attempts to sabotage Britain’s exit … Read more

They called Ted Kennedy the Lion of the Senate. He spent most of his time stuffed, satiated and asleep, and the rest of it on the prowl for young flesh. He also had a hand in numerous pieces of legislation. But the only thing he will be remembered for is leaving Mary Jo Kopechne to … Read more

The recent news of a Spice Girls reunion will, I suspect, be greeted by some former fans with nostalgic longing and others with an embarrassed cringe. But whether you’re a fan or foe, I think it’s worth remembering that golden decade of Girl Power — the 1990s — when it was bliss to be young … Read more

Everybody wants Facebook to be grilled. But big tech firms will only gain from legislation.  

Martin Luther King’s vision was Christian, American, and liberal in a Jeffersonian way. Modern progressives conveniently forget this

Exhausting adventures with a fading right-wing phenomenon

Wonderstruck is a film by Todd Haynes and you will certainly be struck by wonder, often. You will wonder at its painful slowness. You will wonder at the way it strains credulity until it snaps. You will wonder if the violins will ever give it a rest. You will wonder if it will ever end. … Read more

These days throwing insults often just means ‘I disagree with you’

At dinner the other night a friend wondered what came first, social climbing or name-dropping? It’s obviously a very silly question, and we all had a laugh about it. ‘As Achilles told me in his tent the other evening, Helen always fancied him and Menelaus didn’t like it a bit.’ Or, ‘I’m rather tired of … Read more

Americans breathed a sigh of disappointment last week when the promised super-heavyweight bout between Joe Biden and Donald Trump stalled after the weigh-in trash talk. “They asked me, would I like to debate this gentleman, and I said no,” Biden said as he stripped to his trunks. “I said, ‘If we were in high school, … Read more

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 … Read more

Grade: B+ Another ex-Long Beach crip replanted in pleasant Orange County via the conduit of very large amounts of record company money and thus now able to draw on his time as a gangsta, while telling us all it was a very naughty thing to have done. The difference between Staples and much of the … Read more

It was only Seven Days in Entebbe, but it felt like an eternity. The rescue in July 1976 by Israeli commandos of 102 Jewish and Israeli hostages from Palestinian and German terrorists at Entebbe airport in Uganda was a scriptwriter’s dream: a three-act drama of crisis, complication and resolution, in which the good guys won—good … Read more