Freddy Gray

How do you sound clever and au courant in 2014? Easy. You talk knowingly about Capital in the 21st Century, the seminal, magisterial, definitive, landmark, pick-your-coverblurb-adjective book by French academic Thomas Piketty. It’s all about the growing gap between rich and poor, you see, and inequality is all the rage. No wonder: it’s fun to

These online crypto-currencies have made the financial world more fun. It’s all so gloriously bonkers. First there was Bitcoin, the ‘peer-to-peer’ online payment system founded in 2009. Almost nobody understood how it worked or what a Bitcoin actually was — something to do with chains of code, computer ‘mining’, and a ledger system — but

Poor David Moyes, sacked before the season ends. Living up to the standards set by Sir Alex Ferguson was always an impossible task, especially since Fergie left Manchester United in a shoddy state. Moyes inherited a squad stuffed with arrogant past-its like Rio Ferdinand and Ashley Young. It’s testament to Ferguson’s terrifying force of personality

How do you solve a problem like revenge porn? It’s a strange new social evil. More and more men are getting back at women who dump them by posting sex videos and/or photos of them online, along with their name and contact details for all to see. It’s not just a nasty man thing, either

The digital-age male is a pathetic creature. Shorn of all his old manly attributes, he has to puff himself up. He does this, as Clive Martin on Vice magazine pointed out recently, by ingesting large amounts creatine, lifting weights, thinking about his clothes (sorry, look), and calling everyone a legend, because if everyone is a

Politicians like to insinuate that they have a ‘cultural hinterland’ — a range of interesting interests beyond Westminster. Take Stella Creasy, the MP for Walthamstow, who describes herself as an ‘Indie Kid’. This morning she read a Telegraph post by Peter Oborne about modern politicians being too inexperienced and dull. ‘Think of Healey; Crossman; Crosland;

Cheers today from the Tory ranks for the Chancellor’s decision to raise taxes on Fixed Odds Betting Terminals to 25 per cent. Nobody in the political and media elite likes these digital-age one-arm bandits, as I wrote in the magazine last month, because they exploit ‘the most vulnerable’ in society and because they have effectively

Yesterday I took part in an interesting discussion at The Catholic Herald’s offices on the subject of Pope Francis’s first year. The question was, as it seemed to be for the BBC this morning, whether his ‘revolution’ has been one of substance or style. The answer, I reckon, is a bit of both – and

First published in 2014, this bluffer’s guide may still help you feel like Chatham House’s finest at your next dinner party… We’re all journalists now, apparently, so when a major foreign policy crisis comes along it is important to be prepared. Everyone must learn the art of winging it as the big news breaks. That’s not

I wrote a piece about the Fixed Odds Betting Terminals uproar in the magazine this week, and it has prompted some angry responses by email and over social media. I’m told that I didn’t treat problem gambling with sufficient seriousness. I’m not sorry about that, I’m afraid: I think it’s silly to be too serious about the vices of others.

Hands up: who knows what a FOBT is? It stands for fixed odds betting terminal. No? Well, you should, because they are a serious menace to society. That’s what Ed Miliband says, anyway. FOBTs, you see, are those souped-up slot machines one can find in bookmakers’ shops all over the country, especially in deprived areas,

Boy oh boy do I feel sorry for Laurie Penny. I hope that’s not a sexist thing to say. There she is, doing what she does, churning out perfectly harmless po-mo guff for the New Statesman about ‘why the patriarchy fears scissors‘ because ‘short hair is a political statement’ — and people seem to hate her for it, as