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 get all hot under the collar about the 'mega-rich' — especially if you're secretly cushioned by the knowledge that you've got a bit tucked away yourself. Piketty (who must himself be making a mint) even topped the Amazon.com bestseller list last week, not bad for a such a big book on such a heavy subject. But really, who is going to trudge through 700-pages on economic theory?

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 that didn’t stop anti-government types everywhere embracing the idea. A decentralised currency that politicians and bankers cannot manipulate and spoil — what’s not to like? Following Bitcoin, all sorts of junior crypto-currencies have popped up, mushroom-like, across the web.

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 that United managed somehow to win the league last season with such a dodgy ensemble; but he deserves criticism too for leaving a mess behind. Yes, Moyes failed to handle the big ego players — which seems to be the essential skill for a top manager these days. Yes, he never seemed to know his best starting eleven.

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 -- apparently some bitter women are doing it, too. The whole saga begins, in the public eye at least, with celebrities: Paris Hilton and the singer Tulisa, among others, had embarrassing sex tapes published on the web. In Tulisa's case the dirty vid emerged just as her new album was out, which must been terrible timing for her and very painful. As a subject, revenge porn has everything our web-traffic-obsessed media wants. Slebs, sex, porn, the net. Tick tick tick tick. Click click click click.

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 legend then he must be a legend, too. We all become heroes, as Mike Skinner — legend! — said. Oh, and he takes selfies. Lots and lots of selfies. Witness the latest #cockinasock fad: men snapping themselves naked, their penises in socks, their torsos tensed, so as to post the images online in the name of raising awareness and/or money for testicular cancer.

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; Jenkins; Callaghan; Castle and others,' wrote Oborne. 'They had knocked around life far more than the modern generation. They were much broader in their interests: at home in arts, academic or military life almost as much as Westminster.' 'Whatevs,' answered Stella on Twitter.

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 saved the high-street bookie from death by internet. So anything that makes William Hill and Ladbrokes, the sinisterly rich bookies, worse off must be a good thing. Right? Ed Miliband and Tom Watson, among others, want to give councils the power to ban FOBTs. That seems fundamentally illiberal. But Watson is right to say that the government's latest levy on FOBTs means that the Treasury will 'profit from the problem rather than deal with it.

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 a bit of neither. Yes, Francis has thrilled left-liberals everywhere by suggesting that the Church should be nicer to gays and women, by telephoning famous atheists for a chinwag, and by – altogether now – ‘snubbing the pomp and ceremony’ of the papal office. But I’m not sure how radical a departure all that is, really.

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 easy these days. What with Wikipedia on every mobile phone, our understanding of international relations can be called into question at any moment. So here, as a beginner's guide, are ten handy phrases for bluffing your way through a conversation about the situation in Ukraine: 'It's simplistic to think in terms of east versus west in today's global, multi-polar world.

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. My point was that the political and the media classes are having something of a moral panic about FOBTs  — and as always with moral panics, the political and media classes don't really know what they are talking about. I doubt Ed Miliband or Tom Watson, who both seem dead against FOBTs, have ever spent more than 10 minutes in a bookie.

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, usually next to Poundland. The most popular ones offer casino-type games, such as roulette, and have become notorious because of the speed with which they enable punters to lose large sums of money: up to £100 every 20 seconds, apparently. The Daily Mail likes to call FOBTs the ‘crack cocaine of gambling’, which makes them sound much more fun than they are.

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 if she were saying  something dangerously wrong. 'If you've a ladyboner for sexist schmuckweasels,' says Penny, 'short hair isn't going to help, although they might let you administer a disappointing hand-job.' Top drawer prose, that — witty, rude, could be a quote from Lena Dunham's Girls, everything a good New Statesman or Guardian article should be.