Lionel Shriver

In some quarters, American enterprise is alive and well. Established in 1929 to promote consumer protection, the conservative non-profit Consumers’ Research is launching the free service ‘Woke Alerts’, which texts subscribers news of companies ‘putting progressive activists and their dangerous agendas ahead of customers’. Using iconography reminiscent of adverts for those high-frequency plug-ins that ward off mice, the parent website urges shoppers tired of corporations latching onto fashionable left-wing causes to dramatise their displeasure through product boycotts. The idea is a bit goofy. Yet the app could appeal to a far more than niche market. Only 8 per cent of the US public self-identifies as far left.

Look, I realise you don’t want to read this column. I’m unenthusiastic about writing it. For most of us, any mention of Covid triggers a deep aversion and desperation to flee. Even recalling the uncanny tranquillity of the first you-know-what – the blue skies, the blazing sunshine, the serene silence in once-bustling London – makes me wince. Between the slow drip-feed of the Telegraph’s Lockdown Files and Rishi Sunak’s dubious Protocol breakthrough, most UK news consumers would have greeted last week’s headlines with a double-whammy of ‘Oh, no, not that again!’ – since the only subject that rivals Covid’s revulsion quotient for Brits is Northern Ireland. Waves of variants came and went, oblivious of state diktats.

North America’s Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Language Project has released yet another list of Bad Say. Scientists are to swap ‘male’ and ‘female’ for ‘sperm-producing’ and ‘egg-producing’ – as presumably most biologists are stuck in remedial learning and haven’t yet got to the chapter explaining that humans come in only two sexes. But rather than opt for another chortle at these petty rhetorical tyrants’ expense, I’m regarding turnabout as fair play. Behold, a by no means complete list of the expressions I’m banning right back. ‘Black and brown bodies’ – a bizarrely dehumanising reduction of people to biomass, often disconcertingly employed by the very folks in possession of said black and brown bodies.

After publishing 17 books, I’m no stranger to the publicity campaign. In my no-name days, my publicist would purr that my novel’s release would be ‘review-driven’ – which decodes: ‘We don’t plan to spend a sou on your doomed, inconsequential book.’ By contrast, as we’ve seen writ large with Prince Harry’s Spare, your volume can be cast upon the public waters as not a mere object but an event. The intention is to convince book-buyers that unless they snap up a copy sharpish they’ll be caught up short at cocktail parties.

Once the energy price cap expires in April, the Chancellor is apparently considering the levy of ‘social tariffs’ on the energy bills of the better off – a pleasantly elastic category, since most of us are better off than somebody. Charging wealthier customers extra for their energy could facilitate reducing the bills of benefit claimants. The same kilowatt hour would cost the ‘rich’ (i.e. the marginally solvent) more than the socially dependent. To bolster our beloved fairness, might this novel pricing scheme be extended to all British goods and services? After all, for higher-rate taxpayers (assuming that after obeisance to HMRC they have anything left), springing for a £7.95 fillet steak at the supermarket is a relatively mild experience.

If I seem to be bashing universities lately, they’ve asked for it. The prestigious New York University in lower Manhattan didn’t cover itself in glory when, just before this semester began, it responded to a petition from 82 students (out of a class of 350) by sacking the professor. The petitioners’ main objection? The course was too hard. After retiring from Princeton’s chemistry department where he’d taught organic chemistry for more than 40 years, Maitland Jones Jr taught the same course at NYU on one-year contracts as an adjunct. I used to be an adjunct, and this much hasn’t changed since my day: adjuncts are atrociously paid. I’m just guessing, but Dr Jones would surely have been handsomely remunerated at Princeton.