Global fertility is plummeting, as are sperm counts. The populations of Spain and Japan are set to halve; nearly every country will begin to shrink. Researchers say we will have to totally reorganise society if we are to maintain order through this transition. This is not the introduction to the dystopian thriller ‘Children of Men’; Read More
An open letter expressing a generic defence of free speech was published in Harper’s Magazine last Tuesday. By Wednesday morning, two signatories had been hectored into retracting their support, a third had been reported to their employer, and a broad swathe of the activist ecosystem was busy proving the letter’s point that censorship and shaming, Read More
One of the traps politics sets for the unwary is the temptation to enter into process-oriented politics. What I mean by this is a politics devoted to upholding the perceived integrity of a particular process rather than devoted to producing a particular outcome. Politics becomes about doing things in the right way rather than getting Read More
A rope is tied round the neck and feet of a statue standing on a plinth. Six men standing below heave and pull it to the ground, where it shatters as a riotous crowd smashes windows. Half a century after academics began to publish treatises on the need for deep and lasting change, anger and Read More
“If I were in that march, and these racist lunatics were waiving [sic] guns at me, I’d like to think I’d rush them and beat their brains in. And I wouldn’t apologize for it for one goddam second” — Jerry Taylor, President of the Niskanen Center () Think about it for a second. Wouldn’t it Read More
The art of crisis PR is saying as little as possible in as many words as you can. The intent is to obfuscate and blur meaning until all that’s left is a vague sense that something is being done (it isn’t) and that great contrition is felt (ditto). In the event that an employee commits Read More
Newspapers across the United States are tying themselves into knots justifying the decision to capitalise ‘Black’ while keeping ‘white’ lowercase. The Chicago Sun-Times provides a useful illustration; its new approach capitalises ‘Black’ and ‘Brown’ but retains ‘white’ in lower case as “a wider descriptor of people of numerous origins”, resulting in the curious conclusion that Read More
Until relatively recently, you may have been under the misapprehension that preventing people from breaking the law was somehow part of the job of a police officer. If current events had not quite managed to disabuse you of this notion, then you can ask Chief Constable Ben-Julian Harrington: officers at Black Lives Matter rallies dedicated Read More
I have no intention of explaining how I obtained this letter; suffice it to say that circumspect investigations have confirmed its authenticity, and the identity of the correspondents. My dear Wormwood, I read your latest letter with great trepidation. You may well feel that things with your patient are proceeding marvellously; he has been persuaded, Read More
Once again, Tom Holland has put it best: “Whenever people steeped in Christian assumptions experience a particular upsurge of moral fervour, iconoclasm has rarely been far behind.” With the police watching politely from the sidelines, enterprising mobs across Britain and America are taking matters into their own hands; monuments to the old ways must fall, Read More