In the literary world this week, a hackneyed writing genre got an unexpected revival: the stern-faced #MeToo callout. Fearlessly exposing a famous person’s sexual impropriety for the scandalised enjoyment of all, the long read in New York Magazine took as its subject the extremely successful “dark fantasy” writer Neil Gaiman. Sensible readers had already guessed the ending: that the overindulged manbaby in black, with his wild gothic imagination and propensity to hitch himself to splash...| UnHerd
In 1843, the British economy plunged into railway mania. The public had seen the success of the earlier railway projects, and a newly-minted class of middle-class investors wanted their piece of the rapidly-expanding pie. Within two years, stock prices doubled, and the number of railroad securities listed on the London Stock Exchange trebled. In the press, rapturous commentary heralded “the arrival of a time when the whole world will have become one great family, speaking one language, gove...| UnHerd
Lots of people don’t believe in second acts, second lives, mid-life resurrections. As F. Scott Fitzgerald put it in The Last Tycoon, published in 1941: “There are no second acts in American lives.” But his absolutism was being embarrassed at that very moment: 1941 was also the year that Dwight D. Eisenhower became a late bloomer. Before the war came to America, Eisenhower had thought he would retire, without ever having seen either war service or getting a chance to exercise his talents...| UnHerd
Back in 1981, a bitter battle was being fought for the soul of the Labour party. Two totemic figures of the party’s Left and Right wings went head-to-head for the deputy leadership. In the end, Tony Benn — a doyen of the Eighties New Left scene — lost by the tiniest of margins to Denis Healey, who stemmed the flow of moderate MPs to the breakaway Social Democratic Party, and set in motion Labour’s project of “modernization”.| UnHerd
When my daughter was finishing her freshman year of high school in Canada, all at once and without warning, she became the target of school bullying because she was a Christian, or, as the other kids teased, “a Chrees-jan”. A “Chrees-jan” group chat was created by other high school kids, whose sole purpose was to mock my daughter and her faith. Some kids threatened to beat her up. Others, those she thought were her friends, quietly abandoned her. It got so bad that the public school...| UnHerd
Some weeks before the American presidential election, Robert Paxton, the most distinguished American historian of 20th century France — and author of a classic book on fascism — abandoned his previous scepticism about designating Donald Trump as a fascist. What changed his mind was 6 January. To Paxton, the assault on the Capitol was dangerously reminiscent of the anti-parliamentary riots that took place in Paris on 6 February 1934, an event that many on the French Left saw as a botched ...| UnHerd
A common method of intimidation in Dutch gang warfare is to hang an illegal Cobra firework on your opponent’s front door and then run away. The method is not dissimilar to that of greying, far-Right politician Geert Wilders, who, less than a year after his Freedom Party (PVV) joined the government coalition, has just blown it all up.| UnHerd
Thirty-year-old Wouter van Steenberge still lives at home with his mum. “I had an academic education, I have no study debts, I did everything right,” he says. “My generation has no hope at the moment.”| UnHerd
“My philosophy, Mr President, is that all foreigners are out to screw us and it’s our job to screw them first.” With these words, the US Treasury Secretary convinced the President to deliver a colossal shock to the global economy. In the words of one of the President’s men, the objective was to trigger “a controlled disintegration of the world economy”.| UnHerd
While he dismissed Bitcoin as a scam during his first White House stint, Trump has now definitively changed tack. He warmed to cryptocurrencies during his re-election campaign, and to complete his conversion, on 6 March he signed an executive order to set up a “Strategic Bitcoin Reserve and a US Digital Asset Stockpile”.1| UnHerd
Faced with President Trump’s economic moves, his centrist critics oscillate between desperation and a touching faith that his tariff frenzy will fizzle out. They assume that Trump will huff and puff until reality exposes the emptiness of his economic rationale. They have not been paying attention: Trump’s tariff fixation is part of a global economic plan that is solid — albeit inherently risky.| UnHerd
Rereading the novelist David Peace’s GB84, set during the Miners’ Strike, it recently struck me that when Peace wrote the novel, in 2004, he was writing from the middle of the “End of History” era. His portrayal of a country on edge, breaking apart under civil conflict, was a historicising one. Twenty years after the events it depicted, its jagged, paranoid tone was a literary construct, not a reflection of Peace’s lived reality under the New Labour consensus. Yet in today’s Brita...| UnHerd
A perceptive journalist once said that Donald Trump should be taken “seriously but not literally”. The same could have been said about Charles de Gaulle. On the opening page of his memoirs, he wrote that his “certain idea of France” was “like the princess in the fairy tale” and there was always a sense in which de Gaulle knew that he was telling his countrymen a kind of fairy tale. For example, Paris was not, as he said in his speech of 25 August 1944, “liberated by itself”. T...| UnHerd
I once met an old lady in the delightful little town of Neuvic d’Ussel who had forgotten the fact that her next-door neighbour, Henri Queuille, had been prime minister on three different occasions. One can see why she might have failed to remember this. In the course of the French Fourth Republic (1946-1958), there were 16 prime ministers and 21 governments, none of which lasted much longer than a year. There were many small and poorly disciplined parties: several groupings described themse...| UnHerd
In 1950, Lionel Trilling argued that liberalism forms America’s sole intellectual tradition. Conservatives, by contrast, vent only “irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas”. Fast-forward 75 years, and Trilling’s stinging rebuke could apply equally to The Argument, a Substack-based magazine newly launched to “make a positive, combative case for liberalism”. Flush with $4 million [...]Read More...| UnHerd
“When I started writing books for children, I knew what interested me,” Daniel Handler writes early on in his new memoir And Then? And Then? What Else?. “Terrible things happening, like in all the best literature.” Now there’s a man who understands his own muse. Writing as Lemony Snicket, in A Series of Unfortunate Events, Handler has been true to that muse. He piled terrible thing on terrible thing with an insouciant sweetness and lugubrious humour little rivalled in con...| UnHerd
In a Manhattan preschool last year, my daughter’s class read The Pigeon HAS to Go to School! by Mo Willems, a book that has now spent 66 weeks on The New York Times best-seller list for children’s picture books. | UnHerd
Democratic voters frustrated by their party’s feckless leadership got a shot in the arm last month when former Sen. Sherrod Brown of Ohio, an economic populist with deep ties to the Buckeye State’s industrial working class, launched his campaign to take on Republican Sen. Jon Husted. Brown is by no means certain to prevail. In his bid for a fourth Senate term, Brown lost by 3.5 percentage points last November to MAGA newcomer and car-dealership tycoon Bernie Moreno. And the first poll of ...| UnHerd
School sucks. Early mornings, double maths, running round freezing-cold sports pitches — the thought of doing it all again makes me break out in a nervous sweat. Once a month or so, I have the same nightmare: it’s sixth form, and my exam results are in my hands. In my real life, my dad entered into a classic girls’ school bribe. If I got full marks in the IB, he’d pay for my nose job. I met my side of the bargain — but by 18, I’d grown into my bumpy nose anyway.| UnHerd
“In war-torn Asia, Tibetans have practiced non-violence for over a thousand years…” So begins Martin Scorsese’s epic 1997 drama Kundun. Denied filming in India, dropped by Universal, disavowed by its eventual distributor Disney as a “stupid mistake” that alienated China, its release was almost miraculous. Yet, for all its merits, its opening claim, far from being a scrupulous summation of Tibetan history, still stands out as one of the more sensational exhibits of the seraphic sp...| UnHerd
“They Kant Be Serious!” ran the headline in the Daily Mail a few years ago, above claims that students at SOAS wanted to do away with the likes of Plato and Descartes as part of efforts to “decolonise” the curriculum. Now, a mixed team of undergraduates and academic philosophers at SOAS have produced “Decolonising Philosophy: A Toolkit”, giving rise once again to anger and incredulity in Right-leaning newspapers.| UnHerd
There’s good news. And there’s bad news. The International Monetary Fund won’t be descending on 11 Downing Street any time soon. The situation of the UK in 1976 is not comparable with today’s — unfortunately, it is incomparably worse.| UnHerd
True to its Marxist-Leninist roots, the Chinese Communist Party has long regarded religion as spiritual opium. A few weeks ago, it appeared to double down on the drugs imagery by banning people from entering the country carrying religious ideas or objects beyond those required for personal use. Foreign nationals hoping to deal in religion — preaching, teaching or organising religious events — must now seek permission ahead of time from state-sanctioned religious bodies (that permission wi...| UnHerd
This rite of dotage called Late Style is peculiar to artists of one sort or another. Airline pilots and hepatologists are, thankfully, among the undeservedly excluded. This is an almost exclusively aesthetic matter. What it signifies is, however, moot. As a subject for disputatious inquiry it has been posthumously divvied up between the shades of Theodor Adorno and Edward Said and their packs of enthusiastic yes-persons who may consider that Late Style is as involuntary and inevitable as a gr...| UnHerd
It is Muriel Spark’s universe and I just live in it. Certainly, her droll eye and irrepressible spirits have been a comfort to me these past few years, as the culture around me seemed to collapse into obsessive interiority and neurotic display. Just like their originator, many of Spark’s chatty, noticing characters have no interest in navel-gazing and little self-doubt. To spend time with them is relaxing and amusing, no matter what chicanery they witness or have embarked upon themselves....| UnHerd
V.S. Naipaul’s The Enigma of Arrival is a novel for all seasons. It’s a book about seeing and the failure to see; about the difference between wanting to be a writer and truly becoming one; about understanding one’s place in the world and also understanding what that means in a world defined by constant change, governed by loss, entropy, and the inexorable wingbeat of time. It anticipates and yet far surpasses the contemporary vogue for so-called “autofiction” — or just writing wh...| UnHerd
The required summer reading for rising ninth graders at my son’s public high school in Brooklyn this year is a choice of the following: Unwind, a work of dystopian science-fiction by bestselling young-adult author Neal Shusterman; The Epic Crush of Genie Lo, a fantasy YA novel by F.C. Yee; and Punching the Air, a National Book Award finalist novel in verse, also YA, co-written by Ibi Zoboi, a Haitian-American author, and Yusef Salaam, a New York City councilman and one of the “Central P...| UnHerd
The story of the Minneapolis mass shooting appeared below the fold on the New York Times website on Thursday, under the headline “Minneapolis’s Suspect’s Motive is a Mystery.” Nowhere on the Times homepage did “the suspect” get a pronoun. When you clicked through to the top story, it opened: “The person who the police say opened fire,” providing a tip-off that the paper’s ideologues knew there was a problem. Journalism is the business of specifics, and in the normal course o...| UnHerd
“This lecture is forbidden by radical opinion,” shouts one protestor into a hijacked microphone, as the mob fills the lecture theatre. “Forbidden! Forbidden!” answers the crowd, determined to prevent the Jewish geneticist Professor Mangel from delivering a talk titled “Do Rats Have ‘Families’?” It could have happened last week — but this scene is taken from the climax of Malcolm Bradbury’s satirical campus novel The History Man, published 50 years ago this year.| UnHerd
Asa Briggs once came to my school to inspect the Combined Cadet Force (CCF). In retrospect, this should have surprised me in at least two respects. First, that a famously swotty Outer London day school maintained a CCF — albeit voluntary — at all (one schoolmate thought that weapons training might usefully prepare him for the service he planned in the IDF; in fact, he became a theatre director). Second, that Professor and soon-to-be Lord Briggs, then vice-chancellor of Sussex University a...| UnHerd
Why are the top 1% so politically correct? Rob Henderson coined the term ‘luxury beliefs’ to explain how affluent people signal high status with ‘woke’ ideas. In his new memoir ‘Troubled’, Henderson tells the story of a difficult childhood and how it opened his eyes to the hypocrisy of America’s elite. He joins UnHerd’s Freddie [...]Read More...| UnHerd
At the Munich Security Conference later this week, US Vice President JD Vance and envoy to Ukraine and Russia Keith Kellogg will use the stage to present European leaders with part of the Trump administration’s peace plan for the region. Nato membership for Kyiv will be excluded, and Russia will effectively be left with the [...]Read More...| UnHerd
Jimmy Donaldson dropped out of a community college near his home in North Carolina at the age of 18 to crack one of the mysteries of modern life: what makes a video become a viral sensation on social media? Together with four similarly obsessed friends, he spent up to 20 hours a day studying the secrets of YouTube hits after becoming hooked posting footage playing games. The nerds analysed everything intensively: the algorithms, camera angles, lighting, pacing, thumbnails, viewer drop-off dat...| UnHerd
Reactionary as I am, it gives me no pleasure to report that conservatism is finished. As Britain struggles with the exhausted death-spasms of liberal Toryism, the only subset of Right-wing thought in the West today that doesn’t feel moribund is actively anti-conservative. The liveliest corner of the Anglophone Right is scornful of cultural conservatism and nostalgia, instead combining an optimistic view of technology with a qualified embrace of global migration and an uncompromising approac...| UnHerd
