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
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
This might make me a bad parent, but I’m going to be honest: I love Instagram. What’s worse, I love that my kids are on it. Something has shifted recently, and our feeds are absolute fire. We’ve reached peak algorithm. The girls and I are constantly sharing memes and videos with each other through social media. They like it. And — I know this is horrible — I like it, too. It is very, very funny.| UnHerd
Abolishing DEI may be the only way out of the Leftist ideological capture of American campuses, Jonathan Haidt told an audience at the University of North Carolina (UNC), Chapel Hill, on Wednesday. Those words mark a dramatic departure for Haidt, who has been known as a restrained, moderate voice on the subject of cancel culture, [...]Read More...| UnHerd
The “dollar doomsayers” are making headlines once again. After the greenback’s worst start to a year since 1973, some are declaring this the beginning of the end for America’s currency. Although the dollar has experienced a significant sell-off due to Trump’s unprecedented tariffs and investors are exploring alternative currencies to preserve their wealth, it remains [...]Read More...| UnHerd
Visionaries, dreamers, and autocrats have long dreamt of reshaping humanity to their preferred model. In the last century, eugenics was enthusiastically embraced among Anglo-Saxon elites, then by Communist Russia as a means of creating a hyper-selfless Homo Sovieticus, and, most infamously, Nazi Germany’s drive to create a “master race” via racial-hygiene laws and the extermination of people with disabilities and other “lives unworthy of life.”| UnHerd
Elon Musk has abandoned his vision of colonising Mars, according to Peter Thiel. In a new interview with Ross Douthat for the New York Times, Thiel has claimed that the Tesla and SpaceX CEO no longer believes a Martian colony is a viable political project for humans to build a new society. According to Musk’s [...]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
