flat white

Australia’s eSafety Commissioner loses again – A victory for free speech | Celine Baumgarten S3 Ep 18

Celine Baumgarten (Celine Against the Machine) has celebrated her SECOND victory against the eSafety Commissioner. This wasn’t only a personal…

Did Donald Trump conquer the world with witty insults? | Joel Gilbert S3 Ep 17

Did Donald Trump conquer the world with witty insults? I’m joined by Joel Gilbert to discuss the genius of humour…

Digital tyranny or ‘child safety’? 😵 & the bitcoin revolution | Efrat Fenigson S3 Ep 16

When Australia’s Under 16 social media ban started locking adult political writers out of #Substack – it was just the…

Encouraging assassinations

Well, the good news is that there is now an opening for a substitute teacher in Torrance, California.  Cole Allen,…

2 May 2026

Taylor tinkers with tough talk on immigration

In Angus Taylor’s recent keynote speech on immigration, he repeatedly cited the experience of the UK and Europe as an…

2 May 2026

If it’s bad here, it’s worse in the mother country

Just as I was ready to move on from the creeping civilianisation of military justice, the news out of the…

2 May 2026

World sags under record debt

Howard Marks, the co-founder of US-based Oaktree Capital Management, became a billionaire by investing in distressed debt. When giving talks,…

2 May 2026

Zero debt

It was an event that was largely ignored by the mainstream media. On 21 April, it was the two-decade anniversary…

2 May 2026

Australia is trying to drink its way to fiscal sobriety

Australia is in the longest run of falling per capita output since the Australian Bureau of Statistics began publishing the…

How feminism demoralises young women

In 1983, Yuri Bezmenov, a former KGB agent and defector, delivered a chilling lecture on ideological subversion. Speaking at UCLA,…

2 May 2026

Once a jolly jihadist

This week, we learned that the government has spent $318 million investigating war crimes allegedly committed by the approximately 230…

2 May 2026

How to stop rising Jew hate in Britain

It’s now been two days since the Golders Green terror attack, so if the response to previous such incidents is…

1 May 2026

Why is Polanski downplaying anti-Semitism in the Green party?

Zack Polanski is furious. Not so much with the stabbing of two Jews in Golders Green yesterday. So far, he…

1 May 2026

The High Court has undermined freedom of speech in universities

Maybe sex realists really are winning the gender wars. But for every two steps we take forward we are relentlessly…

1 May 2026

Why Bermuda is loyal to the King

At St. Peter’s Church in St. George’s, Bermuda, the oldest Anglican church in continuous use in the Western Hemisphere, a…

1 May 2026

Why does Zohran Mamdani want Charles III to return the Koh-i-Noor?

Even those who don’t think much of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s politics might grudgingly concede he has a…

1 May 2026

Zack Polanski’s shameful reaction to the Golders Green arrest

Yesterday’s knife attack in Golders Green is yet another shocking assault on Britain’s Jewish community. Two Jewish men were attacked…

1 May 2026

Russia has failed to unload stolen Ukrainian grain in Israel

The diplomatic spat between Kyiv and Jerusalem over the Russian vessel wanting to unload stolen grain from occupied Ukrainian territories…

1 May 2026

Is Streeting ready to be PM? 

With a week to go before voters take to the polls, the race for victory is heating up. But it…

1 May 2026

The problem with Labour’s toddler screen-time guidance

As a parent of an 18-month-old, the glorious weather last weekend could mean only one thing: a tour of the…

1 May 2026

Is life expectancy really falling?

On Sunday, the Health Foundation published new analysis of ONS data, finding that between 2012/14 and 2022/24 the average Healthy Life Expectancy (HLE)…

30 Apr 2026

The Bank of England holds interest rates – for now

In a relief for mortgage holders, anyone with a job and the government, the Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Committee…

30 Apr 2026

The long march of the Ukippers

Wakey wakey! Whoooo remembers the United Kingdom Independence Party? Steerpike has fond memories of Ukip, Nigel Farage’s previous-but-one political vehicle…

30 Apr 2026

The row over English becoming an official language of New Zealand

Parliamentarians in New Zealand have been limbering up for an oddly unedifying debate over what ought to be the most…

4 Mar 2026

What they don’t tell you about Christmas in New Zealand

‘I still think New Zealand the most beautiful country I have ever seen,’ Agatha Christie marvelled in 1922. Evidently she’s…

22 Dec 2025

What will Jacinda Ardern do next?

When I first met Jacinda Ardern in the early 2010s, the notion that the young MP with the toothy smile…

8 Nov 2025

The de-Wokification of New Zealand’s education system

The conservative coalition government of New Zealand came to office promising to wind back an enormous, government-run system of ‘Woke’…

3 Nov 2025

Aussie life

How do you write satire when you are up against a literary festival? It writes itself. I have been leafing…

Language

There are some silly people (in the US more than here) who like to claim that President Trump is suffering…

2 May 2026

My meeting with ‘The Godfather’ of flat racing

Trainer John Gosden is a colossus in Newmarket, the centre of the horse-racing industry. Two-and-a-half-thousand horses are trained here and…

2 May 2026

Do ‘picky bits’ give you the ick?

Marks & Spencer’s (as we still call it) has designated 27 June National Picky Bits Day. It entails eating things…

2 May 2026

Were Britain’s postwar dons just having too much fun?

A history of academic life stands and falls by the number and quality of its anecdotes. On this count, Colin…

2 May 2026

How Syria’s dream of freedom ended in further repression

Anand Gopal has form when it comes to war. In Afghanistan, distrustful of President Bush’s ‘good vs evil’ and ‘you’re…

2 May 2026

The doyen of the France’s culinary scene is unmasked

For some reason it took nearly a decade for the news of a revolution in the restaurants of France to…

2 May 2026

A foolproof way of predicting the future

A peek at the horoscope, puzzling the meaning of dreams, wearing lucky socks, having a method for choosing lottery numbers…

2 May 2026

In praise of uncertainty over hollow conviction

When I met Brian Dillon in February 2023, he seemed to have a lot on his mind. We had arranged…

2 May 2026

The land of missed opportunity: The Left and the Lucky, by Willy Vlautin, reviewed

Were arriving aliens to be introduced to the concept of the USA via the work of Willy Vlautin, they would…

2 May 2026

The art of printmaking in all its glorious complexity

Do you know your aquatint from your drypoint? Your intaglio from your lithograph? The appearance of any one finished print…

2 May 2026

A meditation on reality: Transcription, by Ben Lerner, reviewed

Near the beginning of Ben Lerner’s new novel the unnamed narrator recalls visiting an exhibition of botanical models made by…

2 May 2026