What if digital learning is a catastrophe?
There’s a lot of talk in the papers about the importance of banning smartphones from schools. Quite right too. The…
What did David Cameron expect when he lectured the Americans?
Lord Cameron, bless him, is back striding the world stage. He wrote an article last week in Washington’s inside-beltway website…
The feuding tearing apart the Royal Society of Literature
You’d think, wouldn’t you, that the Royal Society of Literature (founded 1820) might be one of those institutions that chugs…
Why the Tory party is breaking apart
I don’t, I freely admit, remember all that much about my chemistry lessons at school. Covalent bonding delighted me not,…
How do we draw the line between gambling and gaming?
‘Skins gambling,’ anyone? No, until yesterday, me neither. It’s nothing to do with strip poker or 70s bovver boys. It’s…
The shame of Britain’s ‘cash for courses’ universities
‘If you can take the lift, why go through the hardest route?’ a recruitment officer representing four Russell Group universities asked…
What Katharine Birbalsingh gets wrong about secularism
Katharine Birbalsingh is back in the papers again. The head teacher at Michaela, a free school whose outstanding academic record and…
Why didn’t the British Library pay a ransom to cyber attackers?
‘They’ve turned one of our most important pieces of national infrastructure into an internet café,’ was how my friend Marcus,…
Michelle Mone and the rise of the ‘fight back’ documentary
You can’t turn on the telly or fire up the internet these days without stumbling across some celebrity or other baring their…
Stop sending Christmas cards!
Christmas cards are the pits, aren’t they? A positive engine of seasonal ill-will. They take hours to do, if you…
Newsnight’s fate is a bad omen for the BBC
Newsnight, we learned last week, is losing ten minutes off its running time, more than half its staff including its entire…
The evolving phenomenon of ‘Brexit regret’
It was reported this weekend that the great trans-Pacific trade deal (CPTPP), the one that Lord Cameron just boasted would…
Can the government be trusted with free speech?
This summer, horrified by the rising numbers of students no-platforming and harassing visiting speakers whose views they don’t like, the government…
The dying days of Rishi Sunak’s black hole government
In my admittedly sketchy understanding of it, black holes are formed when something becomes so massive that it collapses in on…
What can be done about AI porn?
The foul-mouthed puppet musical Avenue Q, way back in 2003, caught the spirit of the age to come. ‘The internet is…
What the Babylon scandal tells us about the British government
One of the consistent themes of Dominic Cummings’s kamikaze mission to reform the machinery of the British state was that…
Are Amazon’s publishing gurus doing anything wrong?
Alex Kaplo lives, apparently, the life of Riley. The 31-year-old’s website shows him roaring around in a Mercedes, and he…
How to win four Nobel Prizes in literature
‘Hi Jacques,’ I say as the publisher of Fitzcarraldo Editions appears on my Zoom screen with his Franz Hals facial…
Can we be honest about Israel and Palestine?
Qui tacet consentire videtur: who keeps silent is seen to consent. That Latin tag haunts the western response to the…
How Elon Musk killed Twitter/ X
Twitter was a newswire. That, at least at first, was the point of it. Something that came with all the…
It is time to rethink the age of consent
In 1983 Samantha Fox was sixteen years old when she first appeared topless on Page Three of the Sun. That…
The ‘naive cynicism’ of Russell Brand’s hasty defenders
I can’t imagine that Channel 4’s investigative slot Dispatches has had such an audience in living memory. On Saturday evening, many…
