Despite everything, America is beautiful — especially at West Point
What is left to say after the church shooting in the Home of the Depraved? Those killed in Texas included…
The new tycoons
The giants of the internet have long said that they are not publishers but mere platforms — or couriers —…
High life
I think this week marks my 40th anniversary as a Spectator columnist, but I’m not 100 per cent certain. All…
A tale of two Valleys
Silicon Valley looks like a cross between Milton Keynes and the set of the Stepford Wives. Row after row of…
Deus ex machina
Mark Zuckerberg says that Facebook could be to its users what churches are to congregations: it could help them feel…
The vaping craze isn’t about nicotine. It’s about gadgets
Probably you never visited the flats of middle-class student drug dealers in the 1990s, because crikey, neither did I, and…
The internet’s war on free speech
The web was meant to empower us all. Right now, it’s empowering censors
Life gets faster — as the Earth slows down
Modern life is too fast. Everyone is always in a hurry; people skim-read and don’t take the time to eat…
The sad decline of the teenage snog
Sometimes I sit my nieces down and treat them to tales of dating in the dark ages, before iPhones arrived…
Long before Twitter, Wogan offered continuous conversation
For once, the superlatives that have greeted Terry Wogan’s death from cancer have been entirely in keeping with the man.…
Will Iman give me a second chance before I die?
The death of David Bowie — how is it that Stephen Glover always gets it right about our over-reaction and…
Any Other Business
Last year was a bumper year for mergers and acquisitions. Recovering prospects and relatively low price-earnings ratios made the takeover…
Mark Zuckerberg should be applauded — whatever his motive
The Egyptian driver of a London minicab said almost nothing during our journey but dropped me off at my destination…
The most dangerous word in the digital world is 'send'
Those who forget the pasta are condemned to reheat it, tweeted Jon Ronson, a man I’d never heard of until…
The problem with Jeremy Corbyn’s populist media-loathing
The new leader walks across a bridge, in the dark, while the journalist asks him questions. He’s not shouting, this…
Does anyone else have an upper house as undemocratic as the Lords?
Peers’ peers Forty-five new peers were created. Are we alone in having an upper house of parliament made up of…
I found the future of privacy among the treasures of Venice
Almost all of Venice’s greatest treasures are on public view. Anyone who visits can look across from the Doge’s Palace…
Lesbos: the tourist island where half Greece's migrants land
On a Greek beach, watching migrants’ dinghies arrive from Turkey
I don’t do WhatsApp, and that’s final
‘No, I do not do WhatsApp.’ That’s pretty much all I ever seem to say to people nowadays. They ask…
The brave thing now: don’t write about your death
In the social media age, breaking ‘the last taboo’ is de rigueur
Bletchley Park was decades ahead of Silicon Valley. So what happened?
Gordon Corera, best known as the security correspondent for BBC News, somehow finds time to write authoritative, well-researched and readable…
Ten resolutions as I stare my 50th birthday in the face
Very soon now I shall reach my half-century. I would have preferred to keep the horror a secret but there’s…
Encounters with the nastiest people on the internet
It is almost a century since the Michelin brothers had the brainwave of supplementing their motorists’ guide with information about…
In the future we will all speak a new language called Predictive Text
Andy the tech guy looked delighted when I told him I had done the stupidest thing ever. He is one…
Spoilt for choice: we are all curators now
As words commonly used to write about the visual arts become increasingly useful to advertisers, ‘to curate’ is becoming the…
