Nick Cohen
Dickens of a Debacle
Little Dorrit‘s uncanny similarities to today’s financial crisis makes it more suitable for adaptation than much of modern literature
How to Make History Badly
Far from revealing what has gone wrong with American politics, Simon Schama’s new series shows what has gone wrong with British television
The Triumph of the Internet
With audiences turning to the online world, television is caught in a deadly web
Self-Censorship And The BBC
The London Bombers was a major drama-documentary about 7/7 of which the BBC should have been proud
Jon Snow and the Gilded Cage
Channel 4 News’s anchorman has to disguise his political bias as neutrality, a pretence that is both insidious and unmanly
All Satirical Passion Spent
Thatcherism provoked great TV but the makers of Headcases are too liberal, too condescending and not nearly angry enough
Tolerating the intolerant
“For those who thought that a global pandemic would sound the death knell for identity politics, think again”
How to prevent the next pandemic
‘I have been reporting as a science journalist for years that the world is at increasing risk of pandemics like this; that this was predicted; that we know what we need to do to prepare and we simply haven’t done it; and that more and worse pandemics are coming so we need to do that, now’
D’où parles-tu? The post-truth world
Power, illusion and the open society: how postmodernism undermines our foundational concepts