Open Season
In the bleak midwinter
Christmas can be a bleak time of year. While some feel isolated, others are overwhelmed by the need for a perfect family Yuletide when their reality is different
Personality journalism started with Paxman. It’s pernicious
‘When I was at the BBC, the cliché was that we left our politics at the door. It appeared not to need saying that other aspects of your personal identity should also be left at the door’
Three cheers for “white saviours”
‘You have to prove you have the knowledge/expertise/ experience to be allowed to step outside your own culture. To whom, I wonder, do you have to prove this?’
Trans trailblazers leave women bruised
‘Female and male bodies differ in many ways that make the best women uncompetitive with even mediocre men’
Who is Pride for?
‘A message of liberation has lost out to the more commercially viable demands for inclusion and recognition of ever-more niche identities’
Baked-in bias
‘Once social media entities become publishers, any political bias already present will be baked in’
The lost Eden of academia
‘It wasn’t difficult to persuade my son that academic life had lost its attractions’
The end of growth
‘The great classical economists all thought that economic growth would eventually cease. The prediction seems to be coming true’
Misperceptions and mistaken policies
‘Under Trump, the US has lost its ability to conduct statecraft: in North Korea it has made a dangerous situation worse’
London doesn’t need another Holocaust memorial
‘London does not need a new Holocaust memorial in the shadow of Parliament. It already has a very moving one in Hyde Park’
How Top Boys topple down crime’s ladder
Too many prisoners rejoin society with no education, stable housing or job prospects. No surprise that more than half reoffend within a year
In the bleak midwinter
Christmas can be a bleak time of year. While some feel isolated, others are overwhelmed by the need for a perfect family Yuletide when their reality is different
My warnings to our spy watchdogs
Britain is under attack from Russia. And the government is blocking a Parliamentary report that details it