Today

17 Nov 2022
There’s nothing magic about magic mushrooms

For about six straight hours after taking magic mushrooms – psilocybin – I had visions of a vast, skeletal shark coming at me out of the watery gloom, mouth open, teeth inches from my face. It wasn’t a hallucination – I only saw the shark when my eyes were shut – but even with my eyes stretched wide I felt dread, the same blank terror I had felt the year before when in the spirit of happy enquiry I’d taken acid. I deserved the shark, I suppose. What sort of a dolt has at the psychedelics again when LSD has already given them the abdabs? The trouble was, I’d bought the psilocybin PR: mushrooms are different because they’re organic; all you need is the right dose in the right environment; just surround yourself with friends.

There’s nothing magic about magic mushrooms

Thursday

3 Nov 2022
Don’t sneer at Elon Musk

I know a man who plans to burn an effigy of Elon Musk on his bonfire on 5 November. Musk will be on a cardboard rocket and it will be hilarious, apparently,to watch him being engulfed by flames, because he’s ridiculous, he and his weird ideas about Mars. The idea that Musk is laughable is one of the few topics on which the progressive left and the old hawkish left agree. Musk isn’t a serious person, they say, and because he’s not serious, he’s dangerous. He shouldn’t be allowed to own Twitter, let alone space rockets. There was cautious, grudging approval when Musk donated terminals for his Starlink satellites to Ukraine, followed by great alarm when he speculated about the possibility of a peace deal with Vladimir Putin.

Don’t sneer at Elon Musk

Saturday

22 Oct 2022

Wednesday

19 Oct 2022
Why can’t I give blood?

I read about the national shortage of blood last week with a feeling of gloomy inevitability. The brains of the nation are scrambled, Westminster’s insane, of course the country’s bleeding out. But at least, I thought, I can help a bit. I’ve given blood in the past and I enjoy it. There’s the feeling of warmth and purpose, and biscuits. I’d never fork out for a packet of custard creams, but like most English women and men I’m a sucker for one or two free on a saucer in a medical setting. Our blood donor scheme is actually all-round cheery. Each country has its own circulatory system, a flow out from the veins of donors, off to hospitals and into patients. Some countries have to resort to paying donors for blood, and the inevitable result is a contaminated supply.

Why can’t I give blood?

Saturday

24 Sep 2022

Thursday

22 Sep 2022
The Edition
Cornered: what will Putin do now?
41 min listen

In this week’s episode:For the cover of the magazine, Paul Wood asks whether Putin could actually push the nuclear button in order to save himself?He is joined by The Spectator’s assistant online editor Lisa Haseldine, to discuss (01:03).Also this week:Why is there violence on the streets of Leicester?Douglas Murray writes about this in his column this week and we speak to journalist Sunny Hundal and research analyst Dr Rakib Ehsan about what’s caused the disorder (13:44).And finally:Is three – or more – a crowd?Mary Wakefield discusses the poly-problems or polyamory in her column in The Spectator and is joined by comedian Elf Lyons, who has written about her experience of polyamory before (26:46).Hosted by Lara Prendergast and William Moore.

Cornered: what will Putin do now?

Wednesday

21 Sep 2022
Why are so many young women buying into polyamory?

The saddest thing I saw this week was a dating advert written by a woman – let’s call her Jane – looking for a man to start a family with. There was nothing sad about Jane per se: she’s attractive and accomplished in the usual alarming millennial way. Not only does she have a well-paid job in a tech firm, but she climbs, plays the cello, writes plays and is a near-professional baker. Because young people these days don’t drink until they pass out, they have time for hobbies. Jane is also polyamorous, she mentioned in the ad, just in passing. She is in a committed romantic relationship with three other people and they live in a shared house – and this, I’ve discovered, is par for the course now in parts of London and across the US.

Why are so many young women buying into polyamory?

Thursday

8 Sep 2022
Kill badgers to save hedgehogs

Until last month I hadn’t seen a hedgehog for close to 30 years, though they were part of everyday life when I was a child. In the school holidays, we’d rush first thing to the nearby cattle grids to check for animals who’d fallen in overnight. It’s what passed for fun back then: picking damp critters out of concrete prisons. Sometimes there were lambs, wedged in up to their woolly armpits; sometimes there were angry, pulsing toads. But it was hedgehog rescue that was our sacred duty. We’d pick them up in towels and take them to the hedgehog spa in the boiler room, where they’d spend the day lounging about eating chopped egg. Never feed a hedgehog milk. It gives them horrible diarrhoea. That was the mid-1980s, and it was then that the hedgehog population began its steepest decline.

Kill badgers to save hedgehogs

Thursday

11 Aug 2022
How ‘kindness’ became big business

In those moments when I most fear that the West is on the skids, I find it helps to make a list of end-time signs, phenomena that indicate decay, like sparks along a piece of faulty wiring. So far my list goes like this: NFTs; babyccinos; liver-flavoured ice-cream for dogs; the fashion for encouraging children to cut off their genitals; the fact that Rowan Williams, former Archbishop of Canterbury, thinks it deeply wrong to talk them out of it; freak shakes; Heinz ‘pink’ sauce; gannets dead all down the North Sea coast; swearing six-year-olds still in nappies (says my teacher friend in the North-East); risking nuclear war over Ukraine; the TV show Is It Cake? My latest and favourite end times sign is buried in the minutes of a recent meeting of the London Ambulance Service NHS Trust board, in a section about the plight of call handlers.

How ‘kindness’ became big business

Sunday

31 Jul 2022
Remembering Gore Vidal

Fourteen years ago, my then boss, Matt d’Ancona sent me off to interview Gore Vidal. I’ll always be grateful to him for the opportunity. D’Ancona could have gone to meet the great man himself, but he knew I was a fan so he let me go. Is there anything hopeful in American politics then? I asked Vidal towards the end of our enjoyable but pretty dispiriting evening in Claridge's. I recorded his response as follows: ‘No,’ says Vidal.Anything good about the American people? ‘Not really.’How do you see the future of America panning out? ‘It panned out already, it’s sinking.’ Can anything be done to save it? ‘I don’t give a f***,’ says Vidal and orders another whisky and soda. At the time, I remember thinking that Gore’s lack of faith in America and the West was a bit OTT and put on for effect.

Remembering Gore Vidal

Thursday

21 Jul 2022
The joy of volcano-chasing

Katia and Maurice Krafft were both born in the 1940s in the Rhine valley, close to the Miocene Kaiser volcano, though they didn’t know each other as children. They met on a park bench when they were students at the University of Strasbourg, and from that moment on, according to their joint obituary in the Bulletin of Volcanology, ‘volcanic eruptions became the common passion to which everything else in their life seemed subordinate’. They married in 1970, formed a crack team of volcano-chasers, équipe volcanique, and set off to get as close as they possibly could to the very edge of every fiery crater, to collect samples and data and just to be there, ecstatic with the enormity of it all, like a pair of mad moths drawn into a candle flame.

The joy of volcano-chasing

Friday

15 Jul 2022

Thursday

14 Jul 2022
Parents must resist Stonewall’s gospel

I think by now it’s becoming horribly apparent to parents of every political persuasion that we can’t sit out the culture wars. You might call yourself progressive, loathe the Tories, but still… the ideological tide is rising, and when it laps at your own child’s feet, everything changes. It becomes impossible to ignore the fact that gender activism these days isn’t about gay rights or even trans rights, it’s not about being inclusive, it’s about presenting utter nonsense as plain fact. A generation of children are being fed a distorted version of reality. In particular they’re told that there’s no such thing as biological sex, that there are no born males and females and that they must somehow, on their own, discern their inner immutable sex identity.

Parents must resist Stonewall’s gospel

Friday

17 Jun 2022

Thursday

16 Jun 2022
If only Tom Cruise would ditch his cult

I keep reading that Tom Cruise is the Last Great Movie Star, as if he’s some noble but endangered animal. I think his people must be putting it about as part of the PR for Top Gun 2, though Lord knows what his peers make of it. Think of Tom Hanks, Jodie Foster, Meryl Streep, De Niro… all of them Oscar winners (unlike Cruise) and all with a better claim to being the Last Great Star. Tom Cruise himself seems comfortable with the idea. He walks and talks like the L.G.M.S. – controlled, confident, impeccably dressed with just a hint of a helpful Cuban heel. But the higher his star rises, the odder it seems that no one mentions the cult he belongs to, or how it behaves. Former members of the ‘Church’ of Scientology have testified to bullying, blackmail, slave labour and a form of child abuse: separating children from their parents.

If only Tom Cruise would ditch his cult

Wednesday

18 May 2022
The nonsense world of emotional support animals

Sometimes an event or a phenomenon is so perplexing and so terrible that it’s best not to deal with it too directly and for too long. Best to look at something tangentially related, which is why I’ve spent so much time recently worrying about Kirrin Medcalf’s dog. Kirrin is head of ‘trans inclusion’ at Stonewall, the charity which once fought for the rights of gay men and women but now devotes itself to trying to overturn the heteronormative patriarchy, using the notion of transsexual kids as a Trojan horse. Don’t worry. You don’t need to understand that. It’s best not to, if you want to stay sane. All you need to know is that for Kirrin and for Stonewall, it’s violent heresy to say that men and women are biologically different.

The nonsense world of emotional support animals

Friday

6 May 2022

Thursday

5 May 2022
How did we fall for the junk science of forensics?

I grew up in the golden age of forensic science, at a time when expert witnesses were becoming celebs, each with their special little area of crimebusting know-how. The papers were full of excited talk about hair microscopy, ballistics and fibre analysis. Crime scene investigators were hot as pop stars. My brother and I had a nanny with a passion for gore. She wasn’t interested in me as a rule, but I could always hold her attention with a nice chat about blood spatter patterns. We discussed what you could tell from the trajectory of arterial spray or the shape of a drip. Over in America, Herbert MacDonell was the undisputed Blood Spatter King – I think he might have even invented it as a discipline. He appeared regularly on TV with his array of droplet charts, explaining, via PowerPoint, that a round splat meant a vertical drip and that a flatter more tear-shaped droplet meant blood sprayed forcefully at an angle.

How did we fall for the junk science of forensics?

Thursday

7 Apr 2022
Our children are at breaking point – and it’s our fault

I think it’s time we stopped scaring the children. I think they’ve had enough. They’re at breaking point now, every generation more anxious than the last – and anxious younger, too. There’s a record number of British children diagnosed with anxiety, and a record wait – two years – for therapy, though I’m not at all sure the therapy as it is helps much. The usual idea is that if the kids are troubled, it’s the world that’s to blame: smartphones, Instagram, the constant comparing; Trump, Putin, the existence of Tories; Covid, global warming. No wonder they have the heebie-jeebies. But I think in fact that we’re doing it to them. It’s us, the parents, carers, teachers in charge. We’re inadvertently torturing our kids.

Our children are at breaking point – and it’s our fault

Saturday

12 Mar 2022

Thursday

10 Mar 2022
The myth that Russia and Ukraine are fighting over

It seems strange now that any of us ever imagined that Putin might not invade. He thinks of Ukraine as rightfully Russia’s, heart, mind and soul. It’s there in that essay he wrote last year: Russians and Ukrainians are ‘one people’, he said, meaning not that they’re brothers so much as that Ukrainians have no right to a separate identity. And I wonder whether, in attempting to take Kiev, he isn’t also trying to lay final claim to the founding myth that Russia and Ukraine fight over and both think of as their own. Kiev is the setting for the epic tale of Kievan Rus, the first great Slavic state founded in the 900s by enterprising Viking Swedes. Putin clearly identifies with its warlord saint, Vladimir the Great. In 2016 he unveiled an enormous statue of that earlier Vlad, 100 yards from the Kremlin walls.

The myth that Russia and Ukraine are fighting over

Saturday

26 Feb 2022

Thursday

24 Feb 2022
Women-only train carriages insult us all

Sooner or later, somewhere in the UK, we’ll have trains with women-only coaches. It’s an idea which keeps rolling around, and though the train people complain — it’s unworkable, unenforceable — it makes no odds. It’s too seductive an idea for a progressive politician. Jeremy Corbyn was tempted by it back in 2015, and now the Scottish transport secretary, one Jenny Gilruth, is considering it. She often feels unsafe on trains, she says, because they’re ‘full of drunk men’, especially the train to Fife, which is her constituency. ‘I just want our railways to be safe places for women to travel.’ I’ve nothing against ladies’ coaches in principle. In my mind’s eye they look appealing. I imagine them with muted marbling and scent diffusers, full of women with the sort of graded hair effect I’ve recently discovered is called balayage.

Women-only train carriages insult us all

Thursday

10 Feb 2022
Is Britain heading for an opioid crisis?

Almost everyone here that I’ve spoken to about it assumes that the opioid crisis in the United States won’t ever come to the UK. Yes, the problem there is accelerating. Drug overdose deaths in America are now at more than 100,000 a year. A few days ago the Lancet predicted 1.2 million dead by 2029 but… it couldn’t happen here. We hold up those three sacred letters — NHS — like a talisman to ward off the evil. We tut about Big Pharma and its undue influence in Washington, we remove the Sackler name from galleries and museums, and then we get back to watching America overdose on TV. The opioid crisis in the US is almost its own entertainment genre these days, with any number of documentaries and dramas available to stream.

Is Britain heading for an opioid crisis?