During my three decades as a reporter, I’ve seen plenty of hype and poor news coverage about renewable energy. But two recent pieces—in the Washington Post and National Public Radio, respectively—are particularly egregious. These reports demonstrate, yet again, that some of the biggest media entities in the
Even by the hyper-progressive standards of the Canadian education sector, Ryerson University in Toronto has distinguished itself as being unusually energetic in its social justice messaging. Last spring, Indigenous activists destroyed the statue of the university’s namesake, Egerton Ryerson, on the basis that he helped design Canada’s system
In 1338, the story has it, a notorious French exile named Robert of Artois strutted into the London palace of King Edward III, bearing a stuffed heron on a silver platter. “Clear the way, you miserable failures,” he said to the assembled lords. “I have a heron … the most cowardly
The Frankfurt School of social theory began about a century ago, in the Weimar Republic. It consisted in the main of a group of rather anti-capitalist, Marxist-light gentlemen who embraced oikophobia (the hatred or dislike of one’s own cultural home), and who were understandably disillusioned by the carnage of
As Russia pushed into Ukraine, we learned that Germany was still preparing to ship 5,000 helmets to the besieged European country. The US, meanwhile, had already sent $2.5 billion in military aid there since 2014. The contrast between the wills and capabilities of the US and Europe appeared
The last decade has seen Corporate Social Responsibility metastasize into what has become known, derisively, as “woke capitalism”—a new vision of companies as agents of radical social change. The outward face of this shift has been a torrent of adverts and products laced with political messages. Ben and Jerry’
Dear Readers, The world that existed last week no longer exists. Shocked by Russian aggression, the Western world has rallied to Ukraine's defence, spurred on by images shared widely on social media of Ukrainian courage and the heroism of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. The entire EU, US, UK,
I am an Englishman in Southern Russia. For nearly four years I’ve lived here, helping my Russian ex-partner bring up our (now) eight-year-old daughter. At 9 o’clock last night I saw both of them onto a sleeper-train to Moscow. From there they will fly to Italy and the
My mother could always sense the difference, the alienation, between me and my father. It’s not that we didn’t get along. It’s just that there was almost nothing there—nothing in common. He was American football, girls, tailgating, hunting, the Air Force, that one story about being
Hot Capital is money that moves quickly and mimetically, following the latest fad or culture war skirmish. And right now, huge sums of money are being mobilized and channeled into projects, companies, and causes as a result of inflamed, rivalrous passions. The rise of this “Hot Capital”—made possible by
Quillette podcast host Jonathan Kay talks to Substack’s founder and CEO about empowering writers through free expression (and his company’s new, foosball-table-free San Francisco offices).
If Putin succeeds in his aggression in Ukraine and the Republican Party follows Trump in his admiration for what he has done, then it will be making a decisive break with fundamental American democratic values.
So much is being written about the Russian invasion of Ukraine that more on the situation on the ground is unnecessary. Certainly, it is premature for a post-mortem on causes and responsibilities of a conflict that came on so quickly and unexpectedly. But it is not a bad time to
Putin’s Neo-Soviet Russia reverted to form with its systematic doping regime at the 2014 Sochi games.
On February 2nd, I wrote an opinion piece entitled “Beware the Anti-Fascists, for they have become what they oppose,” on behalf of the UK-based Centre for Analysis of the Radical Right (CARR)—a research centre for which I served, until recently, as a policy and practitioner fellow. That article began