France
The twin prophets of pessimism
The novelist and the philosopher linked by a common fascination with despair
Amuse Bouche
Lisa Hilton finds a French-inspired retreat for flagging flâneurs in Shepherd’s Bush
Good companions
Brigitte Macron agitated to be granted the title of Première Dame, hoping to emulate not Yvonne de Gaulle but Jackie Kennedy
Most Read
Tame Impala fails to impress
unconquered by a
taste of Crusader food
Gary Stevenson is wrong about wealth taxes
The popular economist is irritating, but more importantly he is mistaken
Why they hated Ann Widdecombe
Fair-minded people could agree or disagree with her opinions. Left-wing bigots hated her for not abandoning them
What is wrong now was wrong before
Julia Gillard should not pretend that the “unintended consequences” of the gender debate were unknowable
Ethnic minorities are abandoning Labour
It is not just Muslim voters who have been abandoning the Labour Party
Decolonisation dissected
This toxic and destructive ideology must be rejected
AI podcasts give me the creeps
The more we outsource to AI, the more forgettable our cultural output is going to be
The limits of choice
Sometimes, we do know better than people who are harming themselves
How the sausage gets made
On the illusions of evidence-based policy
Peston’s Inbox
Burnham: “Ay up! I’m a northerner”
Why do we still have social housing?
A decade working in Social Housing taught me that the sector’s perverse incentives guarantee the perpetuation of the very poverty it exists to eradicate
The pitfalls of epistemic snobbery
The “Sophie of Dundee” case proves that confirmation bias is a double-edged sword
The value of social value
Social value requirements have made public procurement more expensive, more bureaucratic and harder for smaller firms to compete
The global risks of the AI illusion
What if AI turns out to be a lot less profitable than we have been told?
The end of encrypted Europe
Europe’s latest Chat Control may see child protection become a pretext for wider surveillance.
Hyperventilating vexillology
Once councils flew the symbols of the realm; now they proclaim the enthusiasms of the age