Society

Wednesday

Sam Leith Sam Leith

‘Everything is going to be turned upside down’: Michio Kaku on the new world of quantum computing

If you’ve ever wondered how an invisibility cloak would work, how to terraform Mars, how to make a forcefield, whether we’re living in a Matrix-like simulation or how far we are from a working teleportation device, Michio Kaku is your man. In books such as Physics of the Impossible, Physics of the Future and Parallel Worlds, Kaku combines the scientific chops of the theoretical physics professor he is with the gee-wow wonder of a sci-fi geek. That’s apt for someone who grew up worshipping at the twin altars of Albert Einstein and Flash Gordon. ‘It all started when I was eight,’ he says. ‘All the newspapers said that a great

Peter Jones

Twitter, Starmer and the madness of the mob

Elon Musk’s Twitter motto is Vox populi, vox Dei (‘The voice of the people, the voice of God’). This obviously appeals to the lawyer in Sir Keir Starmer since Twitter (being the voice of God) cannot be sued and therefore gives him scope to sail close to the wind. There is much he can learn from the example of the Romans. The mob is in full song on the walls of Pompeii. ‘Amplicatus, I know that Icarus is buggering you. Salvius wrote this’; ‘Phileros is a eunuch’; ‘Nero’s finance officer says the food here is poison’; ‘Secundus likes to screw boys’ and much else of this sort. Roman orators too

Lavatch

Solution to 2599: Slow to Change

The proverb reads ‘A lie will go round the world while truth is pulling its boots on’ (19/7/29/1D/8/10) by C.H. Spurgeon. The unclued lights at 13, 38 and 39 are BOOTS. First prize Janet Burke, Peterborough Runners-up Geoff Lee, London N1, Alan Connor, Kew, Twickenham

Lavatch

2602: Rolling Stones

Three unclued lights are a musician (two words) and a quotation of his (four words), which suggests the other six unclued lights, all anagrams of words of a kind (one of two words).  Across 8 Delaying intro, ace ruler (4) 11 Posh earl pokes you abroad in part of eye (6) 12 Bill eating corn in earnest (5) 17 I’m leaving rupees for Turkic speaker (5) 18 Cat heard in forest (5) 19 Sally’s Samoyed’s caught rabies (5) 21 Mist by lake in wood (5) 22 A hobo, on line, snaps here (5) 24 Energy field in Greek colony (4) 26 Tour of e.g. Ely finished (3,4) 27 A damp old

Lucy Vickery

Spectator competition winners: poems with multisyllabic rhyme words

In Competition No. 3296, you were invited to provide a poem whose rhyme words are all at least three syllables. You riffed off W.S. Gilbert, Wordsworth and Dylan Thomas,among others, in limericks, double dactyls and villanelles, about subjects ranging from Gary Lineker to sex dolls. Philip Roe, Barbara Jones and Chris Ramsey shone, but the winners below take £25. The wisdom of Lord Bostock was, to say the least, debatable, For, shunning living ladies, he had purchased an inflatable. He took her home, unpacked her, and he used her energetically, Excitedly, delightedly, and finally frenetically. He never doubted she could bear the strain of his virility; She burst when he was

Luke McShane

No. 749

White to play. Grandelius-Aabling Thomsen, Xtracon Open 2018. White has just one winning move. What did he play? Answers should be emailed to chess@spectator.co.uk by Monday 1 May. There is a prize of £20 for the first correct answer out of a hat. Please include a postal address and allow six weeks for prize delivery. Last week’s solution 1 Bd5+. Depending on Black’s reply, it’s 2 Qc6# or 2 Qd2#. Last week’s winner Richard Doble, Conwy, Wales

Luke McShane

Reykjavik Open

This year’s Reykjavik Open attracted a record turnout of more than 400 players. The Icelanders’ affinity for chess is well established, and the Harpa Conference Centre is a beautiful playing hall looking over the waterfront. At the top of the seedings was Ukrainian luminary Vasyl Ivanchuk, but first place went to the affable Swedish grandmaster Nils Grandelius. He took the lead in the penultimate round. Abhijeet Gupta-Nils GrandeliusReykjavik Open, April 2023 53…Kf4 is tempting, but 54 Nb7 e4 55 Nc5 Bf5 56 Nxe4! secures a draw as the bishop can never force White’s king out from the a1-corner. In what follows, the sacrifice of knight for e-pawn is carefully avoided. 53…Bd5!

Susanna Gross

Bridge | 29 April 2023

The American multiple world champion Eric Rodwell is truly a legend of bridge. He and his former partner Jeff Meckstroth were the best pair in the world for so long that they were referred to simply as ‘Meckwell’. When he published his book The Rodwell Files: Secrets of a Bridge Champion 12 years ago, it quickly became a modern classic. I bought it a while ago, but only got round to starting it recently, and by coincidence, a friend told me he was reading it too. ‘I came across your name,’ he added. ‘Impossible!’, I replied, laughing at the idea. But he was convinced, so as soon as I got

Melissa Kite

The vegans have landed in West Cork

After a day’s house-hunting in West Cork, I texted the builder boyfriend to say that we were too late. The vegans had landed. This was my second trip to view farms in Ireland and I fell even more in love with the rugged, sometimes desolate landscape punctuated by friendly market towns with bunting strung across the streets. Unfortunately, so had everyone else. Two agents had confirmed that my nearest neighbours might be a pair of unwashed British hobbit people  The London lefties have made it to the Emerald Isle. Having laid waste to Devon, Cornwall and Wales with their llamas and yurts and mental ideas about everything rural from farming

Jeremy Clarke

My morphine machine has broken

Monday morning. In comes Frank. Frank is a carer in his late fifties. He comes daily to wash me. Still half asleep, I sit upright in my mechanical cradle forking in Greek yoghurt, strawberries and granola and looking out of the window. Up here on the cliff, it’s another clear, blue, busy day ahead for our feathery nest builders, egg rearers and chick scoffers. Although he was a bit brutal with his caring to begin with, Funky Frank has become gentler over time In his spare time Frank plays bass, he says. Of all the styles he likes funk best, he says. His style is a busy, intricate one. He’ll

Taki

New York’s killer cyclists

New York The most likely place to be injured, or even killed, in the Bagel is the sidewalk, any sidewalk, where bikes and scooters have free rein to mow down the old, the infirm, and those unable to perform life-saving, matador-like avoidance moves. Yep, marauding bikers use the sidewalks of New York to beat the traffic and intimidate people, and have managed to impose their illegal presence there as a beleaguered police force turn a blind eye. It all started under the last mayor of the Bagel, one so bad that I dare not mention his name in the elegant pages of The Speccie. And it continues – but even

John Mac Ghlionn

The narcissism of Just Stop Oil

Just Stop Oil (JSO) activists have an insatiable appetite for mayhem. Protesters from the environmental group are slowing down traffic in London today, conducting a ‘go slow’ march through Parliament Square. This isn’t the first time, of course, that they’ve caused disruption. Cast your minds back to July last year, when five members of JSO glued themselves to the Last Supper painting in London’s Royal Academy. A few days before this rather odd demonstration, campaigners entered the National Gallery in central London and proceeded to glue themselves to the frame of John Constable’s the Hay Wain. Earlier this month, a JSO protester disrupted the World Snooker Championship in Sheffield by jumping

Jawad Iqbal

Why are so many Indian migrants crossing the Channel?

Indians now make up the second-biggest cohort of Channel migrants: 675 Indians arrived in small boats in the first three months of this year, according to Home Office figures. This amounts to almost a fifth of the total 3,793 crossings made in the first quarter of this year. The number represents a stark rise: only 683 Indians made the journey in the whole of last year. Albanians, yes, Afghans and Iraqis possibly – but the revelation that so many from India are making the dangerous crossing to England has taken many by surprise. The Indian government insists that the growth in emigration is linked to a rise in Sikhs fleeing

Tuesday

Winston Marshall

Peter Boghossian: how the Academy got woke and why the ‘New Atheists’ are to blame

67 min listen

Winston speaks to former Portland State University professor turned international philosopher, Peter Boghossian. Peter was a prominent new atheist author and expert on the Socratic method when he resigned his position at Portland over the percolation of ‘woke’ ideology into the university. In his resignation letter he described how the institution had become a ‘dogma factory’ which had ‘weaponized diversity, equity and inclusion’. Peter and Winston discuss progressive domination of the Academy, how woke spreads, DEI vs free speech, how to have constructive conversations and whether the new atheists led to woke culture.

Brendan O’Neill Brendan O’Neill

Diane Abbott and the trouble with the ‘hierarchy of racism’

The radical left have a new favourite phrase: ‘hierarchy of racism’. This is when one form of racism is treated more seriously than another. Such racial favouritism infuriates online leftists. It is anathema to the noble cause of anti-racism to elevate one ethnic group’s suffering over another’s, they cry. All racism is bad, they’re forever reminding us. But here’s the thing: they only ever use that phrase ‘hierarchy of racism’ when it’s anti-Semitism that is being talked about. I guarantee that every time you hear a Corbynista or some other virtual radical bemoan the treatment of certain kinds of racism as more concerning than others, it’s because anti-Jewish hatred is

Melanie McDonagh Melanie McDonagh

Why should gardeners learn to love weeds?

Dirt, is, as the anthropologist Mary Douglas famously put it, ‘matter out of place’. For her, ‘there is no such thing as absolute dirt’ and ‘no single item is dirty apart from a particular system of classification in which it does not fit’. It is a label for ‘all events which blur, smudge, contradict or otherwise confuse accepted classifications’.   This is a long way of getting round to saying that the Royal Horticultural Society is now encouraging us to embrace weeds. Four of the dozen show gardens at the Chelsea Flower Show are to include them. Indeed Sheila Das, the garden manager at RHS Wisley, is anxious that we

Joanna Williams

Labour’s ‘lessons for boys’ plan is a sinister sideshow

What are schools for? The answer used to be obvious: school was where children went to learn how to read, write and count, while the lucky ones picked up some history, algebra, chemistry and literature along the way. But not any more. Nowadays, academic subjects have become a sideshow to the main event: changing children’s attitudes and values. Whether it is relationships and sex education classes that teach children there are 73 genders, citizenship lessons that preach the importance of fair trade, or personal, social and health education workshops on white privilege, today’s schools seem more concerned with coercing children into accepting a particular set of beliefs than they are

Ross Clark Ross Clark

The era of big state spending is here to stay

Lockdown ended, the economy reopened – and public sector borrowing went up. Provisional figures for 2022/23 released by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) this morning show that the government borrowed £139.2 billion. This is an increase of £18.1 billion on the previous year, when the economy was still being disrupted by Covid. The figure was made much worse by figures for March this year, when the government borrowed £21.5 billion – £16.3 billion more than in March 2022.  A huge surge in borrowing during the pandemic was to be expected. The government was, after all, paying the wages of 9 million people at one stage through the furlough scheme.

Nigel Jones

Britain’s bloody history in Sudan

A 72 hour truce between rival military factions has been brokered in Sudan’s civil war by US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken. But whether this one holds, or falls apart like the previous ones, the history of one of Africa’s largest countries is a troubled one. It is also not the first time that an emergency evacuation of British citizens has caused a British political storm.  In 1884, just as today, a British prime minister was under intense pressure to rescue British citizens from savage fighting in Sudan’s capital Khartoum. So violent was the criticism of the ‘dithering’ in Downing Street then, that it almost destroyed the career of the grand old

Gareth Roberts Gareth Roberts

Jolyon Maugham’s opening sentence might be the worst of all time

In the first sentence of his book, Jolyon Maugham – the anti-Brexit KC best known for clubbing a fox to death – achieves a mean feat. In 22 words, he conveys his trademark self-pity, self-aggrandisement and capacity for tying himself into pompous knots: ‘The life I have is hard, but I got to choose it, and the road that brought me here I did not,’ Maugham writes in Bringing Down Goliath. It certainly acts as a tantaliser. If this is only the first sentence, what other jewels are contained in the remaining 318 pages? After we’ve picked ourselves up from the floor, it’s worth unpacking – or trying to unpack