Society

Wednesday

Mary Killen

Dear Mary: is it disloyal of me to watch The Crown? 

Q. Last week I was a ticket-paying guest at a charity dinner. After the first course, the main fundraiser stood up and gave a speech. I didn’t know the man on my right but I suspect he was some sort of VIP. He never stopped talking about himself to me throughout the speech and I was aware of disapproving glances in our direction. I didn’t want to be rude and ignore him but we were obviously an annoyance to others. What would you have done, Mary? – Name and address withheld A. You might have gripped his arm and said: ‘Did you hear? I think she/he just mentioned your name.’ That

Luke McShane

Lengthy Correspondence

‘In fact it is now conceded by all experts that by proper play on both sides the legitimate issue of a game ought to be a draw…’ Those words were written by Wilhelm Steinitz, who became the first world champion after beating Johannes Zukertort in 1886. But their 20-game match saw 75 per cent decisive games, a quantity of bloodshed that would be unimaginable in the 21st century. By comparison, Magnus Carlsen has played five world championship matches, in which less than 25 per cent of the classical (slow) games were decisive. It is not a matter of style, but rather of skill – the fact is that modern players make far fewer

Roger Alton Roger Alton

Rugby’s new golden age

This column may have been somewhat negative about the future of rugby recently – so how cheering to report a spate of magnificent matches, across both codes and both genders, that provided not only brilliant entertainment but also, as young people like to say these days, ‘learnings’. The best game of all was the women’s World Cup final at Eden Park, Auckland, when after 80 minutes of spine-tingling rugby union England lost by just three points. Forget any snooty talk you might have heard about women’s rugby. This match had everything: athleticism, a real sense of adventure and far fewer of those interminable caterpillar rucks and reset scrums which clog

Toby Young Toby Young

Gary Neville’s fairweather morality

Should England be participating in the Qatar World Cup? On the face of it, the case for a boycott is pretty compelling. Much of the infrastructure – including eight stadiums, an airport expansion, a new metro system and multiple hotels – has been built by migrant workers who are notoriously poorly treated by their Qatari employers. Women still have to obtain permission from their male guardians to marry, study abroad on state scholarships and receive certain reproductive health care. Muslim women who have sex outside marriage can be sentenced to flogging. Homosexuality is against the law and punishable by imprisonment. Freedom of expression and of the press leave a lot

Mary Wakefield Mary Wakefield

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

Janet de Botton

Bridge | 19 November 2022

The EBU’s Premier League (eight teams in Division 1 – seven 16-board matches each weekend) took place over three weekends, and after the second we were leading. Only one problem – I didn’t play the second weekend, which meant that to qualify I had to play five of the remaining seven matches which, naturally enough, gave my teammates a collective panic attack. Playing with my regular partner Artur Mali, we guzzled down 64 boards on Saturday and 16 on Sunday, won them all, and left the four professionals to finish the final two matches. I’ll skip lightly over match six but after match seven we had won… with a bit

Peter Jones

The Greeks’ curiosity extended far beyond the cerebral

These days technology rules the roost and robots take questions in the House of Lords. In the West at least, the Greeks (as ever) got there first. Like the Romans, they were fascinated by hydraulics, springs, pistons, gears, sprockets, pulley-chains – and experimented with them to produce a whole range of lifting, digging, and propelling devices, especially for military purposes. A breakthrough happened when some Ancient Greeks, observing that the earth and heavens revolved in predictable circles, mimicked them in hand-cranked, bronze mechanisms consisting of complex, linked cogwheels to replicate and predict that movement – the first analogue computers.  The single recovered example is the Antikythera machine (2nd century bc),

Aidan Hartley

The energy of the world is shifting south

Kenya Greetings from Africa, my beleaguered cousins. I’ve written before about how in 1973, Uganda’s Idi Amin telegrammed Queen Elizabeth, promising to send shiploads of bananas to feed her subjects after ‘following with sorrow the alarming economic crisis befalling on Britain’. Now that you rival Burkina Faso in the number of times you’ve changed your leaders recently, I’m going to move out of the sunshine, take a swig of cold beer and show some sympathy once more. For a long time, those of us the British Empire left behind when you pushed off a few decades ago sniggering into your pith helmets sometimes wondered if we’d made a mistake. ‘No

Susan Hill Susan Hill

Why do patients need to know they’re dying? 

Old people are being stranded in hospital, diagnosed with terrible diseases but unable to recover enough to go home. Dr Adrian Boyle, the new president of the Royal College of Emergency Medicine, has said that NHS hospitals ‘are like lobster traps… easy to get into but hard to get out of’. Might it not be better for some if they’d never gone, or at least never been told exactly what was wrong? In C.P. Snow’s 1951 novel The Masters, the Master of a Cambridge college is ill. People seeing his bedroom light on night and day wonder how long he has left, but the question never occurs to him because

Melissa Kite

AA is turning away the very people who need it most

‘If AA wants to make its meetings safe, then maybe it should ban alcoholics,’ said the builder boyfriend and I had to admit, he had cracked it. There was me getting all wound up about why more and more of the meetings in Surrey won’t let the bricklayer in because of his criminal convictions and a vaguely expressed malaise about his liking for the ladies, and it was actually quite simple. In this new age of safeguarding, it’s clear that the only way you could make Alcoholics Anonymous into an organisation that passes muster for all the corporate compliance big charities either have to or want to do is by

The Spectator

Who has lost the most money in human history? 

Billion-dollar losers Sam Bankman-Fried, the 30-year-old founder of FTX, saw his wealth plummet from $16 bn to zero when the company collapsed. Other big fortunes lost: – Masayoshi Son, founder of Softbank, lost paper wealth of around $70 bn (in today’s money) during the dotcom crash of 2000-2. The company later floated and now he is reckoned by Forbes to be worth $22.8 bn. – Yasumitsu Shigeta, founder of mobile phone company Hikari Tsushin, lost a paper fortune of $42 bn in the dotcom crash, but thanks to a partial recovery in shares he is now worth $3.4 bn, says Forbes. – John Rockefeller, the oil magnate and America’s richest man

Philip Patrick Philip Patrick

The problem with Ronaldo’s betrayal narrative

Cristiano Ronaldo has almost certainly played his last game for Manchester United after an ‘explosive’ interview which ‘the whole world’s talking about’ (Piers Morgan’s words). ‘The biggest star that football has ever seen’ (Piers again) spills the beans on his cruel and incompetent employers in a two-part interview to be broadcast tonight and tomorrow. Fans will be left wondering how much is hype and where the truth and blame resides. Many will see a star in decline Ronaldo’s complaints range in seriousness from gripes about the food at Man U (no improvement since his first stint) to more significant criticism about the running of the club and its lack of

The Spectator

Letters: Camilla should not be called ‘Queen Consort’

Zero sense Sir: Ross Clark’s article (‘Hot air’, 12 November) neatly sums up some of the fallacies of the net zero target. Electricity generation currently fulfils about 20 per cent of the UK’s total energy demand – of which at best 40 per cent is covered by wind, solar, and hydro: i.e. 8 per cent of total energy demand is fulfilled from renewable sources. Are we really expected to believe that in the next 27 years electricity generation from renewables will grow 12.5 times – or from any source five times – and that the infrastructure will be put in place to deliver it? James Fairbairn Oxford Thank you, Jeremy

Laurie Graham

Elf and safety: are child protection guidelines killing Santa’s appeal?

Santa Claus is coming to town. I know this because I recently spent an evening gift-wrapping empty boxes to decorate his grotto at an upcoming Christmas fair. With most of my grandchildren now in their teens, it’s been a while since I endured the grotto experience and I was interested to know how such a thing is managed in 2022. How does one navigate between overbearing safeguarding guidelines and the jaded palate of today’s pre-school sophisticate? Is it even worth the bother? Father Christmas must nowbe accompanied at all times byone or more vigilant adults  Like anyone who volunteers for a role that will place them in the company of

Jeremy Clarke

How to make the perfect fry-up

Catriona went to England and Scotland for ten days. The last thing she said to the lean and slippered pantaloon as he stood on the doorstep to wave her off was: ‘Please eat healthily, darling.’ Pretty much the first thing I did after I’d watched her disappear down the path and rubbed my hands together was to peel, salt and boil a kilogram of spuds. I monitored them carefully and removed the pan from the heat at the point where a little pressure on a sharp knife was needed to penetrate right to the middle. The dear thing had left the fridge crammed with nature’s bounty, including sealed containers of

Douglas Murray

The delicious fall of Sam Bankman-Fried

Dame Edna Everage says one of life’s most precious gifts is the ability to laugh at the misfortunes of others. You may lament this instinct, yet we all harbour it. New Yorkers are especially prone when it comes to property envy. Every couple of years, it feels like, a skyscraper goes up in the city that is significantly taller than the previous very tall new skyscraper. Each time one does, the only thing that goes higher than the tower’s residences is the cost of purchasing them. So with what rapture do New Yorkers read about the misfortunes these buildings go through. Oh, the thrill of learning that they sway in

Joanna Rossiter Joanna Rossiter

Just Stop Oil aren’t like the suffragettes

What do Just Stop Oil protesters have in common with the suffragettes? Their antics of blocking motorways and chucking tomato soup at famous paintings might lead you to think there are few parallels. But Helen Pankhurst – great-granddaughter of Emmeline – thinks they do share some common ground. Both groups, Pankhurst suggests, are on the right side of history. In an article for the Guardian, she claims that ‘the climate crisis is a feminist issue’. ‘I have absolutely no doubt that in 100 years’ time (climate activists) will be seen as the real heroes,’ she says. Like Just Stop Oil, the suffragettes targeted museums, sports events and public buildings to raise

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

Why we should pray for crypto’s survival

Note to self: don’t sound smug about the sudden collapse of FTX – the Bahamas-based crypto exchange whose valuation has been zapped from $32 billion to zero – because however much it plays to I-told-you-so instincts about the mug’s game of crypto, the episode may herald a wave of wealth destruction that’s the last thing the financial world needs when there’s already so much bad stuff going on. Still, smugness is a strong temptation here – and what could be more provoking of that sentiment than a photograph in the Daily Telegraph of Sir Tony Blair and Bill Clinton on an FTX-badged stage alongside the firm’s 30-year-old founder Sam Bankman-Fried in

Theo Hobson Theo Hobson

Sam Bankman-Fried and the twilight of the ‘Effective Altruists’

Crypto whizzkid Sam Bankman-Fried has come a cropper. His $16 billion (£13 billion) fortune vanished overnight last week after FTX, the crypto exchange he founded, collapsed. What makes the tale of his rise and fall fascinating is that Bankman-Fried wasn’t in it for the money. Well, not in the normal way. Bankman-Fried is (or was) the poster boy of the Effective Altruism (EA) movement: a group of rational philanthropists who use their time and money in the most efficient possible way. That might involve becoming a banker, or crypto king, in order to earn millions, or in this case billions, so that they can give it away. Bankman-Fried fell in with the EA crowd during his time studying physics at MIT, and decided to