Uncategorized

Wednesday

John Mac Ghlionn

The problem with MrBeast

Jimmy Donaldson, more commonly known as MrBeast, is the world’s most successful YouTuber. More than 250 million people follow his channel. His videos are mostly absurd challenges involving obscene amounts of cash generated from his YouTube advertising revenue. In one video, he eats $100,000 worth of gold leaf ice cream; in another, he pays a participant $10,000 a day to see how long they’re willing to live in a supermarket. His most popular video, a remake of the Korean survival horror TV show Squid Game, has over half a billion views.  There seems almost nothing negative that can be said about Donaldson – well, almost nothing Donaldson and his team of friends

Mark Solomons

Confessions of an egg snatcher

April is nesting season and with it comes egg collectors, an illegal band of very specialised and, in some ways, very British of criminals. Many would consider themselves wildlife enthusiasts. Most see their crime as a hobby, ignoring the effects of stealing a clutch of eggs and thus accelerating the species decline in a particular location. The thieves are certainly expert birders; they are able to recognise the nests of particular birds and know when to attempt their raids and where best to launch their raids. Older egg snatchers know not to exhibit their collections But though knowledgeable, they are despised across the birding community. The thieves themselves are not

Angus Colwell

Thank goodness pubs shut at 11

A group of four stagger out of a pub in Britain at around 11.20 on a Thursday night. The search begins for somewhere to have one more drink without a £20 entry fee. Men on doors say no by shaking their heads. Pubs show their appetite for more visitors by turning their lights up a little brighter than an exploding sun. There are bars open, but the mark-up on a glass of white seems out of sync with the occasion and the bank balance. Half an hour’s increasingly muted search ends halfway across the other side of town. Nothing is open. Google maps is opened. Everyone mutters goodbye. If we

Tuesday

Robin Ashenden

My loveless nights in post-Soviet hostels

I suppose there are people who stay in four or five-star hotels all their lives and become a kind of expert in them, turning their noses up at rooms I would regard as the acme of comfort, but since my parents stopped paying, I never have. In adulthood my standards have plummeted and, as a traveller, I’ve stayed in any number of grotty places. I’m not complaining either – you have much more fun in life when there’s nothing to protect you from what Maxim Gorky, in a lyrical moment, called the ‘lower depths.’  None of this was erotic in any way but had a kind of anthropological edge to

Lydia Schmitt

My strange and wonderful tenants

You might find it a bit rum to open your front door to a stranger and hand over your door keys and alarm code as they head for an upper bedroom. Around a third of erstwhile landlords would now agree with you and have ceased renting, while the call for such affordable room at the inn continues to grow. Now we and our crumbling pile are getting increasingly ancient Half a century ago, we answered a tap at the door to a beautiful woman, standing in the snow in kitten heels. She was a Maori, a chieftaness no less, having slaughtered her first sheep on the family North Island farm

William Cook

Euro 2024: a guide to Germany’s cities

Here’s a question for Spectator football fans: what’s the most memorable match you’ve ever seen? I don’t mean on television. I mean in an actual stadium, the way football should be seen. For me it was in 1996, seeing England play Germany at Wembley, in the semi-finals of the Euros. England were the better team over 90 minutes, and also during extra time, but with the game tied at 1-1 it came down to penalties. The first five players on both sides all scored. Then Andreas Köpke saved from Gareth Southgate (I wonder what became of him?) and Andreas Möller stepped up and scored the winner. England were out. A

Monday

Daniel Sokol

A beginner’s guide to finding a good nanny

When an au pair or nanny writes ‘I was wondering if I could talk to you this evening,’ it is rarely good news. At best, it is to ask for a pay rise; at worst, to give notice of a departure. ‘I’d like to go to Madrid,’ said our beloved au pair one evening, confirming our worst fears, and so began the quest for a new live-in nanny. We decided not to confront her with this discovery, and she proved a superb au pair Finding a good au pair or nanny is so fraught with peril that specialist agencies exist to reduce the burden, with some charging thousands of pounds

Kevin Cook

Golf keeps getting weirder

Golf has never been weirder or better. In 2022, the upstart LIV Golf, funded by Saudi Arabia’s $700 billion sovereign wealth fund, took on PGA Tour, poaching stars including Phil Mickelson, Dustin Johnson and Brooks Koepka. Mohammed bin Salman’s regime lured them by shovelling oil money into their pockets, with Mickelson signing for a reported $200 million. A graying, 42-year-old Sergio Garcia, with PGA Tour earnings of $54 million in his 23 years as a pro, got an instant $40 million to lose LIV tournaments to younger, better players. Sure enough, the suits in the PGA Tour’s executive suites soon brokered a secret deal with the Saudis Golf pundits like

Hannah Moore

Why celebrity restaurants so often fail

London has seen a string of celebrity restaurants, mostly with disappointing results. David Beckham and Guy Ritchie opened a pub in 2018 – the Walmer Castle – but it didn’t last. They handed it on in 2022 and the pub has changed hands three times since its opening. Ed Sheeran set up his grastropub, ‘Bertie Blossoms’ just two months before the pandemic, and while it is still open, Sheeran has admitted that it’s not gone smoothly. He’s learned that unless you have a large chain, making money off a restaurant is very difficult. Lewis Hamilton and Leonardo DiCaprio have tried the chain business model, opening eight locations of their plant-based

Friday

Penworthy

Three big priced ante-post bets for April

Max McNeill and his family, who own THREEUNDERTHRUFIVE, have been hoping for months that their horse would line up for next weekend’s Randox Grand National. However, they listened to the man who knows the horse best, 14-times champion trainer Paul Nicholls. He persuaded them that their nine-year-old gelding would be better suited to the challenges of the bet365 Gold Cup instead. This advice led to Threeunderthrufive swerving Aintree and instead being on target for Sandown on 27 April where he will have a really good chance of landing the £95,000-plus first prize. Threeunderthrufive ticks a lot of boxes for this race: he stays well, he jumps well, he goes on

Christopher Sandford

Kurt Cobain’s life was an American morality tale

The Peaceable Kingdom probably isn’t the first place you would have looked for Kurt Cobain. Of all the ironies and confusions of his brief life, perhaps none was as pointed as his choosing to kill himself in a room overlooking that sign, announcing Seattle’s upscale Leschi neighbourhood, with its views of Lake Washington and the snow-capped mountains beyond. It was here that, one morning in April 1994, Cobain – then in the third year of his marriage to his fellow musician Courtney Love – first injected himself with heroin and then took a shotgun and blew his brains out. Had he lived, he could have gone on to become a

Sean Thomas

The person who edited this will soon be redundant

Whenever I write about AI on The Spectator (which is a lot) I always get comments like ‘Yawn. Wake me up when AI actually does something’. And, to a point, these are fair comments. For all its remarkable feats, its photos of Shakespeare with weird fingers, its videos of dogs typing in spacesuits, the new wave of AI hasn’t really done something simultaneously concrete and astonishing, something where you can draw breath and say ‘Wow, that is definitely replacing this particular job’. In my experience, these AI chatbots respond better if you are polite, an uncanny fact Well, now I can address that. Because I am so obsessive about AI,

Ella Dorn

The cult of Camille Paglia

There’s a spectre floating inside the head of a certain type of young woman. It’s the fast-talking, sex-realist American academic Camille Paglia. She was big in the 1990s but my parents haven’t heard of her. ‘Did she write Fear of Flying?’ asks my dad. On sections of the internet she has become a folk hero. She’s an ideological guiding force for the female hosts of Red Scare, an influential left-ish podcast which was described by the Cut as ‘a critique of feminism, and capitalism, from deep inside the culture they’ve spawned’. Paglia is equally popular among some conservative factions: a 2017 debate between Paglia and Jordan Peterson has amassed 3.5

Wednesday