22 Nov 2014

The Stepford students

Featured articles

Free speech is so last century. Today’s students want the ‘right to be comfortable’

[audioplayer src=”http://rss.acast.com/viewfrom22/8f1c0b97-698e-45c6-b50a-84e0e4b3773a/media.mp3″ title=”Brendan O’Neill and Harriet Brown discuss the rise of the Stepford student” startat=41] Listen [/audioplayer] Don’t be a Stepford student — subscribe to The Spectator’s print and digital bundle for just £22 for 22 weeks. Have you met the Stepford students? They’re everywhere. On campuses across the land. Sitting stony-eyed in lecture halls or

Philip Delves-Broughton

How to fight Europe’s demons of deflation

Deflation terrifies economists because once it starts, they have no idea what to do about it. When demand in an economy shrinks, companies cut jobs, and with fewer employed demand shrinks even more. The deflationary spiral is self-reinforcing. Central banks can cut interest rates to near zero and slosh money around like drunken lottery winners,

Anne Jolis

Steve Jobs’s button phobia has shaped the modern world

Koumpounophobia is the fear of buttons. Steve Jobs had it — or at least a strong aversion, which explained his affinity for touch-screens and turtlenecks. So do an estimated one of every 75,000 people alive today. Your correspondent was only recently made aware of the phenomenon when a friend, K of Cambridge, requested that I

Michael Lind

How America’s right wing is becoming a lot more like Britain’s

Washington DC [audioplayer src=”http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_20_Nov_2014_v4.mp3″ title=”Michael Lind and Sebastian Payne discuss the growing similarities of the Britain and American right” startat=1350] Listen [/audioplayer]Amid all the commentary about the Republican party’s triumph in America’s midterm elections, a remarkable fact was ignored: in style and substance, the American right is rapidly becoming a lot more like Britain’s.

Julie Burchill

For some left-wing men, the misogyny of the Islamic State is part of the appeal

Watching the recent footage of Islamic State gang members haggling over the price of captured Christian women in a makeshift slave market — one of them wants a 15-year-old with green eyes, another wants to exchange a girl for a gun — I was reminded that Islamists are at least consistent in their hateful worldview

Ross Clark

London’s real Olympic legacy: paying to build the stadium twice

In 2006, on the day that the government’s estimated cost for the 2012 Olympics was jacked up from £2.75 billion to £4.25 billion, I promised to eat my hat on the steps of the Olympic stadium if the bill came to less than £10 billion. Although the official figure now stands at a mere £8.92

Mark Mason

Life is full of little endings. We should pay them more attention

The end of the year seems a good time to think about lasts. Not many of us ever do. Firsts are always landmarks: the first time you taste alcohol, drive a car, have sex. Then the first time your child talks, walks, goes to school. All are noted at the time, stored away in the

Notes on...

Martin Vander Weyer

A miracle: French hotels actually like dogs

The first time I checked in to a French hotel with a golden retriever — his name was Gregory, predecessor of the incumbent Douglas — I left him, clearly unhappy, in the bedroom when I went to dinner. Then I realised that every other party already in the dining room included a dog, in some