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In the magazine this week I have written a piece about the Canadian Professor Jordan Peterson. He has been in the UK over the last week to talk about his new book 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos. Among many other things – much more of which I go into in the piece – his visit showed up the UK’s broadcast media in a very bad light. On Saturday morning, Peterson made an appearance on Radio 4’s Today programme. They gave him a hurried four minutes at the end of the show. They could have quizzed him on almost anything and got a point of view different from almost

James Flynn’s research on the eponymous Flynn Effect, showing massive gains in IQ in 14 nations in the course of the 20th Century, was leapt on by hard-working teachers, social policy wonks and dieticians. It rebutted claims that IQ was immutable and implied that ambitious interventions in families and schools could be effective. The gains Flynn discovered were so large, they suggested an average child would be regarded as a ‘genius’ by their great grandparents. However, Flynn has now changed his mind. In a speech he gave earlier this year at the International Society for Intelligence Research, and now published in Intelligence, a peer-reviewed academic journal, Flynn announced that this

Isn’t Meghan fabulous? Hasn’t she totally brought the monarchy into the 21st century? Doesn’t she make Kate look like such a square? We were so bored of Sloaney English roses, weren’t we? Meghan Markle is widely considered to be the best thing to have happened to the royal family — and Britain — in a long time. The newspapers are ecstatic, and not just the patriotic ones. There will be pictures, pictures and more pictures to come. Or fake pictures, if that’s what sells. The Sunday Sport recently ‘discovered’ a fake topless picture of Prince Harry’s squeeze, stuck it on the front page and ran with the headline ‘Harry’s Meghan

The deaf are beginning to annoy me. They seem, paradoxically, more voluble than the blind. Perhaps this is because, understandably, deaf people suspect that their voices are not being heard. Which of course they are not, literally, by other deaf people — and in some cases this must lead to a state of suffocating paranoia. Anyway, the severely deaf American singer Mandy Harvey has received death threats from some of her country’s deaf community because she, er, sings — i.e., she is promoting a ‘hearing’ activity and is thus guilty of perpetuating something called ‘oralism’. It is always a pleasure to bring you a new ‘ism’ coined by a new

It may be churlish to be unkind about a young couple who have just announced their engagement but needs must. Someone has to say it, though let me say at the outset that the engagement has made lots of people very happy. Not least journalists. Prince Harry is fifth in line to the throne so constitutionally it doesn’t matter a hoot who he marries because neither he nor his children are going to become monarch, but, for what it’s worth, Meghan Markle is unsuitable as his wife for the same reason that Wallis Simpson was unsuitable: she’s divorced and Harry’s grandmother is supreme governor of the CofE. The last person

For many years, the grandson of the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, Tariq Ramadan, has been one of my closest enemies. In Switzerland and France this Islamist dauphin had a slightly hard time establishing his reputation. This was not just due to his poor scholarship (the basis of which lay in a fawning book about his grandad) but also to his double-speak in public debate and (at best) borderline Islamist views. In France these views were most famously exposed in a television debate with Nicolas Sarkozy in which Ramadan infamously could not bring himself to condemn the stoning of adulterers outright, merely calling for a ‘moratorium’ on the punishment. In Britain,

Oh, the glorious hypocrisy of it all – the dozens of actresses, UN goodwill ambassadors among them, who have come forward to make accusations against Harvey Weinstein – and yet whom said not a word between them when they were on the make and he was in a position to help them with their careers. I should say that if you are important and mature enough to serve as a UN ambassador you ought to be brave enough to report wrongdoing that is going on beneath your nose – and not wait until there is a bandwagon on which to leap. Worse, it turns out that in 2009 some of