Mary Harrington

Mary Harrington is a contributing editor at Unherd

Make Sex Wild Again

The notorious Infowars host Alex Jones once opined that he didn’t like the government ‘putting chemicals in the water that turn the friggin’ frogs gay’. CNBC called this a ‘disturbing and ridiculous conspiracy theory’, and Jones is noted for wild and sometimes actionable claims. But if we read ‘gay’ in the colloquial sense, as offensive

Covid and the rise of the Zoom class

On November 6, 2021, the California petroleum heiress Ivy Getty married the photographer Tobias Engel at San Francisco City Hall. The venue is in the Tenderloin district, and the Tenderloin is at the heart of the city’s drug and homelessness crises. Drug abuse is rife in San Francisco, which the SF Chronicle reported in 2019

Why I’m no fan of the Tories’ free childcare promises

Why are our big three political parties so keen to out do each other in their commitment to separating children from their parents? Labour trumpeted its manifesto offer of 30 hours of childcare for all two, three and four-year-olds by promising a ‘radical expansion of free childcare for all’. Not to be outdone, the Lib

Labour’s women-friendly work policies are anything but

Labour has pledged to close the gender pay gap by 2030 and the party has chosen today – ‘Equal Pay Day’ – to launch its supposedly women-friendly work policies. The party plans to force small and medium-sized companies to perform gender pay gap audits, just as bigger companies of 250 are required to do already. This sounds all