Gus Carter

1 week ago | spectator.co.uk | Gus Carter

Duolingo claims that it is ‘the world’s best way to learn a language’. The app – which has tens of millions of users – boasts a ‘science-backed approach’ that it says ‘delivers measurable results’. I’m not convinced: it seems to me that time wasted on Duolingo would be far better spent doing almost anything else.

1 week ago | spectator.com.au | Gus Carter

Reform’s success in last week’s local elections has been attributed to many causes. Labour’s abolition of the winter fuel payment for pensioners. The hollowing out of the Conservative party’s campaigning base. Nigel Farage’s mastery of social media. But if you want an emblem of why voters turned their back on the political establishment let me give you Goat Man.

1 week ago | spectator.co.uk | Gus Carter

Something rather odd has happened to the way we talk about worry. The straightforward term ‘stress’ has been overtaken by the quasi-medical concept of ‘anxiety’. The problem is that the words mean don’t mean the same thing. Using them interchangeably can have unhappy consequences: just look at the recent reports that the majority of Britons now identify as neurodivergent. What greater evidence could there be of a creeping pathologisation of human experience?

3 weeks ago | spectator.com.au | Gus Carter

A few weeks ago, when Adolescence first came out, I found myself reading some of the academic literature on incels. It turns out they are a risk – but only really to themselves. When interviewed, over half of incels said they had considered killing themselves in the previous two weeks, compared to 5 per cent of the population who had thought about it in the past year.

3 weeks ago | spectator.co.uk | Gus Carter

A few weeks ago, when Adolescence first came out, I found myself reading some of the academic literature on incels. It turns out they are a risk – but only really to themselves. When interviewed, over half of incels said they had considered killing themselves in the previous two weeks, compared to 5 per cent of the population who had thought about it in the past year.