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Jan 10, 2025 | 
fairerdisputations.org | Holly Lawford-Smith
In my book Gender‑Critical Feminism, I argued that consuming the products of the sex industry is a paradigm example of unethical consumption. Discussion of unethical consumption focuses on injustices in the supply chain of a product, anywhere from the extraction of raw materials through to the selling by the final retailer, and looks at whether consumers can be justified in purchasing those products given the injustices.
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Oct 24, 2024 | 
quillette.com | Allan Stratton |Helen Dale |John Lloyd |Holly Lawford-Smith
Introduction: My guest this week is Jack Despain Zhou, also known by his alias Tracing Woodgrains. I first encountered Jack’s work when he was a research assistant on Jesse Singal and Katie Herzog’s excellent podcast Blocked and Reported. Blocked and Reported | Jesse Singal | SubstackA Podcast About Internet Controversies. Click to read Blocked and Reported, a Substack publication with tens of thousands of subscribers. Now, he is an independent writer and law student.
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Oct 24, 2024 | 
quillette.com | Allan Stratton |Helen Dale |John Lloyd |Holly Lawford-Smith
Note: The following essay contains spoilers. On 22 December 1984, four teenagers, all of whom had previously been arrested, boarded a New York subway train with the intention of robbing a downtown arcade. Two of them cornered a mild-mannered loner named Bernie Goetz and demanded five dollars. They did not know that two previous muggings had left Goetz with a permanently damaged knee, and that he’d taken to carrying an unlicensed gun for self-defence.
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Oct 23, 2024 | 
quillette.com | Helen Dale |John Lloyd |Holly Lawford-Smith |Peter Hague
A Review of The Counterweight Handbook: Principled Strategies for Surviving and Defeating Social Justice Ideology—at Work, in Schools and Beyond by Helen Pluckrose, 275 pages, Pitchstone Publishing (June 2024). No-platformings, de-platformings, and cancellations have been around for decades. They have, however, become more common in the last ten years, with a veritable explosion since June 2020.
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Oct 22, 2024 | 
quillette.com | John Lloyd |Holly Lawford-Smith |Peter Hague |John Aziz
A review of Unleashed by Boris Johnson, 784 pages, HarperCollins (October 2024)Boris Johnson was mayor of London from 2008 to 2016, foreign secretary from 2016 to 2018 and prime minister of the United Kingdom from 2019 to 2022. That’s fourteen years spent in high—and finally the highest—political positions in the country. A vigorous and generally successful mayor, he was a disaster as foreign secretary, impatient with detail and prone to insulting or mocking leaders from allied states.
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Oct 21, 2024 | 
quillette.com | Holly Lawford-Smith |Peter Hague |John Aziz |Charlotte Allen
Since 2019, plans have been afoot in Victoria, Australia to expand the state’s existing hate speech protections. Currently only race and religion are protected; the idea was to add a number of new protected groups, and to make prosecution easier. A bill proposed in 2019 made it to a second reading but then lapsed late in 2022. The matter was sent to a parliamentary committee, which recommended in 2021 that legislation go ahead.
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Sep 29, 2024 | 
quillette.com | Brian Stewart |David Cohen |Iona Italia |Holly Lawford-Smith
The military response was late, but when it finally arrived, it hit the target. On 27 September, an Israeli airstrike on a Beirut bunker eliminated Hezbollah’s general secretary Hassan Nasrallah. This operation was the boldest stroke yet in an Israeli campaign that began ten days before with the detonation of thousands of pagers and walkie-talkies used by Hezbollah’s operatives, continued with the targeting of the group’s senior military leaders, and has now decapitated the organisation entirely.
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Sep 29, 2024 | 
quillette.com | David Cohen |Iona Italia |Holly Lawford-Smith |Benny Morris
On 19 February 2020, just three weeks after the World Health Organisation (WHO) had declared COVID-19 an international public-health emergency, a group of 27 prominent scientists published a letter in the Lancet headlined, Statement in Support of the Scientists, Public Health Professionals, and Medical Professionals of China Combating COVID-19.
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Sep 27, 2024 | 
quillette.com | David Cohen |Iona Italia |Holly Lawford-Smith |Benny Morris
It is probably fitting that the academic I contacted to discuss Nick Cave was Tanya Dalziell, a professor of English and cultural studies at the University of Western Australia, in Perth. For nearly 45 years now, her charcoal-voiced fellow countryman—besuited in black and proffering bouquets of flowers from the pit—has been offering us songs of love and hate.
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Sep 26, 2024 | 
quillette.com | Iona Italia |Holly Lawford-Smith |Benny Morris |Dennis Saffran
Editor’s Note: Back in 2019, I felt that my life had become increasingly financially precarious and spiritually empty and I fell into a deep well of regret and self-reproach. I was brooding obsessively over what I saw as the mistakes and missed opportunities of my past and was consumed by anxiety about the future. It was the discovery of Stoicism—largely through Derren Brown’s work (see below)—that, together with the love of friends, helped me out of it.
