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2 months ago | 
thespectator.com | Mary Wakefield |Joanna Williams |Matt Ridley |Toby Young
Have you been to a “divorce party” yet this season? If you haven’t, not to worry, there’s still time. Divorce season lasts for the whole of January, I’m told, so there’s a couple of weeks left to celebrate. And if perhaps the details of your own nasty separation aren’t yet finalized, or if your lawyer and your ex have between them drained the champagne fund, then why not simply nip into town and crash someone else’s? You’re bound to find one.
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2 months ago | 
thespectator.com | Neal Pollack |Ben Domenech |Joanna Williams |Juan P. Villasmil
A Jesse Watters Fox News segment flashed across my timeline recently, and I took it very personally. In the segment, Kamala Harris and Doug Emhoff were at the grocery store. “What kind of husband goes grocery shopping with his wife?” Watters asked, smugly. The answer: every kind of husband. I go grocery shopping with my wife sometimes. I also go grocery shopping without my wife. Also, my wife goes grocery shopping without me. We need to buy food. Most of the time, we buy food at the grocery store.
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Jan 24, 2025 | 
thespectator.com | Becket Adams |Joanna Williams |Justin Brierley |Grace Curley
Which top Trump pick caused concern — bordering on panic — at a major news network this week, by turning up in a daze, slurring their words so heavily employees couldn’t understand them? The appointee claimed to have slipped on the ice and was moving “like a cripple” around the studio and spilling food, a source tells Cockburn. “To me,” the tipster says, the pick “seemed addled on pain meds.
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Jan 21, 2025 | 
thespectator.com | Juan P. Villasmil |Roger Kimball |Joanna Williams |Matt Ridley
After a packed first day in office, starting with an indoors swearing-in ceremony followed by a celebration at Capitol One Arena — where Trump signed executive orders to the cheers of thousands — the most involved in MAGA world tidied up for a first dance. With the doors of the Walter E. Washington Convention Center opening at 5:30 p.m., ecstatic supporters of the president filled the surrounding icy sidewalks in their fanciest attire.
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Jan 21, 2025 | 
thespectator.com | Charles Lipson |Joanna Williams |Matt Ridley |Michael Evans
“The First Hundred Days” was the iconic phrase for Franklin Roosevelt’s rapid-fire acts as the new president. Trump intends to top with “The First Hundred Hours.” Three months is far too slow for the new president. He made that clear by signing some 200 executive orders on his first day back in office. The media has focused on the substance of those orders, and understandably so. But their substantive content, on the border, birthright citizenship, DEI and more, is only half the story.
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Jan 21, 2025 | 
thespectator.com | Joanna Williams |Michael Evans |Brendan O’Neill |Jacob Heilbrunn
Cast your mind back eight years. The day after Donald Trump’s first inauguration, hundreds of thousands of women marched on Washington in opposition to the incoming president. Adorned in pink “pussy” hats, they were joined by protesters in London, Sydney, Zurich and at least 30 other American cities. As I argued at the time, beyond expressing general distaste for the incoming administration the precise aims of this movement were never particularly clear. But it was feminism and therefore good.
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Jan 8, 2025 | 
spectator.com.au | Joanna Williams
The tenth anniversary of the slaughter of Charlie Hebdo journalists reminds us that the literary establishment has long been equivocal when it comes to defending free speech. So news this week that the Royal Society of Literature is in ‘meltdown’, after singularly failing to defend its members when under attack, sadly comes as no surprise.
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Nov 19, 2024 | 
cieo.substack.com | Joanna Williams
In many countries around the world, age and education are the best predictors of how people vote in elections. Qualifications correlate with voting intentions far more than social class, sex or race. In the UK, graduates were more likely to have voted Remain in 2016’s referendum on EU membership and to have backed the Labour party in recent general elections.
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Nov 14, 2024 | 
cieo.substack.com | Joanna Williams
Police officers knocking on someone’s door to warn them about expressing untoward views is a shocking scenario we might imagine having taken place in a totalitarian regime such as communist East Germany. But, as Allison Pearson recently discovered, this happens in Britain today. The Telegraph columnist and best-selling author was visited by the police in response to a complaint they had received about a year-old social media post that allegedly ‘stirred up racial hatred’.
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Jul 13, 2024 | 
thespectator.com | Peter Jones |Svitlana Morenets |Joanna Williams |Daniel Rey
Last week, Lionel Shriver wrote a characteristically sharp piece about the narcissism of the aging Joe Biden, egged on by his wife, in standing again for the presidency of the United States. The Roman poet Lucretius (first century bc) might well have offered a similar opinion, but he would have presented it as an example of a universal and destructive human failing which he described in his magnificent poem On the Nature of the Universe — the dread of death.
