When you look in the dictionary under the word “airhead,” you won’t find a photograph of the Guardian writer Zoe Williams. But there should be one. If the right-wing Ann Coulter is the witty, insightful, tough-minded exception to the rule of female punditry, then the left-wing Williams is the vapid, conformist, slush-brained quintessence. On the […]
Here’s an astonishing fact: the White mathematician Claude Shannon (1916–2001) contributed more to STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) than all Blacks who have ever lived. But then so did the Indian mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan (1887–1920). And the Jewish mathematician Emmy Noether (1882–1935), which is even more astonishing. Jews have always been a tiny minority […]
The mainstream media are also the mutilated media. They don’t have arms, so when a political scandal erupts they don’t pull back the curtain and reveal what’s really going on behind the scenes. That mutilation was obvious during the scandal about the high-flying politician Priti Patel, the obnoxious Hindu Indian who now oversees Britain’s laws […]
If you’re interested in war, here’s a question for you. What’s the world’s most powerful weapon? You might come up with some good guesses, but I suspect you’ll miss the right answer. So here are some clues. The weapon can wreck entire nations, not just individual cities. But it’s not a mega-bomb or a death-ray. […]
“Low-hanging fruit!” cry deluded right-wingers all over the West. “Why doesn’t my favored party on the mainstream right pluck that fruit and defeat the left?” Well, they’ve been crying that for decades and will still be crying it when the left pack them off to a slave-labor camp or an organic gas-chamber. Some of those […]
I’m interested in parlance, I’m interested in poofs, pansies and pillow-biters. How could I not be interested in Polari? According to Paul Baker’s book Fabulosa! (2019), Polari was “Britain’s Secret Gay Language” and used by thousands of “camp gay men” until the late 1960s. Baker describes its history, heyday, decline and revival. But the book […]
The most important thing in the universe can’t be seen, touched, tasted, smelt or heard. No scientific instrument can detect it or measure it. Indeed, everything that science knows and understands about it could be written on the full stop at the end of this sentence. Then again, from the scientific point of view there […]
