When Patriotism Becomes a Loyalty Test
What the Hell Are We Doing to Our Olympians? There’s a moment in the opening ceremony of the Milan-Cortina Winter Games that keeps rattling around my head. The American team…
Freedom of speech
A Perfectly Normal Weather Event
Your Guide to This Weekend’s Bomb Cyclone So there’s a bomb cyclone coming. Not a metaphorical one. Not a political one. An actual meteorological phenomenon with a name that sounds…
California Didn’t Join the WHO
But What It Actually Did Might Be More Interesting. Right, let’s clear something up before the internet gets any more confused. California has not, despite what some headlines might suggest,…
The Land of the Free (Now Screening With Subtitles)
There was a time when visiting America felt like entering a shared dream. You didn’t need to understand every line of dialogue. The plot carried you. Freedom. Reinvention. The open…
Death Has Been Sanitised So You’ll Never Learn to Live
Nobody dies anymore. Not visibly. Not in your presence. They disappear into hospitals, into care facilities, into systems. You never wash a body. Never sit with decay. Never confront the…
The Great Silencing
How the West Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Censorship There’s a particular irony in writing about freedom of speech in 2026. Not because it’s dangerous… well, not yet, anyway.…
The Most Dangerous Lie We’re Telling Ourselves
There is a strange stillness to the world right now. Not peace. Not calm. Something closer to exhaustion. Everywhere you look, the map is on fire. Ukraine grinds on in…
X as a Free Speech Haven?
Let’s Talk About What’s Actually Happening There’s a narrative doing the rounds right now, and it goes something like this: X (formerly Twitter) has become the last bastion of free…
What Have We Learnt This Year? (Spoiler: Probably Nothing)
Another year dissolves into the rearview mirror, and here we are again, pretending we’ve grown wiser. The headlines scroll past like some grotesque carousel… political chaos, economic tremors, wars that…
The Great Geopolitical Shuffle
Why Starmer’s Flying to Beijing While Trump Builds Walls So here we are. January 2026. Keir Starmer’s just touched down in Beijing for the first time a British prime minister…