John Lanchester

I am scared of Facebook. The company’s ambition, its ruthlessness, and its lack of a moral compass scare me. It goes back to that moment of its creation, Zuckerberg at his keyboard after a few drinks creating a website to compare people’s appearance, not for any real reason other than that he was able to do it. That’s the crucial thing about Facebook, the main thing which isn’t understood about its motivation: it does things because it can. That’s why the impulse to growth has been so fundamental to the company, which is in many respects more like a virus than it is like a business. Grow and multiply and monetise. Why? There is no why. Because.

One of the secret scandals of modern Britain has been the increase in the death rate. In England and Wales it went up by 5.4 per cent in 2015, an extra 27,000 deaths over the year before: too big a number to be a statistical glitch. The death rate fell from the mid-1970s until the arrival of the coalition, but has been going up since 2011. The fact that the death rate fell under successive Tory and Labour regimes and is only now rising suggests that there is something specific about recent policy which is making the death rate worse. The likeliest culprit is changes to social care, in particular care of the elderly. This is nothing like as big a scandal as it should be. Who should you vote for if you want this to change?

Just over​ ten years ago, on 9 January 2007, Steve Jobs stood up on stage at the Moscone Center in San Francisco and announced that Apple would be bringing out three new devices: a ‘widescreen iPod, a revolutionary mobile phone, and a breakthrough internet communication device’. The punchline: ‘These are not three separate devices. This is one device.’ That was the...

Most​ writers of fiction are interested in anonymity. If they aren’t tickled by the thought when they sit down to write their first books, they get to that point after the first couple have come out. Writing is solitary, private, inward, and involves something close to complete control; even when there are losses of control or agency, they’re of the sort that a writer has, most...

The white working class is correct to feel abandoned: it has been. If I had to pick a single fact which has played no role in political discourse but which sums up the current position of the UK, it would be that most people in the UK receive more from the state, in direct cash transfers and in benefits such as health and education, than they contribute to it. The numbers are eerily similar to the referendum outcome: 48 per cent net contributors, 52 per cent net recipients. It’s a system bitterly resented both by the beneficiaries and by the suppliers of the largesse.