Diary

Antonia Hitchens: At CPAC, 20 March 2025

... from lower courts. No one seemed certain how long Trump would listen to the courts anyway. J.D. Vance, in a frequently quoted podcast from 2021, said he hoped Trump would ‘fire every single mid-level bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state.’ He added: ‘When the courts stop you, stand before the country, like Andrew Jackson did, and ...

Do you feel like a failure?

Emily Witt: In the Manosphere, 11 September 2025

Extremism and Radicalisation in the Manosphere: Beta Uprising 
by Deniese Kennedy-Kollar.
Routledge, 152 pp., £42.99, September, 978 1 032 63107 3
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Clown World: Four Years inside Andrew Tate’s Manosphere 
by Jamie Tahsin and Matt Shea.
Quercus, 272 pp., £10.99, April, 978 1 5294 3784 3
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... Men’ to study male ‘syntax, language and content’.Among my friends, the sort of women J.D. Vance likes to mock as miserable losers, the male loneliness crisis became a bitter joke. We discussed possible cures: becoming a Deadhead, getting into cycling, poker nights. We made approving comments when we saw straight guys doing things together, like the ...

Is this fascism?

Daniel Trilling, 5 June 2025

Disaster Nationalism: The Downfall of Liberal Civilisation 
by Richard Seymour.
Verso, 280 pp., £20, October 2024, 978 1 80429 425 3
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... in which it is argued the wrong people have been losing’. (The problem with globalisation, J.D. Vance said recently, wasn’t that it was unfair, but that it was causing rich countries such as America to lose their place at the top of the international pecking order.) Yet, as it turns out, its real economic benefits can be relatively meagre (average incomes ...

Down the Rabbit Hole

David Runciman: Britain’s Europe Problem, 9 October 2025

Between the Waves: The Hidden History of a Very British Revolution, 1945-2016 
by Tom McTague.
Pan Macmillan, 546 pp., £25, September, 978 1 5290 8309 5
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... idiotic moral crusade. He cleaved to the views of those in the US – such as Elon Musk and J.D. Vance – who had decided that Zelensky and his European dupes were the real menace. War has a nasty habit of revealing where British political figures really stand on the question of the country’s relationship with Europe because it also means confronting ...

King of Cannibal Island

John Lanchester: Will the AI bubble burst?, 25 December 2025

The Thinking Machine: Jensen Huang, Nvidia and the World’s Most Coveted Microchip 
by Stephen Witt.
Bodley Head, 248 pp., £25, April 2025, 978 1 84792 827 6
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The Nvidia Way: Jensen Huang and the Making of a Tech Giant 
by Tae Kim.
Norton, 261 pp., £25, December 2024, 978 1 324 08671 0
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Empire of AI: Inside the Reckless Race for Total Domination 
by Karen Hao.
Allen Lane, 482 pp., £25, May 2025, 978 0 241 67892 3
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Supremacy: AI, ChatGPT and the Race that Will Change the World 
by Parmy Olson.
Pan Macmillan, 319 pp., £10.99, July 2025, 978 1 0350 3824 4
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... all.’ Altman can’t possibly think that typing a few words into an image generator – ‘J.D. Vance kissing a frog in the style of Studio Ghibli’ – is a form of creativity. His advisers would certainly have told him Miyazaki’s views, if he didn’t already know them. In saying what he did, was Altman displaying the boyish enthusiasm of a 40-year-old ...

Another Country

Adam Shatz: Visions of America, 5 February 2026

... are as likely to associate America with Coltrane, Kendrick Lamar and Beyoncé as with Trump, J.D. Vance, Pete Hegseth and Stephen Miller. Like Beauvoir and James, they know that another country exists in America, one that’s immediately evident when you walk into a bookshop in Paris, Berlin or Madrid stocked with translations of Baldwin, Audre Lorde, bell ...

‘Everything is possible’

James Meek: In Greenland, 17 April 2025

... came – the equivalent of a crowd of 450,000 in London. A week later, it was announced that Usha Vance, wife of the American vice president, J.D. Vance, planned to attend the Avannaata Qimussersua dog sled race that Henrik Jensen hoped to compete in. A group of US officials had decided to come to Greenland without being ...