The Hard Zone

Andrew O’Hagan: At the Republican National Convention, 1 August 2024

... of local universities through huge budget cuts. The city was horribly gerrymandered in the 2010s. Paul Ryan, former Speaker of the House of Representatives and a native of Janesville, Wisconsin, acted as a wrecking ball on social care in the area and was a friend to people who believe that tax cuts are evidence of enlightenment. The Democrats had grown ...

One Summer in America

Eliot Weinberger, 26 September 2019

... territory itself with Kim Jong-un, the president brings along one of his favourite Fox News hosts, Tucker Carlson, as well as Ivanka. Carlson says of North Korea: ‘It’s a disgusting place, obviously. So there’s no defending it. On the other hand, you’ve got to be honest about what it means to lead a country. It means killing people.’*Two major hotel ...

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
Show More
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
Show More
Show More
... has for years remained at one degree of separation from Donald Trump. He has been interviewed by Tucker Carlson on Fox News, and posted photos of himself with Donald Trump Jr, Nigel Farage and Alex Jones. He has received a warm welcome on some of the podcasts credited with helping Trump win over young male voters. After Trump’s inauguration, Tate tweeted ...

Jungle Joys

Alfred Appel Jr: Wa-Wa-Wa with the Duke, 5 September 2002

... praise of his miniatures alone, recordings that are, at most, three and a half minutes long. Mark Tucker has collected the early appraisals in his excellent Duke Ellington Reader (1993). Ellington’s reputation does not depend on his extended compositions. The latter do not have to be deemed better than, say, Copland’s for Ellington to remain ‘beyond ...

Light Entertainment

Andrew O’Hagan: Our Paedophile Culture, 8 November 2012

... Simpson said on Panorama. ‘It’s off the scale of everybody’s belief system,’ said the DJ Paul Gambaccini. But it is our belief system. And now it is part of the same system to blame Savile. He’s dead, anyway. Let’s blame him for all the things he obviously was, and blame him for a host of other things we don’t understand, such as how we love ...
Rationalism in Politics, and Other Essays 
by Michael Oakeshott, edited by Timothy Fuller.
Liberty, 556 pp., $24, October 1991, 0 86597 094 7
Show More
Show More
... essentially British tradition descending from Hume, Smith and Ferguson, seconded by Burke and Tucker, which understood political development as an involuntary process of gradual institutional improvement, comparable to the workings of a market economy or the evolution of common law. The second was a rationalist, typically French lineage descending from ...