The Social World

Category: Culture

  • What can we expect from the Simpsons sequel?

    What can we expect from the Simpsons sequel?

    It is now more than three decades since President Bush the First declared that American families should be “more like the Waltons, and less like the Simpsons.” In this, as in so many other things, Bush was to be disappointed. Thirty-three years after he made his remarks, the Waltons are now barely discussed in popular culture, if at all, while the exploits of America’s most famous yellow-skinned family have now moved into their 37th season with a further three, at least, planned. This is a degree of longevity that is unparalleled in any live-action sitcom equivalent, and the show’s creator Matt Groening could be forgiven for doing a victory lap.

    At the time of writing, it is unclear as to whether the newly announced Simpsons movie sequel, due for release in 2027, represents such a lap. It is coming two decades after the first film spin-off, which grossed $536 million worldwide and attracted critical acclaim, and in this new era of long-belated sequels, its arrival is relatively swift. The continued success of its televisual counterpart means that an enthusiastic fanbase continues to enjoy the exploits of Homer, Marge, Bart, Lisa et al, and their paymasters at Fox will be hoping for a similarly rapturous response in a couple of years.

    All the same, the reception that The Simpsons Movie 2, as it is presently and unimaginatively named, is likely to receive remains largely uncertain. The joy of the Simpsons, despite Bush’s dismissive comments, has always been that its blessedly dysfunctional family feels a good deal more American than the sickly saccharine Waltons ever did. For any show to remain relevant and funny after the time that it has been on the air is a remarkable achievement, and while many would grumble that it peaked decades ago and now is treading water, the show still manages to get laughs in a way that, say, the revamped King of the Hill is unable to.

    Nonetheless, perhaps another big-screen outing might be a harder sell, given the considerably greater challenges that films now face at theaters. In 2007, the competition that the first Simpsons movie faced were the likes of Pirates of the Caribbean and Harry Potter, which were good-natured family pictures that made a lot of money without being particularly demanding, or indeed accomplished. Now, however, the rise of streaming and the subsequent difficulties that anything that feels remotely rote face mean that, bluntly put, the Simpsons sequel is going to have to be really, really good if it wants to stake its continued place in the cultural firmament.

    What should it do to differentiate itself from the series? Of course, it could go nakedly political, but this might feel like a step too far for a show that has never turned its satirical barbs into straightforward sloganeering (and is all the better for it). Yet somehow, the adventures of Spider-Pig, which were so charming the first time around, would now seem almost laughably tame and undynamic given how much higher the bar for family entertainment has been raised. The Wild Robot, for instance, showed how peerless animated films could be, and while nobody is expecting the Simpsons 2 to be similarly heart-rending, audiences may well expect a more naked display of emotion than has been shown hitherto.

    Groening and his co-creators have embraced a considerable challenge. Admittedly, they have pulled it off once before, but if they fail, it runs the risk of tarnishing a much-loved brand. There are any number of avenues and possibilities for this most allusive of shows (a musical? A film-noir pastiche?) that might be pursued, but if they stumble, then the results will be regrettable. Let us hope, in that case, that the creative fire is within them, and that the result does not turn into a sad pastiche of the kind that Krusty the Clown might have dreamt up.

  • Gore Vidal was the Virgil of American populism

    America’s Montaigne, Gore Vidal, was born 100 years ago today. Born Eugene Luther Vidal, this Virgil of American populism entered the world on October 3, 1925 (“Shepherds quaked,” he later said, describing his arrival in his typical, wildly egotistical way).

    His father, Eugene Luther Vidal – after whom he was named – was a former quarterback, Olympian and the founder of three commercial airlines. While he worshipped his father, Vidal had a hateful relationship with his mother, Nina Gore, a beautiful monster who would go on to marry two more times following her divorce from Vidal senior.

    Vidal’s formative friendship was with Nina’s father, Thomas Pryor Gore, the blind senator from Oklahoma. Young “Gene” read him Voltaire, Gibbon, Shakespeare. He had read Livy in translation by the age of seven and attended his first presidential convention at 14, which was when he decided to drop ‘Eugene Luther’ and take “Gore” as his first name.

    Enlisting in 1943 at the age of 18 during the second world war, Vidal served as a warrant officer aboard a freighter in the northern Pacific. This later inspired his first novel, Williwaw (1946), a Hemingway-esque tale of men at sea. He was heralded as a prodigy. But his next, The City and the Pillar (1948), the first serious American homosexual novel, proved divisive.

    In need of money, having bought a Greek revival mansion in the Hudson Valley, Vidal began writing for television. He was a natural, commanding fees as high as $5,000 for a script. Writing the play The Best Man in 1960 inspired a bid for Congress in New York’s bedrock Republican 29th district. Despite help from Eleanor Roosevelt and the actress Joanne Woodward, he lost – but nevertheless managed to outpoll every previous Democratic candidate the district had had since 1910. His slogan “You get more with Gore” had some force – not least given his claim that he had had 1,000 lovers by the time he was 25.

    Vidal’s enduring handsomeness fed an unembarrassed narcissism

    Vidal relished the fact that, following the breakdown of her second marriage, his mother was succeeded as Hugh D. Auchincloss’s wife by Janet Lee Bouvier, mother of Jacqueline Kennedy and Lee Radziwill. He would enjoy an easy relationship with John F. Kennedy but his brother Robert disliked and distrusted him. At a White House reception, he had upbraided Vidal for putting his arm around the First Lady (well, they had shared a step-father). The episode was inflamed by Truman Capote claiming a drunken Vidal had been evicted. Vidal successfully sued but his White House days were over.

    Having been a mainstream liberal democrat, it was accepted that Vidal moved to the left in the mid Sixties, after his break with the Kennedys. There was his loathing of American “empire” and bankers, but he became a populist reactionary who believed his country had been injured by tyranny and foreign adventurism. Thus, the author Michael Lind believed he was more in the mould of his maverick Senator grandfather: that he moved not to the left but “to the South and West and back in time.” A final tilt at the Senate in 1982 also proved unsuccessful.

    He relished enduring feuds with not just Capote but also the writers Norman Mailer, Truman Capote and William F. Buckley. His friendships, meanwhile, were eclectic: Woodward and her husband Paul Newman, the actresses Claire Bloom, Susan Sarandon and Joan Collins – and Princess Margaret. Later in life, he described himself as such:

    “I’m exactly as I appear. There is no warm, lovable person inside. Beneath my cold exterior, once you break the ice, you find cold water.“

    Yet, after an interview with this magazine’s Mary Wakefield, he blew her a kiss. On interviewing Vidal at 70 for the New York Times, Andrew Solomon wrote: 

    “His epigrammatic discourse – bred in equal measure of imagination, affectation and brilliance – is delivered in a voice as rich & smooth and alcoholic as zabaglione.”

    Given that voice and his patrician hauteur, the journalist Mark Lawson thought it a minor tragedy that no director had ever cast him as The Importance of Being Earnest’s Lady Bracknell.

    On Labor Day in 1960, Vidal met his life partner, Howard Austen, a would-be pop singer with stage fright who became an advertising executive. Vidal claimed the union endured because it was sexless. In 1972, they bought a villa – La Rondinaia – on the Amalfi coast in Italy, perched on a cliff in the commune of Ravello. From this august exile, the historical Narratives of Empire series of novels appeared – the revolutionary era of Burr (1973) via Lincoln (1984) to Hollywood (1990) and The Golden Age (2000). Between them, they covered a century of American history.

    Vidal’s self-mythologising memoirs, Palimpsest (1995) and Point To Point Navigation (2006), proved immensely readable but his legacy is his essays – self-assured, original, erudite, elegant and acerbic. His 1,300-page anthology, United States: Essays 1952-1995, is only two-thirds of his output.

    The New York Times’s Charles McGrath believes Vidal will “live on most vividly on YouTube.” As Vidal himself used to say, “there are two things in life you should never turn down: the opportunity to have sex and the chance to appear on television.”

    His enduring handsomeness fed an unembarrassed narcissism: “I have the face now of one of the later, briefer emperors.” His Wildean bon-mots were usually unkind – but memorable: “A good deed never goes unpunished” and his classic “Every time a friend succeeds, I die a little.”

    A confidant of Tennessee Williams and a lover of Jack Kerouac, Vidal knew Christopher Isherwood, E.M. Forster, Albert Camus, Sartre, Anaïs Nin and William Faulkner. We know because he often said so. “Allen Ginsberg kissed my hand as Jean Genet looked on,” he once said. And “I have never much enjoyed the company of writers – who are less famous than I am.” Vidal’s philosophy? “There is not one human problem that could not be solved if people would simply do as I advise.”

    Austen’s health forced a return home in 2003 to the Hollywood Hills. His death a few months later left Vidal bereft and a long, slow self-ruination followed. He died on July 31, 2012, aged 86. 

    So, Gore Vidal was human after all.

  • ‘Media Literacy’ and the decline of Woke

    What is “woke”? To Jordan B. Peterson it is “postmodern neo-Marxism.” To James Lindsay it is “critical race theory” and latterly “revisionism” in general. These theories of what woke means take for granted that one of its core tenets is a denial of objective truth under the influence of what is broadly called “critical theory,” but the thinking behind contemporary wokeness falls far short of these theoretically exalted standards.

    Critical theory was a movement, primarily among academics, in the mid 20th century which had a diverse array of followers, but the common denominator was the belief that texts, whether literary works like novels, or historical documents, had no inherently “true” interpretation. What this means, to hugely simplify, is that there exist as many ways to read a story as there are readers. The critical theorists arrived at this idea by different arguments, one of the most famous is Roland Barthes’ reading of Sarrasine, a short story by the 19th century French writer Honore de Balzac, by breaking down each sentence into a system of “signs” largely borrowed from psychoanalysis. 

    It is pretty obvious, if you are an activist interested in spreading your ideology to as many different media as possible, that an idea which lets you disregard the intention of the original author would be appealing. When critical theory crossed the Atlantic (and hopped across the Channel), it rapidly lost its brooding, Nouveau Roman character and found its utility in readings which emphasized the implicit racial, sexual and gendered meanings of texts. This was not always the case: one of the foremost critical theorists, Paul de Man, was a collaborationist writer in Nazi-occupied Belgium. De Man conceived of his own brand of critical theory as a means of pre-empting, and expurgating, any intrusion of “the social” into literature by claiming that any such reading was arbitrary. 

    However, today, the left has entirely abandoned even the pretense of postmodern skepticism present in retro-eighties critical theory. The phrase of the day is “media literacy,” a meme implying that there is an objectively “correct” way to read texts, or watch movies, and a set of compulsory moral judgments about art to be derived from it. Go on Google Trends and you’ll see searches for “media literacy” jump in the 2022-23 mid-Biden era, when woke influencers like Hasan Piker and @woke_karen on TikTok began using the term. Search the tweets of a typical woke kingpin like evan loves worf or Will Stancil on X and you will see “media literacy” breathlessly invoked as if it were the God of a newly imported cult. The term is ubiquitous in the subreddits associated with these communities.

    Media literacy does not, like the critical theorists, try to read texts through complex philosophical lenses like Marxism, let alone deconstruct them. It exists at the intersection of the vast online world we call “fandom” – in which very basic storytelling techniques, tropes and characterization are explained in less rigorous terms for the sake of entertainment – and the lowest levels of woke academia (“Why The Matrix is about Late Capitalism”). If critical theory proclaimed the death of the author, media literacy is the deification of fandom. What other people say about the work is all that matters to understanding it.

    The left has entirely abandoned even the pretense of postmodern skepticism

    What does this look like in practice? A frequent subject of the media literacy polemic is the film Starship Troopers, beloved of many online right-wingers because it shows a militarised, quasi-fascist society battling hostile aliens. An Adorno, a Derrida or a Foucault would, albeit badly, try to analyze what this says about fascists. The contemporary woke leftist can only point to the dismal intention of the creators for this to be a “satire”. This is what the term means 90 percent of the time it is used: a generic right-winger, somewhere, likes a piece of art but rejects the moral assumptions of the fandom or the creator. Thus, the right-winger is somehow “illiterate” because… because… they just are. Much like, I suppose, anyone who reads The Tempest, and finds the portrayal of the colonized subject Caliban more sympathetic than Prospero, “doesn’t understand” Shakespeare. 

    An uncontroversial standard of “good” art is that it should stand on its own terms and be judged on qualities inherent in the work – in common parlance “show, don’t tell.” The judgment of fandom websites and creators is an example of telling and not showing. The fact that a creator wills something to be a satire does not make it satirical. Satire, for example, requires at least some people to find it funny; the 2008 comic strip PowerUp Comics is intended to be a “satire” of George W. Bush but does not work because it is so obvious. Contrary to the creators’ intention, the comic today is enjoyed ironically as an example of on-the-nose moralizing. 

    Similarly, simply declaring that you find your creations immoral does not mean people with different moral views are “misunderstanding” the work. When right-wingers decide that they support the supposedly parodic protagonists of Starship Troopers, Watchmen and Warhammer 40k they are not failing to understand something about the show. Rather, they are rejecting socially mediated signifiers to liberate the pure text. They are, in short, ideal postmodern readers.

    Modern wokes remind me of the career of an earlier French literary critic, Sainte-Beuve. Sainte-Beuve thought that he was woke. He was steeped in Eclecticism, a minor philosophical movement which took inspiration from Hegel. But Sainte-Beuve got it wrong. He thought that what this meant was that writers could only be understood by their biographies, which inevitably included a great deal of moral commentary on the value of the lives in question. He rapidly became a catchphrase of ignominy among 19th century cognoscenti. Nietzsche called him an “ass” and Marcel Proust devoted an essay to making fun of him, because his oeuvre rapidly degenerated into a series of tabloid kiss-and-tell stories about whether such-and-such writer was a good husband. 

    So, too, have many educated in the tradition of critical theory ended up recapitulating a basically Victorian literalism in how they see art: art is good if it is produced by good people, if it carries sentimental value and if it edifies society. Criticism is good if it comprehends the moral intention of a morally virtuous creator. This is not just bad news for the arts (left-wing people are and will remain dominant in culture for at least another generation) but bad news for the left. As we see Trump’s Department of Homeland Security making repatriation the subject of jokes, it is not that the right “doesn’t understand” some facet of left-wing morality – they actively reject it. If the left wants to put up a persuasive counterargument, it must be prepared to face moral differences head on, rather than outsource their critical faculties to consensus.

  • ‘From the folks that brought you 9/11’

    ‘From the folks that brought you 9/11’

    The American comedy world finds itself embroiled in a not-so-civil war of words over the Riyadh Comedy Festival, sponsored by the Saudi royal family. The Saudis have given enormous paychecks to big names like Kevin Hart, Dave Chappelle, Louis C.K., Aziz Ansari, and Bill Burr. 

    On one side, you have the people invited to perform at the festival, who mostly lean toward the anti-woke, sometimes-semi-canceled, will-do-anything-for-a-dollar camp. On the other, you have hyper-woke, mostly male Gen X comics whose routines these days involve delivering panicked podcast screeds about the end of democracy. 

    Our comedy scene is booming like never before, though it’s rarely been less funny, and the Riyadh Comedy Festival has performed a public service by revealing exactly what type of morons American comics truly are. 

    Grumblings about the Riyadh festival have been stirring for months, but reached a peak when it actually kicked off last weekend. “From the folks that brought you 9/11,” Marc Maron said on Instagram a couple of weeks ago. “Two weeks of laughter in the desert, don’t miss it.” The Saudis didn’t invite Maron, who said, “It’s kind of easy for me to take the high road on this one. Easy to maintain your integrity when no one’s offering to buy it out.”

    It was less easy for comedian Shane Gillis, who turned down the Saudi money bag. He revealed his “principled stand” on his “Secret Podcast,” saying “You don’t 9/11 your friends.”

    But no one went harder against Riyadh than never-nude David Cross, who posted a screed on his website. “I am disgusted, and deeply disappointed in this whole gross thing. That people I admire, with unarguable talent, would condone this totalitarian fiefdom for… what, a fourth house? A boat? More sneakers?

    “These are some of my HEROES! Now look, some of you folks don’t stand for anything so you don’t have any credibility to lose, but my god, Dave and Louie and Bill, and Jim? Clearly you guys don’t give a shit about what the rest of us think, but how can any of us take any of you seriously ever again? All of your bitching about “cancel culture” and “freedom of speech” and all that shit? Done. You don’t get to talk about it ever again. By now we’ve all seen the contract you had to sign…You’re performing for literally, the most oppressive regime on earth. They have SLAVES for fuck’s sake!!!”

    Around the web, comedy podcasts, blogs, feeds and comment sections on comedy podcast blog feeds are appalled that these comedian “heroes” would accept a seven-figure check for performing in a foreign country. Suddenly, every person who has ever been onstage or in the audience at the Comedy Cellar cares about Jamal Khashoggi or the rights of Saudi women, who’ve been legally allowed to drive, after all, since 2018. Now you care about “artwashing”?  The self-righteousness is a little hard to stomach. 

    Then you have Bill Burr, who performed at the festival and has made a vast fortune not giving a shit what anyone thinks. He says the much-criticized “restrictions” placed on comedians at the event boiled down to: don’t make fun of the government, or talk about religion, which actually is kind of a lot. But Burr, on his podcast, still marveled at how the Saudis were “just like us” and that Riyadh has Starbucks, McDonald’s, and Chili’s. 

    “It was great to experience that part of the world and to be a part of the first comedy festival over there in Saudi Arabia,” Burr said. “The royals loved the show. Everyone was happy. The people that were doing the festival were thrilled. The comedians that I’ve been talking to are saying, ‘Dude, you can feel [the audience] wanted it. They want to see real stand-up comedy.’ It was a mind-blowing experience. Definitely top three experiences I’ve had. I think it’s going to lead to a lot of positive things.”

    Easy for the rich guy to say, but Burr does seem a lot happier in the aggregate than David Cross. Then there’s Dave Chappelle, the most self-absorbed man on the planet not named Donald Trump. Chappelle said onstage in Saudi Arabia that “it’s easier to talk here than in America.” He even told the audience that he was afraid to return to America because he’s not allowed to truly speak his mind. He said he’d let his new Saudi fans know if he was being censored, even though the odds of Dave Chappelle actually being censored are lower than the Carolina Panthers winning the Super Bowl. 

    Chappelle said, in the creepy conspiratorial audience whisper that’s his trademark, “It’s got to be something I would never say in practice, so if I actually say it, you’ll know never to listen to anything else I say after that. Here’s the phrase: ‘I stand with Israel.’” 

    Nice, Chappelle. Also, up yours, you anti-Semitic jerk. Enjoy your freedoms. 

    Much less controversial than Chappelle in Saudi Arabia was Kevin Hart, the world’s greatest sellout. “I love what y’all are doing here,” he said. “I’ll continue being a positive ambassador of your change to the world.” 

    With that, the positive ambassador of T-Mobile and Capital One credit cards went back to his hotel suite to wallow in his pile of gold. 

  • The lost glamor of New York nightlife

    Mark Ronson has one of the finest heads of hair in all showbusiness. The music producer’s coiffure is a dark, whipped and quiffed thing that makes it look as though he naturally belongs on a Vespa in Capri, being ogled by the belle ragazze as he scoots on by. As a cultural object, it certainly surpasses the Oscar he won for the songs in that Lady Gaga remake of A Star is Born; it probably equals his Barbie soundtrack; and maybe even approaches the hits he made with and for Amy Winehouse.

    But it wasn’t always like that. Back in the 1990s, Ronson’s hair was a standard-issue crop, while he was a gawky young club DJ looking to make it in New York. It’s this scene that he writes about in his memoir Night People, not the fame and accolades that would follow. He calls it “the Mark Ronson book nobody asked for” in the acknowledgements at the back, adding: “What, no Amy?!”

    Honestly, I turned to those acknowledgements after just a few sentences. My suspicions had been aroused, you see. The book’s first paragraph was an evocative description of a house party at 2 a.m., where “the diehards are smoking cigarettes like it’s still 1999, ashing into a cereal bowl that’s been sacrificed for the occasion” – and I wanted to check whether Ronson had used a ghostwriter, as celebrities so often do. Sometimes you can divine the truth from the nods and thanks in the back matter.

    But, no, I don’t think he did; at least not beyond a bit of polishing, perhaps. Night People appears to be Ronson’s text – and it’s really good. Nobody asked for it, but plenty of people should buy it, whether they’re interested in DJing or not.

    If that sounds patronising, it’s not meant to – it’s actually just raw envy on my part. Judging from this book, Ronson had a blast in the 1990s. From hanging out with his childhood friend Sean, John Lennon’s son, to rooting around record shops for obscure hip-hop, disco and funk releases. From hustling as a “gigging bar DJ” to presiding over dance-floors occupied by “Mike Tyson, Wesley Snipes and Leonardo DiCaprio, a young rap fanatic.” Booze. Coke. Models. Parties. Night People is no cautionary tale; it’s a celebration. It reads like a Bret Easton Ellis book in which almost everyone is nice and balanced.

    Not that Ronson is blind to the preposterousness of much of his old life, nor to its rougher edges. He just doesn’t make a big deal of it. Potentially tricky subjects such as class and race are dealt with – “Jewish DJs played for black promoters, DJs played for Jewish promoters, and we all hung tough” – and then moved on from; not, you feel, out of evasiveness, but because Ronson and his book are more interested in the cultural scene than in causing a scene. It’s the music that motivates him.

    There are times, however, when this approach does leave you wanting more. After all, Ronson wasn’t the only person chrysalizing in New York at the time. Night People contains a couple of tantalizing references to Donald Trump and, separately, his daughter Ivanka (“an underage blonde with exceptionally well-ironed hair”) showing up at parties – but neglects to go into details.

    Elsewhere, Ronson recalls performing at events hosted by the since-disgraced Puff Daddy where he’d see “people like Muhammad Ali, Martha Stewart, Denzel and the Duchess of York (ex-wife of the now-disgraced Prince Andrew) all mingling.” He adds nothing else about her, but perhaps this reflects the DJ’s lot: always overlooking the crowd, never actually joining it.

    Otherwise, the only problem with Night People is that you may end up believing – tragically – that its swagger and cool has somehow rubbed off on you. I realized too late, while nerdily constructing an online playlist of every song mentioned in the book, that I was only proving the point of its final chapter. That whole scene no longer exists.

    It used to take years of accumulated expertise and hours of crate-digging to discover tracks such as Weldon Irvine’s “We Gettin’ Down” or Tom Scott’s “The Honeysuckle Breeze,” whereas now any old tourist can dial them up within seconds on their phone. Even in the best cases – and the nightlife in 1990s New York really does sound like one of the best cases – subcultures can only ever hope to explode into the wider culture before burning out. 

    Which is why it’s astounding that Ronson himself shows no signs of burnout, despite what he put his brain and body through all those years ago. Amy Winehouse’s best songs, the Barbie soundtrack, an Oscar, Grammies, a great wardrobe, exquisite hair… and now, we discover, he’s a fine writer and cultural tour guide too? As some kid once said of Charlie Brown, how I hate him.

  • Emma Watson is utterly unoriginal

    Emma Watson is utterly unoriginal

    For a long time it was handy dinner party fact that Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part One (2010) briefly filmed at my late grandparents’ house, and appeared as Hermione Granger’s house in the film. Even this required extensive exposure of my grandparents to Warner Brothers’ lawyers, the film crew and, of course, to young Emma Watson herself.

    Neither of my grandparents had heard of Harry Potter before they were approached, and throughout filming, they failed entirely to notice her, though there was some vague recollection of “that rather mousy girl” from my grandpa, who was far more taken with Susan, the 60-something woman in charge of props.

    This description stayed with me as Watson’s star rose and rose, plateaued, and turned gender political. Watson, most people over 40 agree, is a key example of how far the British thespian national treasure has declined: where once we had Shakespearean queens like Judi Dench, Maggie Smith and Emma Thompson, now we have little more than a poor woman’s Keira Knightley (and Keira Knightley).

    Watson is certainly a sign of artistically thinner times: she may be good enough for a generation whose childhood literary imagination extended no further than wizards, but seeing her as Belle in 2017’s Beauty and the Beast was a cheapening, sobering experience for those of us who cried and swooned over the Disney cartoon classic in 1991. Feminist point-scoring to the last, Watson refused to wear a corset. “In Emma’s reinterpretation, Belle is an active princess. She did not want a dress that was corseted or that would impede her in any way,” said the film’s costume designer Jacqueline Durran. How radical.

    Watson’s last role as an actress was in Greta Gerwig’s 2019 film Little Women. Since then she has kept herself rather weakly in the limelight by becoming a trans rights cheerleader, and, like her other Potter stars Eddie Redmayne and Daniel Radcliffe, turning on her fairy godmother J.K. Rowling for her “transphobia.” Rowling has posted on X that Watson and her fellow Potter actors were busy “pouring petrol on the flames” when she was getting death threats over trans rights and that unlike them, she “wasn’t a multimillionaire at 14.” Watson is now enrolled on a DPhil at Oxford on the philosophy of creative writing and, rather than jump on the rosé wine brigade, Watson has launched a gin distillery with her brother called Renais. The booze business gets them all in the end.

    Watson wants people to love her. Of her public disavowal of J.K. Rowling, she mewled last week on the On Purpose with Jay Shetty podcast that “It’s my deepest wish that people who don’t agree with my opinion will love me, and I hope I can keep loving people who I don’t necessarily share the same opinion with.” Hm.

    She also discussed her recent driving ban for speeding, saying “my shame is everywhere” and launching into a mea culpa about how she had some missing basic life skills. Now we learn that for all her lofty political ideas, those years being ferried in luxury to Hollywood sets (and my grandparents’ house in north London) were fatal for her road sense.

    “They literally won’t insure you to drive yourself to work,” she said. “I did not have the experience or skills, clearly, which I now will and do.” Good to know. Watson didn’t attend the court hearing but was gracious about the fine of £1,044 ($1410). She “fully understands her position and will accept her punishment,” her lawyer said, adding: “I ask you to give her credit for the plea of guilty. She is a lady in a position to pay an appropriate fine.”

    On the podcast with Shetty, Watson, worth about £59 million ($79.7 million), leaned into the learning experience of being done for speeding. “It’s been a discovery and a journey that’s been humbling because on a movie set I’m able to do all these extremely complex things: stunts, sing, dance… and then I get home and I’m like: ‘OK, Emma, you seem to be unable to remember keys, you seem unable to keep yourself at 30mph in a 30mph speed limit. You don’t seem able to do some pretty basic life things.’”

    I would wager that her problem with “some pretty basic life things” is more connected to her absorption in naff, damaging politicking. If you live in a world where J.K. Rowling is the enemy, and men who say they are women deserve the full scope of feminist passion because “trans women are women,” then perhaps it’s no surprise that the banal facts of speed limits might seem alien or mundane.

    Of course, tens of millions of pounds, global celebrity, and being the world’s most famous childhood witch, might also make the rules of ordinary life feel remote. Overall, her conviction seems unlikely to cause her too much grief; she’s already taken up cycling, and any opportunity for a spot of soul-searching is no doubt welcome for a woman who is now a humble philosophy doctoral student, albeit with millions in the bank.

  • Why is Bad Bunny performing at the Super Bowl?

    Why is Bad Bunny performing at the Super Bowl?

    The NFL announced on Sunday that Bad Bunny, the musician who just wrapped a residency in Puerto Rico, is now a hop, skip and step away from performing on the largest stage in America: the Super Bowl LX halftime show.

    “What I’m feeling goes beyond myself. It’s for those who came before me and ran countless yards so I could come in and score a touchdown… this is for my people, my culture, and our history,” Bad Bunny said in an NFL statement announcing the halftime show.

    Okay, but Americans are the ones in large part watching the Super Bowl – the same culture and country Bad Bunny chose to boycott when his world tour kicks off in November because of fear that US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) would raid the concert venues. As ICE operations have ramped up under President Donald Trump, Bad Bunny, whose real name is Benito Antonio Martinez Ocasio, has shown his contempt for it and the White House Administration. In June, he posted an Instagram video that expressed his discontent and anger for not “leaving these people working here alone,” in Puerto Rico. 

    “People from the US could come here to see the show. Latinos and Puerto Ricans of the United States could also travel here, or to any part of the world,” he told i-D magazine. “But there was the issue that… ICE could be outside (my concert venue). And it’s something that we were talking about and very concerned about.”

    It seems like quite a jump to go from keyboard warrior and boycotter of the United States to pandering for its premier sporting event. It seems that for Bad Bunny performing in the United States is a cardinal sin… unless you’re a featured solo artist. According to the NFL, this past year’s Super Bowl recorded the largest viewing audience ever with 127 million people watching across all platforms.

    Why was Bad Bunny even chosen in the first place? Musicians of all backgrounds vie for the opportunity to perform at a Super Bowl. Gone are the days of recognizable names with long careers – Prince, Madonna, Michael Jackson. Now, the NFL is chasing fads. And most Americans won’t even be able to sing along to this fad’s music.

    Bad Bunny will no doubt use the platform to advance some political point. It won’t be the first time in recent years the stage has been co-opted for this. At his Super Bowl performance earlier this year, Kendrick Lamar made subtle references to 40 acres and a mule, the unfulfilled promise of land and resources to freed slaves after the Civil War. Jennifer Lopez received flack after her 2020 halftime show for wanting to show the Puerto Rican flag and kids in cages, another dig at America’s immigration policies.

    Gone are the days of Americans simply enjoying a good show. Once upon a not-so-long-ago time, audiences could enjoy incredible musical acts rather than being force fed a woke history lesson. Who’s to blame? Jay Z. In 2019, the NFL signed his Roc Nation label to produce halftime shows. He’s been predictably one-note, and that one note is woke.

    The NFL shoulders some of the blame, of course. The league desperately wants to become an international sport (there are seven international games this year). Bringing in Bad Bunny is a ploy to grab the attention of a Spanish-speaking audience, which is being prioritized above the stereotypical burger-eating, beer-drinking bro culture that’s long been the sport’s audience.

    Make no mistake, the opinions of fans who made the sport into the Goliath it is today are no longer top priority. Globalization is here for America’s most popular sport, fan dissent or confusion be damned.

  • Is Slow Horses slowing down?

    Is Slow Horses slowing down?

    Since it launched in 2022, Slow Horses has been one of the most reliable television treats for all its four seasons. Based on the excellent novels by Mick Herron, it has focused on a group of “misfits and losers,” as none other than Mick Jagger sings over the credits, who have all been semi-exiled from MI5 for various misdeeds. They have ended up in the purgatory of Slough House, where they are stuck doing various soul-destroying administrative tasks until they quit. The joke is that most of them are good at their jobs (although not without some seriously challenging interpersonal issues), led by Gary Oldman’s superspy Jackson Lamb, whose belching, flatulent and deeply unhygienic exterior belies a razor-sharp mind and a keen grasp of human nature.

    The last season saw the James Bond manqué River Cartwright (Jack Lowden) find a father, and the Slough House team a nemesis, in the form of ex-CIA operative Frank Harkness. It raised the stakes to new and giddy levels, and in the casting of veteran baddie Hugo Weaving seemed to introduce a Moriarty-esque antagonist for the ages, which is why it’s relatively disappointing that season five begins with a return to familiar territory. There’s an apparently motiveless massacre been committed by a lone shooter who swiftly gets a sniper’s bullet in the head, two men (one Asian and liberal, one white and right-wing) running to be the new mayor of London, and the various spooks are struggling to cope after the death of one of their number in the last series. Oh, and irritating tech support Roddy Ho has an unfeasibly attractive girlfriend. How does all this tie together?

    The appeal in previous seasons of Slow Horses has been half in the deliciously convoluted plotting, playing with tropes of espionage established by John le Carré and Ian Fleming and subverting them for all it’s worth, and half in the interaction between its characters, which at its best has the tight scripting of a great sitcom. This season will be the last from showrunner Will Smith, which on previous form would be a tragedy, but judged by the opening episode, something here is not quite right. The dialogue too often mistakes swearing for wit – one conversation between Lowden and the fiery Shirley Dander (Aimee-Ffion Edwards) simply consists of the two saying “Fuck off!” “Fuck you!” to one another. And one’s heart sinks at yet another show that looks as if it’s going to revolve around the far right and men’s activists as villains.

    Still, it’s too early to write things off yet. Oldman has increasingly described Lamb as his signature role, and he gets all the best lines and situations, reveling in the chance to play a character who doesn’t ask to be liked but ends up being the center of gravity anyway, and there are hints that the rich comic elements of earlier series might yet reappear. I enjoyed Ted Lasso actor Nick Mohammed’s brief appearance as the platitudinous mayoral candidate Zafar Jaffrey, speaking in his special official voice even when there are only a handful of people in the room, and Christopher Chung excels at conveying Ho’s odd mixture of smugness and childishness.

    But for all its surface pleasures, I am concerned that the show is being written and produced at such a clip – five seasons in three years is a lot – that nobody is taking the time to reflect on why it’s built up such a persistent cult following that is always threatening to turn it into a big mainstream hit. Two more seasons are already commissioned, but I am beginning to wonder, for the first time, whether the Slow Horses might yet need to be put out to pasture on a rather permanent basis before outstaying their welcome.

  • The internet has turned us all into accidental witches

    The internet has turned us all into accidental witches

    Two days before Charlie Kirk was murdered, Jezebel writer Claire Guinan paid witches on Etsy to hex him.

    When I first read Guinan’s article, my thought was that it was quintessential Jezebel: clickbait that might have interested 19-year-olds in 2011, back when witchcraft still had a frisson of feminist rebellion. She bought curses from sellers like “Priestess Lilin.” She imagined Kirk’s socks sliding down, his blazers shrinking, his thumb growing too big to tweet. The piece was meant to be funny, a way to channel political rage into something absurd, petty and hopefully entertaining.

    Forty-eight hours later, Kirk was dead.

    Jezebel first added an editorial note condemning political violence, then removed the piece entirely on their lawyers’ recommendation. Guinan doesn’t deserve hysteria or —worse— legal repercussions for a warmed-over blog post about Etsy witchcraft. But the editorial note wasn’t out of left field, maybe surprisingly, for those of us who grew up in a world where the media was overwhelmingly atheistic.

    The article drew significant criticism across media. Megyn Kelly condemned both Etsy and Jezebel in a segment on her show. Commentator Peachy Keenan characterized the hex article as “solicitation of murder.” Rod Dreher and other religious pundits described it as an act of “spiritual warfare.”

    This last characterization – spiritual warfare – is worth examining, though perhaps not in the way these commentators intended.

    Aleister Crowley defined magick (with a “k” to distinguish it from stage magic) as “the Science and Art of causing Change to occur in conformity with Will.” This definition – perhaps ironically to some, given the source – strips away supernatural window-dressing and reveals what magic really is: the deliberate use of consciousness to attempt to reshape reality. Every time we imagine a possible future, we’re doing magic.

    This is what visualization means in magical practice. You create a detailed mental image and hold it, return to it, feed it with emotion and repetition until it becomes more real than physical reality itself. Your brain starts filtering the world through this image. You notice every piece of evidence that confirms it and dismiss what doesn’t. You’ve reprogrammed your perception. That’s what “The Secret,” of Hollywood trend and Oprah fame, is (you’re welcome – saved you twenty bucks).

    When Utah students petitioned to ban Kirk from campus days after the hex, when someone tweeted his head looked bigger, Guinan saw evidence of magical success. The ritual had influenced her attention, making her sensitive to negative news about Kirk. Paying $15 – or $50 – to Etsy witches like “Priestess Lilin” for a hex seems harmless, even ridiculous.

    But Guinan’s Etsy purchase is just a more obvious version of something we all do, all the time: dwelling on negative thoughts about people we dislike. Whether it’s buying a curse online or mentally wishing someone would fail repeatedly, we’re doing the same thing – focusing our mental energy on someone else’s pain. And that focus has real effects.

    There are two ways to understand this.

    The first possibility is that hexes work through supernatural means – that somehow our thoughts can reach across space and actually affect someone. Religious conservatives like Rod Dreher might call this demonic influence or, if the focus is positive instead of negative, compare it to the power of prayer. People into New Age spirituality might say it’s “the universe” responding, or talk about “energy,” “manifestation” and “vibes.”

    The basic idea is the same: our focused intentions somehow influence reality in ways science can’t explain. It works in both directions, positive and negative.

    The Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research Lab spent 28 years documenting how focused human consciousness seems to influence random number generators. Over millions of trials, they found a tiny but statistically significant effect when people concentrated on specific outcomes. Art Bell, the late-night radio host, ran experiments where millions of listeners simultaneously directed attention toward a single issue. In a July 1998 episode, he urged his listeners to focus on bringing rain to drought-stricken Northeast Florida. Allegedly, it worked.

    The second possibility is more mundane but no less powerful – and one we should pay attention to. Hexes, or manifestation (or prayer) reshape social reality. The most dangerous curse is making someone believe they’re cursed. It’s especially effective on the internet – where magic seems to become real. When thousands simultaneously focus negative attention on someone, each person becomes primed to see that individual negatively. They feel permitted – even encouraged – to attack. The hex becomes self-fulfilling through thousands of small actions: unfollows, harsh comments, canceled invitations, hostile interpretations. And in the darkest cases, it creates an atmosphere where violence becomes more thinkable – where someone already on the edge might feel the collective “permission” to act.

    No supernatural forces required – just the aggregate effect of collective imagination turned toward a single person or group.

    Neuroscience research shows the brain treats imagined interactions as practice runs for real ones. Studies on forgiveness reveal that people who release grudges have better cardiovascular health, improved sleep, reduced inflammation. Those who nurture grievances through mental rehearsal show chronic stress responses, disrupted sleep patterns, persistent inflammation. Your body can’t tell the difference between symbolic and real conflict. Brain imaging shows that people who spend time mentally rehearsing negative outcomes for others develop stronger neural pathways for threat detection and weaker ones for empathy.

    Traditional magicians developed rules because they understood these dangers. Don’t cast spells when emotional – performing magic in a heightened state locks that emotion into the working. If you hex someone while enraged, you’re not just sending anger outward but crystallizing it within yourself. Protect yourself from backlash by creating psychological barriers between you and the intention. Ground yourself after working through physical activity, eating or meditation. Without this, practitioners report staying trapped in the magical mindset, seeing signs everywhere.

    This is part of why some magical paths, like Wicca, which is largely based on Crowley’s magick, emphasize “harm none,” not just as ethics but as self-preservation.

    The internet has turned us all into accidental witches.

    When someone starts trending on X, millions of us do the exact same thing at the exact same time: we screenshot their post, imagine our perfect comeback, fantasize about them getting “destroyed” by the replies, then share it to make sure more people join in. Every group chat where friends tear apart someone’s posts is like a coven casting a spell together – everyone focusing their (negative) energy on the same target. We’ve created a massive system where millions can wish harm on someone simultaneously, but unlike traditional magic practitioners, we have no protection rituals and we put very little thought into what we’re doing to ourselves and others. Every time you imagine someone getting “ratio’d,” every time you mentally compose the perfect takedown, every time you rehearse someone’s cancellation, you’re performing the same ritual Guinan paid those Etsy witches to do. You’re just doing it unconsciously, without protection, and without recognizing the price.

    Regardless of which mechanism is true – supernatural forces or social psychology – there’s damage to the practitioner and the environment around them. Whether you’re a real magician or just training your brain for hostility, you’re still hurting yourself and others.

    Kirk is dead – and I don’t want to suggest it’s the “fault” of Etsy witches burning his pictures.

    We may never know all the factors that led to this atrocity. But we do know that the climate of ritualized hostility creates conditions where the unthinkable becomes possible. The magic we perform carelessly, contributes to an atmosphere thick with malice. And sometimes, in ways we can’t predict or control, that malice finds its expression in the physical world.

    Kirk’s death might have been random chance, and certainly a great tragedy. But we should still use it as an opportunity to ask: what kind of reality are we willing into being? The irony is that those panicking about Etsy hexes are missing how we all participate in this dark practice every day online – no crystals or candles required.

  • Tyler Robinson is not an ambassador of the American left

    Tyler Robinson is not an ambassador of the American left

    The Charlie Kirk assassination has triggered a spate of dueling death counts. The usual media suspects on both sides of America’s epic left-right divide have trotted out set lists of the past decade’s politically motivated violence. For once, the faction that chocks up the most fatalities in this warped real-life video game loses – for the competition is over which end of the political spectrum can blame the other end for the frenzied ideological bloodlust we’ve been told for days now characterizes the contemporary United States.

    For the left, the starring evidence that the right’s crazies pose the greater threat to the orderly conduct of civic life is January 6. It’s inconvenient, of course, that the only person who died during the 2021 storming of the Capitol was one of the rioters, ditto the only person whose subsequent death directly resulted from that mayhem. Progressive media have padded the law enforcement casualties after the fact with two not necessarily related suicides and a natural death from stroke. Nevertheless, a mob breaking into the legislature to interfere with the constitutional transfer of executive power was (understatement alert) not a good look. Score a major win for the-right-as-the-bigger-baddies.

    Tyler Robinson is not representative of his generation, nor is he an ambassador of the American left

    Astonishingly, the most convincing counterevidence – suggesting that instead American leftists have been far more berserk than their opponents – never seems to feature in progressive mea culpas. When itemizing recent political violence of both stripes, the PBS NewsHour and the New York Times, for example, conspicuously omitted the Black Lives Matter riots of 2020. Which went on for months! Which entailed arson, looting and massive destruction of property, the businesses vandalized often owned by minorities, with insurance losses of up to $2 billion – not including uninsured losses – whereas the events of January 6 caused only $1.5 million worth of damage to the Capitol.

    Recollections may vary, but the 2020 race riots also killed between 25 and 34 people. You’d think professional journalists would remember a prolonged period during which US political unrest injured over 2,000 police officers, but noooo. Progressive journalists have highlighted the entire hysterical episode and pressed the delete key.

    Both January 6 and the BLM riots displayed unique pathologies, and the violence in both involved thousands of people. Yet clear these two ructions away, and what remains as the ironclad proof that American politics have descended to barbarous gladiatorial combat is a mere handful of incidents by lone actors who often had a screw loose: right-wing attacks, such as the bludgeoning of Nancy Pelosi’s husband and the shooting of two Minnesota Democrats; left-wing attacks, such as a shooting at a congressional baseball practice and the murder of UnitedHealthcare’s CEO, and two attempts to assassinate Trump. To the left’s deplorables, we can add Tyler Robinson, who is, shall we say, strongly suspected of assassinating Charlie Kirk.

    The aftermath of this murder has thrown up numerous matters of consequence. Kirk’s murder could have unpredictable downstream effects, possibly improving Republican prospects in the midterms. I do worry about copycat crimes. We’ve learned that a staggering third of university students endorse violence as a means of restricting bad-say on campus and that only 58 percent of Gen Z believe one should never use violence to suppress offensive speech.

    We’re now depressingly up to speed on the callousness and bloodthirstiness of the many left-wingers who’ve relished Kirk’s murder. This same faction celebrated the October 7 attacks. These individuals are savages. That said, I fear we’re in danger of overinterpreting the decision of one psychically lost 22-year-old to shoot a popular activist whose opinions he didn’t share (and of whom it’s tempting to imagine this loser was envious). Out of more than 340 million Americans, the number of young men who inflict their personal problems on political adversaries – and who solve the challenge of what to do with their future by ensuring they don’t have one – is proportionally infinitesimal. Those lists of violent, politically motivated actors on the left and right: they’re not very long. I resist making broad pronouncements about an entire country and the viability of its democracy on the basis of a decade’s worth of disturbed misfits who couldn’t populate an average-sized birthday party.

    I obviously know what it’s like to have a column due. To rack your brains over how you can conceivably add value. To have a deadline that coincides with national soul-searching in the wake of an occurrence your fellow journalists identify as a “hinge point,” inspiring the likes of the Wall Street Journal’s Peggy Noonan to write: “We are in big trouble.” I know what it’s like to want to get in on the action. It’s tempting, then, to not only chime in, but to up the ante – to extract ever more apocalyptic generalizations from the Big Story, because catastrophizing makes for edgier copy than “simmer down, folks, it’s no big deal.”

    I wouldn’t downplay the sorrow this murder provokes in all morally grounded people or the gratuitous heartache it’s occasioned for Kirk’s family, friends, associates and fan base. But I would downplay Tyler Robinson. I may find his “romantic partner” being male-to-female trans worthy of passing note (we can infer, assuming we care, that Tyler is gay), as it’s yet more evidence that trans world and cloud-cuckoo-land heavily intersect. But I don’t believe this sorry son of a bitch necessarily signposts the direction the US is inexorably heading. He’s neither representative of his generation nor, much as I reject its agenda, an ambassador of the American left.

    Drawing conclusions about America from this one spiteful sad ass accords the guy way too much power and importance. Don’t reward misguided murderousness by grandly designating a senseless assassination a historical watershed.

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s September 29, 2025 World edition.