The Social World

Tag: Life

Why DC loves to hate Partiful

If you’re under 50, you may have noticed that Partiful has quietly annexed the American social calendar over the past year or two. The event-planning app, founded by former Palantir employees, began as another Silicon Valley toy, but it didn’t stay regional for long. Its loud dashboard aesthetic spread quickly through the Bay Area and then achieved escape velocity in Washington, DC. I wouldn’t be surprised if the strong cultural current between tech and defense is what created near-perfect conditions for a social revival in nerd world.

While I understand a bit of snobbery over the aesthetics, I’ve been surprised by the constant performative disdain I’ve observed accompanying its rise. Everywhere I go, I hear people say they “hate” Partiful. I watch otherwise socially adept adults roll their eyes at the indignity of being invited to yet another birthday karaoke or themed dinner through an app, of all things, as if the rest of their lives aren’t already dictated by Outlook and Slack.

Receiving a Partiful link is akin to a minor social injury, a digital affront to imagined analog elegance. This is nothing more than user error, in my view. Partiful’s origins do give it an undeniable tinge of dorkiness, but only the constitutionally weak would let that get in the way of a good time.

Sure, the format is corny. The animated sparkles, the tie-dye backgrounds, the GIFs. But in a society where birth rates are in a nosedive, no one’s heard of sex before and social skills are degrading by the minute, I am more than happy to turn a blind eye to a few lurid colors and kitschy animations in service of prosocial behavior.

Infact, I’d go as far as to say that my social diary has never been busier thanks to the efficient plug-in between Partiful and my iPhone calendar. I know exactly when everything is happening and I am rarely at risk of double-booking myself, which is more than I can say for the pre-Partiful days when RSVPs were a veritable archaeological dig through texts, DMs and half-remembered conversations.

Indeed, it may be the only app that’s as effective at getting people to log off as it is at getting people to use it. For the socially blessed, perhaps the garishness of it all is a true burden – not all of us are well-connected enough to enjoy a constant whisper-network of parties, or handwritten calling cards from a generous host.

For the rest of us, the mere fact that someone went out of their way to invite you to something, even through a candy-colored interface, is hardly an indignity. If being invited to a party is the worst thing that has happened to you this month, I congratulate you on your charmed life.

The main complaint I hear beyond the superficial is that the app feels “too public.” The guest list is visible. The RSVPs are visible. People can see you were invited. They can see you RSVP’d “maybe” and then never updated your status. Knowing who is attending an event supposedly ruins the mystery of running into an exciting stranger or, more thrillingly, an unwelcome ex. But this transparency only offends those who relied on ambiguity to maintain their mystique. Some of us know how to withhold, wherever we go.

Another accusation: the app’s design encourages people to RSVP just to see who else is coming, which allegedly leads to inflated guest lists full of ambiguous spectators. While I’ll admit that this is gauche, it does reflect a fact of human nature. People have always wanted to know who will be at a party before deciding to attend. Partiful simply removed the need for back-channel interrogation and gossip-triangle logistics. Tacky as this may be, millennials have no right to be so snooty about it, given the fact that their long-forgotten Facebook events had the same feature.

If you read between the lines you’ll notice that DC in particular loves Partiful because it flattens status games while simultaneously revealing them. The everyday social life of the city, the informal gatherings of the civil servants and hard-drinking journalists, becomes a semi-public ledger of who’s hosting, who’s being invited and who’s orbiting which micro-scene.

In a city where professional life and social life blur, where a dinner can double as a networking event and a house party can function as a quasi-policy salon, this level of transparency is intoxicating. People here love data, for good or ill, and Partiful gives them plenty of it.

Partiful exploits Washington’s weakness for structure, but in my view, the exploitation is a net positive and benefits all stakeholders. It makes it easier for hosts to gather people, easier for newcomers to break in, and easier for the city’s chronically Type-A residents to remember that fun is a scheduling problem more than a metaphysical one. The app has created a small renaissance in casual hosting: backyard dinners, themed cocktail nights, going-away parties, last-minute potlucks.

I’ve been to five-person movie nights and 500-person galas because of it. It has lowered the barrier to entry for throwing something together. It has reminded people that to enjoy a party, you have to log off and actually attend it.

If some find this embarrassing, so be it. But it’s hard not to admire an app that has done more for community-building than a decade of think-tank happy hours. DC may scoff at Partiful, but it also cannot stop using it. And maybe that’s the clearest sign of all that the app is here to stay.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s December 8, 2025 World edition.

December 2, 2025
The Dr. Strangelove taxonomy of DC types

I tweeted the other day that my social life in Trump’s DC is just getting dinner or drinks with a different Dr. Strangelove character every week. It sounds like an exaggeration, but it’s not. Not really. Every week brings its own apocalypse – and the cast of characters responds accordingly. Find here a taxonomy of DC types:

Dr. Strangelove (The theorist)

The end of the world approaches and only the strong will survive it. Hands trembling slightly from too much caffeine and suppressed grandeur, he (it’s always a he) declares his grand theory of the world in so many words. Women, of course, will be spared. Perhaps you, too, will be counted among the lucky ones. Oh, you’re over 30? If you just read a little more Spengler. Learned a little more about semiconductors. There might be room in the bunker.

Commander Mandrake (The visiting British correspondent)

Efficient. Relatively polite. A cultural anthropologist. Always calling the Uber, assembling the troops for the next pub – I mean, bar – and ordering a round of Guinness for the table. He’s here on duty to report on DC’s pomp and circumstance, endlessly teasing Americans about their earnestness while secretly searching for the nearest Waffle House. Washington isn’t that different from Westminster. It’s just a little more self-serious.

Jack D. Ripper (MAHA’s strongest soldier)

Walk into any bar on Capitol Hill and you’ll find a handful of these guys talking about what estrogenized water is doing to testosterone levels. What the great feminization is doing to the workplace. How the male essence must be preserved. Most likely to be a 40-year-old bachelor with the Red Scare podcast in his Hinge profile as an in-group signal to the based women of Washington. In fact, there may be more Jack D. Rippers in DC right now than at any other time in history. It’s a marvel Kubrick predicted their arrival back in the 1960s.

President Muffley (The earnest liberal)

Still believes in democracy and – bless his heart – due process. Reads the Atlantic like a moral instruction manual. Wants to be good. Wringing his hands at the degradation of decency, biding his time until the inevitable turning of the tides. In the meantime, he tends to his ficus plant and carefully curated coffee bar while stating “cautious optimism” over things that are already engulfed in flames. May have swung closer to the center since the last election, but still can’t quite stomach the rest of it. You’re faintly fond of him, in spite of the cloud of doom trailing his every word.

Major Kong (Defense tech enthusiast)

He works for Palantir or Anduril or something even more secret adjacent to the Department of War. Bicoastal (SF/DC) and proud of it. Certain that the average IQ is higher in the Bay, but Washington is where the decisions get made, so he begrudgingly keeps a Dupont apartment to schmooze with the shot-callers. You get a sense that he’d ride the drones he’s developing into the sunset if the job asked for it.

Colonel Bat Guano (The staffer)

Overworked. Pale. Nervous. Vibrating on Celsius and Zyn. He books the flights, he writes the speeches, he quietly holds the republic together with duct tape and WD-40 while everyone else is tweeting about it. Chain smokes like a ghost who died at inbox zero. When he says it’s been a “busy week,” he means he’s been sleeping on the floor of a congressional office for four days. The midnight oil never seems to run out. By the time he finally crashes, the other party might be in charge.

The War Room (The groupchat)

Where all decisions are made – or at least endlessly litigated. Less geopolitical influence than NATO, more emotional instability than a freshman dorm. All gossip, vice-signaling and purity-testing. Here you’ll find the middle managers of MAGA: men so high on their small-pond power they excommunicate anyone who threatens their crumb of relevance. If you ever find yourself added to one of their threads, don’t panic. Mute, pour yourself a drink and remember that empires fall, but receipts last forever.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s November 24, 2025 World edition.

November 18, 2025
How Trader Joe’s became a way of life

A young woman recently approached me as I stood outside Trader Joe’s on the corner of 93rd Street and Columbus Avenue in Manhattan. “Excuse me,” she said, “I’m visiting from the UK and I’m just wondering if there’s anything worth seeing around here.”

This is not an unusual occurrence. It’s always tourist season in New York. People come for the cherry blossoms in Central Park, for the magic of the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree and for the vague hope of running into Timothée Chalamet at a downtown brunch place. They even come in the sweltering heat of summer when I, personally, would rather be anywhere else – ideally somewhere without the pungent smell of hot garbage and misplaced ambition.

But what struck me that morning was where this particular encounter took place. The Upper West Side, while perfectly charming in a “has a Duane Reade and emotional stability” kind of way, is not exactly a destination. It’s residential, practical, adult. The public schools are fine. It’s where you move, if you can afford it, once you’ve given up on pretending to enjoy warehouse parties in Bushwick. Sure, the American Museum of Natural History is nearby, but I doubted that a fossil collection and a beautifully preserved taxidermy otter were what this young woman was after.

“What brings you to this neighborhood?” I asked politely. She smiled, then lifted the object of her pilgrimage: a crisp new Trader Joe’s tote bag, price tag still attached, logo blazing red and proud. “Everyone back home wants one,” she said.

Let me back up. For the uninitiated, Trader Joe’s, despite what I naively believed when I first moved to New York in 2020, is not merely a grocery store. It’s a way of life. It’s a belief system. It’s a kind of secular religion with frozen orange chicken as communion. New Yorkers generally fall into two camps: those who speak reverently of the $3.49 pork and ginger soup dumplings that have “literally changed their lives” and those who – actually, I have no idea what the second group eats. Probably sadness. And maybe overpriced soup from Whole Foods.

I’ve long since made peace with the zealotry of local devotees. I’m also not saying I don’t belong to that class of converts. I can neither confirm nor deny that I’ve turned misty-eyed over the return of the butternut squash ravioli. I’ve been more than a spectator in full-blown theological debates over which seasonal candle – or which thick and chunky salsa – is the best.

There are Facebook groups, with membership numbers exceeding the populations of small nations, in which people exchange freezer-hack recipes as though decoding scripture. I know someone who once stood in line for 40 minutes because they had a premonition that the “everything but the bagel” seasoning might sell out. That’s not shopping; it’s prophecy.But what’s new – and frankly a little alarming even for me – is the globalization of this devotion. The Trader Joe’s tote bag has escaped its natural habitat. It’s gone international. I’ve heard it’s being slung over shoulders in Paris, Milan and Tokyo – worn not as a grocery accessory but as a cultural artifact, like an Andy Warhol print… but you can fill it with pre-washed broccoli florets. I saw one in London’s Knightsbridge this summer. And now I was standing opposite a young woman of maybe 20 who should’ve been taking a selfie in the line for lunch at Balthazar or flirting with a dreamy barista in the East Village, but who was instead basking in the smug glow of having scored the ultimate token of nouveau Americana.

Dwelling on all of this, I’ve decided I’ve just got to hand it to the California brand that, for all of its countercultural charm, is actually owned by the multinational discount supermarket Aldi. (Womp, womp.) Trader Joe’s has perfected the art of marketing faux frugality: a corporate giant clad in a Hawaiian shirt and the illusion of moral superiority. It’s capitalism’s coziest costume. Only Trader Joe’s could sell you an aesthetic of thrift while quietly printing money off seasonal hummus.

What really amazes me, though, is the reach of all this. Somehow, a brand with just over 600 stores – and not a single one outside of the United States – has managed to convince people who’ve never set foot in its aisles that its tote bag is the global badge of insider cool. The bag doesn’t just hold groceries, it holds belonging.

Now, sure, you could call this a pathetic indictment of the human condition and further evidence that consumerism is alive and well, but I take a different view. I’m impressed. In a world of tech companies harvesting our data and pharmaceutical companies leveraging our insecurities for profit, Trader Joe’s has managed to build an empire out of whimsy and frozen fish sticks. It doesn’t manipulate us with fear or addiction, just promises us a good deal and a delicious dinner. And if the price of that illusion is $2.99 and standing in a long (but actually quite fast-moving) line at the check-out, then so be it. Maybe – just maybe – this is the most honest hustle in America.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s November 24, 2025 World edition.

November 18, 2025
My run-in with airport security

“Welcome back, signore!” said the woman in uniform at the all-seeing security doorway which passengers must walk through to be allowed on a plane, as if it were the Holy Door of St. Peter.

I was about to fly from Rimini on the Adriatic coast, not far south of my home in Ravenna, to Gatwick for a church service in remembrance of my father who had died two days short of his 100th birthday in July.

I was with three of my six children and felt flattered, especially in front of them, to be remembered, proudly and deservedly famous at the Aeroporto Internazionale di Rimini e San Marino Federico Fellini. Two months earlier, I had flown alone from the same airport to be with my father as he died in his sleep. His last words, according to the Polish carer, had been “silly old cow” as he drifted in and out of consciousness. It was not clear which woman in his long life was the target of this parting shot.

I took off my happy hippie sandals at the airport and placed them with the rest of my stuff in the plastic container on the X-ray machine conveyor belt and strode barefoot through the doorway as if I had nothing to be ashamed of whatsoever.

When we go through airport security our lives are under the microscope, even our sins, as those too are visible to the expert eyes of the security staff and their machines, which see more than priests. For some odd reason no alarms went off and once through to the other side I gathered up my stuff and sat down to put my sandals back on, feeling quietly pleased with myself.

But then my eldest son, Francesco Winston, 20, who had gone through before me, came over and said, sotto voce: “Papà, they’ve been talking about you. That woman asked her colleagues: ‘Is the signore ubriaco (drunk)?’”

As you may know, I am not currently drinking, and so I thought: bloody cheek! But it got worse. “One of them came up to you as if to sniff you,” my son added. “And went back to the others and said with a smirk: ‘Non puzza di alcol, solo di fogne! (He doesn’t stink of alcohol, only of sewers!)’” Nor did it end there. “Then the guy on the computer looked up and said: ‘Solito comunista barbone! (Typical communist tramp!)’”

Of course, if I had been in drink mode, I would at this point have started a conversation with the security team. But I was not and I thought: one of the great themes in life and literature is the difference between appearance and reality. For what, in fact, had those security guards got right about the reality of me – il solito comunista barbone, ubriaco e puzzolente – from my appearance?

Yes, alcohol has taken me for long periods to places worse than boredom and despair. But luckily I have somehow so far always been able to come back and give it up – and I had not touched a drop since April. To be fair to them, I suppose, I am a dormant alcoholic. And surely, if they say so, I stink, don’t I? No, not really, no more than they do.

My wife Carla says: “You do not look normal, you are not normal.” Well, thank God. Normality is not quite yet compulsory and that day at Rimini International my clothes were actually rather snazzy. So “tramp” cannot be the right word to define me, except in the sense that I am always broke. But they would not have known that, would they, from their machines? Communist? Italy had the largest communist party outside the Soviet Bloc in Europe, and the Emilia-Romagna where I live was its citadel, where its heirs continue, just about, to rule the roost to this day. But for many years I had a column in a right-wing Italian newspaper and spent much of my time making fun of the “comunisti” and the left-wing press used to call me “fascista!” So they got that wrong as well.

But my father would have seen life their way. For him appearance was reality. You avoid scratching the surface. You avoid… emotion.

He was hostile to all forms of religion, as so many are, but there is nowhere else suitable to hold a memorial gathering, is there, except a church? So about 50 people came to St Andrew’s, Limpsfield Chart – where my brother, who is a KC, gave an exceptional speech in which he told the story mainly of how our father managed to come from nothing to achieve success – and to the village pub afterward.

A couple of days later, sitting alone in my father’s armchair in the conservatory of his lovely old house in the Surrey Hills with its spectacular views south, down to Ashdown Forest and beyond, I heard a frantic fluttering sound. It was a beautiful peacock butterfly that our presence in the house had awoken from hibernation. I wanted to open the windows to let it out but they were jammed and I could not find the key to the door. And then it disappeared. Which was just as well, I later found out. For if I had got hold of it and put it outside it would have died.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s October 27, 2025 World edition.

October 21, 2025
A rendezvous with destiny

Gianluca and I mounted the steps to the Friedrichsbad in Baden-Baden, Germany, in pensive silence. We hadn’t made eye contact since we’d met in reception at our hotel, the divine Brenners, for this rendezvous with destiny. At the front desk, we were sternly reminded of the dress code. We nodded. For the next three hours we were going to be stark naked in a 19th-century, Renaissance-themed, domed and frescoed temple to the God of Thermal Springs, adorned with hand-painted majolica tiles, statuary and a sequence of pools and chambers. “Kein Textil,” the woman repeated.

After removing every stitch, we processed to the shower room – me checking that the area, equipped with vast ceiling-mounted bronze fittings, had several exits – wearing only blue plastic slippers. Gianluca had left his spectacles behind. “Probably a good thing,” I said, as I wrenched a lever for my regulation three-minute drenching. My towel was already soaked so I abandoned it in a hammam where men lolled on stone benches, legs apart. Gianluca and I sat in silence on a raised dais, snuffing the sulfurous airs and glancing at fellow bathers as if this was the most natural thing in the world.

We are like babies who have returned, in advanced middle-age, to the blissful ataraxy of our mothers’ wombs

In my head, I had entered a rhapsodic state already. “This is marvelous,” I was thinking. “When in Baden-Baden, you should definitely go to the Bad, not that modern one next door, the Caracalla, where you’re allowed swimwear, but here, this is the echt Bad,” I was telling myself, pitying the others who’d chosen to go to the super-deluxe spa and pool at the Brenners and how they’d all wish they’d been to this proper old one by the ruins of the Roman baths. For the next hour we moved silently between numbered pools and chambers designed to warm and cool the body with air and water and purify the mind. I had entered a fugue state. It was clear to me now. The reason you or I can be as naked as a Lucian Freud is that this is the one place you would never announce, “But don’t you know who I am?” – it only works if nobody knows who you are. We are all equal, and equally human! This is helped by nobody talking. Being naked while simmering in waters spouted onto the earth’s surface by artesian pressure from 12 springs containing sodium chloride, from a depth of 2,000 meters – waters that reach a temperature of up to 155°F – cannot be improved by small talk of any kind.

Gianluca and I were lolling in a pool underneath a cinnamon-painted dome. This is one of the only times, I was thinking, where we can bask in an amniotic bubble as if we are babies who have returned, in advanced middle-age, to the blissful ataraxy of our mothers’ wombs, all our needs and wants provided for by this warm immersion, cares washed away.

Without his spectacles, Gianluca couldn’t see where we should go next – there were so many options. He turned to a man he assumed was a regular, standing at one end of the pool we were in. He was wearing glasses. He looked at home. Unfortunately, he turned out to be Scottish. “I’ll show ye,” he said eagerly, hauling himself out. We had no choice but to follow his buttocks into a room where you bobbed in shallow water on slabs, like beached whales. Look, I didn’t mind showing my front bottom to any number of naked Germans. Given a choice they’d be naked all the time. But I found I minded someone from Auld Reekie asking out loud in front of half of the Black Forest (no pun intended), “Are you Rachel Johnson?” And then saying he knew it was me, confiding “it’s your hair” and so on, breaking the fourth wall and whipping away my invisibility cloak at the same time.

As we lay with our herbal teas on daybeds afterwards, Gianluca apologized, but I was over it already, and asking him how it was for him. Was there a vibe? I mean, were men checking each other out? I couldn’t tell as I am not a gay man, you see. “Within seconds,” he said, and then explained about the various men, “the skinny one in the corner” and “that fat blond one with the button mushroom,” the looks exchanged and how only gay men sat like that, legs akimbo.

As we left, pink, clean and moisturized with mineral lotions, the fat blond one with the button mushroom turned out to be from Newcastle, England. I know this because as we exited, he followed us out of the changing room, and suggested we went “for a few beers.” Reader, we made our excuses and left the Geordie with the chode (don’t ask me to explain) on the steps of the Friedrichsbad.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s October 27, 2025 World edition.

October 21, 2025
The tyranny of the mass-intellectual

In the classical world the question of whether virtue can be taught, or is rather acquired by interior inclination and moral development, was the subject of intense debate by the best Grecian and Roman philosophers. None ever succeeded, however, in agreeing an answer.

Progressive education along narrow lines is, for liberals, the source of all legitimate moral authority

Since the second half of the 20th century, academics and intellectuals have seemed to believe that they have answered the question definitively and to their own satisfaction. Virtue, they have decided, can indeed be taught, and liberal democratic education is doing it, in public and private schools and universities alike throughout the western world. A high-school diploma is confirmation that one’s progress toward virtue and the virtuous life has begun; a Bachelor of Arts degree is the equivalent of a certificate of virtue acquired; and a PhD is confirmation that the holder is an adept in virtue, entitled to go forth into the world to rule, transform and perfect it. This explains the self-assurance and self-regard of the liberal governing classes, their smug certainty of their own superiority and their unconcealed disdain for the uneducated and unlettered masses beneath them, the people Hillary Clinton, a graduate of Wellesley College and Yale Law School, calls the “deplorables” – the Republicans, Trump voters and other reactionary ignoramuses, many of whose parents, and their parents before them, voted the Democratic ticket and were rewarded for doing so by the beneficiaries of their votes.

The result, before the Obama administration was replaced by Trump’s first term in office, can be fairly described as the tyranny of the educated and the intelligent; or, put less politely, the mass-intellectual, a product of the industrialization of liberal education throughout the western world. Sir Francis Bacon understood knowledge as power; power over nature in service to a more comfortable future for humanity. Modern liberals, and now progressives, understand it as their inalienable right to power, conferred by an ideological education that guarantees the promotion of the sole correct way of thinking about politics and society, man and nature, man and his human destiny, that is not merely in itself virtue but the one and only true virtue.

Thus progressive education along narrow and restrictive lines of thought fixed by the adepts is, for liberals, the source of all legitimate moral authority: the Church of God Without God, recognized as the institution entrusted by them with the privilege of baptizing in its name the present and future members of the new ruling class, endowed with power and the material rewards that come with power – the new Lords Temporal and Spiritual. It is no coincidence that the logo chosen for Tim Cook’s Apple Corporation should be a bitten fruit, symbolizing knowledge acquired through metaphysical rebellion and power as virtue, whether or not acquired by virtuous means and wielded to moral ends. I read only the other day of a team of American scientists who, working with a human egg and a piece of human skin, have succeeded in creating a human embryo, thus realizing, potentially, the ability of two men to sire a “child” that is, indeed, their own and without genetic contribution from what we used to call “Mother” Nature. (The question of what the life of such a freak would be like never – apparently – occurred to them.)

Scientific “achievements” like this one are the result of the modern worship of narrow intelligence and the complete neglect of what used to be called “intellect,” a word one scarcely hears anymore. Every child for the past three-quarters of a century at least has been subjected to a so-called “intelligence test”; none to what one might call an “intellect test.” Intelligence and intellect are clearly two critically different things. To the extent that intelligence really is susceptible to accurate assessment (a claim of which I am extremely skeptical), it needs to be far better, and more comprehensibly, understood than it is in modern western technocratic society.

Intelligence tests are designed to measure the mental capacity of a middle, or upper-middle class, person to succeed in the middle-to-upper-class world of business, the law, medicine, the sciences and technology generally. Success in these fields certainly requires intelligence but by no means necessarily intellect, which implies a comprehensive sense of the entirety of human understanding and culture and of the relationship and balance between their separate categories, including theology and philosophy, history, languages and the arts and fine arts. Many of the finest minds in one field or the other have been hopelessly incompetent in, and even ignorant of or blind to, the others. Music is an art with a fundamental relationship to mathematics. Nevertheless, who can say how Bach would have scored on an SAT test that included geometry and the sciences? Or Shakespeare? Or Rembrandt? Or, for that matter, Saints Paul and Augustine and Aquinas?

However that may be, it is a virtual certainty that none of these men would have seen in modern education anything less than a civilizational, moral and human disaster. Descartes has been famous for nearly five centuries now for his maxim, “Je pense, donc je suis.” Christianity has given the world another, and infinitely deeper, one, though so far as I know it has never been formulated succinctly. That is, “J’aime, donc je suis.” It would take a person of intellect – not necessarily one of high abstract intelligence – fully to recognize the profound human truth of that one.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s October 27, 2025 World edition.

October 21, 2025
Gossip is good for you… so I’m told

The late Pope Francis hated gossip. In his Christmas message to his Vatican advisors last year, he warned that it is “an evil that destroys social life.” It wasn’t the first time he’d attacked rumor-spreading. He once compared gossips to terrorists because “he or she throws a bomb and leaves.”

His condemnations are of particular concern for me because I was recently accused of being a “notorious gossip.” I vehemently reject the charge, but if it were true, at least I’d be following a proud journalistic tradition. In fact, if it were not for gossip, this very magazine might not exist. The original Spectator’s founders, Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, filled the 1711 incarnation by hovering around coffee-houses, picking up gossip for stories. Coffee-houses had become so hated by the establishment that Charles II denounced them as “places where the disaffected met and spread scandalous reports concerning the conduct of His Majesty and his Ministers.”

Rumor has it that the first example of gossip dates back to 1500 BC. According to the journalist Roger Wilkes, who wrote a history of scandal, cuneiform tablets describe a Mesopotamian mayor having an affair with a married woman. While the details remain unclear – Mesopotamian languages are hard to interpret – this anecdote suggests that humans have always been fascinated by the lives of others, par-tic-u-larly when a story involves betrayal or impropriety. Gossip in ancient Mesopotamia didn’t just circulate privately, it was often formalized in public records, scratched into clay for all eternity.

So why do we gossip? The word itself descended from godsibb (“God sibling”), an Old English term for women who would support a friend or relative through childbirth. The term lost its positive connotations over the centuries, as exemplified by a 16th-century Scottish torture instrument called a “gossip’s bridle,” a horrifying spiked muzzle that was clamped down on to the tongues of women accused of witchcraft.

Yet anthropologists believe the innate desire to gossip might not be bad for society; indeed, it has some evolutionary advantages. One study argues that human society would not be sustainable if it weren’t for gossip, as for much of our history it was the only way to spread information over large groups. Another paper says that gossip reinforces and polices cultural norms and keeps members of the tribe in check. The most recent paper on the subject agrees, finding that “dissemination of information about individuals’ reputations leads more individuals to condition their behavior on others’ reputations.” In other words, gossip is evolution’s way of saying “Don’t be a dick.”

I hear gossip’s good for our health, too. One 2012 study found that when participants were gossiping about an antisocial person or behavior, their heart rates reduced and the activity “calmed the body.” Another set of experiments shows that sharing rumors activates the ventral striatum – a part of the brain’s reward and motivation system – while another study found that gossipers going through tough situations had lower levels of the stress hormone cortisol than those better at keeping secrets. So gossiping is quite literally good for body, mind and maybe even soul.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s October 27, 2025 World edition.

October 21, 2025
Polite society is a thing of the past

In 1908, the iconoclast writer Lytton Strachey – the bad boy of the Bloomsbury set – pointed a long finger at a stain on artist Vanessa Bell’s dress and asked, “Semen?” Later, Bell’s sister Virginia Woolf wrote: “With that one word all barriers of reticence and reserve went down… It was, I think, a great advance in civilization.”

Americans tend to think that the English are sexually repressed and too refined and cultured for such talk

I was recently in a bar in Bloomsbury – one that actually serves a “Virginia Woolf hamburger” – when talk among the young women at my table turned to men they knew who were, how should I put this, well-endowed. Of course, I’ve heard such talk before, but not in a long time and not in such anatomical detail. What, I wondered, would Virginia and her Bloomsbury set think of that conversation? A further “advance in civilization” – or the end of it?

Since then I have had numerous conversations like that one – usually with very posh and highly educated young women – or melancholic young men with size anxiety. Like the death of the novel or the rebirth of jazz, the big penis is one of those topics that turns up every so often and quickly disappears. And some will say: thank heavens for that! But not me.

Yes, I know it’s a rather juvenile subject, the silly stuff of schoolboys and bitchy socialites. Traditionally, it’s not been a fit subject for polite society or august journals like this one. But polite society is a thing of the past. We’re no longer in a Noël Coward world – instead, we’re living on Planet Porn where intelligent, kind men send dick-pics to strangers.

So how can I justify all this penis talk? Table talk in London these days is so relentlessly gloomy, so apocalyptic, so grown-up and dull that we need some irreverent juvenile banter to lighten things up. London society has become so serious, with its constant talk of free speech and the war in Gaza. We need more silly talk about sex and private parts that make us gasp and giggle.

And I know of no other topic to enliven a stuffy, dull dinner party full of tedious talk of children’s education, home renovations and holiday plans than to introduce the topic of the big penis. I once sat next to a very deaf old toff who was being asked about the size of his country estate by some rich touristy woman. He turned to me and asked, “What’s she saying?” “She wants to know,” I replied, “if you have a big penis.” Everyone gasped in horror, but the old boy couldn’t stop laughing.

I, too, have been on the receiving end of penis provocation. Once in a seedy club in Soho in the 1970s a very gay man asked if I would like to see his member. Clearly, he thought he could freak out an old, uptight heterosexual like me but I was determined not to back down. “Whip it out, toots,” I said “and let’s have a look.” That shut him up.

Americans tend to think that the English are sexually repressed and too refined and cultured for such talk, thanks to the Brideshead Revisited/Downton Abbey view of of the country. But on the contrary, they talk pure filth and swear all the time. And unlike Americans they use the C-word without embarrassment or regret.

Anyway, if my female friends are to be believed, suddenly every man in London has a large penis. What’s going on? Is this some kind of feminist payback for male obsession about breast size? Maybe it’s all about status; the must-have item for the modern woman who has everything?

I see it as part of a backlash against the progressive/liberal penis piety of the past few decades. We’re all meant to believe that size doesn’t matter and that such talk is symptomatic of “toxic masculinity” and conducted by macho morons. Well guess what: women think it’s fun – and funny – to talk about.

It’s often said that the personal is political – and nothing is quite so personal as the penis. Penis talk is even entering into political discourse. According to a 2014 YouGov poll, British Conservative voters are the political group most likely to agree that penis size matters (48 percent), while their Liberal Democrat counterparts feel strongly the other way, with 60 percent disagreeing.

There’s always been this idea among sections of the left that the authoritarian politician or personality needs to play the big powerful man because he feels inadequate about his penis size – and now they point to Donald Trump as proof. Sound ridiculous and disrespectful? I recall Trump and Marco Rubio bringing the topic into the mainstream. In the 2016 Republican primary, Trump rebuked his rival Rubio’s suggestion that his small hands meant you know what. “I guarantee you there’s no problem,” said Trump. “I guarantee.” True or false, for once I admire his indiscretion.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s October 13, 2025 World edition.

October 7, 2025
I took on a hornet – and won

Midnight. In preparation for a 5 a.m. rise I’d been asleep for two sweltering hours under the ceiling fan when the phone rang. It was a video call. Without glasses I don’t see well but recognized the caller as Jacob, a man I’d met in June when I’d been invited to a fancy villa near the coast for the night with old pals who were visiting friends of theirs. Jacob and I got on well. In the heated pool, having only just met, we sang: “Heaven… I’m in heaven…” At dinner I admired his string of huge black Tahitian pearls and he told me about his exotic social life in New York. We exchanged our best anecdotes. At the end of the week he called to see me at home in the cave. He took me for a posh lobster lunch during which, proving there was no end to his kindness, he commissioned a painting and invited me back to the villa for a night in August when he would be taking it for the month.

To demonstrate my late-in-the-day confidence, I punched the hornet in the face. It flew off but soon came back

The morning after that midnight call, I was due to join him and his house guests, five adults and seven teenagers, for a day at the beach. There was talk of chartering a boat for a short trip along the coast. I’ve never been on a boat down here and although I had rental admin – spreadsheets and banking – to do and was anxious about taking a day off, this would be the closest I was going to get to a holiday and I’d accepted.

Thinking the ringing phone meant the day out was to be canceled, I turned on my front, pulled the sheet over my back and, lying half propped on and behind a pillow, answered. In the dark I could just about see Jacob. “I can see your tits. You look sexy,” he said.

“No you can’t, I’m lying on them and there’s a pillow in the way. And in any case, you told me you haven’t been with a woman for 41 years.”

“I like tits!” Pulling the pillow up further, I said: “Really? Well, perhaps you’d like the Platonic ideal, but not these.” He said: “Come at 9:15 for breakfast and we’ll go to the beach in convoy.” Then, holding up a postcard of one of my paintings I’d given the hosts previously, he said: “I love the painting you’re doing for me now, but could you do me one like this too?” Squinting at the phone, I said: “Anemones. Golly – yes, thanks, but you’ll need to wait until spring…” When morning came, I arrived in good time to find that the boat which had been chartered had engine trouble and no replacement could be found. It was decided we would head to the beach, find water sports for the kids and then get a water taxi across the bay to a restaurant, Le Migon, at the far, quiet end of Pampelonne beach. Even this was a revelation. I’m lucky to get to a beach twice a year and then it’s usually just for a picnic.

At the end of his rental, exhausted after entertaining 29 people in a month, Jacob asked if the cave apartment was available and if so, could he come and have a quiet weekend here on his way to Spain to stay with more friends. It was. His visit coincided with the last village event of the summer, a weekend fête, with dodgems and other rides, and bands playing in the evenings.

After a late lunch in the village, we climbed back up the hill and sat at the table on my terrace undecided about what to do before we headed back down for the music later; whether to retreat to our respective caves for a nap or keep going. We settled for the latter at a gentle pace. After a while Jacob, engrossed in his phone, said: “This guy’s only 150 meters away.” “Really? Let me see. I might know him.” I looked at the photo which showed a man’s head and shoulders emerging from a pool. “No, never seen him before.” “What about this one?” Jacob said holding the phone up again. “Ew! Definitely wouldn’t know him from that angle.”

The following day, I made roast tarragon chicken and salad. As soon as we sat down to eat, a massive hornet appeared and dived toward Jacob’s plate. He shrieked and leapt aside in his chair. Then it came for me. Some years ago I decided, after a lifetime of being less than courageous, to stand up to aggressors. To demonstrate this late-in-the-day confidence, I punched the hornet in the face. It flew off but soon turned and came back, so I punched it again. Down it went. Jacob laughed and declared he should be more west of Scotland in his approach to potentially lethal stinging insects. “Where is it? Is it dead?” Jacob pointed to the insect floundering on the tiles beside a plant pot. “No, don’t kill it,” he said. I began counting it out: “One uh, two uh, three uh…”

At four, it got up and came back at me again. I raised my fist. It stopped six inches from my face, spun round and flew away. I remembered my late husband Jeremy’s words when I related a harrowing event in my earlier life: “Why didn’t you just punch him?” Why indeed.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s October 13, 2025 World edition.

October 7, 2025
Thoughts on moving houses

“A house for sale is not a home,” says Wendell Berry, which is perhaps why we have delayed putting our home up for sale as we slowly move, box by box, the five short – long? – miles down the road to the house my grandfather built in 1938.

We are moving from Chapel Street to Bank Street, which I trust does not indicate a moral demotion from my lofty spiritual perch to the world of grubby materialism. I know for certain it does not augur riches.

We are holding off on selling our Chapel Street home till we’ve cleared it out and are fully moved into Bank, though I nurture a ridiculous hope that before then I might unearth a rusted coffee can filled with 19th-century gold pieces that will enable us to keep both.

Our Chapel Street abode is a Greek revival farmhouse dating from the early 1830s. For most of a century it was inhabited by our county’s leading family of spiritualists. I’ve never seen a ghost herein, though the squirrels in the attic do a pretty good impression of skittering haints. I would welcome ghosts in the new house, since there never was a kinder man than my grandfather.

Lucine and I purchased our soon-to-be-former home in 1992 from a charming eccentric who had named it “La Maison des Fleurs Printemps,” and the first thing I did upon moving in was to rip out that sign—though of course the flowers still bloom every May.

I had a wonderful second-floor office crammed with books and files, its walls papered with posters and our daughter’s artwork. The Kauffman homestead, which is at most two-thirds the size of our current home, offers no such aerie, so I am consigned to the basement, which provides ample room for my avalanche of books and LPs and autographed baseballs and posters bearing images and signatures of persons and things from George McGovern to Barber Conable, Gore Vidal to William Cullen Bryant, Ray Nitschke of the Green Bay Packers to Clyde Tombaugh, the man who discovered Pluto, and The Hired Hand to Zabriskie Point. (I’m a sucker for early 1970s cinema.)

If I must settle in this netherworld, I told Lucine, the dingy-gray basement had to be chromatically transformed into something out of The Brady Bunch. So we’re painting it a color dubbed “sunshine yellow.” Bring sunglasses if you visit.

We are leaving the home in which we raised our daughter, drank thousands of cups of coffee, laughed or rolled eyes at countless in-jokes and lived with humor and love and exasperation for the majority of our lives. We also threw the occasional idiotically themed party. The most preposterous was triggered by our buying a bottle of absinthe, out of which grew what we called the French Literary Party. Two dozen partiers endured readings from Arthur Rimbaud and Charles Baudelaire before we all got back to drinking and talking about the Buffalo Bills. ‘Twas très magnifique!

Technically we’re moving south, but I doubt we quite qualify as snowbirds

Our pets are buried out back. The Chapel Street house has an unobstructed southern horizon that reveals the Greatest Show in the Universe every clear night. Now and then I’d drag out the eight-inch reflector telescope I bought decades ago with found money when an English publication (not The Spectator, I assure you!) paid me a debt I’d been owed for more than a year. I have relished walking to the post office every morning, dropping by the service station for coffee with Sam and Bob and Whitey and Bear. I don’t believe I will ever be able to think of that house without a tear coming to my eye.

All my memories are there. But they’re also in the Kauffman homestead and, since none of the younger members of the clan wanted it, Lucine and I figured it fell to us to keep it in the family.

The Bank Street house is just two lots from the home in which I grew up and in which my octogenarian parents still live. Technically we’re moving south, but I don’t think we quite qualify as snowbirds.

We’ll be just one block from Dwyer Stadium, home of Batavia’s Muckdogs, where I have spent well over a thousand nights watching baseball in a cocoon of community from which I hope never to emerge. (Sixty-five years? How the hell did I get so old? I am like my late friend Henry W. Clune, the Rochester novelist, who lived to a Methuselan age of 105 but said that he always felt 18 inside. But then, he said, you look in the mirror…) “Sometimes I feel so happy/ Sometimes I feel so sad,” Lou Reed once sang. That about sums up my mood these days.

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

September 23, 2025