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Zoe WilliamsThe Guardian |
Advent calendars are a nightmare when you’re divorced. The kids come back from their other house with days’ worth of unopened Toblerone, which is...
Gregg Wallace, accused of “inappropriate behaviour”, had stepped away from MasterChef and was keeping his head down while lawyers were engaged –...
The number of women without a partner having children by IVF or sperm donation has trebled in the past 10 years. IVF itself is not unproblematic;...
What they always say about cats – indeed, one of the reasons I prefer dogs – is that they don’t like moving house. You have to trap them inside...
The concept of “enshittification” was invented by the American sci-fi writer Cory Doctorow, only last year, to describe online platforms and the...
The Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists has landed on an arresting image to illustrate the waiting-list crisis in its field. If all...
It sounds too fanciful and too outrageous to be true, but nothing is too outrageous for the world the tech bros have bequeathed us. The BBC has...
Postmortems continue for who lost Kamala Harris the US election, and these will be consequential for the left in the UK. However many times the US...
Near my house, there are some incredible firework enthusiasts. In November 2020, when I’d just moved in, I thought it was an optical illusion...
Nearly three years ago, I started working on an idea for a book. It started out with the pretty mild proposition: we’re in a class war, but it’s a...
My time management is quite old-fashioned, mainly consisting of a to-do list. Three columns if I’m feeling particularly efficient: work; admin;...
There was something so incongruous about the sight of King Felipe of Spain, mud-splattered by raging elements of a crowd in Paiporta, a suburb of...
The best thing that happened to me during the whole of the pandemic was a story on the internet. An Oregon resident, furloughed, saw on a daytime...
The concept of “elite overproduction” was developed by social scientist Peter Turchin around the turn of this century to describe something...
The modern practice of chugging – a contraction of “charity” and “mugging”, where cheerful young people come up to you in the street and ask...
According to Forbes, Donald Trump talked about five important things in a three-hour-plus podcast with Joe Rogan: whether the 2020 election was...
Locals call Sarah Beeny’s house in Somerset “mini-Downton Abbey”, owing to its grandeur – and its treehouse, boathouse and greenhouse. I went...
One experiences politics through direct encounters with the state, and since the first wave of austerity that experience has diverged enormously...
It’s always tempting to self-soothe when the far right is on the march. Tommy Robinson’s new book, Manifesto: Free Speech, Real Democracy,...
When a fella of 17 arrived at the house in a corset, some pointy ears, a lot of makeup and an alice band with a cat on it, it was only polite to ask...
Melania Trump has put her support for abortion rights at the centre of her forthcoming memoir – you might even call it the news line. This has...
Polling just dropped on trust in the Labour government – 59% think it’s fairly or very sleazy, according to YouGov, which will be sobering news to...
As Keir Starmer entered the room with Ursula von der Leyen for his first meeting with the European Commission as prime minister on Wednesday, we had a...
I noticed Lime bikes almost as soon as they arrived in London, in 2018, because of the teenagers. Let me explain: it’s possible to hack the rentable...
Kemi Badenoch polished her brand as the say-the-unsayable candidate for Conservative leader thus: “Statutory maternity pay is a function of tax; tax...
When Uber was first invented, my mother was incensed about the star-rating system. She did not wish to be evaluated for her manners, she said. It was...
Before going to an open day for a sixth form college, I’d made a number of promises to my daughter, H, in respect of how fundamentally embarrassing...
A friend who works in TV explained to me once how Game of Thrones had ruined our attention spans, packing in too much event. Dragons, nakedness,...
The Evening Standard, chronicler of the nation’s capital since 1827, is closing down this week. OK, every bit of that sentence was slightly wrong....
The most and possibly only surprising thing about hedge fund manager Paul Marshall’s purchase of the Spectator was the anguished public resignation...
My friend’s son, 16, sauntered into a pub at the weekend and came out with a pint. He wasn’t asked for ID, which she thought was outrageous, and I...
Obviously if you are not on any dating apps, you shouldn’t have any opinions about them, and you definitely shouldn’t worry about other people’s...
Two months on from the Tories’ worst election result in its history, none of its prospective leadership candidates inspire confidence in a fast...
Ofsted’s one-word ranking system for schools won’t be missed, because it never made sense: “outstanding” couldn’t possibly mean...
Because I am a good friend and a solid person, I sometimes put together a quiz for my associates. Because I am a slapdash friend and a flake, the...
I never watched The Walking Dead when it first aired, in 2010, because I thought I didn’t like zombies. Then I had a work experience kid who was...
Following a post on social media about letting her 15-year-old son go on an Interrailing trip, Kirstie Allsopp should definitely be investigated by...
Yvette Cooper isn’t wrong when she speaks of the “chaos that has blighted the immigration system for too long” – but it’s still profoundly...
Delayed in transit with Mr Z, I was looking for a way to fill precisely one minute. I’d scoped out my responsibility in the crusade against boredom,...
Ah, August, the month where you have to hear again what Jeremy Clarkson got in his A-levels, to be juxtaposed delightfully (he thinks) against his...
I was getting off a plane the other week, having returned from Iceland, when I had an altercation. The woman in front of me was getting her stuff...
We went 1,000 years, or maybe 10,000, without anyone ever mentioning menopause, and then we started mentioning it all the time – which wasn’t...