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We turn to Nottingham, England, where a custody sergeant has been sacked for telling a British-Iranian …

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Eddie and I were inseparable. We really were inseparable. You couldn’t have ripped that glove puppet off my hand with pliers.

He soon had a voice — a slow, halting, gravelly voice. He developed an off-kilter way of commenting on human behaviour — seeing the world, as someone said of Peter Cook, from a slight angle. When my dad was singing “Wannabe” by the Spice Girls, for example — and don’t ask me why — Eddie would croak, “What do you want Dave?”

A whole society of soft toys emerged around him. There was Tommy — a daredevil who was frequently hurled out of the window. There was Keller — a by-the-numbers glove puppet portraying Lady from Lady and the Tramp, who developed a quasi-Caribbean accent in an attempt to make him “characteristic”.

But Eddie was the favourite. When he was my hand, he really became his own man — or, rather, his own dog. It wasn’t me nipping the noses of adults — it was Eddie. (Yes, I do appreciate how aggravating this could have been.)

He acquired imaginary enemies. The Granary Bread Monster was one of them — not just a “lol so random” creation — more forgivable though that would have been when I was six — but a reflection of just how joyless and repulsive I found granary bread. When I imagined something monstrous, it just made sense that it would be made of granary bread.

Eddie could even get bizarrely philosophical. Sometimes, my Eddie-less hand would become more Eddie-like in a sort of nascent juvenile commentary on substance dualism. (What was the real Eddie?)

The important thing was that I loved Eddie. Through Eddie, I could feel a lot more confident, and have a lot more fun, than I could as, well — myself.

Then I lost him. I lost him while visiting the library in a shopping mall in Bath called the Podium. Perhaps I’d put him down while I was reading a book, or perhaps he had just fallen out of my pocket. We looked about for a long time — and what must have felt to my parents like a very long time — but he had disappeared.

I remember just how strange it was to think about the fact that he really wasn’t coming back. It wasn’t some kind of joke. My parents couldn’t click their fingers and conjure him up. In a very real sense, that was when I first internalised the significance of death.

My mum — angel that she was — soon created a new Eddie. Again, this raised interesting philosophical dilemmas. Was Eddie a spiritual phenomenon that could be transferred between glove puppets? Or was there something essential to Eddie about that original glove puppet? I don’t want to take a position on the mind-body problem. All I’ll say is that Eddie was never quite the same. If nothing else, he had belonged to a more innocent world.

Believe me, I appreciate that when you read all this, it won’t sound nearly as entertaining as it felt at the time. But childhood memories — even when they are your memories — never have the same mysterious richness as childhood experiences. It’s not just a matter of forgetting things. It’s a matter of looking at the world through a more rationalistic lens.

That’s life. Childlike wonder inevitably meets worldly realities and mature responsibilities. But to accept this — as we should — is not to deny the essential nature of an enduring enthusiasm. Without that enthusiasm, after all, what is the point?

If I’m ever feeling jaded, bitter, humourless or otherwise overearnest, I should feel four of my fingers joining in a horizontal line above my chin-like thumb, and the hand swivelling around with a faintly canine look of pleasant curiosity.

“What do you want, Ben?”

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One free sample.

The ultimate challenge.

The ultimate prize.

James Patterson approaches novels like Henry Ford approached cars. Quantity, in other words, matters more than quality.

Patterson has written or co-written more than 200 novels since his debut in 1976. The extent to which he writes the books, though, is questionable. “When it comes to writing,” a Wall Street Journal interview explained in 2012:

… he has a well-practiced system: he writes a detailed outline and then hires someone—often a former colleague from his advertising days—to write the ensuing scenes, usually in 30 to 40 page chunks. He will review those pages every few weeks, sometimes providing notes on them and other times re-writing them entirely.

There are two things I’ll say for Patterson. The first is that I’m sure he works hard. So does any good industrialist. The second is that I haven’t read any of his books and they might be entertaining. I’m sure there’s a reason people buy them by the million — just like people bought Henry Ford’s automobiles. But some of us have a sneaking sense that writing, and reading, should be a bit less of an industrial exercise.

MrBeast, meanwhile, is perhaps the most famous YouTuber in the world. The blank-eyed, bearded social media titan makes mega-popular videos in which people are put through various bizarre challenges to win large amounts of money. MrBeast is eerily — though admirably honestly — attentive to how to brand videos to gain more views and, thus, more money. The man thinks about algorithms more than parents think about their kids.

MrBeast’s popularity has allowed him to release various inane tie-in products like a mobile game and children’s snacks. Finally, at the bottom of the merchandising barrel, he has discovered books. “Growing up I thought books were boring,” he writes:

… in reality I just didn’t read anything that actually interested me. Which is why I teamed up with James Patterson to write The Most Dangerous Games!

Yes, all books were uninteresting until MrBeast came along to save literature.

It’s no surprise that MrBeast thinks The Most Dangerous Games is interesting because he’s a character in the book. In this thriller, MrBeast is recruiting high-skilled, life-hardened people from around the world to take on hair-raising challenges to earn the chance to win a billion dollars and, somehow, save the human race.

“Hey, guys,” begins the invitational letter that opens the book:

It’s me, Jimmy. MrBeast. This is me. For real.

Okay, first off: as we soon learn, MrBeast is writing to people who “didn’t apply to anything”. He’s writing to military veterans and martial artists. What I’m getting at is that while, yes, MrBeast is very famous, it’s pretty damn arrogant to think that everyone will be impressed that “MrBeast” is writing to them. Why should a British ex-Marine or a Chilean jiu-jitsu master not just assume that he’s a dangerous lunatic?

MrBeast is collecting people, we learn, for a series of challenges that will “find someone who can move the world”:

We’ve all seen what happens when one person starts something real. A creator. An athlete. A kid with a phone. A nurse. A teacher. One voice catches fire. Millions lean in. And when those people move together, the impossible stops being impossible.

Actually, I haven’t seen that. Listing random jobs isn’t making it any truer. You can add “accountant” and “garbage man” if you like. I still don’t know what you’re talking about.

Soon, our contestants have been collected — or at least the ones who weren’t smart enough to think that they were being addressed by a lunatic — and we’re in Antarctica with Alek — a 22-year-old who is “a survivor of the many wars that have chewed up her corner of the Carpathian Belt”. What does “her corner of the Carpathian Belt” mean? Serbia? There hasn’t been a war there since Alek was a twinkle in her father’s eye. Was naming a specific war just too liable to alienate some small fraction of the paying audience?

Okay, perhaps the book is set in the future. Perhaps it later gets explained that “the Carpathian Belt” is some kind of new war-torn state. But it’s hard to be generous about the plotting of a book where the authors have so little trust for their readers’ attention span that the chapters seem to be about a hundred words long. The exposition, meanwhile, is delivered with all the subtlety of wet fart in a library. Alek has protective feelings for the younger, smaller Hannah. Then we meet Jack who … has protective feelings for the young, smaller Rupert.

You get the point. I’m not going to squeeze more dollars into the bulbous bank accounts of MrBeast and James Patterson and I think I’ve made my point. The book is a half-baked attempt to MrBeasterise the thriller genre, with precisely the results you would expect.

Allegedly, the book is not performing well. I suspect its sales won’t be as disastrous as initial projections are suggesting — because it’s just hard to gauge initial sales, and because Mr B and Mr P have absolutely massive audience — but it isn’t really a surprise that kids who have been trained to be hyper-stimulated every second of their entertainment experience might not be keen to sit down and read a 480 page tome, even if the chapters are about ten words long.

I want to circle back to MrBeast’s promo. If he’d said “books are great, and I wanted to write one” I would have thought, well, it’s not for me but it’s not my business. The sheer brazen cynicism of implying that books was dull until he came along, though, is downright infuriating. I’ve never wanted to participate in a book burning more.

People talk a lot about “AI slop” these days, and not without just cause, but the fact is that human-created culture has been veering towards mass production, pastiche and opportunism without AI having to be involved. There are probably more egregious examples than MrBeast and Patterson, inasmuch as these two “creators” are pretty upfront about what they do, but the cynicism is still miserable. It’s not that I expect everything to be great art. I’ve watched more WWE than I’ve read Dante for God’s sake. But as offensive as the poor quality is the sterile character — the lack of personality. I mean, look at MrBeast and Patterson pretending to be excited about their book. I’ve seen people at funerals more excited by death.

This kind of thing isn’t just bad on its own terms. It has a corrosive effect on the soul. How else can we explain William Morrow, an imprint of HarperCollins — a home of Neal Stephenson and Elmore Leonard — accepting promotional materials like this. The laziness of the typo (“captial” indeed) is bad enough but the laziness of calling a generic newspaper World News is more offensive.

No one has to live like this. No one has to let their soul be MrBeasterised and James Pattersonated. On Amazon, there are people who haven’t read the book but are praising “the gold Mr.Beast logo on the cover” or lamenting “no access to bonus video”. It’s offensive not in the normal sense of transgressing against morality but in the deeper sense of transgressing against what human beings are.

You can see life as a challenge. A challenge to maintain your sense of integrity and your sense of aspiration in the face of everything that degrades and distorts it. The challenge? To keep your soul. The prize? You keep your soul.

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Still, it was faintly bizarre when Facebook thought I’d want to watch a bunch of content from advocates of the “carnivore diet”. For example, Eddie Abbew, pictured below — who eats a mostly carnivore die…

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Obligatory shilling. I wrote on THE ZONE this month about the changing face of hitmen, the sympathetic case for restrictionism, academic ideology, men and anorexia, satire, the Cambridge Five, my dog, the fallout from an academic scandal, a hangover, human variety and my experiences with high-IQ ADHD.

I wrote for The Critic about Monty Python, Jason Arday’s defenders, the British state and crime, Ricky Gervais, agitprop in podcasts, the Arday fallout, political influencers, joyriding and Jolyon Maugham.

Finally, I wrote for The i about Richard Curtis.

Posting will be lighter next month because I’m getting married. It’s very exciting to be able to write that (the marriage part — not the light posting part). Apologies to subscribers, but I hope I will return with new energy and inspiration.

The end of the summer. This is always a poignant time of year for me. Yes, yes, I know that Autumn can be beautiful. (The leaves! The frost!) But I just can’t see the dark and cold as anything except oppressive. This year, though, I’m dwelling on it less because I’m getting married. If we can love and cherish in sickness and in health, after all, we can at least try to be cheerful in darkness and in light.

War worries. Will Russia attack a NATO country? That’s been the talk of European elites this month. On the one hand, it seems improbable. The Russians are still bogged down in Ukraine. They would take severe losses. The geopolitical fallout would be tremendous. What concerns me is that “the costs are high and the benefits are unclear” could also have been said about the invasion of Ukraine. It might well have made no sense, but it still happened. Mark Galeotti, though, writes that “there is no concrete evidence that Putin is preparing for some imminent direct attack on the West”, and while absence of evidence is not proof of anything, it’s still meaningful.

The God debate returns! Bentham’s Bulldog and Scott Alexander are arguing about whether God exists. Noted non-believer Joe Schmid has converted to Catholicism. Yes, the God debate is back, Baby. Let’s party like it’s 2006.

This is excellent news for someone who has written a book about why it matters whether or not there is a God. It’s slightly less good news if that book has been gathering e-dust for years. Consider this a vow to clean it up and put it out there.

Trash v. slop. Becca Rothfeld considers movies that are so bad that they become “perversely captivating”, and muses on the difference between trash and slop:

Henceforth, all badness will be homogenized. There will be no poorly formatted websites. There will be no B-movie monsters wearing terrible prosthetics, no scripts full of non sequiturs, no glitchy graphics. The world will become tragically, unbearably competent, a surface without a seam.

Space and silence. Kit Wilson reflects on the great Leszek Kołakowski:

Here, in a way, is Kołakowski’s whole message encapsulated: Absolute consistency, absolute certainty, absolute reliability are ruses to distract us from the fact that we must, sadly, think for ourselves, reason without safety barriers, and seek without ever hoping to find final answers.

Amor and alienation. Poppy Sowerby writes on millennials as they approach middle age:

When relationships became optional, the offer was supposed to improve. Men and women were meant to have closer and more compassionate lives together, built through conscious and careful choice and not social pressure. In the event, the sexes simply grew apart, pushed into apathy by the very same internet which was meant to connect them, and which briefly brought Jezebel and the rest so much fame.

Clacton, England and the universe. Fred Sculthorp continues his tour of modern England (someone give this man a publishing contract):

Ashleigh’s plight reminded me of the most disturbing conversation of the weekend. I was sitting near the end of the pier with Maggie, a retired paralegal. I was trying to get her to imagine the first humans that crossed here into Britain all those years ago. What would they make of it all now? Maggie wasn’t really interested. She had long since given up England and reality. In her retirement, she had started being visited by arcturians — extra-terrestrial guardian angels of beauty and truth. What she called “the fourth dimensional world” was beyond help. She had reached the end of the pier, and now she wanted to go even further.

Imperialism and irrationality. Will Solfiac takes Jameela Jamil seriously:

I’m not really surprised by her views, and I’m not singling her out as unusually vituperative. In reality she seems to be, as she states in the article, a standard “millennial social justice advocate”, which is why I thought her article was a good example of the common views I am discussing. While these views being held among millennial social justice advocates is one thing, the wider issue is that they are also commonly held among people from India and other parts of the world from which the bulk of our immigration increasingly comes from.

They were asked. Hugh Percy writes on migration and opinion:

The British people were explicitly asked what kinds of immigration they wanted less of and answered clearly. What followed bore remarkably little relationship to those preferences. The information was there; it was simply ignored.

Peaks and valleys. David Butterfield reflects on mountain walking:

Nature, though she has no curriculum to speak of, remains the greatest of teachers. There are three things that I learned from this particular adventure. First, metres really don’t exist in any shorter form than that platinum bar they struck in post-Revolutionary Paris: the distances really do need covering and climbing, whatever you might have planned.

Second, nothing has such restorative power for my soul as remote rural landscapes: they can solve and heal so much, if you just give them the chance. Third, it is a privilege and, retrospectively, a pleasure to have had the opportunity to put myself to the extreme test in such otherworldly beauty: pathei mathos, as Aeschylus rightly had it — true learning comes through true suffering.

Have a lovely month!

Ben

Yes, when you think about it, the fact that it takes me a week to move a box is proof that I am very smart.

Yep. You’d better not be criticising me for failing to pick up my socks. I have a condition. Do I get to skip queues in airports for this?

I’m kidding, of course. The argument of these adverts — which promote some kind of personality test, and which hilariously features downtrodden husbands being lectured by their mothers-in-law that “most men your age are CEOs” — is that what seems like “laziness” can have sympathetic underpinnings.

There’s something to this. When I fail to get a mundane or bureaucratic task done, I sometimes tell myself: you’re busy, you’re tired, you have a lot on your mind, you get anxious about bureaucracy, you didn’t even see that sock on the floor. It’s all true. I’m not failing to do such things just because I want to sit around and watch pro wrestling. I have genuine struggles.

But laziness is not simply a failure to accomplish things. It is also a failure to try. We can accept that X and Y might be valid obstacles in front of doing Z. The point is that we should try to do it anyway.

This isn’t always possible — at least for everyone. It would make no sense to tell someone with clinical depression, say, that they should be more active. But our state of mind can make things more difficult without making them impossible. If my femur has been broken, I can’t walk. It’s as simple as that. If I have a twisted ankle, I can walk. It might be painful and tiring. I might need a rest sometimes. But light my chair on fire and I’ll walk away from it.

I think these adverts are exploiting a modern trend towards excessively medicalising common states of mind. Allen Frances was the chair of the American Psychiatric Association task force that oversaw the creation of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders IV. But he became concerned about what he called “diagnostic hyperinflation”. “The elastic boundaries of psychiatry have been steadily expanding,” he wrote, “Because there is no bright line separating the worried well from the mildly mentally disordered.”

Hence, I can be told that my failure to change a lightbulb is because of “high-IQ ADHD”.

True, the adverts are promoting some kind of product which promises to “rewire your brain”. But I think a lot of people, on being told that they have a condition, would just use it as a cop-out. “Mop the bathroom floor? I’d love to. But you know — I have high-IQ ADHD. Yep. I guess I’ll just watch wrestling. Enjoy cleaning the bathroom.”

“I fear that a view that talks too much about internal biological processes makes people passive victims,” writes Suzanne O’Sullivan, author of The Age of Diagnosis:

A person who believes they are incapable behaves as if they are incapable, which provokes others to treat them as if they are incapable, and so the cycle feeds back into itself.

She’s right. Again, some people really are incapable of doing things. I’m not trying to deny the potential of mental illnesses and disorders — or life experiences — to incapacitate. I’m saying that the existence of a difficult emotional or otherwise psychological state is not incapacitatory per se. Sometimes, even if there is in no sense a moral obligation to do something, there is a moral obligation to do our best. But wrongly assuming that one is incapacitated is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Granted, I’m not sure it is generally productive to call people lazy and disorganised. I was a teacher for about a decade and I know it tends to make people defensive or despairing, because it is interpreted as an essential defect and not an improvable weakness. There are more positive ways to inspire people.

But when I think about my own failure to learn Polish or send an invoice, “lazy” is truer than “high-IQ ADHD” — not because I am not busy, tired, and distracted, but because a productive life depends on being busy, tired, and distracted, and doing it anyway. People who lie are sometimes under real pressure. People who are cruel have sometimes faced real provocation. To struggle is not to be acquitted of all responsibility.

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If you believe in the existence biological racial differences, you are a racist …

I replied, snarkily:

[Looking at rates of sickle cell …

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Where did this scratch on your knuckle come from?

Last Sunday, I woke up on a mattress in a bare room. It took me a moment to realise that I hadn’t been kidnapped…

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As I wrote, I do think Arday’s critics might have cause for introspection. Most of us — myself included — explicitly made the point that the problem was not so much one acade…

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My conclusion? They were bad guys. Really, really bad guys.

I know — this is the sort of radical judgement that only the most courageous opinion commentator would express. Who would have guessed that communist spies were bad?

But not everyone has thought that the Cambridge Five were bad — or, at least, that they were especially bad. Alan Bennett, who wrote two — very good! — plays about the men, has said:

I liked the notion of the Cambridge spies betraying their class; I liked them two-timing it … Spying is excusable because they thought that they were doing something to improve things, that they were morally on the right side. None of the spies spied for money. They all did it out of conviction …

With all due respect to a writer I admire, this seems like bunkum. Jihadists and Nazis also do things “out of conviction”. Am I meant to believe that Jihadi John and Lord Haw Haw were thinking, “I want to make things worse! Worse, I say!” The point is that they have cruel and irrational convictions.

Whatever one thinks about the Cambridge spies “betraying their class”, meanwhile — and I’m against it — they were also betraying helpless partisans who were sent into the jaws of Stalin, and desperate Central and Eastern European patriots who were struggling behind the scenes to build diplomatic support for their homelands. The likes of Kim Philby and Guy Burgess could enjoy the comforts of the nation they were undermining — warm offices, pink gin and sexual impropriety — while sending young men who had nothing to their doom.

One of Senior’s conclusions in this fascinating, elegantly written book is that the Cambridge Five really did believe in what they were doing. They were committed communists and not mere opportunists or — as Anthony Blunt would later have had people believe — misguided anti-fascists. Burgess “had a dream of the Soviet state”. Philby “had complete faith”.

But I think at least some of the Cambridge Five were driven by something more individualistic — a desire for excitement and significance. “I was being offered a very interesting future,” Philby would reflect on his recruitment, “A very interesting life.” Say what you like about them but they certainly had interesting lives.

At a more insightful moment, Bennett suggested that some of the Cambridge Five had suffered from “an overdose of Englishness”, and I think there’s something to the idea that Philby, Burgess and Maclean, at least, were reacting to the shabbiness and anxieties of inter-war England by projecting the imperial instinct onto the exotic Soviets. Senior comments on the “sense of Anglocentric exceptionalism” that convinced them that if world revolution was going to happen, Britain “would be best served by being in its rightful place as the vanguard”.

As disgraceful as they were, the Cambridge Five were striking personalities. I’m not quite sure how people lie prolifically and consistently. I couldn’t do it. I would have spilled the beans before they had even been served. I suppose lying becomes natural — aided by the sort of compartmentalisation that enables less ambitious men to juggle families. I suppose the booze, which the spies drank prodigiously, must have quelled doubts — though it makes it even harder to believe that none of the rotters gave themselves away.

Having prolific spies at the heart of the establishment was hugely embarrassing for Britain, of course. (Though the U.S. also had Harry Dexter White and Nathan Gregory Silvermaster. McCarthyism did not arrive in a vacuum.) But the “chapocracy”, as Senior entertainingly describes the clubbish and complacent class of establishmentarians that enabled the Cambridge Five, was already doomed. The easy faith in Britishness that had coasted on material and cultural success was evaporating in an age of rival superpowers, technological progress, calamitous war and — relatedly if somewhat separately — philosophical deconstruction. The idea that “England expects” was struggling to survive in an age where so much less was expected of England.

In An Englishman Abroad, Bennett portrays Guy Burgess’s drink-sodden, England-obsessed exile in Moscow — quoting poetry and pining for his London tailors. My own emigration was entirely innocent, and I’m glad and fortunate to be in Poland, but I would be lying if I claimed to see no resemblance to how I read the Telegraph and check the cricket scores. Identity can be a complex and evolving phenomenon in a world without old certainties.

Building it on lies, though — lies told to others and lies told to ourselves — makes it not just insecure but in constant danger of collapsing — exposed, however impressive it might once have looked, as a shabby fraud.

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Spectator editor Michael Gove responded to the news of Liddle’s death as follows: “Rod Liddle was a journal…

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There were two possible responses. One was:

What do you mean you’ve never heard of men being anorexic!?!? You’re promoting stereotypes! Aaargh!

Another was:

Well, yes, it’s typically associated with women, so that is not surprising. But men can be anorexic too!

I think the second kind of response tends to be more helpful. Generally, stereotypes exist for a reason. Anorexia is associated with girls and women because most people who suffer from anorexia are girls and women.

Still, there is a place for correction. In clinical settings, men account for somewhere between 5 to 11 per cent of patients diagnosed with anorexia. Literature specific to the male experience of anorexia, on the other hand, makes up less than 1 per cent of articles that address the condition. So, the relationship between men and anorexia remains a bit mysterious. I can’t claim to be any sort of expert but perhaps I can offer some insight.

There have been some famous cases of anorexic men. Dennis Quaid sought treatment for anorexia after dropping piles of weight for Wyatt Earp in 1994. Richey Edwards of the Manic Street Preachers clearly had an eating disorder (and I’m not sure it was totally coincidental that I was a big fan of The Holy Bible). But for obvious reasons these have been marginal cases.

There are, in broad terms, qualitative as well as quantitative differences between the sexes when it comes to eating disorders. Disordered eating among women is typically associated with — albeit not reducible to — the desire to be thin. For men, it is more typically associated with the desire to be lean. I can’t really speak from personal experience here, because my teenage anorexia did originate from a desire to be thin, but the pursuit of lean muscularity can make dramatic dieting less dangerous, because it inherently demands more nutrition, but also potentially more insidious, because self-destructive behaviour could wear a more convincing disguise.

Sasha Gorrell and Stuart B Murray discuss the similarities between “cutting”, where professional and amateur bodybuilders cut calories to achieve maximal leanness, and anorexic behaviour, and I do think it is important to be clear that temporary extremes, whether or not they were advisable, are not necessarily the same as permanent extremes. But it is the case that the former can slip into the latter, as in the example of Dan Stein who spoke to Men’s Health about dramatically and consistently cutting calories while still trying to maintain a punishing gym routine.

Eating disorders in men are two times as commonly diagnosed among gay men as among heterosexual men. This has something to do with aesthetics, as gay men are above averagely likely to value leanness, and I suspect it also has something to do with higher levels of neuroticism and, from a more positive angle, greater willingness to seek and accept clinical help. This said, most men with eating disorders — like this author — are heterosexual, so I’m not trying to replace one stereotype with another.

I’ve been talking about eating disorders in general, so anorexia, or extreme calorie restriction, is worth distinguishing from bulimia — a cycle of bingeing and purging — and anorexia athletica — an intense and ruthless preoccupation with exercise. Having had all three, what connects them is an obsessive focus on self-control for its own sake. This is worth distinguishing from goal-oriented discipline — for example, the weight lifter who won’t miss a session in the gym because he wants to raise his max bench press. I’m sure this could get unhealthy but it’s a lot likelier to be associated with good physical habits — e.g. eating enough — and it locates a sense of self-fulfillment in something constructive. When perfectionism is associated with control as an end in itself, on the other hand, self-fulfillment is located in something destructive.

Also relevant is body dysmorphia — an intense preoccupation with a perceived defect in one’s physical appearance. Some men have an irrational sense of smallness, which can lead to emotional distress and destructive behaviour like abusing steroids. Some men, on the other hand, have an irrational sense of fatness. I think — as I have written before — that this is associated with fear and disgust towards one’s own physicality. This was creatively and hauntingly explored by Franz Kafka — a man who most definitely suffered from an eating disorder. As I wrote:

Body dysmorphia is not just being unhappy with how you look. That’s part of it, of course, but it isn’t all of it. It’s also being repelled by how it feels to be embodied.

The Metamorphosis is not reducible to this but I’m sure it was an influence on Kafka’s understanding of Gregor Samsa’s “pathetic and repulsive shape”. Why does Gregor retain such composure when he wakes “transformed…into gigantic insect”? Because he had felt somewhat insectile all along.

Eating disorders, then, are not solely about food or body image, but can have deep psychological roots. That said, physiological effects of starvation itself can intensify and entrench restrictive behaviors. “Effects of starvation,” as Paul Garfinkel and Allan S. Kaplan wrote, “Cause the syndrome of anorexia nervosa to be self-perpetuating.” In the Minnesota Starvation Experiment, for example, during World War Two, a selection of healthy conscientious objectors were deliberately starved. They endured physical effects, of course, but also mental effects. They began to have a monomaniacal, ritualistic preoccupation with the food they were given, and lost interest in and energy for other things. Addressing the psychological roots of the condition, then, is exceptionally difficult until the sufferer has been convinced to start physical recovery.

This is why early intervention is generally advisable. Sufferers don’t become likelier to acknowledge that they have a problem as the condition becomes more problematic — indeed, the opposite is often true.

That said, early intervention also entails the risk of pathologising unexceptional behaviour. What I think people should be sensitive to is not just food restriction but food restriction pursued to unsustainable extremes or, crucially, as an end in itself; not just physical dissatisfaction but physical dissatisfaction that becomes a dominant and inexplicable theme in someone’s life; not just weight reduction but a mental withering. It isn’t very common, happily — but it can be very dangerous.

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One academic getting up to funny business is not a huge story. It’s interesting and funny, to be sure, but unless t…

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Well, for sure. But at the risk of being literal-minded, they weren’t.

I promise I have a point here that rises above the level of a truism. It i…

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Johannes Natland, who was recruited by the Sweden-based, Kurdish-founded Foxtrot network to assassinate a man in England, is anything but a convincing hitman. Really, his murder plot has all the makings of a comic farce.

Natland is a drug-addled Norwegian 18-year-old — the middle-clas…

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Obligatory shilling. This month I wrote at THE ZONE about the USA, annoying words, Elon Musk, Jordan Peterson, opinion commentators, celebrating death, Joy Division, slurs, London Falling and China and dogs.

Pretty much every week I write twice exclusively for my paid subscribers. If that interests you — as well as hundreds of archived pieces — please consider subscribing.

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I wrote for The Critic about Twitter, Count Binface, banned books, social media, Argentina, The Salt Path, Jim Goad, Stella Creasy, divisiveness and a conservative conference.

I wrote for The American Conservative about animal welfare.

Finally, I wrote for The Daily Wire about tech gurus.

Arday bargy. The scandal surrounding allegations of plagiarism and fabrication levelled against Cambridge professor Jason Arday fascinated me less because of the allegations themselves than because of how left-wing academics and politicians fell over themselves to deny them without even the briefest of investigations. There was no attempt to argue that the allegations were wrong because of X, Y and Z (an argument I would have been open to and that I’d still be open to if Professor Arday wants to make it). Right-wing criticism of a black professor, it seemed, was wrong precisely because it was right-wing criticism of a black professor. I mean, take a look at this from Professor Alan Lester:

He referenced his source many times, in text and in references, making his debt to her explicit … If one went systematically hunting any academic in this way one would find similar.

But the accusation, whether it is right or wrong, is that Arday copied extracts without acknowledging it. “If one went systematically hunting any academic in this way one would find similar”? I am not an academic and I’ve never copied someone’s text without being clear that I am quoting them. As an editor, I wouldn’t publish someone who did (unless, of course, it was a dim formatting mistake, but that seems different).

This sort of tribalism ends up looking worse than the initial accusations — the truth of which has yet to be conclusively determined. Kathleen Stock is very good on the embarrassing affair.

Cricketing corruption? I can’t stop reading about the “Clicky Ponting” scandal in British village cricket, in which a team stands accused of devising a scam in which a player would click his fingers to convince an umpire that a batsman had hit the ball before being caught behind. On the one hand, it feels a bit unfair for the players to be the subject of national intrigue as if Saltburn Cricket Club’s second XI is the cricketing equivalent of Man United. On the other hand, what makes this case so fascinating is that such a low-stakes activity is alleged to have been the subject of such a high-stakes plot. It’s like incapacitating your spouse so you can beat them in a game of Scrabble.

A minor god of mischief. Here’s a fun profile of Johnny Knoxville from Jackass. Ignore some of the writer’s more annoying analysis and you have to be fascinated by a man who shot himself in the chest for other people’s amusement:

“Jackass” wouldn’t work without its lovable ensemble cast, but Knoxville is the obvious ringleader. When you watch him crash into a fruit cart or electrocute his friends, it is tempting to think of him as a minor god sent down from Olympus for the amusement of higher entities—an emissary of mischief loosed upon mortals who are powerless to resist or understand him. “Get a load of this,” you imagine Zeus saying as Knoxville Jet Skis through a garden hedge.

After Brent. Fred Sculthorp writes about The Office, Slough and England:

“There is something I like to call Schrödinger’s Slough,” says Rob Deeks, a social worker and champion of the town, as I ask him to take me on a tour to see if the new sitcom really does justice to the town. “To outsiders it is simultaneously a drab, gray and dreary place, but then also a vibrant, growing and sometimes dangerous place that no one apparently wants to live in.” When I suggest he might be touching on the broader condition of England, he takes me on a whistle-stop tour: a 10-minute drive that takes in the playing fields of Eton, a busy mosque now serving one of the first estates built to home bombed-out Londoners, and a data center that wafts the smells of cremated plastic into back gardens.

Predators stalk. Alessandra Bocchi considers stalking:

Regardless of who decides to stalk, when you’re on the receiving end, it makes you feel deeply unprotected, and it activates your alertness as if you were alone in a forest in the dark, hearing growling noises. If you think about it, in nature, predators stalk their prey before attacking them, waiting for them to be isolated and off guard to pounce.

Intense agony. Here is a disturbing piece from Bentham’s Bulldog about the capacity for animal suffering — even very, very small animal suffering. I’m sceptical about its more radical implications, but it is a subject that deserves to be considered:

Here, I will argue for what can be called the widespread agony thesis. This thesis simply holds that the capacity to feel intense pain is quite widespread, being present in crustaceans like shrimp and lobsters; insects like ants, flies, and bees; and fish.

Crime and kinship. Chris Bayliss reflects on the cultural roots of the grooming gangs scandal:

The fact is that a tightly-knit extended family structure in which the individual is tied by mutual bonds of absolute obligation to their kin, far above and beyond any loyalty to the state or its laws, is an ideal platform for any kind of illicit activity. Where they evolved naturally, kinship structures provide a reliable basis for cooperation in societies with low levels of trust between non-relatives — but transplanted into high trust societies, they are very powerful means of evasion and protection from the law.

Terror and farce. In the wake of the Berlin Pride terror attack, Jan A. Karon explores the perverse naivete of European institutions:

The suspect being free and being able to kill, after everything else he had been accused of doing, seems simply farcical. Ballout had already tried to join a terrorist army, continued to consume its propaganda even after Lebanese detention, was under electronic and physical monitoring, and was still walking the streets of the German capital on the strength of a counselling program with the hope that juvenile justice might yet reform him.

The rain on spain. Anyone surprised by the chaos in Ceuta should have been following Jack Davey in The Critic:

The measure will grant rights to migrants without papers who have no criminal record and who had been in the country for at least five months before 31 December 2025. Its consequences will be enormous. Official estimates state that over 500,000 people could be included under the amnesty, but the true number will probably be far larger. The best estimates state that Spain has 840,000 irregular migrants. However, a Podemos source told El País that the number of regularised migrants could well exceed one million by the end of the process.

The science of sex. Jerry Coyne reviews a new book by Steve Stewart-Williams on sex differences:

Stewart-Williams notes that such differences could reflect sociocultural pressures like socialisation or bias rather than innate preferences, but we have some data against purely social explanations. Two big meta-analyses, for instance, show little evidence for the differential socialisation of boys and girls—and, anecdotally, we all know of despairing parents who tried to give their children gender-neutral upbringings, only to see them revert to behaviours characteristic of their sex.

Dark Side of the Ring. Wrestling fans — which I assume is all of you — shouldn’t miss this three-part series on Jeff Jarrett and TNA.

Have a lovely month!

Ben

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I’ve had this experience this week, with a minor piece of local news from the Henan province of China.

Chutou wa…

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