This week, an investigation by The Times revealed that ten universities have recently withdrawn books from compulsory reading lists because of concerns about “challenging” content that may “cause students harm”. For example, the University of Essex has permanently removed Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Underground Railroad because of its “graphic description of violence and slavery”, while the University of Sussex has “permanently withdrawn” August Strindberg’s play Miss Julie due to its discussions of suicide. 

The Times also found that trigger warnings had been applied to over 1000 texts, ranging from the classicism of A Midsummer Night’s Dream (University of Aberdeen) to the “upsetting scenes” of Far From The Madding Crowd (University of Warwick) to — my personal favourite — the “animal cruelty” of 1984 (University Greenwich). ...  Continue reading

When you think of child sex abuse scandals, you might think of Rotherham, Rochdale, Oxford, Newcastle, Keighley, or now, Telford. An inquiry found yesterday morning that over a thousand young girls had been sexually abused in Telford over generations due to systemic, wholly avoidable failures by police and local councils.

Yet the reaction to the story has been strangely subdued. While many outlets wrote about the inquiry, within hours the stories were no longer on the homepages of The Guardian, The Independent or The Telegraph. None of these sex abuse scandals have generated the level of outrage you would expect given the harrowing realities behind them. Ever since the news of the Rotherham child exploitation scandal, described as “biggest child protection scandal in UK history”, broke in 2012, the media and establishment has been tiptoeing around the issue. For years these awful atrocities have been exposed, one after the other, yet there has been no national conversation, no social media movements, no calls for heads to roll for neglect of duty. Even though they are ongoing scandals on a scale that eclipse other #MeToo controversies like the abuse of the USA gymnastics team, they have received a fraction of the coverage. ...  Continue reading

Another week, another mass outbreak of Big Tech “misinformation”. The Supreme Court’s recent ruling to revoke Roe vs Wade has led to a surge in videos advising herbal remedies for home abortions, with some amassing millions of views. Self-proclaimed experts recommend everything from pennyroyal (which can damage liver and kidneys) to ginkgo biloba (which can lead to excessive bleeding), all in the name of #mybodymychoice.

This is just a drop in the ocean. On the pro-choice side, we have celebrities like Halle Berry with hundreds of thousands of followers tweeting that the treatment for ectopic pregnancies is the same as abortion (it isn’t). On the pro-life side, old articles are recirculating claiming that the abortion pill isn’t safe (it is). From conspiracy theories that the Democrats support infanticide to campaigns to make abortion legal up until birth, polarised views dominate, and the silent majority who believe in the right to abortion (up until a certain point), have nothing to cling to in the riptide. ...  Continue reading

In his essay ‘Was the jury ever self-informing?’ Daniel Klerman explores how medieval juries were allowed to base their verdicts not on court evidence, but on information they learned through tight-knit communities and interested parties. He concludes that what distinguishes the medieval and modern jury is that medieval jurors came to court with extensive knowledge about the case and the defendant; rumour and gossip meant that jurors were ‘already informed’ before they walked through the door.

By Klerman’s standards, the Amber Heard and Johnny Depp trial, and the insatiable, salacious social media frenzy that came with it, was positively medieval. Amber Heard, in her first interview since the verdict, said that the “hate and vitriol” meant that no one could argue that there had been “fair representation”, and her lawyers have already argued that there was “no way” the jurors “could not have been influenced” by the gruesome media circus that spawned such malicious memes, misinformation, and even merchandise. ...  Continue reading

Nearly 16 years before the creation of Tiktok — 10 years before Instagram, 4 years before Facebook — Mark Feldman wrote an essay called ‘Munchausen’s By Internet: Detecting Factitious Illness and Crisis Online.’ Feldman describes how some users misuse ‘virtual support groups’ by feigning, exaggerating or creating medical problems in order to gain attention and sympathy. Some of the most notorious examples include a blogger who faked a cancer diagnosis; a woman who pretended for over a decade to be a widower with an ill son; or the horrific case of Lacey Spears, who tweeted about her son’s illness while secretly poisoning him with salt. ...  Continue reading

Today is International Women’s Day, and once again I find myself overwhelmingly underwhelmed. International Women’s Day, a global event designed to celebrate the cultural, political and socio-economic achievements of women, has been transformed from a feminist focal point to the equivalent of a Hallmark holiday: contrived, commercialised, cynical claptrap.

At best, the nods to International Women’s Day are benign but random; for example, why did e-scooter company Tier feel the need to email this morning to reassure me that they are committed to making women ‘safer and more confident on their journeys’? I’m not sure hiring more e-scooters is the answer to that particular problem. ...  Continue reading

The metaverse, the ‘future of the internet’, has already proven itself to be a paradise for perverts and sexual predators. There are stories of users being virtually gang-raped, masturbated at and harassed. There are no age verification checks, leaving children free to mix with adults, and making exploitation inevitable. One NSPCC researcher posing as a 13-year-old girl witnessed grooming, sexual material, racist insults and rape threats; she was invited into a virtual strip club, shown sex toys and condoms, and watched avatars simulate sex.

It’s easy to label the metaverse dystopian — a technological nightmare of unfiltered human depravity run by Silicon Valley supreme leaders who are more interested in profit than protecting minors. But the problem with calling it dystopian is that it creates a false sense of distance. A dystopia is only an imagined state, often in the far future, a hypothetical manifestation of society’s fears and anxieties. ...  Continue reading

The pandemic may be apparently over, but it seems we have a new epidemic on our hands: childhood obesity. The government has just released its latest data from the National Child Measurement Programme (NCMP), and the results are staggering. 

The percentage of overweight, obese or severely obese Reception children (aged 4-5) has remained relatively stable between 2006 and 2019, with less than 1% difference in all three categories. However, since 2019 there has been a noticeable uptick of around 4 to 5% for overweight and obese children, while the number of severely obese children has doubled. A similar trend can be seen for children in Year 6, where 41% of children are now classified as overweight or obese, compared to 35% in 2019. ...  Continue reading