Helen Lewis

Recently, on a YouTube channel, I said something terrible, but I don’t know what it was. The main subject of discussion—my reporting on the power of online gurus—was not intrinsically offensive. It might have been something about the comedian turned provocateur Russell Brand’s previous heroin addiction, or child-abuse scandals in the Catholic Church. I know it wasn’t the word Nazi, because we carefully avoided that.

Imagine a fairy-tale city—on the coast, perhaps, with sailboats bobbing in the breeze. This is Ursula K. Le Guin’s Omelas, a fictional utopia where “the air of morning was so clear that the snow still crowning the Eighteen Peaks burned with white-gold fire.”But Omelas holds a horrifying secret: Its continued existence relies on a single malnourished, unloved child being kept in a cellar, alone and uncomforted, in filth and fear.

Well, here we all are again. Ready for three more hours of expensively lit retribution? I hope so, because the second half of Netflix’s documentary Harry & Meghan dropped today, covering the four and a half years from the couple’s wedding to the present day.The final three episodes of this six-hour series—Ken Burns needed just three times as long to get through the entire Vietnam war—focus on the Royal Family’s relationship with the press (again).

Fame at last! Two minutes into Netflix’s Harry & Meghan documentary, the headline of an article I wrote in January 2020 flashed on the screen. “Harry and Meghan Won’t Play the Game,” it said. Observing the departure of the duke and duchess of Sussex from the Royal Family—and from Britain itself—the story declared that “no royal has ever taken on the press quite so directly, much though they might have wanted to.

In December 2019, nearly 14 million people voted for Boris Johnson to become prime minister of Britain. Last month, 140,000 Tory members voted for Liz Truss to succeed him. And today, the support of 195 Conservative members of Parliament was enough to install Rishi Sunak on Downing Street.British democracy is shrinking, and the result is Sunak—a politician who lacks a popular mandate but does have incredible wealth and an air of hoodie-wearing dorkiness.

In March 1841, William Henry Harrison became the ninth president of the United States. He gave the longest inaugural speech in history—one hour and 45 minutes—developed a cold, and then, after a mere 32 days in charge, succumbed to a mixture of pneumonia and 19th-century medicine.According to a persistent, if apocryphal, rumor, Harrison caught that fatal chill at his inauguration.

In his last days as prime minister of Britain, Boris Johnson conducted a farewell tour of the country. Possibly he expected something like the accolades his beloved Roman generals were given—a small arch in his honor, say—or at least a few angry Gauls walking miserably behind his chariot. Instead he went to a field in southwest England and stared at a hole in the ground.

Thirty-seven, I decided, was old enough. Even here in Britain, that is an advanced age to begin learning to drive, but somehow, I had never gotten around to it. And so I found myself, one morning last fall, trying to master the exact sequence of foot movements required to hit something called “biting point.

“The idea is if we don’t look out the white race will be—will be utterly submerged. It’s all scientific stuff; it’s been proved.”These are not the words of the teenager who walked into a supermarket in Buffalo, New York, on Saturday to hunt down Black Americans, although they might as well be. These are the words of Tom Buchanan, a rich, repugnant character in the 1925 novel The Great Gatsby.

Say what you like about the ACLU; it knows how to get people talking. But not necessarily in terms favorable to the ACLU. Late last month, the civil-liberties organization was revealed to have ghostwritten Amber Heard’s contentious Washington Post op-ed about suffering from domestic violence; the article was timed to coincide with the release of her film Aquaman.

Photographs by Jelka von LangenOne peculiarity of European aristocrats is that their names pile up, like snowdrifts. It’s lunchtime in Tirana, the capital of Albania, and I am about to meet Leka Anwar Zog Reza Baudouin Msiziwe Zogu, crown prince of the Albanians.The Albanian royal residence is easy to miss, tucked away on a quiet side street behind the national art museum.

Perhaps the time has come for Vladimir Putin to go on Joe Rogan’s podcast, because Russia has been canceled. Following the invasion of Ukraine, governments and companies around the world have distanced themselves from Russia and its citizens. “The West is not just trying to surround Russia with a new Iron Curtain,” its director of the Foreign Intelligence Service, Sergey Naryshkin, said last week.

“In the name of God, go!”If you wanted to choose a quotation to wound Boris Johnson—a man who wrote a biography of Winston Churchill as a coded advertisement for his own virtues—then this would be it. When Johnson’s fellow Conservative David Davis stood up in Parliament today and said these words, he must have intended them to be a fatal blow. Davis was not comparing the prime minister to his hero Churchill.

I got my COVID-19 booster shot last week, on the first day I was eligible. My shot was delayed because I caught COVID in early December, an experience that was low-key grim: two days of shotgun sneezing, no taste or smell for a week, and a constant fatigue that didn’t abate until the holidays. I was very glad to face the coronavirus with two Pfizer doses already in my arm, and even more grateful that my parents and 91 percent of Britons in their age group are triple-jabbed.

Sometimes it’s hard to remember that Facebook is only 17 years old: If it were a person, it could drive but not drink. If Facebook were a person, it would also be fabulously wealthy, incredibly successful, and exhaustingly argumentative. And it probably wouldn’t use Facebook.The disclosures in The Wall Street Journal’s “Facebook Files,” leaked by a whistleblower named Frances Haugen, are incendiary.

The Met Gala is a barometer of fashion. Not in the boring “What is the hemline of the moment?” sense, but on a grander scale. This benefit dinner is pure spectacle, an event that exists only to be photographed, a sequined media mirage. Look at the pictures from the after-parties and you’ll see that many guests change out of their red-carpet looks as soon as humanly possible. These are clothes for posing in, not wearing. They are statements.

Last summer the temperature in London, where I live, climbed above 37 degrees Celsius—or 100 degrees Fahrenheit. It was hotter outside my body than it was inside it. To someone raised under the sodden, used-tissue skies of Britain, that felt like an offense against nature. Everywhere I went, I felt the same constricting, breathless sensation. The heat was like a prison; I had been sentenced to 100 degrees.

Genetically, Xand and Chris van Tulleken are clones. Yet the 42-year-old twins do not look identical, because Xand is more than 30 pounds heavier than Chris. That is the biggest weight difference recorded in the long-running twin study at King’s College London.The van Tullekens live in London. They argue about food—specifically, how much Xand eats—all the time. They are also both medical doctors, and they present British television shows on health and diet.

Genetically, Xand and Chris van Tulleken are clones. Yet the 42-year-old twins do not look identical, because Xand is more than 30 pounds heavier than Chris. That is the biggest weight difference recorded in the long-running twin study at King’s College London.The van Tullekens live in London. They argue about food—specifically, how much Xand eats—all the time. They are also both medical doctors, and they present British television shows on health and diet.

In the months leading up to the launch of Great Britain’s newest television channel, GB News, its backers insisted that it wouldn’t be a British version of Fox News. They were right in one way: Fox is a slick product with fancy studios and whizzy graphics. By contrast, when GB News went on the air Sunday night, it looked as though it had been filmed in an abandoned strip club—all dark walls and neon lights—and suffered from poorly synchronized sound.

Normal people—with regular lives and real jobs—have soap operas and reality shows. People who are Extremely Online have Substack.Over the past few months, the PR travails of the newsletter start-up have become a reliable source of media gossip. Jude Doyle is leaving! Grace Lavery has joined! Oh man, Matt Yglesias shouldn’t have taken that advance; he’d have made far more money purely from subscriptions! Perhaps those names don’t mean anything to you.

Back to you, Zuck. Facebook’s oversight board earlier today declined to act as a human shield for the social network. Asked to rule on the suspension of Donald Trump’s account in the wake of the January 6 Capitol riot, it passed the ultimate decision back to Facebook.For now, Trump’s suspension stays in place. But the board has given Facebook six months to “reexamine the arbitrary penalty it imposed on January 7 and decide the appropriate penalty.

Ask people for adjectives to describe Nicola Sturgeon and the same few words tend to crop up: poised, perfectionist, regal. Sturgeon has been Scotland’s first minister for six and a half years, leading its devolved government, and she utterly dominates its political scene.

Like other members of the British Royal Family, Prince Philip’s reputation is now defined by his portrayal in The Crown: a stern father, a reluctant consort, a man’s man who struggled to play second fiddle to his wife. It could be worse.The Queen’s husband has died two months short of his 100th birthday, and his death inevitably invites comparisons between the world he was born into and the one he has left behind.

“Dear Sarah,” read the note left on the makeshift memorial, “we are so sorry. You did nothing wrong.” It was just after 5 p.m., an hour from sunset, on March 13 and women were already beginning to gather at the park in Clapham, South London, to remember Sarah Everard, a 33-year-old woman kidnapped from the capital’s streets on March 3. Her body was found a week later in a woodland 50 miles away, in a builder’s bag, and had to be identified from dental records.

The confession, when it came, did not hold back. “For the better part of my adult life, every move I’ve made, every relationship I’ve formed, has been rooted in the napalm toxic soil of lies,” read the Medium post. It was published in September under the name of Jessica A. Krug, a George Washington University professor specializing in Black history.

After the trial separation, here comes the messy divorce. And a vital question: Who gets custody of the narrative?It has been less than a month since Prince Harry and Meghan Markle finalized their split from the British Royal Family, renouncing their patronages and honorary appointments as well as their income. The fallout between the couple and Buckingham Palace has been painful and public.

A tennis ball covered in spikes. That’s all we’ve got. More than a year has passed since the first reports of human-to-human transmission of the novel coronavirus, and its most memorable visual signifier is a stylized illustration of the virus itself. That spiky ball floats in the background of explanatory graphics and charts, or looms eerily behind the heads of television anchors delivering yet more somber news. When I think of COVID-19, that’s what I see.

The Crown is not a documentary. The presence of actors is a strong clue; the members of the Royal Family wish they were this good-looking. Do viewers need to be warned about this? One British politician thinks so. “It’s a beautifully produced work of fiction, so as with other TV productions, Netflix should be very clear at the beginning it is just that,” the Conservative culture minister, Oliver Dowden, said this week.