This year is turning out to be a busy one, so here’s an update of things I’ve written.
I started off 2020 with gushing praise for author Michel Houellebecq in UnHerd, discussing his upcoming final novel Anéantir and arguing against his dismissive characterisation as a soulless enfant terrible.
I followed this up with more apologetics for problematic Frenchmen, with another piece in UnHerd on philosopher Michel Foucault. Foucault gets a bad wrap these days for being the cause of “woke” politics, I make the case that he isn’t to blame for the excesses of American progressivism.
Remaining on the culture beat, I published a review of Nina Power’s new book ‘What Do Men Want?’ in The Critic UK, an excellent post-feminist text looking to cultivate a peace treaty between the sexes.
Briefly sucked into the culture wars, I also wrote a piece in UnHerd on the silly calls to boycott Joe Rogan’s podcast due to vaccine misinformation.
This was remedied by another book review in The Critic UK, this time of Dean Thor Conroe’s debut novel ‘Fuccboi’ , a book which epitomises the destruction of a generation by social media politics.
Speaking of internet addled brains, I also reviewed Grace Lavery’s memoir ‘Please Miss: A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Penis’ in SpliceToday, which turned out to be surprisingly insightful and well written.
Finally, my most recent piece has been another short one for UnHerd applying Jean Baudrillard’s thesis on war porn and spectacle to Western responses to the Ukrainian war.
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