Quillette

By the late 1960s, physician, sailor and navigator David Lewis had become increasingly concerned that a remarkable body of human knowledge was in danger of disappearing forever.

Gemma Tognini is a leading Australian social and political commentator.

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Editor’s note: This article was originally published in French in Le Point on 21 October 2026, under the title « Violences urbaines : vingt ans d’impuissance ».

“They want to read Sex and the City.”

A review of The New Dark Ages: The End of Reading and the Dawn of a Post-Literate Society by James Marriott; 208 pages; Jonathan Cape (January 2027) The author is dead, the French philosopher Roland Barthes famously declared in 1967.

A Belgian entity called Unia (The Interfederal Centre for Equal Opportunities and Opposition to Racism and Discrimination) is preparing a criminal case against the philosopher Nathan Cofnas.

At the time of writing, the riots in France finally seem to be calming down (although I will refrain from making any predictions, because I’m sure they would age badly).

Tiberius (AD 14–37), the second Roman emperor, was Augustus’ stepson (and adoptive son and heir).

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Listen on Spotify Today, we’re going to talk about one of the great epics in the annals of Canadian cancel culture—a story so foundational to the genre that it precedes the popularisation of the term “cancel culture” itself.

The hardest thing I’ve ever done was nothing.

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Listen on Spotify Quillette contributor Robert Lynch spent about ten years on Wall Street before addiction derailed his career.

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The death on 5 October of novelist/politician/rogue Jeffrey Archer inspired many a British obituarist to bring out the vitriol.

In Australia, a policy debate has broken out following the federal government’s release of its long-promised internet regulation, the digital duty of care.

Editor's note (16 October 2026): An earlier version of this article did not mention that Julia Carreon had supplied screenshots of her LinkedIn exchange with Chris Bradley to a Forbes journalist.

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Josh Frydenberg was Treasurer of Australia from 2018 to 2022 and Deputy Leader of the Liberal Party, steering the economy through the pandemic.

As has been well documented at Quillette, Canada recently experienced a widespread social panic following false claims that the “unmarked graves” of 215 Indigenous children had been discovered on the grounds of a former residential school that was operated

Listen on Spotify On 9 October, some 48 hours after the commemoration of the Hamas massacres in Israel, South African jurist Navanethem (Navi) Pillay was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

A review of Our Common Life: Folksong from the Front Porch to the Concert Hall by Stephen Wade; 488 pages; University of Illinois Press (September 2026) I.

For the last 2,500 years, since Herodotus and Thucydides pioneered the Western tradition of history, the discipline has been one of the load-bearing intellectual foundations of our culture.

Jerry Kaplan was working on artificial intelligence long before we all started using it.

In Charles Gounod’s opera Faust—a romanticised version of Goethe’s more philosophical tragedy—the ageing and decrepit scholar Dr Faust makes a pact with the devil to regain his youth and find love.

On 21 June 2018, I published an article at Quillette titled A Literary Inquisition—How Steven Galloway Was Smeared as a Rapist.

A review of In the War Room: The Inside Story of Israel’s Fight Against Hamas and the Iranian Axis by Yonah Jeremy Bob and Elliot Kaufman; 352 pages; Wicked Son (September 2026) In early September, the Israeli political scene ignited after two Haaretz jou…

A review of The Grim Old Days: An Introduction to the Preindustrial Past by Chelsea Follett; 536 pages; Cato Institute, Washington, DC (October 2026) New technologies can be threatening, and consequently many people have had occasion to feel that things w…

What is the purpose of a university?

We start the week with a hilarious essay from Julie Bindel, who recounts her days as a feminist activist in 1980s Britain.

A reply to Robert Lynch’s “The Ape in the Basement” Robert Lynch asks, “Why is masturbation so shameful?”

Listen on Spotify Danielle Haas spent almost 14 years as a senior editor at Human Rights Watch, overseeing the organisation’s thematic and geographic research.

A review of Traumatized: The New Politics of Public Suffering by Catherine Liu; 192 pages; Verso Books (September 2026) In the spring of 2004, I took a graduate course on trauma theory and literature.

Listen on Spotify This week, I’m going to tackle a big and important subject—artificial intelligence and the risks it could pose to society.

In mid-September, the sequel to an unloved 1998 film was number one at the American box office, despite competition from two of the year’s most popular releases—The Odyssey and Spider-Man: Brand New Day.

The text that follows is adapted from a September 23 speech delivered by the author in Laramie, WY, at an event hosted by the University of Wyoming chapter of Heterodox Academy.

Last week, Nikole Hannah-Jones, one of the most prominent racial grievance mongers of the past decade, set the internet ablaze with a bombshell essay detailing the fallout of her decision to send her daughter to underperforming inner-city schools.

A bizarre kerfuffle at a lesbian watering hole in Massachusetts took over the internet last week.

One of the most surprising things about the fifth season of Fauda, the Israeli counter-terrorist thriller created by journalist Avi Issacharoff and actor Lior Raz, is that it is extremely popular in Muslim-majority countries like Jordan, Turkey, and Moroc…

I think you've done enough calling us paranoid and preposterous.

On a November afternoon in 2019, I was sitting at home when my phone pinged to announce the arrival of an email from one of the most famous musical figures of the past half-century.

My boss Lord Singh of Wimbledon was one of the founders of the Inter Faith Network for the UK (IFN) in 1987.

This week, the Prime Minister of Australia, Anthony Albanese, told reporters in New York that an AI agent built by OpenAI had gained unauthorised access to a data portal run by Medicare, Australia’s universal healthcare insurance scheme.

On a November afternoon in 1967, at a hall in Roskilde, Denmark, a panel of the most celebrated left-wing intellectuals in the world delivered a unanimous verdict at the second session of its “International War Crimes Tribunal”: the United States governme…

I have seen the future, and it works.

A review of Hiroshima, 8:15: The Lost Memoir by Kiyoshi Tanimoto, 224 Pages, Penguin Random House (August 2026) The overwhelming sensation in Hiroshima’s Peace Memorial Park—the hypocentre of the atomic bomb’s detonation—is silence.

This is an edited and abridged version of a speech delivered by the author at the Rose and Max Rady Jewish Community Centre in Winnipeg, Canada, on 3 September 2026.