Helen Lewis

The question “What is a woman?” has haunted politics on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean for a decade. In Britain, where I live, Prime Minister Keir Starmer has given a range of tortured answers, before eventually settling on “an adult female.” This week, the country’s highest court has endorsed that view.
Interpreting Britain’s flagship civil-rights law, the Equality Act of 2010, the Supreme Court ruled Wednesday that the “concept of sex is binary, a person is either a woman or a man.

Nigel Farage loves Donald Trump. The 60-year-old’s day job is as the parliamentary representative for the English seaside town of Clacton, and as the leader of Reform, the latest of his populist right-wing parties. But Farage is often focused on America, and his heavily advertised friendship with the 47th president. He was in Washington, D.C., for the inauguration (and chafing that he didn’t get a prime spot in the Capitol Rotunda).

Should American states be allowed to ban puberty blockers for teenagers with gender dysphoria? That issue is currently being considered by the Supreme Court, which recently heard oral arguments about a Tennessee law restricting medical transition by minors. The Biden administration and the ACLU have sued to block the law. Before the justices, Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar and the ACLU lawyer Chase Strangio found themselves trying to navigate two different sets of questions.

One of the mysteries of this election is how the Democrats approached polling day with a set of policies on gender identity that they were neither proud to champion—nor prepared to disown.
Although most Americans agree that transgender people should not face discrimination in housing and employment, there is nowhere near the same level of support for allowing transgender women to compete in women’s sports—which is why Donald Trump kept bringing up the issue.

Traditionally, a campaign’s closing argument is supposed to hammer home its main themes. At a rally in Lititz, Pennsylvania, Donald Trump did exactly that—by once again fantasizing about violence against his perceived enemies.
Describing how his open-air podium was mostly surrounded by bulletproof glass, the former president noted a gap in that protection, and added: “To get me, somebody would have to shoot through the fake news, and I don’t mind that so much.

Why has this election season featured so many stories about animal cruelty? The 2024 campaign has contained many remarkable moments—the Democrats’ sudden switch from Joe Biden to Kamala Harris; the two assassination attempts on Donald Trump; the emergence of Elon Musk as the MAGA minister for propaganda; the grimly racist “America First” rally at Madison Square Garden. But the bizarre run of stories about animal abuse has been one of the least discussed.

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Under normal circumstances, you would not expect a crowd of regular Americans—even those engaged enough to go to a political rally—to recognize an assistant secretary of health and human services. But the crowd at Donald Trump’s appearance earlier this month at the Santander Arena, in Reading, Pennsylvania, started booing as soon as Rachel Levine’s image appeared on the Jumbotron.

Very few podcasters would apologize to their fans for clogging up their feed by interviewing a presidential candidate. But Alex Cooper—the host of a podcast variously described as “raunchy, “sex-positive,” “mega-popular,” and “the most-listened-to podcast by women”—is an exception. “Daddy Gang,” she began her latest episode, “as you know, I do not usually discuss politics, or have politicians on this show, because I want Call Her Daddy to be a place where everyone feels comfortable tuning in.

Have you ever watched a crowd go wild for a PowerPoint slide? After a few introductory hellos yesterday in Butler, Pennsylvania, Donald Trump gestured to a screen showing the same graph on illegal immigration that he had been talking about when he was nearly assassinated in July and delivered his real opening line: “As I was saying …”
The audience loved that. The rallygoers had waited in line for hours in the hot sun to get into the field, and this was their reward.

One weirdness of listening to Donald Trump talk for any length of time is that, amid the syllable minestrone, he occasionally says something that is both intelligible and honest.
One such moment came during his appearance on the popular podcast hosted by the computer scientist Lex Fridman this week. “To get the word out,” Trump said, is important in politics, and television was becoming “a little bit older and maybe less significant.

She’s everything. He’s just Doug.
Don’t take it from me—that’s his official title. Here at the United Center in Chicago, state delegates at the Democratic National Convention are given placards to wave during the speeches. The first night was dominated by We Love Joe and Union Yes!, interspersed with the campaign’s battle-cry: We Fight, We Win.
For the speech by the second gentleman, however, the signs simply read DOUG.

Only a week ago, the Republicans were happy, united in their belief that God had spared Donald Trump for a higher purpose. Their convention looked like a wild, weird victory parade for an election that was already in the bag. And J. D. Vance, the newly announced vice-presidential candidate, was the party’s golden child.
Yeah, about that. Since Sunday, Joe Biden’s abrupt exit and the smooth coronation of Kamala Harris as the Democrats’ presumptive nominee have transformed the presidential race.

The last time Britain traded a Conservative government for a Labour one, back in 1997, the mood was so buoyant that the new prime minister, Tony Blair, declared: “A new dawn has broken, has it not?” His successor Keir Starmer is far less of a showman, and even many of his supporters feel pessimistic about Britain’s future prospects. Yet the scale of Starmer’s victory today appears comparable to Blair’s landslide.

Please read this as classic British understatement: Today was not, on the face of it, an ideal time for Rishi Sunak to call an election.
One of the perks of being Britain’s prime minister is getting to choose the date when voters deliver their verdict on your government. Most push their advantage by selecting a time when their party is ahead in the polls, the economic mood is buoyant, and their supporters are optimistic about success.

Updated at 4:04 p.m ET on March 22, 2024
For many years, the most-complained-about cover of the British satirical magazine Private Eye was the one it published in the week after the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, in 1997. At the time, many people in Britain were loudly revolted by the tabloid newspapers that had hounded Diana after her divorce from Charles, and by the paparazzi whose quest for profitable pictures of the princess ended in an underpass in Paris.

Few journalists and their sources have fallen out as completely as Kara Swisher and Elon Musk. The reporter met the future billionaire in the late 1990s, when she was a tech correspondent for The Wall Street Journal  and he was just another Silicon Valley boy wonder. Over more than two decades, they developed a spiky but mutually useful relationship, conducted through informal emails and texts as well as public interviews.

As an outsider observing the U.S. presidential election, I have been wondering for months when Joe Biden’s age would become a thing. Biden is 81 already—the oldest person ever to occupy the White House—and is seeking another four-year term. He is older than George W. Bush, who stopped being president in 2008, and older than Bill Clinton, who gave up the job in 2000. He is older than the hovercraft, the barcode, and the Breathalyzer.

I’m going to miss The Crown. At its best, it has been alternately soothing, nostalgic, and educational, and even at its worst, it has always been well acted and gorgeous.Unfortunately, the second half of the sixth and final season is very much The Crown at its worst.

“No one enters Slough House by the front door,” the novelist Mick Herron writes in Dead Lions, the second book in his series about an “administrative oubliette” for useless spies exiled by MI5, Britain’s domestic-intelligence agency. “Instead, via a shabby alleyway, its inmates let themselves into a grubby yard with mildewed walls, and through a door that requires a sharp kick most mornings, when damp or cold or heat have warped it.

This Thanksgiving, America is divided: One half knows why the word squirle is funny, and one half does not. Are you in the latter group? Then you should know that earlier this month, a series of tweets surfaced by Taylor Swift’s new boyfriend, the Kansas City Chiefs star Travis Kelce. In one of them, from 2011, he offered this observation: “I just gave a squirle a peice of bread and it straight smashed all of it!!!! I had no idea they ate bread like that!! Haha #crazy.

On Labor Day weekend, 35 excited guests arrived at a campground in Newark, Ohio, for a retreat dedicated to “fat joy”—a place where people could swim, dance, do yoga, roast marshmallows, and sleep in cabins with others who had been made to feel guilty about their weight. The point of Camp RoundUp was “really diving into the joy of being at summer camp, the joy of being a fat little kid again,” Alison Rampa, one of the organizers, told me.

How do you decide who owns a country? At 10:30 this morning in London, a group of black-clad men were gathered about 100 meters from the Cenotaph, Britain’s most famous war memorial. They were chanting. “We want our country back,” went one refrain, followed by “You’re not English, you’re not English, you’re not English anymore.”This group was—as another of their chants put it—“Tommy’s Army.

Michael Lewis was captivated by Sam Bankman-Fried from their very first meeting—and on the evidence of Lewis’s new book, Going Infinite, his affection has not wavered in the two years since. Which is surprising, because Bankman-Fried is no longer a lauded cryptocurrency billionaire but an alleged con man, on trial for seven counts of fraud and money laundering. (He has pleaded not guilty.

Ever since Elon Musk’s lackeys began fiddling with the algorithms of X (formerly Twitter), I have noticed a distinct shift in the content that is pushed onto users. My “For you” tab is now a nest of tradwives, shoplifting videos, and that guy who has strong opinions on trouser creases. It is also home to the kind of old-fashioned misogyny that I once thought was on the decline.

Are you on Bluesky? Let’s be honest: Probably not. The Twitter clone is still in beta and has been notoriously stingy with its invite codes. Its small size means that every time an influx of newbies arrives, the existing user base freaks out, filling the algorithmically curated “Discover” tab with incredibly overwrought complaints.

Before his stump speeches in his reelection campaign last year, Ron DeSantis liked to play a video montage that showed him being gratuitously rude to reporters at press conferences. It was petty and graceless—and warmly received by the Florida governor’s base. At a DeSantis rally in Melbourne, Florida, last fall, I watched the video from an elevated press pen alongside a gaggle of local reporters.

Was the sexual revolution a mistake? From the 1960s through today, the majority of feminists would instantly answer “no.” Easier access to contraception, the relaxation of divorce laws, the legalization of abortion, less emphasis on virginity, reduced stigma around unmarried sex—all of these have been hailed as liberating for women.But in the past few years, an emergent strand of feminism has questioned these assumptions.

When Hogwarts Legacy was released in February, the verdict from video-game sites was close to unanimous: The latest spin-off from the Harry Potter series was a heartless mess, the product of a bigoted worldview, and playing it involved an uncomfortable act of moral compromise—or at least holding your nose and reassuring yourself that J. K. Rowling was not directly involved.The tech magazine Wired gave the game 1/10, and said its “real-world harms are impossible to ignore.

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.