By all means go dry for January, but it’s worth knowing that ‘detoxing’ does nothing for your health

Peter Oborne has written an entertaining piece about why he’s giving up alcohol for January: in essence, because he’s worried that he is looking forward to that first drink of the day a bit much, and feeling the effects more than he used to. With the constant nagging background hangover and diffuse feelings of ill…

Has Dave won the gay vote? Maybe, maybe not

PinkNews, the gay-issues website, has run a poll which suggests that David Cameron’s drive to enact a same-sex marriage bill has raised support for the Conservative Party among lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender voters: up, apparently, from 11 per cent in 2010, to 30 per cent now. It’s interesting, and no doubt extremely encouraging for…

Santa’s stressful Christmas Eve, in numbers

In a strangely paradoxical piece of news, Father Christmas has been fired for telling children that Father Christmas doesn’t exist. It seems a bit harsh to fire an elderly man just for having an existential crisis. Do I exist? Do you? Is the external world real, or merely an illusion brought on by too many…

Gangnam Style at 1bn views: what does our obsession with chubby South Koreans say about society? Exactly nothing

Obviously you’re one of the people on the internet, so you’ve seen Gangnam Style, which today reached its one billionth view. (Cue at least three people below saying that not only haven’t they seen it, they haven’t even heard of it, and what is Gangnam Style, and so on. Okay, well done, you’re far more…

Maya apocalypse: wooooaah, I’m still alive

It’s at times like this, when you’ve been eagerly awaiting the apocalypse, as reliably (not in fact) predicted by a roughly bronze-age-tech-level Mesoamerican civilisation, and your watch ticks past the 11.21am mark which people completely arbitrarily decided was when the Maya thought it was all going to kick off, and it’s 11.22am, that really only…

‘Not enough God, not enough guns, too many video games’: are any of the Sandy Hook blame claims true?

The Sandy Hook horror has recently been blamed on a lack of prayer in schools, on gay marriage, on video games, and on people not having enough guns. (And, in what Slate describes as the single “stupidest thing” written about the atrocity, on Sandy Hook not employing enough burly men.) Are any of these reasonable?…

Ukip candidate suggests compulsory abortion in order to bring down the deficit. Can I call them mad, now?

• Update: Geoffrey Clark has been suspended as a candidate by Ukip, who have rejected his “repugnant” views. The other day I wrote something about Ukip. At the end of the piece, I stuck in a line calling them a “little pack of madmen”. People were apparently offended, and it drew attention away from the…

The rise of the internet anti-fan

The anti-fan is often misdiagnosed as a “hater” or “troll” (video contains strong language). In the old days, there were fans. They listened to albums, read books, went to films. Every so often one of them went mad and started stalking the object of their devotion, or got a tattoo of their face on their…

Connecticut school shooting: we need to treat mass killings as an epidemiological problem

America’s periodic school shootings, I think, fill a similar psychological space for the Left as Islamic terror does for the Right. The horrific images and the unnerving out-of-a-clear-blue-sky nature of the attacks make them terrifying, out of all proportion to the absolute risks, and the political narrative of preventability and blame is easily framed: “fewer…

Climate, economics and predictions: the only certainty is that nothing’s certain

From Saturday’s paper – I’m filling in for Damian because he was writing this instead: Here’s a piece of news that got surprisingly little play this week: a multi-billion-dollar international organisation explicitly set up to make predictions got its first set of predictions nearly right. The reason its comparative obscurity is surprising is that the organisation…

Pardoning Alan Turing will do nothing but make David Cameron feel good

Stephen Hawking and other scientific luminaries have called on David Cameron to formally pardon Alan Turing. The great mathematician was convicted of homosexuality (or “gross indecency”, as the statute books had it) in 1952, and killed himself with poison two years later. A few things are worth noting. First, there’s no doubt that Turing was…

‘We’re losing the war on drugs’: Nick Clegg looks within himself and unexpectedly finds a spine

This morning, in a certain light, with a following wind, and from a particular angle, you might almost be convinced that Nick Clegg has grown a pair. In a major interview this morning with The Sun, the deputy prime minister has said that the political classes, including David Cameron, have failed to show “courage” on…