Explore every episode of the podcast Quillette Narrated

The campaign to remove Hamas from the UK’s list of proscribed organisations is not about defending free speech or political dissent. It is about legitimising jihadist warmongering.

Adnan Syed would never have been released had ‘Serial’ not been made. Advocacy journalism must be treated with caution.

A serious reexamination of this case must begin by setting out the evidence that led the jury to convict.

Last week’s TED Talks in Vancouver featured dozens of brilliant speakers. But the earnest belief that big new ideas can save humanity from itself now feels painfully dated.

Five decades after its release, Wake in Fright remains a brutally captivating reminder that modernity is just a thin veneer over the darker recesses of the human heart.

The environmental havoc is justified as needed for the economy, but the evidence does not support this claim.

Its ability to churn out such plausible sounding explanations for historical and social phenomena is part of Marxism’s core appeal. But its grand theoretical framework simply does not hold up.

The media’s obsessive focus on the Israel–Palestine conflict obscures the broader picture of the ubiquity of jihadism in the Middle East, and the crucial role it plays in stoking and perpetuating turmoil and strife.

My best friend had a psychotic break—our criss-crossing journeys through facts and fictions in thirteen chapters.

Arguments that patriarchy exists in the West today are largely dependent on reinventions of the concept that would be better dispensed with. 

Jay Anson’s haunted-house yarn was a highly lucrative hoax, but it struck a popular chord amid the financial precarity of 1970s America.

What Karl Popper’s classic can teach us about the threats facing democracies today.

The state should not assume the right to end the lives of its citizens at will.

The history of Soviet totalitarianism is now being rewritten.

Every generation or so (i.e., roughly every 25 years) a woman (it’s always a woman) writes a book about kinky sex—and a very specific type of kinky sex.

How Alexis de Tocqueville foretold the rise of victimhood culture.

The accepted view is that the scientists of the European Enlightenment got the issue of race badly wrong. In fact, some of them got more right than they are usually given credit for.

Peter Beinart has responded to the 7 October massacre and subsequent Gaza war with a deeply duplicitous book.

Both Israelis and Palestinians have a reasonable claim to live in the Holy Land, based on deep local roots.

Activists on both sides have an incentive to keep Critical Race Theory undefined and ambiguous.

Civil-rights law made the DEI world; civil-rights reform can unmake it.

Those seeking to address the crisis on America’s campuses should resist the tendency toward nihilism—the temptation to conclude that we need to just (metaphorically) burn it all down.

While we fuss over definitions and pontificate on freedoms, sex and lust and desire and passion and bodies coming together, remain largely undomesticated.

A short history of phoney peace groups and their fellow travellers.

Skin colour, genetics, race, and racism.

The death toll under Communist regimes is of incredible magnitude. Yet whenever I attack Communism for being an evil ideology, I get a serious number of rebuttals.

A New York Times op-ed by a Yale historian tries to see universities from the vantage point of an outsider. Instead, it unwittingly illustrates why universities will not self-correct without external intervention.

Syria’s crisis demonstrates the importance of power.

While Islam traditionally treated Jews with contempt, antisemitic conspiracy theories imported from Germany escalated this animosity by vilifying Jews as agents of diabolical evil.

While claims of skill transfer may be overblown, there is still benefit to be had in the tiny, claustrophobic world of the game.

In her new book, ‘Autocracy, Inc.,’ historian Anne Applebaum provides us with a distinctive and indispensable guide to one of the great challenges of our time.

The accepted view is that the scientists of the European Enlightenment got the issue of race badly wrong. In fact, some of them got more right than they are usually given credit for.

The urge to censor is based on a misunderstanding of what makes literature valuable.

Remembering Don Symons (1942–2024).

A short history of phoney peace groups and their fellow travellers.

Palestinians’ history, culture, and connection to the land are valid in their own right. We don’t need to appropriate or falsify Jewish history. 

So that’s how a fatherhood ends. A few UPCs, like those you find on packs of toilet tissue, delivered via email.

Progressive anti-Zionism and the poisonous legacy of Cold War hatred.

Are we going to defend liberty, openness, and democracy, or are we going to allow radical theocrats and their ideological allies to try to crush our hard-won freedoms?

Claire Lehmann discusses the aftermath of a firebombing at the Adass Israel Synagogue in Melbourne and the perceived leadership failures in Australia relating to antisemitism. Lehmann argues that there is a leadership vacuum as key figures like Prime Minister Anthony Albanese fail to adequately address antisemitic incidents. This institutional indifference is highlighted by several instances where Jewish Australians were intimidated, and their safety compromised, which elicits historical parallels to events like Kristallnacht. Lehmann criticizes both government and corporate sectors for their silence and calls for a more decisive response to distinguish between legitimate criticism of Israeli policies and outright antisemitism. The narrative suggests that societal frameworks often fail to recognize the victimization of successful communities like the Jewish population when subjected to hate-driven violence.

Ever since, all of Europe—the East as well as the West—has carried the burden of Nazi guilt, as others would have us bear the guilt of North American slavery and Jim Crow.

As Israel and Hamas begin to implement the ceasefire deal, both the immediate and the longer term future remain unclear.

Justin Trudeau convinced me he was a sunny patriot who’d unify Canada. What I got instead was a cynical culture warrior who smeared opponents as bigots and defamed my country as a genocide state.

Automation, artificial intelligence, and robotics are set to redefine the relationship between labour, capital, and production.

In a new book, Rachel Chrastil artfully illuminates the history of the 1870 Franco-Prussian War, in all its senseless horror.

A new version of Tinto Brass and Bob Guccione’s notorious 1979 film ‘Caligula’ provides a valuable record of one of the most fascinating disasters in cinema history.

False allegations may be employed by either parent, but, given the prevailing winds of culture, the gun is far more often in the hand of a woman.

The story of William Cobbett and the American Revolutionary culture wars.

Thirty-four years after the massacre of political prisoners in Iran, the conviction of Hamid Noury in Sweden has been a victory for accountability and for the truth.

If we are to fight for liberty for everyone—including Muslims—we must be serious about being ready to stand up to Islamists like Hamas, who seek to revive Islamic imperialism.