“Without the support network that I have, I am not sure I would be here to tell the story, to give this interview today” a noticeably subdued looking Maugham told the nation, who then compared himself with the television presenter Caroline Flack. Flack had taken her own life having suffered an avalanche of hostile publicity after being charged with an assault on her boyfriend. Maugham was suggesting he too had contemplated something similar after falling vertiginously from EU defending ‘hero’ to cross-dressing fox killer.

Thank you for @BBCr4today for inviting me on – at 7.40am – to discuss how it feels to be at the heart of a media hatestorm. https://t.co/K19e4qzOfn

— Jo Maugham (@JolyonMaugham) March 9, 2020

Spiked immediately called out his ‘shameless hypocrisy‘. And yes, hypocrisy there was. Maugham hasn’t been shy of orchestrating a social media pile-on himself, and used all his considerable legal clout to pursue young BeLeave founder Darren Grimes though the courts with all the sympathy of a chasing pack of hounds.

The instinct to say that Maugham deserves all he got is undeniably powerful. He had it coming. I know why people feel that way. But something else needs to be said here too, something about the redemptive power of disgrace. Maybe that sounds too grand, too theological; but I have met quite a number of disgraced people in my time, and I find that their experience often changes them very much for the better. The charge of hypocrisy no longer quite sticks.

Suggested reading

How I found God on Twitter

By Darren Grimes

I received an unsolicited communication from a well-known book publisher the other day. We are thinking about commissioning a book on hypocrisy, it went, and we thought you’d be the perfect person to write it. I wasn’t sure whether to be flattered or offended.

But they were correct to guess that this is a subject that fascinates me, not least because the whole question of hypocrisy focuses attention on that gap between how we present ourselves publicly, and the reality of our actual lives. This gap exists even in the most apparently morally punctilious among us — perhaps especially so. Yes, for some of us the gap is negligible. But, for others, the elastic that holds together the public and the private is stretched to near breaking point. Perhaps this is why many unconsciously long to be exposed, the tension unbearable, the release longed for. Lies are a weight to carry. And there is often much relief in being able to lay down the burden of deceit.

A new series of Confessions begins again next week. And this seems like a good point to take stock of what I have learnt, not least as it applies to the very notion of confession and what sense it might make in a generally post-religious world. The Confessions title is a bit of a tease, of course. Yes, some guests have made personal revelations. I won’t ever think of Bondi Beach in the same way again after Iain Dale’s account of an encounter there. But though this kind of stuff is fun, it is absolutely not the point of the podcast.

What we can learn from the disgraced

Subscribe:

Partly, Confessions is a way of exploring interesting people’s big ideas. What also fascinates me about my guests, most of whom live under the bright sun of public gaze, is how they negotiate the relationship between what they profess and who they are. And this is tricky territory, not least because the public gaze is often unspeakably cruel, wanting to expose and punish people for tensions that exist within their own lives.

A number of Confessions fans have challenged me that I am insufficiently robust at interrogating those contradictions within the lives of my guests. Partly, this is because I do not believe I have earned the right to do so. I am a priest first of all, not a journalist. And the role of self-appointed public prosecutor is not one I have any appetite for. Indeed, I rather despise the species of journalism that exposes, with mock horror and fake surprise, the fissures upon which all human life is precariously poised. And its talk of ‘morality’ is mostly a cover for cruelty.

Suggested reading

Spare us the bedtime morality tales

By Giles Fraser

Most of us do not have bodies buried under the patio so to speak, and we are not all pretending to be something else. The words attributed to the former Times foreign correspondent Louis Heren, “When a politician tells you something in confidence, always ask yourself, why is this lying bastard lying to me”, represents an approach to the search for truth that presumes the worst of human beings. And this distorts the fact that most people are trying to do the right thing, however compromised we may sometimes be. Nonetheless, the human condition is richly variegated, and the different parts of our lives don’t always fit neatly together.

In other words, the exposé doesn’t necessarily tell the whole truth. As Dietrich Bonhoeffer puts it in his Letters and Papers from Prison (arguably, the holiest book of the 20th century) there is a certain journalistic model which insists that it is only when a prominent person is exposed in their underpants or bath that the truth about them is revealed. This is often terribly misleading. The truth of a human life is often far more open to view when it is laid out as an extended narrative, as a life lived; it is just as much a horizontal phenomenon as a vertical one.

And, I hope, this manner of approach — my manner of approach — elicits the sympathy of the audience as much as it generates fresh perspectives. It is particularly pleasing when a listener describes their surprise at discovering how much they identify with someone with whom they thought they had little in common. This too is the bearer of truth, and one that challenges the audience as much as the guest.

This week we recorded Rev Jonathan Aitken’s Confession. Aitken was a former Conservative minister who served a number of months at Her Majesty’s pleasure after perjuring himself on oath (and on the Bible) after lying about who paid his hotel bill at the Ritz in Paris. Doubling down in his denial, Aitken famously took the Guardian to court: “If it falls to me to start a fight to cut out the cancer of bent a twisted journalism in our country with the simple sword of truth and the trusty shield of fair play, so be it.” Aitken, of course, was lying. But the Guardian’s exposure of his deception, though absolutely the correct thing to do, was only the beginning of the story.

Suggested reading

How the Church lost its flock over Brexit

By Giles Fraser

The Reverend Jonathan Aitken now takes confessions himself, sometimes in Pentonville prison, where he serves as a chaplain. And I suspect that he is just the sort of person the lags are queuing up to confess to. After all, what better person with whom to share one’s sins than a man who knows a thing or two about having been there himself. Someone who can speak about judgment without being themselves judgmental — isn’t that precisely what we want from a confessor?

This is not supposed to be any sort of defence of Jolyan Maugham. I have used his example to speak in generalities. But if you can filter out that shrill cry of hypocrisy for just a moment, there is often a kind of wisdom that accompanies disgrace which we all might benefit from listening to.

I find the disgraced generally kinder people: more forgiving. Wouldn’t it be something if Maugham could find it within himself to say sorry for his own persecutory behaviour? But it’s more than this. Disgrace tends to release people from the hypocrisy-inducing effects of personal ambition and excessive self-regard. And the experience of disgrace allows people to finally come clean about who they really are. “It is a joy to be hidden and a disaster not to be found” wrote the psychoanalyst D.W.Winnicott. That perfectly describes the dynamics of confession.

Remember the game of hide and seek you played as a child? On the one hand, you don’t want to be found – that is the point of the game. But also, nor do you want people to give up looking for you — not caring enough to come and find you. In psychoanalytic terms, hiding is a strategy of protection. And an understandable one given the threats that exists out there. But not being found is worse. This is the territory that the confession inhabits. It is all about the tension that exists between wanting to be recognised and yet feeling there is something unbearable about this too.

In public life, this tension is exacerbated by the heightened threat of public opprobrium for transgression. And so public figures are obliged to negotiate an exaggerated version of hide and seek, and in their struggles with this game they reveal in bold a similar tension that is at work within us all.

You may call it hypocrisy. I call it being human.

The bishop thought about it for a bit and then replied, half-joking, half serious: “That there is no immunity from prosecution,” he said, “even when you are dead.”

One of the fundamental principles of justice is that you should get what you deserve. Immanuel Kant argued that one of the reasons he believed in life after death was that he believed the universe had to be just, and that meant wrong-doers must be punished. And given that wrong-doers are often not punished in this lifetime, there had to be some final judgment in order to keep the universe balanced for the good.

When I lived next to St Paul’s Cathedral, I could see the scales of justice from my bedroom window on top of the Old Bailey. Justice requires balance. Sin has to be paid for with punishment. It is a basic principle of law that is enshrined in the way many people understand the requirement for Jesus to be nailed to a cross.

More from this author

Why God needs skin in the game

By Giles Fraser

The argument is that humanity has sinned, and sinned to such an extent that no human punishment can be weighty enough to balance the scales. So God offers himself in the place of punishment to take the consequences of our sin, and thus right the requirements of justice. Sin requires pay-back. For many, this is the heart of the Easter story.

I have long disliked this formulation. It turns God into some sort of vicious, vindictive monster, requiring the blood sacrifice of his own child to achieve some sense of cosmic balance. Others have strongly disagreed with my conclusion, including Ian Paisley.

“What an outrageous blasphemy, that any man should write that which [Giles Fraser] has written. Remember, his words are from the lips of a so-called Protestant clergyman. To libel God Almighty as a ‘vicious God’ because He sacrificed His only Son on the Cross to make possible the freeing of sinners from the damnation of sin and hell, is the language of Satan’s vocabulary. … The whole message of the glorious gospel of our Lord Jesus is that He came into the world to save sinners. There was a debt to be paid. There were sins to be erased. There was a ransom to be paid. … To decry these objectives is the howling of the beasts of hell’s pit, and the roaring of the Devil himself.”

I was reminded of Ian Paisley’s characteristically trenchant response to my opinions on the death of Jesus while interviewing the extraordinary Marina Cantacuzino last week for my Confessions podcast.

Marina is the founder of The Forgiveness Project, a charity that seeks to collect powerful stories of forgiveness, of victims and perpetrators seeking a way forward that does not involve the use of vengeance to right the scales of justice. Christianity is not the inspiration for her approach – forgiveness, she says has been “barnacled by aeons of piety”.

Why is punishment so popular?

Subscribe:

But I think the reverse is almost true. Christians especially may talk a good game about forgiveness, but it often does not find its way into their core doctrines – especially when it comes to understanding Easter.

Yet Cantacuzino is right, of course, that the call to forgiveness is found throughout the Bible. You may remember, back at the turn of the Millennium, that many of us were marching for the abolition of Third-World debt under the banner of Jubilee 2000. The reference to the Jubilee was a reference to a powerful tradition in the Hebrew scriptures in which prisoners are freed and debts are written off every 50 years on the Day of Atonement. The Jubilee is often referred to as “the year of the Lord’s favour”.

Here, for instance, is the first sermon Jesus gives in the Gospel of Luke. This is Jesus announcing what he is all about:

“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour. And he closed the book, and gave it back to the attendant, and sat down; and the eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on him. And he began to say to them, Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” Luke, 4:18

Elsewhere, Jesus famously counters the idea that justice requires “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth” – the classic definition of pay-back theology – with a call for forgiveness. As the anthropologist René Girard was to explain: the only way to draw a close to an escalating cycle of tit-for-tat vengeance is for one party not to respond in violent kind to the other. It doesn’t make sense to me that the death of Jesus has to be understood in terms of pay-back when he so clearly repudiates this very idea.

But there is no doubt that forgiveness is morally problematic, amoral even. It feels like letting people off, and a blow against the foundations of a moral society. Take Shamima Begum. Let us assume, just for the sake of argument, that she is indeed guilty of many of the crimes levelled against her.

More from this author

What Peterson shares with Pelagius

By Giles Fraser

Yes, she deserves to face justice – the justice of a British court, I believe. But what of the tradition that the demands of justice should be tempered with mercy? What of the idea that something like forgiveness should be at least a theoretical possibility? Or are her crimes really so heinous that no such possibility should ever pertain?

She must express remorse first, is one line on the Begum case. And because she hasn’t, no forgiveness can exist for her. This, of course, is just a way to withhold forgiveness, to grant it only to those who have become ‘acceptable’.

One of the reasons I am so keen on the idea of original sin – that human beings are constitutionally broken – is that it establishes some sort of solidarity among human beings as collectively fallen. Those who cannot say “there but for the grace of God go I”, suffer from a lack of imagination and self-knowledge. You are a wrong-un, as am I.

As Hamlet replies to Polonius, “Use every man after his desert, and who should ’scape whipping?” or – in modern English – would any of us really escape punishment if we got what we deserve? This is the reasoning that made Martin Luther come to hate the idea of a just God. Because if God is just – that is, treats us according to our merit and gives us our due – then we are all buggered. The only hope is in a forgiving God. A God of the Jubilee. And if fairness is giving people what they deserve, then what we need is a God who is not fair. This is why Christian theology is not an especially moral business.

Of course, I am not suggesting that a ‘not fair’ forgiveness is any useful basis for judicial policy. The concerns here are more existential than practical. The stories collected by Cantacuzino are beautiful and inspiring. And it is shocking, but not surprising, that some of those who have chosen to forgive are often themselves abused for having the courage to do so. They are “hated for not hating” was how Cantacuzino put it.

The Shamima Begum case has highlighted once again how collective vindictiveness can dress itself up in the language of morality. Punishment is popular. Forgiveness is not. And politicians know that.

Nietzsche had it right:

“But thus I counsel you, my friends: Mistrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful. They are people of a low sort and stock; the hangmen and the bloodhound look out of their faces. Mistrust all who talk much of their justice!”

Why is punishment so popular?

Subscribe:

I summarise a little, but that’s the gist of it. Bulging with semi-digested food (we have our main Christmas meal on Christmas Eve) a declaration of post-dinner atheism has traditionally been the most effective way to stay firmly planted on the sofa. I am considering implementing an ‘atheists do the washing up’ policy this year. I reckon that might make a difference to the religious affiliation of the household. We will see.

But what about God’s existence? This is the time of year when surveys are commonly commissioned by newspapers to show that, as every year passes, fewer people believe in God – at least in Europe. These surveys have become as seasonal as Christmas itself, though what they say is rarely much of a surprise. God is dead, said Nietzsche over a century ago. For some, the problem is not God per se, so much as the church itself: the scandals, the hypocrisy, and (worst of all) that false/pious sanctimonious tone of voice. Others (most, I suspect) just don’t care one way or the other. For such as these, the question of God’s existence is something of a non-question. Like the politics of a distant country or the sex lives of beetles, the question is so distant it has no purchase on our lives.

So, for those of us who are believers, the rise of so-called new atheism around the end of the 20th century came almost as a welcome relief from all the shoulder-shrugging indifference of the ‘who cares?’ brigade. The new atheists cared enough to resurrect the question of God’s existence. It was almost as if God’s corpse needs to be temporarily re-animated, just so he can be killed off all over again, so as publically to demonstrate his death to each new generation.

Further reading

There's more to atheism than the dim-witted Dawkins brigade

By Giles Fraser

The problem with discussing the question of God’s existence is that it often turns into an argument about what we mean by existence rather than an argument about God per se. Consider, for instance, the surprisingly difficult question of the existence of numbers. Philosophers have been debating this since the Greeks. Is there an independent reality to the number seven – something over and above the objects that there may be seven of, like tables or cars? Or is mathematics simply a clever and complicated organising principle supplied by the human mind? Or something else entirely? No one is doubting that there are such things as numbers – the question is more like, in what way do they exist or what do we mean by their existence?

In other words, most philosophers don’t believe that the existence of numbers is an empirical question at all – it is not something that scientists can design experiments to establish. And the same may be true of God. For many theologians, God is not a thing. Thomas Aquinas says that if you made a list of all the things that exist in the universe – cups and saucers, human beings, planets, black holes etc – God wouldn’t be on that list. So there is no point looking for God in the same sort of way that one would look for physical objects. Aquinas explains this by saying that God cannot be both the creator of all things in heaven and earth and one of the things created.

Another shorthand way of saying this simply is that God doesn’t exist. Thingliness may not be a property of the divine. And a number of the more mystically inclined Christian theologians – Meister Ekhart in the 13th century for instance – come pretty close to saying this. Existence, as we understand it empirically, is the wrong sort of thing to ascribe to God.

Further reading

The rise of post-truth liberalism

By John Gray

Another way of approaching this same problem is to ask whether it would be possible for any sort of thing that we encountered actually to count as God. Imagine that a being presented itself that has all the apparently God-like properties – an all-powerful, all-knowing being with flowing robes and a long white beard could that thing ever be God?

Now it must be said that the way philosophers conceive of God and the way that the Bible conceives of God are often sharply contrasting. Omniscience and omnipotence, for example, are words that philosophers like to use to describe God; but they are not words used in the Hebrew scriptures. And why would such a mighty being be in any way worthy of worship? Wouldn’t the worship of this sort of thing be little more than the worship of power, supplication to the biggest force on the block? And if God really had all this executive power and refused to use it to save Jews from the gas chambers or refugees drowning in the Mediterranean, wouldn’t s/he just be a callous bastard undeserving of any sort of praise, let alone worship?

So I almost want to say – to be deliberately paradoxical – that the one thing that would stop me from believing would be if God actually existed. And this is the problem with the new atheists’ approach to God. They confuse believing in God with believing that God exists. It is perfectly possible to believe that God exists without actually believing in God.

The point here is that God cannot be simply a big powerful thing hidden somewhere in the universe. If that is what we are arguing about, then the atheists are right and the believers wrong. But this is not what Christians mean when they talk about God. Take Christmas. The story here is that to imagine a God who is indeed worthy of worship is not to imagine a being of power and prestige but quite the opposite: it is to imagine a powerless child in a shitty shed. Only a God that could share fully in the human condition, only one that could experience suffering and death, only one that could give up all his God-like super-powers, could ever be counted properly as God.

Christmas is a sort of practical atheism. Forget about that big God in the heavens, that God is dead. From now on, to imagine God is not to imagine a set of abstract properties all maxed up to 100%. At Christmas, all of God is small and helpless. “He emptied himself” as the book of Philippians described it. A bit like Prospero at the end of The Tempest, giving up his power. Powerlessness is God’s only excuse. Only justification. Only chance of redemption.

The philosopher Mary Warnock, in her Confessions podcast talk with me, described God as love. She meant this as a sort of definition. That love is the essence of God’s being, the manner of God’s existence. And she is exactly right. For many of us, when we are arguing about the existence of God we don’t care about a thing called God, we care about a belief that all things are orientated towards love and the loving celebration of all existence. And the way many of us experience this is though the astonishing beauty of the Christmas story.

Religion is not physics. And those who confuse the two, be they religious fundamentalists or the so-called new atheists, will always miss the point. Religion is the poetry of cosmic love. Which is why my kids’ “God doesn’t exist” is, in my book, not a good enough reason for staying on the sofa. You will come with me, I will say, and listen again to the message of the angels: “Peace on earth, good will to all.”

These are important questions. But I have another. Does the work of He Jainkui herald the beginning of the end of the “scientific community” – that self-regulating body of collective expertise that supervises the work of global science?

In conversation with the astronomer Sir Martin Rees for my new podcast series, Confessions, the other day, he spoke of his fear that future science will become increasingly deregulated. And that in the global village of future science, there will inevitably be more ‘village idiots’ who do their own thing. In other words, as some scientific techniques get so much cheaper to reproduce, and as massive computing power is available in our own bedrooms, the threat of rogue science becomes ever-greater.

A few days after the work was made public, He gave a presentation to the Second International Summit on Human Genome Editing in Hong Kong. He received a decidedly chilly reception. The organisers denounced the “unexpected and deeply disturbing” intervention, and called for closer supervision of genetic experimentation. “Even if the modifications are verified, the procedure was irresponsible and failed to conform with international norms,” they said.

More from this author

Introducing 'Confessions with Giles Fraser'

By Giles Fraser

The chair of the Hong Kong summit, David Baltimore, called the episode “a failure of self-regulation by the scientific community”. As he managed to conduct his work outside the framework of the scientific community, He may be the first of Rees’s scientific ‘village idiots’.

The very idea of a scientific community was grounded in organisations such as the Royal Society. Founded in 1660, under a Royal Charter from Charles II, members would meet to conduct experiments and share knowledge. From its beginnings, science was an establishment business. Before it was professionalised, the scientific community had its origins in the clubs and societies of a well-heeled intelligentsia. And many members were what we might now call amateur scientists.

The Augustinian monk, Gregor Mendel conducted much of the early work on genetics on his peas in the monastery garden. But with the increasing cost of conducting scientific research and the professionalisation of the university where most scientific work came to be concentrated, such amateur scientists became rare birds. Science came to be the preserve of the university professional, with international peer review and ethical oversight.

But science is no longer the preserve of the wealthy. Citizen scientists are making a comeback, in a sort of democratised throwback to amateur scientists like Wren and Boyle. Still confined to data gathering and in conjunction with professional scientific projects, the Citizen Science movement remains largely under the umbrella of the scientific community. But for how much longer?

Further reading

Has a Chinese chancer won the gene-editing race?

By Tom Chivers

It’s a basic human instinct to experiment, to push at the boundaries. That’s why, when given a chemistry set for Christmas, I got the greatest thrill from doing experiments with the chemicals provided that were not suggested by the instructions. That, after all, is how science ‘progresses’.

But with the power that is now available in our bedrooms and garages, the sorts of experiments that we can now conduct – or soon will be – can potentially include very dangerous interventions. Rees has spoke of the dangers, for instance, of experimenting with the flu virus, inadvertently – or perhaps deliberately – producing a strain of that virus that could have devastating effects. The scientific ‘village idiot’ could become a global menace.

The hostility of the scientific community to He’s research – if it deserves that honorific – is as much about the prospect of the power of science becoming deregulated as it is about the ethics of this particular case. Like the ‘international community’ the ‘scientific community’ may become a thing of the past. Or, as Rees suggests darkly, it is possible that our political authorities will have to come up with much more intrusive regulations to meet this threat, including restrictions on our personal freedom to experiment.

Rees is happy to admit that scientists like him have a poor record at predictions. But it is precisely the unknown quality of the trajectory of scientific advance that gives his futurology such a frightening aspect. Science is power, great power. And the idea that the scientific community will be able to contain this power and regulate it, seems to me highly unlikely – and I say that not as a student of science, which I am not, but as a student of politics and human nature.

Further reading

Are you on CRISPR? You soon will be...

By Peter Franklin

“Entropy is the arrow of time”, goes the second law of thermodynamics. It could be seen as a principle of political systems too. Over time, things get more complicated, more messy, more deregulated. With open source science, and the publishing power of the internet, the power of science is available to an ever expanding group of people.

Very expensive experiments like CERN will always be the preserve of nation states, or nation states in collaboration with each other. But there will increasingly be forms of scientific knowledge that are cheap, relatively easy to replicate and dangerous. And the idea that the “scientific community” is able to sweep up all the knowledge they generate and contain it within their own ethical standards looks like a quite a gamble, at best.

According to the Greek poet Hesiod who lived 700 BC, the great god Zeus tasked the brothers Prometheus and Epimetheus with the creation of human beings. Against the express permission of Zeus, Prometheus gave his creation the power of fire, a gift reserved for the gods. As punishment, Zeus tied Prometheus to a rock and had an eagle feast daily on his liver. To Epimetheus he sent the beautiful Pandora, and gave them a stone jar for their wedding present. The jar contained a number of powerful miseries that would plague humankind.

Zeus gave Epimetheus a key to the jar and warned him never to open it. But curiosity over came Pandora. And greed, envy, hatred, pain, disease, hunger, poverty, war, and death all flew out of the jar. Pandora quickly forced the lid back on the jar, but it was too late. These furies were all released upon the world.

It’s just an old story, you say. Well, maybe. I hope you are right.

Marco Rubio
US Senator

In the American Senate, the most typical sources for unconventional reporting are my colleague’s stories from back home. Here are a few media outlets to which I also turn:

Our national political reporting frequently tries to find conflict or a political horserace to every story. That can be frustrating to those who just want well reported facts about what is actually happening in our country and communities. It’s why I’m a huge supporter of local news. There isn’t a better source for Florida politics than Sayfie Review. It’s a one-stop shop for everything happening in the Sunshine State, from the Florida Keys to the Panhandle.

The policy quarterlies: National Affairs and American Affairs. In today’s minute-by-minute news cycle, publications that take a step back to understand broader political undercurrents are essential. National Affairs has been my go-to journal for new conservative policy concepts and ideas for years now. American Affairs is the most interesting new publication on the Right, dealing seriously with what nationalism might contribute to our political moment.

The sports site: ProFootballFocus provides insightful analytical information on NFL players. Sometimes the brand name athletes are not the best on the field. Like all analytical tools, PFF numbers have their limits. But as a fan of the science of football it is a valuable site to gain insight on both current players and college prospects.

Helen Lewis
Associate Editor, New Statesman

Every year, I try to give up Twitter, and every year I fail. But my efforts are helped by Nuzzel, an app which shows the most popular links among your friends over the last four, eight, or 24 hours. It’s a useful way of finding what everyone is talking about, without getting sucked into the maelstrom. Even more helpfully, it also digests the most popular links from Friends of Friends, which is a good way to find articles you might not otherwise have seen.

I’m also a big fan of podcasts (I co-present the New Statesman‘s weekly politics show with Stephen Bush) because you can listen to them while cooking, cleaning or running (ha). I plan to catch up on the second series of Slow Burn, about Monica Lewinsky, when I get a minute. America is currently streets ahead of Britain in terms of longform political podcasts – I also dip into the Daily from the New York Times, The Axe Files with David Axelrod and Pod Save America.

I like newsletters, too: Caroline Crampton’s No Complaints is particularly good if you like offbeat stories and medieval manuscript gifs; for celebrity reflections, I enjoy Anne Helen Petersen of Buzzfeed. My own newsletter, The Bluestocking, is where I do behind-the-scenes commentary on my writing, and post too many articles about (separately) Jane Austen and Facebook.

Munira Mirza
Deputy Editor, All in Britain

I’ve been reading (and occasionally writing for) Spiked since it began in 2001. With a commitment to “fighting for humanism, democracy and freedom”, they have been the most consistent champions of free speech in the British media and also foretold the dangers of identity politics. It’s thought-provoking writing across a range of subjects.

I’ve loved watching a new series called Triggernometry. Two affable comedians have a go at serious, lengthy political interviews and it really works. Guests to date include David Goodhart, Joanna Williams, Helen Pluckrose (and me).

Arts and Letters Daily is a treasure chest of articles and essays compiled across the English-speaking media. You can find real diamonds on a diversity of topics – from the poetry of Allen Ginsberg to the semiotics of sleep. The criteria seem to be “whatever makes your brain fizz”. I’d recommend it as a full-fat, luxurious alternative to Twitter over the Christmas season.”

John Rentoul,
Chief Political Commentator, The Independent

You may remember a thing called Google Reader, which was a blog aggregator. It was a website that looked a bit like email. It was ugly but simple, and it told you when a blog or news source had a new post. That was in the heyday of blogs, a brief flowering of eclectic commentary before Facebook and Twitter really took off.

Anyway, Google Reader was much loved by a smallish band of devotees, including me, but was discontinued by Google because it was trivial, non-core and had no prospects of making money. So these days I use an aggregator called Feedly, which does roughly the same thing, using the same semi-obsolete RSS feeds, most of which still work.

That’s how I keep track of Tyler Cowen, Chris Dillow and Mike Smithson, who keep the tradition of blogging going. Cowen in particular, an American polymath, has a genius for spotting fascinating new research in economics and behavioural psychology.

Those are the unconventional media sources that leaven the current obsessions of the parliamentary lobby.

Torsten Bell
Director, Resolution Foundation

With Brexit dominating so much of the news coverage, it’s tempting to escape it all with a good (and ideally very long) novel. But there are plenty of other ways to hear about new thinking and alternative perspectives.

Wonky blogs are a great place to learn about new research, often with handy summaries that may be more use than long papers that are a little too ‘academic’. I’d recommend VoxEU as a good start for economics-related content.

For podcasts, I’d recommend this Tim Harford classic on Radio 4 and Gary Gibbon’s excellent Where Next? on Channel 4 – or if Brexit has kindled a new found interest in international trade, you can try Soumaya Keynes’s (of the Economist) Trade Talks.

Finally, crowdsourcing. At RF we have a culture of sharing around the best reads, which I summarise in a weekly email. Word of mouth (or email at least) beats Twitter hands down.

Bidisha
Broadcaster and journalist

When I’m not ‘wording’, I’m a fine artist making films and photographs. My 2019 resolutions are to make my second film, Cold Reading, following my debut An Impossible Poison (2017) and launch my first photo book, The Last English Dancing Season.

To that end, The Artists Information Company is invaluable as sprawling site of news, reviews and blogs about contemporary art.

I also love the film journal Another Gaze which examines the work of women directors and supports women film critics. When I’m feeling isolated as an artist, I go onto Twitter and follow the #WomensArt hashtag which connects me with the work of amazing visual artists from all eras and countries.

Gavin Haynes
Editor-at-large, Vice UK

Bill Simmons’s fabulously over-resourced Grantland used to be the most anarchic yet carefully curated thing on the net, a place where you had Carles from HipsterRunoff churning out a thousand surrealistic words about the Tour de France. Then ESPN turned off the money hose, and now he has The Ringer, which is still a great grab-bag of meaty pop culture dives but has less of the ring of blank cheques to it.

TrendHunter is still an interesting place to get lost in. It’s an endless rain of gadgets, fads and conceptual architecture.

David Fuller, a former Channel 4 producer, has perked up my eyeballs recently with long form chats with the likes of essayist and technologist Jordan Greenhall.

Popular Twitter account I,Hypocrite offers an excellent weekly video digest of all those talking point news clips that you read about but never got round to watching. In common with many creators, he has become nervy about YouTube’s censorious direction, and fled to grey-net competitor BitChute.

Digg has fallen off most radars in the past decade, but their daily email digest generates more click-throughs from me than anything else. It’s like Buzzfeed for people who haven’t been brain-damaged by the past decade of the internet.

Finally, Reddit/relationship_advice is the need to know place if your significant other is faking a pregnancy, has suddenly discovered scat, or overslept for your granny’s funeral. A classic case of people who shouldn’t be advising anyone advising people whose relationship troubles are so deep they are beyond advice. All together now: “DUMP HIM!”

Emma Barnett
Radio presenter and journalist
New writing and plays at the Donmar Warehouse and Royal Court. For example – the Donmar’s season on power and the first grime musical at the Royal Court left me fired up and gave me windows into new worlds and struggles.

The Slow Burn podcast by Slate – the luxury of taking a deep dive into an old news story you thought you knew is akin to a long hot soak in a much-needed bath.

George Nixon
Producer, UnHerd’s Confessions

Anything that does serious financial journalism, from Trump’s trade war to the black market in sand, and puts it in plain English is a godsend. Planet Money does it best. My favourite is #870 on Trump vs Red Tape, which features every regulation Potus has axed since taking office, set to the sound of REM’s “It’s The End Of The World As We Know It”.

What turned a star NFL Tight End who played in the Super Bowl into a convicted double murderer who hanged himself in his cell? Gladiator, a podcast from the The Boston Globe, is a series which produces more questions than answers. But the tragic story of Aaron Hernandez, of how a troubled background and superstardom can be a toxic mix, is compellingly told. Hernandez once busted someone’s eardrum as a 17-year-old university freshman in a row over a bar tab, only for the charges to be dropped after the university’s lawyers got involved. The lesson: when you’re a star, some actions don’t have consequences.

Now read Part Two

Test article

By Various

The anecdote was like a window opening on my old friend. I never really understood Salley Vickers until I heard that story. And how interesting that it took the formal occasion of a podcast interview to find this out about someone I thought I knew.

The interview was for a new series of podcasts we are launching at UnHerd. And what an absolute privilege it has been to sit down with some of the most interesting thinkers around today and just talk, listen and learn. It’s called Confessions and is intended as a contribution to a gentler form of public discourse about politics, philosophy, science, religion and the arts.

It isn’t inquisitorial. It isn’t hostile or angry. It’s me at the microphone with a guest having the sort of conversation you might want to have down the pub: big issues discussed in an atmosphere of friendly and respectful exchange. Because there’s a lot more you can find out about people when you don’t give them the John Humphrys treatment.

Further reading

How Mary Midgley rescued me

By Giles Fraser

The series is not called Confessions because we want people to give us the gossip on their darkest or most embarrassing secrets. Forget all that. It is Confession as in a confession of faith – an account of what it is that people believe in, what their core values are, whether they be religious or not, left or right, liberal or communitarian.

St Augustine wrote his Confessions at the end of the fourth century AD. And with this book, not only did he invent what we now call the autobiography, he also proposed the idea that what you believe about life, the universe and everything has to be understood within the context of personal and lived experience. Augustine’s subject is God, of course. But in order to talk about God he needs also to talk about himself – about stealing pears when he was a kid, about his mother, about his out-of-marriage love affair – all these are required to be understood in order for Augustine to explain his theory of human brokenness and why it is only God that can fix us. For Augustine, writing about himself and writing about belief, about the truth, are impossible to distinguish.

This is not a series about God – though because I have an interest in God, that does come up quite a bit. It’s a series that works on the Augustinian principal that what people believe has to be set in the context of their wider lives, their background. So it is that I begin every conversation by asking people to say a little about their family background, their parents, the atmosphere and values of the home they grew up in.

Further reading

Consumer greed is making suckers of us all

By Giles Fraser

This is often very revealing – not in any sort of intrusive, nosey way, rather as an emotionally persuasive way of situating people’s beliefs. Some of these conversations are more academic, but many are surprisingly personal. And with thinkers as diverse as Roger Scruton and Maurice Glasman, Tom Holland and Martin Rees, Melanie Phillips and Helena Kennedy, no conversation goes the same way. I have worked on the principle that if I am not enjoying the conversation, nobody else will. And George, who produced the recordings, said that I laughed so much he can now instantly recognize the digital wave shape of my laughter.

When people start to explain how they came by the beliefs that they have, it is much less easy to dismiss them as being “on the other side”. For a number of years now I have been a panelist on BBC Radio 4’s Moral Maze, a notoriously inquisitorial programme that attempts to test an argument to destruction. I love doing it.

But often even more, I love the meal we have afterwards. There we go through what was said, but without our weapons raised or our armour on. And in this series I have tried to reproduce something of that feel. Because you often learn a great deal more in this sort of environment.

Further reading

Why citizens of nowhere will never get the World Cup

By Giles Fraser

I don’t, for example, agree with very much that is said by my co-panelist, Melanie – but I hope that people, after listening to her being remarkably candid about where her values come from, will come away with a richer understanding of what makes her tick. And I suspect that quite a number of people will meet a very different person from the one they think they know.

Throughout his adult life, one of Augustine’s major targets was the Manichaeism of his youth, a quasi-philosophical quasi-religious idea that the world is a battleground between good vs evil, and that good people must take on evil people and win. Social media has one again revived this nasty and pernicious doctrine, and turned our digital communal spaces into places of hatred and oversimplification.

News editors like the drama of Manichaeism as it allows them to cast the pyrotechnics of heated and binary debate, the clash of ideas, as the epitome of engagement – whereas it is mostly just click baiting. But the relationship between good and evil is much more complicated than culture warriors suppose. As Solzhenitsyn wrote in The Gulag Archipelago: “If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.”

Further reading

How the Church lost its flock over Brexit

By Giles Fraser

Confessions is a project of listening, of intellectual empathy and re-complication. It is undertaken in the spirit of open and friendly exchange because this way of talking often seems to be in such short supply these days. And because the world is a much more complicated place than the dualists suppose.

We kick off, on Monday, with social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, the philosopher Mary Warnock and the lawyer Philippe Sands.

I hope you enjoy listening to their confessions as much as I did.