Quillette

14/09/2026

Name-calling, guilt-by-association, and other unscrupulous methods of argument are polluting our discourse.

In Bad Criticism, Rosalind Arden examines the tendency to substitute substance with smear, using a recent Guardian article about Peter Thiel’s visit to the British Museum as a case study.

Name-calling, guilt-by-association, and other unscrupulous methods of argument are polluting our discourse.

12/09/2026

"Status is funny though. You can be Norm in Cheers one minute and the guy cleaning up someone else’s half-eaten hot dog the next."

Watch more from Robert Lynch: https://quillette.com/2026/07/06/what-an-eighth-grader-taught-me-about-status/

11/09/2026

On 11 September 2001, Jesse Inman was a ten-year-old in the American Midwest, roughly awakened to the violence of the wider world. That morning shattered the post-Cold War dream of a borderless, war-free future and ushered in an era of surveillance, fear, and the long, costly war in Iraq. Nearly a quarter-century later the event feels remote — yet it reordered American politics and the direction of the century. How much of the American story is still being written by that bright September day?⁠
⁠
Read more: https://quillette.com/2026/09/10/a-bright-september-day-9-11-george-bush-iraq-afghanistan-al-qaeda/
⁠
#911

11/09/2026

"On 11 September 2001, I was in a school that no longer exists. Mrs Murphy’s fourth-grade class was located on the top floor of my hometown’s elementary school, in a building that was razed and rebuilt several years after I left. I was ten years old. The world I inhabited when I went to school that morning? I never saw it again. What does a ten-year-old know about terrorism inside the US on the scale of the 9/11 attacks? Americans and the world were transfixed by the apocalyptic images from New York City—helpless passengers perishing in a wicked collision of flames and charred wreckage, pillars of smoke, thick clouds of soot swallowing entire streets as people scampered away in terror.

Young Americans like me lived in a world premised on American supremacy and its geographic insulation from physical threats. The terrorist attacks that occurred in Jerusalem, London, Paris, Belfast, Athens, and Rome had never penetrated the American shield before. In the opening years of the 21st century, the Western world was still basking in the post-Cold War euphoria of unfettered globalisation—borderless travel, free trade, and the assumption that inter-state conflict had finally been rendered obsolete by the unstoppable march of liberalism, capitalism, and democratisation. Those illusions and the idealistic dreams of a world freed from the Hobbesian forces of history were shattered on 11 September. The living memory of a Cold War stalemate produced by the fear of mutually assured nuclear destruction gave way to newer fears of stateless jihadi terrorism, fuelled by digital propagandising. The enemy in the new century was at once more intimate and apparently omnipresent."

Reflections on a morning that changed the world as we knew it.

11/09/2026

Policy ideas follow fashion cycles — and, oddly, it's often the ideas with the worst track records that come back? Kristian Niemietz calls the wealth tax a "retro fashion" — and points out that most of Europe abolished theirs back in the 2000s because they were bureaucratic, raised little money, and pushed wealth abroad.

Every few decades, the ideas with the worst track records come back into style.

10/09/2026

A fanatic, it's said, is someone who can't change his mind and won't change the subject. Brian Stewart reads New York magazine's 31-page 'Habibi City' feature — a celebration of the city's SWANA scene that treats one political creed as the price of belonging, honours some traditions at the expense of others, and presents Jews in almost entirely negative terms. A community built on shared beliefs isn't necessarily a bad thing, but the value of solidarity depends entirely on the merits of the cause. When does cultural celebration quietly become a political litmus test?⁠
⁠
Read more here: https://quillette.com/2026/09/09/antizionist-city-new-york-magazine-habibi-city/
⁠
⁠
⁠
⁠
⁠
⁠
⁠
⁠
⁠
⁠
⁠
⁠
⁠
⁠

10/09/2026

New from Quilette Narrated 🎧

A look back at the 20th century’s most entertaining literary spat—one of the few such encounters that Orwell emphatically lost.

A look back at the 20th century’s most entertaining literary spat—one of the few such encounters that Orwell emphatically lost.

10/09/2026

Why is s*x — and, with it, the birth rate — in decline across the developed world? Reviewing Debra Soh's new book S*xtinction, Robert King makes a counter-intuitive argument: it's not just technology, it's the illusion of endless options that undermines commitment. A fascinating read on a trend that's reshaping our future. Do you find the argument convincing?

S*x is declining because the options seem endless. This is counter-intuitive, but biologically it makes sense.

10/09/2026

Robert Lynch has a PhD in evolutionary , trained under Robert Trivers, and spent ten years as a Wall Street trader. He now substitute teaches in North Carolina for $160 a day. One afternoon he brought a 510-million-year-old he'd split out of Cambrian shale into a class of eighth graders. At the end of the day he found that one of them had drawn on it in permanent marker.

09/09/2026

"Inclusive excellence." "Black flourishing." Canadian academia has a whole vocabulary to avoid saying "affirmative action." A new report led by Eric Kaufmann tries to price it — about $18M/year, a 6% tax on the Canada Research Chairs program.

Jonathan Kay argues he could live with honest affirmative action, it's the dishonesty he can't stand.

A new report on the Canada Research Chairs program analyses the reduced standards applied to scholars belonging to ‘equity groups.’