43 m. ago I won’t be taking exam leave to support my teens – just hovering, worrying and driving them mad | Zoe Williams

Exam pressures on both kids and parents are at an all-time high, but I’m glad that at least parents are more engaged these daysWhen I was doing GCSEs and my sister was doing A-levels, we were on our way to school for my physics and her maths exams when we had a huge fight at the bus stop. I can’t remember what it was about, but she definitely started it. I took a different route and was 20 minutes late for my exam while she took the original bus and spent the first quarter of her paper getting asked by teachers if she knew where I was. The beauty of this story is that I got an A and she got a B, but the relevant bit is that our mum didn’t know any of this – didn’t know we’d fought, didn’t know I’d been late, didn’t know my sister had got distracted, didn’t know why I was laughing so hard on the third Thursday of August.Parents are now asking for “exam leave” from work to get through their children’s GCSEs and A-levels. The sheer emotional investment – never mind the time, energy and...

Politics

40 h. ago Harry’s TV interview told us everything – and nothing. Why are the royals such terrible communicators? | Zoe Williams

Is their motto ‘never complain, never explain’ or ‘never stop complaining, never stop explaining’? Either way, it’s not working for themThe royal family’s motto has been “never complain, never explain” for as long as anyone asking anything as tedious as a question can remember. Royal watchers trot it out as a devilish smart move by a public relations master-breed. They’ve cracked the code of how to retain their dignity, their mystery, their effortless superiority and, maybe in a fair wind, even divinity: simply never say anything.Personally, I always found it a bit of an impediment to having any feelings for them. Sure, don’t explain if you don’t want to, but complaining to each other is 90% of human intimacy. It’s hard to have a relationship without it, even an imaginary one. Continue reading...

Politics

7 d. ago My mum died in A&E last month – and the place was like a war zone | Zoe Williams

Amid the debate about trans people on hospital wards we have lost sight of dignity, respect and the horrifying reality of a health service in meltdownAnother morning, another absolutely bananas conversation about transgender people, without any trans people involved, following the supreme court ruling that permits the exclusion from single-sex spaces of anyone not born into that sex. On BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, Emma Barnett was asking care minister Stephen Kinnock about wards in hospitals, and came out with the immortal line: “Do you think it’s right for trans people to be segregated from other patients, as an interim measure, or for the future?”Great save, that “for the future” – because if you’re going to interpret this ruling as a requirement to exclude trans people, what does that mean in practice? Trans women on men’s wards, trans men on women’s wards? This delivers dignity and respect to precisely no one; so, sure, “segregate” away, and it would have to be for ever, beca...

Events

8 d. ago Even Tesla drivers seem to hate Elon Musk. Their honking protest warms the heart | Zoe Williams

The demonstration outside the Tesla showroom in west London was one of the smallest I have seen. But everyone who passed by was keen to show their supportPark Royal is the worst underground station in London and therefore the world. You come out of a stubby 1930s entrance hall that must have been cute once, right on to a dual carriageway. There’s a hotel on the other side of the road, and a tourist will most likely approach you, asking how she’s supposed to cross, and your answer will be just a sub-verbal collapse into nothingness. There is no obvious way to cross the road. This place was built for cars, and if you’re not a car, you’re stuck in a tube station now. There is actually an underpass, but that’s no excuse for dystopian urban planning.I was there helping the Stop Trump Coalition make a video before the US president’s state visit, whenever that might be, and they were there to see Tesla Takedown, which is not as antagonistic as it sounds, just a score of people, one dressed...

Events

8 d. ago I went to a Tesla protest this weekend – here’s what I learned | Zoe Williams

The demonstration outside the Tesla showroom in west London was one of the smallest I have seen. But everyone who passed by was keen to show their supportPark Royal is the worst underground station in London and therefore the world. You come out of a stubby 1930s entrance hall that must have been cute once, right on to a dual carriageway. There’s a hotel on the other side of the road, and a tourist will most likely approach you, asking how she’s supposed to cross, and your answer will be just a sub-verbal collapse into nothingness. There is no obvious way to cross the road. This place was built for cars, and if you’re not a car, you’re stuck in a tube station now. There is actually an underpass, but that’s no excuse for dystopian urban planning.I was there helping the Stop Trump Coalition make a video before the US president’s state visit, whenever that might be, and they were there to see Tesla Takedown, which is not as antagonistic as it sounds, just a score of people, one dressed...

Politics

2 w. ago Why a holiday in the US is out of the question | Zoe Williams

The US administration’s ‘reassuring’ words, after deporting two German teens, have made it plain that the border authorities will have a problem with anyone who doesn’t echo their politics In the grand scheme of things, the deportation of two German teenagers, Charlotte Pohl and Maria Lepere, from Hawaii is not the most alarming thing the US administration has done recently. Yes, it is peculiar, you might even call it chilling, that you can now be ejected from America for not having sorted your accommodation before you arrived. The experience itself – handcuffs, strip-searches, body scans, prison uniforms, a night in a cell – sounds pretty harrowing. But at least they were only detained for one night. They could have been held for 12 days, like the Canadian actress Jasmine Mooney; or 16 days, like Lucas Sielaff, also German, who was driving from Mexico with his American fiancee, and says he still has nightmares about it.Marco Rubio has reassured the world that: “If you’re not coming...

Politics

3 w. ago Having as many babies as possible is not the only way to show you love humanity | Zoe Williams

Elon Musk is obsessed with falling birth rates, as is the Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán. Why would leftwingers want to buy into their ‘pronatalist’ agenda?‘Perpetuating humanity should be a cross-politics consensus,” read an article in the Atlantic last week, “but the left was mostly absent at a recent pronatalism conference.” It’s such a simple proposition – everyone loves babies and wants the species to perpetuate, right? – but pronatalism has provoked a ferocious battle on the American left. Should they be trying to engage meaningfully at a preposterous far-right conference? Or should the left stop self-flagellating and start organising?But what is pronatalism – and is it really borderline fascist? I don’t want to think about slippery, bad-faith, rightwing claptrap any more than you do, but in an era in which US politics can sneeze and the world catches encephalitis, we do, regrettably, have to think about bad-faith everything, all the time. Continue reading...

Politics

3 w. ago So Katy Perry went to space. Wasn’t there anyone else we could have sent? | Zoe Williams

No disrespect to the pop star or the rest of Blue Origin’s all-female crew, but most of them weren’t obvious astronaut materialI am broadly of the view that Katy Perry should do whatever she likes, and wear whatever she likes, and if she wants to be shot into space for no obvious purpose looking like one of Charlie’s Angels, then that falls squarely into those categories. So why am I so bothered by Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket, which has just made a suborbital flight to the edge of space and back? OK, it’s partly the outfits (see Angels, Charlie’s, above), but it’s mainly the flight manifest: Perry joined Lauren Sánchez, Jeff Bezos’s fiancee; Amanda Nguyen, a civil rights activist; CBS Mornings co-host Gayle King; film producer Kerianne Flynn and former Nasa rocket scientist Aisha Bowe. I cannot help but notice that only two of these women had anything to do with astronauting (Nguyen studied astrophysics and interned at Nasa before becoming an activist).Obviously it’s very staid...

Politics

4 w. ago Has The White Lotus really forgotten that rich people are the problem? | Zoe Williams

When the show began in 2021, creator Mike White was happy to remind everyone that greed is the root of all evil. This is no time for him to get bored and move onWhen the first season of The White Lotus arrived, it took a while to notice how dazzlingly political it was. The director, Mike White, has since congratulated himself about that little hook at the start: before we know anything, we know that someone is going to die. He has said that he wishes he had started all his shows that way. It is so simple yet so effective. You meander into it thinking it is a whodunnit, with a side order of who-did-it-get-done-to? Then there are some beautiful beaches, and there is some astronomical wealth. By necessity, there are some characters who are not wealthy, since who else is going to fetch the drinks?It is not until around the seventh minute that it becomes obvious how catastrophically unhappy all the characters are, how horrible they are to one another, how disappointing and thin their exi...

Politics