UnHerd

The Econoclasts are coming to London!🇬🇧 Join @yanisvaroufakis & @EuroBriefing on March 23 at the Emmanuel Centre for a live podcast recording on the failing economic consensus and the new world disorder 🌎 Plus Q&A + book signing! Tickets: bit.ly/4raBThI

I am back in @unherd! As the Spanish Right's dissent against the nation's establishment grows King Felipe VI is now in the firing line. Could we see the same in Britain soon? unherd.com/newsroom/the-s…

THE WEST IS TURNING ON ITS JEWS, writes Ben Judah (@b_judah) The places where the Jewish diaspora lives, like New York, London and Paris, are changing. More Muslims, more Hispanics, fewer old men like Joe Biden with a war-era fondness for Jews. Both European and American quite different new mass minorities are more antisemitic. Both populations are younger, more likely to get their news online and watch foreign TV, be it Televisa or Al Jazeera. This is the mechanism by which imported prejudice gets stirred by the footage these wars export. Suspect for being too rootless and transnational in the twentieth century; now Jews are suspect for being too rooted and tribal in the twenty-first. The truth is that we no longer really live in what you could call Western civilisation: an order based around historic nations, a culture based around print, a way of life still furrowed by the old faith, with a clearly defined attitudes towards Jews. Its successor is a globalised internet civilisation that plays out in viral clips and has become unmoored from old certainties. This is a world where X mega-influencers like Iain Miles Cheong and Sneako are as much players as the Archbishop of Canterbury — where everything is being relitigated. This new civilisation, since its litigation is occurring via ephemeral, emotive social media posts rather than by works of sustained thought, has an oral culture rather than a literary culture. By its nature, this culture rewards hatred and anger. Which, I fear, will not prove kind to the Jews. Read more below ⬇️ buff.ly/oPbX88U

TRUMP’S WAR IS EUROPE’S PROBLEM, by Wolfgang Münchau (@eurobriefing) Nobody in the world is completely independent, but many countries are more robust than we are. Russia has proven resilient, shaking off Western sanctions, which should come as no surprise to anyone who knows the country. China, too, is clearly resilient. And the US is more than resilient. It is a country that thrives under adversity, very much in accordance with Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s notion of “Antifragility”. Modern Europe, however, is most certainly not antifragile. With every shock, it weakens. After the Covid pandemic, the US reconnected with its pre-pandemic growth trajectory. The Europeans, mostly, did not. Our GDP settled at a level below its previous trajectory — growing at an increasingly lower rate. It is now happening again. Only three weeks into the US-Iran war, European interest rates have risen and there are reports of gas shortages. Why are the European gas tanks almost empty? Why have the Europeans not built a large strategic oil reserve, like the US and China, or gas reserves lasting for several years? The very essence of dependency is when you let others do your strategic thinking. Read more below ⬇️ buff.ly/6UXE0nl

HOW THE BBC BETRAYED JENNI MURRAY, by Julie Bindel (@bindelj) My friendship with Jenni Murray was cemented, believe it or not, at a lap dance club in Streatham. It was back in the early 2000s. I’d been a guest on Woman’s Hour, which Jenni had been presenting since 1987, a couple of weeks earlier. After the programme, Jenni asked me to stick around for a chat. She wanted to talk to me about the sexual liberation of women, because she disagreed with some of my points of view on pornography, lap dancing, and prostitution. While not keen on any of the above, Jenni was a classical liberal, and wondered whether, after decades of feminism, women could now be sexually liberated. She was thinking of writing a book on the theme. ‘After all,’ she said, ‘there’s even a lap dance club solely for women these days.’ She meant a place called Caesars, which was a dive on Streatham High Road that gave over one night a month to a women’s night: ‘Lap-Attack.’ We agreed to visit Lap-Attack together. It was horrific. The male performers appeared exploited and unhappy, while the female punters were mostly blind drunk and trying their best to pretend they were having fun. In the toilets, I encountered a group of lively black women in their twenties. One of them asked me, ‘Is that Jenni Murray out there? She’s my heroine.’ I told Jenni, who was thrilled at the idea that a working-class woman in a lap-dance club would love what she was doing. Jenni and I, both working-class feminists, remained friends for the rest of her life. She was a titan, presenting Woman’s Hour until she was 70. She would have done it longer, I believe, had she not been dogged by critics who believed her to be ‘transphobic’. Her beloved BBC let her down, leading to her resignation. Now that Jenni has died, aged 75, the corporation is giving her the recognition she deserved as a broadcaster — but I remember her bravery, too. Read more below ⬇️ buff.ly/NjQZi6d

Net Zero dogma prevented the West from preparing for this energy shock. Domestic capacity has been dismantled without a clear replacement, warns @clim8resistance 👇 buff.ly/9jf6xNd

To reduce energy demand, the IEA recommends working from home. Are we inching closer to climate lockdowns? @clim8resistance 👇 buff.ly/9jf6xNd

PinkNews is reportedly moving towards a ’reporter-free newsroom’. That it had any reporters to begin with may come as a surprise, writes @jo_bartosch 👇 buff.ly/Pd9gb8D

PinkNews made Sunday Sport look like The Atlantic. It published pieces asking questions like “Why is incest wrong between same-sex siblings?” | @jo_bartosch 👇 buff.ly/Pd9gb8D

Trump and Netanyahu have projected the image that the Iranian government is flailing. In reality, the regime might be as unified as it has ever been, writes @DanDePetris 👇 buff.ly/n9jDnne

The old guard that ruled the country for the last three decades is now effectively neutralised. But Tehran’s resolve is hardening, writes @DanDePetris 👇 buff.ly/n9jDnne

Why did Cormac McCarthy stop reading new novels? Because he hated David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest that much. Vincenzo Barney tells the story for UnHerd subscribers. unherd.com/2026/03/why-co…

BRITAIN’S CHANCE TO ESCAPE AMERICA, By Aris Roussinos ( @arisroussinos) If we are to truly start from first principles, they must be that Britain has its own interests, distinct from those of our allies in Europe and the United States, and it is only to those interests British leaders should attend. If the Iran War is an American party to which we have been invited but do not wish to attend, so is it the case that the European effort is something Starmer may wish to join, but to which we have not been invited. At the beginning of this conflict, it was a contrarian position in the British press to unequivocally state that joining the fight is not in our interests: now it is, correctly, the mainstream political opinion in Westminster as across Europe as a whole. What a few weeks ago appeared an unusually bold stance from Starmer now seems boringly, obviously sensible: Trump’s increasingly erratic jibes to the contrary now inspire pity rather than deference. There may well be a case, when the shooting stops, for taking part in convoy escort and minesweeping duties in the Strait of Hormuz, but we and other Europeans should demand a reasonable price from this most transactional of American administrations. Above all, surely, we should require that Trump firmly and publicly commit himself to the territorial integrity and self-determination of both Greenland and Canada, the New World extensions of our European civilisation. Read more below ⬇️ buff.ly/tdoH4yX

'This bubble won’t exactly burst tomorrow: these things tend to run for a long time before they pop.' Read @EuroBriefing on the crisis in private credit 👇 buff.ly/iIwIU80

THE MAN BEHIND THE TELEGRAPH TAKEOVER, by Boyd Tonkin (@BoydTonkin) Always partial to a slick antithesis, the British pundit class quickly decided that Axel Springer’s proposed purchase of Telegraph Media Group for £575 million cash would put a ‘very German’ media company in control of a ‘very English’ entity. Up to a point, Lord Copper (or should that be Lord Rothermere?). If it goes ahead — and every signal points to rapid regulatory approval — then the Springer surprise attack, which torpedoed the Daily Mail’s own offer for the paper, would certainly place the firmly pro-EU Berlin conglomerate in charge of one of this country’s Eurosceptic temples. Appearances, however, may deceive. Look further into the motives behind the Springer grab, and a much more nuanced Anglo-German — or rather, Anglo-German-Austrian — story begins to take shape. Far from representing the triumph of ‘digital-first’, AI-obsessed Prussian technocrats over a citadel of insular exceptionalism, the acquisition could be seen as the final, posthumous, coup by a legendary deal-maker who brought the manners, and outlook, of pre-war Mitteleuropa into the heart of the British establishment. Somewhere, Baron Weidenfeld of Chelsea is chuckling over his apple juice or Earl Grey tea (never, in his 96 years, anything stronger). After all, he mentored Axel Springer’s boss, Mathias Döpfner. Read more below ⬇️ buff.ly/OHm4LF3

Oil and gas markets have been in crisis this week — but a subprime crisis could also be on the way. Read on @EuroBriefing on the potential for financial turmoil 👇 buff.ly/iIwIU80

Why Cormac McCarthy stopped reading new novels unherd.com/2026/03/why-co…

‘The greatest change in the past decade has been the move from genuinely social media platforms towards a form of user-generated broadcast media.’ Read @gavhaynes on 20 years of Twitter 👇 buff.ly/CpYt0Gu

In this smart, funny, often (justifiably) acerbic essay @BarneysRubble0 provides a long overdue taking to task lit culture and the industry that manufactures it …unherd.com/2026/03/why-co…

Today marks 20 years since Twitter was founded. Has the algorithm corrupted what was once an innocent app? @gavhaynes 👇 buff.ly/CpYt0Gu

Read in full here: unherd.com/newsroom/the-c…