Happy Christmas!
Welcome to the ZONE Christmas party. Leave your drinks over there. Coats are chilling in the ice buckets. Grab yourself a cigarette or two to nibble on — but please eat outside.
I hope all my followers have had a blessed 2023. Thank you so much for reading my work this year. It has been one of my more challenging trips around the sun, but also the most professionally fulfilling, and I’m really appreciative of all the readers — and writers — who have made that so. It’s not an honour that I take lightly.
As I’ve been doing for some years (2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022), here are my favourites of the pieces I have written this year. Firstly, for outlets other than THE ZONE:
“Confessions of an English teacher abroad”, The Spectator
“Jason Molina’s morbid Americana still survives”, The Washington Examiner
“On the death of my dog”, The Spectator
“Britain’s blasphemy laws,” The Critic
“How were we so wrong?”, The Critic
“Political incorrectness is killing comedy”, The Washington Examiner
“Marginalising the majority”, The Critic
“Honouring Amber”, The Critic
“The sadness of Andrews”, The Critic
“A fence in Röszke”, The Critic
Secondly, for THE ZONE:
“The Rest is Politics: A Review”
“The Red Pill is a Depressant”
“Do the English Have Culture?”
“What Christopher Hitchens Thinks About Modern Politics”
“So, You Want to Leave the Left?”
I’ll do some reading and thinking over the holidays to come up with some fresh and interesting ideas for 2024. Again, I hope you have a lovely Christmas.
Happy Christmas, Ben.