Palestinianism has taken over every progressive cause, to their great detriment. By making tenuous links between different movements, the cultural left is alienating more and more of mainstream society and opening the door to a right-wing renaissance.

The West is the first culture in history to develop an identity crisis because of our successes rather than our failures. We have learned to take a critical view of our own history but we still romanticise other civilisations, even at their most brutal. The result is a generation of people who think the West is uniquely evil.

Polite society has no language to discuss illiberalism among cultural minorities. As the tensions become ever harder to ignore, far-right politicians are filling the void and winning over growing shares of European electorates.

Right-wing views are more likely to cause offence than left-wing ones. That's because the leftist worldview boils down to "let's be kind to one another". On the right, it's "some people need to be coerced for the greater good". That's harder to see as well-intentioned if you disagree with it.

A short visit to Tokyo is a radicalising experience for a European city-dweller. High levels of social trust, a willingness to share space, and a very low crime rate allow a form of urbanism that's hard to put into words.

As summers grow hotter, we're sleepwalking towards a world where every building is air-conditioned. This consumption-based solution to a common problem will harm our social fabric and take away our freedom. Better solutions exist.

Have you ever stopped to think why you wave your thanks to a driver who stops for you at a crossing? Is there any other group of people you routinely thank simply for obeying the law and not breaking your legs? Driver privilege has put down deep roots in our brains, limiting our ability to build better cities.

Every city in Europe gives its wealthier residents a huge subsidy by allowing them to park their cars on the public street for a token fee. This single-use land grant, which can be worth more than €1,000 per year for each car owner, is one of the worst possible uses of public money. But we don't see it.

Dysfunction in Brussels has reached a tipping point. Spiralling crime, poor public services and brutal taxes that just seem to disappear have reached a point where the EU capital may no longer be able to attract the best and brightest from the next generation. It's time to think the unthinkable and consider a move.

Vladimir Putin's war against Ukraine has focused European minds, but not nearly enough. If he is allowed to win in Ukraine, the remorseless economic logic of his war machine will force him to keep fighting elsewhere. He will not stop until he is stopped.

The EU can't be governed efficiently until it has a lingua franca. European businesses, artists and entrepreneurs understand this instinctively, but our politicians cling to the past. It's ironic that the French, brutal exterminators of their own minority languages, are the greatest obstacle to progress.

A lot of EU bureaucrats' livelihoods depend on churning out regulation, regardless of whether there's a demand for it. It used to serve a social and economic purpose, but in many cases it now does more harm than good. We are being left behind, applying redundant rules to American inventions.

An essay of mine went viral because it did well in America. That then spun up a flywheel allowing it to get recommended to people in other parts of Europe. A neat illustration of how America is Europe's hub, and each of our countries a disconnected spoke.

Europeans live in an American world. Card machines that hustle for tips. Map software that doesn't understand trains or bikes. Dating apps that ask you to support indigenous rights (no, not those ones). Our failure to innovate has led to a form of cultural and economic colonisation.

Netflix has demonstrated that Europeans share many cultural preferences and speak a common language, figuratively if not always literally. The tragedy is that it took an American tech company to create something approaching a common European culture. My first essay for The Leopard.

Is Iran a murderous Islamist theocracy or a flawed republic? A rogue state or a proudly independent nation battling against Western domination? A close reading of its history suggests that it's a bit of everything, meaning that normal diplomatic playbooks don't apply.

We can all agree that the Palestinians suffer terribly. The mistake people make is to place all the blame for that suffering on Israel. In fact the leaders of neighbouring Arab countries, by refusing to acknowledge the reality of 1948, have created a cycle of violence that neither Israelis nor Palestinians can halt.

The history of antisemitism is of labelling the Jews as whatever your society most hates or fears. To the Nazis, Jews were Bolsheviks. To the Bolsheviks, they were capitalists. Something to bear in mind next time someone calls the Israelis 'colonisers' of their ancestral homeland.