Free Republic

Columbia University researcher Cat Bohannon claimed that castration could extend men's lifespans and questioned the ethics of impregnating women if artificial wombs were created. (LifeSiteNews) — The annual Hay Festival of Literature and Arts, once described by Bill Clinton as “The Woodstock of the mind,” was held from May 23 to June 2 this year. So: what did the intellectual elites of the West at twilight have to say? Well, this headline in the Guardian summed it up nicely: “Men and other mammals live longer if they are castrated, says researcher.” The researcher in question is Cat Bohannon, a Ph.D....

An American professor and writer has said that Donald Trump’s “brain is rotting in front of us”, and claimed that to compare him to Joe Biden is “dangerous and wrong”. Sarah Churchwell, an American culture specialist and the author of a book examining division in the US, The Wrath to Come, was appearing on a panel at Hay Festival chaired by The Independent’s chief book critic Martin Chilton. They were joined by political podcaster David Runciman and We Need to Talk About Kevin author Lionel Shriver. Shriver claimed that, ahead of the US election on 5 November, she finds herself...

Salman Rushdie can joke these days about the fatwa that put him into hiding for nigh on a decade. “It wasn’t the first time they didn’t like what I’d written; just the first time they’d tried to kill me. But I wasn’t writing for the mullahs. I didn’t think they were my target audience,” he quipped at the Telegraph Hay Festival. “The only thing worse than a bad review from the Ayatollah Khomeini would be a good review from the Ayatollah Khomeini.” The author was keen to stress that a lot of people rather liked The Satanic Verses. … Rushdie’s...