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Zoe Williams

Zoe Williams

The Guardian

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A stranger offered me a seat on public transport – and it’s thrown me into crisis

A stranger offered me a seat on public transport – and it’s thrown me into crisis
yesterday 10

The Guardian

Zoe Williams

The term ‘Blairite’ is meaningless. So why do people continue to use it?

The term ‘Blairite’ is meaningless. So why do people continue to use it?
previous day 10

The Guardian

Zoe Williams

What’s the point of Davos when even the rich are fed up with the super-rich?

What’s the point of Davos when even the rich are fed up with the super-rich?
23.01.2025 20

The Guardian

Zoe Williams

The great Harry and Meghan debate rages on – but I’m staying out of it

The great Harry and Meghan debate rages on – but I’m staying out of it
21.01.2025 8

The Guardian

Zoe Williams

Braverman, Truss and Fox – we have sent the worst of British public life to Trump’s inauguration

Braverman, Truss and Fox – we have sent the worst of British public life to Trump’s inauguration
20.01.2025 20

The Guardian

Zoe Williams

Why I have finally quit Facebook (it’s not just about fact-checking)

Why I have finally quit Facebook (it’s not just about fact-checking)
14.01.2025 80

The Guardian

Zoe Williams

DIY rape kits at universities are a welcome sea change – but they can only offer a hologram of justice

DIY rape kits at universities are a welcome sea change – but they can only offer a hologram of justice
13.01.2025 10

The Guardian

Zoe Williams

This 77-year-old climate activist should never have been jailed – and now faces a Kafkaesque struggle to get out

This 77-year-old climate activist should never have been jailed – and now faces a Kafkaesque struggle to get out
09.01.2025 80

The Guardian

Zoe Williams

I know how to fix new year’s resolutions – and it could change everything

I know how to fix new year’s resolutions – and it could change everything

What’s the right age to realise new year’s resolutions are trash that won’t last until February? By about 12 years old, the data should be in:...

07.01.2025 3

The Guardian

Zoe Williams

Elon Musk loves to provoke – and Nigel Farage is his latest victim

Elon Musk loves to provoke – and Nigel Farage is his latest victim

In fiction, when a billionaire supervillain mobilises himself and his nefarious army of dollars against British democracy, we send a secret agent...

06.01.2025 6

The Guardian

Zoe Williams

Romcoms are clearly fantasy – but divorce sequels aren’t the answer

In 2003, I wanted to write a column about why Love Actually encapsulated everything bad about Britain, not just our culture, but our entire self-...

24.12.2024 10

The Guardian

Zoe Williams

The ‘quad-demic’ is here – and with it I have become a disease detective

Neologisms may have the excitement of the strange, but there is nothing exciting about the “quad-demic” if you’re afflicted by it. Even if the...

17.12.2024 3

The Guardian

Zoe Williams

I went to see two very different pantos this week. Here’s what I learned

They call the Palladium Christmas pantomime “the glitziest show in town”, which basically means “most expensive”. I feel moved to point out...

17.12.2024 10

The Guardian

Zoe Williams

Succession showed us the rich are largely miserable – and the Murdochs are living proof

Rupert Murdoch has lost an epic legal battle against three of his children: he wanted to wrest control of his media empire back from them, settle...

11.12.2024 40

The Guardian

Zoe Williams

‘Loaded for bear’? Online puzzles are puzzling enough without all this American lingo

When Wordle first landed, more than three years ago, a lot of Britons complained, bitterly, about the American spellings, taking to social media to...

10.12.2024 2

The Guardian

Zoe Williams

Rebecca Hendin on the fall of President Assad – cartoon

09.12.2024 3

The Guardian

Zoe Williams

They ‘didn’t look the type’: how the media was fooled by Bashar and Asma al-Assad

As Bashar al-Assad is ousted as Syria’s brutal president, his wife Asma and children having fled to Russia shortly before, the scenes are too...

09.12.2024 3

The Guardian

Zoe Williams

DIY advent calendars are way too much work – but I don’t know how to stop

Advent calendars are a nightmare when you’re divorced. The kids come back from their other house with days’ worth of unopened Toblerone, which...

03.12.2024 3

The Guardian

Zoe Williams

As a middle-class woman of a certain age, all I can say is: ‘Thank you, Gregg Wallace’

Gregg Wallace, accused of “inappropriate behaviour”, had stepped away from MasterChef and was keeping his head down while lawyers were engaged –...

02.12.2024 5

The Guardian

Zoe Williams

Women are fed up with waiting – and they’re taking fertility into their own hands

The number of women without a partner having children by IVF or sperm donation has trebled in the past 10 years. IVF itself is not unproblematic;...

28.11.2024 3

The Guardian

Zoe Williams

I used to think I could adapt to most things – then they rearranged my local Lidl

What they always say about cats – indeed, one of the reasons I prefer dogs – is that they don’t like moving house. You have to trap them inside...

26.11.2024 4

The Guardian

Zoe Williams

On a 17-hour train journey I glimpsed our future – and it was ugly

The concept of “enshittification” was invented by the American sci-fi writer Cory Doctorow, only last year, to describe online platforms and...

25.11.2024 6

The Guardian

Zoe Williams

760,000 women in the UK waiting for a gynaecological appointment? That’s just the tip of the iceberg

The Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists has landed on an arresting image to illustrate the waiting-list crisis in its field. If all...

19.11.2024 4

The Guardian

Zoe Williams

If you can’t trust the voice of David Attenborough, what can you trust?

It sounds too fanciful and too outrageous to be true, but nothing is too outrageous for the world the tech bros have bequeathed us. The BBC has...

18.11.2024 7

The Guardian

Zoe Williams

A British export the US didn’t need: a cosy relationship between editor and proprietor

Postmortems continue for who lost Kamala Harris the US election, and these will be consequential for the left in the UK. However many times the US...

15.11.2024 9

The Guardian

Zoe Williams

That’s the fireworks over for another year. Phew!

Near my house, there are some incredible firework enthusiasts. In November 2020, when I’d just moved in, I thought it was an optical illusion...

12.11.2024 4

The Guardian

Zoe Williams

Billionaires like Elon Musk don’t just think they’re better than the rest of us – they hate us

Nearly three years ago, I started working on an idea for a book. It started out with the pretty mild proposition: we’re in a class war, but it’s...

11.11.2024 70

The Guardian

Zoe Williams

It’s taken me 20 years, but I’ve finally updated my to-do list

My time management is quite old-fashioned, mainly consisting of a to-do list. Three columns if I’m feeling particularly efficient: work; admin;...

05.11.2024 2

The Guardian

Zoe Williams

Unlike the Spanish, the British aren’t pelting their royals with mud. But patience is running out …

There was something so incongruous about the sight of King Felipe of Spain, mud-splattered by raging elements of a crowd in Paiporta, a suburb of...

04.11.2024 30

The Guardian

Zoe Williams

My mother nursed a life-affirming 25-year grudge. Hard as I try, I don’t have the attention span

The best thing that happened to me during the whole of the pandemic was a story on the internet. An Oregon resident, furloughed, saw on a daytime...

03.11.2024 10

The Guardian

Zoe Williams

An excess of billionaires is destabilising politics – just as academics predicted

The concept of “elite overproduction” was developed by social scientist Peter Turchin around the turn of this century to describe something...

31.10.2024 5

The Guardian

Zoe Williams

Pity the poor chuggers – they do an impossible job in terrible conditions

The modern practice of chugging – a contraction of “charity” and “mugging”, where cheerful young people come up to you in the street and ask...

29.10.2024 3

The Guardian

Zoe Williams

I followed Trump and Joe Rogan into the manosphere – and it was not pretty

According to Forbes, Donald Trump talked about five important things in a three-hour-plus podcast with Joe Rogan: whether the 2020 election was...

28.10.2024 3

The Guardian

Zoe Williams

Sarah Beeny’s country house wowed me – but not as much as her sheer chutzpah

Locals call Sarah Beeny’s house in Somerset “mini-Downton Abbey”, owing to its grandeur – and its treehouse, boathouse and greenhouse. I went...

22.10.2024 5

The Guardian

Zoe Williams

James Cleverly spent £655 a head on in-flight catering – while asylum seekers receive £49 a week

It already feels like quite a long time since the Tories were in power, but it was only in December that James Cleverly took a day trip to Rwanda...

21.10.2024 3

The Guardian

Zoe Williams

Rachel Reeves and Keir Starmer try to fill the ‘fiscal black hole’ – cartoon

16.10.2024 7

The Guardian

Zoe Williams

Ikea shelves, books by politicians, even a whole celeriac: in defence of middle-class fly-tipping

One experiences politics through direct encounters with the state, and since the first wave of austerity that experience has diverged enormously...

16.10.2024 5

The Guardian

Zoe Williams

Tommy Robinson’s book went to No 1 on Amazon. This is what I learned from the reviews

It’s always tempting to self-soothe when the far right is on the march. Tommy Robinson’s new book, Manifesto: Free Speech, Real Democracy,...

15.10.2024 10

The Guardian

Zoe Williams

Why is Halloween suddenly so big in Britain?

When a fella of 17 arrived at the house in a corset, some pointy ears, a lot of makeup and an alice band with a cat on it, it was only polite to...

14.10.2024 5

The Guardian

Zoe Williams

Why has Melania Trump come out as pro-choice? Seems obvious to me

Melania Trump has put her support for abortion rights at the centre of her forthcoming memoir – you might even call it the news line. This has...

08.10.2024 10

The Guardian

Zoe Williams

The government could win Britain’s trust back. MPs would just have to wear a uniform

Polling just dropped on trust in the Labour government – 59% think it’s fairly or very sleazy, according to YouGov, which will be sobering news to...

07.10.2024 3

The Guardian

Zoe Williams

Starmer is boxing himself in over Europe – and putting approval ratings above young people’s futures

As Keir Starmer entered the room with Ursula von der Leyen for his first meeting with the European Commission as prime minister on Wednesday, we had...

04.10.2024 60

The Guardian

Zoe Williams

What I learned when I fell off a Lime bike

I noticed Lime bikes almost as soon as they arrived in London, in 2018, because of the teenagers. Let me explain: it’s possible to hack the...

01.10.2024 10

The Guardian

Zoe Williams

Why did Kemi Badenoch attack maternity pay? Ask the Tory members …

Kemi Badenoch polished her brand as the say-the-unsayable candidate for Conservative leader thus: “Statutory maternity pay is a function of tax;...

30.09.2024 10

The Guardian

Zoe Williams

My dog has been reviewed online – and it wasn’t exactly glowing

When Uber was first invented, my mother was incensed about the star-rating system. She did not wish to be evaluated for her manners, she said. It...

24.09.2024 5

The Guardian

Zoe Williams

I bumped into Liz Truss at a school open day. It was super awks

Before going to an open day for a sixth form college, I’d made a number of promises to my daughter, H, in respect of how fundamentally embarrassing...

23.09.2024 8

The Guardian

Zoe Williams

Shōgun proves you don’t need dragons and bare bottoms for compelling drama

A friend who works in TV explained to me once how Game of Thrones had ruined our attention spans, packing in too much event. Dragons, nakedness,...

17.09.2024 20

The Guardian

Zoe Williams

The Evening Standard gave me a job – and unleashed Boris Johnson on the world. I’ll still miss it

The Evening Standard, chronicler of the nation’s capital since 1827, is closing down this week. OK, every bit of that sentence was slightly wrong....

16.09.2024 4

The Guardian

Zoe Williams

What now for the Spectator under Paul Marshall’s ownership? The signs are pointing further right

The most and possibly only surprising thing about hedge fund manager Paul Marshall’s purchase of the Spectator was the anguished public resignation...

16.09.2024 6

The Guardian

Zoe Williams

Teenagers will always get drunk – so why don’t we just serve them in pubs?

My friend’s son, 16, sauntered into a pub at the weekend and came out with a pint. He wasn’t asked for ID, which she thought was outrageous, and...

10.09.2024 3

The Guardian

Zoe Williams