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Zoe Williams

Zoe Williams

The Guardian

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Welcome back Billy McFarland and a new Fyre festival. Shows you can’t keep a good fantasist down

Welcome back Billy McFarland and a new Fyre festival. Shows you can’t keep a good fantasist down
27.02.2025 10

The Guardian

Zoe Williams

Welcome to Britain in 2025 – where there is a heist in my local shop and no one is surprised

Welcome to Britain in 2025 – where there is a heist in my local shop and no one is surprised
25.02.2025 6

The Guardian

Zoe Williams

The fight at the heart of the German election is simmering everywhere

The fight at the heart of the German election is simmering everywhere
24.02.2025 7

The Guardian

Zoe Williams

James Murdoch has spilled the beans, and the reality is more miserable than we – or Succession – ever imagined

James Murdoch has spilled the beans, and the reality is more miserable than we – or Succession – ever imagined
19.02.2025 10

The Guardian

Zoe Williams

What I learned from a lovely woman on a packed ward in hospital

What I learned from a lovely woman on a packed ward in hospital
18.02.2025 6

The Guardian

Zoe Williams

The new world order is exactly what it looks like. Are we too frozen with fear to name it?

The new world order is exactly what it looks like. Are we too frozen with fear to name it?
17.02.2025 30

The Guardian

Zoe Williams

Who wants to look a million dollars, these days?

Who wants to look a million dollars, these days?
11.02.2025 40

The Guardian

Zoe Williams

Trump is driving political debate to ever new lows. The left must hold on to its values

Trump is driving political debate to ever new lows. The left must hold on to its values
10.02.2025 10

The Guardian

Zoe Williams

The idea of ‘welfare’ has lost all meaning. Just look at the cruel state of women’s prisons

06.02.2025 3

The Guardian

Zoe Williams

Who started the culture war between cyclists and drivers?

04.02.2025 10

The Guardian

Zoe Williams

Bridget Jones is a welcome reminder of a much more comfortable era

03.02.2025 6

The Guardian

Zoe Williams

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

28.01.2025 9

The Guardian

Zoe Williams

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

27.01.2025 20

The Guardian

Zoe Williams

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

21.01.2025 10

The Guardian

Zoe Williams

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

20.01.2025 7

The Guardian

Zoe Williams

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

14.01.2025 40

The Guardian

Zoe Williams

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

13.01.2025 7

The Guardian

Zoe Williams

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

09.01.2025 100

The Guardian

Zoe Williams

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 10

The Guardian

Zoe Williams

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 10

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 4

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 that I...

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 10

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 40

The Guardian

Zoe Williams

Rebecca Hendin on the fall of President Assad – cartoon

09.12.2024 5

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 4

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 is...

03.12.2024 5

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 – on...

02.12.2024 7

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 for...

26.11.2024 5

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 the...

25.11.2024 10

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 10

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 8

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 5

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 10

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 a...

11.11.2024 30

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 4

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 8

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 100

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 you if...

29.10.2024 5

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 9

The Guardian

Zoe Williams

Rebecca Hendin on Labour’s plans for the NHS – cartoon

21.10.2024 6

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 10

The Guardian

Zoe Williams

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

16.10.2024 5

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 6

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, Peaceful...

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 10

The Guardian

Zoe Williams