UnHerd with Freddie Sayers

OnlyFans, the self-publishing pornography app, has taken off during the course of 2020 with an average of  200,000 new users  signing up each day. The platform allows creators to release photos and videos to paying subscribers; while the content published is entirely the choice of the creator, the most common genre is pornography. In an extraordinarily candid conversation, Aella explains...

Freddie Sayers meets David Engelthaler, co-director of the T-Gen Research Institute and former state epidemiologist of Arizona. Earlier this week, Freddie Sayers spoke to David Engelthaler, co-director of the T-Gen Research Institute and former state epidemiologist of Arizona, who has been investigating this idea. His view is that there is now “really compelling evidence” that this strain replicat...

Over recent years, we’ve learned to pay attention to the intellectual trends and taboos on university campuses — they have a way of spilling out into mainstream corporate and political life. Which is why the vote among the 7,000 faculty at Cambridge on a new 'free speech policy' matters. The results will be announced tomorrow at 5pm and will be an indication of the willingness to resist the increa...

Arguably the most famous Hong Kong dissident alive today, Nathan Law has become one of the most recognisable faces of the pro-democracy movement in his homeland. Having been at the forefront of protests against the controversial Hong Kong national security law over the summer, the democracy activist was subsequently forced to flee Hong Kong over fears for his safety. The departure proved time...

With less than two months two go until Joe Biden’s inauguration, the President-elect has been busy filling up cabinet posts with various Obama-era appointees. These appointments have been met with some criticism by those on the Left, who argue that — in the face of a global pandemic, a flagging economy and impending climate crisis — they are not nearly bold enough. Freddie Sayers spoke to historia...

Suzanne Moore is one of the most famous columnists at the Guardian newspaper — or at least she was until she finally left last week, accused by colleagues of being a 'transphobe'. For the first time, she talks about her experience to Freddie Sayers — what it felt like to be rounded on how she felt couldn't stay. It's a sobering story of an attempt to shut down freedom of speech at one of the world...

One of the most interesting sources of data for the progress of the Covid-19 pandemic has been the  ZOE app  — downloaded by over 4.3 million people, who input symptoms and test results every day. Its founder is  Professor Tim Spector , an epidemiologist from KCL, and the app is now funded by the Government and Number Ten receives daily data from it. He received an OBE for services...

From the archive, first published: 29 October 2020 Since Aris Roussinos’s fantastic essay on UnHerd earlier this month, “ Why Fukuyama was right all along ,” I’ve been getting to know the much-misunderstood thinker’s writing. It turns out that, far from the triumphalist credo of 1990s liberalism,  The End of History  is a disquieting, and prescient, sketch of what the liberal era would f...

From the archive, first published: 20 October 2020. Freddie Sayers caught up with Scott Atlas, a healthcare policy academic from the Hoover Institute at Stanford, who has become the latest lightning rod for the controversy around Covid-19 policy and his support for a more targeted response. Speaking from inside the White House, where he is now Senior advisor to the President and a member of the Co...

From the archive, first published 15 October 2020 Piers Morgan has made a career out of robust, forceful and — at times — abrasive interviews. Since the start of the pandemic, he has found himself an unlikely hero of the ‘pro-lockdowners’ (even being labelled by one columnist as ‘the hero Gotham didn’t know it wanted, but possibly needed’) for this confrontational style, the full force of which wa...

From the archive, first published on 10 September 2020. What have fungi got to do with politics, philosophy, Covid-19 or any of the great crises we face? Well, potentially rather a lot. Merlin Sheldrake is a biologist and expert on the mysterious world of fungi, and has just published a book on the subject, Entangled Life, that grabbed our attention. He’s a fascinating character and we’ve all foun...

From the archive, first published 2 July 2020. It’s easy to dismiss anyone querying the Black Lives Matter movement as either pointlessly contrarian or — worse — actually racist. After all, who could object to the truism contained within the movement’s name? But there are important questions to ask about what the facts show about the scale of ‘systemic racism’, and whether drawing attention to rac...