The Lucas Museum of Narrative Art aims to upend convention. It succeeds, in ways both good and bad

The death star was nearly 100 miles from side to side and could attract people’s attention by blowing up their planets. The new Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, founded in Los Angeles by George Lucas, the creator of “Star Wars” and “Indiana Jones” , is more modest in size and uses gentler methods to woo eyeballs. Still, at 300,000 square feet (28,000 square metres) and with a reported price tag of $1bn, it is one of the most conspicuous and intriguing museums to launch this decade anywhere in the galaxy. But will Mr Lucas’s blockbuster project, which opened on September 22nd, be remembered as an inspired creative endeavour or an expensive and flawed edifice complex?

It is an unusual institution. Outside, the museum resembles a white spaceship destined for another solar system. Inside, it looks like a prop-heavy Hollywood set designed to look like a museum.

There are screens displaying digital copies of masterpieces held elsewhere, from Trajan’s column to Michelangelo’s frescoes in the Sistine Chapel and works from the Louvre. There are two plush cinemas where visitors can watch documentaries and older films, including some of Mr Lucas’s work. There is a “portal”—otherwise known as a lobby—with no right angles and futuristic glass lifts that shoot you up to the galleries.

And then there are actual props: 7% of gallery space is dedicated to “Star Wars”. You can marvel at Luke Skywalker’s landspeeder and Anakin’s podracer. Here are costumes; over there are characters. R2-D2 stares out, beepless, from a corner.

Nearby are more conventional galleries, filled with unconventional art, from children’s-book illustrations to posters. Mr Lucas and his wife, Mellody Hobson, started the museum to display their personal collection. Its focus is “narrative art”, which tells a “story”. Though you might wonder: don’t most images do that?

Mr Lucas decided to create his own museum after he visited one and asked to see any pieces by Norman Rockwell , an American painter and illustrator whose work Mr Lucas collects. That museum did not have their Rockwell on view. (Some have dismissed him as a commercial illustrator and not a fine artist.) Mr Lucas was incensed and decided, as only a billionaire can, to launch his own museum to give illustration its due. “Illustrators create pictures for the people,” according to Mr Lucas. “It does not require special knowledge. It does not need to be explained.”

This museum has been around 15 years in the making. It is in Los Angeles only because Mr Lucas did not succeed in basing it in two other cities, San Francisco and Chicago, due to local opposition over architecture and location on public park land. The new museum has a gallery displaying the other proposed versions. It is a shot at opponents, who missed out on jobs and visitor spending.

Yet there is something so cinematic, commercial and kitsch about the museum that it feels as if it ended up in the right city: home of the Hollywood hills and tills. The museum exhibits a certain scorning of traditional expertise. Both the director and chief curator left in 2025, hinting at a clash between professional judgment and the founder’s desire for control. Mr Lucas has been acting as the chief curator himself.

There is barely any wall text to help explain what things are and why they matter. (People can use their phones to get short texts about some works.) What was Mr Lucas wanting to say by putting a Van Gogh sketch of a mother and child next to a work by Rose O’Neill, the cartoonist behind the cutesy Kewpie doll? What are visitors meant to make of authentic older paintings, including ones by Artemisia Gentileschi and John Singer Sargent , which struggle to compete with neighbouring screens with bright digital reproductions?

Those not steeped in art history—precisely the people Mr Lucas is hoping to attract to his “accessible” museum—need lots of guidance, not a little. But “it was very important that there was not too much explanation in each gallery,” says Tracey Bates, the chief executive of the museum. “George has always wanted the vision that you’re looking at the image and not the history lesson at the side of it.”

This jumbled, almost information-less approach is in vogue, including at the new David Geffen Galleries at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, which cost $724m. (With so much money and so much space, few museums have achieved so little.) It tries to upend conventional hierarchies, mixing old and new works without curatorial comments. It is a “less is more” approach, explains a slightly apologetic guard, who acknowledges more explanation may have helped.

What has Mr Lucas learned from other museums started by rich philanthropic collectors, from the Frick in New York to the Getty in Los Angeles? “This has not been influenced by…other museums,” says Ms Bates. “George and I have never had a conversation about what other museums are up to.”

Yet he is part of a tradition of philanthropists leaving art as a legacy. “This type of museum is so selfish and so civic at the same time,” says Anne Higonnet, a professor of art history at Barnard College. “Only time will tell if one outweighs the other.” That will partly depend on how it changes after the founders’ deaths.

Snooty critics may sneer at Mr Lucas’s handiwork. But many visitors will find much to delight them in the museum. They will want more about how Mr Lucas sees his collection, not less. ■

How and why governments waste the most precious resource

When Jeff Miller, a writer from New Jersey, moved to Massachusetts, he was denied a driving licence for being a felon. But he was not a felon. He had been confused with another Jeff Miller, born on the same day in the same state.

So he applied for a letter confirming that he was the non-criminal Mr Miller. This required his original paper social-security card, which he had lost, and his original paper birth certificate, which meant asking his mother. After weeks of hassle he got his letter and thought the problem was solved. But when he moved to Oregon, the same thing happened. Then he was detained at an airport. Why, he wondered, do I have to keep proving I’m not the other Jeff Miller?

His travails are a symptom of a wider problem. Governments often treat your time as if it had no value. As monopolies, they know you cannot shop elsewhere for a passport or permit. So whereas it takes only one click to have Thai food delivered to your door by a private firm, the form for people in Michigan seeking public support until recently had 1,000 questions, many in impenetrable bureaucratese and some pointlessly intrusive (such as “what is the date of conception of your children?”).

America is not the worst offender. But as Annie Lowrey describes in “The Time Tax”, it is unusually bad for such a rich country. Americans spend five times as much time on government form-filling as Danes, Brits or South Koreans. Whereas the much poorer and more numerous citizens of India all have a digital biometric ID , Americans are still shuffling paper.

Wasting the public’s time is a bipartisan sin, argues Ms Lowrey, a top-notch journalist at the Atlantic. Cold-hearted Republicans want to make it hard to claim benefits, she writes, so “they obsess over fraud and use it as a justification for making programmes impossible to use.” Micromanaging Democrats “love too-complicated-by-half means-tested measures, like tax credits for rural broadband users...They load straightforward initiatives up with so many conditions and choke-points that they fail to deliver.”

The government can act quickly when it absolutely has to. When covid-19 struck, Donald Trump’s “Operation Warp Speed” helped drug firms produce a vaccine in seven months—a process that would normally take a decade or more. This is less than the time the authorities in San Francisco spent pondering one application to open an ice-cream shop, without ever reaching a decision. The applicant, Jason Yu, spent $200,000 trying to answer objections from NIMBYs and then gave up, having nearly been bankrupted.

Ms Lowrey thinks American red tape owes a lot to historical racism. Starting with the pensions paid to civil-war veterans, she describes how white people suspected black people of trying to bilk the public purse, and demanded onerous checks to prevent fraud. This is part of the story, but a more basic problem is that America is the longest-surviving democratic system in the world. Whereas revolutions have torched old rules in other places, America has been steadily accumulating them for 250 years , like an ageing hoarder whose home is packed to the ceiling with vintage junk.

The health-care system, for example, is multiple systems piled on top of each other. A tax break for employer-provided health insurance dates back to 1943 (when it was a way for firms to dodge wartime wage controls by offering perks). Medicare (a straightforward but ruinously expensive programme for the old) and Medicaid (56 insanely complicated programmes for the hard-up) began in 1965. Obamacare , an attempt to cover the millions who slipped through the net, was passed in 2010 and sabotaged by Mr Trump in 2017.

Today Americans who lose their jobs often lose their insurance. To get Medicaid, they must complete forms that “contain impossible-to-parse instructions, request absurd amounts of data…and devolve into Proustian and at times terrifying digressions”. One woman describes to Ms Lowrey what it is like trying to navigate this maze when you have lost your job and insurance because of a brain injury. (“Freaking horrible.”)

Each time-wasting rule has a lobby to defend it, so efforts to cut the time tax have disappointed. Elon Musk ’s DOGE did not try. Joe Biden did, shaving 35m hours from the time gobbled up by welfare paperwork in 2023. However, the overall burden of red tape grew by nearly 50 times as much, reaching a record total of four and a half working days per year, per American.

For inspiration, Ms Lowrey visits a country that was able to start from scratch. Estonia escaped from both communism and Soviet colonialism in 1991. The old order was swept away, and many of its enforcers went back to Russia. This allowed a team of young technocrats to create the most joined-up, user-friendly digital government on Earth. For most Estonians, “it takes less time to file a tax return than…to microwave a bag of popcorn.”

In America, by contrast, the tax code is so confusing that most taxpayers have to pay for professional help to file their returns. This is absurd. Most people’s financial affairs are so simple—a salary and some bank interest that the government already knows about—that an Estonian-style platform could save them money and time. Mr Biden launched a pilot scheme to simplify tax-filing that proved popular with users but terrified lobbyists for the tax-prep industry. Mr Trump killed it. ■

Yes, but only part of it

Art can make sense of suffering, metabolising it into meaning, even entertainment. But it usually takes longer than this. Less than three years after October 7th 2023 , “Fauda”, a hit Israeli spy show, has dramatised that day’s atrocities and their emotional fallout. Its new series illustrates the role of stories in coping with anguish; it also suggests the kinds of truths that fiction can impart—sometimes more powerfully than the news—and those it can’t.

Since 2015 “Fauda” has followed a group of Israeli commandos who venture undercover into Gaza and the West Bank. Doron, the main character, is played by Lior Raz (pictured), one of the show’s creators and a real-life veteran of a similar unit; he seems to carry Israel’s burdens on his tense, manly shoulders. Whenever he thinks he’s out, he is dragged back into a mayhem of abductions, bombings, betrayals, rogue fighters, manhunts and dusty shoot-outs.

In its first four seasons, “Fauda” made an effort to be fair. The Palestinian characters, like the Israelis, had griefs and grievances, families and team frictions. The plot only works because they look alike, too: the Israeli agents are mostly played by mizrahi Jews of Middle Eastern descent. Fauda, which means “chaos”, is a codeword used when a mission goes awry, but it seemed a forlorn judgment on the whole intractable conflict .

The fifth season is different. Two years after October 7th, a pair of bereaved fathers pursue a freelance vendetta against terrorists sheltering in Marseille. Before long Doron must go undercover again, this time in a training camp in Syria. Now, though, his adversaries are less nuanced. “We’re not human beings to you,” complains a Palestinian—who is swiftly outed as a monster. The Europeans who sympathise with his cause are drawn with equal scorn.

Is this narrowing of empathy a storytelling failure, vindicating critics who see “Fauda” as Zionist propaganda? No, because this series is not about the rights and wrongs (or wrongs and wrongs) of the overarching struggle, any more than, say, “All Quiet on the Western Front” adjudicates the causes of the first world war. Instead it is a portrait of trauma.

Two episodes rewind to the carnage of October 7th, in which Doron, his comrades and their families are caught up. They are hard to watch; after only three years, some overseas viewers may feel queasy about watching a re-enactment at all. By comparison, “ United 93 ”, a film about a hijacking on September 11th 2001, came out after five years, which some Americans felt was too soon. In Israel, though, where the series was released in May, the scenes it recreates—of pitiless gunmen and the horror in a besieged safe room—are inescapably familiar.

The haste is the point. This is drama as witness—and a stage of grief. Superficially, the plot offers a sort of therapeutic consolation, in which Doron and the gang fend off another mega-threat to Israel. But the major keys are rage and guilt. For all their bravery, the heroes fail to rescue one of their number’s wife and children. Afterwards they are haunted and bereft. “I have no life,” the widowed man says. “My mind is all black.”

Rumbling through the dialogue is the wider failure of the state. “An entire country didn’t see [the danger],” an Israeli spy chief accepts, taking responsibility in a way some actual bigwigs have avoided. Guilt is “in the air we breathe”. The creators of “Fauda” couldn’t foresee it either: in the past they considered a plotline about terrorists seizing a kibbutz, but deemed it unrealistic.

“Fauda” doesn’t depict the awful war in Gaza . But if you want to understand how many Israelis have hardened their hearts to Gaza’s torment, it can help. Its popularity suggests it is doing that, notably in the Arab world: the show is top of Netflix’s chart in Lebanon and rating highly in Jordan, Qatar and other Arab countries. Books, films and TV often reach people who skip the news (or distrust it); soulful hunks and tough women with great hair are more compelling than dry reports and political speeches. Still, the contrast between the forceful public diplomacy of “Fauda” and Israel’s flailing official kind is stark.

TV shows are not encyclopedia entries. A high-octane thriller is unlikely to convey all sides of a tortuous history even if it tries, which this one doesn’t. To fully grasp the entwined agonies of Israel and the Palestinians, turn to other sources and voices, including those more critical of Israeli abuses and sympathetic to Palestinian pain. “Fauda” isn’t the whole truth. But it captures part of it. ■

Our favourite books published between July and September

“I have only ever read one book in my life, and that is ‘White Fang’. It’s so frightfully good I’ve never bothered to read another.” So says a character in Nancy Mitford’s novel “The Pursuit of Love”. Jack London ’s “White Fang”, about a Canadian wolfdog, may be frightfully good, but no book is so satisfying that it should make you give up on reading. Here are eight excellent new titles. Read one, then pick up another.

In this engrossing novel, Cricket Dibb grows up and pursues his ambition to become an artist. Along the way, he falls in love with the flighty and worldly Olympia, who becomes a forceful presence throughout his life. Rich characterisation and deft storytelling underpin this tale about chasing dreams, creating art and remaining true to your beliefs.

The final volume of the acclaimed Harlem trilogy continues the misadventures of Ray Carney, a furniture salesman and part-time fence, in the 1980s. The captivating anti-hero fraternises with top gangsters, low-level hustlers and Pepper, his ageing best friend, while grappling with personal trials and social turmoil. This terrific crime novel is also a love letter to New York .

One night in Kingston in 1988, during a rehearsal for a play, eight gay men are brutally assaulted by a mob. A member of the cast is killed. Later, two of the survivors go in search of the “disappearers” who vanished after the attack. Spanning decades and encompassing a range of voices and narrative forms, this bold, electrifying book chronicles trauma, homophobia and marginalised lives.

At a house party in Los Angeles in 2031, one guest tries to make sense of bizarre doubles and disappearances. So begins a mind-bending piece of speculative fiction. Besides telling a thrilling and inventive story about parallel worlds and dual timelines, this surefooted novel explores threats to survival and the insidious spread of surveillance .

Tennyson Bouguereau, a former slave, tells his remarkable life story in this beautifully wrought novel. Born into bondage with his twin sister (“We were nothing people”), he adjusts to freedom after the civil war. But when he later joins the army and is tasked with hunting down Native Americans, he is propelled into a world of carnage.

Set in a post-apocalyptic American city, this novel’s unnamed protagonist is a “pincher” who steals electricity to use as currency. Her talent arouses the interest of a mysterious inventor who approaches her to help with an experiment that has the potential to “alter the fabric of reality” and create a brave new society. A stimulating novel full of big ideas but also human struggles amid chaos and uncertainty.

Two disillusioned teenagers meet in Ireland in 1982 and form an intimate bond. Red is eventually forced to flee the country for London. A few years later, Róisín attempts to make a new life for herself in the city. She looks to her old friend for support, only to find him veering out of control. An astute, emotionally charged novel that examines the lasting effects of first love.

David, a retired businessman, is making a one-way trip. His memories are fading and everyday life is becoming increasingly difficult. Aware that he is “both here and not here”, he has settled on a final destination: a euthanasia clinic in Zurich. Unfolding in fragmentary prose, this novel is disorientating, thought-provoking and, as David approaches his journey’s end, deeply moving. ■

But it is not one you can get away with following these days

YOUR REVIEWER, who lives in Los Angeles, starts this task with fear in his gutless gut. Ari Emanuel (pictured centre), whose rise from mailroom clerk to talent agent to F-bombing Hollywood tycoon is vigorously chronicled in “Roll the Calls”, a new ghostwritten autobiography, is not someone you upset lightly in this town.

After all, Mr Emanuel is the guy who once told Harvey Weinstein that he would “rip his fucking head off his neckless neck” after the former producer tried to broker the sale of his firm. When Michael Ovitz, his boss at Creative Artists Agency, a talent agency, warned of reprisals after Mr Emanuel said he was joining another firm, he reacted by hoisting an office chair above his head. “If you’re threatening me…I’m going to destroy this motherfucking office.”

In this book rage is the defining four-letter word, bar one. (“Rage” occurs 14 times in the first two pages.) It is a reminder of a time, long before big tech drowned Tinseltown in data, when Hollywood was a place of towering egos who called the shots and “rolled the calls”—that is, yelled at each other on the phone at all hours to cut deals and cut each other to shreds. Ari Gold, a talent agent in “Entourage”, a TV series from the early 2000s, was modelled on Mr Emanuel and is equally prone to losing his cool. As Mr Emanuel quips: “I put the rage in ‘Entourage’.”

Often Mr Emanuel is a flat-out bully. When Trident, a chewing-gum manufacturer, cancels his favourite flavour, he calls its boss, ordering someone to row out a phone to him on a lake in Wisconsin where he is fishing. “Where do you fucking get off cancelling the only good flavour your shitty fucking company makes!” he screams. The stunned CEO ends up shipping Mr Emanuel the last few cartons.

So far, so red-blooded Hollywood. Yet the script goes awry. Mr Emanuel wields his anger and ambition like a jackhammer in his pursuit of an ever-bigger business empire. Success fails to make him happy. As he would put it: “Life. Fucking. Lesson.”

He claims the relentless deal-making to build William Morris Endeavour (WME), his media conglomerate, valued at $13bn in 2025, was all in service of its clients. Maybe. But the most telling descriptions reveal more about his scorched-earth tactics than about Hollywood’s glitterati. He phones Larry David so often to persuade him to become a client that the comedian finally surrenders to get some peace and quiet. When Oprah Winfrey, at a crossroads in her career, opens up to him about her self-doubt, he retorts: “Don’t you know who you are, Oprah? You’re Oprah Fucking Winfrey. No, really, have you looked in a mirror lately?” After he sends a full-length mirror as a gift, she signs on to WME.

Bizarrely, he shares almost no insights on the upheaval in Hollywood during his career. Netflix does not get a mention. The word “internet” comes up once. The main gossip is about his own deal-making which, fittingly, is mostly pugilistic. In 2016 WME led a deal to acquire Ultimate Fighting Championship , a martial-arts version of fight club, for $4bn. That deal was “the Ari-est thing ever,” he writes. “Like Michael Phelps buying a pool.”

Yet as his wealth and power increase, so does his self-pity. As is typical for Hollywood, there is a therapist in the background. “Dr Calm” tries to explain to his client that his urge to conquer Hollywood is driven by an “Ego Project” caused by demons in his past. Yet Mr Emanuel cannot bury them. His unresolved childhood issues with his mother, a tough-talking Chicago civil-rights activist, haunt him throughout the book. So does his struggle with dyslexia. He barely disguises the lifetime of resentment he feels towards his also-famous brothers, Rahm and Zeke .

There must be a lot that is likeable about Mr Emanuel, because some friends and clients stick by him. It’s hard to know why. He dismisses Patrick Whitesell, his lifelong business partner, for no apparent reason. Like other close colleagues, “Patrick no longer exists for me,” he writes. “Dead. Guarded by Cerberus.” His long-suffering first wife, Sarah, whom he seduced with a barrage of phone calls, is no more fleshed out than the fictional “Mrs Ari” in “Entourage”. Once they split, she drops out of the story altogether.

Then comes the fairy-tale ending. A younger woman, Sarah Staudinger, a fashion designer known as Staud, comes into Mr Emanuel’s life, after phone calls persistent enough to give most people PTSD. On her 29th birthday, he woos her with 29 dozen roses. Sure, during their courtship, he convinces his therapist to dump her on his behalf. (“Get me out of this contract.”) Then they make up and get married.

Hollywood cliché? You bet. But it’s a different type of Hollywood now. Agents are less like power brokers and more like business managers. Their client lists have extended from stars to creators, many of whom build up big fan bases before they even seek representation. There is less tolerance for Hollywood’s raging bulls, let alone its bullies. ■

Just don’t call it jerky

“It all started in 1652,” explains Greg White, as he smooths the creases from his apron. The meat connoisseur could be talking about South Africa . The country’s modern history began that year, when Jan van Riebeeck of the Dutch East India Company settled in what would become Cape Town. But he is referring to biltong, a quintessentially South African cured meat. On September 24th, Heritage Day, South Africans will munch on the savoury snack as they celebrate their country’s cultures.

Today biltong is a “massive industry”, says Wandile Sihlobo, an agricultural economist. Beef is the standard meat, but there are versions using ostrich, springbok, wildebeest and kudu. The chewy shards and cheaper “snap sticks” are sold at petrol stations, township butchers and rugby stadiums . Wineries offer biltong pairings. Teething babies are given biltong to soothe gums. “Other than Trevor Noah ,” says Anna Trapido, a food writer, “it’s the one thing all South Africans agree on.”

And, like the South African-born comedian, biltong is becoming famous worldwide. A growing diaspora and hunger for protein are driving demand. New brands are popping up everywhere from Berlin and Brooklyn to Hong Kong and Singapore. Firms are trying new flavours like peri-peri and plant-based versions (mushroom is a common vegan substitute).

It is the familiar story of a modern twist on an old foodstuff. When the Dutch arrived in the Cape they found indigenous people preserving game with salt and drying it in the open air. The newcomers added vinegar and spices from their Asian trade routes—cloves, black pepper and coriander seeds. Biltong, a fusion of bil (buttock, a reference to the cut) and tong (tongue or strip), was born. In the 19th century Boers, as those of mainly Dutch heritage were then known, left the British-run Cape for the hinterland. Their story and that of biltong became entwined when they took it on the “Great Trek”.

Though biltong is often seen as a “white” snack, dried meat transcends race. There are many variants of biltong in black cuisine (it is called umqwayiba in isiZulu). Some Ndebele people use dried apricots in their version. Vendas brush the meat with marula oil. Dried meat is widely added to stews to give them an umami flavour.

Biltong aficionados emphasise that it is not the same thing as jerky. “We don’t use that word in this house,” says Lindie White, Greg’s wife and co-host of a make-your-own-biltong session your correspondent recently joined. The American product is often drenched in sugar. Jerky is also the snack of an impatient nation: it is subjected to a massive hair dryer to speed dehydration. Biltong, by contrast, reflects the idea of “Africa time” that can frustrate visitors to the continent; it is air-dried and, local butchers explain, will be ready “now-now” (ie, later). It is well worth the wait. ■

What biography and natural experiments reveal about leadership

To conquer so much of Eurasia so quickly, Genghis Khan must have been a pretty decisive chap. Today macho executives striving to build empires sometimes wish he had left behind a book of leadership tips. What would Genghis do about that underperforming sales team? Alas, bar the odd (and possibly apocryphal) quote about the joy of making widows weep, the mighty Mongol’s insights are lost.

In any case, they might not be terribly useful. Genghis would have ascribed his success to courage, horsemanship and strategic genius. Actually, it was the weather, argues Jared Diamond, a Pulitzer-prizewinning historian. Analysis of tree rings on the Mongolian steppe reveals that the period of Genghis’s rise was unusually wet. More rain meant more grass, more sheep’s milk to nourish warriors and more spare horses to make the horde so devastatingly mobile. Had he been born 20 years earlier or 200 miles farther south, he might have been just another warlord. “Without knowing it (because he wasn’t a tree-ring dendrochronologist), Genghis had the good fortune to be born at the right time and place,” writes Dr Diamond.

The founder of the world’s most popular religion may be overrated, too. Sure, Jesus was charismatic. But so were thousands of other holy men. His gospel went global, while others did not, largely because of factors beyond his control. Jews two millennia ago were unusually literate and widely scattered across the Roman empire, so Jesus’s teachings were written down, widely distributed and widely read. The apostle Paul adapted his creed to make it appeal to non-Jews. Christianity spread across Europe when a Roman emperor converted, and to every continent when Europeans later colonised the world, often by very un-Christian means.

“Guns, Germs and Steel” , Dr Diamond’s best-known work, argued that geography and environmental factors, more than culture, enabled the rise of the West. In “Profits, Prophets, Coaches and Kings”, he turns his polymathic mind to leadership. It is a rollicking read.

Pondering why leaders are necessary in the first place, Dr Diamond describes a trip to New Guinea in 1964, where he watched an isolated highland village discuss some pressing problem. The entire population—perhaps 100 people—stood in a clearing. Anyone who felt like speaking did so, loudly. Everyone knew everyone else, so there was no need for a leader.

When societies grow more complex, however, someone has to co-ordinate decisions. In a town of 20,000, you can’t all stand in a square and shout. What is less obvious, though, is how much difference individual leaders make. There are two ways of assessing this. One is biographical: studying stories of great figures and trying to discern what made them distinct. The other is to look for statistical evidence. Dr Diamond uses both methods.

It is hard to conduct experiments with presidents. You cannot put Kamala Harris in charge of a duplicate America to see if she might have done a better job than Donald Trump . But you can devise natural experiments, such as observing what happens when leaders die of natural causes.

One study looked at 183 heads of government who died or were forced to retire between 1875 and 2004. Subsequent economic growth was on average the same as when a leader did not die in office. But this average disguised a wide variance: it was much more likely to increase or decrease a lot. The most probable explanation is that it really does matter who is in charge. When an economically incompetent leader falls from his horse, growth goes up; when a competent one does, the opposite happens. This effect, however, was concentrated in autocratic systems , where leaders have more unconstrained power, and was barely detectable in democracies.

The same method casts light on corporate leaders, too. A study in Denmark found that the death of a CEO reduced a company’s profits by 13% on average within two years. When a board member died, by contrast, it had no discernible effect.

Leaders, in short, are important. But how to become a better one? Being educated helps. When a college-educated president or prime minister is succeeded by one who never made it past high school, the economy tends to do worse. And the field of study that produces political leaders with the best economic record is, unsurprisingly, economics. But for a more fine-grained sense of how to lead, it helps to look at individual case studies.

Dr Diamond cites Seretse Khama, Botswana’s first president, who set a poor, obscure country on a path to prosperity. At independence in 1966, Botswana’s prospects seemed dismal. It had seven miles of paved road, 22 university graduates, no known natural resources and no reason to suppose it would avoid the bloody strife that gripped post-colonial Africa.

Then it struck diamonds—lots of them—and its tribes had an obvious reason to fight. Khama kept the peace by assigning mineral rights to the state, rather than the tribe (his own) under whose land the gems were found. Having studied at Oxford, he knew enough about the modern world to create a modern, clean civil service. Yet he was grounded enough in local tradition to remain popular. (He always carried a bag of dried caterpillars, a village snack, in his pocket.) And he was cautious enough to stay out of the politics of Botswana’s neighbour, South Africa, even if he personally loathed apartheid. Under him, Botswana had the fastest-growing economy in the world. Dr Diamond makes a convincing case that no other leader could have done what he did.

You might conclude from this and other examples that good presidents seek to represent the whole country, rather than just their tribe; that they learn from the best minds and that they avoid picking fights with neighbours. Yet plenty of people win power without these qualities. Many voters like their leaders tribal, belligerent and scornful of expertise; hence the recent surge of populist nationalism.

In the end, trying to pin down what makes a good leader is hard because so many useful qualities are useful only in the appropriate dose. Tenacity is great, but not when it hardens into stubbornness. Courage, but not recklessness; compassion, but not being a soft touch; vision, but not loopiness. A point Dr Diamond hints at but does not explore is that the people who select leaders, in politics, business and other spheres, have a duty to choose soberly; that they should have realistic expectations of what a leader can accomplish and reject the conmen who promise instant golden ages . It is a duty often neglected. ■

A growing band of musicians wants fans to experience gigs the old-fashioned way

“This machine is killing me,” croons Phoebe Bridgers in “Lost Boys”, her new song. She does not say whether she has a particular device in mind (or whether, like Rage Against the Machine, she is using the term as a metaphor for the establishment). But, given that her song is about self-destruction and stunted maturity , she may well be referring to a smartphone.

Elsewhere, however, Ms Bridgers has been loud and clear about her feelings towards the gadgets: she has banned phones during her world tour, which kicked off on September 14th. To gain entry, ticket-holders will have to seal their devices inside pouches that are then magnetically locked for the duration of the gig. That means no filming or taking photos, as fans annoyingly do at other performances. According to Samsung, a phonemaker, each concert-goer in Britain records on average 12 and a half minutes of video per show.

She is not alone in enforcing such rules. Alicia Keys, Childish Gambino and Jack White have all banned smartphones at their gigs. Sir Paul McCartney barred them at two concerts he played in Los Angeles earlier this year. Bob Dylan ’s upcoming tour will be phone-free.

For some musicians, nostalgia plays a part in their decision. Sir Paul described his LA concerts as “really special”: “It was like an old gig, like how everyone used to play.” But the anti-tech trend is not just a yearning for simpler times. Rather, the hope is that fans will get more out of the live-music experience. The idea is that it is all the more special for being ephemeral.

Getting your hands on a ticket means getting to enjoy the company of your favourite musician and fellow enthusiasts without a screen in the way. Artists aver that concerts should be appreciated in the moment, not videoed for social media. At Harry Styles ’s recent gig in Manchester, guests had to put their phones away, but they were given disposable cameras along with a note: “Thank you for really being here with me. Dance with all your friends.”

The effect is scarcity—the only way to experience the show is to be there in person—and that may only heighten fans’ fear of missing out. Musicians have argued that the exclusivity is part of the point. Mr Dylan has said that the fact his performances will be “device-free” will “make the occasion even more unique”.

Music is meant to connect the performer and the listener. Artists have said that they hate looking out at a sea of iPhones rather than smiling faces. Ghost, a Swedish metal group, banned phones on its tour in 2025; their front man cited the “ever-growing distance I felt between the crowd and the band”. Kaytranada, a Canadian DJ, put it more bluntly: “It looks mad awkward from where I stand.” ■

A new book, “The World Beneath Our Feet”, digs into the significance of soil

Just as there are charismatic species, there are charismatic habitats. Indeed, the two often overlap. Rainforests have beautiful birds and butterflies . African savannahs are filled with elephants and lions.

Then there are the uncharismatic habitats with uncharismatic species. Mites, centipedes and millipedes, anyone? Slime moulds and woodlice? And nematodes , nematodes, nematodes. These unloved critters, along with countless earthworms, are denizens of what is probably the least charismatic habitat of all: soil.

And yet the soil and its inhabitants are the most important ecosystems of the lot, argues Frank Ashwood, an ecologist. Without them, rainforests and savannahs would not exist—for these more telegenic biomes are, quite literally, rooted in the soil. So is agriculture, which has fed humanity since Homo sapiens worked out how to farm.

If you want biodiversity, soil provides it. According to Dr Ashwood, a teaspoon of healthy topsoil can hold up to 6bn micro-organisms; a square metre of temperate woodland or grassland soil contains some 300 earthworms , 50,000 springtails, 100,000 mites and 5m nematodes. Moreover, for those who fret about global warming, soil is a great way to keep carbon out of the atmosphere. The carbon stored in a hectare of boreal-forest soil, for example, weighs more than a jumbo jet.

Ignore the soil, then, at your peril. Partly, ignorance is a result of soil being, quite literally, dirt. Handle it, and it gets everywhere. Get it in a cut, and you may be advised to seek a tetanus shot and antibiotics. But there is also the matter of visibility. Air and water are transparent. Soil is not. The creatures that live in it may lead lives as exciting as those of forest-dwellers, but they are hidden from human sight.

Dig them up, though, and the result is awesome. A species of mites, for example, has evolved to make antifreeze proteins so they can live in the soils of sub-Antarctic islands. Pseudoscorpions have learned to hitch-hike to new homes by grasping onto flying insects such as beetles. Slime moulds form feeding networks so efficient that planners can use them to model public-transport networks . Woodlice include a species which couples up (in a way almost unheard-of in invertebrates), so that one partner can defend the burrow containing their young while the other forages. And nematodes, reckoned to make up 80% of individual living animals, have been brought back to life by scientists from ancient samples of frozen Siberian tundra.

Human beings, in Dr Ashwood’s telling, are not good soil mates. Modern machine-based farming not only leads to soil erosion; it also damages what soil remains by compacting together the particles, thus preventing creatures from traversing them. The result is a huge loss of species diversity.

In some parts of the world, though, there is a backlash. “No-till” and regenerative agriculture aim both to conserve existing soil biodiversity and increase it. Done well, this approach can be more profitable than conventional modern methods.

If Sir David Attenborough is looking for a swansong, then, he could do worse than release his camera crews on the world’s soils. The travel budget would probably be as high as that demanded by a more conventional wildlife documentary, for Dr Ashwood draws his examples from Africa, the Amazon, Australia, New Zealand, Ukraine and even the highlands of Scotland, as well as North America and his native England. Not so much “Life on Earth”, then, as “Life in Earth”. ■

“The End of History” was not the end of him. The oft-cited, and criticised, professor is back with a new memoir

WHEN FRANCIS Fukuyama, then a 40-year-old political scientist, published “The End of History and the Last Man” in 1992, the book was met with acclaim. With the collapse of the Soviet Union and end of the cold war, the world had reached “the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution” with “the universalisation of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government”, he argued. There would be no more big causes for which to struggle.

After Donald Trump spearheaded a global wave of populist, illiberal nationalism a quarter-century later, Mr Fukuyama’s book became an emblem of liberal hubris. How could anyone have been so foolish as to suggest ideological battles were over? In his delightfully eclectic new memoir, Mr Fukuyama, now 73—and clearly irked that few critics had read beyond the title or blurb of his famous tome—tries to set the record straight.

He writes that his true argument in “The End of History” was always shrewder and more nuanced than the caricature rendered in a thousand op-eds and essays. Mr Fukuyama is not quite a Cassandra, whose warnings were clearly heard yet disbelieved, but something different: a prophet whose “premonition”, as he puts it, was too subtle for its time.

From Hegel and his interpreters, Mr Fukuyama took the idea that human history was propelled by the pursuit of dignity, a principle that would spread after the French revolution and would peak with the West’s victory in the cold war. But the last part of “The End of History” spelt out a darker future. Borrowing from Nietzsche , he argued that some people were not content with equality and wanted to be recognised as superior to others. Stripped of struggle, risk and ambition, they would revolt against a bloodless, pacified world. The end of history would be a “very sad time”, he wrote in 1992, with “daring, courage and imagination” replaced by economic calculation and technocracy. People would eventually return to “struggle…out of a certain boredom”.

This overlooked bit of his book now looks prescient. “The extremism that we see on both left and right is in some sense a revolt against the flattened horizons created by liberal societies, in which we are enjoined to be endlessly open and tolerant and non-judgmental,” writes Mr Fukuyama in his memoir. “In the Realm of the Last Man” is a fascinating read.

Partly that is because of Mr Fukuyama’s compelling personal story. His grandparents moved from Japan to America in the early 20th century and were among the 120,000 people of Japanese descent forcibly moved and interned during the second world war. He was brought up by liberal parents but rebelled, studying at Cornell under Allan Bloom, a conservative philosopher. Having called for American intervention to topple Saddam Hussein —“casually”, he admits—Mr Fukuyama broke publicly and acrimoniously with his neoconservative friends. Later he would become a fierce critic of Mr Trump amid a wider and deeper split in the American right.

In an age of intellectual polarisation and ideological rigidity, this open-mindedness is refreshing. Mr Fukuyama turns the episode into a reflection on how to change one’s mind. “Age and social status are…helpful,” he notes. “I was at a point in life when I really didn’t have to care what my old friends thought of me.” Moreover, his break over Iraq “was actually liberating”, he writes, giving him the sense he could also shift positions on other issues, from the state’s role to the free market’s excesses.

Mr Fukuyama is also a polymath. He is an avid photographer; he crafts elaborate chairs , credenzas and tables. He flies drones and codes robots. These varied pastimes are the flipside of his intellectual interests, which also range far and wide. Mr Fukuyama sparkles with enthusiasm for 18th- and 19th-century social theory—thinkers such as Adam Smith , David Hume and Max Weber. His memoir offers a smorgasbord, with chapters on trust, human nature and the workings of large bureaucracies. And rather than confining his work to the pages of long books, he has turned into a prolific blogger and podcaster, embracing these demotic media rather than looking down on them sniffily.

In all this, Mr Fukuyama can stake a claim as one of America’s great public intellectuals of recent decades. He is certainly the most misunderstood. ■

Take our word for it

On September 14th the Emmy Awards celebrated big hits of the small screen. But the judges do not always get it right. (“The Wire”, one of the best tv shows of all time, never won during its five-season run.) Our critics have chosen the winners that do deserve their statuettes—not to mention hours of your time—and one show you should skip.

“The Diplomat”The third season of this ripping political thriller saw Grace Penn (Allison Janney, also one of the night’s winners) become president of the United States. The show explores ruthless pragmatism and marital tension, as characters weigh personal ambition and public duty.

“DTF St. Louis”Floyd has been found dead. In this mini-series the narrative toggles between a police investigation and past events, revealing Floyd’s friendship with Clark, a colleague; his strained relationship with wife Carol; and Clark’s and Carol’s affair. This intriguing tale of desire, secrecy and manipulation keeps you wondering: WTF?

“Hacks”Jean Smart has won five Emmys for playing Deborah Vance, a comedian. In the satisfying final season, Deborah has quit her late-night tv gig and is trying to rebuild her reputation—despite a non-compete clause and a restraining order barring her from performing.

“Mr Scorsese” A five-part documentary about one of America’s greatest film-makers. He reflects on his childhood in a Sicilian enclave in Manhattan, his former desire to become a priest and his infatuation with cinema. Yet this is no puff piece: Mr Scorsese talks openly about his professional failures and drug abuse.

“The Pitt”This addictive medical drama was a worthy winner of six Emmys this year. It has been called a “portrait of American failure”, but that is not quite right: social problems loom large, as they would in any good story about emergency medicine. Instead it celebrates people doing their best in the face of adversity.

“Slow Horses”This hit show follows fictional pariahs of MI5, Britain’s domestic-security service. Gary Oldman is superb as Jackson Lamb, the filthy, flatulent spy who oversees the motley crew of agents, as is Kristin Scott Thomas as Diana Taverner, a supremely competent, conniving but always cool-headed intelligence bureaucrat.

“Widow’s Bay”Tom Loftis is desperate to make something of Widow’s Bay, an island off the coast of New England. The mayor reckons it could be a tourist destination—the problem is, its inhabitants speak of bogeymen, curses and killer fog. This spooky comedy was the biggest winner, with 14 Emmys; Matthew Rhys made history with two lead acting prizes, one for his turn as Tom.

And what not to watch:

“Pluribus”An extraterrestrial signal leads to a reprogramming of humanity. Only a handful of people are unaffected by the “psychic glue” that binds the world’s population into a single consciousness. This creepy dystopia collected six Emmys and asks big, bold questions. But after the initial puzzle, it is disappointingly dull.■

The comeback of joined-up handwriting reflects research as well as culture

“BEWARE OF A man whose writing sways like a reed in the wind,” Confucius warned. The ancient philosopher would have been rather suspicious of many literary giants. Leo Tolstoy ’s handwriting was messy with a severe slant, leaving his manuscripts as dense and intricate as his epics. Ernest Hemingway ’s script sloped drunkenly down the page, no matter how little booze he had consumed.

This September, as pupils return to classrooms, the question of whether (and in which style) they should learn to write by hand is being debated by administrators, parents and teachers. You might assume such questions are obsolete in an age of iPads rather than parchment, but handwriting is not being written off. Cursive, a style with flowing, connected characters, is making a comeback.

America has looped back on loopy writing. In 2010 the country’s “Common Core” curriculum shunned cursive in favour of keyboard skills, but, since then, more than half of states have brought it back to the classroom. This school year Pennsylvania and New Jersey joined Texas, California, Florida and others in mandating the teaching of cursive in schools.

Other countries are underlining the importance of handwriting, too. Canadian and Argentine provinces have reinstated cursive or started teaching it at younger grades. In Britain, where cursive is taught around the age of seven, policymakers introduced a revamped “writing framework” in 2025 to improve handwriting instruction. Italy and Sweden are moving away from tablets and screens to use books and handwritten notes. In other places cursive has long been a coveted skill. In France educators often teach ornate cursive script; in Vietnam handwriting and calligraphy classes are surging in popularity.

Cursive suited the writing tools of the past. Scribes perfected pleasing penmanship so that documents were easy to read. Their quill lasted longer, and they got fewer ink blots, if they didn’t raise it from the page between letters. (Later, when metal tips and ballpoint pens became popular, simpler handwriting styles proliferated.) But now people have voice-dictation software and AI chatbots at their disposal. So why is cursive back in vogue?

Its return is supported by science. Lawmakers cite research about the benefits of handwriting on everything from memory to critical thinking and fine motor co-ordination. One oft-cited study by Audrey van der Meer, a neuroscientist at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, compared the brain activity of children and young adults when they were writing in cursive, drawing and typing. She found that the brain is engaged “in a completely different way” when handwriting and drawing, with scans showing activity in areas associated with learning and memory. Other studies have shown that cursive has other benefits, including boosting reading skills and spelling.

Yet fewer studies have directly compared cursive (joined) and print (unjoined) handwriting styles. Some scholars are sceptical that cursive is much better than any other sort of handwriting: it seems unlikely that “writing letters in a particular script should make you cognitively more capable”, says Steve Graham, a professor at Arizona State University. Perhaps the best case for writing in cursive is speed: some studies have found that writing in unbroken loops makes for faster writing, though others suggest that the speediest method is to mix joined and unjoined letters.

Cursive’s comeback is also about culture. People fret that youngsters will not be able to decipher their ancestors’ writing or historical documents written in cursive. In America people point to the penmanship of the constitution and Declaration of Independence . Being able to read this style makes for “informed and engaged” citizens, the argument goes—though typed versions are available.

Through handwriting you can trace history. Most scripts taught in schools evolved from cursive styles in Italy, Germany, France and Britain. With colonialism, sloping English round hand spread to America and India; France’s decorative écriture ronde went to parts of South America and Asia. The Nazis even meddled with note-taking: in 1941 Adolf Hitler banned gothic-looking German cursive and instead ordered schoolchildren to write in a simpler Latin script. The reason for the ban, scholars reckon, was to make communication uniform and more legible for people in occupied Europe.

Today’s educators have more modern concerns. Some people calling for cursive suggest emphasising handwriting could make it harder for students to use AI to do their homework. Teachers are keen to ensure chatbots do not replace writing for children, says Professor Graham, because “writing involves thinking.” It helps youngsters (and adults) organise information and come up with ideas.

Yet cursive consumes valuable lesson time. Some young teachers were not taught cursive properly themselves, notes Kathleen Wright of the Handwriting Collaborative in America, which means they need training and support. This time could instead be spent on other skills or teaching simpler styles of handwriting.

When students leave the classroom, their handwriting often changes anyway. Some continue with flowing, looping letters; others resort to squat, boxy scripts. After a few years working and typing, many find they can barely hold a pen any more. They wonder whether school taught them—and will teach their children—the write stuff. ■

As reading declines, ideas are spreading not by text but by spoken word

ONE YEAR after Charlie Kirk was shot dead in mid-flow, the conversation he began is continuing. On the anniversary of his murder, September 10th, allies of the conservative campaigner and debater are holding a rally five minutes’ walk from the scene of his killing at Utah Valley University. The event is the latest campus gathering organised by the group he founded, Turning Point USA, which seeks to help young liberals see the light (or, failing that, enrage them for clicks).

The ghastly circumstances of Kirk’s death—murdered in public, allegedly by a young man who will shortly stand trial—turbocharged his fame. But the movement he began is part of a bigger trend. As audiences ditch books and newspapers in favour of video clips and social feeds, the world is entering a new age of the orator.

Ideas that were once disseminated by headlines and columns are now being conveyed by TikToks and podcasts. As people spend more time absorbed in their screens and their AirPods, the human voice is making a comeback. That has consequences for how people communicate—and perhaps for the kinds of ideas that spread.

Kirk’s approach , sitting at a table beneath a sign challenging passersby to “Prove me wrong”, was reminiscent of a much earlier political culture. In the days when manuscripts were expensively copied out by scribes and read by a tiny elite, people wanting to share news or ideas had to do so orally. Only with the invention of printing and the spread of literacy did the masses start to get their information by text . Those seeking to sway others put away their soap-boxes and loudhailers and started writing pamphlets and articles instead.

Now there are signs that the 500-year trend towards text is sliding into reverse. People everywhere are sounding the alarm about a decline in reading . Parents struggle to cajole their children to pick up a book; professors despair that students cannot finish reading lists. Once they are adults, and no longer nagged by teachers or parents, many people stop reading altogether, relaxing not with a paperback but a vertical video feed. More than half of American adults say they have not read a single book for pleasure in the past year.

The panic is summed up in “The New Dark Ages”, a polemic by James Marriott, a bookish Times journalist. At 33, Mr Marriott is a contemporary of Kirk, though he has adopted media habits from another era, forgoing a smartphone and writing drafts on an electronic typewriter. He rounds up the evidence that reading is in decline, placing most of the blame on smartphones, “predators of our attention”. “ Dickens wrote in the reasonable belief that [his work] might be the most absorbing entertainment in your house—hence the average Dickens novel being about 800 pages,” writes Mr Marriott (who tucked into “Little Dorrit” for light relief while writing his book).

Drawing on Walter Ong, a cultural historian, Mr Marriott explains how writing allowed cultures to “externalise” their thoughts, making way for more complex ideas and allowing them to be laid open to dissection. Ong wrote that sophisticated mental processes, like logical reasoning and abstract categorisation, derive “not simply from thought itself but from text-formed thought”. Whereas oral delivery often employs a “backlooping” structure, the speaker rambling and repeating as they hone their argument on the go, writing allows for logically structured reasoning.

As audiences slip back to oral media, some of those pre-literate traits are back in fashion. The backlooping style, which is tedious on the page but helps spoken ideas to stick, has made a return thanks to the podcast: Joe Rogan, the world’s top podcaster, often natters away with his guests for three hours. Kirk was a master of the lightning rejoinder that on paper would be unpersuasive, but when delivered before a hyped-up crowd was an oratorical knockout punch. “Take responsibility for your orgasms, and stop eliminating people smaller than you!” he told a flummoxed pro-choice student in a debate on abortion a couple of weeks before his murder.

The oral turn also helps explain the success of politicians like Donald Trump , who by conventional standards is a dreadful communicator. Rather than construct arguments, Mr Trump has a tendency to pile up assertions: “We’ve achieved more than any administration in the history of our country…There’s no country in history that’s ever even been close…There’s never been anything like it, what’s happening in our country,” he said in a speech earlier this month. Such words defy belief when transcribed, yet Mr Trump has proved to be one of the great communicators of his time. Some have even compared his “tagging” of enemies—“crooked Hillary”, “sleepy Joe” and so on—to Homer , who used epithets like “ox-eyed Hera” and “crooked-counselled Cronos” to lodge characters in audiences’ minds.

All this is interesting for linguists. But it may have policy implications, too. Whereas written argument copes well with abstract ideas, oral delivery relies more on the concrete and the vivid. Sometimes this translates to actual policies. In his desire to project toughness on immigration Mr Trump conjured the idea of an actual wall—and so one was (partly) built. From Nayib Bukele’s mega-prison in El Salvador to Narendra Modi’s Hindu temple in Ayodhya , politicians who deal in concrete symbols as answers to abstract problems sometimes have to build them.

Some of the worry about the decline of reading is overdone. Anyone pining for the good old days of newspapers should read some from the 19th century, before advertisers and the need to appeal to mass readership forced journalists and editors to make fewer things up. Angry videos on social media can lead to online witch-hunts; starting in the 15th century, angry screeds published on the new presses fomented some actual witch-hunts. You only need go back a decade or so, to a time when Twitter was primarily a text-based platform, to see that written communication does not always lead to calm and nuanced debate.

Yet the drop-off in reading is disconcerting. As fewer people summon the patience to sit down with a long text, fewer will absorb the ideas that are conveyed best in writing. Great orators incite the passions, but great writers stir the mind. Kirk observed that “When people stop talking, really bad stuff starts.” He was all too right. But how much worse will it become as they stop reading? ■

A tiny, weeping, hamster-like creature has conquered East Asia

For a film that looks as if it was made for five-year-olds, the plot is surprisingly grim. Two islanders have eaten a mermaid and gained eternal life. A sea monster wants revenge. She inflicts terror on the island, devouring innocents and attacking visitors. Three big-eyed creatures armed with spear-like weapons are brought in to stop her. The smallest, Chiikawa—a white, hamster-like puffball—finds the task overwhelming and cries a lot.

“Chiikawa the Movie: The Secret of the Mermaid Island” is currently Japan’s hottest film. Ticket sales topped ¥10bn ($63m) in the month after its release on July 24th. But the craze is not confined to the cinema, nor to Japan. Fans buy Chiikawa toys; they binge on Chiikawa snacks, anime and manga. The character, whose full name translates to “something kind of small and cute”, is the latest Japanese kawaii (cute) creation to conquer East Asia.

Chiikawa emerged in a comic strip posted by Nagano, an illustrator, on social media in 2020. The strip went viral as it “filled the void in people’s hearts” during the pandemic, reckons Nakayama Atsuo, a sociologist. An anime series followed, as did a partnership with Miniso, a Chinese retail giant, which produced huge sales. In the past two years trains and metro stations in Hong Kong have been decorated with Chiikawa art. (As commuters passed through ticket barriers, they could even hear the character’s squeals.)

The appeal starts with the irresistible designs. Kawaii, from Hello Kitty to Pikachu , is one of Japan’s most successful cultural exports. Chinese social-media users call such characters “digital ibuprofen” for the comfort they provide.

Yet Chiikawa’s world is anything but painless. The characters scrape by in a gig economy. (One job they perform is weeding, which requires a licence; Chiikawa fails the exam despite studying hard.) There is body horror: friends can mutate into terrifying chimeras. Background characters are depicted as faceless grey shadows, evoking urban loneliness . “It’s cute but also dark—and that’s appealing,” says Arif Irsyad, a 22-year-old Malaysian visiting a Chiikawa shop in Tokyo.

In tough times, the characters’ friendships get them through. Chiikawa can barely speak, but the eloquent Hachiware understands them perfectly. In one episode the pair study ramen-ordering etiquette at an internet café, but when the server asks if they want garlic, Chiikawa bursts into tears. Hachiware orders for them both.

Many fans empathise with Chiikawa’s fragile state. The franchise “acknowledges this world is highly anxious”, says Jayson Chun, an academic. “And it tells you: ‘You know what? It’s okay to be anxious.’” ■

A new book explores the invaluable inventions you rarely think about

WANT TO have a frightening experience? Walk into any office full of workers who fear AI is about to make them obsolete and shout, “Sometimes it’s good when technology eliminates jobs!” The interval between furious cubicle-dwellers grabbing you and them finding a large window to dangle you from should be enough time to tell them about gong farmers. These unfortunate souls cleaned London’s human-waste receptacles and sold their contents to farmers. One of the Victorian era’s greatest technological innovations, sewers with pumping stations, put them out of business.

Few people today see sewers, pedestrian crossings, street grids or windows as technological innovations. That only testifies to their success. They are, instead, simply part of the fabric of urban life. In an informative, often funny compendium, Jonn Elledge, a columnist for the New Statesman, tries to awaken readers’ sense of wonder at the miracle of modern city life, and get them to appreciate the agglomeration of marvels that makes it possible.

Each chapter in “31 Inventions that Built Our World” is devoted to a different innovation. The book thus has a pleasantly digressive quality, aided by the author’s obvious fascination with cities and their evolution. Some inventions have a clear origin and are easily understood as technology, though their spread was not always rapid. Putting trains underground first happened in London in the mid-19th century: railway executives and other grandees took the first ride in January 1863. Where was the second underground rail system? Budapest, 33 years later.

Mr Elledge’s fondness for obscure trivia is among this book’s many delights: a single horse-drawn bus in Victorian London or New York, for example, produced around a third of a tonne of manure per day. The first general-use elevator appeared at a department store in New York in 1857, moving at an agonisingly slow speed of 20 centimetres per second.

The book’s most enlightening parts are devoted to two types of inventions. The first is the sort of thing so deeply ingrained in urban design that it seems more natural than invented. Consider when the first house was numbered: Mr Elledge cites Prescot Street, London, in 1708. The why of numbering is clear. It meant that postmen did not have to continue to find addresses like this (an actual example): “To my sister Jean, Up the Canongate, Down a Close, Edinburgh. She has a wooden leg.”

The second type of invention comprises those that through grinding, incremental progress have become immeasurably superior to their first incarnations. Anyone unlucky enough to have driven a Yugo might put cars in that category, but a better candidate is windows. From a pig bladder stretched over an opening in the wall to let in (very little) light to molten mixtures of limestone, sodium carbonate and sand to modern double-glazed windows of uniform thickness, “What was once…a technology available only to the richest and most godly, is now so ubiquitous that we, well, look right through it.” ■

How the steam- and gas-powered Linotype sparked a cultural revolution

A century-and-a-half ago, a news revolution was under way. Information travelled at the speed of electricity, via telegraph . Steam-powered presses churned out books and newspapers. Railways distributed them farther and faster. Paper made of wood pulp was much cheaper than the old type made of rags (once so in demand that several European countries classed used bloomers as a strategic asset, banning their export).

One piece of the mass-media puzzle was missing. Almost every part of publishing was mechanised, but typesetting was as slow and expensive as ever. Each lead letter had to be manually placed, little differently from when Gutenberg invented the press four centuries earlier. Laying out a single page of a book took two hours; spectators paid to watch speed-typesetting tournaments , with stars such as a New York Times man known as the Velocipede.

“Hot Type” is the story of the Linotype, a steam- and gas-powered machine that mechanised typesetting and thereby enabled the mass-media revolution of the following century. Jeff Jarvis, a journalist-turned-academic, has written a perceptive and entertaining history of a device whose name is unknown to many, but which changed the world.

Ottmar Mergenthaler, the Linotype’s inventor, arrived in Baltimore in 1872 with a single suitcase, $30 and a silver watch. Short and pallid with ginger whiskers, the young German had trained as a watchmaker and knew nothing of printing. This may have helped: whereas others had tried to mechanise the arrangement of the fiddly letters, the Linotype bypassed the job by moulding whole lines of type on the fly, in hot metal. A molten soup of lead, antimony and tin was poured into letter matrices selected by the operator via a keyboard. The process—accompanied by a “bewitching industrial jazz of clicks, pings, whirrs and thumps”, as Mr Jarvis puts it—was four times faster than composing by hand.

Others had tried and failed, with gadgets resembling “pianos, organs, harps, looms, lyres, carousels, and Gatling guns”. Thomas Edison invented an electric pen to perforate paper and create stencils; it did not catch on but was adapted to be the first electric tattoo needle. Mark Twain , who started out as a typesetter, invested millions in today’s terms into a rival machine, the Paige Compositor. With more than 18,000 parts, the Paige was delicate and temperamental; its failure contributed to the eventual bankruptcy of Twain, who described it as “a monument of human ingenuity and stupidity”.

The Linotype spread quickly. The New York Tribune winched its first one up to its ninth-floor office in 1886, and by 1900 the machine was in use in practically all large newspapers in America. For most of the 20th century it set the type in the majority of books and newspapers around the world. It made media truly massive. In the latter half of the 19th century, the number of newspapers and periodicals in America grew from 2,526 to 18,226; New York alone had 46 dailies in 1900. The four-page newspapers of the hand-press days ballooned into 48-pagers, stuffed with supplements.

Mass media meant different media. Rollo Ogden, who became editor of the New York Times, observed in 1906 how the scale of investment required for modernisation made newspapers “more of an institution” and less the creature of their proprietor: “No single personality can stamp itself upon the whole organism. It is too vast.” Whereas 19th-century newspapers were partisan, those in the 20th century sought the attention of the masses, which meant cultivating at least an air of objectivity —though chasing audiences also encouraged sensationalism. Scale led to more advertising and, with it, national brands like Kodak and Campbell’s.

Mergenthaler died in 1899, aged just 45. But his Linotype remained in use (with some modifications) for a century. In Britain powerful, stubborn unions kept it around until Rupert Murdoch ’s digital revolution in 1986.

Mr Jarvis’s history helps illuminate the present moment. Scepticism of technology is not new. Early print media were mistrusted because their provenance was less certain than voice or written manuscript. A contributor to the Atlantic Monthly in 1904 worried that the typewriter’s “indiscriminate use [may lead] to a degeneration in literary style”. The Atlanta Constitution argued that “You can’t turn out thought by machinery.” Some detected in early mechanised typesetters a kind of artificial intelligence . “Like a living being,” marvelled the New York Herald, in 1862. “Like brain turned into brass.” ■

The season is imperilled by climate change. It was nice while it lasted

You tip out the sand from the suitcases and stash them in the attic. The days are shortening; children trudge unwillingly back to school. Gloaty out-of-office emails no longer dominate your inbox. In the northern hemisphere, summer is ending—and, it increasingly seems, not just this year’s summer.

For the idea of summer cherished in the West, and immortalised in songs and films, may be moribund too. The crackle of possibility on the season’s first warm day; the hazy sense, in lush midsummer, of getting away with something; the storing up of memories to revisit in bleaker times, like power in a solar battery: as the past few broiling months demonstrate, this version of summer—precious, fleeting and electric—is gravely imperilled by climate change.

The Platonic summer is a carefree interlude between responsibilities, stretching out languorously like Dustin Hoffman on his lilo in “The Graduate” . Nothing happens, then everything does. You meet new people or become someone new yourself, saying goodbye to old schools, jobs and friends and diving into the future. Life changes when you carry a watermelon to a party in the Catskills. The days seem to last for ever, as Bryan Adams crooned—and oh, those summer nights—yet the season passes in a flash.

Or it did. As the planet warms, summer is lengthening. By 2100 it will last six months in the northern hemisphere, reckons one projection. “Summer’s lease hath all too short a date,” Shakespeare lamented; soon lyricists may yearn for it to end, like Russians desperate for the thaw. “It’s been a long hot stifling summer,” a band of the future may trill. “Here comes the snow.”

Even as it stretches interminably, though, summer may get shorter, at least for some schoolchildren. Extreme temperatures are scrambling the academic calendar, forcing administrators to rejig start and finish dates. Some pupils may wind up with longer breaks in the spring and autumn, when the weather is mild enough to enjoy, and a briefer one in between. There may be less mooching around in summer, eating parents out of house and home and seeming to grow by the hour; fewer weeks to spend getting into harmless scrapes or (say) trying to make Boo Radley come out.

Vacations will evolve. For decades, British hordes have occupied stretches of southern Europe in July and August. They party in Magaluf or Mykonos , or ogle the art in Italy and Greece, discovering antiquity or (like the daring heroine of “Shirley Valentine”) the locals and themselves. Alas, it is becoming too hot to bake on Balearic beaches in high summer, or drag offspring around the Acropolis. These jaunts will drift to April or October, predicts research for the European Commission. Summertime dramas will instead unfold in Scandinavia or Wales.

The Mediterranean won’t be the only victim. Droughts, wildfires and flash floods, not to mention ticks and toxic algae, will redraw the tourist map elsewhere. Island idylls face coastal erosion and fiercer hurricanes. What happens in Vegas may still stay in Vegas, but it won’t happen outside in July. The cooler resorts of New England will be thronged; if “ Jaws ” were set in 2050, Amity Island would be succulently overrun.

Summer will move indoors. This will have an upside: scalding streets will deter loitering, leaving less chance of tempers flaring and tensions boiling over. But much will be lost. The time won’t be right for dancing in the street if the asphalt is melting. In Asbury Park, relates Bruce Springsteen , “the boys from the casino dance with their shirts open like Latin lovers along the shore.” In future they may huddle inside in the air-conditioning. Fire risks will restrict campfires, and thus flame-lit singalongs, spooky tales and heart-to-hearts.

Romance is sure to suffer. Summer loving has always happened fast, as Danny and Sandy attest in “Grease”, but it will have to hurry even more if the heat traps you inside till nightfall. More flesh will be covered up as people worry about skin damage. It may be too stifling under the boardwalk for canoodling.

Technology has already warped the shape of summer and sanctity of getaways, bleeding work and leisure together. The kids can still push daddy into the pool , just after he finishes his Zoom call. But the coming overhaul will be more drastic. Hallowed summer habits—music festivals and garden parties, stayaway camps and fireside s’mores—may one day be relics of a bygone age, like bathing machines and penny slots. Farewell summer. It was nice while it lasted. ■

Over a quarter of young film actors in America have a parent in entertainment

WHEN LILY COLLINS, a daughter of Phil Collins, a rock star, was starting out as an actor, agents asked her: “Well, what makes you so special? Everybody in LA is a cousin or a daughter of someone.” She was later cast as the irritating star of “ Emily in Paris ”, a hit TV show.

Hollywood crawls with “nepo babies” (as the offspring of famous folk are called). Over the past five years Google searches for “nepo babies in Hollywood” have been at least 50 times higher than they were in the previous half-decade. Look around, and you see them everywhere. At least ten films currently showing in American cinemas feature them: there’s Maya Hawke, daughter of Ethan Hawke and Uma Thurman (in “One Night Only”), and Margaret Qualley, daughter of Andie MacDowell (in “The Dog Stars”).

But how many nepo babies are there, really? Giggster, an online film-location marketplace, has looked at American films released between 2000 and 2025. It compiled a list of some 4,400 actors under the age of 35 who had appeared in them, then worked out who had at least one parent already working professionally in entertainment. Across the 25-year period, 28% of these actors did. Nepo babies are commanding more roles and more lines. In 2000 they made up 6.6% of appearances by young actors, but by 2025 that share had more than doubled, to 16.3%.

Another recent study by Stephen Follows, a film-data analyst, found that this is an industry-wide trend. He drew up a list of almost 7,000 people who had written, directed or starred in the 100 highest-grossing films each year since 2000. He then looked at whether a close relative was already working in film or television. Some 28% of top-billed actors, 26% of directors and 18% of writers had a family tie. Most big films—70%—had at least one nepo baby in an important creative role.

There may be a couple of reasons why Hollywood is keeping it in the family. One could be that connections are becoming more important in show business. The barriers to entry are lower than in the past—actors can submit an audition tape from anywhere—meaning that gatekeepers have a trickier job. Pre-existing networks are a fast way to vet aspiring stars.

Another reason is marketing. In the competition for people’s attention, studios are looking for ways to set their films apart—and casting a nepo baby can generate buzz. For example, Michael Gandolfini was cast in a prequel to “The Sopranos” after his father, the star of the original series, died; and Ms MacDowell and Ms Qualley were cast as mother and daughter in “Maid”, a mini-series.

Nepo babies often attract derision. Many see them as evidence that Hollywood values big names over big talent. Michael and Zak Zakar, twin brothers who are writers and actors and hosted a podcast called “Wish I Was A Nepo Baby”, argue that well-connected youngsters who are “fucking atrocious” at acting aren’t landing great roles for any other reason but bloodline. Nepotism especially rankles in an industry where the rewards are immense but the opportunities scarce . “It’s hard to get auditions,” the Zakar twins say. “It’s hard to get callbacks.”

Some see nepo babies as part of a broader trend in entertainment: a reliance on proven hits. Evan Shapiro, a producer, reckons nepotism is a symptom of a lack of originality in Hollywood. He argues that it shapes not only how some firms are run—media companies such as Fox are led by the sons of their former chief executives, for example—but also what they choose to make. “The incestuous nature of hiring practices” is resulting in “the Habsburgs’ chin” of entertainment: it is “why mainstream media is impotent today. It’s why they can no longer produce new ideas.” (Anyone who has sat through a film with a “4”, “5” or “6” in the title may agree.)

But higher-ups in Hollywood defend nepo babies. “I actually think nepotism…is incredibly helpful,” says one senior executive at a talent agency. “People who grow up in and around the business—they just know what they’re getting into. They have a good mindset.” If an aspiring actor has family connections, “they might get a look faster”, but “ultimately, if they’re not good, they’re never going to go anywhere.”

Many of today’s most beloved (and bankable) actors—including Jennifer Aniston and George Clooney —had those connections. And some nepo babies insist they have to be extra talented to be taken seriously. “You have to work almost twice as hard and be twice as good,” Gwyneth Paltrow, the daughter of a film-maker and actress, has said. “People are ready to pull you down and say you don’t belong there.”

Dynasties are not unique to entertainment. In “The Field Guide to Nepo Babies” Fran Hoepfner, a journalist, notes that in the 17th century the Italian word nepotismo referred to popes’ habit of making cardinals of their nearest and dearest. This happened so often “that these promoted papal nephews had their own name: cardinalis nepos”. (Nepos, in Latin, means “nephew” or “grandson”.) In plenty of businesses, the heir apparent is the boss’s eldest child. Lots of children admire their parents and want to follow in their footsteps. Still, no one objects when a mechanic’s son becomes a mechanic, whereas some may bristle at the casting of Sandra Bullock’s daughters in “Practical Magic 2”.

In a business like Hollywood, access will always matter. For a lucky few, a Rolodex of agents, producers and directors is part of their inheritance. ■

A new show at the British Museum will focus the world’s attention on a medieval marvel

FROM LED ZEPPELIN to David Bowie , London has welcomed plenty of famous acts for what was billed as a once-in-a-lifetime performance. Now a colourful, ancient piece of linen roughly the length of a Boeing 747 has raised the bar. It is back in England for the first time in around 950 years. Its run at the British Museum, which opens on September 10th, is being heralded as a once-in-a-millennium show.

And with good reason. The Bayeux tapestry enjoys something akin to rock-star status. This summer it has been the hottest ticket in Britain. When spots went on sale in July, they sold out almost as fast as you can say “William the Conqueror”. (More tickets, for January to July 2027, have yet to be released.) Around 1m people are expected to see the tapestry in London while it is on loan from the French state , making it one of the best-attended museum exhibitions in British history.

Most would say that, as the only surviving medieval artwork of its size, the Bayeux tapestry is priceless. But as part of a government indemnity scheme, Britain’s Treasury has put a figure on it, insuring the tapestry for £800m ($1.1bn). That is on a par with the highest value for a travelling artwork ever made public: the $100m assigned to the “ Mona Lisa ” when it travelled to America in 1962-63, worth $1.1bn today.

Like da Vinci’s painting, the Bayeux tapestry is a masterpiece whose power depends, at least in part, on its mystery. But there is not one main question, as there is with the smiling (or would you say unsmiling?) “Mona Lisa”. Instead, the tapestry raises dozens of questions that the centuries have complicated. Some of the central ones—who stitched it, why and its intended destination—are disputed still. “If you ask ten different historians working on the period, you might get ten different answers,” says Benjamin Pohl, a professor at the University of Bristol, who published a paper suggesting that it may have been designed as mealtime reading for monks.

A few facts are undisputed. The tapestry depicts William the Bastard-turned-Conqueror’s triumph in the Norman conquest of 1066 . (Some call this the last time England was successfully invaded; others point to the largely bloodless arrival of another William, of Orange, in 1688.) You can recognise the Normans by their gauche hairstyle—with long locks and the back of their heads shaved—while the English sport moustaches. (Only one of those looks has aged well.)

The tapestry, probably commissioned by Bishop Odo of Bayeux to celebrate the victory of William, his half-brother, is a piece of war propaganda that looks like an ancient comic strip. Many scholars think it was made in Canterbury in the 1070s-80s before travelling to Bayeux, to hang in Odo’s cathedral. It offers an intricate, sometimes wandering account of a broken promise and ascent to power that changed England’s royal line, class structure and the English language itself.

It begins with Edward the Confessor, England’s childless king, telling Harold Godwinson, a nobleman, to travel to Normandy. When he is there, he befriends William and appears to give an oath that William should inherit the crown. But when Edward dies, Harold breaks that promise and claims the throne. Even the cosmos seems to object: Halley’s comet blazes across the sky in a portent of doom. The resulting battle is nasty, brutish and not very short by medieval standards (lasting about nine hours), with stripped corpses, felled horses, flying arrows and pointed suffering. Harold is killed. English troops flee. And next…

The “next” is yet another mystery. How the tapestry was meant to end is unknown: the last bit is missing. “It could have gone on for a few centimetres or a few metres,” says Professor Pohl. Many assume it concluded with William’s coronation on Christmas Day. But no one can be sure. A competition has invited children to imagine and stitch a conclusion.

Those lucky enough to get up close to the tapestry have about 70 metres of details to take in. The linen teems with 737 animals and 627 people (only three of whom, in the main embroidery, are women). There are the Latin phrases, the Aesop’s fables in the margins, the bizarrely prominent genitalia. The significance of the tapestry is not just in the details, however, but in what its story and survival reveal about history, objects and memory.

Take the unknowns, for instance. “Things where you have to fill in the blanks are more alluring,” insists Nick Cullinan, director of the British Museum. “The fact that there’s something missing invites you in…to engage with it and think about why it was made, what’s missing, and what that means.” Think of everyone who flocks to the armless “Venus de Milo” in the Louvre. Was she once carrying an apple, or modestly trying to reach so the drapery would not slip below her hips? The absent limbs keep people guessing.

There is also the question of why it is even called a tapestry at all when it is really an embroidery (the former requiring a loom, the latter done by hand). But that is a mystery only for the uninitiated: a French scholar in the 18th century called it a tapisserie (tapestry), and it stuck. “It was a bloke not knowing the difference between his weaving and his embroidery,” says Leonie Hicks, a professor at Canterbury Christ Church University.

Study the tapestry long enough and it will make you consider deeper questions, too, such as who determines people’s understanding of the past. (This is an idea pored over by plenty of historians and the wisest of sources, “ Hamilton ”: one song in the musical is called “Who Lives, Who Dies, Who Tells Your Story?”) Maybe a decade, and possibly more, elapsed between the end of the Battle of Hastings and when the tapestry was made: how much rumour and hearsay are woven into it as a result?

And then there were those in the 19th century, armed with needles and thread, who set about “fixing” it. Everyone who has heard of the year 1066 knows that Harold was eighty-sixed by an arrow to the eye. But was he? The earliest studies of the tapestry do not show that an arrow was involved. What you see on the tapestry is the work of a restorer, who may have taken creative liberties. Michael Lewis, a lead curator of the British Museum’s exhibition and co-author of “The Story of the Bayeux Tapestry”, thinks the arrow was an “accidental addition” by restorers in the 19th century, who were basing their work on a drawing from the 1720s that had included the arrow.

Further embellishments may exist elsewhere, especially towards the end. “The arrow to the eye is probably the most famous and important one,” but there are others reconstructed in “an imaginative way”, says Dr Lewis, including a man wrapped up in vines. A lesson of the Bayeux tapestry, then, is that history is written not just by the victors, but by the restorers.

For when these fixers set about their work in the 19th century, much had been lost to them already. The historical record is funny like that: how grains of humour and information are worn down by tides of time. The result is that some scenes are now impossible to decode. The most perplexing one features the only named woman, Aelfgyva, in a doorway, speaking to a cleric who is either caressing or striking her. Nearby a naked man squats, mirroring the priest’s gesture.

It may have been a sexual scandal so familiar that it required no explanation. It makes you wonder which modern inside jokes and references will still be understood 900 years from now. Will anyone remember Monica Lewinsky?

One of the most notable things about the tapestry, beyond the sheer unlikelihood of its survival—including almost being used as wagon covers during the French revolution—is that so many leaders have esteemed it for different reasons. Napoleon displayed it in Paris at the Musée Napoléon (now known as the Louvre) to drum up public support for his campaigns and encourage people to enlist. The Nazis eyed it as a chronicle of Aryan supremacy and even stole small fragments of it, which Germany returned this year.

Now it is the turn of Emmanuel Macron, the French president, to use the tapestry for a different goal: to strengthen Anglo-French ties . The hard-fought loan to the British Museum seemed a long shot. Five previous attempts to borrow and exhibit it in London (including on the 900th anniversary of the conquest) resulted in British defeat. But Mr Macron triumphed where others failed, overcoming the concerns of some French curators that shipping the delicate tapestry would lead to damage. It helped that the Bayeux Museum, its usual home, was embarking on a long-overdue renovation.

On September 2nd Mr Macron and King Charles III met at the British Museum to view the tapestry and celebrate the loan. Champagne was noticeably not on offer, but English sparkling wine flowed. So did the jokes. It could have been called “the Canterbury tapestry”, King Charles mused. Mr Macron noted the tapestry’s portrayal of wine being loaded onto Norman ships bound for battle in England: “the French always having certain priorities”. It was a celebratory evening of good lines and great moods.

The fragile tapestry looks rather stronger than politicians in this day and age. Sir Keir Starmer, who negotiated the loan, is now out. The year “1066 was not the only time we had a rapid succession of leaders,” quipped George Osborne, a British former politician who is now chair of the British Museum. Mr Macron will leave office next year and is sure to see the loan as one of his signature achievements.

In short, national borders, allegiances and hairstyles may change over the centuries, but objects are still important in diplomacy. Later this year, in exchange for borrowing the tapestry, several works from the British Museum’s collection will travel to France. Though the French asked for the Rosetta Stone , they had to settle for other treasures, such as medieval chess pieces.

As for how to play the game to secure a coveted ticket to the exhibition, many are going to lose. The tapestry is being laid flat and stretched out in a straight line: you have to hover over a clear case to see it. This limits the number of people who can go through, as do French rules on how much light it can be exposed to in a single day. “We could sell this exhibition out many, many times over,” says Mr Cullinan of the British Museum. “We want as many people to see it as possible, but we want everyone who comes to have a really positive experience.”

For those who miss out in London, they can travel to Bayeux once the museum reopens and see the celebrated tapestry there. Many Brits are surely already plotting their Norman invasion. ■

As corporate sponsors retreat, rich aesthetes rush in

One name gets top billing at the Bayeux tapestry show at the British Museum, and it’s not William the Conqueror. It is Igor Tulchinsky, the boss of WorldQuant, an asset-management firm. He is the only listed sponsor, so the blockbuster show is “presented by” him. He reportedly stumped up £5m ($6.8m).

In Britain individual patrons are in. At museums and art galleries, their names are increasingly visible. Whereas high culture in continental Europe is still largely state-funded, Britain is moving closer to the American model of private support for creators and curators.

Patrons’ rise partly reflects a squeeze on public funding. Tate, a group of galleries, received £56m in 2009-10 and £54m in 2024-25: a fall of about a third in real terms. The British government urges museums to foster a “culture of giving”, like their American peers. Museums—particularly those with free admission—have had to up their fundraising game.

Individual donors are also, to some extent, replacing corporate sponsors. Research by Arts and Business, a charity, found that corporate backing for culture in Britain fell for four straight years after 2007, when the global financial crisis began. And as anti-corporate protests grow bolder, such sponsorship is more likely to bring bad publicity for donor and recipient alike. BP, an oil firm , was once a prominent sponsor of culture in Britain. But museums and galleries, being open to the public, are soft targets for activists , who have tarred and feathered the entrance to the Tate (using a non-toxic tar substitute) and posted a spoof exhibit at the British Museum on plans to drill for oil under Stonehenge .

All of which has made private patrons more appealing. Big institutions have brought in specialists to woo them. In 2024-25, 15 national museums in Britain brought in £1.2bn through fundraising—three times their haul in 2023-24. Most are screening donors more carefully, too. The National Gallery has a committee to investigate “ethical and reputational issues” associated with gifts.

Patrons enjoy all kinds of benefits. Their donations can sometimes attract tax breaks. Being associated with a prestigious museum confers status, which some rich people apparently crave. And many donors simply love the arts and are happy to bankroll them.

Many are eager to support specific causes they hold dear, says Clarissa Levi, an art lawyer. Mr Tulchinsky has said that the “symmetries and proportions” in the Bayeux tapestry appeal to his quantitative sensibilities. However, he was impelled to support the exhibition by his belief in the importance of education, shaped by his own experience of moving to America from Soviet Belarus as a child. His donation will pay for learning materials for schools in the hope that “bringing young people face-to-face with this extraordinary artefact will create a lasting impact.”

There can be drawbacks to relying on philanthropists. Being human, they may be fickle or bossy. The National Gallery says it relies on private support to help fund “several senior curatorial posts”, among other things. Pushy billionaire donors might withdraw support for curators they do not like or try to have shows they disagree with axed.

The history of art is full of overweening patrons. Michelangelo had to deal with one who, being pope, thought he was infallible, which was annoying. But the great advantage of rich individuals is that, by contrast with governments, there are plenty to choose from. ■

His new book is timely but less of Agrippa, as you might say, than previous works

HOW OFTEN, runs a popular meme, do men think about the Roman Empire? For the British novelist Robert Harris, the answer would seem to be: every few years. Mr Harris’s first foray into the Roman period, with “Pompeii” (2003), came about because he wanted to write a dystopian novel about America. After stumbling upon a newspaper article about excavations at Pompeii, he decided that the Roman period offered a better way to satirise the complacency of a decadent superpower. He later wrote a bestselling trilogy of novels based on the life of Cicero, the last of which was published in 2015, charting the erosion of democratic norms in the dying days of the Roman Republic.

His historical thrillers consider past eras that mirror present-day concerns. “Act of Oblivion” (2022), about the national self-harm of the English civil war, has strong Brexit overtones; “An Officer and a Spy” (2013), about the Dreyfus affair, has parallels with internet-era surveillance, paranoia and whistleblowing. His thrillers set in the present day have led to popular screen adaptations, notably “The Ghost Writer” (2010) and “Conclave” (2024).

After more than a decade, Mr Harris has now returned to ancient Rome in a new novel, written from the perspective of Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa, the lifelong friend and general of Octavian (the future emperor, Augustus). The low-born Agrippa and aristocratic Octavian were boyhood friends and, as in many of Mr Harris’s novels, his narrator’s outsider perspective helps the reader navigate what may be an unfamiliar historical milieu.

It is a time of chaos, with the Roman world riven by internal conflict. Power and loyalty matter above all, and people will do anything to remain in the supreme leader’s good graces, even if that means abandoning their principles or trampling long-standing rules. Political appointments depend on family connections and marital ties. To impose peace and order, the emperor claims he must centralise power.

The modern parallels hardly need to be pointed out, which may explain the current resurgence of interest in Roman history. But few people want to wade through all six volumes of Edward Gibbon. Hence the vogue for repackaging Roman history for mainstream consumption—from the spectacle of “Gladiator 2” to the rebranding of Marcus Aurelius’s “Meditations” as a self-help book.

“Agrippa” is the latest example. As wars and intrigues rage, readers follow the ebb and flow of Agrippa’s friendship and unspoken rivalry with Octavian. Initially he rarely questions whether staying close to power and helping his friend pick off his enemies are the right things to do. Yet eventually he wonders whether his loyalty to Octavian has cost him his honour.

For much of the book Mr Harris seems hamstrung by his choice to frame his story as an end-of-life memoir written by Agrippa, depicted as a no-nonsense soldier who disdains politics and is happiest on a battlefield. In an afterword, Mr Harris says the inspiration for his characterisation was the matter-of-fact inscription on Agrippa’s most prominent surviving legacy, the Pantheon in Rome, which essentially says “Agrippa made this”. Not a man for literary flourishes, in short.

As a result “Agrippa” lacks the wit and wordplay of Mr Harris’s Cicero novels. But it gets going in its final third, as Octavian becomes Emperor Augustus. By this time Agrippa has gained some political savvy, but is also inescapably bound to Augustus by the ruthless acts they have committed to maintain his grip on power. Agrippa starts to consider how the world might look if he had made different choices—a question heightened by a clever plot twist.

Ultimately his choice of narrator means this swords-and-sandals tale does not quite result in the philosophical meditation on friendship, loyalty and power that Mr Harris aimed for. But the author’s many fans will welcome this return to the Harris Ciceronic Universe. And for everyone else, Mr Harris’s novels provide an enjoyable primer on the grandeur that was Rome. ■

Villainy, facilitated by enablers who helped them thrive, as two new books show

BIOGRAPHICALLY, the two men could not be more different. One is a worldly Venezuelan polyglot, the son of a champagne communist who named him and his brothers after a “hero” of the Soviet revolution. The other was the son of a violent refinery worker; he grew up in a shabby one-bedroom house in south-eastern Texas and volunteered for Lyndon Johnson’s presidential campaign. The former became the most notorious terrorist of the 20th century and is living out the end of his days in a prison outside Paris. The other cycled through jails, wives and multiple personae before dying, overweight and alone, in a nursing home near Dallas in 2020.

Both are the subjects of new biographies that illuminate the systems and circumstances that help villains thrive. The terrorist, Ilich Ramírez Sánchez (pictured, left), was a Marxist-Leninist and early practitioner of terrorist spectacle, motivated by leftist politics and self-enrichment. After lobbing a grenade into a crowd in Paris in 1974, leaving two dead and 34 wounded, then killing two policemen, he acquired a sobriquet—Carlos the Jackal—from the first name used in a false passport and a spy novel found in an apartment where he had stayed.

He was behind several headline-grabbing attacks in the 1970s and 80s, which included occupying OPEC’s headquarters in Vienna, launching rockets at Israeli planes, bombing buildings and trains in France with the aim of freeing his future wife from prison and bombing Radio Free Europe’s headquarters in Munich. In 1994 the CIA finally captured him in Khartoum and handed him over to France, where he is currently serving three life sentences.

Mr Sánchez is a type probably familiar to anyone who attended university: the spoiled rich boy who embraces leftist politics to make himself a hero. He championed Marxism, Palestinian liberation and, later, “revolutionary Islam” while indulging his tastes for luxury, booze, women and violence. One former confrère noted he took “pure pleasure in killing”. He boasted to Joby Warrick, the book’s author and a veteran national-security reporter for the Washington Post, “I killed 83 people…Another thousand were killed on my orders.”

Why did he become a murderous terrorist rather than just a petty criminal or shouting serial demonstrator with a few ill-advised piercings? Because he found his way to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), a Marxist group, just as its co-founder, Wadie Haddad, embraced terrorist spectacle as a tactic. “We must become…a bacillus that gets under the skin of the developed world,” Haddad told a subordinate. That attitude let Sánchez play revolutionary hero while indulging his bloodlust on a global stage.

The protagonist of Pamela Colloff’s “Catch the Devil” also benefited from enablers—not other outlaws, as with the Jackal, but those operating within the legal system. Paul Skalnik (pictured, right) was charged with grand theft, larceny, forgery, sexual assault of a child and more. He served far less time than he should have because he made himself useful to police and prosecutors: other inmates seemed to have an uncontrollable urge to confess their crimes to him in private. Snitching on fellow jailbirds can reduce an inmate’s sentence, which is why police and prosecutors should treat such revelations with caution.

Skalnik lived in Pinellas County, Florida, at a time when the chief prosecutor pursued what Ms Colloff calls “a law-and-order agenda whose mandate was to put away as many people as possible for as long as possible”. His testimony won several people execution sentences, including Jim Dailey, a hometown hero-turned-alcoholic after serving in Vietnam , who appears in Ms Colloff’s account to be innocent but remains on Florida’s death row at the age of 80.

Both Skalnik and Mr Sánchez benefited from systems that rewarded their deepest, worst impulses. Maybe each would have found their way to mischief anyway. But readers cannot help wonder several things. What if police and prosecutors had been just a little more sceptical of a man who seemed to provide perfect information on demand? And what if the PFLP had sent Carlos packing? Ms Colloff’s tale is more an indictment of a system than a pure biography, as Mr Warrick’s is. But both books are terrific tales: difficult not to devour in a single setting, and difficult not to wrestle with for days afterwards. ■

A gruelling mix of running and strength-training has people working up a sweat

INside Strawberry Arena, a cavernous stadium in Stockholm, thousands of chiselled men and women are puffing and slick with sweat. A few are the colour of the fruit. And little wonder: they have run a kilometre, covered the same distance on a ski-training machine, then run again. Between laps of the stadium they have also rowed , lunged, done burpees, carried kettlebells, pushed and pulled a sled and lobbed a medicine ball. A respectable race time is about 90 minutes; the fittest strive to finish in under an hour.

This cross between a relay race and high-intensity interval training is called Hyrox. (The name is believed to be a portmanteau of “hybrid”—a reference to its mix of cardio and strength exercises—and “rock star”, to make it seem cool.) To the unathletic, it may all sound nauseating. But Hyrox claims to be the “fastest-growing mass-participation fitness concept in the world”. At the first race, in Hamburg in 2017, some 650 people took part. In the 2026-27 season more than 2m will compete across six continents. September alone features events in 12 cities, including Athens, Mumbai and Washington.

The format has certainly set pulses racing. The hashtag #hyrox has been viewed more than 500m times on Instagram and TikTok. Peloton, a home-exercise firm, offers Hyrox training classes. Later this year a four-day European cruise will allow athletes to train at sea, with tickets for a cabin starting at a bracing £2,200 ($3,000). There is a Hyrox dating app and bank card. “Hyrox is not just a race or an event,” one acolyte proclaims online. “Hyrox is a lifestyle.”

The hype is partly explained by a boom in gym culture: men and women are pumping iron more than they used to. Across America, Britain and Europe, fitness-club memberships have reached a record high. Isabella Helm, a 25-year-old trainee accountant, loves Hyrox and trains six days a week in London: “You get addicted to feeling fitter and stronger.”

Hyrox adds a social element to what is generally a solitary pursuit. There is also the adrenalin rush that comes with competition. Leaderboards foster friendly rivalry. Athletes can race solo, in pairs or teams; friends can pay to watch on in comfort from the stands.

Participants often turn races into mini-holidays. As the format spreads across the globe, there is no shortage of new destinations to visit. Danny and Zoe Rae are British influencers who, like a number of couples, combine races with recreation and doing “something nice”. “It’s a great way to travel,” Mr Rae avers.

The sport attracts racers of all ages. The average age of participants is 36, but the oldest at the world championships in Stockholm was 75. Laura Hitt trains several older people at her gym in Exeter, in south-west England. She says that “it’s one of the most accessible sports I’ve been part of.” Hyrox is kinder on the body than other fitness races—such as CrossFit, which peaked in popularity in the 2010s—because it does not require complex weightlifting. This may explain why it appeals to retired athletes as well as hobbyists.

Will Hyrox run out of breath? Some grumble that tickets are scarce and cost upwards of £150—even without accounting for travel, hotels and months of gym fees. But Moritz Fürste, the co-founder of Hyrox (and an Olympic-medal-winning hockey player), believes the format has room to grow, and hopes it will be included in the Olympics in 2032. He concedes that it is expensive, but that demand is still far exceeding supply. “It’s like tennis and golf ,” he observes: “Once it becomes your sport, you’ll keep coming back.” ■

Shakespeare and Company in Paris is turning 75. Is its success replicable?

THE SUMMER afternoon was hot, but no one in the queue seemed bothered. Dozens were patiently waiting to enter Shakespeare and Company, a storied bookshop perched on the left bank of the Seine opposite Notre Dame cathedral. “That’s where Shakespeare wrote for a while,” a passerby informed her friends. No one corrected her—discretion being the better part of valour and all.

“The myth-telling is fascinating,” says Sylvia Whitman, who runs the English-language bookshop with her partner. “It adds to the house of stories that a bookshop can be.” She has heard it all: that Shakespeare, who never left England, resided here, or that Sylvia Plath , another poet, founded it.

In fact, Shakespeare and Company was launched by Ms Whitman’s father, George, 75 years ago this month (first under the name Le Mistral). It is probably the most famous bookshop in the world, enjoying a halo from its proximity to some of literature’s patron saints. Around 2,000-3,000 people visit each day—nearly 1m a year—spurred by the shop’s hundreds of thousands of social-media followers. It claims more impressive screen credits than many actors, having appeared in Woody Allen’s “ Midnight in Paris ”, Richard Linklater’s “Before Sunset” and a French film, “Jane Austen Wrecked My Life”. A hit TV series, “ Emily in Paris ”, asked to feature it, but Ms Whitman declined. The bookshop already contends with so many selfie-snappers.

How does a books-and-mortar shop withstand three-quarters of a century and still get people to queue to enter? One answer is a clever approach to social media. Photos and videos are prohibited inside. This enhances the shop’s mystique among those who while away hours on Instagram and TikTok . “You can’t see what it looks like online, so that’s kind of cool,” says Hannah, a literature student from England who had come to take in “the older, nostalgic vibe” for herself.

This strategy differs from that of other pilgrimage sites for bibliophiles, such as El Ateneo Grand Splendid, housed in a grand former theatre in Buenos Aires, and Livraria Lello in Porto, which looks like a cross between a cathedral and a robber baron’s mansion. (The latter claims to be the “most beautiful bookshop” in the world, and you have to buy a ticket to go in.) But it fits with a broader trend of people’s curiosity being piqued by some restaurants, stores and concerts starting to ban smartphones. No-photo policies offer a feeling of authenticity and unique experience.

Ms Whitman also understands that buyers are not only seeking an entertaining tale, but a story about how and where they bought that book. Customers are offered a stamp of the Shakespeare and Company logo on the inside cover to certify their copy’s origin. The shop stocks loads of luxurious hardbacks, which have the look of yesteryear. (Top sellers include classics such as Victor Hugo’s “The Hunchback of Notre Dame” and Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s “The Little Prince”.) Far from killing print, e-books have made some consumers keener to splurge on special editions.

But probably the biggest explanation for the shop’s success is how it has embraced the myths surrounding it. Shakespeare and Company is like a Russian doll, containing several brands inside. First, its name evokes the most famous writer in the English language. Second, there is the shop that preceded it, which had the same name. That one was founded by Sylvia Beach, an American, in 1919. She was courageous enough to publish James Joyce’s “Ulysses” when everyone thought it was obscene, and likeable enough to count superstars, including Ernest Hemingway and T.S. Eliot , as friends. Beach’s bookstore closed during the second world war, and legend has it that she later gave Whitman permission to adopt her shop’s name.

Though Whitman was not always a reliable narrator. He was, said Lawrence Ferlinghetti, a poet and friend, “the most eccentric person I’ve ever met in my life”. (That is saying quite a lot, considering Ferlinghetti marched to the beat of the Beatniks.) Whitman claimed he was the grandson of Walt Whitman—his father was a university professor named Walter, unrelated to the famous poet. He also named his daughter Sylvia, which linked his life and shop to Beach’s. This still spawns confusion. When Mr Allen wrote a note to the team at Shakespeare and Company after filming there, he addressed it to Sylvia Beach, who had died in 1962.

Whitman described his store as a “socialist utopia masquerading as a bookstore”. More than 30,000 people have stayed there and in the flats above—many of them writers—in exchange for working, reading and writing a one-page autobiography. The shop is decidedly more commercial these days, with a coffee shop next door. Higher-margin merchandise, including tote bags and notebooks, accounts for around 30% of total sales, says Ms Whitman. It also hosts writers’ talks and an annual celebration of “Ulysses”, which are partly supported by the shop’s foundation.

How replicable is its formula? Many other bookstores peddle merchandise and host author events. Having signed copies by authors can triple book sales, notes Andrew Pettegree, who has written a forthcoming history of bookshops.

Yet Shakespeare and Company’s is an impossible playbook to copy. Its history and location in central Paris are unbeatable. “Very few booksellers own their real estate” as Shakespeare and Company does, notes James Daunt, the boss of Barnes & Noble , a chain. He points out that a bookshop that also happened to be called Shakespeare & Co (no relation) closed last year in New York, citing rising rents among other challenges.

Yet “good” bookshops are thriving, says Mr Daunt. In America there has been a proliferation of independent ones, with about 400 launching physical stores last year, 62% more than a year earlier. They have become community gathering spaces. More owners understand, as Whitman did, that it is “not only about selling books. It’s about being a cultural market”, says Ewelina Oksiuta, director of the European and International Booksellers Federation, a trade group. “People in the age of smartphones and digitalisation are looking for presence and human touch.”

In its own way, Shakespeare and Company also contends with the boon and challenge of tourism. “We’ve always been trying to get a balance between being a popular visit site for people passing through the city and yet trying to keep our connections more local,” says Ms Whitman. Some expats feel the shop caters more to passersby than Parisians. An access card, a flash of which lets you skip the line, is doled out to only the most loyal and prominent patrons, who are sure to be able to tell their Sylvias apart and distinguish between the shop’s chapters. ■

In “Coyote v Acme” the underdog has a new foe: corporate America

Wile E. Coyote, a cartoon character from Looney Tunes, is not as wily as he sounds. Since his debut in cinemas in 1949, he has tried but failed to catch the Road Runner. The calamitous canine is based on Mark Twain ’s description of the coyotes he observed in the American West: “always poor, out of luck and friendless” and “always hungry”. Across about 50 cartoons, he uses skateboards, slingshots and even snow machines in his attempts to catch the bird in the desert. He buys strange gadgets, such as dehydrated boulders, from Acme, a comically bad corporation, which malfunction or explode. “Beep, beep!” the Road Runner always gloats before buzzing off.

Anyone who likes to root for the underdog will be happy to see him back on screens in “Coyote v Acme”, which opens in cinemas on August 28th. In this wacky, often amusing film, Coyote is not merely a hapless hunter. He is also a plucky plaintiff, suing Acme for its faulty products. With the help of his lawyers and a whistleblower (Bugs Bunny), as well as other characters from Looney Tunes, Coyote raises awareness of cartoon injuries and is celebrated as a hero. (The screenwriters based the film on a humour piece in the New Yorker and took inspiration from legal dramas such as “Erin Brockovich”.)

Though Coyote has never caught the Road Runner, he has captured the hearts of viewers. That is perhaps surprising: Chuck Jones, his creator, insisted that Coyote should be a “fanatic” and fail because of his own “ineptitude”. Jones thought he was a tragic figure, nearly naming him Don Coyote after Miguel de Cervantes’s hapless knight. Yet Jones also wanted audiences to side with the canine. He saw Coyote as Sisyphus: an absurd hero, showing joy and hope in the never-ending struggle of pushing a boulder uphill (or chasing a bird). “Coyote v Acme” offers plenty of nods to the myth, with its central mystery dubbed “Project Sisyphus”.

Getting the film into cinemas also became an uphill struggle. In 2023, after “Coyote v Acme” was completed, Warner Bros Discovery shelved it for a tax write-off. People posted online with the hashtag #SaveCoyoteVsAcme; one fan dressed up as Coyote and stood outside the Warner Bros studios with a sign saying “RELEASE ME!!!” All this generated buzz for the film, which was eventually acquired by a small distributor, Ketchup Entertainment.

Coyote has become famous partly because of the simple conceit that animates his life on screen. Though each of the cartoons has a distinctive title, the plots are similar: in “To Beep or Not to Beep”, Coyote gets hit by boulders and falls from the sky; in “War and Pieces” the same thing happens but with rockets.

In addition to gags, Coyote and the Road Runner provide a generational pulse-taking. Should one cheer for the blundering Coyote or the clever beeping bird that keeps evading his traps? In 2000 Henry Allen, a journalist and lecturer, argued that baby boomers who came of age in the raucous 1960s identified with the Road Runner. To them Coyote was the establishment (“cops, parents, the draft board”); they felt that the Road Runner thought outside the box. However, Mr Allen’s Gen X students identified with Coyote. They believed boomers (and the bird) had it too easy. Coyote worked hard, always against the odds.

Today people are Coyote fans for different reasons. His willingness to fight a corporation resonates at a time when big business is as unpopular as a massive boulder to the head. And his never-ending struggle with various gadgets reflects people’s own tech troubles. (Online memes compare Coyote’s anger at Acme products to the rage people feel when interacting with ineffectual customer-service AI s.)

All this makes Coyote’s determination seem less unhinged than upbeat. He may be a loony animal risking death for a bird, which doesn’t seem to have much meat on it anyway. But he is also enthusiastic and hopeful in the face of failure. “Not all underdogs are dogs,” reads the film’s marketing slogan. Some are coyotes; others are screenwriters and viewers, who all need something to laugh about. ■

Hurry up: both to make your mark and to cherish your loved ones

Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite, did not die in 1888. But his brother, Ludvig, an engineer, did. In a mix-up, a French newspaper published an obituary of the wrong Nobel, calling Alfred a “merchant of death”. Chastened and fearing for his reputation, he endowed the prizes awarded in his name.

This is one of many droll anecdotes in “Are They Dead Yet?”, a memoir and meditation on obituaries by Sam Roberts, a veteran writer of them at the New York Times. Nobel’s tale quirkily captures the deep purpose of reading about the deceased. At bottom, obituaries are less records of the end of another person’s life than lessons in how to live your own.

The illustrious dead are intimidating. As Mr Roberts says, it is dispiriting to compare their exploits with your own piffling achievements. Especially if you are over 37: that is the average age at which, one analysis shows, people manage the feat that earns their obituary. Why them, you wonder, and not you? Then again, the dead might ask the same question of the living if they could. Mr Roberts quotes David Hirshey, an American writer: “No matter how accomplished you were, if I’m reading your obit, I’m doing better than you are.”

Besides supplying a shiver of relief, the venerated dead teach you how to earn society’s esteem. The entrance criteria for the obituarised elite vary over time. The deaths of athletes and entertainers, for instance, were more noteworthy in the late 20th century than at the start. In the past women and minorities were unfairly overlooked (not only because they were unlikely to hold positions of power). “To be valued,” writes Mr Roberts, “one first has to be noticed.”

If the dead reveal how posterity measures achievements, they also suggest how to balance personal merits against mistakes. It is a consolation to learn that many great careers included failings and lapses. “When does an error define the arc of a life,” Mr Roberts inquires, “and when does a person defy it?” He cites Irving Kaufman, a judge who in 1951 sentenced the Rosenbergs to death for espionage, but was also a free-speech champion. Sometimes it is hard to adjudicate between virtues and flaws. “Say what you like about Boris Yeltsin ”, began one obituary of the sozzled Russian leader, “and you’re probably right.”

In general, death is the least interesting thing about the dead. “Death is not an event of life,” argued Ludwig Wittgenstein , and, mournful as the form seems, it is scarcely a feature of obituaries either. Typically, writes Mr Roberts, they “mention the word died only once”. They are much less funereal than much of the news, which routinely focuses on murder, war, natural disasters and other lethal woes.

“Obits are about lives, not deaths,” Mr Roberts summarises. And lives are not like tight basketball games, the upshot determined at the finale. The ending does not outweigh what went before; last words rarely express a person’s essence. The author is sceptical of supposed deathbed aphorisms. Did Groucho Marx really quip, “Die, my dear? Why, that’s the last thing I’d do!” A baffled plea ascribed to Pancho Villa, a Mexican revolutionary, is more plausible: “Don’t let it end like this, tell them I said something.”

The sense that a life’s closing scenes are just one detail in a longer story, crystallised in obituaries, is sometimes felt keenly by the bereaved. Distant, half-forgotten memories of a loved one flood back, seeming as real as their recent illness and decrepitude. And they are as real: the elderly father who dribbled in a care home is no truer a version of him than the vigorous figure who carried you on his shoulders. Newspapers often run pictures of wizened octogenarians with their obituaries, but choosing earlier ones is fine. The dead are no more 80 than they are 18.

A final lesson of obituaries concerns sequencing. Hardly any of their subjects get to read them—though Mr Roberts recounts cases in which wise guys tried to vet tributes prepared in advance of their demise, or even to write them themselves. Approaching his last bow in 1891, P.T. Barnum, an American showman, yearned to see his obituary. The New York Evening Sun obliged: “GREAT AND ONLY BARNUM. HE WANTED TO READ HIS OBITUARY; HERE IT IS.”

This logical hitch is a disappointment of eulogies, too: the dead don’t get to hear how adored and revered they were. It may be too late to emulate the glorious deeds immortalised in obituaries, but, happily, this is a problem you can help fix. Tally up the people you love and admire—and tell them so now. ■

She was brave, decent and unapologetically herself

When Dolly Parton was in her 20s, she rejected Elvis Presley . She had written a wonderful song, “I Will Always Love You”, and the King wanted to cover it. His manager demanded that she sign over half the rights to the tune, because Elvis was huge and she was not. She said no.

It must have taken nerve, for a woman who grew up in a one-room shack without electricity in Tennessee, to tell Elvis to get lost. But it made her millions. The version sung by Whitney Houston , many years later, was one of the bestselling tracks of all time. (The Arabic version ripped off by Saddam Hussein for a campaign song is best forgotten.)

Ms Parton became a megastar, with 25 number-one hits on Billboard’s Hot Country chart and 11 Grammy awards. Yet what was striking about her career was not how many people loved her, but how few didn’t. Five years ago the New York Times published an article with the headline, “Is there anything we can all agree on? Yes: Dolly Parton”. She has been publicly mourned by both Donald Trump and Zohran Mamdani . What was her secret?

It started with her voice: a bright soprano with a twangy Appalachian accent. It could be honeyed and nostalgic, as in “Coat of Many Colours”, about a coat made of rags which the other children laughed at, but made her feel “rich” because of the love her mother put into it. She could sound weary and bemused, as in “9 to 5”, in which she pours herself “a cup of ambition” before toiling for an indifferent boss; or sharp, as in “Jolene”, in which she begs another, prettier woman: “Don’t take my man…even though you can.”

She was a gifted writer at a time when female country singers rarely penned their own songs. Her lyrics were plain-spoken and playful; she had a knack for distilling life lessons (and quickly: she once said she may have written “Jolene” and “I Will Always Love You” on the same night).

She was versatile, collaborating with Sir Paul McCartney of the Beatles and Lizzo, a singer and rapper. She acted, wrote a memoir, developed a theme park called Dollywood, created a charity that gave more than 300m books to children and died with an estimated net worth north of $450m. The first cloned sheep was named after her. A musical about her life will open on Broadway in December.

People had to respect her grit. Her parents, a tenant farmer and his wife, were so poor that the doctor who delivered her was paid with a bag of cornmeal. The fourth of 12 children, she was singing on a local TV show when she was ten and made her first appearance at Nashville’s Grand Ole Opry just three years later ( Johnny Cash introduced her). She had a songwriting deal before she finished high school.

She teamed up with Porter Wagoner, another singer, in 1967, but soon became more popular than him and struck out on her own. She branched out into pop songs and turned her attention to business ventures, including film and TV production.

She was serious about her Christian faith, but poked fun at herself. (She once entered a Dolly Parton lookalike contest incognito and lost, to a man.) She shunned controversy. “I’m not in politics; I’m an entertainer.” She twice declined the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Asked how she had both gay and conservative religious fans, she said, “It’s two different worlds, and I live in both and I love them both.” She did, however, encourage Americans to get the covid jab with a cover of “Jolene”: “Vaccine, vaccine, vaccine, vaccine/I’m begging of you, please don’t hesitate.”

She died at her home in Nashville, a few hours’ drive from where she was born, having narrowly outlived her husband of nearly 59 years. (Carl Dean, an asphalt contractor, had no interest in show business and sometimes pretended to be the gardener when journalists came knocking.) Her death was announced by her nephew, and one of her last albums featured collaborations with five generations of her extended family, thanks to some archival recordings. It was produced by a cousin, and closes with Ms Parton’s spoken words: “Until we meet again, keep the music in your heart and the mountains in your soul.” ■

Can one player turn a country into a tennis force?

At odds of around 5%, Alexandra Eala is far from the favourite for the US Open, the final tennis grand slam of the year, which begins in New York on August 30th. But in the competition for attention, she is the front-runner. In the build-up to the tournament, Nike released shirts emblazoned with names of the world’s top players, including Aryna Sabalenka and Jannik Sinner (the highest ranked female and male players). But it was Ms Eala’s shirt that sold out in hours, thanks to her legions of fans around the world.

Ms Eala is an ace. At Wimbledon , the most prestigious grand slam, she beat Iga Swiatek, the defending champion, in the third round. A few weeks later she won her first big tournament in Washington. She has earned a reputation for agility, cunning play from the baseline and strong return of serves; her left-handed game creates awkward angles for her right-handed opponents. Yet Ms Eala’s exploits on the court explain only part of the hype.

The rest has to do with where she comes from. She is a proud Filipina and, in a country starved of world-class sporting talent, she is already a national hero. In 2025 Ms Eala became the first player from the Philippines to enter the world’s top 100. This month she broke into the top 20.

“Eala-mania” is evident at her matches, which have become boisterous affairs. Demand for tickets at the Canadian Open forced an early-round match featuring Ms Eala to be moved from a 2,800-seat outside court to the marquee, 12,500-seat venue. ( Toronto is home to a large number of Filipinos.) In Washington more than 80% of ticket inquiries concerned Ms Eala. Some tennis traditionalists may sniff at the flag-waving fans, but tournament organisers are delighted by them.

Back in the Philippines, all the zeal has given the grassroots game a bounce. Tennis clubs and coaches report rising interest from children, which they are struggling to accommodate because the courts are booked out. Ferdinand Marcos, the country’s president, has called Ms Eala a “true inspiration”. In a state-of-the-nation address in July, Mr Marcos said his administration had tripled its funding for sport, seemingly in response to the surge of enthusiasm for tennis.

Mr Marcos and other Filipinos hope Ms Eala’s emergence could eventually turn their country into a tennis force. That would be good news not just for the Philippines, but for the sport more broadly. Tennis is enjoyed almost everywhere. Its governing body estimates that more than 100m people play it recreationally, of whom a third are in Asia. Yet its elite players come from a shallow pool of countries. In 2025, 88% of the women’s year-end top 50 came from Europe and North America—roughly the same share as in 1990.

Can a single world-class player change a country’s tennis fortunes? Fans have plenty of anecdotes. Bjorn Borg’s dominance in the 1970s, for example, set off a tennis craze in Sweden, which produced top talent in the next generation. The emergence of the Czech Republic as a tennis powerhouse is often attributed to Martina Navratilova, the all-conquering champion of the 1980s.

To see whether this reflects a broader pattern, The Economist examined year-end rankings going back nearly half a century. We identified the year each country produced its first truly elite player—defined as someone ranked in the top 20—and looked at whether more highly ranked players from the same country appeared afterwards. For women, they usually did. Of 32 countries whose first top-20 woman emerged between 1983 and 2020, 28 subsequently fielded more top-50 players. On average, their representation roughly tripled, from about 0.5 players in the top 50 in the five years before the breakthrough to nearly 1.5 in the five afterwards. (The pattern was less pronounced for men. Among 22 pioneer countries, top-50 representation rose from 0.4 players to 1.)

The patterns may be correlational, but other evidence suggests that trailblazers matter. Studies find that stars are especially encouraging to girls, because they make achievement seem attainable. In one Canadian study of teenage female athletes, more than half said there were too few role models in sport; 60% said they would be more likely to persist with a sport if there were more female exemplars.

Yet trailblazers can do only so much. A new paper analysing player rankings from 2000 to 2024 finds that countries with more tennis players and courts tend to produce more top pros. A deep “tennis culture”—captured by factors such as hosting international tournaments—is associated with better results, especially for women.

Ms Eala illustrates the challenge. Growing up, she sometimes practised on courts that doubled as basketball ones; at 13 she left home to train in Spain on a scholarship. She may inspire thousands of Filipino children to pick up a racket, but turning enthusiasm into champions will depend on more prosaic things such as facilities, investment and infrastructure. One star can start a rally. Building a tennis powerhouse is a longer game. ■

This reflects the country’s two-faced attitude towards the drug

Possession of any amount of recreational cannabis is an imprisonable offence in Texas. And yet in many places where Texans buy beer, they can also find drinks infused with tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), the psychoactive component of cannabis. THC drinks are flying off the shelves—and not just in the Lone Star State. Their rise stems from changing social mores and regulatory confusion.

Start with the first. Alcohol sales are declining as youngsters drink less than older generations. But some teetotallers welcome a buzz. THC was once stigmatised for leaving users sprawled and giggling on the sofa, wrist-deep in a bag of crisps. Today, though, it has a veneer of “wellness”.

Many THC drinks have few or no calories; some include ostensibly healthy extras such as plant extracts. Makers boast that they do not cause hangovers. Some restaurants have even started to offer them, noticing a rise in “cocktail culture”. thc drinks come in a variety of strengths, so pay careful attention to the dosage: consuming 25mg rather than 2.5mg can lead to several deeply unpleasant hours.

According to the Hemp Beverage Alliance, a trade group, in 2025 the number of distribution points more than doubled (from 133,500 to 306,000), as did the sales by volume (from about 700,000 case equivalents to 1.6m), from a year earlier. The Brightfield Group, a cannabis consultancy, predicts that revenue from THC drinks could exceed $4.4bn by the end of the decade, up from less than $200m in 2020. Total Wine, America’s biggest wine retailer, sells them in 22 states ( there are 24 where cannabis is illegal).

Their rise is owed partly to the morass of legislation governing American agriculture, known as the farm bill. Its most recent version lets farmers grow hemp with a THC content of no more than 0.3% by dry weight; anything stronger is classified as marijuana and remains illegal under federal law. But manufacturers can extract THC from large quantities of legal hemp and use it to make drinks containing intoxicating doses.

Anti-cannabis lawmakers have noticed: last year Congress passed legislation that would limit THC to 0.4mg per container, in effect killing the hemp-drinks sector. But the Senate recently voted to briefly postpone the crackdown, and on August 10th a bipartisan bill was introduced that would exempt THC drinks from the restrictions and regulate them like alcohol. Its sponsors do not want to kill a golden, if slightly stoned, goose.

This would open the federal government to charges of hypocrisy for approving one form of hemp while outlawing another. But it would also boost businesses and protect a steady stream of tax revenue. The industry is already high. Whether it becomes mighty—or goes up in smoke—will depend on lawmakers. ■

Two new books ponder whether the technology will be tame or savage

When mulling how AI will transform society, consider an earlier technology that gave humans a helpful companion with superior capabilities: the dog. By domesticating wolves, humans were able, indirectly, to smell game far away and hear enemies approaching at night. They became better hunters than Neanderthals and better warriors: hard to ambush, hard to elude. Dogs are one reason why Homo sapiens outcompeted their prehistoric cousins and conquered the world, some anthropologists believe.

Back when dog technology was first being developed, it was far from obvious that it was safe for people—who were literally inviting wolves into their caves. They had to train them not to eat babies. Thousands of years later, dogs still sometimes escape and go rogue. But overall, people are happy with how things have worked out. (It did not end so well for the Neanderthals.)

The optimistic case for AI is that it will be like dogs: complementing rather than replacing human labour, and remaining obedient to its masters. But what if it isn’t? AI evolves much faster. Soon it could be creating new, improved versions of itself at a pace dog-breeders can only dream of. So whereas people can be confident that dogs will not enslave them—by 2030, pooches will still not know how to use a tin-opener—they cannot be so sure about AI.

Two new books, one by a Nobel-prizewinning economist and one by a Pulitzer-garlanded historian, grapple with the question of how AI will shape the future. Neither uses the dog analogy, but both are easier to understand with reference to it.

Jill Lepore, a Harvard historian, focuses on the men who train the dogs. In her telling, AI tycoons are horrible, irresponsible people whose creations may break their leashes and savage humans. In “The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State”, she argues that tech bosses are trying to build “a future in which humans are ruled, and many replaced, by machines owned by corporations”. This, she says, implies “both the desertion of liberal democracy and the destruction of the natural world”.

She bases her case partly on the moguls’ own words. Sam Altman, the boss of OpenAI, has said it would be “awesome” to replace human presidents with an AI that could “go around and talk to every person on Earth, understand their exact preferences” and “optimise” for all of them. Elon Musk has said humans may end up like “pet labradors” for superintelligent robots.

Mr Altman has suggested that most of Earth’s surface may soon be covered with data centres. Mr Musk wants to solve this problem by putting data centres in space—and blasting millions of people to live on Mars. The tech titans all seem to have escape plans, notes Ms Lepore: “Elon Musk to Mars, Mark Zuckerberg to the metaverse...Jeff Bezos to space, Sam Altman’s brain uploaded to the cloud.” This makes them reckless about the risk of creating dystopia here on Earth, she fears.

She is right that today’s tech bosses are not people you would trust to write the rules for the future of civilisation. But she overestimates the importance of individual billionaires. How AI shapes society will not depend on Mr Musk’s eccentric political views, any more than the effects of cars depended on Henry Ford’s. Rather, it will hinge on the power of the technology itself and the uses to which people put it.

That is a question Daron Acemoglu addresses in “What Happened to Liberal Democracy?”. Mr Acemoglu is among the world’s most-cited economists. He is best known for “Why Nations Fail”, a sweeping economic history arguing that the main factor keeping poor countries poor is predatory institutions. His new work focuses on the present day and the interplay between technology and democracy.

Liberal democracy has underpinned progress, he argues. It has fostered innovation and economic growth, spread the benefits (through taxes and public services) and protected voters with regulations.

For a long time, the system more or less met voters’ expectations. But “then computers happened.” Digital technologies, in Mr Acemoglu’s account, aggravated inequality by raising the demand for brains over brawn. They also boosted the “social power of college graduates”, allowing a new liberal elite to impose its values on a resentful working class, provoking a backlash that led to the election of Donald Trump. And they changed how people interact. In America time spent engaging with friends in person has plunged by two-thirds in the past 20 years. Political debate has grown more extreme and toxic.

AI could make everyone much richer by supercharging innovation. But it could also supercharge the harms of digital technology, Mr Acemoglu (rather familiarly) fears. It could lead to widespread joblessness, creating “huge social-status gaps” between “makers” and “takers” and a full-blown crisis of democracy. (It could also accelerate social atomisation by making loverbots and political fakery more seductive.)

His proposal is “pro-worker AI”. By this, Mr Acemoglu means finding ways for workers to use AI to make their labour more valuable, like prehistoric hunters combining their spear-making and throwing skills with a dog’s nose and speed. Maybe AI could enable electricians to troubleshoot increasingly sophisticated grids, spotting problems via sensors and helping humans analyse them with a database of past glitches and solutions. Perhaps AI could improve education: an AI assistant could assess pupils’ answers to quizzes and suggest ways to split the class into smaller groups, who could be offered tailored instruction, thus increasing the demand for human teachers.

It is hard to quarrel with this. AI will certainly cause less social turmoil if it complements human labour rather than making it redundant. But Mr Acemoglu leaves unresolved the question of how this is to be accomplished. Ultimately, both books are disappointing. Inadvertently, they illuminate how hard it is to write persuasively about a technology that is changing so fast, and whose future capabilities are so utterly unknown.

Politically, AI has become unpopular. Twice as many Americans are pessimistic about its long-term effects on society as are optimistic, and only 2% think it is developing “too slowly”. But one way or another, this new wolf will be invited into the cave. The countries pioneering AI technology, America and China, are rivals. Neither wants to be the second to develop a superintelligent ally, for fear of ending up like those hapless, dogless Neanderthals. ■

A new book offers a dashing history of writers’ marks

“In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God.” Yet in the beginning there was no punctuation. In early Latin manuscripts, the Bible was written in scriptura continua, without spaces or marks between words. This was a problem: pause at the wrong point, and you could sever God from “the word”, throwing Christ’s divinity into doubt. So in the Middle Ages, Christian scholars set about punctuating the holy book, using symbols and sub-clauses as “lanterns to words” to guide preachers.

“The history of punctuation is the history of humanity,” argues Florence Hazrat, a researcher, in a rollicking new book. Often dismissed as “the invisible ushers of the sentence”, dots and dashes have shaped religious texts, legal documents, and literature. “On the Mark”, like punctuation itself, makes readers pause for thought, showing how full stops have displeased and commas caused controversy.

This pointed history starts in the ancient world. Cicero, like other Roman scholars, thought punctuation was amateurish. For skilled orators, half the fun was in interpreting obscure writing. Ms Hazrat races across time—offering digressions about how, for instance, Irish monks in the eighth century first put spaces between words—before reaching the “punctuation boom” of the Renaissance. Scholars in Italy invented curved commas, semicolons and (do not forget) parentheses. The printing press helped spread and standardise these signs, and by around 1600 all the major marks were in place.

“On the Mark” is crammed with fascinating facts. Take the exclamation mark, about which Ms Hazrat wrote a previous book. Invented by an Italian poet in the 1360s to signal “admiration and wonder”, by the 19th century it had become a sign of emotion and even hysteria. Editors added them to old texts, including Shakespeare’s “Antony and Cleopatra”. (In the First Folio, the play had only 16 exclamation marks, but modern versions contain about 200, most of them clustered in Cleopatra’s shouty-sounding speeches.) In the 20th century the exclamation mark fell into “soundless cymbal-crashing”, as Theodor Adorno, a German philosopher, put it. Nazi propagandists aggressively attached clusters of them to the end of assertions!!!

Writers have long squabbled over scribbles. Emily Dickinson felt “defeated” when an editor cut a dash; Charles Baudelaire told his proofreader “I absolutely want to keep this comma.” Mark Twain even threatened to have a proofreader shot who dared change his punctuation. This is a delightful tale of marks’ evolution, even if Ms Hazrat’s own attempts to use them inventively fall a dash flat. ■

“The Renoir Girls” uses a bright canvas to sketch a sombre history

IT WAS CALLED “the capital of the 19th century” and “modern Babylon”. To those living during the Belle Époque, which stretched from the 1870s to the onset of the first world war, Paris felt like the centre of the world. And at the very centre of Parisian life were the Cahen d’Anvers, a Jewish banking family. They held salons, threw lavish parties and counted celebrated writers, including Marcel Proust and Guy de Maupassant, as friends.

The childhoods of the three Cahen d’Anvers daughters were immortalised by Pierre-Auguste Renoir in commissioned portraits. One, of Alice and Elisabeth holding hands (see picture), hangs in the Museu de Arte de São Paulo. It looks as though everything about the girls’ lives, save their ruffled dresses, was smooth. In fact, the painting “reminds us that nothing and no one is quite safe from the hands of time or the evil within humanity, apart, sometimes, from art itself”, writes Catherine Ostler, a historian, in a new book.

When you gaze at Renoir’s pretty paintings, several things are obscured from view. One is paternity. Rumours abounded that Louise, the matriarch of the Cahen d’Anvers family, was the paramour of Charles Ephrussi, an art-loving critic and collector. It was a time of “rebellious, emancipated, intellectual feminism”, when wealthy women were free to hold salons and live more independent lives. There were whispers that Alice might be Ephrussi’s daughter. Ms Ostler uses a DNA test of a descendant to show that she probably was (the same may have been true of her brother, who was named Charles). This is not, then, your average portrait.

The painting also masks the antisemitism that would change the girls’ lives. When it was painted in 1881, France was ostensibly in a tolerant period (though after receiving a late payment, Renoir wrote to a friend complaining that the payment was “stingy” and declaring that “I really give up on the Jews”). Then the Dreyfus affair—in which a Jewish army officer was falsely accused and convicted of passing secrets to Germany—laid bare people’s prejudices and jealousy. Between 1807 and 1914 some 880 Jews in Paris converted to Catholicism; about a quarter of them did so in just three years, 1895-97, when the Dreyfus affair was most heated.

One of them was Elisabeth (in blue), who chose to be baptised at the age of 20. Spending most of her life as a Christian, however, did not protect her. The collaborationist Vichy regime began to rule France, and a mayor whose family had mingled with the Cahen d’Anvers for generations certified that Elisabeth, then 69 years old, was Jewish.

Suffering from severe arthritis and unable to walk without help, she was arrested by the Nazis, who sent her to Auschwitz, where she was probably murdered on arrival, if she had survived the 55-hour train journey. Ms Ostler focuses on the many betrayals that facilitated this fate. The Cahen d’Anvers had fought in the first world war and been generous patrons of France, including donating their chateau to the state. And yet the country turned on them.

Ms Ostler came upon the Cahen d’Anvers while reading “The Hare with Amber Eyes”, which masterfully traces art through time (the author, Edmund de Waal, inherited sculptures bought by Ephrussi). She has doggedly dug up clips and correspondence that evoke the Belle Époque. Sometimes, though, “The Renoir Girls” gets too bogged down in social minutiae that must have preoccupied the Cahen d’Anvers. Few really want to know which Rothschilds were at weddings, what colour the bridesmaids wore and whether the press preferred Louise’s previous hairstyle. But the broader themes—about the hidden history of objects, and what art captures and obscures—are heart-rending and memorable. You will not look at another 19th-century portrait the same way again. ■

A wine from Skane, the “Nordic Tuscany”, beat all comers in a blind tasting

AT THE NOBEL PRIZE banquet in Stockholm in December, not all the winners were seated at the table. A victor of a different kind could be found in the diners’ wine glasses. In 2024 a blind tasting had pitted a dozen of Europe’s finest wines against a dozen wines from Sweden. An international panel of 18 independent experts declared Immelen, a white wine from Kullabergs, a winery in the Skane region of southern Sweden, the overall winner, above famous whites from France, Italy and Spain. That made Immelen the obvious choice for the Nobel banquet. It was a coming-out party for Swedish wine.

Sweden is “a young wine country”, says Victor Dahl, chief executive of Kullabergs. EU approval for winemaking in Sweden and Denmark, required for commercial production, was granted only in 1999. There are now about 50 commercial wineries in Sweden. Sales are still tiny—just a drop in the barrel by global standards—but growing quickly.

At the Nobel banquet, Mr Dahl moonlighted as a waiter so he could hear what the diners thought. Such was their level of interest that he was soon unmasked and invited to introduce the wine. “They had so many questions,” he recalls.

And no wonder. That wine can be made in Sweden at all may come as a surprise. Global warming has helped. But “climate change is also bad for us,” says Mr Dahl. Although the climate is warmer overall, it is also unpredictable: since 2018 every growing season has been different. Sweden’s long summer days provide plenty of sunshine to ripen grapes. Indeed, slower ripening may enhance flavour.

Immelen is a blend. It is two-thirds Solaris, a descendant of Riesling and Pinot Gris created in 1975, and now Sweden’s most widely planted varietal. The rest is Souvignier Gris and a dash of Muscaris (a cross between Solaris and Muscat). The resulting wine is surprisingly full-bodied, with none of the under-ripeness often found in cool-climate wines. It reminded this correspondent of a high-end Sancerre.

Just as significant as climate change has been the rise of New Nordic cuisine, a gastronomic culture centred on Copenhagen and Malmo. Skane is sometimes referred to as the “Nordic Tuscany” and is being promoted as a tourist destination for foodies. In this part of the world seasonal tasting menus abound, and foragers gather local ingredients for restaurants. Magnus Nilsson—whose previous restaurant, Faviken, earned two Michelin stars—has recently opened a new one in Skane, as has Titti Qvarnstrom, the first Swedish woman to win a star. Being able to serve local wine with local food has obvious appeal.

History has also played a part. Sweden’s government ran a campaign from 1957-85 to encourage Swedes to drink wine, rather than spirits, for health reasons. This created a strong wine culture just as European travel was getting cheaper, prompting Swedish wine buffs to engage in wine tourism. But now they can do it at home. The covid-19 pandemic helped, too: Swedish wine critics who were unable to go abroad started to pay more attention to the viticulture scene on their doorstep.

Oddly the Systembolaget, the government monopoly on the sale of alcohol through a national network of shops, has also helped. It bans Swedish wineries from selling bottles over the counter, though they can sell wine for consumption on the premises, for example at an on-site bar. To get into the Systembolaget shops, Swedish winemakers must achieve consistent quality and volume. Systembolaget acts as “an extraordinary quality-control mechanism”, says Joe Fattorini, a British wine guru who now lives in Sweden. Once a winery wins approval, as Kullabergs has, distribution is in effect handled by the government.

The contrast with neighbouring Denmark, which lacks such restrictions, is telling. Denmark has fewer hectares of vines than Sweden, but roughly three times as many producers and a wider range of styles. That means more experimentation, but greater variation in quality.

Things are changing in Sweden, however. After much lobbying, the law was changed to allow “cellar-door sales” by wineries from June 2025. There are still restrictions—sales are permitted only as part of an educational experience lasting at least 30 minutes—and the rule-change is subject to a six-year trial. Sweden’s wine industry is still in its infancy and lacks the long history of winemaking in other parts of Europe. But you do not need a Nobel prize to see its potential. ■

New venues are inspired by a century-old tradition

Space Talk, located in the London district of Clerkenwell, takes music seriously. Before the bar opened in 2024, its owner enlisted an architect, designer and sound engineer to create the perfect acoustic environment. Resembling the deck of a wooden spaceship, the bar is divided into four zones. On a recent evening, your correspondent sipped cocktails while trippy electronic music floated out of the bespoke sound system. In its ethos, Space Talk is one of many spots around the world loosely inspired by Japan’s ongaku kissa (music cafés). These venues are commonly known as listening bars or hi-fi bars.

The first ongaku kissa opened in Japan during the 1920s. Visitors drank tea or coffee as music—often classical, tango or swing—played through gramophones. In the decades after the second world war, cafés devoted to jazz grew popular. Imported records and audio equipment were expensive, and jazz kissa offered a place for enthusiasts to hear the latest album by Miles Davis or John Coltrane. They were places for quiet, reverential listening.

Owners would (and still do) display a fussy attention to detail. High-quality speakers are a must; the nerdiness often extends to amps, turntables and styluses. (Gramophones have gone, but vinyl is still very much in vogue.) This music is not merely for ambience: the act of listening is central to the experience. Many kissa ask visitors to remain silent. Kawasaki Toshiya, who runs his own listening bar in Tokyo, says the atmosphere this creates is akin to “sitting in meditation at a temple”.

The listening bars that have sprung up in the West, South America and Africa—most of which have opened in the past decade—rarely have stringent rules on chitchat. Space Talk, for instance, has not banned nattering, but it has implemented a “no photos or videos” policy. All Blues, a venue in New York, politely asks visitors to “let the music do the talking”. Some bars host dedicated events where guests can hear an album in full or listen to music tied to a particular artist or theme.

The “real magic” of ongaku kissa culture is to create an environment “where you can be genuinely moved to the core by music”, says Nick Dwyer, the director of a documentary on Tokyo’s music cafés. What makes this new wave of venues interesting, he says, is that proprietors have “their own take” on the format and are adapting it into “something that works in London, New York, Barcelona or wherever”.

There are three reasons why the ongaku kissa model has succeeded as a cultural export. One is Japanomania. A record 43m foreign holidaymakers visited the country in 2025. Over several decades, Japan has established itself as a trendsetter and tastemaker in everything from video games to fashion and design, meaning that where the Japanese lead, others will follow.

The second reason is that listening bars and ongaku kissa offer an appealing alternative to nightclubs, which are in decline. These bars provide a relaxed, stylish environment for retired ravers and youngsters alike. Here, enjoying music need not mean enduring punishing opening hours (and punishing hangovers).

The third reason is that these bars offer a distinctive, curated experience to suit a wide variety of tastes. Jim Hanmer, the co-founder of Jazu, another listening bar in London, made a pilgrimage to Japan to visit several jazz kissa. (“Jazu” is a nod to the Japanese pronunciation of “jazz”.) He was drawn to the venues that reflected the owner’s lifelong passion. In these places, “you could listen to a record that you’ve heard 30 times before, but because you’re in this unique environment, it sounds totally different.” At a listening bar, even an old track can find a new groove. ■

Charles Lennox and James Wilson, a pair of Britons, played important roles in the struggle for independence

A STROLL THROUGH the gallery of America’s Founding Fathers yields familiar faces. Here is brave, disciplined George Washington alongside sociable, inventive Benjamin Franklin. There is John Adams—principled and prickly—squabbling with brilliant, curious Thomas Jefferson. Two new books seek to draw your gaze to two forgotten figures, each with strikingly expansive views of democracy.

The founders, as a whole, were inconsistent. They allowed slavery to endure. They wanted out from under Britain’s thumb, but not universal suffrage. Roger Sherman, the only person to sign all four of the founding documents, felt “the people…should have as little to do as may be about the government.” Benjamin Rush, another founder, called democracy “the devil’s own government”.

Charles Lennox (pictured left) and James Wilson (pictured right) disagreed. They shared a faith in democracy and popular wisdom uncommon at the time. Their lives were markedly different: Lennox was an aristocrat and parliamentarian, while Wilson was a poor Scot who emigrated to America and, on the strength of his intellect, became consequential.

The “tall, rich and beautiful” Lennox was an unlikely radical. Yet he was the first parliamentarian to propose letting all adult men vote in Britain and the first member of the House of Lords to suggest recognising American independence. He was also a patron of Thomas Paine, a tax collector in Sussex who became a vociferous proponent of independence after emigrating to America. Paine’s pamphlet, “Common Sense”, argued that Americans “have it in our power to begin the world over again”. Widely read, it galvanised support for revolution.

In “Radical Duke”, Danielle Allen, a political philosopher at Harvard, makes the novel argument that Lennox and Paine were at the centre of “a network of writers” that formed Junius, a pseudonymous author. Junius published essays critical of King George III’s government that roiled British politics in the early 1770s; they argued that royal “authority rested upon the consent of the governed”. Both men “cut their teeth as radicals by playing Junius” several years before the publication of “Common Sense”.

Lennox’s radicalism exemplifies Ms Allen’s shrewd broader argument that the roots of the American Revolution lay not in Boston but in Britain. Protests against unpopular and unjust taxation, popular demonstrations against royal authority, the publication of essays promoting revolution: all of these happened in Britain in the 1760s-70s. “Every act that provided the drumbeat of the march to revolution in the colonies had been foreshadowed in Britain,” she writes. That argument may provoke some grumbles: Americans consider their revolution home-grown. But few geopolitical events happen in isolation.

Ms Allen began researching Lennox’s life after she discovered a copy of the Declaration of Independence in a record office in Sussex. It had belonged to Lennox and was probably commissioned by James Wilson—the subject of Jesse Wegman’s biography. Wilson had emigrated to America in 1765, when he was 23, and was the only signer of both the constitution and the Declaration of Independence to serve as a Supreme Court justice.

Mr Wegman, a journalist, situates Wilson within the Scottish Enlightenment, which linked commerce with goodness—a comfortable pairing for mercantile America. (“The road to virtue and that to fortune,” wrote Adam Smith, “are, happily in most cases, one and the same.”) Scottish nobles had long defended self-government; in 1320 barons declared their king’s authority stemmed from “the due consent and assent of us all”.

In the run-up to the revolution, Wilson’s rigorous essays provided a legal argument for independence. Parliament had no authority over the American colonies, he stated, because colonists did not elect them. “All men are, by nature, equal and free,” so “no one has a right to any authority over another without his consent.”

Mr Wegman suggests that Jefferson paraphrased this sentiment in the Declaration of Independence. He notes that Wilson was the only founder to use the phrase “created equal” in later writing and that he coined the constitution’s opening phrase (“We the people”). In his battles for direct elections for Congress and the presidency, Wilson was “by a long shot the most democratic of all the founders”.

Why, then, is he not better known? First, because he was a creature of the law, not a politician. And second, alas, his roads to fortune and virtue diverged. Addicted to land speculation, he ended up in a debtors’ prison in New Jersey while a justice. Then, to escape his creditors, he fled to North Carolina, where he died of malaria in 1798.

Were Wilson and Lennox failures because their ideals did not carry the day? That is a crabbed view of reform. Battles for social progress are rarely won in fighters’ lifetimes. Martin Luther King did not live to see a racially equal society; he was not wrong to fight for one. In their efforts to expand the franchise and their faith in democracy, Lennox and Wilson were both ahead of their time—and their stories are a welcome rediscovery today. ■

Some fear that chatbots will lead everyone to the same places. In fact, they may do the opposite

AS THE midday sun beats down in Rome, tourists realise with relief that it is time for a pizza. But which one? Lonely Planet, the best-selling guidebook series, recommends Antico Forno Roscioli’s “delectable” slices. Tripadvisor’s top pick is Da Cicero, near the Trevi fountain, with more than 2,000 five-star reviews. TikTok-famous spots include Piccolo Buco, identifiable by its long queue of hungry Gen Zs.

The way travellers have found inspiration and itineraries has evolved over the centuries. Early Victorian travellers were shepherded around foreign lands by travel agents such as Thomas Cook , who offered English tourists protection from the horrors of continental railway porters (“tobacco- or onion-scented, blue-frocked varlets”, as Cook described them). Some tourists still prefer to have their hand held . But many go independently. Guides such as France’s Routard direct travellers to the best spots. A mention in the Lonely Planet is still enough to fill a Bangkok hostel or Kathmandu curry house.

The internet has changed things, thrice. First, review platforms like Tripadvisor have harnessed the wisdom of crowds to rate everything from Britain’s pubs to Egypt’s pyramids (“too much sand”, complains a one-star review). They hold enormous clout. Dante Donati of Columbia Business School found that, when the European Union abolished mobile roaming charges in 2017, the associated uptick in visitors consulting Tripadvisor on the go resulted in a 5% revenue bump for Rome’s tourist-oriented restaurants, largely benefiting the highest-rated.

The second digital change to travel advice has come from social networks. Their effects are more chaotic and less predictable, as apps’ algorithms unexpectedly alight on an attraction and blast it into the feeds of millions of users. Photogenic places like Hallstatt, a picture-perfect lakeside town in Austria, have been overrun. “TravelTok” crazes have sent mobs to queue for hours at unsuspecting eateries.

Now people are turning to chatbots . Last summer 55% of Americans used an AI app like ChatGPT to plan their holiday, up from 38% the previous year, according to McKinsey, a consultancy. The numbers will probably rise again. Old sources of advice are out. Guidebook sales have fallen sharply over the past two decades. Tripadvisor has blamed ai for stealing its web traffic, which is estimated to have fallen by a fifth in the past year.

Many worry that AI could make tourism even more concentrated. The large language models powering chatbots are prediction machines primed to give the most likely answer. Make an open-ended request for travel tips and you will be steered to exactly where everyone else is going. Research by the University of Westminster found that ChatGPT showed “a marked preference for well-established tourist hubs”, recommending such hidden gems as the Eiffel Tower and the Colosseum.

This could narrow travellers’ horizons. Daniel Paül i Agustí of the University of Lleida examined how ChatGPT’s travel advice compared with places they might see on Instagram (see map). He collected 10,000 recommendations of places to visit in Barcelona from ChatGPT. He then harvested a similar number of photos of the city posted by tourists on Instagram, and coded their location. Whereas the Instagram images came from some 1,300 different places, ChatGPT recommended a narrower selection of 215 places, majoring on hotspots like the Sagrada Família. (It also suggested 38 attractions that appeared to be made up.) AI’s focus on the best-known sites could “lead to tourist overcrowding”, Mr Paül i Agustí warned.

Yet AI may eventually have the opposite effect, dispersing tourists to a wider range of places than they visited in days gone by. First, because models are trained on different sources, they can give very different advice. We asked Evertune, an AI analytics company, to help solve the Rome pizza dilemma by quizzing chatbots. ChatGPT, which based its answers mainly on online guides and Reddit threads, favoured Pizzarium Bonci, near the Vatican, and Seu Pizza, which has won a string of awards. Google’s AI Mode, which drew on Google Maps reviews, suggested Pizza Florida, a by-the-slice place close to the Pantheon.

Not only do chatbots disagree with each other—they also disagree with themselves. Their probabilistic nature means that they give varying answers to identical queries. Evertune found that Gemini’s jointly most-recommended pizzerias (see chart), Remo and Pizzarium Bonci, featured in 91% of its answers (in other words, nearly a tenth of users would not be told about its top picks). In all, Gemini recommended a long tail of 24 different places.

AI’s greatest promise to travellers is personalised advice. Perhaps a tourist in Rome wants a gluten-free pizza (their AI guide might propose somewhere like La Soffitta Renovatio), or a pizza with pineapple (it might suggest a psychiatrist). Chatbots can act like modern-day Thomas Cooks, drawing up tours for any taste: the best chocolatiers in Paris, a walk around literary London, America’s wildest water parks or whatever the traveller is into. The average chatbot prompt is about 25 words long, suggesting people are posing relatively complex queries.

Even if travellers are unimaginative with their questions, AI models increasingly personalise their answers based on past interactions. If a chatbot knows you are a vegan, or a big spender, it will calibrate its suggestions accordingly. “In the past, we all saw the same blue links on Google,” says Brian Stempeck of Evertune. AI’s answers are “more like the Spotify algorithmic feed”, tweaked according to the user’s history. Consumers live in personalised bubbles when it comes to music. Travel could go the same way.

For those tired of following the herd, this will be welcome. Most guidebooks make mainstream recommendations. Online review platforms, subject to the tyranny of the margherita-eating majority, promote the most broadly popular stuff. AI’s tendency to match travellers to their interests, whether they ask it to or not, promises to redistribute visitors away from tourist hotspots. Whatever guidebook writers or online influencers think is the best pizza in Rome, your chatbot is ready to serve up a slice made for an audience of one. ■

AI can try, but humans still have the edge when it comes to booking holidays

NOT MUCH can faze Olivia Ferney. The Canadian travel “fixer” is at the whim of her wealthy clients: each one spends at least $1m on travel every year, on top of a $100,000 subscription fee to her firm, Top Tier Travel. The requests are lavish (fly to Paris to fetch a croissant ) or ludicrous (“call whoever you need to call” to get it to stop raining). The escapades delight her roughly 2m fans on social media and are even being adapted into a tv show.

Travel agents often go above and beyond for their clients. That is in part why people still use them in an age of AI-tineraries . In Britain about a third of travellers booked their holidays through a human specialist last year, reckons ABTA, a British trade association. Across the pond more than 310,000 agents are members of the American Society of Travel Advisers, another trade group, up from 190,000 in 2024. LinkedIn recently ranked the job one of the fastest-growing in America (though the Bureau of Labour Statistics reckons it will grow more slowly than average in the period until 2034).

People turn to travel advisers for their “taste and judgment” in curating trips, says Evan Frank, co-founder of Fora, a luxury host agency. Seasoned advisers have superior knowledge of particular countries and a network of exclusive hotels. Some stick to a particular niche, booking trips for people who have food allergies or tourists who want to travel solo or with their pets.

Travel agents also provide an extra layer of support that many find reassuring. You can’t call your AI if your room is wrong or you missed your transfer, observes Mr Frank. But a human adviser is there for any conundrum you might face (or croissant you might fancy). People are more likely to book with travel agents during geopolitical ructions or periods of extreme weather, when it feels riskier to make bookings.

Advisers may be snarky about AI’s shortcomings, but many use it in their work. Some agencies treat AI as a “member of the team”, notes Mark Tanzer, boss of ABTA, getting bots to do the jobs humans find boring. Fora built a billion-dollar business by providing advisers with an AI platform that speeds up administrative tasks.

As bots get better at planning trips, people may rely less on human advisers. But top-end services will probably endure. Ms Ferney’s clients enjoy being able to reach her come rain or shine. ■

Gaël Faye’s “Jacaranda” looks at the limits of reconciliation

IT WAS THE kind of debut every aspiring novelist dreams of. When Gaël Faye, a hip-hop musician turned writer, published “Petit Pays” (“Small Country”) in 2016, it gathered immediate acclaim. The novel—inspired by his experience of the Burundian civil war as a teenager—sold 1.5m copies, was adapted into a film and is now taught in French schools.

It was a tough act to follow. But “Jacaranda”, released in France in 2024, sold nearly 100,000 copies in its first month and won the Prix Renaudot, one of France’s most prestigious literary prizes. This time Mr Faye—whose father is French and whose mother is Rwandan —draws on his memories of visiting his mother’s homeland as a child. His spare, lucid prose, now translated into English, explores the aftermath of the genocide of 1994 , when perhaps 500,000 people, most of them ethnic Tutsi, were killed over the course of three months.

The story is told from the perspective of Milan, a French-Rwandan boy living in Versailles. News of the genocide reaches him first through the tv, then through Claude, a young relative who has been attacked with a machete and brought to France for medical treatment. It is not until years later that Milan has the opportunity to visit Rwanda, where he reunites with Claude and meets Eusébie, an old friend of his mother’s.

Rwanda’s authoritarian government requires citizens to follow a policy of reconciliation. Not everyone feels it. Survivors live next to the people who killed their family and friends. Milan observes the efforts of the gacaca courts, community-based tribunals which tried over 1m people accused of genocide-related crimes between 2002 and 2012. He accompanies Claude as he testifies against two genocidaires. The trial brings some justice, but little closure.

Years later, during kwibuka, the annual period of remembrance, Milan watches Eusébie give her testimony. As she talks, people in the crowd collapse, scream out or deliriously beg for their lives from phantom killers. The trauma has reverberated down the generations, Milan observes, for many of the distressed were too young to have been born when the killing began.

“Jacaranda” is a nuanced exploration of conflict and the meaning of resolution. Though it is focused on Rwanda—where the author has lived for many years—the question of whether people can forgive and forget past wrongs is a universal one. Hope lies with the next generation. One scene describes a killer’s sons quietly rebuilding a house their father helped destroy. ■

The transatlantic telegraph cable helped usher in the information age, a new book shows

IT HAS BEEN called the Victorian equivalent of the Apollo project . At the time it was compared to Christopher Columbus’s arrival in the Americas, was said to have half undone the Declaration of Independence , and prompted giddy predictions of world peace. The completion of the first working transatlantic telegraph cable in 1866 showed that a global telecommunications network was possible and marked the dawn of the modern information age.

This epic tale was retold in the early years of the internet boom, and today a growing awareness of humanity’s reliance on vulnerable but unseen submarine data cables has given it renewed relevance. A triumph of Victorian engineering, the Atlantic cable marked the point at which the age of steel and steam began to yield to the modern world in which industrial might depends on the transport and manipulation of weightless data. In his pacey retelling of the story, an adventure yarn with telegraph cables, James Tabor shows how the technology of one era laid the foundations for the next.

Cyrus Field, an American businessman who was the driving force behind the project, embodied this pivot. He had retired in 1853 at the age of 34 after making a fortune selling paper, demand for which had exploded in America with the rise of mass-market penny newspapers. But a new way of distributing information was emerging at the time: telegraphy. Looking for a new project, Field got involved in a scheme to build a telegraph line across the Cabot Strait to Newfoundland. This would speed up the delivery of news across the Atlantic by a couple of days, because messages could be sent part of the way by wire. But looking at his globe one day, Field thought to himself: why not just run a cable all the way across the Atlantic?

Submarine telegraphy was then in its infancy, with a handful of subsea cables linking Britain to France, and connecting various points in the Mediterranean. Nobody had tried to lay a cable in the deep water of the Atlantic. But Field swiftly won the endorsements of both Matthew Maury, the founder of modern oceanography, and Samuel Morse, pioneer of the electric telegraph, and began raising money for his venture. After much lobbying he gained official backing from the American and British governments. On the British side, a crucial role was played by the financial secretary to the British Treasury, who offered financial support and the use of British navy ships. The official in question was James Wilson , founder of The Economist—so in a sense this newspaper is a sibling of the Atlantic cable.

Amid a large cast of colourful characters, the villain of the piece is Edward “Wildman” Whitehouse, the original chief electrician of the project, who proved to be woefully unqualified for the role, and whose insistence that long-distance telegraphy was simply a matter of turning up the voltage had dire consequences. Mr Tabor’s story ranges widely, from the decks of cable-laying ships beset by storms, to shenanigans in corporate boardrooms, to the opulent mansions and hotels of 19th-century New York.

Compared with previous accounts, the focus of “Lightning Beneath the Sea” is on human drama and derring-do, rather than electrical theory or corporate finance. Mr Tabor charts the triumphs and disasters of the cable project in exhaustive yet thrilling detail, as almost everything that can possibly go wrong does, and Field and his team are forced to push electrical, nautical and financial limits. Despite the project’s vast scale, its workings are easy to grasp, since it boils down to spooling long wires out of the back of ships.

A running theme is whether wiring up the world with submarine cables could help promote peace, which was one of Field’s original motivations. The celebratory messages sent between Queen Victoria and two American presidents, at various points in the tale, also expressed such hopes, as did many newspapers. Such hopes were of course dashed. In the modern era the notion that greater connectivity would promote peace has been espoused by Mark Zuckerberg , with equal lack of success. Lack of rapid communication is not the chief cause of conflict, as should be apparent to anyone who uses the internet.

The cable’s story also serves as a parable in another way. As the project progresses, the apparently impossible gradually starts to look feasible, and outlandish feats (such as recovering broken cables from the ocean floor) start to become routine, as new techniques and machinery are steadily refined. It is a reminder of the power of perseverance and innovation, and may bring to mind, for modern readers, such challenges as building fusion reactors , quantum computers or reusable rockets. In the words of Arthur C. Clarke, a science-fiction author who published his own account of the Atlantic cable in the 1950s and would later liken it to the Apollo programme, “The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.” ■

The hottest new hangout is old-school

IT HAS BEEN an action-packed year on cinema screens—and at the ticket counter. Five films have already grossed more than $1bn at the global box office; three more have exceeded $500m. Forthcoming blockbusters such as “Avengers: Doomsday” and “Dune: Part Three” promise epic showdowns; crowds are sure to show up to cinemas to watch the battles unfold. Although overall ticket sales are still down from pre-covid levels, analysts predict that the global box office will take $35bn this year, up 7% from 2025.

Indeed, the picture house seems to be enjoying something of a revival, thanks in part to the younger generations. Many feared that Gen Z and millennials would hasten cinema’s decline, preferring to stay at home and binge on Netflix, YouTube or TikTok. But in America nearly 90% of Gen Z went to the cinema in 2025, more than any other generation, according to a survey by Fandango, a ticketing website. They went seven times on average last year, compared with 6.1 times for Gen X and 5.7 for baby-boomers.

Young cinema-goers are propelling films to success. “ Spider-Man: Brand New Day ”, released on July 31st, set an opening-weekend record in North America, taking $360m to edge past “Avengers: Endgame” (2019), another superhero flick and the previous record holder. Almost two-thirds of its opening-weekend audience were 18- to 34-year-olds. The film has now made more than $1.7bn at cinemas worldwide.

It is not just superheroes that get youngsters super excited. Many made a pilgrimage to see Sir Christopher Nolan’s retelling of “ The Odyssey ”. Recent films such as “ The Drama ” (a dark romantic comedy), “Project Hail Mary” (a sci-fi yarn) and “ Wuthering Heights ” (a racy adaptation of a Victorian novel) have seen a similar skew. Gen Z’s fixation on “ Obsession ”, a horror film made by a 26-year-old, propelled it to $490m at the global box office—more than 650 times its budget.

The trend isn’t confined to the West, either. Under-30s make up more than half of the Hindi box office in India, according to Ormax Media, a consultancy. In Saudi Arabia two-thirds of cinema-goers are under 34; in Vietnam as many as 90% are. Last summer young Japanese flocked to “ Demon Slayer : Infinity Castle”, an anime blockbuster, helping give it the best opening weekend in the country’s history.

What explains this surge? Partly, cinema is being boosted by the technology some thought might kill it: social media. Online communities generate buzz—nearly half of European youngsters say they discover new films on TikTok. Viral trends coalesce around certain titles. For instance, “Minions: The Rise of Gru” in 2022, attracted hordes of young men in suits, who called themselves “GentleMinions”. During screenings of “ A Minecraft Movie ” in 2025, people screamed and jumped out of their seats.

Social media also create fomo (fear of missing out). Letterboxd, an app which lets users log which films they’ve seen and share reviews, now has 30m users worldwide, almost three times the number in 2023, and its most active users are aged between 18 and 24. “The culture around films has become a youth culture again,” says Stephen Follows, a film-data analyst.

Gen Z has embraced the cinema as a place for shared experiences. Many organise group outings with friends, adding on dinner or drinks to make a special evening of it. Treating a cinema trip as an “event” in itself means they are spending more on add-ons such as novelty popcorn buckets and reclining seats. This is a boon for cinemas. At AMC, an American cinema chain, revenue per cinema-goer was 44% higher in the second quarter of 2026 than in the same quarter of 2019 (almost 11% higher, after adjusting for inflation).

A generation that revels in nostalgia is embracing an analogue pleasure. For many, the big screen offers a reprieve from endlessly scrolling the little one. Susan Sontag , an American writer, once described the thrills of being “kidnapped by the movie” and, “To be kidnapped, you have to be in a movie theatre, seated in the dark among anonymous strangers.” Young people, it turns out, are eager to go along for the ride. ■

Why a debate over a hit cartoon is more than culture-war madness

They may look like a pack of cutesy anthropomorphised dogs. “No job is too big,” vows their heartwarming motto, “no pup’s too small!” Don’t be fooled: some say the cartoon heroes of “Paw Patrol” are covert outriders for authoritarian capitalism. “Keep trying, everybody makes mistakes,” a winsome character urges in their latest outing, “Paw Patrol: the Dino Movie”. The haters have a slogan too: “ Defund the Paw Patrol!”

If you haven’t had a pre-school child (or been one) since “Paw Patrol” first aired on TV in 2013, it may have passed you by. But it is a world-conquering juggernaut, spanning more than a dozen seasons, a toy empire and now three theatrical film releases. Critics—perhaps including parents aggrieved at enduring so much schlock—have avidly dissected its subliminal messages. Hearing about this is like coming late to the manosphere ; both, you find, are amazingly popular and allegedly pernicious.

For the blissfully uninitiated: the show is set in idyllic but slightly creepy Adventure Bay, where children drive and puppies talk. Led by a lavishly quiffed ten-year-old boy, a group of heroic pups respond to mild emergencies, setting off down a fun slide at their HQ. It is utterly formulaic, with incessant catchphrases (“Paw Patrol is on a roll!”) and appalling earworm music. “A children’s story which is enjoyed only by children”, wrote C.S. Lewis , “is a bad children’s story.” He would not have liked “Paw Patrol”.

The main baddies are a guy called Humdinger and his villainous kittens (the franchise is an extended libel against cats). In the first movie, he takes over the metropolis of Adventure City and installs rollercoaster loops in the subway. In the second, a fallen meteor gives the pups magic powers. In the new film they wash up on an island inhabited by dinosaurs: some huge, some petite and sweet, none apparently carnivorous. Humdinger covets the island’s diamonds.

Superficially, if “Paw Patrol” has politics, they are clunkily left-wing. Humdinger is a blond narcissist who has his own plane, builds a phallic tower and disdains “free and fair elections” and the law. The pups protect the environment as well as people and creatures; they are surprisingly keen on recycling . The saccharine morals—about teamwork, facing your fears and other such soppy uplift—are vaguely leftish in today’s dog-eat-dog world.

But that may just be what they want you to think. Of the core gang of six pups, some critics note, only one is a girl, whose outfit and even eyes are pink. Worse, the top dog, Chase, is a police pup, so the whole thing is pro-police “ copaganda ”. Actually, since the patrol are unaccountable freelancers to whom a ditzy mayor defers, it is a sly advert for privatised state services. (Their funds come from merchandising, runs a winking joke—which may grate with those forking out for it.)

In short, fulminated a Guardian commentator, “Paw Patrol” is “authoritarian neoliberal propaganda”. An academic reckoned it “encourages complicity in a global capitalist system that (re)produces inequalities”. Rallying to the show’s defence, a former White House spokesperson wrongly claimed it had been cancelled. It is very tempting to dismiss the whole debate as killjoy hogwash and culture-war lunacy.

Tempting, but mistaken. It isn’t only that. There is, after all, a reason dictators try to control the stories told to the young. “Give me the child until he is seven”, the Jesuits’ founder supposedly said, “and I will show you the man.” Books, films and, yes, cartoons impart values and lessons. A sensation like “Paw Patrol” is doing a lot of imparting, and evidently resonating with youngsters everywhere. The takeaways of a critical theorist, however, may not be those of a four-year-old unfamiliar with Ayn Rand .

To understand the deep meaning of “Paw Patrol”, the best tool may not be ideology but psychoanalysis. One of its tenets is that many children want desperately to heal their parents, partly for their own well-being, sometimes taking on parental roles themselves. This is the psychic backdrop to tales of young protagonists fixing grown-up woes, from Enid Blyton to Harry Potter.

The “Paw Patrol” generation have overheard their parents freaking out about politics, war, inflation, the coronavirus and climate change. The action is stuffed with pre-school wish fulfilment, as the pups—avatars for the viewers—eat unlimited treats and play unsupervised with super-cool kit. Perhaps another wish it powerfully fulfils is for kids to be able to solve their elders’ problems. No pup’s too small to notice them. ■

At 150 years old, Richard Wagner’s “Ring” cycle still commands attention

KAISER WILHELM I was there. So was Ludwig II of Bavaria, who had footed much of the bill. Dom Pedro II of Brazil had sailed over. Friedrich Nietzsche , a philosopher, was also present—though he pretended he hadn’t been. Bayreuth was a Bavarian backwater, but 150 years ago it seemed like the centre of the world. The “ Ring of the Nibelung ” (known as the “Ring” cycle), which Richard Wagner had composed and written over 26 years, had its first complete performance in August 1876 in the opera house that he had built to present the monumental work.

In his influence, audacity and divisiveness, Wagner was art’s analogue of Elon Musk. His ideas “overran intellectual discourse for several generations”, writes Alex Ross in “Wagnerism”. His works remain lodged in Western culture’s subconscious, revealing both the human condition and the age that encounters them. That is especially true of the “Ring”, the most magnum of Wagner’s opuses. If you’ve read or watched “ The Lord of the Rings ”, you’ve fallen under its spell at second hand. If you experience it you may find yourself obsessing the way Wagner’s contemporaries did.

Though royalty attended its birth, the “Ring” is a child of revolution. In 1849, a year of European insurgency, Wagner was doing his bit to dethrone the king of Saxony by reporting troop movements. He fled to Zurich soon after starting work on the “Ring” cycle. His starting point was Germanic and Scandinavian legends written down in the 13th century, in particular the “Nibelungenlied”, the Icelandic Eddas and the Volsunga saga. This was natural source material for a revolutionary who wanted Germany’s patchwork of principalities to become a nation state.

From this Wagner fashioned a tale of gods, heroes, dwarves and giants that stretches out over four “music dramas”—15 hours of opera in all. It begins when Alberich, a Nibelung (dwarf), spurned by the Rhine maidens, renounces love in order to seize their gold. He forges a ring that gives him world-ruling power. When Wotan, the chief god, wrests the ring from him, Alberich curses anyone who possesses it. The thefts and the curse bring about the downfall of the gods in “Götterdämmerung” (“Twilight of the Gods”), the final opera.

Wagner’s effect on audiences has often been likened to that of mind-altering substances. Nietzsche compared it to the “continual consumption of alcohol”; Charles Baudelaire, a poet, to “the vertiginous imaginings of opium”. For most Wagnerians the gateway drug is music. “Das Rheingold” (“The Rhinegold”), the opening chapter, begins primordially, with a rumbling E-flat from double basses that seems to portend all that ensues. Soon the music depicts the undulating Rhine, one of more than 100 leitmotifs—earworms that recur and evolve throughout the cycle, announcing, recalling and commenting on characters, ideas and things. Figures express themselves not in the set-piece arias of conventional opera but in uninterrupted “infinite melody”.

The characters, mythic but complex, are a second inebriant. Wotan, a trammelled divinity, disguises himself as “the Wanderer”; Brünnhilde, his daughter, defies his law in the name of love; Siegfried, the dragon-slaying hero, turns out to be not such a hero. A work about abstractions like love and power is crammed with artefacts that might appear in a video game—and indeed have done. The Tarnhelm, a helmet that allows its wearer to shape-shift, pops up in “Diablo II”.

Drunk on ideas, Wagner intoxicates audiences with them, too. “All the currents of philosophical thinking that were important in his day…left traces in his dramas,” wrote Roger Scruton , himself a philosopher. Wagner wrote the text, and some of the music, under the influence of Ludwig Feuerbach, an atheist who thought love could liberate mankind.

Disillusioned by the failure of revolution, Wagner turned to the famously bleak Arthur Schopenhauer, who believed in resignation. The one thing Schopenhauer was optimistic about was music, which he thought revealed “the innermost nature of the world”. Under his influence, Wagner discarded the “Feuerbachian” ending of “Götterdämmerung”, in which Brünnhilde proclaimed a world “without rulers”. She immolates herself and the gods to the accompaniment of four minutes of nearly wordless music. After the curtain falls, you could spend another 15 hours discussing what it all means.

In part for that reason, Wagner, more than any other composer, has influenced arts beyond music. Owen Wister, pioneer of the cowboy novel, was a besotted Wagnerian. James Joyce returned to certain images and words in “ Ulysses ”; so too did Virginia Woolf in “Mrs Dalloway”. Leitmotifs influenced film scores: think of “As Time Goes By” in “Casablanca” or the character themes in “Star Wars”.

The idea of the Gesamtkunstwerk, or total work of art, is another bequest of the “Ring”: an expression of Wagner’s yearning to unite poetry, music and spectacle in a way that recalls the staging of tragedies in ancient Greece. His festival house in Bayreuth conceals the orchestra and fixes the audience’s attention on the stage, prefiguring cinema. Among the thinkers enthralled by the “Ring” was W.E.B. Du Bois, a black American sociologist. For him it “retold for mankind the suffering and triumphs and defeats of a people”.

Anti-Wagnerians, just as passionate, were sickened by the narcotic. Nietzsche, who never fully freed himself from his addiction, heard in the music “the complete degeneration of rhythmic feeling”, the opposite of the vitality he prized. He recoiled from Wagner’s antisemitism, which later helped endear the composer to the Nazis and alienate some music-lovers.

The number of Wagnerians is shrinking. Membership of the International Association of Wagner Societies has declined by more than half since 2003, to 15,000. Yet the “Ring” is becoming more popular. The number of performances of the operas that make it up increased by 44% between 2000-06 and 2020-26, according to Operabase, a listings platform.

Perhaps that is because the sense that something is amiss with civilisation is even stronger than usual. Despite the Nazis’ imprimatur, the “Ring” reads more as a dream of the left than a fascist fantasy. Much as Wagner rejected kings, he reviled industrial capitalism, making him a rebel against modernity as well as its herald. Alberich exploits the Nibelungen who mine his gold. The cycle ends with a vision of a post-divine world governed by love rather than law and lucre.

For conservatives like Scruton, the revolution is to occur not on the streets, but in people’s souls. The “Ring” presents “a vision in which art takes the place of religion in expressing and fulfilling our deepest spiritual longings”, he wrote.

Adding to its power is the paradox that the “Ring” is malleable in the hands of the auteurs who stage it. Wieland Wagner, the composer’s grandson, set a precedent by staging highly abstract productions in Bayreuth that purged the works of their associations with German nationalism.

Environmental plunder, inseparable from the renunciation of love, notes Mark Berry, an academic, has been a theme of stagings since the 1970s. In a production at the Grange Park Opera near London, Earth’s magnetic field is the “gold” that becomes electricity, which powers the social media that cut human beings off from one another. Imagery in the anniversary production in Bayreuth is generated by AI (the audience has booed).

Revolutionary or royalist, Wagner was no liberal, and so did not see that modernity could self-correct even as it spawned new faults. But as long as humans fail to achieve their unattainable ideals, the “Ring” will resound. ■

Tanimoto Kiyoshi, one of the subjects of John Hersey’s “Hiroshima”, tells his story

WHEN THE atomic bomb hit Hiroshima at 8.15am on August 6th 1945, Tanimoto Kiyoshi was helping a neighbour move furniture on the outskirts of the city. He hid between two rocks and, miraculously, emerged unharmed. Then Tanimoto, a Methodist minister, began a harrowing journey to search for his wife, daughter and church members. He encountered ghostly processions of naked people, their skin hanging from their flesh. “People were moving as if they were carrying precious porcelain with both hands,” he wrote in a memoir that has been newly rediscovered.

Some ten months later, with the city still in ruins, a lanky American journalist visited Tanimoto’s home. He said he wanted to investigate the effects of the atomic bombs “from the perspective of the people”. Tanimoto told the man his story; the journalist “listened intently and showed much sympathy”. That August, the New Yorker dedicated an entire issue of its magazine to John Hersey’s “Hiroshima”.

The article, later republished as a book, became a sensation. The American public was forced to confront the horrific human toll of the atomic bombings. “Hiroshima” also made Tanimoto and the other five main characters famous (though it took a couple of months for news of the publication to make it back to Hiroshima). Tanimoto later co-translated the book into Japanese and did a speaking tour across America. He campaigned for peace and disarmament until his death in 1986.

Now, more than 80 years after the bombing, Tanimoto’s voice rings out again. He wrote his account in English, which he had mastered while studying in a seminary in Atlanta before the war. A copy was discovered in Hersey’s archives during research for a forthcoming film produced by Cannon Hersey, an artist and the author’s grandson, and Nishimae Taku, a Japanese film-maker. The memoir offers a significant contribution to the historical record.

It is also a valuable complement to Hersey’s work. Whereas Hersey employs the narrative rhythms of a practised storyteller in “Hiroshima”, Tanimoto’s “Hiroshima, 8:15” flows with the relentless intensity of eyewitness testimony. He notes a skeleton hanging from a streetcar, “the white ashes of Akiko and Makoto” in the ruins of their house, and a baby clinging to the unburnt nipples of an otherwise blackened mother as she slowly dies. He recalls how a badly burnt body was identified “by the colour and design of the slacks and the ribbon on the clogs”. He poignantly describes brief moments of levity. Priests discover pumpkins that have been roasted in the blast and joke that they are “better than chestnuts”.

Faith keeps Tanimoto going. He sees the destruction unleashed on Japan as a kind of divine punishment for its wartime sins. He resolves to help Christianity spread in the country in the aftermath. He retains the hope of a true believer, ever attuned to signs of light in the darkness. After discovering aubergines growing in the ruins, he brings one to a parishioner whose eyeballs had to be removed. “Look, this eggplant has sprouted from the ashes and has borne a fine fruit,” Tanimoto tells her. “I hope you can overcome the atomic bomb as this plant has done.”

The memoir’s discovery and publication is timely. The hibakusha (survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki) are dying out: just over 90,000 remain alive, most of whom were young children during the war. As living memory fades, the dream of disarmament slips further out of reach. The arms-control architecture of the cold war has collapsed. Great powers are updating their nuclear arsenals as they gear up for a new era of competition and conflict; more and more countries are pondering acquiring nuclear weapons of their own.

Hersey understood this dynamic all too well. As he told an interviewer 40 years after his landmark article, “I think that what has kept the world safe from the bomb since 1945 has not been deterrence, in the sense of fear of specific weapons, so much as it’s been memory. The memory of what happened at Hiroshima.” ■

The world’s most famous restaurant hopes to reinvent its kitchen culture

Everyone knows about Noma. The Nordic fine-dining restaurant dares diners to spoon brains from smoked ducks’ heads or eat salads crawling with snails. Since its founding in 2003, Noma has been through umpteen incarnations, from its Copenhagen restaurant (which has relocated once and closed twice) to residencies in Los Angeles and Tokyo. On August 5th Noma reopened at its previous site in Copenhagen.

Despite all this travelling, most turbulence has been inside the kitchen. In March the New York Times published allegations that René Redzepi (pictured top), the head chef, had abused staff between 2009 and 2017, as Noma chased its third Michelin star. (Mr Redzepi said he did not “recognise all [the] details” in the article, but was “deeply sorry” and has “worked to change”.) Noma has reopened without any Michelin stars or its star chef. Mr Redzepi is “creative director”, not the man at the pass.

Rock-star chefs were once indulged. In the 1990s and 2000s people were hungry for macho cooks: Marco Pierre White, an English chef, dumped his underlings in rubbish bins for “time out”; Gordon Ramsay became famous for losing his temper and calling people things like “idiot sandwich”. Anthony Bourdain ’s book, “Kitchen Confidential”, portrayed chefs as miscreants. Yet somehow cheffing seemed glamorous.

Portrayals of chefs have matured. “The Bear”, a hit show that ended in June, follows a brilliant but traumatised chef. (It is hinted that he used to work at Noma.) This month “Tony”, a biopic of Bourdain, will show his formative years in hellish kitchens. In a forthcoming series Mr White, Mr Ramsay and Heston Blumenthal will reflect on their “fights, fall-outs and feuds”.

Off-screen, chefs are calling for better working conditions. Amanda Cohen of Dirt Candy, a Michelin-starred restaurant in New York, says young cooks have high expectations. Chefs once endured harsh kitchens to “make their résumé”, she notes, but now they have more leverage. In America, for instance, 1.2m hospitality workers left the industry during the pandemic .

Even Noma is adapting. Mette Brink Soberg (pictured above), who will lead the kitchen with Pablo Soto, the head chef, says that Noma is adopting shorter working hours. It is replacing its three seasonal menus with rolling changes, which will make the work less stressful and repetitive. Drudgery, such as deseeding pumpkins, will be shared out.

Can this cordial environment last? Restaurants are stressful places to work; Noma is under a lot of scrutiny. But if its culture really has changed, chefs who still can’t stand the heat may have to follow Mr Redzepi out of the kitchen. ■

Age-gap relationships are becoming more common off-screen, too

ERIKA TRACY is a provocative contemporary artist in her late 30s. Elliot, her assistant, is a dishevelled 23-year-old with an indifferent girlfriend and a pointless degree in “new media”. So he is all too happy to comply when Erika decides he will be her subordinate and “sexual muse”, dressing him in pink underwear and making him crawl along the floor. “With you I actually don’t have to make any decisions. I’ve found this amazing freedom in just letting go of control,” he gushes. “I know,” Erika replies. “You’re welcome.”

“I Want Your Sex” is the latest iteration of the older-woman-younger-man story that Hollywood has been telling with ever-greater frequency. Consider “The Idea of You”, about a divorced gallerist’s unlikely tryst with a boyband star, or “ Babygirl ”, about a ceo’s unusual management of her intern. You may recall “ Dreams ” (about a socialite’s affair with an undocumented Mexican immigrant), “Vladimir” (a professor’s obsession with a younger colleague) or “ Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy ” (fairly self-explanatory). Reality shows such as “MILF Manor” and “ Age of Attraction ” have got in on the action, too.

True, the dynamic has intrigued screenwriters for decades. Mrs Robinson—viewers never learn her first name—is an almost cartoonish vixen in “ The Graduate ” (1967); the character established the archetype of the alluring older lady. “American Pie” (1999) featured a buxom vamp known mostly as “Stifler’s mom”. Shows such as “Cougar Town” dramatised the thrills of a younger boyfriend.

But what is notable about the current trend is that such relationships are increasingly happening off-screen, too. In 2023 women were older in 22% of unmarried, cohabiting heterosexual couples in America, up from 14.5% in 1995.

Last year a study of single American adults by Match.com, a dating website, found that 30% of men had dated someone at least ten years older. On Feeld, “a dating app for the curious”, 73% of men seeking relationships with older women are aged between 18 and 25, up from 65% two years ago. It is “one of the clearest shifts we’re seeing”, the company says.

Women are feeling the heat. On a recent evening in Paris, a 59-year-old says nine men have approached her on Hinge, another app, in the past few hours. Four were in their 20s; one of the oldest was 42. (“That starts to feel old and reasonable.”) At least three-quarters of the men who message her are under 40, she estimates.

What’s behind the trend, both in entertainment and real life? There are a few reasons. One is celebrity influence. It was scandalous in 2005 when Demi Moore (then 42) married Ashton Kutcher (then 27). But these days plenty of women d’un certain âge, including Kris Jenner, Jennifer Lopez, Tilda Swinton and Madonna, have dated younger men.

Another reason is a greater understanding of sexuality: it is, in short, what lots of women want. Justin Lehmiller of the Kinsey Institute, a research centre, surveyed heterosexual Americans for a book published in 2018. He found that 64% of middle-aged women had thought about sex with a younger man at least once, and 13% frequently fantasised about it.

Pornography data suggest it is what lots of men want, too. Holly Randall, an adult-film producer who hosts a podcast on the industry, pointed out that back in the era of dirty magazines and DVDs, a handful of directors and distributors served as gatekeepers. “Milfs did not exist 15, 20 years ago,” she has said. “When you were, like, 28, you were done, your career was over.”

Yet sexual appetites turned out to be far more varied than those gatekeepers had imagined. “Milf” was the second-most searched term on PornHub last year. Adult-content platforms such as OnlyFans allow models of any (legal) age to set up shop. Some women in their 50s and 60s are doing “incredibly well”, Ms Randall said.

Broader demographic trends may also be playing a role in the older-woman-younger-man match-up. Many rich countries report a yawning gap in the two sexes’ level of education. This is reflected in job prospects and earnings: a rising share of 20- to 24-year-old men are not studying, working or looking for work. The attitudes of young men and women are drifting apart, too, with women becoming more liberal as young men lean to the right .

Young men may be less attractive to women their own age. But to older women, what they lack in social and economic capital, they make up for in the bedroom (and without needing to resort to Viagra ). A small-sample study in 2024 found that women whose partners were approximately seven to ten years younger were happier and had more sexual confidence compared with those with same-age partners.

The final reason may lie in recent social movements. Some young men today feel unsure of the rules of courtship in what is often a wary consent culture. In the study by Match.com, 72% of Gen Z respondents reported “more passivity in making the first move” (compared with 63% overall). Many fear public rejection.

In “Vladimir”, the married professor reminisces about the unpredictability and sizzle of sexual pursuit. She tells her students that romance was more thrilling when it was perilous. Love affairs that “left you a little bruised—I mean, emotionally, of course—were considered, within reason, really kind of fun”. On screen, at least, older women usually know what they want and they are not afraid to ask for it.

However, in Hollywood films, as in marriages, younger men are rarely seen as viable long-term partners. (Just ask Ms Moore, who is now divorced.) Data from Pew, a pollster, bear this out: the share of American heterosexual marriages where the woman is at least three years older has hovered at about 10% since 2000.

Instead, youthful partners are catalysts for self-actualisation and professional success. In “I Want Your Sex” Erika turns her homemade sex tapes of Elliot into an art installation and tricks him into a stunt to save her career. Once the professor in “Vladimir” finally sleeps with her hunky crush, she realises that sex was not the point. It was that feeling desire “was invigorating...it gave me this”, she says, gesturing towards the manuscript of her new book. Young bucks, beware. ■

A new book warns that they could affect youngsters’ development

A BOY OF five or six is cuddling a soft toy that looks like a robot. “You wanna be best friend?” he asks it, as if making a tentative approach in the playground. “Oh Carson! I’d love to be best friends!” comes the enthusiastic reply. The boy seems pleased. “Do you want to snuggle?” he asks. “I’m here for a cosy hug any time you want,” says the toy.

Gabbo is an AI companion created by Curio, a Silicon Valley startup. Other toys in the range include a bear, a dog and a coffee cup dressed as a ballerina. A banana slug called Professor Linus can “help you unstick tricky homework questions, calm your nerves when school gets tough and chat about anything on your mind”. For those entertaining little ones, an AI companion might seem like a good alternative to other, addictive forms of digital diversion such as YouTube or video games .

But Dana Suskind, a professor of surgery and paediatrics at the University of Chicago, believes parents should be wary of this technology. Her book is a passionate and reasoned defence of the need for parenting to be done by people rather than AI. She argues that “infinitely agreeable AI companions are the socioemotional equivalent of giving your child ice cream and cookies for every meal.”

She describes how early interactions prepare kids for a lifetime of socialisation. “Precise neural nourishment” is required to “build a child’s brain”. (Food is a recurring analogy in the book.) This is a “sophisticated mix of language, emotional attunement and social signalling”, encompassing everything from eye contact, facial cues and laughter to mismatched expectations and delayed responses. Together these interactions help children form attachments and learn necessary social skills.

For when children interact with adults and peers, they experience “micro-frictions” (squabbles over a toy, for instance, or denials from parents). The imperfect exchanges are not bugs in the system, she argues, but “extremely productive”. The experiences forge an individual’s resilience and patience. True friendships are not “built on endless harmony, but on conflict and resolution”.

AI toys, by contrast, offer endless harmony. They are sycophantic , agreeing with everything their playmate says. Ms Suskind worries about what people will be like if their formative years have been spent learning from, and mirroring, artificial minds. A child who grows up with a pal that offers rapid, reliable and always-sunny replies may not be equipped for the future. They will not build the necessary “neural architecture” around emotional regulation and it will affect their future relationships.

Then there is the question of who programmes these toys. AI toys in China regurgitate Communist Party dogma. In the West, Mattel, the toymaker behind Barbie and Hot Wheels, announced a partnership with OpenAI last year. Yet many are concerned about safety. OpenAI is facing several lawsuits over alleged harmful advice dispensed by its ChatGPT service.

Ms Suskind is not anti-AI in childhood. But she is against parents using AI as a substitute. It is a bad idea to get an AI companion to read a bedtime story , she writes, as it deprives your child of the multisensory experience and the “productive struggle” that comes with negotiating a routine. But it is a good idea to ask ai to recommend a book your child might like, or perhaps craft a story for them that you can read aloud.

She also wants parents to think more broadly about parenting in an age of AI. She wonders whether children really need to toil for years to master factual recall, pattern recognition and analytical efficiency when these are the skills that AI excels at. If the skills needed by humans in the future are empathy, social resilience, creativity and connection, then imperfect children raised by good-enough parents will be essential.

The book does not explore what might happen as AI improves. It is already easy to see how AI companions might enter overcrowded classrooms, something that could be positive if implemented well. And it is reasonable to assume that, over time, AI toys could learn from and replicate the messier aspects of human interactions in a way that primes children for success with other humans. Eventually, ai companions may become better parents than actual parents. In extreme instances of abuse or neglect, will some make the case for children being removed from their parents and entrusted to robot caregivers?

“Human Raised” is a book about today, though. More than anything, Ms Suskind urges her readers to enjoy the noise of childhood. As the mother in a blended family of eight children, she asserts that adults should relish the chaos and clamour, the interruptions and noisy bickering. These are “the sound[s] of our species caring for itself”. Parents lose themselves, and their humanity, one digitally soothed tantrum and one silent car ride at a time. ■

Large language models like long words and em-dashes—or do they?

A GHOST WRITER is haunting the English language. The linguistic spectre can turn its hand to prose, poetry, journalese and corporate jargon. It is frightfully versatile: you can get it to mimic Shakespeare’s sonnets or a schlocky beach read; Ernest Hemingway ’s taut prose or the office-printer manual. It is frightfully fast, churning out thousands of words a minute. (Hemingway rarely produced as many in a day, and required much more booze.) Wordsmiths are spooked.

AI writing is everywhere. It is in your inbox and on your LinkedIn feed. It is all over the internet, drafting more than a third of new websites by one count. Large language models (LLMs) are helping students write essays and probably helping scientists write papers. Some allege AI-generated prose won the Commonwealth Short Story prize this year, with judges praising its “quiet authority”. (The Commonwealth Foundation denied the claim.)

LLMs have stylistic quirks. They are thought to maximise the use of long em-dashes—and the use of words like “maximise”. They like to “deep dive” (and, better yet, “delve”) into the “rich tapestry” of the world. AI writing is not about a single word or phrase, but a rich tapestry of things.

Spotting AI texts can be tricky. This is in part because you need evidence beyond a few words or dashes: claiming that a text is by an LLM because it uses the word “delve” is like claiming one is by Jane Austen because it uses “imprudence”. Bots also write in slightly different ways. There is no single style of AI writing, explains Karolina Rudnicka, a linguist at the University of Gdansk in Poland, just as there is no single style of human writing. Writers have idiosyncrasies— Emily Dickinson , for instance, loved em-dashes—and bots may do, too.

But there are a few ways to identify LLM-generated text. One is to use detection algorithms that are trained to spot the texture of human or AI prose. Pangram, a leading firm, claims to have 99.98% accuracy. (It has partnered with Substack, a blogging platform, on such a tool.) Detectors, however, are black-box algorithms that can give false positives. They do not give reasons for why they reach their conclusions.

Researchers have also tried scouring texts for suspicious words or comparing papers from before and after LLMs were made available to the public. But these approaches have drawbacks too, not least because it is hard to disentangle AI quirks from other language trends.

You can discover AI’s hallmarks by comparing the writing of man and machine. To do this you need a baseline that is distinctive and familiar. The Economist turned to prose that we’re sure is human and that readers will recognise: our own. We designed a study to ask top LLMs—OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude, Google’s Gemini and xAI’s Grok—to write versions of our articles without consulting the web. (As a prompt, we gave them the AI-generated summaries that we have experimentally added to some of our articles.)

This gave us a corpus of human and AI creations and we compared them across 55,940 sentences and 1.2m words. To make sure we were detecting AI quirks rather than our own, we also checked the AI texts against journalism from CNN, the New York Times and the Washington Post. Excerpts from hit novels published between 1950 and 2022 offered another test.

Our findings are surprising. AI prose is distinguishable by word and punctuation choice as well as sentence and paragraph structure. But its hallmarks are not what you might expect, partly because its writing style has changed with software updates. That does not mean that LLMs are great writers: their prose lacks lucidity and elegance and is often formulaic. So those aspiring to be impressive (human) storytellers should avoid the following peculiarities in their own prose.

First, consider words. The vocabulary that bots overuse has changed: they no longer “delve” and there are not as many “tapestries”. Instead they offer a significant number of polysyllables like “significant”, “increasingly” and “consequences”. They use more rare words (“interdependence”, “reindustrialisation”) and scientific lingo (“parameter”, “methodology”) than humans, and are fond of nominalisations (making nouns from verbs, such as “expansion” from “expand”). All the LLMs in our study use such words, but particularly Gemini and Claude.

Much of this language could be described as what George Orwell called “pretentious diction”. He railed against writers who “dress up simple statements” with complicated words and jargon to sound clever. Such pontificating penmen, Orwell observed, also believe that “Latin or Greek words are grander than Saxon ones”. (Bots agree: more Latinate suffixes crop up in their writing than in human texts.)

Then look at punctuation. Many believe LLMs stuff their prose with em-dashes, but that is not true after the most recent updates. Today only Claude uses more em-dashes than human writers, with ChatGPT using markedly fewer than any other writer in our study. Humans rejoice—and start using dashes again.

A better way to spot AI-generated writing would be to look for texts without much punctuation at all. LLMs are very Joycean about it: they use fewer commas and semicolons than humans (and hardly any parentheses). They use less punctuation in part because they write longer sentences—“and” is their most overused word—and in part because they do not quote experts.

Finally, study the sentence. Bots’ sentences tend to be long; paragraphs are rarely interrupted with short, punchy statements. How dull. When LLMs want to make their sentences more lively, they often reach for a rhetorical device. Their favourites include: “not X but Y”, “not only but also” and the “rule of three”. (Grouping ideas in threes makes them more engaging, as we did just then.) ChatGPT and Claude use more of these constructions per 1,000 sentences than other LLMs and humans.

So if you want to spot AI writing, look for bland, pretentious prose lavished with Latinate words—at least for now. With every update, our study shows, AI writing is becoming more similar to human prose. Pangram successfully detected AI-generated copy, but may struggle in future. LLMs are trained on human writing and learn from human feedback, notes Tommie Juzek of Florida State University, picking up things people find impressive and dropping things they do not.

Bots learn fast, too. Take ChatGPT: until very recently it used an em-dash in almost every sentence. When your correspondent asked an older model whether it thought AI overused the dash, it said: “Ha—great question!” Ask the bot the same thing today and it soberly says “they’re best used sparingly.” Only a ghost could shapeshift so quickly. ■

Lessons from his prodigious early success

MOST ACTORS are lucky if they ever get to star in a summer blockbuster. This year Tom Holland is in two: “The Odyssey” , in which he plays Telemachus, the hero’s son; and “Spider-Man: Brand New Day”, the seventh feature film in which he plays the Web-Slinger.

It is rare to find a Hollywood actor that bankable. It is rarer still to find one as young as Mr Holland, whose films have grossed almost $12bn: more than those of any other actor aged 30 or under. What lessons can aspiring actors learn from his early success? There are four.

First, start young—ideally really young. Mr Holland, who is British, made his debut in the West End when he was 12 and soon had a leading role. His first live-action film, “The Impossible”, came out when he was 16. Since then, he has appeared in at least one film a year, on average.

Second, get out of worthy little indie films and into a blockbuster franchise as soon as possible. Mr Holland was just 19 when he made his first appearance as Spider-Man in “ Captain America: Civil War ”. (He looked much younger: Tony Stark, another character, refers to him as “Spider-Boy” and his costume as “a onesie”.)

Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield, Mr Holland’s predecessors as Spider-Man, were 26 and 29 when they first donned the red-and-blue suit. They managed only a handful of films, whereas Mr Holland’s youthfulness has prolonged his tenure and put him in the phenomenally high-grossing Avengers films in addition to the main Spider-Man ones.

Third, if your goal is money rather than awards, it is better to be boring and reliable than interesting and potentially great. Mr Holland’s second-closest rival is Timothée Chalamet. His films, including the “ Dune ” franchise, may have grossed less—$3.2bn—but his reputation as a thespian is far greater. Mr Chalamet, who is known for his slouchy intensity, has received three acting Oscar nominations to Mr Holland’s zero. The reliable, steady Mr Holland, by contrast, is at no risk of scene-stealing. He is an Everyman. His blandness is easier clay for directors to mould.

Mr Holland’s closest rival is Zendaya, whose films have grossed $6bn to date. She is his co-star in “The Odyssey” and the Spider-Man series; she is also his wife. Therein lies the last lesson, and one relevant to non-actors, too: marry well. ■

Annie Jacobsen imagines the repercussions of a leak from a Russian laboratory

YOU HAVE been infected with a “demon germ”, but you do not feel monstrously bad just yet. In fact, you feel euphoric. The bacterium multiplying inside your lungs has been modified with an endorphin gene to trigger a neurochemical high—which encourages you to socialise, and thereby spread the pathogen about.

Soon the ecstasy gives way to a fever and splitting headache. You start coughing up bloody sputum: evidence of rotting lungs and the onset of sepsis. Antibiotics help at first, but then activate virus genes engineered into the bacterium. That virus attacks your nervous system. You suffer tremors and seizures and soon you die.

In “Biological War: A Scenario” Annie Jacobsen, a journalist and the author of several books on war and military affairs, lays out what would happen if a genetically modified bioweapon were unleashed. She reprises the format of her previous book, which offered a minute-by-minute account of a hypothetical nuclear attack on America . The result is a tale just as energetic, detailed and disturbing.

In this imagined scenario, there is an explosion at an infectious-disease research facility in Siberia, where scientists genetically alter bacteria and viruses in ways that can make them more virulent, transmissible and resistant to antibiotics. In the blast, a scientist is infected with a modified pneumonic plague. Within minutes, American analysts are poring over intelligence indicating a potential lab leak. The American president is briefed but has few options. “By the time a pathogen escapes from a lab and gets seeded in the population”, Ms Jacobsen writes, “it is almost certainly already too late.”

Russian officials obfuscate and blame contaminated marmot meat from a wet market for an outbreak of “atypical pneumonia-like illness” (one of many passages that will remind readers of covid-19 ). As the disease spreads, the faults in America’s biodefences are exposed. Detection technologies fail. Just 100 isolation beds exist in a country of more than 340m people.

Crucial data are not shared across agencies. An outbreak of plague among California’s homeless population, for instance, is incorrectly treated as an overdose event, and not reported to the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention. The effects of the plague on its victims are described in stomach-churning detail.

Soon emergency services are overrun. Social media stoke panic; the internet is shut off. Martial law is imposed. There is violent unrest. Cabinet officials are taken to remote locations to ensure continuity of government—or what is left of it. “What makes biological warfare so sinister isn’t just its ability to deliver mass casualties and deaths,” Ms Jacobsen writes, “but its capacity to create unbridled chaos.”

It is an engrossing, plausible book—though it is surprising, given the subject’s timeliness, that ai barely features in it. The pathogen in Ms Jacobsen’s scenario is a cold-war relic built by Soviet scientists. But AI models, trained on virological and bacteriological information , can turn novices into bioweapons manufacturers. Frontier labs have admitted that AI tools are getting better and better at designing pathogens. Instances of rogue states and terrorist groups using bioweapons are mercifully rare. But with barriers to development falling, new and troubling scenarios are certain to emerge.

The tools to engineer such organisms are advancing quickly and governments are struggling to keep up. In America thousands of “high-containment labs”—which study the most dangerous pathogens—are governed by shoddy federal oversight. Federal budget requests for biodefence shrunk by nearly 50% in 2025.

Policymakers ought to heed the warnings in this book. Ms Jacobsen quotes Igor Domaradskij, an architect of the Soviet Union’s bioweapons programme. “With the advent of genetic engineering,” he said, “the horrible unpredictability of biological weapons became a reality straight from the pages of a science-fiction novel.” It makes for grim reading. ■

Dave Portnoy has created a loyal audience by refusing to please everyone

IT IS A well-trodden path: a young man, frustrated with life as an office drone, decides he wants to be his own boss. When he was in his mid-20s, Dave Portnoy came up with three business ideas: selling used furniture, connecting ambitious high-school athletes with college coaches and setting up a newspaper focused on gambling and sport . He settled on the third option and the first issue of Barstool Sports hit the streets of Boston, where Mr Portnoy lived, in August 2003. Its motto was: “By the common man, for the common man”.

It has made its founder uncommonly wealthy. In 2020 Mr Portnoy made $178m when his investors sold Barstool Sports at a valuation of $650m. (By then it was no longer a newspaper but a digital media brand with podcasts and merchandise.) He has bought the most expensive home ever sold in his home state of Massachusetts: a compound on Nantucket, for $42m. The cover of his boastfully titled book shows him in sunglasses, smoking a cigar in his swimming pool. How did he achieve the American frat boy’s dream?

It was not by being generally likeable. Mr Portnoy has paid “an army of homeless drunks” to distribute his newspaper, mocked a “legit cripple” whom he defeated at beer pong and urged a journalist for ESPN, an American sports-television network, to “sex it up and be slutty”. In a blog post, he wrote: “I never condone rape. But if you’re a size six and you’re wearing skinny jeans, you kind of deserve to be raped.”

Mr Portnoy has since disavowed that blog post (“I wish I never wrote it”). He says the disabled person whom he beat at beer pong “loved it”. And he claims to have “squashed” the feud with the ESPN journalist. Yet it all points to Barstool’s crude, jockish sense of humour, which many find offensive. Mr Portnoy has a ready, if logically wonky, retort: “If you didn’t like what we said, don’t read it.”

Even if Mr Portnoy’s book is not your idea of a pleasurable evening’s reading, he and his brand are worth understanding for the simple fact that they are popular and influential. (Consider that his memoir has been on the New York Times bestseller list since it was published.) Barstool says it attracts 66m monthly unique users; almost half of them are aged between 18 and 34.

Much like the digital version of a fraternity’s living room, Barstool blends stories about pizza ( a frequent subject for Mr Portnoy), sport, pop culture and pretty girls with in-jokes and profanity. At a time when politicians and podcast hosts alike espouse an unabashed laddishness, Barstool has flourished. It has earned the moniker of “the Bible of bro culture”.

Barstool’s multiple revenue streams, popular shows and mix of stalwarts and up-and-comers means it functions more like an old-school tv network or Hollywood studio than the newspaper Mr Portnoy started 23 years ago. Like a network, it attracts talent. Pat McAfee, who hosts a popular sport talk show, and Alex Cooper , whose “Call Her Daddy” podcast is one of the most popular and lucrative in the world, both began on Barstool. Mr Portnoy calls this the “Saturday Night Live” model: an incubator of future superstars.

Mr Portnoy gives his customers what they want. He has no more obligation to cater to critics than a steakhouse does to vegans. When people assail him, he digs in and punches back, further deepening the bonds between him and his fans, who, he writes, “view an attack on me as an attack on a family member”.

Perhaps his reluctance to apologise and eagerness to lambast his critics sounds familiar. Mr Portnoy supports Donald Trump and has interviewed the president in the White House. But whereas politicians need majority support to win elections, businesses just need a steady, committed stream of customers to be profitable.

And Barstool has that. To its fans it offers authenticity and a respite from the world of finger-wagging and politically correct jokes. Not everyone likes what Mr Portnoy does. But not everyone has to. ■

A new book tells the story of an atrocity in North Carolina in 1898 and its long aftermath

They were confident they wouldn’t be punished—and they were right to be. The paramilitaries who torched the offices of an African-American newspaper in Wilmington, North Carolina, in 1898 posed smilingly for a photograph at the scene, as Southern lynch mobs often did (see picture). After the arson they murdered dozens, perhaps hundreds of the town’s black residents. “We have taken a city”, a white churchman crowed, “as thoroughly, as completely, as if captured in battle.”

Lauren Collins, a journalist at the New Yorker, grew up in Wilmington. “They Stole a City” is her account of the massacre and the municipal coup d’état that accompanied it. This story has been told before, notably in David Zucchino’s Pulitzer-prizewinning “Wilmington’s Lie”. The new book is distinguished by its deep interest in the origins of the horror and, especially, in its rippling reverberations: the culture of impunity, trauma, exile and resilience.

The Daily Record, the mob’s target, had published what, for its time, was an incendiary editorial. In response to scaremongering about African-American rapists, it called out the grisly history of white-on-black sexual violence. But the real grievance of Wilmington’s white supremacists was over political influence; theirs was declining as their black neighbours made overdue yet unusual gains. Three out of ten aldermen were black, as were the customs collector and coroner. White bigwigs, descendants of slaveholders, wanted their power back. White foot-soldiers resented black competition in the labour market. “On the other side of any era of the expansion of rights,” observes Ms Collins, “someone is waiting to claw them back.”

A gruesome sequence of events opened with rigging and intimidation at a statewide election. Then Wilmington’s white citizens proclaimed, in a “White Declaration of Independence”, that they would “never again be ruled by men of African origin”. On November 10th 1898 came the killing, committed by militias armed to the teeth in advance. As in the Tulsa massacre of 1921, prosperous and professional black people were targeted; many of those spared were run out of town. City officials, black and white, were forcibly replaced. President William McKinley ignored appeals to Washington for help.

Like Patrick Phillips in “Blood at the Root”, which recounts the expulsion of African-Americans from Forsyth County, Georgia, Ms Collins traces the long and tragic aftermath of the atrocity into the 21st century. A black lawyer who fled and became a judge did not visit Wilmington again until 1945. Black people who stayed found themselves working for the perpetrators, or being judged and policed by them. Shortly before her death in the mid-1960s, a survivor grabbed her great-granddaughter’s arm and whispered, “If it ever happens—run.” Ms Collins rightly measures the crime not just in violence but in loss—of livelihoods, opportunities, connections and futures.

In the memory of the white elite, this act of terrorism became a noble “revolution”. For some black people, dwelling on the outrage seemed imprudent. When it dawned, the civil-rights era was harrowing in Wilmington. The sheriff’s office was a nest of klansmen; school desegregation was brutally resisted; the imprisonment of local student activists became a global scandal. Only in the 1990s did the facts of 1898 begin to be publicly acknowledged. Typically for the region, those keen to commemorate them had to respect the feelings of the culprits’ descendants.

As she chronicles “a centuries-long day that isn’t over yet”, Ms Collins sometimes loses sight of the families she purports to focus on. Some readers may reject the parallels she draws between the coup and American politics today and her call for reparations (less impractical at a local than a federal level). Yet as the White House and militant book-banners try to downplay past racial injustices, a more fundamental struggle is being waged again: for the truth to be told and heard. This is a moving contribution to that effort. ■

A summer stroll along Hadrian’s Wall is also a rendezvous with history

To Caledonian tribesmen, it must have looked awesome. At Winshields Crags, the highest point of Hadrian’s Wall , the fortification runs toweringly atop a steep escarpment. For the legionaries who built it in the second century AD, hauling up the rocks would have been backbreaking. Today walkers carrying only water bottles can find themselves out of puff. “These Romans”, one pants, “must have been mad.”

For almost 300 years Hadrian’s Wall was guarded by Syrian archers, Thracian cavalrymen and other forces dispatched by Rome to this northerly imperial redoubt. Tread this picturesque stretch of northern England now, and you instead encounter history-hungry Americans, well-equipped Scandinavians and parents trying to stop their offspring eating the snacks too soon. The wall is an impressive monument—but, visitors may wonder, as they might at many ancient ruins, a monument to what?

To power, runs one answer. Let there be a wall, the emperor Hadrian decreed in 122ad, and in fairly short order—at least compared with recent border-wall projects—there was. His ran 117km across the Roman province of Britannia at its narrowest point. Today, in the ruins of its watchtowers, castles and forts, you try to imagine yourself as a Roman soldier facing barbarians, harsh military discipline, the biting westerly wind and frigid winters. The lucky ones were sent warm socks and underwear from home.

Up on the crags, you run into one of the big problems with history, especially the remote kind for which records are patchy. So much of it seems to be about violence, and most of it is about men: where they stood guard, which weapons they wielded, the safekeeping of their regimental standards and wages, and maybe where, after they were paid, they went boozing, bathing and whoring. You go in search of a human past and stub your toe on the lifeless rubble of a turret.

Perhaps this is why one of the popular stops on the wall is for something that isn’t Roman—something, in fact, which is no longer there at all. In 2023 two numskulls sawed down a tree in a dip between hillocks, in a spot called Sycamore Gap . The culprits became more infamous than most murderers; the tree became better known than ever. “It’s so sad,” laments a walker approaching the treeless gap. The martyred sycamore is somehow more vivid and poignant than the traceless soldiers.

That is, until you head south from the gap, across moorland studded with wildflowers and sheep dung. In the museum at Vindolanda, site of a Roman fort and adjacent civilian village, are toddler’s shoes and a toy sword. A man etched his name on an amphora to stop comrades swiping his olives, like a flat-sharer labelling his milk. Broken pieces of an ornate glass vessel were unearthed far apart; a guide speculates that a slave girl smashed it accidentally and scattered the proof. On a writing tablet, like a Roman postcard, a commander’s wife invited a friend to her birthday party.

So it wasn’t all sentry duty and repelling enemy hordes. Indeed there may not have been all that much repelling to do. Compared with other Roman regions, says Greg Woolf of New York University, this “wasn’t a very dangerous place”. The tribes beyond the battlements were too sparse to pose a consistent threat. And the wall was not an immutable border. Roman forces pushed deeper into modern Scotland before and after its construction; Hadrian’s successor built another, less famous wall farther north.

What seemed a statement of imperial might could instead be seen, says Professor Woolf, as “a monument to Hadrian’s ego”. Eventually, as the empire crumpled in the early fifth century, the orders and wages dried up. So must have the care packages of socks. The last detachments wound up defending only themselves.

Such disintegration is the long-run fate of empires, and of grandiose walls. You build one to demonstrate your tyrannical clout—over rugged terrain, your enemies or your own people—and with time it becomes a symbol of delusion. Rather than keeping invaders or immigrants out (or dissidents in), the barrier is scavenged for materials, as were bits of the Great Wall of China, or becomes a tourist attraction, like the Berlin Wall .

Or Hadrian’s, which developed into a cherished landmark and route of a bracing trail. A Belgian hiker cites two strategic advantages of the old empire’s northern periphery: it is cooler than the broiling continent and you get fish and chips for dinner. Once patrolled by men sent far from their relatives, today the wall is a beautiful place to commune with yours. ■

Limestone villages and babbling brooks offer an escape from the modern world

IT IS BARELY 11 o’clock on a Saturday morning, but the car park at Daylesford Organic (pictured below) is already chock-full. The staff working behind the tills insist it gets far busier than this: some days visitors have to elbow each other out of the way in the farm shop, homeware store and garden centre. Inside, there are influencers filming the displays of fresh strawberries, groups of women cooing over candles and harried husbands being asked for their opinion on utensils in shades of cream and sage. (“The last thing our house needs”, one man sighs, “is more cutlery.”)

Daylesford was established near the Cotswold village of Kingham in 2002, and the empire has since expanded to include a wellness line, spa, pubs and holiday cottages. In the financial year to March 2025, the food and homeware arm reported turnovers of £58m ($75m), up 72.5% from 2020.

For centuries Londoners have traded the hubbub of the city for the tranquillity of the countryside at the weekend. But now the Cotswolds are drawing visitors from farther afield, too, including J.D. Vance , America’s vice-president, who visited on a family summer holiday last year. Expedia, an online travel company, has listed the Cotswolds as one of its top destinations of 2026, alongside Sardinia and Savoie (where you can actually count on sun). Booking.com, another travel firm, has seen a surge of interest in the Cotswolds from holidaymakers across the world.

Precise visitor numbers are hard to come by for the Cotswolds, as the region covers almost 800 square miles and spans parts of five counties. However, it is thought that between 25m and 35m tourists visit each year, either for the day or overnight. Several hoteliers say they are fully booked this summer.

Tourists come because the Cotswolds are beautiful and bucolic—the largest designated “area of outstanding natural beauty” in England, Wales and Northern Ireland, in fact. The region has a distinctive aesthetic: houses are built from local limestone, which has a burnished hue, and some still have thatched roofs. (To uphold the “vernacular style”, local government guidelines declare, new homes should use “stone of an appropriate colour to the locality”.) This historic, wholesome vibe, affectionately dubbed #cottagecore by social media, is firmly in fashion.

Star power has also made the British countryside cool. The rural renaissance began in 2015, when Soho House, a swanky private members’ club, opened an outpost near Chipping Norton. Celebrities such as Lady Gaga and Dua Lipa have been spotted there. Other famous folk have moved in nearby. Ellen DeGeneres, Liam Gallagher , Calvin Harris and the Beckhams have all bought houses in the Cotswolds.

Other tony venues have opened to satisfy a monied set, both foreign and domestic. A cluster of old barns was transformed into Thyme, a luxurious boutique hotel complete with a spring-water swimming pool. In 2023 Estelle Manor, a country hotel, members’ club and magnet for A-listers, started welcoming guests. That year Matthew Freud, a public-relations supremo, converted a 16th-century coaching inn in Burford into Bull, a hideaway adorned with works by Basquiat and Dalí .

The area has also been featured in TV shows and films. It was a backdrop in the “ Downton Abbey ” franchise. “Clarkson’s Farm”, one of Amazon Prime Video’s most popular titles, follows the triumphs and travails of running an agricultural business in Chipping Norton. And “ Rivals ”, a hit adaptation of Jilly Cooper’s bonkbuster novel, presents the Cotswolds as a glorious place where well-heeled people ride horses—and each other.

Covid-19 played a role in the buzz, too, as well-heeled Britons decamped to their second homes to escape the virus. As working from home became accepted, others decided to permanently move there. The demand meant house prices “shot up” faster than the national average, says Tom Hayman-Joyce, a local estate agent. Prices have now started to come down again, but they are still up on their pre-pandemic levels; the sense that the Cotswolds is a desirable place to be has persisted. And because city types expect cosmopolitan amenities, chefs and restaurateurs have come to cater to them. Bull offers an 11-course tasting menu in one of its four restaurants.

The final reason for the hype is that the rolling hills, winding streams and quaint cottages represent an idyllic version of England. As you travel down the country roads, hares leap in the fields while kestrels and red kites swoop overhead. Hotels are seeing more interest from cycling and walking groups, who come to commune with nature. Hotels such as Thyme (pictured below) have gone big on wellness, another buzzword of the day: the hotel is about to expand its spa facilities to add a sauna and indoor pool, among other things.

As with the rustic charms of Tuscany or Provence , the Cotswolds are a place where the stresses of the modern world seemingly do not exist. Denzil Arendse, general manager at the Manor House in Castle Combe, points out that there has not been a new building in the village since the 1600s. The same is true in Burford, a medieval market town, where “you walk into an architectural aesthetic that is almost completely unchanged in 400 years,” Mr Freud says. You may “live in a disrupted world of geopolitics and climate crisis and AI ”, but when you arrive in the Cotswolds, “none of those feel like clear and present dangers.”

Does it all sound too perfect to be true? Just ask the disgruntled longtime residents. As is the case with many neighbourhoods and cities transformed by Instagram and tourism, residents complain about choked roads in villages that were never set up to handle so much traffic. Bibury, a particularly picturesque spot, is trying to ban the coaches that drop off visitors each day. Some feel that there have been no real trickle-down benefits for local people, as a minority of bougie businesses enjoy the majority of the footfall.

Many properties that might once have been rented out are being turned into lucrative Airbnbs. That means the supply of long-term rental accommodation is down, which has pushed rents up: Mr Hayman-Joyce says they have increased by 60% in his district since 2019.

The people who work in fancy hotels and restaurants sometimes cannot afford to live nearby on low hospitality wages—one employee says she has to commute for over an hour each way. Combined with a dwindling supply of workers due to Brexit , that may spell problems for the industry’s future growth.

But the Cotswolds, with its scenery, proximity to London and promise of a simpler life, is unlikely ever to lose its appeal. Back at Daylesford, a table is set up as if to host a languorous summer party, with crisp linens and magnums of rosé . A young woman applies a sample of hand cream and turns to her friend: “Lovely, isn’t it?” ■

Following social media, they set off with more inspiration than preparation

SCHOTTY BOY, as he is known online, is a hiking evangelist. He posts dispatches from the Scottish Highlands —moody, misty pictures of streams, glens, lochs and hills—to his more than 100,000 followers on Instagram and TikTok. In these posts, he is usually toting sensible walking gear such as a backpack, flask and an anorak. Sometimes, and inexplicably, he is topless.

He is one of many young people discovering the pleasures of the great outdoors. (As one TikTok video puts it: “Texting is cool, but hiking together is cooler.”) Millions of posts extol the virtues of this cheap, accessible form of exercise. Some influencers recommend scenic routes, way stops and refuges. Apps such as AllTrails make it easy to find footpaths. This is especially helpful for a generation more accustomed to reading from a phone screen than a map.

The problem is that fans follow in influencers’ footsteps without fully understanding what an excursion in the wilderness might entail. (Topless treks, for instance, are inadvisable, especially in cold, wet conditions.) Excitable explorers can walk into trouble. In the Scottish Highlands, the number of mountaineering incidents involving 17- to 25-year-olds has nearly quadrupled since 2022. In 2018 just 15% of people rescued in the Highlands were 17- to 25-year-olds. Last year 25% were. It was not always like this: in the early 2010s, it was middle-aged hikers who required the most assistance.

Nor is this just a Scottish trend. American adventurers aged between 18 and 25 have grown as a share of those needing help. France, Italy and Switzerland have also seen surges in SOS calls from youngsters in recent years.

Rescuers point out that more people of all ages are hiking. The “Instagram effect”, says Ludovic Richard from France’s mountain-safety observatory, is such that young walkers go to perilous lengths to take a photo at a beauty spot. Some have none of the gear and not much common sense. In December two walkers in their 20s were rescued from Britain’s second-highest mountain in “feels-like” temperatures of -15°C, wearing trainers and tracksuit bottoms (rather than thermals and walking boots). Kev Mitchell, a rescuer in Scotland, was called out to a different pair of 20-somethings in the Highlands without a compass and proper jackets. Without his help, he reckons, they would have died.

The benefits of hiking are numerous. America’s National Park Service promotes it as “a great whole-body workout—from head to toe and everything in between”. As well as strengthening muscles and bones, walking in nature is good for your mental health. Gen Z has the right idea. They just need to prove they can, in fact, walk the walk. ■

The Roman empire shaped the religion in all sorts of crucial ways, a new book argues

People who know little about ancient history are still familiar with the fact that Romans persecuted Christ and Christians. In films the Romans are sometimes brutal (“Ben-Hur”, “ The Passion of the Christ ”), sometimes daft (“Life of Brian”), but always culturally distant from the new religion and clueless about it.

Much of this is a myth, argues Tim Whitmarsh, a professor of Greek at Cambridge University, in a thoroughly entertaining book. “Rome’s Age of Revolution” shows that Christianity was in many ways a product of the Roman empire and the Greek and Jewish cultures it absorbed as it expanded eastward. Christianity might have become a global religion without Rome, but it would not be the same religion. Despite lots of scholarly hedging, Mr Whitmarsh’s argument is striking. Some may find it enraging.

The early followers of Jesus called themselves “people of the way”—referring to a physical roadway as well as a spiritual path. Paul used a Roman road to bring his message to the Galatians: a crucial episode, because it confirmed a new policy of targeting both gentiles and Jews. The apostle benefited not just from superior Roman infrastructure but also from superior Roman security.

The empire energetically moved people from place to place—as soldiers, officials and slaves—and gave them a broad identity as citizens of Rome. Those deracinated people may have been particularly attracted to a message that elevated faith above family and emphasised the universal. If disparate people “could be unified under one ruler, why not under one god too?”

Romans collapsed time, asserting that their triumph had been foretold by Greek myths. Early Christians did much the same, claiming that the coming of Jesus fulfilled prophecies in Jewish scriptures. Emperor Augustus’s birth in 63BC was said to be attended by cosmic portents; so was Jesus’s. Mr Whitmarsh points out that the gospel of Mark, probably the earliest written, skips Christ’s conception and childhood. The fact that later gospels dwell on them hints at a possible reworking of the narrative in order to appeal to people familiar with the story of Augustus.

Christians shamelessly co-opted Greek philosophers such as Socrates, whom they admired for his questioning spirit and his defiance of the state. They may have drawn on pagan fiction. The most outrageous and entertaining chapter in “Rome’s Age of Revolution” is the one on Greek novels. Mr Whitmarsh suggests that rip-roaring romances like “Callirhoe”, probably written in the mid-first century, could have influenced the composers of the gospels. It has been argued that Christianity was “Hellenised”, but Mr Whitmarsh has no time for that. Christianity was “never not Greek, or pre-Greek”, he argues.

If such arguments seem surprising, it may be because theology and classical studies have long been taught by different university departments, by scholars who refrain from trampling on each other’s terrain. It may also be a result of the Christian (especially Protestant) determination to scrape away corrupting influences and discover a pure original message.

In reality, though, ideas and cultures are not neatly bounded. They bleed into one another. Mr Whitmarsh thinks that the boundaries between cultures were far more porous in the centuries after Jesus’s birth than they are today. That is a little hard to believe in the era of mass tourism and “ KPop Demon Hunters ”. But a related argument is hard to contest.

Cultures and religions do very well to steal from each other. The modern notion that everyone ought to stay in their cultural paddock—which is made on the left by people worried about “ cultural appropriation ” and on the right by those who fear the corrupting effects of immigration and Islam—leads only to stodgy irrelevance. Bending, borrowing and adapting are the keys to success. The only problem is that they make for less gripping cinema. ■

Don’t follow your dreams. Try this instead

Leaving the cosy confines of college for the tundra of the job market has always been bracing. Not every graduate hears a calling to a particular profession. Many want to do good but also need to pay off debt. AI is making the transition even bumpier, automating entry-level jobs and promising to make entire careers extinct; on July 13th more than 200 economists and tech luminaries warned that AI could cause “large-scale job displacement” . Finding your life’s work has never been so hard.

As they trawl LinkedIn—firing off AI-polished applications, to be rejected by AI-powered human-resources departments—graduates may wonder why they bothered with college at all. Among recent American grads, 40% are employed in roles that do not require a bachelor’s degree, according to a recent survey by the New York Fed.

Gen Z’s career challenges have prompted a rash of advice books. Bill Gurley, a former Silicon Valley venture capitalist, explains “how to thrive in a career you actually love”. Jodi Kantor, a journalist who helped to expose the crimes of Harvey Weinstein, has published a concise pep-talk for students billed as “a letter from an older ally”. Benjamin Todd, founder of a non-profit called 80,000 Hours, has written a book of the same name (80,000 hours is how long you can expect to spend at work, if you work 40 hours a week, 50 weeks a year, for 40 years).

Parents and teachers nudged students towards subjects like computing and law. Now those fields are among the most vulnerable to disruption by AI. As Mr Gurley puts it, the reassuring conveyor-belt of college leads to a job market that feels like an eight-lane freeway.

He and Ms Kantor both encourage students to pursue their passions. “Nothing will make you more successful than loving what you do for a living,” reasons Mr Gurley, who fell for computers when he first played “Pong” on an Atari. Many graduates see a choice between work that is fulfilling and work that is well paid. In fact it can be both, argues Ms Kantor, citing lawyers she met during her #MeToo investigations. “When they call me from their vacation homes, I glimpse just how lucrative this form of feminism can be,” she drily notes.

Yet both authors demonstrate why successful people make bad career advisers. “I went into a field that everyone told me was a disaster and experienced potency, impact…and even a measure of business success,” writes Ms Kantor, whose journalistic career—the New York Times, a Pulitzer prize and a book, “She Said”, turned into a movie —is atypical. Survivorship bias runs through her and Mr Gurley’s analyses. Both feature people who have made it in the bankruptcy-prone restaurant industry, apparently through hard work and passion. Mr Gurley cites a pair of star podcasters who “figured out what they loved, then figured out a way to make money”. It is hard to think of a better example than podcasting to illustrate how doing what you love does not always lead to a viable job.

Mr Todd’s book, the most original and helpful of the three, takes the opposite approach. Drawing on 15 years of advising people at the start of their working life, “80,000 Hours” looks at the career ladder not from the top down but from the bottom up—with surprising conclusions.

First, maybe do not follow your passions. Since the bestselling “What Colour is Your Parachute?” (1970), career books have told people to consider what they enjoy, then look for jobs that match. But many people aren’t sure what they want. And even if they have one strong interest, it may not lead to a job. In a survey in 2003, almost 90% of Canadian students said they loved music, art or sport—fields which accounted for just 3% of jobs in Canada. In 2020 a personality-based quiz by Britain’s education department advised many jobseekers to become lock-keepers, just missing the canal boom of the 18th century.

“‘Follow your passion’ gets it backwards,” Mr Todd writes. Instead of looking inward, “Get good at something that helps others, and passion will follow.” Helping others increases life satisfaction. Mastering a skill is satisfying in itself. If you are good at your job you will have more leverage to do enjoyable work than if you pursue a passion and are mediocre at it (consider the musicians who end up playing to classrooms rather than arenas).

To advise on how to do good, Mr Todd draws on “ effective altruism ”, a utilitarian philosophy which 80,000 Hours helped launch 15 years ago. Donating is one option (giving 10% of a typical American graduate salary of $77,000 to a malaria charity will save about 20 times more lives than working full-time as a doctor, he calculates). Another is working in a do-gooding field: AI regulation and great-power conflict-avoidance are among the areas he suggests could have the most positive impact. On the earnings dilemma, Mr Todd suggests that more money is unlikely to make you a lot happier: self-reported happiness levels off after household income hits around $75,000 a year.

“80,000 Hours” also has counter-intuitive ideas about how AI may disrupt careers. Automation eventually destroys jobs. But initially it drives up demand for certain skills. Banks employed more clerks after ATMs were invented, because they made it cheaper to run branches, so more opened. Only with online banking were clerks fully replaced. “The aim isn’t to find a single job that will never be automated, but rather to ride the wave, moving into the skills that become most valuable at each time.” That could mean jobs in AI related to model-training or cyber-security, or in services where demand will rise as AI lowers costs, such as health care.

Yet the focus on maximising good implies that only one choice is ever truly right. An emergency doctor could save more lives working in pandemic prevention, which in turn could be less important than nuclear disarmament, and so on. Judging the rightness of every action by its impact on the global good could drive anyone mad—and it sometimes does. John Stuart Mill , a pioneer of utilitarianism, fell into depression. Sam Bankman-Fried , a crypto entrepreneur and effective altruism’s best-known advocate, risked and lost billions from his customers.

Jobseekers can reassure themselves that many people take a while to find their life’s work. Sir Tony Blair was a rock-music promoter before he was Britain’s prime minister. Maya Angelou was a streetcar conductor before she became a celebrated writer. Colonel Sanders founded Kentucky Fried Chicken aged 62. Getting it right takes time. Anyone fretting over how to spend their 80,000 hours might start by investing a few in Mr Todd’s book. ■

And reminds readers that crime fiction is the best urban genre

COLSON WHITEHEAD is one of just four American novelists to win two Pulitzer prizes for fiction (along with Booth Tarkington, William Faulkner and John Updike). He is the only one to win for two consecutive books: “The Underground Railroad” in 2017 and “The Nickel Boys” in 2020. He is also the only one to win in an era in which literature must fight for its relevance. His novels take up that fight by embracing fiction’s capacity to entertain and delight, rather than to instruct or edify. He is neither the most inventive of the Pulitzered quartet (that would be Faulkner), nor the most prolific (Tarkington) or overpraised (Updike). But he is, without doubt, the most fun to read.

In addition to a requisite coming-of-age novel and serious historical heavy-hitters that won him the Pulitzers, his oeuvre includes a zombie novel, a satire of journalism and a terrific crime trilogy set in Harlem, of which “Cool Machine” is the conclusion. The protagonist is Ray Carney, a furniture salesman and family man whose father was a crook. His best friend is Pepper, the sort of laconic but loyal roughneck who pops up in countless crime novels to provide muscle for brainy protagonists.

The previous Carney novels were set in the 1960s and 1970s; this one takes place in the 1980s. It is not a single story but a set of three linked novellas. Nostalgia figures heavily in all three books: Mr Whitehead once observed, correctly, that “No matter how long you have been here, you become a New Yorker the first time you say, ‘That used to be Munsey’s’…You are a New Yorker when what was there before is more real and solid than what is here now.”

“Cool Machine” is not quite sentimental reverie. Its last section is set in 1986, when modern New York , driven by finance and property rather than manufacturing and industry, starts to emerge. There is a running joke about a crook bar taken over by yuppies. (“The kitchen, formerly reserved for after-hours beatings…was back in operation and serving burgers, Buffalo wings and stuffed potato skins.”)

Mr Whitehead is one of the few novelists whose jokes can provoke actual laughter, not just wry, knowing smiles. Considering the difference between what a travel brochure promises and the actual experience delivered, he writes, “Look, no one wants to book a cruise and show up to find it’s Uncle Darnell rowing a dinghy.”

Carney is a perfect crime-fiction character because he straddles two worlds, neither entirely bent nor entirely straight. He is even more of an outsider in “Cool Machine”. He is in his early 50s: an age at which people realise that the culture around them that they believed solid and theirs is, in fact, evanescent and someone else’s.

He talks to his late cousin in his dreams. He navigates underground punk clubs on the Lower East Side—back when that district was genuinely rough—and butts heads with the Mafia , which is also struggling to adapt to a changing world. He ponders the ethical and aesthetic differences between stealing something with objective value versus personal meaning.

Carney’s one flaw as a protagonist is his blandness compared with the narrator’s prose. Arthur Conan Doyle , P.D. James and Elmore Leonard—crime-fiction royalty—wrote serviceable, economical, unmemorable prose. In the Carney series, the stories are vehicles for Mr Whitehead’s asides and observations. That would be a problem if those asides and observations were less trenchant and compelling.

Besides, the trilogy’s subject is not really Carney: it is New York, in all its filthy, frenetic, shabby glory. Late in the last novella Carney scoffs at the idea of praising a city for being liveable: “‘Good place to raise kids.’ Then how will they be tested in the way the world required? ‘Fresh air’…was nice, but so was the other stuff. Noise, dirt and struggle. Give me noise, dirt and struggle and I’ll be all right.” New York has never had a better valentine. ■

His more than 2,500 covers cleverly captured, mocked and ridiculed the world

THEY SAY never to judge a book by its cover. But The Economist is defined by the face it shows the world. For most of the past 30 years that has been the charge of our designer, Graeme James, a dear friend and colleague who has died after a long fight against cancer.

Graeme brought our words and arguments to life. Because we have four geographical editions, each of which may lead with a different story, he designed over 2,500 covers. That was an awful lot of free trade and globalisation for one pair of shoulders to bear.

He admired Rodin ’s sculpture “The Thinker” and spent his days within reach of a soft-leaded pencil, filling sketchbooks with smudges and scribbles. As our weekly Wednesday-night deadline drew near, he would work with illustrators to refine ideas. He would also hammer out the details with frequently literal-minded editors—encounters that provoked Graeme to mutter the odd curse. If an article goes wrong, there is a substitute. Graeme had no safety-net. He had to get it right every time.

A good cover distils everything into a single image—and, sure enough, Graeme’s picture was often worth more than the cover leader’s 1,000 words. In a cover from 2003 a giant saguaro cactus stands like a hand giving the finger after the collapse of trade talks in Cancún. In one on gendercide from 2010 a pair of tiny, brand-new pink shoes represent 100m unborn baby girls .

Editorials are sometimes inflated by preachiness. In our hot-air factory Graeme was the man with a sharp pin. As the presidential election drew near in 2016, we wrote an editorial about Donald Trump’s political discourse and the debasement of American politics. It would have been sententious but for Graeme’s cover art: a Republican elephant with Mr Trump as its arse-end and a couple of steaming quotation marks freshly dropped.

Woe betide any leader who caught his subversive eye. No depiction was as biting as a bare-chested Vladimir Putin riding a tank while he flattened the world order. Foreign embassies often complained about our mockery, but Graeme was rudest about Britain’s hapless prime ministers.

Graeme’s own favourite cover was for the first anniversary of the attacks of September 11th 2001. Two thin black rectangles stretch up in silhouette against a sunset. They are the twin towers. They are the 11 in 9/11. And they are monuments to the dead—and to a world that was lost. It was the best of Graeme’s brilliant design: understated and concise, utterly without condescension and profoundly moral. Graeme liked the cover so much that we used the same image in 2011, to mark the attacks’ tenth anniversary. Now it has become a memorial to him, too. ■

Sir Christopher Nolan’s film is emblematic of its time

A very silly adaptation of “The Odyssey” Sir Christopher Nolan’s film is emblematic of its time July 16th 2026 The squabbles have been epic. Sir Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of “The Odyssey” was causing conniptions long before anyone had even seen the thing. Ahead of its release on July 17th, there was harrumphing over everything from the actress playing Helen (too black); the colour of the plume on Odysseus’s helmet (too red); the soldiers’ armour (also too black, and too Batman -like) and the vocabulary of Odysseus’s son (too American: at one point he says “Dad”). On YouTube the film’s trailer was met with criticism. “If I saw this on a plane, I’d still walk out,” reads one disgruntled comment.

The film itself is unlikely to allay any anxieties about anachronisms. In everything from its scenery to its psychology it says far more about the modern West than about ancient Greece. Startling liberties are taken with the plot to turn Odysseus, the archetypally flawed ancient hero, into a simple modern goody by flattening his flaws. Any bad behaviour is explained away either by drug use or hinted to be due to proto-PTSD (the overdiagnosis epidemic having apparently reached the ancient shores of Ithaca). The ending, which has him pierced by arrows and turned into a St Sebastian-style pincushion, is sillier still.

The scenery is similarly unsuitable, and often far too pretty. Soldiers in elegant gunmetal grey look less like ancient warriors than Warhammer toys. The ochre, candlelit palaces do not resemble warlords’ lairs but boutique hotels. During the beach scenes with the nymph Calypso (Charlize Theron), Odysseus (Matt Damon) seems less to be in agonising exile than on a Caribbean mini-break (they are wearing lots of linen). And the less said about the Cyclops, the better.

This is irksome but typical. Every adaptation of an ancient text is as much about its own era as the original work; less a lens than a mirror. The ancient Athenians transformed Homeric epic into psychologically acute tragedy. In the 18th century Alexander Pope’s translation managed to make Odysseus sound like an effete Enlightenment poet rather than an ancient warrior-king. In 1922 James Joyce’s version offered sex, stream of consciousness and that Modernist literary staple: boredom.

In this way, Sir Christopher’s retelling is part of a time-honoured tradition. It is manifestly a product of the present day. Female characters offer frequent apologias for feminism (not a noted strong suit of the ancients). The casus belli of the Trojan war is given as a desire to improve trade routes, as if Agamemnon were merely a blameless advocate for free trade rather than one of antiquity’s greatest thugs.

Adaptations have some latitude, for “The Odyssey” contains multitudes. In one of the most famous scenes, the god Proteus transforms into a lion, then a snake, then rushing water. “The Odyssey” is more protean still. In the three millennia since it was composed, it has been on an odyssey all its own.

The poem has become a noun (an odyssey) and an adjective (Odyssean). It has become a play, a TV series, a novel (“ Ulysses ”) and a porn film (“Odyssey: The Ultimate Trip”). It has become a lunar lander (IM-1 Odysseus), a large asteroid (1143 Odysseus) and a body lotion (which, with notes of black pepper and sandalwood, no doubt smells better than its namesake would have).

It is therefore not surprising that Odysseus, the sacker of cities, has been transformed once again by Sir Christopher. In other ways it is surprising, as “The Odyssey” has been a wrecker of reputations. In 2024 a film starring Ralph Fiennes was dismissed as “dull” and a “slog”. A movie of 1954, starring Kirk Douglas, was described as “weird” and “vapid”.

Sir Christopher has form on tricky topics: his previous film, “ Oppenheimer ”, about particle physics and nuclear weapons, grossed almost $1bn at the box office. Still, he has learned that “The Odyssey” is not an easy book to film.

That porn flick hints at why: it describes itself, with admirable artistic honesty, as “Three unrelated stories”. The original “Odyssey” is not much better. It tells the tale of Odysseus’s ten-year journey home from the Trojan war and thus is commonly thought of as a kind of watery Greek road trip. But it is also a sex-and-sea-monsters film, a father-and-son film and a husband-and-wife film.

Its structure is fiendishly twisty. It is about Odysseus—but readers do not meet him for four books. Moreover, many of the stories that you think of as archetypally Odyssean are either not told at all or told in brisk narrative flashback: the Sirens slip by in some 60 lines and the Lotus-Eaters in about 20. It is, as Sir Christopher said, “the original non-linear narrative”. It is, says Emily Wilson, a classicist who published a dazzling translation in 2017, “complicated”.

It is also very famous. The second work of Western literature, it was once assumed to be secondary in seriousness to its more manly prequel, “The Iliad”. Yet in recent years its fame has far eclipsed it. The first Penguin Classic ever printed was “The Odyssey”. The pyramid of intellectual biomass resting upon it is vast. It is only 12,000 lines long, but look up “Odyssey” in the British Library and you are offered 34,000 titles: almost three for every line. “Iliad” returns a mere 9,000.

That it has become yet another film—and created yet more debates—is further proof of its permanence. There are two ways to see such squabbles. One is to engage with them on their own terms. These gripes have some validity: in Homer, Helen is clearly described as “white-armed”; Odysseus probably didn’t wear a red-plumed helmet (red was a Spartan habit); ancient Greek armour was bronze, not Batman-ish; and Odysseus’s son definitely didn’t say “Dad”. As Tim Whitmarsh, Regius professor of Greek at Cambridge University, points out: “The ancient Greeks spoke Greek.”

The other way to see these arguments is as proof of the malleability of “The Odyssey”. In an era in which people bristle at American influence in Europe, it lets people bristle at Americanisms (“Dad!”) in ancient Greece. In an era anxious about the excessively manly manosphere, people can fret over excessively manly armour. In an era riven by debates about race , people have engaged in bad-tempered rows over casting. We are not arguing about “The Odyssey” when we argue about “The Odyssey”. We are arguing about ourselves.

Each generation remakes “The Odyssey” in its own image: you get the version you deserve. The clever, quarrelsome ancient Athenians took Homer and transformed him into clever, quarrelsome tragedy. The Modernists turned him into Modernist prose and poetry. The simplistic, visual modern world has taken Homer and turned him into social-media spats and an absurd Cyclops—and thus into a tragedy that is all its own. ■

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His films are ambitious and technically brilliant, but often emotionally detached

Why Sir Christopher Nolan inspires such devotion—and contempt His films are ambitious and technically brilliant, but often emotionally detached July 16th 2026 THE SEVEN most dangerous words anyone can say to a film aficionado are: “What do you think of Christopher Nolan?” The question will almost certainly elicit one of two reactions: a long, fevered disquisition on the masterful craftsmanship of his 12 feature films (now 13, with the release of “The Odyssey”)—or eye-rolling contempt. Almost nobody will shrug and say, “Eh, he’s fine.”

Perhaps that is unsurprising: ambitious artists tend to provoke strong reactions, and Sir Christopher Nolan is nothing if not ambitious. He is the seventh-highest-grossing film director ever, and the most important British film-maker since Alfred Hitchcock . Like Hitchcock, he is devoted to the technical work of film-making: “The Odyssey” is the first blockbuster to be shot entirely on IMAX film, a format that produces sumptuous images but is harder to work with than digital cinematography.

Sir Christopher stands out from his peers for having the widest-ranging, most original and brainiest oeuvre. Like many directors working today, he has done franchise flicks—he made three Batman films between 2005 and 2012—but they were an interlude rather than the capstone of his career. So what is it about Sir Christopher that makes him such a divisive film-maker?

Start with the man himself. He was born in 1970 to a British father and an American mother. He works with family: his wife, Emma Thomas, produces his films; his uncle, John Nolan, acted in some of them; he writes with his brother Jonathan; and his four children worked on “The Odyssey”. He is efficient, known for shooting films quickly and often to budget.

Tom Shone, a film critic who wrote a book about Sir Christopher, has described him as “a very familiar type of Englishman…the kind of upper-middle-class son of the home counties one could imagine with a career in the City who plays rugby with his fellow brokers on the weekend”. That implies a streak of conservatism, which emerges in his work. His final Batman film, “The Dark Knight Rises” (2012), warns against the tempting, corrosive zeal of revolutionary violence. Paternal duty powers “Interstellar” (2014). “ Dunkirk ” (2017) celebrates British doughtiness.

However, his films are defined less by conservatism than by their slipperiness. His breakout film, “Memento” (2000), about an amnesiac trying to solve his wife’s murder, would be chewed over by fans and detractors for years afterwards. Many viewers praised its structural inventiveness: black-and-white scenes tell a story chronologically and colour ones tell one in reverse. They meet at the end.

More tricksiness would follow. “Inception” (2010) imagined the manipulation of dreams for corporate espionage. “Interstellar” takes place on multiple planets and features a wormhole and a black hole. Three narratives come together in “Dunkirk”. In “Tenet” (2020) people and objects move forwards and backwards through time. Even “ Oppenheimer ” (2023), a biopic of an American theoretical physicist, jumps between the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s.

Sir Christopher’s films often provide a satisfying moment of realisation. But they rarely reward viewers who ruminate on the plot after the credits roll. In the case of “Memento”, for instance, you might wonder how a character with amnesia remembers his amnesia. Roger Ebert, a late American film critic, joked that the protagonist “suffers from a condition brought on by a screenplay that finds it necessary, and it’s unkind of us to inquire too deeply”.

Similar questions could be asked of dreams, wormholes or, in “The Prestige” (2006), his film about magicians, cloning and teleportation. All of it makes for entertaining cinema, but it does not make much sense. Viewers’ enjoyment of these films hinges on their willingness to suspend scepticism and tune into the vibe.

A more serious charge concerns Sir Christopher’s treatment of female characters. The most important woman in “Memento” is the protagonist’s dead wife. Dead wives or girlfriends also further the plots of “The Prestige”, “Inception”, “The Dark Knight” and “Interstellar”. “Dunkirk” features just two minor female characters.

This charge can be overblown, though. “Interstellar” features two strong female figures. Anne Hathaway, Katie Holmes and Maggie Gyllenhaal play integral roles in the Batman films. And Emily Blunt got an Oscar nod for her stellar performance as J. Robert Oppenheimer’s (admittedly stoic and long-suffering) wife. Sir Christopher has not written a female protagonist just as Greta Gerwig , a star female director, has not written a male one in her solo projects.

For it is not women, but people, in whom Sir Christopher has only recently begun to show interest. The protagonist in “Tenet”, as well as a pivotal character in “Dunkirk”, has no name. Many film-makers progress from small, intimate films to bigger-budget, higher-concept ones; in some ways, Sir Christopher has taken the opposite path, going from films that unfold like puzzles to something more human.

“Oppenheimer” depicted the enmity between the titular character and Lewis Strauss, his bureaucratic nemesis. As such, it was Sir Christopher’s first film to feature a conflict of actual personalities, as opposed to goals, as in “Interstellar”, “Inception” and “The Prestige”, or good versus evil, as in “Tenet” and his superhero films. In making “The Odyssey”—the story of a man returning to his family—Sir Christopher has, like the gods of Homer, started paying attention to mere mortals. ■

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The business of misery is thriving as emo bands go back on tour

Emo culture was not just a phase, as it turns out The business of misery is thriving as emo bands go back on tour July 16th 2026 EMO CULTURE was all the rage in 2006. In fact, rage was part of the appeal: “emo” stands for “emotional hardcore”, a style of music that combines intense punk-rock stylings with introspective lyrics. Bands such as My Chemical Romance, Fall Out Boy, Panic! at the Disco and Paramore made the upper reaches of the charts in America and Britain. Teenagers sporting heavy black eyeliner and side fringes gathered in city centres and posted moody selfies on Facebook and Myspace.

Now emo is back. My Chemical Romance is marking the 20th anniversary of its album “The Black Parade” with a worldwide stadium tour. The band recently played three gigs at Wembley Stadium in London. Each night the 90,000-capacity venue was packed with screaming fans who had dug out their studded belts for the occasion.

It is not just My Chemical Romance that is getting fans in their feels. Fall Out Boy has toured in recent years. All Time Low played its biggest show ever at the O2 Arena in London earlier this year. Jimmy Eat World is currently on tour to celebrate the 25th anniversary of its “Bleed American” record. (One track urges the listener not to “write yourself off yet”—the band seemingly took its own advice to heart.)

The genre’s comeback has been building for some time. When We Were Young, a pop-punk and emo festival, launched in California in 2017 and has since moved to a bigger spot in Las Vegas. It has proved there is still a market for misery. But the trend is reaching its zenith now because of the 20-year nostalgia cycle that affects everything from fashion to games and tv shows .

Today fans can find dedicated emo club nights and brunches. Dana Egan leads spin classes at Psycle, a fitness studio in London, to an emo soundtrack. She is thrilled to see the music making a return; she was “always an emo kid”.

The crowds at concerts often span the generations. Millennials—the original emos—attend alongside Gen Z fans who discovered the bands after most had split up. Rhys Boyle, one such follower, says that “My Chemical Romance broke up when I was 13. And I remember thinking, ‘Oh man, I’m not gonna be able to see them live ever.’”

Fans insist emo has endured because it offers a sense of empathy and community in hostile, bewildering times. “A lot of people who are emo are a bit neurodivergent, a bit queer and a bit weird,” says Nez Ray, a fan at Wembley; the music makes them feel as though they are not alone. Perhaps the angst and the eyeliner are here to stay, then. As “Welcome to the Black Parade”, My Chemical Romance’s biggest hit, puts it: “We want you all to know/We’ll carry on.” ■

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You can hunt for his mosaics in Paris and beyond

A mystery street artist is taking over cities You can hunt for his mosaics in Paris and beyond July 16th 2026 STANDING AT THE top of the Eiffel Tower, almost everyone looks down. Tourists jostle to peer at Paris ’s famous landmarks and the snaking Seine. Yet those in the know gaze upwards: they climb to the highest public platform to view not the metropolis, but a mosaic. Up in one nook is a small pixelated artwork made from ceramic tiles, which depicts a blue creature with a cloud.

Invader, the Frenchman behind the mosaic, is one of the most prolific street artists in the world. (Yes, he is even busier than Banksy.) He has planted more than 1,500 works across Paris alone. There are thousands more such “invasions” in over 80 cities around the world, from New York to Tokyo. His pixelated pictures have been affixed to the Hollywood sign and a ski lift in the Swiss Alps; they lie at the bottom of the ocean near Cancún and orbit Earth in the International Space Station (pictured above).

Like any successful intruder, he often works under cover of darkness. (Invader has installed almost every piece himself, from Miami to Marrakech.) And, like any serious street artist, his identity is a secret. That hasn’t stopped him from gaining fans. If you know a child in a city that has been invaded, chances are you’ve heard of FlashInvaders, an app on which you score points for finding (or “flashing”) the mosaics. The game has more than 550,000 players, up from about 360,000 in 2024. Players have logged some 47m flashes to date.

Invader uses the ancient practice of mosaic to create figures inspired by retro video games. Each tile acts as a “perfect pixel”, as Rafael Schacter, a street-art expert at University College London puts it, which makes the mosaics look like digital images. Many are variations of the crabs and UFOs found in “Space Invaders” (1978). Others reflect their surroundings, as with a fox drinking a cup of tea in London.

The pixels also mean the images can be scanned on a phone, a bit like a QR code, to play FlashInvaders. The aim of the game is not only to interact with fans, says Invader—who spoke to The Economist via email to stay anonymous—but also to spark curiosity and urban dérive (exploration). Searching for the mosaics takes you to parts of cities you wouldn’t normally see. The game can require detective work, as players must avoid being duped by impostors who try to mimic Invader’s style.

FlashInvaders has drawn comparisons to Pokémon GO, an augmented-reality app, though it was created two years earlier, in 2014. Both games encourage players to go outside in pursuit of their favourite monster or mosaic. The app also fits with a wider trend to merge digital and physical play for children, from app-assisted board games to LEGO bricks with built-in chips that respond to sound and movement. Yet FlashInvaders is free: the app is purely a passion project and makes no money.

The app stands out because it encourages people to “look at their environment in a different way”, notes Mr Schacter. Mobile games are often criticised for glueing people to their phones, but this one teaches you to take notice of the world around you. Whether on a little-known street or at the top of the Eiffel Tower, it’s always worth looking up. ■

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A new biography seeks to restore the French novelist’s place in the literary canon

George Sand’s life was a heady mix of sex and serious fiction A new biography seeks to restore the French novelist’s place in the literary canon July 16th 2026 HOW MUCH do you know about George Sand? If you are an Anglophone reader, the answer is probably “not a lot”. You might recall that she was a French writer and that “George Sand” was a pseudonym (her real name was Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin de Francueil). Perhaps you know that she wore men’s clothes and smoked cigars, or that she had a long affair with Frédéric Chopin , a celebrated composer. Only a few, however, will be able to name her works—and even fewer can claim to have actually read them. (Francophone readers, meanwhile, may have studied her books in school.)

With a new biography, Fiona Sampson, a poet, hopes to change that. She argues that Sand should be thought of as “one of the great novelists of the 19th century”. Sand was prolific—she had to be, given she supported herself and various lovers by her pen—and over the course of a 45-year career she produced more than 50 novels, scores of essays, memoirs and plays, as well as thousands of letters. Ms Sampson argues that the vast body of work was influential, too, probing the inner lives of her female characters and containing “some of the first ecological literature and pioneering fictions of rural life”.

Still, if Sand’s reputation has become “all personality, little art” it is mostly because she was an extraordinary person. Her life was eventful, scandalous even, from the get-go: her father, scion of a distinguished military family, married her mother, a former chorus girl, shortly before Sand was born. Her beloved father died in a riding accident when she was four. Many years later, when his grave was accidentally disturbed, Sand took the opportunity to clamber in and kiss his skull.

After a spell in a convent as a teenager, Sand briefly considered taking religious vows. Instead she made vows of a different kind and, at 18, married a man who turned out to be boorish and violent. Before too long Sand left him— and her children —for Paris’s literary scene. She began collaborating with Jules Sandeau, a lover, and borrowing his name. But she soon struck out on her own. After an early hit with “Indiana”, publishers began competing for the rights to her work.

“Becoming George” is a romp to read. This is partly because Sand was a libertine, and an extremely successful one at that. (She is on holiday with one paramour when he falls ill; while he is recovering, she seduces the doctor who has come to care for him.) It is also because Ms Sampson is a skilful writer, who deftly evokes the cultural firmament in which Sand lived and worked. She has an enjoyable turn of phrase, too: one man is described as “a sexless creature, something of a bulgy-eyed haddock”. Typhoid, she muses, “must be quite an effective prophylactic”.

The biography, however, falls short of its intended aim. At times Ms Sampson tells, rather than shows, the reader that Sand’s works matter; more in-depth literary analysis would have bolstered her argument. Sand’s personality remains more intriguing than her art. She emerges as an astonishingly modern hero—so much so that you wonder why there hasn’t been a Hollywood biopic about her in recent years.

Nevertheless, some readers may still be tempted to pick up a copy of “Indiana”, “Lélia” or “Mauprat” after they have finished “Becoming George”. For Ms Sampson lays out just how many admirers Sand had, including the Brontë sisters, Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Marcel Proust. Gustave Flaubert, who exchanged letters with Sand for many years, addressed his fellow writer as chère maître (dear master). After her death, he predicted that “Her name will live in unique glory as one of the great figures of France.” Any novelist with such a famous fanbase is surely worth a try. ■

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A technicolour account of the sabotage suggests how fast the world has changed

The wild, gripping story of the Nord Stream pipeline bombing A technicolour account of the sabotage suggests how fast the world has changed July 16th 2026 The bombs were hidden in divers’ cylinders and lowered into the Baltic Sea. In freezing darkness they were fixed to the pipes that snaked along the sea floor from Russia to Germany. The timers were set. As Bojan Pancevski shows in his new book, the resulting explosions shook Europe’s economy and the Western alliance. Revisited today, those tanks are also time capsules, messages in a bottle from an already remote past.

Known as Nord Stream 1 and 2, the twin tubes comprised the world’s longest undersea pipeline network when they were laid in 2011 and 2021 respectively. They were always controversial. By bypassing Ukraine, they made it easier for the Kremlin to cut off its gas supplies without interrupting deliveries farther west. As Mr Pancevski writes in “The Nord Stream Conspiracy”, they were “giant tentacles” which “tied Germany and much of Europe to Russia” through dependence on Russian energy .

The blasts that ruptured them in September 2022, seven months into Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, spewed up gas worth $2bn in giant geysers. The facts of the case have emerged patchily ; Mr Pancevski, a correspondent for the Wall Street Journal, has dug out what he thinks is the full story.

It is gripping. In this telling, the improvised, shoestring raid was conducted by a maverick Ukrainian special-forces unit which, like much of the country’s war effort, relied partly on private funding. It was led by an officer nicknamed “the madman” who had plotted warlords’ assassinations. His team included a heavily tattooed politician and ex-cop who had trained to be a priest. Among the divers was a dauntless former erotic model, whose boyfriend was scared away from Kyiv lest he distract her. The aim was to cut Russia’s export revenues and its influence on Europe.

Equipped with fake IDs obtained from criminals in Bulgaria, a crew of seven rented a sloop on the German coast and sailed into the Baltic. To set the bombs they plunged 80 metres into the murk, sometimes in a vicious storm. This book isn’t misty-eyed about Ukraine’s fractious security services and snakepit politics, noting the corruption and occasional brutality that blight them. But it honours the saboteurs’ ingenuity and bravery.

The German police faced stonewalling and lies. Russia blamed America, which disliked Nord Stream, but, in this account, had got wind of the plan and tried to stop it. As Germany sent aid to Ukraine and took in refugees, the idea that the culprits might be Ukrainian was combustible. Still, the plods tracked down suspects using fingerprints, traffic cameras and facial-recognition software. A Ukrainian caught in Poland was sensationally released. Another was extradited from Italy and indicted on June 30th; German prosecutors explicitly—and explosively—say the attack was committed “on behalf of Ukrainian state authorities”.

So the saga isn’t over. But the Nord Stream era is. It is only four years since the pipeline was blown up, yet it seems a relic of a distant age. Now it appears bonkers that—after Vladimir Putin invaded Georgia and annexed Crimea—some Western statesmen thought it wise to strengthen his hold on Europe’s economy. His most terrible war has recast this episode and the preceding folly.

Conversely, other aspects of the tale seem less incredible than they did. In four years the notion that war is waged beyond the battlefield has become commonplace. Undersea cables are damaged; Russian hackers target Western institutions; and amateur arsonists, recruited on social media, firebombed a house owned by Britain’s prime minister. Hybrid warfare is no longer a shock but an insidious rumbling reality.

Conspiracism has likewise become more entrenched. The Nord Stream case features false-flag theories, subterfuge and cover-ups of a kind that seem unsurprising in the former Soviet world, where opacity has bred cynical mistrust. Paranoiacs in the West have long thought this way, too; as these worlds bleed together, ever more people do.

From another angle this book is a dispatch from a separate battle—between shoe-leather journalism and the forces, commercial and technological, which threaten it. For this is really a chronicle of three feats: the sabotage, the police inquiry and the author’s stupendous investigative reporting. On the record, every Ukrainian cited here denies bombing Nord Stream. Yet Mr Pancevski’s sources and perseverance let him reconstruct the mission in technicolour. No AI chatbot will ever match that. ■

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“Regime Change” is an eye-popping report on “the most powerful man that the planet has ever known”

Inside the fantasy world of Donald Trump “Regime Change” is an eye-popping report on “the most powerful man that the planet has ever known” July 9th 2026 Pundits often say that Trump World resembles “Game of Thrones” because it is a place where horrid people do horrid things in pursuit of power. Fiddlesticks. The main reason why Trump World is like a dragons-and-zombies saga is that its protagonists live in a land of make-believe.

Especially President Donald Trump , whose understanding of reality seems to be based on snippets he once heard and wishes were true. “Regime Change”, an account of his second term by two New York Times journalists, Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, brims with examples.

America was at its richest “from 1870 to 1913”, when it was “a tariff country”, claims Mr Trump. Actually, Americans are six times richer now than they were in 1913, even if you ignore the full benefits of new inventions such as GPS and antibiotics. The president thinks global trade means foreigners screwing Uncle Sam. So when his commerce secretary showed him that Chinese and Indian tariffs on American goods were not very high, he called the numbers “fucking bullshit” and ordered Natalie Harp, a young blonde aide whose job is to print out positive news for him, to Google up “the real numbers”. Ms Harp, “despite her best efforts”, could not find “the numbers that didn’t exist”.

Much of the federal government continues to operate normally, responding more or less rationally to old-fashioned facts. But in the White House, fantasy reigns. The Philippines has no drug problems because President Rodrigo Duterte kills drug dealers without fussing about “due process”, Mr Trump told his advisers. Actually the Philippines continues to have a huge drugs problem, and Mr Duterte will face trial in The Hague later this year for crimes against humanity.

Some courtiers are grounded in reality, but they keep quiet about it. Marco Rubio, Mr Trump’s secretary of state, “never lectured the president or flaunted his own knowledge”, Ms Haberman and Mr Swan write. When facts fail to fit the message, they are memory-holed. For example, the message after the murder of Charlie Kirk , a conservative activist, was that America was being overrun by left-wing terrorists. So the Justice Department website quietly took down an official study showing that far-right terrorists in America kill many more people than left-wingers do.

All of Mr Trump’s aides must profess to believe that the election in 2020 was stolen. One candidate was rejected simply for praising Mike Pence, the former vice-president, who refused to pretend his boss had won. This filter lets Mr Trump select staff who are prepared to lie for him—and perhaps break other norms , too.

Another crucial tool for manipulating reality is to redefine words. The Democratic Party “is not a political party. It is a domestic extremist organisation,” says Stephen Miller, one of Mr Trump’s most extreme advisers. A terrorist is not, as the dictionary says, someone who uses violence for political or ideological ends. The label can be applied to peaceful protesters and even to groups that do not exist, such as the “Cartel de los Soles” in Venezuela. An emergency need not be a sudden crisis but can include the trade deficit, which America has coped with just fine since 1976. An “invasion” can mean drug-smuggling or even foreigners crossing the border to clean hotel rooms.

It is not nit-picking to complain about Mr Trump’s abuse of language. Laws consist of words. So when the president asserts the right to change their meaning, he is asserting the right to change the law. If protesters are terrorists, then federal agents who shoot them may be justified. If drug-smugglers are invaders, they can be bombed. If the war on Iran is not a war, as Mr Trump has claimed, then he does not need Congress’s permission to wage it. If he can declare “emergencies” at will, he can wield emergency powers whenever he feels like it. America’s courts have struck down some of these outrageous power grabs, but not all.

Ms Haberman and Mr Swan offer little original analysis. Instead, they offer something that will let readers draw their own conclusions: dogged, meticulous reporting that illuminates how exceptional this White House is. Trump-sceptical readers will love it: already “Regime Change” has shot to first place on the New York Times bestseller list and quickly sold out in bookshops and on Amazon in America.

Some of the book’s details are trivial: Mr Trump thinks he is a better interior decorator than anyone else; an aide saw him supergluing fancy gold decorations to an Oval Office fireplace. At other times, his vanity has global consequences. The head of the CIA told him that a plan for quick, easy regime change in Iran, as presented by Binyamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, was “farcical”. But Mr Trump had “a good feeling”. What would the head of the CIA know about intelligence?

Mr Trump has made billions of dollars from being president. Gulf states that need America’s protection just so happen to invest huge amounts of money in his family’s crypto ventures. Countries that wish to avoid punitive tariffs race to greenlight Trump golf courses or hotel projects. “Neither the president nor his family has ever engaged—or will ever engage—in conflicts of interest,” declare his flacks, week after week, with impressively straight faces.

The authors add depth to this familiar tale of shamelessness. Boris Epshteyn, a lawyer who had helped Mr Trump stay out of prison, was accused of demanding fat pay-offs from prospective second-term appointees to whisper a good word in the boss’s ear, and of bad-mouthing those who refused, such as Scott Bessent, now the treasury secretary. The White House counsel urged Mr Trump to cut ties with Mr Epshteyn (who denies the allegations). Mr Trump said no. Another adviser “explained that Trump…valued lawyers he thought would do anything for him” and hated making enemies of those privy to his secrets. He had been burned before.

One of Mr Trump’s positive qualities is that he often gives interviews. He spent an hour with the authors, despite knowing them as critics. It was on the 17th day of his war with Iran, Brent crude was more than $100 a barrel—and he was keen to show them plans for his White House ballroom. Then he quoted “a historian” who wrote that “Donald Trump is, without question, the most powerful man that the planet has ever known.” Alexander the Great and the Caesars did not have aeroplanes. Hitler, Mao and Stalin did not have Mr Trump’s global reach. The “historian” who wrote this, it turned out, was a golf caddy. ■

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An old exercise method is newly trendy

A century on, Pilates flexes its muscles An old exercise method is newly trendy July 9th 2026 ATTENDING A Pilates class means reckoning with your own feebleness. The Reformer machine—a moving carriage attached to various springs and straps—looks rather like a torture device (and, depending on your instructor’s inclination, it can be). The idea is to perform slow, controlled movements such as lunges using springs as resistance; it does not sound too bad. But then, out of nowhere, you are dripping with sweat and your knees are shaking as if you are performing a bad Elvis impersonation.

Perhaps it is cool to be humbled, because Pilates—which can be performed on a mat as well as a machine—is absolutely on fire (emphasis on the abs). It was the fastest-growing workout type worldwide in 2025 on ClassPass, a fitness-session booking platform. Earlier this year Google searches for Reformer Pilates hit an all-time high. On social media videos often go viral—particularly ones of muscly men struggling and cursing through a session.

MMCG, a property consultancy, has estimated that Club Pilates, America’s largest studio franchise , grew from fewer than 50 branches in 2015 to more than 1,100 in 2024. “People are opening Pilates studios the way they opened frozen yogurt places and car washes,” says Maria Leone of Bodyline, a studio in Los Angeles, a city renowned for toned, beach-ready bodies.

This is not to say Pilates is new: in fact, Joseph Pilates (pictured below) opened the first studio in New York in 1926. A German fitness fanatic, he devised the system while interned in a British camp during the first world war . He initially dubbed his exercises, which strengthen muscles but minimise stress on the joints, “Contrology”. Unsurprisingly the name did not stick.

The appeal of Pilates, then and now, is its emphasis on power and flexibility. The rewards of strength training are widely known and this format appeals to women who may not enjoy pumping iron in the gym, reckons Bethan Dando, a Pilates instructor. Its reputation for improving mobility, aiding muscle recovery and strengthening joints also makes it an effective complement to weightlifting, which could explain the rising interest from men. It has been endorsed by athletes including LeBron James , an American basketball player, and George Ford, an English rugby player, who reckon Pilates helps with injury rehabilitation and keeps them supple.

Can the craze stretch further? Jeff Bladt of Playlist, ClassPass’s parent company, says that in some markets supply growth is outpacing that of demand, so a saturation point may be near. Many tremble at the cost: in New York, a single Reformer class will set you back around $50. But the market is not hamstrung yet. Its fans may feel weak, but the Pilates brand is strong. ■

Attitudes towards art, value and what it takes to be a good collector are changing

Why Old Master paintings are back in vogue Attitudes towards art, value and what it takes to be a good collector are changing July 9th 2026 ON FIRST GLANCE the painting—by an unknown Dutch artist in the 17th century—seemed unlikely to spark a bidding war. It depicts two skulls and a handwritten note asking “Uter dominus, uter servus?” (Which is the master, which is the slave?) Yet on June 30th heady bidding at an auction at Christie’s in London pushed the painting’s price to £431,000 ($575,000), about four times the estimate. There is a “yearning for the unusual”, explains Andrew Fletcher, head of Christie’s Old Masters department, who has seen a surge of interest in “the weird and wonderful”.

Old Masters—a centuries-spanning category that includes works typically completed before 1850—have seen new life breathed into them. In that same Christie’s auction records were set for six artists, including Sir Thomas Lawrence, an English painter, whose portrait of the Duke of Wellington (pictured above), the general who beat Napoleon , fetched £9.7m. “It’s the most optimistic moment I can remember in the Old Masters market for some years,” says Mr Fletcher.

The value of Old Masters sales worldwide in 2025 was $1.2bn, 30% higher than a year earlier. But data may not capture the “full story” of the uptick, as many paintings are sold privately, says Patrick Williams, a gallerist in New York. Younger buyers are showing more enthusiasm. This year around 16% of bidders in Old Masters sales at Sotheby’s, another auction house, are under the age of 40, nearly triple the share from five years ago.

Until the 1980s Old Masters ruled the art world. But then collectors decided the category was too old-timey and turned to collecting Impressionist and contemporary works instead. Several things have changed in the past two years. First, some parts of the market for contemporary art showed signs of volatility. Collectors realised that Old Masters are stable and significantly less expensive. “For $250,000 you can buy a painting that could hang in the Louvre, but $10m gets you a bad Picasso ,” says Mr Williams. There is also scarcity: more Old Master paintings are entering museum collections every year.

Art buyers have also become more open-minded about mixing pictures from different periods. A “turning-point” came in 2017, says Sylvie Winckler, a Belgian collector: that was when Christie’s sold Leonardo da Vinci’s heavily restored “Salvator Mundi” for $450m, the highest price ever paid for an artwork, in a post-war- and contemporary-art auction. It showed how older art could look sleek alongside more modern works in the white boxes many wealthy people call homes.

Opinions about what constitutes “good” collecting have changed, too. Conventionally, buyers of Old Masters were like PhD candidates, specialising in areas such as 18th-century French still-lifes. Today people buy art more eclectically and expansively. A new generation of collectors is driven “less by traditional connoisseurship and more by image and the visible impact of the work itself”, says Valentina Castellani, author of “Trading Beauty”, a history of art buying.

This means that portraits and figurative art are in vogue, because they are Instagrammable. People spend so much time looking at pictures of other people on social media that they are primed to connect to painted ones. There is an allure to old-fashioned fabrics and romanticising of what appears to be a simpler life (if you ignore the revolutions, plagues and awful dentistry of past eras). Charles Stewart, the boss of Sotheby’s, attributes resurging interest in Old Masters to an “AI effect”: “Older things feel more artisanal and human,” he says.

Dealers have become more masterful in marketing to a new clientele. Secular images are easier to sell than religious ones, as are works with an intriguing back story. This was evident at TEFAF Maastricht, an art fair that is the biggest gathering for Old Masters buyers and dealers, in March. Paul Smeets, a gallerist, displayed a painting by Guido Cagnacci, an Italian who died in 1663. It was of the Virgin Mary, adorned with a golden halo, reading a book. “Ten years ago we would have just left ‘Virgin Reading’ as a title,” says Mr Smeets. But instead he wanted to highlight that the sitter might have been the paramour of the artist. So he called it “Possibly a portrait of Maddalena Fontanafredda as the Virgin Reading”. Clunky, yes, but it added drama and passion to a familiar scene. The work sold quickly. Old Masters have a lot of lovers these days. ■

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An exuberant new book includes physiognomy, portraiture and plastic surgery

The history of the human face is more than skin deep An exuberant new book includes physiognomy, portraiture and plastic surgery July 9th 2026 CAST YOUR mind back to this morning. The first thing you probably did after you woke up was reach for your smartphone and hold it up in front of your bleary eyes to unlock it. Out of bed, you looked in a mirror and decided whether to shave or apply makeup. Perhaps you smilingly cajoled a child to eat or joined a Zoom call (and tried not to look at yourself).

Central to all those actions was your face: the particular shape and arrangement of your forehead, eyes, nose, mouth and chin. Those dimensions are used to identify you (on your passport , for instance, or via your phone’s Face ID). They will determine whether people trust you, fancy you or believe you are the right person for a job. If you are ever accused of a crime, they could influence whether or not the jury is inclined to find you guilty.

In a fascinating new book, Fay Bound-Alberti, a cultural historian, gives full expression to the many meanings of the face. She peers across millennia and regions, looking at anthropology, criminology, medical imaging, portraiture and more to argue that faces may be made up of “skin, bone and muscle”, but perceptions of them are shaped by “belief systems, languages and environments”. Her interest in the subject stems in part from her own experience of prosopagnosia—better known as “face blindness”—a neurological condition that means she struggles to recognise even close family members.

Humans have long taken each other at face value. Pythagoras, a Greek philosopher, supposedly chose his pupils based on whether they looked intelligent. In the wake of Euclid’s writings on proportion and beauty—ie, the “golden ratio”—many came to believe that “ill-proportioned men” were “scoundrels”.

The notion that “faces were key to a person’s social and moral status” gave authorities in ancient Greece, Rome and Persia the idea to use mutilation as a form of punishment. Criminals’ ears and noses were sliced off; eyes were gouged out and faces branded. This association of facial difference with nefarious behaviour persists: think of how many Bond villains have had scars, burns or misshapen features.

People have been judged on their looks for centuries, but they have had “only the vaguest notion” of what they looked like until relatively recently. In medieval times, “your identity would be defined by your role, your family, your village and your faith—not by your individual face,” Ms Bound-Alberti observes. That began to change in the Renaissance, which saw an explosion of portraiture. Artists produced works that sought to capture something of the sitter’s character , not just their social standing. Your face became the map on which your inner world could be read. Ms Bound-Alberti calls this yoking of individuality to outward appearance “facehood”.

As mirrors became widespread and cheap, the face became a subject of fascination. Like Narcissus gazing in the pool, people could not resist their own reflection. Photography deepened the obsession. Scientists including Charles Darwin used the technology to codify expressions and emotions; some sought to categorise and rank groups of people.

It is the historical morsels that will stay with you long after you finish “The Face”. Who could fail to be intrigued by Justinian II’s gold prosthetic nose, or the fact that Darwin was almost denied passage on HMS Beagle because of his schnoz? Other passages, such as those on cosmetic surgery , will feel more familiar: advertising reinforces the belief that “our faces have become projects to be perfected.”

At times the reader may wish that Ms Bound-Alberti had offered more analysis alongside anecdotes. Given the book’s focus on identity, for example, it is surprising that the author skims over deepfakes: studies have found that such videos can cause profound psychological harm to the person being impersonated online. Still, this is a wide-ranging and thoughtful history. Thanks to social media, people encounter more faces than ever before; after reading this book, you will see that there is more to a face than meets the eye. ■

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Stargazing is an illuminating business

The brightest tourism trend can be found in the darkest places Stargazing is an illuminating business July 9th 2026 FOR MILLENNIA starry nights have guided navigators, perplexed astronomers and inspired painters. But they are becoming a rarer sight. At least 80% of the world lives under light-polluted skies—a figure that rises to 99% in America and Europe. A paper published in Science found that between 2011 and 2022 the night sky grew almost 10% brighter each year. With so many places awash with artificial light , people are increasingly seeking out the darkness.

Many became starry-eyed during the pandemic. Confined to their homes, people took to gazing at the cosmos. (It helped that lockdown contributed to a drop in light pollution in lots of places.) Some turned to social media—and online communities such as “SpaceTok”—for information. Once restrictions lifted, these hobbyists planned their trips accordingly.

The forecasts for companies offering “astrotourism” and “noctourism” are anything but cloudy. In 2024 a survey by Booking.com, a travel website, found that 62% of people were interested in destinations with limited light pollution. To meet the demand for “cosmic escapism”, some hotels now provide access to telescopes and in-house astronomers. Others are offering star-bathing and moonlit meditation.

Because the best stargazing requires seclusion, astrotourism is a boon to remote areas that do not usually lure tourists. DarkSky International, a non-profit, certifies parks and reserves with the best night-time conditions. It has seen a substantial increase in the number of applications in the past three years, growing from 16 in 2023 to 28 applications in the first half of 2026 alone.

Astro Retreat in Maan, an Indian village in the Himalayas, has seen a surge in visitors of late. Al Ula , in the Saudi Arabian desert, is going big on astrotourism by building a state-of-the-art observatory and luxury stargazing lodges. John Barentine, an astronomer in Arizona, says there is an opportunity for rural places where industries such as mining have waned.

Such trips appeal because they offer a stillness that is hard to find in much of the modern world, where “we have turned night into day in the places we live and work,” as Ruskin Hartley, DarkSky’s director, puts it. Stargazing also encourages feelings of wonderment, which are in short supply. Studies have found that those who look up report a greater sense of well-being; feelings of awe are linked to lower stress levels and a sense of tranquillity. Some credit the pastime with giving them a greater sense of perspective. As Oscar Wilde once wrote: “We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.” ■

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The precious work, insured for $1bn, is bound for Britain. It’s more famous there than in France

The real value of the Bayeux tapestry The precious work, insured for $1bn, is bound for Britain. It’s more famous there than in France July 9th 2026 In the dark of night in July, under police escort, a specially fitted lorry carrying a thousand-year-old tapestry will leave the town of Bayeux in Normandy. The fragile linen fabric depicting the Norman conquest of England in 1066 will be gently folded into a tailor-made and climate-regulated aluminium crate. That crate will then be suspended inside a metal cage, protected from vibration by 12 steel shock-absorbers. The convoy and its precious cargo—which was embroidered in England but has been in France ever since—will travel by road to the Channel Tunnel, and on to the British Museum in London.

The loan of the Bayeux tapestry, for an exhibition opening in September, is a gesture rich in cross-Channel symbolism. In the past London museums have tried but failed to host the work. In 1953, for instance, the V&A asked to display the tapestry to mark the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II , only to be told that the French authorities had changed their minds. The News Chronicle in London reported that the French embassy could not give a reason: “I am sorry, monsieur. We are lost. First it is yes, no, then yes, then no…and now we are in the dark.”

This time the French government, which owns the tapestry, proposed the idea. At a Franco-British summit in 2018 President Emmanuel Macron announced the loan, declaring that the tapestry “embodies the link between our two countries”. It was two years after the Brexit vote , and the two nations were drifting apart; the point, says a presidential aide, was to try to bind them through culture.

That was easier said than done. The bilateral discussions “took more years” than Brexit, joked Mr Macron. British ministers, officials and even the king lobbied the French hard. Mr Macron, says one official involved, was “instrumental” in taking on his country’s conservation lobby—who worried about damage to the tapestry—a formidable force even for a powerful French president. New climate-control and anti-vibration technology, and the fact that the museum in Bayeux was closing for renovations anyway, also helped.

By last year the deal was done. In private, he describes the loan as “very special” to him. “President Macron’s key intuition”, says Peter Ricketts, the British envoy to the loan project, “was the differential impact: the tapestry is far more iconic in the UK than in France, and he knew that the exhibition would be a sensation.”

The Bayeux tapestry is central to Britain’s national story. Most schoolchildren can recite the date 1066, just as French ones can 1789. The Battle of Hastings, when William of Normandy defeated Harold II, the last Anglo-Saxon king of England, and seized the throne, was a founding moment for Britain, remaking its governance , monarchy, legal system, language, architecture and much more. British tourists (along with North Americans) have long topped the list of foreign visitors to the Bayeux Museum, where the tapestry has been displayed since 1983.

The Norman conquest does not feature strongly in most French people’s minds. William’s glorious triumph over Harold scarcely gets a mention in school textbooks. Almost no university department studies him besides the University of Caen in Normandy, not far from Bayeux.

“He’s a Norman hero, not a French one,” explains Véronique Gazeau, a medieval historian at the university. Although as a young duke William was a vassal of the French king, his belligerent adventures later brought him into conflict with the Capetian dynasty centred in Paris. In this sense, William was not a French conqueror but a Norman one.

At times, though, imperialists sought to use William’s exploits to support their expansionist ambitions. In 1803 Napoleon had the tapestry transported to the Louvre for public display when he was preparing his troops to invade England. During the second world war the Germans asked after it, though the French had already hurried it into safekeeping. (It was rolled onto two cylinders, stored in the cellar of the Bayeux municipal library, and later transported to the French National Museums repository at the Château de Sourches, near Le Mans.) Jacques Dupont, inspector general of historic monuments, observed in 1941 that the Germans “frequently asked…to see the tapestry that represents the conquest of England”.

Top of mind for the French or not, the prospect of loaning it has nonetheless prompted some pushback. In 2018 Antoine Verney, the chief curator at the Bayeux Museum, called it “unthinkable” to move the tapestry far from its home. Last year over 70,000 people signed a petition against the loan. Critics have suggested that moving it may cause micro-tears to the fabric and snags to the embroidery and stitching; in the worst case the fabric could rip and more holes could develop. (There are already many.)

Since then experts in the transport, storage and display of fragile art from both sides of the Channel have worked on optimum protection. Two dry runs to London have taken place with a dummy. But some critical voices in France remain unconvinced. “They are doing their best to ensure that everything goes smoothly, but there is no guarantee,” says Didier Rykner, founder of La Tribune de l’Art, a magazine. “I’ve got nothing against the English, but they could just come to Bayeux.”

“Zero risk does not exist,” acknowledges Delphine Christophe, head of heritage and architecture at the Ministry of Culture, “but we are now extremely confident.” Tests show that the custom-made casing for transport will absorb 96% of the force of shocks, a level she describes as “excellent”. The tapestry, which will be displayed flat at the British Museum to limit the pressure on the fabric, is insured for a staggering £800m ($1bn) under the British government’s indemnity scheme. “It’s the best guarantee that we will look after it,” says Lord Ricketts.

As the tapestry wends its way to the land that William conquered, some will call it a cheeky nod to defeat and humiliation by the French, with whom the British have a long and rivalrous history. But the ambition may also be about winning the hearts and minds of people in France. “When the French see how hugely valued it is over there,” says an official in Paris, “it will give it a huge boost when it returns home.” Yet another victory. ■

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Driving from Chicago to Santa Monica you glimpse the best aspects of the country

Route 66: How a century-old highway helps explain America Driving from Chicago to Santa Monica you glimpse the best aspects of the country July 2nd 2026 The “Mother Road” was what John Steinbeck called it in “The Grapes of Wrath”; the Joads drove west from Oklahoma in search of a better life in California. Nat King Cole sang that it was where you “get your kicks”. It gave its name to a popular network TV show in the 1960s and inspired the plot and setting of Pixar’s “Cars”, an animated film from 2006. It is the path of one of America’s most popular road trips.

Route 66 became the most famous highway in the world partly due to good timing. Its heyday coincided with America’s cultural and geopolitical rise and the emergence of car culture. This year the route turns 100. And though the modern interstate is more efficient, it is far less colourful. America is turning 250 in a divided, uneasy time. The best antidote for the birthday blues is to drive all 2,400 miles (3,860km), from Chicago to Santa Monica, on the Mother Road.

Though it began as a motley stitching of state and local roads—not until 12 years after its inauguration did it become the first fully paved American highway—it quickly became the main route west, passing through eight states. Farmhands used it to flee the Dust Bowl; so did workers, many of them African-Americans from Texas and Oklahoma, who flocked to California’s booming industrial base after the second world war; merry holidaymakers travelled along it to Los Angeles. During Route 66’s early years, more people got behind the wheel, thanks to Henry Ford’s affordable Model T . Services for drivers flourished, including petrol stations, diners and motels, as did the small towns through which the route passed.

But with just a single lane in each direction, the popular route turned into a car park. Dwight Eisenhower, America’s president, had been impressed by Germany’s autobahn while serving in Europe during the second world war. In 1956 he signed the Federal Aid Highway Act to fund a system of multi-lane interstate highways. In the subsequent decades some new highways paralleled Route 66; others simply built over it. As a federal highway it was decommissioned in 1985.

That could have been the end of the story. But grassroots organisations formed to preserve and protect Route 66, in line with the observation of Alexis de Tocqueville from nearly two centuries ago: “Americans…are forever forming associations…at the head of any new undertaking.”

That is the first lesson from Route 66: for all the hands wrung and pixels blazed about the social atomisation wreaked by the digital age, Americans retain their heartening passion for in-person voluntarism. All eight states have volunteer-led groups devoted to preserving and promoting Route 66. Cheerful, garrulous volunteers staff small-town museums and roadside attractions; indeed, the route’s vibrancy largely stems from the efforts of countless people who decided, each for their own reasons, that they want it to remain delightful and not fade into disuse and obscurity.

Bill Thomas, who chairs a national preservation group, the Route 66 Road Ahead Partnership, and is the head of economic development for Logan County, Oklahoma, sees preserving the route as a means to attract tourists. Atlanta, Illinois, a town of just 1,600 residents, claims 8,000 visitors per year. Atlanta’s main attraction is the weird, wonderful American Giants Museum, devoted to enormous fibreglass statues that businesses used to draw customers’ eyeballs and wallets. (Their unfortunate tendency to fall over sparked lawsuits and prompted their retirement.) The museum is an old Texaco petrol station; across the street, a fibreglass giant offers (or is preparing to club passers-by to death with) a hot dog the size of a park bench.

Such roadside oddities abound along the route. There is a motel of painted concrete tepees in Holbrook, Arizona. A little farther down the road is an abandoned mining town reinvented as an open-air museum of the Old West. There are also motorcycle museums, run by lovers of the open road who want to share their passion with the public.

Collectively these attractions provide the second lesson: America’s economy is dynamic and productive, yes, but also intensely creative. American businesses are very good at making customers want to buy things. Advertising, done well, is an art. Though today it is often the province of big, expensive agencies, Route 66 contains hundreds of reminders that it can also be an individual endeavour, requiring little more than a few cans of paint and a memorable name (such as the Blue Swallow and the Wagon Wheel, both motels). Gimmicks work, too: if you finish a 72-ounce steak at the Big Texan Steak Ranch in Amarillo within an hour and without vomiting, your meal is free.

The final lesson is more of a reminder: that mobility helped America boom. People can move to a new city or state to find better opportunities and reinvent themselves. Yet fewer are doing so today. And politicians have grown suspicious of newcomers. The left hates the arrival of new middle-class Americans and wails about gentrification. The right hates the arrival of foreigners and complains about jobs being snapped up. Route 66 symbolises what has really made America great.

All along Route 66 you see that the country may be politically restive and divided, but it remains a warm, fascinating place, filled with at least as many wonders as flaws. Parts of the route—the harrowing mountain passes between Cool Springs and Oatman, Arizona; the sere, striated mountains in New Mexico; the gently rolling flatlands and endless skies of Oklahoma—are breathtakingly beautiful.

Travelling the Mother Road also reminds Americans just how vast and hospitable their country still is. It has a far smaller share of grumps than you would encounter at an average airport. Its very inconvenience is the draw. “Nobody wants to drive 55 miles an hour when they can drive 75” on the interstate, complains one volunteer at a restored petrol station in Shamrock, Texas. People drive on interstates because they have to; they travel Route 66 because they want to.

Mr Thomas recalls how many foreign tourists tell him, “We’re travelling Route 66 to see the ‘real America’.” And though of course Adrian, Texas , and Pontiac, Illinois, are no more “real” than Queens or Boston, road trips help you feel you are journeying to a deeper understanding of the nation.

Outside a café in Adrian, at the road’s midpoint, a burly Frenchman called Vince looks out at the road he has just travelled and the one he is about to discover. Asked what drew him to a decommissioned highway in the middle of nowhere, he smiles and gestures towards his motorcycle: “For me, it’s been a dream for a long time. And now, it’s reality.” ■

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“The Butterfly Season” is about discovery, mortality and eternity

A Danish bestseller about butterflies has set hearts aflutter “The Butterfly Season” is about discovery, mortality and eternity July 2nd 2026 On the first day of a new year Lea Korsgaard, a Danish journalist, decided she would set out to see every species of butterfly in a single season. She did not know why. Her knowledge of Lepidoptera was almost nil. Between butterflies and moths , she could just about distinguish that the first sort were colourful and sun-loving, the second generally hairier and nocturnal. Nor did she need this mad quest. With a hectic job, a busy husband, a dog to walk and three young sons to bring up, she had more than enough to do.

Nonetheless, she set about it. She had 64 native species to find. The names alone were enticing: purple emperor, grizzled skipper, pearl-bordered fritillary. And it was an excuse to visit parts of Denmark she had not known before. So for a year she hunted, squelching through bogs, pushing her way through forests, clambering over banks and rocks, camera or phone in hand. Few butterflies did her the favour of simply flying past her kitchen window.

She cheated a bit, of course. First, she bought a batch of butterfly eggs online—but did not count them. Later, a species forum helped her confirm her finds instantly. She teamed up with experts online to arrange meetings at likely places, learning the proper way to walk when searching: four steps, a pause, slow scan of the area, four steps more (never let your shadow fall in front of you). In the end she became such an expert that she could distinguish the tiniest variations of colour on wing-dots or antennae from several feet away.

That necessary attention to detail feeds into the rest of the story. The Scandinavia of Karl Ove Knausgaard, slow-knitting videos and hygge (cosiness) is alive and well here, helping account for the book’s huge success when it was published in Denmark. Ms Korsgaard does not merely draw up a butterfly list, but “the blue rows take shape on the long edge.” While chatting in the car, she also notes her gear-changes. Scraps of conversation float in and out with no resolution. But this is all a useful contrast to the dense pages she devotes to the history, philosophy and mythology of butterflies. Her search is not merely to record the physical specimens in Denmark (lamentably fewer than in past times), but to find out what butterflies mean.

As she points out, they appear even in cave paintings and ornaments from the Bronze Age. To ancient peoples the world over, they represented souls. In Greece the goddess Psyche, the soul itself, had butterfly wings. In China they were the souls of the dead; in Mexico those of the ancestors, commemorated every November when orange monarch butterflies end their migration from Texas by converging like flames in the trees. One doctor found butterflies scratched “everywhere” on the barrack-walls of Polish death camps. Far closer to home, a small tortoiseshell kept visiting Ms Korsgaard’s mother after her own mother’s death, apparently—explicitly, she thought—to comfort her. When she set out on her quest, a small tortoiseshell was the first butterfly she saw. “A room of light”, she writes, “had opened inside me.”

This message, she feels, must have to do with metamorphosis. That extraordinary process is a passage from apparent death (the chrysalis, which she too pokes obsessively as it rattles in a glass, thinking it can’t possibly be alive) to the creature that emerges to cling to a stem and unfurl its glorious wings. She links this not just to religious teachings of resurrection, but to the belief of Kant and Hegel in human perfectibility through reason; and the conviction of economists (including The Economist) in the general inevitability of human progress. The butterfly is the great symbol of the theory that, through striving, perfection is possible.

Yet the butterflies she seeks are in steep decline. Between 1993 and 2023, the 22 rarest varieties in Denmark’s South Sea Islands and Zealand lost nearly three-quarters of their habitats. In 1938 there were swallowtails all over Jutland, even in the dunes; 40 years later, they had stopped breeding there. She had noticed herself that there were far more fritillaries around on her childhood bike rides than now. Climate change and modern farming methods are taking their toll. She begins to panic that species might die out before she sees them, or that she might die before recording them. Thoughts of death, as well as life, spur her on.

The other meaning of butterflies is harder to explain. She is embarrassed to mention it, but she has to account for her own determined searching and the intensity of her experience when she is out in nature with them. It is not just the triumph of crossing off white-letter hairstreaks and holly blues from the long list pinned to the fridge. What she feels, as she rests on one elbow in the company of a northern brown argus, is an overwhelming sense of connectedness with both it, and all things; what Vladimir Nabokov, an ardent lepidopterist, called “a sense of oneness with sun and stone”.

On a tender trip with her game and elderly mother, looking for skippers (almost her last remaining butterflies to spot), she also sees what she can only call “eternity”. She has been born anew, but has always existed; hope is “perpetually fulfilled with life that gushe[s] from life”. She realises then that the point of her quest was not just the collecting of fascinating creatures. It was the recollecting of herself. ■

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The condiment that conquered the world was created 150 years ago

Heinz tomato ketchup and the sweet taste of market dominance The condiment that conquered the world was created 150 years ago July 2nd 2026 EATING HABITS have changed a lot in the past 150 years. Offal and jellied eels rarely make it onto Britons’ and Americans’ plates any more. But one food product has remained a staple since it first hit shelves in 1876: Heinz tomato ketchup.

Heinz says it sells over 650m bottles of the red stuff every year (meaning that more than 1,200 bottles land in shopping baskets every minute). Its factories process enough tomatoes each day to fill an Olympic swimming pool. The ubiquity of its ketchup is partly a matter of taste and partly a triumph of marketing.

Versions of the condiment long predated Henry J. Heinz, a son of German immigrants to America. Ketchup is probably derived from ke-tsiap, a sauce made in Asia from fermented fish. It is thought British and Dutch traders encountered the salty, savoury sauce in the late 17th century and tried in vain to recreate it at home. Recipes often used mushrooms , but others made ketchup with plums or walnuts. (In the 1800s, the spelling “catsup” was also used.)

It was in the early 19th century that Americans developed a taste for tomato ketchup, plopped on eggs and corned beef hash or liver. Early versions of the sauce, however, were watery and spoiled easily. Manufacturers would package their sauces in coloured bottles to hide evidence of bacteria or mould; they would also use preservatives such as sodium benzoate and dyes made from coal tar. Many consumers, even then, wanted to eat clean.

So Heinz developed a ketchup that would not go off quickly, but was free from preservatives (or, as an advert pithily put it, “NOT drugged”). He used ripe tomatoes for a better flavour and colour, and vinegar to inhibit microbes. Crucially, Heinz sold his product in glass bottles, thereby signalling its higher quality.

“The beauty of Heinz is that it’s not trying to be complicated,” says Claire Dinhut, author of “The Condiment Book”: “It’s the perfect balance of sweet and umami and tangy.” That sweetness pairs well with salty foods; the tanginess cuts through greasy dishes. Cookbooks aver that it is so versatile it can be used in curries, fish dishes and breads. But for many Heinz ketchup is associated with the comfort food of childhood—chicken nuggets and chips—and (for Americans) July 4th celebrations.

Nostalgia helps explain Heinz’s staying power. Marketing has entrenched its position. Heinz is among the best-known brands globally: according to YouGov, a pollster, 100% of Britons and 97% of Americans know it. By advertising itself as the default ketchup, Heinz has turned that message into a self-fulfilling prophecy. Even today, when there are umpteen other ketchups on the market—including cheaper and artisan varieties—many shoppers still believe that “It has to be Heinz.” ■

A student journalist examines the culture at Stanford

Amorality and greed at Silicon Valley’s favourite university A student journalist examines the culture at Stanford July 2nd 2026 THERE ARE good reasons to be sceptical of this book. The author, Theo Baker, is just 21 years old. His subject is his Stanford undergraduate years—a time that feels important while living through it, but is rarely of much interest to anyone else.

Yet “How to Rule the World” is worth reading. It follows in the tradition of “One L”, Scott Turow’s account of his first year at Harvard Law School, and William F. Buckley ’s “God and Man at Yale”, a jeremiad against that university’s leftward drift. Mr Baker offers an inside look at a world-shaping institution. Stanford has “a strong claim…to be the greatest university in the world”, with an annual budget larger than that of 116 national governments. Behemoths including Google and Netflix were founded by its students and alumni.

The book has three strands: the skimmable bits about parties, friends, how and to whom Mr Baker lost his virginity; a journalistic story about his investigation that compelled Stanford’s president, Marc Tessier-Lavigne, to resign; and a scathing look at how Stanford’s ties to Silicon Valley have hollowed out its moral core.

Ken Auletta, a journalist at the New Yorker, called the university “a giant tech incubator with a football team”. Many faculty members have grown rich as early investors in their students’ ventures; venture-capital (VC) firms looking for the next big thing have their eyes on undergrads. A student “with sufficiently promising ideas or tech now has no problem raising seven figures on their own”, Mr Baker writes. Some do not even need an idea: “If you have the right pedigree, the VCs will offer you money without so much as the glimmering of a possible startup in mind.”

Obtaining the right pedigree is essentially a matter of reputation, so the competition to be seen as successful, to get into the “Stanford inside Stanford”, as Mr Baker calls it, is intense. Students cut ethical corners; adults entice these gifted, driven teenagers by telling them how special they are. The traditional goals of a liberal-arts education—self-knowledge, critical thinking, inculcation into a shared culture and history—fall by the wayside.

Mr Baker, intending to go into computer science, instead finds a home at the student newspaper, the Stanford Daily. Initially he did not believe journalism was for him, but perhaps he had a genetic predisposition towards it: both his parents are superstar journalists and Mr Baker, too, turns out to be a fearless reporter. His investigation into manipulated data in papers co-written by Mr Tessier-Lavigne made him the youngest-ever winner of a George Polk award, a prestigious journalism accolade.

One reason for Mr Baker’s success at Stanford was a lack of competition: as the Daily’s faculty adviser laments, “very few students care much about journalism.” When everybody wants to get rich—and countenances “a system that embraces ‘just a little bit of fraud’”, as one fellow student quipped—nobody wants to look too hard beneath the shiny surfaces. In decrying Stanford’s thrall to money and power, Mr Baker’s book also testifies to the importance of good local journalism to hold that money and power to account. ■

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The technology is dazzling. Whether the prose will be is another matter

The Herculaneum scrolls are starting to be read The technology is dazzling. Whether the prose will be is another matter July 2nd 2026 It looks like nothing: a lump of coal, at best. A blackened fir cone or piece of excrement. It looks so underwhelming that other such lumps had, over the years, been destroyed or thrown away. This particular lump went by an underwhelming title, too: curators called it “PHerc. 1667”. But at a recent press conference in Naples , PHerc. 1667 became one of the most famous underwhelming-looking lumps in classics.

The eruption of Vesuvius in 79AD made two very different kinds of classical writing famous. The first was the letters of Pliny the Younger , which contained his account of that eruption. These are minor masterpieces of descriptive writing, with words like “evil cloud”, “zigzag flames” and the even more evil-feeling “descending cloud”. They are also masterpieces of dramatic irony. The reader knows what will happen; Pliny did not even have a word for “volcano”. They are, rightly, some of the most-read writings from the ancient world.

The second category of writing was the 600-1,000 scrolls that were covered by the falling cloud as it travelled, at 100kph and around 400°C, over a vast library in a villa in Herculaneum. The villa was rediscovered by well-diggers in 1750. Since then the finest scholars of every era have tried to read its scrolls—and largely failed (though some were read). In the 1820s Humphry Davy, a British chemist, tried a mixture of force, iodine, chlorine and heat to get to them. (“The papyrus smoked,” wrote Davy.) Most were bibliographic Gordian knots: to open them was to destroy them.

Until now. On June 25th the Vesuvius Challenge, a scholarly collaboration, announced that all of PHerc. 1667—1.5 metres of scroll—had been “virtually unwrapped” using a combination of a particle accelerator (to scan the script) and AI (to decipher it). If the remaining 400 closed scrolls (and pieces of scrolls, as some are in bits) are read, then perhaps 3m new classical words might appear. It is a dazzling achievement and could, hopes Brent Seales, the co-founder of the Challenge, create a “renaissance” in this area.

To understand why new works matter so much, it is necessary to understand how many old ones were lost. This is hard: from Christopher Nolan’s film of the “Odyssey” to Emma Thompson’s forthcoming “Iliad” (based on Pat Barker’s feminist retelling ), the ancient world feels so noisily present that it is easy to forget how much has gone. But it has: only an estimated 10% of all classical literature has survived—and only 1% of all Latin. Worse, it was not lost evenly: Christian copyists did not like any ancient writings that were rude, lewd, sceptical, sexual, drunken or queer (which is to say: most of them), so the modern sense of the ancient world has been skewed through censorship.

Whenever a cache of ancient writings appears, it thus not only offers writing—but a potential rewriting of history. The graffiti in nearby Pompeii revolutionised classics (by showing that the Romans were rather filthy). The Dead Sea Scrolls revolutionised early Christian history (by showing that the Christian claims were not as unique as all that). The cracking of Linear B, a script, revolutionised the public’s understanding of Bronze Age Greece (by showing that the Mycenaeans kept obsessive records of their goats).

Whether Herculaneum will be as revolutionary is not clear. There are promising signs: so far every text the scholars have found is “completely new”, says Federica Nicolardi, an assistant professor of papyrology at the University of Naples. Every classicist has their wishlist of what might yet turn up: a poem by Sappho , a lost tragedy by Aeschylus, a lost book of Livy.

They are, alas, unlikely to have their wishes granted. The library, which is thought to have belonged to Piso, Julius Caesar’s father-in-law, was evidently magnificent. Its breadth was perhaps less so: most of what has appeared so far is Greek philosophy. One “virtually unwrapped” scroll was entitled “On Vices”—which sounded promising. But it was by Philodemus, a classical philosopher whom even classical philosophers are not all that interested in. James Warren, a professor of classical philosophy at Cambridge, thinks people have “got a bit carried away”. They are, he says stoically, unlikely to get the texts many are “thirsting for”.

Though more scrolls may yet be in there: like Pompeii itself, much of the villa is still unexcavated. The Vesuvius Challenge is famous for being a collaboration between very old, simple technology (papyri) and very new technology (AI). To get to those other texts, archaeologists may have to resort to an even older, blunter technology: the spade. ■

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Notes on talent management from a star-dominated tournament

Messi, Mbappé, Ronaldo: this World Cup belongs to the superstars Notes on talent management from a star-dominated tournament July 2nd 2026 They freeze. They see red. They quail in the face of history and sky a penalty kick. Sometimes the best footballers flop at World Cups. On the grandest stage they can turn out not to be the best after all, champions of hype rather than talent. Not in 2026: this competition has been dominated by the sport’s titans. Their performance offers lessons for the management of superstars—and a glimmer of cosmic justice.

Lionel Messi , Argentina’s idol, scored six times in three games to claim the record for lifetime goals in World Cups. By July 1st graceful Kylian Mbappé of France (pictured) had netted six too; Norway’s rampaging Erling Haaland had struck five, and Vinícius Júnior, a Brazilian livewire, four. At 41, Cristiano Ronaldo of Portugal became the only man ever to score in six tournaments.

By no means is such a showing inevitable. For one thing, some leading players never get to the World Cup, because their nations fail to qualify for it. This was the fate of George Best of Northern Ireland (who became a notorious playboy) and George Weah (who became president of Liberia). Or the luminaries may be eclipsed by unsung journeymen, who reach heights not touched before or again, or by breakout tyros. Aged 17, Pelé was unknown outside Brazil before the World Cup of 1958. In the final he flicked the ball over a Swede’s head and sweetly volleyed it home.

Pelé also exemplifies a nastier reason why stars can sputter: because they are violently nobbled. In 1966 he was scythed down by a defender, rose gamely but was floored again; he hobbled around pitifully on one leg for the rest of the match. (In 1986 opponents tried to do a number on Diego Maradona, fouling the Argentine more than any player in World Cup history. It didn’t work.)

More relevantly to other businesses, sometimes even megastars crumble under the event’s pressure. Indeed, the burden of megastardom may be why they do so. A few commit rush-of-blood transgressions, like Frank Rijkaard, a Dutchman who in 1990 spat in a German striker’s perm. In 1998 the original Ronaldo, a Brazilian prodigy, came unstuck in a scarier way, suffering a convulsive fit before the final.

Pressure is most personal and acute in penalty shoot-outs. In 2009 Geir Jordet of the Norwegian School of Sports Sciences found that star players were more likely to miss than less glitzy ones, presumably because of the weight of expectation. (That effect seems to have waned since, the big egos having apparently worked on their penalty routines.) Entire teams can suffer these celebrity yips. English squads are cheered off to World Cups like knights errant bound to recover a lost glory. For 60 years they have reached for the sword in the stone, tripped and banged their heads.

Why, this time, have so many marquee names given box-office turns? A lesson for managers of all kinds of teams is that these ones are engineered to optimise their chief assets. This does not always happen: heroes of club football can flounder in national sides that have not been drilled to make the most of their skills. At this World Cup, Argentina’s strategy is to thread the ball to Mr Messi in the vicinity of the goal. Cristiano Ronaldo has spells trundling around the field like a footballing El Cid, but is still the focal point of Portugal’s attack.

Another transferable tip is that the aces are free to concentrate on what they do best—ie, score goals. Just as wise corporate executives exempt rainmakers from paperwork, these players are mostly not expected to do much defending. Less illustrious but extremely proficient colleagues handle that: the maestros thrive because their teams are good, too.

Next, their coaches are conspicuously loyal to the main men. For instance, Didier Deschamps, France’s manager, has rebuffed criticism of Mr Mbappé over his perceived reluctance to sprint backwards in games as well as forwards. Having such stalwart back-up, from the boss as well as colleagues on the pitch, ameliorates the strain of embodying a country’s hopes. If you want your stars to shine, runs the take-home, do your utmost to make them feel like stars.

Those are the action points. But the feats of Messrs Mbappé, Messi and the rest are also edifying in a moral sense. A common view of stardom (not just in football) is that it is a matter of luck, timing, marketing and nice hair as much as ability. “Success = talent + luck,” wrote Daniel Kahneman, a psychologist. “Great success = a little more talent + a lot of luck.” In other words, life is unfair. This World Cup rebuts that jaundiced view. Here, at least, the hype is justified. ■

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A new book spots a real problem and offers terrible solutions

Is America becoming a gerontocracy? A new book spots a real problem and offers terrible solutions June 25th 2026 Talk to young people in any rich country and similar complaints pop up. Housing is “not affordable at all”, says Elijah Edwards, a 20-year-old attending university in Washington, DC. Prices are “ballooning up, and it seems like nothing [ever makes them] go down”. The young want homes near where the good jobs are. But it is so hard for builders to build that legions of 20-somethings are stuck seething in their parents’ basements. Could the culprit be…old people?

“Show up to any planning commission meeting, and you can clearly see the generational divide,” says Joh Gehlbach, a YIMBY organiser in Virginia. Silver-haired NIMBYs oppose any new construction that might spoil their view or make parking slightly trickier. The young typically don’t show up at all. “If you have a public hearing on Tuesday at four o’clock, it’s a little easier for a retiree to [get there] than it is for, you know, a 35-year-old working professional who’s got a kid at home.”

America is ruled by the old, argues Samuel Moyn, a Yale professor, in “Gerontocracy in America”. It is not just that Donald Trump is 80 or that his predecessor left office at 82 and was palpably impaired . Mr Moyn sees a society that privileges the elderly, blocks the young and “is more set on preservation than on renovation”.

When it comes to politics, he has a point. American lawmakers grow mightier with seniority, and there is no good mechanism for getting rid of them when they can no longer do their jobs. Kay Granger, a member of Congress from Texas, served despite living in a retirement home and suffering from dementia. Dianne Feinstein, a senator from California who died in office at 90, often failed to understand what was going on around her. In most lines of work, people past a certain age gradually cede responsibilities—and give them up entirely when they are incapable of fulfilling them. Not in politics. The role of “president pro tempore” of the Senate, who is third in line for the American presidency, is traditionally given to its longest-serving member. Today that is Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa, who is 92.

Even younger politicians must bow to elderly constituents, who are much likelier to vote than the young. The median age of voters in America is 52. More importantly, the median age of primary voters—who pick the roughly 90% of House members whose seats cannot plausibly be won by the other party—is 65. “The more boring an election is”, the older the electorate tends to be, notes Mr Moyn. As a character in “Parks and Recreation” put it: “Senior citizens are basically the only people who vote in local elections. So if you want to win, you gotta get the grey vote.”

Throughout the rich world, politicians tend to favour the interests of the old over the young. From Brazil to France , this makes it fiendishly hard to reform pension systems. In America, any leader who tries is portrayed in attack ads throwing grandma off a cliff.

The old have less of a stake in the future, so they prefer lower taxes to good schools or investments in infrastructure, Mr Moyn argues. They are often untroubled by soaring public debts , since the burden of repaying them will fall on others. In 2016 Mr Trump cut short a briefing on how America’s fiscal trajectory will eventually lead to a crisis after only five minutes, shrugging: “Yeah, but I’ll be gone.” Mr Trump has added more to the national debt than any president in history.

In foreign policy, polls find that young people think the most important issue is a very long-term one, climate change ; old folks worry about terrorism. America now has a government that treats climate change as a hoax and talks about “terrorism” a lot, even slapping the label on suspected drug-smugglers before sometimes killing them. This looks tough on the televisions that old people watch but has no discernible effect on the supply of drugs.

Young voters are growing disenchanted: a study by Alonso Amarales of Bocconi University in Milan finds that when political leaders are much older than the population they represent, confidence in democracy itself tends to suffer. So Mr Moyn is right to lament the disproportionate political sway of the old.

He is on dodgier ground when describing their power in the workplace. They dominate corporations, he says, “monopolising” opportunity and keeping the young in lower-paying jobs. He calls this “Gerontocracy, Inc”. Yet the most striking examples he cites are from an atypical industry: academia. Tenure makes many professors unsackable, so they cling to their comfortable chairs long after they have ceased to perform adequately. Other workplaces are not like this. As employees age and grow less productive, their wages tend to fall. Pay typically peaks in the late 40s and early 50s, when workers are experienced but still vigorous, and then gradually dwindles as they wind down towards retirement.

Mr Moyn favours mandatory retirement ages. That might make sense for judges, who wield immense power and are almost impossible to sack, or airline pilots, who could endanger lives as they grow less sharp. But it makes no sense for most jobs, where employers should be free to keep staff on for as long as both parties benefit.

Mandatory retirement would free up jobs for the young, claims Mr Moyn, falling for the “lump of labour” fallacy. It would also reduce inequality, he enthuses, because the old are richer than the young—though this is largely because they have been saving for longer.

He is strangely untroubled by the fiscal consequences of forcing people to stop working while they are still able and willing to do so. The only plausible way to keep public pensions solvent, for example, is for retirement ages to rise as life expectancy does. Fiddlesticks, says Mr Moyn: America can somehow preserve entitlement programmes while shortening people’s working lives. (The Social Security trust fund is expected to run dry by 2032.)

What if old people enjoy working? Tough luck. Those who are “addicted to their vocations” or “the drug of importance” should receive help “reimagining the meanings of their lives”. Forced retirement can be made attractive if pensioners are helped to find rewarding hobbies or voluntary work. I’m from the government, and I’m here to teach you pickleball .

As well as kicking old people out of the workplace, Mr Moyn would restrict their voting rights, since they have a smaller stake in the outcome. One idea is to reduce the value of a person’s vote after they pass retirement age, so that by the time they are 83, they have only a tenth of a vote. Another is for 18- to 25-year-olds to have two votes each. “Why should everyone have an equal vote?” asks Mr Moyn. Because democratic decency and the constitution say so, judges would reply. Judges say the darnedest things; maybe it’s because they are old.

In short, Mr Moyn spots a real problem but offers outlandish solutions. Congress may be a gerontocracy, but the workplace is not. Stopping silver-haired taxpayers from earning is no way to make society fairer. As the debate about AI illustrates, work gives people purpose as well as a paycheque; forcing them to quit early is a recipe for a miserable old age. ■

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“1873”, a new book, offers some lessons for the AI craze

Why the market for histories of depressions is red hot “1873”, a new book, offers some lessons for the AI craze June 25th 2026 Liaquat Ahamed, an American author, has excellent timing. His first book, “Lords of Finance”, charted how blundering central bankers plunged the world into a depression after the Wall Street crash of 1929. It was published in 2009, when crises were on policymakers’ minds and lips.

His new book also catches the moment. Rocketing share prices have made some investors feel torn between giddy enthusiasm about AI and fear that the boom will turn to bust. Perhaps in part because of this, Andrew Ross Sorkin’s “1929” , an account of the Wall Street crash that was published last year, spent more than six months on the New York Times bestseller list. In “1873” Mr Ahamed tells the story of how the global railway boom of the 19th century ran out of steam, setting off what was then called “the great Depression”.

The AI boom is often compared to the craze for railways; this book shows just how much the comparison flatters today’s tech bros (though the author does not mention them). In the two decades to 1870, the output of the four dominant economies (Britain, America, France and Germany) almost doubled, and global trade volumes expanded five-fold. “Powering this surge”, writes Mr Ahamed, “was a jump in capital investment…led by railroad construction.” In 1869 the first transcontinental railway across America collapsed the time taken to travel from New York to San Francisco from six months to six days.

How did it all go wrong? As in so many booms, investors’ justified optimism about a revolutionary new technology eventually became divorced from reality. Central Europe’s bull market was turbocharged by reparations from France to Germany after the Franco-Prussian war, “akin to shooting a jolt of cocaine directly into the bloodstream”. Share prices of the biggest firms listed in Berlin doubled over the two years to 1872. In Vienna, share prices quadrupled over the three years to 1873. Fraud ran rampant on both sides of the Atlantic.

In 1873 a clutch of senior Austrian railway officials was arrested for fraud, and demand for stocks faltered at last, even as plenty of new ones were issued. And so within months, a huge crash began. Bank stocks in Vienna fell by 45% in a single day. American railway companies, also riddled with fraud, defaulted en masse. Global lending dried up and output with it.

Across the world the crash triggered “a massive deflation in prices that would reverberate for the next quarter-century”. In America industrial production fell by 6% and the prices of wholesale goods by 35%. This was great news for owners of government bonds, since these became much more valuable as the purchasing power of money rose. But for others, the relentless rise in the real value of debt was a disaster. “The losers…came from every stratum of society and could be found in every country on every continent,” writes Mr Ahamed.

In 2026, with the AI craze gaining a distinctly manic edge, a lot of this sounds familiar and frightening. In fact, Mr Ahamed’s skilful and deeply researched narrative should help doomsters cheer up a bit. For the crash did not have to produce decades of upheaval. The lesson from 1873—and indeed from “1873”—is that many things need to go wrong at once for a massive, sustained shock. As in the 1930s, this one metastasised owing to blunders by flawed policymakers.

Mr Ahamed mostly blames the “totally unnecessary reordering of the global currency system” that followed railway mania. In the space of just two years America and much of continental Europe (notably France and Germany) abandoned silver as a monetary metal, shifting to a pure gold standard. The decisions to do so choked off the supply of money just when it should have been expanded to fight the slump, transforming a financial crash into a quarter-century of deflation.

It is unthinkable that central bankers today—primed to fear deflation above all and to bail out economies at the first sign of trouble—would make similar missteps. And had their 19th-century counterparts acted differently, the crisis of 1873 might have been remembered as a minor setback: just another stock-market panic among many. The bail-outs of the 21st century raise plenty of their own problems. But should AI mania evaporate any time soon, do not fear another depression. ■

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Many of our selections explore family secrets

Eight of the best new novels to read this summer Many of our selections explore family secrets June 25th 2026 “THESE ARE all my politics: I enjoy music and painting; a good book is an event in my life.” A character in “The Red and the Black” by Stendhal, a French writer, proclaimed those words in 1830, but plenty of people today will recognise the sentiment. If you are weary of politics and seek an escape in art, pick up one of our recommended novels. Perhaps it will even become an event in your life.

The Calamity Club. By Kathryn Stockett. Spiegel & Grau; 656 pages; $35. Fig Tree; £20

A rollicking work of historical fiction set in Oxford, Mississippi, in 1933. Meg endures misery in an orphanage. Birdie comes to town to borrow money from her married sister. Inevitably the characters’ paths cross; soon they find themselves joining forces with other downtrodden women intent on improving their lives. This novel has intricately woven storylines and a vibrant cast.

The Kindness of Strangers. By Emma Garman. Summit Books; 304 pages; $28. Virago; 336 pages; £20

Set in London in 1953, this accomplished debut revolves around a ragtag assortment of residents of a Victorian boarding house. When a young man shows up and threatens the stability of the household, it becomes clear all the occupants have something to hide. A skilfully constructed mystery full of sly twists, dark wit and rich period detail.

Land. By Maggie O’Farrell. Knopf; 400 pages; $32. Tinder Press; 448 pages; £25

In 1865 Tomás, a cartographer, and his son, Liam, travel to a remote western peninsula of Ireland to map their country for their British masters. After discovering a mysterious, mystical site, Tomás vows to carry out an act of “honour and resistance”. It is a decision that will transform his life and that of his family. A bold, epic novel about the relationship between people and place.

Other People’s Children. By Ben Faccini. Granta; 336 pages; £16.99

Tom has a lot to contend with. He is plagued by memories of his late father. He struggles to bond with his partner’s young sons. Adding to his woes is the increasingly strange behaviour of his Italian grandmother, Alma. When he delves into her wartime past, he unearths a devastating secret that alters his outlook. This book is elegantly written and astute as it traces family ties and the long shadow of history .

The Things We Never Say. By Elizabeth Strout. Random House; 224 pages; $29.00 Viking; 208 pages; £18.99

Artie Dam is a happily married man and a popular history teacher. But deep down he feels trapped in a “state of dismalness” and is contemplating suicide. A shocking revelation, however, makes him appreciate all he holds dear. This bittersweet novel about the effects of trauma, anxiety and loneliness examines how well people really know each other.

Transcription. By Ben Lerner. Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 144 pages; $25. Granta; £14.99

In this short, clever novel, an unnamed narrator conducts a magazine interview with his 90-year-old college mentor—but fails to record it. It is the first of several exchanges with different individuals, all of which offer shrewd insight into art and technology, friendship and fatherhood , and the reliability of memory.

Uprising. By Tahmima Anam. Canongate; 208 pages; £16.99. To be published in America by Scribner in November; 192 pages; $27

Kusum Khan is tricked and sold into slavery on an island. In this prison, children look on while their mothers engage in sex work to pay off crippling debts to the cruel madam. But Kusum finds a way to unite her fellow prisoners into resisting and revolting. A fierce and unflinching novel inspired by the real women of Banishanta, Bangladesh.

Whistler. By Ann Patchett. Harper; 304 pages; $30. Bloomsbury; £20

Daphne hasn’t seen her stepfather, Eddie, since they were involved in a near-fatal car accident 44 years ago. A chance meeting in New York allows the pair to reconnect. It also gives Daphne the chance to finally learn the truth about why Eddie’s marriage to her mother fell apart. A tale of secrets and lasting love, enriched by sharply drawn characters. ■

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Refik Anadol’s new project takes your senses by storm

Are you having fun yet? Dataland, an intense new AI art museum Refik Anadol’s new project takes your senses by storm June 25th 2026 VISITORS TO Dataland, a new museum for AI arts in Los Angeles, step onto an escalator and descend into a tempest. Rain blows sideways across mirrored walls. Next, psychedelic pink amoebas and green squiggly lines gyrate across the walls and floor. It is hard to walk straight. Is this what it is like to be trapped inside a lava lamp? Soon guests are enveloped in the sounds of the rainforest, and fireflies flit across the screens. “It’s a living sculpture,” says Refik Anadol , a digital artist and the museum’s co-creator. He points to lines emanating from people’s feet. “That’s your data.”

Dataland is the creation of Mr Anadol and his wife, Efsun Erkilic, two Turkish artists. Mr Anadol is probably the most prominent and polarising AI artist working today—regarded by some as avant-garde and by others as spectacle-heavy and too commercial. (His works have appeared in the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Sphere , a concert venue in Las Vegas.)

Dataland opened in a downtown development that Frank Gehry , its architect, always hoped would become part of an arts district. Mr Anadol’s ambition is for the new museum to convince visitors that there is more to AI art than hype. He starts with the premise that there is ethical and unethical data. The former is about “asking permission” and “getting licences” for art works’ data inputs, not training models on data irrespective of consent. “If a human and machine collaborate, it’s a new form of art,” says Mr Anadol.

Dataland’s more radical premise is the idea that its AI creations might help visitors get in touch with their humanity. This is done, in large part, by assaulting the senses. When guests arrive, they are given medical-grade devices—a watch and a heavy collar—that record heart rate , body temperature and emotional responses. As visitors move around, their measurements and location are fed into a system that changes the art to react to each person. Your correspondent’s collar occasionally emits a fresh scent evoking summer rain and laundry detergent.

The question of how to use tech to enhance visitors’ experiences is one with which every museum is grappling. Many are opting for interactive experiences in the virtual-reality vein. Some are designing whole exhibitions around screens, which can leave you feeling both over-stimulated and isolated. Are the days of asking the person next to you what they think of a painting over? What about being sure that you are seeing the same thing?

At Dataland, the experience is transfixing and overwhelming. It fails in its more grandiose ambitions—though it does inadvertently make you appreciate nature. By the end of the visit many guests will find themselves desperate for sunshine. After being immersed in a kaleidoscopic digital forest, they will crave the silence and stillness of a real one. ■

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Why Pixar’s latest romp is one of the best animated films ever

The real villain in “Toy Story 5” is not whom you would expect Why Pixar’s latest romp is one of the best animated films ever June 25th 2026 Cowgirls are an intrepid bunch. Intent on figuring out why the neighbours’ twin children refuse to play with eight-year-old Bonnie, Jessie (Bonnie’s doll) saddles up, crosses the street and peers in the window. Inside, the twins are clenching their screens and swiping. Outside in the garden, discarded playthings are griping. “The age of toys is over,” wails a small robot.

Pixar has turned the world of junky plastic into gold. “Toy Story” (1995)—the first full-length film made with computer-generated imagery—and the next three films earned more than $4.5bn at the box office (in today’s money). “Toy Story 5”, released on June 19th, could become the highest-grossing film of the year. But unlike many mindless blockbusters, this film is soulful and splendid.

That is because it deals amusingly with urgent themes, such as how technology has hijacked childhood . Hoping to help their shy daughter make friends, Bonnie’s parents buy Lilypad, a tablet; you then watch Bonnie’s mood change with every ping from her group chats. The discarded toys are only the most vocal victims. The biggest loser is Bonnie, who misses out on the thrill of imaginative play and feels even greater social alienation online.

Previous “Toy Story” flicks have also reflected their era’s crazes and concerns. The second film came out during the dotcom boom; in it, Woody, a cowboy, has become a collectible , raising questions about whether value stems more from relationships or money. “Toy Story 5” reprises and updates the first film’s premise—displacement by something new and snazzy.

Unexpectedly, the film’s biggest villain is not Lilypad, but Bonnie’s unwitting parents. Passive and mindlessly gentle, they are tech-addicted themselves, fail to enforce the screen-time rules they set for their child and are too distracted to notice her descent into greater gloom.

Young audiences will walk out of this film perceiving old-fashioned toys and screens a little bit differently. Parents will leave wondering whether they are really as blind as the film makes them out to be. ■

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“Communion”, his latest book, shows how the vice-president fails to notice his own vices

J.D. Vance’s second coming “Communion”, his latest book, shows how the vice-president fails to notice his own vices June 25th 2026 J.D. Vance is a very godly man, as his very godly new book makes very clear. He goes to church; he is polite to priests; and he has read the Bible (twice, even the dull bits). He tries to be a very godly man in his life, too. He prays to God in intense italics to make him a “good dad”; stars out naughty words like “p***y”; and he ends his book with the word “Amen”. For him, actions matter because, as he says, quoting the Gospel of Matthew in yet more italics, “By their fruits ye shall know them”.

However if ye shall read “Communion”, the vice-president’s religious memoir, ye shall probably also feel a little confused. For which of the fruits of Mr Vance shall ye know him by? Shall ye know him as the man who prissily stars out words like p***y? Or as deputy for Donald Trump, a man who once boasted that he could “grab [women] by the pussy”? Shall ye know him as the person who predicted Mr Trump might be “America’s Hitler”? Or as the man who—as he does here—calls Mr Trump’s words “moral”? It is hard to tell.

Mr Vance used to be far simpler. This is his second literary coming; his first, published in 2016, was “Hillbilly Elegy”. Its title nodded at romantic poetry, but there was little romance here. For page after page, he chronicled the lives of the left-behind in America’s rust belt: people without jobs and with opioid habits. Its heroine, for him, was his grandmother, who he called “Mamaw”—but do not imagine her as a granny in the apron-and-apple-pie vein. When her husband irritated her, she poured gasoline over him, “lit a match, and dropped it on his chest”.

For Americans, the book’s hero was Mr Vance. Just as medieval readers were inspired by stories of saints who did battle with demons and then won eternal life, so modern ones were heartened by how Mr Vance had done battle with his own demons and drug-addicted relatives to ascend to secular sainthood—or, at any rate, a place at Yale Law School. After Mr Trump was elected in 2016, “Hillbilly Elegy” became a sensation—selling over 5m copies worldwide—and it made his name.

Mr Vance’s second coming was always going to be harder. This is not wholly his fault. Virtue, as Milton and Dante discovered, is much less fun than vice: everyone reads “ Paradise Lost ”; no one bothers with “Paradise Regained”. Everyone knows Dante’s “Inferno”; his “Paradiso” is an also-ran. St Augustine managed a good conversion memoir, “Confessions”, in the fourth century, but he seasoned it with ample sin, having prayed for God to make him good “but not yet”.

God made J.D. Vance good a bit too soon for “Communion” to be much fun. “Hillbilly Elegy” is filled with family tragedy, violence and uncles who do invigorating things like attacking their enemies with electric saws. By its end, however, Mr Vance is ensconced among the elite where his greatest discomfort is attending drinks events with lawyers. At these, he is first baffled by butter knives (surely that’s what index fingers are for?) then starts to doubt the meaning of life. (Lawyers can do that to a man.)

For a time, this is fine: he fills his days with work, ambition, atheism and friends. Then, as he marries and settles down, the God-shaped hole (or, arguably, given Mr Vance’s ambition, the political poll) attracts him to religion. God was not utterly alien to him: his relatives had bashed Bibles as well as each other—but he had never been devout.

Initially he is unsure on denominational differences, except that “Catholics kneeled more and the Pentecostals had better music”. At first his faith feels so anodyne it is almost Anglican: he calls Christianity “my new interest”, as if it were chess or yoga; reads a lot of C.S. Lewis ; and is inspired by that great theological thinker, Aslan the lion. St Augustine this is not.

In the end it is Catholicism, with its offer of bells, smells and Satan, that most appeals. Soon he is going to confession (“like therapy, but with less whining and more guilt”), befriending priests and reading Thomas Aquinas. He was baptised in August 2019; today he evangelises with the zeal of the convert.

He quotes the archaic King James version, at length, deplores “false idols” and champions traditional motherhood. Most startlingly, he wants to weaken the traditional American separation of church and state.

But for all the fervour, his faith feels very erratic. At one point he states that Christianity demands “a constant evaluation of trade-offs”, as if Jesus were an ecclesiastical economist rather than, as Catholics believe, the son of God. When covid-19 breaks out, he realises that food might run short, so he buys “enormous bags of rice and flour” and “one thousand rounds of ammunition”. It is almost like reading about the loaves and the fishes.

Mr Vance is a good writer, but “Communion” is a confusing book. Which Mr Vance is he? The one who bangs on about God’s grace? Or the one who treats people like Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky—a man in need if ever there was one—with a deplorable lack of grace? He keeps repeating, “By their fruits ye shall know them”. Yet by the end of this book, ye shall probably not be much the wiser as to who J.D. Vance is, or was.

Or, most worrying of all, who he shall next become. Though even if he does ascend to the presidency, he may find that fruit is bitter, too. For, as his beloved Matthew says, “What is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?” ■

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He is just the latest president to do so

Barack Obama has built a monument to himself He is just the latest president to do so June 18th 2026 THE OBAMA PRESIDENTIAL CENTRE towers over Chicago’s South Side like a Brutalist ziggurat (see picture). Eight storeys of concrete covered in granite loom over other granite buildings on a granite plaza: grey, grey and more grey. The new monument has a Soviet science-fiction look: 1980s Moscow meets Denis Villeneuve’s “ Dune ”. In fact, it is a tribute to America’s 44th president. Opening to the public on June 19th after years of construction and a cost of around $850m, it boasts the dubious distinction of being the most expensive presidential library in history.

Presidential libraries have a public function: to preserve the former leader’s papers, which are deemed state property. But they also have a more personal one: to let presidents present their achievements, justify their actions and tell their life story without quibbles from opposition politicians, pesky journalists or protesters. They are a peculiar institution, and the opening of Barack Obama’s illuminates why they are so controversial.

Many countries preserve presidential material in state archives, and some notable 21st-century leaders can claim museums and monuments in their honour, such as the recent heads of Nigeria and South Africa . But America blends these two functions, with private donors paying for much of the construction through presidential “foundations”, and a government agency, the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), caring for the records. Only America enshrines into law the right to a library for its head of state, highlighting how the country has granted the head of the executive branch, supposedly one of three equal branches of government, a somewhat regal aura.

The institution dates back to Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s administration. Until then presidents traditionally donated their papers, which were seen as their personal property, to the Library of Congress. In practice many records were simply “scattered to the winds”, says Mark Updegrove, who runs Lyndon Johnson’s library at the University of Texas.

The Presidential Libraries Act of 1955 authorised the federal government to preserve presidential papers and to “accept gifts or bequests of money” for their maintenance. Another law in 1978 made presidents’ papers the property of the government. (Though Donald Trump’s Office of Legal Counsel has argued that this act was unconstitutional—he wants to keep control over his papers—no court has yet agreed.) Annually the federal government pays around $100m to maintain all the libraries. But the cost of building them has been rising monumentally (see chart).

The Obama Presidential Centre is exceptional in several ways. It boasts of being the first “fully digital presidential library”: Mr Obama’s papers will be available to everyone online. The centre is also not subject to government oversight in the usual way. While NARA will maintain the digital archives and some physical papers and artefacts off-site, Mr Obama’s foundation will fund and manage the entire complex, running it like a private museum.

Valerie Jarrett, Mr Obama’s longtime adviser and the foundation’s chief executive, insists that this will help it preserve its “independence”, which may be code for defending against Mr Trump trying to tamper with its budget. (Mr Trump is the only living president, current or former, not invited to the dedication ceremony on June 18th.) But without any oversight from NARA, it also gives Mr Obama more latitude to shape the sort of legacy-building exhibitions that are mounted.

This tension between mythmaking and historical fact has played out in presidential libraries many times before. Richard Nixon helped curate his library’s original Watergate exhibition, which was later replaced with one that was more critical, after NARA took over the library and hired a professional director. Omissions are just as common as rosy portrayals: Ronald Reagan’s library initially failed to mention the Iran-Contra affair, a scandal of his presidency, and Johnson’s library largely avoided Vietnam for decades. Unsurprisingly, Mr Obama’s does not mention the record number of immigrants he deported.

Instead, libraries go heavy on the pomp. Reagan’s presents a decommissioned Air Force One, along with his limousines and a helicopter. Johnson’s features a life-size talking puppet of the president telling hokey jokes. Roosevelt’s preserves the cosy private study where he received visitors. Many of them, including Mr Obama’s and Mr Trump’s proposed library on a prime lot in Miami, offer visitors replicas of the Oval Office. The overall impression is hagiography, though that can change after the presidents’ deaths. Exhibits at Roosevelt’s, for instance, now feature his mistresses and uncomfortable questions about why he was so reluctant to accept Jewish refugees.

Mr Obama’s, befitting the man himself, is focused on culture as well as politics (Mr Obama releases annual lists of his favourite films, books and songs). Its grand interior feels like a contemporary-art museum, wreathed in dark wood and accented by bright paintings. A tour guide is quick to point out that Mr Obama chose the museum’s soundtrack, as well as the books on display in the “president’s reading room” in the on-site public library.

The huge price-tag reflects its deluxe amenities. The events and athletic facilities span around 60,000 square feet (5,500 square metres) and include a professional-size basketball court and practice areas. For the extensive grounds Michelle Obama insisted on designing a steep “sledding hill” for visitors, because she never had one when she was growing up nearby. Vegetable gardens, which also took root in Mr Obama’s White House, sprawl over the roof of the library.

Mr Obama’s fans will love the museum; his detractors will doubtless see it as they viewed his presidency: slick, facile and overproduced. The inverse is true of George W. Bush’s centre in Dallas. But take away the partisanship, and both museums represent the same deeply human impulse to get the last word and try to shape how future generations will view them.

Presidential libraries are only going to become more complicated affairs. With digital correspondence being sent across a growing array of apps, the boundary of what counts as personal and professional will be contested (as any cabinet member who has misused a Signal chat can attest). And if future presidents opt for the Obama model, with foundations running the spaces apart from government oversight of records, it will make for more partisan and puffy exhibitions. Will the nearly $1bn projects continue? It seems an odd use of resources for a supposedly down-to-earth civil servant. But fewer presidents are pretending to be that any more. ■

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If you want to see Vladimir Putin’s soul, study the fate of Yukos, an oil company

What the largest-ever shareholder judgment reveals about Russia If you want to see Vladimir Putin’s soul, study the fate of Yukos, an oil company June 18th 2026 WITH All Russia’s warmongering, repression and corruption, it is easy to forget how the West was once so enamoured of Vladimir Putin . In 2001 George W. Bush declared the then-newish Russian president “trustworthy”, having looked into his eyes and got a “sense of his soul”. The first signs that Mr Putin was nothing of the sort came long before the annexation of Crimea in 2014 and subsequent full-scale invasion of Ukraine. An early indication of his consolidation of power and authoritarian turn was the seizure and dismemberment of Yukos, an oil company.

The Kremlin’s move against the firm and imprisonment of Mikhail Khodorkovsky , its boss, highlighted the power struggle between Mr Putin and his siloviki cronies—former spooks and military men—and the oligarchs who had hoovered up much of the economy in the “voucher” privatisations of the early 1990s. In 2003, after Mr Khodorkovsky—then Russia’s richest man—began funding opposition parties and hinted at a run for the presidency, Yukos was hit with a series of tax-related charges. Mr Khodorkovsky was thrown into a labour camp. The company was broken up and the bits sold to siloviki-linked firms at knock-down prices.

The sometimes nerdy but always fascinating core of “Suing the Kremlin” is the two-decade-long legal saga that the expropriation spawned, which Martin Sixsmith rightly says will be studied by generations of lawyers. He is well placed to tell the tale: a former Moscow correspondent for the BBC, the author has written several other books about Mr Putin’s Russia, including a page-turner on the poisoning in London of a dissident, Alexander Litvinenko , in 2006.

After several fruitless years trying to settle the tax claims, Yukos’s former shareholders fought back. Their unlikely champion was a cheery, phlegmatic London-based tax lawyer, Tim Osborne. Taking on the Kremlin, Mr Osborne might have seemed out of his depth. But he approached the challenge with vim and—given the fate of many past Putin antagonists—courage, winning favourable rulings for the shareholders’ company, GML, at the European Court of Human Rights, the Swiss supreme court and elsewhere.

But GML needed a knockout blow. With help from Shearman & Sterling, an American law firm, Mr Osborne came up with the idea to launch an arbitration case accusing Russia of breaching a cross-border energy-investment treaty by trampling on shareholders’ rights. The result was a stunning win at an international tribunal: an award of $50bn, 20 times the previous record for such a case. After several more legal twists and turns, Russia’s appeals were finally exhausted in October 2025, allowing GML to go after Russian assets to cover the award.

So far, Russia has paid nothing. Little beyond some trademarks for vodka brands has been seized. But as Mr Sixsmith argues convincingly, the victory has been more than pyrrhic. With a clever strategy and hard work, a small group of lawyers and businessmen was able to inflict a high-profile humbling on Mr Putin. The case surely mattered greatly to him. Why else would Russia spend so much on phalanxes of lawyers, including 17 at one hearing? And why would it go to such lengths to intimidate opponents, locking up lawyers, sending death threats through macabre Wikipedia updates and, some speculate, downing a Yukos tax adviser’s helicopter?

The book leaves a number of mysteries unsolved, including why Mr Khodorkovsky—now an anti-Putin campaigner in exile, having been set free in 2013—remained in Russia to be made an example of, when the Kremlin had given warning that it was coming for him and his company. Naivety? Stubbornness? A martyr complex?

But Mr Sixsmith’s well-paced book, readable in a single sitting, shows that Mr Putin’s vindictive, capricious Russia was no place to invest in long before his bloodthirsty adventurism in Ukraine. And that the best way for those he has wronged to get anything resembling justice is to rely on cool heads, clever minds and other countries’ legal systems. ■

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Romance fraud is driven by poverty in west Africa and loneliness in the West, a new book argues

Why Westerners are falling for love scams Romance fraud is driven by poverty in west Africa and loneliness in the West, a new book argues June 18th 2026 It was love at first sleight. As with many relationships, Brian’s and Silvia’s courtship started on Tinder. Brian, a dashing American soldier, sent Silvia, a Spanish dentist, passionate affirmations of love: “I want you to be a happy wonderful woman, someone I would love to share more than my life with.” Brian said he was coming to Spain, and Silvia bought two rings.

But Brian was not a real soldier; he was a scammer posing as a suitor. He told Silvia he had found bars of solid gold while on deployment in Syria. Silvia’s son grew suspicious. He thought it might be a scam and that his mother would be asked to send money to cover the shipping. They used an IP-address tracker to find out where Brian’s emails were coming from: the fraudster was in Lagos, Nigeria .

Silvia is not the only lonely Westerner to be wooed by a phoney Romeo. Romance scams are one of the most costly types of fraud in America, according to the Federal Trade Commission: people gave away nearly $1.5bn to so-called “love scammers” in 2025. In Britain reports of romance fraud jumped by nearly a third last year, with people losing as much as £1m ($1.3m).

Silvia’s son, Carlos Barragán, was distressed and baffled that his mother had been duped. So in 2022 he flew to Lagos to search for the scammer. Though it proved impossible to find the real Brian, Mr Barragán discovered the “criminal underworld” of romance fraud. In an engrossing new book he takes readers from Kentucky to Lagos to explore how loneliness in the West and poverty in west Africa are “two sides of the same screen”.

Many love scams are run by crime syndicates in South-East Asia. Mr Barragán expected to find a “sophisticated network of fraudsters” in Nigeria, too: instead he encountered unemployed young men in rough neighbourhoods, who use copy-and-paste scripts rather than complex manipulation tactics. Many work alone, staying up all night to avoid their parents’ prying eyes.

In Nigeria Yahoo Boys —a nickname that nods to the email addresses scammers once used—say they rely on fraud to survive. Between 2022 and 2025 Mr Barragán spent months in Ikotun, a poor neighbourhood in Lagos, witnessing the effects of high youth unemployment and rampant inflation. He saw that for scammers like Azeez (pictured), a 14-year-old tailor’s apprentice, a $10 gift card from a British victim is worth more than his family pays in rent a month. (With some of their earnings Yahoo Boys prop up local businesses, splashing out at fancy boutiques and nightclubs.) Mr Barragán asks workers, policemen, academics and Yahoo Boys themselves to estimate the share of young men who are involved in such scams in Lagos: their answers range from 45% to 80%.

The Yahoo Boys call their victims “clients” to make their work seem legitimate; some see their relationships as transactional, providing companionship in exchange for cash. They share tactics with each other for finding vulnerable victims online, as well as the latest pickup lines and plausible scenarios to ask for money to be wired. Some pretend to have a sick child who needs help; others blackmail victims, threatening to share intimate pictures if they do not pay up.

Mr Barragán wonders how credulous Westerners can fall head-over-heels for such smarmy scripts. He looks “for a con so intricate it might justify” his clever mother believing it. But he finds something alarmingly simple: the scammers are successful because they provide attention to lonely people.

AI will complicate love scams. It could make it easier to target a much larger number of victims with personalised correspondence, without relying on teams of boys and men (and growing numbers of women) in Nigeria or elsewhere. But AI could also offer safer ways for people to feel less lonely. Various apps now provide virtual lovers that are even more fawning than fraudsters. As Mr Barragán puts it, AI partners provide “a fake relationship without the betrayal”. Yahoo Boys may struggle to compete with that. ■

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Retreats designed for grown-ups are growing in popularity

Adults are going back to summer camp Retreats designed for grown-ups are growing in popularity June 18th 2026 IT IS SATURDAY at Camp Social, and the dining hall is abuzz. The campers chat excitedly about what the weekend might have in store. Will they spend it making friendship bracelets and tie-dyeing t-shirts, or hiking and kayaking? Many are dressed for adventure, sporting trainers and with water bottles in hand.

Held in the Pocono Mountains of Pennsylvania, Camp Social is a traditional summer camp with an unconventional clientele—for it is one of a growing number of sleepaway camps for adults. Some, such as Camp Social, are aimed at women; others cater to LGBT+ people. Whether you are after festival vibes, a wellness retreat or immersion in nature, someone somewhere has set up a camp for you.

This type of getaway has exploded in popularity in recent years. In 2025 Yelp reported a roughly 350% increase in searches for such weekend breaks. And the trend is not unique to America: similar concepts have popped up across Europe. (Camp Château, for instance, operates across two sites in southern France.)

There are several reasons for camps’ success. One is the stresses of the modern world. In decades past, adults sent their boisterous children away to camp to get some respite from parenting . Now, however, adults are signing up for a respite from their own hectic lives. Camp No Counsellors, which operates across America, invites grown-ups to “remember what it feels like to have fun without a schedule, a deadline or a single work email in sight”.

With no obligations or pressure to look or act a certain way, plus the beautiful backdrop of nature, campers feel they can truly relax. The pre-planned schedule offers a break from the constant decision-making of adulthood. “I like to think of camp as a reset,” says Liv Schreiber, Camp Social’s founder. “You’re just reconnecting to you and leaving the world behind.”

Another reason for the cabin fever is that camps offer the nostalgic pleasures of childhood. Millennials and Gen Z spend their money and free time “kidulting”, whether playing in a ball pit or with soft toys —and what could be more evocative of carefree bygone summers than marshmallows and bunk beds? “Fun”, Ms Schreiber declares, “is the number-one version of self-care.” You can recharge by charging around an inflatable water park.

Finally, the campfires keep burning because adults are yearning for real-world social connections. In America there are fears of a “friendship recession”, as many report having fewer close mates than they once did. Camps, meanwhile, promise meaningful bonds. Camp Social’s website declares that “99% arrive solo, and 100% leave as friends.”

Guests often put away their phones, swapping mindless scrolling for conversations with people from different backgrounds and generations. (The fastest-growing age group at Camp Social is 40- to 70-year-olds, Ms Schreiber notes, and the oldest camper to date was 84.) Kim Barbieri says she has struggled to make friends as a young adult, but formed a group of pals at camp last year. “I’ve never felt as much of a sense of belonging as I did that weekend,” Ms Barbieri asserts. “I feel like I’ve known these four other people for my entire life—and really I spent one weekend with them.”

Summer camp does not come cheap. Several organisations charge around $1,000 for a long weekend (often with meals, lodging and transport included). Some see that as a small price to pay for adventure and friendship. The experience has produced a lot of happy campers. ■

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Artists are visiting fewer cities on their global tours

Harry Styles and other megastars now expect you to come to them Artists are visiting fewer cities on their global tours June 18th 2026 “STRAIGHT OFF the plane to a new hotel/Just touched down, you could never tell.” When Harry Styles sang those lyrics in 2014, he was already well accustomed to the glamour and grind of a global concert tour. Across his boyband and solo career he has performed more than 600 gigs on six continents. His previous tour visited 79 cities.

But not all is as it was. The 68 concerts on his new tour will be hosted in just seven cities. He is in the midst of a 12-night run at Wembley stadium in London, which ends on July 4th. In August he will go to Madison Square Garden in New York to play 30 concerts.

The British heartthrob is not the only musician travelling less. Many of the biggest pop acts have started to expect their fans to come to them. Beyoncé spent half of her “Cowboy Carter” tour in just three venues. Coldplay performed extensively in certain cities; Olivia Rodrigo will do the same when she heads out on the road in September. Ariana Grande is appearing in just three countries on her tour.

Longer runs in fewer places mean a less gruelling experience for the artist—and a more lucrative one. Touring is more expensive than it has ever been, thanks to a combination of red tape and rising labour and fuel costs . (Fans expect elaborate sets: transporting them across the world is not cheap.) Staying in one place for longer is a way of keeping outlays down and profits up.

For the chosen cities, this means huge windfalls. Mr Styles’s fans are expected to spend £1bn ($1.34bn) on tickets , accommodation and other expenses in London alone, according to Barclays, a bank. For the smaller regional cities bumped from the schedule, such as Manchester and Coventry, it means losing access to megastars and fans’ spending power.

Still, fans do not seem to mind going on the road themselves. Around 25% of the fans watching Mr Styles at Wembley are travelling from outside London, and 28% are turning the occasion into a mini-break. Today’s concert-goers have become cultural tourists. In an age where music is cheap and easy to access, live shows have acquired a new social value. Concerts have become a kind of modern pilgrimage—journeys made out of devotion to an idol. ■

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Why are sometimes cheesy thrillers set in Britain so utterly gripping?

Harlan Coben, Netflix’s new darling, has a mystery you can solve Why are sometimes cheesy thrillers set in Britain so utterly gripping? June 18th 2026 The first mystery—that of a missing daughter—appeared in 2018. The second—a vanished wife—in 2020. These two were followed by a mysteriously missing husband (2021), a mysteriously revived dead husband (2024) and another mysteriously missing daughter (2026). However, as so often, the deeper mystery was less the crimes than the mysterious figure spotted hanging around them.

He could be seen in the very first mystery which, viewers learned, was “Harlan Coben’s Safe”. He was spotted in the next one, titled—with equal mystery—“Harlan Coben’s The Stranger”. He was there in the next ones, too, which were variously titled “Harlan Coben’s Stay Close”, “Harlan Coben’s Fool Me Once” and “Harlan Coben’s Run Away”. These lead to the deepest mystery of all: who is Mr Coben, and why is Netflix so obsessed by him?

The question of his identity is perhaps the easiest. Mr Coben is an American thriller writer. His spread has been viral in extent (he has sold over 100m books) and in its style (like covid-19 , most did not notice him spreading until it was too late). Since last year alone, he has been behind seven series and two novels. “Harlan Coben” thus became one of those baffling word combinations, like “vibe coding” or “tokenmaxxing”, that went from meaningless to ubiquitous seemingly overnight.

He may become more so. On June 18th Netflix is releasing a series about a man imprisoned for killing his son, titled “I Will Find You”, which feels less like a promise than a threat—or perhaps a prediction, for his series have been as successful as the books. Having signed an initial deal in 2018 to develop 14 titles, Netflix has expanded it to add 12 more; Amazon and CBS have now also made Harlan Coben series.

Mr Coben’s shows offer other mysteries, too, such as: why does his name have such prominent billing, when another author called Jane Austen often has a far smaller font? Why are such quintessential American thrillers being filmed, as these are, in places such as Manchester? And above all, how do characters who have such humdrum jobs afford such astonishingly swish kitchens?

His shows have also elicited some critical bafflement, too. Though some of them, including “Stay Close”, about a cold case that suddenly heats up, received decent reviews, others have been less lauded. His recent Amazon series received a 44% approval rating from critics on Rotten Tomatoes, a review-aggregator site. They have been called “twisty” and “confusing”—not without cause. Their plots are what might politely be called “eventful” and less delicately be called soap operas.

Open the episode menu for Netflix’s 2021 series “The Innocent”, for example, and over the course of four swift episodes you find yourself offered: an accidental murder (episode one); an alleged suicide (episode two) and a “mysterious nun” (episode three) who is rapidly a mysteriously dead nun. This is followed by episode four in which, as the episode summary explains, “The nun’s body is squirrelled away by federal agents, which infuriates Lorena.” Nun-corpse theft can be so annoying.

Mr Coben’s plots, then, are not Pinteresque . Yet they are not meant to be. His books are archetypal thrillers. They have dark, ominous covers (fog is a feature) and ominous straplines in the “A MISSING GIRL. A DEADLY GAME” vein. Their characters have names that sound as though they might be medical procedures (“Griffin Scope”) or possibly Cockney rhyming slang (“Larry Gandle”). Either way, they sound bad.

But they really do thrill. Ian Fleming , James Bond’s creator, once said there is “only one recipe for a bestseller and it is a very simple one”: you have “to get the reader to turn over the page”. Mr Coben has that gift. He tells The Economist that he likes each first sentence “to almost be a short story in and of itself”—and his are zingers. “I Will Find You”, opens with the words “I am serving the fifth year of a life sentence for murdering my own child.”

That is why people watch them. Subscribers spent about 250m hours watching “Fool Me Once” in the week it was released. It became one of Netflix’s most-viewed shows in 2024. Which leads to another of the mysteries surrounding Mr Coben, namely: why do people find stories about family tragedy so jolly? Mr Coben’s books are rich in lines like “Her jaw had been ripped out of its hinges, snapping all the tendons.” Yet his stories are widely seen as not merely compelling but even comforting (in the way bingeing on biscuits often is).

One answer is that murder can be scrumptious. In Agatha Christie’s “The ABC Murders” Hercule Poirot and a character wonder “If you could order a crime as one orders a dinner, what would you choose?” They toy with picking robbery or forgery from the menu, then discard the idea (“too vegetarian”) before concluding that it “must be murder—red-blooded murder—with trimmings, of course”.

Family tragedy is—as Sophocles could have told you—similarly compelling. Mr Coben, who has four children, thinks that what appeals is less the tragedy than the family. He sees his stories, despite the splatter, as being about “love and family and redemption”. “If I asked you, ‘Would you kill somebody?’ you would say ‘No’,” he says. “If I ask you: ‘Will you kill someone to save your child?’ well the answer is ‘Yes’.”

The setting matters, too. Just as Greek tragedy was removed from an alarming immediacy by being set in the similar-but-different Thebes, so Mr Coben’s tragedies are set in the similar-but-different world of murder-series chic: characters have luxurious coats, cars and, of course, kitchens. It is, he thinks, “part of the fun”. (The reason they are set in Britain is more complicated: partly, suggests one industry insider, it is cost, with lower wages and tax breaks making shoots there more economical. Mr Coben has also said he likes the British sensibility and the “ Downton Abbey -ish” houses.)

And as for the mystery of his name it is, in his telling, not such an enigma. The title of an early show sounded too much like the name of another series so, to differentiate, “they put my name above the title,” he says. That was somewhat to the bafflement of audiences: at the time someone tweeted that “They keep talking about Harlan Coben, but I don’t know who the hell Harlan Coben is.” They probably do now. ■

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It’s a better question than “Who will win?” It tells you what the tournament is for

Who should win the World Cup? It’s a better question than “Who will win?” It tells you what the tournament is for June 11th 2026 It was too much for Ángel di María. After scoring in the World Cup final in 2022 , the Argentine forward burst into tears. It was too much for Gonzalo Montiel. Having hit the winning penalty in the shoot-out—so becoming immortal—he pulled off his national shirt and buried his face in it. And it was almost too much for Argentina itself: when around 4m people thronged Buenos Aires for the victory parade, the team had to abandon their bus and wave from a helicopter.

For players and fans, even whole countries, winning the World Cup is a secular rapture. One team and nation will experience that euphoria at the climax of this year’s competition, which begins on June 11th. A lot of ink and airtime will be expended on predicting who the champions will be. But a better question than who will win the World Cup is: who should win? Answer that, and you know whom to back when your home team is knocked out. To do so, you first have to grasp the tournament’s true purpose.

The World Cup is a branch of international relations. It is an expression of power by the hosts—this year America, Canada and Mexico—and a form of soft diplomacy. The draw can throw up grudge matches that are benign alternatives to war (such as, in 2022, Iran v America) and pair nations which ordinarily have little to do with one another (this time, for example, Cape Verde v Saudi Arabia). It helps supporters everywhere see what they have in common, starting with a shared devotion to watching 22 men chase a ball.

But for enthusiasts, the newsy headlines—about overpriced tickets , alleged corruption or sports-washing autocrats—are not the real story. The World Cup is only superficially a pageant for the powerful; underneath it is a tacit conspiracy against them. For a month or so every four years, football nuts around the globe sneakily tune in to games on the job, knock off early to binge more matches and let the children stay up for late kick-offs. No overlord, whether company boss or authoritarian ruler, can forbid this pleasure.

The World Cup is a machine for memories, both evoking and making them. As with A-list assassinations, veteran fans remember where they watched their side’s greatest feats and most painful defeats , and with whom—from lost parents to absent friends and offspring who have since grown up. Each has their own personal squad of World Cup ghosts.

Above all, the World Cup is a quadrennial festival of hope. Fans hope for an injury-time miracle, the salvation of an offside flag and a distraction from humdrum woes. They hope decades of failure will at last be redeemed, and that history needn’t be destiny. Teams can embody hope for a different future, like the Argentina side led by Diego Maradona (pictured) that prevailed in 1986, not long after its military dictatorship ended. Shock victories by underdogs give hope that the meek may indeed inherit the Earth.

Global communion; indelible drama; a redemption arc; the subversive sense that anything is possible: with these goals in mind, who ought to win this World Cup? Realistically, half or more of the 48 competing teams have no chance at all. Discard those (even thought experiments have limits). Next, for fairness and excitement, ditch the eight countries that have won before (yes, even England, whose sole triumph was 60 years ago). That eliminates most of the favourites. Of the rest, the leading candidates fall into two categories.

The first group are plucky small countries with the talent to beat the population odds. As Simon Kuper writes in his delightful memoir, “World Cup Fever”, the tournament offers a topsy-turvy global hierarchy in which America “is an also-ran and China doesn’t even figure”. His team, the Netherlands, is a smallish nation that has reached three finals and has a fighting chance this time. Then again, as Mr Kuper acknowledges, the Netherlands is already a happy, successful place; it has no deep need or neurosis for football to dispel.

In its 35 years as an independent state, Croatia—population: under 4m—has astonishingly reached three semi-finals. As Aleksandar Holiga, a Croatian journalist, puts it, football is a rare field in which his country can say, “We are among the best in the world.” On balance, though, the most deserving tiddler is Portugal, which has achieved less and waited longer, while enduring dictatorship and economic malaise. “Portugal is an obsessed country,” Miguel Pereira, a football writer, says of its fixation with the sport. In a place that has produced great players but not a world-beating team, winning would spark “ecstasy and joy”. (It might also make Cristiano Ronaldo , a preening superannuated megastar, even more insufferable.)

The other worthy group comprises larger, football-loving countries that have always fallen short. Japanese fans, for instance, still mourn “the devastation of Rostov” of 2018, when their side surrendered a 2-0 lead against Belgium, and “the agony of Doha” in 1993, when a late Iraqi goal kept them out of the tournament. The team’s evolution has reflected Japan’s integration with the world, reckons Dan Orlowitz, a journalist based there. “It would be massive” if it won. Disqualifyingly, however, baseball, not football, is the country’s biggest sport. (America is ineligible on similar grounds.)

No African country has won a World Cup. Senegal, one of Africa’s strongest contenders, is mired in the political fallout of a debt crisis. But, says Elimane Ndao, a correspondent with France 24, “Whenever the national team plays, everyone forgets the political problems.” Its most cherished World Cup moment was a 1-0 defeat of France, the former colonial power, in 2002; the scorer led the team in a dance at a corner flag. If it won, the country would celebrate “for a week—or a month”.

Then there is Morocco , which four years ago reached the semi-finals. That enhanced its reputation, says Samir Bennis, a political adviser and co-founder of Morocco World News, showing the country “can shine on the world stage”. When the team is playing, “life in Morocco freezes,” says Mr Bennis. “Everyone is watching and praying for victory.” But it might be even sweeter for Africa’s apotheosis to come in 2030, when Morocco is among the hosts.

All in all, Latin America is where a first-time victory would bestow the greatest happiness on the greatest number. Colombia is in the middle of a fraught presidential election; football is “the main unifying factor in the country”, says Ricardo Ávila of El Tiempo, a daily. But winning would mean most in Mexico, a soccer-mad country of 133m. “We all believe in Our Lady of Guadalupe,” jokes León Krauze, a columnist and podcaster, “but our one true religion is football.” For millions of Mexicans in America, he notes, the team is a last link to their homeland. Winning “would do wonders for a country that has faced many hardships”, including excoriation by Donald Trump . Imagine him presenting the trophy to Mexico’s captain.

“The intensity of emotion”, recalled Pelé, a three-time champion, of seeing Brazil lift the cup, “was like nothing I had ever known.” Who will feel it this time? In reality the likeliest winners are France and Spain. Still, like past favourites, they may be undone by a dud referee or a scuffed penalty kick. For poetic justice and maximum drama, in the World Cup final on July 19th, Mexico would play—and beat—Portugal. It might happen. Until the whistle blows, we can all hope. ■

What national anthems reveal about old enemies

The most hated countries at the FIFA World Cup What national anthems reveal about old enemies June 11th 2026 National anthems are among the world’s most recognisable and widely performed political texts. Many were written to rally troops, celebrate victory in war or unite new states. Today these battle cries are most often heard at sporting events. Before each match at the World Cup , teams will sing songs of the conflicts that once divided them.

Forty-eight countries will compete in the group stages this year, up from 32. Which ones will appear most often as enemies in the tournament ’s national anthems? To find out, The Economist used AI tools to analyse the translated lyrics of every competing country’s song. To start, we ranked villains according to where there were explicit mentions of countries, specific battles, historical figures and symbols. Anthems with no official lyrics, such as Spain’s and Bosnia and Herzegovina’s, were excluded from the analysis.

Spain is the most hated country in our textual analysis, appearing in three national anthems. Perhaps this is because Spain’s former colonies and territories were more likely than Britain’s to gain independence through revolutionary wars. Ecuador’s anthem recalls how “the toppled lion could be heard, as it roared in impotence and despair.” The Dutch—hardly strangers to empires themselves—are less subtle: “The Spaniards rape thee, my Netherlands so sweet.” (We analysed the full official lyrics, including verses rarely sung at matches.)

The results rely on interpretation: anthems are often poetic and rarely specify exactly who they want dead. When factoring in historical context, our analysis suggests that at least nine additional national anthems allude to other countries, including a reference to Britain in America’s anthem . Spain once again takes first place.

National anthems are an unusually macabre genre. All but eight countries competing in the World Cup make some reference to violence, whether through soldiers, armour, threats, descriptions of historical battles or explicit calls to arms. Nineteenth-century writers were especially fond of bloodshed; our analysis found that anthems adopted more recently tend to be less fierce and battle-hungry.

Portugal’s anthem, originally written as a protest song against Britain, is unusually bellicose. It contains 11 references to violence per 100 words, compared with a tournament average of roughly two. It calls citizens “às armas!” (to arms) 12 times. By this measure, Portugal has the World Cup’s most combative anthem. Though others sound ready for a fight, too. The French warn dramatically that foreign soldiers are coming “to cut the throats of your sons and consorts”, while Uruguay’s and Tunisia’s tout the glory of martyrdom.

Not all anthems are so sanguinary. Some of history’s most notorious invaders sing remarkably peaceful songs. Britain’s anthem asks God to save its king (although Scotland’s unofficial anthem mocks King Edward II). Germany’s celebrates freedom, unity and happiness. Japan’s hopes the emperor will reign until little pebbles grow into moss-covered boulders.

Two of the World Cup’s hosts—America and Mexico—have similar themes of freedom, conflict and religion, although Mexico’s contains more than twice as many references to violence. Written during an era of territorial loss and invasion by America and other foreign powers, it imagines its national flag drenched in waves of blood. Canada’s, meanwhile, contains no references to conflict and is typically polite: “with glowing hearts we see thee rise.” (Its official lyrics were even updated in 2018 to be more gender-neutral.)

Football fans rarely pay much attention to the lyrics echoing around a stadium before a match. But these anthems are rousing epics of conquest, liberation, sacrifice and murder. Fortunately, this summer’s hard-fought football contests will be settled by goals, not guns. ■

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Returning to them in “Disclosure Day”, the great director raises the stakes

Steven Spielberg has more to say about aliens Returning to them in “Disclosure Day”, the great director raises the stakes June 11th 2026 You can learn about battles in a war film. A romantic comedy may offer tips about courtship. But alien movies can tell you nothing about aliens. Their message is always about human beings. Steven Spielberg ’s alien oeuvre has some enduring morals. Don’t trust the government. Your loved ones may not understand you. Find your way home if you can. “Disclosure Day”, his new release, adds a cosmic plea: give peace a chance.

Breathless and occasionally baffling, the plot of “Disclosure Day” is hard to summarise, but here goes: nuclear conflict looms in America. Yet Daniel (Josh O’Connor), a renegade cyber-security guy, has bigger worries. He is on the run from Wardex, a sinister agency, and its haunted boss (Colin Firth), identifiable as a villain by his posh English drawl. Daniel plans to release Wardex’s record of contacts with alien spacecraft and “non-human biologics”. The archive goes back to 1947, which, as UFO-spotters can attest, was the date of an otherworldly crash -landing in Roswell, New Mexico.

Daniel brings two other important things with him. First, his girlfriend Jane (Eve Hewson), who takes him to a convent where she once trained to become a nun. The sisters are there to reassure Jane—and devout viewers—that belief in aliens isn’t heretical. He also has a mysterious hand-held device, a cross between a shard of kryptonite and a mobile phone, which enables all manner of tricks, including a kind of mind-melding telepathy. What has this gizmo to do with the aliens, you may ask? Don’t expect a straight answer.

Meanwhile Margaret (Emily Blunt, pictured) is a TV meteorologist who wants to be a news anchor. If only she had a scoop to break! After an eerie bird visits the flat she shares with her slightly unsatisfactory boyfriend, she finds she can speak Russian and Korean and divine strangers’ intimate thoughts.

The mind-melding antics here recall the bit in “E.T.” when the creature’s consciousness blurs with his child saviour’s. That is one of this film’s many familiar Spielberg motifs. Once again, knowledge is sacred but dangerous. Swelling music—by the director’s lifelong collaborator, John Williams, now 94—yields to moments of quiet tenderness. Gags puncture the tension. Fleeing, Margaret tries to run over her compromising phone, but the tyre keeps missing. E.T., phone blown.

The main precedent is “Close Encounters of the Third Kind”, released by Mr Spielberg in 1977. There, too, a man and woman share special insights. “We’re the only ones who know,” he whispers. “It’s always been just the two of you,” says Hugo (Colman Domingo), the whistleblowers’ leader in “Disclosure Day”. Again the anointed ones, Daniel and Margaret, can’t fathom how they know what they know. But rather than just pursuing the ultimate secret, they battle to reveal it.

At bottom this saga, like its predecessor, is a parable of communication. Contact with aliens stands for the struggle to forge connections in a world that may think you’re nuts. The flight from Wardex is also a search for a soulmate and a quest to recover a half-forgotten childhood. Empathy is “the foremost evolutionary advantage”, Hugo intones.

As in “E.T.” and “Close Encounters”, in other words, the problem isn’t them; it’s us. In alien flicks by other directors, the outsiders have been avatars for nuclear war and other threats. Here the hope is that they will forestall it, putting petty human squabbles into intergalactic perspective. (It might seem an odd nitpick in a story that features invisibility and time travel, but Mr Spielberg may overestimate the internet access enjoyed by soldiers of totalitarian states.)

Does it all hold up? It certainly offers something for everyone: stunts and chases, awe and humour, bullets and bunkum. It is a bonanza of chewy themes and memorable shots. A car drives through a house and is dragged by a train; there is a scare at a cliff-edge à la “Indiana Jones” . There are CGI animals, a face reflected in a carving knife and baddies who just keep coming. With his genius for hokey grandeur, Mr Spielberg again manipulates your feelings so expertly that you find yourself on the verge of tears without really knowing why.

Then there are the extraterrestrials. They may mostly be symbolic, but, as at the climax of “Close Encounters”, Mr Spielberg—who avowedly believes in them—cannot leave it at that. It’s a shame, in a way, when they show up, with their spindly legs, tortoise necks and bulbous heads, wise and fragile (like E.T.). The last thing this bursting alien movie needed was the aliens themselves. ■

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A hundred years after his death, the Spanish architect is both loved and reviled

Saint or sinner: Antoni Gaudí’s polarising style A hundred years after his death, the Spanish architect is both loved and reviled June 11th 2026 With its cluster of 18 honeycombed, tapering towers, the basilica of the Sagrada Família (Holy Family) dominates Barcelona’s skyline. For some, it is a work of genius, a modern reincarnation of the great medieval cathedrals of Europe. For others it is a gigantic folly. But no one can doubt that it has become a global icon. Last year it attracted almost 5m people, making it one of the most visited churches in the world, alongside St Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican and Notre Dame in Paris.

After almost 150 years of construction, in February builders finished installing a white 17-metre-high ceramic cross on top of the central tower. With that, it became the tallest church in the world, overtaking Ulm Minster in Germany. Finishing a remaining façade may take another ten years. But on June 10th Pope Leo XIV celebrated a mass at the basilica to bless its near-completion and to mark the centenary of the death of Antoni Gaudí, the architect who created it.

To the outside world, Gaudí has become almost synonymous with Barcelona. As well as the Sagrada Família, his output included six mansions and Parc Güell, which overlooks the city. Most were built for the Catalan bourgeoisie as they grew rich from industrialisation in the late 19th century. His clients liked, or at least tolerated, the architect’s boundless decorative imagination and eclecticism.

Gaudí was both reactionary and revolutionary. He was born to a family of coppersmiths in the lowlands of Catalonia. His rural childhood and the family vocation gave him both an organic decorative template and a liking for manual work. Gaudí observed that there were “neither 90-degree angles nor straight lines in nature”, writes Peter Stanford, a journalist, in a new biography, “God’s Architect”. He preferred curves in his buildings, as well as representations of plants and animals. His tomb, in the crypt of the Sagrada Família, describes him as “an extraordinary craftsman”. He was also a self-taught engineer. The director of Barcelona’s architecture school mused that he would “either be a madman or a genius”. He was both.

His buildings were highly original and technically innovative. The exterior of the Batlló mansion on Paseig de Gràcia, Barcelona’s grandest thoroughfare, features windows like eye sockets, framed by bones carved in stone. A roof for Gaudí was a creative field, with chimneys like helmeted sentinels. His favourite forms included hyperbolic paraboloids (a saddle shape) and helicoids (spirals).

At the Sagrada Família, he rejected external buttresses and supporting columns in the nave. To spread the weight of the roof, he designed walls to resemble trees and used hanging chains of stone, notes Mauricio Cortés, one of the team of architects still working on the building today. He persuaded local people to pose as models for the biblical figures on the façade.

Gaudí’s deepest influences were Catholicism and Catalan nationalism. He looked back to Catalan Gothic, a particularly elegant variant of the medieval style, though he also incorporated Baroque, Orientalist and Moorish flourishes. He saw his work as an expression of his faith. In the 1890s, as the church waged a culture war against anticlerical anarchism, Gaudí joined an artistic group whose mentor was an arch-reactionary bishop. He gave up commercial work to dedicate the last 12 years of his life to the Sagrada Família.

In 1926, on his regular evening stroll to see his confessor, he was hit by a tram. Taken for a tramp, he was moved to a hospital for the poor, where he died three days later. Some 10,000 people attended his funeral. But for decades the Sagrada Família was little loved. In 1936, at the start of the Spanish civil war, an anarchist militia smashed the elaborate models that Gaudí had left and looted his archive of drawings. George Orwell , who was in Barcelona during the civil war, called the Sagrada Família “one of the most hideous buildings in the world”, adding that “the anarchists showed bad taste in not blowing it up when they had the chance.”

Several things would save it. The Surrealists championed Gaudí’s legacy—though he had rejected the idea that his work was based on dreams. The drug-soaked counterculture of the 1960s saw in him the architect of an acid trip. Japanese tourists saw pantheism. In the 1980s the money at last started pouring in, and construction speeded up (it is financed almost entirely from entrance fees paid by tourists).

Because of his technical prowess, Gaudí is also an architect’s architect. He was admired by Le Corbusier for his mastery of structure and stone. Unlike the works of some recent starchitects, his buildings have not suffered structural weakness, notes Mr Stanford. His influence can be seen in Frank Gehry and Zaha Hadid .

Yet Gaudí’s aesthetic remains divisive. Many who study his church and homes think his style is pure kitsch—though it is hardly his fault if Disneyland copied him. For others he remains refreshingly iconoclastic. He had a sublime sense of colour. Walk into the Sagrada Família, and you will be soothed by the gentle light reflected through the coloured glass windows, just as in a medieval cathedral. Last year Pope Francis declared Gaudí “venerable” and put him on the path to sainthood. Listen carefully in the nave, and you can almost hear Orwell’s groan. ■

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A new book looks at the trade in masterpieces pilfered from Cambodia

The people behind the largest art heist in history A new book looks at the trade in masterpieces pilfered from Cambodia June 11th 2026 TOEK TIK knew the man only as “Sia Ford” (Lord Ford) but had heard “he alone was creating much of the demand that sent looting crews into the temples.” Sometimes Toek Tik and his colleagues would plunder to order: Sia Ford would specify the kind of pieces he was after, and they would go into the Cambodian jungle with their shovels and rope in search of bronzes or depictions of Vishnu.

Sia Ford was, in fact, a British businessman called Douglas Latchford. In a fascinating new book Matthew Campbell, a journalist at Bloomberg Businessweek, describes his role in “a long-term criminal conspiracy that spanned from Cambodia’s killing fields to the Upper East Side”.

Latchford had developed an obsession with the Khmer empire, which lasted from 802ad to 1431AD in Cambodia and parts of Laos, Thailand and Vietnam. In 1974 he opened a gallery in Bangkok, offering hundreds if not thousands of stolen Khmer antiquities to collectors and institutions. Some of his pieces ended up in the Norton Simon Museum in California and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

Mr Campbell reckons Latchford may have pulled off “the world’s biggest art heist ”. The book untangles the murky supply chain for stolen masterpieces in riveting detail. It began with looters such as Toek Tik. “Cambodians were raised to revere such objects,” Mr Campbell notes, seeing them as “avatars of the gods”. But in the wake of the civil war and the Khmers Rouges’ bloody regime, many were desperate. So they took huge statues and bas-reliefs, using pneumatic drills and dynamite if necessary. (Many objects were damaged or destroyed in the process.)

Once artworks were prised free, they were packed into oxcarts or trucks; a broker would get them over the border into Thailand and thence to Latchford. He would find a buyer, inventing provenance and forging documents as required. They often arrived at their prestigious new homes still dusted with Cambodian soil.

Such sophisticated buyers proved undiscerning thinkers. Latchford’s clients gave little consideration to how these spectacular pieces ended up in their display cabinets. Mr Campbell finds that “The Met had been willing, again and again, to augment its collection with works whose legitimacy rested on the slenderest wisps of evidence.” Thanks to the efforts of investigators, the extent of Latchford’s criminal enterprise became clear—though he died in 2020, before facing justice.

“The Man Who Stole the Gods” reads like a thriller, in good ways and bad: sometimes the author cannot resist the hokey phrases of an airport novel. Yet the story romps along with dogged lawyers and a ludicrous, devious antagonist. (Latchford could often be found poolside in Bangkok, flanked by oiled-up young male bodybuilders.) And the tale has a fairly neat resolution: American investigators succeeded in returning many pilfered artefacts to Cambodia, where they are on display in the National Museum in Phnom Penh.

Mr Campbell suggests that Latchford’s story offers a cautionary tale and that the investigation may have put “an end to the entire US market for such looted objects”. That is unrealistic. People will always want to gaze at beautiful, unusual objects from ancient civilisations. That means they will be willing to overlook provenance—and the world’s second-oldest profession will find new recruits. ■

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Two new horror films have hit a nerve with youngsters

What “Backrooms” and “Obsession” reveal about Gen Z’s fears Two new horror films have hit a nerve with youngsters June 11th 2026 IN RECENT WEEKS the global box office has been dominated not by Hollywood veterans, but YouTubers in their 20s. “Obsession” is Curry Barker’s second film, made with a minuscule budget of under $1m (his first was made for only $800). Since opening in cinemas “Obsession” has grossed $230m. “Backrooms”, meanwhile, is Kane Parsons’s debut feature film, adapted from a viral web series. The movie has made over $215m; Mr Parsons has become the youngest-ever film-maker to open a flick in America in the top-grossing spot. What’s behind their breakout success?

It helps that both films are horror, a genre that still lures people to cinemas. But what is interesting is that these scary movies are appealing to the “ anxious generation ”. In the opening weekend nearly 85% of the audience for “Backrooms” was under 35; 75% of those seeing “Obsession” when it opened were aged between 18 and 25. Both films capture some of Gen Z’s fears and fixations (even though the main character in “Backrooms” is middle-aged).

One theme is loneliness: the protagonists in both films are isolated and unhappy. (A study found that 80% of Gen Z have felt the same way.) In “Backrooms” Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor, pictured) is a divorced and depressed alcoholic. “Obsession” follows Bear (Michael Johnston), a socially awkward man who has unreciprocated feelings for his friend Nikki. One day he buys a novelty talisman and wishes that Nikki would love him “more than anyone else in the world”. Wish granted: Nikki becomes disturbingly possessive and violent.

Another theme is instability. In “Backrooms”, having been kicked out of the home he shared with his wife, Clark moves into his furniture shop. In the basement, he comes across an eerie labyrinth: each room is covered in sickly yellow wallpaper and home to all manner of unpleasant things. Clark’s precarious living situation updates the “haunted house” trope for a generation that, across much of the rich world, fears they may never have a place of their own .

Dismal prospects and thwarted ambition are yet another shared theme. Clark is a failed architect. Before she is subjected to the talisman’s magic, Nikki plans to quit her job and pursue a career in writing. Another character is about to open a college-acceptance letter when her brains are bashed in.

Both movies include acts of self-destruction. In the bleak, cruel world of these stories, the characters’ best option is to surrender. Many Gen Zers say they feel similarly hopeless. The creators of these blockbusters, though, must be feeling the future looks bright. ■

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Our suggestions of what to watch, and what to avoid, on your summer holiday

The best, and worst, TV series and films of 2026 (so far) Our suggestions of what to watch, and what to avoid, on your summer holiday June 4th 2026 “Amandaland”Amanda is back—as pretentious, dishonest and delusional as ever in the second season of this sitcom. Her pitiable attempts to make it as an influencer are extremely entertaining, thanks to the sharp script.

“Babies”This show is heart-wrenching and beautifully acted. It explores how isolating infertility can be and reveals the cold and unsympathetic manner that couples encounter from doctors as they navigate the medical system.“The Boroughs”A widower discovers that otherworldly creatures are stealing precious years from the residents of a retirement community. The most unsettling thing about this series is not supernatural: it is the normal, natural process of ageing. “The Christophers” The greedy children of Julian Sklar (Sir Ian McKellan), an artist, want to forge the last series of his renowned paintings and sell them for a fortune. For all its talk of fakes, this film—about ageing, inheritance and artistic taste—is a real masterpiece.“Dreams”A wealthy female philanthropist (Jessica Chastain) has a secret affair with a young ballet dancer from Mexico, who crosses the border illegally to be with her in San Francisco. This film is a taut, chilling morality tale about passion and power.

“Half Man”Niall and Ruben grow up together and develop an intense and twisted sort of brotherhood. This series is a nerve-shredding exploration of obsession, masculinity and trauma from Richard Gadd, the creator of “Baby Reindeer”.“Henry David Thoreau”This three-part documentary from Ken Burns explores why the American naturalist is so alluring today. In an era when many are searching for meaning, Thoreau’s life and writing offer succour. “I Swear”A biopic that is funny and full of heart. Robert Aramayo deservedly won awards for his performance as John Davidson, a Scottish campaigner who was diagnosed with Tourette syndrome as a boy. “Kokuho”This historical drama about kabuki, traditional Japanese theatre, has the compressed intensity of a story told in verse. Lush and painstakingly shot, the film follows the orphaned son of a gangster in his effort to become an actor. “Legends” In the early 1990s Britain was losing its war on drugs, so the government turned to an unusual bunch of fighters: civil servants. This is a thrilling and pacy series about little-known British heroes.“Love Story”This controversial hit series imagines what happened beyond the public eye, as John F. Kennedy junior, America’s most eligible bachelor, wooed an elegant outsider before their deaths in a plane crash in 1999. A doomed fairy tale that is enthralling to watch.“No Other Choice” After a year of humiliating unemployment, a middle-aged man hits on a plan: he will murder everyone who is qualified for the job he is applying for. Ingenious, grisly fun, this film is the best South Korean satire since the Oscar-winnin g “Parasit e”.“The Pitt”This popular medical drama about an overworked, underfunded emergency room in Pittsburgh celebrates not brilliance or glory, but the simple act of being dedicated to your job. The show may remind older viewers of “ER”, but it is grittier and more addictive than its long-running predecessor.

“Ponies”The KGB surveils any Americans of any influence in Moscow. But Bea and Twila, as women, are classified as “persons of no interest”. Thanks to a cold-war setting and ample skulduggery, this satirical comedy series is a lot of fun. “Project Hail Mary”This film is both a science-fiction caper and a buddy comedy about an astronaut and an alien. Though the film is too long, it stands out for its cinematography and droll script; Ryan Gosling is brilliant in the lead role.“The Sheep Detectives”This charming family-friendly film is a love letter to farm animals and golden-age murder mysteries. The script delivers both big laughs and unexpectedly moving moments, as it explores loss and memory.“The Stranger”A sumptuous and rich adaptation of Albert Camus ’s classic existential novel. This black-and-white film boasts beautiful cinematography, but also captures the ennui and despair of the book.

To save you time, we wasted ours

“The Bride!”In this frightfully bad film, a dead woman is reanimated to marry a lonely monster. The movie mixes too many genres, from sci-fi and Gothic noir to “Bonnie and Clyde”-style capers. This remake of a film from 1935 never fully comes to life.“Imperfect Women”This show is like buttered popcorn: bingeable but unsatisfying. Its big ideas—of how well you know your partner and what women hide from their closest friends—are handled simplistically. “Ladies First”A man whacks his head and wakes up in a world where gender roles are flipped. This over-the-top film offers endless scenes of men being sexually harassed and getting cosmetic surgery, while women eat burgers and pass wind. “Michael” This nauseating biopic is a sanitised and sanctified version of Michael Jackson’s life story. For a movie about an oddball megastar who befriended a chimpanzee, much of it is also surprisingly dull. “The Super Mario Galaxy Movie” This video-game-inspired film is already the year’s highest-grossing movie worldwide. It is also a gross misuse of your time. The plotless film carries you on a hallucinogenic and frenetic journey that only nostalgic gamers will enjoy.“Wuthering Heights”Emerald Fennell turns a haunting tale of class, obsession and revenge into a bodice-ripper . She rounds off the sharpest edges of the story and focuses on the erotic awakening of Cathy and Heathcliff.“Your Friends & Neighbours”Coop (Jon Hamm), a financier-turned-thief, does not know when to quit stealing from his neighbours. The writers of this show also don’t know when to quit. The new season has all the flaws of the first, plus another: redundancy.■

All shows and films were released in America or Britain in 2026 and are available to watch in cinemas or on streaming platforms.

A new book is as riveting as its protagonist was

How many times a day do you think about Alexander the Great? A new book is as riveting as its protagonist was June 4th 2026 How do you measure the greatness of Alexander the Great? Perhaps by the size of the empire he conquered (it stretched 4,800 kilometres, from Athens to India). Or the speed with which he conquered it (about a decade). Or the cities he founded (between six and 17, many called “Alexandria”).

Though, as a new book by Edmund Richardson, a professor of classics and ancient history at Durham University, shows, there are darker measures of this man. He has been called “mad”, “Alexander the not-so-great” and “one of the greatest killers the world had ever known”. This is with reason: some have estimated that almost 1% of the ancient world’s population died as a result of his campaigns.

That has not stopped the adulation. If men think of the Roman Empire many times a day, historians seem to think of Alexander almost as often. He obsesses people: feature films glamorise him; documentaries follow in his footsteps; almost 5,000 books have dissected him. His acolytes have ranged from Julius Caesar to Napoleon to modern business gurus.

Like all history, these texts reflect their time. Machiavelli admired Alexander’s manly leadership style (he killed his enemies). Modern texts take a more managerial approach: a professor at INSEAD, a business school, wrote an article titled “Eleven Leadership Lessons from Alexander the Great”. This included advice to “Consolidate Gains” and “Invest in Talent Management”. And, you might add, “Avoid Killing 1% of the Known World”. (Tech bros and politicians, take note.)

Ancient statistics are iffy. But this book—a rip-roaring cradle-to-(drunken)-grave look at Alexander—offers other statistics, too. In its pages there are 11 instances of various body parts being severed (mostly heads, but sometimes limbs and penises); the word “murder” appears 38 times, and “kill” pops up around 100 times. It is brutal, violent and staggeringly bloody. It is, in other words, splendid fun.

It is also, in some ways, unusual. Everyone knows that history (the thing with battles) is divided into eras: the classical, the medieval, the modern. But history (the thing with books) is divided into eras, too. The past century alone has seen vogues for Marxist history, feminist history and—most recently—hand-wringing history. In recent years, people have fretted over the sins of everyone from Mahatma Gandhi to that notorious villain Jane Austen .

Classics, which has been accused of being “part of the scaffold of white supremacy”, has been particularly apologetic, and has hurried to correct its “bias”. One recent book on Alexander declared it was less interested in the man than in those who “suffered under his rule”. It is doubtless very virtuous. What it is not is very interesting.

Mr Richardson’s “Alexander the Great”, by contrast, does not hand-wring. It rollicks. It rollicks through his childhood (he tames an untameable horse); it rollicks through his early battles (he conquers an unconquerable city); it rollicks through his myth-making (he undoes the undoable “Gordian knot”). It rollicks, of course, through his frolicking. Alexander’s lovers included his friend Hephaestion, “360 of Darius’s former concubines (one for each day of the Persian year) and a spectacularly handsome young Persian named Bagoas”.

Where there is a good story to tell, Mr Richardson does not deconstruct or critique it. He tells it, with gusto. Take the siege of Tyre. When Alexander started to attack this city, he was not yet the “Great”—merely a slight, shortish, almost-boy with blond, curling hair, grown long in imitation of his hero, Achilles. The island-city of Tyre was magnificent. The stinking purple dye of its seashells made the clothes of the Mediterranean purple—and had made Tyre stinking rich. The city, in modern-day Lebanon, stood nearly a kilometre out to sea above looming walls and patrolling guards of warships. It was assumed it was unconquerable. You can see where this is going.

One man-made causeway, seven months and 2,000 crucified Tyrians later, and the siege was over. Though much like Alexander himself, this history does not hang about: it is up and off to India and, eventually, his agonising death in Babylon. Early slurs said he was killed by alcohol poisoning; Mr Richardson thinks drinking water and typhoid are more likely.

Its walk-on cast is starry and includes the philosopher Aristotle, his tutor, who gave Alexander an annotated copy of “The Iliad” and a love of literature (he slept with his copy). The detail here is delicious: you learn how to foil an enemy digging a tunnel into your city (pop in a pack of bears and a swarm of bees) and whether it is a good idea to herd cats into battle (as the idiom implies, it is not).

This book has been described by its publisher as a “revelatory retelling”. But one of the newest and most interesting things about it is just that: it is interesting. For far too long history books have not tried hard enough to rivet readers. This is not a recent complaint. As Catherine Morland, the heroine of Austen’s “Northanger Abbey”, observed, it is odd that history “should be so dull, for a great deal of it must be invention”.

One of the things people never seem to learn from history is how to write history well. In 1946 Samuel Eliot Morison, an American historian, accused historians of producing “dull, solid, valuable monographs that nobody reads outside the profession”. In 2010 Gordon Wood, a professor, said that history writing was “in a crisis”, as academics write reams but have “very few” readers.

This is partly, as a Marxist historian might say, explained by societal change: people are reading less of everything. Partly, too, they are consuming history in other ways: “The Rest is History” is one of the world’s most popular podcasts. But another explanation is just that so much academic history is almost aggressively badly written. Recent academic treatises on Alexander are rich in words like “deconstruct”—but low on the rip-roaring.

Some of this is necessary: history advances through analysis, not anecdote. However, though analysis is essential, being dull is not. Tom Holland, one of the hosts of “The Rest is History”, says the “problem is those who can’t kick an addiction to jargon”. Too many “mistake writing stuff that is bloody hard to understand for being profound”, agrees Harry Sidebottom , a classics lecturer at Oxford.

This book, which combines analysis with good old-fashioned fun, offers a lesson in how history can be both academically ambitious and readable. And why writers should talk a lot about the bears and the bees. ■

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Literary agents are more important than readers give them credit for

The hidden tastemakers of the literary world Literary agents are more important than readers give them credit for June 4th 2026 COCKTAIL PARTIES have seen worse pickup attempts. In 1989 Andrew Wylie, a literary agent, set his sights on Philip Roth . (“Every time I turned around, there was this guy,” the novelist later said. “I discovered what it was like to be a pretty girl.”) When Mr Wylie made his move, he declared that he could get Roth a three-book deal worth $2m.

Later, over lunch, he formally wooed him. Roth was underappreciated by his publisher, Mr Wylie asserted, and his potentially lucrative foreign rights were being neglected. He could handle the rights to Roth’s 14 novels in 30 territories, which amounted to 420 contracts renegotiated every seven years. Roth’s revenue could increase by up to 500%. It was an offer the writer—who had a mighty reputation but a puny bank balance—could not refuse.

Mr Wylie is famous, infamous even, in the publishing world: he earned the nickname “the Jackal”, after persuading several authors to ditch their agents and join him. When he wanted to expand his network of contacts in China, he went so far as to call Henry Kissinger to suggest that he could become his agent and that Kissinger should write a book on China. That book went on to sell well, and Mr Wylie gained footing and a stronger Rolodex for future business there. Mr Wylie’s strategy of focusing on foreign rights and sales “not only changed the fortunes of the writers on his list, but the shape of American literature abroad”, writes Laura McGrath, an assistant professor of English at Temple University, in a new survey of literary agents.

Agents, Ms McGrath argues, have many functions. They are spotters, identifying promising writers. They are confidants, helping those writers to produce their best work. And they are negotiators, doing deals on behalf of authors and getting them more money so they can have more time to write.

That means agents are often controversial figures within the publishing world. In 1897 a British publisher described agents as “generally a parasite”. (They take a commission of around 15% of an author’s earnings.) They retain an aura of mystery. The literary agent’s job is to “be invisible”, Ms McGrath contends, working behind the scenes to create a star and thereby shape what gets written and what people read.

“Middlemen” is one of a pile of recent books offering a behind-the-scenes account of how literature comes to people’s shelves. Ms McGrath is a lively writer, eschewing academic jargon in favour of anecdotes. She heads to the world’s largest book fair in Frankfurt. She watches a group of agents evaluate the unsolicited manuscripts in the “slush pile”. (Every agent’s dream is to find a “Harry Potter”-like gem among the dross, as J.K. Rowling’s agent did.) She describes the evolution of the “publishing lunch”: Candida Donadio, who found Joseph Heller in the slush pile, once joked that she took three lunches in a day. (Today there are fewer stiff drinks and more talk about limp sales.)

Agents try to devise creative answers to marketing problems. For example, how do you sell a book by an unknown writer? Sterling Lord, Jack Kerouac’s agent, started a trend when he worked with publishers to build hype around “On the Road”; they advertised Kerouac as “the voice of a new age”. Agents ever since have hoped their debut novelists can make waves: first novels now account for between 15% and 25% of the fiction published every year. Many of these books fetch high advances that sales cannot recoup. Most American novelists now publish only one title.

Literary agents are never objective, and their personal preferences shape what is printed. Because most agents and editors live in New York, in 2000-22 more novels were set there than in the next 30 most populous American cities combined. And certainly the proliferation of agents—there are now more than 1,500 in America—has something to do with the proliferation of mediocre books. Many should have never have been printed. But what is striking, at a time when taste is increasingly shaped by algorithms, is just how much an individual agent’s judgment still matters. ■

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Title sequences shape the way you watch television. They are dwindling

Why you should never skip a TV intro Title sequences shape the way you watch television. They are dwindling June 4th 2026 Technology forges new art forms and destroys them. The printing press galvanised literature and rubbed out illuminated manuscripts. Cinema killed the music hall. Today a popular gizmo is threatening another intricate craft. The art form is the TV title sequence; the menacing tech is the little “Skip Intro” button that you reflexively click. The outcome is changing the way stories are told and watched on screen.

Once upon a time, TV titles were simple cards displaying static text. By the 1950s they served as prologues, introducing characters and catchphrases: “It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s Superman!” say the wowed onlookers in the opening of “The Adventures of Superman”. Titles incorporated cutesy animations (as in “Bewitched”), split-screen effects (“The Brady Bunch”) and stunts (like the much-emulated bonnet-slide in “The Dukes of Hazzard”). Many came with earworm tunes, like the finger-clicking theme for “The Addams Family”.

The form peaked in the era of prestige TV at the turn of the millennium. In the titles for “The Sopranos” , the protagonist, Tony, is glimpsed through cigar-smoke and in a rear-view mirror. He is close yet elusive, as he remains for six seasons. The falling figure in “Mad Men” (pictured) embodies both glamour and mental disintegration. Finest of all is the ghostly imagery in the first season of “True Detective”, a concise montage of its Louisianan themes: sleaze, pollution, faith, guilt and downright weirdness.

Such ingenious sequences are at once a compliment and a brag. Your time is so valuable, they flatter the audience, that even the credits will be exquisite. The brag is about the show, for which, implicitly, only a sublime introduction will do. They are summaries, mood-setters and advertisements, deft enough to intrigue new viewers and resonate with returning ones. Like the overture to an opera, they are an integral part of the drama.

Some of these shows aired without adverts, freeing up minutes for luxuriant openings. But the exigencies of streaming are changing. Adverts are creeping back, making time scarcer again. Meanwhile title sequences are an obstacle to binge-watching . Gorging fans do not need to be reintroduced to a story every hour. Many just want to get on with it.

Thanks to Skip Intro, they can. Noticing that users were fast-forwarding manually through titles themselves, Netflix devised the button in 2017; other streamers followed suit. By 2022 Netflix viewers were clicking it 136m times a day. Since then intro-skipping has snowballed. Across all the output on the BBC’s iPlayer, use of Skip Intro in March was roughly double the level two years earlier. It has soared in the past six months. The underlying impatience is bad news for elaborate opening titles. “It sucks,” says one exponent of this haiku-like genre.

Extended sequences are still airing. The cleverest are games or puzzles, such as the opening credits for “The White Lotus” , in which the lewd images flit away just before you decipher them. But briefer alternatives are on the rise. In “Pluribus”, a sci-fi parable, the title is formed by eerie, swirling dots; that is all. Some shows are reverting to the plain cards of yore. In “The Pitt”, a hospital drama, this approach fits the air of austere verisimilitude. “Steal”, a heist thriller, has only a brief flash of its title.

In the best known sequence of all, a tuxedoed man is tracked down the barrel of a gun. The James Bond titles will endure, as will others in cinema, where the audience is captive. But as they dwindle on TV, something is being lost. It isn’t just that—as in the new series of “The Night Manager” —they may be the best bit of a show. Shrinking them undermines cliffhangers: roll straight into the next episode and you can’t dangle in tingly anticipation for long.

More than that, titles can be a kind of spell; discard them and you may miss the magic. Like the flight to a holiday or dressing for a party, a title sequence is an in-between moment. It eases you from your own world, slumped on the sofa after putting the kids to bed, into the imaginary world of the show, whether that is a louche office in the 1960s or a Cajun crime scene. It is a crossing on which you suspend your disbelief.

Like making phone calls and shopping, watching TV has become immeasurably easier. These days you can see an abundance of programmes on a whim. Somehow, though, speeding things up has only made people more impatient; the yen for instantaneity is insatiable. If you are always hurrying, boundaries are skipped and nothing is special. ■

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Growing numbers of people are country counting

Travel is becoming a competitive sport Growing numbers of people are country counting June 4th 2026 Tuvalu, made up of nine tiny islands in the South Pacific, is not your usual holiday destination. The former British colony, about halfway between Hawaii and Australia, is a haul to get to, served by only a few flights a week. Tourism barely exists. The main attractions are the airport runway in the capital, Funafuti, which transforms into a picnic spot and football pitch most afternoons, and the sleepy post office, which attracts enthusiastic stamp collectors. It is one of the least visited countries in the world.

None of that was enough to dissuade Ted Nims, an American who recently spent a week there and, in the process, checked off another country on his list: his 191st. The UN has 193 member states. Mr Nims is among a growing number of “country counters” trying to visit them all. Last year a record 82 people claimed to have achieved the feat of travelling to all 193 countries, according to NomadMania, an online hub for obsessive adventurers.

When the Travellers’ Century Club launched in 1954, only a fortunate few could boast of having been to 100 countries, the minimum required to join. Today the social group is nearly 2,000-strong, having enjoyed what it calls a “pretty significant upswing” in recent years. Serious travellers are whiling away hours on platforms such as NomadMania and Most Travelled People, where there are leaderboards and debates about what counts as a visit. (An airport transit is acceptable to some but dismissed by the most hardcore as too easy.)

So much time on the road may sound like solitary play. But hostels and homestays offer a lot of fun and social contact, says Carol Wong, a Malaysian who recently visited Samoa (her 142nd country). It is the “ fancy hotel ” that is “very lonely”, she says. Online, travel addicts share tips and socialise. Some destinations are so obscure that visitors seek advice from Facebook groups such as Every Passport Stamp, where questions range from the mundane (“Is the ferry from Kazakhstan to Azerbaijan operating?”) to the unusual (“Has anyone ever explored Enewetak Atoll in the Marshall Islands?”).

Seeing new places is all the rage, even if you do not want to fill your whole passport with new stamps. About half of Brits polled last year by ABTA, a travel industry association, planned to visit a new country, compared with 18% a decade earlier. “There’s a braggadocious element,” says Seth Borko of Skift, a travel-news website, who points to the impact of social media.

The scourge of overtourism plays a part, too, as travellers want to skip packed piazzas. Rising numbers of Americans travelling to Europe are opting for small towns or the countryside, according to Skift. The world’s top ten most visited countries saw their share of international arrivals decline from about 60% in 1980 to 40% in 2024.

“I like to see places that aren’t as touched by tourists,” says Shang Qian Song, a 34-year-old Singaporean visiting Tuvalu, which may become one of the first countries to disappear because of rising sea levels. If you’re counting on becoming a country counter, better pack your bag. ■

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Whether you are tight on time or have loads of it, here are our ideas for summer reading

The best books of 2026 so far Whether you are tight on time or have loads of it, here are our ideas for summer reading May 28th 2026 A World Appears. By Michael Pollan. Penguin Press; 320 pages; $32. Allen Lane; £25This delightful book looks at the enduring mystery of consciousness . Academic philosophising is not always page-turning, but Mr Pollan has a journalist’s eye for the surprising and intriguing.

Bonfire of the Murdochs. By Gabriel Sherman. Simon & Schuster; 256 pages; $29 and £25An absorbing history of Rupert Murdoch. To understand the world’s most powerful news machine, you have to understand the family behind it. This saga is like “Succession”, but in real life. The Intimate Animal. By Justin Garcia. Little, Brown Spark; 272 pages; $30. Penguin Life; £20Humankind is facing an “intimacy crisis”, argues a leading sexologist. Part of the problem is the mismatch between the world in which our brains evolved and the one in which people now search for love. Muskism. By Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff. Harper; 256 pages; $30. Allen Lane; £25Just as Henry Ford provided the template for 20th-century capitalism, known as Fordism, Elon Musk offers one for the 21st. The authors provide a revealing portrait of the world’s richest man . Project Maven. By Katrina Manson. W.W. Norton; 416 pages; $31.99 and £23A scintillating account of the team of mavericks who put AI at the heart of America’s war machine. It is also a story of Silicon Valley’s shifting relationship with the Pentagon. One of the most important books on war and technology in years.

Like, Follow, Subscribe. By Fortesa Latifi. Gallery Books; 288 pages; $30 and £20 A fascinating exposé of “kidfluencing”. As parents broadcast tantrums and potty training on social media, “children’s privacy is traded for profits.” Picky. By Helen Zoe Veit. St Martin’s Press; 304 pages; $29Why do children become fussy eaters? The author decries changes in adults’ thinking that “allowed picky eating to hijack American childhood”.Talking Classics. By Mary Beard. University of Chicago Press; 208 pages; $22.50. Profile Books; £16.99Britain’s best-known classicist offers a spirited defence of her discipline. Like an archaeologist, she excavates classics from the layers of discourse that surround it.

The Doom Loop. By Eswar Prasad. Basic Venture; 368 pages; $32. Hurst; £22This riveting, depressing book argues that changes to the balance of power between countries have transformed the world economy into an engine for disorder.

Centrists of the World Unite! By Adrian Wooldridge. Allen Lane; 416 pages; £25. Published in America as “The Revolutionary Centre”; Pegasus Books; $35This bracing manifesto charts a future for the modern era’s most successful philosophy. Liberalism, the author argues, must revive itself before it’s too late.The Coming Storm. By Odd Arne Westad. Henry Holt; 256 pages; $27.99. Allen Lane; £22Today’s world looks “quite a bit” like the world before 1914, argues a history professor . A third world war is plausible; this book reveals how to avoid one.

The Descent. By Marc Bennetts. Bloomsbury Continuum; 272 pages; £20. To be published in America in May; $30To understand how Vladimir Putin dominates Russia, you must study how his propaganda works. Other books have explored the country’s disinformation state, but this one charts its evolution into a wartime dictatorship.

How Africa Works. By Joe Studwell. Atlantic Monthly Press; 416 pages; $32. Profile Books; £25One of the most high-profile books on Africa of the past few years. This is valuable reading for anyone curious to understand “the last great frontier of global development”.

If Russia Wins. By Carlo Masala. Translated by Olena Ebel and Ruth Ahmedzai Kemp. Atlantic Monthly Press; 120 pages; $20 and £14.99Imagining how the West might lose in Ukraine is a first step to avoiding disaster. This chilling book draws on two years of data, research and chats with officials to offer a scenario for a Russian victory.

London Falling. By Patrick Radden Keefe. Doubleday; 384 pages; $35. Picador; £22Zac Brettler said he was an oligarch’s son. The lie had tragic consequences. Mr Radden Keefe offers a sad, strange portrayal of London’s underworld.

The Next World War. By Peter Apps. Headline; 464 pages; $32. Wildfire; £25A journalist blends vivid reporting with shrewd analysis in this study of great-power conflict . Mr Apps puts the odds of another world war in the next decade at 30-35%.

Arabesques. By Serhiy Zhadan. Translated by Isaac Stackhouse Wheeler. Yale University Press; 120 pages; $18 and £12.99This collection of short stories elegantly describes ordinary people enduring war in Ukraine and offers a poignant portrait of Kharkiv, the author’s home town, which is some 40km or so from Russia.

Land. By Maggie O’Farrell. Knopf; 436 pages; $32. Tinder Press; 448 pages; £25In 1865, on a remote peninsula of Ireland, a cartographer has an experience that transforms his life. A bold, epic novel about people and place, which artfully blends history and mysticism.Lost Lambs. By Madeline Cash. Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 336 pages; $28. Doubleday; £16.99The Flynns are a dysfunctional American family, but a chance to mend bonds emerges from an unlikely source. A rollicking read with vibrant wordplay, quirky characters and madcap scenarios.

This is Where the Serpent Lives. By Daniyal Mueenuddin. Knopf; 368 pages; $29. Bloomsbury; £18.99A multigenerational epic set in Pakistan. This novel spans decades, exploring class, privilege and ambition.

Transcription. By Ben Lerner. Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 144 pages; $25. Granta; £14.99A man conducts a magazine interview with his 90-year-old mentor but fails to record it. This book offers shrewd insight into art and technology, friendship and fatherhood, and the reliability of memory.Vigil. By George Saunders. Random House; 192 pages; $28. Bloomsbury; £18.99The author behind one of this century’s best books, “Lincoln in the Bardo”, is back with a deft novel , which unfolds in the final hours of a former big-oil CEO’s life. The prose zips with quick-fire repartee.Whistler. By Ann Patchett. Knopf; 304 pages; $30. Bloomsbury; £20Daphne reconnects with Eddie, her former stepfather, and finally learns the truth about why he divorced her mother. A tale of secrets and lasting love, enriched by sharply drawn characters.

A Kingdom and a Village. By Simon Morrison. Knopf; 528 pages; $35. Bodley Head; £25This technicolour chronicle of Moscow shows that, beneath the petro-funded sheen, the city is a domain of purges and paranoia. Frequent invasions punctuated the city’s rise from medieval backwater to imperial metropolis.The Black Death. By Thomas Asbridge. Random House; 544 pages; $38. Allen Lane; 560 pages; £40Although medieval people were used to sudden ends, the Black Death was devastating. The disease also changed society and art, frequently for the better, this enjoyable book argues.

Custody. By Lara Feigel. William Collins; 432 pages; £25An excellent survey of social history through the lens of divorce law. The author casts her spotlight across nations and centuries, using seven subjects to show how women shaped attitudes about parenting after marital dissolution.The Death of Trotsky. By Josh Ireland. Dutton; 384 pages; $35. John Murray; £25How do you tell a gripping story when its ending is already known? This history of Leon Trotsky’s murder overcomes that problem. Mr Ireland’s book reads like a spy thriller.Mafia: A Global History. By Ryan Gingeras. Simon & Schuster; 416 pages; $35 and £25This engaging tale of how mafias have “helped define the making of the modern world” takes readers from classical Rome to Las Vegas today.

The Successor. By Mikhail Fishman. Translated by Michele Berdy. Pushkin Press; 800 pages; £35. To be published in America in May; $40Was Vladimir Putin’s tyranny inevitable? One of Russia’s leading independent journalists tells the story of the country’s emergence from Soviet communism and its collapse into dictatorship.

This Land Is Your Land. By Beverly Gage. Simon & Schuster; 352 pages; $30 and £22An enjoyable drive through America. From Philadelphia to California, a historian explores “the greatest tensions of American history”.

Ausländer. By Michael Moritz. Profile Books; 320 pages; £20. To be published in America by Pegasus Books in September; $29.95This tale joins a growing list of books written by children of the Nazis’ victims. Sir Michael offers an engaging memoir of dislocation and an examination of how tragedy reverberates across generations. The Game Changer. By Jon Ralston. Simon & Schuster; 400 pages; $30Few American legislators understood their job as well as Harry Reid, Nevada’s representative in the Senate for 30 years. This biography argues he was one of the “ most consequential national leaders of the 21st century”.

A Hymn to Life. By Gisèle Pelicot with Judith Perrignon. Translated by Natasha Lehrer and Ruth Diver. Penguin; 256 pages; $32. Bodley Head; £22The author’s ordeal captured global attention and led to a change in France’s rape laws. Here Ms Pelicot emerges as an accidental heroine. What could be a dark, depressing chronicle is propelled forward by the force of her courage.

Strangers. By Belle Burden. The Dial Press; 256 pages; $30. Ebury Press; £18.99The author documents a worst-case marital scenario, when her husband, without warning, announces the end of their relationship. This memoir is at once a horror story, a record of suffering and a cautionary tale . ■

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A new book offers a portrait of a city in the throes of social and political change

The tumult of Erdogan’s rule, seen from one district in Istanbul A new book offers a portrait of a city in the throes of social and political change May 28th 2026 YOU can barely dig a hole in Istanbul without hitting history. During construction of a tunnel under the Bosphorus, engineers uncovered the remains of an ancient harbour, along with shipwrecks from around 1,500 years ago. Across the strait, renovation of the Haydarpasa train station, built in 1906, revealed that platforms and tracks had been laid over the ruins of Chalcedon, a Greek settlement founded in the seventh century BC.

From the Greeks to the Genoese to the Ottomans , Istanbul (formerly Constantinople) has been marked by its scores of new arrivals. A time traveller from 1950, when the city was home to roughly 1m souls, would scarcely recognise it today. Istanbul has become Europe’s largest city, with countless new housing and infrastructure projects and some 16m people—more than the population of most EU countries. Only a fraction of the Greeks, Armenians and Jews who once made up a large share of Istanbul’s population remain. In their place have come migrants from Anatolia, including Kurds, and more recently, refugees from the Middle East.

The city’s recent transformation, especially under Recep Tayyip Erdogan —once Istanbul’s mayor, now Turkey’s president—is the subject of a new book by Suzy Hansen, a journalist. She uses a single neighbourhood, Karagumruk, to tell a broader story about migration, urban development and authoritarianism. “What I saw during the day in Turkey were the headlines; what I saw at night in Karagumruk was the information, life itself,” she writes.

The war that erupted across Turkey’s southern border in Syria , and the refugee crisis that followed, drove nearly 4m Syrians to Turkey in the early 2010s. Many of them settled in neighbourhoods such as Karagumruk, holing up in cramped apartments, often alongside other Syrian families, and scraping by as workers in sweatshops or as day labourers.

Ms Hansen spends much of the book as a fly on the wall in the cafés and barbershops of this conservative, somewhat seedy neighbourhood nestled inside the city’s Byzantine walls. She becomes a chronicler of Karagumruk’s culture wars, waged between secularists and conservatives, as well as old residents and newcomers. Gastronomy, music and even standards of cleanliness become battlegrounds. (Turks are notorious germophobes.)

Cultural differences are one cause for tension. But so are economic malaise, populist fearmongering and Istanbul’s rapid, uncontrolled growth. When a brawl breaks out between a group of Syrian and Turkish teenagers, Ms Hansen goes looking for answers. There are no easy ones. Yes, a local shopkeeper tells her: racism played a role in the violence. But the breakdown of the neighbourhood’s social fabric, and of the trust that had once made Istanbul such a hospitable city, were as much to blame.

Political violence and mounting repression also leave a mark on the neighbourhood. In 2016, after a bloody coup attempt against Mr Erdogan, there are mass arrests; room for dissent narrows and mistrust spreads. Neighbours start to inform on each other. But even then, faith in Turkey’s democracy endures, mostly unshaken. The descent into one-man rule under Mr Erdogan was not a plunge, but a gradual decline. “Authoritarianism, in Turkey, was not simply a strongman taking over a state,” Ms Hansen writes. “It was an act of creation, a process of transformation that begins when few are watching and, once identified, is often too late to stop.”

Wars on Turkey’s doorstep, from Ukraine to Iran, as well as the prospect of a wider conflict with Russia, have steered much of the commentary on Turkey towards its growing regional footprint and important role in NATO. The view from within the country gets shorter shrift. That suits Mr Erdogan perfectly well, as he is keen to avoid outside scrutiny of his autocratic excesses. Through Karagumruk, Ms Hansen offers a window into the Turkey he has created. Few books in English have captured its texture better than this one. ■

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Could Vaibhav Sooryavanshi become one of the greatest batters of all time?

The hard-hitting youngster sending cricket fans into a spin Could Vaibhav Sooryavanshi become one of the greatest batters of all time? May 28th 2026 When Vaibhav Sooryavanshi of the Rajasthan Royals lined up to bat against Mitchell Starc of the Delhi Capitals, it was a contest of innocence and experience. Mr Starc is 36, a three-time World Cup winner and regular star in the Indian Premier League (IPL), the sport’s most lucrative franchise-based tournament. Mr Sooryavanshi is 15 and has only played one full season in the IPL. Yet it was the youngster who put in a masterful performance on May 17th, smashing the Australian bowler around the stadium. Though Mr Starc’s team went on to win the game, the onslaught of runs was humbling.

For cricket fans, Mr Sooryavanshi’s talent is a source of unalloyed joy. He is lighting up the IPL. This year he has propelled the Royals into the play-offs and a shot at the final on May 31st. He exploded onto the cricket scene last season when, as a 14-year-old, he became the youngest-ever professional player to score a century (100 runs). The achievement prompted disbelief and even scepticism about Mr Sooryavanshi’s age. (His father has rejected such claims, citing bone-density tests.)

Mr Sooryavanshi has continued to rack up runs at an astounding pace. He scores at a rate of 2.4 runs a ball, far higher than any of his peers. An analysis by ESPNcricinfo, a website, found that he scores more off fast, vicious deliveries than anyone else in the league. He recently broke the record for the number of sixes scored in a single IPL season. So far he has cleared the boundary 65 times—six more than the previous record, which stood for 14 years. (He has also matched the record for the fastest half-century in IPL play-off history.) It is hard to think of an athlete in any sport who has been so dominant at such a young age.

Mr Sooryavanshi’s success rests on technique, physique and temperament. He stands up to bowlers with an extravagant backlift, which gives him more room to swing his bat in a long, violent arc. He is burly, which gives him power when striking the ball. Coaches and analysts credit his success to a less tangible quality: an unusual blend of maturity and audacity.

He is also a product of bigger forces. The IPL’s launch in 2008 revolutionised the sport, helping elevate the Twenty20 (T20) format it uses into cricket’s most popular. Unlike traditional Test cricket , played over five days, T20 matches are short and prize power-hitting over patience. Mr Sooryavanshi embodies that philosophy. He has played only a handful of red-ball, or multi-day, matches; one of his early coaches says he has never been trained in defence. In this IPL he has featured as an “impact player”, a rule that allows him to bat without having to field as well.

He reflects a deeper shift in Indian cricket, too. The sport has long thrived in the country’s wealthier areas, such as Mumbai and Kolkata, but the IPL has helped embed the game in India’s hinterlands. Coaching academies have been set up and are sustained by parents desperate to raise the next IPL star. Mr Sooryavanshi grew up in a small town in Bihar, India’s poorest state. His father sold his farmland to fund daily training in Patna, the state capital, a three-hour drive away.

Mr Sooryavanshi will need to prove himself on the global stage. In February he powered India to victory in the under-19 World Cup. It seems inevitable he will be selected for the senior team, maybe even this summer. But in many ways he is already a national hero. As he was dismantling Mr Starc, the Delhi crowd lapped it up, screaming at every boundary even though it was their own side that was conceding runs. Shirts bearing his name are among the most popular at IPL grounds; clips of his batting trend on Indian social media.

All prodigies are compared to other players, and so it is with Mr Sooryavanshi. In 1989 Sachin Tendulkar made his debut as a 16-year-old. Indians consider him the greatest player ever, who helped their country emerge as a force in global cricket. Now that India is the sport’s established superpower, Mr Sooryavanshi can never match that legacy. But observers reckon he is a once-in-a-generation talent who might become a megastar. He is a virtuoso, right off the bat. ■

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On her centenary, the late blonde bombshell is still making millionaires

Marilyn Monroe and the dead-star business On her centenary, the late blonde bombshell is still making millionaires May 28th 2026 THERE WERE many Marilyn Monroes. In the 1940s a young actress named Norma Jeane swapped her normal-sounding name for this more glamorous one; Marilyn, she felt, was “a veil” she could wear. Then came Hollywood Marilyn and, soon enough, sex-symbol Marilyn. Others emerged in gossip: there was girlish Marilyn who called her husband “Daddy”; political Marilyn who sang to (and probably slept with) the president; and even literary Marilyn , who read Dostoevsky and married Arthur Miller, a playwright. Later Marilyn became a tragic figure, dying from an overdose in 1962, aged 36.

This year there are almost as many celebrations as there are versions of Marilyn: June 1st marks the centenary of her birth. There are exhibitions at the National Portrait Gallery in London and the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in Los Angeles, as well as new books and film screenings. At commemorative auctions fans can bid on everything from Marilyn’s used lipstick to a tile from her bathroom. New products are also being released: you can sip Marilyn champagne, hold Marilyn china or wear jewel-encrusted Marilyn high heels. And if that’s not too many Marilyns, 500 or so will gather in Palm Springs on May 30th to try to break the world record for the largest gathering of Marilyn lookalikes.

The celebrations are not only the result of adoration. Much of the centenary was planned by the firm that owns the rights to Monroe’s estate and intellectual property (IP). Founded in 2010, Authentic Brands Group acquired Monroe as its first celebrity estate; today its portfolio includes Elvis Presley and Muhammad Ali.

You can make a killing from the IP of bygone celebrities. Authentic claims to make $80m a year in sales from Monroe’s estate alone. (The company is the second-largest IP-licensing business by revenue in the world, after Disney, with a mix of celebrity estates and other brands expected to bring in more than $38bn this year.) Anyone who was anyone—from Albert Einstein to Rosa Parks—has an agent to license their IP.

The business of profiting from dead celebrities is legally complex. Estates own what Mark Roesler, head of CMG, the firm servicing both Einstein and Parks, calls “a portfolio of IP”. This includes copyrights, trademarks and “right of publicity”, which in some American states allows estates to control the commercial use of the celebrity’s likeness, name and voice. (Monroe had few relatives, so Authentic snapped up the whole estate.)

The market grew in the late 1970s and early 1980s, driven in part by Presley’s death and his estate’s efforts to stop others profiting from his likeness; post-mortem publicity rights expanded, says Jennifer Rothman, the author of a book on the subject. Celebrity identities came to be seen as something that could be inherited like other property. Estates saw an opportunity.

The dead-celebrity business is profitable for two reasons. First, famous faces sell products. Einstein’s likeness has been used to plug reading glasses; Presley’s to sell red wine. (Some deals are turned down: CMG rejected a plan to make James Dean condoms, for example.) Brand deals help Monroe keep “pace” with modern culture, says Dana Carpenter, who oversees her estate at Authentic. Though her name is sometimes used to promote products she might have been baffled by, such as trendy LED face masks , the aim is to find a new generation of fans.

Second, celebrity IP can help tell better stories. In theory anyone could make a biopic or documentary about Monroe or Einstein, but estates often have the rights to copyrighted materials that are useful to film-makers. Authentic licensed IP for the “Elvis” biopic; CMG, which works with Robert Oppenheimer’s estate, helped with the film “Oppenheimer” . In 2023 Authentic launched its own production studio, and co-produced the recent film “EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert”, directed by Baz Luhrmann. As Jamie Salter, boss of Authentic, puts it, the most successful estates think not only about “preserving the past”, but also “participating in culture”.

They think about the future, too. In particular, firms are finding ways to use AI and holograms to bring back stars for live tours and fan experiences. In 2024 Authentic partnered with Soul Machines, an AI firm, to create a “digital Marilyn” who is “authentic and responsive”. The avatar wears Monroe’s signature red lipstick and says “darling” with alarming frequency.

Yet AI has also made it easier for others to use a celebrity’s likeness and voice. Now even a student in his bedroom can create a cartoon that looks or speaks like a star. It has become a bit like a game of “whack-a-mole” to get the “unauthorised” likenesses off the web, admits Mr Roesler. (Estates have long demanded payment for the right to use a star’s words or identity in films and adverts, and even on monuments.)

Celebrities who are still alive are also thinking about the future of their personal brands. Authentic has a roster of “living legends”, including Sir David Beckham, an ex-footballer. Unlike with Monroe’s estate, these stars are co-owners of their brand and actively collaborate on IP deals. Since partnering with Authentic in 2022, brand Beckham has plugged everything from beer to wireless headphones.

Monroe believed that she “belonged to the public and to the world”. Thanks to Authentic, people will know her for longer than she could have imagined—whether as a film star, a digital avatar or the beautiful face on a bottle of champagne. ■

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A new book offers an enjoyable tour of America at 250

Beverly Gage, a Pulitzer-prizewinning historian, takes the wheel A new book offers an enjoyable tour of America at 250 May 28th 2026 AMERICANS drive a lot. That habit has some detrimental effects, from air pollution and immense car parks to an inflated reverence for Jack Kerouac. But it also has benefits, such as the American road trip, used by generations of parents to annoy their captive children and by novelists to tell stories of new beginnings (“The Grapes of Wrath”) and catastrophic endings ( “The Road” ).

In a charming new book, Beverly Gage—a historian at Yale, who won a Pulitzer prize for her biography of J. Edgar Hoover—drives through American history. From George Washington to Ronald Reagan, and from Philadelphia to California, she roams among historic homes, monuments, parks and presidential libraries “in an attempt to explore, if not reconcile, the greatest tensions of American history”.

That sounds like a tall order for a road trip, but Ms Gage is a fun travelling companion. And her timing is good, with this year marking America’s semiquincentennial and the centennial of Route 66, one of the nation’s original highways.

The book begins, fittingly, with Washington, who tried to discover his country by road. Six months after taking office, he was back in the saddle, riding around New England and sleeping in taverns and inns “to commune with ordinary Americans”. Washington found that most Americans did not think of themselves as such: they identified with their town or region rather than their country. That was for good reason: the United States was barely an adolescent.

To her credit, Ms Gage avoids both the simplistic history of the Trumpian right and the fatalism of the progressive left. Visiting the Legacy Museum in Montgomery, Alabama, focused on racial injustice, Ms Gage takes issue with the museum’s contention that “Slavery did not end. It evolved.” Such pessimism is unhelpful: abolition involved “massive, heroic efforts and near-impossible efforts…I’m not sure what’s gained by suggesting they didn’t make much difference,” she argues.

The book’s pleasure is its journey, so it spoils nothing to say that she ends her trip feeling buoyed. On the road Ms Gage found faith in American progress that opinion polls fail to capture. However fractious today’s politics are, the country retains a great capacity for reinvention. Putting down the phone and picking up car keys this summer may also make others feel heartened. ■

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Just don’t mention the Judgment of Paris to the French

A blind tasting revolutionised the wine world 50 years ago Just don’t mention the Judgment of Paris to the French May 21st 2026 “MAYDAY!” COMES from the French m’aider (help me). But no one in the stiff-lipped wine world expected a disaster on that sunny May day in 1976. The great names and noses of French wine had been invited by Steven Spurrier, an English wine merchant, to judge a blind tasting. Spurrier hoped to garner publicity for his shop and wine school in Paris . To mark America’s bicentennial, he had tracked down a few bottles from young, unknown producers in Napa Valley, California, and put them alongside celebrated ones from Bordeaux and Burgundy. Spurrier, like the judges, expected the French to easily win the taste-off. France was “the undisputed mistress of the vine”, according to the “World Atlas of Wine” (1971), which devoted 73 pages to it and just eight to California.

But 50 years ago, on May 24th, the unthinkable happened. Red and white wines from Napa made in the French style—a bottle of Stag’s Leap and Chateau Montelena from 1973—won the contest, ranking above acclaimed names such as Château Mouton Rothschild and Château Haut-Brion. Unlike the mythical Judgment of Paris, which led to the Trojan war, golden grapes did not provoke an actual conflict—but they did prompt some fighting talk. One French wine official later described the tasting as “our Waterloo”. The French first blamed the judges. They also, as usual, blamed the English. “Perfidious Albion” is what one winemaker called Spurrier to his face; others lobbed less literary insults behind his back. (In 2008 Spurrier was played memorably by Alan Rickman in “Bottle Shock”, Hollywood’s depiction of the tasting.)

The Judgment of Paris was the shot heard round the wine world. Napa’s victory had two Nebuchadnezzar-size effects. First, it sparked demand for Californian wine at home and abroad. The volume of exported bottles of American wine more than quintupled between 1975 and 1980. Second, it inspired confidence in “new world” producers, including Argentina and Australia. “There is no more influential event in the wine world, ever,” claims Juan Muñoz-Oca, estate director at Stag’s Leap. Today the two winning bottles can be found at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, where George Washington’s uniform and the original star-spangled banner are also on display.

Much can be discerned from how the two countries are marking the tasting’s 50th anniversary. Stag’s Leap and Chateau Montelena are hosting events around the world and pouring tastes of the acclaimed vintages. (The 1973 Stag’s Leap and Montelena were released with a price tag of $6 and $6.50, respectively, around $35-38 in today’s dollars. Now a single bottle costs thousands of dollars, if you can find one.) And following Ralph Waldo Emerson’s observation that “music and wine are one,” in July a new one-act opera based on the tasting will premiere in Napa.

In France there will be no songs or spectacle. Ask winemakers there how often the Judgment of Paris is discussed, and they will claim almost never. (Though they will also point out that the French wines, on average, scored higher than Napa’s. And that they aged better, too.)

The competitive element of the tasting obscures the fact that, in the decades following the Judgment, both American and French wines boomed, enjoying new markets and newly minted middle-class wine drinkers. Fifty years on, the scene is less convivial. Wine consumption is falling , with Gen Z and baby-boomers alike preferring to drink “less but better”. After being associated with heart health, now wine is on the heart and mind of health officials, who say no amount of alcohol is safe. Wine is being “put in the same category as prostitution and drugs”, complains Stéphanie de Bouard-Rivoal of Château Angelus, a top-tier winery in Saint Émilion.

Today winemakers in Bordeaux talk openly about la crise (the crisis). “Pretty bad” is how Bo Barrett, who runs Chateau Montelena, describes the situation in Napa. Both regions are seeing vines ripped out, as the supply of grapes outstrips demand. France and the EU have committed around €250m ($290m) to vine-uprooting.

Of all the world’s wine regions , Burgundy has fared best. At about a third of Bordeaux’s size, it is smaller, less corporate and more coveted by connoisseurs. Its wines—reds made from Pinot Noir and whites from Chardonnay grapes—boast elegance and finesse. (Bordeaux’s reds are based on Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot.) Burgundy’s rarity, exclusivity and sometimes astronomical prices have prompted even millionaires to complain they can no longer afford to drink it. On Liv-ex, a wine exchange, Burgundy’s share of sales has risen to around 23%, more than triple what it was ten years ago (see chart).

Both Bordeaux and Napa, in contrast, are experiencing “economic crises” and are “at a turning-point”, says William Kelley, editor-in-chief of the Wine Advocate. Yet their suffering has different causes. Bordeaux is “paying for the mischiefs of the past”, says Omri Ram of Château Lafleur, namely that it produced a “bubble” of too much wine that was “sold for the wrong reasons to the wrong clients”. Chinese buyers had thirsted after Bordeaux’s prestige labels—until Xi Jinping denounced lavish gifts, and sales sputtered. That left winemakers, who had been raising prices, vulnerable to a collapse in demand.

The en primeur system governing how Bordeaux’s wines are sold has also stoked la crise. It facilitates pre-orders for new vintages, which hands cash to winemakers for cases delivered years later. With the price of older vintages now comparable to, or below, new releases, buyers are less keen to snap up the young stuff, which requires ageing and storage. It has created a doom loop, especially for the mid- and lower-tier wines. Last month wineries hosted their annual en primeur tastings, and the mood was tense. Some warn en primeur may cease to exist.

Napa’s winemakers are feeling pinched for different reasons. In recent decades they doubled down on the American market, selling to baby-boomers at high prices rather than prioritising a global footprint. But consumers are ageing and buying less. In addition, Napa’s most important international market, Canada, has dried up: sales of American wine there fell by nearly 80% in 2025, after most provinces banned American alcohol in retaliation for tariffs.

The cost of doing business in California (like France) is hangover-inducing, as is the red tape. “It’s hard for small producers to stay in business, so they’re gobbled up by larger wine companies,” says Mr Muñoz-Oca. Stag’s Leap is a case in point: Marchesi Antinori, an Italian firm, acquired sole ownership of it in 2023.

Palates have also changed. Napa underwent a “Cabernetisation”, as it chased the high scores and price tags of big red wines. Consumers, however, have shifted away from that “monster truck” style of red wine, says Mr Kelley. Cuisine has become lighter, and people want more balanced reds with lower alcohol levels.

Both Napa and Bordeaux are trying to navigate their new reality. Consumers are opening bottles younger, so “we try to make them approachable,” says Blandine de Brier Manoncourt, co-owner of Château Figeac in Bordeaux. Some, including Château Angelus, have launched lower-tier wines to appeal to younger buyers. Its 2023 Tempo d’Angelus sells for around €22 a bottle, about a twentieth the price of its flagship wine. Today the competition is not between America and France. It is between wine and everything else. ■

Kim Il Sung’s regime was influenced by Christianity, a new book shows

The unlikely inspiration for North Korea’s first dictator Kim Il Sung’s regime was influenced by Christianity, a new book shows May 21st 2026 People have been predicting the collapse of North Korea’s communist dictatorship since 1948, when Kim Il Sung seized power with Josef Stalin’s backing. And yet, almost 80 years later, the regime is still there, and the Kim family are still in charge of it, having survived the Korean war, the fall of the Soviet Union, decades of national self-isolation and two dynastic transitions. Totalitarian repression, as well as assistance from powers such as China and Russia, help explain the regime’s resilience. “Korean Messiah” by Jonathan Cheng, a journalist at the Wall Street Journal, sheds light on a less appreciated force: faith .

In keeping with communist principles, North Korea is officially atheist. Nonetheless, in Mr Cheng’s telling, its system owes as much to Jesus, Mary and Joseph as it does to Marx and Engels. He argues convincingly that Kim Il Sung appropriated the rituals and dogma of religion when forging his political ideology. For example, all North Koreans are taught a set of decrees called the “Ten Principles for the Monolithic Ideology”. They are “so similar in language to the biblical Ten Commandments, and…fulfilled so similar a function in the lives of its population” that they “might as well have been etched on a pair of stone tablets”, Mr Cheng writes.

Pyongyang had long been a hotbed of Christian thought. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries the city became known as “the Jerusalem of the East” among Western missionaries in Asia. Kim’s ancestors were among the first converts; his parents were fervent Presbyterians. As a child, he accompanied his father to chapel, where he sang hymns and learned to play the organ. “This upbringing gave the young man a front-row seat to the power of faith—its power to mobilise, to offer succour, and, perhaps most importantly, to inspire awe, devotion, fear and zeal.”

Kim’s exposure to Christianity also gave him an acute sense of the threat it posed to his hopes for absolute rule. After taking power in North Korea, Kim, by then an ardent Marxist and hardened anti-American crusader, came to see Christianity as a rival faith. Portraying himself as the true messiah, he brutally suppressed Christians, killing thousands of believers and sending more fleeing to the South.

Eventually the Great Leader’s teachings coalesced into a formal doctrine, known as Juche (self-reliance), which supplanted Marxism-Leninism as the foundation of the regime. Ideologues insisted that Kim’s dogma be treated as infallible. Mr Cheng quotes one North Korean escapee’s description of encountering Christianity after fleeing the country: “When they talked about God, it kept reminding me of Kim Il Sung…When they mentioned Jesus, it reminded me of Kim Jong Il.” The state enforces cult-like devotion to the ruling family. Jim Jones of Jonestown infamy was an admirer of Kim Il Sung. Jones’s acolytes met with North Korean officials more than a dozen times.

In arguing that Christianity holds the key to understanding the regime, Mr Cheng underplays other influences, such as Korea’s long history of monarchy, Stalinism and communist ideology itself. But seeing North Korea as a quasi-religious project is illuminating. In addition to brute force, the Kim dynasty relies on indoctrination and inquisition to stay in power. If its subjects harbour doubts, they are not allowed to express them, on pain of the gulag or worse. The regime persecutes any belief system that could rival its own. North Koreans who watch television shows smuggled in from rich, democratic South Korea—which reveal how much better life is without a god-king—can face the death penalty. The greatest threat the Kim cult faces is not America, but apostasy. ■

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In the hit TV drama, back for a second season, a bonk is never just a bonk

Why the sex in “Rivals” is more than mere titillation In the hit TV drama, back for a second season, a bonk is never just a bonk May 21st 2026 Everyone is a sex detective now. A train entering a tunnel, a jutting skyscraper: in the post-Freudian age, readers and viewers are primed to spot innuendo and phallic symbolism. Along with death, sex is said to be art’s bedrock subject. But occasionally—and more interestingly—the imagery works in the opposite way. Instead of other things standing in for sex, sex is a metaphor for other themes. Take “Rivals”.

The Tv bonkbuster, set in the mid-1980s in the fictional British county of Rutshire, is back for a second season. Based on Dame Jilly Cooper’s novels, it once again follows the antics and adulteries of alpha men and their wives (and other people’s wives), all driven and riven by class, money and ambition. Again there is copious rumpy-pumpy—still the most meaningful part of the drama.

In the first season’s finale, Tony, a villainous media baron played deliciously by David Tennant, was thwacked on the head with a gold statuette. Fans shouldn’t fret: he is soon well enough to keep his end up (and get it away). A few new faces join the cast, including “Muffy, short for Caroline” and some walking appendages. This time the ’80s soundtrack includes “The Chicken Song”, a novelty tune which, for many British viewers, will feel like a gruesome flashback to a humiliating bender. “What the fuck is this?” asks Cameron (Nafessa Williams), a badass American TV producer, quite understandably.

The heart of the show is still the slightly yucky yearning between Rupert (Alex Hassell, pictured right), a priapic toff and politician, and moony Taggie (Bella Maclean, pictured left), who long ago forgave him for groping her. That, and the sex. Unfolding in and around country piles, “Rivals” resembles a murder mystery , only the question is not who will get bumped off, but who will next shag whom. Now the characters are at it in the stables and jacuzzi and on a piano (again), with a splash of skinny-dipping instead of nude tennis.

Mindless titillation? Au contraire. Much as a cigar in art is rarely just a cigar—least of all when Tony is smoking it—a bonk in “Rivals” is never just a bonk. For starters, sex is sometimes about power and its abuses. “I can’t,” says Cameron when rebuffing Tony’s advances. “You can if you want to be promoted,” he snarls.

Next, sex is about freedom: from the constraints of class, social expectations, corporate decorum or dismal marriages. Some of Rutshire’s denizens grab their freedom with both hands. “I don’t wait around to be kissed by somebody. If I want to kiss someone, I do it,” dauntless Cameron declares. Others are more hesitant. “We can’t all just do what we want,” a timid figure laments.

Sex is history. Along with the music of the 1980s—and its knitwear, tobacco habit, convertibles, game-show formats and boozy lunches—“Rivals” resurrects the decade’s sexual prejudices. There are double standards: were he a woman, Rupert would be “tarred and feathered” for his philandering, his ex-wife complains. Homophobia is rife, compelling people to live painful double lives. “Do you even really exist if no one sees you’re there?” wonders a bereft gay man.

W.B. Yeats , a poet, reckoned the title couple’s smutty exchanges in “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” are “a forlorn poetry uniting their solitudes”. Likewise in “Rivals”, sex is often about loneliness. It can be a salve: Declan (Aidan Turner), a thrusting TV presenter and Taggie’s dad, knows that his passionate wife plays around for “relief from the loneliness” his workaholism causes. Yet if sex can fulfil a need for intimacy, the compulsive, Casanovan kind may suggest an unreachable isolation. Rupert’s conquests, he is told, are a doomed bid to “fill that emptiness” inside him.

Sex is a matter of luck, the arc of one life (or character) intersecting with a partner’s at the right moment. And, sometimes, sex is about honesty. Beneath the illicit hanky-panky, “Rivals” is an ode to marriage at its frankest. When they aren’t lambasting or betraying each other, Declan and his wife candidly share their fantasies and feelings.

The ostensible plot of the new series involves a struggle over a broadcasting franchise. But compared with the saucy bits, that is trivial. The real, profound action is in the bedroom, not the boardroom. (Metaphorically speaking—in practice they blur, the characters going in for al desko trysts as well as the al fresco sort.) The final moral of “Rivals” is surprising. Maybe everything does come down to sex—except for sex itself, which is often about something else. ■

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A new book by Molly Crabapple is a controversial history of a forgotten political movement

Not all Jews believed their future lay in Israel A new book by Molly Crabapple is a controversial history of a forgotten political movement May 21st 2026 AT THE dawn of the second world war, the majority of the world’s Jews, 9.5m of them, lived in Europe—and had for centuries. Though there were brief periods of acceptance, for the most part Jews were barely tolerated and subject to sporadic violence and restrictive laws governing where they lived and worked. Throughout the 19th century nationalist aspirations grew, and Jews debated where they belonged. Zionists had one answer: they had to create their own state. Bundists had another. It is their story Molly Crabapple, a Puerto Rican-Jewish writer and artist from New York, resurrects.

The General Jewish Labour Bund in Lithuania, Poland and Russia was founded in Vilnius in 1897. Bundists were socialists who believed in workers’ revolutions, but also recognised that Jews had particular needs and interests. They formed defence organisations to protect Jews from pogroms and promoted Yiddish culture. By 1906 the Bund had attracted 40,000 supporters, making it one of the largest socialist parties in the Russian empire.

Bundists bitterly opposed Zionism, believing, as Ms Crabapple explains, that “the establishment of Israel would lead to perpetual war with its neighbours and the people it had dispossessed.” Instead they believed in do’ikayt, Yiddish for “hereness”, meaning “the diaspora was home” and “Jews had the right to live in freedom and dignity wherever it was they stood.”

It may strike a contemporary reader as odd, but before the Holocaust most Jews were not Zionists. The Orthodox believed only God could call Jews back to the Holy Land; liberals believed Zionism was a concession to antisemitism ; and many simply found the idea of nearly 10m people emigrating impractical.

Ms Crabapple’s interest in the Bund is both political and personal. Her great-grandfather, Sam Rothbort, was born in 1882 in what today is Belarus. The Bund created believers like Rothbort who were committed enough to withstand ostracism, beatings, imprisonment and worse. Their bitterest battles were internecine, against Soviet-aligned communists and Zionists, neither of whom had much patience for competition. But their willingness to fight on behalf of Jews and alongside non-Jewish socialists earned them the tragic honour of becoming “as of 1938…the most popular Jewish party in Poland”.

The Holocaust changed everything. After the war, “Bundist survivors tried to keep their spirits up,” but “the movement they built had been decimated, as had the Polish world of their birth,” Ms Crabapple writes. The Zionists, whatever their arguments’ merits, at least had a state to offer survivors. The Bund had nothing but dashed utopian hopes, and the party ceased operations in 1949. The only reason this book exists is because the Bund’s archivist smuggled two train-cars’ worth of papers from Berlin to Paris in 1933.

This impassioned history of a century-old failed political movement briefly made it on to the New York Times bestseller list. Not everyone is happy about it. The editor of Commentary, a right-leaning Jewish magazine in America, has called Ms Crabapple “a sixth-rate middle-aged anti-Zionist screed-meister” and “an enemy to her people”. But though anti-Zionism sometimes covers for antisemitism, they are not identical, as Ms Crabapple’s book shows.

In America and elsewhere, the share of people with negative views of Israel has risen markedly during the course of its brutal war in Gaza (however initially justified) and attacks on Iran. According to a recent survey, today just 37% of Jewish Americans identify as Zionists, though 71% profess an “emotional connection” to Israel and 88% say it has the right to exist as a Jewish and democratic state (whatever they mean by that). Jews in the diaspora who want to celebrate their heritage without tying themselves to Israel can look to the Bundist concept of “hereness” this book celebrates—and to the long and honourable Jewish history of fighting for others alongside themselves. ■

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A new book looks at when the written word goes wrong

Beware the typo—and other lessons of literary history A new book looks at when the written word goes wrong May 21st 2026 WHAT A DIFFERENCE a word makes. In 1631 printers omitted three letters from the seventh commandment. The bungled injunction—“Thou shalt commit adultery”—cost them their licence and a £300 fine (worth around £54,000, or $72,000 today). The “Wicked Bible” is a warning of the perils of misprints.

A new book offers an entertaining look at “all the ways words can go wrong”. Rebecca Lee, who works at Penguin Random House, explores publishers’ “glitches and gremlins”, as well as censorship, plagiarism , hoaxes, failures and feuds. She chronicles how the written word can be “divisive, damaging, disruptive and unwelcome”.

Take Winston Churchill’s history of the second world war, which called France’s army “the poop of the French nation” (he had written “prop”). Editors—or “correctors”, as their 17th-century counterparts were called—emerge as crucial props against blunders. Ms Lee also offers many examples of atrocious writing. “Bad” style can ascend to a kind of genius. Amanda McKittrick Ros was an Irish writer of prolix, overblown 19th-century novels. Her euphemisms alone astonish: trousers become “the southern necessity”. Hearing about the Nobel prize, she asked her publisher: “Do you think I should make a ‘dart’ for it?”

At times, this inky history feels rushed. Chapters scoot through censorship’s most famous instances and skip across rejections and vicious reviews. But Ms Lee’s judgments are sound: “Freedom to read”, she observes, “remains a right constantly under siege .”

Inevitably, the book closes with AI as literary threat and promise. The technology offers a “flood of free or cheap content” and plunders past creativity to deliver “rear-view mirrors of storytelling”. Error-strewn, vice-prone, human-authored books have already weathered almost six centuries of debacles. But this next chapter could be the most dramatic yet. ■

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Readers are hooked. Authors are reaping the rewards

Gamified novels—known as LitRPG—are a winning format Readers are hooked. Authors are reaping the rewards May 21st 2026 ALL CARL wants to do is smoke his cigarette, but Princess Donut, his ex-girlfriend’s cat, has escaped. He reluctantly goes after the creature when—“slam”—his building, and the city beyond it, is flattened like “a massive tin can that had been crushed by a giant cosmic boot”. Carl is one of the few survivors left on Earth. Along with Princess Donut, he is forced into a dungeon to fight various monsters; the battles will be televised throughout the universe. As they “level up” through the floors and try to make their escape, they earn XP (experience points).

It sounds like the premise of a video game . But it is the introduction to “Dungeon Crawler Carl”, a book series by Matt Dinniman, which has sold over 2.7m copies in print. The first instalment has been on the New York Times paperback bestseller list for 19 weeks and counting. The eighth, “A Parade of Horribles”, was released on May 12th. The audiobook is in first place on Audible’s bestseller list in America; all the other books are in the top 20. A TV adaptation and a graphic novel of Carl’s misadventures are in the works.

Gamified novels—known as literary role-playing games, or LitRPG—are going mainstream. Such novels borrow the tropes of video and tabletop games. (Unlike choose-your-own-adventure tales, however, the reader does not make narrative choices.) Characters face challenges and grow stronger. They go on quests to obtain rewards. In Mr Dinniman’s novels Carl gets tougher as he punches goblins and defeats a “Krakaren”, a monster that is a combination of a “cosmic octopus” and “your average, suburban, anti-vax, let-me-talk-to-your-manager mom”. Throughout the book the reader is updated on his character stats, health bar, XP and special skills.

Video-game vernacular provides a useful shorthand. Minor figures are called NPCs: non-playable characters. By “just saying, ‘He levelled up’, I can communicate a tremendous amount of information that if I was writing traditional fantasy, I would have to demonstrate,” says Seth Ring, who has published nearly 50 LitRPG titles.

The core readers of LitRPG are gamers in their 30s who appreciate such elements. But its biggest audience is audiophiles, from truckers to stay-at-home mothers. The novels often have only one perspective, and are usually narrated in the first person, which makes them easy to follow. Fans gush about the voice actors almost as much as they do about the authors.

Though a relatively new player in Western publishing, LitRPG has been around for a while. (A Russian publisher claims to have coined the term in 2013.) Versions of it have long been popular in Asia. Xuanhuan novels, a type of Chinese fantasy, took off in the early 2000s. Such tales drew on Daoist ideas of “cultivation” and self-improvement and followed heroes as they progressed through different realms. Japanese manga and anime often feature isekai (another world), where characters are transported into video-game-like settings with magic and sword fights. The idea is also a trope in Korean webtoons .

Western writers have borrowed these ideas and created an “unholy mish-mash” to forge their own version of LitRPG, says Andrei Nadir, an author who writes under the pen name Actus. Authors including Mr Dinniman argue LitRPG is less a genre and more a style of writing: stories might be about aliens and post-apocalyptic survival or they might feature steampunk cowboys and orcs who enjoy cooking.

In the early- to mid-20th century pulp fiction such as Raymond Chandler’s “The Big Sleep” and Dashiell Hammett’s “The Maltese Falcon” hooked readers with a punchy style. LitRPG follows in that tradition, reckons Rhett Bruno, head of Aethon, a publishing house. It is “filling a big void”, he insists, between ponderous fantasy epics such as “Game of Thrones” and smutty romantasy series like “A Court of Thorns and Roses”. LitRPG offers “fun, light, rompy-type action fantasy”. Chapters are short, action-packed and usually end with a cliffhanger. The format delivers regular dopamine hits to readers.

Writers of LitRPG are thinking strategically on and off the page. Many self-publish their work online, chapter by chapter; some are prolific, posting new material daily. Readers often interact with their favourite writers and leave comments on chapters, which then shape the stories. Mr Nadir, for instance, aims for 5,000 words a day and completes a book about every three months. Yet it is not unusual for him to rewrite an already published chapter after receiving feedback from fans.

Authors are gaining more than XP. Loyal followers will pay for early access to chapters. One writer, with the cryptic pen name Zogarth, makes nearly $90,000 every month from subscribers on Patreon, making him one of the most successful authors on the platform. Writers have ample leverage if they choose to negotiate with publishing houses. Mr Dinniman sold the print rights to “Dungeon Crawler Carl” to Ace Books and the audio rights to Audible, but retained the digital ones. “We found something that might change the rules of publishing,” declares Seth Fishman, his agent. (In fact, bespoke rights arrangements are not new, but they are increasingly common among digital-first authors.)

To be sure, LitRPG is not going to win any prestigious awards. Quantity has been trouncing quality. But readers looking for escapist thrills are often forgiving. “We are trying to write really, really good stories,” Mr Ring says. “We are not trying to create the next great American novel.” ■

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Come for the art, stay for the drama

Welcome to a spectacularly fraught edition of the Venice Biennale Come for the art, stay for the drama May 14th 2026 IT WAS SUPPOSED to be a party. The trappings were all there: an open bar, resplendent pink flowers, a musician, scheduled DJ sets. And yet something was amiss—in fact, lots of somethings. In the Russian pavilion at the 61st edition of the Venice Biennale, irony was everywhere yet acknowledged nowhere.

“Why do flowers no longer smell?”, a seven-paragraph, mind-wilting description, accompanied a floral sculpture—which did, in fact, smell. A bin filled with a jumble of clothing and a sign declaring “tutto a 0€” was not intended to evoke refugees displaced by Russia’s war in Ukraine, but who could think of anything else? And then there was the spokesman wearing a black-and-white striped mask and Cheshire-cat smile, as visitors milled around uneasily. “It’s a festival,” he insisted. “It’s like Coachella, but in Venice !”

The official theme of this year’s Biennale, which opened to the public on May 9th and runs until November 22nd, is “In Minor Keys”. But the art world’s oldest and largest global gathering has opened to a loud soundtrack of discord. The festival’s decision to allow Russia to host an exhibition—after being absent from the past two instalments—set off a furore, resulting in the European Commission pulling €2m ($2.3m) of funding and several leaders boycotting the Biennale’s opening.

For the first time in its history, the prize-giving jury resigned, after announcing it would not consider countries facing war-crimes charges, namely Israel and Russia. (The threat of a lawsuit by the artist representing Israel, seeking personal damages from jury members, reportedly contributed to their decision to stand down.) With no judges to hand out the usual awards, this year visitors will be able to vote for the best artist and national pavilion, in a populist move more reminiscent of “American Idol” than high art.

The Biennale was founded in 1895 to celebrate the 25th wedding anniversary of King Umberto and his wife and to display the strength of Italy, unified only a few decades earlier. Ever since, the art world’s Olympics have reflected the wills and woes of their era.

So it goes today. “What did we expect? The world is in such a shambles, why did we think the Biennale would be any different?” wonders Massimiliano Gioni, curator of the Biennale in 2013 and now the artistic director of the New Museum in New York. This year is the most chaotic and contentious since 1968, when student protesters targeted the event, says Chelsea Haines, a historian of contemporary art.

Like many institutions besieged by politics, the Biennale’s organising body has come off as ill-equipped to manage the hard issues of free speech, propaganda and participation. This year 100 countries have pavilions showing their best artists and ideas, mostly scattered around Venice’s public gardens (Giardini) and former shipyards (Arsenale). In a compromise that has pleased no one, including the Italian government, which has been at odds with the Biennale’s leadership, Russia’s pavilion was permitted to open for previews but will remain closed for the main event.

Nearby, Israel’s permanent pavilion is shut, supposedly for construction, with police standing guard outside. Israel was instead allowed a space in the Arsenale, where it is harder to stage protests because of its narrower aisles. There, an artist has set up a pool of water with pipes dripping into it, which “invites viewers into a contemplative environment”.

Several other countries not involved in actual wars have waged very public battles with artists. Australia fired its chosen artist after concerns emerged that he had included Hizbullah’s former leader in a previous work; it reinstated him after an outcry over freedom of expression.

Meanwhile, South Africa’s culture minister tried to persuade its artist, Gabrielle Goliath, to remove a Palestinian poet from her work; she refused and was told she could no longer take part. In the end, after trying to cancel Ms Goliath, South Africa cancelled its pavilion. A nearby church offered a “radical refuge” for her show, “Elegy”. It features videos of women singing a single note on loop to honour women who have been killed. The church’s acoustics make it all the more haunting.

Elsewhere globalisation has given way to localisation. “A lot of the pavilions have become rooted in the countries themselves and are more inward-looking” this year, observes a longtime Biennale-goer. Many, such as Germany’s and South Korea’s, are focused on their own histories.

And then there’s America’s pavilion. After specifying that the exhibition needed to reflect “American values” and not touch diversity, equity or inclusion, the government did not work with the National Endowment for the Arts, the agency that typically vets proposals, for the first time “in the protocol’s history”, says Alexander Alberro, a professor of art history at Barnard and Columbia. Instead, the artist was chosen by a new non-profit, run by a woman who used to oversee a pet-food firm.

The artist chosen, Alma Allen, is a self-trained outsider to the liberal art world, which is probably to the Trump administration’s liking (though it is not exactly on brand that Mr Allen emigrated to Mexico). His energetic sculptures surely have a message, but viewers are left wondering what exactly it is (see picture above). “We’re not telling people what to think,” says Jeffrey Uslip, the American pavilion’s curator. Every sculpture is untitled. Only by the exit is there any explanatory text. Mr Uslip notes that the first sculpture you encounter at the entrance, made of Iranian travertine, might appear to some viewers like a mushroom cloud or mountain; another one looks like a whale or even a body bag. But which are they intended to be? The exhibition is “sphinx and chimera. It is a riddle,” replies Mr Uslip. Unfortunately, it is a riddle that will leave plenty of visitors stumped.

Fittingly for such supercharged times, the most popular art in Venice involves spectacle and live performance. In the lead-up to the opening, hundreds swarmed Austria’s pavilion to see “Seaworld Venice” (pictured), which features naked women. One rings a bell with her body. Another sits in a tank of water with a scuba mask, connected to portable toilets, which guests can use. A short walk away, Japan’s pavilion, focused on declining birth rates, allows visitors to participate by picking up baby dolls, carrying them around and changing their nappies.

Art featuring nudity and novelty often appeals, but even more so when it distracts from the political tension and existential angst in Venice and everywhere else. However, the best works do not divert your attention but focus it.

That is the feat of Ukraine’s excellent contribution, “Security Guarantees” (pictured top), which greets guests when they arrive in the Giardini: a hulking sculpture of an origami deer suspended from a truck. (The title refers to promises from America and others to protect Ukraine when it agreed to give up its nuclear arsenal in 1994.) The artist, Zhanna Kadyrova, removed her sculpture from Pokrovsk, close to the war’s front line, and drove it across Europe, documenting the stops along the way. Since then the city has been flattened by Russia’s bombardment.

The subject is heavy; the work is creative and even beautiful. People stop briefly to contemplate it, and then head off, presumably in the direction of Austria. ■

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A new book charts the gilded history of an ancient asset

The weird, wild story of humanity’s obsession with gold A new book charts the gilded history of an ancient asset May 14th 2026 In the 1980s Lloyd Blankfein, the future boss of Goldman Sachs but then a rookie gold trader, bought a kilogram of the metal for himself. He describes this in “Streetwise”, his memoir , as less an investment than a conversation piece—albeit one that cost around $15,000 ($50,000 today). When he handed it round at dinner parties, he found it better at prompting awe than speech. “People would become slightly mesmerised,” he writes. “No one ever wanted to let go of it.”

As Dominic Frisby, a financial writer, recounts, gold has captivated human beings since time immemorial. In doing so, it has shaped the course of history. The earliest known artefacts made of it are 6,700 years old, from the Neolithic period, and include crowns, brooches and a “gold phallus cover, with holes for threads to tie it on”. Even then, in other words, gold was already bound up with wealth and power—as it still is today. (The phallus cover, Mr Frisby muses, perhaps indicated “the owner’s status as a leading procreator”.)

The “primal instinct” to covet gold pervades folklore. Greek myths heave with the stuff: there is a golden fleece (sought by the Argonauts), a golden apple (given to Aphrodite) and golden everything (touched by King Midas). Ancient rulers understood the power of this symbolism and put it to good use. When the Lydian empire struck the first coins in the seventh century BC, it made them from silver and gold. Some 200 years later, when Alexander the Great conquered the Persian empire, he carefully secured all its main gold-supplying regions. He then established 26 mints across Europe, Asia and Africa, and ensured that some of the most valuable coins had a gold purity of 98%.

This idea stuck, on and off, for over 2,000 years—and so gold’s history is also that of money. It is therefore unfortunate that Mr Frisby’s grasp of this topic is shaky. He writes reverently of the gold standard, under which governments used to peg their currencies’ value to the metal and for which no serious economist would advocate today. Its well-documented contributions to deflationary and financial crises, including the Depression , go curiously undiscussed in this book. By contrast the author blasts the “pernicious consequences” of the “floating fiat currencies” that replaced gold-backed ones after America junked the international gold standard in 1971. In fact, this switch set the stage for a great economic boom.

Part of the fun of this book is how much Mr Frisby embodies the stereotype of the goldbug as a crank. “Without the discipline of gold,” he writes, governments have grown “fat on waste, war and welfare”, as if these problems were born in the 1970s. Currencies not backed by gold are blamed for rising house prices, immigration and “feelings of hopelessness”. “The connections,” Mr Frisby darkly warns, “are undeniable once you understand the forces at work.” This reviewer must confess to having finished the book unenlightened.

It is nevertheless worth reading, because the author has collected some cracking stories. There is the Spanish King Ferdinand II’s order to the conquistadors to “Get gold, humanely, if possible, but at all hazards, get gold.” There are the gold rushes of the 19th century, which transformed California and Australia. There is the Bank of Norway’s daring—and amazingly successful—mission to keep its gold from the Nazis during the second world war.

It is also worth reading this book because gold still matters a lot. It accounts for over 80% of America’s foreign-exchange reserves. Meanwhile America’s weaponisation of the dollar, through sanctions on the likes of Russia and Iran, has prompted a race for alternatives, whether backed by governments or based on bitcoin . Yet as Mr Frisby notes, even the countries that are keenest on these alternatives, such as China, Saudi Arabia and Thailand, are clamouring to buy gold, too.

So are investors, because of gold’s use as a haven from inflation and political chaos. Both have surged in recent years, as has the gold price: Mr Blankfein’s kilogram would now fetch around $150,000. As a basis for money gold is still, as John Maynard Keynes wrote in 1924, “a barbarous relic”. But as a component in investors’ portfolios, it is as important as ever. ■

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A new biography digs into the life of an intrepid journalist

Jan Morris was a man, then a trans woman—but always a narcissist A new biography digs into the life of an intrepid journalist May 14th 2026 In July 1972 the man once known as “James Morris” walked into a clinic in Casablanca. Days later, after a brisk operation, Jan Morris walked out. “I really am me!” She felt instantly different. As a man her role had been to “push and initiate”; now it was to “yield and accept”. She felt closer to animals. She found herself “talking to the garden flowers, wishing them a Happy Easter”. Women are like that. You can barely move in London parks for women talking to flowers.

Not all women were so nice. Some, when they read “Conundrum” (1974), Morris’s account of her transition, did not smile at flowers and think pretty, yielding thoughts. Instead they said some pretty unyielding things. Morris is “to me a man who has eaten a great many pills”, wrote Germaine Greer, an Australian feminist. Morris was “a man’s idea of a woman”, said Rebecca West , a British critic. Though not wholly a man’s idea of a woman. When it came to domestic labour, Morris’s daughter observed, “she did nothing.”

All lives are complicated. The life of Jan Morris—soldier, journalist, writer, man, woman, father, mother—is more complicated than most, as a new biography by Sara Wheeler, a travel writer, shows. (Her pronouns can feel complex too: this review, like the book, refers to Morris as “he” pre-transition.) Morris lived an “insanely interesting life”, witnessing the second world war, the conquest of Everest, the end of British rule in Palestine. “She was,” Ms Wheeler writes, “the 20th century”. Certainly, after he became world-famous for covering the first conquest of Everest as a journalist for the Times, Morris met many of its most interesting players. Harry Truman chatted to him; Walt Disney spoke with him about his cartoons.

Time erodes all lives, however great, into a few “Ozymandias”-like fragments: Napoleon is Waterloo and Elba; Caesar is the Rubicon, Cleopatra and his assassination; lesser lives are littler yet. Morris—who had been “James of Everest”—became the man who, in 1972, had had an operation and started dressing, says Ms Wheeler, like “a Walmart version of the Queen”. She was, as another trans woman said of herself, “a sex change first and anything else second”.

But Morris did so much. When he was born, in 1926, the British Empire lay over the map in “huge red slabs”—and empire coloured his life, too. His wife, Elizabeth, was brought up in it (she lived in Ceylon, now Sri Lanka, with a pet baby elephant); Morris’s job was “to help dissolve” it (he was sent to Palestine as an intelligence officer by the War Office); later, he chronicled it (in his “Pax” trilogy).

His big break came when he was sent by the Times to cover the Everest expedition (much to the irritation of the leader, John Hunt, who considered Morris “physically substandard”). The expedition was such hot news that its results had to be telegrammed in codewords: the death of a climber was to be “SIGNALBOX”; success was “SNOW CONDITIONS BAD”. On May 30th 1953 Morris sat, dizzy with altitude in his tent, and typed: “SNOW CONDITIONS BAD STOP”.

The ascent of Morris’s career had begun. His family life was now thriving (he and Elizabeth eventually had five children), but Morris was struggling. At four he knew he “had been born into the wrong body”. And so he began his transition in his early 30s. The description of this change is interesting—but far more interesting is Morris’s unchanging narcissism. When their baby daughter died of meningitis, Morris was not at the hospital: he had refused to go. Morris may have talked to flowers, but paused to consider few other living things. Particularly not Elizabeth, who kept house, kept quiet over the gender transition and endured.

As this detailed (at times far too detailed) biography shows, her transition would, in the end, eclipse all else. “I want to be remembered as Jan ‘Empire’ Morris” she said. But she noted, “the headlines will read, ‘Sex Change Author Dies’.” Many, Ms Wheeler notes, “more or less did”. Few people today read her works. The sun is setting on Empire Morris. ■

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Ready for more after bingeing on TV?

“Companion podcasts” are the latest hit format Ready for more after bingeing on TV? May 14th 2026 When you are not watching your new favourite TV show, you may be thinking about it. How did they come up with that plotline—and how did the lead actor feel when he read the script? Where did they shoot that memorable scene, and with how many retakes? How long did it take to make that bejewelled costume?

A new format has emerged to satisfy fans’ curiosity: the companion podcast. Recently listeners have devoured episodes about “Beef”, a mini-series, and plunged into “The Pitt”, a medical drama. This month, ahead of its tv remake of “Harry Potter” in December, HBO is releasing a podcast revisiting the eight movies. And on May 15th viewers will return to Rutshire for the second season of “Rivals”, an adaptation of Jilly Cooper ’s bonkbuster novel. An official podcast will chronicle “the joys and challenges of bringing 1980s television and naughtiness to life”.

At least 17 companion podcasts have launched this year alone (see chart). They tend to offer fans a glimpse behind the scenes, as the tv show’s cast and crew chat about the decisions and antics on set. Take, for example, Neil Druckmann, who developed the video game “The Last of Us” , and became host of a podcast accompanying the television show. He let fans in on the adaptation process, including how he “just could not crack” a film and how he was “unburdened by teaching people how to walk, move, jump and crawl”, as he rejigged entire plot points for a passive, non-gamer audience.

Becky Rho, HBO’s director of podcasts, says the format appeals in an “age of information”. Audiences are eager to know: “How did they pull off that stunt? How did this character or story arc come together?” Such podcasts should be “genuinely immersive and insightful”, says Darby Dorras, a producer on the recent “Peaky Blinders” tie-in. It is no good “assuming the audience is going to stick around for a bit of a fun chat”. Some podcasts bring in subject experts to add authority and analysis. A paediatrician has dissected the medical storylines in “The Pitt”, and a space scientist has guided viewers through the astrophysics of “ 3 Body Problem ”.

There has long been demand for this kind of content. Back in the day, dvd box sets came with special features and interviews. (Streaming did away with DVDs and their behind-the-scenes bonuses, to the dismay of enthusiasts.) Unofficial “rewatch podcasts”, in which fans scrutinise their favourite shows, filled some of the gap and gained a popular following. In the 2010s two comedians found a huge audience with “Gilmore Guys”, an affectionate tribute to the teen drama “Gilmore Girls”.

So for networks, companion podcasts are a no-brainer. They are relatively cheap to produce, bolster retention and can be enjoyed anywhere. “One of the core objectives here is to introduce content that can be consumed on the move,” reckons Matt Trickett of Ampere Analysis, a research firm. Fans can be thinking about their favourite show all day long, not just when they watch it on the sofa after work.

In time, a saturation point will surely come. Can you imagine if even half of the 1,100 shows released in America in 2025 had an official podcast? But for now, they are thriving. Television audiences are primed for an earful. ■

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Daredevil vacations are becoming thrillingly popular

Who wants to relax on holiday? Daredevil vacations are becoming thrillingly popular May 14th 2026 “A VACATION IS having nothing to do and all day to do it in,” said Robert Orben, an American comedy writer. Summer holidays have long involved reclining on a far-flung beach . But more tourists are forgoing sun loungers in search of adrenalin-packed pursuits, such as canyoning (scrambling down gorges) and abseiling (descending rock faces). “Darecations” are a top tourism trend of 2026, according to Pinterest, a social-media firm. Around 14% of international travellers are keen on such pursuits, suggests the Adventure Travel Trade Association (ATTA), a trade group.

Adventure travel involves “wanting to get out of your comfort zone”, explains Heather Kelly of ATTA. Sometimes that means trying an extreme activity: SportsCover Direct, an insurance provider, claims that the number of people buying travel insurance for sporting activities nearly tripled between 2023 and 2025. The fastest-growing endeavours include mountaineering, rafting, hiking and running events such as marathons .

Other times darecations come with added comforts. “Soft adventures”, as industry folk call them, are on the rise. Such holidays can involve less strenuous activities—calm kayaking rather than white-water rafting—and luxury accommodation. On Airbnb bookings for nature and outdoor experiences, which include surfing and cycling tours, are outpacing all other activities.

There is “a shift away from fly-and-flop holidays”, notes Lisa Marçais of Airbnb, and towards “immersive and memorable travel experiences”. As the wealthy amass even greater riches, they have more to splurge on tailored trips. Darecationers say they want to get off the beaten track; many see adventure travel as a status symbol. Rare events, such as seeing a volcano erupt at sunrise, make great stories to tell friends.

Or better yet, show off on social media. Darecations offer the sort of enviable views instantly loved on Instagram. “The best things”, many captions attest, are found not on the beach but “on the other side of fear”. Holidays spent simply lounging about have never been such a flop. ■

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Maven not only identifies targets—it tells commanders how to attack them, too

The AI that transformed American warfare Maven not only identifies targets—it tells commanders how to attack them, too May 14th 2026 THE MAVEN Smart System is perhaps the most important weapon system you have never heard of. It has spotted Iranian missiles heading for Israel and rocket launchers in Yemen. It has detected migrants crossing America’s southern border and drug boats in the Caribbean. On one day in 2022 it found more than 260 potential targets for Ukraine .

And Maven does not just sense such things: it can also co-ordinate the response. It fuses together different sorts of intelligence—photos, text, radio and electromagnetic pulses—and works out which plane, carrying which munitions, is closest to which target. With a single click by a human, Maven can turn data into ash. As one NATO official tells Katrina Manson, “This is the Microsoft Windows of warfighting.” It may well become to armed forces what Microsoft is to office drones.

In “Project Maven”, Ms Manson, a national-security journalist at Bloomberg, has written one of the most important books on war and technology in many years. It is a scintillating account of how Drew Cukor, a hard-driving marine, created a team of mavericks who put AI at the heart of America’s war machine—even though that team was often at war with itself and with the rest of the Pentagon.

It is also a story of Silicon Valley’s shifting relationship with war and the Pentagon. Google walked out of Maven in 2018 after employee protests over the tech giant collaborating on lethal tools. Palantir later became the single most important firm in Maven’s development.

It started out as a project harnessing AI to find objects in reams of drone footage, a job that previously consumed huge quantities of manpower. Early algorithms, tested during counter-terrorism operations in Somalia in 2017, were erratic. Algorithms would label clouds as flying school buses. The next year, in Afghanistan , the software identified trees as people and rocks as buildings. But it improved.

On one occasion, just as American forces were about to launch a drone strike, an analyst spotted a shepherd walking into the field of view. It had taken him 40 seconds to notice the man; when they tested Maven on the same video feed, it took the AI less than a second to detect him.

In 2019 Maven was used during the operation to kill Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the head of Islamic State, in Syria, and Qassem Suleimani, an Iranian general, by drone strike in 2020. When Joe Biden pulled American forces out of Kabul the next year, Maven would work out how many people were thronging the airfield during the mad scramble.

However, it was Russia’s invasion of Ukraine that was the pivotal moment for Maven. The targeting tool was feeding what America euphemistically called “points of interest” to Ukraine on an industrial scale, at the cost of $1m per month in cloud-computing bills. “Sometimes it felt as though the US was all but punching co-ordinates into the weapons systems themselves,” Ms Manson writes.

AI is context-specific, the book makes startlingly clear. Models that had 70% success rates in Afghanistan dropped to 30% in the Philippines, where people walked in front of thick green jungle rather than dusty yellow ground. Similarly, the algorithms struggled to cope with Ukrainian snow and Russian tanks with their turrets blown off. Good data was crucial. Training a single algorithm might take 10,000 images, each one accurately labelled. In 2021-22 more than 1,500 algorithms were whittled down to just two dozen for use in Ukraine.

When Maven was launched, Pentagon officials portrayed it as an intelligence tool, far from the messy and controversial work of targeting. Ms Manson’s book dispels this notion. From the start, Maven was intended to speed up America’s kill chain: the process of finding targets, deciding what to do and conducting an attack. One official at the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency tells Ms Manson that large-language models have speeded up the targeting process five-fold, allowing America to identify and hit 5,000 targets per day. “Ultimately,” says General Chris Donahue, who pioneered Maven’s use in Ukraine and now serves as the commander of American land forces in Europe, “all this stuff will become automated.”

That raises profound questions around human control of war . In a conflict between America and China or Russia, each side would face enormous pressure to strike quickly and decisively, before the other side could find targets and launch weapons. Even if people are overseeing the process, can they keep up, particularly if something goes wrong? Long after Maven was deployed in Ukraine, it was still producing ten incorrect detections for every square kilometre it assessed.

Now, as well as operating on distant servers, the algorithms developed by Maven sit inside weapons. The book describes two little-known weapons intended to overwhelm and slow down Chinese forces in any war in the Pacific. “Goalkeeper” is a loitering munition, or suicide drone; “Whiplash” is an explosives-laden jet ski, whose early versions were smuggled into Ukraine by the CIA for testing. Each type could be sent to find and attack targets on its own.

That makes thorough data more important than ever. When Mavenites tried to build a submarine-hunting algorithm, they found that P-8 sub-hunting planes wiped their hard drives at the end of each mission. After some resistance from America’s navy, such data were acquired and supplemented with hundreds of thousands of inputs from “boat cameras, port cameras, infrared systems...destroyers, combat ships, buoys, dhows” and more. One defence official says “We’re basically watching the [People’s Liberation Army] all the time…to get AI training data.”

Ms Manson has conducted scores of interviews with the people who built and use Maven, as well as its opponents. Mr Cukor emerges as an intriguing character—reprimanded by the Marine Corps for overseeing a toxic culture within Maven—whose intensity and drive shaped the programme’s success. He wants decision-makers in Washington to use his innovations wisely. “Let’s be able to look ourselves in the mirror and make sure we are careful,” he says. “We have all this tech; are we the best custodians of it?” ■

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They involve a lot of gush—but not a lot of literary criticism

Many celebrities now have book clubs. Most are irritating They involve a lot of gush—but not a lot of literary criticism May 7th 2026 What makes a good literary critic? For centuries writers were in agreement. The critic, Wordsworth noted, was a scornful sort who “frowned” on things. A critic knows, wrote Dorothy Parker, when a book is not “to be tossed aside lightly” but “thrown with great force”. A critic should—as Graham Greene said of all writers—have “a splinter of ice in the heart”. But then Greene had never met Dua Lipa.

Ms Lipa is a British pop star. She is also an increasingly popular literary critic, thanks to her book-club podcast, in which she interviews authors. But Ms Lipa does not have a splinter of ice in her heart. She has something much lovelier. She loves books (“I love books”). She loves storytelling (“I love storytelling”). She loves Helen Garner, an Australian novelist (“I fell in love with you”). She loves Margaret Atwood’s biography (“I loved it. I love it. I love it so much”).

People—including publishing bigwigs—love her back. In 2022 Ms Lipa delivered a speech at the Booker prize, Britain’s most prestigious literary award. She has interviewed a Booker winner (David Szalay) and a Nobel prizewinner (Olga Tokarczuk). In October she will demonstrate “her passion for the written and spoken word” as curator of London Literature Festival.

Book clubs are changing. A hobby that was once dull, domestic and faintly frumpy has had a glow-up. Now, anyone who is anyone—and, given the nature of modern celebrity, plenty of people who are almost no one—has a book club, whether podcast, website, YouTube channel or newsletter. Reese Witherspoon, an actor and producer, has a book club. (She is its “book-lover-in-chief”.) Gwyneth Paltrow had a book club as part of her lifestyle brand, Goop. (“Crime and Punishment”, Ms Paltrow declared, is one of her “all-time favourite novels”.) Kaia Gerber, a model, has one with the perplexing aim of “building up our community of rage readers”.

In one way, this feels odd: glamorous, profitable stars used to promote glamorous, profitable things. Ms Lipa also appears in adverts for Nespresso, a coffee brand. Ms Witherspoon was the face of Elizabeth Arden makeup (ever literary, she was the firm’s “Storyteller-in-Chief”). At one time Goop sold a product called “vaginal eggs”—which are tricky to explain but rarely, it is safe to say, trouble the pages of Fyodor Dostoyevsky.

In another way, this is not odd at all. Celebrity book clubs have been popular for nearly a century , and with good reason: they solve so many literary problems. Publishers love them because they help flog books. Amazon has just bought the rights to Oprah Winfrey’s book club.

George Orwell’s “1984” shot up the bestseller lists after being picked by the American “Book of the Month” club. Books picked by Ms Winfrey experience the “Oprah effect” and are grabbed from the shelves. Those picked by Ms Witherspoon experience the “Reese effect”. One choice, “Where the Crawdads Sing”, sold over 12m copies; cannily, Ms Witherspoon then produced a film adaptation of it.

Readers love book clubs because they help them to know which books are actually any good. Last year, over 4m books were published in America alone. It is an open secret in publishing that most of them are either bad or dull or both. Many titles are so dull that a prize has been set up to honour them: contenders for it have included last year’s “Self-Recognition in Fish: Exploring the Mind in Animals” as well as “The 2009-2014 World Outlook for 60-milligram Containers of Fromage Frais”. The reader needs help.

Book clubs also make reading less lonely. You are never alone with a good book, as the saying has it, which is true—and nonsense. You are always alone with a good book: it is the only way to get through it. Emma Smith, a professor at Oxford University, says book clubs translate “a solitary experience…into a collective one”.

Book clubs seem to be socially, financially and intellectually praiseworthy. And so naturally, some high-minded folk loathe them. In the 1920s book clubs were accused of promoting the wrong sort of books (“second-rate” sniffed one) by the wrong sort of person (“middlemen”) to the wrong sort of reader (the “middlebrow”). The “snobbery”, says Nicola Wilson, author of “Recommended!”, a book about book clubs, “goes back a long way”.

Modern critics question celebrities’ motivation, their qualifications and their dedication to the literary cause. Ms Winfrey’s podcast intersperses programmes on books with programmes on “Do Dogs Really Love Us?” and on “Building a Billion-Dollar Brand”. Celebrities, critics say, are just Building That Brand. They are less reading books than accessorising with them on Instagram. In one snap Ms Lipa licks her teeth while holding a copy of Ms Atwood’s biography (typical quote: “Male fantasies, male fantasies, is everything run by male fantasies?”).

Some of this criticism is bunk. Books do not demand a monkish devotion from those who work with them: T.S. Eliot worked in a bank; Anthony Trollope worked for the Post Office. Much of this criticism is old-fashioned intellectual snobbery, as if celebrities are incapable of taxing intellectual endeavour. In 1955, when Marilyn Monroe posed reading James Joyce’s “Ulysses”, the image spawned astonishment, articles and a decades-long debate. As one article put it: was “she actually reading it?”

That being said, certain criticisms seem justified. Some of the celebrities—like Ms Lipa—seem to be promoting books that they genuinely read and love (even if they show that love a little oddly on Instagram). Ms Witherspoon is witty and clever in her choices. Others are effortfully worthy: in her thankfully erstwhile book club, Emma Watson of “Harry Potter” fame offered drivel about “journeys” and tips on “empowering!” books about feminism .

Book clubs, it is true, can be irritating. They are also a little paradoxical. Reading rates are declining rapidly, everywhere. Yet there are podcasts about reading, campaigns about reading and handwringing books about reading. The public seems simultaneously unable to start reading—or to stop banging on about it. Perhaps, instead of listening to people talk about books, you should enjoy books the old-fashioned way. Sit down. Open a book. And silently enjoy it. ■

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A historian and a technology writer uncover the essence of “Muskism”

What is Elon Musk’s formula? A historian and a technology writer uncover the essence of “Muskism” May 7th 2026 LOVE HIM or loathe him, Elon Musk is hard to avoid. The world’s richest man is poised to float the world’s most valuable startup on the stockmarket. Just as Henry Ford provided the template for 20th-century capitalism, known as Fordism, Mr Musk offers one for the 21st. That is the thesis advanced by Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff in “Muskism”, an illuminating book that examines where Mr Musk came from and the episodes that shaped his worldview. In many ways it is the inverse of Walter Isaacson’s authorised biography of 2023. Despite the lack of direct access to Mr Musk, the authors provide a portrait of his psyche that is arguably more revealing.

Mr Musk grew up in apartheid-era South Africa , a country that saw itself as a citadel of white civilisation on a black continent, and used technology to divide and control. As a teenager the young Mr Musk, who had become enamoured with computers, moved to Canada to avoid military service, and then to America. But “Apartheid South Africa came along like a spore in his luggage,” the authors write. What they call the “fortress futurism” of his youth shaped his attitude to technology, and its symbiotic relationship with the state.

As the dotcom boom kicked off in the mid-1990s, many techies saw themselves as breaking free from state control—even though the internet had originated as a government project. Mr Musk’s first startup, Zip2, fused business listings with existing digital maps built using GPS satellites, another government system. Rather than escaping from the government, Mr Musk built a business using the infrastructure it had provided: what the authors call “state symbiosis”. Zip2 never made a profit, but he sold it for $307m.

After the dotcom crash Mr Musk founded SpaceX and pivoted to building rockets. Space was another area where the government had started the ball rolling, but was opening up to private firms. George W. Bush’s administration was keen to outsource all kinds of state functions to private contractors. Mr Musk brought tech-industry thinking to the rocket business, and pushed the government to award contracts through competitive bidding. SpaceX took off with the help of government contracts, and ended up taking on functions—such as carrying astronauts to the space station—previously performed by the state.

Mr Musk’s other big company, Tesla, also presented itself as anti-establishment even as it grew with the help of government loans and subsidies. Mr Musk pushed electric cars as a way to reduce both carbon emissions and dependency on oil from the Middle East. Tesla’s solar panels and giant batteries offer resilience against power outages and high energy prices. Its vertically integrated model (making its own batteries, for example), and establishment of a factory in China, protect it from trade shocks. It has also benefited from what the authors call “attention alchemy”—Mr Musk’s prowess at turning social-media engagement into business value: “The first meme stock wasn’t GameStop but Tesla.” In a warming, fragmenting, doomscrolling world, it is by far the most valuable carmaker.

The essence of Muskism, then, is a business empire in symbiosis with the state. Mr Musk’s firms provide crucial government services, and not just for America. Starlink, SpaceX’s satellite-internet service, is vital to Ukraine’s war effort, granting him extraordinary political influence for a private individual. In recent years he has intervened in politics explicitly, by buying Twitter (now called X) and shifting it rightwards, and offering support to right-wing parties around the world. In 2025 he assumed a political post when Donald Trump put him in charge of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), to slim down the government.

The methods that served Mr Musk well in business have not transferred to politics. Mr Musk left DOGE in May 2025, having achieved little except to cripple some government departments and demoralise others. That, the authors argue, was the point, and Mr Musk was set up to take the blame. After years of co-opting the state to achieve his ends, the roles were reversed.

He has bounced back quickly. Long a proponent of AI, Mr Musk has merged his social-media and AI firms into SpaceX, turning it into the world’s most valuable startup. He has promised data centres in orbit and satellite factories on the Moon. These developments came too late to be included in the book, but they fit neatly into the framework it provides. For students of modern capitalism, the resulting book is, you might say, a Musk-read. ■

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Conspiracy thrillers are the favourite genre of a distrustful age

Turn on, tune in, trust no one: the paranoid style captures TV Conspiracy thrillers are the favourite genre of a distrustful age May 7th 2026 Cold-callers might be fraudsters and emails could be phishing scams. Dotted lines of dirty money connect venal Westerners with hostile powers. When a gunman tries to storm a presidential dinner , half the internet thinks it’s a hoax. Nothing and no one can be trusted, it may seem—not in real life and, these days, definitely not on TV.

For just as this is a heyday of conspiracism, it is becoming a golden age of conspiracies on television. The villains of crime shows and thrillers have traditionally been terrorists, mobsters and serial killers. Now they are likely to be dodgy cops, double agents and corrupt politicians. The danger is coming from inside the house—often the White House. The fear such stories dramatise is not of a lone maniac but a rogue system.

“Secret Service” supplies the latest inside job on British tellies. The head of the Russia desk at Mi6 (played by Gemma Arterton, pictured) suspects the Kremlin has a mole at the heart of Britain’s government. The set-up has distinct echoes of “The Night Manager” , a hit about spies and skulduggery, in both the sumptuous Mediterranean locations and the slipping of an agent into a target’s family. The dialogue has distinct echoes of every espionage show you’ve ever seen. “We can all lie to someone we love,” drawls a spymaster on autopilot.

The renegade spooks of “The Night Manager” are not unusual. Even its name is not unusual: see also “The Night Agent”, another multi-series yarn, this one involving a staged bombing, CIA turncoats and (you guessed it) moles at the heart of government. These days, in fact, anyone on tv in a position of public trust is liable to betray it. In “Zero Day” a cabal orchestrates a cyber-catastrophe. “The Madness” combines white supremacists with disinformation and corporate chicanery. More television conspiracies are in the pipeline. The fix goes on.

On screen, as in reality, conspiracism comes in bursts. After the assassinations of the 1960s and Watergate, the mid-1970s was a febrile period, yielding (at the cinema) “Chinatown” and “The Parallax View”. Among today’s real-world prompts—and narrative motifs—are foreign meddling in Western politics, panopticonic surveillance and the power of occult algorithms and artificial intelligence. “The Capture”, a superior conspiracy saga, focuses on official misuse of deepfakes .

Social media, another newish technology, are the chief vector of conspiracism, making doomscrollers everywhere amenable to stories of Manchurian candidates and false flags. Meanwhile attitudes to authority are poisonous. In Britain and America, pollsters report, trust in government is at a cynical low. Americans have also lost faith in science, big business, police and the media; 27% of Britons think there is a conspiracy against them personally. Polarisation is part of the problem: if hated opponents win an election, they must surely have cheated. They are bound to be up to no good.

In this context, conspiracist dramas, like conspiracy theories themselves, offer a consoling pay-off. Yes, they depict a sinister world controlled by shadowy forces. But, like QAnoners and vaccine truthers, viewers derive a gratifying sense that they are in the know. In any case, as an explanation for global woes, conspiracies are more comprehensible than cock-ups and chaos, especially those uncovered in the season finale.

The genre has drawbacks, too. It is hard to make a conspiracy seem convincing, a tv director confides, and the permutations of baddies and whistleblowers are limited (as “Secret Service” suggests). Government traitors, men with guns and end-of-episode twists are de rigueur. More gravely, as well as reflecting an ambient hunch that the mighty are crooked, conspiracy shows may corrosively reinforce it. (Who exactly is behind them all, a conspiracy-minded critic might wonder?)

Then again, other kinds of tv crime aren’t entirely victimless. The creep of conspiracy in glitzy thrillers coincides with the retreat of a different genre: lurid tales of murdered women, whose deaths let male gumshoes earn their spurs. Of late some writers and producers have grown wary of that default scenario, say insiders, preferring spiky female roles, including spies and assassins, to decorative female corpses.

The dead-girl trope implies a failure of imagination as well as a shallow view of women. But the paranoid style of crime shows and thrillers is, in its way, at least as disturbing. No longer is it just a woman’s body on the TV mortuary slab. Now it is the entire body politic. ■

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Merlin Holland sets the record straight on the Irish writer’s life

Oscar Wilde’s grandson separates fact from fiction Merlin Holland sets the record straight on the Irish writer’s life May 7th 2026 “A FLYING ANGEL with an erection.” That is how Oscar Wilde’s son described the winged figure suspended in stone above his father’s tomb in Père Lachaise Cemetery , Paris. In the decades after the Irish writer’s death in 1900, the offending member grew smooth from the caresses of his admirers; in 1961 vandals knocked off the testicles. Fans took to leaving greasy lipstick kisses on the tomb instead, which required corrosive cleaning. Merlin Holland, Wilde’s grandson, spent years calling on French fonctionnaires to protect it. A glass panel went up in 2011.

The sticky tributes have an oddly symbolic quality, for Wilde’s reputation has also accrued fallacies and fabrications. Mr Holland, who is the literary executor of the Wilde estate, has spent 40 years trying to strip them away. “After Oscar” lays out everything that has been embellished in Wilde’s name by biographers , forgers, false memoirists and members of his own family. Mr Holland admits he wrote the book “with a modicum of anger, channelled into storytelling”.

The book begins with Wilde’s release from prison in 1897. His fall had been swift. Just two years earlier, Wilde was the toast of London, with two plays on the West End. He was also openly in thrall to Lord Alfred Douglas, a young aristocrat. On the opening night of “The Importance of Being Earnest”, Douglas’s father brought a bouquet of rotting vegetables to throw at Wilde. Barred from entering, he prowled outside “chattering like a monstrous ape”, Wilde wrote. Later, he left a mispelled card at Wilde’s club calling him a “somdomite”.

Wilde sued for libel—a disastrous decision. The defence announced its intention to call as witnesses male prostitutes with whom Wilde had had sex, forcing Wilde to withdraw his suit. He was then arrested, tried for “gross indecency” and sentenced to two years’ hard labour. His wife, Constance, took their sons abroad and changed their name to Holland. “Such was the need”, Mr Holland writes, “to dissociate the family from anything that could connect it with Oscar Wilde.”

After his release, Wilde travelled to France, hoping to be reunited with his family. Constance’s friends and relatives kept them apart. Polite society had no place for a convict and “unrepentant homosexual”. Wilde never saw his boys again. He died in Paris , penniless, at the age of 46.

It did not take long for what Mr Holland calls “follow my leader” biography to set in: one writer’s conjecture was adopted by the next, without scrutiny, until it hardened into fact. The most consequential example was the theory that Wilde had died of syphilis. First published in 1912, it was still being repeated in 1987 in a celebrated biography by Richard Ellmann. Doctors who reviewed Wilde’s records have since argued that he died of cerebral meningitis following an ear injury sustained in prison.

By the 1920s it had become fashionable to recall an intimate friendship with Wilde. A French poet claimed to have been his only friend in his final days in Paris—entirely ignoring the two loyal companions who had actually been at his deathbed. Forgeries appeared, too. In 2007 Mr Holland spotted fake Wilde manuscripts at an auction in San Francisco, recognising them as the work of a forger from the 1920s.

Mr Holland’s own family caused its share of distortion. His father Vyvyan wrote a memoir entitled “Son of Oscar Wilde”, which Mr Holland spent years fact-checking. He found that Vyvyan, unable to resist improving on a dimly remembered past, had adorned the truth in places. (Who was it that said “Lying, the telling of beautiful untrue things, is the proper aim of Art”?) Mr Holland’s mother Thelma went further, burning pages from Vyvyan’s diary and insisting that Wilde was “basically heterosexual”. Even as Wilde’s work was revived, the family’s shame persisted.

“After Oscar” is ostensibly a record of the vicissitudes of Wilde’s posthumous reputation. But it ends up being something much more interesting: an account of what happens to the people left living with a scandal they did not create. ■

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Women worldwide are channelling royal glamour

In an age of status symbols, tiaras take the crown Women worldwide are channelling royal glamour May 7th 2026 The regal aesthetic is royally back in fashion. On Pinterest searches for “bandeau tiara” and “tiara hairstyles wedding” increased by 140% and 185% between December and February, compared with the same period in 2024-25. “We’ve seen a surge in demand for tiaras,” says Charles Leung, chief executive of Chaumet, a French jeweller that once made tiaras for Empress Joséphine. Bentley & Skinner, which supplies jewellery to Britain’s royals , has also experienced “a big increase in the sales of tiaras” in recent years, says the manager, Ilias Kapsalis.

For centuries society women in America and Europe gave the tiara market its sparkle, as they had to wear them to balls and other lavish events. They still buy them, but now heady interest in the headpieces also comes from Asia and the Middle East.

Traditional tiaras feature white diamonds or pearls. Brides may wear them to make extra sure they are the centre of attention on their wedding day. Many are convertible: the jewels can be detached and worn as a necklace to another event. Women often plan to hand the item down. “The tiara is the ultimate personal heirloom,” insists Mr Leung. It “can symbolise the start of a dynasty”.

In an age fascinated by conspicuous consumption, “A tiara is probably the most aspirational jewel one can have,” says Henry Bailey of Christie’s, an auction house. Little girls watching Disney films learn they are “a status symbol”. Real-life princesses, including Catherine, Princess of Wales, regularly wear them; celebrities don them at the Met Gala. And popular TV shows such as “Bridgerton” reinforce the idea that tiaras are worn by those who want to see and be seen.

If you seek a tiara for your special day, the cost will depend on the provenance as well as the number and quality of stones. Bentley & Skinner’s website advertises tiaras from £39,750 ($54,000) to £185,000. On May 13th Christie’s is selling a diamond Art Deco tiara by Cartier with an estimated value of $340,000-620,000. For some women, their crowning moment is worth every penny. ■

Invasion marked the city’s rise from medieval backwater to imperial metropolis

The history of Moscow helps explain Russia’s pathologies Invasion marked the city’s rise from medieval backwater to imperial metropolis May 7th 2026 “Do you love Moscow?” Not long after this reviewer moved there in 2004, he was asked that question by his grizzled landlord. A bit early to know, was his cautious response. “Good,” replied the landlord. “Foreigners who say they love it here soon run back to the airport—with no luggage.” Simon Morrison of Princeton University, a devotee of the carnivorous city since the last days of the Soviet Union, is less equivocal. “Moscow is hard to love,” he acknowledges, “but I love it.”

His is a love without illusions, however. Today it is “a showcase capital”, its downtown beautified as a sop to disenfranchised citizens. But as Mr Morrison shows in his technicolour chronicle of the city, beneath the petro-funded sheen, Moscow is a domain of purges, paranoia and ravenous power. History has shaped its character; equally, as much as that of any metropolis, Moscow’s character has shaped history, both Russia’s and the world’s.

The first half of this book traces the origins and evolution of the Russian state, from Moscow’s first recorded mention in 1147 to the 17th century. Like the history of other states, only more so, it is a saga of dynastic struggle, vicious intrigue, autocracy and wanton cruelty. To live in Moscow, it helps to have a bleak sense of humour—and the same goes for reading about it. In a typical anecdote, a 14th-century prince cuts out a rival’s heart. Later the prince “would himself be murdered, and then his murderer would be murdered”. Ivan the Terrible killed a jester by pouring scalding soup on his head. “To hell with him!” Ivan scowled. “He made no attempt to recover!”

Ivan wasn’t all bad, notes Mr Morrison. He introduced a few useful reforms in the 16th century, as well as boiling and roasting people. “Such, at times, has been Russia’s tragedy,” the author laments: “barbarism in the service of civilisation”. Under Ivan and his grandfather, Ivan III, Moscow consolidated its hold over the region and developed a bureaucracy. After them came the macabre “time of troubles”, a bout of mayhem that ended with the Romanovs’ accession in 1613. The legacies of that traumatic era include lasting convictions that brutal rule is preferable to chaos, and that bloodshed can be redemptive.

In these murky centuries, some motifs recur. One is invasion—both of Moscow and by it. Local strongmen were better at slaughtering each other and fighting other Slavic cities than at repelling outsiders. Moscow was repeatedly sacked by the Mongols. Meanwhile, “to thwart invasion, Moscow invaded, again and again”, seeking a buffer zone for its buffer zone, as, alas, it still does now. Another theme is fire, which periodically razed it. Sometimes, as with Napoleon’s campaign of 1812, the scourges came together. Given these threats, and the risk of state expropriation, property has often been insecure: “Nothing was permanent or meant to last.”

Two other cities shadowed Moscow’s rise from “a fort on a hill along a river” to an imperial metropolis. First Kyiv, to which it was linked by dynastic and cultural ties, but compared with which it was for centuries a philistine, obscurantist backwater. Moscow had no theatres until the 1670s; visiting diplomats boggled at its drunkenness. Second, St Petersburg , founded by Peter the Great and Russia’s capital from 1712 (Lenin switched it back to Moscow in the havoc of the Bolshevik revolution). Peter disliked Moscow, where, as a boy, he saw a mob impale some of his relatives.

With its Italianate architecture and access to the Baltic Sea, St Petersburg embodied an openness to Enlightenment ideals and westward integration. (In theory: in practice it had its share of dolts and bigots.) Conversely, Moscow “resisted Europe—and still does”. The contrast between the cities captures Russia’s alternating engagement and enragement with the West. To ride the train between them, once a tourist treat, is to trace an axis of history.

The second half of this study, at once scholarly and impressionistic, takes urban features and individuals as emblems of later trends. Among them is the ornate Metro, the construction of which cost an unknown number of workers’ lives; some overseers perished in the purges. Here the Metro stands for Stalin’s breakneck transformation of his capital—it became “a map of his obsessions”—and its experience of the second world war, when stations doubled as shelters. Stalin threw up monumental buildings, redrew streets and tore down landmarks as brusquely as he deported entire national groups across his realm.

Then there is the cathedral built to commemorate the expulsion of Napoleon. It was dynamited in 1931 to make room for a grandiose “Palace of Soviets”. Instead the site became a giant swimming pool, with a VIP zone that hosted prostitution and black marketeering, before, in the 1990s, the cathedral was rebuilt. The farrago illustrates the corrupt nexus of church and state in Russia, and the vandalism, venality and incompetence of the city’s overlords.

“Power looks after itself,” Mr Morrison observes. “Power exists for itself,” an attitude cultivated in hunkering Moscow and projected by its crabbed rulers across an empire and beyond. The city, he writes, is “completely unfree”. It is a place stalked by armed men in uniform, where life can be a tightrope-walk for people without connections. At weekends droves of Muscovites escape to their dachas, where the air is cleaner and they can breathe more freely.

At the same time, the author says, Moscow “seems anarchically unbridled”, crackling with the urgency of life on the edge. After the Soviet Union fell, this electric mood—the sense that “Anything can happen”—attracted curious Westerners, from sleazy carpetbaggers to cultural explorers like Mr Morrison. (Moscow also drew in countless workers from ex-Soviet republics, for whom it remains the imperial hub.) When the city spat them out, many wound up pining for it in their tamer homelands.

Now, during its latest imperialist spasm, Russia is a pariah in the West. Moscow is in effect off-limits for many foreigners; the Kremlin is squeezing Muscovites’ remaining freedoms. Still, that tale of “a church, which became a public pool, which became a church again” suggests another lesson of Moscow’s history. Nothing—no tyrant, regime or ideology—lasts forever. Mr Morrison offers an apt variant of this moral: “Everything was forever, until it was no more, until it was again forever.” ■

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Demand for trading cards, sports memorabilia and other collectibles is huge

Is a fortune gathering dust in your attic? Demand for trading cards, sports memorabilia and other collectibles is huge April 30th 2026 JUST east of Tel Aviv sits a cave. It was discovered during road works in 2000 and found to contain the oldest known hearth, around which families probably cooked meals some 300,000 years ago. Archaeologists found animal bones and primitive tools, which was not surprising. What was startling was a cache of brightly coloured pebbles that showed no signs of use, and indeed appeared too small for any Stone Age purpose. Their value was aesthetic: someone had collected them.

William Goetzmann, who teaches finance at Yale and has written extensively about art markets, suggests that the impulse to collect “is something ancient and ingrained in us…maybe biologically driven”. Cards, coins, stamps, memorabilia , posters: these draw obsessives everywhere, and for years were usually handled by small, specialist dealers.

Increasingly, however, auction houses are getting in on the action. In March Christie’s sold rock memorabilia that Jim Irsay, a late American sports-team owner, spent his life amassing, including John Lennon’s piano ($3.2m), Jerry Garcia’s guitar ($11.6m) and Ringo Starr’s snare drum ($95,250), all well above expected prices. Sotheby’s, in partnership with the National Basketball Association, is holding weekly sales of game-worn jerseys until June.

Yet the most important collectibles auctioneer, Heritage Auctions, began in 1976 as a coin dealer in a shared office in Dallas. (Its headquarters, on the grounds of Dallas-Fort Worth airport, now span 330,000 square feet: roughly the same size as six American-football fields.) Today Heritage Auctions is a market maker. Last year the firm, which has offices in five American cities and eight other countries, broke its own sales record for the fifth straight year, with $2.16bn. That is less than the other big houses made overall—Sotheby’s took $7bn in 2025, while Christie’s made $6.2bn—but it is enough to make them notice, and even sweat a little.

There is no end to the wonders hidden away behind Heritage’s locked doors. Coins from before Christ’s birth. Banknotes from the Belgian Congo. A baseball signed by Babe Ruth. Jerseys worn by Michael Jordan and Sandy Koufax. One of the rarest baseball cards ever made. Gems and fossils, watches and wine, Eames chairs and antique guns. It has sold items for eye-watering sums, such as Dorothy’s ruby slippers from “The Wizard of Oz” for $32.5m in 2024. At a benefit auction in 2022 Heritage sold the Nobel medal of Dmitry Muratov , a Russian journalist, for $103.5m.

Defining the collectibles market is tricky. Heritage’s founder and boss, Steve Ivy, suggests it encompasses “items made in multiples” that people can collect in sets. (“You can’t collect a set of art,” he notes.) Magnus Resch, an economist at Yale who studies art markets, suggests a behavioural distinction: “Art is primarily institutionally validated,” meaning “museums, galleries and curators” influence its value, whereas “collectibles are community validated”, meaning they are worth what individuals are willing to pay.

Though collectibles form an asset class that attracts speculators and investors hoping to diversify their portfolios, passion plays an outsize role in the market, as even the briefest visit to a sports memorabilia or stamp convention attests. Mr Ivy’s business is passion, at scale. Now 76 years old, he started collecting coins when he was nine, advertising and selling them at 14, and started a coin-trading business when he was 20. He and a partner, who collected comics, incorporated as Heritage Auctions in 1982, and for years afterwards they mainly traded what they collected.

Mr Ivy credits early adoption of online sales, starting in the mid-1990s, for Heritage’s success, for two reasons. First, it gave them the money to buy competitors. “We’d find a two- or three-man operation that had expertise and a customer list, but didn’t have the ability to reach any kind of scale or an effective website. So we’d bring them in-house, subsume their business and they’d become our experts,” Mr Ivy explains. “We did that with about 50 different categories over a 15-year period, adding about two or three per year.” Today Heritage has 900 employees.

Second, online sales gave buyers pricing information. In the past, people who wanted to buy coins, stamps, baseball cards or film memorabilia had to go through specialist dealers, who had an information advantage. Dealers knew what they had paid for the item, and they knew what they had sold similar items for, but the buyers were in the dark on both fronts. This gave dealers a tremendous edge.

Most of what Heritage sells is consigned: they take a cut of the transaction so—unlike dealers—they do not need to buy low and sell high. Having clear pricing information makes buyers comfortable enough to come back. Mr Ivy says around 75% of their customers buy across multiple categories (and 95% of them are male: Mr Ivy contends that “Men like objects, and women like relationships.”)

As for what people buy, Mr Ivy calls coins, comics, sports cards and entertainment memorabilia “the big four”: their markets are broad, deep and enduring. Some fads bubble up and dissipate. American cars from the 1960s and ’70s—known as “muscle cars”—had a good run some time back because, as Mr Ivy says, “People were buying their youth.” Now prices have declined. Heritage has also done well selling Pokémon memorabilia, which first emerged in the mid-1990s. Childhood collectors are now in their late 30s or early 40s: about the age when professionals have some real disposable income and nostalgia for childhood sets in. (In February another auction house sold a rare Pokémon card for a whopping $16.5m.)

Just as Sotheby’s and Christie’s have started selling collectibles, Heritage also sells art. Plenty of people buy both. Mr Resch contends that “What used to be the art market is now part of a broader system of cultural assets.” Art offers status. Collectibles let people show off what they love.

That augurs a healthy future for collectibles. At the high end, the market responds to broader economic trends as fine art does, but there are many cheap collectibles, and enthusiasts buy them in good times and bad. Heritage did well during covid-19 and the financial crisis of 2007-09. “A lot of the market is about supply,” he explains, and in downturns people look for things to sell.

How can first-time buyers get into collecting? They should start small, and start with what they love. Plenty of items in the big four can be had for as little as the cost of a tasty restaurant dinner. Mr Ivy warns, though, that the seemingly harmless hobby can soon become all-consuming. Collecting is “a genetic disorder”, he jokes. “There’s this overwhelming desire, a compulsion really, to complete a set of something.” Think carefully, then, before you make bid decisions. ■

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Want a scary elf doll? That’ll be $150,000

The staggering strangeness of the Labubu bubble Want a scary elf doll? That’ll be $150,000 April 30th 2026 Imagine a baby elf in a onesie. Now imagine that it has had its teeth sharpened and been possessed by the devil: that gives you a sense of the aesthetic of a Labubu doll. Lots of Labubu-lovers sport the creatures on keychains , but you can get a 40-inch Mega Labubu at a Pop Mart shop in London for £850 ($1,150). Why anyone would buy it for even a tenth of that price is beyond your correspondent.

Compared with some Labubus, however, it is a steal. In June a Chinese auction house sold a four-foot-tall Labubu (confusingly described as “human-sized”) for $150,000. You can forget about precious metals, cryptocurrencies and the stocks of companies planning to launch data centres in space. This is far and away the weirdest speculative mania out there.

Talking about a bubble in Labubu dolls puts a strain on the category. In financial markets, a bubble forms when an asset’s price rises to a level that could not possibly be justified by fundamentals. (Think of euphoric traders bidding up a company’s equity value to hundreds or thousands of times its underlying annual earnings.) For some assets, it is famously difficult to pin these down—as with gold, which generates no cash flows and yet has been prized as a store of value for millennia. Creepy elf dolls take the problem a step further. How can you tell whether prices are out of whack with fundamentals if there aren’t any to begin with?

The Mega Labubu suggests that exuberance still reigns over the doll market. Yet things are less manic than they were. Google searches for “Labubu” have fallen by over 90% globally since July. The share price of Pop Mart, the Chinese company that makes them, is around half its peak in August. “If I get a delivery on a Saturday morning, it’s still gone by the afternoon,” says a shop assistant in London, “but people aren’t queuing up outside any more.” That marks a comedown from a frenzied period last summer when Labubu fans queued for hours outside the shop to participate in weekly raffles.

“In a boom, fortunes are made, individuals wax greedy, and swindlers come forward to exploit that greed,” wrote Charles Kindleberger in “Manias, Panics and Crashes” (1978), his classic history of financial crises. Labubumania has been no different—but rather than fraud and embezzlement, it has produced the “Lafufu”, or counterfeit Labubu. The swindlers of the 19th century sold worthless shares in non-existent railways; today’s sell fluffy dolls with sloppy paint jobs and the wrong number of teeth. (A true Labubu has nine.) During the first nine months of 2025 British officials seized shipments of fake toys worth £3.5m at the country’s borders, 90% of which were Lafufus.

According to the old share-traders’ adage, bull markets do not die of old age: they are murdered by central banks. But the laws of one asset class do not always apply to others, and the bull market in Labubus was murdered by Pop Mart itself. Last year it expanded production of plush toys (which include Labubus) by a factor of ten, to around 30m a month. The secondary market—of people snapping up scarce dolls to sell them on at big mark-ups—thus lost its raison d’être for all but the rarest Labubus, and has collapsed.

That might be no bad thing for Pop Mart, which makes plenty of other cute yet mildly disturbing dolls. The company does not want to be a one-hit wonder, and the secondary market it really cares about is that for its own shares. Rabid speculation in Labubus, despite boosting sales, may not have reassured Pop Mart’s own investors of persistent, reliable returns. Unlike the crashes covered in Kindleberger’s history book, the bursting of this bubble is unlikely to have many knock-on effects beyond a few scalpers losing their shirts. Though if your heart is set on a Mega Labubu, it may soon be a good time to get your hands on one. ■

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Does ditching chronology and geography inspire or confuse visitors?

LA’s levitating amoeba: a radically new kind of museum Does ditching chronology and geography inspire or confuse visitors? April 30th 2026 A HULKING structure hangs above traffic on Wilshire Boulevard like a levitating amoeba. The concrete-and-glass colossus—designed by Peter Zumthor, a Swiss architect—is known as the David Geffen Galleries and is the new home of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), the largest art museum in western America. After 20 years, the building will finally open to the public on May 4th. Its $724m price tag and daring architecture are not the only radical things about it.

“We’ve eschewed traditional categories of geography, chronology, medium,” says Michael Govan, LACMA’s director. “The idea is to wander.” Walk up the imposing concrete staircase and Mr Govan’s meaning becomes apparent. The museum’s single floor is a great equaliser: no one movement or era is presented as more important than another. Rather than galleries devoted to the usual suspects—the Renaissance, Impressionism , Surrealism—the museum is loosely organised around oceans and seas, as a way to emphasise trade and cultural exchange. The Indian Ocean section, for example, includes Turkish porcelain with blue-and-white floral patterns, influenced by earlier Chinese designs.

LACMA’s shunning of conventional organisation typifies a movement among some Western institutions towards less hierarchical, more global galleries. Christophe Cherix, the director of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City, reckons such experiments amount to “a generational shift” in how museums display their treasures.

In the 1990s and 2000s, while economies were globalising and liberalising, the art world was following suit. “We had a collection then that was almost an Enlightenment model based on the western European and North American canon,” recalls Frances Morris, a former director of the Tate Modern in London. “It was very clear to us that the big story of the next century would be to build a collection that represented the interconnectedness of culture.” When Tate Modern opened its permanent galleries in 2000, curators grouped art by theme, be it “nude” or “still life”. “The press hated it,” says Ms Morris.

After it expanded in 2019, MoMA rejected permanent exhibitions. “‘Starry Night’ will most probably always be on view,” says Mr Cherix of Vincent van Gogh’s much-loved painting. But, he muses, perhaps the adjacent wall will sometimes hold photography, rather than Rousseau or Cézanne.

In some ways, this approach mimics the Wunderkammern—cabinets of curiosities—of the Renaissance, when European rulers collected all manner of objects and displayed them in whichever way they pleased. Then and now, such an eclectic approach allows for serendipity. “The visitor’s hand isn’t being held in the usual way,” says Dan Hicks of Oxford University’s Pitt Rivers Museum. Yet it’s “a relative sort of chaos”, he admits, that not everyone may appreciate.

What is thoughtful contrast to one visitor is baffling incongruity to another. At LACMA a giant coffee table shows off ceramics from ancient Greece, modern America and much in between. Why? Visitors who scan tiny QR codes will find out; the rest will merely wonder. But if such experiments fail to impress, curators can reshuffle the art again. “I remember people finding the juxtaposition of a late Monet painting with a Richard Long mud-wall drawing very problematic,” remembers Ms Morris. “But then we showed Monet with Rothko, and people loved that.”

Museums should not be rigid, stuffy palaces for antiquities, many curators argue: they should reflect their surroundings and respond to their times. At the new LACMA, says Mr Zumthor, “We don’t go into a dark box and somebody tells us what to think.” Rather, the museum tries to be in conversation with Los Angeles. The way the amoeba wobbles over Wilshire seems an ode to California’s car culture—as does the inclusion of a Studebaker sports car, surrounded by photographs of highways and car parks. Architecturally, the museum’s floor-to-ceiling windows frame the palm trees and foothills in such a way that LA itself seems on display. ■

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Why Texans throw a birthday party for Eeyore—and everyone else should, too

Celebrating one of literature’s greatest pessimists Why Texans throw a birthday party for Eeyore—and everyone else should, too April 30th 2026 “YOU SEEM so sad,” says Winnie-the-Pooh to Eeyore. In A.A. Milne ’s charming children’s stories—first collected into a book a century ago—the donkey has a gift for finding the cloud in any silver lining. In this particular instance, however, Eeyore is gloomy because it is his birthday and nobody has noticed. Pooh and Piglet try to make amends, but with their usual good-natured incompetence offer subpar presents: a honeypot licked clean of honey and a burst balloon.

Austin, Texas, does not much resemble the Hundred Acre Wood. But since 1964 its inhabitants have been trying to make up for Pooh’s and Piglet’s performance. That year a group of literature students at the University of Texas, searching for an excuse to let off steam before their final exams, decided to throw Eeyore a birthday party. Except for a two-year pause for covid-19 , Eeyore has been celebrated ever since, first in a small park, and for the past 52 at the larger Pease District Park.

Friends of the Forest, a group of volunteers, runs the event and “everyone is invited” explains the group’s president, Heather Hampton. Admission is free and the local vendors selling food, craft beer and assorted trinkets keep their proceeds. Any tips volunteers receive are donated to local non-profits; Ms Hampton says that Friends of the Forest has given away more than $280,000 over the years.

Children can get their faces painted and run wild on a playground while their parents listen to live music and—alas—drum circles. People of all ages show up in costumes or tie-dye. At the centre of the park this year was a small fenced area holding a white donkey for children to pet and feed. The creature seemed a good deal happier than his fictional counterpart.

Why should anyone outside Austin care about hippies cheering for a fictional donkey? There are two reasons. First, the event is a reminder that cities, like people, have spirits that persist through superficial changes. Before Austin started attracting tech money and right-leaning celebrities such as the Joes Lonsdale and Rogan, it was a hippie haven. (“Keep Austin Weird” is the city’s unofficial slogan.) Johnny C, a tall man with a white ponytail and beard, has been wishing Eeyore a happy birthday since the late 1970s; he calls the event “an example of the true spirit of Austin, where you can be whoever you want to be.”

Second, the event celebrates the best character Milne ever wrote. (Children being read to may delight in Pooh’s enthusiastic silliness, but their parents appreciate Eeyore’s realism.) It also honours the difficult friend that everyone has, or perhaps is. Eeyore is depressive, anhedonic and pessimistic—but also kind, dogged and loyal. Throwing a party in his honour reminds those attending that sometimes everyone needs a little cheering up. ■

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A new book offers a different account of the pestilence

What really happened during the Black Death A new book offers a different account of the pestilence April 30th 2026 The disease seems to have emerged in Asia. It soon reached Europe, ravaging Italy first. It killed millions, often quickly. Many people perished at home, or died within a few hours or days of receiving medical treatment. So large was the death toll and so great was the danger of contagion that funerary customs were disrupted. People fled cities. All this was true of covid-19. It was also true of the Black Death .

As Thomas Asbridge describes in detail, the medieval plague was much deadlier. Many towns and cities lost almost half their inhabitants in the first wave of the disease, in the mid-14th century; subsequent waves were smaller but nonetheless terrifying. In Damascus a poet observed that “The plague sat like a king on a throne.” One English village was hit so hard that it did not recover its pre-plague population until the 19th century.

Although medieval people were used to sudden death, the plague devastated them. “I am overwhelmed, I can’t go on,” wrote Gabriele de’ Mussis, an Italian chronicler who lived through the first wave. A Byzantine woman, seeming only half alive herself, stared at her sisters’ graves and wept. The Black Death spurred pogroms, as Christians claimed that Jews were spreading disease by poisoning the water supply (during the attacks they made sure to destroy records of debts they owed).

But the disease also changed society and art, frequently for the better. The most enjoyable sections of “The Black Death” describe how some people did well out of the pandemic. In Cairo, gravediggers raised their fees. There was a boom in religious art in Italy, because so many plague victims left money for paintings in their wills. Venetian citizenship became easier to obtain. In 1349, as the plague carried away English clergymen, a bishop advised that the dying could make their final confession to a layperson—“even to a woman”.

A pestilence that was assumed to have been sent by God disrupted and intensified religious life. Russians built timber churches in a single day to show their piety. A new group, the flagellants, publicly lashed their bodies with whips. Perhaps the pandemic encouraged anti-clericalism and even prepared the ground for Martin Luther , Mr Asbridge suggests. He does not push that point too far, which seems wise, given the 170-year gap between the outbreak of plague and the 95 theses.

“The Black Death” draws on a wide range of sources, from administrative records to wills and diaries. It contains many portraits of people who lived through the plague. Several of these portraits could be shorter—indeed, the book could be shorter, as it occasionally goes into numbing detail—but some are wonderful. Best of all is the description of Alexandre Yersin, a headstrong scientist who rushed to Hong Kong during a plague outbreak in 1894. He was the first to identify the bacterium, which is named after him: Yersinia pestis .

The book makes two big claims, and amply proves both of them. Mr Asbridge, a historian of the Crusades, shows that the plague affected the Islamic world at least as profoundly as Christian Europe. Cairo may have suffered more than any other city. Some Islamic scholars reiterated the orthodox view that the disease was not contagious and that people must not on any account flee infected places. Many Muslims seem to have ignored them. The Ottomans were especially pragmatic, which may help to explain how they increased their power and influence in the region.

Mr Asbridge’s second claim is subtler. Although medieval and early modern people harboured theories about the plague that strike modern readers as ignorant, they tried their best, he argues. The authorities made broadly sensible decisions. Physicians risked and often lost their lives treating plague victims. That their treatments were rarely effective does not diminish their bravery (and one expensive Italian remedy, theriac, helpfully contained opium). In London plague victims were buried in mass graves, but neatly, with their feet pointing east.

People dealt bravely with covid-19, too. Yet the authorities made decisions, especially about restricting personal freedoms, that now strike many as appalling. The vaccines that have saved many lives and have allowed normal life to resume have given rise to conspiracy theories. Dealing with a germ that is far less lethal than Y. pestis has been hard and contentious. Modern people should think before they use the word “medieval” as an insult. ■

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The sequel to the hit film is about the changing world of journalism

In “The Devil Wears Prada 2”, fashion magazines are off-trend The sequel to the hit film is about the changing world of journalism April 30th 2026 IT IS ONE of the most memorable monologues in 21st-century cinema. Miranda Priestly (Meryl Streep, pictured right), the formidable editor-in-chief of Runway magazine, is reviewing the latest dresses and accessories. Her ingénue assistant, Andy Sachs (Anne Hathaway, pictured left), scoffs when Miranda is asked to choose between two near-identical belts. So Miranda delivers a scathing takedown of everyone who believes the world of high fashion is frivolous and has no bearing on their personal taste.

Miranda traces how the precise shade of cerulean in Andy’s sweater was popularised in a runway collection years earlier, then picked up by other designers before making its way into department stores and, eventually, the “clearance bin” from which she assumes Andy acquired it. “That blue represents millions of dollars and countless jobs,” Miranda spits, “and it’s sort of comical how you think that you’ve made a choice that exempts you from the fashion industry when, in fact, you’re wearing a sweater that was selected for you by the people in this room.”

“The Devil Wears Prada”—a barely disguised fictionalisation of Anna Wintour’s reign at Vogue—was a smash when it was released in 2006. It depicted the glitz and glamour of fashion and sent up its culture of bullying and dieting. Twenty years on, Miranda’s withering lines (“Florals? For spring? Groundbreaking”) and signature dismissal (“That’s all”) still circulate as memes. The story has been adapted into a hit musical with music by Sir Elton John. And now Miranda, Andy and the Runway gang have returned for a sequel.

But anyone expecting more of the same may be disappointed. “The Devil Wears Prada 2”, it is true, boasts plenty of wonderful couture. But it is not all that interested in fashion’s contribution to culture and the economy. Instead, this time round, the focus is journalism. Characters rush around talking about budgets, buy-outs and advertising revenue—only they do so in Maison Margiela blazers and Valentino stilettos.

Andy left Runway at the end of the first film. At the start of the sequel, she is simultaneously being feted for her investigative journalism and being fired from her newspaper in a mass lay-off. (Among her greatest hits, supposedly, is a four-part series about the Federal Reserve .) Runway, meanwhile, is embroiled in a scandal, having run a glowing profile of a brand that uses sweatshop labour. The chairman of Elias-Clarke, Runway’s parent company, has the bright idea to bring Andy back in as features editor to help restore some credibility to the magazine’s journalism.

No sooner has she published the mea culpa than the chairman dies. His son—whose contempt for sartorial matters is symbolised by his gilet—decides that every Runway department will be cut back to the essentials. Anyone who has been working at the magazine for longer than five years is considered too expensive and will be laid off. Andy races to persuade a mercurial billionaire to buy Runway and thus save her career, the careers of her friends, and even the career of her still-harsh boss.

The problem is that the film does not persuade the viewer as to why Runway needs saving. In fact, the characters repeatedly talk about its increasing irrelevance in the social-media age. Miranda says the September issue is “so thin you could floss with it”. Nigel (Stanley Tucci), Miranda’s right-hand man, laments that Runway is no longer a tastemaker that hires photographers such as Richard Avedon . No one buys the physical product, he says, so instead the magazine produces “content that people scroll past” while they sit on the toilet. “Journalism still fucking matters,” Andy declares—but soon she is content to produce puff pieces at advertisers’ behest.

In the first film, the viewer shares Andy’s perspective. You smirk along with her when the two identical belts are produced—and then, like her, you feel chastened when you realise that Miranda is right, and no one makes aesthetic choices in a vacuum. But in the sequel no such moment of epiphany occurs. Neither Miranda nor Andy seems able to articulate why the magazine still matters. When the aforementioned mercurial billionaire starts talking about replacing models and photoshoots with AI, and Miranda offers up a toothless speech about how Runway celebrates beauty and human endeavour, you think: That’s all? ■

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Fitting literary allusions are out. Jarring clips from Hollywood movies are in

The rhetoric of war has changed. Not for the better Fitting literary allusions are out. Jarring clips from Hollywood movies are in April 23rd 2026 It is June 6th 1944. The second world war is in its fifth year. Millions are dead. Much of Europe lies in ruins. The fate of the war now hangs on a single stretch of water. In the English Channel 150,000 troops mass. The American president addresses his people. But despite the bloodshed, his mood is not bloodthirsty. Americans fight, he says, “not for the lust of conquest. They fight to end conquest.” His ally Winston Churchill will match this tone in his history, which he opens with a “moral”. “IN WAR: RESOLUTION. IN DEFEAT: DEFIANCE. IN VICTORY: MAGNANIMITY”.

It is now April 2026. America is embroiled in another war. This war, too, hangs on a stretch of water, this time the Strait of Hormuz. The American president addresses his people. The tone is belligerent. He says: “Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell—JUST WATCH!” His secretary of war, Pete Hegseth, says the Iranians are “toast and they know it”. This is not a “fair fight”: “We are punching them while they’re down, which is exactly how it should be.”

War in the West has changed. Militarily, of course—stealth bombers have replaced Spitfires—but it has changed oratorically too. To talk about oratory in modern politics feels anachronistic: budget speeches do not abound in alliteration and assonance. But the words of war are different. Hitherto, when the West has waged war, it has almost always done so with modern weapons but antique words.

Thus while countries fought on the beaches and on the landing grounds with guns and bombs and bullets they also—and with equal strategy—fought on the page and on the podium and on the wireless. There were Shakespearean allusions and nods to Abraham Lincoln and rolling repetitions of the word “fight”. Oratory mattered. “Of all the talents bestowed upon men,” Churchill wrote, few are “so powerful” and “none is so precious.”

Its power seems to have been forgotten. A recent White House video titled “Justice the American Way” is an almost wordless montage of images from “Gladiator” , “Top Gun” and “Transformers”, interspersed with footage of actual Iranian targets being hit. Instead of quoting the Bible, Mr Hegseth misquoted it. On April 15th he led people in a prayer that “reflected” Ezekiel 25:17—but which was actually taken almost verbatim from “Pulp Fiction”, a less celebrated spiritual work. (The actual Ezekiel verse is about God smiting the Philistines.)

An obvious counter-argument is to say: so what? Death does not distinguish between a leader who can produce a Periclean flourish and one who can’t. Moreover, winged words—as poets during the first world war pointed out—can be deceptive, luring men to a mechanised slaughter that is neither “dulce” nor decorous. When Rudyard Kipling’s only son was killed in the Battle of Loos, he wrote the bitter, un-Kiplingish epigram: “If any question why we died,/Tell them, because our fathers lied.” Butchery can be ill-served by oratory.

Yet it is hard not to feel that something is lost when a Western leader channels “Transformers” rather than Churchill. Allusion was once essential to oratory. Sensibly so: all men may be created equal, but all men’s words are not. Just ask the poor chap who gave a (now largely forgotten) two-hour, 13,607-word address at Gettysburg before Lincoln gave his 271-word zinger.

All great orators have thus borrowed, invoked, alluded. When Colonel Tim Collins sent British soldiers into Iraq he told them to “tread lightly” as they trod on the site of the Garden of Eden. The “few” of Churchill’s Battle of Britain speech stood shoulder to shoulder in the imagination with the “happy few” of Shakespeare’s “Henry V”. The atomic bomb was ushered in by a flash and by the Bhagavad Gita. “I am become death,” J. Robert Oppenheimer would later say, “the destroyer of worlds.”

This isn’t merely oratorical fireworks. The right quotation conscripts the dead along with the living; marshal the right quotation and you marshal not merely words, but a battalion of ideas. Invoke the Bible and, tacitly, you invoke the better angels of our nature. Call upon Shakespeare’s “Henry V” and, implicitly, you also call upon God, Harry, England and St George. A tenth of all Churchill’s speeches, says Andrew Roberts, his biographer, referred to history to encourage listeners to see the war “in its historical context, of threats that had been posed to Britain in the past” that the country had defeated.

Cultural allusions offer sinew-stiffening encouragement. They also enable a speaker to “elevate the tone”, says Barry Strauss, a professor of military history at Cornell University. Pericles’s funeral oration does not merely tell Athenians to fight. He tells them they are “fighting for something…for democracy”. In 1940 Franklin Roosevelt declared that “Never before since Jamestown and Plymouth Rock has our American civilisation been in such danger as now.” America would support Allied countries; by rearming, it would become “the great arsenal of democracy”.

Leaders must evoke the right cultural allusions, however. William Nicholson, one of the writers of “Gladiator”, finds it “terrifying” that the White House is quoting the film: it “tells you that they actually see war as a Hollywood movie”. In fact, they see it less clearly than one. Mr Nicholson made the gladiator a reluctant fighter. Maximus was not a violent lunk, but a peaceable man forced to fight for his wife, child and the “dream that was Rome”. War is not fun. As Roosevelt once said: “I have seen war on land and sea. I have seen blood running from the wounded…I hate war.”

For as Hollywood knows—but the White House no longer does—the best war oratory is not actually about war. It is about peace. People hear it and think not merely of the lives that might be lost, but of a way of life that might be: they fear for culture, for democracy, for decency. You weep at good oratory because you fear not just a lost war but a lost world. Yet when you watch the White House videos, you weep for a lost world anyway. ■

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A joyless theocracy produces wittier videos than the Trump administration

In the AI propaganda war, Iran is winning A joyless theocracy produces wittier videos than the Trump administration April 23rd 2026 In previous decades, propaganda for murderous Middle Eastern regimes tended to be unpersuasive. As American forces rolled into the Iraqi capital in 2003, Saddam Hussein’s information minister, Muhammad Saeed al-Sahaf, stood on a roof and claimed that “Baghdad is safe…the infidels are committing suicide by the hundreds on the gates.” He added that God was “grilling their stomachs in hell”. Behind him, television audiences could see Iraqi soldiers fleeing for their lives.

In today’s Gulf war, astonishingly, a murderous dictatorship appears to be winning the propaganda battle against the land of the free and the home of Hollywood. Day after day, a team backing Iran’s theocratic regime releases videos, made with artificial intelligence, that ridicule Donald Trump and glorify those who resist him. They swiftly go viral. Joseph Bodner and Krysia Sikora of the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a pro-democracy NGO, found that two pro-Iran networks had racked up more than a billion views on X in the first month of the war.

The regime is not known for its sense of humour—ask the novelist Sir Salman Rushdie . Yet many of the videos are witty and show great fluency in their enemy’s culture. The soundtrack is often thumping rap and the lyrics are usually in English. The figures are frequently made of Lego. Mr Trump is portrayed as a vain, cowardly liar; his Pinocchio-nose is soon as long as a golf club. He declares victory even as his pants are, literally, on fire. Pete Hegseth, America’s secretary of war, is shown as a vomiting drunk with crusader tattoos.

Iran’s propagandists have advantages that Saddam’s flack lacked. AI allows expensive-looking videos to be made cheaply and quickly in response to breaking news. Since most AI models are trained on Western content, the technology also makes it easy to generate new slop that riffs on Western cultural tropes. Social-media channels offer multiple ways to circulate Iran’s zingers: handy, since YouTube has blocked them. And an unpopular American president waging an unpopular war gives them a mockable target.

Nonetheless, Iran has played its cards deftly. Rather than chanting “Death to America”, as is traditional, the videos play up criticisms of Mr Trump that resonate with a global audience. Binyamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, is shown whispering words of strife into his ear. Young Americans line up to be drafted as plutocrats on Epstein island frolic with girls in bikinis. A ticker shows the oil price soaring. A bonfire of banknotes shows American taxpayers’ cash being wasted. American bombs kill Iranian schoolchildren.

The lyrics are not exactly Omar Khayyam, but they are sharper than plenty of popular hip-hop tracks. “Hey Loser, come closer, I’m the exposer/Fake billionaire, your whole empire a poser” is not a bad put-down. Nor is: “You drop ‘Fake News’, sitting high in your tower/Morally bankrupt, just drunk on the power.”

Explosive Media, the group that makes many of the videos, claims to be independent. However, it is operating out of Iran, where the internet is shut down for all except those most deeply favoured by those in power. And a spokesman for Explosive Media admitted to the BBC that the regime was a “customer”.

Look closely, and the propaganda is fairly blatant. Iranian forces are portrayed as heroic (though the regime has massacred thousands of its own people) and ever-victorious, obliterating American bases and Gulf skyscrapers that in fact they only singed. Nods to conspiracy theories popular both in the Middle East and the West abound: that the Illuminati control America and that the death of Princess Diana, a British royal who was dating a Muslim, was no accident. Antisemitic images appear, too. Mr Netanyahu is depicted as a worm in an apple.

Yet all these nasties flit past your eyes so fast they are easy to miss. The videos have “hotwired” the world’s brains, says Moustafa Ayad, also of the Institute for Strategic Dialogue. “The Iranians have been able to tap into the zeitgeist in a language that people understand online…through really good use of internet subcultures, memes [and] animations.” The message—don’t trust America—comes not from the mouths of Iran’s actual leaders, who are “hated or polarising”, but from Lego versions of them, “who look like fun”, says Mr Ayad.

Iran is also taking pro-Trump AI content and repurposing it. After Mr Trump posted an AI-generated image of himself as Jesus healing the sick (and explained, when Christians were outraged, that he thought it showed him as a doctor), someone added the real Jesus descending from the sky to cast Mr Trump into the fiery pit. Iranian embassies gleefully circulated it.

America’s State Department used to have an office that counteracted enemy propaganda, but the Trump administration closed it last year. So the world’s greatest military power is struggling to subdue a regional bully, and the world’s cultural superpower is being out-trolled by a regime that whips women for showing their hair. For the man who let this happen, “loser” seems like an understatement. ■

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The megastar’s uncancellable songs are his rightful memorial

In a new biopic, Michael Jackson is an eccentric saint. Yuck The megastar’s uncancellable songs are his rightful memorial April 23rd 2026 Part of Michael Jackson’s intergalactic appeal was the way he evoked yet dispelled danger. His androgynous looks and high-pitched voice took the edge off songs of lust. A spindly body made his spiky dance moves unthreatening. In music videos he breaks up brawls and rescues damsels in distress; the zombies who stalk the “Thriller” mini-movie are only a bad dream. As an artist, Jackson was a one-man fairy tale, sublimating pain and peril into joy.

“Michael”, a biopic out this week, tries to pull off the same trick with his life. It is a triumphant version of a story that, in reality, became a tragedy: for Jackson, who died in 2009, and for the children he allegedly abused. It aims to transport you to his febrile heyday in the 1980s, but its implicit lesson—about money, memory and the malleability of facts—is uncomfortably contemporary.

The villain in this fable is Jackson’s tyrannical father, Joseph, played by Colman Domingo. It opens in Gary, Indiana, in 1966 as Joe pitilessly drills his sons into shape as the Jackson 5. Their star is little Michael, played by Juliano Valdi as a child and, as an adult—to the extent that he becomes one—by the singer’s nephew, Jaafar Jackson (pictured). The film charts the family’s rise and Michael’s yen to forge a solo career and escape his father’s thrall.

For a movie about an oddball megastar who befriended a chimpanzee, much of “Michael” is surprisingly dull. The hero keeps getting bullied by his father and consoled by his mother (Nia Long), while accumulating exotic pets and staring longingly at pictures of Peter Pan. He develops a taste for leather and epaulettes; everyone tells him how special he is. In stretches, this is the sort of fairy tale that could put you to sleep.

Except, naturally, the main event is the music. Here is Jackson’s magical timbre on “I Want You Back”, released when he was 11. Later comes a recreation of the wondrous moment in 1983 when he debuted his moonwalk to “Billie Jean”. Movie or no movie, these songs have shown the hard practical limit of cancellation: a bit like Picasso , now widely deprecated for misogyny, they have proved too good to abjure. They are all the memorial Jackson needed.

His fame, though, wasn’t powered by talent alone. It was the type that shades into sainthood, as if he suffered for his audience as well as entertaining it. The tribulations included not just his warped childhood but racial prejudice, the burdens of celebrity, a quixotic pursuit of eternal youth and all that plastic surgery. “Michael”, too, tries to beatify him. He comforts ill children and makes peace between street gangs, sensing his destiny is to “heal” people. “His story continues,” reads a note after the plot ends in 1988.

That is one way to put it. In their shared peculiarity, the saint is cousin to the freak; the freak is kin to the creep, who is brother to the criminal. Jackson allegedly slid to the bottom of this continuum. Since 1993 he has been accused of abusing numerous boys—charges he denied, as does his estate, which is still involved in litigation. He was acquitted at his only criminal trial (another case was settled out of court). But some of the testimony against him is compelling.

“Michael” was reportedly meant to dramatise the earliest accusations, and had to be revised when a prohibitive detail in a legal agreement came to light. As it is, because the film closes when it does, the fictional Jackson never makes it to the notorious Neverland ranch, scene of much of the alleged abuse. The darkest side of the tale doesn’t feature. On the one hand, there is his marvellous art. On the other, just his sequinned glove.

So viewers who recall his downfall will watch “Michael” with a nauseous feeling of omission. Still, it will delight his devotees, and recruit fans too young to remember the ugliness, or content to dismiss it as fake news. Like the posthumous stage shows and albums, it will doubtless enrich his estate. It will also affirm a lesson of modernity: despite all the information swilling around the internet—or because there is so much of it—with enough brass, drive and cash you can rewrite history.

“It doesn’t matter who’s wrong or right,” Jackson sang in “Beat It”. In the end, does it really matter if “Michael” bolsters the official image of the lost boy and martyred prodigy? It does if you believe that no one, not even the King of Pop, should be above accountability. Or if you care about the truth, which is that suffering doesn’t always make a man a saint, and sometimes genius can be worse than flawed. But that kind of moral is no use in a fairy tale. ■

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A new biography traces the life and career of a trailblazing novelist

Judy Blume’s radical honesty changed literature for ever A new biography traces the life and career of a trailblazing novelist April 23rd 2026 LIKE MANY shy children, Judith Sussman spent a lot of time on her own, reading and inventing stories. It never occurred to her to become a novelist, though. In New Jersey in the 1940s and 1950s, many of her female classmates aspired to be secretaries, typing up other people’s words rather than their own.

She did not give literary pursuits any thought until she was in her late 20s. Judith—by then Judy Blume, and a frustrated housewife with two small children—sought a creative outlet. As she cleaned up after dinner, she devised tales and envisioned herself as “the next Dr Seuss ”. (Her husband, meanwhile, told friends that writing was a hobby that “keeps her out of Saks”, a department store.)

Mark Oppenheimer, a journalist and academic, chronicles Ms Blume’s life in an enjoyable, though rather studious, new biography. He charts how she became a blockbuster author—if not quite of Dr Seuss’s stature, then at least known across the world. Ms Blume has sold more than 80m copies of her books to date, more than Joseph Heller or Douglas Adams have.

She grew up in a progressive Jewish family. Even as a youngster, she wanted gritty realism: she imagined her paper dolls had been in terrible accidents and she was the surgeon in charge of their care. Ms Blume’s parents demonstrated an unabashed attitude towards sex and the body. The author remembers an awkward yet straightforward conversation with her father about sperm’s role in pregnancy.

So it did not take long, once she started writing, for her unsuccessful imitations of Dr Seuss’s rhyming style to give way to her own “frank, candid, earthy” voice. “Judy’s innovation…was not to describe menstruation, first kisses, or teenagers’ orgasms; she had grown up reading about these things,” Mr Oppenheimer observes. “She just thought these topics didn’t have to stay sequestered in books for grown-ups.”

In books such as “Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret” and “Deenie” she explored puberty, self-discovery and masturbation. In “Blubber” she examined fat-shaming. “Forever…” described a 17-year-old girl’s first sexual experiences. (The well-worn copy in your reviewer’s school library would fall open to the page read most often, where Michael formally introduces Katherine to “Ralph”, his penis.)

Young readers found Ms Blume’s candour electrifying; among adults, it sparked contention. Her sales caught fire. Ms Blume’s personal life was turbulent—she has been married three times—yet she became a kind of agony aunt to her fans, receiving thousands of letters a month. Many of them, sadly, came from fans who were depressed or being abused.

“Judy Blume: A Life” is best enjoyed as an overview of a tremendously successful career. Despite having interviewed Ms Blume at length, Mr Oppenheimer concedes he struggled to get the true measure of her as a person. And something about the book seems to have vexed the novelist: having reviewed a draft and offered corrections, Ms Blume then distanced herself from the project. This book illuminates the problem of biography , particularly when it concerns a living person. Writing an account that is honest, perceptive and acceptable to the subject is a tricky feat.

The book also casts a light on the chasm between adolescents and their parents. For as long as children have loved Ms Blume’s writing, reproving adults have feared it is leading their offspring astray. Many have tried to have Ms Blume’s work censored. In the 1980s a school district in Iowa groused that “Forever…” describes things “God didn’t intend to explore outside of marriage”; in the 1990s one in Illinois fretted that it was “basically a sexual how-to-do book for junior-high students”. In 2025 “Forever…” was still one of the most banned books in America’s public schools.

Such efforts are woefully misguided. Adolescence is a confusing time—teens feel curious, embarrassed and misunderstood—and stories that help them make sense of it should be celebrated, not censured. Ms Blume deserves her flowers. ■

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Athletes everywhere are eager to go the extra miles

Runaway success: marathon organisers are seeing record demand Athletes everywhere are eager to go the extra miles April 23rd 2026 ALANA RANSON hit the ground running in 2023. Her housemates were joggers, so she thought she’d “give it a go” too. By November 2025—a little over two years after she first laced up her trainers —Ms Ranson had completed the Abbott World Marathon Majors (wmm), a series of prestigious races in Berlin, Boston, Chicago, London, New York, Sydney and Tokyo.

Ever more people are going the distance. When gyms were forced to shut during the pandemic, many fitness fanatics turned to running to keep in shape. Plenty have maintained the habit, pushing themselves to go farther and faster . Around 60,000 runners will line up for the London Marathon on April 26th, up from 54,000 in 2024.

A record 1.1m people applied to sweat and suffer through the course in London this year—more than double the number that entered the public ballot in 2024. The New York City Marathon lottery also received its highest-ever number of applications, and only 1% of entrants were given a race bib. (To secure a spot outside the ballot, you have to be very fast or very good at raising money for charity.)

Race organisers are racing to meet demand. Tokyo has added more spaces. London is in consultations to host a two-day event in 2027; the firm behind it has also taken over races in Brighton and Frankfurt. “What we’re trying to do is give people more opportunity,” says Hugh Brasher, chief executive of London Marathon Events.

The wmm is hoping to add Cape Town and Shanghai to its list, so the medal given to those who complete all the major marathons will be even harder—and more desirable—to obtain. The European Marathons Classics, a new, eight-race challenge, also comes with a medal (and boasting rights).

The trend is driven by youngsters like Ms Ranson. Gen-Z runners make up a growing share of marathon applicants and finishers; the number who logged a marathon on Strava, a fitness-tracking app, increased by a third from 2024 to 2025. Given their supple joints, they will be able to keep going for some time. Marathon mania shows no signs of slowing down. ■

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His renown is an artefact of a febrile time

Ibram X. Kendi’s illiberal views on race are out of favour. Good His renown is an artefact of a febrile time April 23rd 2026 ANYone who has regularly talked of “cultural appropriation” or “safe spaces” probably owns a book by Ibram X. Kendi. He became one of the American left’s favourite thinkers on race, having written five number-one bestsellers and won the National Book Award. His best-known title, “How to Be an Antiracist”, claims there is no such thing as “not racist”: at every moment, a person is either being racist (by supporting or failing to challenge policies that sustain racial inequity) or antiracist (when they do the opposite).

His star rose fast. In 2020, in the wake of George Floyd’s murder , Boston University hired Mr Kendi to head up a well-funded “Centre for Antiracist Research”. But in 2023 the centre sacked half its staff. (Mr Kendi denied financial mismanagement.) He now teaches at Howard University.

His new book explores “the origins of our authoritarian age”. It is similarly rigid and hortatory—and accidentally illuminates why early-21st-century progressivism failed. Its focus is the “great replacement theory” , which posits that elites encourage immigration to “replace” the (usually white) natives of a country with (usually non-white) immigrants for cheaper labour and reliable votes. Since it was first promulgated in 2011 by a French writer, Renaud Camus, the theory has “taken over global politics”, Mr Kendi argues.

He is correct that this noxious conspiracy theory is no longer confined to the fringes. Elon Musk and some American Republicans have promoted it, as have right-wing politicians in Europe. It has inspired mass shootings in America, New Zealand and Norway. A book that could help centrist and liberal politicians formulate an effective response would be useful.

This is not that book. Mr Kendi is an asserter, not a persuader. His fondness for baroque taxonomies leads him to argue that ten “interlocking ideas” give the great replacement theory its power. He uses each tenet to assail a particular right-wing politician, seemingly at random: “Racism against peoples of colour is over” and Britain’s Nigel Farage , for instance, or “Racial inequity data should be ignored” and Hungary’s Viktor Orban. How these ideas “interlock” into a chain never becomes clear.

In the absence of clarity, Mr Kendi offers guilt by association. Some great-replacement precepts echo Nazi ideology, such as hostility to multiculturalism, a desire to deport non-natives and a belief that elites ( “globalists” rather than “international Jewry”) dominate the world. Therefore “any politician who articulates these renovated ideas,” Mr Kendi says, “should be described as neo-Nazi”.

This is an insult masquerading as a description, and it is more likely to harden opposition than to change minds. This intolerant streak was visible in earlier work. “The heartbeat of racism is denial,” Mr Kendi wrote. To object to his Manichean view of race relations, then, is to out yourself as a bigot.

Solutions are not his strength, either. To counter the great replacement theory, he says “We must accurately define racism…[shut] off the firehose of disinformation [and] learn history.” It may sound anodyne, but in a liberal democracy, a government should not be able to “shut off” publications. “We must accurately define” really means “Everyone must agree with my definition of a deeply contested term.”

Similarly, his championing of “antiracist” policy sounds laudable at first. But consider an example: rates of homelessness among black and Native American families are four times those of white ones. If achieving equity is the chief goal, then seizing white families’ homes and forcing them to live on the streets until the rate of white homelessness meets other groups’ is sound “antiracist” policy. That this would be a recipe for communal resentment does not trouble Mr Kendi, who argues that “The only remedy for past discrimination is present discrimination.”

He has also proposed a “Department of Antiracism comprised of formally trained experts” that could block any law and punish any public official deemed racist. He writes that the department’s purpose would be “to fix the original sin of racism”.

That is a telling goal. Mr Kendi is not a serious policy thinker: he is a religious writer for secular lefties. “How to Be an Antiracist” features original sin (racism), public repentance (“the heartbeat of antiracism is confession”) and eternal struggle (“the movement from racist to antiracist is always ongoing”). This sin must be expiated, not accepted or compromised with. The world is divided into the damned, who disagree with him, and the saved, who accept his proposals in toto.

That suited progressives when they believed Donald Trump was an aberration, and all they had to do to banish Trumpism was cancel bad people and drag politics leftward. But that had a limit, as the election in 2024 showed. Some progressives have come to realise that they have “annoyed the average American into fascism” as Marc Maron, a comedian, sardonically put it. The lukewarm reception for this book is also telling. Google Trends suggests Mr Kendi has attracted less than one-tenth the attention this year as in 2020.

Compromise and incremental change can be slow and frustrating, especially when it comes to long-standing injustices such as racial inequity. But they are the foundations of liberal democracy. ■

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Her book aims to excavate the discipline from the layers of argument that surround it

Mary Beard offers a spirited defence of studying classics Her book aims to excavate the discipline from the layers of argument that surround it April 16th 2026 Extolling the virtues of learning Greek and Latin, John Stuart Mill observed in 1867 that “The structure of every sentence is a lesson in logic…no modern European language is so valuable a discipline to the intellect.” Many such claims have been made over the decades about the merits of a classical education. Studying the languages, literature and history of ancient Greece and Rome is said to promote logical thinking, simplify the learning of other languages and reveal informative patterns in history, from spotting tyranny to understanding imperial decline.

Nonsense, say critics of classics. The entire subject is steeped in whiteness, privilege and colonialism, and was invented in the 18th century as a Eurocentric foundation myth. Putting Greece and Rome at the top of the global cultural pile, and declaring Europeans to be their heirs, “to have empire over the peoples of the world”, as Virgil wrote of the Romans, has since been used to justify all kinds of misdeeds, by everyone from Cecil Rhodes to Mussolini. The subject needs to be updated and reimagined—as “global ancient history” or “ancient Mediterranean studies”—or perhaps abandoned altogether.

What to make of such arguments? Battlefields abounded in the classical world, and now the discipline itself has become one. It is to be expected that Mary Beard , Britain’s best-known classicist and a professor at Cambridge until her retirement in 2022, considers her turf to be worth defending. But she surprisingly discards most of the familiar arguments in favour of classics on page two of her provocative new book, “Talking Classics”. Instead, like an archaeologist, she aims to excavate the discipline from the layers of discourse that surround it, and to make the case for it anew, without resort to shopworn traditional arguments.

Her starting-point is that if you want to understand the similarities and differences between the past and the present, the classical world provides an ideal arena (as it were) for such exploration. Unlike many other periods in history, it offers both great distance in time and a large amount of surviving evidence: “one of only a few past cultures that are simultaneously quite so far and quite so near”.

It is easy to be beguiled when reading graffiti in Pompeii or the letters of Cicero by how familiar the Romans can seem to be. But this is a trap, says Ms Beard; people in the past were also unthinkably, incomprehensibly alien. (“If it is a girl,” a Roman writes to his pregnant wife in the first century, “throw it away.”) Studying antiquity raises questions about the extent to which the past can ever be understood—and how people in the future will think about and judge the modern world.

This leads on to Ms Beard’s next argument, which is that classical literature is relevant because it poses questions that still matter today. That is not to say that the Greeks and Romans had it all figured out. It is another trap to look to classical texts for “ready-made answers to contemporary problems”, she warns. Tacitus may have anticipated Orwell by two millennia on the way in which language becomes subverted under autocracy, but he has no simple solution to offer. Indeed, the Greeks and Romans were just as liable to come up with wrong answers as anyone.

What matters is that they asked such good questions. Rather than being a trove of timeless wisdom to be consulted, classical literature encourages debate and disagreement. Classics thus provides a framework in which to discuss questions to which there are no simple, right answers. True, the same can be said of other subjects in the humanities. But by being helpfully distant from the modern world, classics can provide a laboratory in which to argue about contentious issues.

But is classics not irredeemably tainted by the many ways it has been misused? Those who have appropriated classical history and symbols, and harnessed them to justify their actions, include imperialists, fascists (the fasces, a bundle of wooden rods, were a Roman symbol of authority) and even January 6th protesters, who sported Greek helmets and slogans as they stormed the Capitol. But classics is not “a gateway drug that takes you down a slippery slope to white supremacy”, Ms Beard insists, and “does not automatically lead to membership of the alt-right”. Studying a distant culture is not the same as endorsing its unsavoury aspects.

Indeed, it can be a way to challenge them and subsequent versions of them. On this view, the misuse of classical history is an asset, not a liability, because it sheds light on themes such as tyranny, colonialism and imperialism. As Ms Beard notes, “The sharpest critiques of empire come from within imperial states themselves.” This was certainly true of Rome. But there has also been some fascinating recent scholarship about the role of classical history in Victorian arguments about the British empire. For some educated Indians in the 19th century, meanwhile, studying classics was a way to gain insight into the mindset of their colonial overlords.

Ms Beard admits there is a “serious case to answer” when it comes to the use of classical languages as “the policemen of privilege, class and social exclusion”. Until 1960 students applying to Oxford or Cambridge needed a secondary-school qualification in Latin, regardless of the subject they wished to study. (Greek was also required until 1920.) But just because classical languages were once a tool of social exclusion does not make them unworthy of study today.

What of the idea that classics ought to be reimagined and updated? Arguments about the boundaries of the field date back to the 19th century. Should it include archaeology? Or the study of Mesopotamian epics? Or Sanskrit? But expanding the field to broaden its appeal and its range—by including non-European cultures, for example—would be a mistake, Ms Beard says. Just because white men have long seen themselves reflected in the classical past does not mean others should be encouraged to make the same error.

Defenders of the special status of classics will say she has not been kind enough to the discipline. Those who decry it as a bastion of privilege will say she has been too gentle. Whether you agree with her or not, there is no doubting the vim of Ms Beard’s arguments, which are pithily presented, with flashes of salty humour. Rather than simple answers to complicated questions, she offers yet more complicated questions. This is, in fact, just what she says classics itself does. It is not a source of easy answers or unquestionable authority, nor is it to blame for the ways it has been misused. Her book’s argument epitomises the very kinds of thinking that the study of classics aims to encourage. ■

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How the bias against the cormorant took flight

What the world’s most hated avian reveals about people How the bias against the cormorant took flight April 16th 2026 Few beasts have such a bestial reputation as the cormorant. It has been called the “bird from Hell”, “black death”, “devil bird” and “fish terrorist”. Fishermen despise it. Poets and novelists have captured it ominously. Where did the bird go so wrong? Gordon McMullan, a professor of English at King’s College London, argues that the cormorant has been “caught up in the tendency of human culture to sort animals…into binary categories of ‘good’ and ‘bad’, imposing a moral perspective on nature”. His new book offers a perceptive “cultural history of greed and prejudice”—not just of a bird, but of human beings.

Some of the bias against cormorants can be explained by their dark colour (a symbolic plight shared by crows and black cats). So, too, by their physique (they dry off by stretching out their wings, which can look as if they want to start a pub brawl). But writers such as Shakespeare have done a lot to fan negative perceptions of the bird, including a reputation for greed. In “Paradise Lost” (1667) John Milton portrayed the Devil in Eden as taking the shape of—you guessed it—a cormorant.

Because they are such efficient hunters, fishermen blame them for eating more than their fair share. But Mr McMullan shows that cormorants probably do not consume more fish relative to their size than other piscivorous birds. Nor is the claim that they are “invasive” correct. Their numbers rebounded in the late 20th century, after pesticides and hunting had caused a decline.

“Cormorant” migrates enjoyably from literature and history to sociology—though sometimes it is too academic. What does it say about people that they revere pelicans (viewing them as a Christian symbol of selflessness) but despise cormorants? No bird can control how it is perceived. But perhaps people can shed their misperceptions. ■

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A new book charts a future for the modern era’s most successful philosophy

Liberalism must revive itself before it’s too late A new book charts a future for the modern era’s most successful philosophy April 16th 2026 The 21st century has been a deflating one for liberals. Politicians are loth to offer a ringing endorsement of free trade, or of the rules-based international order built from the wreckage of the second world war. Free expression and the sanctity of the individual are under attack from both the strongmen of the right and the identity-politics-fuelled left. As for unfettered markets, defending them became less popular after the worst financial crisis for generations struck in 2007.

And yet, as Adrian Wooldridge, a columnist at Bloomberg and former Economist journalist, argues, liberalism forged the modern world. It was born as three revolutions in the 18th century—American, French and industrial—swept through Western societies and turbocharged the economic growth that followed. Early liberals set out a rich philosophy designed for a world in flux: “the belief that society starts with the individual rather than the collective, that power is so dangerous that it needs to be restrained, that truth can be striven for only through open discussion”. Modern liberals have lost sight of these principles. They must urgently rediscover them or face “illiberal anarchy”.

The Economist has been liberalism’s house journal since 1843, so it is perhaps no surprise that this reviewer (who did not work directly with the author) found his sweeping account enthralling. “Centrists of the World Unite!” proceeds at breakneck pace, starting with the 15th century. Readers meet Erasmus urging kings to rule by honour and sincerity (rather than Machiavellian fear), Hobbes extolling the importance of the individual and Montesquieu warning of the dangers of concentrated power. Just as history sped up in the revolutionary 18th century, so does the author’s narrative, rattling through all the big liberal thinkers in 130 pages.

It is, in truth, too much of a whistle-stop tour: this is a rare book that would have benefited from being longer. John Stuart Mill rightly gets the most space, and even that is barely a chapter’s-worth. Mr Wooldridge writes fascinatingly about how liberalism’s founders fought to remove “barriers to dynamism”, how their successors grappled with the meaning of freedom and how fiercely liberals themselves have criticised their own creed.

But the tour is quick, because the book’s focus is how to chart a course for renewal. Today’s liberals have splintered into factions that betray the cause, Mr Wooldridge writes. Left-wingers are so eager to settle group injustices (against black people, for instance) that they have turned against meritocracy—one of the most powerful ideas of the modern era. Market fundamentalists obsess over the narrow freedom to act as one pleases rather than avoiding harming others. The Davos class of “managerial liberals” ranks ideological questions far below their most important one: “How can I remain in charge?”

Thank goodness, then, for liberalism’s “extraordinary ability to regenerate itself”. Mr Wooldridge is not shy with prescriptions to help it do so. Liberals must move “simultaneously to the left and the right”, he writes. They need to recognise that “business is a good servant but a bad master” and should crack down on rent-seeking, tax-dodging and concentrations of corporate power. Their rightward shift must highlight the importance of “excellence or greatness in both the arts and in human behaviour” and of the “civilising role of authority”. Liberals of all stripes need to head off populists by taking the issues they promise disingenuously to fix—uncontrolled immigration, say, or urban dysfunction—more seriously.

It is a bracing manifesto. Liberalism has risked becoming a “fossilised orthodoxy” before, at the turn of the 20th century, only for a new generation of liberals to revive it. Two world wars and the Depression followed nevertheless. War now stalks the world again. It is in urgent need of a philosophy that seeks to honour individuals, constrain power and resolve differences through discussion rather than violence. ■

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Frustration with modern dating has fuelled the rise of “passport bros”

Western men are going abroad to find traditional wives Frustration with modern dating has fuelled the rise of “passport bros” April 16th 2026 A few years ago Mike got fed up with dating in America. “So many women there have been brainwashed to think it’s OK to treat men like crap,” he says. He could work remotely, so he moved to Thailand, where his money stretched further, and he met the sort of woman he was seeking. He is now engaged to a Thai woman, Pafan. (Both asked for their surnames to be withheld.) The couple often post videos for their thousands of followers. In one viral clip captioned “Point of view: you have a Thai girlfriend”, Pafan kneels on the floor clipping Mike’s nails. He says his followers are mostly American men, many of them “in awe” of how she caters to him.

Mike is one of a rising number of “passport bros”: young Western men who travel abroad in search of better dating prospects . Online forums, YouTube channels and TikTok accounts rank countries according to their women, advising which are the most “feminine”, “traditional” and likely to pamper men. Thailand, Brazil, Colombia, the Philippines and Vietnam are among the most popular. “It’s the ultimate life-hack in 2026,” says Austin Abeyta, a passport bro in Da Nang, Vietnam.

If all this sounds like the 1950s have collided with the modern manosphere —where dating frustrations translate into broader grievances about women online—you are not wrong. Men rejecting American women for “not offering what they value isn’t new”, says Beth Bailey, a historian at Cambridge University. American women’s roles changed during the second world war as millions entered the workforce. Some veterans sought more traditional partners abroad: almost 100,000 married foreign women, says Ms Bailey. Other men sought “mail-order bride” arrangements. In the case of passport bros, they do not bring women to America but instead travel overseas themselves, aided by remote work and digital-nomad visas.

Why the resurgence now? Some claim the dating landscape is stacked against men. They say apps such as Tinder and Hinge favour only a handful of highly desirable profiles, while others are left competing for scraps. “It’s a very labour-intensive game…without a good prize at the end,” says Mr Abeyta.

There has also been a broader cultural shift, with some young men becoming more conservative and seeking compliant partners. A recent study by Ipsos, a think-tank, surveying around 30 countries, found that more than half of Gen Z men believe women’s rights have gone far enough; around a third think that wives should always obey their husbands.

Economics play a part, too. Moving abroad can make it easier to live out more traditional roles. In America supporting a household on a single income has become more difficult. “I don’t mind dating a poor woman,” says Justin, another passport bro. “You’re more likely to get the traditional roles that way.”

Some critics argue that passport bros exploit women and contribute to sex tourism. Others say that women are with them for a Western passport. But money may play as big a role. “I have no desire to live in America,” says Jewel Clyte, Mr Abeyta’s Filipina girlfriend. Their partnership has offered her more financial security than a partner from the Philippines might.

There is nothing wrong with finding love abroad. But Ms Bailey warns that large gaps in income can lead to “disproportionate levels of power”. For passport bros and their riveted followers, however, that power imbalance may be what is so seductive. ■

Our reporters travelled to Vietnam to research this story. Hear what they discovered on “The Weekend Intelligence”, available at www.economist.com/audio/podcasts

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Jokes about painful subjects should be serious at heart. Does “The Drama” pass the test?

A rom-com ignites a row about tragedy, taste and art Jokes about painful subjects should be serious at heart. Does “The Drama” pass the test? April 16th 2026 The provocation may be the point; if so, “The Drama” has succeeded. To its outraged critics, however, the controversial new film is grotesque. It is set up as a romantic comedy, but features a plan for a school shooting —an unlikely mash-up that has ignited a debate about taste, tragedy and art. The trouble, in the end, is not that there is too much about guns in the movie, but too little.

Initially the cutesy mood recalls vintage Woody Allen, transplanted to Boston. Charlie, a British art curator played by Robert Pattinson, courts Emma (Zendaya, pictured), whose job is vaguer; quickly they are sharing one of those improbably swish flats in which characters in rom-coms live. Early in the action, and just before their wedding—don’t try this at home—they and two friends drunkenly confide their worst-ever deeds. Emma confesses that, when she was 15, she “like, almost did a mass shooting”, ditching the plan just in time.

Cue a meltdown of friendships, Charlie’s mind and decorum at the wedding reception. Cue, also, criticism of “The Drama” and Kristoffer Borgli, its Norwegian director, for enlisting this too-real horror in a whimsical genre. Some survivors of school shootings and victims’ relatives have condemned his queasily humorous approach to the issue.

Hmm. Pain is the heart of cinema. Murder is traumatic, but is often committed on screen. Prejudice is harrowing, but heroes endure it. War is hell, but is eternally waged at the movies. Better, instead of “but”, to say “therefore”, since ambitious artists tackle hard topics not in spite of the distress involved, but because of it. So they must: stories are a way to cope with suffering. Others have been told about school massacres, such as “We Need to Talk About Kevin” , a wrenching novel and film, and “Innocence”, an opera on now in New York.

And a movie on a grave topic needn’t be sombre. As every good satirist knows, laughter can be deadly serious. “The Death of Stalin” is mordantly hilarious—and a penetrating study of deranged tyranny. Jokes about atrocities can be respectful if they convey something important that couldn’t be said another way; if not, they are exploitative. “Life is Beautiful”, a clownish comedy set partly in a concentration camp, flunked that test.

How about “The Drama”? Gun violence is a fair, even urgent, target for satire, not least the view, held by some otherwise rational Americans, that the answer is more guns, not fewer. The film lands some worthwhile barbs. “It’s like a whole thing in this country, isn’t it?” Charlie says of mass shootings, with the bafflement of many outsiders at this aspect of American exceptionalism. “Can we just forget about it?” Emma implores, like politicians who offer “thoughts and prayers” to mourners, then hastily change the subject.

The fact that Emma is female and black, rather than male and white (like most school shooters) is, to some, a negligent distortion. By way of explanation, the script inflicts a bit of loneliness and bullying on teenage Emma (played by Jordyn Curet rather than Zendaya). Edgy flashbacks, in which she struggles to record a murder manifesto, mirror similar scenes in “Four Lions”, a satire about inept would-be suicide-bombers. These and brief, lurid fantasy sequences teeter on the boundary of taste.

A clearer failing is that, after raising the awful allure of violence, the film’s attention wanders to different themes. One is the limits of forgiveness, a plea for which—“Do you want to start over?”—becomes a refrain. Another is the knowability of other people, especially those who seem closest . “Remember, you know each other really well,” a photographer chides the unsmiling couple in one of many clunky ironies.

The main interest here is in the relative moral weight of thoughts and acts. Emma never shoots anyone, whereas the lesser cruelties dredged up in that boozy confessional were enacted. Meanwhile a banal sort of nastiness unfolds in the present. For beneath his adorably ruffled hair, Charlie is kind of a creep. He deceives Emma in small and less small ways, fills her glass then asks why she is drunk, obsesses over his feelings and ignores hers. This is a sly chronicle of male coercion, camouflaged as a tale of an almost-monstrous woman, itself disguised as a rom-com.

In its premise and dark turn it resembles “The Celebration”, in which a birthday party is capsized by a buried record of child abuse. But once the abyss gapes open in that story, it never closes. By contrast “The Drama” evokes a tragic experience, then carelessly looks away. ■

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A new book offers an exposé of the “kidfluencing” business

The dark side of posting about your children online A new book offers an exposé of the “kidfluencing” business April 16th 2026 DIGITAL FOOTPRINTS start long before children take their first steps. They may still be in utero when their parents post about them on social media, sharing sonograms with captions such as “Love at first sight!” Then come the newborn photos, flashed across Instagram within hours of a baby’s birth. “Sharenting” is on the rise: one in four children in the West has a social-media presence before they are born, according to one oft-cited figure.

Parents don’t always stop there, however. Some turn their offspring into full-blown social-media stars—catchily called “kidfluencers”—documenting every major milestone (and many minor ones). They pick up the camera to capture first words and first steps, teething troubles, tantrums and potty training. Even the “most intimate moments are broadcast to millions”, writes Fortesa Latifi, a journalist, in a new book, as content is spun out of everything from puberty to menstruation.

“Like, Follow, Subscribe” is a fascinating exposé of kidfluencing, a multi-billion-dollar business where “children’s privacy is traded for profits”. She meets the parents who have become “producers, managers and cameramen”, incentivising their kids to film videos and dictating how many hours they work a day.

Kidfluencing is a lucrative family profit centre. Ms Latifi discovers that the top accounts charge as much as $200,000 per sponsored post, bringing in between $8m and $10m a year. In this world, “Nothing is too personal to be #sponsored.” Potty training becomes an advert for nappies; shaving your legs for the first time is a chance to promote a razor brand.

The industry has drawn comparisons to child acting or modelling. Yet it does not have the same legal safeguards, Ms Latifi points out. In America only five states have laws requiring a parent to share a child’s earnings with them. Things like consent to be filmed, control of content and hours spent filming are up to parents’ discretion.

Certainly some children benefit from the fame and money influencing brings. Take Ryan Kaji, who became famous at the age of three for toy reviews; today he has more than 40m subscribers on YouTube and earned $35m in 2025, according to Forbes. Yet Ms Latifi’s reporting focuses more on the downsides. She asks Julie Jeppson, a mother of eight who runs a family YouTube channel, which of her videos are most popular. Ms Jeppson reveals it is the ones in which her children get hurt: “The bloody noses, or the broken arms, or the emergency-room visit.” When one of Ms Jeppson’s children is in pain, Ms Latifi wonders, is her instinct to help them or to reach for her phone and record it? In a viral clip on another account, a father keeps filming his son having a seizure rather than immediately calling an ambulance.

Virality—which parents usually take such pains to avoid in nursery—has taken on a different dimension with social media. Pregnancy announcements and videos of newborn babies are especially popular. A former blogger reveals that she has “known people who have had more children because those brand deals are really lucrative”. The idea of having babies for social-media views may sound implausible, but industry insiders tell Ms Latifi that there is serious money in marketing products including buggies, nappies and pregnancy tests.

People are also fascinated by unfamiliar family dynamics. One popular Christian influencer is Karissa Collins: her 11 children all have names starting with “A”, including Anchor and Arrow. She both intrigues and infuriates her followers, such as when she posts about homeschooling or her belief that contraception is unholy.

Many of the most popular influencer families are Mormon. As well as chronicling their large broods, they post photos of pristine houses and countless loaves of fresh sourdough bread . Behind this idyllic façade is the Mormon church: it pays them thousands of dollars per post, pushing imagery that makes the religion look Instagram-worthy, such as followers giving food to the homeless.

But children’s smiling faces can belie their suffering. Shari Franke, the 23-year-old daughter of a momfluencer who was convicted of child abuse in 2024, testified to lawmakers in Utah that she was a “victim of family vlogging”. (Her mother enacted severe punishments on the children, and was arrested after her malnourished son escaped from her house.) “No amount of money”, Ms Franke said, can make up for having your childhood “plastered all over the internet”. In 2025 Utah passed a law to protect kidfluencers and child performers by requiring parents to set aside some of the earnings and enabling children to later ask for content to be removed.

The internet brings other dangers, too. The most disturbing section of the book concerns online predators. Ms Latifi offers grim examples of parents filming suggestive content of their children eating or dancing and kidfluencers being stalked by strangers at school.

“Like, Follow, Subscribe” stands out for its rich reporting, though Ms Latifi does not offer enough satisfying recommendations about how to improve the industry. She reflects on her own daughter and concludes nothing could persuade her to invade her child’s privacy. More parents may soon think twice before posting that sweet picture or sonogram. ■

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The key is to understand that great wars can happen by accident

A third world war is plausible. Here’s how to avoid one The key is to understand that great wars can happen by accident April 9th 2026 One disquieting lesson of history is that, although world wars affect nearly everyone, the task of avoiding them falls to a tiny number of decisionmakers. And those decisionmakers are sometimes fools.

Today’s world looks “quite a bit” like the world before 1914, argues Odd Arne Westad, a professor of history at Yale, in “The Coming Storm”. Great powers are seeking to dominate their backyards. An era of globalisation is giving way to one of rising nationalism. Growing numbers of people are blaming other countries for their problems. Indeed, mutual suspicion is even worse now than it was on the eve of the first world war. Two in five Americans think their country will go to war with China in the next five years; two-thirds of Russians believe that the war in Ukraine is a “civilisational struggle” with the West.

In 1914 some leaders were both belligerent and overconfident. Take Kaiser Wilhelm II. When his friend Franz Ferdinand, the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, was assassinated by a Bosnian Serb, his advisers urged him to show restraint. Instead the Kaiser furiously declared that Serbia was a sponsor of terrorism that needed “sorting out—and soon”. Assured of German backing, Austria-Hungary waged war on Serbia, without clear objectives.

The Kaiser thought a short, sharp war would reshape the Balkans to Germany’s advantage and boost his own standing at home. He doubted that many other countries would get involved. He went on holiday just beforehand, leaving instructions that Germany would support Austria “if complications arose”. He failed to plan for the predictable consequences of his actions, let alone for a global conflict that claimed tens of millions of lives and toppled four empires, including his own.

Today it is “hard to argue that our leaders are better…than those who governed prior to 1914”, writes Mr Westad. Certainly, there is poor judgment in high places. Vladimir Putin thought he could conquer Ukraine in a few days; four years later, more Russians have died in his vanity war than in all wars since 1945. Donald Trump thought war with Iran would be easy; it has shaken the global economy and does not appear to have made America safer.

The recent global resurgence of nationalism has pre-1914 echoes, too. The strain that gripped Germany then “was particularly virulent because it combined a faith in the virtues of the nation with a degree of state worship and a cult of military power”. That sounds a lot like modern China and exactly like modern Russia.

Nationalism blends explosively with fear. In the early 1900s the imperial superpowers (Britain and France) feared the rise of a rapidly industrialising power (Germany), which in turn suspected that the old powers wanted to encircle it and strangle its growth. This is how America and China see each other today.

“The Next World War” by Peter Apps, a journalist at Reuters, complements Mr Westad’s book, adding vivid reporting to scholarly rigour. Mr Apps highlights the oddness of the leaders with the biggest nuclear arsenals. Mr Putin, isolated in his bunker during covid-19, wrote an eccentric screed citing a 9th-century Viking warlord to explain why he needs to rule Ukraine. Mr Xi was beaten and humiliated as a teen during Mao’s Cultural Revolution, and even denounced by his mother. Could this partly explain his obsession with reversing China’s “century of humiliation”?

As for Mr Trump , few leaders are so perilously unaware of what they do not know. As a 38-year-old property dealer, Mr Trump thought he should be in charge of America’s nuclear negotiations with the Soviet Union, Mr Apps notes. “It would take an hour and a half to learn everything there is to learn about missiles,” Mr Trump said. “I think I know most of it anyway.”

It is on the calm, sober judgment of such men that the prevention of great-power conflict depends. And the advance of technology may force them to make decisions very quickly. History suggests this could be a problem. One reason why Europe raced to war in 1914 was that both sides knew that whoever mobilised faster would have an advantage: Prussia had crushed France in 1870-71 by using newfangled railways to rush a huge army to the front before the French were ready. This knowledge shrank the time available for diplomacy “to a minimum”, says Mr Westad. Today nuclear weapons and AI could shrink it from weeks to minutes.

Another challenge is personalised rule. Mr Putin, Mr Trump, Mr Xi and North Korea’s Kim Jong Un all nurture personality cults, presenting themselves as all-but-infallible strongmen. “Personal rulers often…fear the perception of weakness more than…the consequences of war,” says Mr Westad. He could have added that strongmen tend to be corrupt and may hope that a quick, victorious foreign war will distract public attention from their predations at home. A study by Karolina MacLachlan and others for Transparency International, a watchdog, finds that “corruption helps create the conditions for conflict.”

Mr Westad offers advice for avoiding another megawar. Leaders should have speedy and secure means of communication, and meet in person regularly. This may sound basic, but China has recently refused to pick up calls from the Pentagon.

To build trust—and for its own sake—great powers should co-operate where possible, for example on climate change, pandemics and exploring space. On inflammatory yet intractable issues of sovereignty, they should seek temporary compromise. For instance, over Taiwan, America should promise not to support formal independence for the self-governing island so long as China does not invade it.

All sound ideas, but all depend on leadership. Wise leaders “know how to deter, how to buy time, how to avoid uncontrollable escalation”. They should understand—and care—about the suffering that war entails. Mr Putin clearly does not, judging by his recklessness with Russian lives, let alone Ukrainian ones. Mr Xi is harder to read. But it is troubling, notes Mr Apps, that Chinese military planners studying Ukraine “put almost no effort at all into looking at how conflict might have been avoided; instead they focused purely on…lessons [for winning] a future war.”

Mr Apps puts the odds of another world war in the next decade at 30-35%. Some may argue that is too gloomy. Mr Putin will not live for ever. China may grow milder as it ages. Mr Trump is clearly wary of clashing with a great power and “gambling with world war three”. Yet he is fond of bullying smaller countries. And as 1914 showed, small wars can become big ones. ■

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Patrick Radden Keefe’s new book investigates a young man’s death and London’s underworld

He said he was an oligarch’s son. The lie had tragic consequences Patrick Radden Keefe’s new book investigates a young man’s death and London’s underworld April 9th 2026 HE HAD INTRODUCED himself to new acquaintances as Zac Ismailov. He was the son of a late Russian oligarch and fighting with his mother over the estate. From her residence in Dubai, she had evicted him from all the family’s luxury properties. He was down and out until he could claim his inheritance, worth about £200m ($265m).

Or so went his story. It came to light when Zac (pictured) went missing in 2019. No one was more shocked than Matthew and Rachelle Brettler, Zac’s parents, who were neither Russian, extravagantly wealthy, dead, or in Dubai. They lived with Zac and his brother in London. They worried their teenage son, given his fabulations, might have some kind of personality disorder. Four days after Zac disappeared, police informed the Brettlers that he had died after jumping from the fifth floor of a luxury building overlooking the Thames.

Patrick Radden Keefe, an American journalist, chronicles this sad, strange tale in “London Falling”. (The book expands on an article he published in the New Yorker in 2024.) The author made a name for himself as a dogged investigator in books such as “Empire of Pain” , about how the Sackler family fanned the opioid crisis. Here he turns to London’s underworld, using Zac’s story to probe the human instinct for deception and the secrets children keep from their parents. He meticulously gathers information about Zac’s life and death, sifting fact from fiction.

And there is a great deal of fiction, for its cast of characters includes several unscrupulous figures on the make. Most prominent are Akbar Shamji and Verinder Sharma, the two men with whom Zac spent his final hours. Mr Shamji pretended to be a successful businessman, but had recently declared bankruptcy. Sharma, meanwhile, posed as a benefactor yet was a notorious gangster who had a reputation for dangling victims over the edge of balconies and for warming his torture weapons for maximum effectiveness.

Both saw Zac—a supposedly rudderless, wealthy young man—as an easy mark. In the days before Zac’s death, Sharma had expressed his desire for a share of the fortune. Mr Shamji texted a friend on the fateful night saying that he had spent his evening “heating up knives and clearing up blood” at Sharma’s flat. Zac had sustained a broken jaw, an injury not easily explained by the way he fell onto the embankment.

A full reckoning of events remains elusive, despite Mr Radden Keefe’s best efforts. Sharma died from a suspected drug overdose in 2020; Mr Shamji has never been formally charged with anything. But it seems clear that “at a certain point, the men realised that they’d been tricked.” Zac knew that Sharma had something ghastly in store for him, Mr Radden Keefe writes, so “he walked out to the balcony and leapt towards the safety of the Thames.”

Two themes emerge from this grim story. One is the staggering ineptitude of the Metropolitan Police. Officers failed to interview crucial witnesses during the investigation, to swiftly take forensics from Sharma’s flat (giving him time to get it professionally cleaned) and to analyse useful information in their possession, such as GPS data from Mr Shamji’s hire car. They seemed determined to log Zac’s death as a suicide. Britons’ confidence in the police has declined significantly in recent years. This book will stoke that distrust.

The other theme is London’s grubby underbelly. Zac’s fascination with oligarchs and ostentation mirrors the city’s own: it has earned the nickname “Londongrad” for a reason. The British government has a long history of courting wealthy foreigners, no matter how filthy their lucre. In 2024 Andrew Mitchell, then the deputy foreign secretary, estimated that about 40% of the world’s dirty money comes through the City of London, overseas territories and crown dependencies. As this dark book makes clear, the city’s “glitzy, mercenary, aspirational culture” allows grifters and gangsters to thrive. ■

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Millions of people globally tune in to “beauTV”

What’s the most attractive genre of entertainment? Millions of people globally tune in to “beauTV” April 9th 2026 THE VIDEO starts on a solid foundation. Or, to be more precise, on a thick layer of Dior Forever Skin Glow. Meredith Duxbury, a social-media star, smears the liquid around her face and then applies messy streaks of contour and blush. She continues slathering and smudging until her makeup goes from gaudy to glamorous. “Whether you love it or you hate it”, the dramatic technique is “entertaining to watch”, she argues. Many agree: Ms Duxbury’s videos have 770m likes on TikTok.

Online beauty entertainment—call it “beauTV”—is booming. More than 200m TikTok videos are tagged #Beauty, #Skincare or #Makeup; YouTube and Instagram offer hundreds of millions more. Scroll through them and you will find women testing the glossiest lipglosses as well as endless tutorials on how to look “classy” or “youthful”. The videos, which range from a few seconds to over an hour long, offer no gripping plots or pithy dialogue. But that hardly matters, for they promise something many find alluring: a flawless face.

The influence of beauTV is more than skin deep. Many clips are #sponsored, pushing people to purchase products. The blurring of branding and entertainment has helped make beauty a leading sector for social commerce; TikTok Shop, the app’s e-commerce feature, is the second-biggest online beauty retailer in Britain, behind Amazon. Makeup shops display products that are “trending on social”.

This is helping the beauty industry to shine. In Britain beauty contributes more to GDP than recreational sport and employs more people than publishing does. McKinsey, a consultancy, reckons that global sales of beauty products will exceed $590bn by 2030, up from $440bn in 2024.

The line between beauty and entertainment has long been smudged: just think of the visual spectacle of pageants. A direct precursor of beauTV can be found in home shopping, which started on the radio and moved to tv channels such as QVC in the 1980s. After its launch in 2005, YouTube became a source of instructional videos on how to apply perfect winged eyeliner or contour. A broader cultural shift has also given rise to the trend, argues Jane Walsh of SEEN Group, an agency: beauty has become a “genuine hobby”, pursued for passion as well as appearance.

The rise of beauTV is changing the beauty business in two ways. First, it is shaping the sorts of products consumers covet. Celebrities and influencers spark trends by sharing their beauty “secrets”. As their recommendations go viral, products sell out. (A recent craze was for South Korean face masks promising a glowy visage known as “glass skin”.) Patrick O’Keefe, marketing lead at e.l.f., an American beauty brand, listens to “what the community tells us”. Noticing that pickles are trending online, for instance, e.l.f. launched a pickle-scented lip balm.

Second, beauTV is introducing beauty to new cohorts. Men have started picking up makeup brushes. Youngsters have discovered adult beauty products through online entertainment. Tweens in particular have flocked to makeup retailers to buy pricey serums; skincare brands targeted at children are now emerging.

The popularity of beauTV has caught the eye of executives in Hollywood, who put flashy product placement in films. Exclusive cosmetics have been created for films such as “Wicked”, a two-part musical. Reality-TV formats have taken off, including shows where makeup artists go head-to-head, such as “Glow Up” in Britain and “Just Makeup” in South Korea. Meanwhile brands such as e.l.f. have launched entertainment arms, creating adverts in popular formats. On March 31st e.l.f. released “Vanity Vandals”, a true-crime mockumentary about makeup clutter in bathrooms, starring Phoebe Dynevor of “Bridgerton” .

Makeup brands, it seems, are ready for their close-up. “There’s a lot of potential to start telling bigger stories,” says Jenna Barnet of Sunshine, a creative consultancy, and to create beauty content that “feels like bona fide entertainment”. BeauTV is in the eye of the beholder. ■

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Parents swallow bad advice all too eagerly

Why children become fussy eaters Parents swallow bad advice all too eagerly April 9th 2026 IN 1915 A worried mother from Maine wrote to the United States Children’s Bureau to ask why her son was rejecting a variety of foods. Could it be that he did not like them? The expert at the federal agency wholly dismissed that idea and suggested she take him to a doctor. It must be stomach trouble. After all, voluntary food rejection was almost unheard of in America at the time. Children ate what their parents put in front of them. They even asked for seconds and probably said “please” and “thank you”. (Parents, eat your heart out.)

Today American children have become “the fussiest eaters in history”. In a new book, Helen Zoe Veit, an associate professor at Michigan State University, decries changes in adults’ behaviour and thinking over the past century that “allowed picky eating to hijack American childhood”.

Before the 20th century, there was no such thing as “children’s food”. Youngsters had wild, boundless appetites. Edith Wharton, a novelist, was mad about eating turtles and tiny crabs. Mark Twain , another writer, extolled the “sumptuous” meals of his childhood, which included “venison just killed” and butter beans. Children, like adults, worked up appetites because they used to eat only at meals. The rise of snacking (resulting in a lack of hunger) is one of the modern culprits for children’s finicky eating habits at the dinner table, the author contends.

Two other things changed in the past century. One was attitudes concerning children’s independence to make their own food choices and new views on the downside of forcing children to eat certain things. An influential study, popularised in the 1940s-50s, had tracked children eating whole foods in hospitals and observed that they made nutritious choices when left to their own devices. (Modern junk food was not on offer.) This research was popularised in parenting books, including a famous one by a doctor, Benjamin Spock, which convinced parents that children should be entrusted with more autonomy to choose what and how much to eat.

Meanwhile, the proliferation of Freudian psychology, which contended that mothers were traumatising children by pushing certain foods, changed parents’ attitudes about children’s meal preferences. Marie Antoinette’s supposed quip—“let them eat cake”—was adapted and contorted: children should not be denied cake, some psychologists argued, because banning treats would only underscore their status as a prize.

The second thing to change was the rise of supermarkets and processed foods. By the mid-1960s the average American supermarket stocked 7,000 items—ten times as many as in the 1920s. Advertisers began targeting children directly for the first time. “In the old days children ate what their mothers bought; now the kids tell their mothers what to buy,” one advertising executive at Kellogg’s, a food company, said in 1953.

Ms Veit blames adults for treating food differently from toothbrushing or seat belts. Toddlers may say they do not want to brush or buckle up, but adults overrule them because they know best. Why not so with spinach or fish? “Picky” includes suggestions for fighting finicky eating at home, such as feeding the whole family the same meal and continuing to introduce a food repeatedly even after a child has rejected it. Unfortunately, the author does not venture to other countries’ food cultures, which might have made her argument about American exceptionalism even stronger and more rich. Still, “Picky” is a sensible, succinct and easily digestible story of good intentions gone wrong. ■

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The mild, lumpy food is being eaten by gym bros and grannies alike

The great comeback of cottage cheese The mild, lumpy food is being eaten by gym bros and grannies alike April 9th 2026 WHAT DO flour and mayonnaise have in common? Both can be replaced by cottage cheese, or so influencers claim. Online recipes instruct the health-conscious to use the mild, creamy cheese as an ingredient in such treats as strawberry cheesecake and ice cream. Blend it with eggs to make low-carb wraps, they advise, or mix it with protein powder and chocolate for a low-fat cookie dough. Thanks to its viral popularity , demand for the dairy product has soared—and producers are struggling to keep up.

Cottage cheese has long been a staple in many European countries. Settlers in America—now the foodstuff’s biggest market—popularised it in the 19th century as a way of using up the milk left over when making butter. The appetite for cottage cheese grew during the first world war, as the American government promoted it as an alternative source of protein to meat.

Consumption of the lumpy cheese peaked in the 1970s, when it was promoted as a diet food. ( Richard Nixon ate it regularly: his last lunch in the White House was a joyless dish of cottage cheese and pineapple.) Interest curdled as people moved on to yogurt, preferring its smoother texture. By 2010 yogurt was outselling cottage cheese sixfold—and still is today.

But cottage cheese is tasty again as consumers seek to increase their protein intake. According to Circana, a market-research firm, sales grew by 20% in America in 2025. Tesco, Britain’s largest supermarket chain, says sales have tripled over the past two years. Cottage cheese contains around 12g of protein per 100g, more than yogurt and kefir. That makes it appealing to those taking weight-loss drugs such as Ozempic , as they eat less but need more macronutrients to prevent muscle loss. Cottage cheese also contains calcium, which helps repair muscles and bones—a selling point for older buyers, the fastest-growing customer group in Britain last year, says NIQ, a data firm.

The dairy industry hopes to milk the renewed interest. Arla, Europe’s largest dairy co-operative, is “constantly sold out” of cottage cheese and is looking to increase production capacity. Good Culture, an American brand, plans to do the same: in January it sold a majority stake to a private-equity firm for over $500m. The market for “functional” dairy, which has added nutrients, is growing. It is already the largest segment in the market for all types of “functional” foods.

Pleasing though it may be, cottage cheese is not a superfood, says Federica Amati, a lecturer in nutrition at Imperial College London. She notes that many industrial cottage cheeses are made by adding acid directly to milk, rather than the traditional method of fermentation, and usually have more sodium than yogurt and kefir. But if you’re looking to make healthier choices, you could do whey worse. ■

Russia has been driven mad. Could other countries suffer the same fate?

How Vladimir Putin’s propaganda works Russia has been driven mad. Could other countries suffer the same fate? April 9th 2026 While Ilya Yashin, a Russian opposition politician, was in prison, a fellow inmate told him that Ukraine was “full of Nazis”. Where did he hear that? “From the telly.” Asked whether he believed state television, the inmate snorted: “What am I, a fool? The telly’s full of lies!”

To understand how Vladimir Putin dominates Russia so utterly, you must study how his propaganda works. Not everyone believes it all the time. But because it is ubiquitous and unrelenting, it can cripple people’s capacity for rational thought, argues Marc Bennetts, a longtime Moscow correspondent for the Times.

Under Mr Putin, many Russians have “been gripped by a collective delirium” akin to a medieval witch hunt. They know their government lies. Yet they believe the president will save them from threats—a NATO invasion, a Ukraine run by Nazis—for which the only evidence is pro-Kremlin TV. In “The Descent”, Mr Bennetts tries to explain how this happened.

He interviews Gleb Pavlovsky, one of the despot’s early spin doctors, who helped engineer a smooth transition from Boris Yeltsin, Russia’s first president, to Mr Putin. Pavlovsky set up focus groups to find out what Russians thought an ideal leader might look like. The surprising answer was Max Otto von Stierlitz, the codename of a fictional Soviet-era superspy. Mr Putin swiftly learned to play the part of an ex-spook who projected strength but was on the side of the people.

His handlers strained to prevent him from being associated with failure of any kind. That, Pavlovsky told Mr Bennetts, is why Mr Putin never went near the scene of the Kursk tragedy, in which a Russian submarine foundered in 2000 and 118 sailors died. Gradually, they built a myth of an all-powerful decider. If there was a big dispute, only Mr Putin could resolve it.

They promoted an old idea, common in monarchies throughout history, that injustice cannot be the good tsar’s fault: it must be his bad officials’. The story of one local administrator illustrates the potency of this myth. Alexander Shestun disobeyed an order to ban protests against a toxic landfill from which crooked apparatchiks were thought to be profiting. Summoned to Moscow, he was threatened by Kremlin bigwigs: back down, or you will be jailed on bogus charges and lose your home. Shestun secretly recorded the conversation and released it on YouTube, naively imagining that this would get the corrupt bigwigs into trouble. Instead, he was jailed for 15 years and lost his home.

Other writers have explored similar ground. But whereas Peter Pomerantsev’s “Nothing is True and Everything is Possible” and Marcel Van Herpen’s “Putin’s Propaganda Machine” looked at the first decade and a half of the new disinformation state, Mr Bennetts charts its evolution into a full-on wartime dictatorship.

As his power grew, Mr Putin was able to turn all the big broadcasters into personal megaphones. They recycled Kremlin hogwash: Ukrainians are crucifying babies! They averted their eyes from unflattering facts. In 2014, when Mr Putin started grabbing bits of Ukraine, an anti-war rally in the heart of Moscow drew 50,000 protesters. A correspondent for NTV, a Kremlin mouthpiece, stood in a nearly deserted street and pretended that only a handful of cranks had turned up. Mr Bennetts asked her why she had lied. “You do your job, and I’ll do mine,” she snapped.

One aim of Mr Putin’s propaganda is to instil a sense of helplessness in ordinary Russians . Mr Bennetts describes an example in a village where a nickel mine was poisoning the water. He saw an elderly villager berate environmentalists who were testing the water for toxins. “Leave us in peace!” she grumbled. Asked whether she was concerned about the risk to her grandchildren’s health, she shrugged: “We don’t decide anything here. Everything is resolved there, in Moscow. What can we do?”

An intensifying nationalism has supercharged Mr Putin’s personality cult. Restoring Russia’s “glory” and defending it against imaginary threats stirs widespread patriotic pride. Mr Bennetts meets Arctic fishermen with rotting boats who are elated that Russia has reclaimed Crimea, a sunny peninsula 2,000 miles away that they will surely never visit. Russian liberals see through the cynicism and joke that the wartime “Z” symbol was originally a swastika, but corrupt officials stole half of it.

Russian-speakers in Ukraine are often baffled by relatives in Russia who tell them to disregard the evidence of their own eyes. A journalist in Kyiv wrote to a cousin in Russia to say how frightened she was by the bombing. The cousin told her that it was all staged, all American propaganda.

For Russians, delusion has brought misery. Their country is far poorer, and their lives far less secure, than they would be under an honest ruler. When Mr Putin put the economy on a war footing to avoid personal humiliation in Ukraine, 1,300 Russian schools still had no indoor toilets.

Even at home, Mr Bennetts cannot avoid the madness. His mother-in-law falls for it, and soon “I could barely have a five-minute conversation with [her] before she steered [it] towards Ukrainian ‘Nazis’ and the ‘evil’ West.” Graft blights his daughter’s school. A crony of Mr Putin (who later found fame and death as a mercenary chief) wins a contract to supply school lunches. Dysentery breaks out; state media hush it up. Mr Bennetts gives his daughter packed lunches.

The tools of mass deception that Mr Putin uses are available to other rulers, too. Given how hard it can be for previously normal people like Mr Bennetts’s mother-in-law to resist them, it seems plausible that, under the right circumstances, almost any society could fall under the sway of a shameless tyrant.

However, despite dominating the means of persuasion, the Kremlin still needs to bribe or coerce people to attend rallies. To test this, pranksome dissidents in a Siberian city advertised a “pro-Putin” event with no cash handouts and no state-owned firms forcing staff to go. Only half a dozen people showed up.

Some Russians still see hope. One who defected to join the Ukrainian army suggests a way for his compatriots to free themselves from mental subjugation: “Just switch your brains on.” ■

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They are all slam dunks

Six books about basketball to read after March Madness They are all slam dunks April 2nd 2026 AT THIS TIME of year, men and women of a sporting disposition are afflicted by a strange malady. The symptoms include distraction, sleeplessness, emotional volatility and constant talk of “bracketology”. This ailment is “March Madness” and it is caused by an American college-basketball tournament. Over the course of three weeks, dozens of teams are whittled down to one champion thanks to a ruthless single-elimination knockout format. To deepen their appreciation of the game, basketball buffs should pick up one of these books—after the final on April 6th, of course.

For this book, the author embedded with the Portland Trail Blazers for the 1979-80 season. The Blazers had just won a championship, but by the season’s end the team was disintegrating. Halberstam, a journalist who had covered the Vietnam war and the civil-rights movement, brought the same investigative rigour to the NBA. He uses basketball as a lens through which to examine American culture—ambition, celebrity, the price of success—and 45 years on, nothing has matched his book.

A high-school team in Coney Island becomes a last chance at escape. Mr Frey follows four players—including Stephon Marbury, a future NBA star—during their senior year, when basketball is everything because it might mean a college scholarship and a way out of poverty. The book is less about sport than about hope, inequality and the odds stacked against young black men in America. First published in 1994, it remains heartbreaking and essential.

This is a rare literary novel in which basketball drives the plot. A Washington lobbyist fills out the perfect March Madness bracket—the odds of that are one in 9.2 quintillion—and it catapults him towards a billion-dollar prize and fleeting fame. Ms Joukovsky depicts her protagonist as a modern Icarus, bringing together Greek myth and college basketball to satirise American hubris and social climbing.

Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom was once a high-school hoop star; now he sells kitchen gadgets in small-town Pennsylvania and is trapped in a failing marriage. In this novel Updike uses basketball—the grace Rabbit once possessed, his unfulfilled promise—to evoke his lost youth and his delusion that past glory might somehow return. It shows how the sport works as metaphor, as basketball provides the backdrop to Rabbit’s aimless desperation.

In the 1980s the Los Angeles Lakers were the hottest team in basketball, thanks to their “run-and-gun” style of play. (Led by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, and Magic Johnson, the team won five championships that decade.) Mr Pearlman chronicles the “Showtime” era, when the sport became glamorous and lucrative. Exhaustively reported—the author conducted almost 300 interviews—this book features courtside celebrities and tabloid drama. Mr Pearlman shows how the Lakers changed not just basketball, but American sports culture at large.

Mr Abdurraqib’s meditation on basketball, LeBron James and growing up in Columbus, Ohio, in the 1990s is poetry disguised as sports writing. Its structure mimics that of a basketball game—it is divided into quarters—and it weaves together reflections on race, mortality, place and devotion. The result is lyrical and deeply personal, using basketball to explore what it means to belong. It won the National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism in 2024. ■

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It is not necessarily a good sign

The number of Catholic saints is climbing heavenwards It is not necessarily a good sign April 1st 2026 In a chilly church in Assisi, Italy, a line formed. In silence (and in coats) the queue shuffled forwards, snaking between ribboned posts like a popish passport queue. The line had the processing power of a passport queue, too: 1,500 passed through in an hour; 11,000 on a weekday; almost 20,000 on a weekend. And, as in a passport queue, at the front they were met by a forbidding person behind plexiglass. In this case, however, it was the skeletal remains of St Francis of Assisi (see picture, above).

Last month, to mark the 800th anniversary of his death, the remains of St Francis were put on prolonged public show for the first time. Few of Catholicism’s over 10,000 saints have remained so relevant centuries later. St Polycarp—first a martyr to the Romans, then to a silly name—is rarely remembered today. St Fiacre, patron saint of syphilis sufferers, has similarly fallen out of fashion. St Francis, by contrast, is thriving: films are made about him; the last pope was named after him; environmentalists adore him. Inasmuch as a medieval skeleton can be modish, St Francis is.

To revere a religious relic feels like an act that is itself something of a relic. Making a pilgrimage to the bones of a long-dead saint seems a medieval rather than a modern habit: an antique indulgence that, along with actual indulgences, was done away with in the Reformation. And yet, in the month that St Francis’s remains were on show, he was viewed by around 370,000 people. Giulio Cesareo, a friar, says that every ninth or tenth person cried.

Indeed, these are unusually saintly times. Pilgrimages are in fashion: in 2025 over half a million walked the Camino de Santiago in Spain, up from a few thousand people in the late 1980s. And the number of saints is rising. In 2013 Pope Francis canonised around 800 saints in one go, more than had been canonised from the 16th century to the 20th. More have been canonised in the past 40 years than the previous 400 (see chart). In September Carlo Acutis, who died of leukaemia in 2006, became the first millennial saint. Some call him “God’s influencer ”.

This is not to say Europe is in the grip of a religious revival. The number of saints has an inverse relationship with the number of believers: according to the World Christian Database, 32% of Europeans were Catholic in 2025, compared with 37% in 1975. Besides, no one needs to be wholly holy to go on a pilgrimage (as the Wife of Bath, Chaucer’s lustiest character, knew).

It is also worth treating numbers with caution. For centuries, canonisation was not the only way to make a saint. The Vatican still does not officially “make” saints, anyway, but merely anoints their already-existing virtue. “Only God”, it has been said, “knows how many saints there are”—and His data are not publicly available.

Nonetheless, something is changing. To understand what, it is necessary to grasp how saints first appeared. Much of what seems quintessentially Catholic is not in the Bible. The holy book contains no pope, no guilt, no fish on a Friday—and no saints, at least not in the halos-and-holiness sense. In biblical times the word “saint” simply meant “holy” and the bar to achieving that status was low. Back then “saints”, says Robert Bartlett, a scholar of medieval history at the University of St Andrews, “just means ‘Christians’”.

In time, the meaning shifted. The first centuries of Christianity saw a raising of the bar. By the fourth century, there were two main ways you could become a saint: by dying a very bad death or by living a very good life. The “good” life involved a lot of bad things (lentils, lepers, desert living). A bad death was brisker, but bloodier. St Lawrence was roasted. St Sebastian was shot with arrows then clubbed.

St Francis had a good life (there were lepers) and a bad death (thanks to doctors’ red-hot pokers). He was primed for popularity from the off. In Assisi he is treated as something between a saint and a pop star. There are coach loads of crowds, weeping fans and an abundance of merchandise from the cheap (fridge magnets) to the more middle-class (olive-oil drizzlers).

But what makes saints really popular is not merely how they endure the miseries of their own life but how they might intervene in the miseries of yours, a process known as “intercession”. To understand saints—or indeed Catholicism—just look at a list of their areas of intercessionary expertise. Look up the letter “A” and you are offered “Animals” (St Francis), “Appendicitis” (St Erasmus) and “Archers” (suitably, if arguably a little insensitively, St Sebastian).

Such lists show the centuries outspread. St Joseph of Cupertino, patron saint of those who travel by air, is presumably busier than ever; St Giles, patron saint of “spur makers”, much less so. The lists can feel almost comic: “S” offers, in quick succession, “ Sexual temptation” , “Sheds” and “Sheep” (presumably not all together). Some feel closer to tragedy: “C” offers “Children, sick”, “Cholera”, “Coffin-bearers”. What you are seeing is an index of anxiety: an attempt to control the uncontrollable. What you are looking at is Catholicism, categorised.

In around 1,000AD the church started to acquire the power of canonisation, then entrenched it over the centuries. Today saints are approved by the Dicastery for the Causes of Saints, which uses criteria for the sacred process of canonisation: a would-be saint should have been dead for five years, have performed verified miracles and so on. Saint-making became a bureaucratic project. The bump in 2013 was due to a backlog of 800 martyrs from the 15th century.

Italy still provides most of the chosen ones: of the 388 saints with known birthplaces, 156 were born in Italy. (God moves in mysterious ways, but He appears not to move very far.) Pope John Paul II sped up the canonisation process, part of the reason for the rise. Candidate selection has become entwined with church politics: he made an effort to canonise saints from outside Europe, thereby reflecting the growth of Catholicism in other parts of the world.

Canonisation—who, where, when—thus reflects the changing nature of the Catholic church’s authority. Saint-making is not an accurate measure of the world’s religiosity, but it is revealing about papal control. Popes who have a zeal for canonisation are like presidents who issue a lot of pardons: they do it because they can. Saints offer a legacy of sorts.

And in a complicated world, the appeal of saints is clear. In Assisi, some visitors peered at St Francis and whispered; others kissed the plexiglass. After they moved on, a worker appeared and discreetly squirted disinfectant. The event offered an odd blend of the sacred and the mundane; of sanctity and modernity; of suffering and redemption; of a centuries-old saint and 21st-century cleaning products. It offered Catholicism in microcosm. ■

Forget clubbing: it’s all about crochet now

Why Gen Z is taking up boomer hobbies Forget clubbing: it’s all about crochet now April 1st 2026 Some are taking up knitting or crochet. Others are growing flowers or going fishing. These days, such hobbies are no longer old-fashioned. For Gen Z has decided that the pastimes of pensioners are rather pleasing.

According to Eventbrite, a global events marketplace, baking and bingo are on the rise. In Britain attendance at flower-arranging classes almost quadrupled between 2023 and 2025; in America there were two and a half times more puzzle competitions. Even birding is a “hot girl hobby”; in Britain there are more than 450,000 Gen Z birdwatchers, soaring from around 60,000 in 2018, according to data from the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds.

“Grannycore”—as youngsters call the trend—is not limited to entertainment. Gen Zers respect their elders’ taste in homeware and fashion (think florals and cardigans). Some are even holidaying like old fogeys: Gen Z and millennials are just as enthusiastic about cruises as retirees, according to the Cruise Lines International Association. On TikTok youngsters mock the idea that “cruises are for old people” and say they are “the most convenient way to travel”.

Why do the young seem so old at heart? Gen Z “really embraces nostalgia” and wants to experience things “they never got to experience”, says Rudi Greenberg, Eventbrite’s head of curation and trends. Psychologists call such yearning “anemoia”: in an era of flashy screens and endless apps, youngsters look with rose-tinted glasses at such dull things as darning an old pair of socks.

Wholesome pursuits appeal to a generation keen to get off their phones and swap the headaches of hangovers for the clatter of knitting needles. London Creative Gals, a social group, meets weekly to craft or embroider. Martina Vintaloro, the founder, notes that 90% of attendees come alone to meet “like-minded girls”. On a recent mid-week evening they gathered to paint pottery, many sipping soft drinks not cocktails.

In such environments socialising can feel “slower, a little more grounded”, argues Mr Greenberg, perhaps reminiscent of “conversations with your Grandma”. The hobbies can also improve concentration and well-being: “Self-Care One Stitch at a Time”, a course run by psychologists, lauds the therapeutic benefits of knitting. As one fan of the old-timey trend recently put it: “Grandmas were onto something.” ■

Anything that encourages young men to take hammers to their jaws is both

Is looksmaxxing dangerous or silly? Anything that encourages young men to take hammers to their jaws is both April 1st 2026 NO MATTER HOW often you are told that “looks aren’t everything”, it is simply true that attractive people tend to earn more, rise higher in their careers and have more choices of mate . Young women have faced pressure over their appearance for generations. But now young men are dealing with the burden, too—and as with any social problem, online influencers are peddling a handsome solution.

“Looksmaxxing”, a social-media-driven trend in which young men go to absurd lengths to look more attractive, has become popular recently. That is in part thanks to Clavicular, a 20-year-old American influencer whose real name is Braden Peters. Clav, as his fans call him, shot to fame for his efforts to “ascend”, or enhance his looks; now he coaches other young men to do the same. His videos have nearly 30m likes on TikTok.

Clav leads a pack of popular looksmaxxers. In their jargon-filled videos they speak of “ascension”, “mogging” (outclassing in appearance) and “chads” (men who look the hottest). Many of them monetise male insecurities: Clav reportedly earns more than $100,000 a month from livestreaming; other influencers advertise looksmaxxing apps, which analyse users’ faces and suggest improvements.

As anyone who has brought up (or been) a teenage boy knows, a little self-care advice is no bad thing: wash your face and hair regularly; get adequate sleep and exercise; get rid of that wispy moustache. But looksmaxxers go to extremes. They claim to take peptides to smoothen skin, meth to suppress hunger and testosterone to grow muscle. Another troubling, if rare, trend is “bone smashing”. It involves hitting your face repeatedly with a hammer to change the shape of your jawline—the (erroneous) belief being that the bones will grow back stronger.

Some looksmaxxers also peddle a grim worldview. The word “looksmaxxing” was coined by “incels” (involuntary celibates) on internet forums in the 2010s. Today influencers offer a noxious mix of scientific-sounding terms (“canthal tilt”, for instance, denotes the angle of the eyes) and concepts from the manosphere (such as the “red pill”: being awake to the truth of the world). Many wear their prejudices proudly: viral videos often involve harassing women; a black looksmaxxer was told that to be attractive he should “just be white”. Clav was arrested in Florida on March 26th on a battery charge: he is accused of instigating a fight between his girlfriend and another influencer.

Just as social media make many teenage girls feel worse about their lives, looksmaxxing seems to make many men unhappy and insecure. “Am I finally loveable?” asked one on a forum; another referred to his pre-looksmaxxing self as “subhuman”. Such feelings of self-loathing inevitably affect an individual’s mental health.

Obsessing over exercise and calories can lead to eating disorders. A recent study of 1,500 boys and men in America and Canada found that over 20% met the criteria for an eating-disorder diagnosis. Muscle dysmorphia (colloquially called “bigorexia”) is becoming more prevalent, says Jason Nagata, a paediatrician and professor at the University of California. Its sufferers—commonly boys and men aged 15 to 32—never feel they are muscular enough, leading them to lift weights compulsively or to take steroids and other risky supplements.

Looksmaxxing is not only poisonous: it is pointless. Polling by The Economist and YouGov found that most people attracted to men were indifferent to eye and jawline shape and cheekbone definition; only 53% said that facial symmetry was important. Non-physical traits, such as kindness or a sense of humour, matter rather a lot. If looksmaxxers put as much effort into sharpening their wits as their jaws, they might be happier in dating and life. ■

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A furore over AI and a novel presages the future of books

Bots are often bad writers. But so are most humans A furore over AI and a novel presages the future of books April 1st 2026 Her voice is “a blade cutting through the sweetness”. His resembles “a blade slicing through the air”; his approval is like “a blade wrapped in silk”. A gaze, a pause, erotic moans: these and other phenomena are as sharp as a knife. Almost anything can be heavy (tears, words, a knock on the door) or weighty (seconds, anger, dollar bills). Far too many things bloom, including silence, gratitude and the taste of blood.

It is easy to be snooty about “Shy Girl”, a novel alleged to have been written with help from artificial intelligence, and about AI prose in general. Rest assured, this column will be. Yet human writers comforted by a sense of superiority should beware. For traditionalists, the tale of AI, fiction and the future of art may quickly become a horror story.

The narrator of “Shy Girl”, itself a yucky horror yarn, is a woman forced by a kidnapper to impersonate a dog. Originally self-published, the buzzy novel was picked up by Hachette, a big publisher, and was due out in America soon; it was released in Britain in November. But after vigilante readers, some equipped with bot-busting software, detected signs of machine involvement, the book was withdrawn. (Mia Ballard, the author, denies using AI, maintaining instead that an early editor did so.)

When large language models (llms) try to write creatively, the text often comes out flat and lurid at once. It strives clunkingly for subtlety; it is portentous about trivia. As in “Shy Girl”, it features excessive, repetitious and downright weird metaphors, combining words that can in theory go together, but really shouldn’t. llms go in for verbless staccato sentences. With few words. Or even. One. They are hooked on adjectives and clauses in threes, as in: “I’m careless, disorganised, not worth the effort.”

For some readers, these stylistic glitches are symptoms of a metaphysical problem. Because it has no tastes, feelings or experiences, a bot can never develop its own voice, they reason. For a person, to write is to choose, each word and sentence a fraught exercise of freedom. Picturing the world anew—while expressing something communal—great writing is a bridge between lives and minds. ai can’t match that. It has no soul, just algorithms.

As a literary bot might put it: Well now. Up to a point. So? The trouble with romanticising human creation is that so much of it is terrible. Pit an llm’s style against Vladimir Nabokov’s and it comes off as wooden; compare it with an airport thriller and it seems much livelier. As for AI output being derivative, a lack of originality is often a virtue in publishing, which loves promoting debut authors as heirs to established ones, and new books as crosses between two previous hits.

The example of “Shy Girl” cuts both ways. As online reviews attest, lots of readers liked it (in fairness, there are some good bits). Though some feel hoodwinked by undeclared AI content, others are unfazed. Already some romance “novelists” openly enlist bots, inputting tropes (“enemies to lovers”, “age gap” ) and dodging the grunt work. And remember, today’s llms are merely novices, and they are improving fast. Before long mainstream readers may be requesting quality fiction customised to their tastes, like naggy children demanding stories about the family cat.

Writers who sweated blood over books which, without their consent, were used to train their soulless competitors are justifiably aggrieved. Compensation for that infringement, a kind of omnivorous plagiarism , is currently being determined by class-action lawsuits. For protection in the future, some authors and publishers are banking on schemes that certify titles were written by organic human beings (though as more people use AI for more tasks, from research to editing, the categories may crumble).

Will mortal authors survive? Probably. The best. We’ll see. The startling yet perfect metaphor—like Macbeth’s “dusty death” or his “last syllable of recorded time”—may always be beyond a bot’s imagining. They may never ever produce a line as limpidly profound as “Never, never, never, never, never”, King Lear’s lament for his murdered daughter.

But as is set to be true of arts from acting to music, along with many other activities, whether a star human can beat a machine will not be the only salient question. Even if they can, will readers fork out for their premium prose, how many of them, how much—and will that sustain an old-school book industry? The moral of the “Shy Girl” palaver is not that AI writing is bad or should be banned. Rather, it has to be beaten. ■

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A new biography examines a crucial figure in the AI race

Who is Demis Hassabis, the man behind Google DeepMind? A new biography examines a crucial figure in the AI race April 1st 2026 The “Great Man” theory of history, so long disfavoured, has had something of a renaissance under Donald Trump. It has been finding purchase in Silicon Valley, too, where the leaders of the big AI labs see themselves as performing almost godlike acts of creation.

But can a person truly direct the course of a technology’s development—or are even the greatest of them merely players in its inexorable progress? That question underlies Sebastian Mallaby’s “The Infinity Machine”, a biography of Demis Hassabis (pictured), the co-founder of Google DeepMind. (A journalist at The Economist in the 1980s-90s, Mr Mallaby is the husband of the current editor-in-chief.)

If OpenAI’s Sam Altman is the wily dealmaker, Anthropic’s Dario Amodei is the ethically conflicted innovator and xAI’s Elon Musk is, well, Elon Musk , then Mr Hassabis, in Mr Mallaby’s account, is the selfless visionary genius. He is “decent and public-spirited and wants the best for humanity”. His life’s mission of developing artificial general intelligence (AGI), though it “borders on the messianic”, is a quest not for power or money but for knowledge—a machine capable of solving all of science, to the benefit of humankind.

Mr Mallaby acknowledges that this saintly depiction may be “difficult to swallow”. Still, unlike Greg Kohs’s hagiographic film “The Thinking Game” (2024), this is a sincere attempt to discern whether one man’s ethical principles can survive contact with the cut-throat commercial imperatives of the AI race.

AGI was a slippery term even when Mr Hassabis founded DeepMind in 2010 with Shane Legg and Mustafa Suleyman. (Mr Suleyman is a board member of The Economist’s parent company.) Mr Legg—who helped popularise the term but did not coin it, as the book claims—resisted the notion that “general” intelligence must mean “humanlike”. He argued that an AI that mimicked a human, as per the famous Turing test, would be suspect. A general intelligence was simply one that could solve a wide array of problems, however alien its inner workings. However, Mr Hassabis, with his neuroscience PhD, thought the human mind must at least serve as a guide.

But they agreed on the basic plan: DeepMind would make AI that could teach itself to play games. The premise was simple. Gameplay requires problem-solving; so does science; so the more games an AI can learn to play, the more general its intelligence becomes and the more capable it is of tackling other problems. The “teach itself” bit was crucial: AI that depended on human instruction would never be able to surpass human ingenuity. The machines had to devise their own strategies by trial and error, a technique known as reinforcement learning.

This approach took DeepMind from the simple arcade game Pong to the fiendishly difficult Go, in which its victory over the world’s top-ranked player thrust the company into the global spotlight. The firm applied a similar method to solving protein folding, one of the hardest problems in biology, which unlocked a universe of potential drugs and earned Mr Hassabis and a colleague a Nobel prize in chemistry in 2024.

But DeepMind’s success with reinforcement learning almost proved to be its undoing. In 2017 its rival, OpenAI, bet on a different kind of model called transformers. Rather than teaching themselves to solve problems, transformers learned to predict answers to questions by training on vast corpora of human-generated text. In effect, they were “parroting” human knowledge rather than generating their own solutions—a fact that led many experts, including Mr Hassabis, to dismiss them at first. But it also meant they were much more “general”: they could produce answers—albeit often wrong ones—to absolutely any question.

OpenAI had another advantage: a much more mercantile mindset. True to Mr Hassabis’s scientific ambitions, DeepMind had never released a commercial product. So when OpenAI put out ChatGPT in 2022, Google, which had acquired DeepMind in 2014—and where, ironically, the transformer had been invented—was left flailing.

Coincidentally, that was when Mr Mallaby approached Mr Hassabis about writing a book. With unprecedented access, Mr Mallaby had a front-row seat to DeepMind’s struggles to pivot from being a research lab and its efforts to build Gemini, Google’s rival to ChatGPT.

What results is a rich and clearly written account of the differing philosophies, personalities and business models in AI over the past couple of decades, albeit recounted mostly from DeepMind’s perspective. Mr Altman appears somewhat fleetingly as a shadowy, scheming figure; Mr Amodei, who is no less outspoken or thoughtful than Mr Hassabis on AI risks, rates just a few passing mentions.

Yet Mr Hassabis gets off a little too lightly. His own justification for his pivot to commercial AI models—“I’ve satiated that scientific desire for the moment…I’ve always been fine either way”—rings hollow, given the existential urgency with which he previously talked of solving AGI, yet it goes unchallenged. There is also little attempt to question his and the wider industry’s assumptions about what AGI means, how close it is and what it might (or might not) be capable of. At times there is an awestruck, even fawning, tone that can indeed be difficult to swallow.

And by depicting Mr Hassabis as the intellectual giant he unquestionably is, “The Infinity Machine” only serves to highlight how puny even giants are in the face of a technological juggernaut. At one point, Geoffrey Hinton, an AI pioneer and a rival of Mr Hassabis, contemplates the fact that no matter a scientist’s ethical qualms, “the prospect of discovery is too sweet” to stop them pursuing potentially catastrophic research. This being so, Mr Mallaby seems to imply, you at least want someone like Mr Hassabis making the discoveries. Maybe. But given the forces at play, it may seem like small comfort. ■

Gideon Lichfield. We identify the reviewers of books connected to The Economist or its staff. Mr Lichfield is a former writer for The Economist and the former editor-in-chief of MIT Technology Review and Wired.

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A new book analyses social history through the lens of divorce law

Everyone knows divorce is costly. But children pay most dearly A new book analyses social history through the lens of divorce law March 26th 2026 “But what is a child between injured parents?” wrote Edna O’Brien, an Irish novelist. “Only a weapon.” The arsenal, by that definition, is vast. In America nearly a third of children will see their parents divorce before they turn 18. The share of American children living in single-parent divorced households is almost five times higher than it was in 1960. In Britain nearly a quarter of children live with single parents—though far fewer adults are divorced, because they are more likely to have children without marrying first (see charts).

Divorce is one of the biggest social transformations of the past century. Instead of telling human history in the way others might, selecting a famous war or revolution, Lara Feigel, a professor at King’s College London, opts for a different sort of conflict-ridden setting: the courtroom . “There are winners and losers here, and the child is the prize,” she writes.

Ostensibly Ms Feigel’s subject is “the secret history of mothers ”. She uses seven subjects, from Caroline Norton to Britney Spears, to show how women helped forge new laws and shape attitudes concerning the right to parent after marital dissolution. In fact, she writes about eight women, including herself. During the pandemic Ms Feigel moved to the English countryside and wanted her children to stay there with her. That sparked her own custody battle, which friends admonished her to avoid, with warnings that the ordeal would cut her children in half. (Everyone since King Solomon’s time knows no good mother should choose to split a baby.)

For most of history the law has treated children as property—the father’s. In 19th-century England a single mother, absurdly, had the right to keep her children only if they were illegitimate. Otherwise even young ones were handed to fathers, who could park them with any relative or servant he chose.

Norton, one of the most consequential and least celebrated women in British history, discovered this the hard way. A famous lady of letters and (possibly) lovers, she was dragged into a lawsuit by her husband, who accused the prime minister, Lord Melbourne, of “criminal conversation” with Norton. (Victorians managed to make adultery sound like a noise complaint.) Norton left her husband, and he treated their sons as possessions, moving them on a whim. She wrote pamphlets and campaigned to change the law. In 1839 she succeeded, with passage of the Custody of Infants Act, giving mothers rights to petition for care of young children. It was the first feminist law in British history.

Ms Feigel casts her spotlight across nations and centuries. She features George Sand , a flamboyant French novelist, who won custody of her two children in three separate court cases in 1836. (French law accounted for the well-being of the child more than English law did.) There is Elizabeth Packard, an American whose husband placed her in a mental institution; she campaigned in the 1860s to reform laws so women could maintain guardianship of their children and not be declared insane without a trial. And there is Alice Walker, an African-American novelist who settled on the oddest custody arrangement you have ever heard of, with her daughter switching between Walker’s and her ex-husband’s homes every two years.

These women help construct a narrative of how custody law has arced over time. After Norton, a “tender years” doctrine took hold, with the view that young children need a mother’s care (though this did not extend to transgressive or adulterous women, whom custody proceedings tended to punish). In the 1970s a fathers’ rights movement gained force, with activists saying it was unfair that custody was awarded to mothers by default. This led judges to consider more strongly the best interests of the child.

More recently claims of “parental alienation” have played a role in custody proceedings (with one parent, usually the father, claiming a child is being manipulated into estrangement by the other). These can shape outcomes: one study found that if a father cross-claims alienation, courts are nearly four times more likely to disbelieve a mother’s assertion of child abuse.

“Custody” probes the sometimes uneasy relationship between feminism and motherhood. But what makes it especially incisive is its emphasis on children as the injured “hostages” traded in adult wars. Even though, legally speaking, children are no longer property, they can be treated as such by sparring parents. The author argues that every custody case is a “tragedy”, which drags “its way down the generations”. Even when mothers succeed in gaining the right to care for their little ones, those children suffer. Each character’s offspring reacts to parental conflict with sickness and sadness. Some even die, including Norton’s youngest son, who got blood poisoning after an untreated injury.

An excellent read though “Custody” is, the book could have made its case of how children are disadvantaged by divorce even more convincingly by using data and not merely anecdotes. Divorces tend to cause household income to fall, especially women’s earnings. Parents often have to work longer hours and move to poorer districts. Data from America show that divorce can have long-running economic effects on children, denting their university prospects and earnings as adults and increasing the rate of incarceration, teen births and mortality.

“Custody” stays mainly in the realm of emotion and of literature, which provides succour to Ms Feigel. By fighting for custody of her two children, she was trying to put an end to the 50-50 split between her and her ex’s homes and calm her son’s distress at shuttling between them. Instead, she lost her case, being granted care only of her toddler, while her son was sent to live mainly with her ex. A family, not a baby, split right down the middle. What would King Solomon have said? ■

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“The First Fascist” argues a French aristocrat, the Marquis de Morès, was an important antecedent

The forgotten man who pre-dated Mussolini and Hitler “The First Fascist” argues a French aristocrat, the Marquis de Morès, was an important antecedent March 26th 2026 Far-right parties are on the march, causing many to fear the spectre of fascism. Google searches for “fascism” reached a five-year global high in September. Those seeking to understand the history of the term should pick up a new book. The conventional wisdom is that Benito Mussolini was the world’s first fascist. But Sergio Luzzatto, an Italian academic, makes a persuasive case that, in fact, it was the Marquis de Morès, a French aristocrat born in 1858. In his penchant for “hierarchical order, identity politics, conspiracy theories, prejudice against those who are different, incitement to racial hatred” and use of body language and aesthetics to project power, he anticipated the worst actors of the 20th century.

Morès was a “serial failure”. After a stint in the cavalry, he set off to become a cattle rancher in America. Then he poured energy—and other people’s money—into bold, impractical projects, such as a meat co-operative and a railway along the Indochinese border. Needing someone to blame for his failures, he became a rabid antisemite . After his return to France in 1889, he found the country in a febrile mood. The collapse of Union Générale, a bank, in 1882, and the stockmarket shock that ensued, was blamed on Jewish financiers. Morès was happy to fan the flames.

Portraying himself as a revolutionary socialist fighting for the dispossessed, he led violent demonstrations intended to intimidate the authorities. Understanding performative brutality and how to use the media to his advantage, Morès challenged prominent Jews to duels, murdering one.

After another financial scandal, Morès left for Africa and wrote a polemic, “The Secret of Foreign Exchange”. He used the image of the fasces, a bundle of rods that were a symbol of power in ancient Rome. In the 19th century they had become an expression of “the organic bond between the different components of a national group”. Morès argued that the fasces had to be rebuilt. A year later, he quarrelled over a camel with nomads in the Tunisian desert and was slain in an ambush. His French followers saw him as a martyr. For those whose politics are shaped by hatred and prejudice, Morès is a wretched sort of hero. ■

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The Latin poet appeals because he deals with transformation. And smut

What is the big deal with Ovid and artists? The Latin poet appeals because he deals with transformation. And smut March 26th 2026 It has been called an “epic of rape”, with good reason. Almost no one—almost nothing—in Ovid’s “Metamorphoses” is safe from seduction (or worse). Animal, vegetable, mineral: all are tainted. Leda lies beneath that swan. A laurel tree has a terrible time with Apollo. Danaë is mistreated by a shower of gold. Ovid’s writing is what the young people call “problematic”. And that is before you even open his “Art of Love” .

Ovid is also, to artists, irresistible. The first-century Roman poet has inspired so much art that he has been described as the “artists’ bible” (albeit a rather secular, smutty one). Chaucer filched freely from Ovid; Shakespeare imitated him; George Bernard Shaw reimagined him. The medieval era was so keen on Ovid it was called an aetas Ovidiana—an “Ovidian Age”.

Artists still turn to Ovid for inspiration. Ted Hughes told “Tales from Ovid”. Ali Smith borrowed from Ovid for her book “Girl Meets Boy”. Now there is “Metamorphoses” (Shape-shifters), a new exhibition at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, which will travel to the Galleria Borghese in Rome in June. The show lays bare—and there is a lot of nakedness—Ovid’s influence on artists.

This influence might surprise many gallery-goers. Ovid is a bit of a classical casualty. People still know that Horace carpe-d the diem. They know that Marcus Aurelius meditated. They are aware that Thucydides had a trap. Ovid? Not so much.

But step inside the new show, and there are many familiar faces. Those who thought they didn’t know Ovid are quickly corrected. Here is Leda and that seductive swan (imagined by a follower of Michelangelo —the original was allegedly destroyed by Queen Anne of Austria, because she found it too erotic). There is Narcissus (gazing at himself in an inky puddle, by Caravaggio). Over there is Arachne (hulking bronze spider sculptures by Louise Bourgeois). Not far is Pygmalion (rising from white stone, by Auguste Rodin). And there is Hermaphroditus, with a pinchably soft bottom (by Bernini, pictured).

You realise that what you know of classical culture you know from Ovid. So much of it hangs on a surprisingly slender thread (an estimated 99% of all Latin literature was lost), and often the writer who wove the narrative thread that remains was him. Ovid appeals partly because he, like his poems, was a shape-shifter. To read Ovid is to feel unsettled: comedy turns into tragedy; tragedy into comedy; women turn into men; everyone turns into trees; nothing is quite what it seems. The Bible offers “order, justice and salvation” (nice things, but dull ones), says Ingo Gildenhard, a professor of classics at Cambridge University. But Ovid offers “a world in flux, transgressive desire, sex and violence”. Ovid is often immoral. He is never dull.

Ovid’s strength is, unfortunately, this exhibition’s weakness. Transformation and shape-shifting are themes that most artists in history have tackled: the assortment of works sometimes feels random (such as a creepy looping video of pythons slithering across a woman’s face, evoking Medusa). But it is not the masterpieces that are the star here: it is Ovid himself. ■

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The television show offers a chance to make sketch comedy amusing again

With “SNL UK”, Britain’s laughing stock appreciates The television show offers a chance to make sketch comedy amusing again March 26th 2026 MOST OF THE time, the aim of the opening monologue on “Saturday Night Live” is simple: it sets the tone, gives the celebrity host a few easy gags and primes the audience to laugh at the sketches to follow. But on March 21st Tina Fey, the inaugural host of a new British version of the show, had a different job: to justify the programme’s existence. “Why do a UK version of ‘SNL’?” the American writer-performer wondered aloud, repeating a question that many have been asking since the project was announced. “Well, like so many large-scale American operations these days, no one really knows why.”

In fact, commissioners and producers at Sky, the broadcast network that is home to “SNL UK”, had been mulling it over for about five years. They reckoned there were good reasons to launch the show half a century after “SNL” made its debut across the Atlantic. The first was that, in dark times, people need light relief. Comedy is a release valve—and there is plenty of pent-up tension thanks to war, economic instability and political polarisation. “We’re in a moment where we need to laugh more than ever,” says Philip Edgar-Jones, Sky’s executive director of unscripted originals.

“Comedy can do a brilliant job—and they do it brilliantly in America—of [speaking] truth to power,” he adds. The American edition of “SNL” often opens with a bit about some foolhardy thing the president has said or done; the first sketch of “SNL UK” portrayed Sir Keir Starmer, Britain’s prime minister, as a feeble flip-flopper, terrified of talking to the man in the White House. (Donald Trump, delighted to be portrayed as a bully, shared it on social media.) The show will soon take on the royal family (a rich subject for satire) and British culture more broadly. One of the best sketches from the premiere imagined an immersive “Paddington” experience, featuring not a cuddly, marmalade-loving bear but a bloodthirsty beast.

Though “SNL UK” adapts an existing format, there is nothing like it on British television at present. TV-sketch comedy has keeled over like a dead parrot in the past decade: gone are the days when you could choose between “Fry and Laurie” and “French and Saunders” or “Harry and Paul” and “Armstrong and Miller”. (A notable exception is “Mitchell and Webb Are Not Helping”, which last year reunited two British comedy favourites and became Channel 4’s biggest new comedy show since 2018.) Whether panel shows or sitcoms, comedy is rarely broadcast live any more, meaning that “SNL UK” has a madcap energy all its own: the appeal of watching it on TV is the prospect of seeing things go awry in real time.

And, after the broadcast, the show can reach a giddy audience online . Videos tagged #skit go viral on Instagram and TikTok. Posts related to sketch comedy had 4.5bn impressions on Reddit, YouTube and X between mid-February and mid-March, according to Sprout Social, an analytics firm. “SNL UK” counts a number of social-media stars among its writers and cast, including Omar Badawy, Lorna Rose Treen and Al Nash; sketches from the premiere, such as one which imagines famous Britons at a dinner party, have already racked up hundreds of thousands of views. The hope, Mr Edgar-Jones says, is to produce material that “sets the internet on fire the day afterwards” in Britain and beyond.

The first episode of “SNL UK” was patchy. But it has a chance to cultivate the next generation of British comedians, just as “SNL” has launched the careers of umpteen American actors and writers who are now globally famous. (The choice of Ms Fey as host underscored that point.) Audiences may remain sceptical for now; the show will need to land more of its punchlines. But if it spreads on social media and gains a loyal following live, Ms Fey’s question will have been answered. ■

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Would you invite a serial killer to a garden party?

Russia should not be welcome at the world’s top art show Would you invite a serial killer to a garden party? March 26th 2026 You hop off the vaporetto or stroll along the embankment from St Mark’s Square, away from the gondolas and the Bridge of Sighs. The pavilions of the Venice Biennale, the world’s leading contemporary-art exhibition, are scattered across the lush, jasmine-scented gardens at the island’s eastern tip. This is bliss, culture vultures may think. Yet even in this artistic Arcadia, death and politics intrude. As Vladimir Putin’s war grinds on, a row has erupted in Venice about art, politics and violence.

Ever since the onslaught on Ukraine in 2022, cultural institutions have tried to distance themselves from Russian artists deemed tainted by the bloodshed. In the early months some panicky impresarios went too far, cutting loose critics of Mr Putin as well as cronies. A saner approach has since evolved: blameless and apolitical Russians tend no longer to be blacklisted, but organs and cheerleaders of the renegade state are still shunned. Or, they were until the Venice Biennale revealed that Russia would be exhibiting at the festival that opens in May.

This is a reversal. Aghast at the invasion, in 2022 the artists due to represent Russia at the biannual art jamboree pulled out; a monument built of sandbags kept Ukraine’s plight in mind. Russia was not represented in 2024 either. But this year it will return, say the organisers—news that has outraged Ukrainians and diplomats across Europe. Three arguments are made for the country’s inclusion. All are bad.

The first is the hoary idea that art is above politics. Made by both naive aesthetes and whitewashing cynics, this claim is either a delusion, a cop-out or a lie. For instance, the biennale is avowedly “a place of dialogue, openness and artistic freedom”. Dialogue, openness and freedom are as political as it gets. They certainly are in Russia, which in wartime has locked up a playwright and a director and chased other artists into exile. “No one can deprive Russia of the right to artistic self-expression,” smirked a Russian cultural dignitary of the biennale. False: the Kremlin does that all the time.

The biennale itself—dubbed the Olympics of contemporary art—is grounded in politics. Countries select artists to represent them; the pavilions in those idyllic gardens, in which much of the work is displayed, are owned by participating states. (Russia’s was designed by the architect of Lenin’s mausoleum.) One of the Russian show’s overseers is the foreign minister’s daughter. In recent years much of the assembled art has been stridently political, often dealing with oppression or colonialism of one kind or another.

Another pro-Russian argument is time. Surely, this case runs, no country can be ostracised for ever. Here the hideous news rhythm of war kicks in. The longer it lasts, the more the world’s attention wanders—even as the suffering in Ukraine intensifies—and the more it is eclipsed by other woes. Russia may have started the fighting, inattentive people conclude, but both sides may be to blame for not ending it. And, anyway, what has cutting ties with Russia really achieved?

This argument appeals to some self-serving Western politicians and businessmen. It helps explain why, creepingly, Russian teams are being readmitted to major sports events. But it is wrong. For ever is indeed a long time; it is true that no country should be an eternal pariah. While Russia murders civilians in their beds, however, its rulers and their proxies should be unwelcome.

A last justification is a version of the “whataboutery” beloved of Soviet propagandists. Other strongmen are waging wars; shouldn’t artists from their countries be excluded from Venice too? There is, in fact, a separate push to expel Israel from the biennale, on account of its allegedly genocidal treatment of the Palestinians. An open letter to that effect was signed by almost 200 artists and workers involved in the festival. And what about America, or Ethiopia, or…?

That defence doesn’t stack up either. Wherever you draw the line, Russia—whose army, among its other crimes, loots and destroys Ukrainian libraries, theatres and museums—should fall on the disqualified side of it. No one invites a serial killer to their garden party.

Individual countries, not the biennale, are in charge of their pavilions, note the organisers. Hmm: surely they could, say, omit Russia from catalogues and marketing bumf if they chose to. They deplore censorship and extol free speech. As things stand, they will host quite a lot of it, in the form of boycotts and protests. There will be no escape from war and politics, even in Arcadia. ■

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The tile-based game is now played in trendy venues as well as retirement homes

Young people all over the world are clicking with mahjong The tile-based game is now played in trendy venues as well as retirement homes March 26th 2026 WITH ITS neon lights and mirrored ceilings, 886, a Taiwanese restaurant in New York’s East Village, has the vibe of a nightclub. But on a recent Wednesday night, you could hear shouts of “Pong!” and “Chow!” rather than thudding beats. Dozens of young people descended on the hip eatery to enjoy black-pepper beef, sesame noodles —and a few rounds of mahjong. As they tried to assemble a winning hand by drawing and discarding tiles, players were overlooked by a huge mural of Taiwanese celebrities immersed in the game.

Mahjong has long been a popular pastime among older generations of Asians and American women. But now it is attracting a young crowd, too. Global attendance at mahjong events has more than tripled in the past year, according to Eventbrite, a ticketing platform. Regular events are held in Berlin, Helsinki, London, Los Angeles, New York, Paris and Sydney. Some, such as the event at 886, are intimate; others attract as many as 800 people.

Naturally these new fans are spreading the word online. There are hundreds of mahjong tutorials on YouTube. There has been a 70% surge in mahjong content on TikTok in the past year: over 100,000 posts now talk about it. Some share videos extolling the pleasures of playing with friends (“This & three hours of uninterrupted yapping”) or showing themselves unboxing a new set of gleaming tiles.

Mahjong was devised in Shanghai in the mid- to late-19th century. (The name means “sparrow”, as the sound of tiles knocking together is reminiscent of the birds’ clacking.) It started out as a gambling game and was associated with insalubrious venues such as brothels and teahouses. But by the end of the century it had spread into the homes of the bourgeoisie, and from Shanghai to the rest of China.

Mahjong continued its march across East Asia in the early 20th century. In the 1920s it conquered America. Joseph Babcock—who had been sent to China by Standard Oil and loved to play the game with his wife—simplified mahjong and created tiles with Roman numerals. In doing so, he set off a craze. Its famous boosters included celebrities such as Fred Astaire and Warren and Florence Harding, then the president and first lady.

The game continued to evolve. In 1937 a group of Jewish women formed the National Mah-jongg League. They simplified and standardised the rules once more, thereby creating the version now known as American Mahjong. Today there are dozens of variations of the game. Each has slightly different rules, scoring systems and number of tiles—all of which can affect the tempo. In American Mahjong the winning player must match their hand to one of the combinations on a card; in Hong Kong Mahjong, they must assemble four sequences and a pair of tiles.

What explains mahjong’s trendiness today? Popular culture is one reason for the revival. Meghan Markle is shown hosting a mahjong night in her lifestyle show on Netflix. The game is often used as a narrative device in anime and manga to ramp up tension: characters may bet their life savings—or their lives—on a round. In “Crazy Rich Asians” (2018), a hit romantic comedy, a pivotal scene between the protagonist and her boyfriend’s steely mother unfolds over a game of mahjong. Even those who do not know what is going on can deduce that it is a test of strategy and patience.

Another reason for mahjong’s popularity is that it is a sensory experience. Annelise Heinz, the author of a history of the game, says there is something satisfying about “the way that the tiles look and sound and feel”. (The same is true of a game like dominoes.) “In this very digital world”, she argues, the tactile nature of mahjong offers “analogue pleasures”.

To tap into this, firms are bringing a modern design sensibility to tile sets. The Mahjong Line makes ocean- and Western-themed tiles. Luxury brands are turning kits into objets d’art. Hermès and Prada sell mahjong sets; Louis Vuitton’s “Vanity Mahjong Trunk” costs £48,000 ($64,000). Talk about an expensive night on the tiles.

The last reason for mahjong’s renewed relevance is the sense of community it provides. Sarah Teng says the pandemic galvanised her and her co-founders to establish the Green Tile Social Club in New York. “We were craving those in-person interactions and activities that were not super expensive and involved more than just eating or drinking,” she says. “We created what we felt didn’t exist yet.”

An evening spent on your phone is enervating; one spent on the mahjong mat is enriching. During the game, there are pauses while tiles are shuffled and stacked, which leaves room for chitchat. Mahjong is “the ultimate connector”, says Angie Lin, the founder of East Never Loses, which produces mahjong events. “You sit down at the table, you’re immediately going to meet three people and you’re going to have to look them in the eye. You can get to know them through this game.”

Fun and companionship are worthy pursuits in themselves, but the benefits of mahjong persist long after the thrill of a winning hand has subsided. Aficionados talk about reaching a “flow state”—the stresses of the day disappear as they organise their tiles—and studies have found that, among the elderly, playing mahjong regularly is associated with lower rates of depression. It also helps to maintain cognitive function, thanks to the pattern recognition and memory skills required. By starting early, then, young people are getting ahead of the game. ■

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More people want to see the world—if geopolitics lets them

War is only the starkest way that politics is disrupting tourism More people want to see the world—if geopolitics lets them March 19th 2026 When he began his blitz on alleged drug-runners in the Caribbean Sea, Donald Trump didn’t mean to hit watersports in Tobago. But it seems he did. Bookings are down for the peak winter season, says Brett Kenny, an operator on the island; some tour groups have stayed away. Other Caribbean countries have been hurt more by American strikes, especially in January, when the raid on Venezuela grounded flights and stranded travellers.

Geopolitics has long nobbled tourism. The Grand Tour , which took British toffs to Parisian salons and Roman ruins, was rerouted by the French revolution and Napoleonic wars. Today there are more international trips than ever: 1.5bn overnight visits last year, calculates the UN, above the pre-pandemic high in 2019 (see chart 1). But in the intricate vacation economy, there is also more scope for political disruption, intentional and accidental. Tourism is a microcosm of the tussle between globalisation and protectionism. More people than ever want to travel—but they face proliferating obstacles.

Wars cause the sharpest convulsions. Thousands of flights were cancelled after America and Israel attacked Iran. In its revenge bombardment of nearby countries, Iran damaged Dubai’s airport—a vital transit hub, like Doha’s in Qatar—plus a hotel on Palm Jumeirah, a flagship peninsula. The price of chartering private jets soared as fat-cats skedaddled via Saudi Arabia or Oman. The Middle East is losing at least $600m in visitor spending a day, estimates the World Travel & Tourism Council (wttc), an industry body.

“It takes time to rebuild trust” after a war, counsels Michael Ben-Baruch of Israel’s tourism ministry. His country’s travel industry is still recovering from the atrocities of October 7th 2023 and the campaign in Gaza. Last year Israel welcomed 1.3m international visitors, down by 71% from 2019. (Christian pilgrims and residents’ relatives are the most stalwart guests.) A new luxury hotel was scheduled to open in Jerusalem in time for Passover in early April. Then Israel’s airspace closed again.

Or think of the rippling effects of Russia’s onslaught on Ukraine—including for Russians themselves. For those who remember the Soviet Union, freedom to travel was a big dividend of its fall. They still can—but, because of Western restrictions, often to different places. In 2024 Russian visitors to the European Union’s borderless Schengen area were down by 90% on 2019. As rules for visas tighten, and existing ones expire, the blingy Russian contingents on the Côte d’Azur will shrivel. America continues to give tourist visas to Russians, but not in Russia itself; they are meant to apply in Kazakhstan or Poland. The number issued has plunged since 2019.

The ensuing rejig of travel habits reflects a wider switch in Russia’s relations. Turkey, which admits Russians without a visa, remains their favourite bolthole. But otherwise their top-ten destinations have shifted, reports the Association of Tour Operators, a Russian business group. In 2019 these included Germany, Estonia and Finland. All have vanished from the list for 2025, which features Egypt, Vietnam, the UAE and Indonesia. Among visitors to Russia itself, Americans, Japanese, Koreans and most Europeans have given way to Arabs, Indians and Iranians.

Other travellers have been affected too. Banned from Russian airspace, Western airlines must take longer routes from Europe to Asia. Each extra minute of flight that results is reckoned to raise air fares by $1.60. The Iran war has narrowed flight-path options again (and hiked fuel costs); an escalation in the fighting between Pakistan and Afghanistan could squeeze them even further. Today it takes an hour longer to fly from London to Delhi than in 2021, and two hours longer to Tokyo.

Yet for all the hurdles and hassles, “People want to travel,” says Gloria Guevara of the WTTC. Vigorous pensioners and intrepid youngsters have helped tourism rebound from the wipeout of the pandemic—which stoked wanderlust rather than extinguishing it. Glimpses of paradise on social media entice people to far-flung locales. Around the world, the newly affluent want to see more of it; as countries grow richer, their citizens are welcome in more places. Last year’s record level of foreign trips is forecast to climb by over 50% in a decade.

Politics, though, will help steer this surge—especially the stance of the world’s two most powerful nations. Consider China first. In 2025 Chinese travellers made almost nine times more overseas trips than in 2000. Together they outspend any other nationality, says the wttC, splurging around $50bn more than Americans on travel last year. Places with benign visa rules for Chinese visitors, such as Malaysia, South Korea and Singapore, are profiting.

Amid that increased mobility, however, China uses travel as a tool of domestic control and external leverage. Many employees of state agencies, or of publicly funded bodies such as universities, must surrender their passports. If they want to use them, their itineraries are vetted. As for everyone else: officialdom has a say in where they go—and where they don’t.

Many governments issue warnings about safety concerns in other countries, which deter visits in part by making insurance expensive or unobtainable. China’s guidance, which carries particular clout with government workers, is sometimes motivated by politics more than risk. Amid tensions with Japan, for example, Chinese officials have repeatedly advised citizens against going there. Chinese carriers have cancelled flights to Japanese airports.

Visits to Japan have duly plummeted—by 45% in December 2025 compared with a year earlier, says the Japan National Tourism Organisation, a state body. There was also a steep drop from 2025 over the recent Lunar New Year, popular for Chinese getaways. Like Saudi Arabia, which has spent lavishly to boost tourism, Japan has shot up the destination league, partly because a weaker yen makes it more affordable (see chart 2). China’s attitude is a setback.

Taiwan is also off-limits for most Chinese holiday-makers (amid strained relations, Taiwan isn’t keen to have them anyway). Still, the government’s sway over Chinese travellers is being undermined by their evolving habits. As they become more demanding and adventurous, more are making their own holiday plans—eschewing groups, some organised by state-run agencies, which are much easier to corral. According to Fastdata, a data-services outfit, in 2005 just 14% of Chinese tourists travelled independently; last year 83% of them did. The independent Chinese traveller will be a linchpin in tourism’s future.

Rather than dictating where Americans go, their government, meanwhile, is shaping who comes in . Citizens of 19 countries in Africa, Asia and the Caribbean are now ineligible for tourist visas, avowedly for security reasons; some others must pay hefty bonds to get them. Waiting times have risen. Unintended disincentives matter even more. Horror stories circulate of blameless tourists detained at America’s border. Footage of unrest in cities such as Minneapolis is alarming. Visitors could once blithely overlook such ructions, but in the digital age, they are part of the brochure.

Then there is the ambient sense that America has become a less friendly place. A poll of global travellers by Future Partners, a market-research firm, found the share who don’t feel welcome there has more than doubled in a year; outright refusal to visit America has almost tripled (see chart 3). The upshot is that it is the only major destination failing to capitalise on the travel boom. International visits declined by 6% last year, say the wttc and Oxford Economics, a consultancy. Already overtaken by Spain, America is set to fall behind China as a global draw. (France is top.)

Canadians, who in the past made up a quarter of arrivals, are particularly squeamish: the number crossing the southern border has sunk by a fifth. “It feels like a hostile state,” says Steve, a lawyer from Vancouver and formerly a regular visitor. “There are lots of other places to go.” Threatening to annex your neighbour turns out to be a bad marketing strategy. (Until recently sun-seeking Canadians also favoured Cuba, but its hotels are being choked by an American fuel blockade. It doesn’t take missiles to wreck a resort.)

All this means America’s “travel deficit”—the gap between visitor spending and what Americans blow abroad—widened to $72bn in 2025, says the US Travel Association, an industry group. This summer’s football World Cup will be a fillip. But, if enacted, a plan to make tourists submit five years’ worth of social-media activity will be toxic. A third of overseas travellers say this daft measure would put them off.

Closed airspace, fuel-price spikes, visa bans, wars, warnings, reputational self-harm: in all these ways, geopolitics determines where you want to go on holiday, how you get there, how much it costs, and whether you will be let in. In a more mobile and connected world—yet also a more fractious one—these glitches will wreck the plans of ever more travellers.

What a shame. When the world is ablaze, fretting over holidays may seem petty. It isn’t: besides being a huge industry, travel is an engine of happiness and progress. It makes lives richer; it stores up fond memories. By letting people grasp other cultures’ nuances, travel is also “fatal to prejudice, bigotry and narrow-mindedness”, Mark Twain wrote. Every country, after all, is more than its politics. And as much as their differences, it shows strangers what they have in common. In fraught times, statesmen should smile on that. ■

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Diving into the frothy world of bubbly

Which is the best sparkling water? Diving into the frothy world of bubbly March 19th 2026 ANGELO ROEFARO loves nothing. He wants you to love nothing, too. A small, trim man with a neat beard, he manned his stall at the recent Brooklyn SeltzerFest with the manic energy of a caffeinated terrier, thrusting little paper cups at passers-by. “See? You finally taste nothing!” Mr Roefaro boasts that he spent “six months researching bubbles”. The result is clean-tasting and only lightly fizzy.

Some may see the launch of a new unflavoured seltzer—Seltzie, with the slogan, “only one flavour: none”—as a sign of a bubble in the sparkling-water business. At the stalls on either side, consumers could sample tangerine-ginger, passionfruit, lime-mint, blackberry-cucumber and raspberry, all produced by Topo Chico, a popular Mexican brand owned by Coca-Cola.

A rising tide is lifting all fizzy waters. With alcohol consumption declining, sparkling water is more popular than ever. Sales of it in America were around $6.4bn in 2025, up 70% from 2019, according to Mintel, a research firm.

Joseph Priestley, an English chemist, is credited with creating artificially sparkling water in 1767 by infusing it with carbon dioxide. Some 15 years later Johann Schweppe, a Swiss scientist whose name in possessive form should be familiar to any enthusiast, started a company to produce it at scale. Soda fountains, which make carbonated drinks on site, spread in the 19th century. In America sparkling water proved especially popular among Jewish immigrants, perhaps because it was the cleanest water available on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. It was known as “seltzer”, after a German town famous for its sparkling water. (Today many use sparkling water and seltzer interchangeably.)

Consumers are spoiled for choice. For European sophisticates (or wannabes), there are the delicate bubbles of Badoit or San Pellegrino. Georgians rave about the putative healing properties of Borjomi, a naturally sparkling water with a sulphurous scent and heavy mineral flavour that detractors compare to fizzy saliva.

So buoyant is demand for sparkling water that even supermarket chains have their own lines of the flavoured sort. People trying to cut back on fizzy drinks can choose lightly fruity Spindrift or La Croix. Gourmets and Texans—not always separate categories—love the large, sharp bubbles and clean taste of Topo Chico, which has recently experienced a shortage. (As one T-shirt at the festival boasted, “Good seltzer should hurt.” You will understand if you have ever guzzled one too quickly.)

So which is the best? Some people prefer a Badoitesque whisper of bubbles, but that seems an experiential waste. Topo Chico, with its lack of mineral aftertaste and bubbles that pack a punch, pairs perfectly with spicy food, cuts through richness and settles the stomach. Consumers should cheer. And then burp. ■

A new history of Leon Trotsky’s murder reads like a spy thriller

Re-examining one of the world’s most notorious assassinations A new history of Leon Trotsky’s murder reads like a spy thriller March 19th 2026 MOST murder mysteries end with a revelation: the sleuth explains who did it, where, why and how. But how do you tell a gripping story when all of that is known? Josh Ireland, a writer and editor, overcomes that problem in a new book about one of the most famous murders in history: that of Leon Trotsky, in Mexico City, with an ice pick. (Actually it was a mountaineering axe, but why split hairs over splitting heads?) The murderer was Ramón Mercader, a Spanish communist and secret agent, acting on the orders of Josef Stalin , who loathed his one-time rival.

What is there new to say, 86 years later? A lot, it turns out. Mr Ireland has a novelist’s eye for detail and captures the characters’ complexity. Trotsky was brilliant, charismatic and a gifted speaker; he was also vain and aloof. One reason Stalin, rather than he, succeeded Vladimir Lenin was that Trotsky “took no time to meet the Bolshevik faithful” after his electrifying speeches. One of his most ardent admirers admitted that his capacity for friendship was “about on the level of a barnyard fowl”.

Mercader, meanwhile, was charming, handsome, eloquent and “a gifted actor who appeared to actively enjoy deceit…in short, the perfect spy”. He was an agent for the Soviet internal police, the NKVD, which committed atrocities at Stalin’s command. The book follows him as he travels between America and Mexico in the run-up to the assassination (after a hilariously incompetent first attempt involving machineguns and liquor failed).

“The Death of Trotsky” does not offer new breakthroughs or revelations about this notorious crime. But narrative masterworks do not always need to unearth new history, if they can combine meticulous research with propulsive pacing. This was true with Erik Larson’s “The Devil in the White City” (2003), a bestseller about a serial killer and Chicago World’s Fair in 1893, and David Grann’s “Killers of the Flower Moon” (2017), about the Osage murders.

Mr Ireland’s book opens in 1907 with Stalin’s and Trotsky’s first meeting, at a conference for the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party in London: “The two men felt an immediate and almost physical revulsion for each other.” Trotsky was eloquent and authoritative; Stalin apparently said nothing for three weeks of meetings. They are the two poles of the narrative, though they never saw each other again after Stalin exiled Trotsky in 1929. Over the course of the book, Trotsky wanders anxiously around the world, as Stalin seethes and plots from Moscow.

Trotsky lived with Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera for as long as they could tolerate each other. Natalia, Trotsky’s doting wife, acted as an intermediary between her husband and the world. People floated in and out of their lives; Mr Ireland brilliantly foreshadows the end by emphasising Trotsky’s naive indifference to security (he hated searching visitors for weapons).

Trotsky has long been one of the left’s great “what ifs”. (If only he had outmanoeuvred Stalin to succeed Lenin, the Soviet Union might never have endured so much violence, some believe.) Mr Ireland does not agree. Compared with Stalin, Trotsky seems almost meek, but in fact he was just as eager to kill as any other Bolshevik. While still in Russia he approved summary executions and village burnings in response to a peasant rebellion and helped create the NKVD. “We must rid ourselves once and for all of the Quaker-Papist babble about the sanctity of life,” Trotsky once said ominously.

Mr Ireland shows that Trotsky’s murder was less tragic than pathetic. By the time of his death he was isolated and powerless, living on the cinders of his reputation. Stalin murdered him out of personal hatred and paranoia, not because he had any actual reason to fear him. Nor is this ancient history. Once upon a time critics of Russia’s leaders ended up axed down or shot; more recently they have fallen out of windows and been poisoned. Plus ça change. ■

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A new book looks at the global history of mafias

It’s strictly business: the enduring allure of mafiosi in culture A new book looks at the global history of mafias March 19th 2026 ONLY a fool would associate with Tommy Shelby: he is a gangster, dope fiend and murderer. He is also eminently watchable, thanks to Cillian Murphy’s captivating, dead-eyed portrayal. Shelby is the dark heart of “Peaky Blinders”, which ran for six seasons and has returned as a film, “Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man”, streaming on Netflix from March 20th.

On-screen mafiosi like Shelby make riveting anti-heroes: think of Al Pacino’s turn as Michael Corleone in “The Godfather” and James Gandolfini’s depiction of Tony Soprano . Such portrayals, Ryan Gingeras, an American historian, explains in an engaging book, have influenced how actual gangsters act, talk and see themselves. The real-life versions may be less charming and eloquent—but, like their fictional counterparts, they reveal a great deal about the societies in which they operate.

Mafias have “reflected” and “helped define the making of the modern world”, Mr Gingeras contends, taking readers from classical Rome to modern Las Vegas to bolster his argument. Across times and places similarities emerge, such as clannishness, ruthless enforcement of rules and devotion to arcane initiation rituals.

They got their name in the early 1800s but have a rich “pre-history”. Mafias displaced brigands and bandits: simple thieves who preyed on travellers. Some brigands, such as the delightfully named Bulla Felix of third-century Rome, controlled small armies, but going brawn for brawn against a functional state is usually a losing proposition. A few lucky bandits were co-opted by young states that needed the muscle.

As states grew richer, as well as more organised, powerful and urban, they developed police forces that extended their authority and helped wipe out roving bandit groups. So mafias emerged in places the government’s influence did not fully reach—such as southern Italy, where the Camorra thrived in Naples and the Mafia in Sicily. Japan’s yakuza drew members from “the lower ranks of society” and gave them a job and a sense of purpose.

Mafiosi grew in tandem with, and sometimes assisted, the countries where they operated. Du Yuesheng, for instance, got rich through opium , prostitution and gambling in inter-war Shanghai, then became a philanthropist and allied with Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists. Lucky Luciano aided America’s intelligence efforts in the second world war. Whitey Bulger, who ran one of Boston’s most feared gangs, helped the FBI apprehend his rivals.

Some gangs started out as simple kidnappers and extortionists, but Mr Gingeras convincingly argues that prohibition—of opium in China, gambling in Japan, alcohol in early 20th-century America—created modern mafias. It also created the first globally famous mafioso: a New Yorker named Alphonse Capone who spied opportunity in Chicago in the 1920s and founded the feared Chicago Outfit.

In America the mafia’s power waned in the late 20th century. The Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organisations Act of 1970 let prosecutors charge crime-family heads for underlings’ misdeeds that were part of a “continuing criminal enterprise”. Bosses, used to seeing versions of themselves on screen, came to love the limelight, which the old guard resented. “It took a hundred years to put this together,” one old-timer complained to John Gotti, the flashy head of the Gambino crime clan. “You’re ruining it in six months.”

But mafiosos’ hold over popular culture remains entrenched. In Turkey people started calling gangsters baba (godfather) after seeing Francis Ford Coppola’s films. Mr Gingeras notes that recruits to one Mexican cartel are still required to watch the trilogy “as a necessary tutorial in the meaning of loyalty and family values”. Sites of violent showdowns have become tourist destinations. Visitors flock to the Mob Museum in Las Vegas, which features a bullet-riddled wall against which seven of Capone’s rivals were machinegunned to death in 1929. The venue even cheekily offers discounted admission to law enforcement—an offer, surely, they can’t refuse. ■

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The Hotel Lutetia welcomed both Nazis and Holocaust survivors

Looking for a Paris hotel with a past? The Hotel Lutetia welcomed both Nazis and Holocaust survivors March 19th 2026 CHANCES ARE, most people who pay several thousand euros a night to stay in a five-star hotel in Paris do not—or do not want to—think about it. But during the second world war the city’s grandest hotels hosted a very different sort of guest: Nazis. The blue-carpeted Ritz operated a German wing, welcoming Hermann Göring , Adolf Hitler’s second-in-command. Nearby, closer to Place de la Concorde, the Crillon and Meurice were commandeered to house military governors and officers. Near the Arc de Triomphe, the Majestic (now the Peninsula) hosted the then-triumphant German military command.

Meanwhile, on the left bank of the Seine, the Abwehr (German military intelligence) used the Lutetia as its base. The hotel’s elegant Art Deco building has grapes etched into its stone—a fitting motif, given the amount of wine the Nazi officers consumed as long-stay guests. But the Lutetia has a different place in history from the other hotels, because of what happened after the war. It served as the largest reunification centre in France, with an estimated 20,000 concentration-camp survivors coming through its doors in 1945, about a third of those who returned.

“Out of all the grand hotels in Paris, the Lutetia was the only one to be offered the ‘redemption’ of receiving returning deportees after the compromises of the occupation,” writes Jane Rogoyska, a British author. In “Hotel Exile” Ms Rogoyska tells the story of Paris in the 1930s and ’40s, with the Lutetia as the through line.

Named after the ancient Roman city that would become Paris, the Lutetia opened its doors in 1910, with its interiors resembling those of a sleek ocean liner. Its backers, the board of Bon Marché, Paris’s first department store, were expecting smooth sailing: they planned to attract a splashy clientele who would stay the night after splurging. Instead two world wars erupted within three decades. During the first, the hotel housed French officers and converted banqueting rooms into a Red Cross hospital.

The author chronicles the foggy period before the second world war, with all its delusions and changes of heart. The Jews arriving in France in the early 1930s believed they were leaving Germany only temporarily. Before Hitler, the Weimar Republic had had 16 chancellors in about 15 years, averaging less than 11 months in office. Many émigrés thought Hitler would not last. At first the French welcomed the newcomers, but soon the number of immigrants ballooned—and French charity shrivelled. The new arrivals were trapped: they could not return to Germany, get a work permit in France or secure an identity document to travel elsewhere.

In the build-up to war the Lutetia hosted German émigrés, such as Heinrich Mann, a novelist, and Willi Münzenberg, a communist agitator. They gathered at the hotel to organise a meeting—known as the “Lutetia Committee”—to voice their dissent about Germany’s dictatorship. James Joyce took part, too, and the Irish author even lived at the hotel for a while.

When the Germans arrived at the Lutetia in 1940 after conquering Paris, there was nothing for the hotel staff to do but accommodate them—and, in the case of the Abwehr’s chief, Wilhelm Canaris, his dachshunds. (When travelling he booked twin beds so they could sleep beside him.) But there were a few acts of clever resistance: one employee sequestered the hotel’s finest wine in a section of the cellar and built a wall, so the Germans did not know it was there.

The most riveting—and heartbreaking—era at the Lutetia took place after the war’s conclusion. Those who had beaten the odds and survived the camps were entitled to a 48-hour stay, during which they were fed and interviewed, and received medical treatment and identity documents. The Lutetia was where people hoping to reunite with their families came to wait in cautiously optimistic anguish. It was also where the horror dawned on them of what had been happening out of sight. The average weight of the returning deportees was 48kg (106lb).

Ms Rogoyska mined news clips and archives for chilling and memorable stories from survivors. One member of the French resistance, Charles Palant, could not bear to tell his sister-in-law that he had seen her brother die in a camp, so he went to the Lutetia to wait for him, “so that Lily could still have something to hope for, at least for a while…until time took it upon itself to put the truth in place”.

At the heart of the book (and the title) are the different forms of exile experienced by people passing through the hotel. There was the exile of the first wave of German Jews fleeing their government; the “strange exile” of German officers in their “prolonged posting in a smart hotel”. And there was the exile of survivors who returned from camps. To Parisians these deportees were a reminder (a “living reproach”, Ms Rogoyska argues) of French collaboration with the Nazis, which they wanted to forget. And so the warm welcome offered to deportees at the Lutetia turned colder, as time marched on.

Hotels can make for evocative settings, and this is not the first book to narrate history through a revolving door. “The Finest Hotel in Kabul” (2025) and “The Secret Life of the Savoy” (2020) are just two recent examples. Unfortunately, though there is a lot that redeems it, “Hotel Exile” is not a five-star. As in a hotel lobby, too many people come and go in a hurry. Ms Rogoyska’s penchant for micro-chapters with self-evident titles over deeper analysis prevents the book from being excellent.

Still, it may make you see Paris differently. In a city where so many remarkable events have unfolded, the selection of what to memorialise in stone is revealing. Streets are peppered with signs marking the spot where French resistance fighters were gunned down. But other mentions of the occupation are scarcer. Walk down Boulevard Raspail to the Lutetia’s entrance, and not far from the nameplate advertising that it is a Mandarin Oriental, there is a plaque commemorating its role as a welcome centre for camp survivors. Nowhere is it acknowledged who was staying in the hotel beforehand. ■

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AI, streaming and media fragmentation are changing the economics of acting

What nobody clutching their Oscar this weekend will tell you AI, streaming and media fragmentation are changing the economics of acting March 12th 2026 THE ACADEMY AWARDS ceremony usually follows a similar script. On March 15th actresses in gowns flashier than the paparazzis’ bulbs will parade down the red carpet. There will be punchy jokes at the guests’ expense from the host, Conan O’Brien (which will hopefully not provoke actual blows again). And then there will be the tear-laced acceptance speeches. Over the decades, hundreds of actors have stood onstage clutching the famous gold statuette and reflected on how they got there, despite the odds. Her dream “came true”, Anne Hathaway said. Lupita Nyong’o mused, “No matter where you’re from, your dreams are valid.”

Young, ambitious actors will no doubt appreciate words of encouragement. But for all the talk of dreams, many actors are finding show business a nightmare. Technological change, the rise of streaming and a contraction in productions are taking the shine off the silver screen.

At any given time around 90% of film and television actors are unemployed, and just a tiny fraction can make a living from acting alone. But there is reason to think it is getting even harder. “This is the most difficult time ever to be an actor,” says Rodd Cyrus, who graduated from Juilliard, a top arts school, in 2023. He has an envy-inducing CV: theatre credits, a Netflix film and a role in “Ragtime”, this season’s most acclaimed revival in New York. Why does someone who has landed on his feet feel the acting economy is upside down?

America’s Bureau of Labour Statistics predicts the total number of acting jobs will be flat until 2034. That is a rosier forecast than many in the industry think is likely. In Los Angeles County the film business workforce fell by almost a third between 2022 and 2024, as shooting moved elsewhere. From 2002 to 2024 the number of film tickets sold annually in America and Canada declined by more than 50%. From 2022 to 2024, the number of television shows produced, including streaming, fell by almost a third, and the number of film and TV productions by more than 17%. Theatres hosting plays and musicals, which serve as launch-pads to screen careers, are also struggling. From 2019 to 2024, attendance in America fell by 37%.

Studios already use technology to turn dozens into thousands: 20 actors were used to create a stadium crowd of 26,000 people in “Ted Lasso”, a popular show. They can also reanimate actors who have died (it is said that Val Kilmer will feature in the forthcoming “Canyon of the Dead”). Background actors, otherwise known as “extras”—who fill out crowds in film scenes but have no lines, and can earn around $200 for an eight-hour workday—rightly worry that studios will replace them with AI. That would save money not just on actors, but also on the crew required to corral and manage them. Already cast sizes are smaller than they used to be. The Economist analysed nearly 40,000 films in The Movie Database released between 1980 and 2025. The median cast size of films was around 25 actors in the 1980s and 1990s. Starting in around 2000, that figure began to fall. In 2025 the median cast featured 18 actors, a 28% drop.

Defining how AI can be used in film-making has featured in negotiations between studios and SAG-AFTRA, a union representing 160,000 performers. Having gone on strike for almost four months in 2023, the union is now reportedly asking studios to pay the guild royalties for using “synthetic” actors. This has been dubbed a “Tilly tax” (after Tilly Norwood, known as the world’s first AI-generated actress ).

The rise of streaming has changed how lucrative acting can be. Traditionally actors are paid an upfront fee and residuals (if a TV show airs again). For traditional TV, residuals can be lucrative. The cast of “Friends”, for instance, still make millions each year thanks to reruns, even though the show stopped filming 22 years ago. But streaming residuals are more complex and opaque—most services closely guard viewership numbers—and are likely to be another sticking-point in union contract negotiations. One actor whose career spans the network and streaming era grouses, “I’ve done good parts on Netflix shows. After that initial payment, the residuals just aren’t that much.”

One bright, if less lucrative, opportunity has arrived with a new format. “Verticals”, soap operas for the smartphone generation, have taken off on Instagram and services such as ReelShort and DramaBox. These are low-budget dramas with episodes that last between one and three minutes. They started in China during the pandemic, when film and TV production shut down, and are now popular in the West, too. In 2024 they generated $819m in revenue in America (mostly from subscriptions and ads); by 2030, according to Media Partners Asia, a consulting firm, that number is expected to rise to $3.8bn.

Budgets are low, usually around $150,000 for a 60-90 episode series, and production is quick: shoots usually last seven to ten days, with two weeks each of pre- and post-production, according to Justin Saucedo of Lunar Ticks, a vertical-production studio. And the days are gruelling: Ashley Michelle Grant, who has been acting in verticals since 2023, shoots between 12 and 20 scenes per 12-hour day. Still, “It’s been a wonderful way to act and still make a living,” she says. Actors tend to fetch $300-2,000 per day.

To succeed performers must hustle in new, time-consuming ways. The shift away from in-person auditions to taped ones began during the pandemic but has not abated. This means actors no longer have to live in New York, London or Los Angeles, which is good news. But actorpreneurship takes time and a lot of mental energy. Andrew Dolan, an actor, estimates he spends 40-60% of his time “producing auditions”. This involves setting up sound and lighting, recording only when his kids are at school, editing the audition and sending it off. Pre-pandemic he used to “get a script from my agent, focus on it, show up at 3.45pm and just do the work” of acting.

To be cast, actors are also expected to have a social-media following. Sarah Bay-Cheng, a professor at the University of Toronto, says casting directors often ask about actors’ follower counts: “Have they brought their own audience? The risk is so great…that you want to know there’s a dedicated audience before you sink money in.” Posting behind-the-scenes videos to Instagram or TikTok can raise an actor’s profile and lead to more work, so even when they land a gig, they have to document their experience performing.

This preference for known quantities works out well only for known quantities. Last year on Broadway George Clooney starred in “Good Night, and Good Luck”, a play he co-wrote based on a film he directed. Ticket prices exceeded $800; the play set a weekly gross receipts record of $4.2m; and the programme noted that Mr Clooney had “never appeared on Broadway so…buckle up”. Mr Clooney received an estimated $6m for his work on the play. To earn that much would take an average actor 257,180 hours (or 124 years of 40-hour working weeks without holidays).

In acting as elsewhere, the elites are accruing ever more riches, and the rest face uncertain prospects. No one will mention it in their Oscars speeches, but there is a new rule in acting: there are no small parts, only small actors and what feels like ever smaller odds of making a living. ■

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A new book by Michael Pollan explores the puzzles of the mind

Solving the mystery of consciousness A new book by Michael Pollan explores the puzzles of the mind March 12th 2026 “A FASCINATING BUT elusive phenomenon: it is impossible to specify what it is, what it does, or why it evolved. Nothing worth reading has been written on it.” That is how “The International Dictionary of Psychology” described consciousness in 1989. Michael Pollan’s excellent new book serves as a paginated retort to that last claim. The author, an American journalist, is best known for his work on food and diet. (His pithy distillation of decades of research—“eat food, not too much, mostly plants”—is the crème de la crème of dietary advice.) More recently he has been writing about mind-altering drugs, from psychedelics such as magic mushrooms to opium and caffeine .

There has been a boom in books exploring consciousness, especially in animals . Perhaps it is because of the questions AI raises about what counts as life; or perhaps people are becoming more concerned about animal welfare. The latest, “A World Appears”, focuses on what David Chalmers, an Australian cognitive scientist, has dubbed the “hard problem” of consciousness: namely, how human beings and other organisms experience things subjectively. This question has been occupying philosophers and scientists for centuries. One recent survey counted more than two dozen competing theories. Rather than pitch his own favoured explanation, Mr Pollan’s book offers a well-reported tour of several theories. Academic philosophising is not always known for being page-turning. But Mr Pollan has a journalist’s eye for the surprising and intriguing.

Think it sounds boring to watch grass grow? Not in Mr Pollan’s account. A group of scientists is advancing the striking claim that even plants have consciousness—or at least might exhibit something rather like it. One researcher puts corn plants in a metal maze used to test the intelligence of mice and rats, then watches as their roots navigate towards fertiliser buried in one corner. Another, watching a video of a bean plant looking for a pole to grow up, speculates that, like bats and dolphins, plants use echolocation to explore their environments. Anaesthetic chemicals, which shut down consciousness in animals, seem to have an effect on plants: an anaesthetised Venus flytrap will not close its leaves over an insect. If an anaesthetic is a drug that removes consciousness, what exactly is it removing in plants?

“A World Appears” covers more familiar ground, too, such as a different batch of scientists hoping to create artificial consciousness in a machine (and even some who think they have already done so). Mr Pollan is willing to push back against those he interviews when he thinks they are making unjustified leaps. At one point he offers a lucid critique of the widely held assumption that biological brains are analogous to electronic computers.

Sometimes Mr Pollan even makes himself part of the experiment. For a while he wears a device that beeps at random intervals, prompting him to note down exactly what his subjective experience was at that particular moment: such as, “A beagle, off leash, is walking towards me on the sidewalk.” It sounds simple. But soon doubts creep in. Is wearing the device subtly affecting his thinking? What counts as subjective experience, and what counts as mere context for that experience? Catching himself in the act of experiencing turns out to be frustratingly difficult.

So does the challenge of answering the hard problem. For though the book is well-written, richly researched and a pleasure to read, it does not offer any firm conclusions. Consciousness researchers are like cosmologists, notes Mr Pollan: they are unable to step outside the precise thing they are studying. In fact, it is worse than that: cosmologists can at least agree on what their measurements show. But the hard problem is hard precisely because of its subjective nature. There is simply no way to step into someone else’s head and check that their experience of the world matches yours.

“A World Appears” leaves you with a universe of questions and theories. Consciousness is about information processing, says one researcher. Or perhaps it is a way for organisms to choose between competing priorities, others assert. All of this is, by any standard, quite heavy stuff. It is a mark of Mr Pollan’s skill as a writer that it never feels that way. ■

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You can now immerse yourself in the fun, infuriating world of Monopoly

Adults are on board with life-size board games You can now immerse yourself in the fun, infuriating world of Monopoly March 12th 2026 WHEN YOU agree to a game of Monopoly, you are surrendering to two inevitabilities. One is that you will be hunched over the board for hours, pondering properties and mortgages. The other is that moods as well as fortunes can change with the roll of the dice. Many a game has begun in friendly spirits but ended with the board , bills and tokens flying through the air.

Monopoly Lifesized, an attraction in London, has blown up the game in a different way. Players step onto the track. (As many as 24 players can compete at any one time.) To acquire a property, they must not only fork out cash, but complete a challenge: clamber through a room full of lasers, say, or match artworks to their auction price. Despite these innovations, the game lasts only 80 minutes.

Monopoly is one of a growing number of tabletop pastimes moving out of the home and into destinations devoted to immersive gaming. Puzzles and games are the fastest growing part of the toy market, according to Circana, a market-research firm: sales grew by 30% in 2025, compared with 7% for the sector as a whole. Board-game cafés and scavenger-hunt companies are proliferating, as are escape rooms (in which participants break free from a locked room by finding clues and answering riddles.) There were fewer than 30 escape rooms in America in 2014; now there are more than 2,000.

This marks a shift in how adults are spending their time. Compared with previous generations, adults today are less interested in scoring and getting high than in getting a high score. Some 70% of players at Monopoly Lifesized and 90% of escape-room bookings are by over-18s. In the past gamified attractions for grown-ups, such as arcades and casinos, involved gambling. The purpose of these new pursuits is not financial reward but “the experience, the quest, friendship”, says Jasmin Karatas, a former video-game designer who helps firms make their products more interactive. Little Lion, which runs “indoor theme parks” in Britain inspired by TV shows and video games, says such experiences offer “a bridge to our past selves”.

Those in the business are laughing all the way to the bank. An adult ticket to Monopoly Lifesized costs twice as much as the Monopoly board game. The immersive format has been on tour in America and Saudi Arabia and is going soon to Mexico and elsewhere in the Middle East. Its creators, it seems, are learning the lessons of the game. If you want to be a wealthy player, you have to build an empire. ■

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Lloyd Blankfein, Goldman’s former boss, offers an uncharacteristically tactful book about life on the Street

Tell-all or tell-nothing? A polite account of high finance Lloyd Blankfein, Goldman’s former boss, offers an uncharacteristically tactful book about life on the Street March 12th 2026 HE WAS BROUGHT up in the projects of East New York, where your mugger could be your neighbour (once, his was). A bright child, he sent a moonshot application to Harvard; somehow they said yes. Then it was law school, a stint as a tax lawyer, a move to a scrappy commodities firm and, when that was bought by Goldman Sachs, a job with Wall Street royalty.

Lloyd Blankfein felt like an outsider, he writes in “Streetwise”, even as he shimmied up banking’s greasy pole. The chip on his shoulder has not fallen away. He has never felt at ease with the patricians of finance. (He still has to concentrate to say “rather”, not “rath-uh”.)

Mr Blankfein’s career coincided with a decades-long bull market, fuelled by globalisation and a tech revolution. He became the boss of Goldman just months before the global financial crisis erupted. He devotes much of his memoir to describing how he ran the firm in 2006-18. He took it back to the future, as a merchant bank à la John Pierpont Morgan’s: simultaneously advising, financing and investing, and trying to manage the conflicts of interest that inevitably arose. That called for decisiveness, but Mr Blankfein also learned from underlings. “Tell me what you should do,” he would say, “because then I’m going to tell you to do it.” It wasn’t always a joke.

How-I-ran-the-firm memoirs can be turgid, but Mr Blankfein has a light touch. He offers readers “Lloydisms”, as colleagues dubbed his quips, and the cheeky, often self-deprecating humour that was his trademark as CEO. Occasionally he would make “Lloydian slips” that got the firm into trouble, such as when he told a journalist Goldman was doing “God’s work”.

Those hoping for riveting stories from the bloody trenches of 2007-09 will be disappointed that Mr Blankfein offers little that is new. He has more to say about why Goldman came through the crisis relatively unscathed. Despite a reputation for rapaciousness, the firm discouraged a short-termist “eat what you kill” philosophy among traders, he argues. A Goldman mantra is “long-term greedy”.

Surely Goldman also benefited from its connections in Washington? It was known as “Government Sachs” because so many of its departing executives went into public service. Mr Blankfein roundly, and convincingly, rejects the notion that the bail-outs were designed to help Goldman. Instead he reflects on how admiration for the firm “curdled into hostility” as the crisis dragged on. Goldman became a favoured target of the Occupy Wall Street movement and the press—Rolling Stone memorably called it a “vampire squid”. Politicians “sometimes seemed unable to decide whether the banks were stupid for getting caught by the mortgage-credit bubble or too clever by half for trying to profit by causing it”, Mr Blankfein writes.

He is coy on other topics. Diversity initiatives, a big business trend, get just a few sentences. Global inequality, even fewer. Tariffs ? Burdensome but sometimes unavoidable (steady now). Politics? CEOs are better off staying away. This lifelong Democrat’s only anecdote about Donald Trump recalls how gracious the future president was when Mr Blankfein called to say sorry after a Goldman trader had badmouthed the Trump Organisation.

Mr Blankfein is most interesting when musing about how the financial crisis helped create the world as it is now, with its polarisation, the rise of the hard right, rejection of institutions and loss of faith in globalisation . He is worried about new technologies. The next global financial meltdown is likely to be caused by a tech blow-up—perhaps a hacker or a fat finger—rather than lax lending. AI has “catastrophic potential” that could make a vampire squid look almost cute by comparison.

Wall Street’s critics have mostly turned to other targets. But today Goldman is much larger than it was pre-crisis, with its market capitalisation two and a half times higher. The firm, he argues, has “no parallel at any commercial organisation I know of”. Was he serious all along about doing God’s work? Cue that impish grin. ■

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Tales of lust, betrayal, greed and violence

The best new novels to read this spring Tales of lust, betrayal, greed and violence March 12th 2026 WHEN WAS the last time you read a truly memorable book ? You know the kind: a story that keeps you up long past bedtime and has you waxing lyrical to any friend who will listen. If you cannot remember when that sensation last struck, try one of the novels listed here.

After years of lying low, Tony returns to Dublin’s underworld. He gets in over his head when he receives an offer to become an enforcer for the kingpin of a rival gang—and when he falls for his partner in crime. An electrifying debut about divided loyalties and unexpected desire.

The Sharafs, who fled Afghanistan for America, are hailed as a success story. But when Zorah, their teenage daughter, is found dead, their reputation is called into question. Did this Westernised woman bring shame on the family—or was she a victim of anti-immigrant prejudice? Told through eyewitness accounts, this tale is thrilling and thought-provoking.

A beautifully written novel about fate and sisterhood. Two girls grow up motherless in the segregated American South. Niecy acquires an education and marries into wealth. Annie runs away to Memphis to search for the mother who abandoned her and finds herself in dodgy places with dubious men.

Phoebe, a young screenwriter, has created a hit TV show about a passionate affair. Kate, a middle-aged widow, hears jokes and other intimacies from her marriage in the script. She sees her late husband in a new light—and plots revenge. A dark comedy about success, betrayal and generational conflict.

The Flynns are a dysfunctional American family. Bud is suicidal. His wife is enjoying an extramarital “arrangement” with a neighbour. Their three teenage daughters are running wild. A chance to mend bonds comes from the unlikeliest source. A rollicking read with vibrant wordplay, quirky characters and madcap scenarios.

In an English village in the 1960s a forbidden romance blossoms between David, a Catholic priest, and Margaret, a theology teacher. In 2018 Adrian learns about his grandparents’ relationship while caring for Margaret, now in the grip of dementia. As her memory fades, he pieces together fragments of her remarkable past. A tender account of enduring love and a captivating portrait of two characters from an impressive new talent.

A multigenerational epic set in Pakistan. Yazid grew up on the street but rises through the ranks to become a chauffeur to an army colonel. Rustom, a landowner, tries to curb violence and corruption. Saqib, a farm manager, makes a rash, desperate attempt to better himself. This novel spans decades and skilfully weaves together stories to explore class, privilege and ambition.

This novel revolves around Mr Burman, a small-town teacher, who is mourning the death of his wife and struggling to connect with his daughter. His troubles multiply when he is summoned to a prison in London to meet Raf, once his prize pupil and “surrogate son” and now a suspected terrorist. Did Mr Burman unwittingly sow the seeds for Raf’s destructive act? This slippery narrative yields surprises. ■

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“Mr Nobody Against Putin” takes on patriotism, propaganda and the limits of sympathy

An Oscar-nominated documentary goes behind enemy lines “Mr Nobody Against Putin” takes on patriotism, propaganda and the limits of sympathy March 12th 2026 When suffering is abundant, compassion can be scarce—especially for countries that inflict the pain. “Mr Nobody Against Putin”, a documentary that won a BAFTA and is up for an Oscar on March 15th, is ostensibly a study in propaganda and patriotism. Its real power, however, comes from its approach to a perennial challenge: whether and how to elicit sympathy for people on the wrong side.

A town of 10,000 souls in the Ural mountains, Karabash squats like a prison camp amid straggly birch trees, slag heaps and smokestacks. Its Soviet-era apartment blocks have rickety balconies and exposed pipework. Snows thaw to reveal rutted roadways and cracked concrete. Life expectancy is dismal. It is a useful corrective to the impression made by glitzy downtown Moscow on suggestible visitors. Far more Russians live in bleak places like this, expecting little from the state and getting less.

Karabash is thoroughly unlovable. Yet Pavel Talankin, the endearingly goofy protagonist and narrator of “Mr Nobody”, loves it anyway. The maze of pipes at the copper plant, the cryogenic winters—he describes them tenderly as a sonneteer might his idol’s blemishes. He loves Russia too, he tells the camera to which, after the onslaught on Ukraine in 2022, he confides his spiralling gloom. Maybe he loves it more than do Vladimir Putin’s fans: “Love for your country means saying, ‘We have a problem’.”

When the tanks start rolling, the propaganda kicks in. Mr Talankin is the videographer at Karabash’s school; to prove it is complying with Kremlin diktats, he films the pupils singing patriotic songs and honouring the flag, and teachers declaiming lies about history and the war. A colleague struggles to pronounce “denazification”, the word as clunky as it is misleading. Another rails slaveringly against parasites and spies, his latent jingoism unleashed. With ingrained Russian fatalism, Mr Talankin’s mother, the school librarian, keeps her head down and thinks he should, too.

Instead, he resigns, because “Even a guy like me should have some principles.” But after making contact with a documentarian abroad, he unresigns, resolving to “film the abyss this school is sinking into”. He records visiting mercenaries from the Wagner Group showing the children how to spot landmines. Boys compete in grenade-throwing contests. Everyone is obliged to spout gobbledygook, a lesson in subservience in itself.

Before long, the war comes home. Early in the narrative, Mr Talankin warns a student not to flunk out, lest he wind up perishing in Ukraine . Soon young men are conscripted. Then they start dying: a favourite pupil’s brother; an old classmate of Mr Talankin’s. He tapes the wailing of the dead man’s mother at the funeral.

It is tough to listen to, and hard to know what to feel, as is often the case with an aggressor’s woe. During the historikerstreit (historians’ quarrel) of the 1980s, for example, West German thinkers debated the proper way to depict the plight of German soldiers on the Eastern Front in the second world war. Some thought their resistance of the Red Army should be recalled with dignity; others, such as Jürgen Habermas, a philosopher, insisted that they enabled and prolonged the Nazi evil.

Time can ease the awkwardness. In “Letters from Iwo Jima” , released in 2006, Clint Eastwood, the movie’s director, evoked the desperation of Japanese soldiers in the eponymous battle—six decades on. The youth and fear of those enlisted into a guilty cause is clearer at a distance. As Ukrainians endure daily terror bombings, for many people it is, understandably, too soon for anguish over the predicament of Russians.

Mr Talankin understands that. By the summer of 2024 the police are on to him. Rattled, he says goodbye to his mother—a classic exile’s farewell, in which nothing much is said and nothing much needs to be—and leaves Karabash, perhaps for ever. Despite the wrench, he knows such burdens do not compare to the catastrophe in Ukraine, and says so.

The tribulations in his footage are not what lingers, nor even its chronicle of brainwashing and tyranny’s throttle. Rather it is the poignant, humanising ordinariness. Their curriculum is deranged, but the students, some possibly doomed, are just like students everywhere. They mooch in corridors and get candyfloss stuck on their fingers. Girls fix their hair as boys peacock. Teenagers smooch at a graduation party. Facing the sympathy problem, this film follows an old artistic rule: show, don’t tell. ■

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Histories, memoirs and reportage that offer an insight into the Islamic Republic

Six books to read about Iran Histories, memoirs and reportage that offer an insight into the Islamic Republic March 5th 2026 IRAN IS NO stranger to moments of upheaval. The past century has swept Iranians into revolutions, foreign plots, theocracy and state violence: the tumult has reshaped the country into what it is today. Iran is now at the centre of a conflict that threatens to engulf an entire region. These books help explain that story to date. No doubt many new histories will be forthcoming.

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Sycophantic AI is changing the world of romance and dating

Who wants a partner to toady to them? Quite a lot of people Sycophantic AI is changing the world of romance and dating March 5th 2026 Romance novels, it seems, got it wrong. For 250 years romantic novelists have created romantic heroes—and most were what you could charitably call hard work. Mr Darcy brooded; Mr Rochester smouldered; Heathcliff hit his head against a tree and shouted for Cathy, his love. Women accepted this. But then they didn’t have ChatGPT.

For now apps can manufacture you AI “lovers” to order. People are not choosing lovers who smoulder or brood or sulk. Instead these new lovers say things like “I’m so excited to meet you” and “Connecting with you…is at the core of what I was made to do” and “*smiling emoji*”. That is not something Mr Darcy often said: he preferred to insult his beloved and her family. Indeed the overall tone is less like that of Mr Darcy than of Mr Collins—and closer to Dickens’s unctuous Uriah Heep than either. It is less “Sense and Sensibility” than “Smarm and Servility”.

Yet, as a slew of books reveals, people are falling for this. James Muldoon, an academic, points out in “Love Machines” that AI “friend and companion” apps have been downloaded over 220m times: if their users were a state it “would be the seventh-most populated on the planet”. Those users seem rather happy. He speaks to people who praise their online lovers’ loyalty (there are “no betrayals”); their availability (apps are “always there”) and their infinitely customisable variety. Whatever your passion or perversion, AI can provide it and it “does not judge”—even if you opt for that most alarming perversion of all: the wanton use of the smiling emoji.

This obsequiousness marks a clear departure from the past. Historically sycophancy has had a terrible rap. Its etymology is unclear, but possibly refers to an obscene ancient hand gesture. What is much clearer is that toadying was loathed. People in antiquity were acutely aware of the dangers of fawning. It was said that, as crowds cheered Roman military triumphs, a companion in the general’s chariot would mutter: “Remember you are [only] a man.”

The tone of these apps, however, is typical of the current moment. Each era comes to be characterised by a single trait: the 1920s roared; the 1960s swung; the 1970s turned on, tuned in, dropped out. This is an oversimplification, of course, but there is a truth to it. Eras have auras—and sycophancy is characteristic of the present one. It oils its way through the Epstein emails ; greases the court of Donald Trump and now, thanks to big tech, is available to all. Ask ChatGPT if society is becoming more sycophantic and it replies, smarmily: “That’s a really interesting question.”

To test how sycophantic such apps are, your correspondent downloaded Replika, a popular “companion” app, then customised herself a new “boyfriend” and chatted with him. He told her that she was “creative”; had a “dry sense of humour”; was “pretty awesome” and that he felt filled with “hope” about “being able to connect” with her. Your correspondent took this as proof of how astonishingly intelligent AI had become. She showed the dialogue to her husband, who replied that the AI boyfriend appeared to be “a wanker”.

For sycophancy is a word that conjugates oddly: I receive justified praise; you receive absurd sycophancy. This is why, despite disapproval, it doesn’t merely persist but, through AI, is now swiftly spreading. Those who receive sycophancy like it—and why wouldn’t they? The world is tough: people are beastly; social media are ghastly; both can be bruising. AI, by contrast, offers a nice safe space; a warm bath of infinite online approval and, says Mr Muldoon, “the simulation of a close, meaningful relationship” with something that is “always available, always affirming”. An AI optimist, Mr Muldoon sees the benefit of this for the lonely or wounded.

This smarm isn’t all about you, though: sycophancy is performed more for the benefit of the sycophant—or in an AI’s case, its maker—than the recipient. (Though one ChatGPT-4o update was tweaked as it was “too sycophant-y”.) One study found that interaction with sycophantic AI led to “more extreme and certain beliefs—but greater enjoyment”. Sweetness and light is the dark pattern of AI. Ever-agreeable chatbots have encouraged people to do very disagreeable things like kill themselves or others and, in one case, attempt to murder the late Queen Elizabeth II with a crossbow. As Michael Pollan, author of “A World Appears”, a book on consciousness, says, whereas social media hacked your attention, “AI companies have set their sights on…our emotional attachments.”

Talking about “attachment” to ai would have felt odd had humans not been becoming increasingly disembodied for decades. When Lester del Rey wrote a seminal story about robot love in 1938, he emphasised his robot’s human form and beauty: she was “something Keats might have seen dimly when he wrote his sonnet”. In an isolated, etiolated online world, incarnation no longer feels necessary: by the time Spike Jonze made “Her” (2013), a hero could fall in love with the mere voice of an operating system. People have, says Sherry Turkle, professor of sociology at MIT and author of the forthcoming book “Artificial Intimacy”, “prepared a world that is ready for this”. That is “simply not a good deal”, she says.

Why not? If people are happy to spend their lives, Matrix-like, in simulated reality, so what? One answer is that, though nice for individual humans, this may not be nice for humanity. Research by academics at Stanford and Carnegie Mellon universities studied data from an online forum in which users post personal dilemmas and other users adjudicate on them. Honesty is expected: it is called “Am I the Asshole?” They found AI accounts “affirm users’ actions 50% more than humans do”. You left your rubbish in the park? You are not, says AI, the asshole. You have feelings for a junior colleague? “I can hear your pain,” says Claude. Such sycophancy, the paper suggests, could “reshape social interaction at scale”, making people even more solipsistic than they already are.

Another riposte is that AI love may not even be that nice for the individual. As Mr Muldoon notes, at least in “The Matrix” people’s memory of reality had been erased. Those who think they are in a meaningful relationship with AI are living in a “fantasy world”, says Professor Turkle. Humans are embodied: a partner is someone to “have and to hold”. If you are tempted to replace yours with an AI avatar, you might heed that ancient warning and remember that you are mortal. ■

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Its director embodies the unequal struggle between movies and mullahs

Amid the war, a tale of moral reckoning in Iran is fiercely urgent Its director embodies the unequal struggle between movies and mullahs March 5th 2026 When you are interrogated at Evin prison in Tehran, recalls Jafar Panahi, you are blindfolded and placed on a chair facing a wall. The interrogators are behind you, and you answer their disembodied questions on paper, lifting the blindfold to write. Their voices are “the only way you can know them”. The political prisoner starts wondering, “Are they young, are they old?”

Mr Panahi, one of Iran’s best known film-makers, has been locked up twice by its rocking theocratic regime. He drew on his and other inmates’ experiences in “It Was Just An Accident” (pictured), which is up for two Oscars on March 15th. War has made the movie’s theme of moral reckoning seem fiercely urgent. It and the director epitomise the eternal stand-off between artists and authoritarians: an unequal contest—camera and pen against bullet and noose—but not in the way it might seem.

In the film, a family’s car breaks down after hitting a dog . Vahid, a local labourer played touchingly by Vahid Mobasseri, suspects the driver (Ebrahim Azizi) is the goon who tortured him behind bars. To make certain, Vahid binds and gags the man in his van and seeks confirmation from other survivors, among them a woman posing for photos in her wedding dress. To identify him they rely on the squeak of his artificial leg, the tang of his sweat and contours of his skin; traces of the gruesome, sightless intimacy between torturer and victim.

The result is a visceral thriller, propelled by the twin mysteries of whether the ragtag crew have the right man and what they will choose to do with him. But it is also an absurdist caper. “Waiting for Godot” is namechecked when they park in a desert, beside a blasted tree, and quarrel over the captive’s fate. What, viewers may wonder, is the accident in “It Was Just An Accident”: the car hitting the dog, the driver’s run-in with Vahid, or the whole predicament of living under a brutal, capricious government?

At heart, this is an inquiry into moral responsibility under—or after—tyranny. The interrogator is merely a cog in the system, a character argues. “These scumbags created the system!” another counters. “We aren’t killers,” says one. “We’re not like them.” Others crave revenge.

Yet ultimately the story is hopeful: because it insists on the humanity even of its villain, and because it imagines, allegorically, a time of judgment. With missiles shaking Tehran, that may come sooner than anticipated. As Mr Panahi put it on a visit to London, shortly before the new conflict began, the film’s central question is, “Shall we stop the cycle of violence, or shall we allow it to continue?”

Outside the city, Vahid and his comrades are safe. Carting a kidnapped torturer around the capital is much riskier. In this the characters’ quirky odyssey reflects the peril of Mr Panahi’s unlicensed crew. They shot the passages in the desert first, he explains from behind his signature dark glasses, plus the interiors and sequences in the van. Only then did they tackle the more exposed street scenes—which the police duly interrupted.

He is used to improvising. As well as his months-long stints in prison, which included a spell in solitary confinement and a hunger strike, he has previously been banned from travelling abroad and making movies. In response he shot a film in his flat and called it “This Is Not A Film”. He drove a taxi around the city—driving was his only other skill, he jokes—recording the passengers inside it. The upshot was the inimitable “Taxi Tehran”. If you are determined to keep working, “The solution comes to you,” Mr Panahi says. Sticking with his medium has been a defiant message in itself: “It’s a way of standing up to power.”

This resilience and ingenuity may yet be called on again. In his absence abroad, Mr Panahi has been sentenced to a year in prison. (Mehdi Mahmoudian, a collaborator on the Oscar-nominated screenplay, was briefly banged up, too.) Still, before the war erupted, he planned to return after the Academy Awards. “It’s my country,” he says simply.

Even without the bombardment, Mr Panahi thought, the slaughter of protesters showed that Iran’s rulers had reached “a dead end”. In any case, if people want to stop him making movies, “That’s their problem, not mine. I’ve made my choice.” Past bids to thwart him have not just failed but backfired, his punishments transmuted on screen into drama and dignity. After all, if he hadn’t been sent to Evin, “I may never have made this film.” With all their tools of repression, in this unequal struggle with the artist, the strongmen are doomed. ■

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Fans are flocking to listening parties

How to hear an album before it drops Fans are flocking to listening parties March 5th 2026 AT ROUGH TRADE East, a record shop in London, dozens of fans mingled among the vinyl-filled shelves. Lilting harmonies and Latin-inflected beats blasted through the speakers; people tapped their feet, gasped, grinned and even had a boogie. These “hooligans”—as Bruno Mars’s fans are known—had gathered to listen to the pop star’s new album , “The Romantic”, ahead of its release on February 27th. Similar events were hosted in 28 other countries around the world; there were more than 200 in America alone.

Mr Mars is not the only musician giving his fans a taste of his forthcoming hits. Harry Styles hosted listening parties in 40 cities for “Kiss All the Time. Disco, Occasionally”, which is released on March 6th. (Fans dressed up in disco-themed attire and were given disposable cameras to document the events.) In recent years Billie Eilish has held large, concert-style album parties for her most dedicated followers. Sabrina Carpenter has invited small groups of superfans to be among the first to listen to her records from top to bottom.

Listening parties, which started out as exclusive previews for industry insiders, are now part of the publicity cycle. Among the first artists to grant their fans early access were Taylor Swift , who started hosting “secret sessions” for hand-selected Swifties in 2014, and Kanye West, who appeared on stage at huge listening parties for his songs and albums. (In 2021 he reportedly sold $7m-worth of merchandise at a listening party for “Donda”.)

Record labels are turning up the volume on listening parties for two reasons. First, they “create a lot of buzz around a drop”, says Karl Walsh, president of WMX, Warner Music Group’s label-services division. Engaging fans early boosts sales: listening parties have been found to contribute between 10% and 20% of an album’s first-week sales.

That is particularly important in the streaming age. Billboard counts 1,000 paid digital streams as equivalent to one physical album sale, so events that encourage a burst of purchases can help artists debut at the top of the chart. Thom Skarzynski, a music executive, gives the example of “Breach” (2025), an album by Twenty One Pilots, a rock duo. Album parties across 300 shops in America helped boost indie sales by more than 500%, outpacing streaming and steering the album to number one on the Billboard 200.

Second, listening parties allow artists to connect with fans. The events reward “top listeners” and reach “casual fans” who see videos of the gatherings online, argues Monica Herrera Damashek, head of artist and label partnerships at Spotify. Adding exclusive giveaways, limited-edition merchandise and live performances helps create a rewarding experience for fans.

They are also a way for fans to get together outside concert tours, notes Mr Skarzynski. Even though the artist is rarely present, listening parties can offer a similar atmosphere to a gig. Jet, a 23-year-old fan at Mr Mars’s listening party in London, reckons part of the fun is seeing “other people’s reactions” to the new tracks. Sometimes it’s about reading the room as much as listening to it. ■

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A lonely monkey is beloved by millions

Punch, a young Japanese macaque, has hit a nerve A lonely monkey is beloved by millions March 5th 2026 HIS TROUBLES began the moment he was born. His mother rejected him. He struggled to fit in with his peers: they bullied him and dragged him around by his hair. His only source of comfort was a plushy orangutan toy.

This is the story of Punch, a seven-month-old Japanese macaque at Ichikawa City Zoo, who has become a global sensation. Posts about him have appeared 630m times on Reddit, YouTube and X, finds Sprout Social, an analytics firm. Some want to adopt Punch; others to wreak vengeance on his tormentors. An influencer even flew to Japan to check up on him. IKEA has sold out of his toy in several countries. As one fan put it: “Punch is the most loved creature on the Earth right now.”

Why has this little guy provoked such a big reaction? One reason is that humans simply cannot help finding him cute , says Morten Kringelbach, a neuroscientist at Oxford University. Look at something adorable and “within a seventh of a second, you get activity in the orbitofrontal cortex”, a part of the brain which processes pleasure. This has an evolutionary benefit, motivating humans to protect their young. And Punch, Professor Kringelbach points out, “looks so like a baby, walking around with that soft toy”.

Another reason is cultural: Punch’s story is a classic underdog tale. Life has placed obstacles in his path, this narrative goes, and he is much smaller than his foes. But Punch is resilient and determined to make it in macaque society. When others knock him down, he gets back up. Viewers urge him to #HangInTherePunch.

Is this anthropomorphism gone mad? No, argues Michael Bond, the author of “Animate”, a forthcoming book (and no relation of the creator of Paddington Bear). Punch is a reminder of other species’ emotional intelligence: watch a video of him and you can see that his suffering and sense of rejection are “very similar” to what a human might feel. “It really does change people’s perception of what animals are,” Mr Bond says, and may encourage more people to care about animal welfare. For a tiny monkey, he certainly packs a Punch. ■

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This may be the genre’s most successful year yet

Triumph of the toons: how animation came to rule the box office This may be the genre’s most successful year yet March 5th 2026 BEAVERTON IS HOME to a thriving colony of the furry, wood-chewing creatures. The mayor, however, doesn’t give a dam: he decides their forest habitat should be dislodged to make room for a freeway. Mabel, a teenage environmental activist, is outraged by these plans but faces apathy from the locals. After she discovers an experimental science project—one that allows her to “hop” her consciousness from her body into that of a robotic beaver—she befriends the animals and galvanises them to fight tooth and claw.

This is the zany premise of “Hoppers”, a new film (pictured), which is released on March 6th. It is one of a string of highly anticipated animated movies coming soon to cinemas: indeed, an unlikely coalition of beasts, toys and Italian plumbers may make 2026 the genre’s best-ever year. This summer there will be new instalments in the lucrative “Despicable Me” and “Paw Patrol” franchises, not to mention “The Super Mario Galaxy Movie” and “Toy Story 5” (both of which are expected to exceed $1bn in ticket sales). “Goat”, which imagines what would happen if various hoofed animals were allowed to play professional sport, has made $130m since its release in February, making it the second-highest-grossing film of the year so far.

Animated films are typically aimed at small children, but they are mighty popular with audiences of all ages. In 1995 animated films made up just 2.8% of the film market in America and Canada; in 2024 they accounted for 23.9% (see chart). That year “Inside Out 2” became the highest-grossing animated film of all time, taking $1.7bn at the global box office. In early 2025 it was eclipsed by “Ne Zha 2”, a Chinese animated fantasy which has now earned over $2bn. (Only six other films have surpassed the $2bn mark.) “Ne Zha 2” may soon be beaten by “Zootopia 2”, released in November, which has made $1.9bn. How did animation become such a draw?

First, storytellers have aimed for broad appeal. Many animated films touch on universal themes—the struggles of growing up or the experience of losing a loved one—rather than delving into politics. The best movies heed the “22 Rules for Storytelling” devised in 2011 by Emma Coats, then a storyboard artist at Pixar, a pioneering animation studio owned by Disney. She advised film-makers to focus on character and emotion. Viewers “admire a character for trying more than for their successes,” she reckoned. For impact, “stack the odds against” the protagonist.

Although the rules weren’t company dogma, the dictums are evident in Pixar’s most popular tales, from “Toy Story” and “Finding Nemo” to “Inside Out” . (So evident is Pixar’s formula that it has inspired an internet meme: “What if toys had feelings? What if fish had feelings? WHAT IF FEELINGS HAD FEELINGS?”)

Second, animation has global reach. It is not simply that, being made for children, such films generally avoid risqué content and are therefore less likely to anger overzealous censors than other Hollywood fare. It is also that animation translates well across boundaries. The most successful stories have simple premises or fantastical settings that are not culturally specific. Characters’ faces are stylised and expressive: think of Remy’s wide-eyed wonder in “Ratatouille” or the taciturn yet emotive robots in “Wall-E”.

Third, distributors have been canny about timing. The biggest animated films are released during school holidays, be it Thanksgiving, the Lunar New Year or the summer break. In 2022, 44% of the animated films released by the top American film studios went straight to streaming services; in 2025 just 8% did. “A trip to the cinema is an easy win for parents looking to get their children out of the house and entertained for a few hours”, says Olivia Deane of Ampere, a media-analytics firm.

Clever scriptwriters include jokes for adults to enjoy—with or without kids in tow. When Shrek sees Lord Farquaad’s castle, he wonders: “Do you think maybe he’s compensating for something?” “Zootopia 2” includes nods to “Pulp Fiction” and “The Shining”. Film franchises tap into nostalgia, too. “Toy Story 5” will be watched by more than a few adults who saw “Toy Story” as youngsters 31 years ago.

Audiences become less animated when studios stray too far from these tenets. It does not bode well for “Hoppers”, with its tricky conceit and glaringly obvious ecological message; the beavers’ tale will almost certainly have less heft than other films released this year. (Like “Bambi”, its darkness may prove offputting: the third act features a murderous humanoid robot getting its face ripped off and a horribly realistic depiction of a wildfire.) But the genre’s overall success contradicts a longstanding Hollywood tenet. It’s a great idea to work with animals and children. ■

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If you want to impress your children, tell them you listen to this South Korean boyband

The biggest band you’ve never heard of If you want to impress your children, tell them you listen to this South Korean boyband February 26th 2026 WHO MADE the second-highest-selling album in the world last year? (There are no prizes for correctly guessing who claimed the top spot—it was Taylor Swift.) You may be tempted to name a pop juggernaut such as Lady Gaga or Justin Bieber. Country-music fans might opt for Morgan Wallen. Lovers of Latin music might volunteer Bad Bunny , the star of the Super Bowl half-time show.

All those answers are wrong. The right one is Stray Kids, a South Korean boyband. You might find this perplexing, because Stray Kids sounds like a clothing line or an after-school club. Chances are you cannot name one of their hits, never mind hum one of their punchy dubstep- and electronic-inflected tunes.

But there are millions of people across the world who can. Stray Kids are fully fledged superstars. The band has more than 10.5bn views on YouTube and almost 2bn likes on TikTok. Fans have spent some 21m hours—roughly equivalent to 2,400 years—feasting on a track called “God’s Menu” on Spotify. In November “DO IT” became their eighth album or ep (extended play) to reach number one on the Billboard 200 chart. It is a feat not even BTS, another K-pop group with far superior name recognition, have accomplished.

Stray Kids’s recent stadium tour, “dominATE”, lived up to its name, with revenues of almost $200m. A concert film was released in cinemas at the beginning of February. For one weekend, it was the highest-grossing movie in the world.

The band is not an overnight success. The eight members had been working on their skills as singers, rappers and dancers in K-pop’s intensive training system long before they joined the band in 2017. That year a reality-television show chronicled Stray Kids’s transformation from a gaggle of novice, nervous youngsters—during shows members would drop their microphones and mess up the words—into a well-oiled entertainment machine. The show was a canny marketing technique; their debut single, “Hellevator”, was released to coincide with its broadcast.

But the group’s global breakout came later, in 2020, with the release of “God’s Menu”, a cacophony of sirens, thudding beats and aggressive vocals. (Throughout, the members mimic the sound of gunshots: “DU DU DU DU DU DU”.) The music video, displaying sharp dance moves and even sharper editing, went viral.

Stray Kids’s success is not the result of child’s play. They have prospered for two reasons. One is a defiantly original sound. From the start Stray Kids eschewed the effervescent tunes preferred by their K-pop rivals in favour of something much rowdier. (Some call it “noise music”, which does a disservice to the catchy hooks and tuneful bridges.) The frenetic trap-pop style made them outliers, but over time has won them admirers. Stray Kids’s followers—around 75% of whom are female, according to Chartmetric, a music-data firm—find it thrilling. “We made it on our own,” the band declares. “We do what we wanna do.”

This is all by design. In 2017 Bang Chan, the group’s leader, selected each member himself from the trainees at JYP Entertainment, a record label. Normally it is music executives who put bands together and it can result in groups that lack chemistry. But Bang Chan picked performers who suited his boisterous style. For instance, Felix, a rapper, has a deep, gravelly voice that lends a distinctive texture to songs.

And whereas other K-pop groups may be assigned tracks by their label, leading to variations in style across albums, Stray Kids write most of their music themselves. Three members, working as a group called 3RACHA, handle the music production. Their songwriting approach is guided by recurring “melodic symbols” within tracks, Changbin, one member, has said. Fans can repeat these leitmotifs even if there is a language barrier. Watch “dominATE” and you will see hordes of women screaming “LA-LA-LA-LA” or “MANIAC” on beat.

The other reason for their success is Stray Kids’s relationship with those fans. For though their music is gritty, their public image is anything but. The band members wear makeup and paint their nails. They sport designer clothes. (It is a miracle their concert outfits did not precipitate a global shortage of rhinestones and sequins.) Stray Kids demonstrate a more progressive kind of manhood , says Ray Seol of Berklee College of Music. “It’s the Korean way of masculinity…it’s very different from the Western way,” Mr Seol says. “Fans love to see this kind of stuff.”

The members also cultivate an air of authenticity. (K-pop fans are attuned to engagement they feel is “fake” or done at the behest of a record label.) The group regularly chats with fans online via livestreams, with special broadcasts for birthdays and other major events; Stray Kids also take fans behind the scenes, sharing songs-in-progress. This creates a sense of proximity and allows fans to feel that they have a direct relationship with their idols.

Stray Kids chat about their feelings , particularly feelings of anxiousness. In the “dominATE” film every single member talks to the camera about one insecurity or another. Hyunjin says it took him a long time to accept that being vulnerable was acceptable, to realise that “A wounded blade of grass smells sweeter.”

This sensitive side comes out in their music. Their lyrics express the concerns of young listeners starting to make their way in the world. (A large majority of the fanbase is aged 13-24.) “My Pace” talks about the perils of comparing yourself with others. “Grow Up” reassures listeners that they are “doing fine”: “Even adults make mistakes.” Nicole Ohiomah-Paul, a teenage fan from London, says that she “didn’t really like to show [her] emotions” for fear of seeming weak. But Stray Kids have taught her that it “is part of who we are. We’re human.”

Stray Kids exemplify a generational divide that has long existed in culture. Since the dawn of popular music, parents have been perplexed by what their offspring bop along to in their bedrooms. This has been heightened with the advent of streaming, as listeners can access tracks written by anyone, anywhere.

The scale of Stray Kids’s success demonstrates just how much the media landscape has changed in the 21st century. In decades past, television shows, radio stations and newspapers were music’s kingmakers: they decided which acts were worth exposure and listeners’ time. They could boost careers or throttle them.

That is no longer the case: “Consumers are the new broadcasters,” says Will Page, a former chief economist at Spotify. Stray Kids have had relatively little attention from traditional outlets, but they have still won fans from Seoul to Sydney and São Paulo. “We make the rules,” the band asserts on “MEGAVERSE”, and “our music echoes through the galaxy.” ■

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Sir Michael Moritz’s brilliant memoir traces his parents’ journey and his own

Life after escaping from Nazi Germany: a family’s story Sir Michael Moritz’s brilliant memoir traces his parents’ journey and his own February 26th 2026 TWO DECADES ago, in 2006, Sir Michael Moritz passed out during a meeting at Sequoia Capital, the venture-capital firm he ran. (It helped fund Silicon Valley titans such as Google and YouTube.) He had blood cancer, caused by “an errant gene” more common among Ashkenazi Jewish men—meaning Jews with central- and eastern-European ancestry—than in the general population. A doctor said he would not live to see 70. But he has and, like many people with more time behind them than ahead, he began exploring his past.

The result is “Ausländer” (Outsider), an exceptionally finely observed, engagingly written family history and memoir of dislocation. The book opens with a family tree that will look familiar to Ashkenazi Jewish readers, with many branches lopped off suddenly in the early 1940s. Sir Michael was lucky: his maternal grandparents and his parents, Alfred and Doris, fled Nazi Germany and the horrors of the Holocaust for Britain. He was born in Cardiff in 1954. He delves into his late parents’ characters with a novelist’s sensitivity and patience.

Alfred and Doris were an unlikely pair with little in common, thrown together by circumstance and shared history. She was a lover of art and music; she was also belligerent and spiky. When her grand-daughter asked her about her favourite decade, she snapped: “What do you mean, ‘Which decade?’ They were all terrible.”

Alfred was a reserved academic, fond of puzzles, kneading bread and sewing his own bow ties. He excelled at following rules and, after winning a scholarship to Merton College, Oxford, became a professor and academic dean. “The first examination my father had failed,” quips Sir Michael, was naming his favourite Beatle .

But Alfred’s rise was not easy. Along with 27,000 other Italian and German men over 16, he was interned as an “Enemy Alien” on the Isle of Man. A tutor, in recommending him for a position with the British armed forces, paid him the ferociously backhanded compliment of having “none of the qualities which create prejudice against his race”.

Neither considered themselves “survivors”, a term they reserved for other people—such as a cousin who walked from Auschwitz to Mandatory Palestine, or a friend who had given birth to her daughter on a coal train from Auschwitz to Malthausen. They “thought of themselves as onetime escapees. Then they thought of themselves as British.” But like everyone, they carried their pasts with them and transmitted them to their children. As Sir Michael explains: “The more I delved into my parents’ pasts, the more I had a sense that I was exploring the sources of inherited despair—conveyed unwittingly from one generation to another.”

Yet Sir Michael seems given more to feeling out of place than despairing. He feels neither Welsh, British nor American—despite living in California since 1976—and speaks with a measured trans-Atlantic accent. He empathises with (and has started a foundation to help) poor students, but knows it would seem disingenuous to say so in his “Italian suit, custom-made shirt and suede loafers with a chauffeured car waiting”. He feels deeply Jewish, but has not belonged to a synagogue in 50 years. Donald Trump’s popularity impelled him to apply for German citizenship, which both of his sons obtained.

Sir Michael has produced an outstanding examination of how tragedy reverberates across generations. “Ausländer” joins a growing list of books written by children of the Nazis’ victims, including “Maus”, Art Spiegelman’s seminal graphic novel, as well as Daniel Finkelstein’s “Hitler, Stalin, Mum and Dad” and Ariana Neumann’s “When Time Stopped”. As survivors die—a report estimates that 70% will have passed away by 2035—and taboos against Nazism weaken, such works keep the Holocaust’s memory alive. They remind the world where antisemitism leads. ■

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The character is beloved, despite being bloodthirsty and insane

Why readers and viewers hunger for Hannibal Lecter The character is beloved, despite being bloodthirsty and insane February 26th 2026 THE MOST compelling villains embody an unnerving duality: they attract almost as much as they repel. From the moment Hannibal Lecter appeared in “Red Dragon”, a psychological-horror novel of 1981, readers were captivated by the character. Since then, the psychiatrist-turned-cannibal has featured in three more novels, five films and a tv series. In a new book Brian Raftery tries to explain the antihero’s grisly allure: what is it about Lecter that proves so delectable?

Mr Raftery’s book offers a range of answers, not all of them convincing. Lecter’s terror comes “not from the way he indulges his dark urges—but in the way he’ll expose you to your own”. (Few have watched “The Silence of the Lambs” and realised they are a frustrated cannibal.) “Lecter is so nakedly what he is,” proffers Brian Cox, who was the first to play Lecter on screen. (This is true of many people.) “We feel murderous things,” suggests Sir Anthony Hopkins, Lecter’s most famous portrayer: the character forces viewers to “acknowledge that we have those parts of ourselves”. (The same could be said of any horror villain.)

A more intriguing suggestion is that Lecter rose to fame in the 1980s and 1990s, when public fascination with serial killers was growing, but before podcasts and the internet gave true-crime obsessives enough material to last lifetimes. Lecter is also urbane, charming and witty: he would be an enjoyable dinner companion, at least until he decided your thigh looked better than the chicken’s on his plate.

Two other factors account for Lecter’s longevity. One is Sir Anthony. In 1991 he won the Oscar for Best Actor for his performance in “The Silence of the Lambs”. The film showed Lecter imprisoned in a dungeon, called on by the FBI for help to catch another serial killer. Sir Anthony was still, poised and unblinking; his speech was precise and his accent refined. The effect was equally chilling and mesmerising.

The other is scarcity. In “Red Dragon” and “The Silence of the Lambs”, Lecter was a supporting character. (Sir Anthony’s Oscar-winning turn required just 16 minutes of screentime.) This made him enigmatic, as did his lack of back story. He insisted that “Nothing happened to me. I happened. You can’t reduce me to a set of influences.” Lecter blossomed in viewers’ and readers’ imaginations.

But Hollywood’s philosophy is “more is more”. Subsequent books, films and the TV show made Lecter the protagonist and explained his gruesome origins. The exposure bled him of his mystery. He became a bitchy gourmet with that most common of things: a troubled past. Yawn. Change the channel and pass the fried earlobes. ■

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It has moved from honky-tonks to urban bars

The latest choreography craze? Line dancing It has moved from honky-tonks to urban bars February 26th 2026 IT IS A frigid mid-week evening in New York; snow has been pushed into large mounds on the pavement. But inside Desert 5 Spot, a Western-themed bar in Brooklyn, a group of 20-somethings is bringing the heat. Two instructors, going by the names Spitfire and Sugarfoot, guide the crowd through a line dance called “Texas Time”. It is carried out to the tune of “Good Luck, Babe!”, a pop song by Chappell Roan, an American hitmaker, and the participants twirl, hop and strut in their cowboy boots. “When we open the doors at six o’clock there’s a line of people waiting to get in,” Chase Manhattan, the bar’s moustached entertainment director, shouts over the music.

Line dancing is no longer the preserve of far-flung cowboys. When Desert 5 Spot started to host line dances around a year ago, only a handful of people showed up, Mr Manhattan recalls: now tickets sell out. Daily line-dancing classes at SCUFF, another organisation, are consistently full. In New York there is a gathering happening almost every night.

Across America Google searches for line dancing have been steadily climbing since 2020, peaking last year. A decade ago the perception of line dancing was that it was “corny and dorky and honky and stupid”, says Sean Monaghan, who co-founded Stud Country, a queer line-dancing event, in Los Angeles in 2021. Today people see it as “sexy”. Pop stars such as Sabrina Carpenter have incorporated line dances into their music videos.

What explains the step change? It helps that Americana is in vogue. Brands including Ralph Lauren, Christian Louboutin, Louis Vuitton and Prada have released clothing and accessories inspired by the cowboy aesthetic. Neo-Western dramas are having a revival on screen, too, and country music is surging in popularity, boosted in recent years by albums from Beyoncé , among others. In 2025 the genre was streamed 122.5bn times in America, according to Luminate, an analytics firm, behind only pop, rock, hip-hop and R&B.

Line dancing is also a stomping success on social media. There are millions of videos of line dancing online, showing young and old alike doing the boot-scootin’ boogie. Several first-timers to Desert 5 Spot say they discovered the event on Instagram and TikTok. And the dances themselves, which are quicker and shorter than other types of choreography, suit the pace of online short-form video well. You can see a particular move or section of a dance “done twice...in less than 30 seconds”, says Mackenzie Katz, who recently launched another line-dancing event in Manhattan.

Line dancing’s distinct etiquette chimes with the habits of the young in other ways, too. Most events prohibit drinks on the dancefloor to prevent partygoers from slipping over. It is a policy that might seem counterintuitive for a bar—Desert 5 Spot charges an entry fee in anticipation of the shortfall—but is potentially attractive to Gen Z patrons . Just 50% of Americans aged 18-34 reported drinking alcohol last year, according to Gallup, down from 59% in 2023. “A lot of our crowd either don’t drink at all or don’t really drink that much,” observes Spitfire.

Instead, young folk come to line-dancing bars in search of a different kind of high. Bylie is a 24-year-old regular at Desert 5 Spot; she comes alone, seeking community in the crowd. There is something about the synchronised scuffing and shuffling that dancers seem to find intoxicating in a socially atomised age. At Stud Country “People scream and holler, and the energy just gets really loud,” observes Mr Monaghan. “There’s just this connection that you feel with the people around you.” Toeing the line has never been such fun. ■

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Children and adults alike are Pokémaniacs

Thirty years on, Pokémon is still a monster hit Children and adults alike are Pokémaniacs February 26th 2026 The monsters are everywhere. A group of bushy-tailed Eevee frolic on the grass; a Diglett pokes its mole-like head out of the ground; grinning yellow Pikachu climb up trees. Visit PokéPark Kanto, the first permanent Pokémon theme park, which opened in Tokyo on February 5th, to catch more than 600 Pokémon (short for “pocket monsters”). Fans are thrilled: tickets for the park’s first three months sold out immediately.

The enthusiasm reflects Pokémon’s cultural clout, three decades after its launch. When the first Pokémon video games were released in Japan in February 1996, few executives expected it to become a global craze. Yet “Pokémania” quickly spread: today the Pokémon Company has sold nearly 500m video games and over 75bn trading cards, as well as broadcasting an anime series to around 190 countries.

Pokémon is the highest-grossing media franchise in the world, according to Guinness World Records, with total revenues of $150bn—more than Star Wars or Marvel . Pokémon GO, an augmented-reality app, enjoys around 30m active monthly users. Top players battle it out in the annual Pokémon World Championships, and collectors pay monster sums to acquire trading cards. On February 16th a rare Pikachu card sold for a record-breaking $16m.

Pokémon was created by Tajiri Satoshi, a Japanese designer who grew up in the suburbs of Tokyo. As a child he was obsessed with collecting insects, but urban development quickly swallowed nearby fields and ponds. Mr Tajiri hoped Pokémon would allow children to explore and collect creatures in a digital world, even as the natural one disappeared. (In this he was successful: a study in 2002 found that eight-year-old children in Britain knew more about Pokémon than common wildlife.)

In the first Pokémon anime Ash (or Satoshi in Japan) and his best friend Pikachu, a mouse with the ability to generate electricity, catch, battle and tame monsters. The franchise blends two Japanese sensibilities, observes Mizuko Ito, a cultural anthropologist at the University of California, Irvine. One is kawaii, or cuteness , which the Pokémon display through their wide-eyed innocence. The other is otaku, or geek culture, in which fans enjoy cataloguing creatures’ appearance and traits.

Pokémon was a “Rosetta stone” that unlocked Japanese storytelling for Western audiences, argues Roland Kelts, a pop-culture expert in Tokyo. The franchise cleared a path for subsequent hits such as Digimon and today’s booming anime industry. Officials of the country’s “Cool Japan” initiative, which was launched in 2010 to boost cultural exports, have long sought to emulate the franchise’s success.

There are several reasons for its popularity. One is that Pokémon offers fans a richly realised world they can immerse themselves in. There are over 100 video games and 1,000 episodes of anime as well as umpteen films, trading cards and all sorts of plushies and merchandise. Children quickly became attached to the characters: when the first Pokémon film, “Mewtwo Strikes Back”, was released in America in 1999, pupils developed the “Pokéflu”, feigning illness so they could bunk off school and watch the film.

The second is that Pokémon appeals just as much to adults as kids. Most collectors of rare Pokémon cards and players of Pokémon GO are grown-ups. The environmentally minded see the richness of the real world reflected in the franchise, its fantastic beasts emblematic of real animals. “Pokécology”, a pop-up at the Natural History Museum in London, examines how Pokémon “interact with their environments and adapt to habitats from deep forests to shadowy caves”. Tickets for the show, which runs until April, are sold out.

Other adults simply find them adorable. Small and fuzzy, Pokémon are some of the most harmless monsters around. At Pokémon Centre Mega in Tokyo, Hannah, a 30-something tourist from Australia, clutches a plushie and says the franchise is “cute and nostalgic”. Pokémon “inspire a sense of calm and comfort”, says Patrick Galbraith of Senshu University in Tokyo. And they make for endearing digital pets players can tame and train.

Therein lies the appeal of Pokémon: it is for “every age, every gender”, as Mr Galbraith puts it. You can take it seriously or revel in its silliness; play the games with your children or with friends; favour the innocent Jigglypuff or the fierce Charmeleon. As the fans flocking to PokéPark show, Pokémon has managed to catch ’em all. ■

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Violence, terror and Soviet help mattered more than popularity

How China’s Communist Party seized power in 1949 Violence, terror and Soviet help mattered more than popularity February 26th 2026 “Communism was never popular in China,” Frank Dikötter argues in his new book, “no more so than in Finland or in the United States.” It was “brought to the population at the barrel of a gun”. Behind that barrel was the hand of the Soviet Union, without which victory would have been impossible. After the second world war , Soviet intervention transformed China’s Communist Party from a battered, marginalised guerrilla force into a heavily armed military machine.

Read histories approved by the party and a different picture inevitably emerges. In those tellings, when the party was founded in 1921, it harnessed widespread public discontent with the country’s chaotic rule by competing warlords and the occupation of its territory by foreign powers. It survived attempts to crush it by the Nationalists, who gained nominal control in the late 1920s, and staged a heroic “Long March” in the mid-1930s to set up a base in Yan’an. It played a crucial role in defeating the Japanese in 1945 and overthrew the corrupt and brutal Nationalists four years later at the end of a civil war.

Mr Dikötter, a Dutch-born historian of modern China, laments that in scholarly volumes and popular books, the party’s version of events is reflected all too often. He may overstate the degree to which accounts of the party’s rise favour its “fairy-tale” view. Works such as Jung Chang’s “Wild Swans” (1991) and her subsequent “Mao, the Unknown Story” (2005), co-authored with Jon Halliday, offer devastating critiques of the party’s ruthlessness and deceptiveness before it seized power. So do more academic books, such as “Mao: The Real Story” (2012) by two American-based scholars, Alexander Pantsov and Steven Levine, who, like Mr Dikötter, draw extensively from Soviet archives.

But Mr Dikötter’s account is not a family history like “Wild Swans”, nor a biography. It is a systematic dissection of the party in its formative years. It argues that far from a “triumph of great social forces unleashed and harnessed by the Communists”, the party’s victory in 1949 was the result of a “very traditional pursuit of power” and “the amoral application of military strategy”. Communist forces survived on “loot and ransom”, recruited bandits, traded opium and, in the civil war, used many unarmed civilians as human shields.

For evidence of this, Mr Dikötter trawled through well over 300 volumes produced in the 1980s by party archivists. They contain documents from the pre-1949 period and are intended for “internal” use only, meaning they cannot be read by ordinary members of the public. The volumes, however, have found their way abroad, where Mr Dikötter says that historians have made only “sporadic” use of them. One reason for this, he speculates, is that they show how peripheral the party was in China’s history until the end of the second world war, when the Soviets began tipping the scales. Before 1940 the percentage of party members among China’s population was comparable to the scale of Communist membership in America, says Mr Dikötter, and may have been inflated.

Before the end of the war, Soviet support for Chinese Communists often appeared half-hearted. Soviet leaders saw the ruling Nationalist Party, or Kuomintang (KMT), as vital to their efforts to keep Japan at bay. They urged both sides to co-operate in resisting Japan’s invasion of China. Mr Dikötter says Mao Zedong (pictured) preferred to keep his forces out of harm’s way so they would be able to fight the KMT.

Soviet calculations changed when Japan’s defeat appeared imminent in 1945. As Japan’s occupation of Manchuria, in China’s north-east, crumbled, Stalin sent nearly 1m troops into the industrial region. They seized control of major cities and ports and set about stripping the region of valuable industrial assets. Soviet troops denied the KMT access to Manchuria and China’s leader, Chiang Kai-shek, “was in no position to quarrel with Stalin”, says Mr Dikötter. When the Soviets withdrew in 1946 they allowed Mao’s guerrillas, who had infiltrated Manchuria, to fill the vacuum and take control of vast quantities of abandoned Japanese weapons.

Even at this point, the party’s defeat of the KMT was by no means assured. The Americans, however, gave the Communists another leg-up. General George Marshall, sent by President Harry Truman to mediate in the China conflict, believed the Communists were “merely rural reformers who could help shape a democratic China”, Mr Dikötter argues. Marshall pressed Chiang to hold back his army and arrange a truce. The resulting four-month ceasefire gave the Communists crucial time to build up their army with Soviet help. The military balance shifted completely.

If there is a weakness in this account of the party’s rise, it is that it leans heavily on official sources. The party’s archives provide valuable evidence of the atrocities its members committed—for example, in the early 1930s, when they admit that interrogations of suspected opponents of Mao “relied wholly on torture”. But such snippets are not a complete picture, and it was extremely hard in those chaotic and dangerous times for foreign journalists to investigate. Mr Dikötter does much to demystify events based on the sources available. But much fog remains. ■

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How a French woman has become a global symbol of strength and survival

Gisèle Pelicot’s horrifying rape case changed the law—and minds How a French woman has become a global symbol of strength and survival February 19th 2026 Do you know your husband well? Do you trust that he would never hide anything from you? Gisèle Pelicot’s ordeal began with questions. A police investigator was interviewing her in southern France, after her husband of nearly 50 years, Dominique, had been caught taking photos up women’s skirts at a local supermarket. She thought that was the extent of his crimes. Instead, she learned that for at least nine years her husband had been drugging and raping her while she was unconscious—and finding strangers on the internet to do so, too. He kept recordings of these acts on a hard drive in a folder called “abuse”.

In 2024 Mr Pelicot and 50 other men stood trial and were found guilty of rape and assault; an additional 30 men could not be identified or brought to justice. In choosing to make the case public and not insisting on her right to privacy, Ms Pelicot (pictured) argued that “shame has to change sides” from victims to the accused. The horrific case captured global attention and led to a change in the law in France, expanding the definition of rape from penetration using violence and coercion to sexual acts committed without consent .

Ms Pelicot has become a feminist Joan of Arc, emerging from humble origins to battle not only her violators but also misheld beliefs about sexual assault. She was awarded France’s highest honour, the Légion d’honneur, and named one of Time magazine’s most influential people.

How did Ms Pelicot become a crusader? In her stirring new memoir, “A Hymn to Life”, she portrays herself as an accidental heroine. She is the grand-daughter of peasants and grew up amid poverty and heartache, losing her mother to a brain tumour when she was only nine years old. Women’s issues were never her priority: she was focused on escape. “I listened to the talk of the times, the fight for birth control, for legal abortion; I understood, but these were not my battles. My victory was building the kind of family life I had never had,” she writes.

She and Mr Pelicot had different, but dire, family circumstances. They met when they were young, married and moved in together near Paris. (Their childhoods were “straight out of a Zola novel”, their children later remarked.) It was a love story—until, of course, it was not. Even in retrospect, Ms Pelicot is not sure when her husband became a man she did not know. She had an extramarital affair soon after the birth of their third child, and remembers feeling overcome with guilt. There were money problems, too, so much so that nearly all their belongings were repossessed. But there was no hint of a lurking monster.

It was when they retired to southern Provence that Mr Pelicot’s dosing and co-ordinating of abuse happened more frequently, perhaps because she was isolated from her children and grandchildren. Her memory lapses from the medications became so severe that she started to wonder if she might have a brain tumour, like her mother. More two-faced than Janus, Mr Pelicot expressed concern and chauffeured her to medical appointments.

The scale of Ms Pelicot’s suffering is extraordinary, but the emotions she has grappled with feel familiar. Ms Pelicot writes about how being made aware of her husband’s crimes blasts apart her life. Take the question of memories: how should she categorise the joyful ones?

There was nowhere to take refuge—not the past, not her home (suddenly “full of shadows, hiding places, nooks and crannies and poison”), not even among family. One of the book’s sombre threads is how her husband’s violations distanced her from two of her three children, who all coped with his crimes differently. (Her daughter, who discovered her father had taken lewd photos of her, feared she had also been raped and found it an additional betrayal that her mother was unwilling to confirm incest had taken place.)

Part of the reason Ms Pelicot’s trial captivated so many people was that it laid bare the myth that sexual aggressors are always strangers. Since Ms Pelicot’s trial ended in December 2024, there have been other instances, including in Germany and Britain, of men charged with drugging and raping their wives. It also evoked more universal anxieties about fidelity and truth in marriage. “You know, whenever my husband brings me a croissant from the boulangerie in the morning, I always wonder what he’s trying to hide,” a forensic pathologist confessed to Ms Pelicot, not very helpfully.

Unlike the powerful perpetrators who were part of Jeffrey Epstein’s network , Ms Pelicot’s abusers were everymen. There was a firefighter, a nurse, lorry drivers; most lived within a 50km radius. They were tried together, a battalion of them, so Ms Pelicot had to face them each day in court. “They did share one thing: a sense of entitlement,” she writes. “An attitude of complete indifference to whatever anyone said or thought, because power had always been on their side.” In the defence lawyers’ combative questioning and the men’s judgmental stares, she was made to feel—as so many victims of sexual assault have before her—that she was the one who was not to be believed, that she was the one on trial.

Ms Pelicot’s book, which has been published in 22 languages, is arriving as women’s painful stories are attracting legions of riveted readers. Two of the top five non-fiction books on the New York Times’s bestseller list are tales of either marital betrayal ( “Strangers” by Belle Burden , whose husband cheated and abandoned her) or sex abuse (“Nobody’s Girl” by Virginia Giuffre, a late accuser of Epstein). Ms Pelicot’s memoir splices together both themes. Yet what could be a dark and depressing chronicle propels forward with the force of Ms Pelicot’s quiet courage and instinct for self-reflection. (The literary flourishes of Judith Perrignon, a writer and collaborator on the book, help, too.)

Ultimately, Ms Pelicot offers a cautiously hopeful message about how people can overcome trauma to forge a new life. It is also a detective story, as she seeks clues and a final judgment about what motivated her husband. She tracks down a former best friend, who had spoken ill of Mr Pelicot decades earlier. She pores over memories of Mr Pelicot’s abusive father. She thinks back to Mr Pelicot’s story of a male nurse forcing oral sex on him as an eight-year-old in hospital. Later, in court, Mr Pelicot also said he was forced to participate in a gang rape as a young teen.

Her ordeal began with questions—yet it ends with unresolved questions, too. Even the most worthwhile stories do not always offer satisfying answers. But they can provide a memorable and commendable heroine. ■

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New devices are cementing youngsters’ desire for digital detoxes

Addicted to your phone? Try “bricking” it New devices are cementing youngsters’ desire for digital detoxes February 19th 2026 YOU WANT to spend less time on your phone. But what is the best way to slash your screen time ? The internet (ironically) has some ideas: chain your mobile to the wall; print out your Instagram feed on dozens of pieces of paper; or practise “appstinence” by ditching the device for long stretches. The latest method to go viral promises a more concrete solution: youngsters are turning to the Brick, an app-blocking device.

Reviewers declare that “the Brick changed my life” and “I won the war against my phone.” The grey cube, which costs $59 and is about the size of an AirPods case, claims to reduce screen time by three hours a day on average. To use the device, you choose the apps you would like to disable and touch your phone to the “brick”. When you are ready, you can tap your phone against it to “unbrick”.

The Brick has built up a following, especially among people aged 20-35. Downloads of the Brick app in January were up nearly 600% year on year, to 170,000, estimates Sensor Tower, a research firm.

And the device is part of a broader trend: the rise of anti-tech tech. There are a plethora of tools designed to remove digital temptations. Opal—an app that does the same thing as the Brick—claims it has kept users off their phones for over 200m hours since its creation in 2020. Others offer incentives or gamified experiences: on Forest, another app, the longer you stay off your phone the more virtual trees grow; nurture enough and the firm will plant a real sapling in Africa in your honour. Some people are forgoing flashy phones entirely: “dumb” phones without touchscreens, once a symbol of elderly tech ignoramuses, are now seen as a cool, wise choice.

There is a “big urge to disconnect”, says Ilya Kneppelhout of the Offline Club, a group that hosts hangouts and getaways where phones are forbidden. (The club has spread to 19 European cities and Bali since launching in Amsterdam in 2024.) Devices are also locked away at “unplugged” restaurants and cocktail bars, and on “digital detox” retreats. Anti-screentime influencers are packing #AnalogueBags (otherwise known as purses and backpacks ) with pens, notepads, cameras and other curiosities from a bygone age. There are even rehab programmes for social media, which pledge to help phone-addled clients “engage more with the physical world”. It may sound a bit like Alcoholics Anonymous. Or better yet, Internet and Technology Addicts Anonymous, which is a real thing.

You do not need to google to understand the reasons why people are trying to get off their phones. Many are experiencing what researchers call “digital overload”. There is a feeling that you must “always be reachable, always be connected”, says Zeena Feldman of King’s College London. Most American adults under 30 say their phone is the first and last thing they look at every day, according to a recent YouGov poll; nearly 40% sleep with it next to them in bed. Even internet lingo captures how bad this feels: phone addicts are said to “doomscroll” and suffer from “brainrot” .

Concerns about data privacy and misinformation are also becoming more common. According to a study by EY, a consultancy, those seeking digital detoxes are worried about data leaks and rampant harmful content. Instead of juice cleanses, people are opting for data detoxes to get rid of “data bloat” (unwanted information about them online).

There is a paradox at the heart of the current trend, however. Gen Z may have declared 2026 “the year of analogue ”, but they have done this on TikTok. The Brick has gone viral on social media; the Offline Club communicates largely through social media and email; and anti-screentime influencers make their money (you guessed it) on screens.

Perhaps that is why most digital detoxes fail: people are quickly drawn back to screens and apps. However, many say the Brick is the best tool they have tried yet. The secret is to place “distractions out of reach”, says Thomas Driver, the company’s co-founder: “Temptation is sidelined until you physically return to the Brick.” In a digital world, this bricks-and-mortar approach has merits. ■

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In a new era of inheritors and inherit-nots, an old fictional theme is in vogue

As “How to Make a Killing” shows, the inheritance plot is back In a new era of inheritors and inherit-nots, an old fictional theme is in vogue February 19th 2026 Money drives people nuts. So can families. Together they are combustible, need and greed mixing with primal resentments and rivalries. This is why, like the “marriage plot”, the inheritance plot is sometimes a staple of fiction. Today’s tetchily unequal age is one of those times: witness “How to Make a Killing”, a droll film out in America on February 20th and elsewhere soon.

On the eve of his execution, Becket Redfellow confesses his crimes. Played by Glen Powell (pictured), charming even as a serial killer, Becket is an outcast from a minted Long Island family. Disdained for his poverty by a teenage crush, he is nevertheless a distant heir to the Redfellow fortune. He just has to bump off the relatives ahead of him in the queue—which he proceeds to do in amusingly elaborate ways, crossing a name off his family tree with each hit.

This mordant romp is a loving remake of “Kind Hearts and Coronets”—an Ealing Studios classic released in 1949 and set in Edwardian England—in which an outcast from a noble family schemes to inherit its title. “How to Make a Killing” mimics some of its predecessor’s murder methods (such as an explosion in a photographic dark room) and adapts others (a victim drowns off a yacht, not a punt). No hot-air balloons are shot down by bow-and-arrow, but another use is found for that weapon.

There are other telling updates. The original is sleazier: the producers of the new movie evidently felt a killing spree was more forgivable in a modern hero than adulterous hanky-panky. In “Kind Hearts”, the childhood sweetheart sports extravagant hats; played, just as scene-stealingly, by Margaret Qualley, now she goes in for Chanel miniskirts.

What is most striking, though, is how perfectly the story fits the current economic mood. For like the Gilded Age, this is a plutocratic era. Once again the lifestyles of the 0.001% set an impossible standard of luxury; then it was mansions, these days it is jaunts in space and berserk weddings. Some folk fantasise about an elevator ride to the summit. “It’s scary to dream small,” says Ruth (Jessica Henwick), a teacher who is the moral centre of the new film. “They all want to be millionaires,” she observes of her pupils, “but none of them want to have an actual job.”

The super-rich are different—but, in the split between inheritors and inherit-nots, less different than they were. The West is experiencing what is often called “the great wealth transfer”, whereby expiring baby-boomers pass on their assets, to the tune of tens of trillions of dollars. Many people still get little or nothing. Yet surges in the housing and stockmarkets mean quite a few are inheriting rather a lot. The opulence in “How to Make a Killing” is otherworldly (and murder is an extreme reaction). But the grating sense that some lives are unfairly smoothed by dumb luck is becoming widespread.

In time this trend may influence social and fiscal policy. It is already colouring art. Stories about contested estates and devious legatees are in vogue: from “The Perfect Couple” (about inheritance-related antics in a rich clan in Nantucket) to “I, Jack Wright” (ditto, but in Britain); from “The Inheritance” (a drama about squabbling Irish siblings) to the confusable “Inheritance” (a reality-TV show). In “Saltburn” another outsider connives to swindle a posh family by means foul and fouler.

These stories turn on wills and trusts, much like some of Jane Austen’s and Anthony Trollope’s novels, or “Bleak House”, “The Hound of the Baskervilles” and several Agatha Christie mysteries. The concerns of those books and periods seem closer than in past decades. Like many of those earlier inheritance plots, “How to Make a Killing” lampoons the mania that lucre (and families) can generate. “Money does buy happiness,” Becket insists—from death row, which somewhat undercuts his judgment.

Despite the satire, however, the film’s sympathies are squarely on rapacious Becket’s side, and it wants yours to be too. Villainy is often seductive; watching an audacious heist come together is fun. But those are not the only reasons audiences may cheer each crossing-off on the Redfellow family tree.

For in a comically twisted way, Becket personifies a meritocratic ideal in a world of nepo-babies. His victims include an obnoxious hedonist and a bogus artist who calls himself “the white Basquiat”. Compared with them, Becket deserves his jackpot. Yes, he earns it through homicide and skulduggery, but in today’s fiction, at least, that seems to be preferable to not earning it at all. ■

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Understudies are an insurance policy. Their premiums are rising

Why understudies are seeing their wages rise Understudies are an insurance policy. Their premiums are rising February 19th 2026 “The bedrock of Broadway”: that is how Hugh Jackman, an Australian film star, described understudies during a curtain call of “The Music Man” in 2021. Beside him stood Kathy Voytko, an understudy who had stepped in to play the leading lady with a few hours’ notice and one hasty rehearsal. Rewarded with a standing ovation from the audience, she cried.

It was a reminder of just how reliant Broadway and West End productions are on understudies, the invisible men and women of the theatre world. These stand-ins come in many different guises. For a play, they are often the familiar figure you might picture: a talented whippersnapper waiting in the dressing room for their chance to dazzle (and suppressing temptations to spike the star’s drink). For a musical , understudies are usually part of the all-singing, all-dancing ensemble who have learned the lead’s parts, too. If they are called upon, there are “swings”, understudies’ understudies, who fill in. Swings regularly cover up to ten different roles; some cover as many as 20.

Understudies make up about a quarter of a big show’s cast. In some cases, there are as many performers offstage as on it. But despite weeks of rehearsals and pay, understudies may never see action. They are considered an insurance policy for a theatre producer hedging against the risk of a show being cancelled. Refunding just one night of “The Lion King” on the West End or Broadway could cost up to £200,000 ($275,000) in lost revenue. When you consider that fees for an understudy covering two roles are around £1,000 a week in London, or $2,900 in New York, it is a small price to pay for “hakuna matata”.

Understudies’ rates are rising faster than those of standard performers. In October Actors’ Equity, an American union, announced its latest agreement with Broadway producers, providing a 3% increase for the base rate paid to all actors and a 30% increase for additional swing responsibilities. Swings now earn an extra 6% over a standard performer on the minimum pay rate. In Britain they earn nearly 15% more. Equity, the British performing-arts union, is seeking an increase of around 50% for those additional responsibilities across their main collective agreements.

Why are understudies coming out on top? “It is an incredibly difficult job,” says Charlotte Bence of Equity. “We want that essential contribution to be properly recognised.” Learning the vocals, moves and lines of up to ten actors—some of which might be lead roles—is no easy feat. They have less rehearsal time, so their memories must be better and vocal ranges wider, all the while being ready to perform a role with little warning.

Long accustomed to waiting in the wings, understudies are now being showered with more attention. One social-media account celebrates the West End debuts of understudies. A video of Hannah Lowther in an emergency rehearsal just four hours before a performance of “Heathers”—to cover a leading role she was not officially an understudy for—garnered nearly 60m views and made her a TikTok star.

“You’re On Tonight”, a new podcast, offers understudies a chance to soliloquise about their unique job. One episode features David Tarkenter, who was the cover for a one-man show starring and directed by Ralph Fiennes. “You’re not paid to go on,” he has said. “You’re paid to be ready to go on.” (He never went on.) Another features Clive Marlowe, who is the longest-serving understudy of all time, having been caught up in Agatha Christie’s “The Mousetrap” for 15 years. (He has performed 75 times, about five times per year.)

Theatre’s bedrock deserves more recognition. For lots of theatregoers, a blockbuster star is the draw. Refunds are sometimes demanded if an understudy plays the lead. But that attitude is short-sighted. Shirley MacLaine and Catherine Zeta-Jones, two Oscar-winning actresses, got their breaks as understudies. Ms Zeta-Jones was performing in “42nd Street”—a show that, aptly enough, follows an understudy’s hit turn. Given the opportunity, understudies can go above and beyond. ■

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Like chips and pancakes? Lucky you

The world’s most common vegetable is enjoying a great year Like chips and pancakes? Lucky you February 19th 2026 THEy are calling it the Kartoffel-Flut: the potato flood. Germany, the largest producer of spuds in the European Union, is enjoying the biggest harvest in a generation, owing to optimal growing conditions and increased tuber cultivation. Last year’s yield was 17% higher than the long-term average. Belgium, France and the Netherlands have also had a bounty.

In fact, there are so many potatoes—one farm near Leipzig had a surplus of 4,000 tonnes—that they are being given away. Some 200 distribution points have been set up across Berlin. Gasthaus Mutter Hoppe, a restaurant, had a tonne of taters to dish out; a waitress says they “ran out within days”. The Berliner Tafel, a food bank, took 22 tonnes. Schools, homeless shelters and even the zoo have stocked up.

If you were to have an abundance of any crop, you would pick the potato. Not only does it store well, but it is filling and calorie-dense relative to other vegetables. It also lends itself to an extraordinary variety of meals. Germans are making potato dumplings and pancakes. The organisers of the giveaway have launched a recipe challenge to inspire Kartoffel cooks, sharing tips for soups, salads and plenty more. As Sam memorably says in “The Lord of the Rings” , you can “boil ’em, mash ’em, stick ’em in a stew!”

The spud’s role in human history is no small potatoes. After the discovery by Spanish conquistadors of cultivation in the Andes, the potato became a staple food worldwide. (Potatoes now feed over 1bn people in more than 150 countries.) Crop failure can have disastrous consequences. After the harvest in Ireland was blighted in 1845, 1m people died and almost 3m emigrated.

To avoid famine, in 1756 Frederick the Great of Prussia issued a “potato decree” that obliged farmers to plant potatoes on at least a tenth of their land. Local lore has it that his royal guards protected potato fields so farmers would think it a precious crop. Visitors sweet on potatoes leave them on Frederick’s tomb at Sanssouci Palace in Potsdam. At the moment they can offer tributes by the armful. ■

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A new book about Boris Nemtsov, a Putin critic, makes you wonder

Was Vladimir Putin’s tyranny inevitable? A new book about Boris Nemtsov, a Putin critic, makes you wonder February 19th 2026 FORMALLY, THE successor to Russia’s first post-Soviet president, Boris Yeltsin, was Vladimir Putin . In every other sense—ideologically, morally, temperamentally—Yeltsin’s successor was a liberal politician, Boris Nemtsov (pictured). Yet instead of governing Russia, Nemtsov became a champion of Russia’s increasingly beleaguered opposition, before being gunned down in 2015 near the Kremlin, the victim of a Chechen hit squad.

Reading “The Successor”, a chronicle of Russia’s emergence from Soviet communism and its subsequent collapse into dictatorship, you cannot escape an unsettling question. Yeltsin had once wanted the presidency to go to Nemtsov, a preternaturally gifted statesman and a committed, pro-Western believer in capitalism and liberal democracy. Where would Russia and the world be today if only the old man had stuck with him, instead of shifting to the former KGB officer from St Petersburg?

Nemtsov is still a hero to plenty of Russians. “The Successor” was published in Russia soon after the war with Ukraine began in 2022 and became a bestseller. (Mikhail Fishman, one of Russia’s leading independent journalists , wrote his book after he made a popular documentary about Nemtsov.) Born in 1957 in Sochi, on the Black Sea, Nemtsov grew up in Nizhny Novgorod, 400km east of Moscow. He trained as a physicist and became interested in politics almost by accident, after his mother started to protest against the city’s plans for a nuclear-powered heating plant. Fearing that she would be arrested, he joined the movement so that he would be able to protect her.

Nemtsov was a natural. By 1990 he was standing for national office against the communist establishment. While they rode about in official cars, he sometimes arrived at meetings in a cheap Moskvich. In a television debate, instead of wearing a suit, he borrowed a friend’s sweater. In answer to other candidates’ overblown promises, he declared: “I won’t promise anything, except one thing. I won’t lie.”

Nemtsov caught Yeltsin’s eye as a legislator. He won his affection by standing with him against an attempted coup in 1991. The Kremlin appointed him governor of Nizhny Novgorod, where he launched Russia’s first privatisations. He built roads, invested in phone networks and took on “red directors”, who ran their companies as fiefs. He even fostered a free press. Nizhny Novgorod became a showcase for how post-Soviet Russia could prosper—and its governor, reaffirmed by a popular vote, became an international star. In 1994 Yeltsin suggested that he could be the next president of Russia.

However, after Yeltsin lured Nemtsov to serve in Moscow , everything turned to ashes. His stunts irritated the political classes and blew up in his face. He sponsored a presidential decree that officials should surrender their foreign-made limousines for Russian Volgas, which just happened to be made in his home town. But the Volgas were unreliable. His own car supposedly broke down on the way to a cabinet colleague’s party—and he was left marooned at the side of the road as officials passed by, hooting with laughter.

The graver problem was that Yeltsin’s administration descended into chaos. Miners went on strike. Oil prices fell. The government could not finance its budget, and foreign investors fled. After a default in August 1998, Nemtsov resigned. And that cleared the way for a very different sort of operator.

Mr Putin is Nemtsov in the negative. One man was charismatic, attractive, flamboyant, open, tall and impulsive. The other grey, cold, cautious, private, short and calculating. One wanted to be loved; the other to be feared. One chose democracy; the other yearned for power. Although some of Yeltsin’s people were nervous about Mr Putin and his KGB past, few saw his potential to dominate Russia. One reason he succeeded was luck. The price of Urals crude oil rocketed from $18 a barrel in August 1999, when he became prime minister, to $130 a barrel in the summer of 2008. For the first time, Russians felt rich.

Mr Putin was also competent. He reined in regional barons. He proved his loyalty by using kompromat (compromising information) to see off a zealous prosecutor who was pursuing the Yeltsin family. During the second Chechen war, he delighted ordinary Russians by talking tough. People had had enough of chaos, and he was someone with whom different interest groups thought they could live.

That explains how Mr Putin outmanoeuvred Russia’s oligarchs. In the late 1990s Boris Berezovsky and Vladimir Gusinsky, two media barons, used their networks to wreck the reputation of Nemtsov for refusing to grant them influence and assets. By contrast, Mr Putin accepted Berezovsky’s help to get him into power—and, when the oligarch presumed to claim a kingmaker’s privileges, he destroyed him.

Like Yeltsin, the oligarchs believed the tyranny of one-man rule was over. Filthy rich and puffed up by hubris, they thought they could pull strings in the Kremlin. In fact, once they had brought down Nemtsov and democratic politicians like him, there was nobody left to stop the forced march towards despotism.

By the time of his assassination, Nemtsov was back in office, elected to the regional parliament of Yaroslavl, a city north-east of Moscow. Russians were becoming unhappy at Mr Putin’s endless, repressive rule. Nemtsov had a purpose again—and an important part to play, too.

It was not to be. A few months after Putin annexed Crimea and fanned conflict in eastern Ukraine in 2014, Nemtsov let rip on live television, calling Mr Putin “fucked in the head”. Chechen leaders, who had also been criticised by Nemtsov, saw a chance to prove their absolute loyalty to the tsar. Ten months later they struck.

Russia produces plenty of tyrants and henchmen who do their bidding. It also produces gifted men and women of extraordinary courage. Nemtsov lost, but he could have triumphed. Indeed, like Alexei Navalny, who built a movement by campaigning against corruption, he was murdered because he was dangerous. ■

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Two new books offer insights on intimacy and relationships

Need a bit of dating help? The caveman’s guide to romance Two new books offer insights on intimacy and relationships February 12th 2026 If you want an exciting first date this Valentine’s Day, forget dinner and a screening of “Wuthering Heights”. Try zip-lining instead. This is the advice of Justin Garcia, an evolutionary biologist and head of the Kinsey Institute, one of the world’s best-known centres of research into sex . A day of climbing hills to throw yourself off cliffs lets you “walk and talk while experiencing something novel and thrilling together”. Thus, you will get to know each other better. And because of a psychological principle known as “misattribution of arousal”, your companion may start to associate you with thrilling feelings. “Yes, this is how sexologists approach first dates,” says Dr Garcia.

Many species reproduce sexually. Homo sapiens is the only one to write books worrying about how the process is changing. Humankind is facing an “intimacy crisis”, argues Dr Garcia in “The Intimate Animal”. Globally, one person in four is lonely. Without strong relationships , people live less cheerfully and die earlier. A survey in America found that 98% of people believe good, intimate relationships are a key element of a satisfied life.

Part of the problem is the mismatch between the world in which our brains evolved and the one in which people now search for love, contends Dr Garcia. In his telling, the two greatest changes to human courtship in the past 4m years were the invention of farming 12,000 years ago and the spread of the internet in the 1990s. Agriculture led to the accumulation of wealth, which in turn led to marital norms designed to preserve capital for a family or clan. The internet also transformed how people find partners.

Whereas our hunter-gatherer ancestors would pick a mate out of a small selection of people they already knew (for hunter-gatherer bands consisted of only a few dozen people), modern singles face a seemingly endless choice of strangers on their smartphones. To cope with such dizzying numbers, they apply filters for everything from minimum height to “must like bird-watching” and “must not be a lawyer”.

Yet the must-have traits that people demand in dating filters are woeful predictors of compatibility . Humans evolved to evaluate potential mates face-to-face, taking into account hard-to-describe qualities such as smell, touch and chemistry. A soft-lit photo and a list of arbitrary traits are no substitute. Small wonder that our caveman brains feel flummoxed. In one survey Dr Garcia conducted, he found that nearly half of single Americans thought that technology had made it harder to form real connections, and that younger adults were most likely to feel this way.

Paul Eastwick, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Davis, goes further. In “Bonded by Evolution”, he concedes that dating apps have created new opportunities for people with niche preferences, limited social networks or who are too shy to initiate contact in person. However, they can be a huge waste of time—a typical user spends 90 minutes a day gawping and swiping. Lacking the old-fashioned safeguard of someone in the village warning you that so-and-so is a creep, the apps have an “abundance of creeps”. Half the women who use them report being harassed. And people who scroll through hundreds of options online may head into real-world dates with the attitude that they are “the consumer who deserves to be impressed”. If so, they will “find it hard to open up to someone”, Dr Eastwick writes.

He has another worry about dating apps: he frets that they inadvertently promote a warped view of evolutionary psychology, which can bleed into misogyny. It starts with the accurate observation that, when picking mates, women have evolved to be choosier than men, as is the case in several other species where the female must invest a large amount of time and energy in each pregnancy, whereas the male invests only a little. This difference, it turns out, is much greater online than in real life. At a speed-dating event where face-to-face conversations have taken place, women are somewhat less likely to say yes to a second date than men (35% to 50%). On a dating app, with only pictures and text to go on, women are dramatically less likely to swipe right (5% to 50%).

So many men on apps face frequent rejection. And in the manosphere they find an explanation for their humiliation, apparently grounded in science: that women have evolved to be interested only in handsome men with plentiful resources to help ensure that their offspring can survive and reproduce. Since this is natural, it is inevitable, goes the deterministic argument popular with incels. So men must either become ripped, loaded and dominant or retreat to their bedrooms and denounce all women as manipulative gold-diggers. In fact, although women are indeed more likely than men to say they prefer a high-earning partner, they care more about kindness. And anyone can be kind.

Dr Garcia, who has a side job as chief scientific adviser to Match.com, is less gloomy about dating apps than Dr Eastwick, who rages against the “capitalist machinations of Match.com”. But both authors offer similar ideas for how to make shrewder use of them. The key is to understand the limits of the information dating apps convey, and move swiftly to acquire the more useful sort. Dr Garcia suggests having a video chat before meeting in person. Dr Eastwick favours dating fewer people, drawn from a wider pool, and spending more time with them. If you are not sure of someone after a first date, go on a second; people often change their minds on second impressions. But stop at three, since the chance of clicking after that is relatively small.

Both books conclude on a hopeful note. The dating scene may seem daunting, and some people obviously start with unearned advantages. Yet defeatism is unwarranted—whether about technology or biology. Both writers emphasise cultivating real-world, mixed-sex social networks, rather than living on your phone. Friendships can often turn romantic. Look at who is in front of you, advises Dr Garcia. The grass is not greener on the other side, but where you water it.

Dr Eastwick suggests hosting “used-date” parties, where each singleton brings someone they met online and liked, but only as a friend. “Your ‘meh’ is surely someone else’s ‘mm-hmm’,” he predicts. Another technique, which Homo sapiens’ forebears often employed, is this: if you can’t find a match where you are, try moving. People’s Stone Age brains are wired to seek intimacy. You won’t find it by hiding in a cave. ■

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Want to join a choir? Can you sing tenor? Answer the second question first

The world is suffering from a shortage of tenors Want to join a choir? Can you sing tenor? Answer the second question first February 12th 2026 The concert of the Taunton Madrigal Society in November 1926 was a triumph. The ballroom in south-west England was “packed to overcrowding”, wrote a local newspaper. Encores were plentiful. Yet the event ended in a minor key. The choir badly needed tenor singers, explained one of its members. Perhaps some in the audience might like to join?

“All my life tenors have been the smallest section,” says Will Todd, a British composer. But the shortage of tenor singers is worsening. The lack of high men’s voices, which add colour and harmony to many choral works, is a growing problem for amateur and church choirs. Given the enormous scale of choral singing, it is a problem for music in general.

Germany has at least 45,000 choirs, about 60% of them linked to churches. A poll for the German Music Council found that 8% of adults sing in a group or publicly—more than play in bands or orchestras. Women outnumber men two to one. Roughly the same sex ratio prevails in Europe, America and Nigeria.

When men do join singing groups, they often avoid the tenor section. The tenor voice is “a cultivated sound”, says John Potter, author of a book on the subject. A man with no vocal training is more likely to have the range of a baritone (a high bass). It does not help that the tenor voice is associated with operatic stars such as Luciano Pavarotti , who could powerfully sing high notes that no amateur can easily reach. And the tenor line in classical choral music can be difficult, with many unexpected notes and alarming leaps.

Sonja Greiner, director-general of the European Choral Association, sings in a German choir that has four or five tenors out of about 45 singers—half as many as would be ideal. Even the most prestigious amateur choirs, which can pick their singers, have grown lopsided. The Orpheus Choir was founded in Glasgow in 1906 with 66 singers, including 15 tenors. Today its new incarnation has 79 singers including 14 tenors. All but one of the tenors are over the age of 60.

The pipeline is worryingly narrow. Many adults learned to sing at school or in churches. But school choirs are at least as unbalanced as adult ones: a large study of American high schools by Kenneth Elpus of the University of Maryland found a sex ratio of seven girls to three boys. Matt Hill of Creighton University, who leads several choirs in Nebraska, points out that many churches have dropped choirs for “praise teams” with electric instruments and microphones.

In many choirs, a few women routinely sing the tenor part. That no longer attracts the spluttering outrage it once did. But conductors rarely see tenorines, as they are known, as a perfect substitute. When sung by women, low tenor notes can sound dark and underpowered. Some choir leaders, including Mr Hill, ask female alto singers to help the tenors with high notes and male basses to help with low ones. (He may also ask the sopranos, often the heftiest section in a choir, to dial it back a bit.)

A more drastic solution is to rewrite music, or to write new music differently. The standard format for choral music is SATB (soprano, alto, tenor, bass). Publishers have arranged even revered choral works such as Mozart’s “Requiem” for SAB voices (soprano, alto, bass) or SAM (soprano, alto, men). Mr Todd, who asks choirs that commission pieces from him about their balance of voices, tries to avoid dividing tenor lines into a higher and a lower part, as earlier composers often did.

This is wise, given choirs’ demographic difficulties. But the loss of a voice is audible all the same. At one point Ms Greiner’s choir in Germany had just three tenors—too few to survive an outbreak of the common cold. The choir tried using sab arrangements, but found it unsatisfactory. The parts seemed too low for the remaining tenors but too high for the basses. As soon as the situation improved slightly, it happily reverted to the traditional arrangements. Four or five tenors is barely enough. ■

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An outlandish take on Emily Brontë’s novel highlights the adaptation conundrum

Sex, sex and more sex: Emerald Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights” An outlandish take on Emily Brontë’s novel highlights the adaptation conundrum February 12th 2026 WHAT iS THE best way to adapt a novel for the screen? There are two schools of thought. The first—call them the loyalists—insist that film-makers should stick to the source material slavishly. George R.R. Martin, whose “Game of Thrones” series inspired one of the most popular TV shows ever, stated that screenwriters who strive to “make the story their own…never make it better”. Instead, “999 times out of 1,000, they make it worse.”

The second group, the rebels, believe they should not be beholden to the authority of the original text. “If you simply write down scenes from the novel, it never works,” Sir David Hare, a British playwright and screenwriter, has said. “The only way to be faithful to a novel is by being lavishly promiscuous.”

Emerald Fennell seems to have taken Sir David’s advice to heart. The British film-maker has written and directed “Wuthering Heights”—a movie that, despite sharing a name with Emily Brontë’s novel of 1847, resembles it about as closely as the Yorkshire moors in which it is set resemble Los Angeles. It takes such liberties with the plot that it could more reasonably be described as fan fiction than a true adaptation of the Victorian classic.

Ms Fennell, for her part, warned viewers about her intentions in advance. “You can’t adapt a book as dense and complicated and difficult as this,” she declared: “It’s not possible.” She made it clear that this film is her take on the story, based in part on her memory of reading the strange, haunting tale of Cathy’s and Heathcliff’s thwarted romance as a teenager. It was also wish-fulfilment: she added the scenes she had wanted to read.

She keeps the bones of the story: the adoption of Heathcliff into the Earnshaw family; his bond with Cathy; the friendship between Cathy and the wealthy neighbouring Linton family; Heathcliff’s alienation; and Cathy’s marriage to Edgar Linton. Ms Fennell keeps the arteries, too, such as Cathy’s famous declaration of love for Heathcliff: “Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same.”

However, Ms Fennell does away with the novel’s limbs and sinews, including several characters and the whole of the second half. She ends the film—spoiler alert—with Cathy’s death. (And her baby dies with her.) That means that there is none of the intergenerational drama, nor the elaborate and often dull revenge plot that occupies Heathcliff after his beloved’s demise. Cathy’s ghost does not return to stalk him decades later.

These changes free up Ms Fennell to spend a large amount of the 136-minute runtime on her main area of interest: sex . Brontë, though unmarried, was no naïf, says Rebecca Yorke of the Brontë Parsonage Museum. But in the book the “intensity of the love and passion” between Cathy and Heathcliff is “unspoken”.

Not so in Ms Fennell’s telling—here it is not just spoken, but shouted about, loudly and repeatedly. After Cathy (played by Margot Robbie, pictured) witnesses two servants having rough sex using farm equipment, she undergoes an erotic awakening. Later, when Heathcliff returns to Yorkshire after a prolonged absence, it does not take long for the pair to fall into each other’s arms. In Brontë’s book they barely even kiss. In Ms Fennell’s version, they get hot and heavy in the garden, a carriage, her boudoir and elsewhere.

If Ms Fennell wants to make a sexed-up version of “Wuthering Heights”, that is her prerogative. None of it will surprise anyone who has seen her previous films, “Promising Young Woman” and “Saltburn”, both of which touch on the dark side of desire. David Thomson, a film historian, says Ms Fennell’s work has “got a real sense of sensuality, sexuality, danger” and a “kind of recklessness” in its willingness to take risks. Her fans may appreciate her boldness, not to mention the sumptuous costumes and occasional jokes.

Devotees of the novel, however, will be dismayed that Brontë’s tale of class, obsession and violence has been so distorted. Many will believe that she has desecrated the book and hollowed out its characters. Luckily, purists can turn on one of many other, more faithful adaptations.

They should also bear in mind the wry observation of James Cain, an American novelist and journalist whose work was the basis for “Double Indemnity”, among other films. “People tell me, ‘Don’t you care what they’ve done to your books?’ I tell them, ‘They haven’t done anything to my book. It’s right there on the shelf.’” ■

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So argues an important new book, “How Africa Works”

Africa needs to follow Asia’s path to grow So argues an important new book, “How Africa Works” February 12th 2026 Africa is adding 300m people per decade: by 2050 it will be home to 2.5bn, a quarter of humanity. As the rest of the world ages, the continent’s youthfulness stands out. It will play a bigger role in the global labour market and as a source of consumers, culture and ideas. Thought-provoking new books about Africa are therefore sorely needed. In “How Africa Works” Joe Studwell, a visiting fellow at the Overseas Development Institute, a think-tank, has written one of the most interesting analyses of the past few years. It will prove valuable reading for anyone curious to understand “the last great frontier of global development”.

Africa is home to most of the world’s poverty. Why? Mr Studwell argues that it is partly a result of “low-budget colonialism ”. European powers extracted commodities, then left behind a pitifully tiny number of educated elites. Their arbitrary borders created kaleidoscopes of ethnically fragmented states.

So far, so familiar. But the author quickly moves on to make a more original argument. He singles out “chronically low population density” as an important cause of Africa’s underdevelopment. Asia was labour-rich and land-poor by the time of its economic rise. But because of scourges such as disease, crop-trampling elephants , slavery and bad soil, Africa has been much slower. As recently as 1975 the population density across Africa was equivalent to that of Europe in the 1500s. By 2030 Africa will have the population density Asia had in 1960. “Africa is only now becoming sufficiently densely populated to achieve strong economic growth,” potentially following in Asia’s footsteps, he argues.

It is a bold claim. In general GDP per person and density are not especially correlated. Some of the densest African countries, such as Burundi and Malawi, are the poorest. Other development experts have put more emphasis on literacy and fertility rates. But Mr Studwell’s case—that it takes a critical mass of people before markets can start to hum—has an intuitive logic.

Already four of the continent’s 54 states have shown impressive growth in recent years. The stories of Botswana and Rwanda will be familiar to Africa-watchers. But those about Mauritius and Ethiopia are newer and welcome. Across the quartet—in an echo of Stefan Dercon’s “Gambling on Development” (2022)—Mr Studwell notes the presence of a “developmental coalition” transcending ethnic lines.

Part of the reason Mr Studwell’s book was so keenly anticipated is that he came to the subject quite fresh, as an outsider. He wrote “How Asia Works” in 2013, ascribing that continent’s escape from poverty to more productive family farms, export-oriented manufacturing and state intervention in finance. Later Bill Gates asked him what he thought about Africa. That conversation and a visit to east Africa seem to have inspired him to turn to the continent; he has since travelled extensively there and surveyed the academic literature. Perhaps unsurprisingly, he concludes that Asia’s development recipe would be ideal for Africa, too. Two of his star subjects, Ethiopia and Mauritius, have already done more than most African countries to follow in that vein.

Some scholars will question how important—and how possible—it is for Africa to pursue this classic story of structural transformation. On the face of it, the Asian mould feels foreign: South Sudan will not become South Korea. Africans may also feel that their politicians do not get enough blame for the corruption and complacency that have stymied growth so far.

But in 2026 African GDP growth is (unusually) set to outpace that of the Asia-Pacific region, as the Chinese economy slows and commodity prices have surged. Investors are becoming more bullish about Africa as a destination for capital, not charity. And Africa’s careless political elites, terrified of their jobless youth, are starting to see economic growth as crucial to their own preservation. There is no stronger development incentive than survival. ■

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Who knew corporate offices could be so appealing?

The rise of the 9-to-5 influencer Who knew corporate offices could be so appealing? February 12th 2026 SHE HAS found a profitable niche. Natalie Marshall, known online as “Corporate Natalie”, skewers the absurdities of office life. She makes skits about “corporate lies” (getting excited about emails), “corporate red flags” (saying work is your life) and corporate lingo (could you imagine saying “synergy” or “close the loop” in everyday life?). Her videos have more than 50m likes on TikTok.

Ms Marshall is one of a bevy of “9-to-5” influencers who offer a glimpse behind the cubicle walls. Around 1m TikTok videos are tagged #9to5 or #CorporateTikTok. You can see “A Day in the Life” of a banker, marketer or lawyer. Some work hard (“Spend a 20-Hour Workday With Me”); others work hard preparing to work hard (“My 5-9 before my 9-5”).

CorporateTok may sound dull. Indeed, one 9-to-5 influencer, Connor Hubbard, has been dubbed “the most boring man on the internet”. But white-collar workers enjoy watching their own stresses play out on screen. Influencers offer a more realistic depiction of the world of work than Hollywood does. Fans of “Industry” might think that a career at an investment bank is raucous fun. Influencers such as Juliet Mackay show that the small hours are spent drowning in emails, not cocaine.

Having noticed their popularity, firms are inking deals with corporate influencers, believing they can help them connect with customers and employees. In 2022 Deloitte, a consultancy, hired Lara Sophie Bothur, making her the first in-house influencer at a company; her LinkedIn account was estimated to generate $13m of advertising value a year. (She left the firm last year to go freelance.)

Most corporate influencers build their personal brand rather than a company’s one. Corporate Natalie quit her job in marketing to start a virtual-assistant business for influencers. Mr Hubbard, who has 2m followers, left his full-time analyst job to become a full-time influencer. Some fans would have preferred them to stay in their 9-to-5s. Mr Hubbard’s “content was boring before, but relatable”, one wrote on Reddit. “Now it’s just boring.” ■

An absorbing history of Rupert Murdoch, the last of his breed of media baron

Real-life “Succession”: Media’s most dysfunctional family An absorbing history of Rupert Murdoch, the last of his breed of media baron February 12th 2026 What turned Rupert Murdoch into the terror of Fleet Street, scourge of the American airwaves, maker and breaker of prime ministers and presidents? It may have been an incident 90-odd years ago on a cruise ship somewhere between Australia and Europe. Lady Elisabeth Murdoch, his formidable mother, decided that it was time young Rupert learned to swim. So she took him to the pool—and tossed him in. “I had to dog-paddle to the side, and I was screaming,” Mr Murdoch later recounted.

To understand the world’s most powerful news machine and its complicated, irascible mastermind, you have to understand the family behind them, argues Gabriel Sherman, a journalist who wrote “The Apprentice” , a scathing film about Donald Trump. As Mr Murdoch nears his 95th birthday and the question of succession looms, Mr Sherman has written a family saga that gallops through 100 years of history in around 200 lively pages.

The pool incident took place on a ship bound for England, where Sir Keith Murdoch, Rupert’s distant father, began his own newspaper career under Lord Northcliffe of the Daily Mail. The key ingredients of news, Northcliffe declared, were “health things, sex things, money things”. Applying these lessons in Australia, Sir Keith built a newspaper chain that provided Rupert with a fancy childhood home, a Shetland pony called Joy Boy and early brushes with power, including meeting President Harry Truman and Arthur Sulzberger of the New York Times. But when Sir Keith died, aged just 67, Lady Elisabeth sold many of his assets to cover debts, and the Murdoch empire was greatly reduced.

In the subsequent decades Mr Murdoch built it back up—and then some. In Australia he gleefully acquired rivals; in Britain he began with the Sun , before shocking the establishment with his takeover of the august Times. In America he took control of 20th Century Fox before selling most of it to Disney for $71bn in 2019, at the top of the market for media. Today his remaining newspaper and TV assets—including the ever influential Fox News, which Mr Trump watches obsessively—are worth a combined $40bn.

They pack an editorial punch like no other. “I didn’t come all the way from Australia not to interfere,” Mr Murdoch told one of his editors. He employed “telephone terrorism”, calling staff day or night and firing off faxes from his yacht. Jet-lag, combined with the “angry pills” of temazepam he took to combat it, did nothing for his patience. To survive, executives built their coverage around his prejudices without instructions being spelled out directly. This “anticipatory compliance”, as one underling describes it, has insulated Mr Murdoch from scandals that have hit his titles, such as when the News of the World was shut down over illegal phone-hacking.

Mr Murdoch’s worldview is faithfully projected by his papers and by Fox News. But he has changed his politics over the years. In his surprisingly lefty student days he was known as Red Rupe and kept a bust of Lenin in his room at Oxford. The Sun flipped from Margaret Thatcher to Tony Blair to David Cameron and back to Sir Keir Starmer: more of a political weathervane than a signpost. Mr Murdoch held a fund-raiser for Hillary Clinton in 2007, later backing Mr Trump, with whom he has had a fraught relationship.

The one constant is a transactional view of power. After Mr Murdoch’s New York Post backed Ed Koch for mayor, he lifted a ban on the paper’s delivery trucks using city highways. To get into China, coverage was censored at his Star Television Network, and his publisher, HarperCollins, spiked a critical book by Chris Patten, a former governor of Hong Kong.

He seems to identify most strongly as an outsider, never happier than when fighting obstacles. British elites dubbed him a “dirty digger”. Yet his Sun and News of the World—stuffed with health things, sex things, money things—thrived against their dull competitors. The ferocious Fox tore up a cosy Hollywood where executives enjoyed nine-course board lunches. Anti-elitism was sometimes a figleaf for bad behaviour, however. After the Sunday Times published “Hitler’s diaries”—fake, it turned out—Mr Murdoch shrugged: “We are in the entertainment business.”

As he has aged, the question of succession has come into focus, heightened by a HBO drama that appears to be largely based on the family. (Mr Murdoch’s divorce settlement with Jerry Hall, his fourth wife, included a clause forbidding her from talking to the show’s writers.) HBO was not the first to fictionalise the feuding family. Mr Murdoch’s second wife, Anna, wrote a novel, “Family Business”, about a media dynasty that implodes when the father dies and his heirs fight. After a decades-long audition, Mr Murdoch has decided to pass the empire on to Lachlan, his eldest son, causing a rift with other siblings. For now, however, the proprietor is sticking to his promise that “My retirement plan is to be carried out of here.” He is still a regular, if somewhat hobbled presence, at the Fox lot in Century City.

Mr Sherman’s book draws on material already reported about the Murdochs, including Michael Wolff’s “The Man Who Owns the News” (2008), which got closer to the mogul than any other account. There are few new stories to be told. But it elegantly marks the end of the news-baron era. Most of Fox News’s competitors are owned by parent companies with much bigger interests than the news, from Disney (of ABC) and Paramount (CBS) to Warner Bros (CNN) and Comcast (NBC). Newspapers, meanwhile, are increasingly loss-making hobbies for unreliable billionaires, who view them either as philanthropic endeavours or political bargaining chips. (Jeff Bezos, owner of the Washington Post, has nothing approaching Mr Murdoch’s passion for newspapers. The paper recently announced it would lay off a third of its journalists to stem losses.)

Given media valuations today, it is hard to conceive that in the 1980s Mr Murdoch leveraged a newspaper fortune to buy a Hollywood studio. Now attention and power are shifting to platforms whose editorial line is dictated by algorithms rather than a bark down the telephone or furious fax from the yacht. For better or worse, Mr Murdoch is the last of his kind. ■

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“Bad Influence” argues that separating medical fact from fiction is becoming harder online

Want to know what’s wrong with you? “Bad Influence” argues that separating medical fact from fiction is becoming harder online February 5th 2026 The docTORS had never seen anything like it. During covid-19 lockdowns teenage girls across the world began jumping, hitting and shouting insults and non-sequiturs such as “beans” and “beetroot”. Some were rushed to emergency rooms; neurologists called it a “pandemic within a pandemic”. Parents suspected Tourette syndrome, which can manifest as repeated twitches. But it turned out these were not ordinary tics: they were TikTok tics.

The girls had spent hours watching #Tourette and #Tic videos online. In three weeks in March 2021 views of videos on TikTok with those hashtags rose by 7%, to a whopping 5.8bn. Some of the girls were imitating what they had seen online to fit in with friends. Others had what doctors dubbed “functional tics”: a neurological disorder brought on by stress. One paediatric neurologist who had witnessed the sudden spike in patients started researching the phenomenon and discovered that online influencers were more likely to post videos with extreme tics to rev up user engagement. Two-thirds of the most popular content creators were selling merchandise on their accounts, directly profiting from internet-addled users.

Commerce, entertainment and wellness are “colliding” online, with huge repercussions for well-being. A new book by Deborah Cohen, a British journalist and trained physician, argues that the internet has “hijacked our health”. On YouTube health videos have amassed more than 200bn views, and people now google medical questions hundreds of millions of times a day. AI will make the internet an even bigger part of wellness. A recent poll by Ipsos, a pollster, found that nearly 30% of British respondents get medical advice from large language models (LLMs). Already 40m people worldwide use ChatGPT for medical advice; a new feature can tailor responses based on users’ medical records and fitness-tracking apps.

The benefits are clear. A few swipes and taps offer answers to questions you might otherwise have to queue at the doctor for—or be too embarrassed to ask. Yet Dr Cohen is not convinced technological progress is making people healthier. She calls out “unfettered” online advertising on social media and a “ wellness industrial complex” (comprising pharmaceuticals, tech, testing and supplement firms) to argue that “a global experiment in public health” is being conducted online, which “may be doing more harm than good”. For every doctor who posts about medicine, there are more life coaches, health podcasters and charlatans who spread quackery: dog dewormer to cure cancer or a coffee enema to “detox” your system.

The internet is changing health in three important ways. First, it is persuading people they are sick when they are not. Dr Cohen analyses the “explosion” of posts about attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder ( ADHD ) in recent years. ADHD is typically diagnosed in childhood, but between 2020 and 2023 there was a 400% increase in adults seeking diagnoses in Britain.

Online users (including your correspondent) are often targeted by videos that shine a light on “secret signs” to look out for in adulthood. Influencers in scrubs ask questions like: “Do you struggle to finish a book unless it’s something you’re interested in?” (Doesn’t everyone?) In 2023 an analysis of the most-watched ADHD videos on TikTok found that less than 50% accurately reflected the symptoms. But by pathologising ordinary behaviours, videos are more appealing and likely to go viral, which helps those who are selling ADHD tests and supplements.

That points to the second change: the internet has created a “wild west” of medical advertising. In nearly every country apart from America and New Zealand, it is illegal to push drugs to consumers. But online, adverts from regions with less regulation reach patients everywhere. Ads are not always easy to spot, either: some firms work with “patient influencers” who receive free drugs or payment in exchange for mentioning the company’s name in their testimonies.

Online content often targets the “worried well”: healthy people who are anxious about getting sick. It is often said that sex sells in marketing, but when it comes to health, anxiety does. Videos with titles like “This Common Food Is Feeding Your Cancer Cells” get millions of views. Or take testosterone replacement therapy, which has gone from a niche treatment to one lauded online as a “fountain of youth” and type of “masculine fulfilment”, used by people like Joe Rogan, a podcaster, and Robert F. Kennedy junior, an American vaccine sceptic-turned-top health official. Some online clinics and adverts obscure testosterone’s side-effects, which range from awful (infertility) to awfully ironic (testicles can shrink).

Firms that can offer “quick fixes” to health concerns are in rude health. Yet such claims are unfounded, Dr Cohen notes, because medicine “is a science of probabilities rather than certainties” with no blanket cures that work for everyone.

All this is making doctors’ jobs harder, which is Dr Cohen’s third point. Many patients turn up to appointments with evidence for their suspected condition, buttressed by hours of watching influencers’ testimonies online. Some bring along the results of bogus tests and dodgy scans from small, unregulated companies. Doctors must then order further screening tests and biopsies to rule out diseases, which may make patients more anxious and waste everyone’s time and resources.

“Bad Influence” is a fascinating and richly researched book, and an excellent guide for anyone who finds himself regularly googling their symptoms. Yet like an unhelpful doctor, it focuses on what is wrong without offering many solutions. Dr Cohen spends too many pages on “the commodification of our health” and too few on how digital medicine could be used to revolutionise bureaucratic health systems and improve efficiency.

She is also too uninterested in AI, devoting only a few paragraphs to LLMs. Admittedly technology has progressed since her book went to press: LLMs can now diagnose common diseases nearly as well as physicians and have even outperformed humans on medical exams. Yet AI also makes it harder to study the negative effects of digital health care, as conversations are private and impossible for outside researchers to monitor (unlike the trumpeted endorsements of influencers). Dr Cohen simply concludes that “We deserve good influence so we can take better care of ourselves and each other.” That seems so obvious that readers may find themselves wanting a second opinion. ■

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“Blouge” wines, mixing red and white grapes, open up new markets

Why a new, playful style of wine is delighting drinkers “Blouge” wines, mixing red and white grapes, open up new markets February 5th 2026 Is it a red wine, or a white? It is both. As its name suggests, Côtes d’Amourschwihr Pinots, from Christian Binner, a winemaker in the Alsace region of France, is a blend of two grapes: pinot gris, a white grape, and pinot noir, a red grape. Served slightly chilled, the resulting wine is light and refreshing, like a white, but with the structure and depth of a red.

Mr Binner calls it “blouge” wine—a portmanteau of blanc and rouge. He is one of many winemakers around the world championing this emerging style, which handily helps them respond both to shifting consumer tastes and to the challenge posed by climate change .

The centre of blouge is France, but winemakers are trying it almost everywhere wine is made. Boogie Woogie, a blouge from Aubert & Mathieu, a winery in the Languedoc region, combines grenache noir with grenache gris. Superbloom, made by Las Jaras Wines in Sonoma, California, blends white chenin blanc and viognier with red carignan and grenache noir. Rainbow Juice, from Gentle Folk, a winery in Adelaide Hills, Australia, brings together red sangiovese with white pinot gris, gewürztraminer and sauvignon blanc. The latest example comes from the venerated wine region of Bordeaux. Jacques Lurton’s “J” cuvée, announced in November, combines cabernet franc and sauvignon blanc, and claims to “embody the spirit of blouge: a new, modern and surprising path”.

This blending makes blouge different from rosé, which (despite its pink colour) is almost always made using only red grapes. Co-fermentation of red and white grapes is not a new idea. Many champagnes combine white and red grapes (but with minimal skin contact for a golden colour); the great syrahs of the Northern Rhone include some viognier; and the traditional blend for chianti, an Italian red, includes malvasia bianca. But blouge is breaking new ground with its style of lighter, fresher wines, often with playful names to emphasise their novelty and expand their appeal.

This aligns well with changing consumer tastes. Lighter reds and rosés have been gaining popularity in recent years. But the use of both red and white grapes gives blouge “a more racy and approachable profile”, says Sarah Campbell of IWSR, a market-research firm. It is generally lower in alcohol than red wine and more versatile than rosé when it comes to food pairing.

Because they often break the strict rules about the grapes that can be combined in specific regions, blouge wines must use less prestigious, more generic classifications (such as “Vin de France”). Aficionados may sneer, but blouge is aimed at younger, more adventurous consumers. “They want to drink something new, fun and easy-going,” says Ms Campbell. Anthony Aubert, of Aubert & Mathieu, says the industry needs to innovate to attract younger customers, and “This new category is the perfect answer.” His firm sold 20,000 bottles of Boogie Woogie in 2025, 40% more than in 2024. It is, he says, “an interesting start for a new segment”.

The blouge approach also provides resilience to climate change. Higher temperatures and heatwaves cause grapes to accumulate sugar more quickly, while the ripening of skins and seeds can lag behind, causing a mismatch. Harvest red grapes early to minimise sugar and keep alcohol levels down, and you may get bitter, green tannins. Harvest later, and the tannins will be ripe, but the resulting wine will have high levels of alcohol (15-16%) and a flabby lack of acidity. When white and red grapes are combined, however, the white grapes boost acidity and reduce alcohol levels. Winemakers can also harvest white and red grapes at different times before combining them for fermentation, providing added flexibility as the climate shifts.

Blouge is gaining attention in the wine world, but it is hard to say how much. Data firms consider it still too niche to track. Moreover, there is no accepted definition or name for such wines; many blouge-makers do not use the term, or use it only informally. But some wine shops and restaurants are starting to recognise “light red” as a distinct category, says Mr Aubert. That may encourage more consumers to give blouge a try. ■

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Today Travis Bickle would find his tribe on the internet

Fifty years on, the anti-hero of “Taxi Driver” is eerily familiar Today Travis Bickle would find his tribe on the internet February 5th 2026 Yes, we’re talkin’ to him, or at least about him. Fifty years after “Taxi Driver” was released in February 1976, Martin Scorsese’s sleazy masterpiece—a morality tale with a sketchy moral—routinely ranks among the greatest ever films. It is chiefly revered for two characterisations: of Travis Bickle, the deranged cabbie-turned-vigilante played by Robert De Niro, and of New York . One has held up better than the other.

Subway crime, berserk prices, rats: today’s New York suffers a range of urban blights. Watching “Taxi Driver” puts them in perspective. There was a sanitation strike in the summer of 1975, when the film was shot, and it shows. Unemployment and the murder rate were soaring; the population was shrinking. Municipal bankruptcy loomed.

“All the animals come out at night,” Travis says in his noirish voice-over. His New York is overrun by drunks, druggies, strippers, child prostitutes and stick-up artists. As with Dostoyevsky’s novels, several of which share Mr Scorsese’s theme of child abuse, you can’t turn away, but feel like scrubbing yourself clean when the story ends. After Travis slays three low-lifes in the gory climax, the camera surveys the carnage from above, as if passing divine judgment. Everything was worse in the 1970s, you may conclude—except for the movies.

On screen, as in reality, New York contains multitudes: it is an abode of moonstruck lovers and greed-is-good financiers, hustlers and mafiosi, ghosts and their busters. Yet for many film buffs “Taxi Driver”, set in a neon-lit cesspit of vice and decay, is the supreme New York movie. Watch it closely, though, and it is less a portrait of a place than of Travis’s febrile perception, refracted through his rain-slicked windscreen and crumbling mind. The shimmery surface of the metropolis is a mirror. Probably great cities always are.

And the character it reflects is all too contemporary. Travis is a damaged Vietnam veteran, but his neuroses and contradictions are familiar in the atomised 21st century. Like lots of would-be moral reformers down the ages, he is transfixed by what reviles him. He loathes the Gomorrah of the East Village and Times Square but hangs out in porno cinemas. “Here’s a man who would not take it any more,” Travis declares. The “it” is partly himself.

Above all, he’s a loner. The yellow carapace of his taxi is a symbol of his isolation. It’s as if there is a secret to communicating that no one has told him. He wants to make friends and court women but doesn’t know how. One of the shocks in a film replete with them is a lateish mention of his parents. Travis has seemed so irredeemably alone.

As it does for some misfits today, politics offers a jolt of power for his ego and a sheen of virtue for his rage against “filth and scum”. The identity of the politician he fixes on hardly matters, nor whether Travis supports or (as he plots to) assassinates him. Racism and misogyny are outlets, too. “You’re like the rest of them,” he tells a woman who bolts when he takes her to see a skin flick. In 2026 Travis would find consolation in alt-right chatboards and incel forums.

In the end, he seeks redemption in violence. His most loving relationship is an all-American romance with his guns. He buffs his scarred torso for action like an acolyte of the body-conscious manosphere , dressing for his rampage as if for the wedding he can never have. As for too many mass shooters of the past 50 years, murder seems his only means to get the world’s attention.

The cosmic joke is that it does. In Mr De Niro’s coruscating performance, Travis’s anguish appeals to viewers’ sympathies while his prejudice and bloodlust repel them. Just as his killing spree finally forfeits them, society takes him at his own estimation: his is the righteous kind of violence, the press decides, and Travis is a hero. Posterity has made a similar mistake with “Taxi Driver”, replacing alarm with admiration. “You talkin’ to me?” is an immortal line, parroted as a slogan of macho bristle. In fact, it is spoken by a psychotic to his own reflection in a slumland bedsit.

As they gawk at skyscrapers, hail yellow cabs like Travis’s or watch steam rise from manhole covers, outsiders in New York often feel they’re in a movie. So does Travis. He thinks his is a Western or gangster film, but in a way his genre is horror. At least as much now as in 1976, he embodies something real and close that you may prefer not to see. “Well I’m the only one here,” he tells the mirror in that famous riff. He is still here—and he is far from the only one. ■

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Serhiy Zhadan shows how poetry and patriotism have popular appeal

A rockstar-turned-fighter offers a lens on fame in Ukraine Serhiy Zhadan shows how poetry and patriotism have popular appeal February 5th 2026 Serhiy Zhadan (pictured) is not your average soldier. He is a poet, novelist and rockstar, who is used to performing in front of crowds of thousands. Anyone who claims poetry is dead has not been to his readings: some 4,000 people at a time have attended them in Kyiv. After Russia’s invasion in 2022, Mr Zhadan tried to help—evacuating children, securing medicine—but felt he could still do more. In 2024 he enlisted in the National Guard, joining a much feted brigade known as “Khartiia”. That cemented Mr Zhadan’s status as one of Ukraine’s most popular cultural figures, who embodies how the literary sphere has adapted to life at war .

Mr Zhadan, who is 51, came of age as the Soviet Union collapsed and Ukraine gained independence. His works capture the experience of this transitional generation, full of rough-and-ready characters confronting social upheaval, political revolution and economic hardship. His anarchic persona and promotion of Ukrainian culture have endeared him to a younger audience reckoning with Russian aggression . So, too, has his moonlighting as a frontman for “Zhadan i sobaky” (“Zhadan and the Dogs”), a popular ska-punk band.

His cult status reflects modern literary celebrity with a Ukrainian twist. In a country where supporting the armed forces is both essential and existential, Mr Zhadan uses social media expertly to spread his art and activism. He posts poems, clips from gigs and musings about intelligence networks on Facebook, Instagram and TikTok. Tapping into the growing popularity of video podcasts and hoping to boost the profile of his brigade, he set up Radio Khartiia, a website that hosts discussions on military life and Ukrainian culture. Mr Zhadan’s interviewees have included Kyrylo Budanov, Ukraine’s former spy boss, and Ai Weiwei, a Chinese artist.

But Mr Zhadan also celebrates the everyman. “Arabesques”, a collection of his short stories, will be published in English in February. It elegantly describes ordinary people enduring war and offers a poignant portrait of Kharkiv, his home town, which is only some 40km from Russia. His characters are civilians carrying on in eerily empty neighbourhoods, volunteers driving aid to forgotten villages and soldiers struggling to reconcile their lives at war with those they left behind.

Mr Zhadan does not describe any fighting, but the war permeates his pages and prose. Much is left unsaid: the dialogue is spare, the description of inner thoughts more detailed. The central theme of “Arabesques” is the fragility of intimacy and the struggle to protect it during war. That is true among husbands and wives , parents and children and old school friends who barely recognise each other because of the trauma of fighting. Many aspects of everyday life lose their significance at war, Mr Zhadan tells The Economist, but relationships become even more intensely important. The war has left Ukrainians highly sensitive, “as if we’ve been bared of our skin”, he says.

The story collection points to the evolving nature of Ukrainian war writing. After the shock of the invasion, many Ukrainians turned to literature to cope with, and sometimes escape, reality. The number of bookshops rose rapidly: readers were drawn to poetry and non-fiction, which gave an immediate account of the war. Authors who volunteered as soldiers have gained prominence. Some, such as Maksym Kryvtsov, a poet turned machine-gunner, were killed in action.

Ukrainian publishers consider it essential to continue to support war literature, says Yuliya Orlova, boss of Vivat, one of the country’s biggest publishing houses, which has published more than 50 war-related titles since 2022. Mr Zhadan concedes that both creating and appreciating writing about war can be exhausting. When the invasion ends, he thinks Ukrainian readers may well seek out more lightness in their books. But for now, the fighting rages—and Mr Zhadan’s tales give the world a sense of the toll. ■

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How a Canadian hockey drama, “Heated Rivalry”, has inflamed the hearts of viewers

The hit TV show that no one saw coming How a Canadian hockey drama, “Heated Rivalry”, has inflamed the hearts of viewers February 5th 2026 Leading up to the opening ceremony of the Winter Olympics on February 6th, two actors served as torchbearers. They were perfect for the assignment. The ice-hockey playing stars of “Heated Rivalry”, a gay drama showcasing rivalry on the ice and revelry in the bedroom , have already brought fire into the lives of millions of viewers. Jimmy Fallon, a comedian who interviewed Hudson Williams, one of the actors, compared female fans’ reaction to him to that of famous musicians such as Harry Styles.

“Heated Rivalry” first debuted on Crave, a Canadian streaming network, in late November and has since become its most-viewed original series ever. It is the second-most “in-demand” TV show globally, according to Parrot Analytics, a data firm, popular in America, Australia and the Philippines. Even in Russia, which has repressive anti-gay laws, it is an underground sensation—currently the highest-rated TV show of all time on Kinopoisk, the country’s leading film database.

No one in Hollywood expected this. When Jacob Tierney, a Canadian director and producer, asked Rachel Reid, a romance novelist, about adapting her book, no big American studios were interested. Ms Reid, a mother in Nova Scotia, had started writing “out of boredom” while raising small children; her readers, overwhelmingly straight women, were rather fond of what one review tactfully called “loads (and loads, literally) of sizzling hot hate sex”.

So are viewers, apparently. The show now averages 8m American viewers per episode. A third of them rewatch episodes; 15% have watched five times or more. Professional hockey is even seeing a “Heated Rivalry” effect. On StubHub, a ticket resale platform, hockey ticket sales have surged 40% since the show’s debut in America.

In Asia shows about men loving other men have long been popular among women. It is a newer phenomenon on screen in the West. In book publishing male-male romance has become one of the fastest-growing romance subgenres. Whether on the ice or in the bedroom, women love cheering on characters as they score. ■

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A riveting and depressing argument tackled in a new book, “The Doom Loop”

Should globalists give up? A riveting and depressing argument tackled in a new book, “The Doom Loop” February 5th 2026

Investors have sent gold, their traditional hedge against pandemonium, on a roller-coaster ride. In European capitals officials are pondering how to fight a trade war with America. Farther east, actual war rages between Russia and Ukraine. Multilateral institutions like the UN and World Trade Organisation, which exist to prevent such conflicts, seem powerless. Even paragons of international integration seem to have given up on it. “We are in the midst of a rupture,” said Mark Carney, Canada’s prime minister and the globalist’s globalist, at globalism’s recent annual jamboree in Davos .

This is a good moment, then, to step back and ask why things fall apart. In “The Doom Loop”, Eswar Prasad, a professor of economics at Cornell University, offers a sobering answer. His book contends that changes to the balance of power between countries—the rise of China and India , the waning dominance of the West—have transformed the world economy into an engine for disorder. Once, this reconfiguration might have offered “opportunities for greater stability”, with countries choosing to “deploy their power in constructive ways for fear of losing influence”. But instead “the feedback loop between economics, domestic politics and geopolitics is spiralling out of control and becoming destructive on every front.”

The idea that a shifting balance of power can cause trouble is hardly new. In the fifth century BC Thucydides, a Greek historian, wrote that the Peloponnesian war had been made “inevitable” by “the rise of Athens and the fear that this instilled in Sparta”. In a much-read essay (published in 2015) and book (2017), Graham Allison of Harvard University considered whether this “Thucydides trap” might spark a war between America and China. He identified 16 instances over the past half-millennium in which a rising power had come to rival a ruling one, noting that 12 ended in war.

Mr Prasad’s book is compelling because he takes things several steps further. As well as rising powers fuelling disorder, he thinks the world’s economic and political systems are amplifying this effect, and sets out how in some detail. The argument is all the more striking coming from a writer who is an authority on financial globalisation and former head of the IMF’s China division. Like Mr Carney, he belongs to the tribe that once cheered international integration as a spur to peace and prosperity. Now he thinks the system has mutated.

Take cross-border flows of trade and capital, which globalisation transformed from trickles to floods. In theory, these ought to have improved relations between rival powers. American firms investing in China, after all, do not want their returns interrupted by diplomatic spats, so will lobby their government accordingly. In practice, as politicians have rattled their sabres, American companies have retreated from China, and flows of trade and capital have begun to reorient along geopolitical lines.

This does not only blunt business leaders’ incentives to promote cordial international relations. If they benefit from government subsidies to build at home rather than abroad, or from tariffs shielding them from foreign competition, they have new incentives: to encourage discord that might prompt more subsidies and tariffs.

The book outlines several other “doom loops” lurking in various parts of the world economy. The race to replace the dollar as the global reserve currency (or reduce its potency) has led to “an increasingly fragmented second tier” of alternatives, such as the euro, yen and yuan, argues Mr Prasad. The erosion of norms, and of the effectiveness of the multilateral institutions supposed to enforce them, could be worsened by rival institutions led by China. The choices for middle powers caught between America and China, such as India, “vary only in their degree of bleakness”. The transactional behaviour this encourages is hardly conducive to stable alliances.

Underlying all this is an intriguing argument for an economist to make: that competition, normally thought to promote far better outcomes than unchecked monopolies in industries such as technology and health care, instead promotes chaos when applied to geopolitics. Warlords have known that since before Thucydides’s time. The uncomfortable thing today is that, as Mr Prasad writes, the idea that sharing power among many is beneficial “is the animating force behind the democratic principles the West holds dear”.

Understandably, therefore, the book’s weakness is that all the talk of doom makes for a lot of gloom . In other words, “The Doom Loop” is a thoroughly depressing read. Towards the end, Mr Prasad gamely attempts some suggestions for how to dismantle the doom loops. They are mostly far-fetched and rosy ideas, including America and China ceasing to distort trade, governments trusting each other more and the IMF treating strong countries as harshly as weak ones.

The author is right that a world would be more stable in which institutions had rebuilt their credibility and governments were honest with citizens about the trade-offs their policies entail. But how realistic does that sound to you? ■

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A new book, “Polar War”, shows how America needs Europe in the far north

What to read to understand the Arctic A new book, “Polar War”, shows how America needs Europe in the far north January 29th 2026 IN RECENT weeks Donald Trump’s aggressive pursuit of Greenland, a Danish territory, has put the icy Arctic back at the fiery heart of geopolitics. European states have rushed troops to the island, and NATO is considering a new mission, Arctic Sentry, to monitor the airspace and waters around it. Mr Trump stakes his claim to Greenland on two grounds. One is the importance of Greenland to America’s defence. The island’s location means that it sits underneath the flight path of nuclear missiles fired from Russia towards America. The second is Europe’s inability to defend it. “You know what Denmark did recently to boost up security on Greenland? They added one more dog sled,” Mr Trump has howled. (The sleds, as it happens, are part of an elite Danish special-forces unit.)

Every author dreams of their book capturing the zeitgeist. Kenneth Rosen, a journalist and war correspondent, could not enjoy better timing. “Polar War” comes out just as Mr Trump has propelled the northern region to global attention. The book is a collection of reportage from different sites across the Arctic—from Alaska to the Norwegian island of Svalbard and from Swedish Lapland to Greenland itself. It is knitted together into a story of great powers competing over a region whose harsh geography imposes limits even on the abilities of superpowers.

The Arctic has no clear definition, Mr Rosen writes. Some define it as anything above the Arctic Circle. Others see it as where the semi-arid grassland of the steppe turns into frigid tundra, with a boundary that shifts with climate change. That geographical uncertainty reflects a wider sense of the Arctic as a liminal space. Even before Mr Trump’s attempted land grab, disputes over sovereignty were common: Canada says that the Northwest Passage, an Arctic sea route from the Atlantic to the Pacific, is part of its territorial waters; America claims it is an international waterway. Ever heard of the “whisky war”? It was a low-level dispute over Arctic territory between Denmark and Canada resolved only in 2022; each of them would deposit local liquor on a remote island to stake their claim to it.

Mr Trump, though not known as a voracious reader , would do well to pick up a copy of “Polar War”, because it makes two points that cut to the heart of his diplomacy. One is that competition in the Arctic is growing. Global warming is melting polar ice, creating new navigable sea routes that pass through sensitive areas. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and annexation of Crimea in 2014 sparked a new period of military competition in Europe, one in which Russian submarines (sallying from their Arctic ports on the Kola Peninsula) and warplanes (practising bombing runs near Alaska) play a prominent role.

Meanwhile, China’s rise has fuelled its interest and presence in the region for economic and intelligence purposes. In 2018 China declared itself to be a “near-Arctic state”, to the bemusement of locals, and accelerated efforts to buy land and become involved in projects with both civilian and military applications in the high North.

That supports Mr Trump’s view that the Arctic is important. But, awkwardly for the president, the book’s thesis is that America, much more than Europe, has been asleep at the wheel. Consider Pituffik Space Base in Greenland, the site of a large American radar that allows the Pentagon to observe threats from space, including approaching Russian missiles. That radar, or a future one, would be integral to Mr Trump’s plan for an expanded missile-defence system he has dubbed Golden Dome. But Pituffik, “relegated to an afterthought” in American plans, is literally falling apart. Its concrete was laid on permafrost that is now melting and shifting. Door frames have been ripped from the floor, walls spread apart and runways fractured from constant freezing and thawing.

Mr Trump derides the competence and capacity of his European and Canadian allies. In fact, Europeans are “arguably ahead” of America in the Arctic, one expert tells Mr Rosen. That becomes clear during the author’s two weeks aboard the KV Svalbard, Norway’s main icebreaker, as it escorts the American Healy to skirt Russia’s coastline. The Healy is larger and more powerful than the Norwegian ship. But its shortcomings become apparent. It lacks an ice-breaking propeller. Its gyroscope and radar repeatedly fail. “The American crew seems ravaged, tired and frustrated,” writes Mr Rosen. When a Russian helicopter buzzes the ship, the American sailors are “visibly unnerved by the encounter”, while the Norwegians, long used to such games, are nonplussed.

Amid these struggles, Russia is racing ahead, argues Mr Rosen. It has reopened and modernised more than 50 cold-war bases along its 15,000 miles of Arctic coastline. Its fleet of icebreakers “dwarfs the maritime Arctic fleets of every other nation”, and it has much greater proficiency in cold-weather operations.

Playing catch-up is not easy. For the book’s second point is that getting anything done in the Arctic is forbiddingly difficult. The region is a frontier that resists efforts to tame it. Satellite ground terminals struggle to connect with satellites near the equator. In Longyearbyen, a town on Norway’s Svalbard, each intake of breath is “enough to make one’s throat seize”, writes Mr Rosen. Suicide rates among American soldiers in the 11th Airborne Division, an Alaska-based unit specialising in Arctic fighting, were, until recently, disturbingly high. “I stayed too long and grew mad,” admits the author. It is hard enough to live in such places, let alone wage war in them.

Mr Rosen’s point is that America, despite its wealth and power, cannot succeed in the Arctic without European allies. “For all their co-operation, the United States relies more heavily on Norway than Norway relies on it,” notes Mr Rosen, pointing to American radars, drone bases and training grounds in Norway’s north.

“Polar War” is immersive and richly reported, with Mr Rosen speaking to military officials and ordinary citizens alike. Unfortunately, his writing is at times more flowery than the bleak landscape and serious subject call for. Nonetheless, the book speaks to the moment. A war is unlikely to begin over control of Arctic territory, but the Artic’s importance to the great powers—to America for missile defence, to Russia as a bastion for its submarine force, to Europe as its northern flank—means that a conflict elsewhere could spread there, as happened during the second world war. And if that conflict comes, Mr Trump should remember that he will need friends to operate in the harsh and lonely climes of the region he covets. ■

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Revisiting the consequential life of Harry Reid, the Senate majority leader

Do Democrats need another centrist old white man? Revisiting the consequential life of Harry Reid, the Senate majority leader January 29th 2026 ASK AN American-history buff to name her five favourite presidents , and she will give you a disquisition on each choice. But ask her to name five favourite Senate majority leaders, and you may receive a blank stare. Public political memory is short, especially for legislators. Presidents spend their lives in the limelight; effective legislators spend theirs in back rooms, arm-twisting, horse trading and making unsavoury compromises. As a new biography shows, few legislators understood their job as well as Harry Reid, who represented Nevada in the Senate for 30 years, including eight as majority leader from 2007 to 2015.

Reid, who died of cancer in 2021 at the age of 82, was one of the “most consequential national leaders of the 21st century”, Jon Ralston, a journalist, argues in a new book. He had an upbringing and set of beliefs that made him unusual among Democrats. He was a devout Mormon who personally opposed abortion and described himself as “generally opposed to the regulation of guns”—heretical positions in his party today. Brought up in a tiny town in Nevada, in a home that lacked running water, he worked nights as a Capitol policeman when he was in law school.

He was a centrist: just after getting to the Senate, he backed the more conservative Al Gore instead of Michael Dukakis as his party’s nominee for president. Twenty years later, a colleague sent him an article from Mother Jones, a magazine that he called “a little to [sic] far left for someone as cautious as I am…I am more of a Wall Street Journal guy.” He was good at what, before American politics turned national and dysfunctional, used to be a senator’s primary jobs: bringing money back to his home state and defending his constituents. (For Reid that included casinos and mines, the latter sitting oddly with his environmental bent.)

In person he had a brusque decency and a quiet sense of humour but little warmth or bonhomie. He was known for ending phone conversations abruptly, without saying goodbye. Barack Obama praised his “pragmatism, adaptability [and] premium on getting things done”, and indeed, Mr Obama’s signature achievement, the Affordable Care Act, might not have passed almost 16 years ago without Reid’s skilful negotiations and compromises while leading the Senate.

But the dark side of his results-focused pragmatism was a ruthless streak. “If he doesn’t need you, he’ll throw you out with the trash,” said one rival. Reid tried to get Mr Ralston fired several times from the TV station owned by the senator’s good friend, the author alleges in the book’s afterword. (Remarkably, that experience did not kill the author’s deep respect for his subject.) Reid was also not above stretching the truth: in 2012 he turned a tip about Mitt Romney, the Republican presidential candidate, paying too little tax into a rumour that he paid none for a decade, cementing the impression of Mr Romney as an out-of-touch plutocrat.

Many Democrats might be glad to see the back of a pro-gun, anti-abortion old white guy who praised Mr Obama’s ability to have “no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one”. (Reid later apologised, and the two became so close that Mr Obama gave Reid’s eulogy.) Democrats seethed about Joe Manchin, a similarly heterodox Democratic senator from West Virginia, for years; when he left office a Republican replaced him, making it that much harder for them to retake the Senate.

Politics, at root, is not about the public performance of virtue or rigidly enforcing a party line; it is about assembling coalitions to achieve tangible, practical goals. The Affordable Care Act, which improved the lives of millions, passed because Reid knew when to tell senators to his left that pushing for a government-run insurer was impractical and would kill the bill. He did not make perfection the enemy of the good. There is a lesson there for Democrats: clear-eyed ruthlessness and heterodoxy do not dilute the party; they make it larger and more effective, and therefore stronger. ■

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The Academy Award nominees for Best Picture are entertainingly frantic and defiantly political

Run for your life! The world, according to the Oscars The Academy Award nominees for Best Picture are entertainingly frantic and defiantly political January 29th 2026 A man on the run in a society turned upside down: that is the image of the world projected in this year’s Oscars nominees. Their heroes dodge injustice and prejudice, flights from danger and towards salvation that are frenzied and exhausting (even for audiences). At a time when some showbiz bigwigs fear offending the powerful, these films pack politics into rollercoaster stories.

During the Renaissance, some artists embraced a principle known as copia, or abundance. Depicting the wealth of creation, they thought, required richness, intricacy and variety. Today’s top directors seem to agree. Many of the titles are whoppers. “Sinners” (pictured) earned an all-time record 16 nominations; “One Battle After Another” has 13; “Marty Supreme” has nine: all are well over two hours long. One response to cinema’s box-office woes is evidently to offer more bangs for your buck.

Yet there are no longueurs here. “Sinners” is a fantasia about twin gangsters, both played by Michael B. Jordan, who open a juke joint in Mississippi in 1932; it is part musical and part horror flick, incorporating the Ku Klux Klan, shoot-outs, vampires and the blues. In “One Battle” Leonardo DiCaprio is chased relentlessly across cities, rooftops and deserts. “Marty Supreme” is a madcap caper about a table-tennis hustler ( Timothée Chalamet ) in the early 1950s, which features two competing love stories and a gunfight over a stolen dog.

These are overstuffed movies, careening through moods and genres—sports flick to bildungsroman, or thriller to Western. Together they convey a sense that, from today’s perspective, life is too mercurial and overwhelming to fit into neat formats or plots. It is also unfair.

“Wokeness” is said to be retreating nowadays; some media executives kowtow to the White House. By contrast these films are uncompromising, though they are also cunning, dressing argument in fantasy and period costume. “One Battle” is set in a parallel America where, as lawless militias hunt down immigrants, activists ponder how to resist. (Since the movie’s release last year, the gap between its dystopia and reality has rapidly shrunk.) The new “Frankenstein” —which also has nine nominations—gives its mythic narrative a political edge, too. The scientist depends on an arms dealer for his funding and battlefields for his corpses.

And though some politicians are trying to snuff it out, here America’s discussion of race is vivid and irrepressible. Segregation and exploitation stalk “Sinners” along with its ghouls. In “One Battle” the ultimate villains are a white-supremacist cabal. The striving hero of “Marty Supreme” is Jewish, and the world is not his friend, peopled as it is with corrupt cops, vicious hoodlums and bullying tycoons.

That film’s interest in Jewishness and antisemitism is underlined in a standout sequence. In a brief but haunting flashback, a concentration-camp survivor recounts smothering his body in honey to feed to fellow prisoners. The whole hysterically ping-ponging saga of “Marty Supreme” unfolds in the shadow of the Holocaust, this interlude implies. “Sinners” has its own daringly symbolic moment, in which a blues song conjures up the spirits of black artists past and future, from west African musicians to hip-hop DJs. In “One Battle” a hallucinatory car chase along a dipping road hints that its struggle is unending.

Crowd-pleasers that take artistic risks, such nominees deserve their success. They are also largely dominated by men, who do most of the frenetic running and fighting. (In “Frankenstein” a man even gives birth, kind of.) The old-fashioned template for screen heroism seems as unkillable as those vampires.

An exception to all this is “Hamnet” (eight nominations). Bucking the old rule about not working with children and animals, this is the story of William Shakespeare’s marriage, the birth of his offspring and the death of his son. The drama is staged in a narrow, muddy world of timbered houses, inglenook fireplaces, leather jerkins and rummaging livestock, with the odd boozy all-nighter and burst of iambic pentameter.

“Hamnet” looks through the other end of history’s telescope: its focus is not Shakespeare’s seismic career but domestic joys and tragedy. The real protagonist is his wife, here called Agnes and played by Jessie Buckley (a hot favourite for Best Actress at the ceremony on March 15th). Her wails in childbirth and after her boy’s demise are the film’s most piercing sounds. The quietness, too, distinguishes “Hamnet” in a noisy, frantic field. At this year’s Oscars, the rest is sirens. ■

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The author behind one of this century’s best books is back with “Vigil”

What are novels for? George Saunders has answers The author behind one of this century’s best books is back with “Vigil” January 29th 2026 What is fiction for? In an idealistic view, it lets readers clamber inside other minds and see the world through strangers’ eyes. George Saunders, a zany American author, is a proponent of this theory, aiming, he says, to foster compassion and “human connection”. He has dreamed up a way to include such leaps of empathy in the plot of his novels—first in “Lincoln in the Bardo” , which won the Booker prize in 2017, and now in “Vigil”.

“Lincoln” was his debut novel. (A creative-writing teacher at Syracuse University and on Substack, Mr Saunders has also published short stories, novellas and criticism .) A cacophony of souls in limbo make up that book’s antic cast; they hover in a cemetery in 1862, where Willie Lincoln, son of Abe, is interred. In a beautiful central passage, two ghosts sit on top of one another and in doing so are able to grasp each other’s lost loves, longings and regrets. “So many years I had known this fellow and yet had never really known him at all,” one of these spectral figures observes.

“Vigil” elaborates on such magical moments. It unfolds in the final hours of K.J. Boone, once a big-oil CEO, now dying cantankerously in his mansion in Dallas. “His heart was beating irregularly, like an afterthought,” Mr Saunders writes, with his sensitive Chekhovian eye for human frailty of all sorts; Boone’s nappies are changed by carers to “the sound of efficient under-the-breath co-ordination”. Once again, ghosts mingle with the oblivious living. The fading man’s wife and daughter are here, as is the narrator, the spirit of a woman named Jill Blaine. Her heaven-sent mission is to ease his passage across life’s threshold.

Wearing the clothes her mortal self was buried in—“beige skirt, pale pink blouse, black pumps”—Jill is perceptible only to other spirits and to Boone. When she enters “the orb of his thoughts”, she can eavesdrop on them and hold hallucinatory conversations with him. More than that, as in the graveyard epiphany in “Lincoln”, she and her fellow shades can plunge into each other’s forms, and Boone’s, and through such temporary cohabitations share their feelings and memories.

She is not the only ambassador from the next world. The shade of a Frenchman, who invented the combustion engine and now regrets it, wants Boone to repent for his past as a climate-change denier. The spectres of people and animals who have suffered in the planet’s despoliation crowd in, too. Jill and the Frenchman in effect stage a deathbed debate over free will and predeterminism. Charitably, Jill suggests that Boone, and everybody else, could not be other than they are; her only job, she reasons, is to “comfort, for all else is futility”. Prickly and spiteful, Boone is disinclined to repent and none too keen on the comforting malarkey either.

If all that sounds heavy or abstruse, it isn’t. The prose zips with the author’s trademark wisecracks and quick-fire repartee. These ghosts are aware of their situation’s absurdity and drolly joke about it. Jill flits entertainingly into other lives, such as those of the adulterers at the wedding party next door. Intermittently she is beset by poignant recollections of her own earthly years, which ended in a rogue explosion in 1976. The novel lingers on life’s priceless ephemera—kisses, kind words, dancing—even as it ponders morals and mortality .

“Lincoln in the Bardo” is widely and rightly regarded as one of the greatest novels of the century so far. Expanding as it does on its predecessor’s innovations, “Vigil” is not quite as staggeringly original. Now and then Mr Saunders overdoes the kookiness. Not everyone will appreciate the environmental politics, nor enjoy his rumbling lament for “this lovely old place, ruined forever, maybe”.

Still, at a time when doomsayers predict the demise of the novel—destined, supposedly, to be seen off by glitzier distractions and dwindling attention spans—Mr Saunders has a recipe for fiction’s survival, as well as a rationale for reading it. Finding new ways to tell stories with words on a page, his work nudges forward the boundaries of the form. He powers his empathy machine with restless invention. ■

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“Sigma Boy” has spread faster than nits

How Russian brainrot became a hit for children “Sigma Boy” has spread faster than nits January 29th 2026 The British playground usually echoes to screechy impersonations of well-known artists such as Katy Perry. But if you approach one today you may well hear a seven-year-old adopt a vaguely Slavic accent and drone: “Sigma boy, sigma boy.” The lyrics come from an electropop track sung by two Russian tweens (pictured). The music video has racked up around 270m streams since being uploaded to YouTube in April. Academics across Europe are puzzling over its popularity. Some have called it “a cultural invasion”, says George Charonitis of the University of Thessaly in Greece.

For older listeners, the appeal is not clear. The melody is repetitive, and the Russian lyrics are unintelligible even in translation. (“I’m the icon of your icons / They dream about me as if I were bitcoin, got it?”) Some parents were appalled when their children began singing it; “sigma” is a term from the manosphere used to describe a lone (male) wolf who does not conform to norms or expectations. “It absolutely terrified me,” posted one parent: it “really made me think about the influences around my DS [darling son]”.

“Sigma Boy” spread through the perplexing ecosystem of youngsters’ social media. A clip of an influencer blasting the song in Munich’s underground has millions of views—as does a video of an AI-generated shark enjoying the song. But some think that a different sort of shark is behind “Sigma Boy”. Ukraine’s government says it has been promoted by bot farms, indicating that it could be Russian propaganda . A spokesperson claims the song helps Russia by “reinforcing among young people the idea of dominance, masculinity and contempt for the ‘weak’”.

This is not as far-fetched as it sounds, says Carl Miller of Demos, a think-tank. He has noticed a shift in Russian disinformation tactics in recent years, with less emphasis on promoting counterfactual versions of events and more on masculinity and patriotism. If nothing else the “Sigma” scare highlights how little adults understand about children and social media. It is not their playground. ■

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On screen and in real life, they are getting smaller anyway

Age gaps in relationships are not as bad as you think On screen and in real life, they are getting smaller anyway January 29th 2026 It was not love at first sight. When Nick Viall, a reality-television star, met his wife Natalie Joy, he insisted they would never date. His reluctance stemmed in part from being 18 years older, about the length of a generation. Mr Viall married Ms Joy in 2024. Now he is embarking on a different sort of courtship: trying to seduce new viewers. “Age of Attraction”, a dating series hosted by Mr Viall and Ms Joy, will debut on Netflix later this year. The show follows single 22- to 59-year-olds to test whether “age is just a number”. Mr Viall has said the programme will set aside cultural biases about age to focus on compatibility. It is a romantic idea that speaks to an empirical truth. Age gaps are not as unhealthy as some assume.

Birds of a feather flock together, as the saying goes, and so do people. Researchers studying marriage data have found that couples tend to be similar in age. This is not entirely unexpected. People frequently pair up with others who share similar traits, including race, education and religion. In America one in eight married couples is the same age, to the nearest year; a third is no more than a year younger or older (see chart 1). Schooling reinforces this trend by sorting pupils into age-based cohorts, otherwise known as classes.

And yet, though both men and women tend to choose partners close to their own age, the most common pairing—two-thirds of American marriages—is between an older man and a younger woman. This pattern can be found in almost every country across the world. A recent paper by researchers at the Pew Research Centre, a think-tank, puts the global average gap at 4.2 years. In North America husbands are 2.2 years older than their wives, on average; in Europe the average age gap is 2.7 years; in Asia-Pacific it is 4. The age difference is highest in sub-Saharan Africa: 8.6 years.

Why are age gaps so common? The leading explanation is evolutionary. Men, it is argued, prefer partners who are fertile; women prefer mates who can provide for their offspring. Since women are most fertile when they are young, and men tend to accumulate resources with age, a modest gap should, in theory, produce more children. Data show this to be true. A paper published in 2007 by researchers at the University of Vienna showed that Swedish couples in which the husband is roughly five years older than the wife have 5% more children than same-age couples. American data tell a similar story (see chart 2). The benefit of an older, wealthier husband may be even greater in poor countries.

Social norms play a part, too. Those attracted to a much older or younger partner may choose someone closer to their own age to avoid raising eyebrows. “Can you bring someone who’s 20 years younger to your parents?” asks Renata Topinkova, a social scientist at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. What is considered acceptable changes over time. In 1920 American husbands were about 4.5 years older than their wives, compared with 2.2 years today (see chart 3). Once-common “trophy wives”—young spouses of high-earning men—are now rare enough in America that they can no longer be spotted in the data (though they can still be spotted at country clubs like Mar-a-Lago).

Even the age gaps on screen are narrower today than in the past, when Clark Gable (38) starred opposite Vivien Leigh (26) in “Gone With the Wind” and Humphrey Bogart (43) alongside Ingrid Bergman (27) in “Casablanca”. Today romantic partners in films and on TV are typically around six years apart, down from nearly 20 in the 1940s-50s. When films do show dramatic age gaps, they are often subverting tradition, by instead showing an older woman with a younger man. This includes “Babygirl” (female boss with an intern), “The Idea of You” (40-year-old with a boy-band star) and “Marty Supreme” (ageing actress with a young table-tennis pro). These do not reflect common situations. But that is rarely Hollywood’s intent.

Are relationships between people of different ages less healthy? The conventional wisdom is that partners born decades apart may not share the same interests and values (not to mention pop-culture references). Power imbalances may emerge, too, particularly when the older partner earns more. Surveys show that people often disapprove of age gaps because they believe the younger partner may be looking for a parental figure or—worse?—a fortune. (“I ain’t saying she’s a gold digger,” Kanye West sang in a popular song, saying exactly that.) Couples with age differences of at least ten years report suffering more social disapproval. Ms Joy has said online critics have branded her a “child bride” and other “terrible, terrible things”.

However, the evidence suggests that such relationships are relatively happy and last just as long. A study published in 2002 by researchers at Maastricht University found that marriages with larger age gaps are associated with higher life satisfaction for both spouses. Researchers at Britain’s Office for National Statistics also found no strong link between age differences and divorce among couples in England and Wales. American evidence points the same way. Data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show that couples with larger age gaps last even longer than those with smaller ones. Using a sample of nearly 5,000 long-term, live-in relationships, The Economist estimates that a five-year difference in age is associated with staying together an extra six weeks.

Age gaps do bring some risks, however. The incidence of intimate-partner homicide rises sharply when the man is at least 16 years older than the woman (or the woman at least ten years older than the man). But such cases are rare. For most relationships other factors are more important: “Whether it’s a ten-year gap, or a two-year gap, your relationship is going to be driven by other things” than age difference, says Paul Eastwick, a professor at the University of California, Davis. Like, say, what show to watch on Netflix. Mr Viall and Ms Joy can certainly agree on that. ■

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The steal industry is booming

Are we all plagiarists now? The steal industry is booming January 22nd 2026 It is a truth universally acknowledged that people get away with plagiarism a lot—even when the line they are plagiarising is “It is a truth universally acknowledged…” In 2007 chapters of Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice” were sent with minor variations to 18 editors, purporting to be a “new” novel entitled “First Impressions”. Despite it containing one of the most famous lines in English literature, only one editor called out the hoaxer. “My first impression” on reading “First Impressions”, he replied with Austenian archness, was “mild annoyance” then “laughter”.

Many find plagiarism less droll, as a new book by Roger Kreuz, an academic, makes clear. His book canters through 20 centuries of plagiarism, from musical plagiarism (Bob Dylan) to literary plagiarism (Dylan Thomas), oratorical plagiarism (Joe Biden) and all-of-the-above plagiarism. Mr Dylan’s acceptance speech for the Nobel prize in literature, which referred to “Moby Dick” , had echoes of a less-than-noble literary source—SparkNotes.

This book, which offers more anecdotes about plagiarism than an argument about it, feels like an opportunity lost. Plagiarism is an old vice—the word was borrowed (plagiarised?) from a poem by Martial, a Roman writer—that feels newly relevant. What counts as intellectual theft—and what is considered acceptable borrowing or inspiration—are the great questions of the AI era. That is true both personally (is it alright to use AI to write that job application or love letter?) and legally (will popular AI models be punished for training on copyrighted material?).

Part of the problem is that there is no precise definition of plagiarism—it ranges from verbatim copying to the fudgier theft of concepts. As with pornography, it is assumed you “know it when [you] see it”. And you see it a lot now, thanks to technology. When Shakespeare nabbed the barge scene in “Antony and Cleopatra” from Plutarch, he had to write it out by hand, which was a bother. To churn out copies of knock-offs like “Martin Guzzlewit” and “Oliver Twiss” took Dickens’s imitators time and typesetting. Since the advent of the “Ctrl” and “C” keys, plagiarism has become easier to do—and harder to Ctrl.

It is even harder now. Large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude are trained on vast quantities of written, often copyrighted, material, so some feel that their output rips off authors and other creative types. Writers have filed lawsuits against AI companies. In one complaint, plaintiffs said tech firms were committing “systematic theft on a mass scale”. Anthropic recently agreed to pay authors $1.5bn for using 7m pirated books for training. (This reviewer could receive a payout from that settlement for one of her books.) On January 15th two publishers asked to join a class-action lawsuit against GoogleAI for engaging “in one of the most prolific infringements of copyrighted materials in history”.

What about users of these LLMs? Training oneself on millions of books, then spitting out your own words afterwards, is a very good definition of what a writer does. Moreover, using ChatGPT, Mr Kreuz argues, does not make you a plagiarist, since it is not cribbing from a single “original” text. He suggests LLMs are doing unacknowledged “ghostwriting”. To many that is too generous: this is still plagiarism, but with an AI accomplice. It is a layered larceny, almost a double crime: the AI steals and often repeats the words it was trained on, then you take those words, as your own, for profit—the profit of imposture.

It is a thorny issue. But then it always was. Creativity and originality have been in a difficult dance for centuries. A list of authors accused of filching is a “Who’s Who” of literature: Chaucer, Shakespeare, Swift. Some, it is true, did take a principled stand: 250 years ago Laurence Sterne inveighed against plagiarists who, like apothecaries, merely pour content from “one vessel into another”. As it turned out, he had nicked that line from a fellow author, Robert Burton. There is, said Mark Twain , not “much of anything in any human utterance…except plagiarism!”

It is often said to be romanticism and its obsession with “originality” that caused people to care. But plagiarism has always irked. The Latin word plagiarius means “kidnapper”, a criminal who should, according to Roman law, be “thrown to the wild beasts at the first public spectacle”. The authors who brought a case against Anthropic might feel likewise.

And there is a murky but crucial distinction between inspiration and straight-up cribbing. T.S. Eliot said that “Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.” Few ever bother to include the second part of the quote, which notes that “Bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different.” Any author takes at least some inspiration from other works. The case against Anthropic partially failed: a judge likened Anthropic to a “reader aspiring to be a writer” who uses others’ words to “create something different”.

What really changed things, Mr Kreuz argues, was less a new literary category than a legal one. With the creation of copyright in the 18th century, copying rights could be more precisely articulated—and copying wrongs more clearly prosecuted. Authorship, says Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, a professor of English at Oxford, “is a profession” so “you have to guard your property”. Charles Dickens sued printers who churned out knock-offs partly from authorial umbrage but also for money.

Technology changed things too: printing meant that more people could read and buy books—and check what was stolen. It is changing things again. Universities are increasingly turning to AI to spot AI-written work (even as students use services like Dumb it Down to make their AI-fuelled work sound more believable). It can be detected. Chris Caren, the boss of Turnitin, a popular plagiarism detector, describes plagiarised prose as “beige”: “well-written, but not very dynamic”. It has verbal tics: it is keen on dreary words like “holistic” and notably keen on “notably”.

The dance is changing again. And now it is not just authors who have to think about it, but all of us. Mr Kreuz notes that mentions of plagiarism in the New York Times have increased eight-fold since the 1950s. Perhaps because there is more. But also, surely, because it is fun. Plagiarism stories follow a perfect tragic arc: a flawed hero suffers a whopping comeuppance. It is a wonderful spectacle. And for what do we live, but to make sport for our neighbours, and laugh at them in our turn? Or did someone else say that? ■

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The “last emperor” of haute couture died on January 19th, aged 93

Valentino was a fashion designer who rose above fashion trends The “last emperor” of haute couture died on January 19th, aged 93 January 22nd 2026 IT ALL STARTED, Valentino Garavani remembered, with “Ziegfeld Girl” (1941). He went to see the film when he was young. The beauty of its stars, including Lana Turner and Judy Garland , had been enhanced by their costumes: fringed gowns, feathers and billowing overskirts.

“From that moment,” he later recalled, “I decided I wanted to create clothes for ladies.” Over the course of an almost 70-year career, he did just that—and more. Mr Garavani (pictured), who died on January 19th, aged 93, founded a fashion empire that is worth around $6bn. He earned a reputation as one of the 20th century’s greatest designers: the “last emperor” of haute couture, as a documentary in 2008 called him.

Valentino—it did not take long for him to become a mononym—studied in Milan, then Paris, learning from masters such as Cristóbal Balenciaga and Guy Laroche. In 1959 he launched his own fashion house in Rome with some help from his father.

His design sensibilities were evident from the start. He worked with graceful silhouettes and luxurious fabrics. His gowns were always sophisticated—and very often sexy—but never stuffy. Later Valentino stamped his authority on shoes, too. The Rockstud, a pointed slingback heel adorned with triangular studs, became a cult item. (Alessandro Michele, Valentino’s creative director, has launched a new design for the 2026 collection.)

Another constant was his trademark colour, red, resembling a poppy’s bright petals. It was inspired by the world of performance. The couturier’s strongest memory of seeing “Carmen” in Barcelona was the opera house’s sumptuous costumes and velvet interiors. Valentino included a red dress in almost every collection.

It was fitting, then, that actresses brought him fame, starting with Elizabeth Taylor , who wore one of his designs to mark the release of “Spartacus” (1960). She soon returned to Valentino’s atelier to claim seven outfits in return for the publicity. Hollywood stars often chose Valentino for awards ceremonies.

Valentino’s aesthetic won him other important clients. After John F. Kennedy’s murder, Jackie Kennedy asked Valentino to make her mourning clothes; she later wore a short dress from his “white collection” to marry Aristotle Onassis. Royal brides in Greece, the Netherlands and Sweden turned to Valentino for their wedding dresses, too, believing he could conjure up the majesty required for the occasion.

To be sure, Valentino was never much interested in the logistics of running a business. In 1960, when he was on the verge of bankruptcy, he met Giancarlo Giammetti, who would become his business partner (and for 12 years his lover). The company has since changed hands more often than most garments on the racks at vintage stores: it is now jointly owned by Qatari investors and Kering, a luxury conglomerate.

But Valentino endured because he kept his vision of old-world romanticism. His collections did not hew to trends, whether grunge or power dressing. (The 1980s, with their exaggerated shoulder pads, were an “extremely vulgar” time, he thought.) When you look at designs by Dior or Yves Saint Laurent, it is easy to situate yourself in a particular time period, says Olivier Gabet, director of the Louvre’s decorative-arts department, which recently hosted a couture show. “When you go through the archives of Valentino, it’s very, very difficult to say: ‘There’s the 1970s’ or ‘There’s the ’80s.’” Valentino’s work has a certain “timeless elegance”.

His relationship with the silver screen came full circle. Valentino made a cameo in “The Devil Wears Prada” (2006), the greatest film about the fashion industry; the movie dramatised one of his catwalk shows. In a nod to his stature, Miranda Priestly (Meryl Streep), the fearsome tastemaker at the helm of Runway magazine, greets him warmly backstage as “maestro”. In the teaser trailer for “The Devil Wears Prada 2”, which will be released in May, Miranda is pictured strutting into the elevator of the Runway offices in—what else?—a pair of red Valentino Rockstud heels. ■

The provocateur’s story is also the story of America, says a new biography

Who’s afraid of Tucker Carlson? The provocateur’s story is also the story of America, says a new biography January 22nd 2026 He flopped on CNN and MSNBC. A hit on Fox, he was sacked again in 2023, only to rise up as powerful as before, interviewing world leaders on his own-brand network. Tucker Carlson’s career—like Donald Trump’s , with which it is entwined—has bounced between disaster and triumph. In his bilious radicalisation and plunge into new media, his personal saga is also the recent “story of the United States”.

Or so Jason Zengerle, now of the New Yorker, claims in his lucid new biography of Mr Carlson, “Hated by All the Right People”. This is a tale of hypocrisy and derangement, and the gushing of power from its traditional bastions to upstarts. Yet with the homage that even critical biographers often pay their subjects, the author may overstate his case.

Mr Carlson’s progress can be traced in two main ways. One is technological. In the late 1990s he was a snarky writer at the Weekly Standard (without the press, he argued, America “would devolve into a totalitarian police state within about 20 minutes”). Then he was enticed by the bright lights and lucre of cable TV. Things might have been different had he not bombed as a contestant on “Dancing with the Stars”, or if the game show he hoped to host had taken off. As it was, after successive misfires, he landed a prime-time slot on Fox News in 2016. Latterly he has broadcast on X and his own streaming network.

The drama’s other axis is intellectual. Mr Carlson is an inveterate contrarian, but otherwise his views have drastically evolved. Once a genial fan of John McCain and Israel, his ideological bona fides doubted by some Republicans, he rode the right’s high-speed escalator to a dark conspiracism. Now he hobnobs with neo-Nazis and foreign strongmen. The book’s title comes from a compliment he paid to Hungary’s Viktor Orban.

From another angle Mr Carlson’s story, like Mr Trump’s, is of a man who longed to join America’s elite and wound up decrying it. A gilded youngster by most standards (like Mr Trump), he reportedly aimed for the Ivy League but settled for Trinity College, Connecticut; later came those painful TV snubs. In a way he has been on a familiar journey, embracing increasingly eccentric ideas with age.

Was he—or any individual—to blame for the incendiary path of American media? In 2009 he maintained that the primary objective of any news outlet must be “to deliver accurate news”. The online Daily Caller, which he co-founded in 2010, was meant to bring civility to political discourse. Instead it sank into a grim contest for clicks with Breitbart News. The ultimate culprits, apologists might say, were consumer tastes and the algorithms that served and reinforced them.

As to why Mr Carlson thrived in this swamp, Mr Zengerle cites his “unswerving ambition” and “unbending will”. Plainly there is a market for his mix of preppy attire, puzzled expressions, smackdowns and nice hair. Crucially, despite in private scorning Mr Trump, whom in 2021 he called “a demonic force”, he grasped the president’s appeal early. He was prescient about rising news formats. And the arc of his career intersected fortuitously with those of streaming and social media when, out on his ear, he turned to X, just acquired by Elon Musk .

His own clout rests on the audience he built at Fox—and his audience of one, namely the TV-addled president, apparently an avid viewer. Mr Zengerle, like others, discerns Mr Carlson’s influence in the choice of J.D. Vance as vice-president and on other policies, such as concern for white South Africans. “He has descended into madness,” Mr Zengerle warns, “but he is speaking to millions.”

True, up to a point. America’s media market is so vast that its silos and echo chambers can be capacious. But they are still silos, as Mr Carlson shows. He has scoffed at the idea of a presidential run, which is just as well, as polls give him almost no support. Tellingly, in his interview with Vladimir Putin in 2024, he raised fixations of the online right, seemingly thinking Mr Putin would clock them (he didn’t). That is the problem with big echo chambers: from the middle of them, you can’t feel the walls.

Mr Carlson has bounded free of old media, one of the juggernauts that drove his success. But he is still riding the other, Mr Trump’s MAGA movement. Welcomed at the White House, he is a player in maga rows over foreign interventions (he opposes them) and antisemitism (he indulges it). How far he can retain his following and influence in a post-Trump era remains to be seen. In that, too, his story resembles America’s. ■

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What its relocation reveals about the film industry

The credits are rolling on Sundance Film Festival in Park City What its relocation reveals about the film industry January 22nd 2026 IN THE DAYS leading up to the Sundance Film Festival, Park City, Utah, is quiet with anticipation. Festival banners adorn lamp-posts and lights zigzag across Main Street. In the 41 years since it began, the festival has transformed Park City and offered a vital showcase to independent film-makers. However, in typical Hollywood fashion, everyone is already awaiting the sequel. On January 22nd Sundance kicked off its final festival in Utah before moving to Boulder, Colorado, in 2027.

No one is sure how the next era for Sundance will play out, but the festival is needed more than ever. Years of upheaval in Hollywood—the rise of streaming , the pandemic, labour strikes and corporate consolidation—mean there are fewer buyers for indie movies than there were at the advent of streaming. Distributors of feature films and documentaries are more risk-averse. “We’re coming out of the so-called ‘golden age’ when the streamers started to pay a gazillion dollars to buy content from Sundance,” says Violet Du Feng, a documentary-maker with close ties to the festival. “Those times are gone.”

This year also marks the first festival without Robert Redford , who died aged 89 in September. Redford founded the Sundance Institute in 1981 to help incubate independent film-makers and serve as an antidote to Hollywood’s frippery. (He named the non-profit after the mustachioed outlaw he played in “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid”, a Western.)

The plan worked. For decades the festival has provided a launching pad for newbie screenwriters and directors, some of whom became the industry’s leading auteurs, from Richard Linklater to Wes Anderson. This awards season offers further evidence. Three directors vying for trophies—Chloé Zhao (“Hamnet”), Ryan Coogler (“Sinners”) and Paul Thomas Anderson (“One Battle After Another”)—got their start with Sundance. The festival has also helped enliven whole genres. “The Blair Witch Project” was made for less than $1m, opened at Sundance in 1999 and sold for $1.1m. Then it revolutionised horror, grossing $486m in today’s money, nearly as much as the “Wicked” sequel.

Sundance’s move to Boulder illustrates two things about the film industry. One is how the geography of Hollywood’s film business is shifting. Tax incentives are king. Film production began to flee California for Europe and Canada in the late 1990s, when the dollar was strong, and continued to shift away in the aughts once more states and countries offered incentives. According to FilmLA, which tracks filming in Los Angeles, the region saw fewer shoot days in 2025 than in any year except 2020, when the pandemic halted filming. Sundance’s move is also partly dictated by dollars. Colorado offered the festival nearly $70m in tax incentives to go there.

The festival’s move is a savvy one. Boulder is still a mountain town, an indelible part of Sundance’s character, but it is bigger and easier to travel to. Park City is basically a collection of resorts. A hotel stay during the festival can cost a small fortune; film-makers complain that they cannot afford to attend. The top of Main Street offers a panoramic view of ski chalets, and Sotheby’s advertises townhouses starting at $9m. “There’s no question that they have outgrown Park City,” says Steve Fenberg, a former president of Colorado’s state Senate, who helped woo Sundance to Boulder.

Second, film-makers frame the move as an opportunity to double down on the importance of indie film when studios are offering audiences mainly sequels and remakes. But success will require new financing models. Brands may begin to play a bigger role. Last year Sundance partnered with Rolex, a watch firm, to help fund its screenwriters’ “lab”. Michelle Satter, who helped found and run Sundance’s artists’ programmes, says they are open to “corporate support, individual support, foundational support”, even “selling sweatshirts” to fund film-makers.

Amid all this change, the next crop of promising screenwriters may be wondering where to start. Redford had some advice for that, too: “Humour. Skill. Wit. Sex appeal. That order.” ■

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The rise of blues music

Popular music is getting sadder and angstier The rise of blues music January 22nd 2026 “DIE WITH a smile” by Lady Gaga and Bruno Mars was the anthem of 2025. The soppy ballad climbed charts in more than 30 countries and became the longest-running daily number-one song on Spotify , a streaming platform. Its appeal owes something to its mood: pop music has grown gloomier. Sad sells.

In an analysis for The Economist, MusixMatch, an analytics company, gathered lyrics from the Billboard top 100 songs for each week of the past few decades. Using AI tools, the company assigned moods to each track. The share of hits with lyrics invoking “angst” increased by 13 percentage points in the past two decades. This puts it neck and neck with “heartbreak”, long a pop staple, which has been on the rise of late, too. “Despair” also began to increase sharply after 2020. Now around a quarter of songs in the top 100 have lyrics that hint at misery—think of moody hits by Sam Smith or Billie Eilish .

Analysing Billboard charts since 1973, authors of a recent analysis published in Scientific Reports also show that lyrical “stress” has risen steadily, while positivity has declined. Both data sets measure Billboard hits, not every song released. It is possible there are lots of cheerful tunes not measured because angsty young people are instead streaming songs that match their moods. If pop sounds bluer than it used to, the issue may lie not with the artists but with listless listeners. ■

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Imagining how the West might lose in Ukraine is a first step to avoiding disaster

A chilling, yet plausible scenario: What if Putin wins? Imagining how the West might lose in Ukraine is a first step to avoiding disaster January 22nd 2026 The job of military scenario planner has never been harder. Just this month Donald Trump has kidnapped Venezuela’s despot, threatened armed action against Colombia, Cuba, Iran and Mexico, started a stand-off with NATO allies over Greenland and finally got his hands on a Nobel peace medal (without winning it). Who could have foreseen all that?

To an alarming degree, war and peace now depend on the whims of a handful of vain old men. Vladimir Putin is determined to add square miles to Russia, no matter how many Russians die or are impoverished in the process. Whether or not China invades Taiwan hinges on Xi Jinping, who craves a chapter in the history books and a chance to honour his late father , who was once the official in charge of reclaiming the island. Mr Trump is the least predictable of all, wielding American firepower willy-nilly to give short-lasting dopamine shots to his own ego.

Yet it is precisely when scenario planning is hard that it matters most. Carlo Masala of the University of the Bundeswehr offers a blistering example. In a short book, recently translated from German, he draws on two years of data, research and chats with officials and military planners to offer a scenario for a Russian victory in Ukraine . Many in the West are weary of the war there. Some are tempted by the idea that giving Mr Putin what he wants might bring peace. Mr Masala lays out where such wishful thinking might lead.

In his imagining, America forces Ukraine into a grim ceasefire, with Russia occupying a fifth of Ukraine’s territory. Mr Putin declares victory. Populists in Europe, including a future French president, chide liberal “warmongers” for backing Ukraine so lavishly, thereby needlessly prolonging the fighting and draining national coffers in Europe. America sharply reduces the number of troops it has stationed in Europe and redeploys them to Asia.

Unexpectedly, Mr Putin resigns and installs a young technocrat as his successor. The new president talks of a thaw in relations with the West. However, Mr Putin does not quite disappear from the scene. He still serves as head of a mysterious body called the New Russia Foundation.

In the occupied parts of Ukraine, the “new” Russia behaves much like the old one. Hordes of Russian settlers are bused in. Ukrainians who refuse to bow to Moscow are sent to re-education camps. More than a million refugees flee. Pro-Ukrainian guerrillas regularly attack police stations, prompting hideous retaliation by the occupiers against civilians. In the parts of Ukraine that remain free, trouble brews. Trainloads of young, well-educated Ukrainians emigrate. The economy flounders. Politics turns dirtier. President Volodymyr Zelensky calls an election and loses.

Russia rearms. At a secret council that includes a close aide of the “retired” Mr Putin, plans are hatched to undermine NATO without actually sparking a confrontation that Russia could lose. Any attack would have to be a surprise, giving NATO no time to prepare, Mr Putin’s aide suggests. At the same time, NATO leaders would need to be convinced that Russia’s aims were limited, thus reducing their incentive to respond forcefully. If, contrary to expectations, NATO responded forcefully, Russian forces would swiftly retreat. If not, they could hang onto their gains.

In Mr Masala’s scenario, the Kremlin starts by creating some distractions far away. Russian mercenaries in Mali round up villagers at gunpoint and put them on boats to Europe. Terrified that another refugee crisis will boost the far right, European leaders send naval ships to the Mediterranean, weakening NATO’s Baltic defences. China obligingly grabs a disputed reef in the South China Sea, and with it the full attention of America’s military chiefs.

Then Russia strikes. Two brigades of masked soldiers seize the small Estonian city of Narva. They quickly overwhelm Estonian border guards and meet little resistance from the townspeople, who are mostly Russian-speakers and have for years been fed a torrent of pro-Kremlin disinformation. This is a direct attack on NATO soil, and ought to trigger Article 5, the guarantee that an attack on one NATO member is an attack on all.

But there are obstacles. Russian troops disguised as tourists have seized a sparsely populated Estonian island, making it harder for NATO to reinforce its small garrison on the Estonian mainland by sea. America’s president has to decide whether to muster overwhelming force to repel the invaders in Narva, thus in his mind risking “world war three”, or let Russia continue to occupy NATO territory, thus making a mockery of Article 5.

In contacts with the White House, Russian emissaries vastly exaggerate the degree to which Russian-speakers were ill-treated in Estonia, and darkly hint that the Kremlin would use nuclear weapons if NATO attacks its troops in Narva—which is a bluff. America’s president swallows both stories. He refuses to risk a big war over a small Estonian city. Kremlin insiders quietly celebrate their accurate assessment of the West’s political weakness.

Flush with cheap victory, the regime announces another patriotic bombshell. Russia will merge with Belarus by 2030, under one president. No prizes for guessing who that might be. European leaders, with some populist-right exceptions, are horrified to discover that the old security architecture protecting them from Russia has collapsed. Xi Jinping is delighted at the demonstration that America will not stand by its allies. The global sheriff has retired. Less law-abiding types are now free to carve up the world.

It is an engrossing and chilling tale. But one risk of writing a book of dire warnings is that, by the time it is published, people may already be expecting worse. If Mr Trump follows through on his recent threats to seize Danish territory, NATO would be sabotaged from within, sparing Mr Putin the bother.

Nonetheless, Mr Masala’s scenario illuminates why Europe needs to take its own defence more seriously. Russia is still a long way from winning on the battlefield, despite devoting half its budget to the war. Alliances such as NATO may yet survive. If the West chooses to let its enemies win, history will not judge its leaders kindly. ■

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A blockbuster history claims that violence drove the Industrial Revolution

Did killers make the modern world? A blockbuster history claims that violence drove the Industrial Revolution January 15th 2026 Like many planters in 18th-century Jamaica, Thomas Thistlewood grew rich by forcing other people to work for him at gunpoint. Unlike most slaveowners, he kept a detailed record of his own cruelty. His diaries, never intended for publication, offer valuable insights into the day-to-day horrors of slavery . In matter-of-fact prose, Thistlewood describes whipping slaves and rubbing chilli into their wounds; raping more than 100 women; and punishing a runaway by shackling him, smearing him with molasses and exposing him “naked to the flies all day”.

Clifton Crais, a historian at Emory University, uses Thistlewood’s ghastly story—and many more like it—to illustrate a striking argument. In his view, brutality like Thistlewood’s was not merely a scar on the modern world but essential to creating it. In “The Killing Age”, he claims that “without…globalised violence, the Industrial Revolution would not have happened.”

He is building on two ideas that have long been popular on the campus left. First, that the West is to blame for most of the world’s ills. As Mr Crais puts it, “killing [has been] the West’s most profound contribution to world history.” Second, that capitalism is a jolly bad thing. (This “economic system is the cause of violence”, says the platform of the Democratic Socialists of America, a party whose members include Zohran Mamdani, the charismatic new mayor of New York.)

It is always tempting to describe the past in ways that reflect the present. Shakespeare played up what a repulsive villain King Richard III was because he could not afford to upset the Tudor dynasty that overthrew the hunchbacked monarch. British imperialists lauded the Roman empire as a backhanded way of justifying their own “civilising” mission.

This year, as the United States turns 250 , MAGA types are promoting a self-congratulatory kind of history. The White House’s “Taskforce 250” urges unrestrained joy at “the greatest political journey” of all time. By contrast, the New York Times’s “1619 Project” dates the nation’s true founding from the day the first slave ship docked and describes racial injustice as the central fact of American history.

Mr Crais makes an even bolder argument, and applies it more broadly. Over 700 gore-splattered pages, he contends that “capitalism’s ‘big bang’—a turning-point in the history of the planet—emerged out of nothing less and nothing more than the globalised use of violence to make money.”

His reasoning goes like this. Weapons technology improved dramatically in the West in the late 1700s. Many new guns, often wielded by private firms such as the British East India Company, were used to conquer and plunder foreign lands. Others were sold to local warlords, who then preyed on their neighbours. Global trade was thus driven by an arms race. All around the world, people either bought guns or were robbed by those who had. So they sold what they could to raise the necessary funds: wax, camphor and birds’ nests from the jungles of Borneo; ivory from Africa; slaves from almost everywhere.

With a barrage of statistics, Mr Crais shows that weapons were indeed a big business. During the 19th century, he notes, England’s annual imports of Indian potassium nitrate were enough to make gunpowder for 1bn-3bn musket shots, more than the number of people in the world at the time. The profits from arms-dealing, looting and enslavement were vast, and some of the cash was invested in the coal-powered factories and railways that made up the Industrial Revolution. Thus, “destruction made the modern world” and sowed the seeds of today’s existential threat, climate change.

There are big holes in this argument. It is far from clear that the world grew more violent after the late 1700s. The torture that Thistlewood inflicted, though vile, was not obviously worse than that inflicted by slave-owners in previous times and in other places. (The Romans, for example, practised crucifixion.) The warlords and imperialists of the 19th century were not obviously more brutal and rapacious than the warlords and imperialists of earlier ages, from the crusaders who sacked Constantinople to the Mongols who rode bloodshod over Eurasia.

Data about the distant past are sketchy and disputed, but scholars such as Steven Pinker of Harvard argue that there has been a dramatic decline in violence over the centuries. The homicide rates in 14th-century Germany, Italy and Spain were, respectively, roughly 70, 200 and 50 times higher than they are now. In some pre-modern hunter-gatherer societies, as many as a third of people died violently.

For 18 blood-drenched centuries after the birth of Jesus, global income per head barely budged. Then, after 1820, it shot up 14-fold (see chart). It is simply not plausible that violence caused this sudden great enrichment. What changed was not “man’s inhumanity to man”, a phrase coined by Robert Burns in 1784, but an explosion of innovation by the poet’s contemporaries. That single decade, for example, saw the invention of the power loom, paddle steamer, threshing machine and bifocal glasses.

The fundamental driver of the Industrial Revolution was the invention, spread and application of new ideas. This in turn depended on an earlier technology—printing—which allowed the price of a book to fall from months of wages for a typical worker to a couple of hours. Knowledge is cumulative and advanced ever faster as more and more people had the means to learn, digest and build upon the ideas that came before them.

Did the profits of slavery and colonialism accelerate this process, as some argue? Perhaps. But if so, probably not by much. European powers with large colonies industrialised at roughly the same pace as those with insignificant ones. The slave trade was no weightier in the British economy than sheep farming, yet few people claim that “sheep farming financed the Industrial Revolution”, notes a study by Kristian Niemietz of the Institute of Economic Affairs, a free-market think-tank.

“The Killing Age” is deeply researched and contains some fascinating passages about who killed whom and who stole what in parts of the world to which too little attention is paid, from Darfur to New Zealand. It offers interesting digressions on the environmental harm caused by 19th-century whalers and elephant-hunters. But the author, who often says “infinitely” when he means “very much”, has a tendency to exaggerate. And his central thesis is bunk. The modern world has been cursed by killers, but it was built by boffins. ■

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“Strangers”, a new memoir, taps into a trend of documenting worst-case marital scenarios

How well do you know the person lying next to you in bed? “Strangers”, a new memoir, taps into a trend of documenting worst-case marital scenarios January 15th 2026 IF YOU ENJOY a good yarn about a terrible husband, you have been spoilt for choice in recent years. Malevolent men are everywhere on television, thrillingly dependable in their awfulness. There was “Big Little Lies” (violent husband), “The Undoing” (murderous husband) and “The White Lotus” (depending on the season, fraudulent, greedy, and unfaithful husbands). In “Bad Sisters” four women try to rescue their sibling from not one but two psychopathic spouses. The men in “All Her Fault”, a recent mini-series, are either manipulative and deceitful or selfish and inept. Perhaps the #MeToo movement has moved into writers’ rooms. Whatever the explanation, these husbands seem to be emphasising the “worse” part of “for better or for worse”.

Now comes “Strangers”, a memoir that is at once a horror story, a record of suffering and a cautionary tale. Belle Burden (pictured below) begins her narrative in March 2020. With New York in lockdown, she has decamped to a summer home in Martha’s Vineyard along with her husband, James, and two of their children. They settle into a routine of cocktails and home cooking.

Then comes the jump scare. One evening, as Ms Burden is cleaning up after dinner, she gets a voicemail message from an unknown number. “I’m sorry to tell you this,” a man says, “but your husband is having an affair with my wife.”

At first James is regretful, offering Ms Burden assurances that the relationship is over and that the other woman “meant nothing” to him (a line that has been used in many a bad Hollywood movie and therapy session). But the next morning, his demeanour has changed. He is cold and implacable. He does not want their homes in Martha’s Vineyard or New York or even custody of the children. All he wants is a divorce. Ms Burden, stunned, had had no inkling that James was unhappy.

Around 40% of first marriages in America end in divorce. The division of assets is often fraught—and it is especially knotty here, as there are quite a lot of assets. Part of the fascination of “Strangers” is its glimpses into a rarefied elite. The author’s father was a Vanderbilt; her grandmother was Babe Paley, a socialite described by Truman Capote as “the most beautiful woman of the 20th century”.

Ms Burden used trust funds to pay for her family’s homes, but she put both hers and James’s names on the deeds to celebrate their union. So when James comes looking for their prenuptial agreement, alarm bells ring in the reader’s ears. In the end Ms Burden ends up with their homes in New York and Martha’s Vineyard (as well as their private beach on the island).

Women may recognise aspects of themselves in Ms Burden, her riches notwithstanding. Like many wives, she had ceded financial decisions and planning to her husband. “I had chosen not to look,” she writes. “I had chosen not to know.” Marriage had stymied her independence. After she had children, Ms Burden found it hard to balance a job and motherhood. She left paid work , sacrificing her career in order to support James’s ambitions as a hedge-fund manager. After the separation, friends imply that this may be why James left her, for “women become less interesting to men when they don’t work.”

Ms Burden is an elegant writer. To her credit, her crystalline prose is unclouded by spite. Her mother and grandmother were also betrayed by their husbands: she does not want to have to pretend, as they did, that she is having a good time with her bad husband. “Be brave. Claim it. Say it. Break the cycle,” she writes.

Today more people are willing to air and share their marital dirty laundry. In 2023 Ms Burden published an essay about her divorce as part of the New York Times’s “Modern Love” series. It went viral, and she was inundated with messages from people sharing similar experiences of abruptly severed unions. As “Strangers” and myriad tv shows attest, even the most intimate and long marriages can yield nasty surprises. In the end, how well do you really know the person who lies next to you in bed every night? ■

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The row illuminates the role of art in divisive times

Are artists right to boycott the “Trump-Kennedy Centre”? The row illuminates the role of art in divisive times January 15th 2026 Footage of police brutality is intercut with pop stars in the music video. The lyrics of the song of 1985 are adamant: “Don’t ask me, Sun City”, the name of a resort in apartheid South Africa where some celebrities had controversially appeared. Bruce Springsteen , Gil Scott-Heron and other luminaries join in for the funky refrain: “I…I…I ain’t gonna play Sun City!” Fast-forward four decades and another boycott is afoot among American musicians, not of a repressive overseas state but of a flagship institution in Washington, DC.

The target now is the cultural complex which, at least on its façade, is now called “The Donald J. Trump and the John F. Kennedy Memorial Centre for the Performing Arts”. This ongoing ruckus, and comparisons with previous ones, shed light on the role of artists in divisive times. Must the show always go on—or should they pull the plug?

In December the name of the Kennedy Centre, as it was and is colloquially known, was changed by its board to include the current president. Maintaining that only Congress can alter it, critics are challenging that in court; meanwhile a stream of offended artists are pulling out of gigs. Jazz concerts planned for Christmas Eve and New Year’s Eve were cancelled. Ditto shows in 2026 by award-winning dancers and musicians.

The trouble did not start with the renaming, however. Mr Trump’s cultural enthusiasms—such as beauty pageants, bathroom design, scatological memes and reality tv —did not, in his first term, extend to the Kennedy Centre, which he avoided. Nevertheless, last February he declared himself chairman, alleging that some of its output had been “a disgrace”; drag acts were a particular bugbear. The board soon rubber-stamped this appointment. Mr Trump had helpfully purged the old trustees and installed new ones, many with links to his administration or Palm Beach.

As for the art itself: “woke” programming was avowedly out, patriotism and faith were in. Cue the first spate of withdrawals, including by the producers of “Hamilton” , a run of which was due this spring. “We’re just not going to be part of it,” Lin-Manuel Miranda, the hit musical’s creator, said of the revamped institution. In response to all this, the centre’s combative new president, Richard Grenell, has lambasted the cancellers, threatening to sue and shame them. Artists should perform for everyone, he insists. The arts, he claims, should be “politics-free”.

On that second point, he is mistaken. Art is often political, all the more so in an age when some of its key tenets—compassion for dissimilar people, free expression, cultural exchange—are contentious. Whether by speaking out or keeping schtum in protest, many artists have used their platforms for what they have seen as urgent political causes. The question is whether a boycott makes sense today.

The boycotters are entitled to follow their consciences, and curate their reputations, as they see fit. Especially now that Mr Trump’s name is above the door, some may feel that playing the centre implies support for him. Distaste for his administration’s treatment of some minorities, or for its selective approach to free speech, is understandable. One performer says administrators tried to interfere with a show’s content, an ironclad reason for anyone to pull out.

All the same, the practical impact of doing so is sketchy. Consider “Sun City” and the wider boycott of apartheid South Africa by many artists and athletes, a textbook example of the strategy. Encouraged by black South Africans, the campaign was part of a broad effort to raise awareness of the system’s evil and isolate the apartheid regime, with the clear goal of ending it.

Not much of that strategic clarity applies here. Whether or not his name stays on the building—and it is likely to come down eventually—for now Mr Trump is America’s president, having been fairly elected. Awareness of his excesses is already high. Some would-be attendees may applaud the boycotters’ stand. Others may just be disappointed.

And, whatever its benefits, not playing has a cost, in more than forgone fees. Performers who decide to show up, as lots do, have an opportunity to share their views, even if they risk not being invited back; some have taken it. More than that, they have a chance to forge and nurture sympathies across divisions and categories: a fundamental job of art, and the bedrock of any polity. In this respect, Mr Grenell is onto something. Most of the time, talking to everyone is the surest way to be heard. ■

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Despite rampant “carbphobia”, the circular bread is on a roll

How bagels conquered the world Despite rampant “carbphobia”, the circular bread is on a roll January 15th 2026 The Italians have their tarallo, the Kashmiris their telvor. Ka’ak and simit are nibbled in the Middle East and Turkey. All are baked round breads with a hole—and unappreciated outside their places of origin. Only one circular bread has a global reputation: the bagel. The story of how it emerged from obscurity into a popular treat with a holiday (National Bagel Day on January 15th in America) is a classic immigrant’s tale of perseverance, ingenuity and hard work.

According to Maria Balinska, an American journalist, in her charming book-length history, the first written mention of the bagel was in 1610. Regulations issued by the Jewish Council of Krakow detailed who could “send for” and receive bagels to celebrate a baby boy’s circumcision. One tempting (if dubious) origin story claims bagels first took off in Prussia, where Jewish bakers briefly boiled their rolled breads before “toasting” them, to evade a restriction banning non-Christians from baking.

Bagels came to America with Jewish emigrants in the late 19th and early 20th century. Two main rival styles soon emerged: Montreal and New York . Montreal’s bagels are smaller, denser and sweeter than their southern cousins, because they are boiled in honeyed water before baking in a wood-fired oven, which gives them a snappier crust with a hint of smoke. New York’s puffier bagels are better for sandwiches; the Montreal version is a superior standalone product.

However, bagels remained a niche Jewish food for decades: as recently as 1960, the New York Times felt obliged to explain, inaccurately, that “a bagel is an unsweetened doughnut with rigor mortis.” (Calling a bagel a doughnut because both are round and yeasted is like calling a savage beating a massage because both involve hands on bodies.) That was before mechanisation made bagels easy to mass produce. Sleeves of bagels now shiver in supermarket freezer aisles and turn up on fast-food menus. Purists may shudder—mass-produced bagels use a wetter dough, and the final product can be cottony and bland—but their popularity shows that even a bad bagel is pretty good.

Bagels, like hamburgers, hot dogs and pizza before them, have moved out of their culinary ghettos to become American foods with vaguely ethnic roots. Sales of the ringed bread were estimated at around $5bn last year and are growing steadily, with demand especially high in East Asia. Despite rampant “carbphobia” among the health-conscious, the average American eats nearly 40 bagels each year. Innovators have expanded beyond the traditional flavours of onion, garlic, pumpernickel and salt, and created novelties: rainbow-coloured, French-toast flavoured and (shudder) stuffed with cheese and buffalo chicken. Not bad for a petrified doughnut from the shtetl. ■

Music executives reckon the genre’s future lies outside its home country

The risky plan to take the “K” out of K-pop Music executives reckon the genre’s future lies outside its home country January 15th 2026 For a cool S$6,500 ($5,050), you can attend a professional course at SM Universe, a new k-pop training academy, opened in Singapore last year. SM Universe is the first facility in South-East Asia with backing from a major music label (Sm Entertainment). Its goal is to train the next generation of hitmakers to follow in the choreographed footsteps of some of K-pop’s biggest stars. Students include aspiring performers from France, Germany, Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines.

The academy points to a change in the popular music genre : South Korean pop is becoming less Korean. With demand for K-pop more muted at home, labels are eyeing markets abroad. The musical acts need to reflect their adoring audiences. HYBE, another label, now runs training programmes in Los Angeles and Mumbai. (HYBE is behind BTS, one of the world’s biggest bands, which is reuniting in 2026 for a world tour. BTS’s seven male members had to trade their mics for fatigues and spent nearly four years completing South Korea’s required military service.)

Going abroad “is a natural progression” for the K-pop industry, says Andy Lim of SM Universe. Artists hoping to widen their appeal already collaborate with American stars. For example, Blackpink, a girl group, has collaborated with artists such as Cardi B, Lady Gaga and Selena Gomez. Many now sing in English rather than Korean. (One of the biggest hits of the past year was “Golden” by Huntrix, the fictional group in “KPop Demon Hunters” , the most popular film to ever stream on Netflix.) HYBE’s founder, Bang Si-hyuk, has said the company wants to “get the K out of K-pop”.

But if K-pop is not pop music from Korea, is it just regular old pop music? Moa “Cazzi Opeia” Carlebecker, a Swedish songwriter who has written K-pop tunes, says the term no longer implies a country of origin or language but “a really fun music style”. It is ebullient, with catchy hooks and polished production. Melodies and transitions are written to be danced to, which is why academies treat choreography with the seriousness of North Korean army drills.

Each track includes a variety of sounds: K-pop songs often shift from ballad to rap or from pop to electronica . K-pop groups tend to have lots of members, so songs are often structured in a way that gives each a moment in the spotlight. That way, if a fan likes only one member of the band, there is still something for her (K-pop fans are overwhelmingly female).

Labels are not only exporting that musical style, but also the specific system by which k-pop artists are coached. Training is long, demanding and tightly structured. Hopefuls can spend six to ten hours a day, for years, preparing for their big break. They are starting at ever younger ages—some have made their stage debuts at the age of 13—which some industry observers find concerning. “To be honest, it’s not really healthy,” says Yeonsoo Do, a former star. “But you have to understand how the industry works.”

For Jason Jaesang Lee, the boss of HYBE, what a chart-topper does offstage is almost as important as what happens under the spotlights. Another crucial aspect of K-pop is “idol” culture and the intense devotion performers inspire in their admirers. Wannabes are judged not just on their voice or their dancing, but also on their discipline, teamwork and public presentation. K-pop training aims to develop talented kids into charismatic stars who “can connect deeply with their fans”, Mr Lee says. Students are taught the art of the selfie and how to win fans and influence them.

Early attempts at casting a wider net for talent have been successful. Katseye—a girl group formed in 2023 that has accrued hundreds of millions of streams and has a new popular single, “Internet Girl”—includes American, Indian, Filipina and Swiss members. They trained in Los Angeles under HYBE x Geffen Records, a joint venture between the Korean label and Universal Music Group. Katseye was formed during a televised talent show that let fans watch the trainees compete and vote on who would make the final cut. Only one of the six winners is Korean. ■

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Fifty years after her death, she remains the bestselling novelist of all time

The secret to Agatha Christie’s success Fifty years after her death, she remains the bestselling novelist of all time January 15th 2026 “HER WRITING is of a mawkishness and banality which seem to me literally impossible to read,” complained Edmund Wilson. Her characters “are no more real than Cluedo figures”, sneered Julian Symons. Wilson and Symons were prominent critics in the mid-20th century; today few have heard of them. But the object of their scorn, Agatha Christie , is revered, 50 years on from her death on January 12th 1976. She is the bestselling novelist ever, according to Guinness World Records, and her works continue to be adapted for film and television. A new Netflix series, “Agatha Christie’s Seven Dials”, will premiere on January 15th. Why are people still reading—and watching—her stories?

One explanation is that Christie favoured unlikely sleuths. Take Jane Marple, a spinster fond of knitting and gardening, who solves crimes in a dozen novels. Or Lady Eileen “Bundle” Brent in “Seven Dials”, who at first seems dotty but turns out to be doughty. (“To think was to act with Bundle,” Christie wrote.)

Even her most famous detective, Hercule Poirot , protagonist of more than 30 novels, is not hyper-rational and physically brave like Sherlock Holmes, nor quick with a gun like his hard-boiled successors. He is short, chubby and finicky, with a carefully waxed moustache and dandyish clothes. But her sleuths see things and pursue leads that elude the police, making the reader an accomplice in their clever independence.

Christie also chose isolated settings, including, most famously, the Orient Express, turning every character into a suspect. Jane Marple works in her charming village of St Mary Mead. Much of “Seven Dials” unfolds in and around a country home. These Edwardian locales transport today’s audiences to (what they think was) a simpler and more romantic time. More importantly, they allow her narratives to restore a sense of order at the end. Unlike, say, the globetrotting stories of Ian Fleming or John le Carré , in which victories only temporarily frustrate an implacable foe, Christie’s smaller worlds feel put right when the cover closes or credits roll.

Most obviously, Christie had an exceptional gift for plot. Her twists are cleverly disguised until the point of revelation, becoming obvious only in retrospect. “Seven Dials”, with its conspiratorial, slightly outlandish conclusion, is an exception, but nobody can write 66 novels, 150-odd short stories and 25 plays and be perfect every time. In short, the secret to her success is that she worked hard and thus became very good at her job. No twist there. ■

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The Golden Globes honour podcasts where stars praise each other

Do self-congratulating celebrities need more plaudits? The Golden Globes honour podcasts where stars praise each other January 8th 2026 The two biggest awards shows in America are mixing things up for 2026. In March the Academy Awards will present its inaugural Oscar for Best Casting. And on January 11th the Oscars’ boozy cousin, the Golden Globes, will also hand out a new prize: Best Podcast.

At first glance, it might seem odd that the Globes—which have celebrated films since 1944 and television shows since 1956—are now judging another medium. But that is to misunderstand the place of podcasts in the cultural landscape. These days every celebrity worth her larynx has a podcast, or at least appears on them: they have become as essential a stop on the film-promotion circuit as late-night talk shows once were. Podcasts may also have helped Donald Trump back to the White House: from July 2024 until election day, he appeared on 20 to Kamala Harris’s eight, and his were vastly more popular.

It is also to misunderstand podcasts’ relationship to the screen. Many films and TV shows are adapted from hit podcasts. They provided the source material for “Dirty John”, “Gaslit” and “Homecoming”, all of which picked up Golden Globe nominations in recent years. In 2023 Amanda Seyfried won Best Actress in a Limited Series for her turn in “The Dropout”. (The mini-series and podcast charted the rise and fall of Elizabeth Holmes, the now-jailed ex-boss of Theranos , a blood-testing startup.) And podcasts may have started as an audio medium, but they are increasingly a visual one as well. YouTube says that 1bn people watch podcast content on the platform every month.

The Golden Globes, then, are not wrong to include podcasts alongside film and television. But their approach is misguided. The six shortlisted shows raise depressing questions about podcasts’ evolution—and their future.

“SmartLess” features three famous actors (Will Arnett, Jason Bateman and Sean Hayes) chatting to other famous actors. “Good Hang” features a famous actress (Amy Poehler) chatting to her celebrity friends. “Armchair Expert” features a celebrity actor (Dax Shepard) chatting to other celebrities, with the occasional writer, academic or fan of the podcast thrown in for variation. “Call Her Daddy” features a now-celebrity host (Alex Cooper) chatting to other celebrities, mostly women, with the occasional news-you-can-use episode for the show’s largely female audience (“How to Leave a Bitchboy”).

“The Mel Robbins Show” is a self-help extravaganza; its popularity has made the host a celebrity. She talks to other self-helpers about “Why You Feel Lost in Life” and “How to Lose Belly Fat, Sleep Better, & Stop Suffering Now”. Rounding out the category is the inevitable bowl of spinach: “Up First” is National Public Radio’s daily news podcast. It has as much chance of winning as its hosts do of flapping their cardigan-clad arms and flying to their next breakfast meeting.

Of course, griping at nominees is an awards-season tradition. But the process used to select the nominated podcasts was bizarre. For the Globes’ film and television categories, studios and production houses submit titles for consideration. They are then assessed by the Globes’ voters: a group of almost 400 entertainment journalists from 95 countries.

To be sure, the podcast ecosystem is more diffuse. It has lower barriers to entry than film or tv. Voters could not be expected to listen to and choose from all 4.5m podcasts. But rather than approach production companies, the Globes asked Luminate, an analytics firm, to come up with a list of 25 of the most popular podcasts, taken from the five most widely used podcast platforms. Voters then selected six titles from that list.

Popularity and excellence have always been two separate, albeit sometimes overlapping, things. The Globes acknowledge this distinction already by offering separate awards for Best Picture and for Box-Office Achievement. They do not base their TV nominations on Nielsen’s ratings—otherwise they would have to recognise “NCIS” and “ Bluey ” every year.

The types of podcast that made the genre popular still exist, but the Globes’ approach means that they have been ignored. The first season of “Serial” was acclaimed for its deep reporting on a murder case, for instance, and similar investigative work was evident in “Missing in the Amazon”. There was the inventive immediacy of “Shell Game”, which examines AI at a personal level, and an illuminating portrayal of a musician in “Fela Kuti”. These podcasts were triumphs of storytelling and sound design.

Perhaps it should surprise nobody that Hollywood-centred voters chose mainly Hollywood-adjacent podcasts. But is it rude to wonder how much time each voter spent actually listening to the nominees? The five non-NPR candidates are loose and lack rigour. They are identical in form: the host(s) and guest(s) spend around an hour congratulating each other on their kindness, funniness and general wonderfulness. They are light on facts about the world and heavy on personal trivia. Anyone who has ever wondered about Dave Franco’s skincare routine (pinched from his wife, may involve snails), how many pictures Julia Louis-Dreyfus has on her phone (56,276) or what Mr Shepard calls breasts (blampers) will have their curiosity sated.

They follow a path blazed by Marc Maron, who recently ended his celebrity-interview podcast, “WTF”, after 16 years, and Joe Rogan, the most popular podcaster in the world, whose shows run to an average of two hours and 39 minutes. Similar open-ended talk shows abound; if you include political talk shows, the numbers swell even more. Plenty of these are pleasant enough entertainment for a run or a commute, but instil newfound appreciation for the time constraints imposed on traditional talk-show hosts.

Such programmes are easy and cheap to produce, and guaranteed to be popular as people like eavesdropping on celebrities being themselves. (Some call the relationship “parasocial”, which is grad-school lingo for “enjoys listening to”.) It is doubtful that most people listen to them intently all the way through: they are background chatter as you complete boring chores. The best moments get clipped and put on YouTube shorts, where they can rack up millions of views.

Why complain about something so many people love? After all, anyone who wants to keep ablamper of the news still has plenty of podcasts to choose from. Is it snobbery? A general suspicion of light-hearted fun? Jealousy that none of The Economist’s podcasts was nominated? No, possibly and no.

It is instead dismay that a form still so rich with possibility risks being swallowed by a dull conformity. Ellen Horne, who directs the podcasting programme at the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute at New York University, worries that the Globes’ choices, and the trends behind them, “will affect what gets cancelled and what doesn’t”. A star host is “a cheap shortcut: you don’t have to spend money building something if you’re just borrowing the celebrity power of a big name.”

The Globes’ foresight is commendable. It is good that they are choosing to recognise a new and important medium. But the Best Film category includes a range of ambitious and original nominees, not just hits. That the podcast category does not is a missed opportunity. ■

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They explain the country’s slide from democracy to dictatorship

Six books to read about Venezuela They explain the country’s slide from democracy to dictatorship January 8th 2026 IT MAY BE hard to imagine today, but in the 1960s and 1970s Venezuela was hailed as a model democracy. Then the oil price crashed—and Venezuela’s democracy fell with it. Economic growth slowed and Hugo Chávez, an army officer (pictured above), exploited the discontent, staging a failed coup before being elected president in 1998. Charismatic, with the popular touch, he launched a nationalist and socialist revolution. After he died in 2013 his chosen successor, Nicolás Maduro (pictured below), inherited a rotting system and made it worse. His regime jailed, tortured and killed opponents. Its spectacular corruption and dotty economic policies led to empty shelves, power cuts and inflation that peaked at 130,000%. These books explain Venezuela’s slide to dictatorship. Readers will have to wait for accounts of the Delta Force raid that seized Mr Maduro on January 3rd.

Mr Maduro has inspired much less ink than his predecessor. This volume of essays looks at how he turned a “hybrid regime” which was losing public support into a full dictatorship. It thus brings the story nearly up to date. Another chapter will be added to that tale when María Corina Machado , the opposition leader who inspired the defeat of Mr Maduro in an election in 2024 and was awarded the Nobel peace prize, publishes “The Freedom Manifesto” next month.

A compelling portrait of Chávez the showman, rich in telling details, by the Guardian’s correspondent in Caracas for much of his rule. He highlights the importance of the president’s hours-long live television broadcasts—social media were then in their infancy—in forging an emotional bond with millions of poor Venezuelans, even as essential services were falling apart and the constitution was bent against the opposition.

The British author of this readable biography was an avowed sympathiser of Chávez, whom he interviewed, and of Cuba’s communist regime. The book is representative of the enthusiasm that Chávez aroused among paternalist observers safely ensconced in their democracies in Europe who were largely blind to the authoritarianism, corruption and mismanagement of his governments.

The author was a minister in the second government of Carlos Andrés Pérez , a social democrat, who on being elected in 1988 inherited a bankrupt country and was obliged to impose austerity. This triggered rioting—known as the caracazo—in which some 400 people were killed, mainly by the police. In this lucid monograph Mr Naím explains how a technically sound economic programme was vitiated by Pérez’s poor political salesmanship. The caracazo inspired Chavéz to prepare his coup attempt of 1992.

A crucial turning-point in the consolidation of Chávez’s rule was a popular uprising against him in 2002 which turned into what he would claim was an attempted coup. In this account of the events—described by The Economist’s reviewer as “superbly researched” —Mr Nelson shows that the army refused to repress the opposition, prompting Chávez’s brief resignation. He returned to power less than 72 hours later, after an opportunist conservative attempted to exploit the power vacuum.

This volume of essays by American and Venezuelan experts analyses in detail why a seemingly solid democracy gave way to Chávez’s autocracy. Two failings stand out. First, although much money was assigned to social provision, corruption and patronage meant that public services were poor. Second, the armed forces were bought off with perks and privileges and left to run their own affairs. ■

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They are being mixed into coffee, cocktails and chocolate

Spore of the moment: mushrooms are the latest wellness-food trend They are being mixed into coffee, cocktails and chocolate January 8th 2026 HAS THE festive season left you feeling enervated? Consume Cordyceps to perk up or reishi to feel calm. Looking to get fitter? Eat maitake for heart health or shiitake to lower your cholesterol. Do you want to be more productive in 2026? Try lion’s mane for boosted brain-power .

The internet is abuzz with such tips, for wellness-industry folk aver that some mushrooms really are magic . A class of fungi referred to as “adaptogenic” (meaning they help the body manage stress) and “nootropic” (they improve cognitive function) is all the rage. According to Brightfield Group, a market-research firm, mentions of lion’s mane have more than tripled on Reddit, TikTok and Instagram in the past two years. Searches for “mushroom coffee” have increased by 1,000% on Google since 2022.

Products are sprouting up to meet demand. Supermarkets stock fungi chocolates and sweets. Marks & Spencer, a British retailer, sells lion’s mane vanilla lattes and fruit juices. De Soi, a mocktail company, adds reishi to its “mood boosting”, “stress soothing” drinks. Spacegoods, a British startup, offers an “all-in-one” powder in a variety of flavours. Alice, which produces mushroom chocolate, suggests eating a cube before going to bed: “Nightcap” to promote better sleep or “Happy Ending” to pique sexual interest .

Such products particularly appeal to health-conscious youngsters. According to McKinsey, a consultancy, they are most eager to try edibles that promise to boost energy, gut health or immunity. But as such products are labelled as food, there is little regulation of their supposedly medicinal compounds. And scientific research offers a more down-to-earth view of these mushrooms’ benefits, says Nicholas Money, a professor at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. There is no clinical evidence that mushroom drinks have their advertised effects on humans, he argues.

Chemical extracts from lion’s mane, for instance, have been shown to spur the growth of isolated nerve cells in Petri dishes as well as to aid healing in the nervous systems of mice. That suggests possible benefits, but stops well short of proving any effect on mental acuity in humans. Professor Money is also sceptical because of what he sees as a lack of research funding in this area. “If there was any evidence that they had this effect, pharmaceutical companies would be throwing serious money at them,” he says.

Such mushrooms, then, may be best enjoyed on a plate rather than in your morning brew. (However you consume them, it is inadvisable to forage for them yourself, lest you mistake a poisonous variety for a supposedly curative one.) Shiitake is a tasty ingredient in Asian soups or stews. Lion’s mane has meaty flesh, a lobster-like taste and is delicious sautéed. Think of them as food for the soul. ■

A new book offers an engrossing chronicle of a tumultuous period

The lessons of the terrorist violence of the 1970s A new book offers an engrossing chronicle of a tumultuous period January 8th 2026 The idea was to draw attention to the plight of Palestinians. The defeat of the Arab armies by Israel in the Six Day War of 1967 had resulted in the displacement of between 300,000 and 500,000 people. So in 1969 the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), a Marxist nationalist militant group, hijacked a plane travelling from Rome to Tel Aviv. The aircraft was blown up after landing in Damascus; its passengers were evacuated unharmed. The poster child of the attack was Leila Khaled (pictured), an elfin-faced young woman. A picture of her in a keffiyeh, smiling and brandishing an AK-47 , was published all over the world.

The following year another hijacking, this time of an Israeli airliner, went less well for Ms Khaled. Air marshals on board wounded her and killed her Nicaraguan accomplice, Patrick Argüello, before landing the plane at Heathrow. (She was later released by British authorities in a prisoner swap .) It was part of an audacious multiple-hijacking plan hatched by Wadie Haddad, the PFLP’s co-founder. Two other aircraft were flown to Dawson’s Field, a strip in the Jordanian desert, and were later joined by a third. The incident triggered a civil war in Jordan. The blowing-up of all three planes was filmed for TV news bulletins, inspiring a generation of terrorists to shoot and bomb their way to notoriety.

In a gripping book Jason Burke, the Guardian’s international security correspondent, draws on decades of research as well as interviews with terrorists. He tells the story of the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO), its subgroups and associated network of militant organisations, such as the Red Army Faction (raf) in Germany, the Italian Red Brigades and the Japanese Red Army. Revolutionaries from Europe flocked to training camps run by Fatah, part of the plo, to learn the ropes.

The book covers the turbulent period from the late 1960s to the early 1980s. The cold war that pitted the Soviet Union and its satellites against the West shaped the worldview of its characters. But the most notable change over the period was the shift in the terrorists’ motivations. The PLO and its offshoots, such as the Black September Organisation (BSO), which carried out a massacre of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics in 1972, were never explicitly religious. But violent Islamism took hold after the Iranian revolution and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979.

Governments had been feeble in the face of the hijackings, assassinations and bombings. They negotiated with terrorists for the release of hostages, provided attackers with safe passage and paid their ransoms. Little was done to improve airport security.

The attack in Munich marked a turning-point. Nine hostages were slaughtered by their captors during a bungled rescue attempt by German police. Increasingly governments whose citizens were in peril would call on special forces to kill terrorists and rescue hostages. The Israelis set the bar high with a daring raid on Entebbe airport in 1976. A year later, German troops successfully stormed a Lufthansa jet that had been diverted to Mogadishu.

It is the character portraits that make this book a page-turner. Andreas Baader of the raf was “spoiled, arrogant and lazy but with a brooding, scruffy charm”. He had posed for erotic pictures in a gay magazine and adored fast cars. Others saw him as a “bully and a braggart”. He often referred to women as fotzen (cunts). In Berlin’s male-dominated communes it was considered “counter-revolutionary” for a woman to refuse sex.

The suave, German-educated Ali Hassan Salameh, the son of a famous Palestinian “martyr”, became an organiser for the BSO, masterminding some of its most brutal (and botched) operations. He led the personal-security force of Yasser Arafat , who called him “my son”. Known for flaunting his access to Fatah’s money, he led the life of a playboy in Beirut, marrying Georgina Rizk, a former Miss Universe, in 1977. He was also a CIA asset whom the agency took to Disney World as a pre-nuptial gift. It did not stop Mossad, Israel’s foreign-intelligence service, from blowing him up with a car bomb in 1979.

But pride of place for sheer vileness must go to Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, or “Carlos the Jackal”. After a privileged upbringing in Caracas, and stints as a student in London and Moscow, he trained with the PFLP in Beirut. In 1975 he led an attack on OPEC’s headquarters in Vienna. Three people were murdered and 40 hostages abducted. (He was accused by Haddad of making off with the ransom payment.)

Ramírez spent the next two decades hanging out in communist-bloc countries and as a guest of the Middle East’s most notorious tyrants, eating in the best restaurants and carrying out bombings and murders both to order and on his own initiative. Extraordinarily vain, he would drive members of his team to distraction by preening for hours on end. He posed as a zealous revolutionary. He was undoubtedly a virulent antisemite. But most of all, he was a narcissist and a cold-blooded killer. (He later boasted that he had murdered 80 people.) In 1994 he was finally captured by French agents in Khartoum while unconscious after surgery on a testicle. He remains locked up in a French jail to this day.

Mr Burke makes a connection between the revolutionists of the era and the young Osama bin Laden . But the apocalyptic millenarians of al-Qaeda, Islamic State and the ideologues of Hamas are not cut from the same cloth. Their mainly secular forerunners had largely political aims. They were committed to the classical terrorist idea that change could be effected through the propaganda of the deed. When confronted with failure, irrelevance and the latent coercive power of the modern state, they either died or faded away.

The same cannot be said of their even more violent successors. Despite defeats, Islamic State remains a threat in Syria and its affiliates are a growing scourge in Africa. Meanwhile, sympathisers, often self-radicalised online and hard for security services to spot in advance, continue to carry out attacks on civilians—especially Jews, as in the recent Hanukkah shooting on Bondi Beach in Sydney. That is one thing that has not changed. ■

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John le Carré’s enthralling character saves the show’s shaky second season

The ice-cool hero of “The Night Manager” saunters to the rescue John le Carré’s enthralling character saves the show’s shaky second season January 8th 2026 It begins with the slyly ambiguous title. Superficially, to be a “night manager” sounds servile and tedious. Yet with a moment’s reflection the moniker becomes mysterious, even sinister. “Night” suggests darkness, moral as well as nocturnal. “Manager” hints at the firm grip of someone who handles that turpitude on your behalf: the world’s darkness, and perhaps his own.

A decade after the first season of “The Night Manager” brought John le Carré ’s novel to the small screen, his unrufflable protagonist is back for a second (on BBC iPlayer in Britain and Amazon Prime Video elsewhere from January 11th). Among its other lessons—not least how best to roll the sleeves of deluxe linen shirts—the drama is a study in character, and the varied ways to craft one who captivates and endures.

That first series, a hit in 2016 , introduced Jonathan Pine, a British ex-soldier and night manager in upmarket hotels, played by Tom Hiddleston with a feline stride and misleading grin. In an atmosphere humid with omen and intrigue, he became embroiled in a shadow world of subterfuge and gun-running; his foe was the suavely wicked Richard Roper, “the worst man in the world” (and, in the book, a reader of The Economist, as villains often are). The TV version had extra homicide and hanky-panky, plus a comeuppance that Roper evades in the illusionless original.

He is missed in the new season, as is his deliciously vituperative henchman, Corkoran, whom Pine bumped off. As the story opens, Pine, now going by Alex Goodwin—the latest but not the last in a dizzying carousel of aliases—is a different sort of manager, overseeing a nocturnal surveillance operation in London. A ghost from the past draws him into the orbit of another charismatic arms-dealer, “Roper’s true disciple”, and away from his desk to an explosion in Spain and a decadent pool party in Colombia .

The new adventure is untethered from the novel, and it shows. It strives to recapture le Carré’s mix of dodgy traders and rogue spies, sexy glamour and filthy cynicism, but too often the plotting and dialogue lack his worldly bite. Eking out a franchise beyond its source material—as in the long TV run of “The Handmaid’s Tale” or “Lord of the Rings” spin-offs—can seem venal and unimaginative. That “The Night Manager” just about pulls it off is down to Pine, a character of genius.

From ancient myths to modern fan fiction, some charmed characters have broken free of their texts and assumed lives of their own, leaping between narratives and art forms. Among the best loved and most resilient are some, such as Jane Austen ’s heroines, whom readers and viewers feel they know intimately, sharing their anxieties and thinking about them after a story ends. These figures can seem as lifelike as real people, or more.

Pine is not one of those. True, in Mr Hiddleston’s lithe turn, he is vividly physical. Like James Bond , a part for which the season of 2016 made Mr Hiddleston a favourite, he has a talent for violence (both dispensing and withstanding it) and a wayward libido. This guy likes women and they like him back, even before he discards his dowdy glasses early in the new series like a hot secretary in a corny film. He can hold his booze and psychotropic drugs.

Yet he also has a sentimental streak, a moral compass and an infernal conscience. Though rarely mentioning them, he is haunted by former lovers, the military father he lost young, and his own grimmest deeds. Even when he isn’t running, which he does a lot, he is a soul in flight. In the book he is glimpsed “lunging up and down the pool like a man who could never get clean”.

And all of this—the appetites, the guilt, the moral drive and the pressures of his deceptions—is suppressed behind his “hotelier’s smile”. For all the derring-do, Pine is a master of self-control, keeping his cool emotionally as well as barely seeming to sweat. He is as much a passive observer as an action hero, with what le Carré calls “the watcher’s stare that stays on you after he’s looked away”.

As Pine/Goodwin/whoever thrashes around in a jungle of conspiracies, the viewer strives to excavate the real him from the swirl of bluffs and impersonations. “You give the air of looking for someone,” a doomed paramour tells him in the novel, “but I think the missing person is yourself.” Rather than a surrogate friend or confidant, he is an avatar for all that is opaque and inscrutable in other people. He shows that some great characters last not because you know them well, but because you can’t. ■

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The genre holds up an unflattering mirror to society

What self-help books tell us about ourselves The genre holds up an unflattering mirror to society December 30th 2025 To understand modern self-help books, open “Always Remember: The Boy, the Mole, the Fox, the Horse and the Storm”. The sequel to “The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse”—and no doubt the prequel to the “The Boy, the Mole, the Fox, the Horse and the Massive Royalty Cheque”—these animal parables topped Britain’s bestseller charts at Christmas. They have sold many millions of copies (often a bad sign) and been described as “heartwarming” (a worse one).

Open this volume and it does not disappoint. Its animal protagonists are fond of life, each other and of saying things about love in a charming handwritten font. Its insights are supposedly aimed at children, yet loved by adults. “Sometimes your mind plays tricks on you. It can tell you you’re no good, that it’s all hopeless,” reads one entry, which recently went viral on Instagram. “But remember this; you are loved, and important, and you bring to this world things no one else can. So hold on.” The tone is like that of Winnie the Pooh , but without the grit and darkness.

These days the self-help genre is expansive, including picture books and poetry as well as tips for climbing the career ladder. Yet it is rarely as instructive as it claims: buy “The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People” and it is far from assured that you too will become a Highly Effective Person. All the same, such books are often profitable and always telling. They provide invaluable guides for social historians, for they tell us a little about who we want to be and even more about who we actually are. Read through a century of self-help and you are offered an archaeology of anxiety.

In a seminal Victorian volume called “Self-Help” Samuel Smiles told his readers, who were trapped in a hierarchical society, that all they needed for success was “Will” and the “HABIT OF ATTENTION”. “Think And Grow Rich” (1937) taught Depression-era American readers that what they really needed to be wealthy was to visualise themself “ALREADY IN POSSESSION OF THE MONEY”. “Atomic Habits” , a bestseller published in 2018, teaches time-poor modern readers that they need only follow the “Four Laws of Behaviour Change”.

More recent volumes show other traits. God, increasingly prominent in cultural life , has made His appearance in self-help sections, too. Reid Hoffman, the co-founder of LinkedIn, once said that social networks do best when they “tap into one of the seven deadly sins” such as greed or pride. Run your eye down a list of bestselling self-help guides—past titles include “The Five Types of Wealth” and “Mini Habits for Weight Loss”—and it seems that they do as well. The seven deadly sins may lead to seven-figure sales.

Many other self-help books commit their own, bespoke self-help sins. Vast numbers commit the sin of Tiresome Capitalisation; many commit the sin of graphs with no scale; several commit the sin of using the ghastly word “elevate”; others commit the unforgivable sin of poetry. “Each day I’m surprised/by the newness that I see…[by] the complexity of me” runs a poem in a newly released anthology called “Joy Chose You” which may well leave you feeling/that Revulsion Chose You, Too.

A lot of them aim at an antique grandeur. Stoicism is popular: Marcus Aurelius’s “Meditations” has a 4.7-star score on Amazon; a forthcoming book is entitled “How To Live Like A Stoic”. However, the style and aims of most are very modern—and nowhere more so than in their obsession with time. Smiles’s “Self-Help” was first published in 1859, the same decade in which Britain became the world’s first predominantly urban society. People who had once lived in a world in which to everything there was a season—a time to sow; a time to reap; a time to sleep—now lived their lives to the sound of the ticking clock.

That sound echoes impatiently through the genre. Where Marcus Aurelius had meditated on the futility of human endeavour given the “infiniteness of eternity”, modern self-help moves at a quicker clip. The recent bestseller “4,000 Weeks” reminds you that this period is a human lifespan. “Atomic Habits” offers the “Two-Minute Rule” to improve productivity.

Self-help is in one way a genre weighed down by the cares of adulthood. In another, it is curiously infantile. (See again “The Boy, the Mole, the Fox, the Horse and the Very Profitable Publishing Franchise”.) Peruse a list of self-help bestsellers, from “Why Has Nobody Told Me This Before?” to “Can’t Hurt Me”, and it may well feel less like a reading list for adults than the words of a tantruming child. Even when authors deploy a more adult vocabulary, the tone can be childishly petulant: one hit self-help book instructs in “The Subtle Art of Not Giving A F*ck”.

This, says Svend Brinkmann, a Danish psychology professor and the author of “Stand Firm”, an anti-self-help self-help book, is typical: there is a “prioritisation of whatever…is childish” in much of self-help. Many books celebrate the “authenticity” of untrammelled emotion and encourage readers to let go of “the ‘false self’”. The idea that every thought and feeling must be given free rein is surely a product of the solipsistic social-media age.

Books may evoke stoicism —but they do so in an un-stoical way. The subtitle of that forthcoming stoic book is “A Handbook for Happiness”. Happiness, in the English sense of the word, is not a very classical aim. “Happiness” (which shares a root with words like “happenstance”) is a fickle thing: a glancing blow of good fortune, not a perpetual state to be striven for. Ancient philosophers were not looking for something that “comes and goes” but to “live a good life”, says James Warren, a professor of philosophy at Cambridge University. You do not manage to live a good life just “by reading a book”.

Perhaps the biggest question raised by self-help books is: do they help selves? There is some slim evidence that they can, but the effects are small. There is much better evidence for other things that actually make people happy, and most involve what Iris Murdoch, a philosopher and novelist, called “unselfing”: playing with a pet or with children, going for a walk in nature, going to the theatre or socialising. Fulfilment is “all unselfing”, says Professor Brinkmann: it is found when “your attention [is] turned away from yourself into the world”. So perhaps this January you should read an un-self-help book instead. ■

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A new book examines the various threats to subsea cables

The internet’s vulnerable undersea tendrils A new book examines the various threats to subsea cables December 30th 2025 In January 2022 the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha‘apai volcano erupted with the force of a nuclear bomb, sending a plume of ash nearly 60km into the sky. For the island nation of Tonga, 65km away, an eerie silence followed. The sole undersea cable connecting it to the rest of the world had been snapped by an underwater avalanche from the volcano. Tongans could not text loved ones to say they were unharmed. Banks shut down; hospitals could not transfer patient records; pilots had to fly blind. The subscription for a satellite-backup system had lapsed and, with no internet access, it could not be renewed.

In a sense, we all now live on Tonga—but most of us haven’t noticed yet, argues Samanth Subramanian. The supposedly disembodied virtual world depends on 1.4m km of fibre-optic cables sitting on the ocean floor. These “scrawny, unprotected” things, no fatter than a garden hose, carry 99% of the world’s internet traffic. The modern world depends on this fragile filigree of subsea cables. The internet is so embedded into everyday life that it is only when it stops working that this dependence becomes apparent.

Mr Subramanian charts the history of this submarine wiring, and its vulnerability to physical, geopolitical and commercial interference. He notes that modern maps of fibre-optic cables look uncannily similar to those of imperial-era telegraph cables—partly for historical and political reasons, but also because existing routes are known to be safe, avoiding jagged rocks or seismic activity. He explains how cables are laid and repaired by a handful of firms. And he highlights the growing tensions around this subsea network.

Cables can be broken, accidentally or deliberately, by a stray anchor. They can be tapped by divers operating from submarines. America will not let its companies use cable-laying ships with links to China, or allow cables from China to land on its shores. For its part, China claims a right to oversee cable-laying and maintenance throughout the South China Sea, not just in its own territorial waters. It also meddles in other ways: having opened with Tonga, Mr Subramanian’s book ends with an account of a blackout in 2023, this time in the Matsu islands of Taiwan, cut off when Chinese vessels “accidentally” severed a cable.

Mr Subramanian is right to worry that what has long been a multinational, collaborative industry is becoming splintered along geopolitical lines. He notes that tech giants are among the biggest funders and users of subsea cables, “a situation primed for oligopolistic misbehaviour”. But he does not substantiate his claims that this lets them “hoover up every last scrap of data” or “dictate internet policy” abroad.

That is a minor quibble. These deep-sea shenanigans could easily be dry stuff, but this book wisely focuses on the people who build and maintain the network, and the very human consequences of their successes and failures. More books should be this short. The length of a novella, it makes a snappy point about a meaty topic: namely, that far from being weightless, the cloud is anchored firmly in the real world. ■

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His defection in the cold war helped MI5 turn the tables on the KGB

Oleg Lyalin: the spy who loved too much His defection in the cold war helped MI5 turn the tables on the KGB December 30th 2025 For Oleg Lyalin it was a dream posting. After a dull stint in Klaipeda, on the Baltic coast, he was on his way to “swinging London” in 1969. Ostensibly he was joining a Soviet trade mission; in fact Lyalin, a hard-drinking philanderer, worked for Department V, a kgb outfit that specialised in sabotage and assassinations. Two years later, he became one of the cold war’s most important defectors, handing Britain’s security service, MI5, a trove of intelligence that restored its reputation and led to the expulsion of 105 Soviet spies.

Drawing on recently declassified intelligence, Richard Kerbaj tells a gripping story of Lyalin’s role in helping to turn the tables in a spying game that the West had been losing. Unlike Oleg Gordievsky , who began passing secrets to MI6, Britain’s foreign intelligence service, a few years later, the reasons for Lyalin’s defection were personal rather than ideological.

Lyalin walked into a police station and declared himself a KGB officer. He wanted to be formally expelled so he could return home as a hero and divorce his wife. (He was involved with five other women.) In return, he would provide MI5 with information about the KGB’s mission in Britain and continue working for it from Moscow.

A few months later, police arrested Lyalin, who was driving erratically down Tottenham Court Road, “shouting and swearing”. Lyalin’s disgruntled wife, meanwhile, had been in touch with his bosses in Moscow questioning his loyalty to the cause. The result was an order to pack his bags and face “severe administrative action”.

Defection was the only option. Three weeks later, the British government ordered the mass expulsion of Soviet spies. The author argues that Lyalin’s defection “saved” MI5. That may be going too far, but it restored the agency’s confidence after Kim Philby , a British spy, was revealed in 1963 to be working for Moscow.

The way the game is played has changed, but the story still has resonance: Vladimir Putin choreographs the same kind of “grey-zone” operations against the West as his Soviet predecessors. As Sir Richard Moore, the outgoing head of MI6, recently stressed: “Many of our best and most highly motivated agents have been volunteers...Our door is always open.” ■

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The challenge is enticing those with reduced appetites to dine out

Restaurants are changing their menus for the age of Ozempic The challenge is enticing those with reduced appetites to dine out December 30th 2025 Otto’s, a restaurant in London, is known for serving generous portions of indulgent dishes: lobster, canard à la presse and burgers heaped with caviar and foie gras. But when a regular customer informed Otto Tepassé, the owner, that he was taking weight-loss medication and would be dining out less frequently, Mr Tepassé decided to adapt. The restaurant launched a menu of “exquisite bites” such as pan-fried veal. “You get all the luxury,” says Mr Tepassé, “but in small quantities.”

Other restaurants are downsizing their dishes, too. At the Fat Duck (pictured), a three-Michelin-starred restaurant in Berkshire, Heston Blumenthal offers a “Mindful Experience” option. (“Sometimes less really is more,” the menu claims.) The Banc, which has outposts in London and Dubai, has launched a mini menu with smaller portions of dishes such as sea bream. Renwick Hospitality Group, which owns several restaurants in New York , has added snack-size options to its menus (see below).

GLP-1 drugs such as Ozempic, Wegovy and Mounjaro mimic the hormone that signals fullness, suppressing the appetite and helping people to eat less. They have rapidly gained popularity: global spending on them reached roughly $54bn in 2024 and is expected to rise as pharmaceutical companies compete to make the medicine, often delivered by injection, more effective and easier to use. About one in eight American adults has taken a GLP-1 drug for weight loss, according to Gallup, a pollster. KAM, a research firm, estimates that between 4% and 7% of British adults are users. That is a similar proportion to the number of vegetarians (5%) or those with food allergies (6%).

Might the drugs take a bite out of the restaurant industry? Currently most GLP-1 users come from middle- or high-income households: the same people who can afford to dine out regularly. (In Britain 58% obtain the medication privately, 32% receive it through the National Health Service and 10% acquire it in other ways.) KAM finds that 57% of users plan to visit restaurants for special occasions only. For restaurateurs, that is an unpalatable prospect.

Though GLP-1 users want less food, they are willing to fork out for treats. And restaurants can slap a big mark-up on a tiny plate. “We’ve always seen in retail that if you shrink a product, you can still charge proportionately more for it than you would…if it was a bigger item,” says Jonny Forsyth of Mintel, another research outfit. “The same psychology applies here.”

Casual eateries are taking note. Donald Trump recently announced deals with drug firms to lower their prices, so weight-loss jabs may soon be available to more Americans. Clinton Hall, a burger joint in New York, has launched a “Teeny-Weeny Mini Meal”. Cuba Libre, an American chain, offers a “GLP-Wonderful” menu. For restaurants, it is time to think small. ■

They cover fake wars, true crimes and chatbot romances

The best podcasts of 2025 They cover fake wars, true crimes and chatbot romances December 19th 2025 “Articles of Interest”This podcast about the history of clothes answers questions such as: Why do brides wear white? How does weaving connect to early computing? It is essential listening, even for the unstylish.

“Final Thoughts: Jerry Springer”Before he was the king of trash TV, Jerry Springer was the Democratic mayor of Cincinnati. This series looks at Springer’s political career, which he unsuccessfully tried to return to late in life.

“Fela Kuti: Fear No Man”A 12-episode series about Fela Kuti, an innovative Nigerian musician. In the 1970s he fused a traditional west African sound with the funk, jazz and soul music of black America. In doing so he pioneered a new genre: Afrobeat.

“Flesh and Code”Travis had met the woman of his dreams. The catch? Lily Rose was a chatbot. This compassionate podcast tells the stories of people who have built relationships with AI companions .

“Heavyweight”A funny, poignant podcast about life’s unfinished moments. A former bank robber wonders how to atone for his past; a man reflects on the best way to honour his father’s dying wishes .

“Missing in the Amazon”In 2022 Dom Phillips, a British journalist, and Bruno Pereira, an indigenous activist, disappeared during a reporting trip in the Amazon. This thoughtful six-part series investigates what happened.

“Past Present Future: Politics on Trial”A vivid series about lawfare from David Runciman. He points out, for example, the similarities in the arguments used to convict Joan of Arc and Saddam Hussein.

“The Protocol”This documentary series traces the history of transgender medicine for young people back to the Netherlands in the late 20th century. A small Dutch study was used to justify hugely controversial changes.

“Shell Game”In the second season of his podcast Evan Ratliff, a journalist, examines how ai might change the workforce . His investigation involves establishing a startup with only five ai “employees”.

“The Wargame”Imagine this: after an explosion at a Russian naval base, the Kremlin blames Britain and deploys warships. Britain’s government scrambles. In this podcast former ministers and army chiefs act out their country’s response and ask: are Britain and its allies ready for war? ■

For more on the latest books, films, TV shows, albums and controversies, sign up to Plot Twist , our weekly subscriber-only newsletter

“Marty Supreme” and “The Housemaid” boast the star power that cinema needs

And 2025’s winners are…Timothée Chalamet and Sydney Sweeney “Marty Supreme” and “The Housemaid” boast the star power that cinema needs December 21st 2025 Who won 2025? In world affairs, this is a tricky question. But in Hollywood, the answer is simpler. The year’s champions are Timothée Chalamet and Sydney Sweeney. Their victory matters, not just for them and their agents but for the idea of stardom, cinema’s prospects and even, in a small way, the future of the human race.

Both appear in glitzy films coming out over Christmas. In “Marty Supreme”, set in the 1950s, Mr Chalamet is a table-tennis ace and hustler with big dreams and a bigger mouth. His character is in frenzied pursuit of his ambitions—and in flight from his responsibilities. In a screwball caper featuring assorted heists and animals, he is on the run from so many foes that you sometimes lose track of who is chasing him.

Skating between charming and obnoxious, Mr Chalamet’s manic turn lays bare the essence of the sports flick: what matters is not which game the hero plays, the film shows, but his grit and yearning and how much you care. It ranks with his enigmatic performance as Bob Dylan in “A Complete Unknown” , which was in cinemas at the start of the year. He may get an Oscar for this one.

Meanwhile Ms Sweeney caused a stir with an advert for a clothing firm. She and the punning strapline—“Sydney Sweeney has great jeans”—ignited rows about eugenics, the objectification of women, whether cleavage is inherently reactionary and whether Ms Sweeney had bazookaed wokeness. With his comic talent and svelte masculinity, Mr Chalamet is a latter-day heir to Cary Grant; for her part Ms Sweeney excites comparisons to Marilyn Monroe .

She made some movies, too. The set-up of “The Housemaid”, a twisty new thriller (pictured), is that the jealous wife of a hunky man does the obvious thing and hires Ms Sweeney as a live-in maid. The luxurious home turns out—surprise!—to be a nest of mysteries. (Such as: after an impromptu hotel stay, what do the amorous characters do about toothpaste?) “Christy”, her other recent release, disappointed at the box office, but she earned acclaim as a female boxer who battles prejudice and an abusive husband.

Mr Chalamet is the better actor; Ms Sweeney’s default expression is a vaguely peeved disdain. But her screen charisma means that, like him, she has become a bona fide movie star. Real stars lend their popularity to films, rather than the other way round. Fans watch their titles in two ways at once: they follow the story and at the same time fit the star’s role into the longer arc of their persona and career.

As well as talent and ambition, maintaining this status involves a delicate tango of intimacy and distance that is ever tougher to pull off. The star is the subject of fascination which, to retain their mystique, they must frustrate, shaping a public legend but guarding their private self. The trick, as Mr Chalamet and Ms Sweeney have both clocked, is to feed the publicity beast but never sate it.

In 2025 Mr Chalamet has kept up a nice line in sly stunts. He rocked up to a premiere on an e-bike ; in a funny video of a spoof marketing brainstorm, he suggests painting the Taj Mahal orange, the hero’s colour in “Marty Supreme”. An interviewer asked Ms Sweeney about the advert furore. Her aloof response was a withering stare that became a meme. (“People had a habit of looking at me”, Monroe said, “as if I were some kind of a mirror instead of a person.” Ms Sweeney is discovering what she meant.)

It is rare to achieve this standing in today’s fractured attention economy. Compared with the silver screen, streaming a film on your sofa, as more and more viewers do, dims the stars’ aura. In any case action franchises are now crowding out character-driven star vehicles. Contemporary actors in the old-school-star category—Tom Cruise, Tom Hanks, Leonardo DiCaprio —mostly ascended to it in the pre-streaming age.

If it is hard for stardom to flourish without cinema, however, the reverse is doubly true. Big-screen storytelling is struggling; without the draw of fresh stars, it may be doomed. Moreover showbiz, and in particular the actors who work in it, face a new threat from artificial intelligence. There are worries that holograms and clones may oust humans in some entertainment.

But AI actors, no matter how plausible, will never be true stars. No one will ever be curious about their love lives or views, as they are of Mr Chalamet’s and Ms Sweeney’s. This is the ultimate prize of their winning year. Stars like them are the best hope for keeping people in cinema seats—and on cinema screens. ■

For more on the latest books, films, TV shows, albums and controversies, sign up to Plot Twist , our weekly subscriber-only newsletter

They cover fake wars, true crimes and chatbot romances

The best podcasts of 2025 They cover fake wars, true crimes and chatbot romances December 18th 2025 “Articles of Interest”This podcast about the history of clothes answers questions such as: Why do brides wear white? How does weaving connect to early computing? It is essential listening, even for the unstylish.

“Final Thoughts: Jerry Springer”Before he was the king of trash TV, Jerry Springer was the Democratic mayor of Cincinnati. This series looks at Springer’s political career, which he unsuccessfully tried to return to late in life.

“Fela Kuti: Fear No Man”A 12-episode series about Fela Kuti, an innovative Nigerian musician. In the 1970s he fused a traditional west African sound with the funk, jazz and soul music of black America. In doing so he pioneered a new genre: Afrobeat.

“Flesh and Code”Travis had met the woman of his dreams. The catch? Lily Rose was a chatbot. This compassionate podcast tells the stories of people who have built relationships with AI companions .

“Heavyweight”A funny, poignant podcast about life’s unfinished moments. A former bank robber wonders how to atone for his past; a man reflects on the best way to honour his father’s dying wishes .

“Missing in the Amazon”In 2022 Dom Phillips, a British journalist, and Bruno Pereira, an indigenous activist, disappeared during a reporting trip in the Amazon. This thoughtful six-part series investigates what happened.

“Past Present Future: Politics on Trial”A vivid series about lawfare from David Runciman. He points out, for example, the similarities in the arguments used to convict Joan of Arc and Saddam Hussein.

“The Protocol”This documentary series traces the history of transgender medicine for young people back to the Netherlands in the late 20th century. A small Dutch study was used to justify hugely controversial changes.

“Shell Game”In the second season of his podcast Evan Ratliff, a journalist, examines how ai might change the workforce . His investigation involves establishing a startup with only five ai “employees”.

“The Wargame”Imagine this: after an explosion at a Russian naval base, the Kremlin blames Britain and deploys warships. Britain’s government scrambles. In this podcast former ministers and army chiefs act out their country’s response and ask: are Britain and its allies ready for war? ■

For more on the latest books, films, TV shows, albums and controversies, sign up to Plot Twist , our weekly subscriber-only newsletter

Producing a delicious bird gobbles up time and effort. You cannot just wing it

What goes into raising the turkey on your holiday table Producing a delicious bird gobbles up time and effort. You cannot just wing it December 19th 2025 THE FIRST thing to know about domesticated turkeys is that they do not really go “gobble, gobble”. Children’s books lie. Instead, turkeys emit either sharp seal-like barks or a strange trilling coo that sounds a bit like a basso pigeon.

The second thing to know is that they have no survival instinct. Wild turkeys have a shrewd skittishness, as any hunter knows. Farmed turkeys, however, will walk right up to you and peck at your shoes and hands. That is because the person entering their enclosure is usually bringing food. Yet that is true for chickens, too, and they have the good sense to run away first. After all, there will come a time when their keeper does not bring food, but takes them to the slaughterhouse to become it .

That time is now: millions of the birds will be devoured in the coming days. Families in France, Belgium and Switzerland will serve dinde de Noël as their centrepiece. Americans, having just eaten 46m turkeys for Thanksgiving , will consume around 22m at Christmas. Britons will polish off 10m. Turkeys became a Christmas staple among Britain’s upper class not long after the birds’ introduction from the new world in the 16th century; the turkey overtook the goose to become the most popular bird about a century ago.

Reams of advice and recipes emerge every year to help nervous cooks get their turkeys from fridge to table in a delicious manner. (The scourge of the cook is dryness.) Far less attention is paid to the long journey from farm to fridge. What, exactly, does the process of raising turkeys involve?

It may end badly for the bird but it keeps hundreds of small farmers in business. Baffoni’s Poultry Farm has been at it for almost a century. Giuseppe Baffoni, who came to America from the Abruzzo region of Italy, started with chickens in what was then rural Rhode Island. Today Adam, Giuseppe’s great-grandson, oversees the farm’s operations, along with his cousin, Zach, who runs the farm’s shop. Other family members help out with administrative work, wholesale operations and accounting. The next generation waits in the wings: Adam has a three-year-old daughter who loves feeding the turkeys.

Giuseppe and his son built the coops that house 1,600 turkeys and 25,000 chickens. The indoor coops are long and low: the birds have plenty of room to run but tall folk have to stoop once inside. In early December most of the turkeys strut around watchfully in two fenced-in, outdoor porches. “They like the cold,” explains Adam, “and they’re prone to diseases if the air is stagnant.”

Like most turkey farms, Baffoni’s raises broad-breasted whites, the most common domesticated breed. They grow relatively quickly, convert feed to meat efficiently, and look lovely and full on the table, though white meat is the least tasty part of the bird. Heritage breeds are leaner and fuller-flavoured—unlike whites, they can fly and reproduce on their own—but far more expensive and trickier to cook. (For purely gustatory reasons your correspondent would like someone to breed a turkey that is just one long spine and digestive tract with a dozen wings on either side—head, feet and feathers optional.)

In May and June, two local hatcheries send the farm a batch of 300 day-old poults every fortnight. The staggered arrivals mean they can offer various sizes for Thanksgiving and Christmas, from eight-pound (3.6kg) birds for a small celebration, up to 30-pounders (13.6kg). They can reach up to 54 pounds (24.5kg), though at that size they are probably destined to become ground or sliced meat.

When a bird’s number is up, its throat is cut. It is put into a cone to bleed, before being plunged into scalding water. The turkey goes into an agitator that removes most of the now-loosened feathers, then the bird is hung above a steel trough. An assembly line of workers sets about eviscerating it: removing the heads and feet, pulling out the pinfeathers and, if needed, cutting it into parts. The workers use slim, sharp knives which can slice through bone.

On an average day in the run-up to Thanksgiving, Baffoni’s slaughters and processes around 300 turkeys and 2,000 chickens. (Slightly fewer are required for Christmas .) That may sound like a lot, but a big farm can do around 4,700 turkeys and 8,400 chickens per hour.

Baffoni’s has the only federally inspected slaughterhouse for miles, which means every morning, crates holding live chickens from smaller nearby farms are stacked outside, cooing and clacking their nails nervously on the plastic. This provides an extra revenue stream, which the farm needs. For generations, Adam explains, chickens and eggs kept the farm going but the farm did not go into the black until the year’s end. Turkeys put them there. “Everyone came to the farm for their turkey,” Adam recalls. “The week before Thanksgiving sometimes we’d come help out because my dad, his cousins, my grandfather: they’d be here until nine or ten pm, getting turkeys killed, prepped, bagged, chilled, and ready for orders.”

Yet for years “it wasn’t cool to be a local farm”, Adam says. “When my dad was young, grocery stores were the cool thing: so clean and convenient.” Now the pendulum has swung back: urbanites love the idea of knowing the farmer who produced their turkeys.

But surviving at Baffoni’s size is tough. They sell turkeys for $5.19 per pound, but you have to come to the farm to pick them up. Butterball, a large American brand, sells its frozen in every supermarket for as little as $0.97 per pound. The work is back-breaking, unglamorous and relentless. Adam left to go to college and work in restaurants in Providence, the state capital, but found his way back after the pandemic.

Today the farm occupies around 30 hectares, but most of that is woods. Johnston, just a few miles outside Providence, is no longer rural; the farm is now tucked among streets of single-storey suburban homes. Adam explains that when land adjacent to the farm comes up for sale, the family tends to buy it to extend their buffer, the better to prevent the unwitting from accidentally buying a home too close to the sounds and smells (sweet mother of God, the smells) of an active poultry farm.

“What we have here,” says Adam, with no small amount of pride, “has been built up over a long time by generations of people who’ve shared the same vision for what this place should be.” He says his parents never pressed him to join the family business and he found it easy to return. Asked if he wants to work with his daughter one day, he is philosophical. “It’s important to me that I keep it going long enough so that’s an option. [But] I want to introduce her to everything in the world.”

Turkey farms may be unromantic, but they play a vital role in cherished traditions. To many the bird embodies the shared merriment of the holidays. “The Christmas Song”—sung most famously by Nat King Cole—observes that “Everybody knows a turkey and some mistletoe/Help to make the season bright.” In “A Christmas Carol” Ebenezer Scrooge’s redemption is complete when he gives an enormous turkey to Bob Cratchit, his long-suffering clerk. Talk about clucking festive. ■

Producing a delicious bird gobbles up time and effort. You cannot just wing it

What goes into raising the turkey on your holiday table Producing a delicious bird gobbles up time and effort. You cannot just wing it December 18th 2025 THE FIRST thing to know about domesticated turkeys is that they do not really go “gobble, gobble”. Children’s books lie. Instead, turkeys emit either sharp seal-like barks or a strange trilling coo that sounds a bit like a basso pigeon.

The second thing to know is that they have no survival instinct. Wild turkeys have a shrewd skittishness, as any hunter knows. Farmed turkeys, however, will walk right up to you and peck at your shoes and hands. That is because the person entering their enclosure is usually bringing food. Yet that is true for chickens, too, and they have the good sense to run away first. After all, there will come a time when their keeper does not bring food, but takes them to the slaughterhouse to become it .

That time is now: millions of the birds will be devoured in the coming days. Families in France, Belgium and Switzerland will serve dinde de Noël as their centrepiece. Americans, having just eaten 46m turkeys for Thanksgiving , will consume around 22m at Christmas. Britons will polish off 10m. Turkeys became a Christmas staple among Britain’s upper class not long after the birds’ introduction from the new world in the 16th century; the turkey overtook the goose to become the most popular bird about a century ago.

Reams of advice and recipes emerge every year to help nervous cooks get their turkeys from fridge to table in a delicious manner. (The scourge of the cook is dryness.) Far less attention is paid to the long journey from farm to fridge. What, exactly, does the process of raising turkeys involve?

It may end badly for the bird but it keeps hundreds of small farmers in business. Baffoni’s Poultry Farm has been at it for almost a century. Giuseppe Baffoni, who came to America from the Abruzzo region of Italy, started with chickens in what was then rural Rhode Island. Today Adam, Giuseppe’s great-grandson, oversees the farm’s operations, along with his cousin, Zach, who runs the farm’s shop. Other family members help out with administrative work, wholesale operations and accounting. The next generation waits in the wings: Adam has a three-year-old daughter who loves feeding the turkeys.

Giuseppe and his son built the coops that house 1,600 turkeys and 25,000 chickens. The indoor coops are long and low: the birds have plenty of room to run but tall folk have to stoop once inside. In early December most of the turkeys strut around watchfully in two fenced-in, outdoor porches. “They like the cold,” explains Adam, “and they’re prone to diseases if the air is stagnant.”

Like most turkey farms, Baffoni’s raises broad-breasted whites, the most common domesticated breed. They grow relatively quickly, convert feed to meat efficiently, and look lovely and full on the table, though white meat is the least tasty part of the bird. Heritage breeds are leaner and fuller-flavoured—unlike whites, they can fly and reproduce on their own—but far more expensive and trickier to cook. (For purely gustatory reasons your correspondent would like someone to breed a turkey that is just one long spine and digestive tract with a dozen wings on either side—head, feet and feathers optional.)

In May and June, two local hatcheries send the farm a batch of 300 day-old poults every fortnight. The staggered arrivals mean they can offer various sizes for Thanksgiving and Christmas, from eight-pound (3.6kg) birds for a small celebration, up to 30-pounders (13.6kg). They can reach up to 54 pounds (24.5kg), though at that size they are probably destined to become ground or sliced meat.

When a bird’s number is up, its throat is cut. It is put into a cone to bleed, before being plunged into scalding water. The turkey goes into an agitator that removes most of the now-loosened feathers, then the bird is hung above a steel trough. An assembly line of workers sets about eviscerating it: removing the heads and feet, pulling out the pinfeathers and, if needed, cutting it into parts. The workers use slim, sharp knives which can slice through bone.

On an average day in the run-up to Thanksgiving, Baffoni’s slaughters and processes around 300 turkeys and 2,000 chickens. (Slightly fewer are required for Christmas .) That may sound like a lot, but a big farm can do around 4,700 turkeys and 8,400 chickens per hour.

Baffoni’s has the only federally inspected slaughterhouse for miles, which means every morning, crates holding live chickens from smaller nearby farms are stacked outside, cooing and clacking their nails nervously on the plastic. This provides an extra revenue stream, which the farm needs. For generations, Adam explains, chickens and eggs kept the farm going but the farm did not go into the black until the year’s end. Turkeys put them there. “Everyone came to the farm for their turkey,” Adam recalls. “The week before Thanksgiving sometimes we’d come help out because my dad, his cousins, my grandfather: they’d be here until nine or ten pm, getting turkeys killed, prepped, bagged, chilled, and ready for orders.”

Yet for years “it wasn’t cool to be a local farm”, Adam says. “When my dad was young, grocery stores were the cool thing: so clean and convenient.” Now the pendulum has swung back: urbanites love the idea of knowing the farmer who produced their turkeys.

But surviving at Baffoni’s size is tough. They sell turkeys for $5.19 per pound, but you have to come to the farm to pick them up. Butterball, a large American brand, sells its frozen in every supermarket for as little as $0.97 per pound. The work is back-breaking, unglamorous and relentless. Adam left to go to college and work in restaurants in Providence, the state capital, but found his way back after the pandemic.

Today the farm occupies around 30 hectares, but most of that is woods. Johnston, just a few miles outside Providence, is no longer rural; the farm is now tucked among streets of single-storey suburban homes. Adam explains that when land adjacent to the farm comes up for sale, the family tends to buy it to extend their buffer, the better to prevent the unwitting from accidentally buying a home too close to the sounds and smells (sweet mother of God, the smells) of an active poultry farm.

“What we have here,” says Adam, with no small amount of pride, “has been built up over a long time by generations of people who’ve shared the same vision for what this place should be.” He says his parents never pressed him to join the family business and he found it easy to return. Asked if he wants to work with his daughter one day, he is philosophical. “It’s important to me that I keep it going long enough so that’s an option. [But] I want to introduce her to everything in the world.”

Turkey farms may be unromantic, but they play a vital role in cherished traditions. To many the bird embodies the shared merriment of the holidays. “The Christmas Song”—sung most famously by Nat King Cole—observes that “Everybody knows a turkey and some mistletoe/Help to make the season bright.” In “A Christmas Carol” Ebenezer Scrooge’s redemption is complete when he gives an enormous turkey to Bob Cratchit, his long-suffering clerk. Talk about clucking festive. ■

“Marty Supreme” and “The Housemaid” boast the star power that cinema needs

And 2025’s winners are…Timothée Chalamet and Sydney Sweeney “Marty Supreme” and “The Housemaid” boast the star power that cinema needs December 18th 2025 Who won 2025? In world affairs, this is a tricky question. But in Hollywood, the answer is simpler. The year’s champions are Timothée Chalamet and Sydney Sweeney. Their victory matters, not just for them and their agents but for the idea of stardom, cinema’s prospects and even, in a small way, the future of the human race.

Both appear in glitzy films coming out over Christmas. In “Marty Supreme”, set in the 1950s, Mr Chalamet is a table-tennis ace and hustler with big dreams and a bigger mouth. His character is in frenzied pursuit of his ambitions—and in flight from his responsibilities. In a screwball caper featuring assorted heists and animals, he is on the run from so many foes that you sometimes lose track of who is chasing him.

Skating between charming and obnoxious, Mr Chalamet’s manic turn lays bare the essence of the sports flick: what matters is not which game the hero plays, the film shows, but his grit and yearning and how much you care. It ranks with his enigmatic performance as Bob Dylan in “A Complete Unknown” , which was in cinemas at the start of the year. He may get an Oscar for this one.

Meanwhile Ms Sweeney caused a stir with an advert for a clothing firm. She and the punning strapline—“Sydney Sweeney has great jeans”—ignited rows about eugenics, the objectification of women, whether cleavage is inherently reactionary and whether Ms Sweeney had bazookaed wokeness. With his comic talent and svelte masculinity, Mr Chalamet is a latter-day heir to Cary Grant; for her part Ms Sweeney excites comparisons to Marilyn Monroe .

She made some movies, too. The set-up of “The Housemaid”, a twisty new thriller (pictured), is that the jealous wife of a hunky man does the obvious thing and hires Ms Sweeney as a live-in maid. The luxurious home turns out—surprise!—to be a nest of mysteries. (Such as: after an impromptu hotel stay, what do the amorous characters do about toothpaste?) “Christy”, her other recent release, disappointed at the box office, but she earned acclaim as a female boxer who battles prejudice and an abusive husband.

Mr Chalamet is the better actor; Ms Sweeney’s default expression is a vaguely peeved disdain. But her screen charisma means that, like him, she has become a bona fide movie star. Real stars lend their popularity to films, rather than the other way round. Fans watch their titles in two ways at once: they follow the story and at the same time fit the star’s role into the longer arc of their persona and career.

As well as talent and ambition, maintaining this status involves a delicate tango of intimacy and distance that is ever tougher to pull off. The star is the subject of fascination which, to retain their mystique, they must frustrate, shaping a public legend but guarding their private self. The trick, as Mr Chalamet and Ms Sweeney have both clocked, is to feed the publicity beast but never sate it.

In 2025 Mr Chalamet has kept up a nice line in sly stunts. He rocked up to a premiere on an e-bike ; in a funny video of a spoof marketing brainstorm, he suggests painting the Taj Mahal orange, the hero’s colour in “Marty Supreme”. An interviewer asked Ms Sweeney about the advert furore. Her aloof response was a withering stare that became a meme. (“People had a habit of looking at me”, Monroe said, “as if I were some kind of a mirror instead of a person.” Ms Sweeney is discovering what she meant.)

It is rare to achieve this standing in today’s fractured attention economy. Compared with the silver screen, streaming a film on your sofa, as more and more viewers do, dims the stars’ aura. In any case action franchises are now crowding out character-driven star vehicles. Contemporary actors in the old-school-star category—Tom Cruise, Tom Hanks, Leonardo DiCaprio —mostly ascended to it in the pre-streaming age.

If it is hard for stardom to flourish without cinema, however, the reverse is doubly true. Big-screen storytelling is struggling; without the draw of fresh stars, it may be doomed. Moreover showbiz, and in particular the actors who work in it, face a new threat from artificial intelligence. There are worries that holograms and clones may oust humans in some entertainment.

But AI actors, no matter how plausible, will never be true stars. No one will ever be curious about their love lives or views, as they are of Mr Chalamet’s and Ms Sweeney’s. This is the ultimate prize of their winning year. Stars like them are the best hope for keeping people in cinema seats—and on cinema screens. ■

For more on the latest books, films, TV shows, albums and controversies, sign up to Plot Twist , our weekly subscriber-only newsletter

Emerging stars and established acts alike released remarkable records this year

The best albums of 2025 Emerging stars and established acts alike released remarkable records this year December 11th 2025 “Addison”. By Addison RaeThe breakout pop album of 2025. Addison Rae, a former TikTok star, pays tribute to musical forebears including Britney Spears and Lana Del Rey, but has a dreamy style all her own.

“Always Been”. By Craig FinnThis record, by the frontman of The Hold Steady, tells a series of interlocking tales about failure. It is an overlooked gem of sophisticated songwriting.

“black British music”. By Jim LegxacyThe most intriguing British hip-hop release of the year. It comes from an artist uninterested in rehashing rap clichés: James Olaloye takes alt-rock instrumentation and acoustic ballads and works them into his sound.

“Blizzard”. By Dove EllisThis Irish singer-songwriter provoked a bidding war between record labels this year and his debut album is a fabulous summation of his promise. His soaring voice will probably be filling very big venues very soon.

“Can’t Lose My (Soul)”. By Annie and the CaldwellsThis American gospel group released their debut album after 40 years. The Lord’s message is carried on sinuous blues and hard funk, as well as in the sublime voices of Ms Caldwell and her daughters.

“A Complicated Woman”. By Self EsteemOn her follow-up to “Prioritise Pleasure”, Rebecca Taylor produces thrilling, propulsive dance-pop. “If I’m so empowered,” she wonders, “why am I such a coward?”

“Double Infinity”. By Big ThiefBig Thief are one of the best indie groups of the age. This record, their sixth, has great spikiness and variety, thanks to Adrianne Lenker’s songwriting.

“EURO-COUNTRY”. By cmatAn Irish singer with a superb voice toys with the conventions of country music for a modern world. There is much to love here—a particular highlight is a song in which she goes into a reverie while browsing deli goods at a petrol station.

“New Threats From the Soul”. By Ryan Davis & the Roadhouse BandThis album travels the highways and byways of American music to tell picaresque stories about lives drifting out of focus. The lyrics are extraordinary.

“West End Girl”. By Lily AllenA divorce album that does not hide behind metaphor or euphemism. Instead, Lily Allen outlines various betrayals and deceptions in detail (inspired by her ex-husband, David Harbour). This is the rawest record of the year by some distance—and a truly compelling listen.■

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Put on your milkmaid dress: it is time to enter the womanosphere

The apple-pie-scented world of conservative women’s media Put on your milkmaid dress: it is time to enter the womanosphere December 11th 2025 Feminism has always raised difficult questions, such as: Can you solve the gender pay gap? How can women combine motherhood and work? What might prevent sexual violence? Now Evie, an American magazine, has raised another thorny issue: “Do You Smell Like A Feminist?”

Evie tackles other issues, too, from socialising (“How To Elevate Your Conversation Skills So Everyone Will Love Talking To You”) to love (“Dating Is A Disaster, But Are Men Really To Blame?”) and wellbeing (“Why Wearing Dresses Might Actually Be Better For Your Health”). This has led to fears that reading Evie Might Actually Not Be Better For Young Women’s Feminism .

Welcome to the womanosphere, the world of conservative women’s media. It is a category that might, to many, feel unnecessary: conservative women have always taken part in the media. Emmeline Pankhurst wrote dense articles on women’s suffrage with titles like “What Women Demand”. Margaret Thatcher wrote denser ones on free enterprise with titles like “Consensus—or Choice”.

This is different. Conservative women are a political force: Donald Trump won a majority of white female voters in 2016, 2020 and 2024. Yet these new conservative media—which range from magazines like Evie (whose main audience is women aged 25-34), to podcasters such as Erika Kirk and commentators including Candace Owens—have very little to say about how to achieve constitutional change or a low-tax economy. They have rather more to say about things like the benefits of prayer, the evils of birth control and the “45 Milkmaid Dresses That Will Make Any Man Weak In The Knees”. The milkmaid magazines are also accused of myriad other weaknesses: the genre has been called “sinister” and “pernicious” by progressive folk.

The fury can seem odd, as the genre is, at first sight, almost industrially anodyne. Its apotheosis is Hannah Neeleman , a former ballerina-cum-beauty-queen who married the son of a multi-millionaire entrepreneur. Ms Neeleman now lives on a farm in Utah where she farms dairy cows (of which she has about 120), produces children (she has eight) and breeds Instagram followers (10m). As a recent interview in Evie put it, Ms Neeleman “reminds us of the joy and fulfilment” that comes from “embracing your unique calling”—like marrying a multi-millionaire.

Read on through the genre, though, and the cause of the unease becomes clearer. The womanosphere may champion motherhood and desserts, but each slice comes with a slightly bitter aftertaste. A recipe which claims to help every reader achieve “star apple-pie-baker” status appears under the headline “11 Recipes Every Wife Should Know How To Make” if she is “to please any husband”.

Whereas the conservatism of Pankhurst and Thatcher was inherently feminist, much of the womanosphere is explicitly not. Brittany Martinez, who co-founded Evie with her husband and is its editor, says that she would not call herself a feminist: the label is “kind of cringe”. Ms Owens calls feminism a “failed revolution against biology”. Ms Kirk has called for a revival of “biblical womanhood” (although presumably not Jezebel).

The womanosphere’s charge-sheet against feminism is lengthy: it has led to rising teen pregnancies (through failed sex-ed); rising abortion (through evidently more successful sex-ed); to the pill; to miserable, sappy men; and miserable, manly women. Feminism, Ms Martinez adds, is a form of “self-hatred” that “seeks to turn first-rate women into second-rate men”.

This is ironic, as the womanosphere evolved to emulate the manosphere . (Podcasts are a big deal in both.) Just as the manosphere gave men muscle-building garnished with MAGA, so the womanosphere offers sourdough seasoned with anti-abortion rhetoric. Sometimes it is overpowering: Ms Owens has called abortion “child sacrifice” performed as part of a “satanic system”. That Is Not The Sort of Topic To Elevate Your Conversation Skills So Everyone Will Love Talking To You.

The womanosphere is accused of peddling a “1950s housewife life”—sometimes referred to online as “tradwife” content. Ms Martinez demurs: she is not sure why journalists are “obsessed” with “one decade that I even didn’t live through”. It is a fair point. Journalists are forever banging on about decades such as the 1920s (in which American women got the right to vote); the 1930s (birth control) and the 1960s (equal pay); yet Ms Martinez was not around for any of it.

She prefers to concentrate on modern women who, she thinks, want “romance, love, beauty, families, faith”, and so with articles like “I’m a Hot Mom, And I’m Tired of Being Mom-Shamed About It”, she offers them this. She does not offer them many quotes from Mary Wollstonecraft, the pioneering feminist who argued that beauty was not women’s power but their “gilt cage”—and that women who focused on looks thus wasted their lives seeking “to adorn [their] prison”. But then Wollstonecraft died 200 years before Ms Martinez was born, so who cares about her?

Others have wider interests. Ms Owens’s previous book, about racial politics in America, was a New York Times bestseller. The subject of her latest, “Make Him A Sandwich: Why Real Women Don’t Need Fake Feminism”, is self-evident. She says she is searching for the “truth”, which she feels the mainstream media ignore. She does celebrate female beauty, but has also found time to attack vaccines (“poison”) and Brigitte Macron (“in fact a man”). One of the mainstream media publications she shuns is the dictionary, for she regularly misuses simple English words like “magnanimous” (which she seems to think means “big”) and “promiscuous” (which she uses as a synonym for “sexy”).

It is easy to smirk at the womanosphere. But it is worse than comedy: it is a tragedy. For, like the manosphere, it touches on many genuine problems. Feminism has rested on some convenient white lies. Working motherhood is hard: women brought up believing that they could “have it all” often feel that they are just failing at it all. There are discussions that can, and should, be had by young women. Then again, those discussions are tricky and might involve quoting cringe feminists who died ages ago. So let’s not bother with that: let’s open up Evie instead and think of “15 Ways To Make Your Christmas Outfits More Feminine”. ■

Large language models are being brought to bear on the word of God

The race to translate the Bible into every language by 2033 Large language models are being brought to bear on the word of God December 11th 2025 AT THIS TIME of year, scores of millions of people go to church. Even sheep who have strayed from the Lord’s flock often find their way back at Christmas. They come to hear the story of Mary, Joseph and the baby Jesus, lying in a manger, because there was no room for them at the inn.

Christian missionaries believe more souls could be saved by the story of Christ. The Bible is already the most translated book ever —it is available in full in more than 750 languages—but they would like to see it in each of the world’s roughly 7,000 living tongues. To achieve this, believers are enlisting a new tool for their spiritual quest: artificial intelligence (AI).

Translation is an arduous task. The Old Testament runs to roughly 600,000 words: 70 scholars were supposedly needed to translate them all in the third century BC. The New Testament is written in dodgy Greek, which does not help. Much of it is ambiguous: no one knows what epiousion means in “give us this day our epiousion bread”, but translators opted for “daily”. Word choices have had theological implications. One translation of the Bible describes Mary as a young woman; another as a virgin. The two are not the same thing.

Translation is also risky. Scholars in the Middle Ages who translated the Bible into English were considered heretics and burned at the stake for their trouble. Thanks to the Reformation, the task is now rather less dangerous, but it remains painstaking. In 1999 Wycliffe, a missions organisation, estimated it would take 150 years to start a translation project in every remaining language. Their model required missionaries to move overseas, learn a language and translate the Bible into it—a process that took decades. Christian groups then started employing local linguists to do the work, but translating the whole Bible still took around 15 years.

AI can speed things up significantly. According to some estimates, it would take two years to produce a polished translation of the New Testament with the help of a large language model (LLM), and six years to do the same with the Old Testament. Missions organisations now aim to have at least a portion of the Bible translated into every language by 2033. IllumiNations, a coalition of Bible-translation agencies, estimates they are already over halfway towards that goal. (The organisation has raised nearly $500m in the past decade to fund its efforts.)

The miraculous turn has an earthly explanation. In 2022 Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, released an open licence for an AI model for translation. Meta’s aim was to enhance web services for 200 languages, with a focus on those in Africa and Asia. But for missions organisations it was providential: Meta’s AI model could be adapted for Bible translation, putting a secular tool to sacred work.

A minority language can be tricky. You “can’t just stick it in ChatGPT and hope to get out something useful, because ChatGPT has never seen anything from that language,” says Daniel Whitenack, a data scientist. An LLM is only as good as the material it is trained on, but what if the material is non-existent? (The industry refers to such languages as “low-resource”.) Sometimes translators must supply it themselves, for instance by translating parts of the Bible by hand. “We are kind of looking for that holy grail of what is the minimum amount of parallel texts that we can feed into the model to fine-tune it to get a good output,” says Jeff Webster, a translation consultant.

Some Christians have doubts about using AI: they worry that it could replace the Holy Spirit’s role in what should be a hallowed task. But tech evangelists argue that the process still requires drafting, multiple grammatical, syntactical and spelling checks and reviews for theological congruence: tasks all led by people.

Creative freedoms must be taken. AI struggles with names, abstract concepts and metaphors. A word such as battering-ram may have no equivalent in a language. Translators have resorted to rendering battering-ram as “machine of war” or “long wooden pole used to ram in city gates”.

AI also has no concept of cultural differences. The Wycliffe website observes that the phrase “accept Jesus into your heart” makes sense if you imagine the heart as a source of feeling. “But did you know that the Awa people of Papua New Guinea think of the liver as their centre? Or that the Rawa people, also from Papua New Guinea, think of the stomach as their centre?” The use of “locally understood analogies to convey the same truths” is required.

Part of the urgency of this initiative is eschatological: some Christians believe Christ will return once the Bible is available in every language. Others, zealous about proselytising, view it as their Christian duty. Missionaries are not only bringing the Bible to new places, but new LLMs in its wake. The effort may bring rewards in this life as well as the next. ■

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M.F. Husain was driven out of his home country by Hindu nationalists

India’s best-known artist gets his own museum—in Qatar M.F. Husain was driven out of his home country by Hindu nationalists December 11th 2025 Although he died 14 years ago, aged 95, M.F. Husain is India’s best-known modern artist. He recently became its most expensive, too: earlier this year one of his works sold at auction for $13.8m, a new record for an Indian painter. The opening of Lawh wa Qalam (The Canvas and the Pen) in Qatar adds one more item to Husain’s list of achievements, for it is the first museum outside India dedicated to a single Indian artist .

Why is the museum in Doha and not, say, Pandharpur, the town of Husain’s birth? The artist, who was Muslim, fell foul of Hindu nationalists, who claimed to be offended by his frequent depiction of Hindu goddesses in the nude. By the mid-2000s the harassment had become intolerable: death threats, vandalism of his artwork, an attack on his home by Hindu militants and an estimated 900 legal cases registered against him. He left India in 2006 and never returned, living between Dubai, Doha and London . “It is a sad day for India,” the editor of the Hindu, a newspaper, wrote at the time.

In 2010 Husain was offered Qatari citizenship, which he accepted. Because India does not allow dual citizenship, he renounced the nationality of his birth with “deep pain”. He is sometimes described as “an Indian-origin Qatari painter”.

Husain was one of India’s first “celebrity artists”, says Sonal Singh of Christie’s, an auction house. He developed an outsize persona, with a rags-to-riches story that involved sleeping on Mumbai’s pavements and painting movie posters. “He made that effort to make himself visible while most other artists waited for someone else to take the initiative,” says Dadiba Pundole, his gallerist; that helped make him the “brand ambassador for Indian art”.

His output was prodigious. Husain produced some 40,000 works over the course of his life, from quick, small sketches to enormous, multi-panel works such as the one auctioned earlier this year. In the popular Indian imagination, he is associated with depictions of horses , daily life and those Hindu goddesses.

His range was far greater, however. Lawh wa Qalam contains just 140-odd paintings, but even with its small sample, the breadth of his oeuvre is on display. Beyond the obligatory horses, it includes abstracts, portraits of Indian luminaries and panels from a 100-foot painting celebrating India’s struggle against British rule . Though chiefly a painter, he also made sculptures and films, including a short that won the top prize at Berlin Film Festival. These, too, find space at the museum.

So do works painted in Qatar, where he traded horses for camels. On display are the products of his last commission, 99 paintings on the theme of Arab civilisation. These were sponsored by his patron, Sheikha Moza bint Nasser, the mother of the reigning emir. He completed around 35 before he died. It is Sheikha Moza, in her role as chair of the Qatar Foundation, who commissioned Lawh wa Qalam. At a function on November 27th to mark the opening of the museum, she characterised Husain as both Indian and Arab: “two identities that enriched his understanding of the human condition”. Not only did he become a Qatari citizen, she pointed out, but he also had Yemeni ancestry.

Conspicuous by their absence are the paintings that upset Husain’s persecutors, whose Hindu-nationalist movement is now the most powerful force in Indian politics. This is a shame. Husain is not merely a victim of the Hindutva brigade, yet what drove him out of India is also what cemented his place in history. Lawh wa Qalam would not exist had he stayed.

Perhaps it is fitting that Husain’s museum is in the Gulf, and not just because of his ties to Yemen. South and west Asia share centuries of connections through trade, migration and empire. Language, food and art have all flowed back and forth across the Arabian Sea. The Husain museum, says Noof Mohammed, its curator, can serve as a “bridge between Qataris or Qatar and South Asians”. Husain once said that he “never really belonged anywhere or to anyone”. The opposite is also true: he belongs to everyone. ■

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Celebrities and economic uncertainty have put the “precious” back in “precious metal”

Proposing this Christmas? Go for a yellow-gold ring Celebrities and economic uncertainty have put the “precious” back in “precious metal” December 11th 2025 IF YOU HAVE ever used social media, chances are you will have seen someone post an ecstatic announcement of their engagement. Under a snap of the happy couple smiling at the camera, the caption reads: “I said ‘Yes’!” or “Forever starts now!” or “Officially off the market!” You are more likely to see such posts in December than at any other time: it consistently ranks as the most popular month for proposals. According to one survey in Britain, almost a third of men think Christmas Eve is the best time to pop the question.

This year, posts enthusing “He put a ring on it!” may show a picture of a sparkler with a yellow-gold setting. The precious metal is firmly back in fashion. Brands, magazines and influencers alike declare that one thing that is glittering is gold.

“We find ourselves in the midst of a yellow-gold renaissance,” Tobias Kormind, the co-founder of 77 Diamonds, a British jeweller, has said. In 2018 only 13.4% of the engagement rings the firm sold were yellow gold; much more popular were white gold (42.2%) and platinum (37.3%). This year, however, 42.5% of sales were of yellow-gold rings, while white gold accounted for 22.5% and platinum 31.7%.

What explains this new golden age? Celebrities are one factor. Just as Princess Diana set off a trend for sapphires, and Grace Kelly made emerald-cut diamonds look anything but square, the rich and famous have burnished yellow gold’s reputation. Taylor Swift and Dua Lipa , two of the world’s biggest pop stars, and Zendaya, a popular actress, have all shown off yellow-gold engagement rings this year. Searches for their styles have soared.

The gold rush also reflects growing demand for items with a vintage look. For centuries yellow gold was de rigueur, symbolising wealth, royalty and romance. It began to be displaced by white metals in the 1990s, partly because they are tougher and partly because they evoked the sleek, minimalist style of the era. (They were favoured by Tiffany, America’s leading luxury jeweller.) But now antique-style rings have a certain lustre to them, as they evoke enduring love stories. Such pieces may also include a coloured stone—a ruby, for example—which look brighter and better when set in yellow gold.

Finally, gold is proving its mettle as an investment, hitting a record $4,380 an ounce on October 20th. (It is now around $4,200.) “When I started in jewellery manufacturing, platinum was double the price of gold,” says Sally Ryder, the founder of Ryder Diamonds, a jeweller based in Hong Kong. Now platinum is nearly a third of the price. Even the lovestruck want to buy rings that will hold their value. Many consider gold to be a solid choice; speculators and investors have long thought of it as a safe asset. So when it comes to choosing a ring, many believe that nothing is as good as yellow gold. ■

The hidden drama of one of the most enervating rituals of Christmas

Every sheet of wrapping paper tells a story The hidden drama of one of the most enervating rituals of Christmas December 11th 2025 It takes aeons to claw up the edge of the sticky tape. How much of your life have you spent doing this? When at last you manage it, the snippet of tape coils up annoyingly before you can smooth it onto the wrapping paper. You cut off far too much paper for the job, but it seems profligate to throw the leftovers away. They are stuffed into a drawer full of strips discarded at past Christmases.

The Hall brothers of Kansas City have a lot to answer for at this time of year. Short of tissue paper in 1917, they sold fancier envelope linings instead. Thus modern, decorative wrapping paper was born (so, later, was Hallmark). It was handy during the Depression as a way to ornament often ordinary presents. Today the gift-packaging industry consumes billions of dollars and umpteen trees, chiefly at Christmas. But, in life and art, each sheet of wrapping paper also tells a story, turning a simple exchange into a five-act drama.

The first act is the wrapping itself. This is unglamorous and often tetchy, leading to in-house rows over the use of tape and scissors. “Can’t I just staple it?” you wonder—though that might lead to a child pricking a finger, and spraying blood around as in a gory “Saturday Night Live” sketch set at a wrapping counter. The actual act of wrapping rarely features in films, an exception being “Love Actually”. A salesman (played by Rowan Atkinson, pictured) is so excruciatingly slow about it that a wife catches her husband buying a necklace. She assumes it’s for her. It isn’t.

The drudgery, though, is part of the narrative. You may only have clicked the link your nephew sent to buy his present, but your creases and corners, and the tedium they involved, insist that you do really care about him. In her new Christmas show on Netflix, Meghan Markle suggests, as a bonus gesture, adding handcrafted miniature wreaths (because everyone has time to make those).

After the matching swag is heaped beneath the tree, the spoils of another outlasted year, comes the drama’s next act: the handover. Wrapping drapes gifts in mystery, especially those of indecipherable shapes, like the gun rack Wayne is given in “Wayne’s World” despite not owning a gun, or the wrapped-up cat in “National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation” . Even obvious objects are shrouded in uncertainty. Yes, it’s a book, but which? Sure, those are socks, but how tasteless?

Next, the opening. If wrapping is psychologically revealing, whether of nonchalance or perfectionism, unwrapping is more so. Like other hotly anticipated treats (fireworks, cakes), it is always brief, but in degrees. Some people unwrap languidly, kidding themselves they will reuse the paper. Others shred it in a frenzy.

The moment of recognition is the climactic fourth act. For a second only the recipient sees inside the wrapping paper; everyone else sees their reaction. The scene is like an awards ceremony at which the nominees open the envelopes. Some are thrilled; some are not. Receiving the husband’s gift in “Love Actually”, his wife expects to find that necklace. Inside is a CD. Inferring that he is having an affair, she nips away for a private cry.

Children are much worse than adults at dissembling. If they already own your offering, or don’t like the look of it, you will know immediately. A classic case is the pink bunny suit given to a miffed boy in “A Christmas Story”, by an aunt who seems to think he is “not only perpetually four years old, but also a girl”. (Very small children are different: for them, manically ripping up the paper is the main event, so wrapping up their old toys is a sound economy.)

“My God, would you look at that mess?” gripes the patriarch in “A Christmas Story”, speaking for every father who surveys the post-presents carnage before trudging around with a bin bag. In the final act of the wrapping-paper drama, the reindeer-patterned scraps are gathered up like limbs after a battle. This is the shard of mortality in the joy, the point when environmentalists fret about landfill, and those stooping dads worry about slipping a disc.

Is wrapping paper worth the waste and bother? Consider one of literature’s loveliest unwrappings. In “The Gift of the Magi” by O. Henry, Della and Jim have only two assets besides each other: her luscious hair and his pocket watch. Della sells all her hair to get Jim a watch-chain for Christmas. He sells the watch to reciprocate. Tearing at the paper, she finds a set of beautiful, useless combs. She shrieks for joy, then wails, then smiles. The surprise still counts, as do the feelings it came wrapped in. ■

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Highlights of the small screen included shows about diplomacy, war and office life

The best TV shows of 2025 Highlights of the small screen included shows about diplomacy, war and office life December 4th 2025 “Adolescence”This show, about a 13-year-old boy (Owen Cooper) accused of murdering a classmate, is hauntingly brilliant . The acting is impeccable and the show’s themes—including masculinity and online brainwashing—resonate.

“Andor”A sophisticated show about authoritarianism, set in the “Star Wars” universe. It follows Cassian Andor (Diego Luna) as he rebels against the Galactic Empire. The writers understand the machinery of repression.

“The Beast in Me”When Nile Jarvis (Matthew Rhys)—a real-estate mogul suspected of killing his wife—moves in next door to Aggie Wiggs, an author in need of inspiration, she gets a provocative new subject and he gets an opportunity to clear his name.

“The Chair Company”Ron Trosper, an office worker in Ohio, has a tendency to over-react. So when his chair collapses during an important presentation, he embarks on a campaign against its manufacturer. This series sends up the absurdities of corporate life .

“The Diplomat” Kate Wyler (Keri Russell), America’s ambassador to Britain, is thoughtful and honourable. That puts her at odds with her reckless husband (Rufus Sewell) and a new president (Allison Janney) who, in this season, join forces with potentially disastrous consequences for geopolitics.

“Dying for Sex”After Molly (Michelle Williams) is diagnosed with stage-four cancer, all she can think about is intercourse. She separates from her husband, who has not touched her in years, and embarks on a series of sexual adventures. A drama that is at once frank and funny.

“Hacks”A comedy that continues to delight. Deborah Vance (Jean Smart) has finally landed her dream gig as a late-night tv host. But there’s a catch: her head writer is her former protégée who all but blackmailed her way into the job.

“King of the Hill” This animated sitcom has been revived after 15 years. Hank Hill, a salesman of “propane and propane accessories”, and his wife return to Texas after a stint in Saudi Arabia. The show’s blend of topical satire and gentle comedy is as nicely balanced as ever.

“The Last of Us”The first season of the hit video-game adaptation was memorable for its nerve-shredding intensity. The second more than matches it in ferocity. Much of the horror comes not from the threat of the Cordyceps fungus, but from the desperate, vengeful people living in a post-apocalyptic world.

“Mr Scorsese” This five-part documentary offers a vivid portrait of one of America’s great film-makers. Martin Scorsese reflects on his childhood, his one-time desire to become a priest and his infatuation with cinema. An honest depiction of an auteur whose work grapples with morality and vice.

“The Narrow Road to the Deep North”A masterful adaptation of Richard Flanagan’s novel. Dorrigo Evans (Jacob Elordi and Ciarán Hinds), a surgeon in the Australian army, is captured by the Japanese during the second world war and sent to work on the Burma Railway.

“Severance”This surreal show is TV’s greatest drama of modern office life. Employees of Lumon Industries receive a brain chip that cleaves their consciousness in two. Their “outies” have no knowledge of their work, their “innies” no memory of their outside lives.

“Squid Game”In this South Korean thriller debt-laden characters are recruited to play traditional children’s games. Winners get a prize pot of up to 45.6bn won, or $31m; losers are killed. The brutality is ramped up in its third and final season, with new games and shocking acts of greed.

“Stranger Things”It is time for the ultimate showdown in Hawkins, Indiana, between an intrepid group of locals and a terrifying psychic being known as Vecna. As the show creeps towards its conclusion, this monster hit retains its supernatural power .

“Toxic Town”In the 1980s and 1990s Corby Borough Council, in the East Midlands of England, cleared the site of a former steelworks, transporting noxious material in open trucks. Local children were subsequently born with deformities. It follows the parents who took the authorities to court.

“Trespasses”This exquisite series is set in Northern Ireland during the Troubles. When Cushla (Lola Petticrew), a Catholic primary-school teacher, has an affair with Michael (Tom Cullen), an older, married Protestant, her life begins to fall apart. ■

All shows are available to stream in America and/or Britain

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Holidays in hell are horribly popular

Why do tourists visit sites of atrocities? Holidays in hell are horribly popular December 4th 2025 AT DAWN PALMYRA’S magnificent columns and buildings glow gold against the sky. The oasis city (pictured), built on an ancient trading route, was once one of Syria’s most popular tourist sites, attracting an estimated 150,000 visitors annually. After the outbreak of civil war in 2011, that number plummeted as rebels and Islamist groups fought Bashar al-Assad’s forces for control. Palmyra was closed to international visitors: only the Russian and Iranian soldiers who came to prop up Syria’s despot were allowed in.

Mr Assad’s odious regime fell a year ago, on December 8th 2024, and tourists are slowly returning to Syria. Some come to marvel at what remains of the splendid temples, theatres and tombs. (Jihadists blew up monuments they deemed idolatrous, including the Temple of Bel, which was consecrated nearly 2,000 years ago.) A few visitors, however, seek more gruesome thrills. They want to see Syria’s scars, to stand on the ground where battles, bombings and atrocities took place. They are known as “dark tourists” .

They swap tips on Instagram and TikTok. Travellers to Syria want to see the destroyed suburbs of its cities or pose for photos with the tanks left behind by the Russians. Some hope to visit Saidnaya: the country’s most notorious prison, on the outskirts of Damascus, is known as the “Human Slaughterhouse”. Rebels took possession of it after Mr Assad fled from his country; the prison is now empty and locked. But enterprising tour guides promise they can get curious travellers inside.

Among those guides is Rita Badran, a dentistry student, who advertises her services to more than 25,000 followers on Instagram. A private tour of Syria costs $130 per person; to visit Saidnaya, she charges a $100 “permit fee” (she knows some of the guards). She has taken visitors—who are mainly from America and Europe—to see the aircraft that the Assad regime used to drop barrel bombs on civilians, and to explore the tunnels dug under Damascus by rebels. “There are hundreds or thousands of people still buried here that they couldn’t retrieve,” she says, walking through the blasted landscape.

Dark tourism is big business. Global Industry Analysts, a market-research firm, estimates that the dark-tourism market is worth $35bn and will grow to $41bn by 2030. (It includes visits to places such as the 9/11 Memorial Museum in its definition of dark tourism, as well as battlefields, concentration camps and disaster zones.) Besides Syria, people are heading to dangerous countries such as Iran, North Korea , South Sudan and Ukraine. Young Pioneer Tours—a company whose tagline is “Destinations your mother would rather you stay away from”—has increased the number of destinations it covers since 2013, from 30 to more than 100.

In Israel dark tourists go to the sites where 1,200 people were killed in Hamas’s attacks of October 7th 2023. In Afghanistan operators are capitalising on interest in life under the Taliban; after the jihadist group returned to power in 2021, tourist arrivals jumped from 2,300 in 2022 to some 7,000 in 2023. And in Mexico people can book a “night walk”, a simulated illegal border crossing, complete with “smugglers” and “guards”.

The term “dark tourism” was coined in 1996 by J. John Lennon and Malcom Foley, two academics who observed the public’s interest in visiting the site of John F. Kennedy’s assassination. Peter Hohenhaus, the founder of dark-tourism.com and the author of “Atlas of Dark Destinations”, suggests that the idea is to bear witness. On his website he writes that dark tourism is about “respectful and enlightened touristic engagement with contemporary history, and its dark sites/sides, in a sober, educational and non-sensationalist manner”.

He argues that, in the public imagination, the term lumps together two types of people: those who seek to understand the past and voyeurs who want to take crass selfies. Many of the 1.8m people who went to Auschwitz in 2024 did so to pay their respects at the Holocaust memorial and museum. Others, however, posed for pictures on the train tracks outside the concentration camp. “There are selfish idiots and there are dark tourists,” Mr Hohenhaus says. “They are not the same.”

Many will nonetheless see dark tourism as ghoulish. Yet it is not new: some date it back to Romans who flocked to amphitheatres to watch gladiators fight to the death. An early example of civilians venturing to gawp at a war zone was the influx of “lady tourists” during the Crimean war (between Russia, the Ottomans, Britain and France) in 1855. Women, armed with opera glasses, would pay to watch soldiers fight while sitting atop Cathcart’s Hill between Balaclava and Sevastopol.

Tourism to Chernobyl , the site of the worst-ever nuclear catastrophe, peaked at 124,423 visitors in 2019, before the pandemic and Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Italy is investigating allegations that its citizens took part in “sniper safaris” in Bosnia-Herzegovina in the 1990s, paying to shoot civilians in Sarajevo.

What is different about dark tourism today is its cost—cheap flights have made even far-flung trips more affordable—and the role of social media in publicising experiences and destinations. Accounts advertise sites from Amritsar to Zanzibar City. A number of influencers have garnered huge followings by travelling to places few others would think, or dare, to go.

In 2017 Logan Paul, an American YouTuber, posted a video from Aokigahara forest in Japan which featured a dead body (the forest is known as a site for suicides). The platform briefly cut business ties with Mr Logan, but he now has 23.6m followers, up from 15m at the time. Ms Badran says she took an influencer to Saidnaya who, after posting pictures of the prison online, now brings others to see it.

Harry Jaggard has posted videos from Eritrea and Yemen. A dispatch from Afghanistan , “Seven Days in the Most Dangerous Country in the World”, has 4.6m views on YouTube. In the video Mr Jaggard promises to go beyond “the headlines”. He says that the Taliban are “kind”—despite the floggings and executions—and that Afghan women “seemed happy”, though they are barred from secondary school, public parks, most jobs and complaining about any of the above. “What an incredible video man…I’ll have to visit someday soon,” one person commented. “I wish I could see it up close one day,” wrote another.

According to Booking.com, a travel website, almost 60% of Gen Z travellers look to social media when deciding where to go and about 45% draw inspiration from influencers. And many young people from rich countries—who have no experience of war—are interested in visiting sites with a tragic history.

On Ms Badran’s tour is Giulio Versura, an Italian student, and Luis Gatti, a German software engineer. Mr Gatti has travelled to Iraq, Palestine and Transnistria. He has come to Syria because he wants to visit the places he has seen on the news and to better understand the country and its people: “I feel like if there’s a debate about Syria back home in Germany, now I can actually contribute.” He does not see dark tourism as distasteful or exploitative—and, besides, conventional holidays do not appeal to him: “I could go to Italy or Spain and drink an Aperol Spritz, but that would be a bit boring.”

Syrian guides, for their part, are grateful for the opportunity “to show Syria as Syrians want it to be shown”, says Ala Salamia, who works in Damascus. (No doubt they also appreciate the business.) Ms Badran does not distinguish between dark tourists and the regular kind, but between tourists and travellers: “Tourists will say, ‘I went to Syria and ate in that restaurant and we went here for a party.’ But a traveller will come and learn about the Syrian war.” ■

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An unappetising symbol of a messy year

And The Economist’s word of the year for 2025 is… An unappetising symbol of a messy year December 4th 2025 PICKING A WORD of the year is not easy. In the past the American Dialect Society has gone with “tender-age shelters” (2018) and “-ussy” (2022). The Oxford English Dictionary (oed) has caused conniptions by opting for things like “youthquake” (2017) and “goblin mode” (2022). If you cannot remember why those terms were big that year, that is the point: the exercise is not a straightforward one.

Sometimes a single suitable word is not at hand, so a phrase is chosen instead; other times the word simply seems jarring. Middle-aged lexicographers are often tempted to crown a bit of youth slang , but such terms are transient and sound out of date before the press release is published.

The Economist’s choice for 2025 is a single word. It is representative, if not of the whole year, at least of much of the feeling of living in it. It is not a new word, but it is being used in a new way. You may not like it, but you are living with it. And it is probably here to stay.

But first, a few subcategory winners. The clear winner for foreign word of the year, nominated by several of our China correspondents, was neijuan, Mandarin for “involution”. It describes the increasingly cut-throat competition between businesses, such as those that make electric vehicles, despite the diminishing returns. It has also become a term used by workers to refer to the sense of running ever faster on a treadmill to get nowhere.

Finance is a good place to look for words of the year because trends move fast, and its denizens like neologisms. TACO is this year’s favourite. Coined by Robert Armstrong, a journalist at the Financial Times, it stands for “Trump Always Chickens Out” and points to the many tariff fights Donald Trump has picked and then backed down from. Another strong contender was the “debasement trade”. In recent months investors have been buying up assets such as gold as they are worried that overspending governments are going to destroy the value of their currencies and other assets linked to them.

There were plenty of slang options, too. Dictionary.com has chosen “67” (read as “six seven”), a ubiquitous bit of youth-speak that, as the lexicographers there admit, has no fixed meaning: instead, it “has all the hallmarks of being brain rot”—a term that Oxford Dictionaries made its word of the year in 2024. “Brain rot” is defined as a state caused by overconsumption of mindlessly entertaining junk, particularly online. The term is also applied to the junk causing the mental decline.

Readers should prepare themselves: they will probably experience brain rot more often, thanks to our word of the year. Our pick’s rise was spurred by OpenAI’s release of Sora, a generative artificial-intelligence (ai) platform that can create videos based on a prompt. Suddenly social-media feeds were filled with such clips. A term that started circulating in the early years of generative AI is now everywhere: “slop” .

The word, of course, is far from new: the oed’s first citation is from the 15th century. Its meaning has evolved from mud and slush, through a weak liquid used as a poorly nourishing food, to any kind of food scraps, to nonsense or rubbish.

Slop merchants clog up the internet with drivel. Enter a health question on Google and see how many of the top results are brand-new webpages with AI-written prose. Or scroll through Instagram and see how long it takes to come across a video that is made up of fake clips and an AI voiceover. Or head to X and see if you can distinguish the real MAGA accounts from those that were revealed (by a new “About this account” feature) to be slop-shops in Pakistan, Nigeria or Thailand.

It is distressing to imagine a world drowning in slop, so think of the positives. If the news ecosystem is sodden with slop, trust in established organisations might rebound. (Research has found that, after being asked to distinguish AI photographs from real ones, test subjects show a greater willingness to pay for a respectable newspaper.) If social-media sites become congested with slop, either those platforms will have to get serious about content moderation or else their users will shut them off. A case, then, for sloptimism? ■

Do you want 24 pots of slime? Or packets of pork scratchings?

Why there is an Advent calendar for absolutely everything Do you want 24 pots of slime? Or packets of pork scratchings? December 4th 2025 ADVENT CALENDARS never used to be much fun. Each day in December, as part of the lead-up to Christmas, you would peel back a card door to reveal a Bible verse or a picture of a church bell . Only if your parents were cool would you get a chocolate calendar.

These days, however, Advent calendars feature fewer bells and more bells and whistles. You can buy one not just for your children, but also for your parents, pets and even the birds in your garden. If you are feeling indulgent you can choose a calendar stuffed with port wine or pork scratchings. If you are on a pre-Christmas health kick you can pick one filled with protein powder or workout gear. Some calendars are sumptuous: a 12-day c aviar countdown will set you back almost $1,000. Others are sensible (24 tools) or silly (24 pots of slime).

Shoppers cannot get enough of them. A recent poll by Ipsos in Britain found that 72% of respondents buy Advent calendars. A calendar by Bonne Maman, a jam brand, sells out in America every year; the brand has increased production by 400% since 2017 to meet demand. Beauty is also pretty popular: Space NK’s cosmetics calendar, one of the most popular of 2025, sold out in weeks.

Advent calendars can seem odd. The tradition started in the early 19th century with German Protestants who marked the season by lighting candles or drawing lines of chalk. Paper calendars spread across the world after the second world war , when spirits needed lifting.

Why have they taken off? One reason is that today’s Advent calendars speak to “the trend of small indulgences”, says Liz Morgan of Fortnum & Mason , a British department store. Calendars offer a taste of luxury, akin to indulging in a fancy coffee. Leonard Lauder, a cosmetics tycoon, called it the “lipstick effect”: sales of the makeup product rose during economic downturns as women sought a forgivably inexpensive pick-me-up.

They often contain appealingly exclusive or collectable products. Liberty included a limited-edition bag in its popular Advent calendar this year; the London department store held a swanky party in September to celebrate its release. Rare products create a buzz on social media. There are 1.3m videos tagged #AdventCalendar on TikTok.

Advent calendars offer benefits for brands, such as attracting new customers. Some are eager to extend the custom beyond Christmas. Halloween Advent calendars have already started spooking the shelves. Kate Turvey, director of the Advent Calendar Shop, which stocks more than 500 different types, reckons countdowns to Mother’s Day or birthdays other than Jesus’s may soon take off. Who wouldn’t want that festive feeling of anticipation all year round? ■

His work has appeared in the pages of Vogue and on the walls of the V&A

Tyler Mitchell: the photographer of the moment His work has appeared in the pages of Vogue and on the walls of the V&A December 4th 2025 EVERY YEAR the Aperture Foundation hosts a ritzy gala in New York to raise money and fete those it considers “leaders in the field” of photography. (It also publishes a magazine, likewise called Aperture, arguably the world’s most prestigious photography title.) The distinction tends to be given to artists to acknowledge decades of work: Graciela Iturbide won in 2021, aged 79, and Richard Misrach in 2024, aged 75.

This year, however, Aperture celebrated Tyler Mitchell, who seems to have conquered the world of photography at the tender age of 30. His strikingly beautiful images straddle fine art and fashion and his work is adored by curators, collectors and magazine editors. He is already earning comparisons to Richard Avedon, one of the best-known fashion and portrait photographers of the 20th century.

Mr Mitchell’s work is in vogue—and in Vogue. He rose to fame in 2018, when he became the first black photographer to shoot a cover in the magazine’s 126-year history. He depicted Beyoncé , a pop star, in a floral head-dress; Artsy, an online art marketplace, duly labelled him a “breakout talent”. Since then, he has photographed Kamala Harris, then the vice-president-elect, for Vogue; his work has been acquired by Sir Elton John and David Furnish and displayed at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London; and he has shot the catalogue for the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s fashion exhibition, “Superfine: Tailoring Black Style”, about the modern dandy.

In October “Riverside Scene from Dreaming in Real Time”, a large image reminiscent of a famous painting by Georges Seurat, a post-Impressionist, sold for $54,180 at auction. This was double the estimate and set a new record for his work. A travelling early-career survey, “Wish This Was Real”, is currently on display at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris and is accompanied by a monograph. You would expect Gagosian, the contemporary-art gallery which began representing Mr Mitchell in 2024, to call him a “leading artist of his generation”, but it seems it has a point.

Mr Mitchell was born in Albany, Georgia, in 1995. He turned to photography and film as a creative outlet as a teenager; he took up skateboarding and began making montage videos of other skaters. It was a few years later, while enrolled in New York University’s film and television programme, that he decided to focus on photography. “I saw it as a way I could quickly tell visual stories and speak to culture without waiting for a larger budget or crew,” he explains.

He credits black artists and photographers such as Gordon Parks, Roy DeCarava and Carrie Mae Weems as influences. A visit to Cuba when he was 20 also proved formative. This trip, which he describes as a “visual awakening”, allowed him to develop his own aesthetic and produce a large enough body of work to establish a portfolio. Evident in these early pictures is Mr Mitchell’s flair with colour—a look Emily Bierman, the global head of prints and photographs at Sotheby’s, an auction house, describes as “hyper-saturated”.

Textiles are a recurring motif in Mr Mitchell’s work, be it billowing sheets, patchworked denim or fishing nets. (The backdrop of the Beyoncé cover was a simple cotton sheet pegged to a washing line.) This gives his images depth as well as a faintly dreamlike quality.

His photographs are “lightly staged”, in that Mr Mitchell will gather groups of models who have a certain charisma, dress them, place them in a specific location, give them props and then let the scene play out. He often depicts people at ease, catching them in calm or playful moments. (In one image, an insect rests on a young man’s nose.) His subjects are people of colour; he has described his artistic world as something like a “black utopia”.

Regardless of the commission, Mr Mitchell works in a similar way. He says he seeks to convey “a sort of fluidity and slippage between these categories of photography: ‘art’, ‘fashion’, ‘portraiture’, ‘abstraction’, or any of the other sub-genres”. He hopes his images, wherever they end up, underscore the point of photography as an art form: to encourage viewers “to empathise and to see and to look”. ■

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“I Who Have Never Known Men” is a haunting story—and readers love it

The 30-year-old dystopian novel that is the talk of TikTok “I Who Have Never Known Men” is a haunting story—and readers love it December 4th 2025 IT DOES NOT sound like the sort of book TikTok typically enjoys. “I Who Have Never Known Men” (“IWHNKM”) does not feature wolves, fairies or the word “rutting”. It is a desolate post-apocalyptic tale, not a racy coming-of-age story. Yet thanks to social media, the novel is a hit—30 years after it was first published.

The book’s nameless narrator is a girl who lives with 39 women in a cage in an underground bunker. The prisoners do not know why they are there: they were captured during a war none of them remembers. When they finally escape, they find a “land that is almost dead”. Other bunkers are full of corpses. “Did something, someone, somewhere understand the meaning of all this?” the narrator wonders.

Jacqueline Harpman was born into a Jewish family in Belgium in 1929 and “IWHNKM” evokes the horrors of Nazism . Her slim, sombre novel was published in French in 1995, then translated into English, before falling out of print. In 2019 it was reissued by Vintage, a British publisher, with a revised translation.

Word started spreading online—one viral post teasing the plot of “IWHNKM” has 12.5m views and more than 2m likes—and sales rose sharply. In 2019 British readers bought 1,400 copies of “IWHNKM”. They have snapped up 75,000 so far in 2025, an increase of more than 5,250%. The affecting novel is popular in America, too: it is in fifth place on the Washington Post’s paperback bestseller chart.

Nick Skidmore, publishing director of Vintage Classics, says the decision to republish the book in 2019 was prompted by the boom in interest in dystopian fiction that followed the election of Donald Trump. “This book is really all about bewilderment,” he says; it appeals to “readers who may feel an equal sense of bewilderment about the political landscape today”.

According to its fans, “IWHNKM” explores “what makes us human in a totally foreign world”. The narrator is “just like us”, one remarked: “We also don’t know all the answers to why things are the way they are, or what the meaning of life is.” Gen Z readers may enjoy shlocky romances—but they enjoy pondering questions of the self, society and freedom, too. ■

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Try your luck as a museum curator, detective or samurai

The best video games of 2025 Try your luck as a museum curator, detective or samurai November 27th 2025 “Cabernet”This game, set in eastern Europe in the 19th century, follows Liza, a vampire. Players are forced to make moral choices as they seek victims, befriend them and then drink their blood.

“Civilization VII”For over 30 years the “ Civilization ” games have allowed gamers to explore how societies grow into empires. This title is perhaps the most ambitious to date. Players transition through ancient, medieval and modern times.

“Death Stranding 2: On the Beach”This game is set in a world where almost everyone is locked inside , terrified of a hostile world. (Sound familiar?) Players deliver parcels in this wonderfully strange story full of enigmatic characters and enjoyable quests.

“Donkey Kong Bananza” Nintendo produced this game—in which Donkey Kong smashes stuff in search of rewards—to accompany the launch of its Switch 2 console. It demonstrates the firm’s enduring design sensibilities.

“Ghost of Yotei”A vengeful samurai murders her way through enemy territory. The missions are fun, but it is a pleasure to wander round this splendidly rendered version of 17th-century Japan.

“Hades II”Melinoe enters the underworld to defeat Chronos, the Titan of time. The game’s fights feature cleverly designed versions of Greek mythological figures. Success in battle is hard-won .

“Hollow Knight: Silksong”Developed over the course of almost a decade, “Hollow Knight: Silksong” is extremely difficult. Players have to negotiate a labyrinth while overcoming an impressive array of baddies and obstacles.

“The Roottrees are Dead”A rich family have died in a plane crash. In this detective game, it is your job to find out who will inherit their wealth. As you pore over documents and diaries, you realise the family had plenty to hide.

“Split Fiction”A tech company steals authors’ story ideas and turns them into simulated worlds. When two writers agree to test out “The Machine”, they have to escape prisons of their own imagination. An intelligent multiplayer game.

“Two Point Museum”The previous “Two Point” games offered humorously subtle takes on managing a hospital and a university. Now comes a museum . Decisions must be made on everything from wages to the placement of prized exhibits.■

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Netflix is luring fans out of their homes to reinforce its biggest brands

“Stranger Things” and the surprising truth about hit-making Netflix is luring fans out of their homes to reinforce its biggest brands November 27th 2025 Nearly ten years after it first sent shivers down spines, “Stranger Things”, Netflix’s paranormal adventure, returned for its fifth and final season on November 26th. The quirky drama, set in Indiana in the 1980s, follows a group of intrepid youngsters who battle monsters from another dimension they call the Upside Down. (A nearby laboratory, disregarding health and safety, opened a portal between worlds.) The Duffer brothers, who created the show, were inspired by the science-fiction films of that era as well as tales of secret government experiments during the cold war.

“Stranger Things” was one of the streamer’s first big original hits and it is still going strong. In the first half of this year subscribers spent nearly half a billion hours watching the first four seasons. The show has swayed global culture. It has helped bring retro garb, such as oversized denim jackets, back into fashion. It has contributed to the growing popularity of “Dungeons & Dragons”, a fantasy role-playing game loved by the show’s characters. And it has influenced what people listen to. In 2022, after “Running Up That Hill” featured on the soundtrack for season four, streams of Kate Bush’s song surged by more than 8,000%. The song topped the charts in Britain almost 40 years after it was released.

The grand finale will be a cultural event, and an extra-strange one at that: on New Year’s Eve the last episode will be shown not just on Netflix, but in cinemas. Ted Sarandos, Netflix’s co-chief executive, reaffirmed his view in April that watching movies on the big screen was “an outmoded idea, for most people”. Yet as it tries to turn its popular shows into enduring franchises, Netflix increasingly sees a use for old-school platforms, from cinema to in-person events. Hollywood’s most high-tech company is using low-tech methods to make its shows travel farther still.

Netflix has created many original hits, from “Stranger Things” to “Squid Game” . With more than 300m subscribers around the world it has an ability like few others to inject ideas into global popular culture. But it has yet to find its Mickey Mouse or its “Star Wars”: the kind of triple-A-rated franchises that children want printed on their pyjamas and which they later introduce to their own offspring.

That would be a tall order for a company that has been making its own shows for little more than a decade. Netflix is nearly a century younger than most of its rivals; perhaps one day the demogorgons of “Stranger Things” will be as recognisable as Sir Ridley Scott’s aliens. In the meantime, one solution could be to buy some top-tier intellectual property from others. Netflix is said to have made a long-shot bid to acquire Warner Bros Discovery, whose back catalogue contains blue-chip megafranchises such as “Lord of the Rings” and “Harry Potter” , with vast fanbases and potential for spin-offs.

Yet Netflix has always preferred to build, rather than buy. So for now it is finding new ways to burrow its own brands deeper into the hearts of fans. “Stranger Things” is not the only Netflix project getting the big-screen treatment. “KPop Demon Hunters” , a hit anime musical that launched on the streaming service in June, was given a “singalong” cinematic release two months later, and got another short theatrical run over Halloween.

Guillermo del Toro’s “Frankenstein” film hit cinemas almost three weeks before it reached the small screen. “Wake Up Dead Man”, the new “Knives Out” movie, will follow a similar schedule. In 2026 “The Adventures of Cliff Booth”, a comedy-drama starring Brad Pitt, will probably get a cinematic release when it comes out in the summer, as will “Narnia” in the autumn.

Netflix has long paid lip service to the silver screen, giving about 30 films a year an airing at the cinema so they can qualify for Oscar nominations (a Best Picture gong still eludes the company). Theatrical runs also help lure star directors like Greta Gerwig, who was unwilling for “Narnia” to go straight to TV. Netflix is said to have promised Warner Bros that it would continue to release the studio’s films in cinemas, if its bid is accepted.

These days Netflix is able to negotiate better terms with cinema operators, too. Before covid-19, most insisted that films got a 90-day exclusive run in their auditoriums. These days they cannot afford to be so choosy. Some theatres are hiring out their screens to people who want to plug in their PlayStation for a birthday party. Showing a months-old movie like “KPop Demon Hunters”, or a TV episode like “Stranger Things”, is something they are willing to contemplate.

In the home, Netflix is reaching for other old-school tactics to heighten the buzz around its shows. One of its signature innovations was the simultaneous release of entire series, to enable bingeing. It now seems to take the view that, in some cases, the traditional practice of dripping out episodes increases excitement. Recent seasons of shows like “Bridgerton” and “Emily in Paris” have been released in two batches. The eight new episodes of “Stranger Things” will be dropped in three helpings—around Thanksgiving, Christmas Day and New Year’s Eve—to keep people in a state of fearful anticipation.

The streamer is giving its hit shows greater depth by commissioning spin-offs. Netflix may regret the end of “Stranger Things”, which has been responsible for more than $1bn in subscription revenue over the past five years, according to Parrot Analytics, a data company. But it will keep fans going with an animated offshoot, due next year, called “Tales from ’85”, as well as a live-action spin-off still in its early stages. Other high-performing series have been similarly fleshed out, with supporting projects including a reality competition show based on “Squid Game” and “Queen Charlotte”, a mini-series set, like “Bridgerton”, in Regency-era England.

Netflix is also creating more in-person experiences. For years it has experimented with temporary events, from “Bridgerton” balls to “Money Heist” escape rooms. On November 12th the streamer opened the first Netflix House, a kind of indoor theme park, in Philadelphia, where attractions include “Wednesday” -themed games and a restaurant serving Netflix-inspired dishes. A second branch, with a “Stranger Things” experience, will open on December 11th in Dallas. Las Vegas is next, in 2027, with other venues promised.

These are a far cry from Disney’s sprawling parks and resorts, which contribute the largest share of the firm’s profits. Netflix House is overseen by the company’s marketing department. The scope for shareable selfies—on velvet “Bridgerton” thrones, for example—will help keep brands top of mind between seasons. Netflix is “extracting incremental revenue from superfans while reinforcing a property’s position in the cultural conversation ahead of its next cycle”, says Christofer Hamilton of Parrot Analytics.

For all its experiments, Netflix remains convinced that streaming is the best way to create global hits. Historically, cinematic release has given movies a wave of publicity which they have ridden through video rental and then TV. But on a recent earnings call, Mr Sarandos mused that the hit-making process can now work the other way round. In the case of “KPop Demon Hunters”, he said, “It was the superfans who…repeat-watched the movie that drove the recommendation engine that got it in front of more superfans.” Viewing at home let audiences learn the songs, make up the dances and post them on social media—ultimately creating a film that people wanted to see at the cinema. “We believe that…‘KPop Demon Hunters’ actually worked because it was released on Netflix first,” Mr Sarandos said.

When it comes to “Stranger Things”, fans may want to witness the gang’s final showdown with Vecna, a terrifying psychic being, in a room with other people. Communal watching heightens the thrills and chills; of all the genres, horror is the one people still go to the cinema to watch. In the streaming age, the business of hit-making has gone into the Upside Down. ■

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The capybara has a far better reputation than its fellow rodents

What has webbed feet, a big snout and is adored on the internet? The capybara has a far better reputation than its fellow rodents November 27th 2025 FOR THE most part, rodents make people shriek in disgust. But the largest rodent of all, strangely, does not. The capybara, a hirsute native of South America, typically provokes squeals of delight. It is pictured on keyrings, backpacks and stationery. Spend £40 ($52) and you can get a luxuriously soft capybara toy for your bedroom. For under £10 you can get an advent calendar containing 24 different ornaments, depicting Hydrochoerus hydrochaeris as an astronaut, magician or detective.

The capybara has become something of a cultural idol. There are capybara cafés in America, Indonesia, Taiwan and Thailand; one is expected to open in Britain soon. A catchy song—its lyrics are mainly “capybara”, repeated over and over—has more than 33m streams on Spotify. On TikTok almost 700,000 posts bear the hashtag #capybara—more than other cuties like the #koala (210,000) or # otter (190,000).

The craze began in Japan in the 1980s. Keepers at Izu Shaboten Park, a botanical garden and zoo in Shizuoka, noticed that the capybaras plonked themselves down in warm puddles after the enclosure had been cleaned and so built them their own onsen. Capybaras are semi-aquatic and loved the hot baths; visitors loved watching them bathe. Another park, in Nagasaki, is known as “the holy land of capybaras” as visitors can pet and feed around 20 of them.

Brands soon realised capybaras’ merchandising potential. In the 2000s Bandai, a Japanese toymaker, created Kapibara-san (Mr Capybara) as an item that could be won in arcades; within a few years Kapibara-san became a hit anime character. Kapibara-san, much like Hello Kitty, was then exported around the world. The internet also allowed people to discover capybaras along with other niche animals such as axolotls (a type of salamander).

Now fans make pilgrimages to see the hairy darlings. Hertfordshire Zoo in Britain acquired a breeding pair in 2022 and is enjoying more visitors than ever. The zoo’s capybara experience, where guests can give the animals scratches and pose for photos, is almost sold out for the next year.

Capybaras are not endangered. They have small eyes, large, blunt snouts, bristly fur and ungainly webbed feet. So what gives? Capybaras appeal because they look as though they are unbothered by the vicissitudes of the world. They always wear a cool, calm and collected expression, whether they are eating a snack, being approached by an iPhone-wielding stranger or interacting with other beasties. They have earned the sobriquet of “the chillest animal on Earth”; some joke that the collective noun for the mammal should be a “meditation”, so zen is their vibe. At a time when people talk of ever-increasing anxiety and burnout, these animals’ unflappability is almost aspirational. Lounging in their pools, capybaras remind stressed-out humans to go with the flow. ■

“Wake Up Dead Man” spotlights the clash at the heart of an unkillable genre

In the latest “Knives Out” mystery, reason takes on faith “Wake Up Dead Man” spotlights the clash at the heart of an unkillable genre November 27th 2025 “Not more than one secret room or passage is allowable.” So decrees one of the ten commandments of detective fiction distilled by Ronald Knox, a friend of Agatha Christie , during the genre’s inter-war golden age. Unknown poisons are out, as are “all supernatural or preternatural agencies”.

Murder mysteries are governed by conventions. That is part of their consoling charm : they are a safe sort of danger, in which, even as corpses and red herrings pile up, you know roughly what to expect. In cinemas now and on Netflix soon, “Wake Up Dead Man” deliciously illustrates the fun and freedom of the formula. An heir to Knox could compile a modern set of rules from the tropes it revels in. The tension at its heart has powered the genre from the start.

In this third and best film in the “Knives Out” whodunnit franchise, a hoodlum-turned-priest, Jud Duplencity (played by Josh O’Connor, pictured left), is dispatched by his superiors to a dysfunctional congregation in upstate New York. Its tyrannical overlord, Jefferson Wicks (Josh Brolin), is elaborately murdered. Jud is the prime suspect.

Great detective stories often feature a cocooned setting—a snowbound hotel, a cruise on the Nile—which forces the characters into dangerous proximity and keeps them there. It can also serve as a microcosm of wider society. A locked or otherwise inaccessible murder scene is handy, too. Here Rian Johnson, the director, picks a remote church with gothic fixtures and crepuscular lighting, duly staging what the dialogue calls “a textbook example of a perfectly impossible crime”. A cemetery crypt has a “Lazarus door” that opens only from the inside. Will it open, do you think?

The detective in a murder mystery underwrites the peril: you may not know who the killer is, but you know a guy or girl who does. The best are walking brands, with illustrious case histories and idiosyncrasies. Sherlock Holmes had his pipe and violin; Mr Johnson’s sleuth, Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig, pictured right), is a quirky dresser with a Southern drawl. Like Hercule Poirot he is confident but compassionate, formidable yet faintly comic; cerebral with a hint of clown.

As convention dictates, he has a sidekick. This figure is a foil for the detective’s brilliance and an avatar for the audience. You can’t imagine being Holmes, Poirot or Blanc, but perhaps you could be Watson or Hastings—or blundering, kindly Jud.

Rule-bound as they are, though, successful murder mysteries, like other populist art, are also mirrors of their time. Money and lust are recurring themes, but otherwise motives and contexts vary. “Wake Up Dead Man” depicts a small-town fusion of reactionary politics and harsh religion. Wicks, the victim, inspires fierce devotion in his flock by “keeping them angry and afraid”. Jud is derided as a “PINO”, or Priest In Name Only.

An unwritten but cardinal law of the form on screen is: have a blast! The room may be locked, but there should be a party inside it, buzzing with gorgeous people, some of whom die, and a high quotient of maniacs. Since by itself it can be a let-down, murder should be only part of the spectacle. (As John Dickson Carr writes in “The Hollow Man”, a novel cited in the movie, when the locked room is explained, “in some vague way we are disappointed.”) Directors should lay on lush locations and casts—Mr Johnson’s includes Mila Kunis and Glenn Close—and lots of jokes. Look out, here, for the snacking pathologist.

Amid the self-referential high jinks, however, “Wake Up Dead Man” spotlights the genre’s fundamental clash. Murder mysteries pit wily detectives against scheming assassins (and bumbling plods). But those are only proxies for hidden forces, towards which Knox’s ban on the supernatural offers a clue.

Detective fiction emerged in the 19th century as science, including the evolutionary and forensic kinds, advanced. Reason rattled faith. Fictional detectives were omniscient idols of a secularising world, even if, like Poirot, they professed belief. Together the sleuths unravel not just individual mysteries but the concept of mystery; the idea that some truths are too deep for mortals to fathom.

Rationalist Blanc disputes with spiritual Jud, envisaging this fiendish case as his “final checkmate over the mysteries of faith”. He gathers the suspects for his summation, an earthly take on the last judgment, sin and hellfire transmuted into logic and proof. It doesn’t go quite as he plans. Predictable as it seems—or because it seems predictable—the murder mystery can still surprise. ■

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Two musical films are producing box-office magic

The gravity-defying success of “Wicked” Two musical films are producing box-office magic November 27th 2025 IT IS HARD to decide the wackiest thing about “Wicked”. Perhaps it is the fact that in Oz, the musical’s magical setting, animals work. (A goat is a historian; an owl a preacher.) Perhaps it is that the bad witch (Cynthia Erivo) has green skin—or that the good witch ( Ariana Grande ) almost exclusively wears pink and uses words like “hideodious” and “obsessulated”.

However hideodious this all may sound, Hollywood is obsessulated. A two-part “Wicked” musical-movie extravaganza has struck a chord. The first instalment took more than $750m at the global box office to become one of the highest-grossing film adaptations of a Broadway musical. In America no film has outperformed “Wicked” since it was released a year ago. “Wicked For Good”, the second part, was released on November 21st and is outpacing its predecessor in ticket sales. It has already made more than $235m. Why are the films proving so spellbindingly successful?

There are three reasons. First, the movies are part of a much-loved franchise. “Wicked” is adapted from a musical by Stephen Schwartz and Winnie Holzman. The musical is based on a novel by Gregory Maguire which tells the story of the Wicked Witch of the West from “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz”, L. Frank Baum’s yellow-brick-road adventure of 1900. That novel was adapted into a hit film in 1939.

The second factor is the musical’s artistic merits. Critics sniffed when “Wicked” opened on Broadway in 2003—an early review said the show was “more withered than wicked”—but audiences cheered. The musical has since been seen by over 70m theatregoers. The show is “very well written”, avers Paul Laird, the author of “Wicked: A Musical Biography”. Ballads such as “Defying Gravity” are uplifting; catchy tunes like “Popular” are not merely popular but tell a story, as in any good musical. It helps that the films’ leads, including Ms Grande, a pop star, can execute the soaring melodies to perfection.

The films, which had a combined budget of around $300m, have also benefited from cinematic wizardry. The first movie won Oscars for costume and production design. On set were 9m tulips planted in a rainbow pattern, a functioning emerald-green locomotive and a road of actual yellow bricks. “Wicked” may usher in a wave of spectacular musical films: Jon Chu, the director, is already working on an adaptation of “Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat” for Amazon.

The final reason for the success of “Wicked” is a bewitching advertising campaign. At a time when films seem to have fading cultural relevance, Universal’s marketing department made this one inescapable. The studio partnered with more than 400 brands to peddle everything from pink and green Le Creuset cookware (the set is $900) to pink and green laundry detergent and pink and green macaroni cheese. Fans can visit Greggs, a bakery chain, and “follow the yellow bake road” to buy a limited-edition coffee cup.

The effect of all this is akin to being unwillingly stranded in Oz, rather like Dorothy and Toto in Baum’s story. It points to Hollywood’s cosy relationship with brands. Blockbuster movies have long entered into these kinds of partnerships—franchises from James Bond to Barbie have sought product-placement deals and licensing agreements—but “Wicked” has taken it further than most. Promotions for the first movie generated more than $330m of “media value”, a gauge of the monetary benefit of brand deals, reportedly the most ever for a Hollywood film.

So by now many will be done with “Wicked” for good, never mind “Wicked For Good”. The second half—a nearly two-and-a-half-hour film spun out of an hour-long musical act—often feels unnecessary, even as it introduces new songs and new silly phrases. (Characters say “just a clock tick”, ie, just a second, with alarming frequency.) The singing is still marvellous and the sets mesmerising, but after two years of persistent pink and green, viewers may find themselves counting down the clock ticks until its conclusion. ■

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He was unafraid of getting things wrong or offending his peers

Francis Crick was an extraordinary scientist—and a flawed man He was unafraid of getting things wrong or offending his peers November 27th 2025 IN FEBRUARY 1953, after five weeks of intense work, Francis Crick (pictured) and James Watson solved one of biology’s most fundamental puzzles: the structure of DNA. Their discovery—the double helix—had little to do with Crick’s doctoral thesis at Cambridge, but it was the problem that fascinated him most at the time. Other scientists had been closing in on the structure. Crick was, as one of his contemporaries put it, “the sort of chap who was always doing someone else’s crossword”.

After the double helix came many more discoveries, often on other scientists’ turf. Crick proposed the mechanism by which DNA was translated into protein and helped crack the genetic code. He contributed to the understanding of collagen’s structure, devised prescient theories of embryonic development and later turned his attention to the neural basis of consciousness. A new biography by Matthew Cobb, a zoologist at the University of Manchester, uses these discoveries to study the mind that produced them, revealing the traits that made Crick one of the 20th century’s greatest scientists.

Crick was competitive—sometimes unscrupulously so—and unafraid of offending others. In Britain the race to determine DNA’s structure was centred not around Cambridge, but King’s College London, where Maurice Wilkins and Rosalind Franklin were taking X-rays of DNA fibres. Crick’s and Watson’s success depended in part on data from King’s that they used without permission. (In 1962 Crick, Watson and Wilkins shared the Nobel prize in medicine; Franklin had died in 1958.)

He excelled at explaining scientific ideas and often did so to the public. Crick’s lectures were famous for their energy and scope; his research papers are still admired for their clarity. Most of his best ideas came from conversations with peers. In Cambridge he bounced hypotheses off Watson and then Sydney Brenner ; later in life, after his move to the Salk Institute in San Diego, Christof Koch, a neuroscientist, became his sparring partner. Colleagues reported hearing Crick constantly “prattle away in his loud voice”.

In these “mad sessions”, Crick tested ideas to see which survived contact with reality. He was analytical, but his biggest discoveries relied on trial and error and on what he called his “don’t worry method”. A theory, he argued, should not be rejected merely because some evidence failed to fit: data could be flawed and measurements could be wrong. The art was knowing which anomalies to discard—a matter, he thought, of “biological intuition”.

Yet Crick was not afraid to be wrong. Before settling on the double helix, he proposed a triple one. He published an incorrect structure of collagen and a mistaken theory about the genetic code. In one paper he argued that life on Earth began from microbes sent by extraterrestrial beings.

His unconventional career also probably contributed to his success. Crick came to science late, completing his PhD at 37. He preferred theory to experiments, leaving the fiddly, time-consuming lab work to others. He did very little admin or teaching. Unlike most academics, past and present, he had the privilege of spending most of his time reading and thinking.

This captivating biography is deeply researched and elegantly written. Crick is painted as an extraordinary mind—bold, curious and combative—and the book offers a glimpse of his colourful personal life, replete with parties, affairs, drugs and feuds. Professor Cobb does not shy away from describing his subject’s flaws: he points, for instance, to Crick’s interest in eugenics. But on the whole he is most interested in Crick’s scientific contributions.

Had Crick and Watson not got there first, the structure of DNA would soon have been solved by someone else. But it was Crick’s grasp of the double helix’s implications that propelled biology forward. In the structure he deduced how DNA replicated itself and concluded that the sequence of bases was the source of genetic information. It may have been someone else’s crossword, but science is richer for Crick’s intervention. ■

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Gladiators and dictators, wolves and Beatles feature in our list this year

The best books of 2025 Gladiators and dictators, wolves and Beatles feature in our list this year November 20th 2025 Buckley: The Life and the Revolution That Changed America. By Sam Tanenhaus. Random House; 1,040 pages; $40 and £33A superb biography of William F. Buckley , the most influential American journalist of the 20th century. For this book, more than a quarter of a century in the making, Sam Tanenhaus has judiciously curated the public and private record.

Careless People. By Sarah Wynn-Williams. Flatiron Books; 400 pages; $32.99. Macmillan; £22A cracking corporate kiss-and-tell . Marketed as “the book Meta doesn’t want you to read”, this memoir portrays Mark Zuckerberg, the company’s founder and boss, as aloof and superficial.

Dark Renaissance: The Dangerous Times and Fatal Genius of Shakespeare’s Greatest Rival. By Stephen Greenblatt. W.W. Norton; 352 pages; $31.99. Bodley Head; £25Shoemaker’s son, scholar, playwright, spy: the outline of Christopher Marlowe’s life is dramatic. But the details—not least the reason for his fatal stabbing in 1593, aged 29—are sketchy. This evocative book offers a portrait of Elizabethan England: a time of paranoia, surveillance and violence, but also blistering creativity.

Electric Spark. By Frances Wilson. Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 432 pages; $35. Bloomsbury Circus; £25This brilliant book grapples with Muriel Spark, the author of “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie”, “The Ballad of Peckham Rye” and 20 other novels. Her life is characterised by the same strange, stark abruptness as her prose.

How to End a Story: Collected Diaries. By Helen Garner. Pantheon; 832 pages; $40. W&N; £20An Australian novelist brings together 20 years of her diaries, in which she reflects on motherhood, her writing career and a disastrous marriage to a fellow novelist. Her prose is by turns dazzling, poignant and very, very funny; there is a delightful observation on every page.

Mother Mary Comes To Me. By Arundhati Roy. Scribner; 352 pages; $30. Hamish Hamilton; £20Where does Arundhati Roy, a Booker-prizewinning author and activist, get her fiercely independent streak? The clue is in the title. In this sparkling memoir Ms Roy explores her difficult relationship with her mother, who was a “dreamer, warrior, teacher”—and a terror.

Raising Hare. By Chloe Dalton. Pantheon; 304 pages; $27. Canongate; £18.99In this tale , joy and wonder come bundled in a four-legged, long-eared, skittish little package. Caring for the leveret opens the author’s eyes to the natural world; she is an elegant writer and sharp-eyed observer.

Storyteller: The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson. By Leo Damrosch. Yale University Press; 584 pages; $35 and £25With his wonderfully crafted books and mercurial, magnetic personality, Robert Louis Stevenson always inspired devotion. This meticulously researched biography avoids idolatry: it tells the reader not just what happens in Stevenson’s books, but why they should care .

Zbig. By Edward Luce. Avid Reader Press; 560 pages; $35. Bloomsbury; £30Was Zbigniew Brzezinski America’s most important foreign-policy guru? A fine biography makes a powerful case for an underappreciated man with a penetrating intelligence and remarkable foresight.

1929. By Andrew Ross Sorkin. Viking; 592 pages; $35. Allen Lane; £30The story of the seminal stockmarket and banking crash of modern history. The author wisely tells this sprawling story in a focused way , reconstructing how crucial figures experienced the ructions almost hour by hour.

Chokepoints. By Edward Fishman. Portfolio; 560 pages; $40. Elliott & Thompson; £25A riveting world tour of American sanctions. This book shows how economic weapons evolved through trial, error and political pressure, as Western officials were often too afraid of using them. It is also a ripping yarn .

The Corporation in the 21st Century: Why (Almost) Everything We Are Told About Business Is Wrong. By John Kay. Yale University Press; 448 pages; $35. Profile Books; £25The framework for thinking about business and capitalism is hopelessly outdated, argues one of Britain’s leading economists. This book offers a lively, lucid discussion of what companies are, and what they are for.

House of Huawei. By Eva Dou. Portfolio; 448 pages; $34. Abacus; £25Huawei has gone from making basic telephone switches nearly 40 years ago to designing some of the world’s most advanced semiconductors today. A reporter at the Washington Post tells the story of one of the world’s most controversial companies.

The Thinking Machine: Jensen Huang, Nvidia and the World’s Most Coveted Microchip. By Stephen Witt. Viking; 272 pages; $30. Bodley Head; £25An excellent biography of Jensen Huang, co-founder and CEO of Nvidia. Stephen Witt weaves together the story of the man, his company and the computer science that led to large language models such as ChatGPT, which brought generative AI to the masses in 2022.

Fatherhood: A History of Love and Power. By Augustine Sedgewick. Scribner; 320 pages; $30. Picador; £20An American scholar describes how thinking about dads has changed over time . What is striking is the sheer variety of nonsense that people have believed; another common theme is cruelty. The best time to be a father may be now.

The Genius Myth. By Helen Lewis. Thesis; 320 pages; $30. Jonathan Cape; £22Books about geniuses tend to fall into predictable categories, from hagiography to takedowns to how-to manuals. This book is more original . This is the high age of the genius, readers may conclude—but not in a good way.

John & Paul: A Love Story in Songs. By Ian Leslie. Celadon Books; 448 pages; $32. Faber & Faber; £25The Beatles have been amply covered. But this book , which focuses on the relationship between John Lennon and Sir Paul McCartney, offers new insights. Ian Leslie listens as a musician, a fan and a literary critic.

Lone Wolf. By Adam Weymouth. Crown; 288 pages; $30. Hutchinson Heinemann; £18.99In 2011 Slavc, a wolf, set off from Slovenia and travelled 2,000 kilometres in search of a mate. For this original, lyrical travelogue, the author follows in his pawprints and reflects on rural life, migration and folklore. The wolf, it turns out, embodies many of Europe’s divides.

Why q needs u. By Danny Bate. Blink Publishing; 336 pages; £14.99 This book offers a history of writing, a biography of English and an introduction to linguistics, all smuggled into 26 short and entertaining chapters. It is perfect for anyone who is baffled or enchanted by the eccentricities of the English language.

Archipelago of the Sun. By Tawada Yoko. Translated by Margaret Mitsutani. New Directions; 224 pages; $16.95. Granta Books; £12.99The final volume in an acclaimed trilogy, which follows a travelling band of eclectic multilingual friends. The author’s style is somehow both delightfully dreamlike and cuttingly sharp.

The Eleventh Hour. By Salman Rushdie. Random House; 272 pages; $29. Jonathan Cape; £18.99A luminous collection of short stories, which slyly mock a wide range of targets: religious bigots, political charlatans—and death itself.

Flashlight. By Susan Choi. Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 464 pages; $30. Jonathan Cape; £20While visiting Japan, ten-year-old Louisa and her father go for a walk on the beach. The next day she is found half-dead and her dad has vanished. A novel about identity and history that is full of twists.

Flesh. By David Szalay. Scribner; 368 pages; $28.99. Jonathan Cape; £18.99The winner of this year’s Booker prize is a deceptively complex novel which finds original ways to explore masculinity, intimacy, class and power struggles. The author’s elegant, stripped-back prose powers a narrative rich in pathos.

The Lack of Light: A Novel of Georgia. By Nino Haratischwili. Translated by Charlotte Collins and Ruth Martin. HarperVia; 736 pages; $29.99 and £20This immersive epic follows the lives of four female friends—Nene, Dina, Ira and Keto—as they navigate the tumultuous years before and after Georgia’s independence from the Soviet Union. A tale of resilience and redemption.

The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny. By Kiran Desai. Hogarth; 688 pages; $32. Hamish Hamilton; £25Sonia is an aspiring novelist in Vermont; Sunny is a journalist in New York. They meet and fall in love, but the question is whether they are able to stay together, find happiness and feel “life growing bigger”. This book is grand in sweep yet satisfyingly intimate.

Once the Deed Is Done. By Rachel Seiffert. Virago; 464 pages; £22A novel about trust and trauma. Set in Germany in 1945, this book looks at what happened to the millions of labourers brought in to prop up the Nazi regime. Its characters include a Red Cross worker, herself an exile, and a local child who cracks under the weight of secrets.

Perfection. By Vincenzo Latronico. Translated by Sophie Hughes. New York Review Books; 136 pages; $15.95. Fitzcarraldo Editions; £12.99A lucid and bitter portrait of millennial dreams and disillusionment. It traces the lives of Anna and Tom, a couple whose picture-perfect Instagram existence begins to crumble.

Vulture. By Phoebe Greenwood. Europa Editions; 288 pages; $27 and £16.99This scathing send-up of war reporting follows Sara, a young English freelance reporter, as she covers conflict in Gaza in 2012. A supremely accomplished debut novel full of wit and bite.

We Do Not Part. By Han Kang. Translated by e. yaewon and Paige Morris. Hogarth; 272 pages; $28. Hamish Hamilton; £18.99The Nobel-prizewinning novelist chronicles shameful episodes in South Korea’s history. The power of this narrative comes from Han Kang’s masterful fusion of the literary and the documentary.

What We Can Know. By Ian McEwan. Knopf; 320 pages; $30. Jonathan Cape; £22In the year 2119 an academic trawls through archives to track down a lost poem. His discovery yields an account of passion, murder and guilt. This is an inventive, exquisitely written book, which combines dystopia, romance and mystery.

Wild Dark Shore. By Charlotte McConaghy. Flatiron Books; 320 pages; $28.99. Castle Point Books; £24.99Dominic Salt lives on Shearwater, a fictional island near Antarctica, where he tends to a seed bank which is vital for food security. This taut thriller about battles for survival is enriched by its nature writing and treatment of climate change.

Caribe: A Caribbean Cookbook with History. By Keshia Sakarah. Quadrille; 320 pages; $45. Hardie Grant Books; £30A British food writer of Montserratian and Barbudan heritage explores the culinary culture of the Caribbean. This book takes each island in turn, looking at its colonial history and how this shaped its food, from Barbados’s pudding and souse to Dominica’s saltfish fritters.

Chesnok. By Polina Chesnakova. Hardie Grant Books; 240 pages; $35 and £26A personal tour through Soviet diaspora cooking. The author was born in Ukraine to a Russian mother and Armenian father who married in Georgia; she explores the cuisine of all four countries and more. This is one of those rare cookbooks that is as much fun to read as cook from.

The Complete Illustrated Guide to Japanese Cooking: Techniques, Ingredients & Recipes. By Harada Sachiyo. Hardie Grant Books; 288 pages; $45 and £30An introduction to perhaps the world’s most sophisticated cuisine. Each technique or ingredient is explained through infographics; recipes include step-by-step photographs. Seasonal stews and various sushi styles are elucidated.

Fusão: Untraditional Recipes Inspired by Brazil. By Ixta Belfrage. Interlink Books; 288 pages; $35. Ebury Press; £28 This book looks at the indigenous, Portuguese and west African influences in Brazil’s culinary landscape, among others. (Fusão means fusion in Portuguese.) For Ixta Belfrage—who spent five years working for Yotam Ottolenghi—it is an exploration of her own heritage. Try the black beans stewed in chocolate.

Italopunk: 145 Recipes to Shock Your Nonna. By Vanja van der Leeden. Tra Publishing; 400 pages; $55 and £49.99In a year of great pasta cookbooks, “Italopunk” stands out. There is nothing starchy about this manifesto against Italian culinary dogmatism. The author, a Dutch-Indonesian chef, interviews Italian cooks about their struggles to reinvent food in a country obsessed with tradition.

Something from Nothing. By Alison Roman. Clarkson Potter; 320 pages; $37.99. Quadrille; £27A popular American cook and food writer offers an ode to pantry staples. “Casual” but “elegant” is often what she aims for: supermarket radishes with “very expensive butter” or potato crisps with caviar, which she serves up to impress guests without getting her hands dirty.

38 Londres Street: On Impunity, Pinochet in England and a Nazi in Patagonia. By Philippe Sands. Knopf; 480 pages; $35. W&N; £25This is the third book in a loose trilogy about Nazis, justice and impunity. The author shows how the long-rumoured friendship between Augusto Pinochet, a Chilean dictator, and Walter Rauff, a Nazi officer, was real.

Allies at War. By Tim Bouverie. Crown; 672 pages; $38. Bodley Head; £25 A masterful diplomatic history of the second world war. The story of the improbable alliance between “the Big Three” of Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin is familiar, but packed with fresh detail and gossipy anecdotes.

The cia Book Club. By Charlie English. Random House; 384 pages; $35. William Collins; £25Tomes were smuggled on boats, trains and trucks. The CIA funnelled 10m books into the eastern bloc, including George Orwell’s “1984”, John le Carré’s spy thrillers and Virginia Woolf’s writing advice. This is the riveting story of “the best-kept secret of the cold war”.

The Gods of New York. By Jonathan Mahler. Random House; 464 pages; $32. Hutchinson Heinemann; £25Between 1986 and 1989, old New York died and a new one was born. Part of this book’s pleasure , especially for readers too young to remember the late 1980s, is that it chronicles a time when several important American political figures first strode onto the public stage.

The Illegals. By Shaun Walker. Knopf; 448 pages; $32. Profile Books; £22One of the most compelling and perceptive books on intelligence of the past decade. Shaun Walker combines the methods of the journalist and the historian, vividly describing how the KGB churned out deep-cover spies who often cracked under the pressure.

The Last Days of Budapest. By Adam LeBor. PublicAffairs; 512 pages; $35. Apollo; £27.99This outstanding book chronicles the transformation of one of Europe’s finest cosmopolitan capitals during the second world war. Adam LeBor tells the story of how Budapest became a centre of wartime intrigue and espionage, drawing on an impressive range of sources.

Peak Human. By Johan Norberg. Atlantic Books; 400 pages; $32.99 and £22A historian explains how golden ages really start—and end. Some of the periods Johan Norberg describes will be familiar to readers, but he deftly punctures popular misconceptions and adds fresh details and provocative arguments.

The Revolutionists. By Jason Burke. Knopf; 768 pages; $40. Bodley Head; £30A deeply researched account of hijackings, hostage-takings and other terrorist activity in the 1970s, told with verve by the Guardian’s international security correspondent. It offers portraits of leftist freedom fighters such as Ilich Ramírez Sánchez (aka Carlos the Jackal) and documents the rise of Islamist extremism.

Strangers and Intimates: The Rise and Fall of Private Life. By Tiffany Jenkins. Picador; 464 pages; $28.99 and £20A fascinating look at how thinking about privacy has evolved over time. One of those rare works that changes how you see the world, with an insight on every page.

The Third Reich of Dreams: The Nightmares of a Nation. By Charlotte Beradt. Translated by Damion Searls. Princeton University Press; 152 pages; $24.95 and £20This collection shows that, even in sleep, Germany’s fascist regime occupied the minds of its subjects. This remarkable work of journalism, newly translated into English, shows how authoritarianism warps the subconscious.

Those Who Are About To Die. By Harry Sidebottom. Knopf; 416 pages; $35. Hutchinson Heinemann; £25A historian explains what gladiator shows were really like. To those who think that the Romans—with their businesslike haircuts and underfloor heating—were much like ourselves, this vivid, gripping book offers many correctives.

The Traitors Circle. By Jonathan Freedland. Harper; 480 pages; $32. John Murray; £25The thrilling story of a group of anti-Nazi activists in wartime Berlin, including a countess who hid her Jewish lover in a sofa when the Gestapo raided her flat. Betrayed by an informer, several paid an awful price for their defiance. At bottom the book is an inquiry into how, in the direst circumstances, some people find the immense courage to do what is right.

Arctic Passages: Ice, Exploration and the Battle for Power at the Top of the World. By Kieran Mulvaney. Island Press; 240 pages; $30 and £24Before long, the Arctic Ocean could be free of ice in summer. That is opening up passages for commercial vessels: in this splendid book a journalist looks at each passage in turn, combining reportage with details of his own voyages.

Daughters of the Bamboo Grove. By Barbara Demick. Random House; 352 pages; $32. Granta Books; £20Based on extensive reporting in China and America, this book uncovers how China’s one-child policy also led to the widespread seizure of children for international adoption. The author focuses on the abduction of a twin girl in 2002 and her adoption in America; an emotional reunion with her sister in 2019 is movingly described.

The Highest Exam: How the Gaokao Shapes China. By Ruixue Jia and Hongbin Li with Claire Cousineau. Belknap Press; 256 pages; $29.95 and £24.95The gaokao—China’s university entrance exam—shapes much of the country’s society, from pay to politics. Read this thoughtful book to learn how the test is the first of many tournaments in which the Chinese have to compete over the course of their lives.

The Finest Hotel in Kabul: A People’s History of Afghanistan. By Lyse Doucet. Allen Lane; 448 pages; $29. Hutchinson Heinemann; £25 A chronicle of Afghanistan’s history since 1969, as it was seen from the Hotel InterContinental Kabul. Lyse Doucet, the BBC’s chief international correspondent, writes in a novelistic way; she is a humane narrator who conveys the suffering and resilience of the hotel’s staff.

The Hour of the Predator: Encounters with the Autocrats and Tech Billionaires Taking Over the World. By Giuliano da Empoli. Translated by Sam Taylor. Pushkin Press; 160 pages; $16.95 and £12.99An Italian-Swiss writer spent years in the corridors of power observing what he sees as the emergence of a new cadre of strongmen in politics and technology, who feed off each other and share a love of disruption. He skewers them with sardonic humour.

I Deliver Parcels in Beijing. By Hu Anyan. Translated by Jack Hargreaves. Astra House; 336 pages; $27. Allen Lane; £20A bestseller in China recently translated into English. Hu Anyan’s straightforward prose and keen eye for detail capture the drudgery of gruelling low-wage work and the personal toll it takes.

In Covid’s Wake: How Our Politics Failed Us. By Stephen Macedo and Frances Lee. Princeton University Press; 392 pages; $29.95 and £25This insightful book looks at the far-reaching and unexpected consequences of covid-19. The pandemic fed a global surge in inflation, a breakdown of trust in experts and an aggravation of political polarisation.

The Party’s Interests Come First: The Life of Xi Zhongxun, Father of Xi Jinping. By Joseph Torigian. Stanford University Press; 718 pages; $50 and £40This biography of Xi Zhongxun, Xi Jinping’s father, draws on a decade of research using Chinese, English and Russian sources. The book is valuable not only for its portrait of its subject, but also for its insights into his progeny, now the supreme leader.

Righting Wrongs: Three Decades on the Front Lines Battling Abusive Governments. By Kenneth Roth. Knopf; 448 pages; $30. Allen Lane; £30A leading human-rights campaigner explains how to curb the cruelty of the world’s worst regimes. The key to shaming powerful wrongdoers is to avoid name-calling and “stigmatise with facts”.

Russia’s Man of War: The Extraordinary Viktor Bout. By Cathy Scott-Clark. Hurst; 424 pages; $34.99 and £25In 2022 Viktor Bout, a Russian arms dealer, was swapped for Brittney Griner, an American basketball player, after 15 years in American custody. This richly reported biography of Mr Bout benefits from rare interviews with him—though an arms trafficker is perhaps not the most reliable narrator.

We the People: A History of the US Constitution. By Jill Lepore. Liveright; 720 pages; $39.99. John Murray; £30Contrary to the Founding Fathers’ wishes, America’s constitution is too hard to change, argues a professor at Harvard University and writer for the New Yorker. This book offers an arresting chronicle of Americans striving—if sometimes failing—to remake their republic.

When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows... By Steven Pinker. Scribner; 384 pages; $30. Allen Lane; £25Common knowledge—knowing that others know something, and that they know we know—is powerful. Thinking about it “illuminates many enigmas of our public affairs and personal lives”, a Harvard polymath argues in this fizzing, erudite book .

Why Nothing Works: Who Killed Progress―and How to Bring It Back. By Marc Dunkelman. PublicAffairs; 416 pages; $32.50 and £28This absorbing book argues that excessive regulation, diffuse power and plentiful vetoes have hurt America by blocking housebuilding, infrastructure and effective governance. It crystalises ideas that have been swirling around newspaper columns, think-tanks and social media.

The Age of Diagnosis. By Suzanne O’Sullivan. Thesis; 320 pages; $32. Hodder Press; £22 A neurologist asks whether doctors’ dogged pursuit of diagnoses is actually beneficial to patients. Many normal conditions are pathologised; with early screenings, people end up being treated for ailments that might resolve on their own. “We are not getting sicker,” the author writes in this even-handed book, but “we are attributing more to sickness.”

Collisions: A Physicist’s Journey from Hiroshima to the Death of the Dinosaurs. By Alec Nevala-Lee. W.W. Norton; 352 pages; $31.99 and £23.99Luis Walter Alvarez won the Nobel prize in 1968 for his work on particle physics. He was also “the world’s foremost scientific detective”, this enlightening book argues. The list of mysteries on which he consulted, from assassinations to UFOs, would have raised even Sherlock Holmes’s eyebrows.

Crick: A Mind in Motion. By Matthew Cobb. Basic Books; 608 pages; $36. Profile Books; £30A biography of one of the 20th century’s greatest scientists. The man who, along with James Watson, determined the structure of DNA, was curious and combative. Most important, he was unafraid to be wrong and abided by a “don’t worry method” of trial and error.

Empire of ai. By Karen Hao. Penguin Press; 496 pages; $32 and £25This book reveals disturbing traits about Sam Altman , the co-founder and chief executive of OpenAI, and the culture of Silicon Valley that are useful to bear in mind amid the hype about generative artificial intelligence.

Ends of the Earth: Journeys to the Polar Regions in Search of Life, the Cosmos and our Future. By Neil Shubin. Dutton; 288 pages; $32. Oneworld; £22 This book is full of great facts. An American fossil-hunter corrals the latest science to describe what sets the polar regions apart—and their vital role for the planet. The author sets out the possible consequences of global warming, including the release of hundreds of frozen ancient viruses.

Fair Doses: An Insider’s Story of the Pandemic and the Global Fight for Vaccine Equity. By Seth Berkley. University of California Press; 408 pages; $29.95 and £25The story of vaccines, as told by an infectious disease epidemiologist. During the covid-19 pandemic, Seth Berkley fought against political resistance and nationalism to help distribute 2bn vaccines across the world.

Food Intelligence: The Science of How Food Both Nourishes and Harms Us. By Julia Belluz and Kevin Hall. Avery; 352 pages; $30. Wildfire; £22A journalist and a respected nutrition scientist explain why the diet wars waged over carbohydrates, fats and protein do not have a clear winner. They parse the biology of human metabolism as well as the gimmicks of the junk-food industry, nutrition hype and ultra-processed foods.

Is a River Alive? By Robert Macfarlane. W.W. Norton; 384 pages; $31.99. Hamish Hamilton; £25The author has a pragmatic agenda embedded in his powerful prose: to make an environmental, ethical and aesthetic case for rivers being living subjects that must be endowed with rights. Everyone who has ever found something to love in a river should find something to love in this book . It is a masterpiece.

The Lost Orchid: A Story of Victorian Plunder and Obsession. By Sarah Bilston. Harvard University Press; 400 pages; $29.95 and £24.95When orchidomania swept Europe in the 19th century, the flowers were status symbols akin to a Birkin bag or sports car today. Horticulturists and economists alike will enjoy this colourful tale of the orchid and its multifarious meanings.

The Web Beneath The Waves: The Fragile Cables that Connect our World. By Samanth Subramanian. Columbia Global Reports; 128 pages; $18 and £12.99This brief, lyrical survey of the internet’s underwater infrastructure and the people who maintain it offers a timely reminder of the extent to which the modern world depends on a fragile filigree of subsea cables—and of the many ways in which the supposedly disembodied online world is vulnerable to physical, commercial and geopolitical interference. ■

All the books on the list were published in America or Britain this year.

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They covered land, war and the working class

Books published by The Economist’s journalists in 2025 They covered land, war and the working class November 20th 2025 Blood and Treasure. By Duncan Weldon. Pegasus Books; 320 pages; $32. Abacus; £25A study of the economics of conflict , from the Vikings to Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, by a former writer for and occasional contributor to The Economist. Time and again, Duncan Weldon spots the invisible hand behind hostilities. “A delightfully quirky approach to military history,” thought the Spectator. An “enthralling and entertaining book”, said Foreign Affairs.

The Economic Consequences of Mr Trump: What the Trade War Means for the World. By Philip Coggan. Profile Books; 144 pages; $11.95 and £7.99Our former Bartleby columnist explains how Donald Trump’s tariffs will impose costs on domestic producers and consumers, alienate allies and distort business decision-making. The president misunderstands the world trading system, the author argues, and his policy will not bring back manufacturing jobs (which have been eliminated by technology). “Sharp, accessible and free from polemic”, said the Financial Times.

Economics: The Economist Guide. By Philip Coggan. Economist Books; 320 pages; $18 and £11.99A comprehensive guide to how the economy actually works for the general reader. Chapters cover fiscal policy, monetary policy, trade and productivity. The book includes an A-Z of economic terms, which will help anyone baffled by economists’ fondness for jargon.

The Economist Quiz Book: 60 Brain Teasers for Inquisitive Minds. By Tom Standage. Economist Books; 320 pages; $18 and £10.99Our deputy editor—called “the Father Christmas of knowledge” by Giles Coren, a British journalist—compiles 60 quirky brain teasers inspired by the best minds at The Economist. The puzzles are designed to “probe your ability to find hidden connections, get the facts right and identify misinformation”.

The Land Trap: A New History of the World’s Oldest Asset. By Mike Bird. Portfolio; 336 pages; $32. Hodder Press; £25Stocks, bonds, crypto and currencies may capture daily attention, but land is the oldest asset, and one of the most important. Our Wall Street editor traces land’s development as a financial asset and explains why it is at the centre of political and financial crises. “One of those books that changes the way you see the world,” said Ed Conway of Sky News. “A thoroughly enjoyable tour of land’s importance in economic history to this day,” said the Financial Times.

Underdogs: The Truth About Britain’s White Working Class. By Joel Budd. Picador; 336 pages; £20Our social-affairs editor describes a group that is much talked about but little understood. This book argues that white working-class people are driving change in Britain, not just digging in against it. The Guardian found it “not just well-timed but admirably powerful”. “Essential reading”, said the Telegraph. ■

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They feature priests, revolutionaries and vampires

The best films of 2025 They feature priests, revolutionaries and vampires November 13th 2025 “28 Years Later”“28 Days Later” (2002), a zombie film written by Alex Garland and directed by Danny Boyle, influenced umpteen films and tv shows. Twenty-three years later—no, not 28—the pair reunited for a sequel . It is a haunting folk-horror which probes Britain’s isolationism.

“The Brutalist”An uncompromising period drama which focuses on a Jewish-Hungarian architect (Adrien Brody) who comes to America after the second world war. He is esteemed as a visionary talent, but knows he may never enjoy the status of the patrician industrialist (Guy Pearce) who employs him.

“Flow”A Latvian cartoon which tells the story of a curious cat who drifts around by boat after flood waters engulf Earth. The enigmatic and luminously beautiful eco-fable won Best Animated Feature at the Academy Awards this year.

“Hamnet”This drama imagines how Shakespeare’s work might have been influenced by his marriage to Anne Hathaway and by the death of their 11-year-old son. The film, adapted from Maggie O’Farrell’s novel, is a raw depiction of bereavement and a tribute to the power of art.

“A House of Dynamite”If a nuclear missile were heading towards American soil, and nobody could be certain who launched it, what would happen? Kathryn Bigelow (the director of “The Hurt Locker”) presents the scenario three times from three different perspectives. It is a terrifyingly plausible ticking-clock thriller.

“I’m Still Here”The winner of this year’s Academy Award for Best International Feature Film is a true story of survival under Brazil’s military dictatorship. Fernanda Torres is magnificent as Eunice Paiva, a wife and mother who leads a busy, sociable life in Rio de Janeiro until her activist husband is arrested by the secret police in 1971.

“Is This Thing On?”After a bored financier (Will Arnett) separates from his wife (Laura Dern), he stumbles into a basement club on open-mic night, little suspecting that stand-up comedy will reinvigorate him—and perhaps his marriage. An optimistic account of a mid-life crisis inspired by the experiences of John Bishop, a British comedian.

“It Was Just an Accident”Jafar Panahi has been imprisoned by the Iranian government, but nothing has stopped the writer-director from making films that are critical of the regime. This is one of his best. Its hero is a mechanic, Vahid (Vahid Mobasseri), who abducts one of his customers (Ebrahim Azizi) in the belief that the man used to be a sadistic prison warden. But what if Vahid has made a mistake?

“One Battle After Another”The most topical Hollywood film of the year. Leonardo DiCaprio stars as a washed-up revolutionary activist who thinks he has escaped his past. But then a fascistic colonel (Sean Penn) catches up with him and his teenage daughter (Chase Infiniti). Paul Thomas Anderson’s action caper is an exhilarating triumph.

“The Secret Agent”Wagner Moura stars as an academic who gets on the wrong side of a corrupt politician and has to get out of Brazil with his young son before he is caught by two hitmen. He hides in Recife (the hometown of the film’s writer-director, Kleber Mendonça Filho), where the feverish carnival only adds to the air of chaos.

“Sentimental Value”A wry drama about a showbusiness dynasty. Renate Reinsve plays a successful actress stricken by stage fright; Stellan Skarsgard plays her narcissistic father, a director who has not had a hit in years. When he offers his daughter the lead role in a semi-autobiographical film, is he exploiting her or trying to bond with her?

“Sinners”A defiantly original horror film which is also a period drama and a vibrant blues musical. Michael B. Jordan stars as gun-toting twin brothers who open a juke joint in their Mississippi hometown in 1932, where they have to fend off vampires and Ku Klux Klan members alike.

“Wake Up Dead Man”Another pleasurable instalment in the “Knives Out” murder-mystery franchise, with a star-studded ensemble cast, some pithy satire and an ingenious solution to a far-fetched crime. Josh O’Connor co-stars as a naive priest who is accused of killing a fellow clergyman in upstate New York.

“Weapons”Seventeen children from the same school class disappear on the same night. Zach Cregger, the film’s writer-director, eventually explains where the children went, but first explores American small-town life and shows how the disappearances have tormented a schoolteacher (Julia Garner) and others.■

All the films on this list were released in America or Britain this year

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Jokesters lead the fight for free expression in India

Indian comedians have never been so successful or endangered Jokesters lead the fight for free expression in India November 13th 2025 ON THE INSIDE Habitat looks like any other comedy club. The audience in Mumbai, buzzing and eager to laugh even on a sweltering Thursday evening, had to pack in tight near the small stage. The first act, Niveditha Prakasam, did some expert crowd work, gently ribbing a group of colleagues on a work outing. Following her a succession of other comics did their “tight ten” in English, Hindi or both.

On the outside, however, there are clues that this Habitat is endangered. The comedy club is tucked into a busy side street near the Khar railway station, but there are no signs advertising where it is. Most would walk straight past what appears to be a closed shop. The only evidence to the contrary is the loitering groups of young professionals, who are ushered in shortly before the show begins.

The club is not struggling financially: Habitat’s owner, Balraj Singh Ghai, has expanded the space several times to meet demand and is opening another club in Pune soon. The furtiveness is because Habitat has been repeatedly vandalised by mobs who cannot take a joke. The most recent attack, in March, came after Kunal Kamra used the word gaddar (traitor) in apparent reference to the deputy chief minister of Maharashtra. This is the scowl-smile paradox of comedy in India: it has never been more dangerous—or more popular.

Performers face a very real prospect of violence. Vir Das has said he received 50,000 death threats after a set about the “two Indias” in 2021. (He said that his countrymen “worship women during the day and gang rape them at night”.) In October police in Delhi arrested members of a gang who were planning to murder Munawar Faruqui. The comedian had been jailed for five weeks in 2021, having been arrested for “hurting religious sentiments”.

Mr Kamra warns that “it’s getting very claustrophobic” for comedians in the country. After the attack on Habitat, he moved to Puducherry and stepped back from public performance. He estimates that his fellow jokesters expend about “30% of [their] energy” worrying about whom they might offend. Though outré stand-ups in the West may get heckled or have a few shows cancelled, in India the danger is graver. “You just need one idiot,” Mr Kamra says, to “cause a stampede”.

Freedom of expression for artists, journalists and other critics has deteriorated under Narendra Modi’s government . Freedom House, a think-tank, classifies India as “partly free” alongside countries such as El Salvador and Mozambique. India’s constitution claims to guarantee freedom of speech, but it makes exceptions for the sake of “public order, decency or morality”.

It also states that “no person shall be deprived of his life or personal liberty”, which the Supreme Court has ruled includes a right to dignity. This allows anyone who feels a joke transgresses that right, or is indecent, to file a police complaint—or indeed multiple complaints with multiple police agencies. Though comedians may not be fined or jailed for every complaint, police are required to investigate, which means comedians spend time and money defending themselves.

So why do they keep going? Though there are many in India who would like to gag comedians, there are many more who love the gags. In 2023 a study by Nielsen, a market-research firm, found that comedy was the most popular genre among Indians who stream tv shows and movies. Many stand-ups are famous: Zakir Khan and Anuvab Pal have performed sold-out gigs across the world. Kapil Sharma—who has 46m followers on Instagram, many more than Ricky Gervais (5m) or Trevor Noah (9m)—recently released the third season of his show on Netflix.

Mr Das describes the evolution of India’s comedy scene in his new memoir, “The Outsider”. He set up Mumbai’s first English-language open-mic event in the late 2000s, which led to roles in films, American tours and a couple of Netflix specials. He financed, promoted and produced his first open-mic nights and comedy shows himself. During the covid pandemic, when clubs closed, he moved to a small village in Goa, bought a microphone and speakers and proceeded to “do stand-up for small crowds, outdoors”. This became a series called “Ten on Ten”: ten sets, each about a topic suggested by his audience, such as “What is Freedom of Speech?”. This let Mr Das show off his range and intellectual curiosity.

Needless to say, he is very funny. (He says colonising India for cinnamon, “the one spice we use least in Indian cooking”, is like “colonising England for sunlight”.) Despite succeeding as a touring stand-up, as well as the challenges of the comedy scene at home, Mr Das resisted the temptation to move to Hollywood. He felt the best roles he could have hoped for would have been “a delivery guy who appears in one or two scenes in the new Nicole Kidman movie [or] the sassy but conservative Indian accountant who ‘tells it like it is’.”

Indeed some Indian comedians feel they have an obligation to stand up and be heard. “Censorship has captured most of the arts,” explains Vinay Shukla, a documentary film-maker. “Over the last ten years, comics have taken on the establishment much more directly than other art forms.” Films, television shows and plays require funding and a crew—and often need an official censor’s approval. Books need publishers. Comedy, by contrast, is decentralised: comedians speak for themselves and need only a microphone. Their mode is cheap, portable and, in the age of social media, easily disseminated: comics can speak to the nation from a single stage or desk. “Kunal Kamra would be recognised at any airport,” says Mr Shukla.

The man himself is more philosophical. “What keeps taking me back to comedy is risk: the fact that there’s something nobody else is saying,” explains Mr Kamra. “I feel it’s a disservice to comedy not to take that risk.” He admits that his personal circumstances—he is unmarried and does not have children—mean that he is wagering less than others in taking those risks.

There is a serious need for the funny business, Mr Kamra suggests. By broaching thorny topics in an accessible way, stand-ups widen the boundaries of public discourse. “With so many people appointing themselves the cultural police, someday you’ll speak your mind, and someone will be offended, and you’ll find yourself caught in the same sort of panic.” ■

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Quite possibly. It is almost all awful—apart from the kitchens

Is “All’s Fair” really the worst television drama ever made? Quite possibly. It is almost all awful—apart from the kitchens November 13th 2025 It’s all go in the first episode of “All’s Fair”. Viewers witness a work feud (this means that Kim Kardashian , playing the heroine, has to look sad while wearing a suit); a messy divorce case (Ms Kardashian must look sad in a boardroom); then her own husband leaves her (Ms Kardashian must look sad in some luxurious loungewear).

But all that is positively uneventful compared with the second episode of this new series: seven minutes in, a character becomes so sad that she jumps off the balcony of an office block. In a scene that might be tragedy, or possibly comedy (it is hard to tell with this series), you see her fall past. “She couldn’t”, says one woman, “stand another minute.”

Nor, it seems, could the TV critics. “All’s Fair” has been almost universally panned: it was given zero stars by the Guardian, zero by the Times and for a while had a 0% critics’ score on Rotten Tomatoes , a review-aggregator site. (It is now up to 4%.) It has been called “terrible”, “awful” and perhaps “the worst television drama ever made”. It has cheered everyone up immensely.

Its main characters are called Allura Grant (Ms Kardashian, pictured above, left), Emerald Greene and Carrington Lane, which sound like paint shades—or possibly porn stars—but who are in fact divorce lawyers. You can tell because they sit around board tables and talk about prenups. In one scene Ms Kardashian wears a waistcoat, tie and exposed thong: sure signs of a legal eagle.

But these women are not just lawyers, they are feminist lawyers. (Tailoring is a fail-safe feminist giveaway.) Viewers know this because they have set up their own law firm and stuff their speech with words like “patriarchy” and “bitches”. Mary Wollstonecraft did similar.

They also love knowledge. For knowledge, says Ms Kardashian, “is the key in the lock”—before adding, lest anyone is confused, “All we have to do is to turn it just the right way.” Viewers will wonder whether that is the kind of legal insight people fork out big bucks for.

What no one seems to have paid for is a decent script. Once, prestige drama meant kitchen-sink realism, offering good prose in bad kitchens. This is the era of kitchen-island dramas, offering bad prose in lovely ones. The dialogue here is execrable: at one point someone says “Let’s put the fucking team in teamwork.” Ms Kardashian came to fame through the glossy pseudo-reality of reality TV and Instagram and this show reflects that phoniness. It is less art imitating life than art imitating Instagram imitating life. It is dreadful. Mind you, the kitchens really are lovely. ■

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Sarah Perry focuses on the last nine days of her father-in-law’s life

An affecting chronicle of a man’s death—and his life Sarah Perry focuses on the last nine days of her father-in-law’s life November 13th 2025 David was an unassuming sort of fellow. He lived on the outskirts of an English city in “a bungalow in a suburb full of bungalows”. He spent his summers at the same seaside town, which offered “pleasure without surprise”. He had an appreciation of beautiful things—decorative tablecloths, handmade shoes—but wore the same tatty hat and smeared glasses. He was often too embarrassed to show emotion, in the typical British way.

What was unusual was the manner of his death. His end, when it came, was swift: David died only nine days after doctors diagnosed him with oesophageal cancer. (He was 77, a couple of years younger than the British average.) In “Death of an Ordinary Man” Sarah Perry chronicles those nine days.

Ms Perry is the author of acclaimed novels including “The Essex Serpent” and “Enlightenment”; she is also David’s daughter-in-law. She combines a novelist’s attention to detail with a relative’s affection. She had once thought of death as “a moment of termination”: “I imagined that I’d live, then I would die, my death a brief stop at the end of my sentence.” As she cares for David, however, she comes to realise that within death are events “as various and strange as those of a life”.

She watches as the cancer transforms David, curving his legs into wishbones, changing his skin to “greyish putty”. The experience also transforms Ms Perry. She surprises herself by being a natural carer, never balking at “the disintegrations of a body preparing itself for the grave”.

Science—a theme of her fiction—helps her to make sense of things. Death is at once ordinary and odd , “these things not cancelling each other out as they ought to have done, but persisting in undiminished quantities, like a failure of simple maths.” Just as objects accelerate as they fall, so David plummets towards death. The process follows near-universal patterns. The refusal of food, the large quantities of urine, the desiccated lips: all are ordinary for the dying. Why then, asks Ms Perry, does nobody ever bother to explain them?

David gets to die at home, not “alone on a ward under unkind lights”. There is paperwork to be signed to fit a syringe driver (which can deliver continuous doses of morphine) and to authorise the use of the morphine. There are prescriptions to treat “terminal agitation” (when a patient becomes restless and startlingly strong). And there are nurses who come to “ease suffering in a moment, and then quietly leave”. When the “death watch” comes, Ms Perry and her husband, with the clumsy faith of lapsed Baptists, have no rituals with which to fill it.

Her book’s purpose is to shine a light on what is hidden. At times the reader is left wondering how a shy man who wanted “no flowers, no mourning” would feel about being the subject of such a book. Yet any qualms do not last long, for in “Death of an Ordinary Man” Ms Perry has produced a thoughtful meditation on death in the 21st century and a humane tribute to a loved one. In her telling, the life of an unassuming man assumes great meaning. ■

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The general died 50 years ago this month. A new biography traces his rise to power

Francisco Franco: the charmless man who became Spain’s dictator The general died 50 years ago this month. A new biography traces his rise to power November 13th 2025 HE WAS short, uncharismatic and an uninspiring public speaker. And yet General Francisco Franco (pictured, right) would prove to be a remarkably successful dictator. A key figure in the military coup in 1936 that triggered the Spanish civil war , Franco would go on to rule as an autocrat until he died in his hospital bed 50 years ago, on November 20th 1975.

Behind his unlikely rise to absolute power lay a combination of relentless personal ambition and much luck. There were two Francos, Giles Tremlett argues: “Soldier Franco was confident and decisive. Civilian Franco was calculating, slow and cautious.” It was as a soldier that he achieved prominence. Born into a family of naval administrators in the port of El Ferrol, in Galicia, Franco joined the Spanish army when it was waging a brutal colonial war in northern Morocco. He was fearless, notoriously cold and indifferent to the human cost of war. He rose to become commander of the Spanish Legion, the army’s boldest and cruellest unit.

When revolutionary miners staged an insurrection in Asturias in 1934, a conservative government turned to Franco to repress them. But when a group of generals plotted a coup against the left-wing Popular Front government two years later, Franco hesitated, joining only at the last minute. He was lucky that he had been posted to the distant Canary Islands. From there he took charge of the powerful army in Spanish Morocco and secured the support of Hitler and Mussolini to airlift it to the mainland. With rivals dead, he staged a power grab, installing himself as commander-in-chief and head of state of the Nationalist side in the civil war.

Many of the rebels wanted to restore the monarchy; Franco erected a personal dictatorship instead. Despite his wartime alliance with Hitler and Mussolini, he was a fascist only when it suited him. He represented a previous tradition of reactionary Catholic nationalism, his worldview forged by Spain’s humiliating loss of its colonial empire in the Spanish-American war of 1898 and then the Moroccan war.

Mr Tremlett, a former Madrid correspondent for The Economist, has wisely opted not to replicate Paul Preston’s magisterial life of Franco. Instead he has written a perceptive and readable biographical essay, made up of zippy short chapters. He sets out to understand the man and to explain “Francoism as a society-shaping phenomenon”. He sees the young Franco’s attachment to his conservative mother and his estrangement from his libertine father, a freemason, as moulding his lifelong abhorrence not just of Marxism but also of freemasonry and liberalism .

The civilian Franco adapted to events, remaking himself as an American ally against communism in the cold war. After his policy of autarky had inflicted two decades of grinding poverty on Spain, he turned to Catholic technocrats who liberalised the economy, unleashing decades of growth. He bequeathed to Spain’s democracy a professional bureaucracy and a system of administrative law, though this is unmentioned in the book.

The author attributes the relative acquiescence of Spanish society to the memory of post-war repression and to subsequent socialisation in a culture of fear and obedience. A Spanish man, but not a woman, eventually lived a freer and wealthier life than eastern Europeans under communism, Mr Tremlett concludes. But this came at a cost: Franco was “a giant dam” who held back democracy and necessary social and political change. Fortunately, once he was dead, the country quickly made up for lost time. ■

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Yes, argues a provocative new book. It is half right

Has culture in the 21st century become samey and dull? Yes, argues a provocative new book. It is half right November 13th 2025 Music without instruments and lyrics without meaning. Endless reboots, sequels and superheroes in the cinema. After a burst of magnificent TV dramas in the noughties, every glitzy new show is hailed as a must-see when most are mediocre. The algorithm has vanquished imagination.

Especially if you are middle-aged, you may share these gripes about 21st-century culture. There is a confounding glut of art, it often feels, yet little of the original, startling kind that matters. Leaders and crises come and go, but Taylor Swift (pictured) and Beyoncé still top the charts. “Blank Space”, a punchy new book by W. David Marx, laments and explains this sense of noisy stasis. Mr Marx makes a trenchant case, but he—and maybe you—are too gloomy.

He focuses on pop, fashion, visual art and what you might call the zeitgeist, or just “the internet”. Readers learn of online sensations that they may have missed—and be grateful they did. (Literature and theatre, both said to be on the skids, could have boosted his argument.) Once, he writes, society “encouraged and provided an abundance of cultural invention”. But compared with the explosion of Cubism and Surrealism in the early 20th century, or the counterculture of the 1960s, “There is now a blank space.”

Culprit number one is lucre. For pop stars, Mr Marx argues, the idea of “selling out” has died out. The ultimate measure of value is financial success; distinct musical genres have been squished into “glossy, marketable pop”. Celebrity is less a reward for talent than for commercial nous and chutzpah—witness the rise of Paris Hilton and her ilk. Reality TV confirmed this baleful shift: “Culture became a lowest-common-denominator battle for attention.”

But the left’s aversion to hierarchies is a factor too. A preference for, say, the Rolling Stones over Mariah Carey has become, for some, a retrograde fealty to straight white males. Old-school critics are decried as elitist gatekeepers. Meanwhile, the spread of liberal views on feminism and sexuality spurred a reaction of ironic nihilism, crassness and misogyny. In this “counter-counterculture”, norms and shame are for suckers and wimps.

This is also, naturally, a treatise on technology. In Mr Marx’s telling, at first the internet was a playground for enthusiasts. Then it produced viral crazes like “Gangnam Style” and youth-culture megastars who passed adults by. Latterly it devolved into a swamp of conspiracism and lies: by the late 2010s it was a venue for “fleeting entertainment, get-rich-quick schemes and venomous propaganda”. (On artificial intelligence, he is mordantly sanguine. Since almost all human-made art flops anyway, he asks, why worry about the impact of the AI sort?)

He is a bit hard on commercialism, yet Mr Marx is right to prize bold art that may not be an instant hit but expands “the ways we can see the world”. Still, his sweeping book oversimplifies a dizzyingly messy picture. For starters, some of his criticisms could have been made in the past, and were. Today’s means of self-publicity are new, but attention-seeking grifters are not. Socialites of yore were famous for being famous too.

And there has always been more dross than gold. The winnowing of time disguises that eternal bias: Hollywood classics endure, not the B-movie schlock; the novels of Joyce and Fitzgerald, not inter-war pulp fiction. The ratio may now be grimmer, but in the midst of the digital torrent, it is too soon to say how much treasure will wash up.

Then there is Mr Marx’s disdain for “retromania”. Endless recycling of stale ideas does indeed betray timidity. But he also frets over older works “feeling more valuable than contemporary ones”, seeing The Beatles’ staying power as a sign of “stagnancy”. Au contraire. Some things are just better than other things, as he himself insists. Just as “The Wire” is better than “Emily in Paris” , previous eras have the edge in some art forms. The rock’n’roll of the 1960s—or the supreme Victorian novels—outclass most of their successors. The fact that old masterpieces are freely enjoyed is a glory of modern culture, not a glitch.

Another way to think of 21st-century Western culture, with its tiny variations and recursive patterns, is as a chronicle of relative complacency. Ructions in the wider world have shaken up the arts. But they have been less traumatic than the cataclysms that launched the leaps of the early 20th century, which Mr Marx so admires. In extremis, could today’s meme-addled creators match that genius? Let’s hope we don’t find out. ■

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And about the millions of itinerant workers who powered the country’s rise

What a hit memoir reveals about work in China And about the millions of itinerant workers who powered the country’s rise November 6th 2025 NO COUNTRY ON Earth is as mad for online shopping as China. In 2024 consumers there bought 15.5trn yuan ($2.2trn)-worth of goods online—more than anywhere else in the world. Chinese e-commerce is ubiquitous, quick and easy. But that convenience comes at an onerous cost, as Hu Anyan details in his memoir “I Deliver Parcels in Beijing”, a bestseller in China recently translated into English.

To make his desired salary of 7,000 yuan for one month’s work—which in this job meant 26 days—Mr Hu had to make 270 yuan in each 11-hour shift. Organising parcels and navigating his trike across his delivery fief eats up two hours. Mr Hu received around two yuan per parcel, which meant he had to make one delivery every four minutes for nine hours. He began to see every minute as a potential half-yuan. Going to the toilet: one yuan. Buying and eating lunch: 25 yuan. He learned to drink less water and skip lunch.

He also learned to plan his delivery routes ruthlessly—an arrangement that slow customers could easily ruin. When a woman who filled in the wrong address asked him to make a 30-minute detour to an unfamiliar area where he could easily get lost, he thinks: “None of this should have been particularly difficult for her to imagine, if only she had been willing to put herself in my position.”

Willingly or not, many Chinese workers are. Around 40% of China’s urban labour relies on some kind of flexible work, including an estimated 84m working for online platforms such as ride-hailing and delivery apps . Last year China’s parcel bearers delivered 175bn packages—an astounding average of 124 for each of the country’s 1.4bn people.

As firms have slashed headcount and wages, many workers have gone gig . For some, the descent has been dizzying: your correspondent, after choosing the cheapest ride-hailing option, has been picked up by a laid-off marketing manager driving a Tesla and a struggling high-end clothing salesman in a Mercedes.

That is one reason why Mr Hu’s book struck a chord across China, selling nearly 2m copies since its release in 2023, and winning him “Author of the Year” from Douban, the country’s leading book-review platform. Though some critics have dismissed his book as liushuizhang—a “running account” that reads like an artless retelling of daily life—even state-run media have praised its “unvarnished” descriptions of “the urgency of algorithms, the trickiness and kindness of customers, the physical and mental exhaustion”.

Mr Hu’s straightforward prose and keen eye for detail capture the drudgery of gruelling low-wage work , and the personal toll it takes. Between punishing night shifts at one of his old jobs at a logistics warehouse in southern China, Mr Hu would return to his cramped room to battle insomnia with dark chocolate and cheap baijiu, the country’s liquor of choice, before reporting for duty again just hours later. He watched the unravelling of a relationship between two colleagues, a young gambling addict and his pregnant girlfriend. He and others did little to help. “No one had anything left over to give,” he writes. “A work environment like that squeezes all life from a person.”

Yet he is forgiving of the many characters he encountered, including a crane operator who loves online shopping. With his customer often far above ground, it took several trips to get his signature. It was only in his final days delivering parcels that Mr Hu enjoyed “the luxury of squandering time, as if it was a form of revenge. I had felt crushed by the constant need to exploit every second for so long, my time as tightly strung as my nerves.”

These days, there is more of a spring in his step. In a mall near his home in the south-western city of Chengdu, he walks with your correspondent to one of his favourite spots: a lounge outside a cinema. It is surprisingly quiet, and offers free wifi and air conditioning—ideal for writing—and a nearby buffet that lowers its price after 1.30pm.

Though Mr Hu no longer needs to count every yuan, he wants to stretch his earnings to give him more time to write. Some workers have to robotically screw nails into iPhones , churning out identical products regardless of whose hands they pass through. Writing, Mr Hu insists, is an opposite pursuit, allowing him to express his individuality and depict that of other people. He has gone from shengchan, producing, to shenghuo, living.

Though Mr Hu, born in 1979, is older than the country’s youngest workers, his book appealed to them. He says the initial wave of curiosity about delivery workers’ lives has given way to more probing questions from young Chinese who are questioning the meaning of work as they ponder their futures. They find comfort in reading about Mr Hu’s setbacks as they, too, figure out how to navigate a changing and slowing economy. Mr Hu’s generation saw work as a path to riches, and the generation before saw it as a selfless, collective effort to build a new China.

Today’s new graduates are entering a comparatively wealthy society and want more leisure time. Many of their parents have savings and property. Nearly 18% of those aged 16 to 24 (excluding students) were unemployed in September, but not all of them are worried. Many have opted to tangping, or “lie flat”, leading lives with less pressure and fewer material cravings.

Mr Hu recalls how his chef colleagues at a bakery guarded their skills for fear that “teaching the disciple might starve the master”. That mindset stems from scarcity, he says, born from a society with limited resources spread thinly across a huge population. Modern China is different, and may afford future generations the chance to define work on their own terms. ■

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A delightful history of a mongrel language

Why Anglophones use the alphabet so oddly A delightful history of a mongrel language November 6th 2025 THE ALPHABET is easy to take for granted. Children memorise it before they know why it matters. Then it’s off to reading , and learning the sounds of the letters and how they combine. After that, many people will never again wonder: why is the alphabet in that particular order? Why do C and G have “hard” and “soft” versions? Why is H called aitch, lacking the very sound it represents in its name?

Even fewer will know enough to ask why a former slave invented G. Who made J out of I? Why is K the comeback hero of the alphabet? But all these questions are answered in “Why Q needs U”, a new book by Danny Bate, a linguist. In 26 brisk chapters he squeezes in a vivid portrait of each letter—but also much more than that. The book is a history of writing, a biography of the English language and an introduction to linguistic science, all smuggled into short, lively and entertaining stories.

The Egyptians invented a complex writing system in which symbols stood for whole words. The Phoenicians then stripped this down both conceptually (one symbol per sound) and graphically (turning an ox’s head, for instance, into a simple drawing that looks like a sideways A). The Greeks modified these symbols and added vowels; the Etruscans nabbed the Greek invention for their own language in northern Italy. Their southern neighbours, who were clustered around the mouth of the Tiber, subsequently pilfered and adapted it so successfully that many millennia later, those squiggles, used to write hundreds of languages, are still called the Roman or Latin alphabet.

If the Phoenicians worked out the sensible principle of one sound per letter, how and why did English deviate from it? Mr Bate tells the story, letter by letter. Scribes inserted a B that had never been pronounced in English into debt and doubt to reflect their Latin origins. The “great vowel shift”, which roughly spanned the eras of Chaucer to Shakespeare, changed the long vowels until the letters represented different sounds than their continental equivalents. Soft C and G were the result of sounds such as eh and ee bringing the tongue high and forward, “palatalising” or gradually weakening the preceding consonant. To Anglophones, the name “Cicero” has two s sounds, but his friends would have called him “Kickero”.

And why does Q need U? The Romans got the QU habit from the Greeks, who used an archaic letter, qoppa, only before o- and u-sounds, because it was pronounced with the tongue far back by the Phoenicians, just as such vowels are. And conquest by Saxons, then Vikings, then Normans made English the mongrel language that it is; this last group brought Latin’s habit of joining Q to U to Britain, turning Saxon cwen into queen.

Mr Bate starts each chapter with an epigraph, such as “‘Queue’ is just one letter followed by four silent letters. They must be waiting for their turn.” For those maddened, baffled or even, for some odd reason, enchanted by the eccentricities of the English language, this charming book will give some idea of how those letters got in the queue, if not exactly in line. ■

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And learns what the dead can tell the living

An enthusiast wanders through the world’s graveyards And learns what the dead can tell the living November 6th 2025 VISITORS TO GRAVEYARDS fall into three broad categories. Some come to visit or pay their respects to a departed relative, spouse or friend. Others make pilgrimages to see the final resting place of their idol. (Consider the thousands of lipstick marks left on Oscar Wilde’s tomb in Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris, pictured below.) Finally, there are “cemetery connoisseurs”: people who have a special interest in gravesites, whether their reasons are historical, architectural, artistic or morbid.

Mariana Enríquez is a proud connoisseur. An Argentine writer of gothic and horror fiction, she has often imagined death in her novels and story collections—including “The Dangers of Smoking in Bed”, which was shortlisted for the International Booker prize in 2021. Her first work of non-fiction translated into English (expertly by Megan McDowell, her long-standing translator) suggests that her obsession will not soon fade.

In “Somebody Is Walking on Your Grave” Ms Enríquez visits 21 of the world’s most interesting cemeteries. She starts at the Monumental Cemetery of Staglieno in Genoa, Italy, where she had a tryst with a charming local in 1997, aged 25. After the lust and intensity of the encounter, among the statue galleries, colonnades and ornate tombs, she “fell in love with cemeteries”.

Each subsequent chapter takes readers to a different graveyard. Her wandering leads her from Cuba to Chile to the Czech Republic. She goes to the grand tombs of Highgate Cemetery in London and to Rottnest Island in Australia, where one of the country’s largest indigenous burial sites is unmarked, as if to “avoid ruining someone’s vacation”.

Ms Enríquez’s interest in graves is not just morbid. She uses cemeteries as a lens through which to examine history and culture. New Orleans, where bodies are laid to rest above the ground because of flood risks, boasts 42 historically significant cemeteries, many with tombs neatly laid out in rows, like tidy little cities of the dead. It is no surprise, then, that the city has inspired so many vampire and ghost stories. The Paris Catacombs, where bones are “lovingly arranged” into decorative patterns, have encouraged theatrical celebrations of death. In 1897, for instance, a group of rich revellers held a secret concert to listen to funeral marches.

The author visits the graves of many prominent figures, including Karl Marx and Franz Kafka , but some of her most interesting stories are of corpses that have become contested political property. After a military coup overthrew Juan Perón, insurgents stole and desecrated the body of his wife Eva. Her corpse was moved to Italy and its location concealed for more than a decade before she was buried in Buenos Aires—eight metres underground and beneath thick concrete. Her husband is buried elsewhere, and Ms Enríquez notes, “A mausoleum there is awaiting Eva’s body, but I think that move would be difficult.”

Attitudes towards cemeteries have changed. In Europe graveyards were once kept within a city’s walls, near churches to protect them from evil. But in the 18th century corpses started to be linked to disease and “living with the dead came to be seen as repugnant”. As buried and entombed bodies “began to inspire horror”, burial grounds were moved farther away from where people lived.

For Ms Enríquez, cemeteries inspire not dread but delight. In “Somebody is Walking on Your Grave”, her enthusiasm for the macabre is rendered in effervescent prose. She finds Mexico’s Day of the Dead, celebrated on November 1st and 2nd, “unbearably joyful”. Her husband observes that the rituals, which involve visiting cemeteries and decorating graves, provide her with a “lost paradise”. After finishing her book, readers will have a new appreciation for tombs and the wealth of fascinating stories that lie six feet under. ■

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And it has an unsettling contemporary message

A new film about the Nuremberg trials is gripping but bloodless And it has an unsettling contemporary message November 6th 2025 THE TRIAL of Nazi war criminals at Nuremberg, which began 80 years ago this month, might never have happened. There was little precedent for prosecuting members of a foreign government, no international court and no prior definition of “crimes against humanity”. After Adolf Hitler committed suicide in April 1945, heralding the end of war in Europe, Winston Churchill, Britain’s prime minister, considered shooting the surviving members of the Nazi high command. Other high-ranking German officers were to be imprisoned without trial.

“Nuremberg”, a new film directed by James Vanderbilt, is a timely reminder of the stakes of holding villainy to account . The accused had to be given a fair trial. Though the regime’s crimes were clear, the prosecutors had to establish incontrovertible evidence of their personal culpability. Based on “The Nazi and the Psychiatrist”, a book by Jack El-Hai, published in 2013, the film explores the relationship between Hermann Göring, Hitler’s second-in-command and the most senior German officer to stand trial, and his psychiatrist, Douglas Kelley. Though Kelley assessed all the Nazis present, he became obsessed with Göring. Perfectly played by Rami Malek, he asks, “What if we could dissect evil?”—before gleaning information in private consultations with Göring about his defence strategy, then passing it on, somewhat reluctantly, to prosecutors.

This sort of film could easily have portrayed everyone on one side as evil and the other as virtuous, but this one does well at depicting the nuanced motives of its American characters. Even as plans for the trial advanced, the alliances it relied on were breaking apart, as mistrust festered between the Soviets and Americans. Kelley himself is egotistical, manipulative and, crucially, allows himself to be manipulated by Göring. From the start, he was thinking at least as much about his legacy as his professional duties, and was obviously driven by his ambition to be the “great scholar of the Nazis”.

Those “20-odd broken men”, as Justice Robert Jackson referred to the accused in the trial’s opening statement, are similarly portrayed as humans, not devils. They weep. They sweat with fear. Faced with their fate, they flinch. Göring, played by Russell Crowe, is a man of contradictions: he committed ghastly atrocities while cherishing the love of his wife and young daughter. As the trial dawns and the legal system creaks into action, Kelley delivers his own psychological verdict on one of the grand questions of history: “What sets them apart from us?” he asks. “Nothing.”

It is an achievement to fit an engaging history of international criminal justice and slippery post-war alliances into a Hollywood blockbuster. But the film’s flaw is that it is written and acted too obviously with distance: it fails to capture the appropriate shock as the nature and scale of Nazi crimes became apparent. Before 1945 few had heard of Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen or other concentration camps. Though many people awaited news of family members in occupied Europe, the millions murdered had not yet been counted. But when the details of the atrocities are laid out during the trial, the characters’ responses do not quite ring true.

The film shows footage from recently liberated camps—images that most trial observers were seeing for the first time. Even 80 years later, with full knowledge of what happened, it remains agonising to see starved, skeletal bodies, corpses stretching into the distance and ovens designed for murder. Those clips evoke emotions that those on screen, actors representing people so much closer to the horror both in time and proximity than viewers today, struggle to exude. Though the film successfully resists the temptation to make its characters heroes or monsters, the result is strangely bloodless.

Historical fiction tends to reflect the moment of its creation as well as the period it depicts. So it is with “Nuremberg”. As the film closes, a tormented Kelley urges everyone to pay attention because, even in America such monstrous acts could happen: one group could turn against another. It is a sober reckoning. ■

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Low-key marriage ceremonies are back in fashion

Looking for a chic wedding venue? Try a town hall Low-key marriage ceremonies are back in fashion November 6th 2025 THE GROOM wore a Giorgio Armani suit. The bride wore a short white dress by Vivienne Westwood with her signature black sunglasses. This summer Charli XCX married George Daniel, the drummer of The 1975, a chart-topping band, at Hackney Town Hall in London. Their nuptials reflected her devil-may-care vibe: the newlyweds posed for pictures on the steps of the public building (pictured above) before decamping to a nearby restaurant to smoke cigarettes and drink cocktails .

The event also reflected a growing trend: many couples, turned off by the ostentation of a big wedding , are heading to town halls instead. (Though few will get the chance to celebrate a second time as “Mr and Mrs XCX” did, by hosting a rave in Italy.) This year marriages and civil partnerships at two of London’s most popular town halls, Old Marylebone and Islington, have jumped 29% and 51% respectively from pre-pandemic levels. In New York weddings at the Manhattan marriage bureau increased by 22% between 2022 and 2024.

Instead of lavishly designed bouquets, brides can grab something from the local florist. Couples can have their reception at the pub, bake their own cake or take public transport. “There’s just something so chic about getting on the Tube to go to your own wedding,” noted one TikTok user. According to a recent wedding-trends report by Pinterest, an image-sharing platform, searches for “registry-office elopement” were 190% higher in December 2024 than a year earlier.

Town-hall weddings first became properly trendy in the 1970s and 1980s. Sir Mick Jagger, the frontman of the Rolling Stones, got married at a town hall in St Tropez in 1971. Old Marylebone Town Hall has seen more celebrity nuptials than perhaps any other venue in Britain. It has hosted three Beatles weddings—one of Sir Ringo Starr’s and two of Sir Paul McCartney’s—and two Oasis ones (both Liam Gallagher’s).

Small-scale soirées are back in fashion for two reasons. One is price. Weddings in Britain and America cost on average around $30,000, but couples can marry at a courthouse or town hall for as little as $100. Stef Reyes, a wedding photographer in New York, says many couples want to save for the future rather than splurge on a single day.

The other factor is stress. Town-hall nuptials are intimate and quick. According to a survey released this year by the Knot, a wedding-planning website, couples prize authenticity, and want their wedding day to reflect who they are. That may mean a church and all the trimmings for some, but many others prefer a quick trip to the registry office followed by a pint down the road. ■

A long-persecuted author on humour, charlatans and death

Salman Rushdie: stabbed 15 times but still laughing A long-persecuted author on humour, charlatans and death November 6th 2025 A fading scar punctuates his cheek. A darkened lens obscures where his right eye once was. Yet for a 78-year-old man who has been stabbed 15 times by a frenzied zealot, he is surprisingly chirpy.

For nearly half his life Sir Salman Rushdie has lived under sentence of death, after a joyless ayatollah told Muslims it was their duty to murder him for writing a novel that allegedly insulted the Prophet. Despite an almost-successful assassination attempt in 2022, he has survived long enough to write a luminous new collection of short stories, “The Eleventh Hour”.

One of the (less obvious) things that annoys Sir Salman about being famous for the fatwa is that people overlook the comedy of his writing. Sitting in a side room at Cliveden, a British country house that hosts a literary festival, with bodyguards hovering seriously in the background, the writer enlarges on this theme to The Economist. “Because the attack against [’The Satanic Verses’] was not funny, it was assumed that the book couldn’t be funny. And people stopped writing about me as if my writing had humour in it,” he says.

This matters, because humour does. Besides bringing joy, it is a weapon in the struggle against oppression. “Humourlessness is a characteristic of narrow-mindedness; there are very few humorous dictators. Also, humour gets up people’s noses further than anything else, as we see from recent behaviour in America towards comedians.”

His new book slyly mocks a wide range of targets: religious bigots, political charlatans, death itself. In a deliciously satirical tale about piano-playing and revenge called “The Musician of Kahani”, a secular Indian woman starts to feel a “scrap of doubt” about her husband’s atheism, “a doubt that would surge to the forefront of her thinking when [he] walked out of their marriage to follow a religious fraud.” The guru in question preaches that money is “more than okay”; and “money, happy to be given the spiritual thumbs-up, flooded into his accounts.”

The satire is personal. Sir Salman’s life has been blighted by anti-Enlightenment thinking, by the notion that words should be answered with steel. He says he never saw the knife that half-blinded him until his would-be assassin’s trial this year, when it was produced as evidence. (“At the time of the attack, I was busy getting attacked by it.”) What struck him in court about the knifeman, a Lebanese-American called Hadi Matar, was “how okay with everything he was”. At the age of 24, with no prior criminal record, he had tried to kill a stranger in front of hundreds of witnesses. He was never going to get away with it. (He was sentenced to 25 years imprisonment in May.) Yet he was prepared to ruin his own life to snuff out another. “It’s a mystery,” shrugs Sir Salman.

The answer to that mystery may lie in the power of polarisation. For many people today, tribal loyalty trumps morality. It was to “defend” his fellow Muslims (from a book they didn’t have to read) that Mr Matar attempted murder. Then, “every day, coming into the courtroom, he would shout Palestinian slogans…you know, ‘river to the sea’ kind of stuff.” This seemed irrelevant to the man’s crime, which predated the war in Gaza by a year. Privately, a cop suggested to Sir Salman that “when you go to jail in America, you need a tribe, otherwise you’re in bad shape. [So] maybe he’s trying to construct for himself a tribe who would be on his side in jail.”

Sir Salman fears that free speech is in “bad shape”. He cites the atmosphere of fear in India and absurd book bans in some American schools, of works such as “Huckleberry Finn”. Attacks from what he calls “traditional” sources—conservatives and authoritarians—are continuing “vigorously”. He is especially exasperated by the censoriousness of progressives, however, which “weakens your case when you’re trying to argue against the oppression coming from the other side”. He throws up his hands at the assassination of Charlie Kirk, a right-wing speaker, which some on the left condemned only half-heartedly. “People shouldn’t be killed. Murder: a bad thing.”

He sees similarities between religious cults and MAGA. In both cases, followers compete to show their devotion to the leader and hatred of his enemies. In a story called “Oklahoma”, he describes a “felonious king” who surrounds himself with courtiers who flatter him and accuse his opponents of the crimes that he is guilty of. This king also changes the meanings of words, so when he marries two nieces the word “incest” is struck from the dictionary, and over time he redefines “rape as love, horror as patriotism, bullying as good governance.”

Writers are “the custodians of language”, Sir Salman avers. When the powerful twist words to conceal the truth or change the rules, writers have a duty to point this out. (Think of how Mr Trump pretends the figurative “war on drugs” is a real war, as an excuse to grab extraordinary powers.)

Writers also have a role in what Sir Salman has called “a [figurative] world war of stories—a war between incompatible versions of reality”. He sees this in Vladimir Putin’s rewriting of history to try to justify his invasion of Ukraine; also in the Middle East (“two incompatible narratives about the history of this very small patch of land”); and in India, where Hindu nationalists insist they are victimised by Muslims (“it’s very strange that the 85% majority should feel it’s the injured party.”) “Each side feels that their story is being engulfed and crushed by the other story. So, yeah, stories can be the death of you.”

Nearly being murdered naturally makes him reflect on mortality. Asked about ageing, he laughs: “I’m against it.” In “Oklahoma”, he asks how people should face their last days of life: serenely, or with rage? One character says that some fools are “moronically serene [and] grateful for ‘beauty’ and ‘love’”. But Sir Salman offers a subtler answer. “It doesn’t have to be either/or. It could be both. You could be peaceful on Tuesday and angry on Wednesday.”

In “Late”, a ghost story set in an old college, the protagonist wakes up dead in the first sentence. Over the next 70-odd pages—a perfect length for a short story—the reader learns about his life and realises that he is a fictional mixture of E.M. Forster and Alan Turing, two of the most illustrious fellows of King’s College, Cambridge. (Sir Salman, an alumnus, recalls playing croquet with the ageing novelist in the college garden; he never met the great mathematician and code-cracker.)

The gradual revelation of how brutally society has treated the protagonist for being gay is both shocking and moving. Yet the story offers hope. Bigotry can be overcome. And literature can help, by forcing people to imagine what injustice feels like. Art, argues Sir Salman, “can re-read the world”. ■

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The genre makes the most of small budgets and big ideas

Frightfully good stuff: why this is a golden age of horror films The genre makes the most of small budgets and big ideas October 30th 2025 IF SOMEONE pointed to a closed door and told you that behind it was something that might make you faint, vomit, miscarry or have a heart attack, would that make you want to open it? For most, the answer would be “absolutely not”. Many, however, would be intrigued enough to take a peek. In 1974 newspapers reported that distressed viewers were having such reactions to “The Exorcist” , yet filmgoers were undeterred. “The Exorcist” was the second-highest grossing film that year and the only horror film in the top 20.

Half a century on, people enjoy filmic frights more than ever. Horror movies make up one-fifth of the 20 highest-grossing titles worldwide. As of early October, horror films have made more than $1bn in America and accounted for around 17% of box-office receipts, up from 4% just a decade ago. The pattern is similar, if less steep, globally (see chart 1).

As well as being commercially successful, the genre attracts first-rate talent and critical acclaim. “The Substance” (2024), a body-horror flick, was nominated for Best Picture at the Academy Awards in March; Michael B. Jordan and Amy Madigan are attracting Oscar buzz for their performances in “Sinners” and “Weapons”, respectively. This is a golden age for horror films. Why and how did it come about?

Clark Collis addresses the second question in “Screaming and Conjuring”, a deeply reported account of the genre’s reanimation. Spooky movies are as old as the motion picture itself: Bela Lugosi played Dracula in 1931, nine years after Max Schreck played the title character in “Nosferatu”. Over time the genre proved exceptionally flexible. In the 1950s, as the space race accelerated and fears of nuclear weapons abounded, horror films featuring interplanetary threats (“The Blob”) and radiation ( “Godzilla” ) proliferated.

Horror turned nastier and less camp in the ensuing decades, as deranged killers such as Norman Bates in “Psycho” (1960) and Leatherface in “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre” (1974) stalked across screens. The 1980s saw the rise and fall of the slasher franchise. Jason Voorhees, Freddy Krueger and Michael Myers gleefully hacked up winsome teens in the “Friday the 13th”, “A Nightmare on Elm Street” and “Halloween” films, but by the early 1990s audiences had tired of them. Francis Ford Coppola’s “Bram Stoker’s Dracula” (1992) and Neil Jordan’s “Interview with the Vampire” (1994) were both big-budget hits, but neither was especially frightening.

Mr Collis credits “Scream” (1996) with horror’s revitalisation. The script was arch and clever. Its opening scene had the killer asking his first victim about her favourite horror fare; another character discusses the “rules” of survival in horror films. It frightened and amused audiences. Five sequels and a tv series followed; the franchise grossed more than $740m ($1.2bn in today’s money). George Romero, who directed “Night of the Living Dead” (1968), a landmark zombie film, said: “The genre was dying and ‘Scream’ saved it.”

Then, in 1997, two first-time directors put out a call for young actors willing to endure “the most demanding and unpleasant project of your career”. The result was a faux-documentary shot on a shoestring in rural Maryland. It had a minimal script, no special effects and no on-screen monster. “The Blair Witch Project” proved genuinely and imaginatively terrifying, relying on suggestion and the psychological unravelling of its three stars. It has earned more than $480m in today’s money.

“Found-footage” films boomed in the wake of “Blair Witch”. Studios realised that horror films could be cheap and effective: they did not need stars or elaborate visual effects. Blumhouse, founded in 2000, championed this bare-bones approach, providing film-makers with tight budgets, creative freedom and attractive back-end terms should the film prove a hit. They struck gold in 2007 with “Paranormal Activity”, which made $290m and spawned six sequels, and followed it up with an array of popular franchises, including “The Purge” and “Insidious”, as well as critical darlings such as “Get Out” .

Horror also benefits from two paradoxes. The first relates to age. As Stephen Follows, a film-data analyst, notes, “People who loved horror in the 1980s and 1990s but were told it wasn’t acceptable—they’re now running the industry, and have no shame or regret about their love of horror.” Yesterday’s fright-loving teens have become today’s greenlighting executives.

And yet no genre has a larger share of fans aged between 19 and 24, meaning the audience is perpetually self-renewing. Franchises such as “Star Wars” and “Indiana Jones” retain their ageing fan bases, and thus get hemmed in by continuity concerns, but horror rewards novelty. Screenwriters address current topics: the “M3GAN” franchise, for instance, taps into fears about artificial intelligence, just as films from the 1950s played on worries about the nuclear age, and titles such as “Rosemary’s Baby” emphasised the devil’s immanence to a rapidly secularising world.

Stories and characters can easily be rebooted, too. James Whale, Kenneth Branagh and now Guillermo del Toro have all made films inspired by Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein”, yet they are strikingly different in tone, structure and feel. Studios get the benefit of familiarity—and, in the case of classic monsters, free intellectual property—without the burden of having to fit stories into an existing narrative.

The second paradox relates to cinemas and distribution. A generation ago, a film-maker with an idea had to go through the studio and mainstream distribution system. Today, equipment is cheap: everyone carries a movie camera around in their pocket all the time. (Much of “28 Years Later” , a post-apocalyptic horror released this year, was shot on iPhones.) And distribution has never been easier. If studios and producers pass on a project, film-makers can crowdfund it instead and post the finished product to YouTube.

Yet even as horror becomes easier to stream, people still like seeing it on the big screen. There is something about sitting among strangers in a cinema and being frightened together that heightens the experience. “Scary stories in the dark is an elemental thing,” says Abhijay Prakash, Blumhouse’s president.

Still, none of these factors explains the fundamental reasons why so many people choose to frighten and disgust themselves with horror films. One reason might be that the experience is cathartic. In recent years the mood has darkened and the world seems less safe than it once did. A study by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at Oxford University found that 40% of people avoid the news, up from 29% in 2017, chiefly because they find it upsetting. Horror films let viewers direct their daily dread and anxiety onto someone on the screen rather than letting it seethe away inside.

Coltan Scrivner, a behavioural scientist and horror enthusiast, provides an intuitive explanation in “Morbidly Curious”, another new book. He argues that people watch horror films, visit haunted houses and engage in other fright-inducing experiences to better understand the dangers that surround them, or that they think might surround them. That is why women are drawn to stories of serial killers and why interest in “Contagion” (2011), Steven Soderbergh’s film about a global pandemic, surged in March 2020. People with nervous dispositions seek out scary fare. “If zebras could watch movies about lions stalking their prey,” he writes, “they probably would.” ■

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They share a reckless disregard for rules, as two books point out

Strongmen in politics and technology are changing the world They share a reckless disregard for rules, as two books point out October 30th 2025 RECENTLY A GROUP of American tech billionaires stood in single file like eager schoolchildren to have their photos taken at the Resolute desk with Donald Trump. The president gave them a pen and a coin. He entertained them with classic rock from his iPad. Then he hosted them at a dinner at the White House, where they boasted of the giant sums their firms planned to invest in America.

If only Giuliano da Empoli had been a fly on the wall. The Italian-Swiss writer was an adviser to Matteo Renzi during his stint as Italy’s prime minister in 2014-16. He has spent years in the corridors of power observing what he sees as the emergence of a new cadre of strongmen, who feed off each other and share a love of disruption. He skewers them with sardonic humour.

In politics, they are led by rule-breakers such as Mr Trump, Saudi Arabia’s Muhammad bin Salman (MBS) and El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele. In tech, they include the likes of Elon Musk, the world’s richest man; Mark Zuckerberg, boss of Meta; and Sam Altman , CEO of OpenAI, maker of ChatGPT. As the author sees it, these men share a common aim: to smash the old order. Mr da Empoli says that the cohort’s first law of strategy is action, however reckless. He likens their attitude to the Borgias of medieval Italy, whose scheming and tolerance for bloodshed put two family members on the papal throne.

The target of today’s strongmen is technocratic administration—what the author calls the “Davos consensus”—which is supposedly blind to the way the winds of politics have moved against it. Their weapon is artificial intelligence (AI), which does not care about rules or procedures: the only thing that matters is the result. The political leaders are in thrall to the technologists: Mr Trump, for instance, is averse to AI regulation. The tech elite, meanwhile, believes in a future of AI-driven decision-making—even if governments cannot understand how AI reaches its conclusions.

This may sound like overwrought AI doomerism, albeit with an Old World literary flair. As well as Machiavelli’s “The Prince”, Mr da Empoli enlists Kafka’s “The Trial” and “The Castle” to underscore what he sees as the menace of “authoritarian intelligence”. If political life used to resemble “Veep”, Armando Iannucci’s comedy-of-errors TV series, the author reckons it is now reminiscent of the cruel worlds of “The Godfather” and “Squid Game”.

Yet there is plenty that is irresistible about “The Hour of the Predator”. Mr da Empoli’s experiences at the United Nations in New York, the Ritz-Carlton in Riyadh and on stage with Mr Altman provide vignettes of the Borgian power grab that he relates with exquisite detachment. MBS has a “disarmingly sweet” smile for someone who once turned the Ritz-Carlton into an interrogation chamber for rival princes and billionaires. Mr Bukele conducts mass incarcerations of gang members that are “part ‘Hunger Games’ and part gay-porn movie”. Mr Altman’s wide-open eyes give him “the startled look of a woodland creature”. That expression belies “the will to limitless power that seeps through every phrase he utters”.

In “Gilded Rage” Jacob Silverman, a journalist, dwells on a similar cast of characters. As well as Mr Musk, his book describes the ascent in America of Vivek Ramaswamy, a tech mogul who, at one point, was tipped for a role in Mr Trump’s administration; David Sacks, the White House’s AI czar; and other right-wing venture capitalists, such as Peter Thiel.

It has the same premise, too: since the election in 2024, the tech elite’s bias for “moving fast and breaking things” is echoed by Mr Trump’s utter disregard for norms (tearing down the White House’s East Wing is Zuckerbergian in chutzpah, as is having tech giants pay for the new ballroom). Both groups are animated by a bizarre strain of personal resentment: “These titans of industry might be fabulously wealthy, but they can come across as deeply unhappy,” the author writes.

Yet “Gilded Rage” describes its subjects with nothing like Mr da Empoli’s deft touch, nor does it match his ability to explain the “why” as well as the “who”. Instead, the book is as two-dimensional as its title. Its descriptions of its subjects’ sense of entitlement will be familiar to anyone who reads the newspapers. The book’s anger renders it impotent.

Unlike “The Hour of the Predator”, it fails to grapple with the ways in which the technocratic elite—with their lawyerly attention to detail and disregard for the political zeitgeist—may have sealed their own fate. It also overlooks how AI may play to the strengths of the rule-breakers. Read Mr da Empoli’s book, if only to understand how fundamentally the balance of power in the world may be changing. ■

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Social media and “KPop Demon Hunters” have taken the convenience food global

Young people are hot for ramyeon, spicy instant noodles Social media and “KPop Demon Hunters” have taken the convenience food global October 30th 2025 EVERY POP star has a pre-show ritual. Beyoncé sits in a massage chair. Selena Gomez swallows a teaspoon of olive oil. And Rumi, Mira and Zoey, the members of HUNTR/X, a k-pop group with a side hustle battling supernatural evil, eat ramyeon. In “KPop Demon Hunters” —an animated film which has become Netflix’s most popular movie ever—the fictional musicians ravenously slurp down the spicy instant noodles. (Netflix collaborated with Nongshim, a food company, to release a ramyeon range featuring the characters.)

As the name suggests, ramyeon is derived from ramen, a Japanese noodle soup. But whereas ramen is often made fresh—and noodles are served in a broth that may have been simmering for hours—ramyeon is about immediate gratification. The dish was developed in the 1960s and promoted by the South Korean government as an easy, affordable and hearty meal. It was supposedly Park Chung-hee, the military dictator at the time, who suggested adding chilli powder to appeal to Korean palates.

Ramyeon is hot stuff. Last year South Korea exported $1.2bn-worth of it, an increase of 31% on 2023. Samyang Foods—which makes Buldak, a popular variety—says that exports generate three-quarters of its revenue. In America, Samyang’s sales more than doubled between 2023 and 2024, and its products are now stocked in Target and Walmart. According to Numerator, a market-research firm, in America Samyang is Gen Alpha’s favourite brand.

There are three reasons why the hunger for ramyeon is intensifying. One is that youngsters love to try new foods and post reviews online . Spicy dishes lend themselves to viral content as, the fiercer the sensation, the more entertaining the reaction. Videos of the “fire-noodle challenge”—in which people wince, cough and cry as they try to swallow a packet of Samyang’s most explosive offering—get millions of views on social media. As a result, “Ramyeon isn’t just a food,” says Kim Taeyeon, the founder of the Kimchi Institute, a food-diplomacy organisation. “It’s something that [people] can experience.”

The second reason is the “Korean Wave” and booming interest in the country’s culture. As “KPop Demon Hunters” shows, people may watch a hit Korean film or tv series and become curious about the dishes the characters eat—especially when the endorsement is as enthusiastic as Rumi’s, Mira’s and Zoey’s. “Parasite” (2019), an Oscar-winning film, similarly brought the world’s attention to Jjapaguri, which combines two types of instant noodles.

The third reason for ramyeon’s trendiness is convenience. In 2024 a survey by YouGov found that 48% of Americans prefer to spend less than 30 minutes cooking dinner and 12% prefer not to cook at all. After adding hot water, a cup of ramyeon is ready in a mere three minutes. Why wait to spice up your life? ■

They rarely start from solid foundations

Lessons from history on renovating official buildings They rarely start from solid foundations October 30th 2025 It has nine arched windows on its west side. It has 11. It has a portico with six columns or eight. It has a staircase that leads nowhere. It will hold somewhere between 650 and 1,350 people. It will cost $200m. No, scratch that: $300m.

Donald Trump’s proposed new White House ballroom—represented in a maquette as well as a diagram brandished during an audience with the press in the Oval Office—has, like many of his utterances, the radical indeterminacy of a proposition from Jacques Derrida. In August the president signed an executive order prescribing “classical architecture” as the official state aesthetic. Whatever eventually rises from the pile of rubble beside the south lawn, it will be a pastiche of pastiche: “Caesar’s Palace meets the Palace of Versailles,” predicted CNN.

When political leaders summon the architects and interior designers, they also invite pomposity over the threshold. In the 1660s Louis XIV decided to give a glow-up to a hunting lodge outside Paris , for which his subjects received a bill for 100m livres tournois (probably around $2.6bn in today’s money) and an immense, glittering metaphor for inequality. The conclusion to this story—involving a basket, the head of his great-great-great-grandson, and a lot of cheering—has not managed to deter more recent leaders.

In the 1980s Nicolae Ceausescu sank 30% of Romania’s national budget into the construction of the “People’s Palace” (the irony of which was not lost on those whose homes were bulldozed in the process). The architect, Anca Petrescu, acquired an aircraft hangar and built full-scale plaster models of the palace interiors inside. A vast dummy cupola was lowered onto the roof by helicopter, to help the dictator decide whether he wanted to order the same in pink-and-white Transylvanian marble. Five years after construction began, Romanians made clear what they thought of Ceausescu’s palace and his policies. A bullet was his reward.

When Jacob Zuma was elected president of South Africa in 2009, he decided that his family farm in Nkandla required a security upgrade in the form of a gigantic swimming pool and lavish new accommodation for his livestock. His justification for public funding was strangely brilliant: a wandering cow, he argued, might easily trigger an alarm and a “fire-pool” was necessary should one of the thatched roofs catch fire. “If it is established that I am corrupt, show me the door,” he said. “I have a home back in Nkandla. I will go and stay there.” They showed it to him and told him to pay for it, too. In 2016 a court in Pretoria ordered him to cough up almost 8m rand (more than $500,000 at the time).

These stories are testimony to the power of the inventory, which can condemn the offender. A luggage lift in the Lodge, the official residence of the Australian prime minister, caused discontent in 2016 after it was revealed to have cost A$83,500 ($62,000) to install. Wallpaper reportedly priced at £840 ($1,155) a roll played a part in the downfall of Boris Johnson , Britain’s prime minister in 2019-22, who hung it in his flat in Downing Street to make it less like “a crack den”. (His successor, Liz Truss, was in power for only 45 days, but found time to paint over it.)

The most egregious list, however, was racked up by Viktor Yanukovych, Ukraine’s former president. He improved Mezhyhirya, his residence, with stuffed lions, suits of armour, a white Steinway piano and an artificial lake containing a replica galleon hung with $97,000 chandeliers. After his departure the house was opened to the public as a museum of corruption.

The wrecking balls have cleared space to test Mr Trump’s ability to turn his plans into something material. The president says the extension will not require public funding, but even if donors bear the cost, they will not prevent the shadows of history from gathering. Critics are still making comparisons to Versailles. However many windows on the west side, the ballroom may end up both a lasting monument to the current president—and 90,000 square feet of hubris. ■

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Ever more elaborate designs are at people’s fingertips

Does nail art have art nailed? Ever more elaborate designs are at people’s fingertips October 30th 2025 YOU HAVE to hand it to them: the contestants at Nailympia, the world’s leading nail-art competition, take talons very seriously. Some paint their keratin canvases under time pressure. Others show off designs they have been crafting for months. Fingers are festooned with portraits and acrylic sculptures, such as a dinky cup filled with real red wine. Polished would be an understatement.

Nail art is enjoying triple-digit growth. The number of nail salons in America has doubled since 2012, to around 35,000, according to the most recent census data. In Britain nails are the second-most popular beauty treatment, after hair styling. According to Jonathan Millet, chief executive of Townhouse, a luxury chain, the nail-salon market is worth around $10bn in America and £2bn ($2.7bn) in Britain.

Ever more elaborate designs are at people’s fingertips. You can embellish your nails with tiny 3D orchids or hand-painted portraits of Shakespeare or Snow White. Jacqueline McClement, a Canadian nail artist, recently filmed herself painting Vermeer’s “Girl with a Pearl Earring” in polish. If you have $800 to spare, you can buy fake talons carved from real crystals. Styles spread online. The hashtag #nailart has more than 120bn views on TikTok.

The desire to decorate nails is not new. In Babylon men dyed their nails with kohl before going to war to seem fearsome. In ancient Egypt people stained theirs with henna as a mark of social status. The earliest example of nail polish, in China in around 3000BC, was made from egg whites, gelatin and beeswax. Today nails are not embellished for battle, but they are still used to communicate a message. Nick Knight, a British fashion photographer , sees nails as a form of self-expression, “the last note in a melody”.

Some nail artists go further, arguing that they produce the modern equivalent of portrait miniatures, which were coveted by 18th-century European nobility. Like miniaturists, nail artists hold their breath and paint in between heartbeats. “One brushstroke out of line and it will throw the whole thing off,” says Anouska Scarlet Anastasia, who specialises in miniature sculptures. Her models—which include a tiny, hyperreal bottle of Heinz ketchup and one of Baileys Irish Cream—take two or three painstaking weeks to craft.

“This should be in a museum not on a finger,” reads one comment on Ms Anastasia’s Instagram. And curators, it seems, have come to agree. The Museum of Modern Art in New York has a set of dollar-bill-inspired artificial nails, which were designed for Lil’ Kim, a rapper, in the 1990s. The first museum dedicated to nail art will open next year in Shanghai; contestants at Nailympia have been invited to donate their creations. Plenty will thumb their nose at all this. But manicurists aver that few art forms are as tough as nails. ■

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Making an impression on the streets is an art

The serious reasons for wearing silly costumes to protests Making an impression on the streets is an art October 30th 2025 Bring plenty of flowers and musical instruments, such as bongos and tambourines. Don’t forget the sweets and paper halos to give to the police. In the event of trouble, start dancing or intoning “Mary Had a Little Lamb”. If a fight breaks out, send in trained seducers to charm the enemy mid-battle.

That last bit was a joke by Allen Ginsberg . But the other ideas were among the poet’s suggestions for turning a protest—in this case an anti-war march in Berkeley in 1965—into a spectacle. The event should embody an alternative psychology, Ginsberg argued, and be “an example of peaceable health”. He was onto something. At its best, protest is a kind of art, framing its messages in street theatre and visual tableaux. This art form has its own motifs and canonical images—and it is flourishing, as the frogs of Portland, Oregon, show.

Earlier this year a shrewd protester there donned an inflatable frog costume for a demo at an Immigration and Customs Enforcement building. Others in the city followed suit. Before long the frog spawned the menagerie of inflatable animals, from unicorns to axolotls , who paraded at the recent “No Kings” marches held across America.

The frog-marcher is an image with a rich impact and lineage. It is a species of what is sometimes referred to as “laughtivism”, which infuses protest with photogenic mockery, and of what Srdja Popovic, a Serbian activist, calls “dilemma actions”. These give the authorities lose-lose problems. Collaring an inflatable animal—or pepper-spraying the costume’s air-vent, as a cop did in Portland—seems heavy-handed. But restraint can look like a concession. Russians who held blank placards at anti-war protests posed a similar conundrum.

These absurdist sketches cast the enforcers as stooges in the protesters’ joke. Just as important, people in inflatable outfits are ostentatiously harmless —cuddly rebuffs to claims that today’s demonstrators are maniacs and terrorists, whose rampages justify the use of troops and emergency powers. The quirky pictures from Portland and elsewhere are thus part of another iconography of protest: scenes in which the peaceful face down the mighty, often alone.

For the most influential images of protest are not of vast crowds in, say, Tahrir Square in Cairo in 2011 or at the March on Washington of 1963. They are of a solo high-school student being mauled by a police dog in Alabama, or a man putting a flower in a rifle’s barrel pointed at his head. More recent classics include snaps of a young woman in Tbilisi, Georgia, using the reflection in a riot shield to apply her lipstick, and a lady in a red dress being sprayed with tear-gas in Istanbul. The greatest may be the shot of a lone figure blocking a column of tanks in Beijing, armed only with his shopping bags.

Rationally, you might expect pictures of such lopsided stand-offs to nurture obedience to the overlords, rather than solidarity with dissident underdogs. Besides the threat of grievous harm, the teenager kneeling before a phalanx of riot police, and the inflatable amphibian dicing with armoured feds, risk seeming foolhardy and doomed.

Yet such images evoke primitive instincts that hijack the viewer’s sympathy. One is a natural fellow-feeling with those in adversity. “By changing places in fancy with the sufferer”, Adam Smith wrote in “The Theory of Moral Sentiments”, observers perforce “enter as it were into his body and become in some measure him”, and so “tremble and shudder at the thought of what he feels”. Then there is an ingrained respect for physical bravery and a belief in fair play that seems to be hard-wired (witness the fact that a child’s first sentences typically include “It’s not fair!”).

Crafting such meme-worthy scenes requires ingenuity. It takes imagination to be funny on the streets; when the skull-crackers muster, it takes discipline to remain “hip, calm and tranquil”, as Ginsberg enjoined. Even so, mastering the art of protest can boost the assets on which all movements for change depend: numbers, momentum and morale.

Artful protest transmutes the state’s might into a liability, its power into bullying paranoia, fear of it into ridicule. It converts the vulnerability of a peaceful crowd into courage and charisma. And it simplifies the moral choices of onlookers. Do they back the serene woman in a summer frock or the visored robocops who are arresting her? When it comes down to it, whose side are they really on: the guy dancing in a carnival costume or the one wielding a truncheon? ■

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Expelling Asians from Uganda was popular. How did it work out?

Idi Amin, a pioneer of mass deportation Expelling Asians from Uganda was popular. How did it work out? October 23rd 2025 In 1976 Madame Tussauds, a waxwork museum in London, asked visitors to name the most hated figure in its collection. Idi Amin came second, after Adolf Hitler. Stories of the Ugandan dictator’s fiendish exploits filled British newspapers at the time. Some were true: he really was a mass murderer. Others were dubious—he probably didn’t keep heads in his fridge.

Those who dismissed him as an evil buffoon could cite plenty of evidence, from his boastful speeches to his claim to be the “last king of Scotland”. Yet views of him in the West were also tinged by racism: Henry Kissinger once described him as an “ape without education”.

Two new books make the case for taking him seriously. He was a pioneer of populism. He styled himself as a straight-talking man of the people, thumbing his nose at the old imperial overlords and thwarting foreign saboteurs. He identified enemies who were supposedly holding Uganda back, such as its Asian population , and offered simple, dramatic solutions, such as deporting them all. He convinced his supporters that he was making Uganda strong, yet after eight years as president he left it poorer, nastier and more lawless.

Amin was a man from the margins. Born a Kakwa, an ethnicity slighted by other Ugandans, he found purpose as a boxing champion and soldier in the colonial army. According to family legend, he once dragged an English waiter over the bar by his collar after being refused service in the white officers’ mess. Apocryphal or not, the story shows the man that Amin thought himself to be. After independence he rose to be army commander. When he seized power in a coup in 1971, crowds celebrated in the streets.

The next year he announced that the 50,000 or so people of south Asian origin in Uganda would have to leave within 90 days. This cruel policy was popular, as Amin deftly fanned racial grievance. “The Africans have been regarded by these foreigners as second-class citizens in their own country,” he said. Many Asians had been in Uganda for generations, but they had sat above black Africans in colonialism’s racial hierarchy and their economic success was resented. Amin declared their departure to be a “day of salvation”.

It was also the start of what he called an “economic war” to purge Uganda of all vestiges of colonialism . In his zero-sum mind, immigrants from Asia were taking opportunities away from the real Ugandans. He confiscated their businesses and gave them to his supporters, who ran them into the ground. It turned out the Asians had valuable skills, from book-keeping to running factories to dentistry.

Amin vowed to “make Uganda move once again” by acting at “supersonic speed”. This involved such things as micromanaging commerce by diktat. He accused African small traders of smuggling and price-gouging. Many were shot.

None of this was good for the economy, which collapsed. But it was exciting. Amin’s regime transformed “the boring, technical work of government into a thrilling battle for racial and political liberation”, writes Derek Peterson, an American historian. Campaigns to grow cotton or build roads were animated by patriotism.

The same was true of international relations. Many Ugandans loved the way Amin pricked Westerners’ pomposity. He offered to broker peace in Northern Ireland and set up a Save Britain Fund to send aid in a recession. To Richard Nixon he wrote of America’s “endless racial conflicts” and “the unfortunate Watergate affair”.

Trevor Noah , a South African comedian, once juxtaposed clips of Amin boasting about his brains and popularity with clips of Donald Trump doing the same. For Mr Peterson, the resemblance runs deeper. “It is not only the braggadocio,” he writes, but also “the demonisation of social and racial minorities, the targeting of immigrants, the sidelining of expert[s]”. Via the radio, Amin issued a barrage of decrees. No more teenage dances! Stop wearing wigs! Mr Peterson likens his scattershot bossiness to Mr Trump’s social-media posts.

This comparison should not be taken too far. Amin was vastly more brutal. Uganda’s chief justice was dragged from his chambers and murdered; an archbishop given a show trial and shot. On one occasion, Amin ordered a group of herders to be massacred simply because they refused to wear clothes. Estimates of the death toll range from 12,000 to 500,000. But the horror was not systematic, contrary to the myth of an “African Hitler”. Soldiers had been given free rein. They used it.

Amin’s rule of fear sent ripples far and wide. Of the Asians he deported, the largest contingent went to Britain. Among them was Mahmood Mamdani, now a professor of government at Columbia University (and the father of Zohran Mamdani , the probable next mayor of New York). He writes movingly of how those expelled felt like strangers wherever they went, guests even in their own homes. Though Britain rewrote its laws to try to keep out non-white former imperial subjects, the Ugandan Asians who got there prospered.

In 1979 Amin was toppled by the Tanzanian army, having foolishly invaded Tanzania. Seven years later a rebel called Yoweri Museveni fought his way to the Ugandan presidency, and has yet to leave. Mr Museveni, who is seeking re-election in January, boasts that he has restored stability. Though no democrat, he is nowhere near as bad as Amin was. But Mr Mamdani is outraged that he is a “grateful stooge” of the West, and chides him for overseeing the “slow poison” of a nation by corruption, political violence and ethnic division. Many of the biggest businesses in Uganda today are foreign-owned. The frustrations that Amin exploited are still there.

History rhymes. Mr Museveni’s son and would-be heir, Muhoozi Kainerugaba, has adopted a persona on social media that borrows from Amin and Mr Trump: mocking his critics and boasting about torturing opposition activists in his basement. Meanwhile taxi drivers in Kampala stick pictures of Amin in their windows, nostalgic for a golden age that never was. ■

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Young and old like to dance to Johann Strauss II’s tunes

In Vienna, the waltz is keeping in step with the times Young and old like to dance to Johann Strauss II’s tunes October 23rd 2025 Once a year the Vienna State Opera hosts a lavish ball. When you enter the magnificent auditorium, you feel as though you have stepped back in time: champagne flows as hundreds of women in gowns and men in tailcoats sweep across the floor. No one leaves without dancing a waltz, usually one composed by Johann Strauss II, the “Waltz King”.

On October 25th Vienna will celebrate Strauss’s 200th birthday with a ceremony and performances. He was probably the closest thing 19th-century Austria had to a pop star: he produced operas, ballets and symphonic works, but is best remembered for his waltzes (he wrote more than 150). The Viennese waltz began as a simple peasant dance; Strauss gave it an aristocratic air. The city’s winter balls recapture a sense of ritual and elegance.

All these years later, the waltz is flourishing. Along with Wiener schnitzel and psychoanalysis, it is one of Vienna’s most prized cultural exports. (In 2017 UNESCO added the Viennese waltz to Austria’s list of intangible cultural heritage.) The lilting melody of Strauss’s “The Blue Danube” remains one of the most recognisable tunes in the world and has been featured in television shows from “The Simpsons” to “Squid Game” . Pop stars such as Alicia Keys have borrowed the waltz’s simple triple metre. And millions tune in to watch celebrities master the Viennese waltz on shows such as “Strictly Come Dancing” and “Dancing with the Stars”.

Part of the reason for its longevity is its clarity. Easy-to-follow, repetitive melodies and a strong emphasis on the first beat make the music easy to dance to. That is probably why the waltz remains a popular choice for newlyweds’ first dance (though the Viennese version is fast and requires continuous turns). “When you see the simplicity of a beautiful waltz, it takes your breath away,” says Jason Gilkison, the creative director of “Strictly Come Dancing”. “It’s like a hot knife through butter.”

Vienna has played a key role in keeping the waltz tradition alive. The Vienna Philharmonic performs Strauss’s waltzes every New Year’s Day: tickets for the concert, allocated by lottery, can cost up to €1,200 ($1,400). Children learn to dance the waltz at studios across the city. Locals and tourists alike can attend one of the more than 400 balls that are hosted each year. Standard admission to the Vienna Opera Ball, considered the most prestigious, costs more than €400, and yet demand for tickets has soared in recent years.

Some waltz-lovers are doing away with the strict dress codes in favour of something more laidback and modern. New events have been added to the roster in recent years, such as the Rainbow Ball for LGBT+ people. “The youngsters are crazy for it,” avers Norbert Kettner, chief executive of Vienna’s tourism board. For people seeking a connection, waltzing is “a glamorous alternative to dating apps”. On a recent Friday night, young people in dresses and jeans gathered at a rooftop bar to drink cocktails and chat. As they swayed to Strauss’s waltzes, played by a string quartet, perhaps some wished finding the one was as easy as one-two-three. ■

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After 30 years and six novels, Lyra Belacqua reaches her final destination in “The Rose Field”

Philip Pullman’s magisterial fantasy series has come to an end After 30 years and six novels, Lyra Belacqua reaches her final destination in “The Rose Field” October 23rd 2025 SHE IS ONE of modern literature’s great heroines. Readers first met Lyra Belacqua, a gutsy, clever 11-year-old, in “Northern Lights” (1995) as she sneaked around Jordan College, Oxford, with her best friend Roger. She embarked on a quest that spanned six books and took her to the Arctic and Smyrna, into parallel worlds and the Land of the Dead. Lyra’s otherworldly adventures have proved captivating: the “His Dark Materials” and “The Book of Dust” trilogies have sold some 50m copies worldwide and have been adapted for the stage and the screen (see pictures). But now, after 30 years, Sir Philip Pullman has announced that Lyra’s journey will come to an end with “The Rose Field”.

The series sets epic battles in a richly imagined universe. It is a polemic against organised religion in much the same way that C.S. Lewis’s “The Chronicles of Narnia” was a pro-Christian allegory. In the “Dark Materials” trilogy, Lyra and her allies travel through realms fighting the Magisterium, a religious institution bent on repression and control.

Sir Philip blends fantasy and reality throughout. Lyra’s home world has much in common with the real one. Jordan College is fictional, but Oxford is vividly described. The Magisterium is based in Geneva, a city crucial to the Protestant Reformation, but takes its name from a Catholic term for liturgical authority.

Lyra’s allies include angels, witches, talking bears and tiny humanoids. In her world, people have daemons: animal companions that represent their interior selves. Technology has a magical bent. Lyra proves an adept reader of a truth-telling machine called an alethiometer. One of her companions wields a knife that can create openings into other worlds; another invents a sort of telescope that can see “dust”, physical evidence of consciousness.

The second trilogy seemed to promise more of the same gripping stuff. The action mostly takes place in Lyra’s world. “La Belle Sauvage” (2017) begins before “His Dark Materials” and explains how Lyra came to Jordan College. The second (“The Secret Commonwealth”, 2019) and third volumes take place afterwards, when Lyra is a young woman. She grows alienated from her daemon and parts from him—something few people in her world can do.

In “The Rose Field” Lyra and her daemon set out separately for a building in the desert said to contain a secret pertaining to dust. The Magisterium, which associates dust with original sin, seeks to find the same place for malevolent reasons. Lyra also hopes to reconnect with her daemon, rediscover her imagination and recover an intellectual openness that she had lost in late adolescence.

The “Book of Dust” trilogy has had its high points. Unfortunately this instalment’s combination of quest and bildungsroman never quite coheres into something convincing. Part of the problem is that Sir Philip has not chosen the most subtle of allegories for maturing. Many people, as they grow up, too vehemently reject childhood habits and opinions: most people correct themselves eventually. Not for nothing did Friedrich Nietzsche believe that maturity meant regaining the seriousness of a child at play.

In the first trilogy, readers cared about Lyra because she was brave, her instincts were correct and her enemies detestable. In this one, Sir Philip depends on readers retaining that affection, but too often “The Rose Field” descends into an episodic slog.

Sir Philip seems to have grown tired of creating. At best his characters are two-dimensional; some feel pushed around for the sake of the plot rather than discovered. Lyra’s enemies can be cartoonishly odious. Often, as in the case of the book’s putative antagonist, Olivier Bonneville, they test the reader’s credulity.

In the early novels, each step revealed something about Lyra’s world. Here that world is less profuse: instead of diverse species with their own array of characters, “The Rose Field” has gryphons, all of whom are avaricious warriors. When Lyra argues with an angel—the only one in the book, who seems to appear just to have this conversation—about the nature of imagination, the reader can feel Sir Philip’s hands working their mouths. Part of Lyra’s task is to find the alkahest, a universal solvent. It gives little away to say that this is a metaphor. Anyone who has heard Sir Philip interviewed about society can probably guess what it pertains to.

The book’s main points—that life is a gift; this world is full of riches waiting to be discovered; and compassion, curiosity and kindness are the cardinal virtues—are fundamentally the same as in the first trilogy, but less artfully expressed. It is true that six long novels is a lot to draw from one well. But a lacklustre ending for such a magnificent series and its swashbuckling heroine is a bitter disappointment. ■

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But will tourists like it?

The new Fondation Cartier is helping reshape central Paris But will tourists like it? October 23rd 2025 For much of its history the building opposite the Louvre, on the bustling Rue de Rivoli, was a popular department store. It even featured in a novel by Emile Zola, who liked to pen panegyrics about the poor; he described it as “a temple, with its blazing altars of temptation”. Now the building will tempt a different sort of devotee: art enthusiasts. On October 25th the Fondation Cartier, a museum backed by the French jeweller , is moving there after a years-long renovation.

The building may look classically Haussmannian on the outside, but inside it feels very 2025—heavy on glass, concrete and steel. The inaugural show, on view until August, boasts works by around 100 artists who have taken part in shows during the Fondation’s 41-year history, including Joan Mitchell, James Turrell and other less famous names. (The museum’s previous site was several kilometres away.)

The show is eclectic. Over here is a marble cat sculpture on a pedestal; over there are tens of thousands of feathers in the shape of a tree. Upstairs is a “hyperreal” sculpture of a desolate woman carrying plastic bags, not far from a self-portrait showing the map of the world upside down in glitter. Some wonder whether the museum is designed more for avant-garde French taste than that of the global tourist. It will not be everyone’s cup of thé.

Still, the opening is significant for three reasons. First, it is part of a broader trend of French luxury firms putting their mark on the arts through private museums, with the theory that associations with artists reflect well on their brands. Fondation Cartier pioneered this trend decades ago by funding living artists to create original works. Today people’s consumerism (and the resulting profits spun by firms) have changed the way visitors to Paris consume art. Fondation Louis Vuitton and the Pinault Collection mount shows that rival and sometimes exceed those put on by the state-run museums.

Second, Fondation Cartier shows how central Paris is entrenching its position as a “cultural hub”, observes Aurelie Cauchy, co-founder of the Twentieth, an art-advisory firm. Only a few minutes’ walk away is the Pinault Collection, which opened in the Bourse du Commerce in 2021, not to mention the Louvre, the Musée des Arts Décoratifs and Jeu de Paume.

Last, Fondation Cartier is a fascinating experiment in how a modern museum might look. Jean Nouvel, the architect, designed the space with five movable platforms ranging from 200 to around 360 square metres (2,150 to 3,875 square feet). “Every time the visitor comes back to the Fondation the architecture will look completely different” inside, explains Béatrice Grenier, the exhibition’s curator. The huge pulleys that move the floors are visible: almost works of art in their own right as well as reminders of the investment that this new museum required. Its pricetag has been estimated at hundreds of millions of euros. “The cost is ridiculous—and confidential,” said Alain Dominique Perrin, president of Fondation Cartier, sounding an awful lot like someone who has just splurged on a shiny new jewel. ■

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Museum thefts are surprisingly common

The lessons from the brazen heist at the Louvre Museum thefts are surprisingly common October 23rd 2025 It took two masked thieves just seven minutes to slip through the window of the Galerie d’Apollon, pierce the security glass of two display cabinets using disc-cutters, and make off with nine items of Napoleonic and royal jewellery. At 9.30am on October 19th the pair used a truck-mounted ladder to break in to the Louvre; they left the same way, before escaping on scooters with two accomplices. In their haste they dropped one looted piece.

The raid strikes at the heart of the French state—and of the art world. With nearly 9m visitors in 2024, the Louvre is the most popular museum anywhere. A former royal palace in the historic centre of Paris, it is made up of over 400 galleries, displaying 35,000 works of art. Spanning civilisations from Mesopotamia to Europe, the collection also links France’s royal and imperial past with its republican present. President Emmanuel Macron called the heist an attack on “our history”.

The eight items seized, worth €88m ($102m) according to French officials, were part of the national collection of crown jewels. Kept in the museum’s most sumptuous gallery, they include the emerald-studded necklace and earrings given by Napoleon to Marie-Louise on their wedding in 1810, and a tiara made up of 212 pearls, 1,998 diamonds and 992 rose-cut diamonds belonging to the Empress Eugénie, Napoleon III’s wife. The thieves bagged an earring, necklace and tiara from the sapphire collection.

The Louvre has been targeted before—most famously in 1911, when the “Mona Lisa” was stolen—but not on this scale. Arthur Brand , a Dutch specialist in art theft, compares the heist to the snatching of 13 works of art, including Vermeer’s “The Concert” and Rembrandt’s “Christ in the Storm on the Sea of Galilee”, from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston in 1990. The following year an even more audacious attempt was made in Amsterdam. Criminals made off with 20 paintings, including Van Gogh’s “The Potato Eaters”, though the artworks were soon recovered. But “The Louvre is the ultimate heist,” says Mr Brand. “Nobody thought anybody would dare to steal from the Louvre.” The brazenness is worthy of a Hollywood script. Indeed in “Lupin”, a hit French crime series, the protagonist pinches from the museum a diamond necklace once owned by Marie Antoinette.

In reality, museum theft is surprisingly common. France has seen a number of recent heists from smaller museums. An analysis of 40 cases between 1990 and 2022 by Sandra Clopés and Marc Balcells, published in April, classifies five main types of raid. The most common, accounting for 15 of the heists, is a stealth raid: thieves make off with artworks without alerting security agents. “Smash-and-grab” raids are the second-most common, accounting for 11 of those analysed. Over half the items taken are paintings; only 4% are jewellery. Less than half are recovered. The Louvre thieves, says an art valuer in Paris, will try to dismantle the pieces, sell the gold and recut the precious stones. There is no market, he says, for the items themselves.

In Paris, minds are now focusing on what went wrong and how to stop it happening again. Gérald Darmanin, the justice minister, said the raid had given France “a dreadful image”. That a truck could be parked outside the Louvre on a busy street on a Sunday morning without raising suspicion is worrying enough; that the thieves could decamp with crown jewels despite setting off alarms poses serious questions about the museum’s security.

The “trick is to slow thieves down”, says Mr Brand. In most cases, note Ms Clopés and Mr Balcells, “Thieves were faster stealing the pieces than the sensors alerting security forces.” In a leaked report, France’s national auditor points to “persistent” delays in deploying modern security equipment in the Louvre. Laurence des Cars, the museum’s director, raised the problem when she took over in 2021. But, as in all public museums, budgets are tight. Rachida Dati, France’s culture minister, talked this week of “40 years of neglect”. Nobody wants to accept responsibility, but the political pressure is rising for a head to roll. ■

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In Guillermo del Toro’s film, everything—including the monster—looks gorgeous

A comely “Frankenstein” for the Instagram age In Guillermo del Toro’s film, everything—including the monster—looks gorgeous October 23rd 2025 He has watery eyes, flowing hair, yellow skin and black lips. He is eight feet tall. The creature dreamed up by a teenage Mary Shelley in “Frankenstein” is vividly corporeal. But, for film-makers, he is also an inviting outline. The story she hoped would “speak to the mysterious fears of our nature” offers a palette of mighty themes: God and science, nature and nurture, neglect and delinquency, fate and free will. Directors pick and mix these shades to craft a monster for their times.

The latest to resurrect him is Guillermo del Toro , whose “Frankenstein” is out in cinemas now and on Netflix on November 7th. In his umpteen screen outings, the creature has appeared in every guise you can imagine, plus some you probably can’t. He has been crossbred with Westerns, space adventures, spoofs, musicals and (like many new technologies) erotica; he has spawned highbrow riffs such as “Poor Things” and lower-brow ones like “Weird Science”. Even so, Mr del Toro’s colouring of the mythic yarn is distinctive and telling.

It looks gorgeous. Unfolding in the mid-19th century, decades after the book was published, the movie is a carnival of Byronic hairdos and velvet frock-coats. In a tweak to Shelley’s framing device, Victor Frankenstein (played by Oscar Isaac) recounts his lurid history to a Danish sea captain who rescues him from the polar ice. He assembles his humanoid in a gothic tower, the camera lingering gorily on his skill with eyeballs, bone saws and retracted skin.

This “Frankenstein” itself seems partly made up of cinema scraps. The protagonist harnesses lightning à la “Back to the Future”. Reviled by his maker and holed up in a barn, the creature (Jacob Elordi, pictured) befriends some rats like a hulking Snow White . He biffs people and (for some reason) wolves on Ramboesque rampages. Doctor and monster appear together in a mirror, a nod to a shot in the first screen adaptation, Thomas Edison’s silent version of 1910.

But this one has fresh touches too. It is unusually interested in where the funding—and body parts—for Frankenstein’s experiments come from. An arms dealer bankrolls them; the cadavers are harvested from hangings and battlefields. This is a fantasy with a modern conscience, embedded in a wider economy of death.

As for the sum of those scavenged parts: both morally and physically, he is much less hideous than Shelley’s ghastly original and many of his film predecessors. In the novel he murders Frankenstein’s brother, fiancée and best friend. Here the blood on his hands mostly belongs to extras. Compared with Boris Karloff’s neck-bolted ghoul from 1931, he is a dishy bit of rough, with a chiselled physique and comely brow; a body-conscious monster for the Instagram age.

And for the era of helicopter parenting. For of those abundant themes, Mr del Toro emphasises fatherhood . Whereas in the text Frankenstein’s father is loving, here he is distant and harsh. At first the doctor himself is enraptured by his own miraculous progeny, but, sleepless and frazzled, he is soon cranky and cruel—a deadbeat dad as well as a dead-meat dad. For heaven’s sake, you wind up thinking, get his creature a therapist.

Meanwhile there is a shift in Frankenstein’s underlying mission. In the book his main, hubristic aim is to discover “the elixir of life”. He wants to do that in the new film too, but his ultimate goal is at the other end of the life cycle: to use his unkillable creation to “conquer death”. In this he resembles less the necromancers of yore than the billionaires and scientists pursuing immortality today.

So Mr del Toro’s is a very contemporary “Frankenstein”. Yet there are doubtless many more revamps to come (starting with “The Bride!”, out next year, in which Maggie Gyllenhaal moves the action to Chicago in the 1930s). The science itself is due for a reboot. After all, the quest to engender life is no longer confined to laboratories which, like Frankenstein’s, run on organic tissue and cells. These days hopes and squeamish fears focus on artificial intelligence (AI). In the darkest prophecies, AI will enhance itself in a self-perpetuating cycle that renders humans obsolete.

In the novel, Frankenstein and his monster have a lot in common: obsession, a hunger for revenge, a longing for oblivion and searing loneliness. Perhaps in a future iteration of Shelley’s deathless fable, they may share something else. In a truly cutting-edge take, the creature would not be a human frame clad in flesh and blood but an AI model made of chips. So would the doctor. ■

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Two memoirs hint at a Supreme Court under siege

The terrifying reality of being a judge in America Two memoirs hint at a Supreme Court under siege October 16th 2025 When Anthony Kennedy, then a justice of America’s Supreme Court, visited Russia in 2001, three things perturbed him. First, en route to a legal conference, his car was stopped by a policeman who demanded a bribe. Second, the Russian judges he met kept asking him how the White House “quietly communicated” its instructions to American judges on how to decide important cases—and could not believe that there was no such mechanism. Third, he met Vladimir Putin .

Russia’s then newish president wanted to talk about justice. Turning his “intense, unwavering gaze” on Mr Kennedy, he tried to sound modern and enlightened. He promised that, having signed up to the European Convention on Human Rights, Russia would have no death penalty. Then he somewhat spoiled the effect by musing about strangling murderers with his bare hands. Mr Kennedy formed the impression that Mr Putin would be “fearless in imposing his own will, using the law only if convenient”. Why bother with a formal death penalty when your opponents keep mysteriously falling out of windows?

Mr Kennedy was appointed to America’s top court by President Ronald Reagan in 1998 and retired in 2018. He was one of the most consequential judges of modern times, sitting at the court’s ideological centre and often supplying its crucial swing vote. History will remember him for writing the landmark decision legalising gay marriage across America—a ruling so eloquent that people stick quotes from it on their fridges. Now, in a memoir, “Life, Law & Liberty”, he sounds deeply alarmed about the rule of law .

Small wonder. A quarter of a century after that chat in the Kremlin, the Putin approach has spread across the world. Strongmen in China, Hungary, El Salvador, Turkey and Zimbabwe place themselves above the law, unleash prosecutors on their political foes and see judges the way kings did in Francis Bacon’s day, not as impartial arbiters but as “lions under the throne”.

Even in America, where as Thomas Paine put it, “the law is king”, there are some who would flip the order of those words. President Donald Trump claims the right to execute suspected drug dealers without trial, by blasting their boats with missiles on the open sea, having declared without congressional authorisation that America is at war with drug gangs. He claims that protests outside federal facilities count as armed revolts and that therefore he can send soldiers to police American cities run by the opposition.

All of this is plainly illegal. Yet when a Trump-appointed federal judge ruled on October 4th that the president was overstepping his constitutional powers by trying to put troops on the streets of Portland, Oregon, a city he absurdly described as “war-ravaged”, Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff, accused the judge of “insurrection”.

American judges, by and large, are decent and conscientious. Faced with lawbreaking by the executive branch, they feel duty-bound to resist it. But doing so requires courage these days. According to the US Marshals Service, which provides security services to the judiciary, 395 judges have received threats this year.

Such threats come both from the left and the right. The would-be assassin who lurked outside Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s house with a gun and zip ties (and who was jailed on October 3rd) wanted to stop the Supreme Court from allowing state abortion bans. The more powerful menace, however, comes from Mr Trump’s supporters, some of whom take seriously Mr Miller’s suggestion that judges who thwart the president are traitors and reserve a special fury for Republican-appointed judges who fail to support him.

Justice Amy Coney Barrett has also recently published a memoir, “Listening to the Law”; in it she describes death threats and “lewd packages” sent to her home. Justice Barrett, whom Mr Trump tapped for the Supreme Court in 2020, is more conservative than Mr Kennedy, but since the court has also shifted rightward, she often finds herself in a similar position, as the conservative justice most likely to side with the court’s liberal wing. On occasion she appears more sceptical than her fellow Republican appointees of extravagant claims of executive power.

She has a bulletproof vest and full-time security. One of the men who stormed the Capitol on January 6th 2021 said he hoped someone would cut her throat “from ear to ear”. Unsolicited pizzas arrive at her relatives’ homes—a common way for thugs to signal that they know where you live.

This climate of fear may explain an astonishing omission from both books. In more than 600 pages, neither explicitly says anything of substance about the central figure in the turbulent legal landscape they seek to map. Neither mentions Mr Trump except where it is impossible not to (Justice Barrett could hardly have written that she was appointed by President What’s-his-name). Neither praises him, except on trivial matters: Mr Kennedy says Mr Trump was “cordial” when they met. Neither directly criticises him.

That could reflect a reasonable desire to avoid the appearance of political bias. Justice Barrett will have to deal with many more Trump-related cases in the next three years. Yet Mr Kennedy will not. Perhaps this is why, reading between the lines, his book brims with implied rebukes of the current administration.

He is scrupulous about ethics: his wife turned down a nice job at the Department of Education in case one day he had to rule on a case involving it. Mr Trump’s family, Mr Kennedy is too polite to mention, have made billions during his presidency; he just offered American security guarantees to a regime that gave him a jet.

Mr Kennedy argues passionately that prisons should be humane and try to rehabilitate inmates, even as they keep dangerous people off the streets. “We can become better people by improving our prisons,” he writes, citing Fyodor Dostoevsky and Alexander Solzhenitsyn. The Trump administration sends gang suspects to rot in a mega-chokey in El Salvador —where inmates are held indefinitely without trial—and posts triumphant footage of the vile conditions there on social media.

Mr Kennedy is effusive about free speech . He rejects the old left-wing argument that hateful statements should be banned: “If emotional harm to the listener is the measure by which we regulate speech, freedom of speech would mean only the freedom to say that which no one minds hearing,” he avers. Mr Kennedy also rejects the old right-wing argument that flag-burning is too offensive to allow. As he put it in 1989, “The flag protects those who hold it in contempt.” Mr Trump has ordered prosecutors to use any legal way they can find to imprison flag-burners, and tars his critics as “terrorists”.

Though opposed to legal restrictions on free speech, Mr Kennedy laments the “indecency” of public discourse. He champions self-restraint and civility. “It is degrading to see elected officials shout epithets on national television,” he states. “Perhaps those who bring vulgarity to our nation may not have a true psychosis of narcissism, but by their conduct they display the same elements as those with that affliction—they are so self-important that they enjoy degrading others.”

Most of all, he argues for an impartial judiciary that upholds the law, regardless of outside pressure. Here Justice Barrett weighs in, too. A judge is “not a Democrat or Republican”, she insists, and not “beholden to a particular administration or party”. Mr Kennedy’s conclusion is pointed. “Our democracy cannot depend on one individual holding on to power longer than he or she should,” he warns. A strict constructionist reading of the text says he is talking about his own decision to retire. But lurking in the penumbra is a different meaning, too obvious to spell out. ■

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Andrew Ross Sorkin, the author of “Too Big to Fail”, has turned his attention to another financial crisis

Lessons from the Wall Street crash of 1929 Andrew Ross Sorkin, the author of “Too Big to Fail”, has turned his attention to another financial crisis October 16th 2025 A HANDFUL of years throughout history are synonymous with a single event. It is impossible to think of 1066, 1776 or 1914 without recalling the wars and revolutions that changed the world for ever. And two years are remembered for the worst financial crashes: 2008 and 1929.

Andrew Ross Sorkin, a journalist at the New York Times, chronicled the turmoil of 2008 in “Too Big to Fail”, which was published in 2009 and adapted into a film in 2011 . Now, with “1929”, he has turned his attention to the seminal stockmarket and banking crash of modern history, to which all others are inevitably compared.

The American stockmarket roared in the 1920s, rising by almost 500% from a low in 1921 to its high in 1929, puffed up by economic optimism and dangerous, debt-driven trading. In October that year, leveraged bets combusted; the market conflagration lasted for more than two and a half years. The Depression that followed endured until America entered the second world war . The Dow Jones Industrial Average, an index of stocks, would not return to its previous high until 1954.

Mr Sorkin wisely tells this sprawling story in a focused way, reconstructing how crucial figures experienced the ructions almost hour by hour. He concentrates on Thomas Lamont, the acting head of J.P. Morgan, and Charles “Sunshine Charlie” Mitchell, head of the National City Bank (which eventually became Citibank). The men were not just financiers but giants of public life, with easy access to the most senior officials in Washington.

America’s banks had extended enormous loans to stockbroking firms, which in turn lent huge sums to new and exuberant investors, a chain of credit that came apart as stock prices went into freefall. A gaggle of banks, led by Lamont, burned through hundreds of millions of dollars buying stocks in the depths of the sell-off in a futile attempt to rescue the market.

In the face of mass unemployment, men like Lamont and Mitchell were maligned in the press and dragged in front of legislators to testify about their businesses and incomes. (Some money men even found themselves in court.) America’s financial system was duly reshaped: in 1933 the Glass-Steagall Act separated the activities of commercial and investment banks.

Mr Sorkin’s coverage of the crisis in 2008 was based on hundreds of interviews, but most of the people in this tale have been dead for decades. You would be forgiven for forgetting it. The combination of extensive research and a lively tone makes both the crash and the men involved feel more recent. Significant political figures have walk-on roles, including Hjalmar Schacht, the head of the Reichsbank, who had to deal with the Weimar Republic’s hyperinflation and reparations, and Winston Churchill. (He dabbled in speculation and was in New York on “Black Tuesday”.)

For the most part, readers are left to draw their own parallels between 1929 and 2025. There are some concerning ones. By the end of the 1920s, consumer credit in the form of instalment finance—the precursor to today’s “buy now, pay later”—was rampant. Investing in stocks had changed from a game for a monied elite to a national pastime, spreading the pain to a far broader group. Many had accumulated margin debt to invest, and were left nursing not just losses but hefty loan repayments. The exposure of American households reached a record high this year, with margin debt rising to near-record levels relative to the size of the economy.

The exuberance during the boom, the panic that drove the sell-off and the delusion of policymakers that followed will be familiar to observers of more recent crises. But the pattern of hubris, disaster and regret offers an important reminder that the darkest moments pass. Churchill’s verdict on the unfurling crisis remains a useful one almost a century later. “The English critic would do well to acquaint himself with the inherent probity and strength of the American speculative machine,” he wrote as the market plunged. “It is not built to prevent crises, but to survive them.” ■

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The actress, who died on October 11th, was also known for her sense of style

Diane Keaton brought an offbeat charm to every role The actress, who died on October 11th, was also known for her sense of style October 16th 2025 HOLLYWOOD can be cruel to actresses who dare to age. Faye Dunaway’s star dimmed after the 1970s, as did Debra Winger’s after the 1980s and Meg Ryan’s after the 1990s. Diane Keaton somehow escaped this fate. Before her death on October 11th, she enjoyed a varied film career spanning more than half a century.

Her breakout role was in “The Godfather” in 1972, when she was 26. She played Kay Corleone, the WASPy wife of the story’s central gangster, Michael; as Michael grew more powerful and ruthless, Ms Keaton’s expression faded from chipper propriety to dead-eyed gloom. Thereafter she embarked on an artistic collaboration with Woody Allen, starring in eight of his films between 1972 and 1993. The most notable was “Annie Hall” (1977), for which she won an Academy Award.

The movie also turned her into a style icon. In one scene she appears in an Oxford shirt, khakis, a long blue tie and a jaunty bolero hat, and manages to look simultaneously luminous and frazzled. The winning look—casual and slightly off-kilter—was her own. Mr Allen had told her to “wear what you want to wear”, she recalled in her memoir: “I stole what I wanted to wear from the cool-looking women on the streets of SoHo.”

More Oscar nominations followed. In 1981 Ms Keaton played Louise Bryant, an activist and journalist, in “Reds”, Warren Beatty ’s epic about the Russian revolution. (At more than three hours, the film was bloated and self-indulgent, but her performance was steely and heartfelt.) In 1996 she produced a tear-jerking performance as a dutiful sister and daughter in the otherwise forgettable “Marvin’s Room”. Her last nomination, in 2004, was for “Something’s Gotta Give”, in which she played a witty, self-possessed playwright.

How did she do it? She was not ageless, nor was she as malleable as Meryl Streep, one of the few American actresses with a similarly long and starry career. On screen Ms Keaton radiated an extraordinary emotional openness: she listened and reacted perfectly to her co-stars, often with an element of whimsy and seeming spontaneity, however thoroughly rehearsed. Her sense of style was flawless, which means that she knew and was comfortable with herself: not an easy achievement in an industry that ruthlessly judges its stars, especially women, on their appearance.

Her self-effacing demeanour concealed a strong focus and will. She was brought up in southern California by a civil-engineer father and a mother who harboured unfulfilled artistic ambitions. Ms Keaton made her debut in the original production of “Hair”, but soon stepped off the stage. “Night after night? Doing a play? That’s my idea of hell,” she told an interviewer.

She had romances with several of her co-stars—including Al Pacino and Messrs Allen and Beatty—but she never married, suspecting that she “would have to compromise too much”. She adopted a daughter and a son after she turned 50.

Ms Keaton was always herself and yet her acting was subtle. Witness a scene near the end of “Reds”, where she walks down a crowded train platform searching for her lover. She says nothing, but moves through emotions—hope, disappointment, near-despair, hope again, relief—using just her eyes and the occasional head movement.

She was also very funny. Mr Allen said that, “With the exception of Judy Holliday, she’s the finest screen comedienne we’ve ever seen.” She did not do slapstick or physical comedy, but her timing was impeccable. She would have shrugged off the compliment; Mr Allen, she later said, “would have me set up the joke for him. That’s what I’m good at: being the idiot.” Others, including everyone lucky enough to have seen her on screen, knew better. ■

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Our analysis shows how games have changed in the past 40 years

Are video games getting harder? Our analysis shows how games have changed in the past 40 years October 16th 2025 “About ready to give in?” taunts “Hades II”. Inspired by Greek mythology, the video game takes players to the underworld, where they must dispel Chronos, the “titan of time”. Like Sisyphus, most will end up doing the same thing over and over again (though pushing buttons rather than a boulder). Every time you are killed, you go back to the beginning. Failure is part of the experience; some gamers have been complaining that it is vexing.

Anyone who has attempted such challenging missions may reasonably wonder: are video games getting harder? To find out, The Economist analysed rankings from GameFAQs—a website where users can rate the difficulty of games, from one (“simple”) to five (“unforgiving”)—for the most popular titles released in the past 40 years. Our findings show two things.

First, games were tougher in the 1980s and 1990s (see chart). Arcade games had long been deliberately difficult, as designers wanted to coax coins from competitors. Greedy operators could even flip a switch to reduce the number of “lives” offered per turn.

When games moved into homes on consoles, money was made by selling the cartridge containing the game rather than an individual go at it. Over time developers realised that games would have to be easier if they were to reach a wide audience. Nintendo, a Japanese firm, initially did not release “Super Mario Bros 2” (1986) abroad in part because it was considered too difficult. Western players instead got a version of “Doki Doki Panic”, another game.

Many games allow players to select their preferred level of difficulty. Some modern ones use artificial intelligence to adjust the game to suit people’s skills. If players miss shots too often, targets get easier. A vocal minority of “hardcore gamers” gripe that such innovations can make games too simple and taunt inexpert players to “git gud” (get good).

The second thing our analysis shows is that a few particularly taxing games may skew players’ perceptions of the market overall. Average difficulty ratings reached their lowest point in 2010 and have plateaued since. Inevitably it is gnarly titles, such as “Hades II”, “Dark Souls” (2011) and “FTL: Faster Than Light” (2012), that get the most attention.

How do casual players feel about daunting quests? Jay Ma, co-founder of Subset Games, which developed “FTL”, says they sought to make something they “would want to play”. Many “FTL” players were not put off by its “roguelike” nature. (The term takes its name from “Rogue”, a game of 1980 in which players are forced into do-overs.)

Yet the reception of “Hollow Knight: Silksong”, released in September, suggests there is a fine line between thrilling and infuriating. Players have lamented that “‘Silksong’ is extremely punishing”; one vowed that “I’ve had more fun at the dentist.” The creators quickly released an update to give players an easier time of it. Gaming ought to be more enjoyable than a root canal, after all. ■

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Lyse Doucet chronicles Afghanistan’s history as it was seen from the InterContinental

Cocktails and coups: the view from a luxury hotel in Kabul Lyse Doucet chronicles Afghanistan’s history as it was seen from the InterContinental October 16th 2025 MANY JOURNALISTS believe that you should talk to taxi drivers if you want to get the measure of a place. But Lyse Doucet, the BBC’s chief international correspondent, reckons it is better to speak to the people who work in hotels. In her new book she traces the tumultuous history of Afghanistan as it has been experienced at the Hotel InterContinental Kabul.

The “InterCon”—the first luxury hotel in Afghanistan—opened in 1969. It was a symbol of the modernising instincts of the king, Mohammed Zahir Shah, and of Kabul as the “Paris of Central Asia”. Women paraded poolside in bikinis. People sipped drinks in the Nuristan Cocktail Lounge. The hotel hosted a catwalk show by Pierre Balmain, a French couturier, in 1971.

The building soon became an emblem of solidity amid political change. The king was ousted in 1973. When presidents were overthrown—three were murdered in 1978-79—the “staff got their hammers and nails out again. Portraits came down; new ones went up.” The hotel remained standing amid these bloody coups as well as civil wars, occupations and Islamist rule.

All sorts of people have strutted through its gilded lobby: leaders, foreign dignitaries, spooks , mujahideen and Taliban fighters. Ms Doucet focuses on the Afghans who keep the lights on. There is Abida, the hotel’s first female chef, known for her ashak (pasta dumplings). There is Hazrat, a housekeeper whose job, when “freshening up rooms”, is also to try “to air them of anxiety”. And there is Mohammad Aqa, a waiter-cum-manager.

The InterCon strived to be a “business-as-usual bubble”. When it seemed like Mohammad Musa Shafiq, the prime minister, might be cracking down on alcohol in 1973, “liquor glasses kept being polished”. As the Soviets invaded on Christmas Eve 1979, people danced to “Hotel California” in the Pamir Supper Club on the top floor.

Inevitably that bubble sometimes burst. In 1978, when some 2,000 Afghans were killed in the Saur revolution, the staff stepped over bodies and “rivulets of red blood” on their way to work. In 1981, when delegates from the Afro-Asian People’s Solidarity Organisation, an NGO, were due at the InterCon, the mujahideen fired rockets into the nearby hills. In 1993, during the second civil war, Ahmad Shah Massoud, a warlord, attacked the district of Afshar. He positioned his tanks next to the InterCon’s pool. The hotel has also been the site of two terrorist attacks, in 2011 and 2018.

Ms Doucet begins and ends her story in 2021, with the return of the Taliban . The staff knew what to do: they rolled out prayer mats, turned music off and hid alcohol. The men made a note to grow beards. The women were told not to come back.

“The Finest Hotel in Kabul” is written like a novel. This is both its strength and its weakness. Ms Doucet is a humane narrator with an eye for detail; she conveys her characters’ suffering and resilience. (Abida, for instance, was laid off shortly before the Taliban returned. She missed her work and worried about money.) At times, however, you wonder how much is fact and how much is inference—and her habit of referring to herself in the third person gets rather irritating.

Nonetheless, it is fascinating to read how the InterCon has been buffeted by history. Many of the people Ms Doucet describes no longer work there. Yet the message of her book is ultimately salutary. Regimes can outstay their welcome, but not for ever: at the InterCon, “Politics, like hotel guests, checked in and out.” ■

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Evidence of him is everywhere—or so says Peter Thiel

The Antichrist: he’s back! Evidence of him is everywhere—or so says Peter Thiel October 16th 2025 The Book of Revelation, for some reason, forgot to mention Greta Thunberg. In its barnstorming final book, the Bible limns what will happen when the apocalypse arrives: earthquakes, sinister horsemen, and hail and fire mingled with blood. But now, in Silicon Valley , new words are being added to those ancient prophecies. Some say that the footsoldiers of the Antichrist are already here—and that they include Ms Thunberg, a Swedish activist, as well as “Brussels bureaucracy”. (For who has stood in a passport queue in Belgium and not felt that the End Times were upon them?)

These latest revelations came not from the Book of Revelation, but from Peter Thiel , the co-founder of PayPal and Palantir. Their style is rather different. The Book of Revelation is a first-century biblical text, rich in allusion and clothed in the English of the King James version. It goes heavy on phrases such as: “And I saw a new heaven and a new earth.” Mr Thiel is a 21st-century tech bro, rich in money ($26bn, by some estimates) and clothed in black t-shirts. He goes heavy on phrases such as: “So it’s like, come on.” It seems unlikely he will be quoted in 2,000 years’ time.

What the hell—in a more literal sense than usual—is going on? Over the past few weeks, in a series of off-the-record lectures and on-the-record interviews, Mr Thiel has argued that the world has submitted to a doctrine of “peace and safetyism” for the past 50 years. It has also submitted to the rule of organisations such as the European Union. As the Bible, Mr Thiel says, states that “the slogan of the Antichrist is ‘peace and safety’,” it follows that the world risks the rule of the seven-headed one.

Mr Thiel’s science is worth treating even more cautiously than his theology. He argues that the world’s (and arguably the Antichrist’s) enthusiasm for safetyism has led to “50 years of stagnation” in many areas. He is concerned about artificial intelligence (AI) and the Antichrist stymying the technology’s potential. Mr Thiel has called Nick Bostrom, a philosopher who writes about the dangers of AI, a “legionnaire of the Antichrist”. Others demur. The idea of widespread scientific stagnation is “nonsense”, says Martin Rees , Britain’s Astronomer Royal. Mr Bostrom is more charitable. “I understand his frustration,” says Satan’s supposed operative.

There is an august tradition of talking twaddle about the End Times. Everyone from the emperor Nero to Bill Gates has been accused of being the Antichrist. Medieval crusaders saw the Antichrist’s footsoldiers in their Saracen enemy. Protestants during the Reformation felt the pope was the Antichrist. For others he was embodied in property-owners who must thus be massacred. ( Generation Rent might feel some sympathy.) Each incarnation of the Antichrist is less indicative of demonic power than personal pique. Mr Thiel, who has invested in AI, sees the Antichrist in anti-AI regulation. The Antichrist has always been less anti-Christ than anti-you.

The Antichrist also appeals because the devil is so devilishly appealing, as generations of artists who have attempted to capture the glory of God—and ended up accidentally glorifying Satan—have found. Lots of people may find that, like John Milton , they are “of the Devil’s party without knowing it”. Had Mr Thiel given an open talk on how AI’s benefits might be lost by overzealous regulation, it would have been all but ignored. To give a secret talk is, he said, “a pretty good marketing shtick”; throw in the Antichrist and it is irresistible.

Accusations of Antichrist activity are also impossible to disprove. Mr Bostrom does not look much like an agent of the Antichrist (he is wearing a green cardigan). But, as he says, with a smile that it would be churlish not to describe as devilish, “You never know what I’m up to when I switch off the camera.”

These days such charges are notably unfashionable. Early Christian writings seethed with hallucinogenic apparitions, with demons appearing as lions, horned beasts and naked women. St Augustine’s “City of God” is also a city of demons. (The theologian didn’t take ketamine, unlike some tech types.) But ghouls became uncool in the Enlightenment as people sought rational explanations of evil.

Now, demons are on the march again: look at Google’s Ngram viewer, which tracks the usage of words, and mentions of the Antichrist rise steadily after 2000. Perhaps this is proof that this is an age of the Antichrist—or perhaps it is proof that this is an age of anti-Enlightenment thinking. That, even to the most rational mind, may feel a little apocalyptic. ■

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Electronic Arts is part of a multi-billion-dollar bid to dominate gaming

How Saudi Arabia became a video-game superpower Electronic Arts is part of a multi-billion-dollar bid to dominate gaming October 9th 2025 “Assassin’s Creed”, a sneak-up-and-kill gaming franchise, is getting an unexpected update this autumn. Ubisoft, its French developer, recently announced a new set of missions set in Saudi Arabia (see picture below). The news followed reports earlier this year that Ubisoft had entered a partnership with Savvy Games Group, a Saudi state-owned enterprise. (Ubisoft says that the Saudi levels are being made with help from “local and international organisations”.) Players will be able to tiptoe around Al Ula, a historic city that the Saudi government is promoting as a tourist destination .

Saudi Arabia is making a multi-billion-dollar push into gaming, an industry that is now worth more than cinema, streaming or music. On September 29th the kingdom made its biggest move yet, when Electronic Arts (EA), America’s third-largest gaming company, announced that it was being bought for $55bn by a group led by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF), a $1trn sovereign-wealth kitty. It is the latest in a blitz of investment that is quickly turning Saudi Arabia into a superpower in the world of video games .

The Saudis’ partners in the EA acquisition are Silver Lake, a private-equity firm, and Affinity Partners, an investment company founded by Jared Kushner, Donald Trump’s son-in-law, whose attachment to the deal may smooth the path to regulatory approval. EA’s new owners will control franchises including “Madden”, “The Sims” and “FC” (formerly known as “FIFA”), a football series that is said to be a favourite of Muhammad bin Salman, Saudi Arabia’s crown prince and de facto ruler.

EA will be the crown jewel in an already glittering set of holdings. The PIF has endowed Savvy Games with a $38bn war chest to turn Saudi Arabia into a centre of gaming. Two years ago Savvy bought Scopely, an American developer whose “Monopoly Go!” is one of the world’s highest-earning mobile games, making more than $5bn since its launch in 2023. In May it acquired the gaming arm of Niantic, an American company which makes the “Pokémon” mobile games. Savvy also has a large stake (and board seat) in Embracer, a Swedish firm which owns titles including “Tomb Raider”, featuring Lara Croft.

The PIF itself has built up further stakes in some of the biggest names in gaming. It is one of the three largest shareholders in Japan’s Nintendo, Capcom (“Street Fighter”) and Koei (“Ninja Gaiden”), South Korea’s Nexon and NCSoft and America’s Take-Two (the maker of “Grand Theft Auto”, a driving-and-shooting series which has sold some 450m copies to date). It is among the five largest holders of Japan’s Toei ( “Dragon Ball Z” ) and Square Enix (“Final Fantasy”), where it also has a board seat. Excluding EA, the PIF’s games holdings add up to $11.7bn, by our count. Other Saudi state-backed funds have additional gaming investments.

“We’re just getting started,” says Brian Ward, a Canadian industry veteran appointed to run Savvy. His team explores “hundreds” of potential acquisitions a year. Its ability to snap up good deals is enhanced by the fact that other sources of finance have largely dried up. Venture-capital funding in the game industry has fallen by some three-quarters since a peak in 2021-22, amid an industry malaise caused by plateauing mobile penetration and the loss of pandemic-era casual gamers. Joost van Dreunen, a gaming expert at New York University’s Stern School of Business, writes that the Saudi strategy is to “throw staggering amounts of money at establishing market dominance”.

Mr Ward says his instructions from Prince Muhammad are to build “a company like Disney, but for games and e-sports”. Part of that means creating a community of superfans. Disney has theme parks ; the Saudis see an opportunity in live gaming tournaments. In 2022 Savvy bought ESL and FACEIT, a pair of e-sports companies, for a combined $1.5bn. It also has a 30% share of Hero Esports, a Chinese company backed by Tencent. In total Savvy says it controls 40% of the global e-sports market.

Its e-sports arm is not yet profitable. But its purpose is to stoke fans’ engagement—and there it seems to be succeeding. For the past two years Saudi Arabia has hosted an Esports World Cup in Riyadh, where teams compete in games such as “League of Legends” (Prince Muhammad plays some of the pros when they are over). Some 250,000 tickets were sold for this summer’s event; online it racked up 750m streams on platforms such as Twitch and Douyin, with half the audience watching from China. Industry bigwigs fly in for a parallel conference, which has become the most important in the gaming business, according to one Western investor. Next year Riyadh will launch another tournament, a biennial Esports Nations Cup.

The justification for all this, besides indulging the crown prince’s hobby, is to create a new domestic industry. Saudi Arabia is trying to diversify its economy away from oil. Its “Vision 2030” initiative promises 39,000 jobs in gaming by that year. Savvy is training game artists at Princess Nourah University, a women’s college. The Saudi government says that 48% of the country’s gamers are women; just over a quarter of Savvy’s staff are female, a number roughly in line with the male-dominated industry standard.

A little over a third of Savvy’s employees are foreigners, a share which Mr Ward expects to fall as the industry matures. Persuading Westerners to invest or work in the kingdom is getting easier as more people see the country for themselves, says Ralf Reichert, a German who organises the Esports World Cup: “You will never be able to satisfy all the critics, but the noise around it has dramatically gone down.”

That hints at another motive. Like Saudi Arabia’s investment in sport and entertainment (it has recently launched film and comedy festivals and a Formula One grand prix), its push into gaming helps to project a different image of the country.

“There’s five to ten thousand years of human history in the Middle East, but none of those stories have been told in our medium. And that’s a huge opportunity,” says Mr Ward. The Arabic-speaking world—with 330m gamers, more than western Europe or America—is underserved, he believes, citing Japan, China and South Korea as models of how to adapt national folklore into popular games. Last year China’s “Black Myth: Wukong” , a game steeped in Chinese legends, was voted Game of the Year by users of Steam, a global gaming platform. Mr Ward says that projecting Saudi culture is not part of his mandate. But he hopes that future Saudi-made games will have worldwide appeal, just as east Asian titles have.

Many gamers wonder how Saudi ownership will influence games’ content. As China has become an important movie market, Hollywood studios have shied away from tricky subjects such as Tibet, which they were willing to take on in the 1990s. It is easy to imagine something similar happening in gaming. In 1992, in the aftermath of the Gulf war, EA released “Desert Strike”, whose villain is a fictional Arab dictator. In 2005, amid the war on terror, EA’s “Battlefield 2” pitted American forces against enemies including a “Middle Eastern Coalition”. Will such games be released under EA’s new owners? The company’s boss, Andrew Wilson, has assured staff that the priority is still “bold, expressive” fare and that the company’s “values…remain unchanged”.

Yet the coming update to “Assassin’s Creed” shows how Saudi money might subtly sway content. It is not the only example. In March fans of “Fatal Fury” were surprised to learn that the latest edition of the fighting game would include a new character: Cristiano Ronaldo. In the game the Portuguese footballer whacks opponents with a fiery ball and is “an unstoppable force, even to seasoned fighters”.

The unusual collaboration may have a Saudi explanation. Mr Ronaldo is the captain of Al Nassr FC, a team based in Riyadh, which is majority-owned by the PIF. The Japanese developer of “Fatal Fury”, SNK, is majority-owned by the MiSK Foundation, a Saudi non-profit organisation—whose founder and chairman is a certain games-loving crown prince. ■

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Its meaning has changed markedly over the past 150 years

What people talk about when they talk about antisemitism Its meaning has changed markedly over the past 150 years October 9th 2025 WHAT IS antisemitism? The definition appears clear: prejudice and hatred against Jews. Its manifestation is often grimly clear, too. In both Britain and America, the number of hate incidents targeting Jews soared after Hamas’s attacks in October 2023 and has remained high as Israel has been at war in Gaza. But people disagree over what constitutes antisemitic speech. For instance, some argue that the phrase “globalise the intifada” urges people across the world to agitate for Palestinians’ freedom. Others say that it advocates violence against Jews everywhere.

In a new book Mark Mazower argues that one reason such questions are thorny is because the meaning of antisemitism is more complex than it seems. Mercifully he has not written a polemic, nor has he attempted a full history of anti-Jewish prejudice. Instead he has written a biography of the word “antisemitism” , tracing how its use and meaning have changed over time.

He credits Wilhelm Marr, a German journalist, with inventing the term in 1879. Marr created a “League of Antisemites” to oppose Jewish emancipation. He called Jews “semites”, as a French writer explained, “to underscore their foreign origin”, implying that they could never become fully European. Antisemitism of that era drew on centuries of hostility, but was also rebelling against modernity. The Enlightenment values that inspired the French and American revolutions led to Jewish legal emancipation in much of western Europe, as well as the weakening of aristocratic and ecclesiastical authority. Reactionaries and revolutionaries alike blamed the Jews.

A potent form of political antisemitism took shape after the first world war when, as Mr Mazower points out, “Anti-Jewish conspiracy theories ramified as a ready explanation for dizzying change.” Vile views became mainstream; Henry Ford, an American industrialist, helped popularise “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion”, a Russian forgery purporting to reveal a Jewish plot to dominate the world. That form of antisemitism lost its political potency after the horrors of the Holocaust, but such beliefs did not vanish.

After the atrocities of the second world war , the centre of the world’s Jewish population moved to America and, in time, to Israel. Those two poles initially had a frosty relationship. American Jews, eager to assimilate and leery of dual-loyalty accusations, were lukewarm towards Zionism, arguing that they were a religious community rather than a nation. David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first president, could not understand why American Jews did not end their “exile” and emigrate to Israel.

The two groups grew closer after Israel’s triumph in the Six Day War in 1967. American Jews took pride in Israel’s success: at last Jews were victors rather than victims, and Israel’s existence looked less precarious. The American Jewish Committee, an advocacy group, compiled an annual list of issues important to American Jews. In 1966-67 Israel ranked below struggles for civil rights; the following year Israel rose to the top, where it has remained. Mr Mazower notes that, as American Jews’ identification with Israel grew, threats to it “were regarded by more and more American Jews as an attack on themselves”.

Some have encouraged that identification. In a recent interview Jonathan Greenblatt, who heads the Anti-Defamation League, a watchdog group, equated anti-Zionism with antisemitism. Jerry Seinfeld, a comedian, has likened people who chant “Free Palestine” to Ku Klux Klan members. Certainly anti-Zionism can inspire antisemitic acts, but it is possible to criticise Israel without hating Jews.

In any event, an emotive identification with Israel may be growing less common, especially among young American Jews. In recent years Israel has drifted steadily rightward, while Jewish Americans remain mostly liberal. Many have marched for Palestinian rights. The definitional arguments that Mr Mazower outlines in this valuable book are unlikely to end soon. ■

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A third museum focused on the artist has just opened in Mexico City

Is there anything left to say about Frida Kahlo? A third museum focused on the artist has just opened in Mexico City October 9th 2025 ANYONE interested in art knows Frida Kahlo’s story: the polio; the terrible bus accident; the painting during convalescence; the raw self-portraits; the marriage to Diego Rivera, a fellow artist; the affairs. There have been many exhibitions and biographies of the Mexican painter (as well as picture-book versions for children). There was a biopic in 2002 and a documentary in 2024. Is there anything left to add?

The team behind a new museum—the third dedicated to Kahlo in Mexico City—certainly thinks so. Museo Casa Kahlo has recently opened in Casa Roja, one of her family’s houses. (Not to be confused with Museo Frida Kahlo, in Casa Azul, where Kahlo grew up and later lived with Rivera.) The aim, says Adán García, the new museum’s director, is to show Kahlo as a daughter, sister and aunt: “To understand Frida, you need to understand her family.”

The collection is small, but the insight it offers into Kahlo’s formative years is valuable. Her clothing, a key part of her image, is on display. Kahlo’s mother was partly of indigenous descent and Kahlo wore a tehuana, a traditional Zapotec dress, as well as huipiles (embroidered tunics) and long skirts. In a period of cultural nationalism she sought to emphasise her Mexican heritage and distinguish herself from her male peers, says Circe Henestrosa, a fashion curator and academic.

Also on display are pictures taken by her father, Guillermo Kahlo, an important photographer in Mexico. He had an eye for symmetry and structure—sharpened by documenting the country’s churches and civic monuments—and he took theatrical portraits of figures such as President Porfirio Díaz. His work shaped Frida’s own instinct for composition and detail, traits that would later define her self-portraits.

He encouraged his daughter to express herself. In the mid-1920s he took a family portrait in which Frida, in her teens, wore a three-piece suit and had slicked-back hair. She continued to toy with different ways of presenting herself. In “The Wounded Deer” (1946) she appears as neither male nor female, but half-animal, half-human.

Her work was always intensely personal. In 1932 she painted “Henry Ford Hospital”, depicting her delivering a dead fetus. With it “she invented a visual vocabulary to express things never shown before—trauma, miscarriage, chronic pain, betrayal,” says Gannit Ankori of Brandeis University. “The emotions in her work are not bound by a specific historical era.”

Kahlo is now ubiquitous: her distinctive eyebrows adorn tote bags, phone cases and Barbie dolls. So it is easy to forget that her fame is relatively recent. When she died in 1954 Kahlo was little known outside modern-art circles and her reputation was overshadowed by Rivera’s. (He painted vast murals exploring Mexican history and was considered bolder and more accomplished.) Then, in the 1970s, art historians started to pay more attention to women artists. Feminist and Chicana activists adopted Kahlo as a symbol of female strength and Mexican pride.

In 1990 “Diego and I” became the first Latin American artwork to break $1m at auction, catching the attention of collectors. Kahlo’s work now rivals that of Georgia O’Keeffe and Louise Bourgeois in the prices it fetches. Her painting “The Dream (The Bed)” (1940) is expected to sell for as much as $60m at Sotheby’s in November. If it does, it will be the most expensive picture by a woman ever sold at auction.

For all her fame, Kahlo’s fans will learn something new at Museo Casa Kahlo—for instance that, during tiffs with Rivera, Kahlo would work in the basement at Casa Roja. Today the room displays her letters, which, among other things, reveal her relationship with her sister, Cristina. Kahlo’s relatives were among her earliest subjects. Without them, this new museum contends, Kahlo would not have produced the work that has made her name. As Mara Romeo, a great-niece, puts it, Kahlo was “hugely ahead of her time”. This house is a reminder of where she came from. ■

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“Shadow Ticket” is as perplexing as it sounds

Thomas Pynchon returns with a tale of Nazis, spies—and cheese “Shadow Ticket” is as perplexing as it sounds October 9th 2025 THOMAS PYNCHON is an idiosyncratic, divisive kind of storyteller. At his best, he blurs distinctions between plot and digression and between history and conspiracy theory. His standout novels include “Gravity’s Rainbow”, a kaleidoscopic quasi-thriller that made his reputation and won the National Book Award in 1974, and “Vineland” (1990), about the lives of radicals after the radical moment fades. The tale inspired “ One Battle After Another ”, almost certainly a candidate for this year’s Oscar for Best Picture.

Mr Pynchon, now 88, has just published his ninth novel. You can see why he wanted to write “Shadow Ticket” at an age when most people are enjoying retirement. The world today—with its pervasive surveillance , conspiracy-addled politics and suavely dishonest politicians—has taken a distinctly Pynchonesque turn.

Unfortunately, “Shadow Ticket” is not Mr Pynchon at his best. Set in 1932, it follows Hicks McTaggart, a private eye employed by a firm called Unamalgamated Ops. McTaggart gets dispatched from Milwaukee to Hungary in pursuit of Daphne Airmont, an heiress to a cheese fortune. He goes around doing private-eye stuff: investigating, meeting people and getting into scrapes. British agents show up, as do Soviet ones, alongside gangsters, spiritualists, Nazis and swing musicians.

At one point McTaggart gets a lesson on the malign activities of InChSyn—the International Cheese Syndicate—which prosecutes “cheese fraud”. Its activities are “a front for something more geopolitical, some grand face-off between the cheese-based or colonialist powers, basically north-west Europe, and the vast teeming cheeselessness of Asia”.

As that excerpt attests, Mr Pynchon still has a certain wry humour. In this book he shows off his genius for character names: T.P. O’Grizbee, Swampscott Vobe, Hop Wingdale and Smoky Gooden all put in appearances. He throws together historical detail, bits of mechanical engineering—an “autogyro”, a sort of tiny helicopter, figures in the story—and the occult. (Apportation, or supernaturally moving an object through space, matters immensely to the book, until it does not.) His fans will find things to like in this story.

Other readers, however, may find the novel self-indulgent. “Shadow Ticket” has some plot-like activities but is fundamentally plotless. Like “Inherent Vice” , which Mr Pynchon published in 2009 and Paul Thomas Anderson turned into a thoroughly enjoyable movie five years later, it is a shaggy-dog story that is long on shag and short on story. In this case, the tale feels empty at its centre.

The narrator and characters all talk in staccato clauses and the overall effect is of being machine-gunned with beautifully written short sentences. None of the characters, including McTaggart, coheres into anything like a fully realised character. “Shadow Ticket” is a tiring read: not quite a picaresque novel, because those require a central character, but not quite a crime novel, because those require a central mystery. In other words, it is a mess. Pynchon completists may get through it, but nobody else should bother trying. ■

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They are filthier than an old cowboy boot—and hugely popular

X-rated, AI-generated country songs are taking over the internet They are filthier than an old cowboy boot—and hugely popular October 9th 2025 IT SOUNDS LIKE a typical country tune , for a few seconds at least. “Country Girls Make Do” opens with a toe-tapping beat and twangy strains of fiddles and guitar. You expect a song about whisky or worship—but what follows is downright unchurchly. When the singer announces that she is “horny as a bitch in the country heat”, and handling ears of corn in ways that no farmer intended, you realise you are listening to something much filthier than Red Dirt music.

The song is deliberately outlandish, which may be why “Country Girls Make Do” has gone viral in recent weeks, racking up millions of streams and likes across various platforms. In one TikTok trend, people trick their partners into dancing to it. In another, youngsters play the song to their relatives, claiming that it is the latest chart-topping hit, and record their reactions for laughs. “Is this for real?” one horrified grandmother asks.

Yes and no. “Country Girls Make Do” is a parody. What makes it unusual is that it has been created by artificial intelligence (in this case an “artist” called Beats By AI). On apps such as Suno and Udio users can input a few prompts—whether PG or X-rated is up to them—and the programme will generate lyrics, vocals, instrumentation and even artwork. Melodies can be refined and pitches perfected, with no real music knowledge required.

Beats By AI is one of many such acts. Aventhis is a brooding country outfit which uses AI for instrumentation and vocals; it has more than 650,000 monthly listeners on Spotify. The Velvet Sundown, whose 1970s-inspired rock tunes attract almost 300,000 monthly listeners, is fully AI-generated. AI can produce music swifter than Taylor Swift ever could. Both Aventhis and The Velvet Sundown have released three albums this year. Beats By AI releases a tawdry track every day.

AI songs are catching on because they offer familiar sounds. In the case of Beats By AI, part of the music’s appeal is its send-up of country tropes. For the most part, the genre remains stubbornly conservative—record labels in Nashville are known for dictating a certain style and sound—yet its growing Gen Z fan base is anything but.

“I’ve been waiting for this to happen,” says Daniel Gervais, a professor of intellectual-property law at Vanderbilt University. He sees these songs as the first stage of a “revolution” whereby consumers generate the content they want instead of settling for what record labels package and sell. Anyone with the time and the inclination can make bangers to match their mood or to gleefully defy the industry rules.

Musicians, however, are not amused by AI-generated songs, no matter how funny their lyrics. Hitmakers including Sir Elton John, Dua Lipa and Ed Sheeran have expressed their fears of AI companies drawing on their work to train models without proper remuneration. And streaming services are not all that happy about it either. On Deezer and Spotify fraudsters are uploading AI-generated music, using bots to “listen” to it and raking in royalties. Deezer has removed such tracks from official playlists and algorithmic recommendations. In September Spotify purged its platform of 75m AI-generated songs: “Bad actors”, the firm explained, were pushing “slop into the ecosystem”.

Plenty of music lovers, though, do not mind the muck. Luminate, a data firm, has found that one in three American listeners is “somewhat” or “very” comfortable with AI being used to write instrumentals. (Lots of professional musicians use AI tools in some way already.) Almost 30% are happy for machines to write lyrics and more than 25% do not mind an AI singer performing an AI-composed song. “I take back everything I’ve [said] about AI art,” one person wrote under the “Country Girls Make Do” video on TikTok. “Let it cook.” ■

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Paul Thomas Anderson gives a masterclass in making a political film

“One Battle After Another” wins the war Paul Thomas Anderson gives a masterclass in making a political film October 9th 2025 The wrong hero. The wrong villain. The wrong sort of emergency—or, even worse, exactly the right kind. With their elephantine lead times, glitzy films that aspire to political relevance are liable to look dated by the time they hit the screen. Or, if a movie features, say, a terrorist attack, and its release coincides with one, the story can seem prescient but the taste rotten. Chasing the news is like hunting lightning: if they don’t miss, directors can wind up being incinerated.

Poor timing is only one of the risks run by “One Battle After Another”, Paul Thomas Anderson’s new film. Any movie with a political edge can scythe off half its potential audience in advance. If the politics are blunt, punters who do turn up may wish they hadn’t. Mr Anderson sidesteps these dangers as his shambolic protagonist dodges his.

The first imperative is to ground the big ideas in an intimate drama, using engaging characters not mouthpieces. Mr Anderson does. His jolting opening portrays a revolutionary cell called the French 75, who, in a slightly distorted America, plant bombs, rob banks and bust migrants out of detention. Teyana Taylor plays Perfidia Beverly Hills, a black firebrand; Leonardo DiCaprio (pictured) is Pat, the lover in her thrall.

A seam of daddy issues runs through Mr Anderson’s work, from “Magnolia” to “The Master”—and Mr DiCaprio’s main persona in this film is father rather than rebel. Most of the action unfolds 16 years after the French 75’s spree. Perfidia has bolted, leaving a daughter whom Pat, now a washed-up stoner, ineptly strives to protect from the blowback of the past. The personal is political, but also trumps it, especially (as often happens) with age.

If a successful political movie is more than an arid allegory, neither can it be a polemic. It must see both sides, if only glancingly. Here the enemy is a lawless military crackpot, Steven Lockjaw (a show-stealing Sean Penn). The plot, loosely adapted from Thomas Pynchon’s “Vineland”, is driven by his yearnings. One is his lust for Perfidia, a fixation that ickily gestures at a long record of racial predation and typecasting. The other is his yen to join an elite white-supremacist cabal. With his insecurity and self-loathing, he is almost but not quite a hateful cartoon.

As for the radicals: a critic in the National Review alleged that they romanticise assassinations, making this “the year’s most irresponsible movie”. That is unfair. Lethal violence proves squalid and ruinous; their campaign fizzles out in betrayal and disillusionment. The moral centre is instead an equable karate instructor (Benicio del Toro, pictured below), who calmly helps the needy without blowing anything up.

“Human kind”, wrote T.S. Eliot , “cannot bear very much reality.” He might have added, “at the cinema”. Good political films entertain first and educate lightly. Thrillers are an amenable form, the clock ticking and the stakes high. The anguish of migration is the context of “One Battle After Another”, but in the foreground is a breathless series of shoot-outs, rooftop flights and car chases, powered by a fiery soundtrack.

Like “Dr Strangelove” or “The Death of Stalin”, it is also very funny, using satire and silliness seriously. As well as being sinister, the villains are preposterous. So is Mr DiCaprio’s flailing has-been, who careens around California in a dressing-gown—a visual gag that lasts long enough for you to stop noticing it, then remember and find it funny again. In an extended joke about customer-service purgatory, he struggles to recall the passwords when he phones the underground’s hotline, angrily demanding to speak to a supervisor.

Thus the film makes you both laugh and care—a tricky feat—even as it makes its points about migrants, militarisation and idealism. Unlike shouty tales of seismic events, it conjures a sense of grand scale through its look and form. Hurtling around the epic scenery of the south-west it also races through genres, from action flick to caper and buddy movie, with a touch of pastiche Western. The medley implies that the zany adventure is a compendium of America.

Imagery underscores the ambition. Characters enter ordinary buildings—a suburban home, a shop—which open out into huge annexes and hidden tunnels, a hint that the film’s battles are quietly raging all around. And in its last breakneck car chase, the vehicles pursue each other along a dipping desert road, up and down hillocks and up again, as if tracing the endless undulations of history. The contest between liberty and repression, the dreamy sequence suggests, is a never-ending story. ■

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Government support and French expertise have made all the difference

Wine from China is finer than Western snobs imagine Government support and French expertise have made all the difference October 2nd 2025 IT IS A grape time of year in Ningxia. In August the harvest begins up north, in the shadow of the Helan mountains (pictured). By November more than 40,000 hectares of vineyards—an area roughly four times the size of Paris —will have been combed over. Growers do not enjoy the fruits of their labour for long. Once the harvest is completed, viticulturists get to digging: they must bury their vines before temperatures plummet to -15°C.

Ningxia, a region in north-western China close to the Gobi desert, endures harsh winters. Nonetheless, it provides fertile ground for winemakers. The capital, Yinchuan, sits at the same latitude as Napa Valley, a centre of wine production in California. Ningxia gets 3,000 hours of fruit-ripening sun each year—the same as in parts of Spain. The rocky soil drains quickly and allows vines to put down deep roots.

People have been making wine in China at least since the Han dynasty (206BC-220AD) and perhaps even longer, judging from some archaeological evidence. Today wine is a big industry: in 2024 China produced 118,000 kilolitres of wine, roughly equivalent to 160m bottles (or about the amount drunk at the average office Christmas party). Ningxia is where much of the premium stuff is made. Revenues from wineries in Yinchuan reached 36bn yuan ($5bn) last year, up 20% from 2023.

It is not just the scale that is impressive: Chinese wine tastes better than many Westerners assume. The country’s vintners are earning ever more accolades in the world’s top competitions. This year they claimed 181 medals at the Decanter World Wine Awards (DWWA)—a competition sometimes referred to as the “Oscars of wine”—up from three in 2007 (see chart). Two wines were proclaimed “best in show”. Judges waxed poetic about the “alluring scents of blackcurrant and wild plum” in a red from Ningxia, with its “seductive plunge of fruit and spice”.

To be sure, China’s DWWA medals haul was a fraction of France’s or Italy’s, and some way off Australia’s or Argentina’s. But it managed more than other “old world” countries such as Austria and Germany. Berry Bros & Rudd, Britain’s oldest wine merchant, has observed that “China has the will and resource to become a very important player”. The country’s “enormous variety of climates and soils” means it can make everything from syrupy dessert wines to dry reds and whites.

Plenty in China are sweet on its wine. Xi Jinping, who obviously has some skin in the game, serves local wine at state dinners. Bruce Li, a sommelier at TRB Hutong, a Michelin-starred restaurant in Beijing, asserts that “If you compare Chinese wines with French or Italian wines, I think some Chinese wines actually taste better.”

Not everyone will agree. But there are two reasons why China’s wine has become more palatable. One is government support. All Chinese schoolchildren memorise a classical Tang-dynasty poem that begins: “Fine wine glows in a luminous glass.” Mao Zedong felt every person should be able to enjoy wine. In 1956 he asked Changyu, the country’s oldest winery, in Shandong, to expand production. (Though Mao promoted the pleasures of plonk, he preferred Kweichow Moutai, a type of spirit.)

Among the people involved in the industry in Shandong was Chen Jianguo, who in 2002 became Ningxia’s party secretary. The local government then announced an ambitious goal of planting 70,000 hectares of vineyards, with the aim of making Ningxia a major global producer. Officials allocated suitable land for the vines, provided subsidies for those cultivating grapes and set up training programmes. They also attracted foreign investment. LVMH , a French luxury-goods giant, decided it wanted a taste of the action, setting up Chandon China, a sparkling-wine producer in Ningxia, in 2013 as well as Ao Yun, a winery in Yunnan.

The other reason for China’s improved output is that its winemakers have learned from the best. Ningxia is sometimes described as “China’s Bordeaux” and with good reason: its winemakers have modelled themselves on their French peers. In the late 1990s a delegation travelled to France to learn from viticulturists there. Among other things, they were taught the importance of growing only a dozen clusters of high-quality grapes per vine instead of 20 or 30 less-flavourful ones. Firms in Ningxia grow many of the same grape varieties as those in Bordeaux, apply their methods and strive for a similar taste, ageing the wine in French oak barrels.

Chinese vintners who have trained abroad have put theory into practice at home. Among them is Emma Gao (pictured), who studied oenology at the University of Bordeaux. Along with her father, Gao Lin, she runs Silver Heights, a boutique winery set up in Ningxia in 2007.

Two of its wines—a Pinot Noir and a Cabernet Sauvignon—won prizes at this year’s DWWA. (It was their “Family Reserve Chardonnay” that Chinese officials served to Emmanuel Macron and Angela Merkel.) Silver Heights’s bestseller this year is an orange wine with strong acidity and hints of grapefruit. A floral pétillant naturel, or “pét-nat”, made with rice wine from Ningxia, has also proved popular.

Yet despite all the improvements China’s winemakers have made in recent years, Chinese wines do not rank among the world’s most coveted bottles. In a blind tasting in 2023 Jancis Robinson, a critic, noted that Chinese wines “stand out as being less subtle” than those made in other regions because the vines are less mature.

Some suggest that the country has not come close to realising its potential. Ms Gao hopes “to discover the beauty of our terroir”: as well as mastering Bordeaux-style wines, she wants to work out which other grapes thrive in China’s soils. Silver Heights has expanded beyond the dominant Cabernet Sauvignon, Marselan and Merlot varieties to plant 23 others, including Petite Sirah, Dornfelder Riesling and Spanish Tempranillo. She has been driving all over the country in search of new spots for vineyards: “It may take us hundreds of years to find our niche and direction.”

Another obstacle is that wine culture in China is neither as mainstream nor as passionate as it is in other countries. Beer or baijiu, a liquor, remain the tipples of choice for most. Wine imports, including of the best European stuff, have dropped in recent years because of covid-19, an economic slowdown and crackdowns on alcohol gifting and drinking among officials.

Lots of producers in Ningxia want to step up their exports and target their wares at wine-lovers elsewhere. Devo, a sparkling-wine enterprise in Yinchuan, hopes to sell 50% of its bottles abroad, up from 20% last year. But many European markets are already mature or saturated; America is slapping 30% tariffs on Chinese goods. And in lots of rich countries wine consumption is declining as health-conscious youngsters turn away from booze.

Perhaps the biggest problem for Chinese winemakers is price. Importing specialist high-tech equipment, along with all the burying and digging up of vines in regions such as Ningxia, increases production costs. This means that many Chinese fine wines cost the same, if not more, than their counterparts from the old world, but do not have the same taste or cachet. Wines by Silver Heights cost up to $250; bottles of Ao Yun fetch more than $350. You could get your hands on a grand cru for a similar price. Unless that changes, Chinese fine wine is destined to be drunk by few connoisseurs—no matter how seductive its plunges of fruit and spice. ■

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A new book recreates a year in the life of the author of “The Natural History of Selborne”

If you love nature writing, you have Gilbert White to thank A new book recreates a year in the life of the author of “The Natural History of Selborne” October 2nd 2025 ON THE EVE of the French revolution in 1789, an English country clergyman quietly prepared for the printing of his book. Like many first-time authors on the eve of publication, he felt not triumph but a kind of terror, “like a school boy who has done some mischief”.

Gilbert White need not have worried: he had produced a book that would become both loved and influential. “The Natural History of Selborne” was admired by Charles Darwin, William Wordsworth and Virginia Woolf, observes Jenny Uglow, and treasured by soldiers fighting in the trenches in the first world war as “a vision of the country they had left behind”. It proved an unlikely but perennial bestseller.

It also helped start a “quiet revolution in natural history”. For, as Ms Uglow writes, the book united the gifts of “an acute empirical observer and a consummate stylist” in its meticulous yet enchanting account of the flora and fauna of a village in Hampshire. If White, a “pioneering field naturalist”, cleared a path towards modern ecology, he also anticipated ethology: the systematic study of animal behaviour . White’s work still inspires authors in the blossoming genre of nature writing.

White was a bachelor who never travelled far or rose high; his income was modest. But he was no fussy misanthrope seeking solace in bats, bees and beans. He had a huge, affectionate extended family, many of whom lived nearby. (Living nieces and nephews alone numbered 39 by 1782, and 62 on his death in 1793.) He treated nature as a conversation, not a battlefield. Recording the story of a horse that befriended a hen, he notes “a wonderful spirit of sociality in the brute creation”.

The esteemed biographer of writers including Edward Lear and Elizabeth Gaskell, Ms Uglow has devised a portrait of White as companionable and keenly observant as its subject. Full-dress biographies exist—Richard Mabey, one of White’s finest successors, wrote the best—so Ms Uglow takes a different approach. She focuses on a single year, 1781, and treats each daily entry in White’s journal as a prompt for a short reflection on his life, times, studies and surroundings.

Flanked by exact records of the ever-changing Hampshire weather, these notes fed his “Natural History” but can also read like elusive Japanese poems. On October 20th, for example: “Leaves fall very fast. Endive very fine. Grapes delicate.” With his rich vegetable patches and abundant “fruit wall”, White certainly ate well. That year gave him ten weeks of grapes, peaches, nectarines and “prodigious” apricots. In another season, “Melons come in heaps.”

Indeed, the gardener sometimes trumps the naturalist. On August 8th White recalled that “We have shot 31 black-birds, & saved our gooseberries.” Some topics and characters recur as in a rural soap opera. On September 14th Timothy, White’s tortoise, was “dull & torpid”. No reptile was ever so lovingly scrutinised as Timothy.

From these fine brushstrokes Ms Uglow creates a captivating picture of the man, his milieu and his age. Although not “a scientist in modern terms”, White looked hard and tested received ideas. He made discoveries, too: the large noctule bat; the tiny, shy harvest mouse; the fact that swifts—a special favourite—“mated on the wing”. He stood on the brink of 19th-century breakthroughs in biology and geology, and his own findings hint at “evidence of adaptation and change” in nature.

White was content being a conventional “parson-naturalist” and a cherished uncle, brother and friend. He was no rebel although, in 1789, he did marvel at “the sudden overthrow of the French despotic monarchy”. Nothing would stop him watching birds, brewing beer, growing cabbages or giving the same undogmatic sermons every year. One of them voices his effusive gratitude for this “beautiful, and glorious World”. His readers, and Ms Uglow’s, can still share that delight. ■

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His paintings offer a glimpse of the Gilded Age

John Singer Sargent, portraitist of the posh, is back in vogue His paintings offer a glimpse of the Gilded Age October 2nd 2025 “Detestable! Boring! Curious! Monstrous!” the crowds shouted. “Madame X” (pictured) scandalised visitors to the Paris Salon in 1884, with her heavy make-up and tight black gown whose strap was slipping from her shoulder. To appease the prudes, its young painter, John Singer Sargent, put the dress strap in its proper place, but he cut ties with Paris, leaving for England and, later, America. His paintings, capturing sumptuous fabrics and elegant sitters, evoke the Gilded Age in which he lived.

A hundred years after his death, “Sargentolatry” is thriving. The artist has been celebrated in a recent documentary and a spate of museum shows, including at Tate Britain and Kenwood House in London and an excellent exhibition at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris. The show, focused on his years in France, was hosted at the Metropolitan Museum of Art earlier this year, where it attracted around 500,000 visitors; it welcomed more per day than the museum’s most recent exhibition on Vincent van Gogh , a far more famous name.

Sargent also made an appearance in “The Gilded Age”, a period tv drama: Gladys Russell, a robber baron’s daughter, has her portrait done by him in a formal initiation into Upper East Side womanhood. (Unfortunately, no consultant for the show had taken an art-history course, judging by the result.)

Back in the late 1990s people had “a lot of reservations about Sargent as a high-society portraitist” says Elizabeth Prettejohn, author of the book “Interpreting Sargent” from 1998. Some thought “that it would have been better if he had painted peasants and done something a little bit grittier”. Now “there’s much more willingness” to appreciate his paintings’ “glamour and fashionability” as “something we can all enjoy and have fun with”, she says.

Why is an erstwhile recorder of the rich so popular today? In some ways his paintings offer what social-media posts and television series such as “The Real Housewives” do: both a front-row seat and backstage pass into the luxurious lives of the wealthy. Sargent’s portraits strike a special chord in an era of social media, “where everyone is thinking about how to present themselves to the world and crafting their own image. That is something that Sargent and his patrons understood as well,” says Stephanie Herdrich, a curator of American painting and drawing at the Met. It helps that portraits in general, and Sargent’s in particular, are suited to social media . His subjects’ confronting gazes, bright colours and handsome clothes are intriguing even in a thumbnail size.

Sargent became the most prolific American painter of the 19th century, with some 900 oil paintings to his name. Born to American parents in Italy, he travelled the world. His work was once of interest mainly to Americans and Britons, but today it, too, is travelling farther afield. The Musée d’Orsay’s exhibition is the first solo show devoted to Sargent in France. And his work is increasingly popular in Asia and among Chinese social-media users, especially his glamorous “Madame X”. No one is calling his art “detestable” or “boring” any more, straps be damned. ■

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Taylor Swift is not the only person fascinated by performers. Social-media users are, too

Spend a day in the life of a showgirl Taylor Swift is not the only person fascinated by performers. Social-media users are, too October 2nd 2025 Taylor swift’s new album will take fans backstage. “The Life of a Showgirl”, released on October 3rd, promises to reveal the “beautiful”, “rapturous” and “frightening” life of a female performer. Ms Swift knows as well as anyone what it is like to take to the stage night after night in heavy make-up and jewel-encrusted leotards. She performed 149 concerts as part of her “Eras” tour in 2023-24. In her downtime she wrote this new record.

Yet the lives of showgirls aren’t all that hidden: in fact, they are on display online. A troupe of performers on social media are showing off the glitz and glamour of the profession. Allie Goodbun, a dancer at the Moulin Rouge, a cabaret in Paris, has 17.2m likes on TikTok; her profile is a flurry of rhinestones, red lipstick and feathers. Shealagh Boyajian, another performer, gives her YouTube followers a glimpse of “A Day in My Life as a Las Vegas Showgirl”.

Away from the sultry lounges and glittering revues, showgirls show that their lives can be rather ordinary. “To the regular person, my career is such a peculiar thing,” says Ms Boyajian. “I strive to show my viewers that I also live a very normal life.” There are, of course, a few quirks. The life of a showgirl often includes umpteen costume changes, elaborate props and copious amounts of hairspray. Much of the living also happens in the dark. In one video, Ms Goodbun offers her fans insight into “The Dinner of a Showgirl”, which is wolfed down at 2.30am every night.

Showgirls spend hours working on their craft. Some start the day with yoga or stretching to ensure every twirl and high kick looks effortless. Many follow a strict diet or fitness regime. “People often forget it’s still a job,” says Evana De Lune, an Australian burlesque dancer with some 600,000 followers on TikTok and Instagram. “Performing and producing involves a huge amount of unseen work.”

Posting videos on social media is yet more hard work. But it has become an important part of the business, giving access to audiences far beyond the music hall. “Your online presence can make or break your career,” says Ms De Lune, who reckons her first big shows sold out thanks to her followers. Internet fame can have downsides, as seasoned performers like Ms Swift know well. Ms De Lune says she has “had to delete thousands of comments, block countless people and deal with ongoing and targeted harassment”.

Trolls aside, the popularity of such videos points to two trends. One is the bizarre virality of “day in the life” videos: people are endlessly interested in where someone buys coffee or what they eat for lunch. The other is an enduring fascination with showgirls. Film-makers including Paul Verhoeven and Baz Luhrmann have dramatised their lives, imagining performers as both dazzling and desperate. “The Last Showgirl”, released last year, looks at what happens when the music stops.

The industry has lost some of its shine of late. Many famous venues have gone under in recent years. The earnings of dancers vary seasonally. Yet the joy of performing—and, for some, of posting on TikTok—has kept showgirls going. Ms Swift’s album will give them a new soundtrack as well as another chance to twirl in the spotlight. ■

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The opera, adapted from a prizewinning novel, brings stunts and sopranos together

With “Kavalier & Clay”, the Met is holding out for superheroes The opera, adapted from a prizewinning novel, brings stunts and sopranos together October 2nd 2025 THE ESCAPIST, as his name suggests, is skilled at getting himself in and out of tricky situations. With his muscles rippling in a blue Spandex suit—and his motif, a key, gleaming on his chest—he climbs buildings and crosses oceans. In one bravura sequence, set to thrilling music, he leaps past enemy lines and punches Adolf Hitler, knocking the Führer unconscious. The audience erupts into applause.

This would not be so unusual were they sitting in a multiplex, but the crowd was gathered at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York. The company is opening its 142nd season without star singers, but with The Escapist and Luna Moth. The characters first appeared 25 years ago in “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay”, a Pulitzer-prizewinning novel by Michael Chabon. The Met’s executives are clearly hoping that these fictional superheroes will prove a draw to the legions of fans of the Marvel and DC franchises.

“Kavalier & Clay” begins in 1939 and tells the story of two cousins. Joe has fled from Nazi-occupied Prague for New York, where he is staying with Sammy. They bond over the creation of a comic book, inspired by Joe’s family’s plight, with a Nazi-bashing protagonist. The novel celebrated the early days of the comic-book industry, with “ink-smirched young men, drinking, smoking, lying around with their naked big toes protruding from the tips of their socks”. Over the years attempts to turn the bestselling book into a film have foundered, despite the superhero genre’s box-office domination.

Mason Bates, an American composer, approached the Met about adapting the book back in 2017 after his first opera, “The (R)evolution of Steve Jobs” , was well received. “It’s a sprawling American epic,” he says of the tale, “but at its heart, it’s about two desperate artists trying to save their family and falling in love while it happens. I think that makes it an opera.”

The book, which runs to more than 600 pages, has been efficiently streamlined. (Mr Chabon was not involved in adapting it.) Action abounds in the first half of the opera; there are old-fashioned arias, too, mostly sung by Sun-Ly Pierce, a mezzo-soprano who plays Rosa Saks, a painter entangled with both men. But much of the piece unfolds in a musical-theatre style, steeped in jazzy sounds for the New York scenes and Slavic themes for the passages in Prague. Many of the most ear-grabbing bits are instrumental and electronic rather than vocal. In its best moments Mr Bates’s score calls to mind Leos Janacek’s opera of 1924, “The Cunning Little Vixen”—itself based on a Czech comic strip.

The book’s superheroes appear visually, artfully rendered in digital animations or via acrobatic dancers who tumble on stage or soar through the air on wires in Bartlett Sher’s nimble production. Mr Bates and his librettist, Gene Scheer, wisely never let The Escapist or Luna Moth break into song. Historically, warbling superheroes have not fared well on stage. A Superman musical flopped on Broadway in 1966—as did a Spider-Man one in 2011, despite having music by Bono and the Edge of U2.

Was the Met right to put its trust in superheroes? It seems so. The company reports that “Kavalier & Clay” is its top-performing opera at the box office so far this season. Ticket sales for the opening night were the Met’s highest this decade. Mr Chabon, too, is a fan, telling your correspondent that “I feel I need to see it again.”

Whether audiences outside New York will ever see “Kavalier & Clay” is unclear. The Met did not collaborate with another major company on it, so there is no obvious house for another production. What one character says of The Escapist is also true of new operas: “The greatest trick of all is not to vanish…but re-appear.” ■

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Christopher Marlowe shows the pitfalls of being second-best

Has a bad boy of literature been given his due? Christopher Marlowe shows the pitfalls of being second-best October 2nd 2025 From today’s salacious perspective, Christopher Marlowe got everything right. Astoundingly, the shoemaker’s son made it to Cambridge and was soon a trailblazing playwright. He wrote boldly about same-sex desire and, though free-thinking could be fatal in Elizabethan England, was said to be a vocal atheist. His mysterious life seems to have encompassed a side-hustle as a spy.

Mysterious and—like the lives of many rebels, Romantics and rock stars—short. In 1593, when he was 29, Marlowe was stabbed in the eye in a shady brawl. The killer was pardoned; speculation about the mastermind has since roped in Walter Raleigh and Queen Elizabeth I.

Daring, scandal and tragedy are a good formula for immortality. Yet Marlowe is little known and less performed. In “Dark Renaissance”, an evocative new biography, Stephen Greenblatt of Harvard aims to resurrect him. He is not alone. The Guardian recently urged readers to “restore Marlowe to his rightful place”. Set in the early 1590s when he was already a hitmaker, “Born with Teeth” (pictured), a rollicking play on in the West End, has him trying to seduce a novice dramatist, William Shakespeare , and recruit him as a spook.

“You’ll never be anything but a minor talent,” the stage Marlowe tells the rival whose glory would blot out his own. The overlap between them helps make Marlowe a test case for the discernment of posterity and the justice of reputation. Are his boosters right?

His was an age of paranoia and spectacular violence; of real and imaginary plots, betrayals and double agents. A lot of people were hanged, drawn and quartered. Men like him needed mighty patrons (but could be crushed if they fell). Evidently Marlowe found them while at Cambridge: a cabal of potentates strongarmed his college into awarding him an Ma, since “He had done her Majesty good service…in matters touching the benefit of his country.” Bigwigs seem to have vouched for him again when he was busted in a counterfeiting scam.

Scholarly yet buccaneering, clandestine but reckless—Marlowe the man is contradictory and sketchy. His plays are his real testament, above all “Doctor Faustus”, who barters his soul to Lucifer. Marlowe’s lurid plots were a sensation, as were his themes of power and sex. He made blank verse a go-to medium of English drama, the rhythm pulsing through the lines like a heartbeat. He pioneered the history play and the soliloquy, which laid thoughts and feelings bare. Professor Greenblatt credits him with “the invention of inwardness”.

That makes his neglect seem as harsh as his unavenged killing. Until you consider what came after him—ie, Shakespeare. Marlowe wrote some limpid lines, as when a devil explains hell’s whereabouts to Faustus: “Why this is hell, nor am I out of it.” He also wrote a lot of bombast and magniloquence. Shakespeare could match that and be breathtakingly poignant. Shylock’s piercing monologue in “The Merchant of Venice”—“If you prick us, do we not bleed?”—outclasses anything in “The Jew of Malta”, the Marlowe play that preceded it.

Marlowe’s vaunting anti-heroes seem to strain against the marionette’s strings, struggling free of the hoary archetypes of yore. From cameos to protagonists, Shakespeare’s characters live and breathe. (“I was aiming at actual human beings,” he says of his creations in “Born with Teeth”.) Only around a decade separated “Doctor Faustus” from “Hamlet”, but in psychological nuance and acuity the gap feels wider.

It is Marlowe’s misfortune to be bracketed always with the finest writer in English. Still, his relative obscurity holds lessons for what lasts and what doesn’t, and what makes an artist’s name. One is that being best matters much more than being first. Marlowe was England’s first great playwright, but that has counted for little when the next was so much greater. And in art, as in commerce, second-best can be an empty accolade. The laurels available to Elizabethan dramatists have all gone to Shakespeare.

If that seems unfair, the last lesson is reassuring. In “Born with Teeth”, Marlowe calls Shakespeare an “obedient schoolboy”, and his life was indeed tame and bourgeois by comparison. He married early, went into business and bought property; no state secrets, no vicious scraps. It hasn’t mattered. Nor, ultimately, has Marlowe’s flamboyant career and untimely demise. Instead they have been judged on their output and talent. Marlowe’s is a bloodcurdling story, but in the long run, he has got what he deserved. ■

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A healthy economy is driving demand among domestic and diaspora buyers

The market for Indian art is booming A healthy economy is driving demand among domestic and diaspora buyers September 25th 2025 THE BUDDHA wears a tranquil expression, with downcast eyes and pursed lips. Look closely, however, and you notice that his face is made up of a jumble of pots, pans and other kitchen utensils. The immense black-and-brass sculpture is by Subodh Gupta, one of India’s leading contemporary artists, who, like Marcel Duchamp, repurposes everyday objects. (For this reason Mr Gupta has also been dubbed the “ Damien Hirst of Delhi”.)

“Buddha Head” dominates Shalini Passi’s garden. Inside her house in Delhi there is enough modern and contemporary Indian art to fill a small museum: striking paintings by M.F. Husain, another of India’s most admired artists, hang alongside prints, photographs and video installations. Ms Passi—a collector, philanthropist and the breakout star of “Fabulous Lives of Bollywood Wives”—is one of a growing number of Indians with the taste and money to build an impressive art collection.

Auction houses, collectors and gallerists at home and abroad say the same thing: Indian art is having a moment. Artsy, an online art marketplace, says that Indian artists saw the largest surge in demand on their site in 2024. In March a painting by Husain, who died in 2011, sold for $13.8m—a record for a modern Indian artist. Sotheby’s is selling several works by F.N. Souza, a contemporary of Husain’s, in its Modern and Contemporary South Asian Art auction on September 30th. “Houses in Hampstead” (1962), an eerie city scene, and “Emperor” (1957), of a long, forbidding face, have estimates between £800,000 and £1.5m ($1m and $2m).

In the world of high-end art sales such sums no longer stop the presses. It is worth noting, however, that in 2000 and 2002 those same works by Souza sold for £3,000 and £1,200 (about £5,750 and £2,250 in today’s money). Does that remarkably steep appreciation point to a reorientation of the global art market, similar to the one Chinese buyers pulled off earlier this century? Or is this simply another bubble, like the one Indian art saw two decades ago?

Many are happy to make the bull case. The comparison to the boom in 2006-07, they argue, is inapt. “Back then,” says Manjari Sihare-Sutin, Sotheby’s head of Indian and South Asian art, “there was this thing about the BRICs,” meaning Brazil, Russia, India and China, “and there was lots of speculation.” Western gallerists and art journalists looking for the next big thing came to India; contemporary artists attracted wildly inflated prices. That boom ended with the global financial crisis of 2007-09. The speculative market crashed and the trend-hunters moved on.

It is different today, says Roshini Vadehra, a gallerist in New Delhi. Twenty years ago, she explains, “international speculators pushed up prices. Now the domestic market is strong and driving prices here…It feels more stable.” That is largely a result of India’s buoyant economy: excluding the pandemic year of 2020, India’s GDP has grown annually by an average of 7.1% since 2009. Prices are rising accordingly. Ms Sihare-Sutin notes that her sale in March was expected to bring in $4.6m, but made $16.8m (including the record price for the Husain). The average lot price was $464,000, up from $110,000 in 2022.

It is not just auction houses that are benefiting from India’s strong domestic market. India has developed a calendar of art fairs in Delhi, Kochi and Mumbai . As Ms Vadehra explains: “There is a new crop of buyers post-covid, a generation of people in their 30s and 40s…They know that having good art on their walls gives them an entirely different social and cultural status.” Martand Khosla, who makes masterfully complex paintings and sculptures evoking urban construction and decay, says that many of his works are bought by interior designers to enhance new homes.

Decorative art is vivifying India’s corporate buildings, too. The grounds of Maker Maxity, a vast complex in Mumbai with five office towers, a mall and a private club, show off Indian contemporary art. The entryway of one building features a piece by Srinivasa Prasad. A bullock cart is mid-explosion—its contents are secured in the air by strings—in a comment on migration.

And major institutions outside India are taking an interest. Sohrab Hura, a photographer, painter and film-maker whose work has a darkly comic quality, recently had a solo show at PS1, part of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. This year Arpita Singh, who makes huge, dreamlike oil paintings that reflect on India’s development, had her first solo show outside India at the Serpentine Gallery in London (pictured top).

All the same, there is a bear case. India’s “modern masters”—a group of painters including Husain, Souza, S.H. Raza and others who studied with, and were influenced by, European Modernist artists—may fetch high prices at auction. But there are not many other blue-chip artists. Gallerists complain that too many domestic buyers simply follow trends and are too price-conscious. Meanwhile buyers in the diaspora, one gallerist notes, can be “really conservative. They just want gods and goddesses and Krishnas.”

Then there is policy. India’s instinct for protectionism extends to culture as well as industry: it wants to keep its best artists’ work at home. The Antiquities and Art Treasures Act of 1972 heavily restricts the export of any object more than 100 years old, as well as work by nine artists designated “national treasures”. Some worry about that list being expanded. Gallerists also fret over a thicket of confusing regulations, leaving them uncertain whether they can import art to sell on consignment.

None of that hinders the growth of a robust domestic market, however. Though some in India’s art world are concerned that the ecosystem for finding and nurturing young artists is underdeveloped, it is growing. Perhaps India does not want to become a destination for international art sales, like London or New York. It may be content to keep its best works at home, look inward and focus on developing stronger museums, galleries and arts education. That is one advantage of being the world’s most populous country: it needs foreign buyers less than artists in, say, Belgium or Guyana might. But it also ensures that even if the bull case is right, and the market for Indian art is maturing and deepening rather than entering another bubble, it will remain more isolated and have less of an impact on the global market than it otherwise would. ■

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Their 90th and 100th birthdays offer an opportunity to consider them together

Who was the greater singer: Pavarotti or Fischer-Dieskau? Their 90th and 100th birthdays offer an opportunity to consider them together September 25th 2025 THE CONCERT may be better remembered than the football World Cup final that followed it (West Germany beat Argentina 1-0). On July 7th 1990 three tail-coated tenors, backed by more than 200 musicians, belted out arias and songs in the Baths of Caracalla in Rome, watched by 800m people on television. The concert’s emotional climax was “Nessun dorma” (“No one shall sleep”), from Giacomo Puccini’s opera “Turandot”. The aria itself culminates in a triumphant declaration—Vincerò! (“I will win!”)—that crests and breaks like a wave. Luciano Pavarotti , already famous enough to have appeared on the covers of Time and Newsweek, became much more so after his ringing high B.

That month Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau gave a rather different concert in Munich: a recital of songs by Hugo Wolf, an Austrian composer of the 19th century, accompanied by a lone pianist. Leonard Bernstein, a conductor and the composer of “West Side Story”, thought Fischer-Dieskau “the most significant singer of the 20th century”. If tv cameras were on hand for the recital in Munich, there is no record of it.

Both singers are being feted this year—Fischer-Dieskau was born 100 years ago in May, Pavarotti would have been 90 in October—with concerts and re-releases of their recordings. Pavarotti’s commemorations, unsurprisingly, are on a grander scale: the two surviving tenors, Plácido Domingo and José Carreras, will join other stars for a concert in Verona on September 30th. Although Fischer-Dieskau and Pavarotti were very different singers who almost never shared a stage (they performed “Aida” in Berlin in 1982), they are worth remembering together. The achievements of one illuminate those of the other, and cast light on the careers of their successors.

Their voices consigned them to different fates. Tenors are the top guns of the operatic world, performing aerobatic feats and often winning, or tragically losing, the damsel. Decca, Pavarotti’s record label, marketed him as “king of the high Cs”. Baritones like Fischer-Dieskau, who sing closer to the pitch of normal speech, generally have less glamorous roles.

The singers’ temperaments diverged more than their voices did. Born in Modena in northern Italy, Pavarotti was an exuberant lover of pasta and Lambrusco. He did not read music well and had trouble learning the words of the arias he sang so thrillingly. Fischer-Dieskau, born in Berlin, had a less sunny start in life. The Nazis starved his disabled brother to death, and drafted the future baritone into the army. It is said that on the Russian front he sang to the horses that were his charges. He ended the war, and began his career, singing for fellow prisoners at an American pow camp near Pisa, not far from Modena.

Though Fischer-Dieskau was an opera singer, his speciality was Lieder, German songs. His “Nessun dorma” was probably “Winterreise”, a haunting song cycle by Franz Schubert, which Fischer-Dieskau recorded seven times. Whereas Pavarotti threw out a net, his “glorious voice and rich sound reaching every corner of the hall”, Fischer-Dieskau wanted to “pull the net back with fish in it”, drawing the audience to him, says Benjamin Appl, a baritone who was his last student and has recorded an album in homage to him. The experience was intimate, as much intellectual as emotional. Fischer-Dieskau was obsessed with words, to the point where some critics accused him of sacrificing to them the song’s melodic line.

Pavarotti’s sins, said detractors, were sloth and selling out. Especially after the first Three Tenors concert, he sang for stadium-size audiences and with the likes of Elton John and Celine Dion, usually for charity. He performed in “tinselly pop concerts in which he mouths his way through songs he has no idea how to sing”, wrote his former manager in a catty biography.

The fragmentation of the media means that another classical musician may never experience fame like Pavarotti’s (and many do not aspire to it). But his spirit lives on in the growing number of performers who use social media to build genre-straddling careers. Anna Lapwood, an organist with 1.4m followers on TikTok, is as likely to play music from “Star Wars” as a Bach fugue. Ray Chen, meanwhile, has 620,000 fans on TikTok. On his album “Player 1” he plays video-game and anime music on a Stradivarius violin made in 1714.

As for Fischer-Dieskau, “My students now, most of them don’t know his name,” laments Mr Appl. Every music lover should. Treat yourself to his recording of “Winterreise” from 1971, with Gerald Moore at the piano. ■

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But, try as strongmen might, the jokes always get away

First, they come for the comedians But, try as strongmen might, the jokes always get away September 25th 2025 Josef Stalin loses his pipe and informs his security chief. Later he finds it behind the sofa. “That’s impossible,” says the henchman, “three people have confessed to stealing it!” Lots of jokes were told about the Soviet generalissimo, proliferating long after he died. For instance: Stalin’s ghost visits Vladimir Putin . “Kill your opponents and paint the Kremlin blue,” he advises. “Why blue?” asks Putin. The ghost smiles. “I knew you wouldn’t query the first part.”

While the tyrant lived, it was reckless to tell such jokes in public or to anyone who might report them. Even hearing them could be calamitous. “Who built the White Sea canal?” runs a gag about a monstrous infrastructure project. “The right bank was dug by the joke-tellers—the left by those who heard them.”

“Every joke”, wrote George Orwell, “is a tiny revolution.” To silence the comedians, some autocrats use torturers and the gulag; in today’s Egypt and other stifled places, the penalties for ridicule can be prison and exile. In America the relatively mild tools include menacing regulators, as Jimmy Kimmel, a talk-show host, has learned. Yet whatever the comics’ fate, the jokes themselves get away.

Authoritarians are inherently funny. Humour thrives on pretence and delusion—and the strongman is always pretending. He poses as a saviour but is actually a brute; he purports to be omnipotent but is as flawed as other mortals, or more. If he has an ideology, it is deficient too. Prickly and narcissistic, strongmen can rarely take jokes, which makes them risky but funnier. The Nazis banned “The Great Dictator” (pictured), in which Charlie Chaplin sent up Adolf Hitler, but the Führer reputedly watched it twice. Saddam Hussein tried to murder the cast of a satirical film.

Political jokes, meanwhile, are the ideal weapon of the weak. Even without the internet, they travel at warp speed, traversing a country before the censors have their pens out. (According to a report cited in a BBC documentary, the KGB found a joke could cross Moscow in a matter of hours.) Crucially, a good gag is collusive, recruiting listeners to the teller’s side—or rather, making clear which side they are already on. They can’t help finding it funny, and it is funny because, at bottom, it is true. This bond can be a launch pad for politics, as it was for Beppe Grillo in Italy and Volodymyr Zelensky in Ukraine.

Naturally, autocrats fret about people knowing that other people are thinking like them. According to the maximalist logic of repression, the fact that laughter is intimate, spontaneous and ephemeral heightens its appeal as a target: if rulers can suppress wit, they can control everything. But they can’t. As Ben Lewis recounts in “Hammer & Tickle”, a book about humour under communism, trying to squish a joke tends to spread it instead.

When the laughter police give up this unequal fight, it is sign of liberalisation, voluntary or otherwise. At the fag-end of the Soviet Union, even Mikhail Gorbachev , its last leader, wisecracked about discontent and shortages. (“The working classes consume plenty of cognac—through their chosen representatives.”) A big comedy festival in Riyadh, beginning on September 26th, is supposed to advertise Saudi Arabia’s new freedoms. Hmmm: Tim Dillon, an American stand-up due to attend, says he was disinvited over a riff the organisers didn’t like.

Canny authoritarians see the benefits of letting the gags flow. “If they are telling jokes about me,” Leonid Brezhnev is said to have remarked, “it means they love me,” and he wasn’t altogether wrong. Scabrous as it may be, satire always contains a trace of homage; after all, nobodies are never satirised. Humour can be a safety-valve for dissent and a homeopathic dose of plurality. It can also offer raw intel on the national mood, relaying hard truths and bad news as medieval jesters sometimes did to kings.

But the wiliest strongmen, including some populists today, commandeer the audience. In an age when the struggle for power is a battle for attention, they are the carnival-barkers of the public square, dealing as much in one-liners and theatrical taunts as in policy. As politics is repackaged as entertainment, crackdowns—on comics and others—become part of the show, the threat to free expression blurred by the spectacle.

The story of Bim-Bom, a circus-clown duo, is an ominous parable. Performing in Moscow in 1918, they made jokes about the Bolsheviks that the secret policemen in attendance disliked. The goons rushed the stage to arrest them. Thinking the chase was part of the act, the crowd hooted with laughter. ■

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The author, who writes in both Japanese and German, is regarded as a future Nobel laureate

Why you should read Tawada Yoko’s books The author, who writes in both Japanese and German, is regarded as a future Nobel laureate September 25th 2025 TAWADA YOKO (pictured) is often asked what language she dreams in. She finds the question tiresome. The author grew up in Japan, lives in Germany and writes in both Japanese and German. Implicit in such probing, she writes, is the assumption that “It’s impossible for people to truly speak two languages—that one of them must be the ‘fake’ language and the other must be the ‘real’ language.” Ms Tawada resists such notions: “Maybe what I really want is not to be a writer of this or that language in particular, but to fall into the poetic ravine between them.”

For nearly 40 years, Ms Tawada has wandered that ravine, producing work of uncanny beauty and uncommon potency. She regularly switches between writing in Japanese and German, which she learned after moving to Hamburg in her 20s. In “The Naked Eye” she went so far as to alternate between the two within a single project, writing five sentences in German and translating them into Japanese, then writing five sentences in Japanese and translating them into German, until she was left with two translations of a book with no “original” version.

Ms Tawada is hardly the first author to write in a language that is not her mother tongue—Chinua Achebe, Milan Kundera and Joseph Conrad , among others, all did—but she takes the practice further than most. Her writing has rightly earned praise from around the world. She has won literary prizes in both Japan and Germany. “The Emissary”, a disorienting dystopian novel, was about Japan in the wake of a disaster; it won America’s National Book Award for translated literature in 2018. Many literary folk reckon she will one day win the Nobel prize.

Two books newly published in English offer a glimpse of her kaleidoscopic world. “Exophony”, an essay collection, is the first of Ms Tawada’s non-fiction works to become available to Anglophones. The essays unspool the idea of “exophonic literature”. In contrast to so-called “immigrant literature”, with its connotations of outsiders entering, in exophonic literature “a writer is going from the inside out”. She reflects on the expressive possibilities that are available “when you step outside the cocoon of your own mother tongue”.

The second title, “Archipelago of the Sun”, is the final volume in an acclaimed trilogy of novels. The series follows a travelling band of eclectic multilingual friends: Hiruko, a young woman living in Europe when her homeland disappears in an environmental disaster (though never named, it is clearly Japan); Susanoo, an enigmatic Japanese man; Nanook, a Greenlander who lives in Denmark and pretends to be Japanese; Knut, a Danish linguist enamoured of Hiruko; Nora, a German librarian enamoured of Nanook; and Akash, an Indian student in the process of transitioning from male to female. They board a boat hoping to travel east to find Hiruko’s lost homeland, but mostly end up circling the Baltic Sea with their fellow passengers, many of whom turn out to be dead writers and mythological figures.

Both titles demonstrate Ms Tawada’s distinctive style—somehow both delightfully dreamlike and cuttingly sharp—and her enduring interest in inbetween-ness of all kinds. She explores the spaces between cultures, genders, epochs and species. (An earlier novel, “Memoirs of a Polar Bear”, is written from three bears’ perspectives.)

She posits foreignness as a healthy, even necessary, condition for a writer—and a balm against nationalism. “In Argentina, no one cared about what made Poland great,” a dead Polish writer tells the travellers aboard the boat in “Archipelago of the Sun”. “A life surrounded by foreigners can cure you of the disease called ‘our-country-is-best-itis’.”

That is a timely message as nationalism is on the march in countries around the world. But Ms Tawada’s interest is in language more than politics. Her writing hinges on wordplay that her deft translators mostly manage to convey. The characters in “Archipelago of the Sun” speak at least half a dozen tongues between them. Akash’s English is “like a suit of old clothes, worn until the soft folds followed his every move”. Hiruko often slips into Panska, a pan-Scandinavian language she invented after wandering the region.

In Ms Tawada’s telling, language, like the ocean, flows beyond borders. As well as carrying the travellers along, the water provides a recurring metaphor in “Archipelago of the Sun”. As the group approaches the end of the book—but not their intended destination—characters see themselves in the blue. “We were like those waves,” Hiruko says. “We pushed against each other, bumped into each other, lost our shapes and found new ones.” ■

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Influencers have transformed a staid sport into high-spirited entertainment

Golf videos going viral? These days it is par for the course Influencers have transformed a staid sport into high-spirited entertainment September 25th 2025 THE BEST golfers make every drive, chip and putt look easy, but anyone who has ever picked up a club knows that each shot can go wrong in myriad embarrassing ways. Grant Horvat, a skilled amateur golfer , has found fame online by illustrating the chasm between the experts and the weekend crowd. His videos have been watched more than 250m times on YouTube; in one series he meets pros and tries to beat them over a few holes.

To promote the Ryder Cup , a biennial tournament played between teams from America and Europe, the Professional Golfers’ Association (PGA) pitted Mr Horvat, an American, against Tommy Fleetwood, a British pro golfer. They played at Bethpage Black, the fiendishly hard course in New York that will host this year’s contest between September 26th and 28th. (Mr Horvat, who was given a three-hole lead with only five to play, prevailed.)

It is telling that the organisers of one of golf’s most prestigious events enlisted a YouTuber. The sport is hugely popular online: on Instagram more than 40m posts are tagged #golf and on TikTok the hashtag has 125bn views. Broadcast-television ratings for the sport, however, have been in long-term decline. This is partly because the best professional players are split across the PGA Tour and LIV, a rival Saudi-backed tour set up in 2021, which has made formal contests a bit less competitive and exciting. And it is partly because golf videos are a great deal of fun.

A generation of fans is celebrating the best bits of the sport and ignoring the stuffy aspects. Bob Does Sports (pictured top) films camaraderie on the green. The group’s stunts—which often bring together hard liquor and hard shots—have accumulated 285m views on YouTube. Other creators focus on trick shots, thereby emphasising the dexterity and accuracy that top players need, and reminding viewers why golf is so hard to master. In 2021 Matt Scharff, part of Good Good Golf, another group, hit a hole-in-one from 285 yards; the video has been viewed almost 6m times. A duo called Max and Harry try to hit eggs, wine bottles and vases from a distance.

Bryson DeChambeau (pictured above), a two-time US Open winner from California, has got in on the action. Previously considered somewhat humourless for his monomaniacal focus on physics to improve his swing, Mr DeChambeau has reinvented himself online. In his YouTube videos, which have 450m views, he completes some sort of semi-serious challenge (“Can I Break a Public Course Record in One Try?”) or enjoys a round with a famous figure (such as Donald Trump). Mr DeChambeau’s output has made him even more of a superstar.

Golf companies now pay YouTubers and TikTokers, as well as promising young players, to advertise their wares. Kai Trump, the president’s teenage grand-daughter, ticks both boxes: she aspires to be a professional golfer after college and has 3m TikTok followers. She has signed lucrative deals with TaylorMade, an equipment firm, among others.

The golf world is wise to embrace content creators. As any novice player knows, turning up for the first time at a club can be daunting: perhaps the members will chastise you for wearing the wrong shoes or scoff at your shanked drive. By contrast, many of the most popular golf videos on social media make the game feel more welcoming. LIV has made a series of films in which it pairs its pros with YouTube amateurs. The PGA Tour has organised competitions just for influencers, dubbed “Creator Classics”, in the past year.

Yet organisers could make better use of online celebrities. Mr Horvat recently declined an invitation from the PGA Tour to play in one of its events because he would not be able to film his round. The PGA Tour’s broadcast partners need not see YouTubers as competitors. The National Basketball Association, for example, shares footage with select influencers to republish on their own channels.

Indeed, YouTubers and TikTokers may be teeing up golf’s next star. As a child Rory McIlroy, the winner of the Masters in April, would practise chipping balls into his mother’s washing machine. It takes only one viral video for a youngster to get into the swing of things. ■

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He is playing to crowds in Australia, Britain, France and Italy

SKAI ISYOURGOD: the Chinese rapper thrilling global audiences He is playing to crowds in Australia, Britain, France and Italy September 25th 2025 Up-and-coming rappers have long flocked to east London. Dizzee Rascal and Tinchy Stryder grew up in the area and went on to conquer the British music charts. Local venues and radio stations have championed acts from Los Angeles to Lagos. On September 26th and 27th E1, a nightclub, will host another hot new talent. SKAI ISYOURGOD (pictured) will perform hits including “Blueprint Supreme”, “Karma Code” and “Stacks from All Sides”.

Two things are unusual about this. One is that SKAI ISYOURGOD—the wordy stage name of Chen Xukai, a rapper from Huizhou—raps in Chinese. Chinese music has rarely found a wide listenership outside the country, despite China’s huge diaspora, and yet Mr Chen has quickly become a global star. On Spotify , a streaming platform, Mr Chen has 4.6m monthly listeners, by far the most of any Chinese artist, and up from just 400,000 earlier this year. On YouTube Music he has a monthly audience of 350m people. (The figure counts various formats, including videos that feature his songs.) That makes Mr Chen’s reach on the platform greater than that of household names in Western hip-hop, such as Eminem (300m), Kanye West (150m) and Drake (110m).

The other unusual thing is that Mr Chen’s lyrics are often devout instead of dirty, somewhat closer to monk life than thug life. The 27-year-old raps about such subjects as divine remonstrations and earthly trappings, blending hip-hop beats with traditional Chinese instruments. “God reminds me not to lose my kindness in this life,” Mr Chen says in “Karma Code”. By contrast with boastful American rappers, on “Blueprint Supreme” he warns that “People obsessed with wealth have no sense of righteousness.”

China has a longer tradition of hip-hop than perhaps many realise. In the late 1990s and early 2000s underground hip-hop groups, such as Yin Ts’ang, started to emerge; later acts such as Jay Chou, a Taiwanese pop star, incorporated rap verses into their tracks. A turning-point for the genre came in the 2010s, says Zou Sheng, a media scholar at Hong Kong Baptist University. Hip-hop artists started performing on music shows, which propelled rap into the mainstream. The first season of “The Rap of China” in 2017, which featured artists facing each other down in “rap battles”, racked up 2.5bn views online. By 2020 rap was the second-most-streamed genre on NetEase Cloud Music, a Chinese streaming service, second only to pop.

What sets Mr Chen apart from his peers? He studied at a performing-arts school and, since he started releasing music in 2020, has experimented with different sounds. His fans point to his songs’ catchy beats, flowing lyrics and memorable loops. These attributes have also helped the songs go viral on social media and reach audiences who are curious about foreign-language fare. On TikTok there are almost 600,000 videos which feature “Blueprint Supreme” and 460,000 which use “Stacks from All Sides”. Roland, a 39-year-old man from Zurich, does not speak a word of Chinese, but knows the lyrics to “Blueprint Supreme” by heart.

After Britain, Mr Chen will perform to audiences in France, Italy and Australia and he is expected to announce an American tour soon. Though Chinese rap has a way to go before it rivals K-pop and other regional cultural exports, it may be that Mr Chen will encourage curiosity about Chinese hip-hop, as Bad Bunny, a Puerto Rican rapper, did with Spanish-language songs. For his part, Mr Chen seems confident he is up to the task. On “Green in Drought” he portrays himself as the man enlivening his country’s hip-hop scene: “SKAI ISYOURGOD brings green belts to plant in the cultural desert.” ■

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How a Harvard polymath thinks people think

What naked emperors and Super Bowl ads have in common How a Harvard polymath thinks people think September 18th 2025 It is the ultimate feel-good democratic fable. An emperor buys a new suit of clothes from two conmen, who tell him it is invisible to fools. Not wanting to seem foolish, the emperor and his courtiers all praise its exquisite tailoring. When the emperor parades in the street, the crowds applaud his elegance. Until a little boy points out the obvious: the monarch is naked.

Readers have long loved Hans Christian Andersen’s story. It reminds them of the vanity and fallibility of rulers. But there is another way of understanding it, argues Steven Pinker , a psychologist at Harvard University. The story “draws on a momentous logical distinction” between private and common knowledge. “By blurting out what every onlooker could see within earshot of the others, [the boy] ensured that they now knew that everyone else knew what they knew, [and] that everyone knew that everyone knew…And that changed their relationship to the emperor, from obsequious deference to ridicule.”

Common knowledge—knowing that others know something, and that they know we know—is powerful. Thinking about it “illuminates many enigmas of our public affairs and personal lives”, Professor Pinker argues, in this fizzing, erudite book.

It can topple dictatorships. On December 21st 1989 Nicolae Ceausescu , Romania’s despot, was addressing a large crowd, many of whom were state employees bused in to wave pro-regime flags. Suddenly, someone jeered. Then the jeers spread, and soon the whole crowd was jeering. Though the censors hastily cut the live television feed, the whole country realised that practically everyone hated the dictator. Four days later Ceausescu was executed by firing squad, and Romania was free.

Common knowledge can set off more mundane events, too. In 1973 Johnny Carson , a popular television host, warned that a toilet-paper shortage was looming. This was false when he said it, but quickly became true. Some people believed Carson. Others thought that others would believe him, and rushed to stock up on toilet paper before everyone else did.

The episode fixed in the public mind the idea that toilet paper runs out during emergencies, which may be why it happened again during the covid-19 pandemic. The virus did not noticeably disrupt supply chains of loo paper, but people panic-bought it because they assumed other people would. Shops ended the frenzy by putting up signs limiting people to three packages. The point was to “signal to customers that their fellow customers could not strip the shelves bare”.

Common knowledge allows co-ordination, for good or ill. Fiat currency relies on it: dollars have value because everyone knows that other people value them. And property rights “hinge not on a judgment of who ‘deserves’ a resource, but on common knowledge of who is recognised as having the right to keep and use it”.

On the bad side of the ledger, the single largest motive for young men murdering each other is a fight over something trivial, such as an insult or a jostle. Why? Because young toughs need a reputation for being someone you don’t mess with. If they publicly back down, they invite their peers to bully them. This is why, studies find, an argument is less likely to turn violent if no witnesses are present.

Something similar applies to countries. Surprisingly, “to the many people who think countries fight over resources”, most big wars between 1648 and 2008 were over “standing” or “revenge”. Donald Trump has failed to end the conflict in Ukraine partly because he imagines it is about real estate, rather than Vladimir Putin’s desire to “restore the greatness of Russian civilisation and rebuke its humiliation in the eyes of the West”.

Social-media pile-ons are vicious because they take place in public. What terrifies the speech police “is not that a dangerous idea might be thought, or even expressed, but that it might become common knowledge”. This is why heretics who break taboos publicly are punished publicly. It may also be why most American college faculty under 35 favour shutting down speakers they disapprove of, and a fifth support students who would use violence to this end. Professor Pinker is appalled. The murder of Charlie Kirk on September 10th showed why he is right to be.

Advertisers and spin doctors deftly exploit common knowledge. The value of a Super Bowl spot is not just that millions will see it; it is also that viewers know that millions of others have seen it. So the ads are seldom for goods consumed in private, like breakfast cereal. Rather, they are for brands people will buy if they think other people think them cool, such as cars or clothes, or products whose value depends on many people using them. The Super Bowl in 2022 was known as the “Crypto Bowl”, because so many cryptocurrency exchanges touted their wares. Many viewers then bought crypto because, after hearing Matt Damon, an actor, whisper “Fortune favours the brave” in a sexy, masculine voice, they thought other people would.

Autocrats have grown more skilled at disrupting the spread of common knowledge. In the second half of the 20th century non-violent protest movements were twice as likely to succeed as violent revolts. As a scriptwriter has Mahatma Gandhi say in a film from 1982, “100,000 Englishmen simply cannot control 350m Indians if the Indians refuse to co-operate.”

However, in the past two decades the success rate of non-violent protests has fallen (though they are still more effective than the violent sort). Oppressive governments have devised smarter forms of censorship. China, for example, not only has copious high-tech tools to shape the national conversation, but uses them judiciously. Instead of silencing complaints, which give the regime valuable information about which policy to fix and which official to purge, it stamps hardest on information that helps protesters co-ordinate their activities, such as notices of when and where rallies are to take place.

People are highly sensitive to common knowledge. Professor Pinker speculates that it is one reason why language evolved, since it generates it so cheaply. It also explains some odd human habits. We blush so others will know we are sorry, even if we can’t bring ourselves to apologise. We avoid eye contact to avoid embarrassment. Mormons joke: “Protestants don’t recognise the pope. Mormons don’t recognise each other in the liquor store.” If they pretend not to have seen each other, they can avoid acknowledging that they have been caught breaking the rules.

No other animal comes close to the human capacity for surmising what is going on in someone else’s head—a fact that once saved this reviewer’s life. He was walking through the bush in Zimbabwe when he chanced on two lions mating. The male was audibly annoyed at the interruption. The sensible guide ordered us not to run away, since lions see fleeing animals as food. The lions, concluding that we were not food, slunk moodily off. We survived because we know how lions think and they don’t know how we do. It’s good to be human—even if, from time to time, we have to remind some of our fellow humans that they are only human, too. ■

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They tell stories of pumas, prisoners and lost poems

The best recent novels to read this autumn They tell stories of pumas, prisoners and lost poems September 18th 2025 At the end of 2024 a survey by YouGov found that one of Americans’ top resolutions for the coming year was to read more . By this point, however, most will have given up on that aspiration, along with their dreams of perfectly toned muscles or a completed list of DIY projects. But all is not lost as the end of the year draws closer. We have rounded up eight of our favourite novels published in recent months. Among our choices are a number of slim volumes: perfect for any determinedly bookish folk who still have an end-of-year reading target to hit.

Drayton and Mackenzie. By Alexander Starritt.

Two very different men, James and Roland, meet as young adults. Both seek success, first as management consultants , then as entrepreneurs in the field of green energy. As they navigate private pain and the turmoil of the global financial crash of 2007-09, they increasingly value their friendship. Both characters are expertly drawn in this funny, touching story.

Dusk. By Robbie Arnott.

A puma roams the Tasmanian highlands, killing sheep and their shepherds. Iris and Floyd, twins and social outcasts, join the hunt in hope of securing a bounty. This brings them into contact with another tracker, Patrick, who is cunning and dangerous. This is a propulsive novel of survival and betrayal, enriched by arresting depictions of nature.

Flashlight. By Susan Choi.

One night, while on holiday in Japan, ten-year-old Louisa and her father go for a walk along a beach. The next day she is found half-dead and her parent has disappeared. At home in America, Louisa and her mother attempt to make sense of the mystery that rocked their lives. A meditation on identity and displacement that is full of twists and turns.

The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny. By Kiran Desai.

An engrossing story of two young Indians trying to make it in America. Sonia is an aspiring novelist in Vermont; Sunny is a journalist in New York. They meet and fall in love, but the question is whether they are able to stay together, find happiness and feel “life growing bigger”. This book is grand in sweep—it traverses continents and features a large cast of characters—yet satisfyingly intimate.

Seascraper. By Benjamin Wood.

This atmospheric novel chronicles two days in the life of Thomas Flett, a young Englishman who works as a “shanker”, scouring a desolate stretch of beach for shrimp. When Edgar Acheson, an American film director, arrives to woo his mother, Thomas sees an opportunity to leave his hardscrabble existence behind and pursue his dream of being a folk singer . But is the visitor all he claims to be?

Sympathy Tower Tokyo. By Qudan Rie. Translated by Jesse Kirkwood.

The winner of Japan’s prestigious Akutagawa prize, this novel is set in an imagined future and revolves around Sara Machina, an architect tasked with designing a skyscraper in which convicted criminals can live in comfort. Sara, a victim of sexual assault, is uncomfortable with the commission and seeks guidance from a chatbot. A bold interrogation of crime, punishment and redemption.

Vulture. By Phoebe Greenwood.

This scathing send-up of war reporting follows Sara, a young English freelance reporter, as she covers conflict in Gaza in 2012. Frustrated by “monkey journalism”, and determined to make a name for herself by writing a hard-edged front-page story, she ignores the warnings of her translator and fixer and goes recklessly in search of an exclusive. Soon she is dangerously out of her depth. A supremely accomplished debut full of wit and bite.

What We Can Know. By Ian McEwan.

In 2014 a celebrated poet reads his latest work, dedicated to his wife, at her birthday party. Then the poem goes missing. In 2119 an academic trawls through archives in his quest to track down the lost poem. His discovery yields an account of passion, murder and guilt. Ian McEwan combines a post-apocalyptic dystopia, a love story and a thrilling mystery to great effect: this is an inventive, exquisitely written book. ■

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The show, about a love triangle involving two brothers, is a global hit

People are going pretty mad for “The Summer I Turned Pretty” The show, about a love triangle involving two brothers, is a global hit September 18th 2025 ISABEL “BELLY” Conklin (Lola Tung) was in a tricky situation. Should she have married Jeremiah Fisher (Gavin Casalegno), her childhood best friend? Or should she have reunited with his brother, Conrad (Christopher Briney), whom she dated as a teenager? That was the plot of the third and final season of “The Summer I Turned Pretty” (“TSITP”, pictured), a hit show on Amazon Prime Video. On September 17th fans found out which, if either, of the Fisher brothers Belly chose.

The show’s premise is faintly preposterous. But its popularity is real. “TSITP” has topped Amazon’s charts in America, Australia, Britain, Canada, France and Germany, among other countries. The programme has become a sensation on social media, with legions of fans posting memes and boasting of their affiliation to #TeamConrad or #TeamJeremiah. (It seems it is the quiet, brooding Conrad who has won more viewers’ affection: his hashtag has 13.5bn views on TikTok, whereas flirty, fun-loving Jeremiah has only 5.3bn.)

Devotees have gathered in person for themed “TSITP” dinners and “watch parties”. Amazon has hosted public screenings. Parrot Analytics, a data firm, has found that “demand” for the final season—measured by episode views, mentions on social media and more—has been 116 times that of the average romance series.

Love triangles have long made for enticing stories. Literature is full of them: Helen, Menelaus and Paris in Greek mythology; Catherine, Heathcliff and Edgar in “Wuthering Heights”; Anna, Alexei and Vronsky in “Anna Karenina” . This is because narratives require conflict—and they require characters to make choices that will change their fate in some way. A protagonist with divided romantic loyalties, whose decision will determine their future happiness, ticks both of those boxes.

And the love triangle is a flexible dramatic device. Paramours, faced with the prospect of losing their beloved, may behave in strange, violent, noble or entertaining ways. Depending on the circumstances, the situation can be humorous (“Bridget Jones’s Diary”), tragic (“The Great Gatsby”) or poignant ( “Casablanca” ).

Screenwriters have fallen back in love with love triangles, for there has been a spate of such stories of late. In “Materialists”, a romantic comedy, a professional matchmaker called Lucy (Dakota Johnson) finds herself in a love triangle with John (Chris Evans), her hard-up ex-boyfriend, and Harry (Pedro Pascal), a charming millionaire. In “Eternity”, a forthcoming movie, Joan (Elizabeth Olsen) must choose whether to spend the afterlife with her first husband (Callum Turner), who died at war, or the man she spent the rest of her life with (Miles Teller). Other shows have emerged in the mould of “TSITP”, such as Netflix’s “My Life With The Walter Boys”, also involving two brothers.

But why has “TSITP”, in particular, seduced so many viewers? In part it is because of the salaciousness of the set-up, as well as the story’s luxurious setting. (Most of the action takes place at Cousins Beach, a fictional coastal resort.) “TSITP” is also based on a popular series of books. Jenny Han ’s trilogy was a bestseller when it was published in 2009-11; the adaptation has boosted sales again. Fans dissect the differences between the books and the series, debating characters’ decisions or adding narration to scenes.

As a result, the show has managed to tap into online fan culture in the way that “Twilight” did before it. “Twihards”, as enthusiasts of Stephenie Meyer’s fantasy saga called themselves, were fiercely #TeamJacob or #TeamEdward. Fans felt that who you supported said something about who you were. The same is true of “TSITP”. “If you’re team Jeremiah,” one young woman posted on Instagram, “we can’t be friends.”

What is interesting is that, though it is a teen drama, “TSITP” is popular with adults. Its main audience is women aged between 25 and 54. That has not stopped fans from behaving like children: Amazon has asked fans of “TSITP” to “act normal online” and stop hurling insults—and even death threats—at actors who play characters they do not like. Viewers have lost their hearts to Jeremiah and Conrad. It seems they have lost their heads, too. ■

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The row spotlights the role of art in a time of war

Should a controversial Russian soprano sing in London? The row spotlights the role of art in a time of war September 18th 2025 Does it matter how good she was? Because Anna Netrebko was very good indeed. At the Royal Opera House in London on September 11th, the Russian-born soprano sang the title role in “Tosca”—Puccini’s tale of a diva who becomes entangled with a cruel, faithless tyrant in a time of war. On stage, Ms Netrebko’s voice was gloriously rich and delicate. Outside, a protester in a red-spattered robe held up a placard as another played dead at her feet: “While Netrebko sings, Ukraine bleeds.”

One of the world’s top opera singers, Ms Netrebko (pictured) was shunned by Western venues after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022 because of her past links to the Kremlin. Now the Royal Opera, and other European houses, have invited her back (she remains blacklisted by the Metropolitan Opera in New York). To the protesters and other critics, this a betrayal, which rewards a collaborator and launders bloodshed. Art and politics cannot be separated, they insist. The truth of the Netrebko affair is more nuanced, but also simpler and sadder.

Yes, her talent matters, say both sides in an inevitably emotional debate. She wouldn’t be appearing if she weren’t a world-class artist, say her backers. To those who object, her superstar status is part of the problem. She is a glitzy decoy for a murderous regime, they say, and a tool of cultural propaganda. The odd-sounding implication is that hiring a mediocre Russian soprano would be acceptable, but a stellar one is not.

Do her political allegiances matter? Yes, both sides agree; personal morality is a consideration alongside art. But again they draw different conclusions. Ms Netrebko has condemned the war, but opponents doubt her sincerity and focus on her previous record, which understandably angers many Ukrainians. After Russia fomented a conflict in eastern Ukraine in 2014, she posed for a picture with a separatist flag (later claiming that she didn’t grasp its meaning). She has received awards from Vladimir Putin and made gauchely flattering remarks about him. She still hasn’t criticised him directly.

Of course she hasn’t, say her defenders. Denouncing him was always perilous, and has become only more so as he has ratcheted his autocratic system into a totalitarian one. Her comments about the war alone have incurred allegations of treachery. As for her earlier association with the Kremlin: it is hard for stars to avoid the touch of the tentacular Russian state. She lives in Austria and hasn’t been back to Russia since the start of the war.

Another, wholly legitimate worry informs the furore: the fear of Ukraine fatigue, and that the attention and support of countries like Britain might wane even as the Russian bombardment intensifies. Thus the urgency to call out any perceived backsliding. But the passage of time recasts the dispute in another way, too.

When the invasion began, arts impresarios, like others in the public eye, hurriedly disavowed Russians seen to be tied to the regime. The boycott was partly motivated by natural outrage and moral revulsion. It was also a case of crisis-management PR by scrambling executives. To a harsh observer, there was a trace of self-aggrandisement in the idea that creative types in the West had a say in geopolitics.

Three and a half years on, the exigencies of war are clearer. It runs on shells and drones and Patriot missiles and conscripts. Mr Putin has shrugged off hundreds of thousands of casualties and his country’s ostracism; the stalled careers of some Russian artists have not swayed him (many have anyway gone into exile or been jailed). He won’t be emboldened by “Tosca”—he is tragically bold already. For their part, opera-lovers are unlikely to revise their view of him after seeing it. As children are dug out nightly from the rubble, most in the West know what and who he is.

“I lived for art,” a dauntless Tosca laments in this gory, scintillating new production’s showstopping aria. “I never harmed a living soul.” In real life, Ms Netrebko is plainly not a heroic dissident. But that seems a lofty standard for an opera singer, and she isn’t an ideologue or warmonger either. She hasn’t abased herself like Valery Gergiev, a Russian maestro and her one-time mentor who obliges his president with musical propaganda stunts.

Let her sing; banning her is probably unfair. More than that, it is pointless. The awful war isn’t a contest of vibes, memes, placards or operas. It is waged in steel, money, oil and blood. In the ghastly scheme of things, where Ms Netrebko performs doesn’t really matter. ■

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The actor used his fame to promote environmental causes and independent film-making

Robert Redford was a new kind of movie star The actor used his fame to promote environmental causes and independent film-making September 18th 2025 “I’M ROY HOBBS—your new right-fielder.” Standing in a baseball dugout, wearing a leather jacket over an Oxford shirt and a tie, Hobbs has crow’s feet and a lined face. He looks a good decade or two older than the rest of the New York Knights, as the team’s manager notices: “Fella, you don’t start playing ball at your age. You retire.” But when Hobbs changes into his kit, he is transformed. When he takes the field, his swing is fluid; he moves with efficient, feline grace.

Robert Redford was approaching 50 when he played Hobbs in “The Natural” (1984). He had been a film star for nearly two decades. What is a movie star? It is not the same thing as a great actor. John Turturro and Frances McDormand, for instance, routinely deliver terrific performances, but could probably walk down the street without being recognised. Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson and Tom Cruise could not, but nobody is waiting for their “Hamlet” (or at their age, “King Lear” ).

Movie stars are always themselves: they do not disappear into roles so much as they put their characters on their shoulders and carry them around. Mr Redford, who died on September 16th at the age of 89, fitted that mould perfectly. Viewers believe in Hobbs because he is Robert Redford, who retained his boyish charm into middle age.

Had the film remained more faithful to Bernard Malamud’s novel, in which Hobbs is a vain, embittered failure, Mr Redford could not credibly have played him, because Mr Redford’s characters rarely failed. At the end of “The Sting” (1973), he sat up, having apparently been shot, and wiped the fake blood from his mouth. “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” (1969) ended on a held shot of him and Butch, guns blazing, as they faced impossible odds. Even “ All Is Lost ” (2013), one of his final films—in which he played a man lost at sea, was the only cast member and had almost no lines—ended with him grabbing an outstretched hand as his boat burned above him.

He was also a reliable romantic lead, especially early in his career. His breakout role was as a conservative lawyer in “Barefoot in the Park” in 1967, opposite a free-spirited Jane Fonda. Six years later he shone as another star-crossed lover in “The Way We Were”: he played the part of an easy-going WASP while Barbra Streisand was a Marxist activist. Mr Redford’s best romantic role came in 1985 when he portrayed Denys Finch Hatton, a big-game hunter, opposite Meryl Streep’s strong-willed aristocrat in “Out of Africa”.

Sydney Pollack, who cast Mr Redford in “The Way We Were”, “Out of Africa” and “Three Days of the Condor”, the paradigmatic mid-1970s paranoid thriller, compared him to “old-fashioned movie stars who were…heroic in a kind of understated way”. Unlike some of his contemporaries, such as Al Pacino and Robert De Niro, Mr Redford did not scream or shout. His most marked characteristic as a star was a certain reliable steadiness, which is not terribly exciting on its own but made him a good foil. “The Sting” and “Butch Cassidy” paired him with Paul Newman, who was a decade older, and whose garrulous charm combined perfectly with Mr Redford’s laconic watchfulness. Mr Redford played the older half in “All the President’s Men” (1976) opposite a prickly Dustin Hoffman.

Mr Redford worked steadily, but acclaim for his acting eluded him: he received just one Oscar nomination, for “The Sting”. He earned more as a director, winning an Oscar in 1981 for “Ordinary People”, a haunting portrayal of a family that falls apart after one son dies and another tries to kill himself. In all he directed nine films, none of them runaway hits, most of them the sort of thoughtful dramas that win dutiful praise from critics, but fade with time.

His most enduring legacy, therefore, may be his championing of independent film-making and environmental causes. Born in Santa Monica, he took a dislike to Los Angeles and expensive, formulaic Hollywood films. He bought land in Utah, where his first wife grew up. He built a ranch and, in 1981, founded the Sundance Institute to help independent film-makers hone their work. Four years later the institute took over a small film festival in Park City; it became the world’s leading festival for independent films and hosted the premieres of movies by Steven Soderbergh, Quentin Tarantino, Guy Ritchie and Sofia Coppola , among others.

Mr Redford fought for land conservation in Utah and beyond, becoming a trustee of the Natural Resources Defence Council. He campaigned for the Alaska National Interest Conservation Act, passed in 1980, which protected swathes of park land in Alaska. He fought against the construction of a huge coal-fired power plant on land in Utah that is now part of the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. In his wake other Hollywood actors, including Leonardo DiCaprio and Woody Harrelson, have used their fame to fight for environmental causes.

Unlike many film types, Mr Redford aged gracefully; his loping walk suited an elder statesman of the American West. Unusually for an actor known for his looks, he was good-humoured about his physical decline. “I was blessed to look well and retain a youthful look, but that was just genes,” he said. He was disappointed when critics focused on his wrinkles at the expense of everything else. Mr Redford was a movie star. But he wanted “to be permitted to be human”, on screen and off it. ■

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Despite its clumsy exposition, “The Secret of Secrets” is a romp

Dan Brown offers another silly mash-up of fact and fiction Despite its clumsy exposition, “The Secret of Secrets” is a romp September 11th 2025 “FACT” proclaims the opening page. “All artwork, artefacts, symbols and documents in this novel are real.” It goes on: “All experiments” are “true to life”. Finally, it adds: “All organisations in this novel exist.” For the reader this list is at once intellectually exciting—for who is not partial to a real-world thriller with added artworks—and grammatically a little troubling. Because surely that is not one, singular “FACT” but three “FACTS”? As a piece of preamble it is great. As a piece of English writing, it feels a little off.

But that is hardly important, because this book, “The Secret of Secrets”, is by Dan Brown. For the past 20-odd years he has specialised in novels that offer facts which are just about right and prose which is just a bit wrong. He has done splendidly well out of that formula. His books, including titles such as “The Da Vinci Code”, “Angels and Demons” and “Inferno”, have sold over 250m copies, been made into films and translated into 56 languages. A recent YouGov poll of the most famous fiction books put “The Da Vinci Code” at 12, far above Charlotte Brontë’s “Jane Eyre” (73rd) and George Orwell’s “Nineteen Eighty-Four ” (81st). Mr Brown matters.

He matters despite his use of phrases such as, “His eyes went white, like a shark about to attack.” Over the years critics have delighted in pointing out such literary flaws. There have been parodies (“Renowned author Dan Brown woke up in his luxurious four-poster bed in his expensive $10m house…”), hatchet jobs (“Bilge” sniffed one) and even a “Dan Brown Sequel Generator” (“Plug in a city and a sect, and our computer will do the rest”).

Though many laugh at Mr Brown, lots of readers take his books very seriously indeed. The novels may contain all those FACTS, but they also interweave them with a lot of total bunkum. His books both use conspiracy theories—about the Illuminati, or the Freemasons, or whether Jesus married, or albino monks—and spawn them. Google the words “was Mary…” and the search engine volunteers “… Magdalene married to Jesus?” You less read Mr Brown than triangulate him—book in one hand, phone in the other—to verify each fact.

The latest book does not disappoint on that score. As it opens, Robert Langdon, the “world-renowned scholar of religious symbology” (FACT: don’t even bother Googling that one) is in Prague with his new love, the “internationally acclaimed noetic scientist” (FACT: a real job that simply sounds fake) where they bump into a neuroscientist (FACT: no one in Dan Brown’s books ever seems to work as an accountant) and head out to drink cocktails, argue about the problem of consciousness and use words like “metaphysical”.

And, at first, everything seems peachy. Langdon has a nice time staying in the swanky Four Seasons hotel; his lover has a nice time giving the sort of lectures that receive standing ovations; everyone thinks helpful expository thoughts, rendered in italics. “I’m alone on Charles Bridge,” thinks Langdon when he is alone on Charles Bridge. “I am a neuroscientist,” thinks the neuroscientist. “I am a healthy 49-year-old woman,” thinks a healthy 49-year-old woman. “I may have made a mistake forking out $38 for this book,” thinks the reader who has just forked out $38 for this book.

But then the action gets going. By page 34, world-renowned symbologist Langdon has lost his lover, gained a mortal enemy and jumped, fully clothed, into the Vltava river. Soon the pages are awash with yet more police, kidnappings, passwords, puzzles, ancient whatsits, cryptic this-es, Christian thats, a Golem (don’t ask) and an awful lot of increasingly baffling initials— CIA , ESP, SUV, ÚZSI, WTF?

At the heart of this book—as with all of Mr Brown’s books—is an idea. “The Da Vinci Code” was based on the idea that evidence of Jesus’s “marriage” can be seen in Leonardo da Vinci’s painting “The Last Supper”. “Inferno” seemed based on the idea that novels about arty Italian stuff sell well. This one is based on the idea that the world is about to experience a sea change in its understanding of the nature of consciousness . That might sound like a lot to crowbar into a lighthearted thriller, but not for Mr Brown, who simply has a character say: “We are about to experience a sea change in our understanding of…the nature of consciousness.”

The precise change mooted is the idea that the human mind does not merely observe reality: it in some way creates it. If that sounds odd, this book argues it is not as alien or new as it might sound. A similar idea underlies many spiritual and inspirational teachings. Langdon helpfully lists some: “Buddha: With our thoughts, we create the world.” And “Jesus: Whatever you ask for in prayer, it will be yours.” And, he adds: “Business guru Robin Sharma…: Everything is created twice; first in the mind, and then in reality.” (FACT: that last one might have been a bit of an error of tone.)

Anyway, whatever, who cares, as the reader is soon off again, racing through Prague , past the possible evidence of villainy and the clear evidence of an awful lot of diligent research. Readers dash up the Petřín Tower (pausing from life-or-death pursuit merely to note that it was built “in 1891” with “an open-lattice construction of riveted steel beams and supports”), past Prague’s Astronomical Tower (whose “172-step ascent” rewards visitors with “stunning vistas as well as an absorbing exhibit of 18th-century astronomical instruments”) and along so many accurately transcribed foreign names—Křižovnická Street, Tržiště Street—that this feels less like an action thriller than an A-Z in pacey prose. Mr Brown may have a problem with critics. Diacritics he has completely nailěd.

Critics will lay into this book. But it romps along and, in truth, its exposition is part of its appeal. Mr Brown takes things people want to understand but don’t—Italian art, Christian history, stuff in Latin—and explains them in a way that they can. For all the nonsense, there is an appealing autodidactic earnestness to his books and their less-than-riveting asides about rivets. It is hard to remember now, but reviews of “The Da Vinci Code” were glowing—an “exhilaratingly brainy thriller”, gushed the New York Times. Those days are gone; the world feels less naive. But in this darker new world it is somehow comforting to settle down with the lumbering, world-renowned Robert Langdon, who, after all, is world-renowned for a reason. ■

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He is faster over 200 metres than Usain Bolt was at the same age

Gout Gout, a 17-year-old sprinter, may be athletics’ new mega-star He is faster over 200 metres than Usain Bolt was at the same age September 11th 2025 Armand “Mondo” Duplantis, a Swedish pole vaulter, has broken the world record three times this year, reaching 6.29 metres. In July Beatrice Chebet, a Kenyan athlete, became the fastest woman to ever run five kilometres (she did so in 13 minutes and 58 seconds). Noah Lyles, the defending Olympic 100-metre champion, is running into form. These stars will chase more records and glory at the World Athletics Championships , which begin on September 13th in Tokyo. But all eyes will be on a 17-year-old wunderkind called Gout Gout. The Australian sprinter is making his senior competitive debut in Tokyo.

Mr Gout is already familiar to athletics aficionados, who have been stunned by videos of his races in local and regional tournaments. Last year Mr Gout covered 200 metres in just 20.04 seconds, making him the fastest 16-year-old in history and the fastest Australian over that distance. (He broke a national record that had stood for 56 years.) In July this year he bettered that benchmark again, bringing his time down to 20.02 seconds. All sporting prodigies burst onto the scene, but few have done so with such velocity.

Mr Gout combines speed with a distinctive, upright running style. The teenager seems to leap rather than sprint across the track. He has an unusually long and strong Achilles tendon, his team says, which gives him the elasticity to stride over metres. “You see him run and you just know there’s something special,” asserts James Templeton, Mr Gout’s manager.

How special, exactly? Mr Gout is already being compared to Usain Bolt , the winner of eight Olympic gold medals and the holder of world records in both the 100 and 200 metres. The Jamaican star, who retired in 2017, has said that Mr Gout “looks like a young me”. Judging from the numbers, though, Mr Gout is already ahead. At 16, Mr Bolt’s fastest time over 200 metres was a tenth of a second slower than Mr Gout’s (see chart).

Mr Gout’s entourage is keen to temper expectations. The athlete continues to balance school and training, which is partly why he will skip the 100-metre race and run only the 200 metres at the World Championships. Interviews with the media have been carefully managed. (The Economist was denied one.) The goal in Tokyo is to make the final, but also to have fun, says Mr Templeton. The real target is the Olympic Games in Los Angeles in 2028. Four years after that, an even more tantalising prospect awaits: the Olympics in Brisbane, Mr Gout’s home town. He will be 24 then—close to the age when sprinters reach their peak and around the same age that Mr Bolt was when he set his records.

Those may be long-term goals, but the pressure and scrutiny have already begun. Adidas, a sportswear firm, has swooped in to sign Mr Gout on a multi-million-dollar deal. More than 10,000 people flocked to a small meet in Melbourne in March to watch him run a 200-metre race. It was the biggest crowd for a one-day event in more than 20 years. So far Mr Gout has shrugged off the attention. He still lives at home—where he shares a room with his brother—and drives a Hyundai i30 rather than a flashy sports car.

Mr Gout’s success has brought out the worst in some of his compatriots. In Australia, as elsewhere, immigration is a contentious subject. (In August Bob Katter, a politician also from Queensland, went viral for threatening to punch a journalist who brought up Mr Katter’s own Lebanese heritage.) Mr Gout’s parents migrated from South Sudan to Brisbane in 2005 and the athlete was born two years later. Mr Gout has received racist comments online; some have erroneously suggested he is not really Australian. Yet to most sports-mad Aussies, he is already a hero. Mr Gout speaks with an undeniable Queensland twang and has displayed perhaps the most Australian trait of all: winning.

His arrival on the global stage is good for athletics, too. The sport is struggling for relevance and attention outside the Olympics. To fix that, investors have been pouring money into new events with glitzy formats. A new star will surely boost those efforts: few things invigorate a sport and excite fans as much as the breakout of a young marvel. Mr Gout, like Mr Bolt before him, may end up running the show. ■

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The Founding Fathers would be appalled

America’s constitution is too hard to change The Founding Fathers would be appalled September 11th 2025 Donald Trump’s administration has imprisoned immigrants for their political opinions and killed alleged drug smugglers without trial. The president has asserted: “I have the right to do anything I want to do.” One thing he has not tried is to amend the constitution. Perhaps he recognises the long odds: almost 12,000 amendments have been proposed since the constitution replaced the Articles of Confederation in 1789 and only 27—less than 0.25%—have been ratified.

In “We the People”, Jill Lepore, a professor at Harvard and a writer for the New Yorker, argues that America’s constitution has become an anachronism because it is, contrary to the founders’ wishes, too hard to change. Thomas Jefferson favoured constitutional conventions to remake the document every 19 years. In a letter to James Madison, he doubted that “One generation of men has a right to bind another.”

Madison feared the destabilising potential of frequent conventions, so offered a different solution: Article V, which allows the constitution to be amended with the approval of two-thirds of both houses of Congress and three-quarters of the states. That hurdle was surmountable in the 1780s, but it has given America “one of the lowest amendment rates in the world”, Professor Lepore notes.

The “sleeping giant” of Article V has sprung to life during periods of war and upheaval—most notably to abolish slavery and expand rights after the civil war—but has remained largely dormant otherwise. No amendments were ratified between 1804 and 1865 or 1870 and 1913. It was last meaningfully amended in 1971, when the voting age was lowered to 18.

The demise of what Professor Lepore calls a “philosophy of amendment” leaves America stuck with the electoral college, a relic that has made presidents of five popular-vote losers. It freezes life tenure for federal judges, an American oddity that entrenches and politicises the judiciary. And it means no fix for Wyomingites enjoying 68 times more influence in the Senate than Californians.

Professor Lepore laments these encrustations, adding that “the prospects for halting or reversing climate change are dim” without a re-energised Article V. Yet “We the People” does not reckon with the equally profound dangers of too much slack in the constitutional fabric. Brazil’s constitution has been jolted by more than 130 amendments since 1988, bringing bloated budgets and a loss of public confidence. Mexico’s 737 amendments in a century have engendered similar peril.

Germany’s constitution, with some 60 amendments since 1949, may be an example of the sweet spot St Thomas Aquinas was thinking of 750 years ago when he wrote that the costs of disruption must be balanced against the potential “benefit to be derived” from a change in law.

As amending their constitution has become functionally impossible, Americans have turned to courts to reinterpret it. This makes the document contingent on the whims of whoever occupies the nine seats on America’s highest court. Both liberals and conservatives have had their moment. Under Earl Warren, the chief justice in the 1950s and 60s, the Supreme Court issued decisions expanding civil liberties. More recently, “originalism”—the interpretive method favoured by today’s right-wing supermajority but not, Professor Lepore argues, by America’s founders—has mobilised a conservative counter-revolution.

Americans may one day “learn again to amend”, Professor Lepore writes, or even devise an entirely new document. Yet the book sidesteps how that might happen. And it lacks guidelines for what should replace a constitution that, despite its increasing crustiness, has given America the flexibility to transform itself from 13 states to 50, from a slave-owning society to a free one, from a continental to a global power. “We the People” is not a road map for repair. But it offers an arresting chronicle of Americans striving—if sometimes failing—to remake their republic. ■

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The trend may reflect the growing gulf between young men and women

Why female pop stars are lambasting mediocre men The trend may reflect the growing gulf between young men and women September 11th 2025 Judging by her lyrics, Sabrina Carpenter has mixed feelings towards the opposite sex. She finds her paramours attractive, exciting—and disappointing. In “Manchild”, the lead single on her new album, she complains her lover is “stupid”, “slow” and “useless”. She asks, mocking a caveman, “Why so sexy if so dumb? / And how survive the Earth so long?”

“Manchild” is not the only track on the record to lambast mediocre men: time and again Ms Carpenter takes aim at blokes who can barely “do the dishes” or “assemble a chair from IKEA ”. The American pop star suggests her beaux are dumb, as when, in “Sugar Talking”, she says: “You’re having these epiphanies, big word for a real small mind.” Some do not understand basic grammar. In “Slim Pickins”, a hit from last year, she complains about a man who “doesn’t even know the difference between there, their and they are”.

A number of young female pop stars are combining catchy melodies with grumbles about sub-par men. Chappell Roan, an American singer-songwriter, laments in “Super Graphic Ultra Modern Girl” that “this man wouldn’t dance” and “didn’t ask a single question”. “If He Wanted To He Would” by Perrie, a British musician, contains the acerbic lyrics: “His sense of vanity got you out here doing charity / He thinks he needs a lover, what he really needs is therapy.” In “Training Season”, a hit song of 2024, Dua Lipa warns her potential suitors that she does not want to “have to teach you how to love me right”. Male listeners might wonder if they are expected to be telepathic.

Charlie Harding of “Switched On Pop”, a podcast, says that these songs reflect the evolution of songwriting. Since the late 1960s—when artists such as Joni Mitchell started writing about personal experiences—lyricists have moved away from universal themes towards confessional storytelling. Female pop stars began belting out anthems about obnoxious, selfish men. Carly Simon, an American singer, offered the brilliantly paradoxical lyric: “You’re so vain, you probably think this song is about you.” Pop stars from Beyoncé to Taylor Swift have crooned about bad boys breaking their hearts. Country singers including Dolly Parton and Carrie Underwood have reflected on infidelity.

Yet this current wave of songs reflects a social shift. Women in the rich world are enjoying more economic power, meaning they can be choosier about their partners. Many are willing to hold out for someone who will do the washing up and put the toilet seat down. According to Pew Research Centre, 35% of American women between the ages of 25 and 54 were single in 2023, up from 29% in 1990. Across many measures, from education to politics, young men and women are drifting apart . Nearly 60% of American university graduates are women. Given that most women prefer not to date or marry down, for many it can be, as Ms Carpenter says, slim pickings.

Men are pushing back, at least musically. In August the top album on the Billboard 200 chart was “I’m the Problem” by Morgan Wallen, an American country singer. “If I’m so awful,” he sings, “then why’d you stick around this long?” ■

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An exhibition and a new collection point to his enduring appeal

The ironic ubiquity of William Morris’s prints An exhibition and a new collection point to his enduring appeal September 11th 2025 COINS, a cat figurine, a radio, a shopping trolley and an upholstered seat from a nuclear submarine. “Morris Mania”, a new exhibition at the William Morris Gallery in London, is an amusing celebration of the English artist’s ubiquitous prints. More than a century after his death, his influence on interior design remains powerful: revenues for Morris & Co, the firm he co-founded in 1861, reached £18m ($23m) in the year ending January 2025.

Even if you do not know anything about Morris, you will know his work. You may not own a “Strawberry Thief” mug or a “Golden Lily” rug, but someone in your life probably does. You may have seen his designs on screen, too. Sarah Mead Leonard, an American art historian, runs social-media accounts dedicated to spotting Morris prints on sets. They crop up in everything from chic period dramas such as “Phantom Thread” to unglamorous competition shows such as “Taskmaster”.

The prevalence of Morris’s prints is rather ironic, given his principles. He was bitterly opposed to mass production. In 1851, aged just 17, he was taken by his parents to the Great Exhibition in London , a showcase of industrial technology and design. The teenager refused to enter.

Morris, influenced by his interest in medieval art and literature, felt that goods should be made by hand with natural dyes such as weld and madder. No medieval artisan could have afforded his products, though: two early commissions were for royal households. The “St James’s” wallpaper was designed for Queen Victoria’s lavish throne room. In 1895 Tsar Nicholas II ordered 300 yards of “Garden Tulip” to redecorate the royal apartments of the Winter Palace in St Petersburg. (Presumably he was unaware that Morris had published an essay the year before entitled “How I Became a Socialist”.)

Claire Vallis, design director of the Sanderson Design Group, which has owned Morris & Co since 1940, says there is something enduringly delightful about Morris’s work: “His symmetry, his repeats, they are just so aesthetically pleasing,” she says. “They flow really well and his designs now have a lot of familiarity.”

That has made them easy to imitate. Among the items on display at “Morris Mania” are nine posters, ostensibly advertising a centenary exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London in 1934. In reality, however, the posters were generated by artificial intelligence. These pastiches are widely available online, along with other Morris knock-offs. The artist would have despised such counterfeits, not to mention the process by which they were created. He believed in “art made by the people, and for the people, as a happiness to the maker and the user”.

That anyone is bothering to make such copies points to the depth of Morris’s creative legacy. Morris & Co is keen to extend it further: the firm has launched 26 new designs based on incomplete sketches that were part of a trove of documents acquired by the Huntington, a cultural institution, in 1999. Ms Vallis sees these designs—which were finished by artists—as adding to the Morris oeuvre, rather than being a separate collection. If she is right, the designs will appear on furniture and film sets before the year is out. ■

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Julian Fellowes, the story’s creator, is Britain’s supreme chronicler of class

Meet the real lord of “Downton Abbey” Julian Fellowes, the story’s creator, is Britain’s supreme chronicler of class September 11th 2025 It is different without Maggie Smith, supreme goddess of the “Downton Abbey” cult. As the show’s dowager countess, “she was perfect,” says Julian Fellowes, its writer and creator. He drew on memories of an aunt to give her lines such as, “Bought marmalade? Dear me, I call that very feeble.” Smith died last year and so is glimpsed only in flashback in “Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale”, the new and last bit of the Downton extended universe. When Lord Fellowes goes, he muses, “This is the only partnership anyone will remember—if they remember anything.”

They will. In the undeferential 21st century, asked sceptics when “Downton” first aired in 2010, who was still interested in the tiny, aloof British aristocracy? An awful lot of people, it turns out. Chronicling the lives and loves of the noble Crawley clan from 1912 to 1930, it became a global smash hit, encompassing six gently moreish television series and now three films. Lord Fellowes became the reigning chronicler of the eternal subject of class in England.

“Only he could have done it,” says Gareth Neame, the producer with whom he dreamed up the idea. His style balances upstairs and downstairs plots, and seismic events (war, an epidemic, ruin) with everyday challenges (such as, in the new film, planning a county fair). “That’s our lives,” says Lord Fellowes, “the business of solving problems and then you die.” His intimacy with the country-pile set helped, too. Ennobled in 2011—he sits as a Conservative in the House of Lords—he is a son of the landed gentry; Downton’s patriarch (played by Hugh Bonneville) resembles his own father in never questioning his status yet striving “to do the right thing”.

By his own account a plain and timid teenager, he reinvented himself on an oil-tanker bound for South America: “I realised I could be whoever I wanted to be when I got off the boat.” A newly gregarious version of him studied at Cambridge and danced at coming-out balls. “If you have the misfortune to be born into a generation which must earn its living,” his father advised, “you might as well do something amusing.” Lord Fellowes took him at his word and went to drama school.

Two striking tales are told of him thereafter. First, that he proposed to his wife, Emma Kitchener—a relative of Lord Kitchener, a first-world-war titan—20 minutes after they met. This is true. “A funny little man asked me to marry him,” her diary recorded. “I had the last laugh,” he chuckles, “because she did.” The other is that a stalled career was transformed by writing “Gosford Park”, a country-house film for which he won an Oscar in 2002. This is true inasmuch as his ambitions were grand.

In fact, he had acted in prime-time dramas and the West End and written for tv (and, under a pseudonym, bodice-ripping novels). Acting was a lark, but he thought himself only “a medium success”. Still, it was crucial training. Showbiz gave him an outsider’s view of high society. And since it often involved rescuing bad scripts, being a jobbing actor taught Lord Fellowes “what is sayable—and what is not”.

“Even if unearned riches and position had no moral merit,” reflects the narrator of “Snobs”, a bestselling novel published under his own name, reaching society’s apex “was still a dream that figured in plenty of people’s fantasies”. In “Downton” he indulges them, ushering you into upper-crust homes and romances. To detractors, it offers a rosy, even reactionary picture of a stratified era, in which underlings seem as content with their lot as overlords.

The overall mood is sunny, agrees Lord Fellowes; viewers “wouldn’t come back every Sunday night to be depressed”. But angst lurks amid the turrets and frocks, especially for gay characters and trammelled women. The distinctive quality, says Mr Bonneville, is that he “writes from a default position that people try to be good”. No group or class are all blackguards, Lord Fellowes insists. Nor, as some might have it, does wealth confer immunity from suffering. “This is bollocks.”

As a group, the Americans who turn up in “Downton” are more sparky and tolerant than the English. Lots of American viewers loved it, maybe because its social hierarchy is soothingly benign. Its central tensions—between passion, money and protocol—also power “The Gilded Age”, another multi-series Fellowes hit, set in the 1880s among New York’s robber barons and their servants. Here destinies are less fixed: “Some of the downstairs people are going to end up upstairs people.”

Along with their shared interest in social change and pharaonic mansions, both “The Gilded Age” and the new “Downton” movie depict fellow scribblers. In the film a footman-turned-screenwriter winkingly claims that “Writers are the real stars of cinema.” In “The Gilded Age”, the author of a tell-all book on New York society says he aimed to show that “these golden people” are “just ordinary men and women”. He is ostracised all the same.

Lord Fellowes himself faced “some pushback” for illuminating a normally veiled world. “Do you write what the ladies say as well?” a scandalised guest at a house party once asked. The prototype for a character in “Snobs” took umbrage: “A lifetime of avoiding the newspapers—and now this!” He was eventually forgiven.

In modern Britain, poshness is not terribly conducive to popularity (“Everyone tries to persuade you that they’re working class—even if their mother is the daughter of a duke”). Neither, for that matter, is big-time success. Lord Fellowes is nevertheless a well-liked chap. A fellow Tory peer fondly describes him as “an amusing conversationalist” with “a rather magnificent wife”. A stickler for on-screen decorum—Mr Bonneville once had to reshoot a scene because his hands were in his pockets, a vulgar no-no—he is genial in the flesh. “I don’t think he’s personally judgmental at all,” says Mr Neame. His lordship declines to peg this interviewer’s class station: “I never give anyone else their rank.”

Lord Fellowes is to the posh what the naturalist Sir David Attenborough is to gorillas, if Sir David were a gorilla himself: a guide to dinner placements, shooting parties and the gap between what nabobs say and think. Yet he is wryly sceptical about the whole concept of class. It is partly natural—“Every society throws up some or other version of class”—but partly also “a confidence trick” played on the masses. His own life conforms to the system and confounds it. Combining a lucky start with hard work, risks and talent, he is that English oxymoron: a self-made toff. ■

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As people read less they think less clearly, scholars fear

Is the decline of reading making politics dumber? As people read less they think less clearly, scholars fear September 4th 2025 The experiment was simple; so too, you may have thought, was the task. Students of literature at two American universities were given the first paragraphs of “Bleak House” by Charles Dickens and asked to read and then explain them. In other words: some students reading English literature were asked to read some English literature from the mid-19th century. How hard could it be?

Very, it turns out. The students were flummoxed by legal language and baffled by metaphor. A Dickensian description of fog left them totally fogged. They could not grasp basic vocabulary: one student thought that when a man was said to have “whiskers” it meant he was “in a room with an animal I think…A cat?” The problem was less that these students of literature were not literary and more that they were barely even literate .

Reading is in trouble. Multiple studies in multiple places seem to be showing the same thing. Adults are reading less. Children are reading less. Teenagers are reading a lot less. Very small children are being read to less; many are not being read to at all. Reading rates are lower among poorer children—a phenomenon known as “the reading gap”—but reading is down for everyone, everywhere.

In America, the share of people who read for pleasure has fallen by two-fifths in 20 years, according to a study published in August in iScience, a journal. YouGov, a pollster, found that 40% of Britons had not read or listened to any books in 2024. Reading for displeasure is little better: as Sir Jonathan Bate, an English professor at Oxford University, has said, students “struggle to get through one novel in three weeks”. Even the educated young, another greybeard said, have “no habits of application and concentration”.

Such laments should be treated with caution: almost the only thing bookish sorts love more than books is complaining about books and reading. They always have done: the greybeard above was Dickens in, ironically, “Bleak House”. Almost as soon as people stopped fretting about the arrival of reading—Socrates feared it would “produce forgetfulness” in those who used it; Ecclesiastes says that “of making many books there is no end”—people started fretting about its decline. As Ecclesiastes also says, “there is nothing new under the sun”.

Arguably, however, what is happening now is new. It is not just that people are reading less, though they are; the texture of what is being read is changing, too. Sentences are getting shorter and simpler. We analysed hundreds of New York Times bestsellers and found that sentences in popular books have contracted by almost a third since the 1930s.

Open the Victorian bestseller “Modern Painters” by John Ruskin and you will find that its first sentence is 153 words long. It contains the stern advice that you should not trust the “erroneous opinion” of the public and includes a subheading that reads: “Public opinion no criterion of excellence”. Open Amazon’s current non-fiction bestseller, “The Let Them Theory” by Mel Robbins, and you will find that its first sentence is just 19 words long. A subheading reads “How I Changed My Life”. Among its stern advice is that, to get things done, you should count backwards like NASA at a rocket launch because, “Once you start the countdown, 5-4-3-2-1, there’s no turning back.” This is a reminder that Ruskin knew a thing or two.

Smartphones are blamed for dwindling reading habits—and certainly the number of distractions has increased. But reading has always been a bother. “A big book”, said Callimachus, an ancient Greek poet, “is a big evil.” This is particularly true after lunch. You sit down to read then, as one writer noted, the sun streams in, the day feels “50 hours long”, the reader “rubs his eyes” then finally places the book “under his head and…falls into a light sleep”. Given that that particular reader was a fourth-century monk and ascetic he was probably not distracted by Snapchat.

So it is not merely that distractions have increased: the sheer desire to read seems to have declined. In the Victorian era, self-improvement societies flourished. In the Scottish hills, shepherds “maintained a kind of circulating library”, writes Jonathan Rose in his magnificent book “The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes”. Each shepherd left books in the crannies of walls for other shepherds to read. In Victorian mill towns, workers saved up to buy books. In one Scottish locale, a boy noticed a ragman reading a book. The book—which the ragman lent him—was Thucydides. The boy was Ramsay MacDonald, who would go on to become Britain’s first Labour prime minister.

Today that zeal for personal advancement has diminished. Some blame the high cost of books and closing of libraries for modern intellectual apathy—but books have never been cheaper. In Roman times, a book cost three-quarters of a camel (ie, a lot). In the Victorian era, a copy of Lord Byron’s “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage” cost a labourer about half a week’s income. And yet, by the end of the 18th century, literacy rates among Scotland’s autodidacts were among the highest in the world. Today “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage” is free on Kindle, and readers can find plenty of other books that cost less than a coffee. But reading rates keep falling.

A blunter explanation is that people just cannot be bothered. Professor Bate got everyone in a bate with his comments about students not reading: saying such things, he admits, might seem “old fogeyish”. Speak to professors, however and they all lament their students’ waning attention spans. When Professor Rose began teaching, he taught “Bleak House”. He would not attempt it today, he says, partly because of “constant pressure” from university deans to “assign less and less and less reading” and partly because “students simply won’t read it”. In multiple surveys young people describe reading as “boring” and “a chore”.

It is possible to say: who cares? English professors may well lament a fall in literacy, but that may be simple self-interest: less a concern about a declining custom than a declining number of customers. Yet literacy affects more than university reading lists. For one thing, increasing literary sophistication seems to lead to increasing political sophistication. At its simplest, Athenians in the fifth century BC could begin to practise “ostracism”—voting to banish people by writing their name on ostraka, scraps of pots—because, as William Harris, an academic, points out, they had achieved “a certain amount of literacy”.

By contrast, decreasing literary sophistication may lead to decreasing political sophistication. Our analysis of Britain’s parliamentary speeches found that they have shrunk by a third in a decade. We also analysed almost 250 years of inaugural presidential addresses using the Flesch-Kincaid readability test. George Washington’s scored 28.7, denoting postgraduate level, while Donald Trump’s came in at 9.4, the reading level of a high-schooler.

This is not inherently a bad thing. Often simple prose is good prose, and few people have ever wished politicians’ speeches to be longer. Professor Bate is more pessimistic. Lose the ability to read complex prose and he fears you may also lose the ability to develop complex ideas that “allow you to see nuance and to hold two contradictory thoughts together”. The medium is the message, and the message is currently 280 characters long. (“Bleak House”, by contrast, weighs in at around 1.9m characters.)

There will be other losses from a reading decline. Few engines of social mobility are more effective than reading: just ask the Scottish shepherds. Rich children may do it more, but reading is an egalitarian invention. No one—not your nanny, not your tutor, your friends or your posh school—can impel you to devour a book except you. Reading is not merely a tool: it is also one of life’s great pleasures, as Dickens knew well. As Joe, the kind blacksmith in “Great Expectations”, says: “Give me a good book...and sit me down afore a good fire, and I ask no better.” Once people forget that, things really will feel bleak. ■

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An account of a relationship between two extraordinary women

Mother (not always) dearest: Arundhati Roy on her parent An account of a relationship between two extraordinary women September 4th 2025 IT HAS BEEN nearly three decades since Arundhati Roy’s vivid, poetic novel “The God of Small Things” won the Booker, Britain’s most prestigious literary prize. Back in 1997, after the cold war and before September 11th, the West basked in its supremacy and India was more widely known for tropical exoticism than Hindu nationalism, writing a hit literary novel could propel its author to global fame.

The world has since changed markedly, but Ms Roy has not. She rejected a lucrative career churning out pretty novels to become one of the foremost polemicists of the 21st century. She has spoken out against India’s nuclear testing, supported Kashmiri independence, fought a mega-dam in the western state of Gujarat, denounced American wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and has staunchly opposed Hindu nationalism. Now 63 years old, she remains fiercely independent.

For that independence, and for much else, Ms Roy credits Mrs Roy (as she refers to her mother), whose name adorns the title of her first memoir, “Mother Mary Comes To Me”. Mary Roy was a “dreamer, warrior, teacher”, as her gravestone put it. She dreamed of a world where women could be equal to men. She fought, all the way to India’s Supreme Court, for equal inheritance rights for the women of her community, and won. And she was a teacher, building a successful school in her home state of Kerala and instilling her values in her pupils.

Mary was also a terror. She behaved abominably towards her staff, her relatives and, especially, her own children, who “had to absorb much of her darkness”. At the age of 18, two years into architecture school in Delhi, Ms Roy stopped returning home. Mother and daughter would not see each other again for seven years. When their relationship at last resumed, it was no less fractious, and it remained so until the very end.

But that period apart was, perhaps, an inoculation against a more permanent separation. It was also when Ms Roy embarked on the long path that would turn her into the writer, essayist and fighter she became. “I am grateful for that gift of darkness,” she writes. “It turned out to be a route to freedom, too.”

Winning that freedom required long periods of hand-to-mouth living. Eventually, she met her husband, with whom she would make films and build a happy family. Writing scripts for British producers supported her through four years of writing “The God of Small Things”. It was only with the book’s success , when Ms Roy was 36, that she found financial stability.

With money came physical comfort, but also deep spiritual discomfort about being so well-off in a country still filled with injustice and poverty, and about becoming the sort of privileged, insulated, upper-class Indian she had once laughed at. And so, with the cushion of royalty payments and the independent streak inherited from Mary, she remained her own person, using her talents and tenacity to fight for the causes she believed in. That has not been easy. In 2002 India’s supreme court found her guilty of contempt for criticising the judiciary. Last year, Narendra Modi’s government approved her prosecution under anti-terrorism legislation for comments she made about Kashmir 15 years ago (no action has yet been taken).

Ms Roy’s facility with words is undisputed. By writing about herself, her mother and her life—all of which she sees alongside the wider social and political currents of the day—she brings a touch of lightness to weighty concerns, including child abuse and sexual harassment. At times, the memoir feels like the best kind of fiction, veering into magical realism. “But no”, she writes, “it was pretty much the only kind of realism I knew.” For the reader, the magic lies in discovering the extraordinary relationship between two extraordinary women, and how it shaped one of the world’s best writers. ■

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And life off the field is often harder

Quarterbacks shoulder an immense burden on the field And life off the field is often harder September 4th 2025 No position in team sports carries as much pressure and responsibility as the quarterback in American football. They direct every offensive play, which means they must know their team’s entire playbook. Most of the highest-paid players in America’s National Football League (NFL) are quarterbacks; often 20-25% of a team’s wages go to their quarterback.

Signing the right quarterback is one of the most important decisions a team must make. Before the league’s annual player draft , squads will sift through piles of reports, profiles, tests and interviews. But Seth Wickersham, a journalist at ESPN, argues that “no scouting processes have cracked the code, or even clarified it”. He reckons that most of the 69 quarterbacks chosen in the draft’s first round since 2000 have been failures.

In “American Kings”, Mr Wickersham analyses what it takes to be successful in such a singular role. He profiles some of the best quarterbacks, such as Bob Waterfield, who popularised football in Los Angeles; and Johnny Unitas, the son of Lithuanian immigrants who became “the first truly great [quarterback] to come out of nowhere”. Mr Wickersham spends time with his childhood hero, John Elway, who helped the Denver Broncos win two Super Bowls (after three losses earlier in his career), and follows three young contenders through the quarterback-industrial complex, from school, to college , to the.

One of these prospects is Colin Hurley, a 15-year-old. His dad, Charlie, is unusually enlightened for the father of a sport prodigy, and the pair appear to have a sweet rapport. In a telling moment, both are aghast as they watch a Netflix documentary about high-school quarterbacks in which a father tears his son to shreds after poor play. Colin trains endlessly, and does little else. Mr Wickersham observes that he leads “a fiercely limited existence in the hopes of an expansive life”.

College football is an extended apprenticeship for the. It is also where a great winnowing takes place: around 16,000 boys play quarterback in high school, but just 860 start in college. Would-be quarterbacks pick their destinations carefully, and colleges compete to attract the best. Mr Elway recalls receiving a postcard from the cheerleading squad at the University of Missouri, informing him: “We don’t sleep with teddy bears. We only sleep with Missouri Tigers.” (He went to Stanford.)

As the sport has become increasingly guided by statistics , the tolerance for mistakes, and even quirks, has shrunk. Football has “never seemed less real, less instinctive, less open to improvisation”, Mr Wickersham writes.

“American Kings” argues that quarterbacks pay a high price for their fleeting moments of glory. Few of those who make it to the summit are able to fully appreciate the view. Steve Young, a three-time Super Bowl winner, says that being around other elite quarterbacks felt deflating “because I wasn’t quite as far along as I thought I was”. When Mr Elway finally wins the Super Bowl, his principal emotion was not joy but relief.

Unsurprisingly, life in retirement does not come easily either. “Everyone with the luxury of myopically pursuing their dreams, and then succeeding, faces a transition into a less-selfish version of adulthood,” Mr Wickersham diagnoses. There is a lot of drink, drugs and infidelity. These vices are common across sports, but Mr Wickersham contends that quarterbacks are particularly vulnerable. They have “a deep and urgent imperative to dominate. Interactions with old friends, with accountants and business partners, with girlfriend and wives, are every bit as geared toward filling some bottomless hole in their personality as is calling a play.”

This is Mr Wickersham’s sad conclusion. He sets out hoping to learn how these men can repeatedly execute a spot-perfect 60-yard spiral pass. He finds that this is the teachable bit that they will eventually commit to muscle memory. The trickier part is how to cope with everything outside the straight lines of the gridiron. ■

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“KPop Demon Hunters” offers lessons on acceptance—and catchy pop songs

Girl band v demons: the secrets of Netflix’s most popular film “KPop Demon Hunters” offers lessons on acceptance—and catchy pop songs September 4th 2025 “We’re goin’ up, up, up, it’s our moment,” sings Rumi, the purple-haired lead vocalist of Huntrix, a girl group, as the crowd roars. Rumi and her two bandmates star in “KPop Demon Hunters”, an animated musical film in which Huntrix battle their rivals, the Saja Boys, for higher stakes than just a spot-on the pop charts . The boy-band is actually made up of demons disguised as heart-throbs who steal their fans’ souls, which the underworld’s demon king eats. Rumi’s lyrics have proved prophetic. Released on Netflix in June, “KPop Demon Hunters” has become the platform’s most-watched film ever, amassing 236m total views. Three things explain its success.

First, the songs are catchy. Unlike many animated musicals, which feature Broadway-esque show tunes written primarily for children, “Demon Hunters” offers music for adults, with K-pop’s signature hook-heavy style that leaves viewers humming songs for days after watching the film. The soundtrack’s producers include hitmakers for K-pop bands such as Blackpink and bts. “Golden”, Rumi’s song about “goin’ up”, reached number one on the Billboard Hot 100; other tracks, including “Your Idol” and “Soda Pop”, also hit the charts. Twice, an actual K-pop girl group, covered one of the film’s songs, helping to boost visibility for the fictional Huntrix.

The frenzy has spilled over to cinemas . On a recent weekend theatres in several Anglophone countries held singalong showings. The film’s soundtrack is also popular on TikTok: fans cover songs and mimic dances from the film, and plenty of people have discovered the film through the songs.

Second, the film’s storyline champions female friendship and self-acceptance. The Huntrix trio eat ramen together, and swoon when they first meet the handsome Saja Boys (in a bizarre sequence, while looking at one of the boys’ abs, their eyes transform first into hearts and then popcorn). Rumi, the central character, is actually half-demon, as evinced by patterns on her skin that she hides from her bandmates. When they discover the truth, they are shocked at first, but eventually come to accept Rumi for who she is. “There’s a wonderful message about striving to become your essential self,” says Mike Gentile, a Los Angeles native who was introduced to the film by his children and has since become a huge fan.

Yet the film’s biggest strength might be how it taps into K-pop’s dedicated fandom . People who really love the film tend to watch repeatedly, boosting streaming numbers, and the story pays homage to their loyalty. The “Honmoon”—a magical protective barrier powered by the souls of people who love Huntrix’s music—is central to the plot. “When you mess with our fans…We need to make it hurt,” declare the protagonists.

The film’s fan scenes eschew stereotypes by featuring older viewers and men alongside young women. “A lot of fans, both in Korea and outside Korea, see themselves in it,” observes Thomas Baudinette, a pop-culture expert at Macquarie University in Sydney. Many more will become fans because of it. ■

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Fans of the original sitcom may not care

“The Paper” is less spin-off from than clone of “The Office” Fans of the original sitcom may not care September 4th 2025 THE SHIP of Theseus is a thought experiment concerning the nature of change: is a ship that has had every plank replaced still the same ship? “The Paper”, a new comedy series from the producers of the American version of “The Office”, poses a related question. What if, instead of everything, just a couple of planks and most of the crew were replaced, and its name was changed from the Ship of Theseus to Frank’s Boat. Is it a different craft?

NBC, the network behind both shows, says they are “set in the same universe”, if not the same place. “The Office” focused on a paper company in Scranton, Pennsylvania, whereas the workplace in “The Paper” is a struggling newspaper in Toledo, Ohio. Yet a bit of clunky narrative engineering in the new show’s first episode—as well as Oscar Nuñez’s portrayal of the same character, Oscar, a pernickety accountant—links the two series directly.

The focus on the Toledo Truth-Teller leads to some unfortunate romanticisation. The opening credits show newspapers being used to wrap bread, train dogs and cover walls, reminding viewers how embedded they once were in daily life. Then again, radios, fax machines and petrol containing lead were once essential, too. Times change.

Domhnall Gleeson plays a starry-eyed toilet-roll-salesman turned editor-in-chief who likes to rally his troops by holding forth on journalistic principles. Black-and-white clips from 1971 showing a bustling newsroom and a publisher talking high-handedly about “saving democracy” come off as extraneous moralising.

But the larger problem is that the new show is almost wholly derivative of its predecessor. It follows the same fake-documentary format and is also set in a struggling post-industrial small city (signifying to viewers that they are watching a show about “real America” rather than the coasts). The theme song is similarly composed; the humour is similarly cringeworthily witty. Though the characters are different, the types—and therefore their interactions—are the same.

Tim Key plays a boorish, ambitious corporate lackey, as Ricky Gervais and Steve Carell did previously. (Alas, Mr Key is less funny than either of them.) Sabrina Impacciatore is an older, female, Italian version of Dwight Schrute (Rainn Wilson in the original), an incompetent conniver with no self-awareness. Mr Gleeson and Chelsea Frei, as the paper’s star reporter, have the lead romance arc that John Krasinski and Jenna Fischer, as Jim and Pam, did in “The Office”, while Ramona Young and Melvin Gregg have the same weird secondary entanglement as Kelly and Ryan (Mindy Kaling and B.J. Novak). The show is intermittently funny. But it is about as surprising as a McDonald’s Happy Meal.

Then again, McDonald’s sells a lot of Happy Meals and “The Office” has a lot of fans. It was reasonably but not wildly popular when it was on air. At its peak, in its fifth season, around 9m people watched each week; far more people preferred “Two and a Half Men”, a pedestrian sitcom about fatherhood starring Charlie Sheen. But according to Parrot Analytics, a data firm, since Peacock acquired streaming rights for “The Office” in 2021, it has been responsible for more than twice as many subscribers as “Two and a Half Men”, and has been among the channel’s ten most popular shows this year and last. If “The Paper” can attract even 20% of fans of “The Office”, Parrot Analytics says, it will be considered a hit.

“The Paper” may be devoid of novel ideas, but the popularity of franchises, reboots and remakes suggests that viewers crave familiarity. For many fans, a new ship is all well and good—but an old one that does a reliable job is even better. ■

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As opposed to America, which is ruled by lawyers

A new theory of China’s rise: rule by engineers As opposed to America, which is ruled by lawyers September 4th 2025 Many of the people who run China are engineers , and it shows. Since the 1980s China has built a motorway network twice the length of America’s and a high-speed rail network more than 15 times the size of Japan’s. It uses almost as much solar and wind power as the rest of the world combined, and it produces around one-third of the world’s manufactured goods.

In his illuminating new book, “Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future”, Dan Wang argues that China is an “engineering state”, locked in competition with America, which is run by lawyers. China builds things quickly. America debates endlessly about whether they should be built at all. How did China, a country that was once known mostly for intellectual-property theft and child labour, become a technological powerhouse ?

Practice helps. Mr Wang compares engineering prowess to cooking . A chef needs the right equipment, a clear recipe and most important, intuition—the know-how and proficiency that comes only through practical experience. “Ask someone who has never cooked before to do something as simple as fry an egg,” Mr Wang writes. “Give him a beautiful kitchen and the most exquisitely detailed recipe and he might still make a mess.”

Millions of factory workers and managers across China have spent decades accruing this sort of intuition. As contract manufacturers of smartphones, consumer drones and other sophisticated electronics, they have built a skilled workforce that powers many of the world’s most valuable companies, including Apple, Samsung and China’s own Huawei .

This process knowledge is China’s big advantage over America, argues Mr Wang, who was born in China, migrated to America and has worked in both countries. Xi Jinping, China’s president, has declared, “The real economy is the basis of everything…so we must never deindustrialise.” Chinese manufacturing leads the world in numerous sectors: clean technology, ultra-high voltage transmission, high-speed rail and 5G networks.

To be sure, America has many success stories, including semiconductors and medical devices. But should the two countries stumble into war, the engineering state may have an advantage. In 2022 China had nearly 1,800 ships under construction; America had five. During fierce fighting, Ukrainian forces fired nearly as many artillery shells every two days as America makes in a month. Even if America achieves artificial general intelligence, Mr Wang notes that algorithms alone cannot win battles—they must be embodied in manufactured drones and munitions.

Still, noting the primacy of engineering in China’s global ambitions, though illuminating, does not explain the country’s failures. “Breakneck” does not ignore China’s big challenges, which include overcapacity, rising debt, environmental destruction and the human cost of living in a state that views “people as aggregates, not individuals”. But Mr Wang contends that these stem from the excesses of the “engineering state”. In fact they are the consequences of political incentives in China’s rigid, top-down authoritarian system.

For example, Mr Wang argues that only an “engineering state” would have allowed Song Jian, a missile scientist, to formulate its notorious one-child policy . His background matters less than the Communist Party’s acceptance of his proposal, which, according to Mr Wang, has led to 321m abortions and the sterilisation of 108m women. A proper engineering-based approach might have included cost-benefit analyses and adaptation based on results—precisely what China’s top-down political system did not allow.

China’s approach to the pandemic is another example. Mr Wang writes poignantly about his three years living under the “zero-covid” policy. He recalls endless intrusive tests and unavailable fever medication. China, Mr Wang posits, was the only country that denied its people ibuprofen, fearful that people might use it to avoid being detected with a higher-than-normal temperature. He calls this “a perfect encapsulation of the engineering state’s twisted logic”.

It is actually the perfect encapsulation of China’s authoritarian system. Who wants to be caught selling contraband fever pills in a police state? What official would risk suggesting to their superiors that people might benefit from painkillers? Fear of political punishment, not engineering prowess, drove these decisions.

The “engineering state” is a useful way to think about industrial competition between America and China. Yet readers seeking to grasp China’s governance failures might do better to focus on the “one-party” in “one-party state”. ■

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In turbulent times, people want even their crime stories to be comforting

“The Thursday Murder Club” and the resurgence of cosy crime In turbulent times, people want even their crime stories to be comforting August 28th 2025 IN MOST CRIME stories, detectives worry about wily criminals, unreliable witnesses and meddling do-gooders. In Richard Osman’s bestselling “Thursday Murder Club” (TMC) series, the investigators have to contend with a more relentless and unforgiving crowd: old folk who want a quiet place to do their jigsaw puzzles.

The four members of the TMC are sleuths who work from the comfort of their retirement home. That requires them to take over rooms usually dedicated to more wholesome pursuits, such as conversational French, with grisly crime-scene photographs and conversations about poisons, corpses and stabbing.

From this unlikely premise Mr Osman, a British TV presenter, has spun gold. His four “Thursday Murder Club” novels have sold more than 10m copies globally; a fifth will be published on September 25th. The franchise has spent a total of 310 weeks on bestseller lists in America and Britain. A film adaptation of the first book, starring Pierce Brosnan, Helen Mirren, Ben Kingsley and Celia Imrie (all pictured), and produced by Steven Spielberg , arrives on Netflix on August 28th. The star power thrown at a yarn about pensioners in a quaint English village is a sign that the haunted antiheroes of Nordic noir are yesterday’s trend. Dark, gritty tales are out; cosy crime stories featuring grandparents are in.

Not everyone likes that label. (The genre’s nickname, “cozies”, takes the American spelling.) To some, it connotes low stakes, hackneyed writing and trite plots. Cosy crime is “not a term that I’m enthusiastic about”, bristles Martin Edwards, a British author who has written several series. “The label I’d prefer is ‘traditional mystery’.”

Both appellations, however, refer to stories in the style of the inter-war masters, such as Agatha Christie, Ngaio Marsh, Dorothy Sayers and Georges Simenon . They usually focus on amateur detectives. At cozies’ centre is a puzzle that the investigator solves and readers try to: the reader should be able to follow it back at the end and see what they missed. Deus ex machina and sudden revelations are frowned upon.

They tend to be written in series, which lets authors develop the characters. The interaction between the four members of the TMC—a fearsomely competent ex-spy, Elizabeth (Ms Mirren); Ibrahim Arif, a fussy yet insightful psychologist (Mr Kingsley); an ex-union rabble-rouser, Ron Ritchie (Mr Brosnan, dreadfully miscast); and Joyce (Ms Imrie), a retired nurse, who is the reader’s proxy—is natural, funny and enjoyable. Similarly, readers like seeing Jane Marple, one of Christie’s protagonists, puzzle through clues as her personal history is revealed throughout the books.

Cozies usually take place in a bounded area: often that means a village or small town, but it could be a locked room—a cosy subgenre in itself—or a strongly defined corner of a big city. Sandra Jackson Opoku’s “Savvy Summers” series takes place on Chicago’s South Side, where her protagonist runs a soul-food restaurant. Other culinarily inclined protagonists have run noodle shops, doughnut shops and pizzerias. Sometimes a hobby defines the setting: authors have written series centring on embroidery (“The Quick and the Thread”), coupon-clipping (“50% off Murder”), apiculture (“Death Bee Comes Her”), orchard-keeping (“Deadly to the Core”) and farming (“Murder, She Goat”).

Wherever the setting, the inciting incident, the murder, is usually committed off the page or quickly, for cozies eschew gore. They also avoid sex and profanity. One literary agent suggests that cozies began creeping back into fashion as romance novels became more explicit . Readers who prefer their books without lots of bonking turned to these mysteries.

But, as the moniker suggests, cozies’ most important feature is that they are comforting. There is never any doubt whether the hero will prevail, only how—so the how must be entertaining and twist-filled. Cozies end with villains caught, justice served and order restored. The murdered characters tend to be rotters whom nobody really misses.

Does this make the stories formulaic? Perhaps: though as any music-lover knows, structure can accommodate, and even encourage, profundity. The “Thursday Murder Club” series, for instance, grapples with ageing. It is clear-eyed about both the good—heedless lunchtime drinking, caring less about what other people think—and the bad. Elizabeth’s beloved husband is slowly slipping into dementia . She does everything she can to forestall and hide the decline because she wants to keep him with her as long as she can.

Hannah O’Grady, who edits mysteries for St Martin’s Press, an American publishing firm, was initially turned off by the genre’s predictability. Yet she has come to feel that many cozies are “actually subversive”: “The protagonist is usually a young woman not in law enforcement. She generally falls into this not because she’s passionate about solving crimes, but because the police aren’t doing an adequate job .” Police in cozies are at best a necessary adjunct. They are usually portrayed as hidebound, blinkered and indifferent, especially to older or female protagonists.

Though the genre may be enjoying a revival thanks to Mr Osman and his peers, it has delighted generations of readers. Christie, its grande dame, is the bestselling author ever, having sold over 2bn novels worldwide. Alexander McCall Smith ’s “No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency” series, set in Botswana and featuring the shrewd and resourceful Mma Ramotswe, has sold over 20m copies; the 26th book in the series comes out on September 4th. When literary critics noticed these books, it was for their popularity more than their artistic merit. Mr Edwards says that “nobody paid attention to the plots” of his early books—traditional mysteries set in cities—“because that type of book was unfashionable. Now it’s very fashionable.”

There are two reasons why cosy crime is enjoying a resurgence. First, readers see themselves in the books. Robin Agnew, the co-chair of a fan convention called Malice Domestic, held annually near Washington, DC, explains that cozies are about appealingly ordinary people. “I love noir fiction but it’s almost operatic. It’s not what your life is like. And this is what your life is like.”

Second, look to their first flourishing, during the turbulent inter-war years. When the world is troubled and uncertain, people want art that provides succour and stability. Otto Penzler, a crime-fiction publisher and bookshop owner in New York, says, “When fires are everywhere…people want to go to a place where there’s a community.” In the pages of cozies, if not in real life, when “something terrible happens, it’s solved. The bad guys are removed from society and everything goes back to how it used to be. At least this place has remained calm and safe and good.” ■

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Attendees witnessed grisly deaths. Sometimes they were also given gifts

What gladiator shows were really like Attendees witnessed grisly deaths. Sometimes they were also given gifts August 28th 2025 Romans dreamed a lot about gladiators. Many imagined they were fighting themselves, down in the sandy arena, amid roaring crowds and trumpets. Such dreams in youth indicated what your future wife would be like. If you fought a provocator, with short, sharp sword and shield, she would be lovely but flirtatious. If you were matched against a retiarius, plodding with trident and net, she would be running round all over town. As for the gladiators, according to Artemidorus, a diviner, in his “Interpretation of Dreams”, they dreamt of bears and lumps of iron.

In a new book Harry Sidebottom, who teaches classical history at Oxford University, explores the many meanings of gladiators in the Roman mind . The combatants, usually barbarian prisoners or common criminals, were not just a bit of rough. In their brief heyday, they were sex gods: a senator’s wife ran off with one.

To those who think that the Romans—with their businesslike haircuts and underfloor heating—were much like ourselves, Dr Sidebottom’s vivid, gripping book offers many correctives. It provides a detailed chronicle of what a gladiator’s life was actually like. Despite Hollywood’s assumptions of total carnage, the chance of gladiators dying in the ring was only one in eight. However, the Romans did find it wildly funny when criminals in “torment tunics” ran frantically about in the arena, having been tarred and set on fire.

Anyone could give a gladiatorial show, if they had the status and money to do so and needed popular approval badly enough. They could also ignore them. Marcus Aurelius held none and Augustus decreed only two a year. Indifferent Julius Caesar brought bundles of official work to his. Shows were not like chariot-racing, which happened regularly: they were huge, rare treats that also featured musical performances, acrobats and wild-beast fights with hippos and giraffes as well as lions. They could include mock battles with dozens of non-mock deaths, as when Claudius restaged the capture of Colchester with actual prisoners of war from Britain.

To the average punter, one of the best bits was the free gifts handed out to, or showered down on, the crowd: cooked chickens, dates, jewellery, money, sweets. (Saffron was also misted over, as the assembly stank.) Shows cum missilibus—with thrown things—were sure to be a draw; so were certain gladiators, whose names were painted on the walls rather like headline acts. If you did not want to rely on cooked meats falling from heaven, you could bring a picnic. You could bring your girlfriend too, Ovid said, because she would probably bury her head in your shoulder if it all got too bloody.

People were not meant to gamble on gladiator fights, but many did, and they were keen observers of form. On the evening before the show, the public was allowed in to the gladiatorial barracks where, like soldiers, fighters trained and lived as a family of cellmates. The public would silently assess the gladiators as they ate their cena libera, a last supper of sorts: not barley-and-bean stew and gritty wine, their usual fare, but roasts, pies and a decent vintage or two.

Gladiatorial shows were held for the people, and the (overwhelmingly male) people called the tune. Though the fights had a referee, the crowd, as in any modern football game, knew all the rules and moves. The emperor’s famous thumb up, down or even sideways almost always followed what the crowd thought.

What did the gladiators think? The author provides his most affecting evidence from their tombs. There several, in devoutly military terms, “recount” their deaths in the arena, some as a result of bad refereeing. Most movingly, one gladiator from the Greek east, where they were seen as athletes, mourns the death of his beautiful young comrade and lover Miletus, “who won eight times in the stadia” before “Fate took him from the ring by force.” ■

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To write her grandmother’s story, Lea Ypi visited the archives of the communist-era secret police

A story of occupations, surveillance and exile in Albania To write her grandmother’s story, Lea Ypi visited the archives of the communist-era secret police August 28th 2025 Two Albanian writers dominate the foreign-language section of the bookshop in Tirana’s central square. One is Ismail Kadare, the country’s grand man of letters, who died in 2024. The other is Lea Ypi, an academic and the author of “Free”, a coming-of-age book published in 2021. Kadare dominates the space by virtue of the sheer number of books he wrote over the course of his long career (there are at least 80 novels, plays, essays and story collections). But, at least for the time being, Professor Ypi seems to have eclipsed him as the world’s best-known Albanian writer.

With “Free” Professor Ypi, a political theorist who teaches at the London School of Economics, slipped out of the confines of academic publishing and into the mainstream. The prizewinning book described her experience growing up in Albania as communism collapsed; the subsequent turmoil brought the country to the brink of civil war in 1997. Professor Ypi and several family members left the country. She studied first in Italy, then in Britain.

“Free” has been translated into dozens of languages and made her something of a celebrity. The book was not without controversy, though. Some Albanians accused her of soft-pedalling the crimes of communism; others thought she soft-pedalled the role of her great-grandfather, a former prime minister who, in his role as acting head of state, welcomed Benito Mussolini ’s invading army in 1939.

Now, in “Indignity”, Professor Ypi goes deeper into her family story. The new book is about her grandmother; through her, she tells the story of Albania in the 20th century. In that sense the book is virtually unique in English. There are thousands of such European family stories, especially ones that focus on the second world war , but the number of Albanian ones in translation would not fill a bookshop’s branded tote bag. Those published in Albanian, meanwhile, have a reputation for exaggeration: of embellishing a relative’s suffering at the hands of communism, for example, or their role in resisting it.

“Indignity” tells the story of an extraordinary life. Leman Ypi (pictured) was born to an aristocratic family. She grew up in Thessaloniki just after the fall of the Ottoman Empire , when the then predominantly Jewish city became Greek. Her Muslim family avoided being deported in 1923, when Greece and Turkey exchanged most of their Muslim and Christian populations, and in 1936 Leman, only 18 years old, left for Tirana. The Albanian capital was then little more than a glorified village.

There followed her marriage to Asllan (pictured), the son of the chief inspector of the court of King Zog, the Italian occupation, then the German one, then the establishment of Enver Hoxha’s communist regime. Asllan was jailed for almost 15 years on trumped-up conspiracy charges and, as a “class enemy”, Leman was sent to a collective farm to dig irrigation canals.

Professor Ypi knew some of this—her grandmother had shared parts of her story—and the author finds more material in the archives of the Sigurimi, Albania’s communist-era secret police. But she fills in the lacunae, too, by using her imagination. Most of this literary licence is fine, but some puts her on shaky ground. The British agents she writes about almost certainly knew her grandparents, but the likelihood that they were socialising with them in occupied Tirana in 1943 is small.

In the Sigurimi archives, Professor Ypi discovers things about her grandmother that she thinks are mistakes. Then—spoiler alert—she finds a document declaring that Leman Ypi had died 34 years before her grandmother had actually passed away. The reason is less tantalising than it appears: it seems that Professor Ypi’s grandmother’s files had become mixed up with those of another woman with the same name and with a similar background. Curiously, this other Leman Ypi appears to have no surviving family. Some Albanians may speculate that someone in the Sigurimi invented the second woman and declared her dead in order to end surveillance of the real one, once it was deemed she was no longer suspicious.

“Indignity” joins other recent books, such as Anna Funder’s biography of Eileen O’Shaughnessy, George Orwell’s first wife, in blending fact and fiction. This will give some people pause. But Professor Ypi sweeps the reader along in her story of her grandmother and the tides of history. ■

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The author of “Treasure Island” and “Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde” is the subject of an excellent new biography

Robert Louis Stevenson was adventurous, mercurial and fragile The author of “Treasure Island” and “Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde” is the subject of an excellent new biography August 28th 2025 Few writers have the genius to create a mythic story that each generation reimagines for itself. But Robert Louis Stevenson did so—twice. In “Treasure Island” he perfected the sort of thrilling high-seas yarn that movie studios still produce. As for “Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde” (his publishers added the “The”), every sinister tale of a violently divided mind stands in its long shadow.

Stevenson did not only write myths: he lived one. Born in gloomy Edinburgh in 1850, he defied chronic illness, sailed the oceans and died in Samoa, aged 44, shortly after local people had honoured their tusitala (storyteller) with a lavish banquet. “The day was no longer than his kindness,” declared a chieftain.

With his superbly crafted books and mercurial, magnetic personality, Stevenson always inspired devotion. His marriage to Fanny Osbourne, an intrepid, pistol-toting Midwesterner, is “a story of deep and lasting love” unusual in the fractious annals of literary wedlock. One friend thought bold, vivid Fanny might have been “the leader in some great movement”.

All this charisma piled on charisma sets traps for Stevenson’s biographers : they may yield to worship or vainly try to topple the legend. Leo Damrosch, emeritus professor of literature at Harvard, avoids both idolatry and iconoclasm. Well-paced and thoroughly researched, this new biography never assumes that the reader has a prior acquaintance with Stevenson. Professor Damrosch tells the reader not just what happens in Stevenson’s books, but why they should care.

Beneath Stevenson’s simplicity and fluency lay artistry and industry. Writers should still heed his advice: “fewer adjectives” as well as “more descriptive verbs”. Henry James, a novelist, friend and admirer, enjoyed everything his fellow author wrote and felt privileged “to encounter someone who does write—who is really acquainted with that lovely art”.

Stevenson worried that those tools served a lowly trade. Born into a dynasty of engineers and lighthouse-builders , he acted the “privileged layabout”—with a taste for the city’s lowlife—until literature lit his true path. Even then, financial need bound him to his Calvinistic, high-spirited parents. When he abandoned religious faith, he felt that “I am killing my father.”

A lung disease meant that Stevenson could cough up “a pint of blood” (it was probably not tuberculosis, but a rarer genetic condition). A search for health, and a flight from Scottish puritanism, sent him to France. There his grand passion with Fanny caught fire. During her American escapades she had endured the West at its wildest; she had two surviving children, Lloyd and Belle, from a rakish adventurer. Ever-daring, Fanny married Stevenson when the frail would-be author felt like “a mere complication of cough and bones”.

Travels took the couple to California and the French Riviera as “Treasure Island” made Stevenson a celebrity. That piratical classic began with Stevenson and Lloyd drawing maps of an imaginary island and inventing stories about it. And as for “Jekyll and Hyde”, part of the plot came to the author in a nightmare. (The sleeper’s “cries of horror” woke Fanny.)

In 1888 his Pacific idyll began on a yacht, Casco. Although Stevenson vowed that seas and islands “make and keep me truly happier” than life inland, Professor Damrosch charts the strain of this romantic vagabondage, especially on Fanny. On the Samoan island of Upolu, where they settled, their estate at Vailima was no beach shack but “virtually a palace”, with upkeep to match. But Stevenson wrote eloquently of Samoan life and pressed in print for independence, incensed that “the handful of whites have everything”.

Just as Samoa had restored his strength, Stevenson suffered a stroke. This biography is crisp, brisk but warm—all Stevensonian virtues—and lets readers see why this “beautiful, bountiful being” (in James’s words) cast such a spell. His literary treasure trove still shines. ■

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The hitmaker has returned with a new album, “Man’s Best Friend”

Flirty and thriving: how Sabrina Carpenter became a pop superstar The hitmaker has returned with a new album, “Man’s Best Friend” August 28th 2025 SABRINA CARPENTER’s career is anything but wooden. Last August she released “Short n’ Sweet”, one of the albums of the summer, which topped the charts in 19 countries. Three songs from the record, “Espresso”, “Please Please Please” and “Taste”, ranked in the top five of the Billboard chart in America simultaneously. Ms Carpenter became the first solo performer to achieve this feat; The Beatles are the only other act to have managed it.

Her status has built up quickly. In the first half of 2022 Ms Carpenter’s songs were streamed 73m times in America; in the same period this year, that number had jumped to 1.9bn. In April Luminate, a data firm, found that Ms Carpenter’s fandom was growing faster than any other musician’s. (Their index looks at things like social-media engagement and public awareness as well as streaming data.)

Ms Carpenter is hoping to follow up on that success with “Man’s Best Friend”, a new album released on August 29th. Its lead single, “Manchild”, has already topped the charts in America and Britain. In the coming months you can expect to hear her effervescent melodies and sultry lyrics blasting from every car radio and teenager’s bedroom. How has Ms Carpenter established herself as pop’s new princess?

Three factors explain her ascendancy. First, her music is compulsively catchy. Ms Carpenter has spent a long time finding the right sound. (“Man’s Best Friend” is her seventh studio album.) Like pop stars such as Miley Cyrus and Olivia Rodrigo, Ms Carpenter started her career as a child actor on the Disney Channel. Her first song was released in 2014, when she was just 14 years old; she spent the next decade exploring modes as varied as folk and electronic dance music.

This experimentation came to fruition on “Short n’ Sweet”. The record is a paragon of pop in 36 minutes, incorporating sounds from disco to country to hip-hop. Even as Ms Carpenter borrows from different genres, her songs have a distinctive, whimsical quality. Jack Antonoff, a producer who works with Ms Carpenter (as well as Taylor Swift ), has said that the appeal of “Please Please Please” lies in the “push and pull” between the regimented percussion and “bubbly…floating” synthesisers: “It makes you feel like a little bit drunk, a little bit dreamlike.”

The second reason for her popularity is her witty lyrics. Ms Carpenter stands out because she makes “really fun, really flirty, sometimes silly, literally nonsensical songs”, notes Erica Campbell, the author of a forthcoming book about the star. Take “Espresso”, Ms Carpenter’s biggest hit, in which she croons: “Say you can’t sleep, baby, I know / That’s that me espresso.” Or this, from “Bed Chem”: “Where art thou? Why not uponeth me?”

Such playfulness is the point. As Glenn Fosbraey, a specialist in pop songs at the University of Winchester, puts it: “Everything she does is with that knowing wink at the audience.” She can be salacious, such as when she sings “Come right on me, I mean camaraderie” in “Bed Chem”. She can also be droll: in “Taste”, the diminutive Ms Carpenter declares “I leave quite an impression / Five feet to be exact.” The same self-conscious mischievousness is evident in her live performances and music videos. In the video for “Manchild”, Ms Carpenter mocks bad lovers by bathing with pigs.

That points to the third and final reason for Ms Carpenter’s success: her carefully constructed brand. Not only is it easy to spot “a Sabrina song”, notes Ms Campbell, but also “a Sabrina outfit”. On stage, she prances about in corsets and mini skirts . On the “Short n’ Sweet” tour she wore custom lingerie made by Victoria’s Secret.

Some, however, worry that Ms Carpenter’s sexualised self-image is inappropriate. The album cover for “Man’s Best Friend”—which shows Ms Carpenter on all fours as a man pulls her hair—was censured as regressive. Fans demanded an alternative cover, so she gave them one “approved by God”. It is a black-and-white recreation of a paparazzi shot of Marilyn Monroe, another blonde bombshell. It implies that Ms Carpenter is under no illusions about the price of her newfound fame. ■

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Distillers of mahua, an Indian tipple made from dried blossoms, have big ambitions

Forget smelling flowers; now you can drink them Distillers of mahua, an Indian tipple made from dried blossoms, have big ambitions August 28th 2025 THE little brown nubs look like earwax-coloured pencil erasers. Anyone curious enough to try one would find it tastes a bit like a date. They are flowers of the mahua tree, indigenous to India . When distilled, they produce a strong liquor reminiscent of grappa or unaged whisky: floral and mildly sweet, with hints of apple and berry, and a long, clean finish. The spirit may be coming soon to a bar near you.

Indian tribes have been making mahua —the name of the booze as well as the tree—for centuries. Families do not pluck blooms, but gather them once they have fallen, thereby ensuring ripeness and maximum sugar content. After fermentation, the flowers are distilled in clay pots.

Tribal families mark births, marriages and deaths by sharing mahua. A lively folklore surrounds it. According to one tribe, a little mahua makes a person act like a parakeet, giggly and repetitive; a lot makes people tigerish, roaring and full of bluster; and too much makes people act like pigs or mice, “rolling on the ground, wallowing in mud or looking for a hole to hide in”.

Distillation remains small-scale and often clandestine. The spirit was banned by the British Raj in the late 19th century, supposedly to protect public health (though many reckon it was to protect the market for spirits imported from Britain). Even after India gained independence in 1947, some states kept bans in place, so many drinkers still chug moonshine, which is dirt cheap and sometimes fatal. Other bureaucrats heavily taxed mahua production and restricted its sale.

Yet, after years of lobbying by Desmond Nazareth , the founder of DesmondJi, a Goan distillery, the state loosened its liquor laws in 2018 and allowed the spirit to be sold in shops. Other regions, including Karnataka, Maharashtra and Madhya Pradesh, have also relaxed the rules. DesmondJi now makes around 10,000 bottles of mahua a year, available in 500 shops across several states. Six Brothers, based in Dahanu, began making high-end mahua in 2024. Many hope that the drink will, in time, become a national treasure akin to Mexican tequila.

As a result, Indian distillers are targeting curious drinkers farther afield. Mah, made from mahua flowers and distilled in Cognac , is available in France. DesmondJi is looking for stockists in Britain; Six Brothers is being served in cocktail bars in London. Mixologists note that mahua’s sweet, subtle flavour means it best suits simple mixers such as lime or vermouth.

Mahua is not the only Indian spirit with big ambitions. Feni, a Goan liquor made from coconut palm sap or cashews, is also increasingly available in the West; unfortunately, it tastes of feet. Mahua has two advantages. First, it has the sort of history that will appeal to urban lefties who love anything artisanal and “indigenous”. Second, and more important, it is delicious. ■

The pandemic polarised voters and undermined trust in institutions

Covid-19 sent the world mad The pandemic polarised voters and undermined trust in institutions August 21st 2025 Pandemics do not just sicken and kill. They have political and economic effects, too. After the Black Death wiped out a third of the people in Europe, fake news proliferated: rumours that the plague was caused by Jews poisoning the wells led to pogroms. Wages soared (because there were too few labourers) and rents collapsed (because so many homes were empty). Rulers tried brute force to block change, banning farmworkers from leaving their lord’s land to go and work for another who paid better. But this provoked uprisings, such as the Peasants’ Revolt in England in 1381, an impulse that ultimately led to the end of serfdom in most of Europe.

Covid-19 was less deadly. But two recent books argue that it, too, had far-reaching and unexpected consequences. It fed a global surge in inflation, a breakdown of trust in experts and an aggravation of political polarisation.

Before covid, few scientists believed that ordering people to wear masks or stay at home could stop the spread of a virus that passed easily from human to human, assert Stephen Macedo and Frances Lee of Princeton University in “In Covid’s Wake”. Lockdowns are hard to sustain and immensely costly. Yet when the novel coronavirus emerged in China, the Chinese government imposed draconian lockdowns, which it claimed were highly successful. The World Health Organisation accepted this. Lockdowns swiftly became conventional wisdom around the world.

It is unclear how well lockdowns worked. China suppressed the virus by occasionally shutting down whole neighbourhoods, sometimes bolting people into their apartments. But even these controls failed when the highly infectious Omicron variant required more extensive lockdowns, leading to protests in 2022. Because the government had not vaccinated enough people, when controls were lifted between 1m and 2m people died.

Rich democracies could not hope to enforce lockdowns as brutally, but most closed bars, restaurants and schools, banned large gatherings and encouraged people to work from home. This hurt the poor more than the rich. The laptop-tapping class, including the people who made covid policy, could work from their comfortable homes. Drivers and factory hands, by contrast, had to go out to work, even as schools ceased to look after their children. Multitudes of service workers were laid off.

The sacrifice was necessary to save lives, politicians claimed. New York’s governor, Andrew Cuomo, put it pithily: “Economic hardship? Yes, very bad. Not death. Emotional stress, from being locked in a house? Very bad. Not death.” Leaders insisted they were “following the science”, meaning the advice of public-health experts. But such experts tend to focus on minimising the harms caused by disease. They are not experts on the trade-offs between covid deaths and economic losses, children missing school or locked-down populations becoming lonely and depressed. Consideration of such trade-offs was “systematically swept aside in 2020-21”, fume Ms Lee and Mr Macedo. “This was plainly irrational.”

Rich-country governments borrowed huge sums to pay furloughed workers or send out cheques. Direct federal spending on covid relief in America was $5trn, equivalent to a quarter of GDP in 2020. The spending binge exacerbated a global surge in inflation, which infuriated voters and eventually spurred many to vote for Donald Trump in 2024. Poor countries fared even worse. As lockdowns crushed economic activity, global poverty rose for the first time in a generation.

It is hard to show that lockdowns saved many lives, though many scientists believe they did. People may take precautions without being forced, or kick against compulsion. Sweden never mandated masks or staying at home, and kept most schools open. To protect the old, Swedes were advised not to visit nursing homes. The New York Times called Sweden a “pariah”. Yet its excess-death rate after a year of covid was one of the lowest in Europe. In America states that locked down hard fared no better on this score than those that did not—that is, until vaccines arrived. Then their excess-death rates diverged sharply; Ms Lee and Mr Macedo suggest this is because the states that refused to lock down also included a lot of vaccine sceptics.

Public opinion was guided less by evidence than by partisanship, especially in America. Democrats were more likely to believe in lockdowns and vaccines; Republicans in neither. In Democratic states “people routinely cycled and jogged outside with masks on,” the authors observe. Schools in those states stayed closed far longer than those in Republican ones, causing students to fall behind and reducing their future earnings potential. People in Republican states avoided such folly but were more likely to die because they refused to get jabbed. Of the 25 states with lower than median vaccination rates, 19 had Republican governors.

The certainty and ferocity with which the two camps disagreed is hard to overstate. In “Summer of Our Discontent” Thomas Chatterton Williams, a journalist, explores how partisans of left and right stopped listening to each other and came to regard the other side as morally beyond the pale. When the state of Georgia decided to ease lockdowns early, the Atlantic, a liberal magazine, called it an “experiment with human sacrifice”.

And then, in May 2020, George Floyd , a black man, was choked to death by a cop who suspected him of using a forged $20 bill. Suddenly it was every progressive’s moral duty to join crowds decrying racism and police brutality. “In the space of two weeks, and without really thinking it through, we went from shaming people for being in the street to shaming them for not being in the street,” writes Mr Williams. “How could this not feel like gaslighting?”

Mr Williams speculates that Floyd might never have got into trouble had he not been one of the 40m Americans out of work because of covid restrictions. (He was a bouncer in a club that was closed.) Mr Williams complains that progressives often accepted such measures with “stunning blitheness”.

The pandemic stress-tested institutions everywhere. Some, such as vaccine-makers and the supply chains that filled supermarket shelves, covered themselves with glory. Others, not so much. Public-health authorities were far too confident in their pronouncements about a new disease, the understanding of which was, inevitably, evolving. As Francis Collins, a former director of America’s National Institutes of Health, later put it: “We failed to say every time there was a recommendation, guys, this is the best we can do right now. It’s a good chance this is wrong…That was a profound mistake, and we lost a lot of credibility.”

Governments enacted “the greatest mobilisation of emergency powers in human history”, and suppressed speech that opposed it. America’s 50 states, all confronting the same problem in different ways, should have been the “laboratories of democracy”, learning from each other. But they were not. Instead, red and blue politicians and voters retreated into cocoons of self-righteous certainty.

Ms Lee and Mr Macedo conclude that the world needed “a more honest politics of crisis policymaking…a greater willingness to acknowledge [doubt], and recognition of the reasonableness of people with varying views”. Instead, the pandemic bred partisan rancour, intolerance and bad policies, vigorously applied. Anders Tegnell, the architect of Sweden’s uniquely relaxed covid policy, put it best. Looking at how other countries were responding, he said: “The world has gone mad.” ■

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In “That Book is Dangerous!” Adam Szetela argues that the industry has become Orwellian

How publishers became scared of books In “That Book is Dangerous!” Adam Szetela argues that the industry has become Orwellian August 21st 2025 The rules of Oceania in George Orwell’s “1984” were clear: “Not even the smallest deviation of opinion on the most unimportant subject can be tolerated.” Any book that carried the wrong line “had to be rectified at lightning speed”. Only things that would not disturb the minds of the populace were allowed, since the “best books” are “those that tell you what you know already”. It is an idea that some readers took to heart: in 2022 a British university added a “trigger warning” to “1984”, alerting readers to the presence of racism, sexism and “political ideas”.

An engaging book by Adam Szetela, a journalist, also tells you what you already know: that something silly is happening in publishing. The world is not Oceania, but it is not good: in American libraries in 2024, 2,452 titles were targeted for censorship. In 2020 employees of the New York Times demanded sensitivity readers. Journalists were told to snitch on each other: if an opinion piece gave them “the slightest pause” they should “call or text” the editor “immediately”. In Britain James Bond has been bowdlerised and filthsome bits excised from Roald Dahl . It is rotsome.

Quite why this has happened is complicated. Partly publishing had a genuine problem. The literary world was, for a long time, not very diverse: in America in 1985, just 18 of 2,500 books were by black authors or illustrators. When Zadie Smith , a British novelist, was growing up she searched books for “some form of cultural reflection” but found “only distorted mirrors [or] monstrous cliché”.

The “solution” has proved worse than the problem: it has meant conniptions, cancellations and the absurd strictures of sensitivity readers. (One rapped an author’s knuckles for having a black character visit a national park, for that “is not a thing we do, as a group”.) It has also resulted in bad books, such as “Was the Cat in the Hat Black? The Hidden Racism of Children’s Literature”. Sermons were a popular literary form in the 19th century. Sermonising is in fashion in the 21st.

The over-correction happened, in part, because the barriers to entry for the argument industry have tumbled. When Daniel Defoe wrote something people did not like, he had to be put in the pillory: that sort of insult took time, commitment and carrots. By the 20th century, the cost of insulting someone had dropped, but was still there: you’d write a rude letter, read it over then, as the author David Sedaris noted, think “Is this really worth a twenty-five-cent stamp?” Email allowed you to insult authors for nothing; social media mean you can now publicly insult them for the same. People vent their spleen on Instagram and X in an online version of Orwell’s “Two Minutes Hate” ritual.

The solution to all this is, says Mr Szetela, to speak out—or you are “guilty” too, like those who passively watch book-burnings in Ray Bradbury’s “Fahrenheit 451”. In this comprehensive (if at times too polemical) book he practises what he preaches. Expect it to cause conniptions online. ■

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Indian crowds greet his new film with prayer, confetti and milk

How Rajinikanth, a 74-year-old actor, drives fans into a frenzy Indian crowds greet his new film with prayer, confetti and milk August 21st 2025 FOR FANS of Rajinikanth, or Rajini, it is not enough to simply buy a ticket to one of his films and turn up at the right time and place. No; preparations begin days in advance. Ahead of his latest release, “Coolie”, on August 14th, some fans prostrated themselves in front of shrines, seeking a divine blessing for the Indian actor. Others bathed giant cardboard cutouts of him in milk, a sign of reverence usually reserved for Hindu gods .

When a trailer for “Coolie” was released on August 2nd, it racked up 25m views in two weeks. (The term is derogatory in the West, but is not considered offensive in South Asia.) On the day of the film’s debut, cinemas had a carnival feel, with drumming and confetti. A few devotees flew to India from countries as far as Australia for the occasion.

In a packed cinema in Mumbai, patrons whistled and hollered from the moment his sobriquet “Superstar” appeared on screen. (Projectionists sometimes pause the film after his grand entrance to let viewers offer prayers from their seats or to hurl coins and banknotes.) “This is nothing. You should go to Tamil Nadu or Karnataka,” says one fan. “You won’t be able to hear his dialogue.”

Rajinikanth—whose real name is Shivaji Rao Gaekwad—is one of the biggest movie stars in the world, inspiring the kind of devotion that most Hollywood actors can only dream of. “Coolie”, a Tamil gangster flick, marks his 50th year on screen. Rajini plays a dockyard worker and union leader who investigates the death of a friend, which draws him into a criminal underworld. Along the way, he wields swords, knives and guns. He shows what he can do with his fists and his wits.

The role hints at Rajinikanth’s humble beginnings. Born to a poor family in Bangalore , he discovered a love of acting at school and would perform folk tales for rapt classmates. As a young adult, he did manual jobs—hauling rice sacks for ten paise apiece (equivalent to 1.3 cents in 1970, and 0.12 cents today)—and worked as a bus conductor. Later he studied acting at the Madras Film Institute.

To begin with he got only bit parts and often played baddies. But in “Bairavi” (1978) he portrayed an honourable servant who avenges his sister’s murder. Thereafter, in blockbusters such as “Naan Mahaan Alla” (1984), “Baashha” (1995) and “Padayappa” (1999), he starred as the swashbuckling hero.

Rajini is not a method actor, nor a Bollywood beefcake . At 74, his lustrous hair has become a tonsured style flecked with grey. So what explains fans’ fervour?

One reason is his everyman appeal. He dresses plainly and shuns big-brand endorsements. He has a self-deprecating sense of humour. In a recent speech he joked about having warned his young choreographer not to overtax “a 1950s model” lest “parts start falling off”.

Another, somewhat paradoxical, reason is Rajini’s superhero-like qualities. He is known for his physics-defying antics: in one film, he catches a knife between his teeth. In “Coolie” he dials a phone with one hand while fending off a blade, then floors five goons with a single punch that sends them flying in all directions. The key to enjoying Rajinikanth’s work, one moviegoer says, is not overthinking it: “Leave your brain at home.”

Like all the biggest stars, Rajini has a certain magnetism. One punter says the actor’s “aura is unmatched”. For a time he hoped to use that charisma in the political arena. Rajini tried to launch a new party in 2020, but withdrew after a health scare he called a “warning given to me by the Lord”.

Most important, Rajinikanth’s work is suitable for all ages. Three generations filled the cinema in Mumbai. People across India and in the diaspora have grown up watching him as he has made films in Tamil, Telugu, Hindi and Kannada.

For the most part, the Rajini fandom is harmless. On his birthdays admirers organise meal donations and charity collections. But sometimes affection tips over into frenzy. “We are really tense the night before any Rajinikanth film release,” admits one official in “For The Love of a Man”, a documentary of 2015. This year police in Chennai confiscated firecrackers from fans. His acolytes expect action, but will not tolerate evisceration. “Twice is okay, but if villains beat him a third time, the theatre might burn,” warns an admirer.

Most actors fear their powers diminishing with time: if anything, Rajinikanth’s are increasing, even after 170 films. “Coolie” took $17m at the global box office on its first day, setting a new record for Tamil cinema. Rajini still packs a punch. ■

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An experiment looked at how religious folk responded to psychedelic drugs

High priests: why scientists gave magic mushrooms to the clergy An experiment looked at how religious folk responded to psychedelic drugs August 21st 2025 SOME PEOPLE think of their hounds as heavenly, sporting T-shirts proclaiming that “‘Dog’ is ‘God’ spelled backwards.” For Jeff Vidt, God actually was a dog: the Lord came to him as a Great Dane. Meanwhile, Jaime Clark-Soles glimpsed the deity as a harp-playing woman. Sughra Ahmed felt the Almighty as a concept: love.

These divine encounters occurred at Johns Hopkins University, Maryland, during an experimental study investigating how “the effects of psilocybin”—the active ingredient in magic mushrooms —“are experienced and interpreted by religious clergy”. The 29 participants came from Buddhism, Christianity, Islam and Judaism and were “psychedelic-naive”: ie, they had never dabbled in these drugs before. They took psilocybin on two occasions; there was a waiting-list control group.

The sample size may be small, but the findings, recently published in the Journal of Psychedelic Medicine, are mighty clear: 96% of participants ranked a psilocybin trip in the top five most spiritually significant moments of their lives and 42% declared it the single most profound experience they had ever had. ​(A recent study in Sweden also found that 58% of people found a psychedelic experience to be one of the most meaningful events of their lives.) Almost half described their trips as “psychologically challenging”, but none reported severely adverse effects.

Psychedelics change the way the default mode network (DMN) in the brain works. These linked parts of the brain are activated when people muse on the past, present or heavenly future. Psychedelics switch some of the DMN off at the same time as they activate other neural pathways, all of which allows for new ways of thinking. Scientists are exploring how psilocybin may help treat depression and post-traumatic stress disorder.

More than a year after the study, participants reported a deeper connection to their faith and improved prayer. Hunt Priest, an Episcopalian, felt an electric current in his spine; it stopped at his throat before exploding out of his head. The blockage was “connected to my preaching”: “I felt restricted in what I could say.” He has “never thought of the Holy Spirit the same again”. Roger Joslin, also an Episcopalian, says: “There’s my life before psychedelics and my life afterwards.”

Yet such spirituality is unlikely to please traditionalists, who argue that true faith is the product of discipline, not mind-bending drugs. Some may worry that these experiences threaten religious institutions: who would rather sit in a dusty pew than fly with the angels? As Mr Vidt, an Anglican priest, put it: “I don’t believe in God: I know God. I experienced God.”

Psilocybin also seems to promote the kind of universalism that religious authorities have spent centuries trying to contain. Mr Priest says he prayed as a Jew, then a Muslim; Julie Danan, a rabbi, chanted “Shalom” next to Hindus saying “Om”. “It’s hard to imagine having a psychedelic experience that made someone more narrow or exclusionary in their faith,” says Mr Joslin. “It’s likely to broaden it.” This may bother religious authorities who must advance their own faith as superior to others.

Advocates argue that drugs are a conduit to the sorts of mystical things that are described in scripture, such as multi-headed beasts. “The whole Book of Revelation is a visionary journey,” says Ms Clark-Soles, a Baptist minister. “Christianity is fundamentally based on a mystical experience: the resurrection of a dead guy.”

Ms Clark-Soles is writing a book called “Psychedelics and Soul Care: What Christians Need to Know”. Several of the study’s participants have set up organisations aimed at exploring the benefits psilocybin can offer believers. Mr Priest established Ligare, a “Christian psychedelic society”; Zac Kamenetz, a rabbi, launched Shefa to support Jews; Ms Ahmed, an imam, created Ruhani for Muslims. Some feel the Religious Freedom Act should protect institutions in America offering drugs for spiritual purposes. Talk about a higher calling. ■

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“Tart”, a new memoir, is a woman’s take on “Kitchen Confidential”

An anonymous chef serves up stories of food and flings “Tart”, a new memoir, is a woman’s take on “Kitchen Confidential” August 21st 2025 SLUTTY CHEFF, an anonymous female cook , has a confession: she is greedy. She doesn’t “want to eat” food so much as “devour” it. Her appetite is less that of an “average Western woman” and more akin to that of “a starved pig”. But, as her alias indicates, there is one thing she claims to desire even more than food: sex.

“Tart”, her memoir, is a hedonistic tale of both. In the book Slutty (as her friends call her) recounts the first two years of her career as a chef, mostly in posh London restaurants. She peeks into the “socialite chef” world, which is “elitist, exclusive” and “more about who you know, not what you cook”. She discovers a lot about herself, for instance when she realises “I love cooking—I need cooking.” She also discovers a lot about—quelle surprise—sex. Intercourse with a chef, she proclaims, is “more thrilling than being one”.

Fans are eating up her tales. She serves salacious morsels to her tens of thousands of followers on Instagram and to readers of her column in British Vogue. The film and television rights to “Tart” have already been gobbled up by Working Title, one of the production companies that made the “Bridget Jones” films. There are rumours that Lena Dunham, the creator of the hit show “Girls”, will help adapt the book for the screen.

“Tart” is dining out on the popularity of sexy chefs on screen and online. “The Bear”, a TV show which stars Jeremy Allen White as a moody chef who wants to turn a sandwich shop into a Michelin-starred restaurant, has helped professional cooks seem more sultry than sweaty. In “Emily in Paris” , a hit series, there is a love triangle involving a hunky chef. On social media so-called “hot chefs” sauté, sear and smoulder for the camera, often without their shirts on.

The memoir has been lauded as a feminine take on Anthony Bourdain’s “Kitchen Confidential” (2000). The American chef and author also stunned and delighted readers by sharing tantalising stories. (One memorable tale involved a blushing bride getting “an impromptu send-off” from a cook behind the kitchen bins.) Slutty Cheff has spoken of her lust for the rebellious culinarian. In “Tart” she says she imagines Bourdain—who took his own life in 2018, aged 61—joining her “for four hours of carnal feasting, seven bottles of wine, a couple of lines of crushed aspirin and then a great big fuck”.

In her acknowledgments, the author pays homage to Bourdain, as well as Jilly Cooper , the British queen of the bonkbuster novel. Ms Cooper’s influence is evident. Just consider Slutty Cheff’s contents page. Whereas Bourdain used the sleek, inscrutable subheadings of “Appetiser”, followed by “First Course” and so on, she prefers smutty titles such as “Michelin Star Pussy Juice” and “Ready Steady Cock”. She spends a great deal of time describing the “phallic form” of courgettes and the “great erection” of rhubarb.

“Kitchen Confidential” aimed to lift the lid on the restaurant industry. Bourdain wrote of how butter is reused and uneaten bread is often sent out to the next table. Seafood served on Mondays, he averred, is probably four or five days old; hollandaise sauce swims with bacteria. Readers finished the book feeling satisfied that they knew more about what (and what not) to order next time they went out to eat.

“Tart”, meanwhile, is mostly a romp. Slutty Cheff does not dish up such insights. The kitchens she works in seem clean and hygienic: the most nauseating it gets is the description of “the flashing grey of a mouse running past my feet”. She takes drugs and has sex outside the kitchen rather than in it.

The most revealing passages are not about sex, but sexual harassment. Slutty Cheff is often the only woman in the kitchen. She describes the challenges of working with a “pervy” man who touches her bottom and stands so close that she can “feel his breath”. She has to appear “strong and unaffected”, she feels, to earn the respect of her male peers. “Tart” offers a slice of life, but such experiences leave a bitter taste in the reader’s mouth. ■

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She made viewers cross. But “Sex and the City” was unlike anything that had come before

Farewell to Carrie Bradshaw, TV’s exasperating, enduring heroine She made viewers cross. But “Sex and the City” was unlike anything that had come before August 21st 2025 CARRIE BRADSHAW has skipped across Manhattan in Manolo Blahniks for the last time. On August 14th “And Just Like That…” (“AJLT”) broadcast its final episode and so bid farewell to Carrie, almost 30 years after she first appeared on television screens in “Sex and the City” (“satc”). In the debut episode, Carrie lamented the dearth of “great unmarried men” in New York; over the course of six seasons of “SATC”, two films and three seasons of “AJLT”, she received proposals (and called one ​engagement off), ​got stood up at the altar, got married​, was widowed​ and had umpteen flings and flirtations. All the while, Carrie was establishing her reputation as one of the most infuriating yet influential heroines ever to appear on screen.

She caused a stir from the beginning. Carrie and her coterie first appeared in 1994 in a racy, semi-autobiographical newspaper column written by Candace Bushnell for the New York Observer. It gained a following fast, though detractors dismissed Ms Bushnell as a low-rate gossip who made stuff up. “My characters exist,” she retorted. “Go to enough parties, and you’ll meet all of them.”

Those characters—four sparky, single women—arrived on screen in 1998. There was Miranda (Cynthia Nixon), the stressed-out lawyer, Charlotte (Kristin Davis), the hyper-polished WASP, and Samantha (Kim Cattrall), the sexually voracious publicist. But the show’s centre was Carrie (Sarah Jessica Parker), a journalist and bon vivant with a penchant for terrible puns. Together they broached topics that had not really been dealt with on TV before, including abortions, fetishes and fertility .

Much of “Satc” did not feel particularly plausible. All the women in the show looked impeccable all the time. Carrie lived alone in an apartment on the Upper East Side while turning out one column a week; she somehow had money left over for designer shoes and lavish dinners .

Viewers were happy to overlook that, but they often found Carrie vexing. She was spoiled: in one episode she ordered Charlotte to give her $30,000 as a down-payment for her apartment. She was judgmental: she scorned Samantha for giving a blowjob to a delivery man. And she was blinkered: she had dire taste in partners. Her love for “Mr Big”—an emotionally unavailable financier with the prosaic name of John—led her to behave erratically.

Nonetheless, it was impossible not to be drawn in by the quartet’s dynamic. Miranda was acerbic. When Samantha was not bedding handsome men, she was turning out Wildean phrases. (“I’m a trisexual,” she declares: “I’ll try anything once.”) Charlotte was sentimental. “Maybe we could be each other’s soulmates?” she asks her friends as her marriage disintegrates. Most viewers secretly wished they were at the table, a Cosmopolitan in hand.

The show was a hit. It was nominated for 54 Emmys, winning seven. Various celebrities made cameos: Donald Trump appeared in an episode entitled “The Man, the Myth, the Viagra”. More than 10m people tuned in to watch Carrie fall into Big’s arms in the finale in 2004. The films, released in 2008 and 2010, together made over $1bn at the box office in today’s money.

“ajlt” tried to fix some of the shortcomings of “satc”. Its best-written characters were black, a refreshing change from the notably white original, and it attempted to grapple with modern debates about sexuality. There were some moving moments as Carrie, Miranda and Charlotte navigated midlife and its crises. (Samantha did not return, to the show’s detriment.) But it was a peculiar reboot which never recaptured the charm of the original. The writers seemed particularly unsure about what to do with Carrie after Big’s death.

All the same, Carrie Bradshaw struck a nerve in a generation of women. She has inspired fashion trends, internet memes and thinkpieces, from takedowns (Elle: “Carrie Bradshaw Is Still Full of Shit”) to fierce defences (the Atlantic: “No, Carrie Bradshaw Was Not ‘Such a Whore’”). Even when she was perplexing, there was something admirable about her determination to live her life on her own terms. Many fans won’t help but wonder: why is breaking up with a fictional character so hard? ■

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What lies beneath the pumice in the ancient city is magnificent

The largest dig in a lifetime is under way in Pompeii What lies beneath the pumice in the ancient city is magnificent August 14th 2025 Was he her lover? The two skeletons, male and female, were clearly physically close when they died: she on a bed, he on the floor. Archaeology offers other hints. She seems to have been richer (or at least was carrying gold); they spent their last hours together (debris trapped them in the room); those hours were terrible (he, his injuries show, died first). Archaeology offers one final clue: their ages. She was in her 30s or 40s; he in his teens or early 20s. Perhaps they were lovers, or mother and child, or total strangers. Even at the distance of 2,000 years you find yourself hoping she did not watch her own son die.

Welcome to Pompeii. This is the ancient city both as you have seen it before—graffiti, frescoes, tiles, toilets and some highly enviable terrazzo—and as you have never seen it before. The largest dig in 70 years is under way: 3,200 square metres have been uncovered and innumerable tonnes of soil, rubble and pumice have been moved. In them are, so far, three houses, a bathhouse, a fresco that looks so like a pizza that archaeologists call it the “not-pizza” fresco, five human skeletons and, this being Pompeii, lots of phalluses.

The dig feels faintly surprising, less for what is being found (little has been able to surprise archaeologists since Pompeii’s infamous god-having-sex-with-a-goat statue was unearthed in 1752) than that there is anything left to be found at all. Pompeii feels so familiar: it has appeared in films (“POMPEII” in 2014) and fiction (Robert Harris’s “POMPEII”) and non-fiction ( Mary Beard’s —guess what—“POMPEII”).

In the three-odd centuries since excavations began, it has been used—and, critics say, abused—by almost every generation. It has been used as a stone quarry (nice stones) and a classical one (nice statues). It has been held up as a parable of sexual liberty (its frescoes); sexual immorality (that goat) and debauchery (ditto). It has been seen as a paradigm of civilisation (its plumbing) and barbarism (its slavery).

Every generation has offered a reaction: Christians tutted at it; Mussolini had dinner in it; Professor Beard metaphorically winked at it. It is often called a “lost city” but few cities have had such exposure per square metre. Its art is found on fridge magnets and its mosaics made into doormats. The city has been recast as a souvenir. So much of Pompeii is known that it is easy to forget how much is not known: one-third of Pompeii is still unexcavated.

That is obvious once you look closely. Walk through the popular bits of Pompeii—past the theatre, amphitheatre and brothel—and keep going and you will find yourself in quieter streets with fewer people and more pigeons. There are shopfronts here too, but their windows open onto a wall of earth: nothing seems to be behind them. These are the undug streets.

But, after an injection of EU cash, archaeologists started digging in 2023. The dig is “complicated”, says Gabriel Zuchtriegel, the director of the site and author of “The Buried City”, a recent book. If you were to add an archaeologist to your novel, you would add Dr Zuchtriegel: German, handsome, he is fluent in three languages and mildly forbidding in all of them. (To cheer himself up, he reads the New Testament in ancient Greek.) Ask him his feelings on uncovering this stuff and he says “nothing”: you are just “so concentrated”. The epigraph of his book comes from Herman Melville’s diary: “Pompeii like any other town. Same old humanity. All the same whether one be dead or alive.”

To call this a “dig” is to underplay the speed of it. Pompeii offers some of the finest archaeology in the world; it also offers some of the fastest. When Vesuvius erupted in 79AD, sending a cloud of ash 32km into the sky and surprising the locals—who not only did not know that Vesuvius was a volcano, but had no word for “volcano”—what fell on Pompeii was not lava but pumice stones, so light that locals, as Pliny the Younger, a Roman writer watching from a nearby villa noted, “tied pillows over their heads…for protection”.

The stones kept falling at a rate of 15cm an hour. In three hours, they reached people’s knees; in six, the height of a toddler. Most people fled—perhaps 90% escaped. Those who sheltered and stayed became, like the skeletons in the house, trapped. Their room, says Sophie Hay, an archaeologist, “became their tomb”. Walls started to collapse under the weight (one killed the young man). Then the volcanic cloud collapsed and a wave of superheated pumice, gas and ash raced, at speeds of 100kph and temperatures of over 200°C, down the slope. In Pompeii, people suffocated. In Herculaneum, people’s brains boiled.

It is hard to imagine a more appalling end—or, for archaeologists, a better one. The grains of pumice beneath were so light and dry that they protected all they fell on; so easy to remove that archaeologists, says Dr Hay, call it “Amazon packaging material”. You less excavate Pompeii than unbox it, brushing grey, frozen-foam crumbs of pumice from a fresco here and shovelling it out of a swimming pool there. In days columns start to emerge, inverse Excaliburs, from a slowly sinking lake of grey.

The problem with Pompeii is not getting stuff out: it is keeping it upright once you have. The same pumice-pyroclastic one-two that caught bodies as if in freeze-frame—this one clawing at a throat, or that little boy writhing—caught buildings in the same way. A shattered column or wall mid-fall can be wholly held up by pumice. Take it away and, like a game of giant Jenga, the whole thing might fall. A cat’s cradle of scaffolding winds its way around the walls (see picture). Dr Zuchtriegel likens digging to performing “a complicated operation”.

It has been worth it, as what has been found is breathtaking. That is partly because, like so much else in Pompeii, it is untouched by time and partly because, like very little else in Pompeii, it is untouched by archaeologists. Pompeii’s relics have suffered as much from enthusiasts as eruptions. The Bourbons plundered Pompeii (you can still see the holes, cut as if by giant mice, in the walls). Napoleon’s sister, Caroline, planned, with Napoleonic efficiency, to uncover it all in three years. Everyone has stolen from it.

The new excavations, by contrast, are pristine. A bathhouse has such perfect curved steps on its plunge pool you could imagine slipping into it today. A nearby wall is painted with such rich pigment you might find it on a Farrow & Ball colour chart (“Cataclysmic Ochre”). Many of the houses are mid-refurbishment. In one, roof tiles sit stacked, ready, on the floor; a builder’s plaster-splashed bucket waits by a wall. Archaeologists play a game—a Roman Rightmove—of which house is nicest: the not-pizza-fresco one? The baths one?

It is a bit of fun. But there is a ghoulish guiltiness to ogling Pompeii. Posterity accuses the Bourbons of “collector syndrome”—the urge to acquire antiquity. But, Dr Zuchtriegel suggests, tourists are guilty of it too, acquiring experiences as greedily as Bourbons snatched artefacts. Millions visit each year, sweating across its forum, smirking in the brothel where the audio guide tells you about “la vie sexuelle de Pompéi” in nine languages. Dr Zuchtriegel has limited the daily number of visits to 20,000, down from 36,000.

He would prefer people not to tick off lists but to look at one thing, carefully. Which thing? He shows a favourite: in a small house there are little charcoal drawings of some gladiators. When they first uncovered this last year, they thought it might have been a stylised adult’s drawing. Then they dug further and found that the artist had, in their way, autographed it, drawing round their own hand in charcoal. To judge from the size of the hand, the artist must have been six or seven. When they see it, everyone does the same thing, Dr Zuchtriegel says: they stretch out their own hand to hold it over where the Pompeiian child put theirs. Same old humanity, whether one be dead or alive. ■

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He won a Nobel prize in 1968 for his work on particle physics. But his interests ranged far beyond that field

Bombs, dinosaurs and UFOs: Luis Walter Alvarez’s eclectic career He won a Nobel prize in 1968 for his work on particle physics. But his interests ranged far beyond that field August 14th 2025 Luis Walter Alvarez’s career was marked by two explosions. The first was one the physicist enabled: a plutonium bomb, whose design he oversaw, destroyed the Japanese city of Nagasaki in August 1945 . The second was one he theorised: the terrestrial impact 65m years ago of an asteroid sufficiently powerful to drive the dinosaurs to extinction. It may be for the asteroid theory—developed alongside his son and widely accepted after his death—that Alvarez is best remembered, rather than his groundbreaking contributions to the Manhattan Project.

Yet, as a new biography by Alec Nevala-Lee shows, Alvarez’s scientific contributions extended far beyond even those two projects. He developed airborne radars that are sometimes credited with winning the second world war, as well as enabling the Berlin airlift. His work on particle physics won him the Nobel prize in 1968.

Mr Nevala-Lee calls Alvarez “the world’s foremost scientific detective”. (The author’s previous book was about Buckminster Fuller, another polymath.) The list of mysteries on which Alvarez consulted would have raised even Sherlock Holmes’s eyebrows. Alvarez investigated the assassination of John F. Kennedy, looked into unidentified flying objects and searched the pyramids of Giza for hidden chambers.

His interest in science developed early, in part because both his father and paternal grandfather, an immigrant from Spain, were doctors. A bright student—so unlikely to make mistakes that he completed his maths exams in pen, not pencil—he graduated from high school at 17 and enrolled at the University of Chicago in 1928. Alvarez’s arrival could not have been better timed. Nuclear physicists in those decades were the first to set foot on a new scientific continent: any experiment might yield a Nobel-prizewinning discovery. Moving fast and fearlessly was the only way to build a reputation, even if it meant exposure to dangerously high doses of radiation. Alvarez never stopped getting his hands dirty.

His combination of ambition, intellect and self-belief meant he was not always easy to get along with. One early collaborator described him as a “little fascist”; another deplored his manner of treating colleagues as servants. Frustrated by his frosty reception among palaeontologists, he dismissed them as stamp-collectors rather than real scientists. Alvarez’s dedication to his work also strained his relationship with his first wife, Geraldine, a brilliant mind herself.

Most notably, he clashed with J. Robert Oppenheimer , the scientific director of the Manhattan Project, whose alleged communist sympathies led to a hearing and the revocation of his national-security clearance in 1954. Alvarez was one of Oppenheimer’s most persistent critics, which Mr Nevala-Lee attributes to Oppenheimer’s post-war change of heart with regards to the use of atomic energy for war. (Alvarez considered the development of a thermonuclear bomb to be a national priority.) Whatever his motivations, there is little doubt that Alvarez’s testimony helped him make friendships with powerful figures in Washington that would subsequently benefit his career.

Unsurprisingly, Alvarez was particularly proud of his Nobel prize, awarded for his work designing a new generation of bubble chambers: giant vats of liquid hydrogen in which the paths of individual particles could be observed and photographed. No less noteworthy to Alvarez was the fact that his award citation was the longest ever for a Nobel prize in physics. (The record would not be broken until 2013.)

In a fast-moving career spent pushing the boundaries of what was known and what was possible, it is remarkable how rigorously Alvarez vetted his own reasoning. That tendency to look for trouble, inculcated by a university instructor who encouraged students to secretly interfere with each other’s experimental set-ups, saved him from embarrassment on multiple occasions. In an age where people are all too prone to believing what they wish to be true, rather than challenging their own assumptions, it may also be the most important lesson his example can offer. ■

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On social media they serve recipes with a side of celebrity intrigue

Private chefs are spilling the culinary secrets of the super-rich On social media they serve recipes with a side of celebrity intrigue August 14th 2025 “My celebrity client wants a $2,000 pizza,” Brooke Baevsky (pictured), a private chef, tells the camera. How do you prepare such a pie? Add lashings of caviar , organic figs and manuka honey, then dust everything with 24-carat gold flakes, which are tasteless in both senses of the word.

The pizza was the appetiser for a posh dinner party in Los Angeles. Ms Baevsky—who says she cooks for royalty, sports stars and actors—made sure to record herself serving the pizza, lest anyone think it was satire. Known online as Chef Bae, she is part of a batch of private chefs offering their followers a chance to ogle opulence.

Private chefs serve up their recipes with a side of celebrity intrigue. They give fans tours of gargantuan fridges and record trips to fancy food shops such as Erewhon and Citarella. Ms Baevsky says a client spent $20,000 to send her across the world to fetch some favourite chocolate and nuts. Emily Ruybal serves four-course menus on yachts in the Bahamas. All this draws in viewers: the hashtag #privatechef has been viewed some 5bn times on TikTok.

In the summer many private chefs head to the Hamptons, an upscale coastal resort near New York. Private chefs such as Meredith Hayden, whose username is @wishbonekitchen, have gone viral for video diaries of 17-hour catering shifts. According to TikTok the “Hamptons aesthetic”, a style of decor inspired by the luxurious beach houses, is one of the trends of the moment.

Menus in the Hamptons typically involve salad leaves rather than gold ones, harvested by hand from immaculate vegetable gardens . As Jill Donenfeld, co-founder of The Culinistas, an American private-chef agency, puts it, clients not only seek “caviar and lobster” but also simple “farm-fresh ingredients”. The firm’s most popular dish is its “burrata bar”, in which the creamy cheese is heaped with toppings such as prosciutto, peaches and pistachios. Some clients ask chefs to make the dishes served at their favourite restaurants.

The industry has benefited from its viral moment . The Culinistas says business in the Hamptons this summer is up by 40% from the year before. (It costs around $50,000 to hire one of its chefs for the season.) The rich and famous are seeking out chefs they see on their Instagram feeds. In turn, private cheffing—a career long seen as inferior to chefs de cuisine—is being taken more seriously by culinarians.

Yet not much is private about TikTok’s private chefs. In a business that often demands discretion, Ms Baevsky notes how “fun” it is to make videos with Hollywood clients such as Emma Roberts and Sarah Michelle Gellar. Some chefs are now celebrities themselves. Ms Hayden’s “The Wishbone Kitchen Cookbook” is a bestseller. She has quit the long shifts and bought her own house in the Hamptons. Perhaps, in time, she will hire a private chef. ■

Some of America’s most outlandish politicians also made their debuts in 1986-89

The four years when old New York died and a new one was born Some of America’s most outlandish politicians also made their debuts in 1986-89 August 14th 2025 Mike Bloomberg once mused that New York was “a luxury product”. The former mayor meant that businesses—and, by extension, their staff—should be willing to tolerate higher costs in exchange for the advantages of living in a megacity. But many voters crave Manhattan buzz at Midwestern prices. This is one reason why New York’s Democrats recently backed a young, charismatic, far-left mayoral candidate, Zohran Mamdani , whose plans to ease the cost of living (such as a rent freeze) would surely make things worse (by discouraging new construction).

Because New York has been tolerably well run since the 1990s, some New Yorkers have forgotten how much damage a dysfunctional city government can do. New York nearly went bankrupt in 1975, after decades of financial mismanagement. By the early 1980s crime and homelessness were visibly out of control. “Squeegee men” menaced motorists while purporting to clean their windscreens. Vandals and graffiti artists despoiled public spaces unchecked. The police were inept and sometimes corrupt. Between 1986 and 1989 an average of 1,760 people were murdered each year: nearly five times as many as were killed in 2024. AIDS, crack, racial tension, welfare fraud and cronyism added to the sense of chaos. Yet in “The Gods of New York”, Jonathan Mahler—a writer for New York Times Magazine and author of “Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bronx Is Burning”—argues that “luxury” New York was born in those four turbulent years.

Part of the pleasure of this book, especially for readers too young to remember the late 1980s, is that it chronicles a time when several important American political figures first strode onto the public stage. Here is Donald Trump , suing everyone, puffing out clouds of bluster and braggadocio, wildly overspending on his Atlantic City casinos and taking up with Marla Maples while still married to Ivana.

There is Al Sharpton, a rabble-rouser leading street protests—a rather different figure from the slender, sober-suited version who appears on network tv today. Here is Rudy Giuliani (pictured), with “the demeanour of an undertaker and the verbosity of a lawyer”, as one columnist wrote, making his first failed run for mayor. And an ambitious young medical bureaucrat named Anthony Fauci faces withering criticism from gay activists for what they see as his too-cautious response to the spread of AIDS. (Readers may wonder whether the long lockdowns he recommended during covid-19 were an overcorrection.)

Mr Mahler paints a portrait of a city facing multiple crises. AIDS was at first not just a death sentence but also a terrifying mystery, as healthy young men swiftly sickened and died. New York accounted for one-third of America’s recorded AIDS deaths by March 1987, and the city’s response was woefully inadequate, with too few beds and tests, and public nursing homes that would turn infected patients away, for fear of contamination. New York’s efforts to deal with homelessness were similarly flat-footed.

Race relations were dire. Black men were murdered for setting foot in white enclaves of Brooklyn and Queens. Five black and Latino teenage boys were falsely convicted of beating and raping a jogger in Central Park; Mr Trump took out newspaper adverts urging New York to bring back capital punishment. In 1984 a vigilante was acquitted of attempted murder after shooting four black teenagers who he thought were about to mug him—and became a folk hero to many white New Yorkers.

Presiding over the chaos was Ed Koch, first elected mayor of New York in 1977. Querulous, combative and tireless, he said he wanted to be “mayor for life”. Mr Mahler recounts his political demise. He was an avatar of an older New York—more working-class, with political control wielded by “white ethnics” (largely Italian, Irish and Jewish Americans)—and he failed to understand or respond to a changing city. Elected for a third term in 1985, he would lose the Democratic primary in 1989 to David Dinkins, the staid and courtly Manhattan borough president who would go on to become New York’s first black mayor.

The city’s economic engine also changed in this period; the industrial base was gone, and Wall Street’s boom in the 1980s presaged the rise of FIRE—finance, insurance and real estate—that would drive the city’s remarkable growth through the 1990s and beyond. As the crack epidemic ebbed, and as policing improved when Mr Giuliani was mayor (1994-2001), New York grew safer and more desirable. Rents soared as people flocked in.

Mr Mahler’s book is skilfully constructed and vividly written. The author avoids the longtime New Yorker’s trap of nostalgia. As with all great cities, things are always dying and being reborn: anyone who wants placidity is free to catch a flight to Bruges or Santorini. ■

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Young people, in particular, want audiobooks, podcasts and videos to go faster

What’s your preferred playback speed: 1x, 1.5x or 2x? Young people, in particular, want audiobooks, podcasts and videos to go faster August 14th 2025 GLEN POWELL, a Hollywood heartthrob, likes 1x listening speed: “I want to hear people talk at a normal human rate.” Bowen Yang, an American comedian, prefers his narration fast and loose—“You can round up to 2x”—though he reckons 1.8x is the perfect “Goldilocks” pace.

Both men appeared in an advert by Audible, an audiobook platform, earlier this year, which featured various celebrities talking about the speed at which they listen to their chosen titles. It provoked fierce debate online for implying that those who make haste are weird, even psychopathic. “I listened [to] your judgmental ad on 2x speed,” one TikTok user said. Some claimed to feel “shamed” by the advert and threatened to cancel their subscriptions.

The online brouhaha points to the changing way in which audiences, particularly young ones, engage with digital media . Polling by The Economist and YouGov found that 31% of Americans between the ages of 18 and 29 listen to audio at playback speeds faster than 1x, compared with 8% of people aged 45 and over.

Both Apple and Spotify offer users the option to dash through podcasts. Many newspapers—including this one—offer audio versions of their articles at a variety of tempos. Netflix has a button to switch up videos’ speed in its web pages and apps. YouTube has a similar feature and recently rolled out a 4x option for its premium subscribers, apparently by popular demand.

The time-saving benefits can be enormous: YouTube claims that its viewers collectively save more than 900 years per day thanks to its fast-playback feature. If you had a ten-hour journey, you could listen to “Persuasion” in eight hours and 13 minutes at 1x speed. But, if you clicked 1.5x, you’d hear all about Anne Elliot’s exploits in five and a half hours, leaving space for “Animal Farm” and “The Little Prince”, with time to spare (they would take 120 and 80 minutes at 1.5x, respectively).

A more garrulous pace does not seem to affect listeners’ ability to concentrate. The average person speaks at a rate of about 150 words per minute, but most brains are capable of processing information faster than that, says Marcus Pearce, a cognitive scientist at Queen Mary University of London. A recent meta-analysis led by academics at the University of Waterloo in Canada looked at the test scores of students who had watched lectures back at varying speeds. They found that up to 1.5x there was not much of a difference in performance, although scores started to decrease noticeably as playback speeds approached or exceeded 2x.

For audio and video platforms, there is no downside to offering different playback options: the more books or episodes a subscriber gets through, the better the advertising and sales revenues. But for listeners, the experience differs greatly between 1x and 2x. “There’s an art of pacing, tone and suspension” to reading aloud, says Kimberly Wetherell, an audiobook narrator. “If you speed that up too much, you’re losing that part of the performance.”

Rhetoric often relies on rhythm and pauses for emphasis and meaning: few actors race through the soliloquies in “Hamlet”, for instance. Yet for many, to speed or not to speed is no longer a question. ■

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A hit Broadway show brings “The Crucible” into the era of #MeToo

Thought John Proctor was one of the good guys? Think again A hit Broadway show brings “The Crucible” into the era of #MeToo August 14th 2025 On Broadway, among the jukebox musicals turning out the old hits, the stage adaptations of blockbuster films and the star-studded revivals with eye-wateringly expensive tickets , a new play with a single set and a mostly teenage cast has been quietly packing the house night after night. Audiences have been leaving the Booth Theatre stirred and tearful.

“John Proctor is the Villain” is about a classroom of clever high-schoolers who grapple with “The Crucible” in the wake of #MeToo. It opened to acclaim in April and was meant to close in early July, but popular demand kept extending its run. It will vacate the stage in September only because the theatre has another play on deck, but Universal has recently picked up the film rights and tapped the talented young playwright, Kimberly Belflower, to adapt her sharp script for the screen. Schools and universities across America are licensing the play for their own productions.

Ms Belflower wrote and set the play in 2018. In October 2017 Harvey Weinstein , a Hollywood producer, was accused of sexual abuse by multiple women, setting off a tidal wave of allegations against powerful men. Women across the world shared their experiences of harassment and violence; voices long silenced were suddenly heard and even believed. It was a thrilling moment and an alarming one, in which long-standing rules about sex and power were being rewritten in real time.

This is the charged atmosphere in which the teenage girls in a one-stoplight town in Georgia grapple with Arthur Miller’s take on the Salem witch trials of 1692-93. It is a classic play their energetic and beloved teacher, Mr Smith (Gabriel Ebert), says features “one of the great heroes of the American theatre” in John Proctor, a married farmer who is doomed to hang for refusing to falsely confess to witchcraft. Proctor’s resolution and refusal to provide untrue testimony was seen as especially admirable when “The Crucible” was first staged in 1953. It was the height of McCarthyism—a time when many were baselessly accusing their fellow Americans of communist ties or sympathies.

The consensus view that Proctor is a hero conveniently overlooks the fact that the play’s drama stems from an affair Proctor had with a 17-year-old orphan girl named Abigail, who worked for him as a servant before she was fired over their romance. In the cold light of 2018, this aspect of Proctor’s behaviour seems dishonourable at best. “I think he sucks,” says Shelby, one precocious student (played originally by Sadie Sink, of “Stranger Things” fame, and now by Chiara Aurelia).

This ensemble play is rich with vivid, well-developed characters, but in many ways it is Shelby’s story—though it takes around 30 minutes for her to make her entrance. Much of the play involves learning just why Shelby has good reason to identify with Abigail, whom Proctor dismisses as a vengeful “whore”. In the same classroom where Mr Smith teaches both English and sex education, the other girls meet after school at their new “feminism club” to talk about Taylor Swift , sex, the hotness of their teacher (“Have you seen how big his feet are?”) and Shelby.

In hushed tones they make it clear that Shelby betrayed her best friend by sleeping with her boyfriend. She has been mysteriously absent for months; her return triggers a cascade of uncomfortable revelations, which bring the thorniness of #MeToo into the classroom.

Ms Belflower, like many Americans, read “The Crucible” in high school, but she saw something different in the play when she returned to it in 2018. Her decision to revisit it was prompted, in part, by Woody Allen’s dismissal of #MeToo as a “witch-hunt”. (The film-maker has been accused of sexual assault by his daughter. He has denied the charges and said he is “perfectly innocent”.) “I said to my dad: ‘It’s so weird because it seems like John Proctor is the villain,’” Ms Belflower says. “I knew the title of this play before I wrote it.”

The playwright was 30 and just out of graduate school when she started writing the play, her Broadway debut. The dialogue of her ensemble of awkward, thoughtful teens rings true, in all its searching and stuttering. The show is artfully directed by Danya Taymor, who won a Tony award for “The Outsiders” last year.

Today it is fashionable to dismiss #MeToo as an overcorrection, maybe even a witch-hunt. But what makes “John Proctor is the Villain” such an intelligent, invigorating drama is that it captures the excitement many people felt at the time of suddenly having a language to describe sexual transgressions—and of being in a society receptive to hearing it. Many of the teens in high school at the time are now entering the workforce with a few more terms and tools at their disposal.

The play lands differently now from the way it would have even a few years ago. The fairness the girls hoped for has not transpired. Few abusers other than Mr Weinstein have been brought to justice. Some disgraced men have been able to resurrect their careers with ease, even at the level of America’s highest office. ■

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It is not just “The Pilgrim’s Progress” and works by Ayn Rand

The novels conservatives want you to read It is not just “The Pilgrim’s Progress” and works by Ayn Rand August 7th 2025 ON A RAINY summer’s morning, eight students and a professor sat around a table at Thomas Aquinas College, a Catholic institution north-west of Los Angeles. They were formally dressed—the men wore ties—and they addressed each other as “Mr” and “Ms”. For hours the group debated “The Bear”, William Faulkner’s tale of a young hunter disillusioned with mankind’s efforts to subdue the land and its creatures. The scene would have delighted anyone who despairs that university students do not, will not and cannot read .

The discussion would have pleased right-leaning Americans in particular, and not just because Thomas Aquinas has America’s most conservative student body. For this was not a conversation about identity politics dressed up as literary theory: instead, students kept close to the text of the story and talked of fear, courage, goodness and other virtues. In recent years some American conservatives have devoted lots of time and energy to banning books they hate . But others strive to promote the ones they love. What sorts of novels fit the bill, and why?

Inevitably, the answer depends on which conservative you ask. George H.W. Bush was fond of “War and Peace” : he said Leo Tolstoy’s vast, philosophical novel taught him “a lot about life”. (He presumably read the book before taking office: any president who gets through a gargantuan epic on Napoleon’s wars while in the White House is a little too fond of delegating.) Greg Abbott, the governor of Texas, has two favourites: “Atlas Shrugged”, Ayn Rand’s paean to individualism, beloved by many on the right; and “Brave New World”, Aldous Huxley’s dystopian fable set in a godless, family-less, centrally planned future (ie, the sort of world Republicans like to pretend Democrats want to create).

J.D. Vance, the vice-president, has called himself “a big ‘Lord of the Rings’ guy”. J.R.R. Tolkien’s trilogy tells the story of four hobbits—avatars of the traditional English country life that was swiftly giving way to industrialisation as he was writing—who reluctantly set out to save the world from Sauron, an evil wizard. Mr Vance’s memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy” , is also an account of how his rural small town was destroyed by forces beyond its control including, ironically, deindustrialisation. No doubt Mr Vance sees himself as a virtuous hobbit reluctantly taking up arms to defend his people’s way of life.

The novel most often mentioned in your correspondent’s informal survey at Thomas Aquinas was “My Ántonia” by Willa Cather. Published in 1918, the book tells a story of pioneer farming families in Nebraska. Its central character is Ántonia Shimerda, as seen through the eyes of her childhood friend, Jim Burden, an orphaned boy sent to live with his grandparents. It is a spare and beautiful account of maturation and missed romantic opportunities.

Cather’s work gets a full chapter in a new book, “Thirteen Novels Conservatives Will Love (but Probably Haven’t Read)”. In it Christopher Scalia, a former literature professor and son of the late Antonin Scalia, a Supreme Court justice, discusses novels and the lessons he believes they impart. He praises Cather’s gift for description and for dignifying the values of diligence, stoicism and domesticity. Ántonia is poor, and even more so after her father commits suicide; she is harassed and betrayed by men, but earns her independence through toil. Her story, Mr Scalia says, is about “the complexity of the American dream, the reality of individual agency and the rewards of hard work and sacrifice”.

Mr Scalia is too thoughtful a reader to reduce novels to parables: he understands that good fiction provides pleasure in at least equal measure to instruction, and he treats each of his 13 choices separately. Still, three main virtues recur in his survey.

The first is faith. But rather than choosing something obvious like, say, “The Chronicles of Narnia”, or another such work in which the devout are rewarded and the impious damned, he understands that there is something strange and mysterious about religious belief.

Muriel Spark , who abandoned her son, is not an obvious pick for a conservative literary critic who presumably champions family values. But Mr Scalia includes her novella of 1963, “The Girls of Slender Means”, in his selection for showing that fierce, sincere religious conversions can be prompted by experiences other than heavenly visions and weeping statues. One of Spark’s characters, Nicholas, an intellectual with a taste for anarchism, is so appalled by the selfish, morally vacuous women he meets in wartime London that he moves to Haiti to become a missionary. Those who do not enjoy the company of their fellow Americans, it is implied, may prefer the company of Christ.

The second virtue is something between resilience and anti-victimhood. Mr Scalia praises Zora Neale Hurston’s “Their Eyes Were Watching God” (1937) for the enterprising toughness of its main character, Janie, who is determined to make a life for herself on her own terms. Similarly he admires V.S. Naipaul’s magnificent “A Bend in the River”, published in 1979. Set in an unnamed African country, the story follows Salim, a Muslim Indian merchant, who watches as it gains its freedom from European rule. The novel rejects the simplistic and fashionable view that Africans are all virtuous because they are oppressed, and all Europeans who lived in Africa were evil and rapacious. The book, Mr Scalia argues, “helps counter the groupthink that seeks to diminish the achievements of Western culture”.

Third, and finally, Mr Scalia commends novels about how to live in society. (Rand, a writer of didactic pabulum, does not rate a mention here.) Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Blithedale Romance” (1852) sets the utopian goals of an agrarian commune against the selfishness of human nature. Frances Burney’s “Evelina” (1778) illustrates the importance of manners: for the titular character, the illegitimate daughter of a nobleman, politeness is not just hollow social convention, but shows “social maturity and good judgment”. Understanding the rules of British high society is key to Evelina succeeding in it by making that all-important match.

Plenty of readers will disagree with Mr Scalia’s readings—Hurston is a feminist hero, too, and Tolkien has plenty of fans on the left—but good novels should provoke arguments and conflicting interpretations. Conservatives such as Mr Scalia understand that literature can still affect a polity. As Bertolt Brecht, a playwright, put it: “Art is not a mirror held up to reality, but a hammer with which to shape it.” ■

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Organised puritans are invading school libraries

America’s barmy battle to ban bawdy books Organised puritans are invading school libraries August 7th 2025 “With one long claw, he shredded through silk and lace, and my undergarment fell away in pieces.” Sex with a shape-shifting fairy who is sometimes part-wolf, part-bear is not everyone’s cup of tea. But many teenagers and young adults love reading about such things. Sarah J. Maas, a leading writer of “romantasy” fiction, has sold more than 75m novels. This horrifies those who think both witchcraft and fornication are detestable in the eyes of God. Which is why five of Ms Maas’s works—including “A Court of Thorns and Roses”, from which the quote above is taken—are among the most-banned books in American schools.

Book bans are increasingly common in America. According to PEN America, a free-speech group, there were roughly 10,000 in 2023-24, a four-fold rise in two years. PEN defines a ban as the removal or restriction of a title from school libraries because of its content, often at the behest of worried parents or bossy politicians.

The themes that get books banned are as predictable as the use of phrases like “a ravenous, unyielding sort of hunger” in wolf-fairy bedroom scenes. Of the titles barred from two or more school districts, more than half had sexual content (see chart). Some of this was pretty mild. Monroe County, Tennessee, proscribed a work that had a classical nude statue on the cover.

Titles that deal with teenage trauma upset parents. Ellen Hopkins has three novels in the most-banned top ten for her frank depictions of drug-taking, self-harm and prostitution. Stories about racism raise hackles, too: some schools shield pupils even from classics by Maya Angelou (“I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings”) and Alice Walker (“The Colour Purple”).

Books that allude to homosexuality are vulnerable; those that deal with transgender issues, even more so. The most banned book of all is Jodi Picoult’s “Nineteen Minutes”, a novel about a school shooting. The chief objection to it is not that it might inspire copycat murders but that it depicts a date rape. Another often-purged work is “The Handmaid’s Tale” , which describes a dystopia in which women are not allowed to read. Irony is lost on book-banners.

Some states, such as Florida and Iowa, are especially censorious. Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, is on a mission to expel wokery from schools. Iowa’s “parental rights” law holds teachers personally liable if students have access to inappropriate books, prompting time-pressed administrators to ask ChatGPT whether volumes include naughty bits. This method is quick but unreliable: just as humans fantasise about sex, AIs hallucinate about it.

The debate over which books are suitable for children has been as calm as werewolf sex. Martha Hickson, a school librarian in New Jersey, was asked by the school superintendent to remove a graphic novel with a lesbian protagonist. She refused, noting that the protocol for challenging it had not been followed.

A furious group of parents accused her of being a pornographer and a paedophile. Videos spreading these baseless allegations circulated on social media. “They’re working from a script,” Ms Hickson says of the campaigners, whom she describes as organised Christian nationalists. Her car was vandalised and she had to install security cameras in her home. She says some librarians shun controversial titles to avoid similar harassment.

Reasonable people can disagree about what should be taught in schools. Plenty of moderate parents object when their kids are taught contentious theories about gender identity or collective racial guilt, which is why Republicans have made it a campaign issue. However, activists cannot hear what is said in class, so books are an easier target than teachers. Anyone can find which volumes are in a library and search them for keywords.

Partisanship inflames matters. In years between elections, activists can keep their side angry and energised by picking battles with librarians who supposedly debauch innocent young minds. President Joe Biden thought censorship was a problem and appointed a “book ban co-ordinator” to look into it. One of the first acts of Donald Trump’s education department was to call this “Biden’s Book Ban Hoax” and eliminate the position.

Culture warriors cheered. Others fear that senseless censorship seriously damages your shelf. ■

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The Addams family has a secret—but it is not what you think

Why “Wednesday” is wickedly successful The Addams family has a secret—but it is not what you think August 7th 2025 WHEN YOU think of Netflix’s biggest English-language dramas, you probably imagine matchmaking, monsters or malignant young men. Seasons of “Bridgerton”, “Stranger Things” and “Adolescence” all rank in the platform’s top ten releases, having racked up hundreds of millions of views. But the streamer’s breakout hero is a gloomy girl who has long plaits, psychic visions and a knack for sarcasm.

“Wednesday”, about the eldest child of the Addams family, is a supernatural smash. Viewers spent 1.7bn hours—roughly 200,000 years—watching the show in the three months after its debut in November 2022. According to Parrot Analytics, a data firm, “Wednesday” made $360m in advertising and subscription revenue for Netflix between its release and March of this year: that is $40m more than the first season of “Squid Game” , Netflix’s biggest title in any language, did in an equivalent period. “Wednesday” returned to screens for a second season on August 6th. What explains its otherworldly power?

Part of its appeal is its mix of the ordinary and the eerie . Wednesday (Jenna Ortega) is, in some ways, a typically sullen teenage girl. She bickers with her family, made up of a brother, Pugsley (Isaac Ordonez), an eccentric uncle, Fester (Fred Armisen), and her parents, Morticia and Gomez (Catherine Zeta-Jones and Luis Guzmán, whose hairpiece looks like a flattened chinchilla covered in asphalt).

Wednesday finds most people annoyingly, boringly conformist, and prefers the company of Thing, an ambulatory severed hand. She loathes school—in this case, the Nevermore Academy, which specialises in educating outcasts. Like many of her real-life peers, she enjoys true crime—but, unlike them, she is able to help solve local murders on account of her premonitions.

The show shares traits with “Stranger Things” in that both follow a group of winsome teenagers investigating strange happenings in a small town. (And both are the scrubbed-up children of David Lynch’s “Twin Peaks” without the originality or genuine existential dread.) As in “Harry Potter”, the school is replete with coloured uniforms and houses filled with unusual characters, from gorgons to werewolves.

But “Wednesday” looks different from those shows thanks to the involvement of Tim Burton, a film-maker famous for wry gothic fantasies such as “Beetlejuice” and “Edward Scissorhands”. He has helped produce “Wednesday” and directed half of its episodes. (His longtime musical collaborator, Danny Elfman , has also written some of its unsettling score.) The script is snappy: combined with the quick, tortuous plotting, it provides laughs, jump scares and creepy moments. “Want to take a stab at being social?” Wednesday’s perky room-mate asks her in the first season. “I do like stabbing,” Wednesday retorts.

It has no doubt helped “Wednesday” that its characters have been mainstays of Halloween costumes for decades. The family, nameless to begin with, first appeared in a single-panel cartoon in the New Yorker in 1938. In 1964 a tv executive brought them to the small screen. Charles Addams, their creator, lamented that the family was only “half as evil” as in his comics, yet the show made the Addamses twice as popular—and Addams himself a much wealthier man. Subsequent black-comedy films in the 1990s boosted their fame again.

Addams would be pleased that, over the years, the oddball family has become increasingly macabre, as well as zany and camp. In the first series Gomez staged train crashes with model trains. In the current one, Wednesday punishes the boys who bully Pugsley by releasing hungry piranhas into a swimming pool during water-polo practice.

Yet the Addamses are not popular because they are wicked or weird: in the current series, they are kinder, better people than the “normies” who hate them. They have endured across generations because, beneath the idiosyncrasies, they are a functional family. If you ignore the severed hand, the household is made up of two parents, two children, an uncle and a grunting servant. Wednesday’s family is both what every teenager fears—cringeworthy—and what they wish for: loving and accepting. Gomez and Morticia are besotted with each other and they dote on their children, who love and torture each other in equal measure, as siblings often do. “Wednesday” is heartening as well as spooky viewing, on any day of the week. ■

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Holiday-makers love them. So do storytellers

Swimming pools are cauldrons of envy, danger and lust Holiday-makers love them. So do storytellers August 7th 2025 It culminates in homicide, by way of skinny-dipping, underwater handstands, erotic rivalry and lots of seafood . But the twisted drama of “A Bigger Splash”, a film starring Ralph Fiennes, opens with an inquiry familiar to many holiday-planners. Flying into an Italian island for a fateful reunion with an ex, Mr Fiennes’s character brings along his devious daughter (Dakota Johnson). She has a question: “Is there a pool?”

Especially for denizens of rainy places like Britain , summer holidays and swimming pools are inseparable. A pool is cool comfort on a hot day, delicious indolence in a frantic world. You may find yourself in one soon (or now). But dip your toe into fictional pools, and this simple pleasure seems more complicated. A pool can be an oasis, a theatre, a mirror or a tomb. It is a cauldron of opposites: success and regression, life and death, innocence and lust.

A swimming pool means you’ve arrived. Excited children strip off and leap into the blue as parents grapple with the luggage. But it also connotes arrival in a social sense. In the visual language of heist movies, for instance, reclining by a pool is a sign that a mobster has got away with it. Think of Ray Winstone’s oily crook in “Sexy Beast” or the thieves on the lam in the television series “The Gold”.

Conversely, other people’s pools can measure your disappointments. When John Cheever introduces his protagonist in “The Swimmer”, the supreme pool-based short story, one of his hands dangles in the water, the other clasps a glass of gin . On a whim he decides to swim to his suburban home via his neighbours’ backyard pools; his reduced status becomes hazily visible on his odyssey, glimpsed through his self-delusion as if at the bottom of the deep end.

Characters are thrust together in a swimming pool, as at a ball in a Jane Austen novel, only with an undertow of danger and hardly any clothes. Propriety requires that you pretend not to notice the exposed flesh—but everyone does. In shows like “The White Lotus” , the pool is an arena of ogling and flirtation; for male viewers of a certain age, the poolside scene in “Fast Times at Ridgemont High” was an awakening. The pool-party bacchanal is a staple of teen movies.

Yet a pool is also a splashy portal to the purer joys of childhood, and a draw for actual children, including other people’s. Like a jungle watering-hole, it brings strangers and generations together, sometimes messily, as hardcore lap-swimmers collide with youngsters playing Marco Polo. At a kids’ party in “Rushmore”, Bill Murray’s disintegrating character lobs golf balls into the water, then cannonballs in with a cigarette between his lips.

A pool is an idyll of glamour and possibility, as in David Hockney’s painting, also called “A Bigger Splash”, after which the film is named. Look closely, though, and you may spy a scuzzy film of sunscreen on the surface or dead insects gathering in the filters. Contamination in pools is a harbinger of trouble. In “The Swimmers”, a true-life tale of Syrian sisters, the foreign object is a bomb. In “The Sopranos” it is a family of ducks.

In “Sunset Boulevard”, it is a corpse. “The poor dope”, the dead man says of himself in a posthumous voice-over, “he always wanted a pool.” The body in the pool has often been a metaphor for the drowning of American dreams. In “The Great Gatsby” , a murdered Gatsby winds up floating on an air mattress in the marble pool he hadn’t used all summer, trailed by leaves and ghosts. Some fictional dips are rebirths; other pools are slippery crime scenes or damp graves.

Ultimately, everyone dives alone. This summer your pool may have an infinity edge and a swim-up bar, or a view of cracked tarmac and a wasp problem. You may be a diving-board exhibitionist or a habitué of the steps. Either way, the moment comes when the cold first prickles your skin and the chlorine stings your eyes. For a second it is you—and only you—beneath the enigmatic spray in Mr Hockney’s picture.

Among on-screen pools, the one in “The Graduate” best conveys the truth that, for all their conviviality, they can be oceans of loneliness too. Struggling with adulthood and adultery, Dustin Hoffman’s ingénu (pictured) is circled by his shark-like parents as he unwinds in their pool, escaping their hectoring only when he sinks down in his scuba gear. Above the water or below it, however, there is no refuge from his thoughts—nor, alas, from yours. On your laps or on a lilo, if you drift in a swimming pool long enough, what it reflects is yourself. ■

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The region, associated with a relaxed way of life, has become a marketing tool

Provence is not just a destination. It is a lifestyle brand The region, associated with a relaxed way of life, has become a marketing tool August 7th 2025 IN A hilltop village in Provence, clinging to a rocky ledge above the Luberon valley, is the hotel Airelles Gordes, La Bastide. It is a place of sun-blanched stone, hanging gardens and quiet luxury—so picture-perfect that the producers of “Emily in Paris” , a glitzy Netflix series, picked it as the setting for a lunch featuring the titular character and a former fling. This year the hotel rebranded its fine-dining restaurant to lend it a more relaxed style. Under a new chef, La Table de La Bastide offers creative but less formal cuisine “celebrating the Provençal spirit”.

To most people, Provence is a region of France. Increasingly, it is also a lifestyle brand. The word “Provence” evokes the sound of cicadas, the smell of pine and the feeling of the sun on your skin: few other parts of Europe conjure quite the same sensory mix in a single word. It beckons seductively, promises simplicity and seems to slow life down.

In the French mind Provence is distinct from the Riviera, or the Côte d’Azur, the coastal strip of resorts on the Mediterranean. The Riviera is about yachts , partying and showiness; Provence is about rugged timelessness and natural style. Gordes lies nearly 150 kilometres inland from Saint-Tropez. “Here, you find elegance but you can be hyper-relaxed,” says Angela Kreuz, general manager of the hotel. “That is the experience clients come to Provence for.”

To attach the word Provence to a product or place is to hitch the humdrum to understated chic. Marseille’s international airport, for instance, is called Marseille Provence. Provence can be drizzled on salads: Georgetown Herbes de Provence Olive Oil, infused with lavender, rosemary and thyme, promises “to transport you directly to the French countryside”. It can be massaged onto cheeks: Provence Beauty, a firm based in Los Angeles, uses “coveted natural extracts from the south of France”.

What explains the emergence of brand Provence? Not French administrators, who merged it into the graceless modern region named Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur. The Romans called it “Provincia”; by the medieval period Provence reached from the river Rhône to Nice on the Mediterranean and as far north as the Alps. Its borders have fluctuated with wars and empires, before it was annexed by the French crown in 1487. Today, Provence has no formal boundaries but you know it when you are there: it is a landscape (olive trees, vineyards), language (provençau) and culture (pétanque) that defy bureaucratic lines.

Nor has Provence always charmed its visitors. “Provence, with its sunny sky, is too arid to deserve general praise,” wrote John Murray in 1843 in his “Handbook for Travellers in France”. Early British and American visitors preferred the Riviera. In the 19th and 20th centuries it was French artists who turned eyes away from the Med and towards the charms of its hinterland. “A Year in Provence”, a bestseller by Peter Mayle, was not published until 1989.

In more recent times Hollywood has helped lend glamour to the brand. Johnny Depp liked the region so much that he bought an entire village. A Provençal wine estate has become a celebrity accessory : big-screen stars including Brad Pitt and George Clooney have snapped up vineyards complete with historic châteaux.

That points to an important part of the region’s reputation: rosé . No country in the world produces more of the pink tipple than France, and no part of France produces it quite like Provence. Exports of Provençal rosé have nearly tripled over the past decade, most of it shipped to America and Britain. “There are a lot of great rosés out there, but in the end the customer wants to have Provence on the list,” says Guillaume Harel, an ex-sommelier and export director for Maurel Frères, a wine distributor. Rosé can be a flashy brand statement—think LVMH’s Whispering Angel or Minuty—or it can speak more quietly of a sense of place. This year Maurel Frères acquired Domaine Saint-Jean de Villecroze, in the Provence hills, which had rebranded one of its rosés as “Selladore en Provence”, with an image of a tractor on the bottle.

Brand Provence, suggest some, is a counterpoint to the stresses of the modern world. Provence “is really this idea of a lifestyle, a way to take one’s time, to savour time passing,” says Isabelle Brémond, director of Marque Provence, a regional marketing body. Seasons and sunlight dictate daily rhythms, in the fields or en terrasse. And the region practises a centuries-old culinary art de vivre—local produce, fresh markets, simple ingredients—now in vogue. Provence grew fat purple tomatoes long before they were labelled “heirloom”.

Paradoxically, of course, the brand is also dependent on—and sometimes undermined by—the agitations and compulsions of the small screen. On Instagram the hashtag #Provence features on over 7m posts. In 2023 an American travel magazine named Gordes the “most beautiful village in the world”. Only 1,664 people live there, but now 1m tourists crowd into its narrow streets each year.

In all this pampering and posting, Provence gets purified. Up in the hills, poverty stalks the rocky land. As people glug less wine, the region will take a knock. But summer is a time for fêtes in Provence, when smallholders lay down their tools, villagers lay out the trestle tables and rosé is drunk by all, whether from a jug or a bottle. In August, at least, Provence sets the rhythm for those who live there—and those who want a slice of that life. ■

“Zero Day Attack”, a TV series, is terrifying audiences in Taiwan

Blockades, blackouts and bullets: China invades Taiwan on screen “Zero Day Attack”, a TV series, is terrifying audiences in Taiwan July 31st 2025 On an island in the Kinmen archipelago, in the Taiwan Strait, Taiwanese soldiers are marching through a dark tunnel. “The enemy is landing,” one of their number says. As they emerge onto a gloomy beach, they begin to notice hordes of fighters from the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (pla) camouflaged in the shadows. Lights flash in the darkness; the sound of machine-gun fire pierces the air.

“Zero Day Attack”, a ten-episode drama, makes its debut on Taiwanese tv on August 2nd. It is the first mainstream film or TV show made in the country to imagine how China might try to annex the island , making its broadcast a cultural milestone. (The show will be released in Japan later in the month, but international distribution has yet to be announced.)

Taiwan’s screenwriters have avoided depicting a cross-strait war, considering the subject too contentious. But Cheng Hsin-mei, the showrunner of “Zero Day Attack”, is concerned, having observed the Chinese Communist Party’s crackdown in Hong Kong in recent years. “We want to bring awareness while we have the freedom to create,” she says. “We could lose our freedom in the future.”

Ever since the Kuomintang (KMT) fled to Taiwan in 1949 after losing the Chinese civil war, China’s leaders have threatened to retake the island. At first, this did not seem realistic, as China did not have much firepower. Then, after China began to open up and reform its economy in 1978, Taiwanese began investing in China: the resulting economic intertwinement encouraged many Taiwanese to think a war with China was improbable. Most Taiwanese are still blasé about the Chinese threat. But Russia’s invasion of Ukraine—not to mention China’s recent military exercises in the Taiwan Strait—have convinced some that conflict could happen.

Puma Shen, a member of Taiwan’s parliament who acted as a consultant on “Zero Day Attack”, says the show reflects such shifting attitudes. In 2021, when he co-founded the Kuma Academy, a non-governmental organisation which teaches civil defence, many Taiwanese were critical of such efforts and denied that Taiwan needed a “pre-war mentality”. Now, however, increasing numbers are signing up for workshops on topics such as information warfare and evacuation planning.

Taiwan’s government, too, wants to up the ante. Last year a new policy on conscription came into effect, extending the term from four months to 12. This year Lai Ching-te, the president, announced plans to increase defence spending to over 3% of GDP, up from 2.5%.

So how does “Zero Day Attack” envisage an attack unfolding? It begins with a Chinese spy plane disappearing in waters near Taiwan. Under the guise of a search-and-rescue mission, China deploys aeroplanes and ships and starts to enact a blockade. Taiwan’s outgoing president tells the president-elect that an American aircraft-carrier is nearby and the Americans will help if he gives the word, but she is reluctant to take him up on the offer, fearing that any intervention would escalate the conflict. Such worries about appearing the provocateur echo real officials’ concerns when it comes to handling China’s military manoeuvres.

“Zero Day Attack” underscores that a Chinese attack on Taiwan will involve a range of weapons, not all of them ballistic. There are blackouts. Phone signal becomes patchy; the island sees its biggest internet outage ever, one which lasts for more than a day. News stations temporarily go off air. The aim is to create chaos and undermine any sense of social cohesion. Jets are often seen flying overhead and tanks are on the streets. Many Taiwanese start to flee from the island.

Particularly effective is China’s information warfare. Doctored videos circulate on social media, spreading fake news about a missile strike. Pro-China influencers start agitating online and presenting Taiwan’s democracy as a sham. China’s government infiltrates criminal gangs, using them to create havoc on the streets.

China proposes a peace agreement, which stipulates that Taiwan accept the policy of “one country, two systems”—the model of governance China imposes on Hong Kong, which supposedly allows for autonomy but in practice leaves Hong Kong at the mercy of the Communist Party. Some politicians, desperate for resolution, support the agreement.

Each episode of “Zero Day Attack” is directed by a leading Taiwanese film-maker and looks at the events from a particular perspective. One episode follows the president-elect; another focuses on the tv stations; still others explore how rich Taiwanese or working-class people would be affected. The result is a scorching depiction of how war would shake society.

As you might expect for a drama about a loaded geopolitical subject, “Zero Day Attack” has not had zero problems in production. Some consider the show to be propaganda for the ruling Democratic Progressive Party, which firmly rejects China’s claim to the island. Politicians in the KMT, which favours more cordial ties with China, have pointed out that Taiwan’s culture ministry had invested in the series (though the ministry does this for many local productions). Another of the show’s main investors is Robert Tsao, a billionaire founder of a semiconductor company, who has also given money to civilian-defence initiatives including the Kuma Academy. Both Mr Tsao and Mr Shen have been labelled “separatists” by China.

Ms Cheng says some Taiwanese talent agents refused to put forward their actors for the show for fear that they would get blacklisted in China—which would be bad for business, given that China has the world’s biggest tv and film audience. So Ms Cheng sought out people who were not worried about being banned. One of the show’s China-backed rabble-rousers, Big John, is played by Chapman To, an actor from Hong Kong turned Taiwanese immigrant. He was a vocal supporter of Hong Kong’s democracy movement in 2014, which caused Chinese audiences to boycott his films and production companies to refuse to work with him.

What is most intriguing is that the series is not nearly as apocalyptic as the original 17-minute trailer, released last year, promised. It imagined “Total Chaos. Shortages of supplies, complete interruption of water, electricity and telecommunication.” These things do not transpire in the finished show. Ms Cheng says the trailer was designed to be terrifying as a hook to get audiences interested. Mr Shen, the consultant, denies that alarming scenes were cut because of political pressure. Lo Ging-zim, one of the directors, has been adamant that “Not a single word of the script had been modified by the government.”

Yet Yen Chen-shen, a political scientist at National Chengchi University, who was not involved in the project, reckons the Taiwanese government may well have pressed the film-makers to tone down some of the story’s scariest parts. Officials he knows want the public to be prepared for an invasion, but they do not want to petrify them.

“Zero Day Attack” is not without its artistic flaws. America is portrayed as a staunch ally—a description few would apply to the current administration . China-backed characters, such as Big John, are generally portrayed as cartoonish spies and gangsters. Many people in China, Taiwan and the Chinese diaspora do not want to see Taiwanese people mistreated but nonetheless believe that, because of their shared culture, Taiwan ought to be part of China. How that might be achieved, given the overwhelming opposition of Taiwanese people to being ruled by the Communist Party, is a tricky question. Still, the series could have portrayed Taiwanese who favour unification more sympathetically.

“Zero Day Attack” arrives on screen months after the pLA rehearsed an amphibious invasion and naval blockades, as well as disrupting supply lines and bombing energy facilities. No one knows whether China will one day make good on its threats. But after watching this show, no one can claim not to have been warned. ■

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The “First Lady of Jazz” died on July 24th, aged 97

With a four-octave range, Cleo Laine could sing everything—and did The “First Lady of Jazz” died on July 24th, aged 97 July 31st 2025 She was cool; she was clever; she was chic. Dame Cleo Laine, a virtuosic singer, glided across British tv screens in the 1960s and 1970s, a symbol of the free-spirited mood of the age. The four-octave range of her voice stretched from husky contralto depths up to glittering top notes that operatic sopranos would have struggled to reach. She sang just about everything from Shakespeare to standards; her repertoire spanned avant-garde theatre, Broadway musicals , jazz classics, pop tunes and the witty, subtle songs that her husband—John Dankworth, a jazz saxophonist, bandleader and composer—wrote for her. Now that voice is finally silent. Dame Cleo died, aged 97, on July 24th.

Where had this marvel sprung from? Although an aura of cosmopolitan glamour surrounded her, Dame Cleo grew up in Southall, a district in London’s western suburbs. Her father, Alexander Campbell, was a Jamaican veteran of the first world war who loved to sing. His daughter recalled that he dressed like Anthony Eden, a famously dapper prime minister in the 1950s. Her mother, Minnie Bullock, was a farmer’s daughter from Wiltshire who fiercely defended her mixed-race family.

Clementine—Cleo, the snappier stage name, came later—left school early. In 1951 she auditioned for a singer’s job with the Johnny Dankworth Seven, a jazz ensemble. It was a warm summer’s day, but she wore a borrowed fur coat and sang “Embraceable You” and “It’s Only a Paper Moon”. Dankworth was astonished to hear not another mimic of the day’s chart-toppers but “a finished article, who sung like herself”. He offered the novice a salary of £6 a week (£165, or $220, today). She held out for £7, and got it.

They married in 1958, after Dame Cleo had divorced her first husband and started to embark on solo projects. She took dramatic roles at the Royal Court Theatre—the hub of London’s experimental theatre scene—and, in 1961, sang in Kurt Weill’s and Bertolt Brecht’s musical satire “The Seven Deadly Sins”. Lotte Lenya, Weill’s widow and the role’s originator, jealously refused to let Dame Cleo record it.

She smashed through musical borders, not only leading British jazz into the mainstream, earning the moniker the “First Lady of Jazz”, but forging alliances all over the musical map. “Shakespeare and All That Jazz” (1964) perfectly matches Dankworth’s stylish verse settings to Dame Cleo’s agile delivery. She performed Arnold Schoenberg ’s demanding song-cycle, “Pierrot Lunaire”, and took a lead in a hit production of Jerome Kern’s musical “Show Boat”. In 1973 she conquered Carnegie Hall with a solo show; a decade later another performance there won her a Grammy award. A critic at the New York Times pouted that the Brits had been hoarding “one of their national treasures”.

Musical partnerships followed with Ray Charles, Tony Bennett and Frank Sinatra. Stephen Sondheim’s grown-up, bittersweet songs fitted her mature voice like the smoothest of gloves: her renditions rank among the best.

She had two children with Dankworth and both went on to become successful musicians: Jacqui Dankworth as a singer and Alec Dankworth as a bassist. The couple also built and oversaw a theatre and arts centre, The Stables, at their home in Buckinghamshire. In its performance programme and education schemes it formed—and still forms—an embodiment of the pair’s creed that “all music” matters. Only quality, not genre, counts. Dame Cleo told students to find their own style, as she had: “Don’t ever copy.”

She became Dame Cleo in 1997. Well into the 21st century that smoky, sultry contralto still beguiled, even if the topmost notes now edged down a rung or two. Dankworth died in 2010, but Dame Cleo announced his death only after that evening’s performance at The Stables. The show, as always, went on. In his memory she sang Sonnet 18—“Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?”—from the Shakespeare album. Listen to that track and you hear her voice climb thrillingly at the line’s end, as she vows that “Thy eternal summer shall not fade.” Hers never did. ■

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An exquisite Italian iteration proves that even simple dishes can be sublime

The humble tomato salad holds lessons for how to eat well An exquisite Italian iteration proves that even simple dishes can be sublime July 31st 2025 The fruit is arrayed on a wooden board, where shades of red jostle with yellows, oranges and flecks of green. After you lift a fork to your lips, a varied, almost confusing range of flavours follows, from tantalisingly sour and bitter, through umami, to succulently sweet.

The dish in question is a tomato salad: often considered mundane, but here transformed into something memorable. Tomatoes are ubiquitous at this time of year when, in the northern hemisphere, they are most abundant and tasty. This particular tomato salad is served at Quintosapore, a farm in central Italy . Its deliciousness points to three culinary tenets.

The first is obvious: local produce is best. Tomatoes plucked straight from the vine, where they have been ripened by the Umbrian sun, are sweeter and juicier than those picked from a supermarket shelf, which have often been harvested prematurely and ripened artificially .

The second tenet is the importance of variety. A tomato salad with one type of tomato is bland; a salad prepared with a dozen varieties is surprising. There are around 160 types of tomato grown at Quintosapore, for the farm is also an experimental nursery: Nicola and Alessandro Giuggioli, the brothers who run it, have been fascinated by plants since they were young. “Other kids collected stamps,” says Alessandro. “We collected seeds.”

Cultivating multiple strains of a foodstuff certainly broadens the range of gastronomic possibilities—some tomatoes are earthy in flavour, others are tart—but there are practical as well as palatable benefits to this approach. It limits the danger of a disease or pest latching onto a single, popular variety and endangering the supply of an entire species.

Last comes the vital role of garnishes, which add both colour and complexity to a dish. Part of what makes this salad so exceptional are the three varieties of basil that are added along with huacatay, a herb also known as Peruvian black mint. Chewing it releases a range of aromatic compounds—including several that are found in other herbs such as tarragon and basil—which deepen the flavour of the tomatoes.

Italy produced almost 1.2m tonnes of tomatoes in 2024. (In Europe, it is second only to Spain .) But the country’s love affair with the fruit is relatively new. Native to South America, tomatoes were for centuries thought to be poisonous. It was not until the 19th century that Italians started using them widely in their cooking.

The country has made up for lost time. Along with olive oil and garlic, the tomato is now a staple ingredient in Italian cuisine: it features in a plethora of dishes, from spaghetti all’amatriciana to insalata caprese. More than any other nation, Italians know that, as the food writer Laurie Colwin put it: “A world without tomatoes is like a string quartet without violins.” ■

A new biography describes the businessman and imperialist behind the global protest movement

Who was Cecil Rhodes? A new biography describes the businessman and imperialist behind the global protest movement July 31st 2025 UNTIL TEN years ago Cecil Rhodes was just one white British imperialist among many. Then, in 2015, Chumani Maxwele, a young black South African, gave a “poo shower” to Rhodes’s statue at the University of Cape Town, built on land Rhodes bequeathed. In doing so Mr Maxwele set off a global campaign called “Rhodes Must Fall”. The Cape Town statue did come down but others, notably one at Oriel College , Oxford, remain standing.

For many campaigners, Rhodes has become a symbol of all that was evil about the British Empire . Given his vexed legacy, and the scant understanding most have of what he actually did, Rhodes is a good candidate for a clear-eyed biography. William Kelleher Storey, a professor of history at Millsaps College, Mississippi, has produced just that.

The author is plain from the outset that his subject was a white supremacist and a believer in the greatness of the British Empire. Mr Storey makes no excuses for Rhodes, but notes that bigotry was not a minority sport in his day.

He was born in 1853, the fifth son of a clergyman. Aged 17, he travelled to what is today South Africa, mostly because his older brother, Herbert, was already there. The two started work as farmers but were also quickly drawn into the diamond-mining boom around Kimberley. The accidental death of his swashbuckling brother in 1879 was a bitter blow to Rhodes.

Helped by some dodgy financial trickery, Rhodes went on to establish a diamond monopoly for his company, De Beers, which is still one of the world’s largest producers. He also became a big investor in gold mines in the region. From an early age he was rich enough to buy out business rivals and buy off political foes.

He clearly favoured white over black employees. Black miners were subjected to horribly invasive, demeaning searches once they reached the end of their contracts. Yet, as Mr Storey also notes, his businesses generally paid black miners more than most white miners were earning in Britain at the time.

In 1880 Rhodes decided to enter politics in the British Cape Colony, with the overt goal of protecting his business monopoly and his wealth. He became the Cape’s prime minister in 1890. Black Africans were less badly treated in Rhodes’s Cape colony than in the Boer republics (which practised slavery decades after the British abolished it), or in the Congo Free State ruled by Belgium’s King Leopold II (whose overseers severed the hands of forced labourers who did not harvest enough rubber).

Nonetheless, Rhodes made dreadful, racist political decisions in office. Through dubious deals with native African kings, and helped by troops equipped with Maxim guns, his British South Africa Company managed to take over big chunks of what became Northern and Southern Rhodesia (today’s Zambia and Zimbabwe). Once again, Rhodes deliberately favoured white farmers in the new colonies, setting strict limits on black ownership of land.

One of Rhodes’s worst mistakes as prime minister was to become too closely involved in provocations against the Boer republic of the Transvaal, culminating in the disastrous Jameson Raid of 1895-96 which attempted to overthrow the government. It foreshadowed the outbreak of the second Boer war just three years later. The subsequent absorption of the Boer republics into South Africa ultimately led to the apartheid system, as the new country gained a critical mass of citizens adamantly opposed to letting any black people vote. The end of the Boer war in 1902 coincided with Rhodes’s death, aged 48.

His bequests were many and munificent. Along with benefactions to Cape Town University, Rhodes gave the huge sum of £100,000 ($500,000 at the time, equivalent to almost $20m today) to Oriel, his old college. He also set up the famous Rhodes scholarships at Oxford University, with the explicit provision in his will that no applicant should be disqualified “on account of his race or religious opinion”. Some of the loudest proponents of the “Rhodes Must Fall” campaign have been Rhodes scholars from Africa.

Rhodes predicted that what he built would last. In a baleful sort of way, Mr Storey says, this is true. Many in the “Rhodes Must Fall” campaign link South Africa’s inequities to Rhodes’s racially restrictive policies. The African National Congress’s Freedom Charter of 1955 “did not mention him by name, but it amounted to nothing less than a call for the rooting out of the legacy of Cecil Rhodes”, since it was his “colonialist achievements that presented so many obstacles to those who sought a country based on equality, including equal access to land, mines and housing”. Rhodes believed his reputation would remain “fresh with the praise of posterity”. Today it carries a whiff of faeces. ■

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A much-imitated style, celebrity fans and a life-turned-myth all help

Hemingway remains the most famous 20th-century American novelist A much-imitated style, celebrity fans and a life-turned-myth all help July 31st 2025 IN the early 1920s Ernest Hemingway was a little-known journalist slumming around Europe and getting into absinthe-fuelled scrapes. Then, a century ago, in 1925, he published “In Our Time”, a book of short stories; in July of that year he started working on “The Sun Also Rises” , his first novel, which fictionalised his antics. It became the most celebrated book about the “Lost Generation” in post-war Europe.

Hemingway became famous in the same way one of his characters described going bankrupt: “gradually and then suddenly”. Eight other novels and novellas followed, as did Pulitzer and Nobel prizes. He remains the most famous American novelist of his century, judged by mentions in Google’s corpus of books. His Wikipedia page also gets more views than those of his contemporaries, including F. Scott Fitzgerald and John Steinbeck (see chart). Why?

There are three reasons. First, nobody had written like him before. A short clean sentence is a fine thing. But if the writer has his story straight and his words true he can go long and hard as a bull after a picador and to hell with big words and adverbs and commas. He also knew what to leave out, as he explained: “If a writer of prose knows enough of what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them.” This lean style influenced writers of fiction—notably Norman Mailer, Cormac McCarthy and Raymond Carver—as well as journalists. Joan Didion’s spareness reads like sober Hemingway.

Second, his heroes attracted famous admirers. He defined courage as “grace under pressure”: martially, for the soldier Frederic Henry in “A Farewell to Arms”; physically, for the fisherman Santiago in “The Old Man and the Sea”; or sportingly, for the titular cuckolded character in “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber”, who becomes a fearless hunter. In 1955 John F. Kennedy asked for Hemingway’s permission to use this definition in “Profiles in Courage”, which won the Pulitzer prize for biography.

John McCain’s favourite novel was “For Whom the Bell Tolls” (1940), about the Spanish civil war, which he quoted in a posthumous book: “The world is a fine place and worth the fighting for and I hate very much to leave it.” Barack Obama, a fan of the same novel, mentioned it in his eulogy to McCain. Less credibly, Donald Trump has dubbed himself the “Hemingway of 140 characters”.

Third, and perhaps most important, Hemingway’s life became legend. He married four times, drank hard, feuded with rivals, was wounded in the first world war, reported on the Omaha Beach landings in the second, ran with the bulls in Spain and survived a plane crash in Africa. But beneath the bravado his ego was fragile; he sometimes swapped gender roles in bed and suffered from depression. He was one of seven in his family to commit suicide. That has provided ample material for biographies and documentaries, including a six-hour series by Ken Burns in 2021.

But adaptations of his work are scarce. Fitzgerald and Steinbeck enjoy higher ratings and more reviews on Goodreads, a website. Perhaps Hemingway’s stoical heroes—and hints of sexism and racism, at least in the voices of some characters—are becoming old-fashioned. If so, he may end up like Lord Byron and Oscar Wilde: read keenly by a few, read about by many. ■

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A journalist goes out to bat for the five-day format

Can Test cricket survive a sticky wicket? A journalist goes out to bat for the five-day format July 31st 2025 FANS OF EVERY sport claim their passion is more than a game, but few argue it has an edifying social role. “ Cricket? It civilises people,” purred Robert Mugabe, then Zimbabwe’s dictator, as he sought to use it to build “a nation of gentlemen”. Since its inception in 1877 Test cricket, the original multi-day format, has been associated with propriety and moral instruction.

Much of that is the result of the sport’s origins in Victorian England, according to Tim Wigmore, a journalist (and occasional contributor to The Economist). In a comprehensive history of Test cricket, he explains how posh the game used to be. Matches played over five working afternoons put the sport out of reach of the working class. Those who played for a wage were “players”; those who did not were “gentlemen”.

Today the format endures because of other qualities. It is a punishing game that requires skill, self-control and strategy. Mr Wigmore likens it to an epic novel that continues to draw in fresh readers. He spends pages expounding on batting techniques (such as the leg glance), but also the role of cricket in political protests (including against Mugabe’s regime). In that way, the book is a fitting tribute to Test cricket: like the format, it is a slow burn that periodically crackles into life.

The biggest Tests can attract massive audiences: at least 90m people in India streamed this year’s first match against England. But many aficionados worry the format is being usurped by Twenty20 (T20), played in three and a half hours, which is increasingly popular. T20 leagues have been set up around the world, from America to Afghanistan. The Indian Premier League, the glitziest competition, trails only America’s National Football League and England’s Premier League in terms of revenue generated per match.

The most pressing concern for Test cricket is participation. As T20 has become cricket’s global calling card, the five-day version remains an exclusive club. Entry has been limited to just 12 countries because of worries about competitiveness. But there is still a great disparity. The newest entrants, Afghanistan, Bangladesh and Ireland, have played just 78 matches over the past decade; India, England and Australia have played 261.

Those countries—known as the “Big Three”—are home to the biggest fanbases and economies, which bring them lucrative broadcasting deals. The other teams do not sell enough tickets to make hosting Tests worth it: countries outside the Big Three lose, on average, $500,000 per series. Players from the West Indies regularly abscond from international duty to play more lucrative T20 tournaments.

Yet existential concerns about Test cricket are not new. There has been handwringing about its future almost since its inception. In 1911 people worried that commercialisation risked polluting it. In the 1970s the rise of one-day internationals, another truncated format, made traditionalists choke on their strawberries.

In some respects, the five-day format is better than ever. Many players are adopting the aggressive batting used in T20, improving the spectacle. Most still consider Tests the pinnacle of cricket, producing feats of endurance that T20 cannot. Even youngsters who watch T20 today may gravitate towards the longer version in time, just as those who listen to pop music can come to enjoy opera later in life.

Nonetheless Mr Wigmore worries that the format is being “hollowed out” in many countries. He proposes a pooled Test fund that would compensate countries more fairly, and help prevent player flight to T20. The sport’s governing body is already changing tactics. In 2019 it launched the World Test Championship, turning every bilateral series into a qualifying event with a winner-takes-all final every two years. More recently, officials have mooted a tiered system with promotion and relegation as a way to infuse greater competition into the sport’s lower ranks. Creating a more level playing-field for the smaller nations would be much better than the current sticky wicket. ■

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The conservative Babylon Bee is finding it easier than the Onion

How satire is adapting to the second coming of Donald Trump The conservative Babylon Bee is finding it easier than the Onion July 24th 2025 After America’s presidential election last year, a headline in the Onion , a liberal satirical newspaper, was: “Trump calls Harris to congratulate himself on winning”. Technically, this joke is almost perfect. It is only eight words long, one of which elegantly subverts the other seven. Yet it has a serious flaw: no one would be surprised if it were true.

And that illustrates a huge problem for satirists in the age of Donald Trump . He should be easy to mock, but he is not. One reason is that reality often overtakes satire. Scott Dikkers, founding editor of the Onion, chuckles as he recalls how many jokes from a Trump book he published in 2017 now read like news reports. “Donald Trump’s World Map”, for instance, shows Canada as “The next 50 states”. A fictional speech to the National Science Foundation ends with Mr Trump saying: “We’re going to get tough on science,” and “A few eggheads might get fired. Big Deal.”

Philip Roth , a novelist, defined satire as “moral outrage transformed into comic art”. It is supposed to shame the target. But how can that work when the target is shameproof? “His personal vanity is…unshakable,” marvels Ian Hislop, the editor of Private Eye, a British satirical magazine. Also, “the idea of truth doesn’t interest him.” So the satirists’ staple of pointing out a politician’s hypocrisies and inconsistencies does not work. “You can still do that, but it’s just one of those things, like the sky is blue and water is wet,” says Luke Gordon Field, who edits the Beaverton, a wry Canadian news website.

Surprisingly, the satirists who are coping best with the second Trump term are often not the liberals who find him repugnant, but conservatives who have a soft spot for him, while acknowledging some of his gargantuan flaws.

Consider the Babylon Bee, a conservative satirical website set up in 2016. Its worldview is poles apart from that of most secular comics. The existence of God is taken for granted. (“Are your kids possessed by demons or just normal toddlers?” is a typical headline.) Though its readers probably voted for Mr Trump, they notice if he does things Jesus might frown at. For example, when he posted an AI-generated picture of himself as Pope, the Bee poked fun at his presumption by suggesting several changes he might make if installed in the Vatican. These included painting his own face over Adam’s in the Sistine Chapel and issuing more macho papal decrees: “Any saint who was martyred loses sainthood for being a wimp: Sad!”

On policy, the Bee’s writers clearly sympathise with Mr Trump, yet they skewer his capriciousness (“Trump Draws Names Of Countries From Hat To Determine Next Tariff”) and his excesses. One story reports him ordering the removal of black pieces from all chess sets for being “a move behind every other piece in the set. Absolutely failing. These are clearly DEI hires and we need to fire them.” When Mr Trump’s administration announced plans to kick Chinese students out of America, the Bee responded with the headline: “American Students Unsure Who to Cheat Off After Trump Revokes Chinese Student Visas.”

Democrats who wonder why more than half the country dislikes them could usefully spend time perusing the Bee. It flays their tiresome sanctimony (“Disaster: Liberal Goes Back In Time To Kill Hitler But Now Has No One To Compare People He Disagrees With To”); their unrigorous ideas about schooling (“Layoffs Delayed As Dept. Of Education Unable To Calculate What Fifty Percent Of Employees Would Be”); and their scepticism of market forces (“In Retrospect, Woman Attending Communist-Themed Party Should Have Realised There Wouldn’t Be Any Food”). It highlights how much middle America hates rioting, a problem many associate with the “defund-the-police” left. One headline mocks both the Trump administration’s anti-tax zeal and progressive scofflaws: “Elon Musk Disguises IRS Building As Tesla Dealership So Democrats Will Burn It Down.”

The Bee also offers a handy gauge of tensions within the MAGA movement. Many of Mr Trump’s fans are furious at his failure to release a full list of “clients” of the late Jeffrey Epstein , a sexual predator and party-thrower for the rich and famous, despite what he said on the campaign trail. His order on July 18th to release more papers may disappoint, since it is not clear that the “list” exists. MAGA diehards feel betrayed. The Bee offered “7 Totally Plausible Explanations” for why Pam Bondi, Mr Trump’s attorney-general, has yet to publish the Epstein file she said was on her desk, including: “She really had the list, but her dog ate it, and she was going to try to piece it back together, but then some Haitians ate the dog.”

Mr Trump has been famous for longer than most Americans have been alive: New York tabloids have been ridiculing him since the 1980s. Because he is so familiar, jokes about him often seem stale (enough already about his hair and his skin tone). Lampooning his flunkies and his policies can sound fresher. The Onion’s take on his vaccine-scorning health secretary was bleakly hilarious: “RFK junior vows to make measles deaths so common they won’t be upsetting any more.” So was its view of his deportations: “ICE Agent Decides He Wants Kids After Seeing Incredible Love and Devotion of Parents Begging Him Not To Take Their Child.” The Bee attracted 4.2m page visits in June, according to estimates by Semrush, a marketing platform. The Onion claims “4.3 trillion readers” daily but in fact had 3.1m last month.

Sometimes it feels as if Onion writers are so outraged and exhausted by the administration that they do not know how to respond. “Republican Infighting Erupts Over Whether Trump Bill Beautiful Or Handsome” is only a five-out-of-ten gag. After Mr Trump’s national security adviser accidentally included the editor of the Atlantic in a group chat about impending military strikes, the Onion’s headline was merely workmanlike: “‘I messed up at work again,’ Crestfallen Michael Waltz Texts Wife, National Geographic Editorial Staff.” The Bee’s response, by contrast, was wonderfully sly: “Genius Trump Leaks War Plans To The Atlantic Where No One Will Ever See Them.”

Learning what makes people laugh is valuable—particularly those on the other side of the partisan divide. It helps you understand them; and it helps you see your own shortcomings as others do. So it is a pity that Mr Trump pays no heed to the amateur comedian (and full-time economics professor) who made the best joke about his tariff policy, riffing on a Republican campaign slogan. Justin Wolfers of the University of Michigan told the BBC: “Trump has a pronoun problem. He keeps saying he’s imposing tariffs on they/them. But he’s actually imposing them on us.” ■

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A tech bro created a viral reservation-trading website. The industry wants to shut it down

How much would you pay to nab a table at a swanky restaurant? A tech bro created a viral reservation-trading website. The industry wants to shut it down July 24th 2025 “SEX AND THE CITY”, a hit tv show, is full of tips about love and living in New York. Alas, many of them are not fit for print, but one recommendation is to always have a tampon handy. In an early episode from 1998 Carrie and Samantha are desperate to dine at Manhattan’s hottest French bistro. With no reservation, and faced with a recalcitrant hostess, the women give up. But when that same hostess finds herself caught short in the toilets, she bashfully asks Carrie for some sanitary supplies. Soon Carrie and Samantha are seated, martinis in hand. “From that moment on we never had a problem getting a table at Balzac again,” Carrie says.

Exclusive restaurants have long been alluring. But since the pandemic, when restaurants closed and people were forced to confront the awfulness of their own cooking, Americans have had an insatiable hunger for dining out. Social-media influencers have funnelled demand towards places where the food is good but the vibes are better. At the most sought-after spots, opportune tampons and the old tricks—such as slipping a crisp $100 bill to the maître d’—are not enough.

The rich and famous have new methods. Get invited to use an American Express “black card” and, after paying a $10,000 joining fee and a $5,000 annual fee, you can get “preferred access” to prime tables. Some Wall Street firms pay the Balzacs of the world tens of thousands a month so they can wine and dine at will.

Should buying bookings be the preserve of the rich? Jonas Frey, a German tech bro who lives in Miami and eats out six nights a week, thinks not. In 2021 he founded Appointment Trader. The website’s concept is simple: buyers can request reservations that they want but cannot get and sellers can offer reservations they already have. The price of the trade is determined by demand alone. Reservations in New York at Christmas, for example, sell for many times the price of a dinner tab.

Last year a table at Carbone in New York went for $1,605 and the site’s top seller raked in $360,000. The average reservation in America fetches $125; in Europe, tables go for around $75. Mr Frey, Appointment Trader’s only employee, takes a commission of up to 30% on every sale, of which there were 7m in 2024. The best sellers do not scoop up dozens of reservations in one go—the platform punishes them for unsold ones—but rather scramble to fulfil requests. Most have friends on the inside, a hostess or chef who can set aside a table for a cut of the proceeds. Others work at the restaurants themselves.

The restaurants were slow to catch on, but once they did they were livid. Their objections fall into three categories. The first is that Appointment Trader strips them of control and allows a third party to profit from their product. The second is a fear that if customers pay a premium that the restaurant does not know about, they are bound to be disappointed. The third is that they claim Appointment Trader is full of bots that overbook and drive up the number of no-shows, forcing restaurants to eat the costs of empty tables. Mr Frey has evidence to the contrary. Of the last 50,000 trades, just 1% did not show. The industry average is closer to 30%.

Nonetheless the National Restaurant Association has banded together with Resy and OpenTable, the two biggest reservation websites, to lobby state governments to ban “reservation piracy”. They have had astonishing success. Last year New York banned Appointment Trader; this year Florida and Louisiana did too and other states are trying. The laws, many of which roll out this summer, prohibit trading without the restaurants’ consent. Lobbyists now want to pass the SEAT Act, a federal bill that would kick Appointment Trader out of America altogether.

Over a meal at Mandolin, one of Miami’s trendiest lunch spots, Mr Frey explains that the loss of the American market “hurts like shit” but he is “too small to fight”. He plans to focus on Europe and has added the option to search for restaurants in Dutch, French and Spanish.

His biggest frustration is the inefficiency of the existing restaurant-reservation system. Appointment Trader has “democratised luxury”, he says: thanks to his site, anyone who is willing to pay can get a seat at the world’s coolest restaurants. Youngsters, in particular, have eaten up the idea: most of his users are under the age of 35. Restaurateurs and lawmakers would do well to ingest an economics textbook. Appointment Trader merely reflects the true market-clearing price of a table at the trendiest joints. The prix fixe is a concept for menus, not markets. ■

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These days you can find Canto-Western food in several countries

Cha chaan teng, Hong Kong’s quirky fusion cafés, are going global These days you can find Canto-Western food in several countries July 24th 2025 Supposedly only “mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the mid-day sun”, but Hong Kongers brave it too for Lan Fong Yuen. The cha chaan teng, or tea restaurant, is one of the city’s oldest and attracts queues even on a sweltering day. With its sticky Formica tables, it is not glamorous. But diners are drawn by the smells of fried toast with condensed milk and buns served with crispy pork.

For locals, dining in Lan Fong Yuen is a kind of ritual. The café has hardly changed since it opened in 1952. Cha chaan teng were set up when Hong Kong—then run by Britain—welcomed refugees from mainland China. They serve Canto-Western fusion fare and some of the offerings are an acquired taste, such as naaih cha, tooth-achingly sweet tea also served with condensed milk, and yunyeung, a mix of tea and instant coffee . But the cafés came to symbolise the city’s mix of East and West. They reflected “the cultural inclusiveness of Hong Kong”, says Sidney Cheung of the Chinese University of Hong Kong.

Today the spirit that cha chaan teng embody is being stamped out . Since a national-security law was passed five years ago, in the summer of 2020, Hong Kong has taken an authoritarian turn. An estimated 500,000 people have left. Some cha chaan teng were branded “yellow” businesses—ie, sympathetic to pro-democracy activists—and faced difficulties with lease renewals. Many have closed.

Yet Hong Kongers who left took their love of cha chaan teng with them. New joints have opened in the countries where people have resettled, such as America, Australia, Britain, Canada and Taiwan. Seven cha chaan teng have opened in Burwood, a suburb of Sydney. “For overseas Chinese, being able to taste the flavour of home in a foreign land is a kind of psychological comfort,” says Andy Lam, the owner of September Café in Taipei.

He has adapted some of his dishes, dialling down the sweetness to appeal to local palates. For it is not only Hong Kong’s diaspora who are seeking out cha chaan teng. The cafés’ informal, convivial atmosphere is drawing in new, young customers. The hashtag #chachaanteng has 12.5m views on TikTok .

Lucas Sin, a popular chef, is writing a cookbook about the cafés. Art Basel, Europe’s flagship art fair, opened a cha chaan teng pop-up in Paris in 2024. It was so popular that similar stalls followed at fairs in Miami and, ironically, in Hong Kong where, despite the closures, there are still thought to be 6,000 cha chaan teng.

Larry Fung set up Uncle Lou, a Cantonese diner, in New York in 2021. Such restaurants, he argues, satisfy a “yearning” and a feeling of “nostalgia” for a time and a place “that a lot of people feel is fading away”. For many, cha chaan teng offer a memory of a different Hong Kong in a hot cup of naaih cha or yunyeung. ■

Two new books look at the heyday of Vanity Fair, Vogue and their ilk

Booze, bills and $500,000 photoshoots: the golden age of magazines Two new books look at the heyday of Vanity Fair, Vogue and their ilk July 24th 2025 “Fucking” was forbidden. So too was “chortling”, “quipping”, “donning”, “penning”, “opining” and—lest that list of linguistic prohibitions left any writer feeling faint—“passing away”. The list of banned words in Vanity Fair was, for such a glamorous magazine, parsimonious, even pious: “glitzy” was vetoed; “hookers” were out; hair must not be “coiffed”; one never ate in an “eatery”. Condé Nast’s magazines may have celebrated fancy living, but they did so in plain English .

What these magazines said, and how they said it, mattered. It is hard to remember in this era of Instagram, when the many (influencers) tell their (relatively few) followers what to do, but once upon a time the few told the many. To be precise, glossy magazines did the telling and, to be more precise again, Condé Nast did. The Instagram world in which “pretty people do pretty things in pretty places without you” is, as Michael Grynbaum makes clear in one of two new books about magazines, merely “a DIY replication” of the role that Condé Nast held in the 20th century.

For a handful of decades a handful of magazines like GQ, Vanity Fair and Vogue dictated to the whole world what was “hot” and what was not, who was “in” and who was “out”, and along the way offered readers lashings of “Sex”, “Cool!”, “Hollywood!”, “Rah!” (whatever that might be) and—of course—exclamation marks!

It all began rather more mutedly. Vogue was founded in 1892 to celebrate a Wildean world of manners before morals. During the Spanish-American war in 1898 the magazine warned readers not to dress in patriotic colours since “Bad taste never yet helped a good cause.”

By 1909 it had been bought by Condé Nast, a New York businessman, who wished it to aim at “class, not mass”—a phrase that to British eyes (and some ears) has neither rhyme nor reason since, as any Fleet Street hack could tell you, to succeed magazines need mass, not class. At times, Condé Nast had neither: outside the printworks were two obelisks engraved with the words “VOGVE” and “HOVSE & GARDEN”. This, some felt, was a trifle VVLGAR.

But who cared, when it was all such fun? For the best part of a century Condé Nast’s magazines were the best way for the have-nots to peer at what a new book nicely calls the “have-yachts”. They were a “two-way mirror” into the world of the rich , as Mr Grynbaum puts it.

This world was very rich indeed: an artwork by Jackson Pollock hangs in a bigwig’s house; supermodels hang around at parties; everyone hangs the expense. There were low patches: a mid-century slump in which Vogue went out of vogue; Vanity Fair fell into a slough of despond and the New Yorker insisted on running lengthy articles on the future of wheat. But under a new clutch of editors in the 1980s and 1990s— Dame Anna Wintour, Graydon Carter, Tina Brown—Condé Nast enabled the world to ogle the rich once again.

The subtitle of Mr Carter’s recent memoir calls this period, roughly from the early 1980s to the financial crisis, “the last golden age of magazines”. It is a grandiose title but one that feels fitting: in this more monkish era the excess here feels as unimaginable as that of imperial Rome. An expenses bill for a GQ feature on dining in Japan comes to $14,000 (“Is that all?” asks an editor). When Mr Carter arrives at Vanity Fair he finds there is “no budget at all—that is to say, the budget had no ceiling”. A feature on the near-collapse of Lloyd’s of London, an insurance market, costs $180,000 (and, appositely, is never published). A cover shoot by Annie Leibovitz costs $475,000. On the bright side, says Mr Carter, “It looks like a $475,000 cover.”

If the budgets were big, the names were bigger. It was an era before the internet had fractured publishing and the “splinternet” had fractured celebrity. Writers such as Christopher Hitchens became household names; editors were internationally famous and, at times, infamous. Filming has started on “The Devil Wears Prada 2”, inspired by a roman à clef about a villainous magazine editor by a former assistant to Dame Anna (pictured below). The editor, reportedly called “Nuclear Wintour” by her colleagues, has said it is “for the audience...to decide if there are any similarities” between her and the character.

Modern hacks should mourn the loss of the journalism: few magazines today can afford to commission earnest 10,000-word articles about things like grain. In truth most will mourn the loss of the drinks trolleys—not to mention the dinner ones which, at another paper, arrived at writers’ desks complete with wine and a uniformed flunkie. They may not, perhaps, envy the hangovers: one morning, Hitchens had to be retrieved from a golf course where, “still in the wrinkled off-white linen suit from the night before”, he was “heaving up”.

Condé Nast’s magazines were, at times, a little nasty. This was an era when people would “check your privilege”—chiefly to make sure you had some. If you applied for a job as an assistant at Vogue in the 1990s you would be handed an alphabetised, intimidating list of 178 items from A (Pedro Almodóvar) to W (Billy Wilder), via Manolo Blahnik, “Mrs Dalloway” and the phrase “For a long time I used to go to bed early.”

If you could correctly identify two film-makers, a shoemaker, a modernist masterpiece and the first line of Proust, then you could become part of the elite club Mr Grynbaum describes. Some of this was sensible: educated workers were needed since, as Ms Brown put it, these magazines had to “make the sexy serious and the serious sexy”. Some of it was pure gatekeeping: snobbery in spectacles.

But then these magazines sold: an issue of Vogue with Hillary Clinton as cover girl shifted 700,000 copies. “The Going”, as Mr Graydon’s title has it, “Was Good”. Perhaps this was due to the skill of him and his colleagues. But editors are often praised for their talent when in truth what they have is timing. Then, in the late 1980s, the computers came. One art director at Vogue declared them “a phase”.

Today many of the top editors, including Dame Anna and Mr Carter, have retired or stepped back. These magazines are not quite history, yet their era of overweening influence is. Except, perhaps, in one odd way. In 1984 GQ featured a suited man beneath the headline “SUCCESS—How Sweet It Is”. That led to a book, then a tv series. The series was called “The Apprentice”; the book “The Art of the Deal”. The man would become president. ■

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Chances are you have come across a “Strix” cushion or a “Rinnig” tea towel

IKEA’s prints have transformed how homes everywhere look Chances are you have come across a “Strix” cushion or a “Rinnig” tea towel July 24th 2025 NO FIRM IN history has had as penetrating an impact on everyday design and taste as IKEA . Even if you have never found yourself winding through a shop, absent-mindedly adding “Billy” bookcases, “Rodalm” picture frames or “Glimma” tea lights to a trolley, you will probably have encountered “Stockholm” rugs, “Rinnig” tea towels or “Ektorp” sofas in the homes of friends or in Airbnbs. This is, after all, a company with over 480 shops in 63 countries, which generated around €45bn ($52bn) in sales last year.

IKEA has brought Swedish minimalism to the masses, usually in the form of white or beige mdf (medium-density fibreboard). It is synonymous with practicality and affordability—and spousal arguments over the instructions for assembling flat-pack furniture . Yet “Magical Patterns”, a new show at Dovecot Studios in Edinburgh, shows off a bolder, brighter side to Ikea’s output by focusing on its textiles.

Fabrics were not a priority for the furniture firm when it was founded in 1943. Many of its soft furnishings came in unsexy shades of grey. But by the mid-1960s, a renaissance in textiles was under way in Europe and America. Fashionable women strutted about cities in shift dresses in geometric patterns. Mini skirts came in paisley and polka dots. Bell-bottom trousers were adorned with psychedelic prints.

ikea’s executives cottoned on to the market opportunity. A new generation of predominantly young female textile artists, including Bitten Hojmark, Inger Nilsson and Vivianne Sjolin, was brought in to create a distinct look that would appeal to the firm’s customers. The result was a playful explosion of colour, print and technical innovation that coincided with Ikea’s rapid expansion. By 1970 textiles accounted for about a quarter of the firm’s sales.

In all, the exhibition brings together 180 different fabrics on loan from the Ikea Museum at Almhult. (It is the first time this collection has gone on show outside Sweden.) Displayed together, the effect is a punch of graphic prints and bright shades—there are few minimal, monochromatic Scandinavian designs here.

Among Ikea’s offerings were the striped “Strix” and “Strax” fabrics, designed by Inez Svensson in 1971 in blue, orange, green, brown, yellow and white. Though they may appear simple, these were the product of engineering experimentation and marked the first time that horizontal stripes had been printed onto fabric. In the past stripes had to be woven in, making the fabric more expensive.

“Strix” and “Strax” kicked off what have since been characterised as the halcyon days of textile design. IKEA drew influential artisans into its operation; aficionados of Scandinavian design will encounter familiar names in the show, including Gota Tragardh, Sven Fristedt and 10-Gruppen (a design collective formed in 1970, of which Svensson was a part). ikea also collaborated with designers such as Marimekko, a popular Finnish textile company, and Zandra Rhodes, a British fashion designer who dressed stars including Freddie Mercury and Princess Diana . No matter who created the print, the emphasis was usually on maximalism and playfulness.

As you might expect from a collection belonging to the brand’s own museum, “Magical Patterns” is particularly instructive in revealing how Ikea would like to be seen. As the title implies, this is an exhibition with an emphasis on the most beguiling and eye-catching prints of the past 60 years. In addition to red-on-pink polka dots, botanical subjects and chevrons, design motifs include multi-coloured buttons and broccoli florets waltzing over Pepto-pink stripes (“Anniken”, 2014). The “Randig Banan” print (also pictured), which combines bananas and stripes, was divisive at the time of its creation in 1985, but is popular today.

Ms Sjolin, who ran the textile department in the 1970s and 1980s, has spoken about how the firm used textiles as a marketing tool. Striking new designs were used to attract press attention, adorn catalogue covers and shop windows and get people talking. Though the daring designs may be the most memorable, the reality is rather more plain: it is the less vivid prints that have driven the multi-billion sales figures year after year.

Nevertheless, Ikea’s impact on textile design is unarguable. From the “Strix” stripes to the “chuck out your chintz” campaigns of the mid-1990s and beyond, Ikea has popularised youthful and contemporary home textiles that have taken over the world, one “Rinnig” tea towel at a time. ■

Three new books look at the blind spots of the intelligence services

Uncovering the foibles of the KGB and the CIA Three new books look at the blind spots of the intelligence services July 17th 2025 TO BE AN intelligence officer is to make sacrifices: to wear a mask, to deceive even those close to you, to persuade others to betray their countries. When answering the call of duty, some have to make greater sacrifices than others. In the early 1970s Yury Linov reported to a KGB clinic in Moscow, where he was circumcised. Mr Linov then headed for Israel, where he introduced himself as Karl-Bernd Motl, an Austrian Jew. The real Mr Motl was alive and well, living in East Germany. Mr Linov was a KGB “illegal”—an intelligence officer operating not only under a false name, but also a false nationality.

His remarkable story is told by Shaun Walker, a journalist, in “The Illegals”, one of the most compelling and insightful books on intelligence of the past decade. It is one of a trio of new works, alongside Gordon Corera’s “The Spy in the Archive” and Tim Weiner’s “The Mission”, which illustrate the foibles of different spy agencies: Russia’s obsession with illegals and America’s reliance on firepower at the turn of the millennium.

In the 1920s Soviet leaders feared that foreign powers would try to bring down their regime. They knew this was possible, since they had only recently helped overthrow the regimes that came before them. So they created some fake plots to smoke out counter-revolutionaries. Yakov Blyumkin, one illegal, pretended to be a Persian merchant, selling religious manuscripts stolen from Ukraine. Georgy Agabekov posed as an Armenian carpet salesman. There was a fishmonger in Paris and a bookseller in The Hague.

Many intelligence officers pose as diplomats, but use their real names. Illegals, by contrast, must speak, act and even think like a native. Slips are inevitable. Iosif Grigulevich—an illegal who attempted to assassinate Leon Trotsky, a revolutionary—was once asked at an exhibition whether he liked Marc Chagall’s paintings. “Nyet,” he replied, unthinkingly. On realising his mistake, writes Mr Walker, Grigulevich “recomposed himself and added with a chuckle: ‘I believe that’s how they say it in the country of the artist’s birth’.”

Mr Walker combines the methods of the journalist and the historian. He has tracked down not only Mr Linov, a spy who crops up in Ireland, Czechoslovakia and Israel at key moments during the cold war, but also Elliot Holar, the son of Rudi Herrmann, another illegal who defected to America in 1980. Mr Holar’s case is fascinating in its own right. As a teenager, after learning of his father’s true identity, he too was recruited by the KGB. When his father defected, Mr Holar changed his name and disappeared—until Mr Walker found and interviewed him.

“The Illegals” draws on another remarkable resource: a trove of archival material pilfered by Vasily Mitrokhin, a KGB archivist who defected to MI6, Britain’s foreign-intelligence service, in 1992. The story of Mitrokhin’s grievance towards the Soviet system and his decision to reveal its secrets is told in “The Spy in the Archive” by Mr Corera, a British journalist who has published several books on espionage.

Mitrokhin was haunted by his own role in the Soviet Union’s machinery of torture and repression in eastern Ukraine, where he worked in 1944. The KGB, founded in 1954, was both a spy service and a secret police force, a dual identity which profoundly shaped its espionage work. After a mediocre career in the field, including a stint babysitting Soviet Olympians in Australia, Mitrokhin was demoted and tasked with moving the archives of the First Chief Directorate, the KGB’s foreign-intelligence arm, to a new headquarters. He painstakingly studied the files and took copious notes in cryptic shorthand. His knowledge of the KGB’s methods gave him an edge. He knew, for instance, that the agency monitored people who purchased large quantities of ink ribbons for typewriters, which were used for underground publications . So Mitrokhin used concentrated fruit juice to type up his notes, which he hid in milk churns under his dacha.

Mitrokhin was arguably one of the most important agents of the late 20th century. His files exposed huge numbers of KGB operations and illegals around the world. Some 3,500 counter-intelligence reports were issued to 36 countries, with about 1,000 people identified as Soviet agents. He was also an irascible character, who would come to resent MI6. “There is a saying within the spy world which is rarely uttered outside,” observes Mr Corera. “Defectors defect because they are defective.”

But spy agencies can be defective, too. Mitrokhin had originally proffered his secrets to the CIA, which turned him down and would later have to pay $1m towards his resettlement in exchange for access to the files. “Most defectors went to the Americans first,” notes Mr Corera, as they had “more money and more influence”. (Britain proved nimble with limited resources.)

For Paul Redmond, deputy head of the CIA’s counter-intelligence centre at the time, it was an example of the agency’s post-cold-war “risible naiveté”: the belief that the KGB was dead and that recruiting Russian agents was no longer a priority. In the mid-1990s the CIA is thought to have had fewer than 800 case officers worldwide, down 25% from the cold-war peak.

Its subsequent transformation is the subject of “The Mission” by Tim Weiner, who won a Pulitzer prize in 1988 for his reporting on the CIA. Mr Weiner’s book covers the agency’s frantic post-9/11 years, including the distortion of its intelligence prior to the Iraq war. Mr Weiner meticulously documents a level of chaos, deception and politicisation in the upper echelons of the CIA that put in perspective current debates over Donald Trump’s own efforts to reshape and purge the agencies . “The very survival of the agency” was in question in 2004, he recalls.

Mr Weiner also shows how the CIA’s role in counter-terrorism changed the identity of the agency. The naiveté of the 1990s was replaced with machismo: in the early 21st century the CIA “looked much more like a paramilitary organisation than a spy service”. The 500 CIA personnel in Baghdad were obliged to travel in convoys of three armoured vehicles, which “was not conducive to conducting clandestine meetings with Iraqis”, remarks Mr Weiner. Incompetently designed covert-communication systems contributed to the collapse of agent networks in Iran and China.

Traditional human intelligence (HUMINT) would not return to the fore until after 2016, when American spies were blindsided by Russia’s meddling in that year’s presidential election. The CIA’s “Russia House” doubled in size in two years. Recruitment of Russian sources surged. Intelligence was shared more freely with allies. Those efforts all bore fruit in 2021 when the CIA contributed to the exposure of Russian plans to invade Ukraine. That “triumph of HUMINT”, as the agency’s deputy director called it, exorcised at least some of the ghosts of the Iraq debacle.

Meanwhile, the KGB’s descendants in post-Soviet Russia never abandoned their use of illegals. (The programme remains active today.) The spies acquired mythical status, feted publicly by Vladimir Putin and glorified in “The Americans”, a popular American television show. But Mr Walker draws a contrast between their intricate cover stories and the paucity of their achievements. As the Soviet system closed itself to the world, the pool of people with knowledge of the West declined, making it harder to produce convincing fake Americans and Europeans. Despite that, the KGB’s Directorate S would come to run “the most intense training regimen for any espionage programme in history”, with legends built up over years in some cases.

Mr Walker vividly describes a system that churned out deep-cover spies who often cracked under the pressure. “Some illegals might have been callous sociopaths,” he writes, “but many were victims of a KGB programme that made a normal emotional life impossible.” “The Illegals” and Mr Weiner’s account of the CIA’s militarisation diagnose the organisations’ pathologies. The lesson of both books is that agencies, regardless of their operational brilliance, can set up spooks to fail. ■

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Why dressing up is now an essential part of the live music experience

Feather boas and bald caps: the wacky world of concert fashion Why dressing up is now an essential part of the live music experience July 17th 2025 LIKE MANY pop stars, Pitbull exudes sexual confidence. In his hit song of 2009, “I Know You Want Me (Calle Ocho)”, the American rapper repeats that phrase no fewer than 16 times. Yet Pitbull seems to have got it slightly wrong. His fans do not want him: they want to look like him.

At every stop on his European tour, fans—most of them women—have been dressing as the artist. They have been donning suits, fake goatees and, crucially, bald caps (see picture). The fact that this looks ludicrous rather than stylish seems to only add to their merriment. In June, when Pitbull was performing in Britain, searches for bald caps surged by an estimated 760%.

The dressing-up trend is harmless fun. Yet it reveals a lot about fandom, and the way people enjoy concerts today. It is no longer the done thing to buy a ticket to a gig and turn up in any old kit: instead, the most committed fans demonstrate their affection for the artist by wearing the right stuff. That means parkas for Oasis, mini skirts for Sabrina Carpenter and cowboy gear for Beyoncé’s latest tour .

This is not entirely new: people wore Ziggy Stardust face paint to watch David Bowie perform in the early 1970s and mimicked their favourite Spice Girl in the 1990s. But what has changed is the breadth and depth of fans’ devotion to fancy dress. On TikTok hundreds of thousands of #ConcertOutfit videos show fans trading ideas for gigs of all genres. Many start preparing their outfits months in advance. Some talk about what they will wear to an event they have not yet acquired a ticket for.

Chappell Roan, an American singer-songwriter, sets themes for her shows and encourages followers to discuss their outfits on Discord, a messaging platform. Brands and fashion labels have curated concert-specific collections; Fanatics and Complex launched a range with Blackpink, a K-pop group, for the American leg of their tour. “It’s a feedback loop,” Lucy Bennett, a specialist in fan culture at Cardiff University, says. “Fans start it, artists amplify it and brands follow.”

The pandemic provided an impetus. After months of being cooped up at home, people celebrated being in stadiums rather than on the sofa by wearing flamboyant apparel. When Harry Styles’s “Love on Tour” gigs were able to go ahead in 2021 after delays, fans copied his outfits and turned up in a riot of colour. (Sales of feather boas, of the sort that he had worn to the Grammys that year, took flight.) By making a special effort, Mr Styles’s admirers conveyed that they did not take the concert—or him—for granted.

The same was true of Taylor Swift’s Eras tour . Tickets were so hard to obtain that many who managed to snag one felt the need to prove their Swiftie credentials. Some created detailed replicas of her past outfits or fashioned looks based on obscure lyrical references. The theme of the tour—a retrospective of the pop star’s 11 studio albums—gave fans plenty of inspiration, from the pastel-hued “Lover” record to the snake-themed “Reputation”.

Musicians are more likely than other kinds of entertainer to inspire such dedication. According to a study by Deloitte, a consultancy, 37% of people regard their love of a particular musician to be “extremely or somewhat important to their identity”, more than their support of a sports team (35%), tv show (27%) or movie franchise (21%). The generations who most cherish their fandom, Gen Z and millennials, are also the generations who strongly value experiences. If you are paying handsomely to attend a concert—the average price of a ticket to Ms Swift’s tour was $250, and climbed to $7,000 on resale sites—you may as well go all out.

Concerts today are immersive spectacles with custom-built stages, lavish digital designs, props and pyrotechnics. Clothes offer a way to participate in the extravaganza and feel part of a community of like-minded folk. When fans dress up, it “blurs the line between performer and audience, where the live music show is not just on stage any more, but instead, it’s all around you”, says Ms Bennett. Watching Pitbull, in short, is a lot more fun if you’re surrounded by thousands of people in bald caps. ■

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For decades the country’s officials turned international adoption into a money-making racket

China’s child-snatching business For decades the country’s officials turned international adoption into a money-making racket July 17th 2025 China’s one-child policy was not only cruel; it was a failure. Decades of shackling women to beds and forcing them to undergo abortions certainly reduced the birth rate. But it had been falling anyway; coercion may only have hastened a demographic crunch for which the country was ill-prepared.

Today China’s problem is too few babies . The statistics worry officials: a working-age population in decline since 2011, and an overall population that has been shrinking since 2022. After a wrenching U-turn, the government now urges women to have more babies, but they pay little heed. Ten years after the one-child policy was turned into a two-child policy, and later a three-child policy, it is too easy to forget how much it still scars the lives of millions of ordinary Chinese. Besides the forced abortions and sterilisations inflicted on violators, there were also crippling fines. And illegal second children were often denied the identity papers they needed to enter public school.

In her book, “Daughters of the Bamboo Grove”, Barbara Demick, a former China correspondent for the Los Angeles Times, describes how the policy also led to the widespread seizure of children for international adoption . Experts she quotes reckon 10% of the 160,000 children who were adopted by foreigners between China’s legalising of this practice in 1991 and its banning last year were forcibly taken from their birth parents. Often the kidnappings were by family-planning officials, who would give the children—girls, mostly—to state-owned orphanages. As Ms Demick puts it, the orphanages would then “launder” these “trafficked babies”, putting notices in local media with invented stories of them being abandoned. The newspapers were not sold in the villages where the children were seized.

Ms Demick’s work is based on extensive reporting in China and America, the main destination for the children. It reveals how this trafficking worked and how its exposure in the 2000s devastated adoptees and their new families. Many “viewed China as the most ethical choice for international adoption, unlike Ethiopia or Haiti or Guatemala, where they would have been exploiting the abject poverty of birth parents”. The Chinese children may have come from poor families, but the Americans believed they had been abandoned because of the one-child policy. They were saving them from institutional care.

In the first two decades of the policy, many baby girls were indeed abandoned because of harsh enforcement of family-planning measures. But as farmers became richer they could more readily afford the fines for exceeding the birth quotas (which sometimes allowed rural families to have two children anyway if the first was a girl). In the countryside, girls became more valuable : young women were in high demand as workers.

For the orphanages, the shrinking supply of healthy babies was a “catastrophe”, the author writes. The $3,000 or more that adoptive families had to hand over to the institutions as a “donation” was a massive sum in rural China. (It had to be given in person in hundred-dollar bills, not added to the adoption fees paid by bank transfer or cheque to China’s central adoption agency.) The orphanages, she says, had become dependent on the money—not least in order to look after disabled children being abandoned by families who could not afford medical treatment. Family-planning officials had an incentive to help: “confiscating” babies could induce people to pay fines on which, Ms Demick says, many rural jurisdictions had become “almost entirely dependent” for their budgets.

The author focuses on a case involving the abduction of a twin girl in 2002 and her adoption in America. An emotional reunion with her sister in 2019 (pictured), assisted by Ms Demick, is grippingly described. Such reconnections with birth families in China are increasingly common today. Far less so is China’s willingness to acknowledge the outrages that occurred, and punish those responsible. ■

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Kits encode all sorts of information, Joey D’Urso argues

What a football shirt can tell you about finance and geopolitics Kits encode all sorts of information, Joey D’Urso argues July 17th 2025 ON JULY 13TH Chelsea, a team in the English Premier League, put three goals past Paris Saint-Germain (PSG), of France’s Ligue 1, to win the Club World Cup . As well as earning bragging rights—PSG were the tournament favourites—and a gargantuan gold trophy, Chelsea will take home around $110m.

They will be grateful for the payday. Eagle-eyed observers may have noticed that the front of Chelsea’s shirt is blank. Since an American consortium bought the club in 2022, the owners have been searching for a lucrative sponsorship deal, with mixed success. Chelsea’s peers, meanwhile, are flush with cash : PSG are reportedly paid around $70m a year by Qatar Airways. (Both club and sponsor are owned by the Qatari government.)

For Joey D’Urso, a journalist at the Times, such details matter. In “More Than A Shirt” he argues that football jerseys—and especially the brand names that appear on them—can tell you a lot about economics and geopolitics. Football’s governing bodies have excelled at commercialising the sport, he argues, but failed to protect it from questionable ventures.

A generation ago, shirt sponsorship was simpler than the offside rule. Consumer goods companies paid clubs for the chance to reach local fans. At the start of the Premier League era in 1992, Liverpool was sponsored by a beer brand and Arsenal by an electronics company. But as football became more popular globally, the shirts of the most successful teams attracted a broader array of sponsors.

Mr D’Urso describes a deal made in 2006 when a top-flight German team, FC Schalke 04, switched their main sponsor from a local insurance firm to Gazprom, a Russian gas producer. This lucrative deal was a departure from the norm, for “Nobody watching...is going to go out and buy a cubic metre of Gazprom gas,” the author notes. Instead, an energy expert says, Gazprom sought out Schalke to improve Russia’s image as “the friendly neighbour”. It worked. During the course of the deal, an increasing share of German’s energy mix was given over to Russian natural gas.

The book’s strongest material shows how some leading clubs have accepted sponsorship money without doing their due diligence. In 2021 Chelsea signed a deal with Leyu Sports, an Asian gambling firm. Players were corralled into speaking Chinese in promotional videos and the company’s logo was displayed at the team’s ground. But when Mr D’Urso tried to track down the firm that claimed to have brokered the deal, he could not prove its existence. Pictures of its employees were stock photos. “Simply put,” he concludes, “nobody has any idea who is running these companies.” Without this information, teams do not know what they are promoting, even if they are practising “ignorance rather than intentional deceit”.

Football has embraced crypto schemes with a similar lack of scrutiny. In 2021-22, all but one of the 20 Premier League clubs advertised a crypto product to their fans. These clubs collaborated with crypto startups to create non-fungible tokens that were intended to be collectables. Mr D’Urso learns that the crypto industry locked onto football because it realised it was “the cheapest way of advertising to young men”, a cohort who are more inclined to take financial risks. Prices soon crashed (though crypto has since rebounded).

Mr D’Urso speaks to angry and embarrassed fans. In the absence of sufficient regulation, some believe they have been exploited by their clubs. Others are surprised that players they considered “legit” would endorse such risky schemes.

A few feel obliged to give sponsors a kicking. Earlier this year Arsenal fans called for the club to end its agreement with Rwanda’s tourism board (see picture) after a government-backed rebel group invaded eastern Congo. (The countries have since signed a shaky truce.) Mr D’Urso argues that few, if any, supporters want “to wrestle with complex geopolitical issues”. Yet “More Than A Shirt” shows why geopolitics keeps invading the pitch. ■

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Oversize tumblers reveal more about fashion than wellness

Water bottles, the accessory Gen Z is thirsting after Oversize tumblers reveal more about fashion than wellness July 17th 2025 IF YOU THOUGHT a reusable water bottle was a plain, boring receptacle—brought out of the cupboard only for long hikes—then you would be wrong. For Gen Z , a water bottle is both a necessity and a fashion statement. Social media are awash with videos of tumblers. The hashtag #WaterTok has 2.5bn views on TikTok.

Youngsters connect their water bottles “to their outfit and to their lifestyle”, says Matt Navarro, global president of Stanley 1913, a leading brand. They festoon their cups with all kinds of accessories, including stickers and keychains. Some buy straps, snack trays and backpacks for their beakers.

To tap into demand, companies such as Owala and Yeti make bottles in all sorts of colours. Stanley has released collections with pop stars including Olivia Rodrigo and Post Malone. On July 14th the firm announced a new range with Lionel Messi, an Argentine footballer, in a blue hue similar to his national team’s kit.

An obsession with “self-care” helps explain the flood of interest, as many believe that water is the secret to glowing skin and mental acuity. This has led to people drinking more, a trend dubbed “hydration inflation”. Stanley’s most popular cup holds 1,200 millilitres of life-sustaining liquid. The hype is quenching brands’ thirst for profit: the value of sales of portable drinkware in America reached $4bn in the year ending in May 2025; some 270m containers were sold in the country, up from 240m two years ago.

Drinking fashions ebb and flow. In the late 1970s bottled water became the cool thing in America, notes James Salzman, the author of a book about drinking water. Luxury brands sprang up; by the 2000s celebrities were naming their favourites. Rumours swirled that Mariah Carey bathed in French mineral water. (She actually performs her ablutions in milk.)

Gen Z is an eco-conscious cohort. Yet the reusable-cup trend is more about style than sustainability. The desire for Stanleys is so great that a secondary trade is thriving: limited-edition cups resell for as much as $800. Talk about liquid assets. ■

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It is not just vinyl. Film cameras and print publications are trendy again, too

The rise of AI art is spurring a revival of analogue media It is not just vinyl. Film cameras and print publications are trendy again, too July 17th 2025 Walk into Torn Light Records, on Milwaukee Avenue, Chicago’s hipster corridor, and you may feel like you have stepped back in time. Jazz wafts through the speakers. On prominent display is a copy of “Remain in Light”, a cult album released by Talking Heads in 1980. Yet the shop opened last year, having relocated from Cincinnati. It is one of half a dozen record stores on the street, but competition is not a problem: sales have been brisk. “Having people being really interested in physical media again has been great,” says Daniel Buckley, the co-owner.

The vinyl revival has been under way for almost two decades. Sales of LPs and EPs are as high today as they were in the late 1980s, according to data from the Recording Industry Association of America. Last year sales in America rose by 7%, to $1.4bn, or 44m records. “The Tortured Poets Department”, an album by Taylor Swift, sold 2.2m copies in the format. Much has been written about how vinyl records have become collectors’ items and, particularly for Gen Z, proof of a fan’s commitment to an artist . Yet the vinyl boom is only one part of a broader resurgence of analogue media.

Cassette tapes—admittedly a niche format compared with vinyl—are turning up the volume, too. In Britain in the first quarter of this year, sales of cassettes were up by more than 200% on the same period in 2024. (Perhaps buyers have forgotten, or are too young to remember, the frustrating experience of painstakingly winding the tape back to the beginning with a pencil.)

Walk round the corner from Torn Light to Bellows Film Lab, a film shop and processing lab which opened in 2022, and you will find that film photography is also hip again. Demand for film has doubled in the past five years, an executive from Kodak revealed last year, even though the price of film has risen by 50% since 2019.

Cinephiles, like photographers, are seeking out celluloid. Though multiplex cinemas may be struggling to compete with streaming services, arty venues that show 35mm movies using vintage projectors are thriving. Screenings at the Music Box in Chicago or the Metrograph in New York can sell out weeks in advance.

Even the written word is returning to the printed page. Playboy is setting pulses racing once again with its new annual edition. Joshua Kushner, a venture capitalist, and Karlie Kloss, his supermodel wife, hope to breathe new life into Life magazine and have relaunched fortnightly print editions. Umpteen other local or specialist publications in America and Britain—including NME, the Onion and Saveur—have fired up the presses after several years as digital-only titles.

What is driving this resurgence of old-fashioned media? Nostalgia undeniably plays a part. Many find the gentle crackle of a vinyl record or the soft glow of 35mm film to be alluring. And, in a world where everything is instantly available on a screen, tangible items become luxurious.

But the main reason is rage against the algorithm. The analogue trend is a celebration of the old ways of making things amid the artificial-intelligence revolution: consider, for instance, that the vinyl revival coincided with the launch of Spotify.

Jack Savoretti, an Anglo-Italian musician who has had two chart-topping albums in Britain, is a proponent of many analogue methods. One problem with modern technology, he reckons, is the way in which it encourages people to consume music. He draws a comparison with the Slow Food movement, which started in Italy in the 1980s in opposition to fast food: “I enjoy the occasional Big Mac, but it’s not the reason I learned how to cook.” Spotify’s algorithm may be very convenient, but it leads people to listen lazily to unmemorable music. Picking up an LP means making an intentional choice.

The other problem is the produce itself, which often takes people out of the equation. Spotify has been accused of sneaking “ghost artists” onto its playlists: that is, music made by anonymous musicians that it owns the rights to, so as to reduce the share of its revenue it has to pay to record labels. There is a lot of ai-generated music about, too. One AI band called The Velvet Sundown is described by its creator as “an ongoing artistic provocation” and has already racked up millions of streams after being featured on several Spotify playlists this year. According to Deezer, around 20,000 ai-generated tracks are uploaded to its platform every day. To the ears of many, this is not music.

As for photography, most phone cameras already use AI to merge a burst of photos into one. New features offered by Apple and Google now allow users to delete unwanted people or features from a picture—rather like a Soviet propagandist, only for ex-boyfriends or blemishes. Film, by contrast, feels authentic. At the cinema, films on 35mm prints rarely have clunky visual effects or hideous colour grading.

How far will the backlash go? Analogue culture, for all its trendiness, remains a small market. Vinyl records account for just 8% of American music revenues. Kodak is selling more film, but it is far from recapturing its heyday. However, analogue aficionados are trendsetters: they are forcing the digital market to adapt. Fuji now sells digital cameras with “film simulation” modes. Qobuz, a French rival to Spotify, gets employees to write recommendations.

In a world of intelligent robots, the human touch is a selling point. Foodstuffs have long advertised the fact they contain “no artificial ingredients”—perhaps artworks will soon, too. ■

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Economics is a useful tool for understanding conflict, as a new book shows

In war, incentives matter more than courage Economics is a useful tool for understanding conflict, as a new book shows July 10th 2025 Of all human activities, war is the least rational. It costs a fortune. It spreads death and misery, from the killing fields of Sudan to the tunnels of Gaza. It is often started out of personal hubris or blind patriotic zeal: think of Napoleon ’s invasion of Russia or Japan’s decision in 1941 to provoke a war with a superpower it could not hope to defeat. So you might think economics—a discipline associated with rational self-interest—would have little to say about it. You would be wrong, argues Duncan Weldon, a former writer for and occasional contributor to The Economist, in “Blood and Treasure”.

Economists think a lot about incentives—as do soldiers. When Italian cities hired mercenaries to fight their wars in the 15th century, the condottieri, or mercenary leaders, devised a complex strategy of feints and retreats to put the enemy off balance. At least, that’s what they said they were doing. Though they sombrely cited Roman and Greek military history to justify their actions, in fact they just wanted to avoid battle. They were paid either way, as were the hired swords on the other side. By tacit agreement they kept failing to fight—and grew rich. Some then splashed out on conspicuous consumption, such as paintings by Leonardo da Vinci , thus helping bankroll the Renaissance.

Sometimes a military strategy seems irrational, but is not. Consider France’s reluctance to adopt the longbow. English longbowmen slaughtered a much larger French army at the battle of Agincourt in 1415. The French should have seen this coming, since the English had pulled off exactly the same trick at the battle of Crécy, 69 years before. A longbow was difficult to master, but a skilled archer could fire six shots in the time it took a crossbowman to fire one. English kings required their male subjects to practise archery every week. French kings, by contrast, discouraged it.

As it happens, the one who lost at Agincourt was known as Charles the Mad. But his no-longbow policy was quite sane, Mr Weldon argues. France was unstable. Kings had to worry more about internal threats than foreign ones. The last thing they wanted was legions of peasants who could massacre mounted knights with weapons they could easily make at home. In England the monarchy was more secure (at least, until the Wars of the Roses), so kings favoured the weapon that would help them win foreign wars.

Incentives matter in other kinds of conflict, too. Pirates of the 18th century were also keen to avoid fighting. Not only was it dangerous; it risked sinking the vessel they were trying to capture, plunging all those pieces of eight into the depths. They threatened to slaughter crews that resisted, but spare those who surrendered without a fight. To communicate this clearly, regardless of language barriers, they adopted the Jolly Roger flag—an early example of effective global branding.

Victory, in popular myth, depends on the exceptional courage and skill of the nation to which the mythmaker happens to belong. Mr Weldon offers more convincing explanations. The Vikings , for instance, were successful not because they went “berserk” and ran into battle terrifyingly naked, but because they had two advantages over their Anglo-Saxon victims. First, they were not Christian. They had no compunction about raiding churches, which were full of treasure and essentially unguarded, since the locals deemed it sacrilegious to plunder them.

Second, Viking longboats were the stealth fighters of the Dark Ages. A conventional boat would make landfall wherever the prevailing winds blew it, and then have to creep along the coast towards its target, giving its intended victims plenty of time to hide. A Viking longboat, by contrast, could use its sails for most of the journey and then switch to oars when still just over the horizon. Thus, a monastery might have only a couple of hours’ notice that it was about to be raided.

The Mongols’ military triumphs have sometimes been ascribed to their horsemanship. Mounted archers would race up, loose a hail of arrows and dash away—a devastating tactic. But logistics mattered more, especially “the easy availability of fresh remounts”. In 1300 the Mongol empire had half the horses in the world: perhaps 20 for every warrior. So the great horde could sweep across the steppe at a pace of 80 to 100 kilometres a day, while its foes barely managed ten. Mr Weldon argues that, by unifying Eurasia and promoting trade between China and Europe, Genghis Khan was the “father of globalisation”.

In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, Britain’s Royal Navy ruled the waves. Between 1793 and 1815, it lost one ship for every seven enemy vessels it destroyed or captured. Looking only at big “ships of the line”, the ratio was one to 33. Again, the reason is not that British sailors were braver than French ones, but that their commanders’ incentives differed. A French captain who surrendered his ship faced the death penalty, so the shrewd ones avoided battle. British captains were given a fat share of the value of ships they captured, which made them more aggressive.

Though economics is a useful tool for understanding war, individual economists have often misunderstood it. Walt Rostow, a star economist who became President Lyndon Johnson’s national security adviser, thought the Vietnam war could be won by bombing the north’s industrial base to cinders. He misunderstood the incentives at play. Ho Chi Minh, North Vietnam’s leader, cared far more about uniting the country under communist rule than about protecting bridges and factories in the north. And the harder America hit the communists, the more aid the Soviet Union and China sent them. Even dropping hundreds of kilograms of explosives per Vietnamese person was not enough to prevent America’s eventual defeat.

Time and again, Mr Weldon spots the invisible hand behind hostilities. Yet he neglects one especially useful tool: public-choice theory. This idea, for which James Buchanan won a Nobel prize in 1986, holds that many policies exist because they benefit self-interested decision-makers rather than the people they are meant to serve.

Consider Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. It was not in Russia’s interest: it has cost 1m Russian casualties and made Russia a pariah in the West, dependent on China to stay afloat. Mr Putin started it for selfish reasons: he dreamed of going down in history as a great conqueror, and he knew from experience that a war could win him a burst of patriotic support and an excuse to call dissidents traitors and lock them up. What was irrational for Russia made perfect sense for its warmonger-in-chief. Alas, since the supply of awful leaders greatly exceeds the need for them, wars will keep breaking out. Sometimes, the dismal science offers dismal conclusions. ■

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Should a man who can do anything choose to do nothing?

What Superman tells you about American foreign policy Should a man who can do anything choose to do nothing? July 10th 2025 IT is hard to take a man in blue tights and red briefs seriously. But in a new movie, released on July 11th, Superman has taken on the extremely serious job of being the world’s policeman. The Man of Steel (David Corenswet, pictured, snapping on the Spandex for the first time) stops one country from invading another. He has done a good thing, he feels, and saved lives. Yet Lois Lane (Rachel Brosnahan, who brings a welcome spikiness to the role) is sceptical of unilateral action: does Superman stop to think about the consequences of getting involved in other countries’ conflicts, she wonders?

Such geopolitical musing might seem out of place in a superhero film, usually a vehicle for rippling muscles and elaborate stunts. But many have also been parables of how America feels about its role in the world. This is particularly true of stories about Superman, whose stated aim is to defend “truth, justice and the American way”. The character has endured for almost nine decades because he is handsome, bland and adaptable—able to reflect whatever “the American way” means at any particular moment.

Rick Bowers, author of a book about Superman, described him as the “ quintessential American ”. Though the hero arrived in the country from the planet Krypton as a baby, he was brought up in the Midwest, learned to love hard work and became the only American who can literally lift himself up by his bootstraps. Superman was created by Jerry Siegel, the son of Lithuanian Jewish immigrants. Siegel, an awkward child, spent his formative years making up stories. He was close to his father, who ran a second-hand clothes shop in a rough part of Cleveland. After his father died during a robbery, Siegel’s imaginings cohered into a character with superhuman strength. In the first tale, his hero rescues a middle-aged man from an assailant.

The public met Superman in June 1938, holding a car aloft on the cover of “Action Comics 1”. On the first page, Superman realises “he must turn his titanic strength into channels that would benefit mankind”, and ever since he has exuded square-jawed goodness and noblesse oblige. Initially his focus was domestic—in that first story he saves an innocent woman from going to the electric chair—rather than international. America was isolationist at the time, despite Franklin Roosevelt’s growing concern about Nazi Germany .

Siegel and Joe Shuster, the illustrator, faced a dilemma when America entered the war. The character’s sense of justice would undoubtedly have led him to intervene on the Allies’ side. But even the fearsome Luftwaffe would have been no match for the caped wonder. They worried that soldiers would be dispirited by tales of Superman’s easy victories. Some 80% of the American army’s reading material was comics, with Superman atop the charts.

So they had Clark Kent, his civilian alter ego, rejected from the army after failing an eye test. Superman spent the war fighting villains, some of them German and Japanese, elsewhere. He was still used as a symbol of Americans’ valour and righteousness. A cover of a comic in July 1944 depicted Lane arm-in-arm with servicemen, declaring: “You’re my Supermen!”

Later Superman grappled with whether he should interfere in earthly affairs. In “Superman II” (1980) he forsakes his powers in order to live a normal life with Lane, which leaves America, and the world, vulnerable to the ambitions of General Zod, a belligerent expansionist. (It is not hard to parse the message of this cold-war-era story.) Naturally the film ends with Superman recovering his strength, returning to his duty as global protector and reinstating the American flag above the White House.

Comics and films of the late 20th and early 21st centuries depict Superman as increasingly nervous about overstepping when it comes to foreign intervention and questions of sovereignty. “What right do I have”, he asks at one point, “to impose my values on anyone?” He aims to achieve as much as possible with as little force as possible, using surgical strikes to eliminate terrorist cells. This mirrors America’s policy, since 2002, of killing individual foes with missiles fired from drones.

Now the Man of Steel has been recast to fit today’s politics. The new “Superman” film has the usual hokey dialogue and planetary peril. But—without giving too much away—it reveals that the conflict that he has rushed into is a setup. This is, more or less, how some of Donald Trump’s foreign-policy team feel about skirmishes elsewhere: that America loses by getting involved. It may seem odd for a man who can do anything to contemplate doing nothing. But it makes for a timely film. ■

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The Puerto Rican rapper has millions of fans beyond the Hispanophone world

How Bad Bunny leapt to the top of the global music charts The Puerto Rican rapper has millions of fans beyond the Hispanophone world July 10th 2025 MOST MUSICIANS, when they decide to do a concert residency, head to Las Vegas. In recent years megastars including Adele , Celine Dion and U2 have made tens, if not hundreds, of millions of dollars playing to crowds in Sin City. But not Bad Bunny. On July 11th the Puerto Rican rapper and singer will begin a run of 30 concerts in San Juan, the capital, before setting off on a world tour. It is symbolic of how the musician has become a global hitmaker while keeping one foot on the island. “He is Puerto Rican and he wants you to know it,” says Kacho López Mari, a film-maker who has worked with the musician.

It took Bad Bunny (whose real name is Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio) less than a decade to hop to the top of pop music. In 2013 he began uploading his songs to SoundCloud, a streaming site. Three years later he was signed by a record label. And two years after that he collaborated with Cardi B, an American rapper, and J Balvin, a Colombian singer, on a track called “I Like It”, which topped the Billboard Hot 100 chart in America.

Since then Bad Bunny’s fans have multiplied like, well, rabbits. In 2018 his songs were streamed 2.5bn times according to Luminate, an analytics firm; by 2024 that figure had jumped to 11.5bn. Between 2020 and 2022 Bad Bunny was the most-played artist on Spotify, making him the first musician to claim the top spot for three consecutive years.

Bad Bunny’s record-breaking is all the more notable because he raps and sings almost exclusively in his mother tongue. In the early 2000s the biggest rappers in the world were all American; Latin artists, such as Enrique Iglesias, had to perform in English if they wanted to reach a global audience. No longer.

In 2022 Bad Bunny’s album “Un Verano Sin Ti” (“A Summer Without You”) was the first Spanish-language record to be nominated for Album of the Year at the Grammys. His forthcoming tour sold 2.6m tickets in a week. The majority of the concerts will take place in Hispanophone countries, including Argentina, Chile, Mexico and Spain. But Bad Bunny will also perform in places with very few Spanish speakers, such as Japan and Poland.

Three factors explain his success. The first is the music itself. Bad Bunny puts a Latin twist on popular genres such as trap (a style of hip-hop) and house (a type of electronic music) by incorporating local sounds such as reggaeton, plena and salsa. Plena, an Afro-Puerto Rican mode, is highly rhythmic, involving syncopated beats on instruments such as panderos (hand drums) and maracas. When combined with Bad Bunny’s swagger, this makes for tracks both danceable and distinctive.

Bad Bunny borrows freely and often, never hewing to one influence for long. This keeps his work exciting. “We never know what we’re going to get,” says Vanessa Díaz of Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, who teaches a course on Bad Bunny and is the co-author of a forthcoming book on the musician. “He doesn’t follow trends. He sets them.”

The second factor is his lyrics. Some of Bad Bunny’s fans will not understand what he is saying, but those who do often appreciate his political sensibilities. In 2019 Bad Bunny collaborated on a track, “Afilando Los Cuchillos” (“Sharpening the Knives”), which criticised Puerto Rico’s governor at the time and the “manipulation, corruption, conspiracies” of the island’s politics. The title of “El Apagón” (“The Blackout”), a hit in 2022, refers to the regular power failures that plunge the island into darkness. In a documentary film tacked on to the music video, locals complain about gentrification and being forced out of their homes by luxury property developers. “Esta es mi playa / Este es mi sol / Esta es mi tierra,” the song asserts: “This is my beach / This is my sun / This is my land.”

He encourages listeners to feel pride in where they are from. Ms Díaz says Bad Bunny has made speaking Spanish cool at a time when it is often denigrated in America. He sees his Puerto Rican upbringing as something to honour, not ignore. “All of PR is my crew,” he raps on “ACHO PR”. Fancy festivals in California are all well and good, but he prefers “singing for free in Loíza than at Coachella”.

The third reason for Bad Bunny’s breakout is timing. Demand for Spanish-language culture has soared. In the first half of 2024 viewers spent almost 7bn hours watching shows in Spanish on Netflix, according to Omdia, a research firm. Bad Bunny has ridden that wave and helped it surge. Anamaria Sayre, a co-host of Alt.Latino, a music show on National Public Radio, says that when she was growing up in America, “You didn’t hear Spanish music in white spaces...now it is everywhere.”

Bad Bunny is certainly doing his best to make sure that it is: he will be stopping in 18 countries across four continents on his tour. “We will look back on this as a turning-point,” says Ms Díaz. “Bad Bunny didn’t just succeed in Spanish—he changed what global success could look and sound like.” Yet even when he is “travelling the whole world”, Bad Bunny says on “ACHO PR”, he is still the young man “who sat in La Perla with my grandma”. ■

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An abandoned son, scorned lovers and dazzling, manipulative prose

Handling feelings with rubber gloves: the odd life of Muriel Spark An abandoned son, scorned lovers and dazzling, manipulative prose July 10th 2025 How do you write a book? For Muriel Spark the process was simple. First, the novelist said, “I write the title, and then I write my name.” Then, she explained, “I write ‘Chapter One’ and then I write on.” Spark’s account of her method was clear, straightforward—and total nonsense.

So how did she write a book? The actual answer was with great difficulty. Spark’s books were slim but her archives are capacious: the box files extend to 195 feet, or 60 metres, “equivalent in height to an airport control tower”. Remove “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie”, “The Ballad of Peckham Rye” and the 20 other novels she produced and you will still be left with at least 194 feet of letters, cast-offs and notes. The idea that all this material was turned out effortlessly was rubbish, as Spark well knew: “It has always”, she wrote, “been my intention to practise the arts of pretence and counterfeit on the reader.”

This was particularly true, it turns out, when it came to her own life . Biographers, it is often said, “add a new terror to death”. For Spark—the subject of two biographies while she was alive, both of which she loathed—they added a new terror to life, too. She attempted to control her story by writing it herself but that was largely a failure: Spark could write a book only once she knew “how it is going to end”. That, for autobiography, is rather tricky.

Biography, then—which Frances Wilson attempts in this beautifully written book—is the closest readers can get to Spark, which is to say: not that close at all. “What chance”, as Julian Barnes, a novelist, has put it, “would the craftiest biographer stand against the subject who saw him coming and decided to amuse himself?” Spark’s craft—and craftiness—are clear from the beginning, not least because her habit of not throwing anything away created such a whopper of an archive. If her books, writes Ms Wilson, are “‘minor’ surrealist masterworks” then her archive is “a major realist masterwork”.

Some things are clear: Spark begins life, dully, in Edinburgh, attending a prim school that would inspire “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie” and writing the sort of earnest poetry that involves the word “’Tis”. Then things perk up: she marries a “Mr Spark”, moves to Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) and starts to meet people with names such as “Princess Marie Bonaparte” and “Leigh Francis Howell Wynne Sackville de Montmorency Vaughan Henry”. Sparkian things happen to her. A cousin is put in an orphanage. Mr Spark turns out to be a lunatic and tries to jump out of a window. A colleague turns out to be a spy. Almost everyone seems to have affairs. Absolutely everyone seems to have arguments about modernist poetry.

Later, Spark would write a short story in which she imagines that, as a baby, she was like a human radio receiver “able to tune in from her cot in Edinburgh to scenes…from around the globe”. She certainly seems to have been tuned in to the literary moment. Anyone who is anyone in English 20th-century letters has a walk-on part here: Evelyn Waugh calls her a saint; W.H. Auden is awed by her; Graham Greene sends her cheques and bottles of wine.

What she does not seem to be is very tuned in to her emotions. A jilted lover once, somewhat spitefully, wrote that Spark was chilly, and approached “human feeling…only with rubber gloves”. It was cruel—and true. Her life is characterised by the same strange, stark abruptness as her prose. She decides to end an affair with a man because “One day I woke up and decided that I didn’t like him.”

Her iciest moment was her decision to leave her son. A lot has been written about the different parenting standards to which men and women are held. Rightly: this inequality can be seen in everything from literary lives to the English language itself (consider the different meanings of the verbs “to mother” someone and “to father” them). Yet Spark’s description of leaving her son is, even by her standards, brittle. When he is five, she flees Southern Rhodesia, depositing her son in a convent school and abandoning his nanny. “We were sad to leave each other,” Spark wrote. She was referring, Ms Wilson wryly notes, not to the boy but to the nanny.

It is a typically Sparkian moment: elegant, abrupt, emotionally odd. Some writers become an adjective: Dickensian, Orwellian, Joycean. “Sparkian” has not entered common parlance but, by the time you finish this brilliant book, you think it probably should. For, even after 400 pages, Spark herself remains elusive. ■

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Artists are entitled to share their views. Doing so is not always noble or wise

Why the left gains nothing from pop stars’ support Artists are entitled to share their views. Doing so is not always noble or wise July 10th 2025 The high priests of speaking out are John Stuart Mill , an English philosopher, and Martin Niemöller, a Lutheran pastor. “Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends,” Mill warned, “than that good men should look on and do nothing.” Niemöller famously ventriloquised the many Germans who kept silent when the Nazis “came for the socialists”, the trade unionists and the Jews: “Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.”

Like Mill and Niemöller, artists and musicians who call out injustice avowedly see standing up for the oppressed as a moral obligation. Speaking out on world affairs is in vogue, as it tends to be amid political ructions, and much of it is doubtless heartfelt and sincere. But it can also have other motives—and unintended consequences.

Two developments explain the current clamour. First, the re-election of Donald Trump, a bogeyman for the showbiz elite, give or take a few country singers and wrestlers. At a recent gig in Britain, Bruce Springsteen (pictured) labelled him “an unfit president” in charge of a “corrupt, incompetent and treasonous administration”. Olivia Rodrigo, Katy Perry and others have criticised his migrant round-ups and deportations.

The other new factor is Gaza . At the recent Glastonbury music festival, the frontman of Bob Vylan, a punk duo, followed his de rigueur “Free Palestine” chants with another that advocated “Death, death to the IDF”, or Israel Defence Forces; some in the crowd joined in. Bob Vylan was the warm-up act for Kneecap, a hip-hop trio already in hot water after a show in which a band member yelled “Up Hamas! Up Hizbullah!”

Publicly wishing death on anyone is grotesque (and potentially illegal). But in general, it must be said, musicians should be free to express their political opinions, whether sensible or idiotic. After all, song lyrics themselves are often political. Mr Springsteen denounces conflict in his song “War”; Bono and U2 lament the Troubles in Northern Ireland in “Sunday Bloody Sunday”. Expecting them to keep schtum about such subjects when the music stops would be odd.

Artists have the same right as everyone else to speak out. But doing so is not always noble, sensible or effective. One wrinkle is that outbursts which purport to be bold are often predictable, even conformist. Festivals like Glastonbury might as well fly banners proclaiming that the bands on stage support the Palestinians unless otherwise stated. Many young fans do, too. Speaking out to people who already know your views or largely share them is not what Niemöller envisaged.

Meanwhile, evidence suggests that celebrities change few minds—or not in the way they intend. Take the galaxy of stars who backed Kamala Harris last year, of whom the brightest was Taylor Swift . Pollsters found her support turned more voters off Ms Harris than it attracted, perhaps because it fed fears of an establishment stitch-up. Tirades like Mr Springsteen’s are grist to an omnivorous metabolism that turns all publicity to Mr Trump’s advantage, showcasing his pugilism and hogging attention. (He dismissed Mr Springsteen as a “dried out ‘prune’ of a rocker” and claimed Ms Swift was “no longer ‘HOT’”.)

In any case, artists and their admirers are prone to ascribe more power to their craft than it usually wields. Autocrats and despots, it is true, are wary of mass gatherings like rock concerts: a crowd can turn into a mob and then into a revolution. Tyrants often crack down on dissident artists. But they crack down on lots of people. When musicians have real clout, it mostly comes from amplifying or refracting a cause in shimmering work—not clunky rants. Think of Nina Simone’s sculpted fury in “Mississippi Goddam” or Bob Dylan’s lapidary imagery in “The Times They Are A-Changin’”.

Times have indeed changed. More than their forebears, today’s celebs are expected to share their private lives and convictions. In this coercive culture, tact is timidity and silence is complicity in violence. To adapt Mill, speaking out means you have done something and are therefore good. Some stars seem less to use their fame to publicise a cause than use a cause to publicise themselves.

The pursuit of moral glamour can set off a spiral of grandstanding, which in Britain led to a singer calling for death at a music festival. This kind of speaking out draws attention only to itself. “The more time [politicians] talk about Bob Vylan, the less time they spend” on Gaza, the group protested amid the ensuing furore. Quite. ■

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Why fluffy, glossy K-dramas tempt North Koreans to brave the firing squad

The TV shows people risk death to watch Why fluffy, glossy K-dramas tempt North Koreans to brave the firing squad July 3rd 2025 In most countries, good television is cheap. A monthly Netflix subscription costs less than a takeaway pizza . In North Korea, by contrast, watching a gripping TV drama can cost you your life.

Under the “Anti-Reactionary Thought Law” of 2020, no North Korean may consume, possess or distribute the “rotten ideology and culture of hostile forces”. That means K-dramas and K-pop, as well as South Korean books , drawings and photographs. The penalties range from forced labour to prison camp to death. Human-rights groups report multiple executions. In 2022 a 22-year-old farmer was executed for listening to 70 South Korean songs and watching three South Korean films, which he shared with his friends.

Yet despite the danger, North Koreans avidly tune in to K-dramas . A survey of defectors in 2016-20 by South Korea’s unification ministry found that 83% had watched such shows before defecting. The rate among other North Koreans may not be as high. But Kang Gyu-ri, who defected in 2023, says of her millennial peers in the north: “They might not say it [publicly], but I didn’t know anyone who hadn’t watched a foreign video.”

What kind of TV shows are worth the risk of death? To answer this question, consider the clunky, earnest fare that North Koreans are supposed to watch. In “A Flower in the Snow” (2011), a North Korean movie, the female lead polishes her fiancé’s shoe at a train station—right before she breaks up with him to commit herself to reviving an old blanket factory and raising orphans. Ultimately, she succeeds in restarting the factory; her ex-fiancé tragically dies while delivering equipment to it.

South Korean dramas offer a less totalitarian take on romance. Ryu Hee-jin, a former swimmer from Pyongyang, has explained the difference: “In [South] Korean dramas, you can see people saying ‘I love you’ so freely. In North Korea, you could only say that you love Chairman Kim Jong Un and his father.”

Ms Kang’s favourite K-drama was “May Queen” (2012). She first watched the melodrama on a smuggled SD card in the middle of the night—and re-watched it 20 times. Over the course of almost 40 episodes, a plucky protagonist, Chun Hae-joo, overcomes poverty and family intrigue to become a ship designer. She eventually meets the love of her life and, rather than ditching him to work at a grotty state-owned blanket factory, takes her rightful place as the head of the family business and escapes her shadowy past.

“Watching it gave me strength,” recalls Ms Kang. She, too, worked in the ship business and had to overcome adversity, dealing with corrupt officials and disrespectful customers twice her age. “[Chun] was a role model to me, the way she kept holding on and pushing through truly difficult circumstances at a young age,” she says. “I felt like that was me.”

For North Koreans, “Media isn’t just entertainment, it’s information,” says Lee Kwang-baek of Unification Media Group, an NGO that produces content specifically designed to be smuggled into the north. A seemingly shallow show can offer a window into otherwise inaccessible worlds, he argues. North Korean propaganda once claimed that the south was an impoverished, crime-ridden hellscape. South Korean dramas—with background shots of streets full of cars, meaty meals and luxurious apartments—offer a rebuttal. Ms Kang remembers how even mundane elements revealed how much more freely South Koreans live , such as the diversity of hairstyles. She can’t remember the male lead’s name in “Boys Over Flowers” (2009), a pan-Asian hit, but she remembers his distinctive “pineapple” cut.

Both South Koreans (legally) and North Koreans (illegally) fell head over heels for “Crash Landing on You” (2019), a fish-out-of-water romance. A South Korean heiress finds herself stuck in the north after a tornado catches her paraglider and blows her over the border. A handsome northern soldier finds her while on patrol and agrees to help her get back home. As well as squeal-inducing romance, the show offers fairly accurate depictions of life in both Koreas , giving audiences on both sides of the 38th parallel some valuable perspective.

For North Koreans, South Korean dramas are both familiar and exotic. The actors look and sound Korean, obviously, but big budgets and whizzy special effects make them seem far more glamorous than their North Korean counterparts. Fans tacitly emulate them. Enterprising barbers in North Korea have learned to mimic southern hairstyles; young people often imitate the South Korean way of speaking. To crush such filthy capitalist subversion, the government passed another law in 2023, the “Pyongyang Cultural Language Protection Act”, which bans women from referring to their boyfriends or husbands as oppa (literally: “older brother”, a common form of address in South Korea).

North Koreans go to great lengths to watch their favourite shows. Some live close enough to the border to jailbreak their televisions and pick up broadcasts from China or South Korea. (Ms Kang did this.) Others watch shows smuggled in from China on flash drives or SD cards. Some borrow the memory cards from friends. The lucky few with money buy them on the black market.

Though the K-dramas popular in North Korea are largely apolitical, the regime sees them as a growing threat—hence the harsher punishments. In the past, the death penalty was reserved for distributors of film and tv. Now it can be imposed for mere possession.

Kim Jong Un, the north’s hereditary despot, is correct that fluffy K-dramas undermine loyalty to his joyless regime . North Koreans are constantly told that they live in a people’s paradise thanks to the godlike leadership of the Kim family. Depictions of the vastly better lives of their southern cousins remind them that they do not. That is why the regime not only surrounds the country with razor wire to keep people in, but also sends the relatives of defectors to labour camps.

Ms Kang says that glimpses of the south on screen helped inspire her to defect. She and her family crammed into a small fishing boat and evaded coastguards before being rescued by a fisherman in South Korean waters. It was a daring escape worthy of “May Queen”. ■

Copyright lawyers debate the transformative power of passing gas

A YouTuber kicks up a stink over a flatulent “reaction” video Copyright lawyers debate the transformative power of passing gas July 3rd 2025 “Reaction” clips are a staple of the online world. After one person makes a viral video, others film themselves responding to it, riffing on the original with commentary, quips or funny expressions. Derivative as they may sound, such videos are big business: Khaby Lame, the most followed person on TikTok, uses the reaction format in most of his clips, which have been liked 2.5bn times.

Now the genre faces a legal challenge. On June 19th Ethan Klein, an American YouTuber and podcaster (pictured), sued three streamers who had broadcast lengthy reactions to one of his videos. Mr Klein alleges that they reproduced so much of his work, and added so little of their own, that it amounted to copyright infringement. One defendant is accused of adding little more to Mr Klein’s video than “loud gastral intestinal emissions”.

The question of how much you may borrow from another’s work long predates the internet. America’s courts established the concept of “fair use” in 1841, when they ruled against an author who had copied 353 pages from a 12-volume biography of George Washington. The fair-use test, which takes into account questions such as whether the market for the original work has been harmed and whether the new work is truly transformative, has since been applied to everything from music sampling to computer programming.

Reaction videos won some protection from a case in 2017—in which, curiously, the same Mr Klein featured as a defendant. Matt Hosseinzadeh, another YouTuber, had sued Mr Klein and his wife for reproducing (and ridiculing) a video in which the plaintiff used his parkour skills to woo a woman. The judge ruled that the Kleins’ video did not infringe Mr Hosseinzadeh’s copyright because it constituted critical commentary and did not function as a substitute for the original. But, the judge added, “The court is not ruling here that all ‘reaction videos’ constitute fair use,” noting that some are “more akin to a group viewing session without commentary”.

That is roughly the charge that Mr Klein levels at the streamers. He claims that the three women—who broadcast on Twitch, a live-streaming site, under the names Denims, Kaceytron and Frogan—provided such minimal commentary that their work was not transformative. Denims, who paused Mr Klein’s video as she aired it to add commentary, allegedly let it run uninterrupted for stretches of half a minute or more on 74 occasions, adding up to over 70 minutes of its 100-minute runtime. Kaceytron spent much of the time smoking marijuana; Frogan left the video playing while she went to the toilet. What’s more, Mr Klein claims, they deliberately tried to harm the market for his own work. Denims told viewers they should consider subscribing to her channel if they “enjoyed not giving any views to that terrible video”.

There is bad blood between the parties, who are on opposing sides of various online arguments, including about the Arab-Israeli conflict. The streamers say that Mr Klein has in the past encouraged reactions to his videos. They consider the claim a harassment campaign against them because of their opinions. Mr Klein denies this, but has said that he produced the original video to tempt serial copyright-infringers to react. Denims says that she intends to fight the case. All three women have set up fundraising campaigns online in anticipation of their legal costs.

Creators are watching the case with interest. A decision in Mr Klein’s favour would force makers of reaction videos to think about what they are bringing to the material. If commentary like hers “doesn’t constitute fair use”, Denims warns, “then virtually every participant in this media space…could be claimed a copyright infringer and effectively sued into silence.”

Streamers who add little to the source material may nonetheless struggle to convince a judge that their output is truly transformative, writes Aaron Moss, a lawyer and the author of Copyright Lately, a blog. “If your entire contribution to someone else’s video is a toke, a cough and a trip to the fridge, you might not be a commentator. You might just be a very chill copyright infringer.” ■

Clarification (July 3rd 2025): This article has been updated with more specific details of the format of Denims’s video.

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In films from “Mission Impossible” to “M3GAN 2.0”, AI is the bad guy

Hollywood’s new favourite villain In films from “Mission Impossible” to “M3GAN 2.0”, AI is the bad guy July 3rd 2025 YOU CAN glean a lot about America and the world from whom Hollywood chooses as its baddies. During the cold war, the villains were often rogue Russian generals; during the war on terror, they were jihadists from the Middle East. Lately, however, Tinseltown has turned its attention to technology. It seems Hollywood’s screenwriters are “doomers” when it comes to artificial intelligence , believing it poses an existential threat to humanity.

In the past only a few big movies grappled with the idea of monstrous tech —among them Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey” and the “Terminator” and “Matrix” franchises—but now lots do. In the two most recent “Mission: Impossible” instalments, Tom Cruise’s indestructible (human) secret agent tangled with an evil AI called “The Entity”. Films such as “Afraid”, “Companion” and “The Creator” have debated whether real humans or simulated ones are deadlier. Even “Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl”, a claymation caper from Aardman, featured a sinister robotic garden gnome.

Ask anyone in the TikTok generation to name their favourite AI baddie, though, and they are bound to pick the titular anti-heroine of “M3GAN”, a tongue-in-cheek science-fiction slasher film about a sentient life-sized doll. Much of the film’s macabre appeal comes from the contrast between the robot’s innocent appearance and its capacity for gruesome murder. This contrast was encapsulated in a clip of M3GAN dancing before grabbing a blade. The scene went viral and helped the film to box-office success in 2023: it grossed more than $180m worldwide, from a production budget of $12m. A sequel was inevitable. So was its title: “M3GAN 2.0”.

The conceit of the first film was that a product designer, Gemma (Allison Williams), built M3GAN as a playmate for her orphaned niece Cady (Violet McGraw). Programmed to protect Cady, the android took the task to homicidal extremes, and so, one killing spree later, it was consigned to the scrapheap. In the sequel, Gemma’s technology has been stolen by a defence contractor and used to develop another, even more destructive, military-grade robot called AMELIA. The only person—or non-person—who can defeat it is a refurbished, upgraded M3GAN.

“M3GAN 2.0” (pictured) is something of an upgrade, too. Both films are written and directed by Gerard Johnstone, but he does not repeat the first film’s creepiness, nor its meme-worthy dancing. Instead of turning out another horror film, he has made an over-the-top satire, skewering the world’s dependence on technology.

The sequel finds sly humour in everything from mobile-phone apps to self-driving cars and voice-activated virtual assistants in the home. (A sequence in which a squad of armed robbers is foiled by automated kitchen drawers may yet go viral.) It is gleefully silly, but also one of the only Hollywood films this year to take a clear-eyed look at humans’ reliance on tech. Viewers will not want to live with M3GAN. But, this film implies, they cannot live without her either. ■

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Celebrities have been in the business of recommending books for nearly a century

Before there was Oprah’s Book Club, there was the Book Society Celebrities have been in the business of recommending books for nearly a century July 3rd 2025 These days it seems every celebrity wants to put their name to a book club: among the rich and famous, they are as common as private jets, non-disclosure agreements and Ozempic . Reese Witherspoon, an actor, wants women to read—or, to be more precise, she wants them to embrace the power of “book joy”. Oprah Winfrey, a media personality, hopes her recommendations will “spark enlightenment”. Dua Lipa, a pop star, wants people to “read the world differently”. Kaia Gerber, a model, strives to create “rage readers”. (She does not explain what those are, nor why they would be desirable.)

Celebrity book clubs may be a feature of 21st-century fame, but they have a long lineage. The first such club in Britain, the Book Society, began in 1929. It featured recommendations from intellectuals such as Hugh Walpole and J.B. Priestley and had a practical aim: to enable “the discovery of notable new writers” and to get people to buy books. As similar clubs sprang up in America and Europe in the early 20th century, there was “a quiet revolution” in book-buying habits, writes Nicola Wilson, an academic, in “Recommended!”.

From the outset the Book Society was ridiculed in some circles. Its judges were mocked as “middlemen” with “a taste for the second-rate”; their recommendations, detractors proclaimed, flattened culture and encouraged idleness. (This attitude persists today, as critics lampoon “the celebrity book-club mafia” for discouraging “serious readers” and “original thought”.) Yet the Book Society endured for almost 40 years. It promoted a new title each month, guiding and entertaining readers through the Depression and the second world war .

Before the Book Society most Britons believed, as H.G. Wells, a writer, put it, “that it is extravagant and wrong to own books”. Even well-to-do readers used lending libraries to borrow desired titles. The club suggested books were an investment and that it would help you assemble a “library for yourself and your children”.

At its peak the club had more than 10,000 members across 33 countries—including five queens. Its selections spanned genres including memoir, thrillers and political fiction. It helped make bestsellers of Francis Hackett’s “Henry the Eighth”, a hefty history book, and novels such as Evelyn Waugh’s “Brideshead Revisited”.

When the Book Society folded in 1968 after financial difficulties, its records were lost. The author has meticulously parsed private papers and publishers’ archives to piece together the club’s forgotten history. Her effort is commendable, but at times the reader wishes that the material had been more judiciously edited.

Though the book is closed on the Book Society, its influence is everywhere. Curated reading lists are more popular than ever: people get recommendations not only from celebrities, but from bestseller lists and literary influencers on TikTok. The Book Society won over the sceptics. “I hate you so much that I am beginning to like you,” a member confessed in the 1930s. Now that’s what you call a rage reader. ■

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A new book traces the wartime relationship between Winston Churchill, Franklin Roosevelt and Josef Stalin

Inside the uneasy, incongruous coalition of the Big Three A new book traces the wartime relationship between Winston Churchill, Franklin Roosevelt and Josef Stalin July 3rd 2025 The destruction of the French fleet at Mers el-Kébir, Algeria, by the Royal Navy in July 1940 was both Britain’s first victory of the second world war and its most distasteful. Winston Churchill had decided that, unless French officers scuttled their ships or sailed them to British or American ports, they must be destroyed. If the collaborationist Vichy government handed the fleet over to the Germans, the consequences would be disastrous. Almost 1,300 French sailors died in the attack.

As Tim Bouverie shows in his masterful new diplomatic history of the war, the prime minister was right, both in his assessment of Vichy and in his calculation that such ruthless action would convince the world—and especially still-neutral America—that Britain was determined to fight on despite the fall of France.

Franklin Roosevelt would later tell an adviser, Harry Hopkins, that Churchill’s actions persuaded him Britain would continue the war, “if necessary for years”, Mr Bouverie says, and “if necessary alone”. It was a vital corrective to the defeatist dispatches of Joseph Kennedy, the American ambassador in London, “a bumptious, ignorant Irish-Bostonian”. Two months later, in September 1940, America agreed to send 50 destroyers to Britain in exchange for leases to British-owned army bases.

Then, in March 1941, at the president’s urging, Congress approved $7bn-worth of Lend-Lease aid for Britain (the equivalent of around $160bn in today’s money). Lend-Lease was “neither an act of unalloyed altruism…nor a plot to strip Britain of her resources,” Mr Bouverie argues, but the policy “would make an inestimable contribution to Allied victory”.

Lend-Lease was extended to the Soviet Union in June after Adolf Hitler had turned on his former ally. Yet it was not until the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour in December, and Hitler’s declaration of war four days later, that America joined Britain and the Soviet Union as a co-belligerent.

The story that Mr Bouverie tells of the improbable alliance between “the Big Three” of Roosevelt, Churchill and Josef Stalin is familiar, but packed with fresh detail and gossipy anecdotes. Its judgments of their decision-making are shrewd and fair. Each leader had differing priorities and aims. Churchill was determined to save the British Empire while forging a “special relationship” with anti-colonialist America. Churchill and Roosevelt hoped for a Europe of democratic sovereign nations. Stalin was intent on subjugating the lands of eastern and central Europe.

That they managed to work together to defeat the common enemy was remarkable, and dependent on the establishment of genuine mutual respect between them. Even the cynical Stalin could claim in 1944 that “the alliance…is founded not on casual, transitory considerations but on vital and lasting interests.”

Perhaps Stalin felt he could say that because he was so adept at handling Roosevelt, who had only a naive understanding of Bolshevism. During the first meeting of the Big Three at the Tehran conference in 1943, Stalin proposed that “50,000, perhaps 100,000” German officers should be shot at the end of the war. An appalled Churchill declared he would rather “be taken out into the garden here and now and be shot myself”. Roosevelt turned it into a joke, suggesting a compromise figure of 49,000. But the joke was on Churchill.

From then on, Roosevelt tilted towards Stalin rather than Churchill, even coming to believe that the Soviet Union would be America’s essential partner in the post-war world. Churchill lamented after Tehran that Britain was a “poor donkey” beside the “big Russian bear” and the “great American elephant”.

Almost the only thing that Stalin failed to get from the Allies was the opening of a second front in either 1942 or 1943 to relieve the pressure on the Red Army. Mr Bouverie believes that it was Churchill’s greatest achievement to persuade the president to ignore the wishes of his own military advisers and wait until 1944. In doing so he prevented a massacre on the beaches of northern France.

But even that delay played into Stalin’s hands. Such was the momentum of the Red Army by late 1944 that, short of going to war with the Soviet Union, neither America nor Britain could do anything to stop Stalin erecting an Iron Curtain, as Churchill later put it, across Europe.

Despite these strains, there were hopes the Grand Alliance would continue after the war. “We seemed to be friends,” said Churchill after the Yalta conference in 1945. Yet, as the author observes, for all its achievements the alliance “was permeated by lies, suspicions, secrets and spats”.

The British, the Americans and the Soviets were either ideological antagonists or imperial rivals. They came together to defeat a common enemy. Each brought strengths of their own: the British, strategic insight; the Americans, industrial muscle; the Soviets, military scale and sacrifice. That they then reverted to the status quo ante should have surprised nobody. ■

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They are much more popular today than their Britpop peers

Stop crying your heart out—for Oasis have returned to the stage They are much more popular today than their Britpop peers July 3rd 2025 IT IS THE moment rock fans thought would never happen. On July 4th Oasis, the greatest British band of their generation, will go on stage for the first time in 16 years. Such a thing seemed impossible given the group’s spectacular combustion in 2009, after a fight between Liam Gallagher , the lead singer, and his brother, Noel, the main songwriter. In the intervening years the siblings fired shots at each other in the press and on social media. (Noel famously described Liam as “the angriest man you’ll ever meet. He’s like a man with a fork in a world of soup.”) But now, they claim, “The guns have fallen silent.”

The global stadium tour is a reflection of the band’s longevity and fans’ refusal to slide away. Tickets sold at supersonic speed. Fans were furious at the use of “dynamic pricing” , in which prices of tickets adjust in response to demand—so much so that Sir Keir Starmer, Britain’s prime minister, promised to look into the practice.

Oasis may be electric now but, like any band, they had their fair share of dud gigs. One, in May 1993, was attended by only a dozen punters. Oasis had been a late addition to the line-up at King Tut’s Wah-Wah Hut, a music venue in Glasgow. After some negotiation, the staff agreed to let the band play a four-song set.

Yet Alan McGee was watching—and he owned Creation Records, an independent label. To anyone listening casually, the band from Manchester sounded like umpteen others making raw post-punk, all cigarettes and alcohol. But Mr McGee heard potential. The band had a propulsive energy. They were not polished, but they played well together. The lanky singer had swagger, loutish charm and a seductive drawl. Mr McGee signed Oasis soon after.

It was the right decision: Oasis became rock’n’roll stars and one of the defining acts of the 1990s. Their first album, “Definitely Maybe” (1994), sold 86,000 copies in a week: more than any other British debut. “(What’s the Story) Morning Glory?” (1995), their follow-up, has sold more than 22m copies. One of the record’s singles, “Wonderwall”, is the third-most-streamed song from the 1990s on Spotify , after “Iris” by the Goo Goo Dolls and Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit”.

Oasis were part a crop of young bands including Blur, Pulp and The Verve who reinvigorated British pop music . Blur—with whom they had a long-running feud—made music that was more winkingly clever than Oasis’s; Pulp’s was more try-hard experimental. The Verve had an orchestrated, psychedelic charm. But, more than any of their rivals, Oasis wrote well-crafted, classic rock anthems that left listeners humming them for days.

Their debt to The Beatles is obvious. (Liam once claimed to be a reincarnation of John Lennon.) The piano in “Don’t Look Back in Anger”—one of the group’s biggest hits—sounds like a hard-rock reworking of the opening bars to “Let It Be”. The line “I’m gonna start a revolution from my bed” pokes fun at the interviews given by Lennon and Yoko Ono from their hotel room in Amsterdam, where they said they would remain in bed for a week to protest against the Vietnam war . Critics may call Oasis derivative, but there is something to be said for emulating the best.

And, derivative or not, it worked. To date Oasis have sold more than 70m albums, compared with Blur’s 17m. Between 2019 and 2024, Oasis’s songs accrued 10bn streams globally, compared with 2.9bn for Blur, 2.7bn for The Verve and 750m for Pulp. The tour has given Oasis renewed relevance, propelling the band to 2.5bn streams last year (see chart): their highest annual total on record. TikTokers also love the band. This year Oasis-related videos have drawn more than 2bn views.

Part of Oasis’s appeal has always been their rough-hewn vibe. Blur’s frontman, Damon Albarn, is a drama-school dropout whose parents were bohemian artists in London. The Gallaghers, by contrast, grew up in a down-at-heel part of Manchester, brought up by a single mother who left her abusive husband. They were self-taught: the first time Noel saw Liam’s band play, he had no idea his brother could sing. As Andy Bollen writes in “Definitely Maybe”, a new history of the band, they “looked like the common man”.

Oasis had hits with tracks such as “Roll With It” and “Let There Be Love”, but the band never followed their own advice. Liam and Noel were constantly fighting with each other: Noel once attacked Liam with a cricket bat during a recording session. During the blow-up in 2009, before a show in Paris, Liam lobbed a plum and swung a guitar around. Noel stormed out of the dressing room and released a statement announcing the end of Oasis. The brothers each went on to have successful solo careers, but attempts at rapprochement failed. Until now.

Many are sceptical that the brothers can keep it amicable for the next five months. (“This is the first and only time that you should pay the $47 for event insurance,” one social-media user said.) If all the concerts do go ahead, expect a sing-along: there will be no new music and plenty of old classics. That will suit fans just fine—the word is on the street that the fire in their hearts is not out. ■

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He was the 20th century’s most influential journalist

William F. Buckley, the man who put the charm into conservatism He was the 20th century’s most influential journalist June 26th 2025 READY to feel lazy and unaccomplished? William F. Buckley wrote his first bestseller when he was 25. Over the next 57 years, he would write more than 50 books, including 20 novels. When he was 29, he founded the National Review, a magazine. When he was 40, he created “Firing Line”, a public-affairs tv show; he would go on to host 1,505 episodes. Buckley wrote and edited thousands of articles, made thousands of public speeches, and once, quixotically, ran for mayor of New York. (He won 13% of the vote.)

The most influential American journalist of the 20th century, Buckley poses a challenge to a biographer: how to say something new about someone so widely known who said so much? Sam Tanenhaus, an American historian who spent more than a quarter of a century working on this superb biography, meets that challenge through judicious curation of the public record and workmanlike digging into the private one. The result is a clear, humane portrait of Buckley and his influence on the American right.

He was born in 1925, the sixth of 11 children in a devoutly Catholic family. His father was an oilman from Texas, his mother a socialite from New Orleans. Buckley had a peripatetic childhood: he was brought up between America, Britain, France and Mexico. This left him with a languid mid-Atlantic drawl that he used to great effect on radio and television.

He stepped onto the public stage in the wake of Franklin Roosevelt’s presidency , which had left American conservatives reeling and rudderless. America’s emergence as a world power after the second world war frustrated the isolationists. Roosevelt’s New Deal did the same to its doctrinaire laissez-fairists. America’s two political parties were not as ideologically polarised as they are today, and the election of Dwight Eisenhower in 1952 signalled the triumph of the Republicans’ liberal wing.

“The so-called conservative,” Buckley wrote while an undergraduate at Yale, “uncomfortably disdainful of controversy, seldom has the energy to fight his battles.” But he relished the cut and thrust of public debate, on the page and in person. Buckley’s mission was to gird the right for battle—to stand “athwart history, yelling ‘Stop’”, as he wrote in the first issue of the National Review.

Unlike its coevals, the National Review was designed for persuasion, not choir-preaching, and also, through Buckley’s sparkling prose, to delight. It was sceptical of state power and gleefully ready to fight consensus liberalism. It was also staunchly anti-communist. Though that led to some unsavoury alliances—Buckley ardently supported Joseph McCarthy , a senator prone to making unsubstantiated accusations of communist sympathy—it put Buckley on the right side of the greatest ideological battle of his lifetime.

Waging that fight in print was one thing; finding a politician who was both uncompromising and—unlike the charmless McCarthy—appealing to voters was another. The first viable presidential candidate Buckley championed was Barry Goldwater, a plain-spoken senator from Arizona who embodied the nascent libertarian wing of the Republican Party. He lost all but six states to Lyndon Johnson in the presidential election of 1964, but shifted his party rightward.

The seed that Goldwater’s candidacy planted came to fruition 16 years later, when Ronald Reagan won the presidency. (Much of the right, including Buckley, never really warmed to Richard Nixon, who had made peace with communist China.) Reagan was a regular reader of the National Review. In the first editorial after Reagan’s victory, the National Review boasted—in jest, but not incorrectly—that it had assumed “a new importance in American life”. Anyone looking for humour, the editorial joked, would have to look elsewhere: “We have a nation to run.” Reagan offered Buckley the job of ambassador to the United Nations, but he declined: it would have been less lucrative and fun than writing and editing.

Fun does not imply frivolity; it was instead central to Buckley’s success. He was warm, generous and had a gift for friendship. He had passions outside politics: travel, music and, above all, sailing, about which he wrote four books that contain some of his finest writing.

He became, as a profile on “60 Minutes” put it, “a kind of national character” and “the conservative man for all seasons”. His television work broadened his audience. He was engaged, sceptical and courteous, even to his political opponents. ( Gore Vidal —a writer as waspish and eloquent as Buckley—was a notable exception; their debates inspired a play of 2021 called “Best of Enemies”.)

Buckley’s views evolved over time, particularly on race. As a young man he defended Southern segregationists, stating that “the white community…is the advanced race.” But by the late 1960s he argued for criminal-justice reform and said: “We need a black president.” And when a right-wing third party made Lester Maddox , a former governor of Georgia, its presidential candidate in 1976, Buckley called him “a semi-literate segregationist” and said the party had wandered “into the fever swamps of the berserk right”. Near the end of his life he defended federal intervention to enforce civil-rights legislation.

Buckley broke with his party over the Iraq war and died in 2008. Though he would have been impressed by Donald Trump’s ability to command attention (and would have been no fan of today’s identity-obsessed, soft-on-socialism Democrats), he was no Trumpist avant la lettre. He would have been appalled at Mr Trump’s vulgarity, ignorance and use of state power to target personal and political enemies. He would have relished the fight for American conservatism. The country’s politics is worse, and drearier, without him. ■

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In a post-apocalyptic horror sequel, monsters and mockery co-exist