Tillerson shock? US Forces Korea officials knew about ‘Rexit’ last month
But they’ll miss the ‘improvisational jazz’ of the Tillerson-Trump partnership
Friday
Not my president: meet the Chinese students standing up to Xi Jinping
At last, some students in the West are campaigning for freedom and democracy. Following years of supposedly rad students banning pop songs about sex, and force-fielding their campuses against offensive speakers, and even expelling certain newspapers from their common rooms as if they were heretical abominations, a group of students has emerged to demand more
Thursday
California is the unexpected antidote to censorious liberalism
If I needed a safe space, I would nominate California. Against most odds this seedbed of censorious liberalism has thrown up the antibodies to the lurgy it created. Here within a short space of each other are a group of leftists and conservatives, religious and non-religious, all of whom are united in deploring the ‘You … Read more
Is Donald Trump, like Bush, being taken over by neocons?
The Trump administration’s foreign-policy team is beginning to look a lot like a Marco Rubio foreign policy team. It’s not hard to imagine a generally hawkish Republican like Mike Pompeo serving as Secretary of State under Little Marco, and John Bolton – widely tipped to replace H.R. McMaster as national security adviser – would have … Read more
‘I’m fascinated by Mussolini’
We are in a hotel suite at the Park Hyatt Hotel in Zurich when Stephen K. Bannon tells me he adores the fascist dictator Benito Mussolini. But let’s be clear. Bannon — as far as I can tell — is not a fascist. He is, however, fascinated by fascism, which is understandable, as its founder Benito
The lost art of Roman winemaking
Taste has a well-noted ability to evoke memory, so it is curious how infrequently most wine writers mine their pasts for inspiration. You wouldn’t think that some had ever fallen in love, read a novel or even got drunk. Instead they obsess over scores, sulphur and diurnal temperature variation. Thank heavens for Nina Caplan, who
In 1968, even Boston was ankle-deep in LSD
‘And this is good old Boston/, The home of the bean and the cod,’ John Collins Bossidy quipped in 1910, ‘Where the Lowells talk to the Cabots/, And the Cabots talk only to God.’ Also home, in 1968, to Mel Lyman, a folk musician turned LSD guru who believed he was God, and to Van
The Special Relationship still trumps Putin
For a president who usually tweets first and asks questions later, Donald Trump’s initial reaction to the Salisbury attack has been curiously slow. Eleven days on from the poisoning of a former Russian agent, Trump’s Twitter account remains silent on the subject. But now that Theresa May is ramping up the rhetoric against Russia –
Donald Trump finally announces sanctions against Russia
Donald Trump today called it a ‘very sad situation.’ The ‘it’ in question is of course the chemical weapons attack in Salisbury, a fresh indicator, if one were needed, of malign Russian intentions toward the West. Even as Theresa May plays, or tries to play, Margaret Thatcher, Trump has been no Ronald Reagan. He doesn’t
Mueller subpoenas Trump Organisation’s Russia documents
When Donald Trump’s daughter, Ivanka, went to Moscow in 2006, she did all the usual tourist things: walked around Red Square, visited the Kremlin… sat in Vladimir Putin’s private chair. At least she did according to Trump’s broker and business partner Felix Sater. ‘I arranged for Ivanka to sit in Putins private chair at his
Kevin Allocca glosses over YouTube’s terrifying power
On 25 April 2005, Jawed Karim sent an email to his friends announcing the launch of a new video site — intended for dating — called youtube.com. Within 18 months, the site was being used to view 100 million videos a day. Last year it had more than a billion users, watching five billion videos
How to make quantum physics fun
We all know that physics and maths can be pretty weird, but these three books tackle their mind-bending subjects in markedly contrasting ways. Clifford V. Johnson’s The Dialogues is a graphic novel, seeking to visualise cosmic ideas in comic-book style. Darling and Banerjee’s Weird Maths is a miscellany of fun oddities, ranging from chess-playing computers
The subtly savage world of filmmaker Ruben Ostlund
There is a culty YouTube video shot three years ago on the laptop camera of Ruben Ostlund. It shows the film director listening live as the nominations for the Academy Awards are announced from Los Angeles. The tension mounts as they approach the foreign film category. Alas, Force Majeure from Sweden isn’t nominated. Ostlund disappears
Wednesday
Rand Paul denounces Trump’s ‘crazy neocons’
President Trump continues to shake up his White House team. As early as tomorrow he plans to name Larry Kudlow, a senior contributor to CNBC, to replace Gary Cohn as his National Economic Council chief. Kudlow is an old chum of Trump’s and an inveterate supply-sider whose gospel is that the more you lower tax … Read more
Democrats should look closer to home to find collusion with Russia
For Donald Trump, yesterday was a bad day to bury good news. While Rex Tillerson’s resignation as Secretary of State dominated the headlines, the biggest and most important story of the day came from Devin Nunes and the Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee. Their news was good for Trump, and very bad indeed for … Read more
After Pennsylvania, can the GOP win again?
The special election for Pennsylvania’s 18th Congressional District has ended in a photo finish. There are absentee ballots still to be counted, perhaps a recount to be demanded. But it looks as if the Democrat, Conor Lamb, has won in this district that just two years ago voted for Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton by … Read more
How Stephen Hawking moved me to tears
Stephen Hawking has died at the age of 76. Here, Kate Chisholm describes listening to the Cambridge professor deliver the 2016 Reith Lectures: You don’t expect to be brought close to tears by the Reith Lectures, which are after all at the most extreme end of Radio 4’s commitment to ‘educating’ its audience. Yet when Stephen
Tuesday
Robert Mueller keeps everyone guessing
Robert Mueller, the former Director of the FBI and special counsel in the soap opera that is the Russia collusion investigation, has been on the case for ten months now. His team of attorneys and Washington prosecutors has interviewed dozens of witnesses, scanned hundreds of thousands of pages of documents, sent an unknown number of … Read more
The Stormy Daniels affair is a storm in a DDD cup
The story of the president and the porn star has been, in the last week, a fast-moving one
Rex Tillerson’s sacking isn’t about Russia
Sometimes it’s almost as if Donald Trump wants the world to think he’s a Russian patsy. Yesterday, Rex Tillerson, as Secretary of State, warned Putin that Russia’s alleged assassination attempt on British soil would trigger ‘a response’. Today he’s been sacked. Mike Pompeo, Director of the CIA, will become our new Secretary of State. He