Thursday

Christopher De Bellaigue

Thanks to Donald Trump, night is falling in Iran again

In the White House on Tuesday, with the world just where he wanted it — eyes on the TV, transfixed by his boldness — President Trump uprooted the Iran nuclear deal. Under this agreement, which was signed in July 2015 by Iran and the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council, plus Germany, the Iranians mothballed significant parts of their rapidly advancing nuclear industry in return for sanctions relief. The country is now considerably further away from a bomb than it was before, and its nuclear facilities are subject to inspections of unusual intrusiveness. In March Gadi Eisenkot, Israel’s chief of the general staff, affirmed that the agreement ‘is working and is putting off realisation of the Iranian nuclear vision by ten to 15 years’.

Sam Leith

Might LSD be good for you?

When Peregrine Worsthorne was on Desert Island Discs in 1992, he chose as his luxury item a lifetime supply of LSD. He may, according to the American journalist Michael Pollan’s fiercely interesting new book, have been on to something. Acid has a bad name these days: either a threat to the sanity of your children, or a naff 1960s throwback favoured by the sort of people who sell you healing crystals at markets in Totnes. Yet in LSD-25, psilocybin, DMT, mescaline and others we have a family of molecules with startlingly powerful effects on the human mind. They are not addictive, carry little or no physiological risk, and their association with the desire to jump out of windows has been distinctly exaggerated. They might even be good for us.

Nicky Haslam

The Wallis Simpson I knew – by Nicky Haslam

One would have thought this particular can of worms might, after nearly 80 years, be well past its sell-by date. But books about Mrs Simpson and her infatuated king appear with thudding frequency, each with some ever more far-fetched theory about this curious union. Now comes the leaden hand and leaden prose of Andrew Morton, with yet another: that Wallis was, all her life, in love with another man long before, during and after her experience of vitriolic abuse, first as the besotted prince’s obsession, then scapegoat for his abdication, and object of vilification during her years as his wife. This love (to borrow words from her step-great nephew, ‘whatever love is’) may well have been real. The man in question was Herman Rogers.

Daniel DePetris

Blankenship’s loss is an important victory for the Republican establishment

The midterm elections this November are bound to be a rough slog for a Republican Party desperately trying to keep its congressional majority. As former President Barack Obama would say, the Democratic base is “fired up, ready to go.” Democrats are giddy about their prospects; Republicans are for the most part gloomy.The GOP will need all the help from the heavens to pull this one off. A primary win by coal baron and provocateur Don Blankenship in West Virginia, however, wouldn’t be one of those gifts. There is a reason why Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and the Republican political establishment threw $1.

Tom Ball

Putin shows off his ‘dagger’ on Victory Day

Then there’s the bravado that goes with it too. International Women’s Day is widely and actively observed in Russia, and though there is an official male equivalent in November, Victory Day is far closer to any actual celebration of masculinity. In the same year that I was wandering the streets of Petersburg trying to steer clear of drunken sailors, a friend of mine was invited to a dacha in the countryside by some of his male colleagues. What he had envisaged as a quiet weekend spent reading Tolstoy by the lakeside, turned out to be a testosteronic blaze of bare-chested rifle shooting and competitive drinking.

Wednesday

Damian Reilly

Peace in our time: If Katy Perry and Taylor Swift can do it, why not the Middle East?

Cynically timed to minimise news coverage, Katy Perry’s decision to bury the hatchet with Taylor Swift just as things are kicking off big style in the Middle East is nevertheless huge news. The parallels between the Swift/Perry crisis and the historic tensions in the Middle East have long been impossible to ignore. Both have come to define a generation, and both have at times seemed utterly unresolvable.

Roger Kimball

Iran’s malevolent mullahs have been well and truly Trumped

The only time I met Donald Trump was at a small event for politically mature journalists at the White House last April. After milling about with my fellow scribes in the press room—it’s a lot smaller and shabbier than it looks on TV, like Jim Acosta—we were ushered into the Roosevelt Room near the Oval Office. The President, secretary of commerce Wilbur Ross, and a few aides (Steve Bannon, Michael Anton, Reince Priebus: wot larks!) soon joined us. After a brief presentation, the President took questions. Mine was about Iran.   During the campaign, I noted, the President had regularly decried the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, i.e, the 2015 Obama Iran deal in which the U.S.

Ned Donovan

Is Piers Morgan the only Catholic offended by the Met Gala?

It will come as no surprise that something in the news has Piers Morgan deeply troubled. For the past two days, Morgan has been incandescent over the Met Gala and its dress code. In a column for MailOnline he claims that, as a Catholic, he has become a victim of cultural appropriation due to fancy dress outfits worn to a party by celebrities.The Gala, a fixture of the New York social season at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, is well known for the theme it sets, and this year it was ‘Heavenly Bodies’ - inspired by the Roman Catholic Church. The Gala was held to launch an exhibition of the same name. Dozens of items of religious clothing have been allowed out of the Vatican Archives to be seen by the public for the first time.Guests at the party took the dress code to heart.

Tuesday

Robin Hanson

Does Facebook want news ratings to fail?

Facebook has had a great ride, but they are now hitting limits. At least in the U.S., we can’t spend much more time than we do on social media, and Facebook can’t gain a much larger fraction of that time. So instead of seeking new vistas here, Facebook is probably now turning their attention to how to lock in their current advantage.And one classic strategy, widely known among economic and business experts, is “regulatory capture.” Get your industry regulated in a way that puts new smaller competitors at a disadvantage.

Lucy Steigerwald

Why the Democrats will lose their battle to stop Gina Haspel

Donald Trump is not known as a champion of women, but he thinks he should be.  The President wants the deputy director of CIA, Gina Haspel, to succeed Mike Pompeo in the top job, and the Democrats are raging against her appointment. Predictably enough, Trump is enjoying the irony, tweeting on Monday morning:  “My highly respected nominee for CIA Director, Gina Haspel, has come under fire because she was too tough on Terrorists. Think of that, in these very dangerous times, we have the most qualified person, a woman, who Democrats want OUT because she is too tough on terror. Win Gina!” Needless to say, it isn’t quite the fact that Haspel is a woman which is bothering the Democrats about her appointment.

Monday

Ian Marcus Corbin

America’s winners are spiritually sick

Some actors reach greatness via pure commitment – shedding pounds, adding them, living in character for months on end, all but transforming into the role they’ve decided to play. Marlon Brando, Christian Bale, Daniel Day-Lewis, and if I may hazard an addition (a somewhat non-traditional nominee), the United States of America.Can we nominate a whole country for an Oscar? A Tony? Can we do that? Can someone check on that? That’d be beautiful. You know what I mean? Beautiful. The best. Beautiful people, beautiful acting. Wow. For approximately the past two years, my country, or the better part of it, at least, has stared into the mirror, and feigned astonishment, as if candidate-cum-President Donald J.

Dominic Green

What happened to honour in American public life?

‘Honour,’ the French poet Nicholas Boileau wrote in 1666, ‘is like a rocky island without a landing place; once we leave it, we can’t get back.’ Especially, Donald Trump might add, when the outlook is Stormy. But Trump’s concept of honour is perhaps closer to that of Stormy Daniels’ fellow artist and near-namesake, the Elizabethan poet Samuel Daniel, who in 1592 called honour an ‘empty sound’, an ‘idle name of wind’. These early modern attitudes still define how we think about honour. Either it’s a unique defence against life’s ethical challenges, or it’s an instrument, a luxury—an affectation that is, as Trump is alleged to have found Stormy Daniels, desirable but negotiable.

Sunday

Daniel McCarthy

How John McCain lost the Republican Party

John McCain is dying, and with him is dying a Republican Party that was never born. The Arizona senator has to be understood in relation to the GOP because he has never really been the “maverick” that pundits made him out to be after his first White House bid eighteen years ago. Before then, he was seen as a reliably conservative Republican, albeit a more hawkishly internationalist one than was the norm for the GOP in the Bill Clinton era. Those were the days when Republicans like George W. Bush swore on an oilman’s bible that they were against “nation building.” McCain was more honest about his interventionism, which made him the neoconservatives’ first choice in 2000.

Ross Clark

The truth about London knife crime – and the prejudice with which the world listens to Trump

I would love to undertake a behavioural experiment in which a cohort of the public were asked to watch Donald Trump reading out the Gettysburg Address and asked to make comments. I can guess what would happen. There would be an overwhelming negative response. Those who listened would use words like ‘outrageous’, ‘disgraceful’. They would accuse him of ‘slurs’, describe him as ‘demented, as well as throwing in the charge of ‘racist’ for good measure. How can I be so sure? Because of the British reaction to Trump’s speech to the National Rifle Association last week in which he described a London hospital being like in a ‘war zone’, so high are the number of stabbing victims being treated there.

Jacob Heilbrunn

A storm’s a coming for Trump over the ‘dirty ops’ allegations

So aides to Donald Trump, the Observer reports, retained an Israeli intelligence organization to launch a 'dirty ops' campaign against two former national security officials in the Obama administration, Colin Kahl and Ben Rhodes. Both happen to have been involved in the negotiations about the Iran deal and the idea seems to have been to find information that could be used to smear their reputations. On Twitter today, Kahl freely confessed to many sins, including selling off his valuable X-Men comic book collection as a lad to help finance a trip to debate camp. It remains to be seen whether Rhodes, too, will fess up to any such grave transgressions dating back to his childhood.

Saturday

Dominic Green

Disobedience is disappointing

If you were to revisit the house you grew up in, would you take a look at your old bedroom? The answer is yes, of course you would—unless, that is, you are Ronit, Rachel Weisz’s character in Sebastian Lelio’s Disobedience. If you are Ronit, you will instead ponder your late father the rabbi’s rich collection of Talmudic literature, then kiss Esti, the lost love of your teenage years, with tongues. There should a joke here about pastrami and tongue sandwiches, but Disobedience has no jokes. Adapted from Naomi Alderman’s novel, Disobedience is set in an Orthodox Jewish community in London. Jews are supposed to be smart and funny, but this lot are slow-witted and mirth-impaired, like black-clad, black-hatted Stepford Wives.

Ian Sansom

Who needs Jordan Peterson when we have Ferdinand Mount?

You will by now doubtless be familiar with the University of Toronto academic Jordan Peterson. He’s the unlikely YouTube star and scourge of political correctness whose book 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos has become a worldwide bestseller, beloved of serious young men seeking intellectual challenge and good old-fashioned fatherly advice. Summary: ‘Sort yourself out, bucko.’ We don’t really need the likes of Peterson here: we’ve got Ferdinand Mount. The book we should all be reading to sort ourselves out, buckos, is Prime Movers. Mount is, admittedly, an unlikely intellectual hero.

Thursday

Hilary Spurling

Enduring life under Chairman Mao

Rao Pingru is 94, and a born storyteller. His gripping graphic narrative weaves in and out of the violent, disruptive upheavals that marked China’s transition in the 20th century from an immemorial, apparently immutable imperial past to its current uneasy truce with the technology, morals and politics of the Western world. He was born in Nancheng, a city virtually unchanged in seven centuries since the end of the great Song dynasty. The first painting in this book shows Pingru himself as a small boy kneeling to knock his head on the floor in a traditional kowtow, performed at the foot of the man who had come to teach him to write. In ancient China, calligraphy embodied continuity, discipline, the accumulated wisdom of civilisation itself.

Dorian Lynskey

The futile gang wars of New York

I’ve interviewed a lot of rappers over the years and always feel a little grimy when I find myself nudging them to repackage a horrendous experience as a juicy anecdote with which to promote an album. Some natural raconteurs are happy to play that game — 50 Cent can now tell the story of the day he was shot nine times with the fluency of Peter Ustinov on Parkinson — but many rappers are understandably coy, at least outside the recording studio, about sharing the gory details of their previous lives. In that respect, this memoir by one of the nine original members of the Wu-Tang Clan lives up to its title, being so brutally frank that it is hard to believe a single story remains untold.

Freddy Gray

Is Rudy Giuliani all there?

It’s unkind to speculate over somebody’s mental health. Still, given the stakes, it seems worth saying what everyone is thinking – that Rudolph W. Giuliani’s extraordinary performance on Fox News last night suggests he is a man not fully in control of his mind. The former New York Mayor, 73, who was hired as Trump’s lawyer less than two weeks ago, dropped a news bomb on Sean Hannity’s show. Giuliani said that Donald Trump repaid $130, 000 hush money that his personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, had paid to ‘some Stormy Daniels woman’ over her alleged affair with the now president of the Unites States. Rudy Giuliani: Trump reimbursed Michael Cohen $130K for expenses, but it was not campaign money pic.twitter.