Features
“Woke is officially DEAD,” Donald Trump announced last summer. That has been a common refrain since the 2024 election: the anti-western, anti-white, pro-transgender ideology is over. The excesses of left-wing radicalism have been rejected. Sadly, nothing could be further from the truth. We’re all still living under the yoke of woke. Just look at Chicago.
Features
Alex Bruesewitz is the President’s celebrity whisperer. He has brought the likes of YouTube personality Jake Paul and rapper Nicki Minaj into the MAGA fold. He is also the director of a social media empire with 50 million followers, which includes such X accounts as @TrumpWarRoom and @TeamTrump. Bruesewitz is an influencer, both online and
Features
I stopped charging my phone beside my bed four years ago and have never regretted it. Alarm clocks seemed destined to go the way of the DVD, but I am on a solo mission to restore them to bedside tables around the world. The harsh tone of the alarm is certainly no match for what
Features
Soberanía is non-negotiable. That’s what Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum repeats time and again, at her mañaneras, at speeches, at rallies, on television and in person. She says it, her government says it, her political party says it, her apparatus says it. The agents of the United States of America must never, ever set foot on
Features
There are several reasons to think we won’t see a blue wave in this year’s midterm elections. A basic one is that the Democratic party simply isn’t very popular. In late May, Donald Trump’s approval ratings in the RealClear polling aggregate stood around 40 percent, which sounds bad. Yet Trump is more popular than his
Features
“And this,” I was told, five minutes after arriving in Mexico, “is where they murdered the Archbishop.” I was at the entrance to the car park at Guadalajara airport. The archbishop was Cardinal Juan Jesús Posadas Ocampo, who died in a hail of bullets on May 24, 1993, along with six other people. He was
Features
Farm bankruptcies in the US have risen by 50 percent in the past year. Soybean farmers lost an average of $100 per acre in 2025, according to the Department of Agriculture, while corn growers are set to lose $150 per acre this year. Meanwhile, the national beef herd is at its lowest level since 1950
Features
As tensions with Iran once again push the US toward the possibility of further involvement in Middle Eastern conflicts, a novel brand of anti-interventionism has swept American politics. After two decades of costly wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, both the populist right and progressive left have grown more willing to question the assumptions underpinning American
Features
Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch’s tour to tout his new children’s book about the Declaration of Independence should have been uneventful. But then Gorsuch decided to talk about what America is. On Fox News, with the New York Times and in the pages of the Wall Street Journal, Gorsuch kept staking out his view on
Features
When is a ceasefire not a ceasefire? When the person declaring it is Donald Trump. Opinions differ about the wisdom of the President’s activities with respect to Iran. Some observers tell us he is playing four-dimensional chess. Some say it more like checkers with no kings. What, after all, is he up to? The commentariat
Features
This spring, many Angelenos have reported a strange, wild wind blowing down through the brushy canyons and over the sunbaked asphalt plains and across the urine-soaked beach parking lots of Los Angeles. There is a whiff of something new wafting into your Tesla sun roof at red lights, and for once it isn’t the choking
Features
I recently walked past an old minicab stand which, during our younger student days, sallied my friends back and forth between the city’s nightlife and our more affordable suburban digs. It is gone now; only a dilapidated and cordoned-off shack remains of a once-thriving minicab empire. Like thousands of others across the western world, the
Features
College is extraordinarily expensive and becoming less useful, and those who insist otherwise are working from a model of the labor market that stopped describing reality sometime in the 1990s. Four-year courses at private institutions often cost more than $70,000 a year, and it should come as no surprise that student debt has tipped over
Features
Elon Musk, already the richest person who ever lived, is at the center of the biggest share offering of all time. A valuation of $1.75 trillion at IPO would hand $75 billion to his company, SpaceX. Musk is being allocated two sets of shares, with performance-based conditions. They will materialize if SpaceX reaches a market
Features
I was born into a sternly Presbyterian culture. Politically, I’m more Orange than Donald Trump’s skin tone. But today I am on my knees giving thanks to the Pope. He has produced the most powerful political document of the year, taking on the greatest challenge of our times. His first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, deals with
Features
I bought my first pint of bitter, in a pub in Slough, in 1972. It cost 12 pence. The Bank of England inflation calculator tells me that is the equivalent of £1.45 today. Yet a pint now sells for £10 in London. What went wrong? Many factors, of which the first was Britain’s entry into
Features
Sam Altman, the co-founder of OpenAI, which launched ChatGPT, is not overweight. Gay tech billionaires rarely are. Even so, as he explained in a recent interview, he was keen to try a GLP-1, one of those drugs that have revolutionized weight loss in the past five years. You can understand why he was curious. Ozempic
Features
When the Labour party football team played a group of journalists at Loftus Road two years ago the hacks won 4-1. The politicians’ solitary goal came from a late penalty. When the referee pointed to the spot, the center-forward stepped up, elbowing well-known politicians such as Ed Balls, David Miliband and Sadiq Khan out of
Features
Forgive the doom-mongering, but the US, and especially the UK, may be dangerously on course for a sovereign debt crisis. Yet debt and deficits play a surprisingly minimal role in our countries’ politics. Overspending on borrowed money hardly featured in either nation’s elections of 2024. A Labour MP hoping for Andy Burnham to challenge Keir
Features
Arsenal’s triumph in finally winning the Premier League again after 22 long, often eyeball-wrenchingly tortuous years has gone down like one of Keir Starmer’s motivational “I’m not leaving!” speeches, which is ironic given the Prime Minister is an avid Gooner like me. It’s hard to understand why a club that boasts a fanbase including us,
Features
As a sucker for any melody which relies heavily upon fourth and eighth notes hammered out on a piano, I was always going to fall for Billy Joel’s 1978 hit single “My Life.” The lyrics were, as ever with Joel, awful, mixing his cringeworthy ordinary guy New York vernacular shtick with what I dare say
Features
“Where are all my favorite parts?” Arnold Schoenberg asked, on being presented with a severe academic analysis of the Eroica symphony. “Oh, there they are. In the tiny notes.” The tendency of many people, presented with the overwhelming abundance of an art form, is to exclude as much as possible. Reduce the wonderful life of
Features
One could go on endlessly about what the ancients have done for us, but one of the most interesting things is that Plato could be said to have invented women’s lib, though it seems to have taken 2,500 years to catch on. Since most ancient states were at war much of the time, putting the
Features
On Petersfield station, southbound side, there’s a huge billboard advertising a tropical holiday with a photo of a beautiful couple joyfully splashing each other in the water. I walked past it, stopped, walked back and stared. “Adults-only holiday,” it read. “Entirely child-free.” But this wasn’t “adults only” in the 20th-century sense: getting frisky with strangers
Books and Arts
When did Republican writers stop being funny? Look around at the landscape of contemporary American literature – and, for that matter, TV and film – and you’d be hard pressed to find a genuinely funny literary voice who doesn’t lean liberal, or at least purport to. This isn’t to say that individual right-wing writers aren’t
Books and Arts
Arthur Miller may have died two decades ago, but America’s answer to Euripides and Sophocles is having a moment. The great tragedian’s plays have been revived, and revived again, ever since he first broke through in 1947 with All My Sons, but even by his standards, the new productions just keep on coming. His most
Books and Arts
This slim volume has only one fault. It has no illustrations. So you’ll have to do some Googling or visit the current Duchamp exhibition at MoMA (until August 22) if you want to know what “The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even” looks like. Otherwise it’s perfect – wittily written and packed with many
Books and Arts
By the time he died in 1882 at the age of 74, Giuseppe Garibaldi had freed the Italian peninsula from its abhorred Habsburg and Bourbon rulers and united all Italy under the liberally inclined House of Savoy. With his whiskery good looks and wardrobe of red blouses, he was the ideal vehicle for romantic notions
Books and Arts
In July 2000, Rupert Murdoch’s Sky acquired an obscure online gambling brand called Surrey Sports. It was little remarked upon at the time but this deal would change association football forever. Two years later, Surrey Sports had become Sky Bet and, by 2004, people watching football on Sky Sports could bet on the game via
Books and Arts
Lucian Freud almost had a second career in the cinema. He acted as an extra in a couple of films during the early 1940s; the only one in which he made the final cut was a farce starring the ukulele-playing comedian George Formby in which his 19-year-old face can be seen peering out of the
Books and Arts
Everybody has been raving about Legends, the Netflix series about undercover customs officers in the 1990s busting a heroin ring. But even though it’s “based on a true story,” there are times when it feels more like a histrionically implausible, over-reverential recruitment drive for HM Customs and Excise. “Thought they were just those men in
Books and Arts
The 61st Venice Biennale arrived freighted with portent. To cut a long story short: Russia and Israel were invited to exhibit, and the prize jurors resigned in protest. Then, on preview day, the city was hit by a storm of biblical force. I sat in the Stansted Wetherspoons for hours, oblivious to the fact that
Books and Arts
English National Opera’s first production created in Manchester is Angel’s Bone, a one-act opera by Du Yun and the librettist Royce Vavrek. It was premiered in 2016 in New York and subsequently won the Pulitzer Prize, but we shouldn’t hold that against it. Musically, at least, it’s certainly more interesting than recent US imports like
Life
We may not be happy campers here in Havana. But increasingly we are campers. Enter any home, from the most privileged (a relative term these days as the blackouts rise to 22 hours a day) to the poorest, and the trappings of off-grid living are everywhere. Some of the kit wouldn’t shame the back of
Life
For six centuries, from the Renaissance forward, the architects and creators of modernity have promised and predicted a new world, one which, in Thomas Jefferson’s immortal words, would be dedicated to “the pursuit of happiness.” The birth of that world in its political aspect is being celebrated this year in the United States, as well
Life
Wedding season has begun. First out of the gate this year was my young first cousin once removed, who entered marital bliss in a lovely Catholic ceremony in the small western New York city of Lockport, hometown of the logorrheic novelist Joyce Carol Oates and the supermodel cum hemorrhoid-cream spokeswoman Kim Alexis. As I sat
Life
Dante’s Beach, Ravenna It was midnight, more or less, and my middle daughter, Magdalena, 18, said with all the untroubled bravado of youth: “Let’s go and find il rospo!” She was at the wheel of the Land Rover Defender and we were involved in a nocturnal driving lesson. Rospo is Italian for toad. And if
Life
“Can I go now?” said the farmer I was talking to over my gate, and he looked so scared I felt a bit ashamed of myself. I had flagged him down as he went by in his rickety blue tractor that’s so old it looks like Noah used it to load hay on to the
Place
Each time I return to Berlin – that wonderful, awful city where I whiled away the best days of my misspent youth – I take a walk along the cobbled path that marks the route of the Berlin Wall. Half a lifetime since it came tumbling down, there isn’t much left to see. A few
Food and Drink
Much as I love France, who sold us the idea of superior French taste in the first place? Why do we continue to beat ourselves up about their supposedly ultra-cool cinema, peerless fashion sense and exquisite food and drink? Has anyone contemplating the pool of congealing demi-glace set before them at a standard-issue Paris café
Food and Drink
Some years ago, I edited and provided an introduction and notes for an edition of Walter Bagehot’s book Physics and Politics (1872). The book has nothing to do with physics in the modern sense of the word (though an argument could be made that it does bear on the original meaning of the Greek word
And Finally
Our esteemed London editor was once excoriated for saying that the public had had enough of experts. “The people of this country have had enough of experts from organizations with acronyms saying they know what is best and getting it consistently wrong.” His remark sits within a fine conservative tradition: there is William F. Buckley,
And Finally
Q. My sister has married in later life and we all like her husband. They have moved nearby and now join us in the weekly pub quiz. I am not competitive but just enjoy taking part. My brother-in-law went to Harvard, and although I went to St. Mary’s Wantage I am able to hold my
And Finally
There comes a time when every man must choose how to tackle an impending midlife crisis. A Maserati? A marathon? A mistress? Lacking the wealth, stamina or sheer Italian-ness for any of the above, I’ve plumped for that most gentile of sports to feel alive again: tennis. The problem with a new hobby, of course,
And Finally
When Labour blocked Andy Burnham from standing as its candidate last time around, Douglas Alexander, the Scottish Secretary, rejoiced at avoiding “three months of psychodrama – who’s up, who’s down, who’s getting on with who…” But as Gareth Roberts remarked in The Spectator’s Coffee House, “I’m not quite sure what the difference is between psychodrama
