Features

Thursday

Max Jeffery

Olympics on steroids: the millionaire behind the Enhanced Games

Aron D’Souza likes to celebrate the new year with Peter Thiel, the venture capitalist billionaire who is good friends with Donald Trump and J.D. Vance. ‘Before Peter had kids, we’d go on these holidays around the world. Small group of us. Gay, tech, venture capital, founder-types,’ says D’Souza, an Australian businessman. ‘It’s quite a close-knit little community.’ Lately, because of the kids, they’ve partied at Thiel’s place, an $18 million compound on a man-made island off Miami’s turquoise coast. In December 2022, days before Thiel’s annual party, D’Souza came up with the idea of an ‘Enhanced Games’. The Olympics – but all the athletes dope. ‘That’s what I do over Christmas, when no one else is working,’ D’Souza says.

Hannah Moore

The rise of the ‘divorce influencer’

On Woman’s Hour recently, Anita Rani and her guests set out to celebrate the positive sides of a woman’s midlife. Forget the crisis: your forties and fifties could instead be a time for change, a refresh. You could take up a new hobby, they said, or a new exercise regime. Or you could get a divorce! What’s alarming is that this sort of discussion isn’t unusual. I regularly spot articles in newspapers and on social media that talk about divorce as if it’s just the latest wellness trend. They usually go like this: a middle-aged woman walks out on a long marriage and insists that she’s never been happier, that she’s free, that she’s ‘starting a new chapter’ in her life. She then demands through a rictus grin that you be happy for her.

Yascha Mounk

How supporting Trump became cool

For the past decade, the basic lines of conflict in American public life seemed clear. Donald Trump was pitted against the establishment, the ‘basket of deplorables’ who supported him against the elites. The reality was more complicated. Yes, plenty of rich and powerful Americans supported Trump and plenty of poorer Americans on the fringes of society were against him. But in a certain section of society the disdain for Trump was unequivocal. Among the country’s elite – at Harvard and Stanford, at Google and Goldman, near the beaches of the Hamptons and the mountains around Aspen – anyone who defied the anti-Trump consensus could expect swift consequences for their social standing. There have been constant melodramas over this form of social ostracism.

Damian Thompson

The plotting to find the next Pope

The Hollywood adaptation of Conclave, Robert Harris’s thriller about a conspiracy to rig a papal election, won’t be in cinemas until November. But judging by the trailer released last week, its starry cast, crafty plot and spectacular cinematography – jets of smoke scattering cardinals as an explosion shatters the Sistine Chapel – will instantly erase memories of The Two Popes, Netflix’s risible Oscar-nominated fantasy in which Benedict XVI secretly chooses Cardinal Bergoglio as his successor.

Kate Andrews

The curious rise of Kamala Harris

I’m struck just in your presence,’ a news anchor gushed to Kamala Harris in January. The Vice President beamed, nodding for her interviewer to continue. ‘You hear candidates suggesting that a vote for President Biden, because of his age, is a vote for you.’ The reporter paused: ‘And that is hurled as an insult.’ Harris explained that this is the price women pay for professional success – in her case, rising from first female attorney general in California to state senator to Vice President of the United States. ‘I love my job,’ Harris concluded, wrapping up the kind of hard-hitting interview the media tends to throw her way. Insult or not, the suggestion that a vote for Biden was a vote for Harris turned out to be true.

Freddy Gray

Does Donald fear Kamala?

On Monday, Donald J. Trump sent out an urgent campaign memo. ‘Joe Biden just dropped out of the race, and now, his replacement has just been announced,’ it said. ‘It’s me!’ How typically Donald. If Trump were worried about the sudden replacement of Biden with Kamala Harris at the top of the Democratic ticket, he’d never show it. He’s already busy pointing towards polls that suggest ‘Lyin’ Kamala’ is the least popular vice president in history. He’s calling her ‘Dumb as a rock’ and emphasising her abysmal performance as Biden’s ‘border tsar’. Trump’s campaign staff, meanwhile, are insisting that they knew all along Harris would at some point be the Democratic nominee and their attack lines are well-rehearsed.

Justin Marozzi

A visit to the world’s worst capital city

Nouakchott in Mauritania is often referred to as the ‘worst capital city in the world’. That may be a little harsh, but it is difficult to recommend it to Spectator readers as a must-visit destination. The heat is savage, the poverty endemic, corruption is off the scale and this west African country is one of the last on Earth where you can still find hereditary slavery. Which is why I’m here. Troubles begin on arrival. A succession of three police officers grill me in the airport. Why have I come to Nouakchott, who am I working for, who am I planning to meet, why, what are their telephone numbers, what am I going to talk to them about, where am I staying? They are flummoxed by the word ‘historian’.

Thursday

Adam Frank

Under pressure: what might life look like on another planet?

Over the past three decades, astronomers have discovered planets orbiting Sun-like stars throughout the universe. This discovery ended 2,500 years of debate about whether worlds existed beyond our solar system, but it came with a shock. The most common kind of planet in the universe is the type of world that doesn’t exist in our small corner of the cosmos: what astronomers call ‘Super-Earths’ and ‘Sub-Neptunes’, planets with much greater masses than ours and which could, in theory, sustain life. Astronomers concluded a little over a decade ago that every star in the night sky hosts a family of worlds. Importantly for the search for life, one in five of those stars will have a planet in the ‘Goldilocks’ zone (sometimes referred to as the ‘habitable zone’).

Sean Thomas

Keep Michelin men out of our hotels!

It’s probably escaped most people’s attention, what with the football, the election, the Ukraine war, the horrors of Gaza, the assassination attempt and the revelation that the most powerful human on the planet has the intellectual sharpness of a daffodil. But in the past few weeks, the world of travel has been roiled by a surprising innovation: Michelin stars for hotels. Though the stars are stylised as ‘keys’. This may not seem like big pommes de terre, but it is quite important. Because, if the concept takes off and hotels start striving for Michelin accolades, then we can expect the best and most ambitious to go the same way as Michelin-mad restaurants. And that will be bad. You could argue it shouldn’t be a problem, as hotels already have star ratings.

Svitlana Morenets

From the front line of the battle to save Kharkiv

Moonlight shines on the wings of the reconnaissance drone as it glides over the field. Within minutes, the Leleka – Ukrainian for ‘stork’ – crosses the border into Russia’s Belgorod region. The soldiers monitoring it wait in their car, hidden in the undergrowth. Soon the image on their laptop freezes: the Russians are jamming the signal. They manoeuvre the Leleka back and forth, eventually finding a gap in the enemy’s electronic defences. The drone is back in contact, sending footage of Russian roads and towns. The hunt for enemy troops begins. Some 30,000 Russian soldiers are amassed north of Vovchansk, a Ukrainian border town that was attacked two months ago.

David Hempleman-Adams

Up, up and down again: my attempt to balloon the Atlantic

I was hoping to fly the first hydrogen balloon across the Atlantic and had been waiting for a year to get the right call from our weather men. I had postponed the trip last year, when there was not a single track that would get us from the USA to Europe. Was it climate change? I had flown solo across the Atlantic in a balloon twice before, although when we say solo, the reality is a huge team of backstage staff to get you into the air safely and support the flight and the landing. This would be no different, except I would be accompanied by two fellow balloon pilots, Bert Padelt and Frederik Paulsen. In the past, weather patterns were stable for days. They now change much more quickly, as anyone trying to barbecue this summer will know.

Max Jeffery

Meet the techno-optimists hoping to save the world

Future House is a weird private members’ club. There’s a mattress on the floor for napping, a bathtub designed to hold ice and bottled beers, a robot dog imported from China and a purple neon sign that reads: ‘Just F***ing Build Something.’ Around 9 p.m. on a Wednesday, the place is rammed. ‘I missed the dotcom era, I’m not missing this one,’ someone says. ‘People need to stop moaning about artificial intelligence,’ says another. Future House, in an old coaching house in Hackney, is described on its website as ‘London’s techno-optimist members’ club’. Techno-optimism? Adherents believe that technological progress is the best way to fix the world’s problems.

James Heale

Meet the MAGA megafans

Milwaukee, Wisconsin If you want to see how Donald Trump has changed his party, look at what attendees wore to this week’s convention in Milwaukee. Gone are the days when Republicans plumped for preppy blazers and demure khakis; now the fashion is for ostentatious displays of red, white and blue. Even the red ‘MAGA’ baseball caps of 2016 have been eclipsed, replaced by this year’s must-have accessory of the cowboy hat – a classic symbol of rugged individualism. It’s a sartorial revolution, as well as a political one. ‘Everyone loves having their photo taken,’ says one press photographer.

Freddy Gray

Is Donald Trump now unstoppable?

‘You’re gonna be so blessed,’ said Pastor James Roemke, doing a pretty good Donald Trump impersonation in the warm-up to his Benediction of the Republican National Convention on Monday. ‘You’re gonna be tired of being blessed, I guarantee it, believe me.’ Sitting in the stands with a bandage on his ear, Trump enjoyed the joke – a riff on his famous line from 2016 about ‘winning’. He smiled almost beatifically for the cameras. In the wake of the shooting, Trump has begun to sound, believe it or not, graceful and magnanimous It was poignant, too, because in his case it seemed so true: God, or some supernatural force beyond our understanding, does seem to be showering the Republican nominee with blessings of late.

Kate Andrews

Why Trump forgave J.D. Vance

It shows a remarkable level of confidence from Donald Trump that he’s chosen for his running-mate the man who once called him ‘America’s Hitler’. J.D. Vance, the 39-year-old junior senator from Ohio, made the private comment in 2016, as he rose to fame off the back of his autobiography Hillbilly Elegy. The book recounts what it was like to grow up in a deprived rust-belt town, where his family and neighbours had ‘no college degree’ and ‘poverty’s the family tradition’. Vance escaped by joining the US Marine Corps, which included a tour in Iraq.

Thursday

Theo Hobson

The C of E needs to talk about sex

My friend Andy is getting married. It’s about time – he and his girlfriend have a one-year-old daughter. He wants to get married in church, so I introduced him by email to the local vicar. I was copied in to their initial correspondence. The vicar told Andy that the Church of England prohibits sex outside of marriage, so a church wedding would not be possible unless the couple repented of their sin and lived apart in the run-up to the wedding. Of course I made up the last bit. The vicar congratulated him and his partner on their decision and started talking dates. But isn’t it true that the church teaches that sex should only take place in marriage? Yes and no. The ambiguity sheds important light on the current crisis over homosexuality.

Charlie Taylor

Can Labour solve our prisons crisis?

There is no doubt that the new government (and in particular the prisons minister, James Timpson) is faced with a serious prison population crisis. Original thinking and a willingness to challenge the system will be the only way out. As HM Chief Inspector of Prisons, I know this all too well. Last month I inspected Durham, a Georgian reception jail which regularly vies for the dubious honour of being the most overcrowded prison along with Leeds, Bedford and Wandsworth. Half of all prisoners are functionally illiterate and yet few are taught to read With remand populations (those who have yet to be convicted) at historic highs, reception prisons across the country are busier than ever.

Svitlana Morenets

What I saw at the Okhmatdyt bomb site

Kyiv For weeks, Kyiv had felt relatively safe compared with just about everywhere else in Ukraine. People had adjusted to wartime life as the city’s air defences managed to intercept most of Russia’s missiles and drones. There had been a sense that things were improving. This was shattered on Monday morning when a missile struck a children’s cancer hospital in the capital. Okhmatdyt is the largest paediatric clinic in Ukraine, the equivalent of London’s Great Ormond Street. Each year, it treats more than 20,000 children with the most serious health conditions. That Russia had targeted it came as a shock but not a surprise: some 1,700 medical facilities in Ukraine have been hit since the start of the full-scale invasion.

Lara Prendergast

Trade like a tradwife

I love to complain about my phone. It has ruined everything, from friendships to childhood to my memory. But if I stop the bitching and think clearly for a moment, I must admit that my phone is a far more liberating bit of kit than the washing machine or the contraceptive pill. Largely that’s because my phone allows me to work from anywhere. For many women, particularly those with children, this is a dramatic and radical change. Claire Roscoe’s story is a good example. Both she and her husband lost their City jobs in the wake of the pandemic. Pregnant with her second child, Claire needed to find work again promptly.

Elisa Segrave

Don’t bribe your dog with treats

‘Do NOT look Lulu in the eye. Keep your voice low and soft and ignore her barking. Do NOT make arm or hand gestures. You can give her a treat, letting her come to you or drop it for her. She has been doing well with strangers outside but her property is difficult for her.’ I was alarmed by this WhatsApp message from my cousin. I was due to visit. Would I be attacked by Lulu when I walked in? Surely I wouldn’t remember these instructions forwarded from her trainer by then? My cousin’s family, like my own, have  always had dogs. But I was dismayed that, like most modern owners, they had sunk so low as to bribe their pets with food. I was trying to resist the contemporary training-with-food obsession with my own new Jack Russell, Peggy.