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The pros and cons of losing my hearing
Ah, the indignities of age. Over the past year I’ve suffered significant hearing loss. “Huh?” has become my favorite word and I’ve developed a strange new respect for the loonies who hear voices.
Aspiring to stoicism, I informed Lucine, my wife, “When I hit 60 I figured that I was entering a stage in which the physical setbacks, some quite unexpected, would mount. So I told myself that I could either whine about it or I could accept all this with grace and good humor.” Lucine didn’t miss a beat. “Then why have you chosen to whine?” Thanks, dear!
I mean no disrespect to the late Freddie Mercury when I say ‘We Will Rock You’ sounds better muffled
I confess to the occasional maudlin moment. In The Thanksgiving Visitor, Truman Capote quoted his beloved Aunt Sook, who fears the dimming of her sight: “I think these eyes are giving out. At my age, a body starts to look around very closely. So you’ll remember how cobwebs really looked.” Sook-like, I would sometimes focus on a loved one’s voice, trying to implant it in whatever part of the brain retains the evidence of senses past.
But life is filled with incongruities, and I am just as likely to grouse, like the Grinch, “Noise! Noise! Noise!” whene’er the aural assault commences in public places.
In recent years it has become almost impossible for me to enjoy organized sports due to the ceaseless thump of amplified sound effects and snatches of pop songs. The assumption seems to be that spectators – we, too, serve who only sit and watch – are incapable of enduring the 15 or so seconds between plays without sonic stimulation. Converse with a seatmate? Gaze or gawk or just take it all in? Think? Impossible.
Rather to my embarrassment, my condition has required me to wear earplugs to, for instance, the occasional Rochester Americans minor-league hockey game. I mean no disrespect to the late Freddie Mercury when I say that “We Will Rock You” sounds better when muffled. (Incredibly, to me at least, one also hears chunks of “Blitzkrieg Bop.” When I saw the Ramones in 1979 I sure never thought their glorious 90-second headbanging tunes would someday be filler music at sporting events. Though I suspect Johnny Ramone would be pleased.)
We are told that there is always a silver lining – Mary Todd Lincoln might have guffawed at Our American Cousin, and the irradiated mushrooms around Chernobyl may be quite tasty – and being hard of hearing limits one’s exposure to the anti-human ghastliness of computerized or AI “voices.”
I’m constitutionally incapable of listening to books on tape – the mind wanders – but I am told that, with grim ineluctability, AI voices are replacing those of our living, breathing brothers and sisters who make money as voice actors. Cheapskate publishers are selling out the human race by refusing to hire actors to narrate their books or newspaper and magazine articles. AI’s mispronunciations, misplaced emphases and creepy inflections add to the chilling artificiality of the whole thing.
It’s like when the niece tells Kevin McCarthy in Invasion of the Body Snatchers that the pod-people version of her Uncle Ira isn’t Uncle Ira. “There’s something missing,” she says. “Always when he talked to me there was a special look in his eye. That look’s gone. The words, the gestures, everything else is the same – but not the feeling.”
This is the dystopian future the soul-killing AI corporations have planned for us – aided and abetted by a Trump administration that aims to clearcut federalist obstacles to a nationalized, one-size-fits-all AI regime.
One of the precious and few memorable moments in the televised presidential and vice-presidential “debates” of our age came in 1992, courtesy of independent candidate Ross Perot’s running mate, James Stockdale, a philosopher and Medal of Honor recipient who had spent seven years as the senior naval officer among American prisoners of war in Vietnam. Among the lasting effects of the torture inflicted upon Admiral Stockdale during his imprisonment was ear damage that necessitated the use of hearing aids. During the debate, Stockdale responded to one question from the moderator with an apologetic, “I didn’t have my hearing aid turned up. Tell me again.” He was roasted by the media as a doddering fool.
Stockdale had made a simple mistake, turning the control down rather than up, but really, if you had to share a stage with his two opponents – the inane Republican Dan Quayle and the pompous-ass Democrat Al Gore – wouldn’t you do whatever you could to shut out the noise?
At least vice presidents Quayle and Gore were, by most accounts, human. Synthetic AI voices are far more objectionable. But instead of making ourselves deaf, maybe we can strike those damned things dumb?
The chaotic thrill of a horse auction
The story of Harry deLeyer and his horse Snowman reads like a Disney classic. DeLeyer was a Dutch immigrant farmer who bought Snowman at auction with his last $80 in the 1950s . Snowman was an unpedigreed plowhorse, already old by competitive riding standards, and likely headed for the glue factory when deLeyer saw promise in his strength and spirit. They went on to become one of the most successful pairings in the history of showriding, taking home the Triple Crown of national titles in 1958.
The horse world has changed a lot since then. Both training and breeding are highly scientific across all pursuits, from showriding to racing. The barriers to entry are so much higher, both professionally and financially, and the idea of a pair like Snowman and deLeyer casually riding to national titles is almost unthinkable. But you still can’t beat the rush of finding a gem at auction.
Know this: everyone willing to spend will just as easily stab you in the back
Attending the Christmas auction held by a neighboring farm has become something of a tradition for my family. The barn is set up with lights, trees and Christmas decor, and it’s a chance to mingle professionally as much as to see old friends. Although I’ve found some good deals over the years, I rarely buy anything. I’ve landed some young green horses, trained them on basic flatwork and beginner jumping and made solid returns in just a few months. But the risks of buying at auction typically outweigh the reward, even at the most prestigious houses.
Horse auctions range from the ultra-high-end, where pedigreed thoroughbreds from top breeders can easily fetch seven figures, to the lowest-end “loose” auctions of misfits for whom the specter of a slaughterhouse is, unfortunately, very much a reality. Having attended both over the years, the chaotic, competitive, emotionally charged energy is not so different.
At the higher end, you’ll have premier catering, top-shelf liquor and high-tech, luxurious facilities. These feel polished and professional because they are: indoor arenas display detailed catalogs, videos, pedigrees and sometimes vet records, with a whole team dedicated to elite customer service. Both consignors and buyers get wined and dined. Arrive early to see horses in pens or being test-ridden as you mingle and strategize but know this: everyone willing to spend will just as easily stab you in the back.
The bidding moves as quickly as the auctioneer’s chant. It’s lively and tense, but not frantic – and while the attendees are better dressed and more knowledgeable, they’re often no less crass than those who lose out in a lower-end auction.
Here, the pace is equally fast, but there’s more desperation. Little planning goes into loose auctions; they’re less events and more weekly occurrences featuring any surplus livestock. Trucks and trailers pack the parking lot, horses are thrown wherever they fit and there’s an overall air of unpredictability. In place of vendor-packed arenas, expect a backyard farm as it is on any other day: scattered hay, manure, lots of mud. Show up early to inspect horses if you can, but don’t expect to be courted. In place of subdued panels, there’s often lots of yelling. And it’s easy to feel the emotional pull to save a horse from “kill buyers” bidding as middlemen for international slaughterhouses.
Beyond the energy on the ground, the one guarantee at any tier of auction is the fact that there are no guarantees. It’s a case of buyer beware: no guarantees, no disclosures. Most horse dealers are unscrupulous, to put it mildly, and take advantage of their asymmetrical advantage. There are many forms of trickery, the classic being drugging a lame horse to ensure it walks normally across the auction floor.
Lost principal is only the beginning; feeding, stabling and vet bills pile up quickly, and it’s not so easy to unload a dud in the private market. I find that auctions are best avoided. My mother once purchased a stunning Appaloosa at auction, but the unexpected trauma of his degenerative kidney disease came to define my childhood.
Our friends are about as trustworthy as auctioneers can be, even offering early tips about the horses up for sale. They run somewhere in the middle-market: you won’t find pedigreed champions, but nothing is going to the slaughterhouse, either. I’ve certainly landed some gems from them over the years. And while I haven’t found my Snowman, I’m always holding out hope.
The subway deserves some respect
A few weeks before the end of the year, I was invited to a house party at which I had the misfortune of becoming embroiled in a conversation with a man I’ll call Joe, because his name was Joe and I don’t feel inclined to offer him the dignity of a pseudonym.
There’s a theory I’ve corroborated since moving to New York in 2020. Every conversation at a party in this city eventually gravitates toward one of five subjects: traffic, the weather, real estate, sex or the mayor.
The ultra-rich are among the subway’s most devoted riders
Joe told me he works in finance (which he pronounced “fin-ants”) and it seemed he wasn’t bothered about the weather. He wasn’t a tax-optimizing Connecticut commuter, so had no unsolicited opinions to share about traffic. Thankfully, he appeared to have exhausted his tirades about Zohran Mamdani’s plans to turn the city into a “socialist dystopia.” And had he started talking about sex, I would have jumped out of the window, leaving this column forever unwritten. Which left us with real estate.
“I’m in the market,” Joe declared, adopting a pathetically coquettish expression he had almost certainly practiced using a picture of George Clooney and a mirror. “Got my eye on a brownstone.” Joe had recently come across a place on West 72nd Street and he was about to make an offer. It was, he assured me, a bit of a “steal” – a word that, in Manhattan real-estate-speak, probably means emotionally destabilizing but legally sound. “That’s great,” I said absently, my attention already drifting toward a smoked salmon blini gliding through the room. “There’s the Trader Joe’s right there,” I continued, “the park, of course. Oh, and the 2 and 3 express trains.” I managed to say all this while mentally already masticating the blini. “Downtown in 15 minutes. Boom.” Joe snorted, as though I’d just confessed to enjoying something unfashionably democratic. “Yeah,” he scoffed. “Only I’m more of an Uber kind of guy.”
At that precise moment, the blini entered my orbit, allowing me – in one graceful, self-preserving swoop – to place the entire thing into my mouth. It was bigger than it looked, which saved me from saying something that would have caused a rupture in the evening’s social fabric.
I know. His comment was probably meant to be innocuous; an offhand opinion – the sort we’re all entitled to in this vaunted land of free thought and speech. But here’s the thing: opinions about the subway are also something of a personality litmus test.
The subway – the 122-year-old rapid transit system that weaves through the five boroughs – is a feat of awesome engineering. It deserves admiration and, at a minimum, a basic level of respect. Yes, it’s filthy. Yes, it smells like despair and warm metal. Yes, between June and September it becomes a subterranean sweat lodge in which time, deodorant and optimism cease to function. And yes, you must keep your wits about you to avoid stepping on something – or someone – you’ll regret. But to dismiss it outright is as offensive as describing New York City as provincial. As rude as calling it soulless.
Perhaps more damning, to categorically snub the subway signals a performative elitism so naked it’s almost impressive. Interestingly, I’ve noticed that the ultra-rich – the scions of old money who have absolutely nothing left to prove – are among the subway’s most devoted riders. One such individual, firmly ensconced in that gilded class, regularly extols its virtues to me over lunch. His enthusiasm isn’t fueled by novelty. He’s lived here his entire life. He simply recognizes an infrastructural marvel when he sees one. And he knows to value it.
It’s only the ascending millionaires – the aspirational, the status-anxious, the sad posers thirsty for attention and adoration – who believe that by declaring the city’s subterranean lifeline as beneath them they’re somehow accruing social capital, presenting themselves as a superior, nobler, more evolved and enlightened breed. As if character could be Ubered to them.
One argument I do buy is the safety one. I too, somewhat sheepishly, tapped my way through the turnstiles a few years ago after a spate of people being pushed – seemingly at random – onto the tracks. But it never stopped me from choosing a 20-minute, high-speed journey priced at $3 over a $50 Uber ride in what can only be described as a vomit comet. (If, that is, comets moved at five miles an hour and were piloted by people who believe good driving consists of alternating between the brake and accelerator until the passenger turns green and abandons the vehicle mid-block.) As a relevant aside, recent data happen to show that the subway has just had its statistically safest year in more than 15 years.
There’s a cartoon displayed in many subway cars intended to raise awareness of indecent behavior – assaults, unwanted advances and the like. The caption urges riders not to “become someone’s subway story.” In other words, don’t become the anecdote someone tells every time they order an $80 car home, complete with a rain-triggered surcharge.
A few days after the house party, as I glanced up at that cartoon on a smooth, civilized uptown-bound 2 train, I laughed. Joe had become my subway story.
Perhaps one day I won’t feel like braving the gritty depths of commuter mayhem. Perhaps I’ll hesitate after another slew of violent incidents, or avoid a midsummer carriage with no air conditioning. Perhaps I’ll simply be too tired to navigate the labyrinthine purgatory that is the Times Square transfer between the 1/2/3 and the N/Q/R/W. But then I’ll remember Joe, and I’ll reconsider. Because I never want to be the kind of person so insecure in their social standing that they have to sneer at one of New York’s most formidable features.
Somewhere between the turnstiles and the exits, the subway has a way of revealing who belongs to the city, and who is merely passing through it in search of something to flatter their brittle ego. So yes, I think I’ll take the train. The blinis may well be all eaten by the time Joe arrives.
The politics of long hair
What is the literal cut-off point for women having very long hair (and by “long” I mean where it almost goes into the toilet bowl)? Thirty? Forty? Fifty? Try 65 – the age I turned this year. If this strikes you as grossly inappropriate, in theory I’m with you. The unspoken rule is that the older you get, the shorter your hair should be. Nobody within ten or even 20 years of me has hair as long as mine. What can I say? As with wearing inappropriately colored nail polish, it is just another small act of defiance women d’un certain age can employ to remind this cruel world that we do actually still exist.
My hair has been this length for so long it has become a part of my identity: how I see myself in the universe. I am my hair and thus find it hard to imagine life without it. Martin Amis used to have recurrent nightmares about his teeth falling out. Well, I have recurrent nightmares about this happening to my hair. I’m lucky: I have the good, thick Indian kind. The kind, because it is dyed blond, strangers sometimes mistake for extensions.
Besides which, isn’t long hair having a bit of a moment right now? There was a piece in the New York Times about how 63-year-old Demi Moore has radically moved the goal posts. In other words: why should I get a Karen haircut just to suit you?
Historically, short sensible hair for women has been a symbol of political might. Just look at Hillary Clinton, Liz Truss and “Mutti” Merkel. Perhaps Margaret Thatcher is to blame. Would she have been taken so seriously without that signature schoolmistress ’do? I think not.
But if long hair was once a no-no for women in positions of political power, it certainly isn’t now. Just look at Republican Exocet missiles Kristi Noem, Kimberly Guilfoyle, Lara Trump, Erika Kirk et al and note how the unifying factor, along with the false eyelashes and Botox, is the ludicrously long Barbie-style hair. “Republican Hair” (yes, it’s an actual thing, you can ask for it in hair salons in Washington, DC) – that’s not the look I’m aiming for as I head toward my seventies. Not at all. In fact, I recently found myself wondering if it might, finally, be time for the chop. Maybe I’ve been kidding myself all these years, maybe my hair is dragging me down and maybe a chic, blunt-edged bob could be just the thing to, as it were, “hoik” everything up. Meanwhile, was it my imagination or was my hair suddenly falling out more than usual? Why did it suddenly feel like cotton candy when I got out of the sea? And what of all the sponsored posts from hair-treatment brands such as Minoxidil and Propecia which had started popping up on my Instagram feed?
I decided I would take the plunge. The day arrived as I knew it would. I got to the salon, put on the gown and sat in the chair. I looked at my hairdresser and he looked at me. At the exact same moment, we both shook our heads. It was like a stay of execution. Neither of us could go through with it. And so it is: I’ve still got hair, possibly thinner than it used to be, virtually down to my lumbar dimples.
The famous Jenny Joseph poem from the 1980s could have been titled, “Warning: When I am an Old Woman I Shall Wear Purple… And My Hair Too Long.”
The US plan for Gaza is absurd
Donald Trump’s strangely artificial Board of Peace event in Davos on Thursday looked like a Hollywood rendering of an international summit. Everything was too slick, faintly uncanny. Like an AI-generated image, it was photo-real yet failed the most basic human glance test. Too perfect. No wabi-sabi.
The first tell was visual: the set, complete with a crisp new institutional logo: a globe on a shield, flanked by olive branches. It carried the unmistakable whiff of Grok or ChatGPT, but the strangeness went deeper than design. The speeches themselves were weirdly messianic and utopian.
The most peculiar part was the show-within-a-show: a piece of political meta-theatre featuring Marco Rubio, Steve Witkoff, Jared Kushner and a pre-recorded video greeting from Ali Shaath, newly appointed head of the National Committee for the Administration of Gaza, the technocratic body intended to run Gaza’s civil administration under the new framework. Like Hamlet’s play-within-a-play, The Murder of Gonzago, this pantomime may yet prove to be the event’s central dramatic device, designed to force an uncomfortable truth into the open. If that sounds far-fetched, stick with me.
The segment, billed as a showcase for Gaza’s reconstruction, unravelled into a series of contradictory and fantastical claims that strained credibility. Kushner, long associated with the Peace to Prosperity plan from Trump’s first term, once again took centre stage. Despite its wholesale rejection by Palestinians at the time, the plan has been defrosted, reheated and rebranded. Today it is called Phase B of the Trump ‘point plan’. But it is the same meal, just a bit staler.
Undeterred, Kushner radiated optimism. ‘We do not have a Plan B,’ he declared. ‘We have a plan. We signed an agreement.’ He spoke of holding Hamas to its commitment to disarm, planning for what he called ‘catastrophic success’. The concern most normal people have is that the catastrophe will vastly outweigh the success.
He noted, correctly, that roughly 85 per cent of Gaza’s GDP has long come from aid. ‘That’s not sustainable. It doesn’t give these people dignity. It doesn’t give them hope.’ He may be right. Yet he spoke as if Palestinian mainstream politics were not riddled with corruption and the systematic embezzlement of aid. Yasser Arafat died a billionaire. Hamas leaders today are exceptionally wealthy, many living comfortably in Qatar. The Palestinian economy depends on only one natural resource – victimhood, and is consequently deeply addicted to aid. When the reserves dry up, withdrawal will be brutal.
Still, Kushner promised speed, showing absurd Jetsons style building renders. ‘In the Middle East they build this in three years,’ he said, airily ignoring that such feats of construction are often achieved through brutal migrant slave labour regimes. In ‘New Gaza’, he implausibly promised ‘100 per cent full employment and opportunity for everybody.’ His PowerPoint projected over $10 billion in GDP and average household incomes exceeding $13,000 by 2035. It was absurd.
What renders these claims detached from reality is not only the scale of destruction since October 7th, but the historical record. For years, billions in aid and resources were siphoned away from civilian prosperity and into the Palestinian war economy: tunnel networks, weapons stockpiles, command infrastructure, salaries for fighters and stipends for the families of terrorists. Alongside this sat entrenched corruption, the enrichment of leaders abroad, and the systematic militarisation of what should have been civilian reconstruction.
Against that backdrop, projecting a tripling of Gaza’s GDP and a leap to near-western household incomes within a decade reads less like an economic plan than a childish fantasy. It assumes not merely the physical rebuilding of a shattered territory, but a total transformation of governance, incentives, and security structures that have been absent for decades. Without confronting how aid was weaponised, and without dismantling the culture that turned international generosity into an engine of violence, the Davos numbers are laughable.
‘This really gives the Gazan people an opportunity to live their aspirations,’ Kushner said, as if those aspirations had not already been expressed when Gaza was handed enormous opportunity for growth, peace and self-rule, only for its population to elect a genocidal Islamist jihadist movement that abused and impoverished them on the promise of fighting Jews, and ultimately launched an invasion of Israel, slaughtering civilians in their homes and at a music festival. Perhaps their aspirations are not quite what Kushner imagines.
And that video message from Shaath, set to rousing music: ‘Judge us by our actions. Hold us to clear standards and stand with the people of Gaza as we take responsibility for our future,’ he urged. So we will.
Shaath cited the proposed imminent reopening of the Rafah crossing with Egypt as proof that a new phase had begun. The claim sat uneasily alongside the grand redevelopment promises, given that much of Gaza remains in ruins, littered with unexploded ordnance, with infrastructure destroyed and a large displaced population.
If Shaath is unfamiliar to western audiences, billed simply as a ‘technocrat’ with a background in civil engineering, they might wish to watch his Arabic-language speech from just 11 months ago at a conference titled ‘The Palestine Forum – The Genocidal Israeli War on Gaza: Scenarios for the Day After’. In that address, he presented in Arabic a paper outlining 13 possible post-war outcomes, ranked ‘mathematically’ by probability and desirability.
Ironically, he now heads the body responsible for implementing the very scenario he described as the least likely: ‘moving from crisis to prosperity, President Trump’s project within the framework of the Abraham Accords.’ He characterised Trump’s plan as ‘dangerous talk’, describing it as an attempt to turn catastrophe into prosperity through a so-called ‘new deal’.
Certainly the Palestinians don’t want this plan. They rejected it outright during Trump’s first term, choosing neither peace nor prosperity. They later launched the October 7th invasion as if to confirm their preference, opting once again for the more traditional Palestinian tradition of terrorism and violence. But maybe that decision changed some minds? Maybe not.
In that same speech, delivered well into the war, Shaath opened with a dedication to wounded Palestinians, invoking the 1925 Arabic poem ‘Nakbat Dimashq’, written in response to the French bombardment of Damascus during the Great Syrian Revolt: ‘For red freedom there is a door, knocked upon by every blood-stained hand,’ he said to the gathered conference.
The reference would have sailed over most western heads, particularly through the patchy simultaneous translation. But it would not have been lost on Arab audiences. It romanticises violent resistance and martyrdom as the path to liberation, equating Israel’s defensive actions in Gaza with French colonial brutality, while erasing the fact that the current devastation followed the October 7th atrocities initiated by Hamas and joined by other factions and civilians. Those crimes were committed against Israeli civilians in undisputed territory. They included mass murder, rape and kidnapping.
The analogy is grotesque. France was an imperial power imposing alien rule for exploitation. Israel is a sovereign democracy defending its existence against terrorist entities embedded within civilian populations. It has no imperial project, only a right to self-defence under international law.
The rhetoric of ‘red freedom’ sanctifies bloodshed. It feeds extremism. It is especially revealing coming from the man now tasked with overseeing a Trump-backed technocratic administration that claims to prioritise demilitarisation, disarmament and non-violent governance. However carefully the Davos video was scripted, it could not erase what Shaath said less than a year ago.
So why the spectacle? Why this fairytale fantasy?
So when Kushner announced the mission statement of the 14 technocrats under Shaath as committing them to ‘cultivating a society rooted in peace, democracy, and justice, operating with the highest standards of integrity and transparency’, concluding with ‘we embrace peace’, it sounded unconvincing.
Of course Trump, Kushner, Rubio and Witkoff know this. They know the Palestinians rejected the plan once and are likely to reject it again. Their aspirations, repeatedly demonstrated, have centred on ‘resistance’ and violence rather than coexistence and peace. Stating this is neither pessimistic nor racist. It is empirical.
So why the spectacle? Why this fairytale fantasy? Trump might as well have promised every Gazan a unicorn to ride into the sunset. One can only hope there is a method here, not just madness.
Perhaps there is. Because running in parallel to the Davos performance is another Trump production: a significant US military buildup in the region, accompanied by blunt warnings that if Hamas does not disarm, ‘they’ll be blown away.’ He repeated the threat in talks with Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, stating that compliance would become clear ‘in the next two or three days, certainly within three weeks.’
And so we return to Hamlet. The inner play exists to expose the truth. Trump loves to put on a show. Without elevating him to Shakespearean genius, one is left wondering whether this extravagantly staged promise of wealth, investment, recognition, and statehood is itself a test. Everything is on offer – a virtual paradise lacking only the 72 virgins. All that is required is compliance.
If it fails, nobody will be able to say he didn’t try.
A short history of the New York Times being wrong about everything
The ‘nothing ever happens’ people seem to be, sadly, correct about Iran thus far, although one hopes that the brutal Islamic Republic might still be overthrown. It’s hard to know what to think, and at times like this we all turn to the experts to give their analysis of what might happen and what might follow.
Foreign policy expertise is hard work, because it requires both a specific knowledge of the national culture and the relative strength of personalities. Because there are so many factors involved, analysts frequently get things completely wrong, the Iraq and Afghanistan debacles being the notorious examples. The art of ‘superforecasting’ came about because US foreign policy experts turned out to be disastrously wedded to preconceived ideas; the success of superforecasters suggests that people with less specialist knowledge but a better control of their biases do a more accurate job of predicting events.
The same is true of media experts. Newspaper opinion pieces have a bad predictive record because journalists have no skin in the game and are incentivised to make attention-grabbing statements. They are also prone to huge ideological bias and arrogance. I recall, for example, a leading British columnist around 2004 arguing that Nato’s victory in Afghanistan proved that we shouldn’t take history as a guide. Just because the British and Soviet empires had failed in their attempts to tame the country, we shouldn’t assume that the Americans would fail too. Oh well – can you give us 1,000 words on Libya by 3 p.m.?
The paper’s coverage of Nazi Germany may have been naïve – they weren’t alone
In my experience, experts within the journalism trade are usually no more accurate or perceptive than a random person who works in finance and sees where investors put their money – and no newspaper has such a rich and deep tradition of getting things wrong as the New York Times. In a much-shared February 1979 article for the august publication, Princeton professor Richard Falk wrote about the revolutionary leader who had earlier that month returned from Paris to Iran, and who he believed was setting the country on a bright new path – one Ayatollah Khomeini.
‘President Carter and [national security adviser] Zbigniew Brzezinski have until very recently associated him with religious fanaticism,’ Professor Falk wrote:
The news media have defamed him in many ways, associating him with efforts to turn the clock back 1,300 years, with virulent anti‐Semitism, and with a new political disorder, “theocratic fascism,” about to be set loose on the world. About the best he has fared has been to be called (by Newsweek) “Iran’s Mystery Man”.
Although revolutionaries tend to degenerate into excess, Falk wrote:
Nevertheless, there are hopeful signs, including the character and role of Ayatollah Khomeini. In recent months, before his triumphant return to Teheran, the Ayatollah gave numerous reassurances to non-Muslim communities in Iran. He told Jewish‐community leaders that it would be a tragedy if many of the 80,000 Jews left the country. Of course, this view is qualified by his hostility to Israel because of its support of the Shah and its failure to resolve the Palestinian question.
He has also indicated that the nonreligious left will be free to express its views in an Islamic republic and to participate in political life, provided only that it does not “commit treason against the country” by establishing foreign connections – a lightly‐veiled reference to anxiety about Soviet interference. What the left does in coming days will likely indicate whether it will be seen as treasonous.
To suppose that Ayatollah Khomeini is dissembling seems almost beyond belief. His political style is to express his real views defiantly and without apology, regardless of consequences. He has little incentive suddenly to become devious for the sake of American public opinion. Thus, the depiction of him as fanatical, reactionary and the bearer of crude prejudices seems certainly and happily false.
In fact, the Ayatollah’s ‘entourage of close advisers is uniformly composed of moderate, progressive individuals’, and the provisional government’s key appointees are:
Widely respected in Iran outside religious circles, share a notable record of concern for human rights and seem eager to achieve economic development that results in a modern society oriented on satisfying the whole population’s basic needs.
Although there was a great deal of deference to the Ayatollah, Falk noted, this was not about coercion and:
The Shiite tradition is flexible in its approach to the Koran and evolves interpretations that correspond to the changing needs and experience of the people. What is distinctive, perhaps, about this religious orientation is its concern with resisting oppression and promoting social justice.
Falk concluded that:
Having created a new model of popular revolution based, for the most part, on nonviolent tactics, Iran may yet provide us with a desperately needed model of humane governance for a third‐world country.
And they all lived happily ever after.
The New York Times weren’t the only ones who were hoodwinked, and Professor Falk wasn’t the worst; indeed, even the CIA was fairly ignorant of the Ayatollah and the dangers of Islamic fundamentalism. None were so foolish about Iran as Michel Foucault, however, who spoke warmly about a revolutionary regime which undoubtedly would have hanged him from a crane.
Yet the New York Times has an especially long pedigree at being wrong about…everything. On 9 October 1903 it predicted that ‘man won’t fly for a million years’, following an attempt at air flight by William Langley from a houseboat on the Potomac river:
It should be remembered, however, that the bird successful in flight is an evolution. It has taken a great many generations of his kind to develop his muscular system in just the right way for flying purposes, and very likely the process has consumed many centuries of time. The mistake of the scientist would appear to be in his assumption that he can do with much less suitable material by a single act of creative genius what nature accomplishes with such immeasurable deliberation.
Hence, if it requires, say, a thousand years to fit for easy flight a bird which started with rudimentary wings, or ten thousand for one which started with no wings at all and had to sprout them ab initio, it might be assumed that the flying machine which will really fly might be evolved by the combined and continuous efforts of mathematicians and mechanicians in from one million to ten million years-provided, of course, we can meanwhile eliminate such little drawbacks and embarrassments as the existing relation between weight and strength in inorganic materials. No doubt the problem has attractions for those it interests, but to the ordinary man it would seem as if effort might be employed more profitably.
The Wright Brothers successfully flew a plane two months later.
In 1914, the paper suggested that the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo made war less likely. As the Vox journalist Matthew Yglesias wrote:
The Times reported that “in Russia, England, and France the Archduke Francis Ferdinand was regarded as one of the most serious dangers to the European peace” while “even in Germany his accession to the throne was viewed with apprehension”.
Their view was that Franz Ferdinand was a proponent of an aggressively anti-Serbian foreign policy, and that his removal from the order of succession made a Balkan conflict less likely. By contrast, the new heir apparent, “while popular in Vienna is described as a young man of no remarkable ability.”
In 1924, after a young firebrand by the name of Adolf Hitler had been sent to jail following a failed coup, the New York Times reported that he had been ‘tamed’ by prison and was ‘no longer to be feared’, having been the ‘demi-god of the reactionary extremists’. I think it’s fair to say that rehabilitation didn’t work in Hitler’s case.
In 1936, with the Nazis in power and hosting the Olympics, the paper gushed that:
However much one may deplore or detest some of the excesses of the Hitler regime, the games make clear beyond question the amazing new energy and determination that have come to the German people.
Huge amounts of energy and determination, it turned out.
The paper’s coverage of Nazi Germany may have been naïve – they weren’t alone. Their coverage of the Soviet Union, however, was shameful. The NYT correspondent Walter Duranty was not naive or overly optimistic, but deeply cynical, a creature of the Kremlin who spouted Soviet talking points as millions starved.
As Izabella Tabarovsky wrote in the Tablet magazine, Duranty was:
The reigning Western popular authority on all things Bolshevik. On 31 March, the Times carried Duranty’s now-infamous piece, “Russians Hungry but Not Starving,” in which he disputed the facts of the famine – facts that he himself knew to be true, and had frequently discussed in private conversations.
Yes, there was hunger, Duranty wrote, but the deaths were due to diseases associated with malnutrition rather than to starvation itself. Shortages existed, but larger cities had food. The “novelty” of collective farming had simply “made a mess of food production”.
It sounds like the Ukrainian famine was some sort of right-wing conspiracy theory that fact-checkers needed to debunk.
Duranty also used his position to discredit his British rival Gareth Jones, who was accurately reporting the famine. While the New York Times’s man spouted lies about Russia, the Manchester Guardian was notably honest, the only paper to publish Jones’s reports, as well as those of Malcolm Muggeridge. In 1932, Duranty was rewarded with the Pulitzer prize for his journalism; the following year Jones was expelled from the Soviet Union in disgrace. After reporting on Nazi Germany, where he found that his earlier fears had proved accurate, the Welsh journalist travelled to Mongolia where he was murdered, mostly likely by the Soviets. In 1941, Duranty would briefly acknowledge that he had underestimated the famine and would even go so far as to call it man-made.
When Stalin finally died in in 1953, the paper wrote an obituary for the Soviet dictator which declared that ‘only a man of iron will and determination like Stalin’s could have held together his shattered country’ and:
The energy and will power he displayed both before and during the war confirmed the justification for his name, for Stalin in Russian means “man of steel”… With head high, a book under his arm, Stalin walked the gauntlet without a whimper, his face and head bleeding, his eyes flashing defiance.
A good thing that he never made any racist comments on a podcast.
The 20th century witnessed a number of nightmarish regimes, often welcomed by journalists and editors who wished to see them succeed, or were prepared to overlook their excesses if the goal was noble. It was Duranty who, paraphrasing a Russian term, first used the phrase ‘you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs’ about communism (to which the obvious reply is: ‘where’s the omelette then?’).
Sometimes, however, one should perhaps blame the headline writers, as journalists are often prone to do. In April 1975, when the Khmer Rouge took over Cambodia, the paper ran with the headline ‘Indochina Without Americans: For Most, a Better Life’, but the text by correspondent Sydney H. Schanberg was not so optimistic.
‘Some critics of American policy in Indochina have gone so far as to predict that the peninsula will become a virtual paradise once the Americans have gone,’ he wrote:
This is perhaps wishful polemics, for it is difficult to predict with any degree of confidence what Indochina will be like under Communism.
As it turned out, it was unimaginably worse: the Khmer Rouge went on to kill a quarter of the country’s population, with Schanberg famously becoming the protagonist of the film The Killing Fields. But, as columnists always like to point out, he didn’t write the headline.
Gender ideology has been a disaster for working-class women
There have been two huge victories for workers’ rights over the past week. And yet the left is schtum. No champagne corks are popping. No raised fist emojis have appeared on lefty social media. I bet no Labour-backing luvvie has plans to make a tear-jerking movie about this stirring triumph for working people.
No Labour-backing luvvie plans to make a tear-jerking movie about this stirring triumph for working people
We all know why. It’s because the victors are women, and more importantly they’re women who demanded that most scandalous right – the right to their own spaces, the right to undress away from men. The left is saying nowt – and in fact is probably seething – because it hates nothing more than an uppity broad who says sex is real and women matter.
The first big win was for the Darlington nurses. These are the eight nurses who bravely challenged the County Durham and Darlington NHS Foundation Trust for making them share a changing area with a male who identifies as a woman. It is an appalling assault on our privacy and dignity to make us share an intimate space with a man, the nurses argued. And they won.
A tribunal ruled that the NHS Trust had ‘unlawfully harassed’ the nurses by making them share a changing room with a ‘biological male trans woman’. It also found that the nurses’ complaints were not taken seriously. It’s the 21st century and women are being haughtily dismissed by the boss class, just for wanting that most basic right to change into their work clothes in a fella-free zone.
It gets worse: not only is much of the left cravenly quiet about the nurses’ valiant strike for reason and freedom in the workplace – some openly opposed the nurses. Alarmingly, Unison, the public-sector union, sided with the biological male over the dignity-seeking nurses. One Unison bigwig dismissed the nurses’ concerns as ‘anti-trans bigotry’.
Imagine going back to the 1980s, or even the 2000s, and telling people that in the future a trade union would actively seek to undermine the workplace rights of women. That it would slam nurses – nurses! – as ‘bigots’ because they would rather not undress in the presence of men. People would have called you a loon. Yet here we are.
Unison’s breezy dismissal of the nurses’ plea for fairness was an outrage. It was an act of treason against the working class. Unions were founded to expand the dignity of working people, not sacrifice it at the altar of ideology. After the tribunal’s ruling, Unison said it stands by its ‘trans, non-binary and gender diverse members’. Strip away all the PC gobbledygook and what Unison is really saying is that the right of men to waltz into women’s changing areas matters more than the right of women to enjoy privacy in the workplace.
Unison’s flagrant betrayal of eight hard-working women speaks to the corrupting influence of identity politics. The bourgeois mania of genderfluidity and other post-truth doctrines have driven our institutions mad. Consider the other recent victory – that of Jennifer Melle, a nurse from Croydon.
Even the most stinging satirist of the follies of our time could not have invented a story like Ms Melle’s. She was caring for a high-security prisoner, a convicted paedophile, who identifies as a woman. And she referred to him as ‘Mr’. Sounds polite to me, but to NHS management it was an intolerable act of ‘misgendering’. Melle was given a written warning.
She referred to him as ‘Mr’. Sounds polite to me, but to NHS management it was an intolerable act of ‘misgendering’
So this is where we are: the feelings of a paedo matter more than the rights of a nurse. His desire to be referred to as ‘she’ outweighs Ms Melle’s right to act according to her conscience (and reality). The truth is Ms Melle was the victim here – the patient is said to have responded to her ‘misgendering’ with racist abuse (Melle is black). And yet, in a searing testament to the Kafkaesque lunacy of our times, it’s Melle who was punished.
This week, the disciplinary action against her was dropped. A black nurse who had an unblemished record during her 12 years of hard graft at the Epsom and St Helier NHS Trust is vindicated following a mad battle with her bosses over the hurt feelings of a male convict, and yet still the left refuses to crack a smile. According to the warped logic of their beloved gender ideology, the bad guy is the nurse who spoke the truth.
We don’t talk enough about the classism that fuels trans and other faddish beliefs. Plummy students and the managerial elites might accrue ever-more virtue points through embracing the gender ideology. But for working-class women, that ideology has been a disaster. It has unravelled rights they fought hard for, prime among them the right of women at work to have a private space where they might dress, wash and attend to their needs away from men.
We had Made in Dagenham, the hit film about female machinists’ fight for equal pay. How about Made in Darlington next – a film about eight nurses who struck a brilliant blow for biological reality, common sense, women’s rights and workers’ dignity? I’d watch it.
In praise of Elizabeth Taylor (no, not that one)
On 15 November 1975, Elizabeth Taylor died. No, not that Elizabeth Taylor – she had many more years, and many more husbands, to get through. I mean Elizabeth Taylor the author, whose 12 novels and four volumes of short stories so piercingly and hilariously chronicle the quietly desperate lives of middle-class women in and around the sleepy towns and villages of the Thames Valley in the middle part of the last century.
Kingsley Amis thought her ‘one of the best English novelists born in this century’. Anita Brookner considered her ‘the Jane Austen of the 1950s and 60s’. Despite such accolades, Taylor never quite achieved the status she deserved. She was never a bestseller; she never won a prize. In fact, a faintly patronising air bedevilled her throughout her writing life. (Saul Bellow, when judging the Booker Prize, for which she was long listed, derided her work as redolent of ‘tinkling teacups’.) She was seen by some as too genteel, too privileged, too low stakes – a mere lending library novelist.
This year marks 50 years since Taylor’s final novel, Blaming, was published, almost a year after her death, in the autumn of 1976. Her star has since risen slightly – Angel (1957) was chosen as one of the 13 ‘Best Novels of Our Time’ in 1984; Robert McCrum included Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont (1971) on his list of the ‘100 Best Novels Written in English’ – but nowhere near the heights it should. It therefore seems a good time to give this perennially undervalued writer her very significant due.
Elizabeth ‘Betty’ Coles was born in Reading in 1912, the daughter of Oliver, an inspector for Sun Insurance, and Elsie, whose parents, of working-class stock, ran the local newsagents. Educated privately at Abbey School, she then worked as a governess before joining the Communist party of Great Britain. In her spare time she wrote.
Despite her bohemian inclinations and left-ish politics (she quickly became disillusioned with the Communist party, but apparently remained a Labour voter), Elizabeth soon settled down to a conventional middle-class life. In 1936 she married John Taylor, a sweet manufacturer, and in 1948 they moved to the Buckinghamshire village of Penn, where they remained. Nicola Beauman, in her biography The Other Elizabeth Taylor, expresses surprise that Elizabeth should have chosen this cosy and conservative life, and not, perhaps, ventured out into the world of the Earls Court bedsitter, there to write socially conscious fiction, as others did – ‘that she chose the gin and tonic and the Daily Telegraph is one of the great mysteries of her life’.
But it is perhaps lucky for us that she did. Her novels and short stories, beginning with At Mrs Lippincote’s (1945), are jewels of finely observed social comedy, where nothing very much happens except for the kinds of problems that everyone faces at one time or another – loss, loneliness, disappointment. They usually centre on the low-key troubles of an intelligent, sensitive woman, perhaps an artist or writer, but most likely a housewife. There are no twists or epiphanies, and little ‘plot’ to speak of. They are quiet and understated affairs, sharpened by an undercurrent of satire, with politics and the wider world intruding not at all. This was seemingly a conscious decision. ‘Sod it all’, she wrote to a friend. ‘I will write what I bloody will, and not worry whether or not it reflects the times’.
Taylor’s two most famous novels, Angel and Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont, both of which were made into films, are in many ways slight outliers but are still good places to start for those new to her oeuvre. For one thing, they are laugh-out-loud funny. Both novels will have you gleefully rereading entire passages for their sublime comedy, but they will also have you nodding along in sympathy and understanding.
She was seen by some as too genteel, too privileged, too low stakes – a mere lending library novelist
Of her other novels, everyone has their favourites (many consider 1951’s Brief Encounter-like A Game of Hide and Seek her best). My own are In a Summer Season (1961) and The Soul of Kindness (1964), which, as well as being wonderfully funny and penetratingly wise on all manner of subjects, also maintain a slightly intoxicating purity of mood and atmosphere throughout. Taylor said that she wrote ‘in scenes’, and her novels tend to unfurl organically, with her characters free to behave as people really do, not as plot or premise dictates.
Why then the uncertain reputation, the lack of formal recognition? To some extent, this was self-inflicted. Unlike her namesake, she was very much uninterested in fame and fortune. She avoided interviews and was shy and self-deprecating when suffering through them, telling one interviewer: ‘There is not very much to know about me. I have had a rather uneventful life, thank God.’ Added to this was her seeming unadventurousness: the very English middle-class milieu, the domestic settings, the often geriatric characters. She was never going to be fashionable. But she knew this, and didn’t mind.
Blaming, which Taylor finished after a serious operation and just before her death at the age of 63, is, understandably, retrospective and overshadowed by loss. It follows Amy Henderson as she comes to terms with the sudden death of her artist husband, Nick, while they are on holiday in Turkey. The central dilemma is the unwanted friendship that Amy develops with Martha, a dreary American writer obsessed with all things English who helped Amy in her time of need, and who now can’t be got rid of.
While it is perhaps not the best place to start when approaching Taylor’s fictional world for the first time, it is a somewhat fitting coda to a remarkable literary career, and, in its description of Martha, it offers a possibly wry acknowledgement of her own situation: ‘Her few books were handsomely printed, widely spaced on good paper, well-reviewed, and more or less unknown. Without fretting she waited to be discovered.’
So, please, look past the genteel surface and the self-effacing comments, and ignore those tinkling teacups, for there is a great deal of life and art to discover in the work of this other Elizabeth Taylor. Don’t keep her waiting any longer.
The joy of the jukebox
One of the peachiest moments in a life of unrepentant tavern-dwelling was my introduction to P.J. Clarke’s on Third Avenue. Here was a bar from central casting – Billy Wilder mocked it up, after a fashion, in The Lost Weekend – and the dollop of cream on this peach was the jukebox.
P.J. Clarke’s was described to me by one regular as ‘a midtown saloon for the tasselled-loafer set’. It remains the glory of Manhattan, which will never run short of places to hang one’s hat. And its jukebox had plenty of hits, but not the obvious ones.
Americans love their jukeys. One of the most generous belonged to Sterch’s, in Oak Park, Chicago, where a couple of bucks bought a dozen plays. Chicago is a famous music town, so you didn’t struggle to find something decent. Sadly, Sterch’s closed two years ago. In another Chicago bar, on Rush Street, I came across ‘Dear Mr Fantasy’ by Traffic. We-ll!
Finding the unexpected disc is the joy of a proper jukey. Any bar can offer so-called ‘classics’ from an approved list, many of which leave you cold. ‘River Deep, Mountain High’ and ‘Nights in White Satin’ are particular bores. Even a song as fine as ‘God Only Knows’ can be tiresome in a pub setting.
However, should you come across Shirley Bassey’s version of ‘Something’ in a Viennese kneipe, or David Rose’s ‘The Stripper’ in the middle of Derbyshire, then you’re a lucky chap. Ella Fitzgerald’s superb ‘Midnight Sun’ always lit up the night at the old Lion’s Head in Greenwich Village.
Milano’s on Houston was a Manhattan favourite, with its narrow passage behind the bar-perchers, and slightly Bohemian atmosphere. When you did eventually reach the other end of the bar – ‘breathe in!’ – there was a terrific jukey, which featured, among other gems, ‘Storm in a Teacup’ by the Fortunes. Bubble-gum pop on the Lower East Side! On the Upper West Side was Dive 75, where the jukey made English visitors feel at home. ‘Bus Stop’, Graham Gouldman’s song for the Hollies, scrubs up nicely.
We used to have good jukeys in our land. They adorned pubs as surely as crates of Mackeson. But those bottles have gone, and so have the jukeys. Now we have canned music chosen by someone else, when the purpose of taverns, surely, is to acknowledge that – within reason – the customer is king. Corbieres, behind St Ann’s Square in Manchester, does its bit – ‘the best jukebox in the world’, apparently, featuring all those delightful Mancunians – but it is such an unprepossessing place that those who step through its underground portal swiftly step out again.
What makes a good selection? The songs should be familiar, of course, but not too familiar. They don’t all have to be from the hit parade but they should have passed the test of time, and drinkers should be happy to hear them more than once.
Finding the unexpected disc is the joy of a proper jukey
The Sixties will be the dominant decade, for obvious reasons, but we shouldn’t be scared of delving into the decades that came before, and hauling out a country-tinged number, or some big-band jazz. There should also be some surprises. ‘Charmaine’, in Mantovani’s soupy arrangement, didn’t make the cut this time, which is not to say it never will.
Some performers should be on all lists: Sinatra, Frankie Valli, the Four Tops. So here is a preliminary inventory of 20 discs that would enrich any jukebox. It is personal, as lists are, but I bought only one of these records. The other 19 selected themselves, and they’re all crackers.
‘Baby, Don’t Change Your Mind’: Gladys Knight and the Pips
‘Sittin’ in the Park’: Georgie Fame and the Blue Flames
‘Don’t Make Me Over’: Dionne Warwick
‘Get Down Tonight’: KC & the Sunshine Band
‘Wichita Lineman’: Glen Campbell
‘Goin’ Back’: Dusty Springfield
‘If I Were a Carpenter’: Four Tops
‘Daydream’: Duke Ellington, with Johnny Hodges
‘Summer Wind’: Frank Sinatra
‘Little Sister’: Ry Cooder
‘Oh Lonesome Me’: Don Gibson
‘Keep on Runnin’’: Spencer Davis Group
‘Street Life’: Roxy Music
‘We Can Work It Out’: the Beatles
‘Hurt So Good’: Susan Cadogan
‘There’s a Ghost in My House’: R Dean Taylor
‘You’re Ready Now’: Frankie Valli
‘Have You Ever Seen the Rain?’: Creedence Clearwater Revival
‘Moonglow’: Artie Shaw
‘Love Hurts’: Everly Brothers
Go on, pop-pickers. Beat that!
Ms. Rachel’s ‘accidental’ anti-Semitism
Who among us hasn’t accidentally liked an Instagram comment calling for America to be “free from the Jews?” YouTube children’s entertainer Ms. Rachel fell into that trap this week, issuing a pathetic and quite possibly insincere apology online after one of her subscribers caught her in the act of upvoting Jew-hate. “I’m sure that’s an accident so wanted to let you know,” the fan said. Was it really, though?
“Deleted,” Ms. Rachel, whose real name is Rachel Accurso, responded. “How horrible. Oh wait. Let me check. Yah, I did delete one like that.” She added, “I hate anti-Semitism.”
That didn’t defuse the situation. Ms. Rachel, clearly the victim here, posted a video to Instagram hours later. She wasn’t wearing makeup or her trademark overalls. “I thought I deleted a comment,” she said through tears. “I’m so broken over this… I feel like we can’t be human anymore online. And I’m so sorry for the confusion it caused. I’m so sorry if anyone thought that I would ever agree with something so horrible and anti-Semitic like that. I don’t.”
But she didn’t delete the comment. She liked it. As one person noted on Instagram, “this gaslighting is WILD.” Wild indeed, and it begs the question as to why a generationally popular children’s entertainer is getting anti-Semitic comments in her feed in the first place.
The organization StopAntisemitism named Ms. Rachel a finalist for its 2025 “Antisemite of the Year Award,” alleging she pushed “Hamas propaganda,” shared “inflated casualty claims” and ignored Israeli child victims. Ms. Rachel said in response that she supports all children. She also posted a short video where she introduced “my friend Motaz,” Palestinian photojournalist Motaz Azaiza, clapping her hands and saying “YAAAAAY!” When she gave a speech at the Glamour magazine “Woman of the Year” ceremony in 2025, she wore a dress featuring artwork by Palestinian children and referred to the “genocide” in Gaza.
None of this makes Ms. Rachel a Nazi propagandist, peppy Hitler in a pink headband. Many sane people have expressed concerns about the well-being of people in Palestine. She’s not a propagandist for pure anti-Semitism. But she is a creature of the global left, and anyone who’s been following the news knows that there’s a strong, sinister undercurrent of anti-Jewish sentiment in left-wing discourse. Someone is whispering these ideas into her ear.
If an entertainer for adults had more than 5 million TikTok subscribers, was talking about “genocide,” and was liking comments calling to “free America for the Jews,” it would be concerning. The fact that she’s backdooring these sentiments for kids is creepy and alarming.
Ms. Rachel may not have hard political power, but she does wield soft cultural power.
She’s friends with New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, and served on his inauguration committee. On Sunday, she posted a video with Mamdani, where they sang, “The Mayor on the bus says hello friends,” and “the money on the bus goes clink clink clink,” and then Mamdani interrupts her and says “the buses are going to be free though.” She says, “this is my song,” and then sings, “the babies on the bus go wah wah wah.”
“Aren’t they happy about the free childcare?” asks Mayor Mamdani.
It’s kind of cute, mostly cringe and lame. But they definitely don’t sing a verse about “the Jews on the bus.” In Mamdani’s and Ms. Rachel’s ideal New York, there won’t be any.
Kat Abughazaleh catches some Zs
Kat Abughazaleh is one of those influencers who – unnervingly – seem to pop out of nowhere fully formed. There was a stint at Media Matters – which in many ways pioneered the modern industry in “disinformation”-watchdogging, political fact-checking and “studying the far right” – where she made short-form videos taking the fight to people like Tucker Carlson. After the 2024 election Abughazaleh, now 26, was one of several youthful activists who called for the destruction of the “gerontocracy” in the Democratic party. She is now a candidate for Illinois’s 9th congressional district, after first issuing a primary challenge to 81-year-old Representative Jan Schakowsky. “I just couldn’t watch it anymore. I thought, fuck it, I’m going to run,” she told WIRED. She has regularly appeared on CNN panels since – and last September she was thrown to the ground by an ICE agent.
On Tuesday evening Abughazaleh failed to appear at a campaign event with Indivisible, an anti-MAGA community organization in Chicago. Her campaign released a statement claiming that the candidate had been asleep. “I have a chronic illness called narcolepsy. It makes me extremely tired and occasionally causes ‘sleep attacks,’ times when my brain literally cannot stay awake,” she claimed. “I ended up sleeping through alarms, calls, and even my campaign manager knocking on my door repeatedly.”
A lady who has made a career out of criticizing disinformation and of accusing others of sloth now having to give a dubious and opaque explanation for why she fell asleep? The irony is not lost on Cockburn. Welcome to the gerontocracy, Kat.
Why I can’t resist a red-light district
I am writing this on the 17th floor of the Novotel Sukhumvit, on Soi 4, aka “Soi Nana,” in Khlong Toei, Bangkok. For anyone that knows the Big Mango, they’ve already guessed where I am, psychogeographically: from that tell-tale word “Nana.”
For those still in the dark, I am on the rude, ribald, rambunctious street that is Soi 4, which is full of tattoo parlors, 7-Elevens, dried-squid-sellers, fake Italian winebars, blaring “British” pubs, slightly dodgy pharmacists, hair salons that do laundry as well – it culminates in Nana Plaza, a multitiered al fresco mall of gaudy and noisy go-go bars that probably constitutes the single largest collection of sex workers on the planet.
As prostitution is technically prohibited in Japan, the actual transaction is done via cake
In other words, I’m in one of Bangkok’s most notorious red-light districts. Not by mistake, but by intention. If you need proof: I’ve been coming to this precise corner of Bangkok so long I can recall when this hotel, the sky-scraping Novotel, was a chic, low-slung seafood joint which did great cioppino. And I can also remember what came before the seafood joint – a sleazy open-air beer garden, which I rather liked.
Clearly I am seduced by Soi Nana. But the truth is I am intrigued by red-light districts anywhere in the world, and I actively seek them out. This is not just for the obvious reasons, even if William Faulkner did once opine that “living above a brothel is the ideal for any writer, it’s quiet by day so you can work, but there’s plenty of company at night.”
The reasons I like red-light districts are numerous. One, they can tell you an awful lot about the society that hosts them; two, they are magnificent places to observe the divine comedy of humanity, in all its flawed, lovable, weird, yearning, melancholy, funny, shocking, fried-cockroach-eating, happy-sad strangeness; and of course three, they generally have the wildest bars with the weirdest drinkers with the wackiest stories. So which red-light districts have stayed with me in memory? Which are the quaintest, or quirkiest? Let’s start with my present locale. Bangkok actually has at least three red-light zones. Patpong is the oldster, and it still retains the faintest whiff of the days when it was frequented by GIs having some R&R from the Vietnam War and watching the notorious “ping pong shows.” It is also past its best as a shiny erotic spectacle, and is now being gentrified into a chic boystown for arty high-society Siamese gays.
The third red-light zone here is Soi Cowboy. This is the place to go if you want to be dazzled by neon and you like the idea of sitting squished together with Japanese salarymen as you watch 100 girls gyrate on a glass floor above you, at which point you understand the meaning of “no panty bar.”
Despite these attractions, it is still Soi Nana that most compels me, because it poses so many questions. Why, for instance, are the kathoeys – the ladyboys who patrol the soi with the hauteur of catwalk models – so frequently enormous? I’m not talking merely tall. I’m talking 6’2” in flats, hands that can slam-dunk a basketball. Is there some genetic correlation between gender dysphoria and greater size? A hormonal explanation? Nobody seems to know. I’ve asked doctors, I’ve asked the kathoeys themselves. The doctors shrug; the kathoeys tell me to buy them a drink.
Then there’s the newer mystery: the women in niqabs: faces covered, only eyes visible, working the same patch as women in hot pants and crop tops. Their clients are generally Arab men – Bangkok’s Arabtown is two streets away – but what fantasy is being serviced here? Sex with a respectable wife? Something Freudian involving mother? I have no idea. I find it genuinely baffling, which is a feeling I treasure.
Moving beyond Thailand, Asia in general is properly diverse – for good and bad. Big Mango Street in Jakarta is dull, despite the name. Geylang in Singapore is orderly, expensive, with excellent food. As for Hong Kong, to my surprise it barely has a red-light zone, unlike Kolkata, which definitely has – and I wish it didn’t.
In Kolkata I saw girls who looked distressingly young, daubed in makeup. I was told they were Nepalese girls brought down from the mountains. It is probably the only occasion I have fled a red-light district in moral horror – which is my failing, of course. But at least I am honest.
Japan, as always, is in a category of its own. In Osaka there’s an entire neighborhood where exquisite young women sit displayed in the ground floors of traditional wooden houses, the front wall simply removed. They pose on cushions in nurses’ uniforms, or tartan skirts, or artfully loosened kimonos. Each is supervised by a madam sitting nearby, invariably scrolling her phone, suffused with terminal boredom. As prostitution is technically prohibited in Japan, the actual transaction is done via cake. No, really: you buy a cake and that entitles you to take the girl upstairs where you can have your cake and eat it.
Europe is almost as varied when it comes to red-light districts. For real cultural peculiarity, I recommend Germany. I was once sent on an assignment, with an American photographer friend, to investigate the sex business in Cologne. The Germans are pretty relaxed about sex work, and in Cologne that relaxation has been industrialized.
For example, you can visit Europe’s biggest single brothel, Pascha, with its “ten floors of whores.” You can also go to one of Germany’s many FKK clubs – 1920s nudist clubs which have become upmarket bordellos, often complete with hot tubs, saunas, luxury gin bars, leggy Ukrainian girls and overexcited Taiwanese businessmen.
If that’s too posh, you can visit the official streetwalking zone on the grim post-industrial outskirts. We went on a wintry dusk and as soon as the first streetwalker saw my friend’s camera – he wasn’t using it, it was poking out of a bag – she brutally attacked him with a bottle of Bailey’s Irish Cream.
You could have a ‘souvenir girlfriend’ for the night, if she liked you – and you had the necessary US dollars
Where else springs to mind? I will never forget Cheb, on the Czech-German border, which for a while after the fall of the Berlin Wall became a magnet for prostitution – and the selling of garden gnomes. I am not joking. Driving around Cheb, you’d pass a massive brothel, then a store selling a great selection of gnomes. Then, another cat-house. Then more gnomes. Cheb and its outskirts aren’t the place for everyone, but it’s an absolutely brilliant destination if you desperately want to have bleak, soulless commercial sex just after buying a plastic elf clutching a fishing rod.
Further east, Minsk in Belarus was notable. There I found that the brothels had been made semi-official and were inside the posh hotels, which gave them an air of faded Soviet planning – but with added lingerie. Meanwhile Cuba was similar yet completely different – prostitution was tolerated but it wasn’t localized, it was everywhere. The very first day in-country, a remarkably beautiful girl approached me on a beach and, within two minutes, asked if she could come back to my hotel room. This was about 2 p.m. I said “No” in confusion and she stalked off, giving me a scornful glance which said, “You will regret this.” Ahhhh, she wasn’t wrong.
As for my favorite (Nana aside) that is probably Ho Chi Minh City. Back in the day, prostitution was illegal in Saigon and yet courteously organized: it was mostly found in a fun little bar district, where it was agreed you could have a “souvenir girlfriend” for the night, if she liked you – and if you had the necessary US dollars.
I confess I arranged a souvenir girlfriend, called Bun, and she was very pretty. We went back to my luxe French colonial hotel and then the hotel manager found out and rang up angrily saying “police come, police come now.” It was me that was in trouble: I was about to be arrested.
I thought Bun would be horrified but she just laughed, chucked her dress on, grabbed my hand and led me down some dingy backstairs. Then we escaped through a firedoor and climbed on her motorbike and roared away exultantly, into the sultry whirling starlit tropical night.
All of which brings me back to why I am so drawn to red-light districts. Yes they can often be tough, maudlin, challenging. All of this is true. And yet, if you want to see the vivid pageant of humanity, there is nowhere better.
Meet Katie Miller, MAGA’s Oprah
When Trump administration figures want to do a warm, humanizing interview these days, they can’t depend on the mainstream media. It’s often adversarial or downright hostile. Chatty bro podcasters such as Joe Rogan give them room to talk, but also challenge them on policy positions. Their best bet is The Katie Miller Podcast, a show hosted by Katie Miller, the wife of Stephen Miller, Trump’s chief policy advisor. She’s quickly emerged as the Barbara Walters, or Oprah Winfrey, of the new American conservatism.
If Miller feels like a relatively new character in The Real Housewives of Pennsylvania Avenue, that’s because she married Stephen Miller in February 2020, toward the end of Donald Trump’s first term, meaning she was poised for a bigger role but had to improvise, like all Trump loyalists, while the chief was in exile.
Before then, the Florida-born Miller was a background Republican staffer, beginning as a House intern in 2013, aged 22. She quickly moved up to become press secretary for Republican senators Steve Daines and Martha McSally (not at the same time), deputy press secretary at the Department of Homeland Security and, at the end of Trump’s first term, press secretary and communications director for then-vice president Mike Pence.
At the dawn of Trump 2.0, she came aboard as the communications director for Elon Musk’s campaign to reduce the size of government, an effort that Musk generously called “a little bit successful.” When Musk left government, so did Miller, announcing that she was going to help him with strategic communications across his various business ventures. Musk, however, made clear that he was leaving government not to be an exterior political actor, but to focus on the science and technology development that made his name in the first place.
Miller, foremost a political operator, drifted back into Trump’s orbit without making a big deal of things. She seems to like crossing bridges, not burning them. Instead, she started the podcast, as effective a piece of personal branding as we’ve seen in the Trump era, with her main audience being conservative women and moms, who she feels current media underserves. It would be, she said, a conservative answer to the popular podcast Call Her Daddy. “As a mom of three young kids, who eats healthy, goes to the gym, works full time I know there isn’t a podcast for women like myself,” Miller wrote on X in August 2025.
Since 2020, Katie and Stephen Miller have had three kids. In an interview with Fox News’s Jesse Watters, Katie referred to her husband as a “sexual matador” – a jarring image for the liberal media who prefer to portray him as Nosferatu in a suit. She also said: “He’s an incredibly inspiring man who gets me going in the morning with his speeches, being like, ‘Let’s start the day, I’m going to defeat the left and we are going to win.’” Katie is the soft power in Stephen’s relentless efforts to crush the libs. One of her first guests was Vice President J.D. Vance, who used the forum not to discuss tariffs or the left’s war on Christian values, but to talk about himself as a husband and a dad.
Vance said that his kids think his job is yelling at people on the phone. Miller asked him how he deals with public temper tantrums. “I immediately grab them, take them to the bathroom and say, ‘You’ve got to cut this shit out,’” he replied.
Katie Miller, foremost a political operator, seems to like crossing bridges, not burning them
Miller also asked Speaker Mike Johnson which House members he’d be most likely to butt-dial. She also got Mike Tyson to admit he’d used fentanyl and say that he thinks cannabis helps athletes relax and perform better when they compete.
When Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth sat down in her studio, Miller asked him which administration members he’d most like to babysit his kids. “Oh, I mean, not your husband or Marco,” he said, but added that Miller’s husband is the person in the White House he’d turn to in an emergency.
Miller’s main function, or mission, is to make the most powerful people in the world seem like they’re just like us. When Musk appeared as a guest, he told a story about how his son insisted on ordering a cheeseburger at a sushi restaurant. In a recent interview with Health Secretary RFK Jr., he said of Trump’s diet: “The interesting thing about the President is that he eats really bad food, which is McDonald’s and, you know, candy and Diet Coke. He drinks Diet Coke at all times. He has the constitution of a deity. I don’t know how he’s alive, but he is.”
Sometimes guests make seeming relatable hard. When FBI Director Kash Patel appeared on the show last year with his girlfriend Alexis Wilkins, a Republican operative and country singer, Miller joked “Where’s her ring?” Addressing rumors that Wilkins is a “honeypot” who’s attempting to entrap Patel, she teasingly asked her, “Are you a Mossad agent?”
That interview in particular came under scrutiny because it aired during a manhunt for the Brown University mass shooter (the shooting occurred after Patel and Wilkins taped the episode). Still, Patel didn’t come off great, given that he’s using government planes to jet off to see Wilkins perform. “If I was actually abusing the privilege, I’d go see every one of her shows – I think I get to like 15 percent,” he said in his own defense.
On New Year’s Eve at Mar-a-Lago, the Millers showed off Katie’s baby bump; a fourth child is on the way. But it’s unlikely a baby will slow down the podcast. “Being a mother has made my career richer, fuller, better,” Miller told Fox News last year. “It doesn’t inhibit your career. In fact, it adds gasoline to the fire.”
Hunting for the Pizza Hut of my youth
About 15 miles off the I-80, tucked away in the Cleveland suburb of Warren, you’ll find a delightful bit of yesteryear, preserved from the 1970s and serving up your childhood dreams. Here you’ll find a Pizza Hut that forgot to evolve into a quick counter-service and delivery outpost like almost all the others.
I had heard rumors of Pizza Hut Classics for some time. For years I’ve wanted to find one. As a person who would live solely on pizza if it weren’t for the heart disease and kidney stones that would inevitably follow, I knew I had to find one. Lo and behold, one such restaurant happened to be in my path on a road trip to Detroit over the holidays.
The good people of Warren, Ohio, don’t know what they have
If you’re a person of a certain age who grew up in America in the 1980s or 1990s, the Warren Pizza Hut is just as you might remember it. As you enter you’re greeted by a host, ready to whisk you away to nostalgia-land. The restaurant floor is covered in green carpeting, the tables in red-checked vinyl table coverings. There are red banquettes in the booths, with the legendary Tiffany-style Pizza Hut lamps over each one.
We’re here on a Saturday and discover it’s the only day of the week where the all-you-can-eat pizza buffet isn’t on offer. We’re also sad to find out we’re the only customers – the good people of Warren, Ohio, don’t understand what they have. Or maybe we’re just annoying tourists from New York. And maybe they understand better than we do that there’s no buffet on Saturdays.
The salad bar, though, is roaring and ready to go. We’re told by our server that “the salad bar is $3.99 and you can go up as many times as you want.” Music to my ears. There are few times in life I would say I love a salad, but all of them are times when I get to load a plate with iceberg lettuce, bacon bits, shredded cheese and croutons and drench it in ranch dressing.
Unfortunately, the bacon bits are missing. The bar also features an assortment of raw vegetables, which I bypass. The biggest disappointment was that it wasn’t covered in kale. Pizza Hut was, at one point, the largest buyer of kale in the US – they used it as decoration on their salad bars long before Whole Foods made it a staple on your plate.
Our Pepsis come served in red plastic cups. We’ve opted for the medium pepperoni-lovers pizza and a personal Buffalo chicken pizza. While the normal pizza looks somewhat normal, the personal pizza almost certainly came directly from a plastic bag. On reflection, they were just as I remembered from the Book It program, though I thought they were more delicious back then.
The Book It program, for those who never learned to read, was and still is a program put on by Pizza Hut to incentivize children to read. After finishing a book, your teacher would give you a sticker on a badge. When you had collected a certain amount of stickers, you could turn your badge in at a Pizza Hut in return for a personal pizza. This was dangerous for me, a young child who loved nothing more than to read books and eat pizza. It may help explain why my doctor recently referred me for a cardiac CT scan.
I won’t bother going into detail on the actual quality of the food – it was exactly what you would expect. It tasted like Pizza Hut, for better or worse. The menu is dotted with old classics such as the Big New Yorker, one of my favorite innovations from the early 2000s, with which I have some history and hold a legendary distinction among my friends for regularly taking down solo. (This might also help explain the CT scan.) Disappointingly absent was the Bigfoot Pizza, a square 21-slice pie from the early 1990s which I hoped had lived on somewhere.
It might be important to pause for a moment and ask how this restaurant still exists. Well, we can ask – but we’re unlikely to find any real answers. There’s basically zero information anywhere on the internet about an initiative from Pizza Hut to keep these sit-down restaurants going. Any research will just turn up a few food blogs and some Reddit threads asking the same question. There’s nothing on the Pizza Hut website mentioning Pizza Hut Classics. Emails to the chain’s public relations team went unanswered.
The only sign that this is an intentional preservation of the past is quite literally a sign – at some point, the giant roadside sign has been converted into a “Pizza Hut Classic” one. Our server, though, tells us that she grew up in Warren and the restaurant hasn’t changed since the 1970s, ruling out any sort of viral marketing stunts – though if that was Pizza Hut’s plan, they haven’t done a great job spreading the word.
While Pizza Hut is keeping mum on the topic, the internet has done a solid job of chronicling the Classics. Reddit forums are alive with people stumbling upon them and alerting the thread, and one enterprising Substacker called the Retrologist has been compiling a list of known Pizza Hut Classic locations. By his count, there’s an astonishing 83 of them, which is hard to believe considering almost no one I know knew of their existence.
The world is full of nostalgia for the restaurants of our youth. In New York, a slew of spots have opened over the past few years mimicking the supper clubs of the Midwest or French bistros of old New York. Some of the hardest reservations in town are still the classics – try getting into Minetta Tavern or Keens without a reservation at least a week in advance and you’ll be disappointed. As far as I can tell from my Instagram feed, one of the hottest restaurants in LA at the moment is Max and Helen’s, a faux-vintage diner serving matzoh ball soup, patty melts and breakfast all day. You’ll wait hours in line just to get in.
In our digital age, there’s something comforting about going to a warm, cozy, no-frills spot that will serve you piles of hearty food. Everyone seems to be looking for a connection to the past. And for someone who grew up in the 1980s and 1990s, the idea of a restaurant that slings pizza and pitchers of beer and soda makes my heart sing – even if my doctor doesn’t like the tune.
The vast landscape of American barbecue
Some 25 years ago, I walked into the University of South Carolina library to check out a book on the history of barbecue. I had just finished a PhD in American literature, but had become more interested in culinary history. I had also taken to driving the state’s backroads, seeking out old-school barbecue restaurants. Researching the history of barbecue seemed the perfect next move.
To my surprise, no one had published a book on the subject. The most that had been written about pre-20th century barbecue were a few sparse paragraphs in larger works on food history. I ended up having to write one myself.
It took a while. The first edition of Barbecue: The History of an American Institution was published in 2010. By that time, I had moved to Charleston, started a food blog just as the city’s food scene was gaining national attention and ended up writing restaurant reviews for the City Paper and later for the Post and Courier, the local daily.
The American barbecue landscape looked very different back then. For starters, it was still highly regionalized. Until I moved from my hometown of Greenville, South Carolina, to Columbia for graduate school – a trip of 100 miles – I had never encountered the Midlands’ unique yellow mustard-based sauce, nor its iconic hash and rice. I had read about Alabama-style white sauce and Texas-style brisket and hot links, but I’d never tasted them. Beef was rarely found in a Carolina barbecue joint – and when it was, you wouldn’t want to eat it.
Researching barbecue history in 2001 felt like chronicling a dying art. Barbecue had all but disappeared from the restaurant landscape by the 1980s, squeezed out by low-cost fast-food chains and shifting consumer tastes. The joints that remained had mostly switched to cooking on smokeless gas-fired pits, and too often the side dishes were afterthoughts, frozen French fries or beans dumped from a can.
By the time my history was published in 2010, though, it was clear that barbecue not only would survive but was enjoying a remarkable renaissance. Food shows on cable television had sparked a renewed interest in old-school restaurants and live-fire cooking. The competition circuit was booming, and a wave of cookbooks and internet forums were teaching a new generation how to barbecue and, in the process, blurring old regional boundaries.
In the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, Americans were eager for simpler, more traditional styles of dining. A new wave of restaurateurs, many drawn from the ranks of out-of-work home builders and classically trained chefs, decided to try their hands at barbecue, bringing a wave of energy and creativity to a formerly hidebound industry.
In 2014, Southern Living recruited me to be its contributing barbecue editor, a freelance role that largely involves driving around the South, eating barbecue and writing about it. (It’s a tough gig.) I lucked into a tableside seat just as the boom really started.
Texas-style beef brisket marched first across the South and then took over the entire nation. Now Carolina-style whole hog and hash are making incursions into Texas, and diners from Boston to Los Angeles are slathering Alabama white sauce on smoked chicken wings. American-style barbecue is being embraced around the world, too, with craft joints serving pulled pork in Paris and brisket in Bangkok. American pitmasters, in return, are embracing global flavors – tucking smoked pork into bowls of noodles, lacing sausage with sofrito, glazing ribs with gochujang.
That brings us to this column, which I’ve signed on to write each month for The Spectator. Though it will sometimes have a historical angle, the focus will be on exploring the current American barbecue scene and how it continues to evolve.
We’ll probe the stubborn appeal of brisket, that invasive species from Texas that spread like kudzu across the country. We’ll check in on what’s happening at barbecue restaurants as well as in backyards, as more home cooks try their hand at the grill and the smoker. We’ll explore the intersection of American barbecue with global flavors and ponder the limits of such fusions.
There’s plenty to explore, even here in the winter. For some reason, most publications only run barbecue features during the brief window from Memorial Day in May to Labor Day in September. Perhaps because I’m from the South, where the weather is insufferably hot during those months, that seasonality never made sense to me.
What better time to stand beside a blazing fire than when it’s good and cold outside? Or to explore America’s iconic barbecue stews – Brunswick, burgoo, hash – which are as warming and comforting as they are tasty? If nothing else, it’s the ideal time to hone new techniques and fine tune recipes in advance of spring barbecue season. So, stay tuned. We have much to chew on in the months ahead.
Will Trump face a domestic backlash over his Greenland caper?
It began, as most things do under Donald Trump, with an idea that struck outside observers as a lark. An interested party – in this case, billionaire Ron Lauder – suggested to the President during his first term that the United States should acquire Greenland, a move that would represent the largest expansion of US territory since the purchase of Alaska from the Russians more than 150 years ago.
The notion was reportedly considered and then left on the shelf, like so many ideas in Trump’s first term. Yet time away from the presidency gave it more resonance. Now the President is back on the case – and he seems very committed to the move, to the shock and horror of European observers who never took his Arctic ambitions seriously.
Trump’s bluster about expansion should not have confused the fact that there is a long history among the Republican foreign-policy expert class, particularly for those mindful of Chinese and Russian threats to the Northwest Passage, of focusing on the importance of achieving an increased security posture in Greenland.
The addition of scads of rare-earth minerals, which the Danes who are currently in charge of the world’s largest island have not fully accessed, just makes it even more enticing for the Trump administration. A security-justified move that grants massive access to land and resources? Of course that’s something this President will want to do, the delicate feelings of Denmark be damned.
There are any number of moves that could have been entertained by the Europeans in the intervening time. A condominium arrangement, which would entail joint sovereignty over Greenland, could have been created. A renewed security agreement (the previous one was drawn up in 1951) involving increased access to the island in exchange for American tax dollars directed to Greenlanders was also possible.
Instead, the disagreement has turned very sour. It took on a more personal flavor when Trump was not offered the Nobel Peace Prize for his moves in the Middle East (although he didn’t technically qualify for it, time-wise). So on January 17, the President announced a plethora of tariffs and the Europeans took great offense. Trump doubled down by posting purportedly private messages from the head of NATO and French President Emmanuel Macron on Truth Social. France, Germany and Sweden all deployed small groups of troops to the island in a show of solidarity. Senators in Washington, including a significant number of Republicans, issued skeptical statements. And European Union President Ursula von der Leyen called for “permanent” independence from the US. “Of course nostalgia is part of our human story, but nostalgia will not bring back the old order,” she said, in one of the more honest acknowledgements you can hear from a Eurocrat.
Will Greenland fall into the category of ‘things the staff wishes we’d put further down the list’?
At the Davos gathering, Trump suddenly declared that he wouldn’t impose the tariffs on Europe or use military force, and followed up by announcing an agreement over a new strategic framework for the security of Greenland.
At its worst, these new developments risk undoing the NATO alliance at a particularly inopportune time. Even if you buy into the idea, as many close to the President do, that the alliance is a decrepit relic of the Cold War, its function has proven itself through the Ukraine war. NATO has, in a world full of hot spots, been a quieter participant at the table during Trump’s tenure. The President’s much-vocalized efforts to make the European nations pay more for their own defense has borne fruit. And if the point of the alliance is to prevent an explosion in nuclear weapons production, that purpose has held. What might happen after a breakdown of the alliance remains an open question.
There is, moreover, a risk of political and economic backlash for Trump. His threat of a trade war with Europe in the interests of territorial expansion is not exactly the reason that people voted Trump back into office, and there is potentially a significant amount of uncertainty that could come to the American economy in very short order. For Republicans on Capitol Hill who were just beginning to feel some degree of confidence heading into the midterms, as economic signals show silver linings and tax refunds start flowing, this is a roll of the dice that could end a lot of careers.
For now, the diplomats are just talking. Danish foreign minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen and Greenlandic foreign minister Vivian Motzfeldt met with Vice President J.D. Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio in Washington to discuss the matter, with comments afterwards that indicated a major gap in opinions. “It was not an easy meeting,” Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen told the Wall Street Journal, adding that “there is a fundamental disagreement because the American ambition to take over Greenland is intact.”
But is it an American ambition or a purely Trumpian one? According to a recent poll from YouGov, 28 percent of those surveyed supported a purchase of the island, and just 8 percent approved of a military move to take it over, with more than half of Republicans in opposition. Using military might to bomb Iran or exfiltrate Nicolás Maduro is not in the same category as using it to take over a little-populated island most Americans have no desire to even visit.
A central question about this second Trump term has been: how much is too much? For a President who wants to move at lightning speed and remake the world, the country, the courts, the economy, the military and even the White House itself, is there a point where the breakneck pace becomes far too much for his team to handle effectively? Will this be a case where, looking back, something like this attempt at Greenland falls into the category of “things the staff wishes we’d put further down the list”?
Trump’s Greenland effort could prove more costly than other choices he has made on the world stage, particularly for the American economy and the future of European security. But it seems unclear who has the President’s ear to say it – certainly not Republicans on Capitol Hill. The consequences of the end to any semblance of global order isn’t a serious threat if, as a party, you view that order as a slumping zombie anyway. Of course, there’s one more person who might suffer the consequences even if Trump’s gambit is successful. But who says Marco Rubio can’t do one more job?
The mindfulness behind the cooking of Buddhist nun Jeong Kwan
I am somewhat allergic to food nomenclature: zero-waste, plant-based, seasonal, small plates, “live cultures,” foraged, farm-to-fork. It’s not that these are inherently off-putting concepts, but I associate them with “foodie” fads, gimmicks and big egos.
All of those trendy labels could apply to the food cooked by the “philosopher chef,” a Buddhist nun called Venerable Jeong Kwan, plus you could throw in a dash of mindfulness and eastern spirituality for good measure. Yet Kwan, who is venerated by Le Bernardin’s Eric Ripert and Noma’s René Redzepi, and has featured in an episode of Chef’s Table, is the furthest thing from an ego-chef. She has no restaurant, no recipes, cooks for only two other nuns and begins her meals by reflecting on her lowliness: “Where has this food come from? I am ashamed to be eating it. I will take it as medicine to get rid of greed in my mind and to keep my physical being in order to achieve enlightenment.”
Our need for food translates into the metaphor of our need for the divine,for nirvana: a spiritual hunger
I spoke to Kwan, who is usually based in South Korea, in a small, quiet classroom of Le Cordon Bleu in London before a class she was teaching on “Plant-Based Culinary Arts.” As her cooking adheres to the Buddhist principle of nonviolence, it includes no meat, dairy or eggs, nor does she use the “five pungent plants” – onions, garlic, chives, scallions and leeks – which are said to whet the appetite and stimulate lust (when cooked) and anger (when raw).
So food is a temptation to gluttony, a way of flexing money or taste, an aphrodisiac, fuel for rage. Then what business does a nun have in a Cordon Bleu kitchen when she could be living on locusts and honey, or waiting for manna to fall from heaven?
Cooking is part of what Kwan, speaking through a translator, called “practice”: disciplined mindfulness, a spiritual effort to abandon earthly desire and escape the wheel of life and death. “I take my ingredients as an extension of practice,” she said, which involves the mind as well as the body. “You start noticing the cycles of nature” – cooking with what is in season in her garden or with what she has preserved for winter, watching a seed give way to a stem, leaves, flowers and fruit before returning to the earth – “and in that way, you also search for yourself.”
A process of coming to terms with the transience of all things, including your own life… that’s one way to describe cooking. It’s not, however, completely surprising that a nun would have a somewhat lofty attitude towards food. Every major religion has its culinary rituals – its symbolic dishes, its prayers, chants, songs, offerings, fasts – which hint that man does not live by bread alone. Our need for food translates into the metaphor of our need for the divine, for nirvana: a spiritual hunger.
Kwan wore a knitted cap over her shaved head and sat cross-legged on a chair, speaking with lively gestures from her small but obviously deft hands. “When I see ingredients,” she said, “I intuitively know what needs to be done, how to season them, shape them, cook them.”
She learned to cook by watching her mother, but her method goes beyond mere mechanical skill: “I follow the connection (in-yeon, the karmic connection built over past lives) with an ingredient or with the people I am feeding. The connection arises naturally. It’s not something you can force.”
In a past life, she said, she must have been a cook. In this life, she was about to teach a class to some journalists and food influencers who were waiting in the kitchen next door. If Kwan’s cooking is an intuition, a skill accumulated over various reincarnations, how can it be explained to a squad of the unenlightened? The boring answer is that we were given step-by-step recipes and premeasured ingredients to re-create her famous soy-braised shiitake mushrooms. The rest, I guess, came down to in-yeon mixed with equal parts of time, technique and luck.
I felt both calmed and unsettled in Kwan’s company. To tell the truth, I’ve had an irrational fear of reincarnation since childhood. I am scared of the thought of dying and waking up as somebody or something new, with no recollection of my past life, and having to do it all over again. Where Kwan is at peace with her impermanence, I am deeply and fearfully attached to my one life. The idea of being part of a cycle of nature and rebirth, with a course in between for the maggots, absolutely spoils my appetite.
Kwan had to confront life’s impermanence early on. When she was 17, her mother died suddenly. “I was filled with grief and resentment,” she told me, but it was the beginning of her life of practice. She decided to run away from home, without telling anyone, and joined a community of monks at Baekyangsa Temple, where she still lives. “I thought: ‘If I were to marry and have children, would it be right for my son or daughter to carry sadness like mine in their heart?’ I didn’t want to pass on that suffering.” In time, though, that suffering yielded to acceptance, then gratitude. Kwan thanks her mother for giving her the opportunity to enter the temple, and her mother’s wisdom is still alive in the kitchen.
Near her hermitage, Kwan tends to a small garden beside a stream and ginkgo trees. “I till the soil, fertilize it, plant seeds, and what grows is mostly vegetables: lettuce, napa cabbage, eggplant, zucchini, cucumber.” To cook anything requires months of patience, especially when you consider the time it takes her to ferment traditional Korean ingredients: kimchi, gochujang chili paste, persimmon vinegar, syrups from fruits packed in sugar and left for months to macerate, “liquid gold” soy sauce aged for 15, 20, 30 years. Some of her soy sauces will outlive her – but that, she would say, is the point.
Why EU farmers would object to a South American trade deal
It was a weekend of mixed emotions for the European Union. There was the news from Donald Trump that he will impose a 10 percent tariff on eight European countries in retaliation for their opposition to his plans to take control of Greenland. But on a brighter note, the EU finally signed the Mercosur trade agreement with several South American countries. The European Commission hailed it as the creation of ‘a free-trade zone of roughly 700 million people’, one which they promise will save EU companies more than €4 billion a year in customs duties.
Ursula von der Leyen, the Commission president, said: ‘We choose fair trade over tariffs, we chose a productive long-term partnership over isolation.’
The prospect of a trade war between the US and EU may convince MEPs to ratify this deal
The Federation of German Industries praised the deal as a strong signal for free trade, delighted with what it will mean for the automotive industry, mechanical engineering and the pharmaceutical sector. Currently, car exports to Mercosur countries are subject to a 35 percent tariff.
The response in France wasn’t quite as ecstatic. Jordan Bardella, president of the National Rally, called the deal an ‘extremely dark day for French agriculture’ and pointed the finger of blame at Emmanuel Macron. The fact that it had been signed in the face of French opposition, said Bardella, ‘symbolizes a series of failures and abandonments on the part of a President of the Republic who is incapable of defending the higher interests of the nation’.
This view is shared by farmers. More than 5,000 of them and 750 tractors invaded Strasbourg on Tuesday and there were clashes with riot police outside the European parliament. Regardless of whether MEPs voted on Wednesday to refer the Mercosur deal to the European Court of Justice, the farmers will keep the pressure on Paris and Brussels.
It has not gone unnoticed by them that Macron is taking a tougher line defending Europe against Trump than he did in sticking up for their interests with this deal. Most of them believe their President is indifferent to their plight, and that soon South American meat will flood into Europe. Beef imports will be limited to 99,000 tons a year and poultry to 180,000 tons, but that isn’t really the point for the farmers. It’s the fact that South American competitors aren’t subjected to the same stringent regulations on animal welfare and the use of pesticides as they are.
Farmers believe that the Mercosur deal will be the final nail in their coffin. There were 1.6 million farms in France in 1970; today there are around 450,000, and the despair within the industry has never been greater. A farmer commits suicide every two days in France, a phenomenon that is also present in other European countries. Last year an elderly farmer took his own life half a mile from where I live in Burgundy. His brother, who continues to farm the land with the help of a manager, gave a resigned shrug when I asked him recently what he thought of the Mercosur deal. All these decisions, he told me, are made by politicians who know nothing of farming.
Politicians such as Annie Genevard, France’s minister of agriculture, was a teacher until she entered politics three decades ago. ‘Annie Genevard is not “our” minister of agriculture,’ said a spokesman for one farming union earlier this month. ‘We would never choose someone so incompetent.’
The same goes for Macron, who is held in contempt by most farmers. ‘Trump, come and get Macron, we don’t want him any more,’ declared a banner on one tractor, soon after American special forces had kidnapped Nicolas Maduro from Venezuela. The French President is talking tough, declaring on X last week that ‘the signing of the agreement does not mark the end of the story’. But very few farmers have any faith in their President to come to their aid. Instead, they are likely to take matters into their own hands, as they have already started to do.
Last week farmers set up roadblocks outside the ports of Cherbourg and Le Havre and stopped container lorries in what they described as a ‘sorting’ operation. ‘The idea is to check the containers arriving in Cherbourg,’ said one of the farmers. Any meat found coming from South America was to be offered to a homeless charity. ‘If they don’t want it, it will be thrown away,’ explained the farmer. ‘We cannot accept food made from products containing anti-biotics or growth hormones.’
Operations like this will intensify if the Mercosur deal is ratified by the EU parliament this week, and they will place the French government in an awkward position. The farmers have overwhelming public support – local governments and even some of the big distributors have pledged not to accept South American meat – and it would be political suicide for any party to side with Brussels. Local elections are in March and next year there are the presidential and parliamentary elections. France’s relationship with Brussels will be at the forefront of these campaigns.
The imminent prospect of another trade deal being signed by the EU, this time with India, will deepen hostility towards Brussels. A poll in 2024 revealed that 70 percent of French people have a poor opinion of the EU and how it functions, though only 38 percent wished to follow Britain out of the bloc. At the moment not many politicians mention the F-word, but the Mercosur deal may well give Frexit some serious momentum.
Inside the Cambodian cybercrime compounds run by Chinese gangs
The scrappy Cambodian border town of Poipet, long associated with vice and criminality, was shaken shortly before Christmas by the sound of F-16 fighter jets screaming overhead. The Thai Royal Air Force was, astonishingly, bombing a series of casinos. At least five fortified compounds were damaged, which were part of a vast industry that has conned millions of people across the world out of billions of dollars. This was “a war against the scam army,” Thailand’s army said.
Scamming is a mainstay of Cambodia’s economy. The country earns an estimated $12 billion annually from online scamming alone, around half the value of its formal economy. Poipet is just one small outpost of a Chinese organized crime network, many elements of which have links to the Chinese Communist party. These gangsters are involved in large-scale human trafficking and modern slavery. That’s because scamming is a labor-intensive business. Some 500,000 scammers are estimated to be working across the region; many are young people, lured by the promise of good IT jobs, but then trapped and kept in prison-like conditions. The gangs are estimated to generate $64 billion each year, far more than the GDPs of the small countries in which they operate. Interpol says Cambodia, Laos and Myanmar are home to online financial crime on an “industrial scale,” representing “a serious and imminent threat to public safety.”
The gangsters are involved in large-scale human trafficking and modern slavery
Poipet is part of that network. It sits in a special economic zone (SEZ) – essentially a state within a state. These have become centers of criminality and Chinese influence across the region. There are 128 SEZs along the Mekong River, which runs from China through Myanmar, Laos, Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam. Within these SEZs are 140 casinos, the ostensible reason for their existence. The promise is that by carving out these autonomous enclaves, the host nations can grow rich. The reality is that China is able to create pockets of control, allowing its vast criminal enterprises to influence their weak Southeast Asian neighbors.
I visited the most notorious of these – the grandly named Golden Triangle Special Economic Zone (GTSEZ) in Laos – while researching my most recent book, crossing the Mekong on a small open-backed boat, accompanied by several nervous youngsters who were answering online ads for vaguely described computer jobs. The air was thick with dust; the land scraped of vegetation and littered with cranes and diggers. There was clearly plenty of money for development, much more than in the rest of Laos. A large massage parlor, the House of Pleasure, sat on China Friendship Street, surrounded by Chinese restaurants, karaoke bars and shops selling fake brand-name electronics. The currency of the zone was Chinese, as were most items in the shops. The area’s first language was Mandarin and all the signs were in Chinese. The clocks were even set to Chinese time, one hour ahead of Cambodia. The zone was, in effect, a Chinese colony.
A casino soared above all of this, complete with mock Greco-Roman statues and vast, thrusting columns. Two Bentleys were parked on a driveway to the casino’s main entrance. On the corner I spotted a blue Rolls-Royce. Down a side street I saw a group of people, not unlike those I had shared a boat with, crowded around a sliding gate. They were being called forward in small groups by a burly foreman who directed them to a compound beyond.
The gangs’ bread and butter is online gambling and fraud. One specialty is the romance scam, or “pig-butchering” (shazhupan in Chinese), which refers to building an online relationship with a victim using a fake profile. Once the victim has fallen in love with the scammer, they are then “butchered” – conned out of their money – often in the form of fake investment or cryptocurrency payments.
The scamming industry is increasingly part of a battle for influence between the United States and China. Bangkok has always been adept at geopolitical hedging, but the bombing campaign is a sign of growing impatience at the power of Chinese organized crime. Thailand is being used as a people-smuggling route and money-laundering center by the gangs, while the Chinese-run SEZs on its border act as immune bases of influence. “It’s out of control,” Chuwit Kamolvisit, a former policeman and self-styled anti-corruption crusader, told me in Bangkok. “They are not afraid of anything because they pay, and they pay much. They can buy the police, they can buy the court, they can buy the judge. They can buy everything. So they have no fear. They come to Thailand and think they can do anything.”
GTSEZ is located on the banks of the Mekong, opposite Thailand, and is described by one business intelligence report as “the world’s worst special economic zone… mired in scandal and criminality.” It is run by a Chinese businessman called Zhao Wei, to whom the Laotian government has granted a 99-year lease on a 15-square-mile tract of land, where he is building his own city.
In 2018, the US Treasury Department sanctioned Zhao, who “engages in an array of horrendous illicit activities, including human trafficking and child prostitution, drug trafficking and wildlife trafficking.” Zhao said this was “a unilateral, extraterritorial, unreasonable and hegemonic act of ulterior motives and malicious rumormongering.” More recently, the British government sanctioned him for people trafficking, alleging: “Victims are promised well-paid jobs but are subject to torture or other cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment.”
Yet the Laotian government has presented Zhao with several awards, including a “medal of bravery” to honor the “renowned Chinese businessman” for “his efforts and contribution to national defense and national public security in the Golden Triangle Special Economic Zone.”
The FBI has stepped up efforts to combat the scammers, who conned Americans out of $5 billion in 2024
When the GTSEZ recently opened a new airport, Zhao’s guest of honor was Wan Kuok-koi, better known as “Broken Tooth,” once Macau’s most notorious gangster. He is a major investor in Cambodian and Myanman SEZs, including hotels and cryptocurrency exchanges. He has also been sanctioned by the US for his alleged involvement with scamming compounds, has strong links with government officials in China’s Guangdong province and owns more than a dozen Chinese companies.
Both Zhao and Broken Tooth present themselves as CCP loyalists, echoing Beijing’s “development” slogans. The SEZs are routinely established under the banner of China’s Belt and Road Initiative, an umbrella for Beijing’s global investments and an instrument for extending its influence. It is inconceivable that they could operate so brazenly without the tacit support of the party, which has a history of working with triads – or “patriotic societies,” as they are often termed – to further Beijing’s interests. The SEZs are praised by Chinese officials and state-owned media, which see them as symbols of China’s growing influence in the region – important chess pieces in the intensifying geopolitical struggle with the West. Chinese media has described Zhao as “a farmer’s child with a pioneering and practical spirit.”
The FBI has stepped up efforts to combat the scammers, who are estimated to have conned Americans out of $5 billion in 2024 alone, sanctioning the companies running the compounds and beefing up their presence in Bangkok. China has also launched well-publicized crackdowns on scamming compounds, notably near its border in Myanmar, but law enforcement officials believe these actions have been selective – concentrating on those scammers targeting China and sparing the most powerful criminal kingpins. The Global Times, a CCP newspaper, recently boasted that more than 5,400 Chinese suspects involved in “telecom fraud” were repatriated to China from Myanmar during the first half of last year.
Last month, Cambodia extradited alleged crime boss Chen Zhi to China in what seemed like a rare act of force by a host nation against these gangs. Chen had already been sanctioned by the US and the UK for running a sprawling cyberscamming and money-laundering empire across Asia. Chen was also rumored to have connections to Chinese intelligence agencies. But all was not quite as it seemed. There are suspicions that his extradition was in fact organized by Beijing to keep Chen out of the reach of American prosecutors, who are becoming increasingly active in the region.
A report by the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission (USCC) suggests the Chinese counterscam actions have merely incentivized the gangs to target Americans instead, shifting their recruitment to those with English language skills. That is supported by reports from Myanmar that, as a result of the Chinese clampdown, the gangs have relocated their scamming compounds away from the Chinese border and shifted their focus to English-speaking victims.
China has sought to strengthen law enforcement cooperation, raising concerns in Washington that it is using the scammers as a pretext to tighten its broader grip on regional security. Thailand recently allowed Chinese forces to participate in cross-border raids on scam centers in Myanmar. This may seem odd at first, given that many of these compounds are run by Chinese nationals. In fact, it’s an attempt by Beijing to bring deviant parts of its organized crime world under control. According to the USCC, the raids resulted in the confiscation of computers and phones containing not only information about the criminals, but also sensitive data about the victims. Many of these victims are American, yet China has been unwilling to share the data.
The criminals are increasingly using AI to target victims and are recruiting people with data-analysis skills
As Beijing exerts greater control, the gangs could well morph into something even more sinister. They are increasingly using artificial intelligence to target victims, tailoring their frauds while using their growing stock of data to branch out into other areas of cybercrime. The gangs have stepped up recruiting people with data-analysis skills, programmers who can sift through massive amounts of information.
What is worrying cybersecurity specialists is the creation of a Russian-style network of state-tolerated cybercriminals, largely allowed to act with impunity as long as they do not target Chinese assets. Similar Russian outfits were involved in trying to sway the 2017 French election, while details of the UK-US trade deal were leaked by a Russian hacking operation in 2019. Beijing may be doing what it does best: copying other countries’ technologies.
Cambodia and Laos are so economically dependent on China that they are essentially vassal states, while Myanmar is being ripped apart by military misrule and civil war. All of which makes them highly susceptible to organized crime and reluctant to upset China. As Ekapop Lueangprasert, a Thai businessman who helps youngsters escape from compounds in Cambodia, put it to me: “They do not want to do anything to affect China. They fear that if they arrest any Chinese, it will affect the infrastructure and investment in their countries.”
Thailand’s bombing campaign is just the most aggressive act so far in a web of organized crime and Chinese influence campaigns. But the gangs are now so powerful that they threaten regional stability. Eradicating them has profound implications, not only for millions of victims, but also for the broader geopolitics of Southeast Asia.
Did the American Revolution ever really end?
We Americans celebrate July 4, 1776, as our national birthday, and this year, of course, marks our 250th. But the American Revolution began before that. And when did it end? Maybe it never did. In 1812, warhawks in Congress and president James Madison – the man known to posterity as the very father of the Constitution – launched an invasion of Canada in the hopes of completing the American Revolution. Canada was unfinished business. We had invaded Québec in 1775, but that was a disaster. And even though the 13 colonies that became the United States succeeded in winning their independence from Britain, the newborn US was not altogether free. The British still had forts in our territory, British agents were suspected of inciting Indians to harry our western frontier and the British Navy wielded considerable power over our commerce.
And then there was Canada, a vast territorial base from which the British could launch attacks against us, if they ever so chose. So was our war for independence really over? America’s first three presidential administrations didn’t want war. George Washington declared America neutral in the wars between revolutionary France and Britain – despite a mutual defense treaty we had ratified with pre-revolutionary France – and did his utmost to keep us from being dragged into Europe’s superpower conflict.
Isn’t it a rip-off if Denmark can extort security subsidies from us on the threat of Greenland going undefended?
John Adams hewed to the same policy, despite his affinity for the British and deep antipathy to the French Revolution’s ideology. Washington had earlier been disturbed by French meddling in American politics, notably in 1793 when the French ambassador (or minister, as the title then was) Edmond-Charles Genêt enlisted Americans to serve on privateers to harass British shipping and promoted pro-French “democratic societies.” Those societies were aligned with fully homegrown ones that were the nucleus of Thomas Jefferson’s political movement (and, eventually, party). France’s revolutionary regime eventually turned on Genêt, and he was lucky to be accepted by Washington as a refugee. But during the Adams administration, France persisted as a source of mischief, abroad and at home in the US, which led a Federalist Congress to pass the Alien and Sedition Acts, empowering Adams to expel foreigners at will.
Yes, more than 200 years ago, American politics was riven by bitter partisan divides over foreign influence and whether to remain neutral or aid in a foreign war for freedom and democracy (or, on the other side, for the international order and to prevent the spread of radical leftism). During the Whiskey Rebellion – which Washington blamed, somewhat implausibly, on Genêt –Jefferson even questioned whether armed intimidation of judges and federal agents was truly an “insurrection” or just an occasional “riot.” The riotous mobs of Jefferson’s own “democratical societies,” in their pro-French ardor, were not entirely unlike today’s antifa types.
The Alien and Sedition Acts added to Adams’s unpopularity and Jefferson won the 1800 presidential election. He believed some of the Federalists, notably Alexander Hamilton, really did want to undo the American Revolution while the British Empire harbored the same desire. Even so, he tried to keep the country out of the European bloodbath by means of an embargo on trade with the belligerents. But that only imposed more hardship on America’s export industries, including Southern agriculture.
Trade, territorial acquisition, strategic logic and ideology all provided grounds for Madison’s War of 1812, a war that America didn’t exactly win – the British even burned down the original White House, and of course, we didn’t get Canada – but that made us stronger anyway. We fought well enough to dispel any notion, in our own minds as much as those of the British, that our independence was insecure. And Canada became, if not exactly our hostage, a vulnerable asset the British now knew would be expensive to protect.
Yet more than 200 years later, Donald Trump likes to speak of Canada as fated to become our 51st state, although if he gets his way, Greenland will become a US territory first. Trump believes Canada depends as much on us today, both strategically and economically, as much as it ever did on the British Empire. So why shouldn’t it be ours, as it was once Britain’s? His thinking about Greenland resembles the way Americans thought about Canada in the lead-up to the War of 1812, too, in one respect: he sees it as a hole in our security fence. To forestall that, the US has already been the guarantor of Greenland’s security since World War Two. Isn’t it a rip-off if Denmark can extort security subsidies from us, forever, on the threat of Greenland going undefended or, worse, falling under the influence of a rival?
Jefferson had some constitutional qualms about purchasing the Louisiana territory from France, yet he found the strategic logic irresistible. “There is on the globe one single spot, the possessor of which is our natural and habitual enemy. It is New Orleans.” Whether or not Trump feels that way about Greenland, he’s doubtless aware, real-estate man that he is, that Greenland’s 836,300 square miles exceeds the size of the Louisiana Purchase. It would be the largest single territorial expansion in American history. Forget the history books – Trump wants to write his legacy on the map.
If it happens, it’ll be negotiated: even before Trump pledged at Davos not to use force, or tariffs, to take over Greenland, there was never any real risk of a War of 2026. But a problem remains. If Greenland is already a protectorate of ours in all but name, the same is true of Europe as a whole. Sooner or later, the price of accepting the American empire’s protection may be accepting that protection implies sovereignty. And Europeans may decide they’d rather lose Greenland than have to provide for their own defense.