Indian gangs are terrorising Canada

South Asian communities across Canada are being terrorised by gangs – and city officials in Surrey, BC are calling on the federal government to declare a national state of emergency.

The crimes follow a distinctive pattern. South Asian gangs demand money from members of their own communities. Intimidation, threats and even shootings follow. Gang members drive to someone’s home or business, and video themselves shooting at buildings and vehicles. They then post the recording online or send it to the target, with threats of worse to come if payment is not made.

The city of Surrey has seen a drastic uptick in these crimes, with police reporting 35 extortion attempts since the beginning of January. But the problem is perhaps even more severe in Brampton, Ontario with regional police reporting nearly 500 extortion cases each year since 2023. Edmonton, and more recently Calgary, have had their share as well.

Dharmjit Mand in Ontario says he was contacted in the autumn of 2025 via WhatsApp and told he had been chosen to ‘donate’ $2 million to the Lawrence Bishnoi gang, a transnational criminal organisation that is based in India but has reportedly put down deep roots in Canada. Mand blocked the number and told the police. But in late November, he got a call from another number with a threat: ‘We’re going to show you what we can do.’

The next night, a car drove by Mand’s farmhouse and seven shots were fired out the window. A video of the shooting was posted online with threats against Mand, accusing him of being a drug dealer. Police told Mand to move, so he went to live with his brother – only to have his brother’s house shot at a couple of weeks later. Mand said he now intends to move his family to the US.

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Police say the extortions attempts are chiefly made on behalf of  criminal organisations based outside of Canada. Notable among these is the Lawrence Bishnoi gang, famously run from behind bars in a high-security Indian jail, where its eponymous mastermind has been incarcerated since 2015. The Bishnoi gang was designated a terrorist organisation by the Canadian government last September. Sikh groups have long accused Indian government agents of using the Bishnoi network to target pro-Khalistani activists in Canada, notably with the killing of Hardeep Singh on Canadian soil in 2023.

Other gangs, along with Bishnoi copycats, are involved in the extortion racket. A man linked to the ‘Brothers Keeper’ gang planned a series of extortions, shootings and arsons in the Edmonton area in 2023, targeting South Asians involved in the building industry. Newly built homes were burned down before occupancy permits could be issued, in revenge for the builder’s failure to pay protection money. All involved but the ringleader were eventually caught.

Caught, but then what? Both in Brampton and in Surrey, people fear that extortionists are getting off too lightly. Critics of current bail legislation point out that police are effectively forced to carry out a catch and release programme, arresting violent offenders only to see them back on the streets 24 hours later, pending an often distant court date. And when that day comes, the Canadian judiciary’s focus on reintegration into the community, combined with ‘identity-based justice,’ mean that sentences are often light and parole easily earned.

Gangs are also expert at exploiting the weaknesses in Canadian immigration policy. Many of their members are present in Canada illegally, often on expired student visas. Some were already known criminals in their home countries, who somehow escaped proper vetting on entry.  

Last December, at least 14 suspects avoided deportation by claiming refugee status, buying themselves years of time in Canada, along with subsidised health care and social programmes, according to Vancouver immigration lawyer Richard Kurland. They now cannot be deported until the Refugee Protection Division rules on the merit of their claims – with a multi-year backlog of refugee cases to be processed ahead of them.

Back in Surrey, authorities worry that people aren’t reporting incidents of extortion out of fear. Some are perhaps even paying the money demanded. Locals say there is a strong sense that police are unable to protect the public effectively. Some are calling for stronger ‘castle’ laws in Canada so they can arm themselves in self-defence.

Police have called for Surrey residents to abide by the law, concerned that the situation may descend into vigilantism. One extortion victim was reportedly investigated after allegedly responding to a drive-by shooting by firing back.

People are on edge – and who can blame them? The Liberals under Trudeau created an untenable situation under which transnational organised crime has prospered. Now that Mayor Locke has turned the spotlight where it belongs – on the federal government – we’ll have an opportunity to see if the Liberals under Carney are any different.

Kemi Badenoch’s favourite book is the perfect choice

Occasionally, the leader of a political party will be asked to name a favourite book. For years, this has produced a dispiriting response. Keir Starmer told an interviewer that he didn’t have a favourite novel or poem. On other occasions, he said that the comic Roy of the Rovers was his favourite book, and, more plausibly, two stories of helpless victimhood, The Trial and James Kelman’s unreadable A Disaffection. It might have seemed that the days were over, when Anthony Eden had been known to be passionately keen on Proust, Margaret Thatcher a great lover of English poetry, John Major an aficionado of Trollope (The Small House at Allington rightly singled out).

Last Sunday, Kemi Badenoch appeared on Desert Island Discs, and, asked for her choice of book to take with her, nominated Thackeray’s Vanity Fair. There seems absolutely no doubt that it’s her personal choice. No focus group would ever have consented to a book as long, complicated, savage and ambiguous. No spin doctor would have had the nerve to suggest it. No: it’s her choice. To coin a phrase, it felt for a moment as if the grown-ups might be back in the room.

Vanity Fair was first published in 1847-8, in serial numbers. Thackeray had some difficulty interesting a publisher, and Bradbury and Evans put off publication, doubtful of its success. It was noticed, but only started to sell well with the ninth number (of 19), about the Battle of Waterloo.

It’s a novel of astonishing power and appeal. There aren’t many English novelists who can do obsessive sexual passion as well as Thackeray, for a start. Thackeray loved the grand dramatic stroke, and some of the episodes concluded with a shattering surprise – George Osborne lying dead, or Becky being revealed to be married. Thackeray loved his readership, and was hugely interested in everything about the people he was describing. That’s a quality worth cherishing in anyone, novelist or politician.

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I like to think that Vanity Fair appeals to Kemi Badenoch because its subject is what had always interested the novel, social mobility and individual transformations through sheer energy. Becky Sharp makes of herself what she will. In the end, amazingly, she becomes, of all things, a pillar of piety, and surfaces in passing in Thackeray’s later The Newcomes as ‘her who writes the hymns.’ People do change, after all, and their limits are usually imposed from outside. Her husband Rawdon says to her, early on, ‘By Jove, Beck, you’re fit to be Commander-in-Chief, or Archbishop of Canterbury,’ – the day for the first woman Archbishop has, finally come. (I doubt Sarah Mullally will be as invigorating as Becky would have been).

The novel wonderfully demonstrates what politicians ought to know, what the world looks like from other people’s points of view. We can easily understand what drives George Osborne, or Jos, or Amelia, or old Sedley, or Dobbin. The range of novelists’ understanding – not necessarily sympathy – ought to be wider than most. And so should that of politicians. Thackeray could effortlessly demonstrate this through his beautiful technique. Sometimes the novel ventures into the head of a very minor character, just so that we can see how beautiful Amelia was on her wedding day through the eyes of a junior ensign. Tolstoy, later, did exactly the same thing. If only politicians could try the same exercise of the imagination, we might get somewhere.

What makes Vanity Fair unusual among English novels is its grand sense of how individual lives are shaped by huge global forces. The possibilities of empire when Jos Sedley turns up, or this astonishing sentence; ‘So imprisoned and tortured was this gentle little heart, when in the month of March, Anno Domini 1815, Napoleon landed at Cannes, and Louis XVIII fled, and all Europe was in alarm, and the funds fell, and old John Sedley was ruined.’

That, too, ought to be squarely within politicians’ understanding. When they agree to something at a summit, or decide to make a change to business rates, the impact on individual lives may be catastrophic. Kemi Badenoch didn’t claim to be a heavy reader of fiction, but going on her taste, and her comments, she’s instinctively a good one. I can’t help thinking that a politician who loves Vanity Fair is more likely to understand and respect individual lives than one baffled by the imaginative exercise of reading a novel at all.

Can Syria’s Kurds trust Ahmed al-Sharaa?

Recent weeks have seen a political and military earthquake in Syria. Nearly 14 months after driving Bashar al Assad from Damascus, President Ahmad al-Sharaa is on the point of extending his transitional government’s complete control over the third of Syria east of the Euphrates. For all practical purposes, this will mean the end of the Kurdish-dominated Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), which had been the West’s allies against Isis. Time is being called on the semi-independent and self-declared autonomous Kurdish province of Rojava which has been created by the SDF during Syria’s civil war.

In a swift campaign lasting only a few days, the Syrian army unexpectedly swept the SDF out of the Euphrates valley and appears to have isolated it in its Kurdish-majority strongholds such as Kobane. The SDF lost 80 percent of its territory in three days and no longer occupies a contiguous area of land but only an archipelago of pockets predominantly inhabited by Kurds. The only question is this: will the end of the SDF and Rojava be by agreement, or will it be bloody? There is enough antagonism verging on hatred on both sides to make the latter a very frightening possibility.

What the SDF wanted was a largely autonomous Kurdish province in a federal Syria in which the central authority was weak. In Damascus, President al-Sharaa insisted on a united Syria with a strong government that can bring peace to the country and rebuild it. Despite there being many unresolved tensions, most Syrians probably agree with al-Sharaa. Balkanization of Syria would risk following a path like that of post-Gaddafi Libya – or, worse still, of Iraq after the toppling of Saddam Hussein.

After nearly a year of attempts at negotiation with the SDF, al-Sharaa felt he was being stonewalled. Besides, the SDF did not have clean hands. By preventing Syrian government access to areas east of the Euphrates, the SDF was depriving it of control over Syria’s borders. The SDF also occupied the Euphrates valley governorates of Raqqa and Deir al Zour with their agricultural and hydrocarbon resources, important dams and precious water. Its intention in doing this was to put pressure on Damascus, even though the people of these overwhelmingly Arab areas did not want the SDF there and actively detested its fighters. It was partly the defection of local Arab tribal militias that enabled the Syrian government to take these areas so swiftly. When retreating, the SDF blew up bridges over the Euphrates and planted mines to delay the Syrian advance.

There is a separatist core in the SDF that effectively wants a Kurdish statelet on Syrian soil and is willing to fight for it. However, Syria and the Kurds go back a long way and the SDF has no right to speak for them all. Saladin, who died in Damascus in 1193, was famously a Kurd. The Crusader castle Krac des Chevaliers was built from 1142 onwards on the site of a fortress with a Kurdish garrison. The Kurds are a proud and hardy mountain people with their own language and culture. Throughout history they have provided soldiers for many armies. They are also notorious for their disunity. They are the predominant ethnic group living in a mountainous region which spreads across a vast area of eastern Turkey, northern Iraq and western Iran.

Yet in Syria, where they may be 10 percent of the population, Kurdish majority areas are not contiguous. Damascus has a large Kurdish suburb, Ruknaddin, dating back to Saladin although today many Kurds there only speak Arabic. But most Syrian Kurds today are descendants of refugees from Turkey who fled to the north and east of Syria after rebelling against Ataturk’s Turkish nationalist government about a century ago. They left their mountains and settled in the steppes around the Euphrates valley where they competed with Arab tribes for pasturage and only became the majority population at a very local level, as the French map from 1935 below shows. There is no area that could be called “Syrian Kurdistan,” and Rojava, the area that emerged under SDF control during the Syrian civil war, included many ethnic Arabs as well as others such as Syriac Christians and Armenians.

Under the extreme Arab nationalism of the Assad family’s Ba’ath party, the Kurdish language was suppressed and excuses found to deprive many Kurds of their Syrian citizenship. Ethnic Arabs were deliberately settled in Kurdish majority areas. Al-Sharaa has promised an end to all of this. Last year he permitted the celebration of Nowruz, the Kurdish (and Iranian) New Year which was marked in Damascus in 2025. He has also allowed the Kurdish flag to fly in Government-held areas. Now he has decreed that Nowruz will be a public holiday and that the Kurdish language will be taught in Kurdish areas and have an official status. Some SDF units may also be incorporated into the Syrian army.

There could be a win-win situation for all, but it means the end of the dream of Rojava. Responsibility for the breakdown in negotiations that led to the fighting is vigorously contested and there is a deep lack of trust. Kurds accuse the transitional government of allowing hate speech in the media, and SDF supporters paint al-Sharaa as an unreconstructed jihadi. They point to the atrocities that occurred in Alawi areas last March and the Druze heartland of Suwayda in the summer. Yet according to Charles Lister, the director of the Syria Initiative at the Middle East Center (MEI) in Washington, since then al-Sharaa and his Ministry of the Interior have encouraged local participation in governance across the country. This has been transformative in the area around Lattakia, where the attacks on Alawis took place, and turned it into one of the calmest areas in Syria. This, Lister points out, could provide a precedent for north-east Syria. It depends, however, on the central government and the SDF reaching agreement if bloodshed is to be avoided.

Can the Kurds trust al-Sharaa despite his jihadi background? We will see, but we might note that Islamism contains a democratic strain that can be traced back to Jamal al-Din Afghani in the late nineteenth century. There is reason to hope that al-Sharaa, in his new incarnation as president of Syria, now embodies this tradition rather than being “a jihadi in a suit.”

What Catherine O’Hara gave cinema

There are actors who dominate the movie screen, and actors who deepen it. There are stars who are “bankable” and have names above the titles, and there are artists who, almost invisibly, give a film its weight, its texture, its lasting emotional impact. 

Catherine O’Hara, who has died at the age of 71, belongs emphatically to the second group. She was one of the rare performers whose presence elevated everything around her. She understood precisely how to serve the story, the tone and the ensemble. Over a career that spanned many decades, genres and registers, O’Hara enhanced every film she appeared in. 

What made her exceptional was not merely that she was funny, though she was one of the great comic performers of her generation. Nor was it just that she could pivot seamlessly from absurdity to vulnerability, though that adaptability was central to her craft. It was that she understood the meaning of a film – how characters existed in relation to one another, how to sustain a consistent tone, how psychological truth could survive even in heightened or surreal worlds. 

O’Hara brought structure, emotional credibility and tonal coherence to films that might otherwise have drifted into caricature or chaos, and at the same time displayed an unusually discerning eye for scripts – appearing again and again in films that were modestly received or misunderstood on release, but which have endured because of their intelligence, specificity and human insight.

A lead character can afford to be broad, schematic or iconic; a supporting character has to be precise. An actor with few lines must suggest a whole life in limited time, often while reinforcing the emotional reality of the protagonist’s journey. Catherine O’Hara mastered that art so thoroughly that she disguised how difficult it is.

One of her defining skills was her ability to establish a film’s internal logic almost immediately. In Beetlejuice (1988), director Tim Burton’s visual imagination is so dominant that it’s easy to overlook how precarious the film’s tone is. The story oscillates between horror, farce, domestic comedy and satire of art-world pretension. Without a stabilizing presence, it might easily have fractured.

O’Hara’s Delia Deetz provided stability. From her first appearance, she taught us how seriously to take this universe. Delia was absurd, but she was never overplayed for easy laughs. O’Hara committed fully to Delia’s self-image as an artist and intellectual, delivering lines with total sincerity, impeccable diction and a hilarious lack of self-awareness. By refusing to wink at the audience and playing the whole thing as embarrassingly real, O’Hara allowed Burton’s heightened world to feel internally consistent.

Earlier, she brought similar gifts to Martin Scorsese’s black comedy After Hours (1985), where O’Hara’s role was far smaller but equally important. As Gail, she embodied the film’s central anxiety: the unpredictability of human interaction in an urban nightmare. Her performance was unnerving precisely because it was not exaggerated. In a movie populated by grotesques, O’Hara played a woman who felt plausible – warm, seductive but slightly off-kilter. She established the rule that made the whole movie feel both plausible and original. Trusting someone who seems normal is the most foolish mistake a person can make.

O’Hara’s value was just as evident in films such as Home Alone (1990), where the lead performances were broad, naive and slapstick. The film’s set pieces were cartoonish by design, and Macaulay Culkin’s gurning performance was built on charm and enthusiasm, rather than emotional depth. Without a grounding force, the film would have collapsed into pure farce.

That grounding weight was the boy’s mother. O’Hara played her as a woman barely holding herself together – frazzled, guilty (not without reason) and increasingly desperate – but never as a parody of maternal hysteria. Watch the scenes where she bargains, pleads and improvises her way across Europe. O’Hara injects each moment with lived-in panic rather than comic exaggeration. The audience believes her fear, and because we understand her, the film’s emotional stakes feel real. She provides the emotional infrastructure that makes the comedy matter.

The same pattern appeared in the much less commercially successful A Mighty Wind (2003). While this comedy was about egotistical folk singers who took themselves far too seriously, O’Hara anchored the satire in something close to melancholy. Her performance was deliberately restrained: she listened more than she spoke, and when she did utter, there was a soft ache beneath the humor. Her quiet resignation gave the film its emotional undertow. Again, she made us care.

What emerges from O’Hara’s filmography are projects that respected actors and audiences equally. She was drawn to ensembles, character-driven stories and films where humor arose from behavior rather than punchlines. Many of these films were never designed to be blockbusters, and most were misunderstood by the critics, who are not generally renowned for understanding comedy.

Over time, as audiences and critics continue to reassess what makes performances last, O’Hara’s work increasingly looks like a masterclass in how to matter without insisting on being noticed. She reminds us that art does not need to be showy or commercially successful to be lasting. The most valuable contributors are often those who ask not how much attention they can claim, but how much meaning they can create.

That was her gift to our culture. It is a profound one.

Inside the world of Wes Anderson

If you make your way to the Design Museum, which occupies the horned modernist structure that was once home to the Commonwealth Institute in Kensington, you are in for a surprise. And not just because it’s one of those buildings that is far more inspiring on the inside than its rather Stalinist exterior would have you imagine.

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No, the biggest surprise is that our national temple to design has decided to dedicate its ground floor to Wes Anderson, the American filmmaker (‘auteur’ is the word film types like to whisper) behind such idiosyncratic gems as The Royal Tenenbaums (2001) or, probably his biggest hit, The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014), which starred Ralph Fiennes, Adrian Brody, Saoirse Ronan and Willem Dafoe, among many others.

Anderson, 56, is one of those rarified creatures – a filmmaker’s filmmaker – whose inventive movies are among the most self-consciously stylised being made today, certainly by a mainstream director. Yet somehow, they’re still highly watchable.

And so it is that until 26 July the Design Museum is giving us Wes Anderson: The Archives, a series of rooms each dedicated to assorted artefacts from his dozen or so films. It begins with 1996’s Bottle Rocket, which he co-wrote with his university pal, Owen Wilson, who also starred in it with his brother, Luke. You can see scripts, notebooks and storyboards, props and Polaroids and professional photography. And from his second film onwards, the cult classic Rushmore (1998) starring David Schwartzman, Bill Murray and Olivia Williams, many of the most distinctive costumes are also on display.

Exhibits include the Fendi mink coat worn by Gwyneth Paltrow in The Royal Tenenbaums and the red Nike tracksuits worn by Ben Stiller and his sons in the film. There are also the costumes from The Grand Budapest Hotel, as well as a three-metre long model of the exterior of the hotel. Then there is the shark and model submersible used in The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004), and a detailed drawing of the railway carriages as well as a model of the train, the costumes and luggage from 2007’s The Darjeeling Limited. Turn each corner and you are confronted by another space containing the costumes, props or models that define the films.

For me, the unexpected stars of the show are the stop-motion puppets, made in Manchester, for Fantastic Mr Fox (2009), based on the Roald Dahl story. They are surprisingly beautiful – more sculptures than puppets, in a way – and astonishingly lifelike: glance at the belligerent-looking badger and you hear Bill Murray; catch sight of Mr Fox and it’s impossible not have a mental voice bubble from George Clooney.

Anderson fans will love all the details, such as the actual letter from Dirk Calloway to Max in Rushmore (if you know the film, you’ll remember it when you see it), or the display of the fictional books written by his films’ many authors (Old Custer by Eli Cash and Dudley’s World by Raleigh St Clair, both in The Royal Tenenbaums). Other highlights include 27 elegantly crafted back-issue covers for the magazine in The French Dispatch (2021), as well as Bill Murray’s Andretti typewriter from that film.

The costumes on the spotlit mannequins are beautifully preserved. Not for nothing was one of Grand Budapest’s four Oscars for costume design. It’s all there: Monsieur Gustave’s brilliant purple concierge tailcoat with the grey waistcoat and trousers that Ralph Fiennes wore; Willem Dafoe’s leather trenchcoat and rings; and Edward Norton’s grey policeman’s uniform, which with its stand-up collar is more Mitteleuropa than a Tintin convention in Prague.

What all this brings home is the unflinching depth and the breadth of creativity underpinning Anderson’s filmmaking, from the smallest detail up. The lengths that have been gone to, and the quality and authenticity of each item, are much greater than you might have imagined and therefore much of the pleasure is in gaining a glimpse of that endeavour, as well as seeing items you recognise in the flesh. You may already have thought that Anderson’s films fetishised design; now you know it’s much more extreme than that. The dense hyper-materialism of the movies is the product of a huge, astonishingly deliberate effort.

With exhibits from his more recent films to bring it all up to date – including items from The Phoenician Scheme, which was out last year, starring Benicio del Toro and Kate Winslet’s daughter Mia Threapleton – the exhibition concludes with four shorts from Anderson’s career, including the original 15-minute 1993 version of Bottle Rocket. There’s also Hotel Chevalier (2007), a two hander between Anderson-regular David Schwartzman and Natalie Portman, which is a prologue, it is said, to The Darjeeling Limited. Set in Paris, where Anglophile Anderson keeps a home, a rather dark story unfolds in the privileged world of monogrammed luggage, hotel gowns and room-service – an elite, very Anderson setting where the world is seen through an ex-patriot, American gaze.

Is it a good exhibition? Absolutely, if you’re a Wes Anderson aficionado. And if you’re not? Well, I could think of no better introduction – aside from watching one of his films, of course. Either way, there are many worse ways to spend £20 in High Street Kensington and, as you can imagine, the exhibition merchandise is on another level.

The Catholic Church is getting swept away by ICE outrage

Cardinal Joseph Tobin, the archbishop of Newark and a close confidant of Pope Leo, called for the defunding of ICE during an interfaith prayer livestream. “If we are serious about putting our faith in action, we need to say ‘no,’” he said. As Congress debates ICE funding this week, Tobin urged Catholics to write to their lawmakers and encourage them to “vote against renewing funding for such a lawless organization.”

The scenes from Minneapolis are disturbing, and the dissonance between what I see and what I’ve been told – either by Trump administration officials calling Alex Pretti a “would-be assassin” seeking to “massacre” law enforcement, or by commentators depicting him as a martyr and saying that people are being “executed” on the street – has made me desperate to turn to some wise voice of moral and spiritual authority. Perhaps that’s what makes it so disappointing to hear Tobin fall in with such an obviously partisan and misguided call to defund ICE. It indicates that the Catholic Church lacks confidence in her own ability to address these complex issues with justice as well as mercy.

American bishops have so far struggled to offer much in the way of practical guidance on the immigration issue, or more specifically, what to do about ICE. Several wrote letters against President Trump’s immigration policy shortly after his inauguration in January 2025, with Archbishop Timothy Broglio, president of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), saying that many of the new executive orders were “deeply troubling and will have negative consequences.” Bishop Mark J. Seitz of El Paso, chairman of the USCCB’s Committee on Migration, stressed “that national self-interest does not justify policies with consequences that are contrary to the moral law.” Archbishop Jose H. Gomez of Los Angeles said that statements from the then-new administration “have caused fear in our parishes, schools, and communities,” and that any law enforcement actions “should be matched by immediate action in Congress to fix our immigration system, which has been broken for decades now.”

One has to wonder if many politicians would not consider the “broken” immigration system to have been functioning as intended in those decades. It was not action in Congress that halted the flow of illegal immigrants over the southern border, but an executive order. Vice President J.D. Vance has criticized the USCCB for its lack of a “commonsense” stance on immigration. “I think the US Conference of Catholic Bishops has, frankly, not been a good partner in commonsense immigration enforcement that the American people voted for,” Vance said, “and I hope – again, as a devout Catholic – that they’ll do better.”

In November, the USCCB issued a joint message on immigration in the light of President Trump’s ramped-up deployment of ICE. “We are disturbed when we see among our people a climate of fear and anxiety around questions of profiling and immigration enforcement,” they wrote (and read out in a short Instagram video with four million views). “We oppose the indiscriminate mass deportation of people. We pray for an end to dehumanizing rhetoric and violence, whether directed at immigrants or at law enforcement.”

Pope Leo called it an “important statement,” and invited Catholics to listen closely to what the bishops said. “No one has said that the United States should have open borders,” Leo said. “I think every country has a right to determine who and how and when people enter.” But “if people are in the United States illegally, there are ways to treat that,” he offered vaguely, such as seeking removal through the justice system. (Notably, the USCCB’s statement did not make any differentiation between legal and illegal immigrants.)

The Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency is, of course, a way of treating the issue. It has arguably overstepped its popular mandate: most Americans are in favor of deporting criminal aliens, less so an indiscriminate approach where immigrants are sent to detention centers even if they have no criminal background. Much of the criticism from Catholic bishops regarding the dehumanizing, deeply Twitter-brained rhetoric coming from the DHS is warranted. But the unrest in Minneapolis is not about how many illegal immigrants are being removed, or which ones, or how. For many of the protestors, it is not a question of how ICE operates, but that it operates at all. They grant themselves the authority to resist federal deportations, no matter how humanely they’re carried out. That is, after all, the point of sanctuary cities.

Minneapolis is a sanctuary city, which means it permits its officials to operate in opposition to federal agents under what is essentially a very ambitious re-interpretation of religious philosophy. Until around the early modern period, sanctuary was provided by churches for criminals who sought refuge and were fleeing arrest. The condition of sanctuary being granted was that the criminal must confess his sins to a priest and repent. After 40 days, the criminal could either stand trial or publicly confess to his crimes and submit to exile.

Sanctuary, in its original sense, requires a particular way of seeing the world: namely, that there is such a thing as the sacred. The “Operation Pullup” protestors who occupied Cities Church during Sunday worship clearly have no sense of the sacred. If there is anything these people hold to be inviolable, it is a set of progressive ideals which might tolerate a lukewarm, tractable version of Christianity, but ultimately holds it in contempt.

“How will you say ‘no’ to violence?” Tobin asked, saying that people of many faiths go to immigration detention centers “and they say ‘no’ by standing at the gates, by talking with the ICE personnel, by insisting on the rights of the detainees within.” Many Americans said “no” to violence by voting for a president who promised to make cities safer by deporting criminals who should not have been there in the first place. Detainees deserve to receive pastoral care and to be treated humanely, but Tobin should be wary of encouraging the kind of confrontation and harassment of agents that we’ve seen in Minneapolis.

The Catholic Church has a long history of peaceful resistance, and a whole litany of saints who stood up to injustice and even gave their lives doing so, but it is naive to think that supporting the Minnesota protests or interfering with ICE arrests is simply and indisputably “the Christian thing to do.” The organized anti-ICE movement is, at its core, anarchic. It is at odds with institutional power, whether that be the Catholic Church or the federal government. Many of these protestors – and the “rapid response” groups that have engineered unrest by harassing and provoking immigration officers – have granted themselves the right to resist law enforcement and to help others do so simply by decreeing the government “fascist.” In Cities Church, worshippers were condemned as “Nazis” in front of their children.

The US bishops have a serious spiritual malaise to minister to in this country, and their emphasis on having respect for other human beings is, however basic it seems, needed. But it does not go far enough. The tensions over ICE’s actions and presence in US cities raise many other questions that require more thoughtful answers from bishops, such as how to face the tensions between solidarity with migrants and America’s right to sovereignty and control of its borders, or what a humane but fair approach to illegal immigration looks like, or what to do about the Catholics who work in border enforcement, immigration courts or ICE and see themselves as civil servants trying to balance compassion and the law. The USCCB should counsel the people of Minneapolis and respond to their outrage, but that is a different thing than being swayed and swept ​away by it.

Jeffrey Epstein: pro gamer

One of the many mysteries surrounding the Epstein saga is Jeffrey Epstein the man. Beyond simple hedonism, his motives seem inscrutable – and how did he make his money anyway?

The latest cache of released Epstein files has shed new light on his character. Part of what emerges is Epstein the compulsive video gamer, who was banned from online play due to abusive behavior and who liked to cruise anonymous online forums for odd genres of pornography.

A December 2013 automated email to Epstein from Xbox Live (the online multiplayer feature for the Xbox console) informed him that he had been banned from the service due to “harassment, threats, and/or abuse of other players.” Trash-talking comes with the territory with online gaming, but Cockburn would have thought that a social lion like Epstein, navigating the halls of power, might have considered the antics of “pwning n00bs” beneath him. 

Even more interesting was Epstein’s use of 4chan – the infamous anonymous internet forum. In May 2017 Epstein sent his last known girlfriend Karyna Shuliak an email with the subject line “amazing animations.” Enclosed was a link to a 4chan thread featuring user-made videos of the animatronic characters from the horror video game Five Nights at Freddy’s in flagrante delicto. 

He also sent Shuliak a link to “/u/,” the forum’s yuri board – yuri being a genre of Japanese anime and manga centered around lesbian relationships between female characters. 

Significantly, it was revealed in this latest tranche of emails that Epstein met with the founder of 4chan Christopher Poole (who styles himself “m00t”) in October 2011, when Poole was but 23. Little about the encounter or their subsequent meetings is known, but on the day of his first audience with Epstein Poole chose to relaunch the /pol/ – “Politically incorrect” – board. For the uninitiated, /pol/ was the essential forcing house for the alt-right and for the acerbic brand of meme culture that many argue helped bring Donald Trump to power. 

There are now people in American public life who often seem to imply that Epstein is the omni-cause that explains everything. Cockburn is beginning to think they have a point. 

Even in death, Epstein’s influence reigns

It was widely suggested that many powerful people – from President Donald Trump downwards – would have preferred the notorious Jeffrey Epstein files remain sealed for years to come. Now, with the latest and perhaps most shocking release yet, the doors of his squirming transatlantic boys’ club have been blown open. Epstein had a rare quality in life for manipulating and flattering others. His posthumous influence is every bit as malign, to say nothing of humiliating for all concerned. 

Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor (formerly styled Prince Andrew) is, as expected, front and center in the latest files. His public disgrace is, of course, long complete because of his association with Epstein. But it is still shocking to discover that he and the billionaire financier were in close contact even after Epstein had been released from prison on child sex charges. In his now infamous BBC interview, Andrew claimed that he had lost touch with Epstein after an investigation was launched in 2006 and only met up with him in December 2010 to cut off contact. But these emails show the former Duke of York cheerily inviting Epstein to Buckingham Palace for dinner months before then and writing, after his period of house arrest ended that year: “Good to be free?”

Epstein, of course, never forgot a friend – or an asset. So, he lined up the then 50-year-old Andrew with a 26-year-old Russian girl called Irina, whom he described as “elevere [sic] beautiful [and] trustworthy.” It may or may not be Irina whom the King’s younger brother was photographed crouching over, while touching her stomach and smirking at the camera. Andrew may long have denied wrongdoing but this compromising, deeply unpleasant situation is only more fuel to the bonfire of his reputationally ruinous association with Epstein. 

Yet, Andrew is far from the only one compromised. The files claim that Bill Gates, who has sought to present himself as a leading figure in world philanthropy, caught an STD from Russian girls procured by his billionaire friend. (He angrily denied all claims, calling them “absolutely absurd and completely false.”) In a draft email addressed to ‘Bill’ (but apparently only sent to himself), Epstein wrote: “To add insult to the injury you then subsequently with tears in your eyes, implore me to please delete the emails regarding your std, your request that I provide you antibiotics that you can surreptitiously give to Melinda, and the description of your penis.” Never has the word “Microsoft” had such an unfortunate double entendre. 

And there are many more who allegedly benefited from Epstein’s largesse. Former British ambassador to Washington Peter Mandelson’s now-husband Reinaldo da Silva asked for and was given £10,000 ($13,700) from the pedophile to take part in an osteopathy course in 2009. Elon Musk, no stranger to hedonism, asked when the “wildest party” would take place on Epstein’s private island, Little Saint James, in 2012. The likes of Richard Branson, Woody Allen and Bill Clinton were all photographed alongside Epstein in his once-glittering orbit. Although all have denied any wrongdoing, the sense only grows that this deeply wicked man collected powerful figures like objets d’art for his own nefarious gallery of influence. Now, we understand why. 

Conspiracy theorists who like to imagine the world is ruled by men in league with giant lizards have been looking in the wrong place. Here, it seems, was a man of huge appetites – amoral, perverted ones at that – who was sufficiently charming and sufficiently useful to a variety of world-renowned figures. They may deny wrongdoing, but why were so many apparently willing to ignore his activities, accept his hospitality and his money – even after his conviction in 2008? Can the answer be any more complex than pure, reckless hedonism or a misguided desire for power?

Already, we’ve seen global outrage over the release of these files – and rightly so. Like the emperor in the children’s story, the members of Epstein’s once-lavish boys’ club have been shown naked to the world. This time, we can all see their pitiful shortcomings.

Why Oxford needs entrance exams

Here comes yet another blow to the rigour of Oxford’s entrance exams. Last December, they got rid of the in-person interview, replaced by less discerning Zoom interviews. And now the university has dropped lots of its subject-specific exams, to be replaced by more generic tests.

There will still be some tailoring to particular degrees. Humanities candidates will sit the Test of Academic Reasoning for Admissions (TARA), while maths and science applicants will take the Engineering and Science Admissions Test (ESAT) or the Test of Mathematics for University Admission (TMUA).

But those exams are still more generalised, less subject-specific than the old ones.

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The aim is to help those who haven’t had the advantage of a brilliant school education – often, but not always, a private one – where you’re lucky enough to have had a deep grounding in your subject.

That’s laudable in subjects that don’t require deep grounding to proceed at top speed once you’re at university. But the truth of it is that if you’ve had a rigorous education from five till 18, then it’s near impossible for someone without that benefit to catch up in the brief three or four years of university.

By the time I got to Oxford to study classics in 1989, I’d done eight years of Latin and seven years of Greek. And that was with long school terms and long daily hours of tuition – compared to four years of a classics degree, for only 24 weeks a year, with only two hour-long tutorials a week.

I had been educated at a London prep school and at Westminster School. My classicist contemporaries at Magdalen College, Oxford, had been as well-educated at other private schools and at grammar schools and comprehensives. In those days, we all sat rigorous entrance exams and tough Oxford exams once we were there. That opportunity for all has nearly disappeared today, now that A-Level Greek has all but gone from comprehensives. A tragedy – and an extremely unfair one.

Oxford has admirably tried to close this gap, with Greek and Latin lessons for undergraduates without the languages, once they matriculate. But, even if they were taught for enough hours to narrow the gap, don’t forget that the undergraduates with the deep grounding are also studying at a top level while the others are catching up with the basics. The gap is bound to persist.

So the only way to paper over this massive gulf is to water down the entrance exams – and water down the exams once you get there. And that’s exactly what Oxford has done, increasingly offering classics-lite exams.

Poor Oxford! It’s not their fault. They’re under government pressure to increase access. But they can’t state the screamingly obvious – the answer isn’t to try to close the gap once you get to the grand old age of 18. The answer is to raise the standards of all schools to the levels of the best schools.

It’s striking that Oxford is keeping subject-specific tests for medicine and law – the University Clinical Aptitude Test and the Law National Aptitude Test.

That is tacitly acknowledging rigorous entrance exams are required for aspiring doctors and lawyers. A badly grounded doctor could butcher you on the operating table. A badly grounded classicist will only mess up his gerundives.

Mmmm… Maybe. But it will also mean Oxford’s overall standards slowly decline, as they are beginning to do. Last year, neither Oxford or Cambridge were in the top three British universities for the first time since the records, made by the Times, began 32 years ago.

Off the record, some Oxbridge dons will admit to this decline but most of them want to hold on to their jobs, understandably, and so stay quiet.

Still, last month, a memo from Trinity Hall, Cambridge, revealed their policy of approaching several top private schools, including St Paul’s Girls, Eton and Winchester, to improve the ‘quality’ of applying pupils, worrying about ‘reverse discrimination’.

Trinity Hall’s ‘targeted recruitment strategy’ meant approaching around 50 independent schools to encourage applications in degrees including languages, music and classics.

Marcus Tomalin, Trinity Hall’s director of admissions, said:

The best students from such schools arrive at Cambridge with expertise and interests that align well with the intellectual demands.

To ignore or marginalise this pool of applicants would risk overlooking potential offer-holders who are not only exceptionally well-qualified but who have been encouraged to engage critically and independently with their subjects in a way that Cambridge has historically prized.

That is, of course, unfair on those who haven’t had the same good fortune of being well-grounded in those subjects. And Trinity Hall was roundly attacked for that unfairness.

But it’s no coincidence that the subjects referred to were languages, music and classics. All three depend on a huge well of knowledge – facts, declensions, conjugations, notes – that you need to learn before you can study them at a high level.

Real fairness demands a level playing field – that everyone applying to the best universities in the world should have had the same access to the best education up until the age of 18.

Real unfairness isn’t top universities demanding that their applicants have been equally well-taught. Real unfairness is a system where some schools provide that education – and others don’t.

Even in death, Epstein’s influence reigns

It was widely suggested that many powerful people – from President Donald Trump downwards – would have preferred the notorious Jeffrey Epstein files remain sealed for years to come. Now, with the latest and perhaps most shocking release yet, the doors of his squirming transatlantic boys’ club have been blown open. Epstein had a rare quality in life for manipulating and flattering others. His posthumous influence is every bit as malign, to say nothing of humiliating for all concerned. 

Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor (formerly styled Prince Andrew) is, as expected, front and center in the latest files. His public disgrace is, of course, long complete because of his association with Epstein. But it is still shocking to discover that he and the billionaire financier were in close contact even after Epstein had been released from prison on child sex charges. In his now infamous BBC interview, Andrew claimed that he had lost touch with Epstein after an investigation was launched in 2006 and only met up with him in December 2010 to cut off contact. But these emails show the former Duke of York cheerily inviting Epstein to Buckingham Palace for dinner months before then and writing, after his period of house arrest ended that year: “Good to be free?”

Epstein, of course, never forgot a friend – or an asset. So, he lined up the then 50-year-old Andrew with a 26-year-old Russian girl called Irina, whom he described as “elevere [sic] beautiful [and] trustworthy.” It may or may not be Irina whom the King’s younger brother was photographed crouching over, while touching her stomach and smirking at the camera. Andrew may long have denied wrongdoing but this compromising, deeply unpleasant situation is only more fuel to the bonfire of his reputationally ruinous association with Epstein. 

Yet, Andrew is far from the only one compromised. The files claim that Bill Gates, who has sought to present himself as a leading figure in world philanthropy, caught an STD from Russian girls procured by his billionaire friend. (He angrily denied all claims, calling them “absolutely absurd and completely false.”) In a draft email addressed to ‘Bill’ (but apparently only sent to himself), Epstein wrote: “To add insult to the injury you then subsequently with tears in your eyes, implore me to please delete the emails regarding your std, your request that I provide you antibiotics that you can surreptitiously give to Melinda, and the description of your penis.” Never has the word “Microsoft” had such an unfortunate double entendre. 

And there are many more who allegedly benefited from Epstein’s largesse. Former British ambassador to Washington Peter Mandelson’s now-husband Reinaldo da Silva asked for and was given £10,000 ($13,700) from the pedophile to take part in an osteopathy course in 2009. Elon Musk, no stranger to hedonism, asked when the “wildest party” would take place on Epstein’s private island, Little Saint James, in 2012. The likes of Richard Branson, Woody Allen and Bill Clinton were all photographed alongside Epstein in his once-glittering orbit. Although all have denied any wrongdoing, the sense only grows that this deeply wicked man collected powerful figures like objets d’art for his own nefarious gallery of influence. Now, we understand why. 

Conspiracy theorists who like to imagine the world is ruled by men in league with giant lizards have been looking in the wrong place. Here, it seems, was a man of huge appetites – amoral, perverted ones at that – who was sufficiently charming and sufficiently useful to a variety of world-renowned figures. They may deny wrongdoing, but why were so many apparently willing to ignore his activities, accept his hospitality and his money – even after his conviction in 2008? Can the answer be any more complex than pure, reckless hedonism or a misguided desire for power?

Already, we’ve seen global outrage over the release of these files – and rightly so. Like the emperor in the children’s story, the members of Epstein’s once-lavish boys’ club have been shown naked to the world. This time, we can all see their pitiful shortcomings.

Japan doesn’t want to see Starmer

If Keir Starmer’s trip to China seemed unfathomable, then his follow-on visit to Tokyo today is even more mysterious. ‘Why on earth is he here?’ the Japanese are asking (those that have noticed he is here that is). There doesn’t seem to be any pressing business for the Prime Minister to discuss with his Japanese counterpart Sanae Takaichi right now. If it is just a courtesy call, then it’s rather a discourteous one since the timing, for her, is terrible.

Takaichi faces a make or break snap-election on 8 February. She is seeking to win an outright majority in the lower house and thus a mandate for her ambitious policy platform. Current polling has her on course to do so but nobody here is confident – especially after the bond markets lurched and interest rates spiked last week in response to her controversial fiscal stimulus plans. Her sky-high approval ratings of around 70 per cent have recently slipped, too. 

The bottom line: Takaichi is popular but her Liberal Democratic party is not. How that will manifests on the 8th is hard to predict. Takaichi remains bullish but, if this turns into the election that goes wrong, she could find herself in the bulging ‘where are they now?’ file of failed Japanese PMs after a mere four months in office.

In such circumstances, to give up a full day to accommodate a visiting British PM seems like a poor use of her time. Wags here are calling the visit a ‘boondoggle’, claiming Starmer is little more than a tourist who wants to enjoy the cheap shopping (the weak Yen has made Japan an unlikely budget destination). Back in Britain, it has been suggested he doesn’t want to come home to face the increasingly discordant music from his own party after the Andy Burnham fallout.

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The most plausible rationale for this visit, which was requested by the UK, is simply optics. As Grant Newsham, the first US Marine Liaison Officer to the Japan Self-Defense Force, told the Taiwan Talks news show, by tagging on a visit to Japan, Starmer can claim that the optically problematic trip to China was part of a wider Asian tour. This would make the ‘kowtowing’ in Beijing – where Newsham said Starmer looked like a ‘guilty schoolboy being led away to detention’ – less egregious.

For Takaichi, there is very little apparent benefit. But she is an Anglophile (she has spoken about her admiration for Margaret Thatcher) and will get some enjoyment from again presenting herself as an in-demand stateswoman courted by the world’s leaders. She has already hosted Donald Trump and Italy’s premier Giorgia Meloni, and exploited the PR value of those visits to the max (a manga cartoon picture was released of Takaichi and Meloni). The Japanese government buildings in Shinjuku will be lit up with the colours of the Union Jack for Starmer’s jaunt. No doubt there will be other little stunts, though perhaps no manga. Maybe Starmer will try to charm his hosts with a few words of Japanese – a stilted, nasally ‘arigatou’ perhaps.

There is an official agenda, of course, and officially the two leaders will ‘confirm cooperation on economic and defense security issues’. The Taiwan problem will overshadow and inform much of the serious business. Takaichi’s controversial comments that Japan would respond with military force if the island was attacked sparked turbulence that has not yet subsided. China has applied export controls on dual-use items (both civilian and military) in the wake of the row. Takaichi is expected to explain Japan’s position on Taiwan and seek Starmer’s understanding, while also strengthening supply chains.

Militarily, the two countries have come closer in recent years. The Reciprocal Access Agreement in 2023 enabled faster deployment of military forces for joint training and exercises. The Royal Navy flagship HMS Prince of Wales visited for exercises in August last year. There is also the trinational fighter jet program with Italy, the Global Combat Air Programme, which promises to deliver a sixth-generation stealth fighter by 2035. Much has been made of this initiative as it points towards a future Japan potentially less reliant on its historic security alliance with the US. 

This all sounds meaningful – but a key development contract for the jets has still not been signed. Even if the jets are eventually delivered (and doubts remain over how the project will be financed), it’s not clear if they will be superior to Chinese technology at the time. As for the UK helping to supplant the US as Japan’s defender, this is laughable. The Prince of Wales’s visit looked impressive until it was reported that the ship needed considerable assistance – including fuel, ammunition and food – from the US navy to make the trip. Whatever is said in the ‘summit meeting’ or ‘working dinner’ won’t change these stark realities. Or anything much.

The Japanese have a polite expression for visitors: ‘O-jama shimasu.’ You say it when you arrive and it means: ‘The nuisance is here.’ Starmer should give it a go when he meets Takaichi. It might at least get him a laugh.

How mediocrity took over the Grammys

Is music getting worse? Rick Beato is a musician, producer and critic with more than five million YouTube subscribers. His answer would be: yes, pretty much. In a recent video, he compares the 2026 Grammy Song of the Year nominees to those of 1984. There are a few bright sparks among the slate of new songs, but Beato regards most of them as derivative, unoriginal and unlikely to be remembered past the end of the awards show. In contrast, 42 years on, all the 1984 nominees – Michael Jackson’s “Beat It,” The Police’s “Every Breath You Take” and Lionel Richie’s “All Night Long” among them – are firmly embedded in the popular music canon.

One could ask the same question about science: has it gotten worse? My answer, I have to say, reflects Beato’s for music. As in popular music, bright sparks do still show up in the stream of science. But, as with popular music, nearly all of what passes for “science” these days is dull, derivative, repetitive and forgettable, unlikely to make an impression past the deadline for the next grant application.

Beato has a compelling explanation as to why popular music seems to be getting worse. His thesis is simple: the culture and economics of the music industry have cheapened creativity and incentivized mediocrity. New technologies are accelerating this decline.

Could something similar be behind the cheapening of science? “No” would be the reflexive answer of most in the industry – and probably laymen, too. But both music and science are, at root, creative arts: Einstein liked to imagine what it would be like to ride a photon; August Kekulé dreamt that the structure of benzene was like an ouroboros, a snake swallowing its own tail; Francis Crick and James Watson imaginatively turned the DNA double helix outside in to arrive at a structure no one else thought possible. Science advances more through these flights of creative fancy than through all the millions of scientific papers academics publish each year. As in the field of music, creativity in science has been debased like a tin nickel. Mediocrity is incentivized.

How did this happen? In popular music, according to Beato, the proliferation of songwriters has been a major factor in the decline. He notes that all the Grammy-nominated songs in 1984, save one, were composed by a single songwriter – the exception was authored by two. And in nearly every case the songwriter was also the performer. This year, several of the nominated tracks were written by teams of songwriters. Rosé and Bruno Mars’s “APT,” has nine songwriters; Kendrick Lamar and SZA’s “Luther,” has ten. 

A similar trend has taken over science. The single-author paper, once the norm, has been all but completely replaced by the multi-author paper. It’s not uncommon now to see bylines listing dozens or even more than a hundred contributors. At the upper extreme, a 2016 article on the Higgs boson particle boasted 5,154 authors.

This mad proliferation of authors and songwriters is usually justified with the trope that “diversity is our strength.” Bring more minds into a team of researchers and musicians, and fruitful cross-fertilization will inevitably ensue – that’s the logic.

That does happen, sometimes. But the opposite is the norm. What occurs most frequently is that teams foster crowd-following and conformity. The most forgettable of the 2026 Song of the Year nominees are also the ones with the most writers, whereas the most memorable, “Wildflower,” has only two, Billie Eilish and her brother Finneas O’Connell. In science, many of the most memorable publications have only one or two authors. The microbiologist Carl Woese, for example, has fundamentally reshaped our conceptions of the origin and kingdoms of life. He typically published alone or with one co-author. Big committees of writers and researchers seem to smother the spark of genius.

Then there’s the problem of new technologies. Music today is mostly a digital medium, and the digital tools for its production are astonishingly sophisticated – and growing more so with every year. This is good news, because it’s put new creative palettes and canvasses of sound into the hands of musicians. That means really brilliant musicians can create totally novel music (assuming they aren’t being suffocated by a team of cowriters).

But there’s also bad news: one doesn’t need much in the way of musical talent anymore to churn out music that sounds pretty good. Digital instruments, clips, samples and loops populate the digital world in the millions, and they are inexpensive to obtain. If you want a percussion track, for example, you don’t need to bring in a drummer who may have spent years mastering his instrument. You don’t need to book expensive studio time, where you might work with a wise producer. And you certainly don’t need to invest the time working out a complex beat yourself. You just drop a few downloaded loops into a track, mix in a sample here and there to liven things up and, within hours, you have a track that sounds pretty good. Not incredible, but pretty good. 

This technological revolution in production has been accompanied by a technological revolution in distribution. Nearly all music is now streamed digitally to consumers through platforms such as Spotify and Apple Music. The volume is astonishing: nearly five trillion songs were streamed in 2024 alone, and that number grows by about 15 percent annually. This appetite is supplied by a prodigious production of new music: an average of nearly 99,000 new songs were uploaded every day of 2024. Of these, 80 percent have never been never played. Talk about forgettable!

This pattern of technology-enabled overproduction plagues science too. In 2022, the number of peer-reviewed publications worldwide reached 3.3 million. In years past – say, 1984 – this number was typically less than a million. As with music streams, this number is increasing exponentially. Like all those never-heard songs crowding streaming platforms, an enormous proportion of that torrent of articles – as much as 80 percent – are never cited and presumably never read.

The underlying theme here is this: both popular music and science incentivize content creation over artistic creation. Artistic creation is the realm of imagination and genius; it requires talent and hard work, both rare commodities. By contrast, content creation is easy: you fire up your digital-audio workstation, click around, play with some widgets and a predetermined chunk of mediocrity comes out. Then you click a few buttons on Spotify and the song is displayed, with no distinction, alongside the work of genuinely talented musicians, who have honed their skills and suffered for their work. There’s no way for the average listener to separate the wheat from the chaff here.

Sharp scientists are likewise increasingly drowned out by their lessers’ content creation. The success or failure of a scientific career is now dominated by metrics of content production: how many papers are published, how many citations gleaned, how many grant dollars won. These numerical metrics can be easily inflated by pumping out mediocre papers. Never mind that scientific advancement is accomplished through a much more methodical, slow – and creative – approach. When a researcher puts himself up for promotion and tenure, these are the metrics that drive the decision. Rare is the tenure committee that actually reads and engages with a candidate’s publications.

So, where are all the musical and scientific geniuses, with their idiosyncrasies and innovations? The answer is obvious: they’re being drowned in a rising tide of mediocre dreck.

Why I’m in the Epstein Files

“Always knew you were a nonce.” That text, from a coworker in London, is how I learned my name appeared in the latest tranche of the Epstein Files. In the moments prior, I had been sweating profusely – unlike a certain former prince.

I can explain. First off, “nonce” is British slang for “pedophile.” More important: at around noon today, the Department of Justice released a series of documents relating to the investigations into Jeffrey Epstein, the late sex trafficker and financier. Among the documents: an email I sent in June 2020 to a number of senior figures who worked in the US Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York, in pursuit of comment on a colleague’s story on Prince Andrew and his friendship with Epstein. A source close to Andrew claimed US Attorney Geoffrey Berman was lying about the prince refusing to cooperate. I emailed Berman and his deputies – including James Comey’s daughter Maurene! No reply came.

I had completely forgotten about this interaction until this morning, on what was otherwise a normal Friday. I got up, had coffee and granola, edited a couple of newsletters and took a work call. At lunch, I switched my phone to Do Not Disturb and went on the treadmill in my building’s gym for 20 minutes. The next time I looked at my phone, after mopping the sweat from my brow, there was a message associating me with America’s most notorious sex offender.

Not a great text to receive, is it? “You’re in the Epstein Files.” I would say it’s down there with “you have chlamydia” and “granddad’s had a fall” among the worst. Apologies for being that friend who’s too woke – but I happen to think Jeffrey Epstein was a bad guy, and don’t much care for the association.

In the hours since, the messages have been pouring in. “My colleagues are v impressed you got yourself into the Epstein Files,” texts one friend, who also described it as “v on brand,” which I don’t love. “Should you add it to your Hinge bio?” suggests another. Probably not!

Of all of the things you could appear in the Epstein Files for, at least I’m documented scrupulously doing my job. Yet of all the names that were redacted, mine wasn’t? Typical. Matt McDonald didn’t kill himself.

Stop shoehorning diversity into BBC dramas

At last, the BBC has been forced to admit what even the dogs on the street know to be true: that the corporation is guilty of ‘shoehorning’ diversity into its television drama output, in series such as Shetland and This Town, and making them feel ‘preachy’ and ‘inauthentic’ as a consequence.

A large swathe of the viewing public believe that the BBC tries too hard to represent diverse groups in its drama, according to a report commissioned by executives, involving a survey of 4,500 adults. Irritation is most pronounced in the area of historical dramas, with feedback indicating the biggest offenders to be a 2023 Agatha Christie mystery starring a black actor and laden with ‘anti-colonial struggles’, a production of Great Expectations starring a mixed-race actress as Estella, and an episode of Doctor Who in which Sir Isaac Newton was also depicted as mixed race. As the report concludes: ‘What needs to be avoided is ethnic diversity which looks forced and tick box, and we found our interviewees of colour as emphatic on this point as those who were white.’

Some will protest that this is a fuss over nothing. Dramas aren’t real life or purport to be historical documentaries. They’re literally made-up. And indeed, the report tries to make the case for the BBC’s hyper-tokenist approach on the ground of artistic licence. ‘In Doctor Who, if we can ask viewers to believe that the central character is an extra-terrestrial being who can re-generate into a range of a different actors… a mixed-race Sir Isaac Newton seems much less of a stretch.’

In an alternate universe, a different kind of Newton could indeed be feasible and legitimate. Yet science-fiction aficionados wouldn’t notice if this was but a one-off, just as we didn’t notice back in 1988 when, upon its launch, Red Dwarf had an over-representatively diverse cast. And this was when Britain was indisputably more racist. Audiences didn’t bellyache back then because this trend wasn’t the mandatory and ubiquitous norm everywhere on television.

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Rather than just being any old kind of frivolous entertainment, historical dramas carry a significance and responsibility not borne by other forms of make-believe. While the audience does indeed expect dramatic licence, and allow for screen adaptations to deviate from novels which might have inspired them, they also expect and assume these programmes to be set against a background faithful to historical reality. This is why, going back to the chiming clock in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar and evidenced more recently in the verbal atrocities of Downton Abbey (‘step on it’, ‘I’m just sayin’’, etc), anachronisms are so offensive to the sensibilities and to one’s intelligence.

Productions which distort history deliberately and cynically are even more exasperating. In living memory, this first became evident in the film Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves (1991), in which Morgan Freeman was shoehorned in to play a Moor. It’s not that medieval England didn’t have any inhabitants of African origin, it’s just that their numbers and influence would have been miniscule. But that film was released at the height of political correctness, the chief parent of wokery, and Hollywood was already desperate in its quest for more diversity. The audiences could see through it, too.

Likewise, when history was subsequently and wantonly falsified in Michael Collins – the IRA didn’t use car bombs in the 1920s – or Braveheart – with howlers too numerous to mention – savvy viewers knew what was afoot. The demonisation of Ulster Protestants in the first movie appealed to a bewilderment of and hostility to these people prevalent in the 1990s, while Braveheart was a crass appeal to the stirrings of nationalism in Scotland.

The over-representation of ethnic minorities on television and on theatre, and especially at the Royal Shakespeare Company, exists today for precisely the same reason. It has little or nothing do with artistic merit, or even artistic licence, and instead derives from political motives and crude, utilitarian exigency: the desire to make television ‘reflect society’ and the desire to place to the fore more benign and more numerous representations of ethnic minorities. The BBC regards its drama output as a tool of effecting social change first, a conduit with which to entertain and amuse second.

People are right, and have a right, to be annoyed about ‘mere fiction’. A nation’s history is integral to its sense of self, and its degradation as represented in historical drama alarmingly mirrors the way it is debased in schools. The revelation last November that children in Scotland were being taught that the Picts were black was but the latest case-study of the manner in which history is being deliberately falsified in schools to suit the prejudices and political agendas of progressives today.

Some may welcome this latest report by the BBC. But things will only ever improve when our culture and its preachy, monomaniacal custodians also change.

What Putin learned from Iran’s crackdown

After losing his erstwhile allies and clients in Syria and Venezuela over the past 13 months, Vladimir Putin ought to be breathing a sigh of relief at the bloody suppression of the protests in Iran. Russia and Iran are natural bedfellows – a marriage of inconvenience, if you will. Both languish under Western sanctions, though Iran’s are stricter and have endured longer. Both economies depend heavily on China hoovering up their sanctioned oil at a discount and Beijing flogging them technology. Both deploy shadow fleets to export their oil. Neither has access to global financial markets.

There are, naturally, crucial differences. The Russian economy is more sophisticated and modern, less tethered to oil, and suffering not from rising youth unemployment but rather the opposite: an ageing population and labour shortages. The sanctions against Russia are softer than those throttling Iran, and its finances are in rather finer fettle.

Nevertheless, what lessons might the Kremlin have gleaned from how Iran has handled its protests? First, the idea that low inflation trumps economic growth when it comes to maintaining social stability. Inflation in Iran has been stratospheric for decades, rarely dipping below 10 per cent annually since the revolution in 1979. It’s been in double figures since the Covid pandemic, peaking at 46 per cent two years ago before dropping to 33 per cent at the start of last year – amid 4.5 per cent economic growth. The World Bank expects plummeting oil prices and war with Israel to propel inflation back up to 44 per cent in the current financial year while the economy contracts. It was the latest in a series of food price hikes that lit the fuse in Iran in December.

On this front, Russia has relatively few worries. Thanks to a set of draconian measures from its central bank, inflation is running at roughly a tenth of the pace of Iran’s. Though price rises for food and essentials exceed the headline rate of inflation, Iranian-style surges are unimaginable in Russia under present conditions.

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The Kremlin is prepared to sacrifice economic growth on the altar of price stability. Russia’s economic slowdown, especially in the civilian sector, is a direct consequence of this Faustian bargain. Faced with a contraction due to war and collapsing oil prices, though, Iran cannot stimulate growth by loosening monetary policy – but Russia can. Events in Iran will only embolden the camp in Moscow championing price stability in their long-running battle against those clamouring for growth at any price.

By Western standards, neither country sports a particularly alarming budget deficit. In 2023/24, Iran’s deficit stood at 2.5 per cent of GDP, rising to 3.3 per cent in 2024/25, and is expected to breach 4 per cent this year. Russia faces an almost identical predicament. Last year, it posted a 2.6 per cent deficit – five times higher than envisaged at the year’s outset. For this year, Moscow has budgeted a 1.6 per cent deficit, but both the oil price assumptions and growth forecasts underpinning it look overoptimistic.

On the face of it, both boast tolerable deficits, especially compared with most developed countries. Britain, after all, is running a shortfall of 5.2 per cent. But here’s the rub: sanctions compel Moscow and Tehran to rely exclusively on domestic banks for borrowing. This ratchets up the cost of servicing loans, and with interest rates sky-high, domestic borrowing becomes ruinously expensive, triggering a vicious debt spiral and, in effect, money printing by the central bank. This de facto monetary financing is partly a consequence of hermetically sealed financial systems in both countries.

The Iranian protests may strengthen the hand of those in the country agitating for spending cuts in Russia. But there, as in Iran, any decision on slashing military and social expenditure must emanate from the very apex of power.

The next lesson for Moscow springs from the world of banking. One catalyst of the Iranian protests was the spectacular implosion of Ayandeh, one of the country’s largest private banks. For years, it had dangled high deposit rates to its customers whilst shovelling loans to affiliated companies. The bank’s owner boasted strong connections to the Iranian regime’s leadership, snapped up expensive real estate in London and deployed the bank’s loans to finance the construction of the Middle East’s largest shopping mall. A government bailout for Ayandeh last year fuelled Iranians’ fury, perceived as evidence of systemic corruption and a klaxon warning about the safety of savings elsewhere.

Russia has witnessed several high-profile bank collapses over the past decade, but a ruthless clean-up by the central bank in the 2010s has left things considerably healthier. When Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, the domestic banking system had been largely decapitalised, cleaned up and partially nationalised. As a result, Russia harbours far lower levels of toxic debt than Iran.

But what about sanctions? Officials in both Iran and Russia peddle a rhetorical paradox: they blame foreign sanctions for the manifold domestic economic afflictions their countries are experiencing while simultaneously dismissing them as feeble. Iran has endured stringent restrictions for four times longer than Russia. One crucial difference is that the measures strangling Iran rest on UN resolutions and are therefore globally enforceable. Russia’s sanctions are piecemeal, levied only by the West and less deeply entrenched.

Both countries were severed from the SWIFT banking system and Western finance – though Russia’s excommunication isn’t total. Both have a turbocharged reliance on China for trade – though, again, Russia maintains financial arteries to other countries, particularly in the Global South. On the other hand, enduring sanctions for as long as Iran has without gravely eroding the well-being, security and forbearance of the public will prove far more arduous for Russia.

Despite its superior economic standing, Putin has doubtless also harvested lessons from his Iranian counterparts on what to do when people flood the streets in protest: don’t be coy about severing the internet and unleashing state repression. The Kremlin began throttling access to some online services before the invasion of Ukraine. Since 2022, those efforts have intensified with a vengeance.

Iran and Russia already share abundant common ground when it comes to digital repression – they both possess near-total state dominion over domestic media, multifarious content filtering mechanisms and laws criminalising critical social media posts. Compared with Iran’s crude, sledgehammer internet crackdown, Russia is deploying a more nuanced approach. Yet as Tehran has demonstrated, if the regime scents an existential menace, flicking the kill switch is both technically and politically feasible. Russian authorities are far more prepared to take that drastic step than they were at the start of the war in Ukraine.

The brutal suppression of Iran’s protests ought to reinforce Putin’s calculus that if dissent cannot be bought off, it must be crushed – the earlier the better. There’s also a comfortable understanding that the West will confine itself to stern rhetoric and hand-wringing condemnation for as long as possible. This lesson transcends economics.

Moscow has likely emerged even more convinced of the wisdom of its financial and economic strategy, particularly regarding controlling inflation and sanitising its banking sector. It also furnishes fresh ammunition for those in the Kremlin advocating for spending reductions. Beyond economics, Iran may well inspire Russia to further tightening of the screws of its regime – both in cyberspace and the real world.

In praise of Sundance

Despite the recent death of its world-famous founder, Robert Redford, the Sundance Film Festival is about to become much, much bigger. This year’s festival, which ends tomorrow, is its last hurrah in the small Utah ski resort it brought to prominence, Park City (population 9,000). Sundance needs more cinemas, more venues and better logistics. Next year and for the foreseeable future, it will be held in Boulder, Colorado (population 100,000).

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For more than four decades, the Sundance Film Festival has been American cinema’s most visible argument in favour of independence: independence of voice, of form, of subject matter, and – crucially – of ambition. At its best, Sundance has insisted that films do not need to be large to be significant, nor expensive to be terrific.

From early on, it positioned itself as an international enabler, receptive to films that shared its independent ethos even if they did not share its nationality. Small British films such as Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994) and An Education (2009) exemplify this. Neither was conceived as an international hit. Both relied on wit, performance and emotional precision rather than spectacle. Awards at Sundance demonstrated that independence was not a national category but a creative one: a way of making films that trusted audiences to engage with nuance, irony and moral complexity.

The mould-breaking charm of Four Weddings lay in its Englishness – its class-conscious humour, its melancholy undercurrents, its willingness (then daring) to allow joy and grief to occupy the same narrative space. Similarly, An Education offered a quietly devastating coming-of-age story that refused easy judgment. These movies’ success signalled Sundance’s role as a platform for films that assume intelligence and patience from their viewers. It also did wonders for the careers of Hugh Grant and Carey Mulligan.

Yet it is in American independent cinema that Sundance’s influence has been most profound. Low-budget films such as Little Miss Sunshine (2006), The Kids Are All Right (2010) and Whiplash (2014) illustrate how Sundance has functioned as both incubator and amplifier. Each began life as a small, precarious project. Each depended on tonal daring rather than scale. Each, in different ways, crossed over into the cultural mainstream without surrendering its identity.

Little Miss Sunshine could never have emerged from the Hollywood system. It was about a dysfunctional family road trip centred on a child beauty pageant, and celebrated failure rather than triumph. It won over big audiences because its humour was humane, its satire affectionate.

The Kids Are All Right demonstrated Sundance’s capacity to normalise stories that mainstream cinema had long marginalised or turned into preaching. Its portrayal of a lesbian couple was not framed as a social problem but as a lived reality, complete with intimacy, compromise and imperfections. The film’s success suggested that audiences were not merely ready for such stories but eager for them – provided they were told with honesty rather than didacticism.

Whiplash represented a different kind of success. Ferocious, claustrophobic and challenging to cinematic convention, it depicted mentorship as coercion, and the achievement of excellence as potentially destructive to the psyche. Hollywood would have tried to soften Whiplash for wider consumption. Sundance showed us a magnificent film that refused to bring feelgood comfort.

Just as momentously, Sundance played a decisive role in launching the careers of Quentin Tarantino, Robert Rodriguez and a wider generation of filmmakers who reshaped American cinema in the 1990s.

For Tarantino, Sundance was the moment when a video-store clerk achieved recognition as an innovative filmmaker. Reservoir Dogs (1992) premiered there. I caught up with it a few weeks later at the Montreal Film Festival, and encouraged my colleagues on the international jury to give him his first critical award.

Quentin’s then revolutionary use of time-shifting structure, heightened dialogue and shocking violence (usually committed off-screen) did not resemble mainstream American film at the time. I would still rate his initial indie efforts, Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction as two of the great cultural achievements of the 1990s.

An entertaining but lesser-known film, Robert Rodriguez’s El Mariachi (1992), was shot for an infamously minuscule budget, and embodied the festival’s democratic promise: that ingenuity could substitute for resources. Sundance did not merely showcase El Mariachi; it turned the film into a parable. Rodriguez became proof that filmmaking was not restricted to the well-connected or well-funded. The festival amplified the story of how the film was made as much as the film itself, inspiring a generation of filmmakers to believe that access, while difficult, was not impossible.

Beyond individual careers, Sundance has helped redefine the auteur in American cinema. It has encouraged critics, distributors and audiences to think in terms of voices and signatures. Filmmakers such as Steven Soderbergh (Sex, lies, and videotape), Kevin Smith (Clerks), and Paul Thomas Anderson (There Will Be Blood) all benefited from this shift. Sundance offered a space where personal style was not smoothed out by Hollywood, but sharpened.

Inevitably, there have been accusations that Sundance has ‘sold out’. The presence of major distributors, high-profile premieres, celebrity attendees and multimillion-dollar acquisition deals has led some critics to argue that the festival has become less a haven for outsiders than a marketplace for prestige content.

The risk is not that independent films no longer appear at Sundance – they do – but that the surrounding noise makes it harder for quieter, stranger works to be heard. The danger lies less in ‘selling out’ than in crowding out.

But Sundance never isolated independent filmmakers from the mainstream industry; it connected them to it on more favourable terms. By concentrating attention, creating press interest and fostering competition among buyers, the festival allowed producers and directors to retain more leverage than they would otherwise have had. Independence became a starting position rather than permanent exclusion.

Sundance-style independence of spirit is needed more than ever. Commercial cinema, like mainstream publishing, is in precipitous decline. Risk aversion has prioritised predictability. Big business relies on sequels, remakes and reboots because they think these minimise financial risk. 

The result has been not just tedious repetition, but a narrowing of emotional and thematic range. Most big films these days feel like content engineered for franchising – films as delivery systems for spin-offs, merchandise and streaming extensions. They certainly seem aimed at people with the mental age of teenagers.

Until very recently, you could have gone to the cinema and enjoyed grown-up dramas, romantic comedies and genuinely surprising thrillers. These have almost completely vanished.

Data-driven, algorithm-dictated development favours what has already worked, encouraging formulaic structures, over-familiar didactic archetypes, and pre-tested emotional beats. This produces films (and, indeed, novels) that are efficient but hardly ever surprising, emotionally shallow, and culturally inert.

Sundance’s greatest gift to talented people has been not just fame and commercial success, but permission to be idiosyncratic, abrasive, personal and ambitious – and to believe that such qualities are the key to achieving great art.

How mediocrity took over the Grammys

Is music getting worse? Rick Beato is a musician, producer and critic with more than five million YouTube subscribers. His answer would be: yes, pretty much. In a recent video, he compares the 2026 Grammy Song of the Year nominees to those of 1984. There are a few bright sparks among the slate of new songs, but Beato regards most of them as derivative, unoriginal and unlikely to be remembered past the end of the awards show. In contrast, 42 years on, all the 1984 nominees – Michael Jackson’s “Beat It,” The Police’s “Every Breath You Take” and Lionel Richie’s “All Night Long” among them – are firmly embedded in the popular music canon.

One could ask the same question about science: has it gotten worse? My answer, I have to say, reflects Beato’s for music. As in popular music, bright sparks do still show up in the stream of science. But, as with popular music, nearly all of what passes for “science” these days is dull, derivative, repetitive and forgettable, unlikely to make an impression past the deadline for the next grant application.

Beato has a compelling explanation as to why popular music seems to be getting worse. His thesis is simple: the culture and economics of the music industry have cheapened creativity and incentivized mediocrity. New technologies are accelerating this decline.

Could something similar be behind the cheapening of science? “No” would be the reflexive answer of most in the industry – and probably laymen, too. But both music and science are, at root, creative arts: Einstein liked to imagine what it would be like to ride a photon; August Kekulé dreamt that the structure of benzene was like an ouroboros, a snake swallowing its own tail; Francis Crick and James Watson imaginatively turned the DNA double helix outside in to arrive at a structure no one else thought possible. Science advances more through these flights of creative fancy than through all the millions of scientific papers academics publish each year. As in the field of music, creativity in science has been debased like a tin nickel. Mediocrity is incentivized.

How did this happen? In popular music, according to Beato, the proliferation of songwriters has been a major factor in the decline. He notes that all the Grammy-nominated songs in 1984, save one, were composed by a single songwriter – the exception was authored by two. And in nearly every case the songwriter was also the performer. This year, several of the nominated tracks were written by teams of songwriters. Rosé and Bruno Mars’s “APT,” has nine songwriters; Kendrick Lamar and SZA’s “Luther,” has ten. 

A similar trend has taken over science. The single-author paper, once the norm, has been all but completely replaced by the multi-author paper. It’s not uncommon now to see bylines listing dozens or even more than a hundred contributors. At the upper extreme, a 2016 article on the Higgs boson particle boasted 5,154 authors.

This mad proliferation of authors and songwriters is usually justified with the trope that “diversity is our strength.” Bring more minds into a team of researchers and musicians, and fruitful cross-fertilization will inevitably ensue – that’s the logic.

That does happen, sometimes. But the opposite is the norm. What occurs most frequently is that teams foster crowd-following and conformity. The most forgettable of the 2026 Song of the Year nominees are also the ones with the most writers, whereas the most memorable, “Wildflower,” has only two, Billie Eilish and her brother Finneas O’Connell. In science, many of the most memorable publications have only one or two authors. The microbiologist Carl Woese, for example, has fundamentally reshaped our conceptions of the origin and kingdoms of life. He typically published alone or with one co-author. Big committees of writers and researchers seem to smother the spark of genius.

Then there’s the problem of new technologies. Music today is mostly a digital medium, and the digital tools for its production are astonishingly sophisticated – and growing more so with every year. This is good news, because it’s put new creative palettes and canvasses of sound into the hands of musicians. That means really brilliant musicians can create totally novel music (assuming they aren’t being suffocated by a team of cowriters).

But there’s also bad news: one doesn’t need much in the way of musical talent anymore to churn out music that sounds pretty good. Digital instruments, clips, samples and loops populate the digital world in the millions, and they are inexpensive to obtain. If you want a percussion track, for example, you don’t need to bring in a drummer who may have spent years mastering his instrument. You don’t need to book expensive studio time, where you might work with a wise producer. And you certainly don’t need to invest the time working out a complex beat yourself. You just drop a few downloaded loops into a track, mix in a sample here and there to liven things up and, within hours, you have a track that sounds pretty good. Not incredible, but pretty good. 

This technological revolution in production has been accompanied by a technological revolution in distribution. Nearly all music is now streamed digitally to consumers through platforms such as Spotify and Apple Music. The volume is astonishing: nearly five trillion songs were streamed in 2024 alone, and that number grows by about 15 percent annually. This appetite is supplied by a prodigious production of new music: an average of nearly 99,000 new songs were uploaded every day of 2024. Of these, 80 percent have never been never played. Talk about forgettable!

This pattern of technology-enabled overproduction plagues science too. In 2022, the number of peer-reviewed publications worldwide reached 3.3 million. In years past – say, 1984 – this number was typically less than a million. As with music streams, this number is increasing exponentially. Like all those never-heard songs crowding streaming platforms, an enormous proportion of that torrent of articles – as much as 80 percent – are never cited and presumably never read.

The underlying theme here is this: both popular music and science incentivize content creation over artistic creation. Artistic creation is the realm of imagination and genius; it requires talent and hard work, both rare commodities. By contrast, content creation is easy: you fire up your digital-audio workstation, click around, play with some widgets and a predetermined chunk of mediocrity comes out. Then you click a few buttons on Spotify and the song is displayed, with no distinction, alongside the work of genuinely talented musicians, who have honed their skills and suffered for their work. There’s no way for the average listener to separate the wheat from the chaff here.

Sharp scientists are likewise increasingly drowned out by their lessers’ content creation. The success or failure of a scientific career is now dominated by metrics of content production: how many papers are published, how many citations gleaned, how many grant dollars won. These numerical metrics can be easily inflated by pumping out mediocre papers. Never mind that scientific advancement is accomplished through a much more methodical, slow – and creative – approach. When a researcher puts himself up for promotion and tenure, these are the metrics that drive the decision. Rare is the tenure committee that actually reads and engages with a candidate’s publications.

So, where are all the musical and scientific geniuses, with their idiosyncrasies and innovations? The answer is obvious: they’re being drowned in a rising tide of mediocre dreck.

How to drink (and not drive) in Arizona

I was in Scottsdale, Arizona and, to put it mildly, a little squiffy. Most folk go there to play golf (yawn) but I’d gone there to drink and, after a lengthy tequila masterclass in La Hacienda and several cocktails at Platform 18 (‘best US cocktail bar’ in the 2023 Spirited Awards, incidentally) in nearby Phoenix, I was also more than a little disorientated.

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No, don’t laugh. Firstly, La Hacienda – a fancy bar in the Fairmont Scottsdale Princess resort – has more than 240 different tequilas and mezcals on its list and, thanks to the resort’s resident Tequila Goddess (its term, not mine), they just kept on coming. And secondly, Platform 18, a Prohibition-era, presidential Pullman-inspired train-carriage-cum-bar on the ground floor of Century Grand which goes absolutely nowhere but which, owing to clever choreography and video trickery, appears to rattle through the North American countryside, is so ridiculously convincing that a lady at the neighbouring table had to draw the curtains because she felt travel-sick.

On some barfly’s advice, I’d downloaded a taxi app to ensure I got home safely. I thought it was for Uber or Lyft, but it turned out to be for Waymo, the driverless car company, which is being trialled in Scottsdale as well as in Atlanta, Denver, LA, Miami and now London (albeit with human ‘safety drivers’ behind the wheel here).

In Scottsdale, they’re entirely driverless and, having thought I’d just caught a train to Grand Central Station, NYC, only to find myself back where I started, it took me a while to work out that I was now in a car heading back to my billet at Hotel Valley Ho (a glorious 1950s throwback where Frank Sinatra and the Rat Pack partied and where Robert Wagner and Natalie Wood got married) with nobody driving. The air-con was just right and ditto the cool jazz and it was extremely clean and comfortable. It was also deeply unnerving.

The car purred along and was courteous in traffic but not above nipping into a gap at the lights before the car behind us could. At first, I clung tightly to the armrests as it picked up speed and was baffled to see the steering wheel spin left and right with nobody there to spin it. After a while, though, I relaxed and stretched out along the back seat, delighting in the fact that there was no gobby driver yacking on about the fact he wasn’t really an Uber driver but actually an actor/doctor/novelist and that he’d had that Matt Damon in the back of the cab once.

I worried that Waymo didn’t know where I wanted to go and that I might have typed in the destination incorrectly but I soon found myself gliding to a stop at my hotel. A voice thanked me for my custom, told me not to forget my keys, phone or wallet, bade me goodnight and crept silently off. By now even more disorientated, I made straight for Hotel Valley Ho’s excellent bar to get even more squiffy. It had been a strange night.

Scottsdale is the perfect place in which to drink. There are countless bars, seemingly more tequila than in Mexico and some eye-openingly appetising local Arizonan wines, and the following couple of days passed in a pleasant alcoholic blur.

I drank beer like a cowboy in nearby Cave Creek, downing glass after glass in the Buffalo Chip Saloon, Horny Toad, Harold’s Corral (live bluegrass music), the Roadhouse (live heavy metal) and Hideaway (live, even heavier metal), before having one for the road at the Rusty Spur Saloon in downtown Scottsdale.

I attempted the Scottsdale Wine Trail, a self-guided walking tour in town that showcases seven (I managed just two) out of almost 150 Arizonan wineries, the highlights for me being a beguiling 2022 Carlson Creek Chardonnay and a spicy, chocolatey 2017 LDV Winery Petite Sirah.

As for cocktails, well, I slightly overcooked it, starting with several over brunch at the Hermosa Inn – the former home of 1930s cowboy artist Lon Megargee – where favourites included the Last Drop (High West double rye whiskey, Luxardo apricot, sweet vermouth and blood orange) and Garden Toast, made from basil and tomato-infused gin.

I continued in FnB, Belmont Kitchen & Cocktails and at Americano, below which a deliciously decadent speakeasy – Tell Your Friends – serves up some absolute belters, the Crimson Crush (Four Roses Yellow Label bourbon, amaro, lemon and black cherry) just edged it over Katie’s Manhattan (Bacardi Añejo Cuatro rum, cherry liqueur, sweet vermouth and orange bitters).

The prize for most bizarre cocktail, though, went to Liquor Pig and their Spam Folder made from Sagamore small batch rye whiskey, blanco tequila, honey, sage, pimento and gochujang-flavoured spam. I know, I know, it sounds ghastly and, served from an old spam tin with a slice of fried spam as garnish, it had no business being as tasty as it was.

I had two just to be sure. And then a frozen margarita to take the taste away.

Why I’m in the Epstein Files

“Always knew you were a nonce.” That text, from a coworker in London, is how I learned my name appeared in the latest tranche of the Epstein Files. In the moments prior, I had been sweating profusely – unlike a certain former prince.

I can explain. First off, “nonce” is British slang for “pedophile.” More important: at around noon today, the Department of Justice released a series of documents relating to the investigations into Jeffrey Epstein, the late sex trafficker and financier. Among the documents: an email I sent in June 2020 to a number of senior figures who worked in the US Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York, in pursuit of comment on a colleague’s story on Prince Andrew and his friendship with Epstein. A source close to Andrew claimed US Attorney Geoffrey Berman was lying about the prince refusing to cooperate. I emailed Berman and his deputies – including James Comey’s daughter Maurene! No reply came.

I had completely forgotten about this interaction until this morning, on what was otherwise a normal Friday. I got up, had coffee and granola, edited a couple of newsletters and took a work call. At lunch, I switched my phone to Do Not Disturb and went on the treadmill in my building’s gym for 20 minutes. The next time I looked at my phone, after mopping the sweat from my brow, there was a message associating me with America’s most notorious sex offender.

Not a great text to receive, is it? “You’re in the Epstein Files.” I would say it’s down there with “you have chlamydia” and “granddad’s had a fall” among the worst. Apologies for being that friend who’s too woke – but I happen to think Jeffrey Epstein was a bad guy, and don’t much care for the association.

In the hours since, the messages have been pouring in. “My colleagues are v impressed you got yourself into the Epstein Files,” texts one friend, who also described it as “v on brand,” which I don’t love. “Should you add it to your Hinge bio?” suggests another. Probably not!

Of all of the things you could appear in the Epstein Files for, at least I’m documented scrupulously doing my job. Yet of all the names that were redacted, mine wasn’t? Typical. Matt McDonald didn’t kill himself.

Don Lemon’s arrest will rally the #Resistance

Lemon squeezy

Don Lemon, the former CNN anchor turned Substack influencer, was taken into custody by Homeland Security and FBI agents in Los Angeles last night. Lemon had previously covered an anti-ICE protest that disrupted a church service in St. Paul, Minnesota, earlier this month – though a federal judge in the state refused to approve charges against him. Another independent video journalist present at the church service, Georgia Fort, has also been arrested by federal agents, who said they were acting upon a grand-jury decision. Lemon faces two charges: conspiracy to deprive rights and FACE Act violation. For context: a number of independent and video journalists were charged following the January 6 riot at the Capitol. Some found themselves subsequently pardoned by President Trump.

Arresting Lemon, naturally, serves to elevate his profile and valorize him. The outcry this morning has been predictable: “This is outrageous and cannot stand,” wrote fellow Substacker Jim Acosta. “The First Amendment is under attack in America!” Their former employer CNN said the arrest raises “profoundly concerning questions.”

“Don Lemon is an accomplished journalist whose urgent work is protected by the First Amendment,” wrote House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries. “There is zero basis to arrest him and he should be freed immediately.”

A more startling response came courtesy of fellow influencer Katie Miller, wife of Stephen. Within minutes of the announcement of Lemon’s arrest, the 34-year-old tweeted a clip of her forthcoming podcast episode with newly MAGA rapper Nicki Minaj. “You called for Don Lemon’s arrest over his church stunt in Minneapolis. He’s since called you racist, unhinged, homophobic and out of your depth. Anything you’d like to say to Don Lemon?” Miller asks, as Minaj laughs. “Cocksucker, stop,” Minaj says, looking dead into the camera. Miller cackles in response.

So much for that long-promised end to lawfare…

On our radar

KEVIN?!?!? President Trump nominated Kevin Warsh as the new Federal Reserve chair. “On top of everything else, he is ‘central casting,’ and he will never let you down,” the President said in a statement this morning.

NOTHING TO SEE HERE Ghislaine Maxwell claimed that 29 of Jeffrey Epstein’s friends were shielded by the Department of Justice through “secret settlements” in a habeas corpus petition last month.

WE ARE CHARLIE COIN? Turning Point USA spokesman Andrew Kolvet had his X account hacked by crypto-scammers last night. The hackers used his account to promote “$CHARLIE.”

Ivanka’s island-hopping

It’s win some, lose some for the Trump family real-estate business – no sooner did the high-profile Greenland deal fall through than Ivanka Trump nabbed another piece of prime property. Mrs. Trump has acquired the uninhabited island of Sazan, just off the coast of Albania, for $1.4 billion, which she plans to develop into a luxury resort.

The deal, brokered by her husband Jared Kushner’s vehicle Atlantic Incubation Partners, was concluded with Albania’s strategic-investment committee in December 2024, shortly after Trump Sr. won his bid for reelection.

The deal has been criticized by more than 40 environmental groups, who argue that Sazan should be preserved as one of the last unspoiled islands in the Mediterranean.

In a Trumpian flourish, Ivanka told Lex Fridman during an appearance on his podcast that “we’re bringing in the best architects and the best brands… It’s going to be extraordinary.”

The locals have apparently taken to calling Sazan “Trump island.” Cockburn can’t help but notice the similarities between Sazan and Elbe, where the powers of Europe once tried to confine Napoleon. Perhaps the island will one day serve as the retirement home of our own era’s Bonaparte.

Kristi Noem’s flights of fancy

The Department of Homeland Security is trying a gentler tack, as its tactics of breaking down doors, smashing car windows and generally terrorizing the populace with anonymous masked antagonists hasn’t won it favor in the court of public opinion.

“HOMESICK?” the DHS X account posted Thursday. For a limited time, if you’re an illegal immigrant and you use the Border Patrol Home app, the US government will give you $2,600 and a FREE flight home. “Leave now,” DHS tweeted. “Avoid the discomfort of not knowing WHEN we’re going to arrest you.” DHS falls short of offering a food voucher or Capital One Rewards points.

DHS accompanied this tweet with a video of various world-tourism spots, accompanied by a kind of Muzak version of Motley Crüe’s “I’m On My Way.” Cockburn highly doubts anyone who’s here illegally is headed straight for the Eiffel Tower, or Giza, or Angel Falls, but sure. The young man who’s using the app in the video looks happy. The deal certainly sounds better than a sharp stick in the eye. Or getting shot ten times in the head at point-blank range. Baby steps.

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