Modern politics

Tuesday

Ian Sansom

Buckle up for the smack-downs: the media behemoth that is modern wrestling

From our UK edition

For British readers of a certain age, wrestling occupies a very particular place in the collective memory. Long before the triumph of World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE), long before the pyrotechnics and the Trump-adjacent billionaire promoters, there were those long-lost innocent Saturday afternoons watching World of Sport with your nan, as men with cauliflower ears, wearing improbable hand-stitched trunks, wrestled in grim, determined, municipal fashion in local leisure centres and town halls up and down the land. If your last points of wrestling reference are those great monoliths Big Daddy and Giant Haystacks lumbering around like coal-fired power stations, today’s wrestling world is almost unrecognisable.

Friday

Katrina Gulliver

Are the French right to be obsessed with their Gaulish ancestry?

This book reminded me of Kurt Andersen’s Fantasyland — but where Andersen thinks only Americans have lost their minds, David Andress thinks everyone has. I can’t say I disagree, being a subscriber to the Hourly Outrage, also known as Twitter. Andress refers to Brexit, Donald Trump’s election and Marine Le Pen’s rise in French politics as things that should have been ‘punchlines’, comparing those who voted for them to dementia sufferers. And that’s just in the first couple of pages. So I’m guessing that as a Leave voter, I’m not the intended audience — nor do I, as someone with a PhD in history, fit into Andress’s analysis of uninformed and delusional Brexit voters.