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Rory Sutherland: The world according to the Wiki Man

United kingdom

Friday

Tibor Fischer

Have you ever heard of the St. Brice’s Day Massacre?

From our US edition

The St. Brice’s Day Massacre? I must admit I hadn’t heard of this “most just extermination” of Danes in Oxford at the instigation of King Aethelred the Unready in 1002, perhaps because the teaching of history in Britain tends to kick off in 1066. You certainly don’t think of Oxford as a place that pioneered techniques of ethnic cleansing. Crypt is a collection of seven essays that unearth details about how certain people lived and died in the past. If you didn’t already know Alice Roberts’s background as an anatomist and biological anthropologist, you’d have a good chance of deducing it from this book.

Roberts

Thursday

Geoff Hill

How the Special Relationship could be renewed after US-UK elections

From our US edition

A record number of countries will hold elections this, including Britain on July 4 and the United States on November 5. These two great powers — each with a veto at the UN — have enjoyed a bond that has survived for so long, is it known on both sides of the Atlantic as “the Special Relationship.” There have been stand-offs: Britain refused to join the war in Vietnam, and when Argentina seized the Falkland Islands in 1982, the US did not intervene. But Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher worked in tandem to bring down the Berlin Wall. And if the view on Ukraine and Gaza is not always the same, there is a shared commitment to the sovereignty of Russia’s neighbors and to a peace in the Middle East that secures the rights of Jews and Palestinians alike.

special relationship

Tuesday

Cockburn

Johann Hari’s career-long trouble with the truth

From our US edition

British fabulist Johann Hari is at it again. After revealing he used Ozempic to lose forty pounds in his tell-all book, the alleged journalist still hasn’t shed his penchant for telling porkies. While the miracle drug made him “listless,” “strangely muted” and “emotionally dulled,” it hasn’t killed his energy for dreaming up facts.  In his latest book, Magic Pill: The Extraordinary Benefits and Disturbing Risks of the New Weight-Loss Drugs, Hari alleged that food critic Jay Rayner had lost pleasure in eating at even the finest Parisian establishments after taking Ozempic. The catch: Rayner has never used Ozempic or any other weight-loss drug.

johann hari

Tuesday

Liz Truss

Liz Truss’s American book tour

From our US edition

National Harbor, Maryland I’ve been visiting the United States for many years, but 2024 was my first time at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Maryland, where I spoke on the main stage, complete with American-style big hair. Compared to political events in the United Kingdom, people at CPAC take things to a whole new level: where else could you have a debate about the Constitution with a woman in a Statue of Liberty costume? Or meet a family of five in matching sweaters that each bear a letter to spell out “TRUMP?” The enthusiasm for the cause was infectious. And few speakers were more dazzling than the newly installed Argentinean president Javier Milei. I confess to bagging a front-row seat for his address.

CPAC

Thursday

Matt McDonald

Liz Truss works the crowd at CPAC

From our US edition

National Harbor, Maryland “Oh, that’s Liz Truss,” a young attendee says as the former British PM passes us in the corridor at the Conservative Political Action Conference. “She sucks. What’s she doing here?” Trying to sell books, apparently. Truss is one of two Brits — alongside mainstay Nigel Farage — addressing CPAC. Her visit forms part of the promotional tour for the US release of her book Ten Years to Save the West: Lessons From the Only Conservative in the Room, which has been handily retitled for US audiences: “Leading the Revolution Against Globalism, Socialism and the Liberal Establishment.

liz truss

Thursday

Amy Rose Everett

How to celebrate Christmas in London

From our US edition

You just can’t beat London at Christmas. Unless you’re lining up to get into the Tube station (never mind onto a train) at Oxford Circus, in the pissing rain. Then you’re better off in one of those glass igloos in Finland.  When I’m in town for the holidays, I find myself returning to a few old faithfuls, with a few old faithfuls. The Zetter Marylebone Keep this gem up your sleeve for when the crowds become a little too much. A warren of sumptuous suites and a lavish, candlelit parlor awaits at dinky Zetter Marylebone hotel, just a couple of streets back from shopping mecca Selfridges. Divide and conquer last-minute shopping with Mom, then meet here at lunchtime for a swift recovery.

christmas london

Monday

Christopher Sandford

Keef at eighty (Yes, really)

From our US edition

Most of us have at one time played the you-couldn’t-make-it-up game. What were the odds back in, say, 1973, that millions of us would casually engage in Jetsons-style video chats, conduct business at the swipe of a thumb, or consider the prospect of a space-tourism flight courtesy of Virgin Galactic? Or for that matter, rue the fact that the all-conquering Oakland Athletics might fall so low as to become the worst team in baseball last season, with a dismal 50-112 record? Perhaps the biggest shock to someone contemplating the future in 1973 might have been the knowledge that Keith Richards, the guitarist and primary creative force of the Rolling Stones, would still be alive and well at the time of his eightieth birthday on December 18, 2023. Wrecked. Sick. Zombielike. Undead.

keith richards

Monday

Alexander Larman

Can The Crown redeem itself in its final hours?

From our US edition

Netflix’s royal saga The Crown has been one of its biggest hits of the past few years. Sacrificing subtlety for big, dramatic arcs, with award-winning performances by a cast that has, in a stroke of genius on the part of its creator Peter Morgan, changed every two seasons, it’s been the most gripping and rich account of the post-war British royal family ever put on screen. It has been helped both by an enormous budget and the useful way in which the present-day battles between Prince Harry and Meghan Markle and the rest of the Firm have come to mirror The Crown’s increasingly eventful power struggles among the various branches of the family.

the crown

Thursday

Thomas W. Hodgkinson

The royal lust of Hampton Court

From our US edition

The Dowager Countess of Deloraine, who was governess to the children of George II at Hampton Court and other royal homes, was a notorious bore — so much so that her “every word” made one “sick,” according to the courtier Lord Hervey. When she naively asked him why everyone was avoiding her, he replied with exquisite irony that “envy kept the women at a distance, despair the men.

Hampton

Tuesday

Jack Holmes

Why America’s top TV networks are banking on English soccer

From our US edition

America’s soccer supernova is always just around the next corner, but Rebecca Lowe, who anchors NBC’s coverage of the Premier League in the United States, recalls a few corners already turned. “When I stood in LA in the rain at four in the morning and there were 5,000 people lining up to come in and join us,” she said, referencing one of NBC’s “FanFest” watch parties in 2021, “I was like, ‘Oh yeah, this has not only made it, but this is not going anywhere. This is only getting bigger.’ And there are not many things in this country that can get bigger.” It sure seems like there are more red-blooded Americans patrolling our streets in Arsenal and Liverpool shirts these days.

premier league

Sunday

Jonathan Sumption

What lies behind the obsession with race transforming universities?

From our US edition

The first problem about decolonization is the word itself. Colonization is the process of establishing control over a foreign territory and its indigenous inhabitants, by settlement, conquest or political manipulation. But decolonization? It has come to mean much more than the reversal of that process. Today, it refers to an altogether wider agenda, whose central objective is to discredit or downgrade the cultural achievements of the West. Objective truth and empirical investigation are mere western constructs. They are optional ideas which need have no weight beyond the western societies which invented them. But the West has imposed them on the rest of the world by a process akin to the colonial conquests of the past four centuries.

decolonization

Thursday

Cockburn

Are Harry and Meghan making moves for a royal return?

From our US edition

It's been a year since Elizabeth II’s death and Harry and Meghan are looking to make their move. With the Queen — that old bulwark of tradition — finally out of the way, the couple has judged it safe enough to return to the royal fold. Their in: Prince Edward and Sophie, the Duchess of Edinburgh.    Cockburn can only imagine what ruin the attention-loving couple has in store for the British royal family. And while he wouldn’t inflict Harry and Meghan on his worst enemy, Cockburn can’t hide his excitement that they are finally making their way back across the pond.

prince harry prince william prince edward

Tuesday

Peter Wood

The Sycamore Gap tragedy is one of a long list of tree killings

From our US edition

My ancestors presumably had something to do with trees — and true to my heritage, I enjoy some amateur forestry on my land in Vermont. The crack, the whoosh and the thunder of a tree coming down exactly where you aimed it thrills the Upper West Side me, chainsaw in hand.  But it grieves me when a good tree is blown down or uprooted. I cut only those that have to be removed because they are dying or might crush house or head if not tended to.  The Spectator reports on the murder of the Sycamore Gap, a 300-year-old tree along Hadrian’s Wall, chainsawed by a vandal when no one was looking. The culprit apparently is a sixteen year-old boy. It was an act of gratuitous violence. But not a singular act.

sycamore gap tree

Sunday

Cockburn

Treachery! Americans rank Britain the world’s best country

From our US edition

It turns out the Revolutionary War was fought in vain. According to a US News and World Report survey, most Americans prefer the United Kingdom to these United States. In Cockburn’s estimation, this a betrayal, a national embarrassment and the least patriotic thing an American could say. We might as well join the Commonwealth.  According to the US News annual Best Countries ranking released on Wednesday, Americans believe the UK is the best country in the world. The report, which aggregates data from respondents worldwide about cultural influence, quality of life and power among other categories, ranked Switzerland first for the fifth time in eight years. America came in fifth, falling one spot since last year.

nigel farage britain united kingdom country

Wednesday

Ross Anderson

Kevin Spacey is finally free

From our US edition

This morning in a London court, a jury handed down a verdict. The actor Kevin Spacey stood accused of nine counts of sexual assault, which had sparked up in the aftermath of #MeToo; six years later, the jury acquitted him of all of them. Though he had remained stoic during the trial, he cried as the final “not guilty” was read aloud. The two-time Oscar winner, star of House of Cards and American Beauty, former artistic director of the famous Old Vic theater and reluctantly outed gay man was free. He turned sixty-four years old today.   To some, this is a massive miscarriage of justice.

kevin spacey

Monday

Christopher Sandford

Mick Jagger at eighty: the beginnings of a Rolling Stone

From our US edition

Among the other jewels in the crown of Sir Mick Jagger’s songwriting career is a number he and his longtime creative partner Keith Richards knocked off in December 1963 to promote the Kellogg’s company products. Don’t laugh — it’s an infectious little tune in its way, even if the key lyrical message — “Wake up in the morning/ There’s a pop that really says/ Rice Krispies for you and you and you!”) falls some way short of the same duo’s “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction,” which followed barely twelve months later. But then Jagger, who turns eighty on July 26, was always a quick study. Last year’s four-part EPIX documentary series My Life as a Rolling Stone may be numbingly banal (“They set the bar for what a rock ’n’ roll band should sound like, look like..

mick jagger

Sunday

Christopher Sandford

John F. Kennedy’s trip worth remembering

From our US edition

Sloppy Joe Biden may face strong political headwinds with just seven months to go before the first presidential primary, but at least he’s in good company. Assessing the Washington landscape in mid-June 1963, when John F. Kennedy set off on a European tour designed to bolster not only the NATO alliance but his own poll numbers, the British ambassador David Ormsby-Gore cabled back to London: He will be leaving behind a disquieting domestic situation, [with] economic troubles to the fore... The Negro leaders are beginning to talk about large scale civil disobedience on a nation-wide basis... Moreover, the racial crisis is causing new difficulties for [Kennedy’s] legislative program...

Kennedy in Berlin

Thursday

Amber Duke

How they treat trans children across the pond

From our US edition

England's National Health Service made the major announcement last week that they would limit the prescription of puberty-blocking drugs for transgender children to clinical trials. A report released by the NHS on June 9 states that "there is not enough evidence to support their safety or clinical effectiveness as a routinely available treatment and that they should only be accessed as part of research." The decision is the latest consequence of a multi-year review into how the medical community in England should treat children who suffer from gender dysphoria.

LGBT activists gather outside the Stonewall Inn (Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images)

Wednesday

Kara Kennedy

Prince Harry’s hotel hideout

From our US edition

A lovely posh woman once told me that should things ever become too much in my life, there was a simple solution: “Just book yourself into a five-star hotel and forget about it. Works every time.” When Prince Harry arrived back in Britain last week to take on the British press in court, rumor has it that he did just that. Instead of spending the night at his previous home, Frogmore Cottage, or one of the many rooms at Buckingham Palace or Clarence House, he stayed at Soho House, the private members' club and hotel. It would not be surprising. Harry is accustomed to a luxurious life and some of these castles are getting far too shabby nowadays. There’s also the fact Meghan and Harry’s first ever date was at the Soho House on 76 Dean Street, London.

prince harry hotel

Friday

Cockburn

Boris gives parting honor to hairdresser

From our US edition

The most surprising part about Boris Johnson's honors list, which allows him to approve lifetime peerages and other awards for his allies, is that he has included his hairdresser. That's right, the famous blonde mop isn’t just something that he wakes up with, but rather an intentional look crafted by House of Commons hairdresser Kelly Jo Dodge, who is set to get a Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) from the former UK prime minister. Johnson is standing down as a Member of Parliament after receiving a report into "Partygate" scandal. The honors announcement, needless to say, has turned heads. It was approved by British prime minister Rishi Sunak on Friday, along with almost forty honors and seven peerages.

boris johnson