Usa

From The Spectator, 10 October 1914: American visitors have been surprised at the apparent absence of emotion in England at such a crisis as the present. They can see, they say, no signs that we realize the tremendous nature of the points at issue. The English people, they think, are not taking things seriously. Yet all the time there are signs, if they knew where to look for them, that we are moved as we have never been moved before. "If we let anybody, even our nearest and dearest, know what we feel, we may be unmanned. We must keep a tight hold, and especially on ourselves, or we may lose control." It is not indifference, but grim determination, which makes England so quiet.

This is an extract from Hugo Rifkind's column in this week's Spectator, out on Thursday Poor Julian Assange. Call me a contrarian but I’m genuinely starting to feel sorry for the guy. He’s just made such a mess of his life, hasn’t he? And with such promise. Only a few short years ago he was the world’s most prominent anti-everything activist, with hair like an indie guitarist, feted and worshipped wherever you might find hot Scandinavian revolutionaries, smug old men who work for ‘theguardian’ and Jemima Khan. Now he’s a hermit with hair like Noel Edmonds who lives in a cupboard. It’s a hell of a fall. Most crushingly, he’s become a figure of fun.

This is a preview from this week's Spectator, available tomorrow: Peering down from the Olympian heights of the New York Times, the columnist David Brooks writes that “We are now living in what we might as well admit is the Age of Iraq.”  There, in the Land of the Two Rivers,  he continues, a succession of American presidents has confronted the “core problem” of our era:  “the interaction between failing secular governance and radical Islam.

There was a time when having almost two hundred of your citizens blown out of the sky was a big deal for a western democracy. But when Malaysian Airlines flight MH17 was shot down over Ukraine last month, killing 193 Dutch citizens and a couple of dozen other Europeans, the response was conspicuous public mourning, some mild objections, a soupçon more sanctions, but otherwise nothing. Everyone knew which government might have handed powerful surface-to-air missiles to eastern Ukraine’s rebels. But nobody seemed willing or able to do anything much about it. There was also a time when whole swaths of the map being overrun by Islamic groups who make al-Qa’eda look like Quakers would have caused concern to the civilised world.

The Daily Dot, founded less than two years ago, is best read while sipping the flattest of flat white coffees. I love it, even though it's not pitched at me: most of its 11 million monthly unique visitors are 'millennials'. No UK site integrates tech news into the broader culture so expertly. This is what you can find on the Daily Dot home page right now: 'A guide to Silicon Valley's top political donors'; 'How the paleo diet developed into a cult of nonsense'; 'Anonymous goes to war with Israel'; 'Jennifer Aniston and Adam Sandler freaked out by giant reporter'. Those headlines were brewed by some of the world's best digital baristas.

I’ve found myself strangely drawn to the videos made by the 22-year-old assassin Elliot Rodger just before he went on his killing spree in his university town of Santa Barbara, California, last week. In a series of stabbings and drive-by shootings Rodger killed seven people, including finally himself, and wounded 13 more. The son of a film director, he had spent the first few years of his life in England, moving to America at the age of four. Rodger had been preparing for his murderous spree and made a series of videos, many of which are accessible on the internet as I write. The last was recorded by himself the day before his attack. He sits parked in his car, arranged so that the sun, low in the sky, spotlights his face in an orange glow.