Is charismatic UFC welterweight contender Sean Strickland the last American hero? This weekend he fights terrifying undefeated Chechen killing machine Khamzat Chimaev for the UFC world championship. If he wins, immediately he will rival Conor McGregor as the sport’s most famous face. Given Strickland’s proclivity for at every opportunity saying the most politically incorrect thing
‘Wherever he is in the world, he remains my best pal!’ Lord Mandelson wrote of the man
‘It won’t be long,’ says Yonatan Dor, ‘before screen actors are a thing of the past’
Unless answers are swiftly forthcoming, Epstein theorizing will not cease any time soon
The FBI leaves a long list of unanswered questions
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This week: one year of Labour – the verdict In the magazine this week Tim Shipman declares his verdict on Keir Starmer’s Labour government as we approach the first anniversary of their election victory. One year on, some of Labour’s most notable policies have been completely changed – from the u-turn over winter fuel allowance
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The problem with the future is it is very obviously no longer being created by cool people. Instead, it belongs to autistic nerds who want nothing more than to be a computer. Cool people invent things like surfboards, Ray-Bans and Triumph Spitfires. Nerds make profoundly uncool things like cars that drive themselves and the absurd
The podcasters’ influence far outweighs the liberal media
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The British people adore Boris Johnson. That is unarguable. It’s why he doesn’t lose elections. It is therefore very funny – the way idiocy so often is – that the Conservative party even in this, its moment of greatest existential crisis, is not right now prostrating itself before the great man to beg for his return. Boris used his farewell speech in Downing
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How will AI destroy humanity? Will it simply go house to house in robot form, slaughtering us where it finds us? Or will it instead discover that a certain property of our livers or spleens is the most cost-effective form of lubrication for one of its less important robotic joints, and harvest us for that
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What exactly is it that the Glazer family has done that makes Manchester United fans whine so endlessly? I ask only because I’ve just finished watching Gary Neville’s frequently ludicrous interview with British billionaire Jim Ratcliffe – who since purchasing a 27.7 per cent stake in the club in 2023 has overseen its football operations – and
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Like the sound of birdsong over the trenches after the machine guns have ceased roaring, the FT reports bankers are once again using the words ‘pussy’ and ‘retard’ in the course of their work with no fear of reprisal. The culture war is over. Hurrah. How funny though for those of us who over the last decade have observed
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Watching Tyson Fury get robbed last night in Riyadh, I realised on balance that I am in favour of Saudi Arabia’s often ludicrous-seeming recent efforts at sports-washing. Why not? Sure, staging ultra-high profile boxing matches like this in a nation with no boxing heritage whatsoever is obviously a shameless effort at changing negative perceptions, but
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Can someone check on Guardian sportswriter Jonathan Liew? It would appear he is not taking events in the Middle East terribly well, and one suspects the election of Donald Trump hasn’t helped, either. I’ve noticed it for a while now, this trend of using the back pages – traditionally the fun pages – to foist desperate and
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Tedious narcissist blowhard Jake Paul will fight Mike Tyson on Saturday in a meaningless freakshow in Texas that will likely – thanks to the fact it is being internationally streamed by Netflix – be the most watched boxing match in history. Naturally, both men will make millions. That the contest has little to do with
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I’ve long liked to think that if I was a really big girl I would transition to compete in the men’s boxing heavyweight championship. Why not, ladies? Tyson Fury earns about £100 million every time he laces up his gloves. Why not get a slice of that pie? After all, for an extremely weird decade
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Hand back the Falklands. Why not? FedEx over the Elgin Marbles. What’s the point of any of it anymore? They have put a German in charge of the England football team. It’s over. Can there be a more depressing, or more obvious, sign of national decline than this utterly abject capitulation at the sport we
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In the pantheon of all-time tennis hunks, Rafael Nadal sits at the apex. The hunkiest ever to do it. In his prime, which remarkably lasted close to two decades, he seemed to conceal within the archetypal Mediterranean love god physique a kind of tennis supercomputer, capable almost always of finding impossible-seeming angles from which to
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Could Rishi Sunak’s emergence as this nation’s greatest gaffe machine since Prince Philip come in time to endear him to the electorate? At this point in his campaign, you’d have to say it’s a tactic he might as well lean into. After all, one of the best things about being British is the manner in
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It’s hard to think of anything Rishi Sunak could have done that would cause greater offence to the British sensibility. You do not, not if you’re the British prime minister, sack off the D-Day commemorations in Normandy to return home early under any circumstances – least of all in order to do an ITV interview
