David Christopher Kaufman

Few places make for a less likely fashion hub than the agricultural community of Masafer Yatta in the West Bank. Located roughly 40 miles south of Jerusalem, the cluster of hamlets and villages rose to prominence a few years back as the flashpoint of Jewish-Palestinian conflict depicted in the Academy Award-winning film No Other Land, whose directors include the Israeli duo behind the even more polarising follow-up, NAZA. The greatest failure of Palestine’s evolution into an emblem of the elite is the lack of any sense of self-reflection or critique Along with olive groves and herds of sheep, Masafer Yatta is also a centre for the production of tatreez, a traditional Palestinian embroidery technique added to Unesco’s Intangible Cultural Heritage List back in 2021.

You can blame the Obamas for the Duke and Duchess of Sussex's ill-fated adventures in America. There they were, Barack and Michelle, with eight-figure book deals and a lucrative spin on the global keynote circuit after Donald Trump's triumph in 2016. Barely two years later, Mrs. Obama was filling major arenas on a rockstar-styled promo tour for her White House-memoir Becoming. I remember sitting up high at the Barclays Center in New York in 2018, when Sarah Jessica Parker interviewed Mrs. Obama with awkward sycophancy, clearly dazzled by the former First Lady’s sheer presence. Obama’s candour and intellect, no matter how commodified to maximise book sales, stood as a sharp contrast to the icy aloofness of her replacement, Melania Trump.

Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani has debuted the transition team intended to prepare New York City Hall for its 111th mayor. The team is filled with the types of leftie loonies expected from Mamdani: a trans, anti-zionist rabbi from Brooklyn as well as a gun-control advocate dubiously associated with Nation of Islam-founder Louis Farrakhan. And then there’s Alex Vitale – a professor of sociology at Brooklyn College whose views on policing are not only disproven, they’re downright dangerous.Vitale is one of a handful of transition team members tasked with overseeing community safety issues. Public safety, policing and crime reduction have become flashpoints for the new Mayor, who established his political career promising to end law enforcement as we know it.

For all of their political similarities – imperiousness, indifference, more than occasional impunity – Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu’s canniest shared superpower is their ability to manipulate their public narratives. Case in point: Netanyahu’s sudden visit to Washington this week, which comes as both he and Trump battle the near-term uproar over their long-term political agendas.  The official reason for Netanyahu’s visit, it seems, is to discuss Trump’s new tariff edict – slated to place a 17 per cent levy on Israeli goods when it goes into effect next week. Despite the sizeable figure – which is certainly worth a challenge – the visit feels contrived.

Of all the images that emerged from the new administration last week, few were as meaningful and portentous as Melania Trump in oversized aviators and snug black cap in North Carolina with her husband, Friday morning, to inspect the damage remaining from Hurricane Helene back in November.  Mrs. Trump, it seems, had actually wanted to travel to California, where she and the president later landed to perform a similarly styled wellness check on wildfire-ravaged Los Angeles. But Trump insisted North Carolina come first — both to show off his return to presidential posturing as well as to highlight the abandonment many North Carolinans believe they’ve endured at the hands of FEMA and the Biden administration.

The bogeyman that progressives feared Donald Trump would unleash upon the United States appears to have already arrived – and inauguration day is still more than 50 days away. The president-elect is reportedly planning an executive order that would kick out all transgender members of the US military. The order, which could come on 20 January, Trump’s first day back in the White House, looks set to result in the removal from the military of about 15,000 active service personnel who are transgender. Having campaigned on a strident ‘anti-woke’ agenda, Trump's focus on identity politics comes as little surprise.