Freddy Gray

‘It must be so awfully boring being a fish,’ says Brian Sewell, as he looks out the window at his pond. ‘You can only have sex once a year on a prescribed day. The frogs are just the same.’ We are in his study. It is a large room full of books, mostly big art books. An old German Shepherd lies passed out on the floor. ‘Poor Winckelmann,’ says Sewell, peering down at the dog. ‘She is the love of my life. I can’t bear the thought of her departure. But I know she’s going.’ Sex and death are on Sewell’s mind. His memoirs, Outsider: Always Almost, Never Quite, have just been published, and the newspapers have taken a keen interest. ‘Everybody seems to have focused on the sex, which is rather boring,’ he says.

Is the truth out there? This week, the US government has insisted it has 'no evidence' that extra-terrestrial life forms exist. The statement was a formal response to a petition on the White House website. In the name of 'fostering a focused and civil conversation about how the federal government should address a range of issues', the 'We the People' section of the site had promised to answer any petition which received more than 5,000 signatures, or mouse-clicks. But if you're a conspiracy theorist who suspects the CIA has been covering up alien activity for decades, you’re hardly likely to be satisfied by an official denial. And if you're not an ET believer, you probably signed the petition for fun. Either way, the whole exercise is a joke.

A month has passed since the riots, and it still feels as if nobody has grasped what really happened. The media debate has been limited, to say the least: lots of self-appointed community leaders and youth experts talking about giving kids a "voice" or "stake" in society, or calling the likes of David Starkey racist. The BBC "riots debate" last night, featuring Dame Claire Tickell, Liam Nolan, Shaun Bailey and former gang member Sheldon Thomas was particularly frustrating. Every time somebody came close to making a good point – Bailey, for instance, issued strong remarks about the commercialisation and sexualisation of children – someone else would drown it in bien-pensant blather.

What on earth is ‘Dominionism’? Lots of Americans who first heard the word just a few weeks ago are suddenly feeling very angry about it. Liberals say that the US constitution is facing a ‘Dominionist threat’ in the form of Michele Bachman and Rick Perry, two Republicans running for president in 2012. Christian conservatives, meanwhile, cry prejudice: they accuse a secularist elite of conducting a witch-hunt against Christians in politics.   What's the fuss? Dominionism is, we are told, a school of evangelical thought that aims to impose Biblical law over secular government. It is to nutty Evangelicals what Shariah Law is to Islamists,­ a way of achieving theocracy on earth.

Are Mormons going to inherit the earth? Or at least America? It is starting to look as though they might. The Mormon church is only 181 years old, and its followers make up just 2 per cent of the U.S. population. Yet they have an amazing number of the top jobs. It is well-known that two leading republicans, Mitt Romney and Jon Huntsman, strong contenders for their party's presidential nomination in 2012, are Latter-day Saints. It is less known that Mormons increasingly run corporate America. A new Bloomberg report offers an impressive list of Mormon business leaders here. Bloomberg’s Caroline Winter attributes the success of Mormons to the Missionary Training Centre, a sort of indoctrination camp for the Mormon work ethic. And I'm sure that's right.

Wimbledon starts next week: as usual, England will provide the setting while the world's most talented foreigners come to play each other and — Andy Murray notwithstanding — walk off with the trophies. It’s a bit like the British economy, as Harry Mount suggests in his brilliant cover essay for this week's magazine. We know that London has become the Rome of the globalised world, but what we're now seeing is the foreign takeover of English summer cultural events. The newcomers are enthusiastically adopting it all: Wimbledon, Ascot, even test matches at Lord’s. Last week, at the ARK fundraiser, Wills and Kate made appeared at an event where global zillionaires bid millions for charity (as Rachel Johnson also reports in her diary this week).

Louise Stern on what the deaf really think of ‘hearing people’ I’m at my desk in London chatting to a deaf woman in Mexico. We are communing through the internet. At 17.57 GMT, an instant messenger bubble pops on to my computer screen: ‘Louise Stern: Hi Freddy, it’s Louise’ and the interview has begun. It’s miraculous, when you think about it. Louise Stern is the author of Chattering Stories, a recently published collection of short stories about adventurous deaf girls in the big noisy world. Louise has a very original writing voice, and critics say that she enables them to understand for the first time what it must be like to be deaf. She isn’t comfortable writing in instant messenger, however. ‘I tend to avoid it,’ she says.

The British like nothing more than the idea that the world is obsessed with our Royal wedding. It is not entirely a delusion: Americans and Europeans, especially in the media, do seem quite captivated by William and Kate. It is what 24-hour news people call a 'global talking point'. In reality, though, most foreigners couldn't care less about the big day tomorrow. Some of them have their own things to celebrate. The Poles, for instance, are getting very excited about the beatification of John Paul II this weekend. On Sunday, in Rome, Pope Benedict XVI will elevate Karol Wojtyla, the most famous Pole ever to have lived, to the altars of the Church. Across the world, millions will watch; millions will rejoice; millions will wave flags.

In the magazine’s cover piece this week (read it here or subscribe from just £1/issue), Richard Littlejohn described the rather feeble assortment of Republican contenders for next year’s presidential elections. But he left out Mitch Daniels, the Governor of Indiana, who seems to be emerging as a favourite among American conservatives.   Daniels hasn’t yet declared his candidacy, and at first glance he comes across as a dweeb. But it would be foolish to underrate him. In 2008, against a tide of Obama-mania, Daniels won the Indiana governorship with ease. He got more votes, in fact, than any candidate in the state’s history. The secret of Daniels’s success is his winningly awkward Pennsylvanian manner.

The American academic and foreign policy realist Stephen Walt has put an interesting idea on his blog: would re-introducing the draft make America less interventionist? Perhaps it would, and perhaps there’s a good case to be made for doing the same in Britain. Calling for a return to conscription might sound like a silly right-wing trope, but it makes sense from an anti-war perspective: we might be less eager to send our soldiers to fight and die in distant conflicts if there were the slightest possibility that we might have to go, too. I’m not sure I agree, though. It’s not as if national service prevented war in the past. We happily shipped off young men to Korea in the 1950s, for instance. Maybe compulsory military training only encourages bellicosity.