Amid the continuing destruction in Gaza and the surrounding global fallout, one thing becomes ever clearer. Even as Israel’s war stutters, Iran’s broader campaign against it, and by extension what we might call the American-led order, is growing in strength.…
The toxic trope of ‘benefit scroungers’
The quickest way for a weak government to score cheap points with a sceptical electorate is to announce a load of stuff it’s going to “crack down” on. And so, in the past year we’ve had crackdowns on single-use vapes, …
Has Beyoncé killed Jolene?
Not long ago, a post crossed my timeline featuring a black-and-white, heart-stoppingly gorgeous photo of Dolly Parton in the Sixties. The caption read, simply: “What the hell did Jolene look like?” One can only wonder.
As a musical artefact, “Jolene” …
Israel is braced for a second war
The loud “baa” of a curious sheep feels ridiculously, laughably incongruous; the only other sounds are the bone-shaking booms of the IDF and Hezbollah exchanging artillery in the near distance. Before you join the road to Kibbutz Metzuba, just over …
Taxi drivers are corrupting Italy
Recently, an octogenarian couple from the UK came to visit me in Parma. Theirs was an all-day journey: a three-hour car trip, a two-hour flight, then a three-hour train journey. By the time they finally arrived, they were exhausted.
But …
Taxi drivers are corrupting Italy
Recently, an octogenarian couple from the UK came to visit me in Parma. Theirs was an all-day journey: a three-hour car trip, a two-hour flight, then a three-hour train journey. By the time they finally arrived, they were exhausted.
But …
The coming civil war on Europe’s Right
With the European Parliamentary elections just two months away, the final result seems all but decided. “A far-Right takeover is underway,” warn the experts of Foreign Policy. “This time, the far-Right threat is real,” add the prophets of Politico. And, …
It’s time to send Nato troops to Ukraine
In 1944, Leslie Groves, the US army general who managed the Manhattan Project, asked its chief scientist, J. Robert Oppenheimer, just how powerful their new bomb might be. Would it be 10 times as powerful as the largest bomb of …
Your boss doesn’t care about your feelings
You’re at work one day when your company’s “wellness” department begins handing out “emoji” stickers with words like “frustrated”, “overwhelmed”, and “stressed” printed below their creepy yellow faces. No one uses them, of course. But the message is clear: “[Insert …
Netanyahu’s regime is built on censorship
In the city of Haifa, in northwest Israel, the sounds of Arabic, Hebrew and Russian chatter fill the streets. In the Arab-Christian neighbourhood of Wadi Nisnas lies Beit Hagefen, an Arab-Jewish cultural centre set in gleaming white stone. For 60 …
The assisted-dying lobby has already won
What counts as a “dignified death”? On Monday, we got an intimation of what one looks like for Guardian readers, as journalist Renate van der Zee wrote about her elderly mother’s “completely calm, almost cheerful” legal demise at the hands …
Inside India’s Potemkin election
Always a rather grubby affair, as if put together by minimally competent quiet quitters, Indian democracy is now in serious trouble. To be sure, its formalistic trappings remain in place. Nearly a billion Indians will file into polling stations starting …
The man who betrayed El Chapo
“Of all the drug lords I had business relationships with, [El Chapo] was probably the most difficult one,” Margarito Flores tells me. Over years, Flores and his twin, Pedro, distributed 60 tonnes of cocaine, as well as heroin and crystal …
This book will send you to Hell
Last autumn, I finally read a book I’d put off reading for years because I suspected (rightly, it turns out) that it would be uniquely harrowing. Jonathan Littell’s notorious, extremely long novel of the Second World War, The Kindly Ones, …
Britain needs to deploy Warhammer
If the BBC is the cultural expression of the British state, then the omens are surely unfavourable. Its funding contested and overstretched, bogged down in interminable culture war disputes, the BBC does not know what it is for. Every few …