Society

The great soccer World Cup swindle

Tickets for this summer’s soccer World Cup are the most expensive in the tournament’s history. Or the history of any sporting event for that matter, with the possible exception of one-off extravaganzas like the Mayweather-Pacquiao showdown in 2015. The face value of tickets at this American tournament are a staggering five times higher that of the previous World Cup in Qatar. The most expensive seats for the final match have reached wallet-busting levels, affordable only to plutocrats and corporate boondogglers. And that’s just face value. What about the quaintly named secondary market? I occasionally peruse Fifa’s resale site, where the custodians of the game double dip from the buyer and seller to act as an official tout. I check the Fifa marketplace not as

The soccer World Cup trophy sits in front of President Donald Trump

Ian Thomson

The bleak humor of Samuel Beckett

Samuel Beckett, with his quizzically peering gaze and handsome, hawk-like appearance, has long been the academic’s pin-up. Endless PhD dissertations exalt the Irish writer, who was born 120 years ago in Dublin on April 13, 1906, as an unsmiling existential hermit figure when he was really nothing of the sort. Over the 60 years of his writing career, Beckett created a memorable gallery of tramps, waifs and other “crotchety moribunds” who find a lugubrious comedy in human failings. “Nothing is funnier than unhappiness,” declares a character in Endgame, while Estragon in Waiting for Godot pines for death in a dry climate where they “crucify quick.” Beckett’s terminal vision was bleakly humorous

Damian Thompson

No, the US didn’t threaten to bomb the Vatican

The first American pope does not like the President of the United States. One of the few things we knew about the Chicago-born Robert Prevost when he was elected last May was that – despite having an older brother who supported MAGA – he detested the immigration policies of the Trump administration. His private X account, now deleted, made that clear. Pope Leo has rejected the President’s invitation to visit the United States to celebrate his own country’s 250th anniversary; instead, he will visit Lampedusa, the Mediterranean island collapsing under the strain of thousands of North African migrants who have risked their lives to get there. When President Trump issued

Margaret Mitchell

The Pentagon’s holy war with Rome

America is having its Golden Age, Iran is about to get blasted into the Stone Age… and Elbridge Colby wants to go back to the Late Middle Ages? According to a Free Press report by Mattia Ferraresi, the Under Secretary of War for Policy summoned Cardinal Christophe Pierre, the Vatican’s then-ambassador to the US, to a meeting in which the Avignon Papacy was invoked. (For those of you who didn’t go to Catholic school: in the 1300s the king of France had Pope Boniface VIII captured and beaten after the pope excommunicated him; a few years later the papacy moved to Avignon amid continued threats from the French crown and instability in Rome.) During this meeting, Pentagon officials allegedly picked apart Pope Leo XIV’s “state of the world” address. This was the

Tuesday

April 7, 2026

Douglas Murray

Can the chaps in chaps smash fascism?

I have spent a small portion of my time lately wondering what I would do if I thought communists were about to take over Britain. At the more civil end of things, I could see myself going on an anti-communist protest, though I would shrink away if I noticed that my fellow marchers were flying swastikas. I don’t exactly know what I would do next. Perhaps I would hope for another election soon, and do what I could to unite other anti-communists. One thing I am fairly sure I would not do would be to dance. In fact, were this country facing the prospect of Stalinism coming at us full

Sunday

April 5, 2026

Michael Coren

What we really know about the first Easter

A friend who spent much of his life as an archaeologist in Israel once told me that there were three levels of authenticity when it came to Christian pilgrimage sites in the holy land. There were those that were almost certainly inaccurate but soaked in prayer. Those that may or may not be the real thing, of which there are many. Finally, those that according to most of the experts were the real thing. “No serious doubt,” he said with a smile, “it happened here.” It’s not altogether different when it comes to Christian history or the places and events that shaped the early church, including Easter. So, what do

Saturday

April 4, 2026

Joshua T. Katz

An appraisal of judicial vulgarity

If you follow the courts, you will certainly have come across Olympus Spa v. Armstrong. On March 12, the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit denied rehearing en banc in this case, which began in 2020 when a transgender woman in Washington State alleged that a traditional Korean spa, which requires patrons to be entirely naked, refused her (or is it him?) entry because she (he?) had not yet undergone so-called gender-affirming surgery. Cases about the rights of transgender people are increasingly on courts’ dockets, with tricky legal issues far from sorted out, but what brought Olympus Spa to wide attention is the explosive and deliberately vulgar dissent by Judge Lawrence VanDyke and the formal castigation of the judge by a very large number of his colleagues.

Friday

April 3, 2026

Druin Burch

What the death of my beloved son taught me about Easter

The hawthorn hedges are white with blossom; the countryside looks set for a wedding. Even in the small garden of my hospital, spring is inescapable. Cherry and magnolia bloom. Viburnum scents the air, young leaves come to the trees. Hospitals are where most lives begin, and where many end. Hospices shepherd only a small minority of deaths, about one in 20, often those of the middle aged whose diseases are more predictable. Frailty is less orderly, and the fitful hazards of age bring many to the general wards where I work. More of us die in hospital than anywhere else. What sort of spring wakes the hedgerows and the weeds,

Roger Kimball

Ignore the propaganda war

Prediction: by the time you read this, the joint US-Israeli operation in Iran will be all but over. In fact, it had mostly ended by the start of April. The Kool-Aid-dispensing press has been telling us since the conflict began that Iran was winning. They wanted it so badly to be true. Being adept at magical thinking, they also believe that what they wanted to be the case would suddenly, hey presto, become the case. A cover story in the Economist declared “Advantage Iran.” “A month of bombing Iran,” that once-sober publication announced, “has achieved nothing… For now, at least, the advantage lies with the Islamic Republic.” Not to be

Peter Watson

Life on Palm Beach Island is not what it appears

When the world thinks of Palm Beach – and it does more and more because Donald Trump has his home and his club there – the world tends to think of a sybaritic sunshiny town of palm trees, sandy beaches, rich old people, easy living, bland blondes, Range Rovers, Porsches, Bentleys and Bugattis as far as the eye can see. This is not wrong but, as ever in real life, there is a little bit more to PB than that. The underlying truth is that there are two Palm Beaches, not one, and their interaction is what drives a lot of activity here. Palm Beach proper – traditional Palm Beach

Daniel McCarthy

Should America be Venice or Sparta?

Americans never tire of asking themselves whether their country is turning into Rome. A Latin motto on the Great Seal of the United States proclaims a novus ordo seclorum – a “new order of ages.” But in the poem from which that phrase is adapted, Virgil’s fourth eclogue, the words mean a quite exact replay of past events: there will be, for example, another voyage of the Argo and another Trojan War. Our new order might likewise repeat the history of Rome. One philosopher who gave a great deal of thought to new orders and Roman history as a template was Niccolò Machiavelli, particularly in his Discourses on the First

Chris Black

How the Face died on the line

The Face, launched in London in 1980 by Nick Logan, was one of my first portals into subcultures that were far from my reach growing up in suburban Atlanta. The magazine introduced me to the photography of Corinne Day, Juergen Teller and David Sims. The original iteration stopped publishing in 2004 and then restarted, under new leadership, in 2019. The new version had some high points, especially an Olivia Rodrigo cover photographed by Jim Goldberg. Still, it could never capture the true spirit of the original and ownership unceremoniously pulled the plug last month. I knew the business was for sale, for a very affordable price, but they couldn’t find

Thursday

April 2, 2026

Brendan O’Neill

Why the keffiyeh classes have forgiven Kanye West

And there you have it. Britain is a country where a musician who says “Heil Hitler” gets to headline festivals while a musician who plays with a Jew from Israel gets canceled. Threaten to go “death con 3 on Jewish people” and you’ll be grand. Jam with a Jewish person and you’re toast. Selling T-shirts adorned with the swastika? No problem. Doing a duet with someone from the Jewish state? Don’t even think about it. In the eyes of the keffiyeh-smothered windbags of the cultural elite, praising the Nazi monster who exterminated millions of Jews is a more forgivable moral error than hanging out with a Jew from Israel That

Jonathan Ray

The trials and tribulations of cowboy college

I first got a taste for it in Eminence, Missouri. Riding a horse, that is, Western style. I also got a taste for the glorious Ozarks, a striking part of the world too often overlooked by, well, erm, everyone. The fact that it was sometimes hard to get a drink put a slight dampener on things. Too many wretched “dry” counties dotted about the two states I was criss-crossing – I’m told, almost 40 in Arkansas and 30 in Missouri. Can this really be true? ‘Swing the loop like you’re putting on a cape – you know, like Zorro,’ Lori said… as I got tangled up again To Europeans, this

Dot Wordsworth

A guide to Strait talking

I little thought in 2023, when writing about dire straits, that we’d so soon be pushed into them by trouble in the Straits of Hormuz. In discussions of these on the wireless, I find that even the best-informed commentators begin by referring to this geographical feature as the Strait of Hormuz but before long fall into calling them the straits. Insisting on the singular strait seems sterile pedantry. The Oxford English Dictionary has got the usage pretty straight: “When used as a geographical proper name, the word is usually plural with singular sense, e.g. the Straits of Dover, the Straits of Gibraltar.” A pleasant piece of naval slang 100 years

Brian Morton

Potatoes are one of life’s great simple pleasures

My wife found the list in the back pocket of my gardening trousers. That ought to have been a clue, but she didn’t pick up on it. She marched into the study with an interrogative stride. “Who the hell are Mimi? Orla? Charlotte? Anya? Lady Christl!?” I felt a pang of relief that she hadn’t found my “tasting notes” as well. “Charlotte – firm, puts out well, nice finish.” If my wife had been a gardener or an allotmenteer she would have recognized the names as varieties of spud. Still, I can’t blame her. The faintly porny air does persist, as do some mysteries. Mimi, for instance – a redhead,

Mary Killen

Dear Mary: Is my dentist profiting from my gold filling?

Q. I went to stay in the new house of a close, but not very close, friend. She put me in a charming room, but it was above a really noisy boiler that kept randomly firing up throughout the night. In the morning, when the husband asked me in front of the breakfast table if I had slept well, I told him about the boiler. I could tell from everyone’s faces that he and the other guests thought I had been rude to mention it. But if I had not said something, the next guest put in that room would be up all night just like me. What else could

Rory Sutherland

Why engineers beat lawyers

I once asked my friend, the engineer Guru Madhavan, why engineering faculties at most universities were outliers in containing more than a small minority of conservatives and political moderates. He explained it in a single sentence: “In engineering, you are peer-reviewed by reality.” ‘Legal’ thinking now precedes ‘engineering’ thinking rather than the other way around In any field where you are judged more by the quality of the outcome than the quality of your argument, there is a limit to the extent to which you can adhere to some all-encompassing ideological world view. If a bridge falls down, it is not a good bridge. The opposite is also true: in

Toby Young

White working-class boys are being left behind

Late March marked the fifth anniversary of the publication of the report of Lord Sewell’s Commission on Racial and Ethnic Disparities (CRED). In spite of a suitably diverse group of commissioners (or perhaps because of that), it refused to blame “systemic racism” for the underachievement of certain ethnic minorities. It didn’t dismiss that hypothesis entirely, but concluded that other factors – class, geography and family background – were more important. This analysis (supported by lots of data) did little to protect the commissioners from the fury of the woke left, who denounced them for ignoring historical injustices. Grievances previously felt by black Britons are now nursed by the white working

Melissa Kite

Meghan is a woman much misunderstood

Lying in bed with a swollen face, I decided that the best thing to do was nothing, so I ended up watching the Duchess of Sussex make smoothies. I don’t know why everyone is so mean about her Netflix show because it hit the spot for me. As I took to my bed after surgery to take out the old screws and plates in my long-ago broken jaw, everything put me on edge apart from watching Meghan and her lovely way of smiling and smiling as she expressed wonderment at a bunch of grapes, or the way a liquidizer whirred. As my face swelled and turned some interesting shades of

Rachel Johnson

Never pass up a chance to ski

The snow is deep and crisp and even, the sky bluer than blue, and beneath my Black Crow skis the soft hiss of fresh powder. I’m rehearsing my excuses as I carve my wiggly way down a well-upholstered piste. “I’ve gone skiing by mistake,” I cry out on the pure mountain air. I’m almost embarrassed by my own excess as this is my second ski break of the year, and to go twice before Easter during a war and an energy crisis is giving peak first-world indulgence. Still, as I like to say, I have not one but two Agas, “just not in the same house,” so what the heck.

Ysenda Maxtone Graham

Do you have the patience to own an EV?

There’s a distinctive glow of virtue that emanates from people recharging their electric cars in public places. I call it the Light of the Charge Brigade. In the run-up to Easter, I spent two hours observing the phenomenon at Fleet Services on the M3. It was mostly men doing the charging. They’ve cracked the EV way of life, and are very pleased with themselves. A sparklingly fulfilled man called Paul was driving from Colchester to Seaton in Devon in his Skoda Enyaq with a carload of friends. He’d planned this stop for a first charge and Pret elevenses. Later he was planning to stop at Montacute House in Somerset for

Peter Jones

The Trumpian appeal of a Trojan horse

Given the tonnage of missiles launched at Iran, it seems remarkable how relatively few Iranians have been killed. But the Americans have no interest in wasting multimillion dollar ordnance on pain-in-the-ass innocent bystanders. However, Donald Trump is now considering a land invasion. That would have been unwise, as the ancients knew. Knowing all about the problems of land assaults against defended cities, the ancients often preferred to lay siege. That could be a wearisome business and did not necessarily guarantee success. Troy was besieged for ten years, but it took the trick of the wooden horse to take it. So when the Persian king Darius (c. 514 BC) had laid

Damian Thompson

How Pope Leo XIV is quietly reshaping the Vatican

On the afternoon of Easter Sunday last year, Pope Francis was driven through St. Peter’s Square in an open-topped Popemobile. A few weeks earlier he had nearly died from pneumonia, so pilgrims were thrilled to watch him blessing babies. They told journalists that it was a miracle to see the 88-year-old Argentinian in such good shape. At 9:45 the next morning, the Vatican announced that Francis had just died from a stroke. And so began the preparations for a conclave that elected the second pope from the Americas. Cardinal Robert Prevost – “Bob” to his friends – was a Chicago-born dual citizen of the United States and Peru. Until 2023