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Sunday

Charles Walford

In defence of American sport

This afternoon, just shy of 75,000 fans of American football will flood in to watch the Atlanta Falcons take on the Indianapolis Colts, in what is set to be the Colts’ largest attendance for a home game this season. A few weeks ago, more than 86,000 turned out to watch the Jacksonville Jaguars face the LA Rams in what was the Jaguars’ best-attended home game this year. The most surprising thing about this? Both games were taking place more than 4,000 miles from the NFL’s heartland – one in Berlin, one in London. Recently, Sean Thomas claimed on Spectator Life that America has failed to export its ‘laughable’ sports. As

Saturday

Rachel Johnson

Enough with the Aga-shaming

The headline smacked me between the eyes. ‘I can’t afford to turn my Aga on this winter,’ a nice writer called Flora Watkins whinged in the Telegraph last weekend (she once wrote a Spectator piece about the sublime awfulness of cockapoos that I wished I’d written myself). The sub-head continued: ‘Our writer’s once cosy Norfolk home is feeling the chill as energy bills rise – how will she and her family cope?’ There was a fetching picture of our tragic protagonist in cardi and layers clutching a mug in front of her Aga and an impressive batterie de cuisine. Watkins had also swathed her pretty neck in the Diana-sheep-jersey scarf (white sheep on red, and one

Friday

Penworthy

Two bets for the big Aintree chase tomorrow

The first race of the season over the Grand National fences at Aintree takes place tomorrow when 17 runners are due to line up for the William Hill Grand Sefton Handicap Chase (2.40 p.m.). A good case can be made for the first three in the betting: King Turgeon, White Rhino and Johnnywho. The former won this race a year ago before showing further improvement later in the season, whereas the other two have clearly been targeted at this contest for some time and are potential improvers. If one of them wins at around 5-1, then so be it but I would prefer to look for value elsewhere. At first

Sean Thomas

The headphones that play the future

I have arrived in Naples, Italy, after an arduous flight from a chaotic London Gatwick Airport. I’m settled in a glamorous top-floor apartment in the Quartieri Spagnoli – the romantic old ‘Spanish Quarter’ – where Vespas fizz over cobbles and laundry hangs across alleys like flags of endless surrender. Most importantly, I’m clutching my Apple AirPods 3 in their shiny new capsule. Because I’ve come here to do a grand, futuristic experiment using their much-heralded ‘live translate’ function. Does it really work as smoothly as Apple says? Can I actually slot them in my ears and have them translate the Italian speaker in front of me, in real time? Is

Gage Klipper

Mamdani will hand New York’s restaurants to the rich

There’s no shortage of catastrophic predictions for New York under Zohran Mamdani’s leadership. While the city probably won’t see breadlines, the wildly expensive, exhaustingly derivative restaurants that dominate its food scene are likely to become more dominant. Mamdani’s big pledge on food is to ‘make halal eight bucks again’. But it’s a ‘false promise’ of street-food affordability according to Heritage Foundation economist Nicole Huyer. She says Mamdani’s economic programme, which includes higher taxes, steeper leasing regulations and a pledge to raise the minimum wage to $30 an hour by 2030, will effectively make restaurants even more expensive. ‘All of these great socialist policies that [Mamdani’s] planning to implement – he’s

Wednesday