Myanmar’s junta is lashing out
Losing its ability to win on the ground, the regime is now resorting to unconventional aerial attacks on civilians
Latest from Coffee House
All the latest analysis of the day's news and stories
Thursday
The scientific case for the existence of intelligent alien life
The foundation of science is based on the humility to learn, not the arrogance of expertise. When comet experts argued that the interstellar object 3I/ATLAS must be a familiar water-rich comet as soon as it was discovered in July, they behaved like artificial intelligence systems: only able to reflect the data sets they were trained
How Queen Camilla is spreading the joy of reading
Queen Camilla loves a book. Almost any book will do. “There’s something so tactile about a book,” she says. “I like the smell of the pages when you open the cover. I like turning the pages and folding down a corner ready for next time…” The Queen, 78, has loved books for as long as
Peter Thiel predicts the future
Peter Thiel has been described variously as “America’s leading public intellectual,” the “architect of Silicon Valley’s contemporary ethos” or as an “incoherent and alarmingly super-nationalistic” malevolent force. The PayPal and Palantir founder, a prominent early supporter of Donald Trump, is one of the world’s richest and most influential men. Throughout his career, his principal concern
Wednesday
Is affordability a hoax perpetrated by the fake news media?
The Spectator has got a hold of a new protocol used to screen visitors from 40 countries
Is Trump becoming a lame-duck president?
He needs to show he is still in charge going into the midterms after recent setbacks
Will tech companies bend to Australia’s social media ban?
The online world is dangerous for under-16s, but barring them could be unwise and unworkable
Tuesday
The billion-dollar fraud in a Democratic utopia
Somali Americans in Minnesota have falsely claimed funds meant to feed low-income children
What Ukraine really needs from Europe
Bear hugs and kind words are not enough
When Piers Morgan met Nick Fuentes
Piers took on a prosecutorial mode, but Nick Fuentes made no attempt to hide his beliefs
Monday
The Trump-Kennedy Center?
The President hosted the Kennedy Center Honors and joked about changing its name
Is Prince Harry about to spend a lot more time in Britain?
His solo trip to the UK in September demonstrated that he’s capable of conducting a quasi-royal visit by himself
What are Ukrainian children doing in North Korea?
For Pyongyang, any opportunity to expound its anti-American worldview is worth taking
Yes, Europe’s civilization is being erased
Trump is right to warn against mass immigration and the Islamification of Europe
Saturday
Slipshod: a short story by Sarah Perry
It was months before the difficulty with Marnie and Addison was talked about, or even alluded to. The sight of their names in emails circulated around the department was enough to cause a pall to settle on everything, like ash from fires only just put out. Besides, the nature of the difficulty (that was the
The myth of human sacrifice
Most of us indulge in mild fortune-telling. We think “If the light changes before I count to five, I’ll get the job” or “If the solitaire hand comes out my tests will be negative’, and so on. We understand prophecy as the ability to foretell the future. But biblically, prophecy was not prediction but castigation.
Jung Chang: what the West gets wrong about China
No writer has done more than Jung Chang to bring the horrors of Maoist China to the attention of western readers. In her monumental memoir Wild Swans (1991), she recounted the Chinese Communist Revolution, the Great Famine and the Cultural Revolution through the stories of her grandmother, her mother and herself. Its influence was enormous:
What England’s old folk songs can teach us
I grew up in the 1980s but in many ways it was more like the 1880s. We lived with my grandmother on the Northumbrian coast and the routine of our days echoed the routines of her youth, perhaps her mother’s and grandmother’s, too. We were like an elephant family in an African game park, following
An interview with the physicist David Deutsch
The Amazon reviews for David Deutsch’s The Beginning of Infinity don’t alert you to the fact that this is a book on theoretical physics. They sound more like a weepy divorcé’s YouTube comments below a Mark Knopfler guitar solo. “I didn’t so much read it,’ says one. “It read me.’ ‘I was honestly sad when
Friday
The Sherlockians’ game
There is no better time to read a Sherlock Holmes story than a winter evening. As the rain lashes against the windows and the fog descends, we can imagine ourselves sitting companionably with the great detective and the good doctor around the Baker Street hearth, waiting for the step of a visitor upon the stair.
Why shouldn’t Trump deport Prince Harry?
Americans are sick of being a punchline for Harry’s frantic attempts to stay relevant
Milo Yiannopoulos holds forth on the origins of homosexuality
He claimed that most gay men hate women because they hated their overbearing mothers
Thursday
Trump’s peace process pageantry
He oversaw the celebration of an accord between Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo at the newly rebranded ‘Donald J. Trump Institute of Peace’
Halle Berry vs. Erika Kirk
Erika led a charge for a return to traditional values – while Halle likened the menopause to Covid
The desperation of the ‘Seditious Six’
Their audience isn’t actually the military, but what remains of the anti-Trump ‘Resistance’
Wednesday
Donald Trump’s affordability blues
His administration remains fixated with Herbert Hoover economics
Why Trump’s Muslim Brotherhood crackdown is long overdue
Intelligence about the activities of Egyptian, Jordanian and Lebanese Islamists will rapidly implicate Qatar and Turkey as the Brotherhood’s key international sponsors
Climate doom is not science
A major paper predicting the economy will shrink by 62 percent has been withdrawn
Why Putin thinks he’s winning
Believing that time and destiny are on his side, Putin is sticking to his maximalist war aims
Tuesday
Trump’s cabinet is a liberal’s nightmare
At this point, YouTube might as well set up a 24-hour livestream from inside the White House, like the sorts of stunts that were popular at the dawn of the personal video era
Mamdani hires author of defund the police bible
Alex Vitale wrote ‘the problem is policing itself’
Monday
Trump was right to snub Johannesburg’s G20 summit
South Africa’s corruption and human rights abuses are deplorable
Sunday
Inside the mind of Putin’s real hatchet man
As Moscow and Washington prepare for talks on the latest version of Donald Trump’s peace plan, leaked recordings of a conversation with US envoy Steve Witkoff have thrown a spotlight on to senior diplomat Yuri Ushakov. It seems he, not Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, is the prime mover behind Russia’s negotiating position. The stature of Lavrov, once
Saturday
Tom Stoppard was himself to the end
“Tom Stoppard is dead.” For anyone who cares for the theater, the English language, and especially for those of us who knew him, these words are as unthinkable as they are hard to bear. How can such a force of nature, such a generosity of spirit, such a voice of sanity, have fallen silent? And
