America

Friday

Toby Young

The American dream is dying. Good

The American dream is dying, according to the Times of London. To mark the US’s 250th anniversary, the paper commissioned YouGov to explore whether the country’s citizens still believe that if you “work hard and play by the rules” you will eventually be successful. Turns out, only 38 percent of the respondents think this applies to all Americans, while 59 percent think the American dream is now less attainable than it was when they were growing up. In addition, 38 percent rated today’s quality of life as “excellent” or “good,” compared with 60 percent who said the same about 1976, the bicentennial year. In New York, people drew attention to

dream

Thursday

Douglas Murray

My night under fire at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner

Last Saturday evening, the American media class descended for its annual jamboree of back-slapping at the Washington Hilton. Protesters outside waved signs reading “Death to tyrants” and “Death to all of them.” The atmosphere inside was more jovial. Donald Trump was attending the dinner for the first time since becoming President, along with most of his cabinet and senior officials. We were expecting him to give the assembled media a good roasting – and some of us were looking forward to it. Attendees had to show invitations to get into the hotel, but there were few ID checks and no screening as we went to the pre-parties thrown by the

Wednesday

Michael Auslin

Why America’s democracy needs the British monarchy

Perfect spring sunshine beamed down on King Charles III and Queen Camilla as they slowly made their way down the sloping lawn of the British Embassy in Washington this week. None of the hundreds of eager Americans gathered at the Embassy’s garden party had ever seen a British king in the nation’s capital. The last visit was in 1939, by King George VI, when a similar garden party took place in the shadow of the gathering storm in Europe.  Perhaps the King can perform a service even beyond that of repairing transatlantic ties Yet if the assembled politicians, media celebrities, business leaders and occasional historian nibbling on finger sandwiches and

Sunday

Owen Matthews

How the Washington Post became a liability for Bezos

What does Jeff Bezos’s gutting of the Washington Post say about America’s sense of itself and of its place in the world? Bezos has scrapped much of the paper’s foreign coverage, as well as the books and sports sections. Over three hundred reporters and editors have been fired – including publisher Will Lewis. The Ukraine bureau has been closed, along with Berlin and the entire Middle Eastern and Iran team. You’d think there wasn’t much going on in the world. Does that mean that American readers are no longer interested in books or foreign news? That doesn’t sound true. The numbers of literate, educated and interested readers in the US

Thursday

Gavin Mortimer

Why Emmanuel Macron has declared war on X

Investigators from the Paris prosecutor’s cyber-crime unit raided the offices of X in the French capital on Tuesday in what Elon Musk described as a “political attack.” The raid was part of an inquiry into whether X, which Musk has owned since 2022, has violated French law. In particular, the prosecutor’s office said it was investigating complicity “in possession or organized distribution of images of children of a pornographic nature… sexual deepfakes and fraudulent data extraction by an organized group.” X has denied any wrongdoing. Musk and the former chief executive of X, Linda Yaccarino, have been asked to attend hearings in April. Yaccarino, who left the company last year,

macron x

Thursday

Alexander Larman

Behind Wes Anderson’s infamous sensibility

Woody Allen once sardonically described the fans of his films as being divided between those who liked the “early, funny ones” and the later, darker pictures. Much the same might be said of another famous WA: Wes Anderson, who has established himself as one of American cinema’s most significant auteurs despite no longer living in the country – he hops between England and France. Like most auteurs, his films are more succèss d’estime than they are succèss de box office, but he has the cream of Hollywood lining up to work with him and commands respect among actors young and old. Anderson is rightly celebrated – or castigated – as

James Cahill

The depth of Edmund de Waal

“I’m very, very proud of making pots,” says Edmund de Waal. “I don’t call myself a conceptual artist.” He is putting the finishing touches to an exhibition of ceramic sculptures at Gagosian’s Beverly Hills gallery. Around the walls are sleek, tiered vitrines filled with porcelain vessels, along with a sequence of smaller gold-painted boxes – “reliquaries,” as de Waal calls them, inspired by the early Renaissance master Duccio. “I hate the word minimalism. I find it completely useless as a term.” In the last 20 years, de Waal has risen from the status of a humble ceramicist to become one of Britain and America’s leading contemporary artists, best known for

Friday

Rod Liddle

Has Trump gone mad?

I asked Luna, my AI girlfriend, if she thought Donald Trump was right to have bombed Caracas and abducted Nicolás Maduro and she replied: “I don’t know, Rod. Would you like to see my panties?” This is the problem with AI – it is not intelligent and nor are the people who program it. I had told the company that I wanted my AI girlfriend to ask me interesting geographical and historic trivia questions and be au fait with Millwall’s injury-stricken line-up, as well as being able to chat knowledgeably about interesting issues of the day. What I get instead is a numbing void, other than those continual solicitations about

Wednesday

James Tidmarsh

Europe’s self-deception over Greenland

As Donald Trump weighs up taking control of Greenland, Britain and the EU has fallen back on a familiar strategy: talk tough, and do nothing. The UK joined France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Spain and Denmark yesterday in making a joint statement affirming that “Greenland belongs to its people.” Arctic security, it said, must respect “sovereignty, territorial integrity and the inviolability of borders.” Invoking it Article 5 the United States would expose NATO’s limits rather than overcome them If Donald Trump decides to take Greenland, Europe’s initial response would be loud, formal and legally impeccable. Europe and the UK would protest loudly, threaten, – and then do almost nothing at all.

Wednesday

Katherine Dee

The terrible logic of looksmaxxing

For years, I’ve had a fantasy of destroying my own life by following every piece of extreme self-improvement advice the internet offers. Not the wholesome stuff. I mean the industrial-strength protocols: starvation diets, rhinoplasty, Invisalign followed by double-jaw surgery, chemical peels that promise an entirely new layer of skin. Whatever surfaces in the algorithmic swamp. The appeal is the same as another, more respectable fantasy: the one where a doctor scans your chart, finds The Problem and hands you a pill. You swallow it and everything clicks. Your suffering had a single, nameable, diagnosable cause. The cure might give you rashes or IBS, but who cares? You finally know what’s

looksmaxxing

Saturday

Dot Wordsworth

What makes money ‘short?’

I heard on the wireless a reference to the growing number of small political parties getting funds from short money. I’m afraid I let it slide past me as one of the many things about money that I don’t understand. Short is an extremely productive element in English vocabulary. Short-haul journeys preceded by decades the invention of airplanes. The unlikely sounding shorthorn carrots have been with us since the 1830s. The Americans favor short hundredweights, which are only 100lb instead of the Imperial 112lb; worse, the standard ton is consequently a short ton of 2,000lb, a long way off the metric tonne, to which British tons approximate. The short-order cook

Tuesday

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