America

Wednesday

Lionel Shriver

No one is safe from a wealth tax

No matter how many jurisdictions discover the hard way that wealth taxes backfire, in California an initiative is collecting signatures to put a “one-time” (ha!) 5 percent tax on the net worth of the state’s roughly 200 billionaires on November’s ballot. Hey, those guys are rich. They won’t even notice. But the funny thing about people and money is that even folks with lots like to keep it. The 2026 Billionaire Tax Act is slyly retroactive, a variety of pre-crime legislation – applying to anyone resident in California on 1 January this year, looping a bungee cord around the ankles of would-be absconders. Thus billionaires such as Peter Thiel scrambled

Douglas Murray

The censors are winning

They say you should never meet your heroes, a rule that is not always correct. But I did have a salutary session some years ago when a friend in New York asked me if I wanted to meet a comedian I really do admire. I had been looking forward to the meeting, but unfortunately it took place during the summer of 2020. If you remember those far-distant days, this was a time when America was obsessing over the story of alleged disproportionate police violence against black Americans. One of the cases was that of a woman named Breonna Taylor. Although the case for the police’s actions and the victim’s innocence

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

Wednesday

Rachel Johnson

An Englishwoman in New York

For this trip, I’ve had to divulge my social-media handles, blood group, shoe size etc, and have therefore assumed the brace position for being “processed” into the US, not least because I was once, under Joe Biden, incarcerated in a side room at JFK for having an apple in my hand luggage. The border protection officers show not the slightest interest in my sarky tweet about neocon Liz Truss Though, I might add, it was even worse under Bill Clinton. My baby boy was placed in a detention center on arrival at Dulles when we relocated to Washington, .C. Oliver, aged six months, was traveling separately from us with a

new york
ICE
Lionel Shriver

There should be no ‘sanctuary’ from ICE

After three hours of parsing American case law, for once I share Donald Trump’s exasperation. See, many a naif, including yours truly three hours ago, would have thought the Democrats’ “sanctuary cities” unconstitutional. A sanctuary city instructs its local police force to cease all co-operation with federal immigration agents. The constitution’s supremacy clause dictates that federal law overrules local law, just as rock crushes scissors in the hand game. For subjurisdictions to offer refuge from big meanie federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (the aptly cold-hearted sounding ICE) should not, legally, be possible. It’s possible. The work-around is the 10th Amendment’s “anti-commandeering doctrine,” which prevents the feds from directly telling local

Wednesday

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

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

Tuesday

Tuesday

Thursday

Tim Shipman

What the UK can learn from Trump’s second term

When John Swinney, the Scottish National Party leader, and former ambassador Peter Mandelson visited Donald Trump in the Oval Office a few months ago, the President showed them three different models for his planned renovation of the East Wing of the White House, which he has demolished to build a new ballroom. “If you’re going to do it,” Scotland’s First Minister suggested, “you might as well go big.” This Wednesday marked one year since Trump’s election victory, and going big captures the essence of his second term – bold and controversial moves, which have impressed even British politicians who thought him reckless in his first term. When Trump visited Chequers,

toby young
Toby Young

Lord Young goes to Washington

I’m writing this from Washington, DC, where I’ve spent the best part of a week talking to politicos and think-tankers about the state of free speech in the mother country. Don’t believe our Prime Minister when he says it’s in rude health, I’ve been telling them. It’s on life support and any pressure that can be brought to bear on His Majesty’s Government to protect it would be hugely appreciated. Once again, it’s time for the new world to come to the rescue of the old. Not that they need much convincing. The view of Britain among Washington’s political class isn’t informed by diplomatic cables or articles in the Economist,

ian williams china rare earths
Ian Williams

China is holding the West to ransom over rare earths

China’s naked weaponization of rare earths brings to mind Mao Zedong’s “four pests” campaign, the old tyrant’s fanatical effort to exterminate all flies, mosquitoes, rats and sparrows, which turned into a spectacular piece of self-harm. Sparrows were always an odd choice of enemy, but Mao and his communist advisors reckoned each one ate four pounds of grain a year and a million dead sparrows would free up food for 60,000 people. The campaign, launched in 1958, saw the extermination of a billion sparrows, driving them to the brink of extinction. But the sparrows also ate insects, notably locusts, whose population exploded, and the ravenous locusts wreaked far more damage to

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