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Banking is cool again
🏜️ Underground town | 🔥 Perfect flame | 🪖 North Korea
In the headlines
The King has told Commonwealth leaders in Samoa “none of us can change the past”, but that we can learn from it to find “creative ways to right inequalities that endure”. Amid calls for a renewed debate over reparations for slavery, Keir Starmer was more explicit, flatly rejecting the idea of financial compensation. Elon Musk has had regular secret contact with Vladimir Putin about “personal topics, business and geopolitical tensions” since late 2022, says the Wall Street Journal. The news raises “potential national security concerns” for the US, given the importance of Musk’s SpaceX to military and intelligence programmes and his close relationship with Donald Trump. Kate Bush has revealed plans to make new music. The British pop icon has shied away from the spotlight since her last record, 50 Words for Snow, was released in 2011. The Hounds of Love singer tells Radio 4 that she’s “got lots of ideas” and is “very keen to start working on a new album”.
Comment
Maxim Shemetov/AFP/Pool/Getty
The West is losing the battle of world opinion
To witness the “momentous global shift” currently under way, says Thomas Fazi in UnHerd, behold the Russian city of Kazan, where this week the Brics bloc of non-aligned countries met for an international summit hosted by the “supposed global pariah” Vladimir Putin. Since the Ukraine invasion, the West has tried to isolate Putin through sanctions and diplomatic pressure. And yet in Kazan he welcomed heads of state or high-ranking officials from 32 countries. They included the bloc’s four new members – Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran and the UAE – as well as numerous prospective members, including Turkey, the first Nato member to consider joining. Even UN Secretary-General António Guterres went along.
The starriness of the event testifies to the growing attraction of the unofficial “non-Western club”. Some 40 nations are said to be on the waiting list to join, with even relatively big-hitters Saudi Arabia and Indonesia expressing “serious interest”. What’s most striking is how many countries made enquiries about joining after the outbreak of the Ukraine war. The failure of Western attempts to rally the so-called “Global South” to the anti-Russian cause has left wonks and mandarins alike scratching their heads in American think tanks and European chancelleries. Ironically, it was the West’s sanctions regime – and specifically the “unprecedented act of economic warfare” of freezing $300bn-worth of Russia’s foreign-exchange reserves – which may have motivated many countries to look for alternatives to the dollar-verse. That this has come as a surprise to the West tells us a lot about its “tone-deaf approach to the rest of the world”.
Architecture
Getty
The town of Coober Pedy has a novel solution to the “scorching heat” of the South Australian desert, says Paul Simons in The Times: move everything underground. When the first workers arrived in 1915 to mine opals, they realised life was far more bearable inside disused mine shafts – so they began digging. Today, Coober Pedy has grown into a “grand subterranean town” with restaurants, bars, art galleries, a bookshop, churches and even a luxury hotel. There are huge underground homes, equipped with walk-in wardrobes, Jacuzzis and high ceilings. There’s also an 18-hole golf course above ground: locals mostly play in the cool of the night, using glow-in-the-dark balls and a portable patch of artificial grass for teeing off.
Inside politics
The diplomatic row over Labour activists going to campaign for Kamala Harris is further evidence that Keir Starmer lacks a “political compass”, says Martin Kettle in The Guardian. Yes, you can argue that Nigel Farage does lots of US campaigning, and that the right-wing media is making a mountain out of a molehill. But it was still a desperately stupid decision, and one that someone – anyone – in the Labour chain of command should have noticed would cause a row. This is just the latest in a long line of avoidable own goals: the freebies revelations; the “tangled rise and fall” of Sue Gray; the “peremptory cull of winter fuel payments”. Starmer needs to hone his “political antennae”, and fast.
Games
Alphaguess is the new Wordle, says Boing Boing. Enter any word, and the game reveals whether it comes before or after that day’s “word of the day” alphabetically. Then you try another word, and so on and so on until you find it. Try for yourself here.
Comment
Marisa Abela (R) and Myha’la in Industry
Banking is cool again
I can’t believe I’m saying this, says Stuart Kirk in the FT, but banking is becoming cool again. The hit TV show Industry, which shamelessly glamourises the world of investment banking, is back for a third series. Finance jumped from fifth to first in the most recent annual Graduate Outlook survey of desirable careers, leapfrogging medicine, healthcare and education. My 12-year-old daughter spent the whole summer singing the viral TikTok meme “I’m looking for a man in finance” (watch it here). What on earth is going on? “At this rate, I may even put my finance roles in my bio again.”
It’s easy to forget just how loathed Wall Street was back in 2008, “even in money-loving America”, both for causing the financial crisis and for receiving government bailouts. Between 2007 and 2009, the world’s 50 biggest banks bled two-thirds of their combined value, with almost 90 lenders disappearing forever. Yet normality resumed remarkably quickly. Just four years after Lehman Brothers “went ka-boom”, the three dozen biggest banks were employing more people than they had before the crash. The “eye-popping” pay packages continued, too: compensation and benefits amounted to 31% of the banks’ revenues last year, up from 27% in 2007. That’s presumably one reason why finance is popular again: “banks are where the money is”. But it may also just be the “culture war pendulum swinging back”. After years of doing good and saving the planet, the cool kids have decided that “unfettered free-market capitalism” actually sounds rather fun. And, yes, it probably doesn’t hurt that “they may get to drive a Porsche”.
Love etc
Hot chef Gabriel doing “non-sexual sexy stuff” in Emily in Paris
Women are increasingly talking about wanting attributes in prospective lovers that go beyond the physical, says Stylist. Examples of this “non-sexual sexy stuff” include: striking a match and getting a perfect flame on the first go; being able to shuffle cards; winning a game of pool “and not making a big deal out of it”; a tea towel draped over the shoulder while cooking; chopping vegetables really quickly; tearing tape with their teeth; and turning the steering wheel with their palms when driving rather than holding it.
Noted
When Justin Welby, the Archbishop of Canterbury, was offered a place at Cambridge, his teachers at Eton were stunned, he tells The Rest is Politics. His final school report read: “He clearly hasn’t got the brains for the City, he may not even have the brains for the army. He might try industry, if they’ll take him.” It probably helped that the master of the college that accepted him, Trinity, happened to be his great-uncle.
Snapshot
Snapshot answer
It’s a photo taken by a woman who thought she was capturing the northern lights, says BBC News, and was “a bit disappointed” to learn that the glow was actually from a nearby tomato factory. Dee Harrison, from Ipswich, received several compliments after she posted her “aurora” pictures online, before another social media user pointed out that the colourful display came from the LED lights at Suffolk Sweet Tomatoes in Great Blakenham. “I have driven that way for over two years and this was the first time I had seen it,” said a slightly red-faced Harrison. “It’s funny how I haven’t noticed it before.”
Quoted
“I have never known anyone worth a damn who wasn’t irascible.”
Ezra Pound