King Charles has become the first monarch to reveal his tax bill, disclosing that he paid £12.9m in the year 2024-25. The monarchy’s core public funding, the Sovereign Grant, will rise to £100m by 2027-28, and palace officials have said that the King and Queen will not move into Buckingham Palace when a £369m renovation is completed next spring, instead remaining in Clarence House. Labour has resurrected a Conservative proposal to house asylum seekers on a former RAF base in Yorkshire as part of its efforts to move migrants out of hotels. The disused base is one of three military sites earmarked by the Home Office to accommodate 3,750 asylum seekers, with the other two located in Suffolk and Oxfordshire. British billionaire Joe Lewis’s art collection set a record for the largest ever single-owner sale in Europe after several of his masterpieces were bought this week for a total of £306m. Among them were works (below) by Modigliani, Freud, Monet, Picasso and Degas.

In the 19th century, Britain perfected what Walter Bagehot called “government by discussion”, says Adrian Wooldridge in Bloomberg. In the 20th century, it honed government by disciplined democratic parties. Today, we face “government by emotional spasm”. The lion’s share of the blame for this lies with the British people, who have “swapped their stiff upper lip for emotional incontinence”. There are seemingly permanent protests outside parliament. Regular marches swarm the capital accompanied by chants and drumming. The youth swoon over “socialist cranks” such as Jeremy Corbyn or Zack Polanski. Brexit was the “ultimate emotional spasm”, a revolt against the status quo that made its case with flags rather than statistics.

Politicians’ habit of pandering to public emotion is “incompatible with good government”. Leaders arrive on a “wave of enthusiasm”, chop and change policies and dump cabinet members who have only been around for five minutes, before swiftly departing with a “tearful speech at the No 10 lectern”. Effective rule requires our best people to endure years of rigorous parliamentary debate and assiduously climb the political ladder. When James Callaghan became prime minister, for example, he had held all the great offices of state. Government by emotion, conversely, suffers from a “weak filtering mechanism”. A mere 80,000 Tory members forced Liz Truss on the country. Now just 25,000 Makerfield voters will put Andy Burnham in the top job. He’s a case in point. People love that he wears casual jackets, listens to the Beatles and, “to his credit”, cites Philip Larkin as his favourite poet. But on vital, consequential issues – borrowing, rejoining the EU, and so on – we have nothing more than confusion and self-contradiction. The problem is not Burnham. It’s that our system for selecting leaders is “designed for failure”.

Some $240bn was wiped off the stock market valuation of Google’s parent company Alphabet earlier this week after two of its leading AI researchers defected in quick succession, says Thomas Barrabi in The New York Post. Senior scientist and Nobel Prize winner John Jumper is leaving for a role at Anthropic, while Noam Shazeer, co-lead of Google’s flagship Gemini AI models, is taking on a role at OpenAI. As one tech researcher said, it appears to confirm the idea that Google is “losing the war for talent at the frontier of AI”.

It’s 40 years since Marks & Spencer first started selling tins of gin and tonic, says Morwenna Ferrier in The Guardian. And Britain is more in love with the canned cocktail than ever. M&S now stocks well over 40 different concoctions, and claims to shift a phenomenal 150 cans a minute during summer months. Ocado and Sainsbury’s stock around 50 different varieties and it’s become hard to pass a corner shop without being confronted by a Pocket Negroni or a Funkin Nitro daiquiri.

Young Americans’ appetite for risk has tanked in recent decades, says Arthur Brooks in The Free Press. Fewer have sex or learn to drive, while the percentage of US teenagers who tried alcohol last year was the lowest on record. More interpersonal “risks” like getting married and having children are increasingly shunned, and Gen Z are financially conservative, favouring safer, liquid assets over high-risk investments and crypto. If life were actually more dangerous today, these increases in risk aversion would make sense. “But this is not the case.” Drinking is obviously no riskier than it used to be, driving has become safer, and divorce rates are down.

The problem, then, isn’t an increase in actual risk but an increase in aversion. And that breeds a culture of dependence, expecting the state to step in and keep you safe in the form of spiralling welfare programmes and punitive taxes. This disease is most advanced in Europe, where family formation has been in collapse for decades. Spain, once a stronghold of Catholic traditionalism, now has some of the lowest marriage and fertility rates in the world. Social welfare programmes, including for the middle classes, are ballooning. In 2023, French citizens took to the streets against a proposed rise in the retirement age from 62 to 64. This is madness. What the youth badly need is a “bit of optimism”. Today’s leaders harp on about a “grim future” and warn of our more dangerous world. Strong leaders of the past, “in scarier moments than these”, exhorted young Americans to live life fully and take risks. As Franklin Delano Roosevelt told the nation: “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” Quite right.

Texas has become the latest “engine of American growth”, says Katy Balls in The Times. Once synonymous with oil, cowboys and the occasional country club, the Lone Star State recently overtook California to host the headquarters of the country’s biggest companies from SpaceX to Bumble, and over the past five years has accounted for one fifth of all new jobs in America. In Austin, driverless cars take you everywhere. In Dallas, the strip mall houses Christian Louboutin, Rolex and Cartier. For food, there’s Cafe Dior; for a drink, Park House Dallas, a private members’ club inspired by Annabel’s.

Ten years ago, says The Economist, as the AI revolution was gathering pace, arts and humanities students were told that, if they wanted to make themselves employable, they should “learn to code”. That may have been bad advice. Today, it is coders whose jobs are most at risk from AI, while AI firms – worried about how to instil basic ethical guardrails in their AI models – are hiring philosophers at a rapid rate, some before they’ve even graduated. Earlier this year, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York found American philosophy graduates were more likely to be employed than their compsci peers.

It’s the Interceptor, says Katharine Gammon in The Guardian, a solar-powered boat that hoovers up waste from rivers before it makes it to the sea. Two long barriers channel rubbish on to a conveyor belt where an automated shuttle then distributes the waste into six different dumpsters. The whole contraption can hold around 9,000kg of rubbish – the same as one fully loaded lorry – and stopped some 65,000kg of waste entering the ocean in LA last year. Ocean Cleanup, the firm behind it, aims to operate in the 30 most-polluted cities by 2030.