For centuries, says Nina Caplan in The Times, “France ruled the saucepans as Britannia did the waves”. From the elaborate, enormous feasts organised by courtiers to impress Louis XIV to the invention of the restaurant and the Michelin Guide, no country’s kitchens and chefs have had more prestige. And if this 300-year run had a figurehead, it was Auguste Escoffier. The son of a Provençal blacksmith, he turned a fraught childhood of forced labour in his uncle’s restaurant, along with a short, brutish stint in the army during the Franco-Prussian War, into a glorious career at the finest hotels in London, Paris and Monte Carlo. He re-imagined the professional kitchen into a place of military efficiency – it’s still called a “brigade” for this very reason – and his 1903 book, Le Guide Culinaire, remains the bible of chefs throughout the Western world.

Escoffier got his breakthrough in 1890, when Richard D’Oyly Carte, owner of the new and struggling Savoy hotel, hired him, along with his longtime collaborator César Ritz. It soon became a destination for celebrities and the preferred love nest of the Prince of Wales, who was rumoured to keep 55 mistresses. Escoffier didn’t leave by choice. He and Ritz were sacked in 1897, having taken kickbacks from suppliers (and possibly pilfered supplies) on an impressive scale. The pair set up the Carlton hotel, and “the future King Edward VII and his gaggle of women friends followed”. Above all, Escoffier, who came to be known as the “chef of emperors and the emperor of chefs”, was an evangelist for eating. As he put it: “La bonne cuisine est la base du véritable bonheur” – good cooking is the foundation of genuine happiness.

When new hires at the legendary Wall Street law firm Weil, Gotshal & Manges gathered for a welcome event last month, says The Wall Street Journal, senior lawyers spoke of plans for a “long and successful future”. The 95-year-old practice, nicknamed “We’ll Getcha & Mangle Ya”, had 1,200 lawyers worldwide and more than $2bn in revenue. Yet just nine days later, at 3.30pm last Wednesday, senior partners announced that the entire firm was shutting down. A failed merger and the departure of several top revenue-generating partners had somehow left the firm that worked on the “mega-bankruptcies” at Enron and Lehman Brothers facing bankruptcy itself. “It’s almost impossible to believe,” said one retired partner. “But the run on the bank came, and the bank has to close.”

Some of the partners on the call that Wednesday were in tears, says the FT. How could a business with a “pristine” balance sheet fall so quickly? The answer is that Weil is the first major victim of a new “mercenary culture” in Big Law. Rather than staying at one firm for their entire career, big money-making partners are being poached by rivals offering $30m-plus salaries. That can leave a huge hole in the company’s finances – one departing Weil executive accounted for as much as $150m in annual revenue, or 7% of the company’s total. Today’s big law firms are no longer “defined by a sense of partnership”, says one Weil executive. “It’s a completely transactional relationship.” The demise of the company has triggered a “feeding frenzy” among headhunters, with partners fielding more than a dozen calls a day. One asked a potential employer how he could be sure the same thing wouldn’t happen at this company. The interviewer said that, as far as he knew, things were fine. Yes, the candidate replied. “We were told the same thing at Weil.”

In a recent poll of US voters, says Jim Geraghty in The Washington Post, 66% said they sympathised with Ukraine and just 3% sided with Russia. Similarly, far more Americans support sending intelligence and military aid to Ukraine than oppose it. So there is no significant US constituency for a US rapprochement with Vladimir Putin. Yet Donald Trump now treats the Russian strongman as a “de facto ally”: inviting him to the G20 summit in Miami, buying Russian diesel, insanely claiming that “Russia, frankly, has been fine on Ukraine”. And there’s every reason to believe that the president’s “defiant, contrarian and often self-destructive instincts” will intensify in the final two years of his presidency, now that the Democrats have won Congress. “Buckle up, America.” The “stable part” is over.

The real reason peace has eluded Ukraine, along with Gaza and Iran, says Stephen Walt in Foreign Policy, is because Trump’s special envoys treat conflicts like real estate deals. Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff have made their millions on the premise that “everyone has their price”. But in politics, national security trumps wealth. All the cash in the world is useless if someone stronger can simply take it from you. Money isn’t irrelevant – Putin would happily pocket the blandishments Kushner and Witkoff keep dangling. But no “economic goodies” will soften his stance until the security concerns that drove his decision to invade – having an increasingly Western-aligned nation on his doorstep – are met. The same is true for Kyiv. If money were all that mattered, Volodymyr Zelensky would long ago have accepted the loss of Crimea and the Donbas in exchange for a big rebuilding aid package. But Ukrainians don’t want to live “in fear of future Russian threats”.

😬🇦🇫 Far-right politicians such as Germany’s Alice Weidel and France’s Marine Le Pen argue that stopping the sale of weapons to Ukraine would force Kyiv to agree to a deal and end the fighting. It’s a terrible idea, says Anne Applebaum on Substack. The violence would likely grow worse, potentially collapsing into a guerilla war. Russia would inflict grotesque repression on the entire country – murdering leaders, building a police state, kidnapping children – forcing millions of refugees to evacuate. Europe would end up with “an Afghanistan” on its borders.