Long reads shortened
Residential buildings under construction in New Capital. Khaled Desouki/AFP/Getty
Egypt’s “pharaonic” new mega-city in the desert
For the past 10 years, says Wendell Steavenson in 1843 magazine, Egypt has been building a spanking new city in the desert 25 miles east of Cairo. “New Capital”, as it’s known, is on a “pharaonic scale”. The plan is for a conurbation covering 270 square miles, with homes for six million people. Parliament, government departments and embassies are being relocated there. A new military headquarters, the Octagon, is 10 times the size of the Pentagon. It has the largest cathedral in the Middle East, a grand mosque with space for more than 100,000 worshippers, and plans for an airport larger than Heathrow. An entire Olympic city is being built for a future bid to host the summer games. Overlooking the skyscraper-filled business district is the 393-metre Iconic Tower, the tallest building in Africa.
You may wonder how President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi’s government can afford all this. One answer is the Gulf. In 2024, Abu Dhabi signed a whopping $35bn deal to build a glitzy resort on Egypt’s Mediterranean coast. Qatar forked out $29bn for a similar project last year, and another multi-billion-dollar “mega-deal” is in the works for a Red Sea tourist destination. These investments are as geopolitical as they are financial. Egypt is the most populous nation in the Middle East, so a crash in its economy would risk (further) destabilising the region. The whole country, including New Capital, has become “too big to fail”. The upper ranks of the armed forces – who do very nicely out of construction contracts – now “aspire to Dubai lifestyles”. Rolls-Royce has opened its first showroom in Cairo. Whether all this is sustainable is another question. As Yezid Sayigh, of the Carnegie Middle East Centre, says: “Pyramid schemes work as long as people keep pumping money into them.”
Property
THE FARMHOUSE This stone-built five-bedroom farmhouse sits in the hamlet of Satron, in the Swaledale valley of the Yorkshire Dales, says The Guardian. Set on the banks of the River Swale and nestled into moorland hillside latticed with dry stone walls, the house has four reception rooms and four bathrooms, with countryside views from every window. The hamlet’s name derives from the Norse for “summer pasture”, and its rural character is preserved in features like traditional stone barns and a 19th-century limekiln. A variety of outbuildings offer storage and development potential. The village of Gunnerside is within walking distance; Skipton and Barnard Castle are both within easy reach. £850,000. Click on the image to see the listing.
Less is more
Hayley Atwell and Tom Cruise in Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One (2023)
Everyone knows films are too long these days. As the New York Times columnist Frank Bruni notes in a piece in the full newsletter, the first Mission: Impossible film, in 1996, was a taut 1hr 50mins; the final instalment had to be split into “Part One” (2hrs 43mins) and “Part Two” (2hrs 49mins). The Knowledge, of course, doesn’t suffer from this problem. We keep things as short and tight as ever, because we know a) how important your time is, and b) that “less is more”.
Yes, a subscription to, say, The Economist gives you pages and pages of extensively researched and sharply written insights into all the important issues: how Suriname’s local elections will affect its fishing industry; what a new Peruvian TV show tells us about South America’s class system. But how much of that will you actually get through?
The Knowledge, by contrast, takes just five minutes to read. Then it’s: “That’s it. You’re done.”
Let us know what you thought of today’s issue by replying to this email
To find out about advertising and partnerships, click here
Been forwarded this newsletter? Try it for free
Enjoying The Knowledge? Click to share
