Keir Starmer held an emergency Cobra meeting this morning after far-right rioting escalated over the weekend. More than 420 people have been arrested in connection with the violence, which saw mobs besiege a hotel housing asylum seekers in Rotherham, set light to a children’s library in Liverpool and attack the homes of migrants in Middlesbrough. Home Secretary Yvette Cooper has promised a “reckoning” for those involved. Several countries have advised their citizens to leave Lebanon, amid rising fears of a wider conflict erupting in the Middle East. Western officials worry Iran will use its Lebanon-based proxy Hezbollah to retaliate against Israel, following the assassinations of Hamas political chief Ismail Haniyeh and Hezbollah senior commander Fuad Shukr last week. Dolce & Gabbana has launched a luxury perfume for dogs. The Italian fashion house says Fefé, which will retail at €99 a bottle, is an “olfactory masterpiece”.

The rise of ethnic conflict in Britain

It should be clear to everyone by now that the riots sweeping the country are really about mass migration, says Aris Roussinos in UnHerd. Protestors demand the government “Stop the Boats” and “Protect our kids at any cost”. Local women, rather than football hooligan skinheads, appear to be a dominant organising force. Yet liberal commentators have nevertheless chosen to portray the violence as orchestrated by the likes of Tommy Robinson, as well as blaming “Nigel Farage, the media, the Conservative Party, the Labour Party and Vladimir Putin”. In truth, there is a simple term for what’s happening: “ethnic conflict”.

Tony Blair, who consciously set out to change Britain into a “specifically multi-ethnic” society, now rejects multiculturalism, as do other countries which tried it, like Sweden and the Netherlands. But Britain, rhetorically at least, remains committed, referring to ethnic groups euphemistically as “communities”, and engaging with “community leaders” in the interests of “community relations”. (Except when rioting is carried out by the ethnic British, whose “community leaders” are dismissed as “far right”). One problem is that we have imported from America racial politics that derive from their “uniquely stratified slave economy” and have little to do with life here. British liberals squirm away from practical discussion of ethnic identities – “especially their own” – but obsess over the abstract politics of race, making up identities nobody really identifies with, like BAME, and lumping everyone from Scots to Greeks under the useless umbrella identity “white”. Britain remains an unusually sane country, but we are starting to see ethnic political groupings, including Nigel Farage’s “ethnic British party” Reform. Unless liberals can face up to these facts, we will only see more.

If you want to know who’s going to win the next British or American election, says Helen Rumbelow in The Times, just look at which candidate is funnier. “Blair was funnier than Major. Cameron was funnier than Brown, Johnson was knockout funnier than Corbyn.” May and Starmer were – just about – funnier than Corbyn and Sunak. In the US, Bill Clinton was funnier than Bush Sr; Bush Jr was funnier than Gore and Kerry. And Trump beat Hillary Clinton in part by casting her “with the type of humourlessness often associated with the left: uptight and po-faced”.

South Korean shooter Kim Yeji is the “first breakout style star” of the Olympics, says GQ. The 31-year-old won silver in the women’s 10-metre air pistol event, but it was her appearance that really made a mark. With her white baseball cap, matching black Fila anorak zipped up to the neck, black tracksuit bottoms and customised red-laced Sauer pistol shoes, the first-time Olympian looked like a “sportswear-wearing sci-fi assassin”. The pièce de résistance: her wonky wire-rimmed shooting glasses, with flippable hinged lenses. Video game artist Del Walker described it as “the most ‘Main Character Energy’ I’ve ever seen in my life”.

“To read well is to ignore the now”

I have a simple rule when choosing what to read, says Janan Ganesh in the FT: “avoid the contemporary”. Given our finite lives and the centuries-deep canon of literature – more than 120 million titles have been printed since the dawn of the printing press – what are the odds that a book written in 2024 will be worthy of your attention? If a novel has worth, it will still have it in a decade or two, and if not, the “filtering effect of time” will have spared you the trouble. In either case, there is something rash – “something of the royal food taster” – in going first. “Let others take the hit.”

The same is true for nonfiction: if the subject is topical – quantum computing, the rise of Beijing – it will “age at speed”. The proper vessel for those subjects is journalism or a “ChatGPT gut of the academic literature”. Schopenhauer’s advice to avoid reading whatever is “making a great commotion” is surely right. “To read well is to ignore the now.” This is true of no other art form, because no other art form is so time-intensive. Looking at a painting made last week does not stop you looking at a Poussin; the opportunity cost is a minute or two. If a new book turns out to be a bit of “zeitgeisty ephemera”, that’s maybe 10 hours you can’t spend reading, say, Tom Wolfe’s The Right Stuff. One of the principal joys of reading is that it “puts distance between one and the world”. The older the book, the truer this becomes. “This thing pre-dates my troubles,” is the sentiment the reader ultimately craves, “and will see them out too.”

The US government has come up with an innovative potential use for a former nuclear weapons production facility, says Canary Media: turning it into a giant solar farm. The 8,000-acre Hanford Site in Washington state is still too radioactive for people to live or farm there, but the radiation shouldn’t affect solar panels. If the project goes ahead, it could produce up to 1 gigawatt of energy capacity, enough for 750,000 homes.

It’s the new logo of the London Museum, comprising a porcelain pigeon and a glittery splat of poo. The scatological symbol is meant to embody the “grit and glitter” that have existed in the capital for millennia, at least according to the institution’s director. Maxwell Blowfield, writer of the popular Maxwell Museums newsletter, is not so sure. “No-one ever thinks, feels or speaks about pigeons,” he says. “London is a remarkable place, yet the London Museum has managed to avoid representing anything remarkable about it… which is in itself remarkable.”