“You can’t go any higher in America”

Trump is right to bail out Argentina’s “madman”

The right are obsessed with Javier Milei, says Aditya Chakrabortty in The Guardian. Elon Musk says he “loves” the Argentinian president; Nigel Farage thinks he’s “amazing”; Kemi Badenoch calls him “the template”. And his first few months in office did produce undeniable achievements. Inflation plunged and the economy stabilised. But now, perhaps inevitably, the nation is back in “freefall”. Last month, the self-styled “madman” was pelted with stones by angry voters yet to feel the benefit of his economic reforms – half of Argentinians still can’t make their paycheck last a whole month – and handed a series of “resounding defeats” in congress and a legislative election. The markets panicked, worried that this was the end of support for his reforms, and the nation descended into a currency crisis. Donald Trump has now been forced to pledge $20bn to the right-wing “poster boy”.

And quite right too, says David Frum in The Atlantic. I’m no fan of Trump, but this bailout should be supported “across the political spectrum”. At a time when much of Latin America is heading the wrong way, Argentina has been progressing towards a more open economy. Sure, Milei has taken something of a gamble with Argentina’s troubled currency – a gamble that’s going wrong – but he has also mostly kept his promises and delivered results. If he fails, it will discredit market-orientated reformers in every economically troubled country in the Americas and beyond. If he succeeds, it will revive economic and political liberalism at a time when such systems are seemingly in retreat. The Trump administration only occasionally manages to act like a normal American government. “The bailout of Argentina is one of those times.”

We are desecrating our most sacred moments

Everyone talks about how Gen Z are wasting their lives consuming mindless online slop. But things are worse than that, says Freya India on Substack. We’re not just watching this brainless garbage, we’re imitating it. Thanks to the malign influence of, er, influencers, more of us than ever are turning the landmarks in our lives into a TV-like series of “episodes”: The Proposal, The Wedding, The New House Tour, The Pregnancy Reveal, every milestone, “on and on, forever”. A single baby can generate mountains of content – finding out, telling family, going to scans, the gender reveal, the name reveal, “pack my hospital bag with me” – and that’s before the poor child is even born. And if you really want to drive engagement? Post those emotional meltdowns and family disasters, and watch the likes roll in.

It’s not just that all of life is being “cheapened, packaged, churned out for others to consume”. Marketing your memories in this way “desecrates them” – the critical moments in your life turn into someone else’s “background noise”. The last thing you should be thinking about while giving birth is whether you’ve got the right light or need a second angle. Truly loved-up couples who barely remember their engagement – because, gasp, it wasn’t “captured” – are far better off than those who orchestrated, rehearsed and recorded the whole thing for likes. We should want to say “I love you” when there’s no one else there to witness it, “holding hands instead of iPhones”.

The beautiful Bolshevik with a taste for slaughter

Most of history’s cold, hard killers have been men, says Catherine Merridale in Engelsberg Ideas. Women feature briefly as part-time spies, poisoners or vengeful mothers, but when it comes to gore, “men get the glory”. Rosalia Zemlyachka was an exception. Born in Kyiv in 1876, Zemlyachka was a young revolutionary with Lenin’s Marxists, and developed a “taste for slaughter” during the Russian street battles of the early 1900s. After Lenin’s daring coup d’etat, she worked 20-hour days whipping the Eighth Army into shape. Reasoning that history was “on her side”, she baulked at no extreme of cruelty: “deserters were tortured, cowards shot, informers had their tongues cut out”.

Having “reshaped” the Eighth into ruthless killers, Zemlyachka was assigned to another regiment, which had been struggling to take Crimea. Here, she and her crew shot an estimated 96,000 enemies – “more than a tenth of the total population” – in just four months. Concerned about wasting bullets, they tied others to makeshift barges and planks before drowning them “wholesale” in the Black Sea – a solution that “disgusted even some Bolsheviks” (though Lenin was delighted). A poet who knew Zemlyachka later wrote about how she “drank wine and yawned” while signing mass death warrants. These “monstrous” exploits earned her the Order of the Red Banner – the first woman ever to receive the award – and she later served Stalin on the Central Committee of the Communist Party. She spent her final years living next door to the Khrushchevs in a prestigious apartment block facing the Kremlin. “Her job was fielding residents’ complaints about their flats.”