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The “amateur diplomat” trying to save the world

Steve Witkoff must have “one of the hardest jobs on the planet”, says Isaac Stanley-Becker in The Atlantic. As Donald Trump’s “special envoy for more or less everything” he has been tasked with securing a ceasefire deal between Israel and Gaza, brokering peace negotiations for Ukraine, and striking a deal with Tehran over Iran’s nuclear programme. It’s astonishingly high-stakes stuff for a real estate billionaire with precisely zero previous experience in diplomacy. Part of his preparation, he recently told me, involved reading “many books” and watching “Netflix documentaries on world conflicts”. The 68-year-old has come to believe, as Trump did with politics, that he can “turn a lack of expertise to his advantage and succeed where the professionals have failed”.

This has led to some fairly unusual diplomatic approaches. In February, he was dispatched to Russia to finalise the release of Mark Fogel, an imprisoned American teacher, in exchange for Alexander Vinnik, a Russian crypto kingpin languishing in a California jail. As Witkoff was leaving the Kremlin to fly home with Fogel, the CIA director called to say that Vinnik was balking at returning to his homeland. Rather than updating his Russian counterparts, Witkoff told his driver to “floor it”, waited impatiently on the airport tarmac for the Russians to de-ice his plane, and only informed the Kremlin that the US might not be able to hold up its end of the bargain once they’d cleared Russian airspace. Witkoff is unapologetic about being an “amateur diplomat”, as he puts it. “Diplomacy is negotiation,” he says. “I’ve been doing it my whole life.”

🪑🎒 Trump and Witkoff have been friends for over 40 years, but they have very different tastes. While the Oval Office is stuffed with bronze busts, ornate portraits and gold, Witkoff’s West Wing office has little beyond “a desk, a plain conference table and a chair where he rests his rucksack”.

Tom Cruise is often talked about as “the greatest daredevil” in cinema, says David Alexander in The Daily Telegraph. But Buster Keaton makes the Mission: Impossible star look positively “risk-averse”. In Our Hospitality (1923), Keaton uses a rope to swing across a waterfall and catch a girl falling over the top. In Sherlock Jr (1924), he sits on the front of a riderless motorbike speeding through a series of hair-raising near-misses – unfinished bridge, incoming train – before pulling down a pipe from a water tower and unleashing a torrent of water so powerful it broke his neck. Enjoy the full Cruise vs Keaton comparison here.

Cheer up empty nesters, and get your kit off

My kitchen is constantly full of female friends “weeping into their wine” about how much they’re going to miss their kids when they leave, says Kathy Lette in The Guardian. Michelle Obama has joined the chorus, revealing that she’s in therapy because Malia, 26, and Sasha, 23, have flown the nest. I admit, for a few days after my children left I “wandered around their bedrooms, touching old toys and storybooks”. But this ennui evaporated as I realised the redecoration potential. Would I turn their old bedrooms into a gym or a study? A walk-in wardrobe? Truly, the two nicest words in the English language are “empty” and “nest”.

Imagine this: you can open the cupboard, and your clothes have not been ransacked. You open the fridge: there is food. Nobody is putting empty packets back in the pantry or standing in that full pantry moaning “there’s nothing to eat in this house”. When you leave your pristine home in the morning, you know you will not return to find it strewn with the flotsam and jetsam of “dropped wet towels, apple cores, bike helmets and random teenage school friends crashed out on your couch”. Best of all, “you can now have sex loudly”. With teenagers around, parents are forced to endure “muffled sotto voce nookie”. With them gone, you can give “full vocal vent” to your joy. Michelle doesn’t need therapy; “she needs to have sex in every room of her empty house” – in the kitchen, on the landing, on top of the washing machine. She and Barack need to run around the house naked. “Yodelling. With antlers on their heads.” Empty nesters: don’t feel despondent. “You’ve hatched and dispatched.” Now go make proper use of the kitchen counter.

Latin America’s “pink tide” is turning

As the investor mania for American exceptionalism fades, says Ruchir Sharma in the FT, most eyes are turning to Europe and even China as the next big destinations for capital. But what few have noticed is that the best-performing region in the world this year is Latin America: its stocks are up 21%, well ahead of second-placed Europe and far exceeding the emerging market average of 6%. One reason is that the region is low on Donald Trump’s tariff target list, making it a relative haven from trade wars. But more important, and less well understood, is its “shifting politics”.

Chile’s former president Sebastián Piñera once told me that Latin America turns “left in good times, right in bad times”. Sure enough, after the roaring 2000s, a “pink tide” elevated a raft of left-leaning populists who subsequently led the region backwards. “On cue, the political tide is turning again.” Most important is the example of Argentina’s Javier Milei, who is inspiring copycats across the continent (including one top right-wing challenger candidate in Chile, whose adviser has a miniature statue of Milei wielding a chainsaw). The Argentinian president is often miscast as a “Latin copy of Trump”: he is pushing trade deals not tariff increases, and downsizing his government consistently rather than erratically. The result – a “dramatic turnaround in his country’s economy” – has not gone unnoticed by his neighbours. With the far-right ascendant in much of the West, it’s striking that Latin America is turning to classical free-market leaders, rather than towards a more Trumpian closed economy. That alone makes it highly attractive in this “post-American exceptionalism” world.

The semicolon seems to be in “terminal decline”, says Amelia Hill in The Guardian; the punctuation mark appears just once for every 390 words in English books today, down from once per 205 words in 2000. Some 67% of UK students “never or rarely” use the semicolon; just 11% regard themselves as “frequent users”. Opinion is divided: Charles Dickens and Jane Austen were big fans; Abraham Lincoln called it a “very useful little chap”. But top grammarian Lynne Truss says keen users risk becoming an “embarrassment to their families and friends”; Kurt Vonnegut said “all they do is show you’ve been to college”.

Kemi Badenoch is too interesting to be PM

Kemi Badenoch is refreshingly different to most top politicians, says Bagehot in The Economist. Whereas Downing Street still obsesses over daily newspapers with shrinking circulations, the Tory leader prefers to “wax lyrical for hours” on podcasts with global audiences, such as Jordan Peterson’s show and the liberal-goading Triggernometry. She gave short shrift when a breakfast show host chided her for not watching the zeitgeisty Netflix show Adolescence. “It is a fictional series,” she deadpanned. “It is not a documentary.” She is more than happy to talk about her favourite big thinkers – Daron Acemoğlu, Roger Scruton, Thomas Sowell – and was “unfashionably hostile” to Black Lives Matter.

Unfortunately, Badenoch’s broad and varied interests don’t appear to extend to the British electorate. She seems to consider the everyday stuff that voters actually care about – pay, GP waiting lists, anti-social behaviour – a bit pedestrian. “‘Oooh, let’s talk about AI, and let’s talk about NHS reform,’” she sighed during the leadership contest. “I want to talk about freedom.” The truth is that Badenoch appears to enjoy politics “more in theory than practice”. She is happy to riff on conference panels about the battle for the soul of conservatism, yet was “oddly absent from the very real battle for conservatism” unfolding in humdrum towns during local elections. The Tory leader has even hinted that she isn’t sure if she actually wants to be prime minister. “Perhaps Kemi Badenoch is more interested in being Kemi Badenoch.” Which might explain why “the electorate is not much interested in her”.