It’s easy to forget, says Gaspard Dhellemmes in Le Monde, that all the recent unpleasantness over Greenland kicked off with a tweet. On 3 January, Katie Miller – wife of Donald Trump’s top adviser Stephen Miller – posted on X a map of the Danish overseas territory in the colours of the American flag, accompanied by the word “soon”. The rest followed. Nicknamed the “Trad Wife in Chief” by Slate magazine and “MAGA mom” by The Guardian, the future Mrs Miller met her anti-immigration hardliner husband while working in the first Trump administration. The pair married in 2020, with the president in attendance, at the Trump Hotel in Washington DC.

When Trump was re-elected in 2024, she went to work as an adviser and spokeswoman for Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency. She became so close to the world’s richest man that rumours spread in Washington, and when Musk abruptly broke with Trump last summer, many expected her to go with him and work at one of his companies. In the end, she chose Trump – and her increasingly powerful husband – and left the orbit of the “unpredictable Tesla boss” to start a podcast. Already, Miller has become one of the leading voices in a new “womanosphere” of content produced by conservative women “blending lifestyle and ideology”. She covers topics ranging from parenting to religion and cooking. Early guests have included Musk, Vice President JD Vance, the boxer Mike Tyson, and the Playboy bunny turned anti-vaccine influencer Jenny McCarthy.

One of the guilty pleasures of the patriotic British travel writer, says Sean Thomas in The Spectator, is encountering yet another country or city or island that we once invaded, occupied, or just “menaced into submission with a couple of gunboats”. In 1807, I learned on a recent jaunt, we “casually took out Uruguay”, demolishing the walls of Montevideo during the British invasions of the River Plate. I’ve had this experience everywhere: the Maldives, Kefalonia, Colombia, Menorca, Haiti, Iceland and even Bolivia, where the old ladies in La Paz still wear bowler hats. I suspect that if it weren’t for the drink holding us back, “we’d have colonised the moon in 1892”.

What’s funny is that, on their home island, the defining characteristic of the British is the opposite of aggression: it is “amiability”. Tolerant, politely cheerful, hard to anger, gently humorous, eager to live and let live. George Orwell wrote, as the Luftwaffe bombed London in 1941, that the gentleness of English civilisation is perhaps its most marked characteristic: “You notice it the instant you set foot on English soil. It is a land where the bus conductors are good-tempered and the policemen carry no revolvers.” The Czech writer Karel Čapek, visiting in the 1920s, found the English “courteous and absolutely trustworthy”; the Hungarian George Mikes observed in 1946 that “an Englishman, even if he is alone, forms an orderly queue of one”. For Bill Bryson, “deference and a quiet consideration for others are such a fundamental part of British life, in fact, that few conversations could even start without them.” He also transcribed that most quintessential expression of stoical British tolerance: “Mustn’t grumble.”

🤨💰 The anthropologist Kate Fox – who once ran an experiment into the English “sorry reflex” by walking down the street intentionally bumping into people, who invariably apologised – witnessed something extraordinary during the 2011 London riots: looters forming an orderly queue to squeeze through a smashed shop window, deterring queue-jumpers with disapproving frowns and raised eyebrows.

The Kurdish-dominated area of north-east Syria known as Rojava is home to some of the most determined women I’ve ever met, says Natasha Walter in The Guardian. For more than a decade, the region has been governed not by the Syrian government but by an autonomous administration with a remarkable commitment to gender equality. Every committee and council from neighbourhood to regional level has a male and female co-chair. Few women cover their hair. In the shops, cafes and universities, women can walk around alone, smoke shisha and dance in the streets. At big events, they chant the slogan: “Woman! Life! Freedom!”

The Rojava women built this revolution from the ground up, establishing women’s houses that offered support and protection to those facing violence and civil disputes, and passing laws against underage marriage. The Women’s Protection Unit and the women’s army, trained in military academies, play a vital role in fighting Islamic State in the region. And there’s a striking intellectual confidence among them – not just the writers or teachers, but the soldiers, the judges, the textile workers and those on agricultural committees. Women I met had read feminist writers from Virginia Woolf to Rosa Luxemburg; they held discussions on the limits of Western liberalism for women’s rights and their loathing of the Turkish occupation. Today, as the new Syrian government tries to bring the whole country under control, the Rojava territory is shrinking and its future looks under threat. That would be a tragedy. What these women have achieved is an inspiration well beyond their borders.