The tiny petrostate that’s now the world’s diplomatic capital

News you’re not getting—until now.

Join 4M+ professionals who start their day with Morning Brew—the free newsletter that makes business news quick, clear, and actually enjoyable.

Each morning, it breaks down the biggest stories in business, tech, and finance with a touch of wit to keep things smart and interesting.

Check it out

In the past few years, says Emma Rosenblum in The Cut, “visiting day” – the one day of the summer when American parents are allowed to visit their children on holiday camps – has got badly “out of control”. The swankiest local hotels are booked up a year in advance; mums with “flawless manicures” set 6am alarms two months before the day to book a table at the best restaurant. Some couples take private planes and “bring chefs and nannies and housekeepers”; others travel by Uber helicopter. Couples arrive with “suitcases full of gifts”, from personalised pillows to $150 perfumes and the latest Nike trainers. In the old days, children’s visiting day wish lists might have included some M&Ms and a top-up of shampoo. Now it’s Nobu sushi and (highly expensive) Alo Yoga outfits, says one mum whose daughter is at the $17,000 Tripp Lake camp in Maine. Another says a friend spent $3,000 on a “cookie cake and a tiered candy tower”, while other parents have been seen bringing in “12 packs of very high-end toilet paper”.

The magazine that rented an elephant for $30k

There was a point in time when one company in Manhattan told the world “what to buy, what to value, what to wear, what to eat, even what to think”, says Michael Grynbaum in his book Empire of the Elite. Condé Nast defined “what it meant to be successful in America”. Editors were given interest-free mortgages on swanky New York townhouses, and eye-popping photoshoot budgets allowed one assistant to rent an elephant for $30,000. When a GQ food critic handed in $14,000 worth of expenses after a fortnight in Japan, an editor asked, without sarcasm: “Is that all?” And when Robert Gottlieb stepped down as editor of The New Yorker after just five years, he continued to be paid his $350,000 salary every year for the rest of his life.

The Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter used to dispatch his assistants to travel destinations a day in advance so they could set up an exact reproduction of his New York desk, complete with his preferred pencils and devoid of any paper clips – a distaste noted in the staff manual. When Carter once landed in Venice for a Condé Nast retreat, he realised he’d left his top-secret issue of a yet-to-be-released magazine in a gondola. His assistant, armed with his usual €10,000 in petty cash, was immediately dispatched to spend several hours bribing the city’s gondoliers until one handed it over. Writers and editors would FedEx their luggage rather than faffing around with it on the plane – typically business class, or Concorde – while one editor was once told her choice of hotel wasn’t splashy enough and she needed to upgrade it.

Empire of the Elite by Michael Grynbaum is available to order here.

From “Brat Summer” to “Cool Britannia Mark II”?

When I was growing up in the 1990s, says Helen Coffey in The Independent, “the UK was cool”. There were the Britpop bands like Oasis and Blur. Everyone watched Richard Curtis movies, and Damien Hirst was known worldwide for his “provocative animals in formaldehyde”. It was a period of “genuine optimism” when British fashion, music and culture were not only progressive, thriving and relevant, but the “envy of all”. Ginger Spice wore a Union Jack mini-dress “without the merest hint that she was making some kind of anti-immigration politics statement”. This golden era of “proud to be British” petered out some time in the 2010s, and for a few years the country has been “lacking in the trendy department”. But now, all of a sudden, we’re “on the cusp of Cool Britannia Mark II”.

Last year we had “Brat summer”, thanks to British popstar Charli XCX, which ended up playing a role in the US presidential election after Charli declared on social media: “Kamala [Harris] IS brat”. Four members of the cast of Adolescence, set in Yorkshire, have received Emmy nominations. The series is Netflix’s most-watched show of the year and second most-watched English-language series “of all time”. Lena Dunham’s new series Too Much is an “ode” to our nation, and the Gallagher brothers, reunited for a global Oasis reunion tour, have kick-started a frenzy of Britpop nostalgia. “Celebrity endorsements” for Britain keep rolling in: US talk show host Ellen DeGeneres, who moved to the Cotswolds after Donald Trump’s re-election, said recently: “everything here is just better”. American singer Olivia Rodrigo told the Glastonbury crowd, while wearing Union Jack hotpants, “I fucking love England”. For the first time in a while, it feels “cool to be British again”.