It’s become a cliché for American liberals to announce they’ll move to Canada if this or that Republican politician wins office. Few ever follow through, says Tunku Varadarajan in The Wall Street Journal, but the evolutionary psychologist Gad Saad is about to do it in reverse. The 61-year-old has been driven out, he says, by Canada’s “orgiastic commitment to diversity, inclusion and equity”. In his new book, Suicidal Empathy: Dying to Be Kind, Saad argues that Western elites have become so fixated on helping others – on immigration, on crime, homelessness, taxation, schools, the environment, transgenderism – that they’re destroying their own culture.

Suicidal empathy seems to be a uniquely Western trait. The Japanese aren’t committing “civilisational seppuku”. Nor are the Chinese. But, says Saad, “if you truly believe the West is built on stolen land, slavery, Islamophobia and genocide”, then it makes perfect sense to annihilate your society “because it’s so corrupt”. And because Western elites can’t conceive of minds unlike their own, they wrongly assume their so-called kindness, beneficence and compassion will be universally appreciated. Yet Islam, for example, processes them as “weakness, weakness and weakness”. Most people know a man from a woman and have no trouble explaining why female genital mutilation and honour killings are evil. But because elites believe it’s racist to prefer some cultural norms to others, we end up acting “as if 500,000 new immigrants from Waziristan are the same as 500,000 from Denmark”. People say they want diversity, but it would be mad to want diversity on the question of “what we do with gays”, or “whether Jews are cockroaches”. If you import millions of people who think that, that kind of diversity is exactly what you’ll get.

Thank you to all the readers who sent us their own recommendations for summer reading. Elise Smith suggests Mark Ezra’s acclaimed spy thriller A Sting in Her Tale, saying the people she has given it to have all finished it within a couple of days. Nigel Milne says YO! Man, the autobiography of YO! Sushi founder Simon Woodroffe, is a “belter” – “fascinating, entertaining and hugely inspiring”. David Head gives a thumbs up to The Predicament, William Boyd’s second novel about reluctant spy Gabriel Dax. And Sally Weymouth recommends the award-winning Lone Wolf, in which the author Adam Weymouth (who may or may not be related to Sally) retraces the thousand-mile trek of a GPS-tracked wolf from Slovenia to northern Italy. Click the book titles to buy.

Andrey Melnichenko is one of Russia’s richest oligarchs, says Arkady Ostrovsky in 1843 Magazine, with an industrial empire that accounts for around 1% of the country’s GDP. But unlike some of his more ostentatious peers, he has always kept a low profile. Even Vladimir Putin was taken aback by the scale of his operations when the pair held their first one-to-one meeting last year. For the previous two decades, Melnichenko had treated his homeland much as a foreign investor would, flying in for a few weeks a year to inspect his businesses. The rest of his time he spent either in Switzerland or aboard his 119-metre yacht, mingling with tech titans, such as Larry Ellison, and Gulf leaders, including Mohammed bin Salman.

Melnichenko began his business career early, dropping out of Moscow State University to run an illegal foreign currency exchange. To make the business official, he teamed up with an American bank that was flying $300m-worth of banknotes into Moscow every day, stashing his share in a disused nuclear shelter. By 2004, having established three extremely successful businesses in piping, coal and fertilisers, he moved to France, where he married in a $30m ceremony with food by Alain Ducasse and a live performance from Whitney Houston. “I’d worked very hard,” he tells me. “I just wanted to live.” But when the Ukraine war broke out, Melnichenko was sanctioned and thrust back into Russia’s embrace. Today, he says he is neither for nor against the conflict. But – somewhat riskily, given Putin’s allergy to criticism – he is now seeking to become an “architect of change”, calling publicly for his homeland to become a “sovereign” nation. “For the first time,” he says, “I feel I have no other country but Russia.”

📕😬 When Melnichenko met Putin last year, all he could think about was a red folder sitting on the president’s desk, which he assumed was stuffed with intel about him supplied by the security services. Putin shuffled closer and asked: “Is anyone bothering you?” “I’m not afraid of anything specific,” the oligarch responded bravely, “unless there’s something in your folder.”