All the week’s wisdom in one place
15-21 October 2021
US politics
“Brace yourself,” says Paul Waldman in The Washington Post. With every day that passes, it looks increasingly certain that Donald Trump will run for re-election in 2024. Many assumed the twice-impeached former president wouldn’t risk another campaign because a second defeat would make him “the biggest loser in the history of American politics”.
Supply crisis
The world is suffering an “everything shortage”, says Derek Thompson in The Atlantic. Car manufacturers are stopping assembly lines because they don’t have enough semiconductors. Shipping containers are in short supply where they’re needed – sending a parcel from Shanghai to Los Angeles currently costs six times more than the return journey.
Sally Rooney
Sally Rooney, the world’s most famous millennial author, caused an almighty stink this week by banning an Israeli publisher from translating her latest novel into Hebrew. But let’s clear one thing up, says Em Hilton in Tribune: this isn’t anti-semitism. The Irish novelist quickly clarified that “it would be an honour” to have Beautiful World, Where Are You? translated into Hebrew. Her beef is with the Israeli state.
Heroes and villains
North West has mastered the art of the insult aged eight. She’s told her mum, Kim Kardashian West, that her house is “ugly”. “It’s all white. Who lives like this?” She has a point – Kim’s house “is hyper minimalist, almost to the point of looking completely empty”, says The Cut.
Tomorrow’s world
For five years, a 36-year-old woman known as Sarah suffered crippling, untreatable depression and suicidal impulses. But when a team at the University of California San Francisco implanted two tiny wires in her brain – one to detect the onset of her depression, another that delivers a pulse of electricity to treat it – she was able to spontaneously laugh again.
Quoted
“Bloody foreigners. Not coming over here and taking our jobs.”
Inside politics
Boris Johnson won’t be worried about the pictures of him painting while on holiday in Marbella, says Simon Kelner in the I newspaper. “This, he might think, will be a portrait of a confident, cultured leader channelling his inner Churchill” (who finished more than 500 paintings in his lifetime). And with respect to the Mirror, which published the snaps: “Who really cares?” We have a PM who is “unembarrassable” and, for now, “unassailable”. He dominates politics like no one since Thatcher – Tony Blair always had Gordon Brown as a brake on his authority. So let Johnson “luxuriate, palette in hand, in impressionistic reverie in the Mediterranean sun”. The world will catch up with him eventually.
Zeitgeist
Professor Kathleen Stock has been pilloried by students at Sussex University, who are calling for her to be sacked. Why? Because she believes the facts of biological sex can’t be trumped by gender identity. If a trans academic had the same rough treatment, says Matthew d’Ancona in Tortoise, there would be “a national day of reflection [and] symbolic acts of solidarity on the pitch at sporting events”.
Noted
It is estimated that by the time a child turns 13, ad-tech firms will have gathered 72m data points on them.
The case for
Was there any substance behind the jokes in the PM’s conference speech last week?
Espionage
It emerged last week that dozens of the CIA’s informants have gone missing in recent years. It’s “the moment of dread for every intelligence service”, says Ben Macintyre in The Times. The world’s best-known spy agency “may have a mole”.
Art
In the “high-stakes world of Old Masters hunting”, a “sleeper” means a lost masterpiece, says Willem Marx in The Wall Street Journal. Last March a Madrid auction house was hoping for opening bids of just £1,250 for The Crowning of Thorns, a humble oil on canvas attributed to the workshop of Spanish artist José de Ribera.
Dwayne “the Rock” Johnson
Dwayne Johnson, once a goofy professional WWF wrestler known as the Rock, is now “the most successful movie star in the world”, says Chris Heath in Vanity Fair. For five years he has ranked as either the world’s best or second-best paid actor, banking an estimated $430m from franchises such as Fast & Furious. Driving his pickup truck around Hollywood, the 49-year-old loves pulling up next to busloads of tourists for a chat. Making people’s day “is one of the best parts of fame”, he says. Snooty celebrities “are missing out”.
Paul McCartney
Paul McCartney stoked an old rivalry this week, describing the Rolling Stones as a mere “blues cover band”. “I’m not sure I should say it,” the 79-year-old former Beatle told The New Yorker. “But… that’s sort of what the Stones are. I think our net was cast a bit wider than theirs.”
Time millionaires
Isaac Fitzgerald works hard at not doing much work, says Sirin Kale in The Guardian. The New Yorker was once a frantic books editor but has deliberately halved his hours and salary since the pandemic began. He loves it: he enjoys a gentle three-hour stroll every day and revels in the work he does do.
Quoted
“The Tory government was way ahead of Black Lives Matter when it came to defunding the police.”
Staying young
Laird Hamilton is still surfing 60ft waves at 57, says Greg Presto in Men’s Health. He starts each day in California with a “really hot” shower or sauna, or by jumping into an ice bath. The extreme temperatures give him “a good kick” – a cold shower isn’t bracing enough. Each morning he drinks coffee with added fat to boost his energy.
Love etc
“Thank God I married somebody 30 years younger than me,” Joan Collins tells Josh Glancy in The Sunday Times. “I couldn’t bear to be married to someone my own age.” The actress, 88, is now on her fifth husband, 56-year-old film producer Percy Gibson. The couple have been together for nearly 20 years and she says he is “absolutely without doubt” the best of the bunch.
Sport
“There was an air of inevitability” when Hungarian football fans fought with police during the 1-1 draw with England at Wembley on Tuesday, says Tomasz Mortimer in The Guardian. Hungary had been sanctioned over the behaviour of fans at four of the team’s previous six games, with transgressions including homophobic banners and monkey chants.
Helen McCrory
Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Sonnet 43 was read by Helen McCrory at the Cheltenham Literature Festival in 2014. The actress died in April, aged 52, but her husband, Damian Lewis, has since found a 45-minute recording of them exchanging love poetry at the festival.
Auschwitz survivor
“I’m the happiest man, because I was condemned to die,” Auschwitz survivor Eddie Jaku says in the BBC’s Best of Today podcast. On Kristallnacht, the “Night of Broken Glass” in 1938, his family were betrayed to the Nazis by their neighbours. Ten soldiers broke their door in, beat Jaku to a pulp and bayonetted his dog, Lulu, “when it tried to save me”. One of the men then engraved a swastika into his arm with a bayonet.
Film and TV
Ridley Road is like “a sip of champagne after weeks of supermarket cola”, says Carol Midgely in The Times. We’re in 1962. The far right is on the march in London. The anti-fascist 62 Group is trying to bring down “preening psychopath” Colin Jordan (Rory Kinnear) and his National Socialist Movement from the inside.
Books
John le Carré’s son, Nick Cornwell, laughs when I tell him “how swiftly I was lost” to his father’s newly published posthumous novel, says Damian Whitworth in The Times. “He’s an absolute sod, isn’t he? It’s just extraordinary. He gets you for five seconds and you’re stuffed.”
Book it
This detached house in a conservation area near Queen’s Park, northwest London, offers a welcome sanctuary from city life. It has six bedrooms, four receptions, an open-plan kitchen-diner, a conservatory, a garage and a large west-facing garden. It’s a short walk to Kilburn Tube station £6.25m.
Noted
Airline pilots are worryingly rusty after months out of the cockpit during the pandemic. Among dozens of errors reported to US aviation authorities, one out-of-practice pilot forgot to start his plane’s second engine for take-off and another almost landed without lowering the wheels.
Eating in
“More of us are cooking or eating solo – it’s time to break free from the stigma of dining alone,” says Clare Finney in The Observer. Whether it’s a dinner you’ve lovingly prepared or the “snatched illicit pleasure” of fast food, eating alone means you can be more assertive in your choices and enjoy your food more.
The great escape
Best known for its nightlife, Phuket is now tempting travellers “who want a hotel with a true sense of place and culturally authentic experiences to match
Quoted
“Yesterday: ‘Boris and his ministers always ignore the experts! They just make stuff up on the hoof! They’re maniacs!’ Today: ‘Boris and his ministers didn’t second guess the experts! They just did what they were advised! They’re maniacs!’”
On the lava fields of Mount Hengill, a vast volcano east of Reykjavik, the Ion Adventure Hotel offers breathtaking views of the northern lights in winter. The bar serves brennivin, a caraway-flavoured spirit affectionately known by Icelanders as “Black Death”.
Noted
A £400m divorce settlement has made former beauty queen Kirsty Bertarelli richer than the Queen, says Helena Frith Powell in the Telegraph. After leaving her husband of 21 years, Swiss pharmaceutical heir and billionaire Ernesto Bertarelli, Britain’s richest divorcée has everything you could want: “Looks, talent, children, money, a 97-metre superyacht with pop-up yoga deck, and a £20m glass house in Gstaad.” The 50-year-old even has a No 1 single to her name: in 2000 she co-wrote the All Saints hit Black Coffee.
Scandanavian influencer Pernille Teisbaek has teamed up with Mango to design a “minimalist and modern” collection, says Vogue. It includes a cream wool suit, above, high-waisted jeans and a black minidress. From £15.99.
Moneymakers
Adele’s latest single, Easy on Me, is out today and will soon be followed by a new album, 30. Between 2009 and 2019, the 33-year-old earned an estimated £290m through record sales and concerts.
On the money
A US private equity giant is setting up a $1bn fund to buy up pop stars’ back catalogues. Blackstone is joining forces with Merck Mercuriadis, whose music-rights business, Hipgnosis, has spent the past three years building up a $2.2bn portfolio of almost 61,000 songs by everyone from Barry Manilow to Beyoncé.
Star Trek star William Shatner, 90, became the oldest person to reach space this week, blasting off on Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin rocket. In 1978 he performed a spoken-word rendition of Elton John’s Rocket Man.
Desert Island Discs
This week JK Rowling published The Christmas Pig, her first children’s book since Harry Potter. She dreamt up the boy wizard on a delayed train journey to King’s Cross when she was 25, and wrote the first book “in cafés, with my daughter sleeping next to me”, she told Sue Lawley on Desert Island Discs in 2000.
Quirks of history
The word “slut” is penned in sprawling red letters on the final page of John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath manuscript, says Alison Flood in The Guardian – a mystery that has always perplexed scholars. This week the case was cracked by Jonathan Shaheen of Stockholm University. “It is the Swedish expression for ‘the end’,” he wrote to experts, noting that Steinbeck had visited Sweden in 1937, the year when he feverishly composed the novel. “A well-placed ‘slut’ always makes me laugh,” added Shaheen, who’s not sure whether Steinbeck or his wife, Carol, was to blame.
