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Behind the headlines
Partygate
A bleak midwinter for Boris
The “rumble of discontent” over Boris Johnson’s leadership “is fast becoming a roar”, says Jason Groves in the Daily Mail. Outrage over alleged lockdown-breaking parties has combined with backbench opposition to new “plan B” Covid measures. Johnson can expect to face “the biggest Tory revolt of his premiership” when the measures are voted on next Tuesday.
Bob Dole
America’s last real conservative
Now that Bob Dole has died, I’m not sure there are any good Republicans left, says Paul Krugman in The New York Times. The former Senate majority leader and presidential candidate, who passed away on Sunday at the age of 98, was built differently from modern politicians. A war hero who was willing to work with Democrats (Joe Biden was a personal friend), Dole always showed a strong sense of civic responsibility.
Heroes and villains
Otters | A mountaineer | Finland’s PM
One of Singapore’s roving gangs of otters have attacked a British man while he was out for a walk, pinning him down and biting him “26 times in 10 seconds”. The victim, Graham George Spencer, said a posse of 20 otters lunged at him, biting his ankles, legs and bottom. “I actually thought I was going to die,” he told The Straits Times. “They were going to kill me.”
Inside politics
Kamala Harris’s staff troubles
Kamala Harris has an unfortunate track record of burning through senior staff, say Cleve Wootson Jr and Tyler Pager in The Washington Post. The US Vice President has lost four aides this month, including her communications director and press secretary. One former aide from before she became Veep has accused Harris of being a “bully” who constantly dished out “soul-destroying criticism” and wasn’t “willing to do the prep and the work”. Another compared her management style to that of Donald Trump. All this makes for a stark contrast with her boss: many of Joe Biden’s staff have worked with him for decades.
Zeitgeist
The problem with unisex loos
Had anyone told us a decade ago that cultural change could be charted by the signs on public toilet doors, we would have laughed in disbelief, says Celia Walden in The Daily Telegraph. But now earnest “gender-neutral restroom” signs in the US include interlinked “Mars” and “Venus” symbols, and “baffling illustrations of stick men/women clad in the kind of half-skirt, half-trouser ensembles that belong on a Paris runway”. Thankfully the newest gender-neutral signs are more humorous: “We Don’t Care” or “Whatever, just wash your hands”.
Quoted
quoted mance 10.12
“To be fair, with all the best parties, no one is quite sure whether they happened.”
The case for
The Commonwealth
Is it just an imperial hangover?
Tomorrow’s world
A city that floats on the sea
The world’s first floating city could be built as soon as 2025, says Aaron Chow on Hypebeast.com. Work on the UN-backed Oceanix will begin next year off the coast of Busan, a port city in South Korea. It will be made up of two-hectare floating bamboo platforms, each forming a 300-person neighbourhood. These are linked up to create the city, with homes, shops, restaurants, galleries, markets, sports clubs, schools and all the rest of it.
Noted
noted Wall Street 10.12
Wall Street bank executives have been encouraging younger employees to dress down when they come into the office because of rising street crime in New York. One top banker has apparently taken to carrying a Taser on his commute.
Long reads shortened
The Uighurs
Is China on the road to genocide?
China’s treatment of the Uighurs has disturbing parallels with Germany’s first genocide, says Konstantin McKenna in Foreign Policy. In 1903 the Herero people in German South West Africa (modern-day Namibia) rebelled against the colonisers, killing more than 100 German settlers. The “bull-headed” Lieutenant General Lothar von Trotha was appointed to subdue them. In 1904 he ordered “the summary execution of all Herero men”, and drove the women and children into the desert to die.
South Pacific
The false messiahs of Vanuatu
Over the past 50 years, a steady stream of Westerners have arrived in the remote South Pacific archipelago of Vanuatu claiming to be the messiah, says Christopher Lord in The Guardian. They come because the islanders believe an “old prophecy” that a saviour from far-off lands will one day arrive, “bringing the islands the prosperity they were denied by their former colonial rulers, Britain and France”.
Life
West Side Story
The real fights were behind the scenes
Steven Spielberg’s new version of West Side Story has just arrived in cinemas. I hope the director had a better on-set experience than the original cast, says Richard Morrison in The Times. I met the four men behind the 1961 movie-musical and was stunned by the egos. There was Leonard Bernstein, the classical composer; Arthur Laurents, the hard-bitten leftie screenwriter; Stephen Sondheim, the twentysomething lyricist; and Jerome Robbins, the talented but dictatorial director. They were all Jewish and secretly gay, and they all hated each other.
Jeremy Strong
Maddening his Succession co-stars
Jeremy Strong doesn’t style himself as a Method actor, says Michael Schulman in The New Yorker, but he certainly seems like one. The 42-year-old, who plays angst-ridden middle brother Kendall Roy in Succession, is devoted to his character. He bases his moods on Kendall’s moods and tries not to speak about Kendall in the third person. It’s an approach that has left many of his co-stars exasperated. “I just feel that he just has to be kinder to himself,” says Brian Cox, who plays his patriarch father, Logan. “And therefore has to be a bit kinder to everybody else.”
Staying young
Here’s how to fight depression
GPs will soon be prescribing free boxing classes for women suffering from depression and diabetes. I’ve been boxing for five years, says Polly Vernon in The Times, and can assure you there’s nothing better for your “body and soul”. “Boxing has made me a happier person. A better person. A bigger person – emotionally, and in biceps, bum and thighs.”
Love etc
Your sex life is written in the stars
Star signs don’t just determine people’s character traits and fortune, says Jessica Estrada in Well + Good magazine – they can also reveal how lovers find “ultimate satisfaction in the bedroom”. Some signs of the zodiac “get steamy standing up”, while others prefer the slow, romantic, “always classic” missionary position.
Eating in
The spy who fed me
Food and drink can make or break a spy, says Alexis Ferenczi in Vice. In 1940 a German agent called Karl Heinrich Meier ordered a pint of cider in an English village at 10am – forgetting or unaware that licensing laws forbade the sale of alcohol before noon. He was arrested, tried and hanged. The same year another German spy was rumbled after bratwurst was found in his bag.
Quoted
quoted nigel Slater 10.12
“It is impossible not to love someone who makes toast for you.”
Best Podcasts
US politics
Trump’s plot to steal the presidency
Donald Trump’s “next coup has already begun”, says Barton Gellman in a podcast for The Atlantic. The 6 January attack on the Capitol was a mere “rehearsal”, and the former president is now “much better positioned to subvert the next election” in 2024. He has the Republican party “in his thrall”, with almost all its members in the House of Representatives claiming that the 2020 election was stolen.
Rasputin
The man behind the legend
Grigori Rasputin was born in 1869 in a “flea-bitten, down-at-heel village” in Siberia, say Dominic Sandbrook and Tom Holland in The Rest Is History. In his late twenties, the peasant turned holy man upped sticks and started travelling around Russia, then a tumultuous place full of self-flagellating religious sects. When he arrived in St Petersburg, two occult-obsessed Montenegrin princesses introduced him to the last tsar, Nicholas II, and his wife, Alexandra.
After Hours
Film and TV
And Just Like That
Seventeen years after Sex and the City left our screens, it’s back with a new 10-part reboot, says Adam White in The Independent – and it’s a triumph. And Just Like That doesn’t feel like “cloying nostalgia-bait” or a “sad rehashing of the past”. It knows its main characters are older, whiter and completely out of step – and it revels in it. Miranda has gone back to school to study human rights law, having realised that merely “wearing a pink pussy hat” doesn’t actually do a lot for women. Carrie is a regular guest on a podcast fronted by a “queer, non-binary Mexican-Irish diva” named Che.
Books
What the critics liked
Writing a biography about Greta Garbo is complicated, says Robert Gottlieb in his new book on the actress. The Swedish star was famously reclusive. She arrived in Hollywood in 1925, made a couple of dozen movies, then, at the age of 36, stopped acting. She lived alone for another 50 years before dying in 1990. It was a strange and quiet end for a woman who was so captivating on screen. “She offered the world intense emotion and great aesthetic pleasure,” says Gottlieb. “But she didn’t offer herself.”
Noted
noted placebo 10.12
The placebo effect is real: in 51% of cases, says FiveThirtyEight, “fake” surgery for problems such as knee and shoulder injuries – with anaesthetic and incision, but nothing more – works just as well as the real thing.
The country house
Picasso and Henry Moore both visited Chiddingly, East Sussex, and Peter Pan author JM Barrie lived nearby. Built circa 1574, the Grade II* listed Manor House is a short walk from the village’s pub and a 15-minute drive from Uckfield station, for trains to London. It has five bedrooms, electric gates and 1.2 acres of gardens. £2.5m.
The hideaway
Princess Margaret described the Caribbean island of Mustique as “the only place I can relax”, and you’d have no trouble unwinding at Tanama, a five-bedroom villa with a pool and a grand pavilion that’s perfect for parties. You can walk to the airstrip for private flights to the larger islands. $7.75m.
The cottage
You can see the Three Peaks from Wildman’s Barn, on the southern edge of the Yorkshire Dales National Park. Set in 3½ acres, it has four bedrooms, a double-height living area and a self-contained one-bedroom annexe. Clapham station, a mile away, has trains to Leeds and Lancaster. £800,000.
The townhouse
On the banks of the River Cherwell, in the North Oxford conservation area, this Edwardian house has four bedrooms, an Aga, mature gardens and a vast games room with a roof terrace on the second floor. You can walk to chichi Summertown and the prestigious Dragon prep school is on the doorstep. £4m.
The pied-à-terre
Pevsner described the Beaux Arts building in Holloway, north London, as “an angular version of Edwardian baroque… with brick channelling and a hint of Lutyens”. This one-bedroom flat has an open-plan living area, a study and a parking space; the owner can use the gym, communal gardens and concierge service. £500,000.Quirks of history
quirk white elephant 10.12
A “white elephant” refers to a possession that is “unwanted, expensive and difficult to maintain”, says Matthew Sweet in The Economist. The phrase can be traced back to the kings of Siam (now Thailand), who used the gift of an albino elephant as an “extravagant form of punishment”. Too sacred to be put to work, the beasts did nothing but consume their owner’s resources and defecate in his courtyard.
Money
Moneymakers
John Lennon
Peter Jackson’s documentary Get Back showcases the Fab Four as no-frills songwriters. Mugs of tea are just about the only creature comfort on show. That is, aside from John Lennon’s white Rolls-Royce Phantom, in which he and Yoko Ono travel to the studio each day.
On the money
Charity’s no act for Michael Sheen
Michael Sheen has turned himself into a “not-for-profit actor”, he tells The Big Issue. The 52-year-old got the idea while helping to organise the Homeless World Cup in Cardiff in 2019, when funding for the £2m event fell through at the last minute. He put everything he had into keeping it going, “all my money” – he sold two houses, one in the UK and one in the US, and moved back to his native Wales. “It was incredibly scary and stressful”, he says, “and I’ll be paying for it for a long time.”
Weather
Dec 7: Kuwait City, 24C ☁️
Dec 8: Brighton, 8C 🌊
Dec 9: Lake Tuz, Turkey, 6C ☀️
Dec 9: Rome, 13C 🌪
Dec 9: Vosges Mountains, France, 5C ❄️
