“By 2030, if we don’t have models that are extraordinarily capable and do things that we ourselves cannot do, I’d be very surprised,” said OpenAI CEO Sam Altman in an interview published by Politico in September. After this year, “I think in many ways GPT5 is already smarter than me at least, and I think a lot of other people too”.

The AI advances we have seen this year could “set the world on a path of explosive growth”, said The Economist. “The picture that is emerging is perhaps counterintuitive and certainly mind-boggling.”

The latest ‘charismatic megatrauma’

We have reached a “pivotal moment” in our relationship with artificial intelligence, said Idan Feingold on CTech. Over the last year, the AI hot potato has “evolved from a buzzword to the epicentre of every business conversation”. There has been an unprecedented “surge” in productivity linked to AI innovation, with practical applications advancing “at a pace we have never seen before”.

“AI has begun to settle like sediment into the corners of our lives,” said David Wallace-Wells in The New York Times. We have emerged from a “prophetic phase” that followed the release of ChatGPT in 2023, and have relaxed into “something more quotidian”. Like many other “charismatic megatraumas”, such as nuclear proliferation and climate change, AI retains the power to distress and disturb, but it no longer provokes mass hysteria.

AI’s role in the healthcare sector has come a long way in the last decade. Microsoft announced this year that its AI diagnostic orchestrator performed four times more accurately than human doctors, with 20% reduced cost. “The real test”, said Time, will be how tools like this perform in real-world settings, but there is hope they might “set the stage” for introducing high-quality medical expertise in parts of the world without access to cutting-edge healthcare.

‘Economic revival’ or ‘financial bust’?

However you look at it, 2025 has been unique. “The hype and the hopes around AI have been like nothing the world has seen before,” said The Economist. Audiences have “marvelled” at ChatGPT’s abilities and were “mesmerised” by Sora 2’s generative video capabilities. That fascination shows no signs of fading; one estimate predicts more than $7 trillion will be spent on AI by the end of the decade.

As the past year progressed, concerns grew over when the AI bubble might burst. But that may be “asking the wrong question”, said Jurica Dujmovic in Market Watch. Don’t be misled by the 2000 dot-com crash: we are experiencing an “orderly deflation” rather than a sudden collapse. Amid the doom and gloom, the AI market still presents “genuine opportunities” for investors, operators and consumers alike.

Focus is now “shifting” to the outlook for AI in 2026, especially concerning its commercial profitability, said The Economist. Revenues from AI in 2025 amounted to a “measly” $50 billion a year, which equated to roughly an “eighth of Apple or Alphabet’s entire annual revenues”. Next year, expect reactions to be even more extreme, with “economic revival”, a “financial bust” and “social backlash” all possible.

People are turning their anger toward the security at Brown University following a shooting on the Ivy League campus earlier this month. The incident left two students dead and nine wounded, and questions abound as to whether the school’s response to the shooting violated federal law. As the Education Department pledges to look into the issue, security experts have mixed feelings.

‘May not have been up to appropriate standards’

As the Education Department looks into what role Brown’s security may have played in the matter, the university’s police chief has already been placed on leave. The “surveillance and security system may not have been up to appropriate standards, allowing the suspect to flee while the university seemed unable to provide helpful information about the profile of the alleged assassin,” said the Education Department in a press release.

Most of the debate has surrounded the Clery Act, a federal law that “requires colleges and universities to report campus crime data, support victims of violence and publicly outline the policies and procedures they have put into place to improve campus safety,” said the Clery Center. Universities, as part of the act, must release an annual security report and issue “timely warnings in the event of an immediate, significant danger to the campus community,” said The Providence Journal.

If it’s determined that Brown violated the Clery Act, the school could be fined. This has happened before, as Virginia Tech “ultimately paid $32,500 in fines to the Department of Education” for alleged Clery Act violations following its 2007 shooting, said CNN. Brown and other universities have been targeted by the White House before for ideological reasons, and the “fallout from this month’s shooting on campus threatens to once again put the university at odds with the administration.”

‘Clery Act doesn’t touch it’

The federal law is often seen as a key lifeline because its “required reports can help families decide where to send their children to college,” said The Boston Globe. Universities that violate it can also “lose federal student aid if they do not follow their own published procedures.” But there are safety experts who say that in the case of Brown, the Clery Act does not apply.

Much of the scrutiny has been around the alleged lack of surveillance cameras on Brown’s campus, with President Donald Trump even addressing this issue on social media. While an affidavit claims the building where the shooting occurred lacks sufficient interior cameras, the Clery Act “does not require universities to have any specific protocols such as cameras,” campus safety consultant Daniel Carter said to the Globe. “Absent saying something in the annual security report about having surveillance cameras, the Clery Act doesn’t touch it.”

Many safety experts are “puzzled by the mention of cameras because that’s not really what the Clery Act is designed to do,” said Peter Margulies, a national security and criminal law professor at Roger Williams University, to the Globe. But there’s also an understanding that the government “will want to make sure an institution like Brown was dotting its Is and crossing its Ts in the wake of a horrendous crime like this.”

The United States under President Donald Trump appears to be readying for war in Venezuela or at least is seeking to depose leader Nicolás Maduro. But it remains unclear why, exactly, the White House has decided to take aim at the regime in Caracas.

Trump has “repeatedly” shifted the public rationale for targeting Venezuela, said The Wall Street Journal. Drugs have been offered as a reason but so has ownership of oil fields formerly owned by U.S. companies. American officials say that “multiple rationales” have been discussed during internal administration discussions, but Congress has largely been left out of the loop. Some GOP members are concerned about “defending the prospects of U.S. military action” to anti-war MAGA voters in November. “I want to know what’s going to happen next,” Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) said after a meeting with national security officials.

Minerals? Oil? Putin?

Trump’s focus on Venezuela is “about oil, not drugs,” Chris Brennan said at USA Today. Venezuela must “return to the United States of America all of the Oil, Land and other Assets that they previously stole from us” during the nationalization of that country’s oil industry, Trump said in a Truth Social post. But a war in pursuit of oil profits would be the kind of “American military adventurism” that Trump once decried.

“It is minerals, not drugs,” Krystal Kauffman said at The Hill. Rare minerals used in high technology and advanced manufacturing are “emerging as geopolitical currency” in the race to shape the next century, and Venezuela claims more than a trillion dollars in reserves. If that is the objective, the Trump administration should “negotiate agreements” instead of wage war. “Venezuelans deserve more than to become collateral in a global resource race.”

Venezuela is a “client state of Russia,” David Marcus said at Fox News. Action against Venezuela would be proof that Vladimir Putin “cannot keep his sketchy global friends safe.” The Russian leader is already “stretched” by the Ukraine war and U.S. sanctions. Trump’s target in Venezuela “isn’t really Maduro, it’s Putin.”

Maduro’s regime is “both an importer and exporter of instability,” Bret Stephens said at The New York Times. His government’s ties to China, Russia and Iran give those countries a “significant foothold in the Americas,” while Venezuela’s chaos has produced a “mass exodus of refugees and migrants.” Maduro should be given a chance to leave the country, but “any morally serious person should want this to end.”

A nation-building trap

The Trump administration has asked American oil companies if they want to return to Venezuela but is “getting no takers,” said Politico. Oil markets are already “glutted with supply,” and prices are at “nearly five-year lows,” giving oil companies little incentive to risk “pouring huge investments” into the country’s oil infrastructure. Forcing Maduro out of power would probably be the “easy part,” Gregory J. Wallance said at The Hill. It is the governing afterward that would be difficult. Trump could become the latest American president to “fall into the nation-building trap.”

Unprepared, arrogant, immature. These are just some of the words being used to describe England’s approach down under that saw them lose the Ashes to Australia after just three Test matches and 11 days of cricket.

In the three and half years since Brendon McCullum took over as coach of the England men’s team, the so-called “Bazball” philosophy he pioneered with captain Ben Stokes “told us that nothing was impossible, that no run chase was too big, that no situation was irretrievable, that no ambition was too haughty”, said the Daily Mail.

England’s final capitulation in Adelaide on Sunday “felt like more than the end of just a game of cricket. It felt like the end of an idea. It felt like that part of a revolution where an ideal bows to realpolitik and the thrill of the new is lost forever.”

A tale of two openers

“Perhaps nobody embodies the emasculation of this England team on this tour, and the emasculation of the philosophy that has underpinned their challenge” more than England opener Ben Duckett, said former England captain Mike Atherton in The Times.

The “unorthodox, rasping opener” who “prides himself on how few balls he leaves at the top of the order” has racked up a grand total of 97 runs over the course of six innings in Australia, being dismissed for a golden duck in the second Test.

Contrast this with the famed England opener of yesteryear, Geoffrey Boycott, who won two tours of Australia and drew the other two. “Never really known for going on the attack as a player,” the now 85-year-old “has been on the offensive as England has laboured through this Ashes tour”, said the ABC.

In a scathing assessment of Bazball, Boycott hammered the team as “irresponsible, rubbish and too far up their backsides to care” and claimed “hubris has taken over from common sense”.

‘Bazball as we knew it is in the skip’

Bazball was named after coach McCullum, whose nickname is Baz. In its “pure form”, it “defined Test cricket as a game of batting intent”, said The Guardian, but “as Australia have demonstrated, it is above all a bowling game”.

While there is “no disgrace at all in losing to these opponents”, England’s “failure lies in the nature of that defeat, in losing not just quickly but sloppily, losing in a way that speaks to a basic lack of tension and discipline, a refusal not just to do your homework, but to recognise that homework exists at all”.

After Adelaide, McCullum was quick to hold his hand up and admit that “we haven’t got everything right” in the series, including England’s much-criticised preparations and failure to play any proper warm-up matches.

This rare moment of introspection “is a massive step forward” for the England coach, said the BBC’s chief cricket commentator Jonathan Agnew, but “Bazball as we knew it is in the skip”.

It “now resembles something hollowed out”, said the Daily Mail. Over the course of three “sobering, humbling Test defeats, a philosophy that once carried all along with it but has become divisive and polarising, has had its soul ripped out and its entrails pored over by those who are now happy to say they always feared it would end like this”.

Attention will inevitably now turn to the futures of McCullum, managing director Rob Key and even Stokes. They may try to claim England’s “death-or-glory style can be retooled and rise again”, said Reuters. “In reality, it is unlikely to survive the bitter post-mortem that looms at the end of a series that had promised so much and has, to date, yielded so little.”

The Turner Prize is “the cockroach of art”, said Waldemar Januszczak in The Sunday Times. Established some 40 years ago, it has proved remarkably resilient: “however bad it gets, it survives the hammering and comes back for more”. This year’s iteration takes place at Bradford’s Cartwright Hall, and sees the award “up to its usual cultural nonsenses”. As ever, four artists from (or based in) the UK have been shortlisted: there’s the photographer Rene Matic, aged just 28; the Korean-Canadian multimedia artist Zadie Xa; the Iraqi-born painter Mohammed Sami; and Nnena Kalu, this year’s winner – a learning-disabled Scottish artist with severe autism.

Making an impact

Each gets a room in the gallery to present an emblematic selection of their work, the first of which comes courtesy of Matic. Mixed race, queer and nonbinary, Matic “complains continuously of feeling culturally divided”. Their room contains a lot of empty sloganeering and a display of “wonky” photos of pro-Palestinian demonstrations, gay marches and right-on graffiti. Whatever you feel about those causes, Matic doesn’t transform them “into good art”.

The artists in this year’s show certainly “know how to make a physical impact”, said Mark Hudson in The Independent. A case in point is Xa, whose room feels “more like some psychedelic nightclub than an art display”, with a mirrored golden floor and soundscapes emanating from shells and tinkling bells. Amidst all this are her paintings, “hallucinatory compositions” that channel the shamanic traditions of her Korean heritage. In this vivid context, sadly, they look like “pieces of decorative scene-setting”.

Sami’s much more traditional paintings, meanwhile, evoke the “traumas” of Iraqi history without resorting to the clichés of reportage. They’re eerie things: one “vast” canvas gives us “a blasted palm forest” through “a fog of orange dust”, a human presence hinted at by the green lines of military lasers. The mood is “‘Apocalypse Now’ via computer games, with a touch of Monet”. It is so thrilling that it makes the other artists feel “a shade superficial”.

‘Recognising artistic excellence’?

Sami should have won the prize, said Alastair Sooke in The Daily Telegraph. His “haunting” contemporary history paintings are like “half-remembered nightmares” of Iraq’s recent conflicts. They stand head and shoulders above Kalu’s efforts: namely, a number of “cocoon-like” abstract cultures hewn from materials such as fabric and VHS tape. They have “a festive, exuberant quality”, but there’s not much more to them. Her win is a milestone for disabled people, but a “maddening” decision nonetheless. Is the Turner, in the end, “about recognising artistic excellence or not”?

Comparisons between Kalu and the others “are not much help”, said Adrian Searle in The Guardian. She has limited verbal communication; her works suggest “a constant flux between objects and space, herself and others”. Each sculpture is born of “drive and urgency and intent”; they are “so full of life and energy, you think they might burst”. She is a worthy winner.

Cartwright Hall Art Gallery, Bradford. Until 22 February

Rowan Atkinson claims not to care what the critics say about him, said Carol Midgley in The Times. He’d be unmoved, then, to learn that I found his new Netflix series quite “charming”.

A sequel to 2022’s “Man vs Bee”, it’s a “comedic survival drama” in which Atkinson reprises his role as hapless everyman Trevor Bingley. In the run-up to Christmas, Trevor loses his job as a school caretaker in a pretty village. He’s about to close up for the last time when he finds a baby abandoned there, and feels obliged to take it home.

‘Unpleasantly stressful’

Lonely and broke, Trevor is thrown a lifeline when he’s offered a house-sitting job in a London penthouse, said Rebecca Nicholson in the Financial Times. There’s just one problem: he can’t offload the baby; the police are too busy and social services think he’s delusional. So he brings the infant with him. The baby proceeds to explore the lethal potential of every item in the flat, leading Trevor in a dance to save it. The series amounts to a succession of “nightmarish” scenarios; I found it unfunny and actually “unpleasantly stressful”.

Silly and ‘trite’

When Trevor went to war with a bee, his no-holds-barred approach to eliminating this nuisance led to some enjoyably farcical scenes, said Rachel Aroesti in The Guardian. Here, he is not, of course, pitted against the baby, so the laughs are thinner on the ground, while sentimentality abounds – as does the product placement. It amounts to four cynical episodes that trade on “Cosy British Christmascore” in a way that is “nauseatingly schmaltzy”, silly and “trite”.

In Kate Winslet’s directorial debut, “family is everything”, said Danny Leigh in the Financial Times. On screen, the film is a “gentle comic-drama” in which the grown-up children of a terminally ill English matriarch come together at Christmas to be with her in her final days. Off screen, Winslet’s decision to grab the megaphone was prompted by the fact that the film was written by Joe Anders, her 21-year-old son with Sam Mendes, and was inspired by her own mother’s death.

‘Beloved British actors’

Not every screenwriter gets their first feature backed by Netflix, but “such is the film business”. And Winslet has certainly attracted an impressive cast. The “treasured grandma” of the title is played by Helen Mirren; Timothy Spall is her husband, who is in total denial about her imminent death; and their semi-estranged offspring, who must try to put aside their differences to make her last days easeful, are played by Winslet, Andrea Riseborough, Toni Collette and Johnny Flynn. Australia’s Collette apart, it starts to feel like “a game of beloved British actors bingo”, with only Bill Nighy’s absence depriving audiences of a full house.

‘A treacly soup of sentimentality’

There are some “nice lines and sharp moments” in this festive heartwarmer, said Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian. But alas, these are “submerged in a treacly soup of sentimentality”. The upshot is a film with the air of “a two-hour John Lewis Christmas TV ad”.

Anders needs to work on his characterisation, said Donald Clarke in The Irish Times. He has saddled Collette, for instance, with a “one note version of the same irritating hippie” she played in “About a Boy”. Still, these are fine actors, who sometimes get the chance for a good rally; and this is, at least, “a proper Christmas film of the old school”. It may well end up playing “once a year until the heat death of the universe”.

It’s been 15 long years in the making but the reaction to the newly released trailer for Andy Serkis’ adaptation of “Animal Farm” suggests that time may not have been well spent. The actor and filmmaker’s animated version of George Orwell’s classic dystopian tale swaps the critique of totalitarian Soviet Russia for a takedown of 21st-century capitalism – with twerking pigs and fart jokes.

“My copy of ‘All Art is Propaganda’ burst into flames,” one Orwell fan posted on Reddit. This “Animal Farm” is a “movie about communism working, and being ruined by capitalism”, complained another on X.

‘Baffling’ and flatulent

“Oof magoof”, this trailer “feels so very badly tone deaf”, said Nerdist. It “looks like it’s trying” to turn Orwell’s dark political allegory into something akin to 2006 critter caper “Over the Hedge”. In fairness, “with Serkis directing and Nicholas Stoller writing the screenplay, it’s entirely possible” that the full movie “will reflect the tone of the novella” – but, if so, why is the trailer “so goddamn goofy”?

“The decision to inject lowbrow humour into such weighty source material is baffling,” said World of Reel. This “Animal Farm” is all celebrity voices, mile-a-minute CGI energy and family-friendly jokes. But I suppose flatulence is “one way to sell Orwell to a seven-year-old”.

The film has a “starry” cast, including Seth Rogen, Steve Buscemi, Kathleen Turner and Woody Harrelson, said Variety’s Peter Debruge, who saw a screening of the film at Annecy International Animation Film Festival. But “the message feels muddled” by “all the pratfalls” and the “noxious ‘Old MacDonald’ rap”.

Just “enough of Orwell’s raw material remains for ‘Animal Farm’ to be recognisable” but it’s “too disorderly to substitute for the book” – especially with the invention of new characters like the “ghastly capitalist” Freida Pilkington (Glenn Close) who “drives a Tesla-style Cybertruck” and bribes Napoleon, the pig leader of the animals, with credit cards.

‘Emphatic message’

The “specific allusions to the Russian Revolution” may be gone but Serkis terrifyingly accelerates the “opportunism and populism of Napoleon”, said IGN’s Rafael Motamayor, who also saw the Annecy screening. The pig’s “desperation to belong among ruthless human billionaires and their cyberpunk-esque vehicles strikes close to home in 2025”. Serkis is a “very competent director with a strong eye” and he’s captured “nuanced performances” from the animated characters.

Stoller’s screenplay is “funny and frighteningly perceptive”, said Pete Hammond on Deadline. It’s “wildly entertaining” and – “uncannily”, given the years it’s taken to get to the screen – may prove to “be a little too close for comfort to America’s drift toward authoritarianism” under the second Trump administration.

It’s not as if this is the first time filmmakers have played fast and loose with “Animal Farm”, said Debruge in Variety. In 1954, another animated adaptation was secretly co-funded by the CIA as part of its Cold War efforts to counter communism, “making alterations and trims” as it “saw fit”.

While it may never “satisfy diehard Orwell purists”, said Ben Daly on Screen Daily, this film “still takes a political stance and delivers an emphatic message” about “equality and the power of the collective – albeit one which permits us a little more hope” than Orwell’s novella.

“To government ministers and police chiefs, it is the biggest investigative breakthrough since DNA screening,” said Mario Ledwith in The Times. “To privacy campaigners, it is ‘turning the country into an open prison’.”

Live facial recognition is already used by eight police forces, who used the technology to scan tens of thousands of faces a day with “ruthless efficiency”, looking for matches to a police hit list of offenders and suspects. Now the Government is looking into expanding its scope.

‘Orwellian’

Under the plans, all 43 police forces in England and Wales would have access to facial recognition. The Home Office would also develop a national face-matching system based not just on images of all offenders in custody, but potentially the passport and driving licence photos of everyone in the UK.

This database could be used to analyse footage of suspects from CCTV, doorbells, dashboard cameras and the like. If that sounds “Orwellian”, it’s because it is, said the Daily Mail. Using facial recognition to keep people safe at large events is proportionate. Having our faces tracked in every town, city and village is truly dystopian.

There would need to be strong safeguards, said The Times. In Luton, for example, faces captured by live recognition that don’t result in a match are immediately deleted. Used responsibly in this way, the technology has clear benefits for police, helping them keep up with “increasingly adept” modern criminals. Over the past two years, the Met has used facial recognition to find more than 100 sex offenders who’d broken their bail conditions – freeing up officers “for the actual job of policing”.

‘Nothing online is ever secure’

It’s true, said Fraser Sampson in The Daily Telegraph: facial recognition really is the biggest policing breakthrough since DNA matching, but there’s one key difference between them. The retention and use of DNA by the police is “very carefully controlled under several acts of Parliament with clear rules, reporting obligations and layers of independent oversight”. The same isn’t true of facial recognition. In fact, right now, the forensic comparison of suspects’ bootprints is better regulated than the use of their faces. That needs to change, and mandatory accountability processes need to be put in place before any wider rollout.

That’s without even considering the risk of hacking, said Simon Jenkins in The Guardian. As the recent experiences of M&S and Jaguar have taught us, “nothing online is ever secure”. Mark my words, if the state develops a database of every human face in the UK, it’s only a matter of time before that precious data “ends up in the wrong hands”.

One of the world’s most prestigious art prizes has been awarded to a 59-year-old Glaswegian artist with autism and learning disabilities. Honoured by the 2025 Turner Prize for what the judges called her “bold and compelling” work, Nnena Kalu becomes the “first learning-disabled artist to be nominated” for the prize, “let alone win it”, said art critic Mark Hudson in The Independent.

Kalu’s large, hanging, cocoon-like sculptures, made from old VHS tape, rope and fabric, and her bright, swirling “vortex” drawings in pen and pastel, beat the work of three other shortlisted artists. Her win “breaks down walls” between “neurotypical and neurodiverse artists”, said Tate Britain director Alex Farquharson, chair of this year’s jury.

‘Seismic’ victory

“Kalu’s forms come at you with their almost alien unknowable presence,” said Adrian Searle in The Guardian. You become entangled in the work’s “roaring, spilling, snaggling details” and can’t help but wonder about your “own boundaries, the body’s beginnings and its endings”.

Her work is “so embodied, so sensuous”, it “is not reducible to anything we might call a technique”. It is “the product of drive and urgency and intent”. Her own verbal communication is limited, so her work “has to speak for itself” – and it has quite a bit to say.

“Much has been made, and rightly so,” of Kalu’s win but her victory is “seismic” beyond reasons of equality and diversity, said The Independent’s Hudson. Her work places an emphasis “on the visual, tactile and experiential in art – values that have lost primacy in recent years”. The recognition of her artistry “seems to herald the welcome return of artists physically making things”.

‘Maddening’ decision

Kalu’s “triumph will be hailed as a watershed moment for Britain’s disabled community”, but the judges’ “decision is also maddening”, said art critic Alastair Sooke in The Telegraph. The shortlisted Mohammed Sami, who “makes vast, haunting contemporary history paintings, like half-remembered nightmares”, will “feel that he’s been cheated”.

Her “lumpy sculpture, fashioned from brightly coloured gaffer tape and discarded bubble wrap”, was “up there with the worst art” ever nominated for the Turner Prize, Waldemar Januszczak, art critic of The Sunday Times, said on his website in October.

Maybe “it wouldn’t be the Turner Prize without a soupçon – or rather a bucketful – of provocation”, said The Telegraph’s Sooke. But “did the jury really consider her the strongest artist” on the shortlist? Farquharson, the jury’s chair, said the decision “wasn’t about wanting, first and foremost, to give the prize to Nnena as a neurodiverse artist”. It was “a real belief in the quality and uniqueness of her practice, which is inseparable from who she is”.

Ultimately, Kalu’s work goes “over and above the disability issues surrounding her win”, said Hudson in The Independent. It serves as a reminder that “no matter how much art may illuminate our perspectives on history, politics, human relationships and the natural world, the visual and the sensual come first”. Kalu “demonstrates that lesson against all odds”.

It has been more than three years since Liz Truss’ disastrous 49-day premiership ended, with the Daily Star declaring victory for its “very own 60p lettuce” in its tongue-in-cheek longevity contest. Now the former PM is back with her own weekly streaming show, pitched as the “home of the counter-revolution”.

In the first episode of “The Liz Truss Show”, which appeared on YouTube at the weekend, the ex-Tory leader declared that “Britain is going to hell in a handcart”, laid into the “fake news BBC” and claimed the “steel towns, mill towns and car towns” of middle England “are being killed off by eco zealots”.

‘Coping mechanism’

“The show started an hour late because Liz forgot to put her watch back in October” and things didn’t get much better from there, said John Crace in The Guardian. Despite her omnipresence on the lucrative right-wing speaking circuit and her ex-prime ministerial allowance, the show appeared to have been filmed in a “makeshift studio”, with editing reminiscent of “a 12-year-old intern doped up on ketamine”.

Viewers were treated to a “deranged diatribe” on “the deep state”, “Islamists” and the “governing elite”, all of whom apparently were more to blame for her downfall than Truss herself. “It’s almost painful to watch someone so lacking in any self-awareness.” This was nothing less than watching Truss “commit a drive-by on herself”.

Ultimately, this show is “less about charting a new redemptive path than it is about rewriting the story of her humiliation”, said UnHerd. A figure “defined entirely by her public fall from grace” and “ostracisation from the political class she had dedicated her life to joining”, this is “more about providing her with a coping mechanism than her viewers with thought-provoking content”.

‘Liz lectures’

“The Liz Truss Show” should be understood not just as the “classic conspiracy theorist’s yearning to make their bonkers views heard”, but also as “an audiovisual cover letter addressed to Donald Trump”, said Imogen West-Knights in The Independent.

Yet despite calls for Britain to undergo a Trump-style revolution, it seems “highly unlikely” that this show “is going to have a wide appeal among Maga types on either side of the Atlantic”. In truth, if “you’re into small boats rhetoric and hand-wringing content about raising the birth rate, you already have so many more eloquent nutters, more possessed of a kind of demonic alt-right charisma, to pick from”.

Truss “can’t start a revolution by chatting with polished media performers in a TV studio”, said Lloyd Evans in The Spectator. Her guests, such as academic and right-wing commentator Matthew Goodwin, “agreed with everything she said”, making the show feel more like a “bank holiday book-club or a gripe session at Wetherspoons”.

With its “mixture of invective, self-justification and political brainstorming”, the show’s “emotional theme is ‘Liz lectures’ rather than ‘Liz learns’. If she were to embrace her foes with an open mind, she may win over a few recruits” but “being angry and radical is pointless. And until her enemies start watching her show, she’s an irrelevance.”

President Trump is slumping in the polls, said Joshua Green on Bloomberg, and he may drag the Republican Party down with him. He is now receiving a negative approval rating from every major pollster. But the “most stinging” numbers came in a recent Fox News survey, in which only 41% of respondents approved of Trump’s job performance – his lowest rating in the poll since October 2017.

Squandered goodwill

The survey had plenty of other bad news for Trump, including career-high levels of disapproval from men, white voters, and those without a college degree. More than three-quarters of all respondents viewed the economy negatively, and “in a rebuke to a president who routinely blames economic woes on former president Joe Biden”, voters blame Trump, by a margin of two to one. Democrats would likely “win big” if the midterms were held tomorrow, said The Hill. A new Marist poll suggests that independents now favour Democrats by a 33-point margin.

I’d love to tell you that Trump is being dragged down by “his authoritarian pathologies or his naked corruption”, said Nick Catoggio on The Dispatch. But the reason he’s sinking is because he has chosen to make the very issue he was elected to solve – the high cost of living – even worse. “Tariffs are eating his presidency alive.” In a recent YouGov poll, 73% of voters, including 56% of Republicans, said Trump’s signature economic policy has raised prices.

It didn’t have to be like this. Voters would have given Trump “loads of slack” had he tried to clean up the “inflationary mess” left by Biden. Instead, he squandered that goodwill on tariffs, and helped Democrats up off the mat.

No obvious solution

Trump has clawed his way back up the polls before, said Ross Douthat in The New York Times. When his numbers tanked in April, he dialled back tariffs, “stopped shipping people to the Salvadoran dungeon”, and halted government cuts. Now “the prescription is less obvious”.

Like Biden, Trump is dealing with an economy that “isn’t terrible, but leaves people chronically dissatisfied”, and he can’t change that “via executive fiat”. His administration keeps talking about how its support for artificial intelligence will supercharge the economy. But that doesn’t play well with voters worried now about inflation, jobs and housing. On those fronts, the White House seems to lack any policy. “That’s the position of a political loser – and sooner or later, a lame duck.”

Having a boyfriend or husband is no longer seen as a goal for a growing number of young women, according to an unromantic procession of recent reports.

Over the past 30 years, the share of senior US high school girls who say they are likely to “choose to get married” has dropped more than 20 percentage points, according to Pew Research Center data. The proportion of young men who hope to get married has remained steady.

Indeed, for a lot of “single and partnered women alike”, choosing to couple up with a man feels like “an almost guilty thing to do”, said Chanté Joseph in Vogue. “It’s become more of a flex to pronounce yourself single.”

No ‘obvious rewards’

The “script is shifting” and “being partnered doesn’t affirm your womanhood anymore,” said Joseph.

You can see the signs on social media, once a space to flaunt one’s relationship status. Now, you see women opting for "subtler signs: a hand on a steering wheel” or “obscuring their partner’s face when they post”. At the more extreme end, “you have faces blurred out of wedding pictures or entire professionally edited videos with the fiancé conveniently cropped out of all shots”.

While being single “was once a cautionary tale”, it’s now a “desirable and coveted status”, another “nail in the coffin” of the “heterosexual fairytale that never really benefited women to begin with”.

For young women brought up to “live their best lives”, marriage is a “hindrance because it requires compromise”, said Lara Brown in The Spectator. Having to “build a life around someone else” is a challenge for an “increasingly transactional generation”.

Marriage “doesn’t bring obvious rewards”; in the UK, there are “almost no tax incentives for committing to someone. Wedding costs are spiralling and far fewer parents are prepared or able to help”.

‘Having-a-boyfriend-is-uncool theory’

Are men the problem? Some feminist thinkers believe that “women still value marriage; they just can’t find enough marriageable men”, said the Institute for Family Studies.

It’s true that “many men are floundering on many fronts – from education to employment”, in a way that is inevitably “unappealing to the opposite sex”. There’s “an ideological dimension” because data shows marriage has “lost its appeal primarily for women on the left”. “Liberal women” are also “much less likely to desire marriage and children”, compared to their “conservative peers”.

Beyond a growing sense that it is “tacky to boast about a soulmate in the era of toxic dating”, simply “loving and wanting to be loved feels like a hangover from old-fashioned times”, said Gabriella Bennett in The Times. “Something has happened along the way to make care seem undesirable.”

But I want “to see my friends happy”. This does not necessarily mean having a “romantic partner” – I just “want to know there’s someone making them sausage pasta after a rough day”.

Who would have guessed that a stubbly, bespectacled cartoon pig would open a new front in the ongoing debate about male role models?

Supermodel David Gandy has launched a takedown of Daddy Pig, the father figure in the long-running preschool cartoon series “Peppa Pig”. He criticised the porcine patriarch as a “useless fool” and a poor example of masculinity and fatherhood for young children.

‘Comedy fool’

At the turn of this century, sitcoms and adverts regularly portrayed men as “schlubby incompetents” and the women in their lives as “long-suffering, competent and beautiful”, said Séamas O’Reilly in The Observer. This “sort-of Homer Simpson/‘Men Behaving Badly’ hangover” was “not merely tedious and infantilising for men”, it made it socially acceptable for them to behave like “lazy, childish boors”. Daddy Pig “is, in every sense, a crudely drawn character, one whose flaws are presented for comic effect”, but he’s not at all a “feckless moron”.

What Gandy seems to have completely missed is that Daddy Pig is a creation in the mould of “a classic, fat, comedy fool like Oliver Hardy or Benny Hill or Falstaff”, said Giles Coren in The Times. “If Daddy Pig did sit-ups all day and made three million a year posing in his Y-fronts, he wouldn’t be funny.”

‘Emotionally present’

Most people believe films, TV programmes and adverts fail to provide good role models for boys, according to a recent Centre for Social Justice poll for its “Lost Boys” study. Male characters are seen either as “pathetic” and useless or “frightening” and “excessively masculine”.

Say what you want about the portrayal of Daddy Pig but I’m sure an “Ozempic-thin, jacked and motivated ‘role model’ version would be just as bad”, said Celia Walden in The Telegraph. The answer seems simple to me: let’s make male characters more “varied and nuanced” and “above all, not politically driven. Because nothing kills a character quite like an agenda – woke or anti-woke.”

Clearly, Gandy “hasn’t watched enough ‘Peppa Pig’”, said Charlotte Cripps in The Independent. Daddy Pig “might be clumsy but, at his core, he’s a good, decent dad”. He is “emotionally present for his kids”, “rarely gets angry”, and, “most importantly, he supports his kids’ dreams”. Let’s be honest: “Peppa Dad is a pig with glasses”. We can’t take him “as seriously as self-proclaimed misogynist Andrew Tate”.

The US president has the absolute right to grant pardons. But Donald Trump’s spree of pardons for loyalists and business allies has raised not only political eyebrows but also legal questions about abuse of power.

Since he began his second term in January, Trump “has begun to expand the pardon power both in nature and in scale”, said Benjamin Wallace-Wells in The New Yorker. He has issued nearly 2,000 presidential pardons and commutations, compared to 238 in his first term.

On his very first day back in the White House, Trump pardoned hundreds of people charged with and convicted of storming the Capitol on 6 January 2021. Last month, he pardoned his former personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani and dozens of others accused of trying to overturn the 2020 election. “More than any previous president,” Trump has “systematically deployed” pardons to “reward loyalists” and reassure “associates that they can violate the law with impunity”, said Thomas B. Edsall in The New York Times.

‘Rewarding partisan allies’

Over the past decade, the presidential pardon power has been subject to “grotesque abuses”, said Jonah Goldberg in the Los Angeles Times. In his first term, Trump pardoned “lackeys and war criminals”, then Joe Biden “issued blanket and pre-emptive pardons for his family”, and now Trump has “outdone” himself, pardoning “a rogue’s gallery of donors, partisan allies and people with business ties to him or his family”.

Take the recent pardoning of Changpeng Zhao. The crypto billionaire had allowed his Binance platform to be used by terrorists and criminal organisations and had pled guilty to money laundering. Yet he had “also worked assiduously to boost the Trump family’s crypto business, and it certainly appears that he got a pardon in exchange for services rendered”.

Trump is using his pardon power as “part of his effort to put the country on an authoritarian path”, Rachel Barkow, a law professor at New York University, told The New York Times. “He is rewarding his partisan allies”, instead of using the power “even-handedly, with a regular process that is available to all”.

‘Separate tier of justice’

It might be “quaint these days” to reference America’s founding fathers but, when they granted unlimited pardon power, “they anticipated at least a modicum of presidential restraint”, said The Wall Street Journal. As such, there are no provisions in the US Constitution to rein in a president who embarks on a pardoning spree.

Trump could still overreach. If, for example, he were to pardon his former friend Ghislaine Maxwell (currently serving a 20-year sentence for conspiring with Jeffrey Epstein to sexually abuse minors), it would highlight – in a much more public way – the “separate tier of justice” he has built “for his allies and investors”, said Wallace-Wells in The New Yorker.

Congress can’t remove the presidential power of pardon without changing the Constitution, but it could seek to “circumscribe” it “around a few basic principles”, said Bloomberg. These could include barring self-pardons and pardons given “in exchange for anything of value”. And pardons “issued in conjunction with a case involving presidents or their family members should trigger the release of all relevant investigative materials to Congress, to ensure greater public transparency”.

Seeking to impose these principles “will surely invite legal challenges”. But it would be difficult “to oppose them on the merits. More to the point: doing nothing would be unpardonable.”

“Donald Trump may have cleared the high bar of uttering the most appalling remark of his presidency,” said Fred Kaplan on Slate. “Things happen,” he declared last week in response to a question about the murder of the US-based journalist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018.

This while sitting in the Oval Office next to the man whom the CIA believes ordered that killing, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. MbS, as he’s called, at least sought to “convey the impression that he knew the murder was contemptible”, describing it in the press conference as a “huge mistake”.

Not so Trump. He disparaged the dead Washington Post journalist – “a lot of people didn’t like that gentleman” – and exonerated MbS: “He knew nothing about it, and we can leave it at that.”

‘Major non-Nato ally’

Trump’s “lies” about Khashoggi overshadowed a visit that benefitted Saudi Arabia more than the US, said The Washington Post. Trump agreed to sell it F-35 fighter jets and advanced AI chips, and give it “major non-Nato ally” status. In exchange, the Saudis committed to invest nearly $1 trillion in the US, although “they offered no time horizon for this far-fetched figure, which is roughly the size of their annual economic output”.

Still, it makes “cold-hearted” sense for the US to cultivate MbS, said David Ignatius in the same paper. He could rule for many decades, and his “continued success in modernising the kingdom is crucial for the future security of the Middle East”. Having neutered the religious police and "empowered” women, he’s working to export that liberalising agenda to other places, such as the West Bank and Syria.

‘Unpredictable’ US

Trump isn’t the first president to conclude that the US-Saudi relationship is “too important to let human rights get in the way”, said Joshua Keating on Vox. In 2020, Joe Biden promised to make Saudi Arabia a global “pariah”. Yet the spike in oil prices following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine led to Biden’s “infamous fist bump” with MbS in Riyadh in 2022.

Saudi Arabia, for its part, still regards America as its key defence partner, although it is forging increasingly close economic links with China and recently signed a defence pact with Pakistan. For now, the two nations feel that they need each other. In the future, though, the big question may not be whether “the US can stomach a relationship with Saudi Arabia – but whether Saudi Arabia still needs a relationship with a country as unpredictable as the US”.

“The Lords of England have stopped the barbarians at the gate of The Telegraph,” said Due Diligence in the Financial Times.

After a drawn-out sale, described as the “auction from hell”, the media group is set to end up in the hands of Lord Rothermere – owner and chair of Daily Mail and General Trust (DMGT), whose great-grandfather co-founded the Daily Mail in 1896. If the government and competition regulators clear the £500 million deal, “the tie-up will create one of the most powerful right-leaning media groups in Britain”.

The UK likes to present itself as “open for business”. Not in this case. For more than two years, ministers and the newspaper’s own reporters have “helped fend off potential buyers from New York to Abu Dhabi”. When Gerry Cardinale’s RedBird Capital withdrew earlier this month, it cleared the way for Rothermere to pounce.

It’s not clear how DMGT (which also owns Metro and The i Paper) will fund the deal, which will give it more than 50% of circulation in the UK newspaper market, said Dominic Ponsford in Press Gazette. But given that newspapers are “a far smaller part of the media than they were”, it’s unlikely to be blocked.

Plenty of Britons will have misgivings about the creation of “a right-leaning media powerhouse” when the populist Reform UK party is riding so high in the polls, said Bloomberg. But regulators should consider that the Telegraph has been “a stranded asset” for several years, said media analyst Claire Enders. “It’s a case of industrial logic”: there should be “operational synergies” of £40 million to £50 million annually. And after the spurning of so many foreign suitors, there’s also “a face-saving dimension to this deal”. As former FT editor Lionel Barber told The Guardian: “This is a very British stitch-up.”

It is the hectoring, jeering tone in Nigel Farage’s voice that brings it all back for Peter Ettedgui, said The Guardian. Farage used the same tone, at Dulwich College, the south London private school that both men attended in the late 1970s, when he would sidle up to him and growl: “Hitler was right” or “Gas them”. He would sometimes add “a long hiss to simulate the sound of the gas showers”, says Ettedgui, now in his 60s, who was one of the few Jewish children at the school. It wasn’t just Jews the young Farage singled out. “I’d hear him calling other students ‘P*ki’ or ‘W*g’ and urging them to ‘go home’,” says Ettedgui.

Smear campaign

Farage has denied the specifics of these allegations. But The Guardian has spoken to 22 contemporaries and former teachers who say otherwise. They remember him, as a prefect, singling an Asian boy out for detention, for no reason; doing Nazi salutes and chanting “Oswald Ernald Mosley”; and singing racist songs as an army cadet. No one is claiming that Farage still holds such views. “Nevertheless, extreme views in any person’s history matter, particularly if that person may be a future PM.”

“A smear campaign is always a nasty thing,” said Brendan O’Neill in The Telegraph. “Deploying rumour and insinuation to taint the reputation of someone you hate – it’s the lowest form of politics.” Obviously, Farage denies these claims, but “there is just something so ominous, so elementally unpleasant about marshalling childhood rumours against a 61-year-old man”. The most recent offence The Guardian accuses him of took place more than 40 years ago. In the case of some allegations, he was just 13 or 14 at the time. “Jim Callaghan was prime minister. The Sex Pistols were storming the charts.”

Only ‘banter’

Bear in mind, too, that social norms were different back then, said Niall Gooch in The Spectator. “There were not the same sensitivities around racially charged language. It is absurd for this to be an issue in national politics in 2025.”

I agree up to a point, said Victoria Richards in The Independent. We were all idiots at school, and I wouldn’t want to be judged for many things I did as a 16-year-old. But we weren’t all vile racists. Farage’s sort-of denials have been “slippery”. He claims that he “never directly racially abused anyone”, and didn’t engage in “racism with intent”; that it was only “banter”. Even so, surely it’s “revealing” that he apparently chose to make jokes about the Holocaust, and to sing horrific songs about gassing Jews and P*kis. The child is father to the man. Isn’t it fair to suspect that Farage’s teenage prejudices might have an influence on his “grown-up” policies?

“The magazine industry is in mourning,” said The New Statesman. Condé Nast announced earlier this month it would be folding Teen Vogue into its flagship Vogue magazine to “provide a more unified reader experience across titles”.

At first glance, this appears like just “another casualty of a fragile market”. But it’s a decision that also marks a significant “ideological turning point”. For the last nine years, Teen Vogue has paved the way for a “new approach to women’s media” that deliberately incorporates progressive politics into its editorial coverage, alongside fashion and lifestyle articles. “Now it has been essentially shut down.”

Fall from grace

Teen Vogue’s shift to the left can be traced back to shortly after the 2016 US presidential election, when it published an article that “set the internet ablaze”, said The Guardian. The piece was headlined “Donald Trump Is Gaslighting America”.

From then on, the magazine intensified its political coverage, becoming “an unlikely hearth for progressive, even radical, feminism within the manicured offices of its publisher”. Now, almost a decade since undergoing this transformation, “Trump is once again in the White House, and Teen Vogue as it was once known is gone”.

Its closure comes at a time of deepening “turbulence for journalism, particularly of the progressive variety”. Many of the trailblazing feminist blogs “now lay dead or dying”, while youth-focused websites like Vice and Vox have “shed jobs at astonishing rates”. These outlets often shone a light on the marginalised groups who have “fallen under the glare of the Trump administration’s microscope”.

Enter the ‘womanosphere’

Over the same period, there has been an increase in the number of conservative women’s media outlets. The Conservateur, for example, launched in 2020 with articles “heralding Melania Trump’s style” alongside “essays on the virtues of marrying powerful men”, said The New Statesman. And Evie Magazine, which has amassed a quarter of a million Instagram followers, is “rife” with anti-contraception stories and “tips for becoming the perfect housewife”.

Across the pond, despite not feeling quite as “glossy and seductive” as the US titles, sites like The Conservative Woman are thriving, with its aim of challenging the “virtue-signalling, intolerant and self-interested elites”. Existing within the broader online “womanosphere”, these publications “frame regressive feminine ideals as a corrective to ‘wokeness’ and the ‘radical left’”.

The unravelling of Teen Vogue has been met with reactions “predictably split along political lines”, said The Free Press. On the right there has been much “celebration”, together with the “occasional cheeky suggestion” that Melania Trump, who Teen Vogue often mocked for her outfits, put the magazine on a “hit list”. The “other side” has expressed “outrage” at the decision to close Teen Vogue at exactly the time its staff claim it is most needed.

In reality, Teen Vogue was “being written by and for millennials”, convinced they were giving a “new, politically obsessed generation the content they craved”. But it turned out “conspicuous wokeness” was the “exclusive passion” of the publication’s “ageing millennial writers and readers”, while the teens it claimed to represent had “long been getting their news from TikTok”. That the magazine would “fade into oblivion at the same time as its millennial fan base slouched out of their 20s” is “not only unsurprising, it was inevitable”.

“I remember singing it in the playground in the late 1970s,” said Guy Walters in The Independent: “Hitler has only got one ball / The other is in the Albert Hall.” We all assumed the ditty was just a morale-boosting marching song. Now it turns out Hitler really might have been “one nut short of a lunchbox”.

‘Startling’ discovery

For a new Channel 4 documentary, genetics experts analysed Hitler’s DNA, extracted from a bloodied swatch of fabric that a US soldier had cut from the sofa in the Berlin bunker on which the dictator “blew his brains out” – and found that he had Kallmann syndrome. This genetic disorder hinders puberty, often resulting in undescended testicles and, in one in ten cases, a “micropenis”.

The “startling” discovery correlates with notes made by a doctor who had examined Hitler in 1923, and found that he had “right-sided cryptorchidism” (an undescended testicle). There are also stories of Hitler being mocked by his First World War comrades for his “inadequacy”. If his genitals were severely undeveloped, it could go some way to explaining the psychology of one of history’s most evil men.

Dubious claims

It certainly raises some fascinating psychoanalytic questions, said Philip Oltermann in The Guardian. Did the Führer “transform a sense of personal deficit” into an ideological cause? Had the documentary, “Hitler’s DNA: Blueprint of a Dictator”, stopped there, it would have been “sensational but also credible”. Instead, it makes a series of more dubious claims. Based on a polygenic risk score (PRS) test, to assess Hitler’s genetic “propensity” for mental health conditions, its makers blithely assert, for instance, that he had a “high probability” of displaying autistic traits and developing schizophrenia.

Not only does this risk stigmatising those with these conditions – will they be cast as “Little Hitlers”? – it’s misleading. PRS tests are not diagnostic tools, said Tiffany Wertheimer on BBC News, and their use to assess people’s susceptibility to complex neurological conditions is controversial.

Hitler’s mental and physical health has been the source of endless fascination, said Ben Macintyre in The Times. Over the years, he has been variously diagnosed with syphilis, rotting teeth, Parkinson’s and flatulence – as if the insanity of the Third Reich could be “reduced to one man’s apparent symptoms”. It’s “tempting fodder”, but in reality, genetics cannot explain Hitler or Nazism; neither could have emerged without the social, economic and political conditions of interwar Germany. Hitler’s genes “may have contributed to creating a singular monster. But German society was already fatally sick.”

Want to make the next sequel to “Frozen” yourself? Now the Walt Disney Company is giving fans a way to do so — sort of. The Mouse House announced it is exploring tools that could allow Disney+ users to upload their own AI-generated content onto the platform. This could potentially include AI content from Disney’s IP, allowing users to tap into the company’s original characters as well as franchises owned by Disney like “Star Wars” and “Marvel.” But while Disney appears to be all-in on its AI bet, the idea has some people shaking their heads.

‘A much more engaged experience’

Artificial intelligence is “going to give us the ability to provide users of Disney+ with a much more engaged experience,” said Disney CEO Bob Iger in the company’s fourth quarter earnings call. This includes the “ability for them to create user-generated content and to consume user-generated content — mostly short-form — from others.” While nothing official has been announced, Disney has had “productive conversations” with AI brands that would also “reflect our need to protect the IP.”

Disney is likely trying to appeal to “younger audiences, especially Gen Z,” who are “gravitating toward spaces where they can participate, remix and respond rather than simply watch,” said NPR. This additionally “points to the growing popularity of indie creators and a change in consumer expectations around quality: Content doesn’t always have to be polished to be extremely popular.”

AI companies are also likely eager to partner with Disney, as they “can work with the creative community to come up with models that work for both of them,” said Copyright Alliance CEO Keith Kupferschmid to NPR. The entertainment industry is “going to start seeing more and more deals come through because they realize they can do this and do it the right way.” Iger has additionally “hinted at other ways Disney could expand its streaming app beyond just TV shows and movies,” said The Verge, including gaming features.

‘Another grim omen’

Despite Iger’s enthusiasm, many “artists, animators and Disney fans didn’t take the news well,” said Forbes. Many commentators were “deeply disappointed that Disney, the legendary animation studio that grew into a sprawling media empire, would embrace the automation of art.” Some “viewed the arrival of AI to Disney+ as another grim omen, fearing that the spread of generative AI would result in more job losses and a deluge of low-quality content on the streaming platform.”

It is “heartbreaking to think of the wonderful artists who put so much obvious love and care into every frame of the old Disney cartoons,” cartoonist Vincent Alexander said on X. “I'm glad they aren’t around to see this.” Others in the art community “called for a boycott, urging Disney+ subscribers to cancel their subscription,” said Forbes.

Disney’s AI gamble “could be bigger than you think,” said The Hollywood Reporter, but the “consequences of this AI video moment go well beyond Disney.” Americans are “slowly becoming accustomed, cringey viral video by cringey viral video, to the idea that stories and personalities are not fixed entities, there to be interpreted as one likes but little else.” For “all the drama attending the AI announcement, it remains deeply unclear how people will use it.”

“Even the staunchest defenders of ‘Wicked’, the stage musical about the tragic origins of The Wizard of Oz’s Witch of the West, would have to concede that it peaks just before the interval,” said The Telegraph’s Robbie Collin.

So splitting the screen adaptation in two meant that the second instalment, the newly released “Wicked: For Good”, was always “going to be a bit stingy”. The result “isn’t quite the worst-case scenario some of us were dreading”, but it’s not far off.

‘Little sense of movement’

If your complaint about “Wicked” was that “it was so oddly lit that you could barely see what was going on”, fret not, said The Independent’s Clarisse Loughrey. In “Wicked: For Good”, you’ll mind less because “there’s so little to look at”. Despite “all that budget and talent at hand”, the director John M. Chu “fails to find a satisfactory fix” for the back half of Stephen Schwartz and Winnie Holzman’s musical.

The supposedly wicked witch, Elphaba, (played by Cynthia Erivo) “declared herself a rebel with a cause” during the first film’s climactic “Defying Gravity”. Part Two must deal with the “drier, more bureaucratic business” of getting us from there to “her predestined meeting with a bucket of water thrown by a homesick Kansas native”. Her “former frenemy-turned-bestie Glinda” (played by Ariana Grande) remains with the Wizard (Jeff Goldblum) and her fiancé Prince Fiyero (Jonathan Bailey). “But these are all essentially foregone conclusions by the end of the first film.” The second has “little sense of movement, literally or emotionally”.

The “rush to include this ‘Wizard of Oz’ backstory” comes at the expense of “emotional authenticity”, said Francesca Steele in The i Paper. The two films were shot at the same time, and “supposedly turned into two” to maintain character development, but the 137-minute runtime is used less for characterisation than for “dazzling design”. Oscar-winning costume and production designers Paul Tazewell and Nathan Crowley have “clearly had an absolute ball again”, but the pace “feels slightly off”. Still, there’s a “lot more passion in this sequel, and a lot more darkness too”. When Erivo and Grande come together for the central duet “For Good”, they “remain a tour de force”.

‘Deeply lovely update’

“Wicked: For Good” takes us into the timeline of “The Wizard of Oz” with a “great deal of tragicomic brio”, said The Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw. The focus narrows to two “interlocking love triangles”: one of Glinda the Good, Elphaba the Wicked and the Wizard – and the other consisting of Glinda, Elphaba and Fiyero, whom they both love. Goldblum is “excellent as the Wizard, who pretty much becomes the Darth Vader of Oz”. Bailey “pivots to a much more serious, less campy, more passionate Fiyero”, and Grande is, as ever, “delicate and doll-like as Glinda, though with less opportunity for comedy” as in part one.

Slightly odder is the “tangential appearance of Dorothy”, and the “little origin-myth-type backstories” of her eventual companions the Lion, the Tin Man and the Scarecrow. But this “manageably proportioned second half” maintains the “rainbow-coloured dreaminess and the Broadway show-tune zinginess” of the first half.

It surpasses part one in “verve, ambition and emotional ache”, said Kevin Maher in The Times. Purging “all the affable scene-setting” of its predecessor, it “arrives as a fiery love triangle between the Judy Garland classic, this deeply lovely update and the resonant ideas that bind them”. There are “audacious touches and additions”, such as the depiction of the yellow brick road as a “slavery-based project”. Schwartz’s new song for Elphaba, “No Place Like Home”, is “both a riposte to Garland’s ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow’ and an expression of the all-consuming paradox of the story”.

There are “sluggish moments”, including the new song for Glinda, and Michelle Yeoh is “wasted” as Madame Morrible, right-hand woman to the Wizard. But Erivo is “sublime”. She carries the “wounded essence of the entire project” in her “quiet despair”. It’s down to her that the film has a heart. “Best actress Oscar?”

YouTuber Jake Paul will go toe-to-toe with Britain’s former world heavyweight champion Anthony Joshua in Miami next month in a bout that promoters have billed as the “most dangerous” contest of the influencer’s boxing career.

Joshua, 36, will be “the first active, elite-level champion” that Paul has faced in the ring, said the BBC, and there are already serious concerns about his safety.

Defying belief 

This will be Paul’s “14th fight since turning pro five years ago – with the 28-year-old YouTuber-turned-boxer having won all but one so far”, said The Sun. But taking on Joshua is a “whole different kettle of fish”.

The two-time world heavyweight champion has agreed to shed several pounds to meet the agreed weight limit of 245lb (17st 7lb) for the 19 December bout. But Joshua is five inches taller and around four stone heavier than his cruiserweight rival. Boxing fans are already “worried” about Paul’s chances of “actually surviving the fight”.

In the UK such a match-up would be “banned” because of the “serious safety fears”, said The Telegraph. This “shocking” plan “defies belief” and “breaks so many codes for the sport”. Joshua “is too big, too strong, too experienced and – genuinely – too dangerous for Paul even to think about fighting”; this is nothing more than a “money heist”. It is being billed as a £140 million fight, with Joshua reportedly set to earn more than £30 million from the Netflix-streamed event.

Paul has “always had delusions of grandeur as a novice pro”, said The Guardian, but boxing “may have to consider its own culpability” should he be “badly hurt and end up in hospital” after this “fully sanctioned bout”. But “the suspicion remains” that it will “be a more controlled arrangement”. That “gut reaction” is confirmed by the fact that the fight has been limited to eight rounds.

‘Laughing stock’

Behind the “initial shock” of the apparent mismatch, the two fighters have more in common than it may appear in that both “have found themselves at a crossroads”, said the Daily Mail. Paul has been “on the search for a more credible opponent” after his bout with WBA lightweight champion Gervonta Davis was cancelled, while Joshua “will be looking to shake off 13 months of ring-rust”.

Joshua has put himself in a “no-win situation” by accepting the challenge, said former world champion Johnny Nelson on Sky Sports. If Paul “lasts the distance, what does that tell you” about Joshua? But if he “goes in there and knocks him out, then you would say that’s to be expected”.

Boxing’s credibility has already “taken a hit because of difficulties arranging fights at the highest level” and an “influx” of cash from Saudi Arabia, said the BBC. For some, influencer fights represent an avenue to “attract new fans” and help “safeguard the future of the sport”, but “others argue they render it a laughing stock”.

If and when the pair do come face to face, Joshua “surely wipes Paul out in a flash”, said Boxing 24/7. “If not, well, the boxing world will have officially gone mad!” This is “what we’re afraid of” – the sport “becoming more and more a circus”.

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s (R-Ga.) once lockstep adherence to the Trump administration is beginning to shift — in no small part due to the White House’s handling of the Jeffrey Epstein investigation that has become a major millstone around the administration’s neck. But does the growing daylight between the U.S. representative from Georgia and this White House signal a genuine political realignment for the MAGA mainstay? Or is the controversial congresswoman simply showing that she has learned how to play politics in Washington with the best of them?

‘More subtle than she first appeared’

The schism between Greene and President Donald Trump reached a crescendo last week, when Trump attacked “‘Wacky’ Marjorie” on Truth Social for her tendency to “COMPLAIN, COMPLAIN, COMPLAIN!” and for having “gone Far Left, even doing The View, with their Low IQ Republican hating Anchors.” The president’s opprobrium, including his withdrawal of political support for Greene, comes as the congresswoman tests “whether Republicans can openly defy Trump and survive” by “betting that standing with Epstein victims is a powerful enough shield to withstand the wrath” of this White House, said Axios.

While the fight over releasing the Epstein documents is the most proximal episode to Greene’s distancing herself from Trump, the “turn against the president” has been unfolding “over the last several months,” said Rolling Stone. Greene has “publicly questioned his foreign policy decision” and critiqued his “support of Israel” and “domestic political maneuvering” on health care, said Rolling Stone. Greene has “asserted that she remained committed to the MAGA movement,” but Trump’s criticisms were a “stunning rebuke” of one of his “fiercest defenders,” said The Washington Post.

In offering an apology for her role in “inflaming the country’s poisoned politics” during a CNN interview this weekend, Greene succeeded in “furthering her own intriguing political reinvention,” the network said. Greene’s “evolution” suggests a politician who is both “more subtle than she first appeared” and who is “increasingly adept at wielding her own power.”

‘Apostasies’ that do not negate a ‘lifetime of conspiracies’

Greene’s pivot may very well be an “honest evolution, which entails accountability,” or it might be mere “shallow opportunism, which offers none,” said The Atlantic. “Recent apostasies from her party” do not automatically negate Greene’s “lifetime of conspiracies.” Although she has said she “still supports Trump,” Greene now wants to “stop the toxic rhetoric” that “if we’re being honest, has been a staple” of her career, said Poynter.

Surprising as Greene’s political pivots may seem, there is reason to see the moves as less about a newfound sense of independence and more about a broader dynamic taking shape within the GOP at large. Trump’s attacks on the congresswoman come during a “politically fraught moment” for GOP lawmakers “feeling squeamish after a crushing off-season election cycle,” Politico said.

The Trump-Greene feud is “highlighting the cracks within MAGA world” in ways that are “increasingly apparent through MAGA-aligned media brands and commentators,” CNN’s Brian Stelter said on Bluesky. What’s notable is “not the number of the cracks but the sheer *variety* of them.”

Even “presidents-turned-cult leaders become lame ducks eventually,” said Gabe Fleisher in his “Wake Up To Politics” newsletter. And though there is likely “some personal element” to Greene’s decision to split from Trump, “at least publicly, it’s over policy divides.”

Greene frequently falls on the less popular side of whatever issues she’s broken with Trump over, but she is nevertheless often “on the side quickly gaining popularity in the GOP.” Greene’s outspoken critiques may then be “just the latest hint,” said CNN, that Republicans are “beginning to assess” the president’s behavior and how it “might weigh on their fortunes when he no longer controls the GOP.”

The Walmartification of French fashion is now complete, said Sophie Coignard in Le Point (Paris). To widespread Parisian disgust, one of our most glamorous department stores, BHV, is now officially home to the Chinese online juggernaut Shein: it was in this landmark building that the ultra-fast-fashion company opened its first-ever bricks and mortar premises last week.

Don’t look on this as “just another retail opening”, said James Tidmarsh in The Spectator. “It’s cultural surrender.” For more than a century, BHV has “embodied a certain Parisian ideal” of accessible luxury, craftsmanship and good taste. “Now it’s flogging throwaway polyester” stitched in exploitative Asian factories; that which, until now, was only available on Shein’s website alongside 600,000 other cheap goods. “It is proof that Paris, once the world’s fashion capital, is now renting out its soul to Chinese algorithms.”

French is ‘addicted to fast fashion’

We French are supposedly scandalised by Shein’s arrival, said Erwan Seznec in Le Point. And certainly Shein’s grand opening was assailed by angry crowds protesting against the Asian giant’s vile labour and commercial practices. These are well documented: a recent investigation revealed extensive evidence of forced labour, with workers in some factories forced to work 18-hour shifts for just £0.03 an item. And the discovery that child-like sex dolls were being sold on Shein’s website resulted in a threat to ban the website in France unless they were removed.

Yet for all the “virtuous rhetoric” and the snobbery, the French are still “addicted to fast fashion”: every single respondent in a recent survey admitted to buying clothing from a fast-fashion brand this year, whether it were China’s Shein and Temu, or more traditional European players such as H&M and Zara.

And fully 35% of French shoppers – enticed by its “rock-bottom prices”, targeted algorithms and “discounting techniques” – admit to having bought something from Shein itself last year, said Stéphane Vernay in Ouest-France (Rennes). They’re no doubt familiar with the accusations of deplorable behaviour levelled against Shein... “but who cares? The urge to buy is stronger.” Shein’s tills in Paris were ringing last week, and it now plans to open five more locations in France.

‘We’re soon not going to have any industry left at all’

You’d have thought Europe’s politicians would be trying to shield our manufacturers from this onslaught, said James Tidmarsh. Not a bit of it. In France and in the UK in particular, they’ve opened the door to the Chinese: they’ve handed our textile industry to companies such as Shein; they’ve opened our roads to carmakers such as BYD and MG – and they call it “progress”. Progress? Our manufacturers just can’t compete with these regulation-skirting companies. “We’re soon not going to have any industry left at all.”

Only the US president has clocked this “unprecedented trade offensive”, said Gaëtan de Capèle in Le Figaro (Paris). Trump has already “built a wall imposing a 100% tax on parcels from Shein and its acolytes”; shipments to the US have dropped 40% as a result. Yet for all “its unrivalled regulatory nit-picking”, Brussels won’t be able to halt the influx for another few years – by which time countless homegrown businesses will have gone to the wall.

There are more than 200 billionaires in California. Now, Golden State labor leaders are pushing for tax on that wealth to help pay for education and Medicaid funding shortfalls.

California lawmakers have “never successfully passed a wealth tax,” said CalMatters. Instead, the state taxes its richest citizens on their income. That would change under a new union-led proposal to create a “one-time 5% tax” on “everything from investments to property value,” as well as “other assets, like jewelry and paintings.” This alarms critics.

The wealth tax could eventually “come all the way down to the middle class,” said Susan Shelley, a spokesperson for the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association, to CalMatters. But California is facing a “collapse of our health care system” thanks to federal budget cuts, said Dave Regan, the president of Service Employees International Union-United Healthcare Workers West, to CalMatters. A tax on billionaires is the “only solution anyone can see.”

Opening the door?

The California proposal is the “first politically viable wealth tax,” Harold Meyerson said at The American Prospect. The purpose is to address a “crisis for many Medicaid recipients.” It has “greater significance” at a moment when the “fortunes of the very wealthy are reaching stratospheric levels,” while middle-class Americans see their incomes stagnate. The tax would be imposed just one time, but it “opens the door” to other efforts to rein in the runaway accumulation of power and wealth by the “very, sometimes obscenely, rich.”

A wealth tax is a “portent of what’s to come” if Democrats return to power in Washington, Allysia Finley said at The Wall Street Journal. The party sought such a tax to finance Joe Biden’s “Build Back Better” bill in 2021 and might have succeeded “if not for opposition from Democrats Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin.” Those two are no longer in the Senate.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom is likely running for president, and he has opposed a wealth tax in his own state. “Would he oppose a national one if he wins” at a national level? Probably not. “Who doubts that Democrats will seek to sock Americans with higher tax bills to pay for their entitlements?”

The real problem is the “Trump administration’s massive planned reduction in Medicaid funding,” Mark Kreidler said at Capital & Main. Addressing that issue is more important than worrying whether California billionaires can handle a “one-time tax on a fraction of their collective wealth.” The proposal will get “plenty of pushback,” including from Newsom, but the bigger question is addressing an “existential threat to the collective well-being of the Golden State.”

Gathering signatures

The tax would apply only to the 2025 net worth of California billionaires who have a “combined wealth of nearly $2 trillion,” said Axios. Because it would apply to their total wealth, “billionaires wouldn’t be able to avoid the tax by moving assets outside California.” Advocates must gather more than a half-million signatures to place the measure on the state’s 2026 ballot. If approved, billionaires will have five years to pay their bill.

“Glee” co-creator Ryan Murphy is “the high priest of tacky, tasteless television”, said Ed Power in The Daily Telegraph. Yet with this latest series for Disney, he has really outdone himself, turning in “a show of mind-bending horror sure to trigger nightmares in the unsuspecting viewer”.

It stars Kim Kardashian and Naomi Watts as high-flying divorce lawyers, and Niecy Nash as their investigator, who have left a smart firm to set up an all-female practice in California. And it’s an “abomination”.

‘A long-form commercial’

The series could be seen as a post-#MeToo “Sex and the City”, said Judy Berman in Time Magazine, if “the sex were all talk, the city irrelevant” and the humour unintentional. Or perhaps it’s “The First Wives Club for psychopaths”. Either way, it “functions primarily as a long-form commercial for a long list of brands”. Strangely for a legal drama, we don’t see much law being practised; instead, much time is devoted to the partners’ personal lives and vendettas.

An ‘embarrassment’ of a script

The script is an “embarrassment” and the performances are no better, said Lucy Mangan in The Guardian. Kardashian, while predictably “expressionless”, is at least “inoffensively useless”. The Oscar-nominee Watts, by contrast, ”preens and pouts” and delivers her lines “so archly that you can almost hear her joints cracking”. And you wonder what Glenn Close, who appears in cameo, was thinking. Camp, lurid drama played with gusto can be fun, but with its dismal plots and characters, this really is not that. Truly, “I did not know it was still possible to make television this bad”.

Disability advocates are taking their latest fight to the Trump administration, where the White House has been accused of discriminating against deaf Americans. This is due to the administration’s decision to axe a Biden-era policy that used sign language interpreters during major White House events, including all press briefings. The administration is now arguing in court that these interpreters should only be required in certain instances, though deaf advocacy groups disagree.

‘Clear, present and imminent harm’

The National Association of the Deaf (NAD) criticized the administration’s decision in a lawsuit, and at least one federal judge agreed. U.S. District Judge Amir Ali ordered the White House to restore interpreters to all press briefings conducted by either President Donald Trump or White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt. The “court finds that denying deaf Americans access to and the benefit of it presents a clear, present and imminent harm,” Ali said in his ruling.

This is due to the “nature of the programming at issue” during press briefings, Ali said, including “regularly scheduled briefings on critical topics implicating markets, medicine, militaries” and other issues. This was the main argument made by advocates for deaf Americans. These people have the “right to the same access to White House information as everyone else. Denying them ASL interpreters is a direct violation of that right,” said Dr. Bobbie Beth Scoggins, the CEO of NAD, in a statement. This information “must be provided not only through captioning but also in American Sign Language.”

The original choice to do away with interpreters was because the “president seemingly does not like the idea of sharing the spotlight with others,” said The Independent. This is not the first time deaf organizations have sparred with Trump, as NAD previously won a victory during his first term by “taking the administration to court over a failure to make coronavirus briefings accessible.”

‘Major incursion on his central prerogatives’

The administration has claimed that the scope of the sign language ruling is too broad, and that interpreters “should be limited to regularly scheduled briefings and not other events where the president takes questions from the press,” said NPR. The White House has also said that the federal ruling “should not apply to remarks made in a broad set of scenarios.”

Requiring Trump to “share his platform with ASL interpreters every time he or his press secretary communicates with the nation is a major incursion on his central prerogatives,” attorneys for Trump said in a court filing earlier this year. His attorneys have additionally argued that an ASL interpreter should be required only under certain scenarios, and that press briefings do not “encompass events with other purposes, such as a ceremony or a speech, at which the president may choose to take questions from the press,” they said in a separate court filing.

The administration is currently appealing the judge’s decision, setting up another potential courtroom fight. But the White House has said it will “proceed with providing ASL interpreters for ‘publicly announced press briefings,’” said DisabilityScoop, a news website for disability issues. The administration also noted that it “continues to have a contract with an ASL interpreter service that extends into 2028.”

David Szalay’s “Flesh” is “almost certainly the most monosyllabic Booker prizewinner ever”, said Johanna Thomas-Corr in The Times. The brooding protagonist, István, largely speaks in “gruff, gruntish ‘yeahs’, ‘nos’ and ‘okays’”, giving the book the “terse narrative style of a thriller”.

It is also perhaps the “blokiest winner” in the literary award’s history, exploring masculinity in a way that will likely appeal to that “elusive creature, the 21st-century male reader of novels”.

‘Timely anxieties’

“This year’s shortlist was a strong one”, said Martin Chilton in The Independent. Each of the “experienced” authors tackled the “theme of identity” in one way or another – but none managed it more “compellingly” than Szalay, whose “urgent and honest 349-page novel taps into timely anxieties about manhood”.

The tale begins in Hungary, where 15-year-old István is living with his mother in a block of flats. Emotionally detached and struggling to fit in, he joins the military and is stationed in Kuwait before moving to London where he works first as a bouncer and then as a driver for the super-rich.

Covering a wide range of themes from teenage sex to infidelity, “everyday struggles” to murder, each chapter is “almost a self-contained unit”. Szalay writes with a “terse precision”, in a prose that is “pared to the bone” yet “deeply affecting”. What makes the book “so hypnotic” is his ability to bring his “introverted” protagonist to life, examining “profound questions about what drives an existence”, and “what sometimes shatters it”.

A novel that deserves “more than one encounter”, it’s a “startling, heartbreaking read”. The “most deserved Booker winner” since Douglas Stuart’s “Shuggie Bain” in 2020, it was the “right choice” by this year’s judges.

Cutting us off from István’s thoughts and emotions is a “risky strategy” said Justine Jordan in The Guardian, but the “narrative flatness hugely pays off”. The “yawning gaps” in the text draw us in, encouraging us to “solve the puzzle” of the protagonist. A “propulsive page-turner”, its “originality makes it a novel you will think about as well as feel, like a gut punch, in your body”.

‘Decent’ enough

“I’d wager” that many commentators will love “Flesh”, said Cal Revely-Calder in The Telegraph. “They’re all wrong.” Szalay’s novel is “decent” enough – “but it wasn’t the best book on the shortlist. That was Kiran Desai’s ‘The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny’, closely followed by Andrew Miller’s ‘The Land in Winter’”. Their prose is “wholly engrossing”, whereas Szalay “didn’t impress me so much”.

His winning tale “wasn’t half the book it could have been”. István’s thoughts are “framed plainly and clearly” and the novel “almost found a second gear that would have tempered the numbness, the aridity. Frustratingly, it never quite did.” Szalay’s winning book will receive much praise, but as a reader nothing beats being “electrified by good prose”. Roddy Doyle, chair of this year’s Booker jury, said “Flesh” was “not like any other book”. “It would be nice if that were true.”

“Is ‘Flesh’ the best of the shortlist?” said Thomas-Corr in The Times. Right from the opening pages it “ensnared me”, and “I’ve been raving about Szalay’s clean, elegant prose ever since”. I admit, though, I have a “soft spot” for Andrew Miller, “one of Britain’s most underrated novelists”. Still, I expect “Flesh” will be a “commercial hit”, and should finally park the “hoary old claim that the male novelist stands no chance of success any more”.

It happens to every president sooner or later — the moment when they are still in power but their influence wanes as politicians and voters look to the future. Last week’s GOP election losses raise the question of whether President Donald Trump’s lame duck moment has arrived.

“Welcome to the dawn of Trump’s lame duck era,” said Politico. Republicans are beginning to realize the president “will soon be gone.” While Americans should not “expect an immediate stampede” away from the president’s less-popular policies, there are “growing signs” that GOP officials are maneuvering around the fact that “they’ll still be around” after their term-limited leader has departed the political scene. Most Republican senators, for example, resisted Trump’s demand to get rid of the filibuster to end the government shutdown. That unwillingness could be challenging to a president whose operating style is to “run roughshod” over his party’s preferences in Congress.

Past his sell-by date?

Trump “seems to be defying the lame-duck precedent” at the moment,” said Ed Kilgore at New York magazine. No president has ever been “more dominant” within his own party, and while congressional Republicans may have misgivings in private they “publicly sing his praises.” But Trump is also “well past the usual sell-by date” for most presidents, having served as the GOP’s presidential nominee in three different elections. The last Republican to do that was Richard Nixon, and it “didn’t turn out well for Republicans.”

The GOP “appears to be fracturing” as it prepares for the “vacuum” that will be created when Trump leaves the scene, said Michael Wilner at the Los Angeles Times. Infighting over antisemitic influencer Nick Fuentes and blame-casting for the GOP’s poor election performance are among the “vicious” fights going on among Trump’s supporters as they prepare for what is next. The “countdown to the midterms” signifies that the president has “precious time left” before the 2028 presidential contest gets underway and begins “eclipsing the final two years of his presidency.”

Third term talk

The president still has a “lot of juice,” said David M. Drucker at Bloomberg. While voters “often tire of reelected presidents,” Trump now has an approval rating of 93% from Republicans. (Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama were “both at roughly 80%” with their party’s voters during their second terms.) That popularity with the base gives him more power than his predecessors. Any Republican thinking of a run for office must “win Trump’s endorsement and then win the voters — in that order.”

Trump keeps talking about a third term even though it is prohibited by the Constitution, said Time. That may fend off lame-duck status by helping him “maintain his relevance and power over the GOP.” But Republican losses last week are giving Democrats a “way out of the gloom,” said Edward Luce at the Financial Times. There is much to come, but it is now clear that the “opening act of Trump’s second term is over.”

Prince William has urged young people to wear a poppy on Remembrance Day today because it’s “not just about the past; it’s about shaping who we become in the future”. His remarks about learning from “the courage of others” contrast strongly with the ritual poppy apoplexy being expressed elsewhere.

“Performative poppy wearing” has become “toxic”, said Helen Coffey in The Independent, with politicians and TV presenters getting “a pile-on” for “an empty lapel” and actor Mark Rylance branded “woke” for wearing the pacifist white poppy.

‘Vile abuse’

“Every year they get more unhinged,” said Coffey, citing the “public shaming” of “anyone foolish/thoughtless/bold enough” to show their face on television in November without “a scarlet talisman pinned proudly to their chest”. The vitriol “hurled at people purely for the absence of a £2 paper flower” has turned the poppy “from a well-meaning show of support into another piece of weaponised propaganda” in the culture wars. “Spewing vile abuse at others in the name of patriotism” is surely an “insult to the memory” of the fallen soldiers who “fought for freedom of speech”.

I wonder what we are “actually remembering” when we take part “in what seem like ever more frenetic and extravagant displays of poppy fervour”, said James Ball in The New World. There’s been a “bastardisation” of the poppy’s meaning. The “policing of who is and who isn’t wearing” one feels “less about solemn thanks and more about the same kind of nationalism” that saw England and Union Jack flags “hung up in their hundreds from lamp-posts” earlier this year.

‘Divisively politicised’

The “vast majority of the people of these Isles are rightly angered by the white poppy” brigade, said Hamish de Bretton-Gordon in The Telegraph. The Peace Pledge Union, which distributes white poppies, “explicitly” supports “de-funding the Armed Forces”, yet these people “can only exist in safety because the Armed Forces stand ready to go to war”. A “tyrant is marching west across Europe” but white-poppy-wearers, like “virtue-signalling” Mark Rylance, would “appease” Vladimir Putin “rather than stand up to him”.

I am “troubled” by how the poppy has “become divisively politicised”, said military veteran Ian Cumming in The Herald. It “jars” when “people with no experience of service” either “use the poppy as a test of loyalty” or “reject it to make a political point”. “For those of us who have faced the harsh realities of war, Remembrance is not a performance – it’s a promise.” Service personnel put themselves at risk “in defence of our way of life” and, in return, we owe them “gratitude, respect and enduring support”. The poppy should be a visual reminder of that mutual commitment, not a “prop for argument and point-scoring”.

“Sudan’s descent into hell continues inexorably,” said Le Monde (Paris). For months, UN observers have warned that if the notoriously brutal ethnic-Arab militia known as the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) were to capture the besieged city of El Fasher in Darfur, there would be a massacre. And now the horrors predicted are playing out before our very eyes.

Satellite imagery last week showed pools of blood across El Fasher – appalling evidence of mass killings carried out by the RSF following its expulsion of the Sudanese army from the city. Videos circulated on TikTok show RSF soldiers hunting down non-Arab black Sudanese civilians and executing them, said Declan Walsh in The New York Times. One shows RSF fighters stepping over bodies scattered in a room at the university. “A survivor can be seen raising his arm, apparently calling for help, before a fighter shoots him dead.”

The Darfur region of western Sudan is home to at least six million people. Most are black African pastoralist farmers, the majority belonging to the Fur (Darfur means home of the Fur). For two years now they have been oppressed by the RSF, whose fighters are from Darfur’s Arabic-speaking nomadic clans. And all the while, the world has expressed alarm... and done nothing, said Hassan Gibril in Sudan Tribune (Paris) – “a stark reminder” of our “failure to learn from history”. Two decades ago, the Janjaweed militia – the RSF in its earlier guise – slaughtered up to 300,000 black Sudanese in what is widely recognised as a genocide. The catastrophe in El Fasher echoes those “darkest moments”.

Ever since Sudan gained independence from the British in 1956, Sudanese politics has been dominated by a northern elite intent on creating a state based on an Arab-Islamic identity, said Hamdy A. Hassan on The Conversation. And the civil war that has been raging for two years (which accounts for the deaths of at least 150,000 people) is the outcome of rivalry between two Arabic-speaking generals, former allies who had together brutally suppressed the black African insurgency in Darfur in 2003.

One of those generals is now the head of Sudan’s army; the other is the RSF warlord known as Hemedti. And he has been able to pursue his murderous campaign in Darfur with impunity, said Arne Perras in Tages-Anzeiger (Zürich), knowing that with the world’s focus on Gaza and Ukraine, “no one will intervene militarily in this remote part of the world to punish war crimes”.

Far from intervening, some countries – notably the United Arab Emirates – are actively fuelling the conflict, said Jared Malsin in The Wall Street Journal (New York). The Gulf monarchy sees Sudan as a vital hub of influence in the Horn of Africa, given its Red Sea coast and vast gold resources. With this in mind, it has funnelled to the RSF an increasing supply of sophisticated arms, some procured from the EU and UK.

Crucially, those shipments came after the militia had lost control of the capital, Khartoum, to the Sudanese army in March, a moment that could have marked a turning point in one of the worst humanitarian crises in the world this century. Instead, a rearmed RSF has been able to pursue another round of bloodshed – and another genocide.

And with the US and other great powers keeping their distance, there’s no end in sight, said Hafed Al-Ghwell in Arab News (Riyadh). An intractable conflict for which “the global community possesses no effective response” – this is “the shape of wars to come”.

The United States has not conducted a working test of a nuclear weapon since the early 1990s. That could change. President Donald Trump has repeatedly vowed to restart testing, raising alarms about a dangerous new arms race with Russia and China.

“Other countries are testing,” Trump said Sunday on “60 Minutes.” The United States is the “only country that doesn’t test” its nuclear weapons, he said. That created some confusion among nuclear observers. The United States, China and Russia have all observed “decades-long moratorium on underground nuclear blasts,” said The Wall Street Journal, and continue to do so. (Russia has recently tested warhead delivery systems, which seems to have provoked Trump.) America also has an “extensive program to ensure the reliability of its nuclear arsenal” using computer simulations and small nuclear experiments. The president, however, seems determined to proceed. “That process will begin immediately,” he said on Truth Social.

Pragmatic and prudent?

The United States “should resume nuclear testing,” said the National Review editorial board. The country has “invested heavily” in maintaining the nuclear arsenal, but it is “common sense” that the next generation of weapons “will be strengthened with a responsible testing regime.” America should keep that arsenal up-to-date to “deter aggression from nations that wish us ill.” That is why a “pragmatic and prudent American testing regime is warranted.”

Trump’s talk of nuclear testing is “dangerous,” said W.J. Hennigan at The New York Times. During his first term, the president ordered the Energy Department to be ready to conduct a simple test within six months. That never happened, but administration officials said such a test would be “political, to send a message to adversaries.” That is a bad reason for testing. Today’s Americans are “lucky” to live in a time “where the deadliest weapons aren’t routinely being exploded by leaders for show.” Resuming testing would augur a “dangerous, unpredictable new era.”

The long moratorium has been “one of the so-called nuclear taboos meant to preserve stability” among nuclear powers, said Andreas Kluth at Bloomberg. If America were to “blow up” that taboo, there is an increased risk that “somebody, somewhere, someday might break the ultimate taboo” and use the weapons in anger. No responsible leader “could reasonably want to take this risk.”

China would benefit

The concern is that Trump’s testing push “provokes other nations to do the same,” said The New York Times. “Why would we want to open the Pandora’s box” and provide an opportunity for nuclear testing to America’s rivals, said John F. Tierney, the executive director of the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation.

China would be the biggest beneficiary, said Heather Williams at the Center for Strategic & International Studies. It has conducted only 47 tests of its weapons, while the United States conducted more than 1,000 during the Cold War. That has created an “asymmetry in test data” that has annoyed officials in Beijing, who would “gain the most in terms of weapons design and warhead information” from a resumption in nuclear testing.

Yorgos Lanthimos’ films (“The Favourite”, “Poor Things”) tend to feature characters who have “untethered themselves from reality and accepted behavioural norms”, said Wendy Ide in The Observer. Yet even by his standards, “Bugonia” is an “unhinged and savage piece of storytelling”.

‘Deliriously preposterous’

A remake of a cult South Korean film from 2003, it stars Emma Stone, the director’s regular collaborator, as Michelle, the CEO of a pharmaceuticals company. On her way home one day, she is kidnapped by Teddy and Don (Jesse Plemons and Aidan Delbis) – a couple of “disenfranchised conspiracy nuts” who are convinced that she’s an alien intent on destroying humanity. They chain her up in their basement, shave her head and demand to meet her leaders, leading to “a battle of wits” that escalates into “a bloody standoff”. The storyline is both “deliriously preposterous and uncomfortably of the moment”, and the film is “deranged, extreme and explosively enjoyable”.

Not Lanthimos’ best film

Michelle may not be an alien, but she is a cunning “corporate bot” for whom every exchange is “transactional”, said Travis Jeppesen in Sight and Sound. Teddy, the underdog fighting against our anti-human overlords, is scarcely more sympathetic. All the characters are meant to represent “certain toxic typologies of the zeitgeist”, but they are saved from being “mere types” by the brilliance of the performances. Plemons makes Teddy seem sincere, even if he is wrong; as for Stone, she makes her character so layered, you can hardly take your eyes off her. It’s not Lanthimos’ best film, said Alissa Wilkinson in The New York Times. And it’s quite bleak. But typically, he never lets you get comfortable. You have to keep watching just to find out what the hell it’s all about.

Tucker Carlson’s recent interview with Nick Fuentes, the Holocaust-denying white nationalist, has exposed a rupture on the right. The divide is between conservatives who would allow once-fringe views in the GOP coalition and those who reject Fuentes’ overt antisemitism.

The Carlson-Fuentes chat was “one of the most dangerous interviews ever in MAGA media,” Will Sommer said at The Bulwark. The country must overcome the challenge of “organized Jewry in America,” Fuentes told the former Fox News host. Such incendiary claims are a “catastrophe for more traditional conservative media figures,” Sommer said, and have drawn rebukes from Breitbart’s Joel Pollak, The Daily Wire’s Andrew Klavan and writer Rod Dreher. (On Monday, conservative influencer Ben Shapiro posted a podcast episode titled “Tucker Carlson Sabotages America.”) By giving Fuentes a platform, Carlson “just accelerated the right’s already prominent tilt toward authoritarianism and hate.”

Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts threw in his lot with Carlson on Thursday, said Politico. Fuentes’ views may be abhorrent “but canceling him is not the answer, either,” Roberts said in a video posted to X. The interview was not an isolated moment, coming after a “string of antisemitic incidents on the right” that included the revelation of racist comments on a Young Republicans group text, said Politico. The trend has “broadly divided” the Republican Party. Antisemitism is “rising on the right in a way I have never seen,” Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) said recently.

Mainstreaming antisemitism

“The Groypers are at the gate,” Peter Laffin said at The Washington Examiner, using a term for Fuentes’ racist followers. Heritage’s Roberts compounded the problem with his public statement, which lent “credence to Fuentes’ and Carlson’s alt-right fever dream.” Groypers are threatening to take over the right and the “conservative movement, led by Roberts, is waving the white flag.”

Jewish conservatives “believe that Tucker Carlson is the most dangerous man in America to Jews,” conservative writer Rod Dreher said at his newsletter. That is because Carlson is the “most important mainstreamer of antisemitism on the right.” President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance could curtail the trend “by forthrightly denouncing it.” For conservatives and Christians, it is “time to find your courage” and push back now.

Fuentes is “shaping up to be the year’s major conservative breakout star” and is “clearly steering the right toward a wholesale embrace of bigotry,” Robby Soave said at Reason. The problem for his conservative critics is “their side is clearly losing.” Refusing to engage with him will not work, however. That would simply make his arguments “seem powerful, hypnotic and ultimately more appealing.”

Hostile toward Israel

Carlson, Fuentes and other influencers are trying to make the GOP “hostile toward Israel and the Jewish people,” National Review said in an editorial. But a version of America that is run by “anti-Israel zealots” is not one “any conservative should want to live in.”

The divide between Fuentes and conservatives is “narrower than it has ever been,” Ali Breland said at The Atlantic. His entry into the MAGA mainstream means his visions for a reactionary party “are closer than ever to being realized.”

“It’s hard to imagine a more fitting image” of Donald Trump’s second term, said Matt Ford in The New Republic, than last week’s photographs of bulldozers demolishing the East Wing of the White House. They are a perfect symbol of the administration’s destructive agenda. A public building that forms part of a national historical site has been razed to make way for a “gaudy” 90,000-square-foot ballroom where Trump can “hang out with his rich friends”.

Back in July, the president assured the public that the ballroom wouldn’t interfere with the current White House structure, said Steve Benen on MSNBC. “It’ll be near it but not touching it – and pays total respect to the existing building, which I’m the biggest fan of,” he declared. Now he dismisses the East Wing, saying it was “never thought of as being much”. Trump feels entitled to make these choices, because he regards these national treasures “as his own”.

Hysterical nonsense

Get a grip, people, said National Review. All this talk of Trump “destroying” the White House is hysterical nonsense. He’s just replacing some 1940s-era offices with a function room. Changes have been made to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue throughout its history. The West and East wings were built in 1902. The Oval Office was added in 1909 and moved in 1934. The central residence was completely gutted and reconstructed between 1948 and 1952.

Successive presidents have sought to improve the property. Franklin D. Roosevelt installed an indoor pool; Harry S. Truman added a bowling alley; Barack Obama put in a basketball court. These updates didn’t “imply incipient fascism” or an “inappropriate sense of permanent ownership”; nor does Trump’s.

The White House will benefit from a permanent space for large functions – they currently have to be accommodated in tents on the South Lawn. President Harrison proposed a similar expansion in 1891. Yet activists are now calling for Democrat politicians to commit to razing Trump’s ballroom and restoring the status quo ante, said Noah Rothman in the same magazine. That’s just not going to happen. A future president might strip away some of the ballroom’s garish gold embellishments – which would be no bad thing – but they will undoubtedly keep the space as a whole because of its “immense and objective practical utility”.

High-handed attitude

There’s nothing wrong in principle with expanding the White House, said Peggy Noonan in The Wall Street Journal. But the context in which this change has been made, and the high-handed manner in which it has been handled, do raise deep concerns about an overmighty executive. In a republic, power is meant to spring from the people and be mediated by balanced branches of government. But in the past nine months a “lot of lines seem to have been crossed”, not least the deployment of troops in US cities and the legal assaults on the president’s perceived enemies.

Trump increasingly resembles Louis XIV, said Jackie Calmes in the Los Angeles Times. He feels no need to justify the extrajudicial killings at sea of those he decrees are Venezuelan narco-terrorists. “Who will it be for?” a reporter asked him recently, when he was showing off the model of a triumphal arch (dubbed the “Arc de Trump”) to be built in Washington. “Me,” he replied.

When millions of Americans took to the streets a fortnight ago for the “No Kings” rally – “perhaps the largest single-day protest in US history” – Trump mocked them by posting an AI-generated video of himself bombarding them with excrement from a fighter jet. He may not care what voters think, but his party certainly should. “Keep the ‘No Kings’ protests coming – right through the elections this November and next.”

Sarah Pochin used her first Commons appearance to call for a burqa ban. Now, the Reform UK MP has made headlines again, said The Guardian, by telling a TV phone-in show that adverts contain too many black and Asian actors. She was talking to “Stuart in London”, who had complained that such ads “don’t represent what this country looks like”. Pochin agreed: “It drives me mad when I see adverts full of black people, full of Asian people,” she said, before blaming this on the “woke liberati”.

Widely held view

Her comments provoked howls of outrage. Wes Streeting, the Health Secretary, warned that they signalled a return to “1980s-style racism”; the shadow home secretary, Chris Philp, eventually agreed that they were racist; Nigel Farage described them as “ugly”. Yet Labour, the Tories and Reform UK are all being hypocritical here, said Darren Lewis in the Daily Mirror. By stirring up anti-immigrant sentiment, they’ve helped turn Britain into a place where an MP “feels empowered” to state that there are too many black faces on TV.

Hang on a minute, said Laurie Wastell in The Spectator. Pochin’s words were poorly chosen (as she has admitted), but she was merely expressing a widely held view that is grounded in truth. A recent Channel 4 study found that black people appear in 51% of commercials (23% in lead roles) though they make up only 4% of the UK population. Diversity campaigners are always going on about the importance of “representation”, meaning too many white people, so why shouldn’t an MP point out that white families are actually under-represented in TV ads?

Aspirational diversity

But adverts aren’t there to represent the world as it is, said Clive Morgan in The Independent. They work by presenting an aspirational vision that connects goods “emotionally” to viewers. Hence car ads don’t show the mundanity of traffic jams, they depict the possibility of the open road. And in today’s Britain, “possibility looks diverse”.

Those of us who grew up when people of colour were hardly seen in ads should celebrate their new ubiquity, but this shift isn’t due to firms getting “woke”. “Every face on screen is the product of research, focus groups, and consumer testing.” If diverse adverts alienated lots of people, they’d not run.

In fact, brands have found that inclusivity sells – especially to the young. Reform UK should pay heed, said Stephen Bush in the FT. Even before this latest row, 47% of Britons thought the party was racist – which is more than in 2024; and as last week’s election in Wales showed, that makes it increasingly vulnerable to tactical voting.

The government is shut down and so, apparently, is the House of Representatives. Speaker Mike Johnson has kept the House on an indefinite hiatus over the last month. That decision has halted the work of passing bills and doing oversight, while also blocking the swearing-in of a new Democratic representative.

Johnson’s decision has “diminished the role of Congress and shrunken the speakership” at a moment when President Donald Trump is claiming more power for himself, said Annie Karni at The New York Times. Johnson has “chosen to make himself subservient to Mr. Trump” instead of a “governing partner” as speakers before him have been. The president is taking notice. “I’m the speaker and the president,” Trump reportedly said to associates. That has created a “strange dynamic” in which Johnson seems to have used his “considerable power” to “render the House irrelevant.”

Shifting the balance of power

Johnson is “ostensibly” making the point that the House has “done its job and voted to fund the government,” said Leigh Ann Caldwell at Puck. It is Senate Democrats who are blocking the passage of a continuing resolution to end the government shutdown, after all. But his decision is also “inadvertently reducing the legislature’s own authority,” while Trump “seizes de facto spending and taxation powers” that constitutionally belong to Congress. Johnson’s deference to the president is accordingly “shifting the balance of power in a way that has not been seen since the Nixon administration.”

The House was “central” to the Founders’ vision of “what democracy looks like,” Will Bunch said at The Philadelphia Inquirer. Small districts and biennial elections were intended to “closely bond its members to the people” and be an “antidote to Western civilization’s monarchy problem.” Now the “absence of a functional Congress” is allowing Trump to “run the country by fiat.” Johnson may lead the House, but he is ceding “all of the job’s actual power to the president.”

House Republicans largely agree with Johnson’s tactics, said NOTUS. “What would we be doing?” said Rep. Tom Cole (R-Okla.). The battle over the shutdown is being waged in the Senate. Most House members would say they should come back when “we’ve got something to vote on,” Cole said. At the moment “we really don’t.” But “cracks are growing” in the GOP caucus, said Axios. Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia and Dan Crenshaw of Texas, among others, have “raised concerns about being on recess during the shutdown.”

Deepening suspicions

It is difficult for Johnson to argue that he is “serious about swiftly reopening the government” when he will not call the House into session, James Downie said at MSNBC. Another side effect: Johnson has used the House hiatus to delay the swearing-in of Democratic Rep.-elect Adelita Grijalva of Arizona. Grijalva has said she would be the 218th signature on a House discharge petition to force the release of the government’s files on Jeffrey Epstein. The delay in swearing in Grijalva “only deepens suspicions that the White House is hiding something” in the Epstein case.

Shocking! Women use exclamation marks three times more often than men, according to a new study.

Punctuation is a “fraught and contentious business”, said Melanie McDonagh in London’s The Standard. The study, due to be published in November in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, delves into the gender divide plaguing exclamation marks – the current “battleground” in the world of punctuation.

Exclamation marks have been found to convey a sender’s warmth and enthusiasm, but also lead to a perceived lack of power or an inability to think analytically. “That’s a particular gender stereotype you don’t want to play into,” said McDonagh.

‘A grammatical whoopee cushion’

Ultimately, exclamation marks are “suggestive of a bright smile” and a “non-confrontational stance” – a staunch “willingness not to seem bossy even if you are being bossy. I have to stop myself from using them all the time.”

This urge to exclaim is often because of fears women hold about how their language could make them look to others, said Cheryl Wakslak, co-author of the study.

Often backfiring instead, exclamation marks “suggest that the user is desperate to seem nice” and is tip-toeing to avoid offence. At the end of the day, your message itself should probably convey kindness “without an exclamation mark taking the sting out of it”, said McDonagh. “As for emojis, don’t get me started.”

Overusing exclamation marks is “irritating and moronic” and, according to F. Scott Fitzgerald, “like laughing at your own joke”, said Carol Midgley in The Times. It’s like admitting that you’re not funny and you need the punctuation to “signpost your jocularity with a grammatical whoopee cushion”.

“Like many women I live in terror of seeming slightly brusque, causing offence”, or, perhaps worst of all, “not being liked”. This could well explain why there’s now a “contagion of exclamation marks everywhere”, even in sympathy notes – something akin to “offering your condolences while wearing clown shoes”.

‘Female exclaimers need not worry’

At one point, “I shunned the things”, especially when writing in the workplace, said Pilita Clark in the Financial Times. But over time, exclamation marks wormed their way back in, whether due to the “informality that social media ushered in” or the pandemic, “which seemed to intensify said informality”. But now I wonder whether I started using them more “for another, more dubious reason” – was it because male colleagues were starting to catch on and do the same?

Now, “the big news from the research" is that regardless of your gender, “you can probably relax”. The perception of fewer analytical thinking skills or less power “doubtless matters” if you work for a London law firm, but “the research shows you will not be deemed less competent”. And you’ll be seen as warmer and more likeable to boot. That means “female explainers need not worry about being judged more harshly than any male counterpart” and “men harbouring urges to be more exclamative should feel free to submit”.

Because much of our communication now occurs online, “punctuation’s job description has gotten more demanding”, said Time. Without facial cues or gestures, it has to do quite a lot of heavy lifting, needing to make clear “not only what you’re trying to say, but how you’re trying to say it”.

And exclamation marks aren’t the only ones to have shifted – research suggests that “omitting periods is a way people communicate that they’re feeling relaxed”, while sentences that end in full stops are seen as less sincere than those without.

Ultimately, whether you use loads of punctuation or not, “everyone benefits from frankness and open discussion around punctuation”.

You cannot watch a game on TV these days without being inundated with gambling promotions. The rise of legal app-driven sports betting is changing the culture of sports. But new FBI arrests of prominent NBA figures raise questions about whether this gambling threatens the integrity of the game.

Portland Trail Blazers coach Chauncey Billups, Miami Heat guard Terry Rozier and former Cleveland Cavaliers player and assistant coach Damon Jones were arrested last week as part of “wide-ranging investigations related to illegal sports betting and rigged poker games,” said ESPN. And the arrests have put a damper on the start of the league’s 2025-26 season. There's “nothing more important to the league and its fans than the integrity of the competition,” said Commissioner Adam Silver.

Some observers believe Silver is responsible. The commissioner “put the NBA in bed with sports betting,” said Gary Washburn at The Boston Globe. The arrests are the “league’s worst nightmare,” but they are also “what many observers expected” when Silver decided to partner with legalized sports betting outfits. The league earned lots of money as a result, but the decision “may taint his legacy.”

Is the genie out of the bottle?

It “wouldn’t be an exaggeration to call this the worst scandal in NBA history” if the charges prove true, said Keith Reed at MSNBC. Now this season will be played “under the shadow of a federal investigation” that will make it difficult for some fans not to “question the integrity of every game they watch.” The league “may never be able to wash away the stench of these allegations.”

The arrests are “not shocking,” said Ian O’Connor at The Athletic. Sports gambling is an “all-American drug” and online technology is the “needle that instantly injects it into the vein.” You can blame the Supreme Court for its 2018 decision to “effectively open the floodgates” to betting, “but all the major sports leagues eagerly hopped on that bus.” Now the genie is out of the bottle and there is “no chance of bringing it back.”

“The NBA asked for this embarrassment,” said Nancy Armour at USA Today. It was “only too happy” to partner with betting companies, believing it could reap the profits but also “inoculate itself from its seedy underbelly” by issuing warnings to players and fans. That embrace by the NBA and other professional sports leagues has “fostered an environment where there are no guardrails.” The league knew the dangers and decided it wanted the gambling industry’s money anyway. “There's no more damning indictment than that.”

More regulation?

More regulation will be needed to “reduce opportunities for game manipulation,” Silver said to ESPN. The league is “learning as we go and working with the betting companies,” the commissioner said.

Sports betting is “bad for sports” as well as for the millions of Americans who “gamble past the point of prudence and move directly to the point of pain,” said David French at The New York Times. The “sports gambling revolution” may require more than regulation. “It may even need termination.”

In Washington DC last week, Rachel Reeves “started laying the groundwork for a painful Budget”, said Hugo Gye in The i Paper.

Speaking at the annual meeting of the International Monetary Fund, the Chancellor “adopted a strategy of doom and gloom”, confirming that both tax rises and spending cuts are on the table for 26 November, to help reverse an estimated £22 billion black hole in the public finances. Reeves blamed a likely growth downgrade by the Office for Budget Responsibility on Brexit, and warned that “those with the broadest shoulders should pay their fair share”.

‘Sitting on their assets’

Having already gone after non-doms and private schools, Reeves clearly believes the wealthy can be squeezed a bit more before the pips squeak, said Fraser Nelson in The Times. Problem is, we currently have a tax system “where the top 100 super-taxpayers contribute almost as much as the North Sea oil industry; where the top 0.1% pay more income tax than the entire bottom 50%”. The wealthy are already contributing their fair share – “and the fair shares of many others”.

Actually, in some ways the well-off are criminally “untaxed”, said Vicky Spratt in The i Paper. The UK’s vast property wealth – which has increased by almost £3 trillion in a decade – is hardly touched by the taxman. Homeowners who rode the historic house-price inflation wave through the 2010s have become “incredibly rich”. Reforming property taxes is the obvious answer. What’s wrong with asking them to contribute a small amount of the wealth they attained simply “by sitting on their assets”, when those on lower incomes are struggling to choose whether to “heat their homes, eat or pay rent”?

‘Electoral suicide’

A property tax is one option; Reeves is also reportedly looking at targeting pensions and cash Isas. But even if the Chancellor does choose to soak the better off, it still won’t be enough, said Andrew O’Brien on UnHerd. The Treasury now “needs huge amounts of cash”: the NHS alone has a £37 billion capital shortfall; we need another £17 billion just to fill potholes. It would be quicker and fairer to “stick this all on income tax”, where an extra 4p would raise around £30 billion a year. Unfortunately for Reeves, that would break a manifesto pledge, so it would be “electoral suicide”.

All options are painful, said Chris Blackhurst in The Independent, but the worst situation is the one we have now: a Treasury with a “tin ear” that feeds us a “drip, drip” of threats about November’s Statement – while also claiming to be kickstarting economic growth. In reality, businesses are putting decisions on hold, and the wealthy are eyeing the exits; “Britain is at a standstill”. All of this, and “the Budget is still over a month away”.

California once led the national campaign against gerrymandering. The Golden State’s once-a-decade congressional redistricting process was designed to prevent Democrats and Republicans from rigging the map in their own favor. Now voters will decide if those reform-minded days are over.

If approved, Proposition 50 will likely lead to “more Democrats being elected to Congress,” said The New York Times. The ballot measure would let the state temporarily dump its current map, drawn by an independent commission, for the “next three election cycles” in order to tilt its playing field to the left.

Democrats could “flip as many as five of the Republican-held seats in the state” under Gov. Gavin Newsom’s (D) proposal, an effort to counter Texas’ recent GOP-driven redistricting effort, said the Times. But some observers are skeptical that Proposition 50 will prove temporary. “How do you go back to restoring norms from here?” analyst Rob Stutzman said at a panel convened by the Public Policy Institute of California.

The will of the people?

Politicians who can “rig the vote in their favor” can also “safely ignore the will of the people,” said George Boardman at The Union. He voted for the 2010 measure that created California’s independent redistricting commission, to “stop the gerrymandering that has created life-long sinecures for many congressmen.” That makes it difficult to vote for the new measure. It's the “lesser of the two evils” to vote for Proposition 50 as long as the GOP is grabbing seats in Texas and other Republican-led states. “But I won’t like it one bit.”

President Donald Trump urged Texas to redraw its maps to favor Republicans. “Copying Trump’s bullying to gain power normalizes it,” said The San Diego Union-Tribune editorial board. And the California proposal is even “more extreme.” Proposition 50 leaves just four of the state’s 52 House seats in GOP hands. That's a level of “disenfranchisement” parallel to what “Deep South states used to do to Black voters for much of the 20th century.”

The ballot measure "doesn’t guarantee Democrats five seats,” Jim Newton said at CalMatters. Californians are “rightly proud of their independent commission” and its efforts against gerrymandering. Even with a redrawn map, however, Democratic candidates would still have to do the work of “collecting voters’ support and securing the office.” No one should make assumptions about outcomes. “District line-drawing alone is not enough for political victory.”

Independents sitting out

Former President Barack Obama is campaigning to pass Proposition 50, said The Associated Press. California voters “can stop Republicans in their tracks” by supporting it, he said in a 30-second TV ad. The measure is opposed by former Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who oversaw the creation of the independent commission in 2010.

More than 2.4 million voters have cast early ballots in the election, said The Sacramento Bee. Just 7% of independent voters have weighed in. If you are not a partisan voter, this election is "tailor-made for you to sit out,” said Republican political strategist Mike Madrid. The final day for voting is Nov. 4.

The filibuster is keeping the government shutdown alive. Republicans hold a majority in the Senate, but filibustering Democrats have enough votes to prevent the GOP from reaching the 60-vote threshold now needed to pass most legislation. Some Republican officials think it might be time to kill the rule and finally end the shutdown.

A growing willingness among GOP senators to consider ending the filibuster is a “sign of just how stuck things are,” said NOTUS. Longtime defenders of the 60-vote rule are now weakening in their resolve. Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) is a “strong supporter” of the filibuster, “but obviously I’ll look at any plan that anyone puts out in order to reopen the government,” she said. Republicans may have no other choice. “If we can’t get anything done, that’s what they’re gonna force,” said Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.). There are skeptics, however. “Bad idea,” said Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.).

Creating excuses for Democrats?

“Republicans can end the government shutdown today,” said Bill Scher at Washington Monthly. GOP senators in September used the “nuclear option” to end the filibuster for many of President Donald Trump’s nominees. If they do not do the same in order to get government back in business, it will show “how little they care about keeping it open” and how much they prefer “creating excuses for vilifying Democrats.” That means “we shouldn’t expect a shutdown to end anytime soon.”

The GOP is “already chipping away at the filibuster rule,” said Matt Yglesias at Slow Boring. That is a good thing, actually. The “filibuster rule is dumb,” and scrapping it altogether is better than creating “weird loopholes” for a few special cases. Ending the filibuster would let Republicans pass their preferred bills while allowing Democrats to “vote no on legislation they don’t like.” Democrats might not win the budget battle, but “we still end up with a better outcome.”

Ending the filibuster is the “most shortsighted way” to end the shutdown, said The Washington Post editorial board. The rule has a history of “frustrating presidents” but has also moderated legislation from the “more unruly House.” If neither side can find common ground to break the deadlock, the “world’s greatest deliberative body will break forever.” That would be a “disaster for Republicans.”

Moving first

Some House Republicans are pushing their Senate colleagues to act, said The Hill. GOP officials “need to be taking a look at the 60-vote threshold,” said Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas). The filibuster makes Republicans “beholden to a broken system right now.”

“Turnabout is fair play,” said Nick Catoggio at The Dispatch. If Republicans nuke the filibuster now, “it will stay nuked when Democrats eventually recapture control of the executive and legislative branches.” That is the argument against ending the filibuster. The counterargument is that Democrats are already likely to kill the rule when and if they return to power. If you are a Republican senator, “you might reflect on that and wonder why you shouldn’t move first.”

For a self-styled “President of PEACE”, Donald Trump has been remarkably bellicose on the home front, said Susan B. Glasser in The New Yorker. He has ordered hundreds of National Guard troops into what he insists are the “war-ravaged” cities of Portland and Chicago, to the outrage of the Democratic elected officials who run these places.

In response to their vocal opposition, Trump called for the governor of Illinois and mayor of Chicago to be jailed. Meanwhile, federal agents working for ICE and Border Patrol are conducting increasingly aggressive raids, said Melissa Gira Grant in The New Republic. Hundreds of them recently stormed an apartment building on Chicago’s South Side, rappelling from Black Hawk helicopters and leading away “zip-tied” residents, including children. Trump is effectively “waging war” on Chicago.

Democrat leaders only have themselves to blame, said Rich Lowry in the New York Post. If they had stopped people rioting outside ICE facilities in Chicago, and harassing agents there, Trump wouldn’t have had the excuse that he wanted to send in troops. It was the same story in Los Angeles. These cities invest a baffling amount of energy in defending illegal immigration, said Byron York in the Washington Examiner. Chicago is a “sanctuary city”, which means it limits or denies cooperation with federal officials in enforcing immigration law. Now, its mayor has declared parts of the city an “ICE-free zone”. Yet polls show that a majority of the public support deporting illegal migrants. By enforcing federal law, “Trump is doing what most people want”.

There have been some protests outside ICE facilities, said Kimberly Atkins Stohr in The Boston Globe, but we’re talking crowds of dozens, not thousands. Local officials have been in no danger of being overwhelmed. Trump is now threatening to invoke the Insurrection Act if legal challenges obstruct troop deployments. But that law is meant only to suppress “rebellion” that local law enforcement can’t handle. In recent history, it has only been invoked once, in 1992, when California’s governor requested military help to quell the LA riots. Ultimately, “Trump wants a war”, and only the Supreme Court can stop him militarising our cities. Given that it has already granted him immunity from actions taken in office, I doubt it will “stand up to him now”.

Zohran Mamdani, the democratic socialist candidate running for New York City mayor, has proposed free public buses as part of his campaign.

It's become a major part of his platform, as he and his supporters argue that free buses could increase ridership and efficiency, as well as benefit lower-income New Yorkers. But the suggestion also has its fair share of critics, who say it would greatly reduce bus safety, increase taxes and may not even be feasible.

Get on board

Implementing free New York City buses could “increase ridership citywide by 23% — an additional 170 million trips in a year — and increase the average bus speed,” said The New York Times. Making buses faster also “incentivizes people to ride the bus who might otherwise now be taking an Uber” or a taxi, said economist Charles Komanoff to NPR. Along with free fares, “building more dedicated bus lanes and other service upgrades could improve speed and ridership numbers further,” added the Times.

The proposal could also improve efficiency. “Assaults on bus operators may decline because passengers are not swiping a card or handing over cash,” said Slate. The boarding process could also be faster without the extra time needed to pay the fare. While there will be a drop in revenue because of the lack of fares, the “city would benefit economically because of the time and money that riders would save,” said the Times.

Free buses are also “fiscally progressive, disproportionately benefiting the less wealthy,” said Slate. It “removes a major barrier to transit access for low-income individuals,” said economics Professor Amitrajeet A. Batabyal at the Rochester Beacon. Fare elimination improves access to “nonwork activities, such as shopping, health care visits and social interactions, which may improve overall quality of life.” As a result, policymakers “ought to focus on the ability of such actions to reduce financial strain, improve health and even decrease contacts with the criminal justice system.”

Missing the bus

“There is no such thing as a free bus,” said The Washington Post editorial board. Removing fares “would cost more than $500 million annually to the MTA (Metropolitan Transportation Authority) in lost fares to make all buses free to riders,” said Vital City. To replace this revenue, the “city would have to provide those funds annually to the MTA either through a reallocation of existing approved funding under the mayor’s control or, more likely, a budget modification approved by the City Council.” The funding will have to come from taxpayers. More specifically, the city’s bus system is “controlled by the state, meaning any changes would need buy-in” from Gov. Kathy Hochul (D), said the Post. She has “already ruled out raising taxes on high-income residents to pay” for Mamdani’s agenda.

Free buses can also lead to “major safety issues,” said Paul J. Gessing, the president of the Rio Grande Foundation, a New Mexico-based think tank, at the National Review. Especially in increasingly extreme weather, they might become “rolling homeless shelters.” If there is free unlimited bus access to buses, “vagrants and drug addicts would camp out all day,” said the Post. In turn, “parents would grow afraid to let their children ride alone.” While “wealthier residents would find another way to get around,” those who are poor and most dependent on the buses would “suffer the most.”

Mamdani's free bus plan may be a lofty promise to begin with, as it would “require cooperation from state leaders and the MTA, which is state-run, and might require some concessions on his part,” said Al Jazeera. The MTA is also “under additional pressure from the federal government.” Mamdani “understands that transportation affects job prospects, influences public health and helps shape the cost of living,” said Slate. “Many of his proposals are creative and worthwhile. Nixing bus fares is an exception.”

The days are getting colder but inside our homes the temperature is rising as the annual thermostat battles hot up.

A survey last year found that 53% of couples argue over the heating and that while eight in 10 women admitted to secretly turning up the thermostat, men were most likely to want a cooler house and to start a row over energy bills.

‘Stealth-adjusting’

There’s simply “no such thing as a couple who wants their house the same temperature”, said Zoe Williams in The Guardian. Instead, couples spend the colder months “stealth-adjusting the temperature until it gets stealth-adjusted back”.

The “beauty” of this scenario is “how many other conversations about compromise, lifestyle, mortality, domestic load and everything else” are “mediated through this very slow-burn conversation”. It’s conducted over a period that is “roughly what harvest time would have been to a pre-industrialised marital unit” – acting as a “release valve” of a “set of practical, crop-and-pig-based conflicts, for all the other tensions of the year”.

Yes, men are generally thought of as the ones who turn the thermostat down, but sometimes it’s the other way around, said Susannah Frieze in the Daily Mail, because “I slink around the house, unseen by my husband, turning down the dials on radiators”.

“I’m far tougher in the cold than my husband”, and while our son is “shivering like a whippet and complaining about the cold”, my daughter “wraps herself in a duvet if all else fails” and “given half a chance, she too will spin the dial down”.

‘Shakespearean bitterness’ 

The “split between those who reach for a jumper, rather than turning on a radiator, can be almost Shakespearean in its bitterness”, said Will Gore in The Independent, but this doesn’t mean it can’t be resolved.

For years, my wife and I would “both find the thermostat had been nudged a degree or two up, or down, depending on who was in the house”, but I’ve “mellowed”, and now, “when I see the thermostat has been turned up to 19 degrees, I (mostly) resist the temptation to twiddle it back to 16” because I “no longer regard radiators in October as an outrage”.

Still, the “central heating battle of sexes” have begun this year, said Nick Harding in The Telegraph, and this is “only to be expected” because there’s “plenty of scientific evidence to show that men and women react differently to temperature”.

A study published in The Lancet found that women’s hands can be significantly colder, at 28.2C on average, compared with 32.2C for men, and a 2025 review on Building and Environment concluded that in cold environments women feel significantly colder than men, and have lower skin temperature, which points to “genuine physiological differences” between the sexes.

Women also have “less muscle, which is a natural heat producer”, more body fat, which can “block the flow of blood carrying heat to the skin and extremities” and as they are generally smaller than men, they have a “higher skin surface to volume ratio, causing them to lose heat more quickly through the skin”.

So stick to your guns “next time you find yourself arguing over the thermostat with your husband”, because “there is plenty of biological ammo to back up your position”.

A specter is haunting Portland — one of amphibians, or at least people dressed as such, in what’s become a regular feature at protests against the Trump administration’s deportation operations. As the White House continues to frame cities like Portland and Chicago as chaotic war zones, demonstrators in inflatable costumes (or sometimes wearing nothing at all) have brought a touch of the surreal and ridiculous to the otherwise grim confrontations with federal immigration forces. As protests grow in both size and intensity around the country, these freedom frogs and their costumed ilk are increasingly becoming symbols for the demonstrators’ cause, for better or worse.

‘This moment is dangerous. It’s violent. It’s also absurd.’

For protesters, the incongruity of an inflatable costume amid frequently tense demonstrations is part of the appeal. The “juxtaposition” of a costumed animal “standing up to ICE covered in weapons and armor is absurd,” said 404 Media. That is part of why the Portland frogs are “hitting so hard” in the zeitgeist. Although critics may argue that the costumed protesters are taking the threat posed by armed administration forces “too lightly,” that is “kind of the point,” said Fast Company. As the White House works to frame anti-ICE protesters as “antifa supersoldiers” in an attempt to create fear around joining them at demonstrations, “viral clips showing gaggles of gyrating animals in Portland deny the administration” both points.

Protesters say the “absurdity” of costumed adults reveling in the face of ICE aggression is “meant to display community joy” and “helps to dispel” the White House’s claims of blue cities as urban war zones, said NBC News. “If you’re going to make it silly and say that we’re evil, we’re going to make it silly by showing how evil you are,” said Brooks Brown, a protester who helped provide dozens of costumes to demonstrators as part of a grassroots “Operation Inflation” project.

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The “juxtaposition of this moment is what’s resonating” with the broader public, said Whitney Phillips, an expert on political semiotics and narratives, to The New York Times. “This moment is dangerous. It’s violent. It’s also absurd.” And although the “animal army” of costumed protesters hasn’t “precluded shoving matches” or ICE arrests of demonstrators, it has “altered the national conversation about the protests” themselves through “internet memes and segments on late-night shows.”

Politics in the second Trump administration is predominantly split between “two internet-poisoned types of behavior, said Sarah Jeong at The Verge: “Auraposting,” or an “earnest attempt to look cool,” and “shitposting,” a form of “nihilism” that “refuses to engage with meaning, words or reality” in a “mockery of seriousness.” In this context, the frog costumes have “no meaning” by themselves. Rather, it is the “juxtaposition against an increasingly militarized ICE” that makes these “big googly eyes so powerful.”

‘If you think this is crazy, congratulations, you’re a Republican!’

For supporters of the president’s deportation platform, the confrontational silliness of costumed protesters is often taken as proof positive that the Department of Homeland Security is largely in the right. Republicans are “optimistic” that the protests outside ICE facilities in Portland and Chicago will do more to “drum up support for the Trump administration,” said The Washington Examiner.

“If you think this is crazy,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said on X, in response to a protest of naked bike riders outside Portland’s ICE facility, “congratulations, you’re a Republican!”

“I have a feeling a bunch of illegals saw this and just threw up their hands and self-deported rather than be subjected to whatever this is,” said Turning Point USA spokesperson Andrew Kolvet on X.

With the president drawing attention to the “small but persistent” demonstrations outside the Portland ICE facility, a “growing number of his supporters, including MAGA influencers, have turned up to confront the protesters,” The Guardian said. Despite “clear visual evidence of a small number of demonstrators in non-threatening attire,” conservative influencers who accompanied Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem for a visit to the site last week “continued to refer to the protesters as dangerous radicals.”

“It has all the makings of a gripping spy novel,” said Gaby Hinsliff in The Guardian. Two young men – one a parliamentary researcher, the other a teacher – are accused of passing secrets to China; but amid “swirling political intrigue” the case mysteriously collapses weeks before going to trial.

The government has been forced to deny that it intervened in the case to appease China, after the Crown Prosecution Service accused it of failing to provide the necessary evidence to prosecute both Christopher Cash and Christopher Berry. The two men had been charged under the Official Secrets Act, accused of passing parliamentary information to Beijing between 2021 and 2023. The current government and the last one have blamed each other for failing to officially designate China a threat to national security – without which, it is argued, the case would have been thrown out.

Yesterday, No. 10 released three witness statements from Keir Starmer’s deputy national security adviser outlining the UK’s handling of espionage allegations that led to the case collapsing. These clearly state that China has been carrying out “large scale espionage” against the UK, but stressed the need for a “positive economic relationship” with Beijing.

‘Who knew what?’

“Key questions remain,” said The Telegraph, including “why did Starmer do nothing to prevent the case collapsing?” and “did the Chinese government make any representations to the UK about this case?”

Another “crucial question”, said Tom Peck in his political sketch for The Times, is “who knew China had become a threat and by when?” That matter “took over Prime Minister’s Questions” yesterday despite MPs admitting privately that they “don’t actually understand” the issue.

‘More confidence needed’

“You don’t need to be George Smiley to know that Beijing is doing everything it can to compromise our security,” said Michael Gove in the Daily Mail. Its spies “bribe, bully, honeytrap and eavesdrop” in order to acquire state secrets and intellectual property.

As well as a profound threat, China is also a crucial partner, said Josh Glancy in The Sunday Times. So Labour’s balanced policy makes sense: engage, but “proceed with extreme caution”. What seems to be lacking is “confidence” in our values; there’s “an undue fear of ruffling China’s feathers”. Look at Germany. Its trading relationship with China is three times larger than ours, and yet last month a German national was imprisoned for spying for Beijing, without any trade bust-ups. Engagement is well and good, but with a nation as ruthless as China, “it works best in tandem with strength”.

“It used to be that famous people would turn to social media to correct the record,” said Rebecca Nicholson in the Financial Times. “Now, you’re nobody without a multi-part Netflix documentary that allows you to illustrate, at length, ideally from the mansion, how wronged you have been.” Two years ago, David Beckham allowed cameras into his home to do that. Now, his wife Victoria has got in on the action.

Broadly likeable

Celebrating the 20th anniversary of her eponymous clothing brand, the series follows Beckham as she prepares for a big fashion show in Paris, looping in multiple industry figures (Anna Wintour, Tom Ford and others) to vouch for the fact that she is more than “a celebrity interloper”.

Beckham comes across as broadly likeable, said Helen Coffey in The Independent. This is a woman so self-conscious, she “hasn’t felt confident enough to smile in a picture for a quarter-century”. Yet here, she cracks jokes and does a dance routine with her daughter.

Boring advert for Brand Beckham

As the series goes through her rise from stage-struck child to pop star to WAG and fashion mogul, we do get glimpses of the real Beckham, said Lucy Mangan in The Guardian – a sober, industrious, drily humorous woman who loves making beautiful clothes.

But the interesting questions raised by the show – how we find our true calling in life; why the media takes against some women – are not ones it is interested to explore. This a carefully controlled “three-hour advert for brand Beckham” and it’s boring, which is a shame, as Victoria herself is clearly more interesting than she allows herself to be here.

After countless rumours, the creators of “The Inbetweeners” have confirmed the cult show will return to the small screen.

It’s been 17 years since the Channel 4 sitcom about the “adolescent travails of four foul-mouthed teens” first aired, becoming so successful it “spawned two blockbuster films”, said The Independent. Now, Damon Beesley and Iain Morris’ hit show is set to return; in an announcement the pair said they were “plotting more adventures” for the awkward friends.

‘Leave the past in the past’

“The Inbetweeners” specialised in that “specific brand of toe-curling cringe humour” that British sitcoms are known for, said Helen Coffey in The Independent. Unlike “Skins”, where the teens were all “beautiful yet permanently angst-ridden”, the uneasy group of friends at the centre of the show “struck a cultural chord because they painted a fairly accurate, if exaggerated, portrait of the specific nuances and humiliations required to make it through adolescence in this country”. Characters were “sick in nightclubs”; fibbed about their sexual conquests; and “casually joked about one of their teachers being a paedophile”. Whenever they did somehow manage to begin a relationship with a girl, they “very quickly ballsed things up”.

It was “completely and utterly of its time” – which is exactly why news of the reboot “brings me no pleasure whatsoever”. I want to be “supportive” of British comedy but “there is not one single atom of me that wants to see those characters all grown up, nor that particular brand of toilet humour translated to adult life”. The problem isn’t just that you “risk forever damaging the original legacy with a botched job” but also that “grasping attempts to cash in on” the nostalgia means there’s less space and money for truly “groundbreaking” new projects. Much as this group of “disgusting” teenage boys will always “hold a weird place” in my heart, “I wish we could leave the past in the past”.

A millennial dream

“I’d argue that there couldn’t be a better time to unite the four unlikely friends,” said City A.M.’s Adam Bloodworth. Yes, there’s an argument that the reunion “definitely wouldn’t have happened” had the four main actors – Simon Bird, Blake Harrison, Joe Thomas and James Buckley – found more success after the show.

“But there’s more to it than that. ‘The Inbetweeners’ went on to epitomise the millennial cliche: the backpack-wearing, binge-drinking nomad who didn’t quite fit in with the idea of growing up.” Like many of my peers, I’m still trying to work out what I want to do with my life. It turns out that for many of us, “not much has changed” in the last decade. “If there was ever more of a reason to bring ‘The Inbetweeners’ back, I don’t know what that would be.”

As a “socially maligned” teenager growing up “out in the sticks of Ireland”, the show was an “equal parts comic and cathartic watch” for me, said Almha Murphy in The Mirror. I just hope the comeback can do the show “justice”, and that it doesn’t lose the “relatable edge that allowed disjointed teenagers like myself to see themselves in it”.

“I am genuinely worried that the woke Gen Zers are instantly going to hate it”, said Rod McPhee in The Sun. Of course, they won’t bother watching it: instead they’ll “fleetingly consult the social media hive and decide it’s ripe for cancelling”. But I think we deserve a reboot “without any censoring of the swearing, smutty gags and obscenity we loved”.

While news of a reboot often comes with a great deal of “fear”, said Milo Pope in Metro, as loyal fans are nervous of “hackneyed” attempts to revive beloved characters, this revival could be an “exciting next step in the show’s history”. Don’t let other failed comebacks convince you it will be a disaster. The show’s creators have an opportunity to explore a “treasure trove” of themes from parenthood to ageing. “If you’re a fan of the original series and movies, ‘The Inbetweeners’ deserves a chance to prove it still has something to say.”