Who should we call the first “Instagram billionaire”? It’s a mark of the new Gilded Age we’ve entered that both women vying for that title belong to the same family, the illustrious Kardashian-Jenner clan. In 2019, it looked like Kylie Jenner had passed the ten-figure mark, only for Forbes to revise its estimates, declaring that Jenner had juiced her net worth with “white lies, omissions and outright fabrications.” (Her real wealth, the magazine thought, was a paltry $900 million). So, as of April this year, the accolade belongs to Jenner’s no less enterprising sister, Kim Kardashian West.

Social media has…

It’s December 1963, and a roomful of liberal luminaries are gathered at New York’s Americana Hotel. They are here for the presentation of the Emergency Civil Liberties Committee’s prestigious Tom Paine Award, an accolade which, a year earlier, had been accepted by esteemed philosopher and anti-nuclear campaigner Bertrand Russell. If any in the audience have reservations about this year’s recipient, a 22-year-old folk singer called Bob Dylan, their skepticism will soon be vindicated.

In what must rank as one of the most cack-handed acceptance speeches in history, an evidently drunk Dylan begins with a surreal digression about the attendees’ lack…

This week, Douglas Murray argued that the on-going shambles of the European Union’s vaccination effort should be chalked up to federalist dogma. “There is no logical reason why EU countries could not have been allowed to pursue independent vaccine development, procurement and roll-out,” wrote Murray, except that “it has already been decided that an EU-wide approach is always the only approach.”

In fact, there are two rather large reasons that richer EU nations, who would have been better off going it alone on vaccines, chose not to: Russia and China. As Jens Spahn, the German health minister, told the Bundestag…

The story of the Opium Wars in mid-19th century China has been told in many ways, but the account which has always stayed with me is the short one given by W.G. Sebald in The Rings of Saturn. In just a few pages, and with his novelist’s eye for arresting detail, Sebald portrays the European incursion into the Celestial Empire as a tragic meeting of two hubristic and uncomprehending civilisations.

The Opium Wars unfolded amid efforts to keep China open to European commercial interests, after the Chinese had tried to limit the British opium trade through Canton. In the Second…

With the recent expedition of Nasa’s Perseverence rover to Mars, I’ve taken an interest in space architecture; more specifically, habitats for people on the moon or the Red Planet. The subject first grabbed my attention earlier this year, when I saw that a centuries-old forestry company in Japan is developing wooden structures for future space colonies. Space architecture is not as other-worldly as you might think. In various ways, it holds a revealing mirror to life here on Earth.

Designing human habitats for Mars is more than just a technical challenge (though protecting against intense radiation and minus 100C temperatures…

Analysing internet memes tends to be self-defeating: mostly their magic comes from a fleeting, blasé irony which makes you look like a fool if you try to pin it down. But sometimes a gem comes along that’s too good to let pass. Besides, the internet’s endless stream of found objects, jokes and observations are ultimately a kind of glorious collective artwork, somewhere between Dada collage and an epic poem composed by a lunatic. And like all artworks, this one has themes and motifs worth exploring.

Which brings me to cat-lawyer. The clip of the Texas attorney who, thanks to a…

The likely appointment of Mario Draghi as Italy’s next prime minister has been widely, if nervously, greeted as a necessary step. Draghi, an esteemed economist and central banker, will be the fourth unelected technocrat to fill the post in Italy in the last 30 years. As the Guardian concedes by way of welcoming Draghi’s appointment, a ready embrace of unelected leaders is “not a good look for any self-respecting democracy.”

Italy’s resort to temporary “technical governments” reflects the fact that its fractious political system, with its multitude of parties and short-lived coalitions, is vulnerable to paralysis at moments of crisis…

Many themes of the Trump presidency reached a crescendo on January 6th, when the now-former president’s supporters rampaged through the Capitol building. Among those themes is the controversy over whether we should label the Trump movement “fascist.”

This argument has flared-up at various points since Trump won the Republican nomination in 2015. After the Capitol attack, commentators who warned of a fascist turn in American politics have been rushed back into interview slots and op-ed columns. Doesn’t this attempt by a violent, propaganda-driven mob to overturn last November’s presidential election vindicate their claims?

If Trumpism continues after Trump, then so…