Chris texted me five days before the edge of the storm reached Jamaica. ‘Hurricane Melissa is coming. Can you spot me £50 to stack up on some food please?’ I checked projections from the US National Hurricane Centre, hoping the storm would blow further west. The hurricane approached slowly. It paused, lingered, crawled. I texted friends to ask if they were prepared. I told them to stay safe. It was magical thinking, like saying ‘have a safe flight.’
Rwanda’s Eric Manizabayo competing in the cycling Road World Championships in Kigali, 28 September 2025 (AP Photo/Jerome Delay)
USA Cycling has said it is ‘committed to diversifying American bike racing and we want to see these Black athletes succeed.’ And yet, in September 2025, they sent no Black riders to the Road World Championships in Kigali, Rwanda – the first time the competition, which has been running since 1921, has been held in Africa.
Part of Rodrigo Paz Pereira’s success in the Bolivian presidential election lies with his choice of running mate, Edmand Lara, a forty-year-old lawyer and former police captain in Santa Cruz, who was raised in a small town in Cochabamba. He became famous for his TikTok videos about police corruption, and knows how to speak a different language from that of either the middle-class doctores or the coca growers’ leaders.
The obvious utility for metal-organic frameworks – always a concern for the Nobel committee, especially in chemistry, especially in recent years – is to use their vast surface to capture and store other molecules: water or carbon in the air; pollutants in the environment; drugs or toxins in the body. There are startups and clinical trials exploring these uses, but nothing yet at scale. That said, they are unquestionably fascinating materials.
The regional psychiatric hospital on the outskirts of Odesa serves a population of around 2.5 million. It’s surrounded by a high wall; the way in is through a set of rusty gates. It was purpose-built in 1892. When Frantz Fanon visited psychiatric hospitals in the Soviet Union in 1960, he remarked that ‘you’re watched everywhere there’ and ‘even the toilets have no doors.’
D’Angelo on stage at Brixton Academy in 2000 (Alamy / Andy Paradise)
D’Angelo, that Pentecostal preacher’s son, the man Robert Christgau called ‘R&B Jesus’, has died, and, with him, a way of seeing and interpreting the world has been withdrawn. Every one of his records was rapturous. There are few people with a singing voice as sensitive, as patient, as sensuous.
Global Progress Action was in London at the end of last month, filling Methodist Central Hall with politicians and think tankers of broadly defined ‘progressive’ politics from around the world. On the day, there was airport-style security, and everyone you didn’t recognise was the former prime minister of Sweden. Morgan McSweeney floated about on a protective cloud of staff as Rihanna’s ‘Umbrella’ played softly through the speakers.