Daniel Soar

If you’re​ 18, without any experience of your chosen branch of higher education, your best hope of advancement – of learning to think like your elders – is to listen to your teachers, taking diligent notes. But that’s no good if what they’re saying makes no sense. Selin, the narrator of Elif Batuman’s novel, who is settling in to her first year at...

The beauty of the Joint Strike Fighter project is that everyone can bring something to the party. In a Lancashire workshop, for instance, BAE Systems is building a section of the aft fuselage, including the tail, for every F-35; along with other contributions from all over the world, these pieces are then shipped to Texas for final assembly. This means that every F-35 sale is a boost to the coffers of Britain’s own largest arms company. (BAE has also been allowed to do the foldy bits at the end of the wings.) And the opportunities are everywhere. There are aluminium sheets from Milton Keynes, electronic modules from Billingstad, circuit boards from Ankara, hydraulics from Melbourne, wiring systems from Rotterdam, manifolds from Adelaide, wing parts from Turin and actuators from New York.

This is​ a story about two bad boys. One, Julian Assange, has been holed up in the Ecuadorian embassy in London for more than three years. The other, the artist Ai Weiwei, has done his time in detention too – nearly three months’ solitary confinement in 2011 in an undisclosed location in Beijing. They’re friends: last year, while Ai was over for his big show at the Royal...

On 21 August​ a UK-piloted Reaper drone – an unmanned aerial vehicle, remotely controlled from RAF Waddington, an airbase south of Lincoln, a few miles off the A1 to Doncaster – launched a Hellfire missile at a car near Raqqa in Syria. In the car were Reyaad Khan and Ruhul Amin, two British citizens who had left the UK to join Isis in 2013. They were killed instantly. If this...

A new year​! A new you! This is supposed to be the time for self-improvement, which makes me wonder what’s gone wrong for 2015. We’re used to the newspaper supplements’ December/January yadda-yadda of diets and get-fit-quick schemes, to the cultural roundups of the year ahead. The steady increase in all this stuff – the annual binge – is one of the more...