Short Cuts: At the Checkpoint in Hebron

Ben Ehrenreich, 30 June 2016

I was​ surprised a few weeks ago to find everyone I knew in Hebron feeling cheerful. Perhaps it was the weather. Four months had passed since my last visit to the city, the largest, and...

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One Click at a Time

Owen Hatherley, 30 June 2016

In the end postcapitalism, like postmodernism, is the name of an absence, not a positive programme. Like the anticapitalism of the early 2000s, it tells you what it’s not.

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Short Cuts: The BBC

Daniel Hind, 16 June 2016

The​ BBC’s Royal Charter is up for renewal. On 12 May the government published a White Paper, A BBC for the Future: A Broadcaster of Distinction, setting out its proposals. A draft of the...

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We perceive the countryside as if farmed fields were the default state, as if the two were synonymous. But why should this be true, when so much else has changed?

Read more about How to Grow a Weetabix: Farms and Farmers

Diary: European Schools

Peter Pomerantsev, 16 June 2016

It’s said of Boris Johnson that he elaborated his cartoon Englishness at Eton, but the groundwork would have been laid at his European School.

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On​ the last day of 2003, Macedonian border guards arrested Khaled el-Masri at the Serbian border. He had a suspicious name, and the Macedonians didn’t like the look of his passport....

Read more about More than a Million Names: American Intelligence

Somalia Syndrome

Patrick Cockburn, 2 June 2016

In​ 1996 I visited Penjwin, an impoverished village in Iraqi Kurdistan close to the Iranian border, where people were trying to make a little money through what must be one of the most...

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Europe’s Sullen Child: Breurope

Jan-Werner Müller, 2 June 2016

Ten years ago, London might have had a different vision for Europe and been taken seriously, even rallied other member states. Now Britain is seen not just as inward-looking, but as selfish and sullen.

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Brexotics have always regarded the EU as a deep-laid plot to undermine and eventually to extinguish the nation-state in general and Britain in particular; ‘they’ are always ganging up against ‘us’.

Read more about Nigels against the World: The EU Referendum

Sometimes, the most important insights make their way into the world without fanfare. As yet, few have picked up on an analysis by Thomas Philippon of the history of the unit cost of financial intermediation.

Read more about Must Do Better: Why isn’t banking cheaper?

David Laws’s memoir of his time in government ends with everything in tatters, his party having gone from being a full partner in government to having the same number of MPs as the Democratic Unionists.

Read more about Short Cuts: Shuffling Off into Obscurity

Stuck in Sicily

Daniel Trilling, 5 May 2016

On a sound file sent to me via WhatsApp, a teenage girl sobs, and an older woman says: ‘Don’t worry, the white people will help you.’ The girl is 17, from a village in Edo state in Nigeria.

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Crisis in Brazil

Perry Anderson, 21 April 2016

Overnight, Dilma Rousseff’s Workers’ Party, which had long enjoyed by far the highest level of approval in Brazil, became the most unpopular party in the country. How had it come to this?

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When Bitcoin Grows Up: What is Money?

John Lanchester, 21 April 2016

It’s time for the bitcoin to decide what it wants to be when it grows up. It could have an impact as great as the new kind of banking introduced in Renaissance Italy.

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Putin in Syria

Jonathan Steele, 21 April 2016

Flanked​ by his ministers of defence and foreign affairs, Vladimir Putin looked characteristically stern as he went on television on 14 March to announce a significant reduction in...

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A master politician like Merkel will never let a good crisis go to waste. By opening the German border, Merkel could hope to recapture the moral high ground.

Read more about Scenario for a Wonderful Tomorrow: Merkel Changes Her Mind Again

Short Cuts: Stirrers Up of Strife

David Bromwich, 17 March 2016

This election year​ will be remembered as the one in which two candidates rallied the indignation of millions against the establishment. Both Trump and Sanders actually call it that. The...

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Diary: At the Calais Jungle

Ben Ehrenreich, 17 March 2016

Baraa Halabieh​ could recall almost every detail of the long journey from his family home in the Syrian city of Hama: every bus and taxi fare, where he slept or failed to sleep each night, how...

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