‘The only thing stopping Trump from monetising Greenland is that you can’t put it on a mug. Yet’ Donald Trump has never been a man who does things quietly, or particularly logically. Chaos is the policy. Disruption is the strategy. By the time he had set his sights on Greenland, most of the world had long stopped being surprised by what came out of his mouth; and yet, for the 56,000 people who live there, this particular fixation landed differently. At some point in 2019, Nuu

Artificial intelligence has ushered in a new age of geopolitics. The unveiling of Anthropic's Mythos AI model in April may one day be remembered as a historic turning point. But this is not a technology story. It is a geopolitical one. How the technology is being distributed, and how Washington has responded to its unveiling, tells us a great deal about the world that is emerging. New geopolitical lines are being drawn, and Mythos may prove to be the ink. What is it exactly?

Tony Blair’s unabashed tendency to offer his unsolicited opinion on the decline of the Labour party has unfortunately become a rather exhausting feature of British politics. Refusing to comply with his fate of exiting stage left and disappearing into irrelevancy, the former Prime Minister and Labour party leader has maintained an irritating desire to be heard. His latest intervention comes in the form of a rambling essay posted to the Tony Blair Institute’s so-called ‘insight

Donald Trump did not engineer the decline of American soft power, though he would probably trademark it if he could. Instead, he is one of its clearest consequences and biggest brands. Long before he entered the White House, faith in the American model was already eroding at home and abroad. Trump emerged from this decline and has spent his presidency accelerating it. After failing to secure a Nobel Peace Prize last year, Trump petulantly wrote to Norwegian Prime Minister Jon

Boards of Canada, a Scottish electronic music duo, are soon to release their first LP in 13 years. ‘Inferno’, will be available through Warp Records and conventional streaming from the 29th of May. The duo released their first full length LP, ‘Music Has the Right to Children’, in 1997, an album which has since been described by Simon Reynolds as ‘the greatest psychedelic album of the ‘90s’. ‘Music Has the Right to Children’ represented a crystallisation of what is now recogn

It feels like only a short while ago that everyone watched Kamala Harris attempt what many saw as an impossible balancing act: to defend an increasingly unpopular president while somehow preparing to inherit the party. Now, JD Vance may be realising his vice presidency comes with the same trap; the parallels have become difficult to ignore as we approach 2028. Both Harris and Vance have served under unpopular presidents. Both are expected to publicly defend every administrati

“Damn Daniel! Back at it again with the white vans!” Says the narrator in a viral Internet meme from roughly a decade ago. You probably associate this meme with reactions of laughter or derision in the school corridor. Regardless, the meme remains in your mind years later. Internet memes – colourful static photos, gifs, or short videos – are easy to recall. Constant repetition helps to reinforce the meme in the memory – your friend may have laughed at “Damn Daniel!”, repeatin

America’s authoritarian tilt is visible just about anywhere you look. You can see it in the institutions Trump has bent to his will, and the way he has pushed his presidential powers well beyond the limits of his office. Yet, I think if you really want to understand the unique authoritarian turn developing in America, you should look no further than Washington DC. Today, the beating heart of America’s federal government is a vision of the country Trump wants to build, and the

Elon Musk seemed to be omnipresent a year ago. 2025 was swathed in a succession of Musk's political undertakings, his name part of the furniture of the headlines. January saw him salute in a way akin to the Nazis at the inauguration of Donald Trump, February his awkward wielding of a chainsaw at CPAC and the painful declaration that he had, quote, “become meme”. His role as leader of DOGE resulted in immense pitfalls for federal agencies and slashing of government jobs, as we

Reminiscent of the UK’s 2003 Stop The War demonstrations , where hundreds of thousands gathered to (unsuccessfully) oppose the Iraq War, the most recent wave of ‘No Kings’ rallies in the US saw demonstrations attended by over eight million Americans . Loudly and proudly criticising the administration of President Trump, there were several incredible photos (available here ). Focusing heavily on ICE, democratic freedom, and US republicanism, it was that last feature from which

Democratic Governor of California Gavin Newsom, the frontrunner to be the next President of the United States , can do many things other politicians can’t. He can wear denim jeans and apply copious amounts of hair gel without looking like a fool, for example. What he doesn’t do, however, is break any moulds in the sense that he doesn’t add another ‘ism’ to American political vernacular. Though this article's headline refers to ‘Newsom(ism)’, those brackets are important becau

“I’m not going to start a war. I’m going to stop wars.” These were the words of Donald Trump, the self-described “President of Peace”, as he railed against America’s interventions in foreign lands instead of “fixing the roads in this country…fixing our highways, our tunnels, our bridges, our hospitals.” America First! He promised his voters, vowing to improve the lives of ordinary Americans above all else. And yet, barely a year into his second presidency, a combination of T

Politics have become quite boring today. This is not to say that the news is uneventful – five minutes of doomscrolling will quickly put paid to that idea. And the humanitarian cost of it all is mounting rapidly in a crescendo that should alarm us all. But for the most part the politics in the West today continues to conform to a number of routines and rituals that contain little new within them; they are ripples from stones already dropped into the pond. We can see this in

19 th Century Methods for 21 st Century Problems Following the abduction of Nicolas Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores, combined with the National Security Strategy (NSS) release in December of 2025, the Trump Era of “Gunboat Diplomacy” consolidated as the world watched on with morose horror. The Trump “Corollary,” as it were, is to represent an abandonment of international good faith and an embracing of the world's brutal dictators, Vladimir Putin and many more across th

As this article goes to press, Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, has reportedly been killed in a joint U.S.–Israeli airstrike. His death marks the most dramatic escalation in U.S.–Iran tensions since the 1979 revolution and introduces a new variable: succession instability at the apex of the Islamic Republic. Yet even this unprecedented development does not make a war with Tehran comparable to Iraq in 2003 or Afghanistan in 2001, both of which share borders with Iran. Ge

New Yorkers have now experienced about two months under the new Mamdani administration. Last November, more than a million New Yorkers, including myself, headed to the polls and cast our ballots for Zohran Mamdani. The New York City mayoral election drew significant media attention from within the five boroughs and beyond. Mamdani stood out as markedly younger than his opponents, born in Uganda, and as New York City’s first Muslim mayor. Yet the aspect that drew the greatest

While the United States and much of the world was focused on the fallout from the Epstein files, the second phase of the Gaza peace plan began . If the current Trump administration manages to deliver a breakthrough in the Middle East, it would be by far the president’s most significant achievement on the world stage so far. Talk of a Nobel Peace Prize for Trump may have died down, but his own desire for it remains obvious, as shown by his angry messages to the Norwegian prime

“The title ‘Eyes Wide Shut’ captures the movie's central paradox: seeing without understanding. Kubrick suggests that power structures are not hidden, but ignored, existing in plain sight within accepted rituals and social norms. The greatest illusion is not secrecy itself, but the belief that we would recognise the truth if it stood directly in front of us .” The other day, I got into a rather heated political discussion with a couple of old friends. We were discussing decli

In the late hours of the 6 th of February, Donald Trump posted a bizarre, AI generated video that depicted his political opponents as animals on Truth Social. The now-deleted clip had the faces of New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez superimposed onto jungle animals, whilst The Lion Sleeps Tonight blared in the background. Amongst them, former President Joe Biden took the form of a mon

Politics in recent years has frequently been referred to as post-truth. In the age of misinformation, and indeed disinformation, what importance does truth have when a salacious not-quite-truth can dominate public chatter for weeks on end? Journalism used to be regarded as a core pillar of free societies, a respected profession bestowed with the responsibility of educating and informing the masses. Shifts toward digital journalism bridged the gap even further, with news beco