The New World

First they came for our attention.

In the immediate aftermath of five men being arrested on suspicion of terror offences near RAF Fairford in Gloucestershire at the weekend, Reform leader Nigel Farage ignored the pleas of police for politicians not to engage in conjecture to do just that.

“Why is the Foreign Office funding abortions in Afghanistan?”

It takes something to shock a GB News presenter such is the level of bile spewed on the hard right conspiracist channel – but one guest managed to achieve it last weekend.

Nothing was too much trouble for Donald Trump when it came to welcoming Xi Jinping to Washington.

When Andrey Medvedev’s father was in a good mood, he would take his son fishing.

In the hit Brad Pitt adventure thriller Heart of the Beast, it’s a German Shepherd.

Some politicians worry about the arts.

Doireann Ní Ghríofa is a necromancer.

Amid the media scramble to interview the curator at the opening of The Bayeux Tapestry exhibition at the British Museum, Michael Lewis is asked an unexpected question: “How many penises are there in The Bayeux Tapestry?

PICK OF THE WEEK Knife: The Attempted Murder of Salman Rushdie (selected cinemas, September 30) As TS Eliot warned: “human kind/ Cannot bear very much reality.”

Here’s a pub quiz question for you.

A lawyer at Roy Cohn’s law firm had a problem.

In a way, the name may be the saddest thing of all.

It was Chambers, the mid-morning break at Eton, in 1981.

By almost any metric, News UK’s broadcasting arm Talk has been a disaster – struggling to attract viewers, losing money and, according to insiders, in internal chaos.

Back in July, Rats in a Sack was able to report the good news for Daily Telegraph columnists worried their new German owners might turn out to be Brussels-loving pinkoes – the Axel Springer group was instead giving its most prestigious award to far right…

With Reform wobbling, it seems like Rupert Murdoch is now smiling on Kemi Badenoch.

It’s less than a decade since Netflix was showing a whole series about the Unabomber – aka Ted Kaczynski, the American anti-tech terrorist whose bombings wounded 23 people and killed three more between 1978 and 1995.

The Tories’ latest welfare proposal is not only reminiscent of a Victorian puritan minister, it is also almost comically at odds with much of what the modern Conservative Party claims to believe.

It is a clear September afternoon on the edge of Dover.

The Sun shouts about “Fears of Brexit betrayal”.

There can be no surer symptom of the rot at the heart of Facebook than the fact that Rupert Lowe, leader of the far-right Reform Party and ex-colleague and current antagonist of Nigel Farage, is doing so well on the platform.

As home secretary, Shabana Mahmood is the cabinet minister ultimately responsible for the UK’s policing and its national security – as well, of course, as managing the country’s borders and enforcing its immigration rules.

When far right grifter Milo Yiannopoulos was deported by the US earlier this month, forcing him back to Britain, GB News sources were insistent he would not end up on their station.

With Reform UK planning to lavish its newfound crypto millions on its own TV channel, GB News has quietly taken steps to expand its own operations – by branching out into music radio.

The first thing to say about Canada being offered associate membership of the EU is that there is no such thing as associate membership of the EU.

I suppose I should discuss my biases before making my argument.

For 67 years, the first name in London’s jazz scene has been that of Ronnie Scott – the saxophonist who opened a club in Soho in 1959 and saw it become Britain’s undisputed premier venue for the musical genre.

This was no accidental death.

At the top of each episode of This F*cking Guy, the most thrillingly acerbic podcast to arrive in a month of rainless Sundays, host Erin Ryan lays out the rules of engagement for the evisceration that is about to follow.

So you’re not supposed to meet your heroes?

This week I’ve been reading Carlo Rovelli’s new book, On the Equality of All Things.

Growing a human brain inside a mouse sounds like the grotesque premise for a sci-fi horror film.

AI bosses keep saying ridiculous, hysterical and quite possibly true things about how they’re accidentally, probably, about to bring about the end of the world.

Something strange is happening to the second world war.

April 15, 1892 – September 26, 1937 As Bessie Smith performs to a packed crowd in Concord, North Carolina, in the summer of 1927, an army of men and boys is assembling outside, determined to kill her and her audience.

On July 7, the Daily Mail was in celebratory mood.

As many of us have, I’ve been following the news of Macklemore being dropped from Ed Sheeran’s tour because of his vocally pro-Palestine stance.

Human languages are not particularly logical systems.

Time was, being recruited to undertake covert missions for a foreign power might involve a tap on the shoulder, a quiet meeting over weak Darjeeling and dry Battenberg in a dusty Cambridge tearoom.

I blamed the trees for quite a long time, without even realising it.

Modern Toss’s Tossary: Bargaintography

Nic Aubury’s 4-line poem: Save Our Souls

Tim Bradford’s cartoon: AI Will Destroy Us All

I read the paper every day for a week, so you didn’t have to.

This is live from the political crisis zone formerly known as stable Germany.

Re: “Never again?

It’s not often we are allowed to get excited about Alaska, psephologically speaking, but as early voting begins for the US midterms, this is the race I can’t stop thinking about.

We cannot know exactly what it was like to sit in a COBR room with Boris Johnson in March 2020.