21 December, 2023

In the headlines

The cost of a five-year fixed mortgage has dropped below 4% for the first time in months, as falling inflation pushes borrowing costs down. Economists expect the Bank of England to start cutting interest rates soon, from 5.25% today to below 4% by the end of next year. The world’s largest offshore wind farm will be built off the coast of Norfolk. The Danish firm Ørsted says its 231-turbine project, which will generate enough power for three million homes, will be completed in 2027. EU chief Ursula von der Leyen has backed the reintroduction of wolf hunting in Europe, by downgrading the animals’ protected status. The decision may or may not be related to the fact that von der Leyen’s 30-year-old pony was killed by a wolf in Germany last year.

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Houthi militants storming a cargo tanker in the Red Sea last month

The West’s enemies are waging a new kind of war

In response to Israel’s war on Hamas, Iran-backed militias are causing trouble, says former US national security advisor John Bolton in The Washington Post. Most notably, the Yemen-based Houthis are attacking ships in the Red Sea with drones and missiles. It’s a critical region: “roughly 12% of global trade, amounting to as much as 30% of global container traffic, sails this route”. These strikes have already sent maritime insurance rates soaring. Four of the world’s largest shipping companies have “paused” entries into the Red Sea “after direct hits or near misses on their vessels” – ships will have to take the longer and more expensive route around Africa rather than cutting through the Suez Canal. BP has followed suit, and oil prices are rising because of the uncertainty. The US is developing a multinational force to escort commercial traffic in the area, but that’s a “purely defensive measure” unlikely to solve the problem.

The Houthis, and Hamas for that matter, have adopted a similar tactic to Russia in Ukraine, says Stefan Kornelius in the Süddeutsche Zeitung. It’s all about “low-threshold aggression” that drags out a conflict. Both Vladimir Putin and the militias “know that they will not win”; their aim is simply to exhaust their opponents to create an opening. It’s a credible strategy: there’s deep disillusionment among Ukraine’s allies as the war stretches into its second winter, which will be amplified if Donald Trump is re-elected next year. Hamas, meanwhile, knows that “constant war” in Gaza benefits them because it makes Israel isolated diplomatically and unstable internally. The only way to break the deadlock is a show of force to demonstrate that the West is serious about defending itself.

Fashion

In 2023, certain celebrities “came, wore and conquered”, says the Evening Standard. Among the top 10 best-dressed stars were Rihanna, whose fabulous pregnancy looks included a “custom Loewe scarlet red boiler suit and breastplate”; “premium fashion daddy” Paul Mescal, whose shaggy mullet complemented a striking spin on black tie; Pedro Pascal, who combined “hot-apocalypse” in The Last of Us with Valentino shorts on the red carpet; and Margot Robbie, who managed to keep her “grown woman doll cosplay” charming and seductive over this summer’s “juggernaut” Barbie press tour. See the full list here.

Noted

It is mathematically impossible for the average Frenchman to do his mandated 35 hours of work a week, says Le Point. He sleeps an average of eight hours a night (2,920 hours a year), eats two hours a day (730 hours), spends an hour on transport (365), “devotes 30 minutes a day to his toilette” (183) and has 52 weekends in the year (2,496). All this leaves 2,066 “useful” hours per year, from which must be subtracted five weeks of leave (840 hours), for a remainder of 1,227 hours. But 35 hours per remaining week adds up to 1,645 hours – leaving an inescapable deficit of more than an hour per day.

Tomorrow’s world

An AI-generated image of a robot not cheating, made using Stable Diffusion

When ChatGPT was released last year, everyone predicted “mass cheating” in schools, says The New York Times, and campuses across America banned students from using the software. But these worries about “bot-enabled plagiarism” appear to have been overblown. New research from Stanford shows that AI chatbots haven’t boosted cheating rates at all – levels are largely the same as previous years. When they were asked about ChatGPT in a poll, a third of the teens claimed they knew “nothing at all” about it.

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Sean Rayford/Getty

The American left still doesn’t understand Trumpism

A second Donald Trump presidential term would pose “an even greater threat to US democracy” than the first, says Edward Luce in the FT. Yet repeatedly issuing this warning to American voters is counterproductive. Polls show that Trump lost the last election not because of his disregard for constitutional norms, but because of his “mishandling of the pandemic”. This time around, voters are similarly focused on everyday issues like inflation, immigration and crime. Many of them think the Democrats are exaggerating the Trump threat, or “using it as a cudgel to disrespect who they are”. If someone “refuses to eat their spinach”, it does no good to keep shouting about how healthy it is.

The “deeply uncomfortable reality” for Democrats is that America’s working-class electorate is increasingly turned off from their brand. This stretches to non-white blue-collar Americans, “including Hispanics of both genders”, and African-American men. The good news for Joe Biden is that not all of those who vote for Trump are “white supremacists” – they can be won back, and there’s still time to do so. “The bad news is that large swathes of his donor base and consultants are obsessed with spinach.” Both of the following facts are true: “Trump is a mortal threat to the US republic; roughly half of the country does not believe that.” The challenge for the Democrats is to tackle the first while not forgetting the second.

👨‍⚖️🙈 This week’s decision by four Colorado judges to bar Trump from the state’s 2024 presidential ballot is utter “folly”, says The Wall Street Journal. The ruling will probably be overturned by the US Supreme Court. So all it will do is confirm for millions of Americans that Trump’s opponents will “do everything possible to deny them their democratic choice”. The “Colorado Four” probably see themselves as “heroes of the resistance”. In reality, they’ve handed Trump a massive “campaign contribution”.

Film

The Guardian’s recent ranking of the top 25 Christmas films doesn’t exactly buck the paper’s snooty reputation, says Michael Deacon in The Daily Telegraph. Naturally, it had no place for “vulgarly commercial tat” like Home Alone or, “perish the thought”, Love Actually. It did, however, include Tangerine, “an obscure, low-budget film about a meth-smoking transgender prostitute” shot on three iPhones. If that’s not quite festive enough, then you could try Carol (above), ranked at number five – “a critically acclaimed drama about divorce, intolerance and how hard it was to be a lesbian in the 1950s”.

On the way out

Diamonds are no longer a girl’s best friend, says The Times – not real ones, anyway. Sales in London’s diamond quarter have plummeted as customers switch “in droves” to lab-created alternatives: the bogus bling now acounts for 18.4% of the market, up from just 0.3% in 2015. They require a “fraction” of the energy needed to extract real ones, so they’re considerably cheaper – a one-carat natural diamond that goes for £4,400 could be rivalled by a lab-made equivalent for £1,360. “Perhaps natural diamonds are not quite forever, after all.”

Snapshot

Snapshot answer

It’s a map showing which item was most googled this year in each US state, via the question “why is x so expensive”. For all of them, it was “eggs”, says Axios. This is the first time a single item has been so ubiquitous – there were 23 different top-searched items a decade ago – and reflects a massive spike in egg prices due to bird flu wiping out so many chickens. Fourteen other countries, including Mexico and Canada, also searched about the price of eggs more than anything else.

Quoted

“If you do not resist the apparently inevitable you will never know how inevitable it was.”