Convenience Big Store: I’ve got a sinking feeling about Venice

19 September, 2023

In the headlines

The Metropolitan Police are investigating an allegation that Russell Brand committed a sexual assault in Soho in 2003. YouTube has suspended the comedian's ability to make money on the platform, where he has 6.6 million subscribers. Canadian PM Justin Trudeau says there are "credible allegations" the Indian government was behind the assassination of a prominent Sikh leader in Canada. Hardeep Singh Nijjar, who campaigned for a Sikh state to secede from India, was shot dead in a suburb of Vancouver in June. China appears to have snooped on a British civil servant by hiding a listening device in a teapot. The ceramic spyware was given as a gift to someone working at the British embassy in Beijing, who only discovered its hidden tech when it was accidently smashed back home in the UK.

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"Overcrowded, beautiful, expensive." Getty

I've got a sinking feeling about Venice

Last week, says Pravina Rudra in The New Statesman, Venice announced plans to charge day-trippers €5 to enter the city, in a bid to deter some of the 20 million tourists who turn up each year. Visitors who happily pay €120 for a half-hour gondola ride, Venetian authorities seem to believe, will be put off by a levy worth less than the price of a coffee in St Mark's Square. It's just the latest in a series of hopeless efforts by locals to reclaim their city. Repeated attempts to ban cruise ships have failed, as have more modest bids to ban wheelie suitcases. "Venice's tourists are an unstoppable stream."

It wasn't always like this. When Charles Dickens visited in 1844, before mass tourism, he was overwhelmed, writing: "Opium couldn't build such a place." Truman Capote said it was like "eating an entire box of chocolate liqueurs in one go". Today, everyone says the same thing: "overcrowded, beautiful, expensive" – a "homogenised response to a homogenised place". Every tourist is competing for a "walking path, a view, a spot at a table". Ancient-looking shops sell chintzy masks and "Murano glass" imported from China; even upmarket restaurants serve "barely defrosted squid and dry cannoli". And underlying everything is a simple fact: "Venice is sinking." It's built on wooden stilts atop a muddy lagoon – "even if sea levels weren't rising, its foundations would be dissolving". And you know what? I think it's time. "Just let Venice sink."

Nature

American photographer Sutton Lynch has earned a loyal Instagram following by getting up before sunrise, heading to the beach near his home in the Hamptons, and sending out his drone to take photographs of passing sea life. The 23-year-old former lifeguard posts the resulting images of "humpbacks, hammerheads, dolphins, bluefish and many other species", says The New York Times, alongside captions that range from "childhood memories and research on the effects of fishing policy" to explanations of animal behaviour. See more here.

Noted

Anyone seen one of these? Getty

The US military has found debris from one of its F-35 stealth fighter jets, a day after appealing to the public for help in finding it. Officials said the pilot safely ejected after a "mishap" somewhere over South Carolina, but weren't sure where the $100m plane had ended up because its transponder wasn't working. "If you have any information that would assist the recovery teams," wrote Joint Base Charleston on Facebook, "please call the 2nd Marine Aircraft Wing Public Affairs Office at 252-466-3827."

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Fashion

The V&A's latest fashion extravaganza – Gabrielle Chanel. Fashion Manifesto – is "somehow only the UK's first exhibition dedicated to the work of the legendary couturière", says Vogue. The London gallery has expanded on the recent retrospective of the same name at Paris's Palais Galliera, adding 120 rare items that chart the designer's career from her first boutique on Rue Cambon in 1910 to her final collection, presented weeks after her death in 1971. "When it comes to understanding the times and what it called for, and seizing that opportunity," says curator Oriole Cullen, "no one did that better than Chanel." Tickets are still available for the museum's members here.

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Kim: "No man is a villain in his own eyes." AFP/KCNA/Getty

What the Koreas tell us about capitalism

There was an "almost cartoonish quality" to last week's meeting between Kim Jong-un and Vladimir Putin, says Daniel Hannan in The Sunday Telegraph. The North Korean leader travelled in a "Bond-villain armoured train"; the two men exchanged rifles and talked rockets. "You half expected them to disappear with a thunderclap into a Gothic castle alongside Dracula and Monty Burns." Not that they will have seen it that way, of course. "No man is a villain in his own eyes." Kim and Putin believe it's the West who are the baddies; that although Western liberalism may yield a higher GDP, it costs far more in fragmented families, drugs and degeneracy. Who's to argue, they would say, that people aren't happier in Moscow and Pyongyang?

Well, just look at the two Koreas. They began from almost exactly the same place in 1953: the same language, culture and work ethic. Today, the South's economy is 57 times larger than the North's. Its people live more than 10 years longer. Its children are many times more likely to survive infancy – "and if that statistic doesn't correlate with greater net happiness, I don't know what does". The rapid growth of the largely atheist South also undermines the argument that booming liberal capitalism is a measure of success only in predominantly Protestant cultures. The West is by no means perfect. But there's a reason why 33,000 North Koreans have braved "dogs, mines and guns" to escape their home country. "States in which you can be liquidated, and your friends will be too scared to complain, are not conducive to human contentment."

Gone viral

It's been nearly 2,000 years since the height of the Roman Empire, says The Washington Post. But it turns out "many men still contemplate it – quite a lot". As part of a new social media trend, women are asking their boyfriend or husband how often they think about the ancient civilisation. "Three times a day," says one woman's fiancé in a TikTok video. "There's so much to think about." "They built an entire world-dominating society," protests another man. The unlikely trend started when a 32-year-old Roman re-enactor known as "Gaius Flavius" wrote on Instagram: "Ladies, many of you do not realise how often men think about the Roman Empire… You will be surprised by their answers!"

Letters

To The Economist:

Swimming, grouse shooting and beer drinking may all be specific interests that benefit from the protection of the hobby lobby, but another slightly more important institution is under the same or even greater protection: the BBC. As one moderate backbench Tory MP was reportedly quoted as saying: "Conservatives will never abolish the BBC – the minute we mess with The Archers we're all done for."

Ross Cathcart, London

Snapshot

Snapshot answer

It's probably the world's biggest-ever onion – an eye-watering 8.9kg whopper grown by Guernsey gardener Gareth Griffin. Produced in a polytunnel with 24-hour lighting and an automatic irrigation system, the 21-inch-long allium won its category at the Harrogate Autumn Flower Show last week. Green-fingered Griffin says he "really got into" competitive growing after going to the world championships 12 years ago. "I nearly got it in 2014 but was a couple of ounces off the record," he told the BBC. "I've tried ever since and this year it went well."

Quoted

"Riches should come as a reward for hard work, preferably by one's forebears."