| | This is a free edition of The Knowledge | You get one of these a week. But for just £40 for the year – less than 80p a week – proper subscribers get a full edition every day. Can we persuade you to join them? To repeat, it's less than 80p a week. Peanuts! | |
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| | | Rachel Reeves has told the Office for Budget Responsibility that she is planning to raise personal taxes later this month. Under the tentative Budget plans, income tax would rise by 2p, and there would be a 2p cut in national insurance for anyone earning less than £50,270, pushing the burden on to higher-earners, pensioners and landlords. Elon Musk is in line to become the world's first trillionaire after Tesla shareholders overwhelmingly voted in favour of a record-breaking pay package for the EV maker's billionaire boss. If Musk hits a set of ambitious targets – including selling 20 million cars, a million robots and a million self-driving robotaxis – he will be granted 400 million additional Tesla shares, giving him control of a quarter of the company's stock. The newsreader Martine Croxall who went viral after rolling her eyes while correcting the phrase "pregnant people" to "women" during a live broadcast has been found to have broken BBC impartiality rules. The broadcaster's Executive Complaints Unit decided her facial expression – which won applause from JK Rowling and Martina Navratilova – signalled a "controversial view about trans people". 🙄 | | | |  | Fuentes (L) and Carlson |
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| Tucker Carlson and Hitler's "fanboy" | An old political poison is growing on the American "new right", says The Wall Street Journal, led by podcasters and internet opportunists who are obsessed with "the Jews". Last Monday, Tucker Carlson welcomed "Hitler fanboy" Nick Fuentes for a chummy podcast interview, in which the 27-year-old white nationalist assailed "organised Jewry" as the main obstacle to American unity and "these Zionist Jews" for impeding the right's success. After the interview, he singled out prominent conservative Jewish commentators, saying they would never be Americans and should "get the fuck out of America". Even while toning it down for the largest audience he'll ever have, Fuentes came off as an "internet mash-up of the worst of the 20th century". | For those unfamiliar with Fuentes's particular ideology, says Michelle Goldberg in The New York Times, he provided a handy primer on his streaming show, America First, in March. "Jews are running society, women need to shut the fuck up, blacks need to be imprisoned for the most part, and we would live in paradise, it's that simple." This sneering, gleefully transgressive attitude has made him a hero to legions of disturbed young men known as "groypers". Conservative writer Rod Dreher, a close friend of JD Vance, warned that "someone in a position to know" had told him up to 40% of DC Republican staffers under the age of 30 were groypers. (The figure is impossible to check, but it captures a widespread sense that "Fuentes's politics are ascendant".) For decades, mainstream conservatives spoke proudly of how William F Buckley had erected a cordon santiaire between respectable Republicans and the "paranoiac and reactionary" fringes, such as the John Birch Society. Today's Maga crowd has a new slogan: "No enemies to the right." Good for racists, bad for the rest of us. | 🐘🫡 Republican Senator Ted Cruz was succinct when asked about Tucker Carlson's matey treatment of Fuentes: "If you say nothing when someone tells you that Adolf Hitler was cool, you are a coward and complicit in evil." | | | | Advertisement | | William Scott CBE RA, 'Themes and Variations: Works from the Artist's Estate' opens this weekend at Jenna Burlingham Gallery in Hampshire, just over an hour outside London. The works date from the early 1950s to the mid-1980s. Prices start at £12,000. | Preview Day
Saturday 8th November 2025, 10am-6pm | Exhibition
Monday 10th to Saturday 29th November 2025
Monday to Saturday, 10am-6pm and outside these times by appointment | 'In Conversation' Event
Saturday 15th November 2025, 2pm
Dr Chris Stephens, Robert Scott, James Rawlin and Jenna Burlingham
RSVP info@jennaburlingham.com | Click here for the catalogue. |
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| | | | The shortlist for this year's "Close-up Photographer of the Year" award, which will be announced in January, includes pictures of a dragonfly on a rain-soaked flower, a baby sloth nestled in its mother's arms, a tiny European ground squirrel blowing on a dandelion, a baby bat catching a ride from one of its parents, and a snake tucking into a frog. To see the others, click on the image. |
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| | | | | One of the many embarrassing details to emerge in the wake of the Louvre heist last month, says Brice Le Borgne in Libération, is that the password for the museum's video surveillance system was… "Louvre". | | |  | Getty |
| The latest sartorial trend among celebrities is the "fashion nappy", says Julie Beck in The Atlantic. Chappell Roan, Olivia Rodrigo, Sabrina Carpenter, Beyoncé and Emma Corrin have all embraced the "panties-as-outerwear" trend, and the look has cropped up on catwalks, at the Met Gala and even occasionally on ordinary folks on the streets of New York. The shape can vary – high-waisted brief, bikini cut, thong – as can the fabric: leather, denim, "chunky knit". The only real goal is to show "as much leg as possible". | | | | |  | Let's teach our primary school children English – not American. Johnny Greig/Getty |
| "You're good? At what? Playing the Polynesian nose flute?" | The news that young children are shunning British English words in favour of "Americanisms" will come as no surprise to anyone with functioning ears, says Carol Midgley in The Times. A recent survey which found primary school children routinely say "candy" and "diapers" thanks to YouTube and cartoons only confirms what is already well known – and is perhaps less of an issue than the fact that many of them start school still wearing said "diapers" because their bone idle parents plonk them in front of a tablet all day instead of teaching them how to use the lavatory. Sorry, "restroom". It's a shift that has been obvious for years. | People talk of "mailing" a letter, not posting it and say "Can I get?" not "May I have?" We've swapped aeroplane for "airplane" and tracksuit bottoms for "sweatpants". There's "normalcy", "bangs", "reach out" and "takeouts". I'll never be able to abide that mimsy, euphemistic atrocity "passed" to mean died – saying Aunt Mabel finally "passed" makes her sound "like a troublesome stool" – and don't get me started on "two times" and not the better, shorter "twice". Computers now automatically change "analyse" to "analyze" and remove the elegant "u" from "favourite". And today, when someone is asked how they are, they respond: "I'm good." You're good? At what? "Playing the Polynesian nose flute?" Look, I like America and it's fine when such terms are said by Americans because it doesn't sound like they're trying desperately to be "hip". It's when they're uttered with an English accent that my "buttocks clench like a clam's shell". Don't call your friend Clive "dude". "You're 56 with a comb-over and you're from Tadcaster." | | |  | Shanghai's Yuyuan Garden. Daniel Dorko/Hans Lucas/AFP/Getty |
| The website Unify Cosmos has an enjoyable collection of what it calls "the most relaxing sounds in the world", including the trickling water and pipe music of Shanghai's Yuyuan Garden; the click-clack of a train travelling through the snowy forests of Russia; waves gently lapping the sands of Siargao Island in the Philippines; the "singing ice" caused by cracks in the surface of the frozen Kvarnsjö lake in Sweden; and the wildlife of South Africa's Talamati Bushveld Camp. To listen to these and many more – including, bizarrely, London's Oxford Street and Fifth Avenue in New York – click here. | | | | | Russian women have come up with a grim new scam, says The Wall Street Journal: duping soldiers into marriage so that when their new husband dies in the war, they will receive a "next-of-kin payout" that can be anywhere from eight million roubles (£75,000) to twice that. Sham marriages have become so widespread that lawmakers are trying to increase the maximum fines for perpetrators – known as "black widows" – and criminal gangs have started facilitating faux nuptials. "It's very easy," an estate agent in Siberia told a podcast earlier this year. "Find a guy serving on the front, and when he dies you get eight million. It's a business plan." | | | | | | They're Hugo and Ross Turner, says Seren Hughes in The Times, British twin explorers who have put George Mallory's 1920s Mount Everest kit to the test by climbing a 6,476m peak in Nepal while one wore the latest high-tech gear, and the other wore a replica of the older stuff. The Mallory mock-up, worn by Hugo, included double-lined leather boots with yak felt insulation as well as seven layers of tops – silk and wool base layers, shirts and jumpers, a green gabardine jacket – and four layers on the bottom half. At the summit, Hugo's body temperature dropped lower than his brother's, but it wasn't considered dangerous, leading the pair to believe that Mallory and his chum Sandy Irvine, who died trying to summit Everest in 1924, weren't let down by their kit. | | | "Life is far too important a thing ever to talk seriously about."
Oscar Wilde |
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