Politics as spectacle: Zohran Mandami's win in NYC mayoral election getting huge play in German media today ... with "is he Trump's prime adversary?" as the dominant angle.

"His own official spoken remarks so defy syntactical analysis as to suggest that his only intention in speaking is to further obscure what he thinks." Joan Didion on Dick Cheney in the NRYB. www.nybooks.com/articles/200...

Washington (AFP) – Dick Cheney, who became one of the most powerful vice presidents in US history as George W. Bush’s number two during 9/11 and catastrophic wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, died Monday. He was 84. www.france24.com/en/live-news...

Conservative Berlin politicians steered millions into favored cultural projects aimed at fighting antisemitism, incl. for "The Nova Exhibition." In clear violation of budget laws, according to opposition lawmakers. www.tagesspiegel.de/berlin/auf-d...

Vanished!: Munich's famous "Eisbachwell" wave, a beloved surfing destination on a stream in the city, has disappeared after work to clear debris and sediment from the streambed. www.stern.de/news/surferw...

Madrid (AFP) – Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez on Friday said his leftist government would accelerate steps to try and dissolve the Francisco Franco Foundation, in a speech a few weeks before the 50th anniversary of the dictator's death. www.barrons.com/news/spain-s...

London (AFP) – Once dubbed "Randy Andy" by the British tabloids, Andrew, the former prince, has hit a new low: the disgraced royal has been stripped of his cherished titles and exiled to rural England. www.france24.com/en/live-news...

Bloomberg reports the EU is weighing a new trade measure that would require some Chinese exporters to supply critical raw materials to the bloc’s stockpiles when shipping certain goods into the EU.

Fringe far-right German influencer Naomi Seibt is reportedly trying to claim asylum in the United States. www.spiegel.de/ausland/naom...

US revokes visa of famed Nigerian writer Wole Soyinka and bans him from the country, presumably over the 91-year-old Nobel laureate's vociferous criticism of Trump. www.bbc.com/news/article...

I have a number of questions about this episode. But one of them is this: how much work does a Bill de Blasio impersonator find for himself these days? www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/bill-d...

Chotiner interview w/ former Biden press sec Karine Jean-Pierre struck me as extremely revealing of a certain strand of Dem Party establishment thinking over the past decade (obviously not in a flattering way). www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a...

these are, uhh, pretty egregious errors for grokipedia

Chinese carmakers will end up as “saviours” of European factories and jobs, in a creeping takeover that will hasten the demise of some western manufacturers, the former head of Peugeot and Jeep maker Stellantis Carlos Tavares has warned.  www.ft.com/content/5...

Awful news. Olena Hubanova and Yevhen Karmazin, Ukrainian journalists working for TV channel Freedom, were killed in a Russian Lancet drone attack in Kramatorsk, according to the city’s mayor and local media reports. This makes three deaths of journalists in eastern Ukraine just this month.

Crazy days... who would have thought that there would be a day when I mention Tuffi, the circus elephant who famously jumped out of Wuppertal's suspension monorail in 1950 when a PR stunt went wrong, and roman emperor Nero in the very same FT article? www.ft.com/content/0400...

Good 🧵 on cars here.

"an investigation by Spiegel, a rival German news outlet, (...) debunked BILD’s claim that Fteiha had staged photos of food distribution in Gaza." theintercept.com/2025/10/22/g...

13. By 2030 most countries will have spot power prices of zero in sunny hours. This will be passed on to end consumers, to encourage them to shift power demand to sunny periods by electric vehicle and battery charging, preheating, precooling, etc.

An amazing story of this decade was the ADL turning all its fire on Israel critics while tech companies dismantled their censors and Hitler-lovers came roaring back.

the "taz" newspaper (whose name means "the daily newspaper") is no longer a daily! the print edition now comes out only on saturdays. print cutbacks, long a fixture of the beleaguered u.s. newspaper biz, starting to bite in germany as well. www.deutschlandfunk.de/nur-noch-dig...

Kyiv (AFP) – Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky visited Norway on Wednesday, the first leg of a European tour aimed at shoring up support for Kyiv amid a string of deadly Russian attacks. uk.news.yahoo.com/russian-stri...

Spain will publish list of symbols of General Francisco Franco's dictatorship slated for removal next month, marking 50 years since the fascist leader's death www.barrons.com/news/spain-t...

Can Syrian shawarma overtake döner kebab, the original Turkish-German fusion fare? Nice @smithsonianmag.bsky.social story on the spread of Syrian street food: www.smithsonianmag.com/travel/how-s...

Kampfner quotes David Chipperfield, the Berlin-based British architect who has recreated the city’s iconic museum sites: “Berlin is not really there. It’s an idea.” www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/culture/7109...

Trafalgar Day. The most interesting bit of Trafalgar isn’t the battle, it’s the preceding cross-Atlantic chase.

Bodenheim, Germany (AFP) – Wine harvest in Germany set to be the smallest since 2010, but the quality from this year's vintage forecast to be "exceptionally good." www.stuttgarter-nachrichten.de/inhalt.weinb...

Munich (Germany) (AFP) – Many of the world's best biathletes swapped skis for skates at an exhibition event in Munich on the weekend, offering a glimpse into the future of winter sports in a warming world. www.france24.com/en/live-news...

WaPo: "Rubio promised to betray U.S. informants to get Trump’s El Salvador prison deal" www.washingtonpost.com/national-sec...

New w/ @bencasselman.bsky.social: Wealthy Americans, buoyed by a booming stock market, are spending freely. Lower-income households, stung by inflation and a slowing labor market, are pulling back www.nytimes.com/2025/10/19/b... @nytimes.com

Shocked to learn that Donald Trump isn't captivated by tales of Prince Rurik of Novgorod and Prince Yaroslav the Wise www.ft.com/content/7af3...

So the president of the United States plans to meet with Putin in Hungary, and when a reporter asked where that plan came from, this was the reply of the United States government www.huffpost.com/entry/trump-...

i have no objections to marking up books, but man do you look foolish if you underline and dog ear the heck out of the first 17 pages, give up and then your copy ends up in a used bookstore.

Up to 20,000 coins from Early Middle Ages discovered by man digging for worms near Stockholm 🪙 bit.ly/3KRc6LW

PARIS (AFP) - British singer-songwriting legend Sting finds the multiple genres and streaming platforms of the modern music scene "quite odd", but still believes in the power of song to unite people.

AFP: "German exports unexpectedly fell in August on a sharp decline in US demand due to Washington's tariffs on European imports, official data showed today." www.rte.ie/news/busines...

I love the idea that there's some guy in the bookies reading through some highbrow Romanian literature (in Swedish translation) and thinking to himself "It's not Cărtărescu's year"

German asylum claims have halved in the last year. Nothing to do with border theatre; everything to do with developments outside the EU that hardly ever play a role in European countries' domestic migration debates. Still, take the win if it allows you to change the subject.

Some ~ personal news ~: I’m starting as a Berlin correspondent for the @en.afp.com this week. Really excited to join a terrific news organization and cover German politics and news a lot more closely.

“De Gaulle wrote painfully slowly, by himself, and wanted, he said, to write a work of art, ‘unlike Churchill who has never written a properly composed book’. Churchill won the Nobel prize in literature; de Gaulle would have been a more worthy recipient.” www.the-tls.com/history/twen...

Some ~ personal news ~: I’m starting as a Berlin correspondent for the @en.afp.com this week. Really excited to join a terrific news organization and cover German politics and news a lot more closely.

Since 1970 income of French pensioners has grown far more quickly than that of workers • French pensioners have exceptional feature for OECD standards—they earn more than working-age adults • Rise in life expectancy will place burden on public finances through rise in health and pension spending

I self-Googled. Got a hit for "Rick Perlstein or Julia Orringer." I was intrigued; we both wrote books called "The Invisible Bridge" Clicking yielded a comment thread without those words, so I Googled us together, and learned...this. I have never met her Our elites are staking our future on AI.

the e.p. my band — possum — recorded back in 2009 (!!) is now out on cassette tape and also online, woohoo: possumisourname.bandcamp.com/album/jims-f...

my brilliant friend jeanie wrote a really lovely essay about new orleans, katrina, family, love and loss and it’s really really worth a read www.newyorker.com/culture/the-...

american soft power persists (grocery store, berlin)

also: pleased to report that the authorities have dropped the allegations of illegal bathing against me and my fellow spree swimmers, and are no longer seeking to fine us for our (alleged) misdeeds.

Reviewed the new translation of brilliant German writer Judith Hermann's memior (...or is it?...), "We’d Have Told Each Other Everything" a lil while back, which is very much worth a read (and then you should go back and devour her short stories too). www.the-berliner.com/books/wed-ha...

earlier this summer, i dove into the spree river in berlin (and was detained by the police on suspicion of illegal bathing) for this story on whether berlin might bring (legal) swimming back to the city center. www.the-berliner.com/berlin/swimm...