Threatening the drinking water and electricity of 93 million people because the IRGC whose control of Iran you accidentally made unshakeable won't agree to a protection racket deal with your son-in-law.

This week in The French Dispatch 🇫🇷 📊Presidential Polling update 📈Macron’s polling numbers jump over Iran 💼Alstom wins €1 billion mega contract in Serbia 🏦French 2025 deficit lower than expected www.frenchdispatch.eu/p/france-202...

“Now that we’re weeks into a war that has seen us touch a load-bearing wall of the global economy and burned through our weapons stockpiles, I’ve got some scores to settle.” My latest: open.substack.com/pub/breaking...

Good morning and welcome to your FT Weekend highlights in giftlinks thread. Highlinks. Giftlights. Anyway, 300 clicks then they're gone. Or you can buy a lovely paper, lasts all week. Or you can subscribe to FT Edit which at £5 a month is a bargain. www.ft.com/ft-edit

Just been approached by Huel to see if I'll be part of their paid influencer campaign. I don't think they're quite across what I do for a living. (FWIW, and in the interests of having influence, I regard Huel as a soul destroying, miserable product and the death of all that is worth living for.)

Free newsletter: The AI industry is lying to you about progress. Only 5GW of data centers are under construction, it takes 6 months to bring online a single quarter's worth of NVIDIA GPU sales, and LLM code is actively breaking big tech. www.wheresyoured.at/the-ai-industry-is-lying-to-you/

acoup.blog/2026/03/25/m... "There is a very real risk that this conflict will end with Iran as the de facto master of the Strait of Hormuz and the Persian Gulf...That would, in fact, be a significant strategic victory for Iran and an enormous strategic defeat for the United States."

Singing the praises of Manchester City with only the shortest, most passing mention of the 115 charges against them, handwaved away as "issues" not allegations of serious, repeated cheating. A complete and total farce.

Right. Lots of speculation on this site all week about what the Marine Expeditionary Units headed towards the Persian Gulf might do, most of it pretty unhinged, so this thread is MEU 101. I'll keep adding to it as necessary.

The oil market mess is much worse than you think www.ft.com/content/3201... Prices were already $175 in Oman on Wednesday

The Manchester City website wrote a nice piece about it too! www.mancity.com/news/mens/de...

An actual post by the sitting President of the United States. 🤬

Arsenal’s season was about the angst of a 22-year wait, it’s now about excitement of a 16-year-old - not allowed in dressing room due to age - parents still ground him - internalises Arteta instructions quicker than anyone - team marvelling over header www.independent.co.uk/sport/footba...

If we made the green energy transition this war would be unthinkable and these authoritarians wouldn’t be in power — not in the US, not in Iran, not in Saudi Arabia, not in Russia. Hydrocarbons are killing our freedom and just plain killing us.

Recommend: Paul Krugman (Nobel-winning economist) speaking to Philips O'Brien (Prof War Studies at St Andrew's Uni) on the Iran war. One quote that made me stop: "Ukraine has provided more military aid to the US in 2026 than the US has provided to Ukraine." youtu.be/DuAJYabShdY?...

Faced with a financial scandal that has ensnared some of the biggest names on Wall Street, I made the obvious move: catching a tube to the end of the Northern Line to eat a fry-up in a greasy spoon. Shoe-leather (and antacids) reporting on Market Financial Solutions here: www.ft.com/content/c522...

Column. On Trump, Hegseth, small dick energy, and moral decline. www.thetimes.com/article/7091...

French news channel, LCI, airs a split screen simultaneously showing footage of Trump dancing to YMCA in front of a rally crowd as oil fields in the Middle East are in flames

Asia scrambles to confront energy crisis unleashed by Iran war – with no end in sight

It's the birthday of Douglas Adams! Time to share favorite quotes!

The trailer for EVERYONE IS LYING TO YOU FOR MONEY. In select theaters starting April 17th 🍿🤑🤣

18 yr old Bahar had offers from York and Reading, but 'thanks to Shabana Mahmood, she will now never escape the Taliban.' 'Britain has decided that the girl who fought the Taliban’s agenda, who learned English in secret, who turned down a forced marriage, who won her place, is an asylum risk.'

Good blog. Labour needs a better idea of how today's economy works. As I keep writing that also requires an understanding of the global forces at work - of which they have shown very little interest. (in fact I'll have my own blog soon on that subject...)

4pm today on BBC Radio 4 Extra it’s the repeat of my adaptation of Iain M. Banks’ The State of the Art, with Sir Antony Sher as the ship. So proud of this amazing production by @nadiamolinari.bsky.social

FT comments section this morning - saying what everyone else is thinking, right?

A boring substack in which I demonstrate how crypto treasury companies are machines for automatically funneling money to the people who set them up, almost regardless of what the stock or cryptocurrency does open.substack.com/pub/gileswil...

I see the winner of the FIFA Peace Prize is at it again, doing more peace and stopping more wars. Oh. Get Infantino out of FIFA. Football deserves better than this ghoulish, obsequious, evil little toad of a man. He represents everything that's wrong about the game and the world.

open.substack.com/pub/paulkrug... Useful post with useful model. Being great at something that's collapsing in price doesn't necessarily advantage you

how do we "measure" patriarchy? this is especially thorny because of how much people are invested in mystifying and defending it--so e.g. "this culture LOVED women! therefore it can't be patriarchal!" evans, like myself, circles back to what we can measure: violence.

It's not the refs, it's the fact Spurs stadium has been built on ancient hopes and dreams burial site so wifi doesn't work in that corner

A great article, and an important warning: “A big psychological block for some European intelligence services was that they believed Putin to be a largely rational actor, and were deeply sceptical that he would embark on a plan they felt was likely to fail.” www.theguardian.com/world/ng-int...

i know you think you don't care about cloned polo ponies, but you absolutely do. Read the story one commenter has described as "FT Weekend but more" and understand why the cutting edge of gene editing is posh horse hockey as.ft.com/r/7f554b0b-5...

This is almost certainly going to get lost amid everything else happening at the moment. But it’s a big story.

this FT reporting team exposed a secret Russian smuggling team by using this one weird trick -- they all shared the same email address??? as.ft.com/r/aa78dec9-c...

Starmer’s real leadership crisis. New post on my Brexit & Brexitism Blog. Fatuous media coverage aside, Starmer’s challenge is to make good on his claim that Britain isn’t the country of the Brexit years in the face of rising ethno-nationalism: chrisgreybrexitblog.blogspot.com/2026/02/star...

I can’t believe you lefty Luddites hate tech so much that you embrace mRNA vaccines, heat pumps, electric bikes, hybrid work, renewable power (and awesome advancements in storage), space telescopes, and hot/cold running water but reject the planet destroying plagiarism enrich the worst people bots!

I make hundreds of media checks each day, monitor TV and radio channels live, near constantly. Currently one thing I'm listening to is BBC Radio's "The History Bureau" looking back at the "Apartment Bombings" in Russia when Putin probably killed his own: www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m...

Writing in @thejournal.ie today about life in the Brussels bubble: www.thejournal.ie/readme/europ...

Deep(er than I expected when I clicked) dive in Japan’s public sector balance sheet from @tobyn.bsky.social. Really interesting. www.ft.com/content/f7d3...

Chatham House experts and researchers are available to follow on Bluesky. Connect with our experts here and follow them for their analysis on key international events and major global trends. ⬇️ go.bsky.app/UKHXrog

The console table with its prized photographs of the rich, powerful and compromised which lays out Jeffrey Epstein's "social Ponzi scheme". Fantastic piece by Paul Caruana Galizia and Kaye Wiggins as.ft.com/r/3d0a85b9-c...

As a neighbor of Russia, and one who actually likes many things about Russian people and culture, it is sometimes so sad that as a nation they are such a miserable, brutal gang of imperialist fuckups. SO MUCH WASTE AND WASTED POTENTIAL.

Please, my magic bean, it is very sick

A publisher who lays off a reporter whose pen is freezing because she's covering a frigid war zone while dodging missiles is not an editor you want to work for, in a more perfect world

exactly. this is not difficult. as.ft.com/r/58ed1b23-d...

I’ve written this lengthy FT analysis overnight about the multiple multi-thousand pound Epstein payments to Mandelson’s husband these particular paragraphs are worth reading slowly www.ft.com/content/608a...

someone should write about this www.liberalcurrents.com/dont-buy-a-g...

Donald Trump’s Greenland ambitions – softened seemingly at Davos – have transformed attitudes in the EU and compressed timelines for decoupling from the United States. bit.ly/4qe2YjL