I was delighted to review @dannybate.bsky.social's excellent "Why Q Needs U" in this week's Economist. www.economist.com/culture/2025...

In case anyone was wondering “how nasty is Chega in Portugal?” the answer is below. The original poster is a member of parliament.

Glad to see that "it's an invasion" is not the only available take.

It's moral panic time! I'm glad The Times had the sense to contact and quote @lynneguist.bsky.social but this (paywalled, sorry) piece nonetheless lets parents fret that Americanisms are "creeping in" and need to be "corrected" etc. www.thetimes.com/uk/education...

People also don't understand what an economic catastrophe *deflation* is.

This was a great column, but I want to add a footnote: the description of “hygge” was as *other people* adopted it—“turning every day into Christmas”—and not as Danes understand it. I wrote about Danes and real hygge here: Hygge, but not as we know it economist.com/1843/2016/12...

Was trying to find some music in the Portuguese town I'm in, and one of the top results was the purest AI slop. Fake pic, generic text, & recommendations—a music venue, a nightclub & a beach bar—that don't exist. Feels like a real threat to Google. adventurebackpack.com/vila-nova-de...

I don’t mind that they think tariffs are great as much I mind the gaslighting. Just declare Reagan an amnesty-loving, abortion-tolerating, tax-raising free-trading traitor to true conservatism and move along please.

President Trump has pardoned Binance founder Changpeng Zhao, whose crypto exchange has been boosting the Trump family's own crypto venture.

I enjoyed chatting with Terry Gross on NPR’s “Fresh Air” podcast this week. We discussed how tariffs, immigration, the AI boom and the labour market are affecting America’s economy—and the unpredictability of Donald Trump’s policies. Listen now: n.pr/47BJ5g5

Roman Jakobson is someone I've quoted almost more than any linguist for his observation that languages differ not so much in what they *can* express (all languages can say pretty much anything) but what they *must*, the different choices different languages force on you, which vary a lot.

This column is a fabulous example of something I try to teach in writing: try developing a metaphor consciously through a whole piece. Make your word choices consonant with it throughout. Stick the landing. You'll remember the argument of this in five years because the metaphor is so good.

AI, soon to put mathematicians out of work. You just got ratioed.

How did I *just* find out that JRR Tolkien worked on the "walrus" entry of the OED?

How many of these can we do? Journalists: "Guys, the tech bros have changed their algorithm and about 60% of you are being let go." Academics: "Guys, you won the job lottery at 33 and you are unsackable even for gross incompetence at 60."

From +5 to -39 with young voters.

Pedro Sánchez is moving to end the Daylight Savings shift as of next year. It can't happen soon enough. I am a prototypical night-owl who must wake up at 7 for a school run; in summer, that is solar 5am in Spain.

And Trump hasn't even openly expressed designs on any Dutch territory (*yet).

This guy gets way worse as you read the (long) story. Politico didn’t single out 1-2 edgelord comments, not by a long shot. www.politico.com/news/2025/10...

As a matter of tactics and planning, it's a bad idea to believe that legit opposition to your policies is fake. (I'm assuming for the sake of this post that both parties still hope to convince a majority of the electorate. We will keep an eye on this for-the-sake-of-argument assumption.)

Trying to find whether an ordinary painkiller can be taken with a migraine medication, for my suffering wife, and the AI slop all over Google results is making me want to quit the internet forever. All these generic "who?" websites crowding the top results, all the nonspecific sourcing...

Doing this on Friday night suggests an amount of vestigial shame. I know that may seem like grasping at a straw of hope, but that’s what I got.

Should be noted that that LatAm population number includes Brazil etc, so isn’t all Spanish-speakers. But there are still around 9x as many Spanish-speakers in the Americas as in Spain (if the Cervantes Institute figure of about 500m is accurate).

We tried the new Live Translation feature that Apple has heavily marketed. It turns out to be optimized for Spanish as spoken in Spain (pop. 49 million) as opposed to Latin America or the Caribbean (663 million), which makes it kind of a disaster to use in the U.S. And that's just one problem. Alas.

As I wrote a couple of years ago: living in Spain didn't hurt her chances either. Not only did the country have the world's oldest person, but longevity is higher than in much richer places. www.economist.com/europe/2024/...

A number of media organizations, including NBC News, have objected to the new Pentagon media policy, which says reporters could have their press passes revoked if they publish information the Pentagon hasn't authorized for release.

It’s funny the number of Republicans who don’t believe Trump on this issue

In a long (but not overly so) e-mail chain, my correspondent's long corporate blah-blah footer appears 42 times on the page, making it incredibly hard to navigate the chain. If you have *any* power at your company, please use it to kill these things.

I have never understood "an historic" rather than "a". The OED has citations for it from 1645 and 1763, but only offers the h-ful pronunciation—it's not like "hors d'oeuvre" or other words that have always/sometimes silent h's. Do we have evidence (besides those cites) that it was silent once?

Trump doesn't realize other countries have politics too. They notice when he tries his childish dominance games on their leader.

The original was "don't know why it's surprising to hear that a massive amount of paperwork will ensue if you get rid of the de minimis exemption, resulting in chaos, confusion, and some packages being destroyed". There is in fact a passive here ("being destroyed"), unusually in such an exchange.

“Dextrous” of course goes back to a root meaning “right side” (cf droit, derecho etc). So “ambidextrous” means something like being right-handed on both sides — sorry, sinister lefties.

Agreed. And it’s a classic arms race too. Everyone sounding more and more ridiculous but gaining no advantage. You need to have earned Regular Joe cred a long time previous to even hope to pull this off, and it isn’t working for anyone in this piece.

This is a chilling and excellent piece about a rash of Chinese executives who have either committed suicide or been locked into a judicial black hole by the state.

In a normal world this is a career-ender. (This is not a normal world.)

So unbelievable I had to check to see if it was legit. It is. This is a recruitment video: the appeal is “YOU will block globalists from ever entering our country.” Does that mean some goon will question me on free trade or the UN before I can enter? Or my non-citizen wife?

I'm tellin' ya: one of the best works of nonfiction I've ever worked on and/or read.

His language (“a violent armed resistance”) is getting worse by the day. It either is or — giving him the benefit of the doubt he hasn’t earned — seems to be designed to give the president the right to unleash “violence” in response, on US citizens and even a Trump-appointed judge.

"This is fake news!" followed immediately by confirmation that it's true ("follow the chain of command [and perp walk Comey] or get relieved.")

While most countries have seen a steady decline in suicide rates, the United States has witnessed the opposite, with suicides jumping almost 30 per cent since 2000

El Café Central se aferra a un resquicio legal para seguir abierto hasta fin de año. La clausura del histórico establecimiento estaba prevista inicialmente para el próximo 12 de octubre social.elpais.com/qos6f4

Back to back in my timeline, but only one outlet realizes it's publishing a joke.

We are delighted to announce The Economist Insider. From next month subscribers will get access to a weekly show from @zannymb.economist.com, our editor-in-chief, plus shows exploring geopolitics, defence, economics and tech. They can also submit questions

They're acting as though they never expect a Democrat to gain the power of the presidency they're building. www.nytimes.com/2025/09/29/u...

And what about writing them?

The NYT feed of the of the Trump speech has suddenly been overlaid with the Portuguese simultaneous translation...

"We are the hottest country in the world and no other country is even close." Trump's really getting into the spirit of the United Nations.

How did I only just learn that "walrus" was in Old English written the other way around—horshwæl—because it means "horse-whale"?