Issue
Issue of September 26, 2026
Issue of September 26, 2026
Headlines
Merzdämmerung
Europe · Friedrich Merz, the zombie chancellor
Wagner’s “Götterdämmerung” — the twilight of the gods — recast for a chancellor who is politically dead but still walking. German opera, German doom, one surname.
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Sanction surrender monkeys
Europe · France forces the EU to lift sanctions on a Russian oligarch
“Cheese-eating surrender monkeys” gets a foreign-policy edit: France caves on an oligarch, and the insult survives with one adjective swapped.
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The quindrant
Business · The greatest advance in consulting since the quadrant
Quad becomes quin: a fifth box bolted onto the consultant’s sacred two-by-two, told as an origin myth complete with tearful salutes.
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Agent of whom?
Business · Agent of whom?
An AI agent, and the principal-agent problem of who answers for what it does. The column goes on to ask about “the homoagentic bond”.
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When Donald met Delcy
The Americas · The love-in between Donald Trump and Delcy Rodríguez
“When Harry Met Sally” applied to a Washington-Caracas courtship, with the alliteration doing the matchmaking.
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Putting the “rage” in “Entourage”
Culture · Ari Emanuel, Hollywood’s raging super agent, shares his playbook
Emanuel’s own quip, promoted to headline: the agent who inspired Ari Gold notes that the word was in the title all along.
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Buried in the text
It’s hard to celebrate an initial public offering that leads to a terminal public offing
Finance & Economics · You can’t trade your way through the AI apocalypse
Offering becomes offing, initial becomes terminal — a four-word IPO joke about human extinction, which is roughly the correct register for the subject.
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They know from experience: it is the hops that kill you
Middle East & Africa · What a beer with no label says about a small African country
“It’s the hope that kills you,” said of São Tomé’s barstool cynics by way of the national brewery. One vowel, two sorts of disappointment.
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A cakeistocracy
Leaders · Why house prices may be in trouble
Homeowners who want both the capital gains and the cheap mortgage, in a leader that runs on debt bloat and fiscal heartburn before closing on “some cake crumbs of comfort”.
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In search of the one true inflation rate, Burns kept narrowing the canon. Inflation, meanwhile, was becoming ever more catholic
Finance & Economics · How the Fed should measure inflation
Arthur Burns, the “Pope of Economics”, excommunicating inconvenient prices — the piece sustains the conceit to a cardinal sin and a closing leap of faith.
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An expensive and flawed edifice complex
Culture · Making sense of George Lucas’s new billion-dollar galaxy
Oedipus gets rebuilt in concrete for a $1bn museum its founder curated himself. Later, Los Angeles is “home of the Hollywood hills and tills”.
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It is also counting on the bad optics being overshadowed
Business · How tech firms hope to beat the backlash against “pervert glasses”
A PR problem and a lens problem in the same two words. The piece signs off on “surveillance capitalism — just through a new lens”.
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Yet it seems no one noticed they were broken until they took them out of the box
Europe · The EU’s new packaging rules are a bureaucratic bungle
The closing line of a piece about packaging law, where the rules and the cardboard are both the thing in the box.
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Less lithium, more lunch
Science & Technology · A new battery could make edible electronics safer
The pitch for a battery you can swallow, in three words. The same article galvanises some pigs’ guts.
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