The New World

PICK OF THE WEEK The Bayeux Tapestry (British Museum, London, until July 11)

Beholding the great embroidery – nine-and-half centuries after its creation and eight years since Emmanuel Macron first suggested it be loaned to this country – I understood finally what Walter Benjamin meant when he wrote about the “aura” of original...

Over the past couple of years, the Daily Telegraph has been very exercised about nepo babies – children of famous or wealthy people – who benefit from family connections to get ahead.

Back in 2024 hack India McTaggart fretted that Labour’s “benches are awash with so-called nepo babies”, pointing to MPs such as Georgia Gould (daughter of Tony Blair’s polling...

Donald Trump’s absurd plan to give every American adult a $5,000 cheque, so long as the Republicans triumph in November’s midterm elections, has been described as unprecedented. But that’s not entirely true.

The president made the entirely uncosted pledge at the party’s so-called Trumpapalooza special convention in Dallas this week, promising to hand over the cash i...

If you’re prepared to waste hours for a pastry because TikTok told you to, you need to have a word with yourself.

Our culture has a particular habit of suddenly catching fire with a new trend and then dying out just as fast. Yes, there have always been trends and fashions, but in our world where everything is curated for social media, and every move is calculated fo...

What made Robert Jenrick complain about “suicidal empathy” in a Telegraph article about benefit reform? The phrase barely existed until the end of last year, when it started to attract flutters of interest on Google search. 

Then, in May, a Canadian professor of marketing called Gad Saad published a book called Suicidal Empathy: Dying to be Kind. E...