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4 weeks ago | 
thespectator.com | Andy Palmer |Ian Williams |Jane Stannus |Gavin Mortimer
With all the insane news this week surrounding President Trump’s tariff and trade drama, only one non-political story was significant enough to break through the news cycle: a Texas-based company called Colossal Biosciences has bred three dire wolves and is currently keeping them in a secret 2,000-acre natural habitat somewhere in the United States. That’s right: dire wolves. An extinct species. A beast so mythical that we only really know of it from Game of Thrones.
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1 month ago | 
thespectator.com | Olivia Potts |Freddy Gray |Teresa Mull |Jane Stannus
Picture the scene. The year is 2004. The setting, a British field or maybe a beach. There is a small open fire burning with a single cast-iron pan perched on it. A male TV chef – dressed in a striped shirt, open at the neck, chinos, possibly red, leather shoes – is standing over it, reverently holding a fish. “This is a beautiful piece of fish,” he says, “and we’re not going to do anything fancy here.
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2 months ago | 
thespectator.com | Ben Sixsmith |Teresa Mull |Jane Stannus |Hannah Moore
If something can be squeezed into a jar with brine, Polish grandmas will do it. Walk into the kitchen of the average babcia and you’ll see jars lining the shelves filled with mysterious experiments, as if in an old-fashioned Slavic science lab. Here are pickled cucumbers, pickled peppers, pickled mushrooms, pickled cabbage, and pickled beetroot. Babcia knows that pickles are tasty, cheap, versatile and great for your health. Dziadek (Grandpa) knows that they are great with vodka.
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2 months ago | 
thespectator.com | Hannah Moore |Freddy Gray |Teresa Mull |Jane Stannus
Irish Americans are arguably the most ostentatious in their national celebrations. It is hard to imagine any other group getting a day off work and spending it turning the Chicago River green. I wrote of my own Irish pride in these pages last year. March 17 was the highlight of our social calendar. My grandfather inaugurated our city’s St. Patrick’s Day parade, which still runs in Great Falls, Montana, today.
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2 months ago | 
thespectator.com | Jane Stannus |Teresa Mull |Hannah Moore |Olivia Potts
I’m sipping Madagascan hot chocolate out of white-and-gold Haviland Limoges, and nibbling on Venezuelan milk-chocolate bonbons, under an oil painting of Queen Victoria. I am on a visit to Guild Chocolates, “the finest chocolate shop in Petrolia,” in southern Ontario. The town’s population was circa 6,000 at the last census and on a Saturday morning, the chocolate shop is the place to be.
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2 months ago | 
spectator.com.au | Jane Stannus
I’m sipping Madagascan hot chocolate out of white-and-gold Haviland Limoges, and nibbling on Venezuelan milk-chocolate bonbons, under an oil painting of Queen Victoria. I am on a visit to Guild Chocolates, “the finest chocolate shop in Petrolia,” in southern Ontario. The town’s population was circa 6,000 at the last census and on a Saturday morning, the chocolate shop is the place to be.
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2 months ago | 
thespectator.com | Hamish McRae |Kate Andrews |Jane Stannus |Jacob Heilbrunn
Could it be that Donald Trump actually wants a bear market now? At some point, one was bound to happen on his watch — after all, US equities weren’t going to keep up their stunning gains from the past two years for the rest of his term. A market correction was inevitable, and it seems we’ve already seen that, as the S&P 500 dipped into correction territory this week. And a bear market was almost certainly coming, given that there have been 27 of them in the S&P index since 1928.
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2 months ago | 
thespectator.com | Sergey Radchenko |Jane Stannus |Matthew Lynn |Michael Evans
After Ukraine accepted America’s 30-day ceasefire proposal, all eyes are on Russia’s reaction. Will Vladimir Putin — who, as President Trump has incredulously claimed, has all the cards, and at the same time no cards at all — go along with the US proposal, or choose to snub it? To answer this question, it is important to understand what Putin is trying to do.
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2 months ago | 
thespectator.com | Samuel Gregg |Kate Andrews |Dave Seminara |Jane Stannus
If there is anything that all governments watch carefully, it is GDP growth. Without substantive and ongoing increases in what GDP measures — the total monetary value of all final goods and services produced in the economy over a specific time period — societies are in big trouble. That’s one reason why recessions usually result in electoral death for whoever holds office at the time. To accurately estimate total growth in an economy, everything that contributes to GDP must be measured.
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2 months ago | 
thespectator.com | Samuel Gregg |Kate Andrews |Jane Stannus |Matthew Lynn
If there is anything that all governments watch carefully, it is GDP growth. Without substantive and ongoing increases in what GDP measures — the total monetary value of all final goods and services produced in the economy over a specific time period — societies are in big trouble. That’s one reason why recessions usually result in electoral death for whoever holds office at the time. To accurately estimate total growth in an economy, everything that contributes to GDP must be measured.
