Sam Knight

London

Staff Writer at The New Yorker

Staff writer @newyorker. THE PREMONITIONS BUREAU https://t.co/vihlXJUb6v // Instagram @samknightwrites

Featured in: Favicon

newyorker.com Favicon

theguardian.com Favicon

nytimes.com Favicon

sputniknews.com Favicon

realclearpolitics.com Favicon

alternet.org Favicon

truthout.org Favicon

prospectmagazine.co.uk Favicon

harpers.org Favicon

newsbreak.com + 8 more

Articles

The Miraculous Fate of a Photographer of Miracles

1 week ago | newyorker.com | Sam Knight

In July, 2024, Friend reached La Salette Fallavaux, a spectacular shrine in the French Alps, ringed with mountains and sky. It had felt essential to include the site in her project. “Can I come back with anything at all?” Friend wondered. “Just anything, and it will feel complete.”In 1846, while tending their cows, a fourteen-year-old girl and an eleven-year-old boy reported meeting a beautiful lady in a small ravine at La Salette-Fallavaux. The woman was bathed in light and huddled over in grief.
London Is a Local-News Desert. What Comes Next?

1 month ago | newyorker.com | Sam Knight

On a recent foul, late-winter London morning—the sort when you can smell the river and almost taste the greasy sheen on the sidewalks—I had breakfast with Jim Waterson, the one-man operation behind London Centric, a six-month-old newsletter attempting to fill the void left by the collapse of local news in the city. It was a Friday, the day that Waterson chases down leads and finds stories. We met next to Paddington Station.
Britain’s Foreign Secretary Braces for the Second Trump Age

Jan 20, 2025 | businessandamerica.com | Sam Knight

The Security Council meeting was about the war in Ukraine. A large mural in the chamber, by the Norwegian artist Per Krohg, loomed over Lammy’s right shoulder. At the base, a dragon was removing a sword from its own body. “The world we see in the foreground is collapsing,” Krohg explained seventy-five years ago.
Britain’s Foreign Secretary Braces for the Second Trump Age

Jan 20, 2025 | newyorker.com | Sam Knight

Shortly before 3 P.M. on a Tuesday in late September, David Lammy, the British Foreign Secretary, sat down at the blond horseshoe-shaped table of the U.N. Security Council chamber, in midtown Manhattan. It was High Level Week for world leaders at the General Assembly. Outside, on First Avenue, the traffic was unbearable.
Elon Musk’s Latest Terrifying Foray Into British Politics

Jan 9, 2025 | newyorker.com | Sam Knight

For the past week, British public life has reverberated with the impact of Elon Musk’s tweets—percussive, repetitive, basically vile—calling for the overthrow of the elected government and weaponizing a national scandal relating to the rape of young girls in impoverished English towns. It’s been hard to keep your head, and not everyone has.
Keir Starmer’s Bafflingly Bad Start as the U.K.’s Prime Minister

Oct 11, 2024 | newyorker.com | Sam Knight

People used to say that Sir Keir Starmer would make a good Prime Minister because he wasn’t very political. The leader of the Labour Party, which won a huge victory at this summer’s general election, was always fairly wooden on the campaign trail. He wasn’t a vision guy. He didn’t understand why he—a former prosecutor of terrorists, a knight of the realm in his early sixties—was expected to talk about his parents so much.
Armand Duplantis, the Timothée Chalamet of the Pole Vault

Aug 5, 2024 | newyorker.com | Sam Knight

There is running, there is jumping, there is throwing things. And then there is the pole vault. On the one hand, it’s totally part of the fabric: on the climactic, final afternoon of the first modern Olympic Games, on April 10, 1896, five men—three Greeks, two Americans—lined up inside the ancient track of the Panathenaic Stadium, in Athens, with their wooden poles and waited to leap over a bar.
Foreign Correspondence, Vol 101

Jul 4, 2024 | foreigncorrespondence.substack.com | Anne Applebaum |Sam Knight |Yasmeen Serhan

Hello, and happy Friday! The U.K. election is over—and what an election it was. As predicted by pretty much every poll in the run-up to the vote, the opposition Labour Party secured a landslide victory, shunting the ruling Conservatives back into opposition after 14 long years in power. Labour Party leader Keir Starmer (remember him?) will become the country’s next prime minister.
Britain Awaits a Wipeout Election | The New Yorker

Jun 29, 2024 | newyorker.com | Sam Knight

After years of Conservative rule, culminating with the leadership of Rishi Sunak, how will Keir Starmer and the Labour Party pick up the pieces? Sam Knight reports.
Britain’s Embrace of the Bomb

Jun 19, 2024 | newyorker.com | Sam Knight

At 2:15 A.M. on January 29th, the United States National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency issued a Hazardous Operations warning for a stretch of ocean from the waters off Port Canaveral, Florida, to some empty waves in the middle of the South Atlantic, about a thousand miles off the coast of Liberia. The operation in question was the firing of a Trident-II D5 ballistic missile, which weighs fifty-eight tons, from H.M.S. Vanguard, one of Britain’s nuclear attack submarines.