Will Dunn

2 days ago | newstatesman.com | Will Dunn

Fifteen years ago, on 11 May 2010, George Osborne arrived in the Treasury with a mandate to change the British economy. The deficit had reached more than £100bn, a hole in Britain’s finances twice the size of the armed forces. Who was to blame? The truth was confusing, technical and international. It involved understanding mortgage-backed securities and credit contraction. It was also depressing, because the people who were most at fault (investment bankers) would obviously never pay for the damage.

1 week ago | newstatesman.com | Will Dunn

Every commuter knows the dismay of realising, after the brief elation of having secured a seat on the bus or the train, that the person next to them has decided to use their phone to play music, or make a video call, or play clips from the bottomless cesspool of internet junk. L’enfer, c’est les autres sur l’autobus avec le TikTok, as Jean-Paul Sartre would have written if he’d ever had to take the N68 to East Croydon.

2 weeks ago | newstatesman.com | Will Dunn

The war in Ukraine has stimulated Russia’s economy. What happens when it ends? As negotiators attempt to broker a ceasefire between Russia and Ukraine, most of the attention is rightly on what any agreement could mean for Ukraine. After more than three years of defending its people against invasion, Ukraine now has to contend with Donald Trump, who has often appeared willing to capitulate to Russian interests.

2 weeks ago | newstatesman.com | Will Dunn

On 5 February 2003, a pipe organ in a 14th-century church in the town of Halberstadt in central Germany began sounding the first notes of a work by the American composer John Cage called Organ2/As Slow As Possible. The piece, as the name suggests, is written to be played very slowly indeed; the current record for a completed performance was broken last month at just over 25 hours.

3 weeks ago | newstatesman.com | Will Dunn

Who does Donald Trump think he his? In interviews he compares himself to William McKinley, the 25th president of the United States, the “Napoleon of Protection” as he was known in his day (which came at the end of the 19th century). Trump has dusted off McKinley’s century-old economic nationalism, and the “reciprocal” tariffs he announced this month were described in the same language McKinley used for his trade policy.