Emma Hayes has described the difference between men’s and women’s football as cortisol v. dopamine. Under her management between 2012 and 2024, Chelsea won the Women’s Super League seven times, the FA Cup five times and the League Cup twice. In 2024 Hayes was recruited by the US national team and they won gold at the Olympics. I was delighted when I heard that she’d be part of the ITV line-up for their coverage of the men’s World Cup this year. But – as a lot of people have been asking on social media – why did the set designers feel the need to put her in a kitchen?
Wearing a football jersey and waving the national flag, Abelardo de la Espriella trotted out the quasi-fascist trinity from the days of Operation Condor, ‘Dios, patria y familia’, promising to end gay marriage and abortion, introduce megaprisons on the Bukele model, cut government spending by 40 per cent by eliminating ministries and privatising state enterprises, and slash whatever taxes and regulations remain on trade, production and commerce to attract US capital. Trump would ‘co-pilot’ his government, he said. Bernie Moreno, the Republican senator for Ohio, said Colombia will be at the centre of the Shield of the Americas.
Bill Clinton called the White House the ‘crown jewel of the federal penitentiary system’ but that’s not the way Jill Biden saw it. On becoming first lady, she was transported into a ‘magical place’, an enchanted castle where wishes could be conjured into being. It wasn’t just that she could call down to the kitchen in the middle of the night and summon a cheeseburger, but that the building itself seemed to anticipate her desires.
Andy Burnham has shown an awareness that the argument for more devolution, for the rebuilding of local government and the rebalancing of the country away from Westminster, goes hand in hand with a critique of Britain’s neoliberal, privatised economy. The British state was unmade by the collapse of the municipal project and can only be remade by its revival.
‘How Dirty Old Father Thames Was Whitewashed’ (‘Punch’, 31 July 1858)
The Thames may be cleaner than when it was declared biologically dead in 1957, but other rivers are close to ecological collapse, suffocated by algae, fungi and weeds that bloom in the run-off from industrial farming. On 1 June, Natalie Bennett, a former leader of the Green Party, waded into this slurry with the first reading of a private member’s bill in the House of Lords. The Nature’s Rights Bill calls for Nature (capitalised) to be recognised in law as ‘a legal subject and rights-bearing entity’.
I arrived to take my exam after half the allotted time had already passed. I hadn’t been delayed by bombing, or even by a power cut, but by a worn-out banknote that no one was willing to accept.
With their immortal 0-0 draw against Spain yesterday, Cape Verde have now given me two truly great World Cup moments. On 11 July 2018, I was on Santo Antão, the archipelago’s outermost island, reachable only by boat from Mindelo, Cape Verde’s second biggest city, on the neighbouring island of São Vincente. We’d been looking for somewhere to watch England’s semi-final against Croatia, and had happily stumbled on a place called Bar Oásis.