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“... Last November​ Joseph Muscat, the prime minister of Malta, flew to Miami to convince several hundred lawyers, accountants and wealth managers of the virtues of a Maltese passport. New legislation, Muscat and his advisers said, would allow carefully screened foreigners to obtain fast-tracked, no-strings-attached Maltese citizenship in exchange for an investment of 650,000 euros ...”

“... On 15 November​ , Leonardo da Vinci’s Salvator Mundi was put up for sale at Christie’s in New York. There is something both exhilarating and embarrassing about watching the world’s wealthiest people spend 19 minutes bidding up, up, up, until a victor emerges half a billion dollars less rich. The crowd gasped as the zeros multiplied, and erupted into cheers when one of five prospective buyers phoned in the winning bid ...”

“... even get a ticket: the UN estimates that around ten million are stateless. ‘In this context,’ Atossa AraxiaAbrahamian observes in The Cosmopolites, ‘the sale of citizenship is interesting not because it is scandalous or even morally reprehensible, but because it speaks to the very arbitrariness of the concept of ...”