Jozef Imrich, name worthy of Kafka, has his finger on the pulse of any irony of interest and shares his findings to keep you in-the-know with the savviest trend setters and infomaniacs.
''I want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can't see from the center.''
-Kurt Vonnegut
A year into his job, the German chancellor is almost terminally unpopular. “Friedrich Merz can’t go on like this,” judges The Economist. But then neither can Sir Keir Starmer. No UK leader has collapsed from landslide-winner to national joke with such speed. He can reassure himself that his peer in the Élysée Palace inspires an even greater hatred. (Macron enculé, a phrase that I can’t find in my Collins French Conversation Second Edition, adorns many an exterior wall in Paris, that 16th-century Florence of graffiti.) As for Donald Trump, he was unpopular even before the Iran war.
What are the chances that all these heads of government are useless? Or “out of touch”? This could be an unusually bad cohort, but that was said of their immediate predecessors too, which is quite the coincidence. Think of the Scholzes, the Sunaks, the Bidens. We all know that Starmer’s successor will be a hate figure within months. If the next US president has an average approval rating of under 50 per cent, that will be the fifth one in a row. What bad luck voters are having.
I’ll be called a metropolitan snob — an absurd accusation, as I was telling the sommelier at Oma the other night — but isn’t it likelier that public expectations are the issue here? In rich and established democracies, what people want from life goes up until no conceivable government can provide it. Notice that one of the few major western countries to have a popular leader right now is Spain. It is a place with recent memories of dictatorship. India was very poor very recently. Sure enough, on some measures, Narendra Modi is the most popular leader in the free world.
So much Anglo-French gloom is an incomprehension that large-ish countries, once dominant on Earth, are impotent in the face of events
Low expectations, born of a low starting point, is most of the trick to happiness. The trouble is that, if I am right, almost nothing can be done. Britain cannot choose to have a Franco in its recent past to make it grateful for a well-meaning plodder like Starmer. And no state is going to induce a crisis every decade or two just to temper public expectations. There is a lot of Stoic or Buddhist-tinged advice out there about acceptance and detachment from desire. But I have known no one downgrade their expectations as an adult without bitterness, except through one method: a premature brush with death, after which each tree is greener, each neighbour easier to bear, each government suddenly deserving of the benefit of the doubt.
The happiest countries are geographically dispersed, such as Finland, Costa Rica, Israel and New Zealand. Some have lots of immigrants. Some are more homogeneous. The one through-line, besides high or high-ish income levels, is that almost all are small. No doubt, 8mn people are easier to govern well than 80mn. But perhaps something else is at work: small countries don’t expect to be able to shape reality. Change — demographic, technological, cultural — is less traumatic for those who are used to being takers not makers of world trends. So much Anglo-French gloom is disbelief that large-ish countries, once dominant on Earth, are impotent in the face of events, whether the event is a refugee boat or a local high street gone to seed.
It is probable — I can’t know — that I had a less advantageous upbringing than the average of my professional peers. This once felt somewhat isolating, and now feels like a godsend. My “patrimony” is a set of modest expectations that were surpassed at around age 23. The ultimate result is a lenient attitude to elites — who, after all, have presided over a bonanza of an adult life for me — and pro-status quo politics. Is this unattractive complacency? Solipsism? Perhaps, but I can’t help it, any more than someone whose life took a different gradient can help being susceptible to a radical’s message.
To be upwardly mobile in a country, a continent and perhaps even a civilisation going the other way rather alerts a man to the importance of starting-points in shaping mood. In the end, if electorates bring the system down to avenge dashed expectations, we can console ourselves that it was all decided long ago.
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In 50 years of travelling the world I have loved many countries – but none more than Ghana.
Its biggest attractions have always been the warmth, charm and hospitality of its people – and that’s saying something at a time when many of the world’s loveliest destinations have gone off tourists. That’s what first seduced me when I landed a Financial Times job there in 1980. And when I visited again recently, after nearly half a century, I found that gracious culture mercifully unchanged.
Of course much has improved in the urban centres since 1980: there are not as many electricity cuts, water shortages and empty shops as I remembered. In their place are art galleries and social clubs, eco-safari lodges and artist collectives. Today’s Ghana has a luxury tourism scene that is modern and unique – but remains true to a traditional landscape that explodes with colour, sound and the sheer exuberance of life. Its capital has become a hub of contemporary art; new restaurants celebrate Ghanaian food; and new fashion designers give African cultural identity a modern twist.
Ghana is still special: well off the tourist-trodden track, but with enough modern comforts for even the least adventuresome. I started my trip in crowded and chaotic Jamestown, in old Accra, to savour the living art of a Ghana street scene. I found office workers and schoolchildren dressed in traditional bold cotton prints making their way through teeming lanes fragrant with traditional street snacks. Crimson piles of fried plantain (kelewele) – the country’s favourite comfort food – transported me instantly back in time. Vast vats of fermented maize and bowls of oily shito chilli sauce invited me to my first meal of kenkey and fried fish in decades. Women bathed babies in shallow basins, tossing used water straight into open sewers. And all the while, traditional Ghanaian music blasted from speakers at no less than two open-air funerals.
In Ghana, funerals are less about private mourning and more about shared social ritual; even tourists are welcome. Often the caskets are works of art: figurative coffins the shape of everything from airplanes to Air Jordans. Billboard-sized obituary posters celebrate the life of the departed, and mourners wear clothing printed with portraits of the deceased. All of that was true back in 1980. What’s new today is the way that local artists are transforming the fabric of Ghanaian life. I went straight from the streets of Jamestown to see that life reimagined at Accra’s biggest commercial art space, Gallery 1957, where Jamestown artist Serge Attukwei Clottey was celebrating the gallery’s 10th anniversary with a vast installation made from discarded cooking-oil containers.
Gallery 1957 is named for the year Ghana gained independence from Britain and is part of a complex that also includes the Kempinski Hotel Gold Coast City, owned by Lebanon-born Brit Marwan Zakhem, who displays numerous pieces of his personal art collection there. I particularly liked the giant hyperrealist group portrait by Ghanaian artist Jeremiah Quarshie outside the hotel restaurant.
“Something is happening in Ghana: it’s been happening for the past six or seven years, and it’s continued to grow,” says Zakhem. “The contemporary art scene in Accra has now become a leading pivot in the world, and not just for Africa.” For decades, Ghanaian artists have gone overseas to gain success; many are now returning home to work.
“The point of Gallery 1957 was to keep the talent in Accra,” says Zakhem. “Previously there just wasn’t the infrastructure. There wasn’t a gallery that was championing young contemporary artists. So when I built the hotel, I purposely put all the young artists in the public spaces.”
Gallery 1957 hosted its first Accra Culture Week in 2016: “I had to pay for people to come,” he says. The current incarnation of the event attracts hundreds of collectors, journalists and the world’s leading museums and galleries. But Ghana still lacks a culture of buying and collecting art domestically: Zakhem estimates that 90 per cent of collectors are international, with about 60 per cent Americans.
At the other end of town – and the other extreme of the Accra art scene – is Artemartis, a collective that acts as an incubator for emerging Ghanaian talent. There I met founder Selasie Gomado, who quit his engineering job to manage artists after proving he could support himself that way. “Artemartis started as an online art shop where we sold random pieces for as low as $20, even $2, $5,” he tells me. Artemartis began making money hosting local exhibitions of young artists. Many now exhibit overseas.
At Artemartis, I met Courage Hunke, a creator who takes plastic shopping bags, till receipts, order slips, invoices and the ubiquitous obituary posters and assembles them into art. “For me, these things hold a memory of who we are,” he says.
This newfound celebration of Ghanaian creativity isn’t just displayed in galleries. Front/Back Accra is a members’ club that doubles as a cultural salon. (Temporary passes are available to visitors who work in creative fields.) Founder Tarek Mouganie tells me he fashioned the front entrance from a repurposed shipping container, to mimic the form of the city’s ubiquitous shops.
Mouganie is fourth-generation Ghanaian-Lebanese: after studying overseas he returned to Accra in 2013 to launch Affinity Africa, his own digital bank, and became a Yale World Fellow in 2024. He says his “Ghanaianness” is his “superpower”, and Front/Back is about celebrating that identity. “When I came back in 2013, there were lots of returnees… but everywhere we went to have a luxury experience was (non-African) – a sushi restaurant, or French or Italian – and it was a sea of white faces.
“We came up with the concept of Front/Back as a members’ club. We wanted to curate the audience,” he says. To belong, you had to have “an interest in the arts in Africa” or the diaspora. The walls are covered in contemporary art; cocktails use local ingredients like shea butter or cocoa juice, and bar foods include (healthier) versions of street standards like kelewele and yam chips.
Nearby in the same Osu neighbourhood I met Ghanaian designer Aisha Ayensu, founder of the luxury fashion brand Christie Brown, named after her seamstress grandmother. She too was inspired by the newfound pride in Ghanaianness that I saw everywhere: even my Uber driver covered his car seats with west African wax print.
“When I launched the brand in 2008, it was a form of activism,” she tells me. “Our prints were shunned; you only wore it to church or wherever, and I thought, ‘Why?’” Now she uses traditional textiles or techniques “to create really interesting pieces that the modern woman would want to wear… into a boardroom, carrying a piece of her heritage. That does something for one’s confidence.”
There is a new Ghanaianness in luxury food offerings: at Buka there are traditional west African dishes; Kozo fuses African and Asian cuisines; and I returned again and again to the seductively named Rent a Wife Kitchen, where all my old favourites – pounded plantain fufu and palm nut soup, fermented maize banku and palaver sauce – taste as they should. Fans of Ghanaian “high life” music will hear plenty of it blaring from car windows, but if that’s not enough, Accra’s +233 Jazz Bar & Grill hosts live performances Tuesday to Saturday.
It’s not just the new coastal middle class that can tap into the creativity boom. A short flight to the dusty northern town of Tamale brings visitors to Red Clay Studio, the atelier and gallery of one of Ghana’s most internationally successful artists, Ibrahim Mahama, the first African to top ArtReview’s Power100 list. His giant installations use discarded items from everyday labour – cobblers’ shoeshine boxes, jute cocoa bags – to make artistic and political points about life in post-colonial Africa. In 2014 he invested the proceeds of his first international exhibition in opening art spaces in Tamale aimed at fostering education and community. He’s waging a personal campaign to persuade Ghanaian parents that their kids can make a living as creatives, pointing out that his own work can command prices in excess of €100,000.
A short drive from Tamale, I watch teenage elephants sparring for fun at Zaina Lodge, Ghana’s first luxury eco-safari camp. From the balcony of my air-conditioned tented chalet, I listened to elephants watering below, before sitting down to a superb Zaina meal. Even the coffee served on the dawn game drive was outstanding. Ghana is investing to protect its environment; something that wasn’t done in my day.
From my 20s to my 70s, Ghana has bookended my life. Much has changed – and even more has not. As the Canadian-Ghanaian owner of Rent a Wife Kitchen commented, “some countries you just don’t care about”. Ghana certainly is not one of them. I wouldn’t have missed seeing it again for the world.
Patti Waldmeir was a guest of Zaina Lodge, from $409, zainalodge-ghana.com; Kempinski Hotel Gold Coast City, from $370, kempinski.com; and Front/Bank Accra, snacks from $5, cocktails from $15, frontbackaccra.
On a hot summer day in late July 1953, employees of the IRS began walking the streets of Boston, ringing doorbells and putting two simple questions to anyone who answered: Have you filed your 1952 return? Can you prove it? A yes to both brought an end to the interview. Anything else guaranteed a harder look from agency officials.
The doorbell campaign was not a new idea (prior analysis: Tax Notes, Sept. 3, 2007, p. 891). Since 1864, the law had required every federal tax assessor to periodically “cause his deputies to proceed through every part of his district and inquire after and concerning all persons therein who are liable to pay any internal-revenue tax.” The Bureau of Internal Revenue (BIR, as it was known until July 9, 1953) had conducted some door-to-door surveys in the many decades since. But efforts were haphazard and intermittent; the agency had never developed a regular program of systematic canvassing.
Until 1953, that is, when newly installed officials in the Eisenhower administration began “rummaging around in the tax laws,” looking for ways to boost compliance and raise new revenue. A well-publicized canvass seemed like just the ticket.
CNN report says 16 US military sites in Middle East damaged
Defense Affairs Magazine: “An investigation by CNN claims that 16 US military facilities across the Middle East were damaged in attacks carried out by Iran and allied groups, with some sites described as effectively unusable. The report, based on satellite imagery and multiple sources, says the strikes targeted sensitive and high-value infrastructure, raising fresh questions about the resilience of US military assets in the region. According to the investigation, imagery reviewed by CNN showed damage to advanced radar systems, communication infrastructure, and aircraft stationed at several bases. A congressional aide cited in the report said the affected sites account for a significant portion of US military facilities in the region, adding that the extent of the damage has led some military discussions to consider whether certain installations should be shut down. The report did not independently verify the full scope of the damage but described a pattern of repeated targeting of strategic assets.
The investigation also highlighted contrasting estimates of the financial impact. US Department of Defense figures cited in the report place the cost of damage and operational disruption at around 25 billion dollars, while unnamed sources told CNN that internal assessments may suggest figures closer to 40 to 50 billion dollars. Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi, cited in parallel reporting, claimed the true cost to the United States could exceed 100 billion dollars, arguing that official figures underestimate the scale of losses. The CNN report also pointed to growing unease among some US partners in the Gulf. It cited a Saudi source who said the conflict has exposed vulnerabilities in reliance on US security guarantees, describing the alliance as not fully “immune” to regional escalation…”
8 Things You Should Know About Trump’s Effort to “Take Over” the Midterm Elections
ProPublica: “When President Donald Trump attempted to overturn the 2020 election, the institutional guardrails of American democracy held — but just barely. If faced with the same tests today, those guardrails and the people who held the line would largely be missing, a ProPublica examination found.
At least 75 career officials who once held roles at federal agencies related to election integrity and safety are gone. Two dozen appointees — including many who either actively worked to reverse the 2020 vote or are associates of such people — have been hired to replace them.
And once-fringe actors now have access to vast powers. As the midterms approach, current and former government officials and election security experts expressed concerns that Trump appointees who’ve espoused debunked conspiracy theories about balloting are now in positions to control the narrative around the vote’s soundness.
It’s hard to debunk false claims “coming with the seal of the federal government,” said Derek Tisler, counsel and manager with the Brennan Center for Justice’s elections and government program. “I certainly worry what damage that could do to voters’ confidence.” Here are some of the key things you should know about the Trump administration’s efforts to, as the president said, “take over” the midterms. Read the full investigation here.”
Well, best opening, anyway. Maybe Lauren Groff? - The Atlantic
An author I will read anything by: There are many, but one is Lauren Groff. While on a hike with two Atlantic colleagues this spring, I made them listen to me recount in detail the entire plot of “Between the Shadow and the Soul”—one of the stories in Groff’s new collection, Brawler. I feel bad because now they can never come to the story fresh, and because I went on for a really long time and they were trapped on a nature trail and couldn’t escape. So I’ll be briefer here: Groff commands the passage of time brilliantly, your understanding of the characters’ relationship changes right up until the very end, and the story is so sad. Groff has also written one of my favorite openings in all of recent literature, for her novel Matrix: “She rides out of the forest alone. Seventeen years old, in the cold March drizzle, Marie who comes from France.” I mean.
Artists have been raiding the toolkits of the Old Masters with new urgency of late, borrowing and reworking Renaissance and Baroque compositional drama, symbolism, and increasingly, their labor-intensive methods. - Artnet
It’s been over a decade, and scholars of the new history of capitalism have no more sense of a system now than when they began. What went wrong?... more »
