Josh Spero

@joshspero

Wealth editor, Financial Times. I like swimming, classical music and cryptic crosswords. Working on a memoir about my earlier life at a magazine for the very rich. he/him 🏳️‍🌈 josh.spero@ft.com

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Josh Spero@joshspero· 16d

Astonishing detail on Laura Loomer/Ukraine from @christopherjm.ft.com as.ft.com/r/69a6effe-a...

Her visit was embraced by Zelenskyy, senior government figures and energy executives, with officials even unearthing the birth certificate of her paternal great-grandfather, Pinkus Loomer, born in Vinnytsia, west-central Ukraine, in 1895, in the hope that her conversion will impress Trump.

Josh Spero@joshspero· 20d

Men are being scrutinized, by women, as though they were women: part by part, inch by inch. And some have responded by seizing the female obsession with looks, already rooted in misogyny, and rebranding it with maximum toxicity—in other words, by becoming looksmaxxers.

Josh Spero@joshspero· 20d

Jia on the unpalatable rise of plastic surgery, including among men, has this interesting thought www.newyorker.com/culture/the-...

Many men, now subjected to heterosexual contempt as a culturally significant collective force for the first time, have proved less equipped to process it within the bounds of a basic social contract.

Josh Spero@joshspero· 20d

I regret to say I read that at first as if it were the past tense of the verb "cheerl" as.ft.com/r/93110622-8...

Josh Spero@joshspero· 20d

And this picture

A group of old people stare at an oddly assertive hoover

Josh Spero@joshspero· 20d

Excellent headline game from the FT's arts desk

A Useful Ghost film review — Thai marvel about a haunted hoover does anything but suck
The poltergeist of a factory worker sets in motion bizarre events in a spiritual seriocomedy that is both wacky and melancholy

JULY 23, 2026

Trainspotting the Musical review — choose something, anything, but this
Heroin addiction and musical theatre are uneasy bedfellows in this Irvine Welsh adaptation at London’s Theatre Royal Haymarket

Josh Spero@joshspero· 21d

www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...

After receiving one of Derrida’s student papers, Althusser, his professor, said, “I can’t grade this, it’s too difficult, too obscure for the agrégation.” He gave it to Foucault, who was then an assistant professor teaching courses at the École. “Well,” Foucault said. “It’s either an F or an A+.” The final grade is lost to history.

Josh Spero@joshspero· 22d

This comment under our rather sad story about more people losing mental capacity, and the family rows over money that causes, did make me laugh www.ft.com/content/1e41...

Wowzers: Seems too easy to contest a will. If I have 5 adult kids and 10 million quid and I want to give it all to a cats shelter and I am of sound mind.....that should be that.
87654: Miao.

Josh Spero@joshspero· 28d

🥹

The seventeenth-century French essayist Michel de Montaigne wrote, of his attachment to his contemporary Étienne de La Boétie, "If you press me to say why I loved him, I feel that it cannot be expressed except by replying: Because it was him: because it was me? "

Josh Spero@joshspero· 28d

I found this line in a piece on male friendship striking www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...

In a parasocial world, Gordon implies, ties are rooted in surface identification rather than in more robust connections, and friendship becomes an aspirational activity through which you pursue an identity you want.

Josh Spero@joshspero· 28d

Greek week at the FT

The Odyssey film review — Christopher Nolan’s $250mn epic is both crazy and conventional
Matt Damon leads lavish retelling of Homer that paints Odysseus as trickster king, haunted hero and fallible dad

JULY 15, 2026

The Oresteia theatre review — no gods or fates, just a superbly acted psychodrama
Simon Stone relocates Aeschylus’s tragedy to the present day in a shattering play about war and inherited trauma at London’s Bridge Theatre

Josh Spero@joshspero· Jul 6

Isn't scrap paper the scrap paper of the ancient world? www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

In New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, you can look at a shard of pottery — the scrap paper of the ancient world — from the Byzantine period, on which a young boy has dutifully copied out the Iliad’s first line over and over

Josh Spero@joshspero· Jul 6

Flashpoint 😂

Josh Spero@joshspero· Jul 5

Hinge’s AI prompt-responses really need some work

My most irrational fear
Local museums with uncanny mannequins
AI prompt: Compare creepy mannequin spots

Josh Spero@joshspero· Jul 4

I wouldn’t be boasting about this, Wall Street Journal, but you do you

This Simple White Line Is America's Greatest Unsung
Innovation

Josh Spero@joshspero· Jul 2

So many amazing/horrifying details and visuals in our piece on how Trump is remaking DC ig.ft.com/trump-dc/

Map of Trump's revised White House with large East Wing. Box text reads: The large structure will block the symbolic axis between the presidential residence and the Capitol, and disrupt the symmetrical landscaping of the White House driveways

Josh Spero@joshspero· Jul 1

Great intro from @joemillerjr.ft.com on Trump's fair as.ft.com/r/93816194-0...

Nine years after he first exaggerated the size of the audience for his inauguration on Washington’s National Mall, Donald Trump this week reprised his role as crowd-estimator-in-chief for America’s 250th birthday.

Josh Spero@joshspero· Jul 1

If I do say so, our live in-person cryptic crossword solvealong (hosted by me) is one of the most fun sessions at the FT Weekend Festival every year, and this time our special guest is THE CREATOR OF WORDLE! who has launched a cryptic crossword app ukftweekendfestival.live.ft.com/page/5949336...

LIVE CRYPTIC CROSSWORD SOLVE-ALONG

Put your puzzling skills to the test as artist, software engineer and Wordle creator Josh Wardle joins FT crossword editor Roger Blitz and FT lead visual journalist Francesca Jakobi for a live cryptic crossword solve-along, hosted by FT Wealth editor Josh Spero. All abilities are welcome.

Josh Spero@joshspero· Jun 26

Sorry to be that guy, and apologies to enthusiastic Norwegians, but the horned helmet was an invention of Wagner’s for The Ring, not a real Viking thing

Photo of two people wearing plastic horned helmets and carrying a Norwegian flag, above the headline Norway embraces “Viking” rowing ritual in storming World Cup campaign

Josh Spero@joshspero· Jun 25

World’s worst Rothko

Map of Britain with large yellow, orange and red patches reflecting heat zones

Josh Spero@joshspero· Jun 23

BBC Breakfast weather this morning came from the lido and guess who they caught finishing his swim 😂

Josh Spero@joshspero· Jun 22

I had no idea Alan Greenspan was married to Joan Mitchell!! as.ft.com/r/1bbbdb21-9...

Greenspan married his first wife, Joan Mitchell, in 1952 but the couple split up after about a year. It was through that relationship that he first met Russian emigree Ayn Rand in 1952. Rand had become famous for her novel The Fountainhead, as well as a belief in the creative power of capitalism and the vital role of self-interest and the individual in society.

Josh Spero@joshspero· Jun 20

Happy Saturday!

Photo of a man in a black Speedo standing smilingly on a concrete jetty leading into a swimming pond surrounded by trees

Josh Spero@joshspero· Jun 18

I want to read an entire novel consisting of an internal monologue based on this Anish Kapoor-related incident as.ft.com/r/f9c13326-3...

Among the works reflected is “Descent into Limbo” (1992), a black-coated circular hole threatening to swallow you into a bottomless pit (it’s actually only 2.5 metres deep, as a visitor who fell in a few years ago discovered).

Josh Spero@joshspero· Jun 18

Has the Journal decided that news is a countable noun? One news, two news, all the newses

Thune has had to deliver a series of unwelcome news to Trump

Josh Spero@joshspero· Jun 15

Russian groups are commissioning hate crimes

By early 2025, Direct Action had begun encouraging its online followers — which numbered in the low hundreds — to spray anti-Islamic graffiti on mosques and Islamic centres in south London.

Josh Spero@joshspero· Jun 12

An AI-generated film about the government crackdown in Iran sounds like a disaster as.ft.com/r/3e0105b2-7...

The scenario can’t fail to feel intense, but technically it’s a mess. The AI-generated humans have vacant eyes, the usual bland burnish and push-button emotional expressions. They move through scenes and shots that are clunkily edited. In an astonishing unforced error, their dialogue sounds muddy, even garbled; Koosha reportedly recorded all the voices himself and fine-tuned gender and age qualities with AI. There’s also no substitute for good writing: the wheelchair-bound boy and his caretaker brother are cornily sketched out, as is the pianist who declares: “I don’t have anything but music.”

Josh Spero@joshspero· Jun 10

The black hole... farted? as.ft.com/r/e5a5d8cc-1...

From the lip of the monstrous black hole, called Sagittarius A*, a large cone of nothingness funnelled outwards. This, researchers announced last week, is long-sought evidence of a hot breeze flowing outwards from the black hole and sweeping away the cold gas in its path, and one that has been blowing for around 20,000 years.

Josh Spero@joshspero· Jun 10

Art-world brouhaha over the US pavilion at the Venice Biennale: the artist, Alma Allen, was picked by some weird body and no one reputable liked him. He has accused a PR of briefing against him and now says he had a terrible time in Venice. All very sad www.artnews.com/art-news/new...

Speaking with ARTnews on Monday, Allen said the experience in Venice had been overwhelming. “It was very difficult,” he said. “People on the street there came up to me and gave their opinion about whether I should or shouldn’t have done the pavilion.” Allen said he ended up leaving Venice after just two days, skipping dinners, parties, and official events.

Josh Spero@joshspero· Jun 3

Thank you @georgebas5.bsky.social for this — was very happy I commissioned you for the FT Weekend magazine years ago and have watched your writing career thrive since