Not stereotypical, but typical: a big candy section in a small Danish supermarket. Adults eat plenty of candy here too. (The adult here is my wife.) The candy is weird to my American palate — oddly savory and lots of licorice flavors. But it’s t is a strangely big part of the culture.

When Samuel Johnson said “When a man is tired of London he is tired of life”, London had the population of today’s Fresno. (About 550-650k.) I looked this up after a very crowded Tube ride once.

Another observation: in my PDF viewer's scroll bar, all the hits highlighed for the word "biological". I think you can see where Kavanaugh's opinion ends and Sotomayor's begins.

Kavanaugh's opinion scrupulously avoids any pronouns at all for the litigant B.P.J. in the trans athletes case. (Note the repetition of B.P.J. in every instance that would call for a pronoun here.) Sotomayor's opinion uses "she".

Is this the first "not so much" in a SCOTUS opinion or dissent, from Kagan? In my search of supremecourt.gov, it would seem to be, in this sarcastic-aside sense. "Haitians are Black. (Norwegians and Swedes, not so much.)"

@anandmenon.bsky.social ‘s right—this visualization is in fact rather cool.

War is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength, green is blue.

Oof, the whole conversation makes this worse. Trump himself changes the topic to Meloni, asks the interviewer what she thought of him, and then tells the selfie story. (My back-translation from the Italian.)

Trump's story that Georgia Meloni "begged" him for a selfie—and Meloni's furious response ("I, and Italy, never beg")—is dominating every Italian news website. This is such a self-own.

To be fair, the Interior Department started it. You couldn’t make this up. Somehow they forgot the “Hussein” which would have really linked the stories.

Mine was an absurd joke. The actual Guardian:

Funny part is that he's denying the reports of "300 million" put out by the Dumocrats. The Josh Block text on Twitter says $300 *billion*.

Here's the pitch to Norway: "We both like beating Sweden, and we bring 6m fans... who *almost* understand your language." www.facebook.com/watch/?v=153...

Denmark's TV2 is doing fun short clips urging fans of teams in World Cup to pitch for Danish fans' support. Here's the one for Spain ("your beers are tiny; ours are big; your pork is cured, and ours is boiled. But we spend a lot of time in your country...") www.facebook.com/reel/9882307...

And finally don't get me started on the Spanish visa page's language: a flood of nominalisations, abstractions and legalese. It would take a long thread to parse just how difficult and off-putting this is. (And bear in mind this is for non-citizens, many of whom are non-native speakers.) 6/

Other countries have followed Britain's lead. Look at the page for getting a birth certificate in Greece. I interviewed Greece's digital minister about the huge effort required and came away very impressed. The efforts are clear to the naked eye.

Spain clearly *can* do this. Here's a page for seeing how much you've contributed to the Social Security system. Nice and neat, with plain language focused on the user ("Who this is for", "What you can do"), and not the bureaucrat. 4/

Britain made a huge effort on this. It centralised control of digital govt in a dedicated department and made all other depts comply. So the page to apply for a wildlife license is just as clean and neat—with the same design!—as the visa page. Same neat user-centered language. 3/

Some countries have made dealing with the state digitally as easy as they can; some have not. Just look at these two web pages and guess which I think is which. 1/

At the right-wing demo that just passed by ("Arrest Sánchez", "Thank you General Franco for 4 decades of security", "Trump: Liberator", "No Sharia") I think the #1 image was the hustling Indian immigrant selling Spanish flags...

People are rightly hard on Itamar Ben Gvir for his performative taunting of humiliated flotilla prisoners. But you could say he's only following the lead of Israel's biggest ally and once the world's model democracy.

This was my funniest slop-citation (we're gonna need a portmanteau for AI-powered spam solicitation, but I'm afraid this ain't it.) Anyway, I give you Madison Blake: Book Club Expert, Book club

Got my America The Beautiful pass, with Trump's scowling face on it next to George Washington's, so I can take my family to the national parks this summer. The Parks webite makes clear that altering defacing it will potentially render it void. Wonder why.

Is the EU trolling Trump with this new ad campaign in my neighborhood?

Our own unscientific poll of our subscribers: who won?

In Marjorie Taylor Greene's Georgia district last night, the 11-point Democratic loss is a huge outperformance. Greene won it by 30 points last time, and Trump won it by 37 points.

Thrilled to be nominated for a Webby for Animation, for the shorts based on my language columns. Huge thanks to my brilliant Economist Video colleagues. We're up against the Death Star: help us beat Disney! Stick your vote right up the old exhaust port. vote.webbyawards.com/PublicVoting...

That and the fact that Trump told voters, in exactly these words “I will immediately bring prices down”. Not slow their rate of increase. So while I share the financial journo’s wonderment that people aren’t more chill with 2.4% inflation, I don’t feel bad for Trump or the voters who believed this.

A more thought-through argument than what I tried to say the other day: governments shouldn't blunt the price signal for consumers when genergy prices surge. It expensive, un-green and pushes the pain on countries that can't afford to do so. www.economist.com/leaders/2026...

www.ft.com/content/1171... Traders placed $580mn in oil bets ahead of Donald Trump’s social media post on Iran talks