Wednesday 6 May 2026 The suggestion that a Pope might excommunicate JD Vance would, at first glance, appear theatrical — a relic of medieval ecclesiastical power projected onto the theatre of contemporary American politics. Yet the idea is neither wholly fanciful nor entirely without precedent. Within the long institutional memory of the Catholic Church, excommunication has served as both a spiritual sanction and a political instrument — a means of drawing boundaries where do

Tuesday 5 May 2026 The annual Met Gala has long occupied a peculiar position at the intersection of art, celebrity, and spectacle. Held each year at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, it is formally a charity fundraiser for the Costume Institute, marking the opening of its spring exhibition and raising vast sums for its upkeep. Yet in practice it has become something else entirely: a ritualised theatre of status and image, in which the human body itself is increasing

Tuesday 5 May 2026 The codification of private law is one of the most profound acts a state may undertake. It is not merely a legislative exercise, but a declaration of how a society understands property, family, obligation and the boundaries of personal autonomy. In Ukraine, where war has accelerated institutional change and intensified the pressures of European integration, the proposal for a new Civil Code has therefore provoked not only technical debate but something clos

Tuesday 5 May 2026 The war in Ukraine has been fought not only across trenches, minefields and shattered cities, but within the minds of those who endure it. The visible destruction of buildings and infrastructure is matched by a quieter, less measurable devastation — the erosion of psychological resilience amongst soldiers at the front, civilians under bombardment and a growing population of veterans returning to uncertain futures. The need for psychotherapy and psychiatric

Tuesday 5 May 2026 It is a complaint heard in cities and villages alike, in Europe and far beyond her borders: life is getting more expensive. The phrase carries an air of resignation rather than surprise. People speak of it as one might speak of the weather, as though it were an inevitable condition rather than the consequence of choices, systems and shocks. Yet rising costs are neither mysterious nor uniform. They are the visible surface of deeper structural changes in how

Monday 4 May 2026 The modern aircraft carrier is often described, in the rhetoric of admirals and politicians alike, as a floating sovereign territory – a projection of national will, a mobile airbase, a theatre of power unto herself. Yet, in recent years the United States Navy’s flattops have displayed a more prosaic and disquieting tendency: they burn. Not metaphorically, as symbols of imperial overstretch, but quite literally – in dockyards, at sea, and sometimes for days