The best-connected woman in Washington

☕️ “Abominable, Heathenish” | 🤖 Cardboard disguise | 🎧 Deejay T’s playlist

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Wells Cathedral: shame to lose it. Getty

What Richard Dawkins got wrong

“Not since the road to Damascus has there been a more notable spiritual volte-face,” says Madeline Grant in The Daily Telegraph. After a career spent railing against religion, Richard Dawkins said in an LBC interview this week that he considered himself a “cultural Christian”. Now, before we start “preparing the baptismal font”, it’s worth noting that this isn’t the first time the good professor has expressed this view, and that he went on to say he is “happy” Christian belief is declining in Britain. But he conceded that he wouldn’t be happy if “we lost all our cathedrals and our beautiful parish churches”, and said that Christianity, unlike Islam, is a “fundamentally decent religion”.

These views obviously betray “a certain level of cultural free-riding”. Those cathedrals and churches won’t survive unless people buy into what Dawkins calls the “nonsense” of Christianity. But they also highlight how the New Atheism movement was wrong in two crucial respects. First, in its naive belief that a post-Christian society would be “rooted in reason”. That rational world clearly hasn’t materialised, and “a nastier, less reasonable one is supplanting what was there before”. Second, in its “semi-adolescent” claim that Christianity is a drag on cultural and intellectual progress. New Atheists were always citing the Spanish Inquisition or wacky American creationists as evidence of the religion’s idiocy, and ignoring any contradictory examples. The truth, as Tom Holland argued in his book Dominion, is that “the ethics we hold as natural and universal” are anything but. So much of what New Atheists ascribe to reason actually emerged out of the faith that informed the West’s “intellectual, moral, and, yes, scientific life”. It is the “cultural oxygen we breathe but never see”.

Staying young

A recent study showed that coffee could reduce the risk of recurring bowel cancer, says Jonathan Morris in The Guardian. In truth, the drink has long been known for its medicinal properties. When Turkish merchants first brought it to Europe, they marketed it as an aid for digestion. By 1663 the City of London had 82 registered coffee houses, whose customers were attracted by claims of “outlandish health benefits” – one document said the drink “closes the orifice of the Stomack, and fortifies the heart within”. But not everyone was won over. The “1674 Women’s Petition Against Coffee” alleged that this “Newfangled, Abominable, Heathenish” beverage was causing men to become impotent – though the call for them to resume drinking “Lusty nappy beer” suggests that the petition was probably produced by tavern owners worried about losing market share.

Inside politics

X/@patriottakes

When Donald Trump is staying at Mar-a-Lago, his Florida club, he has a regular “musical ritual”, says Axios. After having dinner in the members’ restaurant, at his usual table on the breezy patio, he’ll open his iPad, get on Spotify and start playing his favourite songs over the speakers. “Regulars jokingly call it the ‘Deejay T’ performance.” Sometimes it’s so loud that people have trouble talking, and he often “marvels at the sound quality filling the garden”. The songs are always the same old classics: Phantom of the Opera; Jesus Christ Superstar; Lionel Ritchie’s Hello; Sinéad O’Connor’s Nothing Compares 2 U. But Trump’s excitement never fades. “He seems like a kid with a new toy every time he turns on that iPad. It feels like the first time he’s heard or shared the crooning of Sinatra or the life-hard-lived edge of Cash.”

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Life

Chris Maddaloni/Getty

“The indomitable doyenne of Washington”

Esther Coopersmith, who has died aged 94, was probably one of America’s “best-connected diplomats”, says Katharine Seelye in The New York Times. But it was at her four-storey Washington mansion, not government offices, where she “greased the machinery” of global politics. High-fliers who took a seat at her famous dinner table – which was big enough for 75 people – gained access to “networks of money, influence and power”. Ronald Reagan gave her UN assignments. Jimmy Carter credited her with getting the 1978 Camp David Peace Accords “off the ground”, by introducing the wives of Israeli PM Menachem Begin and Egypt’s President Anwar Sadat. At a private fundraiser last year, the president of the United States introduced himself with the line: “My name is Joe Biden. I’m a friend of Esther Coopersmith’s.”

The long-reigning hostess – who part-inspired the fictional foreign ambassador in Netflix’s The Diplomat – kept the plates of the country’s politics spinning by using tactics learnt from years as a Washington lobbyist and Democratic fundraiser. She introduced Bill Clinton, then the governor of Arkansas, to Boris Yeltsin on a trip to Moscow; Anatoly Dobrynin, the long-time Soviet ambassador to the US, had his first Thanksgiving at her table. But Coopersmith, described by Hillary Clinton as “the indomitable doyenne of Washington”, was most proud of her “sometimes unconventional” pairings. On one occasion, she seated an Israeli diplomat next to an emissary of Saddam Hussein. Shortly afterwards, Iraq invaded Kuwait and started the Persian Gulf war. “It’s my home, and I can do whatever I want,” she told The Jerusalem Post three years later. “They didn’t talk much, but as far as I was concerned, it was a start.”

Tomorrow’s world

Deploying a sensor in Vietnam

It’s always worth taking claims about next-generation military tech with a pinch of salt, says Andrew Cockburn in Harpers. In a recent Pentagon experiment, a squad of marines was tasked with sneaking up on a cutting-edge AI robot that had been trained to detect them. They all succeeded, using laughably simple means to confuse the machine. “Two walked inside a large cardboard box. Others somersaulted. One wore the branches of a fir tree.” Back in the Vietnam War, the US Air Force deployed a vast array of sensors in the jungle, designed to detect human activity “by the sounds of marching feet, the smell of ammonia from urine, or the electronic sparks of engine ignitions”. The North Vietnamese tricked the computers by hanging buckets of urine in trees and herding livestock down unused byways – then launched an offensive using hundreds of tanks that had gone “entirely undetected”.

Quoted

“The land of my fathers. My fathers can have it.”
Dylan Thomas on Wales

That’s it. You’re done.