The “sensational” change that made me happy

“A dog’s breakfast of a foreign policy”

“No one could wish for kinder or more constant friends than those Viktor Orbán has in America,” says Janan Ganesh in the FT. It’s not just the soft interviews from the likes of Tucker Carlson, or even the praise from vice presidential candidate JD Vance. No, the real “mark of comradeship” is that US populists do all this even though the Hungarian premier defies them on the biggest topic of all: the rise of China. This year alone, Orbán has hosted and visited Xi Jinping, hailed Beijing as a pole in a “multipolar” (that is, non-US-led) world, and benefited from vast Chinese investment. And yet still the Carlson-Vance wing of conservatism show him an “almost canine faithfulness”.

There’s no “clever ruse” here. The explanation is simple: two of the Republican right’s strongest instincts – an aversion to China and an affection for strongmen – stand in “hopeless conflict”. (See also: their accommodating stance towards Vladimir Putin, despite his “no-limits” partnership with Xi Jinping.) It’s yet more evidence of tribalism, not ideas, driving events; of people adopting a certain position purely because their opponents don’t. The fact that Republicans are less willing to defend Ukraine, for example, was “not at all ordained by conservative dogma” – it was only when backing Kyiv became a liberal consensus that the right shifted the other way. People online use the term “edgelord” to describe those who seek to shock and offend the liberal herd. Well, there’s an “edgelord spirit” at the upper echelons of Republicanism. And it’s resulting in “a dog’s breakfast of a foreign policy”.

Keep schtum – we’re living in an “NDA era”

Non-disclosure agreements are “designed to live in the shadows”, says Reeves Wiedeman in The Cut, but they seem to be everywhere. There was, of course, the NDA Donald Trump gave to Stormy Daniels. OJ Simpson reportedly gave one to every member of his family before they could visit him on his deathbed. Earlier this year, Miss USA referenced her NDA with a cryptic Instagram post in which the first letter of each sentence spelled out: “I AM SILENCED”.

Those are just the ones that made national headlines. In Vermont, a Brazilian jiu-jitsu instructor was apparently requiring students to sign an NDA before receiving their black belt so they wouldn’t “run off with his techniques”. A 70-year-old woman in London convinced her local council to dim some streetlights that were keeping her awake, only to be asked to sign an NDA so that other residents wouldn’t follow her lead. To steal a phrase from Taylor Swift, we are well and truly in our “NDA era”.

The man who designed everything from black cabs to Parker pens

Kenneth Grange may not have been a household name, says The Daily Telegraph, but the down-to-earth designer, who died last month aged 95, changed the way millions of people in the UK lived their lives. Tall, lean, angular, and with an accent reminiscent of Michael Caine, Grange was credited with designing, among many other everyday objects, the classic coin-operated parking meter, Kenwood food mixers, Wilkinson Sword razors, Kodak instamatic cameras, Parker pens, Imperial typewriters, Morphy Richards irons, Ronson cigarette lighters, bus shelters, black cabs, Royal Mail postboxes and an ice cream scoop. He believed the secret of his success was to work 80 hours a week. “At that rate,” he said, “you don’t have to be very good to overtake the competition.”

Grange’s first major job came in 1958, when he was asked to rethink the UK’s parking meters because the Design Council disliked the original 1935 American version. He recalled working on a replacement, “to my first wife’s distress, on our honeymoon”. That same year, while setting up the Kodak stand at the Brussels World’s Fair, he was overheard complaining about the firm’s popular but out-of-date Box Brownie camera. The next day Kodak’s development head phoned and said: “I hear you are going to design a camera for us.” The result was the Instamatic, which sold 25 million models around the world. Grange optimistically told Kenneth Wood he could refashion the Kenwood Chef food mixer in three days. When he ran out of time, he knocked up a model of half the mixer and held a mirror next to it. “We clicked personally,” Grange said of the industrialist, “and I did everything for Kenwood for the next 35 years.”

⚰️📚 In 2002, Grange invented the Really Useful bookcase. Shaped like a man, it doubles as a coffin. “If I ever pop my clogs,” he said, “it’s books out and me in, with the lid fixed, up to the great client in the sky.”