Adrian Wooldridge

One of the most striking things about contemporary America is the popularity of conspiracy theories. The list of absurd things that “everybody knows” gets ever longer. If you’re on the right, you “know” that the Deep State is subverting the...

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It is impossible to visit Sweden without being impressed, and I’m not saying that just because I visited in the run-up to midsummer when the weather was superb and the evenings long. The Swedish people look remarkably fit — the average Swedish woman is 2.5 inches to 3 inches taller than the average US woman, 23.8 pounds lighter, and can expect to live four years longer — and Swedes come at or near the top of league tables for educational opportunity, political and gender equality and general hap

IT IS IMPOSSIBLE to visit Sweden without being impressed, and I'm not saying that just because I visited in the run-up to midsummer when the weather was superb and the evenings long.

In the 19th century, Britain perfected what the journalist Walter Bagehot called “government by discussion.” In the 20th century, it perfected government by disciplined but democratic parties. Today it is pioneering a new form of rule: government by emotional spasm.

“Do you ever indulge?” Alan Greenspan, then in his early nineties, asked with a twinkle in the eye. We were both flagging — it was four in the afternoon, and we had been laboring since nine — and I replied, flustered, that I might have done a bit as an undergraduate, but those days were over. The former Federal Reserve chairman immediately got up from the large table where we sat, walked over to his desk with a surprisingly jaunty step given his back problems, and produced a slim package wrapped

“Do you ever indulge?” Alan Greenspan, then in his early nineties, asked with a twinkle in the eye. We were both flagging — it was four in the afternoon, and we had been laboring since nine — and I replied, flustered, that I might have done a bit as an undergraduate, but those days were over. The former Federal Reserve chairman immediately got up from the large table where we sat, walked over to his desk with a surprisingly jaunty step given his back problems, and produced a slim package wrapped

Britain’s two major political parties have one new thing in common: They are both infatuated with their leaders (or incoming leader in the case of Labour). This is hardly shocking for the latter. The people’s party is firing Keir Starmer on the grounds that he does not have any people skills and is replacing him with the more personable Andy Burnham. But the Tories’ love of Kemi Badenoch is much more surprising.

The US likes to think of itself as a young country, the product of a revolution against throne, altar and aristocracy that is based on the promise of the future (the pursuit of happiness) rather than the claims of the past. Even America’s conservatives are revolutionary: Whereas Winston Churchill liked to say, over a whisky and cigar, that he preferred the past to the present and the present to the future, Ronald Reagan frequently quoted Tom Paine’s adage that “we have it in our power to begin t

Football pundits will exhaust the language speculating about the results of Saturday’s England vs. Norway World Cup match. Will England’s depth win the day? Or will the Viking superstar — the six-foot-five Erling Haaland, strong as a wrestler and swift as a sprinter — tilt it Norway’s way? It is also a good time for their less colorful colleagues, public policy pundits, to say a few words about another matchup: the Norwegian vs. the British economic models.