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simonkuper.bsky.social
Financial Times columnist, football podcaster at Heroes and Humans, and author of books including Chums, Good Chaps, Impossible City: Paris in the Twenty-First Century, Soccernomics etc. British and now French, lives in Paris with wife and kids.
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Per Dr Atul Gawande, ex USAID: “All malaria supplies protecting 53 million people, mostly children, including bed nets, diagnostics, preventive drugs, and treatments – terminated.” There are no words that sufficiently describe this level of cruelty and sadism.

Why do people hang out much less than before in the public spaces of our cities, why do they speed through, and how can we fix this? On homelessness and smartphones. Me @financialtimes.com with some help from the late legendary William Whyte on.ft.com/41lLM10

Fully agree with Sunder's points, but my critique would be: why give attention to a minor political hasbeen who is desperately seeking attention by shouting racist nonsense that she knows to be nonsense? I think best policy with her and others in similar position is to ignore

Given that the current US administration clear obsession with the EU, Europeans are starting to wonder if they’ve been underrating the EU-thing this whole time.

What a great piece. Europe is finding its voice through the Financial Times. Thank God for British journalism these days.

Paris, 24 février

Just look at these paragraphs from the AP story. Hegseth called Brown unqualified solely because he's Black. Then they fired him... and replaced him with a white guy so indisputably unqualified that he requires a Presidential waiver. This is what "merit" means to them. apnews.com/article/trum...

" They relish its walkability, architecture and the absence of active shooter drills at their kids’ schools"- on.ft.com/3XdQflh via @financialtimes.com

FT editorial: "In the past 10 days, [Donald Trump] has all but incinerated 80 years of postwar American leadership" on.ft.com/3D2RrkA

A lovely Lorimer - well done. This drawing is by Abdul Zahra Huthyfa, a football artist in Baghdad, and you too can commission a portrait from him. Email him at [email protected] and ask him to do any player or players. Beautiful gifts, very affordable

A Financial Times investigative documentary has found evidence that Russian executions of Ukrainian prisoners of war are not isolated incidents but are likely to be part of a broader pattern that points to a systematic policy. Watch the full documentary here: on.ft.com/3Qs7oDW

Like most people of my generation in the West, I was raised with a damaging cognitive bias: the belief in progress, that the good guys won in the end. It didn't equip us for the era of Trump, climate change, and technological advances making our lives worse. Me @financialtimes.com on.ft.com/3QriN6X

North east Syria. April 2024. This was at a refugee camp near Raqqa. Nearly 7000 families received emergency food parcels every month. I just got confirmation that today that this whole programme, USAID funded, is cancelled. 600 of my Syrian friends are now unemployed 😢

Yes, if the Ukrainians want to fight on, and Europeans keep supporting them, they would still need to buy most of the arms in the US

The US-Europe divorce: when your partner of the last 80 years leaves you, you need a new life strategy. Me @financialtimes.com on how Europe can cope alone, stick by Ukraine, stand up to US tech, and even grab some of its ex-spouse's assets on.ft.com/3QgpB7l

What Everyone Knows About Britain* (*Except the British) is out in paperback this week - updated and even more on point. “Honest, persuasive & good-humoured” – Jonathan Coe "Extremely entertaining" – Simon Kuper "Incisive, informative & deeply enjoyable" – Rosie Holt linktr.ee/whateveryone...

Great metaphor by @simonkuper.bsky.social Important to note: “Small animals can survive in a jungle”, and probably a lot longer than big predators. www.ft.com/content/1a69...

Sadly, most of the needle was between Dutch players. Germans were just accidental intruders on an embarrassing family quarrel

Or the United States would install a strongman that it could do business with, who could keep the population under control

what if it's both?

Temperatures are still rising faster than scientists expected, despite La Niña changing. Not the time to slow down action on climate change www.ft.com/content/b5d1...

Best way to understand how Trump is changing the world: Canada, Panama, most of western Europe etc spent last 80 years in a petting zoo. Now he's emptying the zoo out into the jungle. Every country needs to ask: where are we in the new food chain? Me @financialtimes.com on.ft.com/3CGHEQW

Nice summary of my book Chums in this @economist.com piece on British political speechifying www.economist.com/britain/2025...

Trump I: no plan. Trump II: no plan, but thousands of toadies ready to take every untested belief the king has ever had and turn it into policy

Thiel more familiar than the rest of us peasants with Greek texts that defined "apokálypsis" as exactly that

US business's reasoning seems to have been: Trump likes rich people, he likes economic growth, so he must think exactly like us. He'll do all the tax-and-regulation cutting policies we always dreamed of but not the crazy stuff he's been talking about consistently since the 1990s

Let's definitely not reflect on what powerful people want. Better to pretend hard that they don't exist

MAGA is built more on the cult of the entrepreneur than on the overlapping cult of the strongman. How do Trump, his supporters and the tech billionaires themselves understand his alliance with Musk et al? Me @financialtimes.com on.ft.com/42DHd4y

Marc, you're being both hypersuspicious and misinformed, a very 2025 combination. Dictionary definition of "apparent" is "clearly visible or understood; obvious". That's why I say that Musk gave an "apparent" Nazi salute, despite his denying it

MAGA is built more on the cult of the entrepreneur than on the overlapping cult of the strongman. How do Trump, his supporters and the tech billionaires themselves understand his alliance with Musk et al? Me @financialtimes.com on.ft.com/42DHd4y

Could the moon be made of green cheese? Regardless of whether one thinks this is a realistic outcome, which I do not, should we not have the courage to ask this question?

Another aspect of this, beyond the extreme far-right nativism, is something I've encountered before from high-status Americans: the idea that other nationalities just aren't very smart and need truths explained to them at primary-school level

If the reader is an absolute moron but not abusive, I always respect their anonymity

My rule for reader emails is that I always respect their anonymity unless they are abusive, Mark Goldstein

I wrote last year that the Israel-Hamas war was a contest between 2 competing fantasies of ethnic cleansing. Now, with Trump calling for Palestinians to be "cleaned out" from the "demolition site" of Gaza, it looks as if the Israeli fantasy may win on.ft.com/3CpAS1R

It’s statue time- Gerd Müller. The sculpture, which stands proudly along Allianz Arena promenade, was created by artist Karel Fron and funded by donations from the Bavarians' supporters and their fan clubs.

“Trump was aggressive and confrontational following the Danish prime minister’s comments that the island was not for sale, despite her offer of more co-operation on military bases and mineral exploitation….” www.ft.com/content/ace0...

How the son of Leicester market traders, whose best sport may have been cricket, thought his way into two great careers. Me for @thespectator1828.bsky.social, reviewing a book that doesn't do Gary Lineker justice (paywall after first bit) www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-...

I wrote an article citing scholars of genocide (successors to my late great-uncle Leo) who believe, based on set legal criteria, that Israel is committing genocide. I tried to be scrupulously scholarly, knowing loads of people are just going to shout on.ft.com/3E4tLN0

How could they possibly have seen this pardoning coming?

My first venture into the art world is going to make me lots of friends! Me for Town & Country magazine on the 'world's snobbiest art fair', TEFAF, founded by the criminal Robert Noortman in a small Dutch town without a proper airport www.townandcountrymag.com/leisure/arts...

Hi there - a first post on this platform. Do please repost this message just in case anyone should want to find me here -- thank you...

Listen out for this BBC Crossing Continents programme tonight www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m... How a town in Poland – once in Germany - is discovering its troubling past, 80 years after the Liberation of Auschwitz. Programme will also be on other BBC platforms at different times.

He did it twice. I was prepared to believe first was some weird oopsie. Not the second.