Life
Back in 2016, says David Segal in The New York Times, Brandon Blackwell was “struggling to reach the highest echelons” of competitive quizzing. The then 22-year-old New Yorker had already earned about $400,000 from appearing on TV game shows, and trained with 30,000 homemade flash cards containing obscure facts. (“Which country is home to Lake Assal, the largest salt reserve on earth? Djibouti.”) But he decided he had to move to London. “Eight of the top 20 quizzers on the planet lived there,” he explains. “Competing in the city was the only way I was going to improve quickly.” When he then learned about University Challenge, he became fixated on winning it. He applied to Imperial College – hardly an obvious choice, given it hadn’t won the competition since 2001. But as a Star Wars fan, he liked the fact that whenever he buzzed in to answer questions, the show’s narrator would shout “Imperial Brandon!”
Blackwell launched into “a self-taught crash course in British history”. He watched over 100 hours of University Challenge on YouTube, trained for 80 hours a week, and went through his entire set of flash cards eight times. He soon made the Imperial team, and in 2020 they “rampaged” to victory. It marked the start of a glorious revival:the university has triumphed twice more since, including in this year’s final on Monday, making it the most successful team ever. Now 30, and living back in the US, Blackwell works on the quiz show The Chase, where he “regularly swipes more than $100,000 from contestants”. He says it’s “not all that different” from University Challenge: “The idea is the same – make someone else go home unhappy.”
Quirk of history
Avocados took a long time to take off, says Katherine Laidlaw in The Hustle. When the fruit first arrived in the US from Mexico in the early 1900s, it was prohibitively expensive. Luxury hotels in San Francisco and New York had to pay $1 (roughly $25 in today’s money) to import each one. And they initially weren’t very popular. People thought they were complicated – you could neither eat them like an apple nor peel them like an orange – and ugly. There was also a rather significant “branding problem”: at the time, they were called “alligator pears”. It was only in 1927 that some canny farmers rebranded it the avocado, a name derived from the Aztec word for the fruit: ahuacacacuahatl, or “testicl* tree”.
Comment
Maybe not such a good idea? Team America: World Police (2004)
It’s dawning on many of us that, just as Israel is facing “reputational calamity” over its war on Gaza, so too are the country’s “Western cheerleaders”, says Owen Jones inThe Guardian. This is just the latest manifestation of “the fall of the West” – a fall that the right blames on, variously, “immigration, multiculturalism, Islam, ‘wokeness’, ‘gender ideology’, the disintegration of the nuclear family, and so on”. The truth is simpler: in the aftermath of the Soviet collapse in 1991, America and its European allies became “intoxicated with a premature triumphalism”. This had two disastrous consequences. One, the 1980s model of “unchained capitalism” persisted. That paved the way for the 2008 financial crisis, and the economic stagnation which sparked the rise of populists like Donald Trump.
Two, the West hubristically believed itself to be the world’s police force. In the 1990s, the first Gulf war and armed interventions in former Yugoslavia seemed to vindicate this “liberal interventionism”. But the wars we launched after 9/11 were catastrophic. Afghanistan “descended into a bloody quagmire”; the invasion of Iraq, in the prophetic words of the Arab League secretary-general Amr Moussa, opened “the gates of hell”. Nato’s intervention in Libya’s civil war toppled Gaddafi. “But at what cost? Libya is now a war-ravaged failed state.” These disasters “ignited a justified contempt for Western claims to moral superiority” – a contempt which the likes of Vladimir Putin have used “as ammunition for their own aggression”. The West is currently learning a painful moral lesson: pride comes before a fall.
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Zeitgeist
A pro-Palestinian activist in London. Mark Kerrison/In Pictures/Getty
According to a recent representative poll of 1,000 British Muslims, saysRod LiddleinThe Spectator, more than a third of those surveyed want to see Sharia law introduced in this country. Only 24% believe Israel has a right to exist. Almost half think Jews “have too much power over UK government policy”. Fewer than a quarter believe Hamas committed murder and rape in the October 7 attacks on Israel. “Quite what the huge majority believed Hamas had been up to instead – playing multi-faith Scrabble with their hosts? Sunbathing? – has not been revealed.” Overall, about a third of the group have views which are antithetical – “in some cases violently antithetical” – to that of the general population. And because these views “are espoused most strongly” by younger Muslims, this segment is probably growing.
When I talked about all this on television, the presenter felt it necessary to assure the viewing public that, actually, “ordinary” Muslims had “no love for Hamas”. But the poll findings “were right there in front of her”. The liberal establishment stubbornly stick to their “official opinion”, even though “there is all too much evidence to the directly contrary”. The BBC, for example, seems not to have covered this report. The number of British Muslims has more than doubled in the past 23 years, to 3.87 million. Of course, the poll findings don’t suggest that all of them are “about to strap on a bomb”. But they do suggest there is a problem. “All I am asking for is a certain recognition of this problem.”
Inside politics
Jeremy Wolfenden: seduced by a handsome Russian barber
“Very clever people do very stupid things for sex,” says Ben Macintyre in The Times. Upon this principle has been built “one of the oldest, nastiest and most effective” of spying techniques: the honeytrap. It was “pioneered and perfected” in the Soviet Union. During the Cold War, the KGB seduced foreigners using “Mozhno girls” – Mozhno meaning “permitted”, as they were allowed to have (very close) contact with foreigners. Men were used too: when the gay British journalist Jeremy Wolfenden was appointed the Daily Telegraph’s Moscow bureau chief in 1961, “a handsome young Russian barber at the Ministry of Foreign Trade was ordered to seduce him”. Compromising photos taken by a cameraman hidden in Wolfenden’s closet were used to blackmail him into spying for the USSR.
Amy Thorpe, codenamed “Cynthia”, was used by Britain and America during World War Two to seduce high-level diplomats, obtaining “intelligence on the Enigma machines and the cipher books of fascist Italy”. Markus Wolf, the East German Stasi spy chief, deployed a “small army” of male “Romeo spies” – the war had left many powerful West German women without partners. Mordechai Vanunu, who fled to London after revealing Israel’s atomic bomb programme to the world, was lured by a honeytrap to Rome, where he was “seized, drugged, taken to Israel and tried for treason”. The recent scandal involving William Wragg – the Tory MP who handed over phone numbers of colleagues to someone on the gay dating platform Grindr – proves that the digital age has made honeytraps more effective than ever. Dating apps, where compromising material can be exchanged between people who may never meet, “are the spymaster’s dream”.
🤷♀️ Honeytraps don’t work on everyone. According to a new documentary about the DGSE, Paris’s equivalent of MI6, Russian spooks gradually realised they couldn’t blackmail French spies about affairs. The usual response they got to their threats was: “Go ahead, my wife already knows.”
Quoted
“Genius is more often found in a cracked pot than in a whole one.”
American writer EB White
