1. Global leaders are dreaming of a US-free world order. Do they stand a chance?
In this timely featured essay, Eduardo Porter examined the disintegration of the world order, as the US crushes the system of cooperation and shared values it helped to create after the second world war, concluding: “History seems pretty clear that a world of roaming great powers is not particularly safe nor prosperous.”
2. If you think politics shaped these Winter Olympics, just wait until LA 2028
From the US men’s hockey team’s chummy phone call with Trump to the backlash against Hunter Hess and others who criticised the US president, Milan-Cortina was an unusually political Winter Olympics. As Bryan Armen Graham reminded us, just wait for Los Angeles in the summer of 2028.
3. ‘We’ve been paying for happy endings for Andrew for years’: the inside story of a royal disgrace, by his biographer
Zoe Williams wrote a fascinating interview with Andrew Lownie, the author of Entitled, a book about Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor that documents, as Zoe put it, “a priapic, exploitative and money-grubbing life in which nothing was ever refused him”. Elsewhere, the art writer Eddy Frankel considered the already famous photograph of Mountbatten-Windsor after his arrest on 19 February, comparing it to Goya and Munch’s The Scream.
4. Gisèle Pelicot on rape, courage and her ex-husband: ‘He was loved by everyone. That’s what is so terrifying’
Angelique Chrisafis’s interview with Gisèle Pelicot was a moving portrait of a woman whose story shocked the world. They discussed shame, resilience, how her husband hid his depravity behind the guise of the perfect husband and why, despite everything, she believes “hope is allowed”.
5. ‘We watched 9/11 from the rooftop, blasting the music out’: how The Disintegration Loops became a requiem for the attacks
For some New Yorkers, the composer William Basinski’s The Disintegration Loops seemed to sum up the mood after the seismic shock of 9/11. He and his friend Anohni discussed the making of this avant garde masterpiece to Tim Jonze – and hundreds of thousands of Guardian readers.
6. Sex first, dinner later: what can singles in Oslo, Berlin, Paris and Rome teach me about dating?
After a breakup, Kitty Drake threw herself into internet dating before becoming increasingly disillusioned. Could daters in Europe give her insight into a different way of meeting people?
