Need something brilliant to read this weekend? Here are six of our favourite pieces from the past seven days
For the past few decades, Alex Karp has stayed largely under the radar, but a new biography, reveals him to be a complex, thoughtful, often contradictory personality, with a background that explains many of his insecurities. Steve Rose profiled the fitness-obsessed billionaire tech leader whose business is at the heart of many governments, including the US, where its AI-powered data-analysis technology is fuelling the deportations being carried out by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Pentagon’s unmanned drone programme, police departments’ (allegedly racist) profiling of potential criminals and much more besides.
A few days after the 2024 UK general election, John Crace wrote that he felt as if the grownups were back in charge and that Britain had regained a basic level of competence, that politics would become business as usual rather than a breathless psychodrama. So what would he write about? It turns out he needn’t have worried.
Ahead of his new book, The Bonfire of the Insanities, our parliamentary sketch writer took stock of the political scene: from Labour’s serial cockups to the Conservatives’ impressive ability to be even less popular.
