How drones now rule the battlefield (2025)

Villains
Broadway shows, which are becoming ludicrously expensive. Theatregoers are paying up to $921 to see Denzel Washington and Jake Gyllenhaal in Othello, $724 for a production of Glengarry Glen Ross starring Kieran Culkin, and $799 to watch George Clooney in the stage adaptation of Good Night, and Good Luck. As the veteran Broadway critic Roger Friedman has said, those sums are normal for the resale market. “But direct? That’s crazy.”

Villains
Organisers of the COP30 climate summit, who have cut down tens of thousands of acres of protected Amazon rainforest in Brazil to build a four-lane road linking two parts of host city Belém. The eight-mile highway is designed to ease traffic at the conference in November, says Ione Wells on BBC News, but conservationists say the deforestation “contradicts the very purpose of a climate summit”.

Villains
The company behind HS2, for spending a whopping £20,000 on a giant Lego model of one of its proposed stations. Although given the astronomical price of the plastic bricks, says Giles Coren in The Times, that actually sounds like pretty good value. I probably spent “roughly half that” on a Friends Lego set for my daughter back in the day, and it was “barely the size of a shoebox”. In fact, maybe the whole HS2 network should have been built out of Lego. “It would have been much easier to dismantle when the government changed its mind about phase two.”

Hero
American football coach Rich Rodriguez, who has banned his players at West Virginia University from dancing on TikTok because it makes them look namby-pamby. “We try to have a hard edge or whatever, and you’re in there in your tights dancing on TikTok,” he said. “Ain’t quite the image of our programme that I want.”

I’ve watched an awful lot of telly, says Deborah Ross in the Daily Mail, but “I can’t recall the last time I was as blown away” as I was by Adolescence. The four-part Netflix drama is undeniably grim: it’s about a 13-year-old boy (Owen Cooper) accused of stabbing someone to death at school. But it’s a compelling story, looking at social media, the “manosphere” and other teenage travails. Each of the hour-long episodes is recorded in a single take, putting you “right in the middle of the action”. And it’s superbly acted: Stephen Graham, who plays the boy’s dad, “can convey pain while boiling a kettle”. The moment I finished the final episode, I immediately started watching the whole thing again. Four episodes, around 1 hour each.

Elon Musk has always been vocal in his concerns about declining global fertility, says Ed West on Substack. And lately, the world’s richest man has been “putting his money where his mouth is”. He was recently revealed to have fathered his 14th child (named, in the Muskian tradition, Seldon Lycurgus, joining siblings including Saxon, Techno Mechanicus, Exa Dark Sideræl and X Æ A-Xii). With so many descendants, who knows what future Game of Thrones-style battles will occur over Musk’s inevitable “Empire of Mars”.

But the Tesla billionaire is really just the latest in a long, distinguished line of men with an overwhelming urge to “seed the earth”. Mongol leader Genghis Khan, founder of the largest contiguous land empire in history, produced so many sons from his numerous wives and concubines that one in 200 people alive today are descended from him through the male line alone. Ismail Ibn Sharif, a Sultan of Morocco, had more than a thousand children, while Ibrahim Njoya, who ruled over the Bamum people in Cameroon, had around 350 from over 1,000 wives (also finding time to develop a writing system – a “true Renaissance man”). Then there’s Nigeria’s Mohammed Bello Abukhar, who fathered 203 children from his 120 wives – some of whom were pregnant when he died on his 93rd birthday. Talk about having “lead in the old pencil”.