Lizzy Peet

A war foretold: how the CIA and MI6 got hold of Putin’s Ukraine plans and why nobody believed them Drawing on more than 100 interviews with senior intelligence officials and other insiders in multiple countries, this exclusive account details how the US and Britain uncovered Vladimir Putin’s plans ...

This @theguardian.com piece is fantastic like everyone says. Bravo to those who worked on it. www.theguardian.com/world/ng-int...

The political effects of X's feed algorithm https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-026-10098-2 Received: 16 December 2024 Accepted: 4 January 2026 Published online: 18 February 2026 Open access • Check for updates Germain Gauthier,5, Roland Hodler?5, Philine Widmer35 & Ekaterina Zhuravskaya3,4,5 m Feed algorithms are widely suspected to influence political attitudes. However, previous evidence from switching off the algorithm on Meta platforms found no political effects'. Here we present results from a 2023 field experiment on Elon Musk's platform X shedding light on this puzzle. We assigned active US-based users randomly to either an algorithmic or a chronological feed for 7 weeks, measuring political attitudes and online behaviour. Switching from a chronological to an algorithmic feed increased engagement and shifted political opinion towards more conservative positions, particularly regarding policy priorities, perceptions of criminal investigations into Donald Trump and views on the war in Ukraine. In contrast, switching from the algorithmic to the chronological feed had no comparable effects. Neither switching the algorithm on nor switching it off significantly affected affective polarization or self-reported partisanship. To investigate the mechanism, we analysed users' feed content and behaviour. We found that the algorithm promotes conservative content and demotes posts by traditional media. Exposure to algorithmic content leads users to follow conservative political activist accounts, which they continue to follow even after switching off the algorithm, helping explain the asymmetry in effects. These results suggest that initial exposure to X's algorithm has persistent effects on users' current political attitudes and account-following behaviour, even in the absence of a detectable effect on partisanship.

A new paper shows that less than 2 months of exposure to Twitter’s algorithmic feed significantly shifts people’s political views to the right.

Moving from chronological feed to the algorithmic feed also increases engagement.

This is one of the most concerning papers I’ve read in awhile.

YouTube video by Sky News Have the Epstein files just brought down the UK government?

V refreshing to hear a group of women dissect the Mandelson scandal, and the misogyny, unconscious or not, of everyone involved in the decision to appoint him ambassador. At the heart of this are victims, who were completely ignored when it was convenient.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=lKIJ...

There are some countries where alleging immigrants are a drain on public finances is plausible, but the US? The public benefits are nowhere near generous enough.

The owner of Amazon killed the Washington Post books section.

Our Carrie Bradshaw index of Europe’s priciest cities for renters The average earner struggles to afford rent in all but eight of the places we looked at

I put together our latest Carrie Bradshaw Index, measuring how affordable it is to rent alone in major European cities from Brussels to Budapest. If a relocation is on the cards, there are some surprising results 👇
www.economist.com/graphic-deta... @economist.com

Another ruthlessly ambitious (and unlikeable) defector. A thought: if they can't push above 30%, it's a hung parliament in 2029 with probable coalition locking out Reform. Next shot is 2034. Farage is now 70, and has kept the party, full of jostling egos, from imploding for eight long years...

Here's a time-lapse from yesterday as thousands of people marched through downtown Minneapolis to protest ICE.

📷️: Sydney Lewis/The Minnesota Star Tribune

Boris Johnson says Trump back in White House is ‘what the world needs’ Ex-PM backs disgraced former US president ahead of election, saying he ‘won’t ditch the Ukrainians’

www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2024...
Exactly two years ago

Not the sort of letter committed to paper by a well man. "Considering your Country decided not to give me the Nobel Peace Prize for having stopped 8 Wars PLUS, I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of Peace"

Had no idea that Denmark sustained NATO’s highest number of fatalities per capita in Iraq and Afghanistan. Sobering context for this growing crisis

Total lack of any sense of humour! And performative frowny "look to how serious and important I am" face. Irritating man.

Don’t believe the fake gloom about London [FREE TO READ] The UK capital is subject to more than its fair share of misinformation

The doom and gloom about London is ridiculous and harmful. Team FT is Team London - as.ft.com/r/19d3d36d-e...

Our new model captures the lottery of Britain’s electoral system Similar results, our data analysis shows, can yield strikingly different outcomes

This is without a doubt the best analysis out there of the stakes in Britain's next election (and the graphics are fun too!)
www.economist.com/interactive/...

Despite becoming a yawn-inducing attack line it is still *extraordinary* that in the early 2000s Britain's Labour government decided to sell off half the country's gold reserves when the price was where it was. 395 tonnes, which then netted $6.3bn (adjusted), would today fetch $52bn 😳

Will Anti-Woke Comedy Recover From the Riyadh Festival? Any event that includes comedy’s biggest names is going to attract attention — but the Riyadh Comedy Festival, which kicked off on Sept. 26 and continued through Thursday, is disproving the adage that...

I'm a "glass is half-full" kinda guy, so let's look at the upside of the Riyadh Comedy Festival: We never, ever have to even pretend to take any of these "anti-woke" "free speech warriors" seriously, ever again.

New from me at @opinion.bloomberg.com (gift link):

bit.ly/4h51JjF

Where can Americans afford to live solo in 2025? Our Carrie Bradshaw index shows rent is soaring in several southern cities

I put together our third annual Carrie Bradshaw index, measuring how affordable it is to rent alone in America's 100 biggest cities, for @economist.com
www.economist.com/graphic-deta...

And another! She’s unbelievable

As popularity and revenue soars, how much longer can the NBA - which effectively controls the W - hold their line that it is still losing money? 🤔

Women’s pro-ballers want more cash The popularity of the WNBA is soaring

With about a month to go until a salary renegotiation deadline on October 31st, I looked at why America's women basketball players are scandalously underpaid, for @economist.com
www.economist.com/united-state...

Who knew the Lib Dems were the chilled ones about tax returns! But overall that's a striking consensus, and a potentially big problem brewing for Farage

Boris Johnson yet to appear on GB News 10 months after being signed up as a presenter The former PM, working on his memoirs, has still not hosted a programme for the right-leaning channel – and his publisher awaits book slated for a 2016 release

Now two years after this was announced and (by my reckoning at least) still no sign? 🤔 Curieux
www.theguardian.com/politics/art...

Lovely vignette on the making of Gone With The Wind (from Bruce Chadwick’s Reel Civil War)

Farewell to Carrie Bradshaw, TV’s exasperating, enduring heroine She made viewers cross. But “Sex and the City” was unlike anything that had come before

“My characters exist,” snapped Candace Bushnell at her critics. “Go to enough parties, and you’ll meet all of them.”
First appearing on TV in 1998, I wrote about the (perhaps slightly overdue) end of her Sex and the City universe last week, for @economist.com
www.economist.com/culture/2025...

What’s your preferred playback speed: 1x, 1.5x or 2x? Young people, in particular, want audiobooks, podcasts and videos to go faster

Our polling with YouGov has found nearly a third of under-30s listen to audio sped up (compared to 8% of those 45+). A sign of brain-frazzling madness, or an ingenious time-saver? I had a closer look for @economist.com
www.economist.com/culture/2025...

The Gospel of Candace Owens The Daily Wire host is waging a far-right fight for the soul of pop culture.

"Owens met Farmer at the London event where she made the Hitler remarks... Seventeen days after meeting Owens, Farmer proposed over the phone. Seven months later, in August, 2019, the pair married, at Trump Winery"- quite the nugget
www.newyorker.com/news/annals-...

A reminder that when Kemi Badenoch was offered a security briefing on this earlier this year she decided that it wasn't important enough for her to bother turning up

There's a lot of 'the spendthrift PLP versus the Iron Downing Street' about, which ignores that the PLP accepted a deferment of scrapping the two child limit and voted to means-test winter fuel.

Shout out to Catherine Corless, independent local historian. who has made a difference.

Women too emotional for politics, etc etc