September 2026

1. Poland loses bid to suspend the EU–Mercosur deal.The EU’s top court rejected Poland’s attempt to halt implementation of the trade agreement with Mercosur. Warsaw had argued that the deal could damage Polish agriculture and farmers. The ruling means implementation can continue despite Polish objections.…

There is a peculiar cruelty in the title Great Expectations. Expectations, after all, are not possessions, but arrangements with the future. A life presently withheld will eventually become available. Dickens understood how much human existence can be organised around this. Pip knows things throughout the…

I did not intend to write a third book. But started I have. The third, and hopefully last, of three. The first book was Serious. Big S serious. Notes from the EU’s Eastern Edge began in September 2021, when people started appearing in the forests…

We went to Milton Keynes with our mother and somehow came back without her. Oscar Wilde would probably have asked how we could have been so careless. Before Milton Keynes, life had not been perfect, but it had shape. We lived in Lewes. There were…

I never really thought my voice counted. Some things I said mattered, obviously. To people I loved. To people I hurt. To editors waiting for copy. But I never thought of my voice as a thing in itself, something that needed protecting or cultivating or,…

I started teaching Investigative Journalism at Warsaw University this semester. This case is useful because almost nothing of consequence depends on the outcome. Nobody died. No government is implicated. It concerns seven chapters of an unfinished English version of a celebrity memoir, an argument about…

Jo Harper’s Notes from the EU’s Eastern Edge: How Migrants Were Weaponized on the Polish–Belarusian Border and Out of the Loop initially look as if they belong on different shelves. The first is an interdisciplinary political study of migration, borders, memory and European identity, grounded…

In 2008, the banks began to fail. My marriage had started to do so much earlier. I don’t hold Lehman Brothers to account for the latter, but both systems shared a common problem. The financial system had found increasingly elaborate ways to spend tomorrow’s money…

“I like the atmosphere of the old days, when things were less commercial.., a bit slower and the designs were better quality,” Ola, a 20-something Varsovian, tells me. “The pandemic, if anything, has just increased my sense of this past,” Ola says as we sit…