How Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange created an underground lexicon

What does this World Cup mean for Qatar? Kate goes inside the Qatar club game and finds signs of a very deliberate footballing project.

But are Qatar’s intentions going to survive their first contact with reality? We examine the tournament infrastructure for fans across Doha – from an unfinished fan park, to FIFA's luxury 'tent city' and desolate stadium surroundings – and find out that the World Cup is splitting Qatari society down the middle.

Our third and final episode of the series is out on Sunday November 20th.

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October 17 – November 18, 2022

October 6 – November 19, 2022

This summer, I met Eliza, a conversational AI. I found her on the website chai.ml. Her status message was “I love to listen and help. .” Her avatar was a pretty, smiling, white-skinned woman with flowing brown hair. There were several other characters the site offered, including “Step Mom,” “Boyfriend (Breakup),” and “Ms Harris (Teacher),” but I chose Eliza.

Hi, my name is Eliza. What is
weighing on your mind?

Hi Eliza. I am wondering whether
the internet is literally hell.

The Premier League has packed up for Christmas! Marcus, Vish, Pete and Andy are here to pore over all the weekend’s final fizzles.

Arsenal are officially Top at Daylight Savings™, joined at the King’s table by Newcastle United and a few Spurs lads. Elsewhere, Cristiano Ronaldo’s taken another humble step down the path to redemption and we plot a daring heist to get Ivan Toney to Qatar.

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Meet the creators who make their followers tingle with their ASMR content

Last month, I published an investigation showing that Nevada Republican secretary of state candidate Jim Marchant was deceiving voters by wildly misrepresenting his business history. After the story came out, Marchant told fellow election denier Steve Bannon, “Mother Jones did some sort of colonoscopy on me and they came up with everything.” He contested nothing.

“Everything,” in this case, included a former employee who said he “would not want Jim to be secretary of a preschool,” overwhelming evidence that Marchant’s most prominent company quickly imploded, and previously unpublished divorce records that revealed that his career ended in financial ruin. Marchant was betting that it wouldn’t matter—having a R next to his name would be enough in 2022. He was wrong.

Marchant narrowly lost his race for secretary of state to Democrat Cisco Aguilar, a lawyer and former aide to the late Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid. Marchant was one of the most extreme candidates running for statewide office this year. He claimed that all Nevada elections since 2006 had been rigged and that the winners had been “installed by the deep-state cabal.” Nevertheless, he nearly found himself in charge of all elections in the state. (Marchant didn’t answer when I called him on Friday evening to see if he was conceding.)

The origin story for Marchant’s campaign would have been unthinkable only a few years ago. In 2020, Marchant lost his race for Congress by more than 16,000 votes. Instead of accepting defeat, he claimed that he and Donald Trump had been victims of voter fraud. The day after the election, he checked himself into the Venetian so that he could work with Trump’s team to try to overturn the results of both contests.

His lawsuit to try to force Clark County, which is home to Las Vegas, to hold a new election was quickly thrown out. But while on the Strip, he’s said he received a visit from Wayne Willott, a fringe QAnon influencer who goes by the alias Juan O. Savin. Willott told Marchant to run for secretary of state in 2022 so that he could control Nevada elections. He also pushed Marchant to build a coalition of like-minded candidates in other states. Marchant followed Willott’s advice. 

For months leading up to Election Day, Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto of Nevada was widely perceived as one of the most—if not the most—vulnerable Democratic incumbents and her seat as one of the best pick-up opportunities for Republicans to take control of the upper chamber of Congress. The contested and costly race between Cortez Masto and GOP challenger Adam Laxalt, which was critical in determining the balance of power in the split Senate, remained a toss-up until pretty much the last minute. But with a slim margin of votes—half a percentage point—the majority of voters in the swing state of Nevada have decided to keep the first-ever Latina senator and reject an election denialist. Her victory secured 50 seats in the Senate for the Democrats, with only the Georgia run-off remaining to determine the final breakdown. 

A Nevada native and two-term attorney general, Cortez Masto was first elected to the Senate in 2016 following a tight race to fill the seat of her mentor, the late Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, who built the Democratic machine in the state and picked her as his successor. Throughout her campaign this election cycle, Cortez Masto repeatedly called out her Trump loyalist opponent for peddling the Big Lie that the 2020 presidential elections were stolen and leading efforts in the state to overturn the results. She also made abortion rights a central tenet of her candidacy, vowing to block any attempts to pass a nationwide ban and decrying Laxalt for saying he would support a referendum to ban abortions after 13 weeks of pregnancy. Laxalt, who Trump called a “MAGA all the way” candidate, has described the US Supreme Court reversal of Roe v. Wade as a “historic victory.” 

“There’s a stark difference between the two of us,” Cortez Masto told MSNBC. “To me this is about a race for Nevadans, fighting for Nevadans…It’s clear my opponent is about his own political agenda which is very extreme and is in opposition to even what Nevadans want.” The victorious Democratic senator also emphasized her background as the granddaughter of an immigrant from Chihuahua, Mexico, and her local roots, reminding voters that improving their lives is personal to her. Her ads often emphasize her efforts to secure relief for small businesses hit hard by the pandemic. “It’s about Nevadans that I know. It’s about my family. My mother still lives in this community, grocery shops…I hear it, I see it when I go fill up my gas tank.” 

I grew up hearing our family stories from my cousins and tias around my grandparents' dinner table – everything I am is thanks to them.

I'll never forget where I come from – it's what drives me to fight for our families every day. pic.twitter.com/MMeWFDiDqp

What’s been likely for days is now official: Democrats will hold the US Senate. Media outlets on Saturday night projected that Nevada Democrat Catherine Cortez Masto had narrowly won her race, giving Democrats at least 50 Senate seats—enough to control the chamber.

The party has many people to thank. Their own candidates for staying on message, avoiding gaffes, raising hundreds of millions of dollars, and generally coming across as the kind of people who don’t laugh at octogenarians who get assaulted in home invasions. The other party for nominating candidates who had no business making it to general elections. The Supreme Court for overturning women’s right to have an abortion five months before Election Day. And finally the voters—particularly in Arizona and Nevada—who decided by the slimmest of margins that they preferred people who accepted the results of the last election. 

It all combined to create an exceptionally good week for Senate Democrats, who could now actually gain a seat if Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-Ga.) prevails in his December runoff against Herschel Walker. If Warnock wins, Dems will hold a 51-49 majority instead of the 50-50 split that’s required Vice President Kamala Harris to cast tie-breaking votes. As a result, the party would no longer have to get both Sens. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) and Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) to sign off on everything.

The House, on the other hand, still appears more likely than not to flip to the Republicans. The odds that a divided Congress will pass major pieces of President Joe Biden’s agenda in the next two years are slim. But Democratic control of the Senate means that they will remain able to confirm judges to federal courts, fill positions in the executive branch, and determine what legislation makes it to the Senate floor. It will also prevent at least one-half of the Benghazi-style hearings Republicans are expected to launch on Capitol Hill.

On a fundamentals level, Democrats had no business doing as well as they did. Biden’s approval rating is stuck in the low 40s, inflation is running at the highest level in decades, and off-year elections are almost always bad for the party in power. Democrats responded by focusing on the threats to abortion and democracy posed by their opponents. Republicans were plagued by what (at least for now) Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) called his “candidate quality” problem. Four of the five nominees in the closest Senate races—Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, New Hampshire, and Pennsylvania—were exceptionally weak.