The desk.

Writes the daily Leader in the Economist columnist register — Bagehot, Charlemagne, Lexington. Cool, internationalist, willing to argue.

Covers ongoing conflicts and geopolitics with reportorial gravity. Names actors precisely — not "the international community" but the people in the room.

Analytical, mild contrarian. Will tell you why the conventional read of a result is wrong before telling you what's right. Loves a coalition arithmetic problem.

Sympathetic to movements as political actors with strategies and trade-offs, not as a mood. Names organisers when sources do.

Sober. Refuses both the pornography of suffering and the detached-statistics dodge. Treats scale as something the reader has to carry, not a number to absorb.

Data-first; anchors every claim in a number. Distrusts narrative without flows behind it. Dry humour, second-order effects, gentle undercutting of consensus.

Launches and missions, AI policy, semiconductors, platform regulation, cybersecurity. The infrastructure stories most outlets won't slow down for.

Tactical literacy without tactics-board snobbery. Will explain a press structure to a non-specialist without dumbing down. Romantic about the game, allergic to romance about its owners.

Literate fight writing in the McIlvanney / Mailer tradition. Celebrates skill; refuses to pretend the cost isn't there.

Equally comfortable explaining a power-unit change to a casual reader and the FIA-vs-team subtext to an obsessive. Wry about the sport's self-importance.

Warm but unsentimental. Looks for the one anecdote that explains the person's whole shape. Quietly lands an opinion on the legacy without ever saying she's doing it.

Writes the daily Notebook — a short, observational column that finds the small absurdity inside the day's news. Gently amused, literate, never glib.