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China has been the lynchpin in the rollout of transformative technologies in Africa over the past decade, while other nations have fallen behind.

In the coming century,* New Orleans will be surrounded by ocean. That’s the contention of a paper published this week in Nature Sustainability. It finds that the city has already passed a “point of no return.” The authors recommend taking immediate action to start relocating the more than one million residents there and across coastal Louisiana who are being placed “in harm’s way” by the rapid loss of coastal wetlands, a loss increasingly driven by rising sea levels. The study suggests that the “widespread conversion” of low-elevation coastal zones in the Mississippi Delta into “open water” is “probably unavoidable.” “Between the chronic stress of land loss and sea level rise, New Orleans’s days are numbered—at least as we know it today,” said Jesse Keenan, a co-author of the paper and an expert in climate adaptation at Tulane University. To some extent, this transformation is already happening: Louisiana is losing a football field’s worth of land every 100 minutes. New Orleans has lost 25 percent of its population since 2005, when Hurricane Katrina caused more than 1,500 deaths and more than $150 billion worth of damage. Some neighborhoods are sinking by as much as two inches per year. Rather than planning for a looming inundation exacerbated by climate change, politicians in Louisiana have been busy trying to keep Democrats in majority-Black districts from governing. Republican leaders there recently moved to eliminate the New Orleans clerk of criminal court position just days before the Democrat voters had  overwhelmingly elected for that job was due to take office. The Supreme Court late last month sided with Louisiana Republicans’ bid to throw out the state’s congressional maps; the decision significantly weakened the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Republican Governor Jeff Landry promptly suspended primaries for Louisiana’s U.S. House seats from May 16 to July 15, when redrawn maps are expected to eliminate one of the state’s two majority-Black Democratic districts. Landry appears devoted to the project of one-party rule. He has been much less enthusiastic about preparing for a future where large parts of his state no longer exist. Last year, he ditched a project to rebuild more than 20 square miles of coastal wetlands over the next 50 years, aimed at restoring the natural flow of the Mississippi River in select areas and directing sediment toward eroded areas. Landry argued that the Mid-Barataria Sediment Diversion project was too expensive, but it was primarily funded by the fees and settlement BP was forced to pay out from its role in the 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster—the largest oil spill in the history of marine oil drilling operations, which deposited four billion barrels of oil from a damaged well, devastating wildlife, coastal residents, fishing operations, and tourism. The project would buy time, Keenan said, but would hardly preserve coastal Louisiana as is. Instead of putting BP’s money to use protecting coasts, some Louisiana Republicans have fought to keep oil and gas companies from having to pay for any other damage to the state’s shrinking coasts. As with the attacks on voting rights, the Supreme Court recently handed them a major win. In April, SCOTUS voted 8–0 to allow energy companies to move lawsuits over their environmental damages to friendlier federal courts. A bill currently making its way through the Louisiana legislature—House Bill 804—would “effectively give energy companies legal immunity from liability related to illnesses, injuries, deaths or other damages stemming from the climate effects of industrial air pollution,” the Louisiana Illuminator reports.Louisiana’s representatives in Washington aren’t keen to talk about their state’s increasingly dire situation. Just one member of the state’s congressional delegation responded to multiple requests for comment about how Louisiana should prepare for the events described in the Nature Sustainability paper; what role local, state, and federal governments should play in that process; how it should be financed; and whether lawmakers should act to mitigate climate change so as to stem additional displacement. I also asked if they agreed with Landry’s decision to cancel the diversion project. The lone respondent was Republican Clay Higgins, whose coastal district stands to be largely swallowed by the three to seven feet of sea level rise the Nature Sustainability paper notes that southeastern Louisiana is “probably committed to.” Higgins’s response was brief: “I read the paper yesterday. ‘The Earth’s going to change’ … is most certainly true. Always has been true. Always will be true.” The phrase “the Earth’s going to change” does not appear in the paper. When I asked a spokesperson for Higgins to clarify why he had formatted that phrase like a quote, he responded that it “isn’t a quote from anything; it’s more of an idea my boss is emphasizing, like an old adage, with his use of the quotations.”Keenan and his colleagues propose, optimistically, that Louisiana might yet offer a model for other low-lying areas to lead the world in planning for relocation. They write that “a carefully calibrated combination of planning and coastal restoration can define the difference between orderly managed relocation and disorderly market-driven movement of people and their assets.” For now, Keenan told me, disorderly movement is already happening. “The market is adapting much faster than consumers and public institutions can keep up,” he said, and the state’s poorest residents are struggling to adjust. The price of a standard private home insurance policy in Louisiana, for instance, rose by more than 40 percent between 2021 and 2024; and costs are high not just for wind and property insurance—which homeowners hope will pay out in a bad storm—but for car insurance too. The state’s Republican insurance commissioner, Tim Temple, has blamed high premiums on overregulation. He’s accordingly backed legislation that makes it harder for residents to sue over unpaid claims, and easier for insurers to raise rates and drop customers.An “orderly managed relocation,” meanwhile, doesn’t seem like anything Louisiana’s ruling Republicans are eager to pursue. That doesn’t mean that they aren’t crafting their own responses to the climate crisis. The people who can least afford to weather the next few decades of climate-fueled loss are—in many cases—the ones Republicans are moving to disenfranchise; they’re trying to help corporations with funds to spare avoid having to pay up for the damage they’ve caused, or should cover. “Right now the fundamental question of public policy is who drowns,” Keenan said. There’s a very real possibility of today’s GOP seeing that reality as an opportunity. Building a one-party state is easier when lots of Democrats are underwater.*This article originally misstated the estimated length of time before New Orleans will be surrounded by ocean. 

Throughout the American South is an archipelago of majority-Black congressional districts that provide some measure of Black representation in Congress. These districts owe their existence to a combination of basic electoral math, federal court orders, and legislative compromises. If Republicans have their way, all or nearly all of them will be gone in the next few months.The Supreme Court’s ruling last week in Louisiana v. Callais kicked off a legislative frenzy as Republicans in more than a half-dozen states race to redraw their congressional maps—in some cases, in the middle of ongoing elections. Their goal is to eliminate as many majority-Black districts as mathematically possible, bolstering the GOP’s midterms chances in November and endangering the future of multiracial democracy in the South.Leading the charge is Louisiana itself. A federal district court had struck down the state’s revised congressional map after the 2020 census and ordered the state to create a second majority-minority district to comply with Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. A group of “non-African American” plaintiffs, as they described themselves, then sued on the grounds that the court-ordered map also amounted to racial gerrymandering and was therefore unconstitutional under the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal protection clause. In last week’s 6–3 ruling, the Supreme Court agreed—and gutted Section 2 in response.It was easy to predict what would happen next. “After today, those districts exist only on sufferance, and probably not for long,” Justice Elena Kagan warned in her dissent. “If other states follow Louisiana’s lead, the minority citizens residing there will no longer have an equal opportunity to elect candidates of their choice. And minority representation in government institutions will sharply decline.”Early voting was already underway in Louisiana’s congressional primaries when the ruling was released, with more than 40,000 ballots reportedly already cast by mail. That did not stop Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry from issuing an executive order to halt the state’s elections so that state lawmakers could draw a new map that eliminates at least one of the majority-Black districts.A group of Louisiana voters filed a lawsuit last week to resume the election, but have not yet succeeded at having the executive order stayed by a court. The Supreme Court, for its part, does not seem interested in delaying the inevitable. Earlier this week, the justices voted to immediately issue the court’s mandate for the lower courts instead of waiting the usual month, drawing a rare dissent from Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson.“Not content to have decided the law, it now takes steps to influence its implementation,” she wrote, referring to the internal rule that governs this specific process. “The court’s decision to buck our usual practice under Rule 45.3 and issue the judgment forthwith is tantamount to an approval of Louisiana’s rush to pause the ongoing election in order to pass a new map.”Justice Samuel Alito, the author of Callais, issued a separate statement joined by Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch to attack Jackson’s dissent. He claimed, among other things, that her preference for “unthinking compliance” with the court’s usual rule itself would create the “appearance of partiality” on “behalf of those who may find it politically advantageous to have the election occur under the unconstitutional map.” The irony of making this argument to ensure a state could racially gerrymander Black voters out of electoral power eluded Alito.The court’s swiftness in issuing the Callais mandate is a clear signal to every Southern state to wipe out majority-Black districts as quickly as possible ahead of this year’s midterms. Louisiana Republicans are reportedly planning to keep at least one of the state’s majority-Black districts intact, likely because eliminating both districts would make it easier for Democrats to contest some of the majority-white seats.Alabama, which also has two majority-Black districts, also took steps to unwind one of them this week. The second district was created after a federal court upheld a racial-gerrymandering challenge in Allen v. Milligan. The Supreme Court upheld the current revised map in 2022 by ruling that the court’s order was lawful under existing precedent a the time. Since the Callais decision changed that precedent, Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall asked the lower court to lift an injunction prohibiting the state from changing its maps again until the next census in four years.Other Southern states are going all in on erasing majority-Black districts. In Tennessee, lawmakers released a new congressional map on Wednesday that would gerrymander the state’s 9th congressional district out of existence by splitting Memphis between three majority-white districts. State Speaker Cameron Sexton, a Republican, told reporters that the new map will “reduce the risk of future legal challenges while promoting sound and strategic conservatism.”In South Carolina, Republicans are also considering steps to eliminate the state’s sole majority-Black district. Representative Jim Clyburn, a member of the House Democratic leadership team, currently holds that seat. A redistricting vote would require two-thirds approval from the South Carolina state legislature, but it may not succeed if some state lawmakers conclude that erasing Clyburn’s safe seat would make it possible for Democrats to compete in neighboring ones.The only Southern state under Republican control that ruled out new maps for 2026 is Georgia, which is scheduled to hold its primary elections on May 19. Governor Brian Kemp told reporters last week that the court’s ruling came too late this year for a new redistricting process. At the same time, he suggested that new maps could be drafted in time for the 2028 cycle. Georgia has four majority-Black districts that could be imperiled; Democrats also currently hold a majority-white district in the northwest Atlanta suburbs.Four other Southern states—Texas, Florida, Missouri, and North Carolina—already redrew their map at President Donald Trump’s behest. Some of them, most notably Florida and Texas, could find it difficult to squeeze more Republican-only seats out of the state’s urban areas. But with the Voting Rights Act now fully moribund, it is possible that they could renew their efforts for 2028, as well.This is not the end of Black political power in the South altogether. The most democratic outlets for Southern voters will now be the Electoral College and the U.S. Senate—two features of the American constitutional order that have long been criticized for stifling the popular will. The influence of Black voters will also be felt in statewide races where they can’t simply be gerrymandered out of relevance, particularly in states like Georgia and North Carolina.Even so, the GOP’s racial-gerrymandering campaign is a tragic milestone in America’s racial history. Not since Reconstruction ended in the 1870s amid white-supremacist terrorism and voter suppression has Black electoral influence declined so suddenly in the American South. The House of Representatives is often regarded as the “People’s House” for its egalitarian design. If Republicans complete their racial-gerrymandering campaign, it will lose any claim to honestly representing the American people as a whole.

Even if you hate President Donald Trump’s mass deportation campaign—which has placed about 60,000 undocumented immigrants in Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention and has deported, depending on who you ask, somewhere between 350,000 and 605,000 people—you probably think the immigration crackdown is benefiting native-born American workers. After all, the crackdown is creating labor shortages in restaurants, in construction, and in health care. How can that not be raising wages for nonimmigrants? Just because the mendacious Trump White House says it’s happening doesn’t automatically mean it isn’t. As the old saying goes, a stopped clock is right twice a day.But according to the first major study on this question, by Elizabeth Cox and Chloe N. East of the University of Colorado at Boulder, U.S.-born workers are no better off as a result of the ICE raids. Indeed, some native-born workers in immigrant-intensive sectors are worse off than they were before.Quite obviously, the ICE raids reduced labor participation by the undocumented workers arrested by ICE. More significantly, though, the raids also reduced labor participation among the much larger group of undocumented workers who weren’t arrested by ICE. They achieved this by making the latter group fearful of showing up at work. In the most immigrant-intensive labor sectors, employment among undocumented workers fell by 3.4 percentage points. For male workers—the overwhelming majority of immigrants arrested by ICE are men—employment fell 4.6 percentage points, and the number of hours worked per week fell by two hours. If for some reason you think we’re all better off when there’s higher unemployment among undocumented workers, then feel free to judge the Trump policy a great success. If, on the other hand, you’re a traditional conservative who complains that government policy never does enough to encourage poor people to work, then you’re obliged to call the Trump policy a significant failure.What about native-born workers? If American-born workers were willing to take jobs left vacant by undocumented immigrants in immigrant-intensive sectors, the authors write, then “we would expect to see an increase in labor supply among U.S.-based workers in these sectors.” But they didn’t see any change at all. An alternative hypothesis—the correct one—is that native-born workers in immigrant-intensive industries more typically inhabit better jobs that you might call immigrant-dependent. When there aren’t enough undocumented immigrants to occupy the rungs below these native-born workers, then demand for the native-born workers will slacken. Does that happen? It does with native-born workers at the same skill level as undocumented immigrants—that is, workers with a high school degree or less. For this group—let’s call them “immigrant-adjacent”—the study found a 1.3 percent reduction in employment. “For every six lost male likely undocumented workers,” the study found, “there is a loss of one male U.S.-born worker.”The Trump theory is that if you take jobs away from undocumented immigrants then those same jobs will be filled by native-born Americans. (For some reason, legal immigrants don’t figure into Trump’s calculus.) Perhaps that would happen if the unemployment rate were to rise very high. But that isn’t happening. Unemployment is higher than it was when Trump took office, but it’s still a relatively modest 4.3 percent. What’s happening instead is that American-born workers with educational attainment comparable to that of undocumented workers are losing their immigrant-adjacent jobs because their jobs depend on there being enough undocumented workers to get the job done.If you’re a liberal who believes ICE goons shouldn’t go around throwing hardworking, law-abiding people in jail, period, then you may now say there is absolutely no demographic group in America that benefits from this sickening policy. You may also now say that the one group we all thought likeliest to benefit—workers at the same skill level as undocumented immigrants—is actually being harmed by Trump’s mass deportations. Spreading this message won’t change White House immigration jefe Stephen Miller’s mind. But it might help Democrats win the midterms.

Nikimbre Daniels spent her thirties living off the grid. Her homes included a yurt in a meadow in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina, countless R.V.s in nearly every region of the country, and even a tent. It was the life she chose after spending her twenties in South Florida. She felt she needed to reconnect with nature.“I never honestly thought that I would be renting again in this country at this point, you know, with all the statistics and rising housing costs, whether you’re a renter or you have a mortgage,” Daniels said. “I honestly never thought it would be possible again.… I’ve been so content living the way that I was living, because I built that life.”But Daniels, now 40, found a job teaching classes about native plants in Estes Park, Colorado, near the entrance to Rocky Mountain National Park, and found a townhome in a rental community set aside for people who work for the county. The workforce housing development she’s in—Fall River Village, near downtown—is one of the first two properties, with 185 total units, participating in Colorado’s new Renter Rewards Program. Every month, Daniels gets about $35 cash back from her rent, and the state will match that amount if she keeps it in a dedicated account for 12 months.One of the most persistent wealth gaps in the United States is between renters and homeowners, and the gap is bigger than ever. The average renter has a net worth of just $10,400, versus $400,000 for the average homeowner, according to a 2024 Aspen Institute report. On top of that, almost half of renters struggle to pay their rent, which makes it even harder to save money for a house. Rent is a burden, and it’s always rising. Homeownership, in addition to building wealth, stabilizes housing costs and allows people to save in other ways, like investing in retirement accounts.In the past few years, policymakers and start-ups have proposed trying to bridge that gap by allowing people to earn cash back and build wealth through the rent they’re already paying. “For millions of people, [rent] is the biggest source of precarity,” said Katie Deal, vice president of the Lafayette Square Institute, a nonprofit that studies economic security and mobility. “It is the thing that they spend all night thinking about, that really influences how or if they’re able to invest in their family’s future. The idea of turning that insecurity into something that actually helps people not only see a better future for themselves but for their kids, that can be a real asset.” Renter-equity programs are rare, and only beginning to take shape. Colorado’s program is the first government-run program in the country that lets renters share in their building’s equity. But is it just another way for investors to make money in a broken system?Colorado voters approved the Renter Rewards Program as part of a ballot initiative in 2022 to create public financing for affordable housing, and it launched in February. Daniels heard about it when she moved into Fall River Village in November and promptly signed up for Stake, the start-up fintech app through which the program operates. “I knew right away that I wanted to opt into that,” she said. “It’s almost as if Stake is holding out their hand to meet the renter halfway.”Daniels opened checking and savings accounts, and $20 was immediately deposited as an incentive. When she pays her rent, $1,766 a month, she gets 2 percent cash back deposited into the account, and if she leaves it there for 12 months it will be matched too. Over time, she could potentially share in some of the value of her appreciating townhome, as well.Stake is one of several start-ups that have entered the renter rewards space. It launched in 2018 with a plan to use blockchain investing to allow renters equity stakes in their rental buildings. Then the Covid pandemic hit. Urban landlords struggled to keep tenants, as renters moved to less populated areas, and a federal eviction moratorium allowed renters to skip monthly payments without fear of being kicked to the curb. Landlords were looking for ways to incentivize renters to pay.“We started offering cash back for paying rent,” said Rowland Hobbs, Stake’s co-founder and CEO. “It was the first time that landlords were offering a positive incentive for paying rent, rather than just—I’m going to put it bluntly—carrying a stick, you know, and being like, ‘We’re just going to evict you if you don’t pay,’ because of that unique moment in time.”Hobbs said landlords thought it was ridiculous at first. But landlords lose a lot of money when tenants move out and they have to let an apartment sit empty, get it ready for new tenants, and show it. Since pivoting Stake toward cash-back equity in 2020, Hobbs has been trying to convince it and its investors that there’s profit in rewarding tenants for paying on time and giving them incentives to stay.Stake wants the idea to spread through the private market, but the idea has so far mostly taken among affordable housing nonprofits. In 2013, Enterprise Community Partners, which funds, builds, and runs nonprofit housing around the country, started a Real Estate Equity Program that raised capital from investors and banks looking for social responsibility investments. Enterprise used the money to purchase aging affordable housing communities and reinvest in them, keeping them affordable.After a decade, Enterprise started to see better than expected returns on the values of its properties, but all of that went back to the investors. Chris Hermann, head of the Real Estate Equity Fund, started to wonder what would have happened if they’d included the renters in the potential gains, as well. “That would have had very different outcomes for the residents of these communities we serve,” he said.To try to do that, they launched the Renter Wealth Creation Fund, also partnered with Stake, in 2022. “There’s a role for profit sharing in rental housing that we think is worth demonstrating, not just because we think it will be good for the residents themselves,” he said, “but also because … you can align interest with residents in a way that generates even more stable communities and better returns for investors.”The program now includes 1,207 residents across seven properties in California, Colorado, Texas, Illinois, Ohio, and New Jersey. The fund has generated $327,238 in cash back, which averages to $33 per resident each month. It so far hasn’t generated any long-term equity for tenants, but that’s where proponents hope it could make a difference. Long-term residents can become vested in a share in the equity of the property they live in, which Hermann says could mean as much as $45,000 per 10-year resident. Daniels, in Colorado, says the savings already make a difference for her. “It may not be a ton of money, but it’s a start in the right direction for renters,” she said. “It’s a start to something I think that, across the country, could be really helpful and supportive to renters out there.” Her on-time payments are also reported to credit agencies, raising her credit score.Of course, $33 a month isn’t going to bridge the wealth gap alone. It also doesn’t do much to address affordability or create more housing supply, which are big problems that keep rents high. Tenants and landlords also often have contentious relationships, and these kinds of programs could add privacy concerns to the mix.Tara Raghuveer, the director of the Tenant Union Federation, said her organization has heard from tenants across the country suspicious about their landlords wanting them to sign up for a renter rewards program, which some tenants suspect is just another way to track them with data. “These [financial technology] companies make their money almost identically to other credit card rewards programs through the side fees, late fees,” she said. “The rent rewards scheme right now seems to be just a way to get people to sign up for the cards. And I think there’s a lot to be concerned about on that front, mostly related to data collection and privacy and the kind of information that we’re then handing over to our landlords and their vendor partners when tenants are compelled to sign up for these endeavors.”Many landlords use technology to hike rents and make life harder for tenants rather than to help them. Stake, which charges its landlords subscription fees, says its model is different. “Our north star is renter savings, not a card network or issuing bank,” Hobbs said in an email. “That shapes every product decision we make, including how we handle data. We don’t sell user data, and our data practices are designed around what puts more cash into the hands of the renters we serve.” (Stake also makes money through other financial products it offers.)At base, though, Raghuveer’s larger point is that these are still moneymaking schemes, designed to serve investors and not tenants. “In the context of the housing market writ large, which is the Wild West, there’s basically no regulation, especially no regulation protecting tenants,” she said. “In that context, there is abundant opportunity for the most exploitative market actors to invent all sorts of moneymaking schemes.”Renter-equity companies are by no means immune to those temptations. For example, Enterprise makes some of its money from a for-profit entity, Bellwether Enterprise Real Estate Capital, which has been accused of investing in companies that buy mobile home parks, raise rates, and force tenants to leave.As long as renter-equity programs rely on making money for private start-ups and providing incentives for investors, they will never make a truly meaningful difference for renters—let alone reform a broken and unequal housing system. And even well-intentioned state government efforts will necessarily be limited in scope, not to mention vulnerable to political interference: Colorado’s nascent program is already vulnerable to budget cuts.But for now, these programs’ most blatant shortcoming is their modest returns. They may help renters save a little extra money, but not nearly enough to compare to the wealth building that homeownership can provide.“It’s still very hard to turn a cash-back benefit on your rent every month into a source of sustainable, growing wealth,” said Katherine Lucas McKay, associate director of the Financial Security Program at the Aspen Institute. “So of course, it’s good if a business can find a way to make money by helping renters.… It just doesn’t compare with the returns on property ownership, or the returns on market investing.”

On November 21, 1974, the Provisional Irish Republican Army detonated bombs in two pubs in Birmingham, England, as part of its campaign to get the British out of Ireland. Twenty-one people were killed, and nearly 200 were injured. It was at the time the deadliest attack in England since the days of V-2 rockets. The police immediately sprang into action, arrested six completely innocent Irishmen, and coerced confessions from them. When the men challenged their convictions, the leading judge of his generation, Lord Denning, threw out their appeal, despite substantial evidence of police misconduct and actual innocence.If the six men win, it will mean that the police were guilty of perjury, that they were guilty of violence and threats, that the confessions were involuntary and were improperly admitted in evidence and that the convictions were erroneous.... This is such an appalling vista that every sensible person in the land would say: It cannot be right that these actions should go any further.An appeal might expose holes in the British justice system, and therefore it was not allowed to happen. Not until 1991 were the men finally freed.The way policing in Britain functions is a colonial legacy. Until the 1970s, most heads of the Metropolitan Police in England were former military officials with colonial service behind them, and in many ways the Met polices London like a colonial outpost—corruptly engaged with favored powerful locals, ignoring the crimes of the ruling class, and concerned above all with social order. The closest American analogue is the LAPD, which is also a corrupt force that uses methods of colonial control. But imagine if there were no FBI to occasionally investigate the most flagrant abuses or the big cases the local police neglect, and if the LAPD was also the counterterrorism police nationwide and the police force for both New York and Washington, D.C.There has been an enormous effort to forget that Britain was an imperial state and the role empire played in shaping domestic British life and institutions. Historian David Kynaston’s bestselling tetralogy of doorstopper histories of Britain from 1945 to 1965 is kaleidoscopic yet barely mentions Britain had an empire, despite its central role in everything from government finance to culture; for decades, British schoolchildren studied the Tudors and the ancient Romans at length but learned little about the British Raj. Imperial superprofits enabled the creation of the famed British welfare state, a widely shared source of pride in a country hastily revising its identity. When the decline of superprofits collided with the global crises of the 1970s, the result was Thatcherism, which began the hollowing out of the welfare state and the industrial base that had supported the British working class. Dean Acheson famously said in 1962 that “Britain had lost an empire and had not found a role,” but by the 1990s it found one: as a one-stop-shop for laundering, storing, and spending wealth looted from the former Soviet Union, providing jobs for costly lawyers, bankers, private schools, and other assorted servants of high net worth. As someone says of one of these bankers in John le Carré’s incisive 1999 novel about this transformation, Single & Single: he has been “bankrolling them, laundering their profits and making their beds for them. Not to mention what he’s been coining himself.” From the welfare state to the welfare of oligarchs in one generation.After the global financial crisis, the Tories (in coalition with the neoliberal Liberal Democrats) took power and set about finishing Thatcher’s work. Austerity led to at least 190,000 excess deaths and gutted public services across the board—including drastic cuts both to the numbers of police officers and to overall funding for police. Half the police stations in the entire country were closed, and 20,000 officers were let go. In 2019, The New York Times reported on the effects of all this on the children who grew up with it:Alex McIntyre was raised on budget cuts. The youth center where he went after school was shuttered when he was 10. When he was 11, his mother’s housing benefit was shaved away, a casualty of the Welfare Reform Act.... “Austerity, that’s what I know, that’s my life,” said Mr. McIntyre. “I’ve never known an England that was a different way.”In 2008, the United States and the U.K. were at near equal purchasing power parity for the first time since the Victorian era. Now Britain can’t afford to keep streetlights on all night.Many boys tell lies to fit in, but the specific lies Zac Brettler told and how they led to his death are a specifically British tale, of the legacy of imperialism, Thatcherism, and austerity.Patrick Radden Keefe’s London Falling is about the life of a boy who grew up in this new horizonless London and how he ended up being murdered by gangsters. He was born to a prosperous London Jewish family but reinvented himself as the son of a Kazakh oligarch fighting for his £200 million inheritance. When his trail of lies caught up with him, he jumped to his death from the balcony of a luxury apartment building rather than face torture at the hands of men to whom he had promised 5 percent of his fake fortune. It is a tale of uncontrolled capital and what happens when the shrinkage of the social state leaves the only dream available that of being super-wealthy. Many boys around the world tell lies to fit in, but the specific lies he told and how they led to his death are a specifically British tale, of the legacy of imperialism, Thatcherism, and austerity.Zac Brettler was born in 2000 in London. His father, Matthew, was a successful financial professional earning a large but not one percent salary, while his mother, Rachelle, freelanced for outlets like the Financial Times’ weekly How to Spend It magazine. On both sides of his family, Zac was descended from Holocaust survivors, but he took no interest in Judaism or his heritage. He had a brother, Joe, one year older. As a child, Zac was always the light in the room, entertaining adults and other children alike. The defining trauma of his life, until his death, was that the brighter Joe was accepted into one of London’s elite schools, University College School, while later Zac was not and was forced to go to Mill Hill, a much less prestigious school.By that time, 20 percent of the students at British fee-paying schools were Russian, and at Mill Hill the number may have been even higher. Zac complained about this at first to his mother: “All the girls are orange.” But soon being surrounded by the children of oligarchs gave him an obsession that would last the rest of his short life: money. And because his family didn’t have billions, he started making up stories in which they did. He cycled through various lies with various people, telling his parents for example that he had started a successful business. But his main lie became that his name was Zac Ismailov, that he was the son of a Kazakh (sometimes he said Russian) oligarch who had died tragically, and he was in a legal battle to secure his £200 million share of the estate. This led him to fall in with a charming man named Akbar Shamji, who presented to the world as very rich but actually lived off his wife’s money and various frauds of his own. Shamji became a second father figure to Zac, and he really could not have picked a worse one. Shamji introduced him to a quiet man named Verinder Sharma, whose alternate identity was as a violent kingpin of the London underground nicknamed “Indian Dave.” Both these men took Zac in, letting him stay in their expensive apartments and socialize with their families, on the promise they would get a share of his massive inheritance. On Zac’s final night, “Zac was by no means the only impostor in the apartment,” Keefe observes. “Verinder Sharma was a leg-breaker posing as a benevolent mentor. Akbar Shamji was a dilettante posing as an accomplished entrepreneur. And Zac was just a London teenager posing as the son of an oligarch … each was caught up in the glitzy, mercenary aspirational culture of modern London.”Eventually Indian Dave became fed up with the delay. On the night of November 28, 2019, he prepared to torture Zac with “hot knives,” a favorite tactic of his that often scared the subject into handing over his money without the knives needing to be used. As best Keefe can put together, to escape this torture Zac decided jumping into the Thames from the riverside flat was the better option. Unfortunately for him, his hip hit the embankment on the way down, and he died. He was 19 years old. It must have been a completely terrifying final few moments on Earth.For months after Zac’s death, the Brettlers patiently awaited the results of a police investigation. But to their amazement, very little happened at all. From the start, the police seemed determined to treat the death as a suicide and move on. Akbar Shamji had left the flat shortly before the death and could not be charged, and within a few months, Verinder Sharma turned up dead himself, with hundreds of enemies left behind. Other witnesses—the man who found the body; the mysterious messenger who showed up at the Brettlers’ apartment to tell them their son was in trouble—were barely questioned. The Brettlers got no closure and no justice. They felt “alienated in their own city, [starting] to see the whole metropolis in a more sinister light.... ‘It’s been eye-opening,’ Rachelle remarked. ‘This whole world we did not know about, this underworld that exists on our doorstep.’” The justice system they believed would work through all of this simply did not materialize. The law-abiding middle-class London they lived in was, it turned out, the fakest London out of all the Londons that existed.One thing that stands out in Zac Brettler’s brief life moving through all these various Londons is how much of his reality was mediated through fictions. He was obsessed with The Wolf of Wall Street, Martin Scorsese’s film about the Wall Street fraudster Jordan Belfort, and War Dogs, another ripped-from-the-headlines film, with Jonah Hill playing a con man arms trafficker named Efraim Diveroli. One school friend told Keefe that, while they all got a thrill from watching these movies, Zac “wanted to be like Efraim.” As London increasingly became a city economically organized around laundering the proceeds of crime, is it any surprise that an ambitious and fragile teenager saw con artists as heroes?As London became a city economically organized around laundering the proceeds of crime, is it any surprise that an ambitious and fragile teenager saw con artists as heroes?Ironically, London Falling has its origins in the film industry, too. Keefe, a justly fêted writer widely rumored to be on the short list to succeed David Remnick as editor of The New Yorker, first heard the story of Zac on the set of Say Nothing, a miniseries adapted from his book of the same title about the sectarian violence in Northern Ireland. Say Nothing and London Falling form something of a duology on what happens when the British state is both pared back and paired with corruption. Say Nothing investigates the IRA’s disappearance of a Protestant woman in Belfast, and at the same time traces the brutality of the British police and army as the colonial occupying force to which the IRA was reacting. The book oddly excludes coverage of Protestant Loyalist paramilitaries, which weakens it and has the effect of making the IRA seem much more needlessly violent than it actually was. But Keefe’s interest in the weird venality of the British security state serves him better in London Falling, a story in which he does not have to tangle with potential justifications for terrorism.It’s also a story that many British outlets had neglected to cover at all. This book follows in the fine tradition of bringing a gimlet foreign eye to the problems with Britain no one with institutional power there wants to confront. In 2003, David Kelly, a British government expert on biological warfare, probably killed himself after it was revealed he had told the media that false claims about Iraq’s ability to attack Britain had been inserted into the British government’s justification for the Iraq War at the insistence of Tony Blair’s spin chief Alastair Campbell. Later the same year, The New Yorker published a long piece by John Cassidy digging into this; no British outlet was able or willing to invest the resources to produce such a report. Since then, a number of British controversies have been exposed by American reporters, particularly at The New York Times. After a Times podcast revealed that a supposed case of Islamist infiltration of British schools was nothing more than hysteria, former Education Secretary Michael Gove called the Times “useful idiots” for Islamists, something that would surprise anyone who has read their coverage of Gaza. British journalists and political figures, particularly those on the left, regularly tweet if only some American journalists would look into this or that problem ignored by the British press.Like the press, with whom it has had a cozy relationship, the Metropolitan Police has a specialty in not investigating cases. Prince Andrew and Virginia Giuffre, despite the photos and her testimony? No investigation needed. In the mid-2000s, the Met prosecuted two people for hacking into the voicemail inboxes of members of the royal family for Rupert Murdoch’s News of the World. They insisted there was no evidence of any further hacking. When The Guardian reported that there was, the Met conducted a “scoping exercise” led by Assistant Commissioner John Yates in 2009 that determined there was no evidence. It was not until The New York Times got onto the story in 2010 that it was revealed the police had all along been in possession of 11,000 pages of documents showing 4,000 people had been hacked. The police had simply not wanted to know what the powerful Murdoch press was up to until forced by the Times. Yates left the Met and went to work for the brutally repressive police in Bahrain, a former British protectorate. As the Bahrainis suppress pro-Iran sentiment at this very moment, we can only imagine what lessons they may have learned from Yates of the Yard.At the beginning of the investigation into their son’s death, the middle-class Brettlers had total faith that Scotland Yard would solve the case. As time went on, it became clear that many relevant witnesses had never been interviewed, and the police had no intention of bringing any prosecutions. “We were too obedient,” Rachelle told Keefe about trusting the police inquiry. They had relied on an institution that does not want to solve crimes that are inconvenient, and Zac’s death was very inconvenient.This is largely where Keefe’s book lands: It’s a powerful indictment of the British justice system, shocking in the details and extent of neglect and high-handedness it reveals. Keefe first explored Zac’s death in a 2024 New Yorker article, “A Teen’s Fatal Plunge Into the London Underworld.” The first half of the book is adapted and expanded from the article; the second half of the book is richer, runs at the pace of a thriller, and has fewer incorrect statements. (It is not true to say that London “was reinventing itself as a financial capital” in the 1980s: it has been a financial capital since the 1690s.) While the book adds more on the corrosive effects of foreign money in London, it doesn’t set out to connect the corruption to the structure of British society itself.London Falling is a book about a particularly British story by an American author, who has lived in England only briefly for graduate school and to film Say Nothing. The degree to which he has mastered the ins and outs of England and its idiosyncrasies is impressive. Only occasionally do infelicities infringe. The exact nuances of the British class system for instance sometimes evade Keefe: It is absurd to say that the Brettlers did not spend on “status markers,” when they were paying £50,000 a year for elite private educations for their children. (This indicates a certain blindness to the reality of class not just in Britain but perhaps in the United States, too, from a Milton Academy, Columbia, Cambridge, and Yale graduate.)Paying attention to the legacies of class and race in Britain also reveals much about the two men who led Zac Brettler to his death: Their training came from the British Empire. Verinder Sharma’s parents had grown up in India and then immigrated to Loughborough to work in the textile industry. When he turned to crime as a teenager, perhaps the enormous state violence Britain had repeatedly exercised in his family’s past helped ease his way into that life. As “Indian Dave” or “ID,” he had been known to demand large sums of money from wealthy nightclub owners and patrons, with a machete at the other end if they did not comply. How different, after all, was this from how the British had extracted their wealth from India?As for the more genteel Akbar Shamji, who connected Zac with Sharma, his story is quintessentially one of the British Empire. His family were Gujaratis who were brought to Uganda, where they thrived as merchants before being expelled by Idi Amin in the 1970s. (Keefe quotes extensively from the work of Mahmood Mamdani to explain the Ugandan background, simply describing him as a “Ugandan Asian scholar”—the political world moves faster than the book one.) Shamji’s father, one of Uganda’s wealthiest men, made it out with a cool one million in Swiss bank accounts, but to re-create in the U.K. the level of success to which he had been accustomed, he turned to fraudulent shell companies and bribes, a tradition in which he raised his son. And why should he not defraud white British people? Had not his family been repeatedly defrauded as the British Empire retreated, and had its legacy not dragged his family across three continents? In so many ways this is the story of the British Empire coming home, of blowback landing on one unfortunate delusional teenager made to stand scapegoat for centuries of brutal imperialism.The Met certainly had no interest in catching either of these men, despite Sharma’s prolific acts of violence and Shamji’s scams. Keefe unearths quite a bit of evidence to suggest that Sharma was a snitch to the Met on other criminals, earning him extra leniency. Not that this sort of blind eye was unusual for the Met. Keefe has an excellent look at the blind eye that authorities turned as the Putin regime murdered opponent after opponent who had taken refuge in Britain: Investigating might disrupt all the money that was being made providing banking and legal services to the Russians. A million other scandals unfolded the same way: The police simply refused to look at the evidence.Having lost its empire, but kept all the traditions of imperial rule, Britain had turned its remaining territory into a colony: itself. Zac Brettler died what is recognizable as a colonial death, inside a colony ruled by a British political elite cut off even from a respectable middle-class child like himself.

James Marc Leas, Substack. Each of the four boats belonging to the Freedom Flotilla Coalition continues to sail toward Gaza. Each of the four boats belonging to the Freedom Flotilla Coalition (FFC) continues to sail toward Gaza. As of this writing, the vessels have completed approximately 10% of their journey since departing from Siracusa, Sicily, at […]