When news breaks that dominates the agenda to the extent of the US-Israeli attack on Iran, one challenge for the Guardian Weekly team is how to keep the magazine’s covers feeling fresh, week after week, while remaining focused on the same story.
For this week’s edition, in response to Patrick Wintour’s must-read essay on how the US has ignored the lessons of two previous Gulf wars, we asked illustrator Doug Chayka to play with the idea of a Middle East that the US either cannot, or refuses to, see. Doug’s artwork neatly captures the dilemma of a Trump administration that now finds its Iran exit strategy – assuming there was one – cut off by chaos.
Spotlight | War losses mount in rural Russia Residents of a remote village in Komi Republic say dozens have left to fight in Ukraine, leaving behind grieving families and labour shortages. Pjotr Sauer reports
Science | Is the passion for taxonomy in danger of dying out? Insect taxonomist Art Borkent fears his field of science is fading, despite millions of insects, fungi and other organisms waiting to be discovered, he tells Patrick Greenfield
Feature | The miraculous survival of Nada Itrab After a nine-year-old girl was kidnapped and taken from Spain to Bolivia, authorities feared the worst. They found her in the rainforest nine months later – but that wasn’t the end of her ordeal. Giles Tremlett picks up the story
Opinion |In this war, Britain’s enemy now is Donald Trump As the Iran disaster escalates, Simon Tisdall argues that Starmer should treat the US president as someone whose actions threaten the lawful, democratic way of life everywhere
Interview | Corinne Bailey Rae The English singer and songwriter was riding high with a hit album when her husband died tragically young. She discusses grief, fame and rebuilding her life with Simon Hattenstone
The United States and Israel killed Ayatollah Khamenei, and Xi Jinping’s decade-long project to build an alternative to the American-led order died with him. For years, Beijing quietly assembled a network of dictatorships and client states designed to blunt American power. Iran supplied China with cheap oil and kept Washington bogged down in the Middle
The history of the global trading system is a story of narrow and vulnerable waterways: the Suez and Panama Canals, the St. Lawrence Seaway, the Straits of Dover and the Skagerrak, which defends the entrance to the Baltic. But none has the power to seize up the global economy as much as the Strait of…..
Like everyone, I’m glued to the news coming out of Iran. I’m experiencing some depression, as one might, upon realizing that much of what one has worked on for 25 years has suddenly gone up in smoke, destroyed when Donald Trump discovered he was pretty much a neocon after all. Like everyone else, I have…
Win or lose, Donald Trump has begun the last war the United States is ever likely to fight in the Middle East. That might sound wildly optimistic, but what it really means is that war with Iran has been decades in the making. If the mission succeeds, it will mark the end of an era.
When President George W. Bush invaded Mesopotamia in 2003, everybody laughed at Comical Ali, the bespectacled Iraqi information minister who kept insisting that the American “rats” were doomed as Saddam Hussein’s regime collapsed around him. The world moved on. Iran is not Iraq, as President Donald Trump’s supporters are so fond of saying, and Bush-eraOwen Matthews
With the exception so far of a single missile intercepted over Turkish airspace and a strike on an Azeri-controlled territory near the Iranian border, Tehran has so far declined to mess with the Turks, and for good reasons. Turkey is a member of NATO and attacking it would trigger Article 5 mutual defense measures. And
President Trump has both called for Iranians to rise up and oust the ruthless theocracy and then said that he’s fully prepared to deal with a new religious leader. By Robin Wright
The Zombie Regulator
As the cost of living continues to spiral upward, the Trump Administration is gutting the government agency built to protect Americans from financial ruin. By E. Tammy Kim
The Unmaking of the American University
For decades, research universities have relied on federal funding, with no guarantee that it will last. Now their survival may depend on compliance with the government. By Nicholas Lemann
THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE: The 3.8.26 Issue features Matthieu Aikins and Wesley Morgan on the former Zero Unit soldiers who are now living in the U.S.; Sophie Haigney on love addiction; Robert Draper on his experience taking ibogaine; and more.
His call to ‘freeze the rent’ galvanized the 69 percent of New Yorkers who don’t own their homes. But the city’s landlords claim the math doesn’t add up. By Jonathan Mahler
In the wake of the U.S. bombing of Iran and its dismissal of European allies, an anxious continent’s best chance at security runs through its largest economy. By Elisabeth Zerofsky
THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS: The latest issue features Anne Enright on a day in Jeffrey Epstein’s life, Jacob Weisberg on the Great Crash, Ingrid D. Rowland on Giorgia Meloni alla fresco, Robert G. Kaiser on Citizen Bezos, Marilynne Robinson on two-party tyranny, Catherine Nicholson on the first diarist, Nathan Thrall on a lost Hebrew classic about the Nakba, David Cole on the fate of affirmative action, Aaron Matz on satire, Orville Schell on Chiang Kai-shek, Mark Lilla on a nineteenth-century protofascist, a poem by Patricia Lockwood, and much more.
When Jeff Bezos bought The Washington Post in 2013 and promised to find inventive ways to make journalism profitable in the digital age, he seemed like a godsend. He wasn’t.
The Leiden Collection—one of the largest private collections of Dutch art in the world—was conceived as a “lending library for Old Masters,” animated by the humanist spirit found in Rembrandt’s paintings.
Art and Life in Rembrandt’s Time: Masterpieces from the Leiden Collection – an exhibition at the H’ART Museum, Amsterdam, April 9–August 24, 2025, and the Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach, Florida, October 25, 2025—March 29, 2026
The Leiden Collection Online Catalogue, Fourth Edition edited by Arthur K. Wheelock Jr. and Elizabeth Nogrady
Some weeks I head out of the office on a Friday afternoon with an uneasy feeling that our best-laid plans for next week’s Guardian Weekly might not look quite the same by Monday. This was one of those weeks.
While the scope and power of the US-Israel attack on Iran – not least the successful targeting of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and several other senior leaders – took many by surprise, the drums of war had been building for a while. With hindsight, last week’s failed nuclear talks may simply have been cover for what was to come.
As war unfurled dramatically across the Middle East, it was impossible to predict the consequences on a range of fronts, from the likelihood of regime change in Iran to the impact on America’s regional allies under attack, or the ripple effect on global energy prices and disruption to international travel.
Spotlight | Can the Louvre rediscover its joie de vivre? After a heist and the departure of its boss, the famous Paris museum is wrestling with repairs, strikes and a criticised renovation plan, reports Jon Henley
Science | Do lizards hold the key to how nature works? The emergence of a new group of common wall lizards offers an insight into how variety within nature can help conserve species, writes Roberto García-Roa
Interview | The world according to Gavin Newsom He’s the Democratic politician with movie-star looks, dogged by accusations of being a smooth‑talking elitist. But Gavin Newsom may just win the most powerful office in the world.Jonathan Freedlandfinds out why
Opinion | Labour needs to wake up to the dawning of a new political era After last week’s disastrous showing in a byelection, the government must accept voters no longer want two-party politics, argues John Harris
Culture | The wild and witty paintings of Rose Wylie Roaring into her 90s, the rebellious artistis now sought after by galleries worldwide and her works fetch huge sums. Melissa Denes visited her studio
News, Views and Reviews For The Intellectually Curious
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