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The Knowledge is a free daily email with over 140,000 subscribers. Best of all, the whole thing takes just five minutes to read.

Every day, we scour hundreds of newspapers, websites and social media outlets, and pick out only the very best bits.

16/02/2025

🔠 Spanish Scrabble

Nigel Richards is the reigning world champion of Spanish Scrabble, says Natasha Dangoor in The Wall Street Journal.

“Just don’t ask him to order a coffee in Madrid.” The 57-year-old New Zealander doesn’t speak the language.

In his title-winning match, he racked up triple-word scores with enrugase (to wrinkle up) and enhotos (an archaic word for “familiarity”), before clinching victory with saburrosa (an obscure term that describes the coated residue of the tongue).

But he didn’t know what any of them meant.

The word-whizz – who is also the undisputed GOAT of English Scrabble, with five world titles – simply memorised the entire Spanish dictionary.

One local newspaper called his win “the height of absurdity”; a broadcaster in Madrid said it was “the ultimate humiliation”.

But those in the know were unsurprised. Richards had done this trick before – in French. Twice.

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📸 Jonathan Brady/PA/Zuma Press

15/02/2025

📺 The White Lotus

In the third series of The White Lotus, a new gang of “shiny unhappy people” arrive at a Thai resort and serve up a “sumptuous feast for the senses”, says Lucy Mangan in The Guardian.

The guests include a “heavily medicated Southern belle” with her wealthy husband and their array of troubled children; an odd couple with a significant age gap; and a trio of old friends who are not quite the “ride-or-dies” they think they are.

Everyone is either hiding a dark secret, or creating a dark secret – and, as ever, there’s a dead body “ruining everyone’s fun”.

This series perhaps lacks the “satirical bite” of the first two, but creator Mike White’s storytelling and characterisation remain masterly.

It’s “killer TV”.

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14/02/2025

🇮🇹 Raunchy tiramisú

Tiramisú has a pretty sordid history, says Silvia Marchetti in The New European.

The coffee-soaked pudding has its origins in the brothels of Treviso, where, due to its supposed aphrodisiac effects, it was used to “refuel” clients.

Its original form – a cup of egg yolks mixed with sugar – was called sbattutin, which in Treviso dialect translates to the less-than-subtle “bang me”.

And the modern name Tiramisú, which evolved after the government closed down state brothels in the late 1950s, still hints towards the dish’s risqué history: it translates as “lift me up”.

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📸 Getty

13/02/2025

🐕‍🦺 Prize pooch

Monty the giant schnauzer was crowned Best in Show at the Westminster Kennel Club dog show this week, says People magazine.

The prestigious pooch beat more than 2,500 other canine competitors at America’s top dog show, becoming the first of his breed to take the coveted prize.

Monty, whose official champion’s name is (inexplicably) “Hearthmore’s Wintergreen Mountain”, pipped finalists including Comet the shih tzu, Mercedes the German shepherd and a bichon frisé called Neal.

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📸 Getty

11/02/2025

🥚 Perfect egg

Gastronomy boffins in Italy say they have found the best way to boil an egg, says PopSci: “periodic cooking”.

All you need is one pot of water kept at a steady 100C and another pot kept at 30C.

Submerge the egg in the boiling water for two minutes, then transfer it to the cooler pot for another two.

Repeat that cycle eight times, for a total of 32 minutes, “and voilà”.

Apparently this technique not only creates a perfectly runny yolk with a perfectly solidified white, it also maintains more of the egg’s nutritional content.

Ideal – if you have half an hour to spare.

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📸 Getty

10/02/2025

🇺🇸 Trump’s tariffs

Donald Trump’s tariffs are unprecedented not just because he is targeting America’s allies, says Max Boot in The Washington Post.

He is also using them in a totally different way to his predecessors.

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📸 Getty

09/02/2025

🩰 Margaret Hookham

It used to be the case that if you wanted to be a star, you had to change your name, says Craig Brown in the Daily Mail.

It’s hard to imagine Margot Fonteyn having much success as Margaret Hookham, or Boris Karloff sending shivers down spines as William Pratt.

Yvette Stevens, James Osterberg and Marvin Aday sound like “partners in a Philadelphia legal office”, but gained stardom as Chaka Khan, Iggy Pop and Meat Loaf.

Set on becoming a country star, a young Harold Jenkins was told to “pick a name with star quality”.

He opened a map of the US and stuck a pin in two towns: Conway in Arkansas and Twitty in Texas.

You or I might have tried again, but Conway Twitty went on to have a number one hit.

I once met a thriller writer whose publishers made him pick a new surname between D and L in the alphabet.

“They didn’t want anything positioned too high up or too low down on airport bookshelves.”

📸 Getty

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08/02/2025

😈 “Demon mode”

Elon Musk is known for going into “demon mode” at his businesses, says Jonathan Swan on The Daily: he adopts a manic energy; sleeps on the factory floor; and carries out mass layoffs to w**d out insufficiently “hardcore” employees.

For the past two weeks, he has taken the same approach to the federal government as head of the new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).

To read how, head to the link in bio and sign up to read today’s edition of The Knowledge.

📸 Getty

07/02/2025

🇺🇸 The Trump aesthetic

Every president brings a certain “aesthetic” to office, says Carolina Miranda in The Washington Post.

Donald Trump’s aesthetic marries “a longing for the past” with the “histrionics of professional wrestling”.

His “big-shouldered, dubiously tailored ensembles” are straight out of the 1980s, while his “garish pancake makeup and architectural hairdo” are meant to cultivate a “cartoonish virility” that makes Hulk Hogan look demure.

Just as important are the looks of the crowd around him.

In Trump world, “men are men and women are women”.

Guys who work for him wear white shirts, red ties, dark suits and have neat hair. The women are expected to be “hyper-feminine”: body-hugging dresses, Utah curls and the “Mar-a-Lago face” – makeup-caked, angular cheek-boned, full-lipped and Botoxed to the hairline.

The appeal of the MAGA aesthetic is that it unites the motley alliance of people that put Trump in office: Christian nationalists, the manosphere, alt-righters and assorted nostalgists who want to “return the United States to some imagined past”.

📸 Getty

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06/02/2025

🎬 Mission Impossible

It’s amazing what can influence big political decisions, says Zeynep Tufekci in The New York Times.

Joe Biden’s former chief of staff, Bruce Reed, revealed in 2023 that one of the reasons the president got serious on the dangers of artificial intelligence getting into the wrong hands was because he watched Mission Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One, the Tom Cruise movie about “AI gone rogue”.

📸 Paramount pictures

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05/02/2025

📸 Camera comeback

Digital cameras are having a renaissance, says Nikkei Asia.

Global shipments of the standalone snappers rose by 10% in 2024, after seven years of decline.

Analysts say the revival is being driven by Gen Z users, who think their smartphone cameras aren’t good enough for the pictures they want to post on social media.

📸 Getty

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03/02/2025

📚 Marvellous memoirs

You can tell a lot about a memoir from its contents page, says The Economist.

Readers know where they stand with the famously lascivious Rupert Everett, whose autobiography includes chapters like “An Es**rt Called Joe” and “Nude Sunday in Berlin”.

Melania Trump’s is characteristically blunt, with the likes of “Lights, Camera, Model” and “My Husband, the President”.

Best of all was Nietzsche’s autobiography, which had chapters including “Why I Am So Wise”, “Why I Am So Clever” and “Why I Write Such Good Books”.

📸 Getty

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02/02/2025

🏝️ Co***ne island

In the summer of 2001, book-sized packages of white powder started washing up on the beaches of São Miguel in the Azores, says Olivia Acland in The Daily Telegraph.

Locals initially didn’t know what it was – little boys used it as chalk to mark out the lines on their football pitch.

But they soon realised it was co***ne, which had been jettisoned by a smuggler caught in a storm.

Police seized half a metric tonne of the drug, worth around £40m today, but some islanders also collected the packages themselves and “began dealing at bargain prices”.

Soon, teenagers could be seen “walking through the streets carrying shopping bags full of the powder”; at the island’s pubs, “beer glasses of co***ne were going for €5 each”.

It became so ubiquitous that women reportedly began dusting raw fish with the drug instead of flour, while “old men spooned it into their espressos like sugar”.

📸 Getty

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01/02/2025

🗣️ John Prescott

Everyone who worked with John Prescott, whose funeral was on Thursday, had a colourful anecdote about him, says Andrew McDonald in Politico.

When Andrew Marr was walking back to his hotel room during one Labour conference, the deputy PM came marching down the corridor towards him, waving his arms “like a demented combine harvester”, and stabbed his forefinger into the journalist’s chest.

“You bastard, you f***ing bastard, you f***ing bastard, I will f***ing ‘av you,” he said, before storming off.

Marr was totally bewildered – only for Prescott to come back round the corner 30 seconds later and tell him: “Sorry, wrong bloke.”

📸 Alamy

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31/01/2025

🥰 Capybara craze

Recently, I met a capybara, the world’s largest rodent, says Gary Shteyngart in The New Yorker.

And now I understand why the dog-sized beasts have a “cultlike following” on social media.

The creatures get hiccups; carry large oranges on their heads; let birds eat the schmutz out of their fur, bringing them almost “orgiastic levels of delight”; and in one case in a Japanese zoo, even adopted a cat into their social group.

They’re so popular in Japan that you can book a 30-minute “coffee-and-carrot date” with one in a café – though as one aficionado noted, bagging a slot is “harder than getting Taylor Swift tickets”.

📸 Getty

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30/01/2025

🫏🧀 Donkey cheese

The world’s most expensive cheese has an unlikely secret ingredient, says The Takeout: donkey milk.

P**e, which is made in a protected wetland in West Serbia and costs around £1,000/kg, consists of 40% goat’s milk and 60% milk from the ultra-rare Balkan donkey, of which only a few hundred remain.

Added to the beast’s scarcity is the fact that while a cow can produce around 55 litres of milk a day, a jenny (female donkey) might squeeze out two litres if you’re lucky.

Given it takes 22 litres to produce one 900g block of p**e, the price doesn’t sound too bad.

Apparently it tastes a bit like Manchego. Иум!

📸 Atlas obscura

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29/01/2025

🛺 Electric rickshaws

A new electric rickshaw made by the car firm Hyundai has been dreamt up as an alternative to the traditional Indian tuk tuk, says Dezeen.

The weeny three-wheelers are designed for manoeuvring through narrow city streets and have a height-adjustable chassis that can be raised to navigate waterlogged roads during monsoon season.

Like their motorised cousins, the tiny taxis are open at the sides with waterproof interiors but are also equipped with experimental heat-reducing gloss paint on the roof to keep the inside cool.

A four-wheeled version is being trialled for a possible global rollout.

📸 Hyundai

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28/01/2025

🇺🇸 Trump’s “human printer”

Donald Trump is an unlikely saviour of “TikTok teens and crypto bros”, says Maureen Dowd in The New York Times.

The 78-year-old is an avowed Luddite, who employs a beautiful young woman, 33-year-old former TV presenter Natalie Harp, to follow him around with a mini printer in her rucksack to produce hard copies of positive news stories.

The “human printer”, as Trump calls her, also takes dictation for his social media posts.

📸 Getty

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