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Simon Kuper

Life & Arts Columnist

Simon Kuper joined the Financial Times in 1994. He wrote the daily currencies column, before leaving the FT in 1998. He returned in 2002 as a sports columnist and has been there ever since. Nowadays he writes a general column for the Weekend FT on all manner of topics from politics to books, and on cities including London, Paris, Johannesburg and Miami.

Email Simon Kuper @KuperSimon  on Twitter (link opens in a new browser window)
Email Simon Kuper @KuperSimon  on Twitter (link opens in a new browser window)

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  • Friday, 20 May, 2022
    The best books of the week
    Chums by Simon Kuper — the Oxford breed of political bluff and banter

    An elegant, occasionally black and white, critique of the elite UK university that nurtured a generation of anti-European Tories

  • Thursday, 19 May, 2022
    FT MagazineLife & Arts
    How we quietly ditched the idea of progress

    The new human mission, both global and personal, is avoiding disaster

  • Thursday, 12 May, 2022
    FT MagazineLife & Arts
    Democracy might be in crisis. But autocracy certainly is

    From the 2008 crisis on, authoritarians were praised for their ‘efficiency’. Their troubles dwarf ours

  • Sunday, 1 May, 2022
    ObituaryMino Raiola
    Mino Raiola, football agent, 1967-2022

    He was a born trader and hardball negotiator who prided himself on his small stable of players

  • Thursday, 28 April, 2022
    FT MagazineLife & Arts
    Don’t say things that are obviously true, and other conference survival tips

    Follow these simple public-speaking rules and you could improve the experience of tens of thousands of people

  • Thursday, 21 April, 2022
    FT MagazineFrench presidential election
    Why the French think they’ve never had it so bad

    Politicians like Marine Le Pen perpetuate the gloom by indulging in fantasies of national decline

  • Thursday, 14 April, 2022
    Life & Arts
    Why 1980s Oxford holds the key to Britain’s ruling class

    From Partygate to Brexit, many of today’s political dramas can be traced back to the leading players’ student days

  • Wednesday, 13 April, 2022
    FT MagazinePolitics
    Putin: the disorder the far right and far left have in common

    George Orwell was right. Hating your country is every bit as bad as loving it blindly

  • Thursday, 7 April, 2022
    FT MagazineEmmanuel Macron
    Emmanuel Macron, the cleverest boy in class, faces his biggest test ever

    Though many voters dislike the president, most French people talk more radically than they think

  • Thursday, 31 March, 2022
    FT MagazinePolitics
    Fallacious political thinking of our time

    ‘Simplists cannot accept that some explanations may be true and yet too complex for laypeople to understand’

  • Thursday, 24 March, 2022
    FT MagazineGeopolitics
    We are living in an era of global fragility

    Today’s world is like a giant train set. If any piece of track malfunctions, the global train can derail

  • Thursday, 17 March, 2022
    FT MagazineGlobal migration
    Becoming French is like winning the lottery

    I was born with a lucky citizenship, and have now upgraded to the best of the 200 or so on earth

  • Thursday, 10 March, 2022
    FT MagazineWar in Ukraine
    Russia, Ukraine and the spectre of 1941

    Putin’s army is inadvertently highlighting the parallels, bombing a Holocaust memorial and rerunning the destruction of Kharkiv

  • Sunday, 6 March, 2022
    ObituaryCricket
    Shane Warne, Australian cricketer, 1969-2022

    A sporting superstar who revived the lost art of leg-spin bowling

  • Thursday, 3 March, 2022
    FT MagazineUK business & economy
    Who are the Londoners enabling the Russian elite?

    Kleptocrats appreciate Britain’s rule of law — as long as it leaves them alone

  • Thursday, 24 February, 2022
    FT MagazineWar in Ukraine
    What western Europe can do for Ukrainians

    And what Putin’s apologists fail to understand

  • Friday, 18 February, 2022
    The Weekend Essay
    The Premier League at 30 — an English success story?

    Since the top clubs broke away from their peers in 1992, foreign players and money have flooded in

  • Thursday, 17 February, 2022
    FT MagazineWar in Ukraine
    This 1946 telegram predicts much of Russia’s 21st-century foreign policy

    Somehow, an American diplomat foresaw thoroughly contemporary innovations like troll farms

  • Monday, 14 February, 2022
    Workplace diversity & equality
    English football: is it time to adopt compulsory hiring quotas for minorities?

    Despite initiatives to address discrimination, black people are still battling to be considered for senior positions

  • Thursday, 10 February, 2022
    FT MagazineUS Government
    Making history via text message

    From Republicans’ frantic January 6 texts to partygate WhatsApps, today’s communications are a gift for future historians

  • Thursday, 3 February, 2022
    FT MagazineBoris Johnson
    After the Tories ditch Boris Johnson, they need to reset their values

    Johnson’s premiership has been largely spent sabotaging his own ‘oven-ready’ Brexit agreement with the EU and mismanaging Covid-19

  • Thursday, 27 January, 2022
    FT MagazineGlobal migration
    In praise of the cosmopolitans

    In a globalised world, being an immigrant can be a big advantage

  • Thursday, 20 January, 2022
    FT MagazineUS politics & policy
    Why America is dangerously polarised — and Europe is not

    Pundits often extrapolate from the US case, whereas in fact it’s an outlier

  • Thursday, 13 January, 2022
    FT MagazineCovid-19 vaccines
    The true toll of the antivax movement

    By rejecting modern medicine, antivaxxers have recreated past eras when people died like flies

  • Monday, 10 January, 2022
    FT Globetrotter
    Many happy returns: the city spaces that bring joy to our correspondents and writers

    Be it New York subway trains, a Frankfurt bakery or a Tokyo karaoke joint, these are the spots that never fail to uplift the FT’s globetrotters

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