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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.

11/03/2025

🤑 $2bn cartoon

The Chinese film Ne Zha 2 has become the most successful animated feature film ever made and the seventh-highest-grossing movie of all time, says The Economist.

The cartoon, which has taken more than $2bn at the box office, reimagines the tale of the eponymous “demon child” from a famous 16th-century Chinese novel, without the “heavy doses of patriotism” that Chinese filmmakers have long felt obliged to include.

One fan said it was breath of fresh air to watch something that doesn’t “force-feed” the party line.

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10/03/2025

🎨 Hunter Biden’s art

Republicans have long claimed that Hunter Biden sold his paintings at inflated prices to people wanting to curry favour with his father, says James Freeman in The Wall Street Journal.

The 55-year-old – not previously an artist of great renown – somehow managed to flog nearly $1.5m worth of art during his dad’s presidential campaign and the early years of his administration.

And he is now encountering a “dramatic shift in consumer preferences”.

In the two to three years leading up to December 2023, he sold 27 pieces for an average price of $54,000; since then, he has only sold a single piece, for a measly $36,000.

Can’t think why.

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📸 Getty

09/03/2025

🎨 Jack Vettriano

The cultural establishment was never kind to Jack Vettriano, who died last week aged 73, says Eddy Frankel in The Guardian.

We “snobby art types” dismissed his work as having no conceptual edge and lacking any postmodern self-awareness, instead deeming it lurid, chintzy, old-fashioned and “often pretty sexist”.

His paintings – people dancing on the beach in 1930s outfits, mobsters and tough guys in suits, “broads” in bras and men polishing cars – were the sort commissioned by “rich, greasy men with three buttons too many unbuttoned”.

Yet the Scottish artist sold countless thousands of prints and was loved by “ordinary people”.

His success was a useful reminder of an essential truth about contemporary art: works that require you to be clever enough to “get it” push most people away.

“You look at a Vettriano and you understand it.” That’s a good thing.

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📸 The Singing Butler (1992)

08/03/2025

👑 The Man with the Golden Arm

James Harrison, an Australian blood donor known as “The Man with the Golden Arm” died this week aged 88.

Harrison’s plasma contained a rare and precious antibody called anti-D, which is used to prevent a potentially fatal condition in newborns called rhesus disease.

He began giving blood as soon as he turned 18 and didn’t miss a single fortnightly session until he hit the maximum donation age of 81.

Doctors say he likely saved the lives of 2.4 million babies.

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📸 Getty

07/03/2025

📱No-villains clause

Apple has a “no-villains” clause for all the kit it provides to TV shows and films, says Richard Osman on The Rest is Entertainment.

So if you’re watching a whodunnit and you see someone with an iPhone, say, or an Apple Watch, “they did not do it”.

And if you see Rob Brydon turn up with a Samsung, “he probably did”.

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📸 Knives out (2019)

06/03/2025

✈️ Flight attendants’ games

We flight attendants get up to all sorts of japes to keep ourselves entertained, says Paula Gahan in The Daily Telegraph.

One is the “cheerio” game: as passengers are leaving the plane, you signal to your colleagues which ones you think are attractive by waving them off with a “cheerio” rather than a “goodbye”.

Then there’s “crop dusting”.

This is when, rather than breaking wind next to your fellow crew members in the cramped confines of the galley, you walk “briskly down the aisle while releasing some pressure”.

And if there’s some “Karen” who’s been complaining at you all flight, well, you might just “linger a little longer by her seat”.

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📸 Catch me if you can (2002)

04/03/2025

🏆 Anodyne Oscars

When the Oscars took place after Donald Trump’s first inauguration, in 2017, says The Economist, the event had an openly political tone.

The host, Jimmy Kimmel, “needled Trump mercilessly”; stars wore blue ribbons in support of the American Civil Liberties Union, a watchdog group fighting his agenda.

This year, politics was barely mentioned.

When one winner made an oblique reference to “the chaos we’re living through”, the orchestra swiftly played her off stage; the two “charming Iranians” who won Best Animated Short Film kept their speech “anodyne”.

Hollywood has ditched the in favour of “toeing the line”.

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📸 Getty

02/03/2025

🦜 Elizabeth Taylor’s menagerie

Elizabeth Taylor was a notoriously awful guest, says Hayley Maitland in Vogue.

A Beverly Hills Hotel clerk said that whenever the actress emerged from her bathroom it was “as if a cyclone had hit a Bloomingdale’s cosmetics counter”: on one occasion she even left lipstick marks on the ceiling, “despite being no taller than five foot three in stilettos”.

Calvin Klein was “horrified” by the state in which she left his house on Fire Island, and “mattresses and rugs were always having to be replaced at The Dorchester” after her stays.

Much of the chaos stemmed from her entourage of pets, which included an “unhousebroken Shih Tzu”, an aviary of parrots (which travelled with their “dedicated claw trimmer”), a terrier who “teethed on diamonds”, and an aquarium of crabs.

When The Plaza Hotel in New York imposed a $2,500 surcharge for “animal-related damages”, Taylor took vengeance by ransacking the suite, stuffing pillows down the loo and tearing the curtains to shreds.

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📸 Getty

01/03/2025

📚 Dream Count

Twelve years on from her last novel, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is “finally, fortunately” back, says Ron Charles in The Washington Post.

Dream Count is a “rich, complicated” story told through the lives of four black women. Chia, Zikora and Omelogor are affluent 40-somethings musing on love and each confronting the “biological clock” in different ways, while Chia’s maid, Kadiatou, explores “the presumptions of wealth” from thoughtless remarks to acts of abuse.

The novel jets between America and Nigeria, flitting between comedy and horror.

It makes for a “deeply compelling” reminder that “no story is ever just a single story”.

Dream Count by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is available to pre-order.

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📸 Getty

28/02/2025

🇬🇧 Starmer’s masterclass

In terms of what was actually achieved, says Steven Swinford in The Times, Starmer didn’t secure the US security guarantees he wanted for any future Ukraine peacekeeping force.

But the PM did win some “significant concessions”.

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📸 Getty

26/02/2025

❤️ Trump’s admirer

One of Donald Trump’s aides is so obsessed with the president that the Secret Service worried she posed a security concern, says Michael Wolff in his new book All or Nothing.

Natalie Harp, who is known as the “human printer” because she carries a mini printer to give Trump hard copies of positive media coverage, wrote him one letter saying: “You are all that matters to me. I don’t want to ever let you down. Thank you for being my Guardian and Protector in this life.”

In another, the 33-year-old quoted Bible verses and assured him she would always be by his side.

When officials raised concerns about the “aggressiveness of her attention”, Trump told them: “Nonsense... she just loves her president.”

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📸 Getty

25/02/2025

🇩🇪 Friedrich Merz

Friedrich Merz is now the “most important man in Europe”, says Christoph Hickmann in Der Spiegel.

After his centre-right CDU party won the largest vote share in Sunday’s German elections, his task over the next four years – once he has cobbled together a coalition – is no less than “defending liberal democracy against its enemies”.

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📸 Getty

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