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The writer is an FT contributing editor The force lay in the symbolism. The parliament buildings at Stormont stood as the citadel of Protestant unionism. This month’s elections have left republican Sinn Féin holding sway in Northern Ireland’s assembly. The discomfort reaches well beyond unionism. The rise of the party that served as the political

There can be few collectors in the world whose tastes range from Kangxi porcelain to NFTs and are still only in their thirties. But Los Angeles-based Jason Li, who left mainland China to study in the US, then founded and ran a China-focused sports agency, got the contemporary art bug and now has 1,000 non-fungible

It was just after Christmas when we finally snapped. My partner and I decided we had to tell the world about our second child, who had been born four months earlier. It couldn’t wait any longer. Some friends already knew. But we’re millennials, so only a social media post could mint it with the currency

Venture capitalists are ploughing millions into digital art, virtual land and online collectibles, the new frontier for investors seeking big returns in crypto. Digital items known as non-fungible tokens (NFTs) burst into mainstream culture last year, quickly becoming a multibillion-dollar market ranging from computer-generated art pieces to cartoon characters costing thousands of dollars. Andreessen Horowitz

The Queen’s Speech this week paved the way for dozens of forthcoming parliamentary bills — but there was precious little to address the problem of soaring household bills. The absence of legislation for a windfall tax or any new measures to address the worsening cost of living crisis has left the government looking like it

Although he has lived in Taos, New Mexico, since 1973, Larry Bell is still chiefly associated with the Light and Space movement that emerged in southern California in the 1960s. His early works epitomised the group: semi-mirrored glass cubes that, through their fleeting reflectivity, reacted to — as advertised — the light and space around

If you have colleagues, what do you think of them? Are they smart? Competent? Motivated? Open to new ideas? Good communicators? Do they work well as a team? The answer may not depend on what you think. And that fact suggests a reason why the modern world now seems so poisonously polarised. In the 1970s,

Soaring inflation and supply chain bottlenecks have begun to crack the $1.5tn US junk bond market, as the lowest-quality borrowers show signs of stress. Unlike the falling stock market, junk bonds had largely escaped worries over the US economy as surging prices add costs for companies. Many bond issuers were flush with cash because they

Invesco has added two onshore Chinese equity exchange traded funds to its line-up, both of which will use swaps to offer a synthetic replication model. The Invesco S&P China A 300 Swap and Invesco S&P China A MidCap 500 Swap Ucits ETFs have been launched on exchanges in the UK, Germany, Italy and Switzerland. The

Tatiana Luboviski-Acosta has learned to perfect the art of the hustle. Born in Mexico and raised in Los Angeles, the San Francisco-based poet and visual artist has been working since the age of 14 to support their family. (They use the pronouns they/them.) They’re still the main provider for their mother and sister, working at

It seems as though everywhere one looks in New York City, Latinx artists are making their mark. In April, El Museo del Barrio in East Harlem, established in 1969 as a neighbourhood museum by and for the Puerto Rican community, opened a major retrospective devoted to the work of its founder, Raphael Montañez Ortiz. Venture

In 2003, Sophie Mörner, a Swedish native fresh out of a photography degree at New York University, started Capricious Magazine, devoted to the work of emerging photographers who were often also women and/or queer. The magazine, which soon expanded into a publishing initiative supporting feminist and queer journals, also spawned a project space in Williamsburg

It’s art fair season again, but not quite as we knew it. Frieze New York, which opens in Manhattan’s The Shed on May 18, encapsulates the new normal better than most. In 2019, nearly 200 galleries participated in the fair’s trademark temporary tent on far-flung Randall’s Island, where it had been since its 2012 launch.

EU high representative for foreign policy Josep Borrell is to be commended for his disarmingly frank comments (“EU weighs giving Hungary time and cash to agree oil sanctions”, Report, May 7) on the constraints facing Hungary as well as Slovakia and the Czech Republic endorsing the EU’s proposed embargo on Russian oil imports. Borrell rightly

With regard to Alan Beattie’s insightful commentary “Trade policy cannot fix America’s inequality problem” (Opinion, FT.com, May 11), we need to add one major issue — education and training. Presidents Bill Clinton and George W Bush, and former vice-president Al Gore, when promoting free trade, overlooked President Teddy Roosevelt’s belief that trade agreements should only

JML Stone highlights the “constant predatory (recruitment) activities of for-profit and non-profit US (healthcare) corporations in the UK” (Letters, May 9). Such “skimming off the top” of the NHS “inevitably means that excellent nurses and specialists are being sucked from the health service, but without any perceivable benefit to the indigenous population — in fact,

Mary Ziegler’s interesting article (“Conflict over dismantling US abortion rights poses a political challenge”, Opinion, May 10) might also have addressed some other relevant points. A right is not an obligation. Those who, out of religious beliefs and/or a sense of ethics, refuse to exercise their right to have an abortion or refuse to enable

Sam Bankman-Fried, the billionaire founder of cryptocurrency exchange FTX, has amassed a 7.6 per cent stake in online retail brokerage Robinhood, calling it an “attractive investment”. Bankman-Fried said in a securities filing he has no “intention of taking any action toward changing or influencing the control of [Robinhood]” and bought the stake purely as an

Elon Musk, Tesla and SpaceX chief executive, spoke to Peter Campbell, global motor industry correspondent, at FT Live’s Future of the Car conference in London on Tuesday May 10. This is an edited transcript of their interview, which covered everything from buying a mining company to lifting the Twitter ban on Donald Trump. Peter Campbell (PC):

China’s biggest stock market listing in a decade — China Mobile — has, in some ways, been an unexpected success story. Its public share offering, in January, was significant not only for the amount of cash raised, but also for accelerating investment flows between China and the rest of the world. However, in raising Rmb48.7bn