-an OD of Toughts-

Let’s begin with a cheerful little statistic. In Malta, roughly one in three bars is allegedly involved in money laundering. Restaurants? About three in ten. Which means that if you’re sitting in a quaint little restaurant in Valletta, admiring your €18 plate of indifferent pasta, there’s a fair chance the spaghetti isn’t the main thing being processed. Now, because this has clearly evolved into something resembling a fully fledged economic sector, I thought it only fair to offer a helpful guide. Particularly for those bright‑eyed dreamers who’ve always wanted to open a restaurant despite having absolutely no idea how food—or business—actually works. Good news: you don’t need to. Step one: get the cash And not the nice, clean, tax‑paid kind. No. You need the sort of cash that arrives in bags, not bank transfers. Plenty of it. According to widely cited figures, the cocaine trade alone in the Maltese market feeds hundreds of millions into circulation annually. So supply, as they say, is ...

  Remarkably Bright Creatures is the sort of film that arrives quietly, wearing sensible shoes and carrying a thermos, and then proceeds to make a far bigger emotional mess of you than any explosion-filled summer blockbuster ever could. It is a gentle, melancholy, and oddly funny Netflix drama that proves a film does not need to shout to be heard. In fact, this one mostly whispers, which is handy because it leaves more room for the octopus to do the judging At its heart, this is a story about grief, loneliness, and the inconvenient fact that other people sometimes matter. Sally Field plays Tova, a widow working at an aquarium, with the kind of calm authority that suggests she could organize a small nation using only a broom and a stare. Lewis Pullman plays Cameron, a drifting young man trying to put himself back together, and Alfred Molina voices Marcellus, the octopus who may well be the smartest character ever to share screen time with us lesser mammals.  What Remarkably Bri...

There are television shows that politely ask for your attention. And then there are television shows that walk into the room, kick the door off its hinges, pour themselves a whisky, and remind you why British television still knows how to make proper drama. It  is one of those shows. Now, normally, modern spy dramas suffer from one of two problems. They either become unbearably clever, where everyone whispers in dark rooms while staring emotionally at rain-covered windows, or they become so action-packed that you forget whether you're watching MI6 or Fast & Furious with passports. Secret Service somehow avoids both.  Instead, it does something rather rare. It gives you tension. Real tension. The sort that sits on your chest like an unpaid tax bill. The story follows Kate Henderson, played brilliantly by an MI6 officer, trying to uncover a Russian asset buried deep inside the British establishment. Which sounds straightforward enough until you realise every character looks ...

In Malta, in 2026, being a normal salaried worker isn’t so much a career as it is a long, slow magic trick where your money disappears, and everyone politely pretends it hasn’t. On paper, the average salary is around €2,100 per month. Very nice. Very respectable. The sort of number that suggests you might one day own a sofa that isn’t emotionally damaged. And then, like a badly timed gear change, taxes, social security, and various bureaucratic nibbles take a bite. What lands in your bank account is more like €1,700 to €1,900. Which, in Malta, is roughly the financial equivalent of bringing a spoon to a sword fight. Now, if you’re a bright-eyed 25-year-old Maltese person who believes that renting a flat in Sliema or buying something respectable in Balzan is just “normal life", I have some news. It’s not normal life. It’s Formula 1. And you’re entering with a bicycle. A one-bedroom flat, nothing fancy, just somewhere your fridge doesn’t hum like a diesel generator, will cost you €1...

That question shows up under almost every post I write about artificial intelligence. A hundred times a week, in a thousand different versions. And it may be the smartest question in the entire AI debate. So smart, in fact, that it was asked long before ChatGPT, long before Silicon Valley panic, and long before “AI disruption” became a daily headline. Seventy years ago, in fact. The 1954 answer Cleveland, Ohio, 1954. Ford has just opened the first fully automated engine plant in history. A company executive is giving Walter Reuther, the head of the American auto workers’ union, a tour. Standing in front of machines that work on their own, he cracks a joke: “Walter, how do you expect to collect union dues from these robots?” Reuther doesn’t hesitate. “And how do you expect to get them to buy cars?” It’s hard to improve on that answer. In seventy years of papers, conferences, books, and panel discussions, nobody has come up with a sharper one. And yet the robots at Ford are still there. ...

Casottel is one of Milan’s most authentic historic trattoria, but its future is uncertain after the lease expired. Here’s why this farmhouse restaurant matters. I still believe cities need places like this I have a soft spot for restaurants that do not try too hard to impress me. Maybe it is because most places now arrive with a concept, a brand story, and a mood board, and very little actual soul. Casottel, in southern Milan, is the opposite of all that: it feels like memory, not marketing. That is why the idea of losing it lands badly. Casottel has been part of Milan’s fabric since 1963, and although the current restaurant grew out of that history later on, the farmhouse itself has long been a place of food, gathering, and community. In a city that moves fast and reinvents itself constantly, that kind of continuity matters.  What Casottel is Casottel sits in Via Fabio Massimo, near Porto di Mare, in the kind of Milan that still feels like it has a bit of soil under its fingernail...