The Suez Canal wasn’t always seen as central to global trade. After Britain purchased an interest in the canal in 1875, former prime minister William Gladstone decried it as useless and warned that it was too easily obstructed. The events of this week have highlighted how wrong he was on the first point, and perhaps right on the second. But even Gladstone would have found it hard to envisage the 400-metre-long ship currently blocking the canal.

It’s a disaster for global trade, 13% of which passed through the canal in 2019. And the delays caused while the Ever Given is shifted could be a major problem for global supply chains. Getting it out will be a huge challenge but tried-and-tested methods could mean it takes days not weeks.

One thing’s for sure, if it were a ship owned by Donald Trump, it’d be the “Biggest Ship Ever”. As it is, he probably thinks it’s “All Sleepy Joe’s Fault”. As we reported this week, the former US president is trying to circumvent his Twitter ban by building his own social media platform, which we gather will be ready in two or three months. If this sounds like a typical Trump-esque fiction, remember that Facebook’s first iteration was built in two weeks.

The weekend marks 80 years since the death of the great feminist novelist Virginia Woolf, whose work provided an alternative to nationalistic narratives in the wake of the first world war. Her influences weren’t just literary and historical, however. They also came from her enduring, passionate love of music. And she revelled in the beauty and wonder of what was the relatively new artform of cinema. At the moment, of course, we can but dream of our next trip to the movies.

This week we also lamented Turkey’s withdrawal from the Istanbul Convention, which aims to protect women against violence, we worried about links between processed meat and dementia, and we looked into the best way to regrow a tropical forest.

Meanwhile our colleagues around the world explained how particles ejected from the Sun affect Earth’s climate, reported the number of QAnon followers who present mental health diagnoses, and mourned the death of Nawal El Saadawi, Egypt’s great polymath woman of letters.

And we celebrated The Conversation’s tenth birthday. Huge congratulations to our Australian colleagues who were there at the start!

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