Society

Friday

Ruaridh Nicoll

The marvels of Cuba’s national botanic gardens

The last time I visited Cuba’s national botanic gardens, there was a wedding in a tucked-away corner by the Japanese pool. The happy couple stood at the water’s edge as jacanas – Jesus birds – walked the lily pads behind them. I have been thinking about that couple, as we’ve just heard that the botanics have closed due to the oil blockade the US is imposing on the island. The gardens were an escape in a collapsing city, not that we could still reach them, as there is no fuel. I have a small boy, Santiago, and it’s hard to entertain him in these trying times. On calm days, there is the beach, the beautiful miles of sand to the city’s undeveloped east, but with an empty gas tank, that too is out of reach.

Sebastian Mallaby

Meet Mythos: the new AI system causing panic over cybersecurity

It’s tempting, even fashionable, to pooh-pooh the hyperbole from our tech overlords. The release in 2022 of ChatGPT, the first mass-market conversational AI system, unleashed a volley of supercilious put-downs. The chatbot was not intelligent. It was merely hallucinating, manipulating statistics, regurgitating phrases from the internet: it was a “stochastic parrot.” Well, over the next three years, ChatGPT became unputdownable. It learned to handle photographs and videos, extract wisdom from dense textbooks, sound like Scarlett Johansson, write everything from code to songs to emails and offer tips on fixing washing machines. Not bad for a parrot.

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Charles Cornish-Dale

Could too little cholesterol be the cause of autism and ADHD?

In September last year, shares in Kenvue, the maker of Tylenol, plunged when Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced the results of an investigation into the environmental causes of autism. One of the causes discovered, RFK Jr. said, was Tylenol use by pregnant women. Studies positing a link had already been used in lawsuits by hundreds of parents who believed acetaminophen – the drug’s medical name – had caused their children to develop autism or ADHD. Now, Kennedy said, the FDA had even more robust data to support that link. Kenvue has since lobbied the FDA to prevent new warnings about the risk of using Tylenol during pregnancy from being added to its product.

SPLC
Blake Neff

The powerful incentives for vilifying white Americans

The Southern Poverty Law Center may not, we hope, be long for this world. The Trump administration’s new indictment has exposed the organization’s practice of funneling millions of dollars through fake bank accounts to “informants” sitting in senior positions at the very “hate groups” it claimed to monitor. Even if the SPLC survives, the criminal proceedings may leave it so damaged and exhausted that it sheds most of its influence. Others have charted out the potential financial incentives behind the SPLC’s alleged misconduct: the demand for “hate” in America exceeds the supply, so to create sufficient far-right activity to keep donations flowing, the SPLC was perhaps ready to pay off the operatives it supposedly fought.

Michael Tracey

Fight me, Jim Acosta: Michael Tracey

The recent DC media revelry was thwarted by a blundering assassination attempt, and in my case, a drunken challenge from journalist Jim Acosta, formerly of CNN and now Substack. He asked me to “step outside” so we could settle our differences like real men. I was eager to oblige on the sidewalk in front of the Smithsonian Museum, where Substack was hosting its gala. His fury erupted when I dared approach the VIP partygoer Julie K. Brown – comically credited with having broken the Jeffrey Epstein story in 2018 with her series of painfully overrated articles in the Miami Herald. She has since enjoyed hero status, getting showered with every contrived journalism award. Julie has even had her likeness optioned for some sort of streaming-service drama.

King Charles
Paolo Odoli

Why Bermuda is loyal to the King

At St. Peter’s Church in St. George’s, Bermuda, the oldest Anglican church in continuous use in the Western Hemisphere, a photograph of the late Princess Diana with the then-Prince Charles has just been taken down. Removing the reminder of the King’s last visit to the island in 1982 was a matter of administrative prudence ahead of his arrival on Friday. A small gesture that reveals much about the respect and deference Bermudians feel towards the British monarchy. The 2022 royal tour of the Caribbean by the Prince and Princess of Wales was defined by protest, demands for reparations and independence from the British Crown. Bermuda will not repeat that performance.

Wednesday

Brendan O’Neill

The Golders Green atrocity is the final straw

It is undeniable now: war has been declared on British Jews. A fascistic crusade is being waged against our Jewish compatriots. The anti-Semitic atrocity in Golders Green today is further brutish proof of this unsettling fact. We’ve had fire bombings at synagogues, the murder of Jews in Manchester on Yom Kippur, and now this frenzied knifing of Jews in London. There can be no more equivocating – this is a moral emergency. The most sickening thing about today’s knife pogrom is that it was entirely predictable The scenes from Golders Green are truly grim. Video clips show the suspect wielding his knife with demented fury at two visibly Jewish men.

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Michael Auslin

Why America’s democracy needs the British monarchy

Perfect spring sunshine beamed down on King Charles III and Queen Camilla as they slowly made their way down the sloping lawn of the British Embassy in Washington this week. None of the hundreds of eager Americans gathered at the Embassy’s garden party had ever seen a British king in the nation’s capital. The last visit was in 1939, by King George VI, when a similar garden party took place in the shadow of the gathering storm in Europe.

Simon Hunt

Is OpenAI losing its shine?

Sam Altman has always been a charmer. At school he reveled in the art of persuasion, joining a school debate team and taking part in national tournaments. After charming his teachers, Altman graduated into charming investors, launching a startup at just 19 before working his way up to become president of Silicon Valley’s premier startup incubator, Y Combinator. Last year, OpenAI managed to spend more on marketing and employee share options alone than it made in overall sales When he later joined OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, his charm was key to recruiting a team of some of the brightest coders and scientists in the world. But for some who worked close to him, the charm started to rub off: they realized he was very good at telling them what they wanted to hear.

Monday

Lee Cohen

What Harry and Meghan don’t get about royal visits

King Charles III’s state visit to Washington this week is the monarchy executing its core diplomatic function with precision and dignity. In Donald Trump’s Washington, an invitation to an event with the British monarch remains the most sought-after in the city. By stark contrast, the King’s son and daughter-in-law careen around the globe representing no one but themselves. They dress up as royals in a sustained exercise in self-promotion and profiteering that repels observers and belittles the very institution that gave them their platform. One upholds the Crown’s purpose, while the other commodifies it. The Sussexes’ grift cheapens the Crown’s reputation and insults the public’s intelligence The King and Queen travel as invited guests of the US government.

numb assassination
Katherine Dee

How we all become numb

These nights, sleep won’t take me. Thirty-one weeks pregnant, I’m too big to ever be comfortable. I toss; I turn; I move to the guest room in the vain hope that having a bed to myself might offer some reprieve from the fact my bones can no longer support my weight. Some time around 3 or 4 a.m., I give up and open TikTok, where the algorithm offers its nightly liturgy of dread. “If you’re seeing this, it’s meant for you,” a woman in her car, voice low, telling me to install a Ring doorbell because somebody could be casing my house. I live in Chicago, and someone just stole my neighbor’s catalytic converter. It’s plausible, I think.

Friday

Julie Burchill

Don’t whitewash Michael Jackson

We’re not used to famous pedophiles having a great talent; perhaps because all of their drive goes into their secret obsession, they’re generally just operators with a lot of front. It’s been easy to slice the cultural contributions of, say, Jerry Sandusky from one’s life and not feel the least absence. If the chattering classes are allowed to keep their Eric Gill, why can’t the dancing classes keep Michael Jackson? On the other hand, we’re inclined to give Caravaggio a pass, as he was such a great painter as well as a boy-abusing murderer – and it was such a long time ago, that the victims can't speak out. The same goes for the pedophile Paul Gauguin, who spent many years spreading syphilis among a proportion of the girl children of Tahiti.

Thursday

Alexander Larman

Russell Brand is everything that is wrong with the world

There are few stranger public careers than that of Russell Brand, the former "comedian" turned MAGA cheerleader-in-chief. He has given an interview to Tucker Carlson, another figure who has been on his own peculiar journey, and has announced his intention of running for Mayor of London in 2028, on a vaguely defined but somehow sinister platform that includes "pragmatic" democracy for "people who live in London, who love London." He is the strutting, peacocking representation of all that is wrong in contemporary society Brand has railed against most of Sadiq Khan’s innovations, asking: "Do you want ULEZ cameras? Do you want congestion charges? Do you want this type of policing where people are arrested for Facebook posts? Do you want us to focus on contemporary rape gangs?

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southern poverty law center
Mark Pulliam

The tawdry shenanigans of the Southern Poverty Law Center

In the financial world, most frauds are short-lived. Ponzi schemes such as Bernie Madoff’s eventually run out of new suckers to provide enough funds to pay the phony “returns” promised to earlier investors. When the cash flow dries up, the scam collapses. The con artists at the non-profit Southern Poverty Law Center have a different racket, and a different problem. Instead of swindling the public with promises of unrealistic, too-good-to-be-true investment returns, the fear-mongering SPLC sold “paranoia porn” to credulous donors, convincing them – falsely – that the country is full of dangerous right-wing extremists who need to be identified and brought to heel.

Wednesday

Melanie McDonagh

It’s little surprise that an Israeli soldier was caught desecrating a crucifix

There’s something apposite, I suppose, about the desecration of a crucifix. In this case, it was an Israeli soldier in southern Lebanon who took a sledgehammer to one on private property and smashed the Jesus figure on the cross. The original crucifixion, as anyone who heard the gospels over Easter will recall, was marked by the humiliation of Jesus; this attack on the figure of one who took on suffering willingly was another humiliation, through the image. Mind you, if the charmer with the sledgehammer had reflected that the Christ-figure is, in Christian belief, not just God-made-man but God-made-Jew, he might have eased off a bit.

Monday

Robert Hardman

Why Donald Trump won’t embarrass the royals

Elizabeth II was never particularly enthusiastic about birthdays. They were a good excuse for a parade or an honors list, but not a patch on a major wedding anniversary, let alone a jubilee. Those were a celebration of true dedication, not of mere longevity. Even so, were she still with us, the late Queen would have acknowledged that her centenary on April 21 is a big deal. It would also have created a delightful conundrum for the Buckingham Palace anniversaries office, the department that sends out 100th-birthday congratulations from the sovereign. At the start of her reign, she was sending 385 of those each year across all her realms (by telegram). By the end, it was over 16,000 (by card).

trump britain royals
Matthew Fraser

What happened to Provence?

The best time to visit Provence, I always advise when asked, is in the spring before the scorching heat and summer crowds. I have been spending time in the south of France since the early 1990s. Provence was fashionable in those days. Peter Mayle’s massively successful book, A Year in Provence, inspired thousands to pull up stakes and move to southern France to emulate his idyllic life in the Luberon hills. Some settled farther west in the Dordogne, famously called "Dordogneshire" for its concentration of British expats. Mayle became a one-man publishing industry, following up with sequels including Toujours Provence and Encore Provence. Thirty years ago, I stayed with friends who owned a renovated farmhouse with a spectacular view of the Dentelles de Montmirail.

decline britain british
Blake Neff

Populism curve: what is the supply side of Britain and Europe’s decline?

In his new book Why Populists Are Winning: and How to Beat Them, British MP Liam Byrne argues that it’s time to go after the “supply side” of populism – time, that is, to curb freedom of the press and the right of individuals to spend money on causes they believe in. For a decade, you see, the European and British establishments have focused on quashing the demand side of populism. They have employed police, prison, censorship and shame to stop people from voicing anti-establishment opinions, demanding populist policies or voting for populist parties. They have formed preposterously broad coalitions to exclude populist parties from power.

Sunday

Olivia Potts

Gentleman’s Relish is no more

It is the early hours of the morning and an email drops into my inbox. Lacking any kind of willpower, I open it. Now I’m wide awake. Because this isn’t the usual PR slop that starts my days. It’s a tip-off. A big one. A reader has discovered something about a company and they are urging me – me! – to investigate. Adrenaline surges. This must be what it felt like to be Woodward. Or Bernstein. Only my informant is pointing me in a slightly different direction. Their intel is on Gentleman’s Relish: the incredibly niche spread is disappearing from our shelves. It has been available in the House of Lords dining rooms – but for how much longer? Online supermarkets and delis are showing it as out of stock. What is going on?

gentleman's relish
oz pearlman
Oz Pearlman

Can I read Trump’s mind?

Making time to prepare to host the White House Correspondents’ Dinner has not been easy. Presently I’m flying back to New York, where I live, on a red-eye after a show in Las Vegas. My wife and five kids, all under the age of ten, are at home waiting for me. On average, I have one media appearance every day and a half between now and then. I’m not asking you to cry for me. All of this momentum and publicity is terrific. And my preparation for the big night on April 25 is always simmering below the surface. It feels as if reading minds for the last 30 years has been training for this moment. My goal is to have Donald Trump take part – and to save the best for last. If I could read only one mind in this world, it would be that of the most powerful person in the world.