Uncategorized

If you saw the Edgar Wright–Stephen King adaptation The Running Man in the cinema last weekend, with Glen Powell as the eponymous fugitive in a dystopian future, then you were one of the relatively few. The film has flopped at the box office, with audiences resistant to Powell’s charms and Wright’s visual pizzazz, and in a tricky year for King adaptations. It’s not been helped by some idiotic remarks the author made at the time of Charlie Kirk’s assassination; there will probably be fewer big-budget films based on his work in the future. Yet The Running Man’s failure also suggests that there is a wider issue at hand, and that

Earlier this month, the best rock band to have come out of America in decades played London’s Roundhouse in front of 3,000 very excited British fans, all of whom sang along to every song the Alabamans played. It was the best gig I’ve been to in years, mainly because the Red Clay Strays are musically so damned good and that smart British audience got everything they were offering. It had that rowdy, joyful atmosphere that Faces gigs did in the early 1970s. Stay with me, Spectator readers. While our collective, more sophisticated, tastes may lean towards Wagner, Chopin and Mozart and, at a push, Miles and Monk, there will always

Gone are the days when I always had a pen in my pocket. Gone are the days when I needed a pen to go to work. The NHS does not now always require a pen, and the NHS is not quick to abandon old technology. Ten years ago I worked in a hospital where a ward computer still had a floppy disk drive. Older readers will understand – and wince – when I say it wasn’t three-and-a-half inches but five-and-a-quarter. I remember writing my university finals with a pen, and I remember it because I recall how it felt. The pressure of time and the pressure of the pen made

It began when one of the care home residents I look after asked me to take her picture for her Facebook account. Harmless enough – until I noticed the photo had been requested by Michael Bublé. The messages were affectionate and convincing and before long she was being asked for personal information. I had to find a way to gently break it to her that this was very unlikely to be Mr Bublé, which led to tears, disbelief and embarrassment. In the end, I blocked the scammer on her account – along with several other suspicious profiles. The Mental Capacity Act’s third principle states that everyone has the right to

In the mid-1990s, ecstasy was a drug of the suburbs. My friends and I, all A-level students and shortly to become beneficiaries of the final years of higher education that didn’t come with tuition fees, did not fit the model of ‘drug users’ that the media, still in thrall to 1980s heroin hyperbole, fixated on. When we took ecstasy, it was in the clipped gardens of semi-detached houses that had been vacated by parents for the weekend. We popped pills in beer gardens, in rickety small-town clubs with swirly carpets and fogged mirrors or, in summer, in the sun-bleached parks of central Chester. We cared not for the risks, judging

The Ashes start this week. If, as an England supporter, you were given the following two choices, which would you pick? First: England win the series 5-0. Second: the series ebbs and flows, the teams arrive in Sydney locked at 2-2, the match goes down to the final hour of the final day, and England lose. If you went for the second option, you’re my kind of fan. I’ve always preferred to see my team (or player) lose narrowly than win easily. Sport is there to entertain us. This is the supporter equivalent of ‘It’s not the winning, it’s the taking part that counts’. As a fan, you get excited

I was sitting in a hotel restaurant in Cheshire a while back: one of those rambling country manors, full of mock Jacobean wood panelling and fake Tiffany lamps, beloved of football-and-property enriched couples with gravy hued fake tans, sports cars parked outside and more signet rings than GCSEs. I was hungry and alone, aside from, as always, travelling with my own disability in the form of severe visual impairment, aka ocular albinism and nystagmus – or the Rolls-Royce Silver Shadow of very bad eyesight, as I prefer to call it. I’d asked in advance for an accessible room which, predictably, was ‘not yet ready’ for me to check into when

There are several class actions going on against developers of Large Language Models. Jodi Picoult, George R.R. Martin, John Grisham and several other well-known authors are among those engaging in long-drawn-out lawsuits with tech companies such as Meta (who developed the chatbot LLaMA), OpenAI (who developed ChatGPT) and Google DeepMind (who developed Gemini). These companies, without seeking permission (imagine!), used books, newspapers, websites and other text sources to generate datasets to train their machines. The lawyers for these tech companies claim it was ‘fair use’. No one actually copied and resold anything, they say; it was used to train, and only to train.  One of my novels was ‘scraped’ by