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Sunday

Naomi Firsht

Nobody Wants This could learn a few things from Seinfeld

Nobody Wants This, the Netflix romcom that brought us the ‘hot rabbi’, recently returned for its second season. For the uninitiated, the first series introduced us to sex and relationships podcaster Joanne, played by Kristen Bell, who meets Noah, played by Adam Brody (of The O.C. millennial crush fame), a reform rabbi who has just broken up with his long-term girlfriend. The premise felt fresh and original: a romcom that dared talk about religion and even made it the key part of the plot. It’s undoubtedly a hit, with season two racking up more than eight million views in its first four days of streaming, taking it to the number one spot

Saturday

The Spectator

The Great British Schools Debate

Toby Young, Spectator columnist and founder of the West London Free School, will team up with historian David Starkey to take on veteran broadcaster and author David Aaronovitch and political commentator Stella Tsantekidou. Locking horns over one of the most divisive questions in education today, they’ll go head-to-head over whether private schools are a stain on Britain’s conscience, and you can watch via livestream.

Gus Carter

I’m the heir to Manhattan

I’m owed around $680 billion. Some 77 acres of downtown Manhattan belong to the Carter family, according to a letter written in 1894. Wall Street, Broadway and One World Trade Center – they all sit on a plot that is, by rights, mine. Yet here I am, grumbling about what ought to be in the pages of The Spectator. What went wrong? The story goes something like this. Shortly before independence, a pirate called Robert Edwards was licensed by the British to hunt down Spanish ships. He was so successful that the Crown gave him a slice of Manhattan as a reward. Edwards leased the land for 99 years to

Friday

Penworthy

Three wagers for Cheltenham’s November meeting

Fairly heavy rain fell at Cheltenham overnight and there is a lot more to come today. If there is anything near the predicted 30mm of the wet stuff over 24 hours, the ground could easily turn to heavy which, whether racing is over jumps or the flat, tends to make the results something of a lottery. Of course, punters have to concentrate on horses that have won or run well in very soft conditions but it is not always as simple as that. Today’s Grade 2 Schloer Chase (2.55 p.m.) is an intriguing contest and sees the return of Jonbon, who is trying to win this race for the third

Rob Crossan

Hotels are still hopeless at accommodating disabled guests

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

Gary Dexter

What happens when there's nothing left for AI to scrape?

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

Wednesday

Travis Aaroe

Teen Vogue and the end of woke

Teen Vogue published ‘9 Climate Activists of Colour You Should Know’ in January 2020. The article already seems like it belongs to a lost world, which is perhaps why Teen Vogue ceased publishing this month. It is an artefact of those frantic Metternichian years from 2020 to about the end of 2023, when Donald Trump was pulled from office and the first wave of populism was declared to have failed. There were firings, criminal investigations, vaccine mandates. ESG was enthroned in the boardroom. Little Amal, a giant frowning puppet of a refugee, made wordless progress through the globe’s capitals, as if on patrol. Superintending all this were activists such as

Nigel Jones

Am I being haunted?

Asked if he actually believed in ghosts, M.R. James, author of the greatest ghost stories in the English language, answered equivocally that he was prepared to consider anything for which there was sufficient evidence. It’s the time of year when Monty James used to invite students to his rooms at King’s College, Cambridge, and turn down the lights. The students would listen to him read the terrifyingly chilly tales that he created every winter, set in the sedate surroundings of cathedral cloisters, country houses and East Anglian seaside towns. Now that I too live in an ancient cathedral city, I also want to see a ghost. It’s a desire that

Robin Ashenden

The small-town world of a Bohemian giant

Nearly everywhere you go in Nymburk, a small Bohemian town an hour or so from Prague, there are reminders of its most famous son, the novelist Bohumil Hrabal. The Czech writer, who died nearly 30 years ago, grew up here, amid the coopers and maltsters at the local Postřižinské brewery, where his stepfather was manager. Beer accompanied Hrabal throughout his life – much of his adulthood was spent sinking mug after mug at the Prague tavern U Zlatého tygra (‘At the Golden Tiger’). Terror stalked him too. He lived through Hitler’s occupation, grilled and harried by the Nazis who came very close to killing him. Four grinding decades of communism