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Friday

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

Tuesday

Simon Heptinstall

The scourge of the cultural inheritance tax

Remember when history cost a few shillings? We wandered through romantic ruins, wondered who painted that dusty landscape above the fireplace, brushed lichen off carved stone and got shoes muddy spotting weeds in herbaceous borders. Visiting was about letting the quiet authority of age do its work; the place spoke for itself. After a financially bruising encounter with a sequence of heritage attractions in the past month, I’ve realised this experience is no longer available in Britain. Accessing our history today means a digital entrance gate, a logo, a QR code and a moral message – plus a fee that makes your eyes water. At St Paul’s Cathedral, the entry

Zak Asgard

The lost world of paintball parties

I’m 11 years old, and I’m crouched inside the broken shell of a former London bus. It’s my friend’s birthday party. He turns 12 today, and he has just been shot. Not by a real bullet, of course, but by a paintball. I look over at his father, who is busy reloading his gun’s hopper. ‘This is my paintball gun,’ he murmurs. ‘There are many like it, but this one is mine. My paintball gun is my best friend. It is my life. I must master it…’ Without warning, his father springs up like a sleeper agent given their activation trigger and unleashes a barrage of bullets (paintballs) on a

Bertie Shah

How to make five dinners for £5

No matter how much the cost of convenience food rises, the idea that it’s still cheaper than cooking fresh food at home somehow refuses to go away. People can fool themselves as much as they like. But it’s (overpriced) pie in the sky.  To be economical, choose chicken thighs over breast; lamb shoulder over leg. Veg offcuts such as broccoli stalk (for soups) and ginger peel (to flavour Asian stock). Leftovers for egg fried rice. Stale bread for croutons. The freezer is your friend: not just for peas and berries, but spinach and an ice cube tray of leftover wine for cooking too. Oxo over refrigerated supermarket stock; Bird’s over fresh

Monday

Julie Burchill Julie Burchill

Jennifer Aniston and the allure of woo-woo

There was a time when, whenever the gossip mags wrote about Jennifer Aniston, they’d always preface her name with ‘Sad’. Sad Jen Aniston – it became one of those three-part names, like Sarah Jessica Parker or Sarah Michelle Gellar, only condescending rather than smug. For someone who was allegedly one of the most desirable women on earth, this must have been extremely annoying, recalling the line purred by the courtesan played by Marlene Dietrich in the 1932 film Shanghai Express: ‘It took more than one man to change my name to Shanghai Lily.’ It took more than one man to change Aniston’s moniker to Sad Jen: Brad Pitt, John Mayer

Jim Lawley

Give Andrew Miller the Booker

The winner of this year’s Booker Prize will be announced tonight. Of the six shortlisted novels, Andrew Miller’s The Land in Winter looks like a good bet for the £50,000 award. It might even be a contender for best Booker novel ever. The prize’s judges have been known to make strange calls – and always bet responsibly! – but the odds on Miller are good. The story takes place against the backdrop of snowbound Britain’s ‘Big Freeze’ between December 1962 and February 1963. ‘For a mile from the Kent coast,’ Miller writes, ‘the sea had turned to pack ice.’ This was the time of Beeching, Babycham, Benny Hill, Acker Bilk, Dr Kildare, the Daily Herald, the