Spectator Life

Once upon a time Frenchmen regarded themselves as the world’s greatest lovers. These days they think of themselves more as fighters. Sexual partners have been replaced by sparring partners. President Felix Faure famously died while being pleasured by his mistress in 1899, but the blows favored by today’s male politicians are administered to punchbags. Emmanuel Macron loves to box. His wife, Brigitte, told Paris Match in 2023 that her husband puts on his gloves twice a week for "45 minutes of training, warm-up and core-strengthening boxing." Macron regularly poses for photos wearing his boxing gloves. In March 2024 he was snapped hitting a punchbag. The more cynical wondered if there hadn’t been some "enhancement" to the President’s bulging biceps.

In recent years it’s become a hackneyed truism that Nordic nations have found the key to happiness. The Danes, who often take first place in global rankings for mental wellbeing, pride themselves on hygge, that feeling of coziness evoked by wrapping oneself in blankets and being surrounded by candles. The Swedes promote lagom, the concept of the optimal medium. And while the Finns also appear to be satisfied with their lot – Finland came first in this year’s World Happiness Report for the ninth time in a row – they have no well-known term that encapsulates their attitude to life. In the spirit of Nordic one-upmanship, however, that could be about to change.

"It won’t last," my schoolfriend Albert told me, as we staggered down London's Embankment one summer evening in 2018, a few pints into his birthday pub crawl. I wasn’t sure as to what he was referring. The evening twilight? His youthful good looks? Our ability to walk in a straight line? He expanded: "Harry and Meghan. She’s not right for him. They’ll be divorced within five years. Just you wait." Then he burped. I was surprised by Albert’s comments. I, like tens of millions of other viewers, had been taken in by the royal wedding weeks before. Yes, the presence of Oprah Winfrey and an over-enthusiastic American preacher had been a little gauche.

Princess Maria Carolina de Bourbon des Deux-Siciles isn’t a name that rolls off the tongue – but it’s now on the lips of every socialite and political pundit in France. The 22-year-old Italian aristocrat, who is the elder daughter of the Duke of Castro, was splashed across the cover of gossip magazine Paris Match last week, gazing into the eyes of her new beau. Was he notable for being a duke, a prince or another such member of the hereditary elite? Not at all. The suitor in question was Jordan Bardella: the right-wing powerhouse whom polls suggest will succeed Emmanuel Macron as French president next year.  In an interview with Hello! in 2024, Maria Carolina declared she was "still waiting for Prince Charming to come and serenade me with a guitar and a red rose.

AI is set to take over all cognitive tasks in the next few years. Your hard-won career as a paralegal, data analyst, radiologist, coder or novelist is about to be hacked out from under you. So far, so apocalyptic. But what about the jobs that are primarily embodied? Sous-chef, rehabilitation nurse, plumber, dog-trainer? These are expected to lag behind, awaiting the next generation of robots. But there is an important further question. Who will train these robots? Answer: you will.  This is the concept of the arm farm. On an arm farm, practitioners of the aforementioned jobs – chefs, nurses, plumbers etc. – wear Go-pro helmets, pressure-sensitive gloves, even full motion-capture rigs, and do the jobs that the robots will ultimately usurp.

I almost spat out my toast (smothered with the As Ever, The Raspberry Spread Trio – "Made To Keep On Hand And Enjoy Often," $42 – naturally) in pure molten anticipation when I read that my role model in spreading jam to flour, sorry, speaking truth to power, will be hosting a women-only weekend "retreat" in Sydney during her forthcoming Australia jaunt, with tickets "a steal" at $2,699 AUD ($1,930 USD). I already had my credit card in my hot little hand until I remembered that, though I love to lunch tête-à-tête with one lady, being in the company of many women at once – with not one awful toxic man around – makes me feel like drawing crude approximations of penises on fragrant toilet doors after around half an hour.

There’s a trend on YouTube at the moment for videos in which older people give advice. They speak directly to camera, frankly and without pretension. One can almost sense the care home staff hovering in the background, coaxing their barely extant charges into making one last testament of their time on Earth. The videos have titles such as "Things I’d tell my 30-year-old self," "Harsh realities of being an 85-year-old woman." "A girl and a woman talk about life," "Lessons learned" and "How to deal with loneliness."  The commenters below the videos respond, largely, with gratitude and a surprising lack of trollery. "I’m terrified of dying," one commenter writes. "I fear many things, but nothing scares me as much as death does.

It was the sort of elaborate birthday surprise that Andrew – practical joker and fond of a fart gag – might have arranged to prank a friend. Six unmarked police cars roaring up to the farmhouse where he had been living on the Sandringham estate at the unseemly hour of 8 a.m yesterday. Only these cops were real and the ‘ex-UK prince’, as one international news network described him, was arrested on suspicion of misconduct in public office before being released under caution around 12 hours later. ‘I’m just glad the Queen didn’t see this day,’ wrote one commentator on X. ‘It would have broken her heart.’ Yet the root of Andrew’s downfall lies with the late Queen Elizabeth II – an unlikely early advocate of gentle parenting.

In recent months, much has been made of "FAFO parenting." Touted as the backlash to "gentle parenting," the philosophy of "Fuck Around & Find Out" seems to be that children should learn the natural consequences of poor decision-making. While gentle parenting advocates empathy and respect, reasoning and explanation, FAFO parenting dictates that rather than going nine rounds with your small person to persuade him or her to go to the bathroom before going out / to put a raincoat on when it’s pouring / not to pull the cat’s tail, you should let them see what happens when they have the temerity to exercise their own free will.    Reading about how widely endorsed FAFO parenting apparently is on social media, my immediate reaction wasn’t: sounds sensible.

I’ve been fat and I’ve been thin; I’ve been pretty and I’ve been plain – ugly, even. Throughout this, my self-esteem has stayed generally constant, as if you’re going to base it on something as ephemeral as physical beauty, you’re going to run out of road very quickly indeed. This objective attitude to my own appearance reminds me of a funny story from the infant days of the internet. Imagine my surprise one morning to receive a message from an unknown recipient informing me that they had film of me masturbating to online pornography which they would make available to a wider audience should I fail to pay a ransom. (Don’t judge – I was young-ish and frisky and it was all so new – I soon grew out of it.

I was born in Santa Monica, California. So were four of my children. When I was little, Santa Monica was still a sleepy backwater with mom-and-pop stores, a quiet local beach that was never crowded and virtually zero crime. A place where murder or mayhem or even robbery were unthinkable. Then, sometime in the 1990s, Santa Monica was discovered by the rest of the city as a “really nice place to live” and was targeted for destruction. In Los Angeles you are not allowed to have nice things. Every Christmas, Ocean Avenue along the coast was lined with 13 historic, life-size scenes depicting the complete life of Jesus. These famous and beloved displays started in 1953, but in 2015 the city banned them after atheist groups complained.

On NPR, they were busy ignoring the Charlie Kirk assassination story by focusing on what really matters: this year’s Emmy Awards, which took place in Beverly Hills. I realized I didn’t recognize a single show – or actor. Then I remembered that I haven’t watched an actual television series in years. What is there to watch? At its core, the reason is because everyone in Hollywood hates you The Emmys are a celebration of TV stars I’ve never heard of, shows I don’t watch and a never-ending succession of narcissists delivering the same woke diatribes into the microphone. You hate Trump, too? That’s one we’ve never heard before, how original. The nation is eager to hear from the best supporting actress winner about how the right must atone for causing Kirk’s death.

Why is anyone even remotely interested in regime-changing a nasty, far-away foreign country that hates America when there is a nasty country much, much closer that hates us, too? OK, technically California is not a country, but it’s about the same size as Japan and Sweden. Its GDP – $4.1 trillion – is the fourth-highest in the world, behind the other 49 combined United States, China and Germany. It has as many residents as Canada. More people live here than in Spain or Saudi Arabia (and more than in our 22 smallest states combined). California is a monster in every way. That used to be a good thing: its powerful allure and economic might attracted the best and brightest from all over. Einstein taught in Pasadena, at Caltech.