After years of blissful indifference, finally I’m scared of AI. I’ve been complacent, slept soundly beside my husband as he stares and mutters, sleepless with anxiety about robots. But now I’m frightened too. What happened was this. The sound of a person you love goes straight to your heart. You respond instinctively and emotionally A
They say that death and taxes are the only certainties in life. But I would add a couple more things to that list. ‘French rioting’ is one. And ‘MPs getting caught trying to make cash on the side’. This week a campaign group called Led by Donkeys released footage of a sting operation they have
Even now, months after he was forced to resign, Boris Johnson has a potency that no other British politician can match. Everything he says still catches the attention of Westminster and the media. Like Donald Trump, he enrages his enemies so much that they can seem obsessed. And rumours of a Boris restoration will not
Wyndham Lewis once said that ‘the ideas of a time are like the clothes of a season’ – but that, of course, is not how they are seen by liberals today. They are regarded immutable, inviolable, permanent and not up for argument. This is especially the case when they are demonstrably counter-factual, such as in
In the language of the Mapuche people of Patagonia, futa (I’m told) means ‘river’ and leufú means ‘big’. So Spanish–speaking Chile could have called it the Rio Grande but instead have kept the indigenous name, Futaleufú, for this sinuous, deep, swift-flowing river, hurling its clear turquoise waters at the black basalt that flanks its roaring
You’ll recall that I’ve railed for years against zero interest rates, which transplanted a cancerous marrow into the very bones of the financial system. Originally a novel emergency expedience to shore up a fiscal skeleton riddled with osteoporosis in 2008, effectively free money was allowed to persist for an improbable 14 years. Not to forget,
I was brought up on Dan Quayle jokes. You know the ones – like the gag that the then vice-president had turned up in Latin America and apologised for not speaking Latin. Thankfully vice-presidents are no longer a laughing stock. Today we have Kamala Harris. Anyway, probably the most memorable line about Quayle was that
The paradox of Rishi Sunak’s premiership is that even though he became Prime Minister because of the economy, it’s the issue on which many of his party disagree with him the most. He resigned as chancellor not because of partygate but because his fiscal conservatism was ‘fundamentally too different’ to Boris Johnson’s stance on the
I would be very happy if I never had to hear the name Gary Lineker again. He was a vague presence in my childhood thanks to his playing the game of football and his advertising of a brand of delicious, obesity-inducing crisps. But after more than a week in which his name has dominated every
This week Michelle Yeoh became the first Asian to win Best Actress at the Oscars – and not by playing a wise mentor, a martial arts fighter or an exotic villain, those classic Asian pigeonholes. No, the 60-year-old played a struggling immigrant mum in the mind-bending film Everything Everywhere All at Once, which also won
There was a kind of peak BBC Radio 4 moment last week when the network put on a play called Bess Loves Porgy. As you might have guessed, this was a rewrite of Porgy and Bess, the twist being that Porgy was a black, disabled grime rap artist in south London. I hope it went
Rishi Sunak started the year with a speech announcing his five priorities. That was quickly followed by Keir Starmer, who sought to outbid him with five missions of his own. The Labour aim was to show more ambition: whereas the Prime Minister just wanted to get the ‘economy growing’, Starmer promised the fastest growth in
I am at a bit of a loss to understand the hoo-ha about the civil servant Sue Gray. She has been offered the role of Sir Keir Starmer’s chief of staff, and many Tories suggest this implies that her investigation into those Downing Street parties may not have been wholly neutral. Where have these Tories
I have never met Enver Solomon, the chief executive of the Refugee Council, but I have not the least doubt that his heart is in the right place. And that’s the problem. In the current and coming furore about small boat crossings and what to do about them, too many who comment are concerned to show
Look, I realise you don’t want to read this column. I’m unenthusiastic about writing it. For most of us, any mention of Covid triggers a deep aversion and desperation to flee. Even recalling the uncanny tranquillity of the first you-know-what – the blue skies, the blazing sunshine, the serene silence in once-bustling London – makes
‘Coad. Coad.’ I wracked my brain. Distant bells began to tinkle as I turned the name over. As though performing a solo game of charades, I said to myself ‘Sounds like?’ And I landed on it. Jonathan Coad used to be known only to a small band of aficionados. Happily today he is almost a
When Rishi Sunak appeared in the House of Commons to outline the details of his new agreement on the Northern Ireland Protocol, one politician was conspicuous by his absence. Over the past few weeks, Boris Johnson had been warning that Sunak was making a mistake in his dealings with Brussels. His words were taken by
You want some tomatoes? Come up here, we’re inundated. We’ve got a tomato mountain. That’s because nobody in the north of England eats salad vegetables, yet the government keeps sending up vast lorry-loads of the stuff to stop us dying of diabetes. So much of what we were forbidden to say about Covid has turned
It was announced last week that another gender has been added to the list: nominalgender. Most news sites reported this in the sort of proud way a zoo might announce the birth of an exciting animal, a baby Komodo dragon maybe – as if the gender had somehow hatched and was waiting to be adopted.
In recent weeks I have been trying out a mental exercise. Perhaps you might join me? Cast your mind back to 1999. We were standing on the dawn of a new millennium. True, there was a strange fear that all the computers might crash because of a bug called Y2K. But aside from that there
