Life

It seems AI is not just making everyone sound the same, but now everything must look the same too. I haven’t been able to walk into a pub, cafe or shop this summer without noticing the uncanny, slightly unreal sheen of an AI-generated poster. From caricatured cartoon children on a nursery advertisement to an abnormally glistening burger on a food menu, every billboard, flyer and sign now seems to have been regurgitated from the same ChatGPT printing press. We are hurtling ever closer to a flattened future in which everything converges toward the average, the mediocre, the visual mean There are many telltale signs that a sign is generic AI-slop.

The NFL season kicks off again today with the Seattle Seahawks hosting the New England Patriots in a Super Bowl rematch. It got me thinking about the growing popularity of the sport in my country, the United Kingdom. I got into the NFL at a time when my “soccer” team, Queens Park Rangers, were especially terrible. It was around 2022. The 16-hour round trips to away games in the less salubrious parts of the UK had begun to wear on me. After yet another 1-0 defeat on a cold rainy night in Stoke I realised I needed an escape. The balls-to-the-wall action of the NFL was exactly the thing my life was missing.  I decided to support the Seahawks.

To experience the Big Apple properly, you don’t just take a bite: you take a carbohydrate-laced mouthful. Think smoked salmon bagels thick with cream cheese or $2 pizza slices dripping with grease. Think warm, salted pretzels, or frankfurters from a street kiosk, or steaks as big as the genetically modified cows from whence they came. Even so, for the full I <3 NYC gastronomic voyage, there’s only one restaurateur whose bagel-crumb trail is worth following: Anthony Bourdain, of course. The “bad boy” Big Apple he represented is a city long devoured and spat out Why, eight years after his death, are we still feasting on our obsession with “Tony” (as last month’s biopic would have us call him)?

As a young man, G.K. Chesterton entered a literary contest, the given topic of which was, “What’s wrong with the world?” His entry was exactly two words long: “I am.” I don’t recall whether he won or not. Certainly he wouldn’t do so today, when every educated person appears to believe that he is what’s right with the world, while anyone who disagrees with him is not only wrong, but a bad person as well. There is something grimly comical about the contemporary humorless quest for social and political perfection by people who are not only themselves manifestly imperfect but very often bad in proportion to the intensity of that quest, though almost always without seeming to know it.

There is a Smiths lyric for almost every moment. Whether it’s telling a friend that their jokes just aren’t funny anymore or being herded into the corner of a club and contemplating hanging the DJ, every song that contains Morrissey’s melodramatic teenage misery becomes useful vocabulary for the most mundane scenarios. Including visiting troops in Ukraine, as the British Prime Minister proved earlier this week. Gen Z is proving rather less doctrinaire about culture than previous generations Perhaps that is just one reason that helps explain why, more than 40 years after The Smiths first appeared, they are finding a new audience among those who were not even alive when the band split up, let alone released their first album.

Travis Cook is a man on a mission. Armed with just a sandwich board (“There is no Climate Crisis”), an array of literature and formidable scientific knowledge, the 32-year-old former mechanical engineer is on a 1000-mile walk around the UK to talk to people and try to dispel the climate gloom that we are customarily bombarded with. His is a message of climate realism (what the BBC might call “climate denialism”) and of hope. Far from being the lost cause this might once have seemed, he believes his message is beginning to be accepted. Fight the battles you can win “I love it,” he tells me of his daily interactions (he was at Hayling Island in Hampshire when we spoke). “It’s a good news message, so it’s easy to deliver, and it brings me joy.

Various theories have been put forward for the surprise return of the Sussexes to the UK. They include the King’s cancer, the lack of English-style schools, missing old pals and the country house shooting season. But my gut feeling, as somebody who also headed home after living in California in the 1990s, is that the real reason is a combo of British Expat Burnout Syndrome and what Tom Wolfe described as “Going Broke on a Million Dollars a Year.” As with so many of us who flocked to California, Harry’s expat dream has fizzled out First, the expat thing. As with so many of us who flocked to California in search of sun, freedom and escapism, Harry’s expat dream has fizzled out.

Three women in my Tuesday weights class are getting married. While we squat and thrust and fling our kettlebells around, there’s nonstop talk of veils, decorations, modes of transport to the venue and whether anyone eats wedding cake these days. Men are allowed in this weights class but, oddly, none ever shows up. The major update from one of the brides this week was that the local register office had given permission for her dog to attend the ceremony. She duly bought “a little tux” for Badger, so he could look the part. How do we feel about dogs at weddings?