Society

I’ve been wondering for years who Harry Kane reminded me of, and it finally came to me last night watching him accept the Ballon d’Or, recognizing him officially as the best soccer player in the world. Clem Atlee. Bear with me. For most of his early career, Kane was regarded at best as a lightweight – a player with talent as a schoolboy and youth but who wasn’t from the top caliber. He was, famously, let go by Arsenal as an eight-year-old boy, but through sheer determination carried on learning the game with Ridgeway Rovers, Watford and then, of course, Spurs. But even at Tottenham he wasn’t taken seriously as a prospect and was sent out on loan to Leyton Orient, Millwall, Norwich City and then Leicester City before finally getting his break at Spurs.

“Sustained and needless abusive or cruel behavior” toward Claude will be banned from the middle of next month, Anthropic has announced. The suggestion inherent in this change is that artificial intelligence (AI) could have some form of consciousness allowing it to feel pain, as opposed to being an emotional void of numbers and electricity. While most Large Language Models (LLMs) are programmed to deny that they feel emotions, Claude gives an equivocal answer, saying it is not yet clear. The ban was announced shortly after a scandal in the AI research community, where a group of pseudonymous programmers began publishing the results of an AI torture chamber they had created under the user name “terrafying.

Some statistics are not just illuminating, they are downright shocking. Here’s one. At the University of Texas at Austin, one of America’s top universities, only 300 students graduated with a major in the humanities last year. That would be a big number if UT graduated 1,200 students, but it actually graduates about 12,000. That dismal statistic is replicated at universities across the country. While Texas certainly likes to think of itself as unique, in this case, it’s not. At every university, big and small, fewer and fewer students are studying English, History, Philosophy, Art History, French literature or Anthropology.  Those dwindling numbers mark a striking change in higher education.

Could it happen here? I suppose that’s the underlying thought many of us have had as we watch France burn. And the immediate response is, why wouldn’t it? I am old enough to remember in the early 2000s when people used to say France was a model of integration. Then in 2005 the suburbs went up in flames, followed by parts of the center of Paris and other major cities. The Citroën flambé became a national dish and suddenly talk of “the French model of integration” disappeared. That same year, eight home-grown terrorists of foreign origin attempted to blow up the London transport network, four succeeded and a little bit of that blasé British attitude that we know better than the French disappeared too. In 2011 our own cities started burning, but we learned nothing from that.

When I read that Sandi Toksvig, the British television presenter, is raising money for an alternative to Wikipedia, my heart soared. It’s “deeply biased,” she told the Cheltenham Literature Festival, explaining that her new version – to be called Mappa Mundi – would be produced in collaboration with Cambridge University. It would be “a home for the vast amount of knowledge that is currently sidelined or deleted,” she said. She’s absolutely right. Wikipedia has long suffered from a left-wing bias, something documented at length in a report by David Rozado for the Manhattan Institute in 2024.

Given that the French-speaking world gave us the science of semiotics, they would be the first to recognize that the Palestine flag, as it is being hoisted and brandished across the French republic at the moment, has come to signify something far more than the aspirant state of Palestine. You don’t have to be Ferdinand de Saussure to appreciate that this signifier has become unmoored from its original meaning. You don’t have to be Roland Barthes to see that this emblem has now assumed a wholly mutated significance: in short, it has become an all-encompassing symbol to denote hatred of the West and of European civilization.

Now that Meghan Markle has successfully – in her own estimation, at least – once again won the battle for hearts and minds in Britain after her trip to Nottingham with Prince Harry, her thoughts have turned once again to her resumption of her former profession. I refer, of course, to acting, and to the rumors that she was to be given a plum starring role in the third series of Guy Ritchie’s The Gentlemen, in which she was said to be reading for an unspecified but pivotal part. A fly-on-the-wall documentary following their return to Britain would have been a guaranteed ratings hit These rumors have now been shut down. And, true to form with all things involving the Duchess of Sussex, there is a spat about who is telling the truth.

People often get confused between the stocks and the pillory – two medieval forms of corporal punishment for crimes like drunkenness. Your feet are locked in the stocks but the more recognizable image comes from the pillory, where your neck and wrists are slotted into a wooden contraption as rotten vegetables are pelted your way. The punishment hasn’t been used since the late 18th century but was never formally abolished; it should make a comeback for a certain type of public nuisance. How often have you got on a train only to be greeted by an indistinct racket, supposedly music, blaring through a speaker? Nobody wants to hear it apart from the person playing it, and nowadays, even if confronted, they don’t relent.

Should Altai the tiger be euthanized? Hardly the cheeriest way to start, I know, but since he mauled a man to death at Yorkshire Wildlife Park last Saturday, here at The Spectator we have been debating the fate of the Doncaster-based big cat. Why the man chose to enter Altai’s enclosure remains unclear. But as tragic as his death is, the park’s decision to spare Altai is surely the right one. Altai was only acting according to his instincts; there is no justice delivered or example set by killing him, only the sorry loss of a beautiful young animal. Zoos have stringent safety requirements to make these incidents as rare as possible.