Angus Colwell

Angus Colwell

Angus Colwell is The Spectator’s daily newsletters editor, and lead author of Morning Press. He also reviews restaurants for the magazine.

Wednesday

Angus Colwell

‘I was astounded’: Gary Marcus on the Sam Altman saga

This morning, OpenAI – the firm behind ChatGPT – rehired its chief executive, Sam Altman, after it fired him on Friday. Altman is the most prominent ambassador for the world of artificial intelligence, and was set to join Microsoft after leaving the company. After his sacking, more than 95 per cent of OpenAI’s employees demanded that the board leave and reinstate him. Many staff were threatening to quit the lab, and Microsoft had agreed to match their pay. Today, OpenAI caved and welcomed him back. What’s going on here? Did a firm that was set up to make AI ‘for the benefit of humanity’, whose whole idea was to not be dictated by the whims of the market, forget itself? I spoke to Gary Marcus, whose Substack is one of the most interesting around.

Saturday

Angus Colwell

Svitlana Morenets, Sean Thomas and Angus Colwell

21 min listen

This week, Svitlana Morenets says Ukraine’s counteroffensive is not living up to the hype (00:59), Sean Thomas says he likes travelling to crappy towns (10:27), and Angus Colwell defends London’s rickshaw drivers (17:38).  Presented and produced by Max Jeffery.

Wednesday

Angus Colwell

In defence of Rickshaws

London rickshaws, or pedicabs, are always described as a scourge. They’re too bright and they’re too loud, the charge sheet reads: they block up the road and rip people off. Last week, the government announced in the King’s Speech that Transport for London will be given powers to license them. Drivers will have their fares regulated, their backgrounds checked and their driving abilities probed. At the moment, it’s a Wild West. If you buy a pedicab – congratulations, you’re a pedicab driver. You can now take German families over Westminster Bridge and play ‘Despacito’ as loud as a jet engine. I went out over the weekend to speak to some of London’s pedicab drivers about their trade, and whether they were worried it’s going to die.

Saturday

Angus Colwell

Inside the Armistice Day protests

The Metropolitan Police today staged their largest-ever operation with two marches – the pro-Palestinian march and a smaller counter-protest – taking place in London. The latter, centred on Westminster, provided most of the arrests. The main route of the pro-Palestine march (which started in Park Lane and was moving towards the US Embassy in Vauxhall) passed more peacefully with fewer scuffles. The demonstration drew perhaps 300,000 (although Jeremy Corbyn claimed a million) and the main arrests seem to be those who decided to sit down at Waterloo station and not move when asked. No one person on the march can hope to give an account on the whole thing. But I can say what I observed and summarise some of the various reports.

Thursday

Angus Colwell

Kamala Harris doesn’t get AI

At least Kamala Harris managed to avoid the dreaded phrase that we should ‘harness AI’s ‘potential’. But that was just about the only blessing in the Vice President’s impressively rubbish speech yesterday at the US embassy in London. Artificial intelligence, it is generally agreed, is the most important issue facing humanity, yet all we had was 14 minutes of waffle from the Veep. Still, it was nice of her to turn up. Joe Biden has put Harris in charge of artificial intelligence. You can read that one of two ways: either Biden thinks that Kamala Harris is perfectly suited to grappling with the gravest existential threat, or that he thinks this AI malarkey is all a bit airy, so that looks like a good one for giving Kamala something to do.

Tuesday

Angus Colwell

Both sides deny being behind Gaza hospital strike

Who is responsible for the bombing of a hospital in Gaza? This evening as many as 500 people are thought to have been killed in one terrible act in a medical building in Gaza. Thousands of civilians were reportedly sheltering there, after fleeing their homes following an Israeli order to evacuate the northern part of the Gaza strip. Israel were quick to deny having a role in the attack, blaming Palestinian militants – and a misfired Palestinian rocket barrage – for the disaster. It follows an incident earlier on Tuesday, when – according to the UN – a school in central Gaza where 4,000 people were sheltering was hit, killing at least six people.

Monday

Angus Colwell

Netanyahu: ‘What we will do to our enemies will echo for generations’

Just a week ago, Benjamin Netanyahu was urging Israelis to take a break. He said citizens should ‘go for a walk in our beautiful country’ during the Sukkot holiday. He posed for photographs with his wife Sara in the Golan Heights, the two of them smiling as the sun set. Tonight, he prepared citizens for an immense retaliation campaign against Israel’s foes. He said that the air strikes seen so far against Gaza are ‘just the beginning’, and that ‘what we will do to our enemies in the next few days will echo for generations.’ Earlier today, his defence minister ordered a ‘complete siege’ of the Gaza strip, cutting two million people off from the supply of electricity, food, water and fuel.

Monday

Angus Colwell

Welcome to the pub of 2030

In 2030 I will turn 30. I hope to be in the pub, but maybe a little less often than I am now. Judging by the way things are going, that might be easier than we’d like to admit. And not just because we lost 383 pubs between the start of the year and the end of June.  I’ll set the scene: it’s seven years from now. Off I go, to one of the last four pubs in London, and park my e-bike next to three thousand others. I walk through the entrance, the etched Victorian glass door replaced by government-mandated energy-efficient double glazing, and there they are: eight 0 per cent beers on draught.  Human beings like pork scratchings and a fag and a pint, and will do forever ‘Do you have anything alcoholic?’  ‘What?

Wednesday

Angus Colwell

A 50-quid, hour-and-a-bit troll: Aphex Twin, at Field Day, reviewed

Forty per cent of London is green space. And what we do with all that grass – all that potential – is pave it with music festivals. This year, Hyde Park hosted Billy Joel and Bruce Springsteen. Gunnersbury Park had Boygenius. Finsbury Park welcomed Pulp and Travis Scott. Field Day is a staple of the season. Always falling on a Saturday in late August, the day is wholly reserved for electronic music. Reams of twentysomethings make the pilgrimage: set off from wherever, change at Bank, District Line to Mile End, 15-minute walk, enter, set aside £7.50 for a can of warm Red Stripe. Everything is very clean: the organisers don’t want Woodstock. The first thing you see upon entry is a stand to buy Alpine’s MusicSafe Pro High Fidelity Earplugs.

Wednesday

Angus Colwell

The real problem with Thomas Straker

Thomas Straker became famous for his TikTok recipes, although he doesn’t like it when people point that out. He protests that he’s a serious cook – he has worked at Elystan Street, Dinner by Heston Blumenthal and The Dorchester – but most people know him as the butter guy. It’s hard to avoid that label when his flavoured butter recipes have led to a following of 2.1 million people. His TikToks are perfectly constructed using schizophrenic jump cuts and ASMR narration and he likes to make viewers salivate over his Bloody Mary butter, Biscoff butter, tequila butter, and bone marrow butter. Here’s him doing something indecent with chicken skin:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?

Friday

Angus Colwell

How to enjoy Glastonbury from your sofa

More than 200,000 people have schlepped down the ley lines for another year of ‘Glasto’. It’s tempting to deride these people: they’ll stink, they’re anchorless hedonists, they’re blue-haired hippies. However, they’ve got tickets to Glastonbury and I haven’t, so they win.  Actually going to the festival, however, is a minority experience. More of us will be watching it on TV. And whether you dig the Glastonbury vibe or not, there’s plenty of good music for all across this weekend.  The most important thing to remember, though, is to watch as little of the coverage as possible. It’s fluff. For three whole days, everything is ‘fantastic’, everyone will ‘bring it’ and ‘vibes’ will always be ‘elite’ for the gawping BBC presenters.

Wednesday

Angus Colwell

Save our cheese sandwiches!

Sad things, cheese sandwiches, especially in their most basic form. Most would add a garnish: pickle, tomato and onion are the most popular. Cowards. The point of a cheese sandwich is its beigeness. This is fuel, not food. Consoling sad corporate workers at their desks. Rows upon rows of sandwiches on Tesco shelves: ‘Cheese – no mayonnaise.’ No mayonnaise is important. That would be too much fun. Everyone knows how the Earl of Sandwich repurposed bread and beef and started an eating revolution. No one really knows who first put cheese into the mix, however. The first mention seems to be from William Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor, where Nym refers to a dish of ‘bread and cheese’. It’s hard to tell whether he meant a sandwich, of course.

Sunday

Angus Colwell

Martin Amis 1949-2023: How The Spectator covered his life

Martin Amis died in Florida on Friday, of oesophageal cancer at the age of 73. Some of The Spectator’s best writers praised, reviled, laughed at and scorned Amis throughout his career. Here’s some extracts from our archive: The Rachel Papers ‘The narrative is often very funny indeed, but I suspect that Martin Amis is getting the last laugh. Charles Highway is so much the archetypal youth, of a certain time and a certain class, that he is necessarily a comic creation. Sex is nowadays the vox populi, and almost vox dei if certain clergymen have anything to do with it, but for Highway it is a road paved with bad intentions.

Tuesday

Angus Colwell

Why are the Nat Cons so serious?

The problem with socialism, the saying goes, is that it takes up too many evenings. Well, the National Conservatism conference, or NatCon, is currently detaining ‘delegates’ for 12 hours at a time, for three days in a row. We’ve had long agonised debates about protectionism vs free trade, communitarianism vs individualism, Ukraine support or Nato scepticism. When did the right get so sincere? NatCon is an American import, and it feels like it. The programme uses the language of ‘plenaries’ and ‘keynote addresses’. It has that American feel of ‘movement conservatism’ – mixing the over-intellectual with the underwhelming.  The problem for a lot of conservatives today is that they can’t decide if they should be angry or not.

Saturday

Angus Colwell

Sam Leith, Lionel Shriver and Angus Colwell

23 min listen

This week: Sam Leith explains how he’s been keeping up friendships by playing online scrabble (00:55), Lionel Shriver questions Nike and Bud Light's recent marketing strategy (06:52) and Angus Colwell reads his review of the V&A Dundee’s tartan exhibition (15:24).

Wednesday

Angus Colwell

What the V&A Dundee exhibition doesn’t tell you about tartan

Criss-crosses, everywhere: 300 objects covered in them. The exhausting range and depth of the world’s most famous pattern is on full display at the V&A Dundee’s vast new exhibition. Tartan is a more genuine emblem of Scottish nationhood than the famous deep-fried Mars bar, which no one really eats. But it’s not uniquely Scottish. Plaid has been worn across western Europe for hundreds of years, then was claimed by Scotland as the symbol of the nation, now recognised the world over. It’s even a political weapon. In the recent SNP leadership election, the outsider Ash Regan wore practically nothing but the fabric. Ian Blackford has in the past unnerved many a viewer when he bent down in his kilt to lay a wreath at the Cenotaph.

Wednesday

Angus Colwell

The new technocracy: who’s who in the chatbot revolution?

Decades are happening in weeks in the world of artificial intelligence. A fortnight ago, OpenAI released GPT-4, the latest model of its chatbot. It passed the bar exam in the 90th percentile, whereas the previous model only managed the tenth. Last week, Google introduced its own chatbot, Bard. Now, the British government is announcing plans to regulate AI for the first time, as well as to introduce it into hospitals and schools. Even some of the biggest technophobes are having to grasp this brave new world. We’re familiar with some of the technology by now, but we know little about the humans in the world of AI.

Friday

Angus Colwell

Xi’s nuclear warnings are a coup for Scholz

Checks and balances on Vladimir Putin don’t come from inside Russia. The people around him supported forced mobilisation, pushed his plans to annex eastern Ukraine, and wanted more nuclear posturing. Xi Jinping and Narendra Modi, of China and India, can do a much better job at constraining Putin. They’re the only two leaders of major powers that haven’t completely ostracised the Russian leader. He needs them to keep his struggling economy afloat. The pair are putting pressure on the Putin to avoid nuclear conflict. This morning, Xi warned Putin off using nukes for the first time, after saying in February that China and Russia’s friendship had ‘no limits’.

Friday

Angus Colwell

Putin at 70: How The Spectator has covered his life

Vladimir Putin turns 70 today. Since he became Prime Minister of Russia in 1999, some of The Spectator's greatest contributors have asked the perennial questions: who is Putin, and what does he want? We've compiled the following pieces from our fully-digitised archive.  ‘Joking with a nine-year-old boy at a televised awards ceremony by the Russian Geographical Society, President Vladimir Putin said: ‘The Russian borders don’t end anywhere.’’ Portrait of the Week, 1 December 2016 Appointment as Prime Minister  ‘Not surprisingly, given his background, Putin has a lugubrious and somewhat sinister manner.

Wednesday

Angus Colwell

Welcome to the weird world of the New Right: Subversive podcast reviewed

Subversive is a podcast that documents the world of the ‘New Right’, a strange development in conservatism. Host Alex Kaschuta, one of the movement’s intellectual leaders, gives a good sense of the New Right’s weirdness. Trembling minor-key synths play in the theme and Alex purrs that we’re about to hear a two-hour long conversation with ‘Covfefe Anon’. Other guests include ‘Zero H.P. Lovecraft’ and ‘Yeerk.P’. Some are anonymous commentators who have their voices distorted like a drug dealer in a Ross Kemp documentary. Others are known entities: journalists like Sohrab Ahmari, Ed West and Louise Perry. They like the classical world, the Unabomber, steak. They hate CNN, porn, sunflower oil I can’t explain the New Right.