Ben Lazarus

The phone-hacking saga has just been given a new lease of life after a judge ruled that Prince Harry can take the Daily Mail to court over claims that it used ‘unlawful information gathering’ in stories about him. The newspaper has never been involved in the historic hacking claims, and said evidence to the contrary assembled by the Duke of Sussex and six other high-profile claimants was ropey and that it was brought ‘far too late’ for the trial to take place. The High Court today disagreed: Mr Justice Nicklin said the newspaper group hadn’t delivered a ‘knockout blow’ to the ‘claims of any of these claimants’. This matters. Newspaper sales are declining in Britain and so far more than £1.

It’s hard not to be shocked by the distressing clip shared online, allegedly featuring the Manchester United footballer Mason Greenwood. In the clip a woman can be heard trying to stop a man forcing her into having sex. The audio was uploaded in January last year alongside images of the alleged victim looking bruised and battered, with blood running down from her mouth.   When the clip was released, Manchester United responded by suspending the now 21-year-old Greenwood. But they stopped short of tearing up his contract. This was the first big mistake the club made. They could have saved themselves a huge amount of hassle (and appalling publicity) had they, at the time, accused him of bringing the club into disrepute and parted ways.

Jim Skea has just taken on the most important job in climate science. As the new head of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), he is now in charge of the organisation that has done more than any other to build the international consensus that climate change is an existential threat to humanity. ‘I’m very conscious that constant drip-drip anxiety messages could have a paralysing effect on climate action’ In the weeks since his appointment, however, the 69-year-old Scot, a former professor at Imperial and a founding member of the UK’s Committee on Climate Change, has set out to strike a very different tone by casting doubt on the apocalyptic claims of the environmentalist movement.

In the summer of 2019, Prince Harry and Meghan Markle were visiting their friends Elton John and David Furnish in the south of France when they were introduced to the barrister David Sherborne. This ‘chance’ meeting would be a massive coup for the man known as the ‘barrister to the stars’ (he represented Coleen Rooney in the Wagatha Christie trial and Johnny Depp against Amber Heard, among many others. Many years ago, he also acted for Harry’s mother, Princess Diana). The encounter led to Prince Harry becoming the star witness against three newspaper groups. ‘It was partially down to Elton and David,’ Harry later wrote in Spare.

Ten minutes before I meet Geoffrey Hinton, the ‘godfather of AI’, the New York Times announces he’s leaving Google. After decades working on artificial intelligence, Hinton now believes it could wipe out humanity. ‘It is like aliens have landed on our planet and we haven’t quite realised it yet because they speak very good English,’ he says. He also tells me that he has been unable to sleep for months. ‘It’s conceivable that the genie is already out of the bottle’ Hinton, 75, revolutionised AI not once but twice: first with his work on neural networks, computer architecture that closely resembles the brain’s structure, and then with so-called ‘deep learning’, which allows AI to refine and extract patterns and concepts on a vast quantity of data.

Every few months I take out a box of essential oils and carefully lay them out on my kitchen table, organising them in order from sweet-smelling to musty. On the left will be scents like juniper berry, lime, frankincense and bergamot; in the middle, woodish fragrances such as sandalwood and cedarwood; on the right, the darker stuff of patchouli and pine needle – and occasionally, when I’m feeling brave in my endeavour to make the perfect beard oil, lavender. Next I fill several large vials with a mixture of carrier oils, usually almond, jojoba and argan (and normally with almond making up the bulk as it’s the cheapest). I then begin mixing in various essential oils: a dash here, a dash there.

Google once believed it could use algorithms to track pandemics. People with flu would search for flu-related information, it reasoned, giving the tech giant instant knowledge of the disease’s prevalence. Google Flu Trends (GFT) would merge this information with flu tracking data to create algorithms that could predict the disease’s trajectory weeks before governments’ own estimates. But after running the project for seven years, Google quietly abandoned it in 2015. It had failed spectacularly. In 2013, for instance, it miscalculated the peak of the flu season by 140 per cent. According to the German psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer, this is a good example of the limitations of using algorithms to surveil and study society.

‘If I needed a guide to go up a mountain, I’d choose someone who knew the way,’ says Nigel Kennedy. ‘So if someone is telling me what to do, they’d better know a little bit more than me.’ In September, Kennedy’s Jimi Hendrix tribute at the Royal Albert Hall was cancelled after organisers Classic FM deemed it ‘unsuitable for our audience’. It still rankles: ‘I reckon I know more about my particular art form than some guy sitting behind his desk,’ says Kennedy, ‘and so I can’t quite take it when people start saying what is classical music and what isn’t. To me, Hendrix’s “Little Wing” is a kind of Celtic-sounding melody.