Matthew Wilcox is a freelance journalist, editor, and travel writer based in Wiltshire.
From our UK edition
There is a moment in a recent University of Cambridge study into Artificial Intelligence in children’s toys that unintentionally recreates one of the most disturbing scenes in film history. The report, AI in the Early Years, published earlier this month, involved observing 14 children aged three to five as they played with a conversational AI soft toy called Gabbo, a
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I live on a road where parking is forbidden. This has not stopped any of us from needing cars. Instead, we crowd each evening into the small cul-de-sac opposite, where ten vehicles can park legally, and 15 can park optimistically. The sign is unambiguous: ‘Three hours. No return within two.’ Most days I manage to comply.
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Last week I was in a branch of Greggs, in the small market town in north Wiltshire where I live. Behind the sausage rolls, steak bakes, corned beef pasties and trays of vanilla slice was something that almost made me drop my Tesco meal deal in shock. A machine dispensing matcha lattes. Greggs, the last bastion of brown food in the
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Halfway through a downward dog, red-faced and breathing a little too hard, a hen stops about 18 inches from my face. It squats, and lifts its a tail a fraction. There is a brief, unmistakable pause. Something warm and biological drops onto the mat beside me. It is not an egg. From the front of the class, the instructor’s
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It comes without warning. A black shape shearing out of the sky, a clap of wings like a sail breaking. The foal has no time to startle. Talons hit, the ground shakes, and in the next breath it is gone, dragged upward into the light. Rewilding is the countryside’s answer to cosplay This summer on South
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Another Banksy appeared this week, this time on the flank of the Grade I-listed Royal Courts of Justice in London. Naturally, the world’s news agencies leapt to attention. Not because of the image – a judge walloping a protester is the sort of wit you’d find on a novelty birthday card – but because the press
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On paper, Charlbury is everything the Cotswolds is supposed to be. Stone cottages the colour of anaemic butter. Sash windows in a riot of Farrow & Ball sage. A train station that survived the Beeching cuts and gets you to London in an hour. ‘People talk about the Chipping Norton set, but that disguises how
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The Church of England’s abuse Redress Scheme was set up to help survivors of abuse, but a serious data breach last night led to the email addresses of dozens of survivors being unwittingly revealed. More than 180 people were openly copied into an email update about the project sent by a law firm tasked with
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For a certain kind of amateur historian there is a moment, fixed in the imagination, endlessly revisited: it is still not yet late on that bright October afternoon in 1066, the shield-wall locked and braced, the hill still theirs, the horses floundering on the slope below, Harold upright, the sun sinking but not yet gone,
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Last month, the Trump administration announced that the United States would once again withdraw from Unesco, the Paris-based UN cultural agency responsible for World Heritage Sites, education initiatives, and cultural programmes worldwide. The official line? Unesco promotes ‘woke, divisive cultural and social causes’ and its ‘globalist, ideological agenda’ clashes with America First policy. Predictably, the
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Have you heard the one where the vice president of the United States and a lesbian former talk show host walk into a farm shop in Gloucestershire? No, it’s not the set-up to a joke – it’s just another Tuesday in the Cotswolds in 2025. The Cotswolds still looks like England – hedgerows, pubs selling Sunday roasts
