Sean Thomas is a bestselling author. He tweets from @thomasknox.
I am writing this on the 17th floor of the Novotel Sukhumvit, on Soi 4, aka “Soi Nana,” in Khlong Toei, Bangkok. For anyone that knows the Big Mango, they’ve already guessed where I am, psychogeographically: from that tell-tale word “Nana.” For those still in the dark, I am on the rude, ribald, rambunctious street
If there is one safe prediction we can make about 2026, it is this: public debate and global news will be dominated by artificial intelligence and the anxieties that surround it. And near the top of that swelling list of worries will be “AI porn” – the fateful collision between ever more accomplished image-making machines
I can remember when I first realized that something strange was happening to white men in Hollywood. It was around 2014, and my younger colleagues in LA – often British writers, directors and actors who had moved to California to “make it” – began reporting, anecdotally, that their work was disappearing. By that I don’t
I am standing inside perhaps the most sophisticated stadium ever built: a magnificent, latticed half-dome of white steel and trillion-pixel megascreens, bent over a football pitch so green it looks iced. And I am watching my least favorite sport on Earth: American football. As I guzzle citrus beer, the players take their 683rd strategic break
I have arrived in Naples, Italy, after an arduous flight from a chaotic London Gatwick Airport. I’m settled in a glamorous top floor apartment in the Quartieri Spagnoli – the romantic old “Spanish Quarter” – where Vespas fizz over cobbles and laundry hangs across alleys like flags of endless surrender. Most importantly, I’m clutching my
It is a place of dreams and deceptions
You must treat Wikipedia not as the final word, but as a cleverly illustrated propaganda pamphlet
Las Vegas is in trouble, but as anyone who has ever loved Vegas knows well, you are only one big win from turning it around
Grown men – and increasingly, grown women – are building intimate, complex, sustained romantic relationships with AI
There are too many loose ends. Too many vanishing subplots
Protesters have gathered in San Giorgio Maggiore, brandishing signs that read ‘No Space for Bezos’
What, exactly, are the worst ones in the world?
Over the past 20 years we’ve seen the intellectual degradation of both electorate and elected
This can and probably will occur
Laos is now an economic vassal of China, a protectorate, or feudal satellite firmly in Beijing’s orbit
If you must be colonized by the Spanish, make sure you have some of your own recipes beforehand
‘West is best’ has been axiomatic for centuries, so this is the cultural equivalent of the earth’s magnetic poles flipping around
The mere fact it is on that liminal, edgy, Mexico-American borderland adds a definite frisson
Spencer Penrose’s Colorado paradise makes the case for booze
