Sean Thomas is a bestselling author. He tweets from @thomasknox.
Unless you’ve been living under a snowdrift – with no mobile signal – for the past six months, you’ll have heard of the kerfuffle surrounding the new generations of artificial intelligence. Especially a voluble, dutiful, inexhaustible chatbot called ChatGPT, which has gone from zero users to several million in the two wild weeks since its
We’re finishing the year by republishing our ten most popular articles from 2022. Here’s number two: Sean Thomas’s piece from May on Karahan Tape. I am staring at about a dozen, stiff, eight-foot high, orange-red penises, carved from living bedrock, and semi-enclosed in an open chamber. A strange carved head (of a man, a demon,
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Welcome to the special Christmas episode of The Edition! Up first: What a year in politics it has been. 2022 has seen five education secretaries, four chancellors, three prime ministers and two monarchs. But there is only one political team that can make sense of it all. The Spectator’s editor Fraser Nelson, deputy political editor Katy Balls
If there is one minor pitfall of being a travel writer, it is this. Whenever you tell a bunch of people what you do, invariably someone will ask: ‘Where’s the best place you’ve ever been?’ I struggled to answer until I got on a special new boat called the Greg Mortimer, operated by a Australian
If you had to choose an obvious place to look for clues about what will happen in the coming year, it probably wouldn’t be the lush, green, watery tropic wilderness of Mount Borradaile, West Arnhemland, in the Northern Territory, Australia, hard by the sizzling blue reaches of the Arafura Sea. For a start, this lost,
All-day diners feasting on the full English, the cheese omelette or the celebrated sausage sandwich (£3.80) at George’s Café, at 36 Blythe Road, Hammersmith, probably don’t realise they are dining at an address which is pivotal in global cultural history. So pivotal, in fact, that it might just tell us whether human civilisation is about to
In 2002 I attended the lying-in-state of the Queen Mother. I did it as part of the grand old British tradition of faintly annoying all your left-wing friends. I also thought it might be an interesting dollop of history-in-the-making. How right I was. Along the South Bank, round midnight, I joined the queue – quite
A few months back I wrote a Spectator piece about a phenomenal new ‘neural network’ – a subspecies of artificial intelligence – which promises to revolutionise art and how humans interact with art. The network is called Dall-e 2, and it remains a remarkable chunk of not-quite-sentient tech. However, such is the astonishing, accelerating speed of
Earlier this year, quite unexpectedly (and for personal reasons too tedious to share), I was forced to be outside the UK for ‘a while’. At the outset, I had no idea how long my exile might be: maybe weeks, maybe months. To add to the ambiguity, I had no particular place to go, except two
They’ve done it again in the grey building on 826 Eighth Avenue, New York City, NY, USA. They – the editors of the New York Times – have launched a tumultuous broadside against the most degraded, pathetic, hopeless, rancid, ugly, stupid, ridiculous, doomed and offensively anti-democratic country in the entire world. That is to say,
Over the coming weeks we will be regaled with dozens of personal recollections, from around the world, of the man who has dominated British politics this last half decade. Some of them will paint him as a foolish clown, others as a flawed genius, others will see him as Leaver saint or Brexiteering Satan, but
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On this week’s episode: Kate Andrews on why Rishi quit (0:26). Sean Thomas on Russian émigrés who hate the war but will fight for Russia (08:32) and Toby Young on his appreciation for the other Toby Young (13.13). Presented and produced by Natasha Feroze.
30 min listen
In this week’s episode:After Boris, who’s next?On the day the Prime Minister resigns, Katy Balls and James Forsyth discuss the aftermath of Boris Johnson’s premiership. Who might be the next Tory leader? (0.51).Also this week:Who are the wealthy Russian émigrés ready to fight in the war?Sean Thomas talks with Moscow-based journalist, Gabriel Gavin about the
If you’re wondering where all those urbane, clever, westernised Russian travellers have gone since the onset of the Ukrainian war – a war which has largely barred them from the West – I can tell you that at least two of them will be found in the tiny Armenian hamlet of Gnishik, high in the
Now that the horror of the Uvalde school shooting in Texas has begun to ebb away, as it always does, it is easy to think that things have returned to normal. And in America, they certainly have returned to normal. That is to say, the mass shootings continue, at the rate of about 11 a
Anyone with even a passing interest in history and archaeology has surely, at some point, asked themselves: what would it be like, to be an eye-witness to a world-shaking discovery? To walk down the Valley of the Kings, even as Howard Carter opened Tutankhamun’s Tomb. Or to visit Sutton Hoo in the week they unearthed
I am staring at about a dozen, stiff, eight-foot high, orange-red penises, carved from living bedrock, and semi-enclosed in an open chamber. A strange carved head (of a man, a demon, a priest, a God?), also hewn from the living rock, gazes at the phallic totems – like a primitivist gargoyle. The expression of the
41 min listen
In this episode: Is Boris going to limp on? In her cover piece this week, Katy Balls writes that although Boris Johnson believes he can survive the partygate scandal, he has some way to go until he is safe, while in his column, James Forsyth writes about why the Tories have a summer of discontent ahead
Take a look at the four paintings on this page. If you are acquainted with modern art, you will probably assume, at a quick glance, that it shows four works by the Russian artist Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944). However, whatever your knowledge of modern art, I suggest you look again, because not all of these works
For an ancient city with an illustrious industrial history, Derby doesn’t get much attention. But it does boast at least one famous, possibly apocryphal story, known to scholars of urbanism. Sometime in the 80s or 90s (accounts differ), a party of visiting German VIPs was given a tour of the city’s sights: the humdrum housing
