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Tuesday

Druin Burch

Pens have gone extinct

Gone are the days when I always had a pen in my pocket. Gone are the days when I needed a pen to go to work. The NHS does not now always require a pen, and the NHS is not quick to abandon old technology. Ten years ago I worked in a hospital where a ward computer still had a floppy disk drive. Older readers will understand – and wince – when I say it wasn’t three-and-a-half inches but five-and-a-quarter. I remember writing my university finals with a pen, and I remember it because I recall how it felt. The pressure of time and the pressure of the pen made

David Woodgett

The scammer in the sitting room

It began when one of the care home residents I look after asked me to take her picture for her Facebook account. Harmless enough – until I noticed the photo had been requested by Michael Bublé. The messages were affectionate and convincing and before long she was being asked for personal information. I had to find a way to gently break it to her that this was very unlikely to be Mr Bublé, which led to tears, disbelief and embarrassment. In the end, I blocked the scammer on her account – along with several other suspicious profiles. The Mental Capacity Act’s third principle states that everyone has the right to

Monday

Julie Burchill Julie Burchill

Robert De Niro has a serious case of Trump envy

The past few weeks has seen the pleasing spectacle of beautiful female film stars (Sydney Sweeney, Keira Knightley – even the previous Trump Derangement Syndrome sufferer Jennifer Lawrence, who once said that an orange victory would be ‘the end of the world’) refusing to toe the accepted Hollywood line on politics, be it by not kowtowing to trans activists or not accepting that everything is racist. Lawrence actually said: ‘Election after election, celebrities do not make a difference whatsoever on who people vote for’ – or as I wrote here in the spring: ‘How dim would a political party need to be to understand that not only do celeb endorsements not work, but have an

Rob Crossan

Have we learned anything in the 30 years since Leah Betts died?

In the mid-1990s, ecstasy was a drug of the suburbs. My friends and I, all A-level students and shortly to become beneficiaries of the final years of higher education that didn’t come with tuition fees, did not fit the model of ‘drug users’ that the media, still in thrall to 1980s heroin hyperbole, fixated on. When we took ecstasy, it was in the clipped gardens of semi-detached houses that had been vacated by parents for the weekend. We popped pills in beer gardens, in rickety small-town clubs with swirly carpets and fogged mirrors or, in summer, in the sun-bleached parks of central Chester. We cared not for the risks, judging

Mark Mason

Why I’d take a close Ashes defeat over an easy victory

The Ashes start this week. If, as an England supporter, you were given the following two choices, which would you pick? First: England win the series 5-0. Second: the series ebbs and flows, the teams arrive in Sydney locked at 2-2, the match goes down to the final hour of the final day, and England lose. If you went for the second option, you’re my kind of fan. I’ve always preferred to see my team (or player) lose narrowly than win easily. Sport is there to entertain us. This is the supporter equivalent of ‘It’s not the winning, it’s the taking part that counts’. As a fan, you get excited

Sunday

Naomi Firsht

Nobody Wants This could learn a few things from Seinfeld

Nobody Wants This, the Netflix romcom that brought us the ‘hot rabbi’, recently returned for its second season. For the uninitiated, the first series introduced us to sex and relationships podcaster Joanne, played by Kristen Bell, who meets Noah, played by Adam Brody (of The O.C. millennial crush fame), a reform rabbi who has just broken up with his long-term girlfriend. The premise felt fresh and original: a romcom that dared talk about religion and even made it the key part of the plot. It’s undoubtedly a hit, with season two racking up more than eight million views in its first four days of streaming, taking it to the number one spot

Saturday

The Spectator

The Great British Schools Debate

Toby Young, Spectator columnist and founder of the West London Free School, will team up with historian David Starkey to take on veteran broadcaster and author David Aaronovitch and political commentator Stella Tsantekidou. Locking horns over one of the most divisive questions in education today, they’ll go head-to-head over whether private schools are a stain on Britain’s conscience, and you can watch via livestream.

Gus Carter Gus Carter

I’m the heir to Manhattan

I’m owed around $680 billion. Some 77 acres of downtown Manhattan belong to the Carter family, according to a letter written in 1894. Wall Street, Broadway and One World Trade Center – they all sit on a plot that is, by rights, mine. Yet here I am, grumbling about what ought to be in the pages of The Spectator. What went wrong? The story goes something like this. Shortly before independence, a pirate called Robert Edwards was licensed by the British to hunt down Spanish ships. He was so successful that the Crown gave him a slice of Manhattan as a reward. Edwards leased the land for 99 years to

Friday

Penworthy

Three wagers for Cheltenham’s November meeting

Fairly heavy rain fell at Cheltenham overnight and there is a lot more to come today. If there is anything near the predicted 30mm of the wet stuff over 24 hours, the ground could easily turn to heavy which, whether racing is over jumps or the flat, tends to make the results something of a lottery. Of course, punters have to concentrate on horses that have won or run well in very soft conditions but it is not always as simple as that. Today’s Grade 2 Schloer Chase (2.55 p.m.) is an intriguing contest and sees the return of Jonbon, who is trying to win this race for the third

Rob Crossan

Hotels are still hopeless at accommodating disabled guests

I was sitting in a hotel restaurant in Cheshire a while back: one of those rambling country manors, full of mock Jacobean wood panelling and fake Tiffany lamps, beloved of football-and-property enriched couples with gravy hued fake tans, sports cars parked outside and more signet rings than GCSEs. I was hungry and alone, aside from, as always, travelling with my own disability in the form of severe visual impairment, aka ocular albinism and nystagmus – or the Rolls-Royce Silver Shadow of very bad eyesight, as I prefer to call it. I’d asked in advance for an accessible room which, predictably, was ‘not yet ready’ for me to check into when

Gary Dexter

What happens when there’s nothing left for AI to scrape?

There are several class actions going on against developers of Large Language Models. Jodi Picoult, George R.R. Martin, John Grisham and several other well-known authors are among those engaging in long-drawn-out lawsuits with tech companies such as Meta (who developed the chatbot LLaMA), OpenAI (who developed ChatGPT) and Google DeepMind (who developed Gemini). These companies, without seeking permission (imagine!), used books, newspapers, websites and other text sources to generate datasets to train their machines. The lawyers for these tech companies claim it was ‘fair use’. No one actually copied and resold anything, they say; it was used to train, and only to train.  One of my novels was ‘scraped’ by

Wednesday