How did Lula defeat Bolsonaro so handily, by a far greater margin than in 2022, after losing in the first round? How did the hoped-for virada take place? Turnout made a difference: close to three million more people voted in the second round. In Bahia alone – where, as the saying goes, ‘fascism doesn’t take root’ (‘na Bahia fascista não se cria’) – Lula gained almost a million votes.
On Wednesday, 21 October, four days after France’s biggest student protest in a generation, Inès stood in the rain outside Art Basel Paris’s VIP preview at the Grand Palais. As part of a programme the fair runs with the École du Louvre, she and other students had volunteered to explain the artworks on display outside to anyone who stopped by, while collectors with the right passes were allowed through the anti-ram barriers to shop for art inside.
‘Things are normal,’ Sofya texted me on Sunday. ‘People really can’t wait to vote. It’s a good atmosphere.’ Marija, a journalist at the independent magazine Vreme, said that turnout was high. ‘But there are many incidents. Tensions are rising.’ There were rumours that the deputy chairman of the electoral committee in Despotovac, a small town in central Serbia, had eaten two ballot papers.
On 19 October, the World Food Programme announced that it would be reducing its monthly food assistance in Gaza, providing support to 1.1 million people rather than 1.6 million. On 22 October, the head of the Bakery Owners Association warned that the remaining bakeries in occupied Gaza would cease operations within 48 hours because of the lack of flour in the territory and Israeli entry restrictions. ‘Things are really, really difficult,’ the Palestinian diplomat Marwan Yaghi said to me, ‘especially with the Israeli action coming on the way.’
Demonstrators confront the police at Place de la République, 17 October 2026 (Tuul and Bruno Morandi)
Amid the tear-gas fumes and flying stun grenades it was easy to miss the ceremony taking place on the Pont Saint-Michel on Saturday, 17 October. A group of French-Algerians threw flowers into the Seine to mark the 65th anniversary of the worst police massacre in Europe since the Second World War.
My mother rang to say that my father had called a water truck owner and offered to pay him to fill our jerry cans, but the man said his truck had broken down and the spare parts weren’t available. We had barely enough water to last the day. My mother asked me to find out if a water truck would be coming to a nearby camp so that I could fill our jerry cans there.
My boss at the bookshop has said he would sell AI novels if there were clear demand and clear labelling. We almost certainly already sell books that have made some use of LLMs in their production. Novels and short stories which are suspected to have been written by AI are being nominated for prestigious literary prizes. When I ask my customers if they would read a novel written by AI they either vehemently reject the idea or shrug.