My back’s feeling better so I’ve started driving for Snapp! again. My first passenger of the night was a man in his mid-fifties, with white hair and a neatly pressed shirt. His mild aftershave permeated the car. Before we reached the highway, his phone rang. ‘Everything in my life is there,’ he said. ‘House, office, bank accounts …’ He didn’t sound tired or angry, just resigned. From snatches of his conversation, I realised he had lived in Dubai for 24 years. His business was good: several properties, several accounts, a successful life outside Iran. With the start of the war, though, his residency was withdrawn, and now he was stuck in Tehran.
I thought I didn’t use ChatGPT because I was too clever. I thought that not using ChatGPT made me cleverer. It turns out, though, that it made me very bad at spotting when a text was written by or with the assistance of AI.
In the Central Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, I got into an argument with an Israeli woman who was tearing down Art Not Genocide Alliance signs from around Vera Tamari’s work, part of the exhibition In Minor Keys curated by the late Koyo Kouoh. The exhibition assistant had already told her that the artist wanted the posters to be there, but the woman insisted that Tamari was Israeli, that she had looked her up. She was so adamant that I might have doubted myself if I didn’t know members of Tamari’s family.
It’s unusual for a defeated candidate in an Irish parliamentary by-election to make headlines outside the country. But Gerry Hutch, whose second bid to represent Dublin Central ended in failure last weekend, is best known for his suspected involvement in two of the country’s biggest armed robberies (although he has never been tried or convicted for those alleged offences, committed in the 1980s and 1990s). Hutch was also embroiled in Ireland’s most notorious criminal feud over the last decade. Though he didn’t make it over the line on election day, he outpolled the candidates of both Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael, Ireland’s traditional parties of government.
‘Dawn’ by Ivan Lytovchenko, made for the wall of a bakery on Lenin Avenue in Pripyat in 1979, photographed in October 2021 (Erik Peterson / Alamy)
Towards the end of April, a bus with fifteen foreign journalists headed north from Kyiv to Chornobyl (the transliteration of the Ukrainian place name, Чорнобиль, rather than the Russian Чернобыль, was adopted by the UN General Assembly in a resolution last December). For some reporters, this was their third or fourth trip to the abandoned city of Pripyat, a few kilometres from Reactor No. 4 in the thousand-square-mile exclusion zone. Access has been even more restricted since Ukrainian forces recaptured the area from Russia in April 2022.
A stone to commemorate the start of construction at Akon City, Mbodiene, Senegal, 30 August 2021 (John Wessels/AFP/Getty)
Last summer, the singer Akon announced that Akon City – the ‘real-life Wakanda’ that he planned to build on the Senegalese coast – was being abandoned. When ground broke on the project in August 2020, he seemed confident that it would transform 136 acres of mangroves and low scrub into a gleaming metropolis. ‘I plan to retire in that city,’ he told the BBC. ‘I don’t like to use the word the king of the city. But that’s what it will turn out to be.’ When I visited a few months ago, the only part of it that had been half-built was the welcome centre.
Unfortunately for Mexicans, Mexico has moved to the top of the US foreign policy agenda. After Trump kidnapped the Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro, he threatened Mexico with ground operations against ‘cartels’ that the DOJ designated terrorist organisations.