During popular insurrections like the one underway in Bolivia, which is calling for President Rodrigo Paz’s resignation after just six months in office, the experience of time and space changes, acquiring an extraordinary charge from day to day, even hour to hour. Indigenous campesino insurgents have long characterised such moments as belonging to ‘another time’.
Out-of-towners, including Tommy Robinson and Laurence Fox, merged with locals outside Southampton police station to form a crowd of several hundred. The troubling speed with which the protest was organised caught the city’s small but diligent antifa and its broad coalition of anti-racists by surprise. Given the severity of the rioting, it might have been for the best that we didn’t have time to organise a response.
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 With the start of the war, though, his residency was withdrawn, and now he was stuck in Tehran.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.