The Yellow Line is supposed to be temporary, but history suggests otherwise. Under ostensibly transient arrangements, Israel has annexed Palestinian land, displaced large numbers of people and expanded its control. Each time, Palestinians are told to wait for the next stage of the plan, while Israel’s gains become the baseline for the next round of negotiations. And the waiting never ends. Each phase is temporary, but every loss is permanent.
Refugeehood is not supposed to be like this. The ideal envisaged by the Refugee Convention is that refugee status should be a kind of substitute citizenship for people whose bond of citizenship with their country of origin has been broken by the threat of persecution. Those displaced by persecution and war may well want to return when they can, but until then they need to get on with their lives as everyone else does.
I am 22 weeks pregnant. During this pregnancy – my fourth; I have two children already and had a miscarriage in February – I have become unduly superstitious, increasingly preoccupied by the idea of life emerging in the shadow of death, and half-remembering folklore taught to me by my Turkish grandmother.
The day before James Watson arrived to deliver the 2013 Michael Davys Lecture in Oxford, I received an email from his personal physician in New York asking me to arrange for him to be seen by ‘one of your best surgeons’ to remove a skin tumour. Since I had invited Watson to Oxford, it seemed I was also now responsible for his medical treatment.
From the revelations about Jimmy Savile in 2012 to the gender pay gap debacle in 2017, the BBC was for many years its own worst enemy. Now, confronted with a rampaging US president and increasingly confident domestic opponents, some of whom sit on the corporation’s board, the BBC is embroiled in a crisis that has so far seen the resignations of two senior executives and the threat of a billion-dollar lawsuit from Donald Trump.
The use of verse to suggest an LLM’s human-like capacities taps into a tradition where those capacities are already being used in an artificial schema. Rhyme and metre are relatively simple linguistic algorithms. Combining them with a heightened tolerance for arbitrariness of content – poetic licence – makes poetry low-hanging fruit for automation. Programmers were already generating verse in the 1950s. Analogue versions date back to the fourth century.
Girl Violence, the third album by King Princess, is my favourite pop record in a good year for pop. It’s all over the place sonically, a hungry scavenger for scraps of slow R&B, thumping rock choruses, indie guitar fuzz, doo-wop references, half-spoken bridges and half-shouted anthemic claims. It’s first-rate popcraft made to hold emotional chaos. And it has, through thirteen tracks, a single subject: how it feels to enter an abusive Sapphic romance or romantic friendship, how to live with it, how to leave, and why people stay.