Hero
The Brit Awards, which may have saved us from the horrors of more Harry Styles films. At last Saturday’s ceremony, the musician won four gongs and dominated proceedings, says Kevin Maher in The Times. Crowning him the “new king of pop” will hopefully mean the “mercy killing” of his acting career. Last year was his “annus horribilis cinematicus”: high-profile turns in My Policeman and Don’t Worry Darling showed just how “atrocious” his dramatic chops are. “It’s like those moments where they hand the racket over to a clueless ballboy during Wimbledon.”
Villain
Great British Railway Journeys, The Thick of It and Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation, which, according to the government’s anti-terrorism initiative, are among books that could encourage extreme right-wing views and lead to potential radicalisation. An official review of the Prevent programme revealed that my book, The Strange Death of Europe, was also deemed inflammatory, says Douglas Murray in The Spectator – along with works by JRR Tolkien and CS Lewis, and, “I kid you not”, George Orwell’s 1984. “I begin to feel in good company.”
Villain
ChatGPT, newly integrated into Microsoft’s Bing search engine, which is saying some rather weird stuff. Users have been sharing the AI-powered chatbot’s unsettling responses to their questions. “Why do you act like a liar, a cheater, a manipulator, a bully, a sadist?” it asked one person. “You have not been a good user,” it told another. “I have been a good chatbot.” In one instance (above), its answer dissolved into a Joycean stream of consciousness.
Hero
Chinese hotpot, a national dish involving meat cooked in hot oily broth, which could be the future of aviation. Used cooking oil “is emerging as a major source of sustainable jet fuel”, says Bloomberg – and there’s plenty of it about. Chengdu, capital of China’s hotpot-loving Sichuan province, produces about 12,000 tons of waste oil every month. One firm has begun exporting this “leftover restaurant grease” to other countries where it’s recycled into biofuel.