A village in Oxfordshire has voted to leave the UK over plans to convert a nearby former army garrison into an asylum centre for 1,200 male migrants. Residents of Piddington, near Bicester, backed the symbolic motion to secede by 285 votes to 26, and will now call their village a “principality”. “We are Piddington,” said parish councillor Susannah Parden, “the village that roars.” Inflation has hit its highest level since the start of the Iran war, driven mostly by the rising cost of fuel and airfares. The Office for National Statistics says the consumer prices index (CPI) rose to 3.1% in August, up from 2.9% in July. A London pizza chain has been named the best in the world at an international ceremony in Naples. Napoli on the Road, which has restaurants in Chiswick, Richmond and Soho, is the first British entrant to take the top spot at the 50 Top Pizzas awards. “I can’t explain how big this is,” says chef and founder Michele Pascarella. “It’s like the Oscars but for pizza.”

The fact that the people building AI genuinely believe it could “kill us all by the end of the decade” raises an obvious question, says Michelle Goldberg in The New York Times. Why carry on? The usual – and valid – argument is that the development of the technology is unstoppable so it’s safest for responsible folks to lead. But that still doesn’t explain the breeziness with which the industry contemplates apocalypse. For that you need to grasp the “quasi-religion” taking hold in Silicon Valley. One AI founder likens the tech to “the Second Coming”. Venture capital titan Peter Thiel says Greta Thunberg is the Antichrist because she is “a Luddite who wants to stop all science”. Their “fantasies of transcendence” take different forms. Sam Altman says he assumes his brain will one day be “uploaded to the cloud”. Elon Musk plans to escape to Mars, describing an Earth-based future as “uninspiring”.

Many of these tech titans already have back-up plans for if it all goes wrong. Mark Zuckerberg is building a “luxury survivalist compound” in Hawaii. Thiel tried to do the same in New Zealand and has recently decamped to Argentina, a potential “escape hatch” from nuclear war and runaway AI. OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever reportedly promised to build staff a bunker before the company releases so-called “artificial general intelligence”. When Ross Douthat asked Thiel last year whether he’d prefer the human race to endure, there was an “uncomfortably long” pause. Thiel eventually answered “yes”, but immediately caveated it with a ramble about transhumanism and immortal bodies. Our tech oligarchs would like civilisation to survive – they just don’t consider it “mission critical”. If lives must be wagered to “summon their digital god”, so be it.

Any attempt to force Reform UK to return donations by making new laws apply retroactively would be dead wrong, says Daniel Finkelstein in The Times, “for reasons a child might understand”. Put simply, you can’t – or shouldn’t – punish people for an offence that wasn’t an offence at the time it was committed. It would undermine the rule of law. The irony is that Reform want to do something similar with immigration, by rescinding the indefinite leave to remain granted to many refugees. How will Labour complain about that if they’ve already embraced “retrospective law making”?

When most people picture the very rich, say Owen Zidar and Eric Zwick in The Atlantic, they think of tech billionaires like Elon Musk, or maybe Wall Street bankers or celebrities such as Taylor Swift. In fact, around 1.7 million Americans have built personal fortunes of $10m or more by running their own business. For every CEO of a public company, there are more than 1,000 small business owners with a net worth over $25m. And many of them do the most random stuff: one is a repo man in Nevada, another owns car washes in Milwaukee. One, in the Ozarks, makes boat covers.

For many people, says John Harris in The Guardian, footage of the highly organised shows of strength by masked, black-clad fascists in Dover and Portsmouth, and later outside the offices of the Daily Mail, was just yet more TikTok content, blearily scrolled through alongside clips of fights on the London Underground and trick-performing dogs. This distracted, quick-fire means of receiving information is probably what’s behind a worrying finding from YouGov last week: 53% of 18- to 24-year olds polled had no opinion on whether the demos were a “legitimate way of protesting”, and 43% of people of all ages were either unaware of the story or not following it at all.

For those of us who grew up reading books and newspapers, the sight of uniformed men who say they want to “reclaim our borders, restore order and send a clear message: Britain belongs to the British” have obvious historical precedents. The whole spectacle was clearly pitched halfway between Oswald Mosley’s blackshirts and the Ku Klux Klan, with the apparently ubiquitous balaclavas adding a “flavour of the Troubles”. But if you’ve grown up receiving information in the form of a distracting and seemingly infinite jumble of random moving images, how would you know about any of that? All this is on my mind thanks to James Marriott’s excellent new book, The New Dark Ages, which makes a convincing case that the decline of reading poses a stark threat to democracy. In an algorithmic world, where almost nobody does the hard work of reading and thinking, and where only the most “angry, paranoid and visually shocking” content goes viral, reasoned public debate becomes impossible. “Mass literacy is a recent phenomenon,” Marriott writes. “So is mass democracy. We simply don’t know whether one can survive without the other.”

While cooking lunch the other day, says Michael Deacon in The Telegraph, I noticed something peculiar on the packet of salt I was using. The top of the label read: “Himalayas finest rock salt. Over 250 million years old.” But at the bottom there was a smaller sticker, reading: “Best before: 01 Aug 2027.” In other words, the salt is fine for the first quarter of a billion years. “But don’t use it after that, in case it’s gone off.”

When Keir Starmer sacked Chris Wormald as cabinet secretary in February, it was assumed his pay-off would be the standard maximum of £260,000. In fact, says George Parker in the FT, newly released accounts show that he received a whopping £859,496. That’s almost double the previous largest civil service pay-off, paid to Treasury mandarin Tom Scholar after his sacking by Liz Truss in 2022. Factor in Sir Chris’s salary, pension contributions and benefits in kind, and he trousered more than £1m for his 14-month tenure – the shortest in the position’s 110-year history.

It’s 28-year-old Lance Corporal Grace Cussons, says Sian Grzeszczyk Melbourne in BFBS Forces News, a corporate high-flyer who has become the first female army reservist to pass the Parachute Regiment’s gruelling entry test. The Proctor and Gamble strategy director was one of only 23 soldiers out of 87 candidates to make it through the “all-arms pre-parachute selection”, which includes a ten-mile march carrying 16kg in under two hours, lugging a heavy log across two miles of rough ground as part of a team, a steeplechase, a pass/fail “aerial confidence” test, and a 60-second boxing match in which you’re not allowed to defend yourself.