The $27 trillion scam industry hidden in the jungle

Villain
Maido, supposedly the best restaurant in the world, for being nothing of the sort, says Giles Coren in The Times. I flew to Lima to eat there, and it was “dismal”. The staff made me feel about “as pampered as you do at Kwik Fit”. The only way to see the wine list was by scanning a QR code on the table. The food – a £300 tasting menu of Peruvian-Japanese cooking – was pretty good, despite consisting almost exclusively of “brightly coloured slime”. I’m sick of this “gastronomic post-impressionism”. Say what you like about French haute cuisine, but “at least those ridiculous old perverts in the vertiginous toques cooked hot dishes your grandma would have recognised as food”.

Villains
Gen Z, whose reluctance to sign up for medical trials could hinder crucial research into new medicines and treatments. I volunteered for “my fair share” of trials when I was young, says Rich Pelley in The Guardian. I got paid £20 to sit under an ultraviolet light to test sun creams and £35 to guzzle a load of anti-ulcer drugs. My pièce de résistance was spending three days having a “long, bendy, 17-lumen silicone tube stuck up my nose, down my throat, around my entire digestive system, and out of my bottom”. For £200. Can’t think why Gen Z aren’t signing up.

Hero
His Holiness Mar Awa III, head of the Assyrian Church of the East, for trolling Pope Leo XIV. The patriarch, a fellow Chicago native, presented the baseball-mad Leo with the team jersey of the Chicago Cubs, who are the bitter rivals of the pope’s favoured White Sox. Both men were smiling at the meeting, says Daniel Victor in The New York Times, but “Patriarch Awa’s smile was a tad wider”.

Villain
AI, which is being used by unscrupulous workers to create fake receipts for expenses. The software provider AppZen says AI-generated receipts accounted for about 14% of fraudulent documents submitted in September, up from zero last year. “How shocking,” says Charles Arthur in The Overspill. “Up until now every expense receipt has been absolutely 100% really incurred.”

Everything is television now

Social media has turned into television, says Derek Thompson on Substack. Meta recently revealed that 80% of time spent on Facebook and 90% on Instagram is watching videos, most of them made by creators unknown to the user. That, for want of a better word, is television. It’s the same with podcasts, which began as “radio for the internet” but have since morphed into yet more TV. Consumption of video podcasts is growing around 20 times faster than audio-only ones; YouTube has “quietly” become the most popular platform for the medium, “and it’s not even close”. Then there’s AI. In the past few weeks both Meta and OpenAI have released platforms where users can create and watch endless AI-generated videos: Sam Altman half-inching graphics processors from Target to make more AI; Stephen Hawking entering a professional wrestling ring. Again, more television.

One consequence of this is that it will accentuate the loneliness epidemic. In his seminal 2000 book Bowling Alone, the Harvard scholar Robert Putnam noted that the six hours a week the average American gained in leisure time between 1965 and 1995 had almost all been funnelled into watching more television, and that husbands and wives were spending almost four times as many hours watching TV together as they were talking to each other. Putnam’s critics argued that the internet would solve all this. Instead, digital media has become “super-television” and time spent home alone has surged. Then there’s the effect on our politics. When everything is television, every form of communication begins to adopt television’s values: “immediacy, emotion, spectacle, brevity”. News becomes performance; politics becomes theatre. If we’re not careful, as the media theorist Neil Postman once warned, we’ll become a society that “forgets how to think in paragraphs, and learns instead to think in scenes”.

The Saint-Tropez beach club where the king of Belgium washed his own plate

Patrice de Colmont, who has died aged 77, spent 50 years running his family’s Saint-Tropez restaurant Club 55, says The Daily Telegraph. A favourite haunt of film stars, playboys, presidents and royalty, the beachfront venue started out in a small fisherman’s hut where de Colmont’s parents made lunch for locals from the nearby village. When a 19-year-old Brigitte Bardot arrived on the beach to film And God Created Woman in 1955, she mistook it for a bistro and asked Patrice’s mother if she’d cater for the movie’s 80-strong crew. Mme de Colmont gamely said yes, borrowed a baker’s oven, “and so created Club 55”.

When Patrice took over in 1972, he was determined to keep his parents’ “affable warmth towards waifs and strays”. High-rollers who asked for the beachfront jewellery sellers to be removed were told to leave themselves; when the king of Belgium came in 1957 he was told he would have to wash his own plate before he could eat, “which he did”. And big names kept coming, from Joan Collins to Roger Moore and even Mikhail Gorbachev. As one newspaper put it: “Eating the restaurant’s overpriced grilled fish while wearing nothing more than a thong is now a rite of passage for any aspiring model, actress or porn star.” De Colmont never lost his enthusiasm for the “hurly-burly” of the champagne-filled lunch service – he refused to open for dinner on the grounds that “nature deserved to recover at night” – nor his sense of humour. When he was offered tens of millions to sell up, he said: “And do what? Become a fat fuck with a yacht who eats at Cinquante-Cinq every day?”