Donald Trump praised Andy Burnham as a “natural businessperson” and said that UK-US relations are “more up” now than they were under Keir Starmer, after the pair met for the first time on the sidelines of the UN general assembly in New York yesterday. Burnham agreed to review Britain’s Chagos Islands deal after Trump described it as “terrible”, and also announced plans for a new UK centre to “stem the poisonous tide” of disinformation, largely coming from Russia. China is rapidly expanding its nuclear weapons programme across at least seven major sites, says The Telegraph. Satellite images show significant construction at nuclear facilities and testing areas across the country, including one production site where an entire support town has been built, complete with apartment blocks, an athletics field and a bus depot. A new geophysical survey has given fresh weight to the idea that a huge complex lies beneath Tutankhamun’s tomb. Researchers believe the site could house several chambers, including Queen Nefertiti’s tomb, which they say would rank “among the most transformative archaeological discoveries of the modern era”.

As someone who is decidedly unpolitical, says James Marriott in The Times, I felt a pang of sympathy for Ed Sheeran last week when he got caught in a bitter row over Israel/Palestine. After much turmoil, he was forced to state his “middle-of-the-road” view, insisting miserably that he wants his music to be about “unity, not division”. “Good luck with that.” Culture has never been more political than it is right now. Taylor Swift, initially reluctant to give up impartiality, long ago bowed under fan pressure to declare herself a feminist and a Democrat. Even consumer brands have been politicised: America’s Black Rifle Coffee is vocally anti-metropolitan; Ben & Jerry’s ice cream is “loud on Palestine”. We may well look back on the death of Dolly Parton as the “end of a bipartisan popular culture”.

The notion that “everything is political” was injected into society at large during the “woke” 2010s, killing the “neutral cultural space”. Suddenly, anything could be labelled either unacceptably racist or unacceptably woke: Jamie Oliver’s microwaveable jerk rice (racist; cultural appropriation); Kim Kardashian’s Kimono shapewear (racist; offensive to the Japanese); Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey (woke; black Helen of Troy). This simplistic “triaging” of pop culture into political boxes is popular because it suits the intellectual level of social media, and jives with the growing tendency for politics to be less about policy and more about performance and identity. The trouble with the “tyranny of the zealots” is that politics is almost never the most interesting or relevant thing to discuss about Homer or Taylor Swift or coffee. A world in which everything is political is not just unpleasantly angry, but “perpetually boring”.

AI may one day make humans unemployable, says The Economist, “but there is no sign of it yet”. The American economy added 162,000 jobs in August, “far above expectations”, and the unemployment rate is 4.1%, which is lower than in almost 90% of months over the past five decades. The young are fine: joblessness among those aged 20-24 is close to a multi-decade low. Meanwhile, firms in AI-related industries are on huge hiring sprees that far outweigh the estimated 200,000 layoffs attributed to AI since mid-2023. Tot it all up, and it looks like AI has actually created around a million new jobs in the US alone.

FlagShuffle is an enjoyable, 30-second quiz game in which players are presented with a series of country names and must choose each one’s national flag from a selection of four. Very pleasing at first, but gets progressively harder. To find out how well you know your Kazakhstan from your Kyrgyzstan, click here.

I know why the big AI companies are suddenly fretting that the technology could kill humanity, says Cory Doctorow in Pluralistic. It’s because their current business model is completely kaput. They insist profitability is only days away (or already here, by a definition of “profitable” no honest accountant would recognise). But they’ll never recoup the colossal cost of setting up and training their models because switching chatbots costs users next to nothing. When Anthropic last upgraded Claude, OpenAI’s best customers defected overnight. At the Consumer Electronics Show in January, every gadget maker I asked said they could swap AI providers for their products “with the click of a mouse”. This isn’t like the railways, where once the tracks are built you can just profitably run trains over it forever. “The minute you finish your railroad, your rivals will announce that they’ve got a new, adjacent railroad.” Regulation that stymies everyone would certainly help.

What’s truly bizarre, says Marietje Schaake in the FT, is that the world’s politicians are looking to the CEOs of these AI firms for advice on how best to regulate them. These tech bosses are, of course, experts in how to make better AI models, but that is where their expertise ends. And they’re hardly likely to be honest brokers. We don’t ask oil companies to design climate policies or car companies to make traffic rules. Europe already has a comprehensive AI law that has safety at its heart – instead of inviting business leaders to swish conferences and asking them to opine on their potentially world-ending products, we should consider enforcing it. There’s no use waiting for another doomy “incident report” warning of disaster. Lawmakers must take the initiative and ignore Silicon Valley. “Pyromaniacs do not make good firefighters.”

Gym bros are learning the hard way that Pilates is more than just a stretching session, says Jamie Waters in The Wall Street Journal. In one viral TikTok video, a firefighter and CrossFit regular in Alabama who joined his wife for her class was left with “his legs shaking like a Chihuahua’s” and praying that the Lord will “heal us from Pilates”. In another clip, a man who accompanied his girlfriend to a “hot” Pilates class was left drenched with sweat and unable to lift his legs after just 10 minutes. His soul, he said, “left his body”.

Anyone doubting Princess Diana’s steeliness should consider an anecdote in Charles Spencer’s new book, says Tina Brown on Substack. He was lobster potting off the southeast coast of Scotland with Diana and their mother, Frances, when, as he puts it, a “lithe, black muscular conger eel… as thick as my arm” writhed free from a pot. Charles and Frances recoiled from its gnashing teeth, but Diana reached into a plastic bucket, grabbed an open-bladed pen knife and “brought its point hard behind the eel’s eyes”. Spencer mentions he briefly considered including this anecdote in his funeral speech. “Thank God he didn’t.”

It’s the largest fresh crater discovered on the moon in more than 15 years, says Robin George Andrews in The New York Times. Spotted by astronomers perusing photos from Nasa’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, the basin is a whopping 728ft wide and 141ft deep, and is thought to be the result of a sizeable comet or asteroid ploughing into the lunar surface at a “blistering” speed in early 2024. Scientists say impacts of this magnitude can be expected only once every 130 years or so, making this a once-in-a-lifetime observation.