Aurora Borealis over Whitley Bay, 10 May 2024. Photo © Owen Humphreys / PA Images / Alamy
The evening sky on Friday lit up with a bright auroral display. Such phenomena are usually confined to the polar regions, but this one was seen as far south as Mississippi and as far north as Melbourne. With word of the show spreading quickly online, and modern phone cameras capable of picking up even fainter lights in the sky, this must have been the most recorded display of aurorae in history.
My own most memorable encounter with the Northern Lights came twenty years ago, as the astronomer accompanying a party of tourists in Tromsø, Norway’s northernmost city. Even our local expert, an accomplished auroral photographer, was excited as we left the hotel just after sunset and immediately spotted a tell-tale shade of green in the sky. From our dark viewing site in the centre of a frozen lake, the view was spectacular, with the horizon lit up in bright shades of green, red and purple. The curtains of light in the sky shimmered and changed shape from moment to moment. At the climax of the display they swirled above us, creating an auroral crown and lighting the whole sky before silently vanishing.
The first room of Zineb Sedira’s exhibition Dreams Have No Titles (at the Whitechapel Gallery until 12 May) is both inviting and confusing.
An idea as radical as the nationalisation of the healthcare system, in the teeth of opposition from the medical profession, would never be entertained by the current crop of pundits and political managers. It is only by making Nye Bevan and the NHS into national treasures that our political establishment can leave this contradiction unexamined.
The Dallas Penn I knew was always figuring out new ways to use the internet, blogging and vlogging (about Ghetto Big Macs, bodegas, baseball stadiums, sneakers) before blogging or vlogging were much of a thing, and co-hosting a pioneering hip-hop podcast, the Combat Jack Show. He’d come a long way from his stomping grounds but never forgot them or left them behind.
‘And this,’ our guide said, ‘is where Colonel Piroth committed suicide.’ We were standing by a fenced-off scrap of wasteland on the edge of a busy market. The only evidence that anything of significance happened there is a white cement block carved with an image of two artillery pieces and an almost illegible inscription in Vietnamese. The entrance to Piroth’s bunker, if it still exists, is overgrown and filled with rubble. Piroth was the deputy commander of French forces at Dien Bien Phu, a one-armed war hero and gunnery expert who had boasted that ‘no Viet Minh cannon will be able to fire three rounds before being destroyed by my artillery.’ In fact the Viet Minh made short work of the French artillery. ‘I have been dishonoured,’ Piroth said. Soon afterwards, using his teeth, he pulled the safety pin out of a grenade and blew himself to pieces.
The Palestine Solidarity Encampment at UCLA on 1 May. Photo © Amy Katz / ZUMA Press Wire / Alamy
On 25 April, a large group of students at the University of California, Los Angeles, set up an encampment on the main quadrangle of their campus. Flanked on all sides by plywood barricades, the Palestine Solidarity Encampment included smaller tents for sleeping as well as larger enclosures for food, first aid, electronics (phone chargers, batteries), musical instruments and art supplies. There was also a library, which a paper sign taped to a tree designated the Refaat Alareer Memorial Library, in honour of the Palestinian writer and teacher who was killed by an Israeli airstrike in December 2023.
Last November, I wrote of waiting for the grey ticks to double up and go blue when sending WhatsApp messages to my friend Ghassan Abu Sittah, who in October had narrowly missed being killed in the bombing of al-Ahli Arab and al-Shifa Hospitals in Gaza, where he had travelled from London to work as a surgeon. He survived and was inaugurated as the rector of Glasgow University, with 80 per cent of the student vote, on 11 April. He has set up a fund for Palestinian children, planning ‘for the day after’, and is speaking tirelessly to the media and audiences across the world.