The use of verse to suggest an LLM’s human-like capacities taps into a tradition where those capacities are already being used in an artificial schema. Rhyme and metre are relatively simple linguistic algorithms. Combining them with a heightened tolerance for arbitrariness of content – poetic licence – makes poetry low-hanging fruit for automation. Programmers were already generating verse in the 1950s. Analogue versions date back to the fourth century.
Girl Violence, the third album by King Princess, is my favourite pop record in a good year for pop. It’s all over the place sonically, a hungry scavenger for scraps of slow R&B, thumping rock choruses, indie guitar fuzz, doo-wop references, half-spoken bridges and half-shouted anthemic claims. It’s first-rate popcraft made to hold emotional chaos. And it has, through thirteen tracks, a single subject: how it feels to enter an abusive Sapphic romance or romantic friendship, how to live with it, how to leave, and why people stay.
The Race Relations Act was introduced on 8 November 1965, part of a wave of liberal social reforms of the 1960s. It was an important first step, though it didn’t provide protection against discrimination in areas such as employment or housing. It followed the 1963 Bristol bus boycott led by the Black civil rights activist Paul Stephenson. The Bristol Omnibus Company was refusing to hire Black and Asian bus crew. To its shame, the Transport and General Workers’ Union backed the company’s racist stance. The boycott received national and international attention. Prominent Labour MPs, including Tony Benn, spoke in support of the boycott campaign. Demonstrations were held and the protest grew in strength. Among its outspoken supporters was the former cricketer Sir Learie Constantine, now Trinidad and Tobago’s high commissioner to the UK.
The percolating instrumentation of ‘New York’, Ja Rule’s piercing 2004 posse cut, was playing on my TV, and Zohran Mamdani strolled out to deliver a rousing victory speech: ‘New York City, breathe this moment in. We have held our breath for longer than we know.’
About ten years ago I visited Dioundiou, a village in Niger two hundred kilometres south-east of the capital Niamey, and met a man known as Albert Camus. Hosseini Tahirou Amadou was the village history teacher. Nicknamed after his favourite writer, he was an expert on the events of 24 February 1899, the day a French colonial contingent turned up in the village demanding water, food and women. When the residents resisted, the French destroyed the village with cannon, massacred 373 people (according to Amadou’s research) and kidnapped hundreds of women. Even then, Amadou talked of bringing France to justice one day.
The Lviv National Opera opened to the public on 4 October 1900. It has remained open for the last 125 years under nine different governing authorities, including the Habsburg Empire, the Second Polish Republic and the Soviet Union. One consistent commitment throughout that time has been to preserve and perform Ukrainian operas and ballets, an effort that was redoubled following the full-scale invasion in 2022.
On 30 October, days after the largest police massacre in the history of a city infamous for them, which left at least 121 dead, President Lula approved a law to fight organised crime. He expressed sympathy, first, for four dead policemen, then for innocent residents and children murdered in the ‘mega-operation’ in the Complexo da Penha and the Complexo do Alemão, in the north of Rio de Janeiro. A photographer discovered the head of one young Comando Vermelho soldier, 19-year-old Yago Ravel Rodrigues Rosário, on a tree. He had no criminal record, but we know he was CV from his social media feeds. Police killed more people than the number of weapons recovered.