IT’S A DAY of rest, and you may be in the mood for a quiet corner and a comfy chair.
We’ve hand-picked some of the week’s best reads for you to savour.
1. Love in the time of AI
Shutterstock
Shutterstock
ChatGPT is creeping into relationships to an extent where it is now playing a role in the breakup of marriages. In this disturbing read, Maggie Harrison Dupré explains how partners are using the technology against each other.
(Futurism, approx 22 mins reading time)
Spouses relayed bizarre stories about finding themselves flooded with pages upon pages of ChatGPT-generated psychobabble, or watching their partners become distant and cold — and in some cases, frighteningly angry — as they retreated into an AI-generated narrative of their relationship. Several even reported that their spouses suddenly accused them of abusive behavior following long, pseudo-therapeutic interactions with ChatGPT, allegations they vehemently deny. Of course, there’s an ambiguity at the core of the phenomenon. Maybe some of these partnerships really were bad, and the AI is giving solid advice when it pushes users toward divorce or separation. Ultimately, it’s impossible to fully understand someone else’s relationship from the outside — but then again, isn’t that exactly what the AI is doing when it demolishes a marriage?
2. The human stain remover
From crime scenes to biohazards, Ben Giles has cleaned it all. The extreme cleaner shares what he’s seen after 25 years in the business.
(The Guardian, approx 18 mins reading time)
Some jobs are logged as finished on the office network then forgotten about. Others are wild enough to earn a nickname as well as a place in the pantheon of tales that Giles likes to swap with Baxter to pass the time. “Do you remember Ratty Rolex?” he said. Oh, Baxter remembered. Ratty Rolex was a case that involved an imitation timepiece, a rodent-infested pit at the bottom of a lift shaft, and a security guard’s severed arm. I suggested that one day they might look back on the Dominion theatre job as Shit Play, but Giles and Baxter weren’t listening. They were discussing the time they arranged to clear a 20-tonne whale from Portsmouth harbour. That was on New Year’s Eve, 2019. When Giles saw the photos, he told Baxter, “Well, don’t say no.”
3. Cinema paradiso
The Il Cinema Ritrovato in Piazza Maggiore, Bologna. Alamy Stock Photo
Alamy Stock Photo
Every year, the Il Cinema Ritrovato festival showcases the magic of restoration by bringing films that were forgotten, lost or damaged come back to life to the delight of the movie buffs that attend. Anthony Lane looks at how the restorers do it.
(The New Yorker, approx 26 mins reading time)
Far from thinning out, the crowds grew denser as the hours passed, borne toward the Piazza Maggiore, the main square of the city’s historic center, as if on a tide. There, beside the shiplike hulk of the Basilica of San Petronio—which is a work in progress, the foundation stone having been laid in 1390, and which somebody really should get around to finishing one of these days—was a vast white screen. Rows of ticketed seating were ranged before it, like pews in a nave. Alternatively, you could lounge, for free, on the marble steps of the basilica, or grab a table outside at one of the restaurants on the opposite side of the piazza. The best ice-cream parlor, around the corner, stayed open till midnight, allowing you to cool your throat with an almond-milk granita. (It comes with a spoon and a straw, so that you can slurp it up as it softens. Pleasure, in these parts, is a serious business.) In short, here was a halcyon arena for a thoroughly normal experience: going out to the movies.
4. Yantar
The FT used radar data collected by European Space Agency satellites to track the Russian spy ship hovering over Europe’s undersea cables, and their investigation reveals why Ireland is particularly vulnerable to its threat.
(Financial Times, approx 15 mins reading time)
Ireland, a non-Nato member which has historically relied on the UK and US for its defence, is particularly vulnerable to Russian sabotage; the accession of Sweden and Finland to the alliance two years ago has further increased its status as a relative outlier within Europe. Kaushal suggests that Irish waters are “a blind spot in the defensive architecture around the UK”. A Royal Navy veteran is more blunt. “It would be very difficult for Russia to sever all the data flows into the UK because there are so many of them from so many directions. It’d be a lot easier to cut Ireland off,” he says. Without taking the risk of directly targeting Britain, a Nato member, he suggests Moscow would still have achieved a “significant economic and social hit on a close friend”.
5. Let’s do the Time Warp again!
Tim Curry as Frank N Furter in The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975). Alamy Stock Photo
Alamy Stock Photo
It’s been 50 years since The Rocky Horror Picture Show jumped (to the left) onto our screens and cemented itself as a cult classic. Frank J Miles writes about why it still thrills.
(Harper’s Bazaar, approx 9 mins reading time)
Once inside the movie theater, audiences didn’t just watch the film—they entered it. The moment their chosen doppelgänger flickered onto the screen, they leapt onto the stage, shouting or lip-syncing every line, stitching themselves into the film’s script. The audience became an unruly chorus armed with props, collapsing the divide between screen and seats, erasing the fourth wall with a delirious act of communal theater. Screenings became safe spaces for misfit communities to gather, celebrate, and be seen.
Half a century later, its mix of irreverence, inclusivity, and freedom keeps it alive as both a cult film and a cultural refuge. “The reason The Rocky Horror Picture Shows still serves as a vital sanctuary for self-expression 50 years on is precisely because of renewed political and legislative attacks against the LGBTQ+ community,” says Peraino. “What’s special about The Rocky Horror Picture Show is its longevity and its history and the sense of social cohesion in the participation—not just the solidarity you are building at the moment of the collective talking back to the screen, and symbolically talking back to authority, but also the solidarity you are building with the past in reenacting past strategies of resistance.”
6. Reporting restrictions
Pete Hegseth’s Pentagon has announced that journalists will no longer be accredited to enter the building unless they agree not to report unapproved information. Nancy A Youssef, who has reported there for 18 years, explains why she’s opposed to it.
(The Atlantic, approx 9 mins reading time)
President Donald Trump noted over the weekend that reporters won’t be stopped from doing their jobs. He is technically right. If these rules are implemented, the best journalists will become better at their craft and find other ways to report their stories. But I have found that giving reporters less access to information about what the military does rarely serves the American people. The Pentagon has already dramatically curtailed its willingness to share basic facts. I struggle to see how this new policy doesn’t further reduce the availability of information that the public has come to expect: Which ocean is a U.S. carrier strike group operating in? Did the secretary speak with his Chinese counterpart? Why is the U.S. denying a shipment of approved weapons to Ukraine? What are the rules of engagement for National Guardsmen deployed on American streets?
…AND A CLASSIC FROM THE ARCHIVES…
A longread from 2022 about how, despite the remaining threat, we no longer fear nuclear war – and why that’s dangerous.
(The Guardian, approx 21 mins reading time)
Leaders have talked tough before. But now their talk seems less tethered to reality. This is the first decade when not a single head of a nuclear state can remember Hiroshima. Does that matter? We’ve seen in other contexts what happens when our experience of a risk attenuates. In rich countries, the waning memory of preventable diseases has fed the anti-vaccination movement. “People have become complacent,” notes epidemiologist Peter Salk, whose father, Jonas Salk, invented the polio vaccine. Not having lived through a polio epidemic, parents are rejecting vaccines to the point where measles and whooping cough are coming back and many have needlessly died of Covid-19.
That is the danger with nuclear war. Using declassified documents, historians now understand how close we came, multiple times, to seeing the missiles fired. In those heartstopping moments, a visceral understanding of what nuclear war entailed helped keep the launch keys from turning. It’s precisely that visceral understanding that’s missing today. We’re entering an age with nuclear weapons but no nuclear memory. Without fanfare, without even noticing, we may have lost a guardrail keeping us from catastrophe.
Note: The Journal generally selects stories that are not paywalled, but some might not be accessible if you have exceeded your free article limit on the site in question.
