Sylvia Plath may have been alive decades before true crime took over our screens and social media feeds, but she understood humanity’s tendency to turn suffering into spectacle. In her poem “Lady Lazarus” she sardonically mocks how “The peanut-crunching crowd/Shoves in to see/Them unwrap me hand and foot —/The big strip tease”. The poem is a damning indictment of our most morbid curiosities, and the voyeurism of a “million filaments” who come to gawp at this “smiling woman” eerily echoes the current obsession with the disappearance of Nicola Bulley. Since Bulley, 45, went missing on 27 January in St Michael's on Wyre, Lancashire, her case has become a circus for those who believe a criminal investigation is a crowdsourcing exercise. The ...

What is missing from the UK media landscape? The unlikely answer, at least according to the former Sun editor Kelvin MacKenzie, is: a populist, right-wing news website. The 76-year-old recently launched a new venture called the Daily Disclosure. For younger readers who might not be familiar with MacKenzie, allow the Chatterer to provide you with a brief CV. He edited the Sun between 1981 and 1994, a period in which its circulation peaked above 4 million. The Sun’s infamous headlines from this period included "FREDDIE STARR ATE MY HAMSTER" (this, it turned out, was probably untrue), "GOTCHA" (which commemorated the sinking of an Argentine ship during the Falklands War), and "THE TRUTH" (the Hillsborough front page that the Sun’s current editor has ...

Kate Forbes is a very impressive politician indeed, and it’s no surprise that she’s considered perhaps the most likely successor to Nicola Sturgeon as leader of the SNP. She’s extremely intelligent, educated at Cambridge and Edinburgh, and a fluent Gaelic speaker, having attended a Scottish Gaelic school. She’s young (32) and spent three years as a child in India. She's been an MSP for seven years and the finance and economy secretary since 2020. There’s no scandal around her. She is well liked and would give the party a new, fresh look. She’s also an active member of the Free Church of Scotland (FCS) – and beyond the sectarian division that still exists in some parts of the country, albeit a mere ...

For better or worse, the pandemic taught us a lot of lessons: about how long we can go without talking to another human being, about how quickly we can all profoundly change the way we live – and about the dangers of dragging your sorry carcass into work when you’re unwell. There’s nothing more pathetic than the sight of a person determined to prove how committed to the job they are while coughing and spluttering all over their desk. And during the pandemic, it became socially unacceptable: at a time when bringing your sniffle into work could result in half the company being taken out by the same virus, taking a sick day suddenly became the only considerate thing to do. ...

We will have to wait for the history books – and the inevitable autobiography – for the definitive account of why Nicola Sturgeon has chosen this moment to announce her intention to resign as First Minister of Scotland. But whatever the full story turns out to be, Alister Jack has surely earned his place in the Conservative and Unionist pantheon. In wielding his power as Scottish Secretary, under section 35 of the Scotland Act 1998, to veto the Scottish government’s controversial Gender Recognition Reform Bill, he defied 25 years of received wisdom on devolution. A constitutional showdown between the First Minister and a Westminster Tory could surely only have one winner, and it wasn’t him. The SNP believed this myth too, ...

Although the US Republican national convention is still 17 months away, the GOP presidential candidate pool has now widened to two candidates. This week Nikki Haley the former South Carolina governor and UN ambassador, announced that she’s taking on Donald Trump for the 2024 presidential nomination.   Haley made her announcement in a video filmed on the old railroad tracks of what one presumes is her hometown of Bamberg, South Carolina. The announcement contained all the normal tropes of a political campaign advertisement: Haley shakes hands with police officers, smiles at schoolchildren, warns of the “socialist left”. An enormous American flag flutters in the wind.    As far as political theatre goes the campaign video does a good job of making Nikki Haley sound ...

What is £211,500 a year to head up equality and diversity at a healthcare research non-profit? A ludicrous waste of money? A grift non-job and sector that exist only to further themselves, which if they were abolished overnight the economy would lose nothing. And what business does a charity have paying an equality and diversity officer (whatever one of those does) £50,000 more than the Prime Minister anyway? So ran the – by now fairly predictable – online response to the Wellcome Trust's ad for a chief equity, diversity and inclusion officer yesterday. Leave aside the question of how much we pay our PMs, or the likelihood that many complaining would be all too delighted if the Prime Minister was awarded ...

High-quality and wide-ranging data has been key in creating artificial intelligence for years. It is all the more important in the advent of, for example, OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which seems to be all anyone can talk about right now. When OpenAI researchers created GPT-3, a precursor to ChatGPT, they filtered out 98.7 per cent of the data from their original dataset, and used datasets of books and English-language Wikipedia to achieve the resulting model. In fact, progress in AI may be limited more by lack of high quality data than the researchers’ access to specialised computers or talent. This means that the race for data is on between companies such as Google and Microsoft to build increasingly powerful AI models in a bid ...