I keep making the mistake of assuming that my partner, a fine dining chef, might enjoy watching films set in his workplace. We discovered the opposite may be true on the morning the trailer was released for Boiling Point, a British film starring Stephen Graham as the tempestuous head chef of an East London restaurant. About 20 seconds in – more precisely, at the moment Graham started screaming at the young commis chef – he asked to turn it off and muttered something along the lines of “why would I want to spend my spare time watching something I have to experience for 16 hours a day”. Fair point. For everyone else, there seems to be a growing appetite for stories that ...

Liz Truss single-handedly hiked the average family's annual mortgage bill by £1,200. She came within hours of crashing several major pension funds. Her plan to borrow money to give it away to rich people has left the UK's fiscal credibility in doubt long after her departure. Any ordinary mortal who had managed to throw away their political career in 49 days of financial chaos might want to spend some time reflecting, learning or even just taking a rest from the charade of statesmanship. But not Liz Truss. She's been in Washington DC this month at the International Democrat Union Forum, a global get-together for right-wing conservatives. She rubbed shoulders with Sebastian Kurz, the disgraced former Austrian chancellor who formed a government ...

No longer does an abundance of snow mean a magical day off school, where nature brings everything to a halt. Where there’s nothing for kids to do but gleefully throw snowballs in the street, pelting each other with ice and screaming with joy. Or take delightfully chilly walks, feet crunching, and build snowmen (or, as my eleven-year-old daughter just corrected me, rather crossly, "snow PEOPLE!" There is no gender stereotyping to be had around Gen Z). No: kids are still off school today, but now they’re cooped up inside working instead of playing. Right now my daughter is staring glassy-eyed at a laptop screen, doing "online learning". History and science lessons just aren’t the same as a cold, fresh day of ...

It’s a Thursday evening and I head to the pub with a few colleagues for some much-needed respite after a long week. We stand awkwardly by the bar – there are six of us and a full round will cost the same as the deposit on a Nissan Micra. I covertly pick an ally, who will be my “round partner” for the evening. But now someone else appears and offers to buy me a drink. They have disrupted the system. I agree due to social anxiety but have now foolishly entered a reckless round of three. When it’s my turn I spend a heart-crushing £33.50, knowing that this could have bought me lunch for a week, a new pair of jeans ...

Can you imagine Rishi Sunak addressing the nation and saying the word “condom” out loud? He would hide behind the lectern, mumble it without making eye contact with the camera. It would be undignified. Liz Truss probably would have gone too far the other way. She would have said it and winked, with that unnerving smile of hers. Tasked with discussing contraception with the great British public, Boris Johnson would have almost certainly made a joke in Latin then stuck a condom on his ear. It is, after all, unclear that he knows how they are meant to be used. In short: it is tough to imagine a British prime minister discussing safer sex practices without either them or the audience yearning ...

After living for five years in this country I have noticed that Brits hold certain, and not entirely unfair, stereotypes of Americans. We come across as a little bit loud, a bit too smiley, overly opinionated, irritatingly chatty and occasionally inclined to oversharing.  With perhaps no one is this stereotype more obvious than with the Duchess of Sussex, Meghan Markle. She does indeed smile a lot. And no matter how fantastic she looks in monochromatic knee-length dresses you can’t help but think that she gets home and immediately changes into ripped jeans and a T-shirt. She’s an American’s American. The type that not only talks about her feelings, but goes on Oprah and tells the whole world about grievances with her ...

The artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot ChatGPT is an amazing piece of technology. There’s little wonder why it has gone viral since its release on 30 November. If the chatbot is asked a question in natural language it instantly responds with a, usually, impressive answer – whether it’s writing biblical verse in the style of the King James Bible about removing a peanut butter sandwich from a VCR, or summarising scientific problems in simple language… or dispensing horrific racism. I’m sorry, I simply cannot be cynical about a technology that can accomplish this. pic.twitter.com/yjlY72eZ0m— Thomas H. Ptacek (@tqbf) December 2, 2022 ChatGPT, an interface for the GPT-3 technology built by the company OpenAI, nominally has filters intended to prevent the creation of ...

I've been on GB News for the last two weekends, but have been told I'm not on this coming Sunday. Even after what happened last weekend, however, I’d give it a go. Many of my friends disagree with me, saying the right-wing television station shouldn’t be given any encouragement, but as long as I can get my point across I’m willing. What happened after the most recent edition of the amusingly-named Common Sense Crusade with Calvin Robinson was unprecedented in my 40-year television career, during which I hosted a daily show in Canada for 17 years and have appeared on Al-Jazeera, Fox News, Russia Today and pretty much everything in between. Outnumbered two to one, I argued the case for bubble zones ...