I had just put something in the oven when the phone rang. It was my husband, who hesitated for a moment before he said: “I’ve just been stung by a stingray. Can you come down to the beach?” He’d taken the car to drive down for a swim, so I was going to have to…
Since the release of ChatGPT in late 2022, generative artificial intelligence has trickled down from adults in their offices to university students in campus libraries to teenagers in high school hallways. Now it’s reaching the youngest among us, and parents and teachers are grappling with the most responsible way to introduce their under-13s to a…
It may be the oldest art form in the world, practised 5,000 years ago by Ötzi the iceman and his fellow copper age Europeans. But with its more recent associations with red-light entertainment and gangland crime, modern tattooing has long been shunned by the galleries that turn lines on canvas into financial assets. A new…
I first got drunk at 13 in the upstairs room of a cheap Italian restaurant, sip by sip on other people’s wine. I giggled as the floor lurched, telling my companions, It’s like being on a boat. I first got paralytic at 13, a few months on. Remembering the pleasant, silly sensation I’d experienced, I…
There’s nothing funny about your co-worker being assassinated. But it was the death of my beloved colleague and friend Hisham al-Hashimi that led me into the world of standup comedy. I knew it would trash my hard-won career in international security, but I didn’t care any more. Hisham had run a workshop with me in…
“You’ll never eat a good meal in a restaurant that puts caviar on scrambled eggs”; “Your dining companions should have a say in what you order”; “There is nothing wrong with making multiple reservations for the same evening and then cancelling them.” The Financial Times asked its food writers to produce a set of commandments…