As part of our series AI for the People, our resident AI skeptic Rhik Samadder agreed to put his life in AI’s hands. This week: therapy
It’s Sunday morning, and I type my feelings into the chatbox, too wound-up to stop.
“I’ve become a carer to my 82-year-old mother,” I write. “Every day brings new problems. I help with hospital appointments, finances, gardening, shopping, home repairs, the council, insurance companies, letters, emails, endless IT problems …”
Continue reading...From hefty literary magazines to thriving newspaper kiosks and book sales, the French publishing industry refuses to let printed matter die
It took me nine months of 20-hours-a-week French language instruction, and the mycelial network of a year spent in Strasbourg, to feel courageous enough to walk into a bookshop to buy something more challenging than Le Petit Prince. I was immediately humbled: there was an entire new universe, just barely linguistically accessible, and I had no idea who was who, who was writing what or what might interest me.
A year later, I came back to France for graduate school after an 11-month interlude working for an NGO in southern Chad, still feeling like an intellectual toddler in my now two-year-old second language. During the first week of courses, I asked a highly bilingual classmate where in the French media landscape I could find long-form narrative reporting with a literary edge – something comparable to the New Yorker. “You have to read XXI,” he told me, and then a few days later brought me a copy.
Alexander Hurst writes for Guardian Europe from Paris. His memoir Generation Desperation is out now
Continue reading...Ahead of World Book Day on Thursday, Guardian music writers pick out the musicians whose literary references illuminated them – from Adam Ant on Joe Orton to the National on Grace Paley
I first heard the Cure’s Charlotte Sometimes as a teenager, and it was like waking up from a dream. With dissonant guitar chiming like church bells and opaque lyrics about preparing for bed, it unburied a childhood memory of reading Penelope Farmer’s ghostly 1969 book of the same name. As a child I’d found it fantastical: on Charlotte’s first night at boarding school, she wakes to find herself 40 years in the past, in the body of someone else, with an unfamiliar moon in the sky. But as a teen, re-reading the story on Robert Smith’s recommendation, it held a mirror to my increasingly uncertain sense of self. To hear Charlotte’s disorientation play out through uneasy bass and Smith’s dizzying, doubled-up vocals was strangely comforting; confirmation that growing up has always felt like time-travelling. Learning that the band recorded it exactly 10 years, to the day, before I was born was further proof: my own cosmic link to a past life. Katie Hawthorne
Continue reading...Explosions heard across Iranian capital as Israeli military announces further ‘broad-scale strikes’ against regime
Israel has carried out another wave of strikes on Tehran and Beirut while Iranian missiles continued to fly toward Israel and the Gulf as the war with Iran entered its fifth day.
Explosions were heard across Tehran in the early hours of Wednesday morning as the Israeli military announced “broad-scale strikes” on Iranian regime targets. Police stations and Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) headquarters in the Kurdish regions of north-western Iran were also razed by strikes, Kurdish media reported.
Continue reading...Groundsman stumbles across room, sealed for more than 100 years, that was part of 12th-century Manchester hall
A sinkhole that opened up on a Manchester golf course has exposed a wine cellar abandoned for more than a century.
The cellar, along with dozens of empty wine and port bottles, was discovered by a groundsman who assumed the hole was nothing more than a collapsed drain.
Continue reading...
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
/s3/static.nrc.nl/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/04103534/040326BIN_2031988210_halsteren0.jpg)
/s3/static.nrc.nl/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/04094341/040326BUI_2032015805_2.jpg)
nikkorglass has added a photo to the pool:
Tokyo Tower and surroundings as seen from Roppongi Hills Mori Tower
An Oracle outage knocked parts of TikTok offline this week. The incident affected Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), which trails AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud in market share but counts the social media behemoth among its customers.…
De hoogste sjiitische geestelijke in Irak, grootayatollah Ali Al-Hussein al-Sistani, heeft de moslims opgeroepen solidair te zijn met Iran. Hij noemt de aanvallen van Israël en de VS op Iran "een ongerechtvaardigde oorlog".
Volgens al-Sistani moeten alle moslims deze oorlog veroordelen en het Iraanse volk steunen. Landen zouden zich volgens hem moeten uitspreken tegen de oorlog en op zoek moeten gaan naar een diplomatieke en vreedzame oplossing van de conflicten rond de Iraanse nucleaire projecten.
Rond de 60 procent van de Iraakse bevolking is sjiitisch. In Iran is dat rond de 90 procent. Al-Sistani is in Iran geboren.
