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Yesterday, more than five decades since they broke up, we were treated to the sound of a new song by John Lennon and his Beatles colleagues. There’s a fascinating backstory about how a half-written song scratchily recorded on a cassette machine in 1977 was brought to life by digital technology using artificial intelligence. But the thing that really raised the hairs on the back of my neck was that I was listening to a brand new song from the Fab Four when two of them are long dead. The song itself is unremarkable if you ask me (which is probably why Lennon never completed it), but the labour of love by Paul McCartney – with help from Ringo Starr and the late
George Harrison – makes for a heartwarming tale.
I found some of the rather X-rated language emerging from Dominic Cummings’ appearance at the COVID inquiry this week fairly remarkable. Not so much the actual words, perhaps, but the fact that someone would type them in a work-related message. Cummings’ evidence to the inquiry was riveting, mainly because of what it revealed about the way Johnson’s administration went about its business. I’ll say no more, except to note that when I heard that his staff referred to Boris Johnson as a “trolley” because he changed direction so often, I was irresistibly reminded of one of my former senior editors (not at The Conversation) who we referred to as “the suitcase”
because someone always had to carry him.
My week has mainly been taken up with coverage of the tragedy unfolding in Gaza. The death toll in the Strip – overwhelmingly made up of innocent civilians, just as in Hamas’s attack on Israel – is rising with unbearable rapidity. And any hope of a peaceful resolution to the Israel-Palestine question has in all probability disappeared for another generation as what looks like a devastating land war gets started in the face of dwindling international support. To help you keep abreast of our coverage of the conflict, we’ve launched a fortnightly digest of the most incisive commentary on this desperate situation. Sign up to receive it here.
This week we also carried a review of a new film about the legendary ancient British warrior queen Boudica, we explored ways in which our brain can distort the passage of time, we considered a new study that suggests that our consumption of salt might be a factor in developing type 2 diabetes, and we pondered the real relationship between interest rates and inflation.
Our friends and colleagues around the world, meanwhile, worried that giraffes might become extinct, while in Australia they are trying to deal with what appears to be a plague of sea urchins. And our American bureau charted the rise and rise of intersectionality.
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