Article in Atlantic claims The Blue Fighter was artificially generated, days after it won Caine prize for African writers
The Zimbabwean writer Simbarashe Kundizeza has denied using AI to write a prize-winning short story after an article in the Atlantic said software had flagged it as almost completely AI-generated.
Kundizeza’s story The Blue Fighter was announced as the winner of the prestigious Caine prize for African writers on 6 October. Five days later, The Atlantic published an article by the author and journalist Vauhini Vara titled: “Yet Another Literary prize winner Seems to Be AI.”
Some medieval books can’t be read by anyone, and one of them has become almost a trademark of the genre: the Voynich manuscript, kept at Yale University and dated to the 15th century. It has inspired novels and theories of every kind. Specialists often place another volume right behind it on the list of enigmas, […]
Chemical fertilizers and animal waste contain nitrates and phosphorus that can get washed with rain or snowmelt into the state's rivers. That affects Iowa's more liberal urban centers which rely on rivers and lakes for drinking water.
Graham Linehan, the Father Ted creator, may have been unfairly arrested by the Metropolitan Police because of his gender-critical views, the police watchdog has said.
A backlash is building against an EU ‘omnibus’ bill that seeks to make it easier to authorise and use pesticides across the bloc.
MEPs are still yet to set a date to vote on the European Commission’s proposal to extend how long pesticide active substances can stay approved in the EU, amid a series of protest letters from scientists, UN health experts, and divisions among member states.
EI parliament’s environment and agriculture committees were originally expected to hold a joint vote on a compromise text on 5 October, but shelved that date without proposing another as this article went to publication.
Sustained criticism has come from the scientific community.
Last month, a group of more than 500 scientists signed an open letter to the commission on 16 September demanding a pause on the file pending “an independent assessment, whether carried out by parliament’s own research service or by an equivalent independent body.”
They warned that the commission’s plan to extend grace periods for products withdrawn on safety grounds, widen derogations for hazardous substances, and restrict the use of the latest independent scientific evidence “seem difficult to reconcile with the precautionary principle and with obligations to respect, protect and fulfil human rights, including the rights of peasants and other people working in rural areas”.
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Manville’s academic psychologist finds herself trapped in a tower block wasteland in 1980s Warsaw. Bizarre and surreal details add to the sinister vibe
Part cold war thriller, part Kafkaesque reverie, this movie takes us back to the sinister drear of Poland in 1981, when General Jaruzelski has just introduced martial law in reaction to the dangerous new mood of freedom occasioned by the Solidarity trade unions. The director is Kasia Adamik, daughter of The Green Border’s Agnieszka Holland; the film is adapted from a story by Olga Tokarczuk, called Professor Andrews Goes to Warsaw.
Lesley Manville plays Professor Andrews, an academic clinical psychologist (like Tokarczuk) from Britain with testy, peremptory mannerisms; her indulgence is a fondness for taking Polaroid photos. She has attained a certain level of celebrity for a book on dreams, despite claiming that she never dreams herself. Andrews has been invited to give a lecture in Warsaw, during which she begins to outline views on mental illness not unlike those of Laing or Foucault; but her speech is chaotically disrupted by students shouting that Poland itself is an oppressive asylum.
Shane Gillis is an actor and comedian. He first came to my attention in September 2019, when he was hired to be a new cast member on Saturday Night Live—and then abruptly fired after it was revealed that he had (gasp) told offensive jokes. (SNL creator Lorne Michaels subsequently said that the network forced him to fire Gillis, and he thought the whole controversy was stupid.)
Since then, Gillis's career has really taken off, to the extent that he has repeatedly returned to SNL as a guest host. He did so again on October 10, delivering a monologue in which he made the following observation: "I haven't been to the gym in so long, I didn't know women just dress like whores now."
Some people are really mad about that joke, including the actor Dan Levy, who called Gillis a misogynist and implied that this sort of joke was emboldening men to treat women as objects—and to sexually assault them.
"It's complacency that has created the environment in which women are sexually assaulted," said Levy.
He was not the only one to make this claim. On The View, Sara Haines echoed Levy's criticism and said that such language—the word whore in particular—was demeaning.
"I'm not saying a joke makes an assault, but it makes it much easier to look at another human as an object," she said.
This is unpersuasive.
I might understand why people would take offense if Gillis consistently singled out women for unrelenting abuse. When it comes to humor, context is everything, and a harmless joke can come off as mean-spirited if it seems targeted.
But in that very same monologue, Gillis denigrates men, gay men, his sisters, and himself—repeatedly. He admits that he's fat and ugly. That's the basis of the humor. It does not suggest that he has some problem with women or enjoys laughing at their expense and solely their expense. He's doing observational comedy, and no one is spared, not even Gillis. He even makes a joke about how he might unintentionally come off as threatening to women, because he's a big ugly guy.
It would be weird if women wearing skin-tight clothing at the gym was for some reason an off-limits subject for comedians. Why? It's OK to insult men's appearance, but not women's? Is that really the standard? Of course not.
Indeed, it is trivially easy to find examples of liberal-coded comedians (Gillis is one of those right-coded, anti–political correctness, Joe Rogan types), mocking the appearances of specific women. Jimmy Kimmel's recent monologue went after Katie Zacharia, the Trump administration's new press secretary, for her looks. Kimmel insinuated that she's a dumb blonde who was picked just because she's attractive. He even showed a photo of her at the gym, dressed semi-provocatively!
You know how the left is trying to cancel Shane Gillis for his SNL remarks about women at the gym, well, Jimmy Kimmel puts up a picture of Katie Zacharia at the gym, "Oh, wait, just kidding. This is the new press secretary, former Newsmax commentator Katie Zacharia, seen here,… pic.twitter.com/ANYeqhfVev
Was Kimmel inviting sexual violence against Zacharia? Of course not. It would be ludicrous to pretend that this joke was somehow out of bounds.
The same goes for Gillis, though.
The Hollywood Reporter writes that Gillis's brand of humor just isn't a good fit for SNL, which has become a show by liberals, for liberals, and aimed at skewering the Trump administration. That's fair enough: Personally, I didn't think the Gillis monologue was particularly funny, though I am well-accustomed to consuming SNL in stone-faced silence. I find about 99 percent of the skits are cringe and humorless. It's not for me.
The team behind director Takashi Yamazaki’s new film created their kaiju roars by setting up speakers on top of an outdoor dam. The people walking by weren’t prepared for what they heard.
This over 1,000-page masterpiece offers a panoramic view of society in the 19th century and exposes the collapse of a merchant family: unrecognized sons, disillusioned daughters and the loss of middle-class ideals.
Portuguese farmers are demanding a €140 million support package from the government, warning that rising production costs are making it increasingly difficult to compete with neighbouring Spain. Around 150 leaders
Czech literature, artificial intelligence, audiobooks, long standing participation and freedom of expression shaped five days of international publishing business and public debate The Frankfurt Book Fair welcomed 236,000 visitors from 137 countries in 2026, sustaining its position as the international publishing industry’s principal meeting place. Across five days, the fair combined rights negotiations and professional […]
Short skirts, knee-high socks, white blouses: Girls' school uniform items are widely used as costumes in pornographic videos. As students experience harassment, a group wants to change that.
Can Xue is considered one of this year's favorites; Margaret Atwood and Salman Rushdie are other strong contenders. But what goes on behind the scenes in the selection of the Nobel Prize in literature?
TEHRAN, Oct. 11 (MNA) – The Shallow Miscalculations of Raw Western Researchers in Their Think Tanks Regarding the Ordinary, Empty-Handed, Yet Complex People in the Squares and Streets of Iran.
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