So much for the male gaze

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A small mouse in Wales that has been tidying up a man’s shed almost every night for two months. The rigorous rodent gathers up items including clothes pegs, corks, nuts and bolts, and drops them into a tray. “I couldn’t believe it,” says 75-year-old Rodney Holbrook, who set up a night vision camera to catch the miniature maid in action. “I call him Welsh Tidy Mouse.”

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Jessica Daley, an actress who travelled more than 150 miles to rescue a production of Evita. Staff at the Curve Theatre in Leicester put out an urgent call for a replacement after both the lead and the understudy were laid low with illness. Daley, who led an international tour of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical in 2019, immediately agreed, and drove down from Middlesbrough. “I walked straight into the building, straight on to stage, straight into rehearsals,” she said. “So we just hit the ground running.”

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Supermarkets, for ruthlessly hiking the prices of low-alcohol beer just in time for Dry January. Analysis by The Grocer magazine found that the average cost of nine popular booze-free brands, including Birra Moretti Zero and Guinness Draught 0.0, is up 22.3% since the start of December.

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Xi Jinping, for not forgetting old pals, says Insider. In 1985, aged 31, Xi went to study agriculture in Muscatine, Iowa, where he made friends with the Lande family. When he visited the state again in 2012, as China’s vice president, he dropped in on Mr and Mrs Lande at their home. And during his trip to San Francisco in November last year, he invited the couple to California – along with several other “old friends” from the Hawkeye State – for a slap-up dinner.

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Gen Z, according to Hollywood star Jodie Foster, who says she finds the younger generation – those born between 1997 and 2012 – “really annoying” to work with. “They’re like: ‘Nah, I’m not feeling it today, I’m gonna come in at 10.30am,’” the 61-year-old told The Guardian. “Or in emails, I’ll tell them: this is all grammatically incorrect, did you not check your spelling? And they’re like: ‘Why would I do that, isn’t that kind of limiting?’”

The tech titans betting on a human-free future

Effective altruism is the idea that you should calibrate your life around doing the most good for the world, says Christian Stöcker in Der Spiegel. It’s associated with “long-termism”, whose adherents are concerned with big-picture “existential risks” – primarily, these days, the possibility that a super-powerful AI could “subjugate or casually wipe out humanity”. While this cautious approach has won support among many Western politicians, an “aggressive counter-movement” is developing in Silicon Valley: “effective accelerationism”, often shortened to “e/acc” online. It’s a direct riposte to effective altruism – to best help humanity, goes the thinking, technological progress should be hastened rather than slowed down.

Underneath this optimistic outlook lies “something darker”. A few months ago, the billionaire venture capitalist Marc Andreessen published his Techno-Optimist Manifesto, a “wild, incoherent hodgepodge” of libertarian ideology and “Twitter-ready slogans”. It rails against all who stand in the way of “unrestricted development of technology”, and exhorts readers to learn mixed martial arts in anticipation of governments losing control. Andreessen quotes from the Futurist Manifesto, a 1909 screed by Italian proto-fascist Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, which describes war as “the only cure for the world”. Another e/acc disciple, the former Google engineer Guillaume Verdon, has written that the ideology has “no special loyalty to biological substrates for intelligence and life”. In plain language, this is a belief “that the future can function without people”. It’s a chilling sentiment, but one with increasing currency among rich and powerful tech titans.

Hiding masterpieces from the Nazis

To avoid what the Germans call Raubkunst – the plundering of cultural artefacts by the Third Reich during World War Two – the works of entire museums “were taken off walls and hidden”, says Hannah Steinkopf-Frank in Messy Nessy. The Greeks stashed their exhibits in underground trenches fortified with concrete. In France, the Louvre closed for three whole days in 1939, under the pretence of “repair work”. Some 200 staff, students and volunteers bundled the museum’s bounty into 2,000 crates, which were carefully shipped off to a Loire Valley chateau. Each box was marked with up to three coloured dots to reflect its importance: “green for major pieces, yellow for valuable ones, and red for the world’s greatest treasures”. The Mona Lisa was given three red dots.

Much the same was happening across the Channel. In the 10 days before Britain declared war on Germany, most of the National Gallery’s collection was sent to Wales, scattered across the country in the likes of Penrhyn Castle and the National Library in Aberystwyth. Amid fears of stray bombs – and of the frequently drunk owner of Penrhyn Castle doing something stupid – the collection was centralised in 1940 in a disused quarry in Snowdonia. To keep the operation secret, some of the world’s “most treasured paintings” were transported in trucks disguised as Post Office vans and Cadbury lorries. Kenneth Clark, the National Gallery’s director, had suggested to Winston Churchill that they ship everything off to Canada. “Hide them in caves and cellars,” the prime minister responded, “but not one picture shall leave this island.”

Who’s the next Kissinger?

The death of Henry Kissinger last November created “the world’s most exclusive job vacancy”, says Adrian Wooldridge in Bloomberg: that of global “wise man”, fount of geopolitical insight, and “all-purpose political consultant”. There are no viable Kissinger replacements in the US: Bill Clinton’s personal life is too incriminating, Barack Obama lacks gravitas, and all the Republicans are deranged populists. Elsewhere, Angela Merkel’s reputation is “shrinking by the year”, while New Zealand’s Jacinda Ardern is a “geostrategic lightweight”. Which leaves one candidate: Sir Anthony Charles Lynton Blair.

Like Kissinger, Tony Blair has admirers across the political spectrum, connections all around the world, and a taste for “conferences, luxury holidays and celebrity friends”. Both men have been accused of war crimes. While Blair might lack Kissinger’s intellectual depth, he is well versed on modern geopolitical essentials like demographics and climate change – and his thinktank, the 450-strong Blair Institute, makes Kissinger Associates “look like a minnow”. Blair’s worldview is that of a “liberal crusader” tempered by failure, most notably the “fiasco in Iraq”. This chastened attitude is more useful right now than Kissinger-style realpolitik – the West must “do business with distasteful people”, sure, but we also need to “sing the song of freedom” in a world of self-confident autocrats. “There is no one like Henry Kissinger,” began Blair’s effusive tribute to the man upon his death. Well, maybe there is.

A job ad for our times

I’ve finally found something that, were I American, would tempt me to vote for Donald Trump, says Matthew Parris in The Times. It’s a recent job ad for a position at New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts, which promises that the successful applicant will be chosen:

“without regard to age, alienage, caregiver status, childbirth, citizenship status, colour, creed, disability, domestic violence victim status, ethnicity, familial status, gender and/or gender identity or expression, marital status, military status, national origin, parental status, partnership status, predisposing genetic characteristics, pregnancy, race, religion, reproductive health decision-making, sex, sexual orientation, unemployment status, veteran status, or any other legally protected basis. Women, racial and ethnic minorities, persons of minority sexual orientation or gender identity, individuals with disabilities, and veterans are encouraged to apply for vacant positions at all levels.”

What an insane “word soup”. Why on earth didn’t they just say they would “disregard personal characteristics unrelated to the applicant’s ability to do the job”?