A new arrival’s love letter to Britain

“I read the greens in Spanish, but I putt in English.”

“Chi Chi” Rodríguez, who has died aged 88, was adored by golf fans for his flamboyant style, says The Times. He would often salsa across the course and, after sinking a birdie putt, drop his Panama hat over the hole “so the little birdie won’t fly away”. When the PGA Tour banned this routine, he came up with “the sword dance”: waggling his club at the hole “like a matador thrusting a sword at a bull”, then pretending to wipe off the blood and “returning the weapon to its scabbard”. Golf, he once said, “is the most fun you can have without taking your clothes off”. In 1970, he was fined for distracting another player by “cavorting with a bunker rake” during the final round of a tournament. A deficient short game prevented him from becoming one of the greats, but he was always “more interested in being popular than winning”. Shots that veered too far right were “Ronald Reagans”. Discussing his woes on the green, he explained: “I read the greens in Spanish, but I putt in English.”

Juan Antonio Rodríguez was born into poverty in San Juan in 1935. He almost died aged four from rickets, which left him with the crooked fingers he said helped his grip. He first practiced his swing by hitting tin cans with guava tree branches, and swapped toiling in the sugar cane fields for caddying at a wealthy country club. A member gave him a pair of oversized golf shoes which he stuffed with paper, and he filled his pockets with broken glass, shaking it so people thought it was jangling money. He later honed his game at a resort run by Laurance Rockefeller, who gave him $12,000 financial backing to join the PGA Tour in 1960. “The first time I played the Masters, I was so nervous I drank a bottle of rum before I teed off,” he once said. “I shot the happiest 83 of my life.”

The ancient algorithms guiding ants

Ants are far more impressive than people think, says Claire Evans on Substack. The creepy crawlies are 140 million years old, older than the dinosaurs. There are around 14,000 known species, only about 50 of which have been studied in any depth. And their versatility is incredible. “Some farm fungus; some enslave other ants; some weave nests from larval silk; some build leaf castles mortared with aphid spit; some build bridges from their own bodies; some keep other insects as livestock.” Even more impressive is the fact they do all this despite that individual ants are “dumb, mostly blind, and can’t remember anything for more than ten seconds”.

The way they get things done, of course, is by acting as a colony. Specifically, they rely on algorithms – in the pre-internet sense of the word, meaning “a sequence of instructions one must follow to achieve a task”. One example is ants laying down pheromones to signal the location of food to their peers. It’s called a “recruitment trail”: each ant that comes across the trail follows it until they find the food source, then takes that food back to the colony. In doing so, it lays down more pheromones, creating a feedback loop that reinforces the trail until all the food is gone. And while this may sound simple and obvious, studies have shown that the algorithm Harvester ants use to coordinate their foraging is eerily similar to the Transmission Control Protocol used to regulate data traffic on the internet. “Meaning that ants beat us to network design by 100 million years.”

What JLo could learn from Elizabeth Taylor

It’s been an annus horribilis for Jennifer Lopez, says Jennifer Weiner in The New York Times. Not only did she hastily cancel her unpopular world tour, but after months of internet speculation about the state of her relationship with Ben Affleck, she finally filed for divorce – on the two-year anniversary of their lavish wedding. The sad but inevitable news reminded me of someone else whose acting achievements were overshadowed by a tumultuous love life: Elizabeth Taylor. Over eight decades, the Hollywood icon was married eight times to seven men (twice to Richard Burton). At just 55, JLo has already walked down the aisle four times and been engaged five.

In both cases, the fans and media outlets that had once so eagerly built them up, were all too happy to lavish attention on their declines. But here’s the thing: between “getting married, divorced and married again”, Taylor found the time to put her celebrity status to good use, holding fund-raisers, giving money, urging Ronald Reagan to make a speech about Aids. “I resented my fame,” she said, “until I realised I could use it.” So far Lopez has followed in Taylor’s footsteps by accident, but perhaps her best next move is to do so on purpose. There’s still time for her to become JLo the “world-changer” instead of JLo “the eternal bride”.