Joe Biden has issued a “full and unconditional” pardon for his son Hunter, who was facing years in prison following his convictions for gun-related charges and tax evasion. The outgoing president, who had repeatedly pledged not to use his executive authority in this way, said Hunter had been “selectively, and unfairly, prosecuted” because of his family name. Iran-backed militias have entered Syria to help President Assad’s forces, after the Islamist militant group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham seized the country’s second city, Aleppo, yesterday morning. Russia, a long-term Syrian ally, is also bolstering Syria’s army with airstrikes on the rebels. “Brain rot” is the Oxford word of the year. The noun refers to the “supposed deterioration of a person’s mental or intellectual state... as a result of overconsumption of material (now particularly online content) considered to be trivial or unchallenging”. In other words, the opposite of The Knowledge.

Nobody really knows what AI war will look like

I recently attended an off-the-record lecture on AI, delivered by the “head of one of the West’s foremost intelligence agencies”, says Max Hastings in Bloomberg. I know next to nothing about the AI revolution, and was hoping to change that. But after the hush-hush briefing I was still none the wiser. The prophets of AI predict war will soon be a struggle between “rival machine systems” with no humans involved: autonomous drone swarms, “literally superhuman” missile defence systems, and so on. Certainly, if I were running a nation’s weapons procurement, I would decline funding for any new combat aircraft with room for a pilot. But in terms of what any of this will actually look like, or how it will play out, even those at the very top don’t seem to know.

Military AI is often compared to nuclear weapons, for good reason. They both have the potential to destroy humanity, and so they both stir the same instinct to outdo your enemy (“we have no choice save to keep up”). And the extent to which AI will affect the world seems as hard to grasp as it was for nukes. When Winston Churchill was approached in 1941 by his chief scientific adviser seeking permission to investigate nuclear fission to make a bomb, he agreed but couldn’t see the point. “Personally,” he said, “I am quite content with the existing explosives.” One difference is that the Manhattan Project was run by real people – will computers have the same instinct for self-preservation? But there’s still grounds for optimism. My father, seeing the devastation in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, assumed I would spend my life “haunted by the spectre of The Bomb”. In fact, it is extraordinary how cheerfully we have made it through the last 79 years.

It’s been a tough old year for the leaders of the G7 nations, says Charlemagne in The Economist. Incumbents in Britain, the US and Japan have been booted out by voters. Emmanuel Macron called and lost snap parliamentary elections in France; German Chancellor Olaf Scholz is heading for an “electoral drubbing” in February; Canada’s Justin Trudeau may well be “forcibly retired” within a year. The only one who’s still popular is Italy’s Giorgia Meloni – though that may be because she hasn’t had to face voters since winning office in 2022.

Young people are spritzing themselves with pheromones – the chemicals used in the animal kingdom to attract a mate – to boost their love lives, says The Times. The scent shop Parfumery claims its pheromone cologne can trigger emotions of “pure instinct, lust and sexual attraction”; the Notino website reckons its PheroStrong massage oil will “make you irresistible to the opposite sex”. Scientists say it’s all balls: while humans do have the organ in the nose that many animals use to detect pheromones, it’s not active. Still, maybe worth a try?

Starmer’s real problem is that he doesn’t like politics

There are plenty of reasons why Keir Starmer’s administration is already so unpopular, says John Harris in The Guardian, but for me the big one is tone. He and his government simply don’t know how to tell a story. Just look at the protests over the removal of inheritance tax relief for farmers. Whereas those in Barbour jackets and wellies talked passionately about “family, history and the emotional pull of the British landscape”, ministers stuck to “dry numbers”: the £3m couples can pass on tax-free; the fact that it was 50% of the normal rate; the 10-year grace period farmers have to pay it. Stirring rhetoric it was not.

This is something centre-left politicians have long struggled with, not just here but across the West. As the US political strategist Drew Westen wrote back in 2007, too many liberal folk fail to understand that “when reason and emotion collide, emotion invariably wins”. The right are much more comfortable on this terrain: they weave compelling human stories while their opponents earnestly recite facts and figures. The best examples are of course Donald Trump and Nigel Farage. However “monstrous” we lefties find them, we can’t deny that they are “overwhelmingly human”: brazen, instinctive and able to spin a good yarn. Starmer and Rachel Reeves, by comparison, are “stilted and bloodless”. They think “all will be well once the relevant numbers align correctly”. That’s not a winning political message.

🔥😐 Starmer’s real problem, says Charles Moore in The Daily Telegraph, is that he doesn’t like politics. A lawyer to his core, he sees questioning of his policies as an “affront” rather than an opportunity to prove his critics wrong. The most successful politicians of the past 50 years – the likes of Thatcher, Blair, Reagan and Clinton – were “energised” by political challenge. They positively wanted to go out and reach voters, to smell “the smoke of battle” and hear “the roar of the crowd”. On the very day Thatcher was forced out of office in 1990, she told the Commons: “I’m enjoying this!” Sir Keir isn’t enjoying it one bit.

Anyone unfortunate enough to have visited LinkedIn recently will know that the networking site is awash with ponderous, jargon-filled essays by executive types trying to position themselves as “thinkfluencers”. What may or may not come as a surprise is that more than half of them are written by AI bots – a new analysis estimates that 54% of posts longer than 100 words are churned out using ChatGPT and the like. It’s not a bad fit, says Wired: LinkedIn is where people “strive to be the most anodyne version of themselves”. Artificiality, in other words, is “what everybody’s expecting”.

The big trend this festive season is “zebra-striping”: a new term for the old trick of drinking one non-alcoholic drink for every alcoholic one. According to a recent study – admittedly one produced by a prominent alcohol-free beer brand – a quarter of British drinkers now do it at the pub to stop themselves getting too sozzled on a night out. For me, says Daisy Jones in Vogue, nothing will beat the tactic my friend’s mum adopted at parties: every time she had a drink, she’d roll her sleeve up once. “By the time her sleeves were rolled up to mid-forearm, she knew that it was time to dip out.”

It’s a killer whale wearing a “dead salmon hat”, says the Vancouver Sun. Boffins tracking the marine predators in Puget Sound, off the coast of Washington State, have noticed at least one orca balancing a finished-off fish on its head, and “possibly snacking on the salmon at its leisure”. What’s weird is that “sporting a salmon-corpse lid isn’t exactly new behaviour”. The phenomenon was first recorded in 1987, when a single female started doing it, kicking off a trend that soon spread to whales in totally different pods. “Honestly, we have no idea why this started,” says local marine biologist Deborah Giles. Or “why it happens, or why it seems to be starting again”.