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Sean Thomas

Sean Thomas

The Spectator

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Gang land / Why is Latin America so violent?

As locations go, they don’t get more humdrum than the address ‘Carrera 79B, #45D/94’. It is so anonymous it sounds encrypted. Nor, in reality,...

15.04.2024 8

The Spectator

Sean Thomas

AI / The person who edited this will soon be redundant

Whenever I write about AI on The Spectator (which is a lot) I always get comments like ‘Yawn. Wake me up when AI actually does something’. And, to...

05.04.2024 10

The Spectator

Sean Thomas

Divergence / Is AI the biggest Brexit benefit?

It’s not easy being a Leaver, right now. For a start, the government that actually delivered Brexit – the present Tory government – is facing a...

01.04.2024 6

The Spectator

Sean Thomas

The secret to taking ayahuasca

Antioquia, Colombia If you’ve ever wondered what happened to drug lord Pablo Escobar’s enormous cocaine and occasional execution palace, as...

14.03.2024 5

The Spectator

Sean Thomas

Now AI is coming for musicians

Do you remember those far off misty days of yore, when shocking, startling, amazing, disquieting revelations from the world of Artificial Intelligence...

12.03.2024 10

The Spectator

Sean Thomas

Cambodia / It’s the best country in the world

Yeah, I know, ridiculous. Cambodia? How can that be the best country in the entire world? For a start, most people can’t place it on a map. This...

06.03.2024 9

The Spectator

Sean Thomas

P(doom) / Are we ready?

It’s difficult to remember a time before climate change – a time when our daily discourse, our newspaper front pages, endless movies and TV...

04.03.2024 20

The Spectator

Sean Thomas

OpenAI / AI just exploded. Again

When they come to write the history of the AI revolution, there’s a good chance that the writers will devote many chapters to the early 2020s....

26.02.2024 6

The Spectator

Sean Thomas

Drugs / Think legalisation is a good idea? Visit Fentanyl Land

In 1988, I lived on the backpackery Khaosan Road, Bangkok, in a hotel which offered heroin on room service. It went like this: in the morning, you...

21.02.2024 20

The Spectator

Sean Thomas

How to check in to a haunted hotel

The haunted hotel. It’s a definite thing, isn’t it? From Stanley Kubrick’s classic The Shining to the slightly less classic I Still Know What...

15.02.2024 5

The Spectator

Sean Thomas

It’s official: modern music is bad

It’s one of the hoariest cliches in popular culture: that every fading generation must, in flailing anger at its own imminent irrelevance, turn on...

13.02.2024 20

The Spectator

Sean Thomas

Unlike / The world would be a better place without Facebook

It’s sometimes difficult to remember a time before Facebook, isn’t it? It’s like trying to remember a time before the espresso martini (invented...

04.02.2024 40

The Spectator

Sean Thomas

AI just changed the world. Again

Argentine President Javier Milei’s recent speech, to the World Economic Forum in Davos, has caused a stir for several reasons. First, it was someone...

20.01.2024 5

The Spectator

Sean Thomas

Sicily and the slow collapse of civilisation

Even in the long-shadowed depths of winter, Sicily can be a seductive place. From the hushed, hidden and time-polished marble piazzas of intricately...

15.01.2024 30

The Spectator

Sean Thomas

Have we just discovered aliens?

It’s one of the greatest puzzles of the universe, and one that has vexed humanity ever since we first gazed at the stars and thought of other...

08.01.2024 60

The Spectator

Sean Thomas

Will we worship the AI?

It’s hard to believe that only five years ago the word/acronym AI was barely seen outside the science pages, and even then solely in the most...

30.12.2023 5

The Spectator

Sean Thomas

Why wokeness really is like fascism

If you had to choose a political word of the decade you could do worse than ‘woke’. Because these days ‘woke’ – and its various subsidiary...

27.12.2023 5

The Spectator

Sean Thomas

Hunting werewolves dans la France profonde

As a travel writer, you soon learn that there are countries which, when you mention them, elicit a polite smile of incomprehension, which says: er,...

19.12.2023 9

The Spectator

Sean Thomas

Gulp / Ozempic has cured my alcoholism

Remember the lockdowns? I wish I didn’t, but I do. Especially that insanely grim third lockdown, the winter one, which went on and on and on and...

13.12.2023 10

The Spectator

Sean Thomas

Smack my granny up / Why the dying deserve illegal drugs

It was about a year ago when my dying father, diagnosed with terminal lung cancer, turned to me and said ‘Sean, can you get me some heroin?’. For...

08.12.2023 10

The Spectator

Sean Thomas

Maggie, Maggie, Maggie / Why the world loves Margaret Thatcher

There are many rituals surrounding the placement of a new Japanese Emperor on the Chrysanthemum Throne. Perhaps the most peculiar is the would-be...

04.12.2023 4

The Spectator

Sean Thomas

What’s wrong with eating dog? 

From my desk, as I write this, in a lofty room in the Rosewood Hotel in Phnom Penh, I can look down at the bustling streets and see the concrete,...

30.11.2023 8

The Spectator

Sean Thomas

The Museum of London’s dubious ‘race research’

I don’t know about you, but I love a bit of topical reading when I go abroad. That’s why, in my last week of travelling between lush, green,...

24.11.2023 4

The Spectator

Sean Thomas

Why is Suella Braverman doing so well on social media? 

As phrases go, ‘Twitter analytics’ is not the most exciting, especially now we are, apparently, meant to say ‘the social medium formerly known...

17.11.2023 8

The Spectator

Sean Thomas

Poor taste / Why I love terrible towns

There are plenty of reasons to visit Catania in Sicily, and some of them are positive. The town is impressively ancient – dating back to the 8th...

16.11.2023 6

The Spectator

Sean Thomas

What BLM and the Remembrance Day protests had in common

Back in June 2020, I attended a quasi-legal Black Lives Matter protest in London, and a widely reviled counter protest, by hard-right Tommy...

12.11.2023 8

The Spectator

Sean Thomas

Welsh Marches / The Welsh Marches: England’s foodie frontier

I’m in a car embarking on a road trip through one of the great foodie regions of the world, charged with the onerous task of scoffing and boozing my...

06.11.2023 8

The Spectator

Sean Thomas

Rishi Sunak is too late – the AI monster is at the door

He must be a busy man, Rishi Sunak. When he’s not rescuing the country from inflation, sending the Royal Navy towards troublezones, making long...

01.11.2023 20

The Spectator

Sean Thomas

AI will destroy TV news

As we all know, the last few days have been filled with terrible news out of Israel and Gaza, and this news – on mainstream or social media – has...

22.10.2023 10

The Spectator

Sean Thomas

I want my prime minister to bore me

We’ve all been there, haven’t we? One minute you are sitting down, with a cup of tea, ready to listen to Sir Keir Starmer’s latest conference...

17.10.2023 10

The Spectator

Sean Thomas

Vandalism / What we lost with the fallen sycamore

I don’t know about you, but my reaction to learning about the felling of that tree in Northumberland was, well, weird. For a start, unlike many...

30.09.2023 20

The Spectator

Sean Thomas

Whisky lullaby / The night I accidentally saved a baby

I was writing a thriller in northeast Laos about 15 years ago near a town called Phonsavan, researching a mysterious megalithic site known as the...

27.09.2023 4

The Spectator

Sean Thomas

The deep absurdity of HS2 diversity’s agenda

When it comes to British railway history, I can say, without exaggeration, that few places are more iconically located than my own home. This is...

26.09.2023 30

The Spectator

Sean Thomas

Hyped cuisine / French food is the most disappointing in the world

There are certain things that are so shocking they can only be said by close friends. And as the British have been in a close friendship – an...

15.09.2023 6

The Spectator

Sean Thomas

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