Pablo Escobar's wildest legacy

In recent years, hippos have become a common sight in the swamps and rivers of rural Colombia, says Joshua Hammer in The Guardian. The increasing ubiquity of the semi-aquatic African herbivores is perhaps the "wildest legacy" of history's most powerful drug kingpin, Pablo Escobar. When Don Pablo was shot dead in Medellín by Colombian police in 1993, locals poured into his infamous estate – Hacienda Nápoles – in search of rumoured caches of money and weapons. What they found instead was a menagerie of exotic animals, including elephants, giraffes, zebras, ostriches and kangaroos. When authorities seized the property five years later, they shipped most of the surviving wildlife to nearby zoos – except a small bloat of hippos (reportedly three females and one male), deemed too dangerous to move. Today, their descendants number in the hundreds.

The idea of hippos waddling around South America might be fun if they weren't so deadly. In their native Africa, hippos kill around 500 people a year, making them among the most dangerous animals to humans. There is now widespread agreement that a hippo cull in Colombia is overdue. But that hasn't stopped locals from building a thriving tourist industry around them. The owner of a nearby supermarket has turned the top floor of his business into a hotel, posting videos on social media of the hippos wandering by to entice visitors. Even Hacienda Nápoles itself has become an attraction: the drug lord's villa is now a museum and wildlife park, and its mascot, a female hippo named Vanessa, lives in the pond.

Property

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Food and drink

Edward VII taking a momentary pause between meals. Topical Press Agency/Getty

Ten-course dinners with Edward VII

Just reading about the food consumed by Queen Victoria and her son Edward VII is "enough to harden the arteries", says Tom Parker Bowles in the Daily Mail. One royal chef recalled breakfast on his first day of duties: the palace coal ranges were red hot, and the spits racked with "chops, cutlets, steaks… sausages, chicken and woodcock". Lunch might stretch to 11 dishes, from consommé and veal tongue to roasted ortolan songbirds and orange soufflé. Dinner invariably involved a further six courses, and since royal etiquette demanded each dish be whisked away the minute the monarch laid down her golden knife and fork, you had to be quick about it. "She eats too much," her uncle, Leopold I of Belgium, once muttered. "And almost always a little too fast."

It is with Edward VII that royal eating reached its "delectable, if assuredly dyspeptic, apex". He was said to be "no breakfast eater", having just a cup of coffee and a bit of toast. But shooting and racing days were an exception, "and he shot and raced quite a bit". On such mornings he'd devour "small fried soles, bacon, eggs en cocotte, haddock à l'anglaise, devilled chicken and woodcock on toast". In the gap between breakfast and lunch, he'd munch lobster salad, or a half roast chicken, accompanied by a few cups of his favourite turtle soup (the recipe begins: "procure a fine, lively fat turtle"). Then after an epic "picnic" lunch at Ascot, say – involving mounds of crab mousse, hot ham, cold quail, pigeon pie and rum baba – Edward would enjoy a "substantial tea", before preparing for dinner: another 10 courses of "truffle, cream caviar and butter-soaked delight". At bedtime, a plate of chicken sandwiches would accompany His Majesty upstairs.

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Tomorrow's world

Two AI podcasters, as imagined by DALL-E

Will AI kill off the podcast?

It has been less than two years since Chat GPT brought AI truly into the public gaze, says Sean Thomas in The Spectator, and the advances have been so rapid that most of us have stopped noticing. But the latest – a Google tool called NotebookLM – should "blow your mind". It certainly blew mine. It's easy enough to use: feed it any text and click "audio overview". It whirs for a few minutes, then produces a stunningly life-like two-person podcast all about the text. It works on anything: book manuscripts, blog posts, PDF manuals – I even fed it a transcript of my WhatsApp messages. The fake presenters "vividly critique the text", tell jokes, digress (though not too much), and sometimes even introduce facts from outside the text, like the machine has "gone away and researched the subject" on its own.

The ramifications of this are huge. First, it could swiftly kill off a huge chunk of the bloated podcast industry. Why pay to hear Joe Rogan interview someone for three hours, a third of which you might find interesting, when you could personally create a podcast about subjects that fascinate you – your favourite novels, say, or the love letters from your first girlfriend. And in education: why fork out thousands for a degree from the "University of Meh" when you could ask AI for a world-class debate about On the Origin of Species or whatever. There are plenty of unknowns – will some people soon prefer this to normal conversation? But what I do know is this: "If I were running a podcast company, right now I'd be worried."

🎙️🤖 To hear a podcast version of this piece, produced by NotebookLM, click here.

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Life

The Tanzanian photographer who defined the swinging sixties

Anwar Hussein's pioneering photographs changed the world's perception of the Royal Family forever, says The Daily Telegraph. The longest-serving photographer on the royal roster, who died last month aged 85, was such a stalwart of royal life that when Queen Elizabeth II arrived in a new country, she always looked out for him in the media pack – spotting his familiar face helped her relax. His informal shooting style made him a particular favourite of Diana: it was Hussein who took the iconic pictures of the Princess of Wales in her black "revenge dress"; with Mother Teresa; and on her famous landmine walk in Angola.

Hussein hailed from a small village in Tanganyika, now Tanzania, and initially photography was just a hobby. But after the United Nations hired him to "document the plight of refugees" in the Belgian Congo in the 1960s, he moved to England in search of more work. He was lucky enough to hit the "Swinging London" scene, profiling The Beatles, Mick Jagger and Marianne Faithfull. A shoot with Steve McQueen led to a fleeting last-minute role in his 1971 film Le Mans. He shot the stills for several James Bond films and snapped the last ever picture of The Who drummer Keith Moon – "an hour later, he was dead". After dabbling with the "burgeoning punk scene", including photographing the Sex Pistols, he decided that bands were too "difficult and rude". Shooting the royals, he found, was "something of a relief".

Quoted

"I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing, not for AI to do my art and writing so that I can do my laundry and dishes."
Writer Joanna Maciejewska