Latest news with #SamuelBeckett
India Today
21-07-2025
- India Today
ChatGPT, crisis of em dash, and please leave our beloved punctuation alone
Almost two decades ago in The Statesman newsroom — this was when I started my training in page-making in QuarkXPress — one of the first things I learnt was ALT + 0151. Soon, mashing together ALT + 0151 in a quick and fluid moment became second nature while typing. This was the key combination that we would input subconsciously while going through news copies — of course, after placing them inside the mighty Quark with which we spent our evenings. A quick ALT + 0151 and each time it would replace with em dash, that puny mark which reporters used to write in a stopped making pages around 15 years ago after I switched from desk work to full-time writing and reporting. But em dash has stayed with me all this while. It is one mark that I love, largely because it is — along with the comma — the mightiest and most versatile punctuation mark. And while it has its share of problems like any other punctuation mark, for people who are in the business of writing, it is a scalpel and an axe at the same time. It can be utilitarian, like in a news copy, or it can be used to make words sing in a book like in 2025, I am rethinking. For years, I encouraged writers in my team to use em dash because of its ability to organise information neatly. In 2025, I sometimes ask them to remove it from their pieces. I know I should not and yet I do. Thank you, ChatGPT! Or not. Yes, it is all because of ChatGPT and that crazy beast called popular taste. Many among you dear readers, many among you, will read the first two paragraphs of this piece and immediately think that it has been written by ChatGPT. Because somewhere you have read, or someone has told you, or maybe you have seen some X thread called How To Identify ChatGPT Writing, explaining that one tell-tale sign of AI writing is em dash. It is not without logic. ChatGPT and other AI tools do use em dash liberally. But what is not right is that just because an AI tool loves a punctuation mark, we are being forced to discard is a reason. ChatGPT loves em dash because writers love it. Em dash is not a punctuation mark like semicolon, a reviled and pretentious sign that is neither here nor there. Semicolon deserves its ignominy. Samuel Beckett hated it so much that in his novel Watt, he ended up writing, 'how hideous is the semicolon.' And Kurt Vonnegut famously called it 'transvestite hermaphrodites' in an era when politically incorrect things could be said without a lynch-mob forming outside one's house. Vonnegut was clear: no semicolons. 'Here is a lesson in creative writing. First rule: Do not use semicolons. All they do is show you've been to college,' he once semicolon deserves all the hate. But not em dash. Because em dash, along with comma, represents how we think. And how we think is how we our regular conversations, such as when everyone is sharing gossip during dinner, we talk linearly. This means one word leads to another, one thought leads to the next, and there is a thread running through them. But writing is different. Writing is not speaking. Instead, writing is a far truer reflection of thinking. And when it comes to thoughts, it is easy to notice that our thoughts are not linear. Instead, thoughts are haphazard, and every time you think about how sweet mangoes are, you are also probably thinking that similarly sweet are love em dash because it can be used in tens of different ways to organise haphazard thoughts. It can be used to branch out to a new tangent — and how lovely that is, like wishfully thinking of sun on a rainy day — while staying the course. It can be used to connect two bits in a statement — join them together so they seem whole. It can be used to put emphasis on something — and think about this deeply — because it is an important point. It can be used to end a sentence with some force — stop. Its versatile nature makes em dash a favourite of is also why ChatGPT — and other AI tools — learnt to use it. Various AI models have been trained in high-quality writing. Just a few weeks ago, we got reports that Anthropic bought millions of books and scanned them to train its Claude AI. The case is similar for ChatGPT and Gemini, or DeepSeek. You can say that AI has learnt writing from people like Hemingway and Joyse and Nabokov, the writers who used to love em that AI has been trained more on writing, and less on speech, it uses punctuation that may seem out of place in 2025. We live in a time of podcasts and short videos and text messaging, a time when reading and writing are considered pretentious activities, when vocab of an average person is considered outsized if it has the word 'delve' in it. In this time, something like em dash may come across as a mark of artificiality even when it is is a tricky subject. Rules exist, and more so in India, where we place our Wren & Martin on the same shelves where we keep our holy books, but in reality, these rules are extremely flexible. Their only task is to bring clarity and meaning to words. It doesn't matter in what manner they do it. This is the reason why Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison struggled with her editor on commas. Her idea was that a comma is not for grammar, a thought that apparently did not sit well with her editor. 'He does not understand that commas are for pauses and breath. He thinks commas are for grammatical things. We have come to an understanding, but it is still a fight,' Morrison once famously said. It is also the reason why Gertrude Stein, who too disliked commas, wrote sentences such as 'Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose.'Writing is this complex, beautiful, shape-shifting thing. It slithers and simmers and, in the hands of good writers, it rarely follows, ahem, a script. But as AI takes over, there is a great rush to create new rules that can distinguish between AI writing and the words that humans have put together. The task is futile. Good writing is going to be good writing. And the marker for that goodness needs to be decided by merit and taste, and not on the basis of how many times em dash and the word 'delve' have been used in it.(Javed Anwer is Technology Editor, India Today Group Digital. Latent Space is a weekly column on tech, world, and everything in between. The name comes from the science of AI and to reflect it, Latent Space functions in the same way: by simplifying the world of tech and giving it a context)- Ends(Views expressed in this opinion piece are those of the author)Trending Reel
Irish Times
21-07-2025
- General
- Irish Times
You can win at life by being a good loser
We all screw up. Failure is part of life. But not all of us can brush it off easily. A society that divides people into 'winners' and 'losers' amplifies the cost of failing. Through our smartphones and in our daily conversations, we're constantly reminded that there's always someone else doing better. How should you deal with failure? And how do I resist that niggling sense that, deep down, I'm a loser? Krzysztof Rowiński, a lecturer in cultural studies at Trinity College Dublin , is part of an international network of academics researching our understanding of failure. They met in Dublin a few weeks ago for a conference titled Fail Worse – a subversion of Samuel Beckett 's famous quote: 'Try again. Fail again. Fail better.' Some of their initial findings can be distilled into four general points: READ MORE 1. 'Redemptive' failure narratives may be part of the problem 'If you look at library catalogues there has been an explosion of books that explore failure as a form of success – self-help books, coaching books, business books,' Rowiński tells The Irish Times. 'I saw that as a larger outgrowth of our optimistic culture where paradoxically failure narratives are on par with success narratives. But it's only because those failure narratives are redemptive failure narratives.' Examples of the genre come from tech bros such as Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk , who love to talk about the failures they experienced before becoming obscenely rich. 'If you're not failing, you're not taking enough risks,' says Musk. Rowiński tracked the use of 'fail better' as a phrase in public discourse. 'In late '80s you see a moderate interest and then it blows up in the '90s.' This coincided with the rise of the positive psychology movement and, more importantly perhaps, a drift internationally away from holding the rich and powerful accountable for their failures. 2. Political corruption and extreme inequality means some people can avoid any cost from their failures There is a recognition of failure in corridors of power 'but always with a sense that we can overcome it with technology, or therapy, or some intervention', says Prof Debbie Lisle, of Queen's University Belfast school of history. Another member of the 'failure studies' network, she believes many of the world's biggest problems are exacerbated by 'toxic positivity'. When it comes to war, the migrant crisis or climate change , 'the normalised dominant responses are all about this myth that we will overcome our failures and everything will be fine. Like climate change: 'It'll be fine; don't worry about it because we will use technology and adaptation; it's going to be amazing' ... and no it's not'. We need 'a different vocabulary', she says. 'We're f**ed!' is her starting point. 'I start there and I make no apologies about that – but I'm not depressed about that. I'm like, let's be modest and humble and realistic about what's achievable, how we can create solidarities however temporary, probably dissonant, to try to do something.' 3. In other cultures everyone is a loser – so cheer up Ireland is heavily influenced by the capitalistic, Anglo-American view of success and failure. Contrast this with eastern European countries. 'In our part of the world, the perception of failure is different,' says Adriana Mica, a Romanian-born sociologist who set up the Failure Lab at University of Warsaw. 'Failure is something like a skin but nobody treats it too seriously ... You see this in post-communist countries and postcolonial countries; they don't trust failure. They think failure is something politicians use as a rationalisation.' This is not entirely healthy from a political viewpoint. It results in a situation where 'we are suspicious of success' and cynical or dismissive about failure. 'We did some research about Covid policy failures and people were saying: 'What policy failures? Covid was a scam.' So it's completely different.' Her research is looking at why students drop out of education, and whether it is due to 'failure deprivation', or because they had 'no taste of failure', before reaching college. This may be a greater problem in more affluent societies. In countries such as Romania and Poland, she says, 'I think we still remember the hardships ... but it can change very quickly.' 4. You're a winner in God's eyes In her latest book The Genius Myth, journalist Helen Lewis explores our understanding of 'natural talent'. Questioning the common perception that people 'deserve' their success, she draws attention to the relationship between capitalism and forms of eugenics. In previous centuries, financial rewards were distributed between 'superior' and 'inferior' races. Today there's a movement, tacitly supported by powerful figures in the United States, to rank human value by IQ score. Speaking to Hugh Linehan on The Irish Times Inside Politics podcast , Lewis said, 'as someone who was raised Catholic and is now an atheist', she was 'surprised' while writing the book 'that I began to feel more warmly towards Christianity as a kind of social operating system because of [its] teaching that every one of God's children has a worth in his eyes – and that no one is better than anyone else'. [ Justine McCarthy: We need to talk about why we're all so angry Opens in new window ] But you don't have to bring God into the picture to realise you're a winner. Keeping a sense of perspective is key. The truth is you can 'win' at life by being a good loser.
Irish Times
18-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Times
‘As an Irish person with an English accent in Ireland, you have to sit there and take it'
I grew up in northwest London , the eldest of four. My father was from Longford , my mother from Mayo , and we lived in a very Jewish area called Hendon in the 1980s. It was a very politically driven time to be Irish. My parents would have been republican sympathisers; my grandfather on my mother's side was in the IRA . They were both teachers. My mother's father was the headmaster of the local technical school, so they were very big into education. Our house was full of books, and our mother had notions about education and learning. So we had politics stuffed into us from Dad, and the likes of Yeats , Edna O'Brien and Samuel Beckett from my mum. I took all of that on board and very much felt like an Irish person from a very young age. England is home of the class system. I remember coming home from school one day and hearing from one of my siblings that someone in school said we were poor because we didn't have a colour television. I asked Mum, 'Are we posh, or are we common?' And she said, 'If anyone should ever be rude enough to ask you, tell them we're educated Irish.' READ MORE We were separated from the idea of Englishness, although I'd say my other siblings identify as Londoners. Their affinity is with London. But I never felt that. I always felt that affinity to Mayo. Because Mayo to me was Ireland. That was where I went on my summer holidays. We never went to Dublin, and we had no real awareness of the city. I am very much a Mayo girl. I always loved writing and drawing and dancing – anything that was creative. I did hairdressing when I left school, and I was sharing a flat with this wild posh English girl in Chelsea. We went out one night, and I just talked all night long, and when we came home, she said, 'You should write some of that stuff down; you're a really good storyteller.' Soon after, a woman, a journalist, came into the salon and mentioned that her husband worked on [the teenage magazine] Just Seventeen. I went in one day with one of my pieces, and he went, 'Yeah, this is great', even though I had no qualifications, nothing. I worked my way up to editor quickly, but it was a different time. Kate Kerrigan as a child on holidays with her family in Co Mayo I moved to Ireland in 1991 to begin with Irish Tatler. Dublin was a culture shock; no one knew what to make of me. Gradually, I assimilated, but Irish people tend to be funny about Irish people with English accents. And as an Irish person with an English accent, you kind of just have to sit there and take it. I began writing books. The first few were comedy, but when I changed styles to historical, my editor recommended I change my name. My real name is Morag Prunty, but I use Kate Kerrigan – Kate is my middle name; Kerrigan is my married name – for my work. During lockdown, I realised that life was too short and I wanted to start writing something with a deeper level of authenticity. I originally wanted to write a nonfiction book about growing up in Thatcher's England as an Irish person, and being deemed a Plastic Paddy. But a friend, who is now my producer, said to book a theatre and perform it. In October 2022 we ran the show Am I Irish Yet? for the first time in Ballina Arts Centre. At the end everyone went nuts. I knew I had something, so we started booking venues. I did a run in a 60-seater in south London, called the White Bear Theatre. It booked out in 10 minutes, and we came back to do another week, back to back. It began to gain traction, and suddenly we started looking at bigger venues. And now, when I perform, we're more or less selling out venues with 200-300 seats. Every single show I have people coming up to me telling me I've told their story. I performed it recently in Ireland, for people like me, who identify as Irish, but talk like 'tans'. And they all say the same thing: we can be lampooned for saying we're Irish. You know, Brazilians or French people can say they're Irish and be accepted, but we can't. It is hurtful to love somewhere so much, and to feel so connected to a place, and then have the people that you want to like you so much saying you aren't one of them. Particularly when you get someone like Joe Biden, with distant Irish links, who comes over and is beloved by if you're a plumber from Wembley who has been coming here every summer for their whole lives, you're not really Irish. Being Irish is fashionable now, but it's the second and third-generation Irish who are keeping Ireland's Irishness alive. The reason that Irish people can feel so comfortable in their Irishness here today is because of the people around the world who have been buying tickets for [the late] Big Tom or Philomena Begley, or waving Paddy's Day flags. We have marvellous actors representing Ireland at the moment, but it's the millions of people who identify as Irish all over the world, who don't have the privilege of being here – they are the backbone of that shift. In conversation with Kate Demolder. This interview, part of a series about well-known people's lives and relationship with Ireland, was edited for clarity and length. Am I Irish Yet? by Kate Kerrigan will be performed at the Féile Chill Damhait Festival, Achill on August 4th and Westport Town Hall Theatre on September 4th. See
Irish Times
08-07-2025
- Irish Times
My French trip had no shortage of Beckett-style waiting, with Marseille Airport at 2.30am about as lively as Knock
En route to visiting a friend in Spain last week, I first flew to Marseille. No reader, you wouldn't start from Marseille to get to Spain if you were me. But I'd never been to Marseille before, and it was a cheap flight, and I had time to spare. There was also the prospect of a side trip into the ochre-red hills of Roussillon, where Samuel Beckett spent time during the war, an experience commemorated in Waiting for Godot. A member of the Resistance, Beckett was waiting for Germans, mostly. And they didn't come either. Even so, his connection with the village has spawned an annual theatre festival, later in July. My plan was to see Marseille and Roussillon, briefly, then take a series of relaxing, picturesque train journeys around the Mediterranean, down to the Costa Brava. READ MORE In the event, I never saw Roussillon. But thanks to that great tradition of holiday season, the French transport strike, my trip had no shortage of Beckett-style waiting anyway. It started at Dublin Airport, where we learned that our 7.45pm take-off would be at 8.45 due to industrial action by French air traffic controllers. Then we boarded the Ryanair plane to be told we didn't have clearance to take off for another 2½ hours. So we sat on the tarmac until 11.15pm, and it was 2.30am local time when we landed in Marseille. On the plus side, this was the airport of France's second-largest city, so sure to be a hive of activity even then? Au contraire. Marseille Airport was about as lively at 2.30am as its equivalent in Knock. The arrival of a flight from Dublin seemed to take passport control by surprise: they had to have a short conference before opening kiosks. Then we trooped out, past flight-delayed families sleeping on floors, to find the bus service had long closed. Taxis were scarce too, although at a nightly average of €90 to the city, they must be a path to riches. A friendly cabman dropping someone off explained his wasn't an official airport taxi but gave me a lift to the rank. When we found that empty, I hired him anyway, and at the same price as the flight, got a taxi to the hotel for half the night I'd booked. That experience sapped some of my enthusiasm for a two-bus trip to Roussillon. But it took another kind of French air strike – the 36 degrees C variety that hit me outside the hotel next morning – to sap the rest of it. Seeing Marseille would be enough of a challenge for this visit. Thirty-six hours later, I caught a train to Perpignan, which was indeed a picturesque journey, if not a relaxing one, because I had to change at Narbonne and feared falling asleep and waking in Bordeaux instead. Also, for reasons explained only in barely audible French, the train became 90 minutes late en route. But I did eventually reach Perpignan: a place notable for being the first city of its size to elect a far-right mayor. That's an interesting subject, to which I'll return later in the week. For the purposes of this narrative, meanwhile, the most striking thing (pun not intended but I'll leave it there) about Perpignan was my attempt to get out of it. A train to Barcelona, although the trip is not much more than two hours, would have cost €139. For €100 less than that, I booked a bus, with a company hitherto unknown to me called Blablacar. That's a fun name for a bus company, although it would not fill you with confidence if you had to call the customer complaints department, as I would. My experience was not helped by the fact that Ireland seemed to be as unknown to Blablacar as Blablacar had been to me. On the screen where you gave your mobile number, the scroll-down menu of prefixes offered the UK's +0044. But +353 was nowhere to be seen and I couldn't enter it automatically. This meant not receiving updates about the lateness of the 12.05pm service, of which there were several. I was dependent instead on a friendly young Frenchman who, even at 1pm, was worried about his 6.30pm flight from Barcelona. I reassured him he had loads of time. I was wrong. Our bus turned up at 1.55pm and left just promptly to avoid the possible refunds a two-hour delay might have triggered. Then, when about 20 miles from Barcelona, the driver announced he had to stop for another 45 minutes. Rules, apparently: he'd been on duty for 8 hours. As we whiled away the time, again, my mind went back to Marseille and the famous anthem it inspired. Maybe that spirit of militancy is still live in the French trade union movement. But the weary patience with which locals greeted the delays everywhere suggested the line 'Attendons, citoyens!' should replace the one that says 'Marchons!'. I would have been up for forming battalions myself, as the song instructs. The natives were content to form queues.
Times
04-07-2025
- Politics
- Times
This is what spending the night at Trinity College feels like
As you step through the gates, the clamour of the city slips away behind you. Inside the cobbled quadrangle of Trinity College Dublin, the air feels older, heavier, and the hush has a faintly illicit quality — as though you've wandered into a part of the city where you're not allowed to be, which is, of course, the allure. Each summer Trinity opens its student accommodation to the public, a canny blend of tourist-savvy pragmatism and romantic fantasy. For a night (or several), you can sleep within the same walls as Oscar Wilde, Samuel Beckett and Bram Stoker. You can walk the same quads once stalked by the revolutionaries Wolfe Tone and Robert Emmet, both famously banished from the university for their radical politics. Founded in 1592 under a royal charter from Queen Elizabeth I, Trinity is Ireland's oldest surviving seat of learning. But its story runs deeper than mortar and manuscript. For centuries, it stood as a symbol of colonial power — a bastion of Protestant ascendancy that excluded Catholics until 1793, when legal reforms lifted the bar on admission. Even then, however, Trinity remained an enclave of elite privilege and exclusivity. The architecture offers a trace of this hauteur. At the heart of the campus stands a statue of George Salmon, a former provost who famously declared that women would be admitted to Trinity 'over my dead body'. As fate would have it, Salmon died in 1904, and women were admitted that year. Despite the grandeur, checking in for the night is a briskly modern, informal affair in a carpeted office just off Trinity's Parliament Square, staffed by unfailingly polite students in blue polo shirts. No need to queue again on your way out — simply leave your key behind. My room was in the Rubrics, the college's oldest building, completed in about 1701 and standing like a red-brick sentry over the cobbles. Inside, it's less Downton Abbey, more out-of-town Ikea — pale woods, clean lines and a minimalist finish that nods to the past without indulging it. Accessibility, as you might expect from an 18th-century building, is limited: no lift, steep stairs and only a handful of ground-floor rooms. The sash windows in the room framed a postcard view of the square below, and although mere steps from the city's main arteries, the night passed in ecclesiastical silence. By day, the campus teems with tour groups and lounging Gen Zs basking in the sun behind the Campanile. The overall effect is oddly cinematic — think Normal People meets Harry Potter, with accents from every corner of the globe. Breakfast is served from 7.30am to 10am downstairs in the college's subterranean canteen — a utilitarian space that contrasts sharply with the splendour above ground, but delivers a solid buffet of hot food, fruit, cereals and pastries. It's certainly not the Hogwarts grand hall, but the buffet is hearty and the coffee strong — enough to set up even the fussiest eaters for a day of exploring Dublin. Trinity's location is, however, its trump card. It sits squarely in the city's cultural and retail core, just a three-minute walk from Grafton Street with its buskers and boutiques, and a stone's throw from some of Dublin's renowned pubs. James Joyce fans will know that the short stroll from Trinity's gates to Grafton Street retraces the author's first meeting with Nora Barnacle in June 1904 — the courtship that inspired Ulysses and Bloomsday. Still, wandering the quad after dusk, I couldn't shake the feeling that the college had more secrets than it let on. As a history lover, I found the official campus tour a touch too tidy. Yes, it covers the essentials — the Long Room, the Book of Kells, a look inside the Museum Building and an impressive roll call of alumni, but it largely sidesteps the stranger, darker stories. Take Edward Ford, for instance, a fellow of the college who met his end in the Rubrics, just two doors down from my room, in 1734. Annoyed by a group of students carousing outside his quarters, he reportedly demanded quiet — at which point they fired a musket through his door, fatally injuring the infamous disciplinarian. The tale is well documented but conspicuously absent from the official script. Perhaps it has been scrubbed to avoid alarming more delicate guests — but for lovers of dark tourism or true crime, it's a chilling reminder of how thin the walls of history really are. Would I stay a week? Unlikely. The magic lies in the brevity — and in the quiet sense of trespass. One night is enough to flirt with one's long-lost student self, to soak in the scholarly hush of cloisters and centuries-old setting. It's not luxurious. It's not flashy. But it is quietly profound — like bedding down inside the mind of the city itself, all faded grandeur, fierce intellect and ghosts who never quite left. Details Trinity College Dublin offers summer accommodation until August 30, room-only from €91 a night;
