It’s not often we are allowed to get excited about Alaska, psephologically speaking, but as early voting begins for the US midterms, this is the race I can’t stop thinking about.
Alaska is a deep red Republican state, powered by oil, fish and mineral rights. Yet this November, suddenly, it’s in play for the Democrats in the Senate. It all hinges around a candidate called Dan Sullivan. And another candidate, who is also called Dan Sullivan.
Dan Sullivan 1 – stay with me – is the Republican incumbent seeking a third term. His opponent, Democrat Mary Peltola, is currently edging ahead of him in the polls. But a retired teacher from Petersburg, Dan Sullivan 2, has entered the race as another Republican, securing enough votes to get through the primary and appear on the actual ballot. A spoiler candidate if you will.
Alaskan officials had originally removed him, but he was reinstated by the courts. Now, there is nothing to stop an eccentric citizen from exercising their right to run for office. But the Justice Department is reportedly investigating his campaign to see if he was recruited by the Dems as a decoy to help get Peltola over the line.
It’s not the first time Alaskan voters have faced nominative confusion at the ballot. In 2010, the “write-in” candidate Lisa Murkowski handed out 50,000 rubber M-U-R-K-O-W-S-K-I wrist bands to help voters write it correctly on their polling cards. She won, and remains in power to this day.
Trump is getting itchy about these midterms. Which is a euphemistic way of explaining why he’s now toying with putting actual FBI guards in actual polling booths on voting day to scare away voters.
Whenever Trump screams “HOAXXX!” at his phone, I find it quietly satisfying. It’s his poker tell. It instantly confirms that a) the thing itself is verifiably true – vis climate change, Russian interference, Joe Biden’s election win, and b) that Trump is terrified.
When it comes to AI, I do not believe he is sweating the whole existential threat to humanity thing. He’s 80. Pure narcissists believe the world will end with them anyway.
No, he’s terrified by what he imagines regulation would do to the stock market, between 10-30% of which is bubbling merrily on the AI premium. While the argument is being framed as a US/China arms race that makes the Manhattan Project look like a bagel, Trump’s real fear is not China in 2036 but Wall Street in the first week of November.
Suggested Reading
America prepares to vote. Only problem is nobody likes anybody any more
At the Elle Style awards I am honoured to be named Journalist of the Year. They’ve asked the actor Ruth Wilson – who played me in the drama series A Very Royal Scandal – to present the award.
I do not see Ruth enough, but every time I do I want more of her; she is funny and engaging and ridiculously down-to-earth. It is an extraordinary way to make a friend, but one I highly recommend. She has seen the inside of my wardrobe, my marriage, my handbag. There are no secrets.
Other winners of the night are artist Steve McQueen, singer Jorja Smith, actor Simone Ashley, designer Louise Trotter of Bottega Veneta and the writer Dolly Alderton. Rosamund Pike – whom I last saw on stage in the insanely good Inter Alia – hands out the British Brand of the Year prize to Erdem.
We are chatting afterwards about the Venice Film Festival when I find myself confiding to her that two days prior to my rendezvous with George Clooney, my face broke out in hives with the stress of it all. There is something quite Chaucerian, she agrees, quite Wife of Bath, about meeting the man of your dreams but only if you accept to look like an old crone with red patches of eczema on both cheeks. It is helpful to see these things through the prism of literature sometimes.
Not as helpful as a doctor’s appointment, as it happens. But still reassuring.
My seventh circle of hell has traditionally been the Apple Store. I am tired of being patronised by gadgety tech bros who still, somehow, can’t fix the problem.
But now it’s urgent. The battery won’t last a tube ride and the face recognition won’t recognise me, which somehow feels like a social snub.
This time I will go armed. I will run there – to exorcise the need to punch anything – and I will bring a paperback to calm my brain while the phone is out of my hands.
The book is an 1872 novel by Samuel Butler called Erewhon (an anagram of Nowhere). Written just a decade or so after Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, it is a pastoral satire – think Gulliver’s Travels – of a world where the locals destroy their advanced machines so they don’t become a whole new form of life.
What happens, Butler asks, when we create something with the means to destroy us? That’s right, he was on it 150 years ago.
So there I am, wrapped up in both the plight of the Erewhonians and my own smug little irony, when my attention is diverted to an in-store masterclass on “How to get the best out of your Mac”. And this time, I encounter not tech bro aggro but the kindest, most brilliant women (Moha, Hilda, Heather), who bend over backwards to sort the phone and steady the nerves as we wait for data transfer. I will leave the store with my belief in machines redeemed by their compassion and expertise.
Is that a victory for humans or technology? I’m mulling.
Saturday morning is spent sheep herding. Which sounds like a metaphor, but is in fact a good hour trying to bribe the oddly independent-minded animals with ewe nuts to get them into a pen.
Andy the farmer is taking them off for their bluetongue vaccination. But my rural credentials are shot when I keep calling it Bluetooth by mistake. Bluetongue is a nasty sheep disease spread by midges, and he’s explaining that Devon, three counties over, has been particularly badly hit.
“It’s curious,” he says. Then there is a pause, and my heart stops as I can feel viscerally where this is heading. “The place worst hit is the same location Bill Gates has been planning a data centre. Some are saying he’s dropped the virus out of the sky right there to see off the protesters.”
I’ll pop the kettle on, I say. I do not believe the malaria-buster-in-chief has been out killing livestock in Great Torrington. It’s not clear Andy does either. But I nevertheless spend the next 20 minutes “chat”-ting the overlap between data centres and disease hotspots JUST IN CASE.
It is a full-time job trying to imagine sheep being weaponised as the first line of defence in the war on AI. Would Trump ever call this a HOAX??!! Absolutely not.
