RAY OF LIGHT

They just called it Vermeer

– the Rijkmuseum’s blockbuster exhibition in Amsterdam didn’t focus on some underexplored theme in the artist’s oeuvre, but simply slapped pretty much his entire body of work on the wall. Everybody loves a Vermeer, even the snottiest critics, who reined in their reflexive urge to pooh-pooh a populist phenomenon and instead pondered this universal appeal. Here were depictions of often ordinary people doing ordinary things four centuries back, transformed into scenes of ageless beauty. With 28 of the 37 known Vermeers on show, this was art Glastonbury: both for the connoisseurs, and those who don’t know much but know what they like. All 450,000 tickets sold out in two days, with some offered online at prices up to £2,100. Attendees were given wristbands and warned not to resell them outside, and just to bolster that festival vibe, the headline act pulled out halfway through: Girl with the Pearl Earring went home to the Mauritshuis museum in The Hague after seven weeks.

‘Think of CHATGPT as a blurry jpeg of all the text on the web,’ said The New Yorker in February – one of many attempts to explain the concept and current limitations of large-language models to the bewildered imbeciles they will one day enslave. Developed by a firm inevitably co-founded by Elon Musk and now predominantly backed by Microsoft, CHATGPT was by then being employed by more than 100 million active users to write job applications, debug computer code and compose limericks about cats in the style of Evelyn Waugh. A ‘WOKEGPT’ controversy brewed when users with a lot of time on their hands established that CHATGPT seemed ready to criticise Donald Trump and tell jokes about men, but clammed up when given the same prompts for Joe Biden and women. A podcaster even persuaded CHATGPT to maintain that it was preferable to let millions of people die in a nuclear explosion rather than utter a single racist epithet. Later iterations appeared more nuanced and circumspect, as well as terrifyingly smart. When researchers put CHATGPT3 – the version active until March – through the US bar exam, it only scored in the 10th percentile. CHATGPT4 scored in the 90th.

Originally marketed as an injectable treatment for diabetes back in 2018, Ozempic’s remarkable effect on appetite – and therefore body weight – is achieved by mimicking a natural hormone that tells your brain when you’re full, while simultaneously slowing the digestion process. Its weight-loss potential had hitherto been known only to the tubby elite, jacked up on by jowly celebrities from Elon Musk to Jeremy Clarkson (the giveaway was a sometimes dramatic sagging of onceplump cheeks, a look that one New York dermatologist dubbed ‘Ozempic face’). This year, however, the word spread and demand exploded – Danish manufacturers Novo Nordisk, having rebranded the drug as Wegovy for weight-loss prescription, saw its market capitalisation eclipse that of Denmark’s entire GDP. In February, Boots announced it would be offering Wegovy to UK customers, dependent on a consultation and certain healthrelated criteria. The upside: potential loss of around 15 per cent of your body weight. The down: possible nausea, diarrhoea and abdominal pain, plus the queasy feeling that if you want the weight to stay off, it’ll cost you £200 a month for the rest of your life.

The two earthquakes that struck the Syrian-turkish border in the small hours of 6 February were among the most brutal of recent decades, registering 7.8 on the Richter scale. The devastation left 55,000 dead and two million homeless, but small, merciful miracles kept hope alive as the rescuers clawed at the rubble day after day. A seven-month-old baby girl was pulled alive from a collapsed building in the Turkish province of Hatay, buried for 139 hours; in the same province, a 34-year-old man was rescued after an extraordinary 11 days. As Mustafa Avci was carried away on a stretcher, he was put on a video call with his family; his wife, who had given birth just three hours before the disaster, showed him his new baby daughter.

Viv forever: attendees at a memorial service for Dame Vivienne Westwood, held on 16 February, include Christina Hendricks, Stormzy, Helena Bonham Carter, Richard E Grant, Sir Bob Geldof, Victoria Beckham and Philip Sallon. Right: destroyed buildings in Hatay, Turkey, following the earthquake of 6 February