The idealism of the Esperanto movement, a plague of flies and a clinic in a deep salt mine
1. ‘I thought, I’ve tried everything else, why not give AI a shot?’: the long-lost family reunited by ChatGPT View image in fullscreen ‘There is
1. ‘I thought, I’ve tried everything else, why not give AI a shot?’: the long-lost family reunited by ChatGPT View image in fullscreen ‘There is a human touch to AI.’ Composite: Nicci Dhamu/Guardian Design double quotation mark Who would have thought that life would unfold in this way? That ChatGPT would find an article that would lead to an email that would lead to all of this? Technology seems to be in alignment, in the same way that stars can be sometimes. There is a human touch to AI – look what happened. Avtar spent decades wondering what happened to the mother he never got to know. Thousands of miles away, Nicci was haunted by the story of a half-brother given away before she was born. Jenny Kleeman wrote a remarkable story about how a chatbot brought them together. Read more 2. Nudists, peaceniks and freeloading travellers: the people keeping the Esperanto dream alive View image in fullscreen Universal language.
Composite: Guardian Design/Getty Images/Alamy For a satirist or a cynic, Esperantists are easy fodder. Many of its enthusiasts are undeniably eccentric. But Esperanto was once a force in global politics. Before facing heavy persecution during the second world war, it gained serious traction in international labour, anticolonial and anarchist movements. Katie Thornton wrote an illuminating long read about the idealistic movement and the vibrancy of its annual congress. She explored why today’s adherents – many of whom are no strangers to global conflict – still believe that the widespread adoption of a century-and-a-half-old invented language may yet overpower the world’s divisions. Read more 3. ‘It makes you feel you’ve got a really dirty house’: what’s behind the UK’s plagues of flies? View image in fullscreen Swatting season. Photograph: cookelma/Getty Images/iStockphoto If just one fly buzzing around your head is annoying, imagine what it’s like to be surrounded by clouds of them, week after week.
Lucy Knight visited one of Britain’s most insect-plagued neighbourhoods for this fascinating story, which also poses the question: although flies are regarded as disgusting, could they be due a rebrand? Read more 4. Deep breathing: the asthma clinic buried 250 metres into an Armenian salt mine View image in fullscreen Going underground. Photograph: Sofia Maria Bergmann/The Guardian double quotation mark For most people, spending hours deep underground in darkness would seem an odd prescription for better health. Yet every morning, a handful of Armenians descend 250 metres beneath the earth into an active salt mine where they spend six hours in cavernous chambers carved from rock salt, hoping the air below ground will help them breathe more easily. Pjotr Sauer visited one of the world’s only hospitals in a deep salt mine. The underground clinic’s fate now hangs in the balance after Armenia withdrew state funding, raising broader questions about its role in supporting alternative medicine.
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