Ten reasons to be cheerful about 2024   

Welcome back. In keeping with the Christmas season, I’m rounding off this year as in 2023 by picking out 10 bright spots that shone out in our troubled times.

You can find me at [email protected] and tell me about any other events that have lifted your spirits over the past 12 months. After the break, this newsletter will be back with you on Saturday January 4.

Last December, my list for 2023 included events such as Poland’s parliamentary election result, the award of the Nobel Peace prize to Iranian human rights activist Narges Mohammadi, and Danish company Novo Nordisk’s launch of the Wegovy weight-loss drug in European countries.

What about 2024?

Elections, elections

It was a big year for elections all around the globe, but I confess I’m struggling to find much cheer in the contests that took place in Europe.

In the EU’s 27 member states, the European parliament elections produced an ambiguous result. The centrist party groups that have long controlled the legislature kept their majority, but the radical right gained support and now occupies about 25 per cent of the assembly’s seats.

President Emmanuel Macron’s gamble in calling snap legislative elections in France didn’t go well. In Romania, the authorities went so far as to annul the result of the presidential election’s first round.

The UK election sent the Tories packing after 14 years in power, but if there was a mood of optimism and celebration after Labour’s landslide victory it seemed to fade pretty fast.

Outside Europe, there were more reasons for hope. And so, here are my 10 picks:

1. My first choice is India’s parliamentary elections, which showed the enduring strength of democracy there. The result was a setback for Prime Minister Narendra Modi, as this FT report noted:

The 73-year-old will face an invigorated parliament, which will probably be a check on his Hindutva or Hindu nationalism, and a newly empowered opposition which will challenge Modi’s omnipresence in Indian politics and society.

2. For similar reasons — the resilience of democracy — my second choice is the election result in South Africa. This was a justified rebuke to the African National Congress, which had ruled virtually unchallenged since the end of apartheid in the 1990s.

A dictator’s fall

3. My third choice is the downfall of Bashar al-Assad, Syria’s dictator.

True, many readers will agree with Heba Saleh, the FT’s Cairo correspondent, that “this joyful moment could lead to a bleak future”. The events that followed the regional uprisings of 2011, which toppled autocrats in Egypt, Libya and Tunisia, provide a cautionary lesson.

Nonetheless, I find it hard not to be relieved, to put it mildly, to see the back of Assad, who ranks as one of the most bloodstained tyrants of my lifetime.

AI advances

4. Switching from politics to business, my fourth pick is OpenAI’s launch of its updated GPT-4 artificial intelligence model.

Things have certainly moved on from 2009 when, as you can read in a blog I wrote from Brussels, an experiment in computerised translation produced this gobbledygook out of a story in the Polish newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza:

A sign of the collapse of the French culture of the restaurant is visible on the streets of Paris rash of quick-service bar, offering generally pogardzane a few years ago and cheeseburgery hamburgers.

Er, what?

AI is still a work in progress. I recently used one system to ask the question: who won the second world war? The answer came back — we don’t have enough information on that.

Hmmm…

But the advances continue. As the FT’s George Hammond reported from San Francisco in May, OpenAI’s tweaked model includes “the ability to interpret voice, video, images and code in a single interface”.

Two rounds of applause for France

5. I’m picking the Paris Olympics as my fifth choice. It is conventional, after the end of each four-yearly tournament, to say “they were the best Games ever”, but in this case it may be a fair verdict.

Who can forget the extraordinary men’s 100 metres final? Right to the finishing line, it seemed that any of the eight sprinters could take the gold medal. It went to Noah Lyles of the US, who won by five-thousandths of a second.

My other abiding memory is of Armand Duplantis, Sweden’s pole vault champion. He broke the world record, for the ninth time no less, with a leap so far ahead of his rivals that it recalled Bob Beamon’s famous long jump at the Mexico City Olympics of 1968.

6. While we’re in Paris, let’s not forget the magnificent restoration of Notre-Dame cathedral, almost destroyed by a fire in 2019.

I can’t wait to go and see it for myself in the new year.

Antelopes and cave art

7. Last year, I included in my list the heartening news that Africa’s white rhino population had increased in 2022 for the first time in a decade.

This year, there’s another conservation success story to report. The long-nosed saiga antelope, which roams the steppes of Kazakhstan and was until recently a highly endangered species, has made a tremendous recovery.

There were only about 48,000 of them in 2005. Now there are 2mn or so.

8. Meanwhile, scientists this year discovered the world’s oldest example of representational cave art on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi.

It’s a painting of a wild pig and at least three humanlike creatures, and it’s more than 51,000 years old — over 5,000 years more than the previous oldest discovery.

Salute Larry David

9. After almost 24 years and 12 series, Larry David’s outrageously satirical comedy show Curb Your Enthusiasm finally came to an end in April.

The laughs come from Larry’s sometimes impossibly rude behaviour and the ingeniously crafted plots, but the improvised acting is a joy to watch. So, special mentions for co-stars Susie Essman, Jeff Garlin, Cheryl Hines, Richard Lewis (who sadly passed away this year), JB Smoove and Tracey Ullman.

A Russian literary gem

10. Lastly, congratulations to Columbia University Press for publishing an English translation of a mid-19th-century Russian novel that until now was virtually unknown to readers outside Russia.

It’s The Talnikov Family, by Avdotya Panaeva, who moved in the same literary circles as giants such as Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoevsky.

She wrote the novel in her twenties, and the translation by Fiona Bell deserves a wide readership.

And so, a happy Christmas to all, and see you in the new year!

Tony’s picks of the week

• Germany’s election campaign has got off to an ill-mannered start, with leading politicians trading insults ahead of the February 23 poll, the FT’s Guy Chazan reports from Berlin

• A table for five: what to expect from each player at Ukraine peace talks — an analysis by Rose Gottemoeller for the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists