By Oliver Egger

At the annual American Racing Pigeon Union convention near Chicago, 1,383 pigeons are released nearly four hundred miles away in rural Iowa, each navigating home through instinct scientists still struggle to fully explain. The sport draws working-class enthusiasts, many Polish and Eastern European immigrants who brought the tradition from places where pigeon racing flourished for generations. While animal rights activists claim massive bird casualties, handlers like Andy Waclaw insist the creatures choose to return, treating them with meticulous care in backyard lofts that represent sanctuary rather than captivity. The most poignant victory belongs to Bosnian immigrant Bozo Mladjenovic, whose winning bird returns to the loft he maintains unchanged since his daughter Sofija's death two years earlier. Racing pigeons for fifty thousand dollars in prize money becomes secondary to something more fundamental: these birds' mysterious ability to find home transforms them into living symbols of belonging, memory, and the possibility that even in our chaotic world, something wild might choose to return to us.

By Sam Kriss

Artificial intelligence has developed a bizarrely distinctive writing voice that's becoming inescapable across emails, student essays, news articles, and even political statements. The prose reveals itself through telltale patterns: obsessive use of em dashes, the rhetorical formula "It's not X, it's Y," and vocabulary choices like "delve" (which surged 2,700 percent in academic abstracts after ChatGPT's release) and character names like Elara Voss appearing in hundreds of self-published novels. This stems from "overfitting," where AI statistically associates certain features with quality writing and drowns its output in them—describing everything as spectral, quiet, humming, or woven into tapestries, speaking in rigid tricolons, and attaching sensory language to abstractions until meaning collapses into purple nonsense about the taste of Thursday or cardboard soaked in regret. What makes this cultural shift unsettling isn't just that corporations and politicians increasingly communicate through this hollow, overwrought voice, but that humans are beginning to absorb these patterns ourselves, unconsciously mimicking the machine's tics as they spread through our discourse like a linguistic contagion we've welcomed into daily life.

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By Mike Nagel

Terry Ball, a 79-year-old former shoe salesman from Lancashire, has spent years perfecting an audacious tax avoidance scheme: filling empty London office buildings with breeding snails to claim agricultural exemptions from business rates worth millions. Exploiting obscure HMRC guidance classifying snail farms as fish farms, Ball leases properties through shell companies he phoenixes whenever councils catch up, charging landlords modest fees while openly confessing he intends never to pay taxes or file accounts. His operation runs from a corrugated shed in picturesque Ribchester staffed partly by Giuseppe, a convicted Camorra associate Ball once sheltered during years hiding Italian mafia fugitives fleeing murder charges—connections forged decades ago through the Naples underworld when importing discount shoes. Westminster council has already seized one building containing thousands of molluscs munching lettuce in boxes, but Ball remains undeterred at nearly 80, banned from directorships after previous bankruptcies, motivated less by profit than gleeful revenge against authorities he believes wronged him: a man who befriended mafia killers, brokered gang summits at caravan parks, and now wages bureaucratic warfare through frozen snails and pop-up charity shop schemes because fighting keeps him from the boredom plaguing retired friends just waiting to die.

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