books: investigating john le carré (non-spoilery)

Since the release of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy we've watched two more le Carré adaptations, The Little Drummer Girl (with Florence Pugh, the lovely Alexander Skarsgård, Michael Shannon) and before that The Night Manager (with Tom Hiddleston, Hugh Laurie, Elizabeth Debicki, Tom Hollander, Olivia Colman).

I was remarking that all three of them were really good and I wondered how they compared to the books. Neither Wax nor I had ever read a single member of the spy thriller genre (though I can think of lots of film examples of it that have interested me going back to Inspector Gadget as a little kid and watching Get Smart with my dad when I was 8 or 9). After that my curiosity about the literary vs media genre was piqued and it was inevitable, so I looked up le Carré's bibliography. ( Spoiler-free ... not exactly reviews... sort-of reviews? of The Looking Glass War, Our Kind of Traitor, and The Spy Who Came in from the Cold )

google's artificial intelligence efforts in chrome on mobile

I know I should get a move on about switching back to Firefox (the last time I switched from it to Chrome there was some kind of streaming video bug I think? It was a few years ago), but I've been putting it off because of the effort involved.

But I have an Android phone, where the Google AI runs voice-activated searches and other minor tasks; and there's an app called Google or Google Search which stores a whole list of 'things you're interested in' for you (and used to be called Google Now or something like that before it got phased out). In your settings it asks you to 'subscribe' to things and offers you weird categories with different topics which it wants you to indicate you are interested in.

What it uses this for is a list of suggested articles that display every time you open Chrome on mobile right under the icons of your most visited sites. I do see the occasional link I want to click on there, usually related to upcoming movies, but the vast majority of the articles on the subjects of genre movie and tv franchises are essentially contentless clickbait blurbs that turn out to simply be notifying you that one person related to a project made a single tweet about it or that Marvel has released some new teaser posters.

I did manage to remove a lot of confusing and random content from the helpfully Google-generated list of "other things you may be interested in" that it offered for my approval in the settings of the Google Search app, and the changes I made there did appear to affect my home screen...

...except that for some reason Google thinks I am interested in tabloid gossip about British royals, presumably because I googled Meghan Markle when she married the prince. Even though I explicitly told Google that I was NOT interested in Prince Philip (the only suggestion related to them that it gave me in the settings), it continues to offer links to the sleaziest and scummiest British tabloids about things like royals blowing their noses or what hairstyles they're wearing, sometimes more than one per day, even though I uniformly dismiss them and have done for months.

Nothing I do can convince Google that I don't want to know about British royals.

In the scheme of things I've had far worse problems with browsers before, but honestly.... this one is pissing me off more than most of them because it's just so maddeningly STUPID.