Some days ago, while watching a film that he probably shouldn't have been watching – The Dark Knight – my 10-year-old son turned to me and said, "Papa, why are so many superheroes billionaires?"
Now, of course, I’m no expert, but there probably aren’t that many billionaire superheroes. There’s Batman, of course, and Robert Downey Jr in his flying Iron Man suit. But the boy had a point: superheroes never really seem too strapped for cash, especially considering their sci-fi military hardware. For the most part, they exist outside of our economy. They’re employed, if they’re employed, in order to keep up appearances.
In truth, our billionaires more closely resemble supervillains. (Imagine, if you will, aspiring supervillain Donald Trump taking on wannabe superhero Mark Zuckerberg. Zuckerberg, even in an iron suit, wouldn’t stand a chance.)
Don DeLillo has written about billionaires before – his weakest novel, Cosmopolis, for example – but you get the sense that even when his characters have ostensibly normal jobs, they exist more as a means of exploring and often reaching certain idea-rich ends. They're untethered philosophical superheroes cutting through, exposing and making sense of American history, the past, present and, as in his 17th novel, Zero K, a possible future. They always seem to be looking from the outside in.
His characters tend to speak alike, and share DeLillo’s delicious, utterly idiosyncratic, poetic rhythm of thought: ideas speaking to ideas, DeLillo speaking to DeLillo. This is not a criticism. Take this conversation, between two twins no less, discussing what a post-death reality on Earth will resemble:
“In time a religion of death will emerge in response to our prolonged lives.”
“Bring back death.”
“Bands of death rebels will set out to kill people at random. Men and women slouching through the countryside, using crude weapons to kill those they encounter.”
“Voracious bloodbaths with ceremonial aspects.”
(…)
“Or pray over the bodies, chant over the bodies, eat the edible flesh of the bodies. Burn what remains.”
“In one form or another, people return to their death-haunted roots in order to reaffirm the pattern of extinction.”
“Death is a tough habit to break.”
DeLillo is a living master of American literature and, I'm happy to report, Zero K is not only one his best novels since the epic Underworld (1997), but one of his three or four masterpieces. Those looking for a way in to his body of work, it's not a bad place to start. And for those who have given up on DeLillo's 21st-century output, here is your way back.
Zero K has everything one comes to expect from DeLillo – shining shards of detail, philosophy, art and intimations of looming disaster – but with a new urgency and emotional depth befitting his topics. Zero K explores death, eternity, family and, especially, the language that makes us human. Or, it should be said, our current idea of what it means to be human. It is a novel that, in part, tries to imagine what it might mean to break the "habit" of death, and if what remains would be recognisably human.
The novel is narrated by Jeffrey Lockhart, son of Ross Lockhart, another billionaire, “a man shaped by money”. Ross’s wife, Artis, is dying. He has invested his money in something called the Convergence, a partly underground secret centre in a desert near to, or in, either Kyrgyzstan or Kazakhstan. There, mysterious scientists and artists and weirdo religious types are working on a way to exterminate death before death exterminates the human race.
Artis’s end is to be induced prematurely, her body preserved and worked on until such a time that she might be resurrected, but in what form remains to be seen. Jeffrey finds his healthy, semi-estranged father, Ross, ready to join her.
This is a basic science fiction set-up, of course. It’s even old-fashioned in terms of speculative fiction. But it’s how DeLillo uses this theme which is extraordinary: taking us to the farthest reaches of what it means to be human, and then, in the extraordinary second-half of the novel, back to New York City, DeLillo’s native land, and the relatively prosaic, but somehow more pressing and superheroic business of what it means to define not death, but “ordinary” life, love and family.
Tod Wodicka’s second novel The Household Spirit was published last year. He lives in Los Angeles.
A MINECRAFT MOVIE
Director: Jared Hess
Starring: Jack Black, Jennifer Coolidge, Jason Momoa
Rating: 3/5
Election pledges on migration
CDU: "Now is the time to control the German borders and enforce strict border rejections"
SPD: "Border closures and blanket rejections at internal borders contradict the spirit of a common area of freedom"
Real estate tokenisation project
Dubai launched the pilot phase of its real estate tokenisation project last month.
The initiative focuses on converting real estate assets into digital tokens recorded on blockchain technology and helps in streamlining the process of buying, selling and investing, the Dubai Land Department said.
Dubai’s real estate tokenisation market is projected to reach Dh60 billion ($16.33 billion) by 2033, representing 7 per cent of the emirate’s total property transactions, according to the DLD.
APPLE IPAD MINI (A17 PRO)
Display: 21cm Liquid Retina Display, 2266 x 1488, 326ppi, 500 nits
Chip: Apple A17 Pro, 6-core CPU, 5-core GPU, 16-core Neural Engine
Storage: 128/256/512GB
Main camera: 12MP wide, f/1.8, digital zoom up to 5x, Smart HDR 4
Front camera: 12MP ultra-wide, f/2.4, Smart HDR 4, full-HD @ 25/30/60fps
Biometrics: Touch ID, Face ID
Colours: Blue, purple, space grey, starlight
In the box: iPad mini, USB-C cable, 20W USB-C power adapter
Price: From Dh2,099
Test
Director: S Sashikanth
Cast: Nayanthara, Siddharth, Meera Jasmine, R Madhavan
Star rating: 2/5
Skewed figures
In the village of Mevagissey in southwest England the housing stock has doubled in the last century while the number of residents is half the historic high. The village's Neighbourhood Development Plan states that 26% of homes are holiday retreats. Prices are high, averaging around £300,000, £50,000 more than the Cornish average of £250,000. The local average wage is £15,458.
At a glance
Global events: Much of the UK’s economic woes were blamed on “increased global uncertainty”, which can be interpreted as the economic impact of the Ukraine war and the uncertainty over Donald Trump’s tariffs.
Growth forecasts: Cut for 2025 from 2 per cent to 1 per cent. The OBR watchdog also estimated inflation will average 3.2 per cent this year
Welfare: Universal credit health element cut by 50 per cent and frozen for new claimants, building on cuts to the disability and incapacity bill set out earlier this month
Spending cuts: Overall day-to day-spending across government cut by £6.1bn in 2029-30
Tax evasion: Steps to crack down on tax evasion to raise “£6.5bn per year” for the public purse
Defence: New high-tech weaponry, upgrading HM Naval Base in Portsmouth
Housing: Housebuilding to reach its highest in 40 years, with planning reforms helping generate an extra £3.4bn for public finances
THE SIXTH SENSE
Starring: Bruce Willis, Toni Collette, Hayley Joel Osment
Director: M. Night Shyamalan
Rating: 5/5
In numbers: PKK’s money network in Europe
Germany: PKK collectors typically bring in $18 million in cash a year – amount has trebled since 2010
Revolutionary tax: Investigators say about $2 million a year raised from ‘tax collection’ around Marseille
Extortion: Gunman convicted in 2023 of demanding $10,000 from Kurdish businessman in Stockholm
Drug trade: PKK income claimed by Turkish anti-drugs force in 2024 to be as high as $500 million a year
Denmark: PKK one of two terrorist groups along with Iranian separatists ASMLA to raise “two-digit million amounts”
Contributions: Hundreds of euros expected from typical Kurdish families and thousands from business owners
TV channel: Kurdish Roj TV accounts frozen and went bankrupt after Denmark fined it more than $1 million over PKK links in 2013
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COMPANY%20PROFILE
%3Cp%3E%3Cstrong%3ECompany%20name%3A%3C%2Fstrong%3E%20Revibe%20%0D%3Cbr%3E%3Cstrong%3EStarted%3A%3C%2Fstrong%3E%202022%0D%3Cbr%3E%3Cstrong%3EFounders%3A%3C%2Fstrong%3E%20Hamza%20Iraqui%20and%20Abdessamad%20Ben%20Zakour%20%0D%3Cbr%3E%3Cstrong%3EBased%3A%3C%2Fstrong%3E%20UAE%20%0D%3Cbr%3E%3Cstrong%3EIndustry%3A%3C%2Fstrong%3E%20Refurbished%20electronics%20%0D%3Cbr%3E%3Cstrong%3EFunds%20raised%20so%20far%3A%3C%2Fstrong%3E%20%2410m%20%0D%3Cbr%3E%3Cstrong%3EInvestors%3A%20%3C%2Fstrong%3EFlat6Labs%2C%20Resonance%20and%20various%20others%0D%3C%2Fp%3E%0A
Dubai works towards better air quality by 2021
Dubai is on a mission to record good air quality for 90 per cent of the year – up from 86 per cent annually today – by 2021.
The municipality plans to have seven mobile air-monitoring stations by 2020 to capture more accurate data in hourly and daily trends of pollution.
These will be on the Palm Jumeirah, Al Qusais, Muhaisnah, Rashidiyah, Al Wasl, Al Quoz and Dubai Investment Park.
“It will allow real-time responding for emergency cases,” said Khaldoon Al Daraji, first environment safety officer at the municipality.
“We’re in a good position except for the cases that are out of our hands, such as sandstorms.
“Sandstorms are our main concern because the UAE is just a receiver.
“The hotspots are Iran, Saudi Arabia and southern Iraq, but we’re working hard with the region to reduce the cycle of sandstorm generation.”
Mr Al Daraji said monitoring as it stood covered 47 per cent of Dubai.
There are 12 fixed stations in the emirate, but Dubai also receives information from monitors belonging to other entities.
“There are 25 stations in total,” Mr Al Daraji said.
“We added new technology and equipment used for the first time for the detection of heavy metals.
“A hundred parameters can be detected but we want to expand it to make sure that the data captured can allow a baseline study in some areas to ensure they are well positioned.”
Rock in a Hard Place: Music and Mayhem in the Middle East
Orlando Crowcroft
Zed Books
The smuggler
Eldarir had arrived at JFK in January 2020 with three suitcases, containing goods he valued at $300, when he was directed to a search area.
Officers found 41 gold artefacts among the bags, including amulets from a funerary set which prepared the deceased for the afterlife.
Also found was a cartouche of a Ptolemaic king on a relief that was originally part of a royal building or temple.
The largest single group of items found in Eldarir’s cases were 400 shabtis, or figurines.
Khouli conviction
Khouli smuggled items into the US by making false declarations to customs about the country of origin and value of the items.
According to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, he provided “false provenances which stated that [two] Egyptian antiquities were part of a collection assembled by Khouli's father in Israel in the 1960s” when in fact “Khouli acquired the Egyptian antiquities from other dealers”.
He was sentenced to one year of probation, six months of home confinement and 200 hours of community service in 2012 after admitting buying and smuggling Egyptian antiquities, including coffins, funerary boats and limestone figures.
For sale
A number of other items said to come from the collection of Ezeldeen Taha Eldarir are currently or recently for sale.
Their provenance is described in near identical terms as the British Museum shabti: bought from Salahaddin Sirmali, "authenticated and appraised" by Hossen Rashed, then imported to the US in 1948.
- An Egyptian Mummy mask dating from 700BC-30BC, is on offer for £11,807 ($15,275) online by a seller in Mexico
- A coffin lid dating back to 664BC-332BC was offered for sale by a Colorado-based art dealer, with a starting price of $65,000
- A shabti that was on sale through a Chicago-based coin dealer, dating from 1567BC-1085BC, is up for $1,950