The Book of the Year Read online

  Pakistan features just a couple of places higher than Afghanistan. It’s not usually seen as an LGBTQ friendly country because homosexuality is still illegal there, but this year it did introduce gender-neutral passports, joining India, Germany, New Zealand and Nepal in offering a third sex option.

  A pet passport photo booth has opened up in London, with an adjoining dog-grooming centre so that dogs can look their best in passport photos. Raw meat is placed behind the camera to make sure the dog focuses on it.

  PENCE, MR AND MRS▶

  The US vice president refuses to dine alone with any woman he’s not married to.

  While writing a profile of Mike Pence’s wife, Karen, the Washington Post found some comments from an old interview in which Pence had said he refused to eat alone with any woman but Karen. Pence also revealed that he declined to attend events that involved alcohol unless Karen was with him, saying, ‘If there’s alcohol being served and people are being loose, I want to have the best-looking brunette in the room next to me.’ In another profile this year, Rolling Stone revealed that Pence calls his wife ‘Mother’ when they’re dining together.

  It turned out that a lot of Americans agree with the Pences’ dining arrangements: a New York Times poll found 53 per cent of women and 45 per cent of men thought it inappropriate for someone to have dinner with someone of the opposite sex unless they were married to them.

  The story of the Pences’ engagement is extremely romantic: nine months into their relationship, the two went to feed some ducks at a canal, only for Karen to discover that Mike had hollowed out two loaves of bread, with a small bottle of champagne in one and a ring in the other. She had her answer prepared – for a month she had been carrying around a small gold cross engraved with the word ‘Yes’, just in case Mike proposed. They later had the bread shellacked as a keepsake.

  Karen Pence used to run a company that sold ‘towel charms’ – little metal tags that can be attached to towels to tell them apart (as she put it, ‘The goal is to eliminate having to wash towels every day because no one knows which towel is theirs’). But it’s not all just about work. Religion, too, plays a big part in the Pences’ lives: Mike’s colleagues nicknamed him ‘the Choirboy’ and Karen occasionally prays for an ill friend’s haemoglobin count.

  Pence is generally seen as more popular than Trump, but not by much: one September poll found that 44 per cent of voters were favourable towards him compared with 43 per cent for Trump. The bad news was that the same poll found that 17 per cent of Americans had no idea who Pence was.

  PENGUINS▶

  A male penguin looked for a mate on Plenty of Fish.

  A penguin specialist at a Dorset sea-life centre uploaded a dating (or, more precisely, mating) profile for a Humboldt penguin called Spruce after all the other penguins in his enclosure paired up. His keepers decided that, as he was now a year old, he was ready to join the centre’s breeding programme, and turned to the online dating site when they realised there were no unattached females sharing his enclosure.

  Computers and penguins interacted in other ways this year, as scientists set out to teach the former how to identify the latter. They want to employ AI technology to count penguins in the Antarctic, but first the robots need to know how to distinguish penguins from rocks. Members of the public have helped out, labelling penguins in various Antarctic photos in order to teach computers what they look like.

  And while computers have been learning from people, people have been learning from penguins. During a cold snap in Berlin, the German Society of Orthopaedics and Trauma Surgery advised that humans should walk like penguins to avoid falling over on ice. Specifically, they recommended that people lean forward as they walk, thus moving their centre of gravity on to their front foot and reducing the risk of slipping.

  In giant penguin news:

  A fossil of a human-sized penguin has been discovered in New Zealand. At 150 centimetres tall, it dates back 61 million years. We know from other fossils that penguins even taller than that roamed the Earth 33 million years ago.

  In tiny penguin news:

  A penguin has joined the list of pieces in a standard Monopoly set, along with a rubber duck and a T. rex. They replace the thimble, the boot and the wheelbarrow.

  PEPSI▶

  In a survey, 44 per cent of Americans who watched Pepsi’s controversial Kendall Jenner advert said it made them like Pepsi more.

  In the advert, Jenner is seen defusing a stand-off between police and protesters by handing an officer a can of Pepsi. Many considered this a cynical exploitation of the social justice movements that swept through America this year. Martin Luther King Jr’s daughter Bernice evidently wasn’t one of the 44 per cent who responded positively to the advert. She sarcastically tweeted: ‘If only Daddy would have known about the power of #Pepsi.’ Pepsi pulled the advert the day after it first ran.

  Unfortunately, Pepsi cans demonstrably do not solve problems with the law. A protester in Portland discovered this after his offer of a can was refused by a riot police officer. Later that day, protesters turned violent and started pelting the police with – among other things – Pepsi cans.

  The advert wasn’t the only disaster Pepsi has had on the streets this year. Only a few weeks after it was pulled, a Pepsi warehouse in Russia collapsed, releasing 28 million litres of its products and flooding the entire town of Lipetsk.

  PHONES▶

  Smartphones spread head lice.

  Following a dramatic increase in head lice cases over the past few years, a study presented at the British Association of Dermatologists revealed that children are more than twice as likely to be infected if they own a smartphone. It’s assumed this is because kids put their heads together when they gather around a phone, for instance when taking a group selfie.

  Mobile phones have an effect on what’s going on inside children’s heads, too. A report published by the University of Texas noted that participants performed 10 per cent less well on a memory test and 5 per cent less well on a maths test when their phones were on their desks, compared with when they were left outside the room, regardless of whether the devices were face down, face up, turned on or turned off. The students even underperformed when the phones were in a bag that was out of sight but still in the same room.

  Because of phones’ distracting effects, police have been cracking down on those who use them while driving. In Devon, they even took to spying on people in cars from the top deck of double-decker buses, which gave them the perfect vantage point. Whenever they spotted drivers talking on phones or not wearing seat belts, they radioed colleagues in police cars nearby. They caught 130 wrongdoers this way within the first two days of the initiative.

  Less successfully, officers in North Wales gave a burglar a mobile phone so that they could communicate with him while he was on bail. They lost track of him immediately, and the man ran up a £44,500 phone bill over the next six months.

  For the number of apps Donald Trump has downloaded on to his phone, see Apps.

  Donald Trump’s aides have been wishing that no one had his number. He keeps giving his personal, unsecured mobile number out, for instance to the leaders of France, Canada and Mexico, when he’s only supposed to share the secure one that connects to phones in the White House and his presidential car.

  PIZZA▶

  Iceland’s president backtracked on his wish to ban pineapple on pizza.

  Guðni Jóhannesson gives 10 per cent of his salary to charity, was the first president of any country to march in a Gay Pride parade, and has a 97 per cent approval rating – but his popularity took a hit after he suggested that he’d like to ban pineapple as a pizza topping. After a week of backlash, he issued a statement saying: ‘I do not have the power to make laws which forbid people to put pineapples on their pizza. I am glad I do not hold such power.’

  After the story broke, YouGov conducted a survey in which Britons were asked about their pizza preferences. Fifteen per cent of people said they would ban
pineapple on pizza if they had the chance. One per cent of respondents said that if they ran the world they would ban all toppings and it would be mandatory for all pizzas to be margheritas.

  New Zealand’s prime minister, Bill English, was told he was not fit to run a country after announcing that he put tinned spaghetti on his pizza, and Donald Trump said that he eats just the topping off pizzas as a healthy alternative. But neither faux pas topped Jóhannesson’s pineapple comment. It was especially poignant as a few months later the inventor of the Hawaiian pizza, Sam Panopoulos, died.

  Panopoulus was not Hawaiian; he was a Greek immigrant to Canada who ran a Chinese fusion restaurant. Before arriving in Canada he had visited Naples, and so thought he’d have a go at combining the pizzas he’d tried there with the sweet and sour element of Chinese cuisine. He made his first pizza boxes with cardboard taken from a nearby furniture store. He could never work out why his invention divided opinion so much. ‘I don’t get nothing out of it,’ Panopoulus said when asked about the Icelandic president’s comments. ‘He can do whatever he wants as far as I’m concerned.’

  When Texas was hit by Hurricane Harvey, one branch of Pizza Hut just outside Houston started delivering free pizzas by kayak.

  PLAGIARISM▶

  People accused of plagiarism this year included Ghana’s president, the US Education Secretary and Bob Dylan.

  The president of Ghana, Nana Akufo-Addo, got into trouble for his inauguration speech, when he told his audience, ‘I ask you to be citizens: citizens, not spectators; citizens, not subjects’ – a line identical to one from George W. Bush’s inaugural speech in 2001. Akufo-Addo added that ‘Ghanaians have ever been a restless, questing, hopeful people’, which is precisely what Bill Clinton said about Americans during his inauguration in 1993. The Ghanaian head of communications later apologised, saying it was an ‘oversight’ not to attribute the quotes.

  Meanwhile, US Education Secretary Betsy DeVos was accused of plagiarising phrases from Obama administration officials. Defenders said this was ‘a desperate attempt to discredit’ DeVos. She wasn’t the only Trump associate accused of lifting phrases from elsewhere: in 2016 a speechwriter apologised for accidentally including phrases by the previous First Lady, Michelle Obama, in Melania Trump’s speech for the Republican National Convention. Also in 2016, Trump’s son, Donald Trump Jr, was accused of stealing phrases from an article in the American Conservative. There was a perfectly innocent explanation: his speechwriter, law professor F. H. Buckley, pointed out that he had written both the original article and Donald Junior’s speech, and that logically he couldn’t plagiarise himself.

  Bob Dylan was accused of plagiarising passages of his Nobel Prize acceptance speech from the student study-guide website SparkNotes. The speech included references to Moby Dick, but when a writer from the website Slate checked an apparent quote from the novel, he discovered that it actually came from the online summary, not the book. There were lots of other very curious similarities between speech and study guide. Dylan may have had an essay crisis. To pick up the $923,000 bundle of cash that comes with the award, winners have to deliver a lecture within six months of the official awards ceremony. Dylan’s deadline was 10 June; he managed to deliver his lecture on the 4th.

  Even Donald Trump’s inauguration cake faced accusations of plagiarism. Duff Goldman, the baker who made the nine-tier cake for Obama’s inauguration, tweeted a photo of his creation alongside a picture of the one served at Trump’s inaugural ceremony. They were almost identical.

  PLASTICS▶

  Michigan banned the banning of plastic bags.

  Unlike much of the rest of the world, Michigan is not in favour of plastic-bag restrictions. The state made it illegal for any local administration to impose plastic-bag charges or limit the number of plastic bags shops can give out. It’s not the first state to do so: Idaho, Wisconsin, Florida and Arizona have already passed similar laws.

  Kenya swung sharply in the opposite direction, with an especially draconian new plastic bag ban. Anyone caught selling, producing or even carrying a plastic bag faces four years in prison or a $38,000 fine. The country has had a particular problem with plastic bags: it used 24 million a month before the ban. Abattoirs often had to remove them from the stomachs of cattle who grazed on piles of rubbish, sometimes finding as many as twenty bags in a single cow.

  Other parts of the world are combatting plastic pollution by seeking to eliminate drinking straws. The number of straws used every year would, if placed end to end, wrap around the Earth two and a half times, and each one takes 500 years to decompose. Moreover, discarded straws can harm wildlife, especially when they get stuck up turtles’ noses. In the UK, All Bar One has begun phasing them out; in the US, 19 major aquariums announced they’ll stop using them.

  Another firm fighting plastic is Adidas, which has been making shoes out of plastic debris from the sea. Each pair of $200 shoes uses the equivalent of 11 plastic bottles that would otherwise have stayed in the ocean.

  The seriousness of the ocean plastic problem was exposed when marine scientists turned their attention to tiny Henderson Island. This uninhabited coral atoll in the Pacific was found to be home to the highest density of man-made waste ever recorded, with 4,500 bits of rubbish per square metre and 13,000 new items washing up there daily. Of all the waste there, 99.8 per cent is plastic. All this pollution is having a huge impact on sea life: the average oyster on your dinner plate contains more than eight pieces of plastic.

  One company has crowdfunded over £600,000 to start manufacturing edible water bottles that it hopes will replace conventional packaging. Ooho, made by Skipping Rocks Lab, is a thumb-sized blob of water contained within a membrane of tasteless, edible seaweed.

  PLAYBOY▶

  For bunnies on a priest’s float, see Carnivals; for a rabbit on a plane, see United Airlines; and for a model on a mountain top, see Volcanoes.

  POLLINATION▶

  Drone bees don’t pollinate flowers, but now ‘drone’ bees do.

  This year a man-made drone pollinated a flower for the first time ever. Because insect numbers, and particularly bee numbers, are under threat, the hunt for artificial methods of pollinating flowers and crops is on. One experiment, conducted by a Japanese scientific institute, involved covering a tiny drone in sticky horsehairs and then flying it into flowers. The exercise was not a total success: it only worked on a very big flower, and the human pilot just smashed the drone into the flower until it was pollinated. Insects are safe from the robots for the time being.

  Crustaceans pollinate plants. It was long thought that underwater plants such as seagrass just allowed their pollen to drift on currents, but this year scientists in Mexico found that crustaceans can act as ‘the bees of the sea’.

  POO, DOG▶

  A right-wing march in San Francisco was cancelled after opponents threatened to litter the route with dog poo.

  The move came amid a series of violent clashes between the alt-right and anti-fascists in the US. Not all of them went as planned. The organiser of the ‘No to Marxism in America’ rally, Amber Cummings, asked people not to attend, saying she had ‘grave concerns’ about anti-fascist violence, including the fact that counter-protesters had threatened to let their dogs poo all over the site of a nearby protest. She said they’d also vowed to send in red-nosed clowns and a giant inflatable chicken wearing a Donald Trump wig. Despite her misgivings, Cummings did still opt to protest – but on her own.

  This year’s dog-poo news from the UK was much less political. Residents of Bexley were told that they could buy advertising space on dog poo bags; a ‘vile dog walker’ was found to be throwing poo-bags on elderly residents’ roofs on the Isles of Scilly; and in Ilfracombe, a volunteer complained that, thanks to irresponsible dog owners, she had been splattered in the face with dog poo 156 times while strimming the church grounds. ‘I’m now looking to get a full face visor to protect myself,’ she told the Sun.

  POPE FRANCIS▶


  Pope Francis became the first pope to act in a feature film.

  Beyond the Sun is a movie that sees Pope Francis playing the role of Pope Francis. The film tells the story of four children from different cultural backgrounds who are all trying to follow the teachings of Christ. The movie was conceived by the Pope, who pitched it to two film-makers and offered to play a cameo role if they were to make it. It debuted at this year’s Cannes Film Festival.

  This is not the first time the Pope has shown an interest in popular culture. In 2015, he released an 11-track prog-rock album entitled Wake Up (Rolling Stone gave the album three out of five stars) and in 2008, before he became Pope, he made references to Lord of the Rings by mentioning Bilbo and Frodo Baggins in his Easter Mass homily.

  It wasn’t all show business for the Pope this year, however; some serious decisions also had to be made. For one thing, he took a stand against gluten intolerance, ordering all religious communities to use proper, gluten-filled wafers as part of Holy Communion. In a letter written to all the world’s Roman Catholic bishops, the seriousness of the matter was spelled out: ‘It is for the Bishop as principal dispenser of the mysteries of God, moderator, promoter and guardian of the liturgical life in the Church entrusted to his care … to watch over the quality of the bread.’ A small compromise has been offered, though: it is permissible for communion bread to be very low in gluten.

  This year the Pope also gave his first TED talk, opened a free launderette for the homeless and told priests they shouldn’t hesitate to call exorcists* more often when they hear troubling confessions.

  POP MUSIC

  James: So the summer hit of the year was ‘Despacito’ by Luis Fonsi and Daddy Yankee. It’s become the most streamed song of all time and has been listened to 4.6 billion times. That’s a total of around 30,000 years of playing time, and if you went back that far in history you’d be at a time before rope.