I am writing this from a small apartment off Piazza Maggiore in Bologna, where the coffee is a euro twenty, the porticoes keep the rain off your head, and the spaghetti is as you’d expect it - alla bolognese.

I’m here for a work event, the Bologna Book Fair, where children’s literature industry specialists gather from all corners of the globe.

It’s a kaleidoscope of stands featuring kids’ books from all over the globe all held in a ginormous convention centre outside the city centre.

The mixing of culture and commerce is the kind of thing that gives me great hope - humans sharing and collaborating with the aim of inspiring children, as well as trying to make a few quid.

Of course, that’s not to say all is well in Italy, where the energy crisis is hitting at least as hard as it is at home.

The country has been a laggard in adopting policies that would decarbonize the transport and housing sectors, not unlike ourselves.

The prime minister Giorgia Meloni is having a challenging week with Italian bonds weakening due to Rome’s heavy reliance on imported energy and the threat of rising government and fiscal instability.

With an election coming up in 2027, Meloni seems to be losing the favour of the markets.

And I’m sure the last thing she needed was her old friend Donald Trump, the “brilliant man” she used to call him, laying into Pope Leo, the first American pope in history, on Truth Social - one of the dumbest moves in his dumbest of weeks.

All bets off on Middle East

While the news on my phone was telling me about the trouble in the Strait of Hormuz, it seems I could have been making a few quid in the process if I had predicted it.

This, I have learned this week, is what people do now. There is a website called Polymarket where for the price of Italian coffee you can take a position on whether the current ceasefire holds until June, on whether Macron survives the month, and, I am not making this up, on the colour of the smoke at the next papal conclave.

The Guardian had a long piece about it at the weekend fretting that gamblers are now better informed about geopolitics than journalists. God help us.

Reality, in 2026, has a spread. Ireland, of course, is in no position to be lecturing anyone. Paddy Power has been running novelty markets on the next Pope since roughly the Avignon papacy. But it’s interesting that The White House sent an internal email on March 24, warning staff not to make bets on the U.S. war with Iran on prediction markets. This is likely the result of reports that more than $500 million in crude oil futures trades were made in the roughly 15 minutes before President Donald Trump announced a pause in hostilities against Iran on March 23.

Small world, incidentally, Donald Trump Jr. is an adviser to both Kalshi and Polymarket. What a world we are living in.

No frontiers for AI model

Speaking of diabolical things you can do on your phone, I’ve been reading with interest about Mythos, the new version of Anthropic’s Claude. It’s quite possibly the most sophisticated artificial intelligence model built yet, or a frontier model as they call it in the business.

It is so capable they are not releasing it to the public yet.  In tests, the model solved 73% of expert-level hacking puzzles that no AI on earth could touch a year ago, and has become the first model to complete something called The Last Ones, a 32-step simulated attack on a corporate network that would take a human expert roughly 20 hours of solid work.

Having built the thing and then apparently startled themselves with it, Anthropic has launched Project Glasswing, a new initiative with Amazon Web Services, Apple, Microsoft, NVIDIA, Google and a bunch of other top tech companies in an effort to secure the world’s most critical software.

Meanwhile, in a development that attracted roughly one per cent of the attention, the ESRI and the Department of Finance quietly published a report this week saying artificial intelligence is coming for exactly the high-paid service-economy jobs the Irish exchequer has been quietly living off for many years.

You get the feeling this might be more difficult to get to grips with than Y2K...

Orbán is not the victor

On a more hopeful note, the Hungarian election. US Vice President JD Vance had flown over only the week before to share a stage with Viktor Orbán at a “Day of Friendship” rally in Budapest.

On Sunday, the Hungarian electorate went to the polls in record numbers, the highest turnout since the fall of communism, and handed Péter Magyar’s Tisza party a two-thirds supermajority.

So after sixteen years of Orbán, he was gone in an evening. Magyar told the crowds along the Danube the result was “so large it was visible from the moon and every window in Hungary.”

Ah, the wonders of democracy. A queue of people in Budapest using the oldest and most boring technology available, a piece of paper and a pencil, to take their country back.

Sometimes reality is exactly what it claims to be.