At your service
Among the new gadgets displayed at the Consumer Electronics Show last week in Las Vegas was a smart fridge with an internal camera so you can check what’s running low while you’re at the shop. Back in the kitchen was a household robot that can fold and stack laundry, put food in the oven or grab things from the fridge. For domestic animals, a robot pet feeder can store seven days of food and has a night vision camera to track how your neglected pet is getting on.
Entitled titles
Over the past 20 years or so, jobs have fallen victim to inflation, not just in the pocket but in the title too. These hyped descriptions can range from “director of first impressions” for a receptionist to “underwater ceramic technician” for a dishwasher. These may be exaggerations, but a real one emerged in the Ashes Test cricket series in Australia. About 50 years ago, the groundsman at the Melbourne Cricket Ground was known as “Grassy”; the latest incumbent, Matt Page, is known as “executive manager for turf” (capitalised by the MCG if not the FM) and paid a lot more than Grassy was.
Bonus for books
As of mid-December, Americans had bought 700-million print books in 2025, according to industry tracker Circana BookScan. That’s only 3-million fewer than the pandemic peak in 2021 and 57-million copies more than in 2019. Readers bought about 184-million print adult fiction books, roughly the same as last year; 5.5-million of those were thrillers by Freida McFadden, a pseudonym for Federica Esposito, a US thriller author and practising physician specialising in brain injury.
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