One of the biggest stories of 2023 was the fairly rapid disflation that occurred over the year. Underlying inflation fell by more than 2 percentage points in both the US and Australia - even more surprisingly this occurred without a substantial rise in the unemployment rate! This immaculate disinflation surprised most economists. But should it have? Given economists were surprised by how 2023 unfurled, one might expect the model that underpins most of their thinking to be wrong or at least misleading.

The Chief Khalsa Diwan was an institution established in 1902, to heal the schism between the Amritsar and Lahore Khalsa Diwans, as both had been influenced by their various ideological differences. The opening was inaugurated in the Malvai Bunga on Diwali. They were renowned for their creation of orphanages, schools and colleges, to help compete with growing missionary activities among other organisations like the Arya Samaj and Anjuman-i-Islam. However, later on, it was criticised as a propagandist voice of the elite Sikhs by anti-British groups like the Akali Dal.

I will tell you my personal and professional experience with Jennifer Friedenbach, executive director of Coalition on Homelessness, San Francisco. In 2017, SFPD Captain (now Assistant Chief) David Lazar invited me to join the new Community Police Advisory Board on Homelessness. I was honored. This subject is close to my heart, not just because I hate to see so much suffering and want to be a positive force in my city, but because members of my immediate family have been homeless.

In March 2020, when COVID-19 shut everything down for a spell, I started watching pandemic films. There was the very shout-y 1995 Dustin Hoffman film Outbreak. There was the underrated cast of 2009’s Carriers. And there was Stephen Soderbergh’s impeccable Contagion. Why watch these films as a pandemic was breaking out? Because as scary as COVID-19 might have seemed in early 2020, these films highlighted all the ways in which things could have been so much worse.

You may have heard that there’s a lot of speculation online as to whether Kate Middleton’s cancer reveal video is truly her or an AI generated version of her. This is an interesting conundrum, and given the ability of AI to mimic people these days, it is not unfair to ask this question. This is especially true because the royal family did admit that the photograph that was shared on Kate Middleton’s social media account recently was in fact, at least photoshopped, if not in part manipulated by artificial intelligence.