Flagship

The fall of China’s soccer league

The Chinese Super League, which a few years ago hired world-famous soccer stars, is all but bankrupt. Chinese leader Xi Jinping wanted to transform the country into a soccer powerhouse, and China’s league soon began competing with Europe for talent. The state backed teams with vast sums, but the collapse of the Chinese real-estate sector, tightening regulations, and COVID-19 restrictions meant the money dried up. Teams went bankrupt. One was forced to auction the team bus. Now, in familiar scenes, Saudi Arabia is spending wildly to build a soccer power base. China’s much-reduced league may yet have a future, one agent told the BBC: “They’ve been working with young players. I think in the next five, six or seven years, we’ll get more local players.”

Rare photos of the DPRK

A new book gives a rare glimpse of ordinary life in North Korea. Picturing the DPRK, by Glyn Ford, is a collection of photos from his nearly 50 visits over the last quarter-century. The Pyongyang-watching website 38North shared some of the images — of leisure, transport, healthcare, and even elections — revealing a country that is both familiar and alien, with citizens eating at knock-off McDonald’s or going bowling. Most images we see from the Democratic People’s Republic are of military marches and rocket launches: Seeing someone cycling a pushbike (with a license plate) or getting dental treatment is a novelty.

AI translates ancient Sumerian

Artificial intelligence can decipher 5,000-year-old cuneiform texts. Clay tablets from ancient Mesopotamia, in what is now Iraq, bear some of the oldest known writing, the wedge-like symbols known as cuneiform. But many of the relics have weathered into indecipherability. German researchers trained an AI using 3D scans of previously translated tablets, then used it on some that were too worn for human eyes to interpret, with “remarkable success,” The Debrief reported. The tablets contain “everything … from shopping lists to court rulings,” one of the study’s authors said. The world’s oldest known fictional work, The Epic of Gilgamesh, including a flood story very like the Biblical one but 1,500 years older, was written in cuneiform.

GTA classics come to Netflix

Grand Theft Auto III, Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, and Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas will be available via Netflix from this month. Subscribers will be able to play them on iOS or Android. They’re the biggest-name games in Netflix’s recent move into streamed gaming. The three titles, released in the early 2000s, were the first 3D releases of the multi-million-selling series — the little-remembered GTA 1 and 2 were top-down 2D affairs — and attracted enormous controversy for their graphic violence, but pioneered the open-world genre that is now a staple of many big releases such as The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. Netflix has not said how the games, which will be available on Dec. 14, have changed for mobile play.

Spinal Tap sequel to begin filming

The sequel to This is Spinal Tap will begin filming in February. Rob Reiner’s classic 1984 movie all but created the mockumentary genre, paving the way for The Office and a hundred other things. The sequel has been planned for a while, but filming was delayed by Hollywood strikes. Christopher Guest, Michael McKean, and Harry Shearer will return as the members of the titular washed-up British rock band with cucumbers down their trousers, and will be joined by Paul McCartney and Elton John, Reiner said in a podcast interview. Whether the volume will still be turned up to 11 remains to be seen.

For our inaugural Best of 2023 list, we’re focusing on the books that we — and you — loved this year.

Semafor recommends

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow — Gabrielle Zevin: “I’m not a gamer but found myself wanting to be one to stick around in Zevin’s intricately woven world,” Editor Preeti Jha said.

Piranesi — Susannah Clarke: Flagship Lead Writer Tom Chivers, Breaking News Reporter Jenna Moon, and Senior Editor Prashant Rao all devoured this mind-bending fantasy novel.

Readers recommend

Material World — Ed Conway: “The best history of, and potential future of, industrialisation and decarbonisation,” Tom Whitehouse emailed in to say.

Semafor plugs

This year, our colleagues Liz Hoffman and Ben Smith each released books. Check out Crash Landing, Liz’s look at how the world’s biggest companies navigated the COVID-19 pandemic, and Traffic, Ben’s charting of the social internet.

We’re still taking your recommendations for great TV shows, movies, podcasts, music, and video games. Just hit reply, or email flagship@semafor.com.

Each week, we’ll tell you what a great independent bookstore suggests you read.

Fully Booked in Manila recommends Before the Coffee Gets Cold, by Toshikazu Kawaguchi, translated into English by Geoffrey Trousselot. The “beautiful, moving” novel is about a small back-alley cafe in Tokyo which serves coffee that sends people back in time. It “explores the age-old question: what would you change if you could travel back in time? More importantly, who would you want to meet, maybe for one last time?”

Order it from Fully Booked, or from your local bookstore.

The number of times Fairytale of New York, by the Pogues and Kirsty MacColl, has been the U.K’s Christmas number 1. Shane McGowan, the former Pogues lead singer, died this week aged 65. Despite being born in south-east England, McGowan was a figurehead of Irish music — Irish President Michael D. Higgins called him “one of music’s greatest lyricists,” while an opposition leader said “Nobody told the Irish story like Shane.” His many hits included Dirty Old Town and A Rainy Night in Soho, but the Christmas ballad Fairytale is by far his best known. Despite reaching the top 20 on 19 separate occasions, including every Christmas since 2005, it has never been Christmas number one — although that may change this year.

How we cook and eat is closely tied to our happiness. Gallup polling found that most people reported cooking, and enjoying doing so, in the last seven days — women were more likely than men both to have cooked and to have enjoyed it. It also found that people who enjoyed cooking were more likely to rate their lives positively. But people who often ate alone were more likely to be unhappy than those who regularly eat in the company of others.

Our weekend roundup of the best Semafor stories you might have missed.

Business

U.S. prosecutors are probing a mysterious sports investor’s sprawling web of bets.

Tech

The reason behind Sam Altman’s ouster has left OpenAI staff uneasy after his return.

Net Zero

Out of 70,000 expected participants at COP28 in Dubai, a handful will shape the outcome and the narrative.

Politics

Donald Trump’s team is well aware of polls showing Joe Biden losing Gen Z support. They have a plan.

Africa

Communities in Kenya are protesting against evictions which they blame on government deals to ramp up the sale of carbon credits.