Preliminary results from Sweden’s general election suggest the centre-left opposition has a three-seat lead over the right-wing ruling bloc that had promised ministerial seats to the far-right. The final result is unlikely to be announced until Wednesday or Thursday, but “weeks of uncertainty” and protracted coalition talks are expected, said the Financial Times.

Who is competing?
The country’s centre-right prime minister, Ulf Kristersson, is fighting for re-election on a platform of cutting asylum numbers and reducing gang shootings. His main rival, Magdalena Andersson (pictured above with Kristersson), leader of the centre-left Social Democrats, has been focusing on the economy, the welfare state and suppressing the country’s growing far-right faction.

Sweden uses a “mandate distribution” voting system, a type of proportional representation that means “coalitions are the norm” and “smaller parties often have outsized influence”, said Politico. With the “razor-thin victory margin” currently projected for the left, “that will be true again this time”.

Why has this election been so tight?
The friction between the two main blocs has been growing since the right-wing coalition “broke a long-standing taboo” by partnering with the Sweden Democrats, an anti-immigration party with “neo-Nazi roots”, said The Guardian. With a campaign slogan of “Make Sweden Sweden again”, the party’s policies include banning headscarves and expanding a “repatriation grant” worth SKr350,000 (£27,000) to immigrants who are already Swedish citizens. Kristersson has promised cabinet positions to Sweden Democrats members if the right-wing bloc is re-elected, which has led to an “unusually heated and polarised” election campaign.

What should we take from the results so far?
The final result, and the fate of the far-right, will be closely watched elsewhere in other European countries where similar nationalist movements are gaining ground. But if Europe’s centrists were hoping to take lessons from Sweden on how to beat the populist right, these “confusing” results leave the situation “far from clear”, said The Economist. Although Sweden Democrats have suffered their first decline in support since their party’s founding, they won’t be “too unhappy”. Previously ostracised, they have now “attained mainstream acceptance that was once unthinkable”.

A menu promising a “glistening digital cheesesteak or an eerily geometrical” turkey sandwich “evokes little more than horror in those who behold it”, said The New Yorker. Yet a growing number of restaurants are relying on generative AI to create their promotional materials.

‘Nightmarish quality’
Images of food were once “a thing to be drooled over”, highlighting the “sensual, the luscious, the beautiful”, said The New Yorker. But now a “nauseating, nightmarish quality defines AI’s insectified interpretation of human cuisine, as if food were just another surrealist goo to stochastically iterate upon”. These fake images “mock life itself”.

Such menus may also make a mockery of customers, Adaeze Onejeme, an ad sales worker in Los Angeles, told CNN. “It’s like you don’t even know what you’re going to get” when the actual food arrives, so “is it false advertising”? Despite such concerns, said the broadcaster, the “phenomenon” is spreading worldwide. In Tokyo, adverts show sandwiches that appear to be “made of cobwebs”. In Kuala Lumpur, a bowl of spaghetti marinara “looks like perfectly arranged yarn or strings of Play-Doh”, while images in Berlin include a “plastic-looking quiche with holes”.

‘Low quality, laziness’
These menu images “can signify qualities people generally don’t want to associate with food”, such as “low quality, laziness or, well, slop”, said CNN. Some of them are “alienlike catastrophes”.

AI images may be cheaper and easier to create, but there’s an “innateness” to how real food looks that “you can feel in your bones”, professional food photographer Emily Hawkes told USA Today. With AI images, “there’s something wrong, and you might not be able to put your finger on it, but you know it when you see it”. That’s why we can’t look away from these pictures, said psychologist Stephanie Sarkis: our brain gets stuck between “approach and avoidance” as it tries to make sense of something that looks almost real but clearly isn’t.

Tribute artist Fabien Pierrel waits backstage to perform on a Céline Dion tribute cruise on the Seine River, to mark the start of the chart-topper’s Paris concert residency. The French-Canadian singer is returning to the stage after a six-year hiatus due to health problems.

Anne-Christine Poujoulat / AFP / Getty Images

The “real preserving season” begins at the “deep, sticky end of summer”, said Itamar Srulovich in The Guardian. “In fact, September may well be the best jam month of all.”

As the weather cools, there is plenty of produce to turn into jars of sweet spread. Plums offer “near endless possibilities”, and some varieties can “take a surprising amount of spice”, while figs’ “honeyed sweetness” is delicious with a “few pods of cooling cardamom for balance”. Grapes are another good option, but they must be chosen carefully as most of the sweet commercial fruits lack the “funk” and “acidity” needed for a good jam. The fragola variety, with its “intoxicating, wild strawberry flavour”, is a “rare treat”.

Making jam has an “undeniable romance”, said Jane Black in The Wall Street Journal. Just three ingredients are needed: fruit, sugar and lemon juice. Heat them over the stove and they become “summer in a jar”. “It’s true alchemy.”

Perfecting the texture and consistency of homemade jam can be tricky, however. Jam-making business owner Daniel Perry suggests using a copper jam pan, which “conducts heat extraordinarily well”, and making jam in small batches to ensure the fruit on the bottom doesn’t burn.

Britain once led but assisted dying vote is backwards step
Simon Jenkins in The Times
The “refusal of the government to steer” the “assisted dying bill into law will be a personal tragedy for thousands of Britons”, writes Simon Jenkins. In other countries, “people can celebrate the conclusion of their lives in the presence of their friends and relatives”. Denying us “this freedom” is “archaic statism, heavily doused in religious prejudice”. The “agony and the indignity of dying in Britain” is a “blot on its image as a progressive nation”.

The biggest threat to the Last Night of the Proms is not the far-right
Jessica Duchen in The i Paper
Instead of the usual “outraged articles” demanding the Last Night of the Proms “be cancelled”, writes Jessica Duchen, “things have been oddly quiet” this year. When “actual Blackshirts” are “stalking British streets”, some “music-lovers in Union Jack waistcoats bobbing up and down to a sea shanty looks mercifully daft”. The main threat to this night of “old-fashioned” patriotism is now its length. By the time “Rule Britannia” started, “we were so knackered that we just wanted to go home and get some kip”.

I’m 69. Please stop saying that I’m in midlife or middle-aged
Denise Taylor in The Independent
“We seem to move from midlife to old age without much language for what comes between,” writes psychologist Denise Taylor. But the “phase from 60 to 80” – which I call “olderhood” – is a “distinct period” that marks a “shift in orientation” from your career being “the organising principle” of your identity to getting “a clearer sense of who you actually are”, and acknowledging that “time is now finite in a way it wasn’t at 40. That’s not decline. It’s focus.”