Eleanor Harmsworth

It was the first day of the spring semester when masked individuals burst into the classroom, shouting and throwing posters at students. As they yelled, the professor asked the protestors calmly, and in Arabic, to leave. The class was on the History of Modern Israel, the campus was Columbia University, and the protestors were part of the highly engaged and increasingly extreme “Palestine liberation” movement. It transpired that the masked students did not speak Arabic, that they did not intend to engage in a dialogue, and their primary concern was causing disruption and documenting that disruption for social media.

Oisin Murphy is seen as a bad boy of flat racing. He’s one of the best riders in the world but he keeps getting into trouble. He’s been banned from racing for 14 months for breaching coronovirus protocols by going to Mykonos and he failed two alcohol tests last year.  Oisin is now taking some time, as he puts it, to reflect. This year he’s at Royal Ascot without his riding boots for the first time in his career.  I find him in the Parade Ring. A horse obsessive, he immediately starts talking me through the details as the jockeys begin to mount.

The Johnny Depp vs Amber Heard trial is now in its fourth week, and so many of us are still gripped. People are either consciously ‘following’ or ‘not-following’ the trial as if it were a television drama, which in more than one way it is. The two main characters are actors, after all. Kimberly Lau, a partner at the New York legal firm Warshaw Burstein, said this week that ‘the testimony of the witnesses and documentary evidence will be even more essential for the jury to determine who is really telling the truth and who may be acting out a role.’ The more slippery truth, however, is that both parties are playing out roles. As in reality TV, or any good court fiction, the thrill comes from trying to figure out who is faking what and when.