Ella Dorn

The British government is going to war with 4chan, the controversial internet message board that has been around for more than 20 years. It’s surprising that it has taken them so long. 4chan users have committed murders, propagated hoaxes and shaped much of the online right. Since the Online Safety Act came into effect, no one at the site has responded to Ofcom’s statutory information requests or explained how 4chan will ‘comply with … safety duties about illegal content’. Officials want 4chan to get better at removing illegal content and to introduce an age-verification system. Under the new law, tech owners are legally responsible for protecting users from each other. 4chan will be fined £20,000 a day until the nastiest place on the internet can sort itself out.

Last month, Katy Perry became the first pop star to go to space. The Blue Origin flight took only 11 minutes and involved her singing to Planet Earth. She had no idea the planet would hate her on her return. Much of the criticisms included phrases like ‘waste of money and resources’; some even mentioned an ‘ongoing genocide’. She has defended herself in strange self-help metaphors, as the biggest pop stars are wont to do. ‘Through my battered and bruised adventure I keep looking to the light and in that light a new level unlocks,’ she said. ‘It’s so out of touch,’ said Lily Allen, who has since apologised for singling her out – there were five other women on the ship.

For the first half of the 2010s, any teenage girl in her room had a chance of amassing more political influence than a junior Spad. She could define political terms and concepts, blacklist undesirable elements, and argue for a different kind of society. Thousands, sometimes tens of thousands, of other teenage girls would be following her, reading and engaging. These were the days of Tumblr, a youth blogging website that functioned like a dysfunctional think tank. I first found out about Tumblr in 2012, when I was in Year 7; a girl in my year group started a blog about her depression and anxiety and linked it from her public Facebook. I wanted in on her mental anguish – the posts she shared would ring safeguarding alarm bells today, but they seemed impossibly grown-up at the time.

Women’s expectations are off. They want men with advanced degrees, but on university campuses, women outnumber their male counterparts. They want men with above-average incomes, but the gender pay gap has been reversed – young women now out-earn men. They want men who share their politics, but in almost every western country over the past decade or so, women have slid to the left while men have remained centrist. NEW: an ideological divide is emerging between young men and women in many countries around the world.I think this one of the most important social trends unfolding today, and provides the answer to several puzzles. pic.twitter.

There’s a spectre floating inside the head of a certain type of young woman. It’s the fast-talking, sex-realist American academic Camille Paglia. She was big in the 1990s but my parents haven’t heard of her. ‘Did she write Fear of Flying?’ asks my dad. On sections of the internet she has become a folk hero. She’s an ideological guiding force for the female hosts of Red Scare, an influential left-ish podcast which was described by the Cut as ‘a critique of feminism, and capitalism, from deep inside the culture they’ve spawned’. Paglia is equally popular among some conservative factions: a 2017 debate between Paglia and Jordan Peterson has amassed 3.5 million YouTube views.

One of China’s most famous poems was penned by a teenager with a killer hangover. ‘Heavy sleep can’t get rid of the dregs of alcohol,’ she grumbles, sequestered in her darkened room after a night of boozing and bad weather. She has to ask a maid to open her curtains. Here comes one of the quintessential images of classical Chinese poetry: a crab-apple tree stands in the drenched earth, wrecked by the storm. Her maid, who hasn’t been drinking, sees nothing wrong. The poet is full of sorrow. Spring has faded. To her, drunkenness was always beautiful, even when it led to disaster Li Qingzhao grew up in 12th-century Shandong, an eastern province around four hours from Beijing.

Marvel is at death’s door. What’s next? Some say we can track an incoming recession by the length of women’s skirts, others by the popularity of dance music. Film, as the composite of a million images, comes out as a more sophisticated forecaster – and not just of the economy, but of lifestyles and mentalities. Styles rise and fall with the times. They’ve been doing so since the early days of commercial cinema. A cowboy craze has already spread to TV Take the original shift from film noir to Western. Noir, which peaked in popularity in the latter half of the 1940s, dealt with the leftover anxieties of world war two. Sometimes this was obvious: in Orson Welles’s The Stranger, a Nazi war criminal descends on a peaceful Connecticut town.

My nemesis is a student at another university. She has not always been my nemesis. We were friends until I realised that she was not who she purported to be. Her interests had been systematically poached from the people around her. Talking to her always felt like an interrogation from a particularly insecure detective. Real feminists know that empowerment comes from defining the breadth of your own animus She mined me constantly for pointers on speed-reading and language-learning. Rarely did she actually follow my advice, especially when it required resourcefulness and hard graft. The final straw came when my nemesis inquired, out of nowhere, about my career plans. ‘Thanks,’ she said when she’d finally managed to file them down to a single job title. ‘I’ll look into that.

Martin Scorsese thinks Marvel films aren’t cinema. ‘The pictures are made to satisfy a specific set of demands, and they are designed as variations on a finite number of themes,’ he wrote in a New York Times article in 2019, written after a wave of backlash from superhero fans and directors alike. Earlier that year, Marvel’s three-hour blockbuster The Avengers: Endgame had garnered over $2.7 billion. For a while it was the highest-grossing film ever made. People turned up to see it in spandex catsuits. You couldn’t move for replica infinity stones. Some cinemas in America, eager to fill the demand, screened the film over and over for 72 straight hours.

In our celebrity-obsessed culture, the EGOT establishes someone as an all-out legend. Achieving an Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, and a Tony is the Hollywood-Broadway equivalent of a quadrathlon. Only 19 people have ever won all four awards and the feat is usually accomplished over several decades. Articles run every award season advising punters of the stars who are ‘nearly there’ – Elton John has finally made it, receiving an Emmy for a streaming performance of his farewell concert. The most efficient route to an EGOT is to write a beloved stage musical which is then turned into a film There is some contrast, however, between the public perception of the EGOT and what it takes to actually win. For example, you might assume that the inclusion of the Grammy implies musical acumen.

The bin system in Taiwan is strange. There is no single bin day. A citizen retains responsibility for their rubbish until the moment the bin lorry arrives on their road, at which point they must take it upon themselves to put it into the appropriate receptacle or shredder. In my bit of Taipei, where my university sent me for a year to study Mandarin, the lorries came almost every evening. Each neighbourhood had two slots – mine were at 18.30 and 21.20. Before the lorries left, they would play loud warning jingles. Sometimes this was Beethoven’s ‘Für Elise’, and sometimes it was ‘A Maiden’s Prayer’, a Polish piano piece also heard on Taipei city buses.

Just Stop Oil have spent the past year vandalising their way through the National Gallery in the over-orchestrated manner of a Cluedo suspect. Once it was Constable’s Hay Wain in Room 34 with a bit of glue. Then van Gogh’s Sunflowers in Room 43 with a Warholian can of tomato soup. The newest casualty is Velázquez’s seventeenth-century Rokeby Venus, its protective glass smashed in several places by miniature safety hammers. Readers may at this point catch onto a sense of déjà vu. The nude Venus had already been victimised in 1914 by suffragette Mary Richardson in the National Gallery with a meat cleaver.