Parag Agrawal’s plan seen as step toward normalizing time off for men involved in childcare
Twitter’s new CEO, Parag Agrawal, is reportedly taking a “few weeks” off for paternity leave after the birth of his second child, a move that drew cheers from other fathers as a positive step towards normalizing men taking time off for childcare.
The 37-year-old became CEO of the company in November when its co-founder Jack Dorsey stepped down.
Continue reading...Even a mild Covid infection can cause lingering fatigue, but exercise plays a crucial role in recovery
The Omicron variant has caused an avalanche of Covid-19 cases in Australia in the past months. While most people who catch the disease experience mild symptoms, many report feeling short of breath and sluggish for weeks afterward.
“It’s normal to feel tired after a viral infection, and everyone’s recovery is different,” says Janet Bondarenko, a senior respiratory physiotherapist at Alfred hospital in Melbourne. “But the severity of your Covid illness doesn’t necessarily predict whether you will have those lingering symptoms.”
Continue reading...Good-looking people may be better at fighting infections, a study finds, so don’t feel shallow when you swipe right
Name: Gorgeous people.
Age: Considerable. Certainly of greater longevity than poor saps like you who’ve been battered by the ugly stick and, let’s face it, will probably die sooner than hotties like me.
Continue reading...I have blood cancer and continue to isolate, living without touch, hugs, intimacy or love. It is heartbreaking
Before the pandemic, I was an artist, activist, teacher, director and producer – living fully, despite having had blood cancer for 10 years. Today, I am classified as “A3” (a person with comorbidities) in the Philippines. In the UK, I am classified as extremely clinically vulnerable.
I don’t believe in labels, yet all of a sudden, I am one. Although I am fully vaccinated and boosted, there are no guarantees that the vaccines work in a body that has a suppressed immune system, like mine.
Continue reading...When I was pregnant, I discovered that I had developed breast cancer – just like my mother before me. One day, the child I was carrying may face the same hard choices
When I was five, I would talk to my mother while she was in the bath. When she stood to get out, the water fell from her, her skin pink from the heat. Her body was miraculous to me. Women’s bodies are miraculous, with the things they can do, but I didn’t know any of that then. I just knew that she was soft and perfect, and mine.
By the time my mother developed breast cancer, I was 30. She was double that age and there was an ocean between us: I was married and living in New York, so when the news came, I couldn’t hold her to me, or be a practical support. I sat on my bed and cried. The next time I saw her, it was all over. One breast removed and carefully reconstructed. The cancer gone. My husband asked me, as we approached my parents in the airport, whether it was OK to give my mum a hug. The surgery was recent; I wasn’t sure. But it was OK. She seemed the same.
Continue reading...Red sequins, faux fur corsets and sky high heels from the celebrity favourite in a tribute to his late mentor, Andre Leon Talley
LaQuan Smith’s autumn/winter 2022 show at New York fashion week on Monday evening started over an hour late.
It soon became clear why – a celebrity was involved. Julia Fox, the model and actor who has had the lens of the paparazzi trained on her for months thanks to her recent relationship with Kanye West, opened the show and caused a hush across the audience.
Continue reading...The supermodel is pictured on the front cover of British Vogue’s March issue with her daughter
Naomi Campbell has described becoming a mother at the age of 50 as “the best thing I’ve ever done”.
In a photoshoot for the March issue cover of British Vogue, the supermodel will appear photographed with her daughter. Campbell has never revealed her daughter’s name, but she confirmed to the magazine that she was not adopted.
Continue reading...The novelist Niamh Campbell on why describing intimacy is so difficult and how creative writing about sexuality is changing. Plus, she picks 10 of her favourite examples
One of my favourite literary sex scenes is a swift and quiet one. In Colm Tóibín’s The Pearl Fishers, a gay man having dinner with a former lover and this lover’s – fanatically Catholic – wife thinks, with a flash of candidness, of anilingus past. It doesn’t read like a calculated shock, just pleasure; the story moves on and the image melts out. No point is made, nobody humiliated, no corny gotcha! occurs. There are only three people: one deceiving (husband), one pious (wife) and one emboldened but alone. The point is nuanced humanity. It’s hot.
It has been remarked upon that recent writing about sex by, in the main, young women tends towards the squalid, abject and confrontational. I can tell you that this partly down to the fact that app-based erotic culture in the metropolises of late capitalism really can be squalid, abject and confrontational. If people’s lives become miserable mills of boredom and humiliation they will tend to take it out on one another. I know this because I am Irish. People think this country was deranged for most of the 20th century by the church, but it was also deranged by poverty and, relatedly, shame. #NotallIrish of course; some people belonged to a more sex-positive cosmopolitan elite class, some were able to smuggle in condoms. And yet, the fact that it still feels impossible to discuss sex and Ireland without mentioning penitentiary laundries says a lot.
Continue reading...They’re actors, how hard can it be? Lily James lays it on thick as Pamela Anderson, while Julia Garner’s just baffling in Inventing Anna. Then there’s Lady Gaga …
Name: Weird accents.
Age: As old as acting.
Continue reading...Many women working in restaurants and bars say men routinely asked them to remove their masks in return for tips, putting their lives at risk
After working as a bartender in Washington DC for many years, Ifeoma Ezumaki’s body reached its limit during the pandemic. For Ezumaki and millions of other restaurant employees, working during the pandemic – often, in the US, for a “sub-minimum” wage – became a source of immeasurable suffering. Tips went down because sales went down, while customer harassment and hostility went up. Ezumaki and her colleagues had to become public health marshals, in addition to cocktail servers; she was asked to enforce social distancing, mask wearing and even vaccination requirements.
One evening, a customer at the bar asked her to pull down her mask so that he could see her face – a request that became so common from male customers during the pandemic that hospitality workers started referring to it as “maskual harassment”. When Ezumaki refused, he said: “Well, I guess you’re not going to eat tonight.”
Continue reading...Given enough time, even the most loving couple can get sick of each other. Roll back the years with this Valentine’s Day refresher
“At what point do you think a relationship becomes a long-term relationship?” I ask my boyfriend, while sitting on the toilet having a post-dinner wee. He is in front of the mirror, trimming the single thick black hair that grows out from a mole on his cheek. Our son is in the bath next to us, squirting water from one stainless steel mixing bowl into the other using a Calpol syringe.
“About here,” he says, gesturing towards the room, past my naked thighs, with a pair of nail scissors.
Continue reading...Rewilding has become a mantra in one Cairngorms glen – but some see initiatives to restore its forestland as a threat
Glen Feshie is one of the magnificent valleys on the north-west side of the Cairngorm massif where the forest has been released from the tyranny of grouse and deer. During the deer-stalking centuries of the 1800s and 1900s, there were 50 deer per square kilometre. Now there are one or two, and the critically endangered capercaillie are coming back. This is the place, I’ve heard, to look for the natural treeline in Scotland.
I arrive in the evening, the day before midsummer, and pitch my tent by the river. Scotland’s right to roam allows wild camping to an extent those south of the border can only dream of. The brown water is dark in the depths under the bridge, and cold. In the still-bright sunlight I walk up the valley and come to a spot where the path widens and a vista of sheer grey hills opens out. This was the setting for The Monarch of the Glen, a famous painting by Landseer of a princely 12-point stag framed by the crags above the valley.
Continue reading...A few years ago, I had a fan. She had read my writing and listened to my podcast, and often replied warmly to my tweets. Occasionally, she would send me private messages, and eventually I started following her back. It was nice. At some point, the volume of communication increased – I began receiving emails, and the notifications and messages spread to Instagram. Then they grew more frequent, uncomfortably so. She wanted things from me: to work for me, to meet up with me, to know how my weekend had gone, to tell me how hers had gone, to tell me about the job she disliked, for me to help her with a project she was launching.
My heart began to sink whenever I saw her name appear on my phone and I started responding less and less in the hope of discouraging her overtures. Then she came to an event I’d organised – the first time we’d actually met – and to my mortification, presented me with a bundle of gifts (which I obviously sent a thank you message for – I’m not a monster).
Continue reading...For increasing numbers of people finding ‘the one’ is no longer the ideal, and there are different, equally valid, ways to connect
I have spent much of the past decade talking to people about love. I make it clear that any type of love is a welcome topic but when I ask what love is, my interviewees often shoot straight to romantic love. This is partly down to the inadequacy of our language: that small word has to do a lot of heavy lifting. But it is also because of the multibillion-pound industry that has convinced us the search for “the one” is the be-all and end-all. Mention love and that’s where we immediately go.
But does this obsession with romantic love still reflect the lives we lead? In my new book, Why We Love: The New Science Behind our Closest Relationships, I have spoken to people from different backgrounds who have made me rethink our acceptance of romantic love as the dominant narrative. For some it is not a priority, for others it is a restrictive stereotype, while for others it can be a source of risk. As Valentine’s Day comes round again maybe it’s time for a different perspective.
Continue reading...The question My partner has suffered from depression for decades, but only saw the doctor once, stopped taking the medication after a few months, and refuses to go on it again. They won’t talk to anyone or seek help professionally or from family – not even me.
In the last two years, Covid has had a major impact on their mental health, and their behaviour on top of this is now affecting me massively. In the past, I’ve been told I’m very positive and happy. I’m certainly not that now. But I don’t want to go on medication myself.
Continue reading...After that initial attraction, what keeps a couple together? And as we change and grow over the years, how do we make sure we move in the same direction? Philippa Perry and five other relationship experts on how to keep that loving feeling
Him: “What are you doing?”
Me: “I’ve got to write 500 words on ‘keeping love alive’, before I go out.”
Him: “What? In case it all changes, when you go?”
The chess grandmaster, 58, on growing up in Baku, Putin’s bloody dictatorship and losing to Deep Blue
My mother was Armenian, my father Jewish. My father died when I was seven and my mother never remarried. She lived the rest of her 50 years for me. It’s the greatest thing that happened to me – I had a mother who dedicated her entire life to her only son.
I grew up in Baku, Azerbaijan, in the deep south of the USSR. Everybody spoke Russian because it was an imperial city. At 10, I was sent to the Young Pioneer Palace in Baku to learn how to play chess. It didn’t take long for me to see the gap between reality and propaganda.
Continue reading...Marie Gracie helps families arriving from Afghanistan. The Guardian angel sends a party entertainer to help the children adjust to their first English winter
Marie Gracie never met the boy, but his fate changed her life. On 2 September 2015, three-year-old Alan Kurdi washed up, drowned, on a Turkish beach. His family were Syrian refugees, trying to reach Europe. Journalist Nilüfer Demir took a photo. Alan lies face down, in a T-shirt and shorts. His feet are so tiny. His hands are upturned, facing the sky.
“I’m a mother,” says Gracie, an artist from Milton Keynes. “Can you imagine anything worse than your child being in the news like that?” She reached out to her local chapter of Refugees Welcome, set up in the wake of the Syrian war.
Continue reading...Shahi Exports, which makes clothes for the UK high street, has agreed to pay staff minimum wage and arrears
India’s largest garment company has paid out an estimated £3m in unpaid wages to tens of thousands of workers, after two years of refusing to pay the legal minimum wage.
Last month Shahi Exports, which supplies dozens of international brands, agreed to pay nine months of back pay to about 80,000 workers, with further payments expected in the coming months that will increase the total paid back to workers to £7m.
Continue reading...After years of disgust, I saw the possibility of beauty in my body just as it is. Now I am the happiest I have ever been
My body is an accordion. Not because it sounds horrible. I mean, it does. It clicks and cracks and honks, and when I try to sing nicely my son screams from the pit of his soul, like I’ve brandished an axe. No, what I mean is, it’s like an accordion because, for 32 years I was squeezing her in. In and in, for a half-life.
On a BMI chart, I’ve always been “obese” – technically, ill. So for decades I saw my body as defective, disappointing and disgusting. If I looked at it, I felt the kind of hatred and repulsion I normally reserve for racists or people who say “hashtag justsayin’” out loud.
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