Category Archives: Life and style

Women are happier without children or a spouse, says happiness expert

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Behavioural scientist Paul Dolan says traditional markers of success no longer apply

We may have suspected it already, but now the science backs it up: unmarried and childless women are the happiest sub-group in the population. And they are more likely to live longer than their married and child-rearing peers, according to a leading expert in happiness.

Speaking at the Hay festival on Saturday, Paul Dolan, a professor of behavioural science at the London School of Economics, said the latest evidence showed that the traditional markers used to measure success did not correlate with happiness – particularly marriage and raising children.

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How about the ‘pro-life’ lobby get behind these life-positive causes instead? | Hadley Freeman

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Banning abortion isn’t the most effective place to start if you want to save lives

It’s always more fun to be on the winning side, and in the US right now there is no question that the pro-life side is – well, “killing it” seems like the wrong term, so let’s say it’s enjoying some triumphs. Georgia, Kentucky, Mississippi, Missouri and Ohio have banned abortion from six to eight weeks into a pregnancy – before many women even know they’re pregnant – and last week, 25 men passed a law in Alabama banning nearly all abortions, including in cases of rape and incest, which was then signed by the state’s female governor, Kay Ivey. I encourage all of you to look at a photo of these men and say their names out loud: Jabo Waggoner. Garlan Gudger. Shay Shelnutt. If Martin Amis were writing a book about a bunch of woman-hating morons, he would reject these as just too on the nose.

It must be a real bummer to the smug bros (and Susan Sarandon) who insisted in the run-up to the 2016 election that there was no real difference between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. Well, no difference to them, perhaps. But to millions of vulnerable women in the US, things are a little different. President Trump has effected a rightwing judicial wave across the US, filling the federal court system at all levels with deeply conservative judges. This includes, of course, the supreme court, with the appointments of justices Neil Gorsuch and the famously charming Brett Kavanaugh; “pro-life” law-makers are hoping to take advantage of this and overturn Roe v Wade.

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‘I even loved his Twankey’: Dench, Hopkins, Mirren and more on Ian McKellen at 80

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Wild parties, stunning performances, silhouette erections and marrying Patrick Stewart twice. As the actor turns 80, friends including Derek Jacobi, Janet Suzman, Michael Sheen, Bill Condon and Stephen Fry pay tribute

Ian has been been very important in my life, even before we became good friends. When I was a young teen I remember watching Walter on the TV and being hugely affected by it. Then at Rada in the early 90s, I finally saw him live, in Richard III at the National. I was blown away. I remember him doing the opening speech while lighting a cigarette one-handed. It was brilliant, so understated. It exemplified his mastery – and his work ethic. To do something so difficult and complicated and make it look so easy. Ian has an innate sense of theatrical audacity, something I think he shares with Olivier. They both did things that would make the audience gasp self-consciously.

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How Stockholm became the city of work-life balance

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With flexible hours the norm, and almost two years’ parental leave for every child, Sweden’s capital boasts a happy and efficient workforce. What can other cities learn?

It is 3.30pm, and the first workers begin to trickle out of the curved glass headquarters of the Stockholm IT giant Ericsson.

John Langared, a 30-year-old programmer, is hurrying to pick up his daughter from school. He has her at home every other week, so tends to alternate short hours one week with long hours the next.

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From bleak to bustling: how one French town beat the high street blues

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Mulhouse has turned around its image and now boasts more shops opening than closing, thanks to smart planning, investment and community efforts

On a lane in what was once considered eastern France’s grimmest town, a street artist is up a ladder finishing a mural, the independent bookshop has a queue at the till, the organic cooperative is full of customers and Séverine Liebold’s arty independent tea shop is doing a brisk trade.

When Liebold opened Tilvist in Mulhouse three years ago, in a space that had been vacant for years, friends tried to persuade her against it. “They said: ‘Not Mulhouse, look elsewhere,’” she recalls. “But I stuck with my instinct, and I was right.”

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‘Step away from the porn’: how to have hot sex at every age

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From early experimentation to long-term relationships, our erotic lives constantly evolve – here’s expert advice for all stages of life

“Nowadays many people start their sexual journey with porn,” says the sex educator and author of The Curious History of Dating, Nichi Hodgson. In fact in a recent study of 1,000 18 to 25-year-olds, 45% said that porn was their main source of sex education, while in a 2016 study commissioned by the NSPCC, more than a third (39%) of the 13 to 14-year-olds said they wanted to copy the behaviour they had seen in porn. “The upcoming age restrictions [on porn sites] will make it less likely that young people just stumble across this content, but there still needs to be a degree of shame-free porn literacy,” says Hodgson.

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The truth about sex: we are not getting enough

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In a world that seems so at ease with sex, you’d think we were having it all the time. Think again

We owe a lot to the sex lives of Greeks. Ancient Greece gave us the origins of the names and concepts for homosexuality, homophobia and nymphomania, as well as narcissism and pederasty. The Romans talked freely to each other in toilets and were equally community-minded when it came to sex, with a reputation for lasciviousness and orgies. Georgians, we believe, were smutty, and Victorians were prudes and hypocrites. (All of these are partial truths.) We like to use sex as a mirror of an era, and to make judgments accordingly. What then, are we to make of us right now?

This is the most sex-positive age ever, right? We are liberal and comfortable with sex like no other people have ever been. Our magazines publish articles on how to get on better with your clitoris. Porn is freely available (and accessed by teenagers). Erotic books are bestsellers, however badly written. TV broadcasts shows in which the contestants are naked, or have sex in a box, or make a sex tape on camera. If sexual choice were a shop, it would be a hypermarket, with dizzyingly long aisles of every possibility: straight, gay, bi, trans, poly, fluid, each with its own culture and each widely accepted.

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Kim Kardashian West and Kanye West name fourth child Psalm

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Reality TV star and musician ‘blessed beyond measure’ with arrival of baby boy

Kim Kardashian West and her husband, the musician Kanye West, have named their new child Psalm after its recent birth via surrogate.

Kardashian West posted a picture of the boy on social media with the caption “Psalm West”.

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Cannes festival in row after director and baby blocked from Palais entry

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British film-maker claims she was denied access to Marché du Film, then told to pay fee for baby and wait two days for it to be processed

The Cannes film festival has been criticised for its treatment of mothers and babies after a female director claimed she and her child were prevented from entering the festival site.

British director Greta Bellamacina, whose film Hurt By Paradise is screening in the market section of the festival, said the festival had displayed an “outrageous” attitude after she attempted to enter the festival with her four-month son.

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Behind the bloodshed: the chilling untold stories about Charles Manson

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Tarantino’s epic is the big draw at Cannes. But there are other Manson movies around – including one about what ultimately happened to the young women who fell under the murderer’s spell

Over the last half century, one villain has loomed large over Hollywood. The gruesome murders committed by Charles Manson and his followers in the summer of 1969 have filled countless films and documentaries about stardom and the debaucheries of the 1960s. But his malign influence extends far beyond the screen. Aside from murdering eight people, Manson and his disciples – the Family – have been blamed for wiping out the counterculture, free love, communes and hippies.

Three new films are making fresh attempts to reckon with “the symbol of animalism and evil”, as Rolling Stone magazine called him. The biggest is Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, about to premiere at the Cannes film festival. Set in Los Angeles during the Manson era, the film stars Leonardo DiCaprio as a fading TV western star and Brad Pitt as his stunt double, both attempting to make the leap to the big screen. Margot Robbie plays Sharon Tate – the actor and wife of director Roman Polanski – who was brutally murdered by the Family. Manson, a background figure in the film, is played by Damon Herriman.

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The age of rage: are we really living in angrier times?

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In a world in which populists whip up anger that spreads on social media, it’s easy to conclude we have never been more furious

It’s a standard observation that the world is getting angrier – but the truth is that taking the emotional temperature of an entire era is a mug’s game. For one thing, it’s almost impossible to get the necessary historical perspective: road rage, for example, feels like a modern phenomenon, until you learn that in 1817, Lord Byron was reported to the police for delivering a “swinging box on the ear” to “a fellow in a carriage, who was impudent to my horse”. It’s also easy to overlook the ways you’ve changed as an individual: I certainly remember life in the early 80s as less frustrating, but that’s surely just because I lived a child’s life of leisure, all expenses paid.

Still, the best data we have suggests that, overall, we are indeed getting angrier. Last year, 22% of respondents around the world told the Gallup organisation they felt angry, a record since the question was first asked in 2006. And something else, even harder to measure, feels like it’s different as well: it’s as though our anger has curdled, gone rancid. As a society, we seem not to express it and move on, but to stew in it – until, at the extremes, it hardens into violence and hate.

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Viard’s first show as Lagerfeld successor marks new era for Chanel

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After 30 years at the highest level of fashion, Virginie Viard makes debut as solo designer

“Complacency,” designer Karl Lagerfeld once said, “is the beginning of the end.”

Three months after his death, this spirit lives on at Chanel. The house has sprung out of mourning and back into action, transforming the Grand Palais in Paris into a Belle Époque railway station for the first collection by Lagerfeld’s successor, Virginie Viard.

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Paolo Di Paolo’s Italy in the 1950s and 60s – in pictures

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The Paolo Di Paolo: Lost World exhibition presents more than 250 largely unseen images from the photographer’s archive. Di Paolo chronicled life in his country as an economic boom followed the destruction of the second world war. Although those were the years of la dolce vita he was an anti-paparazzo – he shunned the salacious and respected his subjects. The exhibition is at MAXXI in Rome until 30 June

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Trieste half-marathon backtracks on exclusion of Africans

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Organisers invited only Europeans to draw attention to exploitation of African athletes

The organisers of a half-marathon in the northern Italian city of Trieste have backtracked on their decision to exclude African athletes from the race following accusations of racism.

“After launching a provocation that hit a nerve, drawing great attention to a fundamental issue, contrary to what was communicated yesterday, we will also invite African athletes,” Fabio Carini, the manager of the Trieste running festival, said in a statement.

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Hand dryers v paper towels: the surprisingly dirty fight for the right to dry your hands

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For a century, the humble paper towel has dominated public toilets. But a new generation of hand dryers has sparked a war for loo supremacy.

By Samanth Subramanian

In the summer of 2005, a Chicago marketing consultant named George Campbell received a tantalising call from a headhunter. Was he open to an interview at Dyson? The company was secretively preparing to launch a new appliance, and it needed a sales strategy for the US: that was all the headhunter would divulge. Campbell was excited; he saw Dyson as “a company with the iconic quality of Apple, and an ability to take a basic product like a vacuum cleaner and make an 80% margin on it”.

He went along to Dyson’s office, a factory-like space with lofty ceilings and timber beams next to the Chicago river. In his first few conversations, he recalled, they wouldn’t even reveal what the product was. Finally, Campbell was told in strict confidence: it was a hand dryer. And he’d thought he was joining Dyson for the glamour. “My heart dropped to my stomach.”

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Exercise helped with my anxiety – but I became obsessed. Therapy was the answer

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It wasn’t until I had a back injury that I realised how extreme my gym habit had become – and admitted that I needed help

The first time I went for a run as an adult, I was at university and had been deeply depressed for several months. I managed a minute before I had to walk, but, I told myself, a minute was a start. I went every day and, as the weeks passed, I ran further, for longer. The impact was immediate – even after that first jog I felt a rush of achievement, of hope. And it was cumulative: every run that followed made me feel stronger, physically and emotionally. Then, one day, many months later, I realised I was not depressed any more.

As the years passed, I gradually branched out from short jogs into runs of more than two hours. I went to circuit classes and step classes, interval training and personal training, core sessions and legs, bums and tums sessions. I dropped two dress sizes and developed stomach muscles.

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UK temperature hits 70-year high for Easter bank holiday

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25.5C recorded, with 27C expected on Monday, which would make UK warmer than Morocco

Britons experienced the hottest day of the year so far on Saturday, and the hottest Easter bank holiday weekend for 70 years, as the temperature hit 25.5C (77.9F) in Gosport in Hampshire.

The temperature is expected to rise even further on Monday to 27C, making the sunniest spots in the UK warmer than most of Europe, Algeria and Morocco.

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The dad who gave birth: ‘Being pregnant doesn’t change me being a trans man’

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Transitioning meant that Freddy McConnell finally felt comfortable in his skin. Then he began a quest to conceive and carry his own child

Freddy McConnell takes out his phone and shows me a film of his baby snoring contentedly. Jack is gorgeous, with blond hair, blue eyes and heavy eyelids, and McConnell is the classic doting dad – albeit more hands-on than most. It’s a year since he gave birth to Jack, an experience he describes as life-changing. He has also made an intimate and moving film about that experience, from the decision to have a baby, through pregnancy and the delivery. Everything is documented in close-up, including Jack’s arrival in a hospital birthing pool.

You might expect McConnell to be an extrovert; an exhibitionist, even. In fact, the Guardian multimedia journalist is reserved and private in a rather old-fashioned, stiff-upper-lip English way. So why on earth would he want to expose himself like this?

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