7 h. ago I never wash our bread knife – and I won’t let the internet shame me into changing my ways | Emma Beddington

Apparently the mostly British habit of not cleaning your bread knife after use is ‘gross’ and unhygienic. If that’s true, then call me disgustingWhat I love about social media in 2025 is how there’s always a new source of insecurity to develop – should I fibremaxx? Do I need a deep-plane facelift? Am I a narcissist? Are my ankles betraying me? This week’s is: cleaning the bread knife. Apparently the (mostly British) habit of just wiping our breadknives after use, possibly on our sleeves, and putting them back in the drawer, as showcased in online skits and cartoons, is “gross”, unhygienic and the reason people refuse to eat outside their own home.As far as I’m aware, our bread knife has never seen a drawer. It doesn’t even get wiped, just washed when it meets an especially oily focaccia. It lives on the breadboard with several weeks’ worth of crumbs and I thought that was normal – surely there are no bacteria in crumbs? I still think it’s normal – plenty of people online admitted to...

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2 w. ago One Bladder After Another: why bros are finally having to queue for the loo | Emma Beddington

There are few things more irritating than waiting outside the Ladies while men sail in and out of their own facilities. A new, very long film has changed all thatThere’s an issue, apparently, with the rapturously reviewed new Paul Thomas Anderson film One Battle After Another, and it’s not that it’s loud and confusing (my review based on watching the trailer, an experience that left me craving a little lie down with a Maeve Binchy – I like films where people in nice clothes discuss their feelings).No, the problem is peeing. With a run time of nearly three hours, people who hold out until the end are bursting, and with audiences skewing heavily male (PTA’s fanbase is pretty bro-y), queues for men’s lavatories are unusually apparent. New York magazine collated social media posts on this: one woman said the gender imbalance was something she had only previously experienced at hockey games; another said her favourite part of the film experience was getting “to skip right past” the men’s...

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2 w. ago 996 work culture is sad and inhumane. Whatever’s wrong with 888 – or even 000? | Emma Beddington

Silicon Valley is keen, once more, on a working pattern of 12-hour days, six days a week. It really is time for a new approach ...My current cultural comfort food is The Gilded Age, Julian Fellowes’ deeply silly Manhattan toffs-in-bustles drama, in which one storyline (summarily dealt with due to lack of taffeta-rustling opportunities, I suspect) features a tycoon’s downtrodden steelworkers going on strike for “888”: eight hours each of work, sleep and recreation.That wasn’t a revolutionary demand in the 1880s. The slogan, coined by the utopian social reformer Robert Owen, dates from 1817 (his New Lanark mill workers still did 10.5-hour days, though). Even then, it wasn’t unprecedented: apparently, a 16th-century Spanish ordinance limited New World construction workers to eight-hour days. Continue reading...

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3 w. ago Tech bros want women to have more babies. But they’re going about it the wrong way | Emma Beddington

Dropping birthrates are worrying Elon Musk, JD Vance and the like. But their proposed remedies are risible. Here are some surefire winnersTo the surprise of no one with internet access, surely, we’re still in a birthrate crisis. What with ecological collapse, incipient fascism, geopolitical instability, the lack of support for new parents, childcare costs and more, bringing new life into the world requires a radical act of hope. And who’s feeling that these days?Plus, even if you do want children, pregnancy feels kind of risky at the moment. In parts of the US and beyond, pregnant people are being viewed, and treated, as functional vessels, valued only as a sort of Le Creuset for precious life delivery. Even popping a paracetamol when you’re pregnant is out now; just “tough it out” or you’ll make your kid autistic, Trump claims. Continue reading...

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4 w. ago Stop sneering at mothers. Most of us have done things you wouldn’t believe | Emma Beddington

Sure, I personally am terminally cautious and aesthetically unadventurous – but I’m the exception“These aren’t your mother’s pantyhose,” I read recently on the New York magazine website, then I scrolled on, because the word “pantyhose” gives me the ick and I’m not planning to layer pink Gucci pop socks over purple tights any time soon. Still, something about it snagged in my brain and I’ve found myself brooding about that expression and how it gets used.That “not your [family member]’s” formula entered the vernacular in a 1988 US car ad, when it was directed at dads: “Not your father’s Oldsmobile”. Now, though, it seems mostly to have defaulted to mothers. It’s a lazy marketing brag or headline, a shorthand for new, directional and disruptive, and I’ve started to hate it. Continue reading...

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4 w. ago Eight things I’ve learned in my year of ‘lifting heavy’ | Emma Beddington

I didn’t expect to enjoy heaving chunks of metal. But lifting has paid off for me in surprising ways – and shown I can change my life dramaticallyI occasionally do self-improvement stuff for work – fell-running, Hula-Hooping, getting up early – and despite sincerely appreciating some of it, and saying I’ll keep it up, I never do. Until a year ago, when I went to a gym to write about lifting heavy weights. This was, to say the least, surprising. I have never enjoyed exercise: I hated it at school, and worked out in my 20s only as an adjunct to an eating disorder. Since then, I’ve mostly walked and done bits of pilates as a dull but necessary investment in my spine. I’ve always been sedentary, a stranger to endorphins.For some reason, though, I finished writing about lifting heavy weights, shut my laptop and went straight to the gym to lift more. Since then, I have gone three times every week, come rain, shine or Storm Éowyn. Here’s the good, the bad and the ugly from my surprise year...

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