53 h. ago Millennial dating involves a lot of sexy moves – so why does it so rarely lead to sex? | Zoe Williams

Modern courtship entails a complex set of escalations, from texts to voice notes to photos, before everything fizzles out. Give me gen X messiness any dayIt’s well known that dating apps are a nightmare, that hell is empty and all the demons are on Hinge, to the extent people aren’t really allowed to complain about it any more. It would sound like whining about getting run over after you couldn’t be bothered to use an underpass, so you just ran across a motorway and hoped for the best.And yet, as it was my great privilege listening to some millennials to discover, young people are still going on dates, and a lot still goes wrong, without the involvement of any tech whatsoever. It’s all in that bit of the Venn diagram where “I couldn’t work out what he/she was thinking” meets “I didn’t know whether I was that into it”, which is to say, the grey lacuna marked “nothing happened”. It could be a super-efficient, young-professional walk-through-a-park date, and then nothing happened, or a...

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57 h. ago This is how many cups of coffee you can safely drink in a day

How much coffee is too much coffee?

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7 d. ago Why the anger with Billie Eilish? You’re not allowed to say what we all know about billionaires | Zoe Williams

The singer is giving away millions – but the parameters for criticising the super-rich are very narrow, and hardly anyone qualifiesWhat exactly happened with Billie Eilish at the Wall Street Journal Magazine Innovator awards last week? Look it up, and you have a perfect thumbnail of the modern information environment, its highs and lows. You can find out the exact words used by the event host, Stephen Colbert, as he introduced her and announced that the 23-year-old singer was giving away $11.5m (£8.8m) to fight food poverty and the climate crisis. You can find out the exact words she used after she took the stage. “We’re in a time right now where the world is really, really bad and really dark and people need empathy and help more than kind of ever, especially in our country,” she said. You can also get straight to the controversial bit. “Love you all, but there’s a few people in here that have a lot more money than me. If you’re a billionaire, why are you a billionaire? No hate, bu...

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7 d. ago Why the anger with Billie Eilish? Because it’s against the rules to say what we all know about billionaires | Zoe Williams

The singer is giving away millions – but the parameters for criticising the super-rich are very narrow, and hardly anyone qualifiesWhat exactly happened with Billie Eilish at the Wall Street Journal Magazine Innovator awards last week? Look it up, and you have a perfect thumbnail of the modern information environment, its highs and lows. You can find out the exact words used by the event host, Stephen Colbert, as he introduced her and announced that the 23-year-old singer was giving away $11.5m (£8.8m) to fight food poverty and the climate crisis. You can find out the exact words she used after she took the stage. “We’re in a time right now where the world is really, really bad and really dark and people need empathy and help more than kind of ever, especially in our country,” she said. You can also get straight to the controversial bit. “Love you all, but there’s a few people in here that have a lot more money than me. If you’re a billionaire, why are you a billionaire? No hate, bu...

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1 week ago Dr Zoe Williams and nutritionist Hannah Alderson on the ‘hormone balancing’ boom

We hear the term “hormone balancing” day in, day out, Instagram is awash with hormone balancing coaches and we’re constantly seeing products that claim to reinstate hormonal balance. But given that hormones are always in flux – due to the nature of them being hormones – what does the term “hormone balance” mean? TV doctor Dr Zoe Williams and nutritionist and author of Everything I Know About Hormones, Hannah Alderson discuss the balancing boom, supplements, healthy eating, the pill, menopause and more with podcast host Emilie Lavinia.

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2 w. ago Want to go to a UK university? Don’t ask me to help you write your personal statement | Zoe Williams

How do you impress admissions tutors? Apparently not by waffling on about babysitting experience, or a love of crochetIt’s university entrance season, and so begin the trials of the personal statement, which now takes the form of three questions: “Why do you want to study this course or subject?; How have your qualifications and studies helped you to prepare for this course or subject?; What else have you done to prepare outside education, and why are these experiences useful?” – 4,000 characters for the Ucas form, in which every 17- and 18-year-old has to express their uniqueness, while at the same time answering the same generic questions. I can’t help my own kids with this because they’re Stemmy (as in science and maths-oriented). their scope of interests is expressed in formulae, and if I ever have the audacity to ask them to translate it back into words, they shake their heads and go, “You’re never going to understand electron configuration”, in the exact tone of voice you’d us...

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3 w. ago Nigel Farage has 1.3m followers on TikTok. Does this mean gen Z likes him? | Zoe Williams

He is the most popular UK politician on one of the world’s most popular social media sites. Working out what that means is actually surprisingly difficultThere’s a famous clip that still does the rounds on social media, which is weird, because it’s Russia Today, hardly regular viewing, it happened in 2017, a fairly long time ago, and it was on the show Sam Delaney’s News Thing, which was never appointment viewing. In it, Nigel Farage is ceremonially knighted by a girl of about seven, who then says: “My mummy says you hate foreigners.” Delaney cuts in, “No no no, little girl”, and Nige falls about laughing, because good old Nigel, he’s always game for a laugh.Pause on whether or not Farage hates foreigners; the reason I can do an impression of the little girl is that every teenager I know is pitch perfect on all three parts – the girl, Delaney, Farage. Whenever people say, “Is it bad that Nigel Farage is the only politician my kids have heard of? Should I worry?”, I try in vain to th...

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3 w. ago Prince Andrew, Jeffrey Epstein and the scandal that won’t go away – podcast

Zoe Williams describes the scandals that have engulfed Andrew, leading to him giving up his titlesOn Friday evening, Buckingham Palace released a statement from Prince Andrew. ‘I have decided, as I always have, to put my duty to my family and country first,’ it read. ‘I will therefore no longer use my title or the honours which have been conferred upon me.’It seemed that Prince Andrew was voluntarily giving up his titles such as the Duke of York, the Knight of the Garter, or calling himself the Earl of Inverness – but perhaps his hand had been forced by the palace, or by his older brother King Charles. Continue reading...

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3 w. ago What do we learn from Epstein and Andrew? There’s a level of power at which right and wrong no longer exist | Zoe Williams

Prince Andrew has finally decided to give up his titles – but we have known the shape of the allegations against him for years. Why was there a collective decision to look away?On the eve of the publication of Virginia Giuffre’s book Nobody’s Girl, released six months after her death from despair, Buckingham Palace is apparently braced for fresh revelations. Many MPs are calling for a change in the law, to give King Charles or a parliamentary committee the power to remove royal titles, with Rachael Maskell, the Labour MP for York Central, pleading with parliament to take seriously this opportunity to “address the wrongs of history and to ensure that the voices of victims and survivors are really heard and acted upon”. A source at the palace told the BBC they expected “more days of pain ahead”.Getting ahead of these “days of pain”, Prince Andrew – he continues to hold the title he was born with – announced last Friday that he was relinquishing his use of “Duke of York” and “KG”, knig...

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3 w. ago My mum died this year. And the glut of apples from her tree has brought with it a new kind of grief | Zoe Williams

Every year, I refused the crates of fruit she tried to palm off on me each autumn. Now I wish I’d taken themMy mother was the most horrible cook, unbelievably bad at it. Her umbrella crime was the lack of self-knowledge – far from being bad, she thought she was brilliant – but underneath that, a set of discrete misapprehensions, any one of which would have been enough to make you not want to eat at her house. She’d never take a recipe literally; each ingredient could be swapped with something else of a similar colour, or a similar size, or not similar at all. She loved to throw in a rogue element. As I write this, I’m flicking through her magazine cuttings, and she’s made a note above an aubergine and potato casserole that says: “Good, but needs something else. Lime?”She thought everything, sweet and savoury, could be lifted by a dried apricot. She was extremely experimental but eschewed basic principles, such as parboiling, or meat being roasted for a specific amount of time, relat...

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