“Men age like wine while women age like milk,” the anonymous comment sneered.  It was lockdown, and I’d become obsessed with consuming incel content on Reddit. “Incel,” of course, is an amalgamation of the words “involuntary” and “celibate”, and despite being neither, I still got sucked in.  I was turning 30, which has always had deeper connotations for women. Read the (often-quoted and often-outdated) stats online, and you might end up like me, convinced your fertility, looks, and love life were about to drop off a cliff. The posters had a word for that: the wall – the point in time ..read more

Back in 2006, when I was just a shy 12-year-old from New Jersey, I got to meet Richard “A-Wire” Lecky at Woodward Camp, an extreme sports mecca in Pennsylvania. I was a skateboarder, and Lecky was a 21-year-old BMX rider (sponsored by Red Bull) visiting from Jamaica, where he was almost single-handedly driving the island’s nascent extreme sports scene. Skaters and BMX riders would usually stick to their own groups at these camps, but I made it my mission to trail him around and get to know him. What began was a seven year journey in which Lecky took me under his wing, and I got to witness and ..read more

TikTok is awash with softcore porn – if that’s what you’d call mostly-clothed creators making provocative noises and speaking in thinly veiled euphemisms. In one video, @cherryapricott moans while swishing a white substance around her mouth, before proclaiming to the camera, “I love the taste of Greek yogurt.” Another sees @oliviafleur_x, who has over 472,000 followers on the platform, talking suggestively while moving her hand, half off-camera, in an unequivocally sexual gesture. One popular trend sees creators accusing viewers of holding their phones in their left hand before counting t ..read more

Picture this: You’ve just moved to London and finally got your own place. It’s the first time you’re living without your parents, you’ve found a cute room in a central location and your flatmates don’t even seem like freaks. There’s just one problem: Your landlord won’t let you have sex. Yes, really. This is what happened to Lucy, 23, who, like everyone else in this piece, is using a pseudonym for privacy reasons. After moving into a shared house with three other girls, she started to notice signs in the communal areas banning “music after 11PM”, “house parties” and, crucially, “loud sex”. Bri ..read more

Spanish police Tuesday confirmed that Maxim Kuzminov, a Russian pilot who defected to Ukraine with a helicopter last year, was found dead riddled with bullets in the car park of his home in Spain. Kuzminov, 28, commanded a Russian Mi-8 helicopter until August 2023, when he landed inside Ukrainian lines as part of an agreement with Ukrainian military intelligence to deliver the helicopter in exchange for $500,000 and a new identity. Two crew members, unaware of the plot, were killed by Ukrainian forces after trying to escape capture. On Monday, Ukrainian intelligence and Russian state media out ..read more

Russian authorities on Monday announced an “indefinite” investigation into the death of opposition politician Alexei Navalny in an Arctic Circle prison and refused to allow his family access to his body for an independent investigation and funeral.  Navalny’s mother was refused access to her son’s body at a morgue in northern Russia four days after his death was announced on Friday, raising further suspicions the country’s top political dissident had been murdered after surviving nearly three years in brutal prison conditions - and a 2020 poisoning attributed to Russian security services ..read more

Russia’s leading opposition figure and vocal Kremlin critic, Alexei Navalny, died Friday in an Arctic Circle prison. Navalny, 47, was serving a multi-decade sentence on corruption charges, widely denounced by the international community as political retribution.  At a conference on Friday afternoon, his widow, Yulia, responded to the report of his death by blaming Russian President Vladimir Putin, and called for justice. “If it's true, I would like Putin and all his staff, everybody around him, his government, his friends, I want them to know that they will be punished for what they ..read more

A recession was announced this week. A mild one, but, a recession that comes off the back of a cost of living crisis, pandemic, and nearly 15 years of austerity, which itself was meant to get us out of previous recessions. Money is tight, basically.  That’s why I skipped breakfast this morning, and had myself a quick and cheap lunch, so I could spend as much time as possible earning cold hard fucking cash for the taxman and the landlord.  Later I have to go on the overground from London Fields to Stoke Newington. This is a line I know in my head as the Liverpool Street to Chingford L ..read more

The Israeli air force is bombing Hezbollah targets deep inside Lebanon after the militant group fired dozens of rockets at military bases and border towns. Lt. Gen. Herzi Halevi, Israel Defense Force (IDF) Chief of Staff told local officials Wednesday that despite the strikes, there was a “long way to go,” before the border with Lebanon would be quiet and the tens of thousands of Israelis evacuated from the border area would be able to return. “There are very great achievements in hitting Hezbollah in Lebanon, but we continue to act,” he said. “This is not the point to stop. There is still a l ..read more

Russian prosecutors have issued arrest warrants for hundreds of foreigners including the prime minister of Estonia, U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham, top human rights officials and even the spokesperson for the social media company Meta, according to a leak of Internal Affairs Ministry records.  Russian investigative reporters Mediazona found the database of 96,752 suspects could be accessed from the internet, then built a search tool to allow searches by name and discovered a large number of indicted foreigners. These included foreign fighters supporting Ukraine’s defense against Russia’s inv ..read more