Is Biden’s decline accelerating?

At one of the D-Day events in Normandy last week, says Freddy Gray in the Daily Mail, Joe Biden began to sit down but then changed his mind. The First Lady, Jill, urgently whispered something to her husband, but he didn’t seem to hear. So “the Leader of the Free World stood motionless – locked in a semi-squat – for several excruciating seconds”. The 81-year-old US president is having more and more of these “seriously senior moments”. Later in France, Jill had to lead him off stage by the hand; when he did finally sit down, “he appeared to doze off”. Then at a White House event on Monday, he seemed to freeze as people danced around him, “his gaze a million miles away”.

While “no decent person should mock the elderly”, these episodes are becoming increasingly hard to ignore. Biden is clearly physically frail: he now wears thick-soled trainers to stop him falling over, and staff surround him whenever he “shuffles glacially” across the White House lawn to the presidential helicopter, to prevent “yet more footage of his blatant dodderiness”. But his health struggles appear to be mental, too. The childhood stutter that he overcame as a younger man is back. In February, a Justice Department investigation into his mishandling of classified documents concluded that there was no point in trying to prosecute “an elderly man with poor memory”. Even Democrats privately concede that the president is showing his age in meetings. With only a few months until the November election, his decline “appears to be fast accelerating at just the wrong time”.

Heroes
Harold Terens, a 100-year-old World War Two veteran, and Jeanne Swerlin, his 96-year-old sweetheart, who got married in Normandy last week 80 years after Harold was involved in the D-Day landings. The American couple spent their wedding night at the Élysée Palace, where they attended a state dinner alongside Emmanuel Macron and Joe Biden. “It’s not just for young people, love,” said the bubbly bride-to-be before her nuptials. “We get butterflies. And we get a little action, also.”

Hero
Rishi Sunak, for somehow managing to struggle through his childhood without Sky TV. Asked in an interview whether there was anything he’d had to go without, the PM said his parents never had the paid-for network. As someone who also experienced a terrestrial-only childhood, “I know this trauma all too well”, says Deborah Ross in The Times. Sure, my life was great in other ways: “I had food on the table and books and foreign holidays. I was not kept in a coal shed.” But I would have “traded it all in for Sky”.

Heroes
Japanese developers who have selflessly agreed to tear down a new 10-storey apartment block in Tokyo after locals complained that it partially blocked their view of Mt Fuji. “We were aware of the [local] culture that values scenery,” said a spokesman for Sekisui House Ltd, “but we failed to consider it adequately.”

Villain
Pope Francis, again, for allegedly repeating a homophobic slur just weeks after apologising for using it the last time. Speaking to 200 young priests this week about the number of gay clerics at the Vatican, the pontiff reportedly claimed there was an atmosphere of frociaggine, or “faggotry” – the same word he used in a private discussion last month. His Holiness also got in trouble last week for saying men have to do the talking because “we wear the trousers”.

Villain
Craig Williams, one of Rishi Sunak’s closest aides, who put a £100 bet on the election taking place in July shortly before the announcement was made. The 39-year-old admits he had a “flutter”, and is now being investigated by the Gambling Commission. He stood to win about £500.

Recipe – Scrambled eggs
First-class scrambled eggs must be beaten and passed through a fine-mesh strainer before cooking, says Kenji López-Alt in The New York Times. Where great chefs disagree is when to add salt. Julia Child and the great Jacques Pépin suggest doing so after beating but before cooking. Gordon Ramsay and his mentor Marco Pierre White season at the last possible moment. After scrambling “several dozen eggs” in various ways, I can confirm that the secret to producing “tender and moist” eggs is to beat and strain them, salt them, then let them stand for 15 minutes before cooking.

TV – The Sympathizer
This “complex and deeply moving drama” may well shift your perspective on the Vietnam War, says Keith Watson in The Daily Telegraph. Based on Viet Thanh Nguyen’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Sympathizer follows a North Vietnamese double agent (Hoa Xuande) who is deployed on an undercover mission in the US shortly after the fall of Saigon. Robert Downey Jr has a “scenery-chewing ball” playing four different roles, from a CIA agent to an egomaniac film director. It’s both “horrific and hilarious”, and at its heart lies a fascinating theme: the question of identity and “where we truly belong”. Seven episodes, 1 hr each

Podcast – Animal
The latest podcast from The New York Times has a simple aim: to appreciate animals, big or small, and the impact they have on our lives. Host and animal lover Sam Anderson swims with manatees in Florida, releases baby puffins on a remote island off Iceland and confronts his fear of bats in Mexico. He isn’t afraid to tackle the biggest questions, from climate change to mass extinction. But he also revels in the tiny moments, like grooming a ferret called Gooseberry. Six episodes, 40m

The root cause of today’s angry activism

If you’ve wondered why there is so much “angry activism” these days, says Hadley Freeman in The Sunday Times, look no further than “elite overproduction”. The term refers to when there are more highly educated people than there are jobs available for them. It’s a particular problem for humanities students who graduated in the decade after 2008: unable to earn a living wage in things like journalism and publishing, they’re instead “raging against those industries as a whole”, trying to tear them down rather than building something better. Case in point is the recent campaign against the Hay festival for accepting funding from Baillie Gifford, due to its investments in companies linked to Israel and fossil fuels. All this has achieved is scaring literary festivals into rejecting all funding lest someone, somewhere, denounce it as “problematic”.

It’s striking that the young people who protested in America in the 1960s were mainly the urban working class, whereas in 2020 the Black Lives Matter protesters were “disproportionately white university-educated kids”. Then there’s Vice magazine, which went from “a £5bn behemoth to a bankrupt disaster” after young employees jettisoned its USP – being “gleefully offensive” – and turned it into “a social justice scold”. I understand the frustration of these young people, but why on earth do those in charge “keep caving in to them”? By enabling rather than guiding the young, all we’ve helped them create is “more destruction, more loss of jobs and, ultimately, more elite overproduction”.

You’d struggle to find a 1960s star who wasn’t in love with Françoise Hardy, says The Washington Post. The French singer and fashion icon, who died this week aged 80, beguiled much of the music world with her “melancholy voice, doe-eyed beauty and trendsetting sense of style”. David Bowie swore he was “passionately in love with her”. Mick Jagger declared her to be his “ideal woman”, and his fellow Rolling Stone Brian Jones begged her for a threesome. Before ever meeting her, Bob Dylan was so smitten he wrote her a poem, which he printed on the sleeve of his 1964 album Another Side of Bob Dylan. When he found out she was in the audience at one of his shows, he refused to go back on stage for the second half unless she visited his dressing room. “It was surreal, but I went,” she recalled in a 2005 interview. “He looked very thin and sickly, which may explain why the concert was so bad.”