The real reason China won’t give up TikTok

Hero
Ron Croker, a pensioner in South Yorkshire who fought off a robber with a pair of freshly washed jeans. The 84-year-old was in Coin-Op Laundry in Maltby when a masked man burst in and demanded his wallet. Croker refused and shouted back, pushing the mugger out of the shop. When his assailant came back in and tried to grab Croker’s belongings, the outraged OAP swung his folded-up jeans into the man’s face and forced him out for a second time. “He just picked on the wrong bloke,” he tells The Times. “It was either me or him and I won.”

Villains
The Glasgow International Comedy Festival, for insisting that all its performers agree to a code of conduct prohibiting “discriminatory or harmful” views and insisting that all material is performed “without malicious intent”. God only knows what gags will actually be allowed, says Michael Deacon in The Daily Telegraph. “Why did the chicken cross the road? To join a mass protest against the apartheid state of Israel’s genocide of the people of occupied Gaza.”

Villains
People who like pineapple on their pizza, according to a fancy pizzeria in Norfolk that is charging £100 for a Hawaiian to deter people from ordering it. Francis Woolf, co-owner of Lupa Pizza in Norwich, says he begrudgingly added the dish to the restaurant’s Deliveroo menu after receiving several requests from customers, but increased the price after his team took exception to sullying their pizzas with pineapple. “Never,” says head chef Quin Jianoran. “I’d rather put a bloody strawberry on one than that tropical menace.”

Villain
David Muir, the notoriously vain star anchor for ABC News in the US, who has been mocked for using clothes pegs to cinch in an unflattering flame-retardant jacket while reporting on the Los Angeles fires. “Glad you look nice and svelte,” wrote TV producer Jack Osbourne on X, “while our city burns to the ground.”

Villains
The Scottish government, which wants to ban birthday cakes in nurseries. Ministers say the rules are necessary to address rising obesity rates, and suggest a “special activity” or a “special trip” as alternative forms of celebration.

A Complete Unknown, which charts Bob Dylan’s rise to stardom in the 1960s, is a dream, says Robbie Collin in The Daily Telegraph. As accessible to newcomers as it is rewarding for die-hards, the whole thing is “gorgeously tactile” and wonderfully free of clichés. Timothée Chalamet delivers a “rivetingly lived-in” central performance as Dylan, miraculously embodying the young star’s “once-in-a-generation coolness, genius and truculence”. If there’s anything wrong with his singing voice, it’s perhaps that it’s “slightly too good”. Other standouts include Edward Norton as Dylan’s sometime-mentor Pete Seeger, and Monica Barbaro’s “duskily charismatic” Joan Baez. Maybe Dylan is too “mercurial a figure for a biopic to ever capture him completely”, but this “gorgeous film comes as close as you could hope”.

The young are right: their votes don’t count

One in five voters under the age of 45 would prefer to do away with democracy and instead have an authoritarian strongman govern Britain, says Stephen Daisley in The Spectator. These findings come from the as-yet-unpublished FGS Global Radar report, but the data is consistent with previous findings: a 2020 study found that millennials grow less satisfied with democracy each year. Why are the youth suddenly in revolt against our form of government? Some point to “reactionary and authoritarian instincts” among very online young men; others say it’s an ultra-progressive response to the electoral success of figures they despise, like Donald Trump. Or perhaps it’s a backlash against that very progressivism, signalling the growth of a “right-wing counter-elite”.

I think the answer is far simpler: it’s the economy, stupid. Just 37% of those born in the 1980s owned a home by age 30, compared to 62% of those born in the 1960s. An average house in England costs 8.6 times the average annual income, up from 4.4 times in 1999. Housing developments are blocked by retired homeowners whose pensions the young are being taxed to death to pay for. Previous generations could try their luck abroad, but since Brexit, which the young voted against, they no longer have access to the world’s largest labour market. Earning power and social mobility are going backwards; even the most basic hallmarks of middle-class British life – buying a house, starting a family – are beyond much of the youth. Is it any wonder 30% of Brits aged 25 to 34 say “voting doesn’t make any difference”? After all, they’re right.