Kamala Harris was widely crowned as the winner of last night’s US presidential debate. After an unsteady start, the vice president repeatedly put Donald Trump on the defensive and goaded him into veering off message (see below). Taylor Swift endorsed Harris shortly after the debate, telling her 283 million Instagram followers America would be better led “by calm and not chaos”. The US is poised to lift its ban on Ukraine firing British-made long-range missiles into Russia. The likely policy shift follows the discovery that Iran has sent Russia a shipment of ballistic missiles, which Secretary of State Antony Blinken says could be used in Ukraine “within weeks”. Campbell Soup Company, whose cans feature in one of Andy Warhol’s best-known artworks, is dropping “soup” from its name after 102 years. “We will always love soup,” says chief executive Mark Clouse. “But today, we’re so much more than soup.”

Trump walked straight into Harris’s trap

Kamala Harris’s strategy for the debate last night was clearly to “get under Donald Trump’s skin”, say Adam Cancryn and Myah Ward in Politico. It worked a treat. When the moderators asked about immigration, “Trump’s favourite topic”, Harris goaded him into talking instead about the size and enthusiasm of his rallies. She taunted him about his past bankruptcies and his inherited wealth, and told him world leaders laugh at him behind his back, “a barb aimed squarely at his personal insecurities”. Each time, Trump couldn’t resist going on the defensive – which meant he struggled to land any hits on Harris at all. At one point, in a moment that immediately went viral, the 45th US president repeated a baseless online conspiracy about immigrants in Ohio eating household pets: “They’re eating the dogs… they’re eating the cats… they’re eating… the pets.”

Harris didn’t make a “powerful case” for her vision or the record of the Biden administration, says The Wall Street Journal. And whereas the moderators repeatedly fact-checked Trump, they said nothing about Harris’s “numerous whoppers”: on Trump’s views on IVF, say, or her claim that no American troops are in combat zones. But it didn’t matter. Trump failed to press Harris on any of her own weaknesses and policy gaps, resorting instead to ludicrous claims that she’s a Marxist and the “worst vice president in history”. And he allowed her to take the mantle of the “change candidate”, despite having been in power for the past three-and-a-half years. The big question going into this debate was whether Harris could convince swing voters that she is “worth a risk”. If she achieved that, she owes her success to Trump’s laughable lack of “preparation and discipline”.

Watching Apple’s annual product launch this week, says Ian Bogost in The Atlantic, I was struck by how the firm’s designs “yearn for the trappings of antique technologies”. The new Apple Watch can be “viewed from oblique angles” and has an “always-on screen” with a ticking seconds hand – features of ordinary wristwatches for hundreds of years. The latest AirPods double up as earplugs and hearing aids. And the iPhone now has a dedicated button for taking pictures, which will soon be able to detect half-presses for adjusting exposure or lock focus – “as such buttons did for decades before cameras were imprisoned inside phones”.

A viral recipe for a cucumber salad – in which a Canadian TikToker slices a single cucumber into a pot, adds a few cupboard ingredients and shakes it – is so popular in Iceland that the country’s farmers have been unable to keep up with demand. Logan Moffitt, known as “The Cucumber Guy”, has amassed more than 6.5 million followers since posting his first clip in July. He begins many of his near-daily videos with the catchphrase: “Sometimes, you just need to eat a whole cucumber.” Check it out for yourself here.

Lumberjack or lumberjane? The UN is on the case

What I would have paid, says Celia Walden in The Daily Telegraph, to sit in on the “Guidelines on Inclusive Language” meetings held by the World Intellectual Property Organisation prior to its crackdown on “gendered language”. Using too many “masculine-specific” terms, warns the UN agency, risks the impression that “women are not represented” in certain groups. So “Englishman” was out, of course, lest someone doubt the existence of the British female, and “cavemen” has been replaced with “cave dwellers”. I’d have liked to watch the panel fete the bright spark who thought to swap “man’s best friend” with “faithful dog”, and the genius who discovered that the reason the world has not yet achieved gender parity is because we haven’t yet replaced “lumberjack” with “wood chopper”.

It’s tempting to laugh and leave it at that, as many of us did when the British Red Cross circulated a similar handbook reminding staff that “language can be harmful”, or when Lloyds Bank warned workers off the terms “guinea pig” and “headless chicken” for fear of triggering vegans. Only, this is the United Nations wasting time, energy, money and headspace on the intrinsic unjustness of “lumberjacks”, when nearly 4.4 million girls are at risk of female genital mutilation this year. A woman or girl is killed by a member of her own family every 11 minutes; 122 million girls are barred from school worldwide; and it’s estimated we’ll need 286 years to remove all the discriminatory laws that currently exist for women and girls. Crazy thought this, but maybe we focus on those issues before addressing the “problematic patriarchal connotations” of the word “sportsmanlike”.

AI is increasingly able to produce life-like videos from simple text prompts. These clips are not yet as convincing as some of the still images made using the same tools, says The New York Times, but they’re increasingly difficult to distinguish from the real thing. To see if you can tell the difference, try this quiz.

For the first time since the 1960s, says Stephen Bush in the FT, television is no longer the main source of news for Britons. According to Ofcom’s latest annual report, 71% get up to date via the internet, compared to just 70% from TV. (For some reason, the survey did not include really excellent daily newsletters.)

It’s a blue pigeon, which has been baffling the residents of Maidenhead in Berkshire, says the Daily Mirror. Some locals claim the colourful columbid looks natural, but wildlife experts say it’s more likely to have been dyed for a “gender-reveal party” – an imported American tradition where expectant couples learn the sex of their baby using pink or blue items. 👶🐦