culture

I don’t love the look of mismatched junk, but the mess satisfies a deeper emotional need.

For the umpteenth time, my son, with an Ikea stuffed ball he has had since infancy, is playing football in the living room. He is joined by one of his best friends, an equally football-obsessed 10-year-old who, before slide-tackling in what can only be described as a deliberate attempt to knock my son’s legs off, shouts: “Brexit means Brexit!” Confused, I pass it off as an example of tweenage precocity: which 10-year-old is happy to quote Theresa May while playing football?

Over the next year, however, I will hear the term used again and again when my son plays football at the local park. He turns 11 and is off to secondary school. There, too, the phrase seems to have become a “thing”. One evening, as he recounts the details of how he got a painful-looking graze on his shin, he quotes the attacking player’s prelude to clattering into him: “Brexit means Brexit!” I ask, finally, why people are saying this. Nonchalantly, as he practises “skills” with the same softball, he explains that the Brexit tackle “is a tackle that doesn’t get the ball, only takes out the player”. Urban Dictionary concurs, stating it is, among other things, “when somebody hits a massive slide tackle and usually sends them flying and it hurts them servely [sic]”.

A friend of mine manages an event place in Scotland, and they’ve banned 50ths. Hen nights, stag dos, 40ths, no problem: but some combination of the manic nihilism that sweeps over people and the middle-aged mal-coordination that crept up on them leads to a wild amount of breakage. Whatever the party anxiety is, and however overwhelming it feels, it’s useful as a displacement emotion. The proximal moment of becoming 50 is, in the end, a lot less terrifying than the point it marks in your life, a whole half-century lived, probably somewhat less than that to come.

Should you be getting Botox? Welcome to Ask Ugly, our new beauty column!

You won’t get suggestions for the best new niacinamide serum from Ask Ugly. Just eat a sandwich. I won’t recommend some celebrity-loved surgery for sucking the fat from your face – it needs fat. Instead, I want to dig into capital-B Beauty here: what it is, what it means, and how it’s been industrialized and assembly-line machine-squeezed into billions of plastic bottles.

See current activity on Bluesky in realtime.

In this conversation, artist and writer Jenny Odell points beyond the domination of clock time toward ways of being that are more in tune with the rhythms and patterns of the Earth.

Though it makes me feel like a grandmother on her deathbed to admit it, I remember the days when the internet was vast, when there seemed to be more places to go than anyone could ever visit and infinite things to read. What you saw was not determined by some highly protected coded algorithm that lives somewhere in the cloud. You could just go out and find it.