Is it always wrong to joke about someone’s appearance? A lot of people have been making that argument since Will Smith slapped Chris Rock at the Oscars, says Michael Deacon in The Daily Telegraph. The actor lashed out because Rock cracked a joke about his wife’s shaved head. Now, the gag itself wasn’t funny – Jada Pinkett Smith suffers from alopecia, which she can “hardly help”. But a joke about a public figure’s appearance can still be “valid, and even useful”. The key is that it “should always have a point” – it has to say something about the subject’s “character, persona, behaviour or mood”.

The biggest threat to America’s economic and political system isn’t “oligarchic elites”, says Joel Kotkin in National Review. It’s the “growing number of underemployed, overeducated” people. Half of all recent college graduates make under $30,000 a year, and 40% work in jobs that don’t actually require their degree. This is a “global phenomenon”: in China, more than a quarter of graduates are unemployed; one in three graduates under 29 in India doesn’t have a job, more than three times the country’s overall unemployment rate. This generation were promised riches from the “new economy”. Instead, they’re scrapping it out for unstable, low-paying jobs.