I don’t know about you, says Hugo Rifkind in The Times, but I’m getting “apocalypse fatigue”. Obviously the largest of the “many horsemen thundering towards us” are climate change and nuclear war. But then there are the “smaller ponymen and donkeymen trotting along behind”. Fuel shortages that’ll leave us shivering in the dark this winter. The new monkeypox virus, or some other dire-sounding “zoonotic malady” – goose leprosy, say, or badger piles. “Oh, and the fish are all dying. And the songbirds are all getting eaten by cats. And we’re about to stop having trains.” There are just so many apocalypses to choose from.

New York’s intelligentsia are increasingly divided “between two warring scenes”, says Nick Burns in The New Statesman. Those in Brooklyn “retain their faith” in progressive, left-wing politics. But over in a “gentrifying area of Chinatown” in downtown Manhattan, something else is brewing: a twenty-something crowd which scorns the sanctimony of the “woke” left in favour of “brash hedonism” and reactionary ideals. Some “toy with converting to Catholicism” or put on “transgressive” film festivals bankrolled by the conservative venture-capitalist Peter Thiel. At one magazine launch, a performer criticised contemporary male sexuality “for being insufficiently dominant” – which was followed by “five full minutes of untranslated Japanese”.