Every so often, a fashionable cause “pushes its luck too far”, says Allison Pearson in The Daily Telegraph. That’s exactly what happened last week, when the trans athlete Lia Thomas won the women’s 500-yard freestyle swimming race at the US national college championships. “Impossibly long of leg, lengthy of torso, flattish of chest,” Thomas looks very much like a “strapping young male” – which, of course, she was, until she started taking oestrogen and progesterone supplements a couple of years ago. Before that, she competed in men’s events for the University of Pennsylvania “with no particular distinction” – in one discipline she was ranked a lowly 554th. But now that she’s up against women, who didn’t benefit from the “huge skeletal and cardiovascular advantage a human being gets from going through male puberty”, she is smashing the competition.

Vladimir Putin’s “obsession with history” is coming back to bite him, says Antony Beevor in The Atlantic. The Russian president doesn’t seem to realise how much warfare has changed: his invasion of Ukraine feels deeply old-fashioned. It’s most evident in Russia’s reliance on tanks. These lumbering vehicles were a “symbol of strength” back in the Second World War, but in recent conflicts they have proved “profoundly vulnerable” to drones and anti-tank weapons. Unsurprisingly, Ukrainian soldiers are destroying them “like ducks in a row”. Russian troops have been attaching odd bits of iron to their tanks’ turrets in the hope that the added metal might detonate anti-tank weapons prematurely. It’s the same shonky tactic the Soviets used back in 1945 – and it’s as useless now as it was then.