Most of us have little idea how much our lives depend on the “freedom of the commons”, says Hal Brands in Bloomberg. Since 1945, the unhindered flow of goods, people and data through shared domains – the oceans, the skies, and latterly the internet – has underwritten an astonishing boom in trade and a rare stretch of peace between the great powers. Now that freedom is under siege. Space is getting crowded and combative: China has launched more than 1,000 satellites in a decade and is building ones designed to knock out an enemy’s hardware in wartime. Cyberspace is splintering into walled-off national zones and has become a playground for ransomware gangs. But the danger is most acute in the original commons: the seas.

It isn’t just the Strait of Hormuz, where Iranian drones, missiles and mines have throttled the world’s “energy windpipe”. Russia’s war turned the Black Sea into a battleground. China treats the South China Sea, which carries a third of global shipping, as its own, while Moscow claims the Arctic’s Northern Sea Route. Indonesia has even floated the idea of charging ships to pass through the Strait of Malacca, which connects the Indian Ocean to the Pacific. Undersea cables are being sabotaged from the Baltic to Taiwan. For two centuries, first Britain and then America kept the oceans open for everyone. But the US Navy now has fewer than 300 ships – half its 1980s strength – just as a growing band of disgruntled states sets out to dismantle the order Washington built. That order made us all fabulously rich: global GDP rose more than twelvefold between 1950 and 2020. “We may soon learn what happens when freedom of the commons is lost.”

Ten days after his 16th birthday, Michael de Cozar joined The Ritz as a page boy, says The Times. “And never left.” During his 53 years at the Piccadilly hotel, de Cozar, who has died aged 69, fulfilled all manner of requests. On his first Christmas on duty, a guest expressed a desire for a dip in the sea but couldn’t bear the wintery seafront. De Cozar dispatched a luggage porter to Brighton with two canisters then filled the guest’s bath with the seawater. On another occasion, he acquired a double-decker bus for a guest and drove it to the south of France for a cocktail party in their garden. When Mick Jagger once asked for a cigarette in the lift, de Cozar produced a packet of Rothmans International. “Oh,” said Jagger. “They’re very posh.”

At 24, de Cozar became the youngest head concierge in the hotel’s history. He looked after those who kept a permanent suite at the hotel – ensuring one such guest had a fresh gin and tonic, “and a waiter to serve”, at 6pm each evening – as well as those who merely dropped in for lunch, such as the Queen Mother, for whom he had a special stool built so she could “rest her royal feet”. Some guests were extremely generous: James Goldsmith was a “big tipper”; Jackie Onassis left a thank you note and a gift after sending de Cozar out to fetch chocolates from Charbonnel et Walker. Others were not. When de Cozar offered to post letters for Paul Getty, who took the smallest room in the hotel and never tipped, the notoriously frugal oil tycoon shouted: “Make sure they go second-class.”

I still remember my first term at university, says Rachel Cunliffe in The New Statesman. The excitement. The “heady sense of freedom”. The food poisoning. I was so overwhelmed that I spent the first month clinging to a boy I’d met that summer, who then dumped me at the worst possible moment, after which I spent a week under a duvet crying and watching Grey’s Anatomy. None of this my mother had any idea about, “which is as it should be”. But for students starting uni this autumn it’ll be a very different experience. A recent poll found that a staggering 67% of parents use technology to track their university-aged child’s whereabouts. So unlike my mum 17 years ago, they’ll be able to see exactly where their beloved offspring are, every single night, be it in a nightclub or “someone else’s bedroom”.

I find this “horrifying”. Feeling anxious about how your kids will get on outside your care is natural. But technology has made it normal to indulge that anxiety in an “invasive and infantilising” way. Young people need the space and privacy to experiment, to make messy mistakes and learn from them, without worrying about what Mum and Dad will say. How can they do that if they’re being “constantly surveilled”? This isn’t the only example of adulthood being “pushed further out of reach”. There’s the new law to prevent teens today from ever buying cigarettes; the campaign to ban young drivers from carrying passengers; the proposed midnight curfew for 16- to 18-year-olds on social media. We seem to have forgotten that “overprotection comes at the expense of self-reliance”. We coddle young adults, then wonder why they lack initiative. Parents, please, however hard it feels, “turn off the tracker”.