Benjamin Netanyahu has suggested a ground operation would be needed to overthrow the Iranian regime, saying Israel is still “working to create the conditions” for the collapse of the Islamic Republic. The Israeli prime minister also said he would “hold off” on attacking Iranian gas fields following a request from Donald Trump. Kemi Badenoch has backed her shadow justice minister, Nick Timothy, for describing an Islamic prayer event in Trafalgar Square on Monday as “an act of domination”. The Tory leader said the Ramadan event, which has also been criticised by Nigel Farage, had been “exclusionary” and that women attendees had been “pushed to the back”. Labour has called Timothy’s remarks “abhorrent”. London’s Natural History Museum has been crowned the country’s most popular tourist attraction for the first time, with visitor numbers last year rising 13% to a record 7.1 million. The free attraction in South Kensington was comfortably ahead of the British Museum (6.4 million), Windsor’s Great Park (4.9 million) and Tate Modern (4.5 million), and the second-most popular museum worldwide after the Louvre.

When I was growing up in the early 2000s, says Josh Kaplan in The Free Press, parents sincerely believed that “heavy metal music inspired Satan worship” and that violent video games like Grand Theft Auto would encourage hordes of young men to become “philanderers, drug dealers and cop killers”. A few decades on, research has found not only that video games are good for mental health, but that there is also a negative correlation between the boys who played GTA and their propensity to commit crimes. Kids, it turned out, were able to play these games and listen to these songs and understand that it wasn’t real life. Two decades on, the same is surely true of the hated “manosphere”.

In the past few years there has been growing alarm over the malign influence of social media influencers with extreme, repugnant, misogynistic views. Louis Theroux has a new documentary about it, and last year the entirely made-up Netflix show Adolescence became a kind of clarion call to people who appeared to believe that previously nice young boys were routinely murdering their female classmates because of Andrew Tate. Such was the hysteria, parliament convened an inquiry within weeks. (Compare that to the 20 years it took to get an inquiry into the vast rape gangs scandal.) Here’s the thing: Tate and co are obviously ghastly, but the idea that they are perverting the minds of the young is simply false. Gen Z boys and men have more progressive views on gender than their older peers. Misogynistic violence has not risen; sexual assaults in the US have halved in the past 20 years. Boys know an idiot when they see one. What if the thing that’s really fuelling Tate is everyone else’s outrage?