The wellness industry is rapidly expanding into the world of pets, say Vivian Giang and Sophia June in The New York Times. For more and more dog owners, grooming has shifted from basic hygiene to a “tailored approach focused on health and holistic care”. Sam Cheow, who lives in Manhattan with four Norwich terriers, spends around $11,000 a year grooming them and another $3,000 on “specialty work”, including close shaving around their privates and “hand stripping” dead hair at the root rather than cutting it with clippers. A typical meal for these dogs includes soft-boiled eggs, broccoli, salmon roe and Manuka honey, supplemented with wild salmon oil for their coats and skin.

Incredibly, Cheow is far from alone. The pet grooming industry is expected to reach $19.5bn this year, and more than double to $46.7bn by 2036. At current prices, that’s no surprise: Chiechie’s Grooming Spa in Washington DC charges upwards of $1,000 for a monthly poodle session. Some can’t afford to buy American: Alan Bateman, of San Diego, drives his golden doodle Thiago to Tijuana, Mexico, saving himself around $100 every six weeks. Owners who miss appointments are regularly fired by the smartest groomers. Jane Lauder, heiress to the Estée Lauder fortune, has started a venture fund entirely dedicated to pet grooming and wellness start-ups, betting that obsessive owners will pay through the nose for longevity treatments, and that AI will provide unprecedented insight into animal wellbeing. “Like human wellness,” says Cheow, “pet care has moved toward prevention, routine and emotional health.”

For all the greybeards trying to divine some strategic masterplan behind the US position on Iran, says Ian Dunt in The i Paper, the best explanation is “machismo”. Donald Trump’s administration operates on an old idea of “masculinity as power”, and nowhere is this more purely encapsulated than in defence chief Pete Hegseth, the “pituitary moron” who has dubbed himself “Secretary of War”. The former Fox News host represents the male personality when it has been stripped of anything meaningful or decent and reduced to its “crudest, most insecure” form. Since the US and Israel attacked Iran, Hegseth’s idiotic rhetoric has been “put on a war footing”. “No stupid rules of engagement,” he said, safe behind a rostrum at the Pentagon. “No nation-building quagmire, no democracy-building exercise, no politically correct wars. We fight to win and we don’t waste time or lives… War is hell and always will be.”

We’ve all met men like this, with a sense of self so fragile they have to compensate with “base demonstrations of theatrical virility”. But the real danger of Hegseth isn’t moral, it’s practical. People with this kind of personality are incapable of planning and forethought, deeming such fussiness effeminate. But planning, logistics, briefings, wargaming different scenarios, scrutinising your expectations, parsing the motives of your opponent – thinking, in other words – is what wins wars. The now-obvious lack of a plan for Iran is a pure example of what the opposite looks like. It is an embarrassment for a great nation like the US to have given a small man like Hegseth such a prominent role, but it’s a lesson: thuggishness and machismo will not make you stronger. “They’ll make you weaker.”

🧔‍♂️🤨 Last September, in what may be one of the “weirdest single moments in American military history”, Hegseth gathered the nation’s grizzled military leaders and told them beards were no longer permitted. “You kill people and break things for a living,” he told the baffled generals, by way of explanation.

The younger generation is obsessed with the differences between lovers, says Faith Hill in The Atlantic. Riffing off the well-established concept of the relationship “age gap”, the so-called “swag gap” became notorious when a photo went viral of a tracksuit-clad Justin Bieber trailing behind his fully glammed-up wife, Hailey. Now, it seems you can pop “gap” on the end of any personality trait or attribute to rule someone out as a potential partner. Common disparities include the intelligence gap, the party gap, the woke gap and the AI gap. There are anxiety gaps, cooking gaps, sleep gaps, and even the truly absurd “able to breathe through your nose properly gap”.

Not all of this is unwarranted. The image of the Bieber couple, for example, tapped into a widespread feeling among women that they are expected to doll themselves up, make the plans and “work the charisma”, often for what the pop star Olivia Rodrigo has described as a “second string loser”. But there’s an irony in the fact that in a world where online dating makes it easier to mingle with a wider range of romantic prospects, people are more paranoid than ever about incompatibility. On apps, they filter out anyone whose alma mater isn’t up to scratch, whose hobbies seem different or who lives in a neighbourhood that’s a faff to get to. No wonder young people aren’t falling in love, when they earnestly believe that the relative bagginess of people’s trousers reveals some “deeper truth” about their soul, and think all good relationships need to be “as frictionless as silk”. As Iris Murdoch once wrote: “Love is the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real.”