Saudi Arabia’s extraordinary transformation

Hero
32 Chunk, who has won this year’s Fat Bear Week competition in Alaska’s Katmai National Park. The half-ton male (pictured) triumphed in the online vote – which crowns the bear that puts on the most weight for winter – despite suffering from a broken jaw likely sustained in a mating-season battle. It was Chunk’s third successive final – he missed out last year after rather unsportingly killing the cub of reigning champion (and eventual winner) 128 Grazer. “I love this bear,” superfan Geoff Hartley told Alaska Public Media. “I guess this is what you feel like when your team wins the Super Bowl.”

Villains
The Trump administration, for allegedly changing the colour of the US flag just before the president’s state visit to the UK. Nick Farley, Britain’s official flag supplier, said the White House decided at the last minute that the red used in the Union flag, called R01, wasn’t strong enough for the Stars and Stripes, and insisted on a cherry red instead. So all the American flags flown during the visit had to be replaced, costing British taxpayers an estimated £50,000.

Hero
Gavin Bourne, a golfer in Worcestershire, who managed to hit two holes in one in a single round. The 47-year-old heating engineer, who plays off a highly impressive 0.4 handicap, struck the two aces 12 holes apart in the final of Droitwich Golf Club’s matchplay championship – which, unsurprisingly, he won. England Golf says the odds of hitting it straight in off the tee twice in one round are about 67 million to one.

Villain
MrBeast, the world’s most popular YouTuber, for posting a video entitled “Would You Risk Dying for $500,000”, in which a stuntman rushes to escape a burning building while collecting bags of cash. Critics say the clip, which has more than 63 million views, could encourage copycats. Still, the stuntman, Eric, made it out with $350,000, which he says he’ll use to help out his retired parents. So it’s not all bad.

Dreaming of chocolate in the Tanzanian jungle

Jane Goodall, who died this week aged 91, transformed our understanding of the relationship between humans and chimpanzees, says The Daily Telegraph. After meeting the paleontologist Louis Leakey during a 1957 trip to a friend’s family farm in Kenya, she soon found herself, aged 26, alone in Tanzania’s Gombe forest studying the primates up close. For two months, the chimps fled every time she approached, but she still “trudged off each morning”, observing them from a distance, until they accepted her. Their behaviour was astonishing: greeting each other with kisses, holding hands, eating meat despite the consensus they were vegetarian, and using tools (then thought to be the key distinction between man and beast) to “fish” for termites. Her discoveries were, in the words of Stephen Jay Gould, among the Western world’s “greatest scientific developments”.

Born Valerie Jane Goodall in London in 1934, she decided aged 11 that she wanted to live in Africa among the animals, often joking that Tarzan had married the wrong Jane. After the success of her early research, she spent more than 15 years living among the apes in Tanzania before accepting a place on a PhD programme at Cambridge, where she refused any red-pen corrections that took her to task for naming the chimps rather than giving them numbers. In 1965, she became only the eighth person in the university’s history to receive a doctorate without an undergraduate degree. She claimed there was little she craved from civilisation during her years in the forest, save for the odd bar of chocolate. Her few luxuries included a glass of whisky and classical music. “How many other people,” she once said, “are lucky enough to have lived their dream for so long?”

No hand-holding please, we’re Gen Z

When it comes to relationships, Gen Z have thrown out the old script and created an “explosion of new language”, says Molly Langmuir in The Atlantic. “Sneaky links” are people you hook up with in secret, “zombies” are people who reappear after ghosting you, and “simps” are people – typically boys – who try too hard to get a partner. Then there’s “breadcrumbing” (offering little bits of attention to keep someone interested) and “cushioning” (flirtations you keep on the side, so you have a soft landing if your current relationship falls apart). There is, apparently, a difference between a “situationship”, a “flirtationship” and an “explorationship”. Perhaps most bafflingly, it’s possible for two people to be exclusively together, but not, “under any circumstance”, describe themselves as dating.

Beyond these “linguistic acrobatics”, Gen Z have also “upended the natural order of life”. Having sex on a first date, for example, is no longer a big deal, says one 18-year-old student. “You’d say to your friends, ‘Yeah, my date was good; we had sex; it was great.’” No one would think twice. But if you went on a first date and held hands? “There would be outrage. There would be uproar.” It’s the result of Gen Z finding vulnerability “agonising” and wanting desperately to avoid any kind of “emotional investment”. Better to be as cautious as possible, lest a relationship publicly fall apart “in an explosion of cringe”. As one 17-year-old put it: “Sex is easy and emotional connection is hard.” These worrisome youngsters should remember that this fear – the idea that “pursuing closeness might get them hurt” – is the “same as it ever was”. And it’s still worth taking the plunge.