Keir Starmer has resigned as prime minister, clearing the way for Andy Burnham to become Britain’s seventh premier in a decade. Speaking outside No 10, Starmer said he accepted “with good grace” the verdict of his MPs that his position had become untenable. Potential leadership candidate Wes Streeting has given his backing to Burnham, reducing the chances of a contest. Kemi Badenoch said Starmer had been a “terrible prime minister”. Gen Zs earn more in their early careers than any previous generation going back to those born in the 1950s. The Resolution Foundation thinktank found that by age 24, real weekly pay for those born in the late 1990s was 12% higher than for those born a decade earlier. For those born in the 2000s, earnings are higher still. Temperatures of up to 38C are expected in Britain this week, with a rare red warning for extreme heat issued across central and south England. Temperatures began to rise significantly yesterday as thousands celebrated the summer solstice, during which Britain enjoyed around 19 hours of scorching sunlight.

One frigid January morning in Manchester, says John Harris in The Guardian, I finally caught a glimpse of why so many people loathed Keir Starmer. I was chatting to voters during the Gorton and Denton by-election, and they all said some variation of the same thing: they didn’t like him, and they couldn’t quite put their finger on why, “which seemed to make it worse”. A couple of months before, Ipsos had put Starmer’s approval rating at -66, the lowest figure ever for a prime minister (“even Liz Truss had not reached such a howling nadir”). What was driving it, I realised, was Starmer’s “sheer blankness”. Where there should have been hope, voters saw a painful lack of clarity and the absence of an even halfway coherent story about what his government was for. And they couldn’t bear it.

Starmer never got the hang of politics, says Tom Harris in The Telegraph, “let alone the job of prime minister”. Watching him try could be painful: for such a clever man, there is “something lacking in his personality” that makes politics a “foreign language”. His stilted and awkward public persona aside, he quickly burned through the loyalty and trust of his own MPs by avoiding their company and frequently ordering them to defend unpopular (if necessary) policies – the latest cuts to pensioners’ heating allowance or disability benefits, say – only to retreat at the first whiff of dissent. He relied on a tiny group of advisers, which steadily shrank as he threw them under a series of buses to avoid personal blame. Even his resignation speech was a lesson in delusion, reeling off a list of achievements that almost nobody will recognise. The prime minister has his talents, but they don’t belong in Westminster. Now, at least, he can stop trying.

Researchers at UC Berkeley have developed an “electronic nose” capable of detecting scents associated with spoilt food and sniffing out common food allergens such as peanuts, says Brandon Sanchez-Mejia in UC Berkeley News. The artificial schnoz is made up of 16 tiny sensors, each of which is highly sensitive to a different combination of gaseous compounds, which have been trained to pick out smells ranging from raw chicken to gone-off milk or even 0.05 grams of isolated walnut.

Move over cottagecore, says Erica Finamore in House Beautiful. The latest interior-design trend is “burrowcore”, which is less about idyllic aesthetics and more about hunkering down in a cosy space that isn’t perfectly polished. Emphasis is on a second-hand, antique feel that swaps plastics and metals for woods and fabrics. Think low lighting, worn oak, overstuffed seating strewn with cushions, vintage finds and layered textiles. It’s snug without trying too hard, nostalgic without feeling curated and centred on the one simple principle that “home should feel like a refuge”.

When I first met Andy Burnham, more than 20 years ago, says Matthew Syed in The Sunday Times, I was standing as a Labour candidate in Tony Blair’s first re-election campaign and Andy was special adviser to the minister for culture and sport. I’ve always liked him, but there’s something “weird” about listening to him talk politics now. He claims we’ve become a “neoliberal” state built on “deregulation, privatisation and austerity”, all of which he proposes to reverse. But I’ve been watching the exact same events over the last few decades “just as obsessively” and the reality I’ve observed is “diametrically opposite”. It’s like we’ve been watching a football match and can’t agree which side scored more goals.

Where Burnham sees austerity, I see governments offering bailouts of “ever more extravagant size and scale” (not least the furlough and Liz Truss energy package) and a rampant rise in welfarism to the point where 53.3% of British people live in households that take more from the system than they pay in. Burnham sees a government that hasn’t taxed enough and has failed to redistribute. I see taxation at its highest level since 1948, with the burden falling overwhelmingly on the upper middle class – the top 10% of taxpayers foot more than 60% of the bill. Deregulation? The regulatory state has “grown in every dimension”, along with a tax code running to an estimated 23,000 pages. It’s noteworthy that in a recent essay, Blair – whose 2001 manifesto Andy and I both campaigned for – repudiates every aspect of Burnham’s essentially socialist diagnosis. I don’t doubt he’s sincere, but I worry he will fail, because he is proposing a cure that involves injecting a higher dose of the same disease. You can’t cure the ills of socialism with more socialism.

The latest dating trend among fitness-obsessed singles suffering “swipe fatigue” is meeting up to work out, says Danielle Friedman in The New York Times. The popular fitness event Hyrox even has an “official dating app partner”, Surf, which encourages its members to wear pink wristbands to signal that they’re willing to mingle. The wellness-focused dating app Ateam hosts mixers at places like SoulCycle, while Leg Day uses geofencing to connect gym-goers who are working out at the same time. People are “craving authenticity”, says psychology professor Gary Lewandowski. What could be better than “less make-up and more sweatpants”.

Richard Nixon is having a rather unexpected second life online, say Benjamin Svetkey and Julian Sancton in The Hollywood Reporter. The late president’s foundation has been releasing slickly-produced videos for social media, in which archive footage is cut together with rap music to present Tricky Dicky as a kind of Gen Z antihero. The “Nixonmaxxing” trend – which has seen the Richard Nixon Foundation’s Instagram account amass more than 100,000 followers – also includes the endorsement of Mad Men’s Don Draper: “Kennedy? I see a silver spoon. Nixon? I see myself.”

It’s a record-breaking Lego sausage, says Ben Hooper in UPI. Made up of 65,000 bricks over the course of a year, the bratwurst and bun creation was built by Germany’s Tommy Schmidt who was approached by sausage producers Die Thüringer to create a tribute to the local speciality. The finished model, which at 6ft 6.7inches long has broken the Guinness World Record for largest Lego sausage, is finished with a line of mustard on top and is now on display at Die Thüringer’s headquarters.