Andy Burnham has announced plans to crack down on “subscription traps” and “deceptive deals” as part of efforts to ease the cost of living. Under the measures, businesses would have to provide regular reminders ahead of subscription renewals and make it easier to exit contracts, while shops would be banned from making misleading claims about discounts, including inflating “previous” prices. Suspected Irish crime boss Daniel Kinahan was charged in a Dublin court yesterday after being extradited from Dubai. The alleged leader of the Kinahan crime cartel, which is estimated to have made more than €1bn from drugs and firearms trafficking, will be tried amid unprecedented security: authorities bought a special bulletproof and bombproof prison van, and part of a nearby hospital has been reserved in case he is taken ill. Italian divers have discovered an ancient Roman shipwreck off the coast of Sicily, thought to be more than 2,000 years old and stuffed with hundreds of well-preserved amphorae (ceramic jars) likely used to carry wine, oil and grain. Italy’s culture minister, Alessandro Giuli, called it “one of the most important underwater archaeological discoveries of recent years”.

There are two complementary cults in the US today, says Andrew Sullivan on Substack: “the cult of Trump and the cult of Woke”. They’re both unravelling. With Trump, no one takes anything he says seriously any more: not the Iranians, not Beijing, not the targets of his latest tariff wars. His defenders look increasingly desperate: the Fox News host claiming the Iran war is a triumph (“while weirdly calling the ayatollah gay”); the Free Press columnist trying to spin the collapse in American munitions as no big deal. Thanks to a litany of failures – slow wage growth, high inflation, ICE brutality, unprecedented corruption, to name just a few – the president is now less popular than he was in the days after January 6. The emperor’s clothes are “unmistakably falling”.

The cult of woke is less easily beaten because it’s more than just “one unhinged man”. But the case of the now-defenestrated Cambridge professor Jason Arday is surely “the apotheosis of this moral and intellectual rot” – proof that our academic establishment and the wokeness it underpins is “as big a farce and as massive a fraud as Trump is”. Even a cursory read of Arday’s work shows it to be “incomprehensible”, the sort of thing a floundering high school student might turn in, yet he was lionised by his boss as “the best in the world”. Even as his various tall tales fell apart, people defended him. More than 18,000 signed a petition saying the allegations were racist; Simon & Schuster is still, for now, publishing his memoir later this month. Most people won’t be fooled. “Wokeness is a joke everyone is now in on.” As with Trump, its power won’t evaporate overnight. But cults are based on lies, and “lies always fail in the end”.

Taylor Swift’s wedding to Travis Kelce last month sounds like “an absolute snooze fest”, says Popbitch. The couple’s vows were apparently at least 20 minutes each, with bride and groom reading from matching golden books. While most of the 800-strong guests were standing, some of those in the VIP seats struggled to stay awake. Tom Hanks nodded off after about five minutes, and his wife, Rita Wilson, didn’t bother waking him until the vows were over. “Now that’s true love.”

Several top members of the Trump administration – including JD Vance, Robert F Kennedy Jr and Howard Lutnick – are obsessed with the “Living Diet”, says Willy Staley in The New York Times. Devised by a handsome 63-year-old doctor called Sean O’Mara (pictured), it involves eating nothing but the flesh of grass-fed ruminants – beef, venison, elk – and as many different fermented foods as possible: fermented vegetables, parmesan, yoghurt and so on. The theory is that the bacteria improves your metabolism, which leads to weight loss, and ruminants are best because they ferment what they eat. Plus, according to O’Mara, it makes your bowel movements “orgasmic”.

Older generations are constantly sneering at Gen Z, says Cindy Yu in The Times, with barbs about their “fragility” or their “weird puritan habits” or their supposedly exaggerated struggles to find a job. The blame for all this has been laid at various doors: social media, smartphones, indulgent parents, the welfare state. Yet rarely do we talk about what shaped this generation more than perhaps anything else: Covid. We seem to have developed “collective amnesia” over what happened during the pandemic: the on-off lockdowns, PCR tests, vaccines, bubbles, “test and trace”, whether a Scotch egg constitutes a proper meal in a pub. That’s understandable. But it means there’s too little discussion of “the scars and bruises that were left”.

It’s not just that education was disrupted, though it very much was, with lessons on Zoom, reduced syllabuses and rampant grade inflation. It’s that’s kids weren’t able to get up to the usual teenage antics. No parties, first dates, boozing in the park, loitering on the high street. These may sound trivial, but socialising “quietly moulds a still-growing brain” – it teaches you how to behave with other people, how to set boundaries and what kind of a person you are. Teenage years are formative in other ways, too. They’re when you start to imagine your future career and think about leaving home. “What’s three years of working from home for a 50-year-old?” For a 15-year-old, it’s a much bigger and more significant chunk of their life. People warned about all this at the time – young people’s mental health, their educational outcomes, their unpreparedness for work. Yet now it’s come to fruition, and Gen Z are struggling, there is a striking lack of sympathy. “Let’s cut them some slack.”

The latest take on the sardine trend is a “sardine manicure”, says Jasmine Hyman in Cosmopolitan. According to the manicure-booking app Fresha, searches for “sardine nails” are up 140% in the past three months, while nail artists are filling social media with pictures of custom creations they’ve done for clients, including using chrome polish to replicate the fish’s shiny scales.

America’s Gen Zs are obsessed with “hyper-specific party themes”, says Victoria Feng in The Atlantic. They typically require niche fancy dress, from “dress like your favourite Metro stop” to “make lamps out of non-lamps”, or they are pegged around an “absurd” activity. One 25-year-old hosted a spelling-bee birthday, while others have run a tech billionaire murder mystery, put on a “farewell to Spirit Airlines” bash after the firm collapsed earlier this year, and asked guests to “pick a historically bad decision, from either personal or public memory, and tell us about it in the form of an 8–10 minute presentation”.

It’s one of two impressive gardens created by prisoners at HMP Birmingham as part of a programme with the Royal Horticultural Society, says Sanchez Manning in The Times. Green-fingered inmates at the category B prison have helped plant manicured flowerbeds as well as vegetable patches growing produce including peppers, tomatoes and cucumbers, which will be sent to local food banks. For many the project has been a lifeline: one severely autistic 29-year-old prisoner has gone from being effectively mute when he entered the jail to speaking freely after getting into gardening.