The Bank of England raised interest rates today, its first increase for more than three years. The rise, from 3.75% to 4%, will increase the cost of borrowing for individuals and businesses in a bid to curb inflation. At least a dozen flights across Europe have been affected by a new wave of bomb threats, two days after several flights were hit with similar warnings in what Britain called a “malicious hoax”. Multiple planes have been diverted this morning, with some escorted by fighter jets, but there have so far been no explosives found on any of the targeted aircraft. Historian Edmund Richardson’s biography of Alexander the Great has won this year’s Baillie Gifford prize for non-fiction. Alexander: God, King, Man is the first book about ancient history to scoop the award, and beat the bookies’ favourite London Falling by Patrick Radden Keefe, as well as Nicholas Boggs’s biography of James Baldwin and Matthew Sweet’s riotous The Great Dictator: A Life of Barbara Cartland.

One big loser from Donald Trump’s shellacking in the US midterm elections is Nigel Farage, says John Rentoul in The Independent. Not only has the longtime Trump ally reminded potential voters that he has repeatedly backed a president who is even more unpopular here in the UK than he is in Texas, Kansas and Iowa, he has also shown extremely poor political judgement. “I don’t go with the consensus that Trump is going to get absolutely smashed,” he said on GB News while the votes were being counted, confidently praising the Republicans’ “Get Out The Vote” campaign and pointing out that Elon Musk “hasn’t chucked in $450m of his own money just for fun”. How humiliating – not merely the fawning, but the cod political analysis. How many Reform-curious voters will be watching and wondering anew if he really has what it takes to be prime minister.

It’s not just Farage and Trump who are losing favour with the public, says Janan Ganesh in the FT. This has been a bad year for populists almost across the board. In April, Viktor Orbán lost power at last. Last month, two right-wingers flunked presidential elections: Flávio Bolsonaro in Brazil and Aleksandar Vučić in Serbia. What unites them? Almost half of Republicans went to the polls citing White House “corruption, self-dealing and conflicts of interest” as a concern. Farage is under investigation over an undeclared gift worth £5m. Bolsonaro? A money laundering probe. Orbán? Allegations of crony capitalism. It doesn’t help that they are all “silver-spoon leaders”. Strikingly, two of the most successful populists, Giorgia Meloni and Narendra Modi, are actually of the people they claim to represent. The others started class wars against elites and never lived up to it.

It wasn’t just politicians people were voting for in Tuesday’s midterms, says Sam Sifton in The New York Times – there was also the usual array of “ballot measures” on specific issues. Voters in California look almost certain to have rejected a proposal to introduce a wealth tax on billionaires. Washington DC banned foie gras. And residents in Idaho selected their “official state gun”: the Winchester Model 1873, known as the “Gun that Won the West”.

I’ll side with women on almost any topic, says Caitlin Moran in The Times. I’m “Team Tits”. But the one fault I can’t forgive is our obsession with tall men. As many as 78% of women say they want a partner over 6ft, with some even stating as much on dating app profiles. Yet the proportion of men who top the 183cm mark is just 15%. Sorry ladies, you need to “literally lower your standards”. As Corinthians doesn’t quite put it: “Love is patient, love is kind, love is not founded on a specific inside leg measurement and the ability to change a lightbulb merely by reaching up.”

If you want to know what Gen Z really thinks about sex, says Poppy Sowerby in UnHerd, read some online “fanfiction”. This is where mostly young people share (terribly written) erotic stories about their favourite celebrities and fictional characters: Harry Styles and Louis Tomlinson from One Direction getting it on; Harry Potter’s Hermione Granger in a “Handmaid’s Tale-style arrangement” with bad boy Draco Malfoy. There are countless weird subgenres, from “mpreg” (male pregnancy) to “wingfic” (essentially “rutting with feathers”). But the typical pairing is an everywoman protagonist with a “brutish but tender, misunderstood man”, and the most distinctive theme is “dubious consent”, or “dub-con”. In other words, many of my peers spend their time fantasising about “submission, surrender, abduction and sexual enslavement”.

It would be easy to portray this as a revolt against the gains of feminism. A more positive reading is that it’s an “uplifting” consequence of those gains. In the West, institutionalised forced marriage, coercion and rape are now “so unimaginable” that they are considered fodder for fantasy. And like many other aspects of modern sexuality – heterosexual “polycules”, anyone? – fanfiction is carefully gatekept by women. The biggest site, AO3, prides itself on censoring almost nothing – the stories are all strictly “tagged”, even rape content, so readers know exactly what they’re in for. None of this is to say Gen Z’s true desires involve milking a minotaur, say, or being turned into sex slaves by an X-Factor boyband. Instead it highlights the failures of real-world dating, where romance has been supplanted by “apathetic casual sex and sterile hookup apps”. What these young women want is to be pursued and desired, to relinquish control and experience “unfettered passion”. Mock them if you like, but their underlying yearnings are universal.

🏒🔥 The sexual themes of fanfiction have long “bled out into the mainstream”. Fifty Shades of Grey began as Twilight fanfic; HBO’s gay ice hockey romp, Heated Rivalry, began as a series of posts on AO3. In the acclaimed new film Wicker, Olivia Colman gets hot and heavy with a sexy man (Alexander Skarsgård) who is “inexplicably made of rattan”.

Brendan Larsen’s image of around 1,400 satellites flying over New Zealand’s Mount Taranaki has racked up tens of millions of views online, says Eva Corlett in The Guardian. The Kiwi astrophotographer spent two hours taking hundreds of photos of the night sky, then another 45 hours overlaying the images and painstakingly editing out stars in Photoshop. Knowing he’d be accused of using AI, Larsen also created a video documenting his process, including an enjoyable time-lapse of the originals being stitched together. Click here to watch.

Many people fret that asking AI chatbots menial questions has a “massive environmental cost”, say Elizabeth Dunn and Jiaying Zhao in The Washington Post. They’re wrong. Asking ChatGPT to write a toast for your cousin’s wedding, for example, is shoddy behaviour but uses hardly any electricity at all – about as much as running a microwave for one second. Asking a bot 100 questions is roughly equivalent to boiling the kettle for a single cup of tea. It’s true that data centres need a lot of water to cool their servers, but it would take 700 questions to use the amount required to grow a single California almond.

It’s Achille and Patroclo, says Nicola Davis in The Guardian: a bull and a male donkey in Ethiopia that appear to have coupled up. Researchers from Pisa spotted the pair while studying monkeys nearby. “We were having a little break for lunch,” says André da Cruz. “I told colleagues: ‘I think I saw a bull mounting a donkey.’ And they didn’t believe me.” So they watched the pair for four days, observing 51 mountings and a great deal of “licking and rubbing” before and after. It’s “really, really unusual”, says researcher Elisabetta Palagi. “We interpret our data as a special relationship.”