Keir Starmer says Britain “simply isn’t working”, as the government unveils what it claims are the “biggest employment reforms in a generation”. The plans will see job centres overhauled and all 18 to 21-year-olds lose their unemployment benefits if they refuse to take up jobs or training opportunities, but they fail to address the post-pandemic rise in sickness benefits. Donald Trump has vowed to impose 25% tariffs on goods from Mexico and Canada unless they reduce the flow of illegal migrants and drugs into the US. The president-elect also said that if Beijing doesn’t curb exports of fentanyl he would slap an additional 10% tariff on top of whatever levy he puts on Chinese goods. The Savoy hotel is auctioning off much of its furniture and art ahead of a major renovation. More than 3,000 lots are listed, including furniture by Italian designer Francesco Molon and pictures of Winston Churchill, Katharine Hepburn and Charlie Chaplin. All lots started at £5; put your bid in here.

Was wokeness just a fad?

After a revolution, symbols of the old regime are “yanked down with unsentimental haste”, says James Marriott in The Times. And lo, the progressive congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has removed the pronouns “she/her” from her profile on X. Last week’s Transgender Day of Remembrance went unmarked by most British institutions for the first time in years. Nothing from the BBC, the Labour Party “or even Stonewall”. Not long ago the Bank of England was floodlit in commemorative pink, white and blue, and vigils were held at universities. This time, the only news from the trans rights battle is that Warner Bros has defended JK Rowling – a position that would quite recently have counted as a “declaration of corporate civil war” with young arts graduates on its staff.

It would be premature to declare the woke movement “over”, but it’s remarkable how quickly passions fade: a sober statistical analysis in The Economist finds that “woke opinions and practices are on the decline”. Those of us who have long objected to the “absurdities and intolerances” of 21st-century political correctness may be tempted to claim an intellectual victory. But walking past the “starkly unilluminated” Bank of England one is forced to wonder: “How much was anyone really invested in this stuff in the first place?” Obviously for a small group of rabid online activists, such battles are “consumingly important”, but it seems likely that most people just nodded along with radical new ideas such as “silence is violence”, “white privilege” and “deplatforming” without really thinking about them. It’s reassuring in a way to know that such apparent fits of ideological passion are so short-lived, but it’s also disturbing. If blatantly illogical ideas can take hold this easily, what’s next?

Squareword is effectively a two-dimensional Wordle, where both the rows and columns in a grid make up five-letter words. Players guess the horizontal words, with correctly positioned letters turning green and incorrectly positioned letters appearing in a yellow box at the end of the row. (As with Wordle, letters that don’t appear anywhere on the grid turn grey.) Try it yourself here.

What Trump has in common with Michelangelo

As the Royal Academy’s new Michelangelo, Leonardo, Raphael exhibition demonstrates, says Janan Ganesh in the FT, 16th-century Florence had “as deep a treasury of artistic talent” as one place has ever known. And notably, each of the eternal trio was an “odd social fit”. Raphael wasn’t from the Florentine republic, or even from Venice or Rome, but from provincial Urbino. Leonardo was born a bastard. And Michelangelo’s neuroses about his déclassé family “never stopped chewing him”. None of these obstacles debarred success, as poverty or womanhood doubtless would have. Yet they might have been enough to provide the artists with an original vision and a “certain impatience”. In other words, each man was “disadvantaged to a useful extent”.

The optimal position in life is that of the “partial outsider” – someone “handicapped enough” in the ruling milieu to see things that others miss, but not so alien as to be unable to work the system. Donald Trump is the ultimate example: “New York but not Manhattan”; urban but not urbane; and rich, but from construction rather than from “genteel finance”. He grew up close enough to the elite to know its frailties, and far enough to itch with resentment at the little slights that are “the lot of the not-quite-pukka”. It’s the same with Boris Johnson (Eton but never rich) and Nigel Farage (public school but not university). Conversely, David Cameron, like the elder Bush in the US, was “groomed to be great, and had the elements for it”, but was just too at ease at the top. The partial outsider has a kind of animal vigilance (“Where is the next humiliation coming from?”) that for top politicians is “priceless”.

To mark the “heavily negative” response to the new Jaguar advert, the marketing site The Drum has compiled a list of classic car ads that “do it right”. They include the 2003 Honda Accord spot in which a rolling cog triggers a chain reaction involving other parts of the car; the 1990s Renault ads about “Nicole” gaining freedom from “Papa” by driving around in her Clio; and the 2007 segment in which bakers create a four-metre cake in the shape of a Skoda Fabia. Watch them all here.

The former England rugby coach Eddie Jones is notorious for his uncompromising management style, according to a new book by retired scrum-half Danny Care. After Jones humiliated an assistant coach in front of the squad, he apologised by giving him a package from the butcher. “I’ve bought you a steak,” the Australian told his slightly bewildered underling. “Take it home and eat it with your missus.” When the coach got home and opened the bag, he found a pack of sausages and no steak. He then received a text from Jones: “You’re not ready for steak. You’re a sausage. Up your game.”

It’s a human washing machine, says The Byte. Made by a Japanese showerhead company, the pod can spray-wash and dry willing (or possibly foolhardy) humans in a 15-minute cycle. It even has sensors that scan the person’s back for stress and fatigue levels, then adjusts the imagery projected on the chamber walls accordingly. Any resemblance to the controversial “suicide pods” developed for assisted dying in Switzerland is presumably entirely accidental.