Two weeks ago I was sent a “grainy image” of Matt Hancock and Gina Coladangelo, says Isabel Oakeshott in The Spectator. I didn’t think it looked like the former health secretary. “Crooks and oddballs send journalists weird stuff all the time” – so I thoughtlessly dismissed it and “missed the scoop”.

Canada is so hot, you could bake an egg “on your forearm now”, says Heather Mallick in the Toronto Star. This week saw record 47.9C temperatures in Lytton, British Columbia, days before unseasonal wildfires burnt the town down. The Pacific Northwest is melting under a “heat dome” that’s already caused 300 deaths. The homeless are being found emergency accommodation in Toronto, where roads are buckling in the heat. A Vancouver resident told AFP that hotel rooms are selling out as people flock there for the air conditioning. “God, it’s hot out there.”

Sky Brown, the skateboarder who is set to become the youngest British Olympian after being named in the Team GB skateboarding squad – she turns 13 just before the Tokyo Olympics which start on 23 July. Brown started competing aged eight, and was the first female to land a “frontside 540” trick.

The stage is set for “electric flying race cars” to go head to head, overhead, says Kim Lyons in The Verge. A company called Alauda Aeronautics has successfully tested zippy, unpiloted Airspeeder drones in southern Australia. On the back of this, it’s planning Grand Prix-style races later this year in three as yet unnamed locations.

Joe Biden’s Catholicism goes deep, says Andrew Sullivan in The Weekly Dish. At the G7 summit in Cornwall, he even went to Mass at a local church. This explains his liberal, compassionate attitude to immigrants, to gay and transgender people, and to tackling climate change. But he has “tragically blurred” Catholicism with critical race theory. The latter sees the world as a “zero-sum power struggle between ‘white’ and ‘non-white’”. But for Catholics “there is ‘neither Greek nor Jew’ – there is only humanity”. Biden is supporting “postmodern conceptions of gender identity” and pushing for “equity”, which, by allocating jobs to under-represented identities, “treats individual souls as simply fodder for benign social and racial engineering”.

Life as an English professor is exhausting, says Frances Wilson in The Oldie. Students are consumed by wokeness. The students of one of my academic friends demanded a “trigger warning” on WB Yeats’s poem Leda and the Swan because it contains a rape scene. It’s true that Zeus, in the form of a swan, rapes Leda. She then gives birth to the woman behind the Trojan war, Helen – “whose face will launch a thousand ships”. It’s a chilling piece of violence, but it’s also “the birth of the classical era”. After all, the Trojan war inspired The Iliad and The Odyssey. A trigger warning belittles this. It “is tantamount to the death of western literature”.