Medieval pointy shoes, which researchers say unleashed a plague of bunions among fashionable 14th- and 15th-century Britons. A study of skeletons in Cambridge cemeteries revealed 27% had bony lumps on their feet, up from 6% in preceding centuries. The craze for pointy shoes – called poulaines or cracows – was also responsible for injuries from falling over face first, which researchers also found evidence of.

Bunny the sheepadoodle puppy can tell her owner to “shut up and walk me”. How? By pressing buttons on a soundboard that “speaks” the commands to her owner, Alexis Devine, says Emma Madden in The New York Times. When Bunny recently pressed the “ouch”, “stranger” and “paw” buttons, she stretched out her paw – in which Devine found a thorn.

The relationships between American presidents and British PMs range from chummy to icy, says Jack Blanchard in Politico’s Westminster Insider podcast. When Winston Churchill was sailing to Newfoundland to meet Franklin Roosevelt in 1941, he spent his days walking up and down the deck of the battleship, playing out potential conversations. The two men hit it off and, that December, Churchill stayed in the White House for three weeks as the pair discussed war strategy. They dined together every evening and drank a fair bit too. FDR even encountered Churchill naked in the bathtub, prompting the PM to quip: “The prime minister of Great Britain has nothing to hide from the president of the United States.”

George Orwell’s 1946 essay Politics and the English Language shows just how intermeshed the two are, says Andrew Sullivan in The Weekly Dish. As the author said, English “becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts”. That still holds true. A US medical journal and podcast recently argued that socioeconomics, rather than structural racism, is the root cause of America’s social problems. Consider this attempt by the Institute for Antiracism in Medicine to put the opposite case.