Society

What do Hollywood bonkbusters Bridget Jones: Mad About a Boy, Baby Girl, and Lonely Planet have in common? The middle-aged blonde ice maidens at the centre of each film are all women who refuse to age gracefully. Their faces show a toxic desire to cling onto youth.  The movies also all feature large age-gap relationships with the woman as the older party. Thanks to the gender reversal, pop culture is lauding the storylines as inspiration and liberating. But what message are young people – especially guys – supposed to take away? The bald fact is there’s a reason why it’s a social taboo to have sex with people young enough

Muhsin Hendricks, the world’s ‘first openly gay imam’, was shot dead in Bethelsdorp, South Africa, on Saturday. While the police are still probing the murder, Imam Hendricks had repeatedly cited death threats – including in the 2022 documentary The Radical – owing to radical Muslims finding his preaching, and officiating of same-sex marriages, as an affront to Islam. According to reports, he had recently performed the ceremony of a lesbian couple, and was on his way to officiating the wedding of a Muslim woman with a non-Muslim man, which too is deemed against Islamic teachings. In addition to sanctioning unorthodox marriages, Hendricks’s Al-Ghurbaah Foundation provided support to those marginalised on

‘I was different,’ Bill Gates describes his childish self, ‘School… felt slow. I found it hard to stay interested in what we were learning; my thoughts wandered. When something did catch my attention, I might leap up from my seat, frantically raise my hand or shout out an answer.’ In his autobiography, Source Code: My beginnings, the schoolboy who went on to become the original tech bro, co-founder of Microsoft and global philanthropist, describes his fascination with learning outside the box. Let classmates dutifully repeat their multiplication tables; he was discovering that the Adelie penguin could hold its breath for six minutes under water and that sound was a propagation

‘When the Lord returned the captives to Zion,’ Psalm 126 goes, ‘we were like dreamers. Our mouths were filled with laughter and our tongues with songs of joy.’ Watching the images of Alexander Troufanov, Sagui Dekel-Chen, and Iair Horn paraded by their captors after almost 500 days of torment, there was no laughter and not a hint of joy. That the three Israelis have been reunited with their families will bring immense relief to those who know and love them, but it cannot give this nightmare the illusion of a dream. These captives have been returned, but others remain. Iair’s brother Eitan is still in Palestinian hands. Their mother Ruti