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Let me tell you a ghost story. I began texting Becky two weeks ago. Soon the messages were flowing. A date was set, a table booked. Friday night. Soho. Here we go. Then, a day before the date, the texts stopped and the lady vanished – leaving me to cancel the restaurant and spend the evening in the company of Wordle. It might be ten years since ‘ghosting’ was added to the dictionary, but the disappearing act has lost none of its sting. It’s also as common as ever: four out of five singletons say they’ve been ghosted. Received wisdom blames the apps. The industrial scale of dating today causes

Women’s expectations are off. They want men with advanced degrees, but on university campuses, women outnumber their male counterparts. They want men with above-average incomes, but the gender pay gap has been reversed – young women now out-earn men. They want men who share their politics, but in almost every western country over the past decade or so, women have slid to the left while men have remained centrist. NEW: an ideological divide is emerging between young men and women in many countries around the world. I think this one of the most important social trends unfolding today, and provides the answer to several puzzles. pic.twitter.com/kG4qQReqfT — John Burn-Murdoch (@jburnmurdoch) January 26, 2024 This

How do you walk away from greatness? How do you vacate the position of being literally the best person in the world at something? Most of us never have to face this challenge, but at some point Ronnie O’Sullivan will. In Steve Davis and Stephen Hendry he has contrasting examples of how to tackle it. I’d argue that Davis’s approach is by far the better – and indeed teaches all of us about life and the way it should be lived. ‘If he plays his best, he wins. It’s as simple as that.’ There aren’t many who disagree with Hendry’s verdict on O’Sullivan, his successor as the king of snooker

It is the evening of Monday 23 September 1985. A band called the June Brides are playing a free gig in the bar of Manchester Polytechnic’s Students Union, the Mandela Building (of course) on Oxford Road. I find myself among the audience of freshers’ week first-year undergraduates. I am 18, a small-town boy who’s been living in a big city for just 48 hours.  The place is half empty, the audience awkward. But I am quite taken with the band and the following day go to Piccadilly Records to buy their just-released mini album, There Are Eight Million Stories. The US novelist Dave Eggers would later recall being a teenage Anglophile

I like to think of myself as good at making friends. I tend to rank them. There are kindred spirits (rare), very good friends (perhaps five at the most), and good (ten or more). Friendships, like plants, need looking after; they require time and attention. One rank below friends are acquaintances. Acquaintances add warmth and comfort to life but are not essential. You can abandon an acquaintance without much compunction. But good friends nurture the heart and soul and are therefore vital. Kindred spirits? By them you know you’re not alone, not mad, not a terrible person and, amazingly, that you’re loved. I think back to childhood when the need

A small but perfectly formed training outfit from Gloucestershire has quietly been making ripples, bordering on waves, with its horses in recent weeks – and there is plenty to look forward to for the rest of the season too. David Killahena and Graeme McPherson, who hold a joint licence to train at Stow-on-the Wold, sent just one horse to the Cheltenham Festival earlier this month and Yellow Car ran a cracker to finish fourth in the Grade 1, 20-runner Albert Bartlett Novices’ Hurdle over three miles. ‘I bought him as a cheap and cheerful three-year-old to have a bit of fun with and for two years he showed nothing at