| A major global IT outage is causing chaos at supermarkets, train lines, banks and airports, grounding flights around the world on what was meant to be the busiest day for UK departures since 2019. The mayhem is apparently due to a dodgy update by the cybersecurity software Crowdstrike, which crashed Microsoft Windows. Rioters set fire to a bus and flipped over a police car in Leeds last night. The violence was ostensibly triggered when social services tried to take some local children into care. The V&A has hired four Taylor Swift superfans to help curate a forthcoming show about the singer. The Swifties (pictured), who were selected from over 1,000 applicants to advise on Taylor Swift: Songbook Trail opening on 27 July, join the museum's growing cast of expert enthusiasts on topics including Pokémon cards and Lego. |  | Lewis Khan |
| | |  | Anthony van Dyck's The Virgin as Intercessor (1629). Getty |
| Old-school religion is having a moment | Five years ago, says James Marriott in The Times, JD Vance was baptised as a Catholic. In an essay on his conversion, tellingly titled How I Joined the Resistance, the Republican vice-presidential nominee frames his Catholicism as a form of dissent, a "rejection of a spiritually vacuous liberal elite". Britons are used to rolling their eyes at America's "religious excesses". But to breeze past Vance's faith as "just another baffling Americanism" is to miss 20 years of social change. The US is now well on its way towards European-style secularisation; Vance belongs to the first generation for whom Church attendance is an anomaly. And I suspect his "countercultural faith" may be a glimpse into the future. | The "trad Cath" movement that makes a fetish of the bits of the faith that tend to embarrass liberal believers – "veils, Latin, the veneration of relics" – is enjoying a moment among metropolitan hipsters. If you believe the New York Times, "New York's Hottest Club is the Catholic Church". This makes a kind of sense: to young people raised in a post-religious environment, traditional Christianity has taken on "something of the exotic appeal of Buddhism in the 1960s". Conversely, it is the forms of Christianity that have most conscientiously adapted themselves to 21st-century mores that are fading fastest. Catholic writer Dan Hitchens points out that the "impeccably progressive" United Reformed Church – with services presided over by a "womanist practical theologian" focusing on "uplifting ethnically minoritised women and communities" – is collapsing faster than any other denomination. Britain's most dynamic churches are evangelical congregations whose conservative moral values are "directly at odds with the liberal consensus". | | | | Donald Trump accepted the Republican Party's nomination for president last night with the longest political convention speech in modern US history, says The Washington Post: a whopping 92 minutes. "I'm not supposed to be here," he said in reference to his assassination attempt, adding: "I stand before you in this arena only by the grace of almighty God." In honour of their hero, some attendees wore an ear bandage. The covering could be made of "sturdy paper, of flimsy napkin, or of gauze and tape", but it had to be white and cover the right ear. "It's a new sign of unity within the party," says Joe Neglia, a Republican delegate from Arizona who claims he was the first to do it. "When I saw him come out Monday night – that magical moment – I thought, 'I have to do something'." |
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| | | The German navy is modernising, says Ars Technica, and that means finally ending its reliance on floppy disks. The nation's F123 frigates use the removable storage devices for their onboard data acquisition systems, which are responsible for controlling the warship's engines and power generation. In fairness, the Germans aren't alone in taking their time to move on from the 1960s-era tech: the US Air Force only stopped using them for its intercontinental ballistic missile command in 2019. | | | | Advertisement | | Vintage Acquisitions specialise in Scotch whisky cask investment. They offer clients not only access to a unique blend of investment opportunities, but also bespoke events and experiences, such as personalising their whisky casks with a name of their choice. The investment is attractive for its tax advantages, and clients are given personalised guidance to ensure that their portfolio aligns with their financial goals. The comprehensive service includes access to award-winning distilleries, HMRC-licensed storage, insurance, and flexible exit strategies. For more information, click here. |
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| | |  | Charli XCX being a brat. Instagram/@charli_xcx |
| "Brat summer" is well and truly upon us, says Rebecca Reid in the I newspaper. For those not "chronically online", this is the viral lifestyle trend that espouses "behaving, well, like a brat". It's named after the latest album by British singer-songwriter Charli XCX, who explains it's "for that girl who's a bit messy and loves to party and maybe says dumb things sometimes… honest, blunt, and a little bit volatile". According to the Essex-raised pop star, the perfect "brat summer" starter pack would be "a pack of cigs, a Bic lighter and a strappy white top with no bra". Enjoy. | | | | Enjoying The Knowledge?
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| | |  | Carol Yepes/Getty |
| How to beat "leisure sickness" | Pack bags. Go to beach. Get sick. "For as long as I can remember," says Pilita Clark in the FT, "this has been the pattern of too many of my summer holidays." It doesn't even have to be summer. One Friday afternoon late last year, just as I wrote the final paragraph of a story I had frantically typed up on the plane home from a work trip, "I began to sniffle". By 10pm all hope of an enjoyable weekend had been killed by a sore throat, temperature and cough. "I was in bed until Monday." Encouraged by similarly long-suffering colleagues, I did some research and discovered that this affliction is a real condition, diagnosed more than 20 years ago by the Dutchman Ad Vingerhoets. It's called "leisure sickness". | Symptoms vary from headaches, fatigue, muscle pain and nausea to colds and flu-like bugs. Possible causes abound. When the body is under stress, it can have greater resistance to disease, so perhaps when work stress subsides, we get got. Or it may be something to do with adrenaline – Vingerhoets says one way of minimising symptoms is to hit the gym before you go on holiday, to lower your adrenaline levels. Whatever the explanation, those most affected tend to be workaholics, and "people who musturbate" – a term from psychology for people who feel they "must be the best at work, or must be the most loved, or must be generally excellent". Vingerhoets thinks that becoming aware of such unhelpful tendencies is a crucial first step in overcoming leisure sickness. I'll be giving that some thought as I head to the beach this summer, "after a very long session at the gym". | | |  | Sean Bean as Ned Stark in Game of Thrones |
| When Sean Bean was cast as Ned Stark in Game of Thrones, says The Guardian, he was asked to play the role using received pronunciation. He refused and stuck to his own Sheffield accent. As a result, all the actors playing other members of the Stark family (including the RP-speaking Kit Harington and Scottish Richard Madden) had to put on a northern accent too. |
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| | | Sherry Irene Virbila, who "ate out six nights a week for 20 years" as restaurant critic for the Los Angeles Times, used to bring along a man to finish her plates, says Pete Wells in The New York Times. "She called him Hoover." | | | | | | | | It's a baby Siamese crocodile, says BBC News: one of 60 born in the wild in recent weeks in Cambodia – a hatching record for the endangered species this century. Conservationists say it's a "real sign of hope" after more than 20 years of efforts to revive the rare reptile's numbers in the remote Cardamom Mountains. The crocs, which were once widespread across Southeast Asia, have been so decimated by hunting and habitat loss that they were once thought to have gone extinct, and until recently numbered just 400 in total. Given their dwindling numbers, says chief conservationist Pablo Sinovas, "the hatching of 60 new crocodiles is a tremendous boost". | | | "Lord, give me chastity and self-restraint. But not yet."
St Augustine of Hippo |
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