No wonder we're nostalgic for the 1990s

In a new viral trend, says Mary Julia Koch in The Wall Street Journal, kids ask their Gen X parents what they were like in the 1990s, and the parents respond with photo montages of their younger years, overlaid with the song Iris by the Goo Goo Dolls. Celebrities from Drew Barrymore to Reese Witherspoon have joined in, "relishing a nostalgia for the last decade before the internet took over". But the trend is hardly limited to reminiscing Gen Xers – if anything, the 1990s fervour is strongest among those who weren't there first time around. Baggy jeans, tortoiseshell headbands and film cameras are all the rage.

Every generation tends to idealise a generation that came before them – "recalling only the glitz, not the gloom". But the 1990s obsession highlights just how much has been lost in recent decades, "and how much Gen Z wants it back". Watch any movie from that era and you'll see beautiful women valued for their quirks. Sarah Jessica Parker didn't fix her big nose; Julia Roberts didn't straighten her frizzy hair; Meg Ryan didn't erase her forehead wrinkle. Even the "heroin chic" supermodel ideal "leaned toward a more natural aesthetic". Now examine the celebrities of today: they are all carbon copies of "Instagram face", with high cheekbones, big lips and flawless skin, thanks to cosmetic enhancements and photo filters. In the age of the plastic ideal, natural beauty looks like a flaw. What utter madness. The more perfect a face becomes, "the less character it reveals". It's no surprise the young romanticise a pre-Botox era, when women didn't spend quite as much time on skin care in order to feel beautiful.

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Another PFO? Consulting the notes on Grey's Anatomy

On the letters pages of The Times, readers have been comparing notes on abbreviations used by doctors for patients. They include "GOK" for a medical mystery, "PFO" for a drunken accident, "NFS" as a Wiltshire-based in-joke, and the cryptic (and brilliant) "E6" to describe someone with a screw loose. Other professions have their own acronyms, of course: apparently IT guys often talk about "PICNIC".

Can you guess what they all stand for? The answers, of course, are in the rest of today's newsletter, which is for paying subscribers only. And that's not all. Also today we have a fascinating piece looking at the bizarre narrative being pushed by Hungarian strongman Viktor Orbán in his re-election bid, and a profile of the DeepMind founder Demis Hassabis, who appears to be the cleverest guy in the world.

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