Alfie, 31, a playwright, meets Sam, 33, who works in techWhat were you hoping for? To meet a silly softie with a penchant for the occasional deep chat. Continue reading...

07 Feb 2026 06:00 ✍️ RSS THE GUARDIAN

There are times when it is better to wear underwear than not. Here’s what the experts sayIn 2015, during a particularly energetic performance of the song American Woman in Stockholm, Lenny Kravitz split a pair of leather pants right down the crotch, revealing his manhood to the world.I’m sorry to say I think about this incident somewhat regularly. Not out of titillation, but because it planted in my head a troublesome question: just how many people, rock stars or otherwise, aren’t wearing underwear in public? Continue reading...

10 Feb 2026 17:00 ✍️ RSS THE GUARDIAN

This unofficial diagnosis describes the anxiety-driven, compulsive obsession with living as long as possible. While it might seem healthy to monitor your diet, exercise and biomarkers, it can come at a huge emotional costIt was a pitta bread that finally broke Jason Wood. It arrived with hummus instead of the vegetable crudites he had preordered in a restaurant that he had painstakingly researched, as he always did, weeks before he and his husband visited. “In that moment, I just snapped,” he recalls. “I hit rock bottom, I got angry … I started crying, I started shaking. I just felt like I couldn’t do it any more, like I had been crushed by all this pressure I put on myself.”Today, Wood, 40, speaks calmly. Neat and groomed, he seems orderly by nature. But at that time, his attempts to control every aspect of his life had spiralled. He painstakingly monitored what he ate (sometimes only organic, sometimes raw or unprocessed; calories painstakingly counted), his exercise regime (twice a day, seven days a week), and tracked every bodily function from his heart rate to his blood pressure, body fat and sleep “schedule”. He even monitored his glucose levels repeatedly throughout the day. “I was living by those numbers,” he says. Continue reading...

08 Feb 2026 14:00 ✍️ RSS THE GUARDIAN

It is one of the most powerful involuntary actions the human body can perform. But is a big sneeze a sign of illness, pollution or something else entirely?How worried should we be about a sneeze? It depends who you ask. In the Odyssey, Telemachus sneezes after Penelope’s prayer that her husband will soon be home to sort out her house-sitting suitors – which she sees as a good omen for team Odysseus, and very bad news for the suitors. In the Anabasis, Xenophon takes a sneeze from a soldier as godly confirmation that his army can fight their way back to their own territory – great news for them – while St Augustine notes, somewhat disapprovingly, that people of his era tend to go back to bed if they sneeze while putting on their slippers. But is a sneeze an omen of anything apart from pathogens, pollen or – possibly – air pollution?“It’s a physical response to get rid of something that’s irritating your body,” says Sheena Cruickshank, an immunologist and professor at the University of Manchester. “Alongside the obvious nasal hairs that a few people choose to trim, all of us have cilia, or microscopic hairs in our noses that can move and sense things of their own accord. And so if anything gets trapped by the cilia, that triggers a reaction to your nerve endings that says: ‘Right, let’s get rid of this.’ And that triggers a sneeze.” Continue reading...

08 Feb 2026 10:00 ✍️ RSS THE GUARDIAN

Americans are expected to devour nearly 280m pounds of avocados during Super Bowl weekend. Are they actually healthy?Most American adults today didn’t grow up with avocados, but we’ve certainly developed a hearty appetite for them. In 1990, the United States imported 38m pounds of avocados; by 2023, that number was 2,789m, mostly from Mexico.On average, each of us eats about 20 avocados, or 9lbs of the fruit, a year – a sixfold increase from 1998. Super Bowl guacamole alone fuels a staggering demand for the fruit; in the lead-up to this Sunday’s game, Americans are expected to devour nearly 280m pounds of avocados, a historical record. Continue reading...

07 Feb 2026 15:00 ✍️ RSS THE GUARDIAN

I was quite spoiled and he could be a little dour. But on that terrible day, when he was just two blocks away when the South Tower exploded, I realised he was all I wantedI met Chris in the college bar in 1997. I was part of a group of visiting American students visiting the University of Oxford – we kept ourselves to ourselves in the first few weeks of term – and he leaned over from the next table to talk to me. I saw his one-dimpled smile and the cocky way he tipped his chair back on two legs and I thought: “Uh-oh, here’s trouble.”Despite the fact that I was only at Oxford for one term, we quickly became a couple – and stayed together. When he finished university and started working in London, I returned to North Carolina to finish my English degree. We visited each other when we could. He made a surprise appearance at my 21st birthday party; we spent a New Year’s Eve in Paris. Continue reading...

11 Feb 2026 06:55 ✍️ RSS THE GUARDIAN

Christopher Duddy was shooting a film in Hawaii when disaster struck. For 28 hours he choked on fumes near a lava lake, fighting to get to safetyThe 1993 erotic thriller Sliver should have ended differently: Zeke, played by William Baldwin, was scripted to fly a helicopter towards an active volcano, after Sharon Stone’s character, Carly, reveals she’s the killer. The pilot, Craig Hosking, had been tasked with flying low over Hawaii’s Kīlauea volcano, accompanied by the director of photography, Mike Benson, and his assistant Christopher Duddy, to film the bubbling lava and white plumes of smoke escaping from the Puʻu ʻŌʻō vent. It was a clear day on the Big Island when Duddy watched a corkscrew trail form in the smoke behind the helicopter, and he remembers thinking: “I can’t believe I’m getting paid to do this.”It was November 1992, and a big storm was due to hit the area, so they were shooting as much footage as they could along the coast, capturing the rainforest and brilliant blue ocean shimmering against the black lava of the volcano, before the weather disrupted production. But as they dipped over Puʻu ʻŌʻō for a second time, the helicopter’s engine failed. Their visibility faded as thick smoke engulfed them. Duddy jolted his eyes away from the camera monitors towards the open doors and saw that they were heading straight for a cliff. There was a loud crash as the rotor sheared off on impact and the helicopter went into freefall. Continue reading...

10 Feb 2026 06:00 ✍️ RSS THE GUARDIAN