The Critical Commentator

  This week everyone appears to be deeply concerned for the wellbeing of 28-year-old YouTube celebrity Jake Paul . The announcement of his fight against Anthony Joshua next month has generated a flood of foreboding prognoses, and fair enough. Stepping into the ring with a two-time world heavyweight champion when a) you're not even a heavyweight, b) your record consists almost entirely of novices and geriatrics and c) you still fight like a marmoset trapped in an empty crisp packet... Obviously Jake Paul will eventually lose, and there may even be some cartoon blood spat in the process. But at the end they're going to hug and Joshua is going to call Paul a warrior, a true fighter, and the pair will hoist their arms skywards, and Jake Paul will live to grift another day... And what we essentially have here is the ultimate collision of these two worlds, these two kinds of fame and power, the pure athlete and the performance artist, the puncher and the prankster, meeting on weird...

  Dermatologists have warned of a "dystopian" trend of skincare brands aimed at children and toddlers. Shay Mitchell, a Canadian actress who starred in the television drama Pretty Little Liars and has 35 million followers on Instagram, is selling skincare products aimed at children aged three and over. The brand, Rini, has products including facial sheet masks in animal shapes and was inspired by Mitchell's daughters Atlas, six and Rome, three. Head of a Girl Eugenie Marie Salanson (1864-1892) Photo Credit: Manchester Art Gallery [CC BY-NC-ND]  Social media has led to increased interest among pre-teens in complicated skin care regimes but experts say they are unnecessary and risk irritating youthful skin. Two years ago Baby Dior launched a "complete skincare line for little ones" offering "luxury" creams costing more than £100 for babies and children. Dermatologists warned that children could become "preoccupied" with their skin from a young...

  Across the country, demand for chef's tables, where diners are sat either in the kitchen or adjacent to it, are soaring, according to restaurateurs. Indeed, they say these premium seats, often just feet from the heat of service, have become the dining room's most coveted spots... Head chef, Craig Johnston said the demand was coming from a younger crowd of food lovers who wanted a "behind the scenes" experience or those who wanted to mark a special occasion with "great food and good company, rather than the usual night out"... Kitchen Interior with a Man  Bringing Fish For Sale Hendrick Martensz (1609/1611-1670) Photo Credit Manchester Art Gallery [CC  BY-NC-ND] The trend is not confined to London either. At Tallow in Tunbridge Wells, guests can book a place at a marble counter overlooking the kitchen while Glasgow's Michelin-starred Cail Bruich offers a setup where Lorna McNee, its head chef, serves dishes directly from the pass. Social media, as ever,...

  Three quarters of top-rate taxpayers do not consider themselves rich, according to a survey by Times Money. Just 21 per cent of those with an income of more than £125,000 said they felt rich, despite being in the top 4 per cent of earners nationally and paying the highest rate of income tax (which applies to earnings above £125,140). About 2 per cent said they were not sure how they felt, while 76 per cent said they did not feel rich at all...   For He Had Great Possessions Amy Julia Drucker (1873-1951) Photo Credit: Ben Uri Collection  [CC BY-NC-ND] The polling of more than 4,000 people suggested that owning a house outright, having more than £1 million in cash savings and earning a six-figure salary were unlikely to make us feel well off. In total, 94 per cent of those surveyed said they did not consider themselves rich, while more than half identified as working class... Sir Mel Stride, the shadow chancellor, said "Britain should reward hard work, not punish ambition...

  How long is a piece of string? David Shrigley can't answer that, but he can tell you how much it weighs. His latest installation, titled Exhibition of Old Rope, is quite literally an exhibition of 10 tonnes of old rope, accumulated by him over months, and left in towering mounds in this swanky gallery in London's Mayfair. Rope Circle Wendy Taylor (b. 1945) Photo Credit: Anthony McIntosh/Art/UK. [CC BY-NC-ND] Most of it is marine rope destined for landfill. It's hard to recycle this stuff, it seems, and there's an endless supply of it dumped around the world. So Shrigley scooped up as much of it as he could find, piled it up and put a massive price tag on it. The work can be yours for £1m. And that's the point of the whole show: this is literally money for old rope. It's not that deep - it's just an idea taken to its logical conclusion, a pun taken too literally. Shrigley made his name with deadpan visual one-liners: simple paintings with simple phrases acr...

  When I die, please say just that: that I died. Please do not say I have "passed, or "passed away", or "passed on", for if you do I will be very cross and come back to haunt you for such infuriating flabbiness of expression. No, actually, scrub the haunting joke. I won't come back. I'm a hard rationalist, who doesn't believe in ghosts or life after death. The precise problem with our journey towards woolly euphemism in the sphere of death is that sentiment is starting to beat science. And in today's world of untruth, we have never needed the tough clarity  of science more. Death the Comforter William Strang (1859-1921) Photo Credit: University of St Andrews [CC BY-NC]   So please say it like it is. I am allergic to "passed" in any form because it implies the soul undergoing a religious transition. The language of death, highjacked by millennials - and now worse, gen z - is becoming one of enforced timidity: florid and filled with woo-...

  Have you been noticing what I have been noticing recently? An awful lot of striped shirts. No, sorry. I haven't noticed them . A nigh-on ubiquity of loafers. Noticing what someone wears on their feet? Twice as many suits as a couple of years ago. You are very observant and a fine mathematician. Jumpers worn over the shoulders, Euro-style. Really? A whole lot of gold jewellery. Being so unobservant is making me feel pretty useless. Rugby shirts, polo shirts. Ah, that's better. I notice a rugby shirt when I put it on. Plus, most remarkably, plenty of heels, even in daytime. I don't wear heels in the daytime or the evening, I'm afraid.     Remember when we all thought heels were dead. I didn't even notice when they were alive. .. A Bacchante William Etty (1787-1849) Photo Credit: York Museums Trust [CPublic Domain] Introducing the two most potent fashion tribes of the moment, the neo-yuppie and the neo-preppie, as identified by one Sean Monahan. Monahan is an Amer...

 Last week, the US Republican congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene suggested that UFOs are probably demons or "fallen angels" expelled from heaven for their sins. "That," she said "is what makes sense in my world view." Well who can argue with such logic? The Dark Ages, as I am hardly the first to remark, seem to be returning. Occult forces we believed the Age of Reason had banished forever are swarming back  into public life. Last year the popular American broadcaster Tucker Carlson explained that he had been "mauled" by a demon while sleeping. It had "left claw marks on my side." (You don't have to be a sceptic in the league of David Hume to wonder whether the fact that Carlson sleeps with his "four dogs in the bed" is relevant.) A few weeks ago Jordan Peterson's daughter Michaela said her father had been "spiritually attacked" by diabolic forces. And in a recent speech... Peter Thiel set out a series of  p...

  His childhood in Port Talbot, South Wales. "My father had that attitude: stop whining, stop complaining, you don't know what you're talking about, stand up straight, get on with it." I was living in my imagination, my dream world, I suppose. I couldn't understand anything intellectually or academically and that drove me into a kind of  loneliness and resentment. I couldn't fit in. Everything was alien. I didn't want to play with the other kids on the street" Arenig, North Wales James Dickson Innes (1887-1914) Photo Credit: Tate [CC BY-NC-ND]  On Lawrence Olivier and theatre "luvvies" . "He [Olivier] gave me this huge break in my life. He seemed to admire my physical strength, because I had that in me, and I had this sense of Welsh danger, you know, quick tempered. I've never felt comfortable with that - the 'kissy-smoochy-darling stuff." Reading his script up to 200 times and the art of acting. "That was my gift, rea...

When the proclaimed  "Word of the Year" is not actually a word and no one knows precisely what it means, it is probably safe to say that we have reached peak cultural absurdity. The website dictionary.com is not exactly the Oxford English Dictionary , but it is a valuable monitor of linguistic trends, and every year it chooses a word that, it says "captures pivotal moments in language and culture." And for 2025, it has selected as its epochal word "67" (pronounced "six-seven"). I know. Me neither. Essentially it's an internet meme that has made it into the Gen Alpha lexicon, and it doesn't strictly matter what it means, or what we - on the outside - think it means. The most popularly accepted definition, given the incantation of "6,7" must be accompanied by having both hands outstretched, in a juggling motion, is that indicates something deemed "so-so" or, in that rather ugly iteration of the age, "meh", or i...