Decisions outsourced, chatbots for friends, the natural world an afterthought: Silicon Valley is giving us life void of connection. There is a way out – but it’s going to take collective effort

Summer after summer, I used to descend into a creek that had carved a deep bed shaded by trees and lined with blackberry bushes whose long thorny canes arced down from the banks, dripping with sprays of fruit. Down in that creek, I’d spend hours picking until I had a few gallons of berries, until my hands and wrists were covered in scratches from the thorns and stained purple from the juice, until the tranquillity of that place had soaked into me.

Mothers on social media are advocating a tough, no-nonsense approach to parenting. Does this teach children important lessons – or just make them feel isolated and ashamed?

A couple of weeks ago, a video posted on TikTok by Paige Carter, a mother in Florida, went viral. Carter explained that she had thrown her daughter’s iPad out of the window when she had been misbehaving on the way to school, and she films herself retrieving the tablet, now with a cracked screen. The video has been watched 4.9m times, and Carter was congratulated in the comments, with one person writing “Learning Fafo at an early age: top tier parenting.” Welcome to the parenting trend that doesn’t seem to be disappearing: “Fuck around and find out.”

In another video, when a small child announces he is going to leave home, his mother says “see ya”, shuts the front door behind him, and turns off the outside light – then opens the door to him screaming and pounding to be let back in (it has been liked 1.5m times). He had learned, said his mother, “the meaning of Fafo”.

Not content with haemorrhaging MPs to Reform, Kemi decides to drive others into the arms of the Lib Dems

A minute’s silence for Kemi Badenoch. Thoughts and prayers welcome. The Tory party leader just can’t help herself. Every time you think that, just maybe, she is beginning to get the hang of the job, she comes up with something so deranged, so batshit that you can only sit back and admire the self-destruction. Almost as if she can’t bear any idea of success. Bewilderingly, sabotaging herself seems to be her default coping mechanism. Someone who can only find satisfaction in annihilating her own party. Sometimes you even wonder if she has ever been a Tory.

Like so much of Kemi’s behaviour, this was all totally avoidable. There was no need for her to do or say anything. With Keir Starmer away in China, this was a week off for her from prime minister’s questions. A slot she would delegate to the even more useless Andrew Griffith. Clearly Badenoch does not welcome any competition so Griffith might get the deputy leader job for good.

A new book and podcast tell the story of a 1 in 12, a venue that used community and artistic passion as bulwarks against poverty and grim politics. Its founders and key acts recall gigs, plays and pranks on the NME

“Things were getting grim,” says Gary Cavanagh, reflecting on Bradford in the early 1980s. “There was a hell of a lot of unemployment, and people were thrown on the scrap heap.”

Cavanagh was working for Bradford’s claimants union in 1981, helping the city’s poor and unemployed get benefits, when a government report stated that one in 12 dole recipients were defrauding the state. So he and some friends reclaimed this statistic – which they thought was ludicrous – as an identity. “We became the 1 in 12 Club,” he says.

If you’re wearing tight clothes and flashing your ankles, you may want to make some bold changes

Is your wardrobe cringe? Does it make you look out-of-touch and cause younger and cooler people to look upon you with pity? Do you really want me to answer that? Never mind, I’m going to anyway, so buckle up. Brutal honesty is very January, so I will give it to you straight. But before we get down to dissecting your wardrobe, two quick questions for you. Do you put full stops in text messages? Were you baffled by Labubus? If the answer to those two questions is yes, then I’m afraid the signs are that your wardrobe is almost certainly cringe.

Being cringe is essentially being old-fashioned, but worse. Being old-fashioned is what happens when you grow older with grace and dignity. Cringe is when you lose your touch while convincing yourself you are still down with the kids.

It’s just not cool to be wasted any more. But for a country shaped by booze, it does pose questions about what comes next

It’s November 2024 and my puritanical American children are attending their first autumn fair at their new English primary school. There’s a laser show and hotdogs and a raffle. There’s also a bar for the parents, which makes my two pull up short. Newcomers to this country experience many cultural differences but perhaps none as striking as this: “Is that alcohol?” says my child, scowling up at me like a tiny member of the Taliban. “At a school thing?” I’m two Baileys hot chocolates in at this point and give her a smile 10% broader than necessary. Yes, my darlings; welcome to Britain.

Or at least, welcome, possibly, to the last vestiges of how Britain once was. For a while now we’ve known anecdotally that people in this country are drinking less than they were. My own generation X is deep into middle age and many of us – save for the odd life-saver at a school event and the biggest occasions – have given it up. Where the anomalies fall more glaringly is in the generations below us, among young people whose behaviour differs from our own at their age. This week, official confirmation came in the form of a survey of 10,000 people commissioned by the NHS that found almost a quarter (24%) of adults in England had not drunk alcohol in 2024, an increase from just under a fifth (19%) in 2022.

Emma Brockes is a Guardian columnist

At Beijing talks, British prime minister Keir Starmer tells Xi he wants a ‘more sophisticated’ relationship with China

• Starmer-Xi meeting – live updates

Chinese leader Xi Jinping has said the UK’s relationship with his country had gone through “twists and turns” over the years but that a more “consistent” approach was in both their interests.

Ahead of talks with Keir Starmer during the first visit to China by a British prime minister in eight years, Xi said the two men would “stand the test of history” if they could “rise above differences”.

Exclusive: MPs backing bill to use ‘nuclear option’ of 1911 Parliament Act if it continues to be blocked by Lords

Supporters of assisted dying will seek to force through the bill using an archaic parliamentary procedure if it continues to be blocked by the Lords.

The high stakes move – described by some backers as the “nuclear option” – would be the first time the 1911 Parliament Act has been invoked for a private member’s bill.

US president says armada heading towards Iran is ‘prepared to fulfil its missions with violence if necessary’

The threat of war between the US and Iran appeared to loom closer after Donald Trump told Tehran time was running out and that a huge US armada was moving quickly towards the country “with great power, enthusiasm and purpose”.

Writing on social media, the US president said on Wednesday that the fleet headed by the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln was larger than the one sent to Venezuela before the removal of Nicolás Maduro earlier this month and was “prepared to rapidly fulfil its missions with speed and violence if necessary”.

Industry groups warn that aligning agriculture standards overnight could cost British businesses up to £810m a year

British food sector representatives have urged the government to introduce a transition period if it agrees to realign post-Brexit agriculture rules with the EU.

They warned that aligning regulations overnight would create a “cliff edge” that could cost UK businesses between £500m and £810m a year, because of the divergence in standards since Brexit.