Janelle Monáe’s trousers do not represent a vagina. They represent a vulva. Have some respect!

I have a stick up my arse about the difference between “less” and “fewer”, and women in the generations below have the same about “vagina” and “vulva”, and even though the principle is the same – why not just use the right word, instead of the wrong one? – I have never been able to see their problem. Everyone’s got the gist. Why make a scene?

It happened that I recently spent some hallowed time with millennials and also saw Janelle Monáe, live, and this all coincided at a festival that it would be crass to mention for the 91st time – but suffice it to say, I have finally come round to their point of view.

By the end of the week, Keir Starmer could be the UK’s next prime minister. Why do voters feel they don’t know him?

Polls say Keir Starmer’s Labour party is on track for a historic win. Yet despite the turn towards his party, voters don’t seem as convinced by Starmer himself. So who is Keir Starmer and what do we know about the forces that have shaped him?

His biographer Tom Baldwin traces Starmer’s life from his childhood in Surrey with his toolmaker father and nurse mother, through his radical university days to his life as a left-leaning barrister. He examines how taking on the role of director of public prosecutions changed Starmer and what explains what some people have characterised as a sudden move to the centre ground. And he tells Michael Safi how Starmer’s refusal to adhere to a strict political ideology could be a strength.

An aversion to risk among the Democrats has kept the US president in the race for the White House. But win-at-all-costs logic isn’t great for politics at the best of times

I remember when people thought the free world was in peril because its self-appointed leader didn’t have a big enough vocabulary. There were also rumblings that, at 56, he was past his prime. This was George W Bush.

There was detailed analysis of his favourite words (“folk”, “folksy”), the span and structure of his sentences and what grade it would put him in at school. A lot of this information was passed by word of mouth, one person in 100 being online and telling everyone else, and none of us in the UK were sure what US grades meant, but we knew it didn’t put him in one of the high ones. Did he have the intelligence of a nine-year-old? A 14-year-old?