A French cartoonist has doubts about her boyfriend in Mirion Malle’s third book in English, a striking hymn to women and solidarity

• Enter the Faber/Observer/Graphica graphic short story prize 2024

I always read the acknowledgments first – is there anyone who doesn’t? – and thanks to this, I came to So Long Sad Love by the French-born, Canada-based cartoonist Mirion Malle half expecting to see women in corsets and long skirts falling madly in love with one another at the back end of the 18th century. But, alas, this was not to be, for all that Malle credits Céline Sciamma’s 2019 film Portrait of a Lady on Fire as her inspiration for this, her third graphic novel to be published in English. While it’s certainly full of women, some of whom may (or may not) be about to fall in love, it’s also set resolutely in the now: an era when, courtesy of WhatsApp and Facebook, word of a bad man’s misdeeds may spread faster than wildfire at midnight.

Malle favours a soapy, forward momentum in her storytelling, and she can’t resist a neat, even a happy, ending. But I found her book irresistible for a different reason. This one celebrates female solidarity, something I feel more and more strongly about at the moment (would that it had arrived at my desk early enough to be included in an anthology I’ve edited on this subject). With its cast of smart, voluptuous female characters – Malle’s women are all eyes, mouths and hair – it reminds me, in the best way, of a classic of 1970s feminism: The Women’s Room by Marilyn French, perhaps, or Robin Morgan’s Sisterhood Is Powerful. Like those writers, she understands the importance of our subterranean networks: grapevines that men, deeming women’s talk to be only gossip, underestimate at their peril.

The former New York Times journalist exposes the excesses of hyper-‘woke’ culture and the suffocating impact of groupthink in this enjoyable study of a topsy-turvy world

Morning After the Revolution by the American journalist Nellie Bowles is a wickedly enjoyable book about the madness that seemingly began to inflame the brains of a certain cohort of the liberal intelligentsia about four years ago (its author dates the fever to the pandemic, but I think – personal information! – it began some time before then). It was a delirium that took her, as it did many people, a little by surprise, not least because she in theory belonged to this subsection herself: at school, where she was for a while the only out gay person, she ran around sticking rainbows all over the place; after college she was known to go to readings at Verso Books (“my God, I bought a tote”); when her girl Hillary was “about to win” she was “drinking with I’m With Her-icanes at a drag bar”. But once she’d noticed it, she couldn’t ignore it. Her instinct was to whip out a thermometer and ask a few pertinent diagnostic questions.

Asking questions, though, is (or it certainly was… things may be shifting now) verboten in the time of madness. Either you’re for the ideological buffet – every single dish – or you’re against it, and must eat at the bad restaurant where all the mean people hang out, a place that is otherwise known as “the wrong side of history”. When the insanity started, Bowles was working in Los Angeles for the New York Times, a job she’d dreamed of since childhood, and there her curiosity soon began to piss off some of her colleagues. When she went on to fall in love with a full-blown dissenter, the columnist Bari Weiss, who’s now her wife, she found herself on the outside of something, looking in. Morning After the Revolution is an account of her adventures in this topsy-turvy realm, in both the period before and after she left the NYT in 2021 (she and Weiss now run the Free Press). It comprises a series of reported colour pieces in which she touches on such things as diversity, equality and inclusion (DEI) programmes, the campaign to defund the police, trans rights and (briefly) the crystal display she noticed when Meghan and Harry did pandemic Zooms from their home in Montecito.

On the eve of her UK retrospective Revelations, the veteran US feminist artist known for her large collaborative art installation pieces such as The Dinner Party – and for dividing the critics – is in celebratory mood

On-screen interviews can be a bit low-key, the victim of time lags and muffled human connections. But not the one on which I’ve just embarked, an experience I can only describe as psychedelic from the off. First to appear on my laptop is Donald Woodman, who sits and chats to me while we wait for Judy Chicago, the celebrated artist and his wife of 38 years, to arrive (a position in which I suspect he quite often finds himself).

Woodman, who is a photographer, has bleached blond hair, bright blue glasses, and gold polish on his nails, which he now waves at me. Apparently, he and Chicago have been going to the same manicurist for years, a routine so entrenched, it’s virtually part of their artistic practice. “It’s fun,” he says. “When I got married to her, I was wearing nail polish. You can’t let only the women adorn themselves. But it’s also a break from work, because it means I have to sit down for two hours.” The couple are famous workaholics, and their days – they live and work in an old railroad house in Belen, a small town in New Mexico – begin early and end late. “Last night, Judy came in and went straight to bed without any dinner,” he tells me, and I can’t quite tell from his tone whether he is proud or completely exhausted. (Maybe both: he is, after all, 78, and Chicago is 84.)

After being promoted by US bloggers and Instagram, cottage cheese sales are now up 40% in the UK. Its blandness is befitting of the times

While I didn’t see the cottage-cheese craze coming – who could ever have predicted this pineapple-chunk-inflected bout of collective madness? – now it’s here, I find myself strangely fascinated by it. In one sense, of course, its ascendancy is utterly banal: another creation of social media (its new popularity may be traced originally to TikTok), it can’t be long before the buffet moves on, maybe in the direction of luncheon meat or tinned mandarins. But on the other hand, it’s still deeply weird, especially to those of us who last ate cottage cheese three decades ago, and then only in extremis (as a student, I sometimes kept an emergency pot cooling on the window ledge of my college room for those piercing moments of youthful crisis when I had no time to eat properly).

Like a mushroom, this trend sprouted last year, seemingly overnight, in the US. “It’s time to stop pretending it’s not delicious,” said Emily Eggers, a New York chef and food blogger who was on a “mission” to make it the new burrata – a quote I thought so preposterous at the time, I quickly added it, last minute, to a book I was writing. But who’s laughing now? “In the 1970s, sales were focused on slimmers trying to lose weight before their holiday to Spain,” says Jimmy Dickinson, the owner of the brand we all remember, Longley Farm. “[But] now the interest is very much, ‘I’ve just swum 50 lengths, and I’ll eat cottage cheese as my protein fix at the end of it.’” According to Dickinson, demand in the UK has reportedly risen by as much as 40% in recent months, a growth that has been powered by the influencers of Instagram and their helpful recipes for dishes that try very hard indeed to make cottage cheese seem … oh dear. I had a look, and none of their ideas are even remotely alluring to my eyes. What, really, is the point of cottage-cheese cheesecake or cookie dough? Even if I was in search of a “protein hit” – at this point, I picture someone being beaten about the head with a leg of lamb – cottage-cheese lasagne is really not for me.