Americans having less kids plus an ageing population could be a recipe for disaster that further erodes social stability

Remember environmentalist Paul Ehrlich’s 1960s-vintage prediction about how overpopulation would deplete the Earth’s resources and condemn millions to starvation? His Malthusian condemnation of humanity’s voracious appetite has kept a grip on the debate over the future of the planet, even scaring the young out of having children.

Ehrlich was wrong. Yet as we have come around to the thought that overpopulation won’t kill us all, we are being walloped by another demographic emergency: we are not having too many kids, we are having too few. This problem is real.

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Our minds evolved to minimise unpredictability. But if we learn to live with doubt, a world of opportunities opens up

It can feel as though the world is tilting towards chaos: political shocks, economic instability, technological upheaval and a constant stream of bad news. Faced with so much uncertainty, many of us default to a sense of impending doom. But is that reaction hardwired – or can we train ourselves to keep a more open mind?

A useful starting point is humility. Every generation, it seems, believes it inhabits uniquely turbulent times, as literary epics down the ages testify. Uncertainty has always been part of the human condition, and none of us can really know what tomorrow holds.

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First there was the double tragedy that tore the family apart – then came a deadly diagnosis. The writer reflects on life after the death of her novelist husband

I am alive. My husband, Paul Auster, is dead. He died on 30 April 2024, at 6.58pm here in the Brooklyn house where I am now writing these words. He was diagnosed with non-small cell lung cancer in January 2023. But before that, in early November 2022, Paul had a CT scan in the emergency room at Mount Sinai West hospital. The radiologist spotted a mass in his right lung and noted it might be cancer.

We all die, but only some of us know our lives could end soon. Although I had often thought about what it would mean to live without Paul, I began to imagine it more often. I imagined walking around the house alone. I imagined grieving. If your father dies, I said to our daughter, Sophie, I will lose my every day.

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The singer is not only a hero for gay men. For a young lesbian like me in the 1990s, she was an object of desire and an inspiration

Recently, when Madonna deleted every post from her Instagram profile, it was as if a gay flare had been fired around the world.

Cue a flurry of texts from gay male friends, with one declaring that this “purging of the Sistine Chapel” meant the release of Confessions on a Dance Floor: Part II was imminent, 20 years after her original disco masterpiece, because Madonna had pulled the same stunt on Instagram in 2023 before announcing our gay Christmas: the Celebration tour.

Tiff Bakker is a New York-based writer who specialises in arts and culture

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People won’t join us just because we’re right. They’ll join if we make them feel like they belong

“Settle your quarrels, come together, and understand the reality of our situation. Understand that fascism is already here, that people are already dying that could be saved, that generations more will live poor, butchered lives if you fail to act. Do what must be done, discover your humanity and your love in revolution.”

George Jackson wrote these prophetic words more than 50 years ago. At that time, he and his comrades were enduring unimaginable violence inside California’s prisons – a microcosm of the fascism already alive in the United States.

Show up, even when it’s uncomfortable.

Talk to people whose politics aren’t perfect.

Work with those still in process because they, too, have revolutionary potential.

Refuse to turn on the people closest to us and focus on the real enemy.

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Jeremy Hansen praised for speaking French in space after Air Canada chief’s linguistic snub exposed tensions and drew rebuke from PM

Few people foresaw humanity’s quest for the moon as accurately as the 19th-century French author Jules Verne, whose two works –From the Earth to the Moon and Around the Moon – anticipated many of the features of modern lunar exploration.

But Verne’s language had never been spoken in deep space until the Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen uttered four words during Nasa’s recent Artemis II mission.

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They disagree on the private rented sector. Can they find common ground over a united Ireland?

• Want to meet someone from across the divide? Click here to find out how

Diarmuid, 25, London

Occupation Accountant

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Study finds decades of intensive logging worsens bushfire [forest fire] risk. Scientists have studied satellite images of a Tasmanian bushfire and found regrowth from extensive logging and recent bushfires has absolutely increased the risk of more severe bushfires.

Eredirigent Yannick Nézet-Séguin bouwde vrijdag een Wagnerfeest in Rotterdam: met het Rotterdams Philharmonisch Orkest dook hij voor het eerst in ‘Siegfried’. Het werd een onmisbaar orkestraal en vocaal evenement.