Many obesity researchers don't appropriately considered the quality of life or mental wellbeing of their patients as a result of these extreme interventions, which is precisely the problem. In their zeal to solve the ‘obesity epidemic’ by any means necessary, they lose sight of the fact that the fat people in their trials are precisely that – people.

Tiger King operates on two pop-cultural levels. The micro: we gaze astonished and delighted at a glamour shot of three meth-addicted married men printed on a microfleece blanket; and the macro, in which the show emerges as a perfect synthesis of several different mass media genres stretching back over the last century.

Those asking the general public to ‘trust the science’ are often uncomfortable or hostile when asked to acknowledge how biased medicine can be, and how it has even very recently committed crimes against marginalised groups in the name of health. We can only start having the right conversations about vaccine hesitancy when we start being more honest: about medical science being a product of the people who create it, about the disparities that still exist (and why), and about the need for committing to real changes in how our health systems work.

At first blush, the phrase ‘gender critical feminist’ is essentially meaningless: all feminism is ‘gender critical’ by definition. What makes TERF ideology reactionary rather than radical is its dedication to binary gender essentialism.

I, too, use parental controls for their devices and stare with some concern at the shouting YouTubers making slime and playing Minecraft. But it has helped me, in the throes of my middle-class guilt, to know that moral panics about children and technology, or children and popular culture, are a particularly common feature of mass media as it relates to modernity.

Bert and Ernie occupy such a mighty place in the popular imagination that it’s hard for us to remember that they began as a reference to something else. But in the Jim Henson universe, sly, humourous, or worthy commentaries on public figures and social issues were always part of the process. The recent public debate about them seems to have handily sidestepped the fact that the characters are, among other things, an obvious allusion to The Odd Couple, originally a 1965 Broadway play by the late Neil Simon.

My father is from southern Louisiana and my mother is from Invercargill (on the southern tip of Aotearoa New Zealand’s South Island). I have never met another person with this combination of cultural groups in their immediate background and I think it unlikely I ever will. I had a DNA test done because I thought it would be interesting and my mother said she’d pay for it as a Christmas present.