Digested week: royal hairlines – Prince George’s hair has such brio as he starts at Eton | Emma Brockes

In a news cycle to make everyone older than gen Z feel ancient, we start the week anticipating the 25th anniversary of 9/11 at the end. Social media floods with poignant interviews and images from lower Manhattan that day, triggering memories for the rest of us of where, who and how young we were. Ridiculously, I was having my eyebrows done in Hendon, north London, and came out to find a white van pulled over at a crazy angle to the curb, doors flung open, radio cranked up, and people stopped in the street to listen. I remember looking over the city and wondering if I’d seen jets, or explosions.

And just as we’re wrestling with that marker of time, photos of Prince George starting at Eton college come out, juxtaposed with photos of his father doing the same at that age. This triggers an even worse sense of whiplash, as we bob back and forth to 1995. How nice Prince George looks, I think; happier, or at least more confident, than his father had been at that age. After which – and I apologise for this – the main focus of my interest is his hair.

I wonder if the young prince has had time, yet, to consider male pattern baldness in his family? The royal men age awkwardly, as we know; sooner or later they all wind up looking like the Spitting Image puppet of Prince Philip (there’s a reference to age me). But here comes the cavalry, in the form of Kate Middleton’s fun, less tightly bred genes, which might send the royal bloodline in a different direction!

“Look, his hair’s standing up on its own,” says a friend, as we scrutinise pictures of the young George. She’s right; while William at that age had the floppy posh fringe, George’s hair has such brio! “I reckon he might keep it,” we conclude, a sure example of generational progress.

Tuesday

How will you spend the remaining decade or so we have left of human life on this planet? As forecasts of an extinction-level event via AI tussle with headlines about the climate feedback loop, I find myself considering, for example, taking out a giant mortgage I won’t have to pay off owing to my own and everyone else’s extinction; pulling out pension money, given retirement isn’t going to happen; or, within easier reach and requiring less decision-making, taking (another) nap, since, times being what they are, we may as well do what we want and to hell with the rest.

The AI thing is scary, not least because of my total ignorance and the sense of powerlessness to do anything – not even throw a bottle, pyrrhically, in the recycling. This latest round of AI doom-mongering kicked off when Jacob Coxon, a former researcher at Anthropic, posted on social media on Tuesday that both Open AI and Anthropic are wantonly ushering humankind towards destruction. “Neither company is acting responsibly,” he wrote. “They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives.”

Coxon is 27 and recently unemployed. I mean, he’s probably just trying to audience-build ahead of launching a podcast, right? On the other hand, a few years ago I met a consultant whose job it was to go into companies and teach people how to formulate better prompts for AI. He told me, half-jokingly but not, that he had taken the precaution of embedding a bunch of code in [insert wherever bunches of code go], in which he identified himself and prompted future AI armies: “If you’re going to go on a murdering spree, leave this guy alone, OK?”

Wednesday

More quotidian ways of being brought down, this week: your toilet flush can give you norovirus and watching TV with your laptop on your stomach can give you something called “toasted skin syndrome”, which I would recommend you don’t Google for images.

First, the toilet. Particles released during a “turbulent” flush cycle can leave microbes floating in the air for up to 20 seconds, according to new findings from Flinders University in Australia. Researchers reviewed 22 studies of toilet-generated aerosols, which sounds like a niche area even by the standards of niche areas. There was, said researchers, a lack of clarity as to whether or not closing the toilet seat might help with this, but, at the risk of sounding anti-intellectual, I think we can deploy our common sense here, right? That, or campaign for the reintroduction of outside toilets.

And then, toasted skin syndrome. In the British Medical Journal, doctors from University hospitals of Leicester NHS trust warned against prolonged contact between your abs and your laptop, citing a fishnet pattern on the skin caused by heat from the device. Customarily, they said, this injury would only be seen in older people using hot water bottles or heating pads, but is increasingly showing up in school-age children addicted to their screens. For the avoidance of a scabby and painful mess, you’re advised not to use your midsection as a desk!

Thursday

Two forthcoming documentaries causing excitement this week: Alex Gibney’s four-hour opus about Elon Musk, which its subject has been whining about all week on X; and You Can See Everything, the Elizabeth Holmes documentary, which sounds even wilder. In it, the Theranos founder, currently serving an 11-year prison sentence for fraud, gives startlingly intimate access to Nathan Fielder, better known for his comedy, and the documentary-maker Lance Oppenheim, and the trailer alone suggests that despite all the hoopla it isn’t over-hyped.

After the film’s opening at Telluride, the review site RogerEbert.com called it “like no other film I’ve ever experienced”. CBS News called it “the wildest documentary ever seen”. Variety called it “a shameless, fascinating, reality-TV-eats-its-tail look at entitled duplicity”. In the trailer, Holmes stares at Fielder while rocking a baby in a bouncer with her foot, the little-girl hair and big Kewpie-doll eyes a reminder of what an uncanny figure she is. Fielder, meanwhile, doesn’t seem fully to have recovered from the experience of being with her. “I’m really struggling to this day to understand what I experienced,” he said in a Q&A after the film and made the whole thing sound like a horror movie I can’t wait to see.

Friday

A beat late, but worth drawing attention to: the presence at Manchester Pride, recently, of a drag rendition of Linda, aka Ann Droid, from the brilliant BBC show of that name written by Diane Morgan and starring both her and Sue Johnston. The figure in lilac fatigues raised a huge cheer and it’s interesting to note how quickly it has been taken up by camp culture.

This is something you can’t engineer. For example, I have a feeling the creators of Riot Women, a show most lesbians I know disliked and a lot of straight women loved, thought it had queer energy, but I would be surprised if anyone dressed up as those characters at Pride. Diane Morgan, on the other hand, has a sensibility that puts her in a very gay-adjacent zip code and, with antique robotic moves and a shout-out to “Sue! Sue! Sue!”, we love and appreciate her accordingly.

The week in pictures