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The law won't save us from Meta's 'pervert glasses'. The only solution is mockery | Jonathan Liew

These things are undermining not just our public spaces but the very nature of being human. Let’s shame them off the streets

So far I am yet to be tempted into purchasing a pair of Ray-Ban Meta glasses. To a certain extent this is a function of possessing a large, misshapen and comically convex head upon which no pair of sunglasses has ever looked remotely appropriate. Nor am I one of those consumers who professes to be “really into gadgets”, a preference I’ve always found weirdly unspecific. It’s subtly telling when people claim to be into “gadgets”, because they’re never talking about, say, a tin opener. What they really mean is something gimmicky and expensive that almost certainly requires the services of a datacentre and enough water to irrigate Kent.

And even if I were to surmount these two obstacles, you then get into the ethics of the thing. I’m nobody’s idea of a PR expert, but if your shiny new product keeps requiring patches and updates to prevent people from using it to do degenerate things to women, perhaps it might be worth walking it back to the research and development stage.

Jonathan Liew is a Guardian columnist

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© Photograph: Carlos Barría/Reuters

© Photograph: Carlos Barría/Reuters

© Photograph: Carlos Barría/Reuters

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Lavish spending fails to fix Tottenham’s big issue – the lack of soul and spine | Jonathan Liew

It might be too early to push the panic button but Roberto De Zerbi faces a huge task if he is to turn Spurs around

Time for Tottenham to start panicking? This is, of course, a subtle trick question. Tottenham is one of those clubs that never actually stops panicking. They panic when they concede and they panic when they score. They panic when they have the ball and they panic when someone else does. They have a coach in Roberto De Zerbi whose face evokes a state of permanent alarm, the expression of a man perpetually having a toilet door opened on him. One year they even managed to panic their way to the Europa League. For the ever-rattled Spurs fan, this club is less a treasured devotion and more a lifelong haunting, broken up by occasional panic substitutions.

You could intuit that sense of encrusted resignation pretty much from the moment Anthony Elanga’s improvised shot kissed the post and trickled over the line to give Newcastle the lead. Since beating Aston Villa 4-1 in late 2024, Tottenham have gone behind 44 times in all competitions and come back to win precisely zero of them. There is something innate and endemic here, a chronic case of Long Tottenham for which – despite the new coach, the new leadership structure and more than a third of a billion pounds in transfer fees – there remains no proven cure. Yoane Wissa’s clincher was of zero surprise to anyone.

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© Photograph: Shaun Brooks/CameraSport/Getty Images

© Photograph: Shaun Brooks/CameraSport/Getty Images

© Photograph: Shaun Brooks/CameraSport/Getty Images

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