The comedian’s remarks on a podcast join his cheerleading of genocidal violence and jokes about suffering children in Gaza

There are few things certain in life except death, taxes and the knowledge that every single goddamn day you can look at the news and find a rich man complaining about how feminism and wokeness have ruined the world.

Politicians parroted untrue rumors that Hamas had beheaded Israeli babies. When the children are Palestinian, they shrug

Earlier this week, I sat down to write a piece about a campus safety officer at a public college in New York who told pro-Palestinian protesters that he supported genocide. “Yes I do, I support genocide,” the officer said, after a protester accused him of this at a graduation event at the College of Staten Island, part of the public City University of New York (Cuny) system, last Thursday. “I support killing all you guys, how about that?”

It’s possible that you didn’t hear about this incident: while it was covered by a few outlets, including the Associated Press, it didn’t get a huge amount of press. It certainly wasn’t splashed all over the front page of the New York Post the way it would have been if that guard had made the same comment about Israelis. The New York Times, which has written a lot about safety on college campuses – and published a piece on anti-Israel speeches at Cuny just a couple of days before this incident – didn’t seem to deem it newsworthy. And the White House didn’t chime in with a horrified statement about anti-Palestinian bias on campuses. After all, this wasn’t a big deal, right? It was just a security guard saying he supports genocide. Which, it should be clear now, is essentially the same position as the US government.

Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist

The revelation that the popstar was ill during five shows has led to many celebrating her work ethic. It’s yet more evidence that our dangerous, damaging hustle culture is here to stay

Should you go into work when you’re sick with a contagious virus? Lady Gaga has spoken and the answer, it seems, is “sure, why not?” During a recent Q&A for an HBO concert special based on her 2022 Chromatica Ball tour, the pop star was asked to reveal something she had never shared before. In response, she said that she’d performed five shows while sick with Covid. It probably would have been wise to never share that little titbit, to be honest, and it is a little disturbing to nonchalantly share it now. Still, rather than seeming troubled by this information, the crowd watching the Q&A appeared to cheer and applaud while Lady Gaga grinned.

To be fair, Lady Gaga isn’t a monster (though her fans are – they call themselves “Little Monsters”): she made it clear that she did have a little think about the ethics of spewing infectious droplets into an enclosed space. The singer said she shared her Covid diagnosis with everyone on her team at the time and told them they didn’t have to work if it made them uncomfortable. As for the concertgoers? “The way that I saw it is the fans are all putting themselves in harm’s way every day coming to the show,” she reasoned.

The state wasn’t the best place to get pregnant in the first place, with some of the highest maternal mortality rates in the US

Louisiana is not a great place to get pregnant. If you need an abortion, a near-total ban means it’s almost impossible to get one, even in cases of rape or incest – anyone who provides an abortion deemed illegal can go to jail for 15 years. And if you plan on having the baby, you have to deal with some of the highest maternal mortality rates in the US. Although, as Senator Bill Cassidy has helpfully noted, “if you correct our population for race, we’re not as much of an outlier as it’d otherwise appear”. In other words, if you ignore Black people (a third of his constituents), things look a little better. So that’s OK then!

The superstar of the avant garde has revisited a notorious football tackle that left one player paralysed. He talks about violence, ageing and how the US empire is in decline

There aren’t many people in the world who could produce a literal river of excrement and be hailed as a genius. But Matthew Barney, the 57-year-old US artist whose maximalist work often features sex, violence, testicles and shit, is one of them. The New York Times, back in 1999, called the sculptor, film-maker and performer “the most important artist of his generation”. The Guardian’s Jonathan Jones has described The Cremaster Cycle, Barney’s most famous work, as one of the most “brilliant achievements in the history of avant-garde cinema”. Kanye West, more recently, called Barney his “Jesus”.

When I arrive at Barney’s New York studio on a grey spring day, the first thing I see isn’t the son of God but a snake. Or rather, a snakeskin – the creature itself is hiding in its tank. Its name is Hardeen, Barney tells me, after Harry Houdini’s brother. It is not a pet. The snake made an appearance in Barney’s 2014 film River of Fundament, a six-hour opera loosely based on Norman Mailer’s rewrite of the Egyptian book of the dead. It features Mailer’s spirits, in various incarnations, crossing a river of sewage. “Hardeen,” Barney jokes, “is a retired actor.”

In what a professor calls an ‘intellectual embarrassment’, the school is requiring students to complete a bizarre training

Like many other campuses around the world, New York University has seen its students protest the university’s ties to weapon manufacturers and other institutions that are profiting off the slaughter in Gaza or enabling it. Like many other campuses, NYU has been doing its best to curtail these protests and punish the students involved.

Unlike many other campuses, however, punishments include being told to watch The Simpsons and write what the NYU law professor Liam Murphy recently described in an open letter to leadership as “coerced confessions of wrongdoing”.

From the ‘boysober’ trend in the US to the 4B movement in South Korea, more and more heterosexual women are giving up sex

Get thee to a nunnery! Apparently it’s the hottest place to be. While we still very much live in a sex-saturated world, voluntary celibacy is having something of a moment. Evidence of this is everywhere. TikTok, for example, is full of videos of young people extolling the virtues of abstaining from sex. Meanwhile, a new Lithuanian romcom called Slow has brought asexuality to the big screen. In South Korea there is a viral “4B” movement, which gets its name from the four types of bi or “no”: bihon, no heterosexual marriage; bichulsan, no childbirth; biyeonae, no dating; and bisekseu, no heterosexual sexual relationships. In the US, generation Z comedian Hope Woodward has started a “boysober” trend, which involves straight young women eschewing dating. Multiple studies show that, around the world, more and more young people seem to be – quite happily – opting out of sex.

Thousands of words have been written about the great sex recession. It’s hardly some sort of underground trend. Nevertheless, Bumble, the dating app which once styled itself as a beacon of women’s empowerment because heterosexual women had to make the first move, appears to have missed the memo. A few weeks ago the company launched a global advertising campaign the point of which seemed to be to make casual sex great again. “A vow of celibacy is not the answer,” one billboard read. “Thou shalt not give up on dating and become a nun,” proclaimed another.

We’re going backwards: a football player can say hateful things from a university podium while students are being arrested

Imagine for a moment that that you are a young woman who has spent more than $100,000 on your university degree. After four years of hard work it’s your graduation and Harrison Butker, a kicker with the Kansas City Chiefs, is the commencement speaker. During his speech the NFL star, who has made millions by kicking a ball, kindly informs you that your hard-earned degree was a waste of time and that your true role in life is supporting your husband. Imagine what that would be like.

“IVF, surrogacy, euthanasia, as well as a growing support for degenerate cultural values in media, all stem from the pervasiveness of disorder.” (This doesn’t make any sense, I know, but the entire speech is incoherent.)

Joe Biden has been “vocal in his support for the murder of innocent babies”. (Which is certainly true if we’re talking about Gaza – but Butker was talking about abortion rights.)

Pride month is a “deadly sin”.

You can’t spread the antisemitic talking point that Jews are responsible for the death of Jesus any more or you’ll end up “in jail”.

Women have been subject to “the most diabolical lies” and, while some women in the audience may go on to have successful careers the majority should be “most excited about your marriage and the children you will bring into this world”.

His wife would be “the first to say that her life truly started when she began living her vocation as a wife and as a mother”. (This sparked long applause from the audience.)

We should fight against “the cultural emasculation of men”.