Penguin Random House launches high schoolers’ award to combat book bans

The publisher’s $10,000 Freedom of Expression prize invites teens to write about a banned book that changed their life, against a backdrop of rising censorship

Publisher Penguin Random House has launched a new writing award in the US celebrating freedom of expression in response to a rise in book bans across the country.

The Freedom of Expression award invites applicants to write about one banned book that changed their life and why. The $10,000 (£8,168) prize will be awarded to a high-school student planning to attend university in 2024.

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‘If we don’t teach kids about consent, the internet will’: Natasha Devon on the importance of sex education

The mental health campaigner’s new book tackles sex and relationships through the eyes of a 16-year-old. In the face of a backlash against inclusive sex ed in schools she explains why we have to keep the conversation open

Sex education has always been a hot topic. But at a time when children are seeing pornography by the age of 13 on average, it feels especially urgent. With her young adult novel Babushka, the sequel to the coming-of-age Toxic, mental health campaigner Natasha Devon MBE tackles themes like victim blaming, safe sex and healthy relationships through the eyes of Cerys, age 16, who leaves Wales for the bright lights of London declaring: “I’ve never felt like I don’t know who I am. Just that I was in the wrong place.”

Devon herself felt similarly when she was growing up in Ugley, a village in Essex. Reading magazines like Cosmopolitan made her think: “In a big city I’ll find my tribe.”

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Can you make an AI understand love? The experimental games festival about relationships

Play a cat trying to please its human, uncover pickup artists’ dark arts or find out how being pregnant feels at Now Play This in London, designed to make us look at video games differently

Outside Somerset House this week, you might notice that two lampposts are blinking at each other. Unless you are fluent in Morse code, however, you probably won’t clock that they are performing Act II, Scene II of Romeo and Juliet. The installation by Geraint Edwards welcomes you to Now Play This, an experimental games festival, where you could also play a game about getting over a breakup by wielding a sword while riding a motorbike through a neon city, or listen to artist Laurence Young give a talk about getting his mother into the fantasy video game Elden Ring. Inside, attendees lounge around a digital fire, browsing books of love poetry.

Now Play This – now in its ninth year at Somerset House – can be relied upon to bring people together in unexpected ways. It has hosted everything from giant ball mazes to outdoor playground games and a game about chucking fascists out of your garden. But this year’s theme, love, has created an especially open, even intimate atmosphere. On a giant arcade cabinet in the largest exhibition room, you can play Breakup Squad, a game about keeping your friend away from their toxic ex at a party; outside, you can play Triangulate, a puzzle game where three players are given random instructions (“point at someone with one leg; rotate slowly; hold hands with a different person”) and have to negotiate how to use their bodies to find a solution that works for everyone.

Now Play This is at Somerset House, London, until 9 April

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‘Sex isn’t difficult any more’: the men who are quitting watching porn

Addiction to pornography has been blamed for erectile dysfunction, relationship issues and depression, yet problematic use is rising. Now therapists and tech companies are offering new solutions

Thomas discovered pornography in the traditional way: at school. He remembers classmates talking about it in the playground and showing each other videos on their phones during sleepovers. He was 13 and thought it was “a laugh”. Then he began watching pornography alone on his tablet in his room. What started as occasional use, at the beginning of puberty, became a daily habit.

Thomas (not his real name), who is in his early 20s, lived with one of his parents, who he says did not care what he was doing online. “At the time, it felt normal, but looking back I can see that it got out of hand quite quickly,” Thomas says. When he got a girlfriend at 16, he started having sex and watched less pornography. But the addiction was just waiting to resurface, he says.

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Sex Education Xplorers (SEX) review – a biology lesson for the 21st century

Summerhall, Edinburgh
Mamoru Iriguchi and Afton Moran raid their dressing-up box to give us a cheery guide to the evolutionary history of reproduction, and what it says about gender fluidity in humans

I imagine the curriculum has changed since my day but, even so, I’m pretty sure not many biology lessons look like this one by Mamoru Iriguchi. With a dressing-up-box aesthetic and a naive enthusiasm, the Edinburgh performer casts the audience in the role of 14-year-old pupils at “Summerhall secondary school”. Ably assisted by Afton Moran, using hand-knitted pubic hair and clownfish costumes as visual aids, and making natty use of a computer monitor that turns real-world objects into screen animations, he takes us through the evolutionary story of reproduction. It’s an illustrated lecture that traces the journey from the earliest sea creatures to the appearance of land animals and onwards to the present day.

The show has a rough-and-ready charm, performed with more enthusiasm than subtlety, and an appropriately adolescent sense of humour. It takes a wide-eyed approach to the allure of human nudity (no other creature is turned on by nakedness) and the magic of organisms that can reproduce by severing parts of their own body.

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Sex Education creator Laurie Nunn: ‘You can’t make sex scenes flowery!’

She scored a global smash with her TV debut. As the taboo-busting show is green-lit for a return, the writer reveals how she turned teenage dorkiness – and her own experience of sexual assault – into dynamite drama

Laurie Nunn is remembering her own experience of sex education. It was, she says, “practically nonexistent” at her school, which is ironic, given that she is responsible for one of the most candid TV shows ever made about the subject. “They didn’t talk about female pleasure at all,” says the writer. “I’m in my 30s and I feel like I’m only now starting to get the right language to talk about my own body. I think, ‘God, I wish I’d known this stuff when I was in my 20s.’”

When Sex Education was picked up, Nunn had no big credits to her name. She had written and directed a couple of short films and had worked up ideas for production companies, but nothing had quite landed. Then, suddenly, she had a hit – such a hit that Netflix’s UK headquarters now has a Sex Education-themed floor. (We meet on the Stranger Things floor, though. Perhaps the Sex Education floor would have been just too weird.)

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Sex Education creator Laurie Nunn: ‘You can’t make sex scenes flowery!’

She scored a global smash with her TV debut. As the taboo-busting show is green-lit for a return, the writer reveals how she turned teenage dorkiness – and her own experience of sexual assault – into dynamite drama

Laurie Nunn is remembering her own experience of sex education. It was, she says, “practically nonexistent” at her school, which is ironic, given that she is responsible for one of the most candid TV shows ever made about the subject. “They didn’t talk about female pleasure at all,” says the writer. “I’m in my 30s and I feel like I’m only now starting to get the right language to talk about my own body. I think, ‘God, I wish I’d known this stuff when I was in my 20s.’”

When Sex Education was picked up, Nunn had no big credits to her name. She had written and directed a couple of short films and had worked up ideas for production companies, but nothing had quite landed. Then, suddenly, she had a hit – such a hit that Netflix’s UK headquarters now has a Sex Education-themed floor. (We meet on the Stranger Things floor, though. Perhaps the Sex Education floor would have been just too weird.)

Continue reading…

Sex Education creator Laurie Nunn: ‘You can’t make sex scenes flowery!’

She scored a global smash with her TV debut. As the taboo-busting show is green-lit for a return, the writer reveals how she turned teenage dorkiness – and her own experience of sexual assault – into dynamite drama

Laurie Nunn is remembering her own experience of sex education. It was, she says, “practically nonexistent” at her school, which is ironic, given that she is responsible for one of the most candid TV shows ever made about the subject. “They didn’t talk about female pleasure at all,” says the writer. “I’m in my 30s and I feel like I’m only now starting to get the right language to talk about my own body. I think, ‘God, I wish I’d known this stuff when I was in my 20s.’”

When Sex Education was picked up, Nunn had no big credits to her name. She had written and directed a couple of short films and had worked up ideas for production companies, but nothing had quite landed. Then, suddenly, she had a hit – such a hit that Netflix’s UK headquarters now has a Sex Education-themed floor. (We meet on the Stranger Things floor, though. Perhaps the Sex Education floor would have been just too weird.)

Continue reading…

Outrage as US rapper TI says he has daughter’s hymen checked annually

Virginity test discussed on Ladies Like Us podcast contravenes guidelines from UN, who describe it as ‘painful, humiliating and traumatic’

US rapper, actor and TV host TI has prompted revulsion after he revealed he accompanies his 18-year-old daughter Deyjah Harris to a gynaecological exam each year, for her hymen (and therefore virginity) to be checked – a practice condemned as “humiliating and traumatic” by the World Health Organisation.

The rapper is a major celebrity in the US, where he has had seven Top Five albums, three of them reaching No 1. He has had roles in films including American Gangster, Entourage and the Marvel movie Ant-Man and its sequel, Ant-Man and the Wasp. He is currently appearing alongside Cardi B and Chance the Rapper in Rhythm + Flow, a talent competition on Netflix.

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