Another contender for our series of classic Guardian sentences, in this case a subheading: 

Until social media manners catch up with the real world, some of us will have to delete the [Twitter] app just to feel safe.

Just to feel safe. From Twitter. Which, we’re told, is “only happening on your phone” and “where no one is actually touching you and you are not in a corporeal sense under threat,” but where being laughed at or called names is “an incredibly visceral experience” for grown men and women.

By way of damning illustration, we’re steered to the sorrows of the actress and writer Lena Dunham, 28, who has “gone dark” on Twitter and is currently “trying to create a safer space” for herself, “emotionally.” Oddly, no mention is made of Ms Dunham’s own attention-seeking pronouncements and outright fabrications, including a false claim of rape involving an identifiable man, and which attracted much of the attention she now finds so unflattering. Guardian readers are thereby left to suppose that the consequent mockery and vitriol, and threats of legal action, were some inexplicable ex nihilo phenomenon.

The author of said piece is Ms Brigid Delaney, a novelist and Guardian features editor whose estimation of her own brilliance and entitlement to taxpayer subsidy entertained us not too long ago. 

Number 2,047: 

A pay cut means we have had to sack our cleaner to save the £25 a week she cost, but, a month on, nothing’s being cleaned and the house is starting to resemble a squat. We set aside two hours on a Saturday morning but it’s not happening. How do other couples divvy up the cleaning without major rows?

Sadly, there’s no word on the fate of the cleaner. Via Anna. 

The Observer’s Nicole Mowbray reveals the hitherto-unguessed fact that poor fashion choices can have practical consequences: 

After seven unsuccessful job interviews, 24-year-old Luke Clark began to think something other than his CV was playing havoc with his job prospects. Potential employers didn’t seem to like the 4cm “flesh tunnel” holes he had in each ear as much as he did. Clark had begun stretching his lobes at university several years earlier, and the problem was that when he took the plugs out his stretched earlobes looked terrible. Now one of the fastest-growing cosmetic procedures in the UK is repairing stretched earlobes.

Several readers of said paper are, however, quite upset. Specifically, they’re upset that not all employers are impressed, either by the Urban Bush Warrior look or by self-inflicted comedy lobes with large, baggy holes in them:

It’s just a bigger hole than what society has considered to be “standard” and judging someone’s ability to do a job based on their outward appearance is incredibly ignorant… If there wasn’t such a pointlessly negative view on stretched ears, people like teachers and professional golf players wouldn’t have to get them sewn up.

Possibly a contender for our series of classic sentences. 

And this chap here, he’s upset too: 

Until you know that person, you have no right to criticise, judge or alter the life chances for them. Those who make decisions about the future of others based only on appearance, are themselves the shallowest of people, and do not deserve to have such a position of influence.

You see, he should be free to deform his anatomy into eye-catchingly unattractive shapes, thereby announcing his heroic radicalism and disdain for bourgeois norms, entirely without consequence. But you mustn’t be free to run your business without him, regardless of whatever message he’s chosen to send via the medium of disfigured earlobes. No bad decision that he makes must ever “alter his life chances” because… well, obviously, it’s all your fault.

And so we’re expected to believe that Mr Clark, who chose to make a bold statement by deliberately stretching and deforming his earlobes – to the extent that a jar of instant coffee could almost fit through the holes – is somehow being wronged, indeed oppressed, when, during job interviews, potential employers notice – and find inappropriate – the bold statement he’s chosen to make. Having decided at university to scandalise the less daring whenever in public, he now seems surprised when those same less daring people make choices of their own, i.e., not to hire him. But aren’t their raised eyebrows and looks of disgust what he wanted all along? 

A Guardian headline brings to light another pressing issue for its readers to fret about:

Why does a black butt only look good in white skin?

Our fearless interrogator, our prober of deep mystery, is Yomi Adegoke, who tells us that she “writes about race, popular culture and intersectional feminism.” Heavens, what a surprise. It’s not Ms Adegoke’s only question, though. She has more:

So the attributes that black women have so long been shamed for have finally been given the… seal of approval due to a new Aryan aesthetic?

Oh my. An Aryan aesthetic. She went there, being so fearless.

Ms Adegoke’s article is at times hard to follow and extrapolates a little too wildly from things that someone said on Twitter. It isn’t without its gems, however – candidates for our ongoing series of classic Guardian sentences. Among them, this:

The black female body is still played for laughs as butt prosthetics become the new blackface.

From what I can make out, our indignant Guardianista is upset that some white female celebrities have been happily drawing attention to their fulsome hindquarters, which are, it seems, the latest must-have fashion item among the suggestible and insecure. No, I hadn’t noticed. Possibly on account of my total lack of interest in MTV and celebrity tattle magazines. But apparently it’s a thing, the hugeness of one’s arse. And this pride in ample buttocks simply will not do. Not when ladies of pallor are the ones doing it:

White women popularising what black women have always had is the latest example of the mainstream media’s cultural appropriation… The era of the big booty has neither started nor ever stopped for black women… Despite what the mainstream media told us, black women never stopped aspiring to possess the curves society so hated.

It turns out that the well-upholstered rear has been “appropriated” in “a world where white is right.” Two ladies named Miley Cyrus and Katy Perry, possibly pop artistes, have been,

using huge novelty bottoms as performance props in a bid to appear contemporary and comedic while accessorising the black aesthetic.

A pop cultural detail that had hitherto, and regrettably, escaped my notice. Doubtless all pale women, being so determined to appropriate and oppress, will soon be turning up to work with huge foam bottoms attached to their person. And according to Ms Adegoke, larger than average buttocks are a “part of black culture” – a part that is “now deemed good enough to gain a level of mass respectability after getting a belated thumbs-up from white society.”

You heard her. Thumbs-up or not, big buttocks are black culture. So you white folk mustn’t pinch them.

Update, via the comments: 

You could argue that New York City after the Occupy movement experienced a positive change in social atmosphere, a democratisation of artistic space, and a revival of its radical mojo.

So says Paul Mason, a fifty-something former Trotskyite and Workers’ Power enthusiast, who, despite his advancing years, is still aroused by mob thuggery and driven to high drama by the state of Twitter. Mr Mason is imagining his ideal city, his own urban utopia:  

I will describe the city I would like to live in. First, it is near the sea, or another body of water warm enough to swim in. Second, it has entire neighbourhoods designed around hipster economics. Though currently maligned, hipsters are crucial signifiers of a successful city economy. Their presence shows it is possible to live on your wits even as neoliberalism stagnates. Such neighbourhoods… are home both to hipsters and ethnically diverse poor communities, who refrain from fighting each other.

I suspect a classic sentence may be lurking in there somewhere. 

The bold envisioning continues,

It has to have theatres. Not just big ones. 

And, naturally,

political unrest.

It being a “measure of aspiration,” something for our Guardianista to write about, gushingly, and practically fellate. And who wouldn’t want their neighbourhood enlivened by rioting and the odd burning car?