From picking your guests (always add a random) and your outfit, to coping with drunks and nudity, this is what you need to know

When I was young, I thought the worst thing you could do, as a host, was to run out of booze. Then, when I was less young, I thought it was to not have enough food, and now I am perfectly wise, I know that those things don’t matter at all, because you can always go to the shop. The important thing is not to look harried, and to not look that way, you need to not be that way.

Whether it’s panicking about the mess, forgetting drinks orders or frantically asking if people are having fun, I’m no fun at parties. How do the bon vivants do it?

Being a bad friend is presumably like being a narcissist – wondering whether you are one probably means that you’re not. However, a writer for the US magazine People questioned this topic just this week, with an article asking if she was letting down her mates by refusing to host Friendsgiving. (For the unfamilar, this is Thanksgiving you spend with friends rather than family, and is increasingly popular in the UK.) She has a good reason though. “I simply don’t want people in my house.”

After mentioning “the foot traffic, the proximity to my stuff, the general vibes of it all”, she admitted, “there is a rhythm and reason to the way my fruit bowl is organised, how my coffee table books are placed and how my cushions lie on the sofa. I would hate to be half-cooking, half-monitoring my guests to make sure no one has their feet on my coffee table and everyone is using coasters. (I’ve seen those types of hosts, and they are the type guests talk about on their way back home!).”

Feeling overwhelmed by divisive opinions, endless rows and unreliable facts? Here’s how to weather the data storm

We all live in history. A lot of the problems that face us, and the opportunities that present themselves, are defined not by our own choices or even the specific place or government we’re living under, but by the particular epoch of human events that our lives happen to coincide with.

The Industrial Revolution, for example, presented opportunities for certain kinds of business success – it made some people very rich while others were exploited. If you’d known that was the name of your era, it would have given you a clue about what kinds of events to prepare for. So I’m suggesting a name for the era we’re living through: the Information Crisis.