Are you twins? No? You must be sisters! No? But you look identical! Are you sure you are not sisters?

It has come to my attention, thanks to incessant, unsolicited comments from strangers, that I am dating my doppelganger. Almost every time I am out with my girlfriend, even if we are just at the supermarket, a random person asks if we are sisters. Sometimes they don’t take “no” for an answer and ask again, as though maybe we just forgot.

For the record, my girlfriend and I are not related. She is an Ashkenazi Jew from Boston; I am a Palestinian from Brixton. I am not sure if our relationship is kosher or halal, but it is 100% incest-free. I have to admit, though, that we do look vaguely alike. And the more strangers point it out, the more I am starting to get a complex. After all, nobody wants to date themselves.

Or do they? After looking into the matter, I have come to the conclusion that a lot of people do seem to want to date themselves. There are tons of studies that show we are attracted to people who look like us. Empirical evidence of lookalike love abounds, too. There is a Tumblr page called Boyfriend Twin, for example, that documents eerily identical male couples. I suggest you do not browse it at work, by the way. Some of the documentation is very thorough.

It is easier to notice similar physical appearances in same-sex relationships, of course, but there are plenty of straight couples who bear an uncanny similarity to each other, such as married thespians Benedict Cumberbatch and Sophie Hunter. They look like they are cut from the same, extremely posh, Cumbercloth. Nicole Kidman and Keith Urban are another straight celebrity couple who look like they are basically the same person.

Perhaps you are thinking smugly that you look nothing like your partner. Well, give it a few years and you will. Science says so. In the 80s, Robert Zajonc, a psychologist at the University of Michigan, compared photos of newlyweds to photos of the same couples 25 years later. He found that even the couples who did not look much alike to begin with started to resemble each other over time. Probably, he hypothesised, because they had started to mimic each other’s facial expressions. And, no doubt, steal their favourite sweatshirts.

While I think that looking like your partner is a tad creepy, some people embrace the idea of romancing their clones. In 2011, a New Yorker called Christina Bloom launched a dating site, Findyourfacemate.com, which used facial-recognition technology to match you with a similar-looking love interest. Nothing weird about that at all! Bloom reportedly got the idea because people used to tell her that she and her ex-husband looked like brother and sister. “I actually became very fixated on the thing,” she told New York magazine. “Whenever I talked about it, people said I didn’t know what I was talking about. And that I was crazy. But I would see it so clearly!” A fair number of people seemed to share Bloom’s vision, though: 50,000 people joined the now-defunct site.

I have forgotten the moral to the story, because I was thinking about myself. Ah, yes: the moral is that I am not a narcissist – we are all narcissists.

Why reclaiming hateful language is important but difficult

There is an “Asian bowl” restaurant chain in California called Yellow Fever – and it is making the internet see red. While the fast-food group has been around since 2014, it recently partnered with Whole Foods, which last week announced that Yellow Fever had opened at one of its locations, prompting outrage. This is not a great surprise. After all, naming a restaurant after a deadly disease and a sexual fetish seems in bad taste at best and racist at worst.



Just because one member of a minority group chooses to reclaim oppressive language does not make that slur OK

Here is the thing, though: the owner of Yellow Fever is a Korean-American called Kelly Kim, who says she picked the name because it was “tongue in cheek”. This does not mean the name is automatically unproblematic, of course. Just because one member of a minority group chooses to reclaim oppressive language does not make that slur OK. It takes a long time and a lot of effort to drain the violence from derogatory words. While re-appropriating hateful language is empowering and important, it is also difficult. I am not sure a fast-food chain is the best medium through which to achieve this.

Nevertheless, it is odd to see social media full of non-Asians getting outraged over a Korean-American who has deliberately chosen to give her restaurant what she considers a humorous name. If she wants to reinterpret the term, should we not hear her out?

While we are on the subject of offensive yellow-themed names, can we have a quick chat about Banana Republic? It has always fascinated me that a clothing store was named after the violent corporate colonisation of Central America. Apparently, when Mel and Patricia Ziegler founded the brand in 1978, they were told by a friend: “Bad choice. You’ll be picketed by people from small, hot countries.’’ They never were, though, having had the good fortune to set up shop before social media.





The Simpsons has lost touch with the zeitgeist

Bill, please ... Homer, Marge, Manjula and Apu in The Simpsons. Photograph: Fox/Getty Images

Don’t have a cow, but The Simpsons jumped the shark years ago. While it used to be a cornerstone of pop culture, the show now seems antiquated. As the controversy over Apu demonstrated, the show is no longer in touch with the zeitgeist. But it keeps going. Last Sunday marked its 636th episode, a milestone that made it the longest-running primetime scripted series in US TV history. When he was asked recently how many more episodes we might expect, the show’s creator, Matt Groening, said he does not “see any end in sight”. I think he needs to get a grip. If the Odyssey came to an end, Homer can, too.