Some 170 million people got access to Instagram’s new location-sharing feature, so why is the Map so empty? In the app’s loneliest corners, Meta and its users may be fighting a quiet battle.

On Saturday, I pulled up my phone settings and did something I haven’t considered in almost a decade, a move so brazen I’ve spent my whole career telling people to avoid it. I gave Instagram access to my location.

Millions of Americans were greeted by a pop-up last week inviting them to try the new “Instagram Map”. The feature lets users share their exact, real-time location with each other. If you want, you can blast your whereabouts to every single one of your mutual followers. For many, however, the app’s history makes it an unsettling place for this kind of intimacy.

Instagram bills the Map as “a new, light way to connect”. But a trip through the feature suggests a different reality, one defined more by emptiness than connection, with users unwittingly broadcasting their location and urgent warnings from the few people watching. It lays bare what may be an emerging conflict between the platform and its users that strikes at Instagram’s very core: what is this app even for?

On one hand, it’s nothing new. Apple and Android phones have let you exchange locations with your contacts for years, and Snapchat has the nearly identical Snap Map that works the same way. In modern relationships, location sharing is as popular as it is problematic. The New York Times described the trend with the catchy headline “I Love You, Let’s Stalk Each Other” back in 2023.

This week, the Sex and the City sequel series finished for good, bringing an end to the adventures of Carrie Bradshaw and friends. Here’s why it never lived up to its beloved predecessor.

Twirling in high heels and a sparkly pink ballgown, singing along to Barry White’s You’re The First, The Last, My Everything, Carrie Bradshaw danced out of our lives forever in the show’s final ever episode, which aired in the US last night.

And Just Like That – the sequel series to Sex and The City – had only clocked up three seasons (half of its predecessor) but a few weeks ago, amid reported falling ratings, showrunner Michael Patrick King announced out of the blue on the show’s Instagram account that the series would be the final ever. “It became clear to me that this might be a wonderful place to stop,” he explained, adding: “the ongoing storytelling of the Sex and the City universe is coming to an end”. Sarah Jessica Parker – who has played the writer-cum-hopeless-romantic since 1998 – wrote a long tribute post on her own social media account: “Carrie Bradshaw has dominated my professional heartbeat for 27 years. I think I have loved her most of all”.

HBO Max The final ever And Just Like That episode ended with Carrie, alone but contented, dancing by herself in a pink ballgown (Credit: HBO Max)

The idea of a SATC sequel was met with feverish excitement when it was officially announced back in January 2021. How amazing would it be to catch up with the four, much-loved old friends – Carrie (Sarah Jessica Parker), Charlotte (Kristin Davis), Miranda (Cynthia Nixon) and Samantha (Kim Cattrall) – and revisit their lives as 50-somethings? However the show stalled at the first hurdle when it was revealed one of the original four women, Cattrall’s man-eating PR queen, would not take part. In the second season of the show, Cattrall threw fans some crumbs with a 70-second cameo, but filmed her scene without any of the other cast members.

How it failed its characters

As for the other women? When the show premiered in 2021, there was widespread disappointment at the way these confident, strong friends had become unrecognisable; and if they were older, they certainly weren’t wiser. Miranda, the straight-talking, highly intelligent lawyer was a bumbling wreck, forever blurting out the wrong thing and/or tripping up and falling over. Charlotte was a maniacally cartoonish Upper East Side mother, who also fell over lots (due, it turns out, to her sudden-onset vertigo, never mentioned before season three). And strangely Carrie, as a former sex columnist, could barely even utter the word on her short-lived podcast, having appeared to become more prudish over the intervening years. She also became even more narcissistic, and even more delusional in her romantic choices, after her great love Big (Chris Noth) died on a Peloton bike in the first episode of the reboot. King and his writers had done our girls a great disservice, was the general consensus.

Climate journalist Graihagh Jackson goes on a quest to find a diet that’s healthy for her child, and helps fight climate change – but will her son actually eat it?

It’s been one of those mornings – the Lion King soundtrack has played non-stop on repeat since 06:00, sloppy cereals are cemented to the kitchen floor and my kid’s newfound obsession with sticky tape means my living room looks like a laser maze. This is a typical Saturday morning for me and my son. As a single mother to a three-year-old, I cope with caffeine. And now that I have quaffed a couple of coffees, I have snuck away to the bathroom for a private, er, moment. Within seconds, the doorknob rattles perilously and in he charges, demanding, of all things, to know where ham comes from.

My mind is whirring: How can I put this delicately? “Well, it comes from pigs,” I say, slightly unsure of my approach.

“PIGS? But they’re dirty!” His gorgeous blue eyes are staring at me in total disbelief.

“Yes, I’m sure they get washed before they’re eaten. It’s where sausages come from too.”

The most striking science photos of the week: including the Perseid meteor shower and glowing underwater wonders.

Record warm seas have brought an extraordinary range of new species to UK waters. Britain’s seas have had their warmest start to the year since records began, with BBC analysis finding that the average sea temperature from January to the end of July was more than 0.2C (about 32F) higher than any year since 1980. Bluefin tuna have been spotted in the warmer waters, as well as salps, glowing marine animals which look a bit like jellyfish and are rarely found in the UK.

Mark Poynting and Justin Rowlatt have the story.

Heather Hamilton @cornwallunderwater Warmer temperatures are bringing new species, such as salps, to UK waters (Credit: Heather Hamilton @cornwallunderwater)

An interstellar visitor

A team of astronomers has captured the sharpest ever photo of a high-speed comet visiting our Solar System from elsewhere in the Milky Way galaxy, using Nasa’s Hubble Space Telescope. The comet 3I/Atlas is only the third known interstellar visitor, and Nasa estimates that it was travelling at a staggering 130,000 miles (209,000km) per hour, the highest velocity ever recorded.

“No one knows where the comet came from. It’s like glimpsing a rifle bullet for a thousandth of a second,” David Jewitt, an astronomer at the University of California, Los Angeles, and science team leader for the Hubble observations, said in a statement.

As Trump and Putin meet in Alaska, two twin islands connected by an ice bridge in the Bering Strait are a reminder that the US and Russia’s culture and history are deeply intertwined.

When Russian President Vladimir Putin meets with US President Donald Trump in Anchorage today, it will mark the first time a Russian leader has ever set foot in Alaska, despite the fact that the US’s largest state was actually a Russian colony from 1799 to 1867.

The summit, billed as a conversation about ending the war in Ukraine, comes more than 150 years after the US purchased the nearly 600,000sq-mile expanse from Tsarist Russia for just $7.2m (less than two cents an acre), and serves as a reminder that the two nations are far closer than most imagine.

Though the US and Russia are often cast as distant rivals, their histories and geographies are deeply intertwined in America’s 49th state. In the early 18th Century, the frigid waters of the Bering Strait, just 51 miles wide at its narrowest point, served as a thoroughfare for Siberian traders, Russian Orthodox missionaries and Indigenous Iñupiat and Yupik communities who moved freely between the two continents to trade, marry and hunt.