Rated Reads this week takes a look at the Twitter bot taking on the gender pay gap, the new celebrity divorce trend and TV's latest scammer obsession.

Behind the Twitter Bot Posting the Gender Pay Gap of Brands Celebrating IWD

This Tuesday was International Women’s Day, which meant it was time for all the organisations and brands to get out on social media and extol just how much they’re supporting their female employees. Talk doesn’t always match action, though – but there’s a Twitter bot here to help with that. This IWD, the Gender Pay Gap Bot spent the day calling out the depressingly large number of organisations that underpay women. Its creators speak out to VICE about their good work that nobody should really have to be doing in 2022.

Celeb Trend Alert: Not Getting Divorced At All

In the times of yore, when celebrity couples broke up, they stayed broken up. Not so these days. Perhaps Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez broke the seal with their very, very high-profile reconciliation, but the celebs are really at it now. Gawker surveys a new trend of couples reconciliation that varies from Ben Stiller and Christine Taylor to Jason Momoa and Lisa Bonet. In summary: don’t worry about what might happen to Tom Holland and Zendaya so much. They could work it out.

Con artists and disruptors – TV’s latest obsessions

Scammers are hot right now. Flick on your nearest streaming service, and you’re probably set to find some true-life story of some rich huckster who convinced the entire world that they were selling something that in reality, was exaggerated or a lie. Elizabeth Holmes, Simon Leviev, Travis Kalnick, Adam Neumann – they’re everywhere. BBC Culture takes a look at the appeal of the scammer story, surveying the curious pleasure we take in watching these figures rise and fall.

Bullet the red, white and blue sky: Why U2’s The Joshua Tree still resonates, 35 years on

It’s 35 years this week since U2 dropped the album that plenty of people consider the magnum opus of a long career, ‘The Joshua Tree’. For The Independent, Kevin E G Perry surveys the ongoing relevance of the classic album’s Reagan-era exploration of the disjunction between America’s idealisation of itself and the harsh reality. Not to mention that thing is full of wall to wall bangers. Don’t mind me, I’ve got “With or Without You” on again.

How I became a scriptwriter for the new season of Top Boy

Netflix’s hit show Top Boy is back next week for another season, and there’s new blood in the writing staff for this go around. One such figure is Tyrone Rashard, a local Hackney boy who was noticed a couple of years ago by the show’s creators and invited to work on scripts. He writes for Dazed about the experience of putting his own experiences onto paper for one of his favourite shows.

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