It’s Movie Week, with routines inspired by films ranging from The Godfather to Ratatouille. But which cinephile rug-cutter will impress the judges most?

Roll the traditional movie-themed VT. A Top Gun spoof this time. I feel the need. The need for speed.

Salt or sugar your popcorn. Switch your phones to silent. Pop open that “sharing” box of Maltesers. We’re about to go live to Elstree Studios…

No, I don’t want to go for a girl walk before my girl dinner with my girl mates: I am a grown woman who walks and eats and votes – and, patriarchy, I am on to you

This morning, after waking up with my girl cats, I made myself a cup of girl coffee then got stuck into some girl work. I took a break to lift some girl weights, then sent some more girl emails. Finally, after my girl dinner, it was time to get some sleep ahead of another long, hard day of being a girl.

I know what you’re thinking: why is this woman so insistent on gendering her unremarkable activities, and infantilising herself when she is clearly an adult? It’s a fair question. Since the pandemic, when “hot girl walks” followed Megan Thee Stallion’s 2019 song Hot Girl Summer to become one of the first big TikTok trends, this framing has become dismayingly ubiquitous, in person and online.

Elle Hunt is a freelance journalist

He’s the titan of TV who revived a flatlined Doctor Who and turned British queer life into jaw-dropping drama. But the screenwriter’s groundbreaking writing has sometimes made him a target of hate – from homophobes and Whovians alike

• ‘Goodbye Whoniverse. God, that was fun!’: Read an exclusive extract from Davies’s memoir

Russell T Davies is a man who prefers to look on the bright side. That time he was gay-bashed by a gang of bus conductors? “People have been beaten up far worse than me, that was just a bit of a thumping in the street.” When the production schedule of his dystopian drama Years and Years forced him back to work within days of his husband’s death? “Writing was a nice escape.” Even a story about his “tough” father branding him “yesterday’s man” after his initial departure as showrunner on Doctor Who concludes with a cheerful: “I knew I wasn’t.” It’s easy to see how he’s earned a reputation as the most affable man in TV, if not the world. So why has he taken to keeping a kitchen knife by his front door, “ready to use”?

“I’m called a paedophile and a groomer online by people like [Father Ted creator and anti-trans activist] Graham Linehan, and now people believe what they read. People believe it when they’re told the Earth is flat,” he says. His support for trans rights has resulted in years of death threats and “groomer” smears, which he used to brush off. “But the online world is becoming the real world. People have worked out my address, and one person turned up at my house. If you believe a paedophile lives here, it’s not the maddest thing in the world to come and get me. I’ve been saying for years that our rights are paper-thin, and here we are. What scares me is that I can’t see an end to it. Nothing is going to unseat these tech barons – it will require some sort of revolution to stop them. So for the first time in history, hatred is being monetised by an algorithm.”

As the university and local police defend their treatment of the alleged perpetrators, women decry a familiar story

Student safety advocates in the US call the start of the fall semester at universities “the red zone”. Fraternities, sororities and off-campus bars throw parties welcoming students back to school. It’s supposed to be fun, but it can also be dangerous: more than 50% of sexual assaults that occur at colleges happen during that six- to 10-week period.

It was mid-October of 2024, during the red zone and just before a deluge of Halloween celebrations, when, a former Cornell University student says, she was gang-raped by a group of fraternity brothers. Recent attention on these allegations sparked widespread outrage this week, reviving a contentious national debate about how authorities respond to allegations of sexual assault on US college campuses.

Green party debate over the motion ‘Zionism is racism’ comes amid renewed arguments over the meaning and history of a contested term

Zack Polanski, the leader of the Green party, has said he is an anti-Zionist. As his party conference prepares to debate a motion that “Zionism is racism”, what precisely is Zionism and what is the history of the claim that it is racist?

For decades, the capital’s house prices raced ahead of the national average – but now they are falling in prime areas

An elegant Georgian facade, a full-width balcony and an exclusive address in South Kensington just steps from the Natural History Museum and the V&A. Yet the listing price of this west London flat at Queen’s Gate Gardens has dropped by nearly £1m since last year, to £4.4m.

It is far from an isolated case. A nearby house originally listed at £20m was slashed to £14m this year, says a local estate agent. In neighbouring Notting Hill, a stucco-fronted property that came to market two years ago at £16m is now being offered for less than £14m, they said.

Exclusive: Shadow chancellor Andrew Griffith told party members last year he had discussed making further savings if they win next election

The Conservatives are planning to make sweeping cuts beyond the £47bn announced last year if they win the next election, according to leaked comments by the shadow chancellor.

Speaking last year when he was shadow business secretary, Andrew Griffith told Conservative members he and fellow shadow cabinet ministers had discussed making further cuts in “every part of government”.

The UK prime minister has earned his party a rehearing but the battle of public opinion is not yet won

“He’s offering what no other politician has offered for a long, long time. He actually feels like he’s one of us,” was how Neil, a geography teacher, described Andy Burnham in our focus group on Thursday night.

Neil wasn’t alone in his praise: this group of Labour 2024 voters – some of whom had drifted to Reform, the Tories and Greens during the Starmer era – provided the most positive reception for a politician since Boris Johnson at the height of his Covid-vaccine bounce.

Frank Strada leaving position as state launches independent investigation into what went wrong

Tennessee’s top prison official is stepping down in the aftermath of the failed execution of death row prisoner Christa Pike, the state’s governor Bill Lee announced Saturday.

Frank Strada, the department of correction commissioner, will leave his position later in October as the state launches an independent investigation into what went wrong during Wednesday’s botched execution of Pike, according to Lee.

• Rui Pinto faces loss of witness safeguarding in Portugal

• More documents over City affairs may be made available

Rui Pinto, whose leaks helped to trigger the Premier League’s investigation into Manchester City’s financial affairs, is prepared to help authorities in the UK with their legal case in exchange for protection from threats, the Guardian understands.

Despite the crowdfunding campaign launched on Friday to fund a new life after leaving the protection of the Portuguese police, the whistleblower’s priority remains to cooperate, provided adequate security arrangements are in place.

Rahman Salehi, 34, and Salam Ahmadyan, 36, were charged with preparing attacks on city’s Jewish community, including Heaton Park synagogue

Two Iranian men identified a Manchester synagogue previously subjected to a fatal terrorist attack as a target for an alleged homemade bomb plot, a court has heard.

Rahman Salehi, 34, from Salford, and Salam Ahmadyan, 36, from Liverpool were charged with preparing to commit an act of terrorism or assisting another to commit an act of terrorism on Friday.

Attorney general says ‘terrorist attack’ was attempted by suspect who is said to have been barred from flying by Oman because of extremist views

The co-pilot of flydubai flight FZ1073 used an axe to attempt to carry out a “terrorist attack” during the Israel-bound flight, the United ⁠Arab Emirates prosecutor general has said.

Disaster was narrowly averted on Wednesday when passengers and crew intervened to stop the co-pilot from his attempt to take control of the plane, which had 182 people onboard and plunged 16,625ft in just over 30 seconds. The descent was so extreme that part of the rudder was ripped off.

Greek PM hopes handover of Tsar Samuel to Bulgaria will persuade Britain that time has come for ‘truth, reason, justice and morality’

In a ceremony replete with the sort of fanfare usually reserved for great events, Greece and Bulgaria have formally exchanged “a treasury” of relics and bones, sealing a cultural deal negotiated over decades.

The handover involved priceless religious objects removed from Greece at the height of the first world war, as well as remains thought to belong to Tsar Samuel, Bulgaria’s revered medieval warrior ruler.

• Nations League updates, 5pm BST kick-off (6pm local)

• Live scores | Get the Football Daily newsletter | Mail Scott

Thomas Tuchel speaks to ITV. “[Being in Rijeka on the sunny Adriatic coast] has helped us to unwind and recharge our batteries …. now we need to switch on … the atmosphere is very different … we want to make it really competitive … I think we are up for it … [Alex Scott] did so well when he made his debut … the full package … there is a lot to defend on [Jarell Quansah’s] side with [Ivan] Perišić … we have [Trent Alexander-Arnold] as an option from the bench … hopefully we can get the edge in physicality.”

Been Around The Block dept. Harry Kane will win his 124th cap for England today. That will put him just one appearance shy of Peter Shilton’s all-time record of 125 for his country. Jordan Pickford is the next cab off the rank for England – he’ll be winning his 92nd cap here – then it’s Bukayo Saka who’ll make it to 58. Croatia by comparison have experience up the yin-yang: Luka Modrić will earn his 203rd cap today, while Ivan Perišić and Mateo Kovačić will win caps 159 and 118 respectively. Should Andrej Kramarić get on at any point, he’ll pick up his 120th Croatian cap.

On the day Andy Burnham spoke of the wrong turn Britain took under Thatcher, football was facing a day of reckoning over its own story of corporate acquisition

It was somehow fitting that Tuesday’s damning ruling against Manchester City landed in the heart of the Labour party conference, in the afterglow of Andy Burnham’s rapturously received prime minister’s speech.

I was there, and read the astonishing 40 pages of findings – that City created “sham” contracts to boost income artificially by £900m – on my phone during a long meeting of the Socialist Campaign Group, where people were celebrating Keir Starmer’s ousting and Burnham’s more leftwing direction.

After reports of suicide attempts and food shortages, the aircraft carrier is expected to dock in San Diego this week following a record-breaking 250-plus days at sea

A mother in San Diego is counting down the days until her son comes home.

“I had a big sign made, welcoming him back,” she said. “I can’t wait to see him.”

Approval ratings for Tory leader and her party have crept up as she has asserted her style and authority but big challenges lie ahead

A year ago, Tory MPs were braced for the prospect of yet another leadership battle to topple Kemi Badenoch as the party sunk to historic lows of 14-16% in the polls.

At the time, the word “November” was uttered in hushed tones – this being the decisive month when rebels would be able to mount a challenge, Badenoch having served 12 months in office.

Robert P Jones argues that declining white Christian influence has fuelled an alliance with Trump, and warns it is reshaping US democracy

The lawyer Mike Godwin famously came up with the “law” that, as an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one (or 100%).

Robert P Jones thought long and hard about whether to go there in his latest book. But the more he studied US demographic numbers, considered the rise of Christian nationalism and heard Donald Trump use the language of racial purity, he found the conclusion inescapable. “This is our 1933,” he writes.

For years, eating was something to control, fear or regret. After I hunted my first deer, I started to see fat, hunger and my own body in a different light

I muffled my sobs with a pillow so my family couldn’t hear me from the adjacent room. I was 19 years old and we were in Paris, staying on the top floor of an old six-story walkup where every step echoed through the thin walls. I was trying, and failing, to hide the emotional war I had decided to wage on my body. Who does that on a family vacation? In Europe, no less?

Pulling tear-soaked strands of hair off my cheeks, I stood in front of a full-length mirror and grabbed the fat of my thighs. If only I could just – I pictured ripping off fistfuls of my body and flinging them out the windows, where they would land on some unknowing French person six stories below. I had this vision often: pulling bits of myself off and casting them somewhere far away from me.

When the new ‘department of government efficiency’ sent young techies to disrupt federal agencies, not everyone complied. Here’s what happened when one worker fought to protect immigrant data

In the early hours of Saturday 22 February 2025 the following email landed in the inboxes of the entire US federal workforce:

From: HR hr@opm.gov

Which salty condiment nails that deep flavour profile, and which is saltier than the sea? Our resident taster tries 10 soy sauces straight from the bottle

• The best supermarket kimchi

Soy sauce was created in China about 2,200 years ago, as a means to preserve food and to zhoosh up the humble vegetarian Buddhist diet. It’s a demonstration in kokumi – literally “rich taste” – a flavour sensation that’s often called the sixth taste.

I tested all of today’s soy sauces straight from the bottle, in all their intensity. I first identified distinctive aromas such as cooked potato, sulphur and broth (all typical in soy sauce and not as off-putting as they sound), alongside caramel and malty notes. The best ones are more nuanced, with fruity high notes and vinous tones.

Formerly a favourite of the A-list, the chain has abruptly ceased trading, leaving teachers and customers blindsided

Kate Comer is a single mother with two children, so she is used to living on a financial knife-edge. But when the yoga studio at which she taught closed without warning in September, leaving her with two months’ worth of unpaid wages, it sent her anxiety skyrocketing.

“I’m just reeling right now,” she said, estimating her loss at about £1,500. “I’m very concerned about the future.”

Former England winger could face a prison term next month and his career collapse raises many questions

In another world, where careers broke in different directions, Raheem Sterling would be in this England squad now, playing for the manager, Thomas Tuchel, who made him the No 1 target of the new Chelsea era after the Todd Boehly-Clearlake Capital takeover.

He is 16 months younger than Harry Kane, who continues to break records as England’s captain and hit a personal high of 73 goals last season. Sterling, meanwhile, is without a club and awaiting sentencing after pleading guilty at Basingstoke magistrates court to dangerous driving and possession of nitrous oxide after an incident that witnesses feared might kill someone.

Authorities crack down on trade they says risks spiralling out of control – but operators say they are being targeted unfairly

On the edge of Piazza Navona, one of the grandest squares in central Rome, Barry and Linda, visitors from Texas in the US, stepped out of a golf cart. They planned to cross the square on foot, perhaps stopping to admire Lorenzo Bernini’s 17th-century Fountain of the Four Rivers, before being picked up by their driver at the opposite end.

The couple had already done a walking tour on day one of their trip, and had been so exasperated by a stifling three-hour shuffle along a corridor towards the Sistine Chapel on day two that by the third day they wanted to give their tired feet a rest.

Tom Cruise transforms in Alejandro Iñárritu’s heavyweight satirical comedy, while the NYC indie rockers are in the UK for an arena tour

Digger
Out now
Tom Cruise is back, but he’s giving flyboys and secret agents a rest in favour of a transformation into a powerful oil tycoon, in director Alejandro G Iñárritu’s 2027 Oscar bid. But here’s the kicker: it’s not a sober, serious Oscar contender, but a wild and comedic big swing. Dig in.

The Guardian’s weekend wrap of essential reads from the past seven days, selected by Miles Herbert

• Get this in your inbox every weekend. Sign up for Five Great Reads here

Hello and welcome to the weekend.

The Guardian’s range was on display this week across these five very different stories. Grab a coffee and dig in, digest, and reflect on harrowing accounts of Trump’s immigration crackdown, investigations into modern motherhood and masculinity, and for a bit of weekend fun, we leave you with some celebrity gossip.

Claudia Winkleman joins a castle full of celebs as the duplicitous favourite returns, while Molly Manners’ extremely funny boarding school comedy tackles desire and adulthood. Here’s the pick of the week’s culture, taken from the Guardian’s best-rated reviews

Here’s how to follow along with our coverage – the finest writing and up-to-the-minute reports

• Grand Final updates, 6pm BST kick-off at Old Trafford

• Wakefield’s wild rise | Warrington’s long wait | Mail Lee

4 mins. A strong carry from Scott takes Wakefield near to the Wire 20m line, but a mix up late in the set leads to an offside off a poor kick. Williams clears the Warrington lines from the penalty.

The next attack from the Wire has Walmsley claiming a towering kick close to the Trinity line, but he can’t do much when he lands and the ball is turned over.

• Nations League updates from the 7.45pm BST kick-offs

• Live scores | Get the Football Daily newsletter | Mail Luke

North Macedonia: Dimitrievski, Mladenovski, Meljichi, Musliu, Ilievski, Gashtarov, Stankovski, Herrera, Bardhi, Elmas, Miovski. Substitutes: Taleski, Siskovski, Stojchevski, Djekov, Elezi, Omeragikj, Kostadinov, Doriev, Mitrovski, Atanasov, Maleski, Rastoder.

Scotland: Gunn, Welsh, McKenna, Binks, Doak, Ferguson, Gilmour, Robertson, McGinn, Bowie, McBurnie. Substitutes: Kelly, Bain, Hickey, Doig, Ure, Christie, Graham, Donovan, Patterson, Miller, Montgomery, McPake.

• Prem Rugby: Bristol 41-24 Northampton

• Bears win opening two games for first time since 2023

Bristol overcame a nasty-looking head injury to the England centre Benhard Janse van Rensburg to clinch an impressive victory over Northampton and maintain their flying start to the season with Louis Rees-Zammit in fine finishing form, helping himself to a double.

Van Rensburg received lengthy treatment and was taken off on a stretcher just before half-time and appeared to be knocked out cold. The South-African born centre is all-action, but suffered the same fate during England’s summer victory over Argentina. Van Rensburg was seen by the Bristol dug out in the second half, however, allaying fears that the injury was serious.

• Domenicali confirms schedule for final races

• Bahrain and Saudi Arabia races were scrapped

The final races of the Formula One season in Qatar and Abu Dhabi will go ahead as planned despite the conflict in the Middle East, the sport’s chief executive, Stefano Domenicali, said on Saturday.

“Based on the information we have, everything is confirmed for [us to stay in] Qatar and Abu Dhabi,” Domenicali told the French broadcaster Canal+ on the sidelines of the Bahrain Grand Prix, which was relocated to the Sepang circuit in Malaysia.

PM’s contortions over the Manchester City verdicts have landed him with an early test of what he wants to stand for. Realpolitik, or real values?

It’s coming for you. It’s coming for you. Oh Andy Burnham, the hugely problematic relationship between principle and realpolitik in post-cash Britain. It’s coming for you. We are going all in on football chat these days, aren’t we? Football populism, football blokeyness, the stylings of the football everyman. That was certainly the horse the prime minister rode in on a few months ago. And right now it’s a horse that’s still very much snorting around the cabinet room, and threatening to run right over the top of him.

Also: fresh plot twists. Previous governments have been thrown into early-term crisis by things such as war, sex scandals and economic meltdown. But never, and historians will have time to pore over this in the coming decades, by the urgent need to overpay for Jack Grealish. “The ramifications of this are MASSIVE,” the man on the radio said on Thursday morning. And he was right. There are ramifications here. And the ramifications, well, Clive, they’re massive. In this case the man on the radio was discussing the United Kingdom’s multilayered geopolitical meltdown through the prism of whether this means Spurs are less or more likely to get relegated. And to be fair there are very few global events that can’t be better understood through a Spurs-in-crisis lens.

Julia Zigiotti Olme’s sixth-minute lob proved enough to earn the Manchester United coach, Eva Olid, a second Women’s Super League victory of the season with a 1-0 home win over Liverpool.

Zigiotti Olme capitalised on a mistake by Liverpool goalkeeper, Khiara Keating, and, despite some late pressure by Gareth Taylor’s side, United held on to make it back-to-back league wins.

• Ireland manager Hallgrímsson calls for ‘cool heads’

• Accusations of racism dismissed as ‘completely untrue’

The Republic of Ireland’s press conference on the eve of their second Nations League match against Israel in Serbia was cut short as the head coach, Heimir Hallgrímsson, fielded questions from Israeli journalists.

Ireland beat Israel 3-0 in Hungary in their first match on Tuesday after a turbulent buildup in which the Irish squad voted to fulfil the fixture despite unease among the team over the war in Gaza.

• India 211-6; Pakistan 192-6 in Twenty20 cricket final

• Captains refuse traditional pre-match handshakes

India’s men beat their fierce rivals Pakistan by 19 runs to complete a golden double in the Asian Games cricket after a pulsating final in front of a small but raucous crowd in Nagoya, Japan. The T20 world champions posted 211 for six in their 20 overs with Abhishek Sharma scoring 61 and Tilak Varma 51 not out, before Hasan Nawaz’s valiant 96 saw Pakistan come up short at 192 for six.

The neighbouring countries only meet in international tournaments and on neutral ground because of political tensions and the captains refused the normal handshakes before the match on Saturday. Afterwards, the jubilant India players paraded their national flag around the ground. The clash on a converted baseball field in Japan was new ground for even these rivals and their hundreds of millions of fans who were watching back home on television.

A rare repeat success could be on the cards with Daryz well fancied, while O’Brien Jr and Sr go head-to-head in Paris

Trainer: Francis-Henri Graffard. Jockey: Mickael Barzalona. Draw: 5.
Pedigree: Sea The Stars x Daryakana (by Selkirk). Age: 4. Odds: 7-4.

Public outcry to punish the alleged perpetrators in the Cornell case misses the point – the only solution is political, legal and cultural equality of women

Sometimes a story is so so appalling, it captures the public’s attention, including the attention of people who don’t focus on the issue otherwise. Such is the case with the alleged 2024 gang rape at Cornell University.

For feminists who focus on violence against women or anyone who has ever cared about campus rape, the claims made in Jane Doe’s civil lawsuit against the alleged perpetrators may be unusual in its severity – but we know the statistics that show that somewhere between 20% and 25% of women college students will be the victim of a sexual assault (no statistics tell us what percentage of men students will be rapists).

In the NHS as in the private sector, the measure of success should be customer satisfaction and not just box-ticking

Andy Burnham said he wanted to “rewire” the economy. Then he seemed to slam on the brakes, kicking most reforms into the 2030s.

Local government reorganisation is on hold, along with an overhaul of the much-maligned water industry. Social care and significant welfare reform are matters to be resolved by the next government.

Her harrowing botched execution is a reminder of why we must not even entertain the idea of restoring capital punishment

• Maya Foa is the CEO of the human rights charity Reprieve

In recent months, there has been a resurgence of interest in the death penalty among rightwing politicians in the UK. The leader of Restore Britain, Rupert Lowe, has made a manifesto commitment to holding a legally binding referendum on bringing back capital punishment. The Reform MP Lee Anderson is also in favour of a referendum, arguing that the public would vote in favour of the death penalty.

Such supporters of capital punishment in Britain point to polls such as this “bombshell survey” that supposedly showed 47% of students favoured bringing back the death penalty. But these headlines are misleading, as surveys rarely include details about the grim administration of capital punishment and only present a binary choice of the options.

Maya Foa is the CEO of the human rights charity Reprieve

Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.

The US defense secretary who hates ‘beardos, weirdos and wimps’ has announced an Office of Religious Affairs at the Pentagon

Apart from money and McDonald’s, there’s nothing Donald Trump seems to love more than a “big, beautiful” wall. The government is currently spending billions of taxpayer dollars to fulfill the president’s fantasy of lining the US-Mexico border with 30ft steel bollard walls and high-tech surveillance.

What the Trump administration is apparently not so keen on is the wall of separation between church and state. While the president may hawk bibles as a side hustle, he is not exactly devout; he serves only mammon. The top levels of his government, however, are stuffed full of religious fanatics who appear hellbent on remaking the country as a Christian theocracy.

Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist

A third runway would fly in the face of reason. If we are to prioritise human life over short-term ‘growth’, we need to use planes less, not more

If a third runway is built at Heathrow, what will be the impact on the wealth of the nation? It will cost us somewhere between £23.4bn and £62.5bn. These are not my figures; they weren’t calculated by environmental groups, but by the Department for Transport.

For decades, government ministers have told us that airport expansion is essential for “growth”. As chancellor, Rachel Reeves claimed that a third runway at Heathrow would add 0.43% to GDP, figures we later discovered came from a report commissioned by the airport. The transport department’s own analysis concluded that the real addition to GDP would be between 0.03% and 0.05%: eight to 14 times less. Against this, it weighed the social and environmental costs of the project, to reveal a massive net loss. It found that a third runway would cause major harm to the health and wellbeing of up to 3 million local people.

George Monbiot is a Guardian columnist

Rather than ridding the Conservatives of their ‘nasty party’ status, Badenoch has a plan – to cut benefits for young people and demonise the unemployed

Kemi Badenoch is considering doing her job. With her second Conservative party conference as leader looming on Sunday, and her rival Nigel Farage finally losing some ground, the provocateur with a reputation for dodging media rounds and being ill-prepared for briefs has seemingly cured her camera shyness.

In recent days, Badenoch has touted a policy to give the unemployed a “subsistence allowance” that would prevent them from buying booze or cigarettes, sought to bar benefits from young people who are straight out of school, accused Andy Burnham of wanting to take Britain “back to the 1970s” with public control of utilities, and enjoyed some mixed polling.

The resolution shows little understanding of what Zionism is, who Jews are or how antisemitism works

Tomorrow I will be in synagogue to say Kaddish, the traditional mourner’s prayer, in memory of my father who died eight years ago this week. If I were a member of the Green party, I would have reason to believe that that simple act could soon see me expelled as a racist.

It sounds hyperbolic, but the warning comes from Green party activists opposed to a resolution declaring that Zionism is racism, which will be debated at the party conference this weekend. The motion, which if passed would instantly become party policy, holds that Zionism should be “treated as any other form of racism”. On that logic, given that the Greens do not admit members of self-described racist organisations, they could not tolerate members of self-described Zionist organisations – a category that includes almost every synagogue, or synagogue movement, in Britain and indeed the world. Which is why saying Kaddish could lead to expulsion.

Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist

Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.

Kemi Badenoch has a lot to say about Labour and Reform UK but none of it amounts to a coherent alternative programme for government

The Conservative party is far from the margin of British politics, but it has yet to recover the relevance to which it feels historically entitled. The Tories are flattered by their status as the official opposition in parliament. In the wider country, Reform UK has set the agenda on the right, overtaking Kemi Badenoch’s party in opinion polls and poaching MPs from her benches.

But Nigel Farage’s progress has stalled. Scrutiny of Reform’s finances has made its leader look shifty. Competition from Restore Britain, an extreme nationalist party, has denied Mr Farage the luxury of taking far-right votes for granted. Pandering to a hardcore audience makes it difficult for Reform to affect the moderation required to capture more Tory and Labour votes.

Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.

From Oprah Winfrey to Dua Lipa, there is no shortage of celebrity literary champions. But the former US leader is in a class of his own

At the Labour party conference Andy Burnham revealed that Hamlet, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and Tony Harrison’s poem V are his favourite works of literature. The UK’s first prime minister with an English literature degree was not the only political figure sharing his book choices last week. Barack Obama, the US’s most literary president since Abraham Lincoln, launched a new podcast in which he discusses six books that shaped him with writer friends.

First up was the actor – and recently turned short story writer – Tom Hanks on Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead, a meditation on faith, fatherhood and forgiveness in the form of a letter written by a 76-year-old pastor to his son. It was an unabashedly highbrow start. With the exception of John le Carré’s cold war classic Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, Mr Obama’s selections are American: Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon, Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses, James Baldwin’s essays The Fire Next Time and Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men. Questions of democracy, race, power and violence are all here.

Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.

Maariyah Seedat wonders at what point does her family become ‘English’ enough, Mark James Slater has always regarded himself as British and not English. Plus letters from Dr Richard Seabrook and Alan Baker

Jason Okundaye’s piece on defining Englishness mirrored my own experiences as a member of an ethnic minority (Of course you can be English if you’re not white. So why can’t the right leave the question alone?, 26 September).

As a child, growing up in multicultural Leicester in the 1990s and 2000s, I was “corrected” by adults in positions of authority – the vast majority of whom were white – for wanting to call myself English. It was a descriptor that I could not claim and, implicitly, was not my right because of my skin colour. I learned very quickly that referring to myself as British was the better, less objectionable option.

Readers respond to an article by Will Hutton and Andy Haldane suggesting that they could be run for the public benefit

Will Hutton and Andy Haldane advocate “turning [utilities] into public-benefit companies with a primary, constitutional objective of delivering high-quality services, with profitability subordinate to that broader aim” (Andy Burnham talks about ‘public control’ of the utilities but it’s a minefield. We can lead him through it, 25 September). So still companies, but with a public interest rather than a profit motive. This is still the wrong approach.

Utilities should not be run as businesses but as essential public services. They do not function in isolation, and business models are unsuited to their functioning in the public interest. They have social and environmental as well as economic responsibilities that have to be met. For 20 years, prior to the advent of the Scottish parliament, local government functioned well in Scotland within a framework of regions and districts. The regions had powers and responsibilities for the wide range of functions that had to be coordinated and operated strategically at the regional level. They included water and sewerage.

A German service matches retired professionals to firms that use their experience, writes Alan Coppin, responding to an article about a 90-year-old Japanese competitive bodybuilder

Your feature on the 90-year-old bodybuilder Toshisuke Kanazawa was a joy (‘I’m 100% natural’: how Japan’s 90-year-old bodybuilder is still winning titles, 25 September), but it’s also a useful provocation. Almost 30% of Japan’s 123.7 million people are over 64 yet, rather than being written off, people like Kanazawa are still contributing well into their 90s.

Britain does the opposite. Between 670,000 and 860,000 people drop out of the UK workforce annually, and by their 60s more than a third of people are economically inactive. The loss is a stock of judgment and knowhow that simply walks out of the door.

Measures of wellbeing should carry real weight in decisions about tax, spending and public services, says Sarah Davidson

Re your editorial on Andy Burnham’s conference speech (29 September), the outcome that all governments should seek is a real improvement to people’s lives, particularly for those with the least, and without storing up problems for future generations. But that requires ministers to measure what matters and use that evidence to guide decisions.

The good news for the prime minister and his colleagues is that the Office for National Statistics already collects robust evidence about our lives through its UK Measures of National Well-being Dashboard. Yet there is little suggestion that this sort of data has been driving policy, including tax and spending plans.

Demonstrators take to the streets of Madrid ⁠and other Spanish cities ⁠after ​new legislation fails to pass

Tens of thousands of people have taken to the streets of Madrid ⁠and other Spanish cities as they step up demands for action to tackle ⁠a mounting housing crisis ⁠after ​government measures were struck down by the opposition.

Demonstrators on Saturday waved posters calling for a general strike ⁠after the measures drawn up to address mass anger over the eviction of an 87-year-old woman in ⁠Madrid, and other housing issues, were rejected in parliament on ​Friday.

Exclusive: Findings will bolster those in No 10 who want to negotiate on re-entry but some senior figures remain wary

Andy Burnham’s personal preference to rejoin the European Union after the next election is supported by almost half of all voters, a new megapoll has found, although cabinet ministers concerned about reopening Brexit divides are privately urging him to proceed with caution.

The poll by the Messina Group (TMG) found that renegotiating the UK’s relationship with the EU could boost Labour’s vote share by as much as seven points, if the prime minister offered a fresh referendum in which he campaigned to re-enter the bloc.

The 25-year-old was the sixth man detained as counter-terrorism police investigate ‘possible foreign state involvement’

A sixth man who was arrested in connection with a suspected terrorist plot at RAF Fairford has been released on bail.

The 25-year-old, a dual UK-Iranian national, was arrested on suspicion of preparing terrorist acts under section 5 of the Terrorism Act 2006.

Investigation revealed thousands of voyeuristic videos taken on Munich beer festival’s Teufelsrad, or Devil’s Wheel

Women have been given free cycling shorts to prevent upskirting on a famous amusement ride at the Oktoberfest in Munich, after an investigation revealed tens of thousands of voyeuristic videos circulating online.

The Teufelsrad, or Devil’s Wheel, which rapidly spins around while people try to sit on it for as long as they can, is one of the beer festival’s oldest rides. But many of the videos discovered by German journalists focus on women whose traditional dirndl dresses have ridden up, often showing their underwear.

Ryan Anderson says he reached out to Blanchard’s father to offer support after apparent overdose death of Ken Urker

The ex-husband of Gypsy Rose Blanchard has said he was “shocked” by the recent death in Louisiana of her former partner Ken Urker – and that he would be there for Blanchard and her daughter “if she needs me”.

Ryan Anderson made those remarks during an appearance on The Sarah Fraser Show podcast on Friday, providing a noteworthy reaction to the latest chapter involving Blanchard, who achieved an unusual level of celebrity in the US after spending time imprisoned for a role in the murder of her abusive mother in Missouri.

With 40 dead and a disaster declared across all 50 city districts, experts warn extreme flooding will only worsen across south-east Asia

Bangkok is used to absorbing the sudden afternoon downpours that inundate the city during the rainy season. Even streets in many central high-rise districts can briefly turn into rivers, with rats and cockroaches racing out of sewers and taking temporary refuge on trees and buildings as the subterranean world is flushed out.

But every city has a breaking point, and this year rain fell so fast and so hard that whole neighbourhoods of the Thai capital have been transformed, not into rivers, but stagnant lakes. In parts of the city, roughly 300mm of rain – the equivalent of half a year of average rainfall in London – fell in about two days.

Citizen environmentalists create online platform that flags spills in real time and highlights repeatedly polluted spots

The easy thing for the people who live on the banks of the River Dart in Devon might have been to grumble and groan about the sewage spills that blight their beloved waterway.

Instead, citizen environmentalists in the area have created a unique online platform that flags up spills in real time, highlights spots that are repeatedly polluted, and sets out where improvement work is planned – and where it isn’t.

Climate crisis blamed as virus that originated in Africa spreads to livestock as far north as Aberdeenshire

British farmers are experiencing the worst bluetongue season on record, with the number of cases surpassing the past three years combined.

The viral disease, which affects sheep and cattle among other animals, can cause fevers, ulcers, a swollen head and lameness. The tongue may go blue and even protrude from the mouth. In the most severe cases, the animal can die.

South Hams, Devon: These are monstrous animals, growing to 3 metres and reaching 40mph, and I was lucky enough to see a pack in hunting mode

It is a perfect autumn day for a clifftop walk: sea and sky blend into a veil of baby blue, and the water is calm and dazzling. A motorboat unzips the ocean as we squint out over the bay.

My companion points to a dark line snaking along in the water. It seems to intensify for a moment, then erupts in a silver commotion. Through binoculars I can make out the frantic leaping of a shoal of eel-like fish. “Garfish,” he says. “Now just watch.”

Revelation comes amid mounting concern over online prediction market’s effects on integrity of financial system

UK authorities are being urged to intervene after it emerged that the online prediction market Polymarket has been taking thousands of dollars worth of bets over whether HSBC and Lloyds will fail.

Polymarket – the US-owned company which holds bets on anything from football matches, to the existence of aliens, to when a bomb drops on a city – has allowed users to take $77,507 (£58,530) worth of positions on whether the world’s biggest banks will go under by the end of this year.

Joshua Kerry, 28, of Rotherham in South Yorkshire, charged with one count of preparation of terrorist acts, say police

The man accused of murdering Ann Widdecombe has been charged with engaging in conduct in preparation of acts of terrorism including against Nigel Farage.

Joshua Kerry, 28, of Rotherham in South Yorkshire, was charged by the Crown Prosecution Service on Friday with one count of preparation of terrorist acts. The charge relates to activity alleged to have taken place between 31 May 2024 and 8 July this year, counter-terrorism police said.

Bavaria’s boozy blowout has inspired dozens of British tributes, from Belfast to Beverley, Cardiff to Cambridge. But what’s the attraction, other than the beer and the bratwurst?

Under a sea of Bavarian bunting, vendors hand out steins of pilsner, dunkel and weissbier, alongside platters of bratwurst, pork knuckle and pretzels. The lederhosen-clad Bettesteiner Footstompers lead the cheering crowd in a boisterous oompah singalong: “Eins, zwei, g’suffa!” (“One, two, drink up!”) Foot-tapping, glass-clinking and swaying soon turn into dancing, and eventually a full-blown conga.

The spirit of Oktoberfest is well and truly upon us – but Munich is more than 500 miles away. My friends and I are at Wünder Harbour in Folkestone, Kent, a homage to the German event. Wünder Harbour has been held since 2023, first over one weekend, and now four as its popularity has rocketed. It is just one of scores of Oktoberfest tributes all over the UK, from tiny bars to enormous marquees in pretty much every major city.

Sunday’s poll pits the leftist incumbent Lula against the son of a former far-right president convicted of staging a coup

• ‘No one disrespects Our Lady’: fears for Brazil’s patron saint grip country ahead of election

Shortly after his controversial speech to the United Nations general assembly in September, Donald Trump gathered a dozen like-minded Latin American leaders and boasted that rightwing candidates had won all seven presidential elections held in the region since he began his second term.

“Everybody I’ve endorsed has won,” the US president said in New York to most of the leaders of the Shield of the Americas, an anti-drug cartel coalition of 15 countries governed by the right or far right.

Rhonda Jewell was sentenced to 17 years for forgetting 10-month-old Ariya in car’s back seat, leading to child’s death

A state appeals court in Florida reversed the felony murder conviction of a woman who accidentally left a baby in her car, resulting in the child’s death.

In July 2023, while babysitting four children from two different families, 46-year-old Rhonda Jewell forgot 10-month-old Ariya Paige was in the back of her car, and went inside to care for the other kids. Strapped into her carseat in the Florida summer heat, Ariya died of hyperthermia before Jewell realized her mistake. Jewell was convicted the following year of third-degree felony murder, predicated on the underlying felony of leaving a child unattended in a vehicle. She was sentenced to 17 years in prison.

They are the support base for non-nationalist parties but are voting with their feet and not on ballot papers

On a perfect October morning in Sarajevo, the motivation for young people to be leaving Bosnia and Herzegovina in droves is not immediately apparent. The country’s capital is basking in the autumn sunshine and the pavement cafes in the shadow of the Sacred Heart Cathedral are packed. People lingering over coffee and cigarettes mix peacefully with the Swedish football fans in town for their team’s Nations League match.

But Sarajevo’s many charms have not been enough to keep young people in Bosnia. One local organisation that tracks emigration estimated that more than 600,000 people had left the country in the decade after the 2013 census, when the official population was 3.5 million.

Companies race to switch households to ‘voice over internet protocol’ services by the end of January

BT has been accused of “bullying” customers by temporarily cutting off their broadband to pressure them to upgrade to a digital landline, as providers race to switch households over before the January deadline.

Telecoms companies have so far migrated 16-17m lines from the old copper network to digital voice over internet protocol (VoiP), which uses a broadband connection instead, in the biggest technological upgrade since the early 00s, when analogue TV was switched off.

Would-be marketers enticed by online talk of entering a world of travel and easy cash find that the reality is rather different

Months before she entered the Love Island villa, the content creator Yasmin Hadlow promised viewers of her online videos that they could “catch flights and get paid mid-air”. All they had to do, she said, was send her a direct message with the word “freedom”.

The 23-year-old is among several influencers and celebrities, including the former Geordie Shore star Vicky Pattison, working for PlanNet Marketing, which recruits people to work as independent travel agents with a separate US business, InteleTravel.

Company says it is reviewing 50 petabytes of data after its agents accessed websites including Medicare without authorisation

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OpenAI says its review in response to the Medicare and Hugging Face agent attacks is costing the company more than US$500,000 per day, as it deploys AI to examine data that would take a human 66m years to read.

The company has warned the review is ongoing, and more organisations may be informed they’ve been targeted in the near future.

Exclusive: Britain’s largest private-sector employer has also trained managers to spot signs of domestic abuse

Tesco has become the first supermarket to introduce paid “safe leave” for victims of domestic abuse, giving staff dedicated time to access support, secure their safety and take steps to move on with their lives.

The UK’s largest private-sector employer is offering up to three days of paid leave which can be taken flexibly for activities such as attending court hearings, arranging emergency accommodation, changing locks, securing childcare or separating finances.

Untying the knot is having a television moment with the launch of the HBO legal thriller War and BBC’s The Split Up

There were 105,002 divorces in England and Wales last year, according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS). Right now, it feels like there are almost as many on TV.

The new HBO legal thriller War, which launched on Sky Atlantic on Friday night, chronicles what it calls “the highest-profile divorce case in UK history”. This enjoyably juicy eight-parter is joined in the weekend schedules by the BBC ​drama The Split Up – a Manchester-based spin-off from Abi Morgan’s The Split – following a British Asian family law firm specialising in elite divorces.

I didn’t realise my school infatuation was just making fun of me, but then an episode of the cartoon series taught me the attributes of true companionship

When I was seven, I was obsessed with one particular classmate. She was the only girl taller than me and she never let me forget it. She was allowed to wear colourful nail polish and had shiny Lelli Kelly shoes, while I had short, plain nails and had to make do with classic black Clarks. I craved her approval.

That spring she got an iPhone, and deliberately shunned me for a while afterwards. I cried for hours, but I wasn’t confused. I understood, and even respected it. Why would she grace me with her aura? I was lucky she let me sit at her table at all, even if it was only to taunt me for still bringing in a packed lunch. She was my best friend – I was always holding out hope that one day I would be hers.

Movie about Nazi-collaborating administration strikes chord during what director calls ‘time of great uncertainty’

It is the story of how a lowly state administrator unthinkingly becomes a cog in the machine of an authoritarian regime, embracing the bureaucracy and logistics of sending people to their deaths – and it is drawing in audiences to French cinemas.

The French film Notre Salut (Our Salvation), with its modern lighting, improvised scenes and anachronistic 1980s Europop soundtrack, is far from the standard historical costume drama about the second world war.

All celebrities will dance to a classic film track for the first time in the show’s history. Plus: Lesley Manville’s fun murder mystery. Here’s what to watch this evening

6.15pm, BBC One

It launched the careers of Jesse Plemons and Michael B Jordan, and let its stars improvise in a way that was fresh and new. This show about smalltown US football was confident, trailblazing – and wonderful

I’ve been around the south of the US enough to have seen the importance of football: little burgs where the high-school football field has stands that wouldn’t disgrace a League Two soccer club in the UK. Friday Night Lights, which was first broadcast 20 years ago, is set in the most fervent edges of that world, smalltown Texas, where what happens under the floodlights at the end of the working week defines the mood of the place for days to come.

Britt Daniel, the frontman of the Texas band Spoon, grew up in one such town, Temple. “Friday Night Lights is based on Odessa, and Odessa and Temple are very, very similar,” he told me in 2017. “The high schools used to play each other at football, and they’re the kind of towns where everything happens on Friday because it’s the football game. I didn’t really think about it until many years later, but you really risked being beaten [up]. Not just harassed, but beaten. Everywhere you went, you really had to look over your shoulder. If you were at the mall, if you were at the parking lot, if you were at a party – people really wanted to fight.”

A love of food and a taste for bloodthirsty action collide as a very angry chef gets caught up in a brutal turf war between warring restaurants in LA

Has foodie culture gone too far? It’s a truism that to get to a lasagne recipe now, you have to wade through an essay about someone’s childhood in Tuscany. We talk about food sentimentally, consume TV about it fetishistically, slavering over slow-motion shots of chopped pepper falling on to stainless steel. We enjoy judging the food of others. We talk about the provenance of our ingredients with a kind of purity fixation. It strikes me that there’s a totalitarianism to it.

So it was bracing to watch Get Jiro (from Sunday 4 October, HBO Max), an adult animation that pairs a love of food with a taste for ultraviolence. It’s the story of a sushi chef, caught up in a bloodthirsty turf war between warring restaurants. It is set in a dystopian near-future Los Angeles, in which all human desires “including companionship, travel and sex, can be experienced … virtually”. (The episodes I’ve seen don’t go into this, explaining for example how chiropody could be experienced virtually, but that’s beside the point.)

From Northern soul and 90s bangers to disco classics and indie anthems, readers share the floorfillers that never fail to start the party

My now-husband and I attended a wedding. The reception was boring. No one was dancing and people were wondering if it was too early to leave. We sat at our table thinking what song would get everyone up on to the dancefloor. We chose I Don’t Feel Like Dancin’. When I asked the DJ to play it he laughed and said: “That’s appropriate.” We danced by ourselves and people started joining us. The party kicked off and we all had a great time. Years later, we played the song at our own wedding. It makes me happy. Rachael, 46, Warrington

When a rarity blew up on TikTok, the solitary ambient artist had fraudsters trying to steal her royalties. It reinforced her DIY mentality – until reforming her band Helen reminded her of the beauty of collaboration

In mid-September, I watched as Liz Harris soundchecked to 1,500 empty seats at midtown Manhattan’s historic Town Hall theatre. Soon each plush red chair would be filled for the second of two sold-out nights, but this ornate seclusion felt oddly perfect. It is fair to infer that most of her concertgoers generally listen to the uncanny experimental music she makes as Grouper alone, just as she creates it.

Harris started Grouper in 2005 in the DIY noise warehouses of Oakland, California. At 46, she now lives farther north, in coastal Astoria, Oregon, where she creates densely tessellated visual art and spare, lucid albums that have made her a titan of modern ambient music. Painfully beautiful and often inscrutable, hers is a sonic language all its own, creating thickets of sound using little more than guitar or piano, voice and space; her angelic and alien songs have influenced artists as disparate as Phoebe Bridgers and Mk.gee, and been sampled by Lil B and 100 Gecs. It is intensely solitary work, often characterised as sad but full of profound relief. “Like a bloodletting,” Harris offers.

(Transgressive)
The Maryland singer-songwriter’s third album has an impressive sense of scale compared to last year’s breakout Burnover, but is less immediately appealing

Greg Freeman’s third album All Set the Bone feels, at its best and most nervy, like an off-brand pressure cooker: too hot, bursting at its seams, rattling with kinetic energy. The Maryland-born singer-songwriter has a voice that often sounds like it’s straining at its limits, and although he is ostensibly part of a growing indierock revival that’s been taking hold over the past few years – a cosy perennial – there’s nothing particularly comfortable about the songs on this double album. On Marooned, frantic stabs of guitar and drums create queasy unease; opener Cahokia muddles up the catharsis of a great American road song, descending into proggy bedlam. And his lyrics most often drum up anxieties big and small: “Who do you look to when you’re all on your own?” he asks on Culture. “When all your heroes lost their microphones?”

Freeman broke out with last year’s Burnover, a set of taut story-songs that were at turns witty, delirious and devastating. Freeman’s secret was in his ability to weld that literary streak to loud, bolshy, riff-heavy music that wouldn’t sound out of place on mainstream rock radio. All Set the Bone is several orders more ambitious in its scale, and its songwriting, which is more imagistic and diffuse. The result is an impressive record but one that’s less immediately appealing. Freeman wrote it while travelling through the US and reckoning with “a lot of change in my personal sense of … everything”, and you can hear that searching quality in the final product. All Set the Bone contains fewer fireworks than Burnover, but Freeman still has plenty of spark.

(World of Echo)
With musical ideas spanning mariachi and motorik beats, and lyrics with Kneecap-grade rage, this brilliant collective evolve tradition with stinging, joyful songs

Quicksilver and giddy in its exploration of Irish music, language and identity, Trá Pháidín’s second album bursts open the idea of a 21st-century traditional folk record. It woos you with the reverb-smothered guitars and birdsong-like flutes of Tí Mhichael Phaddy (Michael Paddy’s House, an opener suggesting a psychedelically perfect rurality) before an Irish woman cuts in, bigging up her countryside Airbnb on the phone. A shouty local then comically interrupts her.

Trá Pháidín (Paddy’s Beach) are a six-strong collective of brilliant musicians from Galway, Ireland’s largest Irish-speaking county, and their album’s title, Cloch’s Claí (Stone and Dry Stone Wall), suggests that each track plays its own scabrous, weight-bearing part in the whole. The 45 minutes unfold as an interrupted sequence, full of improvisation, texture and ornament, the band freely roaming other genres, revealing them as connected neighbourhoods.

Her last novel sold 5m copies and was adapted into a hit series. Nearly 10 years on, the Korean-American author has written another epic. She discusses ambition and the diagnosis that inspired her to leave work and write

Back in 1995, when she was in her mid-20s, Min Jin Lee quit her job as a corporate lawyer. As a teenager she had been diagnosed as a hepatitis B carrier and doctors told her she was highly likely to develop liver cancer in her 20s or 30s. “I thought, if I’m going to die, I’m going to write a book first,” the now 57-year-old Korean-American author says of her decision to turn her back on a regular pay cheque and healthcare. “I was told so many times that I was going to get sicker and sicker, that I’ve always felt that if I can get a really good book out then I’m done.”

Lee, looking very much alive and well, is on a video call from her home in Harlem, New York, floor-to-ceiling bookshelves behind her. We are meeting to discuss the publication of her third novel, American Hagwon, the final part in what she calls her “Korean trilogy”, following Free Food for Millionaires in 2007 and her 2017 international bestseller, Pachinko, stylishly adapted for Apple TV in 2022. “Korean quartet!” she corrects me now. Thanks to experimental drugs, she is now so healthy she can commit to another book. “Before I turn 70, I should turn in my manuscript,” she jokes. “I’m writing the four books that I wanted to write and after that I’m going to take a long nap.”

Have It by John Cooper Clarke; The Dodo Stories by Mary Mulholland; Red River Valley by Ian McMillan; Some Sacred Harbour by Roger Robinson; Otherwhere by Carolyn Forché

Have It by John Cooper Clarke (Picador, £16.99)
The latest collection from the original “people’s poet” displays his characteristic swagger, delivered with a distinctively northern humour. Merging blistering social satire and brash wit, Cooper Clarke irreverently tackles themes from the ridiculous to the sublime, including the malaise of contemporary urban life, the erosion of nature and the environment, money and the prospect of a cashless society, death and ageing, fascism, bachelorhood, popular culture and the NHS. His punk rock values caustically underpin the collection: “Me and my shrinking crowd / Each under our own personal cloud”; “We wish you no serious harm/ However, everybody sucks but us”. There’s heavy use of doggerel and jokes as he stridently proclaims his passion for writing. “It’s a meaningless job but someone’s got to do it / Thank God it’s me”. Overall, Cooper Clarke’s consummate performance skills in playing to the crowd demand applause as he advocates for the “blood royal of the working class”.

A twisting, beguiling investigation into the art of poetry that ends in a call to arms on behalf of the natural world

The poet Alice Oswald is no stranger to thinking in public about her art. She was Oxford professor of poetry until 2023, and her lectures are available online. But this is her first full-length book, and as such is something of an occasion.

So what exactly is it? For a work of prose it contains a lot of poetry, much translated or composed by Oswald herself. Shakespeare, Donne, Shelley and Ted Hughes also feature. Though nonfiction, the book is full of stories, particularly retellings of Homer and Aeschylus. It is billed as “genre-defying” and there is much formal experimentation. But at heart it is an exploration of the oral tradition, and the writer’s own subtitle is A Manifesto, which feels exciting and urgent, pointed at the contemporary world with its pressing realities.

Writers and Guardian readers discuss the titles they have read over the last month. Join the conversation in the comments

I was sideswiped by Giada Scodellaro’s Ruins, Child. A brilliant, strange book that challenged me in the most exhilarating way, with its fractured language and dream-cinema visions, the sense it bestowed of walking through a corridor full of echoes. Echoes of a less elliptical but no-less political kind haunt Jordy Rosenberg’s astounding Night Night Fawn. I guess you could call it a family novel? But it’s at least as much about fascism as it is about the family – as well as about unsettling linkages between the two. And for horrors and rage in a nonfiction register, Jonas Marvin’s The Breaking of the English Working Class is an indispensable – and beautifully written – essay on decades of structural, economic and psychic violence. The feeling it provoked in me brought to mind John Berger’s phrase “undefeated despair”.

Xbox, PC (version tested); The Coalition/Xbox Game Studios
E-Day boasts the best combat in 20 years of Gears games – but everything surrounding it is disappointing

Every Gears of War game released in the last 20 years has made reverent reference to Emergence Day, when alien creatures emerged from the earth, single-minded in their savagery. In E-Day, you’re there to witness it: the police lights, flipped cars, ground tremors, civilians running, aliens pouring out of fissures in the earth and ripping faces off. You’re at ground zero in a squad of four soldiers called Gears – Marcus Fenix, the leader; Dom, who wants to retire; Lucas, a green cadet with a buzzcut; and the dishonourably discharged Mags. Only this dysfunctional quartet can turn the tide. With guns. Lots of ’em.

Instead of answering questions raised by the ending of 2019’s Gears 5, we’re back to the start to find out why Marcus has a scar on his lip and why these soldiers started strapping chainsaws on to their assault rifles. Anything that was left to the imagination is here, for you to point at and say: “I understood that reference. This is a thing that I have seen.”

There’s no Leon, Claire or Ada Wong in Cregger’s adaptation. Instead, it re-creates something more fundamental – the strange, terrifying experience of actually playing the game

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I’ve been surprised by the number of Resident Evil fans complaining on social media about Zach Cregger’s cinematic adaptation of the survival horror series. “It’s not a real Resident Evil movie,” they’ve claimed. Were we watching the same film? Certainly, it doesn’t feature any of the familiar heroes – there’s no Leon, no Claire, no Ada Wong – and there’s a distinct lack of recognisable antagonists and well-known locations. Despite all of this, Cregger’s interpretation is one of the most accurate and interesting video game films ever made.

On the surface, it’s about a zombifying virus that gets accidentally released in Raccoon City by the Umbrella Corporation. These are, of course, the foundations of the Resi mythos. More interestingly, Cregger seeks to replicate and explore the structural and narrative conventions of the series. In the film, the player character, hapless courier Bryan Hodukavich, is thrust into a viral outbreak, with no weapons and no idea what’s going on. He is then submerged into an uncanny shadow world of escalating peril and body horror. The film takes us through a series of locations dragged straight from the games – an abandoned farmhouse, a road tunnel crammed with abandoned cars, a hospital and the obligatory sewer level. As he progresses, Bryan finds increasingly powerful weapons, from a handgun to an assault rifle – but he is always short on ammo. And there are typewriters in at least two scenes!

PlayStation 5, Xbox, PC (version played); Bandai Namco
The game generates blood-pumping moments as you twist, turn and weave through the skies, while your locked-on missiles speed away to obliterate an enemy plane

The core appeal of any Ace Combat game lies in the moment when the beautiful clouds part, the sunlight glints off your perfectly rendered state-of-the-art fighter jet, and guitar-shredding music kicks into overdrive as your locked-on missiles speed away to obliterate an enemy plane. All of that is 100% present in Ace Combat 8: Wings of Theve. What’s new is the way it delivers its unexpectedly compelling story.

Set in the Earth-like alternative world of Strangereal, where every country is absolutely obsessed with fighter planes and giant superweapons, Ace Combat drafts you into the role of a fake ace pilot called the Wings of Theve – a propaganda invention to raise the morale of a besieged nation, similar to real-life rumours about Ukraine’s Ghosts of Kyiv. You rapidly find yourself becoming an actual legendary pilot, soaring through the skies with your buddies and raining hell upon your oppressors as everybody cheers on the radio. Speaking of ghosts, you have one in your ear – your predecessor, whom nobody else can hear, a gravelly voice waxing lyrical about flying, war and whatever else is on his mind as you flit about.

I’ve been holed up in an flat, affectionately dubbed the ‘brotel’, with my son for weeks – and we’ve revisited the first game we ever played together

I have spent the last three weeks living with my 22-year-old son in a two-bedroom flat he has dubbed the ”brotel”. We cook curries and watch Lanterns. We barbecue meat and analyse Tarantino movies. We get pizza and we play video games. Boy, do we play video games!

The first game I ever played in co-op with him was Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 in 2009, when he was five. He wasn’t the most accomplished sidekick, not so great at placing a mobile gun turret while under fire from what seems like a bazillion enemy soldiers, but we had a laugh. It started the video game bond between us before his sister introduced him to Banjo-Kazooie and Rayman, and he stopped being a preschool warmonger. Probably for the best. So how would it be tackling the same game nearly two decades later?

Sylvia: A Musical Revolution, the hit show about the Pankhursts and the suffrage movement, is going on a tour of England and Scotland. We took a first look at Leicester’s Curve theatre

Sadler’s Wells East, London
An interrogater tries to get to the bottom of a surreal scandal while green screen actors meddle with the story in Jess and Morgs’ inventive production

What audiences remember most from a political interview, a voiceover tells the prime minister (Kennedy Muntanga) as he prepares to face his TV interrogator (Rebecca Bassett-Graham, coiffed à la Emily Maitlis), is less the words themselves than the tone of voice and the tenor of the body. Muntanga is on point, then: his arms sweep, his fingers beetle and his hands spread out, as if he were wordlessly fielding fly-by questions and offering open statements. It’s the moves and the staging that count.

This setup lands right in the zone for creative duo Jess and Morgs (Jessica Wright and Morgann Runacre-Temple), whose turf is a congenial mix of choreography, film and theatre. In Deepfake, along with writer Jeff James, they explore the various unravellings of an encounter in which the interviewer tries to find the truth behind a surreal – but maybe real? – story in which the PM was seen variously spattered with yellow paint, with his flies undone, and partaking in a ritual involving a deer’s head.

Royal Opera House, London
Evgeny Titov’s brutal and powerful new staging of Wagner’s final opera explains as little as possible. Christian Gerhaher is a compelling and wild-eyed Amfortas and Jakub Hrůša and the Royal Opera’s orchestra are superb

Grail, wound, spear: some of the narrative trappings of Wagner’s final opera are immediately recognisable as symbolic. Others – woman, saviour, chastity, seduction, suffering, death – are harder to pin down, lodged in the half-light between the literal and the metaphorical. Wagner’s score is his most beguilingly luminous; its critics have pored over the work’s commitment to racial purity, its misogyny, its religiosity. The question that Evgeny Titov’s debut production for the Royal Opera poses is whether we really believe in the story Parsifal tells – the fall, the curse, the redemption through purity – and what it means if we want to.

Titov’s staging explains as little as possible. In Etienne Pluss’s sets, the grail realm is an underground bunker hewn from monumental stone blocks that trundle slowly around the stage. There are CCTV screens and a grimy washroom where Amfortas – the fallen King – is scrubbed down by Grail Knights in breathing apparatus. Costume designer Esther Bialas has the Knights in anoraks. Kundry (the virgin-whore dichotomy incarnate) wears black leathers at first, virginal white later. In a rare moment of literal-mindedness, Titov has Parsifal arrive holding the swan he has shot, which twitches gawkily until the orchestra heralds its demise.

Barbican, London
Spinning off from the classic symphony with composer Caroline Shaw and artist Sarah Crowner, Tanowitz’s dancers find fresh thinking space

Pam Tanowitz’s work is the antidote to the trend in dance for dark and shadowy stages, buckets of theatrical haze, claustrophobic soundscapes and gloopy movement. This stage is so bright and clean, like a sharp palate cleanser, and full of white space – literally, and in a more figurative manner. Tanowitz’s dance can be eccentric, odd even, but it’s also seriously thought-through and specific, every choice utterly distinct and deliberate, every angle planed to the exact degree.

This UK premiere of Pastoral is a collaboration between New York choreographer Tanowitz, Pulitzer prize-winning composer Caroline Shaw and artist Sarah Crowner. Inspired by Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony and the idea of the pastoral in art, Shaw pulls apart and deconstructs the Beethoven, with three live musicians (on various reed instruments) and excerpts of orchestral recordings that emerge like echoes or memories, plus real-world sounds of the street, the skies and the city.

A caiman wearing a wig, two brown bears laughing and a leopard doing a handstand feature in the selection of finalists from this year’s Nikon Comedy Wildlife awards. Winners will be announced on 8 December

In this week’s newsletter: As The Celebrity Traitors returns, Winkleman once again proves herself the show’s secret weapon​, becoming heir to a distinctly British TV tradition

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The Celebrity Traitors has returned and, as ever, its pleasures are manifold: the coming together of very different types of famous people (what other show gives you the chance to see mathematician Hannah Fry chatting with Jerry Hall); the now obligatory series-upending first-episode twist; Richard E Grant careering around trying to break the game; Ross Kemp, eyes wide with terror, convinced that anyone who touches him, talks to him or blows on him is his killer.

There’s so much to enjoy in fact, that you almost overlook the heavy-fringed host at the show’s centre. By this point Claudia Winkleman feels undeniably core to the series, in both its Celebrity and civilian guises – as much a part of the furniture as that mustard armchair where faithfuls learn that they have been murdered. So much so, in fact, that it feels jarring – just plain wrong – when you watch one of the international variants of the Traitors and see someone else attempting to play the part of the pantomimish master or mistress of ceremonies; Alan Cumming, Siobhan McSweeney, or any of the other non-Claudias. They all make a decent fist of it, but none of them manage it quite like her.

As a fan of Henri Cartier-Bresson, the Egyptian photographer was determined to capture his own ‘decisive moment’

Mirna Abass regards his small Egyptian city as “heaven for street, travel and documentary photography”. At the intersection of the Nile and the Mediterranean, the governorate of Damietta is home to Ezbet El Borg, a shipbuilding and fishing port. Abass describes it as “a colourful hub of daily fishing life; fishers and their nets, boats being built, maintained and painted”.

On the day he took this shot, Abass had joined a walk with the Egyptian Camera Crew photography club. Abass works as an agricultural engineer, but describes film and photography as his true passions. Henri Cartier-Bresson is one of his biggest inspirations, and he is often guided by the pioneering photographer’s concept of the decisive moment.

New York film festival: No spoilers here – TV’s grand illusionist meets his match when he moves in with Theranos founder and her family

For anyone remotely near the worlds of documentary, comedy or medical fraud, there has been one thing on the mind for weeks now: a single-minute clip of Nathan Fielder, the absurdist comedian whose boundary-pushing HBO series The Rehearsal cemented his status as docu-reality’s premier auteur, staring into the deep blue eyes of Elizabeth Holmes, the disgraced founder of the blood-testing startup Theranos. Unblinking, faces inches apart, the famously dry purveyor of harebrained business schemes and the convicted fraudster appeared locked in a battle of wills. “Are you being real right now?” Fielder asked her, in a classically meta bit – could Fielder really have spent years filming a secret documentary with one of Silicon Valley’s most notorious pariahs?

The prospect of TV’s grand illusionist versus emblematic girl-boss scammer seemed potentially too good to be true; buzz for You Can See Everything, Fielder’s furtive documentary co-directed with wunderkind du jour Lance Oppenheim (whose narrative feature debut, the Robert Pattinson-starring Primetime, premiered last month) was such that access to the film’s New York film festival premiere on Wednesday became this fall’s hottest ticket.

Shahar, 29, a graphic designer and music label manager, meets Stephen, 34, a product designer

What were you hoping for?
I’d never been on a blind date, so a good story, and a new connection.

Holland on his dashed Olympic dreams, ranking the Real Housewives shows, and a terrifying taxi ride

Born in Greater Manchester, Henry Holland, 43, worked as a stylist and fashion editor for Smash Hits magazine. In 2006, he gained attention for his witty slogan T-shirts which were worn during London fashion week. Two years later, he founded his fashion label, House of Holland, and in 2020, he established Henry Holland Studio, which specialises in ceramics and homewares. He has curated There’s No Place Like It, an exhibition at The Royal Society of Sculptors in London, which runs until 28 November. He is married and lives in London.

When were you happiest?
In my late teen years, on that verge of having independence and no responsibilities.

Steam through the laundry pile with our expert’s top picks for smoothing creases on cotton, linen, silk and more

• How to look after your knitwear

I grew up in a household where everything was ironed. And I mean everything: tea towels, pyjamas, bath mats. Perhaps as a result of watching my mother (and yes, it was always my mother) spend hours every week standing at an ironing board, I revolted. My heart sinks every time I have to go into battle with an iron. But how do we banish irons while still getting linen trousers to look crisp? I present the clothes steamer.

Clothes steamers use heat and moisture rather than pressure to smooth fabric. A small onboard tank heats water into a steady flow of steam, which you run over garments while they hang. Instead of pressing fibres flat like an iron, the steam causes them to swell and relax, releasing creases without the need for an ironing board.

From bullets to rabbits to wand vibrators, our sexual wellbeing expert demystifies what’s available and rates her top 17 models (she tested 67)

• 26 easy ways to spice up your sex life

I could write here about how almost a fifth of women surveyed by Durex said using a sex toy was the most dependable way for them to climax. Or I could point out how Kinsey Institute research suggests regular masturbation can help relieve and prevent symptoms of menopause, such as vaginal atrophy. I could even tell you that studies demonstrate a significant correlation between intimate toy ownership and greater satisfaction – not only with sex but also with life itself.

But the potted version is that orgasms and erotic pleasure are glorious, and top-class toys can help you savour more of both. So here are the best vibrators available. Scroll to the bottom to find out how I selected these vibrators from the 67 I tested for this piece.

Trekking poles can improve balance on uneven terrain and reduce stress on joints. Our seasoned adventurer put 10 to the test to find the best

• ‘I’d never head out without one’: 10 hiking essentials

Oh, I would walk 500 miles – with the help of a trusty pole. A walking pole – or two – makes a surprisingly handy addition to your hiking kit, helping with balance on uneven terrain, taking strain away from your legs and knees, and making going up and down hills much easier. I first tried walking poles when I went trekking in the Himalayas – now, I wouldn’t be without one on rugged terrain, but they can be just as helpful on a casual stroll.

Hiking poles are typically used as a pair, and the idea is to swing each pole in time with the opposite foot as you move forwards: right foot and left pole, then left foot and right pole, in a rhythm. You can also use poles singly to keep a hand free or to take the weight off one side of your body.

It’s often thought of as the problem, but what if the right technology could help us switch off and live more in the moment?

• The best screen-free activities

With the continued backlash against AI and growing concern about our reliance on screens, an analogue life has never looked so appealing. I haven’t gone so far as to get myself an analogue bag just yet, but I have done a relatively complex puzzle and read five physical books this year, which is already two more than in 2025.

But it also struck me recently that I have, somewhat conversely, been using digital tools to do a lot of analogue activities. What if tech could help us live more in the present and reduce our screen time, while benefiting our physical and mental health in the long run?

A worthy, meat-free version of the best comfort dish ever, this French classic is best served with a chilled red and a crisp salad

This is the best comfort dish on planet Earth. Cauliflower cheese held that title when I was a child, but I still remember the first time I ate this gratin, made by Simon Hopkinson at his restaurant Hilaire in London, and wanting to take it away and eat it in a quiet corner. Endive when braised well retains a gentle bitterness that contrasts beautifully with a cheese-heavy bechamel. This dish is traditionally made with comté and with each endive wrapped in a slice of cooked ham, but some dark, crisp-fried mushrooms and emmental serve very well as good, savoury vegetarian alternatives.

Henry Harris is chef/co-owner of Bouchon Racine, London EC1. His book, The Racine Effect, is published by Quadrille at £40. To order a copy for £36, go to guardianbookshop.com

You need five things: broth, flavour-giving tare, noodles, fat and toppings. And it’s the toppings that make it really special. Here are five versions, from a Toyko classic to a new Cardiff cult hit

Watch our guide to the UK’s best ramen renegades in Feed with Jimi Famurewa

At its simplest, ramen is the balance of five elements: broth, tare (secret seasoning sauce), noodles, fat and toppings. If you understand that, this seemingly cryptic and complex corner of Japanese food culture opens right up. The first four take time, but if you pick up a shop-bought stock and some decent noodles, I won’t tell anyone. But the toppings are where the real payoff is: the fastest way to turn a midweek nothing into something worth showing off.

A universal note
Spring onions should be used to top every bowl (finely diced white onion will work as a backup). Where there’s a broth, aim for 300ml, and where dashi is mentioned, instant is fine – unless you’re vegan, in which case steep 20g each of kombu and dried shiitake in one litre of cold water overnight, and keep the mushrooms for the soboro. Noodle portions are 130g unless stated otherwise, and any specialist items should be available online or at your local Asian supermarket.

Try a millionaire’s martini, a Campari that couldn’t be simpler and a booze-free blackberry fizz (plus an Aperol that doesn’t need a spritz)

I make a variation on this year-round. Bring on the autumn.

A warming, comforting, spiced drink that’s ideal for autumn, and pairs brilliantly with a slice of carrot cake

The move into autumn proper leads our taste buds to crave warmth and comfort in equal measure. And what could be more warming and comforting than a spiced vodka and citrus cocktail spiced with nut liqueur? Slice of carrot cake optional.

Bruce Dorfling, bar manager, Palé Hall, Bala, Gwynedd, Wales

Instead of asking her to step away from her distress, writes advice columnist Eleanor Gordon-Smith, could you suggest she channel it into action?

• Read more Leading questions

My wife is obsessed with everything that’s happening in the US. She literally spends all day sitting on the couch, watching videos and reading opinion pieces. She’s originally from America and has been living abroad for 25 years and she has family in the US, so I get that she needs to feel connected to what’s happening. But it’s constant. Whether we’re eating, watching a TV show or movie, when we’re talking about something completely unrelated – everything, every topic, either starts or ends with outrage.

I’ve told her she needs to take at least one day off all social media, but she won’t do that even for an hour. It stresses her out more and more every day, but she just keeps going back to it – and it has been really affecting me, more lately than ever. On weekends I stay up late playing games (my way of winding down after a week of work) and she’ll go to bed early. And during those times sometimes I just sit and cry. Everything that’s happening is so stressful, and there’s nothing we can do about it. I just wish I could rip away her phone and let her breathe! I don’t know what to say or do. Is there anything that could help?

Kitty is buying a flat and Henry is moving in with her, but they’re already having decor disagreements. You decide who needs to get over their hang-ups?

• Find out how to get a disagreement settled or become a juror

It’s not a showroom; it’s a home. Both people should get a chance to display their personalities

A bad breakup had made me afraid I would be mired in anger for ever. But on that family hike, in our fear and horror as we awaited the air ambulance, my old hurts took on a different hue

To steal a well-known line, 2023 is not a year on which I shall look back with undiluted pleasure. My annus horribilis began when a long-term relationship broke up in January, only six months after we had bought our first home together. I was about to turn 38 and the future I thought was mine – marriage, children – all fell apart. What followed was blow after blow: my sister announced her engagement, I was told by a fertility doctor that I was “not a suitable candidate” for egg freezing, and I soon began having multiple panic attacks a day.

Ordinarily, my work would have been my solace; when I wrote, it was as if time was suspended. But now, my words abandoned me. They would not come, no matter how much I tried. So, in April, I decided to take the rest of the year off to recover. As I was self-employed, this was not a choice I made lightly – but my heart was broken and so too, it seemed, was my brain.

It seemed like a good idea to get a puppy with my partner, but then he left me. Single life was hard at first but my disobedient dog made me laugh again

In the spring of 2024, my boyfriend and I lay in bed scrolling through photos of puppies. What about this one? Or that one? We had only been dating for six months or so, but had become besotted quickly, making long-term plans and talking about our future.

Then I found the one: a scruffy, small terrier with black and brown markings on his back that looked like the world map and eyes like Galaxy Minstrels. We named him Dennis to connect him to my mum’s terrier, Beano, because she was ill at the time and I’d failed to provide her with a grandchild. A puppy was the consolation present.

The Naylors’ four-bedroom home in Milton Keynes acts like a mini-power station after retrofitting solar panels, a battery and a heat pump

Clare Naylor paid close attention to how much energy she and her family were using last winter, filling hot-water bottles and bringing out extra blankets to ensure they didn’t go over budget. This year, she won’t have to worry as she is guaranteed not to receive a bill.

While millions of British households face the highest energy charges in three years from today after a 4% rise in the price cap, and predictions of a 16% increase in January, upgrades to Naylor’s home mean she will not have to pay anything.

From a neo-baronial country house with turrets in acres of grounds in Scotland to a modernist tower block in a bustling part of London

Nothing is guaranteed but there are ways to boost your chances of experiencing such in-demand events

Whether your passion is the battle of the bands or the Battle of Hastings, what are probably Britain’s hottest cultural tickets are about to go on sale – and to be in with a shout of going, there are insider tips that will get you a good spot in the queue.

General admission tickets to the Glastonbury festival next June go on sale online at 9am on Sunday, while the next tranche of tickets to view the Bayeux tapestry at the British Museum will be released to members on Tuesday 6 October before a public on-sale on 21 October.

Original triple lock was designed to lift pensioners out of poverty but OBR says it contributes to unsustainability of public finances

The prime minister has announced that the pensions triple lock will be scrapped in its current form, to partly fund a national care service.

Experts say that if you’re eating any berry – strawberries, blackberries, currants, raspberries, blueberries – you are benefiting

Sprinkled on top of yoghurt, blended into smoothies or baked into crumbles, berries are among Americans’ favorite fruits.

Luckily, berries are as healthy as they are delicious and versatile: low in calories, full of vitamins and antioxidants, and a good source of fiber. Research shows that, depending on the type, berries support cardiovascular health, may boost gut health and fight inflammation and show promise as part of a “healthy dietary strategy for diabetes prevention and management”, to quote researchers. Meta-analyses also link compounds in berries with improved cognitive health.

The internet is full of warnings about our ‘dysregulated’ nervous systems. But, experts say, you don’t need to reset yours – you might just need to make it more flexible. Here’s how (and no, you don’t need an acupressure mat)

Whether it’s tapping the side of your hand or standing on a vibrating plate, suggestions on how to “reset” your nervous system are saturating the internet. Cold water plunges, humming, gargling, yawning and spiky acupressure mats are all being touted as ways to help us “regulate” and return to calm. If you’re still talking about feeling “stressed”, you’re behind the times; now, says the internet, you are “dysregulated”.

The nervous system is an integral part of being human. “It’s essentially the body’s communication and control network,” says Dr Serena Lai, consultant psychiatrist and associate medical director at London Psychiatry Clinic. “Made up of the brain and spinal cord, it communicates with the entire body through nerves, helping us to sense what is happening around and inside us. When we have that information, we can process it and coordinate a response.”

Judy Wearing has spent much of her life studying our follicles. She explains how our armpits betray our emotions, why some gentlemen really do prefer blondes and the reason we evolved to have eyebrows

As a PhD student at Oxford studying mating behaviour, Judy Wearing was suddenly struck by a thought: what was the purpose of pubic hair? The point of armpit hair? The function of each of our body’s furry patches? When the published literature failed to produce satisfying answers, Wearing began her own investigation. Her aim was to shed light on why exactly we evolved these particular patches, with pubic hair the most puzzling of all: was it for warmth, protection … or something else?

Wearing is still tangling with those questions, some 30 years after her student days. Now an author and editor (largely in the education sector), she has revisited her fascination with hair in Anxious and Hairy: The Evolution and Culture of Human Hair, exploring its unexpectedly dense and layered place in our history and psyche. Even Wearing was surprised by the places her research on hair took her, and the mysteries that still remain to be solved. “A lot of these questions, no one’s actually looked at,” she says over Zoom. Here is a mere snip of the fascinating facts she’s uncovered about hair.

Experts share what you need to know about GLP-1-related hair loss as the side-effect gets more attention from researchers

About 20 million people across the US, UK, and EU are taking GLP-1 receptor agonists like tirzepatide and semaglutide (Ozempic or Mounjaro are common brands) for weight loss and type 2 diabetes. As their use has surged, we’re learning more about their side-effects. One that’s been getting a lot of attention from researchers lately: hair loss.

In one survey of people who take these medications, 20% of respondents experienced hair shedding, although the lack of high-quality data from a randomized, controlled trial to assess this side-effect makes it difficult to know exactly how common it is.

Olivia Colman and Lisa Bonet are among the stars going silver – but workplace ageism means many women still fear ditching the dye

To dye, or not to dye. That is the decision many people, particularly women, face when their hair starts to grey.

This week Olivia Colman joined the growing ranks of women embracing grey hair and ditching the dye. Appearing at Zurich film festival, Colman had swapped her dark signature pixie cut for a grey, curly mane swept to one side.

From pillboxes and boaters to bicornes and buckets, characterful hats are making their way from the catwalk to the high street

“Here goes – an order for a million hats,” wrote Jackie Kennedy to Bergdorf Goodman before moving into the White House in the early 1960s. It’s a line that could have been uttered by any number of people working in fashion today, because the hat – and not just the ubiquitous baseball cap – has been enjoying a very characterful resurgence.

This season at the turbo-high-end brand Loro Piana, whose clothes are beloved by tech bros and Kendall Roy, almost every model was wearing a hat. At Thom Browne, straw boaters came shrouded in colourful mesh. At Chloé there were see-through hats to match see-through trenchcoats and white sailor hats atop all-white outfits. Courrège’s hats were space-age, Burberry had big buckets, Bottega Veneta had hats brimming with charisma.

American in Paris showcases new simplicity with stretch cocktail frocks, but there’s still plenty of gold-foiled nipples and peekaboo fabrics to wow the frow

In a world of mega brands, the house of Schiaparelli is small but perfectly formed. There are only 10 points of sale worldwide where Schiaparelli clothes can be bought. The size of the business has risen from $6m in 2020 to around $100m today, but Schiaparelli is still small fry compared with other names on the Paris catwalks.

However, the Schiaparelli name punches above its weight. An exhibition at London’s V&A museum this year made a strong case for its founder, Elsa Schiaparelli, who collaborated with Salvador Dali and Jean Cocteau, as a creative force in the surrealism movement of the 1930s.

The animal welfare group has revived their runway-storming tactics from the naughts, now targeting the use of wool

Her walk was poised, her outfit – crop top, tailored trousers, high heels – so on point that when Josie Knowles strutted down a London Fashion Week catwalk last month she could have passed for a model. That is, had it not been for the sign the Peta protester held saying “H&M: Wool is Bloody Cruel.”

Still, as one social media commentator put it when praising her strut: “you cant tell me Peta didn’t know what they were doing when they hired this diva”.

As Michael Sheen prepares to bring Owain Glyndŵr to life on stage, our writer walks the peaceful national trail named after the last Welsh Prince of Wales

Between the treetops, I can see the towers of a distant mist-shrouded castle. Is it possible I could make contact with the spirit of the great Welsh hero Owain Glyndŵr so soon, at the very start of our hike? We are not even on the actual trail of Glyndŵr’s Way. I’ve had to make a detour to find accommodation that takes dogs, as Stevie the terrier is with me. The Castle Inn at Knucklas is a mile off the route, and two miles or so from the pretty border town of Knighton – where the 135-mile (217km) Glyndŵr’s Way officially begins.

The towers slide away behind trees and a railway viaduct emerges. The medieval castle ruins, it turns out, are believed to have been plundered to build the viaduct in the 1860s, and the builders dropped in a couple of crenelated towers to honour the origins of the stone. I fear this may be an early omen: the spirit of Glyndŵr will be as elusive as the man himself was in his lifetime.

From cycling in Berlin and the Black Forest to world-class cocktail bars in Cologne and magical North Sea beaches, readers share their travel tips

• Tell us about a sunny autumn break – the best tip wins a £200 holiday voucher

In an often overlooked corner of Germany, near the Dutch border, Münster is an absolute gem. Covered porticos will convince you you’re in northern Italy, gothic churches will remind you you’re in Mitteleuropa and the buns from Zeit für Brot will insist you’re in heaven. Nature-lovers can take in the Botanical Gardens and relax by the Münstersche Aa river. Those of a historical bent can peek into the room where the Treaty of Westphalia was signed in 1648 and mull the report card of nation states in the nearly 400 years since. But really, it’s a great place just to drop-anchor and lose a few days.
Jeremy

A ride in a water taxi transforms a stunning hike from Lyme Regis to West Bay into a perfect circular route

Many favour a circular walk, but you can give a linear one new shape with the addition of a novel form of transport. My wife Helen, our friend Tom Cox and I take the water taxi – a rigid inflatable boat (Rib) – from West Bay on Dorset’s coast to Lyme Regis, with a plan to walk back to our starting point.

The rain stops as the boat leaves the harbour, the views open along Chesil Beach to low-lying Portland to the east, and west to Lyme Regis; on the far horizon, we can see Start Point on the Devon coast. Our skipper, Nick, is highly knowledgable and takes time to stop and point out the history of the shoreline and the treacherous waters of Lyme Bay. The seabed is studded with wrecks – fishing boats and smugglers’ ships, but some are from the two world wars.

Converted from Victorian buffet bars, ticket offices and waiting rooms, these station pubs offer beautifully restored interiors, real ales and a slice of railway history

No prizes for guessing what this pub used to be… The Old Ticket Office has high ceilings, walls painted shades of locomotive green and booths resembling train carriages; there are outdoor tables on Station Square. A live train departures board theoretically prevents passengers lingering too long, and a canning machine means any draught beer is also available to take away (the hatch on platform 4 also does takeaway orders). There are five handpulls plus Young’s usual spritz menu and other drinks, plus light bites and pizzas. The pub is currently closed for roof repairs and expected to reopen by the end of October.

By over-committing to the bit, I’m in danger of becoming the very thing that I mock

There was a kid in my year in high school named Jimmy Tremarelli. We were in a couple of the same classes, and also had occasion to pass each other in the hall between bells about three times a day. Whenever we did Jimmy would nod and say, “Dr Dowling”, and I would say, “Dr Tremarelli”. And then we’d carry on in opposite directions.

Over the years the pretence became gradually more elaborate. Sometimes Jim would steal up alongside me at the end of class, cupping my elbow in the palm of his hand.

From the Geordie Springsteen to Bridalveil Fall and El Capitan, test your knowledge with the Saturday quiz

1 Whose funeral in 1989 attracted about 10 million mourners?
2 What is the only major river to cross the equator twice?
3 Which singer has been called the Geordie Springsteen?
4 What is the largest surviving carnivorous marsupial?
5 What was added to 30 June 2015?
6 Which sci-fi epic was inspired by the shifting sands of the Oregon coast?
7 Football and which other sport were banned in Scotland in 1457?
8 Which war memorial was designed by Yale student Maya Lin?
What links:
9 Buzzard; Clair; Cygnus; Jackdaw; Rosebank?
10 Dis; Duat; Helheim; Irkalla; Mictlan?
11 England: 188,900; Scotland: 37,200; Wales: 21,100?
12 Susan Janet Ballion; Marianne Elliott-Said; Arianna Forster and Paloma Romero?
13 Bridalveil Fall; El Capitan; Half Dome; Mount Lyell; Sentinel Dome?
14 Saving Private Ryan; Pressure; The Longest Day?
15 Everton (currently); Arsenal; Southampton; Norwich City?

Five multiple-choice questions – set by children – to test your knowledge, and a chance to submit your own junior brainteasers for future quizzes

• ​Submit a question

Molly Oldfield hosts Everything Under the Sun, a podcast answering children’s questions. Do check out her books, Everything Under the Sun and Everything Under the Sun: Quiz Book, as well as her new title, Everything Under the Sun: All Around the World.

A teenager struggling with climate anxiety searches for hope in an unexpected place – writing letters to imprisoned activists. Max, 14, is on a quest to understand the human stories behind direct action and why so many climate protesters are in prison​. As replies begin to arrive, a dialogue bridging generations unfolds and connection transforms despair into purpose. ​When Max writes to the judge presiding over a high-profile trial​, he is surprised to hear the letter referred to in the judge's closing remarks

Mayor Vitali Klitschko says Kyivans can no longer pretend it is ‘peacetime’ amid strikes on school, hospital and bridge

Valeriya Tkachenko was dropping her son off at school in central Kyiv when the air raid alert sounded. Staff hurried the children and parents into the shelter, where the frightened lawyer spent the next two hours with her son.

“I’m scared to death all day about what could happen to my son,” she said as she emerged from the shelter, already late for work.

These graphics explain what the Democrats would need to do to flip the Senate and House of Representatives

A turning point in Donald Trump’s second term will soon arrive. On 3 November, voters across the US will decide whether to keep the president’s Republican allies in control of Congress, or return Democrats to the majority.

Many indicators of voter sentiment suggest the Democrats are favored to take back control of the House of Representatives, and potentially the Senate. Winning either would be a significant victory for the party and give it the power to block Trump’s legislative agenda and more aggressively investigate his administration.

In a new book, German artist and writer Philipp Ruch argues that viewing the ascent of Hitler’s NSDAP through the prism of the Third Reich has distorted our understanding of fascism’s electoral breakthrough

With your art collective Centre for Political Beauty you famously built a replica of the Holocaust memorial on a property next to the home of an AfD politician. Now you’ve written a history book about the Nazis’ rise to power. Don’t we already know everything there is to know about the 1932 elections, the Reichstag fire and the Enabling Act of 1933?

About three years ago I became interested in how Hitler’s National Socialist German Workers’ party (NSDAP) rose to prominence when Germany was still a democracy, because I hoped it could tell us something about the success of rightwing extremist movements today. From looking at historical sources, I realised that the Reichstag elections of 14 September 1930 were in many ways more important than what happened in 1932 and 1933. And I expected it to be an open-and-shut case. But the more I looked into it, the more I realised that most of the theories we have to explain the rise of the Nazis don’t make sense – the data tells a completely different, far darker story.

Much is made of the decision to try to preserve fertility but less explored are the choices that come afterwards. We want to hear from people about what happened next

Oocyte cryopreservation, more commonly known as egg freezing, has been around for decades but the procedure stopped being considered experimental in 2012. Since then, elective egg freezing has boomed. Often represented as an insurance policy against age- or illness-related fertility decline, the process can be costly and complex.

While figures vary, research suggests most people who undergo egg freezing never access their eggs and results are mixed for those who do. Long-term storage poses its own costs and questions.

Are you making cutbacks in light of the price increases?

The average price of diesel in the UK climbed to a record £2 a litre on 2 October.

The price of a litre at UK forecourts has risen 40.5% since late February, when the US-Israel war on Iran began disrupting supplies of crude and refined oil products from the Gulf, leading to cost increases across the economy.

Perhaps you lost your home or possessions in a wildfire, or your mountain business has been affected by glacial retreat and snow scarcity

Has direct experience of a global climate event where you live changed how you now view the climate crisis?

Perhaps you were sceptical or even denied the climate crisis before the impact of recent global climactic events.

How has loneliness affected you? Please share your experience

We live in an age where we have better tools for communication and connection than ever before, and yet we are in the midst of a loneliness epidemic.

In 2025, a World Health Organization report identified that 1 in 6 people globally are lonely. The report defined loneliness as “the painful feeling that arises from a gap between desired and actual social connections.” Perhaps, most strikingly, the age bracket that had the highest levels of loneliness was 13–29-year-olds.

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Russian strikes on Kyiv, the flydubai plane incident, student protests in Paris and Mount Etna erupts – the past seven days as captured by the world’s leading photojournalists

Warning: this gallery contains images some readers may find distressing