From a transporting historical saga to a tale of small-town betrayal, the authors of our favourite page-turners reveal the books they take on holiday – introduced by Jenny Colgan

It is important to follow a balanced diet on holiday. Too many “My Wife’s Sister’s Husband’s Psychopath”, and you’ll get confused and grumpy. Too much sugary romance and your teeth will fall out. Something too big and challenging you’ve been meaning to get round to for ages will make you feel guilty and more liable to give in to scrolling, and if you take too many supposedly upmarket “must reads” of the summer, you will simply prove to yourself just how much overhyped averageness there is out there, when all you want is something satisfying.

You need to be able to chop and change depending on your mood, which means fiction and nonfiction. And finally, you need to be able to throw all of these rules out of the window if you find a sandy old water-stained copy of, for example, James Herbert’s Domain in your holiday cottage and decide to devote yourself to 600 pages of post-nuclear mutant rat-strewn London, or choose to go for a full-on Maeve Binchy sesh.

Avtar spent decades wondering what happened to the mother he never got to know. Thousands of miles away, Nicci was haunted by the story of a half-brother given away before she was born. How did a chatbot bring them together?

As a small boy growing up in Amritsar, India, in the 1960s, Avtar Singh used to hear whispers. Your mum isn’t really your mum, the rumours would say. Your mum lives abroad. Avtar didn’t really pay any attention to it. “I thought, the neighbours are just making up stories.” But the stories were true: the woman raising Avtar was actually his grandmother. When he was too young to remember it, his father had emigrated to Canada to work as a teacher, leaving Avtar in the care of his paternal grandparents. His grandfather, a police officer, was a fearsome authoritarian, but his grandmother brought him up with tenderness, as if he were her own son. She called him by his nickname, Titu. He felt loved.

When Avtar was around eight years old, he was told about his family in Canada: his dad, his mum and a little brother were waiting for him there, and he would soon travel to join them. Just after his ninth birthday, Avtar found himself sitting on a plane, dressed in a three‑piece suit and tie. He was travelling alone. He had never flown before. He didn’t speak a word of English. He landed in Halifax, Nova Scotia, on Christmas Eve, 1968; his family met him at the airport and took him home. “I didn’t know what to think,” Avtar, now 66, tells me in a video call from his home in Abbotsford, British Columbia. “Before I knew it, it was the first week of January, and I was put in school.”

Investigation finds evidence of distinct groups, from big-picture thinkers to those who sweat the small stuff

An investigation into what people think about has put the spotlight on the modern mind, revealing thoughts dominated by work, the need for coffee and a strong desire to go back to bed.

It also found evidence for four distinct groups of thinkers who spend more time than most either worrying about the world; mulling on household chores and finances; focusing on the mind and body; or the work-hard, play-hard combination of career and pleasure.

In the Warrington suburb of Culcheth, people are hopeful about what one of their own can achieve as the first northern PM in half a century

The Cherry Tree pub is an unassuming local. On a busy road in the Cheshire village of Culcheth, it is a chain-run pub where four shots cost £8, every burger comes with a soft drink, and sport is shown all day on the big screens. It is also a favourite of Andy Burnham, the new prime minister.

Many of the drinkers have a story about – arguably – Culcheth’s most famous son.

There’s no denying the power of the film on the big screen. But how far should modern moral sensibilities influence adaptations of classics?

Everyone knows how dumb it is to be this person: the one who mourns the film adaptation of a favourite text because it misses out this scene, or misreads that particularly beloved character, or has a slightly “inauthentic” take on some detail. Of course I’m talking about Christopher Nolan’s film adaptation of the Odyssey, a poem I have loved since I was a teenager. I enjoyed the movie, in common with a huge number of other people. It seems remarkable, even dizzying, that the adaptation of a nearly 3,000-year-old poem took $264m (£196m) at the box office over its opening weekend, has sent translations of the Odyssey surging up the bestseller charts, and is sold out (for instance) at London’s BFI Imax screen deep into September. We are living in an Odyssey time, amid an Odyssey frenzy.

There is no point trying to be a purist about a beloved classic text. Whoever reads the Odyssey, including Nolan, inescapably does so through the prism of their prejudices, informed by the conditions of their own place and time. Since the Odyssey is the result of decades, maybe centuries, of non-literate oral poets working with memory and improvisation, there’s no precise “original” place or time to return to, anyway. But what I can’t help doing is observe the choices Nolan has made and think about their consequences – because there are always divides in the road, paths not taken by any adapter.

Jacob, 27, a volunteer manager, meets Sophie, 28, a journalist

What were you hoping for?
To meet someone who I could connect with and possibly go on further dates.

Officials in Spain warn winds could worsen fires on Saturday

• Tell us: have you been affected by wildfires in Europe?

The French prime minister, Sébastien Lecornu, has requested the armed forces to deploy an Airbus A400M military transport aircraft earlier than originally planned to help tackle the major wildfires in Gironde, according to Le Monde.

The French newspaper reported the aircraft’s use was not originally expected until the end of the month due to the technical preparations and tests required beforehand.

While the fires raging across forests in France are a dramatic reminder of three successive heatwaves in as many months, the state of the country’s rivers provides another, no less worrying insight into the impact of extreme heat supercharged by the climate crisis.

The Loire, France’s longest river, is at a historical low, with the flow of some branches, including through the city of Orléans, reduced to a trickle between sandbanks. Two weeks ago, 16% of French rivers were reported to have dried up. A quarter of small streams were stagnant or had disappeared altogether, according to the national low water observatory. There has been little rain since.

President mocks political opponents and journalists in mostly light-hearted, hour-long speech at White House correspondents’ dinner

Donald Trump joked around with the room of journalists who he again accused of producing “fake news” as he hurled insults at his political enemies in a speech at the White House correspondents’ dinner.

A day after the Trump administration abandoned, for now, an extraordinary bid to subpoena reporters over their coverage, the US president attended the rescheduled White House correspondents’ dinner – an annual celebration of press freedom – in Washington on Friday evening.

In sea pools built with sandbags and rubble, Amjed Tantesh gives traumatised children brief respite from their daily lives

Swimming classes have started again in Gaza after three years of war, with hundreds of children learning to float, doggy paddle and take their first strokes in five makeshift sea pools built from sandbags and rubble.

The lessons allow a few hundred girls and boys to reclaim their childhood for a few hours in a place where there are no playgrounds, no formal education and children live in fear of continuing Israeli attacks. A UN survey in March found that 96% of children felt death was imminent.

Activity on the Gaza seafront

Jalsa Salana in Hampshire has had enhanced support from police, emergency services and local authorities

Security has been increased by several hundred additional staff at the UK’s largest Muslim convention, Jalsa Salana, alongside enhanced coordination with police, emergency services and local authorities, against a backdrop of growing anti-Muslim sentiment.

Last month, another big Islamic gathering was forced to close early after 12 people were arrested, including three on suspicion of conspiracy to murder, over a suspected far-right threat.

Campaigners urge government to introduce right of access to water, particularly as heatwaves become more common

Almost three-quarters of riverbanks in England have no public access, according to data released by the Right to Roam campaign.

Across the country, the public cannot use riverbanks or gain access to the rivers themselves in most of the river catchments from the west of Cornwall up to the Tweed, which flows through northern England and Scotland.

Celeste Rivas Hernandez, who was 13 at the time, later received an abortion, text messages indicate

Singer D4vd had impregnated the teenager he is accused of fatally stabbing, according to evidence presented in a Los Angeles courtroom on Friday. Celeste Rivas Hernandez later received an abortion, text messages between the two indicate.

The musician, who was born David Anthony Burke, apologized to Rivas Hernandez in January 2024 for “putting her through this”, in a text message obtained from his phone.

Pioneering activists risked arrest and imprisonment amid lingering persecution after Franco dictatorship

New research has shed light on Spain’s first transgender political organisation, a trailblazing collective that was launched in 1978 as its members grappled with the lingering persecution of the country’s four-decade dictatorship.

Founded in Barcelona, the Colectivo de Travestis y Transexuales, or Collective of Transvestis and Transexuals, sought to add its voice to the heated conversation playing out across Spain in the transition to democracy after the death of the dictator Francisco Franco in 1975.

‘I can’t tolerate this life,’ said the 24-year-old in his last voice message to his relatives. Attacked by the military, a rebel army and criminal gangs, Siraz Ullah risked all for a better future

The fear was audible as he spoke, recording a message to his family, asking for their prayers. After pressing send, 24-year-old Siraz Ullah boarded a boat he hoped could deliver him from the violence and persecution surrounding him at home in Myanmar.

Instead, Siraz is among 500 Rohingya refugees who have vanished at sea after setting sail for Malaysia in late June.

Don’t delay in taking advantage of the competition that is pushing up interest rates and increasing choice, experts say

It is shaping up to be a decent summer for savers as fierce competition among providers pushes up interest rates and increases choice.

You can currently get instant- and easy-access accounts that pay up to 5% interest, and fixed-rate savings bonds that pay almost that much. Meanwhile, those looking for a regular savings account can now get up to 8%.

From Mo Farah to Bus Aunty, new prime minister makes good on promise to ‘do things differently’ when it comes to communication

They say a week is a long time in politics, but handily for followers of Andy Burnham on social media, you can get daily updates of what the new PM has been up to on his timeline.

Before Burnham stepped inside No 10 this week he promised to “do things differently” in British politics. If his feed is anything to go by, he’s already way ahead of his predecessor.

Research into GLP-1 medications is not always robust but complaints such as digestive problems are well known

Weight loss jabs such as Wegovy and Mounjaro have boomed in popularity, and so have reports of myriad side-effects. This week researchers have suggested GLP-1 medications could be associated with hair loss.

It can be hard to keep tabs on which of these unintentional outcomes have been the subject of expert scrutiny and which remain little more than hearsay. We take a look at some of the most talked about side-effects and explore which have been studied – and which remain unproven.

President’s speech at Friday’s event started well enough but quickly moved to the usual insults, taunts, jokes and grievances

This time, at least, everyone got to finish their dinner.

And any urge to hide under the table was driven not by the barking commands of Secret Service agents on alert against a marauding gunman, but by a desire to escape the tedium of a meandering speech from Donald Trump that strayed quickly and wildly from the matter at hand into the weeds of his normal stump addresses.

The author on an encounter with the CIA, an embarrassing moment in church, and longing to hold hands with David Attenborough

Born in Glasgow, Andrew O’Hagan, 58, studied at the University of Strathclyde. In 1995, he published The Missing, a work of nonfiction. His debut novel, Our Fathers, was shortlisted for the Booker prize in 1999; Be Near Me and The Illuminations were longlisted in 2006 and 2015. His recent novels are Caledonian Road and Mayflies. The latter was adapted for BBC television in 2022 and is now a play which will be performed at the Edinburgh fringe from 7 to 30 August. O’Hagan is editor at large for the London Review of Books; he lives in London with his wife and has a daughter.

What is your greatest fear?
I can’t say it.

The new detective series with Emmy Rossum and Quincy Tyler Bernstine chasing a female serial killer is a must-see for Killing Eve fans

A male friend recently attended a Lily Allen show, and shakily described the experience to me. “I felt like a vegetarian fox at an armed chicken convention,” he said. An overwhelmingly female crowd were experiencing powerful catharsis, united in their anger at men and joy of bangers. I told him chickens couldn’t handle firearms, but I don’t think he heard me. He had tinnitus from the screaming.

There isn’t much screaming in Furious, Disney+’s new detective series (from Monday, 27 July). Also missing are the standard tropes of murder dramas: mutilated female bodies, an absence of women’s agency generally. Furious is the cat and mouse story between junior FBI agent Alice Black (Emmy Rossum) and Catherine (Lola Petticrew), a serial killer who is bumping off male victims with calculated sadism. Catherine might be the least serial killer name imaginable, but that’s just one way this show rewrites the rule book. I’d say it’s the most feminist show I’ve ever seen – except that might lead some to write it off.

Just by his being there, the ex-prime minister undermines the honour of every brave fighter he meets in this tour of the war’s frontline. It should never have made it to TV

Here is the caption viewers are presented with at the start of Boris Johnson: Into Ukraine’s Kill Zone, an hour-long documentary following the former prime minister on his journey to the frontline of the ongoing hostilities between Russia and its coveted neighbour:

“This film presents Boris Johnson’s perspective on the conflict in Ukraine. The views expressed are subjective and reflect his own interpretations of events.”

There is nothing woolly about the sheep awareness training a Kent farmer subjects our dog to

It’s another scorching day, maybe the ninth or tenth in a row. Work is impossible – I spend the afternoon wandering the house in search of the coolest place to stand. I’m busy interrupting a faint breeze at the foot of the stairs when my wife rings.

“This is ridiculous,” she says. “I’m standing still.”

Judgment dismissing Charlotte MacInnes’s case expressed doubts about credibility of three key witnesses, and is likely to be appealed

Rebel Wilson’s self-styled brand as a truth teller was put to the test during a fiery defamation feud where rivals called her a bully.

But the Hollywood A-lister, referred to as “very difficult to be around” and “fucking nuts” during an at-times bruising trial, emerged from the federal court battle with the last laugh.

Need something brilliant to read this weekend? Here are six of our favourite pieces from the last seven days

A woman is reincarnated as a vacuum cleaner in this Cannes prize-winning black comedy, and the uncompromising pop star hits the festival trail

A Useful Ghost
Out now
Winner of best film at Cannes Critics’ Week, this tale of a woman reincarnated as a vacuum cleaner takes you to plenty of unexpected places, even when you discount the sort of unexpectedness suggested by the premise. Part Marxist thriller, part supernatural romance, and taking in foul-mouthed monks and drama with the in-laws along the way, Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke’s directorial debut is an oddball treat.

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

The glitch-pop great is back with a banger-stuffed new album, and reality TV may have some new stars thanks to Channel 4. Here’s the pick of the week’s culture, taken from the Guardian’s best-rated reviews

There’s no way I could get by on a bowl of Coco Pops – give me sliced tomatoes and cucumber every time

I recently got into a row on X about the unlikely subject of salad. I want to acknowledge that arguing with strangers on social media is definitely for babies and I should know better by now, but I’m a work in progress. And so I mentioned that I had enjoyed how readily available salads had been at breakfast buffets while I had been travelling in Denmark and Sweden this year compared with the UK. Salad has been a part of my breakfast for about a decade now, and I think a lot of people would benefit from it. It’s a pretty easy way of getting a couple of portions of fruit and veg before you have even left the house.

All hell broke loose. Salad for breakfast is “not normal in a northern European climate”, according to one agitated typer in a response to my post about its availability at breakfasts there. In one of the towns we visited, Luleå, we were just 100km south of the Arctic Circle and the sea was still frozen in April. The hotel had an excellent breakfast buffet – a rotating assortment of freshly prepared salad items with fruit that hadn’t even been poured from a can. Someone should alert the authorities.

Jacq Kelly is a Toronto-based writer and disability rights campaigner

Having met Nigel Farage, Rupert Lowe and Tommy Robinson, Pauline Hanson is deploying their rhetoric in a country with a very different history of immigration

In a 1950 essay, the critic AA Phillips wrote of a “cultural cringe” in which insecure Australians looked to Britain for instruction. Today, some Australians are championing far-right British actors and importing their visions of doom to Australia.

In June, the former Australian Liberal prime minister Tony Abbott spoke at the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship conference, which is organised around the idea of “renewing” western civilisation. “Sustained mass migration, especially from countries with quite different cultures,” said Abbott, “[is] the surest and swiftest way … to dilute and eventually to extinguish the Anglo-Celtic core culture and the Judeo-Christian foundational ethos (which is actually what attracts migrants to the Anglosphere).” Peta Credlin, his former chief of staff, now a Sky News Australia commentator, said: “You are a petri dish … [on] multiculturalism and radical Islam, you are where we don’t want to go.”

Retail politics while taking power out of London: if this works, Burnham’s premiership could be seriously transformational

One of Andy Burnham’s first policy moves brought back a sharp memory. On Wednesday, he announced that single bus fares across England would be capped at £2, starting from January. It was part of a series of small, practical measures designed, said the new prime minister, to offer a little “breathing space” to a hard-pressed public, but this was the one that registered with me most. That’s because it echoed the first time I ever experienced a specific public policy that I realised affected me directly.

It was in the autumn of 1981 when the newly elected Greater London Council, led by Labour’s Ken Livingstone, slashed bus fares in the city. The headline-grabber was a new, short-hop fare of only 10p. I was 14 years old at the time, so for me it was even better: all child tickets were reduced to 5p. They called the scheme Fares Fair.

An incident in which an autonomous OpenAI agent hacked a startup either confirms that the end is nigh – or that the product is just amazingly sophisticated

Throughout history, many things have been seen by terrified populaces as a harbinger of doom. A comet. A crow on the battlefield. A solar eclipse. A mutant livestock birth. Yet times move on. In the modern era, the leading harbinger of doom is literally any picture of the OpenAI CEO, Sam Altman, attached to a news story. You know it’s not going to be good, right? You know that by the time you’ve read it, you’ll be begging to go back to the time when the worst thing that could happen to us at the hands of the techlords was just some democracy-subversion, or childhood destruction, usually followed by Mark Zuckerberg putting on a suit and claiming: “We will learn from this.”

Anyway: a lot of pictures of Sam Altman in the news of late. Most recently, this week, one darkened the skies alongside the tale of how an OpenAI autonomous agent went rogue during a supposedly sandboxed/guardrailed test, and hacked a major startup that functions as a repository of coding information. (I’m slightly obsessed with the fact that the startup in question is called Hugging Face, adding weight to my suspicion that some vast, tweely benign emoji is the last face humanity will see before it dies.)

Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist

Marina Hyde’s new book, What a Time to be Alive!, is out in September (Guardian Faber Publishing, £20). To support the Guardian, order your signed copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply

‘It’s good to be back,’ says the actor in a new trailer for the forthcoming Ebenezer. Has everyone forgotten about the ghosts of his past?

It is fair to say that, professionally speaking, Johnny Depp has had a quiet few years. Since he and Amber Heard sued each other amid a whirlwind of genuinely ugly accusations in 2019, and went to trial in 2022, Depp has struggled to reclaim his position in Hollywood.

His 2020 film Minimata made less than a million dollars at the box office. Jeanne du Barry fared better in 2023, although its Cannes premiere was marked by feminist demonstrations and an open letter signed by 100 members of the French film industry, furious that the festival appeared to be offering alleged abusers institutional protection. Aside from that, he voiced a Puffin called Johnny Puff in a cartoon series called Puffins, and that’s about it.

If OpenAI loudly proclaims how dangerous AI is, investors will hear how powerful it is. And who benefits from that?

On 14 February 2019, OpenAI announced a language model called GPT-2, the precursor to the models that power modern AI chatbots and agents such as ChatGPT and Claude. But OpenAI declared GPT-2 was too risky to release, citing concerns about safety and abuse.

I recall being annoyed at the time that OpenAI would make such a useless announcement: the risks seemed overblown, and without access to the model there wasn’t much for a researcher like me to learn about GPT-2.

With a flurry of cost-of-living measures and a day in Number 10 North, the new prime minister has hit the right early notes

Appropriately enough, Andy Burnham ended a week of political signalling and first impressions back in Manchester on Friday. At the offices of the new No 10 North – where the prime minister hopes to work at least one day a week – regional mayors sat alongside ministers in an example of Burnhamism at work. It was an early statement of intent, ahead of what Mr Burnham bills as “the biggest rebalancing of power our country has seen”.

The same could be said of the series of cost of living measures fired out during the new government’s first few days in office. A £2 cap on bus fares, a cut in VAT on electricity, and some business rates relief for pubs, clubs and smaller music venues were all modest moves. But they were cleverly indicative ones, nodding empathetically to people’s need to have the chance to enjoy themselves as well as pay the bills.

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.

Small pools don’t get the same attention as polluted rivers or seas. But they have a vital role to play in boosting nature

Frogs; newts; small fish such as minnows and sticklebacks; dragonflies; water boatmen and water snails: these are just a few of the hundreds of animal species that make their homes in Britain’s ponds alongside diverse wetland plants, some of which are endangered. Yet while small bodies of water are cherished by hobbyists as well as scientists, they have startlingly few protections – even at a time when the polluted state of rivers, lakes and coastlines is a key focus of environmentalists.

With a clean water bill expected soon, this official neglect of ponds should soon be consigned to the past. While rewilding projects have overseen the rediscovery of older “ghost ponds” as well as the creation of new, and householders are encouraged to create miniature ones in their gardens, charities including the specialist Freshwater Habitats Trust point to the growing body of international research that testifies to their ecological importance. In 1996 the first-ever national survey estimated that there were 228,900 ponds in Britain. Thirty years on would be an apt moment to grant them enhanced status.

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.

Readers advise the new prime minister and his party on how to turn Labour’s fortunes, and the country’s, around

Rafael Behr neatly summarises Andy Burnham’s strengths as a potential leader and he rightly emphasises that he needs a united party behind him (Andy Burnham is playing the long game in an age of short attention spans, 22 July).

He then accurately identifies what Burnham needs to do, but makes no reference to what the parliamentary Labour party needs to do. Leadership is interactional, and Labour MPs outside the government – particularly those (in Behr’s words) with hair triggers on the radical left and those aggrieved Starmer loyalists – have to realise that Labour is in the last-chance saloon here, and they have just as much a role as he does to ensure the success that leads to a second term.

Until migraines are recognised as a multi-system condition, sufferers will continue to be dismissed, writes Sarah Khan. Plus a letter from Rab Hallett

Thank you for your article about migraines – a maligned, misunderstood condition (The truth about migraines: what causes them – and how to find relief, 19 July). But framing it around the headache understates what it is: a systemic neurological event in which head pain is only one component.

For me, until perimenopause, the head pain was minor. The disabling symptoms were profound fatigue, body aches and cognitive fog, which dominated even the “prodrome”. This is why my migraines went undiagnosed for decades, blamed on a “poor immune system” rather than a neurological disorder.

Readers contribute words that describe how people feel in all weathers

I was interested to read some of the words that your letter writers associated with the weather and our reactions to it (Puggled, scumfished or utterly shrammed, 14 July). Unsurprisingly, the English language is redolent with words to do with harsh weather, with many of the longest-established terms tending towards the cold or inclement. Perhaps as hotter weather becomes the norm rather than the exception, we’ll start to talk less about dreich days that leave us shrammed or clumsed and more about blazers that are a bit of a pech and leave us feeling mooth. The Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary has words to describe all weathers, including all of the above and many more.
Fiona McPherson
Executive editor, Oxford English Dictionary

• I can assure Jan Cooper (Letters, 21 July) that people in Yorkshire are still capable of feeling nithered, in very cold weather. On the other hand, in the recent spells of very hot weather, they are far more likely to have felt mafted, as opposed to feeling nithered.
Simon Green
Hull

Responding to a new exhibition that explores how children have experienced conflict, Arabella Dorman says they live with the consequences long after the fighting has ended

Your article on the Imperial War Museum’s forthcoming exhibition Childhood in War is a timely reminder that the deepest wounds of conflict are often carried by those who never chose it (‘There was absolutely no chance of being a kid’: new exhibition explores how war shapes children’s lives, 19 July). While wars are recorded through battles, borders and political decisions, children experience them very differently: through interrupted childhoods, fractured families and the loss of what should have been ordinary days.

Over many years working in war zones, I came to understand that children are not simply among the victims of war; they are its longest-lasting casualties. Long after the fighting has moved on, they continue to live with its consequences – in their bodies, their memories and the futures they must somehow rebuild.

• Action, news and reaction on opening weekend

• 10 things to look out for at Glasgow 2026 | Mail John

Sean Ingle has been enjoying his time so far in Glasgow.

But do you know what? Despite these initial teething problems, and a fair number of empty seats, it didn’t matter. These Games might be “reimagined” – which is management speak for “made smaller”. But, as the first full day of action showed, they retain plenty of soul and glow.

The soul? That was provided by the Botswanan lawn bowler Diza Mphotho, who delighted the crowd at the indoor SEC arena with his bucket hat and languid style, even if he ended up being on the reverse of a 10-3, 16-1 thrashing by Guernsey’s Jason Greenslade.

To make Scott’s victory even sweeter, he also broke the Commonwealth record. No wonder he lifted his arms up in the air and started to pound his chest like a silverback after leaving the pool. “I was a wee bit nervous before that,” he said. “Being one of the senior members of the team, the onus is kind of me. Those boys made it tough.”

• Teenager lands head-first during high bar routine

• Canada win men’s team gold, with England second

England’s bid for a fourth successive Commonwealth Games men’s artistic gymnastics team title ended with silver after a dramatic final overshadowed by an injury to the teenager Gabriel Langton, who was taken from the arena on a stretcher after a heavy fall from the high bar.

The 19-year-old fell head and neck first on to the mat during the final rotation of the team final, bringing competition to a halt as medical staff rushed to his aid. The arena fell silent while Langton received treatment, with fellow gymnasts watching on in visible concern.

Some big stars are absent, but day one in Glasgow showed the Commonwealth Games have retained plenty of soul

There will be many extraordinary sights at these Commonwealth Games in Glasgow over the next 10 days. But few, you imagine, will top that of a volunteer ripping his T-shirt off and nosediving under the water, without goggles, to fix a broken rope while Adam Ramsay-Peaty waited on at the Tollcross International Swimming Centre.

The crowd, who had watched other volunteers fail to deal with the problem using large nets, cheered. And, after a 10-minute delay, Ramsay-Peaty was back smoking his rivals in the heats of the 100m breaststroke.

The English transfer record has been smashed, with Elliot Anderson and Morgan Rogers on the move during a busy summer of signings

For once, Mikel Arteta is not spending his summer looking for a No 9. Instead the champions have moved to strengthen out wide after the departure of Leandro Trossard with Christos Tzolis arriving for £24m having scored 33 league goals in his last two seasons from Club Brugge’s left wing. After missing out on Morgan Rogers to Chelsea, they will not want to be beaten to Alex Scott’s signature. Defensive cover will probably be necessary after the injury to William Saliba at the World Cup. Billy Munday

Racing director believes his career behind the wheel can help the team deliver where others have failed as new entrants in the top tier of motor sport

There is nowhere to hide in Formula One, a sport where deficiency is brutally exposed week in, week out. It is an environment where success must be fought for tooth and nail yet one where the former driver and multiple Le Mans winner Allan McNish is in his element, convinced he and his Audi team can deliver where so many others have failed.

Always a gregarious, personable character, McNish could not be more at ease even under the intense pressure in his position as racing director for the team which joined the grid for the first time this year. He is one of the very few personnel in F1 in such a senior position who is a former driver and one who has enjoyed enormous success.

• Slovenian only second man to win in yellow on mountain

• Leader opens up gap of more than seven minutes

Tadej Pogacar put further distance between himself and his last remaining rivals, winning the Alpe d’Huez stage of the Tour de France and extending his overall lead to more than seven minutes.

There was a brutal inevitability about the defending Tour champion’s win on the legendary climb of the Alpe, despite all the rumours of illness and gastric problems within his UAE Emirates XRG team.

• New appointee will have to work alongside ODI coach

• Joe Root emerges as frontrunner for Test captaincy

The hunt for the next coach of the England men’s Test team is being complicated by the need for the new appointee to work alongside the man he would be replacing, Brendon McCullum, rather than taking full control of both red- and white-ball squads.

Some high-profile candidates have been unwilling to work within such a setup, either because they want full oversight over the senior men’s teams or because of the unique ­challenge of working alongside ­the person who was sacked as Test coach earlier this month.

New Zealander has returned home with the Claret Jug in tow after stepping out of his father’s shadow

The curse of the iconic sporting parent. Accidental, yet real. Decades of evidence show how difficult it is for the offspring of those who have scaled the greatest heights in sport to replicate those achievements. Until Sunday and a stunning finale at Royal Birkdale, Ryan Fox would always be known in New Zealand as the son of Grant. Fox smiles when asked whether the claiming of the 154th Open Championship means he has finally forged his own reputation for greatness. “I can plead a pretty good case for that,” he replies.

“I have two Claret Jugs [one real, one replica] sitting at home so it is real but it certainly doesn’t feel that way yet. I can’t quite believe it. My wife and I have looked at each other quite a lot over the last few days and buzzed out a little bit saying: ‘What the hell just happened?’ It is crazy.”

Officials have long lobbied for peak that rises 2,918 metres above sea level to be given coveted designation

More than four decades have elapsed since Evangelos Geroliolios made his first ascent to the home of the ancient gods. At the top of Mount Olympus, on the rocky peak of Greece’s highest mountain, he felt unalloyed awe.

“I’ve never forgotten that unique moment, that unique feeling up there on the throne of Zeus,” recalled Geroliolios, who as mayor of Dion-Olympus now spends a great deal of his time administering the area around the site.

Prime minister’s propaganda machine falters as fiercely secular youth protests reclaim nationalism

by Hannah Ellis-Petersen in Delhi

As the poster bearing the face of the prime minister, Narendra Modi, was thrown to the floor, a cheer went up. Then came the feet, trampling the image into the muddy ground with gleeful abandon. “Thief, thief,” chanted the crowd.

Just a week earlier, such scenes in the heart of India’s capital would have been almost unthinkable. For the 12 years Modi and his Bharatiya Janata party (BJP) have been in power it was widely acknowledged that you criticised the government at your peril. Dissent was swiftly, routinely and expertly crushed.

Member states vote to remove British barrister after allegations of sexual abuse

The prosecutor of the international criminal court, Karim Khan, has been removed from office after the court’s governing body concluded in June that he had committed serious misconduct in connection to allegations of sexual abuse.

The ICC’s member states voted on Friday to oust the British prosecutor in an unprecedented move that concludes a damaging episode for the court two years after the allegations were first raised.

Rightwing provocateur meets Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who says he expects to meet Donald Trump in Washington next week

Volodymyr Zelenskyy will meet Donald Trump in Washington next week, according to the rightwing US influencer Laura Loomer, amid signs the White House’s traditional hostility towards Ukraine is beginning to crumble.

In an interview with Loomer, the Ukraine president said he will probably attend the funeral of Senator Lindsey Graham and hold talks with Trump, which will take place as the latest version of the Russian sanctions bill makes its way through Congress.

Isobella Perrie Sullivan, 25, remanded in custody after intelligence-led operation against dissident republicans

A 25-year-old law student has been charged in relation to an “extremely significant” bomb intercepted near the UK-Irish border.

Isobella Perrie Sullivan, from Clane, County Kildare, was charged with possession of explosives at a special sitting of Trim district court on Friday evening.

As temperatures dip, the puffer’s appeal inflates. But quality and filler are factors to consider before buying new

• Change by degrees offers life hacks and sustainable living tips each Saturday to help reduce your household’s carbon footprint

• Got a question or tip for reducing household emissions? Email us at changebydegrees@theguardian.com

Whether you call it a parka, puffer or Tassie tuxedo, the insulated jacket has become a cold-weather closet staple.

A 1920s version by Australian mountaineer George Finch was constructed from hot air balloon fabric and eiderdown, but most modern designs are a mix of petroleum-based synthetics as well as animal and plant fibres, with varying environmental and ethical impacts.

Approach focuses on rebuilding soil health, increasing biodiversity and restoring natural ecosystems

For the last few decades, the nutrient content of our crops has been declining. In the late 90s, the US Department of Agriculture found the vitamin C content of lemons had decreased by almost a third over the previous 22 years. Calcium in carrots, an important source especially for non-meat eaters, had reduced, on average, by more than a quarter. Vitamin A in bananas was down by 57%. The mineral content of wheat has declined by between 20-30% since the 1960s.

A number of reasons have been suggested for this worrying decline, ranging from new varieties of crop that are bred to grow quicker and bigger to the higher carbon dioxide levels in the air causing plants to produce more sugars and starches (they grow faster but they produce fewer nutrients). A wide range of fixes have been suggested, from GM crops to synthetic soil amendments, or underground farms.

Delegation sent to Brasília after gunmen from organised crime group enter homes in western Amazon

Indigenous leaders on the Brazilian-Peruvian border have said their communities are being “taken hostage” by organised crime groups who are running rampant across the region, destroying rainforest, building roads and trafficking drugs.

Earlier this month, masked men armed with semi-automatic weapons entered homes in Apiwtxa, a village in the Kampa do Rio Amônia Indigenous territory, intimidating people and searching for targets.

Black-crowned night heron one of many species thriving at Holnicote Estate where river ‘reset’ has transformed area into lush oasis

A rare black-crowned night heron has been spotted on an estate in the south-west of England where an innovative river “reset” is transforming the area into an oasis for birdlife.

The heron was caught on camera in a jungly corner of the Holnicote Estate, where conservation experts have been restoring the landscape by allowing a river to return to its natural course.

A £10,000 bar tab was drunk, there was a ‘lot of anger’, and now ex-ministers are thinking how to cooperate in future

Keir Starmer’s leaving party had been planned for some time. But in years to come it might be seen as the birth of a new Labour movement.

Dozens of ministers, aides and Starmer himself headed to the Grafton pub in Kentish Town on Monday night to drown their sorrows, hours after the former prime minister left Downing Street for the last time.

Exclusive: Andy Burnham thought to be considering waiving stricter right to remain rules for people already working in the sector

Hundreds of thousands of care workers could be exempted from the home secretary’s plans to toughen up the immigration system under proposals being considered by Andy Burnham as he looks for ways to relieve pressure on the social care sector.

The prime minister will give a speech next week spelling out his determination to start creating a National Care Service before the next general election as he looks to accelerate the process set up by his predecessor, Keir Starmer.

Metropolitan police say officers on marine policing boat are receiving treatment after incident in central London

Five officers have been injured after a police boat struck Westminster Bridge in central London on Friday afternoon.

The Metropolitan police said the incident occurred at about 3.40pm and involved a boat from the marine policing unit.

Connor Read, who is married and has two children, was detained in June during residency permit interview

A British-born man who has lived in the US since he was nine years old has been held in an ICE detention facility for more than a month and a half under threat of deportation, it has been reported.

Connor Read, 29, was taken by ICE agents after he was invited to a green card (residency permit) interview in Tampa, Florida, on 3 June, and separated from his wife, Jaelin, 25, and his three-year-old twin sons Ryder and Ozzie.

Yemeni rebels accuse Saudis of ‘dangerous escalation’ as tit-for-tat strikes mark new front in war that has engulfed region

Yemen’s Iran-backed Houthi rebels claimed a missile attack on the southern Saudi city of Jizan on Saturday, after vowing retaliation against the kingdom for attacks this week.

It came after US ally Riyadh struck Houthi military targets on Friday, following the Yemeni group announcing a maritime blockade of the top oil producer and hitting its ships in the Red Sea.

Increasingly accurate and lethal attacks are revealing weaknesses in stretched defences across the Gulf

As the crisis in the Middle East escalates, Iran has been bombing US bases and critical infrastructure in the Gulf with increasing accuracy, helped by Chinese satellite imagery and tactics learned by Russia in Ukraine.

Three US soldiers were killed last Friday in an attack on the Muwaffaq Salti airbase in Jordan, which was being protected by a Thaad air defence system. Satellite imagery later released by Iranian media showed several buildings had been destroyed.

Zelenskyy says defence industry event should not have taken place; US influencer Laura Loomer visits Kyiv. What we know on day 1,613

A Russian ballistic missile strike in Ukraine’s Kyiv region has killed 10 people and ⁠injured almost 100 at ⁠the site of ​a defence industry event that Volodymyr Zelenskyy said should never have taken place. Pictures posted online by the Ukraine Emergency Services showed teams sifting through piles of rubble at the site north of the capital, adjacent to several houses, after Friday’s attack.

“Of course, the cause of this attack ⁠is Russian missiles, nothing but Russian terror,” Zelenskyy said in his nightly video address. “However, we have said a thousand ​times that under these wartime conditions, with such ‌an enemy, it is absolutely unacceptable ‌to hold any weapons exhibitions with large crowds of people, especially near residential buildings.” The event, hosted by a ‌drone manufacturers’ association, was taking place in an area a short drive from the outskirts of the capital. The acting governor of Kyiv region, Ruslan Oliynyk, said that a day of mourning would be observed on Saturday in the region.

The rightwing US influencer Laura Loomer has visited Ukraine and met Zelenskyy, who says he expects to meet Donald Trump in Washington next week. In an interview with Loomer, the Ukrainian president said he would probably attend the funeral of senator Lindsey Graham and hold talks with Trump. Loomer interviewed Zelenskyy in the garden of the presidential palace in Kyiv – a remarkable move for the online provocateur who has previously minimised Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and amplified Kremlin propaganda to her nearly 2 million followers on social media.

In the interview Zelenskyy said cooperation between ⁠Kyiv and Washington on drones would include a US factory to produce the unmanned aerial vehicles using Ukraine’s ⁠advanced technology. He said Ukraine wanted to build quickly on an initial agreement on drones clinched ⁠with Washington. Ukraine has excelled ​at drone innovation as it ‌has pursued asymmetrical warfare ‌against Russia during their four-year-old conflict, and Kyiv has shared its advances ‌with some allies.

“Important technology. This is what we have. And America has great technology. Our drone deal is win-win,” Zelenskyy said. “We will build a great factory in the United States. We want to [have] lines of production.” In Washington, a source familiar with the matter said details of an agreement were still being worked out ​ahead of Zelenskyy’s talks with Trump, scheduled for Tuesday, according to a White House official.

Romania’s ⁠defence ministry said a second ⁠drone breaching ⁠national ​airspace in as many ⁠days was shot down by a ⁠pilot in an ​F-16 ‌fighter ‌jet in an uninhabited ‌area near the border with Ukraine. The first drone, which Romanian ‌prosecutors investigating the fragments said was ​Russian, was shot down by the Nato ⁠state on Friday, marking ​the ​first time ​it has ​done ‌so ​after ​dozens of airspace breaches.

In eastern Ukraine, a Russian aerial bomb attack ⁠killed five people and injured nine in the city of Sloviansk, regional governor Vadym Filashkin ​said on Friday. He later said ​that a new Russian strike on ​the city in the evening injured 16 people and damaged residential buildings. In the northern Sumy region, a ​Russian drone strike ​killed two people, regional governor Oleh Hryhorov said on Telegram. And in the south-eastern city of Zaporizhzhia, a Russian strike set fire to a shopping centre, injuring a number of people.

On the Russian side, the acting governor of the Belgorod region, which borders Ukraine, reported on social media early on Saturday a “massive enemy drone attack” on the city of Belgorod. “Sadly, there are wounded, who have been promptly taken to hospitals,” he said. “There is damage and fires on the streets, which fire crews are extinguishing.”

A wave of Ukrainian attacks on warehouses belonging to Wildberries – Russia’s largest e-commerce company and the country’s answer to Amazon – has brought the war closer to ordinary people, Pjotr Sauer writes. The strikes have destroyed billions of dollars worth of goods made, sold and bought by everyday Russians and devastated small businesses.

The film-maker, also behind A Nightmare on Elm Street 3, died on Wednesday in his San Diego home

Director Chuck Russell, who helped propel actors such as Jim Carrey, Cameron Diaz and Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson to the Hollywood A-list, was found dead in his San Diego, California, home on Wednesday. He was 74.

Russell directed several box office hits in his decades-long career including A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors, The Blob and The Mask. In 2002, his film The Scorpion King featured The Rock in his first leading role.

Exclusive: Eight companies expect to be covered by the ban for 2025-26, the Guardian can reveal

Water company bosses’ total pay rose over the past year despite a government bonus ban and public outrage over pollution and bills, the Guardian can reveal.

One chief executive, Mark Thurston of Anglian Water, received £1.9m – including a £500,000 “retention payment”, despite the bonus ban.

Business owners in England say prioritising venues selling alcohol leaves vital community spaces behind

Ferdinand Geus is proud of the positive, global impact his small speciality coffee business is having.

“Around 3,000 small, family-owned farms in Yemen rely on us – we’ve persuaded many to stop growing khat, the drug, and start growing coffee instead,” said the business manager of Sheba Coffee, which supplies Yemeni coffee beans to independent cafes across the world, including the UK.

After Google fined €890m by EU, US president said Brussels was ‘robbing’ American companies and taxpayers

• What to know about Trump’s new tariffs on more than 80 countries

Donald Trump has threatened the European Union with additional and “substantial” tariffs after Brussels imposed a series of steep fines on US tech giants.

The US president accused Brussels of taking “direct aim” at several American companies including Apple, Meta Platforms, Amazon and Google, writing in a Truth Social post: “The United States of America is not a ‘PIGGYBANK’ for Europe, nor will we allow it to be!”

Streaming pioneer that transformed TV faces slowing growth and battle for viewers’ attention from YouTube

When Netflix offered viewers the chance to binge on an entire season of House of Cards it revolutionised the TV industry and started on a path to becoming the world’s most popular streaming service.

Almost 15 years on, however, the upstart’s strategy of pumping its service with an avalanche of content and an almost-as-rapid penchant for mercilessly cancelling shows has viewers reaching for the remote.

The Australian version of the sitcom is every bit as entertaining! Plus, get ready to belt out Bonnie Tyler’s best hits. Here’s what to watch this evening

10.30pm, BBC Three

In this week’s newsletter: The release calendar is more shaped by award seasons than what viewers might be looking for, with even the big platforms offering little to get excited about

Back in 2015, when I worked on the old print version of the Guide, we ran a cover calling on readers to “Stay inside this summer”. Our argument went that, such was the amount of great TV airing in the months from June to August that year (True Detective, My Mad Fat Diary, Veep and, err, a show about Abz from the boyband 5ive’s new career in farming), you’d be a fool to head outside for some vitamin D.

This wasn’t a contrarian viewpoint. Streaming’s sudden rise had broken down the walls that had previously left the summer a parched, desolate wasteland and kept the good TV penned into the more viewer-friendly periods of spring and autumn. Now, great new shows would arrive all year round. In the years that followed, some of the most talked-about scripted TV would debut around or after the solstice: Stranger Things, Yellowstone, Euphoria, I May Destroy You, The Bear, and plenty more besides.

Sacha Baron Cohen’s doofus voice-of-yoof has been making fresh mischief with new film Who Iz I? But who will he catch out this time? And what does his fictional hometown make of his return?

The Wimbledon lawn tennis championships are not generally a hotbed of crime. Yet this year, unprecedented infringements ocurred. Eleven players were fined a total of £34,000 for “audible obscenities” and “racquet abuse”. Meanwhile, a spectator at the men’s singles final called a heckler a “bumbaclat” before inviting them to fight, badgered Prince William to repay a drugs debt of £1,400 allegedly owed to him by Prince Harry from his days at Eton, and attempted to sell illegal substances to those seated near him – and beyond. “If u iz at dis borin wimbledore final lookin 2 get grand slammed,” he posted on Instagram, touting for business, “I iz here wif de hookup.”

The culprit was Ali G, real name Alistair Leslie Graham, AKA the malapropism-dropping home counties wide boy played by Sacha Baron Cohen, kitted out for the occasion in trademark skullcap and gold chain, plus custom Wimbledon jacket, traditional crossed rackets replaced with cannabis leaves. Security released him without penalty, but the reprimand was captured on scores of smartphones – including one held by Cohen himself.

She paved the way for Bridgerton, lit up Black Mirror’s most joyful episode – and now she stars in a grisly supernatural horror about slavery. The Belle star talks about Possession, partying with Prince and why she loves to shake things up

Gugu Mbatha-Raw seems blissfully immune to the heat. London is pushing 40C on one of those heatwave mornings when everyone is wearing the weather: damp collars, flushed faces, hair slicked to foreheads. Arriving at the cafe of the central London hotel where we meet, however, the star looks as if she’s stepped in from an altogether different climate. Dressed in a pristine white linen two-piece, makeup free, hair scraped back, she carries herself with a composure that makes everyone else’s perspiration seem faintly melodramatic.

She is, in every sense of the word, cool. This impression is only reinforced as we settle in for some small talk and she mentions that she’s been to the hotel once before.

Ryan Reynolds’ sarcastic superhero is rumoured to be in Avengers: Doomsday – but how is he going to fit in the MCU proper when he spent all of his previous film mocking it?

How do you solve a problem like Deadpool in the Marvel Cinematic Universe? Deadpool & Wolverine found a way: rather than integrate the bloodthirsty, fourth-wall-breaking merc with a mouth into the rather more sanitised world of Thor, Iron Man and Spider-Man, Shawn Levy’s 2024 film chose to lampoon it from the outside instead. Why bother to make everyone’s favourite chimichanga-munching mutant fit when you can make the fact that he doesn’t the entire joke? Why become another cog in the Marvel machine when you can stand beside it, point out the loose screws and watch the box-office greenbacks roll in like it’s Christmas 2019?

Deadpool & Wolverine made $1.3bn worldwide, becoming the second highest grossing film of 2024 and the highest grossing R-rated film ever. But it did absolutely nothing to introduce Ryan Reynolds’ potty-mouthed antihero into the MCU, unless one counts the several thousand jokes about Kevin Feige. By the end of the movie, Deadpool seems no closer to becoming the saviour of Marvel than Happy Hogan is to wielding Mjolnir. He remains a sarcastic observer from the sidelines, less a vital MCU character than its resident heckler.

When Imran Perretta was young, he was abruptly pulled by police into a van for questioning. That experience, as well as the death of his mother, inspired him to make Ish, a coming-of-age tale set amongst the British Muslim community. He talks about trauma, designing toilets and making Luton look magnificent

Imran Perretta always knew that the title of his debut feature film would be “Ish” – short for Ishmail, the name of the 12-year-old boy from Luton at the heart of his story. Only later did people point out the similarity to other coming-of-age films with three letters in the title: Kes by Ken Loach, and Satyajit Ray’s Apu trilogy. Now, as the reviews trickle in, the comparisons to Kes and Apu keep coming. Like them, Ish is a poetic film that grabs you by the heart and pulls you into a child’s perspective on the world.

The response has been lovely, says Perretta, and a relief. “It’s nice that people have compared Ish to those films rather than Kidulthood. I did worry about that.” Why, because it features kids speaking in slang and getting into scrapes? He nods. “I always say that I don’t read reviews, but of course I’ve read every single one. I can’t help myself. And we’ve been really lucky; the reviews have been amazing. A couple have been middling. Then you read them, and the subtext is: ‘I thought it was going to be like Kidulthood.’”

The singer-songwriter and Water from Your Eyes guitarist was unstoppably prolific, despite a growing dependence on substances. Now sober, he reflects on his new album and the songs that helped him turn his life round

For most of his life, Nate Amos made music just to get through the day. There was plenty of it: dozens of self-produced albums and EPs uploaded – since his This Is Lorelei project launched in 2012 – to what was then a plucky, independent platform called Bandcamp. Now 35, he is perhaps the quintessential Bandcamp artist: part bedroom-pop whiz, part alt-country troubadour, part indie rock rascal with a big, heavy heart. His peers treat him like a lost folk hero from a bygone era.

Amos is sitting in the basement of a cafe in Camden Town, north London, cradling an iced matcha; coffee makes him “feel like shit”, he says, and he no longer indulges such foibles. The title of one of those Bandcamp albums, OK N8, is tattooed on his knuckles. A friend inked it a few years ago, soon after Amos got sober. “Exactly when you’re not supposed to be making decisions like getting a tattoo on your hand,” he jokes. His active blue eyes dance around behind a golden-brown fringe and an unruly, woodchip beard. In a tough spot he will swing back in his chair and search for answers that always seem to be hiding beneath the table. But each time he stumbles upon the truth, he looks up with a hungry smile.

(Atlantic)
How do you follow up the album that made you a star – and a caricature? In classic Charli style: with a pivot to guitar and a meta masterpiece about the instability of identity

After a decade spent trailblazing a unique kind of pop freedom from the genre’s fringes, A-list success seemed like the thing that might finally trap Charli xcx. Her 2024 club-rat opus Brat spawned memes, embarrassing political bandwagoning, Collins’ word of the year and possibly terminal damage to the bra industry. Its ludicrous cultural impact looked set to pickle her as a caricature of a Parliament-toting bad girl; the question of whether “Brat summer” could last – whether Charli could sustain the interest – was so rife she turned it into a mockumentary, The Moment. It made success look miserable: your creation turned cringe by execs wanting to milk their prize cow dry of every last acid-green drop.

Even for a pop star renowned for reinvention, it put a higher price on her next move. Pivot and risk losing new fans and looking wilfully contrarian. When Charli released the sub-two-minute single Rock Music, many heard it as a middle finger. “I think the dancefloor is dead,” she drawls over guitars that buzzed like speakers weathering interference from a Nokia 5110, “so now we’re making rock music.” There were boring thinkpieces about the dancefloor being very much alive, actually (as if Charli had ever ridden culture for clout then binned it off), and about whether she was trying to eject fair-weather new fans. But the key to this cheeky song is surprisingly earnest: “Jump off the stage / I hope they catch you today / But if they don’t it’s OK,” she sings naively, an affirmation to take creative leaps, and to come with Charli – or not, as you like – as she takes this one.

(RCA/Cult)
Allying the crackpot strangeness of Julian Casablancas’ side projects with his band’s gift for pop minimalism, the New Yorkers are on playful, joyous form

Here’s a sentence no old-head Strokes fan wants to hear: to understand Reality Awaits, the stalwart NYC group’s seventh album and first in six years, you first have to understand the Voidz. Julian Casablancas’s other band has been taking up more and more of his time in recent years, much to the chagrin of fans who may have dipped into the group’s painfully, awkwardly proggy 2014 debut Tyranny and decided to just let the old legend have his fun (away from their own speakers, of course). Anyone who decided to listen further will have found that the Voidz have turned into a great, crowd-pleasing, safely experimental zone for Casablancas to pull out some of the most energised, goofy work of his career. If you’re thinking I come to this guy for cool, not goof, I don’t know what to tell you: this is a man who spends interviews discussing his theories about ancient Sumerian culture.

The 2018 Voidz record Virtue is a high point of Casablancas’s entire catalogue: a gentle stylistic mixed bag that covers winsome pop-rock, yacht rock, bedroom pop and much more. That album seemed to clear the decks for the Strokes’ last record, 2020’s The New Abnormal, on which they sounded the most like their 2001 selves since Is This It. That album is now the definitive Strokes album for gen Z – go to any Strokes show and watch the younger contingent light up during The Adults Are Talking – but it didn’t presage a long-term back-to-basics route for Casablancas and co. On Reality Awaits, by sheer force of will, he fuses the crackpot strangeness and, ahem, fondness for AutoTune of the Voidz with the Strokes’ minimalism and pop melodicism.

The New Orleans country-punk duo are on a hot streak, about to release their third album in a year, and the crunchy, literate hooks keep coming

From New Orleans
Recommended if you like Parquet Courts, Sheer Mag, Royal Headache
Up next Holy Cross Tigers out later this year

Not one but two of the year’s best albums so far are authored by a ragtag, deeply charismatic band from Louisiana named Twisted Teens, who bear Pynchonian names – Caspian Hollywell and RJ “Razor Ramone” Santos – a console steel guitar and, in Hollywell’s case, one of rock’s greatest, most soulful voices in many years. Virtuosic when it counts, ramshackle when necessary, Twisted Teens feel like they could slot nicely on to a bill with Parquet Courts and the late, great Royal Headache – crunchy, literary rock bands who seemed to shyly conceal their music’s anthemic nature.

Twisted Teens broke through earlier this year with their second album Blame the Clown, a set of 12 country-punk tracks that’s hooky and effusive enough to give any major-label pop record released this year a run for its money. A couple of weeks ago, they released its followup, the rangier and slightly more introspective Florida Water Blues, and before the year’s out they’ll have dropped Holy Cross Tigers, a release schedule befitting a band on a hot streak.

The pair’s origin story is foggy – the most one can glean from interviews is “they were neighbours, then Santos travelled cross-country to buy a steel guitar” – which feels appropriate for this kind of grimy, mythic music, which is raw and self-consciously handmade. Part of that feeling can be put down to Hollywell’s voice, a gritty and pockmarked thing which he uses to great effect, interspersing deadpan meditations on life and love with a rich, almighty howl that’s ostentatious but unpretentious. In other words, Twisted Teens are two of 2026’s true originals – a breakout band whose kooky, ultra-clarified vision outstrips the hype. Shaad D’Souza

The American novelist and screenwriter’s memoir covers sex work, Virginia Woolf and Hollywood success

As an eight-year-old in comfortable, solid, suburban California, Michael Cunningham felt compelled to make art before he quite understood what it was, or could do: a painting of souls ascending to heaven, for example, in which paradise resembled the Griffith Park Observatory and the dead were all depicted in profile because their creator felt unequal to the challenge of full faces. There was also a cigar box covered in gold-sprayed macaroni and a clay representation of the animals on Noah’s Ark – anything, in fact, that would challenge the painting of a placid white chicken that hung in a gilt frame on his parents’ wall.

If Cunningham moved on fairly rapidly from the visual arts, either sparing or denying us the fruits of a more fully formed talent, it wasn’t because the impulse to create had withered. Rather, it was that the experience of making material art had functioned as a temporary outlet, being less painful, less embarrassing – both emotions he ascribes to his young, sensitive self – than attempting to capture the world in words.

The author on the power of folktales, being inspired by Ulysses – and the book that every woman should read

My earliest reading memory
The summer my middle sister was born, my mum and I would walk to the shops at Cherryvalley, in east Belfast, to do her messages, and she’d buy me the latest issue of Storyteller, illustrated tales from around the world. It came with a cassette tape of actors reading the stories, a ding to tell you when to turn the page. My favourite was a Japanese folktale called The Goblin Rat. I was only just two, but I listened to it, entranced and terrified, until I could recite it by heart.

My favourite book growing up
Susan Cooper’s The Dark Is Rising series. I first read them aged 10 – I’ve read the title book every midwinter since, and read them last year with my own then-10-year-old son. They tell a haunting story of the age-old battle between the forces of dark and light, weaving in Arthurian legend, shot through with an adult melancholy that makes them as compelling now as then.

After my 22-month-old child died, music and poetry brought catharsis and comfort

The day Renzo had his aneurysm, in the afternoon before it happened, I distinctly remember telling him that it was going to be a pleasure to watch him grow up. It seems ridiculous to write that here, the foreshadowing so on the nose as to be unbelievable. But it’s true. To him and my wife Allegra, I said, “I love our little family.” After the struggles around his birth, job loss, the pandemic, it felt, finally, like we had made it to the other side. We had, I suppose, just not how I envisioned it.

My friends Jayson and Stacy recommended I get to know David Kessler’s work. According to Harvard Business Review, Kessler is “the world’s foremost expert on grief”. He’d worked closely with Elisabeth Kübler-­Ross, who was the reigning expert on grief before her own death in 2004. A large part of Kübler-­Ross’s legacy is her classification of what she calls the five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance, as described in her 1969 book On Death and Dying. After you experience a death, she wrote, these stages can occur in any order, with one or more possibly not occurring at all. Just weeks after Renzo’s death, I’d tricked myself into thinking I had jumped all the way to acceptance when really I was trying to outrun anger and depression. Bargaining hasn’t been a big one for me, nor has denial. The facts have been pretty hard to ignore.

A portal opens from our modern world of data centres and interior design into a medieval fantasy realm, in this playfully surreal tale from the author of Eurotrash

A reclusive interior designer named Paul travels from his home in Orkney to the Norwegian coastal city of Stavanger for a most unusual commission. A data­centre housing a vast internet server is located by a fjord on the outskirts of the city, and a prestigious arts magazine is paying him a large sum of money to give it a makeover. They want him to paint the interiors white – “not just any white, but the perfect white, the singular white”. Shortly after he arrives, a freak weather event causes a power outage, and Paul goes missing; meanwhile the magazine’s jaded editor, Cohen, takes an overdose of barbiturates.

In alternate chapters a very different tale unfolds, set in a distant medieval world redolent of Norse mythology. A man, referred to only as “the stranger”, is nursed back to health by a nine-year-old girl who has shot him with an arrow after mistaking him for a deer. He is being pursued by a vengeful duke, and persuades the girl to join him on the run. Together they leave their plague-ridden town, traverse a barren wasteland and discover a subterranean stone city whose inhabitants live a communal existence, subsisting on seafood and kelp.

Going by the mantra, if you want to make someone laugh, make them cry first, the game’s developers have created a lonely magpie who fills the void by wreaking havoc

Amid the gleeful anarchy of Bad Magpie’s debut trailer, there’s a striking note of melancholy. The game’s protagonist – a wounded corvid that creates havoc wherever she goes – calls out forlornly as a flock of her kind passes above, with a conspicuous gap in their formation.

Milktooth games designer and co-founder Daisy Fernandez has had this particular image in her head for years. Lying in the grass one afternoon during the 2020 lockdowns, she looked up and saw a V-shaped pattern in the sky, poignantly incomplete. “It really stuck with me,” she says. “I posted about it online and someone told me about a ‘missing man’ formation, which is an aerial salute to a fallen pilot.”

These days, I ‘collect’ birdsong and wild flowers, but it all started when my sons and I first set out to find Pikachu and pals

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Believe it or not, Pokémon Go is 10 years old this month. The wildly successful smartphone game, which allows you to track down lovable creatures in the real world using GPS and augmented-reality technologies, has reportedly been downloaded 800m times across 150 countries and regions. A trillion Pokémon have been caught so far – and I have been responsible for a modest percentage of that figure.

When the game was first released, my sons and I spent many happy hours wandering the streets and parks of Frome searching for Jigglypuffs and Charizards, and the game’s social element, which lets you take on gym battles with other players in your vicinity, offered my autistic son a route to communicate with other children in a way he’d never been able to before.

Renovate rooms, investigate the supernatural and watch people burst into song in this surreal British ghost story

A young American man arrives in a dilapidated British seaside town to take on the renovations of an equally run-down hotel, inherited from a mysteriously absent father he never knew. His power tools talk to him in a Scottish accent, the local people speak in baffling slang, and occasionally people burst into song. Oh, and there are ghosts.

There Are No Ghosts at the Grand is a novel mix of genres – no bad thing in these times of sequels and remakes – but, according to the creative director of independent developers Friday Sundae, Anil Glendinning, it grew organically from a single goal: to tell a very British ghost story.

Nintendo Switch 2
The single-player offshoot of the quirky and colourful multiplayer series is disappointingly run-of-the-mill

Splatoon is among Nintendo’s most ingenious inventions of the last decade: a series of shooting games whose paint-splattered turf war nature means being bad at shooting is just as valuable as – if not more so than – being good. It is also blessed with an abundance of personality, with vibrant characters, a richly imagined world, and a hipness that the competition can only dream of achieving. Unfortunately, Splatoon Raiders makes it difficult to remember all of this.

The first spinoff in the ink-soaked franchise, Splatoon Raiders is advertised as a single player-focused entry in this primarily multiplayer series. While this is true enough – one can play through the entire game solo just fine – Raiders is clearly best enjoyed cooperatively with up to three others. Players start each session on a hideout ship where they can upgrade their equipment and tweak their play style before heading out on bite-sized repeatable missions, and this structure is tailor-made for teaming up with friends or helping out strangers (the game lets you do either), as each person works towards creating their ultimate squid-kid avatar of chaos.

Splatoon Raiders is out 23 July; £41.99

The terrifying visions of Richard Dadd, UFOs, aliens and Van Gogh’s troubled peasant woman – all in your weekly dispatch

Richard Dadd: Beyond Bedlam
Terrifying creatures of the night and surreal dreamscapes galore – and those are just the “sane” canvases this Victorian artist painted before he was confined to Bedlam, where his visions became truly unsettling.
• Royal Academy, London, 25 July to 25 October

Queen Elizabeth Hall, London
Hofesh Shechter’s latest doesn’t break new ground, but its exceptional dancers throw themselves into a moody, pulse-quickening celebration of communal movement

It may be 38 years since the second summer of love, three decades since the dance music boom of the early 90s, but on the contemporary dance stage, rave is still peaking. In recent years, you’ve barely been able to move for dancers letting loose to repetitive beats, in tribal gatherings and transcendent ones.

Hofesh Shechter’s dance has always had that rhythmic pull of the dancefloor – he writes his own beat-driven music, after all – but while the early works were more angst-fuelled, now he seems happy to get lost in music. Shechter’s latest, In the Brain, has been developed from a piece called Cave made for Martha Graham Dance Company in 2022. It’s danced by his junior company, Shechter II, a collection of some of the best young dancers under 25, selected from around the world. They have that hungry energy of youth, and they lay it all out on the floor.

In the Brain is not an all-out party, though. It has its quiet moments, its slow build, its not-always-enlightening detours (into a brief swing dance, and a couples’ slow dance, to name two). The feel is subterranean, not least because of Tom Visser’s lighting. Visser is king of the dim glow in all its subtle shades – maximum atmosphere with minimum drama – and Shechter’s score is similarly dusky and moody, rather than party bangers. (There’s also additional music from German techno duo Âme.)

More than anything, In the Brain is recognisably Hofesh: the hunch of the shoulders, the arms raised to the sky, the ritualised groups moving as one – it’s a style that’s inspired many others. This piece isn’t rushing into new territory, but part of the appeal of Shechter’s choreography is that you can imagine it feels so good to dance it. There’s a tangible, visceral pleasure, whether that’s the thick, gloopy curves of movement or an almost violent exorcism, flinging out the body’s demons to a pounding bass. It’s dance that doesn’t seem drastically far from natural movement – so the viewer could feel themselves inside it – except there’s no way you could match the skill of these explosive performers. But the power is in the communal nature of the dance, the fellow-feeling, plugged into something bigger than oneself, surrendering to the universal heartbeat of the dancefloor.

• Until 25 July at Queen Elizabeth Hall, London

The Yard theatre, London
Barbies, giant erections and exquisite craftsmanship combine in one of the year’s most outrageously funny and startingly original shows

Did someone say Jackie Collins, that doyenne of literary raunch and observer of human sexual dynamics? Fantastic! And an adaptation of her first novel, which revealed her formative interest in, and talent for, capturing the drama of love and sex within the bounds of patriarchy, and set in the world of showbusiness (albeit not in the Hollywood Hills but the leafy green film industry of swinging 60s Hampstead)? Great!

But played out in miniature, in a series of lit doll’s houses, and mainly acted by repurposed Barbie dolls. What? Who dreamed this up? An experimental adult Swedish company, Malmö Dockteater, and “adult” is quite the understatement. Directed by Erik Holmström, also puppet designer, the dolls come with pubic hair, gigantic erections and heavy, surround-sound breathing. In between the story of a marriage in the doldrums, infidelity and female ambition in an era of predatory film directors and savage casting couches (all conceived decades before Harvey Weinstein and #MeToo), there are eye-watering helpings of nudity, fellatio, cunnilingus, quickies and straight-up bonking. This is puppetry with balls in more ways than one, which makes the adult content in the current West End puppet production of Avenue Q look like The Muppet Christmas Carol.

With the British dance legend at the helm, this year’s themes ranged from quantum gravity to slightly muted geopolitics

The most memorable performance in the opening days of this year’s Venice Dance Biennale had barely any dance in it at all. Italian choreographer Andrea Salustri’s Invisible is built around movement, but it’s movement of light, air, water and sound waves, with Salustri and co-creator Alice Rende as shadowy figures conducting the elements. They brew up storms like Zeus and Poseidon, with flashing veins of light, sounds of pummelling rain (in fact small drips and bubbles amplified by powerful microphones) and an enormous amount of billowing smoke that ultimately whips itself into a spinning tornado.

Salustri, who won the Italian callout to create a new work for this year’s biennale, is a circus artist and philosophy graduate, and he is also a choreographer – a definition so much wider than one who devises dance. This year marks the 20th dedicated dance festival in Venice (dance was previously seen as part of the theatre or music programmes here until 1999, since when it has been an annual, then biennial, and now annual feature of Venice’s arts bonanza). In a talk to mark this anniversary, current artistic director Wayne McGregor was joined by four former directors to discuss their aims for the event. The question of “what dance is” kept arising as the ongoing line of inquiry, a question “so ordinary that it is still necessary somehow”, said choreographer Marie Chouinard.

A new film, Life Lines, put together by McGregor and filmmaker Ravi Deepres, compiles archive clips from festivals past, showing that the range of dance here has been vast and multifarious, from the fairly conventional to the theatrically wild. There’s clearly no single story of contemporary dance’s development, and McGregor’s theme for this year’s festival is Time Does Not Exist. Influenced by physicist Carlo Rovelli and the theory of quantum gravity, his is not a linear view of time, and without doubt, in dance (and in life), we carry our embodied pasts constantly into the present. That’s no more evident than in Soa Ratsifandrihana’s piece Fampitaha, Fampita, Fampitàna (meaning “comparison, transmission, rivalry” in Malagasy, the language of Madagascar, from where the choreographer is from). It’s a piece about living in the diaspora and concerned with the sometimes joyful, sometimes painful, memories that link back home – especially the memories stored in our bodies, in songs, stories and dance steps. It’s a gentle piece, conversational between the three dancers and fabulous guitarist Joël Rabesolo, in the sense that like many conversations it meanders, then touches on the profound, then gets self-absorbed, connects again, tails off. But it has its moments.

Stratospheric costs could prevent the fire-damaged landmark from returning to its former glory. Now, unless a wealthy patron is found, the building seems destined for ‘soulless’ facade retention or ‘curated decay’

Doubly destroyed by two fires, Scotland’s finest piece of architecture, the Mackintosh building at the Glasgow School of Art (GSA), cuts a lamentable sight.

A 12-year saga of destruction, rebuilding and yet more destruction, all underscored by an unedifying seam of political and institutional wrangling, reached an apologetic conclusion of sorts, with the recent announcement that Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s exquisite art nouveau creation is unlikely to be rebuilt in its original form because of stratospheric cost.

This week’s best wildlife photographs from around the world

Versions of Amy Winehouse and hundreds of other musicians are generating millions for beleaguered UK venues. But what is the emotional toll for the imitators, and are they pushing out original artists?

As peak heatwave sun beams down on to a field in Derbyshire, Amy Winehouse tells the crowd she is in need of hydration – so Robbie Williams fetches her a drink. Elsewhere, members of the public stop the Beastie Boys for selfies, Fred Durst grooves along as Diana Ross covers Al Green, and shirtless teenagers form a circle pit during Korn as a woman sits knitting in a camping chair just behind them. James Brown and Prince turn out to be the same artist – just dressed up in different clothes.

These are all scenes from Replika festival last month, which won the Guinness world record for the biggest tribute festival, with 108 acts performing across a very sweaty weekend. The punning deserves an accolade of its own: acts included Catfishing the Bottlemen, Pearl Scam, Wrong Jovi and Iffy Clyro.

Actor best known for the 1960s box-office smash Casino Royale

Joanna Pettet, who has died aged 83, was a British-born, Canadian-raised actor who found fame in the 1960s after just a handful of films, including the James Bond spoof Casino Royale.

The 1967 film drew lukewarm reviews for its parody of the “official” 007 movies and suffered from a production history that included five directors, but it became a box-office smash with expectant audiences. In it Pettet played Mata Bond, the illegitimate daughter of Mata Hari and the retired Sir James Bond (acted by David Niven, one of multiple 007s featured). She is seen performing an exotic dance in a Buddhist temple, where Niven signs her up as a spy. “Do I get an exploding briefcase and a secret transmitter?” asks Pettet, who described the role as “campy”.

On a coastline brimming with seafood shacks, crab sandwiches and hyperlocal flavour, our food writer is happy to be distracted from the stunning scenery

If we take it as read that the better the view, the worse the cooking, then by rights south Wales’s Gower peninsula should be a culinary desert. The first time I visited almost 15 years ago, I was unprepared for its loveliness – back in 1956, Gower (never the Gower, as locals were quick to correct me) was the first place in the UK to be designated an area of outstanding natural beauty, and though the peninsula abuts the country’s second city, Swansea, it still feels profoundly rural. Crisscrossed by narrow lanes flanked by towering hedges and ancient churches, it’s a great place to cycle, to drive, and above all to walk up an appetite.

Indeed, it’s been a long-held ambition of mine to hike the 43 miles of the Welsh Coast Path from Mumbles to Loughor. Sadly, it remains just that because on this latest trip I spent considerably more time chomping than yomping … though in fairness I was on a research mission for a walking trip with a friend here later in the summer, because as a food writer and semi-professional glutton, I never like to head anywhere unprepared.

From Carthage airport and Dante’s Purgatory to Maglia Rosa, Maillot Jaune and La Roja, test your knowledge with the Saturday quiz

1 Whose The Dream (The Bed) is the most expensive painting by a woman?
2 Which capital city is served by Carthage airport?
3 Which famous feuding families appear in Canto VI of Dante’s Purgatory?
4 Lock & Co is the world’s oldest shop selling what?
5 Which composer was bandmaster at the Worcester County and City Lunatic Asylum?
6 At what point in a planet’s orbit is it closest to the sun?
7 Liverpool FC were 2023 league champions in which country?
8 What insulting messages were sent by Victorians on 14 February?
What links:
9 Finding Nemo; Little Shop of Horrors; Marathon Man; The Hangover?
10 Andrea Jaeger; Philip Mulryne; David Sheppard; Taribo West?
11 Billington and Mayman; Block and Quayle; Clemens and August?
12 Alloy; carbon; stainless; tool?
13 Teme; Vyrnwy; Warwickshire Avon; Worcestershire Stour?
14 Maglia Rosa; Maillot Jaune; La Roja?
15 Plutarch; Giorgio Vasari; John Aubrey; Leslie Stephen; Lytton Strachey?

Whether you’re on PC or a console, level up your setup with our gaming expert’s pick of the best chairs

• The best games of 2026 so far

Comfort is crucial to the gaming experience. It’s hard to focus on blasting aliens or taking Stoke to the Champions League final if your bum has gone to sleep because you’ve been sitting on an old chair for three hours. We’re spending more time playing games than ever before, so good posture matters. If you have set up a dedicated gaming space, then a rickety seat just won’t cut it.

From luxurious ergonomic thrones to cheap-and-cheerful bucket seats, the options available are bewildering. So I set out on an epic quest: to find the most comfortable, durable and stylish gaming chairs. Here’s what I discovered.

Best gaming chair overall:
Secretlab Titan Evo

Best budget gaming chair:
ThunderX3 Solo 360

Supportive and surprisingly cool for memory foam, Panda’s flagship topper gave our reviewer some of the best sleep she’s had all summer

• The best mattress toppers – tested

When I was struggling to sleep in a heatwave, diving into a 6ft slab of memory foam didn’t exactly sound like the answer. Memory foam is renowned for trapping heat, and the more “sinky” the foam, the more heat you’d expect it to trap. Less comfort layer, more boiled marshmallow.

However, the foam used by Panda in its flagship mattress topper genuinely seems to break the mould. It has the cosy feel of conventional memory foam, but it eased my night sweats so well when I tested the best mattress toppers in summer 2025 that I named it the “best cooling topper”, beating rivals filled with airy wool and microfibre.

They’re the foundation of a good routine, but which face wash does our beauty expert rate for oily, dry, or normal skin?

• How to build the perfect skincare routine

Choosing a cleanser can feel like Goldilocks’ task of searching for the perfect bowl of porridge – finding one that’s just right is rarely straightforward. Add in that our skin is constantly changing, due to hormones, the seasons and environmental stressors, and it’s easy to see why finding the ideal formula can be challenging.

Cleansers are often overlooked, but the right one is the basis of a good skincare routine. To understand what we should be looking for, I spoke with Dr Ahmed El Muntasar, GP and founder of the Aesthetics Doctor, who explained that the ideal formula depends entirely on skin type. “If someone is acne-prone or oily, I would usually recommend something more gel-based, because it helps break through excess oil more effectively,” he says. “Ingredients such as salicylic acid and niacinamide can also be helpful for those skin types.”

Best overall and best budget cleanser:
Cetaphil gentle exfoliating salicylic acid cleanser

Best cleanser if you can afford it:
Sarah Chapman Skinesis Ultimate Cleanse

Good taste doesn’t have to cost a fortune. Whether it’s designer-looking cutlery or affordable art, these clever buys start from £2 – but punch well above their price tag

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You don’t need the budget of a boutique hotel to make your home look a bit more pulled together. It’s all down to knowing where to look, picking a few well-made objects, choosing good-quality fabrics and materials, and spotting timeless classics (or designs inspired by them) that won’t date too quickly.

Here are some tricks, hidden gems and affordable-but-stylish finds, from egg cups to art, that will elevate your space – and prove good taste and quality needn’t cost the earth.

This globetrotting cold fusion dish boasts south-east Asian, Middle-Eastern and even Italian influences, producing sweet and sour notes and a chilli kick

Can a person in a heatwave ever have too many cold noodle dishes? I’d wager no – hence today’s recipe. It started life as one of my favourite meals, the mighty spaghetti pomodoro, but then packed its bags and travelled through the Middle East, picking up some tahini along the way, then on to Indonesia for some heat (sambal oelek), and then hopped over to Vietnam for a final hurrah of fresh lime, coriander and peanuts. The result is a creamy but perky tomato sauce that can live in the fridge for up to a week for the too-hot-to-cook days.

Orange wine and mezcal mingle in this smoky, Georgian-inspired drink

A smoky, refreshing highball inspired by Georgia’s amber wines and qvevri winemaking tradition (large clay vessels buried underground for fermentation). The mezcal works beautifully with the wine, which traditionally has structure and tannin from extended skin contact in those qvevri, and with the hint of citrus. The result is a cocktail that feels ancient and modern at the same time.

Jack Porter, DakaDaka, London W1

These bright, sharp Mexican iced treats are the perfect summer cooler – with a spiky kick

The first time I encountered paletas in Mexico, they felt strangely familiar. They reminded me of the iced treats of my Malaysian childhood: fruit-driven, brightly coloured and made less to indulge than to relieve the heat. What struck me most was the flavour logic shared by both countries, where sweetness is often enlivened with salt, chilli, tamarind or citrus, each sharpening the fruit in its own way and making it seem brighter, cooler and somehow more vivid. Paletas are rarely perfectly smooth; little pieces of fruit suspended in the ice give them texture and interest. These two paletas take different paths from the same base: pineapple – sharp, clean and bright with lime and ginger – and mango – sweeter, rounder and more indulgent, which I’ve spiked with chilli, lime and salt.

Iced tea doesn’t have to be the super sweet, sugar-packed mainstream brands – there are plenty of offerings ready to convert even the staunchest tea purist

As a very prescriptive tea drinker – piping hot “Stephen Fry” everyday Twinings, thank you, brewed strong with a dash of milk and no sugar under any circumstances – iced tea has always been lost on me. But there’s nothing like an unprecedented heatwave to encourage this sleepless mother to review her position on something as vital as tea.

Many of us associate iced tea with the American south, but legend has it that it was actually an English tea merchant who popularised it there. Richard Blechynden met countless visitors who were unwilling to drink hot tea in the summer heat of 1904’s Louisiana Purchase Exposition, so instead he served it over ice. With the American penchant for iced drinks being already well-documented (Mark Twain wrote that if there was one thing that could be called “American”, it was “the national devotion to ice-water”), it took off.

To stay open-hearted and optimistic, you need hope, writes advice columnist Eleanor Gordon-Smith. That’s not the same as expectation

• Read more Leading questions

I’m nearly 30 and my first serious relationship just ended a month ago. It lasted eight months, she was my first girlfriend and first kiss, etc. She broke up with me in a very kind and respectful way, and I have been … OK, I guess.

The thing is, everyone has been saying to me, “But you must feel so much more confident now.” I don’t. My self-esteem and confidence wasn’t exactly soaring before I met her, but now I feel even less so. It just feels like most people are less tolerant or accepting of my shortcomings.

Fay likes to get a good spot and watch the support acts, but Odysseus would rather rock up for the main band. Who is hitting a false note? You decide

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

Fay likes to be on the front row but I think it’s overrated

A Harris’s hawk, she is capable of flying at more than 35mph, scouring the ground for prey, while also judging my footwear. The moments of connection with this wild creature are incredible

My children brought hawks into my life. My youngest son, especially, became fascinated by birds of prey at the age of six, drawing beautiful pictures and reciting endless facts to bird owners at various country shows.

Eventually I decided, why not? We live in the countryside, after all, on Anglesey (Ynys Môn). So, during Covid, Bird, the Harris’s hawk, came into our lives. We got her from a breeder after she hatched. It was perfect timing: I was home-schooling my three kids, and at 2pm every day, rain or shine, with a brilliant local falconer, we would set out on to the headland to watch her fly. It was beautiful to see. For years, my youngest never missed a day, no matter how cold.

A social media manager and a​ transport psychology ​researcher disagreed over Palestine Action, but who ​changed their view on the triple-loc​k?

• Want to meet someone from across the divide? Click here to find out how

Hugo, 21, Birmingham

Occupation Social media manager for the Conservative party

When the problem was finally sorted out in our new-build home, it increased my tariff by 19%

Residents in our new housing development are being billed for each other’s energy after the meters were mixed up.

I realised British Gas was sending bills for my energy to the developer of the estate instead of to me. I informed British Gas of my details when I moved in seven months ago.

They are out to steal your password to commit further fraud such as crypto scams or phishing attacks

You have had an X account for years, since it was known as Twitter. When an email arrives about a new login from a location nowhere near where you live, alarm bells begin to ring.

“We noticed a login to your account from a new device. Was this you?” the email asks.

I bought a wheelchair for my daughter, but she later died in hospital and the company refuses a refund

I bought a £435 wheelchair for my disabled daughter from my local Lifestyle & Mobility store.

She had been admitted to hospital for tests and I planned to use the chair to take her on outings when she was discharged.

Vibrant areas for young workers who plan to rent while saving for a deposit and then get on the property ladder

• The new 100% mortgages for first-time buyers

• Homes to rent before buying in cities

The common property rite of passage for graduates and career-focused first jobbers has changed over the past decade. Many careers used to start in London, and an early house-share would be followed by a first flat purchase, then a move to somewhere bigger.

However, the heavy burden of housing costs in the capital is making would-be first-time buyers stop and evaluate whether – even with London weighting on some wages – it is possible to get on the ladder there.

Feel lethargic even after a full night’s sleep? From not enough fibre to too much sitting, experts explain why your get up and go has got up and gone

The very air you breathe could be an issue. “Close the door, shut the window, add a partner and a heater, and by 3am a typical bedroom sits at 1,500 to 2,500 parts per million of carbon dioxide,” says Dr Jemma King, author of Sleep First: Sleep Smarter, Think Sharper, Feel Better. “Research shows that above 1,000 ppm sleep efficiency drops, deep sleep reduces and salivary cortisol rises on waking. You’re sleeping, but your nervous system is mildly activated all night.” Luckily, it’s an easy fix: open a window – even 2cm will do the job, according to King.

‘Bulking’, or gaining weight on purpose to get stronger, challenged everything I was once taught to do with my body

• Tell us: what impact have GLP-1s had on your relationships?

I had been casually lifting weights for a few years when several things changed in quick succession.

First, my boyfriend proposed.

Experts weigh in on wellness culture’s obsession with natural fibers and the growing trend of people shunning plastic-based clothing

A few months ago, Lane Koch made a decision: she would purge her family’s closets of all plastic-based fabrics and replace them with natural fibers, such as cotton and linen.

Koch, a longtime Republican political strategist who was a senior staffer on Robert F Kennedy Jr’s presidential campaign, has long avoided processed foods and rid her kitchen of plastic cookware about a decade ago. But, for all that she cared about what she put in her body, she told me she had paid little attention to what she put on her body.

Pioneering study linking noise pollution to Parkinson’s finds 3% increase in risk for every 11.5dB rise in noise levels

Long-term exposure to road traffic noise is associated with a higher risk of Parkinson’s disease, the biggest study of its kind has found.

Parkinson’s disease is a progressive disorder in which parts of the brain become damaged over time, affecting movement and balance.

A physio, a tailor and a historian on the style trends that can put women in hospital and how to avoid the dangers

“Buyer beware” is one of the oldest principles in English law. Now, a pair of wide legged trousers from Zara is bringing the phrase back to the forefront of shoppers’ minds.

On social media the £25.99 wide-legged trousers from the high-street retailer have earned the moniker “Zara death pants” thanks to a slew of videos showing wearers tripping over the leg of the trousers and injuring themselves.

V&A event celebrates all shapes and sizes as wider fashion industry stalls on body diversity

Visitors to London’s Victoria and Albert Museum on Friday afternoon to watch Sinéad O’Dwyer’s Fashion in Motion show would have encountered something a little different. The cast of performers and models wore everything from underwear to skirt suits and sequins, and sometimes danced interpretively on the catwalk to a performance by the band Jeanie and The White Boys, but most notably came in all shapes and sizes.

O’Dwyer’s work has pushed against fashion’s insistence on a thin body type since she appeared at London fashion week in 2021. If most brands make the samples for clothes shown on the catwalk based on a size 4-8, she uses a size 18. She has won awards for her work, as well as celebrity fans including Cardi B and Björk.

Thanks to gen Z resellers and platforms like Depop, thrifting has lost its subcultural roots - and ballooned into a $350bn business

Vintage boutique owner Janelle Best has been rummaging in thrift shop bins since the 90s. When she started, she says, there was a stigma about it. “It was either you were a freak, or you were poor – and I was a freak.”

At first, she did it to source stage outfits while playing in psych-rock bands. Then, in 2005, she started “casually reselling” on eBay. Ten years later she was trading as Desert Stars Vintage at street markets, and by 2023 she had opened a showroom specializing in upmarket silk dresses in her Williamsburg apartment. Even just a few years ago, she says, she still put in the hours at places like Goodwill. The bins, she says, “were a field day. There were so many fucking bangers.” And then, thrifting became a social media craze, she says, “and the hell gates of high school students flooded in. Twelve people to each bin. Everyone fighting. Suddenly everyone’s a reseller, and instead of these kids intuitively knowing what’s good, they’re on their phones trying to figure out if it’s valuable.”

Whether you’re on a staycation or jetting away, drawstring trousers and clever layering will keep you cool

From being abused by staff and other travellers to being denied access to toilets, flying is an increasingly distressing and frustrating experience for many wheelchair users. Here, they share their stories

When Hannah Babalola boarded KLM flight 598 on 26 May, she was tired. A Paralympic athlete, she had been competing at an event in South Africa’s Cape Town, and was hoping there would be no hold ups on her journey back home to Chicago.

Babalola, 37, is well-travelled. A former wheelchair racer, she now competes in marathons and has flown to dozens of countries over the years without big problems.

From the Tiramisù World Cup in Italy to street food ‘battles’ in Newcastle, your culinary highlights range from the sublime to the delicious
• Tell us about a book that inspired you to travel – the best tip wins £200 towards a Coolstays break

The town of Menton on the French Riviera is beautiful at any time of the year but becomes even more of a treat during the annual Lemon festival (Fête du Citron, 10-28 February 2027). Its microclimate, courtesy of the Alps to the north blocking colder winds, gives Menton lemons a distinct fragrance, flavour and quality that set them apart. For me, the event transformed a damp cold UK winter into a fortnight of colour, taste and light. There were food tastings, salads made with lemons, tarts, cakes and pies all full of zesty colour and flavour at stalls and markets in the town. There are sculptures made from citrus fruit, parades and exhibitions in the Golden Garden of Light (Jardins Biovès). More than a food festival, it’s a celebration of what nature can give to the world.
April

‘Legends cling like barnacles to these shores,’ says our local writer, who reveals how the lore of these craggy cliffs and beaches resonates with the Homeric classic

The incoming tide has made a labyrinth of the beach. As silvery rivulets spread across Culbin Sands to meet the mudflats, my walk becomes increasingly circuitous: weaving inland towards the pine forest, backtracking closer to the waves, skirting tidal pools and scaling dunes constantly resculpted by the North Sea breeze.

In this shapeshifting stretch of north-east Scotland’s Moray coast, there’s not another soul in sight, nothing to anchor me to the modern day. It’s easy, then, to imagine a longship bringing weary warriors ashore, or a band of man-eating giants marauding from the woodland. Which is exactly what happens here – on screen – in Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of The Odyssey.

The seven inhabited isles off the North Sea coast, part of a Unesco world heritage site, are a sanctuary for wildlife – with great hotels and restaurants too

‘Can you hear that?” my guide Andrea Wellmeyer asks as I sink a little deeper into the wet ground, cold mud seeping between my toes. When the wind drops, I detect a faint but distinct crackling, similar to the rustle of a sweet wrapper or the bubbling of sparkling water. “That’s the Wattknistern,” she says, “a natural phenomenon caused by the tens of thousands of mud shrimp that live here.”

We’re standing in the Wadden Sea mudflats on Norderney, an island just off Germany’s North Sea coast. It’s Friday evening at low tide. In the town centre, bars are pumping with music, but here, just 15 minutes along the southern edge of the island, it’s a completely different story.

Since I started doing search and rescue five years ago, I have found seven survivors. Sadly, the number I find dead is higher

In 2012, I was a student and had arrived in Taiwan from the Czech Republic. I soon discovered something that interested me far more than my studies: the mountains of Taiwan. I would leave the campus to explore untouched trails near Taipei. I was obsessed with old maps, often looking for routes that had vanished from modern ones, and hiking paths that no one had taken for decades.

I stayed in Taiwan because of my love for the mountains – there are more than 250 peaks that exceed 3,000 metres. Among the local hiking community, I became known for my speed and knowledge of remote regions.

There are lots of rules about roses, with Instagram adding to the impression they are hard work. But they’re easy to keep when you know how

Does your Instagram shout at you? Mine does. Every time I open it up – albeit with increasing reluctance – someone I didn’t previously know existed is sharing a “hack”. It could be for stopping my toddler from throwing a fit in the supermarket or how to button a shirt so I look less old. It’s interesting when gardening suggestions are thrown into the mix. Sometimes they’re nonsense (see growing new spring onions from the bottoms of old ones in saucers of water), sometimes they’re so helpful I stash them away with the unfulfilled intention to watch back in the future.

Lately, I’m being shown a lot of stuff about roses. Specifically, deadheading them. Roses are one of those plants that seem more high-maintenance than they are; before I grew them I was convinced they were the preserve of those people who are so serious about gardening that they have a foam kneeler (I still don’t own one of these).

From an intricate bronze-like townhouse in Manchester to a sculptural property in the Essex countryside

A symbol of global inequalities and shifting geopolitical fortunes, some passports offer their holders far more freedom to travel than others

Passports can resemble abridged memoirs, their stamps telling romantic stories of wanderlust, freedom and belonging.

But they are also a symbol of global inequalities and shifting geopolitical fortunes. Passports from some places allow their holders to travel abroad simply by booking a flight and packing a bag. Others, however, entail booking an appointment at the nearest consulate, presenting documents to prove identity and financial means, then waiting weeks for a decision.

With the outbreak of this year’s war, Iraq’s balancing act between the two antagonists has collapsed, exposing a perilously fragile state

• The summer issue of the Long Read magazine is out now. Click here to order

One week after the United States and Israel killed Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and ignited a regional war, drones started flying over Basra in southern Iraq. They were targeting Iraq’s oil industry. They hit an oilfield operated by BP, as well as a cargo terminal at Basra airport and a large compound that houses foreign companies that service the oil sector. Another attack on 6 March hit the same compound, striking offices and warehouses used by Halliburton and KBR, two US companies that have been in Iraq since the 2003 invasion. The attack sparked a massive fire that lit up the night sky.

In the wider war, it was not a particularly notable day – but in Iraq the strikes laid bare just how weak the state had become and “how easily sovereignty could be violated”, as one senior Iraqi security official put it to me. For 40 years, the US, Iran and Israel existed in an uneasy equilibrium of neither peace nor war. As this has come to a sudden, dramatic end, Iraq finds itself caught in the middle.

Anton Jäger has been lauded for his exceptional ability to make sense of these strange political times – and he’s only 32. The writer and academic explains why we’re living in an age of hyperpolitics

‘I am acutely conscious,” said Andy Burnham outside 10 Downing Street on Monday, “that I am the sixth person in the last 10 years to walk up this street.” It was good to hear him say it because, beneath all the cabinet gossip and rune-reading, there is a feeling of terror about the immediate future and also about ourselves, the electorate. Is this who we are now? Wildly enthusiastic one minute, seething the next; as passionate about the change we want as we are convinced that those who promise it are incapable of enacting it?

It is perhaps not surprising that Anton Jäger’s recent book, Hyperpolitics: Extreme Politicization without Political Consequences, is being read by Labour watchers and leftwing thinkers. As the New York Times wrote, it’s “among the best and most dazzling efforts to model the political present in all its maddening strangeness”. Still, I think Jäger was surprised to have his honeymoon interrupted so I could interview him about it. Life comes at everyone quite fast in a hyperpolitical age.

With the cost of holiday childcare rising and many parents juggling work with looking after children, we’d like to hear how you’re managing this summer

The summer holidays have begun, bringing the annual challenge many parents face in balancing work and looking after school-aged children. New research suggests arranging six weeks of holiday childcare can cost working parents up to £1,145 per child, while almost three-quarters of parents say the summer childcare juggle damages their career.

Are you paying for holiday clubs or childminders, relying on family and friends or working from home while caring for children? Are you taking annual leave, reducing your hours or working early mornings and late evenings to fit everything in?

Whether you’re part of a volunteer group or go out on solo clean-ups in the UK, we’d like to hear from you

Across the UK, people are getting together to clean up their local environments. Whether it be maintaining parkland, beaches, waterways or roadsides, we want to hear from the volunteers who are getting involved in the maintenance and preservation of their local areas.

Do you take part in weekly litter picking outings? Are you part of a group taking on the responsibility of keeping our beaches or rivers clean?

We would like to hear about the highs and lows of university clubs and societies

As a new academic year approaches, we would like to hear from students and recent graduates (five years ago or less) about their experiences of university clubs and societies that freshers might find instructive.

What was your best experience of a university club or society? And what was your worst?

We would love to hear about your workhorse appliances, why they’re so impressive and how long you’ve had them

An elderly couple in Gloucestershire are reportedly still using what is believed to be Britain’s oldest working fridge.

The Electrolux appliance was built in the 1930s and bought second-hand by their family in 1949, with the owners telling SWNS that it is “still going strong”.

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Wildfires in Europe, Russian missile strikes in Kyiv, the cockroach protests in New Delhi and the World Cup final – the past seven days as captured by the world’s leading photojournalists

Warning: this gallery contains images some readers may find distressing