The ruthless female characters of The Gentlemen, Beef and Peaky Blinders bring new depth to the evil matriarch stereotype

Television loves a gangster story – and apparently so does the Duchess of Sussex. This week, Netflix’s The Gentlemen – Guy Ritchie’s latest addition to the gangster canon, which stars Theo James as a distractingly handsome aristocrat who becomes embroiled in the world of organized crime – returns for its second season. And in August, the show hit the headlines after rumors that Meghan was reportedly in early talks to join its third season when she and Prince Harry made their highly unexpected return to the UK.

At first, Meghan’s potential role seemed like a random pivot for the former Suits star, who now seems far more at home holding a jar of her Montecito-made jam than brandishing a gun. But really, these casting rumours are indicative of a wider shift in the traditionally machismo-fueled gangster genre, where it’s now more common to see women stealing the spotlight – and calling the shots.

I will calmly read all the threatening letters and await the court case against me. But I will take a stand even if our government won’t

I can’t even remember when I decided to stop paying the sewage element of my Thames Water bill. It might have been after reading this headline from the Guardian in July 2025: “Serious pollution incidents by English water companies rose 60% last year,” with the subheading: “Environment Agency records 75 serious incidents among total of 2,800, with Thames Water being worst offender.”

Living in London means that my supplier is Thames Water, which makes a profit out of pollution. I decided that if the government wouldn’t act, I could at least do my part and not pay for this travesty.

Jenny Jones is a Green party peer

The British transfer record was equalled and one club signed no fewer than 18 players in another hectic summer

Bringing in Christos Tzolis, Bruno Guimarães and Ezri Konsa was a strong start to the window but could Arsenal’s failure to sign a marquee attacker cost them in the long run? They began targeting Morgan Rogers before pivoting to Vinícius Júnior when the England forward went to Chelsea, only to end up disappointed when Vinícius signed a new deal with Real Madrid. Julián Alvarez made clear he had no intention of joining from Atlético Madrid in the final days of the window and Arsenal kept their powder dry despite sanctioning the exits of Gabriel Jesus to Barcelona and Ethan Nwaneri to Borussia Dortmund. Should Gabriel Martineilli complete his move to Al-Hilal as expected in the coming days – the Saudi Pro League window remains open – a few injuries could leave Arteta short. Ed Aarons

Guardian readers share memories of the actor best known for roles in The Rocky Horror Show and Stephen King’s It

I first saw him in the 1978 series Will Shakespeare, where he played Shakespeare alongside Nicholas Clay. Two very classy actors who, whatever the value of the programme, made me want to know more about the man and his work. Tim Curry always had a glorious glint in his eye which drew you in as if you were the only person who understood. Margaret Carradus, Lancaster

For a decade I lived with a fear so bad that I once tried to climb out of a tube carriage while it was in motion. Then a hypnotherapist told me to ask my parents one very important question

In 2000, I had been living in London for just over a decade and working at EMI Records for five years. I had moved to Brixton from Surrey – where space and peace were generally abundant – in the late 80s, and I’d noticed I was becoming increasingly anxious and claustrophobic, particularly on public transport.

As things got progressively worse, I had a string of distressing panic attacks. Every time, it felt like the world around me was closing in. Then, in July 2003, during my daily commute between Brixton and the South Bank, I had a panic attack so intense I tried to climb out of the tube carriage doors. Thankfully, other passengers held me back until we arrived at the next platform – but I knew the problem was no longer something I could ignore.

The comedian’s new Friday night series will be set in a working pub, with his aunties working the bar and celebrities doing shifts as managers. Or it will be if he can only get his licence …

Joe Lycett sits in a pub, an untouched pint in front of him. “Since I had my son, I’m not drinking anywhere near as much,” he laments. “Children do not respect hangovers, or tiredness in general.”

His son is almost two, and Lycett has readjusted his life accordingly. “I’ve started going to bed when he does, which is about seven o’clock,” he explains. “I’ve seen a few nights where I’ve just gone: ‘Right, well, that’s me, then.’”

In first PMQs clash with Kemi Badenoch, prime minister rejects comparison to Liz Truss’s government

• UK politics live – latest updates

Andy Burnham blamed the Conservatives’ legacy for leaving the UK vulnerable to market turmoil, in his first prime ministers’ questions clash with Kemi Badenoch, as the UK’s borrowing costs climbed further.

The Conservative leader compared the market pressure on Burnham’s second day to Liz Truss’s mini-Budget. But the prime minister said it was the Tories’ failure to address the UK’s growth and debt which meant the economy was exposed to market shocks.

Blast also injures 68 guests at the wedding in southern Iran, prompting fears of escalation in hostilities

• Middle East crisis live – latest updates

Iran has accused the US of a “war crime” after a missile blast killed at least four people and injured 68 who were attending a wedding at a private home in a coastal city of southern Iran, as the fresh exchange of strikes prompted fears of a wider renewal of hostilities.

Iranian media said that the wedding ceremony was being held in a home in the city of Kuhestak, Hormozgan province, late on Tuesday when a US missile struck, with shrapnel and debris from the strike killing and injuring people.

Two men and two women accused of murder, causing or allowing death of a child, and perverting course of justice

Four people have appeared in court charged with murder after a newborn baby girl was stabbed to death in Sheffield.

Two men and two women were remanded in custody on Wednesday following the death of the newborn named only as Baby S.

Lack of information raises fears over environmental impact of the AI boom

• UK politics live – latest updates

The UK government does not know what the country’s datacentres are being used for despite fears over the growing environmental impact of the AI boom.

When asked in a freedom of information (FoI) request who was using the largest sites and what for, the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology said it did “not hold the requested information”. The ministry has since been dissolved.

Minister says Sweden has ‘fulfilled its commitments’ amid criticism of ‘unjust’ decisions such as case of Joyce Thomas

The Swedish government has doubled down on its position on removing and deporting British citizens on the grounds they were late to apply for permission to stay after Brexit.

The migration minister, Johan Forssell, issued a robust defence of the Swedish migration agency’s implementation of the Brexit withdrawal agreement on Wednesday in response to a question from an MP about the case of Joyce Thomas, a 78-year-old British widow who has been ordered to leave the country after 21 years.

Ukraine’s president says aviation industry needs to take account of growing number of Ukrainian drones in Russia

• Europe live – latest updates

Volodymyr Zelenskyy has said Russia’s airspace is becoming unsafe for commercial airlines, as Vladimir Putin promised to step up strikes against Ukraine’s energy facilities in the run-up to winter.

The Ukrainian president said there was no intention to directly threaten civilian flights, but the growing number of attack drones being flown into the country by Ukraine would have to be “taken into account” by the aviation industry.

A week on from the flash flooding disaster, authorities are urging relatives of the thousands of missing and dead to provide blood samples

An army official calls out a name. A young woman stands, two pieces of identification in her hands. She fills out a form, takes another and moves to the back of the hospital to give a vial of blood.

With so many people killed by Nepal’s floods, and hundreds of bodies being buried because the morgues are full, there is now a push to identify victims through DNA. The woman, Prakrit Gurung, 19, is hoping her DNA will be linked to her mother’s body. Her father’s has been found – her brother recognised his picture on a wall outside the hospital.

London mayor’s office says he is ‘victim of a scam’ after conviction under fast-track system where magistrates can decide outcomes in seconds

• UK politics live – latest updates

Sadiq Khan’s office has revealed he was the victim of a scam that led to him being fined for failing to tax a car that did not belong to him.

The London mayor was found guilty last month under a system of “conveyor-belt justice”, in which magistrates decide on hundreds of cases a day, sometimes spending less than a minute on each.

• Woods pleads no contest to reduced charge

• Charges stemmed from March rollover crash

Tiger Woods pleaded no contest to reckless driving on Wednesday morning as part of an agreement with Florida prosecutors that reduced a DUI charge stemming from his rollover crash in March.

The 50-year-old was adjudicated guilty of willful and wanton reckless driving, a second offense, during a hearing in Martin County court. Under the agreement, Woods was fined $1,000 and had his driver’s license suspended for five years. Prosecutors had originally charged him with driving under the influence with property damage.

AI datacentres are almost universally unpopular. They are loud, unsightly and drain environmental resources, with most of the profits generated flowing back to the US companies that build them – and the statistics against them are piling up.

Guardian reporter Hettie O’Brien visits Brick Lane in east London, where people are trying to resist plans for a 5,200-sq metre datacentre being pushed through by the government, to find out why people hate them so much

Ahead of a crucial budget, four countries’ experiments offer a mixed verdict on how to tax bumper profits

The countdown is on. Two months out from Andy Burnham’s inaugural autumn budget, bank executives are wringing their hands over whether the government will target their bumper profits with fresh taxes.

The chancellor, John Healey, is reportedly considering a windfall tax on both banks and oil companies in the late October Westminster setpiece.

Rapper’s supporters reflect on ‘astonishing’ events leading to Duane Davis being found guilty over 1996 fatal shooting

A criminal conviction this week in the murder of Tupac Shakur, the first since the rapper was gunned down in 1996, sent shockwaves through his sea of fans who have waited three decades for answers.

Duane “Keffe D” Davis, a former California gang leader, was found guilty of murder on Monday for the role he played in orchestrating the fatal shooting of Shakur.

Fifty years ago Parker was hailed as rock’s next big thing, but he picked a different path: cult records, a Hollywood diversion, an aversion to stardom. Ahead of a UK tour, he looks back at his strange trajectory

To say Graham Parker enjoyed a swift rise to fame is an understatement. He played his first live show with his most famous backing band, the Rumour, in October 1975, at the Newlands Tavern, a pub in Nunhead, south-east London. By the start of the following year, he had a record deal and was in the studio recording his debut album, Howlin’ Wind. The buzz around him was such that the sessions were interrupted by the arrival of a succession of stars – Thin Lizzy’s Phil Lynott among them – intrigued to hear what the fuss was about: a petrol pump attendant from Surrey who sang like Van Morrison and had written a set of smart, sharp, literate songs in between filling up cars.

The record arrived in April 1976 to vast critical excitement, a lot of it occasioned by the album’s closing track, the reggae-influenced, attitude-laden Don’t Ask Me Questions. After Howlin’ Wind came out, followed in October by Heat Treatment, things ratcheted up another notch. Parker turned up in Australia to discover the media waiting for him and a press conference arranged in the airport: they had taken the amount of music press coverage Parker was receiving to mean he was “as big as Bruce Springsteen, which was insane”. Low down on a festival bill topped by Bob Dylan, he found himself backstage collared by the headline act, eager to tell Parker how much he loved his work. There also exists a photo of Parker in Los Angeles, with, of all people, Michael Jackson, but their meeting was apparently less successful. “I said to him: ‘Michael, great to meet you, I did a version of [Jackson 5 hit] I Want You Back recently.’ And he just sort of said: ‘Ooh.’ So that,” he laughs, “was the full extent of my conversation with Michael Jackson.”

Simukai Chigudu’s filmic memoir details the confines and conflicts of growing up in Zimbabwe during political turmoil.

• Don’t already get The Long Wave in your inbox? Sign up here

Last week, I finally managed to snatch one read out of the jaws of a hectic summer. On a series of very long-haul flights (highly recommended as a way to break reading droughts), I fell into the world of Simukai Chigudu’s Chasing Freedom: Coming of Age at the End of Empire. I finished the book just as I was landing in Nairobi, Kenya. In a daze, I stepped on to the tarmac in the chill of equatorial winter.

The book was about growing up in post-colonial Zimbabwe and navigating life between the ex-colonised and the ex-colonial power. But the account of Chigudu’s life also captured, in ways that sometimes left me breathless with the shock of recognition, what felt like a broader shared experience for those of us born to parents whose traumas we never understood. This week, I reflected on how Chigudu’s experience connects to that of a wider post-colonial African generation.

September is the most fun time of year to shop, but it can also be dangerously seductive. Keep your wits about you with these tips

I used to love back-to-school shopping when my children were little. The miniature highlighter pens, the name labels, those pop-out pencil cases from Smiggle, even the intergenerational wrangling over when the price of a water bottle becomes unreasonable. I love the ceremony of new beginnings. The curtain-raising drama of it all.

Luckily for me, you don’t have to grow out of back-to-school shopping even though your children do, because in fashion September is considered the start of the new year. This is eminently sensible, because this time of year is a much better moment for a restart than January. The actual new year is dark and bleak and makes resolutions and projects feel intimidating rather than exciting. But right now, the evenings are still light, and while I’ve still got a bit of a tan pretty much anything feels possible.

The political thinker became famous for declaring the triumph of liberal democracy. Thirty-seven years on, he explains what he really meant and why he made the rare journey from right to left

There are not many public intellectuals who can say they’ve been cited by Capt James T Kirk of the Starship Enterprise, but Francis Fukuyama is one of them. In Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, William Shatner’s character is in a reflective mood, and speaks to the Klingon chancellor. “Some people think the future means the end of history,” Kirk muses. “Well, we haven’t run out of history quite yet.”

When the film came out in 1991 and in the years that followed, you’d often hear comments like that. They were nods to a thesis so famous it hardly needed spelling out. It debuted in a 15-page essay written by Fukuyama, then a 36-year-old thinktanker, which was published in the National Interest, a right-leaning journal of US foreign policy, in the summer of 1989. There was a question mark in the title: it was called The End of History?. In book form three years later, it became The End of History and the Last Man. But these were subtleties that, as we shall see, got lost.

Referencing Tarkovsky and French theory, the Austrian-Iranian singer is writing some of today’s wittiest music – though she’s ‘too pop for the art world, too indie-darling for the mainstream’

You wait ages for a brilliant pop song about film-making and then two come along at once. Following on from Charli xcx’s Camera comes Actress by Sofie Royer, with lyrics referencing rotoscoping, call sheets, screenplays, establishing shots, cinéma verité and more. “When the dust settles on your heart / I’d like to audition for the leading part,” she purrs over pumping disco, screwball-funny as she stacks up the metaphors to woo some Letterboxd-brained beau. “My mise-en-scène is flawless, don’t you know I’m quite adored / I’ll win you over in 35mm 4K-restored.”

It’s a typically smart and witty number from a singer, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist and, as it happens, aspiring actor, whose erudition and taste light up one of the best albums of the year, the forthcoming Before/After. Its lead single Cowboy Mouth is a recreation of a Sam Shepard play in song; another song makes a catchy funk-pop chorus from the word “sesquicentennial”. Her music is cosmopolitan enough to sit Italo disco next to new wave and garage rock, and across her discography there’s a big cast of cultural figures from Andrei Tarkovsky to Kenneth Anger, Luigi Mangione to Ivy Wolk, knowingness offset by her keen sense of humour.

Hundreds of unseen images of the star feature at the Venice film festival, alongside virtual worlds exploring wildfires, wolves and the birth of stars

David Bowie shares the bill with starmen, firefighters and Walt Disney wolves at the 10th anniversary edition of Venice Immersive, the film festival’s pioneering showcase for new forms of storytelling. David Bowie: Unseen Unheard – a 3D documentary featuring hundreds of previously unseen images – is among 69 XR (extended reality) pieces playing at the event’s regular base on Lazzaretto Vecchio, a repurposed small island off the Venice Lido.

Venice Immersive’s 10th birthday marks a milestone for an event which aims to provide a bridge between emergent technology and traditional narrative cinema. But the programme’s organisers are at pains to emphasise the ongoing scope of a project that has in recent years prompted similar sections at the Cannes, Geneva and Toronto film festivals. “This is not a retrospective,” declares the official festival blurb that welcomes guests to the island. It almost sounds like a warning.

As more companies turn to AI, they’re hiring freelancers to cleanup its mistakes rather than create original work

Lisa, a freelance graphic designer based in Spain, noticed a shift in her work after the release of ChatGPT in 2022. She went from receiving slow one-off jobs creating logos and packaging to an onslaught of requests asking her to fix versions that were generated by artificial intelligence – from sharpening fuzzy images for printing to turning flawed designs into usable files.

By 2025, Lisa, who asked not to be fully named to avoid solicitations, said 90% of her incoming logo and packaging design requests required cleaning up AI-generated content, work that accounted for 60% to 70% of her annual income. But the grind was exhausting. Clients lowballed her;' some AI-generated designs were so flawed that she had to recreate them from scratch and she worried about being complicit in AI-driven copyright infringement. By the end of the year, she began turning those jobs down.

‘U-turn’ doesn’t do justice to the myriad ways he found to break a pledge. Now the former PM is resigning as an MP, why did I have such high hopes?

Keir Starmer exits the British political stage as he entered it: doing the exact opposite of the thing he said he was going to do. It’s only 10 weeks since he pledged to remain as MP for Holborn and St Pancras until the next election, despite stepping down as prime minister. That’s plainly the decent course of action: a dedicated Labour man wouldn’t want to force a byelection. Even if it’s a slam dunk for the party, it inevitably draws focus and resources from more important matters. Someone who takes the business of representing constituents even a 10th as seriously as all MPs say they do would feel that the honour of those votes should be repaid.

It’s a pretty boring life for an ex-PM turned backbencher. You have to keep your counsel as a large amount of blame is tacitly shovelled your way, while keeping your opinions to yourself. But that second requirement was the one thing Starmer was really good at. Once it transpired that the opinions he said out loud were open to endless revision and denial, I was never able to figure out what the real ones were.

Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist

Being subservient to the interests of the wealthy now means that his hands are tied, and he will be unable to tackle Britain’s most pressing issues

Damn the electorate. They’re so impatient. No sooner do they get a new leader than they want another one. Those ingrates are already starting to grumble about Andy Burnham. Maybe the country is becoming ungovernable. Perhaps it’s social media. Or a consumerist culture, always picking the next shiny thing. Perhaps we’re addicted to drama. As we’re on our sixth prime minister in 10 years, and as similar levels of discontent surface in many other countries, these claims are recited across the media. What’s wrong with us?

Yet our disgruntlement is entirely rational. We give up so quickly on our prime ministers because they give up so quickly on us. Though it may involve different issues, it is always the same betrayal: the public interest is sacrificed for the sake of a tiny number of immensely wealthy people. And it tends to happen almost immediately.

George Monbiot is a Guardian columnist

The far-right provocateur helped galvanize a movement that no longer needs him. Now his imitators are claiming victory

It’s been a long, slow decline for Milo Yiannopoulos. From the vantage point of 2026, it’s easy to forget that he was once a big deal.

The British-born far-right provocateur, who was arrested by ICE in Louisiana and deported from the US this week, was among the first media figures to ride the “gamergate” controversy and ensuing rightwing populist wave that brought Donald Trump to office in 2016. An editor of the then ascendant Breitbart News from 2014 to 2017, Yiannopoulous was an early adopter of the media strategy of algorithm-optimized outrage bait, trawling the internet and a consulting large network of well-placed sources in search of stories he could use to fan the flames of online culture war discourses. He would write a story mocking a feminist, or fire off a tweet saying something racist about Muslims, and the ensuing firestorm of controversy would result in online arguments, media coverage, and his own promptly and decisively rising star. Rinse, repeat.

You could be walking around symptom-free and not know you’re pre-diabetic, living with hypertension or at a high risk of a heart attack

• Prof Devi Sridhar is chair of global public health at the University of Edinburgh

“An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure,” Benjamin Franklin’s adage goes. Yet that simple prescription has been hard to follow in the current NHS. As has been frequently highlighted, one of the biggest challenges for the health system is not just how much we spend per capita, but where and when it is spent. In England, there has been an ongoing shift within the NHS budget towards acute hospital care – treating people in hospitals, often after they are already quite ill – while funding for primary care such as GPs has fallen.

The consequence is that the NHS is increasingly paying for serious and expensive disease treatment, rather than investing upstream to prevent disease in the first place. We spend heavily on dealing with heart attacks, strokes and other life-threatening conditions, rather than identifying those who are at higher risk and intervening earlier to reduce their chances of getting ill.

Prof Devi Sridhar is chair of global public health at the University of Edinburgh

The US president’s need to assert dominance is igniting patriotism abroad and a backlash at home

What do bullies do when someone stands up to their bullying and punches them in the face? They look for someone weaker to bully who won’t punch back.

Presumably that’s why Donald Trump has now taken on Canada, after Iran punched back so hard in the cage match the US president began more than six months ago as to leave him humiliated and baffled.

As I celebrate five years of citizenship, the far right is poised to take control in Saxony-Anhalt. Courage is needed to defeat it

Two events take place in coming days that will affect my relationship with Germany. One, which will be splashed across the media, is dark and forbidding. The other, which will pass unnoticed except by me and my close family, should have brought me joy. Now that feeling is tempered with confusion.

On 6 September, voters in the small eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt are expected to give Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) a resounding victory. If the arithmetic falls in a certain way, a German far-right party could assume power for the first time since the Nazis.

John Kampfner is a Berlin-based author and broadcaster. His latest book, Braver New World, is published by Atlantic

The president’s call for the FCC to scrutinize Kristin Welker’s innocuous remarks is a sign of desperation

With his approval ratings tanking, the crucial midterm elections looming, and his war with Iran turning into a quagmire, Donald Trump has entered full freak-out mode.

It’s not hard to tell. Just look at what happened this week when he lashed out at Kristen Welker, the well-respected host of NBC’s Meet the Press, and one of the best-known journalists in the nation.

Japan’s collision with Donald Trump reveals the dilemma facing Britain: economic independence is becoming more necessary – and more tricky to achieve

“In the midst of every crisis lies great opportunity” is an aphorism attributed to Albert Einstein. It seems to be taken to heart by this White House. A global bond sell-off sparked by an inflationary shock emanating from the Gulf sees Donald Trump seeking to restrict plans by Japan – a longtime ally – to reduce dependence on an international system America dominates.

Japan, a successful exporter, has long done things its own way. For years Tokyo saw off the bond vigilantes despite running enormous deficits and a huge national debt. It demonstrated how a central bank could fund public spending and keep interest rates low if it wanted to. This economic model was refined by Shinzo Abe, Japan’s longest-serving prime minister. However, this week the US treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, called time on Abenomics as his price for US help in stabilising Japan’s currency. Japan’s Sanae Takaichi, he indicated, should shrink her $2tn spending plans and raise rates. Abenomics did not suddenly become financially impossible. It became inconvenient to the issuer of the world’s reserve currency.

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.

Problems with housing, jobs and technology have dented young people’s confidence in the future and each other

Hope, Raye told a crowd at Reading festival on Saturday, was the theme of a set inspired by her second album. Having established through a show of hands that most of the audience had just done their GCSEs, and after recounting her own rocky road to stardom, the 28-year-old singer led a series of upbeat chants of “it’s gonna be all right”.

For anyone who thinks adolescence ought to be a time of optimism, it was a charming spectacle. But a new report from the Institute for Public Policy Research thinktank paints a much gloomier picture. Building on existing evidence of declining wellbeing, such as Alan Milburn’s report on young people who are not in education or work, the IPPR’s researchers found that 11- to 24-year-olds in England (gen Z and older members of gen Alpha) are increasingly lonely. They have fewer friends than young people in the past and are less contented with those they do have. One in 20 say that they have no friends at all. A series of interviews produced worrying evidence of their lack of confidence about the future.

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 respond to an article by Dr Zubir Ahmed, who argued that better palliative care should be prioritised before assisted dying is legalised

I work as a renal physician, including on a transplant ward, so I will have had many of the same experiences as Zubir Ahmed, but I do not share his opinion about assisted dying (As a doctor, I say this: before we even consider assisted dying, fix how we care for the most vulnerable, 26 August).

It is universally agreed that patients with capacity should be able to make decisions about their treatment. Their decision is the one that matters if they have the ability to use and understand the relevant information and can communicate any decision they make. The doctor needs to explain possible options and their likely outcomes in as fair and balanced a manner as possible.

Sandy Martin and Joan Ruddock respond to an article on changes to the voting system

Your report (Labour MPs will push Burnham to back voting reform in first 100 days, 25 August) says: “The UK last rejected electoral reform in 2011 after a referendum [on] whether to change to an alternative vote system.” Many people do not realise that the referendum was not about a proportional electoral system. While the alternative vote is the best way to elect a single person, it really doesn’t work for a government.

That referendum was primarily a popularity contest for Nick Clegg, and it is no surprise that he was rejected, predominantly by people who were not aware of the actual terms of the referendum. A national commission, taking evidence from people across the country, followed by a general election that includes a manifesto commitment to changing the system, will be a far more reliable and accurate representation of the views of the British people than a referendum is ever likely to be.
Sandy Martin
Chair, Labour Campaign for Electoral Reform

Far from being crazy, the grandchildren of the radical ‘permissive’ generation are using their voices to fight for progress, as we taught them to do, writes Paul McGilchrist

I can’t help feeling that Nesrine Malik’s critique of “Woke 1.0” was more nuanced and focused than the published responses suggest (Letters, 24 August). Yes, it could be puritanical, dogmatic and wrong-headed at times, but to dismiss it on these grounds is to ignore Malik’s entreaty not to “trivialise and dismiss movements that resonated globally, and which had safety, dignity and equal opportunity at their heart”.

Far from being “crazy”, so called “Woke 1.0” was the roar of the grandchildren of the radical “permissive” generation – on both sides of the Atlantic – using voices they were always encouraged to believe could change the world. They were schooled in human rights like no others before them, and inducted into activism through historical precedent, armed only with just cause and integrity. They were unashamed to wear conviction on their sleeves and prepared to face the inevitable backlash as readily as their often-celebrated countercultural forebears.

David Devanny on the challenges in running the late poet Charles Causley’s home in Launceston, Cornwall

In response to your letters on preserving writers’ homes (25 August) Cyprus Well was the cottage home of poet Charles Causley (1917-2003) in Launceston, Cornwall. We are a small charity, proud to open the doors to aspiring writers, schoolchildren, residents and tourists as much as we can, year-round. We share Causley’s sanctuary of 50 years with those who love his work or write their own, as well as those who just want to immerse themselves in a peaceful and enriching environment.

Like others who run writers’ homes for the public, it’s not easy – particularly with weather impact on the building and demands on shrinking sources of funding. We owe everything to our volunteers and occasional private philanthropy, supplemented by grants and donations from trusts and foundations. It would be wonderful if the town council – some of whom knew Causley in his lifetime – would reconsider their position on supporting us, too.

The latest news from Flushing Meadows on day four
You can email Daniel and follow us on TikTok and Bluesky

Word up and welcome to the US Open 2026 – day four!

And, as you might expect, it’s yet another belter, so much so and – thanks in part to the rain – so, so sprawling, that’s it hard to know where discussion of it can possibly begin.

Action from around the County Championship grounds
Mail Tanya and follow us on TikTok and Bluesky

Kent’s start is on the crunchy side of autumn. Compton (8) and Crawley (6) both gone. Kent 18-2.

Rain at The Oval too, where my daughter is looking after my nephews and a couple of their friends. If you see an auburn haired young woman looking harassed, placate her with a mini roll. Auqib Nabi is Surrey’s latest recruit.

Batting is all about solving problems, and the grand old man of Essex backs the England captain to find a way past this one – just like he did

Joe Root lets out a “Woaaa-ho!” as a ball from Pakistan’s Mohammad Ali angles in and then jags away late at Lord’s on the evening of day two. The ball flies past Root’s batting gloves and thuds into Mohammed Rizwan’s keeping ones at head height behind the stumps. Rizwan is stood back too, not up to the stumps and breathing down Root’s neck in the summer 2026 way of things.

Root offers that impish smile and shakes his head at the deviousness of the delivery. He isn’t smiling after the next ball. Ali pushes his follow-up fuller, it doesn’t zip and lift away but darts back and scuds low, pinning Root on the pad. He reviews with a weary shrug but he knows his fate – it’s his second lbw dismissal in the Test, his seventh of the summer and ninth in his past 12 innings.

As the 12 teams start their campaigns, we look at each side’s chances of going up and who will occupy the relegation places

The Women’s Super League 2 season, which gets under way on Friday when Watford host Burnley, comes with a tweaked format and the introduction of a new fixture. After the expansion of the WSL this summer, only the WSL2 champions are guaranteed promotion and the teams finishing second and third will contest a new, pre-qualifying match to determine who will face the WSL’s second-bottom side in the end-of-season promotion/relegation playoff decider. But which of the 12 sides have the best chances of going up. and who may occupy the relegation places?

Sport is a space to help youngsters to develop character, resilience and confidence, but we need stronger leadership and safer environments to make this happen

The fight for the soul of football isn’t just happening in the offices of Uefa and Fifa, it’s taking place on pitches much closer to home. At the weekend games of football for 750 children aged five to six in Scotland were cancelled because of severe behavioural issues within the ironically named “Fun 4s” programme. Seventy-two red cards were handed out in the first week of the season. Accounts describe adults displaying aggression, intimidation and head-butting as if it’s the “wild west”.

This isn’t just a Scottish problem. Contacts I speak to in different roles around football confirm and almost accept that “youth football is atrocious”. This should be sounding major alarm bells, for the consequences go way beyond the pitch. The existing disciplinary systems and PR campaigns are not nearly enough to address and change the situation.

Plus: brothers playing in England’s top four tiers, shirt-hogging sponsors, and goalkeepers sent off upfield

• Mail us with your all of your questions and answers

“Marquinhos won his 40th trophy in club football when Paris Saint-Germain beat Aston Villa in the Super Cup,” notes Paul Gage. “Has any player won more?”

The short answer is no: here’s Pete Tomlin with the breakdown. “I calculate that Marquinhos has actually won 41 trophies – one Copa Libertadores, 11 Ligue 1 titles, eight Coupes de France, six Coupes de la Ligue, 10 Trophées des Champions, two Champions Leagues, two Super Cups and one Intercontinental Cup.” Not a bad haul. “This puts him at No 1 in the list of club trophies won by a player. Just behind is Lionel Messi with 40 (10 La Ligas, 7 Copas Del Rey, 7 Supercopas de España, four Champions Leagues, three Super Cups, three Club World Cups, two Ligue 1 titles, one Trophées des Champions, one MLS Cup, one Supporters Shield and one Leagues Cup).

LA added Myles Garrett and brought Aaron Donald out of retirement to create the NFL’s most menacing defense. A Super Bowl trip still isn’t a guarantee

Last Saturday night, NFL Network premiered the 2025 edition of America’s Game, the annual NFL Films-produced documentary on the reigning Super Bowl champions, this time starring the Seattle Seahawks.

Less than 24 hours later, the Los Angeles Rams announced that they had lured Aaron Donald out of retirement and signed him to a one-year, $20m contract that could reach $30m with incentives.

• Minute’s applause to take place in Lincoln on Wednesday

• Spate of serious recent crashes have put safety on agenda

The death of the Welshman Fin Tarling continues to cast a long shadow over professional cycling and nowhere will that absence be felt more deeply than at the men’s Tour of Britain which begins on Wednesday.

Tarling’s former team NSN Cycling, which includes the Olympic medallist Ethan Vernon, also one of his closest friends, will be brought to the start line in Lincoln for the opening 187km stage, for what is expected to be a minute’s applause.

Study reveals that pesticide poisoning kills 11,000 people each year, with India accounting for nearly 60% of fatalities

Almost half of the world’s farmers are poisoned by pesticides every single year, a study has found.

Using publicly available data from 2006-2023, the study, which was commissioned by Pesticide Action Network, found there to be an estimated 402-433m cases of unintentional acute pesticide poisoning of farmers and farm workers every year.

The company says it prioritizes safety, but suits allege its ChatGPT bot induced shooter to carry out attack in Canada

OpenAI faces 30 new lawsuits filed on behalf of victims of the Tumbler Ridge mass shooting.

The suits, filed on Wednesday, allege the company’s ChatGPT chatbot induced the shooter to carry out the attack in rural Canada in February, in which eight people were killed and dozens more wounded – most of them children.

Shore leave in Pattaya, known for its red light district, comes after reports of deterioriating living conditions onboard the vessel during record stint

• Middle East crisis live – latest updates

At Pattaya’s Hard Rock Cafe and hotel, the city’s mayor and police officials, along with women in traditional Thai dress, wait to greet the sailors who are arriving in civilian clothes, bags slung over their shoulders, off the buses.

The USS Abraham Lincoln’s crew of 5,000 have not been on shore for nearly nine months, a record-setting uninterrupted time at sea.

British far-right pundit breaks silence on ICE arrest and deportation and says he was ‘really, really terrified’

Milo Yiannopoulos, the British far-right commentator who was arrested last week by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers in Louisiana and deported to the United Kingdom, has broken his silence about the experience, saying that “for the first time I know what it feels like to be really, really terrified”.

Yiannopoulos on Tuesday appeared on Piers Morgan Uncensored, a YouTube show presented by Piers Morgan, the British broadcaster and media personality. Yiannopoulos, 41, described the experience in the US as “humiliating and disorientating”, “physically degrading” and “frightening”.

Pay and shares deal nearly matches $58m award to John Ternus, his successor as CEO at the $4.7tn tech company

• Business live – latest updates

Tim Cook has received a $47m (£35m) pay deal as Apple’s executive chair, a remuneration package that nears the level set for his successor as chief executive.

Cook, who handed over to John Ternus on Tuesday, will be paid a base salary of $2m and $45m worth of shares. Half of the share award will be based on performance targets being met, while the remaining half will be paid out over four years.

Bangladeshi complainants allege Rampal power station’s pollution and climate risks threaten the Sunderbans, a world heritage site

Barclays Bank is facing a formal complaint over its financial links to a coal-fired power station near the Sundarbans, the world’s largest mangrove forest and home to millions of people in Bangladesh and India.

Three complainants from the region have submitted a case to the UK government’s Office for Responsible Business Conduct, alleging that the British bank breached international guidelines by underwriting companies involved in the emission-heavy Maitree super thermal power project, also known as the Rampal power plant.

Andy Burnham has announced a crackdown, but doubts remain over authorities’ ability to take on organised crime

“There were parents dropping their children off and then heaving from the smell,” says Liz Thompson, 45, who runs Blessings Nursery in Bradford, West Yorkshire.

During the recent heatwaves, the smell from an illegal waste dump on Midland Road, just metres from the nursery, became so unbearable that staff had to keep the doors and windows shut and the children couldn’t play outside.

Designers are rethinking one of New York City’s most polluted sites with climate adaptation and community benefits

The Guardian receives support for visual climate coverage from the Outrider Foundation. The Guardian’s coverage is editorially independent

Head of tree collections at Kew ‘very worried about this autumn’ as hot, dry summer has caused brittleness

High winds associated with El Niño could cause widespread mortality among tree species already weakened by a prolonged period of extreme heat and drought, experts have warned.

This summer much of Europe has been scorched by a series of record-breaking climate crisis-induced heatwaves. The impact is notable across much of England’s countryside, where once green land has turned brown, and many trees are undergoing “early autumn” – wilting and losing their leaves early – to cope with extreme heat.

Consumer watchdog Which? set up and accepted payment for fake listing for ‘1 bed apartment in heart of London’

Successive politicians have clawed their way past colleagues over the years to call the residence home. Yet in an offer that probably seemed too good to be true, the property site Booking.com has been accused of “systemic security failures” after it was able to set up and accept payment for a fake listing for 10 Downing Street.

A property listed as a “1 bedroom apartment in the heart of London” – with the exact address and a picture of the prime minister’s home – was listed on 18 June by researchers from the consumer watchdog Which?.

Campaigners say care users face a postcode lottery for support overseas – despite no extra cost to taxpayer

Disabled people are being blocked from travelling abroad by NHS care boards and local councils that refuse to let them use their care funding outside the UK, the Guardian has learned.

Campaigners warn of a “postcode lottery” in England where the right of a disabled person to travel overseas depends on where they live or the whim of local officials – even when there is no extra cost to the taxpayer.

Foreign secretary tells MPs he will try to stop illegal settlements carving up the West Bank

Ed Miliband has promised to “reset” Britain’s policy on Israel, saying he will try to stop British companies helping build settlements in the West Bank.

Speaking to the Commons for the first time as foreign secretary, Miliband said he would set out measures to prevent UK involvement in projects such as the illegal E1 plan, which critics say would split the West Bank in half.

The prime minister said Britain needed to be brutally honest about the mistakes of the last 40 years of UK politics

Andy Burnham has blamed Brexit and Margaret Thatcher for a decade of low growth in the UK, arguing that Britain needs to be brutally honest about having taken “a series of wrong turns” in the last 40 years.

In his first Commons appearance since he took over as prime minister about six weeks ago, Burnham told MPs he wanted to build a new sense of optimism so “we can make this next decade better than the last”.

Hinted that he would commit to spending 3% of GDP on defence by 2030, saying he had appointed John Healey as his chancellor “precisely because” of his position on military spending.

Signalled he is open to renationalising the water industry – saying he is looking at “all possible solutions”, as the sector is a “leaking monument” to the failures of privatisation.

Opened the door to looking again at electoral reform in Labour’s next manifesto. “I do believe there needs to be a mandate to make that change. There are different views in this house, but I believe we will need to get a consensus at the next election. And if there is that consensus, then a change can be made in the next parliament.”

Announced he would attend the Cop31 climate summit in Turkey and continue pursuing green energy – but that he would be “pragmatic” on supply, amid expectations he will approve the Jackdaw gasfield. “The mistake is saying it’s got to be one or the other for political purposes. The truth is, it’s going to have to be both.”

House minority leader says decision by two Democrats to advance resolution condemning socialism ‘represents significant breach of trust’

• Sign up for the US Breaking News email

With many Americans facing soaring prices on essentials ranging from housing to healthcare to food, some Democrats think that focusing on this affordability crisis could flip Republican seats in red districts.

Sam Forstag, a Democrat vying for Montana’s west Congressional district, is thought to be among the candidates who could potentially win the seat held by retiring Republican Rep Ryan Zinke, according to The New York Times.

Suspect Tyler Robinson to be tried for aggravated murder, felony charge that carries death penalty sentence in Utah

• Sign up for the Breaking News US newsletter email

A Utah judge ruled Tuesday that the man accused of killing Charlie Kirk must stand trial for aggravated murder, a felony charge that makes him eligible for the death penalty if convicted.

After several hours of closing arguments in Provo, Utah, judge Tony Graf ruled there is sufficient evidence to try Tyler Robinson, 23, who has been charged with the murder of one of the US right’s most prominent figures.

Referendum result means fewer seats in parliament and new rules on candidates, ahead of December elections

Guinea-Bissau voters have approved a new constitution, which critics say will undermine democracy, that significantly expands presidential powers ahead of elections due in December.

According to provisional results, 70% of voters approved sweeping changes in the tiny west African state’s first constitutional amendment since revisions that ended the one-party socialist state more than three decades ago.

Police urged people in Overasselt to stay indoors after one person died and 34 were arrested

Authorities have arrested 34 people, including French, Belgian and Algerian nationals, after a person died in a pre-dawn shootout in a Dutch village reportedly linked to a notorious drug lord.

Police urged people in Overasselt, near the German border, to stay indoors with doors and windows shut in case further suspects were on the loose.

Fully electric SUV unveiled after year-long delay and will be built at Jaguar Land Rover’s plant in Solihull

Range Rover has launched its first electric vehicle – a year later than planned – offering a greener option for fans of gargantuan British-made SUVs who are also conscious about the climate crisis.

Due to be built in Solihull, the home of the marque since 1970, the vehicle comes with an eye-watering price tag, starting at £154,070.

Arthur Downing, author of Power and the People: A History of British Energy, says all-encompassing rapid transition will need a mutualised system

Have you ever wondered why it is that most houses in the UK are reliant on gas boilers? Not what’s stopping more people from replacing them with heat pumps, but instead why and how the gas boiler became so ubiquitous in the first place?

Arthur Downing, the author of the new book Power and the People: A History of British Energy, can tell you exactly why. “We only have boilers in our houses because of a state-owned enterprise that went into everybody’s home and installed natural gas-suitable appliances at no direct cost,” he says. The nationalised gas industry of the 1940s to the 1980s, which oversaw this huge project, was for three decades one of the “most dynamic, innovative, efficient industries in Britain”, Downing says. Yet few of us would use these terms to describe it as such now.

Ian Tyler, who was already in role on interim basis, selected and pledges to ‘lead the board’s evolution’

BP has appointed a new chair after a months-long search following the controversial ousting of Albert Manifold, seeking to draw a line under the boardroom turmoil at the oil and gas company.

Ian Tyler, who has served as the interim chair and sat on the BP board as a non-executive director since April 2025, is assuming the role on a permanent basis immediately.

Canadian PM is set to retaliate against tariffs levied by Donald Trump and criticized US officials over insults

• US politics live – latest updates

Mark Carney has rebuked Donald Trump’s administration and urged officials in Washington to “start being serious” amid escalating trade tensions between the US and Canada.

Days before Canada is due to retaliate against Trump’s sweeping tariffs with its own duties on US goods, the Canadian prime minister criticized US officials for insulting his country. “It is beneath their office,” he said.

‘Joey didn’t surf. And he didn’t like this photo. He said, “You made my legs look thin.” Like it was my fault he had skinny legs’

The first band I ever saw were the Beatles, on 19 August 1964 at the Cow Palace Arena near San Francisco. I was 13. I remember every 29 minutes of it: 17,000 screaming girls making a deafening din and thousands of flashbulbs going off at once, lighting up the entire stadium. I’d been a Beatlemaniac since seeing a clip of them at the London Palladium on the Jack Paar show, then live on the Ed Sullivan show. I bought magazines with them in and wondered what kind of person took the photographs. So my first forays into photography were taking photographs of photographs of the Beatles with the primitive family Kodak.

When I was 15 I took a very basic photography class, but later, after three years of college, I dropped out, sold my Nikon and went to England. I started dating Ian Dury, then after we broke up, a friend gave me a one-way ticket to New York where I started going out with Richard Hell, whose band Television played CBGBs every Sunday night. Richard and I split up on good terms, and he asked me to take pictures of him. My first was the famous fake blood photo of the Heartbreakers, the band he formed with Johnny Thunders and Jerry Nolan from the New York Dolls. Richard suggested captioning the poster “Catch them while they’re still alive” because they had a nefarious reputation.

There are just about enough hand-over-mouth moments to please thrill-seekers in this B-movie follow-up but eyerolls soon prevail

There was plenty of silliness but also plenty of suspense in 2022’s modestly successful don’t-look-down thriller Fall, a surprisingly well-made micro-budget marvel that ultimately found its audience on Netflix. While certain elements, such as the no-name leads and increasingly hokey script, might have made it seem like yet another churned out low-rent original for the streamer, it boasted more genuine thrills than we’ve come to expect there or really anywhere during this quantity over quality time for genre movies.

A sequel was financially inevitable (the original cost just $3m) but narratively questionable, given that the self-contained survival tale did not lend itself to the elasticity of a franchise. So here we are with Fall 2: Deadpoint, a palm-sweating formula regurgitated with only moderately jolting results. The first film saw two young women trying to get over the loss of a loved one by, naturally, climbing up an abandoned TV tower. So now the sequel has two young women trying to get over the loss of a loved one (who died in the first film) by, naturally, attempting a sky-high plank walk on the side of a mountain in Thailand. History then repeats itself when chaos strikes, this time courtesy of a rockslide, and our heroines have something more than grief to worry about.

A backstage peek at the reunion tour and a new film from Burning director Lee Chang-dong are among this year’s most anticipated – plus offerings from Danny Boyle, Luca Guadagnino, Martin McDonagh and more

Danny Boyle’s movie, adapted by James Graham from his own play, is a primal scene of modern Britain and its agonies over class, culture and empire. Rupert Murdoch buys the Sun newspaper in 1969 and turns it into a raucous circulation powerhouse of sexist smut and Tory politics, while gloating over the timid British establishment who winced at the colonial Australian press baron. Guy Pearce plays Murdoch and Jack O’Connell plays editor Larry Lamb.

The attacks changed the world as we know it – and now, 25 years on, this heartbreaking Netflix film shares 9/11 recordings and memories from the bereaved that stop time in its tracks

It is 25 years since two planes, sent by Osama bin Laden as the head of the terrorist organisation al-Qaida, flew into the North and South Towers that comprised the World Trade Center, killing almost 3,000 people and changing the world as we know it.

I’m old enough to remember the day itself – I was a trainee lawyer in London and we watched the news unfold on a conference room television – which means I am also old enough to remember the world before it. But a quarter of a century on, it is taught in schools as a historical event. Can you believe it? No, because if you experience such a convulsive moment – even at the distance of being a television viewer in a different country – time bends around it and normal chronology becomes meaningless ever after. But that is only our perspective.

The infamous Japanese noise artist has a vast and forbidding catalogue that commands a cult fandom. Sam Andrews, 18, is vlogging his way through the lot – and taking a stand for deep listening

An Instagram Reel that looks like an 80s coming-of-age movie pops up on your feed. It’s four teenage boys in an American-style basement – comfy sofas, guitars, ping pong table – jeering and laughing. But they aren’t secretly drinking beer or planning on sneaking out. They’re brandishing a vinyl copy of Pulse Demon, the most popular album from the cult Japanese noise artist Merzbow, and subjecting themselves to its brutally harsh sound in full, for fun. “I think this is the Book of Revelation: The Soundtrack,” one guy blurts out, a vague look of fear in his eyes.

Merzbow, real name Masami Akita, is the world’s most renowned noise artist. Since 1979, Akita has released more than 400 recordings, which range from a 10-hour long album misleadingly titled Merzbient (it’s anything but ambient) to a free-noise supergroup called Flying Testicle. Since February, Sam Andrews, the video’s 18-year-old creator, has been attempting to listen to every one, and is documenting his progress online each day. “I think of my day in album-size chunks,” he says, laughing. “It’s like, get up at seven, get breakfast and then headphones in: noise.”

Irish noisemongers Gilla Band, shadowy producers Two Shell and lovable band the Big Moon have new records, and there are tours from Bob Dylan and Kelela – plus the best of jazz, global and classical

• ‘It’s easier when nobody’s watching’: inside the secretive and sublime freak-folk of @
• See all of our unmissable autumn arts recommendations here

The Black Bananas singer knows all the words to Rapper’s Delight and relates to AC/DC, but which song reminds her of a heartbreaking theft?

The first song I fell in love with
Van Halen’s Runnin’ With the Devil. I was five or six and I went to visit my cousin Tommy who was much older. He was on a hockey team and we went to see them practise before the game and they had Runnin’ With the Devil on really loud. I was like: “Wait, what’s this?!”

The song I do at karaoke
You Shook Me All Night Long by AC/DC. Me and Brian Johnson – my voice has that thing, you know?

Their un-Googlable, very online name is the antithesis of this earthy duo’s sublime art-folk. Like their emotionally ambiguous music, the pair don’t give up their mysteries easily
• The best music of autumn 2026: Johnny Marr, Phoebe Bridgers, Rachel Chinouriri and more
• See all of our unmissable autumn arts recommendations here

Victoria Rose arrives at Philadelphia’s 30th St Station and apologises for the sticky streaks covering her car’s interior. She’s a beekeeper, and it’s just propolis, a resinous sealant for gaps in the hive. Her bandmate, Stone Filipczak, is riding shotgun, and her protective gear occupies the rear passenger seat. We’re heading to one of their favourite spots, an Ethiopian restaurant that doubles as a venue. The dining room quickly gets boisterous – a challenge for our interview given that Filipczak and Rose are relatively soft speakers, and not wildly keen to divulge specifics about the music they make as @. Like Rose’s bees, they’re a secretive and self-sustaining pair.

As you might guess, @ is pronounced “at”. It’s a tough Google. The name, Filipczak explains, came from “a vision of an @ sign on a kick drum head”. Not that they have any need for one: @’s art-folk is rooted in acoustic guitar, woodwinds and vocal harmonies that furrow and frolic. Their fantastic second album, Autosmile, is their first with the venerated indie label 4AD. (The name is a reference to a meme showing a dopey sunflower: “When you and gang faded and auto smile gets turn on …”)

Deep sorrow mingles with illicit desire in this potent novella, the follow-up to a 2006 story about an isolated family in the Catalan mountains

Twenty years ago, Colm Tóibín published a steadily desolating novella set in the high villages of the Catalan Pyrenees. A woman walks out of her house and her life, starts along the mountain road and disappears in the snow. Her son Miquel, failing to find her body, waits through the dark months for the thaw. A Long Winter, which appeared in a standalone volume and then as the final story in the 2006 collection Mothers and Sons, followed Miquel through dramatically extreme circumstances and patient endurance. It was told with the most restrained prose ever likely to be employed for a son’s view of vultures circling a corpse.

Now, in The Bridge, a single year has passed in Miquel’s life and he is eking out an existence with his hurtful, unyielding father. The sheep are grazing their high summer pastures; a side hustle smuggling contraband brings in a little much-needed cash. In the bare conditions of the lonely farm, any warmth of feeling is a kind of contraband smuggled in by night; love between men is doubly illicit. The grave tenderness that grows between Miquel and his father’s maltreated servant Manolo gives The Bridge its emotional centre. These young men salve the emptiness with a few quiet words and touches. We sense their youthful beauty and resilience, their suppleness in a place of fixity.

American Scoundrel tells story of McCarthy attack dog, mob lawyer and Trump mentor – will the president be thumbing its pages?

Kai Bird and Susan Goldmark have written a book Trumpworld doesn’t want you to read. Published on Tuesday, American Scoundrel is a propulsive, horrifying biography of Roy Cohn, the New York mob lawyer whose extraordinary life charted, as the book’s subtitle has it, a “Dark Journey from Joe McCarthy to Donald Trump”.

“I told my publicist to reach out to any of the Fox News hosts and reporters, to Joe Rogan, Steve Bannon,” Bird said. “We haven’t gotten a peep, other than Joe Rogan. He said he looked at the galleys, and he got back to my publicist and said, ‘I’m not interested.’ I’m kind of surprised. This is a serious biography of the president’s mentor, whom he publicly admires and says he still misses.”

The author of Guns, Germs and Steel falters in this flawed study of whether individuals really make a difference

Early in this book, Jared Diamond proudly introduces “what I term ‘the Hamlet test’”, which helps decide whether prominent individuals really make a difference, or whether others might have done just as well. Among William Shakespeare’s contemporaries on the Elizabethan stage, he explains, were “Ben Jonson, Christopher Marlowe and John Webster. But not even their best plays remotely approach in quality Hamlet and Shakespeare’s other masterpieces.” It follows, for Diamond, that Shakespeare was indeed “uniquely talented”: “We can be confident that no Elizabethan other than Shakespeare could have written a masterpiece like Hamlet if Shakespeare hadn’t done so.”

One obvious problem with this is that Marlowe was stabbed to death in a pub in Deptford in 1593 at the age of 29, having already written the absolute bangers Doctor Faustus and Tamburlaine, as well as – so it is now thought – co-writing the Henry VI trilogy with the up-and-coming Shakespeare. Shakespeare himself did not begin to compose his major tragedies, including Hamlet, until he was a decade older. So we can’t rule out the possibility that, had Marlowe lived another 10 years, he would have matched or even exceeded his colleague’s genius. Scholars widely agree that Hamlet and Shakespeare’s other masterpieces were possible only thanks to the outsized influence of Marlowe.

This exhaustive biography of the Booker winner brings her properly out of the shadows for the first time

‘Dr Weiss, at forty, knew that her life had been ruined by literature.” The first fictional sentence Anita Brookner ever published, aged 53, in A Start in Life, certainly set a tone. If people have heard of Brookner today, Hermione Lee says, they imagine a lonely, cardiganed woman yearning for an absent lover. “This,” says Lee (an emeritus English professor at the University of Oxford), “won’t do.”

The cardiganed image confuses the author with her protagonists. Of 24 novels written across 30 years, only the first four – A Start in Life, Providence, Look at Me and Hotel du Lac – are about a single woman pining for love. There is certainly a “Brooknerian” style, characterised by elegance, restraint and melancholia, but her fiction engaged with our emotional lives broadly, examining family, exile, home, trauma, ageing and much more.

As Rockstar’s blockbuster prepares to dominate the headlines, it’s time for the mainstream media to stop treating video games as a novelty that needs explaining

Predictably, the Grand Theft Auto VI “extended look” which premiered on Netflix last week was a success for all involved. The 30-minute preview scorched to No 1 on the viewing chart and even brought the site down for a few minutes as millions of gamers tried to watch what was, effectively, a very long teaser trailer. According to data collated by Eurogamer, more than 9,000 Twitch streamers covered the show leading to 5,227,798 hours of viewing there alone. And this was just the beginning of what will surely be two months of escalating hype – and unprecedented media attention.

Call me cynical, but I suspect the coverage of GTA VI in the media over the next few weeks will follow a familiar pattern. Mostly, it will be five-minute slots wedged in near the end of news bulletins in which games journalists, industry analysts and other pundits will be asked why the game is such a big deal, how much it cost to make and how much revenue it will generate. Perhaps a few will try to reignite the hoary old “violence in video games” debate, there will be presenters laughingly admitting they’ve not touched a game since Pac-Man, rolling their eyes and wallowing in their ignorance, in a way they never would while discussing any other art form. Somebody will venture the subversive view that “games are no longer just for kids”; somebody else will say “games make more money than films and music put together”. And that will be that, job done for another decade … or until there’s a funny story about Pokémon.

PlayStation 5, Xbox Series S/X, PC; Bit Reactor
Split priorities between scripted and emergent story moments hamper an otherwise brilliant Star Wars-themed successor to XCOM

Even if you’re unfamiliar with the term “emergent storytelling”, you’ve likely experienced some of the unscripted tales that can bubble up out of a game’s systems. Perhaps you’ve led a scheming dynasty in Crusader Kings, or watched a favourite hero succumb to madness in Darkest Dungeon. Maybe you’ve surrendered yourself to the infinite yarn-spinner that is Dwarf Fortress – or read about it from the mid-00s forums where users helped popularise the term “Let’s Play” by chronicling their games in descriptive posts. Or perhaps you’ve played Firaxis’ XCOM, the alien invasion tactics hit that several key members of Zero Company studio Bit Reactor had a hand in.

Zero Company hinges on a concept as simple as it is perfect: take the complementary class abilities, tough dice rolls, and permanent character deaths of XCOM, and house them in a sci-fi setting known for spaghetti western blaster duels, last stands and heroic sacrifices. As creative director Greg Foertsch puts it, “Star Wars is about loss.” Which losses you end up mourning in Zero Company depends on you.

There are juggernauts and indie gems aplenty for when the nights draw in, from an ingenious puzzle game to blockbusters such as Marvel’s Wolverine and Call of Duty
• See all of our unmissable autumn arts recommendations here

After 20 years away, Capcom’s hyper kinetic action adventure returns, pitting skilled samurai Miyamoto Musashi against hordes of warriors and demons in Edo-period Kyoto. Master the complex combat then prepare for flashing blades, disembodied limbs and geysers of spraying blood.
• 4 September; PC, PS5, Switch 2, Xbox

Before The Witcher 4 arrives in 2028, CD Projekt Red is returning us to the world of The Witcher 3 for one last foray. Looks like wind’s still howlin’

The game that graced us with Bathtub Geralt, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, arrived more than a decade ago. So it was a touch surprising this summer when developers CD Projekt Red announced a new expansion to the venerable adventure, titled Songs of the Past, for next year. It will release alongside a full remaster of the original game, which will be free for anyone who bought it back in 2015. (The studio is also working on a sequel, The Witcher 4, but that’s not due until 2028.)

As it turns out, this is all possible thanks to a partnership with Fool’s Theory, a studio founded by CD Projekt Red veterans, which took on the brunt of the development work. “We’ve had this story in a drawer for many years,” explains Marcin Blacha, VP story director at CD Projekt Red. “Of course, we moved on to Cyberpunk 2077 and now The Witcher 4, as well as our other projects. But because we knew The Witcher 4 would take time, we saw a gap in our release calendar where Songs of the Past could go. Thankfully, we were able to find the right partner to help execute it.”

Òran Mór, Glasgow
Comedy chemistry drives a play that asks if three contrasting characters – conspiracy theorist, pregnant mum, hen-do attendee – can find common ground

Trapping three nightmare neighbours in the dodgy lift of their Glasgow high-rise, Ready tae Drap has lots of sparky, slapstick humour – but not so much nuance.

Crotchety conspiracy theorist Pat (Isabelle Joss) is in her 70s and armed with barbed, uninvited observations. Saintly, exhausted Muslim mum of two Aaliyah (Tinashe Warikandwa) is on the verge of giving birth to her third child. Dry-humoured Lauren (performed by playwright Éimi Quinn) is the play’s millennial, fourth-wall-breaking narrator, clad in fishnets and bunny ears for a hen-do. It’s a classic setup: can these contrasting characters find common ground in a tight spot?

Benedict Andrews’ intense, interval-free mashup of ancient and modernist classics is a show of two halves

The Electra bit of the title refers to the Sophoclean tragedy of a daughter trapped in a cycle of vengeance, the Persona part to Ingmar Bergman’s 1966 film about an actor who suddenly stops speaking while performing Electra on stage.

Benedict Andrews’ drama after Bergman and Sophocles first welds the two together, then raises the concept higher by enlisting his star castings in Cate Blanchett and Nina Hoss to share the parts of Electra and her murderous mother, Clytemnestra, as well as Bergman’s inexplicably silent actor, Elisabeth, and her nurse, Alma, who fall into a disturbing, mirrored relationship.

At the National Theatre, London until 10 October

As The Story – inspired by a scandal that ended a young Black reporter’s career – makes its London debut, its author explains why, two decades on, it’s more relevant than ever

If our ability to discern fake news from fact is a hot topic today, Tracey Scott Wilson was on to it more than two decades ago. As a child, the playwright’s father trained her to watch the news every night and discuss it with her three siblings. It meant that she was well placed in the early 00s to spot how stations such as Fox News were veering away from objective reporting to become angled towards a given agenda.

By this point a real-life story had been percolating in Wilson’s mind for more than two decades: in 1981, Janet Cooke, a young, ambitious Black American reporter at The Washington Post, had been exposed as a liar. Cooke had just won the Pulitzer prize for her news story about an eight-year-old drug addict, which turned out to be invented. Cooke was discredited, both for her reporting and for embellishing her CV, and was forced to hand back her prize two days after receiving it.

O2 Arena, London
The polymath rapper’s stage show, which also features SWAT teams and a warship, is truly bravura stuff – but you can’t help feeling this is an artist at a creative crossroads

A$AP Rocky dangles precariously from a helicopter, while beneath him black-clad SWAT officers brawl with his white-masked followers. This isn’t some cliffhanger setpiece from the rapper/actor’s latest film – it’s just how shows on his Don’t Be Dumb tour open. It’s a big production: there are further prop helicopters, including a smaller one up in the rafters from which he also raps (a reference to his single Helicopter), while the stage recreates the top deck of a naval warship, for reasons that never become clear.

The bizarre set underscores a sense of a man in career transition, unsure who he is any more. In the eight years since his last album, this survivor of homelessness and incarceration became a father, three times, with Rihanna; he’s pivoting towards movies – good ones – and co-chairs the Met Gala. His new record sought to redefine him as an artist, juggling more of his trademark pugilistic rap with ambitious stylistic experiments and unexpected collaborations (Damon Albarn! Danny Elfman!).

He started in the Harry Potter films and has since become ubiquitous, playing every type of character: romcom leads, evil villains, comical idiots. He even starred in a Taylor Swift video. So how does he stay so under the radar?

Domhnall Gleeson has got so much new stuff coming up, someone recently joked that this was the “summer of Domhnall”. Now the phrase is all over the internet, and Gleeson is mortified: “The worry is that somebody will say this to me now thinking that I believe it.” He doesn’t know where it came from – possibly his co-star Gayle Rankin on his new movie The Incomer. “It’s certainly not something I’m trying to push … but it would be great if it could be the headline.”

He’s in a good mood when we meet at a London hotel on a hot afternoon. You could say he’s good at interviews – charming, funny, garrulous, the perfect chatshow guest. He could just be acting, admittedly, but he seems to be a genuinely good-natured, grounded sort of guy.

The orchestra – at the Proms this week – is hailed as among the best in the world, if not the best. For my money, that’s quite possibly right, but why?

The Berlin Philharmonic are in London tonight and tomorrow at the Proms, days after closing the Edinburgh international festival in thrilling style. It was their first visit to Scotland in over 20 years, but the orchestra and their chief conductor, Kirill Petrenko, are regular Proms visitors; their Royal Albert Hall concerts are always season highlights.

“The best orchestra in the world”, as it is often hailed, brings programmes that offer the expected and – for them – the unexpected. Tonight there’s Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony paired with Elgar’s Enigma Variations, a piece that’s still an astoundingly rare visitor to this orchestra’s concerts; and tomorrow, the safety-first repertoire warhorse is Beethoven’s Violin Concerto, but it’s paired with Scriabin’s brilliantly unhinged Third Symphony.

For his latest in a series of work photographing people with red hair, photographer Kieran Dodds interviewed and made portraits of hundreds of people with ginger hair, with widely varying backgrounds and heritage, across the US between 2024 and 2026. Dodds asked each interviewee the same question at the end of the interview: What unites the states? We hear some of the responses

• A new book of this work is available to preorder here

‘Although almost everyone featured in the project is ginger, it is not really about hair. It is structured around themes raised time and again in the conversations I had with portrait sitters, and which I reflected on during my travels in the states’ – Kieran Dodds

South African artist Puleng Mongale explores how her childhood church still connects her to the women of her family, not through religion but shared history and memory

This image, called Holy Gang, combines an image of a church in my mother’s home town, Fateng-tse-Ntsho, in Free State province, South Africa, with self-portraits of me, multiplied to form a group of women. Although at first glance the women are moving towards the church, it is not the final destination.

Positioned higher, beyond the church, is what appears to be a rising sun. For me, the sun represents a place where I can meet and be with my ancestors beyond religious limitations, even though they were members of the church and I am not.

There’s no excuse for being UV-reckless with these new options

Almost half of UK adults do not apply sunscreen daily. If you think even this woeful figure sounds surprisingly high, I agree with you – some surveys have daily SPF use as low as 8% in the male adult population.

My own feeling, based on hundreds of conversations with the UV-reckless, is that most would probably offer “greasy texture and feel” as their defence. And yet almost a third of the population wear moisturiser.

The seasons might be changing, but the muggy weather remains, and heatwaves are on the rise. Stay comfortable on the move with our tried and tested portable neck and handheld fans

• The best fans for your home, tested
• Shark ChillPill 3-in-1 fan review

So far this year, we’ve seen five heatwaves in the UK. The climate crisis means things are heating up year on year, and while we can hide in air-conditioned shops and offices, our homes can get uncomfortably – sometimes dangerously – hot.

We also have to go outside – or worse, pack ourselves like sweaty sardines on sweltering public transport. On those occasions, a portable fan can make all the difference between manageable discomfort and indulging in an inadvisable quantity of ice-cream. Their recent popularity has led to manufacturers churning out cheap-but-not-especially cheerful products that ultimately end up as clutter in your house – or worse, landfill, where an estimated 4.3m will end up this year alone.

Got that new term feeling? Embrace the September reset with tailored blazers, hints of cashmere and a surprisingly excellent tee

• Don’t get the Filter delivered to your inbox? Sign up here

Nobody has handed me a timetable in decades, but I still love that new-term energy, and this edit leans right into it. A blazer that is properly tailored, rather than assembled from buttons and hope. Closed-toe shoes to ensure a proper soft landing after months of sandals. A T-shirt from a brand I was fully prepared to be sniffy about, until it made me eat my words. And a packing solution, because the only sane way to deal with the end of summer is to plan a holiday, obviously.

There’s also a genius lip colour for lip balm addicts like me, a bag doing a very convincing impression of something 10 times its price, and one long-sold-out cardigan that was worth every month of the wait.

Whether it’s homemade ice-cream or a skirt you can wear as a dress, your August favourites suggest you’re holding on to summer for as long as possible

• Don’t get the Filter delivered to your inbox? Sign up here

After five brutal heatwaves we’d expect you to be sick of summer by now, but judging by your August hitlist, many of you can’t get enough of it. An ice-cream maker, packing cubes and travel wardrobe heroes suggest you’re determined to embrace every last drop of sunshine before summer 2026 gives way to rain and the school bell.

You’ve been thinking ahead too, though. A plastic-free lunchbox and a foolproof coffee maker will help ease you back to work and school, and there’s always undereye concealer when all the coffee in the world can’t hide your post-holiday blues.

This no-frills pizza oven gets the basics right and is more than good enough for most people

• The best pizza ovens – tested
• Ooni Koda 2 review

The market for pizza ovens tends to be dominated by a handful of specialist brands, so it can feel like a gamble to buy from a lesser-known manufacturer or a retailer that offers a wider range of goods.

The ProCook outdoor pizza oven is no gamble, though. It’s every inch a capable, compact and versatile pizza oven, despite being just one product in an offering that includes pretty much everything from storage jars to squeegees.

Book recreates recipes from period following end of Spanish civil war when people faced food shortages

Few dishes are simpler to prepare than Spain’s signature dish of tortilla de patatas, which – aside from disputes about onions – requires nothing more than two basic ingredients and a pinch of salt. But where to begin if you have neither eggs nor potatoes?

That is the question the chef and food writer Berta Álvarez Acal sets out to answer in Recetas de Guerra (Wartime Recipes), a compilation of recipes covering the years of hunger after the end of the Spanish civil war in 1939.

Bananas often go off quickly, so use up over-ripe, brown specimens in a sugar-free dessert that will satisfy any sweet-tooth cravings

With two young kids, we get through a lot of bananas in our household. Perhaps surprisingly, though, most of them are frozen: our daughters eat them straight from the freezer most evenings, with frozen berries and yoghurt, for pudding. We normally order a stack of bananas every Saturday, and before the end of the week they inevitably start to turn brown. At this point, we peel, slice and freeze them for the children’s evening yoghurt, though sometimes, when we have a real excess, I turn them into today’s incredibly satisfying “ice-cream”. Its silky-smooth texture really hits the spot, and satisfies any ice-cream cravings without recourse to added sugar or excessive fat. The trick is to freeze the bananas in a single layer on a flat tray, so they don’t freeze into a homogeneous mass, then transfer to a container to enjoy as and when.

You’ll thank yourself for making these batch-cooking beauties to store in the freezer until the next busy worknight

I’ve called this spicy chicken and baked rice “midweek”, but you can enjoy this baby all week long. Juicy, spiced chicken, fluffy baked rice and enough flavour to make you bin that takeaway menu and raid your cupboards instead. Then some fragrant, delicate fishcakes with a lovely, bouncy texture, which are such a winner for the freezer. Taking only 10-ish minutes to cook from frozen, they save you from hunger and distraction on a busy WFH day.

This rubbly cousin of hummus is flavourful and satisfying at any time of day, served warm, topped with a colourful salad and just made to eat with homemade flatbreads

Few things make me happier than a bowl of warm musabaha served with freshly baked bread straight from the pan. It’s a combination that shouts comfort, generosity and the simple pleasure of sharing food. Across the Levant, musabaha is a much-loved breakfast or brunch dish, though I’d happily eat it at any time of day. Served with the buttery, soft turmeric and nigella-seed flatbreads, it becomes a meal that is nourishing, intensely satisfying and perfect for gathering family and friends around the table.

Assisting an ageing loved one can start with small tasks but may lead to full-time caregiving that requires more support

Helping an ageing parent or loved one often begins with easy-to-field requests: Pick up a prescription. Drive them to a doctor’s appointment. Grab groceries.

However, light tasks – just “helping out” here and there – may eventually snowball into the avalanche of full-time caregiving, a phenomenon becoming known as “caregiver creep”. Like “caregiver burnout”, it’s not a formal term, but there is growing awareness about this slow build among healthcare providers and experts.

After a burglary, my parents decided we needed extra security. Jerry was the answer – and this hungry, handsome hound helped us all in countless ways

Jerry came into our lives because a burglar had broken in. My mum had woken in the middle of the night to find an intruder in our kitchen. He scarpered, but the psychological damage was done. Two days later, my dad came home with the cutest little rescue puppy, with traces of beagle and labrador in him. He was two months old, had a black, brown and white coat, and big, bashful eyes. We called him Jerry because we had a cat called Tom. “I’m not sure how he’ll protect us,” I said. “He will,” my dad replied.

Jerry was very laid-back and Zen. He became part of the family straight away. He also became the therapy dog we hadn’t realised we needed. With two teenagers in the house (me and my older brother) and a hyperactive younger brother, someone was always in a strop and needing to let off steam by taking him out for a walk. Each time, Jerry obliged. I’d bore him with my latest teen-romance trauma; he was a very good listener. Sometimes, he’d have five walks a day, with both of my parents taking their turn. He certainly got his steps in.

Camille had bad experiences with men, so when she met Marcus they took things slowly. Now sex is a shared joy

• How do you do it? Share the story of your sex life, anonymously

Marcus will go down on me for as long as it takes. He has a gentle touch and is an amazing kisser

Mike, 37, a scientific editor, meets Caterina, 35, a teacher

What were you hoping for?
Good company, nice food and an interesting evening with someone new. I got everything I hoped for.

He doesn’t have an account with them, but is being bombarded with demands for money and threats of debt collectors

My autistic son has been bombarded for years by letters to his home from OVO Energy addressed to “The Occupier”, with demands for money and threats of debt collectors. He is supplied by Scottish Gas.

He was required to let an OVO agent into his flat to “prove” he didn’t have an OVO meter. Neither this, nor countless phone calls, has stopped the demands.

While many young people have found jobs and built careers, some have struggled to complete their courses

The crisis in the youth employment market, with almost a million young people not in education, employment or training (Neet) across the UK, has placed fresh emphasis on ways of getting employees into the workforce.

The government hopes to increase focus on technical and vocational learning in England from the age of 14. In parallel, there is an ambition to create thousands more apprenticeships.

I need to take him off my family account, but it says the only way is for him to join me for a joint call with O2

My partner packed up and disappeared with his children while I was out with friends. I was left having to foot all our bills, including rent, which has made me financially stressed.

We had a family plan with O2 which meant family phones were all registered to my account. When my partner left, he stopped paying his share of the monthly phone bill, so I set about trying to remove his, and his children’s, phones from the account. O2 explained he would need to join a conference call with me and O2 to agree the transfer of the numbers in question.

Despite plans to scrap the lifetime Isa, experts still advise you open one now and not wait for the new first-time buyer account to launch

If you want to start saving towards your first home, don’t wait until a new Isa just for first-time buyers goes on sale. That is the advice from experts after more details emerged about a savings account the government plans to launch to help people get a foot on the property ladder.

The first-time buyer Isa is likely to replace the existing lifetime Isa in two years and is supposed to be simpler than the older account. However, it looks as if the financial benefits won’t be as attractive as those offered by the current product, so there’s no advantage in hanging around.

Studies have found that anti-inflammatory drugs can improve your mood. But what does that mean for conditions such as depression and anxiety?

Inflammation is the immune system’s response to injury or infection. If you cut yourself and the area becomes red and swollen, that’s inflammation: immune cells are rushing to fight germs and repair tissue.

But inflammation can also occur in the body during illnesses, and a low level of inflammation can arise from obesity or ageing. “A marker of that inflammation tends to be elevated cytokines in people’s blood,” says Prof Daniel M Davis, head of life sciences at Imperial College London and author of Immune Health: A Myth-Busting Guide. “They’re the molecules immune cells use to communicate with each other.”

More and more young people are engaging in sexual strangulation. But experts say there’s no safe pressure – and we have to start talking to teenagers about it

When touching someone’s throat, it can only take the pressure of a handshake to cause serious injury, unconsciousness or death. These injuries, which include brain damage and stroke, are often internal and invisible, showing up days or even months after the initial incident occurred. Experts say many who participate in sexual choking are not aware of the risks.

Choking or sexual strangulation is common among young people, says Prof Heather Douglas of the Melbourne Law School. In a 2024 survey of 4,702 Australians aged between 18 and 35, she and her research team found that 57% reported ever having experienced sexual strangulation; 51% reported ever having strangled a partner and 43.9% reported participating in both.

The public health emergencies in 2022 and 2024 saw the virus reported in 145 countries, but in the new cases children appear particularly affected

A fresh outbreak of mpox in Guinea Bissau – the country’s first – means the virus formerly known as monkey pox is back in the headlines. So what has changed?

Since 2022, there have been almost 190,000 lab-confirmed cases of mpox reported worldwide in 145 countries. Before then, outbreaks of mpox tended to be relatively small and in a handful of African countries, where the viral infection was known to be endemic.

Scientists found those who had used hormone replacement therapy were 10% less likely to be diagnosed with dementia

Hormone replacement therapy may reduce the risk of dementia, a study has found.

Scientists tracked more than 180,000 postmenopausal women in the UK in the largest study of its kind. They found that those who had used HRT were 10% less likely to develop any type of dementia and 16% less likely to be diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, the most common form, compared with those who had never used it.

Looking for an alternative to fast fashion, Eve Ogden Schaub decided to create a garment from homegrown flax

From crop tops to shorts and brightly patterned dresses, many of today’s clothes are the result of fast fashion. But one woman is taking a radical approach to challenging this trend by growing her own dress.

Eve Ogden Schaub is in the midst of a project to create a linen garment made from flax she is growing at home, documenting the process in videos shared on her Instagram account.

Due to its ubiquity in fast fashion, gen Z are pushing back against the synthetic material and using it as an insult

In 2015, Kate Moss called an easyJet pilot a “basic bitch” and a catchy new insult meaning obvious and uncool hit the mainstream. Had it happened in 2026, Moss might have used the word “polyester”, reportedly gen Z’s new favorite diss, levied at cheap-looking videos on TikTok, and sometimes at other users’ taste.

But its use as a figurative insult also echoes a literal backlash against polyester, now the most-produced synthetic fibre on the planet.

The ‘dad’ look favours straight lines and muted colours, while ‘dudes’ prefer baggier clothes with adornments

There is a competition going on at the US Open this week and it’s not the one involving rackets and balls. Instead, leading men who are not entered into this year’s draw are serving looks rather than aces.

Tennis legend Roger Federer took to the court on Tuesday in navy blue polo shirt and shorts, navy blue sweatbands and navy blue socks. The cuts were trim and the top was tucked in. The young Spanish player Carlos Alcaraz wore a Nike vest, untucked and the colour of Ribena, maroon shorts, and trainers that looked like a sweetshop counter.

Across six decades, the late country singer and pop culture icon turned self‑presentation into a flamboyant art form

• Don’t get Fashion Statement delivered to your inbox? Sign up here

Dolly Parton may have had a record 25 US country No 1 singles, released 66 studio albums and earned six Golden Globe nominations, among many other achievements, but the Tennessee-born star also had an incredible number of fashion moments. “It costs a lot of money to look this cheap”, she famously quipped when asked about her style. As we bid her farewell, six Guardian writers reflect on their favourite Dolly looks.

***

Distilleries are the backbone of Islay’s economy and tourist trade. Thanks to their success, other businesses – from breweries and farms to restaurants and chocolatiers – are now thriving and adding to the island’s appeal

The Paps of Jura disappear into the mist as I pedal along the shores of Loch Indaal, and the rain cloud I’ve been racing finally catches up. I stash my hire bike at Port Charlotte youth hostel, quickly change and make it to Lochindaal Seafood Kitchen just before the downpour.

I’m soon warmed, by the welcome then by a bowl of creamy fish chowder. “We’ve plenty of fresh seafood just in,” is all the temptation I need to order the seafood plate. It’s a bowl for one, but a hungry one, and soon I’m picking and cracking my way through piles of fat langoustines and crab claws, with hot whisky-butter scallops and plenty of bread and butter.

The famous pueblos blancos in southern Spain’s Sierra de Grazalema natural park teem with wildlife amid a limestone wonderland of peaks

‘The wind is in from Africa / Last night I couldn’t sleep.” Joni Mitchell has ear-wormed her way into my head as my wife and I step out from Zahara de la Sierra into the mountains of Sierra de Grazalema natural park. The Africa bit probably comes from yesterday’s visit to Zahara’s castle museum. Here, high above the tiled terracotta mosaic of village rooftops, we learned how the recapture of this picturesque hill town was a turning point in the Reconquista – the military campaign of the 1400s that saw the Catholics retake southern Spain after seven centuries of Moorish control. As for sleep deprivation, I may just have overdone it on last night’s tapas.

Either way, Africa feels present as we tramp through the countryside of Andalucía, if only in the wildlife. The painted lady butterflies drifting over the flower-spangled verges, the turtle doves purring from the olive groves and the booted eagle drifting overhead: all are summer visitors recently blown in from the great continent to our south.

Pierogi are a religion in Poland, but I’d never been a believer. Could a recce in the charming Baltic city convert me?

I used to live in Poland. I worked in a fish-and-chip shop in the western city of Poznań, boning cod and peeling potatoes for £1.50 an hour. With the exception of that job, I enjoyed everything about my time in the country, not least the food. I liked the chicken broth with noodles, the slippery herring, the knuckles of pork the size of basketballs, the cold beetroot soup that beats gazpacho hands down.

One thing I was less delighted by were Polish dumplings – pierogi. It wasn’t that they weren’t nice – they were – it was more that they didn’t seem to warrant the extreme levels of affection and esteem Poles often bestow on the doughy parcels. By being ambivalent about them, I was going against a well-established grain.

Want to avoid the crowds in Florence and Siena? Escape to these islands, from lively Elba to tiny, car-free Giannutri

Scattered between the Tuscan coast and Corsica, the seven islands of the Tuscan archipelago offer a striking contrast to mainland Tuscany. All are part of a protected national park, but each has its own character – some are lively, others tiny and sparsely inhabited. Montecristo and Gorgona are only accessible via strictly limited guided tours, but here’s a brief guide to the highlights of the other five.

***

Inkpen, Berkshire: From lurid yellow to a moorland brown; from the scent of fire smoke to sheep urine. It’s amazing what some rainfall can do

After an entire heat-baked summer without rain, the land looks strange and unlike itself. Fields, banks and grassy margins are the lurid yellow ochre of climate fiction – the mise en scène captured with eerie relevance in the recent BBC TV drama The Rapture.

There are cracks so deep in Weaver’s Field that the farmer can push his arm in up to his elbow. Spots of bird’s-foot trefoil and sky-blue chicory (the latter on uncannily short stems) polka-dot the otherwise dead pasture. Sentinel field oaks seem unaffected, but shallow-rooted beech trees, familiar in giant caterpillar shapes on the downs, shed shrivelled brown leaves and a poor, early beechnut mast. Gnarly field maples are almost leafless, while sycamores bracket the green with their browning leaf-curl. Even in the keepered woods, laurel has wilted.

Girls Gone Bible is on tour in the US, touting a regressive ideal of femininity through discussions of abstinence and mental health struggles

At first glance, the crowd gathering outside a music venue in Red Bank, New Jersey, could have passed for a group of sorority rush hopefuls – or Ella Langley fans on their way to the country star’s show. Most of them were under the age of 30. They wore cowboy boots, maxi sundresses and soft, bouncy blowouts, scrolling on their phones outside the doors as they waited for friends to arrive.

But one accessory gave them away: the Bibles they toted. These women were there to pray.

Selling direct to public helps squeezed farmers control prices and improves access to food in rural areas

Fizzy drinks, packets of crisps and bars of chocolate: for decades, vending machines were known as a place to grab a quick snack.

Now one family of farmers is trying to change that by bringing vending machines offering fresh milk and local produce – including scotch eggs, sausage rolls and brownies – to villages and other rural locations.

It’s a great detection tool, but if your plant is infested with thrips or spider mites it may not be enough …

The problem
The worst pests are the ones you can’t see; thrips and spider mites are tiny and very good at hiding on the undersides of leaves, in leaf joints and along stems. By the time you notice the damage – silvery streaks, speckling or fine webbing – the infestation is usually well under way. Early detection is the difference between a quick fix and a full-blown outbreak.

The hack
Use a sticky lint roller to pick up pests that are hard to see. The idea is it works as both a detection tool, and a light physical intervention, lifting adults and eggs before they multiply.

He was Queen’s flamboyant frontman. She was his shy girlfriend, dreaming of marriage until they both realised he preferred men. Thirty-five years after his death, in the week he would have turned 80, Mary Austin talks about their unbreakable bond

There were four silver trunks in Mary Austin’s attic that she packed in the mid-1980s and hadn’t opened since. It was too painful. Almost 40 years on, in 2022, she opened one. It was crammed with lyrics from songs written by Freddie Mercury – Don’t Stop Me Now, Killer Queen, We Are the Champions and, of course, Bohemian Rhapsody. She shut the case. It was still too painful.

“To say I was overwhelmed is an understatement,” she says. “I couldn’t look at the lyrics. I felt as I did when I originally packed them – that they were his personal belongings and I was being offered an opportunity to delve into them, and I couldn’t do that.” Eventually she asked her two sons to sift through the treasures on her behalf.

We are used to the idea that our fellow humans might intentionally mislead or manipulate us, but the idea that machines can now do the same is deeply unsettling. Researchers are racing to find solutions before it’s too late

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

In November 2023 – a lifetime ago in the field of artificial intelligence – some of the most powerful people in the world descended on Bletchley Park, the wartime codebreaking hub in Buckinghamshire, to talk about AI safety. In attendance were the then US vice-president, Kamala Harris, the AI bosses Sam Altman and Dario Amodei, delegations from 28 countries, two of the three so-called “godfathers” of AI, and Elon Musk.

The first iteration of ChatGPT had been released only a year earlier, and there was already plenty of evidence that AI models could be used for ill, from spreading misinformation to generating deepfakes. A presentation at the summit, however, highlighted a different issue: what if the biggest problem wasn’t to come from people misusing the technology, but from AI’s own behaviour?

The non-profit Leaving Maga is built on the premise that abandoning the Trump-built movement is like fighting a disease or breaking an addiction

• Four Maga defectors on what led them to walk away: ‘I’d been addicted to fear and rage’

Stephania Messina kept birthing boys. In the Quiverfull conservative Christian church she belonged to outside Detroit, Michigan, that made her a community celebrity. Your quiver, as the church taught it, is your womb, meant to be filled with as many arrows – a metaphor for children – as you can shoot unto the Lord. She shot five. “They treated me like I was Mother Mary, like I was this gift to the church,” she said.

But while she was quickly pushed into leading worship and Bible study groups for women and children, she wasn’t permitted to talk about politics.

We would like to hear from people who live in an area where there are plans for AI datacentres to be built – or who already live near one

The Scottish National Party and the Greens have backed a moratorium on new developments of AI datacentres, as part of a growing backlash against the boom.

There are currently around 450 large data centres across the UK. These warehouses contain computing infrastructure that power cloud services and, increasingly, AI.

We want to hear from young people who have chosen to start their own businesses rather than follow a traditional career path

A growing number of Gen Z are starting their own businesses, with the number of Start Up Loans taken out by young founders rising by 132% over the past five years, according to analysis by the British Business Bank. Meanwhile, Hiscox analysis of Companies House data found nearly 400,000 Gen Z directors are now running UK-registered businesses.

We’d like to hear from people aged between 18 and 29 who have started a business about what inspired you to do it and how you got started. How is your business going? What have been the biggest challenges and rewards? Do you see yourself continuing to run your own business in the future?

We would like to hear from frontline or key workers about how the heat has affected them in the workplace this year

With record high temperatures across the UK this summer we want to hear from those whose work meant they couldn’t escape the extreme heat.

August 13 marked the hottest day of the year so far with temperatures reaching 38C in London and 37C recorded in other parts of the country; this marks the first year temperatures of 37C and above have been recorded on three separate days in the UK. Climate scientists are saying the incoming Super El Niño is likely to deliver more record breaking hot weather next year.

Floods and mudslides have swept away houses and roads with many hundreds missing

More than 1,400 people are still missing and 392 have been confirmed dead after the flash floods and landslides on the Nepal-Tibet border.hit the Himalayan border areas of ⁠Nepal and in ​Tibet in China. An avalanche of ice and rock triggered massive flash floods causing widespread damage to villages and infrastructure.

Officials said hundreds of travellers from countries including India, the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and Malaysia, were reported missing.

Wake up to the top stories and what they mean – free to your inbox every weekday morning at 7am

Scroll less, understand more: sign up to receive our news email each weekday for clarity on the top stories in the UK and across the world.

Explore all our newsletters: whether you love film, football, fashion or food, we’ve got something for you

Get smart, sustainable shopping advice from the Filter team straight to your inbox, every Sunday

The Guardian’s journalism is independent. We will earn a commission if you buy something through an affiliate link.

A weekly email from our star chefs featuring the latest recipes and seasonal eating ideas

Each week we’ll send you an exclusive newsletter from our star food writers. We’ll also send you the latest recipes from our star chefs, stand-out food features and seasonal eating inspiration, plus restaurant reviews from Grace Dent.

Sign up below to start receiving the best of our culinary journalism in one mouth-watering weekly email.

Upgrade your space today, with eight emails packed with tips to brighten up your home - whatever your budget

Embrace your space: the Guardian’s House to Home newsletter is bursting with tips and tricks to help you boost your bedroom and give your living room some love.

Sign up any time, and get eight emails direct to your inbox every Sunday morning.

The Guardian’s picture editors select photographs from around the world