Equal Earth projection, adopted by the UN last week, provides an alternative to 16th-century Mercator display

Three cartographers have spoken of their astonishment at the UN’s near-universal adoption of a map they created to more accurately show the sizes of Africa and Europe, even though they have received a few complaints from some disgruntled diplomats.

The creators of the Equal Earth projection aimed to provide an alternative to the dominant 16th-century Mercator display, which critics have long faulted for giving the impression that northern hemisphere nations are larger than they are – and therefore subtly reinforcing perceptions of where global strength lies.

After ​the writer was stabbed in a horrific attack, his wife started making a video diary of his recovery. The clips are featured in a new film from Alex Gibney, who drew on Dennis Potter to create a powerful portrait of Rushdie’s tumultuous life

Eliza Griffiths was at home in New York, drinking a second cup of coffee one August morning in 2022, when her phone rang. She answered it to a frantic friend, who told her the man she had married just a year earlier, and who had set off the previous night for a speaking engagement nearly 400 miles away, had been hurt. “What kind of hurt?” she panicked. Turning on the television, she was assaulted by blurry images of chaos on stage as audience members surged to the rescue. Her husband, Sir Salman Rushdie, had been stabbed multiple times and was fighting for his life.

Within days of desperately chartering a plane to fly her to Rushdie’s hospital bedside, not knowing if he was alive or dead, Griffiths – a poet and photographer who works under her full name Rachel Eliza Griffiths – had begun to make a video diary recording his treatment and recovery. “When it had become likely that I was going to survive,” says Rushdie drily, “I said to Eliza we need to make a record of this. By which I meant something very modest: maybe she would take a picture of me on her iPhone every couple of days just to document the recovery, but Eliza had bigger ideas.”

Switch to ‘business attire’ is a sign of the times, but formal neckwear still has its place, say some of Savile Row’s finest-dressed

The House of Lords has long been derided as a stuffy relic of the past. But now its benches, usually filled with haughtily dressed men, could soon resemble something more akin to “dress-down Friday”.

One of the nation’s most storied chambers of power has enacted a rule change: men are no longer required to wear a tie in the House of Lords. Instead, they should opt for “business attire”.

I was at the mercy of the mountain, heading towards a 20-metre drop, about to discover what it felt like to die

Growing up in Sweden, I was as comfortable on skis as I was walking on my feet. As a teenager, I became a professional free skier, a style that features jumps and tricks. In my 20s, I moved into content creation. Now, at 38, I spend the winter months filming extreme ski videos with my photographer wife, Sofia.

In March this year, we’d been staying at the base of the Lyngen Alps, northern Norway. Nonstop rain had prevented us from filming but, finally, we had fresh powder and clear skies. The plan was for me to go up the mountain with a friend, Lovisa, and make our way down as the sun was setting. Sofia would film us from the bottom using a drone.

This Guy-Ritchie-directed gangland drama is deathly dull. It’s a charm-free watch with awful characters and humour so genital-based that at one point Helen Mirren yells a penis joke at a sausage

MobLand. It sounds like a regional nightclub. Or a boyband. But it’s not. It’s a Paramount+ crime drama starring Pierce Brosnan as an Irishman unable to speak in a convincing Irish accent. This is his tragedy. His cross to bear. And now it’s ours, too, because MobLand is back for a second series, with Brosnan – as the veteran gang boss Conrad Harrigan – once again battling other gang bosses while attempting to say things like “Oi love ye loike a tramp loves paraffin” without his vowels shrivelling into tiny raisins of pseudo-Hibernian shame. Does he succeed? Oi tink not! But there are bigger problems afoot, to be sure.

Created by Ronan “Top Boy” Bennett and directed by Guy Ritchie, the first series of the London-set MobLand (feel the width of that capitalised L!) was a sustained roar of nothing much; a rumble through every possible modern gangster drama cliche in the Every Modern Gangster Drama Cliche book. You know the sort of thing: car chases through suspiciously empty city streets; convoluted drug deals with mumbling eastern Europeans; tiny-eyed endomorphs in flat caps bellowing “Oi” in slow motion as they hurtle through the air to the strains of something unconscionable by Kasabian.

Spurs and Villa meet in desperation derby and Andoni Iraola faces test on south-coast return

• Premier League top scorers: check the latest standings

Chelsea have not won this west London derby since Brentford’s first Premier League season. Each visit since October 2021’s 1-0 win, Ben Chilwell the scorer, has been a draw. This season has continued the divergence between the clubs’ respective approaches, Brentford’s solidity and continuity compared to Chelsea attempting their latest reboot. Kevin Schade, after two well-taken goals at Bournemouth, will fancy facing a defence not yet attuned to Xabi Alonso’s configurations. Only one team has won a Premier League title with a defensive trio: Chelsea’s last title team, in 2016-17 under Antonio Conte. Alonso’s attack has been rather more successful, presenting another challenge for Jannik Schuster. Replacing Nathan Collins, the 20-year-old central defender had a tough examination from Bournemouth’s Evanilson on his first Premier League start, emerging with credit. For Chelsea, João Pedro has registered three goals and three assists, but doubts surrounding his fitness could lead to Danny Welbeck’s first league start. John Brewin

Brentford v Chelsea, Friday 8pm (all times BST)

Tottenham v Aston Villa, Saturday 3pm

Shabana Mahmood says she wants to distinguish between far-right extremism and legitimate local concerns over asylum sites

Shabana Mahmood has described the anti-asylum activist Daniel Thomas as “a far-right and outright racist” who will feel “the full force of the law” if his organisation commits crimes near contested asylum sites such as Piddington.

In an interview with the Guardian, the home secretary also “wanted to reassure” concerned villagers that asylum seekers due to move in to a neighbouring former defence site would not “put pressure” on local resources because they would be given “self-contained facilities”.

When Mohammad Abdul Zinati, 15, rushed to help a man wounded in a bomb attack, he had no time to react before he too was hit

Mohammad Abdul Zinati was walking home from school through the rubble of Salah Khalaf Street, in northern Gaza City, when he stopped at a supermarket where a group of classmates and friends had gathered.

Shortly before 3:30pm, an explosion tore through the air. Along with several others, Mohammad rushed into the street to see what had happened.

Exclusive: Sisters of Nicholas Brandram recount 44-year-old’s deteriorating mental health in days before he took his life

Days before Nicholas Brandram, the man suspected of being the “Putney pusher”, killed himself, he told his family that the police investigation was “murdering him”.

He had “no fight left” in him, he told his sisters, Alexia Hicks and Sophie Voelcker, and could not see an end to the Metropolitan police investigation, or the online abuse.

Efra committee calls for emergency legislation enabling government to take public control of the company

Andy Burnham is under further pressure to take control of ailing Thames Water from a cross-party group of MPs who are calling for ministers to break off talks with the US hedge funds who are effectively running the company.

Adding their voices to demands that the prime minister takes public control of the company, which has debts of £20bn and is being controlled by a group of 100 hedge funds and distressed-debt investors, the MPs said in a report that ministers should consider emergency legislation to take control of its financial affairs to stabilise the company.

Research shows tens of millions of people are being forced to use platform that amounts to ‘backdoor’ on their device

Over the past 18 months, tens of millions of Russians have been forced to install a new app on their phones – a violet-blue button designed for messaging and payments, called Max.

Authorities have touted it as a patriotic alternative to Telegram and WhatsApp; Russian glitterati have promoted it in rap videos and comic routines. This summer, it became the country’s most-used messaging app.

President’s United Russia party faces no meaningful opposition after liberal anti-war party barred from ballot

Russians are going to the polls to elect a new State Duma in a tightly controlled vote stripped of meaningful competition and with little doubt about the result.

Vladimir Putin’s United Russia is expected to extend the grip on parliament it has held for 23 years, alongside a handful of nominal opposition parties that reliably vote with the Kremlin on the issues that matter. The three-day vote begins on Friday, with results expected after polls close on Sunday.

In latest extracts from upcoming memoir, Diana’s brother suggests some in Buckingham Palace were ‘relieved’ at her death

The brother of the late Diana, Princess of Wales, has claimed in published extracts of his new memoir that King Charles sounded “giddily elated – like a lottery winner” in a phone call to him immediately after her death.

Earl Spencer also says he believed Buckingham Palace wanted William and Harry and himself to walk behind Diana’s coffin because the then prince was “adamant” he was going to walk and palace officials feared “members of the public might shout abuse at him”.

More than 1,500 academics and economists sign letter, calling growing gap between richest and poorest ‘a policy choice that can be reversed’

More than 1,500 academics and economists from 100-plus countries are urging global leaders to join an initiative against extreme inequality, calling current unfairness “a policy choice that can be reversed”.

Before the UN general assembly in New York next week, the experts have signed an open letter backing the International Panel on Inequality (IPI).

Peer takes full-time position at the controversial company as it fends off pressure from both Andy Burnham’s government and Sadiq Khan

Another former government minister has been hired by a controversial US AI company, this time Palantir, which has appointed Andy Burnham’s former ministerial colleague Tom Watson.

The Labour peer and former deputy leader will operate alongside Palantir’s UK and Europe chief executive, Louis Mosley, as the company attempts to fend off pressure on Burnham’s government to axe its £330m NHS contract. It is also fighting Sadiq Khan in court over the Labour London mayor’s block on a £50m contract to use its AI in Metropolitan police investigations. Palantir also wants to win more public sector work in the UK, where it already has an annual turnover of £427m.

From Sri Lanka to South Korea, governments are preparing for droughts, wildfires, typhoons and floods – with climate plans facing their biggest challenge to date

Asian governments are rushing preparations for the most severe El Niño weather event on record, with hundreds of millions of people bracing for multiple crises at once as extreme heat, heavy rain and food shortages hit the region.

Fuelled by exceptionally warm ocean conditions across the tropical Pacific – and developing alongside the human-driven climate crisis – El Niño is virtually guaranteed to grow to a very strong intensity towards the end of this year and into 2027.

Modi’s bid to ‘purify’ voter lists has affected a third of the city’s residents. In the GB Road red light district, those who lack permanent homes and documents are among the hardest hit

Rows of hardware and car-part shops line Garstin Bastion Road, with faded signs crammed together above their shutters. By day, the street is one of Old Delhi’s busiest commercial thoroughfares. But as dusk falls, GB Road, as it is known locally, transforms into one of the city’s most notorious red-light districts.

An estimated 2,800 sex workers live and work in brothels that occupy the upper floors of the dilapidated buildings, their entrances tucked behind narrow stairways and unmarked doors. Women sit on plastic stools beneath the stairways, calling out to men passing on the street, while others watch from windows above, their eyes following the movement below before customers are directed upstairs.

Invented a little over a decade ago in Hungary, teqball is a combination of football and ping pong

In Bangkok’s Sports Science Centre, Jutatip Kuntatong is airborne, executing a gravity-defying bicycle kick that slams the ball on to the curved table with a force that echoes throughout the gym.

She is preparing to represent Thailand at the Asian Games, which start on Saturday, but six years ago she had never even heard of teqball, the sport of which she is now the world champion.

The Palestinian Columbia student snatched by ICE writes about his Kafkaesque ordeal with a quiet fury

Mahmoud Khalil was completing a master’s degree at Columbia University when, in March 2025, plain-clothed officers from the Department of Homeland Security snatched him from his home in New York and took him to an immigration detention centre; he was then transferred to another facility in Louisiana, more than 1,000 miles away. As a green card holder, Khalil has permanent US residency, but secretary of state Marco Rubio had determined that his continued presence in the country would have “adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States”, and sought his deportation under a legal provision dating back to the McCarthy era. Khalil was released on bail in June 2024 after a federal judge ruled his detention unconstitutional, but the Trump administration is still trying to have him removed.

Khalil – who was born to Palestinian parents in a refugee camp in Syria – had been targeted because of his advocacy on behalf of pro-Palestinian protesters during campus protests over Columbia University’s links to Israel. They were calling for Columbia to cut its ties with Israeli academic institutions and companies profiting from Israel’s onslaught on Gaza; in response, the university called in the NYPD. There was no suggestion that Khalil had done anything unlawful, and no criminal charges were brought against him; the government had simply identified him as an influential pro-Palestinian voice on campus, and for that reason alone they wanted him gone. He spent a total of 104 days in detention, missing the birth of his son.

Celebrated thriller writer Michel Bussi explains why the plot of his new novel Code Yesterday isn’t so far fetched, saying ‘I wanted to give women revenge’

Relations between France and England have rarely looked brighter. The recent loan of the Bayeux tapestry has become a symbol of a renewed friendship between the two countries, evidenced further by the numerous smiles exchanged on the occasion between prime minister Andy Burnham and French president Emmanuel Macron. A new book released in France at the start of this month, however, could soon darken the sunny skies of a revitalised entente cordiale.

In Code Yesterday, author Michel Bussi proposes that every single song credited to the Beatles was in fact written by a woman … of French descent.

Perched above the clouds in northern Italy, Santnerpass refuge doesn’t just look stunning. It’s a marvel of eco-building – and vegetarian cuisine

‘I think my boots are falling apart!” shouts Nigel just as we hit the pinnacles, a whole range of them jutting up and out from the mountainside, all thrillingly tall, spiky and knobbled. Through them we painstakingly step, fingers aching in gloves, heads sweating in helmets – squashing up narrow chimneys, squeezing through mighty boulders and inching along slender ledges on a twisting path that’s only just discernible through swathes of sharp white scree.

I know how Nigel’s boots are feeling: the going is far harder than I was expecting. This is only the first day of our annual trip to the Dolomites, a vast range of breathtaking sawtooth peaks in northern Italy, but my head’s already full of the thought I have every year as we start out: “If only you’d got fitter.”

What the plan to sell £146bn in gilts back to the Treasury means for the public finances

• Bank of England holds interest rates

• Burnham’s talk of ‘breathing space’ at odds with reality of future rate rises

Mixed in with the Bank of England’s decision on Thursday to hold interest rates at 3.75% was a surprise announcement that it was shaking up its programme of quantitative tightening.

So why is this apparently arcane change to QT important, and what does it mean for the public finances?

While there’s much mocking of gen Z, the idea that the state should do more for those aged 18 to 25 is catching on around Westminster. About time, too

When did you realise you had finally grown up? It’s a trick question, obviously: maturity is just realising that life is full of things you don’t feel old enough for but somehow manage anyway, while getting better at pretending to know what you’re doing. But the question is worth asking nonetheless, because for gen Z the goalposts of grownup life are clearly shifting.

It’s a truism that adulting now comes later than it did to generations who still don’t consider adulting a verb, with 43% of 25-year-olds still living at home and plenty more jobless university graduates boomeranging back there this summer, thanks to a grim labour market. Since they’ll probably be working longer into what were once retirement years, perhaps it’s only natural that they’re taking longer to get started. But there’s a fine line between choosing to grow up more slowly and becoming trapped into a kind of limbo between childhood and adulthood, with nobody to pull you out of the morass beyond parents who aren’t sure how to handle this new life stage either.

Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist

In February that year, the Slovenian government officially deleted 25,000 citizens, turning them overnight into illegal immigrants

So much of your daily life – your job, your health, your home – hinges on the fact that your name is in a government database. Are you a legal citizen of your country, with everything that entails? You are, until an anonymous bureaucrat hits a key one night and strips it all away, turning you into an illegal immigrant. It happened in Slovenia in 1992.

“I took my son to register for secondary school. The clerk rifled through the papers, then stared at me as if refusing to see the boy standing right next to me. Finally, she said: ‘But you don’t have a son. He doesn’t exist.’” I can’t forget the look on the face of the woman who was telling me this story. It was a mixture of deep hurt and bewilderment, with a pause after every sentence, as if she were walking through a minefield. During the research for my book Erased, I compiled countless stories like this: stories I once would have thought impossible.

Miha Mazzini is a writer, film-maker and anthropologist

With nearly £30m of funding, I’m giving communities power over local energy. They know the gravity of global heating, and they want to be part of the solution

• Andy Burnham: UK must fully commit to reaching net zero by 2050

On the day I became prime minister, I pledged to bring power to every postcode. Today, we begin to make good on that promise in the most literal sense. With nearly £30m of funding for People’s Power projects, communities across every nation of the UK will soon have the chance to build and control their own clean energy supply.

This investment means villages, towns and cities can harness the natural resources around them with solar panels on libraries, publicly owned windfarms, hydro schemes in their rivers, or whatever else works for them. The purpose is to put money back in people’s pockets while giving them a direct role in tackling the climate crisis.

Andy Burnham is prime minister of the United Kingdom

It’s all very 2026: with a stadium owner on one side and angry support acts on the other, the cornered star will have to pick a side

Ed Sheeran, seeking to stay out of politics, has become, in this moment, the most political artist in the world. And in trying to leave himself room to manoeuvre, he has backed himself into a corner. Since the rapper Macklemore was dropped as a support act on Sheeran’s Loop tour on Monday, every other opening act has pulled out. Finneas O’Connell kept it brief on Tuesday: “Artists must not be silenced when they speak up for the oppressed. I stand with Palestine and its people.” Aaron Rowe was already out, saying: “I cannot stand by and allow billionaires to use their position of power to silence … rightful voices.”

Beoga, Sheeran’s actual backing band, then pulled out, along with the Danish band Lukas Graham, who probably made the mildest statement, managing to not even mention any countries: “We should be able to speak about war, about civilians being killed, about children who deserve to grow up. Wherever they live. Whatever flag flies over them.”

Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist

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Andrew Griffith is keen on clearing red tape. Good job he wasn’t part of a Treasury team that abolished the Office for Tax Simplification

On days like this, it’s not hard to be overwhelmed by existential futility. At the current rate of progress, the UK looks on course to wipe itself out far sooner than it would with any interference from AI. Everything feels hopeless. Years of minimal growth and a cost of living crisis. The tech bros and the bankers may be getting richer. The rest of us? Not so much.

And there’s no end in sight. Andy Burnham may offer better vibes, but he is fighting a losing battle against global forces – wars, energy prices, borrowing costs – that he can’t control. You can feel the hope drain out of him as each day passes. Mr Congeniality is not quite so congenial as he once was. All the economic forecasts suggest things are going to get even worse in the next year.

Cans of tuna, sparkling water and an old torch – if the end of the world came for me now I’d struggle, but it’s hard to know how to prepare for an unknown threat

It’s been three weeks since the government advisory urging us to start stockpiling in case of emergency – how’s your prep coming along? The Prepare campaign, backed by Wes Streeting, who one imagines gliding through the apocalypse, quiff undisturbed, listed nine essential items, among them wet wipes, first-aid kits and batteries. The World Health Organization, meanwhile, suggests budgeting for 15 litres of water per person per day, so a family of four will need to store upwards of 180 litres to cover the recommended period of three days. The chances of this actually happening seem to me, intuitively, to be considerably lower than the disaster they’re supposed to forestall. But hope springs, so let’s see.

The first step towards stockpiling is stocktaking. This is where I’m at: one mega-torch (uncharged), which I bought in prepper mode after surviving the terrifying New York blackout of 2019 when for about an hour we couldn’t charge our phones; lots of very large sticking plasters and a handful of small round ones, the normal sizes having long been used up; two cans of tuna, which will go down to one after lunch; two litres of sparkling water, so for the first hour or so after a nuclear strike, assuming it happens this afternoon, we’ll at least be able to enjoy some bubbles; and three OxyContin saved from my c-section almost 12 years ago, which are probably less powerful than homeopathy at this point but I retain a vague hope I can use for barter when money breaks down.

Emma Brockes is a Guardian columnist

For so long I wondered why I survived while family and friends were killed. Now I know the only difference between life and death may have been an AI algorithm

The lights go down, and for a moment I forget I’m watching a screen. It fills with a rooftop in Tel Aviv at night, black and grey. The camera pans down. Through windows, we see people watching screens of their own – couples holding each other close, following the news, eating food. They appear absorbed in their own worlds, and why wouldn’t they be?

That’s the thing I can’t get past as a Palestinian journalist from Gaza, watching this apparent tranquillity: this must be it – this must be what safety actually looks like. Just an evening uninterrupted, with no military aircraft flying overhead or drones buzzing incessantly. Meanwhile, men and women on the rooftop above them calmly talk about how they decided how many Palestinian civilians would die on any given night.

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.

My coccyx still hurts from an extreme cycling challenge almost two decades ago. Is there anything it’s good for?

‘Welcome to middle age.” This is what my GP said to me 10 years ago when I asked her why I needed this pill or that. Being then just shy of 50, that hit home. Now being just shy of 60, I mutter those words to myself at least once a day. There’s a long list of aches, pains and assorted maladies about which to mutter. High up on that list are my shoulders. Bloody agony, both of them. Picking something off a high shelf or fishing for something on the back seat of the car have had to become planned events to be undertaken only if absolutely necessary.

I interviewed Prof Alice Roberts this week. A writer, broadcaster, academic, anatomist, archaeologist and sometime medical doctor, she knows her bones, and no mistake. I noted with interest that her PhD thesis was titled “Rotator cuff disease in humans and apes: a palaeopathological and evolutionary perspective on shoulder pathology”. I’ve rarely felt so connected with my ancestors, so human, and indeed so ape-like. In an instant my shoulder pain became easier to bear, as I felt at one with a caveman wincing as he reached up to apply the finishing touches to some wall art.

Mark Carney’s response to the challenges posed by an unreliable US president contains a clarity of vision that is lacking in post-Brexit Britain

There is no “associate membership” of the European Union, nor any blueprint for what such a thing might involve. It is a political hypothesis, describing a relationship of intimate strategic alignment with the EU, stopping short of actual membership, in ways that are significant but undefined.

This week, Ursula von der Leyen, the European Commission president, invited Canada to be the first country to enjoy this putative status. In her state of the union speech, she spoke of a future relationship elevated “to the highest level possible”, reflecting an affinity of interests and values. Mark Carney, the Canadian prime minister, reciprocated the sentiment in a speech on Wednesday. Addressing the European parliament, he said the two sides should secure “strategic autonomy through deep cooperation” across a broad spectrum of interests: trade, defence, industrial capacity, science, space and AI. He proposed Canadian participation in the EU’s Erasmus student exchange programme and Horizon research scheme.

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.

New research links last month’s disaster to fossil fuel pollution. Supporting disaster-hit countries must be at the centre of climate politics

Following a familiar pattern, coverage of the glacier collapse on the Nepal-Tibet border three weeks ago has subsided with the initial shock. But while the world’s attention has shifted, Nepal remains in the midst of an appalling tragedy. As well as at least 1,300 people who are known to have been killed, more than 5,000 are missing, some of them trapped in tunnels linked to the 13 hydropower plants that were damaged by the floods. On Wednesday four bodies were recovered from one of these tunnels, with searches ongoing. Families of the missing people are desperate for news.

Last week the country’s foreign minister, Shisir Khanal, said that it would ask the UN’s loss and damage fund for $20m (£15m) towards a total rebuilding cost of around $5bn (£3.75bn) – including the replacement of up to 20,000 homes. The first academic study linking the disaster to the climate crisis will now be added to that application. Scientists at Imperial College London, along with international collaborators on the World Weather Attribution project, found that a number of drivers of the glacier fall had been made worse by atmospheric heating. While not the sole cause, fossil fuel pollution was judged to have destabilised the geology of the mountain environment.

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 Zoe Williams in which she argues that university has become a scam

Having read Zoe Williams’ article on student loans (Why has university become such a scam?, 14 September), I went and checked my student loan statement. What a depressing read that was. I went to university in 2012 as a slightly older student, at 22. I had been to drama school before that, but decided I wasn’t cut out for the harsh reality of show business and that a law career – a barrister perhaps – was more up my street. I wanted to keep the performance element.

After one law degree totalling £56,000, a career development loan of £15,000 to cover the cost of my bar course and a £12,000 postgraduate loan to cover my legal practice course (solicitor training), my student debt remains at £70,000.

Social care reform must reflect the variations in the type, intensity and duration of care provided, says Dr Louise Lawson

Patrick Butler’s article on the rising number of people leaving employment to provide unpaid care resonated with me, both as an unpaid carer and as a researcher in this field (About 1,500 Britons a day quitting their jobs to become unpaid carers, 16 September). The juggle between paid work and caring responsibilities is a daily reality for millions. The report from Carers UK is a welcome reminder of this often-hidden issue, highlighting not only the growing care needs of older people but also the increasing numbers of younger people who rely on unpaid care. The midwife Jacqui Hylton’s observation in the article that caring for her mother is “harder than working in the NHS” deserves serious attention.

What is often missing from these debates, however, is recognition of the diversity and number of caring responsibilities. There is no such thing as a typical unpaid carer. Caring roles vary enormously, whether supporting a disabled child, a working-age adult with a progressive condition or an older relative with dementia.

Without the unflinching commitment of managers, social workers and those who work in them, they won’t be proper homes, writes John Burton

I congratulate the Guardian and the Bureau of Investigative Journalism for exposing the disgraceful state of residential childcare and the use of illegal children’s homes (Councils pay more than £125m a year placing vulnerable children in illegal care homes in England, 8 September). However, this is a symptom not a cause.

While there are good private children’s homes (I’ve worked with some), they are defined by personal and family commitment, not profit. The same relationships are required whoever runs a children’s home, whether a charitable organisation or local authority. Without the personal, unflinching commitment of councillors, managers, social workers and, crucially, the grownups who work in the home, it can’t be a loving home.

David Redshaw responds to a letter on the bond markets and economic pressures afflicting the UK

Neil Kinnock’s timely letter (9 September) reminds us that we are not alone in suffering high gilt yields and borrowing costs. We are still feeling the fallout from Covid, and it needs mentioning that our national debt is similar to America’s and much less than Japan’s, and it never gets mentioned that Italy routinely runs 100% of GDP debt. But as Kinnock observes, the policies of several Conservative governments (including Brexit) have made things worse, and the problem for us is not so much the actual debt but our direction of travel. The aforementioned will make the bond markets view us with a more jaundiced eye.

It was predictable that Jamie Dimon would pop up at this point (JP Morgan boss meets Burnham and Healey to warn against bank tax rise, 10 September). He talks about potential lack of investment by the banks. What investment? We aren’t even a nation of shopkeepers any longer; we’re a nation of pizza deliverers.

• Banton and Brook lead England home in style

• Big hitting leaves Sri Lanka looking out of their depth

England extended their extraordinary hex over Sri Lanka to a 14th game, with the tourists looking as out of their depth as the balls that were repeatedly deposited into the River Taff as their opponents cantered to an increasingly and deliciously customary victory.

More than a dozen years have passed since Sri Lanka, crowned world champions in the format a month earlier, beat England by nine runs at the Oval. They have lost every meeting since and with this one also another series, and while much about this game contrasted with Tuesday’s first encounter in Southampton – starting with England winning the toss and choosing to chase – the outcome did not. This emphatic home win was sealed in the end in slapdash style: no-ball, wide, single, wide, single, muted celebration. Ryan van Niekerk, the Sri Lanka bowling coach, estimated a par score on this pitch at 200; England’s target was just 146, and they got there with 47 balls remaining to win by six wickets.

The first goal that AFC Bournemouth ever scored in Europe could be heard out on the Bay of Biscay. A tradition from Real Sociedad’s old Atotxa ground, once lost but now recovered at Anoeta, dictates that a single flare is set off every time the visitors score while two are lit when the home team do; that way those out to sea know the score. And so it was that at 21.41 on a Thursday night in September 2026, Justin Kluivert found the net and a man named Juan Iturralde ran out into the street to let everyone know what had happened.

Back in Dorset and high in Anoeta, where 2,000 Bournemouth fans sang their way through this most special of occasions, they knew. They had waited their whole lives for this and it was a nice way to mark the history they made, their arrival announced to Europe with fireworks and a 2-1 victory in San Sebastián, the city where it all began for Andoni Iraola, the manager who brought them here.

• Hoops beaten again after chastening loss to Rangers

• Juventus hammer NEC, Besiktas pile woe on Marseille

Celtic suffered another European embarrassment as the Scottish champions were beaten 3-1 at home by Ferencvaros in the Europa League. Just weeks on from crashing out of the Champions League qualifiers to Austrian side Lask, despite at one point holding a four-goal lead, Celtic’s defensive flaws were exposed once more.

Martin O’Neill’s team also suffered a chastening 3-0 defeat to rivals Rangers last weekend and failed to deliver on their manager’s promise to respond. Bamidele Yusuf opened the scoring for the visitors before Mika Baur equalised late in the first half. However Kristoffer Zachariassen quickly put Ferencvaros back in front before Daniel Arzani’s sensational strike, on his return to Celtic Park, capped a fine night for Ferencvaros.

Floyd Samba lit up this tie with a debut that will have the 17-year-old grinning for a while after a superb goal in each half ensured Manchester City advanced to face Brighton in the last 16 in their defence of the Carabao Cup.

Samba has an older brother by a year, Tyrone, who is also in the academy. Their father, Christopher, is a former Blackburn and QPR defender.

It was worth the wait for Crystal Palace. After being denied their rightful place in the Europa League last season, Pierre Sage’s side made the perfect debut by brushing aside Lech Poznan with a victory that will take some of the heat off their new manager.

The Frenchman has big shoes to fill in replacing Oliver Glasner after his predecessor won three trophies in the space of 12 months and there had been some talk of disquiet behind the scenes following his decision to drop the teenager Jaydee Canvot at the weekend. But while Palace face a testing trip to face in-form Leeds on Sunday, having conceded 11 goals from their opening four Premier League matches, they were given a big helping hand by their opponents here well before Radoslaw Murawski was sent off late on for a reckless foul on Canvot.

• Detroit Lions 31-41 Buffalo Bills

• Bills QB throws three TDs and rushes for two

• Jared Goff excellent in defeat for Lions

Josh Allen quickly put his stamp on the Buffalo Bills’ new stadium, which has been dubbed “The House that Allen built.”

Allen threw three touchdown passes and ran for two scores, and the Bills beat the Detroit Lions 41-31 on Thursday night in the first regular-season game at Highmark Stadium.

• Hodgkinson tripped and fell on canal cooldown run

• Runner shares her unique genetics of split tendons

Keely Hodgkinson has lifted the lid on how plans to chase the 800m world record this summer were ruined by a freak accident that her team has likened to whiplash.

The Olympic champion will run her final race of the season in the Athlos meeting in London on Friday, having returned last week from a hamstring tear sustained at the European Championships in August.

• US PGA champion shoots 66 to share lead with Lagergren

• Pair lead by one from Gerard and Scott at Wentworth

What do you get for shooting 60 in a pro-am? Just ask Rory ­McIlroy. ­“Nothing,” said the Masters ­champion. “Besides a social media post I didn’t want.” McIlroy was laughing but the underlying ­sentiment was obvious: exceptional rounds are best saved for the real stuff.

News that McIlroy had taken only 60 shots around Wentworth’s West Course while in the company of ­celebrities was a hot topic of ­conversation going in to this PGA Championship. ­McIlroy shrugged off the score as something he ­produces fairly regularly. “It doesn’t mean anything,” he added. “My ­playing partners were happy, they won something.”

Exclusive: PM, who is facing pressure over whether to approve North Sea oil and gasfields, makes strongest comments yet on issue

• British people understand the climate crisis threat. Today I’m empowering them to tackle it

The UK must fully commit to reaching net zero by 2050, Andy Burnham has argued in his strongest comments yet on the issue, saying it is no longer possible for Britons to believe they are not already affected by a changing climate.

Writing for the Guardian about new plans for a mass of community-led local green energy projects, the prime minister said the UK must “believe in itself”, and set out his determination to reach net zero targets, which have been rejected by the Conservatives and Reform UK.

Educator talks of ‘moral obligation’ and urges ‘every wealthy white celebrity’ to make similar donation

YouTube star Ms Rachel has said she is matching rapper Macklemore’s $1m donation to organizations supporting Palestinians, calling on other public figures to follow suit.

Macklemore, who was fired as the opening act on Ed Sheeran’s tour after saying “Free Palestine” on stage at New Jersey’s MetLife Stadium, pledged to donate the entirety of his earnings from Sheeran’s tour to several organizations focused on the Palestinian people.

HMRC wins challenge over John Griffin’s claim to be non-dom despite having lived in England since childhood

The founder of Addison Lee owes £20.5m in tax after a tribunal dismissed a claim that he should be treated as a nom-dom despite living in the UK since childhood.

John Griffin had argued he should be treated as a nom-dom due to his connection to Ireland, saying: “I was and am besotted with Ireland, infatuated with Ireland. I believe that I have always been and am Irish.”

For the second year in a row, the administration has barred the Palestinian delegation from US travel for the forum

The US state department said on Wednesday that it had again denied entry visas to Palestinian officials ahead next week’s United Nations general assembly gathering in New York.

The state department said in a statement the Palestinian Authority (PA) and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) had “failed to live up to their commitments”, accusing the groups of “taking actions to internationalize the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict including through the International Criminal Court (ICC) and International Court of Justice (ICJ)” and of “glorifying terrorism” among other allegations.

Since the ancient Olympics, athletes like Hyrox competitor Joanna Wietrzyk have experienced runner’s diarrhoea. What does the science say about extreme exercise’s ‘mechanical jostling of the intestines’?

Soiling yourself in public sounds like a bad dream. But the Australian athlete Joanna Wietrzyk has now apologised for doing just that at the Hyrox games in Beijing on Saturday.

Wietrzyk won the fitness race but not before using communal equipment with faecal matter visibly running down her legs – and muddying Hyrox’s reputation.

In this week’s newsletter: As the Guardian launches a year-long project, Our Rivers, we take stock of the issues facing waterways around the world

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The nicknames of the world’s biggest rivers give a sense of how we feel about them: “the great river”, “the river that swallows all rivers”, “Mother Ganga” and “Old father Thames”. They feed and water us, and many other animal species. They carry our trade but also give us cool relief on a hot day. They’re nerve endings, elders and sources of comfort, but also of awe and respect.

And yet many of the world’s rivers are suffering, hit by multiple environmental challenges. A new report out today from the World Meteorological Organization finds that rivers across the world experienced one of the driest years in more than three decades during 2025.

Climate crisis probably weakened glacier that caused devastating Nepal-Tibet floods, first study finds

Who are the 514 people accused of starting French wildfires and what motivates them?

Benedict Cumberbatch on his Earth-saving eco film: ‘We are in the last grab of the extraction era’

Long-term research in New York shows efforts to reduce air pollution associated with higher cognitive test scores

Improvements in air pollution are leading to brighter, smarter toddlers, according to a new study from Columbia University in New York.

For more than two decades, Prof Frederica Perera and a team from the Columbia Center for Children’s Environmental Health measured the air pollution exposure of pregnant women and the development of their children in the disadvantaged communities of northern Manhattan and the South Bronx. More than 1,100 children were assessed when they were one, two and three years old.

Fish and Wildlife Service memo calls for change in what it means to ‘take’ an endangered species

More than 1,600 critically imperiled species protected under the US Endangered Species Act (ESA) face losing further federal protections following a new reinterpretation of the 1973 law by the Donald Trump administration.

A September 14 memo distributed to Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) field offices by FWS director Brian Nesvik calls for a reinterpretation of what it means to “take” an endangered species. Under the ESA, “take” is defined as “to harass, harm, pursue, hunt, shoot, wound, kill, trap, capture, or collect, or to attempt to engage in any such conduct”.

Barber’s Farmhouse Cheesemakers can draw enough heat from cows’ fresh milk to bring water close to the boil, slashing carbon emissions

In many ways, the world’s oldest cheddar-maker hews to tradition. Since 1833, Barber’s Farmhouse Cheesemakers has operated from the rolling green pastures of south-west England, milking grass-fed cows and fermenting the milk with microbial starters passed down for generations. That heritage has led to award-winning cheese, now popular across continents.

But when it comes to reducing its planet-warming emissions, Barber’s is on the cutting edge. In 2024, the company began to use new ultra-efficient heat pumps from the UK startup Arkaya Energy. The devices quickly cool milk to keep it fresh, and simultaneously heat water used in milking operations, replacing conventional chillers and electric-resistance heaters.

Government spending watchdog warns of price of keeping publicly owned firm in business

Labour has been urged to lay out a credible plan for the future of British Steel, as the government spending watchdog warned of the “startling” costs of keeping the struggling manufacturer in business with no end in sight.

British Steel was taken into public ownership in July to protect “the future of steel production”, 15 months after the government stepped in to prevent the closure of its steelworks in Scunthorpe and the loss of 4,000 jobs.

Exclusive: The Green leader has not spoken publicly about the motion, which is likely to be debated at the party’s conference in October

The Greens are pushing Zack Polanski to take a stance on a potential party policy stating “Zionism is racism”, with some fearing it could alienate Jewish supporters if it was passed.

Polanski, who leads the Greens in England and Wales, has not spoken publicly about the motion, which came top of a members’ vote of policy motions to be debated at the party conference in Brighton at the start of October, and is thus almost certain to feature.

‘Terrible thing’ happened to infant boy found under the floorboards at a house in Bishop Auckland, says coroner

A baby boy who was found with twine looped and knotted round his neck and wrapped in a 116-year-old newspaper was unlawfully killed, a coroner has concluded.

Crispin Oliver on Thursday said the child, known only as Baby Auckland, had been garotted by an unknown person.

Rhys Woods says there are ‘no words’ for family’s pain after Noah’s body was found in pond near Suffolk playground

The father of Noah, the three-year-old boy who was found dead after going missing from a playground, has spoken of his heartbreak and thanked the community who launched a tireless search for his son.

Rhys Woods said there were “no words to describe the pain of this loss”, adding that the family was “absolutely heartbroken”.

Samir Ousman al-Sheikh, part of Bashar al-Assad’s regime, was in charge of Adra prison where prisoners were tortured

This article contains descriptions of torture.

A US federal court in Los Angeles sentenced a former Syrian government official who ran one of the country’s most infamous prisons to 60 years in prison on Thursday – the most significant punishment handed to an official of ousted president Bashar al-Assad’s regime by a foreign court and to a defendant present in person.

After being read charges, Layne Lundeen said: ‘I assaulted a police officer? Is that what it says? I don’t have my glasses’

An American Airlines passenger who was duct-taped to his seat following an alleged outburst including racial and homophobic slurs said that he does not recall the incident.

On 3 September, 67-year old Layne Lundeen was restrained in his first-class seat with duct tape and zip ties over alleged unruly behavior. The American Airline Flight 618 was originally traveling from Dallas, Texas, to Newark, New Jersey, and was diverted to the Baltimore/Washington Thurgood Marshall airport in an emergency landing.

• Australian Phil Gore in hospital after 152-hour solo run

• Persistent pain in thigh requires 12cm incision to suck fluid out

Phil Gore’s legs have delivered extraordinary numbers, including running more than 1,000km last month in a solo attempt during a backyard ultra marathon. This week, they produced another: 500ml of pus, roughly the equivalent of a pint.

The 40-year-old Australian saw a doctor earlier this week after a pain in his leg was not going away following his extraordinary, 152-hour solo ordeal aided by Nerds, meat pies, Coco Pops and a cheeseburger.

The gift from Italy has sparked fierce debate among defence analysts and opposition politicians who question its true cost and purpose

Indonesia has received its first aircraft carrier, a former Italian warship that the government says will strengthen the archipelagic nation’s maritime security and disaster response capabilities.

The 41-year-old former ITS Giuseppe Garibaldi, with capacity for short takeoff and vertical landing aircraft and helicopters, arrived Friday morning at a naval base in North Jakarta’s Tanjung Priok port, where it was welcomed with a military ceremony.

Europe’s largest financial technology company confirmed it had fallen victim to an impersonation scam last week

Revolut is facing a reported $3m (£2.2m) ransom demand after hackers posing as government officials accessed the data of hundreds of the bank’s cryptocurrency customers, including one victim who says he fears for his safety.

Europe’s largest financial technology company confirmed last weekend that it had fallen victim to an impersonation scam in which hackers compromised an Italian government email system to contact Revolut staff and request personal customer details.

Central bank announces surprise plan to sell billions of pounds in government bonds back to the Treasury

• Burnham’s talk of ‘breathing space’ at odds with reality of future rate rises

• The Bank is shaking up its bond sales – why does it matter?

• Business live – latest updates

The Bank of England has kept interest rates on hold as it warned a continuation of the bitter fighting in the Middle East could force it to raise borrowing costs amid mounting fears over inflation.

It also announced a surprise plan to sell billions of pounds in UK government bonds back to the Treasury to avoid fuelling turbulence in the gilt market, a decision that could have consequences for the public finances before next month’s budget.

Facebook told it was wrong in leaving up AI-generated videos of a Labour councillor and Muslim campaigner, amid calls to curb fakes

Meta’s “supreme court” has ordered the tech company to take down deepfake videos of a UK politician and a young Muslim woman from Facebook and do more to tackle AI-generated fake imagery.

A fake video showing a Labour party councillor in Scotland making inflammatory comments about refugees should not have been left up by Facebook, the board said. It also ruled that an AI-generated video of a Muslim campaign volunteer should have been removed after it falsely depicted her offering health advice while carrying out absurd exercises or eating junk food.

Union calls for payouts to help cover travel costs and exemption for those living more than 40 minutes away

• Business live – latest updates

Barclays is facing a growing backlash over return-to-office plans, with thousands of staff calling for payouts to help cover travel costs and an exemption for those living more than 40 minutes from work.

Unionised staff represented by Unite are pushing back against plans announced by the bank earlier this summer to get staff back into the office at least three days a week from October, with more senior employees expected to come in at least four days a week.

The writer and editor shares memories of a creative powerhouse who was generous with her time and expertise

• Bonnie Greer, writer and cultural commentator, dies aged 77

Bonnie Greer personified courage, humour, principle and generosity. Before knowing her in person, I met her work. Her 1994 debut novel Hanging by Her Teeth – about a Black American woman travelling through the US and Europe in search of her father – was sent to me for endorsement by its publisher, and I commented unhesitatingly: “Writing with sharpness, wit and poignancy, Bonnie Greer gathers the sequestered memories behind one Black woman’s bitter-sweet blues.”

The scope of Bonnie’s own life is beyond anything fictional, encompassing highs and lows, triumphs and challenges, her trajectory starting in the West Side of Chicago and ending up navigating iconic areas of London – whether Holland Park or Covent Garden or Soho – as if to the manor born. It was an honour to become her friend, sharing many a good time, offering a consoling shoulder if needed. An added bonus was to meet her husband David Hutchins. What a wonderful mutually supportive team they made.

The genre-fluid singer answers your questions on being funky v lonesome, his infamous MTV interview with Thurston Moore and why he said yes to performing with a chain-smoking alcoholic robot

• Read Alexis Petridis’s 5* review of new album Ride Lonesome

You’ve been performing since the late 80s. What keeps you going? AmongstTheWaves
It’s a good question. I don’t really know any other life. I’ve spent a lot of my time trying to create a body of work, and out of that, maybe there’s a few songs at the end that are not bad. So I just keep going down into the mine, trying to come back with a couple of things worth keeping. It’s a lot of digging. If I had to stop and get a job painting houses or something, I would still make songs just for myself, because that’s how it started.

You tend to alternate between styles from album to album. What do you feel is closer to your intrinsic self, funky Beck or lonesome Beck? Mazzini
Probably lonesome. But the other side of things gets me out of my shell, stops me from being a little too ponderous, which I’m apt to do. The other side of what I do – Loser or Odelay – was more of a fluke. At the time that was what people liked. Now it’s kind of reversed – they prefer the more introspective, quiet songs, and stuff that’s a little more genreless. I don’t have any songs that they play at weddings, like Uptown Funk. I remember telling Mark Ronson, “Hey, you made a wedding song.” He was like, “Yeah, finally.” That’s a very elite category of song.

Sharon Horgan’s post-divorce comedy is scabrously funny and poignant, while Woody Harrelson and Matthew McConaughey bring their real-life bromance to TV

Sharon Horgan’s new comedy is a clarion call for messy fiftysomethings and the third part of what she loosely conceived as a trilogy, following on from Pulling and Catastrophe. “No decade moves faster than 50 to 60,” says the intro. This means, of course, that if you haven’t got your life in order (Horgan’s lead Alex very much hasn’t), you’re running out of time. What unfolds is by turns scabrously funny and poignant as Alex deals with dates from hell, middle-age health problems and empty nest syndrome. It’s as uproarious as it is emotionally acute – Horgan retains the knack of making her characters simultaneously the butt of many of the jokes and incredibly easy to root for.
HBO Max, from Monday 21 September

What’s engaging in this tale of two best girl friends and a dance competition is not the familiar plot but the whip-fast telling and brilliant choreograpy

There is absolutely nothing unexpected about this Netflix comedy set in the world of rival Bollywood dance groups on American campuses. Each plot twist is instantly familiar, every character recognisable, the essential formula untweaked from a dozen previous college comedies. But it’s funny and snappy, and directed with infectious energy by Lena Khan, one of the few Muslim female film-makers working in Hollywood. The scriptwriters are Hasan Minhaj and Prashanth Venkataramanujam, a pair of millennial comedians who look as if they’ve done enough research on the inner workings of gen Z behaviour to write a PhD.

Maya (Maitreyi Ramakrishnan) and Anjali (Priyanka Kedia) star as lifelong best friends who enrol together at UCLA. Maya is the clever difficult one; Anjali is the nice pretty one. (It goes without saying Maya is also a total babe.) During freshers’ week they join the college’s Bollywood dance club where, predictably, Maya locks horns with leader Ronak (Ankur Rathee) over the choreography. He wants to base their new-season routine on Bollywood weddings, which, as Maya points out, is a bit trad. If they are going to beat their rivals they will need to come up with something modern and fresh.

The latest Monster instalment, about the 1892 Borden axe murders, is packed with periods and beheadings, and feels like it was made up as they went along

Okaaay – here’s what I think must have happened. Some time in the past year or two, Ryan Murphy discovered that women menstruate. Incredulous but enthralled, he rushed off to share the news with his soon equally incredulous and enthralled little friends. After confirming the basics they all looked at each other for a moment in silence as they contemplated this crazy, secret habit of the wimminz. And then Ryan said: “You guys? We have got to make a show about this!” The others nodded in fervent agreement and off they all ran.

The result is the utterly bonkers, blood-soaked, borderline-fetishistic fever dream that is The Lizzie Borden Story – the latest entry in Murphy’s popular anthology series Monster. This one is written by Ian Brennan and directed in the main by Max Winkler, the pairing responsible for the series’ previous offering, last year’s lamentable The Ed Gein Story. As, I presume, a gesture to the sex of this one’s subject, there is a female director for two of the Lizzie Borden episodes – Sarah Adina Smith – but it doesn’t really dent the vibe. Think: the gleeful disgust of a roomful of adolescent boys being taught about the female reproductive system in PSHE. It is now an eight-hour miniseries starring Rebecca Hall. We live in strange times.

Glen Matlock, Viv Albertine and Rat Scabies revisit the music, clothes and disgusting spitting in a likable documentary marking half a century of British punk

As the majority of them ease into their eighth decade, the overlords of British punk rock get yet another celebratory runout, gently reheating material that has become familiar over the years but never loses its appeal. A subculture that passed almost immediately from tabloid-triggering menace to picture-postcard caricature, punk may have passed into legend as a joyless and even squalid diversion in music and fashion history, but its surviving spokespeople recall their participation in it all with no little enthusiasm, even if they’ve clearly said it a thousand times already. No doubt it is the gen alphas among us who will benefit most; you’d expect their jaws to drop and eyes to roll at some of the stuff deemed perfectly acceptable in the late 1970s: women’s-breasts T-shirts, amateurish pancake makeup, and all that disgusting spitting. (“I didn’t mind it going in my mouth,” says the Damned’s Captain Sensible at one point, out-disgusting everyone.)

There’s a good spread of voices on offer; at least one member of most of the era’s big acts puts in an appearance with Glen Matlock (the Sex Pistols), Rat Scabies (the Damned), Terry Chimes (the Clash), Steve Severin (Siouxsie and the Banshees), and Hugh Cornwell (the Stranglers) leading the way. (The latter, though affable enough, is easily the least impressed as to punk’s actual achievements, which is a valuable corrective.) The original punk wave had little space for women (despite the sense that blows were being struck for equality) and that’s the case in the film as well: Gaye Advert (the Adverts) and Viv Albertine (the Slits) get a bit of time on camera though inevitably get a bit lost in it all. Due recognition, however, is paid to designer Vivienne Westwood as punk’s true founding spirit; Sex, the King’s Road boutique she ran with Malcolm McLaren, was a crucible of the British punk scene. Don Boyd, who produced the Pistols’ movie The Great Rock ‘n’ Roll Swindle along with the late Jeremy Thomas, says she “was punk and is punk … it came from her”.

Exaudi/Weeks
(NMC)
Four substantial, eclectic works written for James Weeks’ ensemble are brought together here, encompassing swooping folk phrasing, delicate harmonising and exuberant stylistic skill

There is a lot of joy in this release from Exaudi and their conductor, James Weeks, bringing together four substantial, eclectic works written for the vocal group during the 2010s. The first is Guide by Cassandra Miller. Based on a devotional song as recorded in 1968 by the folk singer Maria Muldaur, phrases of which are repeated freely by the singers in imitation of Muldaur’s swooping, full-voiced style, it builds quickly into a kind of controlled cacophony.

Andrew Hamilton’s Proclamation of the Republic imagines Patrick Pearse outside the Dublin General Post Office at Easter 1916, reading the historic text to a largely confused or oblivious public; little by little, pairing syllables on a quietly but insistently repeating two-note figure, the music blooms into something that seems to unite the crowd as they walk away, humming.

(Dirty Hit)
The Filipino-British songwriter’s fourth album sprinkles 90s alt fuzz with disarmingly sweet melodies and an impressive host of guests including Paramore’s Hayley Williams and Turnstile’s Brendan Yates

Last month, the Guardian published a feature about the demise of the monoculture. It suggested that streaming services, personalised algorithms and the declining influence of radio and television meant we now live in a world where stardom isn’t as universal as it once was. It used Sam Fender and Olivia Dean’s single Rein Me In as an example: here was a song that spent a record-breaking 23 weeks at No 1 yet hadn’t attained anything like the ubiquity you would once have expected: to judge by social media, plenty of people seemed to have never knowingly heard it.

If you were looking to advance this theory, you might alight on the career of Beatrice Laus, the 26-year-old British-Filipino singer-songwriter better known as Beabadoobee. To a certain cohort, primarily female and in their late teens and early 20s, she is not just a huge star, but a genuinely iconic figure. The latter is an over-used adjective in 2026, but if social media abounds with tutorials advising female fans how to copy your style and imitate your makeup – if you can be personally held partly responsible for the 2021 outbreak of adolescent girls drawing fake freckles on their faces in imitation of your own – then it probably fits, whether it discomfits Laus or not. The lyrics of Satellite, the closing track on her fourth album Pylon, suggests it does: “I give the generation a new infatuation,” she sings. “If only I knew how to cope with the times.”

A fictional British author in Paris sets out to explore Stein through the lens of her own friendships, in this inventive, perfectly paced portrait

It is late 2024, and an unnamed British author living in Paris is trying to write an essay on Gertrude Stein, the modernist writer and art collector. The author has been distracted by her friend Eva’s cat, who is lost and whose name is “it” in lower case, which inevitably leads to confusion – has Eva lost her cat or her mind? (Her other friend, Fanny, has rechristened the cat Bob, to make talking about him easier.)

The Pennsylvania-born Stein was painted by Picasso, hung out with Hemingway and wrote strange, stream-of-consciousness prose long before James Joyce embarked on his masterwork Ulysses. Commercial success didn’t come until she was in her 60s with The Autobiography of Alice B Toklas, a biography of her partner and one of her more accessible books. Our narrator is an admirer of Stein’s work, yet she can be exasperated by it. “Sometimes, when I read her baffling and beguiling writing I want to smack it in the chops. [Stein] longed for her readers to find her, yet there was a part of her that could not bear to be found.”

Opus13
(Alpha Classics)
The young quartet – winners of the Wigmore Hall String Quartet competition – continue to impress in a recording pairing Mendelssohn and Grieg

You would expect good things from Opus13 – current BBC New Generation Artists, and winners at last year’s Wigmore Hall and Bordeaux string quartet competitions – and this assured, distinctive debut lives up to that. The quartet formed in Oslo in 2014 as teenagers, naming themselves after the first piece they played together, and it’s with that work, Mendelssohn’s Op 13 No 2, that they lead off. The brief, soulful introduction breaks into a tense, runaway allegro in which the occasional violin swoop only increases the feeling of urgency. Mendelssohn’s debt to Beethoven in this work is clear, and the quartet play the slow movement with an intense warmth that makes it seem to belong beside that composer’s great adagios.

The Mendelssohn is nicely paired with Grieg’s Quartet No 1, a work full of insistent repetition beautifully handled here so as to create momentum rather than sap it. The folksy style hinted at in the second movement blossoms in the third, which gets a touch of Nordic fiddle, exuberant yet elegant. As encore there’s more Grieg, a characterful version of Solveig’s Song. The arrangement is credited not to a single person but to the entire group equally – which comes as no surprise at all.

It’s a chaotic time in an industry that’s reshaping our lives – Guardian reporters and experts recommend the books that help explain how we got here, and where we’re heading

Have you been feeling trapped in an endless cycle of artificial intelligence hype and panic? You’re not alone.

It’s a chaotic time to make sense of the industry that’s reshaping our lives, whether or not we like it. Last week, another AI company employee publicly resigned, warning the technology “could kill us all by the end of the decade”. Despite these dire warnings, AI companies have seen “otherworldly” surges in revenue and driven the US stock markets to new highs as they continue to push AI tools into everything from public school classrooms to law enforcement agencies, as well as rushing to put up new datacenters across the country.

What is it that makes books so magical? The Times columnist somehow forgets to tell us in this lofty polemic

While other kids watched cartoons, Times columnist James Marriott would spend his school holidays in bed with piles of books – “a mammoth effort of attention, perhaps the greatest I ever made” – under the spell of his father, a teacher who inculcated in him a literary zeal “not exactly common in the north of England in the early 2000s”.

Twenty-five years on, Marriott fears smartphones have all but killed reading for everyone. He had to get rid of his own – “George Eliot is no match” – and now, watching the rest of us scroll, he worries not only that we will lose the ability to appreciate Middlemarch, but that we risk falling prey to tyrants and anti-vaxxers forging “a world very different to the one we have known … mystical, tribal and autocratic”.

A bereavement memoir mingles with speculative fiction, in a wise and ragged examination of grief from the author of The Power

In his Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough, Ludwig Wittgenstein alludes to an incident that followed the death of Franz Schubert. He recalls that Schubert’s brother cut several scores into small pieces, each consisting of only a few bars of music, and handed them out to Schubert’s favourite pupils. This, Wittgenstein argues, was a totally understandable act of grief. He goes on to suggest, however, that if, in his grief, Schubert’s brother had left the scores untouched, or even burned them, then that too would be equally legible to us. Such is the disorienting nature of loss – in its wake, anything goes.

In The Strangers, Women’s prize-winning author Naomi Alderman tests this thesis to its limits. How about dealing with grief by writing an uneasy memoir/speculative fiction hybrid about the sudden appearance of a new species of quasi-badgers that seem to improve the quality of local soil?

The president’s former press secretary has learned all the right lessons, but how come it took him so long?

The most interesting chapter in Anthony Scaramucci’s All the Wrong Moves is the one where the hedge funder turned podcaster goes to work for Donald Trump. It’s summer 2017, and he’s been given the job of comms director, which he doesn’t know how to do, but he and Trump think it’ll work out because they’re both from New York. Or maybe he took it because he had “Potomac fever”, which afflicts Wall Street financiers who find themselves on the riverfront in Washington DC thinking they know how to run a country just because they’re “full of power and judgmental insight … about to fix everything”.

This appointment lasts only 11 days, not even enough time to be truly tainted by Trump’s first term, though it is enough time for Scaramucci to miss the birth of his son. The account is a mea culpa soup, with the author full of regrets for his hubris, his impulsivity, his “pride, egotism and asinine stupidity”, the fact that, despite the clear-sightedness bestowed by his humble beginnings, he’d come to assume the collective biases of the rich people he hung out with.

The first console I ever bought, it was hyped as a threat to the PlayStation, then mocked as a flop. But now, as it marks its 25th anniversary, it’s looked back on with misty-eyed reverence

This week marks the 25th anniversary of the Nintendo GameCube, the first console I ever bought with my own money. I vividly remember getting on the bus after school with a year’s worth of savings safely zipped into the pocket of my bag and going to a branch of Currys, where I dumped a bunch of notes, coins and vouchers on the counter to collect my pre-order. (It turned out that some of the vouchers from the previous Christmas had expired, but the guy at the checkout clearly felt so sorry for me that he redeemed them anyway. If you’re out there, Currys guy: thank you for taking pity on a desperate 13-year-old.)

If it hadn’t been for the ill-fated Wii U console, whose failure to take off in 2012 resulted in the first unprofitable periods in Nintendo’s game-making history, the GameCube would be remembered as the company’s biggest flop aside from the infamous Virtual Boy, from 1995. Released in Japan this week in 2001 (and in May 2002 in Europe), this surprisingly powerful purple cube sold much less than the Xbox and the PlayStation 2. With its squat, colourful form and unusual controller, arranged around a big traffic-light-green A button and small analogue sticks designed for small hands, it had a hint of Fisher-Price about it.

The distinctively British RPG is returning courtesy of the makers of Forza Horizon – with comedy talent such as Richard Ayoade and Natasia Demetriou voicing sweary characters. We had our first play and spoke to its developer

When Playground Games was founded in 2010, its objective was straightforward: to make the best cars in video games. Operating out of an unassuming white building in Leamington Spa, the studio sought to challenge Gran Turismo with its critically acclaimed British racing alternative: the acclaimed free-roaming Forza Horizon series. Yet as the team grew, so did their ambitions. Now they are making the most intriguing British fantasy game we have seen in many years.

For those who have never ventured into Albion, Fable is a quintessentially British role playing game. Created by Lionhead Studios for the original Xbox in 2004, it boasted cheeky charm alongside world-altering player choices, and its droll writing was brought to life in later iterations by national treasures such as Stephen Fry and Simon Pegg. Thanks to its unique blend of farce and fantasy, Fable grew into a globally beloved franchise – before Microsoft unceremoniously shuttered Lionhead in 2016, after mandating that the studio turn its star series into a multiplayer game. The result, Fable Legends, was never released.

We have a first play of the forthcoming Tomb Raider remake and speak with its developers. Can they improve on the gameplay without losing what made the 1996 original such a classic?

We join Lara Croft in St Francis’ Folly – inspired by the Unesco-listed monasteries of Meteora in Greece – as the light shines through the cracked ceiling and a flock of bats glide across the vast ruins below. When Lara leaps down to the monastery’s crumbling pillared courtyard, it becomes clear that these screeching, leathery creatures aren’t just set dressing. As they lurch towards her with unpredictable movements, she dispatches the swarm with a flurry of gun fire and panicked punches.

It’s a suitably cinematic reintroduction to our heroine and her very first adventure. Co-developed by longtime Lara custodians Crystal Dynamics and Polish studio Flying Wild Hog, Legacy of Atlantis is a reimagining of the classic 1996 game Tomb Raider, and this familiar cliffside location is now brimming with new life and believable detail. Yet while our reunion gets off to an auspicious start, I have my concerns. It feels like reconnecting with an old friend at the pub, only for them to begin spouting conspiracy theories two pints in.

PlayStation 5; Insomniac Games
Logan is well realised by Liam McIntyre and some exquisite character art, but there are lapses in narrative and emotional arcs and some of the combat feels like a chore

It was always going to be difficult to follow Spider-Man. Insomniac’s three games based around the web-slinger are masterpieces of superhero wish fulfilment, allowing you to swoop above a depiction of Manhattan alive with graffiti artists, roving journalists and gun-toting gangsters. If anyone should be up to the task, it’s Wolverine. A beloved Marvel stalwart, his life much darker and bloodier than Peter Parker’s, he seems the ideal protagonist for a moody action adventure. Yet somehow this well-made game falls short of its potential.

Set years before the founding of the X-Men, Marvel’s Wolverine sees a disenfranchised Logan falling back in with Sabretooth and Mystique when their mentor Nathaniel Essex is kidnapped by mutant-hating billionaire Bolivar Trask. This archetypal tech bro has a disturbing plan for world domination and the X Team are out to stop him – but there is a secret buried in Wolverine’s past that’s about to cause an eruption. It’s a decent setup, filled with the sort of intrigue, violence and Freudian tension we expect from the X-Men.

Bush theatre, London
Titas Halder’s coming-of-age monologue is set against the 1984 Bhopal toxic gas leak – but the poetic script doesn’t quite capture the horror

Ominousness permeates Darkling. In Titas Halder’s dramatic monologue, we witness a young girl’s coming of age set against the backdrop of the 1984 toxic gas leak in the Indian city of Bhopal, an environmental catastrophe that remains one of the worst industrial disasters in global history, leading to thousands of deaths.

Actor Linnea Berthelsen – best known for her role as Kali in Netflix series Stranger Things – makes her UK stage debut and gamely takes on the singular role in a tightly wound, physical performance. Leaping across Simon Kenny’s artful, soil-filled set, Berthelsen embodies childlike wonder as she recounts her early years playing in the rain, savouring bowlfuls of plain rice and idolising her older sister.

The Arts at Marble Arch, London
Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins and Jerry Lee Lewis’s 1956 get-together is respun with an unsubtle script but some vigorous performances

With the Arts theatre currently closed for major works, it has established a larger base next to Marble Arch. This temporary new home is now given over to some golden oldies with a jukebox musical combining the stories of Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins and Jerry Lee Lewis. It is almost 70 years since they wound up together one December afternoon at Sam Phillips’ Sun Studios in Memphis and recorded 40-odd songs. “Million dollar quartet” ran the caption that accompanied their picture in the newspaper.

Did this impromptu supergroup share vocals on Blue Suede Shoes and did Cash and Perkins mash up My Babe and Sixteen Tons as they do here? All the evidence suggests not. They chiefly laid down gospel and spiritual numbers amid some breezy chatter kept on the recordings. Two of those, Down By the Riverside and Peace in the Valley, are kept from the original session – along with Chuck Berry’s Brown Eyed Handsome Man – in a show that uses the occasion to rotate instead through some of their greatest hits including Great Balls of Fire, which wouldn’t be recorded at Sun for another year. Even Libby Watson’s design, which turns the modest studios into a sort of checkerboard-floored rock’n’roll diner cum fairground, has a colourful arch resembling a retro jukebox.

Young Vic, London
Despite a book by the original screenwriter, this stage adaptation doesn’t have the depth – or the songs – worthy of the era-defining feminist parable. And where’s the car?

‘Beware; for I am fearless, and therefore powerful.” These words were written by Mary Shelley two centuries ago but could apply to the two runaways in Ridley Scott’s 1991 film who turn into highway fugitives in their liberating cross-country road trip after a girls’ weekend goes wrong.

Thelma & Louise, starring Susan Sarandon and Geena Davis, did not exactly represent Shelley’s “monstrous feminine” but came to be seen as an era-defining feminist parable on freedom from male strictures and abuse. It caught the cultural zeitgeist, the title becoming a byword for sisterhood, with reams written about its feminist layers, spectacular cinematography – and the shock of its un-Hollywood ending.

Faced with a new concert venue – a vast and beautiful walled garden – John Harris and the Lammermuir festival had to decide how to fill it with sound. Anthony Braxton’s colossal composition was the irresistible solution.

Working in contemporary music, I am used to eyebrows being raised by friends and family when I answer their seemingly innocent dinnertime question, “What are you up to at the moment?”. My responses over the years have ranged from “staging an opera about alien abduction underneath Concorde” to “ensuring that a soprano can get a tattoo live on stage while she sings”. However, I’ve never previously experienced anything like the familial spluttering in response to my most recent answer – “putting on a concert with 100 tuba players in a garden outside Edinburgh”.

I do understand some of their surprise, but to be honest 100 tubas seemed like such a logical solution to the problem I was given that I’m not sure I understand it entirely! James Waters, artistic director of the Lammermuir festival in East Lothian, Scotland – and regular partner-in-crime for some of Red Note Ensemble’s wilder productions, including the aforementioned opera under Concorde – phoned me one day last year to say “I have found an interesting – and very beautiful – place to put on a concert. I just don’t have a clue what music to do. Come and have a look!”

Rapper won prestigious award as an unsigned artist before breaking UK Top 10 and nurturing artists including KSI

The British rapper Sway, who proved inspirational to a generation of Black British musicians thanks to his independence and frank, dextrous storytelling, has died aged 44.

The news was announced by the Mobo awards, with whom Sway won best hip-hop act in 2005, the first unsigned act to do so. “Proud to have him as part of our history. Our love goes out to his family, loved ones and fans,” the statement read.

Ireland joins joins Dutch broadcaster in refusing to take part in 2027 song contest, in second consecutive year of protests

Ireland is to boycott Eurovision for the second year running over the “appalling” ongoing killing in Gaza, the national broadcaster has said.

Ireland was one of five countries, along with Iceland, the Netherlands, Spain and Slovenia, that refused to take part in the competition this year in protest against Israel’s participation.

The musician is serving a 50-month federal prison term for prostitution-related offenses

Attorneys representing rapper Sean “Diddy” Combs say they are no longer acting for the disgraced star in a dispute over months of unpaid legal bills.

The musician, who is serving a 50-month federal prison term for prostitution-related offenses, has become increasingly belligerent in recent months, causing “a total breakdown in cooperation and communication” with New York law firm Sher Tremonte, one of its partners, Michael Tremonte, said in a court filing.

The always revelatory dance company is at Sadler’s Wells in London this month with two programmes, celebrating their legacy and presenting ‘heavenly’ new works

From a blue-grey converted iron chapel in Cheshire to a shiny black infill townhouse in London

Steven Kolb tried to stop activists demonstrating against the use of wool – but he can’t curb consumers’ growing concern about where their clothes come from

On Sunday afternoon, Mason Melito took a front row seat at the Cos show at New York fashion week. A campaigner at Peta (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals), Melito wasn’t on the guest list – instead, he and four other activists had planned to briefly disrupt the catwalk show with the aim of drawing attention to the use of wool by the Swedish brand.

Protests on the catwalk have a long, rich history. Since the 90s, Peta have regularly stormed shows in an attempt to draw attention to the industry’s use of fur and leather. It’s a typically peaceful practice that happens regularly – during some shows, the catwalk is so long and security so swift that show-goers don’t even notice. (Sometimes, Peta take a different approach: in 1996, during a lunch, a protester famously dropped a dead raccoon on to Anna Wintour’s plate.)

Loop and tube bands are cheaper than a gym membership and take up less space than weights – our exercise buff put 18 to the test

• The best treadmills for your home

Movement breeds motivation, not vice versa. If you want a fast ticket to a regular training habit, you need to remove the friction between you and that first rep. When the sofa looks more appealing than getting a sweat on, it pays to have a simple, quick, convenient way to kick into workout mode. That’s where resistance bands come in.

Portable, lightweight, compact and convenient, the right set of bands could be the path of least, er, resistance to easy home workouts and reaching your fitness goals.

From sweaty kit to grubby trainers, here’s how to wash, repair and care for activewear more sustainably

• The best moisture-wicking underwear, socks and base layers

As a running and cycling journalist, I spend a lot of time in sportswear. Lycra is my leg coverage of choice, polyester or merino wool my base layer, and I reach for technical materials like Gore-Tex if the weather isn’t playing ball.

A near-daily workout schedule means my washing machine’s sportswear setting takes a hammering to avoid having a laundry basket overflowing with sweaty, salty, sour-scented clothes. But even then, tops can develop hard-to-shift smells in sweat-prone areas, synthetic materials can start to bobble and lose shape, and my sportswear occasionally gets a foamy detergent residue that hasn’t been properly rinsed out, particularly during wet or intensive training sessions.

Craving cosiness, but too warm for blankets and baths? Try our autumn cheat sheet

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After a record-breaking summer of heat, temperatures aren’t set to drop enough for hot baths, warm tights and roast dinners just yet. But if the darker evenings and falling leaves have got you craving cosiness, here’s our recipe for achieving that comforting autumnal vibe while it’s still unseasonably warm out.

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Want to know the essentials fashion insiders swear by? Whether it’s great T-shirts or forever trainers, Guardian writers and stylists reveal the pieces they rate

• Jess Cartner-Morley’s September style essentials

Whether it’s a great pair of pants or the perfect T-shirt, nailing the basics can make or break your wardrobe. “They have to work harder than anything else,” says British Vogue style editor Funmi Fetto.

I asked Fetto and other stylists and style writers, along with members of the Guardian fashion desk – who all spend more time than most thinking about this stuff – for their most-loved basics. And don’t worry, most of them won’t break the bank.

Everyone loves an iced finger bun, but these light and moist bakes with a blackcurrant fondant topping might be your new favourite afternoon treat

Soft, feather-light and topped with a thick strip of icing: few things are as irresistible to me as an iced finger bun. Here, I’ve flavoured the fondant with blackcurrant jam, which lends a gentle tartness to balance the sweetness, though almost any good-quality jam will work. A simple tanzhong (a cooked flour-and-milk paste) gives the buns their wonderfully fluffy crumb and keeps them soft for longer. For a more indulgent version, split the buns along the top and fill with whipped cream and a spoonful of jam instead. They’re best assembled just before serving, and make a particularly lovely afternoon treat.

After the long hot summer, I’m enjoying September’s back-to-school vibes – and the excuse to create delicious lunches to take to work

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After an August spent mostly on the road, I’ve found myself unexpectedly enjoying the back-to-school feeling that arrives with September. Usually, I greet it with the sort of enthusiasm reserved for a tax return, but, having been away for so long, it’s actually been rather nice coming home. Of course, there are all the usual inevitable resolutions and to-do lists: go to bed earlier, eat better, take lunch to work. Admirable stuff, although I suspect a summer of one too many honeycomb ice-creams and an irresponsible amount of Irish brown bread and salty butter may also have something to do with it. Taking a packed lunch is, in any case, an all-round win, because eating out is increasingly expensive, and food bought in cafes and restaurants tends to be richer and saltier than a homemade equivalent. Depressingly, school and college canteens don’t fare much better, either.

But a packed lunch needn’t mean a sad sandwich or last night’s tubbed-up leftovers. Nena Foster’s courgette, olive and halloumi muffins are a very good argument for taking your lunch with you: nutrient-dense without being remotely worthy, they work just as well in an adult’s lunchbox as in a child’s, and they freeze brilliantly, too. Add a flask of pumpkin soup or Tom Hunt’s sweetcorn chowder for an excellent autumn lunch.

There is now a wealth of less sugary, more sophisticated nonalcoholic options out there, with flavours clearly aimed at an adult market

I have written recently about several families of nonalcoholic drinks that are having a moment: tonic water, flavoured sparkling water and wine substitutes. It stands to reason that soft drinks are enjoying their time in the sun. Quite literally, too: the heat of 2026 has demanded some serious refreshments and UK booze consumption is at a record low. But it has dawned on me that there is a broader trend in alcohol-free beverages beyond individual categories, namely that we are living in the age of the grown-up soft drink.

By that I mean those with less sugar and more complexity than post-mix drinks, or “soda pop” (as my daughter now calls them, thanks to the KPop Demon Hunters song of the same name), which are clearly aimed at adults. One example is the tribe of “functional” drinks that have hit the market in the past year or so and that have supposed health benefits or performance-enhancing qualities, such as improving focus or helping you to slow down. Sonic Tonics’ CBD-infused 0% drink, for example, promises to shift your mood, and it certainly quenches thirst with a really original flavour profile of bitter hemp root with sweet and floral fig and violet. And while usually sceptical of celebrity-backed products with wellness claims, Gillian Anderson’s G Spot drinks are genuinely delicious. The passion fruit and habanero chilli is my favourite; I can’t support its aphrodisiac claims (allegedly due to its ingredients including butterfly pea and L-arginine, both of which are said to increase blood flow to the sexual organs), but, at £6.50 for four from Ocado, it’s cheaper than trying Gwyneth Paltrow’s sex oil.

Soaring fish prices, labour costs and changing tastes all spell bad news for Britain’s chippies. Is this the end for the seaside staple – or will a few innovators succeed in keeping them alive?

One day in 2007, Darren Sudlow drove past the old stationmaster’s house at Padgate station, in Cheshire, noticed it was empty and decided to lease it. “He just fell in love with the place,” says his son, Kieran, who was 11 at the time. “He said he always wanted a fish and chip shop, for some reason.” Despite having worked as a joiner up to that point, Darren made a go of it, and the Plaice Station, as he named it, was a success from day one. “He worked like mad to get it open and then realised that the hard work hadn’t even started, and he had a queue out the door,” says the younger Sudlow.

The family lived nearby. Kieran Sudlow, who is now 30, worked at the Plaice Station as a boy, peeling potatoes, washing dishes after school, then cooking at the range when he was 16. He went on to become a chef, working in Australia for a few years, then returning to help out at the chippy part-time when needed. Business had always been pretty good. They won local awards and had a loyal customer base. But one day in March, Kieran remembers, his father came in and told him: “‘I think the fish and chip shop’s going to go.’ He said, ‘It’s not making money. I can’t see it carrying on.’”

The manosphere says this type of suffering is targeted neglect, writes advice columnist Eleanor Gordon-Smith. But your suffering gives you the ability to make your part of the world better.

• Read more Leading questions

I’m approaching 30 and I’m still a kissless virgin.

I’ve suffered with depression and anxiety since childhood and my family isn’t the most functional or supportive. I don’t really have friends either, as I find it hard to connect with others due to being bullied and feeling that I’m not worthwhile or wanted. I was also homeschooled from 14 and moved to a different part of the country at 15 and a few more times since then, so I feel quite rootless and alienated.

As concern about loneliness and social isolation grows, we spoke to people who have joined groups and set up activities

Amid growing concern about loneliness and social isolation, new research from the Institute for Public Policy Research found the number of young people in England with no close friends has risen fivefold since 2014, with one in 20 now reporting having none at all.

Making new friends as an adult is not always easy. We spoke to people who have taken deliberate steps to make new connections about what worked for them.

Ayaan thought she was lending money for something essential. Ahmed says the lender doesn’t get to dictate what it’s spent on. You decide who is on the money

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

I thought I was lending Ahmed money for something vital, not a trip to Greece

We got her as a puppy and she became particularly close to Adam – a blessing when he went into cardiac arrest in the middle of the night

My husband, Adam, and I had always planned to have a big family and that journey began when we got our dog, Polly, five years ago. I’ve loved golden retrievers since I was a child because I grew up with one. We got Polly as a puppy and she was everything we’d hoped for: loving and smart.

She immediately connected with both of us, but became inseparable from Adam. They would go for morning runs together; Polly could always be found wagging her tail by his side. This bond proved to be lifesaving.

Candidates describe feelings of rejection after submitting hundreds of applications but getting a handful of interviews

Hundreds of job applications, exhausting searches and relentless rejection – the experience of attempting to get back into the workforce after losing their jobs in their 50s and 60s has proved an ordeal for some Britons.

For some, those efforts prove fruitless and lead jobseekers to reluctantly take early retirement. Others may have to rely on benefits to pay the bills while they continue to job hunt.

Psychology has become one of the most popular courses at university. That’s no surprise as the insights it gives to our behaviour can help in a huge variety of careers

For Niamh Mulcahy, 21, graduating with a psychology degree from the University of Bath has already paid off. After navigating a competitive graduate jobs market this year, she secured a sales role with a FTSE 100 company starting in September.

“My degree involved a lot of data analysis, which has been really useful in job applications,” she says. “The course felt very current. We covered everything from neuroscience to forensic psychology, and my dissertation was on ‘incels’. I’ve always been fascinated by human behaviour and why people make the decisions they do.”

It told me a year ago I had applied for a credit card – now it is it telling me my payment is overdue

A year ago I got an email from Barclaycard stating that my “application was successful” for a credit card. I had made no such application. I immediately reported this to Barclaycard. More emails arrived and I made repeated phone calls to customer service.

I was assured it was a simple typo rather than fraud, and that my email address would be removed. However, I’m now receiving notifications that the latest account payment is overdue.

The cost of living crisis hits students hard. Planning ahead and some self-discipline will help, alongside a sharp eye for a bargain and, if you’re eligible, a bursary

Like late-night study sessions and cramming into a student kitchen to cook up meals, being savvy with money has long been part of the university experience. But with the cost of living remaining high, students are more money-conscious than ever.

“It is one of the most difficult times to make ends meet as a student,” according to Tom Allingham, communications director at Save the Student (STS). He says soaring prices for essentials, such as food and energy bills, have “disproportionately affected” students, while maintenance loans (intended to help cover day-to-day costs) have failed to keep up with high rates of inflation.

Natalie Greenwood says surgery is no ‘magic fix’ for chronic pelvic pain – a view backed up by a new study

“It’s really frustrating to be in this cycle of continuous surgery. It makes you feel helpless,” says Natalie Greenwood, of a condition that affects her so badly she is “non-functioning most of the time because of the constant fatigue”.

Greenwood, 36, needs to have an operation every few years to limit the impact of the endometriosis that gives her chronic pelvic pain, as well as extreme tiredness and brain fog.

Collagen powders, gummies and pills have boomed in popularity in recent years boosted by claims that they smooth wrinkles, promote glossy hair and help with joint pain. Amid the noise it can be hard to figure out whether there’s any actual science behind the promise of looking younger for longer. Luckily Dr Xand van Tulleken has spent the past three years writing Make me well: a quest to understand the confusing world of wellness, and his chapter on collagen dives deep into the evidence. He tells Madeleine Finlay what collagen does in the body, how we can get it without splashing out on expensive supplements, and why getting to the truth behind wellness claims can be so hard

Handstands display a mastery of one’s physical form that I have never quite felt – and they look cool. Experts share their advice for building up strength and practicing

My aspirations in life are modest: I want to write, spend time with my loved ones, and someday find a lipstick that flatters my skintone. But perhaps my greatest ambition is this: I want to be able to do a handstand.

Why? It turns the world upside down. It seems fun. It displays a mastery of one’s physical form that I have never quite felt. And it looks cool! Maybe it has to do with that one time in third grade when all my friends could do a handstand and I couldn’t, but that’s for me and my therapist to sort out later.

Seeing a pallid, washed-out face in the mirror? Prepare to be diagnosed …

Name: Ferritin face.

Age: The name is new, but the symptoms are old.

Let your legs enjoy the last of the summer’s breeze while a thick top or jacket keeps away the autumn chill

This is the most enjoyable time of the year to get dressed because clothes can just be clothes. They don’t have to function as a personal air-conditioning and sweat-disguising system, as they did for the summer, nor do they need to double as a portable central heating unit yet. Your outfit does not need to “take you from day to night” until party season starts, and it doesn’t have to jigsaw itself into a hand-luggage-sized capsule wardrobe until next summer. There is little in the way of functional heavy lifting, so you get to just wear nice clothes.

And this benign early part of autumn is more fun to dress for than the equivalent weather in spring, because we still have a bit of summer swagger. The summer habit of wearing shorts and halter tops and even swimwear has gotten us a little loose, a little more laid-back about flashing a bit of skin here or there. It is about more than bare flesh, though. There is something about summer that flexes the flashy dresser in everyone – whether that’s fancy dress for a festival, or just the way that putting on a pair of sunglasses brings out your inner movie star.

Personally, I’ve never been a fan of painting on the gloss, but thanks to a range of fresh formats in sophisticated shades and textures, my head – and lips – have been turned

I’m deeply suspicious of people who never change their minds. To be so completely sure of anything as to be permanently entrenched in any position isn’t something I admire, which is why I shove an olive into my mouth every couple of years and hope it finally takes.

I do the same with lip gloss, with historically similar results. Fashion has, until recently, been on my side. Less sophisticated than lipstick, overshadowed by TikTok trending lip oils, less effortless cool-girl than tinted lip balm, gloss has barely had a look-in these past few years, but new formulas steal from other formats for a better user experience and, well, like everything eventually, lip gloss is back in vogue.

Experts don’t know exactly what causes dandruff, but if you’re seeing light flakes on your scalp, over-the-counter products can help

You spy a scatter of white flakes on your collar. Or you’ve got an itch that won’t quit, no matter how much you wash your hair. Dandruff isn’t glamorous, but it’s common: about half the world’s population has it.

An itchy, flaking scalp is rarely dangerous, but it can be annoying. Here’s what you need to know about what might be causing your flakes, what you can do about it, and when it’s time to get help.

Weekenders from Zagreb head to the rolling green Samobor Hills for nature, vineyards, delicious local food and Habsburg-era architecture

‘You’re going to Samobor? You must try kremšnita,” my Dubrovnik friends told me before I set off on my trip north. “But I’ve already had kremšnita in Zagreb,” I told them. They do it better in Samobor, they insisted. I wasn’t about to get embroiled in a battle of the cream cakes in a region where Croatians, Slovenes and Austrians all like to celebrate their own versions of this decadently thick, fat custard slice topped with puff pastry and icing sugar. But I was more than willing – happy, even – to follow everyone’s suggestions to try kremšnita in Hotel Livadić’s Kavana Livadić, in Samobor’s main King Tomislav Square, a mere half-hour drive west of Zagreb.

It lived up to the hype – delicately rich, creamy and with a light touch. After spending a few weeks in sun-bleached Venetian Dalmatia, amid the scrubby, limestone Dinaric Alps, I had swapped empires and was firmly in Habsburg Croatia. Here, in Zagreb County’s prettiest town, handsome baroque houses in pastel shades of buttery yellow, apricot and pistachio, festooned with stucco, line narrow King Tomislav Square, whose umbrella-shaded cafe terraces were filled with Croatians getting their morning fix of coffee and chatter.

Hiking alone in the countryside can be joyous, but for women it can sometimes feel unnerving. Here’s how to enjoy it safely, plus four stunning routes to walk solo

I did my first solo hike during a sunny September, seven years ago. After a summer of feeding and ferrying four noisy teenagers (and their friends) around, I was exhausted. But despite being bone tired, I had barely moved. I yearned, above all, for time on my own, for the chance to walk without interruption (and at the pace I chose), and for the silence of some empty wilderness.

But I was nervous. Not of being on my own, but of what might happen to me with no one around to help (breaking a bone, encountering a psychopath, being chased by a bull, getting fatally lost). I could have found a companion or joined a group, but my need for silence and solitude outweighed my fears.

It’s the birthplace of the popular cheese, but the Barletta-Andria-Trani province in southern Italy has an array of local delicacies – from olive oil and yellow tomatoes to goat prosciutto

‘I don’t eat mozzarella outside Puglia,” says our friend Savio. “It’s not the same.” Savio is a very opinionated foodie, so I take his words with a pinch of good Puglian sea salt (see below). He was adamant about the superiority of the stretched-curd cheese from his home turf.

Puglia is also the birthplace of ingredient du jour burrata, which originated in Andria, a few miles from Savio’s home town of Barletta. Andria forms one part of the triangular Barletta-Andria-Trani (BAT) province, but despite the cheese connection and Barletta having miles of palm-backed, sandy beaches, it is often passed over for better-known parts of Puglia. So I asked Savio’s company, Unexpected Italy, an app that calls itself the antidote to overtourism, to organise a trip to the area.

Chefs in the east of the country are shunning imported produce for local ingredients, reinforcing how food is intertwined with a region and its people

‘It’s a magical place, and not just because of the hotel.” Standing outside the greenhouses at Högbo Brukshotell, two hours north of Stockholm, Stefan Johansson is talking about far more than hospitality. The former head chef, now responsible for sustainability at Högbo, has spent much of the past decade helping reshape the way this corner of Sweden grows, cooks and thinks about food.

The catalyst was disarmingly simple. Years ago, a journalist asked Johansson why he was cooking the food he was cooking. Like many ambitious Swedish chefs, Stefan trained in Stockholm’s top restaurants, where ingredients from around the world were only a phone call away. The question lingered long after the interview ended.

Test yourself on topical news trivia, pop culture and general knowledge every Thursday. How will you fare?

At the very moment this week’s Thursday quiz launches on the website, the quizmaster fully intends to be supping a pint of beer at Stansted airport en route to Istanbul, and will presumably overfly Syldavia on the way. In between packing their books on Byzantine history, reading the rules on transporting feral hogs and fretting about the prospect of someone the size of Gary Barlow’s massive son reclining the seat in front of them, they still found time to write 15 questions on topical news, obscure pop culture trivia and general knowledge for your delight. Allons-y!

The Thursday news quiz, No 265

Initiative aims to keep alive age-old skill, and at Muchelney Abbey in Somerset improve habitat for rare shrill carder bee

It sounds like something out of a Thomas Hardy novel: a merry band of men and women roaming the West Country cutting meadows by hand in exchange for hunks of bread and cheese.

But the conservation charity English Heritage is recruiting a team of volunteer scythers to maintain 21st-century meadowland in the old-fashioned way.

She was born with an ultra-rare genetic disorder. After my decades working in film PR, I now face the biggest campaign of all: the fight for her life

My daughter Elsie has beautiful curls – blond like a little Botticelli cherub’s, hair that someone dark like me could only ever dream of. She laughs a lot, has a cheeky sense of humour and soaks in all the sounds around her – rustling leaves, the sea, a dog barking, children playing around a pool, me impersonating the alarm clock every morning, me impersonating monkeys. Indeed, me impersonating any animal.

Sound is important for Elsie because she has a visual impairment and, while we know she has some peripheral vision, is legally classed as blind. As a result, she uses her tongue to check her environment. When she’s excited it sticks out, tasting the air around her, licking anyone close, sensing space. And when she likes the taste of something she keeps her tongue out until you give her more. This is how we know she likes lollies.

For years, my vitiligo controlled my life, and I was constantly trying to disguise it. But one day, I realised I could take a very different and extremely liberating approach

The microphone felt heavier than I expected. As I stood on stage at a London comedy club last December, I looked out at a room full of strangers sitting quietly, waiting for me to make them laugh. It felt nerve-racking and surreal. I had spent years hiding my vitiligo, hoping people wouldn’t notice it. Now I was about to joke about it in my set.

I was three years old when I developed my first patch of vitiligo on the back of my hand, which later spread to my arms, legs, face and other parts of my body. By the time I was six years old, 70% of me was covered. I was too young to understand what was happening.

The author of Generation Maybe, Camilla Cavendish, explains the many reasons people are having fewer children, from dating apps to unaffordable housing and the climate crisis

Generation Maybe is the most tactful possible title for Camilla Cavendish’s bracing new book – because the trend she’s describing is anything but a “maybe”. “The wave of childlessness that is sweeping the globe is extraordinary,” she writes. It’s in the UK, where the fertility rate hit 1.39 children per woman in 2025, the lowest on record. It’s across the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, visible in so many measures – nearly half of Canadian women surveyed in their 40s said they’d had fewer children than they would have liked. But it’s also a global story. “The UAE, Chile and Tamil Nadu in India have even lower birthrates than Germany,” Cavendish writes. “China is growing old before it gets rich, and Russia has maintained its population size purely by annexing Crimea and parts of Ukraine.” In fact, when it comes to falling populations, “only the Black Death in the 14th century is comparable to what is happening now”.

When I meet her in central London, Cavendish is tailored, self-possessed, you might even say poised, but very open – she never gives an opinion without asking yours, she talks very freely about her family and she is upfront about what she sees as her faults. Now 58, she started her career at McKinsey, the mega-management consultancy, having done PPE at Oxford at the same time as David Cameron, for whom she worked as policy director when he was in government and to whom she remains intensely loyal (every time his name comes up, we have a fight).

Does your child’s favourite show give them a chance to reflect, or does it move too quickly for its lessons to sink in?

• A version of this piece was originally published on Aeon as The bombarding of childhood

I am at the airport gate waiting to depart, watching passengers hurry past with rolling suitcases and paper cups of coffee. A small boy sits very still beside his mother. He holds an iPad close to his chest, almost in a cramp, clutching the screen as if it might otherwise run away. I hear loud clapping hands and squeaking children’s voices. I lean over and see a cartoon character in green snatch a toy from another character in pink. The pink character begins to cry, tears splashing like sprinkles from its enormous eyes. The green character shouts sorry. Instantly, the tears stop and a wide smile replaces them before I have blinked. And, before I have even worked out whether the characters are speaking English or Arabic (as the mother does to the boy), the scene has changed and the two characters are rowing a boat with a random song in the background. The boy’s eyes dart on the screen from right to left, centre, down. His body is still but his attention is being hurried from cue to cue.

This is the problem I have come to think of as the pace of children’s media.

An evocative new Tate Britain show captures an era when the UK’s newly flush creative industries teamed up with a generation of skint dreamers to bring the decade into vivid colour

Here is Kate Moss, with pink hair splayed across a pillow, her face scrubbed of makeup, her smile sweet and wonky. Sarah Lucas’s Pauline Bunny artwork with its confrontational hosiery on a charity shop chair. Sean Ellis’s collaborative knights-in-grubby-armour shoot with Alexander McQueen. Here are happy ravers, in a club, or saluting the sun as it stretches and yawns over a litter-strewn hill.

These photos are old. They were taken a long time ago. But they’re young, too. They are curated by Edward Enninful for the Tate’s exhibition The 90s: Art and Fashion (Enninful worked at i-D in the 90s) and almost everyone involved is shiny and fresh. The models, whether professional or not, are mostly in their 20s, and the photographers are early in their careers. It gives the photos a youthful fizz, a verve. But the energy also comes from an understanding between photographer and subject. In many of the pictures you can feel the shared mischief, a “yes we’re serious about our ideas” but also a “look, we’re getting away with it!” delight.

We would like to hear about your favourite moments and storylines from the documentary series

As the 7 Up documentary series airs its final episodes with 70 Up, we would like to hear your highlights from over the years.

The ITV series started following the lives of 10 boys and four girls in England, beginning in 1964, when they were seven years old, and has returned every seven years since.

We would like to hear your experience of seeing the Bayeux tapestry exhibit at the British Museum

The British Museum’s Bayeux tapestry exhibit opened on Thursday 10 September, and has already broken the British Museum’s record for the number of tickets sold in one day.

Have you seen the Bayeux tapestry at the British Museum? How far did you travel to see it? Tell us all about your experience below.

From renting and troublesome landlords to buying or selling a home, send us your UK housing questions

Are you dealing with a problem with your landlord or tenancy, wondering about buying or selling a home, or facing another housing issue?

We’re planning to launch a new column answering readers’ questions about housing in the UK and helping them understand their options.

The Guardian is looking for single men of all ages to talk honestly about the experience of being unattached

The Guardian is looking for single men of all ages to talk honestly about the experience of being unattached. Whether you are 16 or 100, we want to hear the unvarnished truth about what it’s like to live as a single man today.

Are you trying to find love? Or are you happy living life as a bachelor? Do you find the experience of modern dating – with all its red flags and height requirements – to be a minefield? Or are you attracting more attention than ever before?

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