Oasis and Elbow have soundtracked Burnham’s byelection campaign and he got Liam Gallagher doing Manchester’s tram announcements. Will he keep banging the drum for music if he reaches Westminster?

First came Andy Burnham’s Makerfield byelection campaign launch video, with the Greater Manchester mayor stomping down red-brick streets soundtracked by homegrown stars Oasis, Elbow and James. Then came the eye-catching, northern soul-influenced campaign logo: Change Labour, Keep the Faith. And this week, it is not just pubs and clubs but music venues that would be part of Burnham’s proposed business rates cut.

As he looks to return to Westminster then make a bid for party leadership, music is part of Brand Burnham in a way that is unusual for a mainstream politician, in a campaign where he has pitched “Manchesterism” as the solution to Britain’s woes. But it is a policy platform that can be as vague and vibes-based as a Noel Gallagher verse. How does the Mayor’s love affair with Manchester’s music industry shine a light not just on “Manchesterism”, but the man behind it?

Most of us will experience periods of solitude at some point. But beige furnishings and self-care rituals are not the answer

I have met quite a few influencers over the years and, to be frank, they’ve mostly been a strange bunch. I remember meeting one at a party a while ago, she was running around (literally) with a phone and a bunch of cables. “I don’t have data!” she screamed. “Oh hello?” I said, confused. “And I need a plug!” she declared. And then she screamed again, and promptly attached her phone to the nearest plug socket, which was stationed by her ankle. There she sat, hunched on the floor, gripping the phone and tapping it furiously.

I am only talking about my experiences here, and my sample may be wildly unrepresentative, but I have noticed patterns: they come across as twitchy and manic; they don’t make eye contact; and they seem to struggle to maintain the kind of extended volley of question-and-answer responses, shared anecdotes, or jokes, that a normal conversation requires. They basically radiate social anxiety.

Rachel Connolly is a writer and the author of the novel Lazy City

We go behind the scenes at rehearsals for William Kentridge’s new staging of Monteverdi’s 1607 opera l’Orfeo

‘L’Orfeo is an opera about opera. It’s an opera about the power of music. It’s about the power of art to construct the world,” says director and artist William Kentridge. Claudio Monteverdi’s 1607 work is, if not quite the first ever opera, the earliest opera still performed today, written when the form was in its very infancy.

Monteverdi called his work – composed for performance at the ducal court of Mantua, a “favola in musica – legend in music”. “Monteverdi was a genius,” says conductor Jonathan Cohen. “The piece is about the world’s most famous musician. He begins with a prologue where he has the allegorical character of La Musica [Music, here sung by Francesca Aspromonte, who also sings Eurydice in this production], who says ‘I am music, and I have the power to stop the birds singing, the power over nature.’ And of course Orfeo, the musician, has the power to control even the rocks, the trees, the animals and effect human emotions.”

William Kentridge (centre) during rehearsals, above, and, below, Kentridge talks with Francesca Aspromonte (La Musica/Euridice) and Roseline Wilkens (Euridice). Photograph by David Levene

As the world waited for rational outcomes from irrational players, the people being bombed were forced to adjust to the fact of terror as part of daily life

“Humans take a lot of killing,” wrote Frank McCourt in Angela’s Ashes. As bleak a phrase as it is, McCourt was talking about resilience, how much poverty and abuse a person can withstand and still survive. But the other side of human capacity for pain is how much can be forced upon us and normalised. It is bewildering how war – shocking and intolerable at first – quickly becomes a matter of fact. Few conflicts have demonstrated that more vividly than the war on Iran. For months it was a matter of low-grade strikes, hot and cold rhetoric, and near-conclusions to the hostilities that never came. Sharp political crisis manifested as grinding hardship and upheaval for the people.

We have a peace deal now, for that be thankful, but think what preceded it. Over the past week alone, Donald Trump had ordered strikes on Iran, and expressed a desire to take Kharg Island, which handles 90% of Iran’s crude oil exports. He then prematurely declared that the US had ended the war on Iran in a “great settlement”. The markets did their customary flicker in response to the announcement of a deal, but the rest of us, not invested in oil futures, could have been forgiven for not registering a reaction to imminent peace – he had made the same promise almost 40 times. In press conferences, social media posts and interviews over the past few months, Trump had said relax, it’s almost over. Just how not over it was can be traced by the strikes and counter-strikes across the region, the closure of the strait of Hormuz, general global economic upheaval and specific Middle East destabilisation.

Before Orange Is the New Black made her a star, Cox endured bullying, abuse, harassment and violence. She talks about the bad old days – and her fears they’re on their way back

Two days before she spoke to me, Laverne Cox had been at the premiere of a new, animated Animal Farm, in which she voices Snowball. The film is wildly controversial, for its absolutely unOrwellian, childish tone, complete with happy ending, but Cox had bigger things on her mind than film criticism.

“If we don’t wake up and don’t understand, trans people will be exterminated,” she said that day in April. “People’s rights are being taken away, people are losing their jobs, people are losing healthcare, people are being detransitioned in prison, gender-affirming care is being attacked, not just for children but also for adults. It’s never been about protecting women – it’s always been about creating a permission structure to scapegoat trans people, to dehumanise trans people, to take away our rights and to eliminate us from public life.”

When the artist came home from LA, it seemed like a retirement. But it heralded an astonishing new chapter. Our critic remembers their thrilling dinners together – and the dazzling new works that arrived in his inbox every morning

It was springtime in Paris and I was floating among young green leaves and white blossom – but I was not in a park. I was on an upper floor of the Fondation Louis Vuitton delighting, wallowing in several of David Hockney’s iPad paintings of his garden in Normandy. In one room, this green oasis was shown by the light of the silvery moon: the darkened chamber was alive with shining white lunar discs, blue clouds and the shadowy fingers of tree branches.

It was early April last year and this was the opening of David Hockney 25, a blockbuster show, curated with his close involvement, covering his entire career – but with an emphasis on his work this century. What a bold and bloody-minded spectacle it was, insisting that Hockney’s later pictures of straw bales and ponds are just as good if not better than his famous early swimming pools and sexy portraits. And what a triumph! With extraordinary aplomb, Hockney made his point. You went from gazing in awe at some of his greatest early paintings, basking in their Californian and swinging London light, to suddenly standing in Yorkshire fields in the early 21st century, taking in views of emerald hedgerows and purple trees. And it all suddenly made sense.

Initial deal expected to be signed on Friday but questions remain over strait of Hormuz, Lebanon conflict and Iran’s nuclear program

• Peace deal between US and Iran announced, with strait of Hormuz expected to reopen

• Explainer: what do we know about the US-Iran peace deal?

The agreement between the United ⁠States and Iran should allow for the “immediate reopening” ⁠of the ⁠Strait ​of Hormuz, EU Commission President Ursula von ⁠der Leyen said on Monday.

“The priority now is ⁠its swift and full implementation ​by all parties,” ‌von der ‌Leyen said about the ‌announced deal.

Prime minister announces ban, saying social media is making children unhappy and unsafe

• Social media to be banned in UK for under-16s, Starmer announces

• UK parents: how do you feel about the under-16s social media ban?

Starmer acknowledges some teenagers will get round these restrictons. But that does not make the rules pointless, he says.

Will it mean that no child ever looks at social media again? No.

But look, this might shock you, but it doesn’t shock parents of teenagers; they get around other laws too.

Some technology companies want us to think that social media is unchangeable, part of an almost natural order.

But we have to resist that kind of learned helplessness. We have agency, we can change it, and we will.

Judges overturn decision of high court that government proscription of group under Terrorism Act was wrong

The home secretary’s decision to ban Palestine Action was lawful, the court of appeal has ruled.

A five-strong panel, including the two most senior judges in England and Wales, overturned February’s decision of the high court that the proscription of the direct action group, the first to be banned under the Terrorism Act, was wrong.

Ukraine’s president dismisses Moscow’s claim that it did not target Kyiv’s Pechersk Lavra monastery, ahead of meeting of G7 leaders in France

• Kyiv monastery set on fire in night of Russian attacks across Ukraine

• Macron frames Évian G7 agenda in hope Trump will stay for whole summit

Meanwhile, Unesco has formally condemned the Russian strikes on Ukraine that hit the Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra, “one of Ukraine’s most significant spiritual and cultural landmarks.”

In a statement, the body said:

“The strike reportedly caused significant damage to the exterior and interior of the Dormition Cathedral. Adjacent historic structures, including elements of the Lavra’s fortification complex and Ivan Kushnik Tower, were also reportedly impacted.

Unesco condemns attacks against cultural property, educational institutions, students, education personnel and media professionals protected under international law. Damage to such institutions deprives communities of access to culture, education, and shared spaces that are essential for recovery and social cohesion.

Former Ofcom chair says he welcomed arrival of rightwing news channel five years ago in name of ‘plurality’

Critics of GB News are part of a “liberal, Islington consensus” bent on limiting freedom of expression, Michael Grade, the recently departed chair of Britain’s media watchdog, has said.

The Conservative peer, whose time at Ofcom has been criticised over the handling of the rightwing news channel, said he welcomed the arrival of the broadcaster five years ago in the name of “plurality”.

Marius Borg Høiby found guilty of ⁠two ​counts of rape, one count of domestic violence and other ⁠crimes

Marius Borg Høiby, the son of Norway’s crown princess, has been sentenced to four years in prison after being found guilty of several offences including two counts of rape.

The verdict was handed down by the Oslo district court on Monday morning, nearly three months after Høiby’s closely watched six-week trial.

In a career spanning five decades, journalist was best known for ITV current affairs programme The Cook Report

The investigative journalist Roger Cook, best known for the current affairs programme The Cook Report, has died aged 83, his family has said.

Cook was born in New Zealand and grew up in Australia where he began his broadcasting career before moving to the UK in 1968. His distinctive style of investigative journalism, based on confronting and exposing criminals and conmen, began in the form of the BBC Radio 4 show Checkpoint, which he created in the 1970s.

President’s UFC fights held on the White House lawn overshadowed by chants about former first lady

• Sign up for the Breaking News US email

Donald Trump has announced plans to hold a rally in Washington on 4 July as America celebrates its 250th anniversary, saying the event will include a speech, performances, flyovers and fireworks.

“On July 4th, at The Lincoln Memorial and Washington Monument, in beautiful and safe Washington D.C., we are going to host the most spectacular TRUMP RALLY of them all, a ’TRIBUTE TO AMERICA.’ Starting at 7 P.M. EST, this HUGE Celebration will honor our Country’s People, Spirit, Strength, Resolve, and Triumphs,” Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform.

• ⚽️ Iran’s Taremi says tension ‘undermines joy’

• ⚽️ Player guide | Bracketology | Wallchart | Mail Martin
  

Sometimes a team needs a player to have some standout performances to jump start a tournament and Jordan Henderson believes that player for England will be Jude Bellingham. Henderson said:

I’m sure he will have a big impact for us in this tournament. I can remember five years ago I gave him his first cap, it was away at Middlesbrough. How much he’s grown, as a player and as a person since then, is incredible really. I had a good idea when I first saw him playing and training, and the way he was.

I think everybody forgets how young he is. We do rondos and it’s the youngest in, and there’s people that I think should be going in before him, but he’s always one of the first in the middle to go in. It just reminds us how young he is. I honestly couldn’t speak highly enough of him.

The Standard of Living by James Graham traces economist’s influence on British politics and culture

After exploring the rise of Rupert Murdoch and the emergence of Gareth Southgate’s England team, James Graham has turned his attention to one of the most important political figures of the 20th century: John Maynard Keynes.

His new play, The Standard of Living, directed by Nicholas Hytner and opening at the Haymarket in September, focuses on Keynes’s life from 1917 until his death in 1946 – a period in which he became the founding father of macroeconomics and reshaped government thinking on finance and the role of the arts.

Self-deprecating jokes and mental health advocacy have gone viral, and his political commentary is proving popular

It’s been quite the journey for Hunter Biden. In the space of a few weeks, the former first son has gone from a man seen as a political liability to an unlikely galvanizing force within the Democratic party, through his emergence on social media as a mental health advocate, razzer of Republicans, and working-class whisperer.

In the process Biden has switched from the GOP’s bete noire to, actually, someone that a fair number of Republican voters seem to like.

Amid fears the wreck will be more accessible to explorers – and new species – as the climate warms, conservationists want to create the region’s first underwater protected area

The harsh temperatures, treacherous currents and shifting pack ice of the Antarctic’s Weddell Sea, which crushed and sank his ship, Endurance, in 1915, led Ernest Shackleton to describe it as the “worst portion of the worst sea in the world”.

For more than a century, the inhospitable conditions, which present a challenge even for modern icebreaker ships, helped to protect the lost wreck, which was discovered in 2022, its structure still largely intact.

With an adaptation of Night and Day hitting cinemas, the pioneering author’s work continues to inspire audiences

She’s long been admired by students of English literature, but 85 years after her death, Virginia Woolf has broken out of the seminar room to become an unexpected cultural phenomenon.

The author of Mrs Dalloway and To the Lighthouse, whose innovative prose helped redefine the modern novel, is finding a new audience through a string of high-profile adaptations.

I had just lost my brother when Joey arrived – also struggling and in need of TLC. Caring for him gave me a routine, and taught me that life is worth the fight

As a farmer’s daughter my life has been full of animals. Joey arrived soon after my brother’s sudden death when I was just 18. We were all reeling with grief. Then this tiny twin calf arrived, born to one of my brother’s favourite cows. His twin died almost immediately, but I rebelled against the pragmatic advice of the farm manager to let this one slip away too.

I hand-milked his mother and fed him myself, and took him home to my little cottage where I could watch him whenever I wasn’t at work on the farm, learning the trade. He took up residence there alongside my lurcher puppy, Gail, who accepted him without fuss. It was an unlikely trio – a grieving girl, a dog and a calf – finding our way through the fog of loss together.

Bart and co’s latest video game venture involved the show’s writers, animators and voice talent – plus a showdown between the two infamous tycoons. ‘It’s a true little Simpsons episode,’ say creators

Every generation gets its own Simpsons game. Them’s the rule-diddly-ules. For some, it was the arcade cabinets that swallowed pocket money throughout the 1990s. For others, it was The Simpsons: Cartoon Studio. For millennials like myself, it was The Simpsons: Hit & Run. Joe Zanetti, vice-president of operations at Monopoly Go! developer Scopely, traces his Simpsons gaming nostalgia back to Konami’s 1991 brawler, The Simpsons Arcade Game. “That’s the one that made such an impression on me,” he says.

It certainly did, because Springfield has just crash-landed in Monopoly Go! itself through a collaboration involving Simpsons writers, animators and voice talent alongside a new animated short starring Dan Castellaneta, Nancy Cartwright, Harry Shearer and Will Ferrell. While most licensed TV games have faded into obscurity, The Simpsons keeps finding new digital lives.

In a stark contrast to previous tournaments, and Baden-Baden in 2006 in particular, the players’ partners are set to keep a low profile while some may not travel at all

The BBC is not the only World Cup institution to have stayed at home.

As England make final preparations for their opening game of the tournament against Croatia on Wednesday, only around half of Thomas Tuchel’s squad can look forward to being reunited with their families in Dallas, with many having opted to skip the group stage.

• VAR official Shaun Evans made ‘OK’ sign with right hand

• Resembles white power symbol used in far-right circles

Fifa’s discrimination monitor at the World Cup called for a video assistant referee (VAR) to be removed for appearing to make a hand gesture resembling a white supremacist sign.

When the official broadcast of Germany’s opening game against Curaçao on Sunday cut pre-game to show the team of VAR officials, Shaun Evans from Australia made an “OK” symbol with his right hand in front of his right leg. Though the game was played in Houston, VAR officials work in Dallas at the World Cup broadcast centre. In 2019, the gesture – with thumb and forefinger touched in a circle and other fingers outstretched – was designated a hate symbol by the New York-based Anti-Defamation League.

Gareth Southgate was looking to the future when he dropped midfielder but, as Jude Bellingham says, the veteran’s influence is indispensable

The cat is well truly out of the bag. Nobody expected the conversation to be quite so revealing when Jude Bellingham and Morgan Rogers sat on the Lions’ Den sofa last week. Content controlled by the Football Association was an unlikely place for Bellingham to drop a few truth bombs, but the England midfielder was not minded to hold back when it was time to discuss his experience at Euro 2024.

“It didn’t feel like there was any kind of hierarchy,” the 22-year-old said. “I think at the Euros we got some things a little bit wrong off the pitch. I don’t feel like the group connected as well as it could have – for a number of reasons.”

Ståle Solbakken’s fast, flexible side are far from the no-frills unit that last made the World Cup but new challenges await

If Norway’s highly fancied generation need a warning from history they need only look back 32 years and study the lessons from another searing, suspenseful American summer. They had raced through qualifying at England’s expense to reach their first World Cup since 1938; their top players were starting to make it in the Premier League and through the euphoria shone a confidence that a place in the knockout stage, at least, was there to be seized.

“When we got there we didn’t manage to even get close to the quality of play we had produced in qualification,” remembers Lars Bohinen, one of the silkier elements in a side that, under Egil Olsen, became renowned for an uncompromising and no-frills approach. “That’s the biggest disappointment when I talk now to my old teammates. We never got near to performing at the level we needed.”

• Tournament open to all Fifa members, including Russia

• Infantino wants to use football to promote peace

Fifa wants to schedule a symbolic match between Israel and Palestine as the opening game of a new under-15s tournament in the United States in September.

Although not an official Under-15 World Cup, the competition will be open to all 211 Fifa members, including Russia, who remain banned at senior level.

Max Rushden is joined by Barry Glendenning, Alex Abnos and Ben Fisher as the Netherlands and Japan play out a cracker in Dallas, while Germany put seven past Curaçao

The European Commission has unveiled its plans for digital sovereignty. Its proposals betray a disappointing lack of vision

Beti Hohler is a Slovenian national who lives in the Netherlands. Like tens of millions of other Europeans, she uses Apple’s app store and has an Amazon account. When she travels for work or leisure, she may want to book a place on Airbnb or Booking, using a credit card issued by Visa or Mastercard, perhaps through PayPal.

But when the Trump administration sanctioned her last year for her work as a judge at the international criminal court (ICC), her ability to use any of these services vanished overnight. Her credit cards, her accounts with US companies – all gone. The sanctions against Hohler and some of her colleagues mean they live in “constant uncertainty”, she said.

Max von Thun is the director of Open Markets Institute Europe, an anti-monopoly thinktank

The sordid UFC event represents his own efforts to symbolically fuse the federal government with his person, to insist that he is America and is the state

Hitler dreamed of a 1,000-year Reich; Putin is said to have baroque dreams of territorial conquest meant to restore a dubiously historical empire he calls “Greater Russia”. Sure, there are people around Donald Trump who imagine using his rise to power to establish some sort of grand, civilizational project: there are the white nationalists who dream of a country purged of those they deem racially impure; there are the Christian nationalists who imagine a future theocracy in which women wear long braids and skirts, and don’t vote; there are the techno-reactionaries who imagine a future of interplanetary colonies, techno-assisted eugenics, and polygamous harems.

But Trump himself is conspicuously small in his dreams: his are comparatively little ambitions, not extending far beyond the reach of his ego and his senses.

Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist

If Democrats won’t ensure accountability, Americans should look to the example of Argentina’s escraches

Recently Greg Bovino, infamous former Border Patrol commander, served as a star attraction at a “remigration summit” in Portugal; there he took selfies with Austrian activist Martin Sellner, one of Europe’s most notorious rightwing extremists, and told him: “We’ve never talked before – face to face, that is – until yesterday, and we were on the same sheet of music almost immediately.”

Meanwhile, Tina Peters, the disgraced former elections clerk whose sentence was commuted by Colorado governor Jared Polis, pontificates on Steve Bannon’s show about how Democrats will cheat in the midterms. It is rare that those out of government service show contrition, but it is also rare that they immediately monetize past cruelty and present-day conspiracy theories. Presumably it is only a matter of time before the men who killed Renee Good and Alex Pretti get to cash in with podcasts for Maga world.

Jan-Werner Müller is a Guardian US columnist and a professor of politics at Princeton University

Parents are being encouraged to give kids their own ‘self-invested personal pension’. But where’s the money coming from? Fifteen million of us aren’t saving enough for our own retirement

Parents are rarely short of sources of crushing guilt and night-time waking, but here’s an unlikely new reason to feel you’ve let your offspring down. Have you got your kid a pension? If not, why not, you feckless loser? Rather than screen-free childhoods, Stem camp subscriptions or gourmet bento lunchboxes, the latest middle-class must-have, according to the Times, is a Junior Sipp, or “self-invested personal pension”. Get started early, and the voodoo of compound interest over time could mean you’re well on the way to making the apple of your eye an “alpha pension millionaire”.

Even more inherited wealth disparity – exactly what this country needs! People wondering whether their own pension (if they have one) will be enough for a thimbleful of gruel 30 years from now may find this suggestion somewhat fanciful; last month the Pensions Commission warned that at least 15 million of us aren’t saving enough for our own retirement, let alone anyone else’s. Plus kids already cost an arm, a leg and a kidney. In 2024, the Child Poverty Action Group calculated raising a child in the UK to 18 cost £260,000 (£290,000 for lone parents); it’s probably even more now. Are parents really doing this? It seems like a big and unwarranted vote of confidence in the global economy and geopolitics, given the dire state of both.

Make UK and TUC are right – ministers need a proper strategy to cut energy costs before there are more closures

• Britain ‘faces deindustrialisation’ without relief from high energy prices

The manufacturing lobby group Make UK and the Trades Union Congress have picked a bad moment to plead for urgent relief for the nation’s industrial companies from sky-high electricity prices. The cabinet is tearing itself apart over defence spending, so even a “one minute to midnight” call for an extra £3bn for manufacturers is likely to be shunted into the long grass until after the likely Labour leadership contest.

But the two bodies are correct on their main points. The cost of energy in the UK is a heavy drag on business competitiveness. Ministers’ talk about serious industrial revival is wishful thinking while UK companies are paying the highest electricity prices in the G7, including four times as much as US counterparts. High prices also cut across most of the big items on the government’s to-do list – everything from energy transition itself to, indeed, increasing domestic defence production.

Touring this bitterly divided constituency, what strikes you most is people want something better. But what exactly?

Keir Starmer teeters. The defence secretary exits, and thereby seems to confirm the prime minister’s demise. Andy Burnham scents a final, belated breakthrough, while most of the national talk is of violence, a country in crisis and malaise. And in Platt Bridge, a neighbourhood at the heart of the constituency where the fates of the Labour party, the current government and the country are all about to be decided, life still seems to be locked into an endlessly familiar pattern.

Amid all the redbrick terrace houses, too many shops are shuttered and empty. The latest casualty was a proudly independent baker who had traded for 40 years, apparently to be replaced by another tanning lounge. The main roads are clogged with traffic, while other streets tend to be eerily quiet. People speak of closed-down pubs, impossible private rents, and that ubiquitous British complaint: “There’s nothing for the kids to do.”

Charities are right to be concerned about the supreme court’s decision to lessen oversight of care settings

The UK supreme court has ended a system of safeguards around the human rights of disabled people that has been in place for over a decade, in its recent ruling on a legal question brought to it by the attorney general of Northern Ireland. In doing so, the judges have alarmed charities and disability advocates and pushed a little-discussed aspect of social care regulation into the spotlight.

Any person “under continuous supervision and control” and “not free to leave” the place where they live has until now been entitled to protections known as deprivation of liberty safeguards (Dols). These are part of the Mental Capacity Act, and include annual assessments. While the safeguards mostly apply to older people with dementia, children and younger adults with autism, learning disabilities and brain injuries are also covered.

The 70-year-old has been prosecuted for his artworks under a law that did not exist when they were created. He should be freed

Sixty years ago, Mao Zedong launched the Cultural Revolution – a decade of fanaticism that consumed China. Perhaps 2 million people, from top leaders to impoverished farmers, were killed or driven to suicide for political “crimes” or their family background. Tens of millions more, including the father of China’s leader, Xi Jinping, were hounded.

The party, and most of those who lived through the movement, prefer to forget it. But the years of chaos, violence, zealotry and stagnation, which ended only with Mao’s death, have left deep scars. Among the many victims was a factory worker whose young sons grew up to become celebrated artists. Their work addressed the devastation wrought by the era, including through satirical images of Mao.

Readers respond to an article about how people living with the condition are fighting against damaging stereotypes

Anne Karpf’s article is a powerful and timely reminder that people living with dementia are too often overlooked and underestimated (‘You’re treated like this is the end’: Meet the dementia rebels – diagnosed and determined to change people’s minds, 9 June). I particularly welcomed its emphasis on continued engagement through new experiences, learning, volunteering and social connection. Too often, a diagnosis leads others to focus solely on decline rather than on the person’s remaining abilities, interests and capacity for enjoyment.

My wife was diagnosed with dementia in her 50s. While she was able, she greatly enjoyed volunteering, embroidery, singing, eating out, social events and participating in a walking group. These activities brought purpose, enjoyment, and a sense of belonging. They also demonstrated that a diagnosis of dementia does not mean the end of a meaningful and fulfilling life.

Without investment in more radiographers, NHS waiting lists will continue to rise inexorably, says CEO of the Society and College of Radiographers, Richard Evans

In your article (Record number of people waiting for NHS diagnostic tests in England, 7 June), you quote Marlen Suller of Magentus saying that the solution to ever-increasing diagnostic waiting lists is for the NHS to “make better use of existing capacity, test patients faster, give them clearer information and use financial incentives to drive improvement”.

This implies that diagnostic radiographers – the NHS professionals who carry out diagnostic imaging tests – are simply not working hard enough, or that they would work longer hours if they were offered financial incentive to do so.

Rosie Wolfenden says that under the current tax system, and with rising costs, traditional business models are no longer viable

Thank you, Anita Chaudhuri, for writing about a crisis that is unfolding before our eyes and urgently needs the government’s attention (The British food scene was booming. Why has it suddenly gone bust?, 9 June).

Your article about restaurants struggling to stay afloat resonated deeply with me because it mirrors what is happening in the independent retail sector, alongside the pressures facing food and hospitality businesses. I have run Tatty Devine for 27 years and like to think of us as the Michelin-star equivalent of retail: specialists in our field, delivering quality, creativity and consistency in design. Yet we too have hit a wall.

Dr Tim Causer invites readers to help complete a transcription project and to explore the writings and correspondence of the philosopher and reformer Jeremy Bentham

Your article on the digitisation and transcription of German love letters is a wonderful reminder of both the goodwill of the crowd and the pleasures of archival research (Sixty thousand love letters and counting: volunteers help sift through vast German trove of devotion, 3 June).

We at the Bentham Project, based in the Faculty of Laws at University College London, have also benefited from such generosity through our Transcribe Bentham crowdsourcing initiative, which has made available online the vast manuscript archive of the philosopher and reformer Jeremy Bentham.

• Stokes and Atkinson absent following nightclub furore

• Ollie Robinson misses Oval Test due to soreness in knee

Seamer Ollie Robinson, whose performance guided England to victory in the first test against New ⁠Zealand, will ⁠miss ​the second match due to a sore right knee, the England and Wales Cricket Board, confirmed on Monday.

Playing his first test in more than two years, Robinson ⁠took seven wickets including five in the ​first innings to be named player of the match as ‌England won ‌by 115 runs on a difficult wicket at ‌Lord’s.

• Spain left-back completes move on six-year contract

• Cucurella had spoken out against Chelsea hierarchy

Real Madrid have announced the signing of Marc Cucurella from Chelsea in a package worth up to €60m (£52m).

News of the deal emerged on Sunday, with this Spanish club now revealing a six-year deal has been negotiated. “Real Madrid CF and Chelsea FC have reached an agreement for the transfer of the player Marc Cucurella, who will be linked to our club for the next six seasons, until June 30, 2032,” a club statement released on Monday morning read.

• 41-year-old claims his 106th grand prix victory

• ‘I’ve rebuilt my mind to get back to where I was’

Lewis Hamilton said he feared he had lost the ability to win in Formula One after ending a long wait for success with Ferrari in Spain on Sunday.

The 41-year-old Briton, a seven-time world champion, charged to his 106th grand prix victory at the ­Circuit de Catalunya in Barcelona with a flawless drive that capitalised on Ferrari’s pivotal three pit-stop strategy.

• Trump brings UFC to White House for 80th birthday

• Gaethje stuns unbeaten Topuria for lightweight title

• Josh Hokit targets former First Lady after TKO win

For most of its 250-year history, the White House South Lawn has been reserved for state dinners, diplomatic ceremonies, Easter egg rolls, turkey pardons and carefully choreographed displays of presidential power.

On Sunday night it hosted cage fights.

I became a fan of this team to connect with my father. Their NBA championship does not erase the heartbreaks and hurt of the past – it completes the journey

Do you know what you want your last thought to be? I have waited my whole life for mine.

Most people, I imagine, don’t choose theirs. They arrive at the end and find loved ones’ faces gathered around their bed. Their subconscious gifts them the sound of their child’s laugh, or the memory of their wedding day rises from the dark like a lantern, unbidden. The mind, in its final kindness, selects for them. But I decided long ago that I would not leave that to chance. I decided, the way you decide anything important, deliberately and a little defiantly, the way I have decided most things in my life.

Updates from around the grounds
Kent’s revival continues | Mail Tanya or comment BTL

Mostly positive, with sunny spells, though there are some showers moving north and east. At Wantage Road, they’re starting to mop up.

A huge wicket! Joe Clarke is bowled by Jake Ball, who was substituted in half way through the game because of Gregory’s hamstring. Delight for Somerset, despair for Clarke who was done for pace. Notts 51-4,

Conway, Kobayashi and De Vries added to team’s success, in front of more than 350,000 fans, to go alongside five victories between 2018 and 2022

As the fans walked away understandably a little wearily from the 94th edition of the Le Mans 24 Hours, they had surely earned a sit down in a shady spot and a cold drink or two. Tired but happy, then, after a vingt-quatre that demonstrated the event and the series of which it is part are in rude health.

After the twice-round-the-clock challenge in baking sunshine and through the night with nary a spot of rain, it was the No 7 Toyota TR010 of Britain’s Mike Conway, Japan’s Kamui Kobayashi and the Dutch driver Nyck de Vries who took the flag after 381 laps, just 11 seconds up the road from the chasing BMW. It was a first victory for De Vries and a second for Conway and Kobayashi. There were tears from the Japanese driver in the cockpit as he brought the Toyota home. “I need a beer,” he told the team. He had earned it.

• Trailfinders shock defending champions 29-26

• Saracens beat Exeter 40-38 to spark title hopes

Saracens will avoid their bogey team, Gloucester-Hartpury, in the Premiership Women’s Rugby final after Ealing Trailfinders sensationally knocked out the three-time defending champions. The 29-26 result is one of the biggest upsets in PWR history as Gloucester have won the last three titles but an injury-hit squad and a recent run of disappointing performances sealed the end of their dominance in the top flight and gave Saracens their ideal outcome.

Sarries, who defeated Exeter 40-38 in their semi-final, are within one game of a fourth PWR title but they had a far from convincing win at home with Exeter giving them a scare as the visitors were leading until the 75th minute. Saracens will play Trailfinders in the final on 28 June, a side they have never lost to, unlike their recent poor record against Gloucester. The West Country side inflicted Saracens’ only two losses in the league this season and they also defeated them in last year’s final at the Stone X Stadium.

• Group 1: India, 170-6, beat Pakistan, 106, by 64 runs

• Deepti Sharma takes 5-10 after Mandhana half-century

This was a familiar World Cup story: India met Pakistan and for all the talk of history, handshakes and millions of eyeballs, the contest was settled with little drama by the team in blue. Smriti Mandhana started with 68 off 44 balls before Deepti Sharma cleaned up in the second half, taking five for 10 as Harmanpreet Kaur’s side began their tournament with a 64-run victory in Birmingham.

Pakistan began well with both bat and ball; chasing 171, they ended the powerplay on 52 for one, Muneeba Ali finding some flow. But Deepti, player of the tournament at last year’s ODI World Cup, built up the dots with her off-breaks and the danger of an upset quickly subsided. Pakistan struggled to launch spin, routinely finding fielders in the covers as they fell to 79 for six inside 13 overs. Deepti delivered away from the crease, too, running out Muneeba with a direct hit for 41 as Pakistan fell to their fourth consecutive Twenty20 defeat by India.

Party grandee was MP for Birmingham Sparkbrook from 1964 until his retirement from the Commons in 1997

Roy Hattersley, the former Labour deputy leader and author, has died at the age of 93.

Keir Starmer described Hattersley as a “giant of the Labour movement”.

Men and Boys group of MPs addresses ‘crisis of masculinity’ and joins campaign for longer paternity leave

Government ministers have been urged to set targets to boost the number of male teachers in England, as backbench MPs seek to capitalise on turbulence in the Labour party to influence government policy.

With the government in disarray after the shock resignation of the defence secretary this week, MPs are seizing the moment to embark on a battle of ideas, including tackling toxic masculinity, which they argue has played a role in violent anti-immigrant disturbances.

Exclusive: The recent auction of the star’s belongings included designer outfits and her iconic bowler hats, but a box of assorted pins proved more tempting for one collector

Gustavo Egusquiza knew as soon as he opened the auction catalogue. “I saw them, and I knew I wanted them,” he says of Diane Keaton’s nail clippers. “It was something that she would have used every day, so it was a tiny piece of Diane’s life. It is objects like this that reveal the intimate parts of a person’s real life.”

Egusquiza, a travel journalist and consultant from Bilbao, Spain, admits to being a little celebrity obsessed and is building up a collection of memorabilia that includes Whoopi Goldberg’s teapot and statuette from Larry King’s office.

End of discussions on takeover estimated at $10bn extends uncertainty for 177-year-old British chain

• Business live – latest updates

The Australian pharmaceutical group Sigma Healthcare has dropped its pursuit of the UK retail chain Boots, abandoning a takeover estimated to be worth $10bn (£7bn).

Sigma, a wholesaler and retailer, said on Monday that a deal ​to buy the high street pharmacy business – which has 1,800 UK stores – would not meet its strategic ‌and capital investment objectives.

RuPaul’s Drag Race winner Danny Beard to step into Lily Savage’s heels in Jonathan Harvey’s play

Few showbusiness careers begin in a towering blond beehive in the gay pubs of Vauxhall and end with MPs pausing prime minister’s questions to pay tribute.

But a new play inspired by the life of Paul O’Grady will chart the beginning of that unlikely journey from care worker to Lily Savage, with her dextrous use of expletives, to national treasure presenting heartwarming teatime TV shows about rescue dogs with Queen Camilla.

Heatwave conditions build over much of continent, while mild start to winter continues in parts of Australia

Hot weather is expected across Europe this week as heatwave conditions build over large swathes of the continent.

A mass of hot air from the Sahara has settled over the Iberian peninsula and spread into southern and western France, pushing temperatures widely into the low- and mid-30s celsius.

Geochronologists say Antrim coastline’s basalt columns developed over 5.5m years – 8m less than thought

For centuries, the tale has been passed from generation to generation: how the Irish giant Finn McCool built the Giant’s Causeway in Northern Ireland to fight Benandonner, his Scottish rival, by hurling chunks of the Antrim coastline into the sea.

Now, scientists have revealed it was intense volcanic activity during a “major globally impacting volcanic event” – and not a legendary battle between two destructive giants – that led to the formation of the coastline’s 40,000 distinctive interlocking basalt columns about 60m years ago.

Rebalance Earth is investing in Broughton Sanctuary to generate financial, environmental and social returns

From a high point on the hill, the North Yorkshire landscape unrolls below. The moorland above gives way to grassland, trees and then pasture, divided by the region’s traditional dry stone walls.

The view may be idyllic, but it belies the condition of parts of this land, belonging to the sprawling 1,100 hectare (2,500-acre) Broughton Sanctuary estate, near Skipton.

Researchers also discover that the ancient vines of Chianti, famed for its red wines, produced white fruit

DNA extracted from 2,000-year-old grape seeds found in ancient wells in Tuscany has enabled scientists to map the most extensive genetic history of grapevines recovered from a single site.

The findings revealed that vineyards of the Roman era formed part of the empire’s sophisticated agricultural network that might have influenced the development of modern winemaking.

Former immigration minister criticised by inquiry chair for failing to give statement about ‘wretched’ Manston site

The former Conservative immigration minister Robert Jenrick has been rebuked by the chair of an inquiry for failing to provide vital evidence about conditions for small boat arrivals at a controversial processing centre.

The independent Manston inquiry was set up to examine the events surrounding the detention of thousands of people who arrived by small boat between 1 June 2022 and 22 November 2022 and were held at a former military base in Manston, Kent.

‘Pointless’ reviews are wasting public money and ‘significantly harming’ the mental health of claimants, charity says

Disabled people with lifelong conditions are repeatedly being put through “pointless” benefit reassessments, contrary to official guidance, new analysis suggests.

A study by the anti-poverty charity Z2K has found that hundreds of thousands of disabled people are going through “unnecessary” personal independence payment (Pip) reviews, “wasting” public money and “significantly harming” the mental and physical health of claimants.

MP for Rochester and Strood to use private member’s bill to put issue before MPs again after it was blocked by the Lords

The assisted dying bill is set to return to the Commons after the Labour MP Lauren Edwards agreed to use her private member’s bill to put the issue before MPs again.

Edwards said she wanted to give the legislation another chance because it had been blocked by the House of Lords after being passed by MPs. The return of the bill would give supporters a chance to use the Parliament Acts to potentially bypass the Lords if it was blocked for a second time.

Exclusive: The work will feature some of the photographer’s most powerful images from his 70-year career

After more than seven decades of covering conflicts around the world, Don McCullin will return to Vietnam and his best-known images for his final book.

The photographer, who got his start aged 23 when his image of a gang in Finsbury Park was published in the Observer, has decided to revisit the war and his 12-day stint with US marines during the battle of Hue in 1968.

Alternative singer and internet personality among six who died when two helicopters collided over Rio de Janeiro

The American musician Oliver Tree has died in a helicopter crash in Brazil at the age of 32, according to reports.

Two helicopters collided over Rio de Janeiro on Sunday morning and crashed in the city’s western zone, killing all six people onboard, including Tree, several Brazilian media outlets reported.

The process to renew Daca immigration status used to take a few weeks – now it drags on for months

It’s been six months since Claudia first applied to renew her US immigration status – a process that, for the last 14 years, would only take a few weeks.

But now, the prolonged delay has put her life on hold. Claudia, who moved to the US when she was four, has maintained legal status as a “Dreamer” with the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (Daca) program, which was created in 2012 to protect undocumented immigrants who came to the US as children from deportation.

Cases reported in 83 countries, with at least 10,600 students and staff killed, injured, abducted or arrested, GCPEA says

Attacks on education globally have surged by 40% with more than 8,556 recorded incidents and 10,600 students and staff killed, injured, abducted, arrested or otherwise harmed in 2024 and 2025, according to new research.

Attacks were reported in 83 countries, with the highest incidences recorded in Colombia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia, Haiti, Palestine and Ukraine.

Far-right plan would have obliged the Swiss government to limit the population, currently 9.1 million, to 10 million by 2050

Voters in Switzerland have rejected an unprecedented far-right proposal to cap the country’s population at 10 million in a divisive referendum dubbed “the Swiss Brexit”.

Some 54.79% of voters were against the proposal by the Swiss People’s party (SVP) and 45.21% were in favour. Turnout was 58.86%.

Scams involving gold, cryptocurrencies and wine rise as criminals use AI to increasingly carry out larger-scale fraud

Increasingly elaborate investment scams involving gold, cryptocurrencies and wine have soared in the past year with more than £220m lost to the fraud, according to a report.

UK banks reported almost 15,000 investment scams in 2025 as criminals use artificial intelligence to dupe people out of their money.

Donald Trump posts ‘Let the oil flow’ as US-Iran peace deal sparks immediate drop for Brent crude

• Middle East crisis: live updates

• Peace deal between US and Iran announced, with strait of Hormuz expected to reopen

• What do we know about the US-Iran peace deal – and what questions remain?

Global oil prices have tumbled and stock markets rallied amid fresh hopes that a US-Iran peace deal may end the greatest energy supply crisis in the history of the market.

The price of Brent crude dropped 4% to below $84 (£62) a barrel as the new trading week began in financial centres across Asia-Pacific, amid optimism that the strait of Hormuz could reopen shortly and bring a return of Gulf oil exports to the market.

Make UK says manufacturers’ feedback shows sector at risk of collapse as it calls on Treasury to take action

• Nils Pratley: High electricity prices are killing industry

Britain’s industrial sector is at risk of collapse as thousands of companies warn that they could face bankruptcy within the next year because of high energy prices, according to an industry survey.

The manufacturers’ body Make UK said the latest feedback from its members found that many would not be able to cope for much longer with energy costs that were twice the average in continental Europe and four times higher than in the US.

UK billionaire’s fashion group offers £166m for takeover of 77.1% of shares in shoe firm it does not already own

• Business live – latest updates

The retail billionaire Mike Ashley has launched his second takeover bid in a week, attempting to snap up the Australian footwear business Accent Group days after announcing a tilt at Hugo Boss.

Ashley’s Frasers Group, which already owns the biggest single stake in Accent at 22.9%, said it would offer 65 Australian cents (34p) a share for the remainder of the business, at the same level as its closing price on Friday.

From a Noh Othello that puts Desdemona centre stage to a requiem for a family killed in the Rwandan genocide, the theatre at this year’s festival gives voice to the marginalised

When Willem Dafoe took over at the creative helm of the Venice theatre biennale last year, he shaped the programme around his own passions. Dafoe selected experimental theatre companies that had influenced him as a young actor and took to the stage for an arcane and rather mannered two-hander by Richard Foreman which involved the declaiming of non-sequitur notes from a series of index cards. It all seemed less avant garde, more nostalgic.

This year, the 54th edition, is thankfully very different. Dafoe’s programme is broad and outward looking, with genuine cultural range and an interesting fusion of theatrical traditions. The lineup stretches from Europe to Indonesia (Yusril Katil’s Under the Volcano, among other productions) and India (Sharmila Biswas’s Mischief Dance). There is a flamboyant hybridity to shows such as Satoshi Miyagi’s Mugen Noh Othello, which melds Noh with Shakespeare, and Christos Stergioglou and Alex Drakos Ktistakis’ Cries, which combines physical theatre with musical storytelling, and contemporary themes with ancient Greek drama.

Director Sarah Friedland brings impressive attention to detail to an audacious debut feature about a woman moved into a retirement community

Profoundly tender and yet untainted by the slightest trace of sentiment, this intimate and frankly sensual drama follows elderly Ruth (American stage icon Kathleen Chalfant) as she adjusts to a major change in circumstances. Told with an audacious economy that unveils key details only when absolutely necessary, the film hints at what’s going on when Ruth treats the washing up rack like a toast caddy.

Minutes later, a middle-aged man named Steve (H Jon Benjamin), with whom Ruth slyly flirts at first until he reveals he’s already married, arrives at her home to take her to her new home in a retirement community. When the staff there refer to Steve as Ruth’s son, the reveal is as shocking to her as it is to us.

The latest in our series of writers calling attention to their go-to mood-lifting films is a celebration of Cameron Crowe’s unconventional romantic comedy

The first time I encountered Cameron Crowe’s Jerry Maguire, I was home from film school for the summer, trying to refine my taste and figure out what I was “into”. One afternoon, I pressed play on Jerry Maguire, thinking I’d while away some lazy hours with a silly Hollywood picture. But the movie was a jolt to my numbed senses. It was obvious: Jerry Maguire was what I was into. It was a thrilling epiphany, if also a little disappointing. I wanted to be sophisticated, and yet the truth was that I liked … schmaltzy romcoms.

Even as my taste matured and expanded, I kept returning to Jerry Maguire. Its feelgood nature is baked into the premise: Jerry (an electrifying Tom Cruise) is an indefatigable sports agent who overcomes both personal and professional challenges in the path to fulfillment. But the real reason why it makes you feel good is that Jerry’s arduous path transforms him. He doesn’t fall in love with Renee Zellweger’s Dorothy Boyd until they’ve already married and separated; there is no honeymoon-phase montage. The film’s romcom reputation can probably be attributed to its emotional climax: Jerry’s tear-jerking, glorious win-her-back speech, which introduced the phrases “you complete me” and “you had me at hello” to the cultural lexicon. In a traditional romcom, in which marriage is often the coveted conclusion, this moment would precede the wedding.

Christian theology becomes an unsettling and visually ravishing mystery in early film from the Ghost in the Shell director

This 1985 anime is a true curio: a furtive, portentous odyssey into a hollowed-out landscape told largely in symbolist images. A million miles away from director Mamoru Oshii’s often-logorrheic films (such as his best-known work, Ghost in the Shell from 1995), it still swills around plenty of philosophical concepts linked to his fascination with Christian theology. But like the egg being lugged around by the film’s nameless female protagonist, or the giant fish shadows swimming across the town facades, this is Christian theology as if half-remembered millennia later, or in the aftermath of a bad dream.

The waif (voiced by Mako Hyōdō) carries this ovum under her petticoats, like some pre-pubescent immaculate conception, while scavenging a dark, mittel-European-style city for flasks of water. One day, she’s startled to see a skinny princeling (Jinpachi Nezu) step out from a giant mechanised war machine trundling down the street. She scarpers, but later runs into him and his weird cruciform gun sitting on a set of steps. Showing him the egg, she accepts him, at least temporarily, as a protector in this shadowy burgh, where bands of fishers run after fish silhouettes. But it’s far from clear if he’s benevolent. “If an egg is not cracked open, there is no way of telling what it contains,” he says.

Despite its interesting low-res look, Alexandre Koberidze’s mystifying film is needlessly contrived

Georgian film-maker Alexandre Koberidze appeared to revive the spirit of the French New Wave with his previous film What Do We See When We Look at the Sky? – an unhurried, meandering and garrulous movie with its own cheeky sort of low-tech magic realism as it followed its nose around the city of Kutaisi. His new film is a mystifying three-hour road movie, shot (as was his debut film Let the Summer Never Come Again) on low-res video, like that of an obsolete cameraphone. It is even more challenging and I have to admit it defeated me, despite some intriguing qualities, including a dry touch of comedy.

A middle-aged man called Irakli (David Koberidze) receives a letter addressed to him and his wife, Nino (Irina Chelidze), from their twentysomething photographer daughter Lisa, announcing that she wishes to disappear from their lives. A police officer tells them that Lisa is an adult who can do what she likes. But an oddly emotionless Irakli sets out to track her down anyway, even though another more conventionally plausible movie would have found room for a conversation about the cost of a private detective. Lisa was photographing football fields when she vanished, so Irakli’s plan is just to drive around the country’s football fields, asking people nearby if they’ve seen her. The result is many desultory conversations with people who are apparently nonprofessional actors.

Amber Haque investigates the agencies who manage the careers of adult content creators. Plus: the Dolly the sheep scientists tell their stories. Here’s what to watch this evening

9pm, BBC Three
A beacon of sexual liberation and entrepreneurship or a giant exploitation machine? As more and more money is made through adult content on OnlyFans, agencies that offer to manage creators’ careers have begun to cash in. Some do their jobs and help businesses to expand. But con artists and abusers are also on the loose. Amber Haque investigates a worryingly under-regulated sector. Jack Seale

Unpack the latest viral moments and the week’s celebrity whispers with Clara & Munroe. Plus, the grim story of a man cashing in on the rise in young suicides.

If the first episode is anything to go by, Clara Amfo (let loose from BBC broadcasting) and activist Munroe Bergdorf could well be your fun commute companions. The pair are passionate, incisive and just the right amount of gossipy as they unpack the latest pop culture moments – such as what the loud conversation around Olivia Rodrigo’s baby-doll dress says about women in music. Our one complaint? Half an hour isn’t long enough! Hollie Richardson
Widely available, episodes weekly

(Geffen)
Gossips have rushed to the lyrics for details about her personal life, but the rest of us can just get on with luxuriating in Rodrigo’s funny, Cure-infused craft

With a certain crushing inevitability, the arrival of Olivia Rodrigo’s third album has been accompanied by a lot of frenzied decoding of its lyrics for references to Louis Partridge, the British actor whose relationship with the singer ended late last year. One magazine ran a 1,200 word essay, complete with annotations, panning its songs for nuggets of gossip: the fourth piece they’ve published on the subject in recent months. A British broadsheet plumped for a news story about the fact that Rodrigo had apparently changed the lyrics of a track called Purple, formerly a “very sweet and saccharine” love song, to reflect the end of their relationship. Over in New Delhi, The Hindustan Times was pondering rumours that the couple had actually got back together: “Interest in Partridge has grown after Rodrigo released her new album since fans believe the track Stupid Song has references to the singer’s relationship with him.”

Well, of course it has: for better or for worse, that kind of speculation seems to have become a major part of modern pop, and Oliva Rodrigo in particular has long been a beneficiary of the clickbait publicity it brings. Her breakthrough single Drivers Licence gained traction thanks to the rumour that its lyrics were about her former boyfriend Joshua Bassett’s dalliance with Sabrina Carpenter; Vampire, the lead single from 2023’s Guts invited yet more speculation about whether its subject was another ex or Taylor Swift. Indeed, she actively seems to encourage it: “I never talk about my personal life in interviews or in any public forum, so I guess the music is where people go to deduce things,” she recently told an interviewer, a line that seems to have a distinct hint of “go ahead, fill your boots” about it.

Surreal genius from Harry Hill, trailblazing women and a passionate ode to an incredible New York rapper – these are the best listens from the last six months

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The Ivor Novello-winning musician has written works inspired by his family history. He talks about building music from testimony – and why the Windrush generation deserves new narratives

A briefcase-sized console with a large, sleek keypad, the MPC One drum machine is an eye-catching piece of kit. It can’t be easily overlooked among the various synthesisers, guitars, amps, samplers and vinyl albums in Renell Shaw’s studio in Wood Green, north London. This month, when the 38-year-old musician plays a double-bill show at Kings Place, five miles down the road, the treasured black box will travel with him – and it has special sounds.

“On stage, I’ll have my score and the MPC, with my grandparents’ voices stored in there. They’ll be there with the band in front of me,” says Shaw, artist-in-residence for Kings Place’s Memory Unwrapped season, a series of musical performances that explore nostalgia, transformation and future.

This corrective to our habitual emphasis on competition had me writing ‘wow’ in the margins again and again

When Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species in 1859, the Industrial Revolution and British colonialism were in the ascendant. Charles Dickens had published Hard Times five years earlier; Queen Victoria nominally ruled a fifth of the world’s population. Darwin, writes science writer Rowan Hooper, crafted his evolutionary theory to deliver what he figured his audience wanted to hear: “an account of nature as a competitive struggle”. Natural selection was launched into a world that was “colonial, capitalist, patriarchal and ruled by the upper class” – and Darwin’s central message, crudely paraphrased by the philosopher Herbert Spencer as “survival of the fittest”, chimed with the times.

Hooper adores Darwin – his account of visiting Darwin’s Kent residence Down House radiates reverence (“it’s a pseudo-religious experience”). But he feels that Darwinism and its union with genetics in the so-called “modern synthesis” has placed undue emphasis on competition in the natural world and underplayed the roles of cooperation and collaboration. In redressing that imbalance, Togetherness is not an attempt to make evolution cuddlier and more palatable; rather, it is a corrective deeply informed by what we have learned since Darwin about how nature works. Written with immense charm and passion, and packed with eye-popping facts, it is also a paean to the wonders of nature and the value and urgency of preserving them.

The life of the Brooklyn Bridge’s chief engineer inspires this multifaceted novel

Washington Augustus Roebling, or “Wash”, was the chief engineer on the Brooklyn Bridge, which, when opened to the public on 24 May 1883, was the longest suspension bridge in the world. It was quite an achievement, but he didn’t do it alone. On the one hand there was his father, the austere and tyrannical John Roebling, who had designed and begun the bridge before his untimely death in 1869. On the other there was his wife, the accomplished and capable Emily, who, as well as providing moral and secretarial support, took on ever more responsibility for the project after Washington’s own health began to fail mysteriously.

Wash is something of a companion piece to Chief Engineer, Erica Wagner’s 2017 biography of Roebling. Spurning what she calls in her afterword “the clock’s time”, she has instead structured the narrative in accordance with “the soul’s time”; that is, by jumping backwards and forwards in time and place in a series of short chapters emphasising those individual moments, choices and encounters that together made this remarkable man who he was. It is a bold and engaging, if somewhat disorienting approach, giving this slender novel a vividness and intensity that might be smoothed over in a more traditional narrative arc.

Leading authors including Sarah Waters, William Dalrymple, Bernardine Evaristo and Anne Enright reveal their perfect holiday reading

• Read our selection of 70 brilliant books for the summer

Zadie Smith
Margaret Busby’s Part of the Story: Writings from Half a Century is the record of one woman’s lifelong passion for the literature and life of Africa and its diaspora, wherever she finds it. A beautiful collection. The funniest and smartest novel I’ve read in a while is Black Bag by Luke Kennard.

Mark Haddon
Can I recommend some metaphorical summer travel? Taiwan Travelogue by Yáng Shuāng-zǐ, translated by Lin King, won the International Booker prize so you’re legally obliged to read it. But there are three other books on the shortlist I would strongly urge you to get your hands on. The Director by Daniel Kehlmann, translated by Ross Benjamin, brilliantly fictionalises the story of the film director WG Pabst who fled Germany before the outbreak of the second world war, felt ignored in Hollywood and made the foolish decision to return home. On Earth As It Is Beneath by Ana Paula Maia, translated by Padma Viswanathan, is a short, sharp cleaver-blow of political horror set in a Brazilian prison camp. And She Who Remains by Rene Karabash, translated by Izidora Angel, is the story of Bekija/Matija who escapes an arranged marriage in Albania’s Accursed Mountains by becoming a “sworn virgin” under the ancient laws of the Kanun and living her life as a man.

The American author received ‘thousands of rejections’ over two decades before finally hitting gold with her first published novel

Just as I am about to interview this year’s Women’s prize winner, debut American novelist Virginia Evans, at the party on a drizzly evening in a leafy London square, we are interrupted because someone wants to congratulate her. The fan is Richard Curtis.

A warm-hearted weepy with a sprinkling of gentle humour, Evans’s prize-winning novel The Correspondent is prime Curtis material. In fact, he is too late. “I think he just wants to be my friend,” Evans jokes modestly – Notting Hill is her favourite movie of all time. A film of The Correspondent is already in the pipeline with Jane Fonda playing 73-year-old Sybil Van Antwerp, the crotchety correspondent of the title. Evans will be one of the producers and will have a cameo appearance, “walking a dog or something”.

The Correspondent by Virginia Evans (Penguin Books, £9.99). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.

If you fancy roaring around Japan’s open roads, scaling impossible mountains and playing with post-apocalyptic Pokémon, this year’s highlights mean you can do so without leaving your chair

PC, PlayStation 5, Xbox, Nintendo Switch; Vertigo Games
This clever update captures the 1990s magic of the original… including some of the technical issues

The 90s were a gold rush for adventure games. LucasArts kicked off the decade with its legendarily irreverent Monkey Island games. Then, Cyan Worlds materialised to deliver a series of atmospheric and boundary-pushing odysseys with Myst and Riven. Nestled between these primary genre texts is The 7th Guest, a lesser-known but still notorious adventure that earned plaudits for its unique FMV visual style, blending live-action filmed footage with pre-rendered 3D backgrounds. It was remade originally for VR, and now has been reconfigured into something playable on PC and consoles, its digital cobwebs cleared and tricky puzzles tinkered with for a fresh (or nostalgic) audience.

We are dropped into the ectoplasmic shoes of an amnesiac apparition, arriving at the gloomy haunted home of a toy-maker. Armed with a time-bending lantern and a Ouija board-shaped map, your job is to solve a historical whodunnit by literally illuminating events from the past. It’s a melodramatic, surprisingly campy adventure that effectively evokes the overzealous CD-Rom horror of its original era.

From horror galore to Chinese action games, the key trends, trailers and surprises from Summer Game Fest’s many, many hours of streams and broadcasts

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Did you spend hours of your weekend watching a relentless series of video game adverts? No? I don’t blame you – Summer Game Fest, the collection of livestreams that has arisen in place of the giant annual E3 video game expo in Los Angeles, is extremely overwhelming. There are the bigger, longer shows: the PlayStation and Xbox streams, the main SGF show hosted by Geoff Keighley and Lucy James, Future’s duet of the Future Games Show and the PC Gaming Show. Each show is two hours long. Then there are all the indie showcases: cosy games, women-led games, Black voices in gaming, Day of the Devs. Between them, they show off hundreds of games that might pique your interest.

I picked out exactly 34 highlights here: the biggest news, the most interesting-looking smaller games. But from the barrage of trailers I was also able to discern some trends. Here’s what we can learn.

Hundreds of video games were shown at June’s annual bonanza. After watching more than 15 hours of showcases, our video games editor picks the highlights

The sequel to a revered 2014 horror game from British developer Creative Assembly: this time you must evade the xenomorph on the surface of a storm-ravaged colony world.

Snape Maltings, Suffolk
This year’s Aldeburgh festival opened with a stripped-back concert staging by Rory Kinnear with Ryan Wigglesworth conducting the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra

Trying to unlock the secrets of Debussy’s opera Pelléas et Mélisande, based on Maeterlinck’s symbolist play, is a slippery task at the best of times. Doing so in a barely there staging, with the orchestra on the platform with the singers, is even trickier. For the opening performance of this summer’s Aldeburgh festival, that was the challenge that reunited the conductor Ryan Wigglesworth, a featured artist this year, with the actor and occasional opera director Rory Kinnear.

Apart from some industrial-style pendant lights and a single high stool, there were no props or scenery – unless you count the orchestra, through which the characters stumbled as if the instrumentalists were the forest surrounding the castle. Costumes, likewise credited to Vicki Mortimer, were low-key: dark suits for the royal men, tattered bridal white for Mélisande, drab boiler suits for the silent onstage extras, who also provided the brief offstage chorus.

Regent’s Park Open Air theatre, London
Performers representing the four seasons of life – and a wide range of styles – dance to a ravey remix of Vivaldi

It was a great idea: a dance through the four seasons of life, with performers whose own ages range from spring to winter, set to a reimagining of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. Neat. It’s amazing to see older dancers who can bring all the textures of their experience to the stage. But the thing with such a wide-ranging cast, who all specialise in different styles, is that the dance ends up being somewhere in the middle: everyone can do it but it doesn’t play to anyone’s strengths. The movement lands in a mildly street dance-influenced zone, locked into a basic 4/4 feel. It’s when you get a glimpse of a dancer’s signature – the brilliant Michael Naylor having a rave-up/meltdown in a club scene, for example – that you think, “Oh, this is what we were missing.”

Choreography is by the American Alexzandra Sarmiento, who works mainly in musicals and as a movement director in theatre, alongside director Tinuke Craig. The set-up is a trio of dancers for each season, always dressed in blue, pink and orange, who we come to realise represent the head, heart and gut of a person, although that’s not so clear at the start. The set does have boxes stamped with “HEAD”, “HEART” and “GUT”, but (to me, anyway) it wasn’t obvious because that didn’t seem connected with the dancing.

For the soundtrack, Vivaldi is chopped and spliced by DJ Walde, known for his funky hip-hop scores for ZooNation Dance Company. Back in 2012, composer Max Richter did his own genius rewrite of the Four Seasons, which has since been endlessly used in dance, and it is a mountain of a challenge to take on the same piece. Walde’s version mainly adds in some thumping beats side-by-side with the strings. At a couple of key points, such as that club scene, the Vivaldi is reduced to a sample and the beats take over, and suddenly everyone feels much more in their comfort zones.

Ultimately, there is not a strong enough sense of story or character or purpose to carry this show. It’s fantastic that Regent’s Park is committed to commissioning dance, to prove to general audiences that dance doesn’t have to have songs or script to be great theatre. But if you’re going to convert people, it has to be really, really good.

• At Open Air theatre, London, until 14 June

Theatr Clwyd, Mold
Emily White’s lyrical, if contrived, play is based on a real coastal village whose residents are being made climate refugees by rising sea levels

In 2014, residents of Fairbourne in Gwynedd discovered the local council had decided that maintaining sea defences was longer be tenable. Instead, as part of a process of “managed retreat”, this small coastal Welsh village would be abandoned to the sea by 2055.

This timeline has since shifted and been disputed, but while the village is not identified by name, it serves as the inspiration for Emily White’s Atlantis. Focusing on fisherman Bryn and his wife Gwen (Richard Elfyn and Vivien Parry), the action extends from 2011 to 2039, dramatising what has already occurred and imagining what comes next as weather systems and a community both are undone.

Royal Opera House, London
Prodigal son Paul Lightfoot returns with Sol León for their first performance by a British dance company. The result is impressively choreographed, if in need of more heart

Paul Lightfoot is a prolific, multi-award-winning British choreographer, more than 35 years in the industry, making dance as a duo with his former wife Sol León. Yet this is the first time their work has been performed by a British dance company. Seems hard to believe.

The pair spent their careers at Nederlands Dans Theater (NDT), as dancers and choreographers, then Lightfoot was artistic director from 2012 to 2020. But Cheshire-born Lightfoot trained at the Royal Ballet school, so this is a bit of a prodigal son situation, the Royal Ballet dancing an evening of the duo’s work: one two-decades-old piece revived, another that originated in lockdown that’s been dramatically recreated especially for this company.

The style of dance is so distinctive (influenced by that of NDT’s longtime director Jiří Kylián). It’s full of steps, exclamations, exaggerations and quirks. It is ultra specific, with constant switches of tone and timbre. The Royal Ballet’s dancers are used to demanding, ultra-contemporary movement but you can see how challenging it is to completely absorb a new style, and it’s interesting to see dancers play against type, like Vadim Muntagirov, a classical prince, now an ultra-serious, starkly angled figure in 2006’s Shoot the Moon. He’s one of five protagonists on a clever rotating set where different rooms and relationships come into view. Not so much a story as a set of (moderately opaque) situations. The style can be a bit Marmitey: Euro arthouse angst, well-dressed people in crisis to Philip Glass. Always a beautiful crisis, though.

The dancer most impressively invested in the work is Lauren Cuthbertson, almost reinvented for this piece. At one point there’s a live camera feed on stage and we see a closeup of Cuthbertson on screen, facial expressions as frantic as her body. She’s mesmerising, like a silent movie star scrolling through different roles – puffed cheeks, villainous pout – it could be comical if she weren’t so committed. The only thing is, there are so many expressions (and so many steps), it’s saying so much, that it almost doesn’t say anything; trying to tell a hundred stories, but sometimes one story is enough.

Steven Spielberg’s sci-fi blockbuster is a non-stop thrill ride, but did it convince you that we are not alone?

• This article contains spoilers for Disclosure Day

Six months after a cryptic billboard reading “All Will Be Disclosed” popped up unannounced in Times Square, Steven Spielberg’s Disclosure Day was finally released at global cinemas last week. The film sees the director returning to the sci-fi themes that have fascinated him throughout his career, braiding together multiple character storylines in an adrenaline-fueled – and occasionally dizzying – adventure. Read on for a spoiler-packed breakdown of the film’s themes, layers and Easter eggs, and let us know what you think in the comments.

Crypto.com Arena, Los Angeles
The pop star’s first tour in seven years brought the house down with emotive ballads and clubby bangers delivered with saucy wit

If faced with the choice to erase one’s most painful memories or live with them forever, à la Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, you’d be forgiven for wanting to wipe them away. On the first night of a five-show run in Los Angeles promoting her 2024 album Eternal Sunshine, Ariana Grande riffed on the idea of memory erasure in an emotive, occasionally zany show that illuminated one of her hardest-won revelations: forgetting her most painful experiences isn’t a bargain she is willing to make.

Grande has weathered tragedy and heartbreak in the public eye since her teenage years, including the death of her former boyfriend Mac Miller and the Manchester bombing that killed 22 fans at one of her concerts in 2017. She’s touched on these devastating events on past lyrics, but Eternal Sunshine marks the moment it all caught up to her. She’s spoken about the astrological concept of her Saturn return as making these challenges impossible to deny; Grande joins a long lineage of musicians, from Gwen Stefani to SZA, who have created music in the wake of this stultifying cosmic event, and the conceptually dazzling show’s 23-song setlist leaned heavily on cuts from the album. The show felt especially momentous given that Grande hadn’t been on tour since 2019, wherein she has since starred in two back-to-back Wicked films and judged The Voice.

A porter escorted Nick Buckley to his seat in an empty theatre in Hobart. Loris Gréaud’s new movie, part of Dark Mofo festival, left him questioning everything

Leanne is first in line on Saturday, standing outside the 19th-century Memorial Uniting Church in Hobart, Tasmania. She’s been waiting in the winter cold since 4.45am, but has no idea what for: “It’s a film?”

The film is Sculpt: Eye of the Duck, starring Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Rampling – and only one person gets to watch it at a time. Its director, the French conceptual artist Loris Gréaud, has cut six versions since its 2016 premier at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; less than 500 people saw that first film at Lacma and even fewer have seen the subsequent edits, although you can dig up some clips on the dark web. Dark Mofo – Hobart’s winter festival – is now screening its seventh iteration, with nine tickets made available each day. Only 90 people will get a chance to watch the movie, and the act of seeing it is part of the show.

As he opens a career-spanning show in London, the Turner prize-winning artist gives us a private view of his giant studio and talks censorship, controversy and why disobedience is central to making great art

In Anish Kapoor’s 3,100 sq metre studio complex in south London, photographers, assistants and gallery representatives gather in an upstairs meeting room. The artist has a staff of 23 in London – 11 studio assistants, nine people in the offices, three stone masons at a yard in Battersea – and some have been with him for decades. When he’s in town, everyone wants a piece (“It’s like The West Wing,” says one gallery rep).

Anish Kapoor and his hazmat-suited assistant with some of the 31 parts of Ha Makom

Nick Dowling spent decades in manufacturing and consultancy. The Covid pandemic opened his eyes to other possibilities, though he knew he’d be starting from scratch

Nick Dowling was the only person in the doctor’s waiting room when the practice nurse came out, glanced around and said to the receptionist with a confused look: “I was expecting to meet a student here.” Dowling raised his hand. At 60, he has undertaken an apprenticeship and hopes to qualify as a registered nursing associate this autumn.

Dowling had worked for decades in engineering and manufacturing, but his latest placements have taken him from a general practice to a psychiatric unit, from ward nursing to urgent treatment centres. Sometimes the shifts are 12 hours long, and, at £14 an hour, pay less than he has earned in decades. So why is he doing it?

Tell us: has your life taken a new direction after the age of 60?

Can a long road trip work with children? I set out to relive a classic journey from Bilbao to Saint-Malo I did in my freewheeling 20s

The moment came on about day four. A cloud-like mist was drenching our faces, hair and clothes, despite the thick canopy of trees overhead. My six-year-old daughter silently trudged uphill pushing her bike, her mouth set in a grim line. I looked again at the blue blob on Google Maps, which seemed, unfeasibly, to indicate we were on the right path. I thought, again, about the diminishing supply of chocolate in my backpack.

“See! I told you! We’re having an adventure,” I said with forced jollity. She didn’t even look up.

The very best double creams have a wildly complex taste, but which brands are a little scoop of sunshine and which are much of a muchness?

• The best supermarket natural yoghurts

This was a tricky taste test, not least because 70% of these creams tasted pretty much exactly the same, which is a clear reflection of how homogeneous our conventional food system has become (much of our cream is made from milk sourced from thousands of farms across the country and mixed together). Even the packaging is more or less identical, with a printed plastic tub and a peelable plastic lid.

British double cream is about 48% fat, which is higher than whipping cream (35%) and just below clotted (55% plus). This matters in practical terms because that’s why it whips more firmly, holds its shape longer and is less likely to split when added to a hot sauce. Conventional cream does the job well (it’s white, neutral in flavour and whips well), but really good cream is thick, gloopy and wildly fatty, with an unbelievably complex taste and remarkably nourishing effect; it’s also eminently whippable. Scooping a blob of cream like that straight from the tub can replenish energy and satiate in an almost alchemical way.

We’ve tried, tested and rounded up 62 thoughtful gifts – from gardening gloves to a cold brew coffee maker and a parkrun keyring – to make the father figure in your life feel special

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

Whoever you’re celebrating this Father’s Day – your own dad or a father figure in your life – our bumper list of gift ideas should help you think beyond the norm (though we have included some sock options, because sometimes it’s OK to go classic).

Whatever their age or your budget, we’ve focused on sustainable products that stand the test of time. All of the products have either been tested by me or by our own brilliant testers on the Filter and should still be going strong on Father’s Day 2027 and beyond.

Whether it’s fancy sauces or lesser-known cuts, skip the obvious with these creative garden party gifts (and not a pasta salad in sight)

• The best (and worst) chef’s knives – tested

Summer’s here, so you’ve probably got an invitation to a barbecue. If someone’s gone to the effort of hosting one, they deserve better than supermarket sausages and a bottle of wine grabbed from the corner shop on the way.

But what to bring that’s thoughtful and a little bit different? Whether it’s olive oil or ice lollies, green harissa or Lambrusco (yes, really), here are some suggestions from those in the know.

Our writer grilled halloumi, veggies and spatchcock chicken to find the best barbecues, from crowd-pleasing all-rounders to models that can smoke, roast and more

• The best (and worst) chef’s knives – tested

Salmon don’t know that they swim upstream. Some ancient instinct impels them; they don’t think about it any more than trees think about growing. You are a British person of a certain age and bearing. You are buying a barbecue.

But this half-century-old compulsion often ends before it starts. Few products are marketed with as much machismo as BBQs, and the jargon makes them surprisingly tricky to buy. While we all enjoy the unintended high camp of a snap-jet ignition, it’s unclear if such features are essentials or optional extras. Add in the tedious difference between planchas and kamados, and you can easily spend hundreds of pounds on what is essentially a hot metal box.

Best BBQ overall:
Weber Bar-B-Kettle charcoal barbecue

Best budget BBQ:
Argos Home drum charcoal BBQ with cover and utensils

Master the ultimate (and gloriously messy) finger food, in nine simple steps

When I first made these back in 2015, I noted that the British are “not enthusiastic” consumers of chicken wings. The fried chicken boom has changed all that, but these tangy, spicy versions, named after the American city rather than the beast, still aren’t as well known as they deserve to be, given what perfect finger food they make while watching (or pretending to watch) sport.

Prep 15 min
Dry 1 hr+
Cook 20 min
Serves 4 (with sides)

Fructose, glucose, sucrose. Lactose, maltose, dextrose. Treacle, molasses … honey! The sweet stuff is everywhere, in everything from colas and cakes to fruit and veg. Are some forms healthier than others? And what about artificial sweeteners?

Many people try not to eat too much sugar, yet it is added to so much food and drink, it is hard to avoid. It goes by more than 50 different names on labels, is present even in seemingly savoury products and the alternatives are confusing and controversial. So is the sweet stuff addictive – and should you cut it out completely?

It may be obviously Michelin-chasing, but it’s also resolutely midriff-expanding

Oudh 1722 is chef Aktar Islam’s first foray into London, following his barnstorming ascent in Birmingham with the likes of Opheem. Brum’s love for Islam is resolutely misty-eyed, while Opheem’s 10-course tasting menu has garnered two Michelin stars. It is the ultimate special-occasion spot within a 100-mile radius, more akin to L’Enclume in vibe than its fellow two Michelin-starred Indian Gymkhana in Mayfair. Islam, however, is not taking this snoozily. Instead, he has taken on a listed Victorian townhouse near Borough Market in south-east London and opened a restaurant that’s pretty solemn in its approach to Awadhi cooking.

A laughably brief catch-up on the tradition: the Nawabi era began in 1722, thus the restaurant’s name. The cuisine was luxurious, and defined by slow, thoughtful cooking, sealed pots, aromatic spice blends and subtle notes. Dead posh, basically. The polar opposite of fast, very spicy, grab-and-go food. 1722’s à la carte menu opens with a lamb shorba, a traditional welcome broth poured over finely chopped lamb tartare. Then spherical servings of gol guppa (you might know them by another moniker, pani puri), filled with sprouting moong shoots and tiny edible flowers, and flooded with jaljeera-spiced cumin water. It feels unregal to shove the entire thing in your mouth, but needs must.

It’s so full of nutrients that it tops the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s list of powerhouse vegetables. But this superfood is also surprisingly versatile

Watercress is among the oldest known plants consumed by humans, and claims for its medicinal powers are almost as ancient. Hippocrates grew it near his hospital for medicinal purposes; Pliny the Elder favoured it as a remedy for anxiety and coughs. At one time or another its peppery leaves have been used as old folk remedies to treat fever, scurvy, intestinal worms and baldness.

Even now, watercress maintains a reputation as a nutrient-rich superfood – the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has ranked it number 1 (with a perfect score of 100) on a list of “powerhouse” fruits and vegetables, and with good reason: it’s rich in vitamins C, K and A and antioxidants.

Edward thinks of sex as playtime and has a vivid imagination, which Jane is happy to go along with despite being quite ‘vanilla’ herself

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

When I dreamed about Jane in a latex catsuit, we had one made

Brendan Maclean had never spoken with drag queen Karen from Finance in person, nor laid eyes on the man behind the makeup. Then came a chance encounter in Melbourne

• Find more stories from the moment I knew series

I’d had a big, sparkly pop career in my 20s but by 2024 I was beyond my twink era, and getting by hopping from one weird gig to the next. Covid had really done a number on the music industry and, while my friend Paul Mac had kept me making music, I found myself drifting through a strange, boozy few years in Sydney. I’d been single since 2020 and my best friend was my cat.

Throughout that hazy time, I was as terminally online as ever. At 38 I was posting like a 20-year-old. One day, for no particular reason, I posted a track from the Dissociatives’ self-titled album from the mid-noughties. Paul, who I call my gay uncle, and Daniel Johns of Silverchair fame, had made just one LP together, and the obscure track, Thinking in Reverse, was one of my favourites.

Yusuf, 25, who works in finance, meets Hannah, 26, a PhD student

What were you hoping for?
Someone interesting, good chat is more important than anything. And a fun story. I like a random side quest.

Jordan wants one catch-all digital resource for him and Charlene, so their social lives don’t clash, but she prefers to communicate in person. You decide whose time is up

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

I’m not trying to control her but having one shared calendar helps us plan our lives together

We booked our hotel because of its swimming pool but a hefty hourly fee to use it wasn’t mentioned

My partner and I paid £2,150 for a week’s all-inclusive break in Marrakech with easyJet Holidays.

We chose the Jaal Riad Resort Hotel because of its pool and spa. When we arrived, we were told that use of the heated pool cost £24 a person an hour, the Jacuzzi £24 for 20 minutes, and the hammam was £16 for 20 minutes.

After falling for a scam call, ‘The Tech Chap’ host Tom Honeyands realised he’d given away vital details in social media posts

When Tom Honeyands realised he had been defrauded out of £70,000 he was furious and embarrassed – and left wondering if he had given away too many details on his social media videos.

Honeyands was on a work trip to Tokyo when he got a call from someone claiming to be from Lloyds bank. The caller asked if he had made a recent transaction in Singapore and when he said no, the scammer said his account had been compromised and that security details needed to be reset.

A medical issue can send quotes for cover soaring but it is not worth risking going abroad without a policy

‘I nearly fell over when I saw the travel insurance quote,” says the retiree Bernie Lawrence. The 77-year-old from Fleet, Hampshire, says that after he developed heart problems, the cost of buying cover became “astronomical”.

Lawrence, who usually travels with his wife, Barbara, 79, says he had always been active and fit before suffering chest pains while out running in 2018. Nine days later, he underwent quadruple bypass surgery.

Change in viewing habits offered by match times at 2026 tournament could mean using cheaper off-peak power

Watching late-night or early hours football could provide UK households with a practical opportunity to cut their energy bills, as even just doing the washing when cheaper electricity rates apply can net a decent saving.

At a time when energy costs are back at worrying highs, research by E.ON Next shows the potential to save money on a time-of-use tariff – in this case, its Next Smart Saver deal, which has three rates: peak, off-peak and super off-peak.

Many of us have reassured ourselves with the ‘five second rule’, but bacteria can transfer almost immediately – and sticks around for hours

You drop a piece of cucumber on the floor. Do you immediately throw it in the bin or reassure yourself of the age-old “five-second rule” and reckon it’s fine to pop it in your mouth after a quick rinse?

If you fall into the latter camp, John Tregoning, professor of vaccine immunology at Imperial College London, has some bad news. He refers to three studies into bacteria transfer that all point towards the rule being false.

Founded in 2004, the free weekly 5km event has grown into a global fixture of weekend life, taking place in parks, fields, seafronts and even prisons

The millionth parkrun took place on Saturday, acting as a celebration of the community cohesion and public health benefit that the charity has been aiming to achieve across the past two decades.

Those in attendance at the event in Bushy Park in west London included former Olympic champion Dame Kelly Holmes, as well as thousands of locals and parkrun fanatics alike.

Footy Addicts helps amateur players find a game at short notice – and tackles the problem of loneliness

Cries of “Boss! Boss! Boss!” emerge from the pitch during a hard-fought game of football in a London park. There aren’t a lot of names used in this game, because most players only met just before kick-off. They were brought together by an app that’s injecting life into grassroots football.

Footy Addicts was invented to solve an infuriating problem for amateur players – the late dropout, which can lead to unbalanced teams and ruined games. The app brings together strangers who are desperate to play football, and who can step in after a cancellation to make up the numbers at short notice.

Other projects include developing tools to help visually impaired people navigate video games

Parents are constantly being told to limit their children’s screen time. But when it comes to deciphering which films or TV shows are best suited to developing minds, the guidance remains largely one-size-fits-all. A relatively slow-paced programme such as Bluey offers a very different viewing experience to a fast-moving action series such as PAW Patrol, yet both are broadly considered suitable for young children.

This challenge is growing as the type of content children are exposed to evolves. “Today’s young viewers are increasingly engaging with short-form, fast-paced, highly captivating content, often created by splicing and rearranging existing episodic content into quickly digestible snippets or compilations,” said Prof Tim Smith, director of University of the Arts London’s Nerve Lab. “This evolution is not only changing how content is produced and distributed, but may also affect children’s attention, comprehension and emotional response.”

Taylor Swift and Timothée Chalamet lead the charge in blue and orange, as courtside style hits a ‘memeable’ peak

The World Cup may have kicked off in the US this week, but America’s attention is focused on a different sport: basketball. The NBA finals could end this weekend, with the New York Knicks potentially becoming champions for the first time since 1973. And with Knicks fever comes fan style, especially courtside, where celebrities have been showing their support in different ways.

For Wednesday’s Game 4, won by the Knicks, Taylor Swift and Este and Alana Haim all wore T-shirts in the blue and orange of the Knicks with their own Knicks-related pop culture pun: Swift’s read “Stevie Knicks”, while Este’s said “Knickeback” and Alana’s read “Knickole Kidman”. This was not shop merch. Vogue reported that Alana had made the T-shirts herself.

‘Late life’ male celebrities are turning the need for spectacles into a style statement as they refuse to disappear into fashion invisibility

A heart-throb for more than 40 years, Brad Pitt is no doubt used to people looking at him. But this week, that gaze was distracted by an addition to his face – aviator-style glasses.

Worn to watch the tennis at Roland Garros and with a pink trenchcoat when out for dinner in Paris, these retro glassesare more typically worn by younger men. That’s changed recently – they’re now becoming central to a makeover for men entering their “late life” era, but who aren’t willing to submit to the fashion invisibility associated with ageing.

Dear Frances offers the latest take on ballet flats, offering ‘a glove-like fit wearability’ – which is fine if you have nice feet

When is a shoe not a shoe? On sale this month is a pair that seems to pose the question – the no shoe-shoe is the work of the cult brand Dear Frances and the latest in a steady march of shoes that are barely there; a take on naked dressing but for the foot.

The Balla shoe, which the brand calls a “sock shoe”, covers almost the entire foot, but also leaves it – encased but on display – in a kind of flimsy foot-cage. According to Jane Frances, the creative director and founder of the brand, it “offers a unique, glove-like fit wearability” and “takes inspiration from the delicate strength of a woman”.

With his trademark glasses, his bleached hair and a thrillingly haphazard approach to colour, the artist’s signature style evolved and captivated decade after decade

If artist style is now a well-trodden path in fashion, there are some examples that stand out. David Hockney – with his trademark glasses, rugby shirts, trenchcoats and quirks like wearing a pair of yellow Crocs to meet King Charles in 2022 – might have been top of that list.

His flair for style was there from the start: a self-portrait of Hockney at 16 shows him dressed in a blue coat, red scarf and yellow tie, already with strong statement specs. As time went on, he developed his trademark look. The peroxide mop came in the early 60s, after he saw an advert for Clairol proclaiming “blondes have more fun” and his signature round spectacles replaced his NHS specs by the the middle of the decade.

A 1,600-mile journey to the wild peaks of Scotland, via Llandudno’s Victorian promenade and the bright lights of Blackpool proved an eye-opener in more ways than one

One of my favourite recent photographs is of me (unusually), perched on the bonnet of our car, about to set off on a solo, two-week road trip from our Sussex home to the wilds of Scotland, taking in Eryri (Snowdonia), Lancashire, the Lake District and Yorkshire. I had no idea that the research trip I was about to embark on – for my book, which traces the story of British holidays over 400 years – was going to reveal my homeland as somewhere I barely knew.

As a southerner, it was the northern half of Britain that I needed to discover. I’d stitched together my route with visits to museums, archives and classic seaside resorts that had once blazed so brightly. I’d visited Cumbria before, but the Conwy coast, the Lancashire countryside, Blackpool, Morecambe, Scarborough? All these were unknowns.

I found cinematic landscapes, wild freedom and thousands of miles of perfect solitude on my campervan adventure through the Nordic countries

It’s midnight, in June. Powder pink and dark grey clouds drift across a pallid sky, the palette reflecting in the motionless water of Lake Inari. Islets of pine and just-budding birch create pools of distorted shade close to the horizon of this 420 sq mile (1,080 sq km) lake in Lapland, northern Finland. There is not a sound. It’s so silent, I barely breathe to avoid disturbance. Only me, the lake and a moonbeam-coloured moth, whose wingbeat is inaudible.

I am sat beside my car-sized campervan, with mesmerised reverence for the rose-tinged panorama. I do not wish to go to bed and miss this moment. And I am loving the wild freedom and deliciousness of being entirely alone, with nobody in the world knowing my exact whereabouts. Ordinarily, I would be long asleep by midnight, exhausted after a day of work and family life. But I have left my husband and (adult) children at home in England for an eight-week solo camping adventure through Denmark, Sweden, Finland and Norway, with the singular aim of reaching Nordkapp (North Cape) and Knivskjellodden, Europe’s northernmost point at the top of Norway, in time for midsummer.

From Iceland to Italy, you share your best adventures behind the wheel
• Tell us about your favourite European hike – the best tip wins a £200 holiday voucher

Jeremy Clarkson described Romania’s Transfăgărășan Highway as “one unbroken grey ribbon of motoring perfection”. The route (the second highest in Romania after the Transalpina) with its hairpin bends and climbs over the mountain was thrilling. Although we’d been told bear sightings were possible, we didn’t anticipate spotting them literally on the roadside, with one hanging over a stone wall posing for photographs, taken through the car window. Because of the harsh winters in the southern Carpathian Mountains, the section of the road to Bâlea Lake is open only for a few summer months – it proved particularly beautiful.
Helen Jackson

Follow the folklore and you will discover a landscape full of wonder and powerful women – from a fearsome Scottish warrioress to the first queen of a united England

It’s just past midday and I appear to be inside a rain cloud. Soaked to the skin, my walking boots squelching through tufts of grass and black bog mud, I can hear hundreds of streams rolling off this wide mid-Wales peak, each vying to be the fastest. I’ve hiked around more than 8 miles (13km) of Hafren Forest trails to the top of Pumlumon Fawr (Plynlimon), to reach a wooden post carved with the words Source of the Severn. And I’m here, alone, because I’m hoping to meet a river goddess.

It’s perhaps not as strange as it first sounds. Starting about 150 years ago, the folklorist John Rhys travelled across Wales to archive as many local myths as possible, and among them was the very tale that brought me to this peak: the story of the birth of the River Severn, in which three sisters – Hafren (Severn), Rheidolyn (Rheidol) and Gwy (Wye) – each choose their own route to the sea. My trip to the river’s source was itself a moment of mythically inspired travel, something that has been common practice in the British Isles for as long as we’ve told stories, not least as a means of passing them on.

Our favourite music, clothes and books used to be markers of individuality – but the algorithm has made us all sheep. Meet the style rebels fighting back

What are you into? What floats your boat? What music, films, clothes, art, books – anything, really – do you actually like? Do you find these questions more difficult to answer than you would have done 10 years ago? How about 20? You do? You’re not alone.

It has become impossible to ignore: personal taste has been seriously debased – if not completely destroyed – by technological advancement. We know the internet has radically altered the way we form our opinions and beliefs. Now we’re waking up to another sobering truth: it has wrecked our capacity to form our own preferences.

Smac McCreanor, a content creator who recreates viral internet trends through dance, gets woken up by bunnies every day

Have you seen the video of Smac McCreanor pretending to be a parakeet? Dressed in green, she gracefully slides and sidesteps, occasionally lifting her arms – or wings? – mimicking the movements of a bird who went viral for his dance moves.

McCreanor, 33, translates the internet’s obsessions through her body, whether a green bird, emoji or objects being destroyed by a hydraulic press. A multi-genre dancer with 1 million Instagram followers, she has performed on So You Think You Can Dance and choreographed for the online video game Fortnite.

Jaya Saxena is a co-founder of Ravenous, a worker-owned food and culture site. She lives in Queens, New York.

The long-running series in which readers answer other readers’ questions on subjects ranging from trivial flights of fancy to profound scientific and philosophical concepts

• This week’s question: Is ‘ripen at home’ fruit the supermarkets’ idea of a joke?

I’ve been struggling to get my head around the idea that a passkey, which can be a pin on your phone, or facial recognition, can be safer than using a complicated password and two-factor authentication.

I get that having something unique to your device, not stored on a company’s server, is unphishable and less hackable by cybercrims, but what if your phone is nicked and someone guesses the password? And what if you lose your phone?

She came directly up to me and offered the tray, accompanied by a torrent of incomprehensible Greek

• Read more in the kindness of strangers series

The straps of my backpack dug hard into my shoulders as I trudged like a zombie through the sweltering heat. I was hitchhiking across the Greek island of Crete in summertime and had been dropped off in a small village miles from anywhere, hoping to pick up my next ride. It was 1978 and probably didn’t help that I looked every inch the hippie – jewellery, bushy beard and dusty clothes.

Cars passed only infrequently, maybe one every half hour. When they did, they hurtled past like unstoppable express trains, without a sideways glance my way. I took a seat on a low stone wall and hoped for the best. But after several hours under the relentless sun, I was beginning to think I’d never get out of the place. A few houses dotted the main road but the village seemed to be asleep.

Aiden is an unforgettable young caregiver in Walthamstow, east London, who has been looking after his mum for over half his life. Every few weeks, Aiden and other young carers get a rare night off thanks to tenacious council worker Satvinder, who fights to improve the recognition of young carers in her borough. This film joins them as they reclaim a few hours of their teenage lives back.

Is Mum OK? is released during Carers Week in the UK, a campaign that celebrates unpaid carers across the country and calls for better recognition and support for them. There are more than one million young carers in the UK – with an average age of 12 – which is the equivalent of two kids in every school class.

The 47th has his 80th this weekend – a milestone that surely shouldn’t go unmarked. Artists, activists, writers and thinkers send their messages to the man of the hour (even if they’re unlikely to get a party invite)

Cory Doctorow

Dear Comrade Trump: On this, the occasion of your 80th birthday, I write to extend my sincere thanks for all the work you have done. After decades of deadlock, you have inspired the world to action! You have done more to de-dollarise the world than any American leader in history. Without you, there would be no way that Ethiopia would be revaluing its national debt in yuan. You have done more to end the global dependence on oil than any leader (except, perhaps, for Comrade Putin). Without you, there would be no way that India would be chucking out its gas hobs and replacing them with induction tops. And, of course, you have done more than any president in history to end American dominance over the internet. Without you, there would be no way the EU would be racing forward with projects such as Eurostack and European Digital Infrastructure Consortium, with whole nations ditching American tech exports like Microsoft Office 365 in favour of free, open, auditable, transparent alternatives running on servers within the EU’s borders. Comrade Trump, you are, at long last, ushering in the post-American world, and a grateful planet salutes you!

Alarm over the judgment and behaviour of the world’s most powerful man, and the consequent risks to the world, can only get worse

The main Nuremberg trial ended, Winston Churchill warned of an iron curtain descending across Europe, It’s a Wonderful Life received its premiere and, at Jamaica hospital in the borough of Queens, New York, Donald John Trump was born.

It was 1946, also the birth year of George W Bush and Bill Clinton, but on Sunday the current US president celebrates his 80th birthday in a style uniquely his own. Trump will stage a night of cage fighting on the once-pristine White House south lawn as part of events marking the 250th anniversary of US independence.

Forecasters were wrong about an immediate recession but right that we would be worse off outside the EU

As the 10th anniversary of the Brexit vote approaches, the verdict on Britain’s economic performance is clear: voting to leave has resulted in severe costs for households and businesses.

The immediate recession predicted in the Treasury forecasts ordered by George Osborne – dubbed “project fear” by the Leave campaign – did not happen. The impact from the Covid pandemic, wars in Ukraine and Iran, and Donald Trump’s trade battles also cloud the picture.

Starmer has announced a social media ban for under-16s, we would like to hear from parents and carers about the new measures

The UK government has confirmed a social media ban for under-16s

We’d like to hear from parents and carers about their views on the ban. Do you support restrictions on children’s access to social media? If you have children aged 16 and under, how do they feel? And what are the views of your older children? Do you have concerns?

We would like to hear from people who regret turning to AI chatbots for advice on their personal or social lives

People are increasingly turning to AI chatbots for advice on their personal and social lives. But researchers and even some AI companies are beginning to worry that some users are becoming overly dependent on their chatbots.

Have you taken the advice of an AI chatbot to make a significant decision - and regretted it?

We’d like to hear from UK adult adoptees about they navigated their reunion with a birth parent

Guardian journalist David Batty has described the complex family trauma many adult adoptees have to navigate during reunion with their birth parents, often without professional support.

We would like other UK adult adoptees to share their experiences of adoption reunion. How challenging was it to forge relationships with birth relatives and to maintain them? What, if any, support did you receive? How did it impact your relationship with your adoptive family?

We would like to hear about the holidays reads you’d recommend

Summer is here, which means lazy days at the beach or the pool with a great book by your side.

We would love to hear from people about their favourite beach reads. What books have you loved reading on holiday? What are the page turners that you keep returning to every summer and always recommend to friends? We would love to hear what books these are and why they make a great beach read.

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