He taught maths and walked across Europe, trying to leave his demons behind. As he goes back on tour aged 83, the folk-pop legend explains how he came back to singing

As Art Garfunkel is keen to point out, “I am a singer – there, use that as the title of your article” – but he was never just a singer. “I’ve been an actor. I am a writer,” he continues. “I’ve walked across countries, taken freighters across oceans. I’ve read the dictionary. I’ve read two books a month for 60 years: Darwin, Herodotus, Balzac, Proust, Tolstoy. I’ve taught maths. I have two great kids and I’m a grandfather, but it always does seem to come back to the singing.”

Which is understandable, given that in Simon and Garfunkel (with songwriter Paul Simon) he sold more albums than any other pop duo in history. Garfunkel’s oft-called “angelic” tones powered classic chart-toppers including The Sound of Silence and Bridge Over Troubled Water, and he became a successful solo artist. However, until a year ago, he was hardly singing at all and hadn’t toured since 2019. “I found myself lying on a pillow in a dream state, thinking about the meaning of being alive,” he reveals. “What is my day? What am I supposed to do with myself?”

High food prices are affecting everyone right now, but it turns out they are affecting some people way more than others. Josh Toussaint-Strauss looks at the grocery price situation and official healthy eating advice in different countries to find out how food prices are hitting lower-income households harder and whether it’s even mathematically possible to eat a government-recommended healthy diet

Abandoned by the company they worked for, let down by Labour and their unions – now they watch their friends turn to Reform for answers

After everything, why would anyone still back Nigel Farage? In some of the comments below my piece last week about Reform UK, I spot the usual answers: Farage’s supporters are dim, racist, deplorable. Yet away from Westminster and the news cycle, Reform voters are being manufactured – not with headlines or crypto funds but through the failure of institutions they once trusted to protect them. To see what I mean, leave SW1 and go 40 miles up the road, to Luton.

In a deserted hotel bar, five men are reminiscing about how their world ended. Their minds are on a Friday afternoon in March last year, as the place where they had worked for two or three decades apiece, making friends and even meeting future wives, is about to shut for good.

The petrol hijinks show is getting a total reset – with a relatively unknown new set of presenters. Still, there are signs this trio might turn out to be revolutionarily provocative

Have you heard the news? It’s all change at The Grand Tour. New hosts! New production team! New horizons! Think of everything they could accomplish with a fresh start like this.

Actually, don’t think too hard, because the very first thing the new hosts do is visit Diddly Squat Farm to genuflect before Jeremy Clarkson. After some extremely timid banter, Clarkson turns to the camera and all but pleads with viewers not to be scared of change.

Lance Hammer’s first film in 18 years is a heart-wrenching masterpiece about family, mental decline and sexual consent. He and supporting actor Juliette Binoche discuss how they brought unabashed realism to a condition rarely seen on screen

The first time we see Martin and Leslie, the elderly couple at the centre of Lance Hammer’s wrenching new film, Queen at Sea, they are walking together up a set of stone steps: one of their regular outings, we assume, in days filled with pottering and quiet companionship. They have their backs to us, and we can’t see their destination beyond a bleached sky that fills the top half of the screen. Symbolically, it may be deemed a bit on the nose: two people near the end of their lives, moving gently towards the white light of oblivion. There’s a whiff of sentimentality about it.

But any doubts about this story’s willingness to confront difficult truths are blasted away by the next scene. Leslie’s daughter, Amanda, played by Juliette Binoche, pays a visit to the couple’s house in drizzly, middle-class north London, her teenage daughter in tow. Unable to find her mother and stepfather, she arrives at the bedroom door. Opening it, she finds Martin (Tom Courtenay) on top of Leslie (Anna Calder-Marshall), who lies impassively beneath him, the mask of dementia obvious on her face.

You share your low-key alternatives to overcrowded hotspots, from an island city in the Med to a Norwegian art nouveau gem
• Tell us about your trips in Europe’s mountains – the best wins a £200 holiday voucher

Ferrara in Emilia-Romagna won me over precisely because it feels like Italy with the volume turned down. I stayed in a small family-run hotel near Via delle Volte, where mornings began with quiet cobbled streets and the smell of fresh pastries. The Palazzo dei Diamanti was almost empty when I visited, giving me space to enjoy its Renaissance art without crowds. Evenings meant cycling past terracotta walls to tiny trattorias serving pumpkin cappellacci, a traditional pasta dish. It’s a city that lets you slow down, breathe and enjoy its beauty.
John

James Orr and Dan Jukes, aides to Nigel Farage, stepped down after an investigation by Channel 4 News

British ministers have hit back after the Argentinian president said “winds of change” favourable to his country’s claim to the Falklands were “blowing around the world”, Kiran Stacey reports.

The Electoral Commission has issued a statement this morning saying it is in touch with the police about the undercover investigation into Reform UK. In a statement, it said:

We are considering all relevant information, in line with our regulatory remit, and we are in touch with the Met police.

The Electoral Commission has not approved the donor vetting process for Reform, or any other party. Parties are responsible for ensuring their internal processes and controls are fit for purpose.

Energy secretary could recommend new North Sea drilling next week, as ministers also consider approval for Rosebank oilfield

• UK politics live – latest updates

• Business live – latest updates

Ministers are poised to approve a controversial new gasfield in the North Sea this month, according to government sources, and are considering approving a major oilfield later this year.

Miatta Fahnbulleh, the energy secretary, will give her recommendation to approve the Jackdaw field off the coast of Aberdeen as soon as next week, according to people close to the decision, and the formal approval could follow a week after.

Exclusive: As millions of people face hosepipe bans, many companies are not required to report, let alone cut, use of public supply

Less than 1% of businesses in England use more water than the daily needs of 10 million people, as millions of households face hosepipe bans and three-quarters of the country is in drought.

Businesses across England use 2.6bn litres a day from the public water supply, which includes potable and non-potable water provided by water companies. In total, businesses account for about 30% of public supply use, with two-thirds of their consumption in water-stressed areas, according to Mosl, the organisation that operates England’s business water market.

Mourning turns to anger as residents of Kuhestak say Baloch communities are being placed in path of conflict

People in Kuhestak, a predominantly Baloch city in Iran’s southern Hormozgan province, are mourning after a strike on a wedding killed at least four people, including a child, and injured more than 60, according to local authorities.

The blast hit at around 9.30pm on 1 September, turning a night of celebration into one of devastation for the small coastal community, which is on the strait of Hormuz.

Officials say pair were rescued from Trishuli 3A hydropower tunnel in Nepal after being trapped in depth of 170 metres

Two people have been pulled out alive from a hydropower tunnel in Nepal nine days after deadly flash floods buried the projects in deep mud and left them trapped.

The workers were rescued during an ongoing operation at the Trishuli 3A tunnel, a hydropower project in one of the areas worst affected by last week’s floods, according to the army spokesperson Brig Gen Raja Ram Basnet.

Ed Miliband says Britain’s position remains ‘unwavering’ in response to remarks by Argentina’s president

• UK politics live – latest updates

British ministers have hit back after the Argentinian president said “winds of change” favourable to his country’s claim to the Falklands were “blowing around the world”.

The foreign secretary, Ed Miliband, said the UK would “resolutely uphold” the self-determination of the islands after the Argentinian president, Javier Milei, said his country needed to take them back.

Authorities formally indicted the controversial manosphere influencer along with his brother for a number alleged crimes

in Magdeburg, Saxony-Anhalt

Polls have suggested that the election on Sunday could yield Germany’s first-ever state government led by the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), shattering a postwar taboo and leaving minorities’ fate in the hands of a party that has promised to launch deportations “from day one”.

National Audit Office urges government to act as climate crisis, disease and cyberattacks pose growing risks

The climate crisis, disease and cyber-attacks pose growing risks to the UK’s food supplies and the government needs to act to make the system more resilient, according to the public spending watchdog.

The National Audit Office (NAO) is urging the Department for Food, the Environment and Rural Affairs (Defra) to work more closely with households, communities and businesses to ensure the flow of crucial food into the country can withstand supply shocks that are becoming increasingly common and severe.

As one card recently sold for £12m, opportunistic thefts have surged – envelopes are being opened en route, costing small businesses thousands

Pokémon’s success over the last 30 years has seen it grow from a much-loved Game Boy classic, to a world-dominating brand with TV shows, spin-off games, toys and even a theme park. The trading card game is a huge part of that, with more than 85bn cards printed over its lifetime, and the appetite for them shows no signs of slowing down. Packs get snapped up after release so quickly it’s now almost impossible to find them in shops, and a booming resale market is driving the hobby into murky waters.

One card recently sold for an eye-watering £12m, and an increasing number of people have gotten into the collecting business on the hunt for huge profits, leading to a rise in thefts targeting card shops. More recently though, some small businesses have reported that their sales have been hit by thieves targeting envelopes within Royal Mail, leading to thousands in lost revenue.

As polls point to victory in Saxony-Anhalt for AfD party promising deportations, people face agonising choice: stay or go

As the Bible study session wrapped up, leaving worshippers to mingle over cake and coffee, Fatemeh, 44, fought back tears as the conversation turned to Sunday’s state election in Saxony-Anhalt.

“I worry about it every day,” she said. “I can’t stop thinking about my son and what might happen to us.”

Fatemeh worries about what might happen after the elections. Photograph: Christian Jungeblodt/The Guardian

Sell-off raises concerns of higher borrowing costs for households. Here’s what it could mean

The bond market sell-off has sparked fresh fears of higher borrowing costs for UK households. We look at what the turmoil in financial markets could mean for your mortgage, pension and savings.

The WSL season kicks off tonight and the Guardian’s women’s football writer Suzanne Wrack will be here to answer your questions at 1pm BST/8am ET. Ask her anything: from her career as a sports reporter to her hopes for the new season and the future of the women’s game

Ask a question: log in or sign up here.

The Women’s Super League season kicks off tonight with London City Lionesses versus Manchester United. The 2026/27 marks an exciting new era for women’s football with an expansion to 14 teams, the introduction of playoffs, increased investment and some huge transfers.

Suzanne Wrack has been reporting on women’s football for the Guardian since 2017, appears on our Women’s Football Weekly podcast and is the author of the award winning A Woman’s Game: The Rise, Fall, and Rise Again of Women’s Football. She will be here at 1pm BST/8am ET to answer your questions. Will London City’s superstar signing Alexia Putellas be the magic bullet? How will newly promoted Birmingham City, Charlton Athletic and Crystal Palace fair? Can Manchester City go back to back?

There’d been no morning sickness, cravings or tiredness. My mum didn’t believe I’d had a baby – even after seeing her on FaceTime

When I was 19, I went to college in Texas, where I met my ­boyfriend Preston. It was 2023 and I had big plans. After ­finishing my degree in criminal justice, I wanted to go to law school. I wasn’t in a rush to get married or have kids. My mum had drilled into me a fear of getting pregnant at a young age. I was on the pill and careful with contraception.

In May 2025, I took a trip to London, returning to campus in August after the summer holidays. I noticed I was slowly gaining weight; by January this year I’d gained 10lb. I put it down to my late-night snacking and lack of exercise.

Despite the fame of its red light district, many sailors from the USS Abraham Lincoln opt for the ‘simple stuff’ like socks, decent food and some pampering

On Thursday morning in Pattaya’s Colour Nail salon there isn’t a spare burgundy lounger to be seen as sailors from the USS Abraham Lincoln – male and female alike – settle in for pedicures to take the edge off a gruelling deployment.

More sailors are waiting outside for their turn and Arisa Suekkanya, a worker at the salon, says she is “excited” the US military chose Thailand as their first port of call after a record uninterrupted 286 days at sea.

Jeering and heckling are increasingly commonplace, even at grand slams, as spectators try to influence matches

Midway through the first week of the US Open a couple of years ago, Jiri Lehecka’s attempts to find his form were disrupted by incessant taunting from a spectator close by. “There was a guy who sat just behind my bench on a smaller court, court 4, and he was talking to me basically for the first three sets, like nonstop,” Lehecka says. “He was talking to me like: ‘You can’t do it. You are tired. He’s better than you are.’”

Lehecka maintained his composure and closed out the match, but even as he focused on navigating the intense stress of competition, he believed he understood this spectator’s motivations. The spectator, he thinks, was not there just to cheer for his favourite player: he was a bettor who had put money on Lehecka to lose. He had entered court 4 solely to influence the outcome of the match.

This week’s best wildlife photographs from around the world

Fury at Russia’s death and destruction has fuelled art, action and resistance. But eventually, rage’s fire is all-consuming

Twice, I have heard Ukrainians perform Verdi’s Requiem. Once in Lviv, last Maundy Thursday, and once last month, under the great dome of St Paul’s Cathedral in London. In St Paul’s, performed by the Ukrainian Freedom Orchestra with the Philharmonia Chorus, the great Dies irae – “day of anger” – unfurled in an operatic gale of fury, reverberating so powerfully around Wren’s lofty spaces that the music felt like thunder echoing between mountain peaks.

In Lviv, where it was performed by a Ukrainian chorus and orchestra, the evening began with a call to remember the war dead. Lviv’s lay a mile up the road: 153 graves when I first visited in autumn 2022, and by this year more than 1,000. Ranks and ranks of soldiers killed in their 20s, 30s and 40s, each grave planted with flowers and plants, flags flying above. On that occasion, Dies irae – in the more sober acoustic of the Lviv Philharmonic Hall – seemed to contain the furious ache of grief. Certainly I have never heard a more wrathful day of anger.

Burnham and Macron have committed to going further in the crackdown on French beaches. But little is being done to offer refugees safe alternative routes

Garang*, 18, is one of thousands of refugees recently caught in the crossfire of French riot police, who threw teargas and beat them with batons when they boarded dinghies to travel to the UK. He is a victim of a war in his home of South Sudan – and one being fought on France’s northern shores.

He borrows a phone from anyone with credit who will let him try to call home, where his family is displaced. Garang doesn’t have enough money on the £10-a-week allowance from the Home Office to make a long-distance call. All he wants is to speak to his mum, to hear her voice, and let her know he is alive and safe in the UK despite the violence he has faced.

Diane Taylor writes on human rights, racism and civil liberties

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

Obsessed with exams, devoid of vocational training: there is a total mismatch between schools and life beyond their gates

Blame the schools. Alan Milburn’s report on Neets, published in May, was one of the most damning comments on the welfare state I have read. It described a new generation of a million mostly poor Britons now encouraged to fare worse, not better, than their parents. This means, said Milburn, that “the great British promise” – the advance of generations – is being broken. A sizeable chunk of the population is going backwards.

The number of young people not in education, employment or training – one in eight of all 16- to 24-year-olds – is rising fast and will be 1.25 million by 2030. More than 80% of them claim to want to find a job, education or training. A third even have “good GCSEs”, but 44% of them are on state benefits, now costing £8.1bn. Many of them suffer from anxiety and other disabilities, according to the NHS. The number of young people with special educational needs has doubled in 10 years. Mental ill-health is bordering on pandemic levels.

Simon Jenkins is a Guardian columnist

The CEO is the throughline in a history of billion-dollar blunders that have caused real harm, culminating in last week’s settlement

Last week, Meta, the parent company of Instagram and Facebook, agreed to a settlement of up to $18bn after dozens of US states accused it of harming children with addictive products. The settlement’s regulatory implications for social media will affect every user, far beyond teens.

But if Meta is truly interested in prioritizing the safety of users, the board should request the resignation of Mark Zuckerberg and restructure to put safety above profit.

The activist made the movement mainstream – and became a receptacle for its hopes and disappointments

• Gloria Steinem, groundbreaking feminist campaigner, dies aged 92

• ‘We badly need to raise our boys more like our girls’: Gloria Steinem – a life in quotes

By the time she died on Wednesday, at 92 years old at her home in New York, Gloria Steinem was synonymous with feminism, a kind of human mascot for the movement. So it can be easy to forget that when she was born, feminism was over. It was something that had been faddish years before, among women who were now old ladies; something that seemed, in retrospect, like it might have been a bit overwrought and out of touch. To the girl Gloria Steinem, growing up in Ohio in the 1930s and 40s, the suffrage movement that had gained women the right to vote less than two decades prior probably seemed remote – especially to a girl like her, growing up itinerant and poor under the care of a single mother who was plagued by a violent and debilitating mental illness. You might say that growing up, Steinem had worries that were more immediate than the status of women.

But experience has a way of radicalizing women about their own gendered condition. Steinem attended Smith, and her education opened up previously unhoped for possibilities. En route to a postgraduate fellowship in India in 1957, when she was in her early 20s, she had an illegal abortion in London. Later, in 1969, while she was working as a journalist for New York magazine, she attended an “abortion speak-out” put on by a group of radical women from the emergent fringe of what was then called the Women’s Liberation movement.

Paris converted tens of thousands of on-street parking spaces into docking stations, fundamentally changing its approach to public space

• Agustin Guilisasti is founder and CEO of the London ebike operator Forest

Shared ebikes have become a key part of London’s transport network. From Hounslow to Greenwich, it’s rare to step on to the street without seeing one, and they now facilitate millions of journeys every month. Forest recorded 3m rides this July alone, a new high. Demand keeps rising, and operators are logging ever-higher ride-per-bike ratios, a key measure of how intensively fleets are being used.

This is good news for London, which gains a cleaner, healthier and more sustainable way to get around – one that eases reliance on private car ownership. And, with new research revealing that air-quality improvements driven by the ultra-low emission zone (Ulez) have led to better lung health in children, the benefits of reducing polluting journeys are increasingly clear.

Agustin Guilisasti is founder and CEO of the London ebike operator Forest

The PM’s warmth and feelgood policies, such as scrapping VAT on energy bills and a taskforce looking at political donations, offer something rare: hope

Of all the epithets thrown at a new prime minister, “people-pleaser” bounces off Andy Burnham. After all, the polls have him with a favourability rating of +13, making him the only party leader who scores above zero. His manner as he responded to all 125 of his questioners on his first Commons appearance this week had a warmth and empathy that his predecessor lacked. It’s a natural timbre, a good bedside manner for an uneasy country.

Keir Starmer’s rating as he left office was -36. He was defenestrated precisely because of his unpopularity. That baffled his allies, but his ratings crashed early into an electoral death zone from which no leader returns. His revenge comes in giving Labour a potentially awkward byelection confrontation with Zack Polanski: although, just as Burnham defeated the right in Makerfield, any candidate under his leadership stands a good chance of defeating the Greens in Holborn and St Pancras.

Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist

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

The lack of justice for Daphne Caruana Galizia in Malta casts a shadow on reporters everywhere

The acquittal of Yorgen Fenech, who was on trial in Malta for involvement in the murder of the journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia, is a devastating blow for justice and press freedom. Nine years after her car was blown up, it seems increasingly unlikely that anyone will be held to account for ordering and paying for her death. Mr Fenech’s admissions that he knew about the murder before it happened, and gave money to the middle-man who paid the killers, make it hard to understand why he was found not guilty on the lesser charge of association.

All killings of journalists are wrong. The bomb placed in Caruana Galizia’s car was especially shocking, as such brazen violence is usually associated with war zones or states overrun by organised crime. The fact that this acquittal came two months after those of three men accused of murdering another journalist, Lyra McKee, in Northern Ireland, adds to a grim impression of impunity for killers. While McKee is not thought to have been targeted in the way that Caruana Galizia was, the inability of police and prosecutors to secure convictions in either case points to wider problems.

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

Abductions are resurging and may be spreading to new areas – with young children among the victims. A military response alone won’t work

Early last month, Nigeria’s government announced the largest single-day hostage rescue in its history, with the freeing of 300 people who had been taken in raids in two north central states. Celebrations were short-lived. Barely a fortnight later, gunmen abducted up to 600 worshippers from a mosque in Niger state. Nigerians paid kidnappers nearly $6m in ransoms in the year to June, according to a new report from the Lagos-based consultancy SBM Intelligence – more than triple the total in the previous 12-month period. More than 7,800 people were abducted, a two-thirds increase, and more than 1,100 killed, including almost 900 civilians.

When Boko Haram abducted almost 300 schoolgirls from their school in Chibok, Borno state in 2014, it made headlines worldwide. Yet around 45 children, mostly aged between two and five, remain missing after they were snatched from schools in Mussa, in north-eastern Borno state, in May. There is growing concern that kidnappings may be spreading to new areas. Forty-six students and staff were abducted from three schools in the south-western state of Oyo in the same month; they were rescued in July.

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

Prof Lyla Mehta says the glacial floods and loss of life are a stark reminder that climate disruption is global and highly unequal. Plus letters from Lynda McDonald and Jan Bengtsson

The recent glacial collapse and catastrophic floods in Nepal and Tibet are not isolated tragedies (Report, 28 August). They reflect accelerating climate disruption that disproportionately affects the countries and people that are least responsible for global emissions.

As climate change intensifies, glaciers around the world, including in the Himalayas, are melting at unprecedented rates, destabilising ecosystems and causing glacial collapse and ice-and-rock landslides, destroying settlements, villages and livelihoods in minutes. No one died when a Swiss glacier collapsed last year, owing to early-warning systems that were in place. But a lack of early-warning systems means that the disaster in Nepal and Tibet has led to hundreds of deaths and thousands missing.

The advantages of 20mph speed limits are celebrated by Rod King, while John Hopkin says drivers who speed won’t be deterred unless tougher action is taken against them

Thanks to Christian Wolmar for his insightful article on a 20mph limit and how it would be a good thing for Birmingham (Dear culture-war motorists, look to the future. We’ll all be driving at 20mph soon, 28 August). He is right to identify that the world has changed from when the car was king and we planned our city mobility almost exclusively around automobiles.

At 20’s Plenty for Us we have seen our movement developing from being classed as radical in the 2000s, to progressive in the 2010s and the new normal in the 2020s. As 20mph limits have been adopted by progressive authorities, we have seen the significant benefits extend beyond pedestrians and cyclists to those who drive.

Readers respond to the Trump administration’s decision to change Lake Ontario to ‘Lake America’

I think too much is being made of this (Apple Maps renames Lake Ontario as ‘Lake America’ for US users after Trump order, 2 August). It is common for geographical features straddling borders to receive different names in different jurisdictions.

Consider, for example, Lac Léman and the Bodensee, La Manche and Les Îles Malouines. Wales has only recently reclaimed Yr Wyddfa and Bannau Brycheiniog, and for a reminder and dramatisation of how renaming played out in Ireland, look no further than Brian Friel’s Translations. Perhaps we can look forward to Lake Cleveland (previously Erie) and Lake Trump (previously Superior)?
Owen Stewart
Gatley, Greater Manchester

Museums have countless examples of the common fossils from these Lower Jurassic rocks, says the Charmouth Heritage Coast Centre’s Phil Davidson

The vast majority of the fossils revealed on this rapidly eroding part of the Jurassic Coast hold very little scientific importance and are not in need of protection or recording (Letters, 28 August). Museums around the world have countless examples of the common fossils from these Lower Jurassic rocks, thanks to the efforts of fossil collectors, who since the pioneering palaeontologist Mary Anning (1799–1847) have saved fossils from the same process that reveals them, the action of the sea.

The majority of these scientifically important fossils are saved from destruction after the winter storms, not during the peak tourist season in the summer. Allowing tourists to collect and take home their discoveries helps them foster a sense of curiosity and encourages an interest in the natural world, which is especially important for future generations.

• All the latest news and previews before the weekend
• Premier League: 10 things to watch for | Email Tom

The chief executives of the Football Association, Rugby Football Union and England and Wales Cricket Board have joined forces with leading broadcasters and YouTube in writing to the chancellor requesting tax credits for production companies to help deliver more television coverage of women’s sport.

After a difficult year at Chelsea the striker hopes to get his career back on track at the City Ground

“You can imagine it: he’s a centre-back, I’m a striker,” says Liam Delap, Nottingham Forest’s £45m club-record signing, smiling as he sets the scene. He is reliving taking on his younger brother, Finn, in the garden. These days, they are each other’s biggest supporters – Liam attended Finn’s victory for third-tier Burton on Wednesday – but as kids there was a friendly rivalry. “There were probably a lot of tears, a lot of fights … whether it was playing Monopoly or football, it always ended in either the table being flipped or kicking the shit out of each other.”

It is a competitive streak that has stuck and Delap is determined to make his presence felt at Forest, for whom he could make his full debut against Tottenham on Saturday. It has been a testing 16 months; he left Chelsea a season into a six-year contract and after one goal in 28 top-flight appearances, a dozen of those starts. “It is never a linear path straight to the top,” Delap says, his right hand taking flight in the City Ground boardroom, the 1979 and 1980 European Cups shimmering behind him. “I just want to get my head down, focus and keep improving because I’m still so young and I have so much to learn. I even at times probably think I’ve been in football a lot longer than I have. I’ve still, hopefully, got a long career ahead.

• Letter sent to chancellor, John Healey, on Friday

• ‘Audience demand for women’s sport is growing’

The chief executives of the Football Association, Rugby Football Union and England and Wales Cricket Board have joined forces with leading broadcasters and YouTube in writing to the chancellor requesting tax credits for production companies to help deliver more television coverage of women’s sport.

In a letter signed by 25 representatives of the country’s biggest sports and broadcasters, including Sky Sports and ITV, the government is urged to extend to women’s sport production the audio-visual expenditure credit scheme that provides tax relief to independent films and children’s television.

• Action from around the County Championship grounds

• Mail Tanya, post BTL | Sign up to get The Spin newsletter

There were warm words for hat-trick hero Henry Crocombe last night from one who should know, Jamie Porter.

“I think he is very exciting.” said Porter. “He bowled with serious pace. The element that I felt was potentially missing from his game to take him to that level of being on the cusp of international cricket he seems to have added.”

The Saracens wing is focused on becoming more disciplined and says that he is only going to get better after last term’s breakthrough

Noah Caluori is addressing the dangers of second-season syndrome as he sets about charting a path to England’s World Cup squad next year and it soon becomes apparent he has one clear advantage. Twelve months ago he was an unknown quantity, now opponents will see him coming, but Caluori is hoping playing without pain can ensure he soars to new heights.

What made the 19-year-old’s stratospheric rise last season all the more impressive was that Caluori played with a debilitating wrist injury for much of it. That he still ended his first Prem season as joint top try-scorer and won his first two England caps over the summer demonstrates a resilience in someone who has made things look so easy in his short career to date.

Florian Wirtz has a chance to shine, there’s a Red Bull reunion on Tyneside and Chelsea face litmus test at Arsenal

Florian Wirtz is easing himself into his second season at Liverpool after a forgettable first. There were signs of promise against Nottingham Forest, where he set up the second equaliser and would have had a goal of his own if not for an offside in the buildup. It is clear the German needs to become more influential as a No 10 given the quality of players he has around him, especially after the expensive arrival of Bradley Barcola this week. Bruno Fernandes showed there is plenty of fun for an attacking midfielder to have against Ipswich and Wirtz can follow suit as a protagonist. Liverpool have drawn both their opening fixtures 2-2 and need something to kickstart their campaign, with a Friday night visit to promoted opposition a fine place to do so. Wirtz should cause problems but, if he does not, the internal competition will be after his spot. Will Unwin

Ipswich v Liverpool (Friday 8pm, all times BST)

Newcastle v Bournemouth (Saturday 12.30pm)

Brentford v Sunderland (Saturday 3pm)

• Atlético rejected £500,000-plus bid for Fiamma Benítez

• Arsenal handed difficult Champions League draw

Atlético Madrid rejected a bid of more than £500,000 from Manchester City for the Spain midfielder Fiamma Benítez on the Women’s Super League’s transfer deadline day, the Guardian can reveal.

The WSL champions are understood to have tried hard to add attacking-midfielder reinforcements before the English summer window closed on Thursday at 11pm BST, largely in light of news that their No 10 Vivianne Miedema could be out for at least the rest of 2026 with a knee injury.

• Frenchman falls in straight sets to No 14 seed

• Monfils, 40, will retire at end of 2026 season

• Tien reaches US Open third round for first time

It would have felt more fitting if Gaël Monfils went out with a roar, with a five-set epic matching the reputation he has built as tennis’s great showman.

He may have preferred the kind of bow he made at his home French Open earlier this year, a thrilling five-set fightback that ended well after midnight, or one that had a few more of his dazzling signature shots, like the mid-air forehand that stole the show in his first-round win this week.

Fans would have preferred contest for world crown, but 20-minute Rapid games are still competitive substitute

Magnus Carlsen, the world No 1, will be paired at least twice in the next few days with the world championship challenger, Uzbekistan’s Javokhir Sindarov, in the Tech Mahindra Global Chess League, the six-team franchise competition based on cricket’s Indian Premier League.

In 2024 the Global League was staged in London, but this year it is back in India at Bengaluru (formerly Bangalore), India’s technology capital, from 5-13 September, finishing two days before the 400-team chess Olympiad opens in Samarkand, Uzbekistan.

Collective training exercises for UK-based units to be suspended for most of this year amid budget pressures

The British army has been ordered to halt non-essential training exercises in an effort to save money.

Troops preparing to be deployed or on deployments, those who are on standby or in a quick-reaction role will continue to train as normal. But collective training exercises for UK-based units are being suspended for most of this year amid budget pressures.

Governments are now quicker to point the finger at Moscow, but critics say their inaction invites more sabotage

Russia’s suspected sabotage campaign across Europe appears to be gathering pace again, confronting governments with a problem they have struggled to solve since the start of the war in Ukraine: how to impose a meaningful cost on Moscow for attacks that remain deliberately below the threshold of conventional war.

Over the past month alone, an explosives-laden drone was discovered next to a Ukrainian cargo plane at Germany’s Leipzig airport, Poland has faced suspected acts of sabotage, and a string of unexplained explosions and fires have hit defence facilities supplying Ukraine across Europe.

Ministers draw up inspection regime to enforce rules limiting sugar, fat and salt

Schools could be reprimanded if they serve food containing too much fat, salt or sugar under new checks to ensure pupils receive healthy lunches.

The Department for Education is finalising plans for a promised “robust national enforcement system” to ensure all 21,500 state-funded schools in England comply with existing nutrition standards.

Charity says extra delivery costs equivalent to 47 health clinics in Afghanistan operating for six months

The charity Save the Children has said the oil price shock unleashed by Donald Trump’s war on Iran is forcing it to “spend more to reach fewer children”.

The NGO analysed the increased costs of transport, fuel, food and medical supplies as a result of the Middle East conflict.

Prolific author campaigned against domestic violence, female genital mutilation, pornography and the Vietnam and Gulf wars

• ‘We badly need to raise our boys more like our girls’: Gloria Steinem – a life in quotes

• Hillary Clinton leads tributes to Gloria Steinem: ‘Her activism was rooted in optimism’

Gloria Steinem, the American feminist and journalist whose activism helped push through greater rights for women around the world has died, aged 92.

Steinem “passed away peacefully at her home in New York City, surrounded by some of the many who loved her”, a statement shared to her Instagram page said.

Exclusive: New environment secretary insists ‘nothing is off the table’ in dealing with ailing Thames Water

Britain’s insolvency laws cannot deal with the aggressive behaviour shown by the companies that control Thames Water, the environment secretary has said, as she confirmed ministers were prepared to take it into public ownership.

Angela Eagle told the Guardian she was determined to reform the water industry after being told by Andy Burnham to make it her top priority.

Huge rollout of fish farms could harm ecosystems and threaten vulnerable communities’ food sources, say experts

Nearly half of the world’s wild fish catch will be ground into animal feed for farmed fish if plans to expand aquaculture go ahead, a report has found.

The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) is aiming to increase aquaculture – where fish are farmed rather than caught in the wild – production by 75% by 2040.

Event is likely to be largest in at least 1,000 years and will pile extra heat into a world already in a climate crisis

The El Niño climate phenomenon is “supersizing before our eyes”, the UN has said. The event is near certain to shatter temperature records, according to the latest forecasts.

The El Niño is likely to be the largest in at least 1,000 years and will pile extra heat into an atmosphere where temperatures are already rising rapidly due to global heating. The combination means 2027 is set to “blow apart” the record and be the hottest year ever recorded.

Methane is a potent greenhouse gas that traps more than 80 times as much heat than carbon dioxide over a 20-year period and causes 25% of global heating today. We definitely don’t want this gas spewing needlessly into the atmosphere, but in 2023 that’s exactly what environment editor Damian Carrington found was happening when he reported on 1,000 super-emitting methane leaks across the globe. Now Turkmenistan, the worst country for mega-leaks, has begun to plug them. Damian tells Madeleine Finlay why some experts call stopping leaks the climate ‘emergency brake’ and reveals which countries are still failing to act.

Barrister representing four who smashed drones at Israeli arms factory says ruling of ‘terrorist connection’ led to heftier sentences

Palestine Action activists who were the first defendants convicted of property damage whose offending was deemed to have a “terrorist connection” have launched an appeal of “fundamental constitutional importance” against the judge’s finding.

Charlotte Head, 30, Leona Kamio, 31, Fatema Rajwani, 22, and Samuel Corner, 24, received lengthy sentences in June for smashing up drones and other equipment at Israeli arms manufacturer Elbit Systems’ factory in Filton, Bristol, in 2024.

Organ kept Tim Andrews off dialysis and acted as a ‘bridge’ while he waited for a human transplant in the US

A genetically modified kidney from a pig called Wilma has kept a 66-year-old man with kidney failure alive for a record nine months and successfully acted as a “bridge” to a human transplant in a world first.

Tim Andrews was seriously ill with end-stage kidney disease caused by type 2 diabetes and had only a 9% chance of receiving a human kidney within five years, against a more than 40% risk of dying or being removed from the waiting list.

US tech company has sued London mayor after he prevented it from working with Metropolitan police

Sadiq Khan has agreed for his text messages and emails to be searched as part of a legal battle with Palantir, the high court has been told, after he prevented the US technology company from working with the Metropolitan police.

The London mayor stepped in to block a £50m deal between Palantir and the Met in May, with the artificial intelligence developer suing Khan’s office over the decision.

Green party leader says he will ‘stand up for people struggling to pay their bills’ if he becomes MP for Holborn and St Pancras

Zack Polanski has announced his intention to fight for the Commons seat vacated by Keir Starmer, setting up a high-stakes byelection pitting the mass campaigning of his Greens against a resurgent Labour under Andy Burnham.

Local Greens in Holborn and St Pancras still have to formally select their candidate under a process that will not be completed until next Friday. But it seems inevitable they will endorse Polanski, under whose leadership the party has soared in the polls, with membership more than tripling.

The decision marks a setback for Republicans in a national redistricting battle

• Sign up for US Breaking News emails

A Missouri House race has been rocked by the Wednesday arrest of Republican candidate Thomas Ross, whom prosecutors accuse of attempting to frame his primary opponent Louise Secker for cocaine possession.

In June, Ross allegedly gave his former campaign manager, identified by the initials “CS” in court documents, a bag of cocaine and Adderall. The two allegedly devised a plan for the former manager to stash the drugs in Secker’s purse or vehicle.

Troops escort settlers into al-Mughayyir and raze village outside Hebron as ethnic cleansing of West Bank continues

Israelis have shot dead two teenagers in a Palestinian village encircled by settlers, and Israeli troops have razed an entire village outside Hebron, in the latest attacks in a surge of Israeli terror and ethnic cleansing across the occupied West Bank.

The shootings targeted Khalil Abu Alia, 16, who was about to start 11th grade at the al-Mughayyir boys school, and 19-year-old Omar al-Nassan, who graduated from the same institution with top marks this summer.

Believed to be first deportations to fourth country, the six face ‘horrific conditions’ in Equatorial Guinea, say lawyers

In late August, around 20 people were put on a flight in the US, shackled at the wrists, waist and ankles, and sent to Liberia as part of one of the largest third-country deportation arrangements of Donald Trump’s second term.

Although more than 23,000 people have been sent to 26 countries other than their own since last year, that day saw something that had not happened before: six people refused to get off the plane – and were instead taken to another country.

Student protesters among those hacked, says digital rights group, though Aleksandar Vučić’s government denies spying

At least 14 people from across Serbian civil society were targeted with advanced spyware earlier this year in what the digital rights group Share Foundation said was the largest documented ​wave of such infection in Serbia to date.

The wave of spyware infections was discovered in August after Apple notified people in 110 ⁠countries that they had probably been victims ⁠of mercenary spyware.

Under-pressure carmaker will shed 15% of workforce and halve its product line in sector’s biggest ever restructure

The car company Volkswagen has approved controversial plans to shed 100,000 jobs in a battle for survival as it faces fierce competition from Chinese rivals.

After the latest round of talks this week, the company announced a further 50,000 job cuts and agreed a staggered end to current production at four German plants: Emden, Zwickau, Hanover and the Audi site in Neckarsulm between 2031 to 2034. There are no specific plans beyond that.

Valuation above $11bn expected for firm whose fans include Prince Harry, Jennifer Aniston and Kim Kardashian

Fans of Oura are accustomed to using its trendy smart rings to fastidiously monitor their health but now investors are preparing to track a new metric: its share price.

The company’s filing to list imminently on the Nasdaq stock exchange in New York was made public on Thursday.

Opposition mounts as at least 20 projects proposed, including one in Fife billed as second largest in world

Kat Jones may be the closest thing Scotland has to Erin Brockovich in 2026. Standing in the shadow of Arthur’s Seat outside Holyrood, the 52-year-old is revving up the crowd of protesters around her. “Who is here from Lammermuir? Ayrshire? What about Aberdeen?” she calls to the crowd.

On Thursday, hundreds travelled to Edinburgh to call for an immediate moratorium on Scotland’s datacentre boom, which includes one project in Auchtertool, Fife, that has been billed as the second largest in the world.

Relocation coincides with proposed laws that opponents say would entrench power of US tech billionaires in country

Dozens of protesters converged on Peter Thiel’s mansion in Buenos Aires this week after a congressional session raised questions about the billionaire’s presence in the country.

In white masks, they held signs saying “Peter Thief” and “No to the Peter Thiel law” in front of the wrought-iron gates of the $12m (£8.9m) residence, which Thiel bought in April as he moved his family to Argentina.

The Bayeux tapestry arrives, the Americas go mainstream and modern, and Manchester threads its way to Korea and India – all in your weekly dispatch

The Bayeux tapestry
Blood and thunder, friendship and betrayal, marginal monsters and raw sex – all human life and more is depicted in this medieval artistic masterpiece that tells an epic national story with unrivalled punch and power.
• British Museum, London, from 10 September until 11 July 2027

James Gunn and Peter Safran’s regime had good reasons to ditch Ben Affleck’s Batman and Henry Cavill’s Superman. Other choices have been much harder to fathom

There was never going to be a completely painless way to break up the old DC gang. Warner Bros’ DC Extended Universe probably needed to be ruthlessly ripped apart in order to create space for James Gunn and Peter Safran’s brand-new DCU. We almost certainly did need a clean break from the likes of Ben Affleck (Batman) and Henry Cavill (Superman), if only to persuade audiences that this really was a proper reboot. The question, as Gal Gadot may have been pondering this week, is quite why some of the old universe’s supporting players were smuggled safely into the new continuity while others were left sprawling amid the ruins.

Speaking on the Happy Sad Confused podcast, Gadot, who starred in two solo Wonder Woman movies for director Patty Jenkins, revealed that nobody at DC Studios ever formally told her she had been dropped. One minute, Gadot says, she was being assured by Gunn and Safran that they would develop a third instalment with her; the next, she was looking on in mounting alarm as the entire infrastructure of the previous DC continuum was blown to smithereens. “They were like, ‘We’re going to develop it with you, the third one,’” she said. “But I saw the way everybody else was handled, right? And I, you know – the Henry [Cavill] situation was unfortunate. I was in the middle of that. The Henry situation was not handled elegantly, to say the least. Same with Patty – it was not handled elegantly.”

Amelia Dimoldenberg’s series helped turn YouTube into a world-beating phenomenon. As it bows out, we remember its best bits – from mocking MC Ghetts to that sizzling tension with Billie Eilish and Andrew Garfield

When Amelia Dimoldenberg posted a video to social media this week, telling an unknown companion “we need to talk”, it felt like a monumental announcement was on the horizon. And so it came to pass. Chicken Shop Date, Dimoldenberg’s YouTube series, is coming to an end.

The press release covering the announcement came packed with superlatives. Chicken Shop Date has generated 34m hours of views over the years, and has reached 97% of all countries on the planet. What it didn’t mention is that Chicken Shop Date helped to legitimise YouTube as a platform that has taken on – and perhaps beaten – television. The very fact that the Guardian is covering the end of a YouTube video series in the first place is, in part, down to Chicken Shop Date.

In Brailled It, the tension and stakes of the annual Braille Challenge are brought to the screen by three of the competitors

For the past 26 years, about 22,000 blind and visually impaired schoolchildren from around the world have competed in the Braille Challenge: a literacy test against a loudly ticking clock. It has all the theater of a Model UN competition, all the stakes of a make-or-break standardized exam and young competitors from first grade through high school juggling their own expectations, ambitions and emotions – with a degree of difficulty that is surely unfathomable to most.

Brailled It is a new film that immerses viewers in the ups and downs of the 2024 edition of the Braille Challenge, which saw more than 1,100 students descend on the University of Southern California campus. But instead of Emmy-winning director David Grabias steering a phalanx of camera and sound operators through the scenes, as he has done for past documentary projects on climate change and immigration policy, he strapped cameras to the competitors and left them to their own devices. “Every documentary is a collaboration, and you’re giving agency to your participants,” he says. “But this was: you’re going to go off and make the film, and we’ll help put it together.”

Venice film festival
A white man’s eyes are opened to cruelty and racism when a young boy is thrust into his life in Gianni Amelio’s bold but ultimately naive drama

From the heart of Rome, and broadly in an Italian tradition of sentimentalist realism, film-maker Gianni Amelio brings us a fairytale of the city, about the liberal white guilt of those who live a prosperous pain-free existence and those whom Frantz Fanon called the wretched of the earth.

There is some incidental interest and the film is beautifully shot, but finally it buckles under the weight of its own preposterousness and naivety. It is also sketchy about how and why people go into and come out of prison; the final shot, a supposedly heartwarming visionary moment of redemption and reconciliation, looks absurd.

Pedro Pascal’s bounty hunter and Baby Yoda hit the big time, plus Kenneth Branagh and Ryan Reynolds’s funny cold war buddy caper has charm to spare

With one of the best Star Wars series going feature-length, its biggest draw, “Baby Yoda”, rightly shares top billing with Pedro Pascal’s perma-helmeted bounty hunter. Otherwise, it’s business as usual for the grumpy Mando and his cute, Force-friendly ward as they get involved in a spot of Hutt family politics. Hired by the New Republic to track down a warlord still sympathetic to the old empire, they must deal with Jabba the Hutt’s siblings, who want the return of their abducted nephew Rotta (Jeremy Allen White) in exchange for information. Featuring a bizarre cameo from Martin Scorsese as a multi-limbed food truck cook, Jon Favreau’s sci-fi adventure is a light, lithe addition to the canon.
Out now, Disney+

Royal Albert Hall, London
In their second Proms concert, the Berlin Phil brought Beethoven’s Violin Concerto (with Augustin Hadelich the virtuosic and breathtaking soloist), and a detailed and compelling take on Scriabin’s third symphony

It’s the clarity that hits you first. The soft thuds of timpani that open Beethoven’s Violin Concerto landed from the back of the stage with the immediacy of taps on the shoulder, quietly urgent. The string sound was simultaneously luminous and translucent. Pizzicato bass-lines were shaped as if the main event and bubbled upwards through the rest of the texture. You’ll hear orchestral playing to match this on high-end studio recordings, of course, where the entire process can be geared to achieving such crystalline polish. And the BBC’s sound engineers can work miracles in real time on radio broadcasts of Proms performances. But to produce such lucidity live – particularly in the Royal Albert Hall, with its monumental bathroom acoustic – is another thing entirely.

For that, you need an orchestra of the calibre of the Berlin Philharmonic under its chief conductor Kirill Petrenko. But violinist Augustin Hadelich also served up his own brand of astonishingly flawless musical beauty as the soloist in the Beethoven. In the first movement, his rising octaves appeared to float out of the orchestra, his bowing inaudible – the kind of violin-playing, in fact, that appears to defy the laws of physics. The slow movement was a masterclass in bel canto, the third a biting, bouncing romp as both Hadelich and Petrenko pushed gleefully through the rondo theme. The apparent ease of Hadelich’s virtuosity – all his energy seemingly focused on phrasing and dialogue with the orchestra – was nothing short of breathtaking.

Nacho Pezzati’s new album Swerved taps into the moody ambience of the UK north-west underground, ratcheting a tangible and thrilling sense of unease

From Barcelona, Spain
Recommend if you like Space Afrika, Shackleton, Purelink
Up next Swerved out now

Swerved, by Barcelona-based producer Nueen (Nacho Pezzati) is a bassy, moody, darkly ambient album that travels through R&B, drill, cloud rap and dub without any obvious changes in its grey-black weather. But this is slowly churning music, on the brink of rot. By the 10th track, Copicat, the unease is tangible; after a slow, agonising ratcheting build of fanbelt hi-hats, the album’s only drop arrives with the weight and power of a cloudburst. It’s thrilling.

(Self-released)
Singer Emma Morton brings an indie-girl chorister’s brightness to this captivating debut album, on songs with hints of darkness that sound ages-old

Sairie’s debut album begins at this transitional time of year, its glistening psych-folk easing us out of the summer heat towards the coming darkness. In its Pentangle-like opener Song for the Winter, birds’ voices “climb higher”, hills “glow brighter” and waves “call out louder”, and the songs that follow are similarly saturated with colour and energy, creating an intensity that gradually reveals its perils.

Based in Brighton, Sairie have released a stack of captivating singles and EPs since 2019, spanning folk, originals and modern covers; one great double A-side released earlier in the year had singer Emma Morton master the ballad May Carol and Françoise Hardy’s Tous Les Garçons et Les Filles. Her tone hooks an 80s indie-pop choirgirl-like brightness in tracks like Harder Than It Seemed, bolstered by Andy Thomas’s meaty bass, and makes you realise this style might have its roots in folk singers such as Maddy Pryor. It also channels the twisted beauty of Josephine Foster on songs such as The Breeze on the Meadow, where a wasp-like drone from Jon Griffin’s harmonium, Maria Marzaioli’s violin and Alice Eldridge’s cello amplifies hints of strangeness.

Komsi/Nyman/BBC Symphony Orchestra/Oramo
(Ondine)
Three works by the idiosyncratic Finnish composer who died in 2023 are recorded for the first time

Kaija Saariaho died in 2023, leaving behind a significant body of unrecorded music. The three works here, all premiere recordings, span 40 years, yet each bears the Finnish composer’s idiosyncratic fingerprints.

The most substantial is Vista (2019), a tone poem inspired by a drive along the scenic Interstate 5 highway to San Diego. The first part, Horizons, opens with a lingering oboe duet before brass, winds and gleaming tuned percussion usher in more piquant colours. This is music on cruise control, with otherworldly washes of strings and a deal of ear-catching incident. Targets, which follows, is altogether more dynamic, a turbulent road trip that winds down to a serene conclusion. Fellow Finn Sakari Oramo is a sensitive, sure-footed guide with the BBC Symphony Orchestra commendably precise and texturally detailed throughout.

Fetch by Colin Bramwell; Girling by Eve Esfandiari-Denney; The Dead One, The Unconscious One, Thundering in Your Ear, Thriving Slumber by Jay Gao; Belling the Leopard by Clementine Ewokolo Burnley; The Matter by Padraig Regan

Fetch by Colin Bramwell (And Other Stories, £14.99)
Bramwell’s translation of Fernando Pessoa’s work into Scots won him considerable recognition: it took the Oxford Weidenfeld Translation prize and the Highland Book Prize. Between source and target language, there is always a gap; the translator endeavours within that gap to identify meaning and intention, and that is the difficult work of translation. Fetch, Bramwell’s own debut collection, lyrically thematises this gap in the poet-human’s condition: “I’m an instrument for something else / a digital piano that if you opened it up / you wouldn’t understand the wiring.” Fetch (in Celtic folklore, a doppelganger) is by turns solemnly tender, comically worldly, literarily devout. Here you’ll find deep engagement with Russian poets such as Osip Mandelstam and Anna Akhmatova, poems that fuse Scots and English, alongside filial memories and premonitions of fatherhood. “Death is certain, but back then I was too young for that shit.” For a debut, Bramwell’s poetics convey an uncanny sense of wisdom, patience and, eventually, peace.

Girling by Eve Esfandiari-Denney (Fitzcarraldo, £12.99)
Before theme and subject, there is the pure, iridescent beauty of Esfandiari-Denney’s sentences; a singular voice that is alluring and sensuous, pleasurable to follow to whichever subject the poet chooses. The subjects are girlhood-cum-womanhood, the line between debilitating illness and delusional wellness (“thank god / you invested / in lion’s mane”), the flickering concept of free will for a species so programmed by genes: “I have wondered to what extent my cancer diagnosis is my mother’s, or my grandmother’s cell mutation, before my own … I look up from a cigarette mid-sentence…” The collection hybridises recognisable prose forms: the essay, the diary, the text message, the anecdote. These are interspliced with short-lined lyric poems that startle because of the bubbly voice from which they come: “I hope it’s ok to die. I can / become something / like actualised metaphor.” The magic of this collection is that it is never highfalutin, finding a way to make an ending like “DJ are you listening did you read to the end will you blow my voice a kiss” powerfully funny and moving.

Elizabeth Jane Howard’s niece has picked up the thread of her much-loved family saga series, taking the story into the 1960s

Elizabeth Jane Howard’s beloved family saga the Cazalet Chronicles spans three decades in the life of the upper-middle-class Cazalet family. The first four books, written in the 1990s, run from a bucolic prewar 1937 to a bruising 1947, while the fifth, 2013’s All Change, skips ahead, sitting lonely in 1956. The books are exquisite doll’s houses of feeling and object: both period detail and eternal emotion are rendered precisely and vigorously in Howard’s lovely prose. “Panoramic, expansive, intriguing as social history and generous in their storytelling,” Hilary Mantel wrote in the Guardian. The enormous cast of characters – four late-Victorian siblings, their parents, their children and partners and ex-partners and servants and friends and lovers and enemies and cars and houses – sprawl deliciously over the years. The family fortunes rise and fall. Marriages fail; deaths occur; babies are born; people fall in love. Things change; things stay the same.

Written a decade after the death of the original author, The Golden Hours by Louisa Young adds a sixth to this quintet. As with all Cazalet novels, to describe the plot would be impossible: it is simply that many people, whom we have come to love over the course of the previous novels, live their lives, now in the early 1960s.

The American author on falling in love with The Great Gatsby, being inspired by Dylan Thomas – and the memoir of a canoe trip in Texas he comes back to

My earliest reading memory
The deaths of Old Dan and Little Ann in Wilson Rawls’s Where the Red Fern Grows were etched into my being as a first grader in Chesterfield County, Virginia.

My favourite book growing up
Stephen King’s The Stand. I completely lost myself in the story. I don’t think I realised at the time what a rare gift it is to have that experience.

The activist’s memoir, due to be published this month, now stands as a posthumous testament to her remarkable life

Gloria Steinem was due to speak at a women’s lunch in New York at the end of this month and at more events in October, illustrating the central theme of An Unexpected Life, her new memoir, which, when it’s published a few weeks from now, will stand as posthumous testament to the 92-year-old icon: just keep going. So it is, after her death on Wednesday, that the book’s opening pages unfold with a deep, added poignancy and when Steinem expresses gratitude for a life that has been both happier and longer “than I ever imagined”, one is struck by the greater gratitude we probably owe her.

An Unexpected Life is a follow-up of sorts to My Life on the Road, the activist’s memoir of a decade ago, and as the tributes pour in, the book offers us an opportunity to go back over Steinem’s hardscrabble origins in Toledo, Ohio, and the roots of her activism. This is where it all happened, the formation of a woman who would come to define second wave feminism by combining a tough-as-they-come stance with something that looked a lot like serenity. Reading the first half of the book, one is reminded of Steinem’s original power and the improbability and iconoclasm of her journey, in which a childhood governed by poverty and dysfunction turned into a lifelong mission to resist the narrow templates laid out for her.

As FromSoftware’s new multiplayer game The Duskbloods nears release, the legendary game director behind Dark Souls talks connection, pessimism and of course, feet

Since 2009’s Demon’s Souls, Japanese video game director Hidetaka Miyazaki has shown the world a different way to think about game design. His games defy convention with punishing fights, obscure rules, and unknowable, inhospitable worlds. The “Soulslike” genre – named after Demon’s Souls and its sequel Dark Souls – is now ubiquitous, influencing multimillion-sellers from God of War and Star Wars: Jedi to Hollow Knight. Miyazaki’s most recent success, 2022’s Elden Ring, which credited Game of Thrones author George RR Martin as a co-creator, sold over 30m copies and inspired Alex Garland to adapt it for the big screen at A24. It earned Miyazaki a spot on Time magazine’s “most influential” list, an accolade he shares with just one other game developer: Mario creator Shigeru Miyamoto.

Miyazaki is now 51 and has been FromSoftware’s president since 2014, elevated from game designer to CEO after the success of the Souls series. He has a cherubic face that could pass for 35. He rarely speaks publicly, and never on camera. When he does speak, he answers questions like one of his characters – softly, sadly, his head bowed, making eye-contact only when I am speaking. Outside the studio where we speak is the sprawl of Tokyo’s Shinjuku, an ever-changing maze where tourists get lost and pop-up stores appear and vanish without a trace. Today, a J-pop band performs in the square as the cicadas scream from the trees. A gilded statue of Malania, one of Elden Ring’s toughest bosses, looms over this dimly lit conference room inside From’s headquarters, a bonfire checkpoint away from the chaos.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Actor will play 15th-century hero in sweeping production about Welsh rebellion against English crown

There are myriad films, plays and books focusing on heroes of English, Scottish and Irish history but far fewer that tell the stories of the great figures of Wales.

A major new play about the Welsh nobleman Owain Glyndŵr’s early 15th-century rebellion against the English crown will help redress the balance this autumn.

The ex-marketing manager’s win, for his spoof Sycamore Gap-inspired whodunnit Rewilding, arrives just as he’s gearing up for a new season of hit sketch show SNL UK – which he calls ‘the hardest job of my life’

For the last month, Chris Cantrill has been performing his fringe show Rewilding daily in a lunchtime slot. And yet, when we plan to speak about his victory in the Edinburgh comedy awards, the interview is arranged – on the festival’s penultimate day – for lunchtime. Can he really have won the fringe’s major prize, and – hell of a mic drop, this – immediately sacked off his last two shows? “I couldn’t be happier not to be at the festival today,” he says, on video call from his Northumberland home. But the cancellation, it transpires, is long-standing, because work starts immediately post-fringe on the new series of SNL UK, for which he writes.

“But I’m absolutely over the moon not to be doing my show right now,” he admits. “I’ve got a lot of adrenaline in my body slowly seeping out, and I feel like I’ve been hit by a train.” The Edinburgh comedy award (it used to be the Perrier, and was won in the past by Steve Coogan, The League of Gentlemen and Frank Skinner) has been a long time coming for Bradford-born Cantrill. This year’s was his fourth nomination, twice as a solo act, and twice as part of his duo The Delightful Sausage, alongside 2024 winner Amy Gledhill. He is, as I tease him when we speak, a comparatively senior winner, the oldest since Bridget Christie, also 42, 13 years ago. “Finally, a victory for the middle-aged white man!,” he retorts, then bursts into laughter. “Common sense at last!”

Theatre Royal Bath
Antihero actor Garry becomes a magnificent new kind of beast as Gerri, played with blistering hilarity by Tracy-Ann Oberman

The reputation of Noël Coward’s plays has involved escaping restrictions: his recorded clipped, waspish tone in key roles and a perception that, at a time when gay men’s careers and lives were at risk, the dramatist could not be socially and emotionally truthful.

Seven years ago, in an Old Vic revival of Coward’s 1942 off-stage comedy Present Laughter, Andrew Scott – as actor Garry Essendine, a gorgon of priapic self-importance – memorably banished the parodic playing style and probed forbidden subtext. Changing Joanna, one of Garry’s love interests, into Joe made characters bisexual or in sham marriages.

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

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

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

On the 300th anniversary of Gulliver’s Travels, we celebrate the biggest film stars of them all – from a stone colossus to a metal-munching alien and a 50ft woman on the rampage

Not a first-person-shooter BFG, alas, but one of Steven Spielberg’s worst films, reducing Roald Dahl’s story to digital pap. Mo-cap Mark Rylance, whose cutesy ungrammatical babbling should have been left on the printed page, is the 24ft Big Friendly Giant who kidnaps an orphan girl, Sophie. Ugh. Big Creepy Giant, more like.

The Canadian singer-songwriter answers your questions about her trailblazing career, her spirituality, and collaborations with the likes of Neko Case, Laura Veirs and Pee-wee Herman

I left the Canadian prairies many years ago, but they remain my home. How do you feel about that part of western Canada, where the prairies meet the Rocky mountains, which shaped us both? What does Alberta mean to you now? NicholasLittle
All of my artistic preferences were formed by the minimalism of the prairies, by the affordable space and the stillness. There weren’t many things around, so a field with bales would be this incredibly graphic moment, or a tree or a certain hill – very small increments of beauty placed in vast amounts of space. The sky was very important and a feeling of – I wouldn’t say loneliness, but solace, perhaps. That’s my bottom line, my basic instinct. It’s the frame that that informs all of my art, the way I decorate my house, the way I sing, the way I dress. That sort of minimalist nature is embedded in me.

Many people can sing a song well, but you’re a vocalist who emotes raw vulnerability. Do you work like a method actor – entering, or reliving, the reality of the song during the practice period? verdantearth
I try to sink myself into the lyrics for sure. I try to create visuals, sort of an emotional internal movie of what the lyrics possess, to relive it emotionally. With [Case/Lang/Veirs track] Honey and Smoke, for example, I imagine watching somebody I’m in love with dancing with somebody else and feeling jealousy.

McDonagh’s new film, Wild Horse Nine, stars John Malkovich as an agent in 1970s Chile who feels ‘guilt and regret’ over his role in global interventions

The US’s history of intervening in democratic processes around the world deserves more attention in the light of current political developments, playwright and film-maker Martin McDonagh has said, as his Oscar-tipped film about a rueful CIA agent premieres at the Venice film festival.

“I’ve been very interested in the truth of what the CIA has been doing over the last 60 years, and the awful things they’ve done all around the world,” McDonagh said about Wild Horse Nine, his first film since his 2022 tragicomedy The Banshees of Inisherin. “I think maybe something that’s not talked about enough. We know what the KGB are like, but we probably don’t question the CIA’s activity as much as we ought to.”

He is famed for creating a golden loo that was stolen and a $6m banana that was eaten. But, says the sculptor ahead of a major new show in Germany, there’s more to his work than pranks and provocation

Maurizio Cattelan, the art world’s merriest prankster, pauses when asked which object in his sprawling new Berlin show is most likely to be defaced, stolen or eaten, then emits a foghorn of a laugh. “There is no need to vandalise anything,” says the trim, soulful Italian, explaining that he has already taken care of all that, given how the work cuts villains, imposters and straw men down to size. “But,” he says, referring to the show’s more daring works, “maybe we need someone to resuscitate people.”

Cattelan, who speaks in a lilting English, grins broadly, a mischievous glint in his brown eyes. Speaking on the subterranean level of Mies van der Rohe’s weightless Neue Nationalgalerie (NNG) in Berlin, he darts between the impish and the profound in conversation, mirroring the dizzying range of his work. The silver-haired sculptor is best known for duct-taping a banana to a wall in 2019 and calling it Comedian, in a droll commentary on the excesses of the art market. The joke became even funnier when it sold for $6.2m, then hilarious when its buyer took a bite out of his purchase and swallowed it.

Want every day to be a good hair day? We tested 22 hair dryers to find the best, from gentle diffusers to high-speed and travel-ready models

• The best hot brushes, tried and tested by our expert

In my years of reviewing beauty tech, it was upgrading my hair dryer that made the biggest difference to my routine. I used to dread hair-wash days: the chore of shampooing, conditioning and rinsing my hair, plus the time – and aching arms – spent getting it dry again.

My clunky, bargain-bucket hair dryer of seven years was weighty, deafeningly loud, and took a painstaking 20 minutes to dry my hair. So happier days really did arrive when I switched to a new model.

From a period cottage in Oxford with its own blue plaque, to a quiet leafy pocket in a bustling area of London

Missed out on a fan this summer? Chill your space with our pick of the best still in stock, including tower and misting models

• The best portable neck and handheld fans
• Dyson HushJet Mini Cool fan review

Our world is getting hotter. Summer heatwaves are so frequent, they’re stretching the bounds of what we think of as summer. Hot-and-bothered home working and sweaty, sleepless nights are now alarmingly common.

Get a good fan and you can dodge the temptation of air conditioning. Aircon is incredibly effective, but it uses a lot of electricity … and burning fossil fuels is how we got into this mess in the first place. Save money and carbon by opting for a great fan instead.

We boiled litres of water to find the best electric kettles, from hard-water heroes to vintage-style, repairable and wifi-connected models

• The best air fryers, tried and tested for crisp and crunch

Despite the march of progress, the humble kettle remains a kitchen staple. It’s what we turn to in times of strife, when spirits are flagging, or to start our day. When a visitor calls, one of the first things we often do is put the kettle on.

Many small appliances have evolved beyond their original form, but the kettle’s basic principles remain largely unchanged. Water goes in and heats until a thermostat switches it off; the water then pours out, and we enjoy a cuppa. However, the technology that goes into a kettle has been slowly improving: better insulation to keep water hotter for longer and reduce reboils; different temperature settings to suit every drink from green tea to herbal brews; and more features such as filters and concealed elements to keep scale out of our cups.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A bar for the bountiful season, with a rubbly oat crust, a soft fruit filling and a crisp topping

September is always a wistful time for me. Summer has all but slipped away, the days are noticeably shorter and the children are heading back to school. But there is comfort, too, in settling back into familiar routines. These bars, with their buttery oat crust, soft fruit filling and crisp, golden topping, are just the sort of thing to have waiting for whenever everyone drifts home. I like to use a mixture of apples – some that soften and collapse into the filling, others that hold their shape – to give the bars a little more texture and interest.

Palatable premix cocktails – well, ones that adults like, at least – are far and few between

For somebody whose children recently learned how to crack open a tinnie, this week’s tasting was a perilous one. Cans covered in seductive, brightly coloured pictures of parasols, palm trees and their favourite fruits filled the kitchen, and both the seven- and the five-year-old tried to take a swig. Premix cocktails are disproportionately marketed to young drinkers – gateway booze, if you will, as the likes of Bacardi Breezer pineapple was for me – and often have a one-note, cloying taste. Absolut’s passionfruit martini and Malibu’s piña colada are cases in point: both have sugary, synthetic fruit flavours that mask, or even eliminate, the taste of the base spirits. Is it any wonder that, in 2024, Britain had the worst rate of child alcohol consumption in the world? These drinks make it easy to forget that you’re even drinking alcohol.

Perhaps more than any other theme, writing about premix cocktails has made me confront the very question of why we drink alcohol. Take me as an example. My Bacardi Breezer years were undoubtedly a question of booze for function; it loosened my teenage inhibitions and I had a laugh. The fact that this so-called “alcopop” was so saccharine chimed with my childish predilection for sweetness, and conveniently masked the flavour of the rum, which may at the time have offended my uninitiated palate. Twenty-five years on, and my palate is a different place, and I welcome the notes and nuances of a well-mixed drink. I now drink alcohol to savour it, and I like what I’m drinking to give me pause; it doesn’t need to be hard work, but I do like it to make me think.

September’s preserving season is a race to capture the heady flavours of summer fruit

Sign up here for our weekly food newsletter, Feast

The ideal time to make lemonade, when lemons are juicy and plentiful and cheap, is in the dead of winter, when the last thing you want is a cooling glass of lemonade. Similarly, jam-making is best done on a grey November afternoon, when the windows are steamed up and the kitchen is the warmest place in the house. Winter is exactly when you want to be standing over a great pot of bubbling fruit and boiling sugar, but much less so in summer, which is when all the good fruit is in season. From May until mid-October, our fruit supplier bills spike exponentially as boxes and boxes of seasonal fruit in its absolute prime make their way to our kitchen for a jam session, and the practice of turning them into a sweet spread is part profession, part obsession. Jam is very much our jam.

Early in the season, we can just about cope. The soft fruits start to come in when the weather is still behaving itself, and we love giving them a little seasonal accent – elderflower comes with the last rhubarb, as well as with the first strawberries and apricots, and it pairs wonderfully with all of them (if you are starting there, Felicity Cloake has a very thorough guide to the perfect strawberry jam). Cherries, meanwhile, go with just about anything, while young bay leaves often find themselves heading into the blackcurrant pot. Fennel fronds and peaches are another favourite, and we make some whenever we can get those two at the same moment. It is an amazing combination: sweet, perfumed and just a little bit green.

A fresh, seasonal vegetable soup that can be made in advance and only improves in texture and flavour over time

Now that I am an accomplished sourdough maker, soon to start my own micro-bakery and YouTube channel … Only joking! Now that I can make half-decent, variable loaves of sourdough, I have become more aware of how the temperature in the kitchen affects food. Not that I was completely unaware, of course – I have curdled enough milk and neglected enough eggs – but feeding, then watching the sourdough starter in a jar, and then the dough itself, seeing how the process takes hours in winter, speeds up in spring, then takes on a foaming, bubbling and at times terrifying life of its own in summer, are lessons in living microorganisms and fermentation.

It is a shame, then, that I didn’t give the same attention to the pan of summer minestrone I had felt so pleased with myself for cooking, cutting the courgettes carefully so they looked like Trivial Pursuit scoring wedges, while drinking tea and listening for the bottle bank lorry to drop the glass into its box, and before the sun (or anyone else) was up. Even though the combined taste of minestrone and milky Yorkshire tea is interesting, I knew it had turned out particularly well. I put on the lid, left the pan at the back of the stove and went out.

It’s kind of you to wonder if you should change the way things were left, writes advice columnist Eleanor Gordon-Smith. But it’s possible his preference is already clear

• Read more Leading questions

My dad died suddenly earlier this year, with no will, and I am unsure as to how I should distribute the estate. We are talking about very modest sums of money – about £5,000 (US$6,750, A$9,500) in total.

My dad was a very ethical person. While his death was unexpected, he had a sense it was coming. About six months before he died, he arranged for the disposal of many personal effects. The lack of a will, given his self-discipline and preferences for forward planning, is odd.

Robin keeps used packaging on the kitchen ledge. Benny thinks that’s unhygienic. You decide who’s talking rubbish

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

We’ve had little flies buzzing around – I know they’re coming from the recycling

I was forced to examine the idea of sexual pleasure after a tumor was removed from my spinal cord

Ten years ago, my right elbow started to hurt. The internet suggested I had tennis elbow, so I stopped playing tennis. Once the outer elbow pain moved inward, I changed my self-diagnosis to golfer’s elbow. I stopped lifting weights, competitive dragon-boating and bouldering.

For good measure, I consulted an occupational therapist about my nightly bullet-vibrator routine after reading that golfer’s elbow is common among construction workers who operate heavy-duty vibrating machinery. He listened closely and said he’d note VRI on my patient chart. I asked what VRI meant, eager to end my diagnostic journey. “Vibrator-related injury,” he responded. We busted out laughing.

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

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

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

Across the world, hundreds of people have come to believe they have made extraordinary scientific discoveries with AI chatbots such as ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini. Others say their AI has ‘awakened’, or is leading them to a higher spiritual realm. The Guardian journalist Michael Safi begins investigating a phenomenon labelled ‘AI psychosis’, travelling to the US to meet two people who have been on weird journeys with their chatbots

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

New Zealand decision follows Australian approval in 2023 of psychedelics to treat PTSD and treatment-resistant depression

Two psychiatrists in New Zealand won approval on Friday to prescribe pharmaceutical-grade MDMA to people with severe post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

The move by New Zealand’s pharmaceutical regulatory body Medsafe makes the country only the second worldwide to approve the party drug for use in treating PTSD, following Australia in 2023.

Experts say that the smell comes from a chemical compound called 2-nonenal, and it can show up much earlier than one expects

Last week, my mom complained that she’s starting to smell “like an old person”.

She had grabbed her favorite sweater and draped it over herself at the movie theater. “It smelled like my grandmother,” she said, almost whispering. “I thought someone must have borrowed the jacket. But it was just me.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A fragment of temperate rainforest lies on the edge of Dartmoor, and following years of conservation work, its owners have now opened up a sustainable campsite next to this fragile ecosystem

Mist blankets the valley as I wheel my camping gear down the small hill towards a clearing ringed by trees and shrubs. A picnic bench sits at its edge, angled towards the reason why I’m here: one of the last remaining fragments of temperate rainforest in Britain. I’m pitching my tent at Wray Valley Camping, a low-impact site on Dartmoor’s eastern edge between Lustleigh and Moretonhampstead, where I’ll spend five days on one of the site’s “nearly wild” pitches.

Also known as Atlantic woodland, temperate rainforests depend on a rare combination of high humidity, rainfall and consistently mild coastal temperatures where the sea moderates the climate. They once stretched from the western Highlands of Scotland down to Cornwall, covering 20% of the UK, and sheltering rare and delicate lichens and plants. Today more than 95% of our temperate rainforest cover is gone, but Devon’s near-constant dampness and its exposure to the Atlantic make it one of the last strongholds for this rare habitat.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Increasing heatwaves mean we need to rethink what we grow. The good news? You can still go cottagecore

The only spot-watering my garden has seen in recent months was done by the builder in a quiet moment. I hadn’t asked him to, but I think he saw the state of things and took pity on an acer I’d given up on. I explained I’d been using the drought as an, admittedly extreme, experiment to find which plants are resilient to multiple heatwaves, but said he was welcome to take the acer back to his well-irrigated garden.

My observations are that the roses hung in there. Not flowering, as I’ve seen others doing, but mine are probably younger. The wildflower meadow has been surprisingly floriferous; it’s been a good year for zinnias – although not good enough to make me like them. The volunteer buddleja that was hacked to the ground in April made an Oasis-worthy comeback. Euphorbias, meconopsis, sage, erigeron: all fine. Volunteer robinia saplings loved life. Verbascum coped. My son has been eating passion fruit straight from the vine.

Appledore, Devon: By-the-wind sailors have been washed up in great numbers this summer. I stumble on a single one of these bright blue beauties

Amid the hot grit of the estuarine beach, a cool light glints. Not the habitual shade of mussel shells, nor even the shimmer of sea glass, this is a blue so bright that at first I mistake it for a kind of plastic, perhaps the discarded part of a pair of goggles.

I’m about to pick it up when something prompts me to pause, mid-swoop; an inkling that this is not synthetic, but animal.

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

Every now and then the Thursday quiz pauses to ponder humanity’s ongoing obsession with setting records for things that do not need to exist. Last week we had a cat breaking the world record for toe-count and a robot running the 100 metres faster than Usain Bolt. One feels a bit unnecessary, the other feels like the plot of a dystopian 1980s sci-fi film. Neither feel like things we used to actually count. Never mind. Here are 15 question on topical news, general knowledge and pop culture to amuse and delight. No anteaters were harmed in the making of this quiz. Allons-y!

The Thursday news quiz, No 263

A Maltese businessman has been cleared of involvement in the journalist’s death, but his trial revealed the challenges faced by those leading the search for her killers

The conclusion of the longest-running murder trial in Maltese history has left a country in turmoil, and a grieving family still searching for answers.

At 7.30pm on Wednesday, gasps and cheers echoed around hall 22 of the courts of justice in Valletta, as a jury pronounced a businessman accused of ordering the murder of the investigative journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia not guilty.

He grew up in the ghetto, became a global superstar – then gave it all up. Why did he step away from the spotlight?

Mr T explains why he’s late, but he wants to make one thing clear – this is not an apology. “You caught me in my devotion, and nothing comes before God. So I won’t say I apologise for the delay. I just want you to know that God comes first in all my life. For allowing my success, I give God the glory.”

He is here to discuss a new Netflix documentary, Untold Mr T: I Pity the Fool. At 74, he rarely gives interviews. But when Mr T decides to talk, he really does talk. What Mr T thinks, Mr T says. And I’ve never heard anyone trash the very thing they’re here to promote quite like Mr T does today.

Instagrammers have upended the British restaurant scene, and amassed followings in the millions. But has their moment already passed?

In 2017, two aspiring YouTubers going by the name Topjaw published a video posing the London foodie’s most important question: what to eat in Chinatown? They enlisted the help of longtime Instagrammer Kar-Shing Tong (better known by his username @ks_ate_here), who took them on a lovingly curated loop of the neighbourhood. Cantonese siu mei duck at Four Seasons, Chongqing-style handmade noodles at the now defunct Little Wooden Hut, and Barshu on Frith Street, where they decadently cracked a whole crab for the camera. Any of the 100,000-odd viewers who watched it at the time would be well served by its responsible (if unspectacular) recommendations. But in retrospect, the video may be of more interest to historians. In its unassuming and rapidly cut seven minutes, you can almost see the tectonic plates of the food world begin to shift.

Tong is the elder statesman: the @ks_ate_here account began in the social media dark ages, first on Twitter then on an Instagram that was dominated by static photography. He’s in his element in the video, dutifully explaining the history and technique behind the dishes. He is relaxed and affable in front of the camera, but in his own work he doesn’t show his face often – it just wasn’t the style. Topjaw is something different. Nine years ago, it was still embryonic: host Jesse Burgess sweating profusely at any hint of chilli, cameraman Will Warr unable to use chopsticks. But the formula was there. The constant checking in to see if what they’re eating truly is “the best”. Even doubled over from the heat of a spicy fish soup, Burgess’s eyes always find the camera. He holds out food for inspection and addresses the imagined viewer. The audience is out there. “KS has 40,000 Instagram followers! 40,000!” Burgess says, pointing at Tong with aspirational glee.

We would like to hear your tributes and memories of Gloria Steinem – whether you met her, or appreciated her work

Gloria Steinem, the American feminist and journalist whose activism helped push through greater rights for women around the world has died, aged 92.

We would like to hear your tributes and memories of Gloria Steinem – whether you met her, or appreciated her work.

Are you dealing with subsidence or other issues caused by the hot weather?

During a dry spell, such as the successive heatwaves that affected some parts of the UK this year, houses built on clay-rich soil suffer as moisture is sucked away by trees and bushes. This causes the clay to shrink and foundations to drop, causing structural problems.

We would like to speak to homeowners who are dealing with damage to their homes which is likely to have been caused by this year’s extremely hot, dry weather.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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