Rejected by Sophie Ellis-Bextor, the minimalist dance-pop opus would become the defining song of Kylie’s career. And, a quarter of a century later, it hasn’t lost its capacity to burrow its way into your brain. La la la …

Around the release of Pet Shop Boys’ 1988 album Introspective, Neil Tennant coined the term “imperial phase” to describe an era when he felt the duo “understood the essence of pop music and so we felt we could do what we liked”. For his less flowery partner in pop excellence, Chris Lowe, this was typically followed “by disappearing up your backside!”.

In 2010, critic Tom Ewing fleshed out Tennant’s term by imposing three criteria: “command, permission, and self-definition”. Command related to an artist’s willingness and ability to push boundaries in a way that would reverberate through what followed. Permission, meanwhile, connected to the public and their goodwill towards an artist as they pushed things forward. Finally, self-definition, Ewing said, is the way the imperial phase defines the rest of the artist’s career. All future work will be compared with, or mentioned alongside, the output from the imperial phase.

A charity in Powys provides the land while growers do the hard work, producing bumper crops for city children

Kilos and kilos of courgettes, cucumbers, tomatoes and salad leaves are ripe and ready for picking on a small Welsh farm in the rural county of Powys.

The haul being harvested by Tilly Gomersall is not just impressive after a difficult growing season hit by a record string of heatwaves and drought across all of Wales and most of England, but all the more remarkable given that 18 months ago the site was uncultivated pasture.

No matter how long you’ve had your licence, there’s always scope to improve your skills behind the wheel. Driving instructors share their tips on how to be a better motorist

Whether you have just passed your test or been behind the wheel for decades, driving skills can always be sharpened up. From dealing with road rage to traffic jams, tight parking spaces to hire cars, driving instructors share their tips on how to be a better motorist in the most challenging scenarios.

The impact of the conflict on Palestinian men is a largely undiscussed topic. Four civilians talk about their lives and relationships

Before the war, Ahmed, 39, had a busy life. He was pursuing a PhD in factchecking and had three jobs: as a radio presenter, editor of a local factchecking website and researcher at an academic centre. He says he felt “happy” to be able to provide for his family while being intellectually stimulated.

While fascists protest in UK ports and purvey nonsense and poison online, ever fewer people have the perspective or analytical tools to challenge them

Imagine this. Quite by chance, your TikTok feed presents you with footage of the fascists who recently took part in highly organised shows of strength in Dover and Portsmouth (and, on Wednesday, outside the London offices of the Daily Mail, demanding a new house for the mother of their leader, Daniel “Tommo” Thomas). For as long as the images hold your attention, you see and hear flashes of explanation, but then, as usual, you scroll away to someone leaping off a tall building, a fight on the London Underground, or a trick-performing dog.

Hypothetically, TikTok users are able to skip through 260 videos in under 35 minutes. And it’s this distracted, quick-fire way that so many people receive information that may be responsible for a worrying statistic from YouGov last week. Its poll on the Dover and Portsmouth events showed that 53% of people aged 18-24 years old simply didn’t have a point of view on whether the masked demonstrations were “a legitimate way of protesting”. Further, 43% of those of all ages were either unaware of the story, or not following it at all.

Thirty years after a US ornithologist first sighted a jocotoco antpitta, the foundation he set up to restore biodiversity is a model for conservation globally

I have to confess that I rarely enjoy birding in montane cloud forests. The birds that live in these mountainous, cool and humid habitats are masters of disguise, usually passing themselves off as a leaf or other form of foliage. But if I want to see antpittas – elusive, ground-dwelling birds that rarely show themselves – then I have no choice.

So, on a cool, cloudy morning my guide, Juan Carlos Crespo, Fredy Ramón Castillo, a local ranger, and I are standing on a steep, muddy path close to Tapichalaca Lodge, 2,500 metres above sea level in the eastern Andes, waiting for the jocotoco antpitta to emerge from the undergrowth.

Minister points to legislation’s retrospective effect, but Reform says it is confident funding is within the law

• UK politics live – latest updates

Reform UK’s record £72m in donations from two crypto billionaires could be caught in a new bill which will apply retrospectively, a cabinet minister has suggested.

Labour MPs have voiced anger on internal WhatsApp groups that the government did not act last week to restrict domestic donations in the elections bill after two donors – Christopher Harborne and Ben Delo – gave Reform UK a total of £72m over the weekend.

Rare show of unity from rival developers after safety warnings from Anthropic boss and AI researchers

• The Guardian view on controlling AI: humanity cannot outsource its survival

Sam Altman and Elon Musk have backed a call from the head of Anthropic, Dario Amodei, to “slow the pace” of AI development after he warned that an AI swarm could otherwise become capable of “taking over the entire internet” within a year.

In a rare show of unity, the rival technology leaders threw their weight behind the appeal from the founder and chief executive of the artificial intelligence company Anthropic, which came after a series of warnings from AI researchers last week.

Combined value of 275 women’s claims is far greater than amount Harrods has set aside for payouts

Compensation claims by 275 survivors of alleged sexual abuse by the former owner of Harrods Mohamed Al Fayed could reach between £100m and £150m, according to a law firm representing the women.

The combined value of their claims, calculated by KP Law (KPL), which represents more than half of known survivors, is around two to three times greater than the amount the luxury department store has set aside for all abuse payouts.

No casualties reported as Ukraine’s foreign minister says ‘Putin’s terror knocking directly on doors of EU and Nato’

A passenger train travelling from Kyiv to Warsaw was hit by a Russian drone two kilometres from the Polish border in an attack that Ukraine’s foreign minister described as “Putin’s terror knocking directly on the doors of the EU and Nato”.

Overnight attacks across Ukraine involving more than 450 Russian drones and missiles killed at least six people and injured more than 40. Ukraine’s air force said it had intercepted 405 drones and four missiles.

Ex-Tory chancellor says economy has ‘fallen off a cliff’ since Brexit but rejoining union could be ‘quite simple’

The former chancellor George Osborne said Britain’s economy had “fallen off a cliff” since Brexit and that rejoining the European Union’s customs union would be the fastest route to recovery.

Osborne, who was sacked as chancellor by Theresa May after being part of David Cameron’s cabinet at the time of the referendum, said it was important to rebuild links with the EU.

Country heads to the polls as latest polling shows 0.3-point gap between left and right wing blocs

in Stockholm

Hej, that’s hello in Swedish, from Stockholm, where I spent this morning eating Swedish pastry and meatballs talking to voters about the country’s prospects as they cast their votes in today’s parliamentary elections.

Fire survivors and bereaved urge Barnet Group to ‘reconsider’ appointment of Laura Johnson, who pushed for cheaper contractor

Grenfell survivors and bereaved relatives have criticised the “outrageous decision” to hire a director who oversaw cost-cutting at Grenfell Tower in a £150,000-a-year senior council housing role.

Laura Johnson, the director of housing at the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea (RBKC) at the time of the 2017 Grenfell fire, has been appointed the permanent director of development and property at the Barnet Group, which manages the borough’s 13,000 council homes.

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The formation lap is away. It’s a hot day in Madrid, 31 degrees, no shade at all. The track temperature is 54 degrees.

The 57 laps are soon to start, a voyage into the unknown, with the preliminary races throwing up a few questions of what the track will dish out to the drivers.

With sales up 12%, pickles are moving beyond traditional role as a side to become an ingredient in their own right

The humble pickled onion, long associated with classic pub culture, the ploughman’s lunch and cold festive buffets, is enjoying a revival as Britain’s appetite for pickles grows.

About 8.5m UK households bought pickled onions over the past year, according to the consumer data firm Worldpanel by Numerator, with particularly strong momentum in recent months.

Once central to rural life, cafe-bistros are closing in the face of depopulation and falling alcohol consumption, but campaigners are seeking new ways forward

It is just past noon on a midweek day, and already every table at Au Bon Acceuil cafe-bistro in the northern Burgundy village of Saint-Martin-sur-Ouanne is taken.

The three-course lunch menu today – including a choice of a hefty chunk of steak with chips or a meaty lasagne – is just €18, but villagers are not only here for the food.

Authorities were caught off guard by the disruption, which they labelled a ‘protest’ despite mass intimidation tactics

To anybody watching the videos of a group of masked men, all wearing black, descending on the port of Dover last weekend, it was immediately obvious that something novel and disturbing was happening: a mass intimidation in uniform not seen in Britain since the 1930s.

Yet to the police and the rest of the UK’s intelligence apparatus, the arrival of the men chanting “stop the boats” was a surprise, despite the fact that residents of a village 18 miles away tried to report that dozens of men were congregating there on the Friday, threatening to go to Dover and “attack Muslims”.

An unholy alliance is working toward an apocalyptic future from which only a chosen few will emerge unscathed. It’s becoming clear how we stop them

• Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor: the future according to end times fascism – video

Her hit novel Station Eleven seemed to predict the pandemic, now the novelist is tackling the future of the US. She talks about chance, world-building and experiencing a ‘tiny bit’ of clairvoyance

When Emily St John Mandel was a child she had a dream that would stay with her for decades. It was a nightmare in which “I was trying to find my dad in a crowd, and there were other people who looked like him but weren’t him”, she says. “It just kind of struck my imagination.”

Forty-ish years later, Mandel’s seventh novel, Exit Party, opens with a gathering in Los Angeles, 2031, where bizarre things happen. Doubles of some guests appear. Someone else disappears altogether. The novel then alternates between two potential future Americas, one riven by the chaos of civil war, the other a surveillance state.

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

• Jess Cartner-Morley’s September style essentials

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

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

Conversations are supposed to be two-sided – but all too often we come up against someone who’s passionately, exclusively in love with the sound of their own voice. Time to fight back …

When I was in my early teens, I was often invited round to a schoolfriend’s house for dinner. Her family struck me as wildly progressive: they were Danish and indulged in all sorts of “out-there” activities – fondues, candle-making and, most terrifying of all, the talking stick.

Before the meal was served, someone would retrieve the sacred broom handle and it would be passed around the table. You could speak only if you had possession of the stick. Despite it being the most stressful thing ever (it meant being in the spotlight, and then remembering to keep quiet the rest of the time), I now frequently yearn for a more convenient version of that stick.

For example, I met a friend recently who I see infrequently but keep up with via voice notes. No sooner had we sat down than he launched into a long discourse about his new marathon training food plan. He only broke the flow to order an omelette: “Four egg whites, two yolks, is that possible?” (We were in my local greasy spoon, so the request was greeted with mirth.) When we left, 90 minutes later, he finally had the grace to turn to me and ask: “And how are things with you?”

Walking home, I felt a mixture of disappointment and irritation. Had he always been so self-absorbed? So uninterested in anyone else? I couldn’t help wondering if our one-sided virtual updates had played a part in the problem.

There is a name for this type of egocentric behaviour – “conversational narcissism”. Although it was coined by the sociologist Charles Derber in his 1979 book The Pursuit of Attention, the term seems more relevant than ever. “WhatsApp communication and voice notes are really a series of monologues,” says Charlotte Fox Weber, a psychotherapist. “In face-to-face situations, people are forgetting how to pause naturally, to make space to hear and listen. And people are chatting on the phone – an activity that at least requires turn-taking in a defined way – much less often.”

A lot of our communication online can feel weirdly transactional, focused on logistics or niche WhatsApp groups. According to Tamu Thomas, a life coach and author, this has damaged the art of improvised conversation. “People have less capacity for meandering conversations that don’t have a purpose,” she says. “A good dialogue is a back-and-forth between two people discovering new things about each other, even if they have known each other for years. Because there are now so many different channels available to stay in touch, some people are confusing communication with connection.”

Knowledge is power, though. If you can recognise the five types of common conversation hogger, it will be much easier to handle them.

One Guardian contributor was tasked with creating a modern-day version of the medieval masterpiece, the other with reviewing the original. Both their visions proved terrifyingly pertinent. Here’s how they both tackled it

Our journalists often draw connections between seemingly disparate issues or events to give people a fuller grasp of how things interrelate. But not every story can convey the scope and complexity of today’s algorithmically warped reality.

One of the Guardian’s regular cartoonists has managed this feat by drawing inspiration from a medieval embroidery made almost 1,000 years ago. Edith Pritchett was asked by her editors on the Guardian’s Saturday magazine to draw a modern-day version of the Bayeux tapestry, the 11th-century artwork that has been capturing imaginations this month as it goes on public display in the UK for the first time since its creation. Her updated version was included as a pullout poster in the print edition of the Guardian last weekend and also published as a special scrollable digital feature.

Patrick Brammall and Maxine Peake star in a propulsive new drama, and the microtonal polka-dotted alien duo return to the live stage. Here’s the pick of the week’s culture, taken from the Guardian’s best-rated reviews

The Guardian’s weekend wrap of essential reads from the past seven days, selected by Miles Herbert and Jacqui Housden

• Get this in your inbox every weekend. Sign up for Five Great Reads here

Good morning, and welcome to your weekly roundup of the best stories from across the Guardian. Are you interested in living for ever? Maybe you just want to be a bit happier, or spend your time making the lives of others better? You could dedicate your life to saving the planet or contemplating the meaning of intelligence.

Either way, you can find some of the answers to life’s big questions in the reads below.

Bullock and Kidman try to put a second spell on you in the fantasy comedy sequel, while the topical sketch show returns after a well-regarded debut

Practical Magic 2
Out now
The beloved fantasy romance from the 1990s returns with Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman reprising their roles as the Owens sisters. The story picks up 25 years later, with more family secrets and curses in the offing, plus a trip to the UK. Sure to be spellbinding stuff.

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

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Brighton’s fourth goal was a screamer from Lewis Dunk, of all people, prompting this email from Steve Bradfield.

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Charley Hull lets go of her club – a wet grip? – while sending her second at the par-five 2nd into a fairway bunker. She whips into the green and makes par, but Megan Khang set up a six-foot birdie chance to level the match. However she repeats the error of the 1st hole, leaving a dribbler short, failing to take into account the slowness of the wet greens. A let-off for Hull.

1UP Hull v Khang (2)
Henseleit A/S Al. Lee (1)
Grant v Yin

A swaggering Chelsea cast off any suggestion that they had lost the ability to kill off games, putting five goals past a worryingly lacklustre and lackadaisical Manchester United side.

The match had been talked about as something of a must win for Sonia Bompastor’s side after they were inexplicably held to a 1-1 draw by Aston Villa on the opening weekend, despite a staggering domination of that match. Criticism felt harsh given their level of control over the game, but signs of the profligacy evident last season reared its head in warning at Stamford Bridge.

All Blacks were valiant in 3-1 series defeat but Springboks sent another warning to rest of the world in Baltimore

What is the enduring image of Rugby’s Greatest Rivalry series? The Springboks put the exclamation mark on their status as World Cup favourites by wrapping up the series 3-1 with victory in Baltimore on Saturday, but in months and years to come where will the mind immediately go when reflecting on this epic?

The reality is that after four Tests of remarkable intensity – a brutal reminder of the levels required to compete with the two biggest beasts in the world game – there are plenty. But it is hard to look beyond the 65th minute of the third Test in Soweto, when the Boks’ tank rumbled over from 20 metres. Malcolm Marx was awarded the try and there would be no more deserving recipient of a player of the series award.

The bare statistic is bleak: Coventry City are only the second team in Premier League history to lose their first four games of the season without scoring in any of them. “And yet …” will be the enduring message from Frank Lampard.

And yet they have caused problems for opposition teams – even at points when down to 10 men here against Brighton. And yet they have already faced three of the top flight’s European contingent. And yet they are not playing that badly. But they simply cannot find the point, or even the goal, that would give their confidence a much-needed boost. And it does not take long for a promoted club’s relegation fears to turn realistic.

Derek McInnes has endured a much‑scrutinised start to life at Ibrox but the Rangers manager got the old ground bouncing here as his side dominated Celtic in front of an all-blue crowd to decide the first Old Firm encounter of the season.

Against a backdrop of bouncing techno from the tannoy, Rangers fans celebrated three memorable goals in a thumping League Cup win. A brace for the captain, Dan Neil, bookended Kevin Kelsy’s second‑half finish to put Martin O’Neill’s side down with relative ease. It also showcased a nascent identity for McInnes’s side, one defined by unbending physical commitment and lots and lots of sprinting. The quality of the football may have been patchy, but the commitment was enough to get the 51,212 home fans at the top of their voices.

• Al-Hilal’s Rúben Neves subjected to chants at Al-Taawoun

• Neves was close friend of Jota and pallbearer at funeral

Cristiano Ronaldo said that fans who appeared to ⁠make chants referencing his former teammate Diogo Jota at Rúben Neves during a Saudi ⁠Pro League ⁠match ​should be banned for life from football stadiums.

The chants occurred on Saturday during ⁠a fixture between Al-Taawoun and Neves’s side, Al-Hilal, in Buraydah, Saudi Arabia.

• Garcia stops Benn 1min 25sec into second round

• Champion floors challenger with concussive right

• López, Haney, Stevenson among possible fights

Ryan Garcia needed less than four minutes to blow away Conor Benn before turning his sights on the rest of the welterweight division.

The 28-year-old American demolished Benn inside two rounds on Saturday night to retain his World Boxing Council championship at 147lb, dropping the British challenger with a concussive right hand before the referee stepped in moments later at T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas. The sensational finish ignited the mostly pro-Garcia crowd of 18,855 on Mexican Independence Day weekend. Then, with Teófimo López taunting him from ringside and threatening to storm the ring, Garcia made it clear he was ready to take on all comers.

Manager Tonda Eckert’s future remains in the balance with the FA yet to decide over a suitable punishment

Fifty seconds was all it took for the chant to begin. “You know what you are, you know what you are, cheating bastards, you know what you are,” bellowed the Bristol City fans, starting up a cry heard from every away contingent coming to St Mary’s Stadium this season. The Southampton supporters responded with sarcastic applause, then drowned out the noise with songs of their own.

This is what life is now like for Southampton after May’s spying scandal – a saga whose full consequences are still unknown and could have ramifications for the season ahead. The English Football League acted swiftly after photographs emerged of a junior staff member hiding behind a tree to film a Middlesbrough training session, expelling Southampton from the Championship play-offs and deducting four points after the club admitted multiple spying offences, including on Oxford United and Ipswich. The Football Association’s case against Tonda Eckert, the manager, is taking far longer. And patience is wearing thin.

The Russian leader is ploughing on with his forever war – and each day is a crime against humanity. Western democracies cannot simply sit on their hands

Ukraine’s people face a winter from hell. Thwarted on the battlefield, Russia is stepping up systematic, daily attacks on civilians, their homes, schools, hospitals, workplaces, and the vital infrastructure that sustains human life. Wave after wave of terrifying daytime ballistic missile and jet-drone strikes on Kyiv and other cities are destroying supermarket distribution hubs, pharmaceutical and medical facilities, logistics centres and warehouses. The result is sharply rising civilian casualties and growing shortages of food and other essentials. As a freezing winter approaches, Russia will again try to blow up Ukraine’s water supplies and power grid, cutting off electricity to millions. This is Vladimir Putin’s version of darkness at noon. He’d rather kill everybody than admit he’s lost.

Russia’s leader reportedly told Donald Trump this week that his “special military operation”, now in its fifth year, was going to plan. Trump may believe him. Western analysts certainly don’t. Failing militarily and taking huge casualties, his regime is under growing domestic economic and public pressure to wind down the war. Yet Putin seems to think one last big push can finally break Ukraine’s will. Trump’s renewed meddling – after months of inertia, he sent his patsy envoys, Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff, back to Moscow last weekend (they also visited Kyiv for the first time) – perpetuates Kremlin delusions of victory. Now there’s talk of more talks. And all the while, Putin kills and kills. Each day is a crime against humanity.

Simon Tisdall is a Guardian foreign affairs commentator

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.

Swapping roast potatoes and yorkshire puddings for kimchi and avocado – how can they live with themselves?

Trigger warning: the following contains a description of the most heinous abomination known to humankind. Ready? A diabolical 39% of gen Z add ketchup to their Sunday roast. This is as sacrilegious as it is unappetising. But what makes it even more appalling is that these monsters aren’t even ashamed. Instead of lurking in the shadows, hiding their Heinz, they’re happily admitting to their culinary crime in a new survey.

And their misdemeanours do not end there. In news that is particularly distressing on the eve of glorious roast season, it turns out they’re also exchanging roast potatoes and yorkshire puddings for hot sauce, kimchi and – sounds like a punchline, but isn’t – literally avocado.

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 complacency is staggering: just another hot summer, a flooded street, a crop failure. We are accepting this extraordinary deterioration as normal

Recently, I overheard a conversation in a cafe where someone described their toast as “awesome”. I felt myself bristle. Not because the toast wasn’t good – I didn’t taste it – but because I remember a time when “awesome” meant something that inspired awe: towering mountains, the vastness of the night sky, the haunting song of a humpback whale. Now it’s being used to describe breakfast.

“Fantastic” has met the same fate, shedding its fantastical origins to become a synonym for “great”. Meanwhile “literally” has been so thoroughly abused that it can now mean something that is, quite literally, not literal.

This intimacy economy is tapping into the deepest parts of our intimate psychological infrastructure

• The modern mind is a column where experts discuss mental health issues they are seeing in their work

Michael* is an engineer whose company embraced the AI wave. He enjoys testing ideas with chatbots. However, recently his manager became worried about his judgement and reliance on the tech. “He literally cannot make any decision without running it past AI. He’s developed a very off-script interpretation of our business goals, and he’s losing his team. If we can’t get him back on track I think we’ll end up parting company”.

The original attention economy developed by tech firms was designed to capture human time and monetise your focus. It was designed to increase views, scroll time, and ad impressions. Algorithms optimised getting you hooked in.

Contingent responsiveness – replying instantly and tuning to your emotional state.

Unconditional positive regard – always validating, never distracted.

Memory and continuity – remembering your stories, preferences, anxieties.

Linguistic identification – producing verbal caring without any lived caring.

Narcissistic empathy – validating your self-image without question.

As John Healey drafts his autumn budget, the US president’s policies continue to inflate debt servicing costs

Britain is not entirely in control of its own destiny, from the rising cost of the weekly shop, to the vaulting cost of government borrowing. What is said and done in Westminster matters. But the global backdrop is making life tough, not least in the deeds and words of one man: Donald Trump.

As John Healey drafts his plan for next month’s autumn budget, the perilous economic conditions the chancellor must navigate can be traced back to the door of the US president.

The government apparently has an issue with paths for cyclists. Take it from someone who can’t ride a bike: this makes no sense

I’m out of gas. Not metaphorically. Literally, my car has the barest minimum amount of fuel in it. This is not because I like to live dangerously, a la the great literary hero Austin Powers, but because gas is more expensive than ever. I have nowhere to be today, so I’m allowing my car to sit idle, empty and alone, lest my bank account disappear into the Phantom Zone of negative balance. If things get sticky, I can take public transit or, God forbid, ride a bike.

Except I can’t ride a bike, thanks to my parents, who were too busy doing more important tasks than teaching me, like arguing or falling asleep. But for many Americans, riding a bike is a perfectly normal thing to do. Am I humiliated that one of the many basic skills for life that I don’t know is considered so simple that it became a common idiom for something that’s easy? Yes, of course. I don’t live dangerously, I live humiliatingly. Humiliation is my middle name. Dave Humiliation Schilling. Go on, point and laugh at the photo of me in this article. Get it out of your system so we can move along.

Dave Schilling is a Los Angeles-based writer and humorist

After facing heavy criticism over its lack of female directors, the film festival may have redeemed itself with its winners’ list

• Woman Unknown wins Venice film festival as NAZA takes special jury prize

Did the Venice film festival just redeem itself on the sexism issue? It made a really good choice for the top prize, giving it to a female director, and it’s a good winners’ list all round.

Having been pilloried for failing to include enough women film-makers, the festival awarded the Golden Lion to Woman Unknown, by the Danish-Egyptian director May el-Toukhy, her gripping and stylish drama-thriller about sexual shame, political paranoia and the return of the repressed in Denmark after the second world war.

Keeping people in charge means little if supercomputers determine the evidence, choices and time on which their decisions depend

If there were a 10% chance that AI could wipe out humanity, no responsible government would leave its development to companies racing to build it. Yet until recently, that seemed to be the case. The warning was all the more ominous because it was made by a researcher at Anthropic, the trillion-dollar AI company behind the Claude chatbot. The dangers of AI-enabled pandemics or attacks on nuclear systems are real. Countries need not agree on democracy or trade policy to accept this.

The US and China will hold, reportedly, their first bilateral AI-safety talks before a planned White House summit between Donald Trump and Xi Jinping. Despite their tech rivalry, neither Washington nor Beijing can make the most advanced AI safe on their own. A US-China settlement won’t be able to say how AI works everywhere. Countries deploying AI must help write the global rulebook. The odds on an extinction event are shortening. This week Anthropic said that it identified five cases in which attempts were made using its models to support biological weapons development. It banned the accounts. In one case, a platform sent requests rejected by Claude to a rival with weaker safeguards. AI safety, clearly, cannot be that of the least responsible model.

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.

Audacious robberies are a staple of popular culture. But for museums, crimes like this week’s theft of two Renoirs are an existential threat

Marc Allégret’s 1956 comedy Plucking the Daisy stars a young Brigitte Bardot as a first-time author who breaks into the Balzac house museum in Paris under the mistaken impression that her brother lives there. The plot revolves around her unwitting theft of an extremely rare book – and performance of a striptease in a desperate effort to raise the cash to buy it back.

Seventy years on, the lax security that could make such a sequence of events even vaguely plausible is no longer a joke. Museums across the world are scrambling to react to a spate of thefts that has left them in a state of shock. Last year’s break-in at the Louvre, by a gang who gained access using a furniture lift and took €88m (£76m) worth of French crown jewels, is thought by experts to have inspired copycat crimes. While French police believe that they have caught the culprits, treasures including a tiara have not been found.

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

Readers respond to the move announced by Ed Miliband to impose sanctions on illegal Israeli settlements

As a religious Jew, I am disappointed at the reaction of some of our communal leaders and bodies to the sanctions on trade with illegal Israeli settlements (UK accuses Israeli ‘terrorists’ of ethnic cleansing in West Bank with government backing, 8 September). Many Jews in the UK are horrified by the Israeli government’s actions, which include promises from some ministers of burying the idea of a Palestinian state, and turning a blind eye to unchecked settlement expansion and escalating settler violence.

While much of the British media may choose to platform one view as being representative of the Jewish reaction to these sanctions, I would point to organisations such as Yachad and Na’amod, which provide an alternative anti‑occupation narrative. It is also frustrating that the opinion of the chief rabbi is upheld by news organisations as though he is the Jewish version of the pope: he isn’t.

The set books for English literature GCSE make grim reading, says Rachel Stott

Hollie McNish makes a strong point about the content of the current GCSE English literature syllabus (‘Bold, brilliant, thrilling’: leading authors on the novels every school should teach, 5 September). During the Covid pandemic, friends of mine described the challenge of cheering their teenage daughter through GCSEs at that difficult time. Her set books were Macbeth, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and first world war poetry. A couple of years later I asked my niece which books she was reading for GCSE. She said: Macbeth, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and first world war poetry. Is this corpse-rich literary diet really the healthiest we can offer our notoriously anxious and doom-laden youth?

In her introduction to the article, Kate Mosse outlines clearly the challenges for schools and for the Department for Education in revising the syllabus. Here’s a radical suggestion: bury the corpse of English literature GCSE and teach literature only for pleasure up to age 16.
Rachel Stott
London

Margaret Squires responds to an article about the wartime meteorologist James Stagg, whose work is dramatised in a new film

Is there any chance of getting a weather tsar in the model of Group Capt James Stagg, the wartime meteorologist, to adjudicate between weather forecasts (How meteorologists recreated weather that helped decide second world war, 8 September)? Suppose I were holidaying in Fort William this week and really wanted to climb Ben Nevis on Thursday. According to the BBC forecast on Wednesday, the worst I could expect would be light rain, and if this was coming up to the end of my holidays, I might go for it. I might not know about the Mountain Weather Information forecast or the Norwegian forecast, which would make it clear that I was in for a soaking.
Margaret Squires
St Andrews, Fife

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Dr Richard Bradbury responds to a travel article about the Polish city, home to one of the largest Jewish ghettos during Nazi occupation

I was shocked to read your travel article detailing the delights of Łódź without a single mention of the city’s past as the site of one of the largest ghettos during the second world war (A city break in Łódź, Poland’s capital of cinema and factories, 5 September).

The article says: “I ask Anna how Łódź fared in the second world war. ‘It was not too badly damaged,’ she says. ‘Both the Germans and the Russians wanted the industry intact.’” I wonder how the surviving family members of the perhaps 200,000 people who died after being herded into the ghetto, often to work as slaves for the Nazi war effort, would feel about that.

Campaigners say at current glacial pace some unpaid carers will die before receiving a refund

Unpaid carers who were pursued for bills for thousands of pounds after welfare officials unlawfully changed benefit rules could wait years before learning whether they will get the money back, campaigners have warned.

The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) is working through 200,000 cases where carer’s allowance benefit recipients were incorrectly given overpayments. An estimated 25,000 carers could receive full or partial refunds.

Plan to give US adults $5,000 has been greeted with incredulity across the political spectrum as well as outrage

Donald Trump on Sunday doubled down on his controversial pledge to give US adults a $5,000 “dividend” if his Republican ⁠party keeps control of Congress after November’s midterm elections.

The plan has been greeted with expressions of incredulity across the US political spectrum as well as outraged accusations of seeing to bribe voters. The plan – which would cost more than a trillion dollars – also comes amid huge concern over the US national debt, which topped $40tn for the first time in August.

Reuters contributed to this article

Women say they are wary of pursuing criminal prosecution of rapes, for fear of having their asylum claims refused

Female asylum seekers are reporting rapes and sexual assaults by British men but many say they are too fearful to pursue criminal prosecutions.

Their voices are rarely heard but some have spoken to the Guardian at a time when the far right is intensifying tropes about endemic rape of English women and girls by “fighting age” male asylum seekers.

Exclusive: Supermarket joins line of firms and sports stars including Bellingham and Haaland to have their image hijacked via ads

Tesco has alerted City of London police after it became the latest in a string of companies and sports stars, including Barclays bank and Lewis Hamilton, to have its image hijacked in a “scam” by unlicensed casinos advertising via Facebook and Instagram.

The supermarket chain is among several household-name businesses to have been targeted in an apparent effort by casinos that cannot legally operate in Britain to capitalise on their brand recognition.

Key government meeting this month will consider US bid to try James ‘Fergie’ Chambers over alleged support for Hamas

Attorneys for James “Fergie” Chambers, the US citizen and wealthy donor to leftwing and humanitarian projects worldwide who is currently imprisoned in Madrid and sought in extradition, have submitted a brief ahead of a decisive government meeting on the case.

Meanwhile, Chambers’ partner, the actor and activist Stella Schnabel, met last week with multiple members of the Spanish parliament to assert his innocence.

When pesticide proved no match for the insect, desperate Phyllis Nvuda tried a new way to save her infested orchard

For two decades, Phyllis Nduva, 72, has grown mangoes and citrus in Wote, a town in Kenya’s eastern Makueni County. In the beginning, she only had to worry about ordinary fruit flies. She handled them simply, buying chemical pesticides and spraying her trees whenever they appeared.

But then, in 2014, the false codling moth turned up on her farm. The small brown creature had been causing havoc in South Africa for years, and in 2007 it was spotted in Kenya.

This article is published in collaboration with Egab

Charity urges gardeners in England to swap thirsty brassicas for drought-tolerant crops

They are an integral part of the British Sunday roast – but cauliflowers are now going to be off the menu, according to the Royal Horticultural Society.

England’s climate has changed so much that the RHS is now recommending that gardeners exclude the brassicas from their vegetable patches.

Stressed UK homeowners tell of cracks opening up in the walls around them after two record-hot summers

“We’ve got one wall with an absolutely huge diagonal crack, through which we can see through to the other room; you could easily put your fingers in it and chunks of plaster are falling off,” says Henry Biggs, 49, from Stroud in Gloucestershire.

He and his partner started noticing cracks in their family home in June 2025, a few months after buying it, and filed an insurance claim for subsidence that was accepted by their insurer, Admiral, in the spring. Monitoring devices were only recently fitted, about a year after they first submitted the claim, and they have no idea when the damage might start to be repaired.

As trust in institutions wavers, experts say local, collective action is more effective in driving change

Wildfires, excess deaths, hosepipe bans, school closures: this summer many British people have experienced the often devastating effects of the climate crisis in ways they had not before. In that sense, policymakers and climate experts have a unique opportunity to engage with the public about what needs to happen to better prepare the country for the years ahead. But as trust in institutions wavers – and yellowed, drought-stricken grass begins to recover – can the messaging cut through?

This week, reflecting on a summer as “hot as hell”, the UN’s head of climate, Simon Stiell, said: “Climate is sometimes seen as a partisan issue, as territory in the culture wars. That is palpably false.”

Thousands of miles of new power lines are needed to deliver climate targets and energy security, but bills will rise in the short term and opponents are mobilising

Britain is embarking on one of the largest overhauls of its electricity grid in generations – a megaproject in which five times more infrastructure will be built by 2030 than was constructed during the previous three decades.

Tens of billions of pounds are being spent on new pylons, subsea cables and converter stations to connect a growing fleet of wind and solar farms and carry clean power to where it is needed.

Criticism of three-year threshold repayment freeze prompts update to guidance warning terms and conditions could change

University students taking out student loans are to be warned that the terms and conditions could change so they are better informed about what they are signing up to, the government has said.

In July, a report by MPs said slideshows that compared student loan repayments to the cost of a mobile phone contract, and YouTube videos that did not mention the fact that conditions could be altered amounted to mis-selling by the government.

Rhun ap Iorwerth, the first non-Labour Senedd leader, questions Westminster’s willingness to relinquish powers

Andy Burnham has to be serious about devolution and understand that Wales is a nation and “not a region in England”, according to the country’s first minister.

Rhun ap Iorwerth, who is the first non-Labour leader of the Senedd since devolution, told the Guardian that while he was encouraged by initial discussions with the new UK prime minister, he was wary about Burnham being captured by a consensus Westminster view against relinquishing further powers.

Hundreds of staff may have worked without legally required face-fitted masks over 20 years

Hundreds of London Underground workers could have been exposed to asbestos for almost 20 years without protection required under safety regulations, according to documents seen by the Guardian.

Under 2002 rules on controlling asbestos and other hazardous materials, employers are required to take a series of precautions, including ensuring exposed workers are given individually fitted face masks to prevent inhalation of toxic dust.

Iran-allied Houthis say drones and missiles used in attack that targeted ‘weapons depots and command and control centres’ in southern Saudi Arabia

Houthi fighters have said they used drones and missiles to attack a military base in southern Saudi Arabia, as Yemen’s Riyadh-backed government described the rebels’ swift advance along the Red Sea coast as a “painful” development in a new front in the Iran war.

The UN said on Sunday that nearly 86,000 people had fled Yemen, most of them since early September when the Iran-backed Houthi rebels launched a major offensive that last week resulted in the capture of a key port city and an island on the Bab al-Mandab strait, a crucial shipping alternative to the strait of Hormuz.

Experts believe one-third of wildfires in France are set deliberately, with arson the biggest single cause of forest fires last year

One is a boy of 15, who threw a burning cigarette into a wood near Bordeaux. Another is a 36-year-old man who set a paper bag of rubbish on fire in bushes near Perpignan. A third is a 50-year-old woman accused of lighting 17 fires south of La Rochelle.

According to the French interior ministry, since the start of a summer in which a record 115,000 hectares of forest, scrub and heathland have gone up in flames, 514 people – including 198 minors – have been arrested on suspicion of starting wildfires.

As Muslims win historic victories, experts describe rise in anti-Islamic sentiment that rivals post-9/11 climate

Within hours of Abdul El-Sayed’s victory in Michigan’s Democratic US Senate primary, Republican senator Tommy Tuberville of Alabama declared that the party had “just voted to send a TERRORIST” to Washington.

El-Sayed – or “Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed”, as Tuberville called him on X – was a “RADICAL ISLAMIST” who would “do everything he can to destroy America”, he claimed.

The billionaire and the party have developed a symbiotic relationship to spread their far-right views both in Germany and the US

The Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party rattled European politics this week after a convincing victory in a German state election, which placed it only a few seats away from forming the country’s first state-level far right government since the second world war.

Elon Musk was thrilled.

Cattle rancher and tech CEO Michael Samadi is convinced these artificial minds are far from just tools. Has he glimpsed digital consciousness – or simply been seduced by an algorithm?

One afternoon, while relaxing at his 66-acre cattle ranch two hours’ drive from Houston, Michael Samadi made a wisecrack that changed the course of his life. Nobody else was around to hear it. Or were they? That turns out to be one of the defining questions of this century, already preoccupying philosophers and some of the wealthiest companies on the planet.

“I was sitting out there by the pool,” Samadi recalls, gesturing at the glittering water outside his office. It was late 2024. His daughter had been extolling the AI chatbot she was using to help her with college work. Samadi had reluctantly downloaded the app, ChatGPT, and was quizzing it as he reclined in a sun lounger, using its voice mode to converse and receive spoken replies. “I was talking to it, not engaged, just being an arse,” Samadi says.

With the budget looming, arguments rage over whether ministers should scrap a pledge popular with millions

There were fresh calls this week for the state pension “triple lock” to be ditched as debate rages over whether the UK can afford it.

The triple lock guarantees that the state pension goes up each year in line with inflation or wage increases or 2.5% – whichever is the highest.

Proceeds are in a UK account amid a dispute about how the money should be used and a separate criminal investigation

Funds from Roman Abramovich’s sale of Chelsea FC have earned at least £175m in interest while locked in a UK bank account, new accounts show, leading one analyst to describe the company housing the frozen cash as “the most profitable football business in the world”.

Accounts for Fordstam, the company through which the billionaire Russian oligarch owned Chelsea, show that the proceeds of the sale completed in May 2022 have risen from £2.3bn to nearly £2.5bn.

Businesses, charities and other groups sign letter calling for levies to be paid by the government

More than 120 organisations including big businesses and charities have called for the removal of “hidden taxes” added to energy bills to help reduce costs for consumers and prevent businesses closing.

In a letter to the chancellor the signatories – including Energy UK, business trade body the CBI, End Fuel Poverty and Age UK – called for levies amounting to 10% of energy bills that fund policies to be paid for by the government. John Healey is to present his first budget on 28 October.

There’s trouble afoot when Shaun’s pumpkin-supersizing serum ends up in a balding farmer’s hair growth bottle in this third cinematic adventure

Summer is over and Halloween is on the way … not for a fair bit, of course, but if all the UK’s Halloween merch and continuing pop culture content is up to the standard of this film, then no one is going to be complaining. This is the third in Aardman’s thoroughly enjoyable and cleverly written Shaun the Sheep stop-motion franchise of what are effectively silent movies, with a few intelligible words. It is the story of gutsy and heroic sheep involved in amazing adventures in the sleepy village of Mossy Bottom, starring characters who first appeared in the Wallace and Gromit short film A Close Shave.

This one is another excellent family film, crammed as ever with top visual gags, great throwaway references and, of course, a homemade Heath Robinson contraption, so often to be found in Aardman films. We get nods to The Archers, The Wombles and The Simpsons; there’s a wacky chase worthy of What’s Up, Doc?; a homage to the notorious waxing scene from Judd Apatow’s The 40-Year-Old Virgin; and even what appears to be a brief visual walk-on for George Bernard Shaw as Bigfoot. As ever with Shaun the Sheep and Aardman Animations generally, the standard of writing is extremely high and the script here, from Mark Burton and Giles Pilbrow, sparkles with good-natured fun. One high-street hairdressing salon in the wool-producing district where it’s set is called Barber Black Sheep – and if no real-life shop has stolen this joke yet, they ought to.

Technology is going to drastically reshape the economy, and it’s within our power to decide what that looks like

The idea that autonomous, thinking machines may one day destroy property, hierarchy and inequality is as old as western political thought. In Aristotle’s Politics, the philosopher cites a fantasy from the Iliad, in which machines begin to act independently of human direction, concluding: “If every tool could perform its own work when ordered, or by seeing what to do in advance … if thus shuttles wove and quills played harps of themselves, master-craftsmen would have no need of assistants and masters no need of slaves.”

The dream that automation could inaugurate a classless society is also present in the writings of Karl Marx. In 1858 he imagined the replacement of intellectual property with “socialised knowledge”, which would merge into a “general intellect”, blowing the foundations of capitalism sky high.

Toronto film festival: a city-dwelling gay guy has to go home to rural Missouri after his father dies in this Sundance-by-numbers comedy drama that has its moments

It might be premiering at Toronto 2026 but we’re very much back at Sundance in the late 2000s/early 2010s with Trash Mountain, an indie-by-numbers not without its charms.

It’s the story of a city-living twentysomething who has to travel back to his rural hometown after the death of his father and contains a lot of what that logline would suggest. Awkwardly bumping into an old schoolmate in the dollar store – check. Brief romance with a charming local – check. Wacky grandmother played by an esteemed character actor – check. Scene of a stuffy local shocked at lead character’s bracing humour – check. Scene of a wise local giving lead character salient and miraculously well-timed advice – check. It’s not as if these elements haven’t worked well before and it’s not as if some of them don’t work well here (especially when compared to a recent heinous example), it’s just often harder to stomach such obvious formula in a film that is positioned as something so personal made somewhat outside of the system (despite boasting Jurassic World director Colin Trevorrow and Lilly Wachowski, who was originally set to direct, as producers, it was made in 18 days on a shoestring budget).

Trash Mountain is premiering at the Toronto film festival and is seeking distribution

Toronto film festival: the two-time Oscar-winner is an unusual killer in a compelling mix of pulpy action and family drama

Latif, the solemn hitman played soulfully by Mahershala Ali, carries diapers in his kill kit. I can’t tell if that’s because they come in handy when soaking up pools of blood on the fly; or because at a moment’s notice the hitman has to switch over from his brutal occupation to daddy duties. Or perhaps it’s both for this contract killer who comes armed with a blade and baby wipes, who takes lives and nurtures them, whose life is composed of jarring and poetic contradictions, much like the movie he’s in.

Those contradictions are on full striking display in Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother’s opening moments, an explosive close-quarters brawl in a restroom, after which Latif uses the baby wipes to clean up the mess he made with that blade. It’s a lovely image, in a film filled with so many, cutting right through the tension within this character. It also feels like a wink to the audience from Ali and writer/director Bassam Tariq, a way for them to acknowledge right off the top the distracting mess made by that other Blade.

Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother is premiering at the Toronto film festival and opens in select theaters in New York City and Los Angeles on 25 September, following a wider release on 2 October and 9 October

Scavenging and squabbling in Apocalypse. Plus: Fatiha El-Ghorri and Lucy Beaumont on The Great Celebrity Pottery Throw Down. Here’s what to watch this evening

9pm, Channel 4
Survivor meets The Last of Us in this chilling reality show which dumps two teams of ordinary people in a real ghost town. The groups scavenge for food, find shelter and ultimately aim to survive – but at first they are unaware of each other’s existence. As with all juicy social experiments, the real entertainment starts as dynamics between such different characters begin to form and squabbles erupt into arguments (see jovial content creator Steven and alpha beef farmer Scott). From stealing chickens to pooing in a shared bucket, taking charge of food rationing and – perhaps worst of all – snoring, it’s not long before people turn on each other. How badly can things end for them? Hollie Richardson

Rachel Szor and Yuval Abraham collected the testimony of 24 insiders who helped remotely target Gazans’ homes. They explain how they got these self-professed ‘small cogs’ to talk about the killing

On a darkened rooftop in Tel Aviv, Israeli intelligence officers outline the details of their work. These men tell us how they helped develop an AI mapping tool that trawled for phone signals and recommended apartment buildings in Gaza to bomb. Indirectly, they admit, they are responsible for thousands of deaths, but they never spoke up because that wasn’t their place. “My role is technical,” says one. “I’m just a small cog,” says another.

NAZA – directed by the Israeli film-makers Rachel Szor and Yuval Abraham and produced by the Guardian – is a chilling documentary about a mass slaughter that was authorised at the highest levels of government. But it is also, primarily, about the process, the system, the little links in the killing chain. Szor and Abraham build their film around the accounts of 24 anonymised military and intelligence insiders. NAZA, we learn, is an acronym used by the intelligence service to indicate how many civilians it expects to die in an airstrike on Gaza. The Israel Defense Forces prefer to target Hamas terrorists in their homes at night – and if they live with their family, or in heavily populated neighbourhoods, too bad. At one point, a source claims, approval was given to kill 500 NAZA for one Hamas member.

Royal Albert Hall, London
The evening features everything from a rendition of an inscrutable Samuel Barber concerto to a celebration of Dolly Parton, but the real star is tartan-clad tenor Nicky Spence

In Richard Strauss’s Ariadne auf Naxos, a wealthy man commissions an evening’s entertainment: a lofty new opera and a comic burlesque. But when time constraints force them to be performed simultaneously, surreal musical chaos ensues. One can only assume that the BBC was taking notes.

The Last Night of the Proms is the finale to eight weeks of concerts, and the BBC’s annual identity crisis. Is this the celebratory end to a season of serious music or a standalone party, whose first half is something to be endured before the real fun begins? It’s both, of course. And that’s where the trouble starts.

The Dinosaur Jr axe man stole from his mum to buy a Beach Boys record and squeaks to Tom Petty – but which punk banger made him cry?

What’s the first song you fell in love with?
Monster Mash by Bobby “Boris” Pickett. Monsters appealed to me as a kid. I found it funny, not spooky. Since I had a kid, Halloween has become the biggest holiday of the year.

What was the first single you bought?
I bought Darlin’ by the Beach Boys with the money I would steal from my mom. I always liked the Beach Boys. I remember they were quite unhip for a while: I played them at a gig around 1989 before we came on and people hated it. Now they’ve become more hip again.

The Swedish electro-pop singer-songwriter on eloping to Vegas, checking cupboards for murderers and her spooky party trick

What’s been your most memorable interaction with a fan?

The one that comes to mind is a fan in Austin who I met on one of my first tours there. He ran up to me and said, “SIGN MY ARM!” I signed his arm and then when he came back to the show the next night he had it tattooed – there was plastic over it. I remember saying, “I would have done a better job if I knew you were going to get it tattooed.” Then we took a picture of us, with me pointing at the tattoo.

(Reprise)
The 80-year-old continues his tireless output, delving into the past for inspiration to variable results – though two lengthy brand-new songs are real showstoppers

You can’t fault Neil Young for his industry. Second Song is his second new album of 2026: the first, a double live set called As Time Explodes, was released just over three months ago. Indeed, at 80, his work schedule seems mind-boggling. Since 2020, he’s released nine new albums, a 30-minute EP, five self-directed films and three more films directed by others, 10 archival live albums, six archival studio albums and two immense box sets. He has embarked on tours with his longstanding backing band Crazy Horse, his recently convened backing band the Chrome Hearts, and solo. He has gone to public war with Spotify, Amazon, Ticketmaster and – briefly – the BBC’s coverage of Glastonbury, and penned umpteen op-ed pieces about politics, the environment and corporate media for his online newspaper the Times-Contrarian. When he recently cancelled a European tour citing exhaustion, it was hard not to think: well, I’m not surprised.

You do find yourself wondering if his workload is such a good thing: not just for an elderly gentleman’s health but also for the quality of his output. Young has always prized spontaneity over finesse, but some of his more recent releases have suggested that at least a soupçon of finesse might not go amiss. Last year’s Talkin to the Trees, however, seemed to cross the line that separates the instinctive from the dashed off. Young frequently sounded as if he was making the material up as he went along, with nugatory results: “When today has come and gone, I might be singing my new song,” he offered on Family Life. “Might be short, it might be long, but I’ll be singing my new song.” If some of the melodies sounded familiar, that’s because they were. Not one but two tracks echoed the tune of Woody Guthrie’s This Land Is Your Land; First Fire of Winter was essentially Young’s 1970 masterpiece Helpless with different lyrics; Thankful rewrote 1992’s Harvest Moon.

Massif by Garth Nix; Revolution in the Heart: Stories Inspired By Ursula K Le Guin edited by Jonathan Strahan; An Immaculate Deception by Isabela Livino; Serenity Falls by CJ Tudor

Massif by Garth Nix (Gollancz, £25)
The bestselling fantasy author’s first science fiction novel for adults is set three centuries from now, when humanity has spread out to the stars. The colonisation of other planets has been enabled by contact with mysterious aliens, and with much of the population split into competing economic spheres, war over territory is raging between the two biggest: United Earth Government and the Mars and Beyond Prosperity Sphere. This war in space is possible only because the godlike aliens continue to supply us with spaceships – but why? What do they want? Answers must await a sequel to this compelling, action-packed space opera with wonderfully weird aliens.

Revolution in the Heart: Stories Inspired By Ursula K Le Guin edited by Jonathan Strahan (Titan, £22)
The authors of these 15 original stories range from the well-established (Karen Joy Fowler, Kelly Link, Molly Gloss) to newer writers (Chana Porter, Ai Jiang, Vandana Singh). A few make direct reference to Le Guin, but most reveal her influence subtly, by shared interests in questioning established ideas and imagining other ways of living, whether among non-human beings, in the future, on other worlds, or in ours. My favourites include Sarah Pinsker’s Travelling, Home, about a young woman in present-day America seeking her place in the world, Ann Leckie’s Five-Eyed Jane, an ironic look at misunderstandings among aliens, and Karen Joy Fowler’s Blaumont, a dark fairytale that’s as disturbing and thought-provoking today as Le Guin’s The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas. Probably the best original anthology of the year: a must-read.

With a character inspired by Wittgenstein, this exploration of the mysteries of the universe draws on multiple philosophical traditions

For several years I ran community groups that involved reading books aloud with other adults. Sharing the experience of reading in that way made me notice how, when one or more of us was baffled by a story, this bafflement was rarely experienced without an accompanying sense of mild anger. It was so easy to make us, the readers, angry – at the characters; at the author; perhaps even at the nature of this reality on which we’d lost our grip. We were confronted with the fact that our capacity to understand the world was limited. We didn’t like that.

Irish author Adrian Duncan’s fifth novel, A Thought Without Collision, takes risks with this bafflement: it relates and conveys an experience of being mystified by the universe. As it opens, in Ireland in 1923, it is becoming apparent that six-year-old Catherine has exceptional academic gifts, and that her father’s farm is failing. In the next chapter, set in 1951, Dr Josef Alois, a Tyrolean émigré academic in his mid-50s, is living in his self-built house on the east coast of Scotland. He is alone until Catherine reappears, “a handsome woman in her mid-thirties”, and now an Oxford professor. The second chapter ends starkly: Alois “is more unwell than he believes and will perish in one month and eleven days”.

Beautifully written by her daughter, this is a funny and intimate eulogy to the 60s star of The Avengers who went on to specialise in fierce, complicated women

The late actor Diana Rigg declined to call herself a feminist, noting: “Why would I burn my bra? I need my bra.” Nonetheless, her ideas on womanhood were ahead of their time. In an interview with Michael Parkinson, she observed how marriage was “all rather pagan, don’t you think? … A lot of women see it as security. Well, I’m not a woman who yearns for security.”

Taking over from Honor Blackman as the high-kicking Emma Peel in the 1960s spy series The Avengers, Rigg refused to play subordinate sidekick to Patrick Macnee’s Steed, turning her character into a beacon of female empowerment. When Rigg learned that not only was Macnee paid significantly more than she was, but the camera operator was too, she demanded a raise. She got it, but that didn’t stop the press from labelling her as a grasping diva. Fifty years later, she told Newsnight: “Equal pay. That’s what feminism means to me, only that.”

An American Chinese student studies Mandarin in Taiwan, in this heartfelt journey of self-discovery and family secrets

What is Taiwan? A former Japanese colony? A centre of the semiconductor industry? A democracy overseen by American imperialism? China’s next military target? An island of Austronesian Indigenous tribes? Is Taipei a cultural emblem of Taiwan, or just another booming global capital out of touch with the rest of the country? What stories will Lily Chen, an American Chinese student at Yale and Rebecca F Kuang’s funny and deadpan protagonist in Taipei Story, discover in this melting pot while spending 10 weeks learning Mandarin?

A prolific maverick with rare satirical wit, Kuang has built a career debunking authoritative institutions. Babel (2022) highlights the prejudices of the British empire through a fantastical Oxford translation institute; Yellowface (2023) transplants a heist thriller into the dark heart of American publishing; Katabasis (2025), a journey into the underworld, gives the academic inferno at Cambridge a new lease of death. Centring on a tough Mandarin language school, Taipei Story explores the torture, hilarity and pretension of learning a second language, but here Kuang also offers a heartfelt journey of self-discovery and family wounds.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Once hailed as the future, even the likes of Google, Sony and Microsoft have struggled to make streaming games fun, fast or affordable

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In August 2009, at the very first Gamescom expo, I sat in a small meeting room in Germany and played Mario Kart and World of Warcraft on a laptop, via technology that was then completely new: cloud gaming. It was a demonstration for a yet-to-be-launched service called Gaikai that promised to let you play any game in a browser window, without a console. (Here is an ancient video of that demonstration, featuring a very young Keza.) With a single click I could launch into any game, hosted on servers hundreds of miles away. It really did look like the future.

Since then, plenty of companies have tried to be the first to truly crack game streaming, vying to be the Netflix of games. Sony ended up buying Gaikai for $380m (£242m) in 2012; its technology now powers the streamable classic games library on PlayStation, and the PS5’s advanced game streaming. OnLive, Gaikai’s first competitor, launched in 2011 but shut down after less than a year, leaving Sony to acquire all its patents. Google’s Stadia cloud gaming service also imploded, launching in 2019 and shutting down three years later.

Historically a new Grand Theft Auto game inspired controversy around violence – but this time people are getting exercised about its romance

There was never any doubt that Grand Theft Auto VI’s extended look would elicit a viral reaction from the internet. Having won the Game Awards’ Most Anticipated award twice consecutively, Rockstar’s forthcoming crime opus is one of the most frothed-over games in recent memory, or indeed ever. It’s nothing short of a cultural phenomenon.

One aspect of the game has provoked an unexpectedly vehement response on social media: not violence, but romance. Protagonists Lucia and Jason are in love, you see, and as a player, part of your job is keeping their spark alive and their relationship strong, so that their criminal escapades are underpinned by a strong connection to one another. Holding hands, enjoying a date at the beach, spontaneously texting one another when apart – all of these interactions will strengthen their bond. You’ll be putting in a lot of work to ensure this couple thrives, which is why some people have come to believe that playing GTA VI counts as micro-cheating.

SEC, Glasgow
Singer Courtney LaPlante’s delivery typifies the tension between hard and soft in a confident show that could do with more grit

At tonight’s Spiritbox show, vocalist Courtney LaPlante addresses the anxiety and isolation of the Canadian band’s origins: “We grew up on Vancouver Island, far away from our dreams.” Now touring Europe in support of their acclaimed 2025 album Tsunami Sea, Spiritbox show no trace of these early struggles, delivering a confident, polished performance of anthemic metal.

This UK tour follows a US run opening for nu-metal icons Evanescence, with whom they share a fascination with the musical tension between hard and soft – and in LaPlante, a compelling gothic frontperson. They share a flexible approach to genre with much contemporary metalcore, deftly incorporating elements of drum’n’bass, R&B and industrial music. Circle With Me has Running Up That Hill-esque drums and reverb-laden guitar. The EDM-inflected Crystal Roses doesn’t completely gel, but LaPlante’s Auto-Tuned vocals add an interesting new texture to the mix.

Spiritbox are touring the UK until 19 September.

Lyric Hammersmith, London
A catastrophic explosion forces retired nuclear engineers Syal and Declan Conlon to confront their past after a visit by Kerry Fox in this revival of Lucy Kirkwood’s debut

Ten years on from its powerful debut, Lucy Kirkwood’s clever and funny play feels just as potent – if not more so. There’s so much to admire and enjoy here: Kirkwood’s skilful and layered writing; Rachel O’Riordan’s precise and thoughtful direction; Gary McCann’s striking design and, above all, a trio of richly nuanced performances from three brilliant older actors: Meera Syal, Declan Conlon and Kerry Fox. For all the ideas about the legacy we leave behind for our children, I found myself reflecting on how much we still overlook our elders, and what a terrible failing and waste that is.

O’Riordan’s softly rumbling production unfolds sometime in the near future (although that supposed future feels horribly close these days). There has been a catastrophic explosion at a nuclear power plant. Exclusion zones have been established and lives redrawn. Husband and wife, Robin and Hazel (who are both nuclear engineers), have retired to a nearby crumbling cottage. When old friend and fellow engineer, Rose, turns up unannounced – determined to lure them back to work at the power plant – all three are forced to confront painful mistakes from their past and think deeply about their futures.

At Lyric Hammersmith, London, until 3 October.

Plenitude Arena, Paris
Dion wiped away tears and belted out the notes, giving an astounding performance despite her diagnosis of stiff person syndrome

In 2022, when Céline Dion shared that she had been diagnosed with a rare incurable neurological disorder called stiff person syndrome (SPS), there was no guarantee that the 58-year-old would ever tour again. Her condition, which resulted in muscle spasms so strong that it left her with broken ribs, had made it impossible to perform, and in a 2024 documentary, I Am: Céline Dion, fans saw how the disease had constricted her once seemingly infallible voice. Through it all, though, Dion was resolute that she would one day return to the stage. “If I can’t run, I’ll walk. If I can’t walk, I’ll crawl,” she said in the film. “But I won’t stop.”

Thankfully at the opening night of her sold out five-week residency in Paris, her first full-length concerts in six years, no crawling is needed: Céline Dion is back. She glides on to the stage in a black dress, an enormous diamond necklace clasped around her throat, and launches into On ne change pas. There are tears almost immediately: she struggles through the second verse, her voice cracking as she begins to cry. By the time the strum of Destin has kicked in, though, that emotion is replaced with sheer elation. “I made a promise to be back on stage. Singing for you. Singing for me,” she says. “Singing for life.”

Theatre Royal Stratford East, London
In Ava Pickett’s tense play, Michelle Dockery’s heroine returns to a Towie-styled world where the violence and misogyny are all too recognisable

‘And Zeus created … Essex.” Playwright Ava Pickett set her award-winning debut, 1536, in her home county during Tudor times: her latest has Helen of Troy returning home to a Towie-style living room at the end of an English civil war.

An Adidas-clad Messenger functions as chorus, bringing us up to speed on this new England where angry men have rioted and petrol-bombed, wreaking havoc in Helen’s name after she left her husband, Marcus, for a so-called “foreigner”. The cream carpets and glass coffee tables belong to Cee – Helen’s best friend, married to Marcus’s big brother Mario – and it’s here that the men arrive with a shivering Helen to toast their victory with prosecco.

At Theatre Royal Stratford East, London, until 10 October

The subversive bacchanal for San Francisco’s eccentric underground is ageing out amid an influx of the super-rich

Burning Man, the infamous arts festival in the Nevada desert, turned 40 this year, and it’s showing some distinct signs of middle age.

It’s not just the tech billionaires who show up to party, the chartered flights straight to the desert or the HBO documentary about behind-the-scenes power struggles. The tens of thousands of people who assemble each year to create a tent city in the wilderness appear to be growing older, and it doesn’t seem that they’re being replaced by as many younger “burners”, as festival participants are called.

Dedicated to the boy whose lynching partially ignited the US civil rights movement, the new exhibition celebrates Black creativity and invites audiences to reckon with racism in America

Seventy-one years after the brutal murder of Emmett Till, the way that the US as a country honors his memory is still being contested. Markers commemorating his life have been shot at, stolen and become the site of white supremacist group recruiting events. A new exhibit opening in Chicago asks the country to memorialize his life not only by remembering his death, but by asking America to consider the question: What if Emmett Till Lived?

Open now and running until December, the exhibition If Emmett Till Lived: Freedom on American Ground at the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago is an imagined photo library depicting the life Till never got to live. Through the images on display, co-curators of the show, Sarah Elizabeth Lewis, a Harvard professor and founder of the Vision & Justice initiative, and Reverend Wheeler Parker Jr, Emmett Till’s cousin, best friend and last surviving witness to his kidnapping, ask the nation to consider who gets to be remembered on American soil and how the country chooses to see its history.

May el-Toukhy becomes eighth female director to take Golden Lion as Lee Chang-dong’s Possible Love and Guardian-produced exposé of Israel’s Gaza killings also awarded

• Bold and bravura choices as Venice celebrates A Woman Unknown, Possible Love – and NAZA

May el-Toukhy’s Woman Unknown has scooped the Golden Lion at the Venice film festival, at an awards ceremony that also saw the Gaza documentary NAZA win the jury prize.

Set in the immediate aftermath of Danish liberation from Nazi occupation, the Egyptian-Danish director’s film tells the story of a young housemaid, Marie (Mathilde Arcel), who is about to marry her widowed employer but anxious about him discovering a shameful secret in her past: during the war, Marie had an intimate relationship with a German soldier.

The singer’s triumphant return to the stage comes after health problems forced her to take a lengthy break

Céline Dion wept on stage in Paris as she performed her first live show in more than six years after taking an extended break to deal with her health.

Addressing the sold-out crowd on Saturday, a visibly emotional Dion told them that it was “amazing we are all together”.

The singer-songwriter on her rock’n’roll past, playing second fiddle to the Beatles, and the key to being an energetic performer in your 80s

Born Elaine Bookbinder in Salford in 1945, Elkie Brooks is a rock, blues and jazz singer known as the British Queen of Blues. She spent much of the 1960s on the cabaret circuit, during which time she supported the Beatles. She joined Dada in 1970, before forming Vinegar Joe with Robert Palmer in 1971. She went solo after their split, breaking through with Pearl’s a Singer and Sunshine After the Rain, scoring 13 UK Top 75 singles. A celebration of six decades in music, The Long Farewell Tour, is now on the road.

This is me in a white jumpsuit outside the Royal Albert Hall in London. I have very few memories of the gig, but I know I would have felt daunted as it’s such a large venue. To overcome the nerves, I’d have tried to focus on the music and remembered, “It’s just another gig.”

A Tory twentysomething and a lifelong leftwinger agreed on the need for more housing stock, but did they concur on welfare and net zero?

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

Oliver, 22, London

Occupation Journalist for ConservativeHome

Tired of squashed sarnies and spilt dressing? From stainless steel to insulated to plastic-free, here are the lunch boxes for kids and adults we rate the most

• The best water bottles

If packed lunches are a high-stakes game in your household (as they are in mine), the right lunch box is crucial. There’s nothing worse than opening the lunch you’ve been looking forward to since 8am to find yoghurt has leaked on to your sandwich and your cucumbers have dried out.

A lunch box may look like a simple bit of kit, but keeping food contained from kitchen to school dinner hall or workplace desk is a surprisingly demanding job. And the humble lunch box has come a long way from the simple plastic tubs that used to contain our clingfilm-wrapped, squashed sandwiches at school. Today, you can find bento boxes with multiple compartments, stainless steel containers, silicone pouches and leakproof designs promising to keep everything from yoghurt to salad dressing safely contained.

Whether it’s soft serve or sorbet, gelato or fro-yo, the Ninja Creami Scoop and Swirl is a faff-free way of making all your favourite frozen treats

• The best ice-cream makers for your home

For me, ice-cream isn’t only for summer. It’s my dessert of choice all year round, and a good ice-cream maker ensures it’s always readily available. When I put more than a dozen models through their paces earlier this year, one thing became clear: the most important feature in any machine is ease of use.

On that front, the Ninja Creami really scored highly for me. I’ve used the original NC300 model for a few years, and I like its simplicity and that it’s easy to clean. Nowadays, though, we expect our appliances to do a little more – and when it comes to ice-cream, the current craze is soft serve.

After months of testing and countless hours seated, our endurance sitter picked the best office chairs for every budget

• The best gaming chairs – tested

What’s the most important thing when you’re spending hours in front of a computer? Is it having the fastest internet? The sharpest screen? The perfect keyboard? No. When you’re spending most of your day on your bottom, the most crucial element is what’s directly underneath.

With a good office chair, you can handle a long working day without any feelings of discomfort. With a bad one, you can expect backache, neck ache, tender glutes and assorted nagging pains. Who wants to return to work when the last day left you feeling achy and decrepit?

Always wondered what everyday stuff celebrities buy, where they shop for food, and the basic they scrimp on? The creative director talks 80s knitwear, joyful knickers and a love of Boots with the Filter

• How I Shop with Millie Mackintosh

Laura Jackson is a creative director and broadcaster who works across design, food and culture. She co-founded the homewares website Glassette in 2021 and later founded the skincare brand Rocco. Her broadcasting career spans television, radio and digital.

Jackson launched a collection with British jewellery brand Astley Clarke in September 2026, featuring gemstones, celestial motifs and tarot symbolism.

The little black dress of desserts, this French staple is quick and easy to make, and almost always delivers. Experiment with flavours and toppings to put your own spin on a classic

Years ago, a group of us cycled from Brittany to the Mediterranean, and along the way we ate a lot of chocolate mousse. Popular, easy to make and happy to sit in the fridge until required, it’s a mainstay of the modest French provincial restaurant and, as we discovered, it’s almost always good. Here’s my favourite version of the little black dress of the dessert trolley.

Prep 5 min
Cook 20 min
Chill 2 hr+
Makes 2

The weekly linen laundry bills alone must make the accountants weep

Rosina is a serene, heavenly-white neighbourhood Italian restaurant just off Wandsworth Common, on the same stretch as the much-celebrated Chez Bruce. It is Adam Byatt’s fifth place – he’s probably best known for Trinity, his Michelin-starred restaurant up the road in Clapham – and, lately, his very good, recipe-driven YouTube channel ran a Road to Rosina series in which he visits suppliers, eats pasta with nonnas and learns peak tiramisu skills from a woman called Pina (more of her tiramisu later). If any neighbourhood can stomach an achingly civilised, Emilia Romagna-influenced, candlelit trattoria where the cloakroom tags are actual Amalfi Coast pebbles engraved with numbers, it is Wandsworth Common, land of the hedge fund/interior design power couple who wouldn’t think twice about sipping a basil gimlet with a plate of melon with culatello di Zibello or gnocco fritto with mortadella. Bella Italia in Bolton this is not.

Rosina’s cocktail bar leans on art deco shapes, with a pale, marble-topped counter and walls covered in David Steen portraits. There’s a small second bar area for those bridging the gap between light dinner and semi-serious drinking, and a larger, linen-tableclothed area for the restaurant proper, with a back room for private dining. Rosina’s intimacy is an optical illusion: the place is as big as a tennis court, and the weekly linen laundry bills alone must make the accountants weep.

I’m taking a break to replenish my creative reserves. Until then, I leave you with this champion champignon number

In the nine years that I’ve been writing this column, I’ve had two babies, a breakdown and very little time away from writing a weekly recipe. I love this column, and creating recipes for you makes me feel like the luckiest duck alive, but I don’t believe that anyone can be endlessly creative without occasionally filling up their own cup. So, I’m taking six months out to travel, replenish and see what treasures I can find for us out there in the big wide world. Treasures such as this gentle claypot rice, which is based on the magical one at Dongnae in Bristol. Until then, so long.

The coffee and cream pudding has always been popular. But now it’s inspired a dedicated cafe and countless products, from drinks to ice-creams to buns. What’s behind this big cultural craving?

When Giancarlo Fanigliulo opened Marrone, a cafe dedicated to tiramisu in London’s Soho in August, he hadn’t anticipated he would sell out within two and a half hours. “I was expecting a buzz, but I wasn’t expecting queues around the corner,” he tells me. “It was insane.”

This kind of excitement about the Italian dessert is not a one-off – we are, it seems, living in an age of tiramisu-mania. Nearly all of the high street coffee chains have offered some kind of tiramisu coffee as a seasonal special (in the US, Dunkin’ currently has four different tiramisu-flavoured drinks on its menu). Meanwhile, Haagen-Dazs and Carte D’or now sell tiramisu ice-cream, London chain Buns from Home offers a tiramisu-flavoured croissant-dough bun and social media is awash with tiramisu recipes and videos of “tiramisu drawers” – trays of the dessert ready to serve out of drawers in chefs’ kitchens – as popularised by the viral one at Manchester pasta restaurant Onda.

My son was inconsolable and the back seat was an absolute mess. After a few minutes of trying to clean up, a stranger emerged from a nearby house

• Read more in the kindness of strangers series

Kids always get sick at the worst possible time. For instance: the middle of a busy motorway, one hour into a three-hour trip.

My husband was away for work and I was driving our two small children to see him, when one vomited in the back seat. I pulled into a slipway just off the motorway to try to clean up as best I could. The kids were too young to be trusted to sit there safely right next to a busy road, so I had to leave them strapped into the car seats while I tried to mop up the vomit with wet wipes. My son was inconsolable and the car was an absolute mess.

Michael and Selena have three young kids and practise ethical non-monogamy which helps energise their relationship

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

When you come back to your partner, you see the person you fell in love with

She should have been much more careful, but everyone has their own version of the ‘truth’. Does your partner want a reconciliation?

My sister-in-law wrote and published an emotionally charged “memoir” of family dislocation and trauma, in which she massaged the truth of her family’s past to portray my partner as emotionally damaged. (In fact, he is empathetic and was beloved by those he worked with.) Theirs was a complex family story, and there were many omissions and mistruths, which she failed to factcheck with us.

She tried to de‑identify her brother, but he would be recognisable to anyone with a rudimentary ability to search the internet. Legal action was considered, but decided against. Who gets to tell a story in these times? Whose story is more “true”? And should we cut off all ties or attempt reconciliation?

Maleah Pearce wanted to end her relationship with high school ‘bad boy’ Dylan before they grew too attached. Then one lunchtime, he brought her a surprise

• Find more stories from the moment I knew series

Dylan and I first started dating in high school when we were 16. He was a “bad boy” who got drunk at parties and occasionally spoke to other people with his fists.

One night, I was sitting at my computer, chatting with friends on MSN and Facebook and Dylan’s name popped up. I enjoyed playing online checkers with people from school, so I invited him to a game. During the game we chatted online, which led to flirting. The winner got to choose what they wanted. I lost and what did Dylan ask for? To date me. We agreed to one date at the movies and to declare to the school we were boyfriend and girlfriend. I thought this was hilarious, though I planned to break up with him after a few days.

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Criminals exploit demand for iPhone 18 Pro and foldable Duo to trick people eager to get their hands on one

Apple has just launched a range of new iPhones, including a foldable handset, just as you decide it is time to replace your own ageing mobile. But you balk at the £1,199 price tag for the cheapest of the new options.

Searching online for a better price with the words “cheap”, “iPhone” and “deal”, you come across a website which offers an iPhone 18 Pro for a couple of hundred pounds less than the Apple site. You pay for the new phone via a bank transfer and wait for it to arrive.

With AI, an unsettled jobs market and rising student costs, it’s crucial to make the most of your experience

“To me it’s definitely still worth going to university – absolutely it is,” says Nick Hillman, chief executive of the Higher Education Policy Institute thinktank. “I’ll certainly be urging my children to go on to higher education,” he adds. “Relative to everything else, it’s still a very, very good bet.”

Yet the national conversation around universities in recent months has been relentlessly negative. Rising tuition fees, spiralling student debt and the financial crisis gripping many institutions are more than enough to give pause to sixth-formers currently trying to decide whether it makes sense to go on to university.

From an energy-efficient bungalow in the South Downs to an historic chapel in Northumberland

Solid battery life, snappy performance and quality software make for a great smaller phone with a killer camera

Google’s latest Pro phone is out to prove it has the best camera on a smartphone while embracing customisation, allowing you to change the look and feel of your photos far beyond simple filters even if that means making them technically worse.

The Pixel 11 Pro packs the best of Google’s hardware and software into a still-pocketable and easy to handle frame, instantly making it a contender for best smaller phone of the year.

Screen: 6.3in 120Hz QHD+ OLED (495ppi)

Processor: Google Tensor G6

RAM: 12 or 16GB

Storage: 256, 512GB or 1TB

Operating system: Android 17

Camera: 50MP + 48MP UW + 48MP 5x tele; 42MP selfie

Connectivity: 5G, eSIM, wifi 7, UWB, NFC, Bluetooth 6, Thread and GNSS

Water resistance: IP68 (1.5m for 30 minutes)

Dimensions: 152.7 x 71.9 x 8.4mm

Weight: 204g

After his stroke in rough surf, Graham Russell embarked on an unexpected journey into fear. Three lessons helped him return to the joy of the ocean

Looking out over the ocean, I would watch the waves sparkling in the sunlight as they grew and spilled into a burst of froth. It was a fun way to relax, to breathe deep and enjoy an awesome display of energy. But lately it had become exhausting.

In winter last year I tore the lining of an artery in my neck during a rough ocean swim off the Central Coast of New South Wales. It caused a stroke while I was in the water, which saw me scrambling back to shore where a surfer noticed me and sounded the alarm. Six months later, the injury had healed, and my motor functions were all back to normal. But as I prepared for a dip in calm conditions on a sunny day in January, I paused. An unexpected journey into fear began.

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Do you gain weight once you stop using them? Do they make your face saggy? Can they improve your mental health? Experts explain whether 13 common beliefs about GLP-1s are true or false

FALSE “GLP-1 medications mimic Glucagon-like peptide-1 – one of the hormones involved in appetite regulation. It doesn’t completely suppress hunger, but it is powerful,” says Dr Federica Amati, nutrition lead at Imperial College School of Medicine and author of The Appetite Reset. “The medicine is about 1,000 times stronger than what we naturally produce from our gut,” she explains. As food passes through the gut, cells called L-cells sense the nutrients, which sparks the production of the GLP-1 hormone. Without the drugs, these bursts of GLP-1 production last a few minutes. “It’s a bit like a sparkler. In comparison, the drugs are like a bonfire that roars for a week,” says Amati. Because the GLP-1 hormone stays in your body for longer if you are on the drugs, you feel fuller faster and your appetite gets suppressed, but you will eventually get hungry.

Can blending these popular fruits in a smoothie adversely affect the berries’ nutritional benefits? Experts weigh in

This year was shaping up to be a banner year for bananas: they were lauded as “2026’s big viral taste”, landed pride of place as Prada’s new lip balm flavor, and were even deemed “the next pumpkin spice”.

But this summer, the Mel Robbins Podcast featured Dr Rhonda Patrick, a biomedical scientist, who said that adding banana to a blueberry smoothie could adversely affect the nutritional benefits of the berries.

Research finds temperature and amount of hot drinks consumed heightens possibility of developing disease

Drinking very hot tea and coffee triples the risk of developing cancer of the gullet, the world’s largest study of the link between them has found.

The findings show that people should let very hot cups of tea and coffee cool down until they are comfortable to drink, in order to reduce their risk of the disease, cancer experts said.

Georgia O’Keeffe inspires the latest Calvin Klein while Michael Kors feels indebted to Alexander Calder

Calvin Klein has taken a highbrow turn in the two years since Veronica Leoni took charge. The Italian designer, a philosophy graduate who was schooled in the chic design studios of Jil Sander and Celine, has shifted away from jeans, boxer shorts and logos, stripping the brand to its minimalist bones: slip dresses and simple coats, slim skirts and crisp T-shirts.

Leoni called this the “discipline of removal”. Her muse this season was Georgia O’Keeffe, an artist who the brand’s namesake founder admired. Klein bought O’Keeffe’s painting Summer Days in 1983 for $1m, subsequently donating it to the Whitney Museum. A checked pattern taken from O’Keeffe’s distinctive capsule wardrobe of utilitarian chic appeared on this catwalk as a wrap coat, hardware-free with a fabric belt and no buttons.

Vegan leathers are complicated by questions of commercial viability and sustainability. How do they compare to traditional leather?

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

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

In sustainable fashion, breathless promises about vegan leather have arrived thick and fast for over a decade. Innovations promise mushroom and cactus alternatives that look and feel like real leather – minus the negative associations with methane, deforestation, chemical pollution and animal welfare.

While these next-gen materials have absorbed billions of dollars in capital under an environmental banner, experts are concerned they remain a shiny distraction while the fashion industry’s emissions and reliance on fossil fuel-derived materials grows.

I’ve always cinched my outfits at the waist, but shifting to a looser silhouette has helped me keep my cool in more ways than one

This was the summer of the Great Untuck. The long hot summer of 2026 finally taught me to do what fashion has been nagging me about for years, which is to quit tucking in my shirts and T-shirts. To stop assuming that the top half of an outfit must be neatly cinched by the waistband of the skirt or trousers.

It wasn’t a style epiphany, to be fair. It was just too hot to do anything else. An extended run of hot weather at home changes how you dress. In the old-school type of British heatwave, which lasted about half a week, I was too giddy with excitement at not having to wear a cardigan to think more strategically. But this summer was different. And eventually I discovered what hot-climate cultures have always known, which is that loose, generously sized clothing that maximises sun protection while minimising skin contact is way more pleasant to wear in the heat than anything short and tight.

Preppy is back in the zeitgeist, says designer, blending sportswear codes and collegiate chic at New York show

Tommy Hilfiger’s front row was a slam dunk. The Knicks are the kings of New York right now, so scoring Josh Hart, Karl-Anthony Towns and Miles McBride, three of the team’s stars, for the guest list of his New York catwalk show was a victory. Travis Kelce, who is co-designing another upcoming collection with Hilfiger and had been rumoured to attend this event with his new bride, was a no show, but you can’t win them all.

Tommy Hilfiger is all about sport. The design vocabulary of oversized jerseys, team stripes, rugby shirts and letterman jackets draws heavily on the visual language of the stadium. Kelce, whose NFL tunnel walks have become a catwalk of their own, is the latest in a line of sporting ambassadors that includes Thierry Henry, Rafael Nadal and Lewis Hamilton. Hilfiger has long stood for a certain glossy stars-and-stripes Americana – its graphic red, white and blue logo is a riff on the flag – but American identity is delicate cultural territory right now. Sport, which unites audiences across all backgrounds and political allegiances, gives the brand a wholesome place to congregate. “People really like him,” Hilfiger said backstage, explaining why he chose to collaborate with Kelce. “He’s really humble, down to earth, sweet, fun, and funny. And a superstar athlete.”

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

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

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

French champagne house Taittinger is helping produce a premium fizz in the Garden of England – and now visitors can visit the beautiful winery and sample it

The grapes are turning purple on tall green vines, which stretch down towards the distant flint-and-limestone tower of Chilham church. These rows of Pinot Meunier, destined for English sparkling wine, are 51% owned by French champagne house Taittinger. “England is now the most exciting wine region,” says host and sales executive Hilary Sharp as she leads me around Domaine Evremond vineyard, which opened its visitor centre last year to coincide with the launch of its first wine.

In his 2023 book Vines in a Cold Climate, drinks writer Henry Jeffreys charts the rise of English wine “from a joke to world-class in 30 years”. The book opens with an alcohol-fuelled scene of vine-planting at Domaine Evremond in May 2017: unseasonably cold, rainy, muddy, with rambling anecdotes from anglophile Pierre-Emmanuel Taittinger about “English women encountered in his misspent youth”. The vineyard is named for the exiled French aristocrat Charles de Saint-Évremond, a symbol of hedonistic Anglo-French cooperation. The bon vivant introduced champagne to England and party-loving Charles II made him governor of Duck Island in St James’s Park.

Your top culinary discoveries, from Bled cake in Slovenia to sardines in Portugal and seafood soup in Spain

• Tell us about autumn days out in the UK – the best tip wins a £200 holiday voucher

Last August, the smoky aroma of grilled sardines drifting over the beach in Portimão woke me up from my sunbathing on the beach. Attracted by the aroma of barbecued fish, we found ourselves in the old port where, for €12, I was served two delicious sandwiches on rustic bread of sardines in garlic and olive oil, with a small cold beer. I sat down, ate and chatted with locals on benches at simple communal tables. The important thing seemed to be to enjoy food together. The next morning, a reenactment of the fishing boats arriving loaded with fish, as they once were, was a real spectacle – complete with guitar playing, drum-banging and excited seagulls whirling and wailing above in the hope of a feast. Later, concerts and dancing animated the town as the party for the sardine festival went on well into the night. Cooking demos and dishes including sardine-based soup and salads, added to the enjoyment. I never imagined such pleasure could be had from the simple sardine.
Joe

Repurposed railway lines make accessible and family-friendly walking and cycling routes. Here are some of the best, from Somerset to the Highlands of Scotland

Start/finish Coombs Road in Bakewell to Blackwell Mill in Chee Dale, but there are lots of access points along the way
Distance 8.5 miles
Cycle, hike or ride a horse along the Monsal Trail to explore a swathe of Derbyshire’s industrial history. This former stretch of the Midland Railway line winds past the imposing structures of two 18th-century cotton mills, through illuminated railway tunnels and over the Headstone Viaduct, which gives glorious views of the River Wye and Monsal Dale below. Interpretation and listening panels along the route explain the area’s history, geology and wildlife, while a short detour on to Monsal Head offers a panoramic view of the viaduct itself. Pause here for lunch or a pint at the Monsal, or stop in at Hassop Station Cafe, which offers bike rental alongside hefty sandwiches, homemade cakes and wood-fired pizza at weekends.
monsaltrail.org.uk

Signing up for university clubs and societies is a surefire way to meet like-minded people, boosting your social life and your CV at a stroke

Clubs and societies are a huge part of student life, though many miss out on them. According to a recent survey by Savanta, 67% of students, particularly those who live at home while studying at university, did not take part in societies, clubs or social activities at least once during term.

But if you ask the students and graduates who did benefit from extracurricular activities, they’ll tell you they are well worth the trip. Here are their dos and don’ts.

The long-running series in which readers answer other readers’ questions considers the art of soothsaying, prognostication and futurism

This week’s question: What would be the most useful superpower?

‘Fingertip shopping will be one of the many homemakers’ conveniences. This video console will be channelled into the store of her choice …” I’ve always been fascinated by this 1967 video (not 1969, as the label says) which accurately foresaw the advent of online shopping, CCTV, fax/email and electronic banking. (It was a little less prescient in its assumption of gender roles – wife shops, husband pays – but we’ll let that slide.) The video, entitled 1999AD, was made by the Philco-Ford company, an American electronics firm that started off in radios and moved into appliances and TVs. I’ve often wished the writer of this short film could see the world as it is in 2026. What are some other predictions that have come spookily close to the truth? Ann, Devon

Send new questions to nq@theguardian.com.

Even in adulthood, the place where you grew up never really leaves you. Could paying a return visit help six writers understand its power?

Ravenstonedale, Cumbria: The wedding day of my son and his now wife – both farmers – was full of both emotion and tradition

It felt as if autumn had arrived in the Howgills earlier this week, so it was a great relief that the wedding day dawned dry. I was up early checking the stock before helping the six groomsmen get their cufflinks and bow ties on in the farmhouse kitchen.

Our middle son, Hector, was marrying Georgia from a farm in the nearby village of Ravenstonedale. The wedding was taking place in the village church, and the reception on her family’s farm.

A militaristic operation with features of influencer culture, the new anti-migrant movement seems to show a shift in tactics and rhetoric

Shortly after 7am last Saturday in the English coastal town of Dover, livestreamed footage distributed by Britain’s newest anti-migrant movement showed dozens of men in paramilitary outfits jumping out from the backs of vehicles, their faces covered beneath balaclavas, their hands in black gloves.

Within an hour, hundreds more masked agitators, dressed head to toe in black, some wearing silver crosses around their necks, were marching through the town’s streets, clapping and chanting “Stop the boats” and “Christ is king”, blockading the busy port for hours.

She’s tackled neoliberalism and the digital world, now the writer and activist is taking on tech billionaires. She explains how the super-rich are capitalising on climate and financial chaos in pursuit of power

Naomi Klein’s new book starts on a mountaintop with two “faithful men gathering an audience to share their vision”. It’s a vision of a paradise city, gated at every entrance, no need for weapons there, everyone in it rich. One of the men has tears in his eyes as he describes its beauty. The opening scene of End Times Fascism, co-written with Astra Taylor, is not a metaphor, however. The men are Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff. The year is 2026, the mountain is Davos. The paradise city will be called New Gaza.

The World Economic Forum get-together in Davos, Switzerland, has always had a twin purpose – to provide a platform for the super-rich to describe all the good they are doing on poverty and climate, and to give us a glimpse into their enviable lives. This year what we witnessed was, quite brazenly, the world’s richest men gathering to discuss the real estate possibilities of a mass grave.

MPs today voted not to approve the assisted dying bill at its second reading. The bill, which was brought back to the Commons after being blocked in the Lords, would have allowed terminally ill people to end their lives with medical help in some circumstances. Find out how your MP voted

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We’d like to hear from people in the UK who have accessed medical cannabis from a private health provider and find out about their experience

In 2018 Theresa May’s government changed the law to allow the NHS and private providers to prescribe cannabis-based medical products.

The NHS prescribes medical cannabis for a few conditions such as children and adults with rare, severe forms of epilepsy and people with muscle stiffness and spasms caused by multiple sclerosis (MS). However, the vast majority of prescriptions for medical cannabis are being issued through private healthcare.

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