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Culture

The latest published reporting in this category.

Entertainment

‘Music is the most powerful way of connecting to what’s happening’: can this album change your mind about the climate crisis?

With globe-spanning artists – including Charlotte Church doing angry electropop – the Flow project is hoping to make an impact at this month’s Cop31 Amid tense and long-winded negotiations, and with the future of the planet at stake, emotions can often run high at Cop climate summits. But last year, when the annual conference arrived in Brazil, one UN official was unexpectedly moved to tears by five women singing about the power of water. “She gave me a massive hug after the event and said, ‘We need to bring music into Cop,’” says Nikita Llerena, the project manager for Flow, a music collectiv

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Entertainment

My fiancee, my foreskin and me: the comic who turned adult circumcision into a jaw-dropping show

To be with the woman he loved, Max Olesker had to convert to Orthodox Judaism – which required an unwelcome operation. He relives a painful and sometimes infuriating journey When Max met Eliana at the Edinburgh fringe, the romcom vibes were strong. Shots, songs, falling headlong in love. Less vibey was the conversion Max Olesker had to navigate to marry his Orthodox Jewish beloved. The comedian had always thought of himself as Jewish – when his parents married, his mum converted to a less rigorous branch of Judaism. But to the Beth Din, the rabbinical court, that didn’t count. To be with the w

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Entertainment

‘The output of a lunatic asylum’: what the Bloomsbury group can tell us about mental health

From Virginia Woolf’s horrifying views on eugenics to James Strachey’s seminal translations of Freud, the Bloomsbury set didn’t only experience mental illness, they shaped how society thinks about it ‘As an experience,” Virginia Woolf wrote in 1930, “madness is terrific and not to be sniffed at … In its lava, I still find most of the things I write about.” Woolf’s 1941 suicide by drowning in the River Ouse, her pockets weighted with stones, is usually framed as evidence of her tortured genius. But a new exhibition at Charleston in Lewes radically excavates this narrative while challenging idea

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Entertainment

Andrew Scott drama Elsinore leads British independent film award nominations

Elsinore is in contention for 12 Bifas, including for Scott’s highly praised performance, while Clio Barnard’s I See Buildings Fall Like Lightning, Ashley Walters’ Animol and Mike Leigh’s Tender Loving Care are also recognised Elsinore, the drama in which Andrew Scott plays the actor Ian Charleson as he takes on Shakespeare’s Hamlet in the last months of his life, before he died of Aids in 1990, has emerged as the leading contender for the British independent film awards (Bifas). The film, which is directed by Simon Stone and co-stars Olivia Colman, Billie Piper and Johnny Flynn, received 12 n

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Entertainment

‘His voice was too queer – so they silenced him’: how Spain’s national poet Lorca finally became a gay icon

The significance of the poet and playwright’s homosexuality was repressed in Spain for decades – but a spate of recent work, including the film La Bola Negra, is redressing the balance for a new generation Patricia Langa parades on to an invisible stage in a basement room of Instituto Cervantes in central London, locked into the character of Conchita, a professional mourner loosely based on the sorrowful heroines of Federico García Lorca’s 1936 play, The House of Bernarda Alba. “His voice was too loud, too queer, too alive for those around him, filled with jealousy and hatred,” she tells her i

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Entertainment

Juan Atkins built a cybernetic future for music – but invested it with humanity

The Detroit techno pioneer, who has died aged 64, blended funk and electronics with information-age philosophy to create music of huge power and influence Juan Atkins, the originator of techno who died on 31 October, spent his lifetime translating a fascination with the future into sound. He was the oldest of the founding fathers of techno known as the “Belleville Three”, along with his junior high school friends Kevin Saunderson and Derrick May. He was the first of the trio to buy a Korg MS-10 synthesiser, and also taught the others how to DJ on turntables. His work in the duo Cybotron alongs

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Entertainment

Ghost Town review – the phantoms and lost souls haunting a Japanese city after the 2011 earthquake

Katharine Round’s documentary puts cameras in taxis where drivers and fares reflect on the disaster’s impact and talk of crowds of spectres and disappearing passengers In a manner similar to Ryūsuke Hamaguchi’s Drive My Car, in which journeying lulls passengers into greater intimacy, this nocturnal taxi odyssey through the tsunami-hit city of Kamaishi on Japan’s east coast clears the road for the subconscious to manifest. Conversations between the drivers and their customers drift back towards the cataclysm of the 2011 earthquake and tsunami with an undertow of grief, loss and absence. But at

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Entertainment

‘We’re all on constantly shifting sands’: the play capturing life during the US midterm elections

Playwright Richard Nelson’s acclaimed Rhinebeck Panorama series returns for another timely look at the fictional Apple family living in a divided America Richard Nelson learned a great lesson, cliched as it is, late in his writing career: the thing you toss off without overthinking can end up being some of your life’s greatest work. In the program notes for We’ll See, the latest in what has become a 12-play series, he admits he used to view the plays as “disposable, because of their being tied to a given time and place”. Every November from 2010–2013, Nelson checked in on the fictional Apple f

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Entertainment

‘Mogging’ crowned Collins English dictionary word of the year

Bodybuilding slang referring to making someone else look inferior beat entries concerning AI and climate crisis Mogging – meaning to outperform or outshine someone or something – has been named Collins’s word of the year 2026. Announcing the winner in an article for Collins, the copywriter Rachel Quin said the term describes making someone or something look inferior in terms of appearance, confidence or status. Friendslop A term adopted by gamers to describe low-budget, multiplayer indie titles focused on social fun over high-end graphics. Fricy A portmanteau of “fruity” and “spicy”, reflectin

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Entertainment

The 2026 John Lewis Christmas advert is here – and it’s Kristin Scott Thomas v Pickles the evil AI overlord puppy!

This year’s festive special looks forward to the time when chatbots reign supreme and humans prepare to be stamped out for ever. What a treat! John Lewis Christmas ad stars Kristin Scott Thomas as glamorous granny on a gift hunt The John Lewis Christmas advert no longer lands with the same thud as old. Once it prompted full media saturation and performative crying contests on social media. Now, more often than not, it’s the thing you skip before watching cat videos on YouTube. Nevertheless, its release is still an event, and so here we are again. This year, either by fluke or by design, John L

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Entertainment

Citizen Kim by Jonathan Van Meter review – Kardashian under the microscope

The author gets a backstage pass to the personal life of the world’s most famous woman – but what do we really learn? The magazine writer Jonathan Van Meter profiles very famous people for extremely glossy publications. He was responsible for the notorious 1990 interview in which supermodel Linda Evangelista said she wouldn’t wake up for less than $10,000 a day, and in recent years, he has interviewed Taylor Swift, Michelle Obama and Lady Gaga for American Vogue. In 2019, he wrote a cover story, also for Vogue, on Kim Kardashian, the reality TV star turned business­woman turned criminal justic

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Entertainment

Lords of Serendipity by Randy Boyagoda review – a campus satire for this moment of crisis

This propulsive, globe-trotting tale brilliantly skewers the corruption and corporatisation of higher education It’s no secret that academia is on the blink; Canadian author Randy Boyagoda’s new novel, which is equal parts satire, dystopia and exposé, tells the story of all that’s wrong, glitchy and broken. Set across Sri Lanka, the United States and Italy, it centres on a cast of students, parents and professors, and their dealings with a common antagonist: the university. The first character we meet is Sri Lankan teen Devi, who is set on obtaining offers from “Ochpys” – her acronym for Oxfor

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