
Their movie about marital bed death is this summer’s buzziest, funniest film. Its director and her co-star talk self-loathing, psychosexuality and unexpected eruptions
Earlier this week, Edward Norton took a night flight from Los Angeles to London and felt so dreadful the next day he decided to get a massage. “I hadn’t had one in such a long time,” he says, “and I almost started crying. You’re like: ‘Oh! Ah!’”
He has heard similar sounds from cinemas screening his new movie, The Invite, which is about the devastating impact of marriage on your sex life. “People are almost tearful. They’re like: ‘I haven’t had a good, adult laugh that made me feel seen in a long time.’”
Continue reading...Decades after my father’s death, I was still angry about losing him. Finding a good-luck symbol set me on a new path
Sumter, South Carolina, where I grew up, was nicknamed “Murk City”. It’s not all bad, but it has a history of gun violence and crime. I’m a rapper, and a lot of my early inspiration came from my past experiences – overcoming struggles within my home town and grief after the passing of my father.
The 28th anniversary of his death was on 21 May 2023. It was always a tough day, because he died when I was only 11. The anger I had over his loss grew to the point where I couldn’t deal with it and wanted to lash out at those around me.
Continue reading...After exchanging vows with Travis Kelce, the workaholic pop star probably won’t be staying home to admire the wedding silverware
No speculation is too harebrained when it comes to Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce’s wedding. Are they getting married at the gigantic Madison Square Garden arena? What initially sounded mad is apparently quite true. Will she perform? Will Paul McCartney? All bets are off – and given the level of secrecy, maybe we’ll never actually know what does happen.
Only one recent report has made me go: yeah, as if. Gossip site DeuxMoi claims that Swift recently met 50 country radio execs to pitch an alleged upcoming country album, a return to her roots 20 years after she started in the genre. This strikes me as potentially true: even the world’s biggest pop star will glad-hand when needed, as it usually is in the always-traditional Nashville industry. But the report also claimed the rumoured album – Swift’s 13th, famously her lucky number – would be her last “for a while”, presumably because of her impending nuptials. So much of the discussion around the couple’s wedding is focused on what it will mean for Swift’s job. Will she take a break to “enjoy” marriage? Will it change her ambition? Will her songwriting suffer?
Laura Snapes is the Guardian’s deputy music editor
Continue reading...Rebecca Ferguson is still excellent in this unremittingly grey-green subterranean post-apocalypse. Its political acuity makes it worth watching, even if it’s not always the most entertaining …
Being trapped indefinitely in an underground bunker, post-apocalypse, would have many drawbacks, but one of the worst would be miserable boredom. How would you fill the day, and the next and the next, apart from with squabbles and gloom? It’s a problem that Silo, a plush but inevitably rather dank sci-fi drama, wears like a rusty shackle.
Hundreds of years ago, the survivors of a cataclysm were ushered into the titular silo – a dizzyingly enormous metal cylinder hundreds of storeys deep, with the top floor at ground level and everything else subterranean. Ten thousand of them live there now, the records of how and why it all started having long since mysteriously vanished. Citizens abide by rules for which there is no mandate beyond solemn tradition and a paralysing fear of the alternative: on the floor that serves as a town square there is a giant screen with a live video feed of the devastated, irradiated world outside. Employment is provided by departments with functional names such as Mining and Mechanical, giving the impression that the silo is a clanking retro contraption that could fail at any moment.
Continue reading...Guardian recreates audio landscape of past filled by loud morning symphony before 73m wild birds were lost
Imagine a deafening abundance of birdsong so loud it wakes your children at dawn; the chirrup of house sparrows, the chattering of starlings, the melody of the wren, and the clear high-pitched flute of blackbirds saturating the garden, reverberating around your local park, dominating your neighbourhood from early morning to evening twilight.
So loud is the song of the thrush that the naturalist and ornithologist WH Hudson wrote in 1919 that he was grateful when observing one that it was perched on a tree at a distance from his home, “so that when I woke at half past three or four o’clock, the shrill indefatigable voice came in at the open window, softened by distance and washed by the dewy atmosphere to greater purity”.
Continue reading...For all its gloss and elitist governance, football will not bend to the will of a president so eager to demonise and exclude
At 4.38pm on 28 June Donald Trump dropped a Truth. Nothing unusual in that. Trump’s Truth Social feed is relentless and ever-giving.
That same afternoon he also Truthed at 3.58pm, 3.59pm, and twice at 7.42pm, all in the same instantly recognisable, weirdly cartoonish tone, as if a giant maize-based salted snack from a jaunty 1970s TV advert has been pumped full of voodoo and vitamins and propped up behind a lectern to explain geopolitics to the world, but only in the kind of words you might use while arguing with your nine-year-old sister.
Continue reading...NCA says offenders arrange to sexually assault and film victims via online networks with crimes often taking place in trusting relationships
Criminal investigators in the UK say they have uncovered a “truly international network” of organised drug-facilitated sexual assault in which victims are sedated before being raped and sexually assaulted.
The National Crime Agency [NCA] has said online networks, “many as yet unidentified by law enforcement”, were allowing offenders to arrange to rape and abuse victims or arrange for sexual assaults to be filmed.
Continue reading...Makerfield MP said he would consider reducing business rates as part of a package that could also include freeze on private rents
Andy Burnham promised to ease the cost of living if he becomes prime minister in his first interview since returning to parliament.
The Makerfield MP told LBC that if he became prime minister later this month, as expected, he would look at reducing business rates for some high street businesses, bringing down water and energy costs by de-privatising companies and making bus travel free for 16- to 18-year-olds.
Continue reading...PM says ‘whole country will be backing the team’ for 1am game, as licensing hours in England and Wales extended after fierce backlash
Pubs across England and Wales will be able to stay open until 5am on Monday for the England World Cup match against Mexico, after an intervention by Keir Starmer.
The team’s win over the Democratic Republic of the Congo on Wednesday night booked a last-16 tie against Mexico that kicks off at 1am UK time and is due to run until at least 3am.
Continue reading...Zelenskyy says his forces will ‘definitely’ retaliate over Russian bombardment of capital as Kremlin vows to ramp up pressure. What we know on day 1,591
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