{"id":"lists/tag/profile/emmabrockes","title":"Emma Brockes","style":{"primaryColour":"#005689","secondaryColour":"#4bc6df","overlayColour":"#183f5d","backgroundColour":"#ffffff","lightModeBackgroundColour":"#FFFFFF","darkModeBackgroundColour":"#000000","lightModeTitleColour":"#121212","darkModeTitleColour":"#DCDCDC","lightModeLineColour":"#121212","darkModeLineColour":"#333333"},"pagination":{"currentPage":1,"totalPages":74,"uris":{"next":"https://mobile.guardianapis.com/uk/lists/tag/profile/emmabrockes?page=2","last":"https://mobile.guardianapis.com/uk/lists/tag/profile/emmabrockes?page=74"}},"contributor":{"name":"Emma Brockes","bio":"

Emma Brockes is a Guardian columnist. She is the author of She Left Me The Gun: My Mother's Life Before Me

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Monday

\n

It’s the last week of school and, in our case, the last week of primary school, ever, which I thought wouldn’t be a big deal but now we’re here, I’m sliding off my axis about the cruel passage of time. It’s not about my children, who can’t wait to crack on, it’s about me, me, me.

\n

No more WhatsApp groups, no more requests for volunteer service, and the big one, no more school gate. Light of the need to actually leave the house in the morning, I may, finally, be on the brink of formal entry into my Miss Havisham period and look forward to a future of thickening arteries and fresh air-free days.

\n

The marking of the end has become more pronounced since I was at school, although it’s still a long way off the way they do it in the US, where graduation ceremonies are staged for every school year, starting with nursery and finishing with the end of high school.

\n

No one needs to show up to a second-grade graduation, but at my children’s old school, I found the formality of the fifth-grade graduation ceremony quite moving. The fifth graders leaving elementary school wore ties and dresses and the songs were deliberately angled to kill us, and that was before the principal sang a number from Wicked, which even for a school 20 blocks north of Times Square, was sufficiently jaunty to make me wonder why I was leaving at all.

\n

In London things have been low key and lovely. Still, something about the universal agreement that this is a very large life transition can make one forget that our 11-year-olds aren’t actually leaving home and will still need micromanaging through college and beyond.

\n

A friend with a son in the second year of his degree texts to say her summer will be spent leaning over him to revise for his resits, which, in any other week might be a terrible vision of the future, but in this particular one, reassures me we’re at least a decade off done.

\n

Tuesday

\n
\n \"E\n
\n E Jean Carroll has received her $5.6m, a sum held in escrow since the 2023 civil case in which Trump was found liable for sexual abusing and subsequently defaming her. Photograph: Brendan McDermid/Reuters\n
\n
\n\n

Ring the bells, hang out the bunting: Trump has been forced to pay up. On Tuesday, news broke that E Jean Carroll had received her $5.6m ($600,000 of which was interest payment), a sum held in escrow since the 2023 civil case in which the president was found liable for sexually abusing and subsequently defaming her. After the supreme court knocked back Trump’s move to appeal against the verdict, he was forced to pay out this week in what must be an experience so strange for him as to be practically unique: being held to account.

\n

Trump and his legal team responded with a show of grace in the form of a public request for forgiveness, acknowledging the hurt caused and apologising for besmirching the office of the president and the US’s national life. Just kidding! Aaron Harison, a spokesperson for Trump’s personal lawyers, issued a statement in which he said: “The American people stand with President Trump as they demand an immediate end to all of the witch-hunts, including the Democrat-funded travesty of the Carroll hoaxes.”

\n

E Jean Carroll’s lawyers, meanwhile, looked ahead from this victory towards the small remaining question of the $83.3m judgment awarded to Carroll after a separate defamation case, in 2024, and which we look forward to the courts resolving in her favour.

\n

Wednesday

\n

We’re going to the US next week and it’s a game of Russian roulette as to which calamity we’ll be struck down with first: legionnaires’ disease (at least 28 people sick in Manhattan, possibly from bacteria in the cooling towers), the diarrhoea outbreak caused by cyclosporiasis, a parasitic infection spreading throughout the US via bagged lettuce and leafy greens (thousands of people sick in the midwest and hundreds in New York), or will we be smothered by huge toxic clouds wafting down the eastern seaboard from the wildfires raging in Canada?

\n\n

News outlets sent reporters to stand outside Chop’t, a salad chain, in Manhattan’s midtown, to find out if lettuce was off the menu, but most New Yorkers exiting with their big bowls of greens said they’d take their chances. I won’t be among them; this is exactly the confirmation I’ve been in search of for years to justify my conviction that lettuce is a placeholder for food, not food itself. Spinach, fine, and I can manage kale if it’s smothered in dressing. But a bowl of lettuce for lunch is like a tiny sentence to hard labour. All that chewing and for what?

\n

Thursday

\n
\n \"Four\n
\n Netflix’s Little House on the Prairie – like one of those digital fires you load on to your screen to create a nice ambience. Photograph: Eric Zachanowich/Netflix/AP\n
\n
\n

I went in on Little House on the Prairie, the Netflix remake, this week and it’s like one of those digital fires you load on to your screen to create a nice ambience: lovely shots of big sky, long skirts and men sawing wood for log cabins, but I can’t imagine sitting through all eight episodes as anything other than a soothing background to the vacuuming.

\n

In fact, the show has not had a relaxing journey from conception to screen since being sucked into the US culture wars by the former Fox News host Megyn Kelly, who warned Netflix not to “woke-ify” the story – by which, one imagines, she meant indicate that the US’s foundations were built on anything other than wholesome collaboration, grit, overnight oats and the enthusiastic embrace of traditional gender roles.

\n

Tonally, the show is a soap, which lowers expectations in a way that probably helps it out, and by introducing a neighbouring Osage family it manages to feel marginally more in line with 2026 than either the 1970s version or the 1930s original.

\n

Friday

\n

The weather icons on forecasting apps are too vague, say campaigners from Britain’s top tourist attractions, which lose thousands in revenue every time the little raincloud graphic writes off a day as unsuitable for visitors. I am totally behind this drive, which this week announced a summit at Chester zoo to tackle the problem of a sometimes 50% drop in visitors every time the rain cloud icon leads the weather summary.

\n

Rain can be forecast for a 15-minute spell at 11pm, but users glancing at the weather app will come away with the impression that the whole day is a washout. I would argue there is as strong a psychological as a commercial argument for introducing more nuance into weather iconography – glancing ahead at the forecast, a solid week of tiny rainclouds is as efficient a way to tank a mood as anything.

\n

The week in pictures

\n
\n \"Princess\n
\n Princess Anne: ‘One sees you haven’t programmed him to bow for royalty.’ Photograph: Choe Jae-koo/Yonhap/AP\n
\n
\n
\n \"Liz\n
\n Liz Truss: ‘Look on the bright side; I could still be prime minister.’ Photograph: Henry Nicholls/AFP/Getty\n
\n
\n
\n \"Keir\n
\n Keir Starmer: ‘I’ll never have to talk to Kemi Badenoch again.’ Photograph: Simon Dawson/No 10 Downing Street\n
\n
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Plus, Trump pays out to E Jean Carroll, somnolent Little House on the Prairie, and why I’ll be avoiding salad in the US

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It’s skill and science, says Guardian columnist Emma Brockes","body":"

School’s almost out and the holidays are here, which means for millions of Britons we have arrived at the start line for what might be called our biggest annual event: Wimbledon and the World Cup are one thing, but the all-inclusive and all-you-can-eat buffet olympics remains, I would argue, this country’s strongest competitive sport. Arriving at Luton airport before dawn last year, my children walked past the bars and with the innocence of the American-born said, owl-eyed, “Are they drinking … alcohol?” They are, my darlings, and will continue to do so from first light in the terminal until the last coach leaves the resort.

\n

This is how it is now. Since Covid, vacation trends in Britain have skewed increasingly towards formalising this country’s latent maximalist instincts when it comes to enjoying our holidays. Between 2023 and 2024, bookings for European all-inclusive resorts rose by 30%, and the latest figures from Abta suggest that a quarter of British holidaymakers will now opt for the all-inclusive – meaning bottomless canteen-style food and drink, which, no matter how much we paid for it up front, I defy any of us not to experience as “free”.

\n

The reasons for this rise are, ostensibly, because holidaymakers want to fix costs in a wobbly economy and to enjoy “zero decision” holidays in an era in which many of us feel we have no more decisions left in us to make. But while both explanations might be true, they overlook what I would suggest is the bigger draw of the all-inclusive – the pleasures of cracking the Challenge of the Buffet. Namely: how do I extract maximum value from this spectrum of options in a way that preserves both my dignity and my desire to actually eat what I’ve piled up on my plate?

\n

How successfully you tackle this challenge will rely on your familiarity with the History of the Buffet and also your ability to quickly and accurately put a mental price on each dish. Perhaps, like me, you have the advantage of growing up during the stone age of buffet dining, by which of course I mean the 1980s salad bar at Pizza Hut. Like eastern-bloc gymnasts, those of us who came up in the Pizza Hut era honed our skills in an environment in which diners taking food home were restricted to a single, highly pressured visit to the buffet.

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This is how we did it: lightweight leaves and shredded cheese on the bottom, building up through incrementally heavier and less compressible layers (croutons; ham cubes) until the strategic use of bread sticks propped up the cardboard lid on the carton, allowing for a crucial extra half inch of salad. Hated artichokes aside, the highest value item in the salad bar was the tinned pineapple ring, which would be balanced, wetly, on the lid of the box and presented defiantly at the cash desk for payment.

\n\n

Historically, of course, the greatest buffets of all time have been in Las Vegas, where hotels on the strip would offer multiple adjoining rooms featuring course after course of high-end all-you-can-eat fare. The New York Times this week did a deep dive into these particular buffets as their numbers dwindle, dipping in the past few years from about 70 in 2019 to just half a dozen now. Those old buffets were single-pay, ultra-luxe experiences in which you could be charged up to $100 for two hours of free rein and which have fallen out of fashion as food prices in the US have risen. (I went only once, to the buffet at Caesars Palace, where like a child emerging from 1940s Britain I was brought almost to tears in the cake room.)

\n

By contrast, the Euro model returns us to a more modest spread in which volume beats all. The restaurant critic at the New York Times takes the view that, when it comes to buffet strategy, one should avoid cheap, filling fare like pasta. This is sensible advice, to which I would add: when the buffet is dominated by beige foods and bad salad, laser in on the single luxury item, for example the one-night-only ibérico-ham station at our Spanish all-inclusive last year.

\n

There it was, the best ham in the world, with a dedicated server carving it slowly and beautifully on to tiny plates that were replaced every time someone took one. I don’t know how many times I went up, but by the end of the night I had a cracking headache from the salt, which was totally worth it. Spiking prices, global warming and the obscenity of food waste will, at some point, probably take these options away from us and I suppose we should say rightly so. We will still have our memories. At the end of the holiday, one of my children said to me, “You have to stop talking about the ham.” But I won’t. I’ll never stop talking about the ham.

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As the all-inclusive holiday has a revival, I recall honing my buffet talents at the Pizza Hut salad bar in the 1980s. It's skill and science: exhilarating

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I’ll confess my heart sank slightly at the prospect of reading David Sedaris’s new volume of essays, some of them previously published in the New Yorker, and which, relative to his earlier output, strike me as increasingly shticky and reliant on anecdotes too thin for their weight. (From the essay Little America: “Few things drive me crazier than people who put their feet up on the furniture.”) After nine previous volumes, Sedaris would seem to be suffering from a problem that comes to all writers in the end, and memoir writers in particular, which is a dearth of useable material. What can there possibly be left in the Sedaris backstory that the writer hasn’t already mined?

\n

Well, as it turns out, there is still lots of useable stuff, as well as some an editor could have put a red line through, although Sedaris, who has sold more than 16m books, may well consider himself part of the post-editing elite. (I was reminded while reading of a line from a profile of JK Rowling several years ago in which, referring to The Casual Vacancy, Ian Parker wrote: “Some sentences cause you to picture a Little, Brown editor starting to dial Rowling’s number, then slowly putting down the handset.”) And perhaps it doesn’t matter; as long as Sedaris’s superfans keep coming, both for the books and events, why mess with the formula? For less committed followers, however, reading Sedaris is a glitchier experience than it was.

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The new collection contains 28 short pieces that Sedaris has harvested from everyday experiences with his husband, Hugh, his siblings and his friends, and while in New York, England and on the road. He is continually touring and, as far as the essays are concerned, that’s where life gets in for Sedaris, guaranteeing a certain amount of material generated by chats with drivers, fleeting interactions at airports and the-general-public-say-the-funniest-things encounters with readers who have come to see him. If the scope is narrow, the Sedaris tone still charms, even as it advances to a state of crankiness that makes him look like a gay Larry David. “I’m in the hard part of getting old – the part where everything irritates you,” he writes. No kidding, and if Curb Your Enthusiasm can get away with an episode devoted to the hell of plastic packaging, then Sedaris is entitled to do the feet-on-furniture thing.

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Which is to say, when it’s good it’s still good. In his essay The Hem of His Garment, he writes about people “who aren’t in show business but dazzle nevertheless”, and points for support to Ann Richards, the late governor of Texas (and mother of the late Cecile Richards of Planned Parenthood), an example simultaneously so random, so absurd and yet so on the money in this context that I laughed out loud. Other laugh-out-loud moments include Sedaris’s experience at a No Kings protest against Trump, in which he finds himself baffled by his fellow protestors’ lack of focus. “Go to a protest now,” he writes, “and within seconds you’re looking at the person next to you, thinking, ‘Globalize the Intifada? I thought we were here to defend Masterpiece Theatre!’”

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It’s low-hanging fruit, but I enjoyed the image of Sedaris looking around the protest in Portsmouth, New Hampshire and noting certain aesthetic similarities between the No Kings protestors and the kooks of the Tea Party circa Obama’s first term. Focusing on “a bearded man playing the accordion”, Sedaris writes that the protestors seem to offer “the worst possible advertisement for the Democratic Party: ‘Join us! We folk-dance!’”

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Which brings us to what feels like the writer’s occasionally too rote adoption of the grumpy-old-man trope. When he makes a joke about saying “mothering person” instead of “motherfucker”, or asks, while describing someone, “are you allowed to say swarthy any more?” it’s so lame, so unfunny, so beneath a writer of Sedaris’s standing that it triggers a real are-you-kidding-me moment. Sedaris is only 69; he lives in New York and Europe and constantly travels the world; this kids-today-eh stuff is off the mark and should’ve been nixed.

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The strongest sections, meanwhile, aren’t riffs on modern life but observations about people, close to him or otherwise, and in which Sedaris has always been at his shrewdest and most powerful. If one suffers a slight sense of weariness when he opens yet another sentence with the phrase, “My sister Amy”, the writing about his mother always hits hard. In the essay Cool Mom, a cascade of memories is triggered when he sees a fiftysomething woman at Denver airport in a T-shirt that reads: “I’m not a regular mom, I’m a cool mom.” What follows is Sedaris at his best, proving the point that he could write about his family for ever and never run dry: “Whatever our mother was to us, it’s too complex and momentous to ever fit onto a sweatshirt. A person would need a whole mountain, and then some.”

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It is these reminiscences that send me back to his earlier books and remind me just how lasting some of Sedaris’s images are: the time his mum locked him and his siblings out of the house in the snow; the time she made him give his Halloween candy to some loser kid who came trick-or-treating on the wrong day. In the essay Ashes, from his second collection, Naked, there is that account of her death, a beautifully written piece in which his mother is smoking while contemplating her own end and none of them knows what to do.

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Beneath the whimsy, there has always been a savage side to Sedaris, and an even more deeply buried layer of sentiment. In that same piece, Cool Mom, one sees where Sedaris’s writing voice comes from. Referring to the culture of the family he grew up in, he writes: “Nothing got made fun of more than sincerity.” And yet, as with so many pro curmudgeons, the impression one gets of Sedaris after reading him is of someone who feels things deeply and is probably, at root, a soppy guy. I love the piece about his oldest and closest friend, Dawn, who, he writes, “dresses like a Swiss person” and “smells like a cardboard box”. (I laughed out loud at that, too.) Or the piece in which Sedaris learns of the death of a boyhood pal he hadn’t seen or thought of for decades. “I am 67. This is my life, but different now, diminished, because Dan Thompson, who was there at the start of it and who made it so very worthwhile, has died.”

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In the essay A Long Way Home, Sedaris and Hugh give a stranger a lift back to the city from Maine after their flight has been cancelled, an account of a seven-hour drive with a woman called Susan Du that I found unaccountably moving. “Hugh and I, 10 blocks now from our own apartment, waited with the engine running until she was safely through her building’s front door and well on her way to the elevator.” If these essays can sometimes feel slight, here is a moment in which the strange poignancy of a glancing encounter, like someone seen through a lighted window and for some reason always remembered, finds its perfect expression.

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• The Land and Its People by David Sedaris is published by Abacus (£20). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.

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Monday

\n

The week starts with Penelope Keith, sad news of whose death on Monday sends everyone over the age of 40 screeching back to her greatest hits – and they really were great, weren’t they? There are those sitcom characters from the late 1970s who have more or less faded from view – if I try really hard, I can just about summon the image of Wendy Craig and Geoffrey Palmer in Butterflies – but the Good Life never waned, remaining as stubbornly embedded in the national memory as Fawlty Towers, Dad’s Army and the winter of discontent.

\n

If Tom and Barbara were the beating heart of the show, the real star was Keith as Margo Leadbetter. We loved Margo for her wardrobe and her innocence, for her giraffe-like frame forever curling itself into slapstick contortions while Jerry rolled his eyes in the background. Margo was as emphatically a creature of her time as the women of Motherland are today, airily disdainful, endlessly perplexed and as English as they come. In the tradition of Joyce Grenfell, there was a guilelessness about Keith that, even at her most imperious, somehow hurt one’s heart.

\n

Some things I’ve discovered after reading about her this week: that she was RSC trained and played Beatrice (opposite Michael York as Benedick) in a 1978 TV movie of Much Ado About Nothing. That much of Margo’s wardrobe in the Good Life came from Harrods and the fashion label Frank Usher, known for its flowy outlines and big shapes. And that Keith’s follow-up sitcom, To the Manor Born, which faded more quickly from view than the Good Life, was Schitt’s Creek but in Somerset.

\n

Keith communicated a gentleness that I think Paul Eddington, her co-star from the Good Life, put very well in his final TV interview, a piece of television so affecting I remember it clearly, although it was broadcast over 30 years ago. Knowing he hadn’t long to live, and on being asked what he would like his epitaph to be, Eddington said, carefully, “I think I would like it to be ‘he did very little harm.’” The modesty of this statement, and the joy he and Keith put into the world, make the pair of them rarer than rubies.

\n

Tuesday

\n

Serena Williams, back on Centre Court after an absence of four years, was defeated in three sets by the 20-year-old Aussie Maya Joint on Tuesday, while the seven-time Wimbledon champion’s eight-year-old daughter, Olympia, occasionally yawned from the box. For the rest of us, it was a nail-biting exercise in trying not to think too hard about the fact that Joint was not even born when Williams first played at Wimbledon.

\n

And yet here Williams was, playing a great match with a lot of the old magic still there. I watched from the sofa while ploughing my way through a pile of leftover fish fingers and a stack of puck-like hash browns and pondering the only question for those of us who remember the former world No 1 in her prime: “She’s 44 and has had two kids, how is that form even possible?”

\n

The answer, of course, is that these women aren’t normal. I once found myself at a WTA event in a restaurant on Central Park South with the then titans of the women’s game – Ana Ivanovic, the Serb who had just won the French Open, Kim Clijsters, and Venus Williams, 6ft 1in stocking feet and incalculable in heels – all circulating the room while the sports hacks stared, open mouthed, and tried not to get in their way. It was like being in a room with a superior branch of evolution, a status I guess you can’t really reach when you mostly eat leftovers off your children’s plates and enjoy the big matches from the L-shaped bend in your sofa.

\n
\n \"Taylor\n
\n ‘If any person here present knows of any lawful impediment to this marriage …’ Photograph: Kevin Mazur/Getty Images\n
\n
\n

Wednesday

\n

I wouldn’t mind taking a look at the Bayeux tapestry. I mean, the word “tapestry” makes me a bit antsy, but it’s of great historical importance and, as these things go, there are surely worse ways to spend an afternoon.

\n

As it turns out, a lot of people feel more strongly about the 1,000-year-old piece of embroidery than I do and on Wednesday, 80,000 of them waited online to buy tickets for the forthcoming exhibition at the British Museum. On Thursday morning, when a further 40,000 people jumped online in the queue, the museum informed them every ticket had gone.

\n

What is going on here? We all learned about the Norman conquest at school and I imagine many of us haven’t given it another thought since, unless it’s come up on one of those podcasts we listen to in a vain effort to actually know things. It is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, I guess, since the tapestry has only left Normandy twice, and moving it remains risky; the tapestry has been insured for £800m – which will be quite the claim if it gets snagged going through the machine at the Gare du Nord.

\n

Meanwhile, I’ve been trying to imagine how thrilled my kids would be were I to tell them, “hey, you know how we tried and failed to get Katseye tickets for September? Well guess what after nine hours on the phone I managed to score an even bigger ticket to see a 1,000-year-old bit of cloth with this really exciting battle embroidered on it and which in the 1070s blew people’s minds more emphatically than the Apple Vision Pro.”

\n
\n \"Rachel\n
\n ‘Would you like a hike in national insurance contributions and a freeze in income tax thresholds with that?’ Photograph: Doug Peters/PA\n
\n
\n

Thursday

\n

It is induction day at secondary school and parents divide between anxiously hovering over their soon-to-be year 7s, and fighting off memories of their own transitions to high school, approximately 300 years ago. It’s a different world now, of course. For most of Thursday morning, I find myself glancing every few moments at the two icons on my phone, locating my kids in their soon-to-be-high school, then on their slow journey home on the bus, then in the three shops they go into between the stop and our house, where each time they use their kid debit cards I get a ping on my phone.

\n

Smartphone bans for rising year 7s this year seek to retrain parents to unclench and let their kids find their way home without tracking them online, but once you’ve done it once, it’s a hard thing to give up and the kids are already conditioned to expect it. It remains one of the quickest ways to shock my two – up there with no seatbelts in the back and candy cigarettes – to remind them that, when I was their age, I left the house and my mum had no idea where I was, who I was with or what I was spending until I came back.

\n

Friday

\n

Fibre is the new protein, have you heard? Good news for everyone staggering about on GLP-1s looking like versions of Edvard Munch’s The Scream and subsisting on modest portions of fruit. A big piece in the New Yorker this week explains “fibremaxxing” and contains this excellent line: “Gastroenterologists and influencers alike are eager to explain that fibre affects health beyond ‘gut motility’, formerly known as shitting.”

\n

This quietly hilarious piece goes on to explain the implications of eating to optimise digestion and features a food entrepreneur who spent the pandemic gobbling pints of blueberries at a single sitting, which, Carrie Bradshaw-style, lead to various epiphanies: “At first, she wondered if she was overdoing it –wasn’t fruit high in sugar? – but after a few months she’d lost weight and felt better than she had in years, a transformation that also helped her realise that she wanted a divorce.”

\n
\n \"Andy\n
\n ‘I call this look “filed two pieces to the NME in 1996” and essentially identify as a music journalist.’ Photograph: Temilade Adelaja/Reuters\n
\n
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From certain angles, it might appear as if President Trump is having a tough month. He messed up the renovation of the Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool, which he blamed on acts of vandalism no one has been able to stand up. The supreme court rejected both his bid to appeal against the $5m (£3.8m) civil judgment against him for defaming and sexually abusing E Jean Carroll, and his executive order to end birthright citizenship. And the war with Iran keeps rumbling on. And yet, after Trump’s mandatory financial disclosure report was released on Tuesday, headlines drew attention to the fact the president made more than $2.2bn in revenue in 2025 – more than three times what he pulled in the year before his inauguration. Contrary to appearances, perhaps everything is going exactly to plan.

\n

It is always a question with Trump as to how much the wealth he has accrued in his second term in office is the spoils of strategy rather than the lucky result of his scattergun but industrial-scale hustle. Looking at the numbers in his financial report, one is reminded that before he became president, Trump piloted a series of failed businesses – six of which declared bankruptcy – and gave every indication of being a lousy businessman. It’s often pointed out that if Trump had simply invested the vast inheritance left to him by Fred Trump, his father, in a standard tracker fund, he would’ve made more money than through his lacklustre business career, and there’s nothing to suggest this was likely to change.

\n

That was before his second presidency, of course. Now he and his children are sitting on top of a huge fortune, large parts of which seem to have come from sources with interests in sucking up to the president. As the New York Times points out, a large chunk of Trump’s $2.2bn windfall last year came from an investment firm with ties to the United Arab Emirates, which bought an almost 50% stake in his crypto company, World Liberty Financial, and which is part of an industry over which Trump has policy-making and regulatory influence.

\n

Similarly, the report registers the smaller but still significant revenue streams generated by Trump’s side hustle in defamation and other lawsuits, including settlements with ABC ($16m), Meta ($24.5m) and Paramount ($16m) – legal proceedings which, it seems fair to assume, these media and tech companies may have had more appetite for fighting had the plaintiff not been the president of the United States with vast influence over their industries.

\n
\n \"Donald\n
\n Donald Trump with Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni at a summit in Egypt, October 2025. Photograph: Evan Vucci/AP Pool/AP\n
\n
\n

All of which leaves Trump in the strange position of, on the one hand, getting the thing he has always desperately wanted in life – genuine, unimaginable wealth – at a cost of the other thing he has always desperately wanted in life, universal admiration and applause. This trade-off is so morally neat it might’ve come from a fable, but that is where the US president currently finds himself. Rich but mocked; successful, if you look at his income, but an absolute turkey of a leader with a 39% approval rating and an image so tarnished that even Giorgia Meloni, the unpopular rightwing leader of Italy and former absolute lickspittle to Trump, has felt emboldened to have a crack.

\n

As with most petulant personalities, it’s likely to be the small failures that niggle most with Trump. While his famous deal-making abilities continue to field poor results in the Middle East, the president seems to have turned himself inside out trying to explain away the algae currently blooming in the Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool. It’s a tiny, irrelevant failure as these things go, but with optics so bad, so glaringly unmissable even to those with no interest in Iran – here is a man who can’t even keep the nation’s pond clean – he’s had to drum up endless wild stories to excuse it.

\n

Likewise, Trump’s predictably terrible oversight of something called the Great American State Fair. You’ve probably not even heard of it, despite the fact it is going on right now on the National Mall in Washington DC, and has been advertised by the White House as a 16-day extravaganza to mark the country’s 250th birthday with “a world-class exposition”. Or, as it turns out, with an empty food hall, unpeopled exhibitions and television’s Dr Oz addressing a half-empty field in a setup that looks dodgier than that so-bad-it-became-an-instant-classic Willy Wonka experience in Glasgow.

\n

It’s Trump’s reverse Midas touch, of course, which wrecks everything he touches outside his family’s crypto holdings and which, as support for him wanes even in his former strongholds, must be tearing his ego, divided as it is between the primary motivations of money and praise, clean in two. If only he were a character from fiction – an Elizabethan tragedy, say, or an episode of Captain Underpants – it would be fascinating and grimly hilarious to watch this play out.

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Potus pocketed over $2.2bn last year – but with an algae-filled reflecting pool and his State Fair a fiasco, what price happiness?

","webPublicationDate":"2026-07-01T14:16:44Z","style":{"navigationColour":"#e6711b","navigationDownColour":"#f39f33","navigationButtonColour":"#ffffff","ruleColour":"#e6711b","headlineColour":"#333333","headlineAccentColour":"#e6711b","quoteColour":"#999999","standfirstColour":"#676767","metaColour":"#999999","dividerColour":"#dcdad5","backgroundColour":"#e3e1dc","savedForLaterTrueColour":"#333333","savedForLaterFalseColour":"#36711b","iconColour":"#676767","kickerColour":"#e6711b","colourPalette":"comment"},"lastModified":"2026-07-02T08:17:25Z","listenToArticle":{"uri":"https://mobile.guardianapis.com/uk/audio/commentisfree/2026/jul/01/donald-trump-billions-of-dollars-reflecting-pool-washington-dc-algae-state-fair","durationInSec":315},"bodyImages":[{"urlTemplate":"https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/4ff333847c1881b0c19bbeae777da358607638f5/0_0_3402_2268/master/3402.jpg?w=#{width}&h=#{height}&q=#{quality}&fit=bounds&sig-ignores-params=true&s=90e14bb1d4e4054463c462b006fcef06","height":2268,"width":3402,"orientation":"landscape","caption":"Donald Trump with Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni at a summit in Egypt, October 2025. 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What a joy to watch these legends still fighting on, says Guardian columnist Emma Brockes","body":"

You can look at house prices and hemlines, or prime ministers and presidents, but for my money, the quickest shortcut to evoking an era is its tennis players. I grew up in the age of Graf v Seles and Agassi v Sampras, but my earliest memories – those that yank me back to a primordial time – come from the period immediately before that. I haven’t even reached the end of the trailer for Chris & Martina: The Final Set, the new Netflix documentary following the lifelong rivalry and friendship of Chris Evert and Martina Navratilova, and I am already an absolute wreck.

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Wimbledon starts next week and, in The Final Set, we are taken back to that pivotal moment in the late 1970s when Evert and Navratilova – “the most cold-hearted pursuers of greatness that you’ve ever met in your entire life”, as the documentary puts it – changed the women’s game. It was Rocky v Apollo Creed; Maverick v Iceman. There was Evert, blond, tiny, from Florida, versus Navratilova, who, in 1975, when she defected from what was then communist Czechoslovakia, was out of shape and unsure of herself. Over the next decade she transformed herself into a winning machine and while Evert, my first love, gave way to Monica Seles, my second love, and Steffi Graf, the tennis love of my life, it was Navratilova who would break all our hearts.

\n
\n \"Chris\n
\n Chris Evert and Martina Navratilova in the new Netflix documentary Chris & Martina: The Final Set. Photograph: COURTESY OF NETFLIX\n
\n
\n

For context: to grow up in the UK’s tennis-club belt of the home counties in the late 1980s was a very particular thing. It meant swerving louchely around and knocking imaginary clay out of your big Fila trainers because that’s what Andre Agassi did at Roland-Garros. It was murmuring brand names – Yonex, Ellesse, Diadora – with the fervour of the rosary. For a solid 10 years, I couldn’t imagine aspiring to anything higher in life than getting another white shell suit by Sergio Tacchini and a massive Tag Heuer watch (sponsors of Seles in the late 1990s). It meant despising Anna Kournikova, who never won a singles title. And yet there she was, hoovering up multimillion-dollar sponsorship deals while Amélie Mauresmo, the actual world No 1, went begging.

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Of course, we all know what that was. Tennis had long had a homophobia problem. A generation earlier, Evert was sponsored by Rolex while Navratilova struggled to get any sponsorship at all. Evert was her only friend and that friendship cost her dearly on court. It wasn’t until Navratilova’s girlfriend at the time, a pro basketball player from Brooklyn, said, “You need to kick her ass,” that she turned into a killer and came after her friend. (A line from Navratilova to make lesbians everywhere laugh bitterly: “I think I was influenced too much by my girlfriends.” No kidding.)

\n
\n \"Martina\n
\n Martina Navratilova after winning her ninth – and last – singles title at Wimbledon in 1990. Photograph: David Giles/PA\n
\n
\n

And so the women entered a period of trying to destroy each other, a dynamic amplified by what, in the first half of their careers, was a stark preference by crowds for Evert. At the finals of the US Open in 1984, the entire stadium was behind Evert and Navratilova was booed. “I don’t know if it’s because I’m gay or from a communist country,” says Navratilova, looking back, “but I’m American. And I’m a good person. And you guys are hating on me.” She won the tournament, but 40 years later you can still hear the hurt in her voice.

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Let’s not kid ourselves; the dislike for Navratilova wasn’t about where she came from. The real reason was there when sports journalists asked her if she thought she was “bad for women’s tennis”. It was there at my grandparents’ house during a Wimbledon final when my grandfather made a snide remark about Navratilova’s awesome physique and suggested she might be better suited to the men’s game. I was not yet 10 at the time but, in the way children know things long before they know them, I remember thinking, with a sinking heart, oh, so there’s that.

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The other part of the documentary is a cancer story; the two old champions receive simultaneous diagnoses, Evert with ovarian cancer, Navratilova with throat and breast cancers. Incredibly, the cameras get access to them in hospital and when, in a facility in Florida, a nurse comes into the waiting room and says blandly, “Christine Evert?”, you want to shout at the screen: do you know who she is?

\n

They retired. A new order came in. I fell in love with Graf and then the Williams sisters. But I never got over that era. In 1990, Navratilova made her final winning singles appearance at Wimbledon where she won her ninth title, and that is how I think of her, now: big glasses, hair peroxided and only just growing out of the mullet look.

\n

By 1994, the crowds loved her, and as she bowed out of Wimbledon for the last time they gave her a one-minute-40-second standing ovation. She cried, we cried, and watching these legends at 69 and 71, bald from chemo, fighting, still – “If I didn’t have a bum shoulder, I’d kick your ass,” says Evert to her old friend as the pair leave the cancer ward – I defy you not to cry, too.

\n","atomsCSS":[],"shouldHideReaderRevenue":false,"discussionId":"/p/x5bn4y","section":"Opinion","id":"commentisfree/2026/jun/24/chris-evert-martina-navratilova-friendship-tennis","displayImages":[{"urlTemplate":"https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/2303fea748c00ad1dc3ecc5949131e52fc3159ad/504_0_2518_2015/master/2518.jpg?w=#{width}&h=#{height}&q=#{quality}&fit=bounds&sig-ignores-params=true&s=dfe9c9e711c5e43ac3e57279a85ab090","height":2015,"width":2518,"orientation":"landscape","caption":"Martina Navratilova and Chris Evert after their women’s singles semi-final match, which Navratilova won, at Wimbledon, London, 30 June 1988. Photograph: Photograph: Robert Dear/AP","credit":"Robert Dear/AP","altText":"Martina Navratilova and Chris Evert after their women’s singles semifinal match, which Navratilova won, at Wimbledon, London, 30 June 1988.","cleanCaption":"Martina Navratilova and Chris Evert after their women’s singles semi-final match, which Navratilova won, at Wimbledon, London, 30 June 1988.","cleanCredit":"Photograph: Robert Dear/AP"}],"designType":"Comment","shouldHideAdverts":false,"standFirst":"

Chris was my first tennis love, but it was Martina who broke my heart. What a joy to watch these legends still fighting on

","webPublicationDate":"2026-06-24T15:00:48Z","style":{"navigationColour":"#e6711b","navigationDownColour":"#f39f33","navigationButtonColour":"#ffffff","ruleColour":"#e6711b","headlineColour":"#333333","headlineAccentColour":"#e6711b","quoteColour":"#999999","standfirstColour":"#676767","metaColour":"#999999","dividerColour":"#dcdad5","backgroundColour":"#e3e1dc","savedForLaterTrueColour":"#333333","savedForLaterFalseColour":"#36711b","iconColour":"#676767","kickerColour":"#e6711b","colourPalette":"comment"},"lastModified":"2026-06-24T17:05:55Z","listenToArticle":{"uri":"https://mobile.guardianapis.com/uk/audio/commentisfree/2026/jun/24/chris-evert-martina-navratilova-friendship-tennis","durationInSec":326},"bodyImages":[{"urlTemplate":"https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/60b483bdf49308052cac8df263b86424e72883ea/0_0_1350_1080/master/1350.jpg?w=#{width}&h=#{height}&q=#{quality}&fit=bounds&sig-ignores-params=true&s=24c1e14666c5102ebe196c51a32483c7","height":1080,"width":1350,"orientation":"landscape","caption":"Chris Evert and Martina Navratilova in the new Netflix documentary Chris & Martina: The Final Set. Photograph: Photograph: COURTESY OF NETFLIX","credit":"COURTESY OF NETFLIX","altText":"Chris Evert and Martina Navratilova in the new Netflix documentary Chris & Martina: The Final Set.","cleanCaption":"Chris Evert and Martina Navratilova in the new Netflix documentary Chris & Martina: The Final Set.","cleanCredit":"Photograph: COURTESY OF NETFLIX"},{"urlTemplate":"https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/f75783f9a6f49c619ea33fc4195355899786a621/0_0_1306_1966/master/1306.jpg?w=#{width}&h=#{height}&q=#{quality}&fit=bounds&sig-ignores-params=true&s=620bea85bd6ac23ad18c8e77f923cb85","height":1966,"width":1306,"orientation":"portrait","caption":"Martina Navratilova after winning her ninth – and last – singles title at Wimbledon in 1990. 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What a joy to watch these legends still fighting on, says Guardian columnist Emma Brockes","showQuotedHeadline":true,"showLiveIndicator":false,"sublinks":[],"mainImage":{"urlTemplate":"https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/2303fea748c00ad1dc3ecc5949131e52fc3159ad/504_0_2518_2015/master/2518.jpg?w=#{width}&h=#{height}&q=#{quality}&fit=bounds&sig-ignores-params=true&s=dfe9c9e711c5e43ac3e57279a85ab090","height":2015,"width":2518,"orientation":"landscape","credit":"Robert Dear/AP","altText":"Martina Navratilova and Chris Evert after their women’s singles semifinal match, which Navratilova won, at Wimbledon, London, 30 June 1988.","cleanCredit":"Photograph: Robert Dear/AP"},"cutoutImage":{"urlTemplate":"https://i.guim.co.uk/img/uploads/2017/10/06/Emma-Brockes,-L.png?w=#{width}&h=#{height}&q=#{quality}&fit=bounds&sig-ignores-params=true&s=c48b57da90097f52354f583e3159eed0"},"renderedItemProd":{"minBridgetVersion":"1.11.1","url":"https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/jun/24/chris-evert-martina-navratilova-friendship-tennis?dcr=apps&edition=uk"},"renderedItemBeta":{"minBridgetVersion":"1.11.1","url":"https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/jun/24/chris-evert-martina-navratilova-friendship-tennis?dcr=apps&edition=uk"},"renderedItemDebug":{"minBridgetVersion":"1.11.1","url":"https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/jun/24/chris-evert-martina-navratilova-friendship-tennis?dcr=apps&edition=uk"},"cardDesignType":"Comment","correspondingTags":[],"type":"Article","importance":0},{"title":"‘How do I deal with my rage? I put it in everything I do’: Killing Eve’s Sandra Oh on fury, friendship and hitting her prime in midlife","rawTitle":"‘How do I deal with my rage? I put it in everything I do’: Killing Eve’s Sandra Oh on fury, friendship and hitting her prime in midlife","item":{"trailText":"It took a long time for the actor to find her groove – then the smash TV spy thriller changed everything. She talks about getting advice from A-listers, speaking her mind, and why she’s switching to theatre","body":"

Sandra Oh bursts into a back room at the National Theatre in London with wayward post-rehearsal energy. The 54-year-old, long one of the most stylish actors in Hollywood, is in brown linen, a herringbone jacket and hat and sunglasses, which she removes before collapsing into a chair and throwing her head forward, arms outstretched, hair splayed across the table. “It’s just the fucking process of it,” she groans. “We just finished our first stagger-through, which if anyone is an actor – it’s early days, so the fact we made it through was great. It’s brutal. We started in the Lyttelton, and it’s interesting to be in that space and to hear verse. You can really hear it. It’s not just about volume or speed. It’s not even solely about intention. You learn so much just being in that space, but the big thing is – sorry.” She catches herself. “I’m just marching on.” And she bellows with laughter.

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Oh has been in London for just over a month rehearsing her role as Alice in a modern reimagining of Molière’s Le Misanthrope. It’s a happy return; eight years ago, she was in the capital to film the first of four series of the hit show Killing Eve, which became a phenomenon and changed her life as an actor for ever. Oh played Eve Polastri, the shambolic but brilliant British intelligence agent, who, along with Jodi Comer’s Villanelle, made for one of the best spy capers of recent years. Now, she is playing a novelist – gender-flipped from the 17th-century original, in an adaptation by Martin Crimp – who is fed up with the flattery and dishonesty of the people around her. It’s a deliberate pivot to theatre; last summer, she appeared as Olivia in a starry production of Twelfth Night at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park, New York. In the autumn, she made her debut at New York’s Metropolitan Opera in a production of Donizetti’s comic opera La Fille du Régiment. Unlike the sometimes fraught me-me-meism of screen work, says Oh, working in theatre in general and at the National in particular “is a collaborative thing” – not least, she adds drily, because no one does it for the money. “Everyone has to bring their best and most open selves. And everyone else loves watching everyone succeed.”

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It’s a dynamic that suits Oh in her current phase. In the last few years, she has become that rare figure in Hollywood, a famous woman who has only grown more powerful with age, a champion of younger performers and something of a truth-teller in an industry full of people encouraged by flattery to talk absolute rubbish. She is funny, shrewd, insightful and, above all, generous in her insights. A few years ago, in the New Yorker, she spoke about surviving years of racism as a woman of Asian origin trying to get ahead as an actor. (On white male directors not casting her, she said: “It’s like being able to get over a bad boyfriend. They’re not going to call. Just move on and hang out with the young women who want you to be their mom.”) Later, she described to the New York Times a sense of being “deep into this very rich middle part of [my] life” in which “only now do [I] have enough strength and hopefully curiosity to go into the places of asking the question: why did I do that? Who has been steering the ship? Because now, in this back half of my life, I’m the captain of the ship.”

\n
\n \"Oh\n
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In the diaries Oh has been keeping since she was a child – extracts of which have appeared in papers and podcasts – one gets the sense of an introspective, literary person, with a deep connection to where she came from – a suburb of Ottawa, Canada, where Oh still has friends from grade school. If we loved her 20 years ago as Dr Cristina Yang in Grey’s Anatomy – a blunt, brilliant cardiothoracic surgeon – these days Oh appears as a sage-like person very much in her prime, which, she tells me, she finds, “incredibly liberating and also, like, enraging”.

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We’ll get to that. A fortnight before I meet Oh at the theatre, I see her in a studio on the eve of the first week of rehearsals. As an actor gearing up to appear at the National for the first time, Oh had, a few weeks earlier, the amazing good fortune to run into Fiona Shaw at a grocery store in her LA neighbourhood, where her Killing Eve co-star happened to be living while filming. “She’s one of the greatest stage actors of her generation and knows the National,” says Oh. In the supermarket aisle and later, over breakfast at Oh’s house, Shaw gave her a bunch of hacks about the stage at the Lyttelton. “She said, ‘If you’re going to be on this stage, look out for [the sight lines] in this area,’ or, ‘This is the strongest area on stage, do this technicality this way.’ She was giving me the gold. I could not believe it.”

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In the studio that first day we meet, Oh is in a cropped leather jacket and soft leather shoes that are “good and supportive. I need structure.” Don’t we all, I say, and Oh cackles. In fact, while it’s the structural and technical aspects of theatre work that she enjoys, it’s TV that made Oh. Her jump to leading roles came relatively late. It’s strange, these days, to stumble across Oh in old movies in parts that seem wildly too small for her – the other day, while watching the 2001 film The Princess Diaries with my kids, I was taken aback to see Oh as the cartoonish Vice Principal Gupta. Other credits from that period include “fourth fired employee” from something called Full Frontal and “marketing person” from the movie For Your Consideration.

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Despite enjoying great, early success in TV in Canada and becoming a prominent ensemble player for nine years in Grey’s Anatomy (2005-14), it wasn’t until Killing Eve that she really ascended to leading role status. Famously, when her agent called her with the script for the show, Oh assumed she was to read for a minor character. “‘So Nancy, I don’t understand, what’s the part?’” Oh recounted saying to her agent at the time. “And Nancy goes: ‘Sweetheart, it’s Eve, it’s Eve.’”

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\n \"Oh\n
\n Oh with Ellen Pompeo in Grey’s Anatomy, 2006 (above), and with Jodie Comer in Killing Eve, 2019 (below). Photograph: Michael Desmond/five\n
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\n
\n \"With\n
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Oh as Eve was a revelation; by turns sardonic, baffled, excavating every nuance of what it is to be a frustrated, overlooked cog in the machine, and all the while harbouring star status that let out in her electric chemistry with Comer.

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Eight years and another big show – Netflix’s excellent comedy drama, The Chair – later and Oh’s attitude to all this history is by turns philosophical, resigned and, increasingly, weary of being asked to relive it. She’s that rare actor willing to say crunchy political things such as “Patriarchy runs within all of us” or “If you’re going to put all your stock and wait for the white dude to give you the opportunity … that’s destructive.” Equally, however, raking over and over the bad times gets old. When I ask what makes her angry these days, she says: “Isn’t that just the question and the challenge of life? How do you deal with life not being fair, or/and turning out the way you want? You’ve gotta figure it out. You have to find different avenues to work out what’s going on subconsciously and consciously. Typically women have – I shouldn’t say ‘typically women’.” She thinks for a moment. “No, I will say that. I think this is the one thing that particularly straight men have a much more difficult time with, which is to find friendships where there are deep conversations, and where they can talk things out. I have that relationship with friends, both men and women, because I’m lucky, but also when you’re an artist you’re trying to figure that out all the time in your work.”

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Figure out what, exactly?

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“Figure out what you’re saying, which is: how do I deal with my rage? Or: how do I deal with what’s going on in the world? You can work that out physically, or talking-wise, or you can work that out in art. I will say I’ve been putting that in every single project.”

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The talking part is vital to Oh, a “big believer in therapy” who maintains strong connections with her oldest friends. For two years in the early 2000s she was married to Alexander Payne, the director, with whom she worked on the 2004 movie Sideways, and while she won’t talk about her personal life, she will talk about her other relationships. Oh grew up as one of three children of parents – mother a biochemist, father who worked in business – who moved to Canada from South Korea in the 1960s, and thinks her middle child status has something to do with her self-appointed role as a “bringer-inner. I’m a keeper of people. I’m not an outsider that way. I like the harmony and community.”

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Just that morning, she says, she was on a video call with her oldest friend in Canada, a woman she has known since she was six and with whom she has been through many phases of friendship. “You have to grow out of your teenagehood, and then you hit another thing when you’re in your 30s.” This was the period during which she and her friend sought help from a therapist together because, “we were growing into different people and were trying to figure out how to still stay close”. And, “I gotta tell you,” she says, “it was really hard.” Was there a chance it might not have worked out between them? “No. I feel like the people who are closest to me have to be able to confront things.”

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She bursts out laughing at my expression. “Look how nervous you got.”

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I did!

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“You thought about who you’re anxious about and then you thought, could I [confront them]? That would be really bad. But then …” She’s not far off.

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\n \"Oh\n
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It’s useful to remember that Oh isn’t American, and while Canadians can be as avoidant as the British when it comes to emotional honesty, she reminds me that “Korean people are pretty confrontational. There’s a different thing within the [Korean] family structure – although I do think I’m different, even within my family.” It took her time to learn how to confront people without flying off the handle. “I had to go through so much therapy not to be so reactive.”

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Her broad rule of thumb in relationships is, “openness, confidence, willingness. Being non-judgmental. I just think the freer you are, the freer you let everyone else be.” She says: “I have a lot of longstanding friendships. I cherish them and I’m good at maintaining them. I’m the connector of the various groups. I’ll start the WhatsApp, or I’ll start the Zoom during Covid. I’m the one, often times, saying: ‘OK, let’s all go somewhere!’ You need to put the work in, you can’t just sail by.” These things take work, of course. There is the question of resentment. “Yes. You think it only happens in love relationships, but that’s not true.”

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***

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When Oh was fresh out of theatre school, someone said something to her that she never forgot. Acting hadn’t been her first goal, or rather, she’d disguised to her family how intent she was on pursuing it. “I’m the only person in my family who doesn’t have a master’s,” she has said. She won a place to study journalism at university, which she promised her parents she’d return to if nothing came of the acting gig. Instead, after graduating from the National Theatre School of Canada in Montreal, Oh was immediately cast in the 1994 Canadian premiere of David Mamet’s Oleanna. “And a good friend said to me: ‘Oh my God, congratulations, I’m so happy for you. I’m so jealous, and I’m so happy.’ And I saw that she meant both things and that she held both things, and that I could hold both things as well.”

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\n \"Oh\n
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The crucial lesson Oh took from this exchange is that jealousy can be neutralised as long as you own up to it, and this has been key to her experience of hanging on to old friends. “I kept all my friends from early childhood and my theatre school mates, and my working relationship with people in Canada. I’m hopefully going to shoot something in Toronto and went out to dinner with the producer and I was ‘cheersing’ him, like, you know darling, this is our 30-year relationship. That has great meaning for me.”

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She thinks and adds: “Life can be destabilising, so you have to figure out: what are your stabilisers?”

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During those early years of her career in Canada, Oh enjoyed huge amounts of success. After the Mamet play, she was cast as the lead in a critically acclaimed TV movie called The Diary of Evelyn Lau, which told the story of a teenage runaway, followed by the title role in a CBC biopic of Adrienne Clarkson, a Chinese Canadian who became an acclaimed journalist and the governor general of Canada. For her lead in a film called Double Happiness, Oh won a best actress award at the Genies, the Canadian equivalent of the Baftas. And so she did what successful Canadian actors do: packed up and headed for Hollywood.

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The crash was brutal and instantaneous. Soon after arriving in LA, an agent told her there were no roles for Asian actresses for at least another year and she’d be better off returning to Canada to “get famous” (she was already famous in Canada). Oh had to take encouragement where she could find it, as she had been doing since she was 10 years old and noticed every person of colour on screen, or, later, took heart from the example set by Yoko Ono. She had two personal interactions “in very key moments” during those years that helped her stay the course when it seemed as if the breakthrough would never come. In 1997, Oh won a CableAce award for best actress in a comedy, for her role in an HBO show called Arliss. At the ceremony, she ran into Alfre Woodard, the Oscar-nominated actor currently knocking it out of the park alongside Alfred Molina in the Netflix sci-fi hit The Boroughs. “She didn’t know who I was,” says Oh, “but she took me aside and said something very wonderfully encouraging, which was just, basically, keep going, baby. And that meant a lot to me; I knew who Alfre Woodard was and respected her as an artist, and it was someone just saying, ‘Keep on going.’”

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The second encourager was Jamie Foxx, whom she met at another awards do – Oh laughs, “that’s when you meet these people. And he also basically said keep going.” It doesn’t take much. “No. Sometimes when young people will come to you, they are open and vulnerable and it’s a certain responsibility as adults to guide them. It can be just a kind word or you can actually invest in a moment and really talk to the young person.”

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\n \"Sandra\n
\n

Oh does this admirably and with a certain amount of amused tough love. To those in her industry who complain endlessly about the cost of fame, she says mildly, “Nothing is free.” If it all gets too much – the attention, the speculation – she points out, “You can always go away.” (They never do.) Oh says she has never been particularly vulnerable when it comes to being addicted to fame, or to anything else for that matter. “I don’t think that I was ever in danger. Meaning, like, even my lowest times, they were normal lows, like being heartbroken or depressed because you don’t know what to do – normal things. Maybe I’m not willing to say what my addictions are, but they’re not the classic ones. I’ve got to this point where – it’s so boring; it’s so boring,” she says with comic despair, “‘I have to drink less, because of my stomach.’ It’s bullshit. It’s such a bore.”

\n

She meditates. (“Everything you need to figure out in life is found sitting on that cushion.”) And she moves around. Before any new role, Oh leans into the physicality of the piece – she’s a big fan of body work. “But not exercise; not sports. I like dancing; I like moving my body. I think there are answers in the body. I think there are things that are trapped in the body.” She preps for roles on the move and will often walk a circuit to help memorise a script. “I always look for a park and a tree to learn my lines. It works better for me. When I was doing Killing Eve, I was in this garden and there was a specific tree.” Round and round she went, until she had the part down.

\n

She says good writing is the key to good acting, and I ask if Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s scripts for that first series of Killing Eve made her job easier. “Yes, and that has to do – specifically with television and film – that has to do with tone. Something like a play you have a lot more room to interpret it. Something like television, you need the tone to be right there on the page. To write tone, you have to be coming from a very specific point of view.”

\n\n

While the new version of Le Misanthrope has been put into modern language, the dialogue is still in verse and Oh finds it thrilling – “the challenge of technical language is juicy for me, because you have to work a different muscle. It’s a different way of putting in the emotional discovery. It’s an old play!”

\n
\n \"With\n
\n With Tom Mison in rehearsal for The Misanthrope. Photograph: Marc Brenner\n
\n
\n

It is; Le Misanthrope opened in 1666 at the Théâtre du Palais-Royal in Paris, though Oh finds it has relevance for our times. “Molière set it in his theatre milieu where there are artists and writers and gossip. It’s a lot about hypocrisy and Alice’s own search for honesty and truth, which has meaning in 2026 – the difficulty in finding truth. I hope it has a wider meaning about what it is to want to tell the truth, want to be honest, and how difficult it is.” In the play, Alice gets into trouble for speaking her mind, and, says Oh, “I need to figure out what that means – not only for the character. What does it mean to speak your mind at this time of your life? What is it about a woman who speaks her mind and then gets shot down because of it?”

\n

A few months ago, Oh voiced her support for Zohran Mamdani, the democratic socialist and newly elected mayor of New York, and was thrilled when he showed up at a performance of Twelfth Night in Central Park. “What was amazing, as a non-New Yorker, was to witness how he affected our entire cast, which was very diverse; half over 50, half very young. And the way the cast lit up meeting Mamdani, it was like, oh, this is who he represents and this is how much hope he elicits in New Yorkers.”

\n

Oh is active in promoting the authentic representation of Asian cultures on screen. In 2021, she gave a passionate speech at a Stop Asian Hate rally in Pittsburgh, in which she repeated what has come to be a famous mantra: “I am proud to be Asian. I belong here.” In 2022, she wrote about her career for an online literary magazine, in which she said, “For the first time, I’m finally getting film roles where my character’s name is Korean.”

\n

It has taken such a long time to get here, both in terms of the industry she works in and what she has had to do to process and absorb the years of being sidelined. She’s not there yet, she says. And yet. “All the work that you’re doing, on your own time, with your own heart, in the middle of the fucking night. That doubt? And the raw depression? And the questioning, and the anger? It’s alchemising into something.” When she talks about owning all the different parts of herself – including the internalised racism and misogyny – the conclusion she often comes to is, “There is no self. Meaning you don’t have to be tied to self. But that’s not easy.”

\n

In the meantime, Oh is here to have fun. Backstage at the National, she’s doing the thing she does best, which is creating community. On the table between us is a water bottle decorated with stickers she had made during the run of Twelfth Night of all her co-stars, including Peter Dinklage and Jesse Tyler Ferguson, pulling a face. “Oh, that’s Jesse, tasting hot sauce,” she says, laughing. Later, Oh asks a production assistant if he can get her candid photos of her present co-stars to be made into stickers for the same purpose – an ad-hoc team building thing that amuses her.

\n

And when she leaves the theatre? “I shit you not, I have to sleep,” she says, eyes wide with amazement; Oh, who is by nature wildly energetic, also knows her limitations. “With this play, I need to sleep 10 hours. I get into bed at 8.30pm, and I get up at 7am.” It’s as single focus as it gets, but after all those years of feeling herself to be in the wrong place, denied the opportunities, that’s a luxury she’s here for. “I’m allowed to concentrate on that one thing. I’m doing this for a purpose. It’s a privilege to be able to focus on that. Then hopefully you deliver.”

\n

• The Misanthrope is at the Lyttelton at the National Theatre, London, until 1 August.

\n

• Shoot credits: Hair: Carlos Ferraz. Makeup: Sara Hill. Stylist’s assistant: Charlotte Gornall. Main image and final shot: pink shirt and white trousers, both Carven; bracelet, resin ring and resin pendant necklace, all Dinosaur Designs; earrings and gold ear cuff, both Otiumberg. Fabric and sofa, House of Hackney. Sofa shot: midi dress and embellished shoes, both Simone Rocha. White and yellow dress shot: sequin dress, Huishan Zhang; earrings, Completedworks. Pink dress shot: organza dress, Cecilie Bahnsen; earrings, Completedworks.

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It took a long time for the actor to find her groove – then the smash TV spy thriller changed everything. She talks about getting advice from A-listers, speaking her mind, and why she’s switching to theatre

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Monday

\n

It’s the start of the G7, guaranteeing us a week of either serious commentary or hot mic moments that may, in their way, prove more revealing than all the thousands of words of analysis. Previous summits have delivered a steady flow of off-the-cuff remarks from world leaders, including President Obama, at the G20 in 2011, grousing to the then French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, about Benjamin Netanyahu (“You may be sick of him, but me, I have to deal with him every day”), and Jacques Chirac, who, at a European summit in the early 2000s, said of the UK: “You cannot trust people who have such bad cuisine. It is the country with the worst food after Finland.” Rude!

\n

So far in Évian-les-Bains no one has dropped much of a clanger, and all the evidence suggests that, despite being thoroughly sick of him, world leaders are still rolling in the aisles at the slightest hint of a joke by Donald Trump. At the summit opening, the US president cracked everyone up by entering a meeting room with the words: “I’m the boss!” – which will get ’em every time. Meanwhile, the Italian prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, has been boasting about how she quit smoking in May, and Keir Starmer offered some World Cup punditry on Cape Verde’s shock 0-0 draw with Spain – “quite remarkable, I have to say”, said the prime minister, inoffensively – before being overheard asking: “Are they having a meeting?”

\n

This question from Starmer was, I believe, asked in reference to the temporary absence of leaders including Trump, Emmanuel Macron and Volodymyr Zelenskyy, and it’s hard to resist imagining him asking it in a wounded, beseeching voice, which hurts my heart a little – another reason why I’m not a political analyst.

\n

Tuesday

\n

I’m still processing the mega-piece that ran in the New York Times Magazine at the weekend, telling the story, in impressive detail, of Jeffrey Epstein’s last weeks in prison leading up to his death. It’s an absolute corker of in-depth reporting, and I would urge everyone to read it for the eye-opening detail about Epstein’s state of mind after his arrest at Teterboro airport in 2019, 35 days before he took his own life.

\n

The Metropolitan Correctional Center, which was closed in 2021, was a notoriously badly run and underfunded facility that hosted, among others, Bernie Madoff and John Gotti, and where, on being booked in, Epstein is reported to have said: “Oh, this is bad. This is really bad.” In the first few days, before anyone recognised him, he was placed in the general population, where someone immediately tried to extort him; he was then moved to the high-risk unit.

\n

To win as much time out of his cell as possible, Epstein conducted hours-long meetings with his lawyers, during which he discussed what information he might give to prosecutors to reduce possible jail time, including dirt he might have had on Donald Trump. As the magazine puts it: “Jotting on a legal pad, he returned to the president again and again, trying to dredge up anything to offer prosecutors. But his scribblings – ‘Trump is a total con artist – smoke & mirrors’ and ‘Never had money’ – suggest that he could come up with little that wasn’t already known.”

\n

Here’s one conspiracy theory the piece tries to nix: for a while, Epstein shared a cell with Nicholas Tartaglione, a quadruple murderer and a seemingly suspicious pairing given Epstein’s high profile. But, experts explained to the reporters, convicted murderers who have yet to be sentenced are considered a safe pick as cellmates because they’re highly incentivised to avoid doing any more crimes while awaiting sentencing. Who, as they say, knew?

\n

Wednesday

\n

A useful tip as the World Cup unfolds: if you can schedule your minor accident to drop during an England game – when the pubs are full and everywhere else is empty – you may find yourself enjoying a significantly lower wait time at A&E.

\n

That is according to NHS England, which has felt duty bound – one imagines through gritted teeth; there goes the vanishingly rare chance for a cup of tea and a sit down – to urge patients not to delay seeking medical care until the final whistle blows, but rather, if injured, to egress straight to their nearest hospital, where staff will tear themselves away from the match to treat them.

\n

On past evidence, compared with average numbers, up to 17,000 fewer people visit A&Es during big England games, summoning images of people in pubs in various states of collapse, arms on the floor, heads hanging by a thread, while barking a line baked into the national character: “Just a flesh wound!” In the immediate aftermath of England matches, meanwhile, visits to A&E by patients experiencing what the NHS describes as “trauma … consistent with falls, assaults and other injuries” jump by 10%. God we’re predictable.

\n

Thursday

\n
\n \"Brooklyn\n
\n Brooklyn Beckham in his advert for DoorDash. Photograph: brooklynpeltzbeckham/Instagram\n
\n
\n

Brooklyn Beckham’s advert for DoorDash joins a niche canon of commercials in which celebrities try to “own the joke” by making cryptic references to whatever it is that got them into trouble on the basis that it will win audiences over via clever, meta self-mockery.

\n

That’s the theory. And I have to say, in the case of Brooklyn, filmed smirking at references to his complicated family situation before the World Cup, the ad sort of worked for me. I mean what’s the guy supposed to do? He’s never had a proper job. All he has is his name, his ability to be famous by association, and what one assumes is his baked-in understanding that the only way to solve a problem is through the press. Although he was roundly mocked for the ad, I thought he seemed as likable in it as he ever has. (Admittedly, it’s a low bar.)

\n

Other examples in this genre that have worked for people: Winona Ryder, posing with security guards in an ad for Marc Jacobs after being nicked for shoplifting in 2001, and Charlie Sheen, playing up to his reputation for instability in a TV commercial for Fiat. One assumes Gwyneth Paltrow’s team are, as we speak, frantically brainstorming hilarious send-ups owning her disastrous decision to lend her name to luxury penthouses in Israel; by flogging timeshares at the Somme, perhaps. Good luck with that.

\n

Friday

\n

There’s something going on with bees – have you noticed? Every walk to and from school this week has been interrupted by a need to stop and help a large, fuzzy bee on the pavement, usually stranded on its back, legs waving in the air. My children can’t ignore bees in peril, but equally, these bastards can’t always be helped; you flip them and they flip right back again. How many times must one flip a bee before giving up?!

\n

The sheer numbers, and the fact that many of them seem to be malfunctioning, makes me feel as if we’re in the opening scenes of a disaster movie, when the birds start flying into buildings and the animals respond to signals we can’t see. Perhaps, finally, something I’ve been talking about for decades and no one else ever wants to talk with me about – magnetic flip! – is about to occur, in which case hang on to your hats and just remember, the bees (and I) called it first.

\n

Digested week in pictures

\n
\n \"The\n
\n ‘These medals? Won fair and square for heroic forbearance in the face of precisely this kind of impertinence.’ Photograph: Chris Jackson/Getty Images\n
\n
\n
\n \"Keir\n
\n ‘You’re lucky I’m not Winston Churchill, Mr President, or I’d be taking a swipe at the hair.’ Photograph: Getty Images\n
\n
\n
\n \"Brigitte\n
\n ‘Look on the bright side, Victoria: you’ll never have to come to one of these sodding summits again.’ Photograph: Christophe Ena/AFP/Getty Images\n
\n
","atomsCSS":[],"shouldHideReaderRevenue":false,"discussionId":"/p/x5am44","section":"UK news","id":"uk-news/2026/jun/19/digested-week-g7-summit-hot-mic-moments","displayImages":[{"urlTemplate":"https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/86735f4accd21fabe477089a7c0465ff4381f272/536_0_2971_2378/master/2971.jpg?w=#{width}&h=#{height}&q=#{quality}&fit=bounds&sig-ignores-params=true&s=4d1720b45fa3427d38543f7ab9cc0297","height":2378,"width":2971,"orientation":"landscape","caption":" Donald Trump at the G7 summit in Évian-les-Bains this week. Photograph: Photograph: DTS News Agency Germany/Shutterstock","credit":"DTS News Agency Germany/Shutterstock","altText":"Donald Trump speaking into a microphone.","cleanCaption":"Donald Trump at the G7 summit in Évian-les-Bains this week.","cleanCredit":"Photograph: DTS News Agency Germany/Shutterstock"}],"designType":"Comment","shouldHideAdverts":false,"standFirst":"

Are we in the opening scenes of a disaster movie? There’s something going on with insects

","webPublicationDate":"2026-06-19T13:11:59Z","style":{"navigationColour":"#e6711b","navigationDownColour":"#f39f33","navigationButtonColour":"#ffffff","ruleColour":"#e6711b","headlineColour":"#333333","headlineAccentColour":"#e6711b","quoteColour":"#999999","standfirstColour":"#676767","metaColour":"#999999","dividerColour":"#dcdad5","backgroundColour":"#e3e1dc","savedForLaterTrueColour":"#333333","savedForLaterFalseColour":"#36711b","iconColour":"#676767","kickerColour":"#e6711b","colourPalette":"comment"},"lastModified":"2026-06-26T09:03:04Z","listenToArticle":{"uri":"https://mobile.guardianapis.com/uk/audio/uk-news/2026/jun/19/digested-week-g7-summit-hot-mic-moments","durationInSec":451},"bodyImages":[{"urlTemplate":"https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/ed5b9da66436836127f3ce1e202fb87c229eead2/0_294_1828_2605/master/1828.jpg?w=#{width}&h=#{height}&q=#{quality}&fit=bounds&sig-ignores-params=true&s=755dc9ca98a9519a031f4d1fced3f875","height":2605,"width":1828,"orientation":"portrait","caption":"Brooklyn Beckham in his advert for DoorDash. Photograph: Photograph: brooklynpeltzbeckham/Instagram","credit":"brooklynpeltzbeckham/Instagram","altText":"Brooklyn Beckham sitting on a sofa with the caption: ‘I’m watching the Fifa World Cup 2026 from home.’","cleanCaption":"Brooklyn Beckham in his advert for DoorDash.","cleanCredit":"Photograph: brooklynpeltzbeckham/Instagram"},{"urlTemplate":"https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/f78196e69e92cfa39794f5d0058eb22e38d3a17f/188_0_4467_3574/master/4467.jpg?w=#{width}&h=#{height}&q=#{quality}&fit=bounds&sig-ignores-params=true&s=58a0095ae3340488573cb28ffc1981b5","height":3574,"width":4467,"orientation":"landscape","caption":"‘These medals? Won fair and square for heroic forbearance in the face of precisely this kind of impertinence.’ Photograph: Photograph: Chris Jackson/Getty Images","credit":"Chris Jackson/Getty Images","altText":"The Prince and Princess of Wales and their three children wave to a crowd.","cleanCaption":"‘These medals? Won fair and square for heroic forbearance in the face of precisely this kind of impertinence.’","cleanCredit":"Photograph: Chris Jackson/Getty Images"},{"urlTemplate":"https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/a9b908fbe9b538eb33e9542d466ebe2e36eac1c2/118_0_2500_2000/master/2500.jpg?w=#{width}&h=#{height}&q=#{quality}&fit=bounds&sig-ignores-params=true&s=92ac6fa5f3ed35e577458a6c22046aeb","height":2000,"width":2500,"orientation":"landscape","caption":"‘You’re lucky I’m not Winston Churchill, Mr President, or I’d be taking a swipe at the hair.’ Photograph: Photograph: Getty Images","credit":"Getty Images","altText":"Keir Starmer and Donald Trump standing next to each other.","cleanCaption":"‘You’re lucky I’m not Winston Churchill, Mr President, or I’d be taking a swipe at the hair.’","cleanCredit":"Photograph: Getty 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Photograph: Photograph: DTS News Agency Germany/Shutterstock","credit":"DTS News Agency Germany/Shutterstock","altText":"Donald Trump speaking into a microphone.","cleanCaption":"Donald Trump at the G7 summit in Évian-les-Bains this week.","cleanCredit":"Photograph: DTS News Agency Germany/Shutterstock"},"palette":{"background":"#00000000","mediaIcon":"#00000000","pillar":"#E05E00","main":"#E05E00","secondary":"#FF7F0F","headline":"#121212","commentCount":"#707070","metaText":"#707070","elementBackground":"#FF7F0F","shadow":"#E6DED8","immersiveKicker":"#FF7F0F","topBorder":"#DCDCDC","mediaBackground":"#EDEDED","pill":"#EDEDED","accentColour":"#E05E00","kickerText":"#E05E00","kickerColours":{"plainKickerText":"#E05E00","plainPill":"#EDEDED","liveKickerText":"#F6F6F6","livePill":"#C74600","featureKickerText":"#F9B376","featurePill":"#EDEDED","featureLiveKickerText":"#EDEDED","featureLivePill":"#8D2700"},"mediaPillBackground":"#121212","mediaPillForeground":"#FFFFFF","featureAccentColour":"#F9B376"},"atoms":[]},"byline":{"title":"Emma Brockes"},"trailText":"Are we in the opening scenes of a disaster movie? There’s something going on with insects","showQuotedHeadline":true,"showLiveIndicator":false,"sublinks":[],"mainImage":{"urlTemplate":"https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/86735f4accd21fabe477089a7c0465ff4381f272/536_0_2971_2378/master/2971.jpg?w=#{width}&h=#{height}&q=#{quality}&fit=bounds&sig-ignores-params=true&s=4d1720b45fa3427d38543f7ab9cc0297","height":2378,"width":2971,"orientation":"landscape","credit":"dts News Agency Germany/Shutterstock","altText":"Donald Trump speaking into a microphone.","cleanCredit":"Photograph: dts News Agency Germany/Shutterstock"},"cutoutImage":{"urlTemplate":"https://i.guim.co.uk/img/uploads/2017/10/06/Emma-Brockes,-L.png?w=#{width}&h=#{height}&q=#{quality}&fit=bounds&sig-ignores-params=true&s=c48b57da90097f52354f583e3159eed0"},"renderedItemProd":{"minBridgetVersion":"1.11.1","url":"https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026/jun/19/digested-week-g7-summit-hot-mic-moments?dcr=apps&edition=uk"},"renderedItemBeta":{"minBridgetVersion":"1.11.1","url":"https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026/jun/19/digested-week-g7-summit-hot-mic-moments?dcr=apps&edition=uk"},"renderedItemDebug":{"minBridgetVersion":"1.11.1","url":"https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026/jun/19/digested-week-g7-summit-hot-mic-moments?dcr=apps&edition=uk"},"cardDesignType":"Comment","correspondingTags":[],"type":"Article","importance":0},{"title":"World Cup 2026: Bellingham playing with ‘chip on shoulder’, Côte d’Ivoire’s Wahi barred over alleged fixing – as it happened","rawTitle":"World Cup 2026: Bellingham playing with ‘chip on shoulder’, Côte d’Ivoire’s Wahi barred over alleged fixing – as it happened","item":{"trailText":"England fans reflected on a thumping opening win against Croatia while the Côte d’Ivoire striker Elye Wahi was under investigation for match fixing","liveContent":{"liveBloggingNow":false,"summary":{"id":"block-6a33d6908f087fb1fe061224","title":"The day so far …","publishedDateTime":"2026-06-18T11:45:22Z","lastUpdatedDateTime":"2026-06-18T11:45:21Z","body":"\n
\n \"Elye\n
\n Elye Wahi of Côte d'Ivoire. Photograph: Ian MacNicol/Getty Images\n
\n
\n\n
\n \"Chloe\n
\n Chloe Kelly of England. Photograph: Naomi Baker/The FA/Getty Images\n
\n
\n\n
\n \"Victor\n
\n Victor Muñoz of Spain. Photograph: Johnnie Izquierdo/FIFA/Getty Images\n
\n
\n\n
\n \"Mexico\n
\n Mexico training session in Guadalajara. Photograph: Álex Cruz/EPA\n
\n
","cleanBody":"Fifa has played down reports that ticketless England supporters were able to gain entry for the World Cup opener against Croatia after evading security checks at the Dallas Stadium. England head coach Thomas Tuchel has complained he could not see his players singing the national anthem because of a scrum of photographers blocking his view – and has urged Fifa to intervene. Mexican military forces intercepted and brought down a drone that flew near the South Korea team’s training camp ahead of its World Cup match against Mexico, a federal official told the Associated Press. The Côte d’Ivoire striker Elye Wahi has not been authorised to travel to Canada for his team’s next World Cup match against Germany. He is currently being investigated for alleged match-fixing.\nEngland’s women will need to overcome Greece and either Slovakia or Ukraine to qualify for the 2027 World Cup. Wales have drawn Albania, Scotland face Czechia, and Northern Ireland have Portugal in the first round of the play-offs.\nOsasuna winger Víctor Muñoz will become the first signing of Andoni Iraola’s reign at Liverpool after the club triggered a £34.5m release clause, beating Newcastle to his signature.\nReal Madrid have signed Ibrahima Konaté. The France defender leaves Liverpool when his contract expires on 30 June and has agreed a four-year deal at the Bernabéu. Todays matches at the World Cup are in Group A and Group B, featuring Czechia v South Africa (Noon ET, 5pm BST), Switzerland v Bosnia and Herzegovina (3pm ET, 8pm BST), Canada v Qatar (6pm ET, 11pm BST) and Mexico v South Korea (9pm ET, 2am Friday BST).","postType":"summary","contributors":[]},"blocks":[{"id":"block-6a34087b8f08c4f67d4d2dce","publishedDateTime":"2026-06-18T15:04:42Z","lastUpdatedDateTime":"2026-06-18T15:04:42Z","body":"

Czechia v South Africa is less than an hour away now … Daniel Harris is in the live-blogging hot-seat for the 5pm UK time kick-off, and we’ll have Switzerland v Bosnia & Herzegovina, Canada v Qatar and Mexico v South Korea coming up later … Enjoy!

\n","cleanBody":"Czechia v South Africa is less than an hour away now … Daniel Harris is in the live-blogging hot-seat for the 5pm UK time kick-off, and we’ll have Switzerland v Bosnia & Herzegovina, Canada v Qatar and Mexico v South Korea coming up later … Enjoy!","postType":"blog","contributors":[]},{"id":"block-6a3406ce8f087fb1fe0614f6","publishedDateTime":"2026-06-18T14:59:06Z","lastUpdatedDateTime":"2026-06-18T14:59:06Z","body":"

Of his heroic attempt to watch all the games, Neil emails: “I do admit drifting into Aboriginal dreamtime during Australia v Turkey, but I believe I was always behind the blue line.

\n

“As for messing with circadian rhythms, this is a mythological construction developed in early industrialisation and forcing peasants of the land into factories, as well as being a terrible synth band of the 1980’s.”

\n
\n \"Gratuitous,\n
\n Gratuitous, unnecessary shot of A Flock of Seagulls. Photograph: ITV/Rex Features\n
\n
","cleanBody":"Of his heroic attempt to watch all the games, Neil emails: “I do admit drifting into Aboriginal dreamtime during Australia v Turkey, but I believe I was always behind the blue line. “As for messing with circadian rhythms, this is a mythological construction developed in early industrialisation and forcing peasants of the land into factories, as well as being a terrible synth band of the 1980’s.”","postType":"blog","contributors":[]},{"id":"block-6a3406458f087fb1fe0614e9","publishedDateTime":"2026-06-18T14:54:22Z","lastUpdatedDateTime":"2026-06-18T14:54:39Z","body":"

In further Partridge-related japery, how many times have we all watched Alan Partridge’s World Cup Countdown to ‘94 on YouTube recently? I think I’m at 1.5 times.

\n
\n \"Alan\n
\n Alan Partridge’s Worldcupometer in 1994. Photograph: BBC\n
\n
","cleanBody":"In further Partridge-related japery, how many times have we all watched Alan Partridge’s World Cup Countdown to ‘94 on YouTube recently? I think I’m at 1.5 times.","postType":"blog","contributors":[]},{"id":"block-6a34058f8f087fb1fe0614de","publishedDateTime":"2026-06-18T14:52:19Z","lastUpdatedDateTime":"2026-06-18T15:00:13Z","body":"

Meanwhile in ‘Needless to say, I had the last laugh’ news …

\n

Earlier, I said that my one attempt at our excellent Bracketology feature produced the Netherlands as World Cup winners.

\n

Well, apparently a dead clever mathematician, who correctly predicted the winners of the men’s World Cups in 2014, 2018 and 2022, also came up with the Dutch as winners on 19 July.

\n

Have a crack at it here:

\n","cleanBody":"Meanwhile in ‘Needless to say, I had the last laugh’ news … Earlier, I said that my one attempt at our excellent Bracketology feature produced the Netherlands as World Cup winners. Well, apparently a dead clever mathematician, who correctly predicted the winners of the men’s World Cups in 2014, 2018 and 2022, also came up with the Dutch as winners on 19 July. Have a crack at it here:","postType":"blog","contributors":[]},{"id":"block-6a3402b08f083b97ede8b025","publishedDateTime":"2026-06-18T14:41:34Z","lastUpdatedDateTime":"2026-06-18T14:41:33Z","body":"

From xG to assists to transfer value, Andrew Beasley takes a dive into some of the key data from the first round of matches, with every team having played once:

\n","cleanBody":"From xG to assists to transfer value, Andrew Beasley takes a dive into some of the key data from the first round of matches, with every team having played once:","postType":"blog","contributors":[]},{"id":"block-6a3400a68f08c4f67d4d2d3e","publishedDateTime":"2026-06-18T14:29:48Z","lastUpdatedDateTime":"2026-06-18T14:35:40Z","body":"

This, for me, is the clear winner in the newly-established BTL comment of the day competition.

\n

Hot off the press (OK, comments section) from Smolgrad.

\n
\n
\n
\n \"User \n
\n
\n
\n Smolgrad \n
\n
\n 18 June 2026 3:27pm\n
\n
\n

So far I'm liking this Tuchel fella. He's honest, direct, but also empathetic. Of course if England draw once I'll completely turn against him and a couple of the players.

\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
\n \"Thomas\n
\n Thomas Tuchel: Honest, direct, empathetic. Just make sure you keep winning. Photograph: Simon M Bruty/Getty Images\n
\n
","cleanBody":"This, for me, is the clear winner in the newly-established BTL comment of the day competition. Hot off the press (OK, comments section) from Smolgrad.","postType":"blog","contributors":[]},{"id":"block-6a33ff528f087fb1fe06147c","publishedDateTime":"2026-06-18T14:27:35Z","lastUpdatedDateTime":"2026-06-18T14:27:35Z","body":"

Meanwhile, Peter sends a message entitled “In defence of Southgate”

\n

“Quite a few people are contrasting last night’s performance with the Southgate era, which they seem to remember as eight years of utter tedium. But England played some great attacking football under Southgate at the last World Cup: 6-2 v Iran, 3-0 v Wales, 3-0 v Senegal, and toe-to-toe with an excellent France. Southgate’s first World Cup in 2018 was obviously fun too - the football wasn’t particularly sophisticated, but it felt good. The last Euros was mostly dreadful, of course, but there was much more to the Southgate era than that. Let’s not let lazy narratives or hazy memories rewrite history and traduce a man who did so much for England!”

\n

I couldn’t agree more. Southgate transformed the team on the pitch, and its ethos off it, both in wholly positive terms. That was no mean feat.

\n
\n \"England\n
\n England players react after Eric Dier’s winning penalty against Colombia in 2018. Photograph: Michael Regan/FIFA\n
\n
","cleanBody":"Meanwhile, Peter sends a message entitled “In defence of Southgate” “Quite a few people are contrasting last night’s performance with the Southgate era, which they seem to remember as eight years of utter tedium. But England played some great attacking football under Southgate at the last World Cup: 6-2 v Iran, 3-0 v Wales, 3-0 v Senegal, and toe-to-toe with an excellent France. Southgate’s first World Cup in 2018 was obviously fun too - the football wasn’t particularly sophisticated, but it felt good. The last Euros was mostly dreadful, of course, but there was much more to the Southgate era than that. Let’s not let lazy narratives or hazy memories rewrite history and traduce a man who did so much for England!” I couldn’t agree more. Southgate transformed the team on the pitch, and its ethos off it, both in wholly positive terms. That was no mean feat.","postType":"blog","contributors":[]},{"id":"block-6a33fe158f08c4f67d4d2d12","publishedDateTime":"2026-06-18T14:20:44Z","lastUpdatedDateTime":"2026-06-18T14:20:44Z","body":"

“My 19-year-old old student son was determined to watch every match, perhaps realising that the end of his first year at university is probably the sweet spot for such an insane undertaking,” emails Richey.

\n

“He even hung in the for the Australia v Turkey game with a 7am finish here in Blighty. Sadly he was undone when he realised that Austria v Jordan kicking off at 3am on Wednesday would likely impinge on his ability to be awake and ready for the first ball of the second Test a handful of hours later. Even sports fans have to make compromises sometimes!”

\n

I firmly support prioritising cricket over football in the summer. Thanks for the email!

\n
\n \"Austria\n
\n Austria v Jordan: Down at least one television viewer due to the second Test. Photograph: Ameen Ahmed/NurPhoto/Shutterstock\n
\n
","cleanBody":"“My 19-year-old old student son was determined to watch every match, perhaps realising that the end of his first year at university is probably the sweet spot for such an insane undertaking,” emails Richey. “He even hung in the for the Australia v Turkey game with a 7am finish here in Blighty. Sadly he was undone when he realised that Austria v Jordan kicking off at 3am on Wednesday would likely impinge on his ability to be awake and ready for the first ball of the second Test a handful of hours later. Even sports fans have to make compromises sometimes!” I firmly support prioritising cricket over football in the summer. Thanks for the email!","postType":"blog","contributors":[]},{"id":"block-6a33fd1b8f087fb1fe061462","publishedDateTime":"2026-06-18T14:16:03Z","lastUpdatedDateTime":"2026-06-18T14:16:03Z","body":"

Are you ready for Czechia v South Africa, the first of four matches on the menu on day eight?

\n

Ready or not, this match is happening at Mercedes Benz Stadium in Atlanta, at 12pm local/2am AEST/5pm BST/12pm EDT.

\n

Daniel Harris is currently warming up the dance floor here:

\n","cleanBody":"Are you ready for Czechia v South Africa, the first of four matches on the menu on day eight? Ready or not, this match is happening at Mercedes Benz Stadium in Atlanta, at 12pm local/2am AEST/5pm BST/12pm EDT. Daniel Harris is currently warming up the dance floor here:","postType":"blog","contributors":[]},{"id":"block-6a33f9a18f08c4f67d4d2cc7","publishedDateTime":"2026-06-18T14:03:30Z","lastUpdatedDateTime":"2026-06-18T14:03:30Z","body":"

On the subject of trying to watch all 1,453 matches at this tournament, krishnamoorthy writes:

\n

“It will be insane even if you are a retired person who can just flip day and night (assuming one is in Europe) and watch all the games. It is impossible when you have a job and other obligations like shopping, gardening etc.

\n

“Speaking for myself I will TRY to catch all the games from quarter-finals onwards.”

\n

Spooky, because shopping and gardening are two things that will assuredly interfere with my World Cup watching. Especially watering, what with this looming heatwave. Thanks for your email.

\n
\n \"A\n
\n A woman waters some flowers. Photograph: miljko/Getty Images\n
\n
","cleanBody":"On the subject of trying to watch all 1,453 matches at this tournament, krishnamoorthy writes: “It will be insane even if you are a retired person who can just flip day and night (assuming one is in Europe) and watch all the games. It is impossible when you have a job and other obligations like shopping, gardening etc. “Speaking for myself I will TRY to catch all the games from quarter-finals onwards.” Spooky, because shopping and gardening are two things that will assuredly interfere with my World Cup watching. Especially watering, what with this looming heatwave. Thanks for your email.","postType":"blog","contributors":[]}],"keyEvents":[{"id":"block-6a33a3198f08c4f67d4d2891","title":"Bellingham playing with 'a chip on my shoulder'","publishedDateTime":"2026-06-18T07:53:01Z","lastUpdatedDateTime":"2026-06-18T09:32:28Z","body":"

The England midfielder Jude Bellingham believes playing with a “chip on my shoulder” will bring the best out of him at the World Cup.

\n

Bellingham scored the vital third goal as Thomas Tuchel’s side opened their campaign with a 4-2 win over Croatia in the Group L clash in Dallas.

\n

There were uncertainty surrounding Bellingham’s inclusion in Tuchel’s squad for the tournament in North America after missing the September and October camps through injury.

\n

That followed last summer’s international window which ended in Tuchel saying his mother found Bellingham’s behaviour “repulsive”, while his ability (or perceived lack thereof) to buy into Tuchel’s “brotherhood” has also come under scrutiny.

\n

Bellingham was chosen ahead of his friend Morgan Rogers in the No 10 position, before switching to a deeper role, and made an early mark in the tournament.

\n

“For me personally, it was nice to put some of the noise aside and just show my country and my teammates how committed I am to help us try to win football matches,” he told BBC Sport.

\n

“It was a great team performance. Second half, we got things right, first half we got the intensity right, but not quite with the ball and second half we put it all together nicely.

\n
\n \"Jude\n
\n Bellingham scores England’s third goal against Croatia. Photograph: Simon M Bruty/Getty\n
\n
\n

“To contribute, to help my team and help my country is one of the biggest honours and regardless of the noise outside, that honour doesn’t change for me at all.

\n

“It has been a tough season for me but I am feeling fresh and sharp and stronger.

\n

“I have got a little bit of a chip on my shoulder. That helps me a lot to find that focus early in the game and to find that intensity.

\n

“I know that it’s part of being a footballer and I don’t hold a grudge against anyone who says bad things about me because sometimes I do deserve it.

\n

“Today, it was nice to try to show people and remind people what I’m about.” PA Media

","cleanBody":"The England midfielder Jude Bellingham believes playing with a “chip on my shoulder” will bring the best out of him at the World Cup. Bellingham scored the vital third goal as Thomas Tuchel’s side opened their campaign with a 4-2 win over Croatia in the Group L clash in Dallas. There were uncertainty surrounding Bellingham’s inclusion in Tuchel’s squad for the tournament in North America after missing the September and October camps through injury. That followed last summer’s international window which ended in Tuchel saying his mother found Bellingham’s behaviour “repulsive”, while his ability (or perceived lack thereof) to buy into Tuchel’s “brotherhood” has also come under scrutiny. Bellingham was chosen ahead of his friend Morgan Rogers in the No 10 position, before switching to a deeper role, and made an early mark in the tournament. “For me personally, it was nice to put some of the noise aside and just show my country and my teammates how committed I am to help us try to win football matches,” he told BBC Sport. “It was a great team performance. Second half, we got things right, first half we got the intensity right, but not quite with the ball and second half we put it all together nicely.\n“To contribute, to help my team and help my country is one of the biggest honours and regardless of the noise outside, that honour doesn’t change for me at all. “It has been a tough season for me but I am feeling fresh and sharp and stronger. “I have got a little bit of a chip on my shoulder. That helps me a lot to find that focus early in the game and to find that intensity. “I know that it’s part of being a footballer and I don’t hold a grudge against anyone who says bad things about me because sometimes I do deserve it. “Today, it was nice to try to show people and remind people what I’m about.” PA Media","postType":"key-event","contributors":[]},{"id":"block-6a33ab9b8f083b97ede8ab83","title":"Tuchel urges Fifa to intervene after photographers 'ruin' anthems","publishedDateTime":"2026-06-18T08:29:34Z","lastUpdatedDateTime":"2026-06-18T09:32:04Z","body":"

And in yet more Tuchel news …

\n

England head coach Thomas Tuchel has complained he could not see his players singing the national anthem because of a scrum of photographers blocking his view – and has urged Fifa to intervene.

\n

Tuchel led England to a 4-2 win over Croatia in their opening World Cup game at the AT+T Stadium in Arlington on Wednesday, with Harry Kane scoring twice and Jude Bellingham and Marcus Rashford scoring the third and fourth goals respectively.

\n

He was unhappy that for his first tournament finals match in charge of England, he could not see his players during the rendition of God Save The King.

\n

“I have to tell you something, I am begging Fifa to change the position of the photographers in the national anthem because I could not see my team in the national anthem,” he said.

\n

“I was waiting for this moment. It was a very, very special moment today and I was standing in front of a wall of 50 photographers, half a metre away, and I could not see one single player. It ruined a little bit my experience.

\n

“It is very emotional. When I was young and when I started coaching, this was too big to dream of this kind of occasion.”

\n
\n \"Thomas\n
\n Thomas Tuchel: Visibly unhappy with the scrum of photographers during the anthems. Photograph: Marc Atkins/Getty Images\n
\n
","cleanBody":"And in yet more Tuchel news … England head coach Thomas Tuchel has complained he could not see his players singing the national anthem because of a scrum of photographers blocking his view – and has urged Fifa to intervene. Tuchel led England to a 4-2 win over Croatia in their opening World Cup game at the AT+T Stadium in Arlington on Wednesday, with Harry Kane scoring twice and Jude Bellingham and Marcus Rashford scoring the third and fourth goals respectively. He was unhappy that for his first tournament finals match in charge of England, he could not see his players during the rendition of God Save The King. “I have to tell you something, I am begging Fifa to change the position of the photographers in the national anthem because I could not see my team in the national anthem,” he said. “I was waiting for this moment. It was a very, very special moment today and I was standing in front of a wall of 50 photographers, half a metre away, and I could not see one single player. It ruined a little bit my experience. “It is very emotional. When I was young and when I started coaching, this was too big to dream of this kind of occasion.”","postType":"key-event","contributors":[]},{"id":"block-6a33b6598f087fb1fe06106c","title":"Liverpool trigger release clause for Osasuna's Muñoz","publishedDateTime":"2026-06-18T09:12:58Z","lastUpdatedDateTime":"2026-06-18T09:54:02Z","body":"

The Osasuna winger Víctor Muñoz will become the first signing of Andoni Iraola’s reign at Liverpool after the club triggered a £34.5m release clause, beating Newcastle to his signature. Muñoz will sign a six-year contract after having a medical on Wednesday in Atlanta, where he is part of the Spain squad at the World Cup.

\n

Liverpool have been following Muñoz’s progress for an extensive period and sped up the deal after Iraola’s appointment because the head coach was eager to add his compatriot. Iraola spent most of his playing career at Athletic Bilbao, continues to closely monitor La Liga, and Muñoz has impressed him.

\n","cleanBody":"The Osasuna winger Víctor Muñoz will become the first signing of Andoni Iraola’s reign at Liverpool after the club triggered a £34.5m release clause, beating Newcastle to his signature. Muñoz will sign a six-year contract after having a medical on Wednesday in Atlanta, where he is part of the Spain squad at the World Cup. Liverpool have been following Muñoz’s progress for an extensive period and sped up the deal after Iraola’s appointment because the head coach was eager to add his compatriot. Iraola spent most of his playing career at Athletic Bilbao, continues to closely monitor La Liga, and Muñoz has impressed him.","postType":"key-event","contributors":["will-unwin"]},{"id":"block-6a33c6cf8f087fb1fe061127","title":"Ibrahima Konaté to join Real Madrid","publishedDateTime":"2026-06-18T10:25:15Z","lastUpdatedDateTime":"2026-06-18T10:29:14Z","body":"

Real Madrid have wrapped up another big-name free transfer with Ibrahima Konaté joining Bernardo Silva through the door. The France defender leaves Liverpool when his contract expires on 30 June and has agreed a four-year deal at the Bernabéu.

\n

Konaté, 27, won the Premier League, FA Cup and two League Cups during his five years at Anfield and started the 2022 Champions League final defeat to his new club. He revealed a couple of weeks ago how the deaths of Diogo Jota and his father in the last year have led to him living with depression.

","cleanBody":"Real Madrid have wrapped up another big-name free transfer with Ibrahima Konaté joining Bernardo Silva through the door. The France defender leaves Liverpool when his contract expires on 30 June and has agreed a four-year deal at the Bernabéu. Konaté, 27, won the Premier League, FA Cup and two League Cups during his five years at Anfield and started the 2022 Champions League final defeat to his new club. He revealed a couple of weeks ago how the deaths of Diogo Jota and his father in the last year have led to him living with depression.","postType":"key-event","contributors":[]},{"id":"block-6a33cccf8f083b97ede8acf0","title":"Côte d'Ivoire striker Wahi barred from World Cup match in Canada amid fixing probe","publishedDateTime":"2026-06-18T10:53:43Z","lastUpdatedDateTime":"2026-06-18T11:45:25Z","body":"

The Côte d’Ivoire striker Elye Wahi, who is being investigated for alleged match-fixing, has not been authorised to travel to Canada for his team’s next World Cup match against Germany, the Ivorian football federation have said. Côte d’Ivoire face Germany on Saturday in Toronto.

\n

The federation said Wahi will not be able to travel with the squad because “the necessary administrative authorisations for his entry into Canadian territory could not be obtained at this stage.”

\n

Wahi started in attack when Côte d’Ivoire beat Ecuador 1-0 in its opening game in Philadelphia on Monday. He will remain in the United States pending the team’s return, the federation said.

\n
\n \"Elye\n
\n Elye Wahi played in Côte d’Ivoire’s World Cup opener against Ecuador. Photograph: Harry Langer/DeFodi Images/Shutterstock\n
\n
\n

The French football league said on Wednesday that an “unusual amount of bets” were placed internationally on Wahi receiving a yellow card during a Ligue 1 game with Nice in May.

\n

The French league was alerted by partners monitoring betting markets about suspicious betting activity at international level concerning Nice’s home game against Metz on 17 May, which ended 0-0, and in which Wahi was shown a yellow card.

\n

The French league said it passed this information to relevant police and gambling authorities, as well as the French football federation.

\n

Asked whether Wahi was questioned by police, the Marseille prosecutor’s office told the Associated Press that “a 23-year-old professional football player, competing in France’s Ligue 1 championship, was arrested on May 29, 2026, as part of their investigation.”

\n

The office added “the investigation concerns alleged offences of organised fraud, organised sports corruption, receiving stolen goods, and money laundering.” The player was questioned while in police custody and was released without being detained. The office added the investigation was ongoing.

\n

Wahi’s representatives did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

\n

The Ivorian football federation (FIF) said it has not been officially notified “of any judicial or administrative proceedings” concerning Wahi.

\n

“During this particularly delicate period, the FIF offers its full support to the player and reaffirms its confidence in him,” it said. “Elye Wahi remains an important member of the Ivory Coast national team.” Associated Press

","cleanBody":"The Côte d’Ivoire striker Elye Wahi, who is being investigated for alleged match-fixing, has not been authorised to travel to Canada for his team’s next World Cup match against Germany, the Ivorian football federation have said. Côte d’Ivoire face Germany on Saturday in Toronto. The federation said Wahi will not be able to travel with the squad because “the necessary administrative authorisations for his entry into Canadian territory could not be obtained at this stage.” Wahi started in attack when Côte d’Ivoire beat Ecuador 1-0 in its opening game in Philadelphia on Monday. He will remain in the United States pending the team’s return, the federation said.\nThe French football league said on Wednesday that an “unusual amount of bets” were placed internationally on Wahi receiving a yellow card during a Ligue 1 game with Nice in May. The French league was alerted by partners monitoring betting markets about suspicious betting activity at international level concerning Nice’s home game against Metz on 17 May, which ended 0-0, and in which Wahi was shown a yellow card. The French league said it passed this information to relevant police and gambling authorities, as well as the French football federation. Asked whether Wahi was questioned by police, the Marseille prosecutor’s office told the Associated Press that “a 23-year-old professional football player, competing in France’s Ligue 1 championship, was arrested on May 29, 2026, as part of their investigation.” The office added “the investigation concerns alleged offences of organised fraud, organised sports corruption, receiving stolen goods, and money laundering.” The player was questioned while in police custody and was released without being detained. The office added the investigation was ongoing. Wahi’s representatives did not immediately respond to requests for comment. The Ivorian football federation (FIF) said it has not been officially notified “of any judicial or administrative proceedings” concerning Wahi. “During this particularly delicate period, the FIF offers its full support to the player and reaffirms its confidence in him,” it said. “Elye Wahi remains an important member of the Ivory Coast national team.” Associated Press","postType":"key-event","contributors":[]},{"id":"block-6a33cf348f08c4f67d4d2a73","title":"British nations discover play-off opponents for 2027 women's World Cup qualification","publishedDateTime":"2026-06-18T11:11:46Z","lastUpdatedDateTime":"2026-06-18T11:18:11Z","body":"

In Nyon, Uefa have been shuffling some balls again to do the play-off draw for the 2027 Fifa Women’s World Cup qualification, which you need a degree in astrophysics to understand.

\n

In Path 1, England face Greece. In Path 2, Wales have drawn Albania, Scotland face Czechia, and Northern Ireland have Portugal. Those two-legged matches happen in October.

\n

There is then a second round of two-legged matches in November and December, with the draw for that being:

\n

Slovakia / Ukraine v Greece / ENGLAND\n
Finland / Serbia v Belarus / Italy\n
\n NORTHERN IRELAND / Portugal v Croatia / Iceland\n
Albania / WALES v Romania / Norway\n
Israel /Switzerland v Kosovo / Austria\n
Czechia / SCOTLAND v Lithuania / Sweden\n
Belgium / Poland v Kazakhstan / Ireland\n
Turkey / Slovenia v Hungary / Netherlands

\n

And then finally you have qualified – except for the lowest ranked team to win their play-off tie, who have to go to the intercontinental play-offs. It is all quite the head-scratcher to be honest.

\n
\n \"Ella\n
\n Ella Toone of England during the defeat to Spain that left England in the play-offs. Photograph: Harriet Lander/The FA/Getty Images\n
\n
","cleanBody":"In Nyon, Uefa have been shuffling some balls again to do the play-off draw for the 2027 Fifa Women’s World Cup qualification, which you need a degree in astrophysics to understand. In Path 1, England face Greece. In Path 2, Wales have drawn Albania, Scotland face Czechia, and Northern Ireland have Portugal. Those two-legged matches happen in October. There is then a second round of two-legged matches in November and December, with the draw for that being: Slovakia / Ukraine v Greece / ENGLAND Finland / Serbia v Belarus / Italy NORTHERN IRELAND / Portugal v Croatia / Iceland Albania / WALES v Romania / Norway Israel /Switzerland v Kosovo / Austria Czechia / SCOTLAND v Lithuania / Sweden Belgium / Poland v Kazakhstan / Ireland Turkey / Slovenia v Hungary / Netherlands And then finally you have qualified – except for the lowest ranked team to win their play-off tie, who have to go to the intercontinental play-offs. It is all quite the head-scratcher to be honest.","postType":"key-event","contributors":[]},{"id":"block-6a33d6908f087fb1fe061224","title":"The day so far …","publishedDateTime":"2026-06-18T11:45:22Z","lastUpdatedDateTime":"2026-06-18T11:45:21Z","body":"\n
\n \"Elye\n
\n Elye Wahi of Côte d'Ivoire. Photograph: Ian MacNicol/Getty Images\n
\n
\n\n
\n \"Chloe\n
\n Chloe Kelly of England. Photograph: Naomi Baker/The FA/Getty Images\n
\n
\n\n
\n \"Victor\n
\n Victor Muñoz of Spain. Photograph: Johnnie Izquierdo/FIFA/Getty Images\n
\n
\n\n
\n \"Mexico\n
\n Mexico training session in Guadalajara. Photograph: Álex Cruz/EPA\n
\n
","cleanBody":"Fifa has played down reports that ticketless England supporters were able to gain entry for the World Cup opener against Croatia after evading security checks at the Dallas Stadium. England head coach Thomas Tuchel has complained he could not see his players singing the national anthem because of a scrum of photographers blocking his view – and has urged Fifa to intervene. Mexican military forces intercepted and brought down a drone that flew near the South Korea team’s training camp ahead of its World Cup match against Mexico, a federal official told the Associated Press. The Côte d’Ivoire striker Elye Wahi has not been authorised to travel to Canada for his team’s next World Cup match against Germany. He is currently being investigated for alleged match-fixing.\nEngland’s women will need to overcome Greece and either Slovakia or Ukraine to qualify for the 2027 World Cup. Wales have drawn Albania, Scotland face Czechia, and Northern Ireland have Portugal in the first round of the play-offs.\nOsasuna winger Víctor Muñoz will become the first signing of Andoni Iraola’s reign at Liverpool after the club triggered a £34.5m release clause, beating Newcastle to his signature.\nReal Madrid have signed Ibrahima Konaté. The France defender leaves Liverpool when his contract expires on 30 June and has agreed a four-year deal at the Bernabéu. Todays matches at the World Cup are in Group A and Group B, featuring Czechia v South Africa (Noon ET, 5pm BST), Switzerland v Bosnia and Herzegovina (3pm ET, 8pm BST), Canada v Qatar (6pm ET, 11pm BST) and Mexico v South Korea (9pm ET, 2am Friday BST).","postType":"summary","contributors":[]}],"paginationLinks":{"older":"https://mobile.guardianapis.com/uk/items/football/live/2026/jun/18/world-cup-2026-england-croatia-fans-czechia-south-africa-switzerland-bosnia-and-herzegovina-canada-qatar-mexico-south-korea-live?date=2026-06-18T14%3A03%3A30Z&filter=older"}},"atomsCSS":[],"shouldHideReaderRevenue":false,"bodyImages":[{"urlTemplate":"https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/494bd4df2b1f1731621e8a2e2e89694974029795/0_734_4283_3425/master/4283.jpg?w=#{width}&h=#{height}&q=#{quality}&fit=bounds&sig-ignores-params=true&s=335cb7b4da31ece41aba842edc99e13f","height":3425,"width":4283,"orientation":"landscape","caption":"Gratuitous, unnecessary shot of A Flock of Seagulls. Photograph: Photograph: ITV/Rex Features","credit":"ITV/Rex Features","altText":"Gratuitous, unnecessary shot of A Flock of Seagulls.","cleanCaption":"Gratuitous, unnecessary shot of A Flock of Seagulls.","cleanCredit":"Photograph: ITV/Rex Features"},{"urlTemplate":"https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/53a04414d87b4c1a9b0d4f3a885b8dc8969166b7/0_0_480_360/master/480.jpg?w=#{width}&h=#{height}&q=#{quality}&fit=bounds&sig-ignores-params=true&s=c2a8e2adfee55a697d3dcb24b55f9b06","height":360,"width":480,"orientation":"landscape","caption":"Alan Partridge’s Worldcupometer in 1994. Photograph: Photograph: BBC","credit":"BBC","altText":"Alan Partridge’s Worldcupometer in 1994.","cleanCaption":"Alan Partridge’s Worldcupometer in 1994.","cleanCredit":"Photograph: BBC"},{"urlTemplate":"https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/d1dc4503e3915936c96402f048d28531dbbade71/0_0_5106_3689/master/5106.jpg?w=#{width}&h=#{height}&q=#{quality}&fit=bounds&sig-ignores-params=true&s=4fc972de00697b8ac1638352bac7d7da","height":3689,"width":5106,"orientation":"landscape","caption":"Thomas Tuchel: Honest, direct, empathetic. Just make sure you keep winning. Photograph: Photograph: Simon M Bruty/Getty Images","credit":"Simon M Bruty/Getty Images","altText":"Thomas Tuchel","cleanCaption":"Thomas Tuchel: Honest, direct, empathetic. Just make sure you keep winning.","cleanCredit":"Photograph: Simon M Bruty/Getty Images"},{"urlTemplate":"https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/bd1391e9245df3bf5fde17bebab9f5e6da9cf2f6/0_0_3000_1999/master/3000.jpg?w=#{width}&h=#{height}&q=#{quality}&fit=bounds&sig-ignores-params=true&s=25dd312ab31a59cc9c53556c6071f6f7","height":1999,"width":3000,"orientation":"landscape","caption":"England players react after Eric Dier’s winning penalty against Colombia in 2018. Photograph: Photograph: Michael Regan/FIFA","credit":"Michael Regan/FIFA","altText":"England players react after Eric Dier’s winning penalty against Colombia in 2018.","cleanCaption":"England players react after Eric Dier’s winning penalty against Colombia in 2018.","cleanCredit":"Photograph: Michael Regan/FIFA"},{"urlTemplate":"https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/8921b2267033f9e6ec44267c5392160bbeb2934e/0_0_3882_2743/master/3882.jpg?w=#{width}&h=#{height}&q=#{quality}&fit=bounds&sig-ignores-params=true&s=9be468d988afb801d6681ca47ce68a47","height":2743,"width":3882,"orientation":"landscape","caption":"Austria v Jordan: Down at least one television viewer due to the second Test. Photograph: Photograph: Ameen Ahmed/NurPhoto/Shutterstock","credit":"Ameen Ahmed/NurPhoto/Shutterstock","altText":"Austria v Jordan","cleanCaption":"Austria v Jordan: Down at least one television viewer due to the second Test.","cleanCredit":"Photograph: Ameen Ahmed/NurPhoto/Shutterstock"},{"urlTemplate":"https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/3f79051d377e9a06574449a63727ffae62e8893a/0_0_6720_4480/master/6720.jpg?w=#{width}&h=#{height}&q=#{quality}&fit=bounds&sig-ignores-params=true&s=9521411357a2193d4a458dce76646685","height":4480,"width":6720,"orientation":"landscape","caption":"A woman waters some flowers. Photograph: Photograph: miljko/Getty Images","credit":"miljko/Getty Images","altText":"A woman waters some flowers.","cleanCaption":"A woman waters some flowers.","cleanCredit":"Photograph: miljko/Getty Images"},{"urlTemplate":"https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/72ff91bc3495eaf2bc2cc44cf1d42209100ce580/0_0_4572_3670/master/4572.jpg?w=#{width}&h=#{height}&q=#{quality}&fit=bounds&sig-ignores-params=true&s=2d20965cbb497ee1929febd09a6b39c1","height":3670,"width":4572,"orientation":"landscape","caption":"A human being asleep in bed, holding a football. Not strictly appropriate for this story, but it’ll have to do. Photograph: Photograph: Hudzilla/Getty Images/fStop","credit":"Hudzilla/Getty Images/fStop","altText":"A man asleep in bed, holding a football.","cleanCaption":"A human being asleep in bed, holding a football. Not strictly appropriate for this story, but it’ll have to do.","cleanCredit":"Photograph: Hudzilla/Getty Images/fStop"},{"urlTemplate":"https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/86f9fac311a118fac8ae958f994f4edc042140ab/0_0_5294_3545/master/5294.jpg?w=#{width}&h=#{height}&q=#{quality}&fit=bounds&sig-ignores-params=true&s=62df17d9fbed3f6de8788d55b328ec03","height":3545,"width":5294,"orientation":"landscape","caption":"Winning back possession. A pressing issue. Photograph: Photograph: Simon M Bruty/Getty Images","credit":"Simon M Bruty/Getty Images","altText":"England v Croatia.","cleanCaption":"Winning back possession. A pressing issue.","cleanCredit":"Photograph: Simon M Bruty/Getty Images"},{"urlTemplate":"https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/9d6475337832593f557ce3628a1ca95a1c83aae3/346_0_2675_2141/master/2675.jpg?w=#{width}&h=#{height}&q=#{quality}&fit=bounds&sig-ignores-params=true&s=6d117bdeb7c5e1348da84c4b4acaeef1","height":2141,"width":2675,"orientation":"landscape","caption":"Calvin Harris, an unlikely source of football woe for Celtic. Photograph: Photograph: John Salangsang/BFA/REX/Shutterstock","credit":"John Salangsang/BFA/REX/Shutterstock","altText":"Calvin Harris, an unlikely source of football woe for Celtic.","cleanCaption":"Calvin Harris, an unlikely source of football woe for Celtic.","cleanCredit":"Photograph: John Salangsang/BFA/REX/Shutterstock"},{"urlTemplate":"https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/e6942adb4f1c5ae4fe8563c024f99306a22421d4/249_0_2043_1635/master/2043.jpg?w=#{width}&h=#{height}&q=#{quality}&fit=bounds&sig-ignores-params=true&s=88d3f7a872fa99e0af487e71c762abfb","height":1635,"width":2043,"orientation":"landscape","caption":"Gary Lineker and Polish defender Stefan Majewski during the World Cup in 1986. Photograph: Photograph: AFP/Getty Images","credit":"AFP/Getty Images","altText":"Gary Lineker and Polish defender Stefan Majewski during the World Cup in 1986.","cleanCaption":"Gary Lineker and Polish defender Stefan Majewski during the World Cup in 1986.","cleanCredit":"Photograph: AFP/Getty Images"},{"urlTemplate":"https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/d030264ec5a54a860a14c1915b0a25c7245957bd/369_0_3878_3104/master/3878.jpg?w=#{width}&h=#{height}&q=#{quality}&fit=bounds&sig-ignores-params=true&s=340efa6437a1a65fc78e129ba6026d85","height":3104,"width":3878,"orientation":"landscape","caption":"Elye Wahi of Côte d'Ivoire. 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England fans reflected on a thumping opening win against Croatia while the Côte d’Ivoire striker Elye Wahi was under investigation for match fixing

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Britons can be jolly (Arsenal fans just were), but this was the gold standard, says Guardian columnist Emma Brockes","body":"

There was a moment on Sunday morning when, scrolling through pages of content celebrating the New York Knicks’ spectacular NBA championship win in the city – videos in which it seemed people of every age, race, background and zip code put aside their differences to hug and scream – I wondered how far the principle of sport-as-the-ultimate-leveller might stretch.

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For example: given the joy on Saturday night was so intense, could you have sent the most hated figures in the US into the ecstatic Knicks viewing parties – those gatherings of thousands who came together to watch the game projected on to the sides of buildings – and witnessed the joy of the event transform them into regular humans? Greg Bovino, say, the loathed former US border tsar in his soldier-of-fortune Halloween costume – pop a jaunty Knicks cap on his head and might he elicit high fives? What about ICE agents in Knicks jerseys? I tried to imagine Elon Musk – a man who has surely never thrown, caught or enjoyed watching a ball in flight in his life – attending a Knicks party and experiencing, possibly for the first time, a group of people who appeared genuinely pleased to see him.

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\n New York Knicks’ star Karl-Anthony Towns (centre) celebrates with the team’s owner, James Dolan (centre-right), in San Antonio after sealing the NBA championship, 13 June 2026. Photograph: Adam Davis/EPA\n
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There’s no knowing. All I know is that on Sunday morning, the stories started trickling in from New York of a once-in-a-lifetime experience. A friend, out in Manhattan with a bunch of nerdy podcasters, pulled them into a bar for the tail end of the game and gave them the best night of their lives. My children’s 13-year-old half-brother was out on the streets of the city celebrating until 1am. Video after video – of air traffic controllers at JFK airport saying “go Knicks” at the end of dispatches giving permission to land; of people on those planes celebrating as every screen on board was tuned to the game; of Metropolitan Transportation Authority employees losing it on the subway and buses – captured a truly rare moment of city-wide unity.

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The scenes reminded me of Barack Obama’s first presidential win in 2008 when, briefly, everyone in New York felt as if they were on the same side. I was in Harlem that night and people came out into the streets to bang pots and pans and hug strangers. And so it was this past weekend, when even the grousing was good-natured.

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Hard on the heels of Saturday night’s celebrations was the inevitable audit by sports pundits of real v fake celebrity Knicks fans. I wasn’t in New York for any of this, which makes me one of those creeps getting in on it from afar. Ben Stiller copped it (“he gets [the tickets] for free – it’s a joke!”), as did Taylor Swift for supposedly being a fake fan. Only one front-row celebrity, Spike Lee, seemed to pass muster for being a paying season-ticket holder.

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Meanwhile, Zohran Mamdani, who to that point had been fiercely dividing New Yorkers, emerged from the finals as everyone’s hero. The mayor of New York’s political acuity – signing an executive order suspending bedtimes for kids across the city for as long as the Knicks were in the finals; popping up in bars, wearing his team strip over his shirt and tie – was as on display as his sports fanaticism.

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Mamdani is also an Arsenal fan, and comparing the Knicks’ championship win with Arsenal’s Premier League triumph last month showed up interesting differences between the two cities. The Arsenal victory was grungier, possibly boozier and, although just as inclusive as the Knicks hysteria, light on the myth-making that went on at the weekend. North London might be mentioned in some of the Arsenal chants, but nothing on Earth celebrates itself the way New York does – less a distinction between Arsenal and Knicks fans than between Americans and Britons.

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\n New Yorkers take to the streets to celebrate the Knicks’ victory, 13 June 2026. Photograph: Kyle Stevens/Shutterstock\n
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Anyway, for a brief moment it was heaven, despite the people trying to extract teachable moments from the Knicks win by asking how we might use this spirit of togetherness in the future. (We can’t; it’s ephemeral, that’s the whole point of live sporting events and, by the way, stop trying to turn everything into homework.)

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By law, any big sporting victory must be compared to historic euphoric events. In this case, scenes from New York at the weekend made me think of the Christmas armistice during the first world war. It’s an alternative reality that will return to the city on Thursday, when the Knicks victory parade makes its way up Manhattan to City Hall and strange scenes will unfold. People will talk to each other on the subway; the crowd noise will be heard in New Jersey; the NYPD will receive hugs off passing New Yorkers who would otherwise dismiss them as Trump supporters from Staten Island. It will be beautiful – and then, by the nature of these things, it will be gone.

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A riot of joy and hugging and screaming followed the Knicks’ historic win. Britons can be jolly (Arsenal fans just were), but this was the gold standard

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Fans thronged the streets to celebrate as the New York Knicks won their first NBA championship since 1973. Crowds were dancing into the night after the nail-biting 94-90 finish to game 5 of the finals against San Antonio Spurs.


As the celebrations ran late into the night, hundreds of people also swarmed a convoy of about 15 shuttle buses in Times Square used to transport soccer fans from the first World Cup game in the New York City area. At least one bus was set on fire. It was not immediately clear whether anyone was injured in the incident

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A while ago, to amuse myself, I ran a search through my text archive for the phrase “I can’t stand it”, which delivered pages and pages of returns. Some recent things I can’t stand, in no particular order: the phrase “clutching her pearls”; a very obviously made-up anecdote in a big profile in a major magazine; someone’s passive aggressive use of the word “anyway” in an email; a reporter friend’s colleague who, every time she finishes a story, goes into the system and changes two small things on it so he can shoehorn his name next to hers on the byline; David Beckham sucking up to the royals; Jimmy Fallon’s large face; the opening episode of the Russell T Davies show Tip Toe; weather, specifically high wind.

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If I was transported with rage by all of these things, I assumed it was a byproduct of age. You can’t miss the sheer amount of menopause content floating around at the moment telling us how age makes us angry, even though, apparently, the menopause remains a taboo (it could be more of a taboo!). As it turns out, however, it isn’t just me and other women in midlife who are furious, but rather British women in general, and to a degree that outstrips our counterparts in other countries. I take surveys with a pinch, but this particular poll was extensive, organised by a global health initiative in which 76,000 women worldwide were questioned about their physical and emotional wellbeing. Last week, the findings were released, including the fact that British women are among the angriest in Europe – angrier than the Germans, Swiss, French and Dutch – and that we’re getting angrier with each passing year.

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There’s no way to come at this without resorting to national stereotypes, so first off: we’re angrier than the French? Seriously? What about the Italians?! Whenever I go to Italy, the Italians seem pretty angry! (The only European women angrier than us are the Czechs, Maltese, Greeks, Albanians and Spanish – make of that what you will.) A keener sociologist than me would look closely at cultural norms in each country to deduce the various thresholds for what defines anger. In other words: I know from living in the US that there are certain types of family fights, for example, that to a British person look catastrophically angry, but within certain American subcultures are considered regular discourse, to be forgotten about two seconds after they’ve happened. (Meanwhile, I still haven’t recovered.)

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We do love a grudge in this country, and we also find complaining about things funny – so perhaps this explains why we top the polls. But can recreational anger still be described as anger? The fact is that “anger” is surely too broad a term to have any meaning here. To create an accurate picture, the pollsters at the Hologic Global Women’s Health Index would have had to break the test down into subcategories allowing for the difference between “seething resentment”, “mild irritation”, “a grievance going back 25 years”, and “I’m still banging on about this thing from yesterday because it really does give me enjoyment”.

\n

The inference is that British women are unhappier than their European sisters and, while that may be the case, in my view, anger is the wrong metric to measure this. I think boredom correlates with unhappiness more reliably than anger. Passive indifference; that’s a problem. A sense of defeat; powerlessness; fear; insecurity. But anger can be energising and entertaining. We should be angry! Many things suck! And while there’s no data from the survey about how angry British men are, one assumes they are as subject to the same cultural norms as we are, with the caveat that – just to take a wild stab at it – one of the things that makes British women so angry is British men. If anger festers in this country, it’s because we can’t let it out because we’re all so hung up on keeping up appearances. Thanks, I’m fine.

\n

What exactly are we angry about? The survey has no answers but I’d put money on it not being geopolitics, or the economy, although one assumes both those things create a fraught background against which small irritations land harder. It may be that I’m angry about interest rates in this country soaring, but it’s stepping on a piece of Lego that will really make me howl. I am angry about recent gains made by Reform UK, but it won’t cause me to have a meltdown in the way that, for example, someone harassing me to hang out with them when I’ve already said no does. Or the image of Meryl Streep yukking it up with Jenna Bush Hager. Or someone I haven’t seen for 15 years popping up to ask a favour. I could go on, and on, and on.

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A new survey seems to correlate anger with being unhappy – but it can be an energising and frankly entertaining emotion too

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Well, what’s wrong with that?","type":"comment","headerImage":{"urlTemplate":"https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/3aeee60624c3ab6b24f1619afc84ae900d8df854/361_0_2562_2050/master/2562.jpg?w=#{width}&h=#{height}&q=#{quality}&fit=bounds&sig-ignores-params=true&s=9a316abf5ae0291367f8d46c5b6b865f","height":2050,"width":2562,"orientation":"landscape","caption":"A demonstration organised by Women Against State Pension Inequality, Manchester, October 2019. 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Monday

\n

The first day of Pride month and friends in New York report a textbook encounter between one of the straightest forces in this world – hen night energy – and one of the gayest, the Rocky Horror Show, currently in revival on Broadway, where for the past three months, Tony-nominated Luke Evans has been knocking it out of the park as Frank-N-Furter.

\n

Into the seats in front, reports my traumatised friend, stagger five women, tanked out of their minds, shrieking and swaying and hell-bent on destruction. Had they stumbled into a performance of Mamma Mia, they might have found themselves among like-minded souls. As it was – and I almost pity them for this – they washed up in a sea of increasingly thin-lipped gays.

\n

There has always been tension between the deep, emotional resonance that pieces like Rocky Horror, or more recently Oh, Mary, have with gay people and the theme-park appeal they exert on elements of the straight community. This is why hen parties get banned from gay clubs, but in a theatre, you can’t kick people out until they’ve actually done something.

\n

In the first 20 minutes, the women stood up, waved their arms, screamed, bounced around and generally carried on until, eventually – high fives all round – they were asked to leave. As one of the women lurched out, she threw up a middle finger at my pal, a mild-mannered New Yorker in ordinary circumstances, but he’d been pushed beyond the very limits of his tolerance and invited her nastily to “go back to Long Island”. Happy start of Pride!

\n

Tuesday

\n

Speaking of trauma, we probably need to talk about Anne Hathaway. The 43-year-old actor – who, in her defence, is probably still recovering from the embarrassment of The Devil Wears Prada 2 – has managed to insert herself into Arsenal’s Premier League victory with a video that is almost a work of art in its ability to trigger strong feelings in the viewer.

\n

Wearing the Arsenal strip, Hathaway, head swaying, hair flowing, smiling whimsically to herself as if to say, yes, I’m pretty sure this is how normal people behave when they’re into things and, boy, they’re gonna love me for being into this, sings a version of North London Forever in what appears to be “sea-shanty” or “Irish [trad]” style.

\n

And by sings, I mean really gives it some flourish; watch out or Eva Perón over there will put out a record. In the short piece of dialogue the Hollywood star subsequently delivers to camera, referencing the “group chat” and grinning wolfishly – “congratulations, lads!” – I can feel her vowel sounds pulling, inexorably, in the extremely dangerous direction of the Yorkshire accent she did in One Day, a possibly unconscious nod to ideas about “Englishness”. Anyway, while she name checks Declan Rice and her mum, we can at least be grateful she doesn’t have a crack at the word gooner.

\n
\n \"Arsenal\n
\n ‘Quick, everyone hide, here comes Anne Hathaway!’ Photograph: Toby Shepheard/AFP/Getty Images\n
\n
\n

Wednesday

\n

Jonathan Franzen’s last novel, Crossroads, was published in 2021, and there is excitement this week when a long story worked up from his novel in progress drops in the New Yorker. After a slightly creaky start that feels like heavy machinery levitating into action, there it is, the old magic. The story focuses on Adele, a young girl with a difficult family and strong passions that she initially directs towards religion. “She enjoyed the feeling that God, unlike her mother, paid attention to everything she did,” writes Franzen. After a night in which “she’d felt Christ’s living presence in her bedroom, a night she’d been agreeably rewarded for talking about in church”, Adele worries that “in her secret heart … she hadn’t felt the presence of anything but her yearning to feel something”.

\n

This is exactly what we want from Franzen, who is never stronger than when calling out the gap between how we see ourselves and how others see us. It’s hard to imagine where the novel as a whole might go, and, in remarks to the magazine, the 66-year-old pointed out that the full arc is “far from finished”. Words to make a publisher gulp.

\n

Towards the end of the piece, there is a sudden swerve in what feels like an unusual direction for the author: Adele, a talented actor, becomes suddenly, inexplicably famous and acquires an agent, a woman who, writes Franzen, “had welling eyes and a crooning sentimentality, a related fondness for a bottle of Chablis at lunchtime, but at the mention of a larger East or West Coast agency, for which a client might leave her, her eyes dried and her voice lost its croon”. “When you’re in with me, you’re in,” she said. “And when you’re out with me you’re dead.” Do you know who this passage made me miss like crazy? Jackie Collins.

\n

Thursday

\n

I was going to write something offhand about Rosamund Pike telling off an audience member this week for texting during a performance of her hit West End play, Inter Alia. And then by chance, on Thursday, I happened to get tickets to go see it. The play, by Suzie Miller, is a follow-up to Prima Facie, her brilliant legal drama starring Jodie Comer, and from the reviews I’d imagined Inter Alia would be a good but slightly weaker version of that play.

\n

Well, ha! It’s not often one has cause to say this but Pike’s performance, in which she plays a judge whose son is accused of a crime, justifies all the hysteria, money, and attention that can accrue to actors. I had thought Comer’s performance in Prima Facie was unmatchable, but Pike goes toe to toe with her, carrying the entire production without intermission in a way that is so wild with comedy and agony and levity and sheer physicality, it is impossible to imagine how, night after night, she is able to pull it off.

\n

Miller’s play meanwhile, despite its culture war subject – sexual violence and toxic masculinity – somehow manages to tell a story with extremely complicated dynamics without villainising anyone. Earlier this week, Pike returned to the stage after curtain call to admonish an audience member she’d seen texting – “Maybe it was very important, and maybe you’re a doctor, and you’re saving someone’s life, and I hope you are, but we do see these, we do feel them” – and I had thought, vaguely, quite right. Now, after experiencing the sheer bravura of the show, all I can think is how admirable Pike was in her restraint; whoever the texter, they should have been hauled up on stage and made to explain.

\n

Friday

\n

After the sun, the rain. What a time to be alive for a people who like to talk about weather. It must qualify as a significant life stage when one’s response to a week of unbroken rain after a week of unbroken sun is relief not disappointment. While my children grumble about getting back into raincoats and sweaters, I find I’ve become the person who says, “the trees need it”. For all I care it can rain until September.

\n

The week in pictures

\n
\n \"Andy\n
\n ‘Would someone with centrist dad politics dress head to toe in black with spy glasses?’ Photograph: Temilade Adelaja/Reuters\n
\n
\n
\n \"Keir\n
\n ‘Do you know, I think it might be a pig!’ Photograph: James Glossop/Reuters\n
\n
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Plus, Anne Hathaway shoots from the hip for Arsenal and Rosamund Pike calls out theatregoer for texting during show

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A strong contender for the most satisfying TV clip of the year comes from a recent interview by Oprah Winfrey with the writer Belle Burden, whose memoir, Strangers, was parked at the top of the US bestseller lists for months. Burden tells the story of how her husband coldly walked out on his family, only returning, she tells Winfrey, to inform the kids the marriage was over and demand of the wife on whom he had cheated, “I’m starving – can you make me a sandwich?”

\n

There are many small cruelties in the book, but this, among the worst, triggers outright pantomime incredulity from Winfrey, who murmurs, “Even the cameraman said ‘oh’.” Burden wanted to model kindness in front of her daughters; she wanted to show her husband exactly what he had walked out on. “So,” says Winfrey, arriving at what appears to be the outer limits of her famous ability to empathise, “you made him the sandwich?!!” Burden smiles, weakly. “I made the sandwich.”

\n

Strangers: A Memoir of a Marriage has become a phenomenon since it was published in January, triggering endless discussion about how much anyone really knows about their partner. As well as admiration for Burden, a 56-year-old who – throughout a storm of publicity – has conducted herself with dignity, sanity and what looks like non-media-trained sincerity. The book offers a window into a world of ultra wealth and privilege: Burden is an heiress on both sides, the granddaughter of the socialite Babe Paley on one, and the Vanderbilts on the other.

\n

Mainly, however, the book has soared because of what it says about women being taken advantage of by their husbands. The cruelty shocks: when Burden’s husband leaves, it’s with the words, “I thought I wanted our life, but I don’t,” and later he tells her she can have full custody of the kids – but it’s the financial endangerment that comes after the separation that spurred feverish discussion and, more recently, intense controversy.

\n

Of course, any anointment of a memoir by Winfrey carries with it a strong possibility that, shortly after the fanfare, allegations that the book has a troubling relationship with the truth will arise. So it is with Strangers; two weeks ago, the New Yorker published a blockbuster investigation into what it characterised as serious omissions in Burden’s telling of her story, specifically the financial stuff. In overview: Burden claimed that her husband, a hedge-funder, shielded his own income in the divorce settlement while threatening to pursue her for half the value of the couple’s two homes, both of which she had bought with her own money. She said this left her in a dire financial situation that might have resulted in her losing both.

\n\n

According to the New Yorker, Burden, who gave up work as a successful lawyer when she had children and writes in the book that she has no income, failed to mention the fact that divorce documents show that in 2019 she reported an income of $800,000. Furthermore, while Burden writes that she used up the bulk of her trust funds in the purchase of the family homes, the New Yorker finds that she and her brother are joint beneficiaries of a $45m share in a trust that will pay out to them after the death of their stepmother. When she writes about the unfairness of a divorce settlement governed by a prenup that Burden felt she shouldn’t have signed – and that gave her no claim on her husband’s income in the event of divorce – it might have been a good idea to mention the apparent financial security in her background.

\n

Burden hasn’t commented on these claims, and what is curious is how the balance of public favour still seems to be firmly in her corner. While no one is rushing to defend Moth and Raynor Winn, the pair at the centre of the Salt Path scandal, many of Burden’s defenders online point out that any omissions in the memoir are simply the result of justifiable narrative decisions. None of the fundamentals have changed; the man who walked out on her was and still is despicable. Burden remains immensely likable and apparently self-aware. Women are often left high and dry after a punitive divorce. And so on.

\n

What to make of it all? A generous interpretation would be that the very wealthy experience financial precariousness in ways that are almost impossible for the rest of us to process: $800,000, after tax, becomes a negligible amount. And while pleading poverty when you are, by any normal standards, completely rolling in it, is usually enough to shut off the spigot of public sympathy, Belle Burden still somehow comes out of it wronged, a woman with no idea who she was married to.

\n

Anyway, Gwyneth Paltrow has snapped up the film rights and, assuming she doesn’t give two hoots about any of this, I look forward to seeing how Burden’s image survives being played by Paltrow and what it does, if anything, to our biases.

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The Oprah-approved book is said to have left out important financial details, so why does the writer remain a pin-up for wronged women?

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Monday

\n

Much discussion in my household this week about the possibility of hantavirus or Ebola becoming Covid-like in their spread. As darkening news from central Africa throws the withdrawal of US international aid into terrible relief, so we revisit memories of those early months of 2020 when reports of a strange virus in China slowly crept from final item on the news list to blaring emergency.

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For anyone with kids finishing primary school, there’s a question as to what and how much about that time they’ll remember. My two, who are deep into the second world war as part of their year 6 history curriculum, like to speculate that when they’re 80 they’ll be subjects of what-did-you-do-in-the-blitz curiosity for having lived through the great pandemic of 2020. (I have to hold back from saying that 70 years from now, if Covid is still regarded as the worst thing to have happened to their generation, they’ll be extremely lucky.)

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They were five when the first lockdown happened in New York and mainly remember it as a time of unlimited iPad time and sweets that resulted in one of them having two fillings before she was seven (the shame!). Six years later and they adopt a tone of fond, ancient mariner-like nostalgia, which on closer inspection involves no actual memories – not of an empty Broadway, nor the field hospital in Central Park, nor the sound of sirens echoing through the city. For me, meanwhile, strange memory glitches occasionally surface so that even this morning, as I left the house, I had a moment of patting myself down thinking I’d forgotten something; for a split second my brain provided me with the answer: “Damn, where’s my mask?”

\n

Tuesday

\n
\n \"John\n
\n John Travolta attends the premier of his film Propeller One-Way Night Coach in New York. Photograph: Gilbert Carrasquillo/GC Images\n
\n
\n

We need to talk about John Travolta’s beret, which the 72-year-old director wore to the Cannes film festival this week and, when questioned, explained was a kind of cosplaying gesture to publicise his directorial debut, a one-hour film called Propeller One-Way Night Coach. “You’re an actor [playing] the part of a director, look like an old-school director,” he said, adding: “I looked up pictures from the 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s, and the old-school directors wore berets, and the glasses. And I thought: ‘That’s what I’m doing. I’m doing an homage to being a director, so I’m going to play the part of being a director.’”

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Bit odd, and it doesn’t explain the facial hair, which looked sprayed on and gave him a glancing similarity to the cancelled director James Toback. Still, Travolta is a legend, which buys him leverage for this kind of whimsy and seems obliquely connected to some of his other gestures over the years, like parking that Boeing 707 he bought outside his front door and sticking with Scientology.

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Propeller One-Way Night Coach, meanwhile, sounds like the title of a novel written by Sean Penn and when you dig deeper, turns out to be an autobiographical piece based on Travolta’s memoir of his childhood. Critics have been strainingly nice (the Guardian’s three-star review described it as “sweet”), while Variety implied the greatest thing about the movie was the preroll featuring a montage of Travolta’s greatest film rolls, and the beret, advisedly or otherwise, stole the show.

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Wednesday

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I don’t think I’ve ever liked Rachel Reeves more than in this week’s footage of her fighting a powerful urge to tell some passing heckler to shove it up his back door then re-channelling that impulse in a more constructive direction. It was like watching media training happen in real time as the chancellor first ignored, then mildly admonished, then full on lost it in the direction of a man in a hi-vis vest shouting the words “Nigel Farage” at her while she tried to do a TV interview at a petrol station in Leeds.

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Smiling with the tolerance of someone who has to interact with the public all the time, Reeves, it seemed to me, would like to have gone the full Shabana Mahmood and told the guy to “fuck right off”. Instead, as he went off at her about immigration and Englishness, she yelled at his retreating white van: “I love our country! I love our country!” and “one of the things about our country is good manners!”

\n

This was painful to watch, like a person trying to suppress a sneeze, and, my god, she’s only human. Towards the end of the vignette, Reeves says, “it’s not very British” then does a manual override of what appears to be an adrenaline-charged malfunction in the smooth running of her persona and snaps: “Right. Very good. You can put that on the telly.”

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Reclaiming basic civility as a tenet of Britishness was a smart save in the face of dire provocation, but, of course, she’d have gone up in the estimations of voters across the spectrum if she’d said what we were all thinking, which was: “Hey, thanks for dropping by and good luck winning a woman’s attention without screaming and gesturing across a petrol forecourt.”

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Thursday

\n
\n \"Jinkx\n
\n ‘Pitch-perfect attention to the keening intensity and unvanquished charm of an icon’: Jinkx Monsoon as Judy Garland. Photograph: Sam Lee\n
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To the Soho Theatre Walthamstow for the opening night of End of the Rainbow, the musical drama starring Jinkx Monsoon as Judy Garland – addled by addiction, but still Judy – in the last months of her life in London, and it’s a joyous evening with the best people present, including Mason Alexander Park, fresh off the West End stage in Oh, Mary, and a lot of very excited Garland super-fans. The play, by Peter Quilter, positions Garland cleverly between her horrendous fifth husband, Mickey Deans, and her loving, loyal piano player, Anthony, a fictional character written to encapsulate Garland’s meaning to the gay community and the limits to what it could do to protect her.

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Monsoon, who twice won RuPaul’s Drag Race, is terrific in the role, and I thought I could see in her performance the influence of Garland in I Could Go On Singing, the 1963 film she made with Dirk Bogarde in which she played a lightly fictionalised version of herself, right down to her tardy appearance on stage at the Palladium when she had to win over a hostile audience. There’s a scene in that movie which Garland apparently extemporised – “I’ve hung on to every bit of rubbish there is to hang on to in life; and I’ve thrown all the good bits away. Now can you tell me why I’d do that?” – and the energy of which Monsoon inhabited with pitch-perfect attention to the keening intensity and unvanquished charm of an icon in the last years of her life. Bravo!

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Friday

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With 30C weather and a bank holiday coming down the pike, I feel the urge to introduce my kids to a bank holiday tradition in this country by buying train tickets, standing for two hours in a sweltering, unairconditioned carriage that has stopped for reasons unknown, dragging ourselves to a pebble beach and a freezing, iron grey sea that may or may nor contain E coli from waste overflow and struggling home again, sunburned but happy. There’s no place like home.

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Digested week in pictures

\n
\n \"King\n
\n ‘It’ll soon shake one’s windows and rattle one’s walls/cos the times they are a-changin.’ Photograph: Toby Melville/AFP/Getty\n
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\n \"Trump\n
\n ‘I told you not to use super strength hair fixant.’ Photograph: Eric Lee/Reuters\n
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\n \"Andy\n
\n ‘No, smart arse, PE supply teacher wasn’t the look I was going for.’ Photograph: Peter Byrne/PA\n
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Plus, John Travolta’s beret, Rachel Reeves reclaims basic civility and Judy Garland comes to east London

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Rachel Reeves was repeatedly shouted at by a heckler while she was answering questions from the media at a petrol station in Leeds. As the man drove away in a truck with two St George’s flags on the roof, still shouting, the chancellor responded, saying: 'I love our country', and that his lack of manners was 'not very British'

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Among the many great pleasures of Daniel Okrent’s new biography of Stephen Sondheim – a book perfectly weighted between the gossipy and erudite – is its rendering of the milieu beyond its immediate subject. You come for the biography and stay for the world of mid-20th-century New York, in which Leonard Bernstein says terrible things about Sweeney Todd (“disgusting”), Sondheim says terrible things about Barbra Streisand (“doesn’t have one sincere moment left inside her”), and Arthur Laurents says terrible things about everyone. In the early 2000s, during a particularly poisonous exchange of letters between Laurents and Sondheim, the latter told his old collaborator, “you’re just good enough to know you’re mediocre”.

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The entire book is sheer delight and Okrent, formerly an editor at the New York Times and a baseball fanatic who effectively invented the modern fantasy baseball league, does a terrific job of telling Sondheim’s life story alongside shrewd analysis of his body of work. We meet Sondheim’s mother, known as Foxy, whom the writer and composer made an elaborate play of hating his entire life and who Okrent brings to life in order to get behind that particular performance.

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We see the young Sondheim taken under the wing of Oscar Hammerstein, the great man of musical theatre, who called out the young Stevie, as he knew him, for early missteps: “You’re writing like me,” said Hammerstein. “You’re imitating me, you’re talking about nature and things like that. You don’t believe in those things.” He then gave Sondheim a piece of advice the younger man would carry close to his chest throughout his career: “Write what you believe, and you’ll be 99% ahead of the game.”

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The early chapters are a fascinating study in the gestation of genius. Sondheim attended Williams College, Massachusetts, where he switched from studying maths to music once he understood the latter could have the same “exactitude and rigor”. This shift was largely down to his tutor, Robert Barrow, an unpopular figure among students for being dry and doctrinaire but a perfect fit for Sondheim. Barrow’s instruction was pivotal; on Claude Debussy’s La Mer, Barrow said, “Anybody here hear the sea? Well, even if you do, that’s not what it’s about. What the piece is about is the whole tone scale.” Music to Sondheim’s ears, who later credited that moment for teaching him “that music is a thought-out process, that it is craft, not inspiration”. (Forty years later, he would make the hero of Sunday in the Park With George have similar insights.)

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In those early years of his career, we see Sondheim at the mercy of the big beasts of musical theatre – in 1958, Ethel Merman rejects him as a potential composer for Gypsy because, as she sees it, he is “a beginner” (Sondheim later referred to her as a “loud, vulgar, cheap, small-eyed lady”). Instead, he was relegated to writing the lyrics, a job Sondheim considered far inferior to composing. This story made me laugh: when Sondheim shared his lyrics for Everything’s Coming Up Roses with Jerome Robbins, the show’s director, Robbins asked: “Everything’s coming up Rose’s what?”

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Throughout these episodes we see Sondheim struggling to emerge from the generation of theatre composers before him – to get out from under the influence of the Jule Stynes and Leonard Bernsteins and find his own style. A note on his abilities: as Okrent writes, during a cast recording, “Sondheim would sit in the control room, seemingly not engaged, idly reading the New Yorker. Then he’d look up and say, ‘The French horn just played an E instead of an E-flat.’

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At the same time, he was struggling to settle into his sexuality. For many years, Sondheim tried his hardest to date women, most convincingly Mary Rodgers, daughter of Richard Rodgers, and the actor Lee Remick, before throwing in the towel in the late 1960s. As Arthur Laurents, a more open gay man in that impossible era, believed, Sondheim had been involved with women, “because he hoped”.

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It was this ambivalence and instability – “I’m ambivalent about most things,” said Sondheim in 1976 – that fed his work and would eventually result in some of the greatest musicals of the late 20th century. But in the 60s, the legend was still building. After the film rights for Gypsy delivered a cash windfall, Sondheim bought the five-storey townhouse on 246 East 49th Street, next door to Katharine Hepburn, where he would live for the next six decades. He went to parties featuring the A-list New York crowd of the day, including Mike Nichols, Lauren Bacall and Richard Avedon, whose pretensions he gently sent up. Among them, Sondheim remained idiosyncratic. Okrent writes, “in their social circle, the unattached, unemotional, sexually unresolved Sondheim was the magnetic core”.

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\n \"Stephen\n
\n Stephen Sondheim and Elizabeth Taylor record songs for the film A Little Night Music, August 1976. (Photo by Graham Morris/Evening Standard/Getty Images) Photograph: Graham Morris/Getty Images\n
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In the early 1960s, Sondheim was busy writing Anyone Can Whistle, the show Frank Rich described as his “cult flop” and a genre in which Sondheim would excel. “On his 40th birthday,” writes Okrent, “his entire body of recorded music consisted of twenty-eight songs from the cast albums of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum and Anyone Can Whistle. Then came the first preview of Company, and Sondheim’s life changed utterly and forever. So did the history of the American musical.”

\n

As in most biographies, the successful years are slightly less enjoyable than the slog to the top. But even after his greatest hits – Company, A Little Night Music, Sunday in the Park and Into the Woods – turned him into an icon, the dynamics around Sondheim were still dynamite. Bernstein never recovered from the younger man eclipsing him. (As the playwright John Guare says, “as Steve got more famous, Lenny became more hostile.”) There are moments in the book that capture the precise moment of Broadway’s changing of the guards. In 1970, after Company opened to critical adulation, Okrent writes, “Alan Jay Lerner, the lyricist of Brigadoon, My Fair Lady, and Camelot … came home from the opening night performance, broke into tears and told his wife, ‘My way of writing musicals is over.’”

\n

In his art, Sondheim was precise, exacting, and in his life, not so much. “His personal habits were deplorable,” writes Okrent. “[Mary] Rodgers said ‘he was a pig’ who ‘never washed, never shaved’.” He was also, writes Okrent, “by any definition of the word, an alcoholic”. Sondheim left everything, including writing, to the last minute then let anxiety and adrenaline carry him through. This is how, in the early 1970s, he wrote one of his most famous songs, Send in the Clowns, from A Little Night Music – in 36 hours of total panic just days before the show previewed. He would pull off a similar trick with Children and Art, and Lesson #8, two extremely late additions to Sunday in the Park With George, which Sondheim wrote days before the show went into its off-Broadway trial in 1983, while Mandy Patinkin, the star, tore out his hair.

\n

I could go on. The book is brimming with delicious incident. Towards the end, we see Sondheim offer himself as a mentor to younger writers including Jonathan Larson (Rent) and Lin-Manuel Miranda (Hamilton). He remained generous, and extremely cranky, well into his 70s, when he settled into a relationship and lived with someone for the first time – Jeff Romley, a man 50 years his junior who, to Sondheim’s amazement, brought an Xbox and Facebook-scrolling into his life. By all accounts, he was happier in this period than he had ever been and the pair were still together when Sondheim died in 2021 at the age of 91. One of his great regrets, he said towards the end of his life, was the absence of children. “I really do miss not having had a family.” But, he added, ambivalent to the end, “I suppose if I had one I wouldn’t have had anything to write about.”

\n

• Stephen Sondheim: Art Isn’t Easy by Daniel Okrent is published by Yale (£22). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.

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Packed with gossip and incident, this book is also a fascinating study in the gestation of genius

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Kylie, the new three-part documentary that launched on Netflix on Wednesday and has been making me verklempt ever since, is great in every way it’s possible for TV to be. But on the basis of the first two and a half episodes, a couple of things jump out: Kylie’s almost superhuman ability to stay cheerful in the face of intense provocation, and the extraordinary rudeness she had to tolerate from interviewers back in the day.

\n

Here’s Michael Parkinson in 2004, grinning like an alligator and asking her a question considered totally fine at the time: “What about children? You’re 35 now, leaving it a bit late aren’t you?” And a few years later, Cat Deeley, asking roughly the same question, albeit slightly more diplomatically, right after Kylie had emerged from chemotherapy for breast cancer. Nice work, guys!

\n

Anyway, never mind that. This gorgeous documentary is a correction to the recent slew of terrible hagiographies (Melania), weaselly half-measures (David Beckham) or empty vessels (Victoria Beckham) that skirt around their subjects, instead offering us a profile in fame that apparently took its maker, Michael Harte, two years to finish and features all the people you most want it to. At the heart of it is the enduring oxymoron of Kylie Minogue herself, a person who, even after all these years, appears enigmatically normal, opaquely straightforward, aggressively nice and still, despite everything, a lovable dork from the suburbs of Melbourne who became one of the world’s most famous women.

\n

I had forgotten a lot of this. I don’t think about Kylie much these days. I did once, however. It’s a generational thing, obviously; Kylie was the first concert I ever went to, Wembley Arena, 1990, at the age of 12, with my best friend, Sophie, and her dad. We were those pale, weedy kids on the news – kids from ’80s and ’90s Britain who had never seen sunshine and told owl-eyed reporters we watched Neighbours twice a day, at 1.30pm and 5.35pm, bewitched by the strapping Australians and their back yard pools. Rewatching footage from that era is a heart-thumping exercise – with the added hilarity of Jason Donovan popping up as he is now (sardonic, grizzled) to share his reminiscences over old footage.

\n

God, there’s the mullet; there’s the big Minogue teeth; there’s Anne Charleston as Madge in the background. And here’s 57-year-old Donovan swearing and struggling with himself as he admits he was jealous of Kylie back then, a man by turns burned out and hilarious, like something out of Beckett. Being dumped for Michael Hutchence – “look, I don’t have anything against Michael” – still has him fighting back tears. “Love hurts, mate,” he says to the interviewer and I want to say, Jason! We know! We were all there for it! “I don’t think I can say any more, to be fucking honest.”

\n

The star of the show, however, is Dannii Minogue, whose face during her interviews describes various states of disgust as she talks about the way her sister has been treated over the years. Dannii, who appears from the documentary to be steelier and more outspoken than her sibling, has had an absolute gutful of all of it and as she talks, you are reminded that during that era in which everyone was taken in by Russell Brand, Dannii wasn’t.

\n\n

The other star is Nick Cave, whose description of Kylie’s psychotic teenage fanbase when the two collaborated on Where the Wild Roses Grow (“these monstrous, awful teenage girls”) is perfection, as is his stunned recollection of what it was like for all the miserable bastards in his band when Kylie walked into their lives. “She was like this beam of light,” says Cave, “with this incredibly positivity. I don’t think we’d ever met anyone in our lives that liked life. This bold brightness.”

\n

For anyone who grew up with Kylie, it’s a lot, all of this, and I’ve had to keep pausing to look up things such as the 1989 video for Wouldn’t Change a Thing (“I-I-I-I wouldn’t change/I-I-I-I wouldn’t change”) and have a quiet moment with myself. In the background, meanwhile, are Ron and Carol, the Minogue parents, who it would be impossible to love more, not least because Ron, a retired accountant, gave Kylie some very sound advice when she first started to make money (invest in property) and now she owns half of Melbourne.

\n

But if Kylie is a piece of nostalgia, it is also about how tough certain types of guilelessness can be. “Oh, gosh!” says Kylie. And “absolute tosh!” The only time she swears is when she realises she has been drawn into discussing the late Hutchence and, upset, swears in frustration. After decades of global fame, invasive tabloids and two cancer diagnoses, she’s still here, reminding us who we were when we were young and pushing forward – as Carol Rumens once wrote about Diana, “an eager girl again, dressed for the ball” – scattering joy as she goes.

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After the glut of brand-building shows from other celebrities, the Kylie documentary is radical for simply allowing the star to come across as human

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Trump is trolling us all","rawTitle":"What to make of Brett Ratner’s diplomatic visit to China? Trump is trolling us all","item":{"trailText":"Having the cancelled director of the Rush Hour franchise – one of the president’s favourites – on Air Force One is exactly the kind of gesture he enjoys making, says Guardian columnist Emma Brockes","body":"

One of the least pressing yet most irritating aspects of Donald Trump’s US is the reintroduction of a bunch of people we never thought we’d have to hear from again. Men (and it’s mostly men) who, under previous administrations, were banished to the far corners of our collective consciousness, have come roaring back – this week on Air Force One. I’m referring to Brett Ratner, film director and subject of multiple accusations of sexual misconduct, all of which he denies, who was comprehensively cancelled in Hollywood but has reemerged this week to – what are the chances? – accompany the US president to China for his summit with Xi Jinping.

\n

If Ratner, who was dropped by Warner Bros in 2017, is not an obvious choice of travelling companion for the US president, he does at least fit the mould of men with appalling reputations alongside whom Trump stands a good chance of looking almost appealing. Many in Trump’s inner circle, prior to being plucked from the mire for possible advancement, had been on the brink of cancellation – take your pick from Pete Hegseth and Robert F Kennedy Jr – such that a sketchy past appears less of an oversight when it comes to Trump appointees and more of a qualification.

\n

It isn’t Ratner’s first toe back in the water, of course: earlier this year, he released his documentary Melania, a film for which the term “authorised” seems inadequate given the $40m (£30m) Amazon paid for it, and a sum which, one assumes, took the edge off any disappointment the Trumps felt about the film’s abject failure. (As the kinder among reviewers delicately put it, Melania “underperformed” relative to the high acquisition cost.)

\n
\n \"Donald\n
\n Donald Trump with China’s vice-president, Han Zheng, during an arrival ceremony at Beijing Capital International Airport, China, 13 May. Photograph: Evan Vucci/Reuters\n
\n
\n

The main thing about Ratner’s invitation to tag along this week is that it is in keeping with Trump’s essentially trolling nature. Having the director of the Rush Hour movie franchise, one of Trump’s favourites, on Air Force One en route to a “high stakes” diplomatic meeting is exactly the kind of middle finger Trump enjoys giving to the sorts of people who get upset by, for example, low-end programming at the Kennedy Center. (There’s no suggestion Ratner will be meeting the Chinese president; instead he is hitching a ride with Trump to scout for locations in China for Rush Hour 4 – Air Force One as rideshare is presumably part of the joke). We can only be grateful, I guess, that Trump’s favourite film isn’t Lethal Weapon, or it would’ve been Mel Gibson on Air Force One.

\n

The joke is one of lurid unsuitability, with vague echoes of that time Dennis Rodman – another figure unleashed on us by Trump, via Celebrity Apprentice – sent himself to North Korea as a self-appointed envoy and practitioner of “basketball diplomacy” to the horror of Barack Obama’s state department. Or, let’s see; Trump’s appointment of Linda McMahon, a “former wrestling executive”, to the role of secretary of education and a woman so flagrantly unqualified for a job with power over the lives of millions of American children that one can only assume Trump found it funny.

\n

Or, on the subject of the Kennedy Center, the deeply weird additions Trump made to the board of trustees, which included not only Susie Wiles, his chief of staff, but – a nice touch, this – Susie Wiles’ mother, Cheri Summerall. (See also: the appointment of Charles Kushner, convicted felon and father of Jared Kushner, as ambassador to France.)

\n

Back to Ratner, however, who, it may be useful to remind ourselves, was the subject of an investigation by the LA Times, which included this, about the actor Olivia Munn: “[She said] that while visiting the set of the 2004 Ratner-directed After the Sunset when she was still an aspiring actress, he masturbated in front of her in his trailer when she went to deliver a meal. Munn wrote about the incident in her 2010 collection of essays without naming Ratner. On a television show a year later, Ratner identified himself as the director, and claimed that he had ‘banged’ her, something he later said was not true.”

\n

There is one bright counter to the examples of the worst people in the US being restored to glory by Trump, and that is the fact that, very occasionally, the process runs in reverse. Prior to his association with Trump, erstwhile New York mayor Rudy Giuliani was not only a local and national hero, but appeared to be a man positively brimming with sanity. Last week, when he received last rites while in intensive care in Florida, obituaries writers got going on every sordid detail of the long descent into ignominy of a man absolutely ruined by his association with Trump. (Giuliani has since recovered). A warning – god willing – to all the others who are, at present, so eagerly throwing in their lot with the president.

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Having the cancelled director of the Rush Hour franchise – one of the president’s favourites – on Air Force One is exactly the kind of gesture he enjoys making

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HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. celebrated the updated guidelines with Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins, former boxing heavyweight champion Mike Tyson, U.S. Chief Design Officer Joe Gebbia, American Medical Association President Bobby Mukkamala, Chef Andrew Gruel, Defense Department Undersecretary Mike Obadal, and Bureau of Prisons Director William Marshall. (Photo by Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images)","cleanCredit":"Photograph: Michael M Santiago/Getty Images"},"cutoutImage":{"urlTemplate":"https://i.guim.co.uk/img/uploads/2017/10/06/Emma-Brockes,-L.png?w=#{width}&h=#{height}&q=#{quality}&fit=bounds&sig-ignores-params=true&s=c48b57da90097f52354f583e3159eed0"},"renderedItemProd":{"minBridgetVersion":"1.11.1","url":"https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/may/14/brett-ratners-diplomatic-visit-to-china-trump-is-trolling-us-all?dcr=apps&edition=uk"},"renderedItemBeta":{"minBridgetVersion":"1.11.1","url":"https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/may/14/brett-ratners-diplomatic-visit-to-china-trump-is-trolling-us-all?dcr=apps&edition=uk"},"renderedItemDebug":{"minBridgetVersion":"1.11.1","url":"https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/may/14/brett-ratners-diplomatic-visit-to-china-trump-is-trolling-us-all?dcr=apps&edition=uk"},"cardDesignType":"Comment","correspondingTags":[],"type":"Article","importance":0},{"title":"‘There was a lot of addiction and trauma in my family’: why Drag Race winner Jinkx Monsoon plays a perfect Judy Garland","rawTitle":"‘There was a lot of addiction and trauma in my family’: why Drag Race winner Jinkx Monsoon plays a perfect Judy Garland","item":{"trailText":"As she takes on the icon in musical drama End of the Rainbow, Monsoon recalls a childhood spent watching Wizard of Oz on repeat – and explains why audiences are ready for trans performers in non-trans roles","body":"

If these are strange times in America, they are particularly strange for Jinkx Monsoon, the 38-year-old actor, singer and drag artist who, since winning RuPaul’s Drag Race in 2013 and Drag Race All Stars in 2022, has become a huge breakout star. Monsoon, who has the white-lead-and-vinegar glamour of a 1930s movie star, has appeared on Broadway, at Carnegie Hall and in countless viral clips from Drag Race – and in other words is widely well known. And yet, she says, when she walks down the street in certain American cities, it is in a state of “not knowing if someone’s going to recognise me and be excited to see me, or recognise something about me and be hostile. It’s a really interesting dichotomy.” She lets out a huge laugh. “But it also keeps me humble, I gotta say.”

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We are backstage at the Soho Theatre in London’s Walthamstow, where Monsoon is shortly to appear in End of the Rainbow, Peter Quilter’s musical drama about Judy Garland, set in 1969 in the last months of the icon’s life. It’s a great role for Monsoon, whose impersonation of Garland on Drag Race was so spot-on the clips are still doing the rounds (although for my money, her Little Edie Beale was even better and funnier). But the show isn’t being played for laughs. Monsoon, who had a stellar run as Mama Morton in the Broadway production of Chicago three years ago, is increasingly leaning towards dramatic roles and, like Garland herself, is comfortable with the tragi-comic. “She’s a pillar, and an institution,” she says of Garland, in whom she became interested after watching the Wizard of Oz on repeat as a child. And because, she laughs, “my ex was obsessed with her”.

\n\n

Of course. We’re all obsessed with her, even if Monsoon was aware of taking a risk by choosing Garland to impersonate on Drag Race – “an antiquated character to younger audiences”. (She also did Natasha Lyonne, to great effect.) The fact is, it’s not only Garland whom Monsoon evokes in the show but a whole world of female performers on the Ethel Merman-Elaine Stritch continuum, in which pain and addiction overlap with talent and the other, defining characteristic of these women, which Monsoon identifies as “complete candour”.

\n

Here’s a typical story Monsoon likes to luxuriate in the telling of, that features a famous conversation between Garland and Stritch: “Elaine was saying to Judy, ‘Judy there’s a new show, it’s called Mame, there are two female leads, Vera and Mame. Listen! Vera is a drunk. So I think you play Mame on Mondays, Wednesdays and Saturdays, and I’ll play Vera and I can drink on those nights, but you have to stay sober. And then when we flip it, I’ll play Mame and you play Vera, and you can drink on those nights. So we only have to be sober every other show. And Judy says” – and here, the hairs on the back of your neck stand up because Monsoon’s impression is so pitch perfect – “‘Elaine; what about matinees?’ And Elaine says, ‘Shit!’” (As it happens, Bea Arthur and Angela Lansbury ended up in those roles.)

\n
\n \"Monsoon:\n
\n Monsoon: ‘I want people to remember this …’ Photograph: Mettie Ostrowski\n
\n
\n

Monsoon grew up in the early 2000s in Portland, Oregon, in a Catholic family dominated by women. Unusually for that time and milieu, her family were comfortable and supportive of what, back then, was the gender non-conforming boy in their midst. “My whole family were very liberal. The women in my life saw who I was at an early age and told the men in my life: ‘You will accept this kid or you won’t be here.’” She says there was “a lot of addiction, a lot of trauma [in my family], but when it comes to loving each other we’ve got that part down.”

\n

It still took an awfully long time for Monsoon to find a comfortable identity, first in early drag shows as a teen in Portland, and later as a non-binary, trans-femme artist with the stage name Jinkx Monsoon (her legal name is Hera Hoffer). On Broadway, she replaced Cole Escola in their Tony-winning show Oh, Mary!, and is close friends with the star of the London run, Mason Alexander Park. It’s quite extraordinary, she says, “when you’ve been told your whole life that there isn’t room for you, that you’re going to be lucky if you get anything, to be experiencing this kind of abundance.”

\n

All of which dispels the long-held myth that audiences won’t show up for trans or queer performers. Oh, Mary! has been the hottest ticket on Broadway since it opened in 2024. Monsoon’s run in Chicago sent that fading musical’s ticket sales through the roof, so much so that she returned for a second run a year later. And on the earliest evidence, it looks as if End of the Rainbow will repeat the pattern.

\n

“I want people to remember this,” says Monsoon, “the next time someone wonders, ‘Should we cast this person from this marginalised demographic?’ Yes. Do it. People would rather see a fresh perspective than the same thing over and over. All you need to know is that audiences handled it.” She smiles the toothy smile many of us have come to know and love. “Not just that, they loved it, embraced it, came for every show.”

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As she takes on the icon in musical drama End of the Rainbow, Monsoon recalls a childhood spent watching Wizard of Oz on repeat – and explains why audiences are ready for trans performers in non-trans roles

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Monday

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It’s the Met Gala in New York on Monday and as photos stream out from the red carpet, the people I find myself thinking about most are three prominent holdouts. The annual ball, which raises money for the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum, has always summoned a strong turnout from the have-your-cake-and-eat-it community, notably Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez a few years ago in her “tax-the-rich” dress. This year, that role was assumed by the actor Sarah Paulson, who wore a dollar bill covering her eyes in apparent reference to the “blindness” of the 1%, a protest she undertook while nobly taking one for the team by refusing to sit out the $100,000-a-head event.

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Zohran Mamdani, the mayor of New York, declined his invitation, unlike many mayors before him (Bill De Blasio – thrilled to be there; Eric Adams – couldn’t beetle up that red carpet fast enough). On the night, while the Kardashians and other influencers enjoyed the spotlight, Mamdani posted on the mayor’s official social media feed to pay tribute to “the garment, retail, and warehouse workers who keep the industry running”. The actor Zendaya also declined to attend, for work reasons she said. And there was criticism of the gala from the actor Taraji P Henson, who posted: “I am so confused by some ppl that are going. I am just like WTF ARE WE DOING?”

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What indeed. This year’s guests, most of whom can be found at other times expatiating at length about one admirable cause or another, had no particular problem showing up to an event sponsored for the first time this year by Jeff Bezos. Per the gala’s mission, art must be celebrated – even as it provides a laundering service for billionaire supporters of the unhinged American president, who, among other things, has slashed funding to the National Endowment for the Arts. Still, the costumes were lovely.

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Tuesday

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You may recall President Obama breaking into Amazing Grace at a church in Charleston in 2015; an amazing political and human moment. By way of a follow-up and in a moment of bathos quite apt for the times, here’s Emmanuel Macron, the president of France, going the full Charles Aznavour this week by singing La Boheme at a state dinner in Yerevan, the capital of Armenia, while Nikol Pashinyan, the Armenian prime minister, accompanies him on drums.

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I’m a sucker for this kind of political theatre – up to and including, I’m ashamed to say, Donald Trump at the wheel of that big truck in 2017 and Tony Blair playing football. However staged these photo ops, they entail a small amount of vulnerability on the part of the politician and I’m always clenched for the gesture to fall flat. (The exception to this sensitivity of mine is Boris Johnson, whom it’s impossible to shame or embarrass and whose enthusiasms – remember the carry on about buses? – seem entirely made up).

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Anyway, in Armenia this week, after the Aznavour classic, Macron performed a number by Yves Montan. What the French president – whose poll ratings in France make him even more unpopular than Keir Starmer in Britain – lacked in singing ability he made up for in sheepish grins and a facial expression beseeching us to give him a break, he’s really trying.

\n
\n \"Donald\n
\n ‘I’m very popular with young people, they find me fascinating and inspiring.’ Photograph: Jacquelyn Martin/AP\n
\n
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Wednesday

\n

A lucrative rollout by one of this country’s strongest brands – its posh boarding schools – suffered a setback this week as news came in from Long Island that Harrow international school, which opened last September on a 170-acre campus in Greater New York, is slashing its fees in response to small pupil numbers. At present, the 20 children enrolled in the school are outnumbered by 23 teachers, to which end the $61,700 annual fees have been dropped for the next academic year to $50,544. This is a bargain by New York standards, where top schools in the city such as Dalton or Trinity charge almost $70,000 a year and fill every seat, with a wait list.

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The difficulty, clearly, has been in convincing American parents that Harrow proper, the outer London school founded in the 16th century and alma mater to seven prime ministers, is the same in spirit as Harrow Long Island, founded in 2025 and now advertising aggressively on NPR for pupils (the very idea!). A word to the school’s British overseers: accent and history will take you only so far with this crowd before you trigger intense, who-do-you-take-me-for resistance and the stirring of ancient memories strongly connected to July 4th.

\n

Thursday

\n

An antidote to everything: Michael Frayn talking to Radio 4 on Thursday, a lovely 40-minute listen you can find on playback on BBC Sounds. At 92, he is retired from writing after “a seven-decade career”, as the interviewer somewhat gulpingly puts it, and still very much Michael Frayn.

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Highlights include the story behind the writing of his novel Spies, which was based on Frayn’s childhood friendship with a boy who had a bullying father. While writing the novel, said Frayn, he had been worried his long-lost friend would read the book and be offended, until, by coincidence, a letter came in from him, asking if Frayn remembered their friendship, and reminding him he was the little boy “with the terrible father”.

\n

Then there are Frayn’s translations of Chekhov (a crowded field, he said: “there can’t be many citizens who haven’t translated Chekhov”), which sought to correct the oversight that Chekhov wasn’t “a funny writer.”

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And his memory of writing Towards the End of the Morning, his novel of Fleet Street, in which the central character, John Dyson, was based on the then leader page editor of the Observer, “a rather extravagant man” who would tell him on filing: “Oh, Michael, you write like a darling!” and who never recognised himself in the novel.

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When asked if he was still writing, Frayn replied: “No. Sadly, it’s over.” But look at the riches we have!

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\n \"Nigel\n
\n ‘We’re now marketing this ice-cream as “the middle finger”.’ Photograph: Andy Rain/EPA\n
\n
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Friday

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We’re doing a bedroom makeover, which has required me to spend three straight hours disassembling two Ikea cabin beds, no second of which has been pleasant. The worst part was the sound of my naivety – surely, I thought, heading into the project, disassembly is just a case of turning the Allen keys back the other way – hitting reality in the form of the “cam lock”.

\n

Do you know about cam locks? It’s a screw thing that you have to lie on the floor, among the dust bunnies, trying to get aligned with the arrow pointing up, so that the lock pops and you can separate the headboard from the sides. The thing won’t turn, obviously; it’s stuck. Whacking it with a hammer doesn’t do anything, nor does kicking it with your Crocs, which are too spongey to have an effect, and imploring it to move in a hissing, desperate voice just makes you feel very lonely in your task, and sad. I got there eventually, amid the sound of splintering MDF and a lot of swearing, and am now going to lie down for ever.

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Prominent holdouts of this year’s ball sponsored by Jeff Bezos included Zohran Mamdani, Zendaya and Taraji P Henson

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Called on to do long division, how would you fare? I had no illusions going in. I couldn’t do it the first time round and, four decades later, it seemed unlikely the situation had improved. (For a split second I thought AI might help, but it was like listening to street directions, only worse.) And so, while parents of 11-year-olds offer sympathy and support for their children ahead of year 6 Sats exams next week, let’s not lose sight of the real victims here, which is us parents who have been forced to revisit multi-stage maths problems when we had made large and deliberate life choices to avoid them.

\n

Of course, Sats “don’t matter”, or if you’re a more liberal parent, exams as a whole don’t matter – a statement that, if it was a consoling lie at one time, seems to be becoming ever more true. Arguments around the value of testing have been going on for ever, but as AI eviscerates the entry-level job market and university degrees become increasingly expensive and at odds with the skills young people may actually need, you have to wonder whether the old systems of education are still fit for purpose – and if they’re not, what exactly should replace them?

\n\n

It’s a question to join all the existing doubts we have about what it is that tests actually test, and whether being exam-smart, with its narrow definition of intelligence, should be the singular determinant of a child’s likely future success. The pendulum on this swings back and forth; when I was at school, course work was a big thing, then Michael Gove came along and wrenched us back to the 1950s, and now here I am, on a Tuesday night, helping my kid with a test prep question about the “past progressive tense” and crying, “I’m literally a writer and I don’t know what this means!” (Don’t imagine overuse of the word “literally” makes me feel better about this.)

\n

I would, needless to say, rather not be doing this, and yet alternative systems of assessment always seem to fall short. My kids did most of their primary school education in New York during those final years of enthusiasm for gentle parenting and “prizes for all”, so that, despite being in one of the most competitive cities in the world, they sat two consecutive years of state tests for which there was no upper time limit. (One of them took this rule at face value and returned to her exam paper after a leisurely lunch, only relinquishing it when her fourth-grade teacher howled, “You’re killing me here,” and forced her to hand it over.)

\n

Irrespective of what’s being tested, meeting a deadline under pressure seems to me a useful skill to learn early. So, too, learning to move on if you don’t get the grade that you need, or that, correctly channelled, adrenaline has uses. I’m too lazy to be a tiger mom, but equally, I’ve never loved the approach that seeks entirely to neutralise pressure around children. Now, gentle parenting is on the wane, and we’re back to what seems to me a more usefully robust assessment of what kids can and can’t stand. If nothing else, Sats serve a ritualistic purpose that marks the end of something and the start of something new.

\n\n

Obviously, this makes a case for exams more as life experience than learning tool, in the same way that a university education these days seems to offer best value as a very expensive developmental stage that may not be met by plunging straight into work. I think of that quote by the American novelist Don DeLillo, who when he left advertising, argued that what he needed most in life was a moment “to smoke cigarettes, drink coffee and look at the world”. Financially, if it makes more sense for kids to eschew training systems built for a world becoming rapidly obsolete, what else will afford them the time to grow and think and look at the world?

\n

None of which is helping me with this KS2 maths sheet where, oh god, we’ve reached the multi-stage questions about sweets in bags. I’m trying to set a good example by concentrating and holding on to my temper, but we’re only a few moments in when, like a man arguing that he didn’t get lost, the map is wrong, I find myself crying once again, “This literally doesn’t make sense.” Which, to look on the bright side, may provide a life lesson of its own – in the limitations of the adult emotional range relative to the occasionally bottomless maturity of children. My child pats my arm: “It’s OK.”

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As the traditional route of school, university and entry-level job is ever more precarious, it’s no wonder parents are feeling the strain

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