{"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":73,"uris":{"next":"https://mobile.guardianapis.com/uk/lists/tag/profile/emmabrockes?page=2","last":"https://mobile.guardianapis.com/uk/lists/tag/profile/emmabrockes?page=73"}},"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

","uri":"https://mobile.guardianapis.com/lists/tag/profile/emmabrockes","smallImage":{"urlTemplate":"https://i.guim.co.uk/img/static/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/contributor/2015/9/16/1442396723107/Emma-Brockes.jpg?w=#{width}&h=#{height}&q=#{quality}&fit=bounds&sig-ignores-params=true&s=0a90fbb371caa081bbd8ed3b67236ff6"},"largeImage":{"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"}},"cards":[{"title":"Digested week: memories of Covid resurface with hantavirus and Ebola news","rawTitle":"Digested week: memories of Covid resurface with hantavirus and Ebola news","item":{"trailText":"Plus, John Travolta’s beret, Rachel Reeves reclaims basic civility and Judy Garland comes to east London","body":"

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.)

\n\n

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?”

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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
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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.

\n

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

\n

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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\n __YOUTUBE_MEDIA_PLACEHOLDER_c7d5530c-215b-40c9-8413-52805b00c614__ \n
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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.”

\n

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.”

\n

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
\n
\n

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.

\n

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!

\n

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.

\n

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
\n
\n
\n \"Trump\n
\n ‘I told you not to use super strength hair fixant.’ Photograph: Eric Lee/Reuters\n
\n
\n
\n \"Andy\n
\n ‘No, smart arse, PE supply teacher wasn’t the look I was going for.’ Photograph: Peter Byrne/PA\n
\n
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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”.

\n

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.”

\n\n

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
\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.”

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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.

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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.”

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• 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.”

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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.

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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.”

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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.

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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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Photograph: Photograph: Christopher Jones/Alamy","credit":"Christopher Jones/Alamy","altText":"Children sitting their year 6 Sats exams at a primary school in Wales.","cleanCaption":"Children sitting their year 6 Sats exams at a primary school in Wales.","cleanCredit":"Photograph: Christopher Jones/Alamy"},"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":"As the traditional route of school, university and job is ever more precarious, it’s no wonder parents are feeling the strain, says Guardian columnist Emma Brockes","showQuotedHeadline":true,"showLiveIndicator":false,"sublinks":[],"mainImage":{"urlTemplate":"https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/ee3817fcead43e202c2111091823d45bf9fc1218/89_0_3613_2891/master/3613.jpg?w=#{width}&h=#{height}&q=#{quality}&fit=bounds&sig-ignores-params=true&s=99ad2f491334cf96a70482dd84749b3c","height":2891,"width":3613,"orientation":"landscape","credit":"Christopher Jones/Alamy","altText":"Children sitting their year 6 Sats exams at a primary school in Wales.","cleanCredit":"Photograph: Christopher Jones/Alamy"},"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/07/kids-year-big-exams-anxieties-ai-long-division?dcr=apps&edition=uk"},"renderedItemBeta":{"minBridgetVersion":"1.11.1","url":"https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/may/07/kids-year-big-exams-anxieties-ai-long-division?dcr=apps&edition=uk"},"renderedItemDebug":{"minBridgetVersion":"1.11.1","url":"https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/may/07/kids-year-big-exams-anxieties-ai-long-division?dcr=apps&edition=uk"},"cardDesignType":"Comment","correspondingTags":[],"type":"Article","importance":0},{"title":"Creaky knees be damned – Charlize Theron is showing us what’s possible at 50","rawTitle":"Creaky knees be damned – Charlize Theron is showing us what’s possible at 50","item":{"trailText":"Her new film, Apex, may not be Citizen Kane, but how refreshing to see a middle-aged actor as a female action hero, says Guardian columnist Emma Brockes","body":"

If you are in your 50s, 40s or even late 30s and feel as though things are rapidly heading south, might I point you in the direction of Apex, the 95-minute action movie that launched last week on Netflix and is currently parked at No 1 on both sides of the Atlantic. You may think Apex, which has almost no dialogue, a paper-thin script and plot holes the size of the Australian outback in which it was filmed, is not for you, but you would be wrong. Next time you make a noise when you get up from the sofa, you can visualise Charlize Theron free-climbing a cliff face in peak middle age and remind yourself these things are still possible.

\n

What’s startling about this is that Theron, at 50, appears to have successfully outrun the Hollywood dead end that greets women on their 34th birthday. She could be unrecognisable from surgery while clinging to the reboot of some earlier role. She could be trapped in Yorgos Lanthimos-style whimsy, because what could be more whimsical and grotesque than an ageing female actor? She could be playing someone’s mother – specifically, the mother of a male actor some five years her junior. Instead, Theron has been everywhere in the past fortnight, dominating the social-media feeds, crowding out the increasingly desperate-looking publicity push from the cast of The Devil Wears Prada 2, and shinning up a wall in Times Square in New York to promote a film that is basically an instructional climbing video with a serial killer subplot.

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I mean, it works for me. And, while it probably doesn’t need saying that Apex isn’t Citizen Kane, it is a thoroughly enjoyable hour and a half (the length that, by law, all films should be) and an antidote to the current news cycle. Theron plays Sasha, a serious climber who, after a tragic accident on a mountain in Norway, goes on a solo camping trip to Australia where she enjoys the typical backpacker experience: being chased through the bush by a psychotic killer (Taron Egerton) brandishing a crossbow, from whom she must escape by whitewater rafting and climbing a cliff without ropes. It’s all a long way from the Italian Job remake.

\n

Theron, of course, has form in this area, going back to recent roles in action movies such as The Old Guard and Atomic Blonde, and there are earlier precedents for this kind of midlife turn of the wheel – although I would argue few female actors have landed them so successfully. Linda Hamilton was 35 in 1991 when she pulled off those chin-ups in the opening scene of Terminator 2. A few years later, Meryl Streep was in her mid-40s when, pursued by Kevin Bacon, she ploughed down the rapids in The River Wild, and of course she did some of the stunts herself.

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In 2021, Angelina Jolie had another crack at action-hero status in Marvel’s Eternals, and Kate Beckinsale has gone through that Liam Neeson period, during which she seemed always to be flying perpendicular on the sides of buses. With the exception of Hamilton, none of these roles worked in my view because the actors appeared too delicate and poised, too nervous of upsetting red carpet standards, which is to say too glaringly incapable of, say, genuinely kicking down a door or digging a hole in the road. (Looking at those posters of Beckinsale always made me feel tired and wonder if she had ever considered sitting down for a moment for a cup of tea.)

\n\n

Theron is a different beast altogether and has been ever since Mad Max: Fury Road, the 2015 movie in which she appeared shaven-headed and built like an outhouse, an appearance of toughness that just doesn’t work if you’re an actor who has taken too many GLP-1s. While promoting Apex, Theron has been at pains to point out that she had a stunt double for the kayaking scenes, but she did most of the climbing herself, and it’s a whole look, one she doubled down on at the Apex premiere in New York last week by wearing what a friend points out was a men’s suit by Dior. For those of us who are into that sort of thing, it was certainly noted and appreciated.

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Of course, Theron has certain genetic advantages when it comes to being an action hero, not least what she once memorably described as her “big Dutch face” and the ability to build muscle. And, while the fact she is only four months older than me is, on one level, a bitter pill to swallow given how out of breath I am after two flights of stairs, on the other hand it gives me hope: if I can get to the gym more than twice every three weeks, who knows what may still be possible?

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Her new film, Apex, may not be Citizen Kane, but how refreshing to see a middle-aged actor as a female action hero – and looking the part too

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Monday

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The one upside to a rolling international crisis is that it can give backroom people a rare chance to shine. Witness, this week, the breakout stars of the Iranian diplomatic corps, who from two different diplomatic missions managed to poke fun at Donald Trump while maintaining the base-level decorum that so eludes the American president.

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In Pakistan, the Iranian ambassador, Reza Amiri Moghadam, responded to questions about the ongoing blockade of the strait of Hormuz by the US with an elegant and irony-laden reference to Jane Austen. “It’s a truth universally acknowledged,” said the ambassador, in a reference that was almost certainly lost on his antagonist in Washington, “that a single country in possession of a large civilisation, will not negotiate under threat and force.” Oh, well played, sir!

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Meanwhile, from the Iranian embassy in Ghana, a steady stream of trolling social media posts designed to turn Trump’s mockery around and send it back at him. After the US president’s recent spat with the pope, an excitable social media manager at the Iranian mission to Ghana posted a satirical note addressed “Dear Italy” in which it offered itself as a replacement friend for the US.

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“Your PM just defended [the] Pope and lost an ally in Washington, the Commander in Grief, yet the most ‘powerfool’ man on earth,” ran the post, which made up for in rough energy what it lacked in polish. “We’d like to apply for the vacancy,” it went on, and while some of the material could do with a tune-up, the subsequent list of Iran’s qualifications as a premium ally, including “7,000 years of civilisation, a shared love of poetry, architecture, and food that takes longer to prepare than Trump’s attention span” – absolutely landed.

\n

There was also a decent gag about Iranian versus Italian ice-cream, and the onslaught continued this week with a reference to Trump, after his endless reversals on Truth Social, as “a one-man WhatsApp chat group”. Solid stuff and let’s not spoil the gesture with any pettiness about the reality of life under a theocratic authoritarian regime.

\n
\n \"Starmer\n
\n Keir Starmer on a visit this week to a community centre in Newcastle: ‘Yeah, OK. The question “how’s your week going?” isn’t that funny.’ Photograph: Owen Humphreys/PA\n
\n
\n

Tuesday

\n

It’s finally hot(tish) out and the sun is shining, so it’s time to have our annual conversation about coffee. Do you enjoy an iced beverage which, after 10 minutes in your sweaty little hand, primarily consists of meltwater? Do you enjoy a cup filled almost entirely with ice, so that you are paying approximately 40p per sip? As with one’s position on clowns or pineapple on pizza, there is no middle ground in this debate; you either despise iced coffee or are a wrong-headed fool, and I refer you for reference to a piece published last week on the website Gothamist, in which the writer James Ramsay went out into Manhattan in search of other summer hot coffee drinkers.

\n

His position: that ice coffee neither refreshes, like a proper cold drink, nor energises, like real coffee. He shared with us the detail that cold drinks now make up 75% of all sales in Starbucks, a fact that, when we turn to look back on this period, might turn out to be the canary in the coalmine of where it all started to go wrong. Most of those cold drinks aren’t coffee, of course, but the iced matchas and strawberry refreshers that push up towards £7 a cup and fall into a category with what Larry David once referred to as “vanilla bullshit” drinks. So before you order it on ice, think about that.

\n

Wednesday

\n

Nike, the sportswear behemoth, would like those of us who go for a run and end up walking to, if not hate ourselves, exactly, then at least feel slightly bad about our underperformance. Since the launch of a new slogan in Boston timed to coincide with the city’s marathon – “Runners welcome. Walkers tolerated” – a sizeable palaver has kicked off from runners who like to take a break, or walkers who occasionally break into a run, or anyone whose fitness level is such that they feel “shamed” by the “elitist” slogan.

\n

This week, Nike pulled the ad and replaced it with the more inclusive “Movement is what matters”. This is a better sell, to my mind, but as ever with this kind of dispute one is left with an impression of a wild overreaction, with participants in running clubs thousands of miles away from Boston claiming to feel undermined and embarrassed by Nike’s slogan. Ignoring it is, apparently, not an option. Anyway, Just Do It (But Only If You Feel Like It; Otherwise Don’t Worry).

\n
\n \"Reform\n
\n Mugs come out in support of Farage. Photograph: Peter Byrne/PA\n
\n
\n

Thursday

\n

The fifth and final season of the HBO hit show Hacks is under way and the best thing about it is Robby Hoffman. While the two leads limp towards the finish, the breakout star of the show since the previous season has been the actor and standup who you may or may not have been obsessively watching on YouTube, and who came to prominence a few years ago in the underrated FX show Dying for Sex.

\n

The 36-year-old Hoffman, who grew up the seventh of 10 siblings in an ultra-Orthodox Jewish community, first in Brooklyn, then in Canada, has the flat delivery of an earlier generation of comics and I would urge you to Google her routines hingeing on the words “no backsies”, and also “hard towel”. That the rest of this season of Hacks is as flat as a pancake is sad, but it’s been a good run and all good things etc, and we wait with excitement to see what Hoffman does next.

\n

Friday

\n

Madonna’s corset, at the time of writing, remains unrecovered, after the singer lost her wardrobe at Coachella off the back of a golf buggy. The vintage costumes were being transported from the stage to the car park after Madonna’s set with Sabrina Carpenter and included “archival” pieces that the singer is so keen to get back she launched an online appeal urging anyone with information to email her team.

\n

While this definitely won’t solicit thousands of weird and unrelated messages to the email address she shared, I find myself thinking more about whoever was in charge of driving that golf cart. I very much hope they enjoy their time off and are familiar with how to launch a GoFundMe to make up for the sudden loss of income.

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Diplomats poke fun at Donald Trump, while elsewhere Madonna loses her corset off the back of a golf buggy

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Somehow, evangelical Christians are buying it","rawTitle":"With his Bible readings, Trump is doubling down on his God complex. Somehow, evangelical Christians are buying it","item":{"trailText":"The US president’s Bible reading is a desperate plea to the one group that seemingly hasn’t deserted him – yet, says Guardian columnist Emma Brockes","body":"

He has lost the Catholics, the foreign policy isolationists and the millions of people affected by ICE’s immigration raids. But Donald Trump is still counting on the goodwill of one powerful constituency of American voters, to whom he appealed this week by reading a passage from the Bible urging people to repent their “wicked ways”. A lot of thoughts spring to mind in relation to this, but at the very forefront, one question: do the US’s evangelical Christians, who overwhelmingly support Trump, have a red line and if so, can they find it with both hands?

\n

I’m stating the obvious but it’s worth raising again, if only to boggle at the sheer shamelessness of a religious community that has thrown in its lot with Trump: how on earth do the evangelicals work out the maths on this? Let’s remind ourselves of the facts; that the president treating us to a section of the Old Testament as part of a week-long, continuous public reading of the Bible, from Genesis to Revelation – separation of church and state, anyone? – is the same president who has, variously, been found by courts to have falsified business records, as part of a hush-money payment scheme to a porn star, Stormy Daniels, and sexually abused and defamed E Jean Carroll. As the president intoned to camera in the Oval Office on Tuesday: “If my people, which are called by my name, shall humble themselves, and pray, and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then will I hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin, and will heal their land.”

\n

That particular passage is from 2 Chronicles 7:14 and was reportedly chosen for Trump – whose familiarity with the text, we must assume, is patchy – by organisers recognising its popularity among Christians as a political as well as spiritual call to action. We can also assume that the president approved the selection from a short list of options and what I love about the choice is that it comes hard on the heels of his other, recent engagement with Christianity in a way that looks to me a lot like doubling down. It’s very him, isn’t it? Ten days after sharing an AI-generated image in which Trump appeared as a Jesus-like figure healing the sick, here he is delivering a Bible passage that involves taking on a first-person delivery of God’s word. (By contrast, other participants, for example the actor Candace Cameron Bure, read “then the Lord says”-type passages from Genesis.)

\n

Playing second fiddle to another authority is not Trump’s style, of course, and we wait with bated breath to see whether his co-participants in the stunt, including senator Ted Cruz, the defence secretary, Pete Hegseth, and the governor of Texas, Greg Abbott, have been permitted similar licence to channel God’s word in the first person or are relegated to the I’m-just-the-messenger bits.

\n

More interesting to me is how this performance of Trump’s lands with its intended audience. We already know that, among Christian Americans, the Catholics are having a wobble about Trump, which should concern him. Catholics are swing voters who, by a small margin, backed Biden over Trump in 2020 and in a recent poll appeared to be swinging away from him, with support dipping below 50%.

\n

Evangelicals, by contrast, have no moral leader with the authority of the pope to guide them. They are much more solidly and implacably pro-Trump, not least because he put through their agenda to restrict abortion rights by delivering a rightwing majority to the supreme court. They also appear to be more politically organised in the US. The organiser of the America Reads the Bible event is someone called Bunni Pounds, and you will take from that whatever passing enjoyment you may get. Pounds has been labelled a “visionary” by Fox News, and as well as running Christians Engaged, which organised the event, runs something called the Family Policy Alliance, a lobby group that promotes exactly the kind of policies you think it does.

\n

According to Pounds’s organisation, the point of America Reads the Bible is to encourage a “return to the spiritual foundation that has shaped our country”. A mission, you might imagine, would be better achieved by the country not starting an unnecessary war, deporting American citizens or cancelling foreign aid to cause the deaths of an estimated 600,000 people worldwide. On the other hand, if a convicted felon reading a passage from the Bible makes you feel closer to God, then all one can say is good luck to you.

\n","atomsCSS":[],"shouldHideReaderRevenue":false,"discussionId":"/p/x4q26p","section":"Opinion","id":"commentisfree/2026/apr/23/donald-trump-bible-readings-god-evangelical-christians-us","displayImages":[{"urlTemplate":"https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/b4f10364a6a9cdcbce47f190313bbc75ed8ef589/0_0_3975_3180/master/3975.jpg?w=#{width}&h=#{height}&q=#{quality}&fit=bounds&sig-ignores-params=true&s=d630c86302b4856e04ef72ad6ddd0208","height":3180,"width":3975,"orientation":"landscape","caption":"Donald Trump holds a Bible outside St John's Church near the White House in June 2020. Photograph: Photograph: Patrick Semansky/AP","credit":"Patrick Semansky/AP","altText":"Donald Trump holds a Bible outside St John's Church near the White House in June 2020. ","cleanCaption":"Donald Trump holds a Bible outside St John's Church near the White House in June 2020.","cleanCredit":"Photograph: Patrick Semansky/AP"}],"designType":"Comment","shouldHideAdverts":false,"standFirst":"

The US president is making a desperate plea to the one group that seemingly hasn’t deserted him – yet

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Somehow, evangelical Christians are buying it","type":"comment","headerImage":{"urlTemplate":"https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/b4f10364a6a9cdcbce47f190313bbc75ed8ef589/0_0_3975_3180/master/3975.jpg?w=#{width}&h=#{height}&q=#{quality}&fit=bounds&sig-ignores-params=true&s=d630c86302b4856e04ef72ad6ddd0208","height":3180,"width":3975,"orientation":"landscape","caption":"Donald Trump holds a Bible outside St John's Church near the White House in June 2020. Photograph: Photograph: Patrick Semansky/AP","credit":"Patrick Semansky/AP","altText":"Donald Trump holds a Bible outside St John's Church near the White House in June 2020. 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That’s just wrong: at a certain age, things must change","rawTitle":"Justin Trudeau at Coachella? That’s just wrong: at a certain age, things must change","item":{"trailText":"If you have to consult the Reddit thread ‘am I too old for Coachella?’, then the answer is probably ‘yes’, says Guardian columnist Emma Brockes","body":"

This morning, over breakfast, in the course of discussing the week’s news, I happened to say the word “Coachella” in front of my two scornful 11-year-olds, whose heads snapped up from their screens in unison. “How have you heard of Coachella?” said one in amazement. “How have you heard of Coachella?” I replied. They exchanged a look with which I’ve become increasingly familiar – namely, the “here we go” look reserved by the very young for the very middle-aged. “What is Coachella, then?” I said, to which they replied: “It’s where influencers go.”

\n\n

This is, of course, an accurate summary of what the California music and arts festival has become in the 27 years since its inception, but that’s not why I bring it up. The festival, which is running this week, has featured Jack White, FKA Twigs and Sabrina Carpenter, but most of the publicity has gone on the audience; specifically, on the attendance of Justin Trudeau, the former prime minister of Canada, who, along with his girlfriend, Katy Perry, was photographed dancing to Justin Bieber and squatting chairless on a kerb, red plastic cups perched on their knees.

\n
\n \"DJ\n
\n DJ and producer Bunt during this year’s Coachella festival on 12 April. Photograph: Matt Winkelmeyer/Getty Images for Coachella\n
\n
\n

It’s that photo of Trudeau in college-age uniform – scruffy jeans, white T-shirt and a baseball cap worn backwards in what looks to me like a definite reach for a modern-day JFK Jr vibe (good luck with that, Trudeau!) – that invites us to consider the relationship of middle-aged people to music festivals and conclude that, at some point, perhaps the dignified thing is to call it a day.

\n

Do you worry about staying hydrated? Do you co-host an investment podcast while giving serious thought to which Amex card generates the most points? (Avios over Platinum for ever!) Did you pay more than $2,000 for your ticket, then turn up in a climate-controlled RV before putting on your “festival wardrobe” to go out looking for twentysomethings to brush past slightly too closely? Then maybe, just maybe, you might think about leaving the scene to the enjoyment of young people.

\n\n

I’m talking more about middle-aged men than women here, since it’s a specific kind of man who turns up at Coachella to express his anxieties about middle age. In the case of Trudeau, who is 54, attending a music festival obviously comes a distant second to “dating Katy Perry” as an expression of midlife crisis. Nonetheless, he is part of the general influx of tech, finance and business bros who have plugged the annual music festival into their calendars, driving up ticket prices and injecting a certain narrow-eyed, lizardy energy into the scene. These people are, of course, perfectly entitled to enjoy popular music. But glancing at the photo of Trudeau and Perry or, in years past at Coachella, Danny DeVito, often pictured backstage, it’s hard not to feel one’s spirits sink.

\n

To be fair to Trudeau, it may be that some of this recoil has to do with the reputation of his 41-year-old girlfriend, widely considered to be out of touch and facing her own problems this week having to deny an accusation of sexual assault by the actor Ruby Rose. I wouldn’t want to run into Katy Perry at my local Co-op, let alone an event I’d paid hundreds of dollars to attend.

\n

I’m also aware of the argument furthered by veteran festival-goers who return to Glastonbury every year and have been taking their kids since they were four years old. I tip my hat to these people, and would be one of them if I didn’t hate tents and milling about. Clearly, people like this should carry on doing the things that they love until they drop dead. Plus, it’s likely that I shouldn’t be expressing an opinion about any of this given that, while making the packed lunches this morning, I was happily listening to the soundtrack to The Phantom of the Opera.

\n

Anyway, it’s not those people I’m talking about; it’s the ones who only started going to Coachella when they hit 50 and who fail to understand that, if you have to consult the Reddit thread, “Am I too old for Coachella?”, then the answer is probably yes. Consider the following: you’ll get stuck in the Uber line trying to get out and need the loo for four hours. You’ll be too hot. You’ll have to sit on a kerb. And a lot of it will go over your head.

\n

When I asked my 11-year-olds what it was about Coachella content this week that caught their eye, they said – and I had to write this down verbatim after getting them to repeat it several times – “Carter Kench dressed up as an actual pinky, then got a shout out from Katseye on stage!!” Then they both laughed like this was the funniest thing that had ever been said. No? Me neither. In which case, we should probably stay out of it.

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Now she’s written a tell-all memoir about why she was forced to retreat from the spotlight","body":"

If there is something to be learned from the words people pick for their passwords and proxies, then Lena Dunham’s choice of aliases – pseudonyms that, as a public person, she has used over the years to conceal her identity when checking into rehab or ordering room service – give us a tiny glimpse into the writer and director’s self-image. Among her staples, “Lauri Reynolds” (after her mum, Laurie, with whom she is strikingly close); “Rose O’Neill” (after the American millionaire illustrator, who lost her fortune to burnout and hangers-on); and my favourite, “Renata Halpern”, an alias Dunham shares with readers of her delicious new memoir, Famesick, without explaining the name’s origin.

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“Has anyone else clocked the Renata Halpern reference?” I ask Dunham, who is in her apartment in New York, talking fast via video call while waiting for an egg-and-cheese bagel to be run up from the deli. On the brink of 40, she is in her dark-haired era – very Jane Russell in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes – which, this morning, is set against a bright orange shirt and the pale, glowy skin she describes as the single happy side-effect of hypermobile Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, a genetic condition of the connective tissue with which Dunham was diagnosed in 2019. Later this month, she’ll return to London, where she has lived for the last five years with her husband, Luis Felber, and where she enjoys greater anonymity than in her native New York – although, she says, not enough to dispense with the aliases. (“Just when you think no one cares, someone does something creepy, so you have to watch out.”)

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Renata Halpern: the alter ego of Savannah Wingo, luridly traumatised minor character in The Prince of Tides, Pat Conroy’s timeless potboiler of the mid-1980s, made into a movie starring Barbra Streisand and Nick Nolte which has always attracted a certain kind of smirking obsessive (hi!). Dunham screams. “No one’s ever caught it! The amount of mail I’ve received to Renata Halpern … thank you. Now I’m going to have to change my fake names.”

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Here we are, then, nine years after the sixth and final season of Girls. If Dunham gravitates towards the names of hurt or traumatised women, it is advisedly so; for the last 20 years, her life has been a lot. Famesick covers it all without flinching: the early exposure that coincided with social media’s wildest west period; the creative and personal pressures of running a hit TV show that would’ve buckled a grizzled veteran three decades her senior; the health dramas, including a multi-year struggle to get doctors to take her endometriosis seriously; the subsequent addiction to prescription drugs; the dysfunctional and damaging sex and relationships; the challenge of dating musician Jack Antonoff; the challenge of managing actor Adam Driver; the fallout with her close friend and business partner Jenni Konner; the work; the loneliness when the success – irony klaxon! – of a show typifying the lives of a group of millennial women threw her completely out of sync with her peers.

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In Famesick, Dunham places PTSD, loss, trauma, fuck-up and body horror at the centre of the story, and describes herself variously as oversensitive, people-pleasing and always lying in bed. And yet, reading and talking to her, one is keenly aware that, alongside this version of Dunham, is the other one: the absolute powerhouse of a woman, steely eyed, tunnel visioned, who pushed through punishing volumes of work at the highest of levels, year after year after year.

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\n \"Denham,\n
\n Denham, pictured centre, with fellow Girls cast members Adam Driver, Allison Williams, Jemima Kirke, Zosia Mamet and Alex Karpovsky, 2014. Photograph: Photo 12/Alamy\n
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It is, of course, this version of Dunham – the gimlet-eyed artist, ambitious to get the thing right – who wrote the book. Famesick is frank, unsparing, in parts horrifying and more honest about the experience of fame than anything I’ve read. As one would expect, it is also very funny. Here’s Dunham in hospital shortly before her hysterectomy, when she has been pumped full of drugs more commonly used to trigger labour: “It wasn’t lost on me,” she writes, “that this was the closest I’d ever come to birth – but beside me was not my husband, ready to greet our bundle of joy, but only Mary, a nurse from Staten Island who wondered aloud why I was so often nude on television.” (After the operation, her uterus, she discovers, was “worse than anyone had imagined. It was the Chinatown Chanel purse of nightmares, full of both subtle and glaring flaws.”)

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On accusations of nepotism, she writes: “Nobody watching HBO had ever heard of my parents, unless they had trawled some of the quieter corners of the Museum of Modern Art and really studied the wall tags.” And this, which made me laugh out loud: “When I met my husband, he told me about his trauma, and I told him two things I saw as facts: I was sick, and people did not like me.”

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Let’s start with that last one: in the early 2010s, after the first season of Girls aired, she found herself the target of obsessive online criticism. As she writes in the book, strangers online reached out repeatedly to tell her about, “my bad body, irritating voice, clearly horrific politics, inability to walk in heels, poor sense of style, and the fact that anyone – literally anyone – was more deserving of all of this than I was”. A young woman with talent, opportunity, power and exposure, who didn’t look as if she habitually starved herself, Dunham was extremely triggering to a large number of constituencies, from angry basement-dwellers to the legions of men who hate women, to anyone older than her who hadn’t had the writing career they felt they deserved. What I find remarkable, after that first flush of fame, is that Dunham didn’t stop looking at the online commentary or sharing intimate thoughts and feelings. Instead, she remained perversely, hopelessly open. Why on earth put yourself in harm’s way like that?

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“I don’t know,” she says. “If you have an addictive personality, which clearly I do, any hit of the dopamine of positivity [is welcome] and there’s also a hit of adrenaline that comes from the negative. And then, because you see something negative, you want to see something positive to erase it, and you end up in this cycle. It’s easy when you’re young to feel the internet’s a game you want to win. I remember breaking up with a guy in my early 20s and him writing an email that was really mean. And my father said, ‘Well, why don’t you just ignore him? You’ve broken up, you don’t have to do anything else.’ And I was like, ‘Because I don’t want him to have the last word.’ And then you meet up with the person and they act sweet so you kiss them, then they act mean again. And that’s the relationship you’re in with the internet.”

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\n \"Lena\n
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It is interesting to compare Dunham’s experience with that of young women in the public eye today. No one is as young as she was – just 23 when she sold Girls, and 25 when it first aired. The nearest comparison would be 30-year-old Rachel Sennott, who at 28 sold, then later wrote and starred in, HBO’s hit show, I Love LA (Sennott’s pitch: “Entourage for internet girls”), now heading into its second season. Sennott has acknowledged her love of Girls and debt to Dunham, some of which occupies definite cautionary-tale territory. For young women in the public eye, now, says Dunham, “I am one of the many examples they have of what [can happen] and there’s a sense of people learning how much vulnerability is useful and how much is not. And I did not have any of that. I didn’t have any sense about even just simple things like posing, or style, or how to show your body, or how to show your face.”

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She and her fellow Girls stars were like “lambs to the slaughter.” This was driven home to Dunham recently while talking to a 26-year-old about obsessive compulsive disorder. “I said, ‘What are the things that come up for you?’ I was thinking about the stuff that comes up for me, my big OCD thoughts, which are the classics, like, ‘Am I a pervert? Am I evil?’ Ideas about purity. And he said, ‘I have very extreme cancellation anxiety.’ And I was like, oh, I heard the word ‘cancelled’ in real time when someone said to me ‘you’re cancelled’ and I was like, what does that mean? Like a TV show?”

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She has been cancelled too many times to count – she addresses them all in the book, big, small and enduringly weird. (As she writes, “‘I saw Lena Dunham serve her dog salmon on a china plate’ should not have been a headline, but it was.”) In New York, rumours about her rose to the level of legend. “One of my best friends, Alissa, was once in a bookstore in Brooklyn and she overheard someone saying, ‘Lena Dunham’s been throwing these really exclusive sex parties, and they’re happening once a month and it’s really hard to get an invitation.’ And she was like, it must be really hard to get an invitation because she’s literally always in her bed watching The Bachelor.”

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The fact that for years now she’s been free of social media apps on her phone – Dunham writes posts which someone else uploads – is, she says, “aside from sobriety and moving more slowly and understanding my health better, a huge part of how my life can be calm and joyful”. In recent years, she has only caved in, once. “I made the mistake of going to [the apps on] my husband’s phone – I wanted to see what people said about our wedding picture.” My hand flies involuntarily to my mouth. In 2021, Dunham married Felber, with whom she’d been set up by a friend, and for the ceremony in London, wore a beautiful satin gown designed by the British designer Christopher Kane.

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“I was so excited,” she says, her voice falling. “I felt like it was so joyful and I wanted someone to say how cute my husband is, whatever. And I looked for five minutes and – it was five minutes I deeply regretted.”

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* * *

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Famesick cuts off before the detail of Dunham’s marriage to Felber. Instead, there are two, central love stories in the book: one with Antonoff, the indie rock star and producer whom Dunham dated and lived with for five years until they broke up in 2017, and a platonic one with Konner, her ex-producing partner and a woman 15 years her senior, who was assigned to Dunham by HBO as a mentor when she first started working on Girls. Konner was married with two children when she met the young Dunham and the next 10 years were an absolute corker of toxic female friendship: jealousy, manipulation, sulking, clinginess and, eventually, the death of the relationship – as well as some lovely, sunny periods of mutual admiration and support.

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\n \"With\n
\n With her parents, Laurie Simmons and Carroll Dunham, 2016. Photograph: Nicholas Hunt/Getty Images\n
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Dunham’s youth and inexperience made her vulnerable, in those early years at HBO, to the influence of older people, not all of whom had her best interests at heart. She wasn’t a child star, but might as well have been; a wunderkind who, after graduating, hustled the low budget to write, direct and star in the autobiographical movie Tiny Furniture, which after winning best narrative feature at South by Southwest in 2010, brought her to HBO’s attention.

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It was an extraordinary position to be in at 23: given the keys first to the pilot, then to the season, then to a six-season arc of the hit show she would not only write, but also direct and star in. At the time of signing, Dunham was still living at home in the family’s Tribeca loft. When she travelled for meetings in LA, she had a stuffed toy in her suitcase. She had never had a job, apart from babysitting or other Saturday-type jobs. She had no idea what was coming, and when her dad – someone she characterises drily in the book as, “forever looking a gift horse in the mouth” – tried to warn her things might be about to get weird, she shooed him away. “I was like, ‘You dumb old man, you don’t know how the world works! You check your email once a week!’ And he was right about everything.”

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As catalogued in Famesick, the first fallout was major disruption within her close friend group. Before Girls, Dunham’s only plan post-graduation had been to get a job teaching video production at Saint Ann’s, her old high school in Brooklyn, partly for the health insurance and so she could make “weird indie films” on the side. Instead, she became suddenly, outrageously successful. As her fame grew, so her closest female friends withdrew from her. She discovered dinners and weekends away that she wasn’t invited to. When they did invite her to things, nobody asked her a single question about her life, either because her success was so triggering to them or because they assumed her life was perfect. In one, painful scene, they prank-called her. These parts of the book are fascinating, and brave. It’s such a taboo to talk about this stuff, but of course, that’s not a challenge from which Dunham has ever shrunk.

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“The jealousy thing; it’s so complicated,” she says. “You never want to be the person who’s saying, ‘People are jealous of me’, because then people are like, ‘Girl, no they’re not.’ So I was self-conscious about it. But I was also interested in the way in which having a very clear professional arc in your 20s, when a lot of your friends aren’t there yet, isn’t just that they’re jealous of you; it’s that their life has a different central narrative. My life was completely built around my job. And everything else came second to that. Whereas a lot of people I was close to, their life was built around their relationships, their social life. People worked so that they could go and hang out, instead of hanging out a little so that they could feel better about always being at work.”

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\n \"Portrait\n
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And my God, she worked, endless long days with responsibility for hundreds of cast and crew. Dunham’s leadership style was “coper”, and bravado is a big part of this story, the feeling she had, rightly or wrongly, that any show of weakness and this vast opportunity would be taken away from her.

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“One of the great lessons of my life has been, like, companies are not your friend. And companies that are publicly traded are not your friend. I’m no longer interested in breaking my body for a company that gets more in tax write-offs in a year than any of the artists will make in their lifetime.” It wasn’t only her youth that put Dunham in an invidious position. “I know lots of male wunderkinds, and they’re having a different experience,” she says.

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How so? “Young men are allowed the grace of learning how to behave, and the expectation isn’t that they’re going to do really brilliant work and then also be kind to everyone and listen to everybody, and remember everybody’s children’s names, you know. I did things on Girls like saying, ‘I don’t think we should go 10 minutes late because people might be hungry.’ And that doesn’t occur to men running sets, because they’re given the freedom to just be creative and have a stormy mood, and go into a room and rethink something and come back out. But as a woman, you have to perform grace all the time, in a way that I’m only just now startling to unbuckle from. But: I also care a lot about having a set where people are happy, and feel free and heard and unafraid. Largely because I don’t want people to feel some of the ways that I felt.”

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I tell her that, given she was his boss, I found her account of how Adam Driver behaved towards her on set and in rehearsal completely unacceptable. Driver played Dunham’s character Hannah’s on-off boyfriend, Adam Sackler, for all six seasons of Girls, during which time he was spectacularly rude to her, according to the book. He once hurled a chair at the wall next to her. He punched a hole in his trailer wall. He screamed in her face. She smiles. “At the time, I didn’t have the skill to … it never entered my mind to say, ‘I am your boss, you can’t speak to me this way.’ And, at that point in my 20s, I still thought that’s what great male geniuses do: eviscerate you. Which is weird, because I was raised by a male genius who would never do that.”

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She says, “I have lots of amazing men in my life. Judd [Apatow] is a great hero of mine; Tim Bevan at Working Title is a huge part of my life and so is cinematographer Sam Levy. I just worked with Mark Ruffalo, the most thoughtful, sensitive, politically engaged, beautiful person. There’s plenty of them walking around. But there were years when I thought: Can’t I just make things that only have women in them?”

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* * *

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There is another strand to the jealousy story that’s even harder to write about, but Dunham goes there – and that is parental resentment. A great hero of the book is Dunham’s affable dad, Carroll, an artist, who brings her coffee every morning when she’s feeling sad, accompanies her to doctors’ appointments and is an all-round mensch. Her mother, Laurie Simmons, also an artist, is a more complicated figure whom Dunham refers to as her “original frenemy” and whose number she has saved in her phone under “Laurie Simmons” not “Mom”.

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\n \"With\n
\n With her husband, Luis Felber, 2025. Photograph: Jason Mendez/Getty Images for Tribeca Festival\n
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Of Simmons, she writes: “Art had always been her religion, the one thing I knew I could not touch, change, inform, or be more essential than. And now I was the story.” When things got tough between them during those early days of Dunham’s fame, “we never discussed it,” she writes. “To name this would be to cop to an ugly emotion, directed at an even uglier target – her own child.” And yet, at the same time, the family remains almost suffocatingly close. Long after Dunham moved out and bought her own apartment, she would spend several nights a week at her parents’ house. “Every time my boyfriend would go on tour, every time I would have a hard day, I just reported immediately for duty to the guest room.”

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This was partly a question of delayed development brought on by losing all the milestones of youth – those incremental steps towards independence – to her brutal work schedule. It was also a response to the fact that, surrounded as Dunham was by people either hating her or sucking up to her to try to get their screenplays made, her parents were the only people who saw her as she was and would tell her the truth. “I’m sure people will have a lot of different perceptions about the relationships in the book, but I tried to do the most loving, not-takedown version of everyone because it was important to me that my own culpability in dynamics be explored.”

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\n \"Portrait\n
\n Photograph: Chris Buck/The Guardian\n
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Well, I say, as a lesbian – a formulation with which I like to start fully 50% of my sentences – based on Dunham’s account of her, we have all dated Jenni Konner, a textbook bloody nightmare of a woman: love-bombing and withholding one minute, and sulking the next; charismatic; keeping Dunham on eggshells until she gets her own way; resentful; occasionally amazing; making pointed comments about Dunham’s weight; leaning on Dunham to get HBO to pay the two women the same, even though she didn’t create the show or appear in it. Dunham is obsessed with Konner, desperate for her approval and terrified of her low opinion and it’s a relief when, eventually, the pair go to a therapist to negotiate the end of the friendship. “My female relationships have always been very deep, and very complicated, and very romantic,” says Dunham. No kidding, I say; you really do attach … forcefully. She hoots with laughter. “Forceful is a good way of putting it. You’ll have to talk to my mom about that one.”

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A difficulty of memoir is that the writer spends years finding the right words to pick through the minefield of old relationships and then, during publicity, is invited to say it all over again, only less judiciously. Dunham clearly doesn’t really want to go back over the saga of Konner, beyond thin observations of the “recollections may vary” and “mistakes were made” variety. She’s aware of this, too, of course; as someone who has never had an unstudied response to anything in her life, Dunham says to me, “I feel like because I am trying to be so measured in my response to you I am probably driving you mad.” This is correct, but I get it. These things are hard.

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To mitigate criticism of her old mentor, Dunham goes in hard on herself, itemising all the ways in which Konner must’ve found her needy and annoying. She does the same when writing about the end of her relationship with Antonoff, flaming herself for being difficult and having too many needs. My opinion about this is that, in both cases, and based on the evidence of the book, Dunham’s neediness was at least in part an anxiety response to the way these people were treating her; in other words, the withholding, the manipulating, the gaslighting: these things will drive a person crazy. Which isn’t to say that Dunham isn’t quite capable of being a nightmare in her own right.

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\n \"Dunham\n
\n Dunham with her ex, Jack Antonoff, 2017. Photograph: Jeff Kravitz/FilmMagic\n
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\n \"With\n
\n With former creative partner, Jenni Konner, 2017. Photograph: Michael Loccisano/Getty Images for Tribeca Film Festival\n
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“That’s really helpful feedback,” says Dunham. “At the time, I thought I’m giving [Antonoff and Konner] all of me. Everything that I have to give is yours and what more can I do?” Looking back, she understands this was a category error. “That’s an essential misunderstanding of what the other person is asking of you.”

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* * *

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She lives in London, now, on the other side not only of those first 10 years of fame, but of the terrible health problems that came with them. Dunham was in almost constant pain during the final seasons of Girls, due to multiple ovarian cysts from endometriosis and the undiagnosed Ehlers-Danlos syndrome. She had many unresolved, exploratory surgeries, culminating in the hysterectomy at the age of 31 that sent her into menopause. She developed a dependency on Klonopin, an anti-anxiety drug, that she puts down to lax prescribing by a doctor and that she overcame after a stint in rehab. In one horrific scene, a doctor gives her an excruciating, manual pelvic exam and bursts a blood-filled cyst. In another, a doctor removes 37 lesions from her bladder, liver, abdominal wall, and spine. He tells her he doesn’t even know how she’s been walking.

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These parts of the memoir are astonishing and were the hardest to write, she says, not least because they coincided with her relationship with Antonoff. The pair met in 2012 and after a whirlwind romance, moved in together and things rapidly deteriorated – Antonoff, on tour with his band, Bleachers, was barely around and when he was, wasn’t helpful. “He spent a lot of time telling me about the kind of person I was, and it wasn’t the good kind,” she writes. After her hysterectomy, he sauntered into the hospital two hours late bearing a bunch of “bodega flowers”, mumbling an apology and saying he had texted to see if they could wait for him. From the book: “‘Yeah,’ my father said, looking like he was considering grievous bodily harm for the first time in his life. ‘Surgery is like a train, not a tour bus. You either make it, or you don’t.’”She got better. She split up with Antonoff. After a period of burnout, someone sent her the pilot for a new HBO show called Industry to see if she had any ideas about who could direct it. It was a lightbulb moment; Dunham, in desperate need of a change, offered to direct it, flew to the UK, and the shoot – which involved lots of lovely young actors who reminded her of how she had been before fame fell on her head like a house – felt like a renewal. She met her husband. She made the movie Catherine Called Birdy – a perfect film, in my view – and then the semi-autobiographical TV show, Too Much. She has multiple projects in the works with her production company and its deal with Netflix.

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London has been good for her, she says, not least because she thinks British women age differently. “They lean into their eccentricity as they get older. And it’s not just artistic people – it’s a woman who you see walking her dog on the road in the countryside in funny boots. It’s very different in New York, where I feel like I grew up with women who had a lot more agita about ageing. It’s really cool to get older with [the British model] as an influence.”

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\n \"Lena\n
\n Set design: Oscar Sanchez at Dry Clean Only Studio. Stylist: Anna Su. Hair: Peter Butler. Makeup: Matin Maulawizada. Manicure: Sonya Meesh. Above and main image: top and skirt, by Dôen; earrings, index rings and diamond and gold cuff bracelet, by Alexis Bittar; gemstone silver cuffs, Leandra Medine for Aflalo; socks by Falke. Black outfit: jacket, by Fruity Venus. Polka dot outfit: dress, by Mac Duggal; index ring, by Alexis Bittar; opal pinky ring, by Haverhill; all other jewellery, Dunham’s own. Yellow outfit: dress, by Willy Chavarria. Photograph: Chris Buck/The Guardian\n
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Being with Dunham has been a steep learning curve for Felber, meanwhile, who is not a creature of Hollywood but of north London. “When I first met my husband, he was just a British boy who had not been engaged in all of the feminist dialogue I had, and when I said something like, ‘You know, there are things about my job that are really hard as a woman’, he said, ‘Well, it’s hard to be a person.’ And I looked at him and said, ‘Never say that to me again. Never. Do not even try it.’ And now he starts everything with, ‘Well, you know, as a woman in Hollywood …’”

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Felber has also had to make adjustments around Dunham’s closeness with her parents. “He’s like, ‘You cannot talk to your parents on speaker phone once we’re in bed for the night. Four of us in the bed! You’ve gotta take those calls out in the hall.’”

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She is happy, she says, and has been in a great place for well over half a decade. What does that mean?

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“It means that when things come up, I’m capable of handling them. I’m capable of expressing my own needs, boundaries, requirements. I get to work regularly yet not in a way that breaks me down. I have amazing, really supportive people around me. It makes me sad sometimes that it required such a big reshuffle. I guess what I wanted to capture in the book was: right life, wrong time,” she pauses. “If Girls had all appeared when I was a fully formed person, at 33, I would’ve understood how to handle that work, that place, those gifts, those people in a different way. But it was, basically, that I got everything I could’ve dreamed of at a time when I had no ability to handle it. And it required a rebuilding, and I’m very happy with where I landed, and very lucky. That’s just life, I guess.”

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• Famesick, by Lena Dunham, is published by Fourth Estate on 14 April. To support the Guardian, order your copy from guardianbookshop.com.

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Stardom came fast and hard for the wunderkind who created the hit HBO series Girls aged just 23. Now she’s written a tell-all memoir about why she was forced to retreat from the spotlight\n

\n

• Lena Dunham on going to rehab: read an exclusive extract from Famesick

","webPublicationDate":"2026-04-11T05:00:39Z","style":{"navigationColour":"#005689","navigationDownColour":"#4bc6df","navigationButtonColour":"#005689","ruleColour":"#4bc6df","headlineColour":"#333333","quoteColour":"#999999","standfirstColour":"#676767","metaColour":"#999999","dividerColour":"#dcdad5","backgroundColour":"#ffffff","savedForLaterTrueColour":"#333333","savedForLaterFalseColour":"#999999","kickerColour":"#005689","colourPalette":"news"},"lastModified":"2026-04-11T16:30:17Z","listenToArticle":{"uri":"https://mobile.guardianapis.com/uk/audio/culture/2026/apr/11/lena-dunham-interview-memoir-famesick-rehab-fame-broken-friendships","durationInSec":1595},"bodyImages":[{"urlTemplate":"https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/d8ce28c351dafb432bcb3e978f17f236b6baf35a/0_0_3505_2217/master/3505.jpg?w=#{width}&h=#{height}&q=#{quality}&fit=bounds&sig-ignores-params=true&s=1bbbe145e6794ca094ea6aa9853de180","height":2217,"width":3505,"orientation":"landscape","caption":"Denham, pictured centre, with fellow Girls cast members Adam Driver, Allison Williams, Jemima Kirke, Zosia Mamet and Alex Karpovsky, 2014. 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Photograph: Photograph: Nicholas Hunt/Getty Images","credit":"Nicholas Hunt/Getty Images","altText":"With her parents Laurie Simmons and Carroll Dunham, 2016.","cleanCaption":"With her parents, Laurie Simmons and Carroll Dunham, 2016.","cleanCredit":"Photograph: Nicholas Hunt/Getty Images"},{"urlTemplate":"https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/7dd8e8a37b1e84f9d1f52b5c955d567d5aa02234/0_1028_6727_7941/master/6727.jpg?w=#{width}&h=#{height}&q=#{quality}&fit=bounds&sig-ignores-params=true&s=9b77497f5312866fd7fe9bb83ea908f4","height":7941,"width":6727,"orientation":"portrait","credit":"Chris Buck/The Guardian","altText":"Portrait of Lena Dunham wearing a black and white polka dot dress, lying on a pink satin pillow with her dark hair fanning out over it","cleanCredit":"Photograph: Chris Buck/The Guardian"},{"urlTemplate":"https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/ace36554e9f73390d3689d8f0e8bcd9941525870/729_0_1750_2000/master/1750.jpg?w=#{width}&h=#{height}&q=#{quality}&fit=bounds&sig-ignores-params=true&s=cc8b371b20f7b7ada3c90a7f54e1277e","height":2000,"width":1750,"orientation":"portrait","caption":"With her husband, Luis Felber, 2025. Photograph: Photograph: Jason Mendez/Getty Images for Tribeca Festival","credit":"Jason Mendez/Getty Images for Tribeca Festival","altText":"With her husband Luis Felber, 2025.","cleanCaption":"With her husband, Luis Felber, 2025.","cleanCredit":"Photograph: Jason Mendez/Getty Images for Tribeca Festival"},{"urlTemplate":"https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/9bd985396ea792a651421795ce7bf903ff4cff94/0_0_8736_11648/master/8736.jpg?w=#{width}&h=#{height}&q=#{quality}&fit=bounds&sig-ignores-params=true&s=2bb99e6a63d66eb4b25af991a210f04f","height":11648,"width":8736,"orientation":"portrait","caption":" Photograph: Photograph: Chris Buck/The Guardian","credit":"Chris Buck/The Guardian","altText":"Portrait of Lenham Dunham wearing a black jacket and biting a torn-up envelope with ‘Awards’ written on it in gold","cleanCaption":"","cleanCredit":"Photograph: Chris Buck/The Guardian"},{"urlTemplate":"https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/cf388381849690c6d9a2a5db78ab27552da31e96/0_232_3280_2623/master/3280.jpg?w=#{width}&h=#{height}&q=#{quality}&fit=bounds&sig-ignores-params=true&s=e8921849ce039eeb1a3403da0d74a3d2","height":2623,"width":3280,"orientation":"landscape","caption":"Dunham with her ex, Jack Antonoff, 2017. Photograph: Photograph: Jeff Kravitz/FilmMagic","credit":"Jeff Kravitz/FilmMagic","altText":"Dunham with her ex, Jack Antonoff, 2017.","cleanCaption":"Dunham with her ex, Jack Antonoff, 2017.","cleanCredit":"Photograph: Jeff Kravitz/FilmMagic"},{"urlTemplate":"https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/8ee3601e68843ccf491edde90581b1a5afd4eda5/145_145_1684_1347/master/1684.jpg?w=#{width}&h=#{height}&q=#{quality}&fit=bounds&sig-ignores-params=true&s=7cc55d101c64fb4bcc297a93445857d2","height":1347,"width":1684,"orientation":"landscape","caption":"With former creative partner, Jenni Konner, 2017. Photograph: Photograph: Michael Loccisano/Getty Images for Tribeca Film Festival","credit":"Michael Loccisano/Getty Images for Tribeca Film Festival","altText":"With friend and colleague, Jenni Konner, 2017.","cleanCaption":"With former creative partner, Jenni Konner, 2017.","cleanCredit":"Photograph: Michael Loccisano/Getty Images for Tribeca Film Festival"},{"urlTemplate":"https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/b2a4300fe7e1fdfe78f77699e3521803eacf80a4/0_0_3250_4371/master/3250.jpg?w=#{width}&h=#{height}&q=#{quality}&fit=bounds&sig-ignores-params=true&s=b3f1ca294bfcbd529d6696a169ac231f","height":4371,"width":3250,"orientation":"portrait","caption":"Set design: Oscar Sanchez at Dry Clean Only Studio. Stylist: Anna Su. Hair: Peter Butler. Makeup: Matin Maulawizada. Manicure: Sonya Meesh. Above and main image: top and skirt, by Dôen; earrings, index rings and diamond and gold cuff bracelet, by Alexis Bittar; gemstone silver cuffs, Leandra Medine for Aflalo; socks by Falke. Black outfit: jacket, by Fruity Venus. Polka dot outfit: dress, by Mac Duggal; index ring, by Alexis Bittar; opal pinky ring, by Haverhill; all other jewellery, Dunham’s own. Yellow outfit: dress, by Willy Chavarria. Photograph: Photograph: Chris Buck/The Guardian","credit":"Chris Buck/The Guardian","altText":"Lena Dunham lying on bed surrounded by papers and Lena Dunham lying on bed surrounded by papers and notepads.","cleanCaption":"Set design: Oscar Sanchez at Dry Clean Only Studio. Stylist: Anna Su. Hair: Peter Butler. Makeup: Matin Maulawizada. Manicure: Sonya Meesh. Above and main image: top and skirt, by Dôen; earrings, index rings and diamond and gold cuff bracelet, by Alexis Bittar; gemstone silver cuffs, Leandra Medine for Aflalo; socks by Falke. Black outfit: jacket, by Fruity Venus. Polka dot outfit: dress, by Mac Duggal; index ring, by Alexis Bittar; opal pinky ring, by Haverhill; all other jewellery, Dunham’s own. Yellow outfit: dress, by Willy Chavarria.","cleanCredit":"Photograph: Chris Buck/The Guardian"}],"pillar":{"id":"pillar/arts","name":"Arts"},"permutiveTracking":{"id":"culture/2026/apr/11/lena-dunham-interview-memoir-famesick-rehab-fame-broken-friendships","title":"‘I got everything I dreamed of – when I had no ability to handle it’: Lena Dunham on toxic fame, broken friendships and her ‘lost decade’","type":"Article","section":"culture","authors":["Emma Brockes"],"keywords":["Lena Dunham","Girls","Autobiography and memoir","Books","Culture","Television","Biography books","Drama"],"publishedAt":"2026-04-11T05:00:39Z"},"links":{"uri":"https://mobile.guardianapis.com/uk/items/culture/2026/apr/11/lena-dunham-interview-memoir-famesick-rehab-fame-broken-friendships","shortUrl":"http://www.theguardian.com/p/x4khpe","relatedUri":"https://mobile.guardianapis.com/uk/items-related/culture/2026/apr/11/lena-dunham-interview-memoir-famesick-rehab-fame-broken-friendships","webUri":"https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2026/apr/11/lena-dunham-interview-memoir-famesick-rehab-fame-broken-friendships","dcrUri":"https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2026/apr/11/lena-dunham-interview-memoir-famesick-rehab-fame-broken-friendships?dcr=apps&edition=uk","renderedItemBeta":{"minBridgetVersion":"1.11.1","url":"https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2026/apr/11/lena-dunham-interview-memoir-famesick-rehab-fame-broken-friendships?dcr=apps&edition=uk"},"renderedItemProd":{"minBridgetVersion":"1.11.1","url":"https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2026/apr/11/lena-dunham-interview-memoir-famesick-rehab-fame-broken-friendships?dcr=apps&edition=uk"},"renderedItemDebug":{"minBridgetVersion":"1.11.1","url":"https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2026/apr/11/lena-dunham-interview-memoir-famesick-rehab-fame-broken-friendships?dcr=apps&edition=uk"}},"byline":"Emma Brockes","atomsJS":[],"paletteDark":{"background":"#00000000","mediaIcon":"#00000000","pillar":"#A1845C","main":"#A1845C","secondary":"#EACCA0","headline":"#DCDCDC","commentCount":"#999999","metaText":"#999999","elementBackground":"#A1845C","shadow":"#333333","immersiveKicker":"#EACCA0","topBorder":"#333333","mediaBackground":"#545454","pill":"#333333","accentColour":"#A1845C","kickerText":"#A1845C","kickerColours":{"plainKickerText":"#A1845C","plainPill":"#333333","liveKickerText":"#EDEDED","livePill":"#6B5840","featureKickerText":"#E7D4B9","featurePill":"#333333","featureLiveKickerText":"#EDEDED","featureLivePill":"#6B5840"},"mediaPillBackground":"#121212","mediaPillForeground":"#FFFFFF","featureAccentColour":"#E7D4B9"},"metadata":{"commentable":false,"commentCount":0,"contributors":[{"id":"emmabrockes","name":"Emma Brockes","image":{"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"},"smallImage":{"urlTemplate":"https://i.guim.co.uk/img/static/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/contributor/2015/9/16/1442396723107/Emma-Brockes.jpg?w=#{width}&h=#{height}&q=#{quality}&fit=bounds&sig-ignores-params=true&s=0a90fbb371caa081bbd8ed3b67236ff6"},"uri":"https://mobile.guardianapis.com/lists/tag/profile/emmabrockes"}],"feature":false,"keywords":["Lena Dunham","Girls","Autobiography and memoir","Books","Culture","Television","Biography books","Drama"],"tags":[{"id":"culture/lena-dunham","webTitle":"Lena Dunham"},{"id":"tv-and-radio/girls","webTitle":"Girls"},{"id":"books/autobiography-and-memoir","webTitle":"Autobiography and memoir"},{"id":"books/books","webTitle":"Books"},{"id":"culture/culture","webTitle":"Culture"},{"id":"culture/television","webTitle":"Television"},{"id":"books/biography","webTitle":"Biography books"},{"id":"tv-and-radio/drama","webTitle":"Drama"}],"tracking":[{"id":"tracking/commissioningdesk/saturday-magazine","webTitle":"Saturday Magazine"}],"section":{"id":"culture"},"topics":[{"displayName":"Emma Brockes","topic":{"type":"tag-contributor","name":"profile/emmabrockes"}}],"embeddedVideos":[],"adTargetingPath":"culture","adServerParams":{"sens":"f","su":"0","edition":"uk","tn":"interview","p":"app","k":"biography,autobiography-and-memoir,drama,books,lena-dunham,girls,culture,television","sh":"https://www.theguardian.com/p/x4khpe","ct":"article","s":"culture","co":"emmabrockes","url":"/culture/2026/apr/11/lena-dunham-interview-memoir-famesick-rehab-fame-broken-friendships"},"trackingVariables":{"nielsenSection":"The Guardian Culture - 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Now she’s written a tell-all memoir about why she was forced to retreat from the spotlight","showQuotedHeadline":false,"showLiveIndicator":false,"sublinks":[],"mainImage":{"urlTemplate":"https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/d10dc7a3836e36ab7c804a60c4cb0e00acfe34e6/704_0_10920_8736/master/10920.jpg?w=#{width}&h=#{height}&q=#{quality}&fit=bounds&sig-ignores-params=true&s=d8fdd1300a18023cbef331bb263b0cf2","height":8736,"width":10920,"orientation":"landscape","credit":"Chris Buck/The Guardian","altText":"Lena Dunham lying on bed surrounded by papers and notepads","cleanCredit":"Photograph: Chris Buck/The Guardian"},"renderedItemProd":{"minBridgetVersion":"1.11.1","url":"https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2026/apr/11/lena-dunham-interview-memoir-famesick-rehab-fame-broken-friendships?dcr=apps&edition=uk"},"renderedItemBeta":{"minBridgetVersion":"1.11.1","url":"https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2026/apr/11/lena-dunham-interview-memoir-famesick-rehab-fame-broken-friendships?dcr=apps&edition=uk"},"renderedItemDebug":{"minBridgetVersion":"1.11.1","url":"https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2026/apr/11/lena-dunham-interview-memoir-famesick-rehab-fame-broken-friendships?dcr=apps&edition=uk"},"cardDesignType":"Interview","correspondingTags":[],"type":"Article","importance":0},{"title":"Digested week: NeeDohs, Knox and news from the far side of the moon","rawTitle":"Digested week: NeeDohs, Knox and news from the far side of the moon","item":{"trailText":"The hottest day of the year so far was this week, obliging everyone to lose their minds","body":"

Monday

\n

Easter Monday and we’re out in Camden, observing the tween girls’ stations of the cross: namely, Pop Mart and Miniso, Chinese retailers selling toys, collectibles and “blind boxes”, for which the devotional parent is invited to pay 15 quid for their child to unwrap a surprise. (The surprise – can you guess? – is that it’s not worth 15 quid.) Other purchasing options include the “Action Figure Squid Game Set”, which retails for – adjusts glasses – £250. A range of DC Comics collectible figures starting at £32 a pop. And something called a “Cinnamoroll figurine”, which is, inexplicably, £95.

\n

We come to look not to buy, which seems to be the general position of everyone in the shop and may be why Pop Mart’s share price has lately been tanking. Until this year, almost 40% of the company’s revenue was generated by sales of the Labubu, the “ugly doll” spiritual heir to the Cabbage Patch that sold for up to £70 a unit and that tweens briefly went crazy for last summer. Since then, enthusiasm for Labubus has cooled and Pop Mart’s share price has plunged 22%. As we speak, its top scientists are, presumably, working on the next hideous thing to replace it.

\n

One thing we don’t find on Monday: any NeeDohs, the small, hard squishy that feels like a defective implant and, as the world’s top fidget, is so popular there’s a global shortage. (NeeDohs are favoured by parents, too, mainly because if you drop a NeeDoh on the carpet, it doesn’t stick to the fibres like slime.)

\n

Anyway, thanks to the influencers, you can’t lay your hands on a NeeDoh for love nor money and might have to default to “squishy dumplings” which come in a variety of colours, including the “viral glitter dumpling” which is “secret” and – I could go on in this vein forever until we run out of money, or sanity, or both.

\n

Tuesday

\n

There’s been a lot of pre-press about The Devil Wears Prada 2, which suggests to me its makers are nervous. The trailers look … thin? On Tuesday there’s a release of photos featuring Anna Wintour posing with Meryl Streep for Vogue and reminding us how drastically times have changed. Twenty years ago, when the first movie came out, Wintour scarcely deigned to acknowledge it, but times being what they are and all that, now even the most hatchet-faced among us must engage in fun publicity for clicks.

\n

Elsewhere in the rollout: here’s Anne Hathaway on the cover of Harper’s Bazaar, telling us about her wobbly moment in what she describes as an unflattering swimsuit – as opposed to her “aspirational swimsuit” – and acceptance of which she presents as a moment of wild “who cares?!” abandon. Standing critically in front of the mirror, said Hathaway, “I looked again and I said: ‘You are 43,’” adding that she decided to appreciate what she saw “instead of criticising it”. There followed in the piece a robust discussion about body dysmorphia and how even the tiniest Hollywood star is supported in the delusion that she’ll never be thin enough. Just kidding, it was presented as an adorable piece of relatability for normie middle-aged women to love her for.

\n

Wednesday

\n

An annual rite up there with Christmas: the hottest day of the year so far when everyone in the realm is obliged by law to totally lose their minds. As temperatures drift towards 25C, marine commando-style we activate our response: go to the park, buy ice-cream, drop ice-cream, walk 4km to the pub while kids complain bitterly, wait 45 minutes for food because everyone has had the same idea, get the bus back while ignoring the person in our party who’s pretending to limp, remark on the fact we’ve all caught the sun and by the time we get home, find we’re hungry again but there’s no food in the house because it’s the Easter holidays and I haven’t done a shop for 10 days. Absolutely smashed it!

\n

Thursday

\n

Amanda Knox is in London this month to promote her new documentary, Mouth of the Wolf, in which she travels back to Italy to “confront” Giuliano Mignini, the prosecutor who wrongfully convicted her and sent her to prison. The film comes out after two memoirs and a scripted series, the Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox, last year’s Hulu/Disney+ show dramatising her experiences, and has been directed by Knox’s husband, Christopher Robinson, who also – words to make the heart sink – composed some original songs for the soundtrack with Knox (I’m sure they’re lovely). In her place, I imagine we’d all do something similar, namely go over and over the ground of what happened until it began to make sense. For audiences, however, the latest return to Knox’s story may test a market principle: that a vanishingly small number of subjects – the Titanic, the second world war – can withstand this much revisitation.

\n

Friday

\n

Astronauts!! On the far side of the moon!! On Friday, the crew of Artemis II head back to Earth having seen things no other human beings have seen. “I had an overwhelming sense of being moved by looking at the moon,” said the crew member Christina Koch. “In all of this emptiness – this is a whole bunch of nothing, this thing we call the universe – you have this oasis, this beautiful place that we get to exist [in] together,” said the pilot, Victor Glover. Through them, we saw Earthrise on the far side of the moon and remembered, maybe, there’s still magic and awe left in the world.

\n

Digested week in pictures

\n
\n \"Farage\n
\n ‘Under a Reform government this glass would be full and attached to an inflatable barmaid.’ Photograph: Stefan Rousseau/PA\n
\n
\n
\n \"Royal\n
\n ‘I don’t think there’s anyone missing? Is there?’ Photograph: Alberto Pezzali/AP\n
\n
\n
\n \"Melania,\n
\n ‘New pick for attorney general praised for keen legal mind, long ears.’ Photograph: Alex Brandon/AP\n
\n
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The hottest day of the year so far was this week, obliging everyone to lose their minds

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And consulting ChatGPT did nothing to allay my fears","rawTitle":"It’s finally happened: I’m now worried about AI. And consulting ChatGPT did nothing to allay my fears","item":{"trailText":"A highly alarming New Yorker feature on the machinations of Sam Altman drove me to test his AI for myself. The results were, well, highly alarming, says Guardian columnist Emma Brockes","body":"

A corollary of the truism “don’t sweat the small stuff” is, by implication, “do sweat the big stuff”, but it can be hard to pick which big stuff to sweat. For example: since the 1970s, as the world has worried about inflation and rolling geopolitics, the big stuff we should have been sweating more urgently was the climate crisis. Last year, the top trending search on Google in the US was “Charlie Kirk”, with several terms relating to the threat posed by Donald Trump also popular, when the focus should arguably have been the threat posed by AI.

\n

Or, per my own Googling this week after reading Ronan Farrow and Andrew Marantz’s highly alarming lengthy piece in the New Yorker about the rise of artificial general intelligence: “Will I be a member of the permanent underclass and how can I make that not happen?”

\n

I’ll confess: prior to this moment of giving the subject more than two seconds’ thought, my anxieties around AI were extremely localised. I thought in immediate terms of my own household income, and beyond that, of how the job market might look 10 years from now when my children graduate. I wondered if I should boycott ChatGPT, many of whose architects support Trump, and decided that, yes, I should – an easy sacrifice because I don’t use it in the first place.

\n

Anything bigger than that seemed fanciful. Last year, when Karen Hao’s book Empire of AI was published, it laid out a case against Sam Altman and his company, OpenAI, that briefly pierced the tedium of the discourse to say that Altman’s leadership is cult-like and blind to cost – no different, in other words, to his tech predecessors, except much more dangerous. Still, I didn’t read the book.

\n\n

The investigation this week in the New Yorker offers a lower-commitment on-ramp to the subject, while giving the casual reader an exciting opportunity: to ask ChatGPT, the AI-powered chatbot created by Altman’s OpenAI, to summarise the key findings of a piece that is highly critical of ChatGPT and Altman.

\n

With almost comically studious neutrality, the chatbot offers the following top line: that, per Farrow and Marantz, “AI is as much a power story as a technology story”, and “a major focus [of the story] is Sam Altman, portrayed as a highly influential but controversial figure”. Mmmm, lacks something, doesn’t it? Let’s try a human-powered summary of that same investigation, which might open with: “Sam Altman is a corporate grifter whose slipperiness would make one hesitate to put him in charge of a branch of Ryman, let alone in a position to steward the potentially world-ending capabilities of AI.”

\n\n

It is these dangers, previously dismissed as sci-fi, that really startle here. As relayed in the piece, in 2014, Elon Musk tweeted: “We need to be super careful with AI. Potentially more dangerous than nukes.” There is the so-called alignment problem, yet to be solved, in which AI uses its superior intelligence to trick human engineers into believing it is following their instructions, meanwhile outmanoeuvring them to “replicate itself on secret servers so that it couldn’t be turned off; in extreme cases, it might seize control of the energy grid, the stock market, or the nuclear arsenal”.

\n

At one time, Altman reportedly believed this scenario was possible, writing in his blog in 2015 that superhuman machine intelligence “does not have to be the inherently evil sci-fi version to kill us all. A more probable scenario is that it simply doesn’t care about us much either way, but in an effort to accomplish some other goal … wipes us out.” For example: engineers ask AI to fix the climate crisis and it takes the shortest route to achieving that goal, which is to eliminate humanity. Since OpenAI became mainly a for-profit entity, however, Altman has stopped talking in these terms and now sells the technology as a portal to utopia, in which “we’ll all get better stuff. We will build ever-more-wonderful things for each other.”

\n

This leaves us all with a problem. For voters in a position to prioritise AI oversight as a key election issue, the gap between personal AI use and the use to which governments, military regimes or rogue actors might use it is so vast, that the greatest danger we face is from a failure of imagination. I type into ChatGPT my concern about entering the permanent underclass, to which it replies: “That’s a heavy question, and it sounds like you’re worried about your long-term prospects. The idea of a ‘permanent underclass’ gets talked about in sociology, but in real life, people’s paths are much more fluid than that term suggests.”

\n

Quite sweet, really, wholly witless and – here lurks the danger – seemingly entirely without threat.

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A highly alarming New Yorker feature on the machinations of Sam Altman drove me to test his AI for myself. The results were, well, highly alarming

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And consulting ChatGPT did nothing to allay my fears","type":"comment","headerImage":{"urlTemplate":"https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/2f3d18b21d080a1b5ee42ecd72b2cdc6534a7a83/406_0_4128_3303/master/4128.jpg?w=#{width}&h=#{height}&q=#{quality}&fit=bounds&sig-ignores-params=true&s=2e4b4d62f424aec9ee5e0913c95b3fc7","height":3303,"width":4128,"orientation":"landscape","caption":"Donald Trump and OpenAI’s Sam Altman at the White House in January 2025. 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The results were, well, highly alarming, says Guardian columnist Emma Brockes","showQuotedHeadline":true,"showLiveIndicator":false,"sublinks":[],"mainImage":{"urlTemplate":"https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/2f3d18b21d080a1b5ee42ecd72b2cdc6534a7a83/406_0_4128_3303/master/4128.jpg?w=#{width}&h=#{height}&q=#{quality}&fit=bounds&sig-ignores-params=true&s=2e4b4d62f424aec9ee5e0913c95b3fc7","height":3303,"width":4128,"orientation":"landscape","credit":"Andrew Harnik/Getty Images","altText":"Donald Trump and OpenAI’s Sam Altman at the White House in January 2025.","cleanCredit":"Photograph: Andrew Harnik/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/apr/08/ai-chat-gpt-new-yorker-feature-sam-altman?dcr=apps&edition=uk"},"renderedItemBeta":{"minBridgetVersion":"1.11.1","url":"https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/apr/08/ai-chat-gpt-new-yorker-feature-sam-altman?dcr=apps&edition=uk"},"renderedItemDebug":{"minBridgetVersion":"1.11.1","url":"https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/apr/08/ai-chat-gpt-new-yorker-feature-sam-altman?dcr=apps&edition=uk"},"cardDesignType":"Comment","correspondingTags":[],"type":"Article","importance":0},{"title":"Digested week: Garrick Club confirms an actual woman has joined – the queen","rawTitle":"Digested week: Garrick Club confirms an actual woman has joined – the queen","item":{"trailText":"Approval of the royal’s membership doesn’t seem to be the most rigorous enforcement of the democratic principle","body":"

Monday

\n

For the diary this week I think we should put our heads in the sand, pretend the world isn’t happening, and take refuge instead in the funniest, rudest Aussie TV show in history – namely, season two of Deadloch, which just dropped on Amazon Prime. We pride ourselves in Britain on leading the world in baroque swearing, so it pains me to say this, but I think the Aussies might have the edge.

\n

Dulcie Collins and Eddie Redcliffe – ably described by a passing troll on a mobility scooter as “a shetland pony and a lesbian giraffe” – are odd couple cops who, in Deadloch’s first season, met to solve a murder in Tasmania. Now they find themselves in Barra Creek, a small town in the Northern Territory ravaged by rivalry between the two main, crocodile-based businesses: Land of Crocs, and Don Darrell’s Best Best Jumping Croc Tour. It’s written by “the two Kates” as they’re known in Australia, Kate McLennan and Kate McCartney, and I’ve never heard swearing like it, not even in The Thick of It, none of which I can quote because it’s too rude. (Tiny example: Redcliffe, catching sight of a drone passing overhead, looks up and refers to it for no particular reason as a “hover-c***”).

\n

There’s plenty of fake swearing, too. An Aussie woman built like a cement mixer invites one of the cops to, “shove it up your clack”, a line that made me laugh so hard I nearly fell off the sofa, as did the line, “what adult eats yoghurt through a pouch?” and “the toilet’s non-load bearing”. The toilet’s non-load bearing – tears literally pouring down my face. There’s a joke about a hammerhead shark which I can’t explain, and a drive-by on UK tourists overstaying their visas (“The Croc-ettes have all been deported back to the UK”) which you also, possibly, had to be there for – but my point is, in hard times, what a bloody gift for us all from the southern hemisphere.

\n

Tuesday

\n

It was an open casting call the likes of which hadn’t been seen since the search for Scarlett O’Hara in 1938; one in which every eligible primary school child in the land was given a hard shove in the direction of a casting panel by their absolutely-not-stage-parents (“it’s not us! It’s Tabitha who wants this!”) Finally, this week, we got to see the new stars of HBO’s forthcoming TV adaptation of Harry Potter in the series’ first trailer, and didn’t they look lovely!

\n

They really did, the three young people playing Ron, Hermione and Harry, in what looks like a less arch, more realistic adaptation of JK Rowling’s books than the film franchise. I was in my early 20s when the first Potter book was published and missed the rush, and the films never really worked for me, either – although we have them to thank for the delicious entry in Alan Rickman’s Diaries, in which the late actor grumbled that, after appearing in all eight of the Potter films as Severus Snape, he found his friends always expected him to pick up the tab for lunch.

\n

Wednesday

\n

This hit home: the novelist Ian Rankin, speaking on a podcast that was picked up by the Times on Wednesday, sharing the extremely honest assessment that, despite selling 35m copies of his Rebus series, he has “wasted his life” honing sentences in his head rather than engaging with his family. “I mean, there’s big moments, big beats in my life that I just don’t have any memory of: holidays taken; first days at school for my kids and that sort of stuff because in my head I was somewhere else.”

\n

This distraction was possible, one assumes, because his wife, Miranda, picked up the slack, but in spite of how twitchy that kind of division of labour makes me feel, I understand, too; the near-permanent distraction of anyone trying to get anything over the line and, possibly, not 100% listening when their child goes in on their fourth go-around of the story of what someone said to someone else at break time and what this means for the friendship dynamic. “Are you listening?” one of my children will ask, glaring at me, and I’ll think, my God, I’ve turned into my dad.

\n

It must be said that while Rankin described this state of affairs as “kind of weird”, he didn’t sound overly vexed by it. The person who drove the point home to me more forcefully was Martin Amis, who in an interview in 2020 spoke of the ruinous influence of the puritan work ethic. “I remember once having a really nice drink in Paris with my wife and a friend of ours; and being really uneasy because I wasn’t getting on with something.” Why do we do this, he said; life is short. I think about his remarks all the time.

\n
\n \"Archbishop\n
\n Garrick Club pulls out all the stops for its first female member. Photograph: Yui Mok/Reuters\n
\n
\n

Thursday

\n

Members of the Garrick Club in London are still wrestling with the outsized challenge of recognising that women make up 51% of the population and letting them into their 195-year-old club. Reports in 2024 that the venue in Covent Garden was going co-ed were accompanied by a list of prominent women rumoured to be joining, among them Dame Judi Dench and Dame Siân Phillips. Now, two years later, we have confirmation of an actual woman joining the club and that person is ... the queen.

\n

I mean, the queen is a woman, true. But her approval by the membership panel doesn’t strike one as the most rigorous enforcement of the democratic principle. The Standard this week quoted a royal source as saying the queen “was attracted by the Garrick’s strong literary connections”, which sounds empty enough to be true, and falls in the same week as an event at which Camilla and King Charles marked the 25th anniversary of the Eden Project by “cutting a cake with a sword”. Mmmm, this country.

\n

Friday

\n

Oh, for the days when the wildest story in the tabloids came under the banner of “Tory sleaze”; a more innocent time before Epstein and Trump. Luxuriate, then, in the echo this week of vintage scandals with the story of Crispin Blunt, former Conservative MP for Reigate who served in David Cameron’s cabinet, and who the courts found, rather surprisingly, to have been in possession of a quantity of crystal meth. (His defence was, roughly, “all drugs should be legal”). Blunt was fined £1,200 and we all got to read this immensely enjoyable line in the BBC report, noting that the 65-year-old had been “hosting drug-fuelled chemsex parties at his home in Horley”. Bravo! Perhaps there’s hope for this country after all.

\n
\n \"Nigel\n
\n I’ll have a tea, a white one please Photograph: Sean Smith/The Guardian\n
\n
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Approval of the royal’s membership doesn’t seem to be the most rigorous enforcement of the democratic principle

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Both the experts and I have the same advice","rawTitle":"How to survive our doomed times? Both the experts and I have the same advice","item":{"trailText":"We have two choices: be paralysed by fear or just continue with what we are doing. I know what I choose, says Guardian columnist Emma Brockes","body":"

In the past, my response to any given large-scale world crisis has generally been to do nothing, which, as well as aligning with my personality, has the advantage of being exactly what the experts recommend.

\n

During periods of intense market volatility, we are advised not to look at our investments, let alone touch them. If we are rushed at by a bear, we are supposed to stand stock still (unless it’s one of those bears you have to bang pots and pans at, but let’s leave them aside). The result of this is an avoidant philosophy hingeing on the motto “it’ll probably be fine”, that, this week, as Tehran mocked the US for pretending peace talks were under way, was accompanied by a cold, rival notion: what if this time it’s different?

\n\n

Two spirit-sinking thoughts followed in quick succession: as the war in Iran rumbles on and the energy crisis deepens, what if interest rates bounce up to what they were in the 1970s (impossible, surely?); and, does this mean I have to read Andrew Ross Sorkin’s book about the Wall Street crash? The headlines aren’t reassuring. In the Financial Times at the weekend, the banner headline warned: Borrowing costs soar to 18-year high. Columnists in the Telegraph shared plans to stockpile petrol and tinned food. “Could the Iran war lead to WWIII?” asked NPR, cheerfully, while over in the New York Times, a hedgefunder turned US Treasury official wrote: “I predicted the 2008 financial crisis. What is coming may be worse” – a dire warning at least partially offset by the cheesy, business-as-usual configuration of the headline. Beyond the media, city traders last week started pricing in four quarter-point base interest rate rises in 2026, a complete about-face from previous predictions of rates coming down this year.

\n

It’s not just interest rates, obviously, but they are the canary in the coalmine of worse shocks to come. Meanwhile, the usual, default consolations are wearing thin. Yesterday, Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, even put paid to that fantasy of last resort, universally reached for during hard times in this country – maybe-we’ll-move-to-Australia – by telling the Australian parliament that it faced a “new reality” in which distance wouldn’t save it.

\n

And, so, what? What is the appropriate response here, other than to reverse ferret if you are on the brink of buying a house – as two friends did last week, considering possible 5.5% rates in two years’ time? Or pursue the kind of bad logic that one usually reserves for trying to justify the purchase of something you can’t really afford. For example, six years ago, the economist Nouriel Roubini predicted the likelihood during this decade of a “Greater Depression”, a prediction which resurfaced this week and to which I found myself thinking, irrelevantly: this is a man who, famously, had plaster casts of vaginas on the wall. He may not be reliable!

\n

There are other voices out there. My dad reminds me that interest rates in the UK were 10% in the 1970s when my parents bought the house I grew up in, reaching 17% in 1979, and everyone survived. But the average loan in 1979 in this country was £11,000, with borrowers maxing out on average at two to two-and-a-half times their annual salary. These days, the average mortgage in London is pushing £300,000, and for first-time borrowers, nationwide, that figure is £210,000. Meanwhile, the median full-time salary in the UK in 2025 was £39,039.

\n

We know all this. We also have the recent experience of Covid – surely a more brutal and shocking economic disaster than anything that might happen in the Gulf or be triggered by AI, and from which financial systems recovered. The US stock market returned to new highs five years after the 2008 crisis. It’s 1929 that you have to shield your eyes from – God, I am going to have to read Sorkin’s book – when it took, by many accounts, fully two decades for the stock market to recover from the loss of 90% of its value.

\n

At the individual level, short of taking cash out of the bank and sticking it under the bed, there are two options: abruptly stop doing whatever you were doing – booking a holiday, buying a house, quitting your job to write poetry – and hold fire until the picture clarifies. Or, working on the assumption that the picture may never fully clarify and that paralysis never helps, go about doing what you were doing, only more anxiously. What’s the worst that can happen? It’ll probably be fine.

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We have two choices: be paralysed by fear or just continue with what we are doing. I know what I choose

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Both the experts and I have the same advice","type":"comment","headerImage":{"urlTemplate":"https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/d75f97af39ccef45068fcef7ce03c1d938ae8669/25_0_3722_2976/master/3722.jpg?w=#{width}&h=#{height}&q=#{quality}&fit=bounds&sig-ignores-params=true&s=227aa31321055940f1d2fa2799e24fa3","height":2976,"width":3722,"orientation":"landscape","caption":"Front page of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 24 October 1929. Photograph: Photograph: Icon Communications/Getty Images","credit":"Icon Communications/Getty Images","altText":"Front page of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 24 October 1929.","cleanCaption":"Front page of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 24 October 1929.","cleanCredit":"Photograph: Icon Communications/Getty Images"},"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":"We have two choices: be paralysed by fear or just continue with what we are doing. I know what I choose, says Guardian columnist Emma Brockes","showQuotedHeadline":true,"showLiveIndicator":false,"sublinks":[],"mainImage":{"urlTemplate":"https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/d75f97af39ccef45068fcef7ce03c1d938ae8669/25_0_3722_2976/master/3722.jpg?w=#{width}&h=#{height}&q=#{quality}&fit=bounds&sig-ignores-params=true&s=227aa31321055940f1d2fa2799e24fa3","height":2976,"width":3722,"orientation":"landscape","credit":"Icon Communications/Getty Images","altText":"Brooklyn Daily Eagle Front PageTop half of the front page of the newspaper Brooklyn Daily Eagle has banner headline reading 'Wall St. In Panic As Stocks Crash' which describes the massive fall in stock value on what became known as Black Thursday, October 24, 1929. The stock market crash is often considered the starting point of the Great Depression of 1929 - 1941. Other headlines recount an attempt to kill Italian Crown Prince Umberto (1904 - 1983) (left) and a campaign finance scandal concerning American industrialist and later senator Joseph R. Grundy (1863 - 1961) (right). (Photo by FPG/Getty Images)","cleanCredit":"Photograph: Icon Communications/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/mar/25/headlines-doom-carry-on-paralyse-fear?dcr=apps&edition=uk"},"renderedItemBeta":{"minBridgetVersion":"1.11.1","url":"https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/mar/25/headlines-doom-carry-on-paralyse-fear?dcr=apps&edition=uk"},"renderedItemDebug":{"minBridgetVersion":"1.11.1","url":"https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/mar/25/headlines-doom-carry-on-paralyse-fear?dcr=apps&edition=uk"},"cardDesignType":"Comment","correspondingTags":[],"type":"Article","importance":0},{"title":"Is anyone as ill-suited for great office as Donald Trump? Yes, Pete Hegseth – that’s why Potus likes him","rawTitle":"Is anyone as ill-suited for great office as Donald Trump? Yes, Pete Hegseth – that’s why Potus likes him","item":{"trailText":"The US ‘secretary of war’ earns his keep as the loyalty-hire par excellence, says Guardian columnist Emma Brockes","body":"

Has there ever been a more ludicrous political character than Pete Hegseth, the US government’s so-called secretary of war, who makes Ronald Reagan look understated and urbane? Last week, Hegseth launched an attack on the American press for its coverage of Iran, which he called insufficiently “patriotic”. (A CNN commentator and former Republican congressman came back with “punk” and “cry baby” to describe Hegseth’s own demeanour.) When he stands at the podium with his Mr Incredible jaw and head extended, turtle-like, way out in front of his body, all you can think is this: which is a greater threat to American national security, Iran’s nuclear ambitions or Hegseth’s failure to meet even the most entry-level requirements for a person in his position?

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The majority of Americans who know who he is – only about 70% of them, according to a recent survey by the Pew Research Center – don’t like the guy, and his petulant outbursts last week at the Pentagon can’t have helped. Since Donald Trump appointed him in January last year, what has become evident about Hegseth is that, like so many bullies, he backs down sharpish if he meets any significant pushback. “Jennifer, you’ve been about the worst,” snapped Hegseth to a Fox News reporter last June in a phrase we should all have had printed on T-shirts. (Jennifer Griffin elegantly countered “I take issue with that,” and Hegseth backed away and pivoted to another point.)

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More recently, at a Pentagon briefing two weeks ago, he turned on a reporter who asked if he had a clear objective for the war with Iran. Hegseth cut his eyes at her like a child starting a fight in the playground and snarled, “Did you not hear my remarks?” This was several days before he made his bellicose remarks about the Iranian regime – “they are toast, and they know it” – all of which suggests the former Fox News host has two basic settings: upbeat, bomb-’em-back-to-the-stone-age Dr Strangelove, and surly sixth grader. It is sometimes remarked that Hegseth has a leading man outline, but the evidence points more in the direction of weird character-actor energy; a sort of Max Headroom, all angles and glitches, and eye contact that lasts slightly too long.

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What makes Hegseth’s aspect more disturbing is the vast gap between his presentation as a straight-talking American hero, and the truth of the matter. Trump’s hiring policy has always been long on optics, short on detail, and so it’s hard not to see Hegseth through the lens of his backstory. Like a lot of Trump’s cabinet appointees, the “war secretary” has a full complement of lurid accusations, or leverage as Trump may see it, trailing behind him – financial mismanagement, personal misconduct, sexual impropriety, plus a history of alleged poor behaviour brought on by excessive drinking – all of which Trump presumably files under “maverick” and for which the rest of us supply other words. With exquisite understatement, the Democratic senator Richard Blumenthal, a member of the Senate armed services committee, told the New Yorker in a 2024 profile of Hegseth, “Much as we might be sympathetic to people with continuing alcohol problems, they shouldn’t be at the top of our national-security structure.” Well, quite.

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Still, make do and mend; let’s see what we have to work with here. A former presenter on Fox News, Hegseth can at least talk in sentences that roughly follow on, one from another – not a given in Trump’s cabinet. Googling “Pete Hegseth drunk press conference” fields inconclusive results; that’s a win. If you go back far enough in his history, Hegseth has said at least a couple of honest-sounding things about the challenges of returning to civilian life after being deployed with the military on three overseas tours (Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantánamo).

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Meanwhile, the president’s calculation in hiring people such as Hegseth and, until recently, Kristi Noem, who Trump booted as head of homeland security earlier this month for low-key landing him in it during congressional hearings, is probably more devious than it seems. On paper, Hegseth is an odd combination of characteristics, a midwesterner who went to Princeton before joining the military; a man with some establishment credentials, in other words, but enough disastrous professional and personal episodes to appeal to Trump. If the president’s No 1 hiring priority is loyalty, then Hegseth is the absolute exemplar of someone Trump has fished out of the fire. When it comes to standing up to the president, he has no fight in him.

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Bizarre outbursts at the press, a backstory full of mishaps – the US ‘secretary of war’ earns his keep as the loyalty hire par excellence

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Plus, Crufts brings back happy memories","body":"

Monday

\n

I was going to start with the Middle East, but let’s give ourselves a break and, instead, do the final of Crufts from last night. Crufts! As soothing as the Olympics but with lower stakes and cuter contestants. When I was in my first year of high school, my best friend and I used to “play Crufts” – look, it was a different time; at least we weren’t pretending to be on horseback – which entailed someone being the presenter and someone the dog lady, and when the presenter shrilled, “and it’s the Westie! The Westie has won Crufts 1990!” the dog lady had to take off around the living room, leash held high while the crowd went wild.

\n

I hadn’t really watched Crufts since then, but on Sunday night I had it on in the background and we all got sucked in. My kids had never seen a dog show before, let alone the GREATEST DOG SHOW ON EARTH, and what a moment it was for them, being put through their paces with the invitation to say things like, “oh, look, a pomeranian”, and ask the question all new initiates to the dog show must ask: “Why is that man running like that?” Because, my darlings, it’s Crufts; they all run like that.

\n

By the way, for years after we grew up, my mother and I would still, when triggered, exclaim, “and it’s the Westie!” to each other; that is the enduring power of Crufts and I couldn’t be happier to have found my way home. The championship title this year went to that right big fluffy one that the crowd loved and we loved him, too, and when the presenter boomed, “and it’s the clumber spaniel! The clumber spaniel has won Crufts 2026!” we shrieked with joy. What a time to be alive.

\n

Tuesday

\n

Hat tip to Krishnan Guru-Murthy for his reference on Tuesday night to Iran’s new “nepo-ayatollah”, not a bad joke for the news and eked from extremely unpromising material. While the carnage grinds on and the war footage piles up, so too does that other staple of television news during any sudden conflict in a country where Brits go on package holidays: shots of hapless tourists, yanked back from the beach by the intrusion of geopolitics into their week in the sun, and jumped on by cameras at arrivals.

\n

Here we are at Luton airport, where TV reporters capture a stream of returnees dragging their wheelie suitcases across the concourse and looking startled to report the sight of rockets flying over their hotels. Not only were these poor Brits caught up in a war, but they returned home to the sudden sea change in public opinion towards people who travel to or live in that part of the world.

\n

Once a high-end-seeming destination of choice, now here’s Ed Davey in the Commons referring to expats living in Dubai as “washed-up old footballers and tax exiles”. And the average punters haven’t entirely escaped, either; there is a lot of chat going around about the gormlessness of holidaymakers who travel to Dubai on the assumption it’s exactly like Greece or Spain, except cheaper. Turns out – who knew? – it was actually in the volatile Middle East the whole time!

\n
\n \"Conservative\n
\n ‘We’re just going to pretend she’s doing it right, yeah?’ Photograph: Carl Court/Getty Images\n
\n
\n

Wednesday

\n

Oh, Chalamet; now what have you done? In a recent event with Matthew McConaughey he made the remark that ballet and opera are niche interests that “no one cares about any more”, adding that get-out-of-jail-free afterthought that always works when you’ve said something insulting: “All respect to all the ballet and opera people out there.”

\n

The response has been more enjoyable than Marty Supreme and, thanks to the young people in charge of the US’s largest cultural institutions’ social media feeds, it just keeps going. At the Metropolitan Opera in New York, a video uploaded to Instagram showed off the efforts of hundreds of people backstage before a major production, while the words “all respect to the opera (and ballet) people out there” flashed across the screen. It racked up almost half a million likes and 6.5m views, while in the comments, up popped the Guggenheim, the Brooklyn Museum and one of the stars of Operation Mincemeat on Broadway.

\n

Meanwhile, over at the Seattle Opera, this post on social media: “All we’ve got to say is … use promo code TIMOTHEE to save 14% off select seats for Carmen.” My favourite pushback, however, was from Afonso Coelho, a dancer with the Royal Danish Ballet, who posted a 30-second clip of himself doing the most beautiful, mind-blowing ballet, like a representative from a superior branch of humankind. “Your turn,” he wrote, to Chalamet.

\n

Thursday

\n

New updates in the Carolyn Bessette/JFK Jr discourse in the form of an angry diatribe published in the New York Times by the actor Daryl Hannah, who is depicted in the first half of the Hulu series as JFK Jr’s girlfriend before he met Bessette, and to call the role unflattering would be an understatement. In the show, which has been causing uproar in the US, mostly for good reasons – the fashion, the 90s innocence – Hannah is portrayed as a grasping coke addict who Jackie O can’t stand.

\n

“The actions and behaviours attributed to me are untrue,” writes Hannah. “I have never used cocaine in my life or hosted cocaine-fuelled parties. I have never pressured anyone into marriage. I have never desecrated any family heirloom or intruded upon anyone’s private memorial. I have never planted any story in the press. I never compared Jacqueline Onassis’ death to a dog’s.”

\n

Friday

\n

Rigorous Oscars prep in the form of a thorough snack audit – reminder to get in more Jaffa Cakes before the ceremony on Sunday – and a last-minute effort to catch up on the films I haven’t seen, including Hamnet and Train Dreams (although, shamefully, I’m more in the mood for F1). Everyone, meanwhile, should watch every movie in the documentary category, but especially The Alabama Solution and The Perfect Neighbour, and spend the weekend kidding themselves, as I will, that they’ll stay up long enough to see even the first five minutes of the opening monologue. Happy Oscars!

\n
\n \"Princess\n
\n ‘Stand back, I’m a commoner!’ Photograph: Kin Cheung/AP\n
\n
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Photograph: Photograph: VCG/Getty Images","credit":"VCG/Getty Images","altText":"Chalamet smiling as he listens with his hand on an earpiece","cleanCaption":"Timothée Chalamet at the Beijing premiere of Marty Supreme this week.","cleanCredit":"Photograph: VCG/Getty Images"},"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":"Actor’s remarks about two of the dramatic arts draws a delicious backlash. Plus, Crufts brings back happy memories","showQuotedHeadline":true,"showLiveIndicator":false,"sublinks":[],"mainImage":{"urlTemplate":"https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/f3b30fd32f28d4f1a86f9ae4181d6a85ae8f240a/0_0_4240_3392/master/4240.jpg?w=#{width}&h=#{height}&q=#{quality}&fit=bounds&sig-ignores-params=true&s=1050e0519c945e690ba95c00090fbfbf","height":3392,"width":4240,"orientation":"landscape","credit":"VCG/Getty Images","altText":"Chalamet smiling as he listens with his hand on an earpiece","cleanCredit":"Photograph: VCG/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/uk-news/2026/mar/13/digested-week-geopolitics-package-holidays-collide-timothee-chalamet?dcr=apps&edition=uk"},"renderedItemBeta":{"minBridgetVersion":"1.11.1","url":"https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026/mar/13/digested-week-geopolitics-package-holidays-collide-timothee-chalamet?dcr=apps&edition=uk"},"renderedItemDebug":{"minBridgetVersion":"1.11.1","url":"https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026/mar/13/digested-week-geopolitics-package-holidays-collide-timothee-chalamet?dcr=apps&edition=uk"},"cardDesignType":"Comment","correspondingTags":[],"type":"Article","importance":0},{"title":"Saturday Night Live is surely only funny if you’re American. Can a UK spinoff really make Britain laugh?","rawTitle":"Saturday Night Live is surely only funny if you’re American. Can a UK spinoff really make Britain laugh?","item":{"trailText":"There are reasons to be sceptical. But if the sketch show’s British talent strikes the right tone, Saturday night comedy could become a family ritual, says Guardian columnist Emma Brockes","body":"

A strong contender for the most depressing four words in the English language – after “I’ve started a Substack”, obviously – is the formulation, “topical sketch comedy show”, a line that will yank many of us back to painful memories of late night Channel 4 in the 90s. British telly has never excelled at this live comedy format, or maybe, depending on your view, nowhere has. Near the end of this month, Sky is launching a UK version of Saturday Night Live, that most revered of American staples and a holy grail for US comedy writers going back to the 1970s. If it seems like a strange import, it may be that, as the dusty original fields kicks from all sides, SNL UK has a prime opportunity to reboot the franchise.

\n

The curious question for observers is whether there are things so rooted in their original context they can’t be expected to travel. We’ve seen a lot of this going in the other direction, with disastrous US remakes of British TV shows, such as Skins (cancelled after one season), The Inbetweeners (ditto) and any British show featuring actors who look ballpark normal, recast with Americans who look like Kristi Noem. (For my money, even the US version of The Office didn’t really work, although nine seasons and everyone else say otherwise). US television imports to the UK, meanwhile, have mostly been gameshows or reality TV, so SNL is a newish experiment. And yet the kneejerk response to news of its commissioning – see John Oliver, calling it a “terrible idea,” per GQ’s reporting – has been overwhelmingly negative.

\n

It shouldn’t be. After all, SNL is a broad format; if the UK version follows the American original, it’ll be a Saturday night show written from scratch every week by a large team of writers plus the 11 comedians who play all the parts, and an opening monologue by a big-name celebrity. For those who haven’t seen SNL, you may be familiar with details of the show from its proxies – the terrifyingly quick turnaround so faithfully and tediously documented by Aaron Sorkin in his big flop of the mid-2000s, Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, and with much more success by Tina Fey in 30 Rock.

\n
\n \"Amy\n
\n Amy Poehler, Rachel Dratch and Tina Fey on SNL in 2002. Photograph: Dana Edelson/NBCU\n
\n
\n

A bigger challenge for the UK cast, which has been drafted after a huge, nationwide casting call, is that at this point in SNL’s 51-year history, the show’s appeal is almost entirely rooted in nostalgia. Anyone who spends more than five minutes in the US is guaranteed to run into a Gen X American who would like to share their memories of watching SNL as a child. This will not be a short conversation. They will want to share with you their favourite sketches, cast lineups, the ones who should’ve had bigger careers after the show, the ones who were wrongly overlooked at audition stage, some trenchant Thoughts About Lorne Michaels, and a lot of SNL lore that can only be matched for passion in this country by Gen X chat about Bagpuss, or someone reciting the shipping forecast. (If you’re very unlucky, the American monologue on SNL history will bleed into recollections of Steve Martin’s comedy albums from the 1970s, and before you know it you’ll be nodding along to observations about Sid Caesar.)

\n

Here’s the thing: I’ve rarely met a British person living in the US who has actually found SNL funny. It’s hard to say why this is. The comedians have always been top notch, from Kristen Wiig and Amy Poehler to Fey and Will Ferrell. And going back to the 1980s, Billy Crystal and Eddie Murphy. But – and I say this as someone who loves Americana – it’s somehow just very, very American. It doesn’t matter how pointed the comedy is, behind the sharpness of the material resides a kind of innocence bordering on indulgence. The brutally high turnover, meanwhile, means that a lot of the sketches are middling at best. And to those who didn’t grow up with the show, the bad wig-based nostalgia appears dated. I imagine this may be part of the appeal to the British producers; the opportunity it affords to invite British families to sit down on a Saturday night and create our own tradition.

\n

Ultimately, its success will come down to the ratio of good material to middling, and how willing the audience is to sit through mild amusement – which can be soothing when you know all the characters! – to get to the occasional out-of-the-park sketch. About once every 10 years there’s an SNL sketch so on the money that you have to watch it hundreds of times and everyone talks about it for ever. The last great one was, to my mind, Kate McKinnon’s Fire Island sketch from 2017. Nine years on and my friends and I still collapse hopelessly with laughter if anyone says: “That’s a wolf sanctuary, all right.” Let’s see what the Brits can do.

\n","atomsCSS":[],"shouldHideReaderRevenue":false,"bodyImages":[{"urlTemplate":"https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/31f03b21e2b162090d41a23707102ad7e9230eb5/0_0_3000_1955/master/3000.jpg?w=#{width}&h=#{height}&q=#{quality}&fit=bounds&sig-ignores-params=true&s=7c173f45e9c7f8c4a867d47ed2f47b23","height":1955,"width":3000,"orientation":"landscape","caption":"Amy Poehler, Rachel Dratch and Tina Fey on SNL in 2002. Photograph: Photograph: Dana Edelson/NBCU","credit":"Dana Edelson/NBCU","altText":"Amy Poehler, Rachel Dratch and Tina Fey on SNL in 2002.","cleanCaption":"Amy Poehler, Rachel Dratch and Tina Fey on SNL in 2002.","cleanCredit":"Photograph: Dana Edelson/NBCU"}],"discussionId":"/p/x4htb9","section":"Opinion","id":"commentisfree/2026/mar/12/saturday-night-live-funny-american-uk-spinoff-britain","displayImages":[{"urlTemplate":"https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/99deda2498c01007352f5311e87ae60b62e64642/736_0_5905_4724/master/5905.jpg?w=#{width}&h=#{height}&q=#{quality}&fit=bounds&sig-ignores-params=true&s=1fe767b8320f0159d27348cf69703758","height":4724,"width":5905,"orientation":"landscape","caption":"The SNL UK cast. Photograph: Photograph: Charlotte Rutherford/Sky UK","credit":"Charlotte Rutherford/Sky UK","altText":"The SNL UK cast.","cleanCaption":"The SNL UK cast.","cleanCredit":"Photograph: Charlotte Rutherford/Sky UK"}],"designType":"Comment","shouldHideAdverts":false,"standFirst":"

There are reasons to be sceptical. But if the sketch show’s British talent strikes the right tone, Saturday night comedy could become a family ritual

","webPublicationDate":"2026-03-12T10:00:10Z","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":"2026-03-12T15:55:15Z","pillar":{"id":"pillar/opinion","name":"Opinion"},"permutiveTracking":{"id":"commentisfree/2026/mar/12/saturday-night-live-funny-american-uk-spinoff-britain","title":"Saturday Night Live is surely only funny if you’re American. 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Unforgivably glib? Perhaps. But this stylised drama is the show we all need right now, says Guardian columnist Emma Brockes","body":"

If you are looking for a break in the clouds from this terrible news cycle, can I direct you towards Love Story, the nine-part series executive-produced – but crucially, not written! – by Ryan Murphy, which documents the love and untimely deaths of John F Kennedy Jr and his wife, Carolyn Bessette. You might think this isn’t for you, that it’ll be too tabloidy or that you’re not interested in JFK Jr. But while Love Story, which takes us back to a very particular version of early-1990s New York, might not seem like the show we want right now, it is exactly the show that we need.

\n

This probably sounds like a heartless summary of a true story that ends in the terrible deaths of two young people (in 1999, while flying his wife and her sister from New Jersey to Martha’s Vineyard, Kennedy crashed his light aircraft, killing everyone on board). But that tragic end only suffuses the preceding nine hours of storytelling with a kind of pearly, nostalgic light, just the thing to see off the iron-grey wash of today’s reality. The New York of Love Story isn’t the city’s current iteration, with its impossible rents and charmless finance bros ruining downtown. Nor is it the 1990s New York of, say, Home Alone 2, in which Donald Trump strides through the Plaza Hotel and Central Park is a crime-ridden disaster.

\n

Instead, Love Story takes place in the stylised New York of Kate Moss, freshly discovered at Calvin Klein; it’s lunch at the Four Seasons and dinner at Indochine. It’s an excellent Paul Anthony Kelly as JFK Jr, standing in the street using one of those half-enclosed pay phones, and Sarah Pidgeon, excellent as Bessette, blowing smoke through the three-inch crack of a window. Before this show, I harboured absolutely no nostalgia for smoking in offices or anywhere else. Now, apparently, scenes of people blowing smoke indoors make me sigh with sadness. (Ditto the wearing of black capri pants and loafers.)

\n

I wasn’t aware of being nostalgic for the Kennedy dynasty, either. But there’s something weirdly moving about looking back to an era in which the worst thing a Kennedy did was wear his baker boy cap backwards and fail his New York bar exam – rather than, say, back vitamins as a treatment for measles during a surge of cases in the US.

\n
\n \"Paul\n
\n Paul Anthony Kelly as John F Kennedy Jr and Naomi Watts as Jackie Kennedy Onassis in Love Story. Photograph: Eric Liebowitz/FX\n
\n
\n

This misty-eyed feeling is part of the broader revival of 90s nostalgia being pushed by gen Z yearning for what looks, to them, like a simpler, pre-internet time when people managed to meet up with each other without sending 500 texts documenting each stage of their journey, and you could ground yourself in the tangible pleasures of vinyl LPs. As such, people have been losing their minds about Love Story since it launched on Hulu and Disney+ last month. Here’s the New York Times this week with a handy guide to Bessette’s wardrobe. British Vogue has gone deep on the show’s costumes which, after paparazzi shots of cheaply and inaccurately dressed cast members were widely shared and mocked when the show first started filming, ended up being sourced via eBay, Etsy and a callout to fashion collectors. Real estate websites have gone in hard on the production design, while the soundtrack – highlights include Lenny Kravitz, En Vogue and Björk – keeps trending. When, in episode four, Madonna’s 1994 anthem Secret starts playing, you may cry for more innocent times.

\n

Also key to its charm: Love Story understands the sensibilities of those most likely to love it and gives us exactly what we need. Namely, Naomi Watts, aged up to play Jackie O in her dying days, landing a performance somewhere between Edie Beale and Moira Rose from Schitt’s Creek. In one scene, Watts, cigarette in hand, sways gently along to Richard Burton’s finale from the 1960 Broadway production of Camelot while gazing at an oil painting of her late husband JFK. “It was supposed to be both of us that day in Dallas!” she whispers and exits left, via hearse, to the strains of Ave Maria.

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Of course, not everyone loves it. Jack Schlossberg, nephew of JFK Jr and the latest pretender to the JFK throne, who is running for a congressional seat in New York, doesn’t like the show at all. He told CBS: “If you want to know someone who’s never met anyone in my family, knows nothing about us, talk to Ryan Murphy.” One absolutely sympathises. Shows like Love Story are monstrously presumptuous and unforgivably glib. And yet, give it one episode and I defy you not to swoon and keep watching.

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It’s monstrously presumptuous? Unforgivably glib? Perhaps. But this stylised drama is the show we all need right now

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