Ed Sheeran: Azizam review – a cross-cultural Persian experiment … which sounds incredibly English | Ed Sheeran

Ed Sheeran’s new single arrives at an interesting point in his career. His last albums, 2023’s Subtract and Autumn Variations, felt not unlike a riff on Taylor Swift’s pandemic-era Folklore and Evermore: two albums released in the same year, produced by the National’s Aaron Dessner, a little woodier and more understated in tone than usual. … Read more

Chaka Khan on Prince, poetry and wild, wonderful nights: ‘No one’s done anything but craziness at 4am’ | Chaka Khan

Can you remember the precise moment you realised you had a gift as a vocalist? SalfordRed64I was doing a talent show at the Burning Spear in Chicago. My group, the Crystallettes, graced many a nightclub stage in competitions, and every time either us or [fellow Chicago girl group] the Emotions would win. But I remember … Read more

‘Dead white men are what I’m legitimately interested in’: film’s foremost podcaster on resurrecting the classics | Film

‘When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” So runs the most famous line from John Ford’s elegiac 1962 western The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. The 44-year-old historian Karina Longworth has other ideas. The former LA Weekly film critic launched her podcast, You Must Remember This, in 2014, setting out to tell “the secret … Read more

Mo Gilligan review – riotous red-carpet relatability from a big-hearted comic | Stage

There are shaggy dog stories, then there’s the centrepiece anecdote of Mo Gilligan’s touring show, which narrates more or less in real time a recent glitzy night out on the Hollywood tiles. It’s quite the gambit for a standup known for his boy-next-door approachability to dedicate half an hour to this tale of red-carpet excess. … Read more

From android to assassin: Daryl Hannah’s 10 best films – ranked! | Daryl Hannah

10. The Pope of Greenwich Village (1984) Looking as though she has strayed from another genre, Hannah plays Mickey Rourke’s girlfriend, a leggy aerobics instructor who keeps getting undressed. At least she’s more fun than Rourke and an insanely posturing Eric Roberts as deadbeat cousins ripping off the mob: roles originally written for Robert De … Read more

John Thornton, Venture Capitalist Who Founded The Texas Tribune, Dies at 59

John Thornton, a financier who leveraged his wealth and influence to embark on the seemingly quixotic mission of reviving local journalism in a time of crisis, by founding The Texas Tribune, a seminal regional nonprofit news organization, and the American Journalism Project, which supports local digital newsrooms around the country, died on Saturday in Austin, … Read more

Plasticine men and giant goddess women: why Ken Kiff’s brilliant, bizarre art is getting a second look | Art

Ken Kiff was a brilliant odd one out in post-second world war British painting. In works that sing with colour and texture, he crafted wibbly-wobbly fables in which eyes and noses slide around faces, animals tower over mountains and dreaming, desiring, questing men are rendered poignantly goofy. Looking to modernist greats such as Klee and … Read more

NaNoWriMo showed me I could knuckle down and write a book – and though it’s closing, I hope the idea behind it lives on | Books

It seems budding writers can make alternative plans for this coming November. Maybe take a holiday, learn to juggle, work on their chess openings … or anything, anything, that doesn’t involve writing an entire novel in a month. I am, of course, referring to the sad news that the online writing community NaNoWriMo is calling … Read more