Daniel Blumberg hands me his Oscar, as surprised as he is chuffed. Bloody hell, it’s heavy. Is it real gold? “I wish it was,” says the latest winner of best original score, for The Brutalist. (Apparently, it’s gold-plated bronze.) He puts it back on a shabby wooden shelf alongside his Bafta, also for The Brutalist, … Read more
What is home? What does it mean to belong? For Eritrea-born artist, activist and chef Ficre Ghebreyesus, who fled war in his homeland at the age of 16 and landed on US shores in 1981, these were vital questions that played out in his vibrant, often dreamlike canvases. “Painting was the miracle, the final act … Read more
Chanel DaSilva has always been a dancer. “I felt completely free,” she says of her first class. “I felt at home. Like I was doing exactly what I was supposed to be doing. And it’s weird to know that at the age of three.” The New Yorker, 38, is a rising star choreographer in the … Read more
Author Torrey Peters’ mind has imagined everything from a future virus that turns everyone trans to a crossdressing fetishist in a poreless silicone suit, but the premise of her new novel, Stag Dance, sounded too bizarre even for her. “If I hadn’t read it in a book I wouldn’t have believed it,” she told me … Read more
‘What Manchester does today,” Benjamin Disraeli once proclaimed, “the world does tomorrow.” So begins the breathless promotional video for Manchester United’s proposed £2bn football stadium, summoning the words of the Victorian prime minister to launch Norman Foster’s vision for a “mixed-use mini city” beneath a gigantic, three-spired tent. The only thing is, the world has … Read more
The journalist Andrey Sapozhnikov of Novaya Gazeta Europe, the independent Russian newspaper that now operates from Latvia in order to avoid censorship by Putin’s regime, recently asked Neil Tennant of the Pet Shop Boys: “You have been actively commenting on Russian politics since 2013 and the Pussy Riot case, and you are arguably one of … Read more
After a characteristically slow start, we are now halfway through this year’s season of The White Lotus. From what we know of the last two seasons, this means that things are about to get very crazy very quickly. To use season one as a way marker, we are now approximately the runtime of The Brutalist … Read more
Since 2021, Spotify has published its Loud & Clear report, corralling data points to show how much money is being earned by artists on the streaming service. There is much talk of “transparency” – perhaps the most duplicitous word in the music industry’s lexicon – but this year’s report feels very different, coming as it … Read more
Lucius Malfoy just showed us his wand. In the fourth and latest episode of The White Lotus, viewers saw more of actor Jason Isaacs than they expected. Several inches more. We screamed in unison with his character’s grossed-out children. You didn’t get that at Hogwarts. As wealthy patriarch Timothy Ratliff, he has been steadily coming … Read more
In the late 1970s, whenever young Birmingham reggae band Steel Pulse performed their song Ku Klux Klan, the group’s vocalists would theatrically wear white KKK hoods onstage to illustrate the song’s lyrics, which excoriated the Klan’s violence, racism and cowardice. British audiences loved it and understood the power of a black band making such a … Read more