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We’re asking people from around the world to nominate their favourite spineless species for our third Invertebrate of the Year competition

Step aside World Cup heroes, there’s a bigger global competition in town. The whistle has been blown to launch the third Invertebrate of the Year contest.

We want you to nominate your favourite spineless creature for the hugely popular annual Guardian jamboree which celebrates the wonder and importance of the world’s invertebrates.

Mexico have won four games without conceding a goal. How is excitement building before the big last-16 match?

Well, Mexico fans, it’s looking good. You have glided into the last 16 of the World Cup with ease. Four games, four wins and not a single goal conceded. And you have finally broken your habit of losing in the first knockout stage at World Cups. Your win against Ecuador this week was your first in a knockout tie since you beat Bulgaria at the Azteca Stadium in 1986. And your reward? Another big match at the Azteca. This time it’s England in the last 16.

Are you feeling confident? What is the mood in the country – how is excitement building in Mexico City before the match? Are you enjoying being one of the three co-hosts? Has the experience exceeded your expectations? What is your prediction for the England game? How far will your team go? And who will win the tournament?

Japan has ambitious targets to increase overseas visitor numbers, but there are growing concerns about overtourism. One possible answer is two-tier pricing

Perched dramatically on a hilltop in western Japan, Himeji castle’s striking white-plastered, tiered roofs earned it the moniker “white heron castle”. The sweeping 17th-century complex is regarded as the finest existing samurai fortress, and attracts more than one and a half million visitors a year.

But as Japan seeks to manage greater numbers of foreign tourists, Himeji is one of the attractions raising admission prices for non-residents. The World Heritage site increased its admission fee to 2,500 yen ($15.50) on 1 March, but left the price for those who live in Himeji city at 1,000 yen ($6.20).

Avi Loeb’s White House panel has asked the Pentagon for videos and files on unexplained aerial sightings

A Harvard University cosmologist who has suggested alien life forms could be sailing into the solar system disguised as meteors is leading the Trump administration’s secretive new scientific advisory panel on security risks posed by UFOs.

Avi Loeb and his hand-picked committee have already begun looking into the origins of mysterious flying craft, now known as unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP), and last month asked the Pentagon for dozens of videos, images and documents of reported encounters and incidents, the Associated Press reported.

Birthright citizenship ruling only a surface-level setback, with the court granting president’s multiple power grabs

The symbolic and high-profile defeats cannot obscure a more uncomfortable truth.

The US supreme court – a vital cog in the US constitutional framers’ vision of an intricate system of checks and balances aimed at reining in an excessively assertive president – has made Donald Trump stronger than ever, and shows little inclination to stop.

Aiden is an unforgettable young caregiver in Walthamstow, east London, who has been looking after his mum for over half his life. Every few weeks, Aiden and other young carers get a rare night off thanks to tenacious council worker Satvinder, who fights to improve the recognition of young carers in her borough. This film joins them as they reclaim a few hours of their teenage lives back.

Is Mum OK? is released during Carers Week in the UK, a campaign that celebrates unpaid carers across the country and calls for better recognition and support for them. There are more than one million young carers in the UK – with an average age of 12 – which is the equivalent of two kids in every school class.

From a less-crowded camino and the Slovenian Alps to a stunning river trail and Ireland’s remote Beara peninsula

Distance up to 74 miles
Duration 3-9 days

I thought I knew what it was to be a good citizen. But after seeing him scramble up a ditch, beaming with pride at his rubbish-filled bag, I realised what it actually involves

I’ve always thought of myself as a good person: a good citizen and a good member of my community – at least in the ethical sense of the word. I presumed being good required refraining from harming the world and the people within it. An example of this being that I never litter.

However, when I moved home to Staffordshire after graduating in the summer of 2025, my understanding of what it means to be a good citizen – what it means to be “good” altogether – changed significantly.

While most hospitality venues are struggling, there has been an enormous rise in ‘competitive socialising’. But why? And could I find the answer while dressed in a prison jumpsuit and drinking a daiquiri?

British hospitality is in crisis. In the first quarter of 2026, three hospitality sites closed every day, while one in five remaining businesses fear collapse over the next year owing to rises in tax and employment costs. For those venues struggling to make ends meet in London in particular, there is the added worry of increasingly stringent licensing rules and influential lobby groups making once-thriving areas such as Soho a ghost town after 11pm.

And yet one hospitality niche seems to be bucking the trend: themed bars. Blending booze with, say, axe-throwing, darts, immersive theatre or adult-sized ball pits, these experiential venues have seen a boom in recent years. A report from Savills estate agents found a 58% increase in “competitive socialising” venue openings in 2025 compared with 2018, while another survey found one in three adults had visited one of these venues in the UK in 2024-25. Photo-friendly interiors have made many of them a hit on social media, too.

Australian nicotine consumption is on the rise, the illegal tobacco trade is booming and cigarettes have returned to pop culture – and experts are worried

Have you heard? Smoking is back. Or rather, have you seen?

Kylie Jenner lit up on the cover of Vanity Fair. Madonna and Hailey Bieber posed with cigarettes in Interview. Cool girl fashion brands Khaite and Dôen have been handing out branded packs at parties.

This antioxidant may enhance the protection sunscreens provide, but it is no substitute for them

Sunscreen does two important jobs. It is largely used for its UVB protection benefits – blocking the rays that cause sunburn and are a major contributor to the development of skin cancer. But it also blocks UVA radiation, filtering out the rays that lead to signs of ageing.

Vitamin C does neither of these things, says Rosalind Simpson, a professor of dermatology at the University of Nottingham. That said, it is thought to help prevent sun damage in a different way.

The hotter it gets, the faster our bodies lose water. Obviously, we need to replace it – but is anything better than plain H₂O? And does timing matter? Here’s what the science says

Hydration is important. In temperatures like those we’re increasingly seeing in much of the world, sweating can be the only way for our bodies to cool down, and our thirst isn’t always the best indicator of how much water we’ve lost or need. The consequences of not being sufficiently hydrated as temperatures creep towards the 40s can be severe, and can kick in much faster than most people realise. The good news is that remembering to drink plenty of water at regular intervals throughout the day will be enough for most people to avoid the worst. But if you’d like to understand why dehydration is so dangerous, whether you really need extra electrolytes, or if a cup of tea really can cool you down, read on.

To start with, it’s helpful to understand that our bodies are producing heat – and therefore losing water – all the time. “All the cells in our body are constantly using fuel for energy for various different processes, whether that’s movement or just staying alive,” says Dr Lewis James, a lecturer in sport, exercise and health sciences at Loughborough University. “About 75 to 80% of the energy that we use appears as heat.” If we didn’t have any way of dissipating this heat, then even lying on the couch would see your body temperature rise about 1.3C in a single hour (already enough to make you noticeably feverish) – but of course, we do. Normally, we lose a decent amount of heat through a combination of convection and radiation: the blood vessels in our skin dilate, allowing the blood to be cooled by the outside air. The problem is that when the external temperature goes up, this process becomes less effective and eventually stops working altogether. At this point, our main way of losing heat is through sweating: our bodies produce tiny droplets of warm water mixed with trace minerals, which (usually) evaporate on contact with the air, drawing heat away from the skin in the process. And as we rely more on sweating, it’s increasingly important to replace the fluids our bodies are losing.

We are surrounded by sights, sounds, smells, tastes and textures – and most of it barely registers. Time to slow down and take it all in …

What was the last thing that made your body feel good? Maybe it was the first sip of tea or blast of water in your morning shower, the warm silk of a cat’s back arching to meet your fingers, pulling on a T-shirt softened by repeated washing or the moment you align the numbers on your bike lock and it releases with a weighty clonk? Maybe somewhere you encountered a paper coffee cup with a cardboard sleeve embossed with ridges that offered “a surprisingly gratifying tactile delight”? Maybe you’ve never considered paper cups much; I hadn’t before I read that in Ian Bogost’s The Small Stuff: The Sensory Enchantment of Everyday Life.

The Small Stuff is a manifesto for tuning into the tiny opportunities for gratification being human offers, even in increasingly frictionless, AI-enabled, automated lives. Starting from that paper cup, Bogost – an interdisciplinary academic at Washington University, video game designer and writer – explores how we’ve become what he calls “dematerialised” and how to fight back, analysing the idiosyncratically pleasing qualities of plastic drinking fountain tumblers, using “steel-crank-roll paper towel dispensers” and – don’t tell me this one doesn’t resonate – peeling the plastic protective film off, in his case, a wooden knife block (I have happy memories of doing this on our microwave door).

Reckless exercise can lead to exertional rhabdomyolysis, a condition that has risen due to the popularity of high-intensity workouts

In January 2025, I attended my first bootcamp class.

I had spent the day hunched over my laptop, anxious and craving an intense workout that would dispel my worries. I booked the class at a nearby gym, and the five-star reviews promised the all-consuming exercise I wanted: “Militant style instructor, but very motivating,” read one. Another: “Hardest workout of my life; extremely rewarding.”

The cost of living is putting pressure on relationships – and preventing some couples from properly splitting up

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The separate sleeping arrangement started seven years before the marriage finished. When Mary-Ann’s* hot flushes turned the bed into a furnace, her husband, Bill, moved into another bedroom. For the next two years there was some travel between the bedrooms for the purposes of intimacy. Then that stopped too.

The distance grew after each argument; they took separate holidays and, when Bill inherited money, he separated it from their pooled finances. Mary-Ann says it was clear Bill’s mind was no longer in the marriage – he was what is termed “quiet quitting”. But she acknowledges she was drifting away too, focused on a demanding new job.

First Liza Shaw and Rohan were housemates, then they had a casual relationship. But a protest at Woomera would deepen their emotional connection

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I met Rohan in 1998 in Lismore, New South Wales, where we were both going to university. Before that, I’d noticed him around town in his sarong and peacock feather earrings. He was distinctive and slightly dandyish, sometimes wearing dresses on campus. I had another partner at the time but our mutual friend introduced us, and Rohan and I became housemates.

We bonded living together and hosting dinner parties, where we’d talk about life and politics well into the night. I was intrigued by his friends. One time Rohan invited a member of the Black Panthers to come and stay at our house.

You say you don’t put him under pressure, but he seems to feel it. Could you be overcompensating for your initial reluctance to have children?

My husband and I have one son, in his late 20s. We’ve always been devoted to him, keep in touch on a weekly basis and see him about once a month (he has a busy job and has recently started a new relationship, which seems to be making him very happy).

I never really wanted children, possibly due to my traumatic childhood: an absent, mentally ill father; and a single, emotionally imbalanced mother who made me the centre of her life. When my husband talked about having children, I gave it careful consideration and decided in the end to give it a go. Once our son was born, I embraced motherhood fully. We both adore him.

Graham and Josephine were friends for years, but after their spouses died they discovered a mutual attraction – and a fondness for adventurous sex

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Our sexual preferences cover everything from vanilla to being tied up and spanked

Brollies are becoming year-round must-haves, as designers from Burberry to Blunt cater to people ducking out of the sun

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A bottle of water and a handheld fan are regularly deployed to keep cool while out and about in hot weather. With temperatures reaching record levels for June, though, a new heatwave accessory has emerged: the sunbrella.

On high streets around the country, people wielding umbrellas to shield themselves from the sun have become a common sight. On Thursday, as the Austrian Grand Prix declared a heat hazard, Lewis Hamilton was spotted in the paddock holding a Ferrari red umbrella that matched his race suit. And they’re popping up on catwalks, too. At the Dior show during Paris fashion week on Wednesday, guests including the actors James Marsden and Mike Faist were handed large cream umbrellas to help ease their discomfort as temperatures hit 38C.

As Andy Burnham stuck to his ‘cool dad’ look while the UK sweltered, many in the Paris fashion pack did the same

For many, dressing for an extreme heatwave means wearing as little as possible. But for some men, not even record-breaking temperatures can dissuade them from pulling on their favourite pair of jeans.

This week as temperatures in the UK rose sharply on the back of the climate crisis, Andy Burnham stuck to his tried and tested “cool dad” combination of dark jeans with a dark blue (not black as he pointed out to Kemi Badenoch) T-shirt as he made his way to London to be sworn in as MP for Makerfield.

Once dismissed as frivolous, spots are having the last laugh – popping up on celebs, catwalks and all over the algorithm

For years, stripes have been the thinking fashion person’s choice. The style equivalent of remembering to charge your phone overnight. Bracing like sea air, with a top note of French intellectualism. In stripes, you can captain a ship and feast on oysters.

Spots and dots are much less serious. From a distance, they could be smiley face emojis. Spots bounce and dance, whereas stripes are rigid. They are spontaneous and giddy, where stripes are rational. The polo scene in Pretty Woman, when Julia Roberts wears that chocolate polka dot dress, is an iconic fashion moment not just because it’s a great dress, but because the dress itself does so much storytelling. Those polka dots set Roberts apart as vivacious, adorable. The buttoned-up crowd around her does not stand a chance.

At Sydney’s Hair festival, professionals from the hair industry put their locks on show – and jostle for a view of the live cutting competition
Isabella Lee, photos by Jessica Hromas

At the entrance of the Hair festival in Sydney’s ICC exhibition centre in late June, mannequin heads with luscious locks silently cast me as a fraud. I’m no hairdresser and this is an industry-only event for hairdressers, barbers and stylists. Rainbow cheetah-print buzz cuts, sea-green rat-tails and blunt mullets – on human heads – pass me by as I make my way into the centre of it all.

Bass-heavy music echoes around the hall and the crowd heaves with excitement as a large timer counts down to the final 10 seconds. Pushing through the crowd, I’m trying to get a view of the most popular event of the day, the live hair cutting competition.

British berries always sparkle in desserts like this French almond sponge, but their hidden talent lies in savoury dishes

British berries have a secret; we tend to reach for them in crumbles, fools and jammy things, but their real superpower is their tartness – it’s the key to their versatility. Think of them less as fruit and more as a condiment: something to cut through richness and balance a dish, in much the same way that a good vinegar might. I’ve long had a love affair with British berries – childhood summers spent picking blackberries from the hedgerows for my grandmother’s apple and blackberry pie started it all – but over the years I’ve become increasingly reluctant to confine them just to dessert. Let these be your permission to do the same.

Effervescent, inexpensive and with a moderate ABV, Portugal’s ‘green wine’ is the ideal accompaniment to garden get-togethers and alfresco dining

If there is a better wine for summer frolics than vinho verde, I don’t know it. Translating literally to “green wine”, the wines from the region known as Vinho Verde DOC in northern Portugal aren’t actually green; the verde is metaphorical. These are young wines, inexperienced wines; their hearts haven’t been broken, they are joyful and fizzy with unlived life, like a Tangfastics-guzzling tween who has just discovered the Beach Boys in her parents’ record collection.

I write this in the aftermath of the hottest UK days on record. If you’re drinking wine on sultry days such as those, chances are you’ll want something refreshing. Thanks to the Portuguese region’s Atlantic maritime climate – ocean breezes, cool nights, high rainfall – and (usually) well-drained granite soils, vinho verde excels at gluggability: vibrant, with high acidity, a low ABV (usually below 12%), sometimes a touch of spritz, and notes of ripe lime and orchard fruits.

Lower East Side gems and bars of Boston were low on pretence and high on personality. Plus, southern soul, Jewish delis and, of course, apple pie to celebrate America’s 250th anniversary

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A dark emerald puck on a white plate – our spoons disturbed its surface to break it down to its crystal components. Bright shards of green ice released their flavour as they melted on our tongues – vegetal, flowery, herbal, slightly honeyed and a lot saltier then any dessert should be. We didn’t know what to expect when we ordered the savoury borage-and-lovage sorbet; we didn’t expect to be transported to a place of infinite green – a virgin forest, a field in spring, an alpine valley. We were in Estela (pictured top), a restaurant on the Lower East Side of Manhattan that is a favourite of ours. It is just as good as it was when we first went there, almost a decade ago. Around us, the understated room was full of achingly stylish people. Outside on the street, two shirtless older men were playing checkers on a bench while two girls in skintight dresses did TikTok poses on a nearby stoop. Neither group seemed disturbed when a woman in a bathrobe suddenly began to shout at a garbage bag and kick it with force.

We were there to promote our latest book, and had not been since before Covid, so we did not know what to expect. There is no doubt that the US is in a very strange moment in its history, and from Britain things look scary and confusing. But we learned, yet again, that things seem different when you are up close, and that food is always the best, quickest and deepest way to connect to people. For instance, a breakfast TV presenter in Chicago secretly confessed that no one in the city really likes deep-dish pizza; instead, we were sent to a farm-to-table restaurant that served us delicious Greek-style pasta.

Sarawak peppercorns add their woody, citrus aroma to shellfish steamed in wine and served with crisp fries

Black Sarawak peppercorns have a soft, woody smell, like a forest floor mixed with lemon zest. Those things come through in the taste, too, along with a fruity sweetness. But then peppercorns, the tiny black balls I take for granted (and often forget about), are berries, which is something I didn’t know until I did a pepper tasting at my local spice shop, Emporio delle Spezie.

I also learned that the spice I have always considered one thing, black pepper, is in fact a species, Piper nigrum, a flowering vine in the vast Piperaceae family. Native to south-west India and Sri Lanka, Piper nigrum spread, taking on different characteristics according to wherever it took root: Sarawak pepper, Penja pepper, Lampong pepper, Kampot pepper, Malabar pepper, Madagascar pepper …

As Taylor and Travis tie the knot, lean into the Swiftie mania with a nod (subtly) to red, white and blue, and add bejewelled accessories

Millennium Square, Leeds
As they tee up a long-awaited third album, the deep south band are variously slick and raw as they ruminate on overcoming tough times

‘Long time, no see,” declares Brittany Howard, stepping on stage to a rapturous welcome, as Alabama Shakes return from a hiatus. It’s been 10 years since the multiple Grammy-winning blues-soul-rock outfit from the deep south last played in the UK and 11 since their most recent album – though a third is being teed up for later in the year.

If there’s any rustiness, it isn’t evident as they glide straight into the smooth but punchy Rise to the Sun. It sets the tone for an evening in which the group can do slick and groove-locked songs as vividly as they do raw and raspy ones.

Plymouth retrospective of artist, who died in 2018, aims to ‘champion and celebrate the power of the imagination’

She spoke about indulging in colour, feasting on beauty, feeling a little giddy when drinking in glorious hues and textures – and not searching too deeply for meaning.

So in these gloomy times, a major retrospective of the work of the artist Gillian Ayres in her adopted Devon homeland may be just the job.

Lead vocalist of Village People, the American disco group famed for their hits YMCA, In the Navy and Go West

Victor Willis, who has died aged 74 after suffering from “a short but aggressive illness”, was the lead vocalist of the disco group Village People, and the most instantly memorable member of this most flamboyant of combos. Willis would often perform onstage wearing the uniform of a policeman or a naval officer, while his bandmates dressed as a cowboy, a construction worker, a GI, a leather-clad biker or a Native American chief.

The idea, conceived by the group’s svengalis, Jacques Morali and Henri Belolo, was that they would represent a range of American male stereotypes.

CrazySexyCool, the celebrated playwright’s new show in DC, is a vibrant love letter to the hits and sisterhood of the R&B trio

CrazySexyCool, an ambitious new musical about the visionary 90s trio TLC at Arena Stage in Washington DC, aspires to make good on its title and then some. Crammed with platinum sing-alongs and tabloid-chronicled plot twists, it follows the legendary girl group – Lisa “Left Eye” Lopes, Rozonda “Chilli” Thomas and Tionne “T-Boz” Watkins – through more than a decade of success and struggle, resulting in a teeming production that includes piles of era-defining R&B hits, deep racks of vintage Cross Colours T-shirts and a claw-foot bathtub filled with Nikes set aflame. At its most outrageous, CrazySexyCool seems to be testing the tensile strength of the jukebox musical itself.

Then again, this is TLC. The truth was outrageous. And that makes for a busy, dizzying, detail-minded show. Throughout the various dramas unfolding onstage, the musical’s three leads – Holli’ Gabrielle Conway as T-Boz, Jade Milan as Left Eye, Stoney B Woods as Chilli – exude a poise that feels as cool and congenial as the real TLC did when they ruled the radio three decades ago. At a weeknight performance of CrazySexyCool in late June, audience members seemed as if they had been reunited with old friends, singing, laughing, shouting affirmations and dancing in their seats.

As football fans revel in the real world tournament, its digital counterparts continue to stumble in capturing the ​hyped up ​atmosphere

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I come with a warning to all football fans: if you’ve been enjoying the World Cup enough to think, “I’d like to re-enact this on a football video game”, do not go to Netflix and play Fifa World Cup: Launch Edition, the officially licensed game of the tournament, which streams via your smart TV or computer. Developed by the virtually unknown Delphi Interactive, it’s a juddering, dated calamity, with sluggish controls (via your phone, once you’ve downloaded the app) and commentary courtesy of Clive Tyldesley that delivers all the excitement of a robotic train station announcement.

Until this, it was largely agreed that the worst World Cup football game in history was World Cup Carnival, the first official Fifa tie-in, which was released on various home computers in 1986. Publisher US Gold thought it had a deal with the Manchester studio Ocean Software to repurpose its acclaimed title Match Day, but the agreement fell through. With three months to go before Mexico 86, US Gold was forced to effectively rebadge a dire 1984 sim, World Cup Football, by the fading developer Artic. To add some value to the package, the game was released in a fancy big box complete with a fixtures chart, a World Cup facts poster and some flag stickers. Nobody was fooled – the World Cup Carnival was a critical and commercial disaster.

The blockbuster launch is expected to dwarf the box office takings of the year’s biggest movies with one industry analyst predicting it could make $1bn within an hour

It is, quite simply, the most anticipated piece of entertainment since the Star Wars prequels and now, at last, you can reserve a copy. At midnight last night, Rockstar opened preorders on Grand Theft Auto VI, the latest title in the epic open-world gangster adventure series, five months before its 19 November release date on PS5 and Xbox Series S/X.

Prices have also been confirmed, with the standard edition costing $80 in the US, £70 in the UK, and €80 in Europe. An Ultimate Edition (£90/€100/$100) will include exclusive in-game cars, clothes and weapons – the developer has confirmed that there will also be in-game stores that are only open to Ultimate owners. Anyone who pre-orders the game will get a Vintage Vice City pack filled with 80s apparel and other nostalgic items, which look to be straight out of Don Johnson’s Miami Vice wardrobe.

Normal Golf Game takes a tiresomely easy genre and makes it infernally difficult. Which deserves a round of applause

I have always struggled playing golf. I wish I didn’t. It’s a beautiful game in concept. A leisurely walk in the sunshine, slapping a ball around, sandwiches and beer consumed during and after play. Sure, you have to dress like Huggy Bear from Starsky and Hutch, and getting membership of an actual club is more complex than joining the Freemasons (although many offer a two for one deal with this), but you don’t have to be fit, you don’t have to even run. It is the only outdoor sport where a fat dad can be the best in the world.

The premise couldn’t be simpler: get the ball in the hole. But there is nothing worse in sport than knowing what you have to do and not being able to do it. Just ask amateur parachutists.

A preview of the forthcoming sci-fi game from Gareth Damian Martin showcases their unmistakable talent for innovation and game design

Over the past decade, an impression has taken root among gamers that any real creativity and originality in the industry is to be found in the indie, rather than mainstream, sector. Gareth Damian Martin can claim some responsibility for that. Their first game, 2020’s In Other Waters, merged sci-fi and underwater xenobiology in a uniquely calming and thought-provoking manner, while Citizen Sleeper (2022) and Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector (2025) were full-blown sci-fi epics with ultraminimal aesthetics and a rare intelligence.

Martin has broken with tradition by unveiling their next game, Signet City, far in advance of its 2027 launch. Set in a dystopian monochrome city, it’s a narrative role-playing adventure with a curious first-person perspective. “You play as a parasite,” says Martin. “And it felt natural that it should be a game where you see the world through the eyes of your hosts, very literally. You wake up in the mind of a person called Sid at the same time as she’s waking up in the river of a city. You’re coming to understand what you are, why it is that you’re in the mind of this person who doesn’t know that you’re there, along with what your capabilities are, and what the world is, through Sid.”

Queenie’s ticking biological clock drives her chaotic misadventures in this sage and funny follow-up

A gynaecological examination is a good analogy for the kind of painful self-inspection at which Queenie Jenkins excels. The heroine of Candice Carty-Williams’s 2019 debut Queenie memorably begins that novel with a medical appointment for a mystery ailment that turns out to be a miscarriage. The sequel, Queenie Is Working on It, picks up the story eight years on, with the now 33-year-old Queenie back on the gurney, this time for a fertility checkup. “I didn’t realise they did condoms for anything other than … penises,” Queenie observes lamely as the unsmiling doctor sheaths a probe. Life has changed, but in many ways, Queenie has not.

Carty-Williams’s first novel about a stumbling Jamaican-British woman living in London, navigating romantic disaster and a mental health crisis, was a breakout bestseller. Reassuringly, her keen ear for female friendships – the deep affection, the stubborn solidarity, the ribald humour – endures, as does her understanding of how the particular experience of race suffuses the ordinary lives of Black women. These are the qualities that made Queenie feel unique and interesting in 2019. She remains so in 2026, but your patience for the new novel rather depends on your tolerance for her continued misadventures.

JD Vance’s Christian vision is thoughtful – but impossible to square with the political company he keeps

At the heart of this strange, perhaps rather poignant, book is the biblical question: “What must I do to be saved?” Not in the crude sense of how to secure a place in heaven, but as an urgent challenge to a whole repertoire of destructive assumptions and habits endorsed by the majority culture. Vance’s famous first book, Hillbilly Elegy, chronicled, among other things, the impact of substance abuse on generations of the rural poor. It is not too much of a stretch to see this book as a vision of the modern west through the lens of addiction and its generational effects. Except, this time, it is the norms and expectations of elite modernity that are as lethal for the ambitious young professional as fentanyl is for the less privileged.

Vance offers a diagnosis that is not particularly original, but derives its force from the intensity of the personal questioning he undertook to arrive at it. The US vice president describes with clarity the pervasive mechanisms, in education and the professional and political worlds, that induct us into wanting what others want – not what we regard as inherently desirable. Most of us instinctively desire emotional security, meaningful work and, perhaps above all, hope and joy in nurturing the next generation, introducing them to a world of value and promise. One of the most telling moments in the book is the spectacularly successful young Vance’s painful bafflement when faced with the challenge of becoming a parent: “I knew exactly how to help my kid get into a good college but was woefully underprepared to make him a good man.”

Candice Carty-Williams, Patrick Freyne and Guardian readers discuss the titles they have read over the last month. Join the conversation in the comments

I just finished reading Wimmy Road Boyz by Sufiyaan Salam. I absolutely adored this book, a fantastic combination of violence and vulnerability set on Manchester’s Curry Mile. I became completely attached to the three main boys, and I loved all of the perspective shifts to different characters throughout the book. I fully weeped at the end – it was an unexpected but completely understandable ending. 10/10, everyone should read this.

Queenie Is Working on It is published on 2 July by Trapeze. To support the Guardian, order your copy from guardianbookshop.com.

From classical painting to video games, this survey of the taboo and the twisted won’t let you look away

Museums are damned if they do, damned if they don’t. Ignore the problems of the past and they’re criticised for being problematic. Rewrite their labels according to changing politics and they’re called preachy and woke. The fact is, history is filled with immoral art. But how do we know it when we see it? And what, if anything, should we be doing about it?

In her timely and punchy new book, the philosopher Daisy Dixon explores some of the most controversial artworks ever produced. She’s interested in how an artist’s character can influence their creations, and the harmful effects those creations can have on the world.

With country music festival attendances soaring and US artists selling out tours, are British and Irish audiences ready for “the full Southern experience”?

“There’s a certain magic with country music in the UK right now,” says Anna-Sophie Mertens, smiling in hi-vis from the build at State Fayre, the UK’s newest festival for country fans. It is located in Chelmsford but styled like the American South – think clapboard, rusted metal and water points disguised as retro gas stations – and this weekend, the gates will open to 50,000 country devotees.

Country is the UK’s fastest-growing genre, according to data from the Country Music Association (CMA), and has been for three years in a row. Until 2023, UK tastes leaned towards legacy acts, but now modern megastars such as Morgan Wallen, Luke Combs and Cowboy Carter-era Beyoncé have taken the wheel, reflecting a changing of the guard.

Tipped by Lorde and Billie Eilish, the New York musician twists sublime folk and chaotic synths into bewitching new shapes

At first Shane Lavers can’t get through. Then he’s on video call but I cannot speak. When we finally make a clear connection over the phone, I can hear that he’s surrounded by nature, with faint snatches of birdsong at the edge of his measured, slightly gravelly speech. The musician who performs both in and as Chanel Beads (it remains unclear even to its core members whether they’re a band or a solo project) is on location shooting a music video somewhere on the coast of North Carolina. Encountering him as a disembodied voice, never mind one competing with worldly twittering and chirping, somehow feels more fitting than it would for most other musicians.

For years, Lavers has homed in on a cryptic, panoramic sound that ricochets from catchy, shout-along rock music to flare-ups of dissonant experimental noise. If the typical payoff of a pop song is to encapsulate a clear emotional arc in three-minute, verse-chorus structures, the appeal of a Chanel Beads track is much more unwieldy. Earlier singles such as Ef, Police Scanner and Male Friendship flicker in and out of focus, establishing a ground-floor of groove, only for Lavers and his bandmates to upend it with swelling strings, chiming guitar and ear-splitting samples. Lyrically, his songwriting gathers around an unstable emotional core that is so dense in its unspoken feeling that it manages to achieve an aching kind of orbit. It’s Lavers’s great talent to handle all of that swirling intensity while keeping everything suspended in the air.

Nicky Woolf’s investigation into a rightwing YouTuber reveals much more than state interference in social media. Plus, why did a kid pretend to be Steven Spielberg’s nephew?

Lauren Southern tells journalist Nicky Woolf she feels as though she’s in a spy movie, “but the dumbest ever made, because I’m just a YouTuber”. Along with other members of the right-wing commentariat, the Canadian found herself linked with the Kremlin when a company she had worked for was revealed as a front for the Russian state. Her candour is striking, as Woolf’s investigation unfolds across six uneasy chapters. Hannah J Davies
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After years spent chasing trends like trap and Latin pop, Madonna settles back​ nicely into​ old-school dance music to tell vivid vignettes of life in 80s New York

‘Ask yourself this – what are you doing it for? / Is it for you? Is it for them?” ponders Madonna during Bring Your Love, a collaboration with Sabrina Carpenter from Confessions II. It’s a question you could ask of her decision to release a follow-up to 2005’s Confessions on a Dance Floor 21 years on.

The official line is, of course, that it’s for her. Confessions II was inspired by Madonna’s 2023 Celebration tour, a rampage through her back catalogue – with staging that recreated the videos for old hits including Don’t Tell Me and Human Nature – that apparently set the singer thinking about her past. Certainly, Confessions II is rich with references to Madonna’s history, and not only the album from which it borrows its title and its initial structure, a sequence of house-influenced tracks that segue into each other like a DJ mix. There’s also the trip-hop-inspired Madonna of Bedtime Stories (the album concludes with a suite of slower, more introspective material); the club-hopping, fame-hungry Madonna of her 1982 debut single Everybody, who keeps cropping up in the lyrics; and the maternal, spiritually inclined Madonna of Ray of Light. The Test, a duet with her daughter Lourdes, is an older, wiser sequel to that album’s lullaby-like Little Star, alluded to in its opening lines.

Birds of War is an award-winning docudrama in which its own directors fall in love while reporting the horrors in Syria. They explain why they needed a psychotherapist to complete it

The air is thick with smoke and dust, the ground littered with the twisted remains of burning vehicles. Children scream and sirens blare as activist and videographer Abd Alkader Habak rushes to help the injured after the bombing of an evacuee convoy in Aleppo at the height of Syria’s civil war in 2017. A voice note bubble pops up on Habak’s phone screen. “My bird are you OK?” says BBC journalist Janay Boulos. “Get away from there, run.”

For more than a year, Habak and Boulos have been working to document Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad’s atrocities against his own people, their connection deepening all the time despite the physical distance. But this exchange represents the moment the pair’s relationship shifts from colleagues to something more. “I don’t want footage,” Boulos says, fear clearly detectable in her voice as she tries to follow things from her desk in London. “I don’t want anything, just please take care. I am here whenever you want to talk.”

From Rose Byrne in If I Had Legs I’d Kick You to Jodie Foster in A Private Life, an onscreen parade of psychoanalysts are unravelling before us, tapping into our worst fears

There is an old adage that “every therapist needs a therapist”. Even while the treatment was still in its infancy, Sigmund Freud said all psychoanalysts should “submit” themselves to being analysed. Recent cinema has been acutely aware of that painfully unbreakable cycle. In the likes of If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, Mary Bronstein’s hallucinatory Rose Byrne vehicle in which she plays a therapist and floundering mother caught in a downward spiral, or 2022’s Smile, in which a psychiatrist (Sosie Bacon) is pursued by a malignant metaphor for her poor mental health, therapists are as much at the mercy of their traumas as anyone else.

Rather than being relegated to supporting character status, as they long have been in everything from Good Will Hunting (1997) to The Sopranos, film is finally giving therapists their moment on the couch. Within the space of a month in UK cinemas, two more trick cyclists are taking on lead roles. Backrooms sees Renate Reinsve totally unravel from a secure, calm and collected psychiatrist and self-help author (albeit one who lives alone and subsists on a diet of lacklustre ready meals) to a nervous wreck attempting to navigate the uncanny corridors of her own mind. Meanwhile in Rebecca Zlotowski’s A Private Life, a Francophone Jodie Foster takes on the role of shrink turned sleuth, deciding to investigate the death of a former client without realising she is trying to make up for her shortcomings as a spouse and parent.