The Pulitzer prize-winning photojournalist Liu Heung Shing’s images record China’s rise from self-imposed ruin to today’s superpower. His new book presents scenes of hope, hardship and change under Communist party rule. A Life in a Sea of Red is published by Steidl
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‘I was a dangerous person’: Casey Legler on life as a teenage Olympian – and raging alcoholic
At 19, Legler broke the Olympic freestyle swimming record. But she was also an alcoholic and drug dealer who had suffered years of abuse from her trainers. She is surprised she is still alive, she says
One day, when she was a teenager, Casey Legler woke up with a hangover, then jumped into a pool and broke the Olympic freestyle swimming record. The year was 1996 and Legler was in Atlanta, a member of the French team, having a practice session as she awaited the Olympic finals the next day. Legler, at 6ft 2in, was built to swim. She had been groomed to be an Olympian from the age of 12. But when the finals came – the biggest day of her professional life – she bombed, coming 29th in the women’s 50m freestyle. She spent the next day drunk and dealing cocaine – to Olympic teammates and teenage members of other international teams.
That is perhaps the most troubling aspect of Legler’s new memoir, which charts her time as one of the fastest female swimmers in the world. This isn’t just the story of an alcoholic girl who, under the supposedly protective wing of coaches and doctors, was sexually abused and given performance-enhancing drugs. It’s how her experience was not unusual among her female peers. She remembers, for instance, a teenage member of the English Olympic team asking her to buy drugs. Alcohol and drug use, she says, were commonplace among top-level child athletes, not just in celebratory post-competition blow-outs but every night. From the age of 12, “I swam for every chance to get wasted,” she writes.
Continue reading...Nepal festival celebrates end of monsoon season – in pictures
The annual Infra Jatra festival, named after the god of rain and heaven, is celebrated by worshipping, singing, dancing and feasting in Kathmandu valley
Continue reading...‘This tape rewrites everything we knew about the Beatles’
Mark Lewisohn knows the Fab Four better than they knew themselves. The expert’s tapes of their tense final meetings shed new light on Abbey Road – and inspired a new stage show
The Beatles weren’t a group much given to squabbling, says Mark Lewisohn, who probably knows more about them than they knew about themselves. But then he plays me the tape of a meeting held 50 years ago this month – on 8 September 1969 – containing a disagreement that sheds new light on their breakup.
They’ve wrapped up the recording of Abbey Road, which would turn out to be their last studio album, and are awaiting its release in two weeks’ time. Ringo Starr is in hospital, undergoing tests for an intestinal complaint. In his absence, John Lennon, Paul McCartney and George Harrison convene at Apple’s HQ in Savile Row. John has brought a portable tape recorder. He puts it on the table, switches it on and says: “Ringo – you can’t be here, but this is so you can hear what we’re discussing.”
Continue reading...Gwyneth Paltrow ‘a crucial source’ in Harvey Weinstein revelations
A new book says the actor was scared of going on the record at first but then encouraged other women to speak out
Gwyneth Paltrow has been named a key figure in the New York Times story that first catalogued a series of sexual harassment allegations against Harvey Weinstein, and led to the film producer’s dismissal from his own company and subsequent prosecution.
In a new book titled She Said: Breaking the Sexual Harassment Story That Helped Ignite a Movement by Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey – the New York Times reporters whose story on 5 October 2017 triggered Weinstein’s downfall – Paltrow is said to have been “scared to go on the record but became an early, crucial source, sharing her account of sexual harassment and trying to recruit other actresses to speak”.
Continue reading...Amazon cowboys: rodeo culture rides high in Brazil – in pictures
Along a forest road in the small town of Monte Negro in Rondônia state, just south of the Amazon basin, cowboys from the area’s vast cattle ranches display their talent at a rodeo. In recent years, Monte Negro has expanded as a key cattle town with a strong cowboy culture
Continue reading...Chrissy Teigen ridicules Trump after president’s late-night Twitter attack
- Trump complained he was not getting enough credit
- Hit out at ‘boring John Legend and his filthy-mouthed wife’
Donald Trump’s social media behaviour took another surreal turn with a public attack on model Chrissy Teigen and her musician husband John Legend over the issue of criminal justice reform.
Related: 'A dynasty for decades': Trump aide stokes succession speculation – live
Continue reading...Sampa the Great: ‘I went back to Zambia and people said, you’re different’
Raised in Zambia, the rapper moved to the US and made her name in Australia. Returning to her roots – and carrying the weight of representation – terrified her
Sampa the Great was terrified before she stepped on stage to play her first ever show in Africa earlier this year. The show was in the Zambian capital of Lusaka – and the artist, MC and poet’s cousins were in the front row.
“I’m based in Australia and all the monumental moments in my career have happened there,” says Sampa (born Sampa Tembo). “But I’m from Zambia. My fear was that they wouldn’t get it – and their opinion matters most.” She sums up her concerns: “A person coming out of Africa and playing globally while still being themselves and pushing for their own culture – to go home and not be understood.”
Continue reading...Wildlife photographer of the year – highly commended images
The Natural History Museum has released a selection of highly commended photographs from a range of categories. The winners will be announced on 15 October and the exhibition opens on 18 October
Continue reading...Nazi design exhibition in Netherlands raises fears of glorification
Visitors have been asked not to share photographs of exhibits including Arno Breker statue
An exhibition of Nazi design has opened in the Netherlands to protests and a request for visitors to the museum not to take and share photographs for fear of the exhibits being glorified on social media.
The Museum of Design in Den Bosch is showcasing sculpture by Adolf Hitler’s favourite artist, Arno Breker, a 1943 VW Beetle, photos and Leni Riefenstahl films from the era, in what is being billed as the first great exposition of the “Design of the Third Reich”.
Continue reading...Hustlers review – J-Lo’s stealing strippers saga is a vicarious thrill
The multi-hyphenate star delivers a standout turn in a snappy, fact-based caper about strippers scamming Wall Street bankers
After the dog days of August, littered with one lazily patchworked Hollywood product after another, there’s something wickedly indulgent about the arrival of Hustlers, a slick, flashy, seductively entertaining segue from one season to the next. It’s ideally positioned, premiering at the Toronto film festival before a mid-September release: it matches the immediate gratification of a summer movie with the artful substantiveness of an awards contender – yet remains not quite definable as either.
Related: From Fyre festival to Hustlers: why are we so obsessed with scammers?
Continue reading...Venice film festival: shock and awe as Joker – and Roman Polanski – triumph
Comic book movie starring Joaquin Phoenix takes top award and An Officer and a Spy wins grand jury prize
Joker, Todd Phillips’ mordant spin on Gotham’s grinning antihero, has won the Golden Lion award at the 76th Venice film festival.
The film, which stars Joaquin Phoenix as a would-be standup comic, was ecstatically received at its premiere on the Lido last weekend, with critics immediately tipping it to be the first superhero film to take the best picture Oscar.
Continue reading...Country diary: this stone is a tabernacle of folk memory
Lledr valley, Snowdonia: Birdsong scatters like elegies here where once an old woman screamed her curses
This split rock with the wizened rowan growing from its cleft – I was first made aware of it by the old butcher from Dolwyddelan who gave me a lift along the valley one wet day when I was a young teenager on my first walking tour through Wales. He drew his Morris van to a halt, gestured towards it and gave me its name: Maen yr hen wraig sy’n melltithio – the stone of the old cursing woman.
In some earlier time, he told me, a woman would stand on top of it and scream imprecations at passersby. He showed me a kind of cave behind it. “Some say she used to live in there,” he added. He knew no more than those folk memories, which have hovered in my mind for 60 years.
Continue reading...Nicki Minaj says she is retiring from music
The 36-year-old New York musician tweeted that she’s ‘decided to retire’ from the music business
Rap star Nicki Minaj has announced she’s leaving the music business because she wants to make family life her priority.
The 36-year-old Trinidadian rapper, who grew up in New York and is known for her outlandish outfits, bizarre alter egos and fast flow, made the announcement in a tweet on Thursday morning.
Continue reading...Jarvis Cocker: ‘Politics has turned into Game of Thrones – I can’t see it ending well’
The former Pulp frontman is back with new band Jarv Is, unable to resist his holy grail: the perfect pop song. He talks about the death of mainstream politics – and how he still believes in the good of common people
Jarvis Cocker has packed a lot into his 55 years. For 26 of them he fronted Pulp, who created one of the genuinely era-defining songs of the 1990s with Common People. He made seven albums with Pulp, has made two solo albums and written songs for the likes of Marianne Faithfull and Charlotte Gainsbourg. Other extra-curricular activities range from appearing on Question Time to starring in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. But it’s not enough.
“My output isn’t as much as I would have hoped,” he says, softly. “I’ve always felt that.”
Continue reading...Carol Guzy’s best photograph: a little girl in the war-ravaged ruins of Mosul
‘It was innocence amid war – this tiny girl who should have been enjoying her childhood trapped in this catastrophic battle’
I was one of the last photographers left in Mosul during the final days of the battle to liberate the Iraqi city from Islamic State in July 2017. I have covered the humanitarian consequences of war for three decades, but the sheer horror I witnessed during this conflict felt different.
There was no end to the cruelty. The stream of suicide bombs, grenades, car bombs, and snipers was relentless. People were forced to watch their loved ones die in front of them. And when civilians did reach the point of escape, Isis would use them as human shields.
Continue reading...Meghan pays tribute to fashion photographer Peter Lindbergh
The German photographer, who worked on the Duchess of Sussex’s Vogue cover, was best known for his 90s portraits of Linda Evangelista, Naomi Campbell and others
German fashion photographer Peter Lindbergh, who died on Tuesday aged 74, was renowned for black-and-white portraits that appeared in magazines including Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar and the New Yorker, as well as his refusal to retouch images. Recently, Lindbergh photographed women for the “Forces for Change” issue of British Vogue, guest-edited by Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex, including Jane Fonda, the climate activist Greta Thunberg, and New Zealand prime minister Jacinda Ardern.
On the duke and duchess’s official Instagram account, Meghan shared an image of herself with the photographer, captioned: “His work is revered globally for capturing the essence of a subject and promoting healthy ideals of beauty, eschewing photoshopping, and preferring natural beauty with minimal makeup.”
Continue reading...Moffie review – soldiers on the frontline of homophobia
Hidden passions add to the brutish hell of apartheid-era South African conscripts in Oliver Hermanus’s skilfully tense drama
Moffie, screening in the Orizzonti sidebar at Venice, is a tense, stealthy rites-of-passage drama from the dog days of South Africa’s apartheid regime, a tale of callow young conscripts inside a corroded old system. Set in 1981 during the country’s border conflict with communist-backed Angola, Oliver Hermanus’s film manages an unflinching portrait of a society in spasm; paranoid and brutish and largely screaming at itself. It’s a war story of sorts in which the battle has already been lost.
Kai Luke Brummer gives a fine performance as Nicholas, a willowy 18-year-old at a sun-blasted army boot-camp. Nick and his fellow soldiers are supposed to be fighting the enemy, but the only action they’re seeing is on the volleyball court, or the dorm, or sometimes in the toilet cubicle, much to the sergeant’s horror. The way the officers see it, the very worst thing a soldier can be is a “moffie”, an Afrikaans insult that the subtitles translate as “faggot”. “Moffie!” they scream – as though they regard homosexuality as a mad dog that has somehow got under the fence, or an invading swarm of wasps, liable to sting any man who isn’t properly covered up.
Continue reading...Show me the mummy: the undying allure of ancient Egypt
Paris’s Tutankhamun exhibition is a record-breaking hit – but scarabs, pharaohs and man-eating monsters have been thrilling us for centuries
Paris’s current mania for Tutankhamun should come as no surprise. The Grande Halle de la Villette exhibition of 150 objects found in the tomb of the ancient Egyptian pharaoh is now France’s most-visited exhibition ever, having attracted over 1.3 million visitors. Many of the objects on show – “wonderful things”, in Howard Carter’s words, including mini-coffins, a gilded bed and a calcite vase – have left Egypt for the first time for the Treasures of the Pharaoh exhibition, which will move to London’s Saatchi Gallery in November.
The exhibition’s popularity echoes the wave of “Tut-mania” that swept the west almost 100 years ago when Carter first discovered the boy-king’s tomb. Suddenly everyone seemed interested in Egyptology, evident in the fashions, arts, culture and advertising of the time, and most enduringly in art-deco architecture such as the Chrysler building in New York – especially its distinctive elevator doors – and the Carreras Cigarette Factory in London, with its line of sleek black cats guarding the entrance. US president Herbert Hoover named his dog King Tut, and there were calls for the extension of the London Underground’s Northern Line that linked Tooting and Camden Town to be named Tutancamden.
Continue reading...The Testaments by Margaret Atwood – read the exclusive first extract
Set more than 15 years after The Handmaid’s Tale, Atwood’s Booker prize-shortlisted sequel revisits her dystopian republic Gilead
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