Books by James Williams and Carles Boix offer fascinating takes on how we can combat anger and distraction online
We’re having problems with the internet and big tech, principally Alphabet (Google/YouTube), Amazon, Apple and Facebook. The government has taken note.
Related: 'Facebook is dangerous': tech giant faces criticism from Congress over Libra currency
Continue reading...The Swiss town of Vevey has staged a once-in-a-generation celebration of its winemakers, with fancy dress, alpine horns, cows and dancers kicking off a festival that dates back to the 18th century. The three-week Fête des Vignerons, which began in 1797, is held roughly every 20 years and on Thursday 5,500 locals donned costumes, wigs and makeup to take part in the gala opening
Continue reading...The illustrated city: artist Ariel Aberg-Riger pieces together the history of New York state’s second largest city via second-hand postcards, pottery and tchotchkes
Continue reading...Official praises ‘effective temporary measure’ using looped children’s song to drive away people from banqueting venue
City officials in West Palm Beach, Florida, are using extremely catchy children’s music to try and drive away homeless people from one of its civic buildings.
The city’s mayor, Keith James, confirmed to Fox News that the songs Baby Shark and Raining Tacos were being played at the patio of the Waterfront Lake Pavilion, where homeless people have been living.
Continue reading...Dozens more injured after ‘man threw liquid and set fire’ to building, police say
Japan has been plunged into a state of shock after an arson attack on an anime studio left at least 33 people dead and dozens injured in the country’s worst mass murder in nearly two decades.
The perpetrator, who was also injured and has been taken into police custody, walked into the 1st Studio building of Kyoto Animation in Fujimi ward, Kyoto, at about 10.30am. He poured what is suspected to be petrol in multiple areas of the building before igniting it.
Continue reading...Ravers, semi-naked sun-worshippers, booming queer culture … we meet the photographers chronicling a new generation of Lebanese shaking off the trauma of civil war
‘Parties are a privileged place, a space for exploration, a time for fusion,” says photographer Cha Gonzalez. They’re also the focus of her series Abandon, which looks at the way some Lebanese people have used nightlife – and techno music in particular – as a release after the trauma of the country’s 15-year civil war, which ended in 1990. “I knew a lot of people who were either born during the war or in exile,” she says. “What was put aside during the day came to light – and their internal struggles surfaced.”
Abandon is a pertinent theme not only for Gonzalez, but for all of the 16 contributors to an exhibition in Paris called C’est Beyrouth (This Is Beirut), at the Institut des Cultures d’Islam. Gonzalez in particular seized on the city’s dance scene, and later continued the series in Paris, where she lives, because “there was something to say about countries that are very far from war as well. The war is inside us: how we feel useless, alone, bored, guilty, horny.”
Continue reading...Grammy-nominated singer one of few white artists to openly confront apartheid regime
The South African singer and songwriter Johnny Clegg, one of the few white artists to openly confront the apartheid government in the late 1970s and 1980s, has died aged 66, his agent has said.
He had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2015.
Continue reading...R&B star announces numerous African pop and rap stars on album out Friday, as well as Kendrick Lamar, Pharrell Williams and daughter Blue Ivy
Beyoncé has outlined details for her 14-track new album to accompany The Lion King remake, entitled The Lion King: The Gift, to be released on Friday. The album features four new solo songs alongside collaborations with Kendrick Lamar, Pharrell Williams, Childish Gambino, Beyoncé’s daughter Blue Ivy and more. It is separate from the soundtrack to The Lion King, though the Beyoncé song Spirit appears on both. The singer voices the character Nala in the new 3D-animated version of the 1994 Disney classic.
Related: The Lion King review – deepfake copycat ain't so grrreat
Continue reading...You might think of Hong Kong, given its famous skyscraper skyline, but by different measures of verticality other cities come out on top
Looking out from sky100, Hong Kong’s highest observation deck on the 100th floor of the city’s tallest building, the 494-metre-high International Commerce Centre, you get a 360-degree view of one of the world’s most famous skylines – an urban jungle framed by mountains and the gleaming Victoria harbour, with endless clusters of high-rise buildings packed so closely together they resemble a game of Tetris.
It’s little wonder a city of such visible density has more skyscrapers than anywhere else in the world. According to the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat (CTBUH), Hong Kong has 355 buildings over 150m in height.
Continue reading...From second-hand train seats to old school cupboards, the artist has transported discarded objects from his west African homeland to create a ‘parliament of ghosts’
‘We’re haunted all the time by ghosts of the past,” says Ibrahim Mahama as we sit on dirty old plastic second-class Ghana Railways carriage seats in Manchester’s Whitworth Art Gallery. Even these seats from an abandoned railway? “Especially these,” he says, smiling.
Mahama, a junkyard utopian whose art involves recycling stuff that’s lost its purpose, bought up rows and rows of these seats. He packed them into shipping containers and sent them on a 5,000-mile trip, from his west African homeland to the Whitworth, along with some school cupboards no longer fit for purpose, exercise books of children now grown up, and the minutes of Ghanaian parliamentary debates now deemed obsolete.
Continue reading...As she returns to our screens in a new drama about an abusive relationship, the actor talks about sexist directors, ignoring Line of Duty – and why people think she’s living on the moon
One of the best stories about Vicky McClure concerns the time she flew by private jet to attend the Berlin film festival in 2008 with Madonna. “It was, like, wow, a whirlwind.” And the next day, McClure was back at her office job sorting out the mail. “Answering the door: ‘Hello, postie? Yeah, I’ll let you through.’”
The film, Filth & Wisdom, wasn’t too well received, alas. But being handpicked by Madonna for her directorial debut – McClure must have felt she was about to make it? “When you’re young,” says the actor, her blue eyes widening, “it’s hard because your expectations are so high. Just having so much rejection, I’d built quite a thick skin. Even so I was like, ‘This is it, I know it.’ And it wasn’t, again.”
Continue reading...Thousands of Aleppians are using a Facebook group to share their way of life before the Syrian war
Going to the hammam was once a beloved ritual for Aleppo resident Atef Shikhouni and his friends. Recalling the boisterous, joyful experience, the 55-year-old wrote: “Here is a man shouting, ‘Where is the soap?’ while another one is asking for the shampoo and a third wants someone to rub his back. It becomes very noisy. After spending some time in the sauna, it is time for the ‘rubbing man’. He uses a rough loofah to rub my body mercilessly and I pray it will end without any damage.”
But that was before the outbreak of war in Syria. “Today, the bath is cold and has no soul,” the sports teacher wrote in February 2017, shortly after the worst of the fighting in Aleppo had ended. “Cruel are our days, exactly like our bath today.”
Continue reading...Star clarifies comment: ‘Any actor should be able to play anybody and Art, in all forms, should be immune to political correctness’
Scarlett Johansson has said comments she made on the “authentic casting” debate have been taken out of context and asserted that she supports diversity in film.
Related: Scarlett Johansson drops out of trans role after backlash
Continue reading...Catalan pop star uses Spanish words in Milionària, her first single in the local language
The Catalan pop star Rosalía has upset language purists with her first single recorded in Catalan, by using “Spanishisms” that critics say dilute the language.
In Milionària, which received 2m views on YouTube in its first 24 hours, the 25-year-old singer uses the word cumpleanys – a corruption of the Spanish cumpleaños – to mean birthday, instead of the Catalan aniversari.
Continue reading...Fuelled by hard drugs and righteous anger, his incendiary prose shook America. Could our writer channel his spirit by spending a night at the typewriter where it all happened?
It is 4.30 on a Thursday morning and I am writing these words on the big red IBM Selectric III that once belonged to Hunter S Thompson. Owl Farm, Thompson’s “fortified compound” in Woody Creek, Colorado, is dark and silent outside. Even the peacocks he raised are sleeping. The only sound anywhere is the warm hum of this electric typewriter and the mechanical rhythm of its key strikes, as clear and certain as gunfire.
In April, Thompson’s widow, Anita, began renting out the writer’s cabin to help support the Hunter S Thompson scholarship for veterans at Columbia University, where both she and Hunter studied. It sits beside the main Thompson home on a 17-hectare estate marked with hoof prints and elk droppings that gradually rises towards a mountain range. A short walk uphill is the spot where Thompson’s ashes were fired into the sky from a 153ft tower in the shape of a “Gonzo fist”, a logo he first adopted during his unsuccessful 1970 campaign to be sheriff of nearby Aspen. Johnny Depp, who played Thompson in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, picked up the $3m tab for that elaborate sendoff, which took place shortly after Thompson killed himself in 2005.
Continue reading...R&B singer expected to be taken from Chicago to New York to face charges relating to child pornography and obstruction of justice
R&B singer R Kelly has been arrested on sex trafficking charges, according to American law officials.
The 52-year old was arrested in Chicago on Thursday night on 13 federal sex crime charges, and was expected to be taken to New York, according to officials.
Continue reading...Nike’s famous ‘Moon Shoe’ and limited-edition trainers produced by Kanye West, Air Jordan and Adidas will be sold
Sotheby’s in New York has announced its first-ever auction dedicated to sneakers.
The auction house will sell 100 pairs of the rarest sneakers ever produced, including a sample of one of the first Nike running shoes with a pre-sale high estimate of $160,000.
Continue reading...Rip Torn belonged to a high-spirited tradition that was fuelled by too much booze and testosterone. Like it or not, we may never see their like again
The death of the film and TV star Rip Torn, whose drunken exuberance so often resulted in the breaking of glass, the splintering of wood and the bandaging of limbs, has led the industry to ponder that exotic creature whose rock’n’roll behaviour, from the 1960s onwards, persisted for decades to tolerant chortling from the similarly inclined or wistfully well-behaved gentlemen of the press. And that creature is the “hellraiser” – a term that originates from a defiant credo espoused by the hard-drinking, hard-living Hollywood legend Richard Burton: “God put me on this earth to raise sheer hell!”
Peter O’Toole’s death in 2013 led to a similar outpouring of grief for the booze legends who have evidently been replaced by corporate dullards, drinking mineral water, policing their own language and anxiously checking their mentions on Twitter. Once we had hellraisers: now we have “disrupters”, people who give Ted talks about their revolutionary new app for maximising your leisure time. Actors used to spend every penny getting fantastically drunk. Now George Clooney gets a reported $1bn for selling his Casamigos Tequila brand to the drinks retailer Diageo — although Clooney was reported to lose his cool after a few drinks.
Continue reading...From modernist machine-built perfection to a nuclear-proof metropolis buried far underground, our predictions for future cities tell us much about the past
Future Cities: Architecture and the Imagination by Paul Dobraszczyk is published by Reaktion Books
Ever since the world’s first recognised skyscrapers were built in Chicago and New York in the 1880s, cities have been in thrall to visions of extraordinary height. Early intimations of the ways in which skyscrapers would transform cities came in the 1910s, with images such as Richard Rummell’s below suggesting a future not only of immensely tall buildings but also of multilayered streets, railways and flying machines.
Continue reading...The singer has reportedly earned $185m in the last year in Forbes’ annual list of highest-paid stars, followed closely by Kylie Jenner and Kanye West
Singer Taylor Swift was named the world’s highest-paid entertainer on Wednesday but was closely followed by two members of the wider Kardashian clan – reality star turned cosmetics queen Kylie Jenner and rapper Kanye West.
The annual Forbes Celebrity 100 list also saw soccer stars Lionel Messi, Cristiano Ronaldo and Neymar among the top 10, along with British singer-songwriter Ed Sheeran and 1970s soft rock band the Eagles, who embarked on a new tour in 2018.
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