A drug-smuggling route runs straight through the Comuna 13 neighbourhood on the outskirts of Medellín, which was once one of the most dangerous places in Colombia. Over the past decade it has been transformed, and is now better known for its colourfu

An attractive young woman in billowing white linen enters the room and takes a seat on the floor cushion, arranging her body in lotus position. Her eyes flutter closed and she takes a deep breath, then fixes her gaze ahead. “Hello, everybody,” she sa

My earliest reading memoryI was an early reader because I was excruciatingly shy, and books alleviated some of the discomfort of existing as a tender little person in the world. I remember lying in my bed at naptime, picking up a Little Bear book, an

Michael Caine wears two watches: an analogue for the time and an Apple for everything else. It even knows his pulse, he says, impressed. Right now, it’s telling him his flat is 26C: warm enough for his wife, Shakira, to pour iced coffee into his flas

Hannah Amond always loved drawing. When she was young, she would use gigantic rolls of wallpaper to draw intricate schematics of interconnected rabbit warrens, and “each little rabbit had a room with sofas and all these things”. Then, in high school,

“I have a lot of opinions and I come by them honestly,” Roxane Gay writes in the introduction to a new anthology of her essays. The academic and author, whose 2014 collection, Bad Feminist, became a bestseller and cultural touchstone, has gained a de

“Birds are so foreign to us – there’s not one body part that looks like ours,” Olivia Rodrigo recently told Rolling Stone magazine with a straight face. The gen Z pop sensation went on: “Everyone’s all afraid about aliens and shit. They’re like, ‘Wha

Naomi Wood has won the 2023 BBC national short story award for Comorbidities, a story about a married couple struggling to maintain their sex life who eventually decide to make a sex tape. The bestselling author and UEA creative writing lecturer was

When the tears came, they weren’t always for the dead and the unfathomable depths of suffering. They also flowed for the times in between, for the joy and smiles of the unknowing. As the acclaimed American war photographer Corinne Dufka sorted throug

Most tourists who come to New York City for the first time seek out sights like the Empire State Building, the Statue of Liberty and Central Park. But between the early 60s and 1972, visitors with a more adventurous nature had a different agenda. “Ce

Julian Schnabel is agitated. The artist and director has just walked into his new exhibition at the Pace gallery in Manhattan and is fixated on the folding table I’m standing behind. “What’s that?” he asks the PR person. “It’s … a table,” she replies

Who will get to write the last word on Bob Dylan? A number of men compete for the honour of world authority – Michael Gray, Howard Sounes, Greil Marcus, Robert Shelton, Clinton Heylin – and relations aren’t always good. In his introduction to volume

Sunil Kavuri is not a novice investor. Sure, he hasn’t always been involved in finance: 20 years ago, he was a model. He and his identical twin brother were the stuff of local newspaper human-interest stories, straight-A lads from Rugby in Warwickshi

It’s possible that Chris Raven is the only person in the UK making baroque flutes. He turns 80 in a few months, and far from having a lifetime of making instruments behind him, he started out at 70, after decades working in IT. Yet in childhood, he l

Almost two weeks after the Libyan port city of Derna was devastated by floods, Hassan Ben Faid sits on the floor of a secondary school classroom that will, for the foreseeable future, be his home. A pen in hand, he starts drawing his house and then,

Daniel Johns has responded to speculation about the removal from iView of an ABC documentary featuring his former Silverchair bandmates, Ben Gillies and Chris Joannou. In a statement posted on Instagram on Sunday night, the singer claimed drummer Gil

After nearly five months – 146 days, to be exact – the Hollywood writers’ strike appears to be nearing its end, as the Writers Guild of America (WGA) reached a provisional deal with the group representing the studios and streamers. If ratified by uni

Several years ago, I paid a friend to read a boring book about British television so I could pretend to my Channel 4 bosses that, as head of news and current affairs, I had done so. I bought her a slap-up meal, from my own pocket, in recompense. Her

It’s sometimes the fate of a single city to epitomise an era: Berlin in the 1920s, perhaps, or London in the 1960s. So which one would represent our own period of ecological anxiety, true crime and fake news? I’d wager it’s one you might not suspect:

When I was young, I wanted to be an astronaut. I loved flying and space travel. My dad was a flight captain and he’d take me up in his plane. I remember having to be quiet in the cockpit because of the black box, so nobody knew I was there. The first

I am a chronic rewatcher. I love watching films and TV over and over, never stopping to think it might be a waste of time. Some find this baffling – how boring to rewatch something you’ve already seen. You know how it ends! Recently I started to wond

Given the extensive research that connects dangerous driving with alarming personality traits, it is always enlightening to see who speaks up for speed, currently by attacking the introduction of 20mph limits in residential roads. Last week the leade

When the first great book about the New York Times was excerpted in Harper’s Magazine in 1969, the magazine’s cover proclaimed its scoop with an imaginary Times headline: The One Major Story America’s Foremost Newspaper Has Never Covered In Detail: T

This summer, Iris Mogul – a junior at a Miami high school – found out that she wouldn’t be able to take an AP African American history course that she had planned for the coming semester because it had been blocked by the state’s department of educat

Anyone remember Ned Fulmer? Fulmer was one of the Try Guys, a quartet of fairly inoffensive comedians whose YouTube channel was in 2022 valued at $6m. But one day last year, Fulmer was unceremoniously deprived of his living. The problem was that he h

Born in Wolverhampton in the West Midlands in 1973, Beverley Knight is a musician and actor. She discovered her talent for singing in her Pentecostal church choir when she was a child. Signing her first record contract at the age of 21, she joined a

Battles between human and artificial intelligence are no longer science fiction. The strikes in Hollywood led by the united guilds of actors and screenwriters have a common, intangible enemy: the algorithms and computer-generated imagery that are inc

Like a Night City gangster after a botched cyberware installation, Cyberpunk 2077 emerged from development as a half-finished pariah. When it was released in the dismal winter of 2020, the game’s stunning virtual metropolis and cinematic storytelling

“When I was 18 I had an incident with a powerful male comedian in his 30s,” says Lucy (name changed), a female comic in her early 30s. “It was really harrowing and triggering. But when I raised it with other comics at the time they just encouraged me

“The first thing people see me as is a Black person,” says choreographer and dancer Chris Fonseca, 33, meditating on the multiple aspects of his identity. Only, Chris isn’t speaking to me, at least not in a language I understand; Fonseca has been Dea