Inspired by Berlin clubs, Amber’s’ phone ban has been embraced by clubbers seeking deeper connections

Standing in line at Amber’s, one of Manchester’s newest nightclubs, before your bag is searched, or your ticket is checked, you are asked to take out your phone, and a white sticker bearing the club’s name is placed over the camera .

Once through security, and before heading downstairs, following the sound of pounding music from the dark rooms below, a doorman again asks whether phone cameras are covered.

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The long-running series in which readers answer other readers’ questions on subjects ranging from trivial flights of fancy to profound scientific and philosophical concepts

Why are you expected to be quiet in an art gallery? Thierry Dupond, Charente-Maritime, France

Send new questions to nq@theguardian.com .

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This timely and important book reveals Barbados plantation owner James Drax to be the equal of Robert Clive or Cecil Rhodes in his profiteering from human misery

In his enthusiastic introduction to Paul Lashmar’s Drax of Drax Hall , David Olusoga observes that Britain’s role in slavery was, until recently, a “terra incognita”. While a deeper reckoning seemed to have begun in the past few decades – statues toppled, archives scoured, reparations debated – the global rightward lurch has seen a renewed reluctance to connect past crimes with present privilege. Lashmar’s book makes that connection impossible to ignore. Unlike broader studies of Britain’s colonial economy, such as Matthew Parker’s The Sugar Barons or Michael Taylor’s The Interest (to both of which Lashmar acknowledges a great debt), Drax of Drax Hall narrows its focus to a single family, showing that the Drax dynasty did not just profit from slavery but pioneered its brutal processes.

James Drax, the family’s 17th-century patriarch, was not merely a plantation owner but the founder of a system of control and punishmen. Arriving in Barbados in 1627, he was instrumental in shifting the island’s labour force from white indentured servants to enslaved Africans. By the 1640s, he had devised the plantation model that would dominate the Caribbean for centuries – a vast industrial machine, extracting staggering wealth through calculated cruelty. At the height of their power, the Draxes enslaved up to 330 people at any one time. The violence was staggering: life expectancy for the enslaved on the island was just five years. Lashmar makes clear that, while figures such as Clive or Rhodes may loom larger in the public imagination, James Drax deserves equal, if not greater, infamy as one of history’s great profiteers of human misery.

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For one writer, tragedy led to comedy, the sudden loss of a colleague giving her the nudge she needed

There’s nothing funny about your co-worker being assassinated. But it was the death of my beloved colleague and friend Hisham al-Hashimi that led me into the world of standup comedy. I knew it would trash my hard-won career in international security, but I didn’t care any more.

Hisham had run a workshop with me in Iraq six months prior to his death, and I’d taken everything so seriously, marching around the hotel yelling about how everything was going wrong. But Hisham always had a lightness in his step, a smile on his face. Every evening, he’d take me to a café, order me my favourite shisha and proceed to tell the most disgusting jokes.

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Normally staid historians sound alarm at authoritarian grasping for control of the premier US museum complex

In a brightly lit gallery, they see the 66m-year-old skeleton of a Tyrannosaurus rex . In a darkened room, they study the flag that inspired Francis Scott Key to write the national anthem. In a vast aviation hanger, they behold a space shuttle. And in a discreet corner, they file solemnly past the casket of Emmett Till , a 14-year-old Black boy lynched for allegedly whistling at a white woman in the US south.

Visitors have come in their millions to the Smithsonian Institution , the world’s biggest museum, education and research complex, in Washington for the past 178 years. On Thursday, Donald Trump arrived with his cultural wrecking ball.

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The Oscar‑winning director of The Artist spent five years creating The Most Precious of Cargoes. He talks about why he would never have made it as a live action movie

When the acclaimed French film-maker Michel Hazanavicius was approached by his parents’ best friend, the author and playwright Jean-Claude Grumberg, to adapt his fairytale The Most Precious of Cargoes (2019) into an animated film, he hesitated. The short book is a fable about the Holocaust, and the extraordinary acts of kindness that people are capable of. Although moved by it, Hazanavicius was initially reluctant: he had never made an animated film, and he thought he would never make a film about the Holocaust. The grandson of eastern European immigrants who came to France from Lithuania and Poland in the 1920s, Hazanavicius, 58, had felt that the subject was not his to tell. “It was more my grandparents’ and my parents’ story, not mine,” he says, speaking from his home in the 10th arrondissement, Paris, the sunlight streaming through the window behind him. “I was born in Paris in the late 1960s, and I had a wonderful, very happy childhood.” That period, however, coincided with when Holocaust denial began and survivors, who had until then remained silent, started to speak out about their experiences in the camps. “For many years, the priority [of those seeking to preserve the memory] was hearing testimony from witnesses. And I thought fiction on the subject was not appropriate.”

It was Hazanavicius’s wife, the actor Bérénice Bejo – who starred as Peppy Miller, an ambitious young actress in The Artist , Hazanavicius’s Academy Award-winning film about Hollywood’s black-and-white silent era – who changed his mind. Bejo told him he had not explained enough about his family’s Jewish history to his four children, now aged 26, 23, 16 and 13, and she persuaded Hazanavicius to take on the project, not only for them, but also for other people’s children. “[I realised] that if I hadn’t told my kids stories about my family – how they came to France and what happened during the war – it was likely that other [Jewish parents] hadn’t passed on [their heritage] either.”

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Red Scare author Clay Risen sees parallels between 1950s witch-hunts and the right’s assault on government today

On 9 June 1954, in a Senate hearing room on Capitol Hill, Joseph Nye Welch made American history. With one question , the lawyer prompted the downfall of Joe McCarthy, the Republican Wisconsin senator who for years had run amok, his persecution of supposed communist subversives ruining countless lives.

“Until this moment, Senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness,” Welch said, as millions watched on TV , as he defended Fred Fisher, a young lawyer in McCarthy’s sights.

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As the indie singer-songwriter and Boygenius star releases her latest, highly personal solo record, she talks of her weariness of AI and digital art, the pressures of being in a public relationship, and her anger and fears in Trump’s US

In the shadow of a Hogarth painting, accompanied by guitar and violin, Lucy Dacus is singing about disappointment. The painting depicts Thomas Coram, founder of the Foundling Hospital in London’s Bloomsbury district. A shipbuilder by trade, he is portrayed in full baroque garb, a style usually reserved for the aristocracy. But amid the classical architecture and rich fabrics, he is shown as he was: the thread veins on his face, his feet not quite touching the ground. The setting is apt for Dacus’s disquisitions on life and love, and the ways they can exceed, or fall short of, the expectations we place upon them: the moments that feel exalted, idealised, as well as the times when reality intrudes on the fantasy.

The Foundling Museum , the setting of tonight’s intimate show, also holds a deeper meaning for the singer-songwriter, who was raised in Mechanicsville, Virginia by adoptive parents; the mother who raised her was herself adopted from an orphanage at a young age. “I had nothing like this growing up,” says Dacus to the assembled crowd. “We don’t have the concept of a foundling in the US. It would have been cool if the other kids at school had known that was fine.” The previous day, after her photoshoot in the museum’s grand-looking court room, she is visibly moved upon learning about the building’s history, and its current work training care-experienced young people. She asks the organisers about inviting some of the trainees to the concert: it would, she says, be a way of showing them “hey, I’m doing cool shit – you can do cool shit.”

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The O2, London
From rollerskating around the stage wearing a union jack suit to feeding cocktail cherries to women in the audience, Usher wears middle age incredibly well

Early on during the first show of Usher’s London residency, the audience is treated to the sight of the teenaged singer fantasising about playing London and “thousands of people shouting my name”. It’s presumably been flammed together for the occasion via the miracle of AI, but the point it’s making about succeeding beyond one’s wildest dreams is clear. More than 30 years into his career, Usher has sold out a staggering 10 nights at the O2: the crowd seems to be equally split between people old enough to remember his late 90s rise to fame and those you suspect may have first encountered his music through their parents playing it. As he skips between old-fashioned slow jams and the kind of EDM-influenced pop-R&B that temporarily held sway around 2010, you’re struck by the sense that his longevity might be down to his ability to neatly assimilate whatever’s currently vogueish into his own sound.

His current world tour follows on the heels of two Las Vegas residencies, and a distinct hint of Vegas lurks around the show, both in its desire to cram as many songs as possible in – there are well over 40 tracks, or at least parts of them – and in its penchant for glitzy spectacle. Like Vegas itself, it’s not really at home to subtlety. This is an evening in which Usher deploys his impassioned falsetto while rollerskating around the stage wearing a union jack suit; in which he underlines his loverman credentials by feeding ladies in the audience cocktail cherries; in which a pair of high-waisted trousers that appear to be made entirely out of studded belts teamed with a bare chest and a selection of chains and medallions Isaac Hayes might have considered a little de trop constitutes one of his more understated outfits. He wears it to perform one of the aforementioned old-school slow jams, Nice and Slow. “I’ve got plans to put my hands in places I’ve never seen,” he sings: lest anyone mistakenly believe that means he’s thinking of sticking them down the back of the radiator, he lubriciously caresses his privates, then pretends to have sex with his microphone stand.

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