When documentary-maker Lauren Greenfield immersed herself in the online and offline lives of 25 teenagers, she unearthed a world of sexually explicit images, rape culture, bullying and suicidal ideation. Adolescence, she says, has become like the wild west

Reactions to Lauren Greenfield’s documentary series Social Studies tend to fall into two categories. Young people think it is validating; adults think it’s a horror show. After all, the screen of a teenager’s smartphone is a shiny black hole to which access is rarely granted. “Our kids are right there,” as Greenfield puts it, “and yet we don’t really know what’s going on in their lives.”

Her five-part series, which tracks the online and offline lives of a group of teenagers and young adults – the first generation of social media natives – is being tipped for an Emmy . Under the noses of their parents, she captures teenagers climbing out of bedroom windows to spend the night with boyfriends, posting sexually explicit images, tracking their longest-ever fast (91 hours) and living out their experiences of rape, cyberbullying, whitewashing, the tyranny of Caucasian beauty standards and suicidal ideation. She makes adolescence look like the wild west.

All Saints Church, Penarth
The joy and anarchy of Mahler were brilliantly captured, alongside wild Shostakovich and mellow Brahms

Mahler had been dead for just 10 years when, in 1921, his Fourth Symphony was arranged for chamber ensemble by Schönberg’s pupil and assistant, Erwin Stein, to be played at one of their weekly Society for Private Musical Performances in Vienna. The least monumental of the symphonies, though still clearly long, it lent itself well to being scaled down, with each of the 14 instruments plus soprano in the last movement treated as soloists and the listener being given a new aural perspective on even the most familiar passages.

In the hands of the top players that David Adams and Alice Neary bring together for their annual Penarth festival, the clarity and eloquence both of Mahler’s flowing contrapuntal writing and of his harmonies seemed to emerge newly minted. Schönberg himself had conducted that first concert; here, Ryan Bancroft was a quietly animated presence, alert to the teeming detail and to the irresistibly dancing lilt. Yet, in what is sometimes only characterised as the child-like innocence of this symphony, lurks the grim reaper figure, said to have been inspired by Arnold Böcklin’s self-portrait , the scordatura mis-tuning of the violin giving death’s devilish waltz its grotesque edge. And even in the last movement’s setting of Das Himmlische Leben from Des Knaben Wunderhorn, always Mahler’s conscious destination for the work, the litany of saints have a delicious touch of anarchy about them. Soprano Rebecca Evans captured both the mischievous excitability of the child’s vision of heaven and also the ethereal joy.

An exhibition explores the authors’ love of theatre, highlighting the dramatic impact of his works

As a sliding doors moment, it leads to arguably one of the greatest “what if?” questions in literary history. Passionate about the theatre, Charles Dickens, then just 20, wrote to the famous Covent Garden theatre actor-manager George Bartley seeking an audition, saying he believed he “had a strong perception of character and oddity, and a natural power of reproducing in my own person what I observed in others”.

Bartley responded saying they were producing “the Hunchback” and arranging an appointment. Dickens planned to take his sister, Fanny, to accompany him singing on the piano.

The writer’s account of the Trump trials is packed with revenge and barbed wit. She has little to hide

At his wedding to Marla Maples in December 1993 , two months after the birth of their daughter, Tiffany, Donald Trump got talking to Howard Stern. According to the shock jock, Trump allegedly opined, charmingly: “Vagina is expensive.” Trump and Maples split in 1997. Nearly 30 years later, E Jean Carroll, an adjudicated victim of Trump’s verbal and sexual abuse, might at least in one way concur with his crude and sexist analysis.

Carroll was assaulted by Trump in a changing room at Bergdorf Goodman, the New York department store. Thanks to court cases arising from that encounter, Trump owes her “slightly over $100m”, Carroll writes.

Not My Type: One Woman vs a President is published in the US by Macmillan

Royal Albert Hall, London
Elton John was a constant silent presence as Carlile veered from crooner ballads to hot-rubber-and-leather vibes

‘I’ve waited to stand on this stage since I was 12 years old,” said Brandi Carlile, and somehow, she made her achievement feel like everyone’s success. Within three songs of appearing at the Royal Albert Hall she had invited her 5,000-strong audience to sing along with her. You and Me on the Rock’s evocation of family life became the best wedding karaoke ever.

Carlile has been a voice for the marginalised in the rural roots scene for two decades. But her largest headline show in the UK – part of a five-date UK and Ireland tour climaxing at Glastonbury – suggests her outlier-country is now legitimately mainstream here. Her No 1 album with Elton John played no small part and this setlist paid gracious tribute to her collaborator. She even serenaded him with a yearningly harmonised version of its title track as he sat in his box like a silent angel.

This summer will mark 80 years since the attacks stunned the world. Today, every one of the crew members who carried out the bombings is dead. Here, one of the last writers to interview them reopens his files

‘It was a beautiful morning. The sun was shining on the buildings. Everything down there was bright – very, very bright. You could see the city from 50 miles away, the rivers bisecting it, the aiming point. It was clear as a bell. It was perfect. The perfect mission.”

I’m sitting in a Chinese restaurant in San Francisco opposite the navigator of the Enola Gay, the B-29 bomber that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima on 6 August 1945. The year is 2004, and Theodore “Dutch” Van Kirk, aged 83, has agreed to be interviewed for a book I’m writing for the 60th anniversary of that fateful mission. Van Kirk informs me, with the trace of a smile, that this will probably be the last interview in his life.

Kiln theatre, London
Iman Qureshi’s play starts as a good, old-fashioned underdog story before exploring sexuality, homophobia and trans identity

A group of women convene around a piano in a nondescript room for weekly singing practice. It could be any amateur choir in any town hall, but this motley group first meet to be among fellow lesbians and then embark on a quest to perform on the main stage of the Pride festival in a national competition.

For a while, Iman Qureshi’s comic musical drama follows an “against-all-odds” trajectory, in the mould of a good, old-fashioned underdog endeavour warmly reminiscent of The Full Monty or Calendar Girls. It is exuberant and uplifting, accomplishing the extraordinary feat of being broad and universal in its appeal, yet speaking to and about the lesbian and queer community.

Shot in vertical, phone-friendly aspect and produced on the quick, the Chinese-import format is bringing work to an ailing industry

They’re a Chinese cultural phenomenon which keeps millions of viewers glued to their phones, but the runaway success of “vertical dramas” is providing an unlikely source of employment for film and TV crews here in the UK.

The bite-size melodramas have breathless titles such as A Flash Marriage with the Billionaire and My Firefighter ex-Husband Burns in Regret, and are chopped into one minute episodes for avid consumption on viewers’ vertically held smartphones.

The Scissor Sister has a complex relationship with the Smiths and gets parties started with Grace Jones, but who’s her (not so) guilty pleasure?

The first song I fell in love with
I was obsessed as a child with the Muppets and Sesame Street. My grandmother made me a puppet of the Count to help practise my counting. I loved The Pinball Number Count with the Pointer Sisters counting up 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 / 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 / 11/ 12 which is prophetic because I still consider the Pointer Sisters one of my all-time favourite bands.

The first record I bought
I was playing Delirious by Prince for my mother in 1982, and she said: “He sounds like Little Richard.” I said: “Who is Little Richard?” and she said: “Get in the car, young lady,” and we went and bought a Little Richard greatest hits set. It was the start of a long conversation about music with my mom.