‘I am a crime writer, I understand theft,’ said Val McDermid – joining Richard Osman, Kazuo Ishiguro and Kate Mosse in their appeal to Lisa Nandy to act on their behalf

A group of prominent authors including Richard Osman, Kazuo Ishiguro, Kate Mosse and Val McDermid have signed an open letter calling on the UK government to hold Meta accountable over its use of copyrighted books to train artificial intelligence.

The letter asked Lisa Nandy, the secretary of state for culture, media and sport, to summon Meta senior executives to parliament.

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The Smithsonian’s museums have been ordered to root out ‘divisive narratives’. It’s part of a pattern: the battle lines are now clear

It has come to this: we are now in Ministry of Truth territory. In Washington DC, the Smithsonian Institution, the US’s ensemble of 21 great national museums, last week became the subject of an executive order by President Donald Trump. “Distorted narratives” are to be rooted out. There will be no more of the “corrosive ideology” that has fostered a “sense of national shame”. The institution has, reads the order, “come under the influence of a divisive, race-centered ideology” that portrays “American and Western values as inherently harmful and oppressive”. The vice-president, JD Vance, is, by virtue of his office, on the museum’s board. He is charged by Trump to “prohibit expenditure” on programmes that “divide Americans based on race”. He is to remove “improper ideology”. The order is titled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History”. George Orwell lived too soon.

The move is deeply shocking, but predictable. After Trump’s insertion of himself as chair of the John F Kennedy Center and his railing against the supposed wokeness of the national performing arts venue, the federally funded Smithsonian was bound to be next in line. Those who imagined the Kennedy Center was a one-off, attracting the president’s ire for personal reasons, were deluding themselves about the scale of Trump’s ideological ambition. Picked out for opprobrium in the executive order are the Smithsonian American Women’s History Museum for celebrating transgender women (the museum, it should be pointed out, has yet to be built); the National Museum of African American History and Culture; and an exhibition titled The Shape of Power: Stories of Race and American Sculpture at the American Art Museum.

Charlotte Higgins is the Guardian’s chief culture writer

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Barbican, London
The hands of pianist Tamara Stefanovich executed a mesmerising ballet as the BBC Symphony Orchestra and Martyn Brabbins saluted this revolutionary composer

It’s hard in our current climate to imagine any other iconoclast of musical modernism being celebrated as energetically as Pierre Boulez is to mark his centenary year . But even amid fear and funding cuts, it remains impossible to imagine postwar classical music without him . There is, in theory, a Boulez for everyone: revelatory conductor, director of a major French research institute , rhetorical troublemaker – “blow up the opera houses,” he famously suggested – and, of course, composer of intricate, horizon-shifting scores .

Boulez’s own music was centre-stage for the BBC Symphony Orchestra’s latest total immersion day, the audience modest but passionate. (“To start, find 200 fanatics,” he once urged on the question of engaging people with new music.) The closing concert crackled abruptly into life, the first of his Deux Études – Musique Concrète for Tape griping and whirring from overhead speakers with the stage still empty. In the second, semi-recognisable pitches rush past in flurries, all attack and ending. More than 70 years since Boulez created them, such sounds remain refreshingly alien.

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A revelation at Pontins fuelled the producer to avant garde acclaim. But with ‘sublime’ sounds came struggles with substances. Her intense new album peels back the plaster

‘Kissed by a witch, I got hexed!” Aya howls through a storm of screaming electronics and bass groans on I Am the Pipe I Hit Myself With. The song revisits a time before Aya Sinclair was one of the UK avant garde’s most exciting talents – when she was still a Huddersfield teenager, newly into Christian rock. The music gave her “this tingly, bubbly sensation”, she says. “And someone said: ‘This is the holy spirit.’” The experience led her to join a Pentecostal congregation for a couple of years, but after confiding in a church friend about some “feelings” – Sinclair would later come out as a trans woman – she was “kicked out for being queer, essentially. I was given an ultimatum, to either closet myself or leave.” As she whispers in this track, over the quickening click of a Geiger counter, “they had me out on a witch-hunt, when I found myself”.

It’s a suitably vulnerable, conflicted opener to her new album Hexed!, which plays out in a lurching mix of heavy metal and hardcore electronics. The record sounds twisted and contorted, wincing at the pain of “peeling back the plaster”, she says over a video call. She is warm, funny and seemingly at peace – following the traumas and battles with substance abuse that she revisits on this nightmarish, alien album.

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Writer and director Jed Hart’s debut psycho-thriller is very nearly a decent film but is let down by a script that goes completely awry

First-time feature director Jed Hart starts with a great premise for a low-budget psychological thriller about a very real subject, and he gets good performances from his three actors. Hart’s direction is strong, but it’s better than his script; for me the movie, having established its realist credentials, is let down by a completely unreal and silly ending.

Nicky, played by Lyndsey Marshal, is a hard-working agency nurse who is all alone, a single mum to a son away at uni. She lives a lonely but reasonably content life, listening to classical music, doing yoga and vaguely dating a clueless but nice man called Kevin, played by Barry Ward. But all this is utterly destroyed when a lairy and aggressive guy moves into the property next door and has loud parties with his mates every night until four in the morning; this is the unspeakable Deano (Aston McAuley), who responds with hostile contempt to Nicky’s timidly polite requests to turn the music down – along with some belligerent self-pity: “I’ve had a tough couple of years with my mental health.”

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A breezy but ambiguous allegory arranges its symbols with appealing wit

Digging the Well

On our plot between the river
and the railroad track,
there is a well. We discovered
it by chance — weeds had covered
all but a sliver
of its rim
which time had filled to the brim
with soil and rock.

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Exhibitions at this year’s Milan Furniture Fair, a guide to green wood carving and funeral urns by Alessi

This is the final monthly design news round-up, so we’ve made it a bumper edition. As well as previewing some shows that will be this year’s Salone del Mobile in Milan, there’s pyjamas from Grayson Perry and Greek mythology reinterpreted by conceptual artist Maurizio Cattelan. Enjoy.

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Irish-set remake of Italian film about a bachelor who cares for his elderly mum never quite matches the charm of the original, despite occasional shimmers

Gianni Di Gregorio’s modern Italian classic Mid-August Lunch from 2008, about a middle-aged bachelor caring for his ageing mum and other elderly ladies, has inspired this loose remake: a broad comedy amplifying what could be seen as the original’s queer subtext. Despite one or two sweet touches and game performances, it never comes close to matching the gentleness, subtlety and charm of the original.

The action is transferred from Rome to Dublin and the gay theme perhaps effectively replaces the importance of food in the Italian film. James McArdle is Edward, a YA author and gay man on the verge of major literary stardom, for which an upcoming US publicity tour is vitally important. But he has to take care of his widowed mum Alma (Fionnula Flanagan) who cannot speak after suffering a stroke, and there is some droll comedy with the Stephen Hawking voice enunciating her crisp commands from her iPad.

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Only a few statues remain, with thousands of priceless artefacts from Nubian and Kushite kingdoms missing

Videos of Sudan’s national museum showing empty rooms, piles of rubble and broken artefacts posted on social media after the Sudanese army recaptured the area from the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) in recent days show the extent of looting of the country’s antiquities.

Fears of looting in the museum were first raised in June 2023 and a year later satellite images emerged of trucks loaded with artefacts leaving the building, according to museum officials. But last week, as the RSF were driven out of Khartoum after two years of war, the full extent of the theft became apparent.

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