The music from Zach Braff’s seminal comedy drama took centre stage for one special night bringing back artists from Imogen Heap to The Shins

It’s been two decades since the release of Garden State, Zach Braff’s film about an alienated young actor’s struggle to find meaning in life. But while the movie itself became a cult classic, perhaps its biggest legacy is its soundtrack, which went platinum, won a Grammy and became a cultural touchstone among a certain subset of the American population.

So it was no surprise that, when Braff announced a 20th-anniversary concert celebrating the album, at which each of its dozen or so artists would perform, tickets were going for hundreds of dollars. This was Woodstock for elder millennials – at least a certain swath of us who, when the soundtrack came out in 2004, found an outlet for our big teenage feelings in bands like the Shins, Frou Frou and Iron and Wine. All three were among the performers at Los Angeles’s Greek Theater on Saturday evening (technically nearly 21 years after the album’s release). The concert raised money for the Midnight Mission, a century-old LA charity fighting homelessness.

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The actor died on Saturday night in Waimānalo, Hawaii of complications after a stroke, his publicist says

Richard Chamberlain, the hero of the 1960s television series Dr Kildare who found a second career as an award-winning “king of the miniseries,” has died. He was 90.

Chamberlain died on Saturday night in Waimānalo, Hawaii of complications after a stroke, according to his publicist, Harlan Boll.

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The Guardian journalist’s tender account of how music became a bridge between him and his autistic son, James, is full of wit and wisdom

Halfway through Maybe I’m Amazed , there’s a photograph of John Harris’s son, James, with one of his heroes. James is a young-looking 10 in knee-length shorts decorated with stars. Ian Hunter of 1970s rock band Mott the Hoople stands beside him, a hand gently around his shoulder. “Sixty-nine years separate them,” Harris writes. “Here is proof of how songs and their creators find fans in the most unlikely of places.”

Maybe I’m Amazed is the story of a growing child’s love of music, but it’s more than that: it’s also about how songs provided a whole world for James, and his family, after his autism diagnosis. It marks a departure for Harris, whose previous journalism, aside from his political work for the Guardian , has involved editing magazines and writing columns, reviews and other books about music.

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Didier Eribon’s guilt and shame fuels an angry and eloquent meditation on our attitudes towards the elderly and the end of life

“My mother,” writes Didier Eribon, “was unhappy her whole life.” Abandoned as a child, she started work at 14 as a house servant, later becoming a cleaning lady and then worked for decades making glassware at a factory in France’s Champagne region.

Married at 20, she shared a bed for 55 years with a violent, philandering and controlling man she did not love, ultimately bearing intimate witness to his Alzheimer’s disease and death. A decade later, in her mid-80s, her sons put this cognitively and physically enfeebled woman into a state-run nursing home, whose French name – établissement d’hébergement pour personnes âgées dépendantes – makes it sound nicer than it was.

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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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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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