He was mentored by Buddy Guy as a teen and played for Michelle Obama in the White House. Now, the 26-year-old Mississippi guitar hero is bringing the blues back into the spotlight – and taking it to the top of the box office

Founded in 1848, Clarksdale, Mississippi, soon earned the title “the Golden Buckle on the Cotton Belt”, a place where enslaved Africans and their descendants picked cotton by the tonne. But mechanisation in the 1960s changed things. Today, the small city’s median household income is $35,210, with 40% of the populace living below the poverty line. And 80% of Clarksdale’s 14,400 residents are African American. Just another left-behind town in the poorest state in the Union? This is how Clarksdale appears to many outsiders.

Or it did until one of the biggest movies of 2025 opened with the words: “Clarksdale, Mississippi – October 16, 1932”. Why was Ryan Coogler’s Sinners set in Clarksdale? Because this forgotten settlement is also a blues mecca. The crossroads where Robert Johnson supposedly “sold his soul to the devil” is here. Bessie Smith, shattered after a car crash on Highway 61, drew her last breath in Clarksdale. WC Handy, Muddy Waters, Robert Nighthawk, Junior Parker, Ike Turner and Sam Cooke are just a handful of the celebrated blues and R&B musicians who were either born or based themselves in Clarksdale at some point across the 20th century. Now, after decades of neglect, Clarksdale is using its musical heritage to re-establish its place on the map – and one of the city’s native sons, Christone “Kingfish” Ingram, is bringing the blues back to the centre of American culture.

The former England coach could’ve written a great book – instead he’s produced an AI-style word-sludge of generic leadership chat

This is an oddly dull, oddly irresistible football book. Even its title is confusing. Dear England is already the name of a hit Gareth Southgate play, a forthcoming Gareth Southgate TV show and an open letter to the nation authored by Southgate himself in 2021.

This Dear England isn’t formally related to any of those. It is instead an anomaly in the Dear England Multiverse, a book about leadership: a classically dull elite football manager trope that Southgate sticks to doggedly, using the words “leader”, “leading” or “leadership” at least 500 times in 336 pages. “What are leaders? What do leaders do? And what do leaders know?” he asks early on, setting out his stall, but stopping short of Why are leaders , How are leaders , or When are leaders?, questions he will presumably touch on in volume two.

More so than ever before, the contestants seem unable to actually look at one another’s behaviour, and I think I know why

• Paul Gorton was a contestant on BBC reality show The Traitors in Janaury 2024

‘Faithfuls, you are breaking my heart,” an exasperated Claudia Winkleman told the players at the sixth round table of this year’s BBC Celebrity Traitors. “You are not getting it, what are you not seeing? You have to open your eyes – please.”

Winkleman is hardly a shrinking violet at the best of times, but in this case, her theatrics were justified. The episode in question – which saw poor, diehard Faithful Mark Bonnar banished from the castle after a dramatic deadlocked vote – marked the moment Celebrity Traitors officially produced the worst-performing group of Faithfuls in British Traitors’ history.

Paul Gorton was a contestant on BBC reality show The Traitors in Janaury 2024. As told to Emma Loffhagen

Park theatre, London
Alliances and enmities form among a crew of butchers who are trying to shape new lives after prison despite ICE, addiction and the financial lure of criminality

Busy kitchens contain an inherent, high-pressure drama. The backroom of Arnold Wesker’s Italian restaurant in The Kitchen is one such bubbling space, as is Lynn Nottage’s Pennsylvania sandwich shop in Clyde’s . Hannah Doran’s Papatango prize-winning play, which takes place in a butcher’s shop, joins the ranks.

Like in Nottage’s play, the formidable owner, Paula (Jackie Clune), tends to employ ex-prisoners. This brings the notion of new beginnings but also turbulent pasts and narrowed choices. Doran’s Brooklyn establishment manifests the hopes and disappointments of the nation’s underclass. It is essentially a dissection of the American dream, beginning with 4 July celebrations when the Italian-American meat store receives a massive order.

At Park theatre, London , until 29 November

This hit debut from Finland is intensely readable, but could have delved more deeply into the links between human progress and environmental destruction

In November 1741 Georg Wilhelm Steller, “theologian, naturalist, and curious man”, was shipwrecked on an island between Alaska and Russia. There he found, floating in the shallow waters, a vast sirenian, Hydrodamalis gigas, nine feet long and soon to be known as Steller’s sea cow. Having made it through the winter, largely by eating the sea cows, the following August Steller and the remaining survivors of the Great Northern Expedition left the island. Within 30 years, Steller’s sea cow was hunted to extinction.

Having described these events, Finnish author Iida Turpeinen’s debut novel goes on to describe the lives of other historical figures, each of whom are touched in some way by the sea cow, now reduced to bones. There is Hampus Furuhjelm, governor of Alaska, in search of a complete skeleton, and his sister Constance, who finds peace and intellectual autonomy among her taxidermy collection. Later, there’s Hilda Olson, a scientific illustrator, and John Grönvall, specialist in the reconstruction of birds’ eggs, who is tasked with preparing a sea cow’s relics for exhibition.

Street photographer Daniel Arnold searches out the candid human moments of NYC, capturing a complex city alive with characters and contradictions

Documentary examines British greyhound racing with affection and respect but doesn’t shy away from the opposing views of animal rights activists

At one point in this documentary about greyhound racing, an interviewee describes it as a fundamentally working-class sport, and it’s hard to argue with that. And like so many British working-class pleasures and pursuits, shifting tastes and the relentless march of gentrification have seen its popularity wane substantially since heydays past. This frisky film explores the canine-centric milieu with affection and respect – but, laudably, it also makes room, about halfway through its runtime, for the case against racing as articulated by several animal rights activists who decry the conditions in which some dogs are raised, the practice of euthanising animals deemed no longer viable for racing, and the injury risks racing itself poses.

Naturally, the trainers, breeders and owners we meet here violently disagree with these critiques. It’s to director Greg Cruttwell’s credit that he gives the subjects time to voice the point-counterpoint around these arguments. Some, like garrulous Scottish trainer Rab McNair, will have absolutely no truck with the activists’ points, insisting that they are grounded in ignorance of how well the dogs are treated. All the animals we see here look pretty bright-eyed and waggy-tailed, although some of the kennel spaces we see them hanging out in look a little on the spartan side; but who knows, this is hardly a meaningfully large enough sample to judge by. Encouragingly, one pro-racing speaker acknowledges that recent exposés of poor treatment in the industry, such as RTÉ documentary Greyhounds Running for Their Lives and reports in the Guardian , have compelled breeders and the sport in general to clean up their act significantly.

It’s been one hell of a series, but will the faithfuls really win? Plus: Celebrity Race Across the World is back. Here’s what to watch this evening

9pm, BBC One
Who knew a fart would make the first celebrity version of the game such a hit? Not content with breaking wind, Celia Imrie also wailed her way into Traitors history. Then there’s Alan Carr, who went from sweating profusely to feeling zero remorse over killing his best mate Paloma Faith. The casting has been a revelation, unlike the stars’ ability to play the game – it will be a miracle if a Traitor doesn’t win. Hollie Richardson

Hut where father of immunology trialled first smallpox vaccine among 138 additions to Historic England list

A rustic, ordinary-looking English garden hut regarded as the birthplace of immunology – revolutionising global public health and saving countless lives – has been added to the nation’s heritage at risk register.

The hut belonged to Edward Jenner (1749-1823), regarded as someone who has saved more lives than any other human. It was there that he first trialled a vaccine for smallpox in the late 18th century.