Two Temple Place, London
On show in one of London’s swankier mansions, this exhibition features some great art – but betrays a clichéd view of what authentic working class expression really is

They’ve certainly picked a surprising venue for it. Lives Less Ordinary , an exhibition that critiques and claims to rectify the representation of British working-class life, occupies the wood-panelled, gothic-windowed mansion Two Temple Place , built in the 1890s as a London pad for millionaire William Waldorf Astor. Photos and paintings of common people are hung around a hall that looks like the grand staircase of the Titanic.

It’s a curious sight and even curiouser exhibition. The British working class, says the press release, are seen in art “through the reductive and distorting lens of the middle-class gaze. Working-class subjects have been … stereotyped or sensationalised. Working-class artists have been misinterpreted, pigeonholed, or overlooked altogether”. Which artists are they accusing? Richard Billingham , I suspect, whose photobook Ray’s a Laugh portrays drunken squalor inside the council flat where he grew up, and Martin Parr , whose pictures of seaside life tend to be toe-curling. Yet both are lyrical, memorable artists of real British life. Just not with a sufficiently positive attitude.

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The rock star called copyright ‘the absolute bedrock of artistic prosperity’, ahead of a vote on a bill granting AI companies easier access to musicians’ work

Elton John has backed Paul McCartney in criticising a proposed overhaul of the UK copyright system , and has called for new rules to prevent tech companies from riding “roughshod over the traditional copyright laws that protect artists’ livelihoods”.

John has backed proposed amendments to the data (use and access) bill that would extend existing copyright protections, when it goes before a vote in the House of Lords on Tuesday.

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For centuries, we’ve pursued happiness and meaning. But what does that leave out?

What if I told you that we could all be rich? Not in dollars or pounds, yen or rupees, but a completely different type of currency. A currency measured in experiences, adventures, lessons learned and stories told. As a social psychologist, I have dedicated my research career to a simple, but universal question: what makes for a good life, and how can we achieve it? For much of human history, we have been presented with two possibilities: pursuing a life of happiness, or a life of meaning. Each of these paths has its benefits and proponents, but decades of psychological research have also revealed their limits.

The current cultural conception of happiness, for example, can work against us finding fulfilment. Historically, happiness tended to be defined as the result of “good luck” and “fortune”. Today many expect it to come from individual effort and success. But this, in turn, makes unhappiness and negative emotions such as sadness or anger seem like personal failures.

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Small details of nature in a garden expand into an anxious global picture

there’s a bird
in a tree
in the garden

a small tree
in a small garden

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Reid Davenport, whose documentary Life After is at Sundance, thinks euthanasia has ‘a lot to do with cost savings’

In 1983, Elizabeth Bouvia, a 26-year-old woman in California with a non-terminal but debilitating illness, tried to starve herself to death in a hospital. “I’ve made a confident, rational decision,” she said.

Doctors began force-feeding her, which she resisted. The ensuing legal case turned her into a focus of intense public attention. A headline declared: “Elizabeth Bouvia is young, pretty, smart – and ready to die.”

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The Good Place writer didn’t know there were prizes at the Edinburgh fringe until his acrobatic debut show earned him a nomination. Now he hopes to spring similar surprises

If you wanted a career that sums up the amorphous nature of modern comedy – from online content creation to the live stage and more besides – Demi Adejuyigbe’s would be hard to beat. He started out making online skits, moved into podcasting, then into writing for TV on the afterlife-set Ted Danson sitcom The Good Place . His flair for improbable comic song saw him dubbed by one critic “the Weird Al [Yankovic] of his generation”. Then when he performed a few one-off sketches at club nights in LA, his friends Brian and Nick, AKA the sketch duo BriTANick , coaxed him to glue them into a solo hour which last year secured the 32-year-old a best newcomer nomination on the Edinburgh fringe .

As if that weren’t variety enough, Adejuyigbe gave the show an unusual gimmick, requiring him to master a new and unrelated skill. The clue is in the title: Demi Adejuyigbe Is Going to Do One (1) Backflip . “I had all these bits,” he recalls now, Zooming from California, “and there was no real through-line. What I came up with was telling everyone I’m gonna do a backflip at the end. Because it’s kind of an Evel Knievel stunt that’s funny and appealing and everyone would be like, ‘ Why are you doing that?!’”

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Despite regular adrenaline spikes, this post-apocalyptic action movie also reminiscent of Gareth Edwards’s Monsters is too derivative to develop an identity of its own

An efficient post-apocalyptic thriller, Elevation subscribes to the Quiet Place school of action streamlining: in this case, the remaining 5% of humanity must stay above an 8,000ft line; any lower, and they are prone to being set upon by Reapers, the giant insects that have conquered the planet. It is also reminiscent of Gareth Edwards’s Monsters in the way it frugally reveals its shield-bug-like monsters, and it has an intriguing enough final twist to suggest that a viable franchise might be on the cards.

Will (Anthony Mackie) lives in an isolated community at altitude with his son Hunter (Danny Boyd Jr). With everyone merely subsisting like “rats on a sinking ship”, he has to head down the mountain when the supply of air filters for Hunter’s asthma runs out; his route to Boulder, Colorado, only involves dipping below 8,000ft twice. So he ropes in embittered alcoholic scientist Nina (Morena Baccarin) – who thinks the research she left behind in the city might hold the key to defeating the critters – and his ballsy friend Katie (Maddie Hasson) to watch his back.

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From exhilarating driving through the British countryside to an action romp with ancient Greek gods – Microsoft’s console duo has built a players’ treasure chest

It was November 2020 when Microsoft launched its latest console duo into the rapidly evolving gaming marketplace. Over four years later, the Xbox Series X – together with its more budget-friendly counterpart, the Series S – has amassed an impressive and varied library of games, ranging from sprawling open-world blockbusters to intimate indie puzzlers. If you’re just getting started with the console, here are 15 games that represent the variety on offer, each one interesting, enjoyable and rewarding in its own right.

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Nasreen and Hasan Askari open Karachi museum with her 1,000-piece centuries-old collection from trade crossroads

As a young medical student in 1970s Pakistan, Nasreen Askari had an encounter that would shape her for ever.

After asking the mother of a sick boy routine questions about his family history, the woman looked outraged. Marching Askari outside, she took off her colourful shawl and laid it on her lap. “Most of the answers to your pointless questions are here,” she said, pointing to intricate embroidery that symbolised everything, from the woman’s community, to her marriage status and her number of children.

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