The author and film-maker explores dance, desire, mortality and transcendence on a wild autofictional journey

Miranda July’s characters often wonder what is real and what’s not. How far can our minds take us – dreaming, fantasising, making art – and when must we return to a shared reality? “Real comes and goes and isn’t very interesting,” a therapist advises in July’s 2015 debut novel, The First Bad Man . Most of the characters in her 2005 debut film, Me and You and Everyone We Know, throw themselves dizzyingly into dream and play. In the film, it’s fantasy that enables genuine connection; in the novel, the protagonist has to move beyond fantasy to discover that life’s core lies elsewhere – in the touch of a lover or a baby.

This breezy commitment to inwardness and strangeness has often led to July being described as kooky. I don’t like the word – why not honour strangeness rather than belittling it? – but I did find July’s own character in the film a little gratingly winsome, while the protagonist of The First Bad Man felt too wilfully imagined, or maybe just too dangerously deranged, for me to care deeply about her fate.

In They Came for the Schools, Mike Hixenbaugh looks at how a conservative agenda caused conflict in his Texas school system

Mike Hixenbaugh had been a journalist for years, reporting on a variety of topics ranging from education policy to healthcare, the military and other subjects, when one day he discovered a potential story literally in his front yard. It was the summer of 2020, and in response to a local Facebook thread spreading false information about antifa operating in his neighborhood, Hixenbaugh and his wife, who is Black, put up a Black Lives Matter lawn sign in their front yard. The response was prompt: “Every weekend for two months after my wife put the sign up, someone drove their four-wheeler into our yard and did donuts in it, churning up deep divots in the grass.”

At that point, Hixenbaugh realized that something had been happening in his quiet Dallas suburb of Southlake, something that was probably very big – unraveling just what was afoot would be the journalistic work of years, and would ultimately result in his new book, They Came for the Schools.

Le Corbusier called grain silos ‘the magnificent first fruits of the new age’. But what can be done with these soaring industrial cathedrals when they’re redundant? A Norwegian tycoon has the answer

If you’ve ever wondered what it would feel like to be as insignificant as a kernel of corn, you can now get a good idea in Kristiansand, a city in southern Norway. Standing on the fourth floor of its new Kunstsilo art museum , carved out of an old 1930s grain silo, you can peer down a vertiginous concrete tube that plunges towards huddles of ant-like people below. Or you can look up, through more concrete shafts, towards tiny circles of sky. You can mimic the journey of a grain by climbing a spiral staircase inside one of the cylinders, or test your nerves by walking on a glass-floored terrace suspended over another shaft, floating above a tubular abyss. It’s a dramatic spatial spectacle – and we haven’t even got to the art yet.

Once home to 15,000 tonnes of grain, this mighty concrete mountain is now a repository of the most important collection of Nordic modern art in the world. It is a 5,500-strong haul spanning paintings, drawings, ceramics, sculpture and full-size architectural installations, telling the story of the past century of abstraction, surrealism and expressionism across Norway, Sweden, Finland and Denmark – inside one of the ultimate symbols of modernity itself.

A brilliantly funny but deadly serious account of NHS psychiatry in crisis

On his first day as a trainee ­psychiatrist, Dr Benji Waterhouse ­–conflict averse, bookish, balding – receives a crash course in martial arts. A brawny ex-policeman with tumescent biceps exhorts the gaggle of junior doctors never to wear a tie unless they want to getthrottled, never to make a patient a cup of hot tea unless they want to get scalded, and to always sit in the chair closest to the door in case their life depends on ­making a quick getaway.

It’s the start of a litany of rude awakenings, documented in brisk and self-deprecating style. Waterhouse’s decision to specialise in psychiatry, for example, is dismissed by one medical consultant as “a waste of a perfectly good doctor”. A cardiologist tells him a psychiatrist is nothing more than “a social worker with a stethoscope”. Nevertheless, he arrives for his first job on an acute psychiatric ward buoyed up by the conviction that he is going to help his patients live happier and more fulfilling lives. The ward handover is dominated by a clipboard-wielding bed manager who sneers at the patients, belittles the junior doctors, and whose sole measure of success is how quickly he can pressure the team into discharging the inpatients. When Waterhouse meets his first patient – a young woman called Paige with a tortured history of neglect, abuse, prison, addiction and innumerable episodes of self-harm – the consultant in charge dismisses it all. “There’s no true mental illness there. It’s all just personality disorder and drug-seeking behaviour and there are no wonder drugs for that,” says the fearsome Dr Glick (names have been changed). Even Paige’s threat to jump out of her flat window is derided, since she only lives on the second floor.

From an AI that ‘creates’ family photos to images printed on glass – and then broken – these artists nominated for this year’s prize use radical methods to achieve groundbreaking results

What happens to the 2bn bottles we consume in the UK every year? Plus, Sian Gibson’s murder mystery comedy has some stellar cameos. Here’s what to watch this evening

8pm, Channel 4
The brand is considered socially evil in more ways than one, but Coca-Cola’s environmental impact is the specific focus of this report. Ellie Flynn – a self-confessed Coca-Cola addict – investigates the reality of what happens to the 2bn bottles of the product consumed every year in the UK, and its claims about recycled plastic and water sustainability. Hollie Richardson

Nicola Coughlan is sensational as Penelope Featherington, whose long-simmering romance with Colin Bridgerton reaches boiling point – and the bonking is scarce but seriously steamy

Always a pleasure, never a chore (but sometimes an over-saccharine trifle): Bridgerton is back! Having lassoed the zeitgeist upon its 2020 debut – and fast-tracked its young stars to household names in the process – it feels odd to note that this is merely the third outing for Netflix’s costume drama for people who don’t like costume dramas. That is a real credit to the show: Bridgerton has established its arresting yet soothing take on Regency Mayfair with aplomb. It’s an immaculately constructed dreamland; the pinnacle of comfort TV.

It’s also immediately clear that Bridgerton is benefiting from having two seasons under its corset already, laying the foundations for the most captivating courtship yet. Thus far, each series has focused on different members of the Bridgerton children as per Julia Quinn’s novels: Daphne ( Phoebe Dynevor ) found love with Regé-Jean Page’s Duke of Hastings, before eldest son Anthony (Jonathan Bailey) met his match in 26-year-old “spinster” Kate Sharma (Simone Ashley). This season sees Francesca Bridgerton, a composed pianist with a businesslike approach to marriage, make her society debut. Yet the real beating-heart of these first four episodes (the final four will be released in mid-June) is the long-simmering romance between Colin Bridgerton (Luke Newton) and his neighbour Penelope Featherington (Nicola Coughlan).

Presenter has added 1.6m listeners to Greatest Hits Radio mid-morning slot in last 12 months

Ken Bruce has added 1.6 million listeners since joining Greatest Hits Radio, as commercial radio stations continue to eat into the BBC’s audience.

Bruce left Radio 2 last year , saying the BBC had failed to offer him a new contract and he wanted a challenge. Aided by his regular PopMaster quiz, he has boosted the audience for his new mid-morning slot on Greatest Hits Radio by 73% in the last 12 months.

Enlarge / The Enterprise-D bridge recreation, seen in London in 2002. (credit: Peter Bischoff/Getty Images)

More than a decade has gone by since three Star Trek: The Next Generation fans first decided to restore the bridge from the Enterprise-D . Plans for the restored bridge morphed from opening it up to non-commercial uses like weddings or educational events into a fully fledged museum , and now that museum is almost ready to open. Backers of the project on Kickstarter have been notified that Sci-Fi World Museum will open to them in Santa Monica, California, on May 27, with general admission beginning in June.

It's not actually the original set from TNG , as that was destroyed while filming Star Trek: Generations , when the saucer section crash-lands on Veridian III. But three replicas were made, overseen by Michael Okuda and Herman Zimmerman, the show's set designers. Two of those welcomed Trekkies at Star Trek: The Experience , an attraction in Las Vegas until it closed in 2008 .

The third spent time in Hollywood, then traveled to Europe and Asia for Star Trek: World Tour before it ended up languishing in a warehouse in Long Beach. It's this third globe-trotting Enterprise-D bridge that—like the grit that gets an oyster to create a pearl—now finds a science-fiction museum accreted around it. Well, mostly—the chairs used by Riker, Troi, Data, and some other bits were salvaged from the Las Vegas exhibit.

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