Sally Wainwright brings us a superb drama about women of a certain age forming a punk band, and Nina Conti’s monkey makes for an unlikely movie star. Here’s the pick of the week’s culture, taken from the Guardian’s best-rated reviews

Guillermo del Toro offers his take on Mary Shelley’s cobbled-together creature, and the baroque rockers follow up their chart-topping debut album

After the Hunt
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Julia Roberts stars in the latest from Challengers director Luca Guadagnino: a cancel-culture thriller set in the aftermath of an accusation of sexual assault on a college campus. She plays a philosophy professor at Yale, whose colleague Hank (Andrew Garfield) claims he is innocent of the charges against him.

Earlier this month, the Trump administration made nine elite universities an offer they couldn’t refuse : bring in more conservatives while shutting down “institutional units that purposefully punish, belittle, and even spark violence against conservative ideas,” give up control of admissions and hiring decisions, agree to “biological” definitions of sex and gender, don’t raise tuition for five years, clamp down on student protests, and stay institutionally “neutral” on current events. Do this and you won’t be cut off from “federal benefits,” which could include research funding, student loans, federal contracts, and even student and faculty immigration visas. Instead, you may gain “substantial and meaningful federal grants.”

But the universities are refusing. With the initial deadline of October 20 approaching, four of the nine universities—the University of Pennsylvania , Brown , University of Southern California , and MIT —that received the federal “compact” have announced that they will not sign it.

In addition, the American Council on Education, which represents more than 1,600 colleges and universities, today issued a statement calling for the compact to be completely withdrawn.

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In 1890, a German scientist named Robert Koch thought he’d invented a cure for tuberculosis, a substance derived from the infecting bacterium itself that he dubbed Tuberculin. His substance didn’t actually cure anyone, but it was eventually widely used as a diagnostic skin test . Koch’s successful failure is just one of the many colorful cases featured in Dead Ends! Flukes, Flops, and Failures that Sparked Medical Marvels , a new nonfiction illustrated children’s book by science historian Lindsey Fitzharris and her husband, cartoonist Adrian Teal.

A noted science communicator with a fondness for the medically macabre, Fitzharris published a biography of surgical pioneer Joseph Lister, The Butchering Art , in 2017—a great, if occasionally grisly, read. She followed up with 2022’s The Facemaker: A Visionary Surgeon’s Battle to Mend the Disfigured Soldiers of World War I , about a WWI surgeon named Harold Gillies who rebuilt the faces of injured soldiers.

And in 2020, she hosted a documentary for the Smithsonian Channel, The Curious Life and Death Of …, exploring famous deaths, ranging from drug lord Pablo Escobar to magician Harry Houdini. Fitzharris performed virtual autopsies, experimented with blood samples, interviewed witnesses, and conducted real-time demonstrations in hopes of gleaning fresh insights. For his part, Teal is a well-known caricaturist and illustrator, best known for his work on the British TV series Spitting Image . His work has also appeared in The Guardian and the Sunday Telegraph, among other outlets.

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We all feel it: Our once-happy digital spaces have become increasingly less user-friendly and more toxic, cluttered with extras nobody asked for and hardly anybody wants. There’s even a word for it: “enshittification,” named 2023 Word of the Year by the American Dialect Society. The term was coined by tech journalist/science fiction author Cory Doctorow , a longtime advocate of digital rights. Doctorow has spun his analysis of what’s been ailing the tech industry into an eminently readable new book, Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What To Do About It .

As Doctorow tells it, he was on vacation in Puerto Rico, staying in a remote cabin nestled in a cloud forest with microwave Internet service—i.e., very bad Internet service, since microwave signals struggle to penetrate through clouds. It was a 90-minute drive to town, but when they tried to consult TripAdvisor for good local places to have dinner one night, they couldn’t get the site to load. “All you would get is the little TripAdvisor logo as an SVG filling your whole tab and nothing else,” Doctorow told Ars. “So I tweeted, ‘Has anyone at TripAdvisor ever been on a trip? This is the most enshittified website I’ve ever used.'”

Initially, he just got a few “haha, that’s a funny word” responses. “It was when I married that to this technical critique, at a moment when things were quite visibly bad to a much larger group of people, that made it take off,” Doctorow said. “I didn’t deliberately set out to do it. I bought a million lottery tickets and one of them won the lottery. It only took two decades.”

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The Star Trek universe panel at New York Comic Con (NYCC) this weekend concluded with a brand new trailer for Star Trek: Starfleet Academy. The ten-episode series will follow the exploits of the first new crop of cadets in a century.

Per the official premise:

Star Trek: Starfleet Academy introduces viewers to a young group of cadets who come together to pursue a common dream of hope and optimism. Under the watchful and demanding eyes of their instructors, they discover what it takes to become Starfleet officers as they navigate blossoming friendships, explosive rivalries, first loves and a new enemy that threatens both the Academy and the Federation itself.

The new cadets include Sandro Rosta as human orphan Caleb Mir; Karim Diané as a Klingon cadet, Jay-Den Kraag; Kerrice Brooks as Sam (Series Acclimation Mil), the first Kasquain to attend the Academy; George Hawkins as Darem Reymi, a Khionian cadet who wants to be a captain; Bella Shepard as Genesis Lythe, a Dar-Sha cadet; and Zoë Steiner as Tarima Sadal, daughter of the president of Betazed. In addition, Holly Hunter plays Academy chancellor Captain Nahla Ake; Gina Yashere plays Cadet Master Lura Thok; Becky Lynch plays a member of Starfleet bridge crew; and Paul Giamatti plays a half-Klingon, half-Tellarite character named Nus Braka, the series' chief villain.

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Cards Against Humanity (CAH) this week announced its newest stunt : a "Cards Against Humanity Explains the Joke" edition that ditches the game's rules and adds explanatory notes to each card in the box. This makes the project "informational material" rather than a "game," and therefore CAH can avoid import tariffs. All profits from the one-off project will be donated to the American Library Association to fight censorship.

While a clever way to stick it to Trump, this week's news did raise a question I've heard from several readers: If CAH is this upset about the whiplash-inducing tariff rates, which are added and then removed with almost no warning, why doesn't it print the game in the US? I mean, it's just a box of cards! How hard can it be?

In the board game space, designers have wrestled with this question for years. While many US-based designers would like to work with local manufacturers, in reality, it's often not possible. Complex board games today may feature cardboard creations like constructible dice towers, custom-shaped and painted wooden markers, multicolored jewel pieces, plastic bits of nearly every possible variety, custom-printed component bags, molded miniatures, cards in multiple sizes, metallic coins, dry-erase boards, fancy box inserts, massive dual-sided playing boards, and long manuals. The only manufacturers capable of doing all this work are generally in China or central Europe (Germany still has good manufacturing, and there are also sites in Poland and the Czech Republic).

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Marvel Studios has dropped the first teaser for Wonder Man , an eight-episode miniseries slated for a January release, ahead of its panel at New York Comic Con this weekend.

Part of the MCU's Phase Six, the miniseries was created by Destin Daniel Cretton ( Shang-Chi and the Legend of Five Rings ) and Andrew Guest ( Hawkeye ), with Guest serving as showrunner. It has been in development since 2022.

The comic book version of the character is the son of a rich industrialist who inherits the family munitions factory but is being crushed by the competition: Stark Industries. Baron Zemo ( Falcon and the Winter Soldier) then recruits him to infiltrate and betray the Avengers, giving him super powers ("ionic energy") via a special serum. He eventually becomes a superhero and Avengers ally, helping them take on Doctor Doom, among other exploits. Since we know Doctor Doom is the Big Bad of the upcoming two new Avengers movies, a Wonder Man miniseries makes sense.

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New York Comic Con (NYCC) has kicked off with an extended teaser for A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms , a new Game of Thrones spinoff series based on George R.R. Martin's novella series, Tales of Dunk and Egg .

A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms adapts the first novella in the series, The Hedge Knight, and is set 50 years after the events of House of the Dragon . Per the official premise:

A century before the events of Game of Thrones , two unlikely heroes wandered Westeros: a young, naïve but courageous knight, Ser Duncan the Tall, and his diminutive squire, Egg. Set in an age when the Targaryen line still holds the Iron Throne and the last dragon has not yet passed from living memory, great destinies, powerful foes and dangerous exploits all await these improbable and incomparable friends.

Peter Claffey co-stars as Ser Duncan the Tall, aka a hedge knight named "Dunk," along with Dexter Sol Ansell as Prince Aegon Targaryen, aka "Egg," a child prince and Dunk's squire. The main cast also includes Finn Bennett as Egg's older brother, Prince Aerion "Brightflame" Targaryen; Bertie Carvel as Egg's uncle, Prince Baelor "Breakspear" Targaryen, heir to the Iron Throne; Tanzyn Crawford as a Dornish puppeteer named Tanselle; Daniel Ings as Ser Lyonel "Laughing Storm" Baratheon, heir to House Baratheon; and Sam Spruell as Prince Maekar Targaryen, Egg's father.

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