In 2024, the US Supreme Court unanimously ruled to defend a pretty obvious idea about free speech: viz., that the government cannot punish people or companies simply for saying things that government officials dislike or disagree with. Being a media organization, this principle is of fundamental importance to Ars Technica.

Unfortunately, nearly one year on, the government is routinely trying to censor voices it doesn't like. The recent blow-up surrounding late-night comedian Jimmy Kimmel is just one of the most obvious examples of the new censorship regime. But the case also shows that, even where courts do not act, the public can still successfully push for change.

Disfavored speech

Here's how Justice Sonia Sotomayor put the basic free speech principle last year:

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Soho theatre, London
Nina Bowers and Philip Arditti claw passionately at Henry V’s colonialism and imperialism in their frequently funny and at times deliberately uncomfortable play

When Englishness is being weaponised on the streets, how should we respond on the stage? In the wake of the UK’s largest ever far-right rally, as the St George’s cross increasingly becomes a racist dog-whistle, this depressingly timely production is a rallying cry against unquestioned nationalism. A theatrical vendetta against Shakespeare’s Henry V, English Kings Killing Foreigners is a scrappy, headstrong two-hander interrogating theatre’s role in politics and protest. “All the flags,” Nina Bowers waves her hands, “isn’t it a bit National Front?”

Shakespeare’s propagandistic history play has come to symbolise a bastion of English heroism, with the plucky “warlike Harry” mightily defeating the French. But as Bowers and Philip Arditti point out through energetic debates and playful sketches, the 1599 play champions colonialism, imperialism and extreme anti-foreign sentiment. This isn’t a new idea, with several productions, such as Headlong’s remarkable 2022 rendition , engaging with the texts’ extreme xenophobia. But hurling Shakespeare’s band of brothers into the centre of their set-less stage, Bowers and Arditti claw passionately at the text, tearing it apart and asking whether there’s any acceptable way they can piece it back together.

Dr Chris van Tulleken learns that Covid-19 was nothing compared to what’s coming to wipe us out. Still, at least he’s like a jolly old uncle as he delivers the bad news

‘Humanity has three great enemies: fever, famine and war. Of these, by far the greatest, by far the most terrible, is fever.” Thus spake the revered physician Sir William Osler, and thus quoteth Dr Chris van Tulleken at the start of this hour-long trip into terror, entitled Disease X: Hunting the Next Pandemic. Buy your bunker and pack your go-bag as you watch.

Van Tulleken is an associate professor at University College London, a practising doctor in infectious diseases and a tremendously affable sort, committed to making complex medical matters accessible to a wide audience. This makes his documentary about where and what the next pandemic virus will be (“It’s out there, trying to get into the human population every day”) a strangely jolly while utterly comfortless watch. I guess a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine – and contemplation of an existential threat – go down.

Late-night host reinstated after brief suspension related to comments on Maga and Charlie Kirk that Disney called ‘insensitive’

Jimmy Kimmel is headed back to air.

Disney announced on Monday that Jimmy Kimmel Live! would return to broadcast this Tuesday, after a brief but highly criticized suspension that sparked a national debate on free speech and the muzzling tactics of the Trump administration .

Forest Hills stadium, New York

The star claims she wasn’t ‘feeling 100’ for her Queens stadium show, but it was hard to see any fatigue as she carried the crowd through her dazzling setlist

Time feels evermore like a ludicrous concept in 2025, but it especially collapses when considering the career of Chappell Roan . The Missouri-born pop artist languished in up-and-coming mode for years – I first learned of her prismatic gay club anthem Pink Pony Club via a friend’s recommendation in 2020 – only to experience one of the swiftest ascents into the mainstream I’ve ever witnessed. Just 18 months ago, she was still playing 2,000-cap amphitheaters in mid-sized cities; by summer’s end, she drew the largest crowd (more than 100,000) that Chicago’s Lollapalooza festival has ever seen. Her rise was so vertiginous – viral Tiny Desk , Grammys best new artist , festival undercard to headliner, international chart takeover – that she feels lifetimes away from the artist I saw, stunned by her own zeitgeist earthquake at New York’s Governors Ball in June of last year.

Her return to New York at Forest Hills stadium this weekend, her first live shows in the US in a year, thus represents a homecoming of sorts, and a victory lap for the occasionally rocky journey into the stratosphere. Her eight “pop-up” shows this fall, billed as the Visions of Damsels & Other Dangerous Things tour, span the geographical linchpins of her music: four shows in New York, site of sexual awakenings (Naked in Manhattan) and devastating breakups (new single The Subway, the night’s pre-eminent vehicle for Roan’s torrential belt); two in Kansas City, Missouri, a few hours from her hometown of Willard; and two in Los Angeles, where Roan forged the joyously queer and infectiously cheeky pop of her debut and still only studio album, The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess .

Richard Beard says he’s got ‘better at telling the truth’ by arranging his life story on a grid – and invites others to do the same

Richard Beard, award-winning author of The Day That Went Missing and Sad Little Men , thought he was writing his next book, a whole life memoir. In the event, he has written his way off the page and into an entirely new publishing model. The Universal Turing Machine is the title both of Beard’s memoir and the mass memoir project he hopes others will help him to build.

Organised as a chessboard, each of the 64 squares narrates one year of Beard’s life, in 1,000 words per year. (He’s 58, so the last five years are fictionalised.) The reader moves around the “board” as if they were a knight, picking the next year to read from options limited by the knight’s L-shaped ambulation.

Contributions to The Universal Turing Machine can be made at universalturingmachine.co.uk

John Mister calls out double standards and a blinkered focus on physical attributes. Linda Perham would like to see more photos of the late star

I found the number of references to Robert Redford’s looks in Peter Bradshaw’s article worrying ( Robert Redford: The incandescently handsome star who changed Hollywood forever, 16 September ).

Here they are: “supremely beautiful”; “indecently attractive”; “outrageously handsome”; “incandescently handsome”; “handsomeness on legs”;“His photograph was in the dictionary next to ‘handsome’”; “blond bombshell”; “like a very lonely and beautiful woman”; “pure handsomeness”; “Redford’s physical beauty”; “always more than a pretty face”.

Much is written about how young people no longer form real-world communities. Well, fashion trends are a stark rejoinder to that

Wake up babe, a new trend just dropped.

According to the website Know Your Meme , it’s been five years since the “ wake up babe ” format – which sees the phrase pasted over an image of a man waking up his girlfriend to announce a new internet talking point – really took off. I first encountered it at the height of what might be called “core fever” in fashion. A new look seemed to be arriving on social media feeds every week, driven by gen Z’s love of blink-or-miss-it microtrends. “Wake up babe, there’s a new aesthetic,” seemed an apt and amusing way to sum up the times.

Meryl Streep, Tom Hanks and Robert De Niro among signatories of ACLU letter decrying Disney’s move after Jimmy Kimmel made remarks on Kirk’s death

More than 400 Hollywood stars have signed an open letter by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) condemning Disney’s indefinite suspension of Jimmy Kimmel Live! under pressure from the Trump administration .

The letter, released five days after Disney “pre-empted” the late-night talkshow over host Jimmy Kimmel ’s comments on the death of slain rightwing activist Charlie Kirk, calls on all Americans to defend their right to speak freely. It states that efforts to pressure artists, journalists and others with retaliation for their speech “strike at the heart of what it means to live in a free country”.