Philadelphia’s Speling Reform Asoshiashun wasn’t the only group to demand a simpler way of putting things in print

You may be familiar with the ghoti, the shiny animal with fins that lives in the water; perhaps you even have your own ghoti tank. Ghotis evolved long ago, but they didn’t get their name until the 19th century, when jokesters noted that, thanks to the weirdness of English spelling, the word “fish” might be written with a “gh”, as in “rough”, an “o”, as in “women”, and a “ti”, as in “lotion”.

The idea of the ghoti is often attributed to George Bernard Shaw, but there’s no evidence that he coined it . He was, however, a proponent of simplified spelling – an enterprise that, in some form or other, goes back centuries. From “through” to “though” and “trough”, whether you’re a child or learning English as a second language, getting the spelling right is a nightmare. Efforts to fix that might seem niche, but Shaw is one of many luminaries who have had a go. Charles Darwin , Mark Twain and Theodore Roosevelt also took up a cause that has left its mark on American and British culture in unexpected ways.

Julie Lunde Lillesæter’s timely documentary tells the story of the courageous women whose cases of sexual assault and rape have gone unheard by the US judicial system

In 2018, a historic lawsuit was brought against the US city of Austin, Travis County, the Austin Police Department, and the Travis County District Attorney’s Office. The plaintiffs were survivors of sexual assault, whose cases had gone unheard by the judicial system. Gripping and timely, Julie Lunde Lillesæter’s riveting documentary follows these courageous women as they fight for justice.

The film lays bare the shocking details concerning how sex crimes were treated in the county. In one year, between July 2016 and June 2017, of more than 220 cases presented for prosecution, only one went to trial – and the victim in this instance was male. Testimony from the survivors reveal the harrowing extent to which officials turned a blind eye; even with scientific evidence such as DNA matches, the majority of criminal filings were dismissed, denying these women due process in front of a jury.

The theme of this year’s celebrated photo bonanza is ‘humanity’ – and Kyoto is bursting with images – from family albums with a twist, to naked men in a frenzied battle for fortune

Towering above commuters and passersby at Kyoto station is a monumental mural featuring more than 500 portraits of local residents. This striking installation by acclaimed French photographer JR heralds the opening of Kyotographie 2025, the city’s celebrated month-long international photography festival.

The theme for this year’s event is “humanity”. Last autumn, JR and his team transformed Kyoto into a living studio, setting up mobile portrait stations across the city to capture the rich diversity of Kyōto-jin society. Monks, artisans, politicians, schoolchildren and drag queens – all life is here.

Shooting the Chronicles of Kyoto – each person is photographed against a greenscreen backdrop

A great cast has fun in this drama about the death of a wealthy family’s patriarch. Plus: Jamelia plays Tina Turner in Just Act Normal. Here’s what to watch this evening

9pm, U&Alibi
A great cast – including John Simm, Gemma Jones, Rakhee Thakrar and Niamh Cusack – for this rompy thriller about a wealthy patriarch who died by suicide … or did he? Businessman Jack Wright married three times and has a brood of grownup kids, so there is a lot of squabbling at the reading of his will. But while everybody is storming out in a rage, an autopsy prompts questions about Jack’s death. Hollie Richardson

Comedy spacecraft thefts, passive-aggressive in-laws and a planet being fracked to death – the revolution just got playful, comrades!

Comrades! Welcome back to the revolution. Andor is the Star Wars TV show with the sharpest political acumen: yes, like everything in the franchise, it’s about an underdog rebel movement fighting against a totalitarian empire in space, and it has plenty of thrilling battle sequences, but here there are no Jedi mind powers or cute green backwards-talking psychics. Under the hard-nosed stewardship of writer Tony Gilroy, Andor bins the magic and myth and replaces it with the reality of anti-fascist struggle, where the good guys are ready to risk their lives for freedom. It’s the Star Wars spin-off with the strongest claim to being a proper drama – but, in season two’s opening triple bill, it shows it can do sly, wry comedy too.

We’re a year on from where we left off, which is four years before the Death Star blows up at the end of the original movie – the point at which all the work done by our hero, Cassian Andor (Diego Luna), pays off. We pick him up in an imperial military facility, where he’s posing as a test pilot for a spacecraft he intends to nick. There’s a classic Andor moment where Cassian meets the rebellion’s woman on the inside, a junior technician who has gathered her courage to make her contribution, and knows the rage of her superiors will be directed at her once Cassian has flown off. “If I die tonight, was it worth it?” she asks him, and gets a rousing speech in response, urgently whispered.

He put Carmen in a gorilla suit and had Das Rheingold’s Erda represented by an 82-year-old naked woman. What are the the director’s plans for his edge-of-the-seat Die Walküre?

From the Muppet Show to Kafka, Yiddish theatre to Vivaldi, pop music to Wagner – Barrie Kosky’s enthusiasms ricochet at a speed that leaves you dizzy as well as, in their rampant variety, a touch envious. This 58-year-old Australian theatre and opera director sees all art, all life, as one. His love of clowns, cabaret and musicals is as intense as his passion for theatre and grand opera. “Whether it touches the soul is all that matters,” he says, his loquacious personality expanding into a small side office at the Royal Opera House in London before a rehearsal. His new staging of Die Walküre, the second opera in Wagner’s Ring cycle, openson 1 May .

Kosky was born in Melbourne but has been based in Berlin for the past 20 years, where he was artistic director of the Komische Oper and still has an association there. He is funny, clever, outrageous but above all serious. His productions may shock, though that is never his intention. Dressing his Carmen up in a gorilla suit for a production that now has cult status in Frankfurt and Copenhagen – but did not catch light with audiences in London – was part of a studied aesthetic: the heroine living her brief life through a set of extreme roles. In his Das Rheingold , the first part of the Ring which opened in 2023, he caused upset in some quarters by having Erda – mother Earth – represented by a naked 82-year-old woman.

Ocean-inspired artworks created using kelp-based pigment will be sold to raise funds for conservation

Last year in early summer, Alex Glasgow could be seen hauling up a long string of orangey-black seaweed on to the barge of his water farm, located off the west coast of Scotland near Skye. Growing on the farm was what Glasgow described as “perhaps the quickest-growing biomass on the planet”: seaweed.

The weed from Glasgow’s farm, KelpCrofters, is used in everything from soil fertiliser to artisanal soaps to glass-making and is part of a burgeoning industry – not just in Scotland, but around the world.

Professor says text shows Hathaway lived with playwright in London, upending the established idea of an unhappy marriage

It has long been assumed that William Shakespeare’s marriage to Anne Hathaway was less than happy. He moved to London to pursue his theatrical career, leaving her in Stratford-upon-Avon and stipulating in his will that she would receive his “second best bed”, although still a valued item.

Now a leading Shakespeare expert has analysed a fragment of a 17th-century letter that appears to cast dramatic new light on their relationship, overturning the idea that the couple never lived together in London.

Last Friday, in an op-ed piece on the Trump administration's war on American universities , we called for academia to 1) band together and 2) resist coercive control over hiring and teaching, though we noted that the 3) "temperamental caution of university administrators" means that they might "have trouble finding a clear voice to speak with when they come under thundering public attacks from a government they are more used to thinking of as a funding source."

It only took billions of dollars in vindictive cuts to make it happen, but higher education has finally 1) banded together to 2) resist coercive control over its core functions. More than 230 leaders, mostly college and university presidents, have so far signed an American Association of Colleges and Universities statement that makes a thundering call gentle bleat for total resistance "constructive engagement" with the people currently trying to cripple, shutter, and/or dominate them. Clearly, 3) temperamental caution remains the watchword. Still, progress! (Even Columbia University, which has already capitulated to Trump administration pressure, signed on.)

The statement largely consists of painful pablum about how universities "provide human resources to meet the fast-changing demands of our dynamic workforce," etc, etc. As a public service, I will save you some time (and nausea) by excerpting the bits that matter:

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