(Warp)
Made using a cache of Y2K sample CDs that Daniel Lopatin salvaged from the internet’s fringes, the kaleidoscopic result speaks to contemporary information overload

It should come as no surprise that the new album by Oneohtrix Point Never comes with a concept attached. They usually do. When not composing film soundtracks, or producing an eclectic range of other artists – the Weeknd, Anohni, Charli xcx, Soccer Mommy – Daniel Lopatin has released a string of acclaimed works, each with their own overarching idea.

The “hyperreal world music” of 2010’s Returnal was inspired by the fact that people now see more of the world than ever without actually leaving their homes. In 2015, Garden of Delete had an accompanying origin story about an adolescent humanoid alien called Ezra; 2018’s Age Of imagined artificial intelligence attempting to recreate human culture after humans themselves had been rendered extinct. Lopatin also has an all-consuming obsession with nostalgia and forgotten pop cultural artefacts: he’s made albums based around warped loops of 80s pop hits, preset sounds on obsolete synthesisers and recordings of US radio stations changing formats, discarding the musical genres in which they previously specialised in favour of the current vogue.

Architect Farshid Moussavi is behind a tranquil and timeless new building where Houston’s 40,000-strong Ismaili Muslim community can come together. But how has she created something that looks so delicate out of stone?

On a hot autumn day in southern Texas, monarch butterflies flit around the gardens of Houston’s new Ismaili Centre. Fragile and gaudy, they are on their way south to overwinter in Mexico, travelling up to 3,000 miles in a typical migration cycle, an epic feat of insectile endurance.

Their combination of delicacy and stamina is an apt metaphor for the Ismaili Centre, a building that has taken seven years to realise and is designed to last for a century or more. It’s a place where Houston’s 40,000-strong Ismaili Muslim community, one of the largest in the US, can practise their faith but it’s also a venue for shared activities.

Motown star denies allegations, in addition to four existing sets of allegations against him

Two more former employees of the soul music star Smokey Robinson, both male and female, have alleged he sexually assaulted them, which he denies.

Robinson is already facing similar allegations from four other former employees, who filed a joint lawsuit in May . This week, lawyers for the accusers filed a motion to have two further accusers added to the lawsuit, both anonymously.

At the high-end Metro Private Cinema, a private screening room with a gourmet meal and drinks can reach $200 a person. Will people pay?

On a recent trip to the cinema, I found myself annoyed. The person next to me kept sniffling loudly and, even worse, scrolling Instagram on their phone, dimly visible from the corner of my eye. The former is simply an occupational hazard of being around other people, a thing I usually love to be doing; the latter, though a violation of the theater’s no phone policy, still more preferable to the conflict-averse than confrontation. If only, one sometimes wonders, there was some middle ground between full cinema experience and the privacy of one’s couch.

Enter Metro Private Cinemas, a new upscale theater in Manhattan that caters to cinephiles eager to privatize and glamorize the theatrical experience – for a price. For $50-100 a head, you can book a room at the 20-screen complex in Chelsea for a group sized anywhere between four and 20 people. Pick a film from either current releases or a curated archive, select a drink package for an extra $50 each, choose a 12-13 course gourmet meal off a seasonal menu for another $100 a head, and you have a ritzy night at the movies.

National Gallery, London
Abbey’s studies for the vast murals in the Pennsylvania state capitol – early 20th-century Trump-style symbols of power – leave you wanting to see the finished works

Oh say can you see, by the dawn’s early light, how a huge painting covered in writhing nudes and gold leaf could be a symbol of US power? Not a huge leap is it? And here it is, in the National Gallery, Edwin Austin Abbey’s study for The Hours, a huge circular painting which adorns the ceiling of the Pennsylvania state capitol – a bold, blue and gold testament to the US’s glory.

It’s hard to believe – with museums everywhere begging for money from arms dealers and drug barons, and the arts becoming increasingly defunded – that back in turn-of-the-century America, the arts had value. And Abbey reaped the benefits. He was born in the US in 1852 but made his name in the UK. And when the big kahunas from the newly megarich Pennsylvania came knocking, he answered the call of the motherland.

Roles as EM Forster and a young, gay American dying of Aids in the 2018 play allowed an opportunity for deep personal and social reflection

In 2018 I had recently lost my mother, so I was looking for connections with the spirit. The Inheritance allowed me to talk about matters of the heart.

It was the world premiere at the Young Vic in London, so we were making something brand new, which is always thrilling. They’d already done a week’s rehearsal with another actor who had pulled out of what became my role. I stayed up all night reading Matthew López ’s script before my audition. It was so gripping. I was nervous of Stephen Daldry going into the audition, as he has an enormous status and he’s very front-footed in the rehearsal room. I like to be in the background and find my way, so his working methods frightened me a little bit. But I put all of that aside to serve this story.

Organisers look at other UK venues amid concerns over costs and industry’s lack of working-class voices

For almost 50 years, the great and the good of British broadcasting have descended on Edinburgh each summer to discuss the trials and tribulations of the TV world. David Attenborough, Tina Fey, Emily Maitlis and Rupert Murdoch are among those to have previously given speeches at the city’s TV festival.

Yet amid concerns about the industry’s lack of working-class voices and the high cost of a hotel room in the city, the event’s organisers are thinking the unthinkable: the Edinburgh TV festival could be leaving Edinburgh.

Only our current tech hellscape could create a comedy so insidiously inoffensive. Prepare to be pummelled into submission as your time is siphoned off by OK entertainment

This is a cosy, lighthearted whodunnit about a retired professor who gets a second wind as a private eye. It’s also a bingo card for just about everything that makes streamer-era TV so patronising, uninspiring and mind-numbingly dull.

On the surface, A Man on the Inside’s crimes might seem negligible: it’s a little schmaltzy, a little too pleased with itself in that wisecrack-stuffed American comedy way. Yet it’s exactly that inoffensiveness that makes this strain of television so insidious. When the New York Times critic James Poniewozik coined the term “mid TV” to describe the current “profusion of well-cast, sleekly produced competence” that has come to dominate our screens, it wasn’t so much a vicious takedown as a shrug at the blah-ness of it all. The tech giants have pummelled us into submission by siphoning off our time via OK entertainment.

The former 70s-loving PE teacher has found cult acclaim with his sitcom Mammoth, about a time-travelling 70s PE teacher. The parallels don’t end there, he says, but some things from that era are best left in the past

Think growing some fuzz on your top lip for Movember is impressive? Mike Bubbins hasn’t shaved his moustache for 15 years. “Growing up, all the people I admired like Burt Reynolds and Tom Selleck had a moustache,” explains the Welsh actor, writer and comedian. “My stag night had a Welsh 1970s rugby theme; there were some great taches in that era so I grew a moustache just for the occasion. Afterwards, I told a friend that I missed the moustache. He said: ‘Grow it back then.’ I said: ‘I’m not gonna get TV work if I’ve got a moustache.’ He said: ‘But you might get work because you’ve got a moustache.’ It was like Samson’s hair, and I haven’t looked back since …”

Bubbins’s love of all things 70s and moustachioed helps explain the idea behind his BBC sitcom, Mammoth. In it, Bubbins plays Tony Mammoth, a 70s Welsh PE teacher who is cryogenically frozen in an avalanche in 1979. When he awakes in 2024, he goes back to a teaching job he technically never left, and in the process is forced to navigate the changes to the modern world since he last lived in it, from same-sex relationships to traffic pollution (“Always keep the engine running” is his outdated advice).