Mat Collishaw’s cutting-edge experiments, a delirious meeting of two legends and more mischief from Maurizio Cattelan – all in your weekly dispatch

Mat Collishaw: Move37
How many artists are really “cutting edge”? Collishaw is. He catches the essence of now in this eerie experiment with AI.
• Seed 130, London, until 31 May

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California cases over AI trainers’ use of work by writers including Ta-Nehisi Coates and Michael Chabon transferred to consolidate with New York suits from John Grisham and Jonathan Franzen and more

Twelve US copyright cases against OpenAI and Microsoft have been consolidated in New York, despite most of the authors and news outlets suing the companies being opposed to centralisation.

A transfer order made by the US judicial panel on multidistrict litigation on Thursday said that centralisation will “allow a single judge to coordinate discovery, streamline pretrial proceedings, and eliminate inconsistent rulings”.

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Andrew Cunningham and Lee Hutchinson have spent decades of their lives with Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson's Wheel of Time books, and they previously brought that knowledge to bear as they recapped each first season episode and second season episode of Amazon's WoT TV series. Now we're back in the saddle for season 3—along with insights, jokes, and the occasional wild theory.

These recaps won't cover every element of every episode, but they will contain major spoilers for the show and the book series. We'll do our best to not spoil major future events from the books, but there's always the danger that something might slip out. If you want to stay completely unspoiled and haven't read the books, these recaps aren't for you .

New episodes of The Wheel of Time season 3 will be posted for Amazon Prime subscribers every Thursday. This write-up covers episode six, "The Shadow in the Night," which was released on April 3.

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In 1985, a star-studded lineup of Black UK musicians, including Aswad, Dennis Brown and Janet Kay, recorded a charity single to raise funds for famine-stricken Ethiopia. Why are their efforts so little known?

The Ethiopian famine of the early 1980s was one of the defining news stories of the decade, an exposure of the stark divide between developed and developing nations, still referred to at the time as the Third World. It is a received wisdom that the general public in Britain learned about the crisis when shocking images of emaciated men, women and children were shown on BBC news reports. This is not entirely true. In fact, plenty of Rastafarians were already aware of the situation.

The east African country was their spiritual home – many in the movement viewed its former emperor Haile Selassie as their messiah – and a place free from the iniquities of the west. “A lot of Rastafarians went to Ethiopia [before they] came to London,” says the musician and campaigner Leon Leiffer. “I knew many of them, and there was a rumour going around that things were really bad because of the drought. We heard it like that before the mainstream media. And I had the idea to do something to help before we saw anything on the BBC.”

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The Inside Out studio’s latest, long-awaited project is a neon-drenched star-straddling adventure featuring an orphan, a tardigrade and a wannabe astronaut

Pixar’s film-makers are famously asked to pitch three unique ideas when proposing new projects. In terms of Elio, unique is very much the operative word. Presumably that pitch went somewhere along the lines of: “A lonely kid is mistaken for Earth’s ambassador by a UN-style council of sentient celestial bath bombs dipped in day-glow glitter and floating in a malfunctioning lava lamp.”

If you thought Inside Out , with its candy-coloured Freudian crisis management team, was pushing it, the studio’s latest project may make you suspect Pixar has fully surrendered to the void, and is now making films for children who are made of sherbet and tie-dye, rather than flesh and bones.

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After years of creating dark, disturbing, thought-provoking TV, Charlie Brooker is changing it up. The creator and star-studded cast of Black Mirror talk about why this season is the most moving and vulnerable yet

Charlie Brooker has been contemplating the passing of time, and he’s not happy about it. We’re on set at Shepperton for USS Callister: Into Infinity, the sequel to the 2017 space opera from his terrifying tech anthology Black Mirror. “The cast don’t seem to have aged at all,” he grumbles, “whereas I am a wizened old gentleman.”

There is a more reflective, almost nostalgic tone to this seventh season. The episode Plaything flashes back to Brooker’s early years as a gaming journalist in a Bandersnatch-adjacent slice of computer-induced madness; Eulogy immerses Paul Giamatti in his memories as he literally enters decades-old photos; gaslighting parable Bête Noire forces Siena Kelly’s chocolatier to reckon with youthful misdemeanours; Hotel Reverie stars Emma Corrin as a 1940s matinee idol falling for Issa Rae ’s modern film star, who plays her white, male love interest in an AI remake of a vintage romance.

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In this week’s newsletter: Donald Trump’s week of chaos has made me reappraise the unloved Star Wars prequel – was it quite prescient after all?

There are many scary things to come out of Trump’s tariffs. The world economy being thrown into chaos; spiralling prices; furious economic experts showing charts with big down arrows, using phrases like “gilt markets” and “share index undergrowth”, which I definitely understand. But the most terrifying thing – the thing that has made me truly believe that we are living in the End Times – is a panic-inducing realisation: The Phantom Menace just might have been right all along .

For those who haven’t seen the first Star Wars prequel, GOD I envy you. The dialogue is wooden and the structure inexplicable (sure, let’s just have a pod-race instead of an Act II) – and that’s even before we get onto the Jar Jar Binks of it all (the answer to the question “what if we shaved Paddington and spliced his DNA with the most unlikeable newt in the world?”). But the biggest complaint is the subject matter.

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Wilton’s Music Hall, London
Every character is distinct in this bewitching solo performance by Mark Lockyer, a masterclass in pacing and emotional clarity

Shakespearean performance has been a curse for Mark Lockyer. When he played Mercutio for the RSC in 1995, it began to feel like a “daily execution” , he wrote. That led to a long hiatus from acting – also brought on by alcoholism, bipolar disorder, imprisonment and homelessness. But in taking on this one-man vehicle about the melancholy Dane, he proves – perhaps to himself and certainly to the audience – that Shakespearean performance is his gift too.

It could have turned into a circus trick or feat of memory ( as it did in the hands of Eddie Izzard ) but, instead, the emotional clarity of Lockyer’s performance draws you in. Every character is made distinct, without recourse to broad characterisation. Whenever he is Claudius, Horatio, Hamlet’s father’s ghost or even the guards who see that apparition, he fully embodies each of them.

At Wilton’s Music Hall, London , until 12 April.

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‘Vertical dramas’ consisting of minute-long episodes boom, with market predicted to be worth $14bn by 2027

Found a Homeless Billionaire Husband for Christmas. The Quarterback Next Door. Revenge of the XXL Wife. My Secret Agent Husband.

These may sound like cringy fantasies, but they’re actually titles of “vertical dramas”, a new form of episodic television that’s gripping millions around the world.

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