After a career in accountancy, Sally Goldner decided to get in the ring – as Zali Gold – and live out her childhood dreams
On the night of her 60th birthday, Sally Goldner climbed on to the top rope of the wrestling ring, to the roars of the crowd, and launched herself on to her competitors with a missile dropkick. The crowd roared. For a second, she was completely airborne, before landing on her opponents.
“‘Wow, I’m doing this,’” she thought. “Exhilarating. I couldn’t think of anything I’d rather be doing on my birthday.” She had seized her moment in an Alpha Pro battle royal, a multi-competitor elimination match. As her opponents – all men – threw her out of the ring, they wished her a happy birthday.
Club culture is notoriously hard to capture on film. Oscar-tipped director Oliver Laxe explains why he had to organise his own music festival in the Moroccan desert to find deeper meaning in dance-floor ecstasy
In the opening scene of Oliver Laxe’s existential mystery thriller Sirāt, a crowd of partygoers stack up a sound system for a rave in the southern Moroccan desert, where the paths of the film’s protagonists cross for the first time. Crucially, Laxe explains, the revellers were no ordinary extras. Most of them were committed, lifelong ravers who had travelled to the makeshift festival from across Europe. One of the DJs who played, Sebastian Vaughan AKA 69db, was a core member of Spiral Tribe, the pioneering British “free party” collective of the 1990s.
“In film, reality is usually made to adapt to the rules of cinema,” the French-born Spanish director tells me when we meet in Berlin. “But we do the opposite: we adapt cinema to reality.” When negotiating with the ravers how to best represent them in the film, he recalls, “they told us that the music cannot stop for three days. And we were really pleased with this idea”.
Ergonomic shape, quality materials and satisfying clicks, now with novel haptic feedback and repairable design
Logitech’s latest productivity power-house updates one of the greatest mice of all time with smoother materials, a repair-friendly design and a haptic motor for phone-like vibrations on your desktop.
The MX Master 4 is the latest evolution in a line of pioneering mice that dates back more than 20 years and has long been the mouse to beat for everything but hardcore PC gaming. Having given it a magnetic free-spinning scroll wheel, plenty of buttons and precise tracking, now Logitech is trying something different for its seven-generation: the ability to tap back at you.
Documentary following Laurence Philomène captures the vibrant palette of their work – and the shadows cast over it by prejudice
For non-binary trans photographer Laurence Philomène, art, life and identity are intimately entwined. Though drawing from art history, their photographs strike a distinctive note with their pastel colours; capturing queer subjects, including Philomène themself, in restful poses, these portraits bloom in soft hues of pink, purple, blue – the full rainbow. This style seems to seep into Catherine Legault’s intimate documentary, which captures not only the artist’s creative process but also their daily life with vibrancy.
Philomène’s home, just like their work, bursts with colour. As they prepare their first book, Puberty, which documents their transition, their home doubles as a photography studio. Philomène takes pictures of ordinary rituals, from taking their daily hormone shots to a gentle cuddle with their partner in bed. At a time when non-conforming gender expression is being policed, censored and even banned, these tableaux of trans life are more radical than ever. In contrast to conservative rhetoric demonising trans people, Philomène chooses to focus on moments of joy, love and respite.
Alison Spittle and Fern Brady’s hugely entertaining new show sees them tackle any topic they like. Plus, an amusingly personal take on how generative AI will affect the future of employment
“It’s clear that the theme of this podcast is us trying to talk about a topic and getting immediately sidetracked.” So say comedians Alison Spittle and Fern Brady about their new show. It’s a hugely entertaining ramble through subjects including Lily Allen’s “breakup album for narcissists” West End Girl, sex (“there’s more frigid people in England than Ireland”) and the length of pig orgasms (up to 90 minutes!). Lots of fun. Alexi Duggins
Widely available, episodes weekly, from Tue
A new biography reveals Brown to be a man of exceptional vision and probity – what a contrast with today’s politics
For a while, during the 13 years when Gordon Brown was at the apex of British politics, it became fashionable, and then a cliche, to depict him as a Shakespearean protagonist. He was the Scot who would be king, consumed by vaulting ambition for the throne, or else the powerful man of action, devoured by envy of his onetime friend. But in an illuminating new biography by the political journalist James Macintyre, Brown emerges as something closer to the hero of a Victorian novel: a man who leads an epic life shaped by early misfortune and later tragedy, driven onward by a moral purpose that burns to the very end.
His is a compelling story. Bill Clinton was once described as the most psychologically complex occupant of the Oval Office since Richard Nixon; the same is surely true if you substitute Brown, Downing Street and Winston Churchill. Macintyre hails him as a “titan”, brimming with both intellectual firepower and the urge, rooted in Christian faith, to do good. (When the former archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams was asked to identify who in the current era most closely incarnates the values of the pastor and legendary anti-Nazi dissident Dietrich Bonhoeffer, he answered: “Gordon Brown.”) But Macintyre also describes his subject as “famously flawed”, with a volcanic temper, a talent for grudges – he stops speaking to Robin Cook and can barely remember why – a tendency towards “needless suspicion towards his perceived opponents” and a willingness to rely on a phalanx of “sometimes thuggish spin doctors”, expert in the blackest arts.
Venezuela’s opposition leader Maria Corina Machado said on Sunday that close ally Juan Pablo Guanipa was kidnapped in Caracas around midnight, just hours after his release from prison.
Israel President Isaac Herzog started a state visit Monday aimed at consoling grieving Australian Jews and improving bilateral relations by laying a wreath and stones at the site of an antisemitic attack in Sydney that left 15 dead.
Haile Cummings, 34, was allegedly part of the crew involved in the deadly shootout with rival gang members at the Taste of the City Lounge in Crown Heights in the early hours of Aug. 17.
Detentions of senior Reformists Front figures follow criticism of the authorities’ handling of recent protests
The head of Iran’s Reformists Front, the organisation that was instrumental in securing the election of the country’s president, Masoud Pezeshkian, has been arrested by the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps in a move that will probably deepen the tensions over the handling of the recent street protests.
Azar Mansouri, the secretary general of the Islamic Iran People party, had expressed deep sorrow at protesters’ deaths, and said nothing could justify such a catastrophe. She had not in public called for the supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, to resign.
Forty-odd residents of Clydach Terrace in Ynysybwl, south Wales, relieved by council buyout after years in fear of fast flooding
When Storm Dennis hit the UK in 2020, a wall of dirty, frigid water from a tributary of the Taff threw Paul Thomas against the front of his house in the south Wales village of Ynysybwl. He managed to swim back into his home before the storm surge changed direction, almost carrying him out of the smashed-in front door.
“I was holding on to downpipes to stop myself being dragged out again. It was unbelievably strong, the water,” he said.
We’re often told the PM is a ‘decent’ man. But in appointing Peter Mandelson he chose political convenience over doing right by trafficked women and girls
Contempt everywhere. From Jeffrey Epstein’s email exchanges to the scandal of Peter Mandelson’s appointment, contempt radiates. Contempt for women and girls, for the law, for the public. A continuum of disdain runs from Epstein on the one end to our political establishment on the other. The other thing that joins them is a restless pursuit of power.
Contempt is not a byproduct of that power, it is the point of it. Procuring, trading, objectifying and violating women and girls is the summit of potency for those who already have everything else: money, status, respect. To subordinate another human being to your urges, to reduce her in all ways, is to be initiated into a club of super-predators who are above the law. The Epstein emails are a demonstration of how misogyny – there really should be a stronger word for it in this context – is a currency, lavishly spent to show how much power you have. The gut-twisting way that casual references to body parts would come up in correspondence is part of a whole language of signalling. Referring to women as “pussy” – or just “P” – is to flash your exclusive club membership card.
Heath then turned around and allegedly dropped his pants, exposing his bare bottom while spanking himself and caressing his left butt cheek, police said.
Bad Bunny's Super Bowl halftime show was a visual triumph but a musical dud. Maybe viewers learned a few words of Espanol, but next year, let’s get back to something a little less polarizing.
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