Demonstrations against deteriorating living conditions have widened to include criticism of how Iran is governed

Alborz, a textile merchant in the central Iranian city of Isfahan, decided he could no longer sit on the sidelines. He closed his shop and took to the streets, joining merchants across Iran who shuttered their stores and students who took over their campuses to protest against declining economic conditions.

The sudden loss of purchasing power pushed Alborz and tens of thousands of other Iranians into the streets, where protests are now entering their fourth day. Students have paralysed university campuses, traders have shut down their stores and demonstrators have blocked off streets in defiance of police. Protests have spread from the capital, Tehran, to cities across Iran.

We’d like to hear from people who are training AI to replace their current roles

Analysis by the International Monetary Fund says Artificial intelligence will affect about 40% of jobs around the world.

We’d like to find out more about the impact of AI on jobs now. With this in mind, we want to hear from people who have been training AI to replace their current roles. What has the experience been like? How do you feel about your future at your company? Do you have concerns?

Hydrated skin and some trips to the gym – I’ll be embracing better beauty habits next year

I’m not given to making new year resolutions, but by coincidence I have recently made a number of pledges to adopt better beauty habits. I believe that even someone in this job, who already moisturises and UV protects religiously, can still find areas for improvement.

Once again, I have pledged to drink more (or indeed some) water. After decades of tea dependency, I never find myself thirsty in the way others describe, and so force myself to hydrate only for the sake of my skin (to which it makes a noticeable difference) and well, aliveness. To this end, I’ve bought one of those ridiculously enormous mugs influencers drain several times daily, and hope to make my way through perhaps one by bedtime.

Whether Vinted’s to blame or TikTok’s to thank, people are flocking back to car parks in search of secondhand bargains. How did the car boot get hip again?

It’s a crisp Sunday morning in south-west London. Tucked within rows of terrace houses, the playground of a primary school has been transformed into an outdoor treasure trove. Tables are filled with stacks of books and board games; clothes hang from metal racks or are piled into boxes which are strewn over a hopscotch. It’s the 10am opening of Balham car boot sale. A modest queue filters through the entrance: families, pensioners, fashion influencers, TikTokers.

Three friends – Dominique Gowie, Abbie Mitchell (both 25 years old) and Affy Chowdhury (26) – arrived an hour earlier, to set up. They are selling at a car boot for the first time, enticed by the growing hype circulating on social media. “If you go out and say: ‘Oh I bought this at the car boot,’ I think it’s actually cooler than saying I bought this on Asos,” says Dominique.

Symptoms of the virus include diarrhea and vomiting and it infects about 684 million people globally every year

Norovirus is the term for a family of about 50 strains of virus that all share one miserable endpoint: copious time in the bathroom. Every year, an estimated 684 million people globally come down with it.

Norovirus is a kind of infectious gastroenteritis, “an inflammation of the bowel and the colon that can cause diarrhea” and vomiting, explains Dr Ambreen Allana, an infectious disease physician based in Texas.

After years of worrying that running or sneezing would leave me needing fresh underwear, a quick, minimally invasive procedure changed my life

Some of my earliest memories feature my mother’s leotard-encased body bouncing to Jane Fonda with abandon. A similar carefree fluidity prevailed a decade later, as her feet struck hard-packed sand on a shorebreak jog. Twelve-year-old me panted alongside, so desperate to be made in her image that I tolerated heated cheeks and shaking quads. Their trembling barely subsided during the one stop we made, for her to wade into the waves and pee.

But it got easier to keep up after she gave birth to my youngest brother, with her squatting in the bushes every 10 minutes or so. Soon, even that wasn’t enough to staunch the flow. She gave up and switched to hiking. “I should have done more Kegels,” she quipped.

As 007 makes his gaming return, you can climb a mountain in Cairn, play a scaredy-cat in Resident Evil, and play a criminal couple in GTA VI

Live your mountaineering fantasies and brave the elements in a wonderfully illustrated climbing game. You must carefully place climber Aava’s hands and feet to make your way up a forbidding mountain, camping on ledges and bandaging her fingers as you go. Like real climbing, it is challenging and somewhat brutal.
• PC, PlayStation 5; 29 January

It was the end of a fabulous decade, when spontaneous, unpredictable parties seemed not just possible but typical. A new millennium was dawning. What could possibly go wrong?

‘We wish you peace,” said Tony Blair as the clock struck 8pm. It was New Year’s Eve 1999, a Friday night, and I was on the banks of the Thames. Britain’s fresh-faced prime minister – only two years into the job – was giving a gimmick called The British Airways London Eye its first spin. The Eye was physically unremarkable and harrowingly slow, but it didn’t matter because it only had a five-year lease and definitely wouldn’t still be around a quarter of a century later, littering the skyline.

It was the end of the 90s and, as the Thatcher/Major doldrums whizzed out of view like the subplot of Sliding Doors, we maintained a Bridget Jones-like innocence and entrusted the future to guys like Blair, Peter Mandelson and Bill Clinton, who didn’t seem like (respectively) warmongers, abuse excusers or sex pests.

How do you photograph darkness? A question Sarah Lee considers with her work as the nights draw in: ‘I’ve always been drawn to photographing the darkness as the winter months draw in after the clocks go back and we head towards the solstice. I wondered why that was given that the world itself seems so dark at the moment. I realised this year that it is not the darkness I’m photographing, but, rather, the light. Always the light.’

This year saw everyone from Alan Carr to demon sheep run riot on our screens – but there could only be one winner. Here’s our full countdown of the very best television of 2025
• More on the best culture of 2025

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Brilliant biopics, daring documentaries and a host of chillers and thrillers – our critics pick the best from another sensational year of cinema
• Read the US version of this list
• More on the best culture of 2025

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Here’s what you need to know about the supplements, procedures and hacks everyone’s discussing

• Tell us: share your experiences of traveling with friends

Staying up to date on wellness trends can be tough. What if you get sat next to an energy healer at a dinner party? What are you going to talk about? Raw milk is already sort of passé.

Don’t worry, we’ve got you covered. Here are the wellness trends everyone was discussing in 2025, and what you need to know about them.

Topped by Rosalía’s multilingual, ultra-ambitious Lux, here are the best albums of the year as voted for by 30 Guardian music writers
• More on the best culture of 2025

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A family classic reborn in a wide open world, a satirical adventure through teenage life and a mystery puzzler for the ages – our critics on the year’s best fun
• More on the best culture of 2025

Ivy Road/Annapurna Interactive; PC, PS5, Xbox
An arena warrior on a losing streak takes refuge in a vast forest where she discovers the joy of working in a cosy teashop. From this simple premise comes a joyful game of mindfulness and social interaction, as Alta learns how to serve up witty conversation and decent hot drinks. Colourful and highly stylised, it is a thoughtful study of burnout and recovery.

Beyzaie, who has died aged 87, wove myth, folklore and classical Persian literature into stories that defend against a regime which sought to obliterate them

One of the last messages I sent to the great Iranian stage and screen writer-director Bahram Beyzaie was a recent photograph, taken by a friend, of the interior ruins of Tehran’s oldest cinema, Cinema Iran. There, on one of the walls, hung posters of Beyzaie’s 1988 film Maybe Some Other Time, positioned above and below the torn portraits of the supreme leaders of the theocratic regime.

The symbolism – the ideological ruin; cinema and the future – was too striking for something so accidental, particularly given that Beyzaie’s theatre and cinema are intricate mazes of carefully constructed and overlapping allegorical moments.

Did you decide not to pursue your dream profession or did you have to retrain? We would like to hear from you

AI will affect 40% of jobs and probably worsen inequality, the head of the International Monetary Fund has said.

What has your experience been of trying to future-proof your career? Have you retrained or moved jobs because your previous career path is at risk of an artificial intelligence takeover?

Sex is an appetite like any other and there is much you can do to make it a priority, from making sure you find the time for it to building your confidence and maintaining intimacy throughout the day

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If you have sex, chances are, you’ll have a good day. But scheduling it makes it feel like a chore. And unlike any other chore or fitness enterprise, you conceive it more as self-indulgence than self-improvement, and as such, even if you’re already in a relationship, it’s hard to find that chin-out determination to get it done. Yet sex is an appetite like any other, a necessity like any other, a nourishment like any other. If you let it go dormant the effect on your relationship might be as if one or both of you are on a permanent diet – and also lonely. That might be fine for both of you, but for many of us, sex is a thing worth prioritising.

At its core, before you introduce any other domestic obstacles, it’s a two-person job, so you have to be attuned to one another; you can’t just decide unilaterally. To take this in ascending order of hurdles; if you’re a childless couple, the main block is going to be each other – not being in the same mood at the same time, not being in the house at the same time. This is true for your entire relationship, not just sex; I once interviewed a fertility doctor, who described working with a couple, trying to find an appointment time for when one was ovulating and both were in the country. They scrolled through several weeks before they managed it. “I felt as if I was beginning to get to the bottom of why they couldn’t conceive,” she said.

PC, Xbox, PlayStation 5; Embark Studios
The breakout hit, which has players coming together (or turning on each other) to battle intimidating robots in an apocalyptic future, is worth the hype

Arc Raiders is an extraction shooter from Embark Studios – so, a game where you deploy into a map full of other players and do as much shooting and looting as you can before making an escape. This is my first real go at the genre, and it’s excellent. It has smooth, only occasionally cumbersome combat, sound design that scratches the brain just right and robotic enemies that genuinely terrify. And it satisfies my constant need to sift through my inventory and rifle through every drawer.

But I have to keep my head on a swivel: Arc Raider’s player v player element means I can get jumped for my precious cargo by a malicious rival at any moment. And also, the knowledge that this game was made with the help of generative AI voice acting makes me slightly ashamed of how much I enjoy it. I play every game sheepishly looking over my shoulder (and my character’s) in case someone in-game takes my sought-after blueprint, or someone in real life kicks down my door to call me a hypocrite.

Young men swapping Nike Tech fleeces for quarter-zips are all over TikTok, as well as staging IRL meetups worldwide. What’s behind the growing movement centring a once unremarkable garment?

As I’m wearing a quarter-zip jumper and sipping on an iced matcha, you’d be forgiven for thinking it’s my last day of term before the school holidays. The giveaway is it’s a Saturday in London’s Soho, and I’m surrounded by 20 or so young men between the ages of 13 and 21 who are all here for London’s first ever “quarter-zip meetup”.

Organised, rather bizarrely, by sibling rappers OKay the Duo, the meetup is the latest manifestation of a growing tongue-in-cheek trend for quarter-zips and matcha that has taken over TikTok globally. Previous meetups have taken place in Houston and Rotterdam.

Two film producers discuss second homes, the use of the word ‘woke’, and the importance of the BBC. Could they find any common ground?

Alex, 28, London

Occupation Assistant producer for documentaries

There was no shortage of fun and video games in the Diamond household in the last 12 months. Which ones did we play so much our thumbs hurt? And which one saved my soul? Let the ceremony begin …
• The 20 best video games of 2025

So, how was 2025 for your household? Was it really all as good as you pretended it was on Facebook? Full of A-grades for the kids and riotous themed fancy dress birthday parties for the grownups? Or was it a sea of disappointment with only occasional fun flotsam? And was any of it actually real, or are we all now seven-fingered AI slop beings with Sydney Sweeney’s teeth?

I have gathered my thoughts (and the Diamond household) together, whether they wanted to or not, to reflect on the most important thing in any given year: which video games we enjoyed the most. Without further ado:

Date a vending machine, watch intergalactic television and make the most out of your short existence as a fly. Here are the best games you weren’t playing this year
• The 20 best video games of 2025
• More on the best culture of 2025

PS5, Xbox, Switch, PC
Have you ever wanted to romance your record player? Date Everything! offers players the chance to develop relationships with everyday objects around your house, in a fully voiced sandbox romp featuring over 100 anthropomorphised characters. Wonderfully meta; you can put the moves on the textbox, or even “Michael Transaction” (microtransaction – get it?) himself. Meghan Ellis

Perhaps you have been living with friends for many years, or live in a commune

Do you have what could be described as unusual living arrangements?

Perhaps you live in communal housing, or a commune or with extended family.

We’d like to hear from independent retailers about how changes to online searches has affected them. We’d also like to find out from customers about how easy it is to track down independent retailers

We’d like to find out more about how your business has been affected by changes to online searches amid the rise of AI.

Independent businesses have traditionally relied on online advertising for increased visibility and sales, even if they are based on the high street. However, with the introduction of AI mode and AI Overview summaries on Google, and the proliferation of LLMs such as ChatGPT or Google Gemini, people are altering their search habits, which may affect the online visibility of small businesses.