The actor says her historic 2002 best actress Oscar did not open doors in Hollywood, as studios remained wary of stories led by black performers
Halle Berry, the only black woman to have won the best actress Oscar, says her 2002 victory “didn’t necessarily change the course of my career”.
Speaking to The Cut’s Monica Corcoran Harel to promote new drama Crime 101, Berry said that she anticipated the victory, for Lee Daniels’ Monster’s Ball, would mean “there was going to be a script truck showing up outside my front door”.
Renowned mixed media artist discusses her new exhibition and how it speaks to her personal experience and a wider concept of technology
With just 13 pieces – 11 art objects and two video installations – artist Sarah Sze’s new showcase at Gagosian Beverly Hills packs a punch into a relatively pared back show. The paintings themselves are substantial – as large as 8ft by 16 ft – and their intricacy compels lengthy gazes. Furthermore, the artist has impeccably arranged the space, conjuring an impactful and holistic experience from start to finish. “I’m always interested in talking with architecture and planning out how you can have an experience that unravels over time,” Sze told me via video interview.
Long known as a masterful practitioner of collage, Sze here draws on landscapes as a general means of organizing the space on her canvas, but then radically alters them to offer experiences that at once feel both subtly familiar and utterly fresh.
As record number of seafarers and cargo ships are abandoned in war zones, crew members stranded in a Black Sea port have shared their dramatic testimony with the Guardian
On the night of 16 July last year, Gaurav Joshi, one of the crew working on a cargo ship stranded at a port in southern Ukraine, was on patrol. The crew of the MT Nathan had found themselves abandoned in a war zone for the past three months after a dispute between the ship’s owners.
It had been a rough few months for Joshi and the 14 other crew, who came from India, Egypt and Turkey. They often spent sleepless nights listening to the distant sounds of explosions caused by Russian bombing and the Ukrainian air defence. “Some nights we could even see the lights and fire in the sky,” says Joshi.
Outcome of meeting uncertain as ‘erratic, temperamental’ presidents could be either ‘confrontational’ or amicable
One month ago, a White House meeting between Donald Trump and his Colombian counterpart, Gustavo Petro, would have been unthinkable.
The US raid on Caracas to capture the Venezuelan leader, Nicolás Maduro, brought already heated relations between them to a boil, with Trump warning the leftist Colombian leader “could be next”, claiming Petro was a “sick man who likes making cocaine and selling it to the United States”.
The last time the Seahawks and Patriots met in a Super Bowl, a dramatic interception by an undrafted rookie changed the history of both franchises
When the New England Patriots faced off against the Denver Broncos in this season’s AFC championship, Malcolm Butler was at home in Houston. He had considered attending the game in Denver or watching on TV in a No 21 Patriots jersey, which he wore in Foxboro for four seasons through the mid-to-late 2010s, but feared he might jinx the outcome. In the end, it was just him and his nerves for company.
Just as Butler was feeling somewhat at peace with that setup, and the Patriots’ prospects, a bad omen intruded: His wifi glitched, delaying the broadcast as the Patriots clung on to a three-point lead in the fourth-quarter. “I was lagging bad,” Butler tells the Guardian. “But I did get the wifi back working. And as soon as I did my phone was ringing like crazy, so I knew something was going right. It’s crazy that we’re back.”
Social media suggests that the combination is a superfood for tired plants. The reality is mould, gnats and the sour smell of rot
The problem
Once you tumble down a houseplant rabbit hole online, suddenly everything in your kitchen starts to look like fertiliser. Using oats and Epsom salts sounds wholesome, thrifty; breakfast for you, breakfast for your plants. But does it help?
The hack
The idea is that oats break down and enrich the soil, while Epsom salts (magnesium sulphate) top up magnesium to keep leaves green and glossy. Social media says a spoonful of each will pep up tired plants without the need for proper feed.
There used to be hundreds of pie and mash shops in London. Now there are barely more than 30. Can social media attention and a push for protected status ensure their survival?
Outside it’s raining so hard that the sandwich board sign for BJ’s pie and mash (“All pies are made on the premises”) is folded up inside. The pavement along Barking Road in Plaistow is a blur through the front windows and deserted, and there are only two customers in the shop. Another sign – this one on the counter – says “CASH ONLY”.
Card machine companies often tell proprietor Nathan Jacobi that he’s missing out by not catering to customers who favour cashless transactions. “They’re the ones missing out,” he says. “Cos they ain’t getting pie and mash.”
The European Commission would be “open-minded” to discussing closer trade ties with the UK, including a customs union, a senior EU official has said.
The EU economy commissioner, Valdis Dombrovskis, told the BBC that the European bloc was “ready to engage with an open mind” when asked about a customs union.
A violation of a ceasefire by Russia would result in a response in less than 24 hours, according to the plan
Nato secretary-general Mark Rutte has arrived in Kyiv. He will address the Rada, Ukraine’s parliament, according to the Kyiv Post.
The Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, shared a video on X of himself and Rutte paying tribute to Ukrainian soldiers killed fighting for the country.
Karim Benzema’s move to Al-Hilal has cast fresh doubt on the future of Cristiano Ronaldo at Al-Nassr. The 40-year-old was missing from Monday’s 1-0 Saudi Pro League win at Al-Riyadh, the day Benzema’s move from Al-Ittihad to Al-Hilal was confirmed. Ronaldo is reportedly dissatisfied with how Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, which also has a stake in Newcastle, is controlling the affairs of both Al-Hilal and Al-Nassr, unhappy that a rival club have signed his former Real Madrid teammate. Sounds plausible?
Dwight McNeil was all set to sign for Crystal Palace from Everton before Jean-Philippe Mateta’s switch to Milan fell through. The Eagles lodged a very late £20m bid for the former Burnley schemer, but reportedly moved the goalposts after failing to offload Mateta, preferring a loan deal with an option to buy instead.
In wonderfully bewildering shows, New York’s venerable avant garde theatre company mash together everything from baroque opera to sci-fi B-movies. Their next trick? A seance-style tribute to an old friend
Spalding Gray used to perform a show called Interviewing the Audience. The celebrated monologist would invite a stranger he had met in the lobby to join him on stage. Through a sequence of innocuous questions, he would get them to open up about their lives. At one performance, a guest broke the audience’s hearts by talking about her daughter’s murder. At benefit nights, people living with HIV shared their tales. Other times, the anecdotes would be eccentric or amusing. Gray said they showed us “what it is to live in the world”.
Watching Gray conjure up this material made a big impression on a young actor called Scott Shepherd. It was the show he saw on his first visit to the Performing Garage, the New York home of the Wooster Group. The pioneering avant garde company had been established a few years earlier by Gray and director Elizabeth LeCompte with their colleagues Kate Valk, Ron Vawter, Jim Clayburgh, Willem Dafoe and Peyton Smith.
The author of The North Water vividly captures bleak beauty and brutish appetites on an 18th-century expedition into the frozen wilds of Canada
It was Ian McGuire’s second novel, The North Water, longlisted for the Booker prize in 2016 and later adapted for television, that established his reputation for savage historical noir. A professor of American literature at the University of Manchester, McGuire specialises in the late 19th-century realist tradition; at its best his work blends the unsparing violence of Cormac McCarthy with a bleak lyricism reminiscent of Welsh poet RS Thomas.
Both The North Water, set onboard a whaling ship dispatched from Hull to Baffin Bay in 1859, and The Abstainer, inspired by the hanging of three Irish rebels in Manchester a decade later, probed the grisly underbelly of Victorian imperialism, harsh worlds where a “man’s life on its own is nothing much to talk about”. In White River Crossing, McGuire travels across the Atlantic and back another 100 years to the Prince of Wales Fort, a remote trading post of the Hudson’s Bay Company in what is now northern Manitoba. Founded by royal charter in 1670 and granted sole right of trade and commerce across some 1.5m sq km of territory, the British venture was established to exploit the indigenous fur trade, but investors also hoped for other profitable discoveries, particularly silver and gold.
The stars get big audiences and complex characters to develop. We’ve lucked out in this golden age of streaming shows, and so have they
Shrinking, the TV series about Jason Segel’s Jimmy, a grieving psychotherapist who can’t stop telling patients what he really thinks, seems pretty innocuous on paper. From Frasier to In Treatment to Sex Education, there’s no shortage of TV dramas about dysfunctional therapists. What marks Shrinking out from the crowd is the presence of Harrison Ford, who plays Jimmy’s octogenarian mentor. Here we see a Hollywood megastar getting high on edibles, wrestling with his failures as a father and trying to keep a lid on his Parkinson’s symptoms. Though Segel shares top billing with Ford, the latter is the main draw and gets all the best lines.
Paramount’s 1923, showrunner Taylor Sheridan’s prequel to Yellowstone, similarly draws on Ford’s elder statesman status as it depicts a ranching family’s efforts to maintain their wealth and status during the Great Depression. Ford’s co-star is Helen Mirren, another octogenarian actor who previously appeared with him in the 1986 film The Mosquito Coast. Set in Montana, 1923 is a classy drama that makes high art of its protagonists’ craggy features along with their penchant for brutality.
US president makes further claims of antisemitism against Ivy League school amid wider dispute with higher eduction institutions
Donald Trump has announced that his administration is seeking $1bn in damages from Harvard University, the latest step in a long-running battle with the university over allegations of antisemitism.
In a Truth Social post late on Monday, Trump accused the Ivy League school of being “strongly antisemitic”, adding that Harvard president Alan Garber “has done a terrible job of rectifying a very bad situation for his institution and, more importantly, America itself”.
The high-risk nature of the sport creates enjoyment for the competitors regardless of the hunt for medals and this positive feeling helps attract spectators
As the Winter Olympics approaches, we get to watch sports many of us have never tried. How can we connect to these sports? What should we look out for? What can we enjoy and learn? Research by three-times Olympian Lesley McKenna into what makes snowboarding meaningful offers us some great ideas.
As a British athlete, coach and team manager, McKenna experienced first-hand the pressures of managing athlete performance, wellbeing and the pursuit of medals. She saw the push and pull between the inherent creativity in pipe and park snowsport events and the drive for standardisation to make it easier to compare athletes.
Ministers’ proposals to tackle ‘forever chemicals’ fail to match tougher stance taken in Europe, say experts
Environmental campaigners have criticised a “crushingly disappointing” UK government plan to tackle “forever chemicals”, which they warn risks locking in decades of avoidable harm to people and the environment.
The government said its Pfas action plan set out a “clear framework” of “coordinated action … to understand where these chemicals are coming from, how they spread and how to reduce public and environmental exposure”.
Based on a real-life case of a teacher charged with abusing a child, Japan’s master of the extreme doesn’t sit on the fence in this two-sided retelling
Takashi Miike, Japan’s maestro of the extreme, now takes on a relatively sedate and mainstream genre: the courtroom drama. But he can’t help bringing to it his signature shocks and unsubtle tropes. Sham is based on a real-life case from 2003 that convulsed Japanese media and public opinion. In the city of Fukuoka in south-west Japan, primary school teacher Seiichi Yabushita was accused of racially abusing and beating a pupil and driving him close to suicide on the grounds of the child supposedly having an American grandfather, his pure Japanese blood tainted by foreigners. But was the child lying on the instructions of his mother, the real abuser? The film is based on Fabrication: The Truth About the “Murder Teacher” in Fukuoka, investigative journalist Masumi Fukuda’s 2007 book about the case.
Mirroring the prosecution and defence cases in court, Miike gives us both sides of the story in quasi-Rashomon style: first, that of the boy’s mother Mrs Himuro (Kô Shibasaki) and in this version, the behaviour of the teacher (Gô Ayano) is truly sinister. Afterwards – the “prosecution” version having taken up very little of the film – we get the teacher’s own account, and it soon dawns on us that this is in fact the objective reality. He is a gentle, reasonable man, loved by his pupils; he wouldn’t hurt a fly and his remarks on the boy’s family background are entirely innocent. The trouble stemmed from having been persuaded by the school’s terrified headteacher to apologise to the parents in a doomed attempt to make the case go away and to confess to corporal punishment on the grounds of one misjudged chastisement after a bullying incident, intended to show him how awful violence is.
A whistle-stop tour of the greatest hits of progressive policy fails to take account of a central conundrum
If you’ve written a successful book based around one big idea, what do you make the next one about? Back in 2009, Kate Pickett’s The Spirit Level (co-authored with Richard Wilkinson) argued that inequality was the ultimate cause of almost all our social problems, from obesity and teenage pregnancy to violent crime; more equal societies, they claimed, had better outcomes across the board. While criticised – as most “big idea” books are – for overstating the case and cherrypicking evidence, they struck a chord, and some aspects of their thesis are now mainstream.
However, when it comes to the UK, there is an awkward problem, both for Pickett and for economists like me who, while not entirely convinced by The Spirit Level, would still like to see a more equal society. In the first chapter of Pickett’s new book, inequality is once again the root of all (social) evils: “if you know a country’s level of inequality, you can do a pretty good job of predicting its infant mortality rate, or prevalence of mental illness, or levels of homicide or imprisonment”. By contrast, she argues that GDP or GDP growth are very poor measures of overall welfare. Pickett then goes on to list the ways in which the UK has become a worse place to live since 2010 – higher child poverty, flattening life expectancy and child mortality, more people in prison.
By travelling during the day on scenic routes, travellers can soak up spectacular landscapes before taking in Turin’s cultural heritage
Is there a better sensation for a traveller than when a train speeds out of a tunnel? The sudden flood of light, that howling rush of air. Clearly, it’s not just me who thinks trains are the new (old) planes, with 2025 having seen a 7% rise in UK train travel, and more Europeans than ever looking to hit the rails.
It’s late December, and I’m heading out on a slow-train journey across the historic railways of the Swiss Alps and the Italian lakes. It’s a trip of roughly 1,800 miles (2,900km), crossing five countries, almost entirely by scenic daytime trains.
Modelling suggests 5.4m children under five among those who could die if budgets of donor countries such as UK and US continue to be slashed
Aid cuts could lead to more than 22 million avoidable deaths by 2030, including 5.4 million children under five, according to the most comprehensive modelling to date.
In the past two decades there have been dramatic falls in the number of young children dying from infectious diseases, driven by aid directed to the developing world, researchers wrote in the Lancet Global Health. But that progress was at risk of reversal because of abrupt budget cuts by donor countries, including the US and the UK.
Pia Paulina Guilmoth and Jesse Bull Saffire spent seven years sniffing around discarded boxes and junk shops in order to paint this peculiar portrait of their home
A fairly technical-sounding change to student loans tucked away in last November’s budget has become the catalyst for an increasingly bad-tempered row pitting the UK consumer champion Martin Lewis against the chancellor, Rachel Reeves.
In one interview, Lewis – the founder of MoneySavingExpert.com, who boasts a vast following – said he did not think the planned change to repayment terms “was a moral thing”.
‘We had 11 players available – unbelievable but true’
Cristian Romero has said it is “disgraceful” that Tottenham are operating with such a threadbare squad in an apparent dig at the club’s January recruitment strategy.
The club captain is no stranger to outspoken social media posts and he dropped another one on Monday evening shortly after the closure of the mid-season transfer window.
Layers of eastern spice and flavour run through these mini bulgur wheat balls in a spicy sauce of pepper and pomegranate molasses, and there’s a sprightly fennel and herb salad on the side
I have always dreamed of a return to the golden age of Arab trade, when spices, fruits and ideas voyaged across deserts and seas, creating extraordinary food cultures through exchange and curiosity. I’ve imagined bringing new flavours home, letting them transform the kitchen – but with all the madness in today’s world, that dream must stay a dream, for now. So, these recipes become my journey, a way to reconnect with that spirit and taste the magic of the Arab golden age today.
Connexion
