Keyword – Food Trefwoorden – Vegetables, Food, Tofu, Sauces and gravies, Noodles, Main course, Vegan food and drink, Vegetarian food and drink, Japanese food and drink Title – Meera Sodha’s vegan recipe for lime and sesame cold noodles with miso ‘meatballs’ | Vegetables | The Guardian Author – https://www.theguardian.com/profile/meera-sodha Link – Meera Sodha’s vegan recipe for lime and sesame cold noodles with miso ‘meatballs’ | Vegetables | The Guardian Publish date – 2026-06-20T05:00:53.000Z Category – Lifestyle URL – https://www.theguardian.com/food/2026/jun/20/lime-sesame-cold-noodles-miso-meatballs-vegan-recipe-meera-sodha
W hat’s your favourite hot weather food? Mine’s gazpacho. I’m joking – gazpacho’s lovely, but cold noodles are my top pick because, in the summer, they meet me exactly where I am in both the cooking and the eating. They don’t need much by way of cooking, and they can be dressed and paired with many a store-cupboard ingredient – in today’s case, tahini, miso and sesame oil. Best of all, cooling the noodles shocks the starches, which makes them firmer and gorgeously “QQ”, a Taiwanese term used to describe food that’s delightfully bouncy and springy. Which personally, is how I’d like to feel all summer long.
Lime and sesame cold noodles with miso “meatballs”
You’ll need a food processor to make these.
Prep 10 min Cook 35 min Serves 4
280g very firm tofu , drained and roughly chopped ( Tofoo ’s is by far the firmest I’ve come across) 60g dried breadcrumbs 4 tbsp white miso paste 2 tbsp agave syrup Fine sea salt 2 tbsp rapeseed oil 250g ramen noodles 2½ tbsp tahini 3 tbsp lime juice (from 2-3 limes) 2 tbsp toasted sesame oil 150g radishes , thinly sliced 150g cucumber , quartered and sliced 30g mint , leaves picked to get 18g
First make the “meatballs”. Put the tofu in a food processor with the breadcrumbs, two tablespoons of the miso, half a tablespoon of agave syrup and an eighth of a teaspoon of salt (in other words, a big pinch). Pulse or blend until the mix comes together into a dough, then tip out, break into roughly 20g pieces and roll into balls.
Put the rapeseed oil in a nonstick frying pan on a medium heat and, when it’s hot, fry the miso meatballs for 10 minutes, shaking the pan every so often so they fry evenly (and don’t catch and burn).
Meanwhile, cook the noodles according to the packet instructions, then drain, rinse under cold water, until they’re cold, and leave to drain.
Now make the dressing. Whisk the remaining two tablespoons of miso with the tahini, lime juice, the remaining tablespoon and a half of agave syrup, the toasted sesame oil and three-quarters of a teaspoon of salt.
Put the drained noodles and dressing in the empty noodle pan, add the radishes, cucumber, mint and meatballs, and mix well. Transfer to a large platter or divide between four bowls, and serve.
Keyword – Film Trefwoorden – Film, James Bond, Culture, Idris Elba Title – Idris Elba says audiences would never accept a black actor playing James Bond: ‘That’s not what they like in their culture’ Author – https://www.theguardian.com/profile/catherineshoard Link – Idris Elba says audiences would never accept a black actor playing James Bond: ‘That’s not what they like in their culture’ Publish date – 2026-06-08T11:27:51.000Z Category – Culture URL – https://www.theguardian.com/film/2026/jun/08/idris-elba-audiences-would-not-accept-black-actor-james-bond
Idris Elba has refuted rumours that he was seriously in contention to play James Bond after Daniel Craig’s departure in 2021.
The actor, 53, who is currently promoting new film Masters of the Universe, told British GQ the conversation linking him to the role was “never legit”.
“I’ve always felt that it’s not a realistic thing,” he said. “James Bond was written how he was written for a reason. But I was complimented by it. And also, I think, in realistic terms, some markets just don’t go for that. Bond is big all over the world. And [audiences] won’t [all] go for a black male, an African male, playing Bond. That’s not what they like in their culture. Period.”
Elba also said he believed that the character should not evolve too dramatically from Ian Fleming’s original creation. “Bond is so unrealistic, so a hint of reality is good, but let’s not try and make it woke,” he said. “I think you’ve got to be pure to what it is: escapism. Don’t try and answer the world’s taste. Just be Bond.”
Last month, veteran casting director Nina Gold was brought on board for Amazon MGM’s reboot of the franchise, joining director Denis Villeneuve and screenwriter Steven Knight.
A source told Variety that 26-year-old Tom Francis has already auditioned, while Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Jacob Elordi and Callum Turner are all also apparently in the frame.
Keyword – Music Trefwoorden – The Beatles, Paul McCartney, John Lennon, Ringo Starr, George Harrison, Pop and rock, Music, Photography, Art and design, Culture Title – Hello, goodbye: the Beatles’ chaotic, controversial final tour – as never seen before Author – https://www.theguardian.com/profile/ianleslie Link – Hello, goodbye: the Beatles’ chaotic, controversial final tour – as never seen before Publish date – 2026-06-07T05:00:24.000Z Category – Culture URL – https://www.theguardian.com/music/2026/jun/07/the-beatles-unseen-photographs-chaotic-controversial-final-tour-jim-marshall
The Beatles played their last official concert on 29 August 1966, at Candlestick Park in San Francisco. Jim Marshall’s pictures capture the group at a pivotal moment, when they are already feeling nostalgia for what they are leaving behind.
Two months earlier, the Beatles had finished precording Revolver, a glittering collection of pop gems. The next day they boarded a plane to begin a global tour during which they would play nothing from it. They were not being perverse; it was simply that none of the songs lent themselves to live performance. On stage, they were a four-piece band. They could hardly play anything as complex as Eleanor Rigby or Tomorrow Never Knows to tens of thousands of fans.
Three years after their first No 1, the Beatles’ artistic development had split into two branches, one of which was withering. Until they came along, a recording was literally a record of a live performance. Please Please Me, the Beatles’ first album, was a collection of performances honed on stage in Hamburg and Liverpool. But the Beatles had come to see the studio as a creative platform in its own right; a place where they could experiment with different sounds and do things nobody else had done. That excited them in a way that live shows did not any more.
While artists like Bob Dylan and the Rolling Stones were inventing what we would now recognise as the modern rock gig, the Beatles’ minds were elsewhere. Consequently, even as their records raced into the future, their shows remained stuck in the past. The format of a Beatles concert in 1966 was still a kind of package-tour variety show, comprising five or six acts. The Beatles would come on last, play a breathless half‑hour set, and say goodnight.
After the first giddy flush of global success, touring had lost its lustre. When they weren’t performing, the Beatles were confined to planes, cars and hotel rooms. On stage, fans pelted them with jelly beans – not as much fun as it might sound – or whatever came to hand, including bottles and shoes. In a 1965 show at the Cow Palace in California a crowd of fans surged past police; in the resulting crush, 30 people were injured, mostly teenage girls. (Joan Baez, who, along with Dylan, had grown friendly with the Beatles, was present. She was seen pulling kids out of the crowd and taking them to safety.) On more than one occasion the Beatles received death threats before a show.
When George Harrison said the Beatles swapped fame and money for their nervous systems, this is what he was talking about. Meanwhile, in every city they landed in, the band had to answer asinine questions at press conferences with whatever reserves of charm they could muster. They felt trapped inside public personas that were an increasingly uncomfortable fit. As John Lennon put it, “We have been Beatles as best we ever will be – those four jolly lads. But we’re not those people any more. We are old men .”
Still, it was not easy to stop touring. A pop group that didn’t perform live was almost inconceivable. Touring was lucrative for the Beatles and for the corporate machine of agents, promoters and merchandise sellers that had sprung up around them. But as they set off in 1966, they were asking themselves if it was worth it. The tour made up their minds.
After desultory gigs in West Germany, they set off for Tokyo, where protesters who viewed the group as a mortal threat to Japanese values marched in the streets, with banners reading GO HOME BEATLES. In the Philippines, they unwittingly triggered a political incident by refusing to attend a reception hosted by the first lady, Imelda Marcos. At the airport on the way out they were abused and jostled by a seething crowd. They were terrified.
In America, DJs in the deep south picked up on a stray remark by Lennon , about the Beatles being more popular than Jesus, and stoked a hate campaign, involving ritual burnings of Beatles records. At one point, it seemed as if their entire career was in jeopardy. The Beatles, used to sellout shows, played to stadiums with thousands of empty seats.
The tour was the most stressful and harrowing episode of their career to date. By the time they got to Candlestick Park for the last show, they had regained their equilibrium. Their fans were already turning the backlash campaign into a defiant joke (“Lennon Saves”). The Beatles had informed their manager, Brian Epstein, they were done. Having supported each other through all the controversies, they were closer than ever, and more sure of their creative purpose. In these photos they look weary but determined to enjoy this final concert as best they can. McCartney asked an aide to tape their performance as a memento.
That night they closed with Long Tall Sally by their hero Little Richard. After taking a bow, they were hustled into an armoured truck and driven away. A new phase would soon begin. Following a break, the Beatles gathered at Abbey Road in November to work on a new song from John, to be called Strawberry Fields Forever
The Beatles: Live at Candlestick Park 1966 by Jim Marshall, curated by Amelia Davis, is published by Chronicle Books at £30 on 11 June. To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com . Delivery charges may apply.
Ian Leslie is the author of John and Paul: A Love Story in Songs
Keyword – Film Trefwoorden – Steven Spielberg, The Terminal, Schindler’s List, ET: The Extra-Terrestrial, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Jaws, AI, Jurassic Park, West Side Story (2021), Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Culture Title – The best Steven Spielberg films, chosen by directors, critics and super-fans: ‘pure popcorn perfection’ Author – Anne Billson Link – The best Steven Spielberg films, chosen by directors, critics and super-fans: ‘pure popcorn perfection’ Publish date – 2026-06-07T09:00:29.000Z Category – Culture URL – https://www.theguardian.com/film/ng-interactive/2026/jun/07/writers-choose-favourite-steven-spielberg-films-jaws-close-encounters-raiders-lost-ark
Steven Spielberg is often described as the inventor of the “event movie” – or as the creator of our new age of IP supremacy, in which the genre property is more important than any above-the-title film star. But that isn’t quite it. He came of age in the American new wave era but in spirit belonged neither to that nor fully to Hollywood’s golden age studio system that preceded it.
In fact, he synthesised both into a directing style that was audacious and fluent. He availed himself of the subversiveness of the new wave, and yet was classically oriented, drawing upon his love of – and alienation from – the all-American suburb, making him the Edward Hopper or the Andrew Wyeth of the movies. Tellingly, it was François Truffaut, the most emollient and Hollywood-friendly of France’s Nouvelle Vague masters, whom Spielberg cast in a cameo in Close Encounters of the Third Kind .
Spielberg’s early achievement was to bring about an evolutionary sea change, reinvigorating pulp-popular themes and ideas and giving them a new maturity and mainstream box office credibility. The idea of a giant shark crazed with a vindictive taste for human flesh or dinosaurs busting out of an amusement park is something that Roger Corman or Ed Wood Jr might have made in two weeks with risible rubber creatures . In Jaws and Jurassic Park, Spielberg’s production values were state of the art. His digitally fabricated dinosaurs were gasp-inducingly real. So was his shark in Jaws, a compellingly villainous character – but we could not be permitted any more than a brief glimpse of the mechanical fake shark. Spielberg arrived at the inspired idea of making John Williams’s legendary two-note musical theme the shark: we then imagined the shark, felt the shark, and shivered with fear at the demonic thumping motor of that musical phrase.
Similarly, derring-do adventures in exotically imagined foreign locations for family audiences were once thought the domain of Saturday morning serials. Spielberg, in partnership with the franchise inventor George Lucas, made them the lifeblood and vital voltage of the movie theatre: they were serious propositions in a way they hadn’t been before.
He has an almost supernatural sense for what an audience is expecting and hoping for in each scene. Like an orchestra conductor, he knows how to bring in the chest-busting timpani of the audience’s gasp, cheer and applause.
In movies such as Lincoln, West Side Story, Bridge of Spies and War of the Worlds, he revived great ideas and great figures and brought to them a rapturous verve. He created one of the great battle scenes in Saving Private Ryan and also declined to stay in his lane by taking on racism in Amistad and The Color Purple.
In what is considered his masterpiece, Schindler’s List, he addressed the Holocaust with absolute seriousness and commitment, and set himself the task of trying to find a candle-flame of hope in the darkness.
And in his late classic, the autobiographical gem The Fabelmans – a self-portrait of the artist as a young man – he takes on the antisemitism he experienced, and shows us the moment when the protagonist removes evidence of his mother’s affair while making a home movie – a template for Spielberg’s more family-oriented treatment of novels such as Peter Benchley’s Jaws and JG Ballard’s Empire of the Sun.
The Fabelmans includes the stunning scene in which the protagonist almost reduces a blowhard bully to tears of confusion by making him look good in the amateur film he’s made about school life. It’s still the most instructive moment about Spielberg’s film-making procedure that I have ever seen from him. In a sense, he became the movies; he is the tentpole, the icon of cinema. Peter Bradshaw
Duel
Peter Bradshaw Steven Spielberg’s great 1971 debut, conceived for television, famously electrified George Lucas. It is myth-making reduced to an elemental core: a fundamental contest between good and evil with no backstory, no motivation, no afterlife.
Dennis Weaver (known for roles in the TV shows Gunsmoke and McCloud) is an everyman American executive with the symbolic surname of Mann. He is driving solo through California on his way to a business meeting and is rather proud of his car, so when, in a later stage of panic, he is content to damage that car in the cause of his own survival, it is even more disturbing.
Weaver’s character begins the story by overtaking and honking at a truck on the deserted road; innocuous but perhaps high-handed gestures. And it seems that the driver of that truck – an entirely human being mysteriously fused into the metalwork of the vast, fast-moving automotive weapon – has decided to kill Mann. (Every time I watch, I strain to catch a glimpse of the driver’s face behind the windshield.)
To paraphrase another film entirely: he can’t be bargained with; he can’t be reasoned with; he doesn’t feel pity or remorse. And with this, Spielberg created a classic of ordeal cinema, like something by Michael Haneke, only this time the good guys win – albeit without ever finding out quite what was going on. With only the barest essentials in that desert landscape, Spielberg conjured up a mistral of pure fear.
Raiders of the Lost Ark
Edgar Wright Few films have shaped my love of cinema as profoundly as Raiders of the Lost Ark . I first saw it when I was seven years old, during the summer of 1981, just before my family moved from Dorset to Somerset. In those days blockbusters stayed in cinemas all summer long, so I was lucky enough to see it in both places I grew up. Because of that, the film is vividly burnt into my earliest big-screen memories, but its impact on me goes far beyond nostalgia.
Watching it at that age was the first time I really became aware of the film-makers themselves; that a movie was not just perfect entertainment, but a creation made by people. I had already seen Star Wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and the teaser trailer for Raiders proudly announced it was from the makers of Jaws and Star Wars. This promise of a tantalising blockbuster team-up made me understand the importance of directors and producers. I also realised, perhaps for the first time, that actors could transform completely. Harrison Ford was no longer space cowboy Han Solo; he was the dashing archaeologist Indiana Jones. Better still, the film delivered on all the cumulative excitement, tenfold!
As I grew older and eventually became a film-maker, Raiders became more than a beloved adventure film. It became a masterclass. The pacing, the blocking, the escalation of suspense and action, the tonal shifts; it is an astonishing piece of direction. It’s a film that truly has it all, even the gory bliss of seeing melting Nazis.
I regularly watch Raiders whenever I’m making a film. One of the best ways to learn visual storytelling is by watching great films with the sound off, and Raiders of the Lost Ark is one of the finest examples imaginable. The only discouraging part is realising you will never make anything quite that good. For me, it will live for ever as one of cinema’s most precious artefacts, one we can only dream of equalling; entertainment on a grand scale, 115 minutes of pure popcorn perfection. Edgar Wright is the director of Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz and Baby Driver.
West Side Story
Scott Tobias In the months leading up to its release, the question that hovered over Spielberg’s West Side Story was, simply: “Why?” Why remake a movie musical from 1961 that had already won 10 Oscars? Why excavate an urban Romeo and Juliet that may feature timeless numbers by Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim, but would seem hopelessly dated in its then-radical vision of hardscrabble white and Puerto Rican gangs squaring off on the Upper West Side?
Yet the movie musical itself, once a staple of Hollywood, had fallen into such disarray in the 21st century that Spielberg’s West Side Story immediately stood out as a thrilling revitalisation of the form, with a fluid choreography of camera and movement that held the clunkiness of stage-to-screen Broadway hits in sharp relief. It also benefits from the subtle contributions of Tony Kushner’s script, which respects Arthur Laurents’s original book while bringing more balance to the Puerto Rican side of the story and adding meaningful period context to these underclass characters at the mercy of city planners.
Minority Report
Gwilym Mumford Steven Spielberg would be few people’s pick to direct a Philip K Dick adaptation, the film-maker’s sense of saucer-eyed wonder doesn’t exactly dovetail with Dick’s dystopian visions. Which makes Minority Report all the more remarkable: a gloriously grubby aberration in Spielberg’s pristine filmography. Leaning into the loopy paranoid stylings of the source material – crime-predicting clairvoyants powering a presumed-guilty police state – the director produces his darkest, most outwardly anti-authoritarian work, perpetually bathed in an unsettling hyper-saturated light and full of wild techno-noir flourishes (targeted ads shouting down from giant billboards, retina scans on severed eyeballs).
This being Spielberg, though, there’s popcorn pleasure to be enjoyed among the murk, including a megawatt performance from Tom Cruise and some of the director’s most kinetic set-pieces: you’ll find yourself holding your breath alongside Cruise as he hides from a pack of surveillance spiders by submerging himself in an ice bath. Both familiar and daringly different, it’s the capper on perhaps the most underrated era for Spielberg: a purple patch of adventurousness around the millennium that saw him also release Saving Private Ryan, Catch Me If You Can and the now slightly underrated AI: Artificial Intelligence. But the dizzying Minority Report is the real jewel.
Close Encounters of the Third Kind
Joseph McBride When I was a kid, I was so obsessed with space travel that I actually imagined an alien rocket ship had landed in our back yard. I soon let go of that fantasy, but Steven Spielberg has never abandoned his youthful dreams about visitations from outer space. He has never made a more enchantingly personal vision than his 1977 Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Other Spielberg classics might have been by other directors with a comparable, if not complete, degree of skill, but only he could have made Close Encounters, with its dysfunctional family, need for escape from stultifying suburbia, concern with communication, and blend of hi-tech with lyrical visual poetry.
Close Encounters made another admirer, Jean Renoir, observe that Spielberg resembles the French concept of the“the village fada … the one possessed by fairies”. It upended the cold war norms of the sci-fi genre by making its aliens benign. This stems from Spielberg’s empathy with aliens of every kind: an expression of solidarity with the refugees from Russia and Poland in his own family, and an emotional identification by this perennial Jewish outsider with minority groups of all kinds. Spielberg gets viciously attacked whenever he makes films about Black people – the underrated Amistad is one of his greatest works. But Spielberg believes we are at our best as “a nation of immigrants”, so Close Encounters speaks directly to us today. Joseph McBride is author of Steven Spielberg: A Biography.
The Terminal
Stuart Heritage Released in 2004, not long after the monumental run of Saving Private Ryan, AI: Artificial Intelligence and Minority Report, The Terminal might just qualify as one of Spielberg’s sweetest and most delicate films. The story of a man forced to live inside an airport after falling through the cracks of international bureaucracy, it lacks the obvious blockbuster heft of Spielberg’s surrounding work, but more than makes up for it with sheer heart.
For such a small story, its scale of production was enormous. A colossal airport terminal was custom-built for the shoot, giving Spielberg total command over the space. As a result, the airport becomes an intricate Tati-esque playground for Tom Hanks, playing a man trying to make a home in a place most people pass through.
Really, though, what stands out is the film’s absolute decency. Another film-maker would have leant too hard into the worst impulses of Hanks’s character, either making him too sentimental or too much of a funny foreigner. Here, however, he’s given precisely the right mixture of sweet and stubborn. But the real star is Stanley Tucci, as an airport official who just wants the problem to go away. Spielberg has done bigger, and he has definitely done flashier, but this is by far his most human work.
1941
Anne Billson Six days after the attack on Pearl Harbor, a concatenation of wacky incidents fool paranoid Los Angelenos into thinking that the Japanese are invading Hollywood. Hysteria, if not hilarity, ensues. 1941 was not a financial flop, but compared with Jaws and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, it underperformed. Critics complained it wasn’t funny, and audiences agreed. In some quarters it was condemned as unpatriotic.
But Stanley Kubrick thought it should have been marketed as drama, not comedy. And once you stop expecting 1941 to make you laugh, an often sublime absurdity kicks in. It’s an orgy of slapstick destruction rather than a coherent story. Spielberg parodies the opening of Jaws: Toshiro Mifune, captain of a Japanese submarine lurking off the coast of California, speaks Japanese to Christopher Lee’s Nazi officer, who speaks German back at him. Nancy Allen gets turned on by B-17 bombers. Ninjas disguise themselves as Christmas trees. A brilliantly choreographed dancehall sequence degenerates into a riot. An all-star cast, including Warren Oates and John Belushi, yell their head off while Robert Stack as General Stilwell, voice of reason amid the mayhem, sheds a quiet tear at a screening of Dumbo.
There are elements that haven’t aged well: racial slurs, a blackface gag, and sexual harassment is played for laughs (though the great Treat Williams is such a cartoonish bully it’s hard to take him seriously). And we see so many stocking-tops you begin to wonder if little Stevie has a fetish. In any case, this is Spielberg with his id exposed, before he slipped back into universal audience-pleasing mode.
Catch Me If You Can
Sasha Mistlin What with all the dinosaurs, aliens, beach landings and futuristic gizmos, it’s easy to forget how great Spielberg is at directing actors. The list of people who gave their defining or breakout performance in one of his films is long and varied: action stars such as Harrison Ford and Liam Neeson, comic performer Whoopi Goldberg, child actors such as Drew Barrymore and Christian Bale; he even launched a gen Z ingenue in Rachel Zegler.
Catch Me If You Can is a masterclass on this front. Leonardo DiCaprio stars as Frank Abagnale Jr, a teenage conman blagging his way across the analogue, take-you-at-your-word America of the mid-1960s in a stolen Pan Am pilot’s uniform. On his tail is the fussy, friendless FBI agent Carl Hanratty (Tom Hanks); pulling at him from the other direction is Frank Sr (Christopher Walken), the father he’s fleeing but still desperate to impress.
Post-Titanic, DiCaprio wasn’t in a slump exactly, but a run of misfires (The Beach, The Man in the Iron Mask) suggested nobody quite knew what he was for. It took Spielberg to build the role that let Leo become Leo, by spotting the cold calculation behind the blue eyes, the steel under the charm.
On first watch, it’s Hanks – and that thick Boston accent (“knawwck knawwck”) – who wins the film. But the masterstroke is getting Walken to dial all the way down. The most imitable of actors has no tics or mannerisms; his bruised, unshowy, Oscar-nominated turn as Frank Sr is simply a diminished man taking shelter in his son’s glamorous fiction.
It’s also Spielberg’s closest thing to a Christmas movie. Frank rings Hanratty every Christmas Eve, two lonely men so committed to the chase that all they’ve really got is each other.
Schindler’s List
Andrew Pulver In this age of social media atrocity footage, it might be hard to understand the impact of Schindler’s List when it came out in 1993. I remember standing outside a theatre after a press screening surrounded by supposedly hardened film critics sobbing in the London streets. Schindler’s List was by no means the first film about the Holocaust, but was the first large-scale Hollywood attempt to depict the events – even if the film itself stopped at the gates of Auschwitz. In those days, the studios steered clear of traumatic recent history, and it took a film-maker of Spielberg’s stature to clobber a way through the executive thickets to get it off the ground.
What “it” was was an adaptation of a prize-winning novel by Thomas Keneally that had the slightly different, less elegant title of Schindler’s Ark. It told the story of German factory owner Oskar Schindler’s attempts to prevent his Jewish employees from being murdered by the Nazis. It might be a classic white saviour narrative, but Spielberg put all his considerable welly into the telling, aided by a pair of unexpectedly brilliant lead performances.
Liam Neeson, at that point known best for comic-book thriller Darkman, was properly heavyweight as Schindler, while Ralph Fiennes, with only a couple of British films behind him, was jaw-dropping as camp commandant Amon Göth, arguably the vilest Nazi ever put on screen. It’s an even more remarkable achievement when you realise Spielberg was editing Jurassic Park during the evenings, having covered the risk by agreeing to make the crowd-pleasing dinosaur film first.
These days, Schindler’s List may look a little punches-pulled next to the all-encompassing horror of László Nemes’s Son of Saul , but of all Spielberg’s prodigious output it’s still the most consequential and meaningful.
ET the Extra-Terrestrial
Ryan Gilbey Steven Spielberg has arguably made five near-perfect movies, all released within a nine-year period at the dawn of his career. Jaws, Close Encounters and the first two Indiana Jones adventures are awe-inspiring. ET the Extra-Terrestrial, though, is in another galaxy of awesomeness. It distils the director’s themes, strengths and obsessions into one rapturous vision. Like ET himself, who is stranded in California’s San Fernando Valley and befriended by young Elliott after his mothership departs Earth, the movie is an odd duck. Its opening eight minutes are dialogue-free; Allen Daviau’s cinematography adheres to a child’s-eye view (no adult males are seen from the waist up until near the end). And despite its blockbuster status, the film is so daringly slow and soulful that it often plays like an intimate indie drama into which a pumpkin-headed alien happens to have waddled. The synthesis of Melissa Mathison’s tender script, John Williams’s stirring score and Spielberg’s miraculous way with child actors guarantees that our tears are honestly earned. This movie is one to phone home about.
AI: Artificial Intelligence
Ann Lee There’s a profound darkness at the heart of AI Artificial Intelligence. The story of a robot boy desperate to win back the love of his adopted human mother after she abandons him in the middle of a forest ends with the destruction of all humanity. It’s unrelentingly bleak. But the film is also incredibly – and at times unbearably – moving.
This is thanks, in large part, to a 12-year-old Haley Joel Osment. As the unblinking android Pinocchio, who’s hellbent on becoming a real boy with only his faithful teddy bear and Jude Law’s flashy robot gigolo to help, he’s unnervingly creepy but also gut-wrenchingly vulnerable.
The backstory behind the film is touching, too – Stanley Kubrick spent decades developing the film but he handed over the project to Steven Spielberg a few years before he died. This mishmash of two distinct auteur styles led to complaints that it’s too jarring and not Spielberg-enough. All I see is a man trying to honour the dreams of his late close friend with ambition and verve, creating a chilling dystopian fairytale about grief, loss and mortality that will leave you obliterated.
Jurassic Park
Simran Hans You may recall Jurassic Park’s opening scene, in which a group of men in orange hard hats chew gum as they await the arrival of a dinosaur. They might as well be the audience, giddily chomping their popcorn as they anticipate the director’s big reveal.
Jurassic Park is Spielberg at his commercial peak, bolstered by John Williams’s soaring, triumphant strings. The director was riding on the coattails of the Indiana Jones trilogy he’d wrapped up four years earlier. The story involves a theme park, and through its creator, Richard Attenborough’s daffy, cuddly, slightly power-mad Hammond, you get the sense that a hugely successful mid-career Spielberg was grappling his own God complex, his own ambivalence about the business of popular entertainment and franchising.
It is also just a perfect all-ages blockbuster, full of humour, wonder, terror and suspense (key ingredients of Spielbergian magic). I watched the film countless times on VHS and on TV as a kid. A white goat chained in a paddock, a rippling plastic cup of water, a velociraptor’s shadow, yellow anoraks and bucketing rain; for me, these images evoke childhood.
Jaws
Catherine Bray Jaws is the perfect shark film, but one of the reasons it works as well as it does is that you could take the shark out entirely and still have a compulsively watchable and beautifully observed study of a small holiday resort in America in the 1970s, filmed on real locations and populated with plausible characters played to the hilt by an array of actors with genuinely interesting faces. This is the stuff that the vast majority of contemporary creature features, from shoestring efforts to the Godzillas of this world, tend to omit.
It’s a critical commonplace to say of a beautiful film that every frame is a picture. For Jaws, it’s a little different. You could isolate any scene from Jaws, and have a brilliant short film: the characterisation, humour and the dialogue are all so strong that any scene in the movie can stand alone. Spielberg achieving this at the age of 26 is phenomenal, but a big part of Jaws’ success is the script by Peter Benchley and Carl Gottlieb and the editing by Verna Fields. Cut the shark, and they basically made a Robert Altman movie. How do you improve an Altman movie? Add a shark.
F or many of us, going to a restaurant is a real treat, so you want to make the most of every mouthful. From starters to small plates, how can you ensure that you have the best possible dining experience? Restaurant critics share the insider secrets to ordering well when eating out.
Don’t overplan
“I would normally have a glance at the menu,” says London-based Jimi Famurewa, who is a broadcaster, and a columnist and restaurant writer for Broadsheet London . But, says Famurewa, a bit of mystery can enhance the whole experience: “There is something to be said for having an element of surprise, like a bistro or gastro pub where they write the menu every day. If you have a vague idea that it is cuisine you like, or you’ve seen some dishes online that look appealing, then you’ll be all right.”
Look for the anomaly
“Being able to judge from a menu whether a restaurant is worth your time is tricky,” says Jonathan Nunn, a food writer from London and co-editor of Vittles . “Most restaurants, whether they’re a local takeaway or a high-end kitchen, tend towards a template. However, one good sign is spotting something that breaks this template – the use of an unusual ingredient or cut, a regional dish, or something homemade that really doesn’t need to be. It suggests that there is someone in the kitchen who is passionate about what they do. Even if the rest of the menu has no surprises, that one thing may be a sign that the chef cares.”
“In New York, the fashionable restaurants go through phases, and all the menus tend to look the same,” says Adam Platt, the former restaurant critic of New York magazine and author of The Book of Eating . “As a critic, I would look for the strangest or most emblematic stuff [on a menu] that tells a story. If lamb is on the menu, I find it boring, because lamb has a very distinctive taste and is usually served the same way.”
Order for the table
Don’t feel pressured to decide quickly, says Famurewa, which can be hard at the start of the meal when you are catching up with someone you haven’t seen for a while and you have a table for 90 minutes. “If you see snacks or bites, order a couple of those while you peruse,” he says. “It takes the pressure off, calms everyone down, and the people you are with will be impressed by you taking charge.”
“Diners have become more comfortable with cuisines where dishes are meant to be shared, so the skill of ordering for the table is increasingly valuable,” agrees Nunn. “If you don’t have it, find someone who does and let them take the lead. If you let people just order the things they like the sound of, the meal will descend into chaos. An ideal order for a table should balance meat and fish, and different cooking techniques, along with vegetables and more delicate dishes so the meal is digestible. There is also the art of being able to eyeball, from the number of people at the table, their historic capacity for eating, and their current appetite, exactly how many dishes to order – but this is not something you can teach.”
Always have a starter
“The top of the menu tends to be where a lot of the great value and creativity is,” says Famurewa. “At Town in Covent Garden , for example, you can get a chickpea pancake, some amazing pickles, and a yoghurty dip for £4.”
“Starters are the best things at restaurants,” agrees Chitra Ramaswamy, the restaurant critic for the Scottish edition of the Times, who lives in Edinburgh. Perhaps because “when you are at that stage of a meal, you’re so full of anticipation, hunger and excitement that the food tastes its best. Also, chefs often try out things in the starter section, so you tend to get more interesting food. I would never go to a restaurant and not have a starter.”
Never copy your dining partner
“ I wouldn’t dream of ordering the same thing as the person I’m eating with,” says Ramaswamy. “I am a big believer in swapping plates and trying each other’s food.”
“I am happy to share stuff,” says Platt. “In New York, Italian has replaced French as the dominant cuisine and you are always being force-fed pasta courses, so the only way to survive that is to share them.”
Don’t be afraid to ask
If you don’t know what something on the menu is, don’t get your phone out, says Ramaswamy: “Restaurants are a rare chance to resist our attention being captured by technology. There is a human standing right there whose job it is to find out those things for you. The chances are, they will be thrilled to tell you.”
“No question is too obvious,” says Famurewa. “Quite often, things on a menu will be deliberately opaque or mysterious, such as ‘holiday potatoes’ at Wildflowers in London, which are like parmentier – little olive-oil-fried roast cubes with rosemary.”
Be wary of recommendations
“You shouldn’t necessarily trust the view of a waiter on what to order in a restaurant,” says Nunn. “There are many reasons that your goals may not align.” Your server could be, “trying to push you towards a safer dish, bamboozling you into ordering an item that the kitchen needs to get rid of, or upselling you crudo you didn’t want. However, if you’re in a small plates restaurant, it is sometimes worth ordering one fewer dish than required and then asking the waiter if you’ve missed anything. The recommendation will often be a good one.”
Specials aren’t always so special
Ramaswamy admits she has made mistakes with this: “I’ve gone to a restaurant where I’ve ordered off the specials and then realised afterwards that the regular menu had been crafted by an executive chef, so it’s really well thought out and coherent. If you’re swept away by the specials, you don’t get that chef’s vision.” That said, she adds, “you can sometimes get the most fresh, seasonal and rare things on the specials board”, and these should be snapped up. “ Dogstar in Edinburgh had the most astonishing mylor prawns cooked over a charcoal grill as a special, and they only had a certain amount in. As I was eating them, it was crossed off the specials board”.
Ask fellow diners for tips
It is “100%” OK to ask a neighbouring diner what they are eating, says Ramaswamy. She recalls going to Macau Kitchen in Edinburgh, where the tables are very close to each other. “That intimacy meant I wanted to know exactly what [others] were eating. They gave us a recommendation, we took their advice and it was absolutely brilliant.”
Remember that variety is the spice of life
“We all have restaurants where you always order the same thing,” says Ramaswamy. “That is fine, but there is something to be said for ordering something different from your favourite restaurant.”
“Going out to eat is such an expense now,” says Famurewa, “I would just go for what you really fancy.” He cautions against the viral dishes that might lure you in: “I would not let that cloud your instincts about what you actually want.”
Give your diet the day off
“Let go when you eat out,” says Ramaswamy. “The point of going out to eat is pleasure. You can’t control the levels of salt, fat and sugar that are being used in the kitchen. Make changes at home instead.”
Platt has a different take on this: “I used to order everything on the menu, and so now I look for things that are light. I wouldn’t order salmon as a critic, but as a civilian trying to watch my weight, salmon is fine.”
Avoid over-ordering
“It is classic to fill up not just on bread but get really excited and order loads of starters, and then run out of enthusiasm and stomach space as the mains arrive,” says Famurewa. He recently had a huge starter and then asked to switch his main to something smaller. “You don’t want to annoy the kitchen, but if you change your mind, and you can catch it before it’s made, it’s better to do that than to waste food.” While it can be difficult to undo an order, you can always order more if you need to.
Be prepared to take home any food you don’t eat, says Ramaswamy: “I grew up in an Indian household where we didn’t throw away a single grain of rice. So no matter how fancy the restaurant is, if I don’t finish, I say: ‘Can I take that away?’ The only thing that will stop a person from doing that is embarrassment, in a fine dining restaurant in particular, but in those environments it is even more important because huge amounts of work by many hands has gone into each plate.”
Don’t overdo the booze
If you are knocking back the alcohol, “you’re not necessarily going to remember the dishes”, points out Famurewa. Paired wines are the perfect example of this, he says: “It can get to the point where the end of the meal is a blur.” Instead, have “a cocktail or aperitif to start, or a mocktail or low/no option, some wine with your main, then maybe a digestif or a coffee. If you are packing in too much in each of those zones, you will probably lose the run of the meal slightly.”
End on a sweet note
“Dessert is definitely something to share,” says Platt. “I like a lemony dessert: the acid cuts through the richness. But I’ll always share it.”
You have to be tactical to save space for a whole pudding, says Famurewa: “You might have gone lighter earlier, because you’re at a place where they do fantastic desserts. But quite often a scoop of something or an affogato is all you need – just a little bit of something to leave yourself with a nice sweet ending, rather than feeling bilious and trying to force down an enormous sticky toffee pudding.”
And if you don’t like your meal …
“You should probably say something,” says Ramaswamy. “It rarely happens to me: I’m easy to please and I only really go to restaurants I know will be good. I don’t mind things like slow service or bringing the wrong dish; I think that’s par for the course. What I cannot bear is rudeness and snootiness. But things have to have been pretty bad for me not to tip.”
“If you have built up a bit of a rapport with your server, hopefully you can be fairly honest,” says Famurewa. “Say, ‘this wasn’t for me’ or ‘I wasn’t sure about the flavour’. Approach it in a gentle way, rather than making grand demands, and you’ll probably get more sympathy and more of an effort to make it right. But just remember that restaurants, particularly independent ones, are under quite a lot of pressure at the moment.”
“Don’t eat it, don’t say anything and be polite,” advises Platt. Then, “don’t go back”.
Charming then terrifying … Javier Bardem as Max Cady in Cape Fear. Photograph: Apple TV
“Ever look around and wonder if we deserve all this?” a woman asks, standing by their sprawling mansion’s swimming pool with her handsome, ripped, fellow lawyer husband.
“No,” he replies.
Ah me. Ah my. Welcome to the latest screen incarnation of John D MacDonald’s taut psychological thriller, published in 1957 as The Executioners and now adapted for the third time under the title Cape Fear. Robert Mitchum and Gregory Peck starred in the first, in 1962 – the former as the villain Max Cady, nursing an incandescent rage and obsessive desire for vengeance against the latter, as lawyer Sam Bowden, for successfully prosecuting him for rape. Martin Scorsese directed a remake that had Nick Nolte as Bowden and a truly terrifying Robert De Niro as Cady in 1991. It introduced a few more moral grey areas but the battle remained between good and very, very evil as Cady sought to destroy Bowden’s life and family in every conceivable way.
But we have all got a lot more complex since then and here to match our new sophistications and probe every single modern weakness, fear and pressure point is Nick Antosca’s 10-part series of the same name. It is a wild ride. The new Cape Fear stars Amy Adams and Patrick Wilson as lawyers Anna and Tom Bowden and Javier Bardem having the absolute time of his life as Max Cady. Bardem turns in what will surely become the definitive take on the role; genuinely charming, convincing, momentarily even sympathetic and then terrifying, in a way that makes De Niro look like Danny DeVito but somehow never quite becomes pantomimic or preposterous.
This Cady was jailed for life for killing his wife after his lawyer Anna advised him to plead guilty in the hope of getting a lighter sentence. The gambit didn’t work. Afterwards, Anna got married to Cady’s prosecutor – Tom. In the intervening 17 years, Cady has had plenty of time to think about this and their claims that the relationship didn’t begin until after the trial and he is not happy.
He is, however, now free – exonerated by new evidence that has come to light. Anna remains convinced that he is guilty. Whether she is so convinced that she – or she and Tom? – did something to ensure he was convicted becomes the question. Their coded conversations – one overheard by their daughter Natalie (Lily Collias), with whom Anna was pregnant during the trial (which will become, like every other tiny detail, an awful part of the intricate web of horrors woven with unflagging glee by its creator over the increasingly dread-filled hours) – suggest much darker secrets in the mix (Tom’s microdosing habit likely a mere bagatelle) than anyone knows.
Meanwhile, the destruction of the Bowdens begins. Gently, at first – a family of skunks drowned in the pool, shots of their cat wandering around looking increasingly vulnerable, the intruder alarms going off at all hours of the night – but soon the stakes are raised. The Bowdens’ son Zach (Joe Anders) proves as vulnerable as the cat looks. Anna’s previous charity client and his mother are found dead. Natalie becomes best friends and more with a girl she meets at a party whose ability to terrify her own mother to tears makes you wonder just how many twists and turns this new version can support … And there’s more, much more, including a fine extension to the tradition of using actors from earlier versions in unexpected ways, much as it uses iconic scenes from 1962 and 1991 in ways that add to the growing feeling of disorientation and sense that anything could happen – usually right before it does.
The direction is immaculate, and Antosca has been vocal with praise and gratitude for Scorsese’s contribution (an executive producer, along with Steven Spielberg) to the process and execution of the story as a whole.
It is, to be sure, a masterclass in tension, in taking things right to the edge of credulity but never over and it never forgets the power of the jump scare. Dear God, does it never forget the power of the jump scare. The new Cape Fear also manages to work in, in superbly seamless fashion, just about every hot button issue the modern age offers. The plot uses the possibilities offered by AI, by the phenomenon of catfishing, of cancel culture, of online rumours, by our deepening mistrust in all the systems we once thought would protect us, our growing distance from reality itself and what happens when our last remaining redoubt – the sanctity and safety of the family unit – is threatened. If you don’t need your own microdosing habit by the third episode, you are Max Cady and I am running far, far away.
The world must prepare for the imminent return of El Niño and the supercharged weather extremes it brings, the UN has warned.
The powerful natural weather pattern, which raises global temperatures and worsens some rainfall, has an 80% chance of forming before September and a 90% chance of persisting until November, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) said on Tuesday.
It found most models projected the return of the cyclical phenomenon in the ocean and atmosphere to be “at least moderate” in strength, and possibly strong. Scientists have previously warned that it could be the strongest this century.
António Guterres, the UN secretary general, said the world “must treat it as the urgent climate warning it is”.
“El Niño conditions will pour fuel on the fire of a warming world,” he said. “Impacts will hit even harder, travel even farther, and cross borders with devastating speed.”
The most recent El Niño, which hit in 2023-24, was one of the five strongest on record and contributed to a scorchingly hot year in 2024 that broke global temperature records.
The WMO said unusually high temperatures were forecast in nearly all parts of the planet for the next three months, and warned of a greater probability of extreme rain and drought.
Although each El Niño event is unique, scientists usually associate them with heavier rain in parts of South America, the southern US, the Horn of Africa and central Asia. Drier conditions typically hit Central America, northern South America, the Caribbean, Australia, Indonesia, and parts of south Asia.
The warm waters can also fuel hurricanes in the central and eastern Pacific Ocean but hinder their formation in the Atlantic basin.
The finding comes as western Europe emerges from an unusually hot May in which temperature records for the month were broken in the UK and Ireland. Last week, the WMO and the UK Met Office warned that a record-breaking hot year for the globe was almost certain before the end of the decade, with the expected return of El Niño likely to make that come as soon as 2027.
Gareth Redmond-King, from the Energy & Climate Intelligence Unit (ECIU), a British thinktank, said the latest findings were “bad news” for food supplies as they were already under strain from climate breakdown and the restriction of fertiliser flows from the Iran war.
“The havoc El Niño will wreak as it likely delivers another hottest year, in 2027, will be devastating for many farmers, and a question of life or death for far too many people,” he said.
El Niño conditions occur every few years and last around nine to 12 months.
During such years, winds that push warm waters to the west soften or shift direction, enabling the surface waters in that part of the Pacific to warm.
The WMO said sea surface temperatures in parts of the Pacific that scientists use as a reference were approaching El Niño thresholds in late April to mid-May, fed by unusually warm subsurface conditions. It said the atmospheric component of El Niño was also consistent with its development.
It rejected the term “super El Niño”, which some scientists have used in recent months in anticipation of a particularly strong event, because it falls outside the official classification system.
Guterres said: “The only effective response is climate action equal to the crisis – ending the addiction to fossil fuels, accelerating the shift to renewables, protecting the most vulnerable, and delivering early warning systems for all.”
I t’s late afternoon at Bangkok’s Khaosan road, the city’s backpacker strip. Bar staff are calling after passersby, enticing them inside with drinks promotions. The smell of cannabis, widely sold in the city, wafts into the street, where vendors sell anything from fake tattoos, flip-flops and icy fruit shakes.
This street, and its famously noisy nightlife, has attracted visitors from around the world for decades. But increasingly, some in Thailand are growing tired of the country’s party-loving visitors.
Some assume Thailand can be treated “as a playground,” says Minnie, who runs Thai’d Up with Minnie, a social media channel teaching visitors about the Thai language and culture.
Last month, Thailand, famed for its hospitality, drew a line in the sand. The government announced it would tighten visa rules, cutting the length of visa-free stays for visitors from more than 90 countries from 60 days, replacing this with a new allowance of up to 30 days in most cases. It is unclear when the new rules will come into effect.
The changes have been welcomed by many in Thailand, fed up by a constant stream of news about misbehaving tourists, including reports of visitors refusing to pay restaurant bills, viral clips of drinkers brawling in the streets and foreign couples deported for reportedly having sex in a tuktuk.
Videos have also shown abusive treatment of locals; in one case, a foreign visitor apparently blew mucus from his nose at a street food vendor.
There’s “a growing response of unhappy Thais who are really starting to see now that we don’t want this kind of behaviour,” says Minnie, who asked not to give her second name. “[It] hurts the people who do live here.”
The anger among local people has been picked up on by the government, who have issued their own warnings against badly behaved tourists.
“Foreigners who enter Thailand cannot act like influential figures, do illegal things, bully the people of the host country, or behave in ways that go against Thailand’s morals, culture or traditions,” said Arsit Sampantharat, permanent secretary of the interior ministry earlier this month in comments reported by local outlet The Nation.
Despite these strong words the government is trying to strike a balance between public order and the economy, which relies heavily on foreign visitors. The tourism sector contributes up to 20% of GDP, and drives employment across the economy – from Thailand’s luxury hotels and spas to its food sellers and taxi drivers.
‘A loophole for people without good intentions’
It is not only reports of unruly behaviour that is troubling Thailand, but also concerns that foreign visitors are running businesses illegally, or exploiting visa rules to use the country as a base for more serious transnational crimes.
South-east Asia has become a hub for criminal scam compounds over recent years, with syndicates often transporting human trafficking victims through Thailand into neighbouring countries such as Myanmar, to work in scam facilities. When announcing the visa changes, officials referred to “national security” without specifying further details.
The current system created “a loophole for people without good intentions to take advantage,” said Rachada Dhnadirek, a Thai government spokesperson.
Authorities have launched crackdowns on foreigners setting up businesses or illegally owning land in tourist areas without the correct papers, but opposition politicians in Thailand have called for further immigration crackdowns, including tighter screening of people who hold long-term visas and elite residency programs.
“What we worry [about] is not … the real tourists but the people who enter with the tourist visa but stay here, and make a business here illegally,” says Chutima Jeeramongkol, president of the Pattaya Business and Tourism Association.
Chutima says the tightening of visa laws will allow for better screening of tourists, and that the impact will be minimal as most tourists typically do not stay for an extended period.
Outside Wat Arun, one of Bangkok’s most famous temples, sunbaked tuktuks are lined up waiting for customers, while shop owners display glittering silk dresses, ready to hire for temple photoshoots.
Most tourists passing through say the immigration changes would not have affected their holiday plans. Juan Luna is visiting Thailand with his husband and two children. Despite only being here for four days, he says the new rules would still give plenty of time to travel in Thailand, if they had wanted to explore further.
Some had planned to stay longer, however. Rudolf Guzsaly, who is visiting from Hungary, says he had hoped to stay for at least six weeks. “I understand, because there are many troubles with the tourists now,” he says, but he’s not convinced the changes will stamp out bad behaviour.
“Most of the tourists just come for two weeks so if they want to make trouble, they make trouble in two weeks,” says Guzsaly.
Many, like Minnie, hope the visa changes will help protect the things that make Thailand special.
In Thailand, people often try to be considerate of others and not impose – a concept known as being “ greng jai” , she explains, adding that this can lead people to be passive in the face of tourists behaving badly.
Attitudes are now changing though. “I think Thailand now is trying really hard to preserve its culture.”
The Guardian’s picture editors select photographs from around the world
The Tenggerese people carry vegetables as offerings to Mount Bromo during the Yadnya Kasada ritual in East Java Photograph: Rendy Agung Prakoso/NurPhoto/Shutterstock
Rothwell, UK Local people try to disarm the halberdiers of their halberds – a medieval weapon – after the reading of the charter, granted by King John in 1204 to the people of the town to allow them to hold a market and a fair, as part of the Rowell Fair Proclamation Day. Rowell Fair is a royal charter fair running from 30 May to 6 June Photograph: Joe Giddens/PA
Addis Ababa, Ethiopia Voters hold umbrellas to protect themselves from the sun as they queue outside Beshale Katla polling station. Ethiopians have begun voting in parliamentary elections Photograph: Marco Simoncelli/AFP/Getty Images
Medina, Saudi Arabia The interior of al-Masjid an-Nabawi (the Prophet’s mosque) as Muslim pilgrims who have completed their hajj duties in Mecca continue to arrive Photograph: Ali Atmaca/Anadolu/Getty Images
Beirut, Lebanon People flee the southern suburbs of Beirut after the Israeli PM, Benjamin Netanyahu, ordered the military to attack targets in the southern suburbs Photograph: Mohamed Azakir/Reuters
Mykolaivka, Ukraine The White Angels police unit looks up at the sky for drones during the evacuation of civilians from the city Photograph: Diego Herrera Carcedo/Anadolu/Getty Images
Tyre, Lebanon A plume of smoke rises after an Israeli airstrike on the outskirts of the southern Lebanese town. Iran’s foreign ministry said on Monday that a ceasefire in Lebanon remained a key condition for any deal with the US to end the Middle East war Photograph: Kawnat Haju/AFP/Getty Images
Bandar Abbas, Iran People ride paddleboards, with vessels in the strait of Hormuz visible behind, as seen from the southern coast of Iran Photograph: Amirhosein Khorgooi/ISNA/Reuters
Nanyuki, Kenya Protesters gesture as soldiers stand by during a protest against a proposed Ebola quarantine centre to be established by the US at Laikipia airbase Photograph: Andrew Kasuku/AP
Xinghua, China A drone photo shows agricultural machines harvesting wheat in Huguan village, in eastern China’s Jiangsu province Photograph: Xinhua/Shutterstock
Pyongyang, North Korea Children take part in the 76th anniversary of International Children’s Day at Taesongsan Funfair Photograph: Jon Chol Jin/AP
Beijing, China A man shields himself with an umbrella from the sun as he walks by a resident sunbathing on a bench along the Liangma River on a hot day Photograph: Andy Wong/AP
Kolkata, India Pedestrians watch as workers remove a statue of the Argentinian footballer Lionel Messi, which will be reinstalled in a safer place. The giant statue, erected to mark Messi’s visit to India last year, is swaying in the wind and will be removed, a lawmaker said Photograph: Dibyangshu Sarkar/AFP/Getty Images
Perth, Australia The Indiana Teahouse at Cottesloe beach is pictured after a storm Photograph: Paul Kane/Getty Images
Probolinggo, Indonesia The Tenggerese people carry vegetables as offerings to Mount Bromo during the Yadnya Kasada ritual in East Java. The Yadnya Kasada festival is held to seek blessings from the Hindu gods for safety and prosperity by presenting offerings such as rice, fruits, livestock and other goods Photograph: Rendy Agung Prakoso/NurPhoto/Shutterstock
T he yen is low, and everybody is coming to Tokyo. If that sounds familiar, it’s not because I’m being coy or hedging my bets; it is the only information to be found in most English-language coverage of Japan’s capital in the aftermath of the pandemic. I can’t stop reading these accounts. After nine years in the country, you’d think I would have learned enough Japanese to liberate myself from the Anglo-American internet, but I’m afraid I’m stuck with flimsy stories about the tourist uptick for the time being.
Part of the reason that so much coverage of the city where I live errs on the side of optimism is that Tokyo remains lodged in the postwar American imagination as a place of sophistication and wealth, good taste and cultural authenticity, with a reputation for deferential hospitality. Never mind that this was the calculated effect of bilateral postwar public relations campaigns, a boom in exportable middlebrow culture and fearmongering about Japanese industrial dominance.
Now, 80 years after the American invasion, Tokyo is accessible to anyone with a couple of thousand dollars. Just as, in the popular telling, Mexico City is an oasis for digital nomads, or Yiwu is a modern-day Alexandria – a cosmopolitan shipping hub, attracting dealers in durables and middlemen from the global south – the travel-brochure-as-think piece only comes as a surprise to those who have managed to remain innocent of a century of complete transfiguration. The authors of such pieces suggest, always in the mildest, most consumer-friendly terms, that calling budget tourism down on Tokyo is the last hope for a country burnt to the filter.
Japan’s economy never regained the heights of the asset price bubble of the late 1980s; wage increases have all but vanished for the past three “lost decades”, and the number of citizens has plummeted over the past 15 years (the population is estimated to become half its current number by 2100). Hence, every tourist delivered to Haneda or Narita airports counts, whether they are purchasing frocks on Omotesandō, pornographic manga in Akihabara, or fried dough at the FamilyMart.
Or maybe, the next story in the cycle will venture, the real problem is that there are too many tourists. An ambitious author might draw parallels between the struggles against overtourism in Venice or Bali and Japan’s panicky municipal schemes to address holidaymakers thronging formerly sedate neighbourhoods or trawling red-light districts for teenaged prostitutes, citing editorials about foreigners yanking on cherry trees and eating so much rice they’ve endangered domestic supplies. I cringe when the television set in the kissaten, or coffee shop, airs a story about foreign hooligans in Shibuya; if I’m in a coffee shop, I feel the eyes of the Japanese patrons on me as they consider my criminal predilections, but alone in my bedroom I actually savour the reports of congestion on public transit and interviews with outraged local residents making noise complaints. Most reports are helpfully followed by a commentator bold enough to bring up kanko kogai , or “tourism pollution”, a term ubiquitous in coverage of Chinese tourists since around 2018.
Tokyo’s race towards peak tourism hasn’t been all bad. In this massive city, with an economy surpassing that of almost every country in Europe and an area of about 5,000 square miles, the ebb and flow of tens of millions of tourists can be better accommodated than in more boutique tourist traps abroad. The real estate market has received a modest jolt from developers buying up property for hotels, and tight restrictions on short-term rentals introduced six years ago have saved Tokyo from the market distortion of cities such as Florence, where Airbnb and predatory landlords have been blamed for an affordability crisis.
Still, mass tourism is as demoralising and demeaning here as anywhere. Tourists disrupt the rhythm of the city, agents of minor turmoil set loose in familiar spaces. There may be no way to describe these transgressions without sounding like a crank – I know it is not maliciousness on their part – but I have lived in Japan long enough that the surprise of encountering a broad, looming American, with their transparent expressions and flashy Lycra pants, stuns me out of the daze into which the city has lulled me. I am rankled by offences invisible to outsiders. While part of me sympathises with the family of sightseers blundering their way on to a crowded Yamanote Line train with their suitcases, or the young women filming TikToks in the aisles of a Ministop, my Tokyo training means I know infringement of its unwritten rules when I see it. This is a city that expects people to suffer in peculiar ways. You would need to live here to know that using a bicycle bell is anathema when you can simply squeeze the brakes by way of warning. There is no way to explain that the cement curbs around the overgrown green spaces carved out of the pavement at many intersections are not for sitting. I couldn’t say for sure why the rumble of the plastic wheels of rolling suitcases is more frightening than jackhammers.
Apart from making the city uglier and less orderly, the tourist is a reminder of an unhappy history in which the native population has been relegated to a vassal class. In recent years, the concept of omote-nashi – basic hospitality, reconfigured as essentially Japanese – has been popularised by domestic tourism boosters as a national responsibility akin to wartime thrift. As a result, the tourist acts as though they are among staff members in a grand resort or actors in a stage show; the whole hospitable nation is at their service. (It can be funny to stand on an Asakusa corner and watch American or European tourists asking for directions from harried but unfailingly courteous office drones, Chinese tourists or old men staggering toward the off-track betting parlour.) The tourist reminds the citizen that, as far as the future of the city is concerned, they are an afterthought.
M ine is not a neighbourhood for sophisticated tourists. Taitō is temples and cheap hotels. The more civilised sightseers are busy elsewhere, I know. Chinese tourists still make up the bulk of travellers to Japan, but there are markedly fewer than five or eight years ago. Perhaps they have had their fill of Sensō-ji temple or find the shoddy stalls in Ameyoko market suspicious. In this part of east Tokyo, the tourists come mostly from Australia or the US, white English speakers decked out in athletic gear as if they expect the flat course from Ueno to Asakusa to tax their endurance. In inclement weather, they cover themselves and their rucksacks in disposable rain jackets, so they look like ghosts coming through the mist.
They approach with a rustle and the rumble of plastic wheels on pavement. They sleep in converted love hotels in Uguisudani. They gather at the mammoth Uniqlo in Okachimachi. They take photographs outside temples in Asakusa. They wear body cameras so that they can show the world their visit to Kappabashi Street. I surveil them without guilt: they have come to turn their tourist gaze on the city, and turnabout is fair play.
Battalions of immigrants have been redirected to this half of the city to serve the tourists, who most likely overlook how the waitresses at Asakusa restaurants are now often Vietnamese students and Chinese sojourners. It is beyond most foreigners to listen for a note in a server’s accent when they speak English or Japanese (now that ordering is most frequently done on a tablet, conversation is kept to a minimum anyway), let alone be alert to telltale, un-Japanese body language.
The guest worker in Japan, though necessary to keep operations running, is stretched thin between demand and bureaucracy, especially considering the quasi-legal subterfuge required to ship them in. While the recently assassinated former prime minister Shinzo Abe expanded the quota for moderately skilled immigrants in a series of reforms translated as “comprehensive measures for acceptance and coexistence of foreign nationals”, many still arrive on student visas. Brokers and language schools arrange minimal coursework and permission to work a 28-hour week on the side, though much longer shifts are typical. Legal measures to end death from overwork could be more difficult to enforce among student workers, who are preyed on by language schools and staffing agencies. The truly unlucky souls wind up as part of the technical intern training programme, a scheme to bring in unskilled labour under the guise of vocational training that domestic and foreign investigations have found is rife with human trafficking, fraud and vicious abuse that culminates in death, disfigurement and psychological trauma. When guest workers abscond from the legal programmes – in 2023 alone, more than 9,000 interns disappeared from the books – they become even more vulnerable, surviving on under-the-table jobs.
As Tokyo’s economy has become a client of the service industry, it has drained its reservoirs of young people to run cash registers and deliver food, meaning guest workers must be tolerated. The ruling centre-right Liberal Democratic party acknowledges them as their sole defence against shoshi koreika – “fewer children and ageing”. Until automation takes a stronger hold – we’re only now phasing out floppy discs, fax machines and employment for life – or the economies of Vietnam and Nepal surpass Japan’s, the only way to keep salad wraps in 7-Eleven is to import staff.
Federations of bureaucrats and upstart politicians dream of an economy based on real estate investment and financial speculation. They would prefer to run their new city with a new population, one willing to render their cash or labour without expecting the power to make demands. Demographic collapse can be sidestepped, tourists and guest workers selected by grade like eggs, quotas adjusted to the whims of finance. The state-affiliated Japan National Tourism Organization is shooting for 60 million tourists a year by 2030. Efforts are under way to entice foreigners to work as farmhands, cooks and truck drivers. Meanwhile, the Japanese population shrinks to a nub.
T he guest workers don’t live in this neighbourhood either. My neighbours are the subset known as expatriates: the software engineer from Sweden who sends his daughter to the same school as my son; the English teacher from Tennessee; the Chinese couple who run a signage shop down the block; the Gujarati jewellery dealer I know to wave at, who illegally parks a Maserati with a swastika on its hood outside the mid-rise next door; and the French photographer whose Japanese wife tells me theories about dog training, vegetarian diets and 5G in the vaccine.
I myself followed a woman to Tokyo. We met when she was a tourist in my country. We were to return to her home and then drift through rugged places as tourists together, before I signed up for a master’s in contemporary Chinese literature at Sun Yat-sen University, and she sweated through an undergraduate degree in a more marketable field. But too many months went by. We ran out of money, we were happy and I was trapped. We married at the municipal office in Shibuya, posed for the silly portraits that are de rigueur for newlyweds (her in gown and costume jewellery, me in matt grey tailcoat), and made the formal application to convert my tourist visa to “Spouse or child of Japanese national”, authorised to work in any sector.
I took a job mopping vomit and picking up empty cups at a nightclub in Roppongi. I cleared tables in an Italian restaurant in Harajuku and worked in the kitchen of a pizza shop in Oji, apprenticing under an embittered long-term expatriate restaurateur forced into business with his ex-wife. It felt familiar. I had worked most of my life at the lowest end of the service industry or in warehouses and slaughterhouses. I consoled myself that when I finally finished my novel, it would be more authentic for having been composed while I was forking soggy hamburger buns into the trash. With few marketable skills, I didn’t have much choice.
It didn’t help that I was too stubborn and stupid to learn Japanese. I skipped the free language lessons provided by the Arakawa ward government and worked on my Russian instead, hoping to understand what the bouncers in Roppongi were saying. I practised my Spanish with the Peruvians who worked front-of-house at the Italian place. I never learned a polite word in Tagalog, only obscene slang.
Now I earn a living writing, with wire transfers from abroad. It is better to be in the category of tourist that can call themselves expatriate, even if it pains me to admit I have more in common with the Swedish software engineer across the street than the Chinese student-labourers who spill out of a language school above the closest 7-Eleven in the afternoon.
Being an expatriate author is not as glamorous as I imagined as a boy dreaming of a loft in Tangier with a novel-in-progress spread out on the floor. It is not even as romantic as when I attempted it the first time, spending my savings in Guangzhou, writing unpublishable short stories in between appeals to my mother for another Western Union money transfer. But it does mean I am sought out by sophisticated tourists when more famous Anglophone writers don’t get back to them. This began when the country reopened after the pandemic, and the exchange rate made it affordable for half-famous authors, graduate students with bylines in leftist magazines, and minor internet celebrities to travel to Tokyo.
F lattered by their attention, I was happy to act as de facto tour guide to what passes for “authentic” Tokyo. I met my guests at Uguisudani station, pointing in the direction of a cluster of love hotels where a recent street scuffle broke out between ageing criminals over sex industry protection money, before leading them to the Fujizuka cult mound (a miniature Mount Fuji, relic of a religious movement dating back to the 16th century) fenced inside a backyard shrine. I chaperoned them through the more intimidating public housing developments; usually deserted. I brought them to inspect nagaya , those corrugated-iron-sided terrace houses awaiting demolition. I aspired to reveal history otherwise buried, such as the bones that came to the surface when foundations were dug around Minami-Senju station, where the crematoriums and execution grounds once presided.
“Araki shot pictures for Midori here,” I have told more than one of my guests in Yoshiwara Park, “and now the soapland girls come here to pose for their daily photo diaries.” Around the corner, I pointed out the gory pictures beside the statue of the Bodhisattva Kannon. “Kawabata came here in 1923,” I said, “right after the earthquake, and wrote about the hundreds of corpses of the courtesans and their children, boiled alive in the pond as the fire swept through the pleasure quarter.”
I took my guests for tepid coffee gelatin and slices of buttered milk bread at kissaten between blaring televisions and demented proprietors. I pushed crocks of monkfish stew under their chins, pointing out how the gelatin rendered from fish skin made for an exquisitely rich broth, which could only be cleaned from the palate by buckwheat shōchū. I used to end the tours I gave of east Tokyo at the site of the old labour market, or yoseba , in Irohakai. Some people knew the place by reputation. They had streamed Yama: Attack to Attack, the 1985 documentary about neighbourhood activism, famous for bringing down the rage of organised crime and resulting in the murder of its original director during the production of the film, as well as his replacement after its completion. Even if the neighbourhood was no longer called Sanya (city authorities scrubbed it from maps in the 1960s), some of my guests knew that name from reading about labour struggles.
Sanya provided the foundation for a city now divided between tourists and guest workers. After the second world war, the men who arrived from the impoverished rural regions of the north became permanent residents for its cheap proximity to Ueno station, where the trains dropped them off. The crowded welfare barracks set up by the American occupation were taken over by landlords who carved them up to accommodate even more. The yoseba at Sanya functioned as an auction for human beings. Construction firms listed how many of each particular sort of worker they needed every workday – 10 men with experience pouring concrete, say, and 20 more unskilled labourers – and labour brokers descended on the slums before dawn to negotiate their wages.
The economic miracle fizzled. Sanya became a refuge for the homeless, a place for ward governments to redirect vagrants. The yoseba declined but never went away altogether. Foreign workers joined the natives in hoping for work, but by the time I began coming to Irohakai, there were only a handful of elderly men standing around. The mobbed-up labour brokers had been replaced by subcontractors or man-and-a-van renovation guys. I noticed only a few foreigners, probably Bengali or Nepali. There are better places to find employment.
The men who ran the flophouses and hostels had to adapt. Now they collected a daily housing allowance granted by the government from the demobilised migrant workers. They filled the rest of their beds with sightseers. Sanya, despite being one of the poorest sections of the city, became a tourist destination. As I told my visitors, when I first arrived in Tokyo, the arcade had a roof, which the local government and the developers since conspired to demolish, in part to stop the homeless from sitting under it.
They wanted to see the neon streets of the bubble economy years, still preserved in American media. They wanted to catch the girls in outrageous dresses posing in Harajuku for FRUiTS magazine’s freelancers taking “street snaps” like it was twentysomething years ago. They wanted, even if it would be gauche to admit, to play out their Lost in Translation Charlotte-and-Bob fantasies in a rundown karaoke box in a hip neighbourhood. They wanted to see the bathhouses converted into art galleries. My tour reminded them that Tokyo was just as cruel as anywhere else. “All of this will be gone soon!” I said. I meant it as a lament. They may have been relieved.
I f history is any guide, temporary residents will be swept away via deportations or pogroms, or when the next generation moves to the nicer parts of the city. Enclaves may never fill in for neighbourhoods, but neighbourhoods themselves do not last. Tokyo is a young city relative to many other foreign capitals, having become a centre of power only after the Meiji Restoration in 1868. There is little left of the old world, as most of the city was burnt or knocked down in the 20th century. Curtis LeMay torched and demolished 16 square miles with his B-29s. People were displaced. The city expanded again.
In my neighbourhood, most of the native Japanese came from somewhere else over the course of a generation – down from the north to work on the reconstruction of the city, or from the vast, sprawling suburbs. The shrine festivals of east Tokyo are attended by the new young couples, but there are too few dedicated locals left to observe the rites, so the shrine maidens tasked with handing out amulets in their white gowns are girls recruited through temporary labour websites, while stout country boys are hired to carry the shrines in the procession. The Japanese residents of my building are mostly old widows who arrived in the city after the war and whose children have relocated in favour of work and easier commutes. They have no real need to stay here and could be just as happy in Akabane, Minowa or Machiya as they are in Shitaya. The Edokko – someone whose roots in the city go back four generations or so – have always been rare. It is hard to find a number, but a single percent of the population is probably optimistic.
The prospect of being expelled from the city is terrifying. The residents who grouse to newspapermen about the sound of plastic wheels on the sidewalk hate the city, but they are more afraid of their shallow roots being dug up, of towers and chain coffee shops burying all traces of their existence. In a nation that gathers around Tokyo like the last torch in the encroaching dark, being asked to quit the city for a wretched exurban stretch of pachinko (pinball) parlours and family restaurants amounts to exile, even if we’re talking about the native soil of one’s own parents or grandparents. A government policy that offered cash in exchange for relocating out of the city was deemed a failure, and with good reason: to leave Tokyo would be to give up on the dream of Japan’s reconstruction, when the dignity and wealth of the nation was worth any sacrifice, when everyone was told they were witnessing a miracle.
Japan was a miracle! The transformation from a bloody empire to a placid failed democracy is remarkable – even more so because the Allied occupation left war criminals in charge. Its carefully managed postwar economy was a behemoth. Moderate prosperity and lifetime employment was guaranteed if you could tolerate the strictures of corporate life. But the men in charge put it all on black, went bust and made up their losses selling off what remained to foreign capital; Japanese socialism – the command economy responsible for public housing, employment for life and fast trains – was dismantled. Japan became hopeless, and the promised renewal has never come to pass.
And so, everyone is looking backward. The guest worker wants to relive the dream of the 1980s, when they could wash ashore in Japan from Fuzhou or Tehran and entertain hopes of striking it rich and returning home loaded down with foreign currency. The budget tourists photographing the maid cafe touts in Akihabara; the sex tourists in Kabukicho; the solemn, well-dressed tourists in the Andaz lobby; the busloads of elderly European tourists disembarking behind Sensō-ji; and the long-term sightseers who call themselves expatriates – they are no less nostalgic. They want the futuristic, clean, fashionable Japan they dreamed of when they were children.
I started meeting those important strangers who reached out to me in the perfumed lobbies of luxury hotels or in restaurants on the upper stories of Nihonbashi and Ginza department stores, choosing the sorts of places that a kyabakura hostess might take a client on a pre-shift date, gorging herself on steak and champagne before marching the man triumphantly into her establishment to be drained of more cash. They were disappointed with my doomsaying about the urbanist paradise. My guests didn’t want to hear that the future here, as everywhere, was human trafficking and budget tourism. Eating pigeon in the satellite branch of a Hong Kong barbecue shop on the upper floor of a crystalline tower, nobody wanted to be lectured about the replacement of housing projects and migrant worker slums with retail-residential complexes.
Political and business elites are enthusiastic for foreigners to solve the demographic collapse, prop up flaccid service sector consumption and reheat the real estate market. As those claiming citizenship pass from the city, its neighbourhoods can be optimised by city planners working for property developers, reconstituted with temporary residents who make fewer demands and who, if necessary, can be exsanguinated from the body politic.
Tokyo is preparing for such a future. But foreign labour has become harder to attract, as Japan grows poorer while its neighbours become wealthier. For tourism numbers to recover to their pre-pandemic peak, let alone grow, the yen would have to be kept at a price that drags down the rest of the economy – to say nothing of the difficulty of guaranteeing geopolitical and ecological stability.
The future will only come when people abandon their faith in sustainable development goals and omotenashi , or in the wisdom of converting red-light districts to duty-free shopping zones and knocking the roofs off the arcades to accommodate more hotels. At that point, there will no longer be enough physical or spiritual remnants to credibly resurrect even the least romantic visions of the past. Those left behind – the grandchildren of the enclaves and the less ambitious products of the expatriate neighbourhoods, the returnees from exile in suburbia, those who have held on – will face the problem of what is to be done with a city transformed to maximise investor confidence. An old society in a poorer country served by young people who have come from far away is one that must look elsewhere for new sources of hope. That is why I stay. If it is true – this time, after so many false starts – that Tokyo is the future, I would like to know what that means.
This piece was adapted from an essay titled Eastern Promises , in the Baffler issue 77, Expatriates
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