A Romanian F-16 Nato jet shot down a drone over Estonia on Tuesday in what appears to be the latest case of Russian electronic jamming diverting long-range Ukrainian drones into the alliance’s territory.
A local resident told the Estonian public broadcaster, ERR, that he had seen two fighter jets – part of a Nato force policing the skies over the Baltic states – flying in the area before a loud bang that brought the drone down. He said the drone had crashed about 30 metres from the nearest residential building.
After analysing its trajectory, “we decided that we need to take it down,” Estonia’s defence minister, Hanno Pevkur, said.
The spokesperson for Ukraine’s foreign ministry, Heorhii Tykhyi, said: “We apologise to Estonia and all of our Baltic friends for such unintended incidents.
“We have been and remain in close cooperation between our specialised institutions to get to the heart of the matter in each case and seek ways to prevent them.”
He blamed Moscow for the incident, saying that Kyiv had been aiming at legitimate targets inRussia and that it had never attempted to use Baltic airspace for its drones.
It was the latest in a series of incidents in which Ukrainian drones have apparently been pushed off course by Russian electronic jamming. The Latvian government collapsed last week over a crisis that stemmed from its response to a similar incident in which two drones exploded at an oil storage facility.
Russia’s SVR foreign intelligence service said on Tuesday that Ukraine planned to launch drone attacks against Russia from Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia, and warned of “just retribution”.
Officials from the three Baltic countries deny plans for their airspace to be used for the launch or overflight of drones.
“Russia is lying about Latvia allowing any country to use Latvian airspace and territory to launch attacks against Russia or any other country,” the Latvian president, Edgars Rinkēvičs, wrote on X.
Estonia’s foreign minister, Margus Tsahkna, said the only reason Ukrainians drones were appearing over Estonian territory was as a result of Russian electronic warfare pushing them off course.
“Estonia has not permitted its airspace to be used for attacks against Russia. Incidents such as this are linked to Russian jamming activities,” he said.
In an interview with the Guardian in Tallinn over the weekend, Tsahkna struck a similar tone: “These are the consequences of the Russian war of aggression against Ukraine. This is a desperate move to divide the west and also put us on pressure that we should tell Ukrainians to stop it, because Ukraine is hitting their lifelines,” he said.
Estonia supported Ukraine’s right to attack targets in Russia, he said, adding that the two capitals were in constant contact and Tallinn had asked Kyiv to be more careful with its drone routes given the Russian jamming.
Pevkur reiterated after the shooting down on Tuesday that Ukraine had to be careful with its drones.
“We’ve said to the Ukrainians all the time that if you’re attacking Russian positions or Russian targets, then these trajectories have to be as far from the Nato territory as possible,” he told Associated Press.
Intermezzo, the most recent book by Irish novelist Sally Rooney, will be published in Hebrew this month by the Israeli publisher November Books, in collaboration with +972 Magazine and Local Call. The announcement comes more than four years after Rooney, citing the global boycott movement against Israel, turned down a translation offer by a different Israeli publisher for an earlier book.
Below, Rooney talks to Irish Palestinian activist Samir Eskanda about her decision to work with November Books, which has been deemed to be in compliance with the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement. They discuss what first brought her to the boycott, the movement’s aims and targets and the role of the artist in bringing about radical change.
The discussion, which took place over email, has been condensed and edited for clarity.
Samir Eskanda: Before getting to the specifics of this new release, I thought we could start with the wider context. Palestinians have called since 2004 for the boycott of complicit Israeli cultural institutions. Since then, many thousands of artists, writers, cultural workers and arts institutions have publicly endorsed this call.
The Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) leads and guides this work. It’s a founding member of the nonviolent BDS movement, which launched in 2005 and is led by the broadest Palestinian civil society coalition. The boycott targets institutions rather than individuals, and complicity, not identity. Israeli cultural organisations, companies and institutions are overwhelmingly complicit in whitewashing and justifying Israel’s ongoing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza, its wider regional wars of aggression and expansionism, and its decades-old regime of military occupation and settler-colonial apartheid, which must be isolated and entirely dismantled.
Sally, when did you first become aware of the Palestinian call for the cultural boycott of Israel? Was supporting it a difficult decision to make?
Sally Rooney: In Dublin in 2014, I was involved in the protest movement against Israel’s illegal military campaign in Gaza. For readers who aren’t aware, I should say that Israeli forces killed more than 2,000 people in Gaza that year, including hundreds of children. That moment of horror and outrage was a formative experience for me, as a person and as a writer. My second novel, Normal People, includes a scene set at those same protests. I couldn’t write about life in Dublin at that time without acknowledging the centrality of that political moment.
I was certainly aware of the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement then, and I tried to comply with the boycott in my role as a consumer. And yet I sold the translation rights to both my first two novels to an Israeli publisher, which I later discovered had links to the Israeli military. How could my actions be so inconsistent with my beliefs?
I remember trying at the time to find BDS guidance on the publishing industry. Of course, the information available online was targeted at consumers, not at literary novelists, who do not make up a big constituency of the general public (!). It seems so obvious now that I should have reached out and contacted PACBI. In truth I think I felt too awkward, or I felt as if it would be attention-seeking. I had never published a book before and no one had ever heard of me. From what I could see online, most of the authors I admired seemed to have translation deals in Israel. I wrongly assumed that the complicit institutions targeted by BDS did not include literary publishers.
By the time it came to selling the rights for my third book in 2021, things had changed in a few ways. An increasing number of international human rights organisations were confirming what Palestinians had long said: that the Israeli system of racial domination met the legal definition of apartheid. I had come to a better understanding of the complicity of the Israeli culture sector in that apartheid system. And meanwhile, I had also become something of a public figure, and I felt a greater sense of responsibility in making decisions around my work.
But I still didn’t reach out to anyone for advice. With what I knew, I decided that I couldn’t in good conscience sell translation rights to a mainstream Israeli publisher and still comply with the boycott – but I didn’t even really tell anyone what I was doing. I just turned down the specific deal that I was offered. Looking back, I obviously should have contacted PACBI from the very start and asked for guidance.
Samir, you’ve long been involved in the cultural boycott of Israel. Can you tell us a little bit about the roots of that call, how it relates to the broader BDS movement and how you came to be involved?
SE: I grew up in Britain, where I came to understand the state’s hypocrisy and complicity in enabling, while obscuring, Israel’s colonial oppression against Indigenous Palestinians. But it was the emergence of the BDS movement that provided a principled and strategic way to actually do something about international complicity, and spurred me on to take sustained action. I’ve been involved for a decade, but I joined a movement that was already thriving.
Since the onset of Israel’s genocide and the unspeakable crimes committed by Israeli forces against Palestinians in Gaza, tens of thousands of artists have demanded justice and liberation for Palestinians, accountability for the perpetrators, and refused to allow their work to “artwash” these atrocities.
At heart, the authoritative Palestinian call on artists and all others is about ending complicity. As Martin Luther King Jr said of the Montgomery bus boycott, we are “withdrawing our cooperation from an evil system”. In the colonial west, this ethical obligation is especially profound, given its centuries of domination and oppression. In the context of genocide – and given the rulings by the international court of justice (ICJ) that Israel must “prevent” any and all genocidal acts, that it is guilty of apartheid, and its occupation is illegal and must end – this is also a legal responsibility for states, corporations and institutions.
You said in 2021 that you would be happy to work with an Israeli publisher that is not complicit in Israel’s regime of oppression, and that recognises the comprehensive rights of the Palestinian people under international law, including the right of return of Palestinian refugees. This is now happening almost five years later. What was the process that led to this release?
SR: In a way, it wasn’t so different from any other process around the sale of translation rights. The publisher November Books approached my agent with a proposal to translate one of my novels into Hebrew. Because the team at November is based in Israel, they were careful to explain how the publication would meet the requirements of the cultural boycott. For instance, November Books does not operate in illegal Israeli settlements, receives no state funding and explicitly recognises the international legal rights of the Palestinian people, including the right of return. I also kept in touch with PACBI along the way to try to ensure that I was upholding both the letter and the spirit of the institutional boycott.
For me, the act of translation is in itself a beautiful ideal. Though my refusal to work with complicit Israeli publishing houses made the contractual side of things more complex, I was, of course, never boycotting the Hebrew language or any language. I’m very pleased that Intermezzo will soon be available in Hebrew with November Books. I am a devoted admirer of literary translators and the work they do. It means a great deal to me that my books are available in languages other than my own and I’m very grateful. I’m also delighted that the novel is published in Arabic with the Palestinian publishing house Tibaq.
What do you think is the role of radical – or if you like, dissident – Israeli institutions such as November Books in the academic and cultural boycott?
SE: According to an Israeli poll published in November 2023, when Israeli forces had already murdered at least 10,000 Palestinians in Gaza, 94% of Jewish Israelis supported Israel’s genocide. Most agreed that Israel should use even more deadly force. Clearly, many Israelis have also participated in the genocide, which has killed at least 80,000 Palestinians and likely far more, with the toll still rising since Israel has systematically annihilated the necessary conditions for sustaining life. Israel has also destroyed every university in Gaza and obliterated its educational and cultural infrastructure. It has targeted and murdered at least 242 journalists. It has filled mass graves, including outside hospitals . It has killed tens of thousands of Palestinian children, including premature babies . It has targeted IVF facilities and destroyed thousands of embryos. It has executed well over 1,000 starving Palestinians at “aid distribution points”. All this depravity has been done with the support of the overwhelming majority of the Israeli public, which includes cultural workers, academics, athletes and others.
So it is perhaps unsurprising that very few Israeli cultural institutions have met the conditions that the BDS movement has set for exemption from the boycott: end diverse forms of complicity, and publicly endorse the full, UN-stipulated rights of the Palestinian people. Working with complicit Israeli publishers that have failed to take these basic steps can only harm the Palestinian struggle, as you and at least 7,000 other writers, including winners of the Nobel prize, Booker prize, Pulitzer prize, and National Book Award have publicly recognised .
Ta-Nehisi Coates is also publishing a translation with November Books, since it is the only Israeli publisher that has met these conditions, which are grounded in international law – or what remains of it. Beyond publishing, the tiny minority of Jewish Israelis who sincerely support Palestinian liberation can and do play a part in the movement, as the historic 2005 BDS call affirms .
SR: What do you say to artists who approach you for guidance in complying with the boycott?
SE: I think that artists can sometimes struggle to see themselves as a potentially important part of a much larger collective. I’ve seen talks you gave recently in which you encouraged other cultural workers to basically drop the ego and participate in the movement. That’s rare. It’s also essential, if we’re going to effectively resist this time of rising fascism. Seeing ourselves as a small yet significant part of a wider struggle frees us from the trap of toxic hyperindividualism, and this means we can fully participate in the cultural boycott, which is fundamentally a strategic, power-building tactic. Rather than seeing it as an individual purity test or an exercise in sloganeering, it positions our collective efforts as ever-evolving and highly attuned to specific contexts.
What does that actually look like in practice? I think it means asking, as you did: is that publisher, festival, label or platform implicated in grave violations of international law? Does it benefit from and thereby perpetuate Israel’s regime of apartheid and ethnic cleansing against Palestinians? Has it taken any meaningful stance to end its complicity? Do I have influence over this institution to compel it to do so, and to enshrine this in policy? What steps can I reasonably take to prevent my work from reaching it, if not? Have others taken such steps and what can I learn from them? Do these steps represent a strategic benefit to the movement? Does not taking them represent a harm?
Our task as a movement is to channel anger at Israel’s genocide in Gaza into the most meaningful initiatives. Raising awareness is an important first step. Making individual ethical choices to resist complicity can be the next. But joining with hundreds, thousands or millions of others and demanding accountability and pledging to uphold the demands of Palestinian civil society have to follow. Virtually everyone has influence, leverage or connection to some organisation or company. Use your relative freedoms and privilege. If you can’t do it loudly – perhaps because you are in a precarious or professionally vulnerable situation – then do it quietly at first. Seek your community, and work together.
Thousands of the world’s leading musicians , writers and film workers , including hundreds of Hollywood celebrities, have conditioned the supply of their work on ethical grounds. Dozens of states have introduced policies of military , energy or trade embargos against Israel, though more pressure is needed to enforce them. At least 2,000 arts organisations have joined the cultural boycott of Israel, including major film festivals, theatres and museums. Five European broadcasters boycotted Eurovision, the world’s biggest live music event, rather than share a stage with apartheid Israel. Millions of people are boycotting the products of complicit Israeli and international companies. This is a dynamic, growing movement, rooted in universal, ethically consistent, intersectional and antiracist principles. Ultimately, we will measure the success of the movement not by the numbers in our ranks but by the freedom of our people. But to get there we need to keep building grassroots and civil society power that can sever the links of complicity sustaining Israel’s entire regime of oppression.
In the current era of might-makes-right, relentlessly pursuing accountability for the perpetrators of genocide and all those complicit in it is an essential priority for humanity, in my view. If Israel gets away with genocide, no one will be safe in future. I think we’re already seeing that now with the expansion of unmasked US-Israeli aggression across the region. So don’t just speak out, urgently act to end complicity. We in the west cannot afford to lapse into hopelessness or despair, despite how utterly bleak things may appear. Even Trump admitted that Israel can’t fight the world, because the world will win. That world is us.
To go back to your experience – your commitment to boycott complicit Israeli publishers made headlines around the world in 2021, and Israel’s two main bookstore chains responded by pulling your books from their shelves. These chains actually have branches in illegal settlements . A number of writers came out in support of your decision. What was your reaction at that time?
SR: At first, I was a little rattled by the degree of public condemnation. Had I accidentally done something to undermine rather than support the Palestinian cause? But I quickly started getting messages of encouragement from people within the movement, and after that, I felt confident that I had done the right thing.
Of course, it’s important not to get complacent about that feeling of righteousness. I always have to check in with myself – and with others – to make sure I really am being consistent about my principles, or as consistent as I can be in practice. But when I do feel that I’m right, I’m not much bothered by criticism. Who has ever stood up against injustice without being criticised? If that’s all I have to endure, then it’s very little.
I do remember people saying at the time that by joining the boycott, I had in effect ended my career. And it wasn’t just critics and adversaries making that point: even people who sympathised with the cause were murmuring that I had no idea what I was up against. Of course I did face some backlash, as I knew I would. But I think we have to be careful not to exaggerate in a way that drives people away from the movement and induces self-censorship and fear. In reality, I have gone on writing and publishing happily since 2021. I have not had to sacrifice my role in public life. I think I can say I have not even lost the respect of anyone whose respect I cared to keep. Joining the boycott would have been worthwhile no matter the consequences, but for me the consequences have really been very positive and life-affirming.
SE: Do you think it’s possible to truly subvert power through the written word, or can almost anything you write be coopted? If the latter, what choices are we left with?
SR: I remember thinking very early in my publishing career: if anything I had to say was truly radical, I wouldn’t be allowed to say it. The very fact that my novels were widely reviewed – and that institutions like the BBC and the New York Times wanted to work with me – showed me that my political commitments were perceived as manageable and non-threatening. And, as I’ve said, perhaps to my discredit, I wasn’t part of any broader movement or coalition from which I could draw support. I was on my own, trying to make the right decisions according to my own principles, and I often made mistakes.
But in this last year, some of my intuitions about radicalism and public life have, I think, been proven right. Since the UK government unlawfully proscribed the protest group Palestine Action as a “terrorist” organisation last summer, it has been against the law for me even to express my political beliefs in Britain. And because I have expressed those beliefs anyway, I have in effect lost the right to travel to the UK, and my contracts with British companies have in practice been suspended. Needless to say, that is nothing compared with the prolonged state persecution of Palestine Action activists themselves.
The proscription of Palestine Action has already been challenged successfully in the high court and I hope and expect it will ultimately be struck down for good. But whatever happens, I know I will never regret standing by my beliefs. And whereas once I worried that the mainstream popularity of my work was in itself politically limiting, now I can feel purely proud and happy that my books continue to be popular among a mass readership. That same popularity heightens the stakes for the UK government in trying to criminalise the publication of my work.
In all, I think my entanglement with the literary and cultural establishment means I have been able, in some respects, to be more politically useful.
Sally Rooney is an Irish novelist. She is the author of Conversations with Friends, Normal People, Beautiful World, Where Are You and Intermezzo
Samir Eskanda is a Palestinian Irish artist, organiser and human rights activist. He has provided strategic guidance and played a key role in many high-profile solidarity campaigns that have contributed to the cultural boycott of Israel
E arly this month, a single pen stroke effectively ended representative Steve Cohen’s career in Congress. The man who has represented Memphis for 19 years will turn 77 later this month, but he wasn’t planning on retiring. He hadn’t lost any primary. The reason was that his district had been erased around him.
A new electoral map , passed by the Republican-led state legislature and signed by Bill Lee, the governor, divides the ninth district three ways. “Last week Tennessee Republicans silenced the Black vote here in Memphis to make Republican victories likely,” Cohen said in his statement. That’s succinct and accurate.
The new map folds a significant portion of Cohen’s Black constituents into Williamson county, which sits south of Nashville and was, until recently, the subject of a different fight.
To this day, the Williamson county seal depicts a Confederate battle flag draped over a cannon. It was adopted in 1968, at the height of the civil rights movement. A Tennessee court ruled in 2024 that the county could remove it. The state legislature responded the following year by passing a new law specifically designed to keep the flag on the seal. The vote was 70-24 in the House and 27-6 in the Senate, with no Democrats voting in favor. Lee, who is from Williamson county, signed it.
The same statehouse that just folded Memphis Black voters into Williamson county is the one that legislated to preserve the Confederate flag of the county absorbing them. The cartography doesn’t require translation. Tennessee is being precise, and they aren’t alone.
This is the aftermath of the supreme court’s disastrous 6-3 ruling in Louisiana v Callais , decided less than a month ago, which gravely weakened the Voting Rights Act’s protections for Black representation. Ever since, Republicans have resembled eager children on Christmas morning, tearing our electoral maps to shreds. Louisiana is set to eliminate one of its two Black-majority districts. The court let Alabama erase one of its two Black-majority districts before this fall’s primaries.
In Mississippi, the Republican state senator who chairs the Medicaid committee said this week that it was time to “ erase Bennie Thompson’s district ”.
Thompson is 78 years old. He is the only Black member of Mississippi’s congressional delegation in Washington, from a state where 38% of the population is Black . He is also the man who chaired the House investigation into January 6. Yet Tate Reeves, the governor, who proclaims April Confederate Heritage Month every year, recently vowed that Thompson’s “ reign of terror ” will be over soon.
Who, precisely, is terrified here? And of what, or whom?
Yvette Clarke, the chair of the Congressional Black caucus, told NBC News recently that 19 of the caucus’s 62 members were at risk through the 2028 cycle . The US has gone from 13 Black members of Congress in 1971 to 62 today; almost a third of them are in jeopardy. As Hakeem Jeffries is poised to become the first Black speaker of the House, the ground is collapsing beneath Black officeholders across the south.
Representation without architecture is brittle. The presence of a Black speaker matters; but it cannot, by itself, prevent the unbuilding of the conditions that made the speakership reachable. What the Voting Rights Act produced – not just officeholders but the constituency-mapping that allowed Black political coalitions to cohere – is precisely what Republicans are now undoing.
They have a roadmap. In 1913, Woodrow Wilson’s administration resegregated the federal civil service that Reconstruction had pried open. They did it by executive action and administrative memo. Department by department, lunchroom by lunchroom. Wilson never issued a proclamation that named the project. The most consequential racial reordering of the early 20th century happened via paperwork .
Between 1900 and 1903, Black voting in Alabama fell from 180,000 to fewer than 3,000 . The 1901 state constitution gave county registrars administrative discretion. White men could vote without anyone vouching for them. Black men required the recommendation of a white voter. After George Henry White left office in 1901, no Black American was elected to Congress until 1928 .
That collapse was a procedure. The architects did not call it apartheid. They called it “states’ rights”. They called it reform.
Plessy v Ferguson, which upheld segregation, outlasted, by 58 years, the presidents who appointed the justices who decided it. The Jim Crow settlement, built between 1877 and 1896, held for nearly nine decades. These are lifetimes. The architects of that settlement were not building for a midterm. Theirs was a generational project, and they succeeded.
The price of disobedience is rising. Last week, the speaker of the Tennessee house of representatives, Cameron Sexton, sent a letter to the Democratic leader, Karen Camper, stripping members of the house Democratic caucus of their committee assignments . The alleged offenses, in his own listing : interlocking arms in the well of the House. Blocking aisles. Distributing earplugs to a colleague. A speaker of a state legislature stripped legislators of their committee assignments, in part, for the distribution of earplugs. Other red states will surely recognize the template; some will use it themselves.
Yet while Tennessee was carving up Memphis, Democratic party stalwarts – including Pete Buttigieg, Elissa Slotkin and Barack Obama – were in Toronto at the Global Progress Action Summit, gathering to learn affordability messaging from Mark Carney. How do we fight the authoritarian right? The president of the Center for American Progress asked from the stage. The answer offered was to message better on groceries, move slightly to the right on immigration, build housing faster.
There is nothing wrong with affordability politics – but it will not save us, or our electoral maps, from a Republican party that would rather decimate representation than persuade voters. There is more at stake here than our grocery bills. America has its own version of the structure other countries call apartheid. Ours is older. Ours is Jim Crow. Republicans are adapting it for a new age. By the time the next census is conducted, it will be conducted under these rules. By the time a Democratic president takes office, the federal courts adjudicating that president’s executive orders will have been shaped by a decade of Republican appointments.
It is tempting to believe that November can return the country to a sort of racial status quo that existed before Trump’s political ascendancy. Frankly, even that America was never what it claimed to be. But rather than bringing the nation closer to becoming a free republic worthy of the name, Republicans are dragging it backward, again.
Saying so is not despair. It is where the fight begins. You cannot resist what you refuse to name, and you cannot outlast what you have decided is temporary.
T owards the end of a miserable summer last year, Arthur Fils received a message from a friend imploring him to listen to a song. Fils was soon confronted with the sound of his own name. “My friend sent me the song saying: ‘Look, they are talking about you.’ I listened and I was like ‘Oh yeah’,” he says, theatrically mimicking his excitement. “ That’s cool.”
There was a depressing irony to the lyric. The popular French rapper La Rvfleuze repeatedly referenced Fils in the chorus of Serrure #5 , likening the noise Fils generates through his performances on the court to the rapper’s impact in his own arena: “Arthur Fils, j’fais du grah sur le court,” he rapped. In reality, Fils’s career was worryingly soundtracked by complete silence.
At 21 years old, Fils is one of the most talented players of his generation. Armed with a forehand off the charts with its heaviness, he complements his supreme athleticism with a well-rounded game. He is one of the few around with even vaguely realistic ambitions of one day consistently challenging Jannik Sinner and Carlos Alcaraz, but for eight months, between his withdrawal at the French Open last May and his return in February, he was sidelined with a stress fracture in his back.
The mere mention of Fils to anyone involved with French tennis at times last year elicited several deep, sorrowful sighs and there were legitimate doubts whether he would return at full strength. The only person who was not particularly concerned about Fils’s future was the man himself. He could feel the stress radiating from his coaches, though. “Now they are very chill as well because they see I can play some good tennis and I’m still here,” he says.
It takes just a short amount of time around Fils to understand he is about as extroverted as is humanly possible. On the court, his charisma is eternal. It manifests in the immense self-confidence and his passionate, theatrical fist-pumps and celebrations. He is just as exuberant outside his workplace. Fils has been nothing but extremely kind, curious and familiar in our many meetings, whether eagerly answering questions or chatting casually about discovering his favourite barber in Brixton, south London where some of his family live.
While Fils’s competitiveness is the driving force behind his success, it can also be his great undoing. When he was younger, his temper was out of control: “Every match I was losing my mind,” he says. “I was going crazy; breaking the racket, screaming, hitting the ball out. Everything. But just because I was losing. I hate losing and so I was getting very mad.”
Maturity has provided Fils with greater self-control, but he also leans on the people around him to help him keep his head. During his tight opening match last month in Madrid, Fils’s constant ranting prompted his fitness trainer, Lapo Becherini, to tell him to “shut the fuck up”. When Fils argued back, Becherini repeated the command. Fils won the match.
His excited retelling of this interaction numerous times post-match was hilarious, but in a sport where players often surround themselves with yes men, it also reflects well on his relationship with his team. “When something is going wrong on the court, they talk to me straight and that helps me,” he says.
“It’s not like something is wrong, but they’re going to tell me; ‘No, no, no, everything is good, keep going like this, the same way.’ That’s not going to help me. If I have people that I can trust, they’re going tell me sometimes bad things, they’re going to be tough on me. But if I’m mature enough to take it, then it helps me.”
In his short time on the tour, it has been fascinating to witness so many opponents attempting to test his patience and temper: “Older people are always going to try to teach you some lessons,” he says. “Some of them are pretty good. Some of them are just because of ego. And when it’s because of ego, then they just say that because you are younger and that’s it. Some guys tried to get under my skin because I was young.”
As many of his contentious moments with opponents are relayed to him, including Dan Evans, Alexander Zverev and Thiago Seyboth Wild needling Fils during matches, his mouth slowly forms a mischievous smile. The assertion that he is tough and never backs down instantly provokes a fiery response: “No, no. Hell, no . I never back down from a fight,” he says. “It’s how my dad raised me. My mom as well.
“When guys are talking to me, we’re on the same level. I’m not the kid and they’re not the adult.”
Fils’s relationship with his father, Jean-Philippe, is at the core of everything he has accomplished. It was Jean-Philippe, a former basketball player, who first envisioned his eldest child’s success and has guided his son every step of the way. He has described his son’s career as a project, throwing his time, resources and sporting expertise into ensuring its completion. The pair are incredibly close and Fils’s father accompanies him to nearly every tournament.
Jean-Philippe hails from Haiti, emigrating to France when he was 10 years old. Fils unsurprisingly cites his Haitian roots as the source of his fighting spirit and the tough love from his father that has been key in his success: “It’s a different mentality. It’s not a French mentality,” he says. “It’s tough. It’s really tough. He has been through a lot of things so he tried to make me understand life a bit more.”
There is one particularly obvious example of his father’s lessons. During his youth in Essonne, a small district south of Paris, Jean-Philippe deliberately made his son train on a horrendous, decrepit court despite having the means to play elsewhere. Fils believes that court helped to build his character, instilling in him greater perspective and grit. He is blunt about the state of it: “It was a disgrace,” he says, laughing.
Not even Fils could have anticipated the progress he has made so early into his comeback. He sits at No 5 in the ATP Race after a series of remarkable, consistent results yielded his first two Masters 1000 semi-finals, in Miami and Madrid, and an ATP 500 title in Barcelona.
These are a reflection of his ambition and hard work. Fils and his team, which now includes Goran Ivanisevic alongside his primary coach, Ivan Cinkus, used Fils’s extended time on the sidelines to make a startling amount of changes to his game. He has lengthened his service motion and shortened his forehand swing, learned how to properly slide in open stance to his backhand corner on all surfaces and chose to significantly drop weight from his muscular frame, primarily to lessen the stress on his back. He is, by far, a better player now.
Few countries are as cynical and critical of their athletes as France. Even this magnificent comeback has been accompanied by some negativity before the French Open starts this weekend. The general subject of proving doubters wrong prompts Fils to directly call out a particularly harsh pundit by his name. “In Barcelona, I saw one guy talking very bad about me: Simon Dutin,” he says, shaking his head.
“So I was very happy to win the title to show him that he was completely wrong. I try to not react to these things. I try to not see them. But when it’s coming to me, then I have to see them and I have to think about it.
“I was very surprised about what he said and not happy with the way he said the things. But when I won the title, it was the best answer.”
There will be plenty more criticism and potential distractions to come and despite how he endeavours to avoid reading about himself on social media, there is no way for the 21-year-old to avoid the frenzy that accompanies being France’s latest candidate to follow Yannick Noah’s 1983 triumph at Roland Garros, the last time a Frenchman or black man won a grand slam singles title.
The most effective thing Fils can do to protect himself is to ensure that the noise he continues to generate on the court drowns out everything else.
I t’s always a pleasure to see that funny, smart performer Adèle Exarchopoulos in Cannes – after all, she made Cannes history by being jointly awarded the Palme d’Or for the 2013 film Blue Is the Warmest Colour , sharing the big prize itself with the director Abdellatif Kechiche and her co-star Léa Seydoux. Exarchopoulos has her moments in this film from Jeanne Herry, in which she plays an actor struggling with a drinking problem. The scenes in which we see her up on stage, boisterously performing in a touring theatre for schoolkids, are genuinely great. But really this is a very glib and unsatisfying drama, whose essential naivety becomes apparent when the lead character is forced to confront the crisis in her life.
Exarchopoulos plays a young actor called Garance; she adores Arletty’s character of the same name in Marcel Carné’s movie classic Les Enfants du Paradis . At the moment, she has an assistant stage manager position in a prestigious Paris repertory company, believing herself to be on the verge of getting some serious speaking parts when the next season’s casting is announced. But she is instead relegated to the touring schools company, where her undoubted talents are compromised by partying extremely hard every night and waking up with a terrible hangover every morning.
Garance is one of those people who show up chaotically late to meetings with a drama-queen swirl of excuses about late buses and trains. With an awful inevitability, she is fired from the theatre troupe, a sacking which is made worse by being executed collectively with a stern injunction to get help, like an intervention. She forms a new relationship with a set designer, Pauline (Sara Giraudeau) but this is also placed under pressure by her drinking and she begins to suffer anxiety attacks and depression. To make things worse, her pregnant sister, who is there to be the unimpressed voice of common sense, gets cancer – a contrived health crisis that exists to facilitate Garance’s own path to maturity.
It is when Garance is forced to confront her life choices by a doctor that the film looks very flimsy. This doctor professes herself astonished by how good Garance looks for someone supposedly necking litres of white wine daily. Yes, it is astonishing; she looks like a well-groomed movie star who isn’t drinking anything like that amount. When she finally admits she needs to quit because her liver is packing up, there are some tearful scenes in which she says how “scared” she is but then she just quits, without going to AA. And it doesn’t even look that hard. She is surely therefore what AA veterans call a “dry drunk” or a “white knuckle drunk”, someone who thinks that they can just go it alone. Surely this film isn’t suggesting that you can do it the way that Garance is fancifully shown? It’s a very superficial portrait.
C ork Mental Hospital, also known as Our Lady’s, was once the longest building in Ireland: a monster of 19th-century gothic, much added to before its closure in the 1990s, that stares from the north bank down to the River Lee and the city beyond. In recent years, a lot of the complex has been turned, predictably, into apartments. A developer’s website now invites you to “Live comfortably, live conveniently, live with us”.
This, surely, is a spectral sort of invitation: hard for “us” not to conjure, amid bright mockup interiors, the fretful shades of the unwell – and the unwilling. When Doireann Ní Ghríofa – celebrated poet and author of the nonfiction A Ghost in the Throat – began exploring the derelict site several years ago, she recognised it straight away as a place she might herself, but for historical fortune, have ended up. Said the Dead is an intimately researched but also wildly imaginative study of lives (mostly female) lived and often concluded during the hospital’s first 70 years or so.
The book’s historical span is a matter of official constraint. When she goes divining in the archive, chiefly in the hospital’s large green casebooks, Ní Ghríofa must stop reading at a century’s distance: anything more recent risks breaching confidentiality. As a result, the Victorian and Edwardian voices she has been hearing fall silent in the early years of an independent Ireland.
Regardless, her notes seethe with the names, characters, adventures and misfortunes of patients. Bridget, heavily pregnant, who had emigrated to America but was thrown out and sent home by her brother when he discovered her condition. Anna Martha, a painter, “peculiar in her antics”, who pulled a gun on magistrates who wished to put her in the asylum. Sixteen-year-old Dora, who “wishes to be dead”: a great reader of novels, beaten into depression by her parents. Muriel, whose husband was Terence MacSwiney: republican lord mayor of Cork, soon to die on hunger strike in Brixton prison.
There are names that fade quickly from the record, others that stubbornly, mysteriously or even merrily persist in the archival pages. Behind these accounts of lives ruined and sometimes recovered, there are the doctors who treated the women. In the archive, their voices are most forthcoming at the time of admission, recording fears and delusions. “Says that fairies work on her nerves … Said she has changed into many shapes since I last saw her. Said that she will be burned soon, and that people are foretelling it.” Affect and intellect are noted: “dull”, “sullen”, “stupid”, “intelligent”. In many instances, these accounts decline into seemingly careless repetition: “No change.”
But in 1896, into this institution arrived Lucia Strangman, the first woman qualified as a psychiatrist in the British Isles. She is Ní Ghríofa’s double in Said the Dead, a reader of faces and bodies and letters, a listener to voices on the edge of extinction. On the evidence here, Lucia seems to have been at the humane, inquiring end of early 20th-century psychiatry.
Reading is Ní Ghríofa’s version of doing justice to these lives, but reading is double-edged, a kind of love and a type of surveillance. Early on, her presence on the page sunders: she is there as an exploring “I”, but refers to herself some of the time as “the Reader” who presides even over Lucia and her staff, who assumes authority and responsibility for all of these dead, vivid souls. Ní Ghríofa’s treatment of the patients and their textual remains is never less than sensitive. Like Freud with certain celebrated cases, she will use first names only. But the Reader is also obsessive and susceptible: she is the one who pursues the dead, impossibly, out of the written record and into their hopes and regrets, dreams and extravagant desires. It is these that give this book its extraordinary formal and ethical force.
Said the Dead by Doireann Ní Ghríofa is published by Faber (£18.99). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com . Delivery charges may apply.
H ere is a non-canonical, or semi-canonical tale – maybe the distinction is beginning to blur – from the Star Wars universe, serving up some entertaining but very familiar Star Wars narrative tropes on a spectacular Imax scale. And if you thought it was possible to end a movie like this without a climactic aerial combat scene involving X-wing fighters, think again. It is developed from the Disney+ streaming TV series The Mandalorian and set in the timeframe just after Star Wars: Episode VI – Return of the Jedi , in which holdout warlords from the defeated Empire are plotting a return against the New Republic.
Pedro Pascal plays the Mandalorian, a badass freebooting bounty hunter not unlike Han Solo, only he has on his shoulder Grogu, his “ward”. (That quaint Victorian term is revived here for the first time since the days of Dick Grayson and Bruce Wayne.) Grogu is the Yoda-species infant with nascent telekinetic powers. As for the Mandalorian, he has a voice like Clint Eastwood’s man with no name, and in fact he’s the guy with no face; he hardly ever removes his helmet – apart from in one key scene – despite the fact that it must surely restrict his visual field. And he must surely remove it occasionally to eat and drink and trim his moustache. Body-double actors Lateef Crowder and Brendan Wayne variously play the helmeted Mandalorian striding around, giving director Jon Favreau and Pascal exceptional leeway with the filming and voice-recording schedule. The Mandalorian is a vivid symbol of the importance of genre IP over old-fashioned star presence and the obvious comparison with Dave Prowse body-doubling Darth Vader is disconcerting.
The Republic’s Colonel Ward – a martial role which Sigourney Weaver politely phones in, rather as she did with her part in the Avatar films – hires the Mandalorian and Grogu to exfiltrate from imprisonment Rotta the Hutt (voiced by Jeremy Allen White); he is the son of the loathsome Jabba the Hutt, and Hutt Jr is being held by an imperial warlord played by Jonny Coyne. The deal with the hateful Hutts is that in return for Rotta’s freedom, they will give the Republic intel about what the Empire schemers are up to.
TM&G begin their bold quest at the wheel of a reconditioned battlecraft not entirely unlike the Millennium Falcon, and they encounter more than few wacky minor characters, including a nervy and over-caffeinated four-armed street-food vendor, cheerfully voiced by Martin Scorsese . Favreau gives us a fair few exotic and horrible creatures that the Mandalorian, often called “Mando”, has to battle, including a colossally yucky snake that emerges from the goopy depths presided over by the reptilian and duplicitous Hutts.
The film is watchable and barrels along capably enough, but perhaps there isn’t enough of the humanity, humour and extravagant space melodrama which has made and continues to make Star Wars lovable.
Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu is out on 21 May in Australia and 22 May in the UK and US.
Emma Raducanu’s return to competition for the first time in more than two months ended in a frustrating defeat as she fought hard but failed to convert a string of early opportunities, eventually falling 6-4, 7-6 (4) to France’s Diane Parry in the first round of the Strasbourg Open.
This was an unsurprising result for Raducanu, who now faces the challenge of regaining her rhythm, form and confidence after not competing since her loss to Amanda Anisimova at Indian Wells in early March. She was outplayed here by a talented and accomplished clay-courter in Parry, the world No 94, who dominated with her forehand while effectively using her variation to keep Raducanu uncomfortable.
Raducanu, who has fallen slightly to No 37 in the WTA rankings, had been on the sidelines due to post-viral illness, with her symptoms dating back to the virus she struggled with in February during the Middle East swing. She had considered returning to competition at the Italian Open two weeks ago but, after training on-site, she chose to withdraw.
This week also marks her first tournament since rehiring Andrew Richardson as her coach after spending a few weeks with Richardson training on clay at the Ferrer academy in La Nucia, Spain, his previous base, during the early stages of her recovery. Richardson was vocal throughout the match from Raducanu’s player box on the corner of the court, feeding his charge with a steady stream of strategic advice and encouragement.
The last time Richardson and Raducanu were together on a match court, the pair were holding the US Open trophy on Arthur Ashe Stadium in 2021 after combining to pull off one of the most remarkable, shocking results in the history of the sport despite working together for less than two months. There will be no instant, magic resolution this time. The biggest question surrounding Raducanu for the next few months is whether the pair can work together consistently over an extended period, competing and training without issue. So much of her career has been disrupted by her numerous physical issues and a lack of continuity within her coaching setup.
Still, Raducanu had her chances. She established a 4-2 lead in both sets before she was punished for her poor serving throughout the match. After losing four games in a row to fall in the opening set, Raducanu lost three in a row to trail Parry 5-4 in set two.
With the match hanging in the balance, Raducanu fought well. Parry served for the match at 6-4, 5-4, establishing a 30-0 lead, before Raducanu pulled herself back into the match by gutsily forcing herself inside the baseline and taking her forehand early. Then, after losing her serve in a bruising, extended service game, Raducanu recovered to force a tie-break.
While Raducanu served poorly, Parry is a talented and completely unique player armed with a sweet, heavy top-spin forehand and ample variety. Parry was first known as one of the few top 100 WTA players with a single-handed backhand, but she now curiously employs a dual backhand, often returning serve with a two-hander and using her left hand when most convenient.
Parry’s clay-court expertise exposed the difference between the two players in the tight moments, with Parry dragging Raducanu off the court with angles and keeping the ball out of the Briton’s strike zone. Despite her difficulties in the final stages, she closed out a well-deserved victory in straight sets.
