Keyword – Television & radio
Trefwoorden – Podcasts, Television & radio, Syria, Culture, Shamima Begum, Islamic State
Title – ‘It detonated right outside our house’: the explosion that started an incredible podcast series | Podcasts | The Guardian
Author – https://www.theguardian.com/profile/zoewilliams
Link – ‘It detonated right outside our house’: the explosion that started an incredible podcast series | Podcasts | The Guardian
Publish date – 2026-09-09T11:28:04.000Z
Category – Culture
URL – https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2026/sep/09/i-am-not-a-monster-podcast-josh-baker-interview-bbc-where-is-austin-tice

I n 2012, the US marine turned freelance foreign correspondent Austin Tice disappeared in Syria . If he’s still alive, he’ll be the second-longest detained journalist in the world. That, says Josh Baker (speaking to me from Wales), was the podcast he thought he was making: “We thought we were looking for a missing person, and what we fell into was almost like a Bourne novel, utterly extraordinary. A world of espionage, spies, dictatorship.”

It’s also a story of American exceptionalism – the way the US saw itself in relation to the rest of the world. Moreover, “I don’t mean this in a crass way,” Baker says, “but through Austin’s story, we also learn a lot about the last 14 years of the civil war in Syria. We really go inside the regime’s industrial complex of disappearance and torture. As episode two begins, Assad is gone, and we enter into these facilities.”

Ultimately, the hunt for the people who know the truth about Tice, and the hunt for those responsible for these atrocities, are one and the same. “A lot of my work for the last decade has involved intelligence and espionage and dealing with intelligence agencies, and I have never received so many leaks from so many different places as I have with Austin Tice – from every direction imaginable. It is absolutely extraordinary.”

This is Baker’s third series of I’m Not a Monster for the BBC. The first two – one about an American woman, Sam, who disappears into the Islamic State caliphate with her young children when her husband becomes a sniper, and the other one about Shamima Begum – are extraordinary pieces of journalism. But just as extraordinary is the backstory of how they came about.

Now 37, Baker started as a night editor on the foreign desk of the Times, and did “a little bit of reporting on the Serbian refugee crisis, and from the Middle East”. By the mid-10s, he was directing Battle for Iraq (a Guardian/PBS co-production), embedded with Iraqi special forces. “The story of the day was that the coalition forces were defeating Isis, were kicking their ass basically. And the reality was quite different.” He got caught in the centre of Mosul and by nightfall had been offered a place to stay by a family, explosions and fighting happening all around. A radio operator woke the team with a warning, “and I could hear shooting”, he remembers, “but without wanting to sound like a war bro, it was all going one way and it was all American weaponry. The sound is different when it’s Isis.”

What he didn’t hear until too late was a massive articulated lorry, trying to manoeuvre its way down the street to deliver a car bomb. “I know this bit because Isis, the bastards, were filming from a drone. It detonated right outside our house and I was buried in the collapsing building, and broke my back.”

As he was recovering in England after his evacuation, a source of his heard he’d been injured and got in touch. “He’s now almost like a friend, but a source like that always has an agenda,” Baker says. “He showed me a home video from inside Raqqa, which was then the Isis capital, of a young American boy called Matthew being forced to assemble a suicide bomb. This wasn’t a propaganda video, it was a home video.”

Matthew was Sam’s oldest son. “I was obviously in a mental state, having just walked out of something by the skin of my teeth. But I thought: ‘I’m gonna find this kid,’ which sounds incredibly idealistic, but seven months later, I did.”

The Begum season also came out of that suicide bombing – a Dutch IS bride had been in Mosul at the same time, and some years later privately messaged Baker on Twitter, saying she was in the same refugee camp as Shamima Begum and her children (all three of whom have now died). Baker was more than familiar with Begum’s story – he’d been working as assistant producer on Welcome to the Mosque and had been inside her east London mosque the day she and her school friends disappeared in 2015. But his new source was the start of an incredibly rich picture of what life was like for these girls and young women when they reached Syria – the deprivation, the violence, the forced marriage, the jeopardy.

Baker was also, after a long research trip to Turkey, able to piece together the role of Canadian intelligence in getting Begum across the border, an act which in itself (in my view) was cynical enough that it should solidify Begum’s case that she is more victim than terrorist. He plays down the credit for that exclusive – had it been an action of British intelligence, he says, he’d never have been able to prove it, “because of the tradecraft. Whereas if you look at some of the American or Canadian, or even some European agencies, the tradecraft doesn’t seem to be there in the same way.”

The Dutch woman was repatriated to the Netherlands, where she served some of her prison sentence, before it was overturned on the basis that she had been groomed and abused by her husband. “Tens of thousands of people from potentially as many as 100 nations were convinced to go to Isis,” Baker says. “They had a highly effective campaign. Which isn’t to say that someone who’s been with Isis isn’t a threat, but you will struggle to find a security expert who’ll say that our current strategy” – stripping people like Begum of statehood – “is making us safer.”

Baker and his colleagues received a large number of death threats after that documentary. It touched on everything: terrorism and foreign policy, who gets to be British and whose Britishness will always be conditional, how much transparency one can ever expect from one’s government. “By the end of that programme, it wasn’t really about Shamima any more.”

“In Britain, when people say they have an intelligence source, they often mean they’ve spoken to a press officer,” Baker says. “In America, and particularly in Washington, that world is much more accessible. You can meet intelligence officers or senior law enforcement at dinner parties or even in bars. And still, a great deal of what I’m told I either can’t stand up or I’m told I can’t use. I will say, though, that under the Trump administration, people have become much less inclined to speak.”

That access really shows in the Austin Tice podcast, which feels extremely close to the source, and urgent in a way that you wouldn’t think possible for a case that, 14 years on, one would expect to be cold. “Genuinely, our first mission was to try to get answers to Austin’s mum. But also, I really want people to care about what happened in Syria, because it’s obscene. Conservatively, 100,000 people have been disappeared. One of the reasons I left news is I got very tired of having to explain complex things in a matter-of-fact way. The privilege of doing this kind of narrative investigative journalism is that I can slow down and make you care about the people.”

I wonder whether Baker chose Tice’s story because he identified with him: a young guy in a war zone, playing stark odds and never knowing which, among myriad dangers, might be decisive. “No, what I identified with was his mother. I remember seeing her do a press conference, nine or 10 years into his disappearance, and thinking about my own mum. I’m from a single-parent household – we’re very close. I just thought, ‘Jesus Christ, what an awful existence to have.’”

He thinks he has emerged from this investigation with “a pretty decent idea about what may have happened to Austin. Whether or not we could ever be definitive about it is a different thing.”

In the UK, the first episode of season three of I Am Not a Monster is available on BBC Sounds now

Keyword – NO KEYWORD FOUND
Trefwoorden – NO KEYWORD FOUND
Title – Ella Baron on the abuse of RNLI volunteers in Portsmouth – cartoon | Ella Baron | The Guardian
Author – Ella Baron
Link – Ella Baron on the abuse of RNLI volunteers in Portsmouth – cartoon | Ella Baron | The Guardian
Publish date – Wed 9 Sep 2026 18.50 CESTLast modified on Wed 9 Sep 2026 18.52 CEST
Category – Opinion
URL – https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/picture/2026/sep/09/ella-baron-abuse-rnli-portsmouth-cartoon

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Keyword – Music
Trefwoorden – Music, R&B, Pop and rock, Culture, Liverpool, Race, Black British culture, Soul
Title – Even better than the Real Thing? The overlooked Black music scene of 1970s Liverpool | Music | The Guardian
Author – https://www.theguardian.com/profile/claudia-efemini
Link – Even better than the Real Thing? The overlooked Black music scene of 1970s Liverpool | Music | The Guardian
Publish date – 2026-09-09T11:00:07.000Z
Category – Culture
URL – https://www.theguardian.com/music/2026/sep/09/even-better-than-the-real-thing-the-overlooked-black-music-scene-of-1970s-liverpool

M onths before the Real Thing’s You to Me Are Everything became a UK No 1 hit in 1976, lead singer Chris Amoo took the unreleased song to the Timepiece, a nightclub devoted to Black music tucked in between bars on Liverpool’s Fleet Street. His DJ friend Les Spaine stuck it on, and the empty dancefloor “just filled up, and nobody, not one person in that place, had heard the song before”, Amoo says with pride on a call from his home on the outskirts of Liverpool . “That’s when me and Les looked at each other and thought: you’ve got something there, brother.”

The track’s symphonic majesty and romantic vocals captured the hearts of millions, and it peaked in the charts during 1976’s summer heatwave. Fifty years later, Amoo is on tour with his fellow bandmate Dave Smith in celebration of its anniversary. But the Real Thing were just the most high-profile group from an underground funk and R&B scene which emerged in 1970s Liverpool, upheld by a generation, predominately from the Toxteth area south of the city centre, that embraced Black American culture.

They were not inspired by the city’s household names like the Beatles, Amoo says; instead, it was from seeing groups like the Jackson 5 and the Temptations on television that he thought: “They look like us – we can do that!” Likewise Spaine, now considered a godfather of the UK’s funk scene, grew up in a household with a deep love for Black American music: “Nat King Cole, the Drifters, the Ink Spots, Five Blind Boys of Alabama, all them sorts of things that my old man used to play.”

Black US soldiers residing in Burtonwood, a nearby airbase, brought the latest records to Toxteth on weekends, leaving them with friends or at clubs, as well as “clothes, those really fantastic baseball boots and the apple hats that they used to wear. We’d learn all the new dances and songs,” Amoo says.

Spaine started DJing with the imported records he amassed, Amoo formed the Real Thing, and as each made a name for themselves in the music business, they became mostly immune to the colour ban that Black people faced. “I could get into many clubs, Chris could, but the majority of people from Toxteth couldn’t,” Spaine says. “We weren’t morbid about it; there was a saying back then, ‘that’s the way it is’. You could have signs saying no this, no that. This was before laws came in prohibiting that.”

Located in town among nightclubs that enforced a colour ban, the Timepiece became the club for Toxteth’s Black community to let loose. “We had big screens and I’d go and visit all the record companies to get these 16mm films,” Spaine remembers. “Then we’d have a back projector and all of a sudden these people could see Michael Jackson, Rufus and Chaka Khan.” As for the dress code, “we were soul boys, so you had to be immaculate; we had mohair suits and Ben Sherman shirts”.

People of all races would travel from across the country for their all-nighters. “Everybody who loved Black music went,” says Barbara Phillips, former member of Distinction, a vocal harmony band formed in Liverpool in 1976. “It was the only place where you kind of felt safe.”

Liverpool had been home to Black communities since the 18th century. During the transatlantic slave trade, enslaved Africans were brought to work as servants or sold at auctions in the dock area. Following the abolition of slavery, sailors from across the world, many from West Africa, worked on trade ships and contributed to the war effort during the world wars. Many settled in Toxteth. “The Windrush is a wonderful thing that we should all be proud of, but Black people have been contributing and in this country, especially in Liverpool, for hundreds of years and there’s a narrative to make it sound as if we all came in 1948,” says Spaine, whose Sierra Leonean father was a merchant seaman in Liverpool.

Both Spaine and Amoo speak fondly of their experiences growing up in Toxteth in the 1950s and 60s, “this melting pot of poor white people, Chinese people and Black people and we all just got on really well,” Spaine says.

“If you were getting up to a little bit of mischief, you’d have older women shouting ‘I can see you Christopher, I’m going to tell your mother and father’,” Amoo laughs. “They shouldn’t be shouting at us because we were 16 at that point, but there you go.”

The warmth in the community was offset by deprivation. “There was no money coming into Toxteth, no businesses that could thrive,” Amoo says. Those hardships, along with racial profiling by police, were a driving force for 1981’s Toxteth riots, which lasted nine days and resulted in widespread damage, hundreds of injured officers and the death of a man who was rammed by a police vehicle.

But when the Real Thing topped the charts in 1976, their entire community was jubilant. A Black band from Liverpool had got to No 1 – the first Black British band to do so. “The whole city was behind them,” says Phillips, and her group Distinction soon had a first of their own: never before had a Black British female group been signed to a major record label.

Distinction formed in the basement of their local community centre where they had vocal lessons from Vic Christian, whose brother Garry had success with the multi-racial Liverpool band the Christians; Phillips’s father was calypso musician Lord Woodbine, who mentored the Beatles. “We liked to think that we were funky, also harmonies were our big thing,” Phillips says. “We used to copy the Three Degrees because that was the nearest to what we saw ourselves as. But I think we were too young to be like anybody, because everybody we looked up to they were proper women, and we were just girls.”

The band members – Phillips and her sister Sue, plus Donna Alleyne and Mandy Smith – were still just teenagers when they got a deal with EMI, but, Phillips says, the label “would sign an artist but just sit on them for a year. You wouldn’t get to release anything, and that kind of happened with us.” They got picked up in Germany by the Hansa label who released their single That’s the Way I Like It in 1982, “the nearest we got to making it”. They spent a month in Germany touring cities and US air force bases, but their career soon fizzled out.

Spaine describes Distinction as “wonderful: they could harmonise, they could move”, and highlights other Black Liverpudlian acts such as the Chants and Colin Areety, “but most of them just kept local. I think in them days we always had this idea that everything American was best; the Real Thing were holding their own but there were lots of acts here which weren’t given the push given to American acts. You just did not have that interest from London.”

The UK recording industry and music fans “absolutely weren’t ready,” says Phillips. “They didn’t mind blue-eyed soul – white singers who covered Black music – but they didn’t really want to buy into Black UK artists. I can remember a poster of us and it had on it ‘four coloured girl singers’. That sounds like 200 years ago!” Instead, Phillips found success elsewhere, writing for stage, TV and radio and setting up a talent development agency.

Making an album in the 1970s was incredibly costly compared to now, Amoo says, which stripped some artists of opportunities. “First, record companies would have to find you a writer if you didn’t write yourself. Then they’d have to bring you down to London because there was nowhere up here to do it. Then you’re paying God knows how much an hour for studio time. For a vocal group like Distinction, you’d have to bring in a musician to make the track. For acts like them it was difficult, and they were good: a nice female vocal group, basically like our younger sisters.”

Even the Real Thing, Les argues, do not get the credit they deserve as a band. Their song Children of the Ghetto released in 1977 has been remade by several artists from Earth, Wind & Fire’s Philip Bailey to Mary J Blige. “Chris and Eddie wrote Children of the Ghetto, and Americans pay it more credit than the UK lot do.” But the Real Thing eventually had their story told in Everything, an acclaimed 2019 documentary, and Amoo remains grateful for his career. “We have been airbrushed out quite a lot,” he says, “but there’s a hell of a lot of experiences that the Real Thing have had that most other bands in the country can only dream of.”

And for all the difficulties the scene faced, Spaine’s memories of Liverpool’s Black music scene in the 70s still remain equally strong and rosy. “You didn’t make a great amount of money but you worked for the weekend – you literally lived for the weekend. Those nights, you forgot all your troubles.”

The Real Thing play We Love the 70s at Butlins, Bognor Regis, 12 September; then touring into 2027

Keyword – Environment
Trefwoorden – Alaska, Arctic, Climate crisis, Birds, Endangered habitats, Environment, Conservation, Wildlife, US news, World news, Animals, Biodiversity
Title – Can an entire Arctic ecosystem evolve to adapt to the climate crisis? | Alaska | The Guardian
Author – https://www.theguardian.com/profile/gloria-dickie
Link – Can an entire Arctic ecosystem evolve to adapt to the climate crisis? | Alaska | The Guardian
Publish date – 2026-09-09T11:00:07.000Z
Category – News
URL – https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/sep/09/arctic-ecosystem-evolve-adapt-climate-crisis-aoe

O n Alaska’s North Slope, scientists tread carefully across clumps of tussock grasses toward a fast-flowing stream draining the imposing Brooks Range of ice and snow. Near Galbraith Creek, they string out a mist net for white-crowned sparrows. The birds have recently arrived from southerly latitudes, intent on feasting on the insects that will soon descend on the tundra like storm clouds.

The Arctic summer is short-lived, and sparrows have only a few weeks to establish territories, find mates, lay eggs and raise their chicks on a steady diet of bugs. From every ensnared bird, the scientists collect blood, feather and faecal samples to see what they are eating and how that changes over the summer.

One thing they want to know is whether the sparrows are consuming a lot of stream insects, such as stoneflies and mayflies, says Ian Shuman, a doctoral student in quantitative ecology at Columbia University. As willow shrubs claim new territory along the Arctic’s rivers and streams – a process scientists call “shrubification” – this could disrupt the life cycles of stoneflies and mayflies. If the songbirds also depend on aquatic insects to thrive, that might affect the sparrows’ prospects.

The tundra can feel immutable in its vastness. A sea of grass and moss extends as far as the eye can see. But above the Arctic Circle, change is happening faster than anywhere else on Earth. Snow is melting earlier in the spring, sending torrents of water downstream. By late summer, such early season deluges have given way to parched creek beds. The Arctic grayling – cold water fish in the salmon family – that swim between deep lake winter refuges and shallow summer spawning streams may become stranded in isolated pools. Their survival, too, rests on the mayflies and stoneflies.

Galbraith Creek on Alaska’s North Slope

Ian Shuman, a PhD student at Columbia University, downloads the data from an autonomous recording unit set up on the tundra of Alaska’s North Slope to listen for bird calls

An Arctic grayling, a freshwater fish in the salmon family, caught in Toolik Lake, Alaska

Across the planet, global heating is reshuffling the order of life. Some species will prosper, while those that can’t adapt quickly enough will nosedive toward extinction. Evolution and adaptation have long been thought of as solitary endeavours – a survival of the fittest. But what if species could instead draw on their longstanding relationships not to succeed or fail alone, but to swiftly evolve and adapt together to climate breakdown, keeping whole ecosystems intact?

That’s the question evolutionary ecologists, biologists, physiologists and geneticists are trying to answer from Alaska’s stream and tundra ecosystems in a first-of-its-kind $15m (£11m) project, supported by the US National Science Foundation. Over six years, scientists will closely assess five species and their connections to one another: the white-crowned sparrow, the feltleaf willow, the Arctic grayling, an aquatic mayfly and a ground beetle (the exact species are yet to be determined). If species adapt in response to temperature, they may also adapt in response to each other – and each other’s adaptations.

“There is how organisms respond individually, but then all those organisms also live in a matrix that is an ecosystem,” says Linda Deegan, a senior scientist at Woodwell climate research center in Massachusetts who is leading the project, known as the Evolving Meta-Ecosystems Institute (Evome). “We think those connections will help them prosper in climate change. Things won’t completely fall apart.”

Scientists chose Alaska’s tundra and stream ecosystems to study, not only because the Arctic is the fastest-warming region on Earth, but because it is also home to relatively simple ecosystems where a handful of species shape the environment. Still, what they find in the far north will help inform how ecosystems around the world, from the tropics to the alpine regions, might be able to withstand the climate crisis.

T he land on either side of the Dalton Highway, the road that connects Fairbanks to the oilfields of Prudhoe Bay, serves as a sprawling laboratory for the 50 scientists from US research institutions working on the project. Almost every day throughout the spring and summer, scientists trawl the 15 field sites scattered along a nearly 190-mile stretch of road that runs from just south of the Brooks Range up toward Sagwon Creek, 60 miles south of the Arctic Ocean.

The Brooks Range peeks out from behind the sprawling tundra of northern Alaska

It is impossible to walk very far on the tundra without stumbling across a research project tucked into the willows or sedges. Dozens of sticky traps poke out of the permafrost to collect bugs. Recording boxes listen for bird calls. Temperature sensors lie submerged in frigid streams. Mesh bags flap around on the tundra to gather willow leaves. In the distance, the silver Alyeska pipeline cuts through the rugged terrain, transporting crude oil to Valdez – a reminder of why scientists are here in the warming landscape.

“We follow the road and the pipeline all summer,” says Andie Norton, a Woodwell research assistant who is studying the impact of encroaching willows on nutrient flows in Alaska’s streams.

Andie Norton, an ecologist with Woodwell Climate Research Center, examines a water sample taken from Alaska’s Hershey Creek for aquatic mayflies and stoneflies, and a feltleaf willow, one of Evome’s main study species, in the early stages of leafing out

A shadier stream means less algae is produced through photosynthesis to feed the mayflies and caddisflies, she says. But if more willows are dropping their foliage, shredding insects that enjoy munching on leaves – such as stoneflies – might become more abundant. The question is whether fish and birds will be able to take sufficient advantage. Unlike mayflies, stoneflies generally don’t form large swarms and they emerge earlier, during the spring melt.

Still, there is good reason to think that Alaska’s stream and tundra ecosystems will continue to function, Deegan says, though she notes such an optimistic outcome is only a best guess. Few studies have looked at how adaptive evolution can affect entire ecosystem dynamics – including nutrient and energy flows – and none have assessed how evolution could affect connections between two adjacent ecosystems.

Individual species can adapt to a warmer world in one of three ways. They can adjust their behaviour, such as birds shifting their migration routes . They can acclimatise at the physiological level, for instance trees temporarily altering photosynthesis during a drought . Or they can draw upon evolution – passing on genetic changes to their offspring, sometimes within just a few generations.

Scientists measure the beak length of a newly arrived, migratory white-crowned sparrow on the tundra of Alaska’s North Slope

Studies reveal that many plants and animals have been able to persist through evolutionary rescue – the process by which a population on the brink of extinction survives and rebounds through rapid genetic adaptation. Scarlet monkeyflowers in Oregon and California, for example, rapidly evolved during the 2010s to survive a four-year drought.

“Across hundreds of experiments, we have seen this happening,” says Mark Urban, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Connecticut working on the project. “There is this incredible buffer ability of adaptive evolution.”

Alpine azalea, a common dwarf shrub found on the Alaska tundra

How the evolution of one species can help the holistic ecosystems depends on how an adaptive trait ultimately translates into ecological properties. For example, if a fish species can quickly evolve, it means that not only is the population maintained, but so is the stream’s productivity. “Any ecological properties that depend on those populations are maintained as well,” Urban says.

To get a better idea of whether the Arctic’s stream and tundra habitats will continue to prosper, scientists are mapping the genetic diversity of each of the five study species to see if there is enough to allow for adaptation – influencing the ecosystems’ resilience potential.

“We can get so far with ecology, but at some point we want to get down to the basics of why organisms do the things they do, and can they change the things they do,” says Urban. “That’s something only genetics can explain.”

Certain genes control the traits associated with succeeding in different environments. “The holy grail in genomics is to find that one gene that affects everything. The gene that rules them all,” he says. “I think that’s optimistic. Most of the traits are going to be determined by hundreds of thousands of genes.”

T he Arctic grayling is, in many ways, the crown jewel of the scientists’ investigation. The migrating fish – distinguished by its iridescent body and flamboyant dorsal fin – connect Alaska’s watersheds, moving nutrients between streams and lakes. They are also exceptionally vulnerable to changes in the climate. Grayling require cold water to develop into adults. They feed on the stoneflies and mayflies likely to be affected by increased shrubbiness. And unpredictable summer stream flows can block their movement back to winter lakes.

“The snow is melting earlier most years, but summers are also getting drier and grayling have to move,” says environmental ecologist Chris Neill, also at Woodwell, who is looking at stream flows, water chemistry and plant communities for the project. Certain cues tell grayling when they should begin migrating. “Those cues may be programmed into their genome – or they may not.”

Harrison Dubois and Chris Neill, members of the Evome project, measure the late spring stream flow of Galbraith Creek on Alaska’s North Slope

In May, University of Alaska Fairbanks students Matthew Zimmerman and Roberto Ponce Velez travelled to a lake just south of the Brooks Range hoping to collect fertilised eggs from the spawning grayling for a pilot experiment. Just finding a spawning event is “like throwing a hammer at a nail”, Zimmerman says.

Things only got harder from there. The students had hoped to transport their bounty back to a laboratory on the university campus along the notoriously bumpy Dalton Highway. More than half of their eggs perished en route.

The survivors that made it to Fairbanks were placed into four tanks with five different water temperatures ranging between 4C and 20C. At the same time, the students collected fertilised eggs from a channel of the Chena River a few miles outside Fairbanks, where grayling were spawning at just 4C – six degrees cooler than the grayling up north – and transferred them to the tanks.

The idea is that by collecting species from different geographies and growing them together under shared conditions, scientists will be able to see how genetic variations and adaptations differ across the Arctic. “Temperature is really controlling how quickly things develop,” says Ponce Velez. “There are a lot of trade-offs. At higher temperatures, we have much quicker development of fish. But we have really high mortality.” Next year, they’ll gather more fertilised eggs from other lakes and streams spread across the North Slope to see how each population fares in the lab.

Matthew Zimmerman, a PhD student at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, holds up an Arctic grayling caught in Toolik Lake

Evome scientists are close to completing the first reference genome for the Arctic grayling, which will allow them to compare differences in temperature responses between populations and search for the specific genes that may be tied to local adaptations.

Mist-netting for birds, scrubbing rocks for algae, assembling genomes, and trucking grayling eggs down the Dalton Highway, scientists hope, will eventually allow them to forecast how this fragile place at the top of the world might manage to persist under the weight of immense change.

Will Alaska’s streams and tundra bounce back, bend, or snap entirely? “I think there are going to be a lot of springs,” says Urban. “But we’ll also witness a few breaks or bends in the system.”

Find more age of extinction coverage here , and follow the biodiversity reporters Rebecca Ratcliffe , Phoebe Weston and Patrick Greenfield in the Guardian app for more nature coverage.

Keyword – Film
Trefwoorden – Brad Pitt, Film, Culture, Advertising, Dogs, Animals, World news
Title – Inglourious baristas: why is Brad Pitt making coffee for 16 abusive dogs? | Brad Pitt | The Guardian
Author – https://www.theguardian.com/profile/stuart-heritage
Link – Inglourious baristas: why is Brad Pitt making coffee for 16 abusive dogs? | Brad Pitt | The Guardian
Publish date – 2026-09-09T10:30:04.000Z
Category – Culture
URL – https://www.theguardian.com/film/2026/sep/09/brad-pitt-coffee-the-heart-of-the-beast

B rad Pitt has a new movie out this month, The Heart of the Beast, about an emotionally damaged man who forms a life-saving bond with a dog. If that sounds familiar, maybe it is because you have seen The Call of the Wild. Or maybe it is because you have seen A Dog’s Way Home. Or maybe it is because you have seen Dog. Or, look, you get the idea.

But perhaps Brad Pitt knows that getting people to see something as unimaginative as The Heart of the Beast is an uphill struggle, because that would explain why he has just made an advert that looks and feels much more like the Brad Pitt dog movie that deserves to be made. In short, it is an advert where Brad Pitt gets loudly disparaged by a number of dogs for an extended period of time.

As reported by Variety, the commercial is for the De’Longhi Magnifica Duo, an all-singing, all-dancing coffee machine that retails in the UK for about £700. But really the product is beside the point. The main point is that the advert, running to almost two minutes, sees Brad Pitt stumble around cluelessly while a small army of real dogs – all of whom have names, some of whom are dressed in human clothes – shout insults at him.

As he wanders into his living room, some of the dogs (in subtitle) tell him that he woke up too late. They tell him to make a hot coffee and, even though he has started to make a cold one, he drops his head and sullenly obliges. Then another dog says that he can’t have any coffee at all until his attitude improves. “OK,” he mumbles in return, like a put-upon sitcom dad. The dogs berate him for his slovenliness and his stupidity and, when he finally snaps and tells them to go and fetch a stick, they make him fetch a stick for them instead.

It’s a weird advert. It is slightly reminiscent of that bizarre Chinese commercial for Chinese vitamins from a few years back, when Tom Hiddleston cooks you breakfast before looking straight into your eyes and promising that he’s going to have sex with you. The difference is that, while you could tell that Hiddleston desperately hoped that nobody would see his ad, Pitt’s has been made for an American market. He wants you to see this.

Of course, it helps that the weirdness is deliberate. The commercial was directed by Spike Jonze, the visionary director of no films at all for the last 13 years. The world has been crying out for a new film by Jonze, and if the closest we’re going to get is a film where Brad Pitt gets insulted by a dog named Kyle, then that will have to do.

In fact, the more you consider it, the better a move this advert seems for Pitt. Compared with the derivative grit-jawed Americana of The Heart of the Beast, it demonstrates that he’s much better when he’s allowed to be funny. And if it underlines a connection between Pitt and dogs along the way, creating an implied synergy with his movie, then that’s OK too.

It’s also a big step up from Pitt’s previous De’Longhi commercials, the majority of which just required him to stand still and smoulder for a while . Those commercials could have starred anyone. You could have put a carrot on human growth hormones and it would have adequately done the job. At least this one has a bit of personality.

Only the De’Longhi sales team will know if this has been a successful gambit or not, but speaking personally I think it works perfectly. With any luck it will bring Spike Jonze out of retirement, and Brad Pitt Gets Shit-Talked by Some Dogs will be a motion picture by next Christmas.

Keyword – Opinion
Trefwoorden – Life and style, Sleep, Science, Health & wellbeing, Parents and parenting
Title – Want to start lazymaxxing? Here are some low-effort ways to improve your life | Arwa Mahdawi | The Guardian
Author – https://www.theguardian.com/profile/arwa-mahdawi
Link – Want to start lazymaxxing? Here are some low-effort ways to improve your life | Arwa Mahdawi | The Guardian
Publish date – 2026-09-09T10:00:06.000Z
Category – Opinion
URL – https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/sep/09/want-to-start-lazymaxxing-here-are-some-low-effort-ways-to-improve-your-life

T his evening I’m going to tuck my five-year-old into bed and read her a chapter from one of her princess books, followed by a summary of research recently presented at the annual congress of the European Society of Cardiology. Once upon a time, I’ll tell her, there was a scientist called Dr Nawon Lee who authored a study that found having a weekend lie-in may be very good for you and can protect against high blood pressure. Our accomplished protagonist Dr Lee said: “People should not feel lazy or guilty for sleeping a little longer on the weekend.” And the moral of this story, dear child, is that you should try not to wake your mothers up at 6am every day.

Unfortunately, I’m not sure that all the peer-reviewed science in the world will convince my early riser to have a weekend lie-in. Still, as a big fan of sleep and someone who has never once felt guilty for hitting the snooze button, I have to say I feel vindicated by this new study. CEOs can get up at 4am and run 10 miles before eating five foraged mushrooms if they want to, but I’m going to protect my heart health by sleeping in, any opportunity I can get, thank you very much.

The rich world is currently in thrall to tech-enabled self-optimisation. Or as some people (people you do not want to end up seated next to at a dinner party) call it: humanmaxxing . We’re told we should track our biomarkers and optimise every second of our days, often in complicated and joyless ways. If that works for you, great. But, personally, I’m a big fan of lazymaxxing and finding low-effort ways to improve my life. Weekend lie-ins are obviously one, drinking coffee is another. A 2025 study found that morning coffee drinkers were 16% less likely to die early of any cause. Swearing is also surprisingly good for you : uttering a profanity can decrease physical pain and increase focus. And while I can’t go so far as to say that bingeing Love is Blind has health-giving properties, I did unearth research concluding that enjoying trashy films is a sign you’re a well-educated cultural omnivore. I still haven’t found a study proving that lying on the couch, eating crisps, reading thrillers and ignoring your obligations is good for you, but I live in hope.

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