Keyword – Culture
Trefwoorden – Black US culture, Music, Culture, Michigan, Pop and rock, Beyoncé, Lana Del Rey
Title – ‘I’m trying to figure out where I’m supposed to be’: singer Momo Boyd on making space for herself | Black US culture | The Guardian
Author – https://www.theguardian.com/profile/morgan-jerkins
Link – ‘I’m trying to figure out where I’m supposed to be’: singer Momo Boyd on making space for herself | Black US culture | The Guardian
Publish date – 2026-09-06T11:00:04.000Z
Category – Culture
URL – https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2026/sep/06/infinity-song-momo-boyd-profile

“I ’m trying to figure out where I’m supposed to be, but at the same time enjoying the fact that there’s nowhere I’m supposed to be.” This admission might seem like the beginning of an existential crisis, but it’s a welcome, liminal space for the rising singer and songwriter Momo Boyd. Between her recently released debut EP, a second EP in the works, and two tours, the 27-year-old is being pulled in many directions. But she’s also enjoying the emotionally ambiguous position she’s currently in – it’s what characterizes much of her work.

Boyd, who’s a part of Infinity Song, a pop rock sibling quintet that debuted in 2015, confesses that she’s nervous about striking out on her own as a solo artist. The demands are high: Her debut Miss Michigan tour just finished its US leg this past August and she will continue on throughout Europe in the fall, with a stop in London in November. She said that in comparison to Infinity Song’s sound, which can be characterized by guitar-driven melodies full of romanticism. “I’m doing my own thing and it’s a bit folksy, emotional and personal.” One might expect that Boyd being both a solo artist and an ensemble group member means that she runs the risk of producing indistinguishable bodies of work. But her moodier sound could not be more different from the family band’s more optimistic tunes. Nevertheless, the young singer is quick to say that the balance between the two lanes has been “pretty easy”.

The challenge so far has been trusting herself to explore different sounds in an industry where Black women’s artistry is often flattened into categories. The alternative and indie rock artist Santigold spoke about the industry’s narrow view of “Black music” during her 2022 Tiny Desk performance, and the Grammy award-winning artist SZA once said that her own music was only categorized as R&B because she’s Black. Being Black, female and gifted is often accompanied with being misunderstood–a consequence that Boyd has learned early on in her career.

Her musical origins began with her father, John Boyd, who started multiple choirs in Michigan, where the family is from, so that the younger people of their community would have an activity after school. By the time Momo was seven, her family relocated from the midwest to the north-east. While going to school in the Bronx, Boyd recalled, a blonde-haired, blue-eyed girl said to the singer: “Where you from? You talk like a white girl.” The comment made Boyd acutely aware of the cultural shift from her slower, midwestern roots to a faster, city life. The suspicion that she was cosplaying whiteness would resurface years later when she released her debut single, American Love Song.

Boyd’s melancholic, haunting voice about an ill-fated romance in American Love Song has made some listeners call her the Black Lana Del Rey , which Boyd considers a compliment. “She’s so emotionally interesting,” Boyd says about Del Rey. “I was drawn to her.” Boyd said that working through her own deep-seated sadness has allowed her to protect her inner child and to present herself to the world with intentionality and sensitivity. As the seventh of nine children who, Boyd said, didn’t get much attention growing up, she spent a lot of her formative years experiencing anxiety and temperamental attitudes. She decided to channel those feelings from childhood into her music.

After high school, Boyd chose not to attend college and remained at home with her parents, where she learned and practiced the guitar and bass for hours daily. She describes the isolation of that period as “tough” but crucial. When Infinity Song’s Hater’s Anthem, a quirky, acoustic number about jealousy and prideful laziness, went viral in 2023, her family knew that their dedication came full circle. “We always knew something would happen,” Boyd said. “We were feeling a bit discouraged and very unsure. Around that time we were just coming together to see what could happen.”

Though Infinity Song has developed a cult following as a group, each member intends to go solo. So when Boyd released Miss Michigan in April, her siblings were in full support of her endeavors. Boyd’s velvety vocals float over the seven tracks as she processes her self-doubt, avoidant tendencies and lovelorn experiences. Fader called her voice “moisturized” and The Source called Miss Michigan “reflective and deeply personal” .

This emotional interiority of her music manifests through the visuals for the aforementioned American Love Song, where Boyd sings about the inability to love due to being too “independent” and “American” for commitment. The music video captures Boyd with a delicate touch that complements her soft vocals. She is introduced wearing two-tone chaps-style denim jeans as she pets a horse and stares off into the distance. The fashion is pure rockabilly and Americana – her softly coiffed curly hair, the fit-and-flare silhouettes, a vintage style wedding gown, and an American flag sweater.

Boyd alternates between playing the guitar amidst wild grass and brush and running through an open pasture. The ease that Boyd exudes as she frolics through a pastoral landscape might seem incongruent to how such settings, which recall plantations and fields, would have been the historical sites of violence against Black people. “People were assuming that I was catering to a white audience. They were questioning my right to make a song on Americanism because of my race. For it to be twisted as if I’m sinister or an agent of propaganda, when I tell you–” Her voice trails off before continuing. “Sometimes I’m like, should I even bring it up?”

The truth, Boyd said, is that American Love Song is not propaganda or even a product of her own imagination. It was her life. Boyd lived with her large family in Shay Lake, a rural oasis for working class and upwardly mobile Black people seeking rest away from their homes in Detroit and Flint. Her home was the renovated lobby of an old motel with huge pine trees wrapped around the entrance. She reminisced on her family’s crabapple tree, picnics and bonfires, the small Black church her family frequented, and the countless stars that illuminated the evening skies. “This is where my home is. Do I not exist? Is this not where my family has put in all these hours of work? It’s just the truth. But the truth was controversial.”

Boyd operates within a tradition of Black female artists who dare to center their experiences as integral to the American landscape as anyone else’s. In 2016, Beyoncé performed with The Dixie Chicks at the Country Music Awards and online communities argued whether or not she belonged in the genre. Despite her 2024 album Cowboy Carter topping the Billboard charts, she received no CMA nominations. In 2020, Mickey Guyton triggered a shockwave throughout the country music scene with Black Like Me, a song that addressed systemic racism in the industry. Country music star Tanner Adell spoke about the underrepresentation of Black women in her genre and staked her claim as a glamorous Black woman of the south with her song, Buckle Bunny. Adell told Grammy.com: “We, as Black women, have been fighting our whole lives. We’ve been fighting for space. I’m purposely trying to bring softness into the picture.”

Although Boyd emphasizes that she doesn’t want to over-intellectualize her music, her sound and aesthetic choices are inherently political. “I had some not so pretty experiences in high school with colorism–how you’re perceived, how you’re ranked on the scale of desirability, and whether or not you’re seen. It lowkey radicalized me … My goal is to be a representation for Black women who desire freedom.”

Freedom, to her, is the refusal to allow the fear of failure to eclipse one’s courage and the ability to be one’s self. When Boyd created She’s a Sweetheart, a tongue-in-cheek song about a woman who’s too accessible to others, she said she wanted to create a world where Black women were the moment and nothing else existed besides those who looked like her. Despite once feeling invisible because of the color of her skin, Boyd professes that she’s always been a lover of beauty and feminine archetypes. She’s a devotee of classic rom-coms like Love Jones, Brown Sugar, and Pretty Woman. She loves the effortlessness of women from the 1970s and 1990s. And though her wide-ranging interests may confuse some people, Boyd enjoys the variety. “It takes a lot of work to have gratitude and peace. I have done a lot of work to protect my heart and who I am at the core and maintain this joy.”

Keyword – Books
Trefwoorden – Comics and graphic novels, Books, Culture
Title – ‘It leaves holes inside of you’: graphic novel aims to remember the history and horror of genocide | Comics and graphic novels | The Guardian
Author – https://www.theguardian.com/profile/davidsmith
Link – ‘It leaves holes inside of you’: graphic novel aims to remember the history and horror of genocide | Comics and graphic novels | The Guardian
Publish date – 2026-09-06T09:00:02.000Z
Category – Culture
URL – https://www.theguardian.com/books/2026/sep/06/book-of-genocides-dana-mashoian-walrath

The artist Dana Mashoian Walrath’s new book honours the Jewish victims of the Nazi Holocaust. But she also expects it to get her banned from Israel.

That is because The Book of Genocides also contains a chapter that portrays Palestinians forced to live as second-class citizens and watch their homes bulldozed or bombed. “What does it mean to be starved?” the narrative asks. “To know that perpetrators have themselves experienced genocide and now commit genocide against you?”

There are many more questions posed by Walrath’s graphic history, which is quite unlike any other book about humanity’s periodic descents into the abyss of mass extermination and ethnic cleansing over the past five centuries.

In an experimental blend of anthropology, memoir and visual art, which encourages readers to cut the pages and create three-part interactive figures, she offers 10 case studies ranging from the killing of Indigenous peoples in the Americas and the enslavement of Africans to the Armenian genocide, Holocaust, Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia, Palestine and the persecution of the Rohingya.

Walrath, 66, an artist, writer and anthropologist, travelled to all 10 places represented in the book and has a personal connection with genocide. She is Armenian-American, the granddaughter of survivors who fled the systematic destruction of the Ottoman empire’s Armenian population during the first world war. For decades, her family’s survival story was condensed into a single narrative fragment.

When she asked her mother about her own mother’s childhood in western Armenia, she replied : “After her parents were killed, she hid during the day and ran at night with Uncle Benny and Aunt Alice from their home in Palu to the orphanage in Aleppo.”

It was only recently that deeper, more horrifying layers of that journey were revealed. When her mother, Alice, was diagnosed with dementia and moved into her home, Walrath took a leave of absence from her academic career to engage in full-time creative work, eventually publishing a verse novel about the Armenian genocide, Like Water on Stone.

“After that novel came out my older relatives started telling me more details of what happened,” Walrath says from her studio near Burlington in Vermont, adorned with towering draft pages of The Book of Genocides and a monumental portrait of her mother. “I did not know about my grandmother hiding in an urn while her father was dismembered until about five years ago.

“She was taken into enslavement with her son. I also learned that my grandmother, at one point probably after sex, hit her enslaver on the head with a stone and the two of them fled. This is what my aunt told me. Can I verify it? Can I find these facts? I don’t know.”

This inheritance of violence and survival has haunted Walrath’s life and given her a personal connection to genocide, wherever it happens. She reflects: “It’s knowing what it does to people and knowing how it leaves holes inside of you and that you have to figure out how to overcome the desire to get even.

“You have to figure out how to transform the anger and the hurt into something productive and I feel like I’ve spent much of my adult life trying to figure out how to do that. Writing the novel let me exorcise a lot of demons and then writing this book was so gratifying because I could literally bring people together.”

Walrath committed herself to traveling to every location depicted in the book, seeking out survivors and descendants to sit with them in their grief. She spoke with survivors of Pol Pot’s killing fields in Phnom Penh , met with perpetrators and survivors of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda and visited Rohingya refugees in the sprawling camps of Bangladesh.

This deep exposure to human suffering took a severe toll on her physical health. The 66-year-old recalls via Zoom: “I got physically sick at various times and it would usually take the form of a terrible chest cold. Grief is supposed to live in the lungs and I got very sick after Auschwitz. I got very sick in 2013 when I crossed into the West Bank through the wall to go to Bethlehem with a bunch of Armenian pilgrims .”

“I remember right after I came back from Auschwitz I was reading [Polish lawyer and Holocaust scholar] Raphael Lemkin’s autobiography . It starts out great and then he comes unravelled in the last couple of chapters. I had a spell where I was thinking, oh no, what if I lose my mind?

“Then I went through no, no, I have very good supports and live in nature and, at this moment in time, as America is well on its way into a very scary place, I felt like I could get up every morning and have something concrete to do to push back. When I reread the book recently it was even more shocking how many elements of USA 2026 are present in all these genocides.”

To convey these heavy histories, Walrath turned to a medium distinctively suited to representing the unrepresentable: comics. In the tradition of Art Spiegelman’s Maus and Joe Sacco’s Palestine, The Book of Genocides uses the graphic form to bridge the gap between abstract history and raw empathy.

“Comics are very active. I love cinema and it’s a very powerful medium for learning about things that might be outside of your experience but it is passive. You sit in your seat and you take it in. Comics are probably closer to cinema than anything else but they’re active. They’re created by a series of fragments that the reader has to take in and process and put together in an active way and because of that it gave me a vocabulary to talk about these horrors without making people run away from them .”

Walrath deliberately avoided drawing explicit, realistic acts of violence, opting instead for metaphorical representations. “I left out drawing most of the horror and was always walking the line between making sure the image was gonna draw people in, even if it was talking about something horrible,” she says.

The book’s unsettling interactive design aims to force readers to confront the systemic patterns of dehumanisation that make such horrors possible. Readers are invited to cut certain portrait pages into thirds, creating a “turn-the-flap” sequence – a structural device reminiscent of the surrealist game of “exquisite corpse”. As the reader flips the segmented pages, the illustrated human subjects transform back and forth between recognisable faces and non-human creatures – beasts, predators, vermin and parasites.

For Walrath, this physical interaction is not a gimmick but an exercise in moral philosophy. She explains: “I wanted people to try and get inside the mind of someone else and also to make it so that they would feel their potential complicity. Have I always spoken up when I’ve heard somebody call someone else a monster? Have I always spoken up if someone is called a parasite? I don’t know. A lot of times we let things slide.

“We’ve invited people to cut the pages to get people thinking about how we’re taught: what’s allowed and what isn’t allowed. We’re not supposed to desecrate books. We love books and yet we’re taught that war is OK, that it’s OK to kill other people. I wanted it there in an interactive, metaphorical but also subconscious way, rather than saying, this is what we do. People take it in differently when they’re interacting with it.”

The Book of Genocides relies on the concept of genocide developed by Lemkin and enshrined in the 1948 Genocide Convention: ‘acts committed with the intent to destroy in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group” and marked by a process of dehumanisation of the targeted group.

As an anthropologist, Walrath finds a common thread running through half a millennium of genocidal violence. She argues that they are often less spontaneous outbursts of tribal hatred than highly planned, bureaucratic operations, with material interests – particularly land – playing a central role.

“ Land theft almost always. The only exception is not really an exception; it’s enslavement. The Europeans stole Africa but then also stole African people and then put them into the transatlantic slave trade so, even though the land stealing was going on within the Americas, it was dependent upon European colonisation. Settler colonialism is nearly always there.

“Dehumanisation is part of that and then systemic injustices within the societies. These are precursors to massacre. What’s the difference between prisons in the US and many other countries where strictly disenfranchised people are the majority of the prisoners, and the Warsaw Ghetto ?”

Perhaps the most controversial decision in The Book of Genocides is its chapter that addresses the history of Palestinian displacement and the aftermath of the 7 October 2023 Hamas attacks and Israel’s subsequent war in Gaza . The inclusion of Palestine under the banner of genocide is a move that Walrath knew would draw fierce criticism and potentially severe professional consequences.

“I decided that was the right thing to do because the goal of the book is to spark conversations, to put it out there, to talk about Palestine, call it a genocide, and let people start speaking with each other about it.

“It would be great for someone to try and say why it is and isn’t genocide, and at the same time. I think that the way I’ve employed the term is aligned with Raphael Lemkin’s intention about what genocide was. It’s aligned with the convention, with the Rome statute , and what we’re watching is political machinations making the convention useless.”

Walrath adds: “Indiscriminate bombing of any place is a war crime for sure. When we’re killing babies and killing children and keeping people from healthcare and selectively bombing hospitals and journalists, I have no doubt in my mind that this is a systemic attempt to eliminate a people .”

She is clear-eyed about the fallout of this stance in Israel. “I probably won’t be allowed to visit again, which would be sad because I have respect for the real peace activists there. Honestly, going to Jerusalem as an Armenian was incredibly powerful. But maybe this will change and in my lifetime maybe I’ll live long enough that I will be able to go back but I know right now after this book comes out I will no longer be able to arrive at the airport.”

Despite the harrowing terrain of her subject matter, Walrath remains fundamentally an optimist. She rejects the jaundiced view that human violence is an evolutionary inevitability. “I am sure that’s not true. I am sure that we’re hardwired to care for one another. Every time we see dehumanisation get undone in the midst of a war it’s because someone’s heart has been touched .

“It’s governments that perpetrate genocides and it’s baked into our systems and structures and because those systems and structures and governments are all human-made creations, we can make better ones. A rugged as the content is, the message is an underlying message of hope and that we can change this. It’s not inevitable.”

The Book of Genocides is out on 8 September

Keyword – Music
Trefwoorden – Ezra Collective, Black British culture, Culture, Music
Title – ‘On the other side of pain there can be renewal’: Ezra Collective’s Femi Koleoso on reasons to hold on to hope | Ezra Collective | The Guardian
Author – Femi Koleoso
Link – ‘On the other side of pain there can be renewal’: Ezra Collective’s Femi Koleoso on reasons to hold on to hope | Ezra Collective | The Guardian
Publish date – 2026-09-06T09:00:02.000Z
Category – Culture
URL – https://www.theguardian.com/music/2026/sep/06/femi-koleoso-ezra-collective-guest-editor-cultural-picks

M y first thought when contacted about guest editing the culture section in today’s Saturday magazine was: this will elevate me into an intellectual bracket far beyond my wildest dreams. The first person I told was my dad. The second was my secondary school English teacher, Mr Pickering. I guess it was a subtle way of letting them know that the student is now in charge.

It’s a truly wonderful feeling. Even if this entire takeover is trash, I’m still proud to have been given this wonderful opportunity. That said, I did get an A in my GCSE English and English Lit!

To give some context: I am not a writer, nor an intellectual or a journalist. I am Femi Koleoso, a musician from north London. Born to Nigerian parents and raised in Enfield, a corner of London paved with gold, I started playing the drums at church (I know, typical). This became more than a hobby; it was a deep-set love, nurtured in the UK’s wonderful state school system and polished in powerful youth clubs. Today, I travel the world with my band, Ezra Collective , playing and producing music, DJing and broadcasting on BBC Radio 6 Music for a living. If there were a version of the “British-Nigerian dream” that didn’t involve becoming a lawyer, accountant or doctor, you could say my family and I got pretty close.

There’s power in a happy story; it brings hope. Normal school, amazing career. That’s the dream, right? That said, joy is at the centre of who I am, and every day I am filled with hope for the future.

But is there really reason to have hope for the future? Though I often only want to talk about Arsenal football club and playing the drums, I am well-informed enough to see the many reasons to lose all hope, not just for the future of the UK but the world. But while I acknowledge that, I believe there is a counter argument. I believe there is reason to have hope for the future of the UK and beyond; perhaps in this guest edit, I’m building a case for a more positive outlook on things.

The word “hope” has many definitions, but as my dear friend, the actor Letitia Wright, wonderfully phrases it via spoken-word interludes on our new album, Here Because of Hope, hope also captures the belief that on the other side of pain there can be renewal. There’s joy after mourning. Beauty from the ashes. Even when you don’t know how or when things will change, there can still be something inside you that believes your feet will eventually land on solid ground.

So on one side, you have pain; on the other, there will be joy. And hope is a marker on that spectrum that brings you from one end to the other; it makes you feel like getting to joy might be possible.

Being a musician, I see that hope most eloquently articulated in songs. Songs born out of pain bring joy. Fela Kuti wrote a song about his mother being executed by the Nigerian government – and its bassline became a club anthem. The pain and hardship of life in poverty-ridden council estates gave us grime music, which has people sweating and smiling in clubs. Calypso even emerged out of the horrors of the transatlantic slave trade.

The fuel for this wide-ranging artistic output, across continents and centuries is, for me, hope. In these features, you’ll be able to read about some people and stories that bring me out of pain and into joy; stories that bring me hope.

Collective decisions: Ezra’s cultural picks

Film: The Secret Agent I watched The Secret Agent recently while on a long drive to a show in Italy. It’s an intense story and Wagner Moura is incredible. I love the way director Kleber Mendonça Filho so immersively takes you into 70s Brazil. TJ Koleoso

Album: Rosa Passos – Recriação Recriação by Rosa Passos is a beautiful album, with minimal instrumentation but used in the most perfect way. Especially the drumming. It’s often just kick drum, rather than the full kit, and it works incredibly well. Also, if anybody knows what synth they used on the record, please let me know. Joe Armon-Jones

Live music: Southbank Centre Rather than go the traditional album-film-TV-show route, I’m picking the Southbank Centre. As part of its 75th-anniversary celebrations, it chose to celebrate the steelpan, and I had the privilege of watching loads of young bands play. It was a “best of London” feeling just seeing so many different generations, cultures and people all dancing and celebrating the joy that togetherness and music can bring. Femi Koleoso

Film: My Father’s Shadow My pick is Akinola Davies Jr’s 2025 film My Father’s Shadow, a Nigerian coming-of-age tale. I watched it recently and loved it. The storytelling was great and it felt so raw. It had so much cultural depth, which I could resonate with as a Nigerian. Ife Ogunjobi

Album: KeiyaA – Hooke’s Law I’m really into Hooke’s Law by KeiyaA at the moment. Ife put me on to this record when we were on tour in Italy and I haven’t put it down since. I love it when artists take us on a journey through different sound worlds within one album, as I think it creates such a rich and beautiful piece of art. Throughout this album it feels as if she’s not confined to one thing, which gives it a really original energy and makes it a truly unique and captivating listen. She produced it all as well and, sonically, it’s really tasty. James Mollison

Keyword – Books
Trefwoorden – Edna O’Brien, Books, Biography books, Ireland, London, TS Eliot, James Joyce, Culture, World news
Title – The twilight of Edna O’Brien: son chronicles novelist’s dedication to her craft and the dread of loss | Edna O'Brien | The Guardian
Author – https://www.theguardian.com/profile/rorycarroll
Link – The twilight of Edna O’Brien: son chronicles novelist’s dedication to her craft and the dread of loss | Edna O'Brien | The Guardian
Publish date – 2026-09-06T09:00:01.000Z
Category – Culture
URL – https://www.theguardian.com/books/2026/sep/06/edna-obrien-chronicle-novelist-craft-loss-nonfiction

A fter visiting his dying mother in London, Carlo Gébler returned to his rural home in Northern Ireland one night and encountered a hedgehog sitting on the doormat. A thought bubbled up: his mother had died and returned as this woodland creature.

In fact his mother, the novelist Edna O’Brien , was still alive, and not reincarnated, but his mind insisted otherwise. “At that moment that’s what I believed. And then of course I stopped believing it because I knew it wasn’t true.”

When O’Brien died days later in July 2024, at the age of 93, the literary world mourned the passing of a singular voice who had scandalised her native Ireland with depictions of female sexuality and blazed a trail for generations of Irish writers.

Now her son has produced a chronicle of O’Brien’s final years, a twilight marked by her struggle to keep working despite illness and frailty, and of the impact of her death on his own life.

Published on 11 September, No One Tells You: The Last Years of Edna O’Brien documents the writer’s doomed battle to complete a final book about TS Eliot as age and infirmity sapped her powers.

It was a painful fate for a woman so dedicated to her craft. “My mother’s strategy was basically to be a Stakhanovite, to keep on working. That was the elixir of life,” Gébler, a novelist, critic and biographer, said in an interview.

O’Brien escaped a stifling and conservative upbringing in County Clare by moving to Dublin and eloping with an Irish-Czech writer, Ernest Gébler , to England, where they raised two sons, Carlo and Sasha, before divorcing.

The Country Girls, published in 1960, established O’Brien’s reputation, launching her image as a glamorous public persona in London: a convent-educated rebel who befriended Hollywood stars while penning novels, biographies, plays and poetry.

Female desire and subversion populated O’Brien’s fiction decades before Ireland liberalised and legalised divorce, same-sex marriage and abortion, but that did not entitle Irish people to “co-opt” her memory for political ends, said Gébler.

“In Ireland people want a narrative which emphasises the progressive journey, as if she planned all the political progress on the back of an envelope. She wasn’t antagonistic to progress but she was a writer. Writing is about the transcription of feeling into a narrative. That is not a political programme and you shouldn’t get the two mixed up,” he said.

Gébler said his mother endured many hostile reviews, initially by critics who deemed her work “unseemly” and later by critics who disliked her forays into the lives of historical figures, such as James Joyce’s muse Nora Barnacle , or the kidnapping of girls in Nigeria . “Her fiction changed its register, but the world isn’t very sympathetic to that. It’s kind of: ‘It’s not your gig, madam’.”

He called a 2019 New Yorker profile a “hatchet job” and lamented that his mother was accused of cultural appropriation. “The dialogue on the left about what is and is not appropriate for writers to write about is chilling. It’s morally cramping and inhibiting.”

Posthumous acclaim for his mother validated the morbid joke about death being a great career move, said Gébler. “A living writer is sometimes overlooked because there’s so much other noise, but death is an even bigger noise, so you can get people’s distracted attention.”

For Gébler, however, her passing brought loss, confusion and dread. “The awful thing about a parent’s death is that you move up to the cliff edge. Once they’re gone, you know you’re next. And then you start to have all sorts of terrible thoughts. Why did I do this to my children? They didn’t ask to be born and then they too are going to die.”

The impulse for the memoir came in her final weeks as he shuttled from his home in County Fermanagh to tend to her in London, said Gébler. “The unconscious is very patient and very clever, and it always waits until the right moment. And then comes this very strong sense, right, this is what I must write.”

Asked if his mother would have approved of the book, Gébler replied: “I think she would have thought that that’s what writers do. She might have preferred a fictional iteration.”

He opted for nonfiction. “Why not just tell it as it was? It is about my experience of the death of somebody to whom I was very close – it’s about what the effect someone’s slow annihilation has on the psyche of someone that continues living.”

His response to the hedgehog on the doormat showed the “strange things” that the mind is capable of. “Although you are reasonably rational, there are deep wells of irrational belief.”

The finality of death is unconscionable, said Gébler. “There’s no way around the fact: one’s own extinction is disgusting to contemplate, as is the extinction of other people.”

Those who are close to a dying person have an obligation to let them feel seen and heard, he said. “Human being to human being, you listen. That’s your most important duty.”

His other advice is to impose order on the chaos of loss by writing about it, no matter whether in scribbled notes or a published book. “If you just let things fester in the basement of the psyche, they just get bigger and darker and huger and more and more terrible. You have to get it up into the light. And then you can come to some sort of accommodation with it, or a truce.”

Keyword – Life and style
Trefwoorden – Family, Life and style, Siblings
Title – I’ve always supported my dysfunctional siblings, but I’ve had enough. How can I divorce myself? | Family | The Guardian
Author – https://www.theguardian.com/profile/annalisabarbieri
Link – I’ve always supported my dysfunctional siblings, but I’ve had enough. How can I divorce myself? | Family | The Guardian
Publish date – 2026-09-06T05:00:57.000Z
Category – Lifestyle
URL – https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2026/sep/06/dysfunctional-siblings-divorce-myself-annalisa-barbieri

I’m a 66-year-old widow and the middle of three siblings . They are struggling with mental health, financial issues, or both . I’m the only one who is doing well in both areas. I’m the only one who graduated high school and college ; the only one who hasn’t spent time in jail ; the only one who had a successful career and has a comfortable retirement. I help them when asked and appropriate, and do my best to be supportive, even when they continue to make bad decisions.

Recently, my older sister mistakenly texted me intimate pictures meant for the new man in her life. It’s one more disturbing thing in a very long line of disturbing things she’s said and done over the years and I’ve had enough. My world is so different from my siblings’ – it always has been.

I feel as if I’m carrying this family, but don’t feel a part of it . I never have, because my choices have always been different, even when we were children. Our parents are deceased, and I’ve become the de facto and very reluctant mother, I’m the responsible one. How can I divorce myself from them and not feel guilty? How can I shield myself from their dysfunction, and protect my own sense of peace? I know they will never change.

When one sibling seems to have a “better” life than the others, that can bring up guilt, and guilt is a strong tether to behaviours we’d rather not demonstrate. If you could get to the bottom of why you feel it’s your job to carry the family, it may help you start to unshackle yourself.

The guilt was the first thing psychoanalytic psychotherapist Susanna Abse picked up on. “Your letter,” she said, “made me think about survivor guilt, which people can feel when they’ve been through something like a very big trauma. [You gave no indication that you had been through trauma, but it might have been useful to know more about your childhood.] I can see you are struggling with rage at being misused by your siblings, and being made to feel responsible.”

Abse said that sometimes, when one sibling has a better life than the others, it can feel that something they did caused the others to have that sub-optimal life. I stress we are not saying you did, but often this is the narrative: either their birth took attention away from an older sibling or maybe they got more attention, or more something, at the expense of the others. It’s important to realise that if this was the case it is neither your fault nor your responsibility.

The reality, said Abse, is that “if we do better it’s usually because we’ve got a good dollop of competitiveness and we direct it effectively. Particularly for women, when they direct their energy and ambition and succeed, they can sometimes feel quite ashamed. They don’t want to boast about it.

“You can’t help your siblings,” said Abse. “Their situation is very sad, but there’s something a bit omnipotent about your feeling that you can make them better. You have to mourn the fact that you’ve had your own losses. You need to step back and accept your own limitations. We tend to go on trying to rescue others when we don’t accept our own limitations. If you keep doing this you’ll end up feeling more resentful and misused, and it will poison any loving feelings left. Love them for who they are.”

Your most successful shield is to let go. Help them – but not to your own detriment. It’s not easy, but it gets easier with practice. Your resentment is a useful feeling: it reminds you that you are doing too much. When you feel resentful, stop, look and learn from what just happened and try not to repeat it. I don’t think divorce from family members is possible or easy unless you have no other relatives at all who will “loop you in”, in some way.

Who was there for you when you were widowed? Refocus your energies on to those people. You deserve to be looked after. And repeat regularly: “I am not responsible for my siblings.”

Every week, Annalisa Barbieri addresses a personal problem sent in by a reader. If you would like advice from Annalisa, please send your problem to ask.annalisa@theguardian.com . Annalisa regrets she cannot enter into personal correspondence. Submissions are subject to our terms and conditions . The latest series of Annalisa’s podcast is available here .

Comments on this piece are pre-moderated to ensure the discussion remains on the topics raised by the article. Please be aware that there may be a short delay in comments appearing on the site.

Keyword – News
Trefwoorden – Tupac Shakur, US news, Race, Rap, Music
Title – Tupac trial spotlights decades of US police failures in solving the case | Tupac Shakur | The Guardian
Author – Lois Beckett
Link – Tupac trial spotlights decades of US police failures in solving the case | Tupac Shakur | The Guardian
Publish date – 2026-09-06T05:00:56.000Z
Category – News
URL – https://www.theguardian.com/news/ng-interactive/2026/sep/06/tupac-shakur-murder-investigation

For years, US law enforcement officials blamed their failure to solve hip-hop star Tupac Shakur ’s murder on the lack of cooperation from key witnesses, and on gang members’ “snitches get stitches” culture.

But testimony in a much-delayed murder trial, which concluded this week , almost 30 years after Shakur’s death, highlighted just how much law enforcement officials knew about the shooting, and how early.

On Monday, a Southside Compton Crips gang leader and drug dealer, Duane “Keffe D” Davis, was convicted for orchestrating Shakur’s killing. Davis told investigators in 2008 that it was his nephew, Orlando “Baby Lane” Anderson, who pulled the trigger. Anderson died in an unrelated shooting in 1998.

The lack of resolution in Shakur’s murder had resonated painfully not just with the artist’s own family and friends, but with many Black Americans.

Even though Shakur was one of the most famous Black men in the world, a star whose movements attracted enormous media attention, his killing remained officially unsolved for almost three decades, said Jody Armour, a law professor at the University of Southern California. “If even he could be murdered on a major Las Vegas boulevard and the case could sit around and languish, one naturally wonders what happens when the victim is just a 19-year-old Black man in Compton, or South Central, or Chicago.

“Tupac spent much of his career insisting that America did not adequately value Black life,” Armour added. “His own homicide became another exhibit in that argument.”

The fact that the Las Vegas jury reached a verdict in the Shakur case so swiftly – after less than three hours – “suggests that the evidence that had existed for some time was persuasive enough for them to convict, and calls into some question why it didn’t happen sooner”, Mark Chutkow, a former federal prosecutor, said.

And indeed, witnesses in the trial put a new spotlight on allegations of police corruption and incompetence, the mixed motivations of investigators, and law enforcement turf wars that went on for years behind the scenes of the homicide investigation.

What the police knew, and when

Though it would take Las Vegas police 27 years before they made their first arrest in Shakur’s murder, testimony at Davis’s trial revealed that police received information almost immediately about what prompted the killing, and who might be behind it.

Surveillance footage played at the trial showed Shakur, the Death Row Records founder, Marion “Suge” Knight, and their associates, some affiliated with the Mob Piru Bloods, assaulting Anderson at the MGM hotel in Las Vegas, an attack that Davis would later say prompted him and his nephew to seek revenge on Shakur.

Reggie Wright Jr, the former head of security for Shakur’s record label, testified that in the hours immediately after Shakur was shot in Las Vegas, he made multiple phone calls to a police lieutenant in Compton, California, warning him that Shakur and Knight had “got into it at the MGM with some guys from the Southside Crips” and “There’s going to be trouble in Compton.”

The immediate communication between the Death Row Records security chief and the Compton police on the night of Shakur’s shooting was no surprise: Wright Jr had been a Compton police officer until he retired earlier that year, and he was calling his father, Reginald Wright Sr, then the head of Compton’s gang unit.

The elder Wright quickly passed on the information about Shakur’s Las Vegas shooting to then-Compton gang homicide detective Robert Ladd, who testified that police in Compton immediately braced for retaliatory violence on their streets. “We expected war,” he said.

The violence that exploded over the next 10 days – three killings and 10 attempted murders, including a shooting that left a 10-year-old girl in critical condition – left Ladd convinced that the information Compton police had received about who shot Shakur had been accurate.

“There was no doubt in my mind that the Southside Crips were responsible, because the Mob Piru had to retaliate, and they had 54 other gangs to choose from, but they went right after the Southside Crips,” Ladd testified.

In response to the violence in Compton, Ladd testified, police “rounded up” a large number of local gang members on both sides of the conflict in October 1996, including Anderson, Davis’s nephew. They also invited the Las Vegas police to interview the arrested men. The alleged gang members were “all the players that we heard about that were involved in the shooting of Tupac Shakur”, with the goal “to try to help Las Vegas PD with their investigation”, Ladd testified. Compton officers also collected a large number of firearms, hoping to find the weapon used to murder Shakur, he said.

While Las Vegas sent two detectives to Compton and they did interview Anderson, nothing came of the interview, Ladd testified .

The trial was not the first time the former Compton detective has spoken publicly about the Shakur case: Ladd went public about his frustrations with how Las Vegas police handled the case in a 2002 Los Angeles Times investigation, saying that Compton police had told Las Vegas police a week after the attack that they believed Anderson was the shooter, but that the Las Vegas police rejected the theory.

When Compton police gave Las Vegas police a chance to interview Anderson and other gang members they believed to be involved in Shakur’s murder, “Las Vegas expressed no interest whatsoever in talking to any of them,” Ladd said in 2002 , saying that their interview with Anderson lasted only 20 minutes.

Anderson was publicly identified as a potential suspect in Shakur’s killing less than a month after the shooting, and was widely rumored within Compton to be the one who killed the hip-hop icon. Anderson, his lawyer and his family repeatedly denied he was involved in the killing, but those close to him told the Guardian after his death that the allegations that he shot Shakur shaped his daily life , and that strangers would sometimes recognize him as Shakur’s killer.

In 1997, while Anderson was still alive, Tupac’s mother, Afeni Shakur, filed a civil lawsuit accusing him of murdering her son .

In an audio recording heard in a Las Vegas courtroom 29 years later, Davis described Anderson as the one who fired the shots that killed Shakur.

Police mistrust, gang connections

There were reasons, of course, that Las Vegas police might be skeptical of Compton police, and particularly about information they were sharing about Shakur’s killing.

It wasn’t just that Compton itself had a reputation for political corruption, and that Compton’s police department, battered by scandals and conflicts with the city’s mayor, would soon be disbanded by the city council.

The fact that a former Compton police officer was in charge of security for Death Row Records, and that he had been paid to protect Knight, Shakur and the label’s other artists while they engaged in high-profile gang disputes, concerned Las Vegas detectives because they feared that his father, the head of Compton police’s gang unit, might pass information along to Knight. Knight himself was known for associating with Mob Piru gang members. He would also continue to make headlines for his donations to Compton city officials .

At the trial, Wright Jr himself testified that he had grown up in a Compton neighborhood that was considered Mob Piru territory, had known many gang members since childhood, and that he had already been employed by Knight as the head of security for Death Row Records during “my last year or two of being a police officer”.

As his private security business grew, Wright testified, he would hire off-duty and retired police officers daily to provide security for Death Row Records’ studio and to accompany the label’s artists to events. He had “about ten officers working a day”, he testified.

The testimony of “Mob James” McDonald, a 61-year-old who said he had done security and enforcement for Knight, reinforced just how closely Wright and the officers he employed worked alongside the Mob Piru gang members that surrounded Suge Knight.

“His security did, like, the right thing. My security did what they ain’t going to do. You get what I’m saying?” McDonald testified.

It was two Mob Piru gang members who first told Wright that Shakur had been shot, he testified.

In his memoir, Compton Street Legend, Davis accused Knight, the then Death Row Records executive, as having “police hitmen”, and “crooked ass police on his payroll”, and named Reggie Wright Jr and his father specifically. Wright and his father would later be indicted on federal drug-trafficking and money-laundering charges.

When it came to the Shakur homicide investigation, Las Vegas detectives had feared that Wright’s father, the gang lieutenant, or other Compton officers might pass along information to Knight, or try to protect him, the Los Angeles Times reported in 2002 . Compton’s police chief at the time removed Wright Sr from the case and replaced him with another officer to address these worries, the Times reported, but it did not assuage the concerns.

As conspiracy theories flourished in the absence of any official narrative of Shakur’s death, the police, and Reggie Wright Jr himself, were regarded as potential suspects in the star’s death, something Wright denied on the stand this past month.

Hostile witnesses, law enforcement turf wars

Testimony in Las Vegas left no doubt that some witnesses to Shakur’s killing did not want to work with law enforcement to convict the hip-hop star’s assailant, and that they preferred to seek street justice instead.

Garry Dale, a former Las Vegas police officer, testified that Shakur himself, lying wounded inside the ambulance, would not identify his shooter when asked, saying only something to the effect of, “No, we’ll take care of it.”

Other witnesses described a fear of being perceived as snitches, and even facing violent retribution, if they cooperated with police or prosecutors. “Mob James” McDonald repeatedly told prosecutors, “You better treat me as a hostile witness”, and refused to answer some questions, saying “Me or anybody else bringing up the dead is wrong.”

But as they investigated the ongoing conflict between the Southside Crips and Mob Piru, law enforcement officers also found themselves caught in their own bureaucratic turf wars.

One of the most outspoken retired officers on the Shakur case is former Los Angeles police detective Greg Kading, who served on the law enforcement taskforce that heard Davis’s 2008 confession to his involvement in Shakur’s killing.

The Los Angeles-based taskforce was originally set up to solve a different murder: the 1997 shooting of Christopher “Biggie Smalls” Wallace, which, like Tupac’s murder, languished for decades without any official resolution.

Wallace’s mother, Voletta, eventually sued the LAPD , alleging that police officers had been involved in the murder. “Desperately trying to cover its ass,” the LAPD set up a multi-agency taskforce to investigate the Wallace murder, Kading wrote in his 2011 memoir, Murder Rap: The Untold Story of the Biggie Smalls & Tupac Shakur Murder Investigations.

In an account that largely mirrors the one Las Vegas prosecutors brought to trial, the book describes how, in a 2008 interview with the taskforce, Davis unexpectedly confessed to his role in Shakur’s murder. The book also alleges a motive and a gunman for Wallace’s murder, which remains officially unsolved. The book ends with Kading’s removal from the taskforce, which eventually shut down without bringing the evidence it had gathered in either hip-hop killing to trial.

“It’s my belief that the LAPD carefully weighed its options and decided that, all things considered, it best suited them to let sleeping dogs lie,” Kading wrote.

It wasn’t that the LAPD wanted to hide the identity of the killers, Kading argued – it was that the specifics of the murder trials in the cases, and the accompanying media coverage, might be messy and difficult for the department’s reputation. In the end, it was more bureaucratic ass-covering, not conspiracy, that stood in the way of justice, he argued. “Rather than manning up to bring these killers to justice, it chose to hedge its bets, letting the investigation die an unnatural death rather than risk the potentially damaging, but ultimately insubstantial, flak that would surely come its way.”

Kading did not testify in the Las Vegas trial. Daryn Dupree, a career Los Angeles police detective who served with Kading on the taskforce, did, and suggested a different motivation for the apparent law enforcement priorities in the case: Davis was a relatively small fish to federal law enforcement officials involved in the taskforce, which had tried, and ultimately failed, to hook a much bigger fish.

After Davis’s initial confession in 2008, the taskforce focused on trying to verify allegations by Davis that Sean “Diddy” Combs , who ran the rival record label Bad Boy Records, had commissioned the hit on Shakur and offered payment, Dupree testified

Despite flying Davis to New York to attempt to verify his link to Combs, the investigators were unable to get the evidence they needed, Dupree said.

The higher-level officials overseeing the Los Angeles taskforce also made the decision to delay sharing intelligence from their investigation with Las Vegas police, Dupree testified. That choice would probably have “led to a lot of frustration” once Las Vegas learned about it, Chutkow, the former federal prosecutor, said.

At the federal level, law enforcement officials on the taskforce were “chasing the money”, and trying to build a racketeering case against both Suge Knight’s Death Row Records, which had signed Shakur, and Combs’s Bad Boy Records, Dupree testified. The FBI, Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives and Drug Enforcement Administration were trying to solidify that both record companies had been originally funded by drug sales.

“I’m from the hood,” Dupree said. “Everybody knows that those record companies were started with narcotics. So the feds were looking at a Rico [a case using the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act]. We cared about the murders.”

‘The defendant implicated himself’

In finally bringing Davis to trial for orchestrating Shakur’s murder, Las Vegas prosecutors relied heavily on two fairly old pieces of evidence: Davis’s 2008 confession to the Los Angeles taskforce, and his public description of the shooting in his 2019 memoir, Compton Street Legend.

In the end, the only reason the case was solved was “because the defendant implicated himself”, said Shirin Bakhshay, an assistant professor at UCLA law school. “This is not amazing police work that uncovered, after 30 years, the facts of the case. This was a guy who thought he was out of the window of any sort of danger – who didn’t understand the legal implications of what he was doing.”

When Davis was finally arrested and indicted for murder in 2023, Steve Wolfson, the Clark county, Nevada district attorney, told reporters, “In this case, justice has been delayed, but justice won’t be denied.”

But the delay in securing any official justice in Shakur’s murder “festered for a long time”, Armour, the USC law professor said, and a guilty verdict after 30 years “isn’t going to repair America’s deplorable record of racial injustice in the criminal justice system”.

“It will give at least some sense of closure,” he said. “It will put to rest some of the conspiracy theories that have cropped up around this case.”

While Shakur’s killing had acquired an almost mythical status, and the theories around it were sweeping and dramatic, Armour said, the case prosecutors ultimately made in court was not: Shakur was “a 25-year-old artistic genius, who died largely because one group of young men beat another young man in a casino lobby, and the humiliation demanded retribution”.

Keyword – Life and style
Trefwoorden – Relationships, Life and style, Chile, Marriage, Family
Title – ‘It was a sweet, tender voice’: the pilot who fell for his air traffic controller – before ever seeing her | Relationships | The Guardian
Author – https://www.theguardian.com/profile/jonathanfranklin
Link – ‘It was a sweet, tender voice’: the pilot who fell for his air traffic controller – before ever seeing her | Relationships | The Guardian
Publish date – 2026-09-06T04:00:54.000Z
Category – Lifestyle
URL – https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2026/sep/06/pilot-air-traffic-controller-love-story

A lfredo Bravo had landed aeroplanes in a lot of sticky situations – as a bush pilot in Chilean Patagonia and as a commercial pilot in rural China – but it was a singular voice floating over the radio waves from air traffic control in Santiago, Chile , that set his heart aflutter, upended his concentration and reshuffled his life.

It was the 1990s and, although he was still young, Bravo had held pretty much every low-level flying gig possible. He had dumped plumes of orange chemicals on to forest fires and flown surveillance missions to detect illegal fireplaces polluting the already smoggy Santiago airspace. He had completed hundreds of flights with photo crews operating a big Hasselblad camera as they mapped tree farms, calculating the heights of trees in a forest owned by a timber company involved in a low-level guerrilla war with the Indigenous Mapuche. As a pilot for the company, Bravo was a conspicuous outsider who slept in the fields amid the Indigenous communities, and worked alone in the hangar. But Bravo had a pair of aces up his sleeve.

His first was that he was not Chilean. Bravo was born in Montevideo, Uruguay, a quietly functional socialist democracy with a mass middle class, an erudite populace, and a fleet of dilapidated motorcars – a bit like Cuba might have become had things worked out. Thus he avoided the vitriol directed towards the Chilean government for its three-centuries-long campaign of repression of Indigenous peoples.

Bravo’s second ace was his generous nature. On his days off, the young pilot began offering free flights, and spent his Saturdays and Sundays twirling local kids into the air. “Soon after, the community adopted me, they sent me food all the time,” says Bravo.

Flying was Bravo’s game, and he promised himself never to let children or a family get in the way of his free-flying lifestyle. “When I saw people on the highway with bicycles in the car and three kids inside, I would think: ‘Poor guy. That guy is crazy.’”

Then, in 1999, while preparing to land at a small airfield in the Vitacura neighbourhood of Santiago, Bravo heard her voice for the first time. He has never forgotten that first heart-thumping moment. “‘OK’, I told myself, ‘Alfredo, come on. Yeah, her voice is very nice but …’”

Bravo began to invent reasons to talk to the air traffic controllers. How could he match a face to that voice? It took him weeks. Pilots and air traffic controllers had mismatched schedules; controllers worked for three to five days, then had two or three days off. There were few routines, few fixed schedules.

Bravo invented excuses to visit the control tower. “I got into the tower, officially on some stupid tour,” says Bravo, of his first visit. He had waited until it was winter and air traffic at the small field was reduced to fewer takeoffs and landings, with plenty of downtime to plot his approach.

As often as he could, Bravo obtained access to the tower, listening intently for a cadence, a certain lilt as the air traffic controllers on duty answered his invented queries. Was it her? He failed, and failed again to identify her. “It was a very sweet voice, a tender voice. It transmitted warmth,” says Bravo, who only after weeks of trial and error, finally matched the voice to a woman who introduced herself as Carolina Provoste.

Provoste took one look at Bravo and freaked out. From her low desk, all she could see above the partition were his Caribbean-blue eyes and a gaze that she instantly felt she recognised – because she had fallen in love with it in a dream she had when she was a teenager. “The dream was shocking, because I felt so much love that I broke up with my boyfriend,” she now says with a laugh.

The normally loquacious air traffic controller clammed up. “My friends knew I liked deadpan jokes, so they told me to tell him one,” she says. “But I couldn’t. I was too nervous.” She grabbed her belongings and sped off to a meeting room, too unnerved to speak to the man her colleagues glowingly referred to as El Uruguayo .

But there was no denying the instant chemistry between them. Bravo decided to up the ante, so he baked a cake, placed it in the cockpit and invented a flight plan that would end with him landing at the airport where Provoste worked.

But the weather was bad and just as he was approaching the landing strip, Provoste ordered him to return to the airport from which he had come.

Their first date was also a disaster. Having little cash, Bravo had got hold of two free cinema tickets, but when he handed them to the usher he was told they had expired a week earlier. At this, Bravo thought it was all over, but Provoste didn’t hesitate to pay and keep the flame alight. That night, they shared their first kiss and soon the slow, wintry afternoons provided a perfect excuse for flirting in the control tower during long hours between occasional takeoffs and landings. After work, they travelled together on the bus home – by coincidence, they lived just eight blocks apart.

After a few months of this, an overseas assignment that Bravo had long sought finally came through. Flying for an NGO in the national parks of Mozambique, it would have been safari bush-pilot heaven. But Bravo turned it down immediately. He realised that what he really wanted was to be more grounded, more able to devote himself to this single mother with a three-year-old daughter.

The relationship continued. Bravo was regularly piloting the last scheduled flight to land at Provoste’s airport. The airport would be nearly shut down and already darkened, but when he radioed the tower, it was Provoste’s turn to impress. “At the last minute, when the sun was setting, she would wait for me and she would turn on the lights,” said Bravo.

Bravo finally asked Provoste to marry him as he descended in an Airbus jet on a flight back to Chile from Brazil. It had taken three months for his landing to coincide with Provoste’s shift in the control tower. When the moment finally arrived, Bravo panicked. “First, I had to make sure I was actually talking to her,” he says. ”

“Carolina? Is this you?” asked Bravo, who had a meticulous script at the ready. She was petrified. She knew the proper use of language from air traffic control was strictly Papa Tango Alpha. No one ever uttered personal names or broadcast personal messages. She confirmed her identity, and Bravo, the co-pilot, announced that he had a question. As the captain gave him a side-eye, Bravo asked Provoste to marry him.

Her silence was long and brutal. “I would appreciate your answer,” he drawled. “Before landing.”

All she could do was stick to protocol, and utter a single word – “ Af irmativo .”

This private conversation was mistakenly broadcast to a dozen pilots, the entire control tower listening live and a class of 15 up-and-coming air traffic safety planners who happened to be taking a tour of the tower. Everyone was astonished by the proposal, the dramatic delay, then Provoste’s eventual acceptance, which unleashed a whooping, tear-filled celebration – the tower staff as one collective witness. Pilots high above the clouds broadcast heartfelt congratulations.

For their wedding, Bravo and Provoste went to Morro de São Paulo, a village on an island off the coast of Brazil. “We bought tropical Hawaiian-style clothing on the beach,” says Provoste. “We got married in Havaianas flip-flops.”

Their witnesses and guests were the 12-person flight crew. The only priest on the island married them after motoring across a lagoon in a fishing boat named Sonho de Icaro – The Dream of Icarus.

Today, they live with their three children in Santiago, Chile, and recently celebrated 25 years together. Bravo revels in a story he can barely believe is true. Provoste describes their original encounter with the astonishment of someone who just yesterday felt a dream come true. Sometimes, for fun, they listen to the old cassette recording of his bumbling cockpit proposal and laugh.

Keyword – Fashion
Trefwoorden – John Galliano, Met Gala, Anna Wintour, New York, Fashion, Life and style, US news
Title – What does Met’s U-turn on John Galliano augur for him, the gala and Anna Wintour? | John Galliano | The Guardian
Author – https://www.theguardian.com/profile/edwardhelmore
Link – What does Met’s U-turn on John Galliano augur for him, the gala and Anna Wintour? | John Galliano | The Guardian
Publish date – 2026-09-05T12:00:36.000Z
Category – Lifestyle
URL – https://www.theguardian.com/fashion/2026/sep/05/met-gala-john-galliano-anna-wintour

Did Anna Wintour , Vogue’s long-serving fashion titan and ringmaster of the annual Met Gala, meet her match in Julie Menin, the speaker of New York’s city council?

The museum is the crown jewel of the wealthy neighborhood and some residents hold significant sway at the institution, financially and in terms of the art they plan to bequeath to it. So when it was announced late in July on a Friday afternoon that Galliano would be the focus of the Met Gala next year, it left many stunned.

The designer, whose astonishing creativity as designer at Givenchy and later Dior in the 90s is not in question, had been videotaped in a Paris bar in 2011 abusing tourists in a drunken, antisemitic rant. “I love Hitler,”he slurred, and indicated their forebears should have been gassed.

Galliano was dispatched to rehab, sought corrective instruction from Jewish leaders and picked up a conviction for making hateful remarks about Jews and Asians. He got sober, apologized and made amends. He visited Auschwitz and gingerly resumed his career, though not at the top of a Parisian design house.

Wintour stood by him, using her power through job placements and a documentary, produced by Vogue parent Condé Nast, that placed equal attention on his creative life as on the scandal and its aftermath. Many of fashion’s powerful business executives were drafted in to attest to the designer’s restoration of spirit.

Water under the bridge then? Not so fast. The extraordinary mess that has unfolded around the Met and New York’s social elite over the last 10 day – in which history, racism, global politics, clothes design and institutional and personal power intertwine – is going to take time to unpick.

Wintour, according to friends, is sad that people show little forgiveness and acknowledges that she made a crucial misstep by announcing her gala 2027 pick without passing the idea through the Met’s 100-member board. But it was left to Galliano to decline Wintour’s invitation for a career-retrospective.

“I remain fully accountable for the pain caused by my words in the past,” he said, adding: “I understand that meaningful atonement is not achieved through an exhibition, institutional recognition or a single public gesture.”

Wintour, the longtime editor of Vogue and now chief content officer of corporate parent Condé Nast as well as a Met trustee, said in a notably brief statement that Galliano’s decision to step away from the celebration was “courageous” and “the right decision”.

Opposing forces, their thinking crystalized in a letter of protest published by Menin, were by then in full revolt. Arne Glimcher, head of Pace Gallery, had informed the Met he was reconsidering gifting the museum 50 pieces of art. ⁠“I don’t think you have considered the cost of this action and its reverberations to come,” Glimcher wrote in an email to David Breslin, the Met curator in charge of the modern and contemporary art department.

Alice Tisch, head of a powerful New York real estate family, sent a letter to Max Hollein, the Met director, calling the exhibit a “whitewash” of a “known” antisemite. Her letter, according to the Times, said the Galliano show “bespeaks a failure of governance as it seems you are unduly influenced and directed by a corporate donor and commercial enterprise, and mining it all for financial gain”.

Menin, as the first Jewish speaker of the city council and a moderate Democrat who has emerged as a tempering counter to Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s progressivism, wrote to Wintour, Hollein and Andrew Bolton, curator of the Costume Institute, said that cultural institutions, and particularly those like the Met that receive funding from the city, “have a responsibility to demonstrate that hatred and bigotry carry consequences”.

But none of this occurs in a vacuum. Upper East Side synagogues have been picketed by anti-Israel protesters, despite laws making it a crime to block entry to a house of worship. Last month, 63-year-old Larry Montes was hit with federal hate crime charges for violently disturbing a service at Central Synagogue, on Lexington Avenue near East 55th Street, 20 blocks from the Met.

“This is not just about the antisemitism or protests outside synagogues, honoring Galliano while Jews are being attacked is just bad judgment. The Met was not obligated to become a participant in his rehabilitation campaign by throwing a celebrity gala in his honor,” says Gerard Filitti, senior council at The Lawfare Project.

“The issue is not about separating the art from the artist,” Filitti said, and doubted that the exhibition’s planned “orientation gallery” would correct the issue. “The gala chose to make Galliano the centerpiece. So it was not conferring art and culture, it was conferring privilege,” he said.

There are misgivings about the Met Gala, too. The business it brings to hotels is welcome but it ties up the neighborhood with street closures and limousines and, in recent years, attracts protests. The exhibition itself is rarely reviewed except as a costume party – fashion industry’s biggest night – and it’s a major promotions night for Wintour’s hand-picked guest list.

Upper East Side society figures, who have largely been supplanted by celebrities at the gala itself, privately say they grew fed up with Wintour phoning to ask what they planned to wear.

Fashion is often accused of existing in vacuum, but it’s also a popular one, even if fans can no longer afford the designs and the industry has been in recession for several years. The Devil Wears Prada 2, released this summer and with a main character inspired by Wintour (played by Meryl Streep), made $692m globally. The Costume Institute raised $42m at its most recent, and also controversial, Jeff and Lauren Bezos sponsored gala.

But that sum, which is used to buy clothes for the collection, is a slender figure compared with the $125m donation made in 2021 by financier Oscar Tang and his wife, Agnes Hsu-Tang.

The late cosmetics heir Leonard Lauder pledged in 2013 to give 78 cubist works to the museum, valued conservatively at $1bn, and plans have been announced to merge the Lauder’s Neue Galerie of 20th-century Austrian and German art with the Met in 2028. It’s unlikely that the ultra-rich of fashion, including LVMH’s Bernard Arnault, will donate to the Met – they have their own museums.

Galliano is later this month set to release a collaboration with Zara, the Spanish clothing chain with revenues of nearly $30.1bn. If there are lines around the block, as expected, they will serve as proof that the furore around his now-cancelled retrospective means little to many ordinary fashion fans.

An outpouring of personal support from prominent “creatives”, models, stylists, fellow designers and photographers on his Instagram page suggest the Met drama falls flat with some of them, too. The New York Times, which has led reporting deeply on the growing backlash, asked in two separate editorials last week if the Met was cancelling the fashionista and if it is Wintour, not Galliano, who should be shown the door, perhaps along with the party itself.

“The exhibition should not have been canceled,” wrote Robin Givhan in the Times. “Instead, the Met Gala should have been canceled.” Bret Stephens, also in the Times, offered that it is, in principle, “best to separate judgments about an artist from judgments about the art”.

Stephens noted the date of the gala coincided with Yom HaShoah or Holocaust Remembrance Day. “Whoops,” he wrote. “High fashion and good judgment rarely coincide.” It was not the museum’s job to act as a “contextualizer” and floated that “perhaps there’s another fashionista the Met could have canceled”.

Others said the debacle was “only possible because of Anna’s power”. A Vogue former colleague described their sense of schadenfreude: “Given that she’s spent the last 20 years purging everyone who was too old and too well paid it would be poetic if she got fired.”

A standoff now exists between Wintour, 76, and Menin, 58. Officially, the exhibition “will not proceed as planned”. But Wintour, 76, via Vogue, said it has been “postponed”. Menin’s office points to a line in her statement that leaves the door ajar: “There are indeed more appropriate ways in which The Met could instead feature his work, including through a contextual exhibit or educational program.”

But that leaves no room for a Galliano-themed gala and no room to prove the one axiomatic rule of fashion: that there’s no problem that can’t be solved with an outfit change. Two years after Galliano was arrested in Paris, he was photographed in New York in what appeared to some to be an Hasidic costume – a rounded large hat, short trousers and curled long sideburns.

His publicist offered a list of the clothes he selected that day – a Stephen Jones hat, Yohji Yamamoto trousers, Brooks Brothers shirt, Dolce & Gabbana vest. “In other words – fashionable,” she said. “The last thing on John’s mind would be to do anything that would offend the Jewish community.”

Keyword – Sport
Trefwoorden – NFL, Concussion in sport, US sports, Sport
Title – CTE in football players is a health crisis. It’s time for us to stop watching | NFL | The Guardian
Author – https://www.theguardian.com/profile/nathan-kalman-lamb,https://www.theguardian.com/profile/derek-silva
Link – CTE in football players is a health crisis. It’s time for us to stop watching | NFL | The Guardian
Publish date – 2026-09-05T10:00:34.000Z
Category – Sport
URL – https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2026/sep/05/cte-football-players-nfl

As a new NFL season begins this Wednesday, the danger of America’s most-watched sport has never been more clear.

A new and widely circulated study published in the British Medical Journal examined the donated brains of former NFL players who died between 2016 and 2021 and compared them with the overall number of players who died during that period. Of the 235 donated brains in that period, 215 had evidence of the degenerative brain condition chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE). That group of 215 comprised 24.5% of the former players who died during that period in total . Given the finding, the study’s authors estimate that the prevalence of CTE among players who died in that period was at minimum 24.5% to a maximum of 97.7%, with the actual rate likely somewhere in between.

The implication of that finding cannot be overstated: it suggests that CTE is a disease that may affect a substantial share of those who spend their careers in the NFL. The players taking the field this season are being exposed to the same fundamental risk: the repeated blows to the head that have been linked to the disease. When we watch players deliver and receive those devastating if also thrilling hits, when we watch the lines collide on every play , we are watching the repetitive head trauma that puts players at risk of developing CTE. We are watching lives being permanently altered in ways that will in the end result in heartbreak.

And yet, as recently as Friday, the Wall Street Journal published an op-ed by former senator Ben Sasse that makes the titular claim “America needs its boys to play football.” That sentiment isn’t just a vestige of should-be-antiquated gender politics – it is better understood as tantamount to child endangerment.

Because, perhaps the most disconcerting statistic is one that we already know: every 2.6 years of participation in football doubles the chances of developing CTE, in large part because a typical high school or college football season can deliver between 600 and 1,000 subconcussive blows to a single athlete , and that these blows heavily predict later-life clinical depression, apathy, executive dysfunction and cognitive impairment . We also know that participation in football increases the chances of developing Parkinson’s disease by 61% compared with athletes in other organized sports (and that risk is 2.93 times greater for those who play football at the college/pro level compared with youth/high school).

When you put these figures in the context of the reality that in many parts of the United States, children are enrolled in tackle football as early as 5 years old, it becomes clear that this is a potential public health crisis.

The statistics only tell part of the story. In our 2024 book The End of College Football: On The Human Cost of an All-American Game , we talked to former big-time college football players – a level lower than the NFL, meaning fewer total head impacts than those at the pinnacle of the game – about how their lives had been affected by head injury in the sport. These players understood that their lives were at stake. One told us frankly: “I feel like there’s a good chance that I will have CTE. Especially if I kept playing, it’ll probably be guaranteed. But I won’t find out until I die, which isn’t comforting at all.”

Another explained, “The scariest part about that for me is I don’t know the price that I paid in terms of cognitive ability, in terms of how many concussions did I play through, how many times did I have a concussion and didn’t report it?”

A third player told us that his career had bequeathed him a “panic disorder related to probably all the sub-concussive blows”.

One player said that after enduring 10 concussions, “I could barely do school. … I would forget what I was talking about mid-sentence. I’d be forgetting everything that happened like 10 minutes ago. I would just completely zone out sometimes. It was like I was halfway there. I couldn’t really control it.”

Still a different player told us, “I played with guys in the NFL that took their own lives and then were diagnosed with CTE when they did the autopsy, so you think about that, like, ‘Boy, I hit my head against that guy’s head, so what’s going on with me if that was obviously was going on with him?’”

No one wants to see football players die for this sport. But they are. In 2025 alone, nine former NFL players under the age of 48 died. Seven of those deaths were a result of suicide, underscoring the fears surrounding the long-term neurological and psychiatric consequences of repeated head trauma.

The tragedy of death by football is thus happening whether we realize it or not. Far too much evidence now exists that the sport systematically produces life-altering head trauma for us to continue with business as usual when we know that football is morally unsustainable.

The NFL will of course never turn itself off. So, starting this season, it’s up to us as fans to do that. There are too many lives at stake.

Nathan Kalman-Lamb is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of New Brunswick. Derek Silva is Associate Professor of Sociology and Criminology at King’s University College at Western University.

In the US, you can call or text the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline on 988, chat on 988lifeline.org , or text HOME to 741741 to connect with a crisis counselor. In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116 123, or email jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie . In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at befrienders.org

Keyword – Life and style
Trefwoorden – Health & wellbeing, Life and style, Work-life balance, Mental health, Parents and parenting, Family, Health, Work & careers
Title – Chat to strangers and let your kids be bored: how to embrace a ‘slow September’ – and enjoy life more | Health & wellbeing | The Guardian
Author – Rebecca Cope
Link – Chat to strangers and let your kids be bored: how to embrace a ‘slow September’ – and enjoy life more | Health & wellbeing | The Guardian
Publish date – 2026-09-04T14:00:10.000Z
Category – Lifestyle
URL – https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2026/sep/04/chat-strangers-kids-bored-embrace-slow-september-enjoy-life-more

I t is a hangover from our school days that September can feel like a time for getting back to the grind. As in January, there is a sense that we should return as better workers, partners, friends and parents. This sense is even stronger now a culture of optimisation – has taken over – evidenced by the fad for adding “maxx” to everything. Yet that can lead to disappointment and burnout, which Mental Health UK reports up to 91% of adults were at risk from over a recent 12-month period.

One antidote to this drive is to embrace a slower way of living. Rather than always rushing from one activity to the next, we could be enjoying life.

“In the age of digitisation, from work to socialising, we are seeing everything intensify,” says Heejung Chung, a professor of work and employment at King’s College London. “But by doing everything, we’re also creating a culture where it’s seen as normal. So you are not only creating a standard for yourself, but for everyone else as well. There is a creeping set of collective expectations that we can do everything, especially women, and we need to change it.”

So say “no” to self-optimisation this September, and instead embrace these practical ways to slow everything down – from work to parenting.

Make time for micro-connections

More often than not, we feel as though we don’t have enough time to converse with strangers in our daily lives, whether that be the woman next to you at the bus stop or the barista making your coffee. Yet taking the time to mindfully have a conversation with someone we don’t know has tangible benefits.

In Once Upon a Stranger: The Science of How Small Talk Can Add Up to a Big Life , Dr Gillian Sandstrom argues just this. “Research shows that even tiny conversations with strangers improve our mood,” she explains. “They naturally slow you down, so you start paying more attention to the people around you and your surroundings. They also help you learn new things – I’ve met someone who rescues bats at Durham Cathedral, and a publican who taught me that asparagus squeaks.”

Sandstrom points to a 2012 study, Giving Time Gives You Time , which shows that when you spend time on other people, you end up feeling as though you have more time yourself. “When we’re busy, we feel like we can’t spare time for other people, but if we never take that time, we’ll never stop feeling busy,” she adds. “It’s counterintuitive but it works.”

Walk at someone else’s pace

One literal way to slow down is to start walking at someone else’s pace. “If you’re with a child, an older adult, or even your dog, let them set the pace instead of pulling them along,” says Sarah Hodges, therapy network manager at the mental health and meditation app Headspace. “When we stop rushing to keep our own schedules, we often notice things we would have missed, like the small moments, conversations and connections that make life meaningful. Research on mindfulness and attention shows that when we slow down and intentionally notice what is happening around us, we can reduce stress.”

Prof Mark Williams, founding director of the Oxford Mindfulness Foundation, also suggests walking with an upright posture. “Most of us walk leaning into the future, mentally rushing towards whatever comes next,” he says. “Research shows that simply standing or walking a little more upright can positively influence how you feel.”

Let your children be bored

If you are a parent who is preoccupied with ensuring your child is always busy, you might be doing them a disservice. “Being bored is part of the human experience,” says Stephanie O’Dea, author of Slow Living: Cultivating a Life of Purpose in a Hustle-Driven World. “ This is how creativity, imagination and independence begin. A child saying they are bored isn’t an indictment of your parenting.”

Allow them the space for imaginative play. “A child is more likely to play independently if you spend time with them beforehand,” says Dr Maral Amani, a paediatric physical therapist and child development expert. “A helpful response the next time your child says, ‘I’m bored,’ is to resist immediately solving the problem. Instead, try offering confidence. You might say: ‘Hmm, I wonder what you’ll come up with.’ This communicates that you believe they are capable of finding something to do on their own.”

Another suggestion is to invite your child to help you with whatever you’re doing. “If you’re folding laundry, cooking dinner or putting dishes away, you could say: ‘Do you want to keep me company and tell me a story while I do this?’” says Amani. “Sometimes children aren’t looking for entertainment, they’re looking for connection. Inviting them into your everyday activities shows them that ordinary moments can be meaningful.”

Do a ‘no outcome’ activity

Many of us feel we always need to be productive, even during our downtime. Yet there is much joy to be had in actual leisure time, whether that is doodling, kicking a ball around the garden with your child or listening to music. “Do something with no goal beyond enjoyment,” advises Hodges. “Research on rest and recovery highlights the importance of activities that allow us to step away from constant achievement and performance. Doing something simply because we enjoy it helps restore our energy and reminds us that our value is not only tied to what we accomplish.”

Rosie Nixon, the author of The Pro Method: Pause, Reflect, Organise – Three Simple Steps to Reinvent Your Life , a new book about how to overcome burnout, also recommends doing a “joy audit” of what you actually like doing, and sticking to those activities. “Take a minute to pause and reflect on what genuinely fills your cup, and enables you to cope with the more demanding aspects of your life,” she says. “Then deprioritise anything that isn’t serving you any more – whether that’s friendships, or social media accounts you are following.” And if there’s a TV series or book you’re just not getting into, don’t feel you have to complete it.

Schedule pauses at work

Our always-on work culture means many of us feel as though we can’t take a break during the working day. But as Chung has discovered through her research, having sufficient time away from work makes you a better worker the next day. “For athletes, resting their body isn’t optional; it’s how they are able to perform so well,” she says. “The brain works in much the same way. If your job involves creative thinking, problem-solving or knowledge work, rest isn’t wasted time. It’s what enables you to perform at your best.” For this reason, she argues that working long hours into the night will affect the quality of your work not only at the time, but the next day too.

Yet finding time to pause during the day can feel impossible. “Finishing one task simply acts as the trigger to begin the next,” says Williams. “So one particularly useful moment to pause is immediately after completing something.” He recommends taking a “mindfulness minute” , whether that be 10 slow breaths, or walking to refill your water bottle.

Claudia Hammond, author of Overwhelmed: Ways to Take the Pressure Off, suggests scheduling your meetings for five past the hour, so that you always have five minutes to catch a breath between hour-long calls. “A recent study found that micro-breaks of just two minutes each hour – where you stare out the window, or doodle, or lean your head back in your chair and shut your eyes – are great for mood and therefore productivity and concentration,” she says.

Simplify your social life

Many believe that in order to have a meaningful experience with our friends, we must be dining at a restaurant, going to an exhibition or attending a party, but some of the most meaningful interactions happen when we’re doing very little at all. “Organising seeing friends can start to feel like a job in itself,” says Hammond. “Especially if there are conflicting priorities, or somewhere requires a deposit, or is fully booked. So it’s a question of remembering that you don’t need to do something massive: it can be as simple as going for a walk.”

The same can be said of hosting. Remove the pressure to cook a gourmet meal and design a tablescape. Instead, focus on the joy of sharing a meal together – whether that’s something homemade or a takeaway.

“September is about fortifying yourself for the winter, and delving into the pleasures of home and slowness after the freneticism of summer,” says cook and food writer Jago Rackham. “Eat slow-roasted meats and poached fruit, do as little as possible to the excellent seasonal ingredients, and plan long lunches and early dinners to catch the last of the light.”

Habit-stack your mindfulness

If you think you don’t have time for mindfulness, try to incorporate it into what you are already doing. “You can build these small moments of awareness into everyday life without adding anything else to your schedule,” says Williams. “If you’re eating lunch, really pay attention to the experience of eating. When you’re walking, ask yourself: ‘What else is here, apart from all the thoughts in my head?’ You might notice an interesting roofline, a bird perched on a fence, or the way the light falls on a building. Appreciation is incredibly valuable. It brings a little more positivity into the day, and we know that being in a positive mood increases creativity too.”