Keyword – Fashion
Trefwoorden – Men’s fashion, Fashion, Men, Life and style, Gary Neville, Men’s trousers
Title – Wide-legged trousers for men are having a moment. Just ask Gary Neville | Men's fashion | The Guardian
Author – https://www.theguardian.com/profile/priyaelan
Link – Wide-legged trousers for men are having a moment. Just ask Gary Neville | Men's fashion | The Guardian
Publish date – 2026-09-04T14:00:09.000Z
Category – Lifestyle
URL – https://www.theguardian.com/fashion/2026/sep/04/wide-legged-trousers-men-fashion-moment-gary-neville

From Kylian Mbappé’s World Cup style to Erling Haaland’s hair tie, football has had many viral fashion moments in 2026.

Perhaps the one that speaks to the fashion crowd, and a larger debate happening in menswear right now, is Gary Neville being mercilessly teased on Sky Sports’ Monday Night Football for sporting wide-legged trousers.

As a producer played Baggy Trousers, by Madness, Neville’s chino-style, wider-legged black slacks were mocked by fellow pundit Jamie Carragher, who compared Neville to Frank Worthington, the forward from West Yorkshire whose dandyish off-pitch style raised eyebrows in the 1970s.

“I went shopping in London,” Neville explained as Carragher jogged along to the Nutty Boys’ hit. “This guy styled me. I think they’re pretty cool, you know.” He predicted that Carragher would be wearing a pair soon.

Neville seems to be on to something. Because as far as the cut of your trousers goes, girth is greater.

Nick Pope, the site director at Esquire, said: “In terms of what people are actually wearing on the street, it is the wider silhouette.” Retailers from Cos to Next and Marks and Spencer are going great guns selling wider-fitting trousers in the menswear aisle.

The width currently in style can’t quite be described as “baggy trousers”, however. Pope said what Neville wore was a relaxed 90s fit for today, like the trousers seen on A$AP Rocky at the Tribeca festival in New York City in June.

The silhouette dominated men’s fashion week for autumn/winter 2026-27 among designers including Dior, Prada and Saint Laurent. On the red carpet, the style has been seen on fashion magnets such as Connor Storrie (at the Golden Globes) and Joe Alwyn (at the Baftas).

The classic football pundit dress code grew out of newsreader style: a suit and tie. It was a safe option for the footballer turned television presenter who could not show up wearing their home kit. But Neville and fellow presenter Jamie Redknapp donning a wider leg on Sky Sports speaks to a moment where TV dress codes are morphing.

James Andrew, the editor of FourFourTwo, a football magazine, said: “It’s more relaxed now.”

Pope added: “I think punditry is becoming more fashion forward in the sense that they’re wearing knitted polos and chinos. But it’s still very tonal and sensible.”

Paul Monks, who dresses the pundits for Sky Sports, including Monday Night Football, said he believed the clothes should echo the easygoing feel of the show and its audience.

“We want what we do on screen to feel relevant to the viewer,” he said. “The way people dress generally has become more relaxed. You see far fewer men wearing suits day to day now, so it wouldn’t make sense for television to become more stiff or overly formal.”

The wardrobes of pundits, as well as the England star Jude Bellingham and managers such as Pep Guardiola , have started to have an impact on everyday style.

Pope said: “They’ve become these unlikely style influencers for middle-aged men. Someone like Gary Neville is probably quite aware of that.”

The viral incident illustrated Neville’s growing interest in fashion: he has a clothing collection with Hawes & Curtis .

Corina Gaffey, a stylist, said: “Gary seems receptive to switching up his on screen style, trying different brands, silhouettes and cuts. He’s obviously in tune with fashion and interested in it.”

Pope predicted there would be more collaborations between footballing and fashion. “I think we’re going to see more pundits with their own lines,” he said.

One-nil to wider leg trousers, then.

Keyword – Wellness
Trefwoorden – Well actually, Health, Life and style, Ageing
Title – Do people really smell different as they get older? The truth behind ‘old person smell’ | Well actually | The Guardian
Author – https://www.theguardian.com/profile/jillian-pretzel
Link – Do people really smell different as they get older? The truth behind ‘old person smell’ | Well actually | The Guardian
Publish date – 2026-09-03T16:00:42.000Z
Category – Lifestyle
URL – https://www.theguardian.com/wellness/2026/sep/03/old-person-smell

Last week, my mom complained that she’s starting to smell “like an old person”.

She had grabbed her favorite sweater and draped it over herself at the movie theater. “It smelled like my grandmother,” she said, almost whispering. “I thought someone must have borrowed the jacket. But it was just me.”

My mom, who’s in her 60s , has a ton of energy. Her hair is thick and still naturally chestnut. She’s healthy and strong; she likes to hike and go to rock concerts.

“I don’t feel like an old person. Why do I smell like one?” she whined.

I told her, truthfully, that I didn’t notice any new aroma. I thought she smelled the same as always: a mix of lotion and gardenia. But I immediately knew what she was talking about.

Experts say that we do smell different as we age. “It’s one of the most universal, least talked-about parts of being human,” says Dr Roya Javid, a dermatologist in Monterey, California. “It’s just biology, unfolding on schedule, the same way we grow taller, then our hair goes gray . Every single person on the planet goes through these same transitions.”

What causes us to smell different as we age?

The musty odor that people sometimes call “old person smell” comes from a chemical compound called 2-nonenal. 2-nonenal is produced when certain skin oils oxidize and break down, says Javid.

It’s a normal – and unavoidable – change.

“Our skin is coated in a thin layer of natural oils called skin lipids. They keep skin soft, waterproof and protected,” she says. Those lipids are made up of fatty acids, and as we age, the fatty acids change in composition. At the same time, the skin’s ability to fight off every day wear-and-tear slows down. The oils are more exposed, and when they break down through oxidation, they release 2-nonenal.

“It’s just a natural byproduct of skin ageing – not dirt, not poor hygiene,” Javid says. “It’s just oil quietly changing over time, the same way metal changes when it’s exposed to air.”

Levels of 2-nonenal vary by person. “We don’t yet know why some develop a stronger scent than others,” says Javid. “Though an individual’s skin-oil composition, genetics, the skin’s microbiome, hygiene practices, clothing, health and environment may all play a role in both how much 2-nonenal is produced and how much stays on the skin throughout the day.”

When does this change occur?

Experts say “old person smell” can show up much earlier than you might expect.

A Japanese study from 2001 tested the skin of subjects between the ages of 26 and 75, and detected 2-nonenal starting at age 40. But Dr Arshad Rather, consultant geriatrician and general physician at Medical Express Clinic in London, says this doesn’t mean people wake up with a noticeable new odor.

“Research suggests 2-nonenal increases gradually the older you get, particularly past middle age. It’s not a switch flipping at 40 – more a dial slowly turning up,” says Rather.

Experts note that developing an age-specific odor isn’t unique to older adults. In fact, every age group has associated smells, for better or worse.

“Every stage of life has its own signature scent,” says Javid. “Babies smell sweet and milky because their scent glands haven’t switched on yet. Puberty flips that switch, and suddenly hormones drive a stronger, muskier smell for teens. Adulthood has a more consistent scent tied to sweat and daily life. And [these] changes in the skin’s natural oils give people a different scent later on.”

Is ‘old person smell’ inherently bad?

Any negative feelings people have toward “old person smell” are really a perception problem, not a reality problem, Javid says.

A blind test found that the 2-nonenal scent may not be disagreeable. In one 2012 study , researchers asked 41 young adults to smell T-shirts worn by individuals from three age groups: young (20–30 years old), middle-age (45–55) and old age (75–95). The researchers found that the odor from older adults was “rated as less intense and less unpleasant” than other groups.

Dr Johan N Lundström , a professor of psychology at Karolinska Institutet in Sweden and one of the authors of the study, says his team was surprised by the results. They hypothesized that smell would follow a linear trend, with the youngest group being rated highest and the oldest group rated the lowest, but that wasn’t the case.

“The elderly have a clearly separate body odor quality, but it was not rated as being all that negative,” Dr Lundström says.

Can you do anything about the odor?

Experts say there’s no way to stop 2-nonenal from developing. But there are some ways to manage the odor.

Javid says regular bathing can wash away some of the scent. However, soap and water won’t fully remove the chemical, because it doesn’t simply sit on the surface of the skin like sweat – rather, it’s being generated continuously. Deodorants might temporarily cover up a smell, but won’t remove 2-nonenal.

Meanwhile, regularly washing clothes, sheets and airing out rooms can help reduce the odor in the home. But because 2-nonenal won’t easily wash out, it can linger even after the most dedicated cleaning practices.

Some body wash products are marketed as neutralizing 2-nonenal, such as soap made with persimmon. Experts say while there are some anecdotal accounts that these help, scientific evidence is lacking.

Rather suspects there’s a connection between 2-nonenal production and a person’s lifestyle and diet, but says more studies are needed. “Since the smell comes from an oxidation reaction, reducing oxidative stress is a sensible target. Eating antioxidant-rich foods, such as colourful fruit and vegetables and sources of vitamins C and E, can reduce oxidative stress,” he says.

“Not smoking and protecting your skin from sun damage are sensible anti-oxidation habits too,” adds Rather.

In the end, experts say it’s true that people develop a different smell as they age, but it’s nothing to be embarrassed about.

If a person starts to notice they smell like 2-nonenal – which we all will – Javid urges them to not feel self-conscious or spend a fortune on special soaps.

“Focus on the things that support your skin generally: antioxidants, less sun damage, less smoking, good hydration,” she says. “And know that the science says you’re worrying about something that, objectively, isn’t as bad as the stereotype.”

Keyword – Books
Trefwoorden – Gloria Steinem, Books, Culture, Feminism, Civil rights movement, Women, Journalism books
Title – Share your tributes and memories of Gloria Steinem | Gloria Steinem | The Guardian
Author – https://www.theguardian.com/profile/guardian-community-team
Link – Share your tributes and memories of Gloria Steinem | Gloria Steinem | The Guardian
Publish date – 2026-09-03T11:30:14.000Z
Category – Culture
URL – https://www.theguardian.com/books/2026/sep/03/share-your-tributes-and-memories-of-gloria-steinem

Gloria Steinem, the American feminist and journalist whose activism helped push through greater rights for women around the world has died, aged 92 .

We would like to hear your tributes and memories of Gloria Steinem – whether you met her, or appreciated her work.

If you’re having trouble using the form click here . Read terms of service here and privacy policy here .

Keyword – Games
Trefwoorden – Games, Action games, Role playing games, Culture
Title – ‘Ruin and decay bring a chance of rebirth’: Hidetaka Miyazaki on uniting players in a damaged world | Games | The Guardian
Author – Kirk McKeand
Link – ‘Ruin and decay bring a chance of rebirth’: Hidetaka Miyazaki on uniting players in a damaged world | Games | The Guardian
Publish date – 2026-09-03T09:00:49.000Z
Category – Culture
URL – https://www.theguardian.com/games/2026/sep/03/ruin-and-decay-bring-a-chance-of-rebirth-hidetaka-miyazaki-on-uniting-players-in-a-damaged-world

S ince 2009’s Demon’s Souls, Japanese video game director Hidetaka Miyazaki has shown the world a different way to think about game design. His games defy convention with punishing fights, obscure rules, and unknowable, inhospitable worlds. The “Soulslike” genre – named after Demon’s Souls and its sequel Dark Souls – is now ubiquitous, influencing multimillion-sellers from God of War and Star Wars: Jedi to Hollow Knight. Miyazaki’s most recent success, 2022’s Elden Ring , which credited Game of Thrones author George RR Martin as a co-creator, sold over 30m copies and inspired Alex Garland to adapt it for the big screen at A24. It earned Miyazaki a spot on Time magazine’s “most influential” list, an accolade he shares with just one other game developer: Mario creator Shigeru Miyamoto.

Miyazaki is now 51 and has been FromSoftware’s president since 2014, elevated from game designer to CEO after the success of the Souls series. He has a cherubic face that could pass for 35. He rarely speaks publicly, and never on camera. When he does speak, he answers questions like one of his characters – softly, sadly, his head bowed, making eye-contact only when I am speaking. Outside the studio where we speak is the sprawl of Tokyo’s Shinjuku, an ever-changing maze where tourists get lost and pop-up stores appear and vanish without a trace. Today, a J-pop band performs in the square as the cicadas scream from the trees. A gilded statue of Malania, one of Elden Ring’s toughest bosses, looms over this dimly lit conference room inside From’s headquarters, a bonfire checkpoint away from the chaos.

FromSoftware’s in-game universes are filled with clues – enemies, places and scraps of information from item descriptions paint a vague image of the world, and the player fills the blank space. You never fully understand these domains, although countless YouTube video game theorists have tried – as have other developers in awe of his work. “Of all the many things Miyazaki and his team do well, creating a sense of mystery is the greatest,” explains Dishonored director Harvey Smith , who has more than 40 days’ playtime in Elden Ring. “It’s so incredibly hard to do in video games, which are technical systems … But Miyazaki somehow creates an atmosphere of wonder. Even when finishing, you are left ruminating on fun, murky elements that feel half understood. It’s a delicious sense of intrigue.”

Rather than the single-player action game that Miyazaki’s audience craves (fans are desperate for a sequel to his 2015 gothic masterpiece Bloodborne , for instance), his latest project The Duskbloods is a multiplayer Switch 2 exclusive. Eight players face off against ghoulish horrors, fighting each other to avoid being culled at the end of each round. The survivors are whittled down over three phases culminating in a final three-way battle. The Duskbloods is releasing to an audience with shifting tastes and trends, and it is certainly a risk. “I’m very nervous,” Miyazaki says. “With every title we release there is this mounting tension.”

The game opens with an arresting image: one hand reaching out for another. A male character is slumped on a chair, dejected; the shot moves in close to focus on their draped fingers. From below the frame, a pale hand slowly reaches out and caresses them before gently clasping his wrist. Hands are a recurring motif in Miyazaki’s games; in Elden Ring, massive crawling hands burrow up from underground to attack you, and hand-like giants are revered as deities.

“It’s not necessarily something I’m consistently aware of – maybe it’s something subconscious coming through,” Miyazaki says when I ask about this imagery. “Take a look online and there’s a rumour that I have a bit of a thing for feet, but I’m not honestly sure where this comes from. I feel like I’m trying to depict some side of human nature or the human existence that is difficult to describe.” (His games have featured, by my count, at least six barefoot female characters.)

Perhaps all the hands and feet are symbolic of human connection. One hand reaches for another; bare feet connect skin with earth. Miyazaki has been exploring that theme since Demon’s Souls , whose novel, stranger-centric multiplayer was inspired by a time his car slipped on an icy hill and a stranger helped to push him to safety. In Demon’s Souls and the Dark Souls series, players paint runes on the ground, which other players can then use to summon help in a fight, creating moments of spontaneous togetherness before an inevitable parting.

While The Duskbloods primarily puts players in opposition, it also explores temporary alliances and conflicting objectives, buoyed by Miyazaki’s love for tabletop role-playing games and board games. Players can even become betrothed to each other, forming an alliance. “I feel it’s less a traditional romance and more a sense of secure trust with a character in the world, and that’s something I personally yearn for,” he says. “It’s not necessarily a romantic pairing – it’s having someone that you can ultimately rely on. This concept is carried through from characters like the maidens in Elden Ring … it’s a transient, ephemeral love, which is maybe a motif I’m striving for.”

The Duskbloods is preoccupied with ruin and rebirth, a thematic cornerstone of From’s games – much as Godzilla was a product of nuclear paranoia in Japan. Even as Miyazaki and I talk, a deadly magnitude 6.8 earthquake hits the Kumamoto prefecture on Kyushu island, a thousand miles away. If the very ground beneath your feet is unreliable, that can shape your outlook on life, a concept explored extensively in Japanese literature and entertainment, recently on the hit television show Shōgun . “[Ruin and rebirth] is an ongoing theme in a lot of my games, I realise,” Miyazaki says. “That theme on a cosmological scale applies to The Duskbloods as an interesting philosophical area to explore.”

Miyazaki describes himself as a pessimist, a tendency that he believes comes across in his output. That should be obvious to anyone who’s finished any of his games, in which you keep throwing body and blade against seemingly impossible odds, reborn each time you die at a bonfire checkpoint, to try again. Even when you triumph, nothing ultimately seems to change: these games culminate in bleak, morally ambiguous gut-punches, leaving you not as a conquering hero but as the perpetuator of a hopeless cycle. “If we have two ideas of a brighter or dark future, I would tend to sway towards the darker one,” Miyazaki says. “[But] if you explore the ruin and the decay in those worlds, it also lets you explore some chance of rebirth, and I think having that tiny pinprick of light or hope can be something beautiful, something fleeting.”

Sekiro, Dark Souls, Bloodborne, and Elden Ring are all separate series, but they share the same bones. They’re reborn in different forms, to explore fresh ideas, places and perspectives while still playing, feeling and sounding like a FromSoftware game. While it’s immediately clear The Duskbloods is a Miyazaki game, it too wears a different skin, inspired by extraction shooters like Escape from Tarkov and those tabletop role-playing games the director loves. “There’s no intentional FromSoftware [mantra] – ‘this is the way we make our games’ – because if you start to do that it becomes stale and conservative, and you start having to adhere to a set of rules and philosophies, and it just doesn’t become interesting, you can’t make anything that’s as fun,” Miyazaki says.

“So I feel like at least what’s worked for us philosophically is trying to adhere to what we find interesting first. I think that has created a good throughline through our games, and that’s what we concentrate on to [conceive] a new title.”

Back in his early days at the studio, when he was only a coder on the Armored Core series of games, Miyazaki volunteered to take on a struggling project at From – the game that would become Demon’s Souls. (The game was already in trouble, so he felt he had nothing to lose.) He changed everything about the game, and then the game changed everything about his life, as he climbed from coder to company president. From failure was born a game that changed the landscape of video games. Ruin and rebirth.

But does Miyazaki think he has changed? “I don’t intend to,” he says, a smile curling on his lips. “But I probably have.”

This article was amended on 3 September 2026 to correct the release year of the original Demon’s Souls.

Keyword – Games
Trefwoorden – Games, Culture, Grand Theft Auto, Grand Theft Auto VI, Netflix, Film adaptations, Twitch
Title – Grand Theft Auto VI is a phenomenon – but there is much more to the gaming world | Games | The Guardian
Author – https://www.theguardian.com/profile/keithstuart
Link – Grand Theft Auto VI is a phenomenon – but there is much more to the gaming world | Games | The Guardian
Publish date – 2026-09-02T14:00:26.000Z
Category – Culture
URL – https://www.theguardian.com/games/2026/sep/02/pushing-buttons-newsletter-grand-theft-auto-vi-cultural-phenomenon

P redictably, the Grand Theft Auto VI “extended look” which premiered on Netflix last week was a success for all involved. The 30-minute preview scorched to No 1 on the viewing chart and even brought the site down for a few minutes as millions of gamers tried to watch what was, effectively, a very long teaser trailer. According to data collated by Eurogamer , more than 9,000 Twitch streamers covered the show leading to 5,227,798 hours of viewing there alone. And this was just the beginning of what will surely be two months of escalating hype – and unprecedented media attention.

Call me cynical, but I suspect the coverage of GTA VI in the media over the next few weeks will follow a familiar pattern. Mostly, it will be five-minute slots wedged in near the end of news bulletins in which games journalists, industry analysts and other pundits will be asked why the game is such a big deal, how much it cost to make and how much revenue it will generate. Perhaps a few will try to reignite the hoary old “violence in video games” debate, there will be presenters laughingly admitting they’ve not touched a game since Pac-Man, rolling their eyes and wallowing in their ignorance, in a way they never would while discussing any other art form. Somebody will venture the subversive view that “games are no longer just for kids”; somebody else will say “games make more money than films and music put together”. And that will be that, job done for another decade … or until there’s a funny story about Pokémon.

I hope I’m wrong. I hope, at least, the BBC, which employs plenty of staff who understand video games, will make time in its schedule to take a good look at GTA VI – its themes and influences, its creators, its place in the wider culture of games and entertainment. Sure, arts coverage on BBC television has been in decline for years, with the broadcaster shifting this content to digital platforms, but I saw plenty of in-depth analysis of Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey, looking at the quality of its translation, its depiction of female characters, its use of practical effects. I didn’t see a single presenter shrugging, looking comedically bewildered and admitting they’d not read Homer since secondary school.

On top of this, whatever mainstream media attention GTA VI does get it will come at the expense of covering other titles. Because, when the next video game story comes up in the wake of Rockstar’s behemoth, TV and radio editors and producers will be thinking, “Oh, we covered games last month.”

The thing is, GTA is a phenomenon – it looks gorgeous, it looks vast, and it will sell many millions of copies. The series’ notoriety transcends the medium. But is it the most interesting video game since GTA V? So much has changed since then. We’ve explored the fascinating, innovative open worlds of Elden Ring, Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and No Man’s Sky (an open galaxy!); we’ve seen brutal adult themes explored in The Last of Us: Part 2 and Silent Hill; we’ve experienced dizzying narrative innovations via Disco Elysium, Split Fiction and Lost Records: Bloom & Rage. All of these deserved at least a portion of that GTA screen and radio time.

True, some games have drawn similar levels of media attention. Minecraft and Fortnite receive regular coverage, but almost always because of concerns over children and games addiction, or because of how they intersect with other media: Minecraft through its hit movie, Fortnite through its many collaborations with music artists. And this is the key problem. Mainstream media is still at the stage where every single games story that does make it to TV or radio has to do the job of explaining and justifying the whole industry. It’s time for programme-makers to understand that video games are a mass cultural phenomenon. Enough people play them and understand them so that they don’t have to be re-introduced every time they’re covered. And most importantly, there is life, love, art and brilliance beyond Grand Theft Auto and beyond the coming storm of hype.

What to play

It was my birthday a couple of weeks ago, so I set out to find a simple, fun video game that the whole family could enjoy – and I wanted to share my discovery.

Inspired by Dominik Diamond’s recent column on this very subject, I downloaded the party game What The Dub?! , in which players watch old film clips with portions of the sound dubbed out and then enter their own amusing dialogue to fill the gap. The clips are then re-shown with each player’s text added to the soundtrack via a stilted robotic voice – then everyone votes on the funniest entry. It was hilarious, especially because the clips are from weird old public domain films and TV shows, so everything feels stilted and ridiculous. It’s also simple to take part, with each player using their phone to enter their dialogue choices. Apparently, it’s possible to add new clips via the Steam Workshop, the digital store’s user-generated content feature, but we didn’t figure that out. Regardless, What the Dub?! will definitely be revived at future family celebrations.

Available on: PC Estimated playtime: All evening!

What to read

EA staff have been speaking anonymously to the industry-news site Game Developer about their concerns after the Saudi-led buyout of Electronic Arts . Some are troubled by the prospect of popular games such as EA Sports FC, Madden and Battlefield being used by Saudi Arabia to distract from its poor human rights record. There are also worries about the company’s culture and job security.

TV producers looking for interesting game stories that don’t involve GTA could check out Eurogamer’s excellent article on the No Man’s Sky’s Galactic Hub project . It’s a community of players exploring and scientifically cataloguing specific regions of the long-running space adventure sim, like a sort of ragtag Starfleet mission. Live long and prosper, lads.

As if making and marketing independent video games isn’t hard enough, several developers have reported thefts at this year’s Gamescom event in Cologne. Posting on X , Mimic creator Ryan Laley said: “Our equipment was stolen last night from the booth. Police reports have been filed. At a loss for words to describe the feeling. Just defeated. Gonna do my best with what’s left of the week. But a huge blow financially and mentally.” According to VGC , others affected included publisher iam8bit and Tessera Studios.

What to click

Gems, ghosts and GTA VI: the biggest video games for autumn 2026

The Witcher 3: Songs of the Past – Geralt of Rivia returns after a decade in the sun

Help! I have disappeared down a rabbithole of horrible mobile gaming adverts

Trainwatch – alone with your thoughts on a railway line to nowhere

Star Wars Zero Company – joyfully absurd heroics with a tight-knit team of misfits | ★★★★☆

Vholume – a headlong rush of parkour perfection in a brutalist wonderland | ★★★★☆

Resonance: A Plague Tale Legacy – picture-postcard retelling of haunting Minoan myth | ★★★☆☆

Question Block

A question from Richard via email:

“My son, aged 6, is a big fan of aeroplanes and is really interested in flight. What games are there that could be used to entertain him, as a thing to do with me. I have (ridiculously) a PS5 and Xbox Series X – is Flight Simulator right? How about Ace Combat? Anything else?”

I’d definitely recommend Microsoft Flight Simulator , which is available on PS5 and Xbox. It can be controlled with just a joypad and you can switch off all the technical elements for your son so he’s basically just steering the craft like in an arcade game. There are lots of aircraft to fly, from tiny prop planes to passenger jets, and you can choose anywhere on Earth to explore. I love simply zooming over cities and scenic highlights, taking it all in.

If you’re ok with him doing a bit of shooting, Ace Combat 8: Wings of Theve is out in October, promising highly detailed visuals and exciting dogfighting. Fans say it looks to be a highlight for the series. I’d also recommend No Man’s Sky, which is a space exploration game, but the flight feels lovely, whether you’re scorching over the surface of a planet or out in the depths of the cosmos. The controls are extremely intuitive too. If he gets into space flight, the slightly more involved Elite Dangerous is worth a look, and for an accessible combination of space flight and shooting, Everspace: Stellar Edition is a really nice option on PS5.

If you have a question for Question Block – or anything else to say about the newsletter – hit reply or email us at pushingbuttons@theguardian.com .

Keyword – Fashion
Trefwoorden – Fashion, Life and style
Title – Jess Cartner-Morley on fashion: swot up with these lessons in back-to-school dressing | Fashion | The Guardian
Author – https://www.theguardian.com/profile/jesscartnermorley
Link – Jess Cartner-Morley on fashion: swot up with these lessons in back-to-school dressing | Fashion | The Guardian
Publish date – 2026-09-02T13:00:24.000Z
Category – Lifestyle
URL – https://www.theguardian.com/fashion/2026/sep/02/jess-cartner-morley-fashion-back-to-school-dressing

I used to love back-to-school shopping when my children were little. The miniature highlighter pens, the name labels, those pop-out pencil cases from Smiggle, even the intergenerational wrangling over when the price of a water bottle becomes unreasonable. I love the ceremony of new beginnings. The curtain-raising drama of it all.

Luckily for me, you don’t have to grow out of back-to-school shopping even though your children do, because in fashion September is considered the start of the new year. This is eminently sensible, because this time of year is a much better moment for a restart than January. The actual new year is dark and bleak and makes resolutions and projects feel intimidating rather than exciting. But right now, the evenings are still light, and while I’ve still got a bit of a tan pretty much anything feels possible.

Back-to-school is a whole vibe, not just a shopping spree. The juice is in the back-to-school thinking, rather than the back-to-school shopping. It is about snapping back into focus, getting your head in the game. Life gets a little loose over summer, which is delicious, but sometime about now you get a restless itch for a new tempo: more coffee and less wine, more can-do and less can’t-be-bothered.

This is the most fun time of year to shop. I love seeing the swimwear and sandals swept away by crisp shirts and I-mean-business kitten heels and loafers. But this also makes it a seductive time to shop, so we need to have our wits about us.

I came across a useful protocol on stylist Allison Bornstein’s Substack , where she wrote about her fashion red flags; deal breakers that tell you that a piece isn’t going to work for you, and which you ignore at your peril. They are personal to everyone.

Bornstein’s first red flag – and I am very much with her on this – is the bra-specific top. Off-the-shoulder necklines, shoulder cut outs, open backs. These are acceptable for special occasion tops, but no one has the time to rummage for a strapless bra before work, and wardrobe-solution type bras are almost never comfortable to wear all day. Not to mention: if the person who designed the top doesn’t think about where bra straps go, it makes me wonder how much they think or care about women’s bodies – so it’s a philosophical red flag as well as a practical one.

Green flags, meanwhile, are those items which you should snap up when you see them, because they are as rare as hen’s teeth. (Annoyingly, you will almost always spot a green flag item when taking a short-cut through M&S because you are late for a meeting, but you must try to grab them when you can.) Green flags include the perfect jeans, and an all-day bag of the right size that has a secure but unfiddly fastening and doesn’t require you to hunch one shoulder toward your ear to stay in place. I would add shoes with a 5cm-ish mini-heel that is either block-shaped or flared, so that the tip doesn’t come off when wedged in the escalator or between paving stones – you will have your personal green flags, also.

Back to the red flags. It is good to be extremely picky. Fashion has a monumental overproduction problem, so there are a lot of clothes out there. The best shoppers are utterly ruthless. One of my red flags is anything with buttons that look a bit cheap or even just boring: a bad button makes a dull coat. Another is anything that misbehaves when you move: skirts that ride up, off-the-shoulder necklines that won’t stay down. “That woman over there yanking at her top every 10 seconds looks so chic,” said literally nobody ever.

The key is to combine high standards with gritty, laser-focused realism. Do not buy a sundress you wish you’d had on your holiday last month or a grand linen ensemble perfect for a long lunch which you won’t have time for between now and 2027. Clothes should express your aspirations, but they also need to survive your Tuesdays. More than anything, back-to-school season is about clothes for real life. If a top only works with a weird bra or a bag only looks good until you put anything in it, that’s not wardrobe, that’s a fail. It goes back on the rail and you, my friend, go straight to the top of the class.

Styling: Melanie Wilkinson. Styling assistant: Charlotte Gornall. Model: Moli at Milk. Hair and make up: Sophie Higginson using Hair by Sam McKnight and Hourglass Cosmetics. Bandana , £125, Blazer , £350, and Shoes , £375, all ME+EM. Necklace , £125, Sézane. Cardigan , £49.99, Mango. Jeans , £130, Levi’s

Keyword – Games
Trefwoorden – Games, Culture, Strategy games, Star Wars, Film, PlayStation 5, Xbox series S/X, PC
Title – Star Wars Zero Company review – joyfully absurd heroics with a tight-knit team of misfits | Games | The Guardian
Author – Nic Reuben
Link – Star Wars Zero Company review – joyfully absurd heroics with a tight-knit team of misfits | Games | The Guardian
Publish date – 2026-09-02T09:00:28.000Z
Category – Culture
URL – https://www.theguardian.com/games/2026/sep/02/star-wars-zero-company-review-joyfully-absurd-heroics-with-a-tight-knit-team-of-misfits

E ven if you’re unfamiliar with the term “emergent storytelling”, you’ve likely experienced some of the unscripted tales that can bubble up out of a game’s systems. Perhaps you’ve led a scheming dynasty in Crusader Kings, or watched a favourite hero succumb to madness in Darkest Dungeon . Maybe you’ve surrendered yourself to the infinite yarn-spinner that is Dwarf Fortress – or read about it from the mid-00s forums where users helped popularise the term “Let’s Play” by chronicling their games in descriptive posts. Or perhaps you’ve played Firaxis’ XCOM , the alien invasion tactics hit that several key members of Zero Company studio Bit Reactor had a hand in.

Zero Company hinges on a concept as simple as it is perfect: take the complementary class abilities, tough dice rolls, and permanent character deaths of XCOM, and house them in a sci-fi setting known for spaghetti western blaster duels, last stands and heroic sacrifices. As creative director Greg Foertsch puts it , “Star Wars is about loss.” Which losses you end up mourning in Zero Company depends on you.

In theory, anyway. The game echoes Rogue One in its titular company of doomed misfits, but despite selling permadeath as a looming threat in the scripted tutorial, things rarely get dicey enough to put your squad in real danger. Even on its toughest difficulty, Zero Company feels reluctant to let a stray thermal detonator cut your companions’ stories short, blunting much of its potential for unscripted drama.

But in lieu of heroic sacrifices, Zcom (as I like to call it) is exceptional at telling a different kind of emergent story. Ones about iron-clad camaraderie and uneasy alliances. About the time your Mandalorian medic jetted in to heal your Jedi right on time, or the begrudging “nice shot” your clone trooper paid a former enemy sniper. The script feels designed to sell your mercenaries as an inseparable, dysfunctional family. Unironically, this one really is about the friends you make along the way.

Each fight is a reminder that Zero Company have each other’s backs. After an opening shot at enemy droids, you might have Kabb – a squat, bulbous alien scoundrel who speaks entirely in cutesy anastrophes – rush over and punch a hulking robot straight down a ravine. “What’s for supper? Cutty-upper!”, he declares for the third time in 15 minutes, met by some variations of “nicely done” from a random squadmate. Kabb’s still in bad shape from last turn, so you have your Astromech launch over healing stim. Kabb grabs it mid-air, slams it into his bicep, thanks the droid, and a notification tells you their bond has gotten stronger. That’ll mean a nice stat bump for them both later.

As all this happens, the battlefield buzzes with noise and motion. Idle combatants trade harmless potshots, ducking behind cover. Blaster holes sizzle through steel barriers. Battle Droids mock your missed shots, babbling “oh no!” like exploding lemmings when their comrades fall. There is so much personality in the different ways characters move. Gangers scramble down ladders. Astromechs bump into crates, then jump-jet over. Jedi leap and flip, and droids curl and spin like chrome woodlice. Through it all, veteran Star Wars composer Gordy Haab underscores every peril and triumph, paying pitch-perfect tribute to the textures of John Williams’ original score.

Between missions, you’ll return to the Den: a streamlined but engaging take on the customisation and upgrades of XCOM’s command centre, with the hangout space of Mass Effect’s Normandy. Via a galaxy map, you’ll spend intel, collect rewards, and make tough choices about which upgrades to deny your foes. It’s also here you’ll learn about your crew’s pasts. If you’ve got the time, you can even join them on personal quests.

I haven’t mentioned Zero Company’s overarching plot so far, mainly because there’s little worth mentioning. Its central threat, the Infinite Coil, are a tiresomely exoticised, first-draft cult with ill-defined goals, evidently concocted because the combat needed an enemy faction with some flavour of space magic for variety’s sake. The enemy’s reliance on healing and damage negation – a clumsy workaround for AI that can’t keep up with your team’s escalating stats and skills – results in some laborious late-game encounters.

These are by far the weakest parts of an otherwise brilliant debut from Bit Reactor, however. And even when the plot falters, touching character moments join digestible, deeply human explorations of this era of Star Wars’ byzantine factional politics. XCOM’s success has influenced countless turn-based tactics games. Few have made squeezing joyfully absurd heroics out of a handful of action points feel this good. Fewer have made me grin so hard at a final lucky shot during a last-second evacuation. That’s my squad down there, after all.

Star Wars: Zero Company is out now: £39.99

Keyword – Games
Trefwoorden – Games, Culture, Xbox, Microsoft
Title – ‘I feel like I’m grieving’: staff on the devastating fallout of widespread layoffs at Xbox | Games | The Guardian
Author – https://www.theguardian.com/profile/keithstuart
Link – ‘I feel like I’m grieving’: staff on the devastating fallout of widespread layoffs at Xbox | Games | The Guardian
Publish date – 2026-09-01T09:00:04.000Z
Category – Culture
URL – https://www.theguardian.com/games/2026/sep/01/xbox-layoffs-microsoft

O n the morning of 6 July, an email went out from Asha Sharma, the chief executive of Xbox, to all of the division’s employees around the world. Under the headline “ Resetting Xbox ”, it announced the most significant restructuring in the history of Microsoft’s console business: 3,200 staff would be laid off throughout the financial year to 2027, and 1,600 of those roles would be eliminated immediately.

An hour later, at studios throughout company, the Teams meeting invites started arriving. “It was a virtual call with our studio manager,” says Anne Barrett, who was laid off from Bethesda Game Studios Austin. “All of our cameras and microphones were turned off so we weren’t able to say anything or react to anything. We were just brought in, told the news and it was like: ‘You guys are going to lose access to your Slack channel.’ So you saw a flurry of goodbye messages before everything was just shut off.”

This, it seems, was the routine, at least at studios in North America: a Teams call with a studio head, a prepared statement read, then a warning about Slack (the group messaging app widely used at game development studios). Emails, the staff were told, would be turned off a few days later. “We’re primarily a remote studio, so Slack is the main mode of conversation with our teammates,” says Morgan Goin, who worked at ZeniMax Online Studios. “All through the morning, everyone was sending their goodbyes … ‘Hey, it’s been great working with you. Here’s my contact information. I’ve loved working here. I will miss all of you.’” Then silence.

Bethesda Games Studios and Zenimax Online Studios were unionised in 2024 and both Goin and Barrett are on the bargaining committees for their respective studios, currently in talks with Microsoft . In the US, the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) act is a federal law that requires companies with 100 or more employees to give its workers 60 days’ notice before major closures or mass staff layoffs. Consequently, affected staff at US studios will be paid until 4 September. Union reps at Bethesda are undertaking a bargaining process with Microsoft to negotiate severance packages and any benefits owed, and is attempting to get at least some affected members re-employed. Rallies are taking place outside studio buildings across North America, with the Bethesda union seeking support from gamers via social media.

Staff say rumours had been circulating about a new wave of lay-offs for several weeks, and that they saw the Bloomberg article on 10 June warning of coming job cuts. “There was an impending sense of doom, and it was like, man, is it going to be us?” says Barrett. “We thought we were safe. I mean, Bethesda Games Studios is Skyrim, it’s Fallout. We have really highly anticipated stuff coming out. We thought that the work we were doing was going to keep us safe. And instead, we got brought into a meeting that was two minutes long, to end, in some cases, decades of career at the company. It was just devastating.”

“I remember, I laughed the whole day because I was in complete disbelief,” Barrett adds. “I was like, there’s no way they’re doing this. That’s how I processed it. Some of my co-workers were just devastated. I mean, breaking down. They did not understand what was going on. We had people who were just in really dark places. I think it hit me probably the next day. I felt like, wow – I just spent seven years doing all this. In college, people called me Bethesda because it was my dream to work here. And that was just … gone.”

This is what doesn’t get reported with the statistics of mass redundancies: the sheer human cost of it. “I’m very tired, my sleep schedule is all kinds of messed up, my eating has not been great,” says Goin. “I have to ask myself daily: have you had enough food and water? Have you had enough sunlight? When was the last time you took a shower? We’re doing the depression symptoms, that’s what’s happening. I feel like I’m grieving.”

Simon Préfontaine has a similar story. Previously a designer at Bethesda Game Studios Montreal, he is a single father concerned about the future without work, and without the health insurance his job came with. “It’s very stressful,” he says. “I’ve heard of other people who have been laid off for over a year and haven’t been able to find work. I know I’m not the only single parent in the Montreal studio, I know there are people that have health issues.” But as with Goin, it is about more than financial stability. “It might seem like an overstatement or a dramatisation, but I do feel like I went through the stages of grief. You work with these people for years and years and years, and then suddenly you don’t get to see them any more.”

What has been most bewildering to staff is that there seemed to be no structure to the layoffs, no clear reasoning behind who was affected. “I’m on the character art team, and we lost two people who had been there for decades,” says Alex Nguyen, a union bargainer still employed at Bethesda Games Studios Dallas. “They did everything that was asked, they were very passionate, they were great at their jobs. They worked on all this stuff that made our creatures, characters and armour feel real. Outstanding employees. It never made any sense.”

It is likely, after all that, there will be ramifications for games being produced at these studios – including content delays and project cancellations. Id Software, creator of Doom and Quake, lost 136 staff in the cuts – a majority of its workforce. One staff member affected, VFX artist Derek Best, claimed in a LinkedIn post that the developer had been relegated to “support studio size”.

Barrett makes a similar assertion about Bethesda, where the redundancies have been less severe but where key staff have been affected. “I don’t know how you create games at the quality level we were without the institutional knowledge that’s been lost. We have proprietary tech. Our titles have a very well-known visual identity. And when you lose the people who built the tech, when you lose the people who were improving it, you can’t just throw new people at that problem, right? You can’t replace an artist with someone brand new and say: ‘Now replicate what they were doing 15, 20 years ago.’ The company has said that they can do it. I disagree.”

Nobody knows what happens next. Barrett could only provide a brief statement on how the union’s talks with Microsoft are faring: “Effects bargaining continues with each side exchanging counterproposals. In their counter, the employer has not made enough substantial movement to care for the very real consequences impacted members are facing (loss of employment; loss of income; and disruption of benefits for their families). We (the union) have indicated that we are prepared to work toward an agreement but we cannot accept a proposal where the burden of compromise falls almost entirely on the employees.”

A Microsoft spokesperson provided the following statement on the bargaining process: “Effects bargaining for our union-represented ZeniMax colleagues is under way and on track, and we have offered severance terms comparable to the generous package provided to our non-union represented colleagues, including up to 39 weeks of severance, six months of company-paid Cobra [Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act], and 16 weeks of outplacement support. We are committed to reaching an agreement that supports impacted colleagues as they move forward.”

At least 1,600 more redundancies are coming at Xbox studios as the “reset” of the division continues. During that time, there will likely be mass lay-off events at other large companies in the industry. All of the staff I spoke to echoed a familiar feeling about mainstream games development – that something has gone drastically wrong and that mass redundancies point to a wider malaise. “Publishers have to be prepared for multi-year development cycles,” says Nguyen. “If that cost is too high, or those timelines are too long, then the game needs to scale back in some way. That might mean more indie and AA games and fewer blockbuster titles. What doesn’t work is investing in a long-term game product, and expecting profits on a yearly basis.”

Barrett concurs. “My view of the industry has definitely been damaged,” she says. “There’s been a loss of sight over why AAA games were so valuable to players. It wasn’t just that they were big and shiny. It was that [the studios] had the resources to invest in creativity. What I see now is the same formula over and over and over again. In any entertainment industry, if you do that enough times, people get tired of it. I would love for us as an industry to get back to actually being creative and investing in that creativity.”

Keyword – Music
Trefwoorden – Music, Pop and rock, Disco, Dance music
Title – Tell us: what’s the song that is guaranteed to get you on the dancefloor? | Music | The Guardian
Author – https://www.theguardian.com/profile/guardian-community-team
Link – Tell us: what’s the song that is guaranteed to get you on the dancefloor? | Music | The Guardian
Publish date – 2026-08-27T12:29:16.000Z
Category – Culture
URL – https://www.theguardian.com/music/2026/aug/27/tell-us-whats-the-song-that-is-guaranteed-to-get-you-on-the-dancefloor

There are some songs which are guaranteed dancefloor fillers whether it’s at a wedding, a club or a music festival.

We would love to hear from people about the song that always gets them on the dancefloor. Are you throwing shapes to Beyoncé’s Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It) or ABBA’s Dancing Queen? Why is your go-to song for dancing your favourite?

If you’re having trouble using the form click here . Read terms of service here and privacy policy here .

Keyword – World news
Trefwoorden – Nepal, World news, Tibet, Nepal-Tibet flood disaster
Title – Tell us: have you been affected by the flash floods on the Nepal-Tibet border? | Nepal | The Guardian
Author – https://www.theguardian.com/profile/guardian-community-team
Link – Tell us: have you been affected by the flash floods on the Nepal-Tibet border? | Nepal | The Guardian
Publish date – 2026-08-27T03:09:10.000Z
Category – News
URL – https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/aug/26/tell-us-have-you-been-affected-by-the-flash-floods-on-the-nepal-tibet-border

More than 1,400 people are still missing and 392 have been confirmed dead after the flash floods and landslides on the Nepal-Tibet border.hit the Himalayan border areas of ⁠Nepal and in ​Tibet in China . An avalanche of ice and rock triggered massive flash floods causing widespread damage to villages and infrastructure.

Officials said hundreds of travellers from countries including India, the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and Malaysia, were reported missing.

If you’ve been affected by the flash floods on the Nepal-Tibet border, we’d like to hear from you.

Though we’d like to hear from you, your safety and security are most important. When recording or sharing your content with us, please put your welfare and the welfare of others first. Extreme weather events can be very unpredictable and carry very real risks.