Hand of Irulegi: ancient bronze artefact could help trace origins of Basque language | Spain

 Posted on April 5, 2024  |  5 minutes  |  890 words  |  Aldo Pusey

The Hand of Irulegi was discovered last year near Pamplona. Photograph: Navarra government/AFP/GettyThe Hand of Irulegi was discovered last year near Pamplona. Photograph: Navarra government/AFP/GettySpain This article is more than 1 year oldHand of Irulegi: ancient bronze artefact could help trace origins of Basque languageThis article is more than 1 year oldThe Vascones, an iron age tribe from whose language modern Basque is thought to descend, previously viewed as largely illiterate [Read More]

Master of Light: how one man went from poverty to prison to painting

 Posted on April 5, 2024  |  7 minutes  |  1411 words  |  Jenniffer Sheldon

Documentary filmsIn an inspiring HBO documentary, the classical painter George Anthony Morton reviews his past of hardship and incarceration The first images in the HBO documentary Master of Light show George Anthony Morton chopping up white powder. That crafty opening knowingly plays on our assumptions that Morton is cooking dope. A few beats later and it’s revealed that he’s actually just making paint. Morton acknowledges the fake-out on a Zoom call. [Read More]

Old music: Sinad O'Connor Nothing Compares 2 U | Music

 Posted on April 5, 2024  |  3 minutes  |  440 words  |  Chauncey Koziol

Old musicMusicOld music: Sinéad O'Connor – Nothing Compares 2 UThis song was so pervasive precisely because its emotions were so universal – and its performance so truthfulReading on mobile? Watch here Through the summer of 1990 Nothing Compares 2 U by Sinéad O'Connor was not only pervasive but quite inescapable. It was a huge international hit. You could hear it in taxis, shops, friends' houses in London, New York, Berlin, Sydney and O'Connor's home city of Dublin. [Read More]

Sampha: Lahai review how to make an existential crisis sound sublime

 Posted on April 5, 2024  |  5 minutes  |  870 words  |  Aldo Pusey

Alexis Petridis's album of the weekSamphaReview(Young) Six years after the Mercury prize-winning Process, Sampha Sisay’s follow-up is jittery with anxiety and indecision, yet poised and luscious In 2017, Sampha Sisay released his debut album Process. A troubled, sometimes harrowing, frequently beautiful response to his mother’s death, it was rapturously reviewed and a Top 10 hit. It wound up high in critics’ year-end polls, occasioned nominations at the Brit awards and the Ivor Novellos, and won the Mercury prize. [Read More]

Yotam Ottolenghis corn recipes

 Posted on April 5, 2024  |  7 minutes  |  1416 words  |  Aldo Pusey

Yotam Ottolenghi’s cornbread with cheddar, feta and jalapeño. Photograph: Louise Hagger/The Guardian. Food styling: Emily Kydd. Prop styling: Jennifer Kay. Food Assistant: Katy GilhoolyYotam Ottolenghi’s cornbread with cheddar, feta and jalapeño. Photograph: Louise Hagger/The Guardian. Food styling: Emily Kydd. Prop styling: Jennifer Kay. Food Assistant: Katy GilhoolyYotam Ottolenghi recipesFoodMake the most of the summer’s bounty by folding it into cornbread, blitzing it into pancakes or using it as a topping for creamy spiced semolina [Read More]

A proposal Saudis can't refuse | Syed Neaz Ahmad

 Posted on April 4, 2024  |  5 minutes  |  900 words  |  Valentine Belue

Cif beliefSaudi Arabia This article is more than 14 years oldA proposal Saudis can't refuseThis article is more than 14 years oldSyed Neaz AhmadIt may be the world's most puritanical kingdom but there are still legal ways to have sex on the sideSaudi Arabia's conservative society stands divided on the issue of misyar, a no-strings marriage of convenience that has become increasingly popular in the kingdom. Misyar is a form of marriage that allows couples to live separately but come together for sexual relations. [Read More]

Angela Carter obituary | Angela Carter

 Posted on April 4, 2024  |  5 minutes  |  864 words  |  Kary Bruening

Angela CarterObituaryAngela Carter obituaryThe soaring imagination Angela Carter died yesterday aged 51 and at the height of her powers as a novelist. The boldness of her writing, her powers of enchantment and hilarity, her generous inventiveness, all make this premature and tragic death harder to take. We needed her around. She interpreted the times for us with unrivalled penetration: her branching and many-layered narratives mirrored our shifting world of identities lost and found, insiders versus outsiders, alternative histories and utopias postponed. [Read More]

Cid Corman | Books | The Guardian

 Posted on April 4, 2024  |  4 minutes  |  778 words  |  Chauncey Koziol

BooksObituaryCid CormanPoet who was behind the literary magazine OriginAlthough he published some 150 collections of poetry, translations, and essays, Cid Corman, who has died aged 79, will be remembered as an editor. Through five decades, from 1951, his literary magazine Origin provided an early platform for the work of Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, Gary Snyder and Theodore Enslin. Inevitably associated with Olson and the poets who clustered around him at Black Mountain College in North Carolina in the 1950s, Corman's own work owed just as much to the influence of Japan, where, apart from a 12-year break in Boston, he lived from 1962 until his death. [Read More]

Ncuti Gatwa: I know many a gay man whos exactly like the Doctor

 Posted on April 4, 2024  |  5 minutes  |  1060 words  |  Kary Bruening

‘The Doctor doesn’t have a family, but Ruby is his now, in a way’ … Millie Gibson and Ncuti Gatwa in the Doctor Who Christmas special. Photograph: James Pardon/Bad Wolf/BBC Studios 2023‘The Doctor doesn’t have a family, but Ruby is his now, in a way’ … Millie Gibson and Ncuti Gatwa in the Doctor Who Christmas special. Photograph: James Pardon/Bad Wolf/BBC Studios 2023Doctor WhoTime is ticking down to the Fifteenth Doctor and his new companion Millie Gibson’s festive special. [Read More]

Study for Obedience by Sarah Bernstein review a masterly meditation on life as a survivor

 Posted on April 4, 2024  |  3 minutes  |  591 words  |  Jenniffer Sheldon

The ObserverFictionReviewOne of Granta’s best young British novelists of 2023 weaves an unsettling tale of abuse, prejudice and blame told by the ficklest of narrators In the years since #MeToo, an outpouring of fiction by writers such as Emma Cline, Sophie Mackintosh and Rachel Yoder has grappled with what it means to be a victim, and what it takes to be an abuser. Montreal-born, Scottish-based author Sarah Bernstein’s second novel, Study for Obedience, spins a carefully woven web of culpability and criminality – of which gender is one fine thread – in answering its central question: if attacks on minority groups are unrelenting, in what ways do those groups internalise blame? [Read More]