6 h. ago ‘Our era of violent populism’: the US has entered a new phase of political violence

The political temperature is dangerously high – and shows few signs of coolingIt has been a grim couple of weeks in the US, as multiple acts of politically motivated violence have dominated headlines and sparked fears that a worrying new normal has taken hold in America.Last Saturday, a man disguised as a police officer attacked two Democratic legislators at their homes in Minnesota, killing a state representative and her husband, and wounding another lawmaker and his wife. The alleged murderer was planning further attacks, police said, on local politicians and abortion rights advocates. Continue reading...

Politics

9 h. ago I study the history of Nazi resistance. Here’s what the US left can learn from it | Luke Berryman

Effective opposition calls for a laser focus on change, no matter how small. We should consider these activists’ examplesAround the end of 2022, I had an idea for a book about the history of resistance to Nazism. I wanted to show that Nazism has faced nonconformity, refusal and protest ever since it was born in 1920. I also wanted to explore beyond a handful of famous heroes and cast a spotlight on people who changed history without entering popular memory. When I began my research, Donald Trump had just announced his candidacy for the Republican ticket in 2024. When I gave the manuscript to the publisher a little over two years later, he was president-elect.His comeback, the darker version of Maga that came with him, and the Democratic party’s collapse gave fresh relevance to the stories of resistance to far-right extremism that I was finding. Even as I was piecing them together, they began to intrude on the present. It was a haunting transformation – and it helped me to understand...

Politics

2 w. ago ‘The Mozart of the attention economy’: why MrBeast is the world’s biggest YouTube star | Mark O’Connell

He’s spent 24 hours immersed in slime, two days buried alive – and showered vast amounts of cash on lucky participants. But are MrBeast’s videos simply very savvy clickbait – or acts of avant garde genius?Jimmy Donaldson, the 27-year-old online content creator and entrepreneur known as MrBeast, is by any reasonable metric one of the most popular entertainers on the planet. His YouTube channel, to which he posts his increasingly elaborate and expensively produced videos, has 400 million subscribers – more than the population of the United States of America and equivalent to the total number of native English speakers currently alive. It’s close to twice as many subscribers as Elon Musk has X followers, and over 100 million more than Taylor Swift has Instagram followers. And that number, 400 million, does not account for the people who watch MrBeast’s videos in passing, or who are aware of his cultural presence because of their children, or who just sort of know who he is but don’t ha...

Politics

3 w. ago Robbie William's most popular song ever is not what you'd expect as star takes to Murrayfield stage

Robbie Williams is kicking off his European tour at Edinburgh's Murrayfield Stadium tonight and is set to play a number of his biggest hits from over the years - but which is his most popular track of all time?

Politics

3 w. ago Four tips for home care, from vacuuming your mattress to cleaning your dishwasher?

I tried some of the advice from Kyshawn Lane of the wildly popular Instagram account Weekly Home CheckBuy an exclusive print from our Well Actually seriesI am fairly tidy. I stay on top of vacuuming and laundry; I wipe down counters and sinks. But when it comes to appliances and structural issues at home, I don’t know a thing. If you told me my AC was run by a family of small penguins who blow cold air through the vents, I probably wouldn’t believe you, but nor would I have a better explanation.Enter: Kyshawn Lane, the man behind the wildly popular Instagram account Weekly Home Check. Every week, Lane posts videos about how to care for your home and the things in it. In a calm, encouraging voice, he demonstrates how to weather-strip your doors or label your electrical circuit breaker box. Continue reading...

Politics

3 w. ago Violent and lewd! Not Grand Theft Auto, Shakespeare’s Macbeth

If Shakespeare were around today, he’d be making open-world shooters with the same depth and diversion as his playsLast week, the Guardian spoke to the team behind Lili, a video game retelling of Macbeth, shown at the Cannes film festival. The headline quote from the piece was “Shakespeare would be writing for games today”, which I have heard many times, and does make a lot of sense. Shakespeare worked in the Elizabethan theatre, a period in which plays were considered popularist entertainment hardly worthy of analysis or preservation – just like video games today! The authorities were also concerned about the lewd and violent nature of plays and the effect they may have on the impressionable masses – ditto!But if we agree that a 21st-century Shakespeare would be making games, what sort would he be making? If our central thesis is that Shakespeare would be interested in mass, popular entertainment, then – if we’re talking pure revenue – he would be making casual smartphone games: Te...

Politics

last month Shooting of Israeli embassy staffers underscores US ‘era of violent populism’

This is the latest act of violence in a string of incidents that have affected Jewish, Arab and Muslim communitiesUS politics live – latest updatesThe killing of two staff of the Israeli embassy in Washington DC comes as the war in Gaza has splintered the American body politic alongside the ongoing rise in political violence.A shooter, identified as Elias Rodriguez, shot the two people, Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim, outside the Capital Jewish Museum on Wednesday after they left an event hosted by the American Jewish Committee. Rodriguez reportedly chanted “free, free Palestine” while being detained by security. Continue reading...

Politics