Rolling coverage of the latest economic and financial news

• US firms say Trump trade war is hitting production as dollar nears three-year low

The slump in China’s manufacturing PMI (see opening post) is “a canary in the trade war coal mine,” says Stephen Innes, managing partner at SPI Asset Management.

The poor bird’s feathers have been “scorched by tariffs and global uncertainty”, Innes reports, explaining:

The Caixin Manufacturing PMI’s plunge to 48.3 isn’t just a weak print—it’s a body blow to the backbone of China’s economy: small and mid-sized exporters now caught in a brutal vice grip between faltering global demand and a Washington-led tariff regime that’s more carrot-and-stick diplomacy than ceasefire.

“There is no simple, single change, no matter how radical, that will deliver the fundamental reset that is needed for the water sector.”

“We have heard of deep-rooted, systemic and interlocking failures over the years – failure in Government’s strategy and planning for the future, failure in regulation to protect both the billpayer and the environment and failure by some water companies and their owners to act in the public, as well as their private, interest.

IDF says it fired at ‘individual suspects who advanced towards troops’ during incident at aid point in southern Gaza Strip

• Palestinians killed by Israeli fire at aid point, Gaza officials say

• Israeli strikes on Gaza schools part of deliberate strategy, say sources

In its statement about troops opening fire on people near an aid distribution point in southern Gaza, Israel’s military has claimed “IDF troops are not preventing the arrival of Gazan civilians to the humanitarian aid distribution sites. The warning shots were fired approximately half a kilometer away from the humanitarian aid distribution site toward several suspects who advanced toward the troops in such a way that posed a threat to them.”

At the weekend Philippe Lazzarini, the Unrwa commissioner-general described the aid distribution system being enforced by Israeli authorities as a “death trap”, adding that “This humiliating system has forced thousands of hungry and desperate people to walk for tens of miles to an area that’s all but pulverized due to heavy bombardment.”

A canny biography of the early career of this strange, brilliant novelist

Muriel Spark, born Muriel Sarah Camberg, was nothing if not protean. Her gravestone declares her a poet; posterity knows her as the author of 22 short, indelibly strange and subversive novels. In life, she was by turns an editor, critic, biographer, playwright, Jewish Gentile, Catholic convert, divorcee, abandoning mother, spy. As Frances Wilson observes in this canny biography, she looks in every photograph as if she is played by a different actor, so drastic are the changes in her face and style. From precocious Edinburgh schoolgirl to unhappy Rhodesian wife, spirited London bohemian to poised Roman socialite, Spark made an art of unsettling transformations. She was the queen of narrative control, not least the narrative of her own life.

She was also the enemy of biographers, a pursuer of lawsuits who managed to delay the publication of her own authorised biography by seven years (“a hatchet job; full of insults”, she said, unjustly), and went to war with the former lover who wrote two accounts of her life. And yet she didn’t hide her traces, leaving for researchers not one but two vast archives, of her personal papers and her working process, neatly organised in box files that total the length of an Olympic swimming pool.

From brooding, brutalist boxes to Scandi-inspired circular affairs with curved confessional booths, these astonishing churches are often located off the beaten track

The hike offers dramatic views of the Swiss Alps’ ‘murder wall’ – and poignant insights into the climbers who first braved it. For the son of one of those pioneers, it had a special resonance

A few years ago, my dad told me of a mountain where I could easily sense another world. “There is a special air and light,” he had said, vaguely. “You just have to walk close to it to feel and see it. Stand in one place and just look up.”

The mountain on my dad’s mind that day was the Eiger, Switzerland’s 3,970-metre ogre of limestone and ice. Like few others, the peak exerts a gravitational pull on climbers and it remains the chief symbol of the Bernese Oberland; its most notable feature, the 1,800-metre north face, is the largest in the Alps. This gigantic slab looms over the village of Grindelwald, to the south-east of the town of Interlaken, appearing at sunrise as an immense black spectre in a valley of green.

A badass surfer on Australia’s Gold Coast takes on a villainous tour guide who is ferrying unwary sightseers to view the sharks

Sean Byrne’s gonzo horror thriller premiered in the Directors’ Fortnight section of this year’s Cannes film festival, in the sidebar where Cannes traditionally finds a place in its heart for genre or offbeat fare. Yet despite this stamp of authority – and a lead turn from Jai Courtney that could best be described as “gnarly” – I couldn’t get behind this movie, which has a bargain-basement straight-to-streaming feel to it.

The scene is the Australian Gold Coast where surfers come to catch gigantic waves. Hassie Harrison (from TV’s Yellowstone) plays a badass surfer named Zephyr, who travels around in her van as free as the wind sampling the most outrageous swells. She meets-cute with Moses (Josh Heuston), a nerdy guy who is very sweet and yet also kind of hot. When they part, Zephyr is to come fatefully into contact with the film’s horrible villain, a beefy, bullish guy called Tucker, played by Courtney, who has a business taking attractive twentysomething tourists wearing only swimming costumes out on his boat, promising them an intimate encounter with sharks. But the unspeakable Tucker, a great shark enthusiast himself, has some pretty unusual ideas about the food he wants to offer to bring these creatures up to his boat.

Half of those diagnosed will now survive for 10 years or more after advances in diagnosis and treatment

The proportion of people surviving cancer in the UK has doubled since the 1970s amid a “golden age” of progress in diagnosis and treatment, a report says.

Half of those diagnosed will now survive for 10 years or more, up from 24%, according to the first study of 50 years of data on cancer mortality and cases. The rate of people dying from cancer has fallen by 23% since the 1970s, from 328 in every 100,000 people to 252.

This extraordinary adaptation of Paris Lees’ memoir follows wild, witty teen Byron as they go from cottaging for cash aged 15 to finding solace in a raucous gang of trans and queer pals. You’ll never look at a loo brush the same way

The title suggests a generic experience of nascent womanhood, but What It Feels Like for a Girl is miles from your typical female bildungsroman. This adaptation of journalist Paris Lees’ excellent memoir about growing up in Hucknall, Nottinghamshire (or ‘Ucknall, as the book, with its mesmeric phonetic dialect, has it) chronicles the coming-of-age of Byron, who is seen by others as a boy. Initially, our protagonist doesn’t really push back on that; despite some early gender dysphoria – angrily dismissed by their macho father – the prospect of one day openly living as a woman is completely outside their frame of reference. On a visit to a nightclub, Byron (Ellis Howard) encounters future friend Lady Die, who makes a joke about someone being a transexual. “What’s a transexual?” asks Byron – smiling, mystified.

This is the early 00s, you see: pre Nadia’s Big Brother win, although a couple of years post Hayley Cropper’s Corrie debut. Still, in terms of the general public’s comprehension of trans issues, it is the dark ages. (Thanks to the current Y2K fashion renaissance, however, the aesthetics are positively aspirational: dumbphones, chokers, FCUK slogan tees, Kappa tracksuits.) Yet Byron’s eventual gender transition isn’t what makes this an extraordinary and at times deeply disturbing account of a partly misspent youth. The reason 15-year-old Byron is at the aforementioned club in the first place is because they are searching for their erstwhile boyfriend Max (Sweetpea’s Calam Lynch). But Max isn’t just Byron’s first love – he’s also their pimp. A chance encounter in a public toilet introduced Byron to cottaging; they then begin performing sex acts on strangers for money. Byron’s success in the field – and enthusiasm for the job – means they are soon headhunted by Max to meet the demands of wealthier clients.

Served in a comforting broth and topped with fresh herbs and grated pecorino, this versatile dish is one for all ages

There is something deeply nostalgic about this dish, although it wasn’t something I grew up with. Perhaps it’s the use of small pasta that makes me feel childlike, but either way, it is the kind of recipe that is immensely versatile: it can be an elegant, light spring meal finished with punchy extra-virgin olive oil, an extra sprinkle of pepper and a grating of pecorino, or you could label it kid-friendly and comforting. It’s not exclusively so, but I’d hazard a bet that they’ll enjoy it.

The whole tax and spending ship is an unseaworthy rustbucket. This spending review is a chance to fix it

Who in their right mind would want to be Rachel Reeves right now? Her spending review out next week will feel like austerity all over again. Even if, in reality, it’s not a cut but more spending, as the Institute for Fiscal Studies emphasises. After an uplift in everyday spending at the budget, here comes a much-needed capital slab of £113bn. Yet whatever the numbers say, painful cuts to most things will be the story and the feeling.

If you want to try your hand, the IFS has just put its “Be the Chancellor” gadget up on its site. Strap yourself into Reeves’s fiscal straitjacket and attempt a Houdini-like escape, as you decide on levels of borrowing, taxing, spending and debt. One thing it illuminates is how much even mere slivers of growth improve your position immensely. How far can you go? The febrile market meltdown point is unknowable, but Liz Truss was a useful crash dummy testing squillions on tax cuts without raising revenue. Donald Trump, plunging into an unexplored fiscal wilderness, beat a retreat when his monster tariffs sent the markets charging back out at him. He seems to be having another try.

Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist

Climate minister says greenlighting North West Shelf project until 2070 is not the leadership Pacific countries expect as Australia seeks to host summit

Vanuatu’s climate minister has expressed disappointment over Australia’s decision to extend one of the world’s biggest liquefied natural gas projects and said it raises questions over its bid to co-host the Cop31 summit with Pacific nations.

The UN is expected to announce which country will host the major climate summit in the coming weeks, with Australia pushing for the event to be held in Adelaide as part of a “Pacific Cop”.

Murder accused also tells jury she was never diagnosed with ovarian cancer and had history of ‘consulting Dr Google’

• Erin Patterson trial LIVE

• Who are Erin Patterson and the other key figures in Australia’s mushroom trial?

Erin Patterson has told a court she wishes she never told her Facebook friends in a private group chat “this family I swear to fucking god” in relation to her in-laws, saying she felt ashamed but hoped that sharing her frustrations would mean she had a “big cheer squad” for her problems.

Patterson also told the jury in her triple murder trial that she was never diagnosed with ovarian cancer and had a history of “consulting Dr Google”, and hoped to bring her family back together despite a formal separation with her estranged husband, Simon, seven years earlier.

• Head coach planning mid-season training break in March

• Move may exacerbate concerns about player burnout

Thomas Tuchel is planning a warm-weather training break for his ­England squad next March followed by a pre-World Cup boot camp in Miami in June because of concerns about the effect of high temperatures on the players during the tournament in the US.

The England head coach has altered the Football Association’s usual travel itinerary this week by taking his squad to Barcelona for a six-day ­training camp to work them hard in the heat before the World Cup qualifier against Andorra on ­Saturday. Similar trips are on the agenda for next year.

Problems caused by underinvestment are being seized on by the far right as evidence of ‘state failure’

Waiting for the M49 bus to the zoo, Wolfgang, 82, peers down at the crumpled concrete and metal rubble below, the remains of a Berlin bridge recently demolished after wide cracks were discovered.

Over the loud pounding of a hydraulic hammer crushing the concrete, the retired technician says he watched its construction about 60 years earlier from the window of his nearby flat. “Now we have to hope they’ll get their act together to build a new one, though I have my doubts I’ll be alive to see it finished,” he says.

Yoshua Bengio’s organisation plans to create system to act as guardrail against AI agents trying to deceive humans

An artificial intelligence pioneer has launched a non-profit dedicated to developing an “honest” AI that will spot rogue systems attempting to deceive humans.

Yoshua Bengio, a renowned computer scientist described as one of the “godfathers” of AI, will be president of LawZero, an organisation committed to the safe design of the cutting-edge technology that has sparked a $1tn (£740bn) arms race.

Our lives are blighted by illegal settlements, and Israel has just approved 22 more. Without concrete action, we will be erased

• Issa Amro is a Palestinian human rights defender

Each of the 22 illegal settlements approved by Israel last week is another nail in the coffin of the peace process, hammered in by the complicity of western governments and corporations. Israeli settlements are not benign civilian neighbourhoods – they are primary instruments of dispossession, control and apartheid. Settlements are closed militarised zones on Palestinians’ stolen land, cutting off our access to our resources, our farms, our schools, our jobs and each other. Palestinian lands rapidly shrink, our livelihoods are devastated, our rights are systematically violated and our identity is undermined.

Western lawmakers look on, expressing commitment to peace through a two-state solution but choosing to do nothing to achieve this goal. Instead, their policies and inaction enable yet further settlement activity.

Issa Amro is a Palestinian human rights defender and co-founder of Youth Against Settlements

Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.

Is artificial intelligence coming for everyone’s jobs? Not if this lot have anything to do with it

The novelist Ewan Morrison was alarmed, though amused, to discover he had written a book called Nine Inches Pleases a Lady. Intrigued by the limits of generative artificial intelligence (AI), he had asked ChatGPT to give him the names of the 12 novels he had written. “I’ve only written nine,” he says. “Always eager to please, it decided to invent three.” The “nine inches” from the fake title it hallucinated was stolen from a filthy Robert Burns poem. “I just distrust these systems when it comes to truth,” says Morrison. He is yet to write Nine Inches – “or its sequel, Eighteen Inches”, he laughs. His actual latest book, For Emma, imagining AI brain-implant chips, is about the human costs of technology.

Morrison keeps an eye on the machines, such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, and their capabilities, but he refuses to use them in his own life and work. He is one of a growing number of people who are actively resisting: people who are terrified of the power of generative AI and its potential for harm and don’t want to feed the beast; those who have just decided that it’s a bit rubbish, and more trouble than it’s worth; and those who simply prefer humans to robots.

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 have any intricate awareness as to why he is famous.

That number is the number of people who have made the volitional move of clicking that subscribe button, to ensure that they will a) not miss his latest videos and b) can be literally counted by potential advertisers as a more-or-less guaranteed audience. One last fact, before we move away from numbers and into more nebulous modes of consideration: his 2024 Amazon Prime reality competition show, Beast Games, in which 1,000 contestants competed for $5m (£3.7m), the largest cash prize in television history, reportedly cost $100m to produce, making it the most expensive unscripted show in history. Jimmy Donaldson, at the risk of belabouring the obvious, is an incredibly big deal.

Morocco’s commercial centre has brought investment to the continent – but critics say it masks domestic inequality

For centuries, Casablanca was a significant trading hub for merchants from across the breadth of the Atlantic coast, given its geographical position between Africa, the Middle East and Europe.

These days, Morocco’s economic capital is merging those historical roots with a strong modern commercial identity. One such manifestation is the Casablanca Finance City (CFC) district, whose high-rise buildings stand as a symbol of the city’s dream of being a main gateway for international investment into Africa.

Sankirtan mandali troupes are usually male singers and dancers. But in Odisha, women are joining in to spread safety messages as the climate crisis turns their region into a tinderbox

For years, the women of Murgapahadi village in eastern India have quietly managed farms and children, collected flowers and firewood in forests, and kept households running while their husbands work away in cities. This year, many are educating too – in song as they work.

Forest officials are enlisting devotional song-and-dance troupes – sankirtan mandalis – to help in the fight against fires in the dry deciduous woods of Odisha state in soaring temperatures. Fires have already affected more than 4,500 hectares (11,120 acres) of forest in Odisha this year, up from about 4,000 hectares in 2024. Officials are using technology such as AI cameras and satellite data to track blazes but are also turning to the appeal of song to ask villagers not to burn leaves in the forest, apractice believed to benefit the soil, but which has led to uncontrollable wildfires in recent years.

Boiled eggs? Tofu? Avocado? Are these high-protein, low-sugar alternative mousse recipes the new way to make the chocolate dessert? TikTok certainly seems to think so. Guardian Australia staff put them through a taste test so you can decide if you should try making these at home – or give them a miss and keep scrolling instead

► Subscribe to Guardian Australia on YouTube

• Curd surge: TikTok recipes drive a national cottage cheese shortage

• ‘My face is leaking’: taste testing the spicy ramen deemed too dangerous for Denmark

Victorian woman, 50, has pleaded not guilty to three charges of murder and one of attempted murder over a fatal 2023 beef wellington lunch. Follow live

Barrister Colin Mandy SC asks his client why at one stage there were three properties in both Erin and Simon Patterson’s name when the couple had been separated for four years.

I always thought we would bring the family back together. That is what I wanted ... It was something tangible to say to Simon, I see a future for us.

I have not.

I’ve never had a needle biopsy anywhere.

I consulted Dr Google.

I alternated that with Don.

We did talk about it sometimes.

The kind of conversations that we had ... they would gently make fun of the fact that I was religious and I would try and evangelise back to them in a sense ... It was sort of all in good humour.

Zelenskyy says ‘no one cares’ if Putin is angry after hidden drones hit bomber fleet; Russians want truce to collect dead soldiers. What we know on day 1,196

‘Anywhere you can see the ocean, you have a chance of spotting a whale,’ says Sydney expert

• Australia news live: latest politics updates

• Get our breaking news email, free app or daily news podcast

Every winter, Australia’s “humpback highway” hums to life.

Thousands of humpback whales migrate from Antarctic feeding grounds to tropical breeding areas along Australia’s east and west coasts.

Pardons signed for Tanner Mansell and John Moore Jr, who freed 19 sharks and giant grouper from fisherman’s longline

Donald Trump has pardoned two south Florida shark divers convicted of theft for freeing 19 sharks and a giant grouper from a fisherman’s longline several miles from shore.

Pardons for Tanner Mansell and John Moore Jr were signed on Wednesday. They had been convicted in 2022 of theft of property within special maritime jurisdiction.

Critics had called for Oyun-Erdene Luvsannamsrai to step down after reports of his son’s lavish spending

Mongolia’s prime minister has resigned after he failed to receive enough support in a vote of confidence in parliament, Mongolian media has reported. The country’s embassy in Washington confirmed it.

Prime minister Oyun-Erdene Luvsannamsrai received 44 votes, well short of the 64 needed, according to news site ikon.mn.

Fringe Society CEO says venues could offer concertgoers ‘morning after’ shows or tempt residents who ‘want to hide’

Organisers of Edinburgh fringe events have been urged to be “pretty smart” and capitalise on the decision by Oasis and AC/DC to play gigs in the city midway through the festival.

There was surprise and irritation when it emerged the bands would be staging four concerts at Murrayfield stadium in mid-August when the world’s largest arts festival is in full flow.

Shock decision has raised fears ancient site with almost 2,000-year-old geoglyphs will be exploited by illegal miners

Archeologists and environmentalists have expressed their outrage at a shock decision by Peru’s culture ministry to cut by nearly half the protected archaeological park around the iconic Nazca Lines, excluding an area nearly the size of urban Lima, the country’s capital city.

The Unesco world heritage site attracts thousands of tourists to see the massive hummingbird, monkey and whale figures in the desert in Peru’s second-biggest tourist attraction after Machu Picchu. Last year, archaeologists using AI discovered hundreds of new geoglyphs dating back more than 2,000 years, predating the famous lines in the sand.

Doug Burgum says Biden order that banned drilling in 23m-acre National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska will be reversed

Millions of acres of Alaska wilderness will lose federal protections and be exposed to drilling and mining in the Trump administration’s latest move to prioritize energy production over the shielding of the US’s open spaces.

Doug Burgum, the interior secretary, said on Monday that the government would reverse an order issued by Joe Biden in December that banned drilling in the remote 23m-acre National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska (NPR-A), the New York Times reported.

Hamit Coskun, found guilty of religiously aggravated public order offence, was ‘motivated at least in part by a hatred of Muslims’, judge says

A man has been fined after he set fire to a Qur’an outside the Turkish consulate in London, in an act that was deemed “motivated at least in part by a hatred of Muslims” by a judge.

Hamit Coskun, 50, who was found guilty of a religiously aggravated public order offence on Monday, called his prosecution “an assault on free speech”.

Election pitting liberal Lee Jae-myung against conservative candidate Kim Moon Soo comes after months of chaos following Yoon Suk Yeol’s short-lived imposition of martial law

South Koreans are voting for a new president in a snap election triggered by a brief period of martial law imposed by the now-impeached former leader Yoon Suk Yeol.

Polls suggested that Yoon’s liberal arch-rival, Lee Jae-myung, was heading for a comfortable victory in what Lee has described as “judgment day” for Asia’s fourth-biggest economy.

Offer gives no ground on Tehran’s demand to continue to enrich uranium inside country, sources say

Iran is on the brink of rejecting US proposals on the future of its nuclear programme after the US draft insisted that Tehran would have to suspend the enrichment of uranium inside Iran and set out no clear route map for lifting US economic sanctions.

The US proposals were the first in written form since five rounds of indirect talks started, but Iranian diplomatic sources said the US proposals gave no ground on Iran’s demand to continue to enrich uranium inside the country.

Police believe remains are of Izabela Zablocka, from Normanton, and have launched murder investigation

Human remains have been found in a search for a woman missing for more than 15 years as police launch a murder investigation into her disappearance.

Izabela Zablocka, from Normanton in Derby, was 30 when she went missing in 2010. Originally from Poland, she had last made contact with family on 28 August 2010.

Claudia Sheinbaum defends decision to put 2,600 judges’ posts to vote despite record low turnout

Mexico’s president Claudia Sheinbaum has defended the country’s unprecedented judicial elections after just 13% of Mexicans turned out to vote, a record low in a federal election.

Roughly 2,600 posts, from local magistrates to supreme court justices, were up for grabs on Sunday, as an entire judicial system was put to the vote for the first time in the world.

• 33-year-old ends time at Spurs to take first No 1 role

• West Brom dismissed Tony Mowbray in April

Ryan Mason has left Tottenham to take over as West Brom head coach on a three-year contract.

Mason quickly emerged as a leading candidate for the Championship club after they dismissed Tony Mowbray on 21 April. Spurs’ rollercoaster 2024-25 campaign – in which they secured Europa League success – only ended on 25 May and forced West Brom to bide their time but Mason, after a short holiday, decided to accept their offer and take his first step into management.

Oncologists say patients rejecting proven treatments are dying needlessly because of increase in online ‘cures’

Cancer patients are snubbing proven treatments in favour of quackery such as coffee enemas and raw juice diets amid an “alarming” increase in misinformation on the web, doctors have said.

Some were dying needlessly or seeing tumours spread as a result, oncologists said. They raised their concerns at the world’s largest cancer conference in Chicago, the annual meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology (Asco).

The actor and director claims that an Austrian newspaper invented a recent interview with him

Clint Eastwood has released a statement to claim a recent interview with him is a fabrication.

Quotes from an alleged interview with the Oscar-winning actor and director had gone viral over the weekend and were picked up by a number of sites. Yet Eastwood has now said that he never spoke to anyone from German-language Austrian newspaper Kurier.

• Proceeds from Chelsea sale earmarked for Ukraine aid

• Government issues statement over recovery of money

The government says it is “fully prepared” to take Roman Abramovich to court to resolve the three-year impasse over the £2.5bn frozen from the sale of Chelsea.

In a rare joint statement, the chancellor of the exchequer, Rachel Reeves, and the foreign secretary, David Lammy, confirmed the UK was ready to escalate its efforts to secure the money which has been promised to support humanitarian activity in Ukraine.

Prime minister seeks to shore up his fragile coalition and vows not to back down

Donald Tusk says he will call a vote of confidence in his government to try to shore up support for his coalition after a bruising setback in Poland’s presidential election.

In his first public comments since Sunday’s election result was declared, the prime minister sought to regain momentum as he promised to “get to work” and submit a number of draft laws.

Jesse Armstrong’s rushed Succession follow-up might be heavy on of-the-moment buzzwords, but it’s too smug to make any real point

Picture this: a group of very rich people gather at an ostentatiously large, secluded retreat. The SUVs are black, tinted, sleek. The jets are private. The egos are large, the staff sprawling and mostly unseen, the decor both sterile and unimaginably expensive. This is the distinctive milieu of Succession, the HBO juggernaut which turned the pitiful exploits of a bunch of media mogul failsons into Shakespearean drama for four critically acclaimed seasons. It is also the now familiar aesthetic of a range of eat-the-rich satires plumbing our oligarchic times for heady ridicule, if increasingly futile insight – The Menu, Triangle of Sadness, Knives Out: Glass Onion, Parasite, The White Lotus and the recent A24 disappointment Death of a Unicorn to name a few. (That’s not to mention countless mediocre shows on the foibles of the wealthy, such as this month’s The Better Sister and Sirens.)

So suffice to say, I approached Mountainhead, Succession creator Jesse Armstrong’s first post-series project about four tech billionaire friends gathering for poker as one’s AI innovation wreaks havoc on the globe, with a sense of pre-existing fatigue. The market of ultra-rich satire is, to use the logic of Armstrong’s characters, saturated. (Or, to use their language: “I would seriously rather fix sub-Saharan Africa than launch a Sweetgreen challenger in the current market.”) There’s more than a whiff of Argestes, the second-season Succession episode at a billionaire mountain retreat, to these shots of private cars pulling up to a huge chalet hugged by snowcapped peaks. And though Armstrong, who solely wrote and directed the film, continues his avoidance of easy one-to-ones, there’s more than a whiff of Elon Musk to Venis (Cory Michael Smith), an AI company CEO and the richest person in the world with a tenuous grasp on reality, a stupendous sense of nihilism and unrepentant need to assert his own virility (the landscape, he notes, is “so beautiful you can fuck it”).