The most successful quarterback of all-time approached his playing career with ruthless focus. He could do with the same intensity in his retirement projects
Tom Brady played for 23 NFL seasons with a single, maniacal goal: to become the greatest quarterback who ever lived. He achieved it. Now, in retirement, Brady has dabbled in everything. He calls games for Fox. He’s building chimneys in Birmingham. He’s flogged crypto. He’s spreading America’s Game to Riyadh. He has a thriving YouTube account. He cloned his dog. Brady’s post-playing portfolio has been diverse, or aimless, depending on your perspective.
Side hustles are one thing. But running a pro franchise is not a part-time job. Along with his other roles, Brady is also the de facto football czar of the Raiders, the most hapless team in the league.
Amid Liverpool’s deepening crisis and the growing scrutiny on Arne Slot, it is only right that Nottingham Forest’s role in it is given some attention and acclaim. Back-to-back league wins at Anfield for the first time since 1963 deserves recognition, as does the willingness of Forest’s players to embrace the gameplan of the third different managerial voice they have heard this season. Sean Dyche’s instructions were implemented to perfection as Liverpool disintegrated. “We changed the tactical side today,” said Forest’s recently appointed manager. “I told the players: ‘We’re not passing it, we are going long, because Liverpool were going to press the life out of you’ – which is exactly what they did at the start. We dealt with that quite well and we mixed it tactically, which is credit to the players.” Forest’s tactics may have been straight out of the Dyche playbook but they were also encouraged, inadvertently, by Slot, who has regularly told opponents how to play his Liverpool team this season. He has meanwhile not found any solutions. Andy Hunter
In western Chad, villagers are desperately trying to hold back the sand as the climate crisis wreaks havoc on one of the hottest countries in the world
On the ochre sands of Kanem, the neat vegetable gardens and silver-green palm trees of Kaou oasis stand out, incongruous in this desert province of 70,000 sq km in western Chad.
Oases such as this, on the edge of the Sahara, have sustained human life in the world’s deserts for thousands of years. Globally, an estimated 150 million people rely on the water, arable land and access to trade networks they provide. But in Chad, such oases are disappearing fast.
The fingerprints of Russia and Saudi Arabia are all over the decision text in Brazil. But a group of nations led by Colombia and the Netherlands offer hope
Genevieve Guenther is the founding director of End Climate Silence
The 30th conference of the parties (Cop30), the annual climate summit of all nations party to the UNFCCC, just ended. Stakeholders are out in the media trying spin the outcome as a win. Simon Stiell, climate change executive secretary for the UN is, for instance, praisingCop30 for showing that “climate cooperation is alive and kicking, keeping humanity in the fight for a liveable planet”. But let us be clear. The conference was a failure. Its outcome, the decision text known as the Global Mutirão or Global Collective Effort, is, in essence, a form of climate denial.
In 2023, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change(IPCC) determined that the world had already developed, or planned to develop, too much fossil fuel to be able to halt global heating at 2C. It acknowledged that the capital assets built up around fossil fuels must be stranded – that is to say, abandoned and not used – if warming was to be limited to 2C. But the Cop30 decision text ignores all this. Indeed, it never even mentions fossil fuels.
Genevieve Guenther is the founding director of End Climate Silence, and the author of The Language of Climate Politics
On paper, ‘horny teens do battle with mini demon snowmen’ sounds fun, but the jokes are dumb and the references to better films only draw attention to its weaknesses
It’s teenager Zach (Chris Cavalier)’s birthday and he plans to spend it watching Highlander and, well, masturbating – but an army of miniature demon snowmen have other ideas. It is the perfect jumping off point for a mashup of Gremlins and American Pie, and for quite a chunk of time the film manages to coast along on that kind of silly guilty pleasure energy, with zippy pacing and plenty of jokes so stupid they’re funny, plus cameos from icons such as Joe Dante (director of Gremlins).
Unfortunately the comedy writing isn’t quite there, and the jokes rapidly revolve back around to so stupid they’re stupid. Similarly, the introduction of a couple of sexy nymphomaniac nuns initially seems promising – you wonder what their deal is going to be, assuming they will be more than one-dimensional sex puppets – only to find that no, that really is their full extent. Maybe there’s something refreshing about characters existing purely as eye candy, without any hypocritical woke pretence that there’s more to it than that?
The Philippines is one of the countries most at risk of the climate emergency due to its low-lying island geography. With sea temperatures rising, the country deals with increasingly frequent and intense typhoons, rising sea-levels that threaten coastal communities, and changing rainfall patterns that disrupt agriculture. The country is one of the smallest contributors to climate change but one of the places most affected by its impacts. Gideon Mendel’s visceral portraits from his project Drowning World show people in Bulacan province dealing with the climate emergency in their daily lives
From stylish townhouses to characterful country piles, this selection of inns, B&Bs and hotels offer delicious food and a touch of luxury for £150 a night or less
Drakes, Brighton Keep an eye out for deals at this glamorous Regency seafront hotel (a November 30% discount won’t be a one-off). A sea-view balcony room, of course, will cost a bit, but even the snuggest, city-facing bedrooms have air conditioning, a king-size bed, wet room, bathtub and Green & Spring toiletries. For somewhere so fun and stylish, Drakes offers real value, including the shorter tasting menus in Dilsk restaurant. Or just treat yourself to a sundowner in the bar, then head out to dine. This is Brighton; the world is your oyster. Doubles from £143.50 B&B, drakeshotel.com
Michel Simon, who steals the show in Jean Vigo’s 1934 masterpiece L’Atalante, was a soft-faced, gravelly voiced clown capable of tremendous pathos – and total chaos
Jean Vigo’s L’Atalante, his poetic and surreal 1934 romance about a young couple living on a canal barge, is one of the most beautiful, sensual films of all time. Dita Parlo and Jean Dasté play the newlyweds getting awkwardly accustomed to married life in close quarters, and their love story shapes the film. But it’s their bargemate, the uncouth Père Jules, played by Michel Simon, who steals the show: a well-travelled sailor speckled with tattoos, standing guard over a cabinet of risque and macabre curiosities, whose cabin teems with cats every bit as unruly as he is.
The Swiss actor Michel Simon was one of the most distinctive presences in 20th-century French cinema: a soft-faced, gravelly voiced clown capable of tremendous pathos, and true chaos. Charlie Chaplin called him “the greatest actor in the world”. He worked with the best European directors on some timeless films. As well as acting for Vigo, he played the timid man transformed by his affair with a sex worker in La Chienne (1931) and the incorrigible tramp in Boudu Saved from Drowning (1932) for Jean Renoir. He worked with Marcel Carné in films such as Le Quai des Brumes (1938), with Carl Theodor Dreyer in The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928), with René Clair, Marcel L’Herbier, Julien Duvivier, GW Pabst … even John Frankenheimer in The Train (1964). “When Michel Simon plays a part,” said Truffaut, “we penetrate the core of the human heart.” He spent five decades working in the cinema, starting out in the silents, and received his highest accolade, the Berlinale’s Best Actor award in 1967, for his role as an antisemitic peasant befriending a young Jewish boy during the war in The Two of Us (Claude Berri). Reviewing that movie, Renata Adler called Simon “an enormous old genius … the general impression is that of an immense, thoughtful, warm-hearted and aquatic geological formation”.
The first scholarly biography in more than 100 years of the man who immortalised the Tudor court does not disappoint
Much of what we know, or think we know, about the court of Henry VIII comes directly from the paintings of Hans Holbein. There’s the famous portrait of the king himself – puffy, phallic and cruel, looking more like a murderer than a monarch. But there is also ascetic Thomas More, hiding his cruel streak behind fine bones, and sly yet thuggish Thomas Cromwell, with those shifty eyes and the beginnings of a double chin. “Hans the Painter” did the wives too – an appropriately sketchy drawing of Anne Boleyn, a saintly portrait of Jane Seymour who died after giving birth to Henry’s heir, and a pin-up version of Anne of Cleves.
It was this last portrait that caused an international incident in 1539 when Holbein was sent by Henry to the Low Countries to check whether Anne was pretty enough to be his next wife. Based on Holbein’s portrait, Henry committed to the marriage in absentia, only to be horrified when the actual Anne arrived on the Kentish coast, looking “nothing so fair as she hath been reported”. The union lasted six months.
Nervous flyer considered driving from Perth to Brisbane
Tourists yet to decide if Test players will play tour match
Mark Wood has considered driving straight from Perth to Brisbane – a 2,500 mile (4,000 km) journey over four days – just to fill the extra time created by the chastening start to England’s much-hyped Ashes moonshot.
Feral cats are already caught and killed in some areas but will now be subject to coordinated targeting, with large-scale eradication programs
New Zealand aims to eradicate feral cats by 2050, the country’s conservation minister has announced, in plans that a decade ago generated a fierce backlash from environmentalists.
The conservation minister, Tama Potaka, announced the addition of feral cats to the world-leading Predator-Free 2050 strategy on Friday, the first time a predator has been added to the list since its inception in 2016.
In the pounding heat of a sweaty basement, revellers danced till 6am posing in lavish outfits and flexing their thigh-high boots. Liz Johnson Artur relives how she photographed the anything-goes spirit of this DIY oasis
For more than three decades, Liz Johnson Artur has photographed “the people I’m with” – a characteristically modest expression that belies the radiance, intimacy and unshowy brilliance of her pictures, an extraordinary archive numbering thousands of images that celebrate beauty, resilience, community and resistance. Intimate and alive, her photographs – often shot on the fly, in streets, nightclubs and living rooms – pull you right into the moment, just before it disappears for good.
PDA, the photographer’s latest book, celebrates a bygone London underground music scene. PDA was a popular queer club night that ran monthly in a Hackney basement from 2011 to 2021. The abbreviation PDA did not stand for a single phrase, apparently. Rather, the founders playfully suggested it could stand for many things, including Public Display of Affection, Please Don’t Ask, and even Pretty Dick Available.
The England forward has made a decent start to his Emirates career but this performance was stick-it-on-a-mural stuff
Has there ever been a softer, more delicate act of derby day brutality than this, a hat-trick in a 4-1 win where every goal must have felt like being bludgeoned to death with a feather‑light Parisian macaron?
Eberechi Eze’s third goal, the killer, the legend-maker, was the funniest, and also the most telling. It was made by a thrust down the left, and by Leandro Trossard’s smart pass. But it was made as an aesthetic by Destiny Udogie falling over, not because of any real act of trickery, but because Eze stopped suddenly, out there in the middle of all that heat and light, taking the ball on the edge of the Spurs box and simply ceasing to move, like a squirrel on a branch.
Forward Trust patron says ‘compassion and love’ are needed to end fear and shame felt by those affected
The Princess of Wales has called for an end to the “stigma” surrounding addictions, saying the experiences of those dependent on drugs, alcohol or gambling are “shaped by fear, shame and judgment”.
Catherine, who is a patron of the charity Forward Trust supporting recovering addicts, said more open conversations were needed to bring the issue “out of the shadows” and for society to show “compassion and love” to those affected.
Let’s put aside the schooldays accusations and look, instead, at the Reform leader’s path since then. I think a pretty clear picture of the man emerges
When I see the allegations of racism against Nigel Farage from his schooldays, I can’t say I am greatly surprised. There are those who believe that the Reform UK leader’s persona must have been developed to win over working-class voters, or the “red wall”. I know that it is quite in keeping with the sentiments expressed by plenty of young men in elite institutions like English public schools – the kind of men who run the world.
Farage was educated at Dulwich college from 1975 to 1982; there, fellow students have told the Guardian, he allegedly used racist insults about fellow pupils and sang a song with the lyrics “Gas ’em all”. I attended Eton a couple of decades later, but the attitudes of some of the people I encountered there were not very different. One pupil, having fallen out with me over some perceived slight, boasted that his great-grandfather was a slave driver. A Jewish friend who was there with me at the same time told me how common it was to hear “Jew” or “rabbi” being used to describe anyone who was thought to be mean with their money. When I later saw Old Etonian Boris Johnson referring to black people as “piccaninnies” with “watermelon smiles”, I thought back to the peers of mine who would erupt into rants filled with racist stereotypes whenever they saw the West Indies cricket team on the TV.
Musa Okwonga is an author and football podcaster based in Berlin
Make-ahead caramelised shallot pasta, brothy vinegar noodles with mushrooms and sesame, and a super-savoury lamb ragu
To say this caramelised shallot pasta changed my life might be a bit dramatic,but it also might be true – then again, so many people love a little skillet of caramelised shallots, a tin of anchovies and a whole lot of tomato puree as much as I do. But, first, for me one of life’s greatest pleasures is a bowl of perfectly cooked, slippery udon or soba in a shallow pool of something salty and vinegary, eaten alone on a brief but well-deserved lunch break. These noodles are a homage to the countless solo lunches I’ve had at a variety of wonderful Japanese restaurants.
Sanae Takaichi gets no meeting with Chinese premier Li Qiang at the G20 in Johannesburg after her comments about Taiwan sent tensions soaring
When she selected her wardrobe for this weekend’s G20 summit in South Africa, Japan’s prime minister, Sanae Takaichi, took extra care to choose something that – in her words – would “give her the upper hand” in negotiations.
But she never got the opportunity to test the theory in what would have been her most pressing engagement – talks with the Chinese premier, Li Qiang, aimed at easing a deepening diplomatic row between the north-east Asian neighbours.
Actor who appeared in My Own Private Idaho, Blade, Armageddon and Dogville, as well as Madonna music videos and video games, died on Sunday
Udo Kier, the German actor who appeared in 275 roles across Hollywood and European cinema, including multiple films by Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Gus Van Sant and Lars von Trier, has died aged 81.
Kier died on Sunday morning, his partner Delbert McBride told Variety. The actor died in hospital in Palm Springs, California, his friend the photographer Michael Childers announced on social media. No cause of death was given.
In the wake of US strikes Tehran is exploring a softer diplomatic approach – even as its leaders fear further conflict and crackdowns intensify at home
Iran is taking its first faltering steps to boost its dismal soft power abilities, spotting a slim opening to improve regional relations after Donald Trump’s June bombing campaign and Israel’s attack on Hamas negotiators in Qatar unsettled Gulf states.
The tentative foreign policy tweaks are born in part of necessity: much of Iran’s network of regional military alliances has been dismantled in recent years. But there is also a feeling in Tehran that Trump’s trampling over international law gives it an opportunity to forge less disruptive alliances with Arab neighbours.
‘She is the daughter of immigrants,’ supporters of her cruel asylum policies say. ‘How can she be wrong?’ Let me put them straight
Over the past couple of weeks, Shabana Mahmood has launched not only her new asylum crackdown policy, but also her “story”. The two are inseparable: her story justifies the crackdown. It moralises the crackdown. And it silences criticism of the crackdown. Sold as an origin story from within an immigrant and racialised experience, the purpose is to imbue her politics with sacred authenticity – the credibility of the first person. It is clever and effective. It is cynical and disgraceful.
“I am the child of immigrants” is how Mahmood now starts her fable. Immigrants who came here legally. She goes on to tell us that immigration is tearing this country apart, and proposes policies that mean UK-born children, who have known no life anywhere else, will be deported. As she launches policies that will leave refugees homeless and without support, tear families apart, punish those legally in the country for claiming any benefits and make settlement and security a long and arduous process, Mahmood declares: “this is a moral mission for me”.
Two leading journalists from both sides of the border warn against another ‘vague, thumbs up-thumbs down’ vote
A decade after the UK stumbled into a hasty referendum that polarised the nation and unleashed chaos, a warning comes from across the Irish Sea: it could happen again.
The government and voters sleepwalked into Brexit and the same may happen with a referendum on a united Ireland, triggering convulsions for which no one is ready.
The Thor actor and his father try to stave off the latter’s symptoms by taking a road trip to old haunts. It becomes a moving treatise on the sadness of letting go of a parent
Celebrities are forever taking their parents on televised road trips, and they’re usually cheap, easy commissions. Look how self-deprecating I am, says the famous person as they try to award themselves national treasure status by moving into light-factual programming: the person who knows me best is about to mildly embarrass me on holiday!
Be assured that Chris Hemsworth: A Road Trip to Remember is a more serious endeavour. It features some intergenerational joshing as the guy from the Thor movies goes on a motorcycle ride with his old fella, but this is a journey filled with a wistful, desperate longing, towards a destination nobody can quite reach. Craig Hemsworth, 71, has early-stage Alzheimer’s. His mental faculties are starting to slip. But his boy is a Hollywood star, with the resources of a TV company behind him. Can he help?
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