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The Wax Child by Olga Ravn review – a visceral tale of witchcraft

The author of The Employees goes back to 17th-century Denmark for an intensely poetic portrait of everyday sorcery and female solidarity

On 26 June 1621, in Copenhagen, a woman was beheaded – which was unusual, but only in the manner of her death. According to one historian, during the years 1617 to 1625, in Denmark a “witch” was burned every five days. The first time this happens in Danish author Olga Ravn’s fourth novel, the condemned woman is “tied to the ladder, and the ladder pushed into the bonfire”. Her daughter watches as she falls, her eye “so strangely orange from within. And then in the heat it explodes.”

The child is watched, in turn, by a wax doll who sees everything: everything in this scene, and everything everywhere, through all space and all the time since it was fashioned. It sees the worms burrowing through the soil in which it is buried; the streets of the world in which it was made. It inhabits the bodies that walked those streets: “And I was in the king’s ear, and I was in the king’s mouth, and I was in the king’s loose tooth and in the quicksilver of his liver, and did hear.”

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© Photograph: Marie Hald/The Observer

© Photograph: Marie Hald/The Observer

© Photograph: Marie Hald/The Observer

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Feel a connection to a celebrity you don’t know? There’s a word for that

‘Parasocial’ crowned Cambridge Dictionary’s word of the year as ‘unhealthy’ relationships with celebrities rise

If you’re wondering why Taylor Swift didn’t respond to your social media post offering congratulations on her engagement, then Cambridge Dictionary has a word for you: parasocial.

Defined as “involving or relating to a connection that someone feels between themselves and a famous person they do not know”, parasocial has been chosen by the dictionary as its word of the year, as people turn to chatbots, influencers and celebrities to feel connection in their online lives.

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© Photograph: Ashley Landis/AP

© Photograph: Ashley Landis/AP

© Photograph: Ashley Landis/AP

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Untie me! Why big bows are everywhere – feminine, ironic and strangely subversive

They can be garish and ostentatious, or a sign you are softer than you might first appear. From the catwalk to the high street to the big screen to the rugby pitch, you just can’t miss them right now

Wuthering Heights is a story about pain, revenge and the Yorkshire moors as a metaphor for bad life choices. But if Emerald Fennell’s forthcoming adaptation is anything to go by, it’s also about bows.

In the two-minute trailer for the film, Cathy wears red bows and black bows, navy bows and pink bows. There are bows around garden pots, and bows around “baddy” Edgar Linton’s throat. Some bows flutter in the fell wind, others are unlaced at speed. In one memorable shot straight from the Jilly Cooper precoital playbook, a pretty white bow is cut from Cathy’s bodice using a labourer’s knife, which would be unforgivable hamminess were it not incredibly hot. Never mind that Emily Brontë rarely mentions bows in the book; that one is an entire plot device.

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© Photograph: Damson Madder

© Photograph: Damson Madder

© Photograph: Damson Madder

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The real Slim Shady? Eminem sues Australian company Swim Shady for trademark infringement

Eminem claims consumers may mistakenly think he is linked to the Sydney beach brand – but Australia is no stranger to lawsuits from US rappers

Eminem has launched legal action against the Australian beach brand Swim Shady, alleging its name is too close to that of his trademarked alter ego, Slim Shady.

The 53-year-old rapper, real name Marshall B Mathers III, filed a petition to cancel Swim Shady’s US trademark days after it was successfully granted by the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) in September.

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© Photograph: Aaron J Thornton/Getty Images

© Photograph: Aaron J Thornton/Getty Images

© Photograph: Aaron J Thornton/Getty Images

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Men of the Manosphere review – a truly terrifying hour

Mortified documentarian James Blake meets young men who have drifted towards misogynist influencers – and finds them lonely, heartbreaking and on ‘semen retention journeys’ to control their sex drives

Just as you can accurately measure the quality of a documentary about pornography by the number of examples of its subject that it does not show, so too you can judge a programme about “incel” culture/the manosphere/toxic masculinity by the amount of time it does not devote to the noxious leaders of the subculture. Porn documentary makers often seem to use their commission to indulge their own murky fascinations, or at the very least fill the screen with naked women as an easier way to hook viewers than constructing a decent programme. Similarly, stuffing any programme with footage of the poster boys’ diatribes, generally about pussies (female, metonymically; males metaphorically), power and the need for men to wield one over the other is a titillating opportunity and an easy shortcut to engagement.

Belfast broadcaster James Blake admirably avoids this trap in his hour-long film Men of the Manosphere. It has snippets of the loudest, vilest voices, doing their loudest, vilest thing, telling young, disaffected, vulnerable men what they want to hear: that the problems in their lives are the fault of women, feminism, woke society, beta men and anyone who is not full of ambition, independent spirit and willing to subscribe to the influencer’s latest course on how to be a successful man. If you have spotted any inconsistencies here, you are probably a blue-pilled cuck and not the target market, so please move along.

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© Photograph: PHOTOGRAPHER:/CREDIT LINE:Strident

© Photograph: PHOTOGRAPHER:/CREDIT LINE:Strident

© Photograph: PHOTOGRAPHER:/CREDIT LINE:Strident

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Fiume o Morte! review – darkly comic reconstruction of D’Annunzio’s Yugoslavian coup

Igor Bezinović uses local residents of what is now Rijeka in Croatia to re-stage the vainglorious Italian protofascist’s ragtag takeover of the Adriatic port city

This intriguing documentary from Croatian film-maker Igor Bezinović is partly a comic opera and partly a chilling message from the past. It is about Bezinović’s hometown of Rijeka, a port on the Adriatic which after the first world war was the site of one of the 20th century’s strangest episodes, whose key moments the director stages through re-enactments with locals. The film is in effect a protofascist Passport to Pimlico.

In 1918, this city, with its significant ethnic Italian population, was known as Fiume and was formerly ruled by the recently destroyed Habsburgs. After the war it was not absorbed into the victorious Italian nation as many expected but left under the control of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes (whose name was later changed to Yugoslavia). Enraged by this betrayal, hothead Italian aristocrat, poet and cocaine addict Gabriele D’Annunzio led a bizarre insurgency with 186 mercenaries or “legionaries”, with whom he carried out a sub-Napoleonic landing in Fiume and established it as a kind of pro-Italian city state under his absolute control.

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© Photograph: Publicity image

© Photograph: Publicity image

© Photograph: Publicity image

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Ninajirachi started making music because of YouTube. Now she’s up for eight Aria awards

The 26-year-old’s debut album I Love My Computer has already netted her some of Australia’s most prestigious prizes – and it’s all about the delight and depravity of growing up on the internet

Ninajirachi is having a dream run with her debut album I Love My Computer – and between leading this year’s Aria nominations with eight nods and the rapturous crowds at sold-out shows, she knows it.

“I want to live up this one before I move on, because it might be hard to come back to this headspace and time,” says Nina Wilson. “I don’t want to rush into the future.”

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© Photograph: Billy Zammit

© Photograph: Billy Zammit

© Photograph: Billy Zammit

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The joyful world of Kaylene Whiskey: the Indigenous artist pulling Dolly Parton and Wonder Woman into the outback

Forget hushed, white-walled reverence: Whiskey’s new exhibition at Canberra’s National Portrait Gallery erupts in celebration. Expect big colour, big mischief, big joy

Kaylene Whiskey’s sneakers are so silver they’re making the light dance. She’s wearing one of her signature jumpers and sparkly Christmas earrings. The gleefully bold Yankunytjatjara artist is ready for a party, and she’s brought that mood to the National Portrait Gallery (NPG) for the launch of Super Kaylene Whiskey. Forget hushed, white-walled reverence: this showcase exhibition erupts in celebration. Big colour, big mischief, big joy.

It demands a soundtrack, and there is one: Cher, Abba, David Bowie, Boney M. And Dolly Parton, of course – always and forever Dolly. When she’s painting, Whiskey cranks up the music and works 9 to 5, Dolly-style.

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© Photograph: Hilary Wardhaugh/The Guardian

© Photograph: Hilary Wardhaugh/The Guardian

© Photograph: Hilary Wardhaugh/The Guardian

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