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Can we afford to be afraid of nuclear power?

Not only is nuclear essential if we want to reach net zero – it’s the key to tackling poverty, too

Money can buy comfort, but energy makes comfort possible in the first place. Energy is the great enabler of the modern world. It connects the globe by moving people and hauling goods. It loosens the grip of the weather by warming our homes in winter and cooling them in summer. It forges the steel that raises our cities and synthesises the fertilisers that keep half the world’s population from starvation. It increasingly empowers us by electrifying the technologies we rely on daily.

It is also the great enabler of socioeconomic development. Monetary wealth and energy abundance move in lockstep: plot a graph of GDP per capita against energy consumption per capita, and you’ll draw a straight line. Low-energy, high-income nations do not exist. Prosperity and energy are inseparable; you cannot have one without the other.

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© Illustration: Elia Barbieri/The Guardian

© Illustration: Elia Barbieri/The Guardian

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Butler by Salena Zito review – how Trump won America’s heartland

From the site of the failed assassination comes a sharp-eyed account of Trump’s political gains – and Democrats’ failings

The Democrats’ famed blue wall is more the stuff of nostalgia than reality. On election day 2024, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin voted for Donald Trump for the second time in three elections. Barack Obama’s upstairs-downstairs coalition lies in ruins, as Democrats struggle to connect with working-class voters across racial and ethnic lines.

Last November, Trump came within just three points of winning a majority of Latino voters. Such Americans walked away from their presumed political home – in droves. A Trump endorsement by Roberto Clemente Jr, son of the late Pittsburgh Pirates baseball star, was a harbinger. Likewise, Trump posted double-digit gains among Catholics and Jews, once core constituencies in the Democratic party of FDR.

Butler is published in the US by Hachette

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© Photograph: Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images

© Photograph: Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images

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Paula Bomer: ‘If you describe yourself as a victim, you’re dismissed’

Having made waves as part of the alt-lit movement, the US author is poised to go mainstream with The Stalker, her most exhilarating work yet

When I arrive at Paula Bomer’s apartment building in south Brooklyn I am briefly disoriented in the lobby, until I hear the yapping of dogs and amid them, her voice calling my name. Bomer is tall and striking, in her mid-50s. I met her last year at a reading in Williamsburg, Virginia, where she seemed like someone who cared almost manically about literature and also like someone who would be fun to hang out with, two qualities not always confluent. I had heard of these anxious dogs before, when she and I met for dinner a few months ago, and she disclosed that her life was now spent managing canine neuroses.

“I got them when my dad died,” she says, in between offering me matcha, coffee, tequila or wine (it’s 2.30pm on a Sunday; Bomer doesn’t drink any more, save a glass of champagne on selling her book, but doesn’t mind if others do). “The dogs were a mistake,” she says, “But that’s OK, I’ll survive it.”

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© Photograph: Benedict Evans

© Photograph: Benedict Evans

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The radical 1960s schools experiment that created a whole new alphabet – and left thousands of children unable to spell

Decades ago, a generation of UK schoolchildren unwittingly took part in an initiative aimed at boosting reading skills – with lasting consequences

Throughout my life, my mum has always been a big reader. She was in three or four book clubs at the same time. She’d devour whatever texts my siblings and I were studying in school, handwrite notes for our lunchboxes and write in her diary every night. Our fridge door was a revolving display of word-of-the-day flashcards. Despite this, she also was and remains, by some margin, the worst speller I have met.

By the time I was in primary school, she was already asking me to proofread her work emails, often littered with mistakes that were glaringly obvious to me even at such a young age. It used to baffle me – how could this person, who races through multiple books a week and can quote Shakespeare faultlessly, possibly think “me” is spelt with two Es?

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© Illustration: The Guardian

© Illustration: The Guardian

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Who preserves the homes of Black literary giants | Nneka M Okona

Langston Hughes and Toni Morrison’s childhood homes remain unmarked – raising urgent questions about legacy and preservation

Nothing could prepare me for seeing the house that Langston Hughes, the heralded Harlem Renaissance poet, author, journalist and traveler, lived in as a teenager in Cleveland, Ohio. Only eight steps separated me from the walkway that led to the front door as my Uber driver idled behind me. I clasped my camera in my hand, the shutter echoing in the quiet of a snowy February day. I looked more like a too-curious-tourist than a concerned writer researching the literary legacy of a man who had inspired me all my life.

The house was ordinary, painted in an aging beige that was deepened with crisp, burgundy accents. At the top in an attic space the burgundy was most prominent. I’d learned before this visit that Hughes had lived and written there. I’d also known going into this trip that the house had at one point been at risk of being demolished, efforts that were subverted largely in part due to local librarian Christopher Bucka-Peck’s intervention.

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© Composite: Nneka M Okona, Getty Images

© Composite: Nneka M Okona, Getty Images

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‘We’re told to be polite and small and dainty. But that’s not me!’: Megan Stalter on starring in Lena Dunham’s new romcom, Too Much

Her kooky online skits brought her viral fame and a breakout role in HBO’s Hacks. Then Lena Dunham came calling with the job of a lifetime. Is the actor ready to take centre stage?

When Lena Dunham messaged, Megan Stalter lost it. “Like d’uhh,” Stalter is explaining – delighting, really. “Who wouldn’t? I was at home: this really bad apartment in Laurel Canyon [in the Hollywood Hills]. The area is haunted, and it was actually a really scary building, and nothing ever got fixed because apparently in the lease I signed they didn’t have to repair anything! I don’t actually live there now …” Stalter, 34, has a tendency to wander off on tangents. So Dunham?

“OK yes, so we were just about to start filming Hacks again.” The wildly popular, 48-times-Emmy-nominated HBO comedy in which Stalter plays nepo-baby Kayla, a chaotic and kind-hearted talent agent, her total-commitment-to-the-bit characterisation making her a breakout star. “And there Lena was in my DMs.” Stalter opened the message, which said: “I have a project I want to talk to you about.” “That’s when I lost my mind,” she adds. “Panic set in.”

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© Photograph: Nolwen Cifuentes/The Guardian

© Photograph: Nolwen Cifuentes/The Guardian

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‘The best song to have sex to? Anything by Marvin Gaye. Nothing by Rick Astley’: Rick Astley’s honest playlist

The pop veteran works up a sweat to Biffy Clyro and recognises the dancefloor power of Abba, but which Kylie banger hits a little too close to home?

The first song I fell in love with
I’ve got two older brothers and an older sister. My sister played the grooves out of Big Yellow Taxi by Joni Mitchell. When I got my chance, I’d put on I Wan’na Be like You from The Jungle Book.

The song I do at karaoke
Tale As Old As Time from the Beauty and the Beast soundtrack, even though it’s a duet. My daughter Emilie is 33, but when she’s home, we’ll watch a Disney film together. She turns into a five-year-old, I turn into a young dad and it’s just lovely.

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© Photograph: Antonio Olmos/The Observer

© Photograph: Antonio Olmos/The Observer

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Reboots and remakes: why is Hollywood stuck on repeat?

As Jurassic World: Rebirth and 28 Years Later become the latest franchise titles to hit the big screen, movie fans are realising a depressing truth

On Monday, the director of the new Jurassic Park movie explained his aim for the seventh film in the series. Innovation it was not. Rather, said Gareth Edwards, it was karaoke. To prepare, he binged Steven Spielberg clips on repeat, hoping to accomplish genre cloning.

“I was trying,” he told BBC’s Front Row, “to make it feel nostalgic. The goal was that it should feel like Universal Studios went into their vaults and found a reel of film, brushed the dust off and it said: Jurassic World: Rebirth.

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© Photograph: ILM/Amblin/Universal/Kobal/REX/Shutterstock

© Photograph: ILM/Amblin/Universal/Kobal/REX/Shutterstock

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Black Sabbath and Ozzy Osbourne: Back to the Beginning review – all-star farewell to the gods of metal is epic and emotional

Villa Park, Birmingham
The biggest names in rock, from Metallica to Slayer, came to pay tribute to the men who created their entire genre – and even in old age, Sabbath’s sound has bludgeoning force

Fireworks burst over Villa Park’s pitch, Black Sabbath wave goodbye, and the inventors of metal leave the stage for the final time. It has not been an epic show – just War Pigs, NIB, Iron Man and Paranoid – but is the farewell this extraordinary band deserve, with an undercard of stadium-fillers and festival headliners come to pay tribute.

The returning Bill Ward adds the swing other Sabbath drummers have never managed, Tony Iommi churns out those monstrous riffs, Geezer Butler flits around them on bass, and Ozzy Osbourne … is Ozzy Osbourne, a baffled and discomfited force of nature.

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© Photograph: Black Sabbath/Ross Halfin

© Photograph: Black Sabbath/Ross Halfin

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James May: ‘When I’m mistaken for Jeremy Clarkson, I have to go home and examine myself very deeply’

The TV presenter on his disdain for sandwiches, dying in space and why his pub is better than Clarkson’s

James May. But what would James Definitely Not?

All sorts of things. Skydiving. Morris dancing. Living as a monk. Agricultural work. Being a high court judge. Anything that involves dressing up. I’m not too fussy about food. I can’t think of anything I wouldn’t eat, although I have a strange ambivalence about broccoli. I can’t make my mind up about it and it infuriates people. People say: you’re not doing it properly. I think: how do you know how I’m doing it? I’ve heard you can roast it with bits of bacon, garlic and olive oil. In which case, it’s not only broccoli any more, is it?

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© Photograph: Tatiana Marchant/Estellar PR

© Photograph: Tatiana Marchant/Estellar PR

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