Big farmers grab the lion’s share of US government support, and recent cuts have chipped away at small growers’ markets and margins

The most significant food system failure since the pandemic was not a natural disaster: in October, the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) announced the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (Snap) was temporarily suspended for the month of November due to the government shutdown

More than 40 million people had to ration food, skip meals and make sacrifices we might associate with the Great Depression, not 21st-century America. Churches, community groups and neighbors sprang into action. They checked on single moms juggling multiple jobs, elderly friends living alone, people with disabilities and large families with children too young for school lunch programs. And though food stamps were restored, the Trump administration is now threatening to pull Snap funds from Democratic-led states.

This year’s edition of the Florida-based art gathering is spearheaded by artists from Brazil, Mexico, Argentina and Panama

Whether it’s literally bringing Panamanian soil to Miami, or subverting the messages of Mexican religious cults by appropriating their iconography into tile murals dripping with sexual innuendo, Latin American artists at Art Basel Miami Beach this year are finding ways to reinvent their cultural heritage as surprising and fantastic pieces of art.

Mexican artist Renata Petersen, originally from the metropolis Guadalajara, has outfitted her Art Basel booth with three collections that may at first appear disconnected – intricate murals made from tiles and covered slogans and iconography, 80 chrome-blown glass works that look slightly like chess pieces but are actually derived from sex toys, and ceramic vases sporting carefully arranged motifs. For Petersen, these works spring from a childhood lived with her anthropologist mother, where she learned to look at cults and other religious movements with a detached eye.

Hardish Virk uses photography, film, music and his family’s memorabilia to tell a wider story of migration and community resilience

As you enter the living room at the Stories That Made Us exhibition, a stereo plays the Hindi anthem Yeh Dosti Hum Nahi Todenge. It is a ballad celebrating friendship and love from the epic film Sholay. Beside the stereo sits a bottle of Johnnie Walker and a red glass decanter. On the table are copies of the Punjabi newspaper Des Pardes, which translates as “home and abroad”.

The scene, which depicts the childhood home of the Coventry-born curator and artist Hardish Virk, is one of several spaces in an immersive exhibition at the city’s Herbert Art Gallery & Museum. It traces four decades of the experiences of south Asians as they arrived and adapted to the social, political and cultural changes in modern Britain.

Le lancement, fin novembre 2025, par Amazon de doublages d’anime générés par IA en anglais a déclenché une tempête, entre fans scandalisés, acteurs de doublage indignés et extraits moqués en masse sur les réseaux sociaux. Face aux critiques, la plateforme a rapidement fait marche arrière.

La série d'espionnage de Netflix cartonne à chaque nouvelle saison, depuis 2023. Mais une suite est-elle prévue pour The Night Agent et si oui, quand pourrons-nous la découvrir sur nos écrans ?

Moins d'un an après sa saison 2, la série d'espionnage s'apprête à tout exploser sur son passage avec de nouveaux épisodes très attendus. Et bonne nouvelle pour les fans : on sait enfin quand nous allons pouvoir découvrir la saison 3 de The Night Agent sur Netflix.

Late-night hosts discussed outrage over Hegseth’s authorization of extrajudicial killings near Venezuela and Trump’s cabinet meeting naps

Late-night hosts tore into Pete Hegseth’s Venezuelan boat blame game, Donald Trump’s cabinet meeting naps and the annual Spotify Wrapped lists.

The guitarist for Booker T & the MGs defined the sound of original R&B, co-creating soul anthems and proving himself one of the most influential musicians of the 60s

• Steve Cropper, legendary guitarist for Booker T & the MGs, dies aged 84

Steve Cropper stood at the side of musical legends and toiled in the shadows of the studio, never a star. But his work with his fellow musicians and singers at Stax Records in Memphis, Tennessee, established him as one of the most creative and influential musicians of the 1960s.

Actually, pretty much every rock icon of that fabled decade looked up to Cropper, who has died aged 84. The Beatles seriously considered recording at Stax, and the Stones covered songs he played on and emulated his crisp rhythm and lead guitar playing. As a jobbing musician in 1964, Jimi Hendrix drove from Nashville to Memphis to meet Cropper (they chatted about guitars and jammed), while Janis Joplin insisted her new band play Stax’s Christmas party so as to rub shoulders with Cropper and co. Across the world, garage bands played songs he had helped to shape.

La série d'espionnage de Netflix cartonne à chaque nouvelle saison, depuis 2023. Mais une suite est-elle prévue pour The Night Agent et si oui, quand pourrons-nous la découvrir sur nos écrans ?

This Palme d’Or-winning drama arrives in the same week its director was handed a prison sentence

Oscar-winning filmmaker recently labeled the ‘There Will Be Blood’ star’s performance ‘weak’

A number of major artists have released material on cassette this year

‘Needs keeping an eye on,’ the former ‘One Show’ host said

The actor Paul Hilton brilliantly inhabits the character of a ranting working-class academic in this debut novel

Some books feel so suited to the audio format that they could have been written with the voice in mind. All My Precious Madness is one of those. Mark Bowles’s debut novel, which won the audiobook fiction category at the inaugural British Audio awards (where, full disclosure, I was a judge), is a deliciously sweary monologue from a middle-aged malcontent.

A sideways reflection on working-class identity and masculinity, the novel gives voice to Henry Nash, a man of little patience. Sitting in a London coffee shop and trying to write a monograph of his father, he rains judgment on the other patrons whose obnoxious phone calls he can’t help but overhear. An Oxford graduate turned writer and academic, Nash lives in a Soho flat where he has been known to furtively drop eggs on passersby who disturb him with their drunken racket.

The Nash Ensemble
(Onyx)
The chamber group’s all-Ravel CD is an impeccable farewell to its much-missed founder

This all-Ravel recording by the Nash Ensemble was the final project of Amelia Freedman’s extraordinary 60 years as artistic director, and it’s a fitting farewell to the group’s much-missed founder, who died in July. It includes all three larger chamber works plus the composer’s own two-piano arrangement of his orchestral masterpiece La Valse: Alasdair Beatson and Simon Crawford-Phillips are a polished team in this, sounding wonderfully louche early on and then dispatching fistfuls of notes and long glissandos with seeming ease, all while catching the music’s increasingly sinister nature.

The 1905 Introduction and Allegro was a commission from a harp manufacturer, intended to make their instrument sound good – which it duly does as played by Lucy Wakeford, although what is most striking is the way the seven instruments coalesce and separate to create kaleidoscopic textural interest. Indeed, as confirmed by their quicksilver, sometimes excitably fierce String Quartet and especially by their vibrant performance of the Piano Trio, it’s the attention to the details of colour and tone that really makes these performances take flight, the instruments combining to catch the dazzling light and intriguing shade that are such intrinsic features of Ravel’s music.

The box office smash of Halloween 2023 gets a shoddily made follow-up written carelessly and devoid of an actual ending

The ghost-possessed family-restaurant animatronics of the Five Nights at Freddy’s movies lumber around with such heavy-footed gaucherie that it’s hard to figure out how they’re physically able to move from place to place as quickly as they’d need to for a proper killing spree. In what could be mistaken for a case of form following function, Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 moves the exact same way. It’s so ostentatiously awkward that it constantly draws attention to its inept imitations of actions that other movies, even bad ones, intuitively understand – like making transitions between scenes or locations.

For example, when faced with the need to isolate a mean science teacher (Wayne Knight) so that he can be vengefully murdered by one of the aforementioned animatronics, Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 bafflingly cuts to him walking down a school hallway (during a science fair that has inexplicably run far into a Saturday evening), having a cellphone conversation about how he needs to visit his office to retrieve his keys. The keys themselves, the location of his office, and the unseen person on the other end of the phone have no meaning in the greater story, not even nominally. They’re just a jumble of elements that the film-makers grasp at, under the assumption that it will add up to something that looks and sounds like a movie should.

From Ewan Roy in Succession to Sideshow Bob in The Simpsons, here are 15 truly unforgettable characters who elevated their shows – when they eventually turned up

Mike Hannigan was the only character to truly feel like a seventh Friend. He was the perfect match for Phoebe, a lightning rod for her kookiness and providing the solid family she’d never had. It wasn’t just the fact that he was played by Paul Rudd that managed to win over the viewers. His profile was nowhere near what it would later become, so the audience weren’t responding to star power in the same way they had, say, to Bruce Willis, Tom Selleck or Reese Witherspoon. Mike had to play the long game, put in the graft and win Phoebe’s trust, and won ours in the process. AJ, London

The actor on playing Draco Malfoy, all-night fishing with his brother and taking a beating from Chadwick Boseman

Who is your favourite other school bully: Donovan from The Inbetweeners, Biff Tannen from Back to the Future, Heather Chandler from Heathers, Nelson Muntz from The Simpsons or Gripper Stebson from Grange Hill? Dr_J_A_Zoidberg
I have so much compassion for Draco [Malfoy], knowing that he is the result of piss-poor parenting on his father’s side. I know James Buckley from The Inbetweeners very well. His character is an example of a comedic bully. But as a lifelong fan of The Simpsons, I’m going to have to say my favourite is Nelson Muntz.

What’s the biggest fish you’ve ever caught? TopTramp
A 37lb 4oz common carp caught on the St Lawrence river in New York state 15 years ago. Chris, my older brother, got me into fishing, while he was my chaperone on Harry Potter. My mum chaperoned me for the first film, and my grandfather for the second. He looked so much like a wizard that [director] Chris Columbus cast him at the teachers’ table next to Dumbledore. Then my brother was commandeered. He was one of the worst chaperones in history – all he seemed to do was sleep the entire day – but that’s probably because we’d been up all night, fishing. Some days we’d leave set at 6pm, drive two hours back to Surrey where we lived, go straight to a lake, cast our rods, set up a tent, sleep – barely – for a few hours, wake at 6am, pack up, and head straight back to Hogwarts. It was a great introduction to a lifelong passion of being outdoors, fishing and walking the dogs.

Anthony Hopkins and Kathy Burke on acting, Jacinda Ardern and Nicola Sturgeon on politics, plus Margaret Atwood on a life well lived

Not all memoirists are keen to share their life stories. For Margaret Atwood, an author who has sold more than 40m books, the idea of writing about herself seemed “Dead boring. Who wants to read about someone sitting at a desk messing up blank sheets of paper?” Happily, she did it anyway. Book of Lives: A Memoir of Sorts (Chatto & Windus) is a 624-page doorstopper chronicling Atwood’s life and work, and a tremendous showcase for her wisdom and wit. Helen Garner’s similarly chunky, Baillie Gifford prize-winning How to End a Story (Weidenfeld & Nicolson) is a diary collection spanning 20 years and provides piquant and puckish snapshots of the author’s life, work and her unravelling marriages. Mixing everyday observation and gossipy asides with profound self-examination, it is spare in style and utterly moreish.

In Arundhati Roy’s Mother Mary Comes to Me (Hamish Hamilton) and Jung Chang’s Fly, Wild Swans (William Collins), formidable mothers get top billing. In the former, The God of Small Things author reveals how her mother, whose own father was a violent drunk, stood up to the patriarchy and campaigned for women’s rights, but was cruel to her daughter. Describing her as “my shelter and my storm”, Roy reflects on Mary’s contradictions with candour and compassion. Fly, Wild Swans is the sequel to Chang’s bestselling Wild Swans, picking up where its predecessor left off and reflecting how that book was only made possible by the author’s mother, who shared family stories and kept her London-dwelling daughter apprised of events in China.

He’ll be forever known for his festive hit, but Wood was virtually the face of 70s glam rock – writing and performing stomping hits with the Move, ELO and Wizzard

Roy Wood occasionally wrote for others – psych fans should check the Acid Gallery’s splendid 1969 single Dance Round the Maypole – and the single he made with girlfriend Ayshea Brough, an early 70s TV presenter, exemplifies his idiosyncratic pop skills and his kitchen-sink approach to arrangement: kettle drums! More oboe!