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One bizarre expression after another: DiCaprio’s viral moment won the Golden Globes

Famously serious Oscar-winner gave rare insight into what might be the real Leo with his commercial break antics

The fact that nobody really knows anything about Leonardo DiCaprio is well-established at this point. Indeed, the best joke of Nikki Glaser’s Golden Globes monologue last night revolved around that fact that DiCaprio gives so little of himself away that the only things she could find to joke about him were his notoriously younger girlfriends and an obscure magazine interview he gave when he was 17, where he announced that his favourite food was “pasta, pasta and more pasta”.

However, DiCaprio then went and instantly gave some of himself away. A camera remained on him during a commercial break, and it caught him giving one of the most flamboyant demonstrations of his personality ever seen.

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© Photograph: Alessandro Galatoli/ZUMA Press Wire/Shutterstock

© Photograph: Alessandro Galatoli/ZUMA Press Wire/Shutterstock

© Photograph: Alessandro Galatoli/ZUMA Press Wire/Shutterstock

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British Library acquires archive of rural life writer and essayist Ronald Blythe

Exclusive: Collection includes workbooks and index cards, and papers that show his research for bestseller Akenfield

One hundred years of a unique literary rural life will be made available to readers and researchers after the British Library acquired the archive of Ronald Blythe.

The author of Akenfield, a globally bestselling account of a Suffolk village in the throes of the agricultural and social revolution at the end of the 1960s, lived and wrote in East Anglia until his death in 2023 at the age of 100.

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© Photograph: Eamonn McCabe/The Guardian

© Photograph: Eamonn McCabe/The Guardian

© Photograph: Eamonn McCabe/The Guardian

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Newly discovered ‘Port Talbot Pompeii’ may have been Roman centre for agriculture

Academics say the villa, found in Welsh deer park, shows the area was not on fringes of Roman empire

Over the last 100 years or so, a characterful but tough corner of south Wales has become best known for its steelworks and coalmines. But the discovery of the footprint of a large Roman villa in a country park on the outskirts of Port Talbot gives an intriguing fresh insight into life here centuries before heavy industry took hold.

Found below the surface of Margam country park and close to the M4, the presence of the villa – which has been labelled “Port Talbot’s Pompeii” – suggests the area was not on the fringes of the Roman empire but very much part of it and may have been an important agricultural centre.

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© Photograph: Swansea University

© Photograph: Swansea University

© Photograph: Swansea University

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Brutal, vibrant and creative: capturing the soul of Latin America in 100 photographs

The journalist Paulo Antonio Paranaguá uses images from the turbulent continent to weave a history of the region, covering colonisation, slavery and dictatorship

Its tumultuous past, marked by massacres, slavery, violent domination, coups d’état, revolutions and uprisings, often overshadows another narrative of Latin America: that of a vibrant, culturally rich region where art, creativity and solidarity hold a central place in society.

Throughout its post-Columbian history – the period after Christopher Columbus’s arrival in the Americas in 1492 – Latin America has grappled with the tension between subjugation to colonial and imperial powers, resistance and the pursuit of independence.

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© Photograph: Susan Meiselas/© Susan Meiselas/Magnum Photos

© Photograph: Susan Meiselas/© Susan Meiselas/Magnum Photos

© Photograph: Susan Meiselas/© Susan Meiselas/Magnum Photos

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Truckin’ on: Bob Weir of the Grateful Dead’s 10 best recordings

From 46-minute jams to MTV video hits, here are the freedom-loving Dead guitarist and singer’s finest songs about ‘rainbows of sound’ and ‘enjoying the ride’

Bob Weir, co-founder of rock group the Grateful Dead, dies at age 78
Alexis Petridis: ‘Bob Weir was the chief custodian of the Dead’s legacy’
Aaron Dessner: ‘I’ll never forget playing with him’

The Dead’s love for the road is in evidence on this segment from That’s It for the Other One, the four-part opening track of their second LP, Anthem of the Sun. A rare Bob Weir-penned lyric details the Dead’s youngest member being busted by the cops “for smiling on a cloudy day” – referencing a real-life incident when Weir pelted police with water balloons as they conducted what he took to be illegal searches outside the group’s Haight-Ashbury hangout. It then connects with the band’s spiritual forebears the Merry Pranksters by referencing Neal Cassady, driver of “a bus to never-ever land”. The song later evolved into The Other One, one of the Dead’s most played tunes and a launchpad for their exploratory jams – as in this languid, brilliant version at San Francisco’s Winterland in 1974.

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© Photograph: ExclusiveAccess.Net/Shutterstock

© Photograph: ExclusiveAccess.Net/Shutterstock

© Photograph: ExclusiveAccess.Net/Shutterstock

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Four months and 40 hours later: my epic battle with 2025’s most difficult video game

When Hollow Knight: Silksong came out last summer I was in so much pain that I didn’t know if I’d be able to play it. Could a video game teach me anything new about suffering?

Last year I became uncomfortably well acquainted with suffering. In March I started experiencing excruciating pain in my right arm and shoulder – burning, zapping, energy-sapping pain that left me unable to think straight, emanating from a nexus of torment behind my shoulder blade and sometimes stretching all the way up to the base of my skull and all the way down into my fingers. Typing was agony, but everything was painful; even at rest it was horrible. I couldn’t play my guitar; I couldn’t play video games; I couldn’t sleep. I learned how quickly physical suffering lacerates your mental wellbeing.

I’d had episodes of nagging pain from so-called repetitive strain injuries before, the product of long hours hunched over laptops and game controllers over the course of decades, but nothing like this. A few months later, after the initial unrelenting agony had subsided to a permanent hum of more moderate pain, it was diagnosed as brachial neuritis, inflammation of the nerve path that travels from the base of your neck down to your hand. (Nobody knows what causes it, but it sometimes happens after an infection or an injury.) The good news, I was told by a neurologist, was that it usually gets better in about one to three years, and I hadn’t lost any function in my right hand. The bad news was that there was nothing much to be done about the pain in the meantime.

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© Photograph: Team Cherry

© Photograph: Team Cherry

© Photograph: Team Cherry

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‘A celebration of the carefree’: why Ferris Bueller’s Day Off is my feelgood movie

The latest in our series of writers celebrating their favourite comfort watches is an ode to John Hughes’s 1980s classic

It’s hard to ignore a film’s message when the main character is addressing you directly down the barrel of the camera. Granted, the first time I watched the 1986 teen comedy Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, I was the impressionable age of 11 and “Look people in the eyes when they’re talking to you” was on constant rotation in my household. So my green eyes met Ferris’s brown ones and I took it all in.

Centred around Matthew Broderick’s playful turn as Ferris Bueller, a high school senior faking illness to skip school, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off is certainly a celebration of the carefree, though the story is by no means languid. Made frantic by doing the thing you’re not supposed to do with the aid of a red Ferrari, the day speeds by in comparison to the fictional days of other American teen films, such as American Graffiti and Dazed & Confused – which, to be fair, features a decent amount of marijuana.

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© Photograph: Cinetext Bildarchiv/Paramount/Allstar

© Photograph: Cinetext Bildarchiv/Paramount/Allstar

© Photograph: Cinetext Bildarchiv/Paramount/Allstar

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