‘Big Five’ country follows in the footsteps of Netherlands, Slovenia, Iceland and Ireland

‘There’s a lot of information I still don’t have about my condition,’ said the singer

Canadian pop star will be joined by fellow headliners Sabrina Carpenter and Karol G at the Empire Polo Club next spring

Singing legend underwent a double knee replacement in 2024

From flagrant nudity to cartoon bestiality, there are all sorts of reasons cover art can spark controversy. Kevin E G Perry picks some of the most memorable examples

Kiss star hailed Black Sabbath musician months after his death

Kiss star hailed Black Sabbath musician months after his death

Revered guitarist performed his first tour in nearly a decade, which included a show against the dramatic ruins in Rome

Singing legend underwent a double knee replacement in 2024

The singer’s album Man’s Best Friend bottles young women’s increasing sense of healthy relationships being out of reach

Sabrina Carpenter’s country-tinged synth-pop album Man’s Best Friend initially drew attention for its divisive album cover. But as masculinity researchers, we see her work differently. It’s a cultural marker of a wider phenomenon: young women’s increasing withdrawal from dating and committed relationships.

Carpenter bottles the palpable exasperation of young women’s experiences with emotionally unprepared partners. And her feelings show up in the data. Women are more likely than men to say dating is harder than it was 10 years ago and they are twice as likely to cite physical and emotional risk as the reason why. The disproportionate emotional labor placed on women in relationships, paired with rising economic insecurity, does not compute.

Caroline Hayes is a researcher and narrative strategist, specializing in the intersection of tech, culture and gender; Carolina Hidalgo-McCabe is an organizer, researcher and the host of The Masking Tapes, a podcast that explores 21st century masculinity and the gender divide; Alice Lassman is a policy expert, with her forthcoming book exploring how AI’s influence on gender and emotions are reshaping economic life.

‘A guy from our record company told me to take out the whistling. I said no way. When the song went through the roof, he came to me, bent over and said, “Kick my ass!”’

Being a West German band made playing the Soviet Union in the late 1980s particularly special. We’d grown up in a divided country and had tried many times to play in East Germany, but they would never let us in. When we did our first gig in what was then Leningrad, the atmosphere was a bit grey, not very colourful or rock’n’roll – but hearts started opening up over the course of the 10 gigs we did in the city. It ended up a bit like Beatlemania, with fans circling our cars after every show.

Bobby Hart created hits such as Last Train to Clarksville and I’m Not Your Steppin’ Stone

Pop singer and actor said she wants to focus on other projects, after launching the podcast with friend Miquita Oliver last year

What once seemed a pretty fringe subculture of hobbyists riffing on stories that got them privately hot is now bringing mainstream cinema to a rolling boil

There was a time when fan fiction meant furtive scribbles uploaded to shadowy corners of the internet, in which Mr Darcy was recast as a moody vampire flatmate, Captain Kirk discovered his inner romantic, or Gandalf finally got around to opening an artisanal shop in the Shire. It was an underground hobby that could never trouble Tinseltown’s accountants. And yet here we are in 2025, with the news in the Hollywood Reporter that Legendary Pictures has just paid at least $3m – (£2.2m) – an unprecedented amount – for the screen rights to a forthcoming novel called Alchemised that began life as an unauthorised and kinky Harry Potter spin-off.

The backstory behind Alchemised, by SenLinYu, sounds pretty freaky. SenLinYu’s original book, titled Manacled, inhabited a strange sub-niche of Potterverse named “Dramione” in which Hermione Granger finds herself regularly involved in unlikely and transgressive romantic encounters with Draco Malfoy. Now stripped of all reference to Hogwarts, butterbeer and Nimbus 2000s, and with renamed characters, Alchemised will hit shelves and online bookstores later this month as the dark fantasy tale of a young woman with memory problems who finds herself at the mercy of a powerful and cruel necromancer.

Lewis Capaldi has made a strong comeback after taking time out of music to focus on his mental health