‘Huge parts of the city were being destroyed. This was part of my attempt to preserve the whole damn thing. The area became a juvenile prison’

I landed in America in 1965 from Chile. I literally arrived on a banana boat. I went to the University of Notre Dame in the midwest and then to Columbia in New York. I had a teacher – also a photographer – who taught foreign students to write and speak better English. I would try to write poetry, which he thought was terrible. I’d never taken a picture before but he encouraged me to try photography and offered to lend me the money for a Pentax Spotmatic he’d seen for sale downtown. After that, I would just walk around New York with it and take photos. It quickly became clear to me how divided the city was. Half was white and the other half was Black and Latino. There was tremendous segregation.

Columbia was very prosperous. The students were well off and many were the sons of extremely rich people. I felt out of place. Also, there’s just a huge sense of loss when you leave your country and you don’t know anybody and are on your own. It made me want to look at what else was going on: to see the other side and the underside of the city. I found it easily because, in the late 60s and early 70s, deindustrialisation was going on. Big companies and car plants were shutting down and there were huge job losses and store closures. That contrast resonated with me. My family had lost a lot of money. The first part of my life was about seeing things disappear and having to make do with less and less. I was interested to see that in the US.

What began as a welcoming home for many in the global Black diaspora is threatening to cause frictions that no amount of fun can resolve

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Hello and welcome to The Long Wave. It is now unmistakably post-holiday season, and in some parts of Africa, the last of the “Detty December” revellers are packing their bags. The few weeks of heavy partying that attract Black diaspora travellers from all over the world have been a fixture on the calendars of cities such as Lagos and Accra for almost a decade. But this year, it feels as if the darker sides of the festivities are encroaching on the year-end celebrations. Have we reached peak “Detty December”?

A party scene has taken off on the African coastlines. In less than a decade, an annual gathering, increasingly attracting members of the Black diaspora, grew large enough to gain its own name. “Detty December” is a tongue-in-cheek reference to the untrammelled fun, indulgence and even debauchery of the holiday party season. Festivals, concerts and club events, from Ghana and Nigeria to Kenya, receive an influx of local and global guests who now make a regular pilgrimage to beaches, bars, restaurants and nightclubs across Africa that are firmly south of, or on the equator, to enjoy boiling temperatures and blue skies, leaving behind the need to shelter and shiver through the northern winter.

Agatha Christie’s Seven Dials star Mia McKenna-Bruce has revealed that she filmed one of the Netflix series' most energetic scenes with a broken foot.

Agatha Christie’s Seven Dials star Mia McKenna-Bruce has revealed that she filmed one of the Netflix series' most energetic scenes with a broken foot.

A sociologist talks to the people putting their faith – and their hearts – in the hands of robots

If much of the discussion of AI risk conjures doomsday scenarios of hyper-intelligent bots brandishing nuclear codes, perhaps we should be thinking closer to home. In his urgent, humane book, sociologist James Muldoon urges us to pay more attention to our deepening emotional entanglements with AI, and how profit-hungry tech companies might exploit them. A research associate at the Oxford Internet Institute who has previously written about the exploited workers whose labour makes AI possible, Muldoon now takes us into the uncanny terrain of human-AI relationships, meeting the people for whom chatbots aren’t merely assistants, but friends, romantic partners, therapists, even avatars of the dead.

To some, the idea of falling in love with an AI chatbot, or confiding your deepest secrets to one, might seem mystifying and more than a little creepy. But Muldoon refuses to belittle those seeking intimacy in “synthetic personas”.

Singer Laufey corrected Golden Globes photographers after they called her the wrong name on Sunday's (11 January) red carpet.

Owen Cooper made history on Sunday, 11 January, becoming the youngest-ever winner of the Golden Globe for Best Supporting Actor at just 16 years old.

The champagne was on ice with Hollywood once again kicking off awards season with the Golden Globe Awards in Beverly Hills on Sunday (11 January).

The performative male was over at the 2026 Golden Globes, where even risk-takers like Timothée Chalamet, Jacob Elordi and Jeremy Allen White did little to temper the black tie stuffiness

Timothée Chalamet was the final clue. As he arrived in good time on the Golden Globes red carpet, the star of Marty Supreme put pay to speculation as to whether the chromatic marketing of the film’s ping pong balls would have him wearing orange. Instead, he wore a black T-shirt; vest, jacket and Timberland boots with silver buttons by Chrome Hearts, souped up with a five-figure Cartier necklace. Kylie Jenner, his partner and sartorial foil, was nowhere to be seen.

Styled by Taylor McNeill, who was also responsible for Chalamet’s wildly amusing if chaotic red carpet campaign for the film, the look was bad boy Bond. It also set the tone for an evening of subdued tones. If we thought the penguin suit had gone extinct, we were wrong. The performative male is over – welcome to the return of the staid suit.

The Champagne is on ice and Hollywood is once again ready to kick off awards season with the Golden Globe Awards in Beverly Hills tonight.