From Britain’s medieval buildings to western pop and contemporary art, these creations showcase our interwoven stories

We are repeatedly sold a painfully two-dimensional picture of the motivations of those seeking shelter in Britain. According to this picture, migrants are eager to experience the benefits of our society, but they are also out to undermine it, because they come from cultures whose values are dramatically different from our own. Think of the ongoing “grooming gangs” scandal: an undeniably appalling series of events, institutional failures and victim-blaming that has been transformed into a narrative that suggests any “alien” is likely to be a sexual predator, since their predatory behaviour is a direct consequence of their religious and cultural background.

So often, all we are allowed to know about asylum seekers is that they are asking – with irritating persistence – for a place in our social fabric, as if they have no world of their own, no cultural hinterland, no really recognisable human values aside from mysterious and dangerous belief systems. This explains why there is now a feverish pressure to instantly reveal the ethnicity of any suspect in a major crime of unprovoked violence – as with the Cambridgeshire train attack (where, confusingly, it transpired that the hero of the day was a man of north African background), or the tabloid habit of illustrating stories about migrants with images of young men, usually of Middle Eastern appearance.

The photographer’s painted bottles and hoops enhanced a carefree afternoon on a Burmese beach

As a tuk-tuk driver, Moe Wai feels that he has honed both his observational and people skills. Wai lives and works in Myin Ka Par, a village in Myanmar, and became interested in mobile photography several years ago. In this instance, he used his phone to capture this gaggle of local children as they were returning home from school.

“They were playing on a sandbank with their own plastic bottles,” Wai recalls. He’d been collating props for some time; bottles and hoops he had painted in a variety of colours, including neon pink. “The children were happy to let me replace theirs with my own colourful ones for the purpose of this photo.” He later applied some minor edits using the Lightroom app.

This first newsletter of the new year looks at some of the big questions we hope will be answered in the next 12 months, across film, TV, music and games

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Welcome to 2026! I hope you are enjoying the final dribblings of the festive break, before reality bites on Monday. As is now tradition (well, we did it once before), this first newsletter of the new year looks at some of the big questions we hope will be answered in the next 12 months, across film, TV, music and games. Hopefully it will double up as a decent primer for the year ahead too, though for a more exhaustive rundown check the Guardian’s 2026 previews for film, music, TV, gaming, stage and art. Right, let’s get on with it:

Russian drone strikes hit Kyiv, flooding in California, the African Cup of Nations and New Year celebrations: the past seven days as captured by the world’s leading photojournalists