G2

Alicia Keys’ greatest songs

1 If I Ain’t Got You (2003) Ostensibly a love song, but actually inspired by the death of Aaliyah and the 9/11 attacks that happened a few weeks after the singer’s passing, If I Ain’t Got You is Alicia Keys’ most popular song – over 1.5bn streams on...

I’m an only child, and so is my son. We are not weirdos!

Sticks and stones may break my bones but names will never hurt me ... must be a saying thought up by somebody extremely privileged. For everyone else, words wound, and there are certain groups that are seemingly, bafflingly, forever considered fair...

A WhatsApp message about a little-known sport made me briefly famous in Japan

It was December 2023 and I was searching in the attic for Christmas decorations when my phone pinged. I pulled it out of my pocket and found a WhatsApp message from my son who was backpacking in Australia. The message read, simply: “You might want to...

This World Cup is the perfect opportunity to tackle extremism

Whenever my kids and I are stationary in the same room, within five minutes they will have started talking about football. Every now and then, a name will float out that I recognise – Jude Bellingham, say – but most of the time it lacks the dramatic...

‘My life is about beauty’

The best songs about football

1 The Fall – Kicker Conspiracy (1983) Not just the best song about football, but one of the very best Fall songs: a memorable chorus hook over a massive riff, and rackety verses that refracted English football in the early 80s through the prism of...

My year with the robots

I became an uncle – and it helped me heal from childhood bullying

When I found out I had become an uncle, I was 22 and on a year abroad as part of a languages degree, living in Madrid. I’d spent much of my time there having raucous fun on the city’s gay scene, dancing till the early hours then sloping off with...

I devoured classic novels as a teenager. Can I relearn how to read them?

‘I felt I could smash my past up through sex’

‘Music was segregated until disco came out’

You have been an active contributor to an astounding canon of music. What was the essential ingredient that made it all happen? eamonmcc The first word that comes to mind is passion – for the music, for what I do. If you get to be the voice of a song...

I love baseball, but it’s a lonely, left-field passion in the UK

When you’re happy about something, it’s good to share it. And when you’re unhappy about something, it’s also good to share it. But if that something is the performance of your baseball team, and you live in the UK, you’ll have your work cut out finding...

Who gets the sofa?

Turned out nice again!

I couldn’t get anything done – until a kitchen timer pushed me into action

Long before I knew what a 9 to 5 was, I struggled to get things done. When I was a child, I avoided showers for as long as possible and put off brushing my waist-length hair. My mum ended up cutting it into a bob to help me manage it. During my...

Laurie Anderson songs

10 Flying at Night (2024) The best moments of Amelia, Laurie Anderson’s concept album about pioneering aviator Amelia Earhart, come when the songs delve into her internal world. Flying at Night is a case in point. The lyrics are ambiguous – “top speed...

Sorry about the yelling and swearing, but my corn’s playing up again

They really bloody hurt, I tell you. Corns, that is. Or rather, in my case, corn singular. One is enough, trust me. One is enough to have me wincing, limping, yelping, swearing. One is agony. One is plenty. My one is on the lateral side of my left...

I thought doctors had given me a death sentence – but that was 40 years ago

On 21 February 1986, I was diagnosed HIV positive. I was 22. It was the day of my sister’s 21st birthday. That afternoon, my life changed for ever. We had planned a surprise party later that night. My sister was seven months pregnant, and I had gone to...

Where do dogs belong?

I dedicated myself to saving soil – and a life of wild adventure began

Sousan Samadani was watching videos on YouTube one day when she came across a post about how the world’s soil was degrading so rapidly that it was in danger of extinction. The video – posted by the Save Soil movement – “was like a shock for me”,...

Cannes’ biggest controversies

1 Lars von Trier’s solidarity with Hitler (2011) What else could it possibly be? During a press conference for his own film Melancholia, Lars von Trier made a string of wilfully provocative announcements. “I understand Hitler” was the most clippable,...

When I want to feel loved, I just go to a hardware store

Let us all rise to acclaim the local shop, the little independent establishment that always seems to have exactly what you went in for. These places are not many in number, so we must be sure to celebrate those that remain with us. Their prices might –...

Slow down!

Almost anyone can be prime minister. But should they be?

In the late 1800s, the boxing and wrestling scene of east and southeast London was going through a transformation, and if you are interested in that, I recommend the work of the historian Sarah Elizabeth Cox. If, on the other hand, you are more...

‘Being offended isn’t the worst thing. Being poor is’

Lizzo’s best tracks

1 Good As Hell (2016) If you had to pinpoint a moment when Lizzo’s career shifted gear, it would be the release of this track from her EP Coconut Oil. Good As Hell amped up the pop aspects of her second album, Big Grrrl Small World, until they became...

The best filing system? Just sweep everything into the nearest bin

How I hate paperwork. Forms to fill, bills to pay, statements to file, receipts to keep, documents documenting things, proving things, explaining things. Keep them all. Up the pile rises until this tower of fear and confusion can no longer support...

Totally grounded?

What is Reform trying to achieve with this latest nastiness?

All parties struggle to invest local elections with meaning, because no party can alter the consequences of what is coming up to two decades of austerity. They can promise they’ll work hard for local people, and many of them will, but they can’t change...

I turned my eye for colour into a new career

Isabel Walker was taking her daughter out for her 36th birthday. She had wanted to do “something unusual and special”, so first Walker accompanied her to get her colours analysed. While the specialist draped swatches over her daughter’s shoulders and...

I couldn’t help but wonder...

What’s my favourite food? Whatever you’re trying to eat

I have identified my worst character trait. In such a crowded field, this has been no easy task. This one wins out because it’s two equally unappealing traits rolled into one. They both concern food, or rather eating. Number one: I cannot stop coveting...

I cried about my cleft lip for the first time in my 60s

At a fundraising event, I looked across the crowded room and saw a woman with a cleft – a gap in the lip (and sometimes the palate) where a baby’s face doesn’t fuse properly during pregnancy. She was standing on her own, and I beckoned her over to join...

Are prime ministers the problem? Or is it the voters?

At what point, as you consider the prime minister’s shortcomings more in sorrow than in anger, as you size up likely successors and try to wonder, idly, whose wallpaper we’re on in Downing Street, do you start to think that you, the electorate, are the...

‘It takes a lot of work to love yourself’

Everything But the Girl songs

See the full list of 20 at theguardian.com/music 10 Come on Home (1986) When their record label suggested making a “big”-sounding album, Everything But the Girl took them at their word. Baby, the Stars Shine Bright was big not in the sense of its 80s...

I tried to do a press-up – and had an existential crisis

I decided to do some pressups. They’re good for you, apparently. A calisthenic classic. This much I picked up in a doomscrolling session. Some algorithm somewhere must have decided I’d be open to the idea and, not for the first time, the algorithm was...

I was always intimidated by landlords - until I met one of mine at a party

After 12 years of renting, I’ve known my fair share of landlords – although “known” is probably the wrong term. I don’t usually meet them in person and rarely speak to them directly, only communicating through a managing estate agent or, if I’m lucky,...

Worried about the May elections? Here’s my tactical voting advice

If there’s one thing I love more than being canvassed at local election time, it’s being canvassed when I’m at someone else’s house. I promise those people the earth. Sure, my friend whose house it is will definitely vote Lib Dem, I tell them; I once...

Abandoned Britain

My gut was telling me to get off the mountain. I’m so glad I listened

I didn’t have a reason for my terrible feeling of dread – and that was part of the problem. From the moment I arrived in Tajikistan with my boyfriend, Tim, to climb two 7,000-metre (23,000ft) peaks, something felt off. It wasn’t a fear I could name: it...

‘My life has become a rollercoaster’

‘It has been a horrendous journey’

Cocteau Twins songs

See the full list of 20 at theguardian.com/music 10 Bluebeard (1993) Bluebeard was a deeply improbable delight in a number of ways. First, who in the 80s could have imagined a Cocteau Twins track audibly influenced by country music? Second, who would...

‘I’ve never been relatable’

‘It’s industrial in scale’

‘Some questions will never be answered’

I gave up my job in tech to become a professional poker player

Gary Fisher has always enjoyed a game of poker, but after he turned 60, his partner suggested he take it seriously. “She said: ‘You’re really good at it, but you don’t study. You just turn up and play.’” It wasn’t what Fisher expected to hear, but he...

‘I’m having the time of my life!’

Surfing the zeitgeist with pop’s hottest property

Talkin’ about evolution: a new model for cancer research

In laboratories across the world, scientists are trying to stay one step ahead of cancer – anticipating the disease’s next moves before it outmanoeuvres treatment. For more than a century, many of these experimental studies have been funded by Cancer...

A stranger pronounced my name correctly

I had five names on the day of my Hindu naming ceremony, but my given name was Priti, a name that came to shape me. Like most children with “unconventional” names, I dreaded the first day of each school year. I would squirm in my chair as my new...

Did Labour lose voters by dithering about kids’ screen time?

I’m past the stage in my parenting journey where I have any influence over my kids’ screen time. They would be much more likely to invade my privacy, grab my phone, perform some search in settings that I don’t understand, wonder out loud how it’s...

I took off my headphones – and noticed a stranger in peril

For years I walked the streets of London wearing noise-cancelling headphones, absorbed in playlists, politics podcasts or long voice notes from friends, and a million miles away from wherever I physically was. One damp January evening last year, I was...

‘I want to give that R&B rock star energy!’

The explosive rise of a pop soul powerhouse

I will always love my Bert, but a photograph has unsettled me

I came across something that makes me happy every day. It’s a figurine of a cheery chef chap holding up a menu board in one hand and giving a big thumbs up with the other. I found it in a reclamation yard in Old Hill in the Black Country. It’s run by a...

I felt trapped by Parkinson’s – but dance set me free

Fourteen years ago, a neurologist told me: “You have Parkinson’s.” I remember his face before I remember his words: calm, certain, kind. Parkinson’s: a progressive neurological disease. No cure. In my mind, it was an old person’s disease. Something...

When the UK’s Ice comes calling

I went on 75 first dates – and wrote a book of Kama Sutra-inspired poetry

When Zack Rogow’s relationship ended, he joined an online dating site. At 66, Rogow prepared for his first date with a mixture of grief at the loss of a love he’d thought would last a lifetime, and euphoria. “I was gaga – ‘Oh, I’m single again. I can...

Dianne Wiest’s best films

See the full list of 20 at theguardian.com/film 1 Synecdoche, New York (2008) Wiest shows up only 15 minutes before the end of Charlie Kaufman’s wayward two-hour masterpiece about a theatre director, Caden Cotard (Philip Seymour Hoffman), who spends...

Robotaxi!

I slapped on some foul green mascara – and stopped trying to be ‘pretty’

I wore makeup for the first time just after I turned 12: a tube of green mascara from a pound shop in my home town in south Wales. This was not a chic emerald or a flattering forest green. It was a frosted, mucous-tinted green – a colour that looked...

Gwyneth Paltrow’s Oscars dress has changed the game

The 50s are an awkward decade for women on the red carpet. So, the Oscars, being the ultimate red carpet, are like a dramatisation of the awks, a silent movie told in One Dress After Another. It’s complicated by the convention that “over 50” and “in...

‘I saw Courtney Love … and it felt like destiny’

Nancy Sinatra songs

10 So Long, Babe (1966) Sinatra’s first single written by Lee Hazlewood wasn’t a hit, but it was a vast improvement on the limp bubblegum she had spent the previous five years recording. It was hipper – with a hint of folk-rock in its sound – and...

The AI assistant tried to help, but all I wanted was a human being

Something went wrong. The car charger wouldn’t work. Terrible, lifeshortening faff ensued. It was to do with the wifi to which the car was linked having to be changed. I find this stuff so boring that I have been known to simply slump to the floor and...

‘I wish I could buy her 100 more years!’

Liza Minnelli at 80, by Neil Tennant, Ron Howard, Gene Simmons, Audra McDonald …

How to spot a psychopath

Lesley Manville’s best films

1 Another Year (2010) Manville has worked with Leigh for nearly 50 years –but Another Year is her bravest and most complex work for him. Charting the emotional disintegration of clinging, sozzled Mary, Manville can elicit contradictory responses from...