The ones we love: all 16 of REM’s albums – ranked!

The REM album that REM appeared to hate: guitarist Peter Buck called it unlistenable, “a bunch of people so bored with the material that they can’t stand it any more”. In truth, the songs aren’t bad, but there’s something lifeless about Around the Sun: its best tracks sound infinitely better on the 2007 REM Live album.“I guess a three-legged dog is still a dog,” mused frontman Michael Stipe after drummer Bill Berry’s 1997 departure from REM. “It just has to learn to run differently.” Thus Up was heavy on synths and drum machines, muted, crepuscular – and a relative commercial failure

‘My biggest fear’: the artist spending three days banged up in a jail cell

Cell 72 will put a detained man on show for three full days and nights to confront spectators with the grim reality of confinement. Is the project exploitative or a chance to change society? A filthy mattress lies in the corner of an otherwise barren room. The only adornments here, screwed to the wall, are a metal table and a payphone. But this is no ordinary prison. Rather, it’s a north London gallery which has been temporarily converted into a humid, fetid cell

Footballer, Bachelor star … fantasy writer? The TikTok furore over Luke Bateman’s book deal

Hello Caitlin. I hear people on TikTok are up in arms over a Queensland farmer/Canberra Raiders player/Bachelor star scoring a book deal. Who is this modern day Renaissance man?Julia, a colleague described Luke Bateman’s four years with the Raiders as the one of an “honest toiler, who always played above his weight”, and to be frank, it’s a fairly apt description for the guy.The Toowoomba countryman grew up as the typical sports-playing boy. On his now famous TikTok account, he has spoken earnestly about reading books in a toilet cubicle as a child so his peers wouldn’t witness his sensitive side

Jimmy Kimmel: ‘We are living in the golden age of stupid’

Late-night hosts looked at the latest mistakes made by the Trump administration while expressing fear at the president’s sinister new portrait.On Jimmy Kimmel Live! the host spoke about how “stupid” is the through-line of both that night’s show and the moment.He said that we are “living in the golden age of stupid right now” while talking about those who refuse to believe scientific fact and the rise in measles down to fewer vaccinations.“The only thing we learned from Covid is how to make sourdough bread,” he joked and said that “people who do their own research always do it wrong”.This week has also seen Donald Trump continuing to war with Harvard and with the writer Michael Wolff after he claimed that the reason behind all of this was that the president didn’t get accepted when he applied years ago

He’s been hanged, stabbed and cut in galleries – now artist Carlos Martiel is being buried alive

In 2022 in a Los Angeles gallery, Carlos Martiel placed a noose around his neck and suspended his nude body from a rope tied to the ceiling. The piece was titled Cuerpo, Spanish for “body”, and the photographs and footage alone are shocking, mournful and distressing, as volunteers take turns holding his body aloft to prevent the real risk of asphyxiation.In conceiving the work, the Cuba-born, New York-based Afro-Latinx artist viewed hundreds of photographs of public lynchings from across the US – a brutal history of normalised extrajudicial violence that has moved artists from Billie Holiday to film-maker Steve McQueen. Those lynchings were also a kind of public performance: of terror, dehumanisation and white supremacy.“I couldn’t put into words everything I thought and felt during the development of the work; it was a very profound and intense experience for me,” Martiel says, over email

‘Tudor high drama’: English Heritage looks for descendants of abbey rebels

They included a brewer, a tailor and a shoemaker – a hardy bunch of craftspeople prepared to stand up to the might of the Tudor regime to try to save their local monastery.Exactly five centuries on, English Heritage is appealing for people who think they may be descendants of those who took part in the uprising against Cardinal Thomas Wolsey’s closure of Bayham Abbey to come forward.The idea is to get some of them together for a commemorative event this summer to mark the Bayham Abbey uprising, which took place on 4 June 1525 and is seen as a precursor to the turbulent years of religious reform that followed.Michael Carter, an English Heritage historian, described the Bayham Abbey uprising as a moment of “Tudor high drama”.He said: “It is a fascinating precursor to Henry VIII’s religious reforms – a harbinger not only of the dissolution of the monasteries 10 years later but also of the Pilgrimage of Grace, a major revolt against the reforms in the north of England in 1536 and 1537