Jimmy Kimmel on Trump’s speech: ‘Surprise primetime episode of The Worst Wing’

Late-night hosts discussed – or ignored – Donald Trump’s surprise primetime address and dug further into the explosive new interview the White House chief of staff, Susie Wiles.Jimmy Kimmel opened his Wednesday night show with an acknowledgment of the president’s 9pm ET national address, also known as a “surprise primetime episode of The Worst Wing tonight on every channel”.Trump announced only on Tuesday that he would deliver an impromptu fireside chat during the season finales of Survivor and The Floor. “It’s weird to think that had a couple of states just gone the other way, he’d be hosting one of those shows,” Kimmel joked. “Trump shouldn’t be pre-empting The Floor

Stephen Colbert on Susie Wiles’s candid interviews: ‘She dished, bish’

Late-night hosts reacted to White House chief of staff Susie Wiles’s revealing interview with Vanity Fair.“If there’s one thing Donald Trump wants, it’s a hamburger,” said Stephen Colbert on Tuesday’s Late Show. “If there’s a second thing, though, it would be to make you think that you’re crazy. That’s why periodically, I like to remind all of you that you’re not crazy. What’s happening is crazy

The 50 best albums of 2025: No 3 – Blood Orange: Essex Honey

Dev Hynes’ deeply personal response to his mother’s death embodied the many unexpected shades of grief in pastoral hymnals and post-punk The 50 best albums of 2025 More on the best culture of 2025There’s a lot of grief across the best albums of this year. It’s unsurprising: 2025 has felt like a definitive and dismal break with government accountability, protections for marginalised people and holding back the encroachment of AI in creative and intellectual fields, to cherrypick just a few horrors. Anna von Hausswolff and Rosalía reached for transcendence from these earthly disappointments. Bad Bunny and KeiyaA countered colonial abuse and neglect with writhing resistance anthems. On a more personal scale, Lily Allen and Cate Le Bon grappled with disillusionment about mis-sold romantic ideals

Arts funding in England must be protected from politics, Hodge report urges

Arts Council England must ensure funding is protected from politicisation and simplify its application process in order to regain trust, a damaging report has found.The investigation into the national body for arts funding found there had been a “loss of respect and trust” for ACE among those it backed, in part because of “perceived political interference in decision-making”.The report was written by the Labour peer Margaret Hodge, who recommended that ACE be retained but with the arm’s-length principle strengthened at all levels of government “to ensure that arts funding is protected from politicisation”.She said: “There have been attempts to exert more political control over ACE decisions in recent years and this has to stop. The Arts Council must remain free from political interference

The Hodge report into Arts Council England: ‘Not exactly a ringing endorsement’

The arts in England are underfunded, and were dealt a blow by Covid from which many organisations have not yet recovered. But that has been only part of the story. The sheer weight of required form-filling, the endless bureaucracy, the impracticable length of time it takes to simply be funded by Arts Council England (ACE) have caused universal frustration among those working in the arts. There is much talk of exhaustion and burnout.Many organisations have felt frustrated, too, by the strictures of ACE’s flagship strategy, Let’s Create, which, though admirable in principle, with its focus on participation in the arts, is perhaps tilted too far from recognising the expertise and individuality of artists and arts institutions

Jimmy Kimmel on Trump’s Rob Reiner comments: ‘So hateful and vile’

Late-night hosts reacted to the murder of legendary director Rob Reiner and his wife, Michele Singer Reiner, as well as Donald Trump’s 10-minute tangent about Christmas snakes.“This is the kind of weekend that makes you wonder if things will ever feel good again,” said Jimmy Kimmel on Monday evening, after a couple days of horrific news: the terror attack at a Hanukkah celebration on Australia’s Bondi Beach, a mass shooting at Brown University in Rhode Island, and the “murder of one of our greatest directors and patriots, Rob Reiner, and his wife, Michele Reiner”.“What we need in a time like this, besides common sense when it comes to guns and mental health care, is compassion and leadership,” he continued. “We did not get that from our president, because he has none of it to give. Instead, we got a fool rambling about nonsense

The Vietnam War ended 50 years ago. But its lessons live on in The Quiet American

Alden Pyle (Brendan Fraser) was a “quiet American”, says Thomas Fowler (Michael Caine) to a French policeman. “A friend,” he adds, as the lifeless corpse of Pyle stares back at him with a wretched expression.This is the scene that opens Phillip Noyce’s Vietnam-set political drama before the film flashes back a few months earlier to 1952 Saigon, where Fowler, an ageing Englishman, lives leisurely as a journalist reporting on the first Indochina war. When Pyle, a young American aid worker advocating for US intervention, falls for Fowler’s 20-year-old Vietnamese lover, Phượng (Đỗ Thị Hải Yến), the jaded reporter’s tranquil existence begins to unravel.At Pyle and Fowler’s first meeting at the Continental hotel, it is clear that Pyle is anything but “quiet”: handsomely bespectacled, the American idealist is attentively reading Dangers to Democracy, a book on foreign policy

‘Fans stole my underwear – and even my car aerial’: how Roxette made It Must Have Been Love

‘We had 2,000 people outside our hotel room in Buenos Aires singing our songs all night. David Coulthard later told me that all the Formula One drivers were staying there and were annoyed because they couldn’t sleep’In my early 20s, I was in the biggest band in Sweden. But after Gyllene Tider [Golden Times] collapsed, I was depressed for two years. At first, Roxette only got together when Marie Fredriksson, our singer, wasn’t busy with solo stuff. To keep her in the band, I needed to make it successful, so I was very motivated

‘Like lipstick on a fabulous gorilla’: the Barbican’s many gaudy glow-ups and the one to top them all

The brutalist arts-and-towers complex, where even great explorers get lost, is showing its age. Let’s hope the 50th anniversary upgrade is better than the ‘pointillist stippling’ tried in the 1990sThe Barbican is aptly named. From the Old French barbacane, it historically means a fortified gateway forming the outer line of defence to a city or castle. London’s Barbican marks the site of a medieval structure that would have defended an important access point. Its architecture was designed to repel