Jimmy Kimmel on a tumultuous year: ‘Don’t know what the American way even is any more’

Late-night hosts reflected on a rollercoaster 2025 and Donald Trump’s combative, primetime year-end address to the nation.Jimmy Kimmel opened his final monologue of 2025 with an emotional reflection on a tumultuous year. “This has been a strange year. It’s been a hard year,” he said. “We’ve had some lows

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