‘I really enjoyed it’: new RSC curriculum brings Shakespeare’s works to life in UK classrooms

Act 1. Scene 1. A classroom in a secondary school in Peterborough. It is a dreary, wet afternoon. Pupils file into the room, take their seats and face the front

Jon Stewart on government shutdown deal: ‘A world-class collapse by Democrats’

Late-night hosts unleashed on Senate Democrats for caving on the longest-ever government shutdown with no assurance on healthcare subsidies from Republicans.Jon Stewart minced no words for congressional Democrats on Monday evening, hours after a coalition broke from the party and voted with Republicans to extend government funding through January with no assurances on the healthcare tax credits at the center of the 41-day stalemate. “By the way, tonight’s show will be brought to you by: I can’t fucking believe it,” Stewart fumed at the top of The Daily Show. “I can’t fucking believe it: for when the ‘I can’t believe it’ Edvard Munch scream emoji doesn’t quite convey how much you cannot fucking believe it.”“They fucking caved on the shutdown, not even a full week removed from the best election night results they’ve had in years,” he continued

Old is M Night Shyamalan at his best: ambitious, abrasive and surprisingly poignant

In August 2002, Newsweek boldly anointed the stern-faced man pictured on the cover of its splashy summer issue as “The Next Spielberg”. While some might have called this an unfair comparison to one of cinema’s most legendary figures, for a then 31-year-old M Night Shyamalan, it was a childhood dream come true. The Indian-born, Pennsylvanian-raised film-maker had whetted his cinematic appetite on the images of Jaws and Raiders of the Lost Ark, and for better or worse, would find himself chasing that same level of stratospheric fame in the early days of his career.Despite the initial acclaim of The Sixth Sense, though, Shyamalan’s reputation and audience goodwill would soon begin to nosedive as his idiosyncratic directing style rubbed against the grander ambitions of his movies. But after a temporary exodus from Hollywood and a retreat to his roots in independent cinema, Shyamalan finally returned to studio film-making in 2021 with the release of Old, a masterful high-concept thriller that rekindled the director’s longtime fascination with family, parenting and the mystifying possibility of the unknown

‘Harlem has always been evolving’: inside the Studio Museum’s $160m new home

The iconic museum, which was founded in 1968, has been rehoused in 82,000-sq-ft building providing a new destination for Black art in New York CityCall it the second Harlem renaissance. On Manhattan’s 125th Street, where a statue of Adam Clayton Powell Jr strides onwards and upwards, and a sign marks the spot where a freed Nelson Mandela dropped by, there is bustle and buzz.The celebrated Apollo Theater is in the midst of a major renovation. The National Black Theatre is preparing to move into a $80m arts complex spanning a city block. In September the National Urban League opened a $250m building containing its headquarters, affordable housing and retail space with New York’s first civil rights museum to come

‘Most of it was the conga preset on Prince’s drum machine’: how Fine Young Cannibals made She Drives Me Crazy

‘Prince’s Purple Rain guitar was in the corner of the studio and his lava lamps were everywhere. You couldn’t help but be inspired’I was in a band in Hull called Akrylykz. When the Beat came to play at the Welly club we gave them a demo tape. Then they invited us to tour with them. Later, after they split up, Andy Cox and David Steele were looking for a singer for a new band and they remembered me

Groundbreaking British Museum show set to challenge samurai myths

A groundbreaking samurai exhibition that promises to challenge “everything we think we know about Japan’s warrior elite” spanning a millennium of myth and reality is to open at the British Museum next year.Titled Samurai, the blockbuster exhibition will reveal a world beyond armour-clad warriors and epic duels, as popularised by the noble, katana-wielding heroes of Akira Kurosawa’s classic action films and PlayStation’s hit video games.Much of the samurai myth – including even the word “samurai” – was invented long after their heyday, a modern phenomenon linked to mass media and pop culture.The exhibition, which opens in February, will also show that, far from being a male warrior cult, samurai women were educated, governed and even fought.Rosina Buckland, the exhibition’s lead curator, told the Guardian: “This is the first exhibition to tackle the myths