My cultural awakening: Buffy gave me the courage to escape my conservative Pakistani upbringing

I was 10, cross-legged on the floor of my parents’ living room in Newcastle, bathed in the blue light of a TV. The volume was set to near-silence – my dad, asleep in another room, had schizophrenia and frontal lobe syndrome, and I didn’t want to wake him. Then, like some divine interruption to the endless blur of news and repeats, I stumbled across Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The show may have been barely audible, but it hit me like a lightning bolt.Before Buffy, life was like a pressure cooker

Your front-row pass to who the performers will be watching at Glastonbury

Hello from Worthy Farm, home to Glastonbury festival! As is tradition, this newsletter is coming to you from a sparsely apportioned cabin behind the festival’s legendary Pyramid stage, which this weekend will feature headline sets from The 1975, Neil Young and Olivia Rodrigo.The festival proper is kicking off right about now, though really it has been whirring away for two days already. The official opening was on Wednesday night: a circus spectacular on the Pyramid stage featuring jugglers, drummers, fire-flinging dancers and a bloke doing handstands on a fairy-light-strewn bike suspended above the audience. The extravaganza came courtesy of the talented folk from Glastonbury’s theatre and circus fields, who were tasked with opening the festival for the first time since the early 90s.(Incidentally, the Theatre and Circus Fields have a pretty remarkable origin story: in 1971 Winston Churchill’s granddaughter Arabella was being relentlessly hounded by the paparazzi in London, having created a bit of a stink by daring to speak out against the Vietnam war

‘Joyous, immersive’ Beamish wins Art Fund museum of the year award

Beamish, the Living Museum of the North, has won the prestigious Art Fund museum of the year award, the largest such prize in the world.Awarding it the £120,000 prize, judges called Beamish a “joyous, immersive and unique place shaped by the stories and experiences of its community”.The open-air museum in County Durham, which is celebrating its 55th anniversary, brings north-east England’s Georgian, Edwardian, 1940s and 1950s history to life through immersive exhibits.Visitors engage with costumed staff and volunteers and experience regional stories of everyday life. The museum has a longstanding commitment to preserving local heritage

Seth Meyers on Trump’s new Nato nickname: ‘Why is anyone calling him daddy?’

Late-night hosts discussed Donald Trump’s belief that he should win a Nobel peace prize and the bizarre new name given to him by the Nato chief.On Late Night, Seth Meyers said that Trump’s insistence that he deserves the Nobel peace prize for inserting himself into the Iran-Israel conflict is “obviously insane” but “at best we can trick him” by offering him a “Babybel piece of cheese on a lanyard”.He added that “no president should get a Nobel peace prize” and played footage of Trump listing all of the things he has done that deserve one. “This idiot thinks it’s the Nathan’s hotdog contest,” he said.Meyers said that Trump is thirsty for praise “for stopping an illegal war he started” and is now “absolutely livid” that the ceasefire was violated

Stephen Colbert on Ice: ‘Constantly devising new terrible ways to treat immigrants’

Late-night hosts talked about US involvement in the Israel-Iran conflict and how the situation at home should be higher on the priority list.On The Late Show, Stephen Colbert spoke about the “tenuous ceasefire” that Donald Trump has been taking credit for after getting involved in the situation between Israel and Iran.The president’s controversial decision to bomb Iran has led some of his most ardent loyalists to claim he deserves the Nobel peace prize.Colbert said he is “not sure if they give an award for bombing people into submission” and anyway, they “kept bombing each other” despite an alleged ceasefire.The ongoing conflict led Trump to lose his cool with press, telling reporters that Israel and Iran “don’t know what the fuck they’re doing”

‘She killed three husbands with this teapot’: Prue Leith, Huw Stephens and more pick their favourite museum

From a stray meteorite to an immersive coal pit, via the chance to sit on a ‘feeding chair’, famous fans tell us how they fell in love with the UK’s Museum of the Year finalistsIt’s rare to hear someone getting this excited over a teapot. But as Terry Deary tells me, with exactly the kind of relish you’d expect from the author of Horrible Histories, this particular drinks vessel belonged to the Victorian-era mass murderer Mary Ann Cotton. Believed to have killed 12 of her children, not to mention three husbands, she was finally caught after poisoning her stepson in 1872 with an arsenic-laced brew. “And in Beamish they’ve got the teapot!” says Deary. “I was blown away to hold it!”He’s talking about Beamish, the Living Museum of the North, an open-air site based in County Durham (just like Cotton herself, who was eventually hanged in Durham Gaol)