ZedVlog

Book of the dayRebecca SolnitReviewA collection of essays on ‘further feminisms’ from the writer who inspired the term ‘mansplaining’ is convinced that new stories will open up the worldSerendipity might well exist, for I opened Rebecca Solnit’s collection of essays subtitled “further feminisms” at a moment that demanded what you could call “further feminist” thought. The allegations against Harvey Weinstein had hit the news cycle, and scanning it had become a hot and stuffy experience. [Read More]

Cesaria EvoraObituaryCesária Évora obituarySinger behind the popularity of Cape Verde's morna balladsThe singer Cesária Évora, who has died aged 70 after a long period of ill-health, rose from poverty on the Cape Verde archipelago to achieve worldwide fame in her later years. She put the islands – off the coast of west Africa – on the world music map by performing their distinctive "morna" ballads with a mix of sweetness and melancholy. [Read More]

Decoding Russian criminal tattoos – in pictures Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Share via Email From the 1960s to the 1980s, Arkady Bronnikov visited correctional facilities all over the Soviet Union and photographed thousands of tattooed inmates to decode their body art – and helped solve many crimes by identifying criminals based on their ink. Here, you can learn what roses, snakes and cowboys really mean … [Read More]

BooksObituaryPat BoothEast End girl made good who embodied the zeitgeist of the late 20th centuryMost people get a single chance at incarnating the zeitgeist, but Pat Booth, who has died of lung cancer aged 66, made a success of multiple of-the-moment employments - model, boutique owner, photographer and bonkbuster novelist. She knew why she was so driven - "a profound fear of poverty is ingrained on my heart and soul". Her childhood in London's East End might have sounded picturesque, but, as she said, the reality was " [Read More]

Charles Nahale on the balcony of his temporary housing overlooking a lush golf course, in Kapalua, Maui, on 28 October. Photograph: Akasha Rabut/The GuardianCharles Nahale on the balcony of his temporary housing overlooking a lush golf course, in Kapalua, Maui, on 28 October. Photograph: Akasha Rabut/The GuardianThrough the roofHawaii firesFour months after the deadliest US wildfire in modern history, thousands of people have yet to find stable housing When Charles Nahale checked into a one-bedroom time-share condo in Kapalua Bay, a tourist mainstay on Maui’s north-west coast, in mid-October, front desk staff told him he would only be staying for 12 days. [Read More]

FilmReviewDramatising the true story of Teddi Pietrzykowski, an internee who fought to entertain the guards, this is a solid, occasionally sentimental tale This cleanly hewn drama from Poland, surely destined to be Poland’s submission for the Academy Awards, tells the true story of Tadeusz Pietrzykowski, AKA “Teddi”, a (non-Jewish) Polish bantamweight boxer who was one of the earliest prisoners at Auschwitz. There have actually been a couple of other films about Pietrzykowski over the years, which might explain why writer-director Maciej Barczewski, making an impressive debut here, doesn’t go into a lot of detail about how Teddi fought Nazis at the start of the war during the siege of Warsaw in 1939. [Read More]

TheatreReviewRose theatre, Kingston upon Thames Charles Dickens takes to the stage and Ebenezer Scrooge is a woman with a moving backstory in Morgan Lloyd Malcolm’s adaptation As fine a festive treat as Charles Dickens’s story of Christian charity may be, do we need quite so many Christmas Carols every year? Joyously, this musical reworking is different. Morgan Lloyd Malcolm’s adaptation still features Ebenezer Scrooge, Tiny Tim and co, but Scrooge is a woman (Penny Layden, appropriately dour) and her backstory has been subtly yet movingly revised. [Read More]

An illustration showing how a Roofscapes wooden platform could be constructed above a sloping zinc roof. Illustration: Roofscapes StudioArchitecture trio says adding roof terraces to French capital’s buildings could boost biodiversity and tackle summer heat by Kim Willsher in ParisFrom the roof of the eight-floor residential building in Paris’s 16th arrondissement, you can see the Eiffel Tower and the Arc de Triomphe. It’s the space between these icons, however, that the Roofscapes team have marched me up the stairs to see; the zigzagging roofs that make up a vast area of unused, ignored and mostly unseen space. [Read More]

Maine shootingsIn the bitter and politically fraught gun ownership debate in the US, distinctions are often lost, leaving some frustrated The mass shooting deaths of 18 people in Lewiston, Maine, has again shone a spotlight on gun ownership and safeguards around mental health in a state that has prided itself both on high levels of gun ownership and low levels of violent crime. The suspect, an experienced marksman and US army reservist Robert Card, is believed to have used an AR-15 military style weapon with an expanded magazine, perhaps carrying 60 rounds, similar to the gun that was found later in his abandoned car. [Read More]

A raw new C4 drama asks what it takes to turn five 'ordinary' lads into gang rapists The crisis in modern masculinity has been well documented in almost every medium over recent years, from the tongue-in-cheek New Lad backlash of Baddiel and Skinner or Loaded, via films such as Fight Club, to the sociological and psychological explorations of books such as Anthony Clare's On Men or Susan Faludi's Stiffed. The observation that the economic and social empowerment of women is contributing to the emasculation of modern man has turned into an easy truism, prompting the question of what happens as the natural progression of this trend? [Read More]