A chart-topping podcast about psychic communication makes for a troubling listen. Elsewhere, more excellent mental health musings from Scottee, and in praise of the adventure playground

The Telepathy Tapes Ky Dickens
Self Help Scottee
Thinking Allowed: Playgrounds Radio 4/BBC Sounds

When I was little, my favourite book was Mysteries of the Unknown , and one of the strangenesses it featured was spontaneous combustion. In it, there was a picture of a pair of shoes in front of a blackened armchair; in my mind’s eye the shoes are still smoking. Whatever happened to spontaneous combustion? It seems to be less of a concern these days, as smoking has dropped out of fashion and sitting-room suites become less flammable.

Despite fewer silly glitches, you now get an executive summary of the world, with all interesting complications removed

I often find myself thinking of a sentence by the American novelist Nicholson Baker about the size of thoughts: “Most are about three feet tall, with the level of complexity of a lawnmower engine.”

The sentence comes to mind when I’m presented, casually, with ideas produced by our new emotionless sidekick “generative AI”. The most insistent examples of this come at the top of Google searches, which, rather than simply providing “real world” links to that morning’s query – “What time does the pub open?”, say – offer first a little machine-generated reply that allows you to imagine yourself slickly informed.

In the week of Donald Trump’s inauguration, the US artist is in the UK with a show drawing on the legacy of Malcolm X – and an alternative vision for making America great again

When you are in this line of work, a question people sometimes ask is: “Of all the people you have interviewed and written about, who was the most inspiring?” And when they do, my memory often goes back to a day I spent 10 years ago driving around the south side of Chicago with the radical potter, and revolutionary urban planner, and guerrilla archivist, and situationist gospel singer, Theaster Gates.

At the time, Gates, then 41, charismatic and intellectually irrepressible, was about seven years into a project to transform the neighbourhood in which he lived – blighted by years of neglect and unemployment and poverty and related crime – into a working community of makers and artists, a place that looked after itself. While employed as a city planner and academic at the University of Chicago Gates had, he explained to me as he drove, become haunted by a fundamental question: why is it so often that the people with the least amount of imagination and the most concern for the bottom line – real estate developers – get to choose how to transform derelict urban areas? Why not the people who might care about those areas most: the citizens who grew up there and live there?

Second series of BBC drama was initially rejected by all the streaming services, Peter Kosminsky tells inquiry into UK film and TV

Mark Rylance took a “significant” pay cut along with other members of the Wolf Hall team to get the second series made, the director Peter Kosminsky has said.

The BBC drama, based on Hilary Mantel’s final novel in her epic Tudor trilogy, returned last year with Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light.

In this extract from her book Dare I Say It, the actor and advocate writes about imposter syndrome, taking risks and the power of menopausal women

I’ve always had a strong sense of resilience and have been pretty good about not letting fear take hold of me. My friends and I often remark that good things happen when we take chances on ourselves. Sometimes I look back on choices I made early on in my career and think, Wow, that was bold.

Still, not everything made sense as it was happening. Every woman I know has a winding road from where she started out to where she ended up. This is mine.

The Brutalist actor, 41, talks about perfect childhoods and imperfect performances, crying on planes and looking like Eddie Redmayne’s twin

I think about bringing up our children all the time, and the thought is: we can’t mess it up, we have to do everything perfectly, otherwise they’re going to hate us for the rest of our lives. Safeguarding the anarchy and innocence of childhood is so hard to do now.

Looking back on my own childhood, it felt limitless. Summer holidays away from school felt like they went on forever. Anything before the smartphone was a utopia because we weren’t recording every minute of our experiences.

Here at Outernet, London
On the first of a three-night London residency, British dance producer Sam Shepherd conjures up a transcendent set that’s equal parts body-jacking rave and harp-laced, retina-melting art show

Most people would not bring a harp to a rave. But UK producer Floating Points – Sam Shepherd – is emphatically not most people: an uncommon artist as au fait with acoustic instruments and spiritual jazz as he is DJing to a delirious club.

There are a great many people who can push faders while bobbing about, headphones half on, half off. But few have Shepherd’s range. On his spatial, guitar band-adjacent album Reflections: Mojave Desert (2017), he used mountains as reverb, blasting his music into the California hills and then recording what came back. His celebrated 2021 record Promises looped the London Symphony Orchestra in with jazz saxophonist Pharoah Sanders. It was Sanders’s last recording before he died in 2022.

The singer on his wild musical upbringing, being dismissed as a one-hit wonder, and his surprise return to the limelight

Born in Berkshire in 1971, Chesney Hawkes started his career at the age of 19, appearing in Buddy’s Song, a film that featured his single The One and Only. The song went on to top the UK charts for five weeks. His second single peaked at No 27, and Hawkes, dismissed as a one-hit wonder by the press, was dropped by his label aged just 23. In recent decades he has found a new audience at nostalgia gigs and tours. His first album in 10 years, Living Arrows, will be released on 28 March. He lives in Los Angeles and has three children with his wife, Kristina, a model and actor.

This photograph was taken at the start of everything , just as The One and Only was released. The expression on my face is of someone who has done 10 other shoots that day. I was tired, with dark circles under my eyes. The leather jacket became a “thing” – I used to wear it without a top sometimes, showing off the old six-pack. As for the hair, I probably blow-dried it, but there wasn’t a massive amount of work put in to achieve that volume.

How people dress – their bodies, their communities, their houses – mattered a great deal to the Nobel prize winner

“The beginning begins with the shoes. When a child I am never able to abide being barefoot and always beg for shoes, anybody’s shoes, even on the hottest days. My mother, a minha mãe, is angry at what she says are my prettify ways.”

This is how readers are introduced to Florens, an enslaved girl with tender feet in A Mercy, Toni Morrison’s ninth novel. How people dress – their bodies, their communities, their houses – mattered a great deal to Morrison, which is evident in the way she focused on how her characters presented themselves to others.