June 2025

Junction 15 of the M25 may not be the first place that comes to mind when you think of escapism, but for me as a child in the late 1980s, joining the M4 was crossing a watershed. We visited my grandparents in Wales every summer, and not only did leaving the London Orbital mean we were properly on our way, it was also the point at which I was allowed to ask for music to be played. I always asked for The Best of the Beach Boys. (No one objected: my father had loved the Beach Boys since the 1960s, even before his older brother moved to the US.) Their songs weren’t just the soundtrack to a car journey to Wales, but a gateway to an America of the mind.

Nathan Fielder loves an elaborate plan. In the TV show that made his name, Nathan for You, the Canadian satirist played an exaggerated version of himself – affectless, sexless, awkward yet oddly confident – who offered terrible advice to real-life business owners. He meets a restaurateur, for instance, who is struggling to get permission to sell his chili con carne inside a nearby hockey stadium. Fielder ‘helps’ him by inventing a heat-resistant body suit that he fills with the chili, smuggling it into a game and dispensing it through hidden tubes; in a subplot, he tricks a doctor into thinking that he has a pacemaker to get a medical exemption that allows him through the stadium’s metal detectors.

The protests that broke out last weekend in Los Angeles are at once an autonomous phenomenon and a continuation of the George Floyd rebellion of 2020 and the student-led campaign against the war on Gaza. They have been met with no longer shocking displays of state violence, including the arrival of the National Guard and seven hundred marines. Protesters have been gassed, shot in the head with ‘less lethal’ munitions, beaten, trampled with horses, hit by cars and taken into custody.

Marie Nejar died last month at the age of 95. As far as the Initiative Schwarze Menschen in Deutschland (ISD) is aware, she was the last Black survivor of Nazi Germany. She was born in Mülheim an der Ruhr in 1930. Her mother, Cécile Nejar, was a musician who performed on Hamburg’s Reeperbahn. Her father, Albert Yessow, was a Ghanaian seafarer working aboard the Victoria.

‘I thought,’ White wrote in his autobiographical masterpiece The Farewell Symphony (1997), ‘that never had a group been placed on such a rapid cycle, oppressed in the Fifties, freed in the Sixties, exalted in the Seventies, and wiped out in the Eighties.’ He was describing, as he always did, the generation of gay men of which he was a part. 

Laila Soueif never normalised her son’s incarceration. Through three arrests and three trials she fought for him in the courts, in legal depositions, appeals, marches, protests. Then, on 29 September 2024, she declared a hunger strike. Laila had given ten years of her life to fighting for her son, and now, in what she decided would be the final act of the fight, she put her life on the line.

Malak Mattar’s monumental 2024 black-and-white painting inspired by Guernica is entitled No Words (… for Gaza). A photographer told me he has aerial images taken in May 2023, October 2023 and May 2025 which say it all. Some things are incommunicable through words. But words are all that some of us have.