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The Sun
30-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Sun
Harry Potter stars' savage swipe at JK Rowling as they sign letter of support for trans women
HARRY Potter stars have taken a swipe at author JK Rowling by signing a letter supporting trans women. One is actor Paapa Essiedu, who is set to play Professor Snape in the new wizarding TV series — due out next year. 5 5 5 It comes after Ms Rowling backed women who celebrated a recent Supreme Court ruling that biological sex defines a woman in legal terms. Feminist Ms Rowling, 59, previously locked horns over trans rights with Potter stars Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint and Emma Watson, whose careers she launched. Their relationships publicly deteriorated after Rowling published a 4,000-word essay about trans women on her blog in 2020. They each responded with statements showing their support for transgender women, saying they could choose who they wanted to be. Now Fantastic Beasts star Eddie Redmayne and Katie Leung, who played Cho Chang in the Potter movies, are among the stars joining Essiedu signing the open letter to film and TV industry bodies. Ghosts star Charlotte Ritchie — a student in The Goblet Of Fire — and Breeders star Daisy Haggard, who voiced the Ministry Of Magic lift, also signed. The letter said that the signatories wish to "add our voices to the 2000+ signatories of the Open Letter from UK Writers to the Trans Community published last week", which was signed by Doctor Who showrunner Russell T Davies and Chewing Gum's Michaela Coel. Signatories said: 'We believe the ruling undermines the lived reality and threatens the safety of trans, non-binary, and intersex people living in the UK.' Julia Hartley-Brewer stands with JK Rowling Unlock even more award-winning articles as The Sun launches brand new membership programme - Sun Club. 5
New York Times
29-03-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Breaking Through
In a meeting at work last week, my colleague told the story of how she recently took her son, age 17, to his first concert, Kim Deal at the Brooklyn Paramount. She was so excited to blow his mind, to introduce him to the magic of live music that she'd discovered at 15 when she first went to a rock show herself. How cool, I thought, imagining her son, forevermore when asked 'What was the first band you saw live?' getting to answer that he went with his mom to see a rock icon like Deal, bassist and frontwoman of the indisputably hip bands the Pixies and the Breeders. This occasioned everyone at the meeting revealing the first band they saw in concert. Perhaps more than any other bit of personal trivia, I find this one fascinating. You learn about their teenage tastes in music. If their parents took them, you learn something about their childhoods. ('Oh, he had the kind of parents who took their 6-year-old to see Steely Dan!') My colleagues' first concerts were impressive: Duran Duran, R.E.M. on the 'Monster' tour. Mine was the English rock band Squeeze, age 15, third row, Madison Square Garden. And people love to tell you about their first concerts. It's a jewel box of a question, an invitation to reveal something unique about themselves , to tell a well-practiced personal story. They get to convey as much or as little about your taste as you feel comfortable with — 'See, I've always been cool' or 'God, look what a dork I was.' It's the perfect specimen of that most reviled form of corporate get-to-know-you activity: the icebreaker. I have, over the past few days, conducted an unscientific but wholly convincing study of my friends' feelings about icebreakers. They all, to a person, hate them. I get it. On their face, team-building exercises of any sort should be treated with suspicion. Icebreakers are meant to loosen people up. How loose, one might wonder wisely, is it ever appropriate to get at work? We're going around the table stating our favorite breakfast cereals, innocuous enough, but I'm not sure I want to reveal anything more intimate than that to the entire marketing department. But, as cheesy as they can be in a work context (is there anything more humiliating than trying to conjure 'a fun fact about yourself'?), I will defend a good icebreaker as a delightful shortcut to a measured intimacy. In a past job where I ran a weekly staff meeting, I began each meeting with an icebreaker. A good portion of my team was remote, before remote work was normal, and it seemed impossible that we were going to get comfortable with one another without some kind of corny intervention. I may be deluding myself, but once the team members got to know one another a little, the icebreakers became a fun parlor game, a way to get closer, to remind ourselves that we were interesting, dynamic human beings even in the matrix of the workplace. Looking back at my icebreakers from those weekly meetings, I see in my notes questions I have no idea how the people closest to me would answer, and I'm tempted to ask them. Some of these questions I devised myself, some came from the writer Rob Walkers's newsletter 'The Art of Noticing,' some came from the team. 'What's the first thing you bought with your own money?' 'What were you doing at 23?' 'What's something you're great at but hate doing?' 'What are the most common things people say when you tell them your hometown?' It might feel awkward or artificial to pose these questions in the middle of a regular conversation, but it might be fun to deliberately ask an icebreaker of your family at dinner, or a group of friends about whom you think you know everything, or your spouse. For those of us who understand the utility of small talk but deplore the slow, inefficient on-ramp of get-to-know-you questions — where are you from, what do you do, any siblings? — icebreakers do just what they claim to. You can wait for the ice to melt, or you can just smash it with a question that gets at something actually a little interesting, a little revealing. And you don't have to call them icebreakers. Outside of a corporate framework, icebreakers are just manifestations of curiosity. What do you really want to know about the person you're talking to? Why not just ask them? 🎬 'A Minecraft Movie' (Friday): This movie will have references — to things like water buckets, Creepers and Ender pearls — that go over your head. But they'll delight the kids in your moviegoing party. Hopefully the high jinks of Jack Black and Jason Momoa bumbling through a video game realm prove entertaining enough that even the newbies can enjoy their time in the Overworld. Earl Grey Tea Cake For a not-too-sweet dessert that will keep well into the week, there's Samantha Seneviratne's moist and tender Earl Grey tea cake with dark chocolate and orange zest. Its subtle floral-citrus scent comes from loose tea leaves stirred into the buttery cake batter, which is also liberally speckled with chopped dark chocolate. Serve thick wedges after dinner or for a midafternoon snack, preferably accompanied by a pot of Earl Grey tea. The Hunt: A couple with a $350,000 budget searched for a home on the sea. Which boat did they choose? Play our game. At home with: See inside the spacious Potomac, Md., home of a film producer couple. What you get for $55,000: A 1912 Queen Anne Revival house in Harpers Ferry, W.V.; a condo in an 1840 house in Charleston, S.C.; or a shingled house in New Bedford, Mass. Mortgages: Trump administration officials are ramping up talks of privatizing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. This is what it will mean for home buyers. Click here to read this weekend's edition of T, The New York Times Style Magazine. Art of craft: Nails are the canvas for her mind-boggling creations. Manhattan: T.J. Byrnes, a no-frills Irish pub in the Financial District, has started attracting the young and hip. Digital art, IRL: Qualeasha Wood incorporates distorted self-portraits and internet memes into her tapestries. Lexicon: The Oxford English Dictionary added 42 new words borrowed from other languages, including 'gigil,' a Tagalog expression for witnessing something adorable. Achy knees? This exercise can help. How to become a birder without going birding If you feel called to bask in the springtime delight that is bird-watching, but don't have the time to camp out and patiently spy, consider setting up a smart bird feeder. Our favorites look just like regular feeders, but they come equipped with cameras that capture high-quality, up-close shots of avian visitors. They'll send you smartphone alerts when birds come by, and even record videos or photos of their escapades — perfect for sparking some joy in your group chats. Also: We've spotted deals on both of our top-pick feeders as part of this weekend's spring sales. — Brittney Ho Notre Dame vs. TCU, women's N.C.A.A. tournament: Notre Dame's past three seasons have ended in the Sweet Sixteen round. Can it avoid the same fate this year? The Irish defense has been great, thanks in large part to Hannah Hidalgo, the ACC's defensive player of the year. But TCU's offense can be tough to stop when Hailey Van Lith gets her pick-and-roll game going with Sedona Prince. Today at 1 p.m. Eastern on ESPN Here is today's Spelling Bee. Yesterday's pangrams were headphone and openhanded. Take the news quiz to see how well you followed this week's headlines. And here are today's Mini Crossword, Wordle, Sudoku, Connections, Sports Connections and Strands. Thanks for spending part of your weekend with The Times. — Melissa Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox. Reach our team at themorning@
Boston Globe
05-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Boston Globe
Kim Deal comes to Boston with a personal, vulnerable solo album
'It was so sweet to me, such a great moment to live in. Also a horrible lot of pathos there.' Advertisement Once you know the backstory, it's pretty clear what the song is about: 'Let me go/ Where there's no/ Memory of you/ Where everything is safe/ And nothing is true.' Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up But Deal specializes in a kind of surrealistic songwriting style. 'I know you, little libertine,' she sang on 'Cannonball,' the Breeders song that the Village Voice (among other outlets) named the best song of 1993. 'I know you're a real cuckoo.' That indelible hit helped introduce Deal's wry rock songs to a new generation when Olivia Rodrigo hand-picked the Breeders to open some dates on the young star's 2024 arena tour. To Deal, her songs are transparent, almost to the point of embarrassment. 'Sometimes I cringe because I feel so vulnerable,' she said. 'I'm exposing so much.' But she does admit that listeners may not hear them that way. When she recorded the vocal for 'Skinhead #2,' a song from the Breeders' fifth and most recent album, 'All Nerve' (2018), she tried to explain its intent to her twin sister, Kelley, and engineer Steve Albini. 'I said, 'You know what I'm saying here?' and they both said, 'I don't care,'' she recalled with a laugh. ''But the lyric is pretty cool…' ''Don't care!'' Some of the songs on the new album, 'Nobody Loves You More,' date back over a decade ago. Then Advertisement Albini, a longtime friend and collaborator, worked with Deal on the last song on the album, 'A Good Time Pushed,' shortly before his Albini, a famously uncompromising presence in the studio, worked with Nirvana, PJ Harvey, and many lesser-known bands over a 40-year career. One of his earliest notable credits as a producer came on the Pixies' debut album, 'Surfer Rosa' (1988). He was effusive in his praise for Deal, once calling her Without planning it, Deal said, her new album amounts to a fond farewell to him as much as to her mother. 'It turns out it's a tribute, because he [bleeping] died ,' she said. If Deal epitomizes a certain kind of brassy composure onstage, she has a theory about where that comes from. Though she and Kelley were born and raised in Dayton, their family roots trace to Appalachia. 'All my family – cousins, grandparents, grand-uncle, aunts – they're all from West Virginia,' Deal said. 'There's definitely a singing style out of Appalachia that I love.' Take, for instance, the Carter Family, the 'first family of country music.' 'They were so cool, so exciting to me,' she said. 'I love that music. They're jamming their asses off, with no body movement. Nobody's rocking, no swaying. A pure voice, harmonizing with another pure voice. It doesn't have vibrato or anything. I think it's otherworldly and ghostly.' Advertisement Singer/guitarist Kim Deal performs with The Breeders at House of Blues in 2023. (Ben Stas for The Boston Globe) Ben Stas for The Boston Globe The Breeders originally formed as a side project featuring Deal and Tanya Donelly of Throwing Muses, with Carrie Bradley of the late, lamented Ed's Redeeming Qualities on violin. For their first show at the Rat, they were billed as 'Boston Girl Super-Group.' The Breeders became a fulltime band after Deal convinced her sister to learn guitar and recruited a British friend, Josephine Wiggs. For her solo songs, she's touring with an entirely different cast, including bassist Mando Lopez, drummer Lindsay Glover, and guitarist Rob Bochnik. While the Breeders have proven to be much more than just a diversion from the Pixies, at 63, Deal may be embarking on another new chapter in her rock 'n roll life. Not, she insists, that she has wasted too much time thinking about it. 'I think a lot of people do have an expectation of what they 'deserve,' how things 'should be,'' she said. 'I have none. I have zero plans, no five-year plan. If nobody wants to listen to it, nobody has to listen to it.' Then she concluded with a good-natured pronouncement, which began with four fitting words: 'I don't give a…' KIM DEAL With Ratboys. Monday, March 10: 7 p.m. doors, show at 8 p.m. $60-75. The Wilbur, 246 Tremont St., Boston. James Sullivan can be reached at .
