Latest news with #Englishwoman
USA Today
a day ago
- Sport
- USA Today
At U.S. Women's Open, the world's best amateur is moving closer to coveted LPGA card
At U.S. Women's Open, the world's best amateur is moving closer to coveted LPGA card ERIN, Wisconsin – Lottie Woad's whirlwind summer will likely end with an LPGA card – perhaps sooner rather than later. Here at the 80th U.S. Women's Open, the world's top-ranked amateur says the tour's new LPGA Elite Amateur Pathway (LEAP) program remains in the back of her mind. "I try to push it away," said Woad, "but it's obviously there." Midway through the festivities at Erin Hills, the decorated Englishwoman is 2 under for the championship after rounds of 72-70, six back of leader Mao Saigo and securely inside the top 20. An amateur player must earn 20 points in the LEAP program to earn her LPGA card, and the Florida State star currently has 16. She can earn two points this week with a top 25 finish or only one point for a cut made. After the USWO, Woad heads to the Arnold Palmer Cup June 5-7 at Congaree Golf Club in South Carolina. She'll earn a point there for representing the International team. Top-ranked amateurs are often invited to the Amundi Evian Championship and, if that's the case for Woad, a made cut there would give the Englishwoman her LPGA card for the rest of the 2025 season as well as 2026, should she manage to finish in the top 25 this week. She's already in the field for the AIG Women's British Open based off her top-10 finish last year at St. Andrews. She can play in that event as an amateur or a pro. Worst case, she'll lock it up after the conclusion of the U.S. Women's Amateur in August based off her standing in the World Amateur Golf Ranking. The player who wins the Mark H. McCormack Medal for finishing No. 1 earns three points. Those who finish second or third earn two points. But first, there's work left to do at Erin Hills, where the 2024 Augusta National Women's Amateur champion is the low amateur in the field, tied for 20th with 16-year-old Rayee Feng.
Newsweek
a day ago
- Sport
- Newsweek
US Women's Open: Charley Hull Shows Up Lexi Thompson's Slow Play
Based on facts, either observed and verified firsthand by the reporter, or reported and verified from knowledgeable sources. Newsweek AI is in beta. Translations may contain inaccuracies—please refer to the original content. Less than 10 days ago, Charley Hull revealed that she had started smoking as a way to pass the time on the golf course. As is well known, Hull quit smoking at the beginning of the current season, but at the US Women's Open she may have found a reason to return to it. The Englishwoman hasn't been seen smoking again at Erin Hills, but she has seemed to be very uncomfortable with the pace of play of her playing group. It seems Charley might be frustrated with Lexi's pace of play. A couple of deep breathes and muttering something. Oh, and this is the first hole. 👀👀👀 — Monday Q Info (@acaseofthegolf1) May 29, 2025 Hull, one of the fastest players in the world, is playing in the same group as World No. 1 Nelly Korda, another player who takes very little time to execute her shots. But the third member of the group is Lexi Thompson, who has a much, much slower pace of play than her two colleagues. Hull appeared to be rather annoyed with Thompson's time she took on the first green. But that was just the beginning. The 29-year-old Englishwoman was even seen sitting in one of the tee boxes, allegedly waiting for Thompson to complete her performance on the previous hole. Charley Hull was not thrilled with the pace of play today 💀 — Fore Play (@ForePlayPod) May 29, 2025 The LPGA Tour put in place a new pace of play policy at the beginning of the current season, which seeks to reduce playing times. Players flagged for slow play can expect penalty strokes and even fines. The new policy began to be implemented last March, so there isn't enough data yet to evaluate its effectiveness. Less than two weeks ago, Hull gave an interview to the popular podcast No Laying Up, in which she discussed what led her to smoke on the courses: "I found the golf rounds are sometimes way too slow," she said. "So, then you kind of, like, lose your momentum, and anything I do in life, I, like, get to be fast and just on the go all the time. That's one reason why I used to smoke, cuz it just used to kill a bit of time. Just, like, relax you." Charley Hull of England looks on from the 11th tee during the first round of the U.S. Women's Open presented by Ally 2025 at Erin Hills Golf Course on May 29, 2025 in Erin, Wisconsin. Charley Hull of England looks on from the 11th tee during the first round of the U.S. Women's Open presented by Ally 2025 at Erin Hills Golf Course on May 29, 2025 in Erin, you may recall, Hull announced in early 2025 that she had quit smoking. Her highly publicized $12,000 bet that she wouldn't relapse in the first month was also widely reported. Coincidentally, around that time, the two-time LPGA Tour winner gave an exclusive interview to Newsweek in which she confirmed her success in quitting smoking. "So far so good!" she told us back then. "I've got a good reason to stay off them as I had a bet with a friend of mine and don't want to lose." Hull finished the first round of the U.S. Women's Open with an even-par 72, carding four bogeys and four birdies. Korda finished with the same score, thanks to a birdie and a bogey. Thompson, meanwhile, finished the round at 1-over par, with three birdies and four bogeys. More Golf: Max Homa, Rickie Fowler get to work qualifying for US Open
Daily Record
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- Daily Record
Netflix fans have 'new favourite film' with 'heart-wrenching' period drama
Netflix has been the home of some of the most popular period dramas in recent years, with the likes of Bridgerton and The Crown taking the world by storm, and now the streaming service has added a new romance to its collection The final, enthralling and completed novel by the literary icon Jane Austen has been transformed into a screen adaptation that features an A-list star delivering the dramatics of the 19th century. Austen aficionados and period drama enthusiasts are forever in pursuit of the acclaimed author's tales. Despite their existence for hundreds of years, the captivating wit of her characters and fiery romance within her stories leave readers yearning for more. Persuasion ticks both boxes and hence the film's launch in 2022 sparked considerable excitement amongst devotees of Austen's work. These sentiments were echoed on Rotten Tomatoes where an audience member posted: "People are mad it's not your usual Austen adaptation. It's funny, it's modern, it's cute, it's heart-wrenching... It'll make you laugh and make you cry. It's one of my favourite movies. Even if the two have zero chemistry!". With Dakota Johnson, whose casting was itself a topic of debate, starring as protagonist Anne Elliot following her resettling in Bath, England, the movie navigates her life there. At 27, the Englishwoman relocates with her family to save money, opting to let out their family manor to an admiral and his spouse, reports Surrey Live. Coincidentally, the admiral's sister-in-law's brother is Frederick Wentworth, Anne's former fiance from 1806 whom she parted from owing to her family's influence. Fast forward eight years and they're both unwed, fate orchestrates their reunion granting them another shot at love. One review reads: "I love this version of Persuasion. It's visually beautiful; the use of colour and light, the outdoor scenes, costumes, and even the wallpaper! Just gorgeous. It also captures the humour of Jane Austen's novel in a way that feels more playful than previous versions. "Anne speaking directly to the camera lends itself to the viewer being in on the joke. I'll admit I was ready to dislike Dakota Johnson as Anne but was pleasantly surprised with her portrayal." The film took a bold stance in casting an American actress to play a quintessentially British character and decided to go for a more playful take, which has left some viewers divided. One person penned: "Dakota Johnson's accent is all over the place, and her acting skills are lacking. The story is so convoluted you can't keep up... especially if you are aware of what it truly is about... steer clear of this one." While others have lauded the film's bravery for trying to put a modern spin on a classic tale. They said: "Ahead of its time, this is that film which makes fools of its reviewers quickest off the mark. Granted, it is a jarring first watch, especially for Austen-genre enthusiasts. Its fourth-wall-breaking, modernised dialogue and playful actor interpretations are unexpected." Cosmo Jarvis, who plays Johnson's love interest, is one of the main attractions in this film, which also boasts performances from Richard E. Grant and young British talent Mia McKenna. Why not take a trip back in time and see if this period drama can win you over? The 2022 hit adaptation of Persuasion is now available to stream on Netflix.
Newsweek
23-05-2025
- Sport
- Newsweek
LPGA Star Charley Hull Reveals Unbelievable Golf Reason She Started Smoking
Based on facts, either observed and verified firsthand by the reporter, or reported and verified from knowledgeable sources. Newsweek AI is in beta. Translations may contain inaccuracies—please refer to the original content. One of the few stories of the 2024 season on the LPGA Tour to rival Nelly Korda's sensational performance was Charley Hull's on-course smoking. The Englishwoman made almost more headlines for ripping some darts than for her results in professional golf. However, a fitness role model like Hull was not destined to make smoking a part of her life for long, and she quit in early 2025. In fact, she made a much-publicized bet that she would not relapse in the first month after quitting. The 29-year-old spoke about the topic during a recent interview for the popular No Laying Up podcast, where she revealed what led her to start smoking: "I found the golf rounds are sometimes way too slow. So, then you kind of, like, lose your momentum, and anything I do in life, I, like, get to be fast and just on the go all the time," Hull said. "That's one reason why I used to smoke, cuz it just used to kill a bit of time. Just, like, relax you. But then I quit about two months ago." Charley Hull of England smokes a cigarette on the 9th tee during the first round of the U.S. Women's Open Presented by Ally at Lancaster Country Club on May 30, 2024 in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Charley Hull of England smokes a cigarette on the 9th tee during the first round of the U.S. Women's Open Presented by Ally at Lancaster Country Club on May 30, 2024 in Lancaster, of play has long been a problem on the LPGA Tour. Recently, the organization implemented a new policy to better address the issue. During the interview, Hull assured that she remains smoke-free, although she admitted to still using nicotine patches to curb her cravings. Another topic the two-time LPGA Tour winner discussed was her stated goal of reducing her 5K race time to 20 minutes. She confirmed that her current record is 23 minutes and 30 seconds. Hull also revealed the hilarious way she came up with that idea: "My nephew can do it in like 17 minutes. And like years ago, when we were like 17, 18, we all used to go out drinking together. And he was a little chubster and so was I. And I thought, if you can now do it in 17 minutes, I should easily be able to do it in under 20 minutes. So that's where my motivation has come from." Hull has played in just six LPGA Tour events this season, missing the cut five times. She has one top-10 finish, a tie for fourth at the HSBC Women's World Championship. She also played in the Ladies European Tour's PIF Saudi International, where she tied for eighth. In her seventh LPGA Tour start of the season at the Mexico Riviera Maya Open at Mayakoba, Hull got off to a slow start, carding an even-par 72 in the first round. She will need a big improvement on day two to avoid missing the cut. More Golf: Collin Morikawa's Axed Caddie Lands on Ryder Cup Hopeful's Bag at Colonial
New Statesman
22-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New Statesman
There is no contemporary fiction
I write contemporary fiction. Sometimes it's more contemporary than some people find entirely decent: I published a lockdown novel during lockdown and was bemused to find that for some critics and readers it was 'too soon', as if the major global event that had dominated everyone's lives for two years needed to be put away to mature like wine or cheese before we were allowed to make art with it. Who would ring the bell, I wondered, when it was time? Where are the gatekeepers of contemporaneity? I have just published a novel with a subplot about European Jewish intergenerational trauma. The narrator is an Englishwoman living in the west of Ireland; I was interested in the literature of guilt and complicity, a major strand of post-colonial and postwar fiction but not much developed within these islands. My move from England to Ireland five years ago had made me more conscious of my Englishness than I had ever been, even though I was born in Scotland and grew up in a household divided between Russian-Jewish-American and Yorkshire allegiances. I wrote my PhD on British voyages of exploration in the 18th century, and so knowledge of imperialist art and colonial land-grabbing has been part of my thinking for decades. But I had not felt so personally implicated until arriving in Ireland. My immediate love for particular places and landscapes – often geologically familiar from my Scottish and northern-English childhood – had complications, because English people's admiration of Irish land has, historically, not gone well. I wanted, of course, to do the right thing, to think the right thoughts, to school my desires and pleasures in moral ways, but it wasn't clear that goodness and Englishness could be compatible in Ireland. Even the self-laceration and abnegation that come easily to me didn't meet the case, because the self-loathing oppressor is if anything more malignant than one with healthy self-esteem. I'd read and written about plenty of English people playing out their masochistic dramas on other people's territory and that wasn't good either. These cultural legacies were not about me and still there I was, here I am, living with them. Uncomfortable, intriguing: let's write a novel about it. I made my central character half-Jewish partly because I am and the half-ness is interesting, partly because her ambivalent status opened my theme of belonging. In the weirdly binary popular history of oppressed and oppressors, goodies and baddies, for most of my life the Jewish identity – at least in western Europe – felt like one of victimhood. I spent my teenage summers on exchange in West Germany, where grandparents at the neighbourhood pool sometimes tried to apologise to me for the Holocaust. My Old Testament name and stereotypical appearance were enough to trigger guilt, and – especially in my half-ness – I felt an imposter. Broadly mainstream feelings about Judaism in Europe changed while I was writing the book, as Israeli violence in Gaza escalated. I want to add 'unimaginably' to that last clause, but there's nothing unimaginable about a well-armed state's elimination of a weaker neighbour, and the horrible familiarity of that event is part of the point of my novel, Ripeness. Down the generations, descendants of survivors and of perpetrators, we all live with the consequences. Violence breeds violence. No such thing as an innocent bystander. Is there an innocent passport? Trauma passes down the family, and what about guilt? What if most of us carry complications? I set Ripeness at more or less the same time I started writing what became the final draft, in the spring of 2023, six months before the events of 7 October, though far enough into the war in Ukraine that I could include the presence of Ukrainian exiles in Ireland. As I wrote, of course, events continued to unfold, as they do, and so sometimes I could nod over the page to the reader's and my shared knowledge of what would happen later. Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe A different set of characters in different circumstances would have had more concern for Middle Eastern politics in spring 2023, but Ripeness is interested in the decline of my parents' and teachers' generation, in the last years of the European postwar sensibility and in its bequests, in its visions and blind spots, of which one might argue that Palestine was often one. Even a politically engaged woman in her early seventies living in County Clare might not have been preoccupied with Palestine in those months. From the beginning, I imagined the novel as an elegy for the flawed, Eurocentric and fundamentally optimistic ideas of the world that shaped the (flawed, Eurocentric) postwar liberal consensus. That idea of the world order was always – but coyly – rooted in violence and repression. We all always knew that our gadgets ran on rare minerals produced by the forced labour of children far away, that our food and clothes were produced by underpaid workers at the cost of poorer nations' land and water. We knew that there were wars and famines and droughts about which our governments, liberal and conservative, were not concerned, and indeed from which they and we benefitted. We guarded our social security and healthcare systems against undeserving outsiders. We have known for decades that our abuse of our planet is accelerating towards our own obliteration, killing poorer people before richer people, and we know how to slow down, but it's too much hassle, someone else's problem. There's no point in listing large-scale and ongoing examples of human inhumanity in which almost everyone not personally involved is uninterested, because you already know about them. With the destruction of Gaza and the election of Trump, the fictitiousness of the postwar 'rules-based order' is patent. But those rules always applied to some and not others. The old world order has come to an end. I set my novel in its final months, at the latest possible point where a reasonable person could have believed that the liberal European world-view would prevail. There will be novels about what has happened in the Middle East in the last two years, as there will be novels about Trump's re-election and whatever happens next in Ukraine. They will be written by people who have, through experience or research, an understanding of the intimate, material detail of individual lives in those times and places, because fiction runs on intimate, material detail. Other people living other lives, including me, will continue to write about other matters, all of which continue to be related to each other. But to an extent there is no such thing as 'contemporary fiction', because however fast a book might now or in the future travel from writer to reader, the process of writing – in which I include much of the work of literary publishing – does and should take time, sometimes a lot of time, and also, crucially, because a fundamental promise of fiction is that there will be an ending. It is in the writer's invitation to the reader, the handshake on which the reader's suspension of disbelief is based. Comic, tragic, neither or both: I will make meaning for you. I will offer you a pattern. And this means that the writer must make an ending, not merely an end, which means that the events of the novel are concluded. Endings are the hardest part of realist fiction because they are where reality diverges most from realism: in reality there are ends, not endings. Reality is a mess, realism makes meaning. I cannot write well or honestly about real-life events ongoing at the time of publication because I write at the time of writing. All narrative is retrospective, because of the ending. I am startled that I feel the need to say that the durations of art are not those of the internet. There is an interesting question about a novelist's responsibility to portray 'current events', whether that currency relates to the time of writing or the time described. It's a compelling idea that it's outrageous to write about anything but war while war is ongoing, but one might also reasonably write about the way people living out of sight of war do, mostly, continue to go about their business, to attend meetings and send emails and weed their gardens and recycle packaging and celebrate birthdays and indeed read novels exactly as if thousands of people were not being murdered over the horizon, or even down the road. Very few of us not personally affected down tools and stop everything until the killing ends, and in my experience those individuals who do are often not especially kind or pleasant in personal life. Our inclination to keep calm and carry on is at least as worthy of attention as the rarer and perhaps better tendency to stop and howl. Art is not activism. If your sole desire is to stop genocide, writing a novel – or making music or dance or painting – does not rank highly among ways of achieving that aim, and only partly because by the time it is published the war may well be over. I do not mean to exonerate artists from politics, much less morality. Shelley's claim that 'poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world' has always been true, but only in the loftiest sense. As totalitarian regimes continue to demonstrate, in the short term at least, the police, or ICE or the IDF, have a far stronger case. There may be case for war reporting as an art form, but the difficulties are plain and the obverse – that art is war reporting – is plainly untrue. Even if we consider such readily located examples as Picasso's Guernica or Aharon Appelfeld's Badenheim 1939, what makes them important and enduring is precisely their truth beyond a particular time and place. Guernica speaks to massacre and civil war, not just a particular town in Basque country in May 1937. Badenheim 1939 is about the human capacity to ignore, to uphold routine, to deny accumulating evidence of both ascendant evil and imminent personal danger. That is why they are still interesting nearly a century later, when we might also note that massacre, civil war and the ability to deny accumulating evidence of ascendant evil remain current. It is a delusory narrative of 'progress' that insists on the power and obligation of art to make people better. Art is as old as people – the making of art is a plausible definition of humanity – and we are not better. There are many ways of making contemporary fiction contemporary. So I may, I think, write about the intergenerational effects of genocide and forced migration without betraying an obligation to write about the particular genocide taking place just after the novel is set. I may let the shadow of contemporaneity hang over a story that becomes historical as fast as I write. I hereby make unacknowledged legislation. I ring the bell. Sarah Moss's 'Ripeness' is published by Picador [See also: The dark reality behind Trump's embrace of white South Africans] Related
