Seth Meyers on Trump: ‘The most unpopular president of all time’

Seth Meyers spoke about rising tensions within the Republican party with Donald Trump losing support from his base over the Jeffrey Epstein scandal.The Late Night host spoke about yesterday’s dramatic meeting in the situation room to discuss Epstein, an ongoing crisis that has seen the president becoming “wildly unpopular”.Meyers said that Trump is “by all the accounts the most unpopular president of all time” and up until this point has only been “able to hang on to power because he has a tight grip on the Republican party no matter what he did or how bad things got”.But a new poll shows that only 33% of American adults approve of how the president is managing the government, a figure that’s down from March with the fall driven by Republicans or independents.Meyers called this “a meaningful and real development” and “it’s not coming out of thin air” with Trump “pissing off Maga” in multiple ways

Jon Stewart on government shutdown deal: ‘A world-class collapse by Democrats’

Late-night hosts unleashed on Senate Democrats for caving on the longest-ever government shutdown with no assurance on healthcare subsidies from Republicans.Jon Stewart minced no words for congressional Democrats on Monday evening, hours after a coalition broke from the party and voted with Republicans to extend government funding through January with no assurances on the healthcare tax credits at the center of the 41-day stalemate. “By the way, tonight’s show will be brought to you by: I can’t fucking believe it,” Stewart fumed at the top of The Daily Show. “I can’t fucking believe it: for when the ‘I can’t believe it’ Edvard Munch scream emoji doesn’t quite convey how much you cannot fucking believe it.”“They fucking caved on the shutdown, not even a full week removed from the best election night results they’ve had in years,” he continued

My cultural awakening: The Big Lebowski inspired me to embrace unemployment

The Dude’s relaxed attitude towards the pressures of life helped me realise it was better to be jobless than stuck in one I hatedQuitting your job in your 30s with no solid plan is generally considered poor decision-making. Doing it because you watched The Big Lebowski is probably even worse. But as I faced up to what would be my eighth year in an IT role, I watched Jeff Bridges meandering his way through the chaos of life in a dressing gown. And I found myself thinking: maybe the Dude had it figured out.For most of my working life, my identity has been strongly bolstered by work: doing well career-wise felt like evidence of my utility and respectability (despite the fact no one ever really understood what my job was anyway)

Three decades later, The Truman Show feels freshly disturbing – and astoundingly prescient

The great Australian director Peter Weir is perhaps underrated as an auteur, simply because his filmography doesn’t follow any thematic or stylistic principle; each of his contributions feels like a complete work of art unto itself. While Picnic at Hanging Rock remains his finest work, his foray into Hollywood culminated in the utterly transfixing, intermittently horrifying Jim Carrey vehicle The Truman Show. Almost 30 years after its theatrical release, the film has only grown in stature and prescience.Ostensibly a dark satire on voyeurism and the inexhaustible manipulations of the media, The Truman Show predated the television juggernaut Big Brother by a single year, and it’s hard not to see something causal in that. Both are about surveillance and the murky line separating reality from entertainment; both involve hidden cameras watching the participants’ every move

Big trouble in ‘Little Berlin’: the tiny hamlet split in two by the cold war

A new museum in Mödlareuth tells the story of how a settlement of only 50 people straddled Bavaria in West Germany and Thuringia in the eastA creek so shallow you barely got your ankles wet divided a community for more than four decades. By an accident of topography, the 50 inhabitants of Mödlareuth, a hamlet surrounded by pine forests, meadows and spectacular vistas, found themselves at the heart of the cold war. They had the misfortune to straddle Bavaria, in West Germany, and Thuringia in the East, a border that was demarcated first by a fence and then by a wall. American soldiers called it Little Berlin.Months after their own wall was breached, and even before their country had reunified in 1990, a group of local people set about memorialising their history

Paul Kelly: ‘Imagine by John Lennon is probably one of the worst songs ever written. I can’t stand it’

Your new album is called Seventy. You are 70 years old. And I hear you like the number 70.It’s a biblical number. It’s a very pleasing number to me