Albanese government must ban dynamic pricing and prosecute scalpers, local ticketing agency says

The government must ban dynamic pricing and banish scalpers if consumers are to pay fair prices for concerts, the head of Australia’s largest locally owned ticketing platform says.Last month the Albanese government said it planned to change consumer laws to address the practice of inflating tickets while customers wait in online queues, known as dynamic pricing, after tickets for the US rock band Green Day’s Australian tour rose to up to $500.While the details of the reforms are yet to be released, the Humanitix co-chief executive officer, Joshua Ross, said the government and ticketing companies could do more to prevent people and online sites from buying tickets for the sole purpose of reselling them at huge markups.“They need to create examples of it with proper prosecution,” Ross said. “And if they can clean up the scalping world by making the disincentive strong enough, then it makes sense to ban dynamic pricing

‘People feel terrible. They want to laugh’: can comedy make light of Trump 2.0?

“When Trump first won, there was almost a novelty to having a character such as him in a position of such vast responsibility – that was a new thing for comedy to address,” said Andy Zaltzman, chair of Radio 4’s The News Quiz and the satirist behind The Bugle podcast and multiple political comedies.The first Trump presidency spawned debate about whether it’s possible to satirise a man whose extreme appearance and rhetoric mean he presents as a walking caricature. The New York Times even ran a piece titled “How President Trump ruined political comedy”.Now comedians in the UK and US are trying to work out how to deal with a second, possibly darker, Trump presidency.“Trump is so ridiculous that he makes comic extrapolation harder,” said Chicago-born, London-based standup Sara Barron, who found much of the comedy targeting Trump “did not provide catharsis”

Jon Ronson: ‘What will be the next culture war? Autism. And climate migration’

If you could have learned one lesson earlier on in your life, what would it have been?Don’t tweet. I remember right at the beginning of Twitter – and this is really indiscreet, so I hope the parties involved won’t mind – but I remember Matt Stone from South Park said to me, “Look at Lena Dunham. She’s got this incredible show on HBO. She’s can express herself in these beautiful ways on HBO. And then she goes and fucks it all up on Twitter

David Hare: ‘I don’t have much time. I am trying to write a lot of stuff’

Now 77, the playwright who has chronicled British life for 50 years, says he is stepping up his work rate as he has limited scope to tell important storiesSir David Hare has charted the forces and habits shaping British life for more than half a century, on stage and on screen. His work for cinema stretches from the 1985 film of his play Plenty, starring Meryl Streep, to his screenplays for Damage, The Hours and 2016’s Denial. And his string of theatrical “state of the nation” accounts of political and moral dilemmas, with hits such as Pravda, starring Anthony Hopkins, The Absence of War, starring John Thaw, and Amy’s View, with Judi Dench, have regularly set the cultural agenda.But now, at 77, Hare has revealed he is to seriously step up his work rate because he fears that, for him, it is already “five minutes to midnight” and so he has limited scope remaining to tell important stories.The leading playwright and Bafta-winning director now has three new dramas in production and plans for more

On my radar: Monty Don’s cultural highlights

Born in 1955 in West Germany and raised in Hampshire, Monty Don studied English literature at the University of Cambridge. After running a costume jewellery business in the 80s, he was the Observer’s gardening editor from 1994 to 2006. He has presented Gardeners’ World since 2003, as well as his own series including Around the World in 80 Gardens and Monty Don’s Japanese Gardens. He lives in Herefordshire with his wife, Sarah; they have three children. He has published 27 books, the latest of which is Spanish Gardens (BBC Books, £39

The Guide #164: The quit list – when to give up on that book, TV show and more

It’s list-making season for those of us who write about culture, the point of the year where we tot up all the things we’ve consumed in the past 11-and-a-bit months and try to decide which of them is the best. For me, this exercise always comes with a pang of guilt over the culture I either haven’t got around to watching/listening to/reading or, even worse, started and then never finished. Books pile up on the bedside table, podcasts sit dormant in my series feed, and TV shows lie half-watched on the (far too) many streaming services I’ve signed up for.In the age of so-much content, this isn’t a problem confined to professional list-makers. But should you stick with that TV show, game, podcast or book you’ve been struggling through, or should you abandon ship? To help you in that tricky decision, I’ve asked some of the Guardian’s sage cultural heads for their advice:BookSome people seem to view reading as the kind of “eating your greens” of entertainment – I guess because of the widespread tendency to look down on screen time, with books being a morally superior option