Stephen Colbert on Trump-Zelenskyy meeting: ‘Embarrassing, chilling and confusing’

Late-night hosts recap Donald Trump’s shocking rebuke of the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, during a disastrous White House press conference.Stephen Colbert braced himself on Monday to recap Friday’s chaotic White House meeting between Trump, JD Vance and Zelenskyy that devolved into a shouting match between the two world leaders, with Trump as the aggressor, blaming Zelenskyy for continuing Russia’s war in his country.“In just 10 minutes, Donald Trump reversed 80 years of postwar US foreign policy,” the Late Show host explained. “A mere six weeks ago, America defended democracy against autocrats and promoted free and open societies all over the world. Now, we’re on the same pickleball team with Russia

‘The blue blues have never left us’: a new book examines the color’s spanning ties to Black culture

What makes blue Black?In her latest book, Black in Blues: How a Color Tells the Story of My People, the scholar and writer Imani Perry traces the spanning, interdisciplinary connection between the color blue and the Black diaspora.The book opens with a simple anecdote: Perry’s grandmother had a blue bedroom. Not just any blue, but “bright, like the sky in August”, Perry writes. She ponders why her grandmother chose that blue. Was it simply preference, a reminder of her grandmother’s rural upbringing? Was it inspired by the lush backdrop of Alabama, with its “parade of wildflowers”?“I wanted to write toward the mystery of blue and its alchemy in the lives of Black folks,” Perry writes, arguing that blue is equal parts beauty, ugliness, joy and cruelty

‘There’s a poetry to her work’: why Lina Ghotmeh is the right person to remake one-third of the British Museum

The Beirut-born, Paris-based architect has beaten a list of top candidates to redesign the museum’s Western Range. It will be the latest in a series of compelling creations which ‘get all the senses engaged’The British Museum, behind its purposeful and orderly front, gets more and more complicated the deeper in you go. It has grand spaces – the white stone and shadowless light of the Norman Foster-designed Great Court, the classical halls designed by its original architect Robert Smirke to display statues of Pharaonic scale, and the Parthenon-sized Duveen Gallery, built in the 1930s to house the marble sculptures from the famous temple. Beyond and between them is a tissue of spaces and passages, hard to navigate, like the back corridors and lumber rooms of a stately home, in which exquisite vases and reliefs languish in dim cases and on dull walls, over floors tiled in the bureaucratic beige of a 1970s revamp.Overhead there’s a hodgepodge of skylights and valley gutters, accreted over time, prone to leaks, which doesn’t strengthen the museum’s case when they resist calls to repatriate those marbles, and other exhibits acquired by dubious means

On my radar: Richard Russell’s cultural highlights

Richard Russell was born in London in 1971. He joined XL Recordings in 1991 as an A&R and took over the label several years later, attracting a slew of artists including Dizzee Rascal, MIA and Adele. His parallel career as a producer began in 1992 with rave single The Bouncer and continued in 2010 with I’m New Here, his acclaimed collaboration with Gil Scott-Heron. He has since produced albums by Bobby Womack and Damon Albarn. Russell has just released Temporary, the latest album of his collaborative project Everything Is Recorded, with features from Sampha, Florence Welch, Kamasi Washington and others

Behind the curtain: what really goes on in theatre dressing rooms?

SLightbulb-wreathed mirrors, wigs and makeup artists, a sense of faded glamour: the backstage dressing room has its very own lore in Theatreland. It is a private space for a company of actors to gear up or wind down, in between slipping into character, but it’s so much more than that. Films such as All About Eve and John Cassavetes’s Opening Night, as well as plays such as Ronald Harwood’s The Dresser, show this space bristling with tension, vulnerability and rivalries. And Judi Dench has spoken about the fun to be had in this other, unseen side of the proscenium arch (including accidentally flashing Kenneth Branagh).Denise Gough (centre), who plays Emma in People, Places and Things, chats with her fellow Emmas during the interval at the Trafalgar Studios theatre

‘I don’t know whether I’d describe it as fun’: Aimee Lou Wood on the intensity of making The White Lotus

Aimee Lou Wood has a peculiar habit of losing herself. She is known among her fellow cast members for capsizing so completely into a role that they can’t tell who they’re talking to: Wood or her character. (This probably wasn’t helped by the fact that her standout debut role in Sex Education was also called Aimee.) Suranne Jones, who plays alongside her in forthcoming dramedy Film Club, even bought her a bag with a big A on it: “And she said to me,” Wood says, “‘You can put things in there, and that’s Aimee’s bag, so you don’t lose who you are.’ My imagination and my reality can get scarily blurred