Looking for a hint for today’s Connections puzzle? Below, we have clues to help you unlock whichever category has you stumped for the puzzle on July 7, 2025.
Connections first launched on the New York Times in June 2023. The premise is deceptively simple: Players have to find the thematic connection of four groups of four words … without making more than four mistakes.
Today’s Connections has categories about blowin’ the whistle, takin’ it to the hoop and more.
Below are the hints, categories and answers for today’s Connections game, puzzle #757, on July 7.
A hint for each Connections category today, July 7
Looking like a teetering stack of washing machines perched on the edge of an elevated highway, the Nakagin Capsule Tower was an astonishing arrival on the Tokyo skyline in 1972. It was the heady vision of Kisho Kurokawa, a radical Japanese architect who imagined a high-rise world of compact capsules, where people could cocoon themselves away from the information overload of the modern age. These tiny pods would be “a place of rest to recover”, he wrote, as well as “an information base to develop ideas, and a home for urban dwellers”. Residents could peer out at the city from their cosy built-in beds through a single porthole window, or shut it all out by unfurling an elegant circular fan-like blind, all while remaining connected with the latest technology at all times.
Launched to critical acclaim, the Nakagin tower’s 140 capsules quickly sold out, and became highly sought after by well-heeled salarymen looking for a place to crash when they missed the last train home. Never intended to be full-time housing, the pods came stuffed with mod cons: en suite bathroom, foldout desk, telephone and Sony colour TV. But, 50 years on, after a prolonged lack of maintenance and repairs, and disagreements among owners about its future, the asbestos-riddled building was finally disassembled in 2022. The creaking steel capsules of Kurokawa’s space-age fantasy were unbolted and removed from the lift and stair towers, pod by pod.
Now, three years on, a little piece of his dream is back. After a meticulous process of conservation, people will soon be able to get a glimpse of life in one of these sci-fi capsules, thanks to a new exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. MoMA acquired a unit in 2023, one of 14 capsules that were carefully restored to their original condition, with oversight from Kurokawa’s office, after the tower was disassembled. “The Nakagin Capsule Tower is one of the world’s most written about works of modern architecture,” says MoMA curator Evangelos Kotsioris. “But the many lives of the building, and its residents, have rarely been told.”
He and co-curator Paula Vilaplana de Miguel have pieced together an immersive display that tells the full story of the project in all its facets, from conception to marketing to unexpected afterlife. There will be a wealth of ephemera, from the building’s only surviving sales brochure, to the original promotional film for the tower, alongside video interviews with former residents, and an explorable digital model of the entire building. And of course, there’s the capsule itself, visible in all its freshly white-painted glory through the window of MoMA’s street-level gallery. The museum’s retractable glass facade was opened up for the first time to get it in.
Peek through the pod’s porthole window and you will find a streamlined white world that could have been lifted from 2001: A Space Odyssey. A reel-to-reel tape recorder shines out from an angled wall panel, next to a sleek radio receiver and built-in rotary phone, beneath a Sony Trinitron TV. A bright red Olivetti typewriter perches on a fold-down desk, alongside a Sharp electronic calculator – one of the cutting-edge features included in the “super-deluxe” capsule model.
“Just as there is a full range of automobiles, from sedans to coupes to sports cars,” Kurokawa explained in the sales brochure, “a capsule house can serve numerous purposes – mini-office, studio, hotel, home, conference room, or urban villa – based on the equipment selected.”
Media-savvy salesman … Kurokawa in front of the completed tower in 1974. Photograph: Tomio Ohashi
Kurokawa was the youngest founding member of the Metabolist movement, a group of Japanese architects formed in 1960 that fused ideas about megastructures with those of organic biological growth. They imagined a networked world of interconnecting modular structures that could multiply and spread across the planet like a great branching fungus. But, unlike many of his contemporaries who struggled to communicate effectively with clients and the public through the usual clouds of architectural jargon, Kurokawa was a media-savvy salesman.
He produced a sizzling manifesto, The Capsule Declaration, illustrated with Airstream trailers and Nasa space capsules, amniotic sacs and coffins, arguing that “the capsule transcends human and device”. He imagined a seductive plug-and-play future, where capsules could be adapted, expanded and replaced as societal needs changed, presenting a new kind of architecture capable of growth and transformation through “metabolic cycles”. In 1970, he published a punchy magazine-like book, which came with a striking fold-out orange and pink poster and a 7-inch vinyl recording of his computerised voice reading out his manifesto. On seeing this, as well as Kurokawa’s capsule installation at the Osaka Expo the same year, the Nakagin development company was sold.
Their sales pitch for the “capsule manshon” – a term for high-end apartment buildings – was expounded in a glossy brochure designed like a car catalogue. It included dashing cutaway illustrations of the 10 square metre capsules, drawn by a car magazine illustrator, suggesting that life in one of these pods would be just as thrilling as driving a sports car. The construction company, Taisei, made a 25-minute film, with actors performing a glamorous day in the life of the tower, while buyers were even gifted a lamp in the shape of a building. The marketing worked. Despite their small size, the capsules sold for around 50% more per square metre than the average apartment.
The only surviving wooden model of the project will be on show in the exhibition, and attentive visitors will notice that it includes a second capsule tower. Such was the initial sales success, Nakagin started planning a twin complex across the road, to be connected to the first by a raised plinth, as well as towers for several other sites across the city. But their timing couldn’t have been worse. The 1973 international oil crisis saw construction costs soar – and Kurokawa’s capsule dreams evaporate. Still, the first tower remained a success for the next 15 years. Its neighbourhood, Ginza, boomed into a bustling business district, while the capsule prices were ever-inflated by the 1980s bubble economy. Kurokawa, meanwhile, would continue pursuing his penchant for pods elsewhere, building the world’s first capsule hotel in Osaka in 1979, which spawned a wave of similar micro-hotels across Japan.
Meticulously restored … the MoMa’s capsule. Photograph: Jonathan Muzikar/The Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Nakagin Capsule Tower Preservation and Restoration Project, Tokyo
But the Nakagin tower wouldn’t be repeated. Like a giant pixelated bar chart, it reflected the country’s fortunes: when the bubble burst in the early 1990s, so the capsules started to crumble. Residents moved out, maintenance funds dwindled, and rainwater pooling on the capsules’ flat roofs caused extensive corrosion.
Kurokawa had always intended that the pods would be replaced after 25 years, to respond to changing needs. But a crucial design flaw made it impossible to remove them individually without first removing every capsule above. Besides, any attempt to refurbish would have required the prohibitively expensive removal of the asbestos insulation. Lured by the value of the site for redevelopment, the individual pod owners voted by majority to sell the building for demolition in 2007, just a few months before Kurokawa died.
“Many people see the Nakagin tower as a failed utopian project,” says Kotsioris, but it actually stood for a relatively long time, in terms of Japan’s throwaway building culture. “When buildings in Tokyo had an average lifespan of 15 to 20 years, the fact that it stood for 50 years makes it a resounding success.”
‘Like a traumatic memory’ … Wakana Nitta (AKA Koe-chan) in the capsule she uses as a DJ booth. Photograph: Courtesy Tatsuyuki Maeda / The Nakagin Capsule Tower Preservation and Restoration Project, Tokyo, Japan
As it turned out, the building’s final years were some of its most vibrant. It won a 15-year reprieve when, after the 2007 financial crisis, the developer that had agreed to acquire the site unexpectedly filed for bankruptcy. Takayuki Sekine, a retired chamber of commerce manager, and his wife, Yumiko, bought a capsule when demolition was already on the cards, and spent every weekend in it. “After I started my blogposts, my articles attracted many readers here,” Takayuki recalls in a video interview. “Some enthusiasts started living here, with many more people joining in. And we had so much fun, with drinking parties at night.”
In another video, a DJ called Koe-chan explains how she spotted the tower from the highway. “It stuck with me like a traumatic memory,” she recalls, and she was compelled to acquire a capsule for live-streaming her DJ sets. Others used their pods as offices or libraries, each customised to their new purpose, while the collective efforts to repair and maintain the leaky hulk brought the tower a real sense of community for the first time. “Ironically, the capsules were originally designed as protective wombs for isolation from the city,” says Kotsioris. “But in the end, they turned out to form a really sociable, neighbourly community.”
As for Kurokawa, he would no doubt be amused that some of his capsules have found new homes, scattered around cultural institutions and collections worldwideAfter all, he imagined a future where you might undock your capsule and take it with you across the ocean to pastures new.
When Emmanuel Macron rides in a horse-drawn carriage to Windsor Castle this week, it will be to celebrate the return of close political relations between London and Paris, drawing a line under the damaging spats of the Brexit years.
The French president’s office said the “shared interests” of the two countries were what mattered now, hailing France and the UK’s “essential” close relationship on the international stage. This reinvigorated cross-Channel bond was “vital”, a UK official said.
For Paris, it is symbolic that Macron is the first European leader to be invited for a pomp-filled state visit to the UK since Brexit. It is seen as a sign of the special France-UK relationship that Macron beat the US president, Donald Trump, to be hosted by King Charles. Trump is expected to take his turn in a gilded carriage later this year.
The strong Franco-British unity on display is seen as crucial at a time of war in Ukraine and the Middle East and faced with the unpredictability of the US president. London and Paris’s close bilateral ties on security and defence continued unhindered by Brexit, but are expected to be deepened and updated at Downing Street’s Franco-British summit this week, as the two countries lead the “coalition of the willing” on Ukraine.
For France, Macron’s state visit underlines how far Labour’s Keir Starmer has gone to move on from the nightmare chapter in cross-Channel relations of the Brexit years. Boris Johnson, who used his best franglais to say Paris should “donnez-moi un break”, was seen by French officials as a populist engaged in constant France-bashing to numb the electorate to the impact of Brexit. Trust and dialogue had ebbed away during bitter rows over submarine contracts with Australia and fishing rights. The short-lived PM Liz Truss had deliberately refused to say whether Macron was a friend or a foe while running for the Conservative leadership.
Relations began to thaw under Rishi Sunak, assisted by King Charles’s state visit to France in 2023. The king dined at the Palace of Versailles, saying he loved Édith Piaf songs because the French cabaret star had sung to his mother on a state visit when she was pregnant with him.
King Charles and Queen Camilla enter French presidential palace with President Macron – video
Macron and Starmer see each other unusually often. The UK prime minister has travelled to France five times since his election, with Macron travelling several times in the other direction, as they work together on Ukraine.
“The geopolitical landscape has changed and made it more compelling for both sides to make up,” said Sébastien Maillard, a special adviser to the Jacques Delors Institute. “At a time of tremendous, almost earth-shattering movements in the international order, it’s a way for of both countries – who are permanent members of the UN security council, have nuclear deterrents and the same level of diplomatic and military outreach – to cling to an order based on international law.”
Maillard said France and the UK’s renewed relationship, and putting Brexit aside, sent a signal to the Kremlin and the White House that they were like-minded and “there is no ideological warfare between them … that core values and principles are deeply shared, and they are closely tied when it comes to defending Ukraine and the continent, and upgrading their military capabilities while increasing defence spending”.
But a difficult issue remains on the table: the catastrophic deaths of would-be asylum seekers trying to reach the UK coast on small boats across the Channel from France. Despite joint British funding and cooperation, and French police presence on the coast, nearly 20,000 people have arrived in Britain via small boats so far this year, a 50% increase on the same period in 2024. At least 17 people died this year trying to cross the Channel by boat, after a record 78 died last year. France is considering allowing police to stop British-bound boats in its shallow coastal waters up to 300 metres from the coast, but this requires a legal decision from sea authorities. Announcements are expected at this week’s summit.
“Both governments have to approach this as a domestic political issue, which makes the situation even more complex,” said Christian Lequesne, a professor of international relations at Paris’s Sciences Po university. He said Starmer and Macron were in their own ways both under pressure at home from an increase in far-right and anti-immigration political discourse from Marine Le Pen and Nigel Farage.
Lequesne said that ultimately the newly warmed relationship better equipped the countries to find solutions: “It took a long time, but France has finally digested Brexit, which it had a hard time swallowing and was disappointed about.”
Women forced back to living under the Taliban’s increasingly repressive regime have spoken of their desperation as Iran accelerates the deportation of an estimated 4 million Afghans who had fled to the country.
In the past month alone, more than 250,000 people, including thousands of lone women, have returned to Afghanistan from Iran, according to the UN’s migration agency. The numbers accelerated before Sunday’s deadline set by the Iranian regime for all undocumented Afghans to leave the country.
The Taliban, who returned to power in 2021, have been accused of enforcing a system of gender apartheid in Afghanistan. Women returning to the country must live with oppressive laws that ban them from showing their faces, speaking or appearing in public, as well as being excluded from most jobs and education. Anyone caught breaking these rules faces public flogging.
An employee of the NGO World Vision assists a woman at an office where deported Afghans can call their family members, 3 July, Islam Qala, Afghanistan. Photograph: Getty Images
Speaking to the Guardian and Zan Times, an Afghan news agency, at a border crossing in southern Afghanistan, Sahar*, 40, is travelling with five children and says she has no idea where she will live now. A widow originally from Baghlan, a city in northern Afghanistan, she had been living in Iran for more than a decade. She ran a small tailoring workshop and had recently put down a deposit on a home. Last week, she says she was detained, taken with her children from a refugee camp near the southern city of Shiraz, and deported.
“I didn’t even get to pack their clothes. They came in the middle of the night. I begged them to give me just two days to collect my things. But they didn’t listen. They threw us out like garbage.”
Until recently, women were rarely forcibly returned from Iran. Men, often undocumented labourers, were more likely to face arrest and deportation. But Afghan border officials say there has been a recent shift, with at least 100 unaccompanied women deported through a single border point in Nimroz province, in the south of the country, between March and May this year.
Returning to Afghanistan without a male guardian puts women in direct conflict with Taliban law, which prohibits women from travelling alone. Many of those returned from Iran find themselves stranded at the border, unable to continue their journey.
With temperatures now reaching 52C, local officials say that a number of people have died during the forced crossings. Border officials say at least 13 bodies have arrived in the past two weeks, but it was not clear whether they had died of heat and thirst or were killed during Israel’s airstrikes in Iran.
Afghans wait for assistance and buses at the Iranian border on 3 July in Islam Qala. Women are unable to continue their journey without a male escort. Photograph: Getty Images
Those arriving at border crossings in southern Afghanistan say they are thirsty, hungry and exhausted, having walked for hours under the sun. Most have no belongings, documentation or plan about where to live.
“From Shiraz to Zahedan [close to the Afghan border], they took everything from us. My bank card had 15 million tomans (£110). They charged 50,000 tomans for a bottle of water, 100,000 for a cold sandwich. And if you didn’t have it, your child went without,” says Sahar.
The Taliban says it offers short-term shelter and transport assistance to women deported without a mahram (an adult male who can accompany her on a journey). But many returnees say they received no such help. Under Taliban policy, most single women are barred from receiving land, travelling alone to their home province, or accessing employment.
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Sahar says her options in Afghanistan are bleak. She has an elderly mother in Baghlan, but no home, no job and no husband, meaning, under Taliban rules, she cannot travel alone or work legally. “I asked for land [from the Taliban], anything to start again. They said, ‘You’re a woman, you have no mahram. You don’t qualify.’”
Deported Afghans wait to receive sim cards at the Iranian border on 3 July in Islam Qala. Many arrive hungry and exhausted, having walked for hours in extreme heat. Photograph: Getty Images
Many end up relying on extended family or informal networks. One woman, recently returned with a newborn, says she was denied food and shelter. “They told me: ‘You’re not eligible. You don’t have a man with you.’ But my baby is just four days old. Where am I supposed to go?”
The UN agency, the International Organization for Migration, and other groups provide temporary aid at border crossings, but they do not have the mandate or resources for long-term support.
In the buses taking deportees from detention to the Afghanistan borders, women also say they are subjected to verbal abuse, bribes demanded for basic services and no air conditioning in extreme heat. “They said it’s a waste for you Afghans. My child cried from the heat, but the driver laughed and mocked us,” says Zahra*.
Anne Reid wants to get one thing straight from the off. She adores working with the director Dominic Dromgoole. “He treats actors like grownups. Some directors feel as if they’ve got to play games and teach you how to act. But a conductor doesn’t teach a viola player how to play the blooming instrument, does he?” She talks about directors who get actors to throw bean bags at each other and go round the room making them recite each other’s names. “Blimey! I want to be an adult. I think I’ve earned it now.” She pauses. Reid has always been a master of the timely pause. “You can’t get more adult than me and be alive really, can you, darling?”
Reid turned 90 in May. She celebrated by going on a national tour with Daisy Goodwin’s new play, By Royal Appointment. I catch up with the show at Cheltenham’s Everyman theatre. She’s already done Bath. Then there’s Malvern, Southampton, Richmond, Guildford and Salford. I feel knackered just thinking about it, I say. She gives me a look. “Oh, they send me in cars. I don’t have to toil much!”
Yesterday she did a double shift – matinee and evening show. Reid is magnificent as the queen in this witty, moving drama, directed by Dromgoole. The play documents Elizabeth II’s years on the throne via relationships with her dress designer, milliner and, most poignantly, her dresser. We witness the major events of her reign backstage as her team prepares appropriate outfits for them. Reid’s queen is fabulously multifaceted – funny and mischievous, loyal and dutiful, devastated and disappointed, nostalgic and lustful. There are myriad lines to learn and she’s on stage virtually the whole two hours. When Reid emerged for the evening performance’s encore, she looked as if she could have happily popped out a third show of the day.
Anne Reid as the queen in By Royal Appointment, with (from left) James Wilby, Caroline Quentin and James Dreyfus. Photograph: Nobby Clark
She tells me she’s delighted with the part, not least because it’s so different from the roles she played earlier in her career. Back then she tended to be cast as working-class mothers tethered to the kitchen or women working in aprons (Victoria Wood’s canteen comedy Dinnerladies, the cook in the revival of Upstairs Downstairs). “I’ve always been below-stairs, and you can’t get more upstairs than the queen!”
The weird thing is, she says, she grew up in a middle-class family and was privately educated. Her grandfather, father and all three brothers were journalists. Reid’s dad was a foreign correspondent for the Daily Telegraph, and she discovered in 2015 (when participating in the genealogy TV show Who Do You Think You Are?) that he also had a sideline spying for the British in the second world war. Her brother Colin was a columnist for the Daily Mail, and her husband Peter Eckersley worked for the Guardian before becoming head of drama at Granada, which is where they met.
Did she ever fancy a career in journalism? “No, I wanted to be a ballet dancer. My dad wanted me to be a performer because my grandma was some sort of small-time performer. I had a letter from him in the war saying, ‘I want you to drink milk when Mummy gives it to you because that will make you strong, but most of all I want you to learn elocution and to sing and dance.’” She was sent to boarding school in Wales, dutifully took the elocution lessons and lost her geordie accent, and her teacher told her parents that Anne was a born actor. She went to Rada and was the only girl in her year to win a prize.
For the past couple of decades, her parts have been more varied and challenging. Now she’s best known as the genteel Celia in the BBC’s comedy-drama Last Tango in Halifax; the family matriarch Muriel in Russell T Davies’s dystopian series Years and Years; the grande dame Lady Denham in the Jane Austen adaptation Sanditon; and the mousy May, who has a sizzling affair with her daughter’s boyfriend in the 2003 movie The Mother. All of them dream roles, beautifully played.
Anne Reid as Valerie Barlow in Coronation Street, 1967. Photograph: ITV/Shutterstock
Reid is a household face rather than name. When I tell friends I’m interviewing her, most look blank. Then I show them pictures of her best-known roles, and they say they love her.
We meet in the boardroom at the Everyman. Reid is elegantly casual – shirt, slacks, a dash of lipstick. She can look a little sour and disapproving, then she smiles and her face lights up. It’s one of Reid’s great dramatic gifts, transforming her from dour curmudgeon to empathetic beauty (and vice versa) in a flicker.
Your career has been amazing, I say. She gently rebukes me. “Well, it hasn’t, actually, darling!” Give me a chance, I say – I mean in recent years. “Yes, right! Well, in the beginning I don’t think casting directors rated me. A casting director said to me once, ‘Dear Anne, you always help us out when we’re absolutely desperate.’ Meaning they’d tried everyone else in the business and no one was available. On Desert Island Discs, Kirsty Young said to me, ‘Your career’s the wrong way round.’ I said to her, ‘I think it’s the right way round actually.’ Most people have success in their 20s and then it starts to fade away. Mine’s just got better and better and better.” In 2010, she was awarded an MBE, presented by the queen, upgraded to a CBE in King Charles’s 2025 new year honours list.
Reid was actually famous in her 20s – again a household face rather than name, as Ken Barlow’s first wife, Valerie, in Coronation Street. She made her debut in 1961, and was electrocuted by hairdryer a decade later – still one of the iconic soap deaths. Reid says she was desperate to leave. “I said, ‘I have to go – I’m going mad.’” Was she bored? “Oh yeah! I was so frustrated. I didn’t get a laugh in nine years.”
She thinks that being in Coronation Street pigeonholed her as northern and working class. Didn’t she tell casting directors that she was privately educated and more than capable of playing posh? “Honey, have you ever met a casting director? Once you’ve done Coronation Street, you’re working class. I do think that hangs about.” Even if she was married to the upwardly mobile teacher Ken Barlow? “Well, he’s pseudo-middle class!” she says dismissively. “God, I don’t know how he’s stayed in there so long. I would have gone totally bonkers.” I tell her William Roache is in his 65th year on the Street. She looks aghast. “It suits some people, but it doesn’t suit me. No! I would have been in the funny farm by now, darling.”
Reid and Peter Eckersley on their wedding day in Manchester, 1971. Photograph: Mirrorpix/Getty Images
It was on Coronation Street that she met Eckersley, who wrote many of the scripts. She adored him, and tells me how wise and witty he was. “My husband was the funniest man in the world. You know that thing Clive James said: ‘A sense of humour is just common sense dancing’? Wonderful saying! Pete had that pinned up on his office wall. Michael Parkinson said he was the funniest man he’d ever met, and so did Victoria Wood.”
She married Eckersley in 1971, the year she left Coronation Street, and got pregnant soon after with their son Mark. But life didn’t work out as she had planned. First her mother became ill and then Eckersley was diagnosed with cancer. She became a full-time carer and mother. In 1981, Eckersley died. “He was ill for a very long time. It was a miracle that he survived that long. We were both 45. Terribly young when I think about it now. I can’t really talk about that much.” She looks upset. “Mark was nine.”
How did she cope? “People deal with these things. You just get on. I wish I’d been the person I am now. I’m much wiser now. I was a fool when I was young.” In what way? Well, she says, Mark had a top education at boarding school, became head boy and went on to the University of Oxford, where he met his wife, but she’s still not sure she did the right thing in sending him away. “He’s lovely. He’s a film editor. And I’ve got two lovely grandsons. Family’s the most important thing in my life.”
When Reid finally returned to work, she’d been away for 12 years, and it felt as if she had to start again with bit parts on TV and in repertory theatre. Wood gave her a break in Dinnerladies in the late 1990s. By now Reid was in her 60s, and this is when she thinks her career really began. She’d never done comedy before except at Rada. “The relief of working with people like Vic was so lovely. Yeah! Yeah, sad!” And I can see her travelling back to the days working with Wood, the comic genius who died aged 62 in 2016. “Sad that she’s gone. She could never have imagined that she would die before me. Vic was a huge talent. Absolutely huge!”
Anne Reid (right) and Victoria Wood in a scene from Wood’s BBC series in 1989. Photograph: Radio Times/Getty Images
It was The Mother that transformed Reid’s career as a serious actor. In an early interview, she said she’d love to be cast in a role where she had to come out of the sea in a bikini and be made love to by James Bond. Here she got her chance, with Daniel Craig, 33 years her junior (and not yet cast as Bond). Reid played the part with such tender yearning and uninhibited passion. The film, directed by Roger Michell and written by Hanif Kureishi, was groundbreaking. Beforehand, we only seemed to see older women with noticeably younger men if it was played for laughs or weirdness (Harold and Maude) or they were famous beauties (Anne Bancroft in The Graduate, and even then she was only six years older than Dustin Hoffman).
“The Mother changed my life,” she says. Did she realise how radical the part was? “Not really, no. Roger used to say, ‘It’s a film about this old granny.’ I was only 68!”
You were a baby, I say. “Of course I was, but it’s because he was only 40 or something. He said ‘We can’t cast Julie Christie because everyone wants to fuck Julie Christie!’, the implication being that no one in their right mind would want to fuck me.”
‘I want to be an adult. I think I’ve earned it now.’ Photograph: Christian Sinibaldi/The Guardian
That’s outrageous! “I know! I know. He said, ‘I wanted to cast somebody you wouldn’t notice if you passed them in Tesco.’ Thanks a lot! You can see why I don’t feel I’ve been valued, can’t you!” She smiles.
I tell her I think it was a brave film. “Yeah, but I think they wanted to shock people. I mean all that business about leaning down and giving a …” She stops herself for once. Blowjob, I suggest. “Yes! And the actual sex was very unromantic. I thought all that was rather ugly, personally. I don’t think it was necessary. Nooooo! But young men want to shock the public. And Hanif, who I love dearly, certainly does. I do think it could have been more about the emotion than the shocking thing. I found some of it disappointing. I haven’t watched it for years.” It’s really good, I say. “Well I did win the Film Critics’ best actress award. That was really important.” Then she changes her mind. “Oh, it doesn’t matter! Who remembers, darling?”
At the time, she said it was important to show that sexual desire doesn’t simply disappear in older people. “I don’t think it does, really,” she says. What about now, 22 years on? “Oh, now would be ridiculous, darling, but there you go! No, I don’t really think about it.” But what she does think about is desire in general – to push herself, to have fun, to make the most of her life. Reid says it drives her nuts when people in their 60s tell her their best days are behind them. “A dear friend said it to me yesterday: ‘Oh, I’m 62 now – I might never do another play.’ Then a taxi driver – I live in black cabs – said, ‘It’s all over now.’ He was in his early 60s, and you think My God! Well, if you don’t need those years, give them to me because I could do with them. So many of the most wonderful things in my life have happened since I was 68! I hadn’t done cabaret then. I’d not done Last Tango in Halifax. Travelling – I’ve been all over the place. I can’t bear negativity! I can’t bear it, and I get so angry with people who give up.”
Now she’s on a roll. “I’m a real optimist. I always see the best side of things. My father-in-law was the most divine man, an English teacher, and he said happiness is not something you find – it’s something you take with you. Some people will always be miserable, and some people will always find the upside and be happy.”
Anne Reid and Daniel Craig in The Mother in 2003. Photograph: BBC Films/Allstar
Reid never remarried after Eckersley died. Have there been partners? “Ah well, that’s for me to tell you.” Go on, then. “No, no, I don’t talk about my private life.” Is there anybody in her life at the moment? “Nononononono! Not for a good long time. I don’t like living with anybody. I’m very happy on my own. I just prefer to be on my own. I can get up at two in the morning and play the piano if I feel like it. Yeah. I’ve got wonderful friends, and I like to get up and do what I want to do. If I want to go to New York today and I’ve got the money I’ll go, I don’t have to ask anybody or say, ‘D’you want to come with me?’” She pauses. “I used to think it might be quite nice to be American, but I don’t now!” She cackles, and doesn’t even mention his name. “God! What a nutcase!”
She says she’s having a riot touring the play. Every night she and her co-stars Caroline Quentin and James Dreyfus stay up late at night shooting the breeze. Sometimes they are joined by Dromgoole’s daughter Grainne, who is also in the play. “Dominic worries about us. He thinks I’m too wild. He’s always saying, ‘Go to bed! Go to bed!’ because he worries that I live the life too much! But blow that! That’s half the fun.”
As for the future, she’s hoping to take the play to New York, is writing a cabaret that she plans to perform later in the year, and wants to finally get on with her memoir. There’s obviously no point in talking about retirement, I say on the way out. She laughs at the idea. Then, with the sweetest voice, she gives me a warning: “If you write anything horrible about me, darling, I’ll come round and put a bomb through your letterbox and blow your house up.”
Perhaps we should reconvene in 10 years’ time if we’re still about, I suggest. “You don’t know! I might be.” And she heads off, singing: “I’m gonna live for ever, I’m gonna learn how to fly!”
The 25 people who have gathered in a small Madrid theatre over the past few months to consider identity, relationships, gender-based violence and inclusion aren’t exactly the crowd you’d normally expect to haunt a cutting-edge drama space housed in a former slaughterhouse. And that is precisely the point.
The men and women, aged between 65 and 84, are the first cohort of an initiative that aims to introduce those who live around the Matadero arts centre in the south of the Spanish capital to the joys and challenges of contemporary theatre. Last year, mindful of the fact that many of the older residents of the barrios of Usera and Arganzuela rarely attended contemporary theatre and would be unlikely to darken the doors of the new Nave 10 space, the Matadero and the city council came up with a plan.
“The idea of Nave 10 was to create a contemporary theatre space that provides space for relatively young directors and authors,” said Marta Ruiz, who leads the educational outreach work at Nave 10.
“But we also realised that the programming you get at a very contemporary art space, such as Matadero, can seem a bit remote to people over 65, who may see it as something aimed at a younger audience. That’s why we decided that, in order to create a dialogue between generations, it would be good to bring older people in and make them feel that they were a part of things.”
Participants in Escuela de Espectadores Sénior rehearse plays being shown at the Matadero arts centre. Photograph: Pablo Garcia/The Guardian
Last summer, Ruiz and the actor and director Mariana Kmaid Levy began spreading the word around local cultural centres and day centres that they were looking for two dozen older people to take part in a free project that would involve seeing 10 plays and attending classes, workshops and talks.
“From there we put together this group that has spent the whole season coming two or three times a month to see the shows, to do activities and workshops, to get to know the theatre a little more inside and to delve a little deeper into the themes of the works,” added Ruiz.
For the past nine months, those enrolled in Escuela de Espectadores Sénior (the Senior Audience School) have watched, dissected and discussed everything from The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant to Jauría, a play based on the infamous trial of five men who raped a young woman in Pamplona nine years ago. The most recent play was an auto-fiction two-hander by the actors and writers Nao Albet and Marcel Borràs about two ageing friends.
Some of the participants, such as Carmen Horrillo, have been delighted to learn how a production is put together on a technical level, but also to be given the tools to decipher some of the forbidding codes of modern drama.
“It’s easier for me now to explain why people should come and see this kind of contemporary theatre,” she said.
Isabel Cotado, whose membership of the programme has helped her navigate the early days of her retirement, feels it’s also been about shaking up old perspectives.
The school offers classes in contemporary theatre for older people, as well as putting on performances. Photograph: Pablo Garcia/The Guardian
“I’ve learned about understanding and accepting people as they are,” she said. “I’ve also learned to laugh about my own life and my own problems – it takes the sting out of some of the nonsense you face in life. Life isn’t just about you.”
Kmaid Levy said that while the group’s “enthusiasm and life experience” had helped them interpret the works and empathise with the characters, the sessions had also proved instructive for the professionals involved.
“This a group of people who speak about theatre in different ways and have another vision and another way of looking at things,” she said.
Albet and Borràs also said their interaction with the group had yielded a different perspective.
“They gave us really interesting points of view about experiences they’d had and that’s always great,” said Borràs. “We normally get reviews and criticisms from friends in the profession or from critics or on social media.”
Luis Luque, the artistic director of Nave 10, said the basic idea of the project – which will resume with a new cohort later this year – was to forge links between participants, between local residents and the venue, and between art and a sometimes neglected sector of society.
“They’ve seen that contemporary theatre speaks to them, too,” he said. “It isn’t something remote; it’s something that calls to them as men and women and poses them questions.”
He highlighted Jauría, which is based on the court transcripts of a trial that provoked a nationwide debate about sexual violence.
Participants watch scenes performed by their fellow members. Photograph: Pablo Garcia/The Guardian
“They’re been very honest and very passionate about Jauría and have felt compelled to speak because they’ve witnessed assaults and some have been abused,” he said. “They come from a generation where there was a very brutal sexism – especially the women. When older men see this, they say, ‘What did we do about all this?’ The questions they’ve come out with have been very interesting. It’s not about taking the blame; it’s about taking responsibility.”
Theatre may not point the finger, said Luque. “But it does show you your reflection in the mirror when it comes to how you’ve behaved.”
Marta Rivera de la Cruz, Madrid’s councillor for culture, tourism and sport, is keen to fight against the creation of “cultural ghettoes” and the idea that certain kinds of art are only for certain people. Proof of the school’s success came in a recent chat with a participant. “She told me she’d come to the theatre with her grandchildren and that she’d explained what the play was about before they saw it,” de la Cruz said.
Or, as Horrillo puts it, nothing ventured, nothing gained. “People should go and see this; they can decide afterwards if they like it or not,” she said. “After all, this is art, too.”
Crypto companies and traders are pouring billions of dollars into tokenised versions of money market and Treasury bond mutual funds, as they look beyond stablecoins to other places to park excess cash that can also give them some yield.
Total assets held in tokenised Treasury products — which include funds whose units have been converted into digital tokens as well as some tokenised US government bonds — have jumped 80 per cent so far this year to $7.4bn, according to data group RWA.xyz. Funds run by BlackRock, Franklin Templeton and Janus Henderson have grown particularly rapidly, with combined assets tripling.
Inflows have been driven in part by crypto traders, many of whom are finding tokenised funds a more attractive place than stablecoins to park their money. Some investors are also starting to use these funds as an easy-to-trade form of collateral in crypto derivatives transactions.
“Stablecoins were the place holder, tokenised money market funds are the real deal. Traders are starting to make the switch,” said Olivier Portenseigne at FundsDLT, which is part of the clearing house Clearstream.
“Tokenisation . . . provides a cheaper and easier way to buy mutual funds, and liquidity is enhanced,” he added.
The election of pro-crypto US President Donald Trump has triggered a fresh wave of enthusiasm that blockchain-based technology can modernise the plumbing of financial markets, where the speed at which deals are settled still lags far behind the pace at which trading information is processed.
Tokenising money market funds creates a digital version of one of the most conservative asset management products, which can then be held on a ledger. Proponents say tokenisation encourages faster and cheaper trading because Treasuries and money market funds can be accepted as collateral.
Settlement times on a blockchain are minutes rather than days — which reduces capital requirements — while risks in meeting margin payments and administration expenses for the asset manager are also lower, they say.
McKinsey estimates the market for tokenised mutual funds, bonds and exchange traded notes could grow to $2tn. Traditional US money market funds at present manage about $7tn in assets.
So far, the main demand for tokenised bond and money market funds has come from crypto traders, who are increasingly using them as an alternative to stablecoins.
The latter — frequently used as a place to park cash before or after trading other tokens — are pegged to and denominated in a hard currency and thus do not change in price, but also do not offer any yield to holders. Tokenised money market funds provide more security than stablecoins, say analysts, while providing the investor with yield.
Crypto investors can use tokenised products to hold any spare cash “in a format that is easy to use and, unlike most stablecoins, allows them to earn a yield”, wrote Stephen Tu, an analyst at Moody’s, in a recent report.
Another source of growth has been stablecoin issuers themselves, which have invested the reserves that back their tokens into high-quality, yield-bearing assets. Janus Henderson’s $409mn tokenised Treasury Fund (JTRSY) is primarily backed by one client, Sky Money, the third-largest stablecoin issuer.
In addition, investors are also starting to use these tokenised US Treasury products as collateral when trading on margin, for instance in over-the-counter derivative trades such as interest rate swaps. Doing so means that traders are — like nonstop crypto markets — no longer tied to the operational hours of banks for payments and trade settlement.
In a sign of growing enthusiasm on Wall Street for tokenised collateral, last month several groups, including US trading company DRW Trading, bond market platform Tradeweb Markets, BNP Paribas, Citadel Securities and Goldman Sachs collectively invested $135mn in Digital Asset, whose Canton Network blockchain holds tokenised assets such as bonds and repurchase agreements. YZi, the family investment office of former Binance chief executive Changpeng Zhao, was also part of the fundraising.
Digital Asset chief executive Yuval Rooz said the company’s focus was on moving collateral, which is used to meet margin calls, and payments. Allowing companies “to move their collateral and margin” as quickly as all their other crypto assets would lead to “pretty dramatic” efficiencies and cost savings, he added.
While money market funds are sometimes used as collateral in derivatives trades, few clearing houses will take them as collateral — such as for futures contracts — owing to the lengthy redemption process that can only be done during bank and market opening hours. Clients of JPMorgan Chase, through its blockchain unit Kinexys, used a tokenised money market fund as collateral in a swaps trade in 2023 as a test case. Later in 2024, its blockchain unit even issued a tokenised US municipal bond.
“The true killer app [of tokenisation] for me is collateral management,” Caroline Pham, acting chair of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, told a conference in London last month.
But broader acceptance by traders and exchanges has been slow, with some pointing to the dramatic drop in crypto market liquidity at weekends when mainstream markets are largely shut.
“Everyone in the market understands the [collateralisation] thesis and the reason to use these,” said Tony Ashraf, who is in charge of digital asset transformation at BlackRock.
However, he added that at present, “tokenised bonds are inferior to cash bonds. They lack liquidity in the market. I still think it’s very early days for the product.”
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Spotify’s latest Android Auto update brings the Jam feature to car displays, letting friends join in and contribute music.
The feature allows passengers to join a shared music queue by scanning a QR code on the in-car screen.
The latest update for Spotify on Android Auto also improves offline listening and adds a floating search button for easier access.
Spotify’s Android Auto app just got an important upgrade, adding the popular Jam feature to the in-car experience.
Jam allows multiple Spotify users to listen together in real time and is now available directly from Spotify’s Now Playing screen on Android Auto.
When music is playing, the Android Auto display shows a QR code that passengers can scan to join the Jam session and add tracks to the shared queue. The driver acts as the host and retains control of the Jam session, with the ability to remove any contributors at any time.
This marks the first time Spotify Jam is available on a car interface. Spotify previously made Jam available to desktop users. It’s also important to note that you need to be a Spotify Premium subscriber to start or host a Jam. However, free users can join and add songs to the Jam.
Google announced the Android Auto redesign for Spotify as part of its new in-car experiences at I/O 2025, and confirmed the feature will also arrive on vehicles with Google built-in at a later stage.
Apart from Jam, the redesigned Spotify app on Android Auto also brings some other enhancements, including a more prominent “Downloads” section to make offline playback easier, especially useful when driving through areas with poor connectivity. There’s also a new floating Search shortcut that gives users quicker access to Spotify’s search interface.
All of these features are reportedly (via 9to5Google) part of Spotify’s latest update — version 9.0.58.596 — which rolled out to Android users just a few days ago.
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