Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
The subtle musical collages and slowly unfolding soundscapes that mark Openness Trio, the debut release from a collective comprised of Nate Mercereau, Josh Johnson and Carlos Niño, are a far cry from the urban stamp that marks Blue Note’s classic recordings. The five tracks were recorded in various locations dotted around Los Angeles, and the trio’s rhythmic palette has more in common with the minimalism of Steve Reich than the polyrhythmic bounce of modern jazz. Add in layers of electronica that bring to mind the soundscapes of noughties Nordic jazz, and this release represents something of a Blue Note outlier.
Although the trio’s musicians project a strong common bond with shared influences ranging from Robert Fripp to spiritual jazz, their musical careers have taken different paths. The underground reputation of percussionist/producer Niño rests on his long-running ambient jazz project Carlos Niño & Friends. Guitarist Mercereau, a new underground face, is currently grabbing attention for his control of advanced guitar synthesiser techniques to forge improvised sound.
In contrast, seasoned session saxophonist/producer Johnson has performed on recordings for Miley Cyrus and Harry Styles, and spent five years as soul singer Leon Bridges’ musical director. The canny arranger’s touch remains intact, but now his crisp phrasing is overshadowed by resonant ripples, seductive doodles and swaths of mournful sustains.
The set opens with the oscillating electronic pulse of “Hawk Dreams”, which was recorded outdoors in the hills of Ojai. As the piece develops, stirring melodies from doctored sax and guitar synthesiser assemble, merge and float away over a bed of textured sound. “ . . . Anything is Possible” comes next, with acoustic sax ruminating over rhythmically fractured support, and then the churchlike moods of “Openness”, which was recorded in an oak tree cathedral growing in a hillside orchard.
The final two constructions continue to immerse the listener in ambient rhythms, kaleidoscopic textures and flutters of tenor sax. The gentle warmth of “Chimes in the Garden” is contemplative, but the sway of “Elsewhere”, recorded under a pepper tree in Topanga Canyon, pushes dynamics to the extreme.
DGCA warned parent company Air India for operating three Airbus planes with overdue escape slide checks and, in June, slammed the airline for serious pilot duty hour violations
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India’s aviation watchdog, the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA), in March had called out Air India Express for failing to replace engine parts on an Airbus A320, as mandated by the European Union Aviation Safety Agency (EASA).
This revelation comes amid increased scrutiny in the country’s aviation sector following the deadly
Air India plane crash in Ahmedabad.
According to a Reuters report citing official records, the airline also submitted falsified documents to fake compliance.
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Air India Express is a low-cost arm of Air India under the Tata Group and runs a fleet of over 115 planes, flying to more than 50 destinations with about 500 daily flights.
What issues were flagged by DGCA?
On March 18, the DGCA flagged issues with one of its Airbus planes, specifically aircraft VT-ATD, which flies domestic routes and international ones like Dubai and Muscat, per AirNav Radar.
The regulator warned parent company Air India for operating three Airbus planes with overdue escape slide checks and, in June, slammed the airline for serious pilot duty hour violations.
The DGCA in its notice said: “This condition, if not corrected, could lead to failure of affected parts, possibly resulting in high energy debris release, with consequent damage to, and reduced control of, the aeroplane.”
Back in 2023, EASA raised alarms about manufacturing flaws in CFM International’s LEAP-1A engines, ordering airlines to replace certain parts like seals and rotating components.
CFM International is the joint venture between GE Aerospace (formerly GE Aviation) and Safran Aircraft Engines, specialising in the design, manufacture, and support of commercial aircraft engines
A confidential March government memo, reviewed by Reuters, showed Air India Express didn’t make the required engine fixes on time for the A320.
Worse, it allegedly tampered with AMOS—the software airlines use to track maintenance—to falsely show the work was done.
Air India Express admitted the slip-up and said it’s put corrective measures in place, according to Reuters.
Anna Weyant shares her home with a ghost. Not the metaphorical kind; not the ghost of painters before her, nor the ghost of her early, soaring success. Just the standard issue, after-life sort of ghost.
“When I first moved in, I just felt this presence of a spirit and started researching the building — more and more things were happening and I thought: somebody’s here. There were certain areas that I didn’t want to go into. I ended up finding out that somebody had passed away in my bedroom. And so I actually found out where his widow lived,” she tells me as we enter the studio space of her apartment.
To be in touch with her, I ask?
“No, I read him the address one night to see if he might want to go there, because it’s just down the street.”
Weyant, aged just 30, is one of the most successful and spoken about young painters in the world. She lives with her elderly King Charles spaniel, Sprout, in a sedate, beautiful space uptown, which strikes me as I enter it as notably old New York, dark wood and low lighting, not fussy or self-consciously sophisticated, but definitively adult. Everything uptown feels a little more permanent, the residents older, more fixed, less subject to the temporal shifts of the city, and it makes sense to me as we speak that she has chosen to exist here rather than in a trendier neighbourhood or apartment. Despite some caustic dismissals about the nature of her career, Weyant is in it for the long haul.
We are meeting in advance of her first major museum show, which opens at the Thyssen-Bornemisza National Museum in Madrid this month. This will be the first exhibition to draw from her entire output, through 26 paintings, predating her first New York solo show in 2019, Welcome to the Dollhouse, and past her most recent in London, Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolves? in 2024. Particularly appealing about the exhibition, according to Weyant, was the opportunity to select works from the Thyssen’s collection to be presented alongside her own, including a Magritte, a Balthus and a beguiling portrait by the German painter Christian Schad. One senses that the opportunity not only to show the growth of her own work, but also to declare some influences not typically ascribed to Weyant, is important to her.
“There’s only one work that I really was insistent on having, this big painting called ‘Feted’ [2020] that I’ve never shown before which was in a private collection in New York, and we had to talk somewhere into loaning it, and they did,” she says. “And then my most recent painting. Actually, no — it doesn’t have my most recent painting. It was going to have my most recent painting, but last night I killed it.”
Killed it for this show, I ask, or will you never return to it?
“I’ll cut it up,” she says easily. “I’ve killed the last three.”
Weyant is aware that she could easily sell this and more or less anything else she might choose — “I’m sure I could just send it out and it would be fine, but at this point, if it’s not exciting, it’s not worth it for me to let it out into the world” — but her market value has become something of an albatross around the neck of her career, as has much of the lore surrounding her beginnings.
Weyant’s origins are so well established that her publicist is able to succinctly list them in one brief parenthesis as items to avoid focusing on: high auction prices, Instagram, comparisons to Botticelli, selling paintings on beach towels in the Hamptons. It’s unusual for an artist to have such widely known bullet points, the kind your average person would ordinarily be able to cite about a Real Housewife or pop star, but Weyant has the unusual confluence of undeniable generational gifts as a painter and the sort of personal star power and beauty that is bait to tabloids (the Daily Mail comes in for particular outrage when we discuss her relationship to her media coverage — they published photographs of the interior of her old apartment).
Weyant and her King Charles spaniel Sprout photographed at home for the FT by Kana Motojima
Although the attention was partly to do with the spurious claim that her meteoric success began with “being discovered on Instagram”, it rocketed after Weyant began dating Larry Gagosian, the immensely successful gallerist who now represents her. The relationship has since ended, and Weyant is now with the musician Jason Isbell; she and I debrief for a bit about dating men who have children.
Before meeting Weyant I had worried that I did not have the sufficient ruthlessness to bring up the relationship with Gagosian, what I assumed would be a source of tiresome displeasure for her. Luckily she does it for me, with the same gentle openness she communicates with all afternoon. I asked about how her work has formally developed in recent years.
“In the past few years, as I started to have more market attention and wider attention, that’s when I decided I needed to step it up again. I also had entered into a relationship with my art dealer at the time. There was a lot of talk that maybe the success had come from that, and I’m not denying that at all, but I felt like if that was going to be the narrative, then I was just gonna have to go full speed ahead and make the best fucking work I could.”
It’s easy to see why the shorthand (if somewhat lazy) narrative of Weyant as a “millennial Botticelli” worked. Her early paintings do often have a jarring wit and juxtaposition that could be read as frivolous — she paints many pretty women, many of them her friends and muses, in a style often likened to the Dutch or Renaissance masters, but with knowing contemporary details (I love 2018’s “Sip n’ Paint”, a woman painting a gaudy Paris skyline with a glass of wine). But her work has always been more destabilising and surreal than caricature, her pony-ponytail meeting in 2019’s “My Pony” bringing inexorably to mind the sumptuous mercurial womanhood of Twin Peaks.
When I ask about the initial development of what would become her style, Weyant refers to a year she spent studying in China after graduating from the Rhode Island School of Design. “I had nothing to lose and kind of nothing to gain. It was a really weird, dark, lonely time, but also so beautiful and poetic. I was alone a lot, I didn’t speak the language. I didn’t know how to get around. I was just sort of jogging and painting, and so lonely and so homesick. Which was so good for me, and shaped my practice.”
Her more recent work has, as often as the gorgeous soft wide-faced women, the kind of euphoric unsettling discord that makes the Magritte selection in her Thyssen show so relevant. And further, as I spent time with her monograph, I found that who I was thinking of most often was not any Dutch master but Philip Guston. The work of hers I love the most (and what I would be acquiring if I found myself with a few million to spare) is the disturbing cartoon mask-like figure of “A Disaster, Such A Catastrophe” (2022).
The novelist Emma Cline, a friend and subject of Weyant’s, told me: “She’s a true artist — her involvement with her work is total. It’s like life comes second to her art practice. She’d rather be painting than doing anything else.”
As we conclude, Weyant is eager to show me the painting she will soon destroy, in that studio space that looks more like the room for a character in Succession to swill brown liquor and brood. She unveils it, a portrait of her friend Ariana, a painter in LA, obscured by a window frame.
“I just wasn’t vibing with it, I wasn’t getting the face, so I thought, I’m going to cover it up with the window and then it looked shittier and so I’m throwing [in] the towel.”
How does that feel? She shrugs.
“Today I’ll move on.”
July 15-October 12, museothyssen.org
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The soundtrack of the Age of Dinosaurs remains a mystery. The T-rex’s roars and the screams of velociraptors we see in the movies — such as the fourth installment of Jurassic World, which opened last week — are purely the invention of sound engineers seeking to shock viewers. These supposed dinosaur sounds have permeated the popular imagination, while for years scientists could do little more than speculate. Since the vocal apparatus of animals is composed of soft parts that almost never fossilize, until very recently, the sounds of dinosaurs could only be imagined based on the canals these animals had for perceiving sounds and on certain crests and ornaments on their skulls that could serve as sound chambers. But all that is changing.
The 70 million-year-old Parasaurolophus tubicen might have sounded like a ship’s horn or an Australian didgeridoo thanks to its distinctive cranial ornamentation, as shown in a scientific recreation at the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science. In 1995, paleontologists at the museum recovered a fossil of the hadrosaur with a massive crest nearly a meter long protruding from the back of its head.
Like a prehistoric wind instrument, inside this unique structure there were three pairs of hollow tubes running from the nose to the top of the crest, which researchers scanned in minute detail using a CT scan. After two years of work, the result was computer simulations of how the organ would resonate if air were blown through it, digitally reconstructed with the help of computer scientists. “I would describe the sound as otherworldly. It sent chills through my spine,” Tom Williamson, one of those paleontologists, recently told the BBC.
No one knows for sure what the enormous diversity of dinosaurs that existed throughout the Mesozoic sounded like. The soundscape would have been different at each of the three stages of the more than 180 million years that spanned it, but science has made some attempts. Based on the shape of the inner ears and other cranial cavities, scientists have developed theories about what this group of extinct reptiles might have sounded like.
If the purpose was to communicate and warn of danger, the dinosaurs’ hearing would have had to be subordinate to that function; their small auditory structures would have perceived low frequencies, just as modern crocodiles do. Animals are supposed to perceive the types of sounds they themselves can produce. No screams or roars. It’s more likely that most large dinosaurs emitted long-wavelength, low sounds capable of traveling long distances and shaking the earth. A low, amplified hiss, something like a beastly ancestor of the Italian opera singer Cesare Siepi, considered one of the best lyric basses of the 20th century.
Fossil of a ‘Parasaurolophus’ on display at the Chicago Museum of Natural History. Zissoudisctrucker/Wikimedia
However, the imagination must stretch in another direction, one that lessens the terror of the sounds of some of these prehistoric beasts. Until recently, it was believed that high-pitched calls and high shortwave frequencies were reserved for birds, but in 2023, a discovery emerged from the sands of the Gobi Desert (Mongolia) that changed everything.
It was a fossilized larynx of the ankylosaur Pinacosaurus grangeri — a three-ton, quadrupedal, herbivorous armored vehicle almost two meters in height and about five meters in length — which suggested that birdsong could have also come from wingless animals. “This is the first discovery of a vocal organ from non-avian dinosaurs in the long history of research on them. Interestingly, the larynx of Pinacosaurus is similar to that of modern birds, so it probably used it to modify the sound like birds, rather than the vocalization typical of reptiles. Therefore, we can say that Pinacosaurus basically sounded similar to birds,” says in an email the Japanese paleontologist Junki Yoshida, first author of the discovery, which was published in the journal Nature.
The larynx is made of cartilage, a type of soft tissue that is easily disintegrated by microorganisms and environmental erosion, so its natural preservation over millions of years is exceptional. Therefore, paleontology has turned to other resources to try to reconstruct something as intangible as sound. “Dinosaur sound communication had been studied only through the inner ear of the fossil skull, but not through the vocal organ itself,” explains Yoshida, openly proud of his work. “Therefore, my discovery of the larynx represents a completely new and more direct approach to studying dinosaur sound communication.”
Dawn with the song of a dinosaur
On the other side of sound — and the world — the Argentine paleontologist Ariana Paulina Carabajal, an expert in sensory biology at the National Scientific and Technical Research Council (CONICET), is working on cranial structures to elucidate how these extinct animals saw, heard, and moved to do what all living beings do: survive each day. “What do animals use sound for? Basically, to communicate with each other and to warn of danger, but very little is known about the emission side.”
The conclusions derived from the larynx of Pinacosaurus coincide with those drawn by Paulina Carabajal in Canada, Mongolia and Turkey, when studying a part of the inner ear of dinosaurs from the same family. “I studied one of the two ankylosaurs in which the lagena — a fundamental structure for hearing — was preserved, and when I reconstructed them, they were among the largest I’d found so far. Very long, much longer than in other dinosaurs.”
She continues: “In general, their lagenas are the same size as those of a modern crocodile; they don’t change much, but ankylosaurs have wider lagenas. So, we think they would have slightly increased their range of sound perception. Always at low frequencies because all dinosaurs tended to hear low frequencies. Now, in conjunction with the Gobi discovery, it makes sense. We understand that for some reason they heard a little differently than other dinosaurs. They had some specialization for vocalization. It’s interesting because it changes the interpretation of the entire group of ankylosaurs and opens the possibility of asking: what other dinosaurs could have had a similar development?”
It’s tempting to get excited about the implications of the discovery. Taking a bit of a risk, the scientist believes that, since they were desirable prey for large carnivores, it’s not unreasonable to think that these animals were capable of producing high-pitched sounds imperceptible to their predators. But she acknowledges that reality isn’t always as linear as that reasoning, and therefore, there are other aspects to consider.
An artist’s impression of the appearance of a ‘Pinacosaurus grangeri’, a Late Cretaceous ankylosaur.DiBgd/Wikimedia
Paleontologist Fedrico Agnolín, a researcher at CONICET and the Azara Foundation, worked 10 years ago on another discovery linked to prehistoric sound: an exceptionally preserved syrinx from a species of duck extinct 70 million years ago was the first direct evidence of the typical vocal apparatus of birds that coexisted with the last dinosaurs. In light of Yoshida’s discovery, he proposes a bold reconstruction. “That dinosaur’s vocal repertoire is somewhere between that of songbirds and parrots. It’s not that we’re thinking it sounded like an eagle, no. Maybe it was like a thrush that got up in the morning and started singing.”
For him, we must give free rein to our imagination. “The problem is that we have a whole wealth of previous research that we can’t get out of our heads. So, we keep imagining a Tyrannosaurus rex as a gigantic reptile, even though its relatives, whose fossils have preserved their skin, show that they were covered in protofeathers, something similar to hair. The whole body is covered in hair, let’s suppose, but we’re still unable to imagine a T. rex like that.”
More cautiously, Paulina Carabajal sets limits on creativity. “What shouldn’t be interpreted directly from Yoshida’s work is that when he emitted sounds like a bird, he had a song. It wouldn’t be like the beautiful songs birds make, but rather a rattling sound related to the way air passed through the larynx.”
This is a different instrument from that of birds, which, on the other hand, have a syrinx, a unique organ that allows them to produce those songs so appreciated by humans. “Reptiles have folds of tissue that protrude — move — into the space where the air comes out, and when they move, they generate sounds, hisses, but most reptiles don’t vocalize. Making a sound is one thing, and vocalization itself is another.” That’s why the case of the Pinacosaurus from the Gobi Desert is so surprising. Its discoverers emphasize that it and its mates could have vocalized.
The larynx of this ankylosaur is composed of two parts like that of any reptile, but with the peculiarity that between these two pieces there was mobility, which would have allowed it to control the air that entered and exited, producing sounds similar to those of some birds.
Re-evaluating many fossils
The tongue of reptiles is not mobile like that of mammals. Since it is attached to the lower part of the jaw, its movement is very limited, and only the tip remains free, preventing it from manipulating food. What is interesting about Pinacosaurus, according to Paulina Carabajal, is that “very large hyoid cartilages that support the tongue — essential for swallowing, breathing, and producing sounds — were also found. Therefore, the authors propose that this tongue was much more mobile than in other dinosaurs, perhaps allowing it to manipulate food a little when grabbing it.”
For Agnolín, surprises could emerge in specific cases. “We have to reevaluate many remains. Dinosaurs are found with some neck pieces whose exact nature is unknown. We have to see if they are syrinxes or similar structures.” Erosive factors, above all, limit certainties. “The syrinx is composed of several ossified cartilages that wrap around each other and form a kind of small drum. When the animal dies, this falls off, falls apart, and rots. So, if you find a small piece of a syrinx drum, which must be 2 millimeters in size, you wouldn’t recognize it,” the Argentine scientist laments.
Studies like his own and that of Pinacosaurus, however, encourage us to review the deposits in search of those fragments that were not identified at the time to assess the possibility that they might be sound tracks. This is something he has already done, and he regrets not having found any matches. Agnolin suspects that in many cases, human bias will also have to be overcome. “Perhaps there are some researchers who deny that this is a syrinx and will talk about other structures. All of this takes time and is part of the scientific debate, which is eternal.”
The consensus among paleontologists is that, with these insights and ongoing technological advances, solving the mystery of the dinosaurs’ sounds is closer than ever. Reconstructing the soundtrack of the Mesozoic is only a matter of time.
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Patrick Wolf in East Kent, a rural area where he has been living for years. Daniel Riera
This morning, before his interview, Patrick Wolf, 41, went swimming in the North Sea. It’s what he does every day, from the beginning of spring until fall. Afterwards, he returned to his home in East Kent, a place where he arrived by pure chance a few years ago at, he says, “my lowest point of obscurity.” Up until that point, the London native had always been a city boy. “I used to live in a house [in London] by Waterloo station. But in the pandemic, I was forced out to the suburbs. For so much of my life, I’ve been really drawn to the places where my brain starts to rot, in the liminal spaces and suburbia, the places which aren’t one thing or the other. The black mold of my soul just crept in. I knew I couldn’t afford to go back to London, like many people can’t. I thought — and this was combined with sobriety as well — I’ve got to go somewhere where I can wake up in the morning with a sense of wonder and the thrill of looking around my environment. So, I went as far east of England that you could and found a little house here. I found an abandoned concrete hover port with all this nature. I just felt immediately, this is where I live now.”
What might seem like yet another story of moving during the era of Brexit and gentrification is in reality, a tale of survival against the odds. Between 2002 and 2012, Wolf had a brilliant and atypical career in British pop. At 18 years old, he released Lycanthropy, a shining introduction to a singer-songwriter who played all the instruments on his albums, an artist who had his roots in English folks and counterculture, a kind of feral child raised among ukeleles, synthesizers, electric guitars, harps and clavichords, whose deep voice sang gothic and sophisticated lyrics that seemed straight out of an Angela Carter or Virginia Woolf story.
That album was followed by four more, two of them on major labels. Wolf found success, played nonstop concerts, earned money. In 2012, after putting out an unconventional acoustic compilation, he fell silent. Later, the public would learn that he’d been overtaken by creative, personal and family crises. Addictions, losses, bankruptcy, grief. That cycle is finally coming to an end.
Patrick Wolf, portrayed à la Peter Berlin in East Kent, where he has been living for years.Daniel Riera
Last month,Wolf released Crying the Neck, his first album of completely new material in 13 years. Since May, he’s been touring its music and reuniting with his fan base. “ When it had been a decade since my last album, I put out a little EP [The Night Safari, 2023]. It was getting a bit too self-indulgent, the time away. I thought, ‘It’s now time.’ I had survived on royalties and bankruptcies, saying I had no debts for a while. I had been digging long enough under the earth, I’d found enough treasure that I thought it was time to bring it back and start sharing with the world.” One need only listen to the first piano chords of Reculver, the song that opens the album, to agree that Wolf is back. And in top form, with prodigious melodies and that deep and unmistakable sound, austere yet refined, of his early recordings.
“Luckily when in bankruptcy, they can’t legally take the tools of your trade,” he explains when asked about having regained his sound. “If you’re a musician, they can’t take your instruments.” During the first years of his career, Wolf collected all kinds of instruments. “The way those records were sounding was because those were the instruments around me, that I could see in my bedroom. And then when I became a pop star,” he smiles, “I had so much, being in the public eye, I kind of forgot that all those instruments were in storage.”
When he re-emerged from the shadows, he discovered they were still there, and picked them up again. Now, a shed in his garden houses a small recording studio where most of his new album came to life. “It was my dream as a teenager, and all the way up to my thirties, when I stopped having dreams about where I want my life to be and my work to be. A lot is to do with having a room of your own, really, to think. Like, the major label albums, I would always be on the contract with the creative control. But when somebody is throwing half a million pounds around, creative control also means a lot of boardroom meetings,” he says.
His relationship with the recording industry was somewhat convulsive. The Magic Position (2007), his biggest commercial hit, led to him being labeled as an extravagant, Baroque artist, a kind of colorful response to the folk renaissance. Wolf made perfect songs, wore his hair dyed red and even starred in a Burberry campaign alongside model Agyness Deyn. In 2011, with the release of Lupercalia, he said he’d spent a fortune renting a glassed-in penthouse on the banks of the Thames, just to see what it felt like to live there. But it was all a mirage. In 2015, his mother was diagnosed with cancer and Wolf nearly died in a hit-and-run in Italy. He rose from the crash covered in blood and, completely distraught, shouted, “Let’s go to the beach!”
“It was the universe saying, ‘Slow down,” he confessed to The Guardian. In 2017, he was declared in bankruptcy and in 2018, after the death of his mother, he started drinking again. But he prefers not to wallow in those years. “I put the work in to be free from that period of time,” he says. “I used to think that the power of writing would be enough to divorce you from the recent trauma of life. I realized by the end of my twenties that hadn’t worked for me. I had written, I’d made art I was very proud of, but in terms of doing the emotional deconstruction, none of that work had been done. I was still basically an 18-year-old, you know, but 32, and I hadn’t done any work. I’d just been out there looking glamorous and singing to big audiences and sharing my stories with people and being useful to other people. I do think other people’s music can help you through problems, but writing your way out of this situation — it sounds like this romantic emancipation, like a spiritual quest, but really, there’s a reason why psychotherapy exists.”
The key, he says, is not to sublimate suffering through art, nor to drop one’s guard. “I’m still in recovery for the rest of my life as an addict. I have to do daily work, that’s a way of keeping on being the dominatrix over the slave, making sure that misery is on the chain and you’re in charge of it. I’ve grown with responsibility in order to stay functional, but that involves not staring at the past at all. If you look that way too long, there’s a danger of it.”
His new album is the first of a series of four which, during the next 10 years, Wolf plans to release following an almost conceptual plan. Each corresponds to a season of the year, and speaks of traditions, legends, rites and folklore. Crying the Neck, at first glance, is luminous — it’s the summer album. “This grief naturally feels like gothic subject matter. I’m not going to set that in Halloween,” he jokes. But nor is he hiding from the trauma. The press statement for the LP talks about mourning, addictions, loss and illness. “I’m like, this is for a party!” he jokes. Lead single Dies Irae is an impossible conversation set between the artist and his dead mother.
“They are all quite intimidating subjects. I’m like, why isn’t it on the radio? I’m delivering quite a lot of overwhelming subjects. If I was in the literature world, then it would be intimidating work, but within this context of pop music, I understand if this might be a hard record for people,” he reflects. “For me, survival is like — death becomes an affirmation of life.” Has he learned something from the suffering? “Well, I think some people don’t learn and they sink with the ship. There seems to be a disease in culture, I feel, at the endings and positivity. What the album tries to address is that actually, it’s very important to live with your sorrow, it kind of creates a shadow for your job, a contrast to your optimism. The album doesn’t have this happy ending and then you turn into a butterfly and fly away and it’s a sunny day. It finishes by saying, I am feeling incredibly heavy and I think I will carry this with me for the rest of my life. It’s important to live with these things and to find a space for your sorrow.”
In his case, that learning has led him to limit his public presence. “I wasn’t that famous. But I was ashamed, and that was inherited from the way the media perceived me.” He says he regrets having allowed them to paint him as “this kind of monstrous clown”. “I did want to be famous, you know, because it seemed so much fun. Little did I know that the pursuit of it would drive you insane, and that it’s the complete opposite of doing good work. You know, unless you’re very clever and your art form is celebrity, like Charli XCX. But my work, if I look back on it, is incredibly introverted.”
Part of that overexposure had to do with his sexuality. “It was like, you’re the only gay person and you work at McDonald’s, or you’re the only lesbian in the office. Out of survival, you become more funny, or you become something that you’re not in order to develop a sense of belonging. But you’re actually not sharing your vulnerable side at all. Talking about indie music, I was the only out gay boy in this country, you know. I had unresolved trauma from being that at school, and the violence that surrounded that. Then you’re thrust into a professional context, and you feel like it’s the only way people can accept you. I had to deconstruct that over the years, and I can’t do that anymore. What I realized when I got clean and sober was that I’m actually an incredibly quiet person and really unsure of myself, and that’s not conducive to being a successful public figure. I’m out here now as an advocate for my work. It’s such a strange mental labyrinth to go into, that I’ve escaped now. I understand that it’s not about being Patrick Wolf, it’s something that I think comes down to a minority experience within the workplace.”
I’m still in recovery for the rest of my life as an addict. I have to do daily work, that’s a way of keeping on being the dominatrix over the slave
What does he think, then, of the new generation of artists who celebrate such labels? “I don’t think that my experience at 41 is gonna help somebody at 21. They’re going through a whole different set of social circumstances,” he reflects. “But for a long time, we were all trying so hard for there to be no suffix. There were certain interviews that were like, ‘sing a song right now’ and it had to be flamboyant. It was like seeing Laura Marling release an album as ‘a female songwriter’. And now the new generations are coming in like ‘queer artists, Black artists.’ I’m like, guys, don’t undo the freedom of having your work speak for itself. It’s really very liberating. But I think in a way, it shows that something that we were really trying to push away is seen as something to celebrate. I think over the next 10 years, my comments on sexuality and society are going to be quite sparse. It’s a rapidly changing country in which our identity is either being weaponized or commercially exploited. I think it’s better to be observant and see where you can help on a day-to-day level.”
But for now, the priority is his new songs, his tour, and his plans for the coming years. He’s now better prepared for success, if it comes, and has learned to enjoy living in a place where no one has ever heard of Patrick Wolf. “I landed here at my lowest point of obscurity. My driving instructor said, ‘What do you do?’ He got really obsessed with Googling me and people are finding out very slowly. Generally, they don’t care about that kind of thing at all down here. But I can’t keep that secret any longer. It’s like a nudist beach: at the end of this, I hope I can still be naked and no one’s going to get their phone out and stuff like that. I’m not insane enough to want to pursue that level of celebrity. I kind of would love pure anonymity for the next 10 years, but it won’t happen, you know.”
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The Full Moon is just days away now, but if you want to know what’s going on with the moon tonight, keep reading because we have all the info you need.
The moon changes each night, well, from our perspective it does anyway. This is because of the lunar cycle, a recurring series of eight unique phases of the moon’s visibility. The whole cycle takes about 29.5 days (according to NASA), and these different phases happen as the Sun lights up different parts of the moon whilst it orbits Earth. The moon is always there, but what we see on Earth changes depending on how much it is lit up.
See what’s happening with the moon tonight, July 5.
What is today’s moon phase?
As of Saturday, July 5, the moon phase is Waxing Gibbous. According to NASA’s Daily Moon Observation, 75% of the moon will be lit up and visible to us on Earth.
This is day 10 of the lunar cycle, and we’re only one phase away from the Full Moon. So, with so much of the moon lit up, there are plenty of geological features for us to spot, both with the naked eye and with aids.
Tonight, there is plenty to see with the naked eye, the most notable being the Mare Vaporum, the Copernicus Crater, and the Tycho Crater. With binoculars, you can add the Alps Mountains, Archimedes Crater, and the Alphonsus Crater to your list.
If you’re one of the lucky ones with a telescope, you’ve got a great night of moon gazing ahead of you, with additional viewings of the Linne Crater, Apollo 12, and the Rupes Altai.
Mashable Light Speed
When is the next full moon?
This month’s full moon will take place on July 10. The last full moon was on June 11.
What are moon phases?
Moon phases are caused by the 29.5-day cycle of the moon’s orbit, which changes the angles between the Sun, Moon, and Earth. Moon phases are how the moon looks from Earth as it goes around us. We always see the same side of the moon, but how much of it is lit up by the Sun changes depending on where it is in its orbit. This is how we get full moons, half moons, and moons that appear completely invisible. There are eight main moon phases, and they follow a repeating cycle:
New Moon – The moon is between Earth and the sun, so the side we see is dark (in other words, it’s invisible to the eye).
Waxing Crescent – A small sliver of light appears on the right side (Northern Hemisphere).
First Quarter – Half of the moon is lit on the right side. It looks like a half-moon.
Waxing Gibbous – More than half is lit up, but it’s not quite full yet.
Full Moon – The whole face of the moon is illuminated and fully visible.
Waning Gibbous – The moon starts losing light on the right side.
Last Quarter (or Third Quarter) – Another half-moon, but now the left side is lit.
Waning Crescent – A thin sliver of light remains on the left side before going dark again.
NATPAT’s new animated series NATPAT Pals represents an organic brand extension that transforms the company’s child-focused wellness philosophy into engaging storytelling. Departing from conventional marketing tactics, the YouTube series builds an original fantasy universe inspired by real customer experiences and the founders’ personal lives, with characters named after their children and pets.
NATPAT’s approach creates authentic emotional resonance rather than relying on licensed intellectual property or overt product placement. The three-minute NATPAT Pals episodes focus on universal childhood themes — from emotional awareness to problem-solving and family dynamics — through adventures featuring protagonists like adventurous siblings Ethan and Ruby. Playful antagonists add lighthearted conflict.
The content deliberately avoids commercial messaging, instead aligning with NATPAT’s core mission of helping children feel emotionally supported. Produced independently without external funding, the project maintains the brand’s grassroots ethos.
The State Bank of Pakistan (SBP) injected a total of Rs13 trillion into the banking system through conventional and Shariah-compliant Open Market Operations (OMOs) on July 4, 2025, in a move aimed at maintaining short-term liquidity.
According to official data, the conventional OMO injection amounted to Rs12.647 trillion, accepted at a return rate of 11.03%, with most of the liquidity injected via 14-day tenor instruments.
In parallel, the central bank conducted a Shariah-compliant Mudarabah-based OMO, injecting an additional Rs361.6 billion through 7-day and 14-day instruments at return rates of 11.11% and 11.10%, respectively.
This large-scale liquidity operation reflects massive rupee circulation and an inflationary environment that erodes public buying power.
Meanwhile, the Pakistani rupee posted a slight decline against the US dollar in the interbank market on Friday, slipping by 0.04%. By the day’s close, the local currency was quoted at 283.97, down by 11 paisas from the previous session’s closing rate of 283.86.
Moreover, gold prices in Pakistan declined on Friday, primarily due to subdued local demand amid Ashura-related closures, even as international bullion markets witnessed a rebound driven by a softer US dollar and renewed safe-haven inflows ahead of potential trade policy moves by former US President Donald Trump.
According to data released by the All-Pakistan Gems and Jewellers Sarafa Association (APGJSA), the price of gold per tola dropped by Rs1,500, settling at Rs355,500. Similarly, the rate for 10 grams of gold fell by Rs1,286 to Rs304,783.
The dip in domestic prices contrasts with gains earlier in the week. On Tuesday, gold had risen by Rs800 per tola, reaching Rs357,000.
Adnan Agar, Director at Interactive Commodities, explained that global market activity remained subdued due to a bank holiday in the United States. “The market is relatively inactive today, with gold trading between $3,325 and $3,344 per ounce. Current levels are hovering around $3,332,” he noted.
Agar added that volatility is expected to return next week when markets reopen, particularly as attention turns to the US president’s reinstatement of trade tariffs.
CD Projekt Red is returning to the Cyberpunk:Edgerunnersuniverse with a new stand-alone entry, which the game developer announced alongside the anime series’ showrunner during a panel at Anime Expo on Friday.
The video game developer will once again partner with the animation studio Trigger for Cyberpunk: Edgerunners 2, which, like its predecessor, will stream on Netflix. An official logo and poster art were shared as part of CD PROJEKT RED’s “Cyberpunk: Edgerunners — Behind the Scenes With its Creators,” with a promise that later in the day, Trigger would tease new footage for the series at the Peacock Theater as part of its own panel.
The series will serve as a new 10-episode stand-alone story set in the world of Cyberpunk 2077, and asks the question: in a city that thrives in the spotlight of violence and when the world is blinded by spectacle, what extremes will you go to in order to make your story matter? Described as a raw chronicle of redemption and revenge, Edgerunners 2 will, according to the series’ story writer and producer Bartosz Sztybor, not only be a sadder and darker take, but “more bloody, and more raw.”
“Night City has a lot of stories to tell. I have a dream that it won’t end with Cyberpunk: Edgerunners. There’s more stories, more characters,” he added about his decision to pursue another series. “I wasn’t satisfied with the sadness I received from the audience so I want you to be even more sad now.”
Cyberpunk: Edgerunners 2 will feature a new story and fresh characters, and while the series does not currently have a release date, it will be directed by Kai Ikarashi. Cyberpunk: Edgerunners director Hiroyuki Imaishi made a special appearance during the panel to pass the baton for Ikarashi’s directorial debut on the series, after working together on the 2022 entry. Voice actors Emi Lo (Lucy Kushinada) and Zach Aguilar (David Martinez) also appeared on the panel, which saw cast and creatives take fans behind the scenes of the 2022 anime.
Sztybor and Ikarashi will be joined on Cyberpunk: Edgerunners 2 by lead character designer Kanno Ichigo and Masahiko Otsuka, who will be responsible for the screenplay adaptation.
“[Cyberpunk: Edgerunner’s] David [Martinez’s] story might be over, but there’s plenty more to discover in Night City. And to again have the legendary animation studio Trigger along for the ride makes us at CD Projekt Red so excited to introduce a raw, real chronicle of redemption and revenge, something unlike what we’ve done before,” Sztybor said in a statement.
Jayden Seales ripped out the opening batters to reduce Australia’s second innings to 12-2 and lead over West Indies to 45 runs on day two of the second Test on Friday.
The West Indies’ first innings almost lasted the entire day, but it was all out for 253 — 33 runs behind Australia — which left a tricky half-hour in the day.
The hosts made it as hostile as possible and preyed on Australia’s nervous top order.
Seales bowled Sam Konstas for a duck in the first over and almost claimed Cameron Green on the next ball. Green barely fended off Seales and was fortunate the ball dropped in front of second slip.
Seales then got a nip-backer to trap Usman Khawaja plumb on two. Khawaja’s video review showed it was going to hit middle stump.
Nathan Lyon came in as the nightwatchman, and he and Green just made it to stumps. On the penultimate ball, Lyon took an Alzarri Joseph delivery into his left bicep. He needed on-field treatment.
Seales had two from five from three overs, including a maiden.
For Konstas, it was his third single-digit score in four innings on tour. Opening partner Khawaja has scored 47, 15, 16 and 2. Before that, he had 0 and 6 in the World Test Championship final. No. 3 Green is also still looking for a morale-boosting score.
The West Indies have their own top-order issues.
Kraigg Brathwaite was out for a duck in his first innings in his 100th Test, caught and bowled by Josh Hazlewood in the first over.
Keacy Carty went the same way on 6 to Pat Cummins, and John Campbell wasted a good start of 40 when he skewed Beau Webster to mid-on.
It took Brandon King’s maiden Test half-century and the tailenders’ 73 invaluable runs for the West Indies to get close to Australia’s 286.
The West Indies was 174-7 after lunch, still more than 100 behind, but the Nos. 8-11 batters — notably Alzarri Joseph and Shamar Joseph, not related — frustrated the Australians for 25 overs and led the West Indies past 200 and 250.
King and captain Roston Chase, who took 18 balls to get off the mark, rebuilt West Indies from 64-3 to a confident 110-3 by lunch.
Chase was out straight after lunch, trapped on 16 by Hazlewood after Australia reviewed.
But King lofted Hazlewood for six over square leg, then his seventh boundary brought up his 50 off 77 balls, his first 50 in his second Test and West Indies’ first 50 in the series.
King waltzed down the track to hit Lyon for another couple of sixes as his partnership with Shai Hope began to flourish.
But Cummins ended their 58-run stand when he bowled Hope on 21, and King fell in the next over, nicking Lyon behind. King laboured for 75 off 108 balls with eight boundaries and three sixes.
A third wicket in four overs, Justin Greaves, tumbled West Indies to 174 for seven.
But the Josephs made it to tea and kept going for 51 runs together. Alzarri scored 27 and Shamar 29. Last pair Anderson Phillip and Seales resisted for another nearly 11 overs for 16 runs.
All six Australian bowlers took wickets; Lyon led with three for 75.
